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The President's Dilemma


James Bryant Conant
Walter Lippmann

Harvard President James Bryant Conant, in his annual report for the 1937-1938 school year, wrote that although the Nieman gift “places an additional problem at our door, (it) can only be regarded as a great challenge to this particular academic community…The presence of a small group of practical and experienced newspapermen in residence is sure to enrich the Harvard community.” Still, he acknowledged, “the plan is frankly experimental” and, if found impractical, would be abandoned in favor of some other project which might seem more promising.

In reflecting on the challenge Mrs. Nieman had given Harvard, Conant wrote, “When I first heard the news, I must admit I was disappointed… The Depression was still very much of a reality; every private college and university was hard pressed for funds. The last thing I should have thought asking Santa Claus to bring was an endowment to ‘promote and elevate the standards of journalism.’ Here was a very large sum of money which was tied up in perpetuity by what looked like an impossible directive. How did one go about promoting and elevating the standards of journalism?”

The Harvard Corporation instructed Conant to consult widely in search of suggestions for spending the income of the Nieman fund. He found that no one favored establishing a school of journalism. The best ideas from the Harvard faculty, he thought, were to establish writing courses in the English department that would be of special value to journalists and a collection of microfilms from newspapers around the nation.

Ultimately, Conant settled on an idea patterned after a mid-career fellowship program in public administration that was funded by an endowment given a few years earlier by Lucius Littauer, a glove maker and New York congressman.

Conant discussed his proposal with Harvard’s Board of Overseers, a group that included journalist Walter Lippmann, as well as a few deans and faculty members.

Lippmann helped persuade the university’s governing boards to allow journalists to come to Harvard for a year of study. He thought the world needed better-educated journalists; the Nieman year would provide the time and Harvard would provide the setting to make that possible.

He later wrote that “It is altogether unthinkable that a society like ours should remain forever dependent on untrained accidental witnesses — the better course is to send out into reporting a generation of (journalists) who will, by sheer superiority, drive the incompetents out of the business.”

Conant also talked with a number of newspaper editors and publishers. Some liked the idea of mid-career fellowships, he recalled, “but no one reacted with enthusiasm.” He described a meeting with representatives of Boston newspapers who concluded, “We have no better suggestion; you might as well try what you have in mind, though it will probably fail.”

In announcing the fellowship program in early 1938, President Conant said it was “a dubious experiment.”

Much later, in his 1970 autobiography, “My Several Lives: Memoirs of a Social Inventor,” Conant described Mrs. Nieman as his ideal benefactor. “The widow of the founder of The Milwaukee Journal led me, by the terms of her will, to recommend the creation of the Nieman Fellowships in Journalism — an invention of which I am very proud.”

The Experiment Begins »