Word: conant
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Before, during and after WWII, Harvard was intimately connected to the national political scene. Conant, who served as Harvard's president from 1933 to 1953, was also an atomic weapons adviser to Presidents Roosevelt and Truman...
Having earned a Ph.D. in chemistry before assuming the helm of the University, Conant was hand-picked by Roosevelt to function as the president's liaison to the scientists at New Mexico's Los Alamos National Laboratory-the physicists and military experts who made the United States a nuclear power...
President Conant transitioned fluidly from the Ivy-covered walls of Cambridge to the halls of power in government. After the war, he continued to serve Washington, sitting on the Educational Policy Committee (EPC)-a body of academic experts who in 1949 issued a report calling for the expulsion of Communists from the ranks of the nation's teachers...
...Conant and the University, his signature on the document represented a policy shift. Just the previous April, Conant had testified at the State House against a bill that would have prohibited Communists from teaching in the state's public schools...
...ramifications for academic freedom were, at best, murky. Crimson President John G. Simon '50 met twice with Conant in an attempt to understand the report's implications for Harvard professors, andCrimson editors penned a staff editorial callingfor assurances that no systematic scouring of theFaculty would ensue...