Combining Combined Charities

Beginning on Monday the Combined Charities Committee will stage its annual drive, held in the spring this year for the first time. The postponement of the usual fall campaign has given the co-chairman just the chance they needed to find an efficient yet flexible solution for the charities problem. The Committee has made the recipient charities as personal as possible and has coordinated all the separate drives throughout the University into a single campaign. "E Pluribus Unum" represents the organizational aim of the committeemen. Its monetary significance should induce students to respond generously.

Three separate drives last year, in the College, the Law School, and the other graduate schools north of the Yard, greatly multiplied costs. With an eye on expenses, the Committee has now merged these campaigns to cover all but the distant graduate schools. Even though it now has to send out nearly 4,000 letters to non-resident students, it feels that the value of a concerted drive offsets the mailing costs involved. Dudley will receive complete coverage, by mail, for the first time. In order to make the drive more appealing, the Committee has kept the number of benefiting charities at a minimum. The six recipients this year are not large nation-wide organizations to which a student's parents might well contribute. Instead, they should interest him personally.

Yet the Committee has not achieved its fine work without a struggle. Combined Charities Committeemen groaned when the Dean's Office clamped down two years ago on term bill pledges, because they affected the University's tax status. As the direct result of this restriction contributions last year dropped from the $18,000 total of the year before to $12,000. But the value of charitable contributions made by students rather than by their parents is indisputable. Students this year should take the Committee's handicap as a challenge to raise their contributions to former levels. The motto of the Combined Charities is "Give once. Give generously. This is the only drive of he year." Translated into negotiable terms this motto means: dig deeply.