This declaration of great need may come as a surprise to some who will wonder how an institution with Harvard's great resources can be in want--how there can be at Harvard so many needs, especially so many in only one department.

Two things can be said in reply:

Measured against what Harvard has become in three hundred years of growth--against what Harvard is and is doing today--against the fact that in recent years the needs have been growing more rapidly than the gains--the list does not appear formidable.

And the idea that Harvard is so very rich that it no longer has needs is a very old illusion.

As early as 1868, when the development of the modern University was almost wholly still in the future, President Hill said: "The president has long been impressed with a conviction that the wealth of the University is greatly over-estimated by her friends and by the public." Only yesterday, after the ninety years of tremendous growth which produced the great University we now enjoy, President Conant was saying. "Two legends are now current in certain circles in the United States: One is to the effect that the days of private philanthropy are over; the other is that Harvard, unlike other universities, is so rich it needs no more money." And he added quickly, "Both are demonstrably false."

Tremendously Rich?

This notion, current for at least a hundred years, perhaps longer, that Harvard is a tremendously rich university is not so much an inaccurate commentary on Harvard as it is an unmistakable indication of how seriously and consistently the American public has underestimated the proper cost of higher education. President Eliot made this point with characteristic vigor. As early as 1890 he stated bluntly, "The American public must enlarge its ideas of the cost of supporting a university."

He would make the same statement with even more vigor today, for in our generation the difficulties of financing higher education have increased substantially. Twenty-five years ago income from that part of Harvard's endowment fund which belongs to the College met 47 per cent of the cost of operating the College. Last year this income met less than 27 per cent of these costs. Though the amount of endowment has considerably increased and the income from it has doubled in twenty-five years, the significant fact is that during this period the costs of operating the College have quadrupled. It is also to be noted that most of Harvard's endowment is committed for specific purposes, some of them only very remotely connected with the instruction of undergraduates. Of the total endowment income of the University, less than 15 per cent is for unrestricted use throughout all of Harvard, and less than 1 1/2 per cent is for unrestricted use within the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, the parent faculty of the College.

A college or university is rich or poor not in terms of its visible resources, but only as these are set against the variety and extent of its full program and activity, and against its demonstrated capacities and ambitions. President Lowell