(The following is the text of the report which President Pusey delivered in October outlining the needs of The College).

Gentlemen of the Board of Overseers:

I have asked permission to speak to you today in order to call to your attention the need for a special Program for Harvard College.

From the colleges and universities of America flows a current of creative power vital to our society--a current steadily growing to meet the increasing demands called for by our widening responsibilities as a nation. Our colleges and universities prepare more and more young people in each generation for positions of trust in the adult life of our society while at the same time the complexities of that society steadily and inexorably multiply. In particular the call for individuals of increased insight, wider knowledge, firmer direction, and all the other qualities of mind and will which it is the colleges' chief purpose to elicit becomes ever more insistent. In the face of this already vast and enlarging obligation an educational institution needs constantly to be asking itself whether its practices are good enough to ensure that it is doing and is equipped to do what is expected of it.

"Schoale or Colledge"

There has never been a time in this country when we did not cherish, support, and seek to advance the opportunities for larger knowledge and clearer vision, for training young minds to love learning and to use it for human betterment. Two examples will serve to suggest the whole. In 1636 the Great and General Court of the Massachusetts Bay appropriated a quarter of their tax levy "towards a schoale or colledge." In 1862 the members of Congress by passing the Morrill Act gave impetus to the whole system of publicly supported institutions of higher learning in the United States. Both actions were motivated by a common purpose: to conserve, increase and disseminate knowledge; to provide professional training for those best qualified, and above all, to add to the number of the sensible and the educated in the body politic.

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My present concern is for Harvard College.

In 1868 President Hill declared, "It is time that we should have in our country at least one institution thoroughly organized and amply endowed at which it shall be a principal aim to carry those students who have the highest talents to the highest degree of culture." For more than two centuries Harvard had been a small college. To be sure, by the early nineteenth century it had entered claim to the title "university" by establishing graduate study in medicine, law and divinity. Yet, in the middle of the last century, like the other colleges of the time, it was little more than a small provincial school.

Though President Hill lived to see only the beginning of the process, during the past ninety years Harvard has been transformed into a great modern university. This is all gain. If President Hill seems, by hindsight, seriously to have under-estimated the future demand for universities, he was clearly right nonetheless in his conviction that Harvard had the opportunity and the capacity to become an institution of this enlarged and more serviceable kind.

University's Center

But Harvard was first a college, and the College remains at the center of the University today. It is rightfully the center because a disinterested love of learning is here first implanted in its students, and it is here that this love is most devotedly and consistently served. The College's inescapable first concern is to stimulate that kind of intellectual and spiritual life which will enable a young mind to find its way in the world and to grow in confidence from the exercise of its own power. It has only a restrained secondary interest in the usefulness or application of knowledge. Both things, of course, are of great importance. There must also always be in both a constant concern for increasing knowledge. But it is only as an individual learns first, in the College, to give himself to the spirit of learning that graduate and professional training, indeed the whole activity of adult life, find proper definition and exercise. Indeed, though it may seem extravagant to some, to me it seems not too much to say that the transforming and quickening task of the College is almost the very since qua non of civilization itself.

Harvard College grew strong with the growing University. It has experienced steady improvement for a hundred years. It was especially advanced by President Lowell's devotion to curricular change and multiform development, above all by his establishment of the House system. No one in all Harvard's history cared more for the College than he. And, after him, President Conant set himself no less steadfastly to strengthen this part of the University. Mr. Conant's new scholarship and fellowship programs advanced the claim of the College to be a truly national institution attracting more and more of the exceptionally able from all parts of the country. General Education enhanced its program and gave it increased power to work its magic on students. And no advance did more to help the College than the relatively recent achievement of a separate undergraduate library. Today's Harvard College is the strongest Harvard College yet achieved.

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But there is no rest from effort--at least not in life. Today there are many areas of need within Harvard University. You who are involved in its government know this as well as I. There are few if any of these needs which do not have legitimate claim to be satisfied if the University is to be kept strong, growing in liveliness and in fullest use to the nation. There is not a single department of the University which is not needed in abundant strength if we are to meet the mounting demands which press upon us for ideas and knowledge, for scholars and scientists, for doctors and lawyers, for preachers and teachers, for architects and engineers, for business leaders and government servants and, above all, for an enlarged number of humanely educated men and women.