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The 1960s, at Harvard at least, opened on a hopeful note.1 A dashing Harvard graduate was running for president. And in 1960, university president Nathan Pusey hired the psychoanalyst Erik Erikson away from the Austen Riggs Center to become Professor of Human Development. Pusey had passed over several other candidates, including the Marxist sociologist Herbert Marcuse, and instead had designed a position especially for Erikson. The Harvard president was pleased to enjoy monthly dinners with his famous new hire, the author of the innovative and gracefully written study of identity, growth, and religious history, Young Man Luther (Erikson, 1958; Friedman, 1999, p. 310).
Nathan Pusey (1963) was soon to publish a book he confidently called The Age of the Scholar: Observations on Education in a Troubled Decade. In Pusey's view, touchingly naive in retrospect, that decade was 1953-1963. In the book he defended the university system against the Red Scare and the threat of intellectual conformity; he noted the growing dependence of the university on government funding. The scholarly community, Pusey believed, was “a powerful force for world peace,” he said, “one of the noblest creations of the mind of man.” The task at hand was “to keep the American university … a place of lively learning” (Pusey, 1963, pp. vi, 165).
By 1968, everything had changed. That year, in Paris, Rome, Tokyo, and Mexico City, young people led insurgencies against the establishment (Isserman & Kazin, 2000, p. 221). In Czechoslovakia, a reform movement within the Communist Party, termed “socialism with a human face,” tested the repressive grip of the Soviet Union. In Southeast Asia, the North Vietnamese launched the Tet Offensive, and in America public confidence in the war, already low, dropped sharply. The year opened
with mass protests against the war. In April, the assassination of Martin Luther King., Jr., sparked riots in many cities. And a few weeks later, radical students at Columbia Universit