Word: moralization
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...annals of 324 years of College history one president stands out for another interest. Josiah Quincy strove for academic freedom, wrestled with financial problems and helped the College expand--but throughout the 16 years of his reign, his primary concern was inculcating an outmoded Puritan ethic of moral conformity and behavioral excellence...
...greater disorder. Quincy became a martinet, the "Tiberius" of the College. "His policy toward the students, an alternate cuffing and caressing, ended in making him the most unpopular President in Harvard history since Hoar," wrote historian Samuel Eliot Morison. Quincy knew what was right--the Puritan code of upright moral behavior--and attempted to impose this upon the naturally unwilling student body...
Entering Harvard at 14, he followed the regular curriculum: "a little Latin and less Greek, and not much mathematics, with a sprinkling of rhetoric, logic, metaphysics, and ethics." At his graduation in 1790, he delivered the English Oration, highest academic honor in the class. His moral character, according to testimony of his classmates, stayed at the same high level...
...must have taken satisfaction, if he ever could, reflecting on the moral education he provided for sixteen years of Harvard students. The brash students themselves may have disagreed with him, but Josiah Quincy was staunchly proud of his righteousness in upholding the old verities against the moral latitude of new and looser generations
...favored the affirmative. Nearly 50 years later, Quincy looked back on this episode: "No public exertion of mine has been more fully justified by the reflections of a long life," he wrote. His defiance of the President, of Congress, and of public opinion fitted in well with his independent moral code...