The concept of the Zeitgeist can be a great palliative to Boring, as well as explanation. "I don't think President Pusey understands what is going on in psychology, though Buck did and Bundy was wonderful about it. But Pusey has wanted very much to have this new building and has guided the Corporation to support it. So I don't share the bitterness and contempt I hear for the President. (Dr. Skinner is upset about the support of religion). Beebe-Center--a man who did the work of ten--used to say, 'Eliot is a University man, Lowell is a College man, Conant is a University man.' Doubtless he would say Pusey is a College man. This calms me down tremendously. Eliot was a scientist, Conant was a scientist, and the next President should be a scientist."
Boring finds the times have produced undergraduates enormously different from the kind he knew when he first came here. "The change came about in the forties, when there were enormous social changes. We faculty were scared about the GI Bill of Rights. But when the students flooded in, there was a sudden stiffening of intellectual interest; the gentleman's C became a thing of the past. But it's obvious it wasn't just the GI Bill of Rights; it has something to do with the population explosion.
"Now look at what we've got; it's respectable to be intellectually successful. This is something one just didn't see in the 1920's. It's more fun now talking to undergraduates--in fact, I like undergraduates now. How I used to suffer with Psychology 1 when people came to complain about grades."
The present academic selectivity at Harvard is good, Boring feels, because it has also changed the graduate students. "Not everybody can go through to the A.B., and certainly not to the Ph.D. Our graduate students are ever so much more highly selected, and this must be good." The only thing about selectivity Boring detests is the process of selection. "I hate the arrogance of the Faculty in assigning grades. If we could get rid of grades this might be fun." Then off into history: "I remember in the Department of Philosophy when we were making judgments about graduate students, Alfred North Whitehead and R. B. Perry were friends of the man in trouble. 'Oh, but he might be Aristotle,' they would say, 'oh, his wife's been ill.' I used to look at the bad record."
In addition to his classic History and the companion Sensation and Perception in the History of Experimental Psychology, Boring has written psychology texts, a research monograph on The Physical Dimensions of Consciousness, a war manual (Psychology for the Fighting Man), articles on planaria, dementia precox, sensations in the alimentary canal, mental measurement, and the role of great men in the progress of science. Particularly famous papers dealt with the return of sensation in the arm after nerves have been cut, an experiment he performed on himself, and the "moon illusion"--the difference of the apparent size of the moon when it is on the horizon and when it is at the zenith. In all his writings, and in the many years he served as editor of the American Journal of Psychology and of Contemporary Psychology, he emphasized, by example and proscription, the importance of plain, sound English. It is a concern he passed on to the whole Department here.
In his spacious office in the basement of Memorial Hall, Boring now works regularly at the desk which used to belong to Hugo Munsterberg, the German psychologist whom James brought to Harvard in 1892. In the files along one wall are one hundred thousand letters from and to psychologists all over the world: "I'm just too lazy to throw them out," Boring says.
He is now editing a collection of his papers, and compiling a source book of readings in the history of psychology in collaboration with Richard Herrnstein, assistant professor of Psychology. But he is not in a rush; he enjoys a casual talk and a reminiscence. "I am too old to be in a hurry," he says, "for if there is one thing age teaches you about science, it is that there will always be someone to carry on, and that's very comforting."