"While I happen to think their choice delivered a severe blow to the President's memorial, my view is not important," he added.

In the final analysis, however, it is clear that Daly was simply unable to muster adequate support for a last-ditch effort on Harvard's part to retain at least some portion of the memorial. Community pressure and federal law combined to fell the Harvard giant.

Hale Champion, financial vice president, supports Bok's contention that Harvard's days of territorial acquisition are largely over. "We are in a steady state," he explains. "We will now try to utilize our existing space, and to reconvert old space to fit our needs, but we are not expansionary in character."

The new calculation on Harvard's part emerges from a number of sobering local developments over the past few years, not the least important of which has simply been the skyrocketing cost of construction.

More important, however, is that almost every project undertaken by the University over the past several years has met with some form of community protest. Community problems surrounding the construction of the new Mission Hill student housing project near the Medical area have only recently been ironed out. A proposed Medical area power plant has met with stiff community opposition on environmental grounds. Members of the Harvard community have criticized the recently opened Soldiers Field Road apartment complex across the river in Allston for its high rents and consequently low availability to students. And, of course, Harvard's most outspoken community critic, Cambridge Mayor Alfred E. Vellucci, who has repeatedly expressed his antagonism towards Harvard, now wants to build a track in the shape of a sausage on the overpass between the Yard and the Science Center.

"We're trying to provide a long-run assurance to the community that we're not going to be buying outside certain boundaries," Bok says. "You have to keep building a certain amount, but I'm anxious to slow that down at this point."

While community pressure on the University increases, governmental pressure on universities in general is growing at what Bok considers an alarming rate. A panoply of government regulations concerning college finance, affirmative action guidelines and access to student files have shattered the once idyllic laissez-faire posture of state and federal governments toward universities.

Bok, who lashed out against federal regulation in his annual report to the Overseers this year, says the University "has changed the line we will be following in its lobbying efforts. Unable to effectively ward off pending legislation, the University will strive to establish subtler points of access to the individuals drafting the enactments affecting Harvard.

Bok says Harvard will increase its policy research in order to "contribute to the legislative process at an earlier stage" and will decrease its apparently unsuccessful attempts to buttonhole legislators in Washington and at the State House.

According to Bok and Michael Brewer, assistant vice president for government and community affairs and Harvard's chief lobbyist, Harvard will coordinate its lobbying efforts more closely with large associations of American universities.

The University has already met with a reasonable amount of success in dealing with the problems of government intervention on a cooperative basis with other institutions. Last year, it was instrumental in forming a 30-member ad hoc consortium to draft a coherent program of finance for higher education. The consortium's report, Brewer says, "was the first major effort on the part of these institutions to confront these problems together."

Brewer is confident that the best representation of the interests of higher institutions like Harvard in the future will be by the big educational combines. "Five years ago, higher education was sacrosanct to the government," he says. "Now, institutions are forced to compete head on with other groups and other needs, and the role of associations thus seems more in tune with political and social reality."

If Harvard has a tough time dealing on a one-to-one basis with the legislative bodies, it hasn't faced too many problems with a regulatory agency like the NLRB. In fact, because of its seemingly "favored" position, the University was forced all year to fend off charges on the part of District 65 of the Distributive Workers of America that Harvard somehow "owns or controls" the labor board.

The District 65 matter has been in the hands of the NLRB both in Boston and in Washington for nearly two years now, and the charges that Harvard controls the board stem from the fact that after lengthy foot-dragging, every decision reached by the board save one has gone against the union. The charges sound like sour grapes to many members of the Harvard administration, as well as to members of the board itself, but they are, in part, grounded in reality.

Although Harvard does not literally control the decisions reached by the board, it is capable of exerting a lion's share of influence on any given matter--indeed, on any legal matter at all--simply by virtue of the quality and quantity of its legal know-how. Daniel Steiner '54, general counsel to the University, and the law firm of Ropes and Gray, working in tandem on the District 65 case, provided a seemingly airtight defense for the University--one which the regional board apparently took so seriously that it chose to quote the Harvard brief at length in its final decision on the case.

With a worsening on-campus labor outlook, Harvard nonetheless appears well-equipped to go the necessary distance with the NLRB. The evaporation of the paternalism upon which Harvard once prided itself notwithstanding, the road still seems pretty clear for the University. As Leslie Sullivan, Medical area organizer for District 65, says, "Harvard is playing with a stacked deck."

Bok puts it somewhat differently: "We see this as simply a muddy area of the law, but the odds are very good that we are right on it."