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8 Takeaways From Harvard’s Task Force Reports

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"Yale is singularly like a poor man who has been given a house to live in and has difficulty in paying the grocer," remarks the Yale alumni Weekly. The comment is equally true of Harvard. With one of the finest college libraries in the country. Harvard has no money to operate its ventilating system in the reading room. With gold-encrusted beams in Adams House, it cannot afford to provide rooms enough in Dunster House for tutors. Every moth has seen additions to Harvard's skyline, and every new building has increased the expenses of maintainance without providing a way to meet them.

There are two causes behind this paradox. One is the natural desire of donors to see their gift take permanent and tangible form, as in a building, and their natural reluctance to sink money in the bottomless pool of unattached funds. The other important factor that has been overlooked is the lack of proportion shown in apportioning money within a given fund. It is bad planning of this sort that decks house libraries lavishly with Oriental rugs while it scrimps on accomodations for the tutors who are so essential to the full working of the house plan.

When the richest university in the country is reduced to such false economy, it is time to ask why.

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