Taylor, Harold Alexander

(b. 28 September 1914 in Toronto, Canada; d. 9 February 1993 in New York City), educator and public intellectual who attracted national attention for his spirited leadership of Sarah Lawrence College during the McCarthy era.

Taylor was the second of two children born to Elizabeth Henderson Wilson and Charles William Taylor. His British-born father worked as a government employee and lay minister in Canada and his mother was a homemaker.

In 1926 while a student at Riverside Collegiate School in Toronto, Taylor’s interest in music led him backstage after a Duke Ellington concert. In answer to the eleven-year-old’s question about how to become a great player, Ellington told Taylor, “Take that clarinet and keep on playing it till it sounds real pretty.” A few years later Taylor hitchhiked to New York City where he subsisted on bananas and cereal just so he could hear the great jazz artists of the day. He became an accomplished classical and jazz clarinetist. His dedication to music and musicians and to the arts and artists were elements in a philosophy that emphasized individual freedom and creativity. This philosophy sustained Taylor throughout his life.

At the University of Toronto, Taylor earned an A.B. degree in literature in 1935 and an M.A. degree in philosophy and literature in 1936. In 1938 he was awarded a doctorate in philosophy from the University of London. He supported his studies in England by writing a jazz column and playing in jazz bands, frequently aboard cruise ships. It was on one of these voyages that he met Grace Muriel Thorne, whom he married on 8 November 1940. The marriage produced two daughters and ended in divorce in 1968.

From 1939 to 1945 Taylor taught philosophy at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. For part of this time he also contributed to the war effort as a researcher on a classified project for the Office of Scientific Research and Development of the U.S. Navy. He became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1947.

In 1945 the thirty-year-old Taylor became the youngest college president in the country when he was chosen to lead Sarah Lawrence College. An exclusive, progressive, liberal arts college for women located in Bronxville, New York, just north of New York City, Sarah Lawrence became the focus of national attention as a celebrated target of the forces of McCarthyism during the early 1950s. Twelve members of the faculty of seventy were subpoenaed to testify about possible links to the Communist party. Assaulted at the national level by the Jenner Committee on Internal Security and the House Un-American Activities Committee and attacked locally by the Westchester County American Legion, Sarah Lawrence students, faculty, and trustees rallied around President Taylor. With a campus composed of such renowned faculty colleagues as the sociologist Helen Merrell Lynd, mythologist Joseph Campbell, classicist Horace Gregory, and poet Stephen Spender—some of whom were themselves staunchly anticommunist—it was no easy task for Taylor to emerge as an activist champion of academic freedom.

Taylor’s position gave him a bully pulpit from which to argue the legitimacy of Sarah Lawrence’s curricular emphasis on an active, experimental, student-centered approach to liberal arts education and prepared him for his outspoken and eloquent opposition to threats to liberty in culture, politics, and education. The issues of the student revolution in American universities became Taylor’s issues. The themes of a radical pedagogy, personal freedom, and institutional transformation were expressed in two early books, Essays in Teaching (1950) and On Education and Freedom (1954). Taylor returned to these concerns again in Students Without Teachers: The Crisis in the University (1969) and How to Change Colleges: Notes on Radical Reform (1971).

As the president of Sarah Lawrence College, Taylor often functioned as an intellectual and artistic entrepreneur. Contemporaries marveled at his ability to weave people together in cultural and political causes. Taylor introduced the British poet Stephen Spender to American college audiences. He attracted the writers Randall Jarrell and Mary McCarthy to Sarah Lawrence. Consequently, Jarrell’s book Pictures from an Institution: A Comedy (1954) and, to a lesser degree, McCarthy’s book The Groves of Academe (1952) sparkle with satirical reflections of the political and intellectual intrigues of the American professorate derived from Sarah Lawrence under Taylor.

Starting early in their years at Sarah Lawrence, the Taylor family spent the summers in Holderness, New Hampshire, at Brushwood, a commodious cottage on White Oaks Pond. It was there that Taylor did most of his writing. For four decades the house was a gathering place for intellectuals and social activists including Norman Cousins, Rollo May, Gardner Murphy, and Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda.

In January 1959 notice of Taylor’s sudden resignation from Sarah Lawrence appeared in more than 100 newspapers across the country. It sent a shock wave through the campus community. Students and alumni pleaded for him to stay. Taylor argued, however, that being a college president had deteriorated from a position of being first among scholarly and artistic peers to the role of a manager and fund-raiser. His retirement party at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York City drew more than 1,300 people. Hosted by the CBS vice president Edward R. Murrow, speakers included Eleanor Roosevelt, Archibald MacLeish, Robert Frost, and J. Robert Oppenheimer.

For the next fifteen years Taylor refused repeated offers to return to full-time university teaching or administration. He admitted that his presidency had spoiled him for similar posts. Taylor was determined to make his living as what he termed an “itinerant intellectual,” to concentrate on speaking out and writing on world and national cultural issues. His new career was launched almost immediately. In late 1959 and 1960 with support from the Ford Foundation, he spent six months traveling and lecturing in Japan, Indonesia, India, and the Soviet Union. Upon his return to the United States he immersed himself in projects designed to internationalize the experiences of American undergraduates. He elaborated his proposals in a book that was the culmination of two years of study, The World as Teacher (1969).

A popular speaker, Taylor addressed hundreds of college audiences. A bibliography of his writings includes more than 500 items. He was a frequent contributor to the Saturday Review, the Herald Tribune, the New York Times, Change, and numerous educational journals.

Taylor served many organizations. He chaired the board of the independent and iconoclastic radio station WBAI (1963–1972), was a member of the League for Industrial Democracy (1964–1980), and was a consultant to the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). Additionally, he worked for the Eleanor Roosevelt Memorial Foundation, was vice president of the Martha Graham School of Dance (1964-1971), president of the American Ballet Theatre (1965-1967), and president of the Agnes de Mille Dance Theatre (1970-1975).

In 1975 Taylor returned to academe as a Distinguished Professor at Staten Island College of the City University of New York. He was instrumental in the creation of an international studies program, a poetry center, and a high school for international service. In 1982 at his second retirement party, a surprise tribute lightheartedly memorialized him as the “Ideal Passenger” and was presented to him by his “chauffeur,” a captain on the Staten Island Ferry. During his retirement years Taylor returned each summer to his beloved Brushwood, where he continued to write.

At the time of his death from natural causes in New York City, he was at work on his autobiography. Taylor is buried in the cemetery in Holderness.

Extensive archival materials for Taylor including manuscripts, speeches, correspondence, FBI files, project materials, and notes are housed in the Museum of Education at the University of South Carolina in Columbia, South Carolina. A smaller collection of materials is located in the archives at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville. Autobiographical material from an oral history project conducted by Carole Nichols for Sarah Lawrence College can be found at both locations. An obituary is in the New York Times (10 Feb. 1993).

Joseph G. Flynn