'Year of Our Ford'

Once again, the seven Masters and Dudley Senior Tutor are faced with the necessity of finding a use for the new grant given them by the University from Ford Foundation funds. The grant has been greeted by some Masters as the most valuable contribution for the Houses since President Lowell, as Reuben Brower has said, while others have wondered fitfully whether they could find enough projects to use it up.

It would be unfortunate if the money were to be used up on a number of little projects, which give benefit only to the few people who engage in them. To a great extent, this is what happened to the grant last year; Houses used it for painting and sculpture rooms, theatre workshops, and art prizes, which proved to be of value to an unfortunately small minority of the Houses which instituted them.

A more widely beneficial use of the funds was the plan of inviting renowned men to visit the House for several days, dining and speaking with students frequently during their stay. This plan, if men in the Houses take advantage of it, is worthwhile. Unfortunately, in some cases in which distinguished visitors have been invited to speak, students have shied away from the table at which they were sitting, or stayed away from gatherings at which they spoke. Leverett House, for example, invited several important speakers for its 25th Anniversary Dinner last year, and found that few people bothered to attend. Fine as these visits are in theory, if they continue to be ignored by students, they and the Ford money lose their effectiveness.

Even this plan has a limited advantage. The speaker arrives, talks with a few students or tutors for a while, and leaves. If the terms of the grant could be changed to permit some permanent, and perhaps concrete, contributions to be made to House intellectual atmosphere, the grant might serve a better purpose than at present. If conference rooms were to be built in the basements, for example, more tutorial groups might meet in the House, along with informal discussion groups, in which instructors in or outside the House met with interested students.

This is only a suggestion, put forward to prevent a whittling away of the Ford money for small projects of limited benefit, and to prevent also several wasted visits from important men. The grant should be used to provide for the greatest benefit possible for the greatest amount of time. The money should not scare the Houses, but should encourage them to plan carefully before they put it into use.