Citizen President

Soon after the announcement that the gaunt, gangling chemistry professor was to be their new president, two members of the Harvard faculty gloomily sat down one day in 1933 to talk the matter over. "Well, after all," said one, trying to cheer himself up, "Charles W. Eliot was a chemist, too." "But," countered his colleague, "Eliot, you see, wasn't a very good chemist--and this boy is."

As the years passed, "this boy" was to prove that being a good chemist was not necessarily a handicap for a Harvard president. James Bryant Conant was soon just as much at home presiding over the Harvard Corporation as he had ever been puttering about his laboratory. A mild-mannered Yankee, with a cracker-barrel wit, he may have been quite a wrench from such grands seigneurs as Charles Eliot and A. Lawrence Lowell. But by this week, as he boarded his plane for Germany to begin his job as U.S. High Commissioner (see NATIONAL AFFAIRS), professors and teachers across the country knew that James Conant had left his own indelible mark on U.S. education.

Pebbles & Trains. For some Harvardmen, Conant took a good deal of getting used to. Striding across the Yard with a sheaf of papers bundled under his arm, he looked more like a minor clerk than a president. Sometimes on a Saturday, he could be seen tossing pebbles at a laboratory window, trying to catch the attention of one of his ex-cronies at work inside, and sometimes he could be found playing with an electric train on the floor of the presidential ballroom. Even some of his ideas were a bit disturbing. He hated silver spoons and ivory towers, and for a man who lived so close to Boston, he talked with unseemly eagerness about a future classless society. Education, said he, is "a social process . . . Personally, I like the word 'relevance' ... To my mind, a scholar's activities should have relevance to the immediate future of our civilization."

All in all, Harvard was to get quite an education from President Conant. To broaden his student body (it was 60% Eastern), he set up a series of national scholarships to bring in able students from all over the U.S. To broaden the scope of his faculty, he created a series of university professorships "in the hope that distinguished scholars with a 'roving commission' would help to break down departmental barriers." Over protests from some professors, he plumped for a program of general education, and with the publication of the famed Harvard Report (TIME, Aug. 13, 1945), he placed an official seal on a great postwar overhaul of higher education.

The Highest Aim. But as an educator, President Conant never stuck to any particular bailiwick. He wandered into every field--from the teaching of science and the education of dentists to the training of teachers. Sometimes he wandered into fields that seemed far from Harvard Yard.

He was an outspoken brand of liberal to whom democracy was a sort of religion and citizenship apparently the highest aim of man. This week, in a new book called Education and Liberty (Harvard; $3), he could be found wandering in typical fashion again--as the aggressive champion of the U.S. public school.

To Harvardman Conant, himself a graduate of the 308-year-old independent Roxbury Latin School, the "first-rate comprehensive high school" is the ideal for America. "More than one foreign observer has remarked that . . . free schools, where the future doctor, lawyer, professor, politician . . . labor leader and manual worker have studied and played together . . . are an American invention. That such schools should be maintained and made even more democratic and comprehensive seems to me to be essential for the future of this republic."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.