More than half the College concentrates in the Social Sciences; just over one quarter of the permanent members of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences teaches in the Social Sciences.

One quarter of the College concentrates in the Natural Sciences; 42 percent of the permanent Faculty teaches in the Natural Sciences.

Why is there such an obvious discrepancy between apparent demand and allocation of top-level instruction?

These are the reasons: (1) instruction is given by the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, not by a college faculty, which means the College's needs are not all-important; (2) the number of permanent appointments allowed each department is frozen at its "historical" size.

As a "university college" Harvard has many advantages over the independent college. The intellectual level of the community is higher. Specialists can be retained economically by being shared by the college and one or more graduate schools. Undergraduates can take seminars primarily for graduates, offered by graduate schools (This practice is much more common at Yale, where undergraduates major in such subjects as drama which are taught only at graduate schools).

On the other hand, graduate schools bleed off much of a university college's manpower. The man who becomes an expert soon spends much of his time in small graduate seminars.

The Social Sciences suffers a heavier loss than either the Natural Sciences or the Humanities. For in addition to the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, which draws on all three fields, the Social Sciences surrenders an enormous amount of energy to the Graduate School of Public Administration. The Natural Sciences gains more from the graduate schools than it loses, for the schools of Medicine, Dental Medicine, and Public Health provide a large number of top-level instructors for limited use in advanced and specialized courses.

The "historical" size of a department as an operative concept is peculiar to Harvard. The nation's oldest institution of higher education does not wish to be over-influenced by trends, by changing emphasis and intensity of student interest.

Example: Soc. Rel.

An excellent example of this policy in action is the social relations field. The Social Relations Department was established after the war to include the now extinct Sociology Department and portions of the Anthropology and Psychology Departments. Before the war, these three departments together averaged 237 concentrators, or 6.6 percent of all concentrators. In the last three years, the social relations field has averaged 547 concentrators a year, 13.2 percent of the present total--exactly double the pre-war figure.

The pre-war field had 12 permanent appointees and the fractional services of nine or ten others. The present field has 15 permanent appointments. It will get has no more within the forseeable future because the Faculty of Arts and Sciences is not convinced "the Social Relations boom" is permanent.

If the social relations field maintains its high number of concentrators, it can do so only at the expense of other departments, since the enrollment of the College has been fixed by administrative decree. But it will not increase its allotment of permanent appointments at the expense of other departments. It will have to wait for new money, in the form of either endowed chairs or gifts to the University for unrestricted purposes.

In 1939-40 the University adopted a new system of appointments to full and associate professorships--the two ranks with permanent tenure. Its conception and its mechanics were largely the work of William C. Graustein '11, professor of Mathematics, an outstanding geometrician. Graustein was an extraordinary individual who brought to administrative problems a precise and mathematical approach. He made out the course catalogue each year, almost as a hobby, for he enjoyed wrestling with its major difficulty: to schedule at different hours the courses which are most likely to interest any particular student, while at the same time not giving any teacher too rough a program.

In the spring of 1939 Graustein and Provost Buck, then an associate professor of History, were appointed assistant deans of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Before the year was out, Graustein died in an automobile accident.

The appointment system is very simple. In 1939 the Faculty determined the "historical" size of each department. The exact details of the process are shrouded in mystery. "Historical" size depended to a certain degree upon size at the time, and to a small degree upon number of students and concentrators. Endowments played a role: for instance, the Department of Semitic Languages and History had two chairs endowed for over $118,000. Although the department then offered only nine courses for a total of 38 undergraduates and graduates, to throw out one of the professors would have meant giving up completely a large endowment fund.