If you wanted to start a fund-raising drive at Harvard ten years ago, about all you had to do was pick up a phone and call a few alumni in New York, and maybe ask the Ford Foundation for three $250,000 grants over a period of three years.

The only problem with this process was that while you were making the calls to the various alumni about 100 other departments, research centers and institutes at Harvard may have been dialing the same numbers. Professors still tell stories about Harvard fund-raisers leaving alumni offices only to let in another Harvard fund-raisers to plead his case. As for the Ford Foundation, the days of the big matching grants are over. New tax laws designed to curtail foundation assets have caused organizations like Ford to cut off their grants--not with a slow phase-out but an abrupt yanking of the tap.

Nowadays the process has changed. Nobody calls anybody for money anymore without several administrative double-checks and a final OK from the president's office. The people making most of the calls are different, too. The University now has its own special projects division designed specifically to make sure that other sources besides the big contributors are being asked to give. Now glossy brochures do most of the talking for some projects.

Most important, there has been a shift in who gets called. The foundations will still get their perfunctory rings, and alumni who are far from depleted after the last $10,000 donation will still be asked to contribute. But now, because of an inflationary economy that renders infeasible a badly needed general fund drive the likes of which raised $82.5 million in the 1950s, the University is looking both inside and outside the country--for people who have never been asked to contribute to Harvard before.

When Japanese industries flooded the University in 1973-74 with $2.5 million to study Japan, it was the culmination of an effort begun by John T. Dunlop, then dean of the faculty in early 1972. Dunlop, foreseeing the cutback by 1975 of $500,000 in Ford Foundation funds to study Japan, and understanding the need to increase one of Harvard's less-developed areas of study, scraped together a team of professors and organized a task force on East Asian studies.

The task force's mission was an odd one--the professors, John K. Fairbank '29, Higginson Professor of History, Edwin O. Reischauer, University Professor, and Ezra Vogel, professor of Sociology, among them, were told to fend for themselves. They cultivated their Far East contacts and encouraged Japanese businessmen and government officials to invest in Harvard. "We must rely on alumni and business contacts--we professors are not businessmen ourselves," Fair bank recalls today.

And yet the academic team had enough ties to reel in the biggest companies--Nissan, Toyoto and Mitsubishi (a Japanese import-export firm)--despite the fact that none of these grants were tax-exempt in Japan. And the links Reischauer forged as ambassador to Japan in the 1960s figured significantly in the Japanese government's presentation last year of $1 million to Harvard to support Japanese studies.

In the short time since Harvard received the grants, the Japanese money has all but dried up. "It is an uphill battle now," Vogel says citing Japanese inflation and exorbitant oil prices that have caused many Japanese doors to close on University fund-raising efforts. But Dr. Chase N. Peterson '52, vice president for alumni affairs and development, says the University has now placed East Asian Studies second only to President Bok's recently announced public policy program on the priority list of fund-raising efforts. By doing that, Bok has taken the work out of the hands of the professors--many of them are grateful for a respite from exhausting fund-raising shuttles to East Asia--and put it in the hands of Peterson, the University's head fund-raiser.

It is now up to Peterson and his team of fund-raisers in special projects, including William S. Olney '46, director of special projects, and Morrison L. Edwards '69, development manager of the program for Harvard and East Asia, to come up with the rest of the estimated $15 million for a Japan Institute. Actually, Peterson has always had his hand in Japanese fund-raising, as well as all of Harvard's other national and international fund-raising, since he took office in the spring of 1972. He says it is his job to "know where the other hand is going," to insure that nobody gets asked for money too frequently, whether it is Toyota or an American alumnus.

His office assesses the priorities for Bok, tells groups whom to call and decides who has first crack at a particular donor. The East Asian drive is typical of the effort Peterson expects to mount in the future. He is not particularly optimistic about the prospects of increased Japanese contributing--"we might even think we won't be more successful at all in Japan," Peterson says. But he is not giving up on international fund-raising.

Instead, within the last few months, he has inaugurated, quietly, a program designed to tap a resource that Olney says has "never been asked" as long as Harvard has been fund-raising--American corporations dealing with the nation being studied. Olney says that Japanese industries have shown such good faith in donating to help study Japan that it "is only appropriate that we seek funds of U.S. corporations" that deal with Japan.

"There is a concerted effort right now to make plans to interest the private sector," Olney says. Already, in the three months since the shift has taken place in East Asian development, he has heard from IBM and Exxon, which he says may be willing to contribute to the institute.

"It was a question of initiation on the part of the Japanese corporations," Olney says of the beginning of corporation gifts to Harvard. "They saw the opportunities before American corporations." The industries were particularly responsive, Olney says, to Reischauer's speeches about mutual understanding and the need for corporations to establish a greater awareness about the countries with which they do business.

Development manager Edwards says that when Dunlop established the original task force it was "in the back of everyone's minds" that "American corporate philanthropy" could be an eventual source of funds for the University. Edwards notes, however, that "levels of corporate giving in this country are not as high as the size of gifts coming from Japan."

Olney says in the case of Japan "the timing was just right," before the energy crunch and the world-wide inflation that followed. But, he says, "if General Motors had come forward first it would have been fine--but they didn't." And now it is up to his office and the Council for East Asian Studies to convince American industries to give to what Japanese industries funded so quickly.