You need a tough hide to be editor of the Harvard Alumni Bulletin. You have to put out a bi-weekly magazine that will please some 14,000 College alumni all over the world, you have t provide an almost personal apology for any unsuccessful football season, and occasionally, you have to endure accusations of crimes ranging from the defense of Communists to the appeasement of Yale.

Luckily, the charge of selling out to New Haven doesn't crop up very often, but for a certain type of alumnus this treachery may be implicit in even the most routine act on the Bulletin's part. Last March, for example, when the magazine had just adopted a new cover comprised of a little less crimson and a little more white than the previous design, it received the following letter from a subscriber:

With my Bulletin today I received a shock. Gone was the lively cover that used to adorn it. In its place, a format which could just as well be taken over with little change by the undertaker's association. From now on I shall be ashamed to show the Bulletin to my non-Harvard friends. Princeton has its orange and black, Yale its blue. Well, what the h... has happened to Harvard's Crimson?

Through its 56 years of publication the Bulletin has become rather impervious to such criticisms, however, and its current editor can laugh them off quite readily. For despite what certain alumni may say, members of the Bulletin staff know that the magazine has its admirers.

"Most Distinguished"

Probably the most significant of these admirers is the American Alumni council, an impartial organization which annually examines over 140 alumni magazines and selects one as best maintaining a "high level of editorial achievement." In 1948, when the Bulletin was celebrating its 50th year of continuous publication, it received the Alumni Council's award as "the most distinguished alumni magazine of the year" in the United States and Canada.

Uniqueness among alumni magazines was nothing new for the Bulletin, however. In 1948, as is the case today, and as was the case back in 1898 when editor Jerome D. Greene '96 watched the first copy of Harvard's new publication roll off the press, the Bulletin stood almost lone as an alumni magazine completely free of outside support and control.

Although recognized as the official organ of the Harvard Alumni association and the Associated Harvard Clubs, the Bulletin is financially and editorially independent of both these organizations, and of the University itself.

The Harvard Bulletin, Inc., which publishes the magazine bi-weekly during the college year, is a non-profit corporation that is completely self-supporting and has been for all but a few years of its long existence. Admittedly a sort of interlocking directorate exists, with William Bentinck-Smith '37 being the current University official on the Bulletin's board of directors, but no one questions the magazine's spasmodically-asserted right to disagree with any Harvard official it chooses, from President Puscy on down.

The situation is different at Yale, Princeton, and most other American colleges and universities. At New Haven, for example, the Yale Alumni Magazine is published independently t be sure, but usually goes far into the red and needs a yearly subsidy from the university to remain solvent. Princeton, meanwhile, has a complicated system whereby a varying portion of the alumnus's class contribution buys his subscription to the Alumni Weekly, and consequently all Nassau alumni are compulsory subscribers to the publication.

Competes With "Time"

Thus the Harvard Bulletin, in the words of editor Philip W. Quigg of the Princeton Weekly, is "Possibly the only alumni magazine today that has to hawk subscriptions in competition with commercial publications like Time and Look.

Members of the Bulletin staff are quite proud of this autonomy, and repeatedly emphasize that their magazine is in no sense a "house organ of the Dean's office." Joseph R. Hamlen '04, President and Publisher of the Bulletin since 1927, for example, recalls telling more than one University president the magazine could not carry an editorial or news item in exactly the form the president wanted. On the whole, however, there has been little conflict between the Bulletin and the University, and Hamlen characterizes their relationship as that of "pleasant playmates."

But there have been times when life in the playpen wasn't so pleasant. One of the latest of these spats between Massachusetts Hall and Wadsworth House--the old, yellow wood and brick building in the southwest corner of the Yard where the Bulletin's editorial offices are located--occurred in March of 1949, when Bentinck-Smith was editor of the magazine. At that time the University was still over-run with war veterans, and improved attention to the individual student, through such media as advising and tutorial, was sorely needed. In addition, a consistently losing football team and charges of communistic tendencies in the Law School were reaping some unusually unfavorable publicity, and discontenting alumni throughout the country.

"Shocking Deficiencies"