Abbott Lawrence Lowell

BA, Harvard University LLB, Harvard University Harvard University President

He could have been genetically engineered to be president of Harvard: born into a family of aristocratic Boston Brahmins; paternal grandfather a longtime member of the Harvard Corporation; maternal grandfather founder of the Lawrence Scientific School at Harvard; father a Harvard alum. Of course he went there too, got a BA and a law degree, and taught there after practicing law for a while with his cousin Francis Cabot Lowell, who also had a pair of Harvard degrees.

Which isn’t to say that Lawrence Lowell adored everything about his alma mater. When he was named president, in 1909, he was deeply offended by the class divisions, the way the rich kids tended to live in fancy off-campus housing while others lived in the decrepit student housing in Harvard Yard. And he didn’t care for the well-off students’ lazy disdain for classwork and their infernal gentleman’s Cs.^* He quickly whipped the place into shape, raising funds to build new dorms and requiring all freshmen to dwell therein to promote a “democratic social life.” He revamped the curriculum, introducing the concept of the concentration or major, which forced students to actually study and gain knowledge rather than skate by with the easiest classes available every semester. And he cast a wider admissions net, seeking top candidates from schools that did not typically send their graduates to Harvard.

He was, in short, a progressive, and progress was definitely achieved during his twenty-four-year tenure as president. However, as with many progressives of his generation (see Charles Davenport, Madison Grant, Harry Laughlin, and William Z. Ripley), Lowell’s idea of progress had a strong component of narcissism, or outright prejudice: progress meant Making the World a Better Place for Me and People Like Me. Which inevitably had a flip side: Making the World a Worse Place for People Who Are Not Like Me. And Lowell definitely made the world worse for three types of students who were Not Like Him.

We’ll pause while you guess which three kinds of students suffered Lowell’s disapprobation. Got it? Okay.

In May 1920, a Harvard student named Cyril Wilcox confessed to his big brother, George, that he was sexually involved with an older man. The next day Cyril killed himself. In quick succession the furious, grieving George found letters to Cyril from two other gay Harvard students, tracked down the older man and beat him until he gave up the names of others involved with his brother, and accosted a dean of the school to demand that Harvard homosexuals be exposed and destroyed.

With Lowell’s blessing, the dean convened a so-called Secret Court to track down the hated (and feared) gay men and administer justice. Ultimately, eight students were expelled (one of whom killed himself the month after Cyril Wilcox’s suicide), an assistant professor was fired, and a recent graduate was proclaimed persona non grata. Parents were informed, and the expelled students were essentially blacklisted from attending college elsewhere, as Harvard was brutal when responding to transcript requests.* Lowell initially opposed any gesture of clemency, but he eventually allowed two of the expelled students to complete their studies.

Would you care to guess who else Wasn’t Like Lowell? If you said “the blacks,” you’re right, and we appreciate your Donald Trump impersonation. Starting in 1915, per Lowell’s mandate, all first-year students were to live in campus housing reserved for freshmen. All, that is, except for black freshmen, who Lowell felt should live… someplace else.^* “We owe to the colored man,” he wrote, “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.” To the credit of the Harvard community, an outpouring of protest in 1922—mainly by students, but also by faculty and alumni—led the Board of Overseers to review the situation. Lowell disingenuously argued that the effect of forcing blacks and whites to live together would be to increase the amount of prejudice against blacks.^* The Board of Overseers responded wisely by unanimously rejecting Lowell’s segregation policy.

And then—surprise!—there was Lowell’s Jewish problem. (Did you guess all three? Good job!) At the outset of his presidency, the Jewish population of Harvard was 6 percent. By 1925, after Lowell’s meritocratic admissions policies had been in place for a decade and a half, it had risen to 28 percent. This, for his taste, was far too high. His argument for reducing the number of incoming Jews was related to his argument for segregating the freshman dorms: the presence of so many Jews at Harvard was causing an uptick in anti-Semitism, which was bad for the Jewish students, ergo there should be fewer of them. He then undermined the argument by suggesting that Harvard might suffer the same fate as certain elite clubs who see a decline in their traditional membership when they admit too many Jews.*

None of this sat well with the faculty or the Overseers, but Lowell persisted in his effort to fine-tune and tweak and hone and rejigger the admissions process until he was satisfied that it was functioning properly. And he succeeded. By the time he stepped down in 1933, he had reduced the proportion of Jews in the incoming freshman class to a safe, manageable, and less offensive 10 percent. Just enough Jews. Just enough anti-Semitism.