Word: puseys
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...this, Pusey's departure will not be without bitter feelings. For a man who defended the right of the University, any university, to exist free from outside control, he has made many enemies among academic liberals. The image of the bold young college president standing up to the forces of intolerance has been replaced, in the eyes of many, by an image of a tight-lipped, uncommunicative old man, alienated from younger faculty and students, with a mid-Victorian conception of the role of the academic community. Probably neither image is true: Pusey, after all, is only human...
Senior Yearbooks from the early days of the Pusey era frequently contain pictures of the new president, his hair not yet gray, and often wearing a casual looking sweater under his tweed jacket, sipping sherry with undergraduates. In those days, he was still the hero of American academics, the man who had fought the right wing demon and defeated him. The Faculty of Arts and Sciences commended him in an unusual resolution, and he was featured on an Omnibus program. His door was still open to the press, which heaped him with praise...
...this was all at an end, and Pusey began building his reputation for aloofness. Unlike most cases, it was not a gradual slipping away from popularity to indifference to opprobrium; the death of Pusey the White Knight, and the birth of Pusey the ogre, can be traced to one occurrence-the Memorial Church crisis...
...Harvard is interdenominational, and recognizes the right of members of all faiths to worship freely in Memorial Church. Most of them never get to Harvard, and few of those who do remember this little statement, or realize its significance. For it marked the beginning of the end of Nathan Pusey as a president with a constituency...
...Memorial Church Crisis was a simple affair, really. In 1957, a Jewish couple requested permission to be married, by a rabbi, in the University's interdenominational Church. The request was denied, and Pusey explained the denial by proposing the thesis that Harvard was not, strictly speaking, interdenominational, but interdenominational-Christian. Under immense pressure from every quarter, the Corporation was compelled to retract the stand, and open the Church to all comers...