At other times, their reasons are sharp and to the point. Dean Glimp has said, "A private university like Harvard just cannot afford to decentralize the decision-making structure." And Dean Trottenberg told students who wanted seating, "The people who give money to Harvard seem to be quite pleased with the way the school is run right now. Will you be able to run it as effectively?"
These men must be given the credit they deserve for removing the financial motivation of decision-making from most discussions. If it were well-known, student protest would be much more dangerous. When they do discuss financial decisions, administrators cherish the impression that policy decisions are dictated by economic necessity. Actually, the policy decisions are made, then the financial criteria are set up accordingly. For instance, administrators usually counter the arguments of reformers by claiming that this or that change "would be too expensive." Thus, we must raise tuition, but, they say, we "can't afford" to raise scholarships. Or, we can't invest part of the endowment in Roxbury because "we can't afford to lose all that interest." In hiding behind this economic determinism, the administration avoids confronting the reforms on their own merits.
Administrators say they have little control over how our $1 billion endowent is spent. They claim that most of the funds are "tied"--the term applied to a money gift when it stipulates a specific expenditure. Actually, Harvard's University Fund, which holds all the untied money, compises almost one-third of the total endowment. Last year, more than $25 million of the total $130 million which Harvard received in gifts was untied. So administrators have ample funds to use at their own discretion.
For example, the administration announced last year that the Faculty of Arts and Sciences had fallen into the "red." What that meant, really, was that the Faculty had spent more than the planners had decided it deserved. They had decided that the University's money could be better used elsewhere--like for the underpass, which cost $2 million.
What about the tuition hike without a commensurate raise in scholarships? This, too, is economic double-talk which conceals specific political priorities. In a term paper on University financial decisions written for David Riesman last spring, David Labaree '69 concludes:
The fact is, that with real expenses rising linearly and the investments rising exponentially, Harvard cannot lose over time by allowing the endowment to shoulder more of the burden which student fees now carry....The lowered growth rate will over time approach the old higher rate asymptotically.
Conventional wisdom has it that while the Board of Overseers has the final legal power over university decisions, the Corporation is the real financial planning body of Harvard. This is quite alarming because the five-man Corporation is dominated by super-rich big businessmen and is self-perpetuating to boot.
Actually, the Corporation is little more than a rubber stamp for the recommendations of President Pusey and Treasurer Bentinck-Smith. And the latter's proposals are prepared by the team of "experts" in Massachusetts Hall known as the administrators. Of course, the administration cannot make decisions contrary to the interests of the wealthy businessmen who compose the Corporation. So their decisions must allow Harvard to make an ever increasing amount of money above cost. This means Harvard must present a "good image," and, ultimately, that student activity must be kept in line with what is acceptable to that particularly conservative element of society