Critics of the University's investment philosophy have grown relatively quiet and Bennett--like his predecessor Cabot--has been an extremely successful Treasurer. Taking his role as trustee of Harvard's 300-year-old endowment seriously--"I've got to produce or they'll get a new Treasurer"--he has helped spiral the fund to four times what it was just 20 years ago. Much of the increase was caused by a rising stock market that most sharply raises the value of the 60 per cent of the billion now invested in common stock.

The steadily-enlarging stock portfolio reflects one of the major changes in American investment over the past 40 years, Bennett says. In the 1920's stocks were not considered "suitable" for conservative endowment funds. In the late '30's as confidence and stability returned to the market, more and more conservative investors began to foresake the low (two and one half to three per cent) return rates on safe bonds for the higher income and better big money opportunities of stocks. As stocks became fashionable, Harvard's bundle climbed swiftly from trace holdings before the 1929 Crash to 35 per cent of the total endowment by 1948.

The University will continue to buy more common stock, Bennett said, until it reaches that "practical limitation--the point beyond which you wouldn't want all your money" in the always slightly risky world of the market. Daily, or even yearly, shifts in the market don't really concern Harvard, he said, because an investment fund is set up so as not to succeed or fail on the strength of day to day market fluctuations -- Harvard, says Bennett, doesn't bother with "interim moves.'

Whenever a new project stalls for lack of funds, a cry arises to the effect of "well, if we're worth a billion dollars and we have the largest endowment of any private university in the country, why can't we spare a few puny millions to build..." a new indoor athletic building, for instance. That billion is capital, Bennett stresses, "and once we start cutting into that, we're going to get busted." All the University can spend from its riches for the fiscal year 1967 is the $30-$40 million it will realize in income.

And a good deal of that income has strings attached. According to Bennett, "too much of the endowment is restricted," whether to supporting specific scholarships, filling certain professorial chairs or financing one or another of the graduate schools. Moreover, there is $30 million of special investments, which cannot even be invested with the rest of the endowment. They must be sunk into specific areas--one block, for example, must be invested in the steadily declining world of railroad bonds. The unrestricted alumni contributions that come in each year are thus essential to the University's financial well being.

Bennett is an investor; he doesn't see the Harvard fund as different from the John Hancock Mutual Fund in terms of how it should be handled. His job is "to invest and reinvest the billion to provide the largest possible income." If his investments go the least bit sour, the pinch may be felt from Wigglesworth to Mallinckrodt. There's a hot line on George Bennett's desk--it goes directly to Cambridge. But some critics, with memories of the Middle South controversy, think a wall of dollars has sprung up somewhere in between