At 24 Milk Street, in the financial heart of Boston, a sign on an office door reads "President and Fellows of Harvard College." Behind this door, in the neat, conservative office of William H. Claflin, Jr. '15, Treasurer, the University's money is controlled. Today this fortune adds up to almost two hundred million dollars in market value, a figure that does not include a penny's worth of the physical plant. It is the source, not only of that vague concept known as Harvard's greatness, but also of many more specific questions, such as the various rates of tuition throughout the University. Yet the nature of Harvard's money, both in terms of its powers and its limitations, probably is more of a mystery in the minds of most students than any other major influence on their academic careers.

One of the most striking aspects of the University's finances is the variety and number of different securities they encompass. It would be difficult for a student to make a purchase without some fraction of his money finding its way back, eventually, to 24 Milk Street. If he buys gasoline, whether Shell, Gulf, Standard, or Sinclair, he is contributing to Harvard dividends. Every time he buys Ivory Soap, Diamond Matches, Carnation Milk, Kodak Film, or Gillette Razor Blades, Harvard gets more money. He can hardly buy a drink without adding a trickle to a stream of dividends that totaled $6,665,149 last year. In what Claflin calls the "highly profitable distilleries," University holdings include Ruppert, Hiram Walker, Canadian Distilleries, and many others.

That six million in dividends, and not, as many suppose, the sum total of the University's money, comprises the bulk of cash available from the endowment fund for current expenditures. Add two million in "gifts for immediate use," nearly five million in reimbursement on Government contracts, and close to twelve million in tuition, and you have the total income of Harvard University in 1946-47--some twenty-five million dollars. Expenses ran a mite lower, leaving the University $369,333 in the black for the year.

These are by no means normal, peacetime figures. In 1939-40, for example, total expenses were about ten million dollars, with total income approximately the same. While expenses have increased evenly up and down the long list, the income boost has been provided primarily by a huge jump in tuition. This has resulted from the overall increased enrollment, and from hiked-up tuition fees in some parts of the University, such as the Business School. The effect on University balance sheets of a return to prewar enrollments--and the consequent reduction of income--in the fact of postwar economic conditions will be, according to Claflin, one of the great financial questions Harvard must study in coming years.