Just how much is the love of Harvard alumni for their alma mater worth? The University is betting it will be worth at least a quarter of a billion dollars over the next five years. Assuming the Corporation formally agrees--which now seems almost certain--Harvard will launch a five-year, $250-million fund drive some time this fall, a grand scheme that administrators hope will bolster Harvard's massive $1.4 billion endowment in the face of relentless inflation.

The drive didn't spring forth, full grown and armed, from anyone's head; the idea has floated back and forth between Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) offices and University fund-raising centers for at least two years. But the drive only began to take definite form in recent months and now awaits nothing but Corporation approval--expected late this spring--before the appeals for money can start. Harvard's development officials are already establishing a network of volunteers in each class and geographical area who will be ready to comb their classmates for money the moment the drive officially opens--perhaps after a two-day or longer stopover in Cambridge for training and instruction on just where the money they raise will go and why Harvard needs it.

Why does proverbially rich Harvard need so much money so fast? And where will it all go? The last major University fund drive--the Campaign for Harvard College in 1958, which raised $82 million--financed expansion and left tangible results in its wake, including Holyoke Center. This time around, the bulk of the money, earmarked chiefly for the College to finance faculty salaries, student aid and academic reform, will disappear into bank accounts and endowment investments. There won't be any new buildings for generous contributors to plant their names on.

Though you can't see the College's problems on a walk through the Yard, administrators emphasize the size and the seriousness of Harvard's needs. Most students have already met the chief culprit, inflation, through burgeoning annual increases in college costs. But cost hikes reveal only part of the problem.

Inflation eats away at the real value of the Harvard endowment, the guarantor of the University's immortality, even as the number of dollars in the portfolio reaches new heights. A major goal of the fund drive will be to raise money to endow chairs for current Faculty members, so the Faculty can re-allocate the money it now uses to pay them. Roughly $80 million in fund drive revenues will probably go towards this end, the largest single item on the fund drive's list, according to tentative figures supplied by Peter F. Clifton '49, director of the Harvard College Fund.

As Robert E. Kaufmann '62, FAS associate dean for finance and administration, explains, a donor pays for a program or a tenured chair and gives enough capital to keep the program running each year. But inflation eats away at the value of the income from that capital year by year. Because Harvard remains committed to the program, the Faculty must move in and make up the difference. This erosion affects every endowed program and chair under the Faculty's wing, and more and more of the Faculty's unrestricted income--money it may spend as it wishes--becomes tied up in these restricted uses.

Besides securing the endowment against inflation, the fund drive will help combat an overall decline in the real value of the average faculty income. "One long-range question is whether we're going to be able to attract the same quality of faculty," Thomas O'Brien, vice president for financial affairs, says.

Planners also hope higher faculty salaries will make academic jobs more attractive to graduating students who now flock to lucrative professional jobs. The fund drive will "specifically provide" for increased funding of junior faculty positions, says Alfred M. Gibbens, director of development.

Whatever its long-range effect on the endowment and faculty salaries, inflation hits hardest at students and their parents, who feel its effects when term bill time comes around. To ensure that Harvard can continue its policy of providing financial support for all students who show they need it, the fund drive will set aside about $32 million for loans, scholarships and work-study programs.

The College pulled through the mid-'70s by raising tuition and cutting corners, and now it has no choice but "to moderate further tuition increases through a new burst of capital," Kaufmann says. Although Harvard has not been "cavalier" about passing increased costs on to students, as Kaufmann puts it, the University has recently come to depend more and more on income from students.

"The Harvard student body today bears more of the University's costs than the student ten years ago," O'Brien says.

A net increase in the size of the undergraduate student body during the '70s because of the admission of more women helped bring in more tuition money for a while; but the growth has leveled off, Kaufman says.

Officials have had their eyes for some time on the Harvard "middle income" group of students whose family incomes fall between $20,000 and $35-40,000 annually. They fear that more of these students whom Harvard accepts will decide to go elsewhere, threatening the diversity of future College classes. Fund drive planners hope their efforts will keep enough aid money available for these students, while admissions and financial aid officers continue heavily publicizing Harvard's aid and loan programs.

The largest single items in the fund drive are faculty salaries and student aid, but together they add up to less than half of the total amount to be raised. The other "lines" in the proposed drive budget include:

Funding the Core Curriculum. Roughly $24 million is slated for this, the most glamorous and concrete of the drive's goals. It is not clear right now exactly where the money will go; but course development, administrative costs, and classroom renovation for the Core are sure to cost the Faculty a good deal.