Gerald B. Folland ’68, professor of mathematics emeritus at the University of Washington, is a closer reader of The American Mathematical Monthly than most people of Primus’s acquaintance. Recently, he stumbled on a series of reminiscences about Benjamin Peirce, who served as Perkins professor of mathematics from 1842 until his death in 1880. (Folland described him as the “first really distinguished member of the Harvard math department.”)
The essays, published in 1925, came from a cadre of distinguished contributors—among them Harvard presidents Charles W. Eliot and A. Lawrence Lowell, and W. E. Byerly, a subsequent Perkins professor. All painted a portrait of a lost era and, in Peirce, a lost kind of academic.
Here is Byerly’s depiction of the campus of yore: “Cambridge was a small straggling town. The inhabitants still spoke of visiting Harvard Square as going down to the village.” The portion of the College Yard east of University Hall “was a hayfield, from which the University drew a modest annual profit.”
But inside Harvard’s gates, Byerly recalled, were “giants” among the professoriate: “poets, discoverers, philosophers, seers in soft hats and long cloaks [who] looked their parts,” upon whom he and other freshmen gazed “with admiration and awe.” Among them, Peirce stood out as “a real live genius, who had a touch of the prophet in his makeup.”
Not that it was easy to study with a prophet, Byerly continued. “I always had the feeling that his attitude toward his loved science was that of a devoted worshipper, rather than of a clear expounder.” His blackboard calculations were “illegible, marred with frequent erasures,” and when the bell rang, he was often left “abstractedly staring at his work, still with chalk and eraser in his hands, entirely oblivious of his departing class.”
Such pedagogical peculiarities aside, Peirce was a superb mentor. Lowell called him “the most massive intellect with which I have ever come into close contact.” And Eliot cited Peirce’s public service and his bedrock conviction that “the true greatness of nations grew out of their fostering of education, science, and art.”
May that spirit live on in the Benjamin Peirce Fellows, the math department’s cohort of likely leading scholar-teachers of the future.
One would be hard-pressed to find a more Tiger-ish person than John McPhee, the illustrious New Yorker writer. Born in Princeton (where his father was the physician to the university’s athletic department), he graduated from Princeton High and Princeton University (1953) and, since 1975, has taught his craft to hundreds of undergraduates at you-know-where.
So Primus was tickled to learn how McPhee relied on a dyed-in-the-crimson fellow traveler during his postgraduate year at Magdalene College, in the other Cambridge. (The confession appeared in McPhee’s “Tabula Rasa” feature in the April 27, 2026, issue of The New Yorker.)
In September 1953, McPhee wrote, he and C. W. Ufford ’53 were bound for the University of Cambridge on the Queen Elizabeth (those were different times). The two had met at Deerfield Academy, where McPhee took a gap year. As they sailed, Ufford regularly ceded McPhee the first 14 points in squash games—before toying with him and finishing him off.
In England, McPhee played basketball on a team that made it to the national tournament, where the roster’s uniformly small stature seemed a disadvantage. He asked Ufford to join, as a rebounding specialist. Lo and behold, the team advanced (eventually falling to a team of Navy personnel attached to the U.S. embassy).
McPhee credits Ufford’s height and overall athleticism, but Primus prefers to think otherwise. After all, Ufford was the Lionel de Jersey Harvard Scholar at Emmanuel College—where John Harvard himself had matriculated more than four centuries earlier.
—primus
Editor’s note: The previous College Pump (September-October 2026) referenced a 70th reunion essay by higher education leader Thomas Ehrlich ’56. It can be read in full at harvardmagazine.com/ehrlich-higher-education-retrospective.
