Word: puseys
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...University apart from other colleges in the nation. Despite President James B. Conant's '14 signature on a 1949 National Education Association report which stated that Communist Party members "should not be employed as teachers." Harvard did take a comparatively firm stand against McCarthy; first, by selecting Pusey to succeed Conant; and second, by refusing to fire professors who either admitted that they had been Communists or pleaded the Fifth Amendment when brought before investigatory committees...
...Pusey was president of Lawrence College in Wisconsin when he was chosen to replace Conant, Wisconsin was McCarthy's home state and Pusey had gained notoriety for openly opposing McCarthy's virulent crusade, and working against his reelection to the Senate. For many of Pusey's appointments symbolized a defiant Harvard response...
...when Pusey became president in June of 1953, he inherited the cases of Wendell H. Furry, Leon J. Kamin and Helen Deane Markham. In February Furry, then an associate professor of Physics, had been called before Congressman Harold H. Velde's House Un-American Affairs Committee and had refused to answer any questions. Kamin, a teaching fellow in Social Relations and Markham, assistant professor of Anatomy, had also invoked the Fifth Amendment in March before the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee of the Judiciary Committee. The Harvard Corporation was faced with a dilemma: what should be done with these professors...
...month before Pusey assumed office, the Corporation decided the three professors would stay, but Kamin and Markham had been found guilty of "misconduct," because invoking the Fifth did not befit scholars who were, in the Corporation's opinion, devoted the the "pursuit of truth" and free inquiry. Furry, however, who had testified in a second hearing that he had ceased being a communist in 1951 and had admitted to Harvard officials that in 1944 he had lied to FBI officials about a colleague's political affiliations, was found guilty of "grave misconduct"--grounds for dismissal...
...University kept Furry on, placing him on probation for three years. Furry passed the three years without incident, became a full professor of Physics in 1962, and retired in 1977. Kamin and Markham finished the terms of their unrenewable contracts with Harvard and left. It was Pusey's public statements and handling of these three cases, far more judicious and civil than the actions of many other universities, that set the tenor of Harvard's reputation in the period...