The typical "old grad" of American folklore, with his hip flask in the fall, his straw hat and banner in the spring, and his instantaneous reversion to puerility any time that he sets foot back on the campus, has disappeared. He has gone the way of maid service in the Harvard Houses.

Twenty or thirty years ago the traditional old grad may actually have existed at Harvard. If so, he cried for the coach's scalp whenever the varsity lost to Yale, showed up at his local Harvard Club only when football movies were being shown, contributed to his Class Fund only so that good old '98 could raise a larger Gift than '97, looked forward to his Class Reunions as the most easily rationalized binges of his life, and otherwise--unless he happened to think there were too many New Dealers on the Faculty--pretty much forgot about Harvard.

Today, the typical alumnus still takes seriously the result of the Yale game, still exhibits staunch Class loyalty, and still has a wonderfully wild time at Reunions (the Class of '31 plans to spend $130,000 on its 25th anniversary affair). He is likely, however, to know less about Harvard's football record than about its policy in regard to "Communist" Faculty members, to work actively on the schools or scholarship committee of his local Club, to consider just what educational principles he is buying when he writes a check to his Class Fund, and to stray from the Hasty Pudding bar to a New Lecture Hall symposium at least once during a Reunion in Cambridge.

In a word, the old grad has grown up.

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In the field of alumni fund raising it would at first seem that there has been no revolution at all. "GIVE!", the eternal imperative, still monopolizes the alumnus's incoming mail, especially as Reunion time draws near. The class of '31's 25th Reunion Bugle, published last December, failed to strike any radically new notes either in its headlines ("GIVE TO CLASS FUND NOW," "TAX ADVANTAGE IF GIFTS MADE BEFORE DEC. 31") or in the news story below ("The Class of 1931 has got to do some hustling between now and June, 1956").

"Professional Racket?"

Indeed, the complaint once voiced by Willard L. Sperry probably still holds:

"If the truth be told, all the skills of American business, its ingenuity in advertising, and its shameless appeal to sentiment as well, are employed by the institution in building up its endowments from living alumni.... At its worst the procedure borders dangerously on something like blackmail or a professional racket...."

(If the President and Fellows and the other directors of Harvard's alumni operation really are running a "racket," at least no one can accuse them of petty extortion. Not when they spend some $300,000 a year merely to keep in touch with the estimated 44,000 living alumni of Harvard College. This averages out to an expenditure of about $7 per year on each alumnus--a figure that seems extravagantly high until one reflects that last year College alumni presented their Alma Mater with gifts totalling $636,807, a total representing about $14.50 per man, or more than a 200 percent return on the original investment.

Although alumni fund-raising now may have the same objective and the same devasting efficiency as ever, some of the tactics employed have definitely changed. The last two decades have seen, along with the general maturing of the old grad, a conspicuous weakening of the concept of Class solidarity. Consequently, Class agents and other apostles of the ancien regime, finding that the "good old '28" ploy doesn't work so well any more, have had to look around for a new pitch.

The Class idea has actually been on the way out for a long time. It could never again mean as much as it did in the early nineteenth century, when, as Morison reports, "most classes ... at least after they graduated, became mutual benevolent societies, of which no member need suffer as long as any were well off, and knew of his need." As early as 1894, a British writer observed that "among the younger generations at Harvard class loyalty is dying out," and at about the same time an undergraduate complained in the CRIMSON that "There is no Class spirit at Harvard. The elective system destroyed it long ago."

Today, despite the dilution of the free elective system by General Education, a College Class is less cohesive than ever. Besides the obvious fact that, in Morison's words, "the possibility of being one's brother's keeper declines when the family numbers over nine hundred," there is also the consideration that somehow, in the modern world, the members of '28 can no longer get very excited about the prospect of raising a Class Gift larger than than of '27.

With Class spirit no longer a strong selling point, alumni, fund raisers have had to find new appeals by which to build up their Class Gifts (which now amount to $250,000 by the time of the 25th Reunion). The result, as expressed by Pratt, is not the least significant change brought about by the alumni revolution:

"They're no longer trying to get the money by selling competition with other Classes. They've also thrown out the idea that you simply pay your fee in order to come to Reunion and relive your 'Bright College Days.' Instead, these days they're actually showing the alumni what goes on in Cambridge and selling them on Harvard College."