Charles Eliot

Charles William Eliot was a 35-year-old Professor of Analytical Chemistry at MIT when he was appointed president of Harvard.  Believing that higher education needed to be “broadened, deepened, and invigorated,” Charles Eliot created, in large part, the Harvard we inhabit.  Before his presidency, the curriculum of the College consisted almost entirely of required courses.  Chapel attendance was compulsory, there was an entrance requirement in Greek, and students were evaluated according to a “Scale of Merit” that, by all accounts, they universally despised.

Charles Eliot abolished compulsory chapel, got rid of the Greek requirement, and introduced letter grades.  He expanded the faculty and the range of courses they offered, insisted that a liberal education include both the humanities and the sciences, and created an open curriculum made almost entirely out of electives students chose for themselves.  Charles Eliot changed Harvard from a provincial New England college to the internationally-known research university that we know.  His tenure as president lasted an astonishing 40 years, allowing him not only to make a lasting mark on Harvard, but to shape significantly what American education would become.

We can be proud of Eliot’s unwavering commitment to the liberal arts, his establishment of a curriculum that allowed students to follow their own interests, and his transformation of Harvard into the influential research university that it is today. But there is much in Eliot’s legacy about which we cannot be proud.

Eliot helped establish Radcliffe College for the education of women but believed a separate college was needed for women because their intellectual capacities were different from those of men. The first African American student to graduate from Harvard College, Richard Theodore Greener, graduated during Eliot’s tenure, as did W.E.B. DuBois, and the first Black faculty member at Harvard, George F. Grant, was hired during Eliot’s presidency. But Eliot held repugnant views about race, endorsing racial segregation, opposing interracial marriage, and promoting, with enthusiasm, the eugenics movement. The so-called “race science” promoted by Charles Eliot at Harvard and beyond is a legacy of slavery that caused direct harm to individuals and communities and is one of the ways white supremacy took root in universities, including Harvard.

The lasting influence on our society of the institution of slavery and all that has followed in its wake, including the policy of segregation Charles Eliot endorsed and the eugenics movement he promoted, is something we must actively resist, every day, in our life together—through study, discussion, activism, artistic expression, and all the ways we share our lives in this community.

To hear Eliot Faculty Dean Stephanie Paulsell discuss the Report on the Legacy of Slavery at Harvard, including Charles Eliot’s place in it, with Professor Matthew Ichihashi Potts of the Divinity School and the Memorial Church, listen here.

To learn more about Charles Eliot and the eugenics movement, see https://legacyofslavery.harvard.edu/report/intellectual-leadership-harvard-slavery-and-its-legacies-before-and-after-the-civil-war#legacies-of-slavery-in-scholarship-race-science