For Dean of the College Harry R. Lewis '68, student groups may be on the top of students' priority lists, but administrators rank other needs higher.

"Focusing on 'what students want' would tend to focus on short-term goals, and we constantly have to think about the long--indeed the very long--term goals," Lewis wrote in an e-mail message. "The only reason Harvard has been around for 360 years is that each generation has thought about the needs of future generations, not just about its own."

"I am not sure that there would be many people paying the bills to go here who would want the expenditures of those dollars prioritized by some plebiscite among students," Lewis added.

Instead, alumni may turn to Faculty members like Sidney Verba '53, director of the University Library and Pforzheimer University professor of government, to prioritize their funds. Verba says funding libraries is at least as essential to the student experience as funding student groups.

"If the libraries weren't here, the University wouldn't be here," he says, adding that undergraduate use of the University libraries has increased over the years as curricula changed.

"The Core curriculum is no longer a list of 50 Great Books," he says. "Today, undergraduates get some exposure to the depth of a subject."

So for Verba, the libraries are one concern that is crucial to student satisfaction. And alumni, wooed by the University and its campaign-raising efforts, tend to look no further.

"I leave it up to the University," says Whipple V.N.Jones '32, who has given over $10 million in unrestricted donations to the College Fund.