Slightly more than six and a half years ago, in October, 1956, President Pusey announced the most ambitious short-term effort ever undertaken to raise funds for an educational institution--the $82.5 million Program for Harvard College. Despite the unprecedented size of the goal, the Program was certainly not merely "the wealthy calling for more wealth," as one British writer put it. A careful examination of the College's needs had resulted in the goal of $125 million for specific projects, and the final goal was set only after much difficult budget-slashing.
The Program was also conservative in another respect. It intended simply to fill existing needs that had developed since the thirties. No reserve was allowed to finance future expansion or to prepare for the anticipated surge of applicants for College admission in the coming decade.
No Building
In the 25 years since President Lowell's administration Harvard had added little to its physical plant. Wartime and the immediate post-war years did not favor any major building at the University. Post-war inflation had taken a heavy toll. It cost three times as much to run Harvard in 1953, President Pusey's first year at the College, as it did when President Conant took office twenty years earlier.
Harvard's endowment income had shrunk in importance as a means of meeting the College's annual budget--from 42 per cent of the budget in 1931 to 27 per cent in 1956. Teacher's salaries, though higher in dollars, were actually lower in purchasing power than those received in 1930, a disturbing reversal of the trend in business and other professions. After remaining constant for 25 years, tuition more than doubled in the eight years following 1948 (for 1964 it will be nearly four times the pro-1948 figure!). Endowment funds to meet the mounting demand for scholarships proved insufficient.
During these same 25 years, however, while depression, war and a long inflation boosted costs and held back physical expansion, the size of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences had increased more than 50 per cent. Undergraduate enrollment rose from 3200 in 1930 to a post-war high of more than 5500 in 1948. In 1956 the influx of veterans subsided, and enrollment dropped to 4500. Still, 2,666 upperclassmen were living in facilities designed to accomodate 1,846, and 843 freshmen were crammed into living space designed for 557. More than 300 students could not be housed in University facilities.
Harvard was bulging at its seams: its House and Yard dormitories over-crowded, its laboratory and faculty office space inadequate, its health facilities scattered and outmoded. The flight of married students and young teachers from substandard dwellings in Cambridge to the suburbs was accelerating. All this formed an unpromising background if Harvard wished to contribute to the general expansion of higher education necessary in the year to come.
Thus, in 1956, the answer to Harvard's physical problems demanded a solution as comprehensive as the Program for Harvard College. In February, 1957, after nearly a year of attempting to determine the most important needs of the College, 16 specific objectives were announced. From the very starts, these were considered minimum goals if Harvard were to meet its responsibilities to the present generation and in almost all cases even the vast sums of money hoped for would not be sufficient to restore the leisure and magnificence of the Lowell days.
After three years of aggressive fund-raising and reams of campaign literature (estimated to contain twice the number of words in Gone with the Wind, President Pusey was able to announce that the fund drive had not only reached its goal but had surpassed it with contributions totalling $82,775,554.
Many of the objectives received a great deal more than was asked. The fund to create new academic chairs surpassed its goal by more than 20 per cent. Nineteen new chairs have been created with funds given to the Program, including the Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professorship, the Aga Kahn Professorship of Iranian studies, and the Dillon Chairs of French Civilization and International Relations.
More than $11 million was ear-marked for financial aid to students, nearly triple the target figure of $4 million; the funds sought to support athletics were easily raised. Both of these projects indirectly helped the top priority goal of the Program: the raising of Faculty salaries. Endowment funds of $16 million to be raised through the Program were assigned directly to Faculty salaries. This goal was not met, and a wage increase for Faculty members was financed partly through further increases in tuition and the use of unrestricted endowment income released from the scholarship and athletic programs by specific donations.
Still, if certain of the Program's objectives were over-subscribed many projects received far less than the amounts selected to meet minimum needs. The $82.8 million actually collected during the effort indicates that the Program was a success, but today, more than three ears after the official end of the fund drive, there exist Program goals which have not yet been realized.
Most serious of the "neglected" projects were the libraries and the construction of new facilities to relieve crowded living conditions for students and young faculty.
The maintenance and steady growth of a widely dispersed library system containing more than 6 million volumes is a most expensive undertaking. Yet as the Program came to a close, only a little over $2 million of the requested $15 million was received in donations for library endowment.
A library as large as Harvard's must grow rapidly just to keep its collection up to date with the results of recent research. And in an inflationary period the cost of books and periodicals has risen sharply. The cost of building operation and maintenance has moved upward at an even more alarming rate. Decentralization, which has had highly beneficial effects on scholarship, is also to be credited with sparing Harvard the necessity of replacing Widener with a vast, multi-million dollar central library building. But decentralization increase difficulties and costs in other directions.
The costs of processing materials--that is, primarily, of selecting and cataloguing them--are a major problem. Unit costs tend to rise instead of fall, as a library grows larger. Growth means that the library must deal with publications in increasingly obscure subjects and languages, that its catalogues must become increasingly complicated, and that even the relatively simple process of circulating books grows more costly. It takes longer, for example, to re-shelve a book in stacks containing two million volumes than in stacks containing only a few thousand.
Library improvement, unlike improvement in most other parts of the University, is cumulative. Any innovation that improves the quality of a library's service is sure to entail costly demands for additional service.
For example, use of Widener continued at a high level even after the opening of Lamont, so that reductions in the Widener staff never became practicable.
Cataloguing in Arrears
Program donations were insufficient to meet even the current needs of the library. In 1962 lack of funds forced the suspension of the Harvard Library Bulletin, and cataloguing lies hopelessly in arrears because of a chronic staff shortage. A cut-back drastic enough to make present income sufficient would involve giving up something like half the collection, and closing a number of buildings. Harvard would have to abdicate its traditional library pre-eminence.
Even if the library had sufficient endowment to provide for satisfactory growth of its collection and physical plant, its income would still be too low to support an adequate staff.
Low Library Salaries
A staff of more than 380--more than one third of whom are classified as professional librarians--is required to operate the Harvard library. While it leads in Faculty salary scales, Harvard unfortunately has always lagged far behind many other institutions in library salaries. In 1957 starting salaries for library employees were $3,240 at the University, compared with $4,000 for a leading public library and more than $5,000 for the library of a Midwestern municipal university. And the program simply did not provide the endowment income necessary if Harvard is to raise its library salaries to a competitive figure.
Since World War II the Harvard Houses have labored under severe handicaps. The postwar growth from a total of 3,500 undergraduates to more than 4,400 has heavily overtaxed the present buildings. The seven undergraduate Houses in existence before 1956 were designed for about 1,800 occupants in all. The increase in enrollment had combined with the growing proportion of resident students to push 1100 more students into the Houses as the Program for Harvard College was launched. Claverly and Wigglesworth were pressed into service to house 310 of this total.
Quincy House was the first to be constructed of three undergraduate Houses provided for in the Program, and it siphoned off 350, but the Houses still contain 123 per cent of their pre-war quotas. A tenth House will allow almost complete deconversion, provided Harvard does not expand further before it is constructed.
At the beginning of the Program, the Yard dormitories were in even worse shape than the Houses. With 167 upperclassmen living in Wigglesworth, and with half of Weld occupied by administrative offices, 843 freshmen were crammed into living space designed for 557. Two freshman dormitories were purchased on Prescott Street (Hurlburt and Green- ough), and the Program called for two more to be built "in the vicinity of the Yard." In practice this objective was never met. A third dormitory, Pennypacker, was purchased and remodeled, but to date no construction of new facilities has taken place. Instead, the interiors of all 18th and 19th century dormitories were extensively rebuilt, while their exteriors remained intact. This method of change symbolizes the essential conservatism of the entire Program: it was an attempt to restore in present-day terms the standards of space and comfort which marked an earlier Harvard. Yet the effort at preservation has led to a transformation; presenting drama in the Loeb or teaching art in the Carpenter Center naturally produces pressure for higher; less-amateurish, standards of performance. A similar, although less sharp, pressure for excellence, is exerted by the other new buildings although Leverett Towers, with its huge population of cubicle-dwellers, has tended to de-personalize House life. In trying to meet the physical needs of the College, the Program has to some measure furnished new standards for its intellectual life. For any attempt to preserve relative standards now requires a raising of standards. This the Program has done.
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