Full Text of Pusey's Report to the Overseers

(The following is the text of the report which President Pusey delivered in October outlining the needs of The College).

Gentlemen of the Board of Overseers:

I have asked permission to speak to you today in order to call to your attention the need for a special Program for Harvard College.

From the colleges and universities of America flows a current of creative power vital to our society--a current steadily growing to meet the increasing demands called for by our widening responsibilities as a nation. Our colleges and universities prepare more and more young people in each generation for positions of trust in the adult life of our society while at the same time the complexities of that society steadily and inexorably multiply. In particular the call for individuals of increased insight, wider knowledge, firmer direction, and all the other qualities of mind and will which it is the colleges' chief purpose to elicit becomes ever more insistent. In the face of this already vast and enlarging obligation an educational institution needs constantly to be asking itself whether its practices are good enough to ensure that it is doing and is equipped to do what is expected of it.

"Schoale or Colledge"

There has never been a time in this country when we did not cherish, support, and seek to advance the opportunities for larger knowledge and clearer vision, for training young minds to love learning and to use it for human betterment. Two examples will serve to suggest the whole. In 1636 the Great and General Court of the Massachusetts Bay appropriated a quarter of their tax levy "towards a schoale or colledge." In 1862 the members of Congress by passing the Morrill Act gave impetus to the whole system of publicly supported institutions of higher learning in the United States. Both actions were motivated by a common purpose: to conserve, increase and disseminate knowledge; to provide professional training for those best qualified, and above all, to add to the number of the sensible and the educated in the body politic.

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My present concern is for Harvard College.

In 1868 President Hill declared, "It is time that we should have in our country at least one institution thoroughly organized and amply endowed at which it shall be a principal aim to carry those students who have the highest talents to the highest degree of culture." For more than two centuries Harvard had been a small college. To be sure, by the early nineteenth century it had entered claim to the title "university" by establishing graduate study in medicine, law and divinity. Yet, in the middle of the last century, like the other colleges of the time, it was little more than a small provincial school.

Though President Hill lived to see only the beginning of the process, during the past ninety years Harvard has been transformed into a great modern university. This is all gain. If President Hill seems, by hindsight, seriously to have under-estimated the future demand for universities, he was clearly right nonetheless in his conviction that Harvard had the opportunity and the capacity to become an institution of this enlarged and more serviceable kind.

University's Center

But Harvard was first a college, and the College remains at the center of the University today. It is rightfully the center because a disinterested love of learning is here first implanted in its students, and it is here that this love is most devotedly and consistently served. The College's inescapable first concern is to stimulate that kind of intellectual and spiritual life which will enable a young mind to find its way in the world and to grow in confidence from the exercise of its own power. It has only a restrained secondary interest in the usefulness or application of knowledge. Both things, of course, are of great importance. There must also always be in both a constant concern for increasing knowledge. But it is only as an individual learns first, in the College, to give himself to the spirit of learning that graduate and professional training, indeed the whole activity of adult life, find proper definition and exercise. Indeed, though it may seem extravagant to some, to me it seems not too much to say that the transforming and quickening task of the College is almost the very since qua non of civilization itself.

Harvard College grew strong with the growing University. It has experienced steady improvement for a hundred years. It was especially advanced by President Lowell's devotion to curricular change and multiform development, above all by his establishment of the House system. No one in all Harvard's history cared more for the College than he. And, after him, President Conant set himself no less steadfastly to strengthen this part of the University. Mr. Conant's new scholarship and fellowship programs advanced the claim of the College to be a truly national institution attracting more and more of the exceptionally able from all parts of the country. General Education enhanced its program and gave it increased power to work its magic on students. And no advance did more to help the College than the relatively recent achievement of a separate undergraduate library. Today's Harvard College is the strongest Harvard College yet achieved.

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But there is no rest from effort--at least not in life. Today there are many areas of need within Harvard University. You who are involved in its government know this as well as I. There are few if any of these needs which do not have legitimate claim to be satisfied if the University is to be kept strong, growing in liveliness and in fullest use to the nation. There is not a single department of the University which is not needed in abundant strength if we are to meet the mounting demands which press upon us for ideas and knowledge, for scholars and scientists, for doctors and lawyers, for preachers and teachers, for architects and engineers, for business leaders and government servants and, above all, for an enlarged number of humanely educated men and women.

Since the needs of the University are many and since at any given moment only the most urgent can hope to be satisfied, it is always necessary to make selection among them. Throughout all Harvard's history there has always been need to make do in one part with a less than adequate situation in order to move ahead in another. This is still true. One part moves ahead while others mark time or at least go forward more slowly. Many advances have been made within the College during recent decades. But at the same time other needs have been left unsatisfied and new ones have developed. The result, in my judgment, is that we have now come again to a time for heightened effort to make new advance within the College.

Let me sketch rapidly some of the more pressing present needs.

Recompense

The first concern of any college should be its teachers. Harvard values excellence in her teachers and must see to it that they are correspondingly recompensed. Still, the Harvard professor is a poorer man today than he has been for generations. Despite repeated salary increases he has steadily lost ground. And Harvard salaries, still perhaps on the average the highest in the profession, no longer enjoy the kind of unchallenged lead they once had and to which no small part of Harvard's present greatness may be attributed.

Of special importance in Harvard's conception of education is the environment in which learning goes on. Harvard provides good intellectual conditions for its faculty and students. Our libraries, laboratories, and museums are of high quality. We cannot, however, afford to rest content. It is necessary endlessly to be concerned with the improvement of environmental conditions in order to build here in Cambridge a modern community of learning of highest excellence in all respects.

In building such a community in the College, the needs complement each other. Perhaps the most urgent of the College's environmental needs is for additional Houses. Our seven Houses were constructed and put into operation more than twenty-five years ago. At the same time the Freshman Class was established in the Yard. Down to the second World War the largest number of undergraduates for whom rooms were provided in a single year was only a few more than 2700. Since the War it has never been fewer than 3700. And there are now actually fewer rooms available than twenty-five years ago. Approximately 1200 more students live in the existing facilities than they were built to accommodate. Each House has a large number of "members" for whom there is no place in the House. Upperclass students have backed up into the Yard. They fill not only the Houses and Claverly Hall, but now also the Freshmen's Wigglesworth Hall. There is an immense backlog of building need here to be met. One House immediately, two more as quickly as they can be had, and, as well, increased dormitory space for Freshmen, are required to resolve this critical situation. In my judgment these are minimum requirements if we are to return to the best educational use of the House system. A House is more than a dormitory. It is a device for preserving, in the midst of a large University, an intimate "collegiate way of living," that ideal brought from England at Harvard's beginning. The system has effectively proved its worth in the years before the War and since.

Faculty Commuters

An essential part of this collegiate way of life is association of teacher and student, of younger and older. For many years forces have been slowly at work moving the members of the University faculties away from Cambridge. As early as 1903 President Eliot noted in his annual report that the living conditions of the faculty were deteriorating. This tendency has continued and become more pronounced. To reverse this trend, to re-establish a community of learning, apartment dwellings must be built for those students (some of them undergraduates) and younger members of the faculties who are married and have families. And for older members of the Faculty there are needs for many separate homes in the neighborhood of the University. Harvard College as experienced and loved by generations of Harvard men cannot indefinitely survive if its teachers become commuters.

The activity of the Faculty and the interaction of faculty and students have other needs of fresh support. The Chemistry Department has again outgrown its facilities. The same can be said of Astronomy. But it is not only the natural sciences which have been experiencing vigorous development. No proper physical facilities have yet been provided for the Department of Social Relations, a growing field at Harvard which has been of increasing importance to undergraduates during the past decade. And this lively department is only slightly less adequately provided with endowed professorships than are several other areas. Indeed, the future of the Faculty depends not only upon restoring the purchasing power of the professor's salary, say, to that of the period of 1925-35, but also upon the continuing creation of new professorships to keep pace with the advance of knowledge.

College's Center

There is further a very considerable lack of faculty offices and studies, and of rooms for small classes. The Faculty of Arts and Sciences has virtually doubled in size during the past twenty-five years, and yet, because of the press of other needs, the problem of additional office and study space has had to be met again and again by inadequate improvisation. And a strictly academic want, possibly overshadowing all others in this area, is for increased endowment for the Library, the center of both College and University and the chief resource for the activity of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. For many people its great library is Harvard. But the cost of its operation is vastly greater now than it was only a very few years ago; and it rises steadily year by year.

There are other pressing needs in the area of student life: first, perhaps, for scholarships and fellowships. Today the Faculty of Arts and Sciences is spending nearly $400,000 a year of its own unrestricted funds to help the worthy and exceptionally able students who come to Harvard College. It spends about $600,000 of unrestricted income to support the program in athletics which is of such quality and is of such importance to undergraduate life that a serious effort should be made to get it increased endowment support. There is a long-standing need for a theatre and another for increased facilities for the study of art. Some would say that a new centrally located health center for Radcliffe and Harvard--which would incorporate the basic purpose of the badly outdated Stillman Infirmary with the offices, clinics and equipment necessary for a community of some 20,000 faculty, students, and employees--is the most crying need of all. And now perhaps the failure, through fire, of the recent effort to rehabilitate Memorial Hall points unmistakably to a time not too distant when we may have to find an appropriate replacement for this historic building which would still preserve its memorial quality.

Quickened Concern

Such is only a very rapid survey of some of the more pressing needs of the College. Each deserves, and later will find, separate treatment. But seen even thus summarily the list of needs seems to me unmistakably to indicate the necessity for quickened concern for the well-being of Harvard College. Indeed it is more than time for those who care for Harvard College as the first and still one of the most vigorous practitioners of collegiate learning in America now to increase the strength of the College for its great work in undergraduate education.

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This declaration of great need may come as a surprise to some who will wonder how an institution with Harvard's great resources can be in want--how there can be at Harvard so many needs, especially so many in only one department.

Two things can be said in reply:

Measured against what Harvard has become in three hundred years of growth--against what Harvard is and is doing today--against the fact that in recent years the needs have been growing more rapidly than the gains--the list does not appear formidable.

And the idea that Harvard is so very rich that it no longer has needs is a very old illusion.

As early as 1868, when the development of the modern University was almost wholly still in the future, President Hill said: "The president has long been impressed with a conviction that the wealth of the University is greatly over-estimated by her friends and by the public." Only yesterday, after the ninety years of tremendous growth which produced the great University we now enjoy, President Conant was saying. "Two legends are now current in certain circles in the United States: One is to the effect that the days of private philanthropy are over; the other is that Harvard, unlike other universities, is so rich it needs no more money." And he added quickly, "Both are demonstrably false."

Tremendously Rich?

This notion, current for at least a hundred years, perhaps longer, that Harvard is a tremendously rich university is not so much an inaccurate commentary on Harvard as it is an unmistakable indication of how seriously and consistently the American public has underestimated the proper cost of higher education. President Eliot made this point with characteristic vigor. As early as 1890 he stated bluntly, "The American public must enlarge its ideas of the cost of supporting a university."

He would make the same statement with even more vigor today, for in our generation the difficulties of financing higher education have increased substantially. Twenty-five years ago income from that part of Harvard's endowment fund which belongs to the College met 47 per cent of the cost of operating the College. Last year this income met less than 27 per cent of these costs. Though the amount of endowment has considerably increased and the income from it has doubled in twenty-five years, the significant fact is that during this period the costs of operating the College have quadrupled. It is also to be noted that most of Harvard's endowment is committed for specific purposes, some of them only very remotely connected with the instruction of undergraduates. Of the total endowment income of the University, less than 15 per cent is for unrestricted use throughout all of Harvard, and less than 1 1/2 per cent is for unrestricted use within the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, the parent faculty of the College.

A college or university is rich or poor not in terms of its visible resources, but only as these are set against the variety and extent of its full program and activity, and against its demonstrated capacities and ambitions. President Lowell