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Evidently, the Boston Herald and the New York Times have known better than to treat the Harvard News Office's attempt to sabotage Wilbur J. Bender's final report on admissions very seriously.

Both papers based their stories on Bender's warning that the College is limiting itself to an economic elite. Still, the Times missed completely and the Herald touched only sparingly on the second great issue raised by the Bender report: that academic elitism is as much of a threat to present and future Harvard as the economic spiral.

Whatever the current and future reaction of the national press, the role of the News Office in this affair will remain a black mark against the University whose name some people, for reasons increasingly hard to discern, have associated with truth and the freedom of ideas. The News Office release was uninformative; but far more than that, it was in many places deliberately distorted. Unless education writers turn to a copy of the report itself (and, considering the state of "education departments" on most papers, they are not likely to), they will never sense the urgency and feeling with which Bender wrote. Nor will they get all the facts.

The News Office's biggest apostasy is in trying to protect the cherished image of a Harvard that poor boys, as well as rich ones, can attend. "With college costs rising rapidly," the report says innocently, as though this development were independent of any action on Harvard's part, the College's scholarship endowment and the amount of its awards both doubled, and "the College continued to help about one-quarter of each class with scholarships." The rest of the single paragraph given to scholarships--possibly the most important issue discussed in the report--consists of generalizations about loans and part-time jobs.

This treatment constitutes nothing less than deliberate evasion. Bender raised the question of scholarships to show that "no significant gains were made in lowering the economic barrier to a Harvard education." The median family income of scholarship holders rose from $4,900 in 1952 to $7,800 in 1960, Bender reported, and "Harvard is rapidly becoming a college serving only upper-middle income families." This point, one of Bender's most serious concerns, is entirely omitted from the News Office release.

Bender spoke out against turning Harvard into a college for the academic elite, and against making it a "pre-graduate" school. He saw a real danger that the kind of student body he did so much to shape was to be replaced by a sterile, super-intellectual community. For his strongly-worded warnings the release substitutes bland sentiments ranging in age from 10 to 50 years.

At the last, the release attempts to indicate substantial agreement between Bender's report and that of the Special Faculty Committee on Admission Policy, and thus accord among the Faculty as a whole. In his report, Bender said that the Faculty Committee's recommendations "for the most part either state the obvious or are so neatly balanced as to be useless as guides for action."

These issues desperately need discussion rather than concealment. President Pusey in his Commencement address last June asked alumni to look into the facts before making up their minds about the image of the University. Surely, then, it is the University's duty to make the facts available. In any case, the News Office has handled in the shabbiest way possible the last warnings of the man President Pusey called "the architect of postwar Harvard."