In 1897, Lowell became lecturer, and in 1898, professor of government at Harvard. In the 1990s after being damaged , the hall was renovated and now has 352 seats in the main hall, and eight classrooms with capacity of 22-24 people. From relatively early in his professional career, Lowell worried about the role of racial and ethnic minorities in American society. As early as 1887, he wrote of the Irish: "What we need is not to dominate the Irish, but to absorb them ... We want them to become rich, and send their sons to our colleges, to share our prosperity and our sentiments. We do not want to feel that they are among us and yet not really part of us." He believed that only a homogeneous society could safeguard the achievements of American democracy. Sometime before 1906, he became an honorary vice-president of the
Immigration Restriction League, an organization that promoted literacy tests and tightened enforcement of immigration laws. In 1910, he wrote approvingly in private of excluding Chinese immigrants entirely and of Southern states that denied the franchise to black citizens. Publicly he consistently adopted assimilation as the solution to absorbing other groups, limiting their numbers to levels he believed would allow American society to absorb them without being changed itself, a stance that "fused liberal and racist ideas in making the case for exclusion." He was an early member of the
American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 1909, he became president of the
American Political Science Association. That same year, he succeeded
Charles William Eliot as president of Harvard University, a post he held for 24 years until his retirement in 1933. Lowell received an honorary doctorate from the
University of Leiden (the Netherlands) on 30 August 1919.
Harvard reforms Lowell immediately embarked upon a series of reforms that were both academic and social in nature. Under his predecessor,
Charles W. Eliot, Harvard had replaced the single standardized undergraduate course with a system that allowed students free choice of electives. That was a logical extension of the trend in U.S. education that had modeled the university on the German system, including the German principle of student freedom in choosing courses. So dominant was Harvard's role in American education that all large American colleges and universities had adopted the elective system by 1904. It appealed to all student types, those intellectually curious and energetic as well as the lazy without intellectual ambition. Lowell now implemented a second, equally revolutionary restructuring of undergraduate education. As early as his service on an ad hoc faculty Committee on Improving Instruction in 1903, he had determined that the elective system was a failure. Large numbers of students, lacking intellectual ambition, chose their courses with little concern for learning, more intent on the ease with which they could fulfill the course requirements, resulting in a course of study that was "neither rigorous nor coherent." Lowell dismantled the elective system and in its place established concentration (what is commonly called a "major") and distribution requirements that would soon become the new American model. Paired with the concentration requirement was a tutorial system in which every student had the guidance of a tutor to see he was prepared for examination in his area of concentration. On admissions, Lowell continued Eliot's attempts to broaden the backgrounds of the entering class. Eliot had abolished the requirement in
Greek (1886) and
Latin (1898) so that students from schools other than elite
preparatory schools could gain entry. Lowell in 1909–10 added a new admission procedure that allowed students to qualify through a new examination process designed to admit "the good scholar from a good school that does not habitually prepare for Harvard." The numbers of students from public schools grew steadily, forming a majority by 1913. Educational practices were only one side of the crisis Lowell saw at Harvard. He analyzed the social divisions of the Harvard students in similar terms. As the admissions process changed over the years, Lowell recognized that the student body was divided sharply socially and by class, far from the cohesive body he remembered from a few decades earlier. Student living arrangements embodied and intensified the problem. As early as 1902, Lowell had decried the "great danger of a snobbish separation of the students on lines of wealth," resulting in "the loss of that democratic feeling which ought to lie at the basis of university life." Harvard had not built new
dormitories even as the size of its undergraduate enrollment grew, so private capital constructed living quarters designed to serve as dormitory-like accommodations for those who afford it. That produced two classes, the underprivileged living in
Harvard Yard in out-of-date buildings and the upper crust living on the "Gold Coast" of Mt. Auburn Street, the "centre of social life." Lowell's long-term solution was a
residential system that he only achieved with the opening of the residential houses in 1930. In the short term, Lowell raised funds and initiated construction projects that would permit the College to house all its freshmen together. The first Freshman Halls opened in 1914. In 1920, Harvard purchased the private dormitories on Mt. Auburn Street "so that the student body may enjoy what was the privilege of the few."
Lowell Institute and Harvard Extension School In 1900, Lowell succeeded his father as Trustee of the
Lowell Institute, which Lowell's great-grandfather founded to subsidize public lectures and popular education programs. Throughout the 40 years he headed the Institute, Lowell's selection of topics and lecturers for the public series reflected his conservative tastes. Topics tended to history and government, with some science and music upon occasion. He ignored contemporary literature and current social trends. Typical were "The War of 1812," "The Development of Choral Music," "The Migration of Birds," and "American Orators and Oratory." A balanced series on "Soviet Russia after Thirteen Years" was an exception. To the education programs Lowell brought his instinct for organization. He transformed the earlier variety of scientific courses into the School for Industrial Foremen at MIT, later called the Lowell Institute School, and focused its program on mechanical and electrical engineering. Stating that "any popular education at the present day should be systematic," he hired Harvard professors to repeat their courses for an audience of adults in Boston in the late afternoon or evening, promising the same quality and examinations. When he became Harvard's President, Lowell exploited his two positions to press further. In 1910, he led in the formation of a consortium of area schools, soon called the Commission on Extension Courses, that included
Boston University,
Boston College, MIT,
Simmons,
Tufts,
Wellesley, and the
Museum of Fine Arts. All agreed to provide similar courses and agreed to award the degree of Associate in Arts to students who completed the equivalent of a college program. He had earlier been approached by a committee of Boston schoolteachers, and he believed his extension program would "put a college degree within the reach of schoolteachers." When the Harvard Overseers agreed in 1910 to appoint a dean for the Department of University Extension, the program's 600 student were two-thirds female. Roughly a third of the students were teachers, a third office workers, and the remainder working at home. After 7 years, enrollment reached 1500. When the schoolteachers asked why they were not entitled to the same bachelor's degree as the Harvard College students, Lowell defended the distinction. Though courses were comparable, the programs and requirements were different, since the many specialized courses required of the College students could not be offered in the Extension Program. He meant the Associate in Arts degree to be distinctive. When Lowell learned in 1933 that other American schools had begun to award the Associate in Arts degree to students after the equivalent of just two years of work, he felt betrayed. He wrote: "the name of Associate in Arts has been degraded, probably beyond recovery, by wicked, thievish, and otherwise disreputable institutions." Harvard responded with a new Adjunct in Arts.
Academic freedom During
World War I, when American universities were under great pressure to demonstrate their unambiguous commitment to the American war effort, Harvard under Lowell established a distinguished record of independence.
The New York Times later wrote that Lowell "steadfastly refused to accede to the demands of the hysterically patriotic that German subjects be dropped from the curriculum." When a Harvard alumnus threatened to withdraw a ten-million-dollar bequest unless a certain pro-German professor was dismissed, the
Harvard Corporation refused to submit to his demand. Lowell's uncompromising statement in support of academic freedom was a landmark event at a time when other universities were demanding compliant behavior from their faculty. He similarly defended a student's anti-German poem with a statement of principle in defense of free speech within the academic community. In 1915,
Kuno Meyer a professor at the
University of Berlin who was considering a temporary Harvard appointment, protested the publication of an undergraduate's satirical poem in a college magazine. Lowell replied that freedom of speech played a different role in American universities than in their German counterparts. "We have endeavored to maintain the right of all members of the university to express themselves freely, without censorship or supervision by the authorities of the university, and have applied this rule impartially to those who favor Germany and those who favor the Allies—to the former in the face of a pretty violent agitation for muzzling professors by alumni of the university and outsiders." During the
Boston police strike of 1919, Lowell called upon Harvard's students "to help in any way ... to maintain order and support the laws of the Commonwealth" by providing security in place of the strikers.
Harold Laski, a tutor in political science of socialist views and still too young to have a scholarly reputation, supported the strikers. Members of the University's Board of Overseers began to talk of dismissing Laski, which provoked a threat from Lowell: "If the Overseers ask for Laski's resignation they will get mine!" Harvard's Professor
Zechariah Chafee paid tribute to Lowell's defense of Harvard's teachers and students by dedicating his 1920 study
Free Speech in the United States to Lowell, "whose wisdom and courage in the face of uneasy fears and stormy criticism made it unmistakably plain that so long as he was president no one could breathe the air of Harvard and not be free."
Purge of homosexuals In 1920, the brother of a student who had recently died by suicide brought evidence of ongoing homosexual activity among the students to the College's Acting Dean
Chester N. Greenough. After consulting with Lowell and under his authority, the Dean convened an ad hoc
tribunal of administrators to investigate the charges. It conducted more than 30 interviews behind closed doors and took action against eight students, a recent graduate, and an assistant professor. They were expelled or had their association with the university severed. Lowell proved particularly opposed to readmission for those who had been expelled only for associating too closely with those more directly involved. He eventually relented in two of four cases. The affair went unreported until 2002, when Harvard President
Lawrence Summers called the affair "part of a past that we have rightly left behind."
Excluding African-Americans from the Freshman Halls African-American students had lived in Harvard's dormitories for decades, until Lowell changed the policy. Freshmen were required to live in the Freshman Halls beginning in 1915. Two black students did live there during World War I without incident. When a few were excluded after the war they raised no protest. The matter became the object of student protest in 1922, when six banned black freshmen, led by a recent alumnus who was studying at the Business School, protested their exclusion. Lowell wrote this explanation to
Roscoe Conkling Bruce, himself an African American Harvard alumnus and the father of an incoming freshman: "We have not thought it possible to compel men of different races to reside together." Bruce's lengthy reply underscored the irony of Lowell's position: "The policy of compulsory residence in the Freshman Halls is costly indeed if it is the thing that constrains Harvard to enter open-eyed and brusque upon a policy of racial discrimination." Lowell stood his ground: "It is not a departure from the past to refuse to compel white and colored men to room in the same building. We owe to the colored man the same opportunities for education that we do to the white man; but we do not owe it to him to force him and the white into social relations that are not, or may not be, mutually congenial." He accused Bruce of insisting on a change of policy and employed an argument about minority presence provoking prejudice that he also used about the same time in the Jewish quota dispute. "For the colored man to claim that he is entitled to have the white man compelled to live with him is a very unfortunate innovation which, far from doing him good, would increase a prejudice which, as you and I will thoroughly agree, is most unfortunate and probably growing." When their direct appeal to Lowell failed, the students organized public support from alumni and the press. Of those who wrote to Lowell, blacks saw his position as unqualified racism. Whites either saw it as a violation of Harvard's traditions or applauded it in frankly racist terms. Most criticism saw Lowell's stance as a submission to Southern prejudice. One called it "the slaveholder's prejudice" and another called Lowell's policy a "surrender to the Bourbon South." One
Wisconsin minister suggested Lowell allow the black students to live "voluntarily" in a segregated section of the Freshman Halls. Lowell replied that such a plan "seems to me to be something like the
Jim Crow car, an enforced seclusion which is, to me, very repulsive." A faculty committee called Lowell's exclusion policy "a dangerous surrender of traditional ideals," and in March 1923 the Harvard Board of Overseers unanimously overruled Lowell. One of them,
Franklin D. Roosevelt, wrote: "It seems to be a pity that the matter ever came up in this way. There were certainly many colored students in Cambridge when we were there and no question ever arose." Despite an official policy of integration, what freshmen experienced thereafter is not entirely clear. Some black freshmen lived in the dormitories but believed that not all the Freshman Halls were open to them. One was granted permission to live outside the Freshman Halls even though he had not requested such a privilege. Harvard Dean Henry Aaron Yeomans, later Lowell's biographer, frankly admitted that he and Lowell as administrators found a way to accommodate themselves to the Overseers' stated principle: "The matter was settled in theory, and in practice no serious difficulties were encountered. The applicant who had raised the question decided to live elsewhere. A few others who applied at long intervals, were so skillfully located in the Halls that no susceptible feelings were hurt."
Admissions and Jewish quota controversy Following Lowell's earlier reform of Harvard's admissions process to increase the admission of public school students, the Jewish proportion of the student body rose from 6% in 1908 to 22% in 1922, at a time when Jews constituted about 3% of the U.S. population. Lowell, continuing to focus on the cohesiveness of the student body, described a campus where antisemitism was growing and Jewish students were ever more likely to be isolated from the majority. He feared—and recent developments at Columbia University supported him—that the social elite would cease sending its sons to Harvard as Jewish enrollment increased. He cited what he saw as the parallel experience of hotels and clubs that lost their old membership when the proportion of Jewish members increased. He proposed limiting Jewish admissions to 15% of the entering class. His attempts to persuade members of the Harvard Board of Overseers to adopt his views were already failing when the plan was leaked to the
Boston Post in May 1922. The idea was immediately denounced by Irish and black groups and by the
American Federation of Labor. Lowell continued to argue both in private correspondence and in public speeches that his rationale was the welfare of the Jewish students. "It is the duty of Harvard," he said, "to receive just as many boys who have come, or whose parents have come, to his country without our background as it can effectively educate." If higher Jewish enrollment provoked greater prejudice against them, he asked, "How can we cause the Jews to feel and be regarded as an integral part of the student body?" He also suggested that Harvard would not be facing this issue if other universities and colleges would admit Jews in similar numbers: "If every college in the country would take a limited proportion of Jews, I suspect we should go a long way toward eliminating race feeling among the students." The question was turned over to a faculty committee: the Committee on Methods of Sifting Candidates for Admission. In the course of the internal campaign to influence that group's work, Lowell sought to exploit divisions within the Jewish community. Despite the basic divide between the older Jewish immigrants, usually of German origin, and the lower class of more recently arrived Eastern European Jews, Lowell found no ally there who would articulate his view of "desirable" and "undesirable" Jews. The faculty committee eventually rejected Lowell's proposed quota. Instead, Harvard's new guiding principle in admissions would be the top seventh rule. Harvard would reach out to youths in smaller cities and towns, even to rural communities, with the guideline that the student place in the top seventh of his class. It would seek "to pick out the best pupils from good schools, here, there, and everywhere." Though some suspected this was nothing but a covert way to decrease Jewish enrollment, the policy had the opposite effect. The numbers of non-Jewish students attracted from the South and West could not match the larger numbers of Jews admitted from the Middle Atlantic and New England states. By 1925, Jews made up 28% of the entering class. Lowell then found another way to accomplish his goal, this time less publicly. He first won approval from the Harvard Board of Overseers for a new policy that would, in addition to traditional academic criteria, use letters from teachers and interviews to assess an applicant's "aptitude and character," thus introducing discretion in the place of the strict top seventh rule. He even persuaded one doubtful Overseer that this would not support discrimination against Jews as a group, but merely "careful discernment of differences among individuals." When Lowell gained final approval of these modifications in 1926 and appointed a compliant Admissions Committee, he had won his way. When Lowell left his position in 1933, Jews made up 10% of the undergraduate population. == Public stances ==