Excerpts from the final report of Wilbur J. Bender '27, former Dean of Admissions, to the Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, for the academic year 1959-60:

General Obeservations

"1. In determining admission policy the overriding concern must always be how Harvard can use its extraordinary educational resources most effectively to have mankind...

"2. Tradition cannot be allowed to control admission policy...but Harvard will act more wisely if it confronts its problems informed by a sense of its own rich past and an understanding of its special nature and quality...

"3. Harvard is not alone. Policies and procedures must be considered not only in the light of their internal impact, but also in terms of their impact on other colleges and higher education generally, and on secondary education and the public...

"4. The welfare of the individual student must always be a paramount concern... Harvard can be a bad place for some very promising people at a particular stage in their development...

"5. Finally, it can be said that the goals of our admission policies can be intelligently defined only in terms of the basic purpose of Harvard College. The Harvard faculty does not seem to me to be clear or united at present about the purpose of undergraduate education in this complex university college. Differences among the faculty about admission policy are, to a degree, the results of our uncertainty of purpose...

"Will the Harvard College of the future be, in effect, simply a pre-professional school whose student are expected to absorb as rapidly as possible the material deemed necessary for entrance to the next phase of professional training?..."

The "Top-One-Per-Cent" Policy

"The student who ranks first in his class may be genuinely brilliant. Or he may be a compulsive worker or the instrument of domineering parents' ambitions or a conformist or self-centered careerist who has shrewdly calculated his teachers' prejudices and expectations and discovered how to regurgitate efficiently what they want. Or he may have focused narrowly on grade-getting as compensation for his inadequacies in other areas, because he lacks other interests or talents or lacks passion and warmth or normal healthy instincts or is afraid of life. The top high school student is often, frankly, a pretty dull and bloodless, or peculiar, fellow...

"What I am trying to say is that a deliberate policy of one-factor selection might produce in our student body not more students of first-rate intellectual power, but fewer. It might well produce, in fact, simply a high level of dull, competent, safe academic mediocrity, an army of future Ph.D.'s who would do useful work with no originality or commitment...

"If we lose most of our alumni workers and antagonize or discourage many of the schools by setting our minimum standards at certain levels we may find ourselves eventually with a smaller pool of candidates, fewer top scholars and a lower average level of academic ability as well as a less interesting, attractive and varied student body. In other words the attempt to obtain a top-one-per-cent student body may in fact defeat its own ends...my guess is that whatever admission policy is followed the number of candidates for admission to Harvard and similar colleges is not likely to increase anything like as much in the coming decade as was once commonly predicted. High costs, wholesale rejection of good boys, and other factors will probably have a powerful discouraging influence on applications. . .

"There are other practical aspects of a top-one-per-cent policy which need to be considered. Such a policy would, for instance, just about end the traditional relationship between Harvard and its community, greater Boston. . .

"(A group) which has also played a major role in shaping Harvard would also be entirely eliminated--the Harvard-son group. . . It is certainly unlikely that (this) would help the major effort Harvard, like most all private colleges, is making to enlist the continuing moral and financial support of its alumni. Nevertheless, there are considerations, pro and con, on both the Harvard-son and the Boston issues, and it is regrettable that the special faculty report (in 1960) did not deal with these issues more comprehensively and more forthrightly. . .

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