The school offers four degree programs, and combined enrollment has grown from 300 in 1979-80 to about 460 this year. Slightly less than half of students follow the three-year Masters in Divinity course, which ordinarily leads to ordination in one of the Protestant or Catholic faiths. The more purely academic degree, the Master of Theological Studies (MTS), usually requires two years and attracts another third of the student body. Two smaller degree programs-the one-year Master of Theology and the two-year Doctor of Theology-involve about 100 students altogether.

Despite the steady growth in enrollment. Rupp says the school simply must boost its endowment to insure that the quality of the programs doesn't slip. Toward that goal, the school will begin a major fundraising program later this year.

Rupp emphasizes that the fundraising effort will not operate on the strict timetable of a normal capital campaign--"It will be an ongoing effort to generate funds, rather than a campaign with a timeline and it set goal. The reason for that is that the Harvard constituency is, for easily understandable reasons, not ready for another endowment fund. They're just barely going to be getting out from under a major effort to raise $350 million."

No specific goal exists for the drive, but Rupp says he would like to see the endowment grow to $60 million. "If our endowment were now $60 million instead of $40 million, we would be in healthy shape," says the dean.

Associate Dean Roger H. Martin says that as part of the drive the school hopes to endow a chair in women's studies at a price tag of $1.5 million. Martin also says he hopes donors will fund chairs in each of the major religions at the school's affiliated Center for Study of World Religions.

More mundane shopping list items for the school include an expansion for its 370.000-volume library, which has waited for an addition of two new floors since the 1960s and is now bulging at the seams. Its buildings--Andover Hall, holding the chapel and administrative offices, and Rockefeller and Divinity Halls, both dormitories--need substantial maintenance work on the scale of the ongoing undergraduate House renovations. "There's a lot of sort of bricks-and-mortar work that needs to be done." Martin says.

Academic Problems

While the Divinity School grapples with its pressing financial problems, it has also confronted major academic changes during the last several years. Rupp's philosophy of what the Divinity School should be relates to fundamental problems in the world at large: the emergence of a worldwide community and the struggle for world understanding.

Rupp's mission for the school meshes "out double capacity to represent a particular religious community effectively and at the same time relate it positively to other religious traditions and to the broader society."

To achieve that goal, the school beefed up its women's studies program in 1980 and attracted funds for an Albert A. List visiting professorship, which hosts a different professor each year in the field of Jewish-Christian relations. Working with the Center for the Study of World Religions, the Divinity School also founded a program in comparative social values.

"The project is designed to promote the development of a community of scholars who collaborate across traditional disciplinary divisions to clarify similarities and differences among traditions of social values," says Rupp, "and to reflect on the policy implications of those similarities and differences."

The women's and intercultural programs try explicitly to bring outside scholars to Harvard. But during their research the scholars also teach seminars and meet with the community is speeches and forums. The school seeks to use these programs to attract a more broad-based, diverse community of students, and students say the idea is working.

"I think it's one of the most exhilirating schools I've ever been in. I like the diversity a great deal," says Vicky C. Phillips, second-year Master of Theological Studies students who hopes to go into journalism.

"One of the strong points of the Divinity School is that there's a good mix of people who have primarily academic interests and people who have more practical aims," says Richard E. Cohen, another second-year MTS candidate who studies the Jewish-Christian relationship.

But many students say that while the Divinity School succeds fabulously at attracting a wide range of students, they don't feel the school really coalesces into a community.