Harvard Observed

Depicting the evolution of 20th-century Harvard in the broader context of national and world events, this text shows how changes in the structure and aspirations of American society led the University to remake itself after World War II, and to do so again after the social upheavals of the Vietnam era. It opens in 1898, when a quick victory in the Spanish-American War made the United States a world power. The narrative spans the presidencies of Charles William Eliot, A. Lawrence Lowell, Conant, Nathan Pusey, Derek Bok, and Neil L. Rudenstine, tracing the ups and downs of America's oldest university in a century that saw: the dismantling of empires; wars on a planetary scale; the age of flight; electoronic communications; the evolution of jazz and rock music; the parting of the atom; artificial intelligence; the arrival of film as a major art form; genetic engineering; global interdependence; and the exploration of deep space. As a documentary of the changing institutional life of a major research university, this text has much to say and show about the academic rites, intellectual arguments, sexual mores, fads, and folklore that became touchstones for successive generations of Harvardians.