Intimate Academics?

Although the large classes did well with Harvard academics, Harvard academics suffered under the strain. The huge numbers put considerable stress on University resources. The majority of the returning veterans chose to study the sciences, and lecture halls were filled with hundreds of students, crouching in the aisles and standing against the walls.

And the College also was still grappling with the impact of the February 1946 announcement that

the "joint instruction" between Harvard and Radcliffe students begun during the war when instructors were scarce would become a permanent co-education system.

The tutorial and advising systems suffered much under the crowding strain. It was under this pressure that the University first began a heavy reliance on teaching fellows and non-faculty advisors.

The College had spent years developing a tutorial system to put students in contact with upper-level faculty for advising and instruction. As more and more first years arrived, teaching fellows were hired to advise at $20 per student. The arrangements threatened the intimate faculty-student relations upon which Harvard prided itself.

Dean Bender called the ad hoc solutions "highly unsatisfactory."

Dean of Freshman Delmar Leighton saw them as necessary sacrifices to the exigencies of the day, but hoped future students would receive more individual treatment during their first year.

"[First year advisers] are the least experienced members of the teaching staff and are not likely to have the knowledge of different fields in which freshman need competent guidance," he said.

"It is my hope that the return of more normal conditions will make it possible to reduce the proportion of inexperienced men on the Board of Freshman Advisers and to…give to Freshman access to their fair share to the experience and wisdom of the whole teaching staff," he continued.

Growing Classes

A return to normalcy never occurred. The College, bloated from the 3,500 students for which it was designed to the 5,300 which it took in 1946, grew even larger in the next few years. Administrators expected the Class of 1950 to undergo "shrinkage" as the veterans simmered in Harvard's crucible, but the veterans' success undid their plans.

The next two entering classes were even larger as Harvard hedged its bets on the Korean War draft, accepting more students than it could handle to compensate in advance for the students it would lose to conscription.

The losses never came, and Bender, looking back on those years, saw the increased enrollment as "a surprising and regrettable fact." In an annual report he lamented the heavy burdens on faculty and facilities and ascribed them to "the continued remarkably low rate of loss of students because of academic failure."

A resilient Harvard accommodated the growing classes. Lamont Library opened in January 1949, and the undergraduates entrenched in the overcrowded Widener Library reading rooms left the University libraries for their own.

But Radcliffe students, whose access to Widener was restricted, were barred from entering the new library. The policy was justified by officials who said the staff needed to oversee a co-ed group of students in reading rooms was prohibitively expensive.

In many ways, the sudden arrival of those 1,645 first years made Harvard College the school it is today. Enrollment jumped from 3,500 to 6,000 that fall, and while later enrollments would start to decline, the accommodations the College made to compensate for the student crunch were not to dissipate so readily.