Election of Overseers by the alumni was indirectly responsible for the formation of another group of alumni, the Associated Harvard Clubs. Although alumni had been traditionally organized on the basis of graduating classes, midwestern Harvard graduates in the 19th century were somewhat spread apart geographically both from each other and from the University.

Western Allegiance to Clubs

For this reason, the movement to found Harvard Clubs started in the midwest and the west, and since that time the allegiance of the alumnus in areas other than the New England and Middle Atlantic States has been to the Club rather than to the Class.

The Associated Harvard Clubs was formed primarily to insure the nomination of a midwestern candidate to the Board of Overseers. Its liberalizing tendency is to be seen in the fact that the procedure of the postal ballot, used at present to insure the right of every alumnus who has been a graduate for more than five years to vote in Overseers elections, was the result of action by the Associated Harvard Clubs.

A certain amount of this liberal tradition remains an element of the Associated Harvard Clubs today. AHC Headquarters are located in St. Louis, and there is a feeling, chiefly among the "old guard" of the organization, that removal of the offices to Cambridge might destroy its independent nature.

Cambridge Office for Clubs.

However, at the annual meeting of the AHC, held last month in Pittsburgh, a special committee recommended that the Clubs maintain an office in Cambridge.

The Pittsburgh proposals were the result of suggestions by President Pusey that the organizational set-up of the AHC be modified in order to keep the alumni in closer touch with the University. The Alumni Association has asked that both groups be served by a single executive secretary.

Contact with the University is the keynote of alumni affairs, and has received special emphasis as the result of the Program for Harvard College. March 28, 1958, "Harvard's Day," set some important precedents for alumni gatherings, which are being echoed this week in the forums scheduled for Wednesday morning. For one of the important effects of the Program has been to utilize ways of showing alumni what the school is doing.

This contact is important for many reasons. It is primarily through the graduate that the University is known to the nation. The make-up of future classes is largely determined through the alumnus, both by the example he sets and by his active recruiting.

Contact is important for such constitutional matters as election of the Overseers. Expansion policies are particularly subjct to alumni criticism and particularly in need of a picture of the University as it is today, not in 1933 or 1908.

A Low-Pressure Undercurrent

Finally, according to Peter D. Schultz '52, Secretary of the Alumni Association, "The dollar sign does loom pretty big." The Alumni Association, through the Harvard Fund Council, headed by poet David T.W. McCord '21, tries to encourage the "habit of annual giving."

This important alumni function figures in virtually every alumni affair as a low pressure undercurrent. McCord set the pace for the Program, the Alumni Association, and the Associated Harvard Clubs with this bit of whimsy, read at the New York Harvard's Day Program:

The man in the money: they're bound he will give.

They hug the old bunny,

That man in the money;

And once he's begun he

Is just like a sieve.

The man in the money; the bounder WILL give.