ELIOT OF HARVARD

1 R E L I O T O F H A R V A R D R I C H A R D C . L E V I N Several years ago, I was asked to deliver a mid-summer lecture to a group of university presidents on the subject of leadership. With the unusual luxury of having some time to prepare, I chose not to reflect upon my personal experiences, but to seek inspiration from history. Initially, I planned to draw lessons from the work of the greatest of my Yale predecessors, as well as several presidents with distinguished records at other institutions. The more I read, the more convinced I became that one leader stands above all others in the history of American higher education. He, alas, was not a Yale man. Charles Eliot served as the president of Harvard University for forty years, from 1869 until 1909. He was, almost certainly, the most influential university president of his time. I believe it is fair to say that, cumulatively, the changes he wrought at Harvard had a more significant and enduring impact on higher education in the United States than the accomplishments of any university president before or since. He became a national figure during the second half of his tenure as a spokesman for liberal individualism and an advocate of school reform. In retirement, he championed continuing adult education through his role in conceiving and 2 L E V I N Y editing the Harvard Classics, a multivolume series of the great works of western civilization. In the contemporary discussion of leadership – in general management and public life as well as in education – much is made of the importance of vision. We expect good leaders to have a vision, to state it clearly and frequently, and to take actions that advance toward its realization. In these respects, Eliot was truly extraordinary . From the very beginning, he articulated a clear and ambitious vision for transforming Harvard. His vision had three major components. First, he envisioned an undergraduate curriculum with more freedom to choose among a wider variety of elective courses. Second, he wanted to provide greater opportunity for future teachers and scholars to pursue advanced subjects beyond the bachelor’s degree, and, third, he wanted to elevate to a higher standard Harvard’s professional schools of law, medicine, and theology, and open them only to those who had already completed an undergraduate degree. His ultimate goals were ambitious, but he managed expectations so that gradual progress toward them was regarded as success. He restructured the presidency so that he could spend more time on his highest long-term priorities. He took risks, persevered in the face of initial failure, and understood when it was most advantageous to act on his own and when he needed first to build support within the faculty. He selected strong leaders for supporting roles, and he aligned their incentives so that their personal triumphs were institutional triumphs. I will comment on each of these attributes of Eliot’s leadership as I tell his story. Among Eliot’s accomplishments at Harvard, the best known was his transformation of the undergraduate curriculum from one that was largely a prescribed set of required courses to a completely unconstrained set of elective courses. In fairness, Eliot was neither the first champion of the elective system, nor the first to introduce elective courses at Harvard. But he took the idea to its logical and, indeed, ideological conclusion. In Eliot’s view, the well-prepared student should be entirely free to shape his (Harvard educated only men in these years) own education. He railed against the defects of coercion, and supported instead the use of incentives to bring coherence to a potentially unstructured course of study. He seized upon the clever idea of awarding ‘‘honors’’ only E L I O T O F H A R V A R D 3 R to those graduating seniors who took a su≈cient number of courses within a single discipline and earned su≈ciently high marks. Thus, Harvard under Eliot was the first U.S. university to conceive of the undergraduate ‘‘concentration’’ (as it is still called today...