A Nobel Prize winner in 1952, he continued his research in physics and remains one of the most admired teachers in the University. He is, in the words of one prominent Faculty member, "indisputably a great scholar" and, in the words of another, "a man whom you respect a lot, especially when you disagree with him. He's usually got a good reason for doing what he does."
Purcell did not graduate from Harvard (he's an alumnus of Purdue as is astronaut John Glenn, but Glenn's chances of becoming president of Harvard vanished when he fell in the bathtub during the Ohio Senatorial primary and broke his coccyx, making it virtually impossible for him to lead the commencement procession around the Yard without limping). Purcell did get his Ph.D. here. Scientists have fared well in the Harvard presidency. Pusey's predecessor, chemist James B. Conant, served for 20 years before retiring to become high commissioner of occupied Germany in 1953.
Should Purcell or someone like him (possibly Edwin O. Reischauer) become president, it has been strongly recommended that a man like Derek Bok be named to the new provost or chancellor position and groomed to take over when the president reaches retirement age.
Just as there is a Pope John approach to the presidency, there is also a "right man at the right time" approach, and support for it is more emotional than rational.
By the Corporation's announcement last week that it wanted a man with a primary academic commitment, politicians should by all rights be excluded. Ramsey Clark is a politician: A Justice Department lawyer under Bobby Kennedy and Attorney General under Johnson. His academic credentials are pretty meager compared to those of the other four: two years at the University of Texas, where he graduated with an A.B.; another year and a half at the University of Chicago where he simultaneously took his law degree and a masters in history. He's been to Harvard less than ten times.
It's surprising to hear his name mentioned so often and in so many of the right places. Unlike a John Gardner, Clark is admired for being right rather than thinking right. "He's a concerned man with sound developed instincts about flaws in our society," one Washington observer said.
It is Clark's innate understanding of what is happening in this country that forces his inclusion on a list of possible Harvard Presidents-no matter what the odds against him are.
He is probably the one conceivable presidential candidate who would be rated desirable rather than acceptable by students. A man who could come into Harvard from the outside and through genuine personal magneticism unite the Faculty with some sense of why it's here, and yet someone who would never be charged with tempering in Faculty matters.
If, as one Faculty member suggested, McGeorge Bundy is the man that rational men will measure other candidates against, Clark is the standard, perhaps, on which to measure their "goodness": a sentimental choice in a time when sentiments may be the only thing left we can trust.