When Roger B. Porter became the master of Dunster House in 2001, he had already served as a top domestic policy advisor for three presidents. A faculty member at the College for decades, he was the longtime instructor of “The American Presidency,” one of Harvard’s most popular classes. But that year, he gave up a quiet family life to do something louder—live amidst hundreds of undergraduates.
Sitting in his warmly lit study, books lining the shelves from wall-to-wall, Porter seems disconnected from the buzz emanating from the bustling dining hall just outside his door.
Even when a disoriented undergraduate unexpectedly stumbles into his room on her way out of the dining hall, Porter smiles calmly and points her in the right direction.
“That happens all the time,” he says.
Growing up in suburban Salt Lake City, Porter was the son of a World War II soldier-turned-academic, a professor of sociology at Brigham Young University.
“I really enjoyed academic communities and I enjoyed my father, who always seemed very young to me,” he says. “It dawned on me that one of the reasons he seemed so young was that he was around young people.”
And that’s a lesson Porter has taken to heart.
MR. PORTER GOES TO WASHINGTON
Porter is one of few professors at Harvard who can claim a résumé punctuated by multiple stints on Pennsylvania Avenue. But it was a long journey from practicing his serve on the tennis team at Brigham Young to playing a match at the White House—as Gerald Ford’s partner.
Porter says that from an early age, he knew that he wanted to be an academic, surrounded by books, just as he had been as a child.
“We had tons of books in the house and my mother would read to us at the dinner table at night,” he says, beginning a story, something he often does when answering a question. “She would fix a meal, eat quickly before we would all sit down, and she would read to us.”
By the time he had finished a Rhodes Scholarship at Oxford and a PhD at Harvard, Porter says he knew that he had a real interest in government and economics.
“I thought, ‘You know, if I’m going to teach this I really ought to go see how it works in practice as well,’” he says.
Porter left Harvard’s halls for a fellowship in the Ford administration where, as young graduate, he says that he “was just taking in everything.”
The professor says that one of his most formative experiences in Washington was watching Ford reach out to heal the wounds of Vietnam and the Nixon years while confronting the economic crisis of the mid-1970s.
“It was really a remarkable performance, and by the time he left office two years later, he’d gotten the inflation rate down,” the former economic advisor says.
Porter rejects the notion that universities are nothing but isolated “ivory towers,” explaining that he didn’t go to
Washington because he felt that he needed more “real world” experience.
“I’m not really sure where this ‘real world’ is,” he says. “Where I’ve been, it’s never there. The government’s not the real world, the university community’s not the real world, the business community’s not the real world. I’m not quite sure where this real world is that people keep talking about.”
Carlos Diaz spent nine years as the head teaching fellow for ‘The American Presidency,’ watching Porter tell story after story from his experiences working alongside presidents.
“In class, he usually tries to present different angles of an issue and approaches it from a really interesting perspective that nails the academic side with the practical side,” Diaz says.
THE PROFESSOR OF THE PRACTICE
“Practical” takes on a whole new meaning in a residential college setting where the demands of the house master can range from attending the quotidian administrative meetings to remedying the occasional late night crisis.
And the mastership is not without is own small controversies.
In 2004, a few years after the Porters took the helm of Dunster, some students, writing about BGLT student life in Dunster called the House “exceptionally homophobic,” over the House open-list.
One student claimed that he and friends had been “harassed numerous times” in a house that had not had a resident BGLT tutor in two years.
Porter, looking back on the incident says that the complaints were a brief interruption in an otherwise collegial house community, and that the students’ concerns were addressed immediately.
The Porters appointed two residential tutors to serve as the BGLT liaisons, replacing a non-residential House affiliate who had served as the House’s main BGLT resource.
Today, Daniel Chen, the current BGLT tutor says that Porter has created an “incredibly warm and friendly house environment.”
“One of the themes that I find myself returning to is, ‘How do I build a sense of community so people treat one another the way they ought to treat one another?’” Porter says.
Of competition? Porter claims it doesn’t really exist among students at Harvard.
He sees his job as an unique opportunity to interact with a virtual revolving door of undergraduates in their most formative years.
One such student, Vivek Viswanathan ’09 keeps a running list of the pieces of advice that Porter has given him for the past three years:
“Take professors, rather than courses.”
“Set goals, but be sure that they are your servant and not your master.”
“Begin at the end.”
Another student, Valentine N. Quadrat ’09 said that Porter’s class was one of her most memorable academic experiences at Harvard, and that she found his anecdotal style highly effective.
In one story that Quadrat still remembers vividly—two years after taking the course—Porter described Ronald Reagan as one of the most confident men he had ever met. But Porter added that while Reagan was preparing for an interview with Forbes magazine, the president said, “I feel like I’m cramming for a final exam.”
“He worked with mainly Republican presidents,” Qaudrat said. “But I didn’t feel like he was giving propaganda like some other professors at Harvard do.”
FAMILY GUY
It is no secret that Porter is a conservative, one who identifies strongly with much of the ideology that has characterized Republican administrations for the past half century. But Porter insists that his political work, in addition to his other personal beliefs, have never impacted the way that has he presents information in the classroom, or how he directs life in Dunster.
“My job is not to make other peoples’ choices for them or to impose my choices on other people,” he says.
The Porter family has graduated three children from Harvard. A fourth is currently an undergraduate at his father’s alma mater.
For Porter, the responsibility of being a master is great: he wants for Dunster students the same undergraduate experience that he would want for his own children.
And according to many in Porter’s personal circle, his stories seem to reflect his perspective on life.
“He’s a very principled guy,” said Diaz, now the resident dean in Dunster. “For him, family values and values in general are very important.”
