As Pusey took office, McCarthy kept up his public tirades against Harvard—which had a reputation as the “Kremlin on the Charles”—and urged the University to fire Furry.

But Pusey, a classics scholar, did not share the views of his national security-minded predecessor, a scientist who had worked on the Manhattan Project.

“Conant really didn’t think that somebody who took the Fifth Amendment deserved to be kept on, and said so,” says Brandeis historian Morton Keller, co-author of the book Making Harvard Modern. “Pusey, who had clashed with McCarthy in Wisconsin, knew pretty much who he was, and I think by the standards of the time was stronger on academic freedom than Conant was.”

In November, McCarthy sent a telegram to Pusey demanding to know how the University would act on Furry’s case.

Pusey pledged in a press conference that the University was “absolutely, unalterably and finally opposed to communism” and that no known communists were on the faculty. But he defended Furry against the charges that he was a current member of the party or “sought to indoctrinate his students.”

In a speech before the New England Association of Colleges and Secondary Schools the following month, Pusey condemned those who continued to target Harvard, noting that no one on the faculty had been proven a communist.

“And yet some unfriendly critics continue to belabor us with the name of one single teacher who was a communist, seeking thereby to create the impression or perhaps mistakenly believing that we are a seat for widespread disloyalty,” Pusey said.

As Harvard remained under fire in Washington for its alleged communist ties, many student groups on campus backed Pusey’s stance against McCarthy.

“[McCarthy] was doggedly continuing his fight against subversion, with methods about which many were becoming increasingly skeptical,” the editors of the 1954 yearbook wrote in their retrospective.

Pusey did not receive unanimous support. One group of students attempted to form the Harvard Conservative League, an organization dedicated to rooting out communists on campus.

“The student body, or at least a small part of it, is refusing to sit by and watch this University harbor, indeed foster these enemies of our country,” the students wrote in a statement.

But some prospective members distanced themselves from the club’s original mission, and the Office of the Dean of the College said it would not approve a group that advocated spy tactics and investigations of faculty members.

DIVINE INTERVENTION

As Pusey engaged in his public debates with McCarthy, the new Harvard president, a devout Episcopalian, also focused on an issue nearer to his heart.

Several weeks before his inauguration, Pusey became the first leader since 1909 to participate in an exercise at the Divinity School, speaking on the school’s role within the University at the opening convocation ceremonies in Andover Chapel on September 30, 1953.