Paul C. Cabot '21, former Treasurer of Harvard, was in his office one day nearly 25 years ago when an elderly, disheveled man wearing an old coat drenched from a rainstorm outside walked in and sat down. Placing his briefcase on the floor, the intruder reached in and drew out his wet, muddy galoshes, and proceeded to drop them on the fine office rug. Before Cabot could say anything, the man, Arthur D. Stillman, reached in his briefcase once more and handed Cabot over $1 million worth of securities in AT&T.

Stillman's donation came in an era of an expanding national economy when former President Nathan M. Pusey '28 could easily tap great fortunes for large' scale development. But "Harvard's ability to call on wealthy alumni is rapidly nearing an end" one University fundraiser says, and Treasurer George Putnam Jr. '49 now concedes that Harvard currently faces "the hard realities of an acute financial bind where there now exists a need for hard choices."

The bottom line of soaring inflation and crippling recession that are hitting the traditional sources of outside gifts is that the cost of operating Harvard is nearly outrunning the University's ability to pay. In recent years, Putnam says, President Bok and Hale Champion, financial vice president, have "succeeded in squeezing all the old fat out, but you can't do this forever. Eventually the choices will have to be made."

To fight off the impending squeeze, Bok said this week that the University is turning to the fundraising efforts of the Development Office to cultivate new sources of income and improve upon the traditional sources of giving. It is a challenge which that office has faced in the past, and Harvard is meeting it head on with innovative techniques especially adapted for the tight economy.

The University's fund raising style is designed to tap more financial resources than in the past, by running several separate drives at once. Each one gears its approach to a constituency with a special concern in the development of one facet of the University. Not only is Harvard going overseas to reach untapped and valuable foreign fund resources, but the University has also created programs that will catch the eye of various American ethnic groups, and still others that appeal to the self interest of American and foreign corporations.

"We can appeal to self interest," Dr. Chase N. Peterson '52, vice president for alumni affairs and development, explains, "and claim that our program will benefit the group that we approach." In the East Asian Studies Program, for example, the University has been remarkably successful in convincing Japanese, Korean, and other East-Asian-based corporations that an East Asian center at Harvard will ultimately benefit these corporations because it will strengthen ties to the United States. In this same way a group of Korean business men has contributed $1 million for a chair in Modern Korean Economics and Society, hoping the chair will provide valuable training for students who will eventually return to Korea.

Similarly the Program for Jewish Studies is directing its appeal to the American Jewish community in hopes that this "valuable resource of charitable money" as one fundraiser calls it, can be tied to the University.

Harvard has done more, however, than simply redesign its fundraising drives to appeal to a certain interest group. "When the financial times are hard you get lean, musclier, and hungrier, and you start to open your door to newer forms of giving," one fundraiser said last week.

One of the more bizarre plans the University has right now is the sale of land in Florida that could net Harvard as much as $10 million.

The make-up of Harvard University determines the underlying push of these fundraising efforts. Not only are few programs free from the financial squeeze, but Peterson is now beginning to claim that if Harvard cannot "get off the plateau" and significantly increase its sources of funding, then the "golden era of Harvard College when the University could always afford to offer substantial scholarships could be nearing its end." "Harvard is the place of pre-eminent excellence," Peterson believes, and it is the fundraising done on a year by year basis that makes the University go. Without momentum, if we just sit on our hands, the Harvard of today would decay."

When Pusey gained office, he undertook the first massive fundraising effort which would radically change the structure of the University. Pusey inherited the sad financial legacy of the Conant years, during which the one major fund drive, the Tercentenary, attempted in 1936 in the middle of the Depression, was a tremendous failure. As a result of the generally poor state of fundraising, Conant attempted cut back faculty positions. The furor these cuts stirred near toppled the Conant administration.

Because of World War Two, many of the University's maintenance needs went unheeded and a great increase in House occupancy severely taxed Harvard's housing capability.

Thus when Pusey moved into Mass Hall, he recognized that fundraising would be a major factor in his administration. Pusey was convinced that American higher education had to get on a higher financial plateau if it was ever to satisfy burgeoning educational needs and provide the scholarships to make Harvard a national university.

Pusey began an extensive study of the University's needs and coaxed Faculty dean McGeorge Bundy and the Harvard Corporation into backing a huge $82.5 million general fund drive--The Program for Harvard College--to be kicked-off once a $6 million drive for the Divinity School started by Conant was completed.

No private institution, let alone university, in the United States had ever attempted a drive of this proportion before. "It was a quantum leap from anything thought of at the time," Pusey recalled last week. "With the expanding economy and the mounting operation expenditures, the costs of standing still were enormous, and this occupied me constantly," Pusey added.