By Richard Warch
President
Lawrence Today magazine, Spring 2002
When I arrived at Lawrence for an interview in the spring of 1977, I knew two things about the college: that one of my best friends from high school in New Jersey, Quen Sharpe, '61, had graduated from here and that Nathan Pusey had been president. The halo effect of his transition to Harvard in 1953 was still in place 25 years later. I was not to meet President Pusey until 1979, but in my first year as vice president for academic affairs, I met him after a fashion when I had the opportunity to work with the faculty in restoring Freshman Studies -- after a brief hiatus -- to its former and present status as a required course and several years later to work with Dean of the Faculty Michael Hittle and the faculty in extending the course to two terms, a feature that has remained in place ever since.
Over the past 23 years, I have had frequent occasions to visit Mr. Pusey, during his few visits to Lawrence -- once to speak about Freshman Studies -- and in New York, where he and Anne faithfully attended our alumni gatherings. He was a good, gentle, and gracious man whose career in and beyond higher education was exemplary. Though his national prominence was a consequence of his position at Harvard, his influence and legacy at Lawrence were themselves remarkable and lasting. During his brief stint on the faculty from 1935 to 1938 as sophomore tutor, he earned his reputation as a superb teacher, and as president he made the academic enterprise -- particularly the excellence of instruction -- his top priority.
President Pusey did oversee construction of two major new buildings during his tenure -- the Memorial Union and Worcester Art Center -- though he once confided to me with a twinkle in his eye that the first piece of construction during his tenure was a cinder-block storage building behind Brokaw, which today serves as the carpenter shop. He also "built" the faculty and, indeed, was something of a one-man search-and-selection committee, seeking out potential faculty members from around the country and visiting them personally to attract them to Lawrence.
The most enduring Pusey legacy, of course, is Freshman Studies, which was his inspiration and creation and which became and has remained the "signature" course in a Lawrence education. In the introductory lecture for Freshman Studies in 1945, Pusey enunciated the principles, priorities, and practices that the course was designed to effect and promote. They included, first and foremost, the intention to introduce freshmen "to the kind of mental activity which is pursued by each of the five great fields of man's thought, so that, at the outset of their career at Lawrence, students can know something about the nature of college studies."
The course was also designed to educate the faculty or, rather, to enable the faculty to display their fealty to liberal education.
"The teachers in this course are making an honest proof of their principles," Pusey said. "Believing that specialized competence in one line need not prevent a man from study in other fields, they are practicing their belief."
Finally, Pusey emphasized the nature of the materials to be considered in the course. "Most of the books for this course are chosen because they have in themselves real greatness," he stated. "They are not textbooks which talk about other books but are great original works which have affected civilization and still affect it. Books are read in entirety. The object of this is to counteract the increasing helplessness of men and women before a book and the consequent flight to summaries, reviews, and anthologies."
While Freshman Studies has evolved over the decades since its inception, Pusey's founding principles have remained at the center of the enterprise. Importantly, those principles and that enterprise will persist for generations to come. Two weeks after learning of President Pusey's death in November, Lawrence received the news that the National Endowment for the Humanities has awarded us a challenge grant to enable us to raise funds for a Freshman Studies endowment. It will be, in a sense, a sign of the lasting gratitude that all of us have for Nathan Pusey's service that we will secure in perpetuity the intellectual stamp he firmly placed on a Lawrence education.
I feel honored and privileged not only to serve as one of Nate Pusey's successors but also to have known him and counted him a friend. We mourn his passing, but we celebrate and give thanks for his life and his place among us. I and everyone at Lawrence will miss him.