A Face From the Past

At dawn one Thursday morning in April 1969, Fred L. Glimp '50, then dean of the College, announced by megaphone that the several hundred students occupying University Hall had five minutes to get out before a force of more than 400 metropolitan policemen would come in and take them out.

Now, ten years later, he may well be putting the touch on some of those former students to contribute to their alma mater.

Glimp left Harvard in 1969--an unfortunate time, he allowed last week--to serve as executive director of the Boston-based Permanent Charity Fund. But as of the first of year he was back again, serving as vice president for alumni affairs and development.

In 1969 Glimp was up against social and political unrest. In 1979, he's up against a more mundane problem: inflation, and the University's efforts to maintain a strong endowment in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and to keep soaring tuition rates from putting a Harvard education out of reach of any but those with good scholarships or wealthy families.

Glimp's main responsibility will be guiding the University's big, once-a-generation capital drive, to be launched next fall.

Although University officials are trying to keep the $250 million drive under wraps as much as possible until the fall, so they can start off with a splash, Glimp said last week that the drive will focus on raising money to bolster undergraduate financial aid and faculty salaries against inflation.

One new form of financial aid that Glimp said might be established with the money raised would be "student assistantships"--academic posts designed especially for undergraduates.

And although the drive is almost entirely for the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, 10 per cent of the amount raised will go to one of President Bok's pet areas--the development of graduate programs in public policy on a par with those in medicine, law and business.

This job, anyway, should be a lot more fun for Glimp than his last Harvard job.