Besides accepting gifts, the President and Corporation play several roles in fund-raising: as the highest budgetary authority of the University, they determine what areas deserve the priority of a formal drive, what will be its goals, and who should head the campaign. Individuals on the Corporation often serve on campaign committees. The President, of course, is the University's best solicitor; his development assistants try to protect him for that very reason. When it is important, he will talk with the potential donor. The Development Office may ask him perhaps 10 times a year to speak to a party, and Pusey on his own initiative may talk to a dozen people about specific needs. Anyone contributing over $1000 to the University automatically receives a letter from the President.
When a drive begins to take shape in a development office, it is Pusey who must persuade an alumni leader to become the general chairman, find members for the executive committee, and spend some time with them so that they know the University is interested.
Pusey has initiated two major changes in the nature of Harvard fund-raising since he became President in 1953. First was the enormity of the $82.5 million Program for Harvard College. "It took a lot of persuading to convince people that the goal was realistic," he recalls. "Nowhere near that much had been raised before." The major innovation of this drive, in Pusey's view, was the frankness with which it expressed the College's backlog of needs. The fact that it was successful allowed Princeton and other colleges to begin major capital campaigns.
Scarcely had the Program for Harvard College ended, however, when the $58-million Program for Harvard Medicine began. As with the College drive, it was understood that this campaign would have priority over other efforts. Alumni work and publicity centered on the medical drive, while other faculties continued to find funds quietly.
"At the completion of the Program for Harvard Medicine," says Pusey, "I asked each dean to state his school's capital needs for the next 10 years. It showed me that another major program would not be practical and would tend to create a mood of continual hopelessness." He also felt that in the face of so many demands, he would have a hard time justifying an other single central effort.
At that point; Pusey made his second major change and announced that he did not want to see another single campaign dominate the University. The new approach was to move ahead on all fronts. The result is the long list of individual capital drives, whose total is $160 million. Also, each school has its own annual giving program. These campaigns, which include the College Fund, are for unrestricted gifts with the exception of scholarships.
A new step this year was Pusey's requirement that the head of the Harvard schools must put down the operating and capital budget with a 10-year perspective, explaining the amount of money involved and from where it will come. Pusey looks to the government as the inevitable source for the ever-increasing operational costs and capital needs.
He considers it one of his major tasks to exert his influence upon officials who will be setting legislative policy on education. "To base grants on just a per-capita basis would be disastrous to Harvard," he says. "People must recognize that it costs more to educate a specialist or graduate student than an undergraduate, just as a senior is more expensive than a freshman."