Education: Mr. Lowell

In his mansion in Boston’s Back Bay last week died Abbott Lawrence Lowell, 86. “Harvard College, as it stands today, is to a large extent his handiwork,” said his successor, Dr. James Bryant Conant. Abbott Lawrence Lowell, for 24 years Harvard’s president, himself largely represented what both admirers and detractors meant when they spoke of Harvard, Boston, and the New England cultural tradition.

For the forefathers of this Boston Brahmin two Massachusetts mill towns are named. His older brother Percival discovered the canals of Mars and the planet Pluto. His younger sister was the cigar-smoking poetess Amy. At Harvard young Lawrence was a brilliant student of mathematics and never lost a foot race. Still proud of his fitness some 50 years later, he one day challenged Lord Bryce (The American Commonwealth) to climb a picket fence built around the Harvard athletic field. Bryce declined, but Lowell nimbly scrambled over.

After Harvard Law School, Lowell practiced law in Boston for 17 years, wrote several books on law and political theory. In 1899 he was made professor of government at Harvard. Ten years later he was chosen to succeed President Charles W. Eliot.

Away with Codfish. Lowell—who preferred being called “Mr.” rather than “President”—began at once to remodel Eliot’s Harvard. Eliot had built up a distinguished faculty but had let the undergraduate college slump. Under Eliot’s famous system of free electives, many Harvard undergraduates chose snap courses, thought any grade higher than C ungentlemanly. Snorted Lowell: “The B.S. degree is a certificate not of a man’s mastery of science but of his ignorance of Latin.”

Lowell reined in the elective system so that students had to concentrate in one field after introductory courses. Said he: “The time has long passed when instruction can be given purely by lectures—as the Moors after the conquest of Granada were baptized by sprinkling in crowds.” He pioneered Harvard’s individual tutorial system, which has been widely copied. But he was never satisfied. Long after he grumbled: “No wonder there is so much knowledge in colleges. The freshmen always bring in a little, and the seniors never take any away.” Said he of I.Q. tests: “No good, no good—like trying to measure Tremont Street with a codfish.”

Convinced that college social as well as intellectual life had “disintegrated,” Lowell conceived Harvard’s system of “Houses,” modeled after Oxford’s colleges. In 1932, with a gift of $13,000,000 from Yaleman Edward Stephen Harkness,* Harvard finished its group of seven redbrick, white-spired Georgian social nuclei, each with its own library, tutors and dining-hall.

Lowell also built the Edward Mallinckrodt Laboratory, the huge Widener Memorial Library, the Fogg Art Museum. With $6,000,000 from the late First National Banker George F. Baker, he built the Graduate School of Business Administration on the south bank of the Charles. All told, Lowell raised Harvard’s endowment by a cool $100,000,000—in spite of frequently outraging alumni by such proposals as the abolition of intercollegiate football (except with Yale).

A Man for Damns. Lowell roused serious controversies among much larger groups than Harvard’s alumni. He was roundly damned for protesting the appointment of Louis D. Brandeis to the U.S. Supreme Court for “lack of judicial temperament,” for proposing a quota for Jewish students at Harvard as an anti-anti-Semitic move during the Ku Klux rampage of 1922, for barring Negroes from freshman dormitories. He was internationally damned for his part in the Sacco-Vanzetti case. In 1927 at the request of Massachusetts’ worried Governor Alvan T. Fuller, LowelLand two others* reviewed the trial of the two anarchists, declared them fairly judged and, in effect, sent them to the electric chair amid worldwide uproar.

But Abbott Lawrence Lowell was no orthodox conservative. He was also damned for refusing—unlike Columbia’s Nicholas Murray Butler—to fire an outspoken German subject, Philosopher Hugo Munsterberg, from his faculty during World War I. He likewise refused to fire radical Harold J. Laski, who sided with the Boston police strikers in 1919. Lowell opposed the strikers, but defended Laski’s academic freedom.

Brown Shoes for Morning. Such was Lowell’s position that, though he barbarically wore tan shoes with his morning clothes, Boston’s tailors voted him the city’s best-dressed man. He prowled about expanding Harvard as if it was his own back yard, leaping into sewer ditches to discover fragments of antique Harvard chinaware, laying out new Yard walks with a bundle of stakes and twine. He inherited a large fortune and fattened it judiciously (except when he lost $194,412 in Kreuger & Toll). He endowed (with some $1,000,000) the Harvard Society of Fellows—a group of 24 brilliant young men who are lodged in the “Houses” and paid $1,250 to $1,500 annually for three years so that they can pursue graduate studies unencumbered by formal Ph.D. requirements.

Lowell always politely refused to be interviewed by newsmen. He refused to speak over the radio until 1932, when he was moved to warn the nation that Japan’s aggression in Manchuria foretold ultimate war, that the U.S. must join with the League of Nations in an economic boycott. He had advocated a League of Nations even before Woodrow Wilson (from whom he got some of his educational policies), and had publicly debated with the League’s archfoe, Henry Cabot Lodge. Lowell was later stirred to broadcast his opposition to the Child-Labor Amendment because he thought it gave Congress too much power.

Mr. Lowell’s social philosophy: “Truly, the future has less to fear from individual than from cooperative selfishness.”

* Yale refused a gift for similar purposes from Alumnus Harkness until Mr. Lowell had take his.

* Judge Robert Grant, Dr. Samuel W. Stratton.