Since the needs of the University are many and since at any given moment only the most urgent can hope to be satisfied, it is always necessary to make selection among them. Throughout all Harvard's history there has always been need to make do in one part with a less than adequate situation in order to move ahead in another. This is still true. One part moves ahead while others mark time or at least go forward more slowly. Many advances have been made within the College during recent decades. But at the same time other needs have been left unsatisfied and new ones have developed. The result, in my judgment, is that we have now come again to a time for heightened effort to make new advance within the College.

Let me sketch rapidly some of the more pressing present needs.

Recompense

The first concern of any college should be its teachers. Harvard values excellence in her teachers and must see to it that they are correspondingly recompensed. Still, the Harvard professor is a poorer man today than he has been for generations. Despite repeated salary increases he has steadily lost ground. And Harvard salaries, still perhaps on the average the highest in the profession, no longer enjoy the kind of unchallenged lead they once had and to which no small part of Harvard's present greatness may be attributed.

Of special importance in Harvard's conception of education is the environment in which learning goes on. Harvard provides good intellectual conditions for its faculty and students. Our libraries, laboratories, and museums are of high quality. We cannot, however, afford to rest content. It is necessary endlessly to be concerned with the improvement of environmental conditions in order to build here in Cambridge a modern community of learning of highest excellence in all respects.

In building such a community in the College, the needs complement each other. Perhaps the most urgent of the College's environmental needs is for additional Houses. Our seven Houses were constructed and put into operation more than twenty-five years ago. At the same time the Freshman Class was established in the Yard. Down to the second World War the largest number of undergraduates for whom rooms were provided in a single year was only a few more than 2700. Since the War it has never been fewer than 3700. And there are now actually fewer rooms available than twenty-five years ago. Approximately 1200 more students live in the existing facilities than they were built to accommodate. Each House has a large number of "members" for whom there is no place in the House. Upperclass students have backed up into the Yard. They fill not only the Houses and Claverly Hall, but now also the Freshmen's Wigglesworth Hall. There is an immense backlog of building need here to be met. One House immediately, two more as quickly as they can be had, and, as well, increased dormitory space for Freshmen, are required to resolve this critical situation. In my judgment these are minimum requirements if we are to return to the best educational use of the House system. A House is more than a dormitory. It is a device for preserving, in the midst of a large University, an intimate "collegiate way of living," that ideal brought from England at Harvard's beginning. The system has effectively proved its worth in the years before the War and since.

Faculty Commuters

An essential part of this collegiate way of life is association of teacher and student, of younger and older. For many years forces have been slowly at work moving the members of the University faculties away from Cambridge. As early as 1903 President Eliot noted in his annual report that the living conditions of the faculty were deteriorating. This tendency has continued and become more pronounced. To reverse this trend, to re-establish a community of learning, apartment dwellings must be built for those students (some of them undergraduates) and younger members of the faculties who are married and have families. And for older members of the Faculty there are needs for many separate homes in the neighborhood of the University. Harvard College as experienced and loved by generations of Harvard men cannot indefinitely survive if its teachers become commuters.

The activity of the Faculty and the interaction of faculty and students have other needs of fresh support. The Chemistry Department has again outgrown its facilities. The same can be said of Astronomy. But it is not only the natural sciences which have been experiencing vigorous development. No proper physical facilities have yet been provided for the Department of Social Relations, a growing field at Harvard which has been of increasing importance to undergraduates during the past decade. And this lively department is only slightly less adequately provided with endowed professorships than are several other areas. Indeed, the future of the Faculty depends not only upon restoring the purchasing power of the professor's salary, say, to that of the period of 1925-35, but also upon the continuing creation of new professorships to keep pace with the advance of knowledge.

College's Center

There is further a very considerable lack of faculty offices and studies, and of rooms for small classes. The Faculty of Arts and Sciences has virtually doubled in size during the past twenty-five years, and yet, because of the press of other needs, the problem of additional office and study space has had to be met again and again by inadequate improvisation. And a strictly academic want, possibly overshadowing all others in this area, is for increased endowment for the Library, the center of both College and University and the chief resource for the activity of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. For many people its great library is Harvard. But the cost of its operation is vastly greater now than it was only a very few years ago; and it rises steadily year by year.

There are other pressing needs in the area of student life: first, perhaps, for scholarships and fellowships. Today the Faculty of Arts and Sciences is spending nearly $400,000 a year of its own unrestricted funds to help the worthy and exceptionally able students who come to Harvard College. It spends about $600,000 of unrestricted income to support the program in athletics which is of such quality and is of such importance to undergraduate life that a serious effort should be made to get it increased endowment support. There is a long-standing need for a theatre and another for increased facilities for the study of art. Some would say that a new centrally located health center for Radcliffe and Harvard--which would incorporate the basic purpose of the badly outdated Stillman Infirmary with the offices, clinics and equipment necessary for a community of some 20,000 faculty, students, and employees--is the most crying need of all. And now perhaps the failure, through fire, of the recent effort to rehabilitate Memorial Hall points unmistakably to a time not too distant when we may have to find an appropriate replacement for this historic building which would still preserve its memorial quality.

Quickened Concern

Such is only a very rapid survey of some of the more pressing needs of the College. Each deserves, and later will find, separate treatment. But seen even thus summarily the list of needs seems to me unmistakably to indicate the necessity for quickened concern for the well-being of Harvard College. Indeed it is more than time for those who care for Harvard College as the first and still one of the most vigorous practitioners of collegiate learning in America now to increase the strength of the College for its great work in undergraduate education.

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