Nathan Pusey

Nathan Pusey (born April 4, 1907, Council Bluffs, Iowa, U.S.—died November 14, 2001, New York, New York) was an American educator, president of Harvard University (1953–71), who greatly enhanced the school’s endowment and educational facilities and revitalized its teaching of the humanities. From 1971 until his retirement in 1975 he was president of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Pusey was educated at Harvard (A.B., 1928; M.A., 1932; Ph.D., 1937) and began his teaching career as a tutor in an experimental “great books” program at Lawrence College in Appleton, Wisconsin, and then as a teacher at Scripps College in Claremont, California. In 1940 he returned to New England to develop a freshman-sophomore liberal arts program at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, where he became associate professor of classics in 1943. In 1944 Pusey returned to Lawrence College as president, and in 1953 he was appointed president of Harvard, succeeding James B. Conant. He was the first non-New Englander to hold the post.

Pusey immediately devoted his efforts to increasing Harvard’s endowment—as he had done at Lawrence College—and his efforts were highly successful. He won great praise in the 1950s for his defense of academic and intellectual freedom when U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy called Harvard a “privileged sanctuary for Fifth Amendment communists” and demanded the dismissal of several faculty members. Pusey was also instrumental in modernizing Harvard: he raised faculty salaries, brought in more female faculty, added new buildings to the campus, and instituted coeducational dormitories. Antiwar protests in the late 1960s, however, twice forced the closing of the campus, and in 1969 bloodshed resulted when Pusey called in the Cambridge police to end a student sit-in. Sharply criticized for his handling of the situation, he announced in 1970 that he would retire the following year. Pusey’s works include The Age of the Scholar (1963) and American Higher Education, 1945–70 (1978).