Called away from Cambridge after sophomore year, Gill spent time in the army stationed in Japan, and won the regimental boxing championship, in the middleweight division.

Once back in the Square, Gill graduated summa cum laude in economics, garnering the Palfrey Exhibition (awarded to the most distinguished graduating scholarship student) and a Henry Fellowship to study philosophy and psychology at Jesus College in England.

And though he later earned a Fulbright Fellowship for further study, Gill returned to the States after only a year abroad when his father became ill.

Mastering Harvard

At age 21, Gill became an assistant dean of the College, and claims to be the youngest "baby dean" in Harvard College history.

Awarded his Ph.D. in economics in 1956, Gill directed the largest course at the College, known now as Social Analysis 10: "Principles of Economics."

And by 1963, after an eight-year stint as senior tutor, Gill and his wife Elizabeth were moving into the master's residence at Leverett House.

Being administrators during the days of student protests was challenging, the Gills admit.

When strangers threw rocks through the windows of the Gill home and nearly injured their children, Elizabeth Gill was not sure if the protests were directed at her advocacy of increased diversity in Cambridge's public school teaching staff--or at her husband's "neanderthal" ideologies.

"It turns out they were my enemies," she sighs.

Her husband's commitment to freedom of speech was unpopular in the late '60s, Gill says.

"I was very much a law-and-order type," Richard Gill notes.

Gill says one of his Leverett students had interned for President Lyndon B. Johnson, and there was a good chance LBJ would agree to speak at the House senior dinner. ("Not even [famed Eliot House Master] John [H.] Finley ['25] could've topped that," Gill laughs.)

Ultimately, Johnson declined the offer--and Gill, who faced "the sharpest of criticisms" from some Faculty members for extending an invitation to the commander-in-chief during the Vietnam War, concedes that the president's arrival "would have caused a riot."

The Making of a Star