However, students from the time remember the affidavit generating more criticism from faculty than from undergraduates.
“There was an awareness that the U.S. rightly or wrongly thought it needed to catch up [to the Soviets],” said Mary Ellen Gale ’62, a former Crimson editor. Many undergraduates agreed with Pusey’s statement that the loyalty oath was “odious.”
Yet the NDEA debate failed to gain considerable traction among the student body.
“The thing that brought Harvard students to the streets was when they learned that the diplomas were going to be de-Latinized,” said former Crimson president Frederic L. Ballard Jr. ’63.
This apathy was partly a question of timing. Sandwiched between the height of McCarthyism in the early 1950s and increased student radicalism of the late 1960s, the years 1959-1962 were relatively tame ones. The question of student loans, at that time, was not particularly polarizing to many students.
“Student loans were not as a big a thing in our lives as I think it is today,” Ballard said. “We were, I think, very unaware of family money.”
Harvard boasted its own scholarship programs, and, in comparison to other universities, was perceived as better able to reject federal funds.
“The University is one of the few institutions in the nation still wealthy enough to defy Congress on this kind of issue,” declared a staff editorial in 1961.
A REVERSAL
A year later, the affidavit requirement was repealed under the Kennedy administration. Harvard and its peer institutions agreed to accept federally funded student loans.
In the fall of 1962, Harvard received $240,000; in 1963, that amount increased to approximately $350,000. By 1964, the University requested $1 million from the federal government.
Harvard’s own student loan program had increased dramatically over the same time period. Yet tuition was also rising, so the NDEA money allowed the University to continue to expand its scholarship programs as well.
The debate regarding the loyalty oath had shifted toward a debate about educational equity and socioeconomic diversity within American universities.
“Educators...may one day get down on their hands and knees to thank the powers that be for Sputnik,” wrote Efrem Sigel ’64, former associate managing editor of the Crimson in October 1963. “There is hope, therefore, that Congress will move from the modest NDEA program to a large commitment to increasing educational opportunity.”
—Staff writer Beth E. Braiterman can be reached at bbraiterman@college.harvard.edu.