Scholars venerable
One of them corrected Harvard student John F. Kennedy’s literature papers. Another is the grandson of slaves and was a classmate of the teenaged Martin Luther King Jr. A third escaped Europe on the eve of World War II and rose to become a key aide to President Lyndon Johnson during the Vietnam War. A fourth helped to throw open the gates of all-male colleges to women. Harvard has hundreds of older professors with intriguing personal stories like these. Officially, the men are each called emeritus and the women emerita, honorifics that originated with the Latin word for “skillful, but honorably retired.” In many ways these professors, many of them still active in their fields, are the keepers of Harvard’s living history. Their experiences illuminate most of the 20th century, their teaching guided generations of students, and their mentoring trained most current faculty members. Many emeriti had early lives marked by family...