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The Harvard that is being celebrated this week was essentially the creation of Charles William Eliot about a century ago. An austere and high-minded man who suffered deeply from having a large, liver-colored birthmark across his right cheek, Eliot was a chemistry professor of such limited talents that when he applied for a vacant chair, the post was given to another man. Crushed, Eliot went to Europe, where he was deeply impressed by the German university system. America, he wrote, must develop "a system of education based chiefly upon the pure and applied sciences, the living European languages, and mathematics . . . The vulgar argument that the study of the classics is necessary to make a gentleman is beneath contempt."
Chosen president of Harvard over considerable conservative opposition, Eliot made sweeping changes. He abolished virtually all required courses. He canceled the stern Puritan rules of discipline: no more compulsory daily chapel, no more bans on smoking or theatergoing. He overhauled and greatly improved the medical and law schools, founded the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (1872) and the business school (1908). He also presided over the establishment of a college for women, Radcliffe (1894), originally known mainly as "the Annex." He recruited a brilliant faculty, not only notable lecturers like Ralph Waldo Emerson (on philosophy) and William Dean Howells (Italian literature), but younger teachers like Adams, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., William James and George Santayana. (They had a sense of their own value too. Said Shakespeare Scholar George Lyman Kittredge, after falling off his dais: "At last, I find myself on the level of my audience.")
Overall, in his 40-year reign, Eliot raised the university's endowment from $2 million to $22 million, its faculty from 45 to 194, its student body from 500 to 2,000. And he brought Harvard such a quality of leadership that everything he did influenced other colleges. When the aging president strolled & across his Yard, said young Walter Lippmann, he looked "a little bit like God walking around."
Government Professor A. Lawrence Lowell, who took over in 1909, was a patrician, a conservative and a consolidator. He modified Eliot's total freedom of choice and insisted that each student must choose a field of concentration. "Every educated man should know a little of everything and something well," he said. The growth under Eliot had made little provision for where the swarms of students should live; Lowell discovered Edward S. Harkness. A Yale graduate, Harkness wanted to give his alma mater the funds for new student dormitories. Yale spent two years thinking it over. Nettled, Harkness made the same proposition to Lowell in 1928. Lowell, no hesitater, said thank you very much and began building seven handsome neo-Georgian houses near the banks of the Charles. Another huge donation from the mother of Harry Widener, '07, who had died in the sinking of the Titanic, enabled Lowell to build what would become the world's greatest university library.