More important, he was an accomplished physicist. When he was named a fellow of Harvard College, Slichter was completing a four-year stint on the President's Science Advisory Committee under Presidents Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard M. Nixon. Slichter says it was this experience that made him valuable to the Corporation.

"I had not been active in Harvard affairs at all," Slichter says. "But they had an interest in adding some academics, thinking that we would have a perspective that would be useful. [And] because of the prominence of the relationship with the government in support of science, they were interested in signing a scientist."

Equally important was Slichter's own affinity for Harvard.

He entered the College in 1941, rooming in a double in Thayer South.

Like all physics concentrators, Slichter carried a heavy academic course load. But as a result of World War II, the first two years of the young physicist's course of study was crammed into one.

"In [sophomore] fall, I was taking electronics courses which we ordinarily would have taken much later, as seniors," Slichter recalls. "And all the graduate students had disappeared, so I had a job grading lab reports for [courses I had taken the previous summer]."

After his sophomore year, Slichter left Harvard to work on an underwater explosives project at the Woods Hole Institute in Woods Hole, Mass. The project allowed him to apply his newly-acquired electronics knowledge and introduced him to the idea of a life of research.

Slichter returned to Harvard in January 1946, and completed his course requirements by the end of the summer. He had little time for extracurriculars, participating only briefly in the radio station. And with the help of an undergraduate thesis advised by J. H. Van Vleck, Slichter graduate magna cum laude as a member of Phi Beta Kappa.

Slichter also attended graduate school at Harvard, earning his masters in 1947 and his Ph. D. in 1949. His doctoral dissertation was advised by Edward Purcell, who had just discovered magnetic resonance.

The project was so intellectually stimulating that Slichter decided to pursue a career in solid state physics. So he took a job as an instructor at the University of Illinois.

"The University of Illinois physicists, and I thought it would be a wounderful place because I would really learn a lot," Slichter says. "The University of Illinois made a very big commitment to that field at that time. It was a very attractive place for a scientist with those interests to be."

Aside from a one-year stint as a guest lecture at Harvard, he has been at the University of Illinois ever since.

Slichter looks back fondly on his early education at Harvard. In particular, he says, the opportunity to study under Purcell and Van Vleck--both of whom would eventually claim Nobel Prizes in physics--made his Harvard experience special.

In the end, of course, Slichter decided that the experience was worthwhile enough for him to trek more than six hours from Illinois to Cambridge every other week for the Corporation's meeting.

"I just decided that this was a very special responsibility, you can see the fantastic experience I'd had, both as an undergraduate and a grad student," Slichter says. "So that had given me a tremendous sense of what a wonderful place Harvard is at its best, and the desire to try to help preserve that."