Word: puseys
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...stood on a table at the south side of the room, under the portrait of President Emeritus Nathan M. Pusey '28, the last man to preside over a Faculty meeting in the room...
Contrast the slick maximizers who now glide through Massachusetts Hall with the zany Yankees--William Bentinck-Smith, J. Boyd Britton, F. Skiddy von Stade Jr.--with whom Pusey surrounded himself. For that matter, contrast Pusey himself with Bok. Nathan Pusey was a nasty old man obsessed with reactionary beliefs and values. Yet, for all that, he was more human than Bok. He had human loves and hates, and he was willing to fight to the death with any weapon he had to preserve his principles inviolate...
...memories of Pusey stand out in my mind. After Harvard's upset victory over Yale in 1970, the Harvard band marched to Pusey's house and serenaded him with a medley of Harvard fight songs. The old man emerged from the house and accompanied the band on cymbals as it ripped through "Ten Thousand Men of Harvard." And in the spring of 1970, when he was asked what qualification he considered most important to his successor, he answered simply: "a belief...
Imagine the contempt and derision with which this was received in Langdell, Baker, Littauer, William James, and the Computer Center. With all the important skills necessary to manipulate a great university, the godstruck old fool had cited something as intangible as a belief. For it was not only Pusey's belief in God which was pitiful and funny: it was his belief in belief of any kind. Nothing more amuses the men who run this university--and their compatriots who run our society--than people with beliefs and no power...
...breifly shut Harvard down in 1969 were not only enemies to be checked; we were also jokes, pathetic Luddites trying to smash the fabric of the new American order without money or power or management skills. Our day, like Pusey's, had passed, and the future belonged to them, the smartest, most dynamic, most skillful group of technocrats the world had ever seen. Thus far, they are winning...