For more than 90 years, the student members of Phillips Brooks House Association, Inc. (PBHA) have been committed to helping the needy adults and children of Cambridge and Boston.

But for at least a quarter of that history, student leaders of the University's largest public service organization have been locked in a series of battles with the College administration over how the group should be run.

"It is a cyclical conflict between PBHA and the administration," says Greg A. Johnson '72, the outgoing executive director of the PBHA organization. "Unless the structure is changed and either the students or the administration [are] given complete control, the problem can never be truly resolved."

Twenty-five years ago, the organization entered a period of financial difficulties and begged the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) for a subsidy simply to keep its doors open.

Today, the battle has come nearly full circle, with the student leaders of the nearly 2,000-member organization demanding increased financial and administrative autonomy.

A Growing Organization

Phillips Brooks House was built in 1900, and PBHA was established in 1904. Its initial purpose was to help the needy in the city of Cambridge; but, beginning in 1954, the association became involved in projects in the metropolitan Boston area and neighboring communities.

The new activities pushed against the organization's financial and administrative limits.

"We probably did become more grandiose," says then-PBHA president Christopher D. Hoy '70-'71.

For example, in 1960, PBHA introduced a program called Project Tanganyika that prepared students to take a year off to travel to Africa to do volunteer work.

The expansion resulted in greatly increased expenditures for coordinating the central operation of the association with the work of the individual committees.

"[Money] was always a problem," Hoy says. "But there wasn't that much administrative staff--one executive secretary and her assistant. She knew everything. People like me came and went."

In the early 1960s, the need for money for PBHA's expanded slate of programming was filled by grants from foundations. But by 1965 these initial grants ran out, and PBHA was forced to turn to the College for money.

In 1966, PBHA applied to the FAS administration for emergency funding. A $20,000 subsidy was granted by then-dean of the Faculty Franklin L. Ford for the 1967-1968 academic year.

The purpose of this money was to pay professional consultants, to improve cost-accounting and to provide personnel for fundraising.