As Harvard embarks on a multi-million dollar fund raising drive to modernize the College and ready it for the future, it is obvious that much publicity will be given to the needs and ambitions of the College. While the drive is certainly necessary, it unfortunately runs the risk of obscuring important and equally urgent needs which lie elsewhere in the University.

On the other side of Boston, for example, Harvard's three medical schools are faced with educational and physical problems of the first magnitude. Their needs and hopes--unlike those of the college and the more proximate graduate schools--are seldom considered by the undergraduate unless he happens to have medical aspirations.

Yet these three schools are now facing the same problems of educational and physical change which confront the rest of the University.

Essentially, there is little difference between one Harvard graduate school and another. Each one tries to maintain the highest possible standards of exellence and to give each one of its students the best possible training in its specialty. Consequently, any hindrance to the achievement of these goals must be regarded as the most serious and basic problem a school can face.

It is this type of problem which confronts the School of Public Health today.

The excellence of any school depends directly on the quality of its professors, and a school which wishes to improve itself attempts to bring the best available men onto its faculty. Tenure appointments, which assure a man of a continuing academic position, are the means normally used by a school to give its best men the security which will attach them firmly to the school and to their teaching and research in the school. However, due to lack of funds the School of Public Health is at present unable to offer new leaders in the field anything more than short term professional appointment. This condition leads to an unstable faculty which is extremely unhealthy for the academic life of the school. Since the minimum cost of a tenure appointment is set by the University at $400,000, this is indeed a difficult problem with which to deal. Dean John C. Snyder of the Public Health School estimates that $2.5 million would be the minimum amount with which "we could stabilize the school and proceed on a sound basis."

"Bricks and Mortar"

The second type of problem which an institution must face is of a physical nature. It is probably true that "bricks and mortar" can never solve completely the difficulties of an educational institution, but there is no doubt that the graduate schools face serious physical inadequacies.

All three of the University's medical schools are involved in the worst way with the consequences of the growth and development of the past few decades. It is indeed regrettable that an institution cannot build once and be done with it. One might even settle for being able to build and feel that needs had been taken care of for just one decade. However, the general rule appears to be that you build and need to build again as soon as you move into your new buildings.

Perennial Problems

The Medical School has been plagued by this problem ever since its birth in 1782 in the basement of Harvard Hall. From that era up to the present day the School's history has been one of constant moving from one building to the next. In 1883, the School moved to 688 Boylston Street which "was expected to be the home for medicine for generations." Seventeen years later, it was ready to move to its present location just off Huntington Avenue.

When it finally did enter its present location in 1906, all problems seemed to be at an end. With five enormous granite buildings and the clinical resources of Boston's hospitals nearby,, there seemed no doubt that the Medical School had stopped growing.

This was partly true, for the days of moving from building to building were definitely over. But the School was quick to grow within its new structure over the next fifty years. The student body increased by 80 percent. New methods changed the techniques of medicine beyond many expert's wildest dreams, and these methods brought about a need for new types of equipment and special types of buildings. Most of all, time took its inevitable toll on the buildings.

Today there is a tremendous need for constant temperature rooms, special dark rooms, animal houses, refrigeration rooms, laboratory space, and renovations dictated by fifty year's wear and tear on the physical plant. The most convenient way to achieve many of these new requirements appears to be by the costly process of mezzanining (putting a floor between the already existing floors and ceilings).

Expensive Needs