“It was not certain the College could survive his bad reputation and the bad blood caused by the loss of money,” Gomes says.

For several terms the College sat dark and shuttered, before the election of the first president, Henry Dunster, who rebuilt the school from scratch.

Given wide latitude by the overseers, Dunster seized control, recruited faculty, instituted checks and balances, adopted modern teaching techniques and ensured the University’s early viability.

His 14-year tenure as president transformed Harvard from a backwater seminary to an academy on par with England’s great universities at Oxford and Cambridge.

Standardizing Standards

Since students have always been at the center of Harvard, president after president has struggled with the question of how to measure their achievement.

Over the last hundred years, Harvard’s “grade inflation” has made headlines multiple times—and forced each 20th-century president to address the issue.

The debates began during Reconstruction, when the rigidity of the earlier College—where students were graded every week on class performance and behavior and chapel attendance was mandatory—had fallen away in the years after the Civil War under President Charles W. Eliot, Class of 1868.

Eliot “turned the College over like a pancake,” according to Keller. He instituted a free curriculum, whereby students could take just about anything they wanted.

“It was the first big modern change,” Keller says.

However, by the time A. Lawrence Lowell took office, many questioned the College’s free curriculum—too many students just took easy courses, now called “guts,” but then referred to as “bow-wows,” Gomes explains.

Lowell came to office with a mandate to combat grade and honors inflation, increase the size of the Faculty and expand the University—a mandate strikingly similar to that given to University President Lawrence H. Summers in the last year.

Lowell, dissatisfied with student performance, instituted the first comprehensive final exams and tutorial system.

But even as late as the early years of the administration of James Bryant Conant ’14 in the 1930s, the University had not accumulated the clout it now holds. Admission to the University was simple—1,200 students applied for the 1,000 slots. Beyond that, though, Harvard’s critics saw the University as out-of-touch and pointed to who was attending the College.

“There was a sense that the College had become too much of a rich boys’ school and didn’t have the kind of students it should have,” Keller says.