Buffeted by charges of elitism and a lack of diversity, Conant expanded scholarships and tried to draw more students from the Midwest.

“Conant made it clear that it was no longer acceptable for Harvard to be filled with rich boys,” Shoemaker adds.

Over the coming decades, the school’s diversity expanded as more blacks, Asians and women were admitted to the College—but even now it has not entirely shaken the old boy’s club image.

Fickle Faculty

The tension between teaching and scholarship has always been at the forefront of Harvard’s identity—and the quality and relative happiness of the Faculty has long been at the center of its campus quarrels.

In the first two centuries of Harvard, faculty retention was nonexistent as teaching fellows spent between one and five years instructing students. Little more was demanded from those who became assistant professors.

“There was the sense that if you had put in a few years of good work and had a brain, the University owed you an assistant professorship,” Keller says.

While Harvard had always attracted good faculty, under Eliot, the University developed its first superstar departments—including the nation’s best philosophy and history departments, boasting William James, George Santayana, Charles Pierce and, in history, A.J. Gurney.

Despite the preeminence of the University of Chicago in economics and John Hopkins University in sociology in the early 1900s, major changes to perpetuate an environment of academic excellence were underway.

Lowell recognized that the former star departments could no longer carry the University, and that in order to ensure quality and excellence in his hires, he had to expand the number of endowed chairs.

He revamped the tenure system and instituted the now-traditional eight-year terms for assistant professors.

In his reforms, though, he emphasized a somewhat unique aspect—presidential culpability. By forcing the president to agree to all hiring and tenure decisions, he made the president ultimately responsible for the school’s quality.

“What made the big difference for Harvard’s reputation in modern times was the president having to care about the quality of the Faculty,” Keller says.

Presidents since Lowell have had to pay attention to their faculty and who is being hired—a power they have wielded judiciously with an eye not towards flash-in-the-pan academic trends but towards long-term quality.

“Harvard is blessed with the broadest and deepest assembly of intellectual talent and academic resources in the world,” Yale’s Levin said last year.