A New Solidarity: Race, Diversity, and the Development of Modern Harvard, 1869-1969

Abstract

Few would associate America’s university modernizers, serving between the Civil War and World War II, with present-day attempts to make universities more diverse and inclusive. They were, however, in many ways, pioneers of such efforts. Two things set their work apart from that of current administrators: the vast, concentrated power they held and, crucially, that their concepts of diversity and inclusion were limited almost exclusively to white men and buttressed by legal discrimination. The gradual bureaucratization of university administration has diluted the former. The latter would be true up until at least the 1960s when the Black Freedom Struggle radically transformed America’s universities by forcefully separating the idea of progress from unyielding antiblack racism. This dissertation looks back at a time, in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, when concern for diversity and inclusion centered on enriching the experiences of white male students.

Why and how did the concept of and approach toward diversity change among Harvard’s leadership in the century following the Civil War? From Reconstruction to the high tide of the civil rights movement, diversity for Harvard’s leadership meant a pursuit of white racial cohesion across various socioeconomic and regional backgrounds; and the administration used racial, ethnic, and religious exclusion to achieve it. After the Civil Rights Act of 1964, however, diversity took on a new institutional meaning: compliance with anti-discrimination law to protect the University’s access to a new postwar bounty of federal funds. The midcentury shift in focus, among the administration, from white racial cohesion to compliance did little to make Harvard a more welcoming place for the black students who arrived as part of the growing postwar influx. By demanding intellectual inclusion through the establishment of a black studies program, black undergraduates offered their own vision of the meaning of diversity that went beyond compliance.