Harvard President Research Articles

The Trouble with Government. By Derek Bok. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001. 493p. $35.00 cloth, $19.95 paper.

When first presented with this book, I confess to harboring two strong reservations—both, as it turns out, badly misplaced. First, perhaps because the author is a widely known American who was once the president of Harvard and, therefore, spent considerable time among movers and shakers, I was prepared for a broad, rambling, and discursive book peppered with anecdotes, personal musings, name-dropping, and disconnected prescriptions for change. Second, no doubt because I have never been fond of the overarching evaluation exercises that so enthrall foundations, when I read in the introduction that this volume on government had been commissioned by three major foundations, I feared I was about to read another governmental report card accompanied by the obligatory and often vacuous justification for the grade assigned in each area.

Tuxedo Park: a Wall Street tycoon and the secret palace of science that changed the course of World War II

In the fall of 1940, as German bombers flew over London and with America not yet at war, a small team of British scientists on orders from Winston Churchill carried out a daring trans-atlantic mission. The British unveiled their most valuable military secret in a clandestine meeting with American nuclear physicists at the Tuxedo Park mansion of a mysterious Wall Street tycoon, Alfred Lee Loomis. Powerful, handsome, and enormously wealthy, Loomis had for years led a double life, spending his days brokering huge deals and his weekends working with the world's leading scientists in his deluxe private laboratory that was hidden in a massive stone castle. In this dramatic account of a hitherto unexplored but crucial story of the war, Jennet Conant traces one of the world's most extraordinary careers and scientific enterprises. She describes Loomis' phenomenal rise to become one of the Wall Street legends of the go-go twenties. He foresaw the stock market crash of 1929 in time to protect his vast holdings, making a fortune while other bankers were losing their shirts. He rode out the Depression years in high style, and indulged in the hobbies of the fabulously rich. He raced his own America's Cup yacht against the Vanderbilts and Astors, and purchased Hilton Head Island in South Carolina as his private game reserve. Conant writes about the glamour and privilege of his charmed circle as well as Loomis' marriage to a beautiful but depressive wife, whom he sent away for repeated hospitalizations while he pursued a covert affair with his protege's young wife. His bitter divorce scandalized New York society and drove Loomis into near seclusion in East Hampton. At the height of hisinfluence on Wall Street, Loomis abruptly retired and devoted himself purely to science. He turned his Tuxedo Park laboratory into the meeting place for the most visionary minds of the twentieth century: Albert Einstein, Werner Heisenberg, James Franck, Niels Bohr, and Enrico Fermi. With England threatened by invasion, he joined Vannevar Bush, Karl Compton, and the author's grandfather, Harvard president James B. Conant, in mobilizing civilian scientists to defeat Nazi Germany, and personally bankrolled pioneering research into the radar detection systems that ultimately changed the course of World War II. Together with his friend Ernest Lawrence, the Nobel Prize-winning atom smasher, Loomis established a top-secret wartime laboratory at MIT and recruited the most famous names in physics. Through his close ties to his cousin Henry Stimson, who was secretary of war, Loomis was able to push FDR to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to create the advanced radar systems that defeated the German Air Force and deadly U-boats, and then to build the first atomic bomb. One of the greatest scientific generals of World War II, Loomis' legacy exists not only in the development of radar but also in his critical role in speeding the day of victory.

Pretending to be Real: Stephen Greenblatt and the Legacy of Popular Existentialism

In a recent article in the Harvard College Gazette, announcing Hilary Putnam's successor as the new Cogan University Professor of the Humanities, Harvard President Neil Rudenstine praised Stephen Greenblatt as a world-renowned scholar working on the frontiers of knowledge: "[n]o one has done more than Stephen Greenblatt to shape the direction of scholarship and criticism in literature over the last quarter-century." 1 Despite the presidential hyperbole, there is a great deal to this claim: it is certainly difficult to imagine a contemporary Renaissance scholar more influential than Greenblatt. All of us who write on early modern English literature and culture have benefitted from his imagination and insight—as David Norbrook puts it, his magus-like ability to make "familiar words seem strange and new." 2 No question. In the same article, Greenblatt himself describes the early stages of his path to eminence, "an early career marked by odd encounters and fleeting possibilities." He says, "I spent summer as a counselor at a summer camp where I played the guitar and sang mournful folk songs with a fellow counselor. He talked about introducing me to a pal of his with the idea that we might possibly sing together, but, with my eye on college, I declined. My fellow counselor was Art Garfunkel, and his friend was Paul Simon" (2). He goes on to describe how one of his chums at Yale was "now vice presidential hopeful" Joe Lieberman, how an elderly man he knocked over on the way to the drugstore turned out to be T. S. Eliot, and how at Cambridge the group of students he performed with "went on to become the Monty Python's Flying Circus troupe" (2). Accounts of these unusually frequent brushes with celebrity are not limited to college newspaper copy. In a recent PMLA article, his encounters with the rich and famous continue; but his [End Page 491] meeting with Nadine Gordimer and Carlos Fuentes is especially instructive, since they are somewhat surprisingly satirized for their name-dropping: "'I was in Washington recently for a party in honor of Nelson,' Gordimer said, 'and I was very disappointed by Bill Clinton. He seemed awfully shallow and uncultured.' 'That's strange,' replied Fuentes, 'I had lunch on the Vineyard with Bill and Hillary just a few weeks ago, and I found him remarkably cultivated.'" 3 The acerbic edge of the satire is softened by Greenblatt's graceful recognition of his own complicity in and weakness for the failing he mocks. What I want to suggest in this essay is that the recurrent need of an intellectual as eminent as Greenblatt to authenticate himself in ways that often seem as jejune as his role in the lost trio Simon, Garfunkel, and Greenblatt is not simply some nervous name-dropping tic, but a pattern that cuts right to the heart of his work and ultimately has much to do with explaining its extraordinary influence.

The Force of Ancient Manners: Federalist Politics and the Unitarian Controversy Revisited

As 1804 drew to a close, Massachusetts Federalists could be forgiven for thinking that it had been a very bad year, the latest among many. The country again stood on the verge of war with England, while Bonapartist forces swept across Europe. Closer to home, buoyed by the immense popularity of the Louisiana Purchase, Thomas Jefferson had been elected by a wide margin to a second term as president. Even the Bay State had cast its electoral votes for the Republican ticket; of all New England, only Connecticut had remained steadfastly in the Federalist camp. In the Senate, Massachusetts found herself represented by independent-minded John Quincy Adams. A year earlier, Adams had defeated staunch Federalist Timothy Pickering just in time to make himself the sole New England Federalist to vote in favor of implementing the acquisition of Louisiana, thereby rendering Massachusetts complicit in her own subjugation by the slaveholding Virginia interest. More dispiriting, Alexander Hamilton lay dead on the field of honor, shot by Aaron Burr, vice president of the United States, losing Federalist candidate for governor of New York-and, it was rumored, the man who would have delivered his state into the Northern Confederation when the High Federalists led New England out of an increasingly untenable union. To heap insult on injury, as the year reached its dismal end, Harvard College, the institutional center of Massachusetts Federalist political culture, found itself under siege from within. Since the August 1803 death of Professor David Tappan, the university had faced a vacancy in the Hollis Professorship of Divinity, the oldest endowed university chair in the United States.2 Then, in late September 1804, Harvard President Joseph Willard died as well. The year-and-a-half-long struggle to fill these vacancies exposed a fissure in New England Federalism, a rift that played itself out as theological liberals and trinitarian Calvinists struggled for control of the university. Politicians and clergy who had previously worked together to combat the twin evils of democracy and infidelity now ranged themselves on opposite sides of the religious question, with the dominant High Federalists casting their considerable weight on the side of the liberal clergy, making possible their ultimate victory. In doing so, they revealed a great deal about the peculiar social and political synthesis that distinguished the Massachusetts Federalists from other wings of the party and about the forces that led to their defeat in public life. The conventional view of the Harvard dispute has focused on the revolutionary (albeit, to the outsider, somewhat parochial) changes that followed in its wake, treating the affair as the first skirmish in what is known to historians of American religion as the Unitarian controversy.' The initial phase of that ostensible revolution came with the February 1805 election of Unitarian Henry Ware as Hollis Professor; it was completed a year later, in March 1806, with the election of theologically liberal Professor Samuel Webber as university president. Both Ware and Webber replaced traditional Calvinists in their respective posts. Little more than twenty-five years later, the Massachusetts Standing Order had collapsed and the state's Congregational churches had split into two separate denominations, with trinitarian Congregationalists on one side and Unitarians on the other. Most discussions of the Harvard controversy have focused almost entirely on the appointment of Ware to the Hollis Professorship; these accounts treat the choice of the university president as an afterthought in what was primarily a theological dispute between those who believed in the orthodox Calvinist doctrine of the trinity and those who did not. More than thirty years ago, Conrad Wright challenged one aspect of this dominant interpretation with an elegant reconstruction of the complex sequence of events that led up to Ware's election. Wright demonstrated that the Harvard Corporation, which bore initial responsibility for the choice of the Hollis professor, engaged in a good deal of give-and-take and that its fellows were willing to compromise, even offering to link the appointments of professor and president in order to secure ideological balance in the university administration. …

The College Movement and its Critics

The great majority of high school seniors expect to go to college, though far fewer enroll in four-year schools, and still fewer graduate. These and other findings reported here by Mr. Boesel have important implications for prospective and current students. IT IS NO secret that average educational level of Americans has changed drastically over last century. At end of 19th century, there were far fewer high school graduates, relative to population, than there are graduates today. Indeed, high school graduates were viewed in much same light then as graduates are now. In 1893, an influential committee on secondary schooling headed by Harvard president Charles Eliot wrote that main function of secondary school was to prepare for duties of life that small proportion of children in country - a proportion small in number but very important to welfare of nation - who show themselves able to profit by an education prolonged to eighteenth year, and whose parents are able to support them while they remain so long at school.1 At turn of century, median educational level of white males was eighth grade, and high school graduation was rare. It wasn't till midcentury that a majority of young people completed high school. In 1950, for example, 53% of 25- to 29-year-olds were high school graduates, and 8% were graduates. At time, a high school diploma was generally regarded as achievable standard required to get a good job and support a family. Today, in either a two- or four-year school has become norm. In 1997, 57% of young people aged 25 to 29 had at least some college. Many consider a bachelor's degree essential to economic success, and some foresee a day when four years of will be accepted standard for educational attainment, much as a high school diploma was in 1950. Yet some observers believe that there is much emphasis today on getting a For example, William Goodling (R-Pa.), who chaired education committee in U.S. House of Representatives, has remarked: We're overselling college: four-year traditional conception of a education. Similarly, Robert Reich, former secretary of labor, has argued that too many families cling to mythology that their child can be a success only if he or she has a degree. Others expressing such reservations include Washington policy experts Samuel Halperin, Jack Jennings, and Diane Stark Rentner; professors Kenneth Gray and Edwin Herr of Pennsylvania State University; and journalists Richard Harwood of Washington Post and Rochelle Stanfield of National Journal. James Rosenbaum, a sociologist at Northwestern University, argues that college for all has become norm in high schools, though many students are not prepared even for two-year colleges. We call widespread expectation that almost everyone will attend the movement. The critics of movement make a number of key points: * Within last several decades, people have come to expect that most or high school graduates should go to college. * Many young people who do not have ability or educational preparation to perform well in four-year colleges are being encouraged to enroll anyway, and colleges have increasingly admitted students whose chances of doing well are slim. * Because many students are not well prepared, graduation rates have become unacceptably low. * Many four-year noncompleters do poorly in labor market and might have been better off enrolling in two-year colleges or in occupational programs. * Many students are burdened with accumulated debt from loans that could have been avoided or minimized by a choice of other educational and training options. This debt is especially burdensome for noncompleters. …

Harvard et le critère du mérite

Harvard and the ideology meritocracy. The new president of Harvard, James Bryant Conant, wasted no time in calling for (at the time) bold changes in the university admission policy : he believed that access to higher education should be based on ability rather than inherited privilege. His program of National Scholarships was therefore designed to enable brilliant, however poor, students to obtain their education in the best institutions. Yet, his vision of both the educational system and the larger society was deeply hierarchical. While promoting the ideal of equality of opportunity, he thus claimed that less young people should attend college. At the same time, he was careful to assure Harvard's various constituencies that the vast majority of students would still be selected through traditional processes. In a 1938 Harper's Magazine article, he identified himself with the Jeffersonian tradition of universal schooling and its emphasis on the importance of the equality of opportunity, which would entail a large-scale redistribution of privilege to the advantage of a "natural aristocracy of talent and virtue" but opposed the "Jacksonian Democracy" which he deemed much too egalitarian. Again, his position prevented him from going too far and he was careful to explain why Harvard and like institutions had to admit the sons of the privileged. He believed that the emergence of a hereditary aristocracy of wealth and the hardening of class-lines would soon produce class consciousness, a danger to America which only a "more equitable distribution of opportunity" (generating increased social mobility) could turn back. In a highly contro- versial 1943 Atlantic article, which displeased Harvard's most loyal supporters, Conant advocated the confiscation of all property once a generation : the third choice, which was embodied by the indigenous American radical and his concern with social fluidity, was the antidote to the European "industrial feudalism" and would preserve the existing capitalist order and free enterprise.

From Conant's Education Strategy to Kuhn's Research Strategy

The seminal influence of Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions on the history, philosophy, and sociology of science illustrates how changes in pedagogical demands can significantly alter patterns of research. Kuhn's book was honed as a teacher in the General Education of Science curriculum designed by Harvard President James Bryant Conant, to whom Structure is dedicated. The courses targeted non-scientists who would have to make policy decisions in the dawning ‘Atomic Age’, where science would play an increasing role, despite the public skepticism generated by the atomic bomb (which Conant administered). Conant wanted these future policymakers to be ‘connoisseurs’ of science who understood problematic Big Science as continuing the basic mindset of culturally valued Little Science. This partly explains why Kuhn presented science as following the same stages, regardless of the specific science and period under discussion. I consider three other senses in Conant's curriculum left its imprint on Kuhn's research practice: the use of case histories to manufacture the internal/external history distinction; the invention of the historiographical mirage known as ‘normal science’; the application of the incommensurability thesis to create a more receptive attitude to past scientists.

Charlotte Hawkins Brown and Palmer Memorial Institute

Charlotte Hawkins Brown and Palmer Memorial Institute, by Charles Wadelington and Richard F. Knapp. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999. 303 pp. $16.95, paper; $39.95, cloth. Reviewed by Joseph T. Durham, Community College of Baltimore and Coppin State College. If it is true, as Ralph Waldo Emerson observed, that an institution is but lengthened shadow of one man (or woman), then Palmer Memorial Institute (PM) in Sedalia, North Carolina, was its founder, Charlotte Hawkins Brown, and she was Palmer Memorial Institute. The authors of this volume, both associated with North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources, have reviewed life and times of Brown and her beloved institution, an outstanding African American secondary boarding school that existed for almost 70 years. They paint a fascinating portrait of an indomitable Black woman who founded a school and developed a peculiar philosophy of education that appealed to Black parents and clients as well as to prominent, affluent Whites who contributed financially to PMI. Following essentially a chronological sequence, Wadelington and Knapp place history of Brown and Palmer Memorial in context of their times. At turn of 20th century, they note, African Americans were experiencing a period of racism, rampant segregation, and lynchings. Into this scenario, a youthful, 18-year-old Charlotte Hawkins, a product of a New England classical education, literally jumped from a train and landed in an isolated part of North Carolina, 10 miles from Sedalia. Hawkins had been engaged by American Missionary Association to teach at Bethany Institute, but it closed soon after she arrived. A lesser person might have been discouraged, but Hawkins sensed an opportunity and stayed to open her own school in 1902. Under her firm hand, PMI developed into a model finishing school for children of some of most distinguished African American families in United States. The authors paint Charlotte Hawkins Brown as a study in contrasts. Distinguished by her clipped New England speech and steeped in classics, she could appeal on one hand to luminaries such as Charles Eliot, president of Harvard from 1869 to 1909; President Franklin Delano Roosevelt; and Alice Freeman Palmer, second female president of Wellesley College, after whom PMI was named. On other hand, though she did not fully embrace industrial education model of Booker T. Washington, Brown believed that Black youth should be trained to work with their hands. She required PMI students to work on campus farm and to do chores related to upkeep and maintenance of school. She was nonetheless influenced by W. E. B. DuBois's concept of talented tenth and called her own philosophy of education the triangle of achievement. Her goal was to help PMI matriculants become educationally sufficient, culturally secure, and religiously sincere. Brown was also an indefatigable fundraiser who traveled extensively, especially in New England, often working long hours without proper food or rest. As a result, she was frequently hospitalized due to exhaustion brought on by overwork. Yet, PMI was Brown's institution. She was its head for a half-century, and was, in a sense, wedded to school. She married twice, but neither marriage was successful. The first one to Edward S. Brown ended in divorce in 1916; second to John William Moses was later annulled. The authors' unrelenting association of Brown with Palmer has both its bright as well as its low spots. On positive side, they note that Brown successfully garnered funds and support from a wide circle of supporters-the rich and famous of North as well as southern Whites, who had firm ideas about intellectual ability of Blacks but who were convinced that Brown's educational plan was sound and beneficial. …

We Can't Eat Prestige: The Women Who Organized Harvard

This story explodes the popular belief that women white-collar workers tend to reject unionization and accept a passive role in the workplace. On the contrary, the women workers of Harvard University created a powerful and unique union - one that emphasizes their own values and priorities as working women and rejects unwanted aspects of traditional unionism. The workers involved comprise Harvard's 3,600-member support staff, which includes secretaries, library and laboratory assistants, dental hygienists, accounting clerks, and a myriad of other office workers who keep a great university functioning. Even at prestigious private universities like Harvard and Yale, these workers - mostly women - have had to put up with exploitive management policies that denied them respect and decent wages because they were women. But the women eventually rebelled, declaring that they could not live on prestige alone. Encouraged by the women's movement of the early 1970's, a group of women workers (and a few men) began what would become a 15-year struggle to organize staff employees at Harvard. The women persisted in the face of patronizing and sexist attitudes of university administrators and leaders of their own national unions. Unconscionably long legal delays foiled their efforts. But they developed innovative organizing methods, which merged feminist values with demands for union representation and a means of influencing workplace decisions. Out of adversity came an unorthodox form of unionism embodied in the Harvard Union of Clerical and Technical Workers (HUCTW). Its founding was marked by an absorbing human drama that pitted unknown workers, such as Kris Rondeau, a lab assistant who came to head the union, against famous educators such as Harvard President Derek Bok and a panoply of prestigious deans. Other characters caught up in the drama included Harvard's John T. Dunlop, the nation's foremost industrial relations scholar and former U.S. Secretary of Labor. The drama was played out in innumerable hearings before the National Labor Relations Board, in the streets of Cambridge, and on the walks of historic Harvard Yard, where union members marched and sang and employed new tactics like ballooning, designed to communicate a message of joy and liberation rather than the traditional hate-the-boss hostility. John Hoerr tells this story from the perspective of both Harvard administrators and union organizers. With unusual access to its meetings, leaders, and files, he examines the unique culture of a female-led union from the inside. Photographs add to the impact of this dramatic narrative. Author note: John Hoerr, a freelance writer, has been a journalist for more than thirty years at newspapers, magazines, public television, and United Press International. A specialist in labor reportage, he is the author of And the Wolf Finally Came: The Decline of the American Steel Industry.

AJP centennial. One hundred years of journal publication.

AJP centennial. One hundred years of journal publication.

And To Think That It Happened on Mt. Auburn Street: Dr. James, Harvard, and the Making of Manhood

And to Think That It Happened on Mt. Auburn Street: Dr. James, Harvard, and the Making of Manhood Mark C. Carnes (bio) Kim Townsend. Manhood at Harvard: William James and Others. New York: W.W. Norton, 1996. 318 pp. Figures, bibliography, notes, and index. $29.95. Oh, the thinks they did think! Hear the Honorable Curtis Guild, Governor of Massachusetts and a member of the Harvard Class of 1881, as his words rumble across Harvard Yard: “Whatever patriotism of American manhood comes to the fore, Harvard memory, Harvard ideals, instinctively rise, because Harvard is not merely Massachusetts, Harvard is not merely New England, Harvard is the ideal of America” (p. 10). See the great James Russell, arms outstretched in embrace of the Class of 1865: “These hold great futures in their lusty reins / And certify to earth a new imperial race” (p. 17). Behold Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., bedecked in commencement regalia, polishing the best fruit of Harvard, vintage of 1895: “The measure of power is obstacles overcome, to ride boldly, at what is in front of you, be it fence or enemy; to pray not for comfort, but for combat” (p. 60). Oh, yes, and there’s more, much more: Charles William Eliot, president of Harvard from 1869 to 1909, describes the essential trait of the successful college president as “the capacity to inflict pain” (p. 84). Professor Barrett Wendell invokes Harvard’s hallowed traditions to deprive women of them: “There has never before been a deviation from the principle that the influences amid which education should be obtained here must remain virile” (p. 228). Henry Cabot Lodge, arbiter of the nation’s foreign policy, on football and the ascent of civilization: “The time given to athletic contests and the injuries incurred on the playing-field are part of the price which the English-speaking race has paid for being world-conquerors” (p. 103). And from high atop the evolutionary heap at Harvard Yard, the bellow of that big-sticking Yertle, Teddy Roosevelt, exhorts those below to exertions both fearless and fecund: “If we stand idly by . . . then the bolder and stronger [End Page 594] peoples will pass us by, and will win for themselves the domination of the world. Let us therefore boldly face the life of strife, resolute to do our duty well and manfully.” 1 Wonderful nonsense, all of it, and with every footnote Kim Townsend pulls more delicious mischief out of the hat. But this is not a new trick. Quotes such as these have appeared in garish profusion since the 1960s and 1970s, long before the taxonomists of our profession thought to give men’s history its own genus. In The Inner Civil War (1965), George M. Frederickson cited Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Francis Parkman, Francis A. Walker, and other dignitaries of Harvard to show how the men of the post-Civil War generation were plagued with doubts as to whether they measured up to their heroic fathers. In the late 1970s, several pioneering works in men’s history anticipated other elements of Townsend’s thesis. In 1976 G. J. Barker-Benfield’s The Horrors of the Half-Known Life: Male Attitudes toward Women and Sexuality in Nineteenth-Century America documented a pervasive misogyny among educated men. In 1979 came two signal works. In Be a Man! Males in Modern Society, Peter N. Stearns described the “considerable complications in the masculine world of the middle class” (p. 96) caused by the maturation of the industrial economic system in the second half of the nineteenth century, and, in A Man’s Place: Masculinity in Transition, Joe Dubbert attributed the popularity of the novels of Frank Norris (A Man’s Woman, The Pit, McTeague) and Owen Wister (The Virginian), and the iconic appeal of Teddy Roosevelt, to increased anxieties about the state of manhood at the close of the century. 2 Townsend makes similar points with many of the same figures and some of the same quotes. Yet everywhere in the thickets of Victorian discourse on manhood, Townsend perceives the massive footprint of Harvard. Previous scholars may have cited the words of Holmes and all the rest, but none noticed the centrality of Harvard in this...

The Soul of the American University: From Protestant Establishment to Established Nonbelief

Only a century ago, almost all state universities held compulsory chapel services, and some required Sunday church attendance as well. In fact, state-sponsored chapel services were commonplace until the World War II era, and as late as the 1950s, it was not unusual for leading schools to refer to themselves as "Christian" institutions. Today, the once pervasive influence of religion in the intellectual and cultural life of America's preeminent colleges and universities has all but vanished. In The Soul of the American University, Marsden explores how, and why, these dramatic changes occurred. Far from a lament for a lost golden age when mainline Protestants ruled American education, The Soul of the American University offers a penetrating critique of that era, surveying the role of Protestantism in higher education from the founding of Harvard in the 1630s through the collapse of the WASP establishment in the 1960s. Marsden tells the stories of many of our pace-setting universities at defining moments in their histories, including Harvard, Yale, Princeton, the University of Michigan, Johns Hopkins, the University of California at Berkeley, and the University of Chicago. He recreates the religious feuds that accompanied Yale's transition from a flagship evangelical college to a university, and the dramatic debate over the place of religion in higher education between Harvard's President Charles Eliot and Princeton's President James McCosh. Marsden's analysis ranges from debates over Darwinism and higher critics of the Bible, to the roles of government and wealthy contributors, the impact of changing student mores, and even the religious functions of college football. He argues persuasively that the values of "liberalism" and "tolerance" that the establishment championed and used to marginalize Christian fundamentalism and Roman Catholicism eventually and perhaps inevitably led to its own disappearance from the educational milieu, as nonsectarian came to mean exclusively secular. While the largely voluntary disestablishment of religion may appear in many respects commendable, Marsden believes that it has nonetheless led to the infringement of the free exercise of religion in most of academic life. In effect, nonbelief has been established as the only valid academic perspective. In a provocative final chapter, Marsden spells out his own prescription for change, arguing that just as the academy has made room for feminist and multicultural perspectives, so should there be room once again for traditional religious viewpoints. A thoughtful blend of historical narrative and searching analysis, The Soul of the American University exemplifies what it advocates: that religious perspectives can provide a legitimate contribution to the highest level of scholarship.

The soul of the American university: from Protestant establishment to established nonbelief

Only a century ago, almost all state universities held compulsory chapel services, and some required Sunday church attendance as well. In fact, state-sponsored chapel services were commonplace until the World War II era, and as late as the 1950s, it was not unusual for leading schools to refer to themselves as institutions. Today, the once pervasive influence of religion in the intellectual and cultural life of America's preeminent colleges and universities has all but vanished. In The Soul of the American University, Marsden explores how, and why, these dramatic changes occurred. Far from a lament for a lost golden age when mainline Protestants ruled American education, The Soul of the American University offers a penetrating critique of that era, surveying the role of Protestantism in higher education from the founding of Harvard in the 1630s through the collapse of the WASP establishment in the 1960s. Marsden tells the stories of many of our pace-setting universities at defining moments in their histories, including Harvard, Yale, Princeton, the University of Michigan, Johns Hopkins, the University of California at Berkeley, and the University of Chicago. He recreates the religious feuds that accompanied Yale's transition from a flagship evangelical college to a university, and the dramatic debate over the place of religion in higher education between Harvard's President Charles Eliot and Princeton's President James McCosh. Marsden's analysis ranges from debates over Darwinism and higher critics of the Bible, to the roles of government and wealthy contributors, the impact of changing student mores, and even the religious functions of college football. He argues persuasively that the values of liberalism and tolerance that the establishment championed and used to marginalize Christian fundamentalism and Roman Catholicism eventually and perhaps inevitably led to its own disappearance from the educational milieu, as nonsectarian came to mean exclusively secular. While the largely voluntary disestablishment of religion may appear in many respects commendable, Marsden believes that it has nonetheless led to the infringement of the free exercise of religion in most of academic life. In effect, nonbelief has been established as the only valid academic perspective. In a provocative final chapter, Marsden spells out his own prescription for change, arguing that just as the academy has made room for feminist and multicultural perspectives, so should there be room once again for traditional religious viewpoints. A thoughtful blend of historical narrative and searching analysis, The Soul of the American University exemplifies what it advocates: that religious perspectives can provide a legitimate contribution to the highest level of scholarship.

Books

former president of Harvard, Derek Bok, called graduate education, so seldom scrutinized, soft underbelly of the research university. Now two giants of academic administration, William Bo wen and Neil Rudenstine, have scrutinized and scrutinized, in 400 big pages and many scores of charts and graphs. Bowen is an economist, the president of the Mellon Foundation, and the former provost and president of Princeton. Neil Rudenstine is an English professor, the new president of Harvard and former provost at Princeton, and second in command at Mellon. The Mellon Foundation supported their project, which was started in 1989 and completed, among their many other duties, in record time. The book claims to be the first comprehensive study of graduate education since Berelson's in 1960. The study is focused on the top echelon of graduate programs, namely, the authors' Ten Universities group Princeton, Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Cornell (that is, most of the Ivy League), Stanford, Chicago, Berkeley, Michigan, and North Carolina. Remember this list. And it focuses on six fields, namely, English, history, and political science (known euphoniously as EHP), with some attention to math and physics (MP), plus economics. The EHP fields were the most IN PURSUIT OF THE Ph.D. by William G. Bowen and Neil L. Rudenstine. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992, index, $35.

Henry P. Bowditch's forgotten contributions to radiology.

Henry P. Bowditch's forgotten contributions to radiology.D L Crandall and A C BargerAudio Available | Share

The Caring Physician: The Life of Dr Francis W. Peabody

This brief biography of Francis W. Peabody (1881-1927) was written by Oglesby Paul, MD, professor emeritus of medicine at Harvard Medical School, whose own father was attended in his last illness by Dr Peabody. Drawing on letters, diaries, and numerous published and unpublished documents, Dr Paul has produced a richly detailed, absorbing, and moving account of Dr Peabody's personal life, professional career, philosophy of medical practice, and early death. Francis Weld Peabody was born and raised in Boston's elite "Brahmin" society, son of a professor in the Harvard Divinity School and nephew of Harvard President Charles W. Eliot. After graduating from Harvard College and Medical School and interning at Massachusetts General Hospital, he devoted some months to advanced study in Europe before returning to Boston to take up a career in internal medicine. From the first he showed a leaning toward clinical and laboratory research, teaching, and writing. During successive

From Circumstance to Mechanism in Pediatrics During the Hopkins Century

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was The Johns Hopkins. In the beginning, like Janus, the Roman God of thresholds, the new medicine was double-faced,1 the one visage gazing inward at the mechanisms of disease, the other outward at the social circumstances in which disease occurs. With time, the very success of the search for mechanisms displaced the concern for circumstances. Is it hyperbole to aver that Hopkins was the Word for the education of American physicians in the scientific practice of medicine? This University began formal graduate education in the United States2; this Hospital introduced the graduated system of clinical instruction for house officers incorporated in a teaching hospital in place of preceptorships with specialist practitioners3-5; this Medical School inaugurated the full-time system in clinical departments, chose its faculty for competence in research as well as patient care, and became the prototype for academic excellence.4 Harvard's president, Charles W. Eliot, acknowledged this University's seminal role when he wrote2(p105): The example of Johns Hopkins forced our faculty to put their strength into the development of education for graduates. . . . What was true of Harvard was true of every other university in the land. Nor was Eliot6(p93) reticent in assessing the state of medical education B.H. (before Hopkins): The ignorance and general incompetency of the average graduate of American medical schools at a time when he [sic] receives a degree which turns him loose upon the community, is something horrible to contemplate, considering the nature of the physician's functions and responsibilities.

The Last American Puritan: The Life of Increase Mather, 1639-1723

Powerful preacher, political negotiator for New England in the halls of Parliament, president of Harvard, father of Cotton Mather, Increase Mather was the epitome of the American Puritan. He was the most important spokesman of his generation for Congregationalism and became the last American Puritan of consequence as the seventeenth century ended. The story begins in 1639 when Mather was born in the Massachusetts village of Dorchester. He left home for Harvard College when he was twelve and at twenty-two began to stir the city of Boston from the pulpit of North Church. He had written four books by the time he was thirty-two. Certain he was God s chosen instrument and New England God s chosen people, he disciplined mind and spirit in service to them both. Tempted to Atheisme and unbelief, afflicted early by nightmares and melancholy, then by hope and joy, he was a pioneer in recognizing the excitement of the new sciences and sought to reconcile them to theology. This well-wrought biography, the first of Increase Mather in forty years, draws on the extensive Mather diaries, which were transcribed by Michael Hall.

Graduate Education in International Affairs: A Discipline in Transition

GRADUATE EDUCATION IN____ INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS: A DISCIPLINE IN TRANSITION Roger S. Leeds HE EFFECTIVENESS OF AMERICAN FOREIGN POLICY and the competitiveness of American business in an era of global interdependence hinge on the quality of practitioners occupying positions of influence and leadership in the international arena. Many of these individuals have been trained in five select graduate schools of international relations: the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, the School of Public and International Affairs (SIA) at Columbia, the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton, the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service, and the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). Given the influence of these schools' graduates in setting corporate and public policy, it is no exaggeration to suggest that the performance of these institutions is of some consequence to the nation at large. It is therefore legitimate to question how well this small community of graduate schools is fulfilling its mandate, and whether adjustments could be made to improve their performance. The issue is timely because some of these highly competitive schools are being squeezed by financial pressures and academic changes that were unforeseen a few years ago. An increasingly familiar reproach from the students themselves is that too many in their ranks pay too much money in search of too few acceptable job opportunities in a field that has been transformed fundamentally in the past twenty years. Other danger signals are also evident. After decades of steady growth in the number of applicants for admission, some of the schools saw a levelling off of applications in 1985. The career placement officers at the larger schools are also Roger S. Leeds is a senior staff member of the International Finance Corporation , an affiliate of the World Bank. He is also a professorial lecturer in international finance at SAIS, where he received his M.A. and Ph.D. 205 206 SAIS REVIEW concerned by the high numbers of graduates still unemployed months after receiving their diplomas. Unless these institutions can sustain their reputations as the primary advanced training ground for international careers, they will falter, and some may not survive. BY THE MID- 1940s IT WAS APPARENT that the conduct of relations between nations and basic power relationships had been fundamentally transformed. Political coalitions were shifting. Old adversaries became new allies and the United States emerged as a superpower, rendering its isolationist tradition obsolete. Trade and investment patterns provided convincing evidence of an unprecedented degree of economic interdependence . Commercial air transportation and sophisticated international communications networks made the world seem to grow smaller. It was a dynamic era in international relations, which demanded a new generation of professionals trained in the tools of internationalism. It was during this period that a number of major private universities located along the Eastern corridor initiated graduate programs in the broad discipline of international affairs. The new programs emerged in response to initiatives by prominent academicians and statesmen who perceived a gap in the range of graduate education available. Among the founders of SAIS were two future secretaries of state, Christian Herter and Dean Acheson, and arms control negotiator Paul Nitze; at Tufts, A. Lawrence Lowell and Roscoe Pound, respectively president of Harvard and dean of the law school, were instrumental in launching the Fletcher School. These visionaries believed that the advanced study of international affairs was too heavily focused on abstract political and economic theory and was divorced from the practical concerns of policymakers. They perceived a need in the United States to provide a rigorous, practical international education for a select group of young men and women of promise. Thus, the discipline of "international relations" entered the lexicon of graduate education and became recognized as an appropriate subject of academic endeavor. Soon, interdisciplinary programs in the study of the political, economic, and social relations between nations were being established at major academic institutions. Although each of these new schools was started at a different time and each claimed to be unique, there were common points of departure. They were very small at the outset, seeking to attract a limited number of students from elite social and academic backgrounds. In 1949, for example , SAIS...

Out of Eden

Religion can inspire. It can also distort, and this is precisely what it does for Professors McThenia and Shaffer.' It leads them to mistake the periphery for the center. In my earlier article' I tried to come to terms with a movement that seeks alternatives to litigation. Known as ADR (Alternative Dispute Resolution), this movement is headed by Chief Burger and is now sweeping the bar. It recently received the endorsement of the President of Harvard, Derek Bok, and the Advisory Committee on the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. In 1983, the Advisory Committee managed to revise Rule 16 to strengthen the hand of the trial judge in brokering settlements, and for the last two years the Committee has been engaged in a determined campaign to amend Rule 68 to create additional pressure for settlement. The party who rejects an offer of settlement would, if the Advisory Committee has its way, stand in jeopardy of paying the attorney's fees of the other side. Professors McThenia and Shaffer now lend their voices to this movement, but in an unusual way. They add a religious dimension. They emphasize reconciliation rather than settlement, and appear to be moved by a conception of social organization that takes the insular religious community as its model: Justice is what we discover-you and I, Socrates said-when we walk together, listen together, and even love one another, in our curiosity about what justice is and where justice comes from.4 McThenia and Shaffer speak out on behalf of social mechanisms that might restore or preserve loving relationships and, not surprisingly, they find the judicial judgment a rather inept instrument for that purpose. I have no special interest in countering their plea: I am as much for love as the next person. What McThenia and Shaffer say is not wrong,