Harvard’s Bundy Standard

In The Best and the Brightest, David Halberstam described the elevation of McGeorge Bundy first to full professor, then to the deanship of Harvard in 1953. Bundy had a lowly appointment in the government department when his colleagues submitted his name to Harvard’s president, the distinguished chemist James Bryant Conant, for tenure. One wonders what could have been in Bundy’s dossier: He hadn’t written much, and his sole degree was a bachelor’s in mathematics from Yale. But Bundy was a known genius. Conant, according to Halberstam, signed off with a sigh. Tenure in government, for a man who had no Ph.D.—in fact had never taken a class in government—and few publications? “All I can say is that it couldn’t have happened in Chemistry,” Conant said.

Yesterday, another Harvard president, Claudine Gay, announced her intention to resign, after nearly a month of critique, justified and not, of her response to alleged campus anti-Semitism and reporter Aaron Sibarium sensed her weakness, they found more and more instances of cribbing.