Enlarging athletic facilities, financing the arts, and preserving Memorial Church. The capital drive will incorporate "mini-drives" already underway for Memorial Church and the Soldiers Field athletic complex.

Renovating the Houses. During the '70s the Faculty skimped on building maintenance to try to hold down costs, Kaufmann says. The drive provides for work on housing to the tune of about $12 million.

Providing money for teaching innovations. The drive earmarks about $6 million to fund experimental teaching programs, as well as to support the Danforth Center for Teaching and Learning.

Preserving libraries, museums, and laboratories. The fund drive will incorporate the Fogg Museum's "mini-drive" currently underway, and will provide money for library upkeep. It also seems the Peabody Museum is slated to receive some money from the drive, after the recent controversy over the sale of a collection of paintings to pay for a conservation system for the museum's collections. The total funding for libraries and museums from the drive will amount to about $33 million.

Establishing a financial base for the public policy program. The only part of the fund drive that will largely benefit graduate schools alone will probably receive about $20 million all told.

Funding current operation of the College. While the drive is going on, the Harvard College Fund will almost certainly suspend its annual campaign. The drive provides $20-25 million to the Faculty--$4-5 million each year of the capital drive--to replace the College Fund's annual contribution to the FAS budget.

The relation between a major capital drive and the annual College Fund drive, which relies on reunions and a network of class representatives, created a sticky problem for planners. "The first rule of fund-raising is always keep your unrestricted annual giving going even while a capital drive is on," Clifton says.

But Harvard officials saw a unique opportunity to take advantage of the field-tested College Fund organization by class and area, which has broken fund-raising records for each of the past several years. "Our reunions are so strong that we were terrified of the competition between reunion giving and a capital drive," Clifton said.

So, pending Corporation approval, the College Fund's annual drive will be suspended and its network of alumni put to work for the capital drive. "A lot of pros and our colleagues in the Ivy League think we're crazy, but we feel this will simplify the drive for our alumni--there won't be any 'double-ask' and we won't have two parallel organizations," Clifton comments.

The fund drive and the College Fund might develop a "destructive rivalry" if both sought alumni money at the same time, Gibbens says. Some officials suggest that it was just this trouble which plagued Yale's recent capital drive.

Thomas M. Reardon, director of communications in the development office, says running a capital campaign organized by alumni classes is a new idea as yet untried by other universities. "We'll tell you in five years whether it's a good one," he adds.

As now planned, the fund drive's large umbrella will cover not only the College Fund but all of the University's half-dozen "mini-drives" as well, excepting the campaigns for the Busch-Reisinger Museum and the Villa I Tatti, Harvard's center for Renaissance studies in Florence, neither of which appeal to traditional Harvard contributors. The mini-drives" were the mainstay of University capital fundraising throughout the '70s and effectively focused donors' attentions on specific problems--but the College's basic needs did not receive their "due attention," Reardon says.

Fred L. Glimp '50, who took over last month as vice president for alumni affairs and development, will oversee the drive and try to keep relations between alumni fundraisers and Faculty planners cordial. Glimp says he sees his responsibility as "holding all the pieces together."

Even when the contributors are as prosperous as Harvard alumni tend to be, how easy will raising a quarter of a billion dollars in a stagnant economy be? Officials agree that only a troubled economy could cause the Corporation to decide against launching the drive. "If it gets much worse than a mild recession, we'd be crazy to kick off a drive," Glimp says. "If the drive gets delayed or put off, a really severe economic downturn would be the cause," according to Gibbens.

Ideally, Gibbens adds, the drive would start when the national economy was strong, persevere through any slump in the middle years, and end on an upswing. "But if you wait for a good time to start, there's never a good time," he says.