"It was all of a piece--with his dedication to the quality of undergraduate life, intellectual quality and all the other things that go into the life," Donoghue said. "He sacrificed a lot to pursue that ideal."

Dirk M. Killen '82--the senior tutor in Pforzheimer House whose dissertation was advised by Heimert--recalled the Puritan scholar's devotion to Houses as the center of undergraduate education.

"He wanted the students and the teaching fellows to know that they were part of something larger than themselves, not to puff them up with pride, but to inspire them to equal or better the contributions of those that had gone before them," Killen wrote in an e-mail message.

Heimert's Life and Times

Heimert was born in Oak Park, Ill., on Nov. 10, 1928. His family soon moved to nearby Chicago and finally to suburban Elmhurst where he attended York Community High School.

Neither his mother nor his father received a college degree although his father completed two years of school before his own father's death forced him to earn a living for his family.

Heimert arrived at Harvard as an undergraduate in 1945. He wrote his senior thesis on Abraham Lincoln, a subject he returned to last year in an undergraduate seminar.

"He was very good at asking questions--perceptive and profound questions that helped him to get to know you, to know what you think and why you think it," said Joshua R. Carter '98-'01, a student in the Lincoln seminar.