And so though the Committee demonstrates the myth of Harvard's uniqueness and says "there's no turning the clock back," it implies that only the intangible aura of the community can save the University's standards of excellent. The chapter on The Harvard Community concludes with the vague but pregnant advice: "It is appropriate to ask whether it lies within its power to make Cambridge a more attractive setting for life as well as for work. . . . By providing a milieu encouraging to the development of a variety of subcommittees it could widen the options for involvement open to the Faculty. And it could help to generate a sense of common intellectual interest that might transcend the differences among its members."
"If ties of the individual to the University are weakened further, the costs of competing in the open market for the services of a faculty of quality may be far higher than can now be reckoned," the report warns ominously. But the Committee is as conservative in the measures it recommends for rebuilding community as it is bold in defining the problem.
A NUMBER of influences on Harvard's attractiveness are not treated at all. The most disappointing omission (at least to students) is the lack of any detailed treatment of undergraduate or graduate teaching. Though the report concedes that Harvard's "capacity to attract students of high quality," is crucial to attracting faculty, it goes no further. It does not consider how the attractiveness of Harvard to Faculty might change if standards of recruitment altered--specifically if more emphasis were placed on getting men eager and able to teach.
A man's skill as a teacher now has virtually nothing to do with his chances of getting a tenured position at Harvard. The ad hoc committee system has considerable advantages of impartiality and expertise, but as one veteran of six or seven of these said last week, it makes a man's appointment hinge on what he has written and on what his colleagues say about him, since the committees usually have no information on his competence as a teacher, especially if he is at an outside university.
There is no particular malice in the Committee's exclusion of the issue of teaching undergraduates; it did not consider the opposite possibility either--converting Harvard to the style of Columbia or Chicago where most of the top professors do not teach undergraduates. The report simply accepted as a given the present balance of undergraduate and graduate instruction.
The structure and internal government of departments gets slightly fuller treatment, but the Committee here is very circumspect in its recommendations. It acknowledges that the alienation of junior from senior Faculty, their "exclusion from discussions of curriculum . . . and social isolation" is "the most painful aspect of their life at Harvard."
But the tradition of departmental autonomy is inviolable here, and predictably the Committee does not try to tell the History or Government departments how they should behave toward their junior faculty. It recommends merely "that each department review its practice as they affect this relationship," and that Dean Ford request the results of these reports from certain departments. Instructors cannot vote now in the Faculty; and the Committee would retain that rule, requiring three years of service from an assistant professor before he is given the vote.
In many places the report latches on to the quickness of Harvard's growth, revealing with a certain awe that the number of tenured appointments has risen by 50 per cent since 1951 and questioning what governs the pattern of this growth. The Committee says that the direction of future expansion is "central to the future strength to the Faculty," but does not presume to say directly how future appointments ought to be distributed.
Instead the Committee recommends a system of continuous data-gathering, so that educational goals can be constantly balanced with exact information on financial resources. Also Dean Ford is encouraged to prepare periodic reports on the departments--rather like HPC audits from the opposite end of a department's operations. The report recommends that the Dean of the Faculty be given "even greater power" to influence the allocation of new professorships.
Only obliquely does the Committee suggest the direction in which Harvard should be channeling its resources. One significant recommendation asks the University to budget money "to redress in part the vast imbalance in the availability of outside research funds." "I wouldn't say we should be simply counter-cyclical," Dunlop said Monday, but clearly this clause is an attempt to protect the Humanities at a time when federal funds and foundation money are flowing into the Natural and Social Sciences. "We cannot change the world in five seconds," Dunlop said, "but we may set precedents which others will choose to follow."
THE COMMITTEE'S most delicate problem in suggesting ways to strengthen the community was what to say about Cambridge. The University's relations with the City have been improving in recent years, and there have been signs of a thaw in the Cambridge School Committee's traditional coldness to offers of help from the Ed School. But the CCA committeemen who have consistently voted for Harvard help are the minority on the Committee now and any slap at the quality of Cambridge schools would be disastrously impolitic. At the same time, the exodus to Belmont and Lexing ton in the last 15 years has been led by professors with school-age children, and the report could not be silent on the education of Faculty children. Still it was equivocal.
If the Committee ever seriously considered recommending a university school for Harvard, there is no hint of it in the report. In fact it says specifically that "there is no case" for the idea. The report calls much of Harvard's hostility to the Cambridge schools ill-informed; the best of the city's elementary schools are as good as those in the suburbs, it says. And it recommends that, "if invited," the University should provide teachers and advisers on released time.
But there is one punch at Cambridge mingled with this praise and encouragement. The report calls the quality of Cambridge high schools at present "unsatisfactory" and recommends that the University expand its loan program to provide money for Faculty who want to send their children to a private secondary school. The loan program, by subsidizing local private schools, could have the same effect as establishing a University school. This change, together with University building on its Shady Hill property, might concentrate a bit more of the Harvard population in Cambridge.
A CLOUD of financial restraint hangs over the entire report. Present Federal aid to education is now geared to developing new "centers of excellence" around the country, and the report seems to assume that the current financial squeeze on established private college is going to get worse. With its final paragraph, the report delivers the coup de grace to the notion that Harvard can be universally excellent: "The Committee recommends that the Faculty concentrate upon a limited number of areas in which it can provide top-quality leadership rather than seek to achieve a full spectrum of appointments in every department and academic specialty. Given financial constraints, the Faculty cannot hope to cover all fields and specialties without risking a dilution of quality. On a departmental level we endorse cooperative arrangements with other institutions in the area to reduce duplication and to provide a more effective community of scholars."
That conclusion probably means that the next few years will find the University linking with M.I.T. and B.U. to cover fields in which Harvard is weakest and to start programs in undeveloped areas of scholarship. The recommendation also sounds the note of "community," which the Committee once again insists must be strengthened if the University is to remain excellent. But how? This group of seven professors, brooding and sifting through data for a year, only began to answer.