(4 of 4)
Like many other university presidents, Pusey was much concerned with fund raising. In 1956 he launched a successful campaign to raise the then unprecedented sum of $82.5 million for new professorships, faculty salaries and scholarships. By 1968 he had increased the university's endowment to $1 billion. But these were times of extreme discord, and many students paid little attention to Pusey's ambitions. In the fall of 1967 a band of about 250 leftist students trapped a recruiter for the Dow Chemical Co., chief manufacturer of the napalm being used in Viet Nam, and held him prisoner for seven hours. Pusey put 74 of them on probation and said their conduct was "simply unacceptable."
Still worse came in the spring of 1969, when the students seized University Hall, Harvard's administrative nerve center, vandalized the offices and spilled confidential files all over the floor. Crimson Editor James Fallows, | later a speech- writer for Jimmy Carter, reported encountering "the great stone-faced Nathan Pusey, (who) tried to conceal his utter astonishment at the passions tearing up his university." Pusey called in the police, plus 200 state troopers. With a four-foot battering ram, they smashed down the main door; chain cutters, sledgehammers and billy clubs did the rest.
Within half an hour, the building had been forcibly cleared and 184 students arrested; 45 were taken to the hospital. The students responded with a three-day protest strike, much argument, many furious demands and dire prophecies. "It's hard to believe," said one dismayed dean, "that something put together over a third of a millennium by Harvard men can be destroyed in a few days in April."
Well, nothing was really destroyed after all, except some illusions. Pusey, perhaps still "utterly astonished," retired two years later, two years before his expected departure, giving way to the earnestly optimistic Derek Bok. Fewer and fewer people now striding purposefully through the yard even remember the upheavals of nearly 20 years ago.
Besides, Harvard is not all a matter of social problems and cosmic issues. Some Harvard graduates with very long memories still recall the day when Lothrop Withington Jr., '42, swallowed a goldfish to win a $10 bet and set off a national fad that is better forgotten. Others will always remember the day in 1968 when mighty Yale was leading by 29-13 with only 42 seconds remaining in the Game, and then all kinds of incredible things began happening. The Crimson headline next day: HARVARD WINS, 29-29. Others remember less epic events: sculling on the Charles, drinking at Cronin's, the ludicrous vaudeville shows at the Hasty Pudding Club, the sun rising over the blue dome of Lowell House. And as with Oxford or the Sorbonne, the House of Commons or the Vatican or any other very long-lived institution, 3 1/2 cen- turies of history have probably taught Harvard that all things come and go. And this too -- whatever it may be -- shall pass.