Charles William Eliot (Mar. 20, 1834. Aug. 22, 1936), educator and president of Harvard University (1869-1909) was born in Boston, Massachusetts, the only son of Samuel Eliot, mayor of Boston, U.S. Congressman and Treasurer of Harvard, and Mary Lyman. Raised as a Unitarian, he attended Boston Latin School until 1849, when, aged 15 he matriculated at Harvard. Academically he excelled in chemistry with Professor Josiah Parsons Cooke, who instilled in Eliot the importance of the scientific method and laboratory and field research in university education. He graduated second in a class of eighty-eight students in 1853.

Eliot was appointed tutor in mathematics at Harvard in 1854, and assistant professor in mathematics and chemistry in 1858, the year he married Ellen Derby Peabody. He also served as de facto assistant to President James Walker. He exceled in teaching, research, and especially administration, but when he was not promoted to full professor in 1863, Eliot traveled to Europe, to study chemistry and absorbed the German model of higher education which emphasized the scientific method and specialized research. On returning to the U.S. he began to put the German method into practice, first as Professor of Chemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1865 to 1869, when he was appointed President at Harvard. That year he published a landmark essay in the Atlantic Monthly, “The New Education: Its Organization,” which envisioned a new American university ideal, consisting of a liberal arts college and distinct technical and professional schools. Graduate research was also central to his vision of the modern university, which has continued into the 21st century.

Perhaps his greatest success came in establishing the global prominence of Harvard’s professional and graduate schools, especially Medicine, Law, and Theology, which embodied his emphasis on scholarly rigor for admission and the centrality of clinical and laboratory methods. He lectured and wrote widely on his education reform vision, notably in Educational Reform: Essays and Addresses (1898) and University Administration (1908). Eliot also shaped American education more broadly in the Progressive Era by encouraging a greater emphasis on modern languages and the sciences in secondary schools and by promoting standardized testing for college admissions.

As president, Eliot transformed the college experience at Harvard. He abolished compulsory chapel attendance and established the elective system in which undergraduates chose their own courses, a development that spread nationwide by the early 20th Century. He was recognized for always treating students with respect and for putting their priorities before his own. One biographer has noted the “nearly legendary story of his taking in a lonely student suffering from smallpox and making his own family leave their home to provide the student with care.” (Hutcheson)

Eliot’s tenure also had a significant architectural legacy, most notably in the completion of Memorial Hall (1870-78), Sever Hall (1880), Austin Hall (1883), Harvard Stadium (1903), and the Medical School Quadrangle (1906). Harvard Yard’s gate-and-fence system emerged with the completion of Johnston Gate (1890). His meritocratic vision for the university included education for women, with the establishment of Radcliffe College in 1894. The first African Americans to deliver speeches during Harvard’s graduation exercises--W.E.B. Du Bois and Clement G. Morgan, both in 1890—did so under Eliot’s presidency. The 1900 Cuban expedition to Harvard further underlined this meritocratic vision. The initiative began in February 1900 when two young Harvard graduates in Eliot’s own mold, Alexis E. Frye, Superintendent of Cuban schools as part of the U.S. military occupation, and Ernest Lee Conant, a lawyer in Havana, proposed to the president a special Harvard summer school for Cuban teachers.

Taught by America’s “best and brightest” educators in Cambridge, Frye and Conant argued that these teachers would carry Harvard’s culture and values back to Cuba and inspire the rising generation of the island’s youth. The president’s four-word telegrammed reply highlighted his forthright support for the proposal: “Frye, Havana. Yes, Eliot.” Immediately, Eliot began lobbying the University and local and national leaders to support the excursion. In April the university voted unanimously to guarantee $70,000 to fund the project. Henry Lee Higginson, a banker, philanthropist, and member of the Harvard Corporation donated $20,000 of the funds needed to cover the transportation, housing, and other costs of the six week program.

Eliot was conscious of the logistical complexity of this “unexampled expedition,” but his legendary attention to administrative detail proved invaluable. (Graduates’ Magazine, 507). Housing was provided for male visitors in Harvard dormitories and for women in Cambridge homes close to campus; they also ate separately. Alexis Frye, Mrs. Theodore Brooks, the lead Cuban chaperone, and some of the Cuban teachers even stayed in the presidential residence for the duration of the Summer School; the Eliots decamped to their summer home.

Since most of the 1273 Cubans spoke limited English, an army of young translators and chaperons was enlisted to guide them through the cultural and educational events that followed a day of lectures and classes given in English and Spanish by Harvard, Radcliffe, and Wellesley faculty. At the opening ceremony for the program in Sanders Hall, President Eliot outlined his vision for this “unique experiment in mutual service. We are going to see how much we can enlarge each other’s minds and sympathies, and strengthen each other’s sense of brotherhood.” (Martin, 53).

Among the most popular classes were those in kindergarten education and the practical Sloyd system for woodworking and other technical subjects, both promoted by the Boston reformer and philanthropist, Pauline Agassiz Shaw, a longtime family friend of the Eliots. A central role was also found for local Roman Catholic churches and lay organizations to provide religious services and social events like dances and concerts. Some of the Caribbean visitors were unused to so many excursions at the height of summer, and some chafed at restrictions of overly protective hosts and chaperons, but overall, the Harvard Summer School for Cuban teachers was one of the great successes of Eliot’s celebrated presidency. In a letter to Mark Jefferson, who led the geography lessons and excursions in Spanish, Eliot wrote that “the expedition as a whole was much more successful than anybody could possibly have anticipated. For me, it was the most interesting single piece of work that has ever come my way.” The Cuban visitors’ respect and affection for Eliot is evident from the letters many sent to him when he stepped down as president in 1909, having served for a record 40 years. (Harvard University Archives, UAI 5.150, Box 35).

Eliot’s national prominence was such that by 1900 both political parties regularly sought his endorsement and he was even discussed as a possible candidate for the US Presidency. Instead he remained committed to education, editing the Harvard Classics, a scholarly but affordable collection of texts from the Classical, European, and American traditions. In his final decade he was outspoken in calling for restraint by the U.S. in World War I and supported the Versailles Treaty and the League of Nations that followed the conflict. He died in Boston in 1926, aged 92. pled expedition. There was never such aone in the world.


Further Reading.

The Harvard University Archives, Cambridge, Massachusetts, house two collections of Eliot’s Papers: The Papers of Charles William Eliot, 1807-1945 (UAI 15.894) document his personal and professional life before and after his presidency (1869-1909). Materials related to Eliot's official activities as President of Harvard University (1869-1909) and his later writings (1869 to 1926) are to be found in Records of the President of Harvard University, President Charles W. Eliot (UAI 5.150). Letters to Eliot from Cuban teachers from the 1900 Summer School are to be found in UAI 5.150, Box 35

1. Adams, C. F. “The Coming of the Cuban Teachers,” Harvard Graduates’ Magazine, 1899-1900: 506-509
Hawkins, Hugh. Between Harvard and America: The Educational Leadership of Charles W. Eliot. (1972).

2. Hutcheson, Philo A. “Charles W. Eliot,” American National Biography (1999).

3. Martin, Geoffrey J. Mark Jefferson: Geographer (1968). Available online at https://commons.emich.edu/books/4/ See, especially, Chapter 3, “The Cuban Summer School, Harvard University, 1900.” https://commons.emich.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?filename=4&article=1001&context=books&type=additional

4. Macou, P.B. “The University and the Cuban Teachers,” The Harvard Illustrated Magazine, Oct. 1900: 1-18
Obituary: New York Times, Aug 23, 1926.