Henry Rosovsky, Who Redefined Harvard to Its Core, Dies at 95

Henry Rosovsky, an economic historian who as a Harvard University dean was instrumental in imposing a back-to-basics core curriculum while establishing groundbreaking undergraduate programs in Black and Jewish studies, died on Friday at his home in Cambridge, Mass. He was 95.

The cause was cancer, his daughter Leah Rosovsky said.

In the wake of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination in 1968, Black students at Harvard demanded a Black studies program, an endowed chair for a Black professor and the recruitment of more Black faculty and students. While Harvard was largely spared the upheaval over Black studies and recruitment that roiled other campuses, its one hastily organized course on Black culture in 1968 was roundly denounced as an inadequate response.

In January 1969, after consultations with Black students, a faculty panel headed by Professor Rosovsky recommended that Harvard establish a degree-granting program in Black studies. It wasn’t the first such program in the country, but, because it was Harvard, it became front-page news in The New York Times.

Campus radicals joined Black students in demonstrations demanding more. Three months later, Professor Rosovsky quit the panel after the faculty, in what he branded “an academic Munich,” acquiesced to student threats and granted Black students a role in hiring teachers and shaping the curriculum of what was then called the Afro-American studies program. His resignation also made the front page.

What eventually was elevated into the Department of Afro-American Studies was considered an underachieving stepchild until 1991, when Professor Rosovsky, with the support of Harvard’s president, Derek Bok — just before both men relinquished their administrative roles — recruited Henry Louis Gates Jr. from Duke University as its chairman.

Professor Gates, now the director of Harvard’s Hutchins Center for African and African American Research, described Professor Rosovsky in an email as “one of the first administrators to see African American studies not as ethnic window dressing, but as a bold and innovative addition to the core mission of a liberal arts university, a long-suppressed body of knowledge that would enrich our understanding of the humanities, the arts and the social sciences.

“The success of Harvard’s department in this field,” he continued, “can be traced to Henry’s vision and his commitment of the resources necessary to implement that vision.”

Professor Rosovsky was the first Jewish dean of Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, serving from 1973 to 1984. In 1978, he was a founder of Harvard’s Center for Jewish Studies.

“Henry’s time as dean,” said Lawrence H. Summers, the former Treasury secretary who was the president of Harvard from 2001 to 2006, “saw Harvard College complete the transition from being a WASP redoubt to being a truly open gatherer of extraordinarily talented future leaders.”

Professor Rosovsky was also a professor of economics from 1965 to 1996 and briefly, in 1984 and 1987, acting president of Harvard. In 1984, he became the first professor in a century to sit on the seven-member Harvard Corporation, which oversees the entire university.

Perhaps his greatest academic impact resulted from his appeal as faculty dean in 1974 to tighten the loosey-goosey curriculum requirements for graduation. Harvard students, he warned, had so much leeway in choosing their courses that a bachelor’s degree would merely amount to a “certificate of attendance.”

“The world has become a Tower of Babel in which we have lost the possibility of common discourse and shared values,” he told The Times in 1976.

He said an educated person “must be able to communicate with precision, cogency and force” and “should have achieved depth in some field of knowledge” and have a “critical appreciation of the ways in which we gain knowledge and understanding of the universe, of society and of ourselves.”

In 1978, following his recommendations, the faculty redefined “an educated person” as one who has an “informed acquaintance” with five academic areas: literature and the arts, history, social and philosophical analysis, science and mathematics, and foreign languages and culture.

Under the new curriculum, students would have to choose six to eight courses, or about a quarter of their undergraduate program, from these areas and spend about half their time to develop “depth in some field of knowledge” as a major.

Henry Rosovsky was born on Sept. 1, 1927, in the Free City of Danzig (now Gdansk, Poland) to Selig and Sonia Rosovsky, Jewish immigrants from Russia. With Nazi Germany poised to seize the city in 1938, the family fled, first to Belgium and then to France, Spain and Portugal, before arriving in New York in 1940.

His father, a lawyer in pre-revolutionary Russia, became a lumber dealer in America. His mother was a homemaker.

After attending the Cherry Lawn School in Darien, Conn., Henry enlisted in the Army and served in the Counterintelligence Corps at the Nuremberg war crimes trials. In 1949, he graduated from the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Va., on the G.I. Bill. From 1950 to 1952 he served in Korea, where his feet froze; he received a Purple Heart and was transferred to a listening station in Japan to monitor Soviet broadcasts.

He earned a master’s degree from Harvard in 1953 and a doctorate in 1959. He taught at Stanford, at Hitotsubashi and Tokyo Universities in Japan, and at Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

In addition to his daughter Leah, the director of the venerable library the Boston Athenaeum, he is survived by his wife, Nitza (Brown) Rosovsky, an Israeli-born author and a former curator of the Harvard Semitic Museum; two other children, Judy Rosovsky and Michael Rosovsky; four grandchildren; and a great-granddaughter.

In 1959, he was hired by the University of California, Berkeley. He taught economics, history and Japanese studies there until 1965, when he joined an exodus of professors fleeing student unrest for what they misguidedly figured would be more sedate campuses further east.

Mr. Rosovsky remained unflappable, even if Harvard erupted in a more vanilla version of bohemian Berkeley’s sometimes bloody confrontations. He became so attached to Harvard that he would reject offers to become president of other universities, including Yale.

Professor Rosovsky’s books include “Capital Formation in Japan” (1961), in which he said that nation’s rapid transformation from a feudal society to a world power was largely the result of public-sector investment.

He also wrote “The University: An Owner’s Manual” (1990), a largely optimistic book about American higher education, which focused on what he called “the true, difficult and timeless questions” for universities: “How do we select professors? How do we govern ourselves? Whom do we admit? What do we teach?”

In that book, he also restated his earlier findings that the incidence and perception of sexual harassment on campus exceeded the level of official complaints.

He served as faculty dean under Derek Bok during tough financial times for Harvard. But he said he was not necessarily chosen because he was an economist.

“How can you be cost effective in teaching biochemistry or Mongolian?” he asked in an interview with The Times in 1974. “No institution is less well adapted to inflation than a university.” Yet he expressed faith in Harvard’s resiliency.

“You are here for four years,” he used to tell students. “The faculty is here for life. And Harvard is here forever.”

Tweedy and pipe-puffing, he distinguished himself as diplomatic and self-deprecating in a decidedly egocentric environment. A sign over his desk reminded visitors “The cemeteries are full of irreplaceable people.”