In June, the University community lost two titans, whose trajectories bridged traditional and modern Harvard—and whose service contributed immeasurably to this institution.
Walter M. Cabot ’55, M.B.A. ’59, was appointed the first leader of Harvard Management Company (HMC) when it was established in 1974. That began a new era of endowment investment, enabling the University to pay for the faculty, facilities, and financial aid that give the place its contemporary character and reputation.
The idea of an in-house investment firm was novel. So were the ways in which Cabot set about deploying $1 billion in internal funds and $400 million entrusted to five outside firms. Gone were plain-vanilla stocks and bonds. In their place, this magazine’s former editor John Bethell recounts in his book Harvard Observed, were “stock lending, and…options trading, arbitrage, derivatives, and venture capital.”
Successors took advantage of HMC’s stand-alone status to compete for investment talent, turning the place into an enormous hedge fund under Jack R. Meyer, M.B.A. ’69, who took over in 1989. Today, under N.P. Narvekar (CEO since 2016), it is a leaner team of professionals who vet and select external fund managers. It was Cabot’s foundational work that led to today’s $56.9 billion endowment, the source of more than one-third of Harvard’s operating revenues.
Cabot also served as Wellesley College’s treasurer, Tufts Medical Center’s board chair, a trustee and director of many nonprofits and businesses, and an active town citizen. A money man, to be sure, but a model in multiple other ways, too.
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Harvard’s fortress balance sheet is a means, not an end, and so one turns to the people who make the place—none larger, during the past 60 years, than John P. Reardon Jr. ’60 (universally, Jack). Like Cabot a graduate of Milton Academy and the College, Reardon served over the years as associate dean of Harvard College admissions, director of athletics, associate vice president for university relations, executive director of the Harvard Alumni Association, senior adviser for alumni affairs and development, and acting secretary of the University’s governing boards. (He also served on the Harvard Magazine board of directors.)
In those roles, Reardon met tens of thousands of people—and listened to each of them, and seemingly elicited trust and respect from all. Bridging personal differences, divergent ideologies, and every variety of enthusiasm for or complaint about matters Crimson, Reardon found ways to connect people to the University, and to enhance their support for it. As president emeritus Larry Bacow told the Crimson, “There were people who would not talk to Harvard, who wouldn’t talk to me, who would talk to Jack.”
Reardon lived to see his 70th Milton graduation year, but not the equivalent College reunion. Someone fortunate enough to enjoy the latter landmark is Thomas Ehrlich ’56, LL.B. ’59. Informed by his remarkable career—Stanford Law dean, University of Pennsylvania provost, and Indiana University president, among other roles—Ehrlich had much to say in a reunion essay about changes to Harvard and Radcliffe since his undergraduate era. Highlights included the coequal inclusion of women into once exclusively male ranks, the rise of new pedagogies, and the effects of technology on teaching and research.
But at this fraught moment, Ehrlich’s broadest reflections on education resonate most. Recalling his class’s exposure to the curriculum guided by the 1945 report General Education in a Free Society (known as the “Red Book”), he observes, perhaps wistfully, that it aimed at preparing the student for “life as a responsible human being and citizen,” not just for personal satisfaction or professional attainment. (“Next to the King James version of the Bible,” Ehrlich notes of the Red Book, “it is the best committee-written substantial text…that I know.”)
“Like all institutions, and all heroes, Harvard had and still has flaws,” Ehrlich observes. “But it remains an extraordinary place of teaching and learning, of scholarship and public success.” Cabot and Reardon surely would have agreed.
