Pusey's Inaugural: Pledge to Teaching

In a brief address, given after he was sworn in as President of Harvard College on October 13, 1953, Nathan M. Pusey said he would take a special interest in trying "to keep assembled here the very best teachers that can be found, to work to ensure conditions conducive to their best efforts, and constantly to strive for more effective ways to make their activity touch, quicken, and strengthen the intellectual aspirations of succeeding generations of young people.

"Our major concerns at Harvard remain the education of youth and the advancement of learning. I hope these things will mean no less to me than they have meant to my great predecessors.

"I should like to add one word more. This community has never been a community unto itself alone. Today it relationships reach throughout the whole country and everywhere into the world. As President Conant said so eloquently in June, our responsibility for the development of Western civilization is now greater than ever before. Together we must face up to this increased responsibility.

"I pledge myself to lead this University to the limit of my abilities, according to its Statutes, in the way of the excellence of its high tradition, toward the continuous fulfillment of its great calling. Harvard is a live, intellectual enterprise founded and nourished in a great faith. It shall be my purpose, continuing in that faith, to guide it as best I can, so help me God."