Harvard's $200,000,000 Fate Guided By 7 - Man Corporation

Harvard's vast empire is nominally governed by an imposing hierarchy ranging from the humble Student Council, through the Faculty Council, Visiting Committees, and Corporation, up to the Board of Overseers, final arbiters of Harvards' destiny.

Despite this apparent division of authority, the real control of Harvard's $2000,000,000 worth of property, its $148,000,000 endowment, and her giant domain stretching from the Atkins Botanical Institution in Soledad, Cuba, to the Boyden Observatory in Bleemfentein, South Africa, lies in the bands of seven men.

In 1650 Governor Dudley signed a charter which gave to the "President & Fellowes" of Harvard College, a self-perpetuating body known collectively as The Corporation, the power "to make from tyme to tyme such orders & Bylawes for the better ordering & carying on the works of the College as they shall thinck fitt."

Overseers Have Last Word

But if the Corporation is at the same time the executive and legislature of a miniature state inhabited by 8000 students and 2000 Faculty members, the Board of Overseers is in theory the Supreme Court. This body of thirty alumni, chosen for five years in an election open to all Harvard graduates who have held their degrees for five or more years, by statute holds ultimate vote power over all the Corporation's decisions.

Although the Overseers ordinarily convene seven times a year to approve (almost as a matter of course) the Corporation's action, much of their collective job of keeping a watchful eye delegated to the Visiting Committees.

Composed of Overseers and outsiders chosen for their interest in a particular field, the committee's function is to advise the various department of the University. They exercise no actual control of policy, and the position is largely honorary.

Faculty Consulted

In even less of a position to dictate to the Corporation than the Overseers in the matter of pulling the purse strings and hiring and firing is the Faculty. Although Harvard Presidents have made a practice of consulting in advance with the Faculty on impending changes of educational policy, the Faculty's opinion is in no sense binding on the President.

In recent years the Faculty, now grown too large and unwieldy for a practical deliberative and advisory body, has been largely replaced by the Faculty Council. This body of 65 men, representing all departments and elected by the whole Faculty, acts on behalf of the Faculty in consulting with the President on matters of policy. Like the visiting committees, however, the Council is in no sense a legislative body.

Until the Student Council was found- ed in 1908, the undergraduate body had no formal machinery for voicing its opinions. As the initiator of many reforms in the College community, it has lately felt a need for a better way of impressing undergraduate opinion on the Administration.

Students Want More Say

On the heels of widespread student protest against the dismissal in 1937 of two young Economics instructors, Alan R. Sweezy '29 and J. Raymond Walsh, the Council recommended that student committees be formed in each department to consult with Faculty members of that department on proposed appointments and dismissals.

While the Council repeated its proposal last year, the Administration has made no moves toward putting the plan into operation.

In the past two years undergraduates have become increasingly vocal on the subject of Faculty appointments. Culminating a year in which hundreds of undergraduates petitioned President Conant to reconsider administrative decisions, the Harvard Chapter of Phi Beta Kappa last June openly indicted President Conant for the summary dismissal of ten assistant professors.

The Administration, however, did not answer the petitions. Even a Student Council resolution urging Feild's reappointment brought no word from the President's offices in University Hall. Today Harvard undergraduates are as far from having any say in the administration of their college as they were in the seventeenth century, when they rioted against horse-meat in Commons