James Bryant Conant

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Conant received his Ph.D. in chemistry at Harvard in 1916. During World War I, he joined the Chemical Warfare Service, where he directed the Organic Research Unit in the production of mustard gas. He subsequently taught at Harvard, became chair of the chemistry department, and in 1933, the university's president. In the depth of the depression, his dealings with conservative and radical groups on campus led him to take positions in national politics. He generally opposed New Deal programs, but also the isolationist views that dominated in his own Republican Party.

When World War II broke out, Conant advocated aid to the democracies and worked through the National Defense Research Committee to enlist U.S. scientists in war preparations. Later, with the Office of Scientific Research and Development, he played a key role in coordinating atomic research with Great Britain and setting up the Manhattan Project. His June 1945 suggestion to drop the newly completed atomic bomb on a Japanese war plant and its populated environs in order to shorten the war was taken up by President Harry S. Truman, who targeted Hiroshima, a sizable city, an army headquarters, a rail center, and a major producer of material. From 1946 to 1962, Conant served as adviser to the Atomic Energy Commission.

The outbreak of the Korean War in 1950 convinced him of the magnitude of the Soviet threat, and he soon headed the Committee on the Present Danger, which urged the United States to station up to 1 million troops in Europe under NATO command. An appreciative President Dwight D. Eisenhower named Conant U.S. high commissioner for occupied western Germany in 1953, and, after the occupation ended in 1955, first U.S. ambassador to the Federal Republic of Germany. During his four years in Bonn, Conant aided in the transformation of Germany into a democratic state and a dependable military ally against communism.

After his return to the United States, Conant devoted his reforming energies primarily to the field of education, heading a Carnegie Foundation study of American secondary schools (1957–62) and publishing a number of important works on education.

[See also Atomic Scientists; Bush, Vannevar; Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Bombings of; Science, Technology, War, and the Military.]

Bibliography

• James B. Conant, My Several Lives: Memoirs of a Social Inventor, 1970.
• James Hershberg, James B. Conant: Harvard to Hiroshima and the Making of the Nuclear Age, 1993

Conant, James Bryant (1893-1978) educator and scientist, born in Boston, Massachusetts. Conant chaired the National Defense Research Council, the weapons research and development group of the federal Office of Scientific Research and Development (1939-46). He coordinated the federal effort to develop the atomic bomb and other scientific war-related programs. An advocate of total war, he authorized the “all-out” development of an atomic weapon in December 1940. As high commissioner and ambassador in Germany (1953-57), he managed occupying military forces, coordinated relief efforts, and provided diplomatic leadership.

See the Introduction, Abbreviations and Pronunciation for further details.

James Bryant Conant (1893-1978) was an American chemist, president of Harvard University, U.S. Ambassador and educational critic. He was an effective spokesman for the support of national policies by private and public scientific and educational institutions.

James Conant was born on March 26, 1893, in Dorchester, Massachusetts. Both his father's and his mother's families trace themselves back to 17th-century New England settlers. After graduating magna cum laude from Harvard College in 1914, Conant pursued graduate studies in organic chemistry and received his doctorate in 1916. During the next three years he served as instructor at Harvard, tried unsuccessfully to set up a private chemistry laboratory, and joined the Army's Chemical Warfare Service. Engaged in the secret production of poison gases, Conant advanced to the rank of major, belonging to the elite group of organic chemists who constituted the nucleus of a growing profession in universities, industry, foundations, and the armed forces.

Returning to Harvard, Conant was appointed assistant professor in 1919, associate professor in 1925, and professor in 1927. He served as chairman of the Division of Chemistry, as consultant to the Du Pont Company, and on the Board of Scientific Advisers of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research. In 1933 he became president of Harvard University (until 1953). Following the policies of Harvard's recent presidents, Conant placed heavy emphasis on bringing talented students and faculty to Harvard. He devised interdisciplinary studies in American civilization and the history of science to improve the liberal education of the undergraduates. He sought to strengthen the graduate school of education by introducing the master of arts in teaching program.

In 1934 Conant joined the Board of Trustees of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. During World War II he directed the resources of Harvard in support of the war effort, and he himself became an adviser to the Manhattan Project, which produced the first atomic bomb. He was a member of the General Advisory Committee of the Atomic Energy Commission from 1947 to 1952 and, after his retirement from Harvard in 1953, ambassador to West Germany from 1955 to 1957. Following that, from 1957 to 1959 he undertook a study of American secondary education for the Carnegie Foundation and thereafter served in various roles as educational consultant. He died on February 11, 1978 in Hanover, New Hampshire.

Further Reading

Conant's educational views are contained in the series of books he wrote on secondary education: The American High School Today (1959); The Child, the Parent and the State (1959); Slums and Suburbs: A Commentary on Schools in Metropolitan Areas (1961); and The Comprehensive High School (1967). In On Understanding Science: An Historical Approach (1947) Conant wrote on the place of science in the general education curriculum of the undergraduate, and in The Education of American Teachers (1963) he discussed teacher education.

A more personal account is Conant's autobiography, My Several Lives: Memoirs of a Social Inventor (1970). Paul Franklin Douglass, Six upon the World: Toward an American Culture for an Industrial Age (1954), examines Conant's achievements in the context of the postwar technological society. See also Lawrence A. Cremin, The Transformation of the School: Progressivism in American Education, 1876-1957 (1961); Edgar Z. Friedenberg, The Dignity of Youth and Other Atavisms (1965), which has a chapter critical of Conant; Adolphe E. Meyer, An Educational History of the American People (1967); and Robert E. Potter, The Stream of American Education (1967).

Twenty-third president of Harvard University, James Bryant Conant witnessed many defining moments of twentieth-century American history. He was intimately involved with transformational events: World War I, as president of Harvard University, the initial formation of federal science policy, the development of the atomic bomb in World War II, the cold war and the postwar atomic energy policy (including opposition to the H-bomb), the reconstruction of Europe, and the reconsideration of public education in the United States. His autobiography is aptly titled My Several Lives, and he moved with remarkable ease through lives in academic, scientific, governmental, and diplomatic circles.

Conant was born in Dorchester (Suffolk County), Massachusetts, to James Scott Conant and Jennett Orr Bryant. His father had served the Union in the Civil War, owned an engraving and etching business, and speculated in real estate and residential construction. Conant could trace his lineage back to the ships immediately following the Mayflower on his mother's side and to the founding of Salem on his father's.

In his own words, Conant was raised by "a regiment of women," including his mother, several aunts and cousins, and his two elder sisters. Both parents were members of the Swedenborgian Church, an organization devoted to exploring the entwinement of religion, nature, and life. His mother's interest in the church waned, however, and Conant later referred to himself as a Unitarian.

Education

Conant attended the Roxbury Latin School, a college preparatory school that required a rigorous entrance examination for admission. At home, he nurtured his budding interest in science in general and chemistry in particular by practicing magic tricks and doing experiments in his small laboratory equipped by his father. At Roxbury, his career was solidified by his relationship with science teacher Newton Henry Black. Black guided Conant through the high school science curriculum, and then exposed him to more advanced texts and techniques, including college entrance exams. Conant's performance in high school earned him the Harvard Club Scholarship and graduation in 1910 near the top of his class of twenty-one students.

Conant graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Harvard in three years and managed to find enough time away from the classroom and laboratory to write for the Harvard Crimson, join Delta Upsilon, and develop a friendship with his rooming house neighbor, novelist J. P. Marquand. Conant's graduate school plans included study with physical chemist Theodore W. Richards, the first American-born winner of the Nobel Prize in chemistry. In his third year of undergraduate studies, he did some special research with organic chemist E. P. Kohler, a new arrival to Harvard from Johns Hopkins University. This project resulted in Conant's becoming Kohler's graduate assistant in advanced organic chemistry for two years. Ultimately, Conant wrote a double thesis in physical and organic chemistry for his Ph.D. degree in 1916.

War Work

The outbreak of World War I in Europe prevented Conant from realizing his dream of postdoctoral study in Germany. However, in the summer of 1916 Roger Adams left the Harvard faculty, and Conant was selected to fill this vacancy in the chemistry department faculty. At the close of the 1916 through 1917 academic year, Conant joined the United States Bureau of Mines, which was soon absorbed by the Department of Defense as the Chemical Warfare Service. World War I would be remembered as the "chemist's war," primarily due to the use of poison gas warfare initiated by the German army against the French in 1915. Conant worked on gas warfare projects in laboratories at American University in Washington, D.C., the largest federally funded scientific research project to that date.

Newly commissioned Lieutenant Conant immediately went to work on mustard gas and then on a more toxic and easily deliverable gas, lewisite. In July 1918 the Army promoted Conant to the rank of major and placed him in charge of a lewisite production facility at an automobile factory in Cleveland. The gas was a weapon intended to be used offensively, but it was never employed. Significantly, the chemist's war connected chemistry to society through demonstration of its applied uses, and allowed Conant to associate with the leaders of government, the military, business, higher education, and administration who would shape the remainder of his career.

Academic Career

In September 1919, following demobilization of the war effort, Conant returned to Harvard with an appointment as assistant professor of chemistry, and in 1921 married Grace T. (Patty) Richards, daughter of T. W. Richards, his department chair and mentor. Conant's early research focused on the areas of mechanisms of chemical reactions, equilibrium-rate studies, and free radical structure. His later research interests centered on respiratory pigments and the properties of hemoglobin and other natural products, especially chlorophyll. He was promoted to associate professor, granted tenure in 1924, and elevated to full professor in 1927. During this period, he and his wife had two sons.

In 1931, Conant was named the Shelden Emery Professor of Organic Chemistry and accepted the department chairmanship. Awards and honors accumulated as Conant was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Science and the National Academy of Science. His research won him the Nichols Medal of the American Chemical Society and the Chandler Medal of Columbia University, among others. Between 1919 and 1933 he wrote or coauthored five chemistry textbooks, including his first, Practical Chemistry (1920), written with his former Roxbury science teacher, Newton H. Black.

The Conants made three significant sabbatical trips, two to California and one to Germany. In 1924 they spent a semester at the University of California, Berkeley, and in 1927 a semester at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. There, contacts with western scientific leaders A. A. Noyes and Robert A. Millikan would not only prove valuable later during World War II, they resulted in a lucrative offer to move to Pasadena to join the faculty there. In 1925, Conant, Patty, and their son, Jimmy, spent nine months in Germany, where Conant was exposed to the fast-paced scientific competition among individuals and institutions alike. Much of what he learned of science and scientific administration in Germany would be applied to his own administrative practices. He and his biographers characterized his persona as science itself, with all the characterization implied: the scientific method, increasing specialization, and reduction of a problem to its simplest elements.

In 1933 Harvard's president, Abbott Lowell Lawrence, announced his expected retirement amid much speculation on his successor's identity. Lowell was the administrative opposite of his predecessor, Charles W. Eliot. Lowell was a close supervisor of faculty, a harsh master of students, and a highly opinionated, socially conservative policymaker. It is said that a list of forty possible candidates existed at that time, and it did not include the name Conant. A difference of opinion among the Harvard corporate board led to a visit from a board member to Conant. His recommendation appears to have solidified the corporation; on May 8, 1933, Conant was selected as the twenty-third president of Harvard University and was formally installed on October 9, 1933.

President of Harvard University

Conant was immediately forced to begin thinking not only about campus issues and politics, but also about contemporary world events: the Great Depression, the rise of Nazism in Germany, the eventual establishment of the Third Reich, and the foreboding threat of World War II. Conant's presidency would be broken into three distinct eras: 1933 to 1940 was a period of innovative policies at the institutional level and pleas for military and civilian preparedness at the national level; 1940 to 1946 was marked by long absences from Cambridge as Conant became closely involved with the organization and administration of scientific research funded by the federal government; and 1946 to 1953 as postwar equilibrium was achieved and the debates over atomic energy policy and the manufacture of thermonuclear devices heated up.

As president, Conant began to implement policies, some controversial, to improve faculty quality. Among these were the so-called up or out rule - an assistant professor who was not promoted at the end of the probationary term was terminated as a member of the faculty. In addition, university professorships were established to recognize and retain exceptional scholars. Conant put policies in place to establish a more diversified student body; the Harvard National Scholarships were merit-based awards established with the intent of reducing financial and geographic barriers to a Harvard education. He was elected to the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching board of trustees in 1934 and was an early proponent of standardized testing, including nationwide administration of the Scholastic Aptitude Test as a reliable admissions tool.

As war in Europe seemed imminent, Conant supported the Roosevelt administration's quest for peacetime military conscription legislation, an action that was not warmly received by the undergraduates at Harvard. Following Germany's invasion of her European neighbors, Conant's attitude crystallized; he sought ways that scientists and scholars could mobilize to defeat Hitler.

Vannevar Bush, a contemporary of Conant, had been a professor of engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and, later, vice president of MIT. Bush moved to Washington, D.C. in 1939 to assume the presidency of the Carnegie Institution with its traditional role of science adviser to the government. Bush convinced President Franklin D. Roosevelt that the military needed to make rapid advances in technology and employ civilian scientists with the necessary expertise to do so. Thus, the new National Defense Research Committee (NDRC) was established almost eighteen months before United States entry into war, and Bush recruited Conant for the committee. The NDRC mobilized civilian scientists for war and let contracts, funded by the federal government, to academic and industrial laboratories.

As 1941 progressed, Conant became chair of the NDRC with direct responsibility for committee-supervised work on uranium fission, and, ultimately, the crash program to build the atomic bomb. He was present at Ground Zero, Alamagordo, New Mexico, for the Trinity atomic device test explosion.

Meanwhile Harvard went about its business without the physical presence of Conant, who took a voluntary twenty-five percent salary reduction from 1942 to 1946. One seminal bit of policymaking that did occur during the war years was the agreement reached with Radcliffe College to merge classroom instruction. As a result of a wartime shortage of faculty, 310 years of all-male Harvard education came to an end.

Presidential Appointments

When Dwight D. Eisenhower, former president of Columbia University, was inaugurated as president of the United States in 1953, one of his first appointments was the choice of Conant to become the U.S. high commissioner to Germany. Conant took this opportunity to return to Germany to aid reconstruction as the ideal time to retire from Harvard following twenty years as president. Following the ratification of the treaty establishing the Federal Republic of Germany, Conant became the U.S. ambassador to Germany.

Publications

Conant served in Germany for Eisenhower's first term, then retired from the diplomatic corps in 1957 to undertake a study of American secondary education for the Carnegie Corporation. Several influential books arose from his research, including the American High School Today (1959), an on-site examination of the critical problems facing the public "comprehensive" high school. Although the fieldwork began before the launch of the Soviet satellite Sputnik, the timing of the publication to coincide with national fears that the country was falling behind the Soviets in secondary education triggered sales of nearly 200,000 copies and Conant's third Time magazine cover story. The book outlines twenty-one recommendations, ranging from an increase in the number of guidance counselors to a call for a twelfth-grade capstone course in American democracy. The volume received much attention from parents, educators, and critics, but little substantive reform resulted.

The controversial look at urban schools, Slums and Suburbs (1961) presents a contrasting picture of high schools within "half an hour's drive" of one another in the cities of Philadelphia, New York, Detroit, Chicago, and St. Louis. Conant argued that "we are allowing social dynamite to accumulate in our large cities" (p. 2) as evidenced by racial discrimination, poverty, and violence. Contending that a school is a product of the socioeconomic status of the families it serves, he concluded that, "More money is needed in slum schools" (p. 146) rather than busing pupils to other schools. This opinion was not well received among civil rights leaders, thus dooming the rest of Conant's recommendations to obscurity.

Moving to higher levels of the education system, the final two volumes to emerge from this study were The Education of American Teachers (1963), a critique of the curricula and teacher certification of schools of education, and Shaping Educational Policy (1964), an examination of state and federal education policy.

Contribution

Conant's career and his life-long educational philosophy should be remembered as one of service - to education, to science, and to the interests of his country. He took a "hands on" approach to his supervisory duties in the laboratory, the president's office, and his national study of secondary education. Upon assuming the Harvard presidency, he undertook the daunting task of attending and presiding over every faculty meeting of every college in the university.

Conant's admiration for the German university system fueled his belief that Harvard could be transformed from a New England university with a national reputation to a world-level institution. He initiated graduate degrees in education, public policy, and history of science. His innovations included faculty appointments unattached to any specific department so as to strongly encourage interdisciplinary thinking and collaboration. At Harvard, as at other institutions, the budgetary effects of the depression were felt, and Conant found it necessary to keep the faculty ranks spare. He managed to do this without sacrificing quality by eliminating many of Harvard's inbred hiring policies and instituting the practice of opening position vacancies internationally.

Student enrollment reforms accompanied those of the faculty. Conant purposefully directed the admissions office to scrutinize legacies more closely, open the doors to more first-generation and ethnic immigrant applicants, and scour the country for the most brilliant students. The goal of a more diverse student body was pursued through these directives and the addition of standardized admission testing. Conant strongly believed that the American system of higher education allowed for sorting by ability, and, therefore, students need not reach beyond their grasp in the choice of a college.

In the introduction to the American High School Today, Conant wrote of his regret over the talent wasted in the European system of early preselection of students for the university. He clearly understood that the diversity of American institutions of higher education and their ability to absorb all those who wish to go to college are foundational American ideals that promote equality of opportunity and equality of standing. The public benefits of all forms of education were foremost in Conant's pursuit of excellence in science technology education and federal policy. He wrote in his freshman diary at Harvard, "Education is what is left after all that has been learned is forgotten" (Hershberg, p. 20).

In 1963 Conant was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President John F. Kennedy. An arrhythmic heart condition that was discovered in 1965 caused Conant to curtail drastically his public life. He and his wife spent most subsequent winters in their Manhattan apartment and summers in the hills and mountains of New Hampshire until his death in Hanover, New Hampshire.

Bibliography

Conant, James B. 1948. Education in a Divided World: The Function of the Public Schools in our Unique Society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Conant, James B. 1952. Modern Science and Modern Man. New York: Columbia University Press.

Conant, James B. 1959. The American High School Today: A First Report to Interested Citizens. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Conant, James B. 1961. Slums and Suburbs: A Commentary on Schools in Metropolitan Areas. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Conant, James B. 1963. The Education of American Teachers. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Conant, James B. 1970. My Several Lives: Memoirs of a Social Inventor. New York: Harper and Row.

Davis, Nuel P. 1968. Lawrence and Oppenheimer. New York: Simon and Schuster.

Hershberg, James G. 1993. James B. Conant: Harvard to Hiroshima and the Making of the Nuclear Age. New York: Knopf.

— DAVID A. CAMPAIGNE

American medium who, through the generosity of Luther Colby, editor of The Banner of Light, gave, for the last 17 years of her life, free public séances in Boston. Her trance messages, characterized by the impersonation of the departed, were published weekly in the Banner.

Conant was known in Spiritualist circles as both an inspirational speaker and a platform healer. For her medical diagnosis the medium relied on the spirit of Dr. John Dix Fisher, an old Boston physician.

While in trance she believed herself to be outside her body and wandering about, and on occasion her double was believed to manifest through other mediums. She also wrote automatically in trance, and reportedly spoke in many languages un-known to her especially in various Indian dialects, an ability known as xenoglossia.

Sources:

Putnam, Allen, comp. Flashes of Light from the Spirit-Land. Boston: William White, 1872.

——. Biography of Mrs. J. H. Conant. Boston: W. White and Co., 1873.

Quotes:

"Some of mankind's most terrible misdeeds have been committed under the spell of certain magic words or phrases."

"Behold the turtle. He makes progress only when he sticks his neck out."

James Bryant Conant
23rd President of Harvard University
Term	1933 – 1953
Predecessor	Abbott Lawrence Lowell
Successor	Nathan Marsh Pusey
Born	March 26, 1893 Dorchester, Massachusetts
Died	February 11, 1978 Hanover, New Hampshire
Alma mater	Harvard

James Bryant Conant (March 26, 1893 – February 11, 1978) was a chemist, educational administrator, and government official. As the President of Harvard University he reformed it as a research institution.

Contents 1 Biography 1.1 Death and remembrance 2 Controversies 3 Notes 4 Sources 5 References 6 External links

Biography

Conant was born in Dorchester, Massachusetts in 1893 and graduated from the Roxbury Latin School in West Roxbury in 1910. He went on to study chemistry at Harvard (B.A., Phi Beta Kappa^[1] 1914; Ph.D., 1917). At Harvard he studied under Charles Loring Jackson, and became acquainted with Roger Adams, Farrington Daniels, Frank C. Whitmore and James B. Sumner. As a Harvard professor, he worked on both physical and organic chemistry. The American Chemical Society honored him with its highest prize, the Priestley Medal, in 1944.

In 1933, Conant accepted an appointment as the President of Harvard University, a post he held until 1953. Between 1941 and 1946, he also served as chairman of the National Defense Research Committee; from that position he played a key role, along with his close friend Vannevar Bush, in ramping up the Manhattan Project which developed the first nuclear weapons. After World War II he was an adviser to both the National Science Foundation and the Atomic Energy Commission. He served as U.S. High Commissioner and United States Ambassador to Germany from 1953 to 1957.

As the university's president, Conant was instrumental in transforming Harvard, until then still somewhat parochial into an increasingly 'diverse' and world-class research university. He introduced aptitude tests into the undergraduate admissions system so that students would be chosen for their intellectual promise and merit, rather than their social connections.

Many American colleges followed Conant's lead. Conant became an advocate for educational reform in society generally, and this campaign led eventually to the adoption of the SAT. In this regard, Conant also did much to move general undergraduate curriculum away from its traditional emphasis on the classics, and towards a more scientific and modern subject matter. He was active throughout his career on issues of education and scientific policy on both the secondary and collegiate level, being a strong advocate for the establishment of community colleges. In 1959 he authored the book, "The American High School Today."For this work, he was awarded the prestigious Sylvanus Thayer Award by the United States Military Academy at West Point, NY.

Conant also actively promoted the discipline of history of science, instituting the Harvard Case Histories in Experimental Science and including history of science in the General Education curriculum. For Conant, an approach to the history of science that emphasized the internal and intellectual dimensions of scientific development — as opposed to the so-called external factors of sociology, economics and politics — reinforced the American Cold War ideology and would help Americans understand the importance of science since the Second World War. During that time, American science (and especially the field of physics that Conant viewed as exemplary) was rapidly becoming dominated by military funding, and Conant sought to defuse concerns about the possible corruption of science. Conant was instrumental in the early career of Thomas Kuhn, whose book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions has been extremely influential for the various fields of science studies.

Death and remembrance

Conant died in Hanover, New Hampshire in 1978. James B. Conant Middle School is a former school named after the man in Neenah, Wisconsin, though it has since become the "Conant" building of Neenah High School, in addition to the Neil Armstrong building and a large building connecting the two known simply as "The Link." James B. Conant High School in Hoffman Estates, Illinois was named after Conant, as was James B. Conant Elementary School in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan.

He was presented with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, with special distinction, by President Lyndon Johnson on December 6, 1963. He had been selected for the award by President John F. Kennedy, but the ceremony had been delayed, and was presented with the award after Kennedy's assassination in November 1963.

Perhaps his most famous quote is also repeatedly mis-stated. He is quoted as saying, "Behind the turtle. He makes progress only when he sticks his neck out," but the actual quote was "Behold the turtle. He makes progress when his neck is out."

Controversies

As the president of Harvard, Conant led the administration in welcoming the Hitler regime. He had high ranking Nazi officials visit the campus and give speeches, including the 1934 commencement address by Ernst Hanfstaengl, while he restricted admission of Jewish students and hiring of Jewish faculty.^[2] In the words of historians Morton and Phyllis Keller, he "shared the mild antisemitism common to his social group and time." ^[3]

Another shameful incident in his career took place in 1940 when he apologized to the commanding admiral of Annapolis after the Harvard lacrosse team attempted to field a player of African-American descent. Navy's coach refused to field his team. Harvard's athletic director, William J. Bingham, overruled his lacrosse coach and had the player, Lucien Victor Alexis Jr., sent back to Cambridge on a train.^[4] After serving in World War II, Alexis was subsequently refused admittance to Harvard Medical school on the grounds that, as the only black student, he would therefore have no one to room with.^{[citation needed]}

Notes

See also: Ivy League Presidents

Sources

• John F. Kennedy Presidential Library & Museum

References

1. ^ Halberstam, Michael J. James Bryant Conant: The Right Man, Harvard Crimson, June 19, 1952
2. ^ Stephen H. Norwood, Legitimating Nazism: Harvard University and the Hitler regime, 1933-1937, American Jewish History, June 2004.
3. ^ Morton and Phyllis Keller, Harvard’s Jews, women, and blacks. Making Harvard modern, New York: Oxford University Press, 2001, 578 pp.
4. ^ On race, Harvard still must learn, Los Angeles Times, August 2, 2009.

External links

• Annotated bibliography for James Conant from the Alsos Digital Library
• Works by James Bryant Conant at Project Gutenberg
• Key Participants: James Bryant Conant - Linus Pauling and the Nature of the Chemical Bond: A Documentary History

Academic offices
Preceded by Abbott Lawrence Lowell	President of Harvard University 1933–1953	Succeeded by Nathan Marsh Pusey
Preceded by Anton J. Carlson	President of the American Association for the Advancement of Science 1945	Succeeded by C. F. Kettering
Awards
Preceded by Robert A. Lovett	Sylvanus Thayer Award recipient 1965	Succeeded by Carl Vinson

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