Chemist of Ideas

(See Cover)

Most Europeans and a good many Americans consider Harvard the No. i U.S. university. Just as many, and perhaps more, Americans think of it as an overripe berry patch full of arrogant and precious snobs. For every man who admires Harvard for producing an Emerson, a Holmes, a Henry Adams, a Henry James, a Franklin Roosevelt, there is at least another who agrees with the old gag: "You can always tell a Harvard man, but you can't tell him much."

This week, as the nation's colleges and universities were engulfed by the biggest tide of students in history, the oldest, richest and most prestigious U.S. university will register a record enrollment of 11,700. Hundreds of them will live in barracks at Fort Devens, 32 miles away, in defense-worker shacks set up on tennis courts and in Boston's Brunswick Hotel, which the university has bought and allocated to married veterans. For many of them, "going to Harvard" this year will mean only the bare essential of "going to classes."

And within the university, the atmosphere is different. One of the best things about prewar Harvard was its sense of leisure, the conception of "education over the breakfast table," the notion that by the unhurried exchange of good conversation and ideas with his fellows a man could learn much that he would never get out of books. Now Cambridge is gripped by urgency, a hurried and un-Harvardlike anxiety to make up for lost time.

Three in every four of the 11,700 new students are veterans, thousands of whom would never have come to Cambridge but for the G.I. Bill of Rights and Harvard's liberal policy of measuring veterans' achievements, rather than their formal preparation, as a basis for admission. But these newcomers fit neatly enough into the scheme of a university that has become--under its 23rd president, James Bryant Conant--increasingly national in its influence, interests, emphasis and student body.

Zest & Relevance. This president, a Harvard man himself, can talk about "American culture" without a semblance of snobbishness. But he is quite as likely to talk about a "classless society."

A scientific celebrity and adventurer, he finds zest in teaching, mountain climbing, fishing and in trying a new flavor of ice cream, no less than in exploring the complicated structure of chlorophyll and in helping develop nuclear fission. He has the great capacity for growth that is the essence of the educated man. And his own breadth of intellectual interest is the essence of 310-year-old Harvard, whose motto is the single Latin word Veritas (Truth).

This is the Harvard whose president argues the necessity for social scientists to dissect American institutions "as fearlessly as the geologist examines the origin of rocks," who knows the merit of "pure" science and thought but decries the pointless "thrashing over old straw" which often passes for scholarship.

James Bryant Conant's outstanding characteristic as an educator is that he is interested in education--which is a point of view not as typical of college presidents as it might be. He looks on education as "a social process." as something very much a part of the community. In Emersonian fashion, he inveighs against "the recluse who has almost ceased to be a man, and whose labors in the library or the laboratory differ from stamp collecting only by the courtesy of a name." Says he: "Personally, I like the word 'relevance.' ... To my mind a scholar's activities should have relevance to the immediate future of our civilization."

Esthetes & Extroverts. The practical achievements of the 13-year-old Conant-Harvard partnership have been considerable. One widely known example is last year's report on General Education in a Free Society (TIME, Aug. 13, 1945). That $60,000, 267-page report, which did not even discuss Harvard until page 177, had an immediate impact on American education. It was President Conant who set the sights for that far-ranging study.

The investigating committee, spending its first twelve months studying secondary education, became convinced that high schools are much too vocational. To provide the basic education in a common language and a common set of values that American youth needs, the report recommended that every pupil spend at least half his classroom hours on English, science and mathematics, and social studies.

On the college level, the committee also urged a common core, thought it was high time that Harvardmen in particular had something more in common than the ability to write grammatical English and swim 50 yards. The committee recommended the introduction of cut-across courses in the humanities, social sciences and science. Adopted almost unanimously by the Harvard Faculty of Arts & Sciences, such general education courses will get under way next week, on an experimental basis.

In Conant's brief and war-interrupted regime, there have been other achievements. Two samples:

1) Twelve years ago President Conant decided that something should be done about Harvard's reputation for producing effete esthetes, few in actual number, but high in visibility. Results: a $100,000-a-year scheme of National Scholarships, to bring to Harvard talented, tough-minded Westerners and Midwesterners; and a general admissions policy aimed at attracting "healthy extraverts."

2) When a newspaper publisher's wife bequeathed nearly $1,000,000 to Harvard, specifying only that it be used "to promote and elevate the standards of journalism," Conant sounded out newspapermen in half a dozen cities. They agreed with him that $1,000,000 was not enough for a first-rate journalism school, and that, anyway, a journalism school might not be the thing newspapermen needed most. It was Conant's idea that the money should be used to give about a dozen newsmen a year a chance to study at Harvard as "Nieman Fellows," take whatever courses they liked. The plan has brought prestige to the university, and given an unacademic lift to courses where the outspoken newsmen sit in.

First & foremost on this year's Arts & Sciences faculty agenda are four new teaching and research programs designed to help education catch up with the nuclear world. Also in prospect is a new $3 to $5 million science center (see cut), a pet project of Scientist-President Conant.

Scientific Approach. The late Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes (Harvard 561) once complained that in Cambridge, when they speak of the president, they mean the president of Harvard and not some "minor official in Washington."

Harvard's White House is 226-year-old, ivy-covered Massachusetts Hall, where this week the president was hard at work. The furniture in his office consisted mainly of hand-me-downs from his predecessors, Presidents Eliot (1869-1909) and Lowell (1909-33); one piece dated back to 1681. But no picture of Eliot or Lowell, Back Bay Brahmins both, hung in the Conant office; it was dominated by a Duplessis oil of Benjamin Franklin. The man who sat in the green chair beneath the portrait of this famed scientist-educator-statesman had something of Ben's breadth.

James Bryant Conant is no longer a working scientist, but he has not lost his readiness to make hypotheses and test them by experiment. That is his greatest asset as an educator and as a man.

Dinners, Dances, Charades. Young Bryant, as his family called him, inherited his scientific bent from his father, a photo-engraver who liked to tinker with inventions and gadgets. The boy tested his mother's soap in his home laboratory, told her she was paying for the brand name and not the ingredients.

Young Conant was the most precocious chemistry student Roxbury Latin School had known in 20-odd years. He finished two years of college chemistry and one year of college physics before he even entered Harvard. In college he began with advanced courses, worked hard and was graduated (magna cum laude) in three years. Three years later (1916) he had his Ph.D.

No grind, Conant was popular during these Harvard years, much sought after for dinners, dances or an evening of charades at the home of his chemistry professor, Nobel Prizewinning Theodore William Richards--whose daughter Patty he later married (one of their sons is a Boston Globe reporter, the other is in the Merchant Marine). People liked Jim Conant because he had a wide range of interests, was always attentive to what other people had to say, usually had something worthwhile to add of his own. He had (and has) a wide acquaintance but few close friends.

Acids, Gases, Eggs. World War I was a boom time for U.S. chemists. Conant developed a process for making benzoic acid, and went into business in New Jersey with two partners. But on a large scale the process proved tricky, and one of his partners--Stanley B. Pennock, an All-America guard at Harvard--was killed in an explosion. Conant sold out and went back to Cambridge.

Soon after the U.S. went into the war, he was bossing a crew of scientists developing deadly Lewisite gas in a laboratory called "the Mousetrap." He had been commissioned as a lieutenant, was promoted to major.

Returning to Harvard again after the war, Conant kept up his researches in explosives, and in chlorophyll (the "what makes grass green" factor). As a teacher, he developed a good sense of showmanship to go with his ability to talk in chalk. In the course of one lecture, he whipped an egg out of his pocket, dropped it into a substance which he said would solidify the albumen, whipped it out again and heaved it at the wall over his students' heads. They were relieved to find that the professor was right: the egg bounced.

A talent for getting to the core of abstruse subjects made him one of the leading lights of the Shop Club, a once-a-month supper club founded (to talk shop) in 1921 by Conant and a group of his faculty friends and their wives. Conant was a good listener and a quick questioner, especially on history, literature and philosophy. He once remarked to an associate who was studying 17th Century history: "I sometimes wonder if our two subjects aren't both the same, when you get high enough into them."

Professor to President. By 1927 Conant's researches in the borderland between organic and physical chemistry had earned him a solid scientific reputation, and the California Institute of Technology invited him to set up a new biological chemistry department. Anxious to keep Conant, Harvard promoted him to a full professorship, a few years later made him chairman of the chemistry department.

In 1933, when he was 40, the Harvard Corporation elected him to succeed retiring President A. Lawrence Lowell (see BOOKS). Nobody was more surprised than James Bryant Conant himself. He still wonders at times "why the Corporation elected me, and why I took the job when they did."

The administrative system which President Conant inherited was creaking in every joint. After a bumbling start, Conant learned to pick good administrators and then keep his nose out of their day-to-day business. The test of his "coordinated decentralization" came during the war, when he was able to spend as much as 75% of his time on National Defense Research Committee affairs, far removed from Harvard.

Conant's three chief administrative assistants are now: 1) Treasurer William H. Claflin Jr., a Boston investment banker, who worries about the university's $205 million investments; 2) Edward ("Ted") Reynolds, wartime chief of the Army's medical supply service, whose responsibilities are housekeeping functions (food, real estate, etc.); 3) Historian Paul Herman Buck, Dean of the 597-strong) Arts & Sciences faculty and Provost of the University. Roosterlike little Paul Buck, ambitious and hardworking, is No. 2 man in the academic setup.

Faces & Finances. One of the most important men in Conant's and Harvard's life is a moonfaced, mild-mannered fellow with the unimpressive title of Secretary to the University. New England-born David M. Little has been a close friend of Jim Conant's since Shop Club days, once taught English at Harvard and is now Master of Adams House (one of the seven residences for upperclassmen). He has a Jim Farley memory for faces, dates & places, and knows more alumni by their first names than any other man alive.

To Conant, who is only moderately good at remembering people, Dave Little is an indispensable assistant in the important job of keeping the alumni happy. Harvard, rich as it is, has such costly commitments that it must add money every year, has averaged $5,000,000 in gifts since Conant became president.

Lowell, who got Yaleman Edward Harkness to endow the magnificent Georgian houses along the Charles River (see cut), was not very tactful with many alumni. He had a habit of throwing their letters into the wastebasket unanswered.

President Conant is punctilious about answering mail, and really enjoys hitting what he and Dave Little call "the kerosene circuit"--of the 120 Harvard Clubs, scattered all over the U.S. and from Tokyo to London. Conant is a witty, effective speechmaker; he leaves the gladhanding to jovial Dave Little.

Controls & Pressures. Harvard's alumni, besides being the main source of its endowment, have the ultimate control of the university--at least in constitutional theory. The 62,567 alumni elect 30 of their number for staggered, six-year terms to membership in the inspecting body, officially called "The Honorable and Reverend, the Board of Overseers" (originally they were all clergymen). The Overseers meet eight times a year, to approve (rarely to reject) the decisions of the Corporation, which is the actual governing body. A sample list of Overseers past and present covers a lot of territory--from Massachusetts' Senator Leverett Saltonstall and San Francisco's Mayor Roger Lapham to Columnist Walter Lippmann and Poet Robert Frost.

But it is the president and the self-perpetuating board of six trustees, known as the Fellows (or Corporation), who really run Harvard. The Corporation's interests lie with what Boston calls State Street, though more of them are lawyers than bankers. Subjected to the pressures of this predominantly conservative group, President Conant has seemed to some critics to become less outspokenly liberal in recent years.

One Jam, Three Jobs. Descendant of New England farmers and tanners, Conant is a registered Republican, who prefers to keep publicly neutral in political campaigns (he was for Al Smith in 1928); he usually comes out for issues (like an interventionist foreign policy) rather than for men.

To advance his Jeffersonian ideas of equal educational opportunity and what he calls a fluid, classless society, Conant has become a vigorous essayist. It got him into one jam with the Corporation. Conant's "Wanted: American Radicals," in the May 1943 Atlantic Monthly, "urged the need of the American radical not because I wish to give a blanket endorsement to his views, but because I see the necessity of reinvigorating a neglected aspect of our . . . development." Conant said that "the kernel of [this] radical philosophy" would be a "demand to confiscate [by constitutional methods] all property once a generation."

Harvard alumni all over the country flooded Massachusetts Hall with letters and telegrams of protest. The Corporation indirectly sponsored an Atlantic antidote to the Conant poison.

Getting along with the alumni is one of the three big jobs of Harvard's president, as Conant conceives it. The others: presiding over the ten faculties, personally participating in the selection of every new permanent professor.

Conant spends his mornings at his Massachusetts Hall office, ticking off a crowded schedule of meetings with professors, deans and administrative officers. About ten afternoons a month Conant presides over the meetings of the faculties. He also presides over "ad hoc committees," which Conant (who invented them) calls "the best invention Cambridge has seen in years." Aware that standing committees to fill faculty vacancies invited politicking, Conant decided in 1941 to draw up a new committee every time there was a new vacancy. Prominent outsiders sit on the committees.

This year President Conant will add another assignment to his load. Out of the classroom since 1933, he has volunteered to guest-lecture in the new general education courses in natural science. His recipe for teaching science to nonscientists: a new type of course dealing with the "tactics and strategy" of science, putting a minimum emphasis on factual knowledge, a maximum on scientific method and historical approach.

Catalyst with Resilience. Having just weathered the toughest science brushup course of all time, Teacher Conant should be in good form. As chairman of the National Defense Research Committee he exercised absolute dictatorial powers over men and materials in its $2 billion wartime research program, developing radar, antiradar, various new chemical warfare wrinkles--and nuclear fission. Conant's job was as an organizer, moderator and catalyst, but he would have failed if he had not been a topnotch scientist.

Rushing back & forth from Cambridge to Washington and Los Alamos (some 250,000 miles of travel in all), he demonstrated his tremendous physical and mental resilience. He was probably right in saying: "I could be perfectly happy with a permanent Pullman ticket." Whenever people marveled at his bounce, kerosene-circuiting Conant kidded: "What's the matter? Running out of kerosene?"

Deputy to Director Vannevar Bush of the OSRD and special consultant to Major General Leslie Groves, Conant was the No. 1 intermediary between scientists, industrialists and military, an indispensable link in building the Bomb. His success in this role does not make Conant altogether happy. He considers control of the Bomb the world's biggest job, flew to Moscow last December, as an adviser to Secretary Byrnes, to discuss with Molotov and the Russians plans for atomic-energy control. While he was there, he added Moscow to the alumni kerosene circuit (see cut).

Now that Conant is wholly occupied with Harvard's adjustment--in science, international studies, social relations and citizenship--to the Atomic Age, some of his former Washington associates wonder if that is the most useful spot for him. In retrospect they are more than ever impressed with his facility for learning "through the pores," for quickly grasping human as well as scientific problems--and they are quietly talking about Conant's presidential potentialities. Nobody has asked Jim Conant what he thinks, but at 53 he still has a zest for adventure.

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