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This chapter details John Wompas's youth in the town of Roxbury. Although Roxbury was an English town, it had a decidedly Indian side. Because Roxbury was the home of John Eliot, the “apostle to the Indians,” the town was a destination as well as a way station. It stood at the heart of the English effort to bring “civility” and Christianity to the Indians, a project that would frame much of John Wompas's life. John Eliot, Daniel Gookin, and colleagues from surrounding towns used several different approaches to converting and “civilizing” the Indians. These approaches include establishing Christian Indian towns, preparing Indians to form their own Puritan congregations, recruiting Indian children to live and work within English families, and shepherding a small number of Indian children through English grammar school to enroll at Harvard College.

This chapter recovers the history of the Harvard Indian College and highlights the multiple cultural, literary, and oral traditions that intersected in colonial Cambridge, Massachusetts. It includes analysis of the missionary schools in which Wawaus, or James Printer, a young Nipmuc scholar, and his Wampanoag, Patucket, and Nipmuc peers were trained alongside English students. Native scholars were trained in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew literatures and participated in the production of the first bilingual works of American literature, including the “John Eliot” bible, printed at the Harvard Indian College, where the first printing press in the colonies was housed. This chapter includes an extensive interpretation of the Latin address of Caleb Cheeshateaumuck, the first Native American graduate of Harvard College. The Harvard Indian College provides a necessary foundation for understanding the complex role of “praying Indians,” or members of Indigenous mission communities, as scribes and scouts during King Philip’s War. The chapter demonstrates that Indigenous scholars were not merely students who received, or were subjected to, colonial education but became significant contributors to a multilingual American literary tradition.

This chapter explores the seventeenth-century Latin declamations of Joseph Belcher at Harvard College. When engaged properly, these compositions offer up incredible insight into the history of education and reading in early America. While Belcher's declamations have long been available in Harvard's archives — and even recently digitized — no scholar has thus far examined this unique window into the world of Puritan learning in much detail. The manuscript's chimera status, as an American artefact entirely in Latin, could help explain this neglect. Historian Meyer Reinhold comments that for the better part of the twentieth century ‘there were no American intellectual historians with sufficient training in Greek and Roman antiquity, and no classicists with sophisticated knowledge of American history’. Only very recently have certain classicists and classically-trained historians begun to bridge this gap and turn their scholastic gaze once again to colonial America. The chapter's analysis hopes to build on this nascent project, but is in no way complete; these declamations offer insight into the work of just one student over the period of one to two years. Still, a more lucid image emerges of the actual practice of education at Harvard College.

Chapter 4 documents the influence of Francis Bacon, Comenius, and the new science on colonial aspirations to the intellectual perfections enjoyed by Adam and partially restored by Solomon. John Cotton, Leonard Hoar, and other early administrators of Harvard College linked New England educational endeavors to Bacon’s emphasis on induction and his plans for “the advancement of knowledge”; Cotton Mather and Jonathan Edwards collaborated in transatlantic scientific inquiries with the Royal Society. In contrast to these collaborative attempts to institutionalize the search for edenic wisdom, the chapter presents Anne Bradstreet’s individual quest to rewrite the legacy of Eve, whose search for wisdom in fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil resulted in mankind’s Fall from paradise. Chapter 4 thus extends the examination of Eve’s legacy in New England that began in chapter 3, highlighting ways in which resistance to the Genesis narrative shaped major portions of Bradstreet’s oeuvre.

When Conant became president, Harvard College students were male, almost all white, primarily Unitarian, Congregationalist, or Episcopalian in religion, predominantly from New England. Brahmin Harvard sought to restrict the number of Jewish students and faculty; indeed, that issue often was the outlet for opposition to the effort to make Harvard a more meritocratic university. Even more pervasive was the desire to shield Harvard men and Radcliffe women from the perils of coeducation. Catholics were scant, but for different reasons: hostility to godless Harvard in Catholic churches and schools kept their numbers small during the 1920s and 1930s. As for African Americans, there were so few that it was safe to accept (if not to welcome) them—if they met academic standards for admission and had the money to pay for their education. Under Eliot’s benign lead, turn-of-the-century Harvard was more receptive to Jewish students than were other Eastern universities. Undergraduates from well-off German-Jewish families combined with a growing number of commuters from the Boston area to become a substantial presence. By the early 1920s, an estimated 20 to 25 percent of the undergraduate student body was Jewish. This was cause for concern by alumni, faculty, and not least President Lowell. In 1922 he proposed a formal Jewish quota of 12 percent. This was the limiting device traditionally used in European universities, now much in the American public mind because of the movement for quota-based immigration restriction laws. Harvard historian Samuel Eliot Morison, looking back on the controversy fifty years later, ascribed the emotional strength of the Jewish reaction to the fact that Lowell’s 12 percent quota was the same as the numerus clausus of the Russian imperial universities. Lowell’s biography, published in 1948, rather laboriously tried to exonerate him: “the poor, hard-working student, native-born or immigrant, Gentile or Jew, white or black, never had a warmer friend, although many excellent persons criticized at times his way of showing friendship.” But it is clear that Lowell shared in full measure the prejudices of his caste. Jews, he thought, lowered the moral tone of the College.

This chapter describes how the library card index reached the New World and developed into a card index system for business use. It reconstructs the independent “invention” of an old European paper slip technique in the New World. In 1817, William Croswell’s project of devising a comprehensive catalog for the Harvard College Library marks the birth of the American card index.

This chapter presents a brief background of Avery Dulles before looking at two experiences of his senior year at Harvard College which can provide some insight into the scholar and the human being he eventually became. His years in Rome prepared Dulles to start his career teaching theology. Through all those years, he worked within Catholic circles and also ecumenically to reconcile opposing ideas and work out new syntheses, especially of theological thought. The source of the Latin inscription on the coat of arms of Cardinal Dulles, Scio cui credidi, is the Second Letter of Paul to Timothy: “I know the one in whom I have put my trust” (2 Tm 1:12). Another way of translating that phrase is “I know the one in whom I have placed my faith.” There is a quantum jump between deistic intuition and living faith in the Lord Jesus, and Dulles spent his life making that quantum jump.

This chapter looks at the dissemination of these ethics by America’s colleges through honor codes, disciplinary measures, books, and classroom lessons. American schools became instrumental in establishing a commonality of thought and a sense of camaraderie based upon honor culture that helped to translate into unity during the Revolution. The lessons taught in classes and the rules that governed the colleges became a continuing guide and foundation for the progression of honor as an ethical concept throughout early America. This is the first study of its kind and shows how early college rules would directly impact the patriots’ behavior during the Revolution.

Every institution goes through crises produced by a mix of outside stimuli, internal discontent, and administrative failings. In the case of higher education, that happened in the late 1960s: to Berkeley in 1967 and Columbia in 1968, to Paris in the May Days of 1968, to Harvard in the spring of 1969. Critics of those upheavals resorted to the language of world-class disasters: “The Time of Troubles,” “The Terror,” “World War III.” Apologists favored comparably distended metaphors of revolution and rebirth, of a Words worthian sense of sheer bliss to be young and alive and involved in a time of institutional re-creation. The university protests of the late sixties had large-scale demographic, cultural, and political sources: the coming of age of the baby boomers, the rise of the counterculture, the trauma of Vietnam. But the greatest institutional disruption in Harvard’s history occurred as well in a more particular context: that of the increasingly meritocratic, affluent, self-satisfied university of the sixties. Of course other schools shared these qualities and experienced similar (or worse) student uprisings. But there appears to have been a special degree of shock on the part of Harvard faculty, administrators, and alumni that so much student disaffection existed in their university: that it could have happened here. The Vietnam War was the flash point that set off the protests of the late sixties. As American involvement in Vietnam grew, so did on-campus opposition. Initially it proceeded within the prescribed Harvard tradition of civility and open debate. Divinity School dean Samuel Miller wanted “to be sure that all viewpoints are represented” at a faculty meeting on Vietnam in the spring of 1965, and National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy participated in the (relatively) polite discussion. Antidraft demonstrations were limited to a handful of students; even the Crimson had what a Pusey aide called a “mature” editorial on the topic. In November 1966, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara came to discuss the Vietnam War at the invitation of the Kennedy School’s Institute of Politics. He emerged from a talk with students in Quincy House to face a crowd, organized by Students for a Democratic Society, which tried to engage him in a “debate.” Ultimately he was obliged to escape through Harvard’s steam tunnels.

In the fall of 1873, Theodore Roosevelt began to study under Arthur Hamilton Cutler, later founder of the Cutler School for Boys, who devised a crash course to prepare Teedie for Harvard College's entrance requirements. Teedie took the Harvard entrance exams in the spring of 1876 and graduated in 1880. This chapter focuses on his education and academic life at Harvard, his exposure to neo-Lamarckianism, and his encounter with racialism. It also examines how Teedie developed an interest in politics and public service, his detestation of New York Senator Roscoe Conkling, and Rutherford B. Hayes's victory in the fiercely contested 1876 presidential election.

This chapter discusses Avery Dulles's journey of faith. Dulles's early childhood was spent within the confines of his religious family environment. After graduation from Choate Preparatory School in Connecticut, his desire to study history and literature led him to Harvard College. It was while an undergraduate student at Harvard that Dulles began the search, which would eventually lead him to rediscover faith. On November 26, 1940, he was conditionally baptized in the Catholic Church, which was the practice at the time. In the late 1950s, Dulles spent his tertianship in Germany, where he was introduced to various theologians who were working in ecumenism. Once he accepted the Catholic faith, he never wavered in his commitment to it, and it sustained him throughout his life, especially in the many physical deprivations he endured in the months before he died.

This chapter begins with Everett’s return to the U.S. and service as president of Harvard College, and follows his thoughts and actions relative to slavery, race, reform, and the Union through 1852. Highlights and revealing moments in this period include his moves towards potentially admitting Harvard’s first African-American student, Everett’s eulogy for fallen antislavery statesman John Quincy Adams, correspondence with Free Soil Party leaders in the presidential election year of 1848 in relation to a possible vice presidential nomination, and the debates leading to the Compromise of 1850. Everett was deeply uncomfortable with the Fugitive Slave Act as part of that Compromise, but soon thereafter fought on the battlefields of memory to vindicate the Compromise and especially its proponent Daniel Webster.

This chapter examines Ralph Waldo Emerson's time at Harvard College. It discusses the Emerson's literary apprenticeship at Harvard, his view on the literary scene and the tendency of Harvard men to be sharply critical of their own performance. It also comments on Emerson's 1837 “The American Scholar” address to Phi Beta Kappa and highlights his success in winning the Bowdoin prize by learning to work the Harvard system while also working to undermine it.

Hooker and Stone imbibed a philosophy based on the writings of Peter Ramus. Their Ramism was filtered through the thought of Alexander Richardson, another widely influential thinker whose positions shaped the education of Harvard College students for almost a century. Richardsonian Ramism offered a method whereby students could not only dissect reality into its component parts but also recover God’s intentions in creating it. It encouraged ministers to fit biblical narrative into logical boxes which would then govern the interpretation of that narrative. As it dichotomized all reality, Richardsonian Ramism reinforced the black/white distinctions of extreme Augustinianism, most notably the belief that God had from all eternity divided the human race into elect and reprobate. Ramist presuppositions turned the Bible into a set of data about nature, moral precepts, and exemplars, fostering a theology based on proof texts.

This chapter begins by exploring Roosevelt’s four years at Harvard College. The death of his father in 1878 prompted extended religious musings and the clearest evidence of youthful evangelical faith. Roosevelt married Alice Lee in 1880 and launched his political career in 1881. As a state assemblyman, Roosevelt advocated for reforms in economic and social life. The tragic death of Alice Lee and Martha Roosevelt on the same day in 1884 drove Roosevelt to the Dakota Badlands, where he became a rancher. In these years Roosevelt said much less about personal faith, a marked contrast from his upbringing. The chapter ends with his engagement to Edith Carow in 1886.