At Harvard's highest administrative level, a body of seven men functions as the University's board of trustees.

However the workings of the board remain relatively mysterious to most of the University community. The President Treasurer, and five Fellows who make up the Corporation prefer to remain in the background letting others implement their decisions. Today, in the final two installments of a three part series. The Crimson examines the history of the Harvard Corporation, how its role has hanged over the last 334 years and how it governs the University today.

The Corporation is often referred to as "The Oldest Self-Perpetuating Body in the Western Hemisphere" because it has continually replenished its ranks without outside interference since 1650, as Samuel Eliot Morrison and Seymour Martin Lipset describe in their histories of Harvard. But during the past 334 years its role within the University has changed considerably. The Corporation has always supervised Harvard's finances, but after 250 years of relatively easy management, the job has become increasingly complex in this century.

The Corporation has also eased away from scholarly matters: its early days it played a vigorous day-to-day role in the academic administration of the College, but today it only exerts a final check on all but the most extreme issues of teaching and research.

Harvard was founded on October 28, 1636, with a grant of *400 from the Massachusetts Legislature, but its governing boards did not take their present form until 14 years later. A year after the College's founding the first Board of Overseers was appointed with six magistrates and six ministers, and they chose Nathaniel Eaton of Trinity College, Cambridge, and the University of Frankener in the Netherlands, as Harvard's first Master President. But Eaton did not survive his second year after he was indicted for assault for nearly bludgeoning his assistant to death with a walnut club The board fired him.

For the next 12 years the College endured great financial hardship. It did secure a few large donations, most notably John Harvard's, but it also depended on the help of the legislature, which granted Harvard the revenues of the Boston-to-Charleston ferry and a special tax called the College Corne--Each New England family was required to donate a peck of wheat for the College's support.

The Overseers of the 1640s also established a precedent which would continue for more than 200 years, that of incessant meddling in the College's day-to-day affairs. Harvard's second president. Henry Dunster, was continually hampered by the overseers' intrusion into mundane administrative decisions and the small budget they allowed him.

At Dunster's urging the legislature redefined the College's governance in 1650, establishing the bicameral system that has persisted with only one major modification until today. The Corporation, composed of the president, treasurer, and five Fellows, won primary control over the institution. The Board of Overseers became a supervisory group composed of clergy and local magistrates to represent the community. The Overseers were designed as the higher board, but then as today, they met less frequently and were supposed to cede day-to-day power to the Corporation. Until the boards escaped from control of the state legislature in 1865, the two continually locked horns over who would actually run the fledgling Harvard.

Much of the controversy centered on religion. The College, first a Puritan Seminary, became enmeshed in pitched theological battles as other denominations won seats on the governing boards. At the end of the 17th century, President Increase Mather fought unsuccessfully to turn the College into a Calvinist seminary. He failed, but after King William III nullified the College Charter in 1697, the debate began in the legislature. Mather continued to try to block non-Congregationalists from serving on the Corporation but still failed to have his wishes put in writing. Ultimately he was forced to resign.

His dismissal began one of the periodic battles between the Corporation and the Overseers--which continued until 1865--over who should be appointed president. The Corporation nominated John Leverett, but the religiously conservative legislature blocked his appointment--which they could legally do because Harvard was operating without a charter. But Governor Thomas Dudley was a friend of Leverett's, and he overrode the King's order, disempowering Leverett's opponents, and paving the way for his friend's presidency.

Leverett supervised the most significant change in the Corporation's history, introducing outsiders to the group. Since its founding the body followed the English model, in which all of the Fellows were also tutors in the College, but in 1717 three of the Fellows died and were replaced with outside ministers, not tutors.

The tutors, led by Nicholas Sever, complained that the move treated them as second class citizens, and they argued before the legislature for the right to a monopoly of the Corporation. The fight lasted three years, and in the end the tutors won in what is considered an early victory for academic freedom, an issue the Corporation has had to deal with repeatedly since 1650.

Sever had been dismissed from the board because of his religious and political beliefs, but in 1725 he won reinstatement. For the next half century the Corporation continued in the English tradition with at least three Faculty members serving on the board. Not until 1780 did the neat, modern division of academic and supervisory policy power between the Faculty and Corporation became permanent.

Despite Sever's political victory, the Corporation was not a real exponent of academic freedom in the 18th century. It still engaged in frequent battles with the Overseers over University business and frequently hired and fired professors for their personal beliefs. Harvard would have to wait over 100 years, until the term of President Charles William Eliot, before the University's hiring policy truly reflected respect for academic freedom.

In this period the Corporation was expanding Harvard into the research and teaching institution we see today, and taking greater interest in the University's finances. Hollis, Massachusetts, and Harvard Halls all rose in the 1760s, and the colonial College was on the way to becoming a true University.