Unlike his predecessor and successor, who instituted and refined the General Education and Core curricula respectively, Pusey did not introduce sweeping change to College academics.

He did take the first tenuous steps to a merger between Harvard and Radcliffe, put emphasis on more stringent academic standards and pushed for a greater role for religion at the College.

But Pusey’s lasting legacy was his commitment to meritocracy in admissions and faculty appointments, Brandeis University historian and Harvard expert Morton Keller says.

“He made possible the meritocratic University Conant envisioned,” Keller says.

Pusey also left his fingerprints on Harvard’s actual campus. The Science Center, the towers of Leverett House, Mather House, Peabody Terrace, Holyoke Center and William James Hall are only the most noticeable physical additions that Pusey planned and funded.

Even during the 1950s, Pusey’s efforts were not without significant bumps.

According to Keller, in 1957, as Pusey’s admissions policies were rooting out the last vestiges of anti-Semitism, he was roundly criticized for barring a Jewish wedding from Memorial Church.

But the real troubles came later on.

Despite the physical reminders of Pusey’s tenure, it is the last year and a half of his time as president—when the wave of student protest swept over Harvard—that Bethell, Rosovsky and others say Pusey is remembered for.

“He’ll be remembered most for ’69—its very unfortunate and unfair,” Keller says.

According to Keller, Pusey himself acknowledged that he had nearly 16 “wonderful years” and “one terrible one.”

Observers say Pusey’s personality, combined with a yawning generational gap, exacerbated the troubles of his final years.

“The 1960s were very difficult for him,” Rosovsky says. “He was unprepared for it, but so was everyone else.”

Generational gulfs always exist between the administration and the students, Keller says, but with Pusey the gulf grew steadily as the decade of the 1960s went on.

Bethell agrees that the generational gap was important. “It was very hard for Pusey to understand where the [Students for a Democratic Society] members were coming from,” he says.