Yet since each individual Club is completely autonomous, and since the whole South is currently suffering acute growing pains over this issue, the situation would seem to call for time and toleration. Ten years ago, it will be recalled, most Harvard Clubs in the South were not even looking for white students to send to the College. One may hope that the rapid growth of the past decade will continue bringing a speedy end to adolescence.

Meanwhile, despite these flaws in the Clubs' work, Wilbur J. Bender '27, Dean of Admissions, considers their overall schools and scholarship program infinitely successful. The thousand-odd men participating in it, says Bender, "are doing about the best thing any alumnus could do for the College."

* * *

This amounts to pretty strong praise. First Reunions are tamer, fund raising techniques more enlightened, and Club activities directed toward improving the College student body. And now organized alumni, long considered the bete noire of every college administrator's life, suddenly evoke such a sincere tribute from a University Hall official--one, moreover, who is not directly engaged in alumni fund raising.

There can no longer be any doubt: A revolution in alumni affairs has definitely taken place!

As for the exact date when the revolution started, no one can say for sure. The end of the last war is probably as good a Bastille as any, although most of the current changes in alumni affairs could be spotted back in the thirties. Everyone recognizes, however, that the trends have been gathering more and more force ever been since the 25th Reunion of the Class of '28. For it was at that Commencement, in June, 1953, that a Reunion Class member named Nathan M. Pusey took over as President of the University.

Pusey's immediate predecessors, it is probably fair to say, were less than enthusiastic in their non-pecuniary dealings with the College's alumni. Presidents Eliot, Lowell, and to a certain degree Conant had something of the attitude cited by Sperry in regard to another college president: "I could run this university if I had only the trustees and the faculty and the students and the general public to deal with. It is the alumni that make the job hard." Or, in the words of William F. Buckley, Jr., in God and Man at Yale, these Presidents in dealing with alumni were often "glad to settle for their money and to eschew their counsel."

Education More Than Diploma

But Pusey is different. He seems actually to take seriously his own statement that "Education does not cease with the acquisition of a diploma. Being an alumnus is not simply a looking back--but also a continued and intelligent interest in the institution and its problems."

One of Pusey's first official acts as President was to authorize the preparation of a report covering all phases of Harvard alumni activity. When the report was presented, veteran Yard officials were as amazed as the President to discover that the University was spending $850,000 a year on the alumni affairs of the College and the various graduate schools. According to Milton Katz '27, now professor of Law and chief author of the report. "This was probably the first time that anyone sat down and actually totaled up what was going on."

Largely on the basis of the "Katz Report," the President this spring took his most significant action in the field of alumni relations. In order to "give increased impetus to Harvard's alumni program and provide a closer connection between the educational program in Cambridge and its graduates," Pusey appointed Daniel S. Cheever '39 to the new post of Director of Alumni Affairs.

Cheever, who takes over the position in July, is the first to admit that his prescribed duties are rather awesomely vague. The general idea, he says, is that since College alumni today are not at all the stereotyped old grads that they perhaps used to be, but instead are intelligent, prominent, and interested in the problems of education, it is to Harvard's advantage to draw them into as close a relationship as possible.

Cheever is very pleased that many Faculty members, instead of sneering at his appointment as a public relations measure on the part of the Administration. have told him sincerely that they think such a liaison between the University and its alumni is needed.

By appointing Cheever and by otherwise demonstrating his sincere respect for alumni, as well as by his actions on such policy issues as the McCarthy attacks, Pusey has made himself very popular among University graduates. In the opinion of a current member of the Board of Overseers, he already has built up more confidence and support among the alumni than any previous Harvard President.

And for the future, as Cheever takes up his new duties, as Pusey's various other steps toward closer links with the alumni take effect, and as the old grads themselves continue to become more responsible in their attitude toward the University, one can look for an ever-closer relationship between Harvard and its graduates body on many levels.