John Finley and Eliot House

The story of one man and one building unexpectedly brings together many of the defining people and events of the twentieth century.

“Harvard!”

When Professor John Finley said the word, it sang.

Older than the city of Cambridge and much older than the formation of the United States, Harvard’s history was already entwined with that of the country when, in 1921, Finley first set foot in the Yard. Over three centuries, the tiny wilderness college at the edge of the British empire had grown into a global university that was itself an empire.

Finley would serve the institution as a professor and house master during a period of remarkable change for both it and the United States — from WWII though the Vietnam War, the Cold War, and the fight for civil rights. During his tenure, Eliot House served as a naval school when Harvard became a military academy after Pearl Harbor. Finley’s classmate Robert Oppenheimer and friend James Conant worked on the atomic bomb at Los Alamos. Another classmate and friend was Mason Hammond, who led the Monuments Men to rescue some of humankind’s most valuable cultural heritage from the Nazis. Eliot House tutors were targeted by Senator McCarthy’s witch hunts. Finley played an unexpected cameo appearance in John F. Kennedy’s inauguration. And Eliot House figures including Ben Bradlee and Archibald Cox played central roles in the efforts to address the Pentagon Papers and Watergate scandals.

A Classics scholar, Finley understood the power of stories. As a child he was acquainted with living heroes; he personally knew Mark Twain among many others. He would later ensure that his students connected with Huck Finn, Tom Sawyer, Odysseus and Oedipus by establishing their relevance as archetypes, making them as real and relatable as the students themselves.

After Pearl Harbor, Finley wanted to enlist. Instead, Harvard asked him to lead an effort to reshape American education. In the resulting General Education in a Free Society, Finley proposed a shared narrative and common base of knowledge to unite an increasingly diverse nation. His vision feels even more relevant today.

Finley would not have had the opportunity to so fully fashion Eliot House into a microcosm of his vision for the university had he become president of Harvard, as many expected. Instead, he spent 26 years as Eliot’s faculty dean, a time which the House became known as “more Harvard than Harvard itself.” To educate House residents, Finley also brought in, as guest lecturers, some of the most recognized names of the era: writers T.S. Eliot, E.M. Forster and Evelyn Waugh; poet-statesman Archibald MacLeish; Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter; actor John Gielgud; and Leonard Bernstein, a former resident. 


Eliot House is rich in lore and legacy. If the House were in London, it would be covered in the blue plaques that mark distinguished residents and cultural significance. Finley’s legacy is similarly rich, and yet the story of his years at Eliot House — years of vital importance for the university and the country — has never been told.

Eliot House: John Finley’s era of humanism at Harvard is that story.