April 23, 1962

NINE YEARS AGO Nathan M. Pusey came to Harvard from Lawrence College in Appleton, Wisconsin, to become President of an enormous institution built on layer after layer of sedimented traditions. A slow and delicate play of subterranean forces had brought it to its current stature, a vast and complex machinery that it would be foolish to meddle with too deeply. The University might change, but it would have to change more through a process of natural evolution than through administrative decisions initiating and guiding change.

Now, nine years later, and more than a year since Dean Bundy left for Washington, Mr. Pusey's view of Harvard remains essentially conservative. But the last few months have placed him in situations where he has needed to make a number of decisions concerning the University's future....

Not that anybody can reasonably suggest that the President make all the essential decisions of the next decade this spring. But his reluctance to make up his mind on matters which urgently need direction not only leaves the problems themselves unsettled but the concerned Faculty foundering, fragmented, and confused....

Wrong decisions can be reversed: the lasting consequences of Mr. Pusey's errors is a growing feeling among the Faculty that the President does not understand his University. Scholars do not like to work where they are not understood. The Faculty's suspicion that Mr. Pusey's Harvard is not their Harvard is dangerous; it is also disasterously close to true.

The Crimson was by 1962 extremely critical of President Nathan M. Pusey's leadership and administration, complaining of the growing distance between the President and his community.