American educationalist, born in Boston, MA, on the 13th of December 1856, the great-grandson of John Lowell, the “Columella of New England,” and on his mother’s side, a grandson of Abbott Lawrence. He graduated at Harvard College in 1877, with highest honours in mathematics; graduated at the Harvard Law School in 1880; and practised law in 1880–1897 in partnership with his cousin, Francis Cabot Lowell (1855–1911), with whom he wrote Transfer of Stock in Corporations (1884). In 1897 he became lecturer and in 1898 professor of government at Harvard, and in 1909 succeeded Charles William Eliot as president of the university. In the same year he was president of the American Political Science Association. In 1900 he had succeeded his father, Augustus Lowell (1830–1901), as financial head of the Lowell Institute of Boston. He wrote Essays on Government (1889), Governments and Parties in Continental Europe (2 vols., 1896), Colonial Civil Service (1900; with an account by H. Morse Stephens of the East India College at Haileybury), and The Government of England (2 vols., 1908).
He built for Harvard at his own expense a president’s house, which was finished in 1912. From the time that he became president (1909) he took great interest in the social life of the students, and was specially desirous that members of the entering class should have the opportunity of becoming thoroughly acquainted. The result was the erection of an attractive group of dormitories in which all freshmen roomed and had their meals together. President Lowell was a strong supporter of free speech among the members of the faculty. After the outbreak of the World War in 1914 he refused to accept, in spite of considerable pressure, the resignation of Prof. Hugo Münsterberg, who had defended the German cause. In 1915 Prof. Kuno Meyer, of the university of Berlin, a prospective exchange professor to Harvard, sent a letter of protest because of the publication in one of the college magazines of a satirical poem, Gott mit Uns, by an undergraduate. In his reply President Lowell pointed out that freedom of speech was an important characteristic of American universities as distinguished from those in Germany. He was chairman of the executive committee of the League to Enforce Peace, and later was a strong supporter of the League of Nations.
He was the author of Public Opinion and Popular Government (1913, based on lectures at Johns Hopkins University); The Governments of France, Italy, and Germany (1914, abridged from his earlier Government and Parties in Continental Europe) and Greater European Governments (1918, abridged from earlier works).
