The purpose of college, he would tell them, was to reduce the time they spent thinking about women from 80 percent to 60 percent.

From John H. Finley Jr., 91, Classicist At Harvard for 43 Years, Is Dead by Robert McG. Thomas, Jr. From June 14, 1995.

An obituary which really brings home to you what we have lost with degradation of our universities into doctrinaire postmodernism and the complete absence of humanity. The loss of leaders and gentlemen to cringing bureaucrats and administrators. The loss of knowledge of messy reality.

John H. Finley Jr., the classicist who brought ancient Greece alive and taught a generation of Harvard men how to live, died on Sunday at a Exeter Health Care Center in Exeter, N.H. He was 91 and a resident of Tamworth, N.H.

There were close to 300 years of Harvard before he came along, and the university has continued for more than a decade since he left. But almost from the moment he joined the faculty in 1933 until 1,000 students, including the university president, gave him two standing ovations at his final lecture in 1976, John H. Finley Jr. was the embodiment of Harvard.

He wrote the Harvard book. He taught the Harvard course. He lived the Harvard life.

As the principal author of "General Education in a Free Society," in 1946, Professor Finley laid down the principles -- and the handful of required courses -- that governed education at Harvard until the 1980's.

None of the courses were more popular than Humanities 103 -- the Great Age of Athens -- in which Professor Finley interpreted Homer, explained Plato and defended Aristotle with a mesmerizing delivery that took wing on unexpected flights of image and notion.

"A single three-by-five card," his son, John 3d, said yesterday, "would last him an entire lecture."

[snip]

As a child he would carry a Greek New Testament to church every Sunday to check on the adequacy of the King James version.

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But for all his achievements at the lectern and for all his scholarly accomplishments, including books on Thucydides and other Greek luminaries, it was in the dining hall and sitting rooms of Eliot House, one of Harvard's residential complexes, that Professor Finley put his most lasting imprint on a generation of students.

As master of Eliot House from 1941 to 1968, Professor Finley took far more pains that his fellow house masters in evaluating the freshmen who applied to live there for their last three years. He not only studied each resume carefully and interviewed every applicant, he also memorized their names and advised them on life's perils. The purpose of college, he would tell them, was to reduce the time they spent thinking about women from 80 percent to 60 percent.

His goal, his son recalled yesterday, was the well-rounded man, one who combined intelligence with a range of social and other skills, especially those that ran to athletic prowess.

"Sports were very important to him," his son said, noting that Eliot House invariably won the most intramural competitions.

The care he took paid off academically, too. During a year Professor Finley spent as a visiting professor at Oxford, his son recalled, his father was pleased to note that something like 12 of the 18 Rhodes scholars in attendance had come from Harvard and that 11 of those 12 had come from Eliot House.

"One of the great pleasures of university life," he once said, "is the cheerful company of the young."

As a traditionalist, however, Professor Finley drew the line at admitting women, saying: "I'm not quite sure people want to have crystalline laughter falling like waterfall down each entry way of the house at all hours. I should think it would be a little disturbing if you were taking advanced organic chemistry."