Read e-book online Making Harvard Modern: The Rise of America's University PDF

By Morton Keller

ISBN-10: 0195144570

ISBN-13: 9780195144574

ISBN-10: 0195302818

ISBN-13: 9780195302813

Making Harvard Modern is a candid, richly precise portrait of America's such a lot trendy collage from 1933 to the current: seven a long time of dramatic swap. Early 20th century Harvard used to be the country's oldest and richest college, yet now not unavoidably its notable one. via the century's finish it was once extensively considered as the nation's, and the world's, top establishment of upper schooling. With verve, humor, and perception, Morton and Phyllis Keller inform the tale of that upward thrust: a story of compelling personalities, impressive fulfillment and no much less impressive educational pratfalls. Their publication is predicated on wealthy and revealing archival fabrics, interviews, and private event. younger, humbly born James Bryant Conant succeeded Boston Brahmin A. Lawrence Lowell as Harvard's president in 1933, and got down to switch a Brahmin-dominated collage right into a meritocratic one. He was hoping to recruit the nation's best students and a good nationwide scholar physique. however the loss of new cash in the course of the melancholy and the distractions of global struggle saved Conant, and Harvard, from reaching this aim. within the Fifties and Sixties, through the presidency of Conant's successor Nathan Marsh Pusey, Harvard raised the money, recruited the school, and attracted the scholars that made it an outstanding meritocratic establishment: America's college. The authors give you the fullest account but of this change, and of the wrenching campus predicament of the past due 'sixties. over the last thirty years of the 20th century, a brand new educational tradition arose: meritocratic Harvard morphed into worldly Harvard. throughout the presidencies of Derek Bok and Neil Rudenstine the college opened its doorways to turning out to be numbers of overseas scholars, girls, African- and Asian-Americans, and Hispanics. Its management, school, and scholars grew to become extra deeply engaged in social matters; its scientists faculties have been extra able to input into shared advertisement ventures. yet worldliness introduced its personal conflicts: over affirmative motion and political correctness, over commercialization, over the ever better bills of upper schooling. This interesting account, the 1st finished heritage of a latest American college, is key interpreting for somebody with an curiosity within the current nation and destiny process greater schooling.

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Still, all was not what it had been. "15 But the Depression crimped the already straitened lives of commuters and boardinghouse dwellers. A faculty member sympathetically discussed the plight of commuter "untouchables" in 1932. By the mid19308 almost a quarter of the undergraduates lived at home, and their numbers were growing. If anything, the house system deepened their isolation from the rest of the College. They had no building they could call their own; the Freshman Union was open to them, but its meals were too expensive.

His efforts to come up with viable answers defined his presidency. Conant believed that the faculty's primary task was not so much to preserve as to advance learning. " He estimated that about half the Harvard staff consisted of scholars and half "of men who are frankly not active or interested in the advancement of knowledge in the widest possible sense of the term. " His hopes for Harvard's undergraduates were strikingly similar. 22 Conant's belief in equal opportunity and social mobility coexisted with more than a trace of red-in-tooth-and-claw academic social Darwinism.

The transformation was cultural as well as quantitative. By two to one, postwar students planned on graduate study; by almost as large a margin they wanted to go into the professions rather than business. For the first time the College had a number of married undergraduates, and officials had to concern themselves with seeking out and, in extremis, providing housing for these couples. )21 The veterans invigorated student cultural life. The University's Sanders Theater had been dark four or five nights a week before the war; by 1948 it was in constant use for concerts, plays, lectures, and debates.

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Making Harvard Modern: The Rise of America's University by Morton Keller


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