The Evolving Face of HSA

4 Holyoke Street used to be a pool hall. But in the fall of 1957, a handful of Harvard students spent an entire night on their knees scraping the gum off the floor and painting the walls yellow to lighten up the basement room.

Tucked away under a store in Harvard Square, the room would serve as the original headquarters of a corporation that would later become the largest student-run organization in the world.

The Harvard Student Agencies, Inc. (HSA) was founded by then-Director of Financial Aid John U. Monro ’34-’35, who envisioned a means of opening the University to all students regardless of financial need. The private, non-profit organization chartered in Dec. 1957 would provide an opportunity for students to defray the cost of attending the College.

“[Monro] was concerned about the danger that the admissions committee might not be able to admit students who had great need,” said Dustin M. Burke ’52, one of the six original incorporators along with Monro and the University’s director of student employment at the time.

But a half-century later, some say that the mission of the organization has shifted away from helping students graduate without debt—and the landscape of student-run businesses has returned in many ways to its pre-HSA days.

A MISSION OF UPLIFT

Theodore H. Elliott Jr. ’57, one of the incorporators and the second president of HSA, described the organization’s early years as “an introduction to positive entrepreneurship.”

Elliott, who was also a member of The Crimson’s business department, voluntarily integrated his own business—printing desk blotters—with HSA. Other original agencies provided services ranging from stadium concession stands to laundry to milk and doughnuts.

According to its mission statement in its 1957 charter, HSA’s primary purpose was “to conduct and supervise enterprises for the benefit of students of Harvard University who are in need of financial assistance to defray the expenses of their education.”

The charter emphasizes that the organization was intended to target and help “such students.”

But despite these stated positive intentions, within the agency’s first year of operation, student entrepreneurs, student council members, and others at Harvard were already questioning how much these aims were being upheld and whether the agency was living up to its charter.

A Crimson article in May 1958 contended, “Whereas helping the needy student may be the agency’s objective, it tends to become lost in the realities of the business world. The result is that the person with that great intangible, ‘business incentive’, is rewarded for his efforts apart from any financial need he may have.”

Burke himself admitted at the time, “Need is strictly a relative position.”

“I would hesitate to tell any student he is not needy,” he said.

A GAME OF MONOPOLY

On top of controversy over the discrepancy between the principles and practices of the agency, as HSA continued to take over other individual student-run businesses and expand, rising tensions and rumblings among the student body culminated in a “full investigation” by the student council in Oct. 1957.

While Monro denied allegations of a University-controlled monopoly at the time, Burke stated recently that HSA was in fact “monopolistic,” since the University gave approval only to HSA to operate certain businesses in the Houses.

“No student can just go in and sell birthday cakes or beer mugs in the dormitories,” Burke said.

Elliott agreed that the corporation was monopolistic in nature but said that he was not aware of anyone who was prevented from starting his own business as a result.

But other students who managed their own businesses under HSA said they were more wary of the relationship between the University and the organization.

“I viewed the University as a monolithic structure taking over student businesses,” John D. Bagdade ’58, who ran the Birthday Cake Agency, said recently. “The risk was that it would stifle entrepreneurial efforts.”

In addition, managers of some agencies cited the coercive nature of HSA’s centralization.

“I was called into Dusty Burke’s office one day, and it didn’t feel like I had any choice,” said Bagdade, who also said he reluctantly joined the corporation.

Rolf Goetze ’59, the manager of the Refreshment Agency, also said that he was given the impression that it would be “their way or no way.”

Despite the general displeasure resulting from HSA’s centralization, the agencies remained for the most part autonomous. Students continued to run their individual businesses, but had to contribute 10 percent of their profits toward the operating costs of existing agencies and the expense of setting up additional ones.

Goetze said that he did not particularly like the idea of sharing his profits with HSA to help others realize their “lame ideas.”

Burke said that he felt the students’ frustration resulted from their inexperience in working in the business world, as no organization could not survive without funds to cover overhead.

CHANGING OPERATIONS

Since HSA’s founding in 1957, the landscape for student-run businesses in the College outside of the agency has fluctuated, inherently impacting HSA along with it.

While student businesses aside from those affiliated with HSA were technically allowed in the late 1950s, many felt they would be run out of business if they tried to go it alone.

But over the course of the rest of the century, the University’s enforcement of an old-standing policy restricting businesses on campus became stricter than at the time of HSA’s incorporation. By 2000, student businesses were subject to the full force of the policy, and those who did not comply were subject to review by the Administrative Board.

A policy change initiated by former Dean of the College Harry R. Lewis ’68 revised the rule to allow a modest level of student business activities but required them to register with the University. This registration process was later abandoned in 2006.

These moves, according to Lewis, have affected HSA’s market dominance.

“No one anticipated...that students would use this relaxation of the rules to go into competition with HSA or that the College would allow that,” said Lewis, who relaxed the rules in response to the rise of the Internet. “That was certainly not the intent to have individual students going head to head with HSA, which I always considered to be an important institution, both educationally and in terms of the money it put in students’ pockets.”

Aside from the shifting role of the College in student businesses, HSA has seen its own changes.

Fifty years after the agency’s founding, current president Timothy J. J. Creamer ’09 said that while the organization’s mission of offering employment opportunities to undergraduates has remained the same, the focus is now on the “bigger aspect” of pre-professional experience rather than providing students with a means to afford tuition.

But thinking back to the early years of HSA, rife with controversy and mistakes, Burke said that he felt Monro’s experiment “did work overall.”

“It was a wonderful part of my education that was not part of the Harvard syllabus and required courses,” Goetze said. “And when I finished at Harvard, I didn’t owe Harvard a single cent.”

—Victoria B. Kabak, Gordon Y. Liao, and Laura A. Moore contributed to the reporting of this story.

—Staff writer June Q. Wu can be reached at junewu@fas.harvard.edu.