"Here were all these right-wing people adopting me, which made me even more unhappy, because I'm not a right-winger," he says. "I was the University president for 18 years. All but two of those years were just pure joy and happiness. I think I was the luckiest man that ever lived. I had a wonderful situation, friendly and supportive people--why should I feel sorry? But here were these people all feeling sorry for me."

But if Pusey does not feel sorry for himself, he feels sorry for the way the world has changed in the years following the tumult of 1969--a year which marks in his memory the point when the nation and the University he loved succumbed to the pressures of a harsher, more violent age.

"One of the things that I'm saddest about is that up until that time, we didn't have all the doors locked, and all the chains on things you see now at Harvard," Pusey says. "It just makes me sick to see what Harvard has been like since 1969, and what it was like before. It was an open place."

"Since '69, if you're in New York City, everything has to be locked up...I was held up by a Black yesterday."

"All of this comes since '69," Pusey says, convinced that he was there when the tides changed. "Since you were born, really--you never knew what a pleasant world it was before then. After [World War II], and before all this trouble came, was the period when all of the forces were creative, and helping higher education. That's when the American universities, about 20 of them, became the great institutions in the world. It was a real joy to have been identified with."

"It all kind of went out when the Kennedy boys got shot, and Martin Luther King was shot, and when that Vietnamese war dragged on and on, and everything got worse and worse," Pusey says. "Now we've had these eight years of Reagan, and this tremendous debt and so forth, and whether or not this thing's going to get straightened out in another 10 years I don't know."

Still, Pusey says he has not lost his faith in the University he has loved since he arrived in the Yard in the fall of 1924.

"Harvard is just great," he says. "It righted itself; it just went through a troubled sea, with a lot of people in the ship that were making it go this way and that way. And that was just something that had to be lived through. We have lived through it, and it's gone. And I think sanity has come back."