(2). In early 1950 John U. Monro '34 was named to head a Financial Aid Center, which now integrates scholarship, employment, and loan aid to the men who have been admitted.

(3). Director of Scholarships F. Skiddy von Stade '38 compiled financial aid information into a 54-page "Alumni Handbook" which he sent out to all interested alumni. The book also lists criteria for selection, suggested interview techniques, and a system for evaluating and reporting data to the Admissions and Scholarships Committees. It is constantly being kept up-to-date.

4. Changes in Cambridge

(4). The Admissions Office added Graham R. Taylor '49 as Gummere's first full-time assistant, and Dana M. Cotton also began helping the office on a part-time basis. In addition other officials like Bender, von Stade, Monro, Dean Leighton, and Professors Lect and Menzel have aided Gum mere by making special trips to admissions "problem areas."

(5). Francis P. Kinnicutt '30 became the first full-time secretary to the president of the Associated Harvard Clubs. He was to be a roving liasion between Cambridge and the Schools and Scholarships Committee.

(6). Other groups joined the program, too. A reorganized and more compact Overseers' Visiting Committee on Athletics and the Varsity Club, both eyeing the "athlete" problem, pledged their aid. Even the Crimson Key formed a group of 85 undergraduates, who have already begun acting as contact men for the alumni Schools Committees.

These six steps have at last provided most of the necessary machinery to match similar Princeton, Dartmouth, and Yale programs. Yet they represent no guarantee of successfully "balancing the College" without alert, aggressive alumni to fill committee ranks.

At the same time, however, the project carries certain grave dangers. Unleashed alumni who track down only football players could do the College much greater harm than those who overlook the athletes and other schoolboy leaders and hunt solely for scholars. Probably the basic questions to be faced are whether everyone has the same definition of "Balance in the College" and whether everything in Harvard's new program really helps this goal.

6. What Does 'Balance' Mean?

"Balance in the College" does not mean a student body of "all-around boys." As Dean Bender points out, it is not the mission of Harvard College to educate a vast horde of C-minus "good citizens." Bender and others realize that Harvard is too important an institution to tamper with. "Superior academic intelligence is still our primary concern," Bender emphasizes.

But beyond this common student base of top intelligence, the College is seeking a variety of skills and tastes in its undergraduate body. It seeks scholars. But it also wants top writers, athletes, politicians, musicians, debaters, and even some men who for the present seem to be merely dilettantes.

"Balance" is a crucial factor in education itself, Harvard has always felt. For a national student body possessing many and varied talents offers the most perfect cosmopolitan environment for teaching and for learning. Samuel Eliot Morrison '08 says in his "The Founding of Harvard College":

"As long as Harvard remains true to her early traditions, rich men's sons and poor, serious scholars and frivolous wasters, saints and sinners . . . will meet in her Houses, her Yard, and her athletic fields, rubbing off each others angularities, and learning from contact what cannot be learned from books."

Much of this balance is achieved almost automatically. Harvard still holds undisputed first place as the nation's top University, a reputation which will always attract a solid group of fine scholars.

For better or worse, the College's inevitable reputation as a "brain factory" will probably keep principals shunting to Harvard "the best boys we've had in years." But only about ten percent of the College form this absolute "scholar class"; it is below this top ten percent "balancing" qualities (like character, extra-curricular interests, and of intent) enter into the picture.