Provost Paul Herman Buck is a great believer in consistency. But his is not a consistency limited to the narrow confines of a particular dogmatism nor capable of blanking out ideas contradictory to a chosen pattern. Quite the contrary, Buck maintains that "the surest cure for the ills of a free society is more freedom" and he has transposed this general belief to Harvard. "The only thing you really need in a University," he states, "is ideas, and an administrator's job is partly to see that a Faculty and student body capable of having ideas are selected and partly to create an environment in which ideas can flourish."

But his own definition is an oversimplification. As second in command of the College, his duties enmesh him in such non-academic matters as setting the Faculty's financial budget, scrutinizing athletic policy, and formulating admissions procedures. Even outside the academic world, he is consistent in his concept that the best policy provides equal facilities for all and permits the individual to have as much latitude and free will as possible. Thus he has been an earnest supporter of the intra-mural "athletics-for-all" plan despite the fact that it aids in plunging the Athletic Association deep in the red each year, and expeditiously sought a study hall for freshmen who felt discriminated against because they, unlike upperclassmen, had no studying facilities after Lamont closed. Buck found them a hall in Memorial Church. And, like the House libraries, it will be open until midnight.

His faith in freedom of thought has had broader implications. It is the dominating concept behind the General Education Report, and it has provided the necessary amunition to withstand the continued onslaughts against the very concept of academic freedom and the liberal University.

Value of the House System

A graduate of Ohio State University, Buck has worked in Cambridge since 1923, and until his administrative appointment in 1945, he has been a historian, specializing in the South of the Civil War. In his first year at Cambridge, President Lowell selected Buck to be resident tutor in Straus Hall. Buck became a precursor of the sweeping change that was yet to come--institution of House tutorial and Senior Tutors. Later Lowell appointed him librarian in Dunster House, and the future Provost immediately set to work stocking the new Dunster library. It was from his work in Dunster that Buck learned to appreciate the value of the Houses as centers of student life.

Throughout this period he continued his studies of Southern history. His efforts culminated in 1938 with the publication of "Road to Reunion" which received a Pulitzer Prize and an unrestrained lambasting from a College Marxist group., "Road to Reunion" looks benignly on Southern efforts during the post-bellum Reconstruction period, dimly on Northern contributions, and skeptically at the ultimate value of the Civil War. The Marxist group, however, judged him guilty of "maligning the struggle and achievements of the negroes" and went on to find him following "in the footsteps of the traditional approach to the period by asserting in his lectures that the negro had not sought freedom." Asked by the Boston Globe to comment on the charges, Buck replied: "I am grateful as a teacher to find students interested to do the extra work in the preparation of such a pamphlet (the Marxist attack ran five, closely-typed pages.) Then somewhat typically, he added: "I should like to go on record as a liberal in expressing honest pleasure that Harvard students feel perfectly free to differ with their instructors."

Gross Illogic

In 1939, he received a dual appointment: he became an associate professor of History and associate dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Three years later President Conant appointed him Dean of the Faculty. Until this time no one noticed the curious illogic about the University's hierachy: each of the major schools, like Law and Medicine, had a Dean subordinate only to the President and Governing Boards; the College has a Dean too, but only a Dean of the Faculty with no control whatsoever over the various College departments like the museums and libraries.

As the war thickened, President Conant found himself spending less and less time in Cambridge, and unable to handle the inevitable minuscule probles of finance and faculty. Gone were the days when President Eliot could fill out the University's budget by hand. In 1945 Conant decided to appoint Buck "Provost of the University and Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences." Since Conant likens each University department to a tub--"every tub will stand on its own bottom"--Buck has almost complete autonomy in an extensive domain that includes the Collage, the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. libraries, and research institutions. President Conant act as an appeal board and final judge of overall policy.

When Buck took over as Provost he had formulated a three-legged concept of Harvard education. "First there is concentration. It is to know something about something. Then there is distribution. Finally there is the concept of total life, brought out in the House system and extracurricular activities."

"These are the three things I've been trying to get into undergraduate life and I think I've been consistent." Both concentration and distribution were well-established by the time Buck took office. Despite this, one of the most significant changes in educational policy came during the early part of Buck's administration--the institution of the General Education program. Buck served as chairman of a 12-man committee which produced the 267-page report, General Education in a Free Society. The report noted that "education seeks to do two things: help young persons fulfill the unique, particular function of life which it is in them to fulfill, and fit them so far as it can for those common spheres which, as citizens and heirs of a joint culture, they will share with others. . .Democracy is a community of freedom. The quality of alert and aggresive individualism is essential to good citizenship; and the good society consists of individuals who are independent in outlooks and thing for themselves while also willing to subordinate their individual good to the common cause."

Democratic Knowledge

"Scholars who devote themselves exclusively to what they specialize in have good educations in their particular fields, but they will be unable to form ideas in other areas," Buck observes. "The General Education program is intended to enable students to integrate and understand the many things in democratic society."

Another major educational change was the inauguration of Joint Instruction for Radcliffe students. In a report to the Faculty, Buck stated that "this new plan grew out of a conviction that Harvard-Radcliffe relations at present are unsatisfactory." The merger, he believes, is a healthy compromise between complete divorce and outright coeducation.

In extra-curricular life he maintains that the best program should give experience--athletic or otherwise--to the largest number of students. "I worry about collegiatism. I don't like to see fraternities or the 'big-men-on-the-campus' stuff. They come only as a substitute for something better." To Buck the "something better" is the House plan or athletics for all. "Varsity competition should never go beyond the player's ability." Once athletic officials start clamoring for gate receipts, than tension mounts, alumni demand better teams, better teams involve higher expense, and the result is that "football is no longer in the hands of the students."