Harvard's Alumni: The Old Grad Grows Up

It is Reunion Week in Cambridge. Along Massachusetts Avenue, in the Yard, and at nearby country clubs another contingent of "old grads" is celebrating the traditional week of re-awakening friendships, tinkling (and crashing) glasses, and dissolving inhibitions.

This time, however, something is different. Below the surface frivolity a quiet revolution, already more than a decade old and still gathering steam, is gradually transforming every aspect of Harvard's alumni affairs.

Perhaps the most startling change is in the nature of Class Reunions themselves.

They have always been a problem. Back around 1730 the Corporation tried keeping the date of Commencement secret until a week or two before, and transferring the day to Friday, "so that the rest of the week would not be consumed in Saturnalia." However, as Harvard historian Samuel Eliot Morison continues, "this was held an intolerable grievance, not only by the public, but by the country clergy, for whom a Friday Commencement gave insufficient time to sober up and get home for the Sabbath."

Since that time, authorities here, as at most other colleges in the nation, have learned simply to expect the worst each June when a new group of dignified, responsible, and highly educated adults returns to pay homage to its Alma Mater.

Bluntly, alumni Class Reunions--especially the 25th--have become characterized as drunken brawls. A typical description tion, appearing in The New York Times Magazine several years ago, spoke of "the grotesque costumes, the irrational deportment, and the genial acceptance by the institution's money-raising departments of disorder which at any other time would cause the High Command to put in a hurry call for the campus Gestapo to get in there and do its stuff."

On the basis of this traditional concept of reunion activities, many observers before the last war would have agreed with Socialist leader Norman Thomas, Princeton '02, who once said:

"The last audience in America to which I would make a serious address would be a reunion of college graduates. In such reunions men honoring ancient shrines of learning with one accord breathe one prayer: 'Make me a sophomore just for tonight.' And few prayers are more unfailingly answered."

Today, however, the program at Harvard for Reunion Week, 1956, shows that many prominent men decidedly disagree with Thomas's pronouncement (as with many of his other ideas, no doubt). Three such persons, it may be presumed, are John H. Finley, Jr. '25, Master of Eliot House, John U. Monro '34, Director of the Financial Aid Office, and McGeorge Bundy, Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, all of whom actually will dare to address a Reunion audience seriously when they take part Wednesday morning in the symposium on "The College: Its Future Size and Shape."

The fact is that Reunions in Cambridge now are significantly different from what they were a decade or two ago. There are symposia (an innovation begun in 1949, expanded ever since); there are instructive tours of the University's facilities; there are more professors and fewer coaches on the speaking platforms; for the 25th Reunion Class there is even a "Back to College Day" several months in advance, when Class members can attend lectures, inspect the Houses, and talk with Faculty members in a less hectic atmosphere than prevails in June. In sum, there is now a process of actually "re-educating" the alumni.

This new trend in Reunion behavior has been developing for some time. Edward A. Weeks, Jr. '22 spotted it back in the thirties, and commented: "It is no longer necessary to break three hundred glasses and fifteen windowpanes in order to prove that you've been college graduates for six years. Amen! Amen!, sigh the hotel proprietors on the Cape."

Reunions Somewhat Tamer

Or, as Peter E. Pratt '35, Secretary of the Alumni Association, puts it: "There's getting to be less and less of the 'Bright College Days' stuff, thank God!"

The reason Harvard Reunions have become somewhat tamer lately is not that after three centuries the University authorities are finally beginning to crack down. Nor is it, as one observer suggested last year, that the Classes currently celebrating their 25th anniversaries "graduated during the depression and have never gotten over it."

The revolution that during the past decade has been affecting all phases of alumni activity, both at Harvard and elsewhere, is much more fundamental than that. While all of its implications are not yet evident, one thing is already sure:

The typical "old grad" of American folklore, with his hip flask in the fall, his straw hat and banner in the spring, and his instantaneous reversion to puerility any time that he sets foot back on the campus, has disappeared. He has gone the way of maid service in the Harvard Houses.

Twenty or thirty years ago the traditional old grad may actually have existed at Harvard. If so, he cried for the coach's scalp whenever the varsity lost to Yale, showed up at his local Harvard Club only when football movies were being shown, contributed to his Class Fund only so that good old '98 could raise a larger Gift than '97, looked forward to his Class Reunions as the most easily rationalized binges of his life, and otherwise--unless he happened to think there were too many New Dealers on the Faculty--pretty much forgot about Harvard.

Today, the typical alumnus still takes seriously the result of the Yale game, still exhibits staunch Class loyalty, and still has a wonderfully wild time at Reunions (the Class of '31 plans to spend $130,000 on its 25th anniversary affair). He is likely, however, to know less about Harvard's football record than about its policy in regard to "Communist" Faculty members, to work actively on the schools or scholarship committee of his local Club, to consider just what educational principles he is buying when he writes a check to his Class Fund, and to stray from the Hasty Pudding bar to a New Lecture Hall symposium at least once during a Reunion in Cambridge.

In a word, the old grad has grown up.

* * *

In the field of alumni fund raising it would at first seem that there has been no revolution at all. "GIVE!", the eternal imperative, still monopolizes the alumnus's incoming mail, especially as Reunion time draws near. The class of '31's 25th Reunion Bugle, published last December, failed to strike any radically new notes either in its headlines ("GIVE TO CLASS FUND NOW," "TAX ADVANTAGE IF GIFTS MADE BEFORE DEC. 31") or in the news story below ("The Class of 1931 has got to do some hustling between now and June, 1956").

"Professional Racket?"

Indeed, the complaint once voiced by Willard L. Sperry probably still holds:

"If the truth be told, all the skills of American business, its ingenuity in advertising, and its shameless appeal to sentiment as well, are employed by the institution in building up its endowments from living alumni.... At its worst the procedure borders dangerously on something like blackmail or a professional racket...."

(If the President and Fellows and the other directors of Harvard's alumni operation really are running a "racket," at least no one can accuse them of petty extortion. Not when they spend some $300,000 a year merely to keep in touch with the estimated 44,000 living alumni of Harvard College. This averages out to an expenditure of about $7 per year on each alumnus--a figure that seems extravagantly high until one reflects that last year College alumni presented their Alma Mater with gifts totalling $636,807, a total representing about $14.50 per man, or more than a 200 percent return on the original investment.

Although alumni fund-raising now may have the same objective and the same devasting efficiency as ever, some of the tactics employed have definitely changed. The last two decades have seen, along with the general maturing of the old grad, a conspicuous weakening of the concept of Class solidarity. Consequently, Class agents and other apostles of the ancien regime, finding that the "good old '28" ploy doesn't work so well any more, have had to look around for a new pitch.

The Class idea has actually been on the way out for a long time. It could never again mean as much as it did in the early nineteenth century, when, as Morison reports, "most classes ... at least after they graduated, became mutual benevolent societies, of which no member need suffer as long as any were well off, and knew of his need." As early as 1894, a British writer observed that "among the younger generations at Harvard class loyalty is dying out," and at about the same time an undergraduate complained in the CRIMSON that "There is no Class spirit at Harvard. The elective system destroyed it long ago."

Today, despite the dilution of the free elective system by General Education, a College Class is less cohesive than ever. Besides the obvious fact that, in Morison's words, "the possibility of being one's brother's keeper declines when the family numbers over nine hundred," there is also the consideration that somehow, in the modern world, the members of '28 can no longer get very excited about the prospect of raising a Class Gift larger than than of '27.

With Class spirit no longer a strong selling point, alumni, fund raisers have had to find new appeals by which to build up their Class Gifts (which now amount to $250,000 by the time of the 25th Reunion). The result, as expressed by Pratt, is not the least significant change brought about by the alumni revolution:

"They're no longer trying to get the money by selling competition with other Classes. They've also thrown out the idea that you simply pay your fee in order to come to Reunion and relive your 'Bright College Days.' Instead, these days they're actually showing the alumni what goes on in Cambridge and selling them on Harvard College."

* * *

The revolution has even extended to the Harvard Clubs, which with their plush sanctums on their remote locations long seemed immune to any regenerative influences from Cambridge.

The Clubs have existed almost as long as the University itself, and represent probably the best example of an alumni institution that has matured decisively over the past two decades. The old tradition--which, of course, has by no mean disappeared--was described by Sperry in his article "The Alumnus," as he told about spending the night at a metropolitan Harvard Club:

"Elderly club servants in somewhat moth-eaten vestments...were shuffling about with trays of ritual cocktails being served to what President Eliot once called--and his successors still call--'the society of educated men'. Even the olives and cherries, the orange peel, and toothpicks in the glasses seemed to have taken on moral dignities and a sense of mission which they can never hope to attain in the outer illiterate world where they are at the best the unashamed symbols of candid self-indulgence."

It is only a handful of the larger Clubs that maintain clubhouses, however. More typical would be an organization that might exist in a city the size of Omaha. It would have, say, 40 members. Normally these members would get together perhaps twice a year, once at a Christmas party for present and prospective College students and once at a dinner meeting to be addressed by a member of the Harvard Faculty. In the old days the old grad's Club activity would be limited to these two meetings. He would insist, moreover, that the Faculty member sent out to speak was a football coach, and that he brought with him movies of the past season's games.

But gradually the activities of both the local Harvard Club and the old grads in it have changed considerably. Of course football coaches still speak and show films at many clubs each year. In 1954-55, however, head coach Lloyd Jordan addressed exactly four full-Club meetings. Meanwhile President Pusey made eleven such appearances, Professor Robert G. Albion seven, Professor Arthur E. Sutherland and Professor Perry Miller three each, and Bart J. Bok, professor of Astronomy, took the year's honors with a grand total of fifteen speeches in Clubs as well-scattered as California, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Iowa, South Carolina, and Syracuse.

Academic Speakers

In general the Clubs no longer want athletic speakers. Especially in cities such as Atlanta or Houston, where many of the Club members attended one of the Harvard graduate schools but not the College, movies of last year's Yale game just will not go over. But the Law School's Professor Sutherland, speaking on "The Banning of the Communist Party," will. According to Secretary Pratt, who co-ordinates all speaking schedules for the Alumni Association, "a coach may still be O.K. for a Christmas party, but for a dinner or evening meeting a Club wants an academic man."

The sphere in which Harvard Clubs are currently serving the College best is that of schools and scholarship work. In the old days each Club probably had a few members who kept an eye open for good high school football players in the local area. Supporters of the College football team may well hope that such men are still operating. Since the last war, however, 84 of the Clubs have built up schools and scholarship committees whose members do the same sort of scouting with significantly different objectives.

These committeees perform three func- tion. The "recruiting" one, whose importance varies directly with the Club's distance from Cambridge, now concerns intellectually promising high school students who would not ordinarily apply to Harvard. (Of course, a good scholar is not disqualified if he also happens to play fullback.) Generally more important is the screening role that the Club members play, interviewing local applicants to the College and relaying their evaluations to the Admission Office in Cambridge. Thirdly, the Club committees actually raise funds--a national total of $70,000 last year--to endow College scholarships for deserving local students.

Yet even now the activities and attitudes of the Harvard Clubs are not uniformly enlightened. Although the Clubs have matured greatly since the war, traces of adolescence still remain.

A minor complaint is that ticklish situations sometimes arise between University Hall and a remote Harvard Club in regard to the screening of a prospective freshman. Critical standards are likely to vary with the miles, the years, and the enthusiasm of the interviewing alumnus, so that an applicant highly recommended in Spokane, Washington may get turned down in Cambridge, Massachusetts. A flustered air mail correspondence often results.

Much more serious is the fact that a number of Harvard Clubs, especially but not exclusively those in the South, maintain prejudices that cannot help compromising the reputation and principles of the University. The Washington Club admitted its first Negro several years ago only after much internal wrangling and indirect pressure from Cambridge. Several Clubs in the Deep South, such as the one at Atlanta, still steadfastly refuse to admit the qualified Negro alumni in their area.

The schools committees of the most of the Southern Clubs, moreover, are careful to visit only those local high schools that consist of all white students. It is apparently true that no Negro student has ever come to Harvard via the recruiting or scholarship facilities of a Southern Harvard Club.

Meanwhile the College itself, of course, admits or rejects applicants without regard to their race. It thus seems somewhat anomalous that these organizations which consist of Harvard graduates, use the University's name, and are supposedly cooperating with its Admissions Office still maintain a stritctly racist policy.

Yet since each individual Club is completely autonomous, and since the whole South is currently suffering acute growing pains over this issue, the situation would seem to call for time and toleration. Ten years ago, it will be recalled, most Harvard Clubs in the South were not even looking for white students to send to the College. One may hope that the rapid growth of the past decade will continue bringing a speedy end to adolescence.

Meanwhile, despite these flaws in the Clubs' work, Wilbur J. Bender '27, Dean of Admissions, considers their overall schools and scholarship program infinitely successful. The thousand-odd men participating in it, says Bender, "are doing about the best thing any alumnus could do for the College."

* * *

This amounts to pretty strong praise. First Reunions are tamer, fund raising techniques more enlightened, and Club activities directed toward improving the College student body. And now organized alumni, long considered the bete noire of every college administrator's life, suddenly evoke such a sincere tribute from a University Hall official--one, moreover, who is not directly engaged in alumni fund raising.

There can no longer be any doubt: A revolution in alumni affairs has definitely taken place!

As for the exact date when the revolution started, no one can say for sure. The end of the last war is probably as good a Bastille as any, although most of the current changes in alumni affairs could be spotted back in the thirties. Everyone recognizes, however, that the trends have been gathering more and more force ever been since the 25th Reunion of the Class of '28. For it was at that Commencement, in June, 1953, that a Reunion Class member named Nathan M. Pusey took over as President of the University.

Pusey's immediate predecessors, it is probably fair to say, were less than enthusiastic in their non-pecuniary dealings with the College's alumni. Presidents Eliot, Lowell, and to a certain degree Conant had something of the attitude cited by Sperry in regard to another college president: "I could run this university if I had only the trustees and the faculty and the students and the general public to deal with. It is the alumni that make the job hard." Or, in the words of William F. Buckley, Jr., in God and Man at Yale, these Presidents in dealing with alumni were often "glad to settle for their money and to eschew their counsel."

Education More Than Diploma

But Pusey is different. He seems actually to take seriously his own statement that "Education does not cease with the acquisition of a diploma. Being an alumnus is not simply a looking back--but also a continued and intelligent interest in the institution and its problems."

One of Pusey's first official acts as President was to authorize the preparation of a report covering all phases of Harvard alumni activity. When the report was presented, veteran Yard officials were as amazed as the President to discover that the University was spending $850,000 a year on the alumni affairs of the College and the various graduate schools. According to Milton Katz '27, now professor of Law and chief author of the report. "This was probably the first time that anyone sat down and actually totaled up what was going on."

Largely on the basis of the "Katz Report," the President this spring took his most significant action in the field of alumni relations. In order to "give increased impetus to Harvard's alumni program and provide a closer connection between the educational program in Cambridge and its graduates," Pusey appointed Daniel S. Cheever '39 to the new post of Director of Alumni Affairs.

Cheever, who takes over the position in July, is the first to admit that his prescribed duties are rather awesomely vague. The general idea, he says, is that since College alumni today are not at all the stereotyped old grads that they perhaps used to be, but instead are intelligent, prominent, and interested in the problems of education, it is to Harvard's advantage to draw them into as close a relationship as possible.

Cheever is very pleased that many Faculty members, instead of sneering at his appointment as a public relations measure on the part of the Administration. have told him sincerely that they think such a liaison between the University and its alumni is needed.

By appointing Cheever and by otherwise demonstrating his sincere respect for alumni, as well as by his actions on such policy issues as the McCarthy attacks, Pusey has made himself very popular among University graduates. In the opinion of a current member of the Board of Overseers, he already has built up more confidence and support among the alumni than any previous Harvard President.

And for the future, as Cheever takes up his new duties, as Pusey's various other steps toward closer links with the alumni take effect, and as the old grads themselves continue to become more responsible in their attitude toward the University, one can look for an ever-closer relationship between Harvard and its graduates body on many levels.

The revolution is as yet far from completed. It has actually just begun to roll.

* * *

But is this really a good thing? How close to the University can alumni get before they start to dictate its educational policies? Is the current alumni revolution just what books like God and Man at Yale are pleading for when they urge that alumni return to the campus, use their financial power to dictate educational policy to the administration, and thus purge the faculty by "kicking out all the dirty Reds"?

Maybe President Eliot was right in his policy of calling alumni "the society of educated men" but nonetheless keeping them at arm's length from Massachusetts Hall. During the period that Eliot was instituting such great reforms as the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and the free elective system, according to Morison, "If at any time...his policies had been referred to a plebiscite of Harvard alumni, they would surely have been reversed."

Alumni Plebiscite?

If the current trends in alumni affairs are permitted to continue, will such a plebiscite soon be possible?

In short, is there a danger that the alumni body's growing role in the operation and policy of the College will bring an infringement of academic freedom?

A glance at Harvard history would suggest that there is. Virtually every President of the University has had to rebuff alumni who tried to use their financial power to control educational policy. In 1650 Dunster faced attempts to purge the Yard of "antipaedobaptism." Leverett in 1717 was threatened for his "secularism." Eliot in 1885 encountered an organized alumni campaign to block the free elective system. Lowell in 1916 was attacked for the presence on the Faculty of pro-German professors. Conant's mail was constantly enlivened by letters such as that received in 1935 from Alexander Lincoln, Jr. '32, who pointed out that "My Class this year celebrated its fortieth anniversary and an overwhelming majority of its members...are utterly opposed to the New Deal and all its work." Lincoln then drew the logical conclusion.

In all these historical examples, groups of alumni have attempted to direct the University's policy into "reactionary" channels. They have failed simply because their influence over the Administration was not strong enough.

Yet now the President of the University, already a veteran recipient of threatening protests, is himself taking the lead in drawing the alumni closer to the College and, in fact, giving them more influence over the Administration. Is this not just what the "crackpots" want?

Pusey's policy is undeniably a bold one. It is not, however, as suicidal as it may seem.

The President is apparently counting on the assumption that the "unenlightened" policies cited above are no longer typical of the alumni body as a whole. He is confident that the revolution of the past two decades has indeed transformed the4Two alumni, Class of '03, have a laugh at their 50th Reunion in the Lowell House courtyard.