[2] Ward attended Boston Latin school where he played football, captaining the team his senior season when it went undefeated.
Demobilized in 1945, he returned to Harvard, changed his concentration from pre-med to history and literature, and graduated with honors in 1947-48, albeit as a member of the class of 1945 because of his wartime service.
After a brief period in retail, he enrolled in the doctoral program in English and American Studies at the University of Minnesota, where his advisor was Henry Nash Smith.
It was during this time that Ward would publish Andrew Jackson: Symbol for an Age (1955), and Red, White, and Blue: Men, Books, and Ideas in American Culture 1969.
The Trustees of the College reluctantly voted in favor of it in November 1974, the first female students were admitted in the fall of 1975, and the first women graduated in June 1976.
Ward's participation stirred both approval and outrage, as well as a large volume of media coverage and commentary, related to the appropriateness of a college president's involvement in individual acts of civil disobedience.
Other figures who Ward treated as symbolic of contradictions in America's myths about itself include John F. Kennedy, Henry David Thoreau, Charles Lindbergh, and the Anarchist activist Alexander Berkman.
[4] Like many academics in the humanities during the Cold War, Ward refrained from direct opposition to American foreign policy for most of his career, although his work, much of which is included in his career retrospective Red, White, and Blue: Men, Books, and Ideas in American Culture, implies a dialectical approach to understanding culture that would influence the New Left and other expressly radical critics.
The failure of the New Left to credit their own academic theories to the sometimes radical critiques underlying the myth and symbol criticism in which they were initiated as students has been referred to by recent writers as "New Left amnesia"..[citation needed] After resigning as Amherst College President in 1979, Ward worked for two years as Chairman of the Commission Concerning State and County Buildings in Massachusetts.