And while Heimert still maintains a love for Harvard, he believes it was ultimately his involvement in its inner bureaucracy that limited the time he could devote to scholarship.

Heimert recalls English Professor Kenneth B. Murdock, one of his mentors, advising him to always appear to be an inept administrator.

"Don't ever at Harvard show administrative skills-you'll just be given another promotion," he said. When Heimert countered that wasn't that the American way of upward mobility, Murdock further explained his comment: "I didn't say a better job, but another job."

Murdock, who served as both Master of Leverett House and Dean of the Faculty, illustrated his point to Heimert by telling him about how he would write letters back and forth from the Leverett House Master to the Dean of the Faculty-addressed to and signed by Murdoc himself.

Most prominent among Heimert's administrative roles was his position as a committee chair on the Committee of Fifteen, which decided the fate of the most egregious offenders of the 1969 University Hall takeover.

It was this involvement which Heimert says marked him as too controversial to be selected as University president or Dean of the Faculty. Other committee members suffered the same fate, including James Q. Wilson, who ultimately left Harvard.

Heimert's administrative involvement along with the responsibilities of being the Master of Eliot House led people to question whether he was washed up or not.

Yet, Heimert, more than a typical Faculty member or administrator, had to deal with the real student effects of unrest on a very personal House level.

"When one was Master, one was closer to the student unrest as opposed to a Faculty member with a nice office in the distance," he says.

Heimert's tenure at Eliot coincided with the social changes of the postwar decades.

Parietals rules prohibiting students from entertaining members of the opposite sex in their dorm rooms at night were officialy loosened in the spring of 1970. In addition, Heimert's time at Harvard saw the abolition of official rules governing the tradition of wearing a coat and tie to all meals in the House dining halls.

Ultimately, there was no way to discipline what Heimert calls an increasing number of "wayward students" in the late '60s and early '70s. All students, not just card-carrying members of SDS, and even in the traditionally upper crust world of Eliot House were rebelling against Harvard-and its dress code.

"[A student asked about his attire] would have been more likely to say 'Fuck you.' Authority was desanctified," Heimert says.

Heimert, however, says he is resigned to the fact that Harvard will inevitably change over time. Although he marveled in 1995 on how different Harvard had become since he arrived in 1945, he said a member of the Class of 1895 would have similar thoughts if he saw Harvard in 1945.

Yet, Heimert still believes he has seen the most rapid change Harvard has gone through since it was a tiny divinity college in Newtowne-Cambridge's original name.

"The last 30 years have seen the most change in Harvard in its history, with the possible exception of its first 30 years," Heimert says.

For Heimert, even his impending retirement will not sever his connection with fair Harvard. He will continue to come in from his home in Winchester to teach history and literature tutorials and a class in the English department.

For a high school student who did not even know Harvard existed, the school has become an integral part of his existence over the last fifty-four years.

Roger Rosenblatt, who worked with Heimert on the Committee of Fifteen, described it best when he described Heimert in his 1997 book, Coming Apart. "A scholar of American religion, his was Harvard."