President Conant

On December 2, 1942, James Bryant Conant—Harvard University President and the chairman of the National Defense Research Committee—received a phone call from prominent physicist Arthur Compton.

“The Italian navigator has landed in the New World,” said Compton—an improvised coded message to notify Conant of the first successful nuclear chain reaction, a crucial step in the development of the atomic bomb.

“How were the natives?” Conant responded without missing a beat.

“Very friendly,” Compton replied.

With this short, impromptu exchange, Conant became one of the first people in the world to learn of the military technology that would end World War II and change the course of human history.

President of Harvard from 1933 to 1953, Conant is remembered for his decades of service to both the University and the nation. Ever committed to meritocratic principles, Conant increased financial aid and promoted the expansion of standardized testing at Harvard, while simultaneously maintaining involvement in several government projects during and after the war. In this way, Conant’s legacy extends beyond Harvard to encompass the society in which he lived. More than a powerful university president, he was a quiet yet profound leader of Cold War America.

The first in his family to attend college, Conant’s socioeconomic background represented a significant departure from those of his immediate predecessors, Charles William Eliot and Abbott Lawrence Lowell, both of whom came from established Boston Brahmin families.

Born in Dorchester, Mass., in 1893, Conant graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Harvard in 1914 with a degree in chemistry, earning his Ph.D. in 1917 and later becoming a professor.

When Conant was appointed University president in 1933, one of his top priorities was to “swing an axe against the root of privilege” through the expansion of financial aid, which he believed would allow for greater socioeconomic diversity in the student body. At Conant’s very first Harvard Corporation meeting in September 1933, he proposed a major fundraising effort, later known as the 300th Anniversary Fund, which supported the creation of national scholarships for talented students regardless of their financial backgrounds.

Conant was also a firm believer in the power of standardized testing to help college administrators identify and admit qualified students based on merit rather than social connections or class. He was a strong advocate for the widespread adoption of the Scholastic Aptitude Test and, later, for the creation of the Educational Testing Service, for which he served as the founding chairman.

Conant’s role in reshaping standardized testing was one of many endeavors that reflect his overarching commitment to issues of national importance. Over the course of several decades, Conant testified before U.S. Senate committees on topics ranging from federal aid to education, the creation of the National Science Foundation, and the development of the Lend-Lease Program—an important wartime initiative that allowed the U.S. to supply its allies with military resources during World War II, moving away from its previous policy of isolationism.

As the U.S. became increasingly drawn into World War II, Conant’s involvement in government projects intensified. In 1941, he was appointed to chair the National Defense Research Committee, which directly supported the Manhattan Project to develop the atomic bomb, and was present at the bomb’s first testing in New Mexico in July 1945. He also worked as a special deputy to the head of the Office of Scientific Research and Development Vannevar Bush, who was also Vice President of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a close personal friend.

Conant also supported the American war efforts in subtler ways. He conferred with President Franklin D. Roosevelt on military issues and traveled to England as an emissary for defense research. In July 1944, as the war was drawing to a close, Conant allowed the U.S. State Department to use Harvard’s Dumbarton Oaks Research Library in Washington, D.C. for a conference on postwar security. The conference resulted in the Dumbarton Oaks Proposals, which helped create the charter of the United Nations. Personally concerned with postwar nuclear safety, Conant traveled to Moscow shortly after the end of the conflict to participate in talks with Great Britain and the Soviet Union about nuclear weapons controls.

Concurrently with his wartime political projects, Conant led a significant review of the undergraduate curriculum at Harvard in the 1940s. With Provost Paul H. Buck, Conant developed the General Education Program to encourage study in a broad array of liberal arts, laying the foundation for the current General Education curriculum. In particular, he advocated the development of the history of science as an academic discipline. Shifting the emphasis of the standard curriculum away from the classics, Conant focused on instruction in the sciences and current affairs.

In 1945, he published a summary of the program entitled “General Education in a Free Society,” a text that later became colloquially known as the “Red Book.” The principles of Conant’s pedagogical philosophy extended beyond universities and impacted both high school and college curricula around the country.