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[ 30 ] Cambridge, Massachusetts, late spring 1917. The United States is at war with Germany. Several third-year Harvard medical students, including John, decide to drop out of medical school and enlist in the military. Their plans fall apart when the older brother of one of them, now serving in France, insists that they wait until they can be commissioned as medical officers. Marlborough, Massachusetts, January 1919. John’s world is upended when his beloved mother dies suddenly, dissolving the glue that held the Rock family together. Boston, January 1921. John completes his final residency and takes a position as assistant in surgery at Massachusetts General Hospital. He is beginning his career at last. In September 1911, freed from the depressing prospect of a career in business, John Rock entered Harvard College as a member of the class of 1915. Part of an elite triumvirate of colleges—Yale and Princeton were the others—Harvard was nevertheless unique. Its stature, which came from a combination of its history, the reputation of its undergraduate college, and even more important, its standing as a graduate institution, had enabled it to attract unprecedented financial contributions from industrialists and financiers, among them some of the notorious robber barons of the Gilded Age whose gifts made possible the growth of existing graduate and professional schools and the creation of new ones.1 The largest university in the United States by the time John matriculated , Harvard enrolled four thousand students throughout its schools, enjoyed a $12 million endowment, boasted a faculty that was “the envy of other institutions,” and provided the “best-funded financial aid program of any private [college or university]” in the United States.2 CharliehadpromisedtopayforJohn’sundergraduateeducation,withFrank agreeing to pitch in if he could. Now all John had to concern himself with was being accepted. His good fortune held here, too. John just happened to apply choosing medicine, coming of age Chapter 2 cho osing medicine , coming of age 31 to Harvard at exactly the time when the university embarked on a concerted effort to admit a broader range of students. The typical Harvard undergraduate came from one of a few private New England preparatory schools: Andover , Exeter, Milton, Groton, St. Mark’s, and Middlesex. But Harvard’s new president, Abbot Lawrence Lowell, who took office in 1909, had declared his intention to diversify the undergraduate population. In a deliberate attempt to attract talented students who had not attended these favored preparatory schools, Lowell developed what he called the “New Plan” for admissions. The New Plan, inaugurated in 1911, called for prospective students, in addition to providing documentation of an “approved” high school course, to take a specific set of entrance examinations. Applicants took four examinations: in English; Latin (for a BA), German or French (for a BS); mathematics, physics, or chemistry; and one choice from this list. For example, if an applicant were examined in English, German, and physics, he could choose for his fourth subject French, mathematics, or chemistry. Of course, the New Plan was created not to recruit young men like Rock (local or near-local young men from Catholic families), but to attract promising Protestant students from beyond New England and the Mid-Atlantic. As Lowell explained his plan to a skeptical New England headmaster, he wanted to increase the absolute numbers of undergraduates and admit “boys from schools in other parts of the country which did not hitherto fit our requirements.”3 Although the university’s graduate and professional schools had already succeeded in drawing a more cosmopolitan student body, Lowell believed that the undergraduate college was still too parochial.4 Attracting a greater number of students from a broader array of backgrounds was just one part of Lowell’s vision. He also initiated the construction of freshman dormitories and mandated that first-year students live in them instead of segregating themselves by social class. And finally, he had intellectual ambitions for the undergraduate college, promoting a series of curricular revisions designed to make it more difficult for undergraduates to avoid serious study. To attract prospective students from around the nation, Harvard orchestrated a national recruitment campaign conducted by the Harvard Federation of Territorial Clubs. (Geographically based, territorial clubs included students and alumni who came from a particular city, state, or region.) The federation took its responsibilty seriously and among other initiatives sponsored an illustrated book-length publication that advertised Harvard’s intellectual , athletic, and social advantages—not to mention its scholarship program —for promising young men from all over...

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