Harvard: The Future

By Alfred North Whitehead

About twenty-five years for a man and about three hundred years for a university are the periods required for the attainment of mature stature. The history of Harvard is no longer to be construed primarily in terms of growth, but in terms of effectiveness.

I am talking of effectiveness in the wide world, of impress on the course of events, without which civilized humanity would not be as in fact it is. In the Cambridge of England, the first college was founded in the year 1284, and Emmanuel College in the year 1584. The English university was then grown up. Within the next one-hundred-and-fifty years there occurred a brilliant period—the brilliant period—of European civilization. It staged a decisive episode in the drama of human life. In this episode the English university played no mean part, from Edmund Spenser and Francis Bacon at the outset to Newton and Dryden at the close. Among other things, Cambridge helped to contribute Milton, Cromwell, and Harvard University.

What is the influence of Harvard to mean in the immediate future, originating thought and feeling during the next fifty years, or during the next one-hundred-and-fifty years? Harvard is one of the outstanding universities in the very center of human activity. At the present moment it is magnificently equipped. It has enjoyed nigh seventy years of splendid management. A new epoch is opening in the world. There are new potentialities, new hopes, new fears. The old scales of relative quantitative importance have been inverted. New qualitative experiences are developing. And yet, beneath all the excitement of novelty, with its discard and rejection, the basic motives for human action remain, the old facts of human nature clothed in a novelty of detail. What is the task before Harvard?

It will be evident that in this summary presentation of the cultural problem, the word “Harvard” is to be taken partly in its precise designation of a particular institution and partly as a symbolic reference to the university system throughout this country. Of these institutions some are larger and some are smaller, some are in cities and some are in country places, some are older and some are younger. But each of them has the age of the group, as molded by this cultural impulse. The fate of the intellectual civilization of the world is today in the hands of this group—for such time as it can effectively retain the sceptre. And today there is no rival. The Aegean coast line had its chance and made use of it; Italy had its chance and made use of it; France, England, Germany, had their chance and made use of it. Today the American states have their chance. What use will they make of it? The question has two answers. Once Babylon had its chance, and produced the Tower of Babel. The University of Paris fashioned the intellect of the Middle Ages.

Today Harvard is the greatest of existing cultural institutions. The opportunity is analogous to that of Greece after Marathon, to that of Rome in the reign of Augustus, to that of Christian institutions amid the decay of civilization. Each of these examples recalls tragic failure. But in each there is success which has secured enrichment of human life. If Greece had never been, if Augustan Rome had never been, if Institutional Christianity had never been, if the University of Paris had never been, human life would now be functioning on a lower level, nearer to its animal origins. Will Harvard rise to its opportunity, and in the modern world repeat the brilliant leadership of medieval Paris?

—Abridged from an address at the Harvard University Tercentenary Celebration,1936