Lowell, Abbott Lawrence 1855-1943

LOWELL, ABBOTT LAWRENCE 1855-1943

President of harvard university

Reform of Harvard

A lawyer and a largely self-taught expert on government, Abbott Lawrence Lowell during his tenure as president of Harvard University (1909-1933) remade the university, both on the undergraduate and graduate levels. He stressed the importance of community at the school, revamping the residential system. Lowell was also instrumental in the installation of course concentrations. As president, Lowell attracted some of the best minds to Harvard's faculty, whose academic freedom he strongly defended. In politics Lowell played an important role in both the League of Nations debate and the case of Sacco and Vanzetti.

Boston Brahmin

Lowell was a member of one of the oldest and most prominent families in Boston and the brother of astronomer Percival Lowell and poet Amy Lowell. After attending private schools in Boston and Europe he enrolled at Harvard, where he excelled, especially in the field of mathematics. He graduated cum laude and entered Harvard Law School in 1877, from which he received his degree in 1880. With his cousin and brother-in-law, Francis Cabot Lowell, he formed a law firm in 1880; but although he had once aspired to a career on the bench, his energies and talents were soon attracted to education and the study of government. He succeeded his father as a member of the Corporation of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1890, and, in 1900, as the only trustee of the Lowell Institute, a foundation for adult education. For three years, beginning in 1895, Lowell served on the Boston School Committee; his one reform of the system—making the superintendent responsible for teacher appointments—identified him with the rising professionalization of education.

Scholar of Government

While working as a lawyer, Lowell began publishing essays and books on various forms of government. In 1889 he published Essays on Government, which drew the attention of Woodrow Wilson. His two-volume Governments and Parties in Continental Europe (1896) was the first thorough study of its type published in America and led to an invitation to teach part-time at Harvard in 1897; Lowell immediately resigned from his law firm. In 1900 he accepted a professorship in government on the condition that he be allowed to teach half time for half pay so that he could pursue scholarship. His major study was The Government of England (1908), which successfully predicted the downfall of the British Empire.

President Lowell

Beginning in 1903 Lowell became involved with a movement to remake the educational system at Harvard. He believed that the free-elective system at the college produced mediocre albeit highly specialized students. As a professor and then as president beginning in 1909, Lowell helped replace the free-elective system with one requiring concentration and distribution in a student's choice of studies. He was also instrumental in establishing examinations in fields of concentration and a tutorial system, both based on English models. Believing that a strong sense of community was valuable to a college, Lowell in 1914 began requiring freshmen to live together in special halls and in 1930 opened the school's residential colleges, the Harvard House Plan, that distributed the student body into seven colleges. He established the business, architecture, and public-health schools at Harvard in the 1920s. Despite his belief in the educational value of community, Lowell did not allow African American students to live in the freshman dorms until he was forced to do so by protests in 1922 and 1923. Lowell also advocated limiting the number of Jewish students, a move blocked by Harvard's overseers.

Controversies

Lowell supported academic freedom, defending pro-German professor Hugo Münsterburg in 1917. Lowell disagreed with untenured lecturer Harold J. Laski over the Boston police strike of 1919, but when the overseers hinted that Laski should leave Harvard, Lowell responded, "If the Overseers ask for Laski's resignation they will get mine!" He helped found, with former president William Howard Taft, the League to Enforce Peace in 1915. He campaigned for the League of Nations Covenant. In 1927 he chaired an advisory committee for Massachusetts governor Alvan T. Fuller on executive clemency in the Sacco-Vanzetti case. After reviewing the trial record, the committee ruled that the trial had been fair and that the death sentences should be carried out. Lowell had to endure the vilification of opponents to the executions, claiming, "I have done my duty as a citizen with honesty and courage." In his last year at Harvard he created the Society of Fellows, a graduate program designed to encourage independent study. He retired in 1933 but remained active at Harvard and in politics, frequently criticizing New Deal policies and policies of appeasement in dealing with Japan and Germany. He died of a cerebral hemorrhage in January 1943.

Sources:

Abbott L. Lowell, At War with Academic Traditions in America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1934);

Lowell, What a College President Has Learned (NewYork: Macmillan, 1938);

Henry A. Yeomans, Abbott Lawrence Lowell, 1856-1943 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1948).