See this story's original coverage in The Crimson

By the time the Class of 1957 had entered their freshman year, the College was facing a looming crisis. Before World War II, the number of students enrolled at the College had barely topped 2,700, however, in the post-war era enrollment swelled to over 3,700 students. In addition, University leaders said a decrease in the number of rooms available for student use had led to significant overcrowding in the Houses, as doubles became triples or quads and meal lines grew longer and longer. As more and more young men sought a Harvard education, the College eschewed slowing its growth and instead embarked upon a years-long fundraising campaign of unprecedented reach and complexity.

According to a report delivered by University President Nathan M. Pusey ’28 to the Board of Overseers on Oct. 8, 1956, approximately 1,200 additional students were living in Harvard undergraduate housing above the number the dorms were built to accommodate. Upperclassmen without space in their houses were being forced to retreat to the freshmen-only yard, taking up residence in Wigglesworth Hall. The College was in desperate need of more space.

“There is an immense backlog of building need here to be met,” Pusey said. “One House immediately, two more as quickly as they can be had, and, as well, increased dormitory space for Freshmen, are required to resolve this critical situation. In my judgment these are minimum requirements if we are to return to the best educational use of the House system.”

In the fall of 1956 the Harvard Student Council, through a subcommittee chaired by Jerry Goldberg ’57, administered a college-wide survey about overcrowding in the Houses, tutorials and classes. The survey results, compiled in a report entitled “Growth and Development of Harvard College,” showed that the most serious problem lay within the Houses, as 71 percent of respondents felt that the Houses were overcrowded. In addition, the report highlighted problems springing from the overcrowding, including a lack of student-faculty contact and feelings of isolation among students.

“The House does provide the student with a sense of community, as we have noted above. However, the sense of belonging is not potent enough to dissipate a strong feeling of detachment and isolation,” the report reads. “The House has been unable to cope with this sense of impersonality bred by the growing size of the University.”

Unfortunately, a housing shortage was not the only problem the College had to confront. Pusey also stressed the need for increased salaries for professors, an area in which the College was losing its previously “unchallenged lead to which no small part of Harvard’s present greatness may be attributed.” In a report to the Class of 1930 given by the Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences McGeorge Bundy in 1955, he wrote that professorial salaries have not been able to keep up with the rises in cost of living. According to Bundy, since 1930 the salaries of full professors at Harvard have risen 30 percent while the cost of living increased by 60 percent. This also represented a relative loss in salary compared with other professions.

“The Harvard professor is a poorer man today than he has been for generations,” Pusey wrote.

Also among the pressing needs Pusey cited in his report were the shortage of housing for married students, the lack of space for the growing Chemistry, Behavioral Sciences and Astronomy Departments and the need for more professorships and money for financial aid.

“We have an exceptionally good College and we are proud of it,” Pusey wrote. “But we know the College, as the heart of the University, cannot hope to continue to provide a strong active intellectual life for its students and to contribute to human welfare in future generations if the present generation of Harvard men does not promptly and determinedly provide the necessary resources to go forward.”

BIRTH OF A PROGRAM

And so, Pusey announced his intention to create the Program for Harvard College (PHC), a capital campaign to raise $82.5 million—over $575 million today—by Commencement Day of 1959. The drive would be the largest in the history of American higher education, and would mark the first modern fundraising campaign undertaken by a university, according to historian of Harvard Morton Keller. Investment banker Alexander M. White ‘25, a partner in the New York based White, Weld & Company firm, was named general chairman of the program by Pusey in 1956. Working with him would be Thomas S. Lamont ‘21 of J.P. Morgan & Company and David Rockefeller ‘36 of the Chase Manhattan Bank.

The program, though not officially announced until the Class of 1957’s Commencement, had been underway for some time. By Oct. 31, 23 days after Pusey’s report to the Board of Overseers calling for the program, it had already raised approximately $1.2 million according to the Office of the Recording Secretary.

The idea for a massive capital campaign for the College may have even proceeded October. In a letter dated Feb. 4, 1957 to William Bentinck-Smith ’37, Pusey’s assistant, Lamont even remarked that “It could be said that the groundwork for the Program was laid in the spring of 1953 when the Corporation brought the name of Nathan M. Pusey to the Overseers as the 24th President of Harvard College.”

A MULTIFACETED CAMPAIGN

The PHC’s fundraising efforts consisted of much more than letters and phone calls. Indeed, it became a sustained multimedia promotional campaign that sought to reach Harvard alumni all over the country though publications, lavish dinners, and the radio and television airwaves.

In the spring of 1957, the PHC published the first issue of Harvard Today, a magazine dedicated to disseminating information about the program and encouraging donations from the college’s 45,000 alumni. Overseen by managing editor Frank Pemberton ‘42 and editor Bentinck-Smith, the pages of Harvard Today were filled with news about the progress of the campaign and features that emphasized the utility and necessity of the PHC. Among the contributors to the first issue were Bundy, White and then-Massachusetts Senator John F. Kennedy ‘40.

The PHC’s promotional campaign did not stop with printed publications. The Crimson reported that by the fall of 1957 top university officials were gearing up to attend a series of dinners held throughout the nation to court the purses of wealthy alums. A promotional film entitled “To the Age that is Waiting” was made to highlight the needs of the College and was to be screened at the dinners. Narrated by Pusey and Bundy and written by novelist John P. Marquand ‘15, the film emphasized the importance of Harvard’s history in encouraging alumni to safeguard its financial future. On April 12, 1958 “To the Age that is Waiting” debuted on Boston television, according to the Boston Sunday Herald`.

The PHC broke new ground again when an hour-long commercial entitled “Case for the College,” read by Pusey, hit the radio airwaves in March of 1958. According to the Boston Sunday Herald, this marked the first time that a college had run a commercial to solicit funds. In addition to being broadcast nationwide, the piece was carried by stations in Canada, Ecuador, Korea, the United Kingdom, China and beyond.

The commercial followed the development of a Harvard student through his four years using the voices of students interspersed with the voices of eminent alumni and faculty. The New York Times reported on March 29 that the show had cost $6,000 to produce and $10,000 to air and included the voices of famed composer Leonard Bernstein ’39, then-Secretary of Defense Neil H. McElroy ’25 and Kennedy.

The multifaceted nature of the campaign proved to be effective. According to a receipt prepared in the Office of the Recording Secretary, the program raised approximately two million dollars in paid gifts by December 15, 1956 and an additional $1.6 million in unpaid pledges. By June 11, 1959—Commencement Day for the Class of 1959—the program had raised only $61 million, or 74 percent, of its goal of $82.5 million, according to the Boston Sunday Herald. A $2.5 million donation from Harold S. Vanderbilt on January 3, 1960 finally pushed the campaign to its goal, bringing the first modern college fundraising campaign to a close.]

NEW HOUSES, NEW HARVARD

Though most undergraduates at the time were not following the progress of the PHC, they could feel the housing pinch that spurred it. The seven existing houses—Adams, Dunster, Eliot, Kirkland, Leverett, Lowell and Winthrop—were built for a normal capacity of 1,846 undergraduates, according to the October 1957 issue of Harvard Today. By 1957, that number had ballooned to 2,955. With the funds from the PHC, an eighth house was to be built by 1959. In March of 1957, The Crimson reported that the block bounded by Mill, Mt. Auburn, Plympton and DeWolfe Streets had been chosen as the site for the new House and would cost about $5 million to construct. At the time, the site was occupied by a psychological clinic, Mather Hall—a part of Leverett House—and a row of houses on DeWolfe St. In the three decades since the construction of Lowell House in 1930, the cost of handsome Georgian architecture had ballooned out of the range of possibility, so the residents of Quincy House would have to do without the entryway system, bell towers, and the multitude of fireplaces that characterized the older Houses. The other two other additions to the House system paid for by the program—the Leverett Towers and Mather House—would be completed in 1960 and 1970, respectively.

Money from the PHC also addressed a different kind of overcrowding—that of Harvard’s undergraduate drama spaces. “Apart from antiquated Sanders, Harvard still has no proper theatre. Student producers must make do with what space they can find: common rooms and dining halls, a museum courtyard, a disused swimming pool, even a roped off street,” the program wrote in promotional material. New York investment banker John L. Loeb ’24 contributed $1 million of the $1.5 million needed for the Loeb Drama Center, which opened in 1960. Four years later construction finished on the final building to come out of the campaign, William James Hall, the new home of the Behavioral Sciences Department.

As the old adage goes, “When Harvard sneezes the rest of the world catches a cold.” The PHC was the first modern capital campaign undertaken by a university, and it revolutionized fundraising in American higher education. In the years that followed the end of the PHC, over 130 universities and colleges around the nation launched capital campaigns of their own, raising upwards of $750 million. From its ambitious announcement at the Class of 1957’s Commencement, the Program for Harvard College would shape the undergraduate experience for generations of Harvard students since, and for generations yet to come.

—Staff writer Jamison A. Hill can be reached at jahill@fas.harvard.edu.