Divinity, Education, and Business Schools Grow

Resplendent in clerical robes and red cap, Augustin Cardinal Bea, President of the Vatican Secretariat for Christian Unity, took the pulpit in Sanders Theatre March 27 to address the Divinity School's Catholic-Protestant Colloquium. In a dramatic way Bea's visit to Harvard marked the re-emergence of the Divinity School as a significant force in the intellectual life of the University. Sure of its present and hopeful for its future after ten years of growth, the School is making an effort to expand the influence of religion in contemporary society.

President Pusey's appointment of Samuel H. Miller, professor of Pastoral Theology and a Baptist minister of national reputation, as dean in 1959 recognized the desirability of this effort. The seven years which preceded Dean Miller's appointment had witnessed the effective rebirth of the Divinity School.

In that time enrollment in the School had more than doubled, from 103 to 256. With the active support of President Pusey and Dean Douglas Horton, a capital funds drive to raise $5 million in new endowment had reached its goal. An increase in the number of professors from a mere handful in 1952 to over 20 had given it a distinguished faculty--including such luminaries as University Professor Paul Tillich, Krister Stendahl, and Old Testament scholar George E. Wright--and made it a leader in scholarship.

Train Ministers

Under Dean Miller the Divinity School has returned to its basic aim: training men for the ministry. In the last four years Dean Miller has overseen a reworking of the program for the Bachelor of Divinity degree, the establishment of a Department of the Church to promote closer relations with parishes, and the inauguration of a series of "Reports from the Ministry" to bring students into closer contact with the problems of working clergymen.

The most striking evidence of the School's renewed concern for the role of the church in the modern world was this year's Colloquium, which brought together more than 150 Catholic and Protestant churchmen. Dean Miller called the Colloquium a "superb success," and saw in its format of public lectures and panel discussions "a method of introducing into our School a dialogue with many different fields." Among the colloquia which he suggested the Divinity School might sponsor were a symposium on contemporary business ethics, a discussion of the relationship between ministers and psychiatrists, and an examination of the theological significance of modern novels.

Religion or the University

This desire on the part of the Divinity School to confront the sciences and humanities on their own terms has replaced what was, in the middle fifties, almost a preoccupation with the role of religion in the university community.

President Pusey himself started the preoccupation by delivering a major address at the Divinity School in the fall of 1953. He criticized the idea that society is a substitute for God or that knowledge without faith can serve as a guide for human conduct, and called for leadership "in religious knowledge and even more, in religious experience."

Though the President's active concern for the quality and influence of religious thought has been a major impetus behind the rebuilding of the Divinity School, it has at times caused friction in a Harvard steeped in religious indifference. The most notable example of this friction was the Memorial Church controversy of 1958, in which, after intense pressure from the Faculty, the Corporation recognized the right of non-Christians to be married in the chapel.

More Secure

But the need to reassert Harvard's religious traditions which marked Pusey's original, unbending stand in 1958 has become less urgent as the place of the Divinity School has become more secure, and there are few who would challenge the integrity of religious thinkers willing to meet their critics halfway.

"The place of religion in the University is to some degree determined by the openness and moderateness of the claims which religion makes," Dean Miller said. "If we're not trying to re-establish theology as the queen of the sciences we may get a lot further in trying to confront all the realms of human knowledge and in manifesting a real integrity in the search for truth."

The rejuvenation of the Divinity School over the last ten years is the most dramatic, if most obvious, example of the power of Presidential patronage at Harvard. Even in Cambridge, money talks, and the keeper of the purse is in Massachusetts Hall.

The annual reports of the deans of the graduate schools present a tiresome chronicle of precariously-balanced budgets and impending financial disaster. If the President lends a sympathetic car it may mean a fund drive, or a larger share of the jealously-guarded unrestricted monies of the Corporation. If he does not, the pleas for a new building, new programs, or new faculty members will go unheeded, to be repeated in next year's report.

Education School Needs

No dean pleaded louder or more urgently in the last ten years than Francis Keppel '38, who left the Graduate School of Education in December to become U.S. Commissioner of Education. Although the Ed School's endowment, now $5,780,000, has more than doubled since 1948, its financial position remains unhealthy. Expenses have risen from $226,000 to almost $3 million; today income from endowment provides a scant 11 per cent of the annual budget, and tuition adds only 21 per cent.

Despite a chronic shortage of funds, the Ed School during the last ten years has impressively expanded its programs in teacher training and research. The faculty has been greatly enlarged and overhauled, and the School has gone a long way toward closing its historic rift with the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

President Conant began the rebuilding program in 1948 with his decision to "save" the Ed School; and in Keppel he found the ideal dean. As Theodore Sizer, director of the Master of Arts in Teaching Program, describes him: "he was too young to have made enemies; the he possessed only one degree and that the most appropriate, the Harvard A.B.; he had been trained in Cambridge as an assistant to Dean Buck of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences; and he was the son of a distinguished scholar and philanthropist. Impeccable he was indeed, and his arrival was timely."

Expansion

In sheer numbers the Faculty of Education increased from 28 in 1948 to 148 in 1961. (At the same time the student body expanded from 252, most of whom were part-time, so 589, most of whom were full-time.) To improve relations with the Faculty of Arts and Sciences a number of joint appointments were made, notably in mathematics and psychology, and the process of departmental consultation for Ed School appointments was instituted.

President Pusey has already announced his intention to bring the two faculties even closer by getting more Arts and Sciences members to work on educational problems; in his year as acting dean of the Education School he will have an opportunity to put this policy into effect.

In its attempt to concern itself with education in the widest sense, the Ed School has sought to include three kinds of personnel in its ranks: 1) scholars from the specialized academic disciplines, who will work on educational problems and research, such as historians and philosophers of education; 2) experts in the variorums educational specialties, such as guidance and methods of instruction; and, 3) working educators with firsthand experience with the problems of organization and administration in the schools.

The last category--which involved the part-time appointment of school administrators to the faculty--comprises the School's outward "face" to the schools, just as its relations with the University and the FAS form its inward face.

Starting almost from scratch, the School has built up in the last ten years close contact with the local school systems. An internship program to give Ed School students a term of practice teaching was set up in 1954, and in order to give them additional experience the six-week Harvard-Newton Summer School was begun.

Master of Arts in Teaching

Both the internship plan and the summer school had their start as adjuncts of Harvard's Master of Arts in Teaching program. The purpose of the M.A.T. program is to attract good students from liberal arts colleges, and in a year of study, to give them further work in their own subject, under the FAS, and professional training in methods of instruction and the role of the schools, under the Faculty of Education.

Though begun in 1936, the M.A.T. program did not become truly successful until the last ten years. It was in the fall of 1952 that Harvard sponsored the formation of the 29 College Cooperative Plan, in which leading northeastern colleges joined in an association to "sell" teaching as a career to their undergraduates.

Whatever the success of its larger aim, the Plan did succeed in sending new talent into the Graduate School of Education. Faculty committees in the participating colleges provided a recruiting and screening agency for the M.A.T. program, and by 1956 the percentage of students from the 29 colleges enrolled at the Ed School had jumped to 43 per cent from 14 per cent in 1948.

The blossoming of the M.A.T. program is the most ready demonstration of the extraordinary improvement of the Ed School in the last ten years. But the very success of the School in expanding teacher training programs and research has added to its problems.

The Centers

During the 1950's, generous philanthropic support, especially from the Carnegie and Ford Foundations, financed a variety of Ed School projects. The Laboratory of Human Development, the Center for Field Studies, the School and University Program for Research and Develop- ment (SUPRAD), the Center for Studies in Education and Development, the Center for Research in Careers--all these were established, as centers so often are, to gain foundation money. The proliferation of centers has made Harvard a national leader in educational research, particularly in the behavioral sciences.

But foundation support has its disadvantages. The grants are now coming to an end, creating a compelling need for a capital funds drive. Though President Pusey himself recognized the School's need for funds as early as his 1954-55 report, he has done little to satisfy that need. A year as dean may bring him to a renewal of appreciation of the School's financial plight.

In the next two years the Ed School will relocate its classrooms and administrative offices in Longfellow Appian Way. The signs point to a period of consolidation and re-Hall and in the new seven-story castle to be built across the street on examination--and perhaps to a renewed effort at finding "hard" money to give financial strength to programs developed over the past fifteen years.

Business School Overhaul

Consolidation, familiar as the term may be, is not the word to describe the current activity at the Graduate School of Business Administration. From its position of splendid isolation across the river, the Business School has been conducting a quiet but thorough revamping of its curriculum and teaching methods to adjust to a rapidly changing business environment.

Unlike the Ed School, the main problems of the Business School are not financial. Though expenses have doubled in the last ten years and the dean must raise $2,30,0000 of his annual $8 million budget in current gifts, the combination of alumni, corporation, and foundation money has provided a fairly regular income.

Nor is the B-School troubled by growing pains. The faculty has increased slowly (102 in the professorial ranks today, compared with 87 in 1955) but the student body has remained at its present level of 1300 for ten years. Even the administrative expansion has caused little dislocation: students have been getting married and moving off campus fast enough to permit the conversion of dormitory space to offices.

The real change at the Business School in recent years has been the conscious widening of horizons, and the willingness to employ new techniques in training business administrators. Simply stated, the School has asked itself whether its concept of the "tough-minded" decision maker can survive in an era when the businessman needs both an expanded social conscience and a grasp of new quantitative techniques.

In 1959 former Dean Stanley F. Teele set up a committee to review the Master of Business Administration (MBA) Program, and under George P. Bakes '25, James J. Hill Professor of Transportation and the present dean, the Faculty this year approved a number of changes.

Trimester System

Chief among these is the decision to institute a three-semester academic year, starting next fall, to permit students to take a greater number of courses and to organize the school year more efficiently.

Along with the new division of the8-1