Ex-Dean Bender's Valedictory Message

Excerpts from the final report of Wilbur J. Bender '27, former Dean of Admissions, to the Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, for the academic year 1959-60:

General Obeservations

"1. In determining admission policy the overriding concern must always be how Harvard can use its extraordinary educational resources most effectively to have mankind...

"2. Tradition cannot be allowed to control admission policy...but Harvard will act more wisely if it confronts its problems informed by a sense of its own rich past and an understanding of its special nature and quality...

"3. Harvard is not alone. Policies and procedures must be considered not only in the light of their internal impact, but also in terms of their impact on other colleges and higher education generally, and on secondary education and the public...

"4. The welfare of the individual student must always be a paramount concern... Harvard can be a bad place for some very promising people at a particular stage in their development...

"5. Finally, it can be said that the goals of our admission policies can be intelligently defined only in terms of the basic purpose of Harvard College. The Harvard faculty does not seem to me to be clear or united at present about the purpose of undergraduate education in this complex university college. Differences among the faculty about admission policy are, to a degree, the results of our uncertainty of purpose...

"Will the Harvard College of the future be, in effect, simply a pre-professional school whose student are expected to absorb as rapidly as possible the material deemed necessary for entrance to the next phase of professional training?..."

The "Top-One-Per-Cent" Policy

"The student who ranks first in his class may be genuinely brilliant. Or he may be a compulsive worker or the instrument of domineering parents' ambitions or a conformist or self-centered careerist who has shrewdly calculated his teachers' prejudices and expectations and discovered how to regurgitate efficiently what they want. Or he may have focused narrowly on grade-getting as compensation for his inadequacies in other areas, because he lacks other interests or talents or lacks passion and warmth or normal healthy instincts or is afraid of life. The top high school student is often, frankly, a pretty dull and bloodless, or peculiar, fellow...

"What I am trying to say is that a deliberate policy of one-factor selection might produce in our student body not more students of first-rate intellectual power, but fewer. It might well produce, in fact, simply a high level of dull, competent, safe academic mediocrity, an army of future Ph.D.'s who would do useful work with no originality or commitment...

"If we lose most of our alumni workers and antagonize or discourage many of the schools by setting our minimum standards at certain levels we may find ourselves eventually with a smaller pool of candidates, fewer top scholars and a lower average level of academic ability as well as a less interesting, attractive and varied student body. In other words the attempt to obtain a top-one-per-cent student body may in fact defeat its own ends...my guess is that whatever admission policy is followed the number of candidates for admission to Harvard and similar colleges is not likely to increase anything like as much in the coming decade as was once commonly predicted. High costs, wholesale rejection of good boys, and other factors will probably have a powerful discouraging influence on applications. . .

"There are other practical aspects of a top-one-per-cent policy which need to be considered. Such a policy would, for instance, just about end the traditional relationship between Harvard and its community, greater Boston. . .

"(A group) which has also played a major role in shaping Harvard would also be entirely eliminated--the Harvard-son group. . . It is certainly unlikely that (this) would help the major effort Harvard, like most all private colleges, is making to enlist the continuing moral and financial support of its alumni. Nevertheless, there are considerations, pro and con, on both the Harvard-son and the Boston issues, and it is regrettable that the special faculty report (in 1960) did not deal with these issues more comprehensively and more forthrightly. . .

Do We Want an Elite College?

". . . Would the College be a wonderfully stimulating and rewarding place when every student at entrance was a potential magna or summa man? Or would a precocious academic careerism tend to corrupt the young and inhibit breadth of interest and the disinterested search for understanding and enrichment? Would academic competitiveness be greatly increased and tensions, anxieties and frustrations grow unbearably, particularly for those able students who, perhaps only because they dared to take a course outside their field or had bad luck with an instructor or two, found themselves

". . .there are many kinds or aspects of intelligence which are important (admitting that not all kinds are relevant to a college), and grade-getting and test-scoring intelligence is not necessarily the most important, even for purely intellectual pursuits. Judgment is important, and curiosity and independence and honesty and courage and sensitivity and generosity and vitality. Energy may well be the most important x-factor in determining the future contribution of

"These questions are not meant to imply that an individual with a high IQ is any more -- or less -- likely than an individual with an average or low IQ to be unable or unattractive or physically uncoordinated or have a bad character or a high feminine component. . . (But) there is a some profane amateur opinion that the percentage of bearded types tend to go up with the increase in the average IQ. And anyone who has survived the feline atmosphere of a Phi Beta Kappa chapter meeting when the Junior Eight or the Senior Sixteen were being chosen must have some concerns. . ."

Conclusion

"Is it really a good thing to strain so hard-to get the 'best' students, particularly when no one can define or identify the 'best' when we are dealing with seventeen-year-olds and there are so many different kinds of 'bests'? No one can ever prove which college has the best students anyway. . . One of the less attractive aspects of Harvard is a perennial tendency to arrogance, to the assumption of an air of condescending superiority to the lesser breeds of Dedham. Isn't it enough to be the oldest and the richest, and otherwise just to do our job happily and with a quiet pride in what we hope is general excellance? If we also boast about has the most brilliant student body in country we might become insufferable.

"Perhaps, in other words, we will actually be the best college and make optimum use of our resources if we reasonably relaxed about it, if we show a little more humility and humanity catholicity in our search for talent, if we recognize the fundamental human social importance of other factors than A-getting ability and high academic ambitions, and don't use the faculty exclusively to reproduce themselves. By means let's have a lot of brilliant students, the first class academic minds which have always been one of the marks of Harvard. . . But let's have some other students to help hold place together, students who are intelligent and curious and interested enough to profit from Harvard, who are intelligent without necessarily being 'intellectuals' but whose distinction is primarily other--goodness or loyalty or energy or perceptivity or a passionate concern of some sort. We might even have a few who aren't particularly distinguished in anyways, who aren't brilliant leaders, who are just plain, ordinary decent, uncomplicated human being like so many faculty sons and Harvard sons, to provide a human scale in this community of supermen. . .

"In other words, my prejudice is for a Harvard College with a certain range and mixture and diversity in its student body--a college with some snobs and some Scandanavian farm boys who skate beautifully and some bright Bronx premeds, with some students who care passionately if unwisely (but who knew about editing the Crimson or beating Yale, or who have an ambition to run a business and make a million, or to elected to public office, a college which not all the students have looked on school just as preparation for college, college as preparation for grade school and graduate school as preparation for they know not what. Won't even our top-one-per-cent be better men and better scholars for being part of such a college?