HARVARD UNIVERSITY FUND

Harvard will be three hundred years old next September. It is a respectable age, however infantine compared with that of Paris or Bologna. A dignified ceremonial worthy of the pieties of such a commemoration is to be expected; and on an anniversary of the Genial Mother's birthday, she would be well pleased to see the children bring gifts back to the old home. In October the President and Fellows adopted a statement, made public this morning, of the plan and the purposes of the Three Hundredth Anniversary Fund. The general purposes of this fund "is to strengthen the intellectual and spiritual life of the university, first, by creation of a number of new professorships to be known as, University Professorships; and second, by the establishment of new Harvard National Scholarships."

The first aim seems the more important. Get your distinguished, great, original teacher and the scholars can't be kept away from him. It is hoped to find men with something, say, of the intellectual stature of the greater gods at Johns Hopkins Medical School in its beginnings. The endowment for one of these proposed chairs is $500,000. Not only will the occupant be well paid but he will have paid assistants to teach and to aid his researches. In sharp contrast to the iron rules that fetter so much of the earlier endowment, these professorships are to be flexible. The chair is to be fitted to the man, not the man to the chair. The sought-for professors will be men "who are working on the frontiers of knowledge, and in such a way that they will cross the conventional boundaries of the specialist."

As soon as there is money enough for one of these professorships it will be established. And one man may be a multitude in himself. Alfred North Whitehead, whose present address is Harvard, may be called a faculty and college of mathematics. The endowment required for one of the new scholarships is $25,000. President Conant has been eager to attract to Cambridge promising students from regions separated from the Eastern colleges by expensive distances and naturally within the orbit of local or State universities. The new scholarships will be a continuation and broadening of the prize fellowships already open to Middle Westerners, the first fruits of Dr. Conant's journey in search of talent--genius preferred.

They will yield from $200 to $1,200 a year, according to the winner's resources. Since none of the fund is to be dumped into buildings, probably ugly, but all used to hunt and develop brains, it is hoped that collections will be good and the growth of the fund gradual and continuous. There will be no ballyhoo and no drive. Graduates will be notified by letter. Non-graduates, more likely to be "well-heeled," may be interested in the new type of professors unless they have Tory hardening of the heart and believe there is overproduction of professors in evidence and Government employ. --New York Times