A typical pre-war Harvard man was white and Protestant, from New England and prepared at a private school, preferably Exeter, Andover, Groton or St. Paul's.

In the late 1940s, however, President Conant, Dean Bender and Provost Buck began work to make Harvard a national university with a student body that reflected the breadth of American diversity.

Buck described the vision for a new Harvard full of "illogical co-minglings."

"Rich men's sons and poor, serious scholars and frivolous wasters, saints and sinners, puritans and papists, Jews and Gentiles, will meet in her Houses, her Yard and her athletic fields, rubbing off each other's angularities and learning from friendly contact what cannot be learned from books," he said.

Buck was the force behind the movement to draw new blood from the West and South.

His motivations came from a distaste for Harvard students from private schools, whom he described as "delicate, literary types of boys who don't make the grade socially with their better balanced classmates who, in turn, head for Yale or Princeton."

Athletics were the healthy core of an undergraduate life, Buck preached, and slowly turned admissions to his side.

In search of "healthy, extrovert American youth," Buck focused recruitment efforts on the South and West.