Conant's Arsenal

In Harvard Yard there are more men in uniform than in mufti. A dozen or more special schools for Army & Navy men have sprung up. Officers and undergraduates double up in double-decker bunks, overflow dormitories. They eat in shifts (but contracts have been let for a huge new mess hall on the Soldiers' Field tennis courts). The president's big house on Quincy Street has been converted into Naval offices.

This Harvard wartime transformation, greatest in its 306 years, was drafted in red ink: the university's budget this year has been upped from $13,000,000 to $20,000,000.

Most of Harvard's students are taking war courses; Latin, Greek and philosophy are in the doghouse. The Law School has dwindled from 1,500 to 180 students. Graduate schools are deserted. Instead, Harvard is conducting special schools (enrolling 3,000 Army & Navy officers) for Army quartermasters, chaplains, engineers, for Navy supply men, and communications men, for Air Force statisticians. The statisticians' school teaches flyers from every U.S. training field the logistics of putting combat squadrons into the air.

The man who counts most in this transformation is Harvard's tall, razor-keen, 49-year-old President James Bryant Conant. Last week he was even busier than his university. In Washington he spent most of the week conferring with fellow members of Franklin Roosevelt's three-man committee investigating rubber. As chairman of the National Defense Research Committee, he helps direct U.S. scientists' search for new materials, new weapons.

When Jim Conant, a Dorchester engraver's son, was picked as Harvard's president in 1933, Harvard men wondered whether he would prove as good an executive as he was a chemist. Last week they were ready to admit that he had proved even better.

Washington hardly knew Dr. Conant--a Harvard classmate of Sumner Welles ('14) --when he went there to champion Lend-Lease in 1941. At a Senate committee hearing, Senator Gillette asked:

"Are you a doctor of divinity?"

"No."

"Are you a minister of the Gospel?"

"No."

"What is he, anyway?" whispered another committeeman to a Conant friend.

Right after Pearl Harbor President Conant sharply cut his own salary (formerly some $23,000), moved from his president's mansion into a smaller house on Quincy Street. He is seldom there. In Washington, where he spends most of his time, he lives in a "four-room apartment --at Dumbarton Oaks, an 18-acre estate in Georgetown given to Harvard two years ago by former U.S. Ambassador to Argentina Robert Woods Bliss.

Washington still knows little about Dr. Conant. One of the stories about him that Washington enjoys is about a Harvard faculty meeting: After he had held forth learnedly on one of his ideas, there was a respectful silence and then a facultyman blurted: "President Conant, I'm frankly not sure whether what you said is correct." The president pondered a moment, replied: "Come to think of it, I'm not sure of it myself."

Washington has sized up Dr. Conant not only as a natural leader but a man of determination and a great conviction: he believes that World War II is a war between democratic and Axis scientists and that the survival of science itself is at stake. Challenges he: "Progress in science has been made by the unusual person, the unorthodox individual. He cannot survive a regimented social order. It seems to me illogical for a scientist to be even quietly resigned to the possibility of a highly organized paternalistic state."

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