To the Editors of the CRIMSON:

Your heart is in the right place, but your decimal point is not, when you say "Of the government's money, the average social scientist gets $20,000, to the scientist's $40,000 and the humanist's $10,000 (CRIMSON Editorial, January 17, 1962). These rough average figures are obtained by dividing the number of faculty members in each of the three areas into the corresponding total Departmental expenses for 1960-61. (Data from p. 36, Harvard and the Federal Government, 1961.) If you count only "the government's money," the average humanist has only under $300 in his department budget. (Your earlier report of what I said in the Faculty meeting is the same error. I did not speak of Federal, but of total, funds.)

To answer an obvious question about these figures, note that they do not include the annual operating budgets for Widener and Houghton Libraries ($2,100,000); but they exclude also the Cambridge Electron Accelerator ($2,600,000), the Observatory ($1,200,000), Museum of Comparative Zoology and Peabody ($870,000), the various social science centers and, in fact, all other institutions that do not show up on Departmental budgets. If these expenses are taken into consideration, the share of Federal funds available to the humanistic scholar gets even smaller. Moreover, the total departmental funds available to the average scientists and social scientist, though still and always inadequate, have approximately doubled in the last seven years, whereas they have risen only about 50% for the average humanist. The point of this is not to start a futile debate on who needs more money, but rather to show you that the facts, and the rising pressures they produce, support (more than you knew) your feeling that in time Federal aid will almost inevitably have to be expanded into the field of humanities. Gerald Holton,   Professor of Physics