Sons of Harvard:

Thomas P. Champion is a junior living in Mather House and son of Hale Champion, financial vice president of the University.

On the second day of my freshman year, as I was moving furniture into Holworthy on a summery September afternoon, I was visited by a Crimson editor. The editor identified himself as Dan Swanson, and explained that he had occupied my room the year before, and wanted to talk to me about Harvard. My roommates and I were flattered, but also a trifle suspicious. Why should someone of such exalted journalistic rank want to speak to such as us?

Swanson assured us that his sole purpose in visiting us was to brief us on some of the eccentricities of Harvard in general and Holworthy in particular, so that we might be spared some of the problems that traditionally beset the ignorant and innocent freshmen. Swanson added that the idea of briefing freshmen was not entirely his own, but was a collective endeavor on the part of The Crimson staff to provide a more realistic picture of life at Harvard than was to be found in the introductory material put out by Harvard itself.

The briefing lasted about half an hour, and consisted largely of warnings about the Holworthy squirrels ("They'll come right through the windows and chew up your term papers"), explanations of the course catalogue ("I've marked all the good courses with an X"), and a plug for The Crimson. As he was about to make his farewells. Swanson added, almost as an afterthought.

"Oh, by the way, never but never believe anything the administration tells you."

This was my first encounter with this attitude, but it has certainly not been the last. It is an attitude I hear expressed frequently in the undergraduate community, and one which I might easily share if I did not have more contact with Mass Hall than most of my classmates. Because I am the son of Harvard's financial vice-president. I can't talk in the same easy generalizations about the Harvard administration.

The great difficulty in being an administrator's son is that you see the men and women of the administration as individuals and not as stereotypes. This is not necessarily a problem when the words "administrator" or "bureaucrat" carry some connotations of dignity, or are, at least, neutral descriptions of occupational roles. Unfortunately, administrators and bureaucrats have fallen into general disrepute of late (much of it well-deserved), and the term "bureaucrat" has become positively pejorative. In the post-Watergate era, it is easy to understand why the image of the self-serving, over-cautious, callous, and arrogant bureaucrat has become so widespread, and so easily applicable to almost any large administrative organization. But the image of the self-serving, double-talking administrator has been so universally applied around Harvard that many administration figures wonder whether or not the undergraduate population even tries to find out if there is any truth to the image, or whether it simply assumes that all bureaucrats are alike, be they at General Motors, at the White House, or at Harvard.

This identification of the Harvard administration with the larger community of governmental and business administrators results in several remarkable misconceptions. The first, and most damaging, of these is that Harvard is a corporate entity in the classical capitalistic sense. Labor disputes are couched in the classic terms of struggling proletariat versus grasping, profit-conscious management; budget surpluses are denounced as "inexcusable" by The Crimson, and students stand amazed at the greed of an administration that could let alumni-giving projections play a part in determining sex-ratios in admissions.

Clearly, this interpretation of Harvard's structure is incorrect and unfair. Harvard has no stockholders, makes no profit, pays no dividends. Instead, the University has a limited income which it must divide between the maintenance of its plant, the development of new facilities (housing, library, and recreational), the funding of various academic programs, food and a myriad of other expenditures. All the money gets spent; if not this then next year; if not on one program, then on another. When fees are increased or expenditures curtailed, nobody makes money because of it. The University as a whole is the sole beneficiary of Harvard's financial policy.

Another popular misconception about Mass Hall is, in the words of a Mather House tutor, that the administration "really is out to screw the students and faculty." The implication here is that somehow the administration can gain from squeezing students and faculty. Aside from the obvious response that Mass Hall actually does profess a desire to improve the education and quality of life of the Harvard undergraduate, there is also the fact that the administration is trying to balance a variety of goals, not all of which can be served totally. While I share the suspicion of many students that Harvard does not pay as much attention to undergraduate needs as it should, I do not think that this stems from a desire to screw the students, but from a set of priorities different from my own.

Finally, a third misconception about the Harvard bureaucracy is that things go wrong because they were supposed to go wrong. Harvard administrators, according to this popular image, intentionally do things that are unfair and stupid (such as lose term bill payments, allow the food to get worse, etc.) because they want to. Clearly, most of these things are accidental, and none of them in based on malicious motives. As one Harvard administrators has lamented. "You're lucky if you're right 75% of the time."

Unfortunately, one of the chief perpetrators of these misconceptions is The Crimson. Implicit in The Crimson's coverage of Mass Hall is the assumption that the stereotypes apply. Administrative activity is newsworthy only if it smacks of oppression, indifference, or collusion with the Establishment. In the area of Medical School administration, for example. The Crimson has given much print space to the unionization controversy but has made no mention of Harvard's Total Energy Plant proposals, which could revolutionize the generation and supply of heat and electricity for large facilities (and result in substantial savings to schools and hospitals using the program). Because the former story can be written in terms of existing stereotypes, it is news; the latter story does nothing to reinforce that bureaucratic image.

A recent example of this tendency is a quotation from a Crimson story discussing the possible construction of the Kennedy Library (without museum) at the Boylston Street site, ...[The University is not totally out of the power scene: Hale Champion, financial vice-president, is not about to let the benefits of the project go down the dram benefits that include a new Kennedy Institute building, 2.2 acres of property and a 10 million Institute of Politics endowment.

The peculiar thing about this statement is that it sounds as if an administrator (in this case, my father) is trying to increase the University's power (in Cambridge? in Washington?) with the benefits of the Kennedy Library. This would certainly reinforce the administrative stereotype. What does not reinforce the stereotype, and what is not mentioned in the article, is that the money and facilities provided by the Library would benefit students and faculty directly, and that the Kennedy archives themselves would be a tremendous resource for scholars in a number of academic departments.

If The Crimson is to develop a healthy adversary relationship with Mass Hall, and if the students and faculty are to achieve any real understanding of the way the administration thinks and works, they will have to abandon the standard stereotypes and misconceptions which color current relations between the administration and the University community. If The Crimson asks tough questions rather than loaded questions, if students try to think in terms of human administrators instead of stereotypical bureaucrats, a higher and more productive level of understanding can be reached between Mass Hall and the community it serves. And perhaps students will come to know that, at least most of the time, you can believe what the administration tells you.