The WASP Meets the Westerner

While the embattled gym-dwellers and Quonset huts announced the G.I. Bill's influences on Harvard to any who saw the campus, a more subtle but critical shift occurred. The Class of 1950 was not only huge and half veteran, it was the end of an era.

The entering class showed the diversity that would characterize the College through the second half of the twentieth century as it slowly expanded its admissions from New England preparatory schools to encompass the nation.

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, in the search of "healthy, extrovert American youth," 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.

The National Scholarship program, temporarily suspended during World War II, was started again as well.

The scholarships focused on specific areas of the country and guaranteed financial aid for students with minimum academic requirements.

The admissions office began sending representatives out on marathon recruitment campaigns. One officer spent months moving westward from Georgia to California, visiting high schools to lure Southerners and Westerners to Harvard. Others went as far as the Alaska and Hawaii territories to bring back students from every part of America.

To support a more economically diverse class, the College raised scholarships to levels unheard of in the pre-war days when Harvard was largely the domain of the wealthy.

From 1946 to 1950, scholarship allocations jumped $221,080 to $507,471.

President Conant bemoaned the lack of jobs for students while the University employed thousands of part-time laborers. Conant went from department to department demanding that students be hired for part-time work and started the now-common practice of part-time undergraduate employment.