Alumni and Admissions

Sometime within the last fifteen years, the College got mixed up in American education's big battle for students. Educational institutions have learned to apply the slick principles of modern advertising to the problem of persuading young candidates for admission. For better or for worse, the country is stuck with it.

There is no basic reason why Harvard should not go along. It certainly cannot be hurt by having three or four times as many exceptional applicants as places. Alumni scholarship committees, more and bigger publicity releases, March of Time productions, and the like are all methods of meeting a present need. They are symptoms of the University's attempt to maintain a policy which calls for a rational and cosmopolitan student body.

But there are dangerous complications to this policy. Right now, for example, a man from a western state from which there are relatively few applications will probably have an advantage over someone from an eastern area where Harvard is more popular and better known. If he can do reasonably well on his College Board exams, a man from Washington has a better chance than one from New York as long as the College attempts to keep a geographically distributed student body. The advantages will remain until competition for admission is increased in areas outside of the East.

Nor do the dangers end here. For when the Harvard Administration speaks of a balanced student body, it is referring to a much more complicated structure than an elite of nationally-distributed brains. It believes, for instance, that athletics makes up an important part of a college education. It believes that the College ought to contain some athletes to remain balanced.

In this nation gone stupidly mad about athletics, and especially about football, the "scholar-athlete" is a sought after person, no matter where he resides. Colleges go out of their way to offer him prizes for attending. The competition for him among schools is stronger than that for any other type of man, genius or not.

Yet Harvard has tried to stay clean. It seeks the scholar-athlete through legitimate means, it states, offering him only this opportunity to attend Harvard and nothing more. But here it has found a frustrating situation. For, to attract this vigorous young man, a school must get good publicity and be well known. And, it would seem, to be well known in America, a school must sport a set of good teams, particularly football teams. Many schools have slipped into the habit of buying athletes just trying to get a good enough public reputation to attract the scholar-athlete and scholar-leader.

Certainly Harvard must not go down this path in its campaign to obtain an all-round national student body. Athletics are still an extra-curricular activity. A university is still basically a community of scholars seeking after truth. It is not, nor should it ever become, the refuge of the physically able seeking after money.

The CRIMSON feels that the only answer Harvard can give is an extensive and well-run advertising campaign bolstered by alumni support. But this program must be controlled from Cambridge. The alumnus inclined to back the athlete over the scholar in every case must be held in check at the same time the University is firing up alumni in general. Admissions standards must remain the same no matter what offers some alumni might want to make to excellent, if slightly retarded, quarterbacks.

If impossible promises are being made, if some alumni actually believe that the College has let down the academic bars, part of the blame must rest with the Administration. Its policies--which must surely sound naive to many citizens of this country--stand in need of constant explanation and publicity. After all, one cannot expect the average American to believe on first hearing that Harvard expects to get its scholar-athletes without so much as dangling a convertible now and then.

Harvard does not want to become a popular College is the usual sense of that term. It should continue to stand on its reputation as the top educational center in America. That is enough for any real scholar, whether he be athlete, leader or merely student nonentity.

If the College carries out its program as it says it intends, it may be successful. The CRIMSON believes it will be. But the administrators and alumni now walking the tightrope should always remember that there is no one holding a net below them.