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Fuller's Harvard Years

Fuller at Harvard: twice expelled as a student (1913-15) for blowing tuition on a Ziegfeld cast dinner and 'irresponsibility,' then invited back as Norton Professor of Poetry (1961-62) — the institution's most ironic vindication.

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Fuller's Harvard Years

Expelled twice by twenty. Invited back as poet by sixty-six. Collected forty-seven honorary doctorates but never a real one.

Richard Buckminster Fuller entered Harvard College in the fall of 1913 as a fourth-generation legacy. His father, Richard Buckminster Fuller Sr., was a Harvard graduate and successful importer. His great-aunt was Margaret Fuller (1810–1850) — transcendentalist writer, Dial co-founder, author of Woman in the Nineteenth Century, and the first woman permitted to use Harvard's libraries. The Fuller name had been attached to Harvard for over a century.

The attachment did not hold. During his freshman year, Fuller withdrew his entire tuition and expense money, decamped to New York City, and blew it all in a single night hosting a lavish dinner for the cast of a show — most sources identify the troupe as performers from the Ziegfeld Follies, though accounts vary (some say a vaudeville company, others name the dancer Marilyn Miller). Harvard expelled him. He preferred the word "fired." His family sent him to work at a cotton mill in Sherbrooke, Quebec, where he developed hands-on proficiency with machinery — knowledge that proved more formative than anything Harvard had offered.

His mother insisted he return. Readmitted in fall 1914, Fuller declined to concentrate in mathematics (which he considered "too easy"), chose literature and political science instead, and quickly lost interest. Harvard expelled him a second time, citing "irresponsibility and lack of interest." He never returned for a degree. He never completed any formal degree at all — but over his lifetime he received forty-seven honorary doctorates, a collection that makes his original expulsions read less like failure than like an early signal that the institution and the man were operating on incompatible wavelengths.

Nearly fifty years later, Harvard invited Fuller back as Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry for the 1961–62 academic year. The Norton Professorship, established in 1925, defines "poetry in the broadest sense" — previous holders included T.S. Eliot, Igor Stravinsky, and Robert Frost. Fuller shared the 1961–62 appointment with architects Felix Candela and Pier Luigi Nervi. He lived at Quincy House on campus, delivered marathon lectures without notes — reportedly two and a half hours at a stretch — and produced Education Automation (1962), a prescient vision of technology-mediated learning. The appointment was made partly "because he sometimes expressed complex ideas in verse to make them more understandable." Harvard later established the R. Buckminster Fuller Professorship of Design Science at the Graduate School of Design.

See Also

Sources

  • Fuller's Harvard Years Research