James Bryant Conant: The Chemist as President, The President as Defender of the Free University

On certain Saturday afternoons in the spring of 1934, goes a budding legend, a youthful, wiry individual could be seen tossing pebbles against the windows of Converse chemical laboratory off Oxford Street. The individual was James Bryant Conant, twenty-third president of Harvard University, and he was engaged in a wistful attempt to return to his first love. When he had taken office the previous fall Conant had been in the midst of several exciting experiments in organic chemistry which were still being carried on by assistants. Thus every so often during his first year he would escape from the President's office and wander down to Converse to see how things were going, only to remember that he no longer had a key to the lab. The pebble-against-window method was his means of solving the problem.

Conant today calls the legend entirely untrue, but admits that "perhaps it is symbolic. Eighteen years later he feels that he has succeeded in shutting off chemistry in a small, little-used corner of his mind. True, there are occasional twinges when he reads chemical journals or revises his standard textbook on the subject, but he has done no actual research since becoming president. He gives infrequent but spectacular demonstrations in Natural Science courses, but, as he says, "since 1933 I can't claim to have advanced the barriers of science one millimeter."

In return for giving up a possible Nobel Prize, Conant has directed a great university to some of its most notable triumphs, has made the crucial decision to build the atomic bomb, and has become the most incisive defender of liberal education in the United States today. Inevitably he has also become the sort of public figure editors cherish for making news no matter what he speaks on. Conant is a familiar figure to periodical readers; to devotees of "Scientific American" he is known as a top-notch organic chemist, to the faithful of the "Boston Pilot" he appears as the arch-enemy of the parochial school system, and to those who buy the "Chicago Tribune" he is a sinster Mother Hen nourishing a flock of "Red fellow-travelers" under the guise of academic freedom.

The fame--and notoriety--that Conant has gained in non-Cambridge circles has served to a great extent to place him in a sphere far outside that of the ordinary undergraduate. To the average Harvard student Conant at times appears little more than a glossy figure-head who journeys around the country gaining prestige while the University is run by some people over in University Hall. Faculty members smile gently at this notion; they realize that Conant, as he should be, is by far the most influential figure in the administration of the University, and that his influence stems not only from his intellectual leadership, but also from plain administrative power. In fact, at one period the faculty considered Conant so over-bearing that some of its members characterized his as "ruth-less" and "a slide-rule administrator."

Permanent Chairman

Much of his power stems from the fact that he takes an important part in the naming of every member of any University faculty to a post of permanent tenure--associate professor or above. Not an associate professor of pediatrics is appointed without Conant's approval. The methods for making permanent appointments vary from faculty to faculty, but in the College Conant began a system of "ad hoc" committees which are set up every time a department is about to make a permanent appointment. Separate committees are set up for each appointment and their membership usually includes scholars from other universities along with local faculty members--but Conant is always the chairman.

The legend of Conant the Wandering Scholar therefore has little substance. An undergraduate impression--also shared by many alumni and even some faculty members--that is harder to kill is of Conant the Cold-Fish Chemist. The 59-year-old Conant is no rollicking extrovert, but stuffed-shirt dignity is also not a part of his character. The summer after he was elected president he spent abroad with his wife; they created a sensation by traveling second-class on the "Europa." A CRIMSON of that same era reported that Conant's outstanding characteristic was his shyness; as substantiation it reported the following conversation between Conant and a man he was calling up to appoint his secretary:

Man--What is it please?

Conant--Is this Vernon Munroe?

Munroe--Speaking. Who's this?

Conant--James Conant.

Munroe--Who did you say?

Conant--James Conant.

Munroe--Sorry, I'm afraid I don't know you.

Conant--James Conant, the chap they just elected president of Harvard.

Other observers who happened to be at the right place at the right time in that same fall noticed the president playing touch football with his sons in the Yard behind his house on Quincy Street. According to a CRIMSON of the fall of 1933, the football-playing president "appeared to be enjoying himself hugely."

Real Rope Stuff

The President's athletic pretensions have not always lain along such hap-hazard lines. In the summer of 1937 he went with a group to climb in the Sierra Nevadas--"real rope stuff" Conant refers to it. The next two summers he climbed in the Canadian Rockies and then was elected to the American Alphine Club. A wrenched back ship plan, the CRIMSON decided that it would be appropriate to cease talking about the Age of Lowell and begin to realize the Age of Conant had arrived. Even abolition of the beer plan in Since 1760 men living in the Yard had been roused from their sleep at 7 a.m. by the so-called "rising bell" which was first situated in Harvard Hall and then in Memorial Hall. Conant announced that he had "looked into the matter and found no good reason for continuing the 7 o'clock bell, and therefore ordered that it be discontinued." This move--it was the early Roosevelt era--was claimed by some freshman as a "new deal in Harvard's administration."

Further evidence of that new deal came later in the fall when Repeal went into effect in Cambridge. Students, liberated from the puritanical bonds of the Volstead Act, began showing up at meals in the Houses with bottles tucked under their arms. The matter was brought to Conant's attention and he immediately issued a statement: "I am ruling that no student may bring in any beverage of any sort whatever to the dining halls to be taken with his meals."

This did not mean that Conant's regime was going to be a prohibitionist one. Less than a month later the University itself applied for and received a license to sell beer in the dining halls, and the Second World War put an end to his mountain-climbing expeditions, but since the war he has continued, as he says, "in the hobby of walking uphill." His other outdoor recreation at present consists of trout fishing. Last summer's trip to Australia and New Zealand was a disappointment to him only in that it was winter Down Under and the fishing season was over.

Undergraduates today sometimes complain that Conant is inapproachable; they forget that the Lampoon proposed creeting a tablet in the Yard on the spot where once President Lowell spoke to a freshman. Conant not only speaks to freshmen on all occasions--formal and informal--but three years ago he hurried next door from his Massachusetts Hall office to Straus Hall to take tea with an intrepid group of first-year men. He is also the first president in over 100 years to teach an undergraduate course at the same time he held the presidency.

Conant's first official move after being in stalled as president in October, 1933, earned him the amazed thanks of the entire freshman class, after the announcement of the National Scholar and on January 4, 1934 liquor was served to undergraduates by the University for the first time in over 100 years. By the end of his first years, the next year--it was costing too much--did not serve to lesson the Conant administration's stature.

Revolt

This is not to say that Conant has always been followed--at a distance of course--by hordes of undergraduates worshipping in his tootsteps. During the 30's when political activity tan unchecked through the streets of Cambridge. Conant was a frequent target for extremist student groups. The far left-wing element regularly denounced him as "a tool of Wall Street." This attitude was exemplified by an article in "The Nation" by a former head of the University News Office who denounced Conant, but added that "I hardly expect the University to thumb its nose at the Wall Street bankers who now help administer its finances."

Conant also was pounced upon by the conservatives in the student body and alumni for his policy on the New Deal. As opposed to President Lowell, who was a fighting foe of child labor laws and gloried in being called a conservative, Conant adopted a policy of cautious approval of the New Deal as a worthwhile experiment. His attitude came forth most clearly in 1935 in his awarding of an honorary degree to Secretary Wallace and in the accompanying citation: "A public servant of deep faith and high integrity who finds courage' to attempt an uncharted journey in our modern wilderness."

This citation, written by Conant who takes great care in preparing them each spring, shows his feeling as explicitly as possible, since he has made it a rule never to engage in partisan politics. Even my closest friends have to guess about how I vote," says Conant, who was at one time listed in "Who's Who" as a Republican, but who campaigned for Al Smith in 1928. His policy toward the New Deal invoked angry grumblings from alumni which culminated when an old grad supposedly tossed a pie at him during a reunion of his undergraduate social club in the late 30's. Conant does not remember the incident, but it is a rapidly-growing legend in the club itself.

The high point of all anti-Conant fervor came just before the last war when the president was an ardent advocate of aid to Great Britain and further intervention by the United States. He naturally supported the nation's first peace-time draft. This naturally engendered a certain hostility from the College, since some undergraduates got the idea that Conant was trying to force them all into the Army to get shot at. This was hardly a fair attitude, especially since one of his two sons was at the time eminently draftable, but student picketing of Conant speeches nevertheless became a commoplace event.

"Unfair Ball"

The one incident that Conant even today still recalls with a touch of bitterness occurred at the Yale game in New Haven in 1940. At halftime--things weren't quite so well organized then--a group of three students rushed onto the field to present a playlet in which President Conant was represented as engaged in solitary military drill until a chemical retort was substituted for the gun he was carrying. The slogan of the group that put on the act was "Books, not Guns." Conant was not at the game, but he says now "if I had been it would have been hard to sit there. That's what I call unfair ball."

Not all of Conant's opposition at the time came from students. Members of the faculty, especially the late Professor F. O. Matthiessen, violently criticized what they though was the president's "war-mongering" philosophy. The alumni again made a lot of commotion about his activities in behalf of the Committee to Help America by Aiding the Allies, but Conant still feels that "probably most of the alumni and surely the majority of the faculty felt as I did on the subject of intervention." Conant's stand was no matter of purely academic importance; he, Wendell Willkie, and Fiorello LaGuardia were the last three witnesses called by the Roosevelt Administration to support its position on the Lend-Lease Bill in the Spring of 1941. The bill passed, and shortly afterwards, FDR appointed Conant to establish better scientific liason with the British.