". . . Would the College be a wonderfully stimulating and rewarding place when every student at entrance was a potential magna or summa man? Or would a precocious academic careerism tend to corrupt the young and inhibit breadth of interest and the disinterested search for understanding and enrichment? Would academic competitiveness be greatly increased and tensions, anxieties and frustrations grow unbearably, particularly for those able students who, perhaps only because they dared to take a course outside their field or had bad luck with an instructor or two, found themselves

". . .there are many kinds or aspects of intelligence which are important (admitting that not all kinds are relevant to a college), and grade-getting and test-scoring intelligence is not necessarily the most important, even for purely intellectual pursuits. Judgment is important, and curiosity and independence and honesty and courage and sensitivity and generosity and vitality. Energy may well be the most important x-factor in determining the future contribution of

"These questions are not meant to imply that an individual with a high IQ is any more -- or less -- likely than an individual with an average or low IQ to be unable or unattractive or physically uncoordinated or have a bad character or a high feminine component. . . (But) there is a some profane amateur opinion that the percentage of bearded types tend to go up with the increase in the average IQ. And anyone who has survived the feline atmosphere of a Phi Beta Kappa chapter meeting when the Junior Eight or the Senior Sixteen were being chosen must have some concerns. . ."

Conclusion

"Is it really a good thing to strain so hard-to get the 'best' students, particularly when no one can define or identify the 'best' when we are dealing with seventeen-year-olds and there are so many different kinds of 'bests'? No one can ever prove which college has the best students anyway. . . One of the less attractive aspects of Harvard is a perennial tendency to arrogance, to the assumption of an air of condescending superiority to the lesser breeds of Dedham. Isn't it enough to be the oldest and the richest, and otherwise just to do our job happily and with a quiet pride in what we hope is general excellance? If we also boast about has the most brilliant student body in country we might become insufferable.

"Perhaps, in other words, we will actually be the best college and make optimum use of our resources if we reasonably relaxed about it, if we show a little more humility and humanity catholicity in our search for talent, if we recognize the fundamental human social importance of other factors than A-getting ability and high academic ambitions, and don't use the faculty exclusively to reproduce themselves. By means let's have a lot of brilliant students, the first class academic minds which have always been one of the marks of Harvard. . . But let's have some other students to help hold place together, students who are intelligent and curious and interested enough to profit from Harvard, who are intelligent without necessarily being 'intellectuals' but whose distinction is primarily other--goodness or loyalty or energy or perceptivity or a passionate concern of some sort. We might even have a few who aren't particularly distinguished in anyways, who aren't brilliant leaders, who are just plain, ordinary decent, uncomplicated human being like so many faculty sons and Harvard sons, to provide a human scale in this community of supermen. . .

"In other words, my prejudice is for a Harvard College with a certain range and mixture and diversity in its student body--a college with some snobs and some Scandanavian farm boys who skate beautifully and some bright Bronx premeds, with some students who care passionately if unwisely (but who knew about editing the Crimson or beating Yale, or who have an ambition to run a business and make a million, or to elected to public office, a college which not all the students have looked on school just as preparation for college, college as preparation for grade school and graduate school as preparation for they know not what. Won't even our top-one-per-cent be better men and better scholars for being part of such a college?