Discovering Harvard's Changing Social Fabric

When Michael S. Lottman ’61 transferred to Harvard, 1950s America was in full-swing. Dwight D. Eisenhower was president, the civil rights movement was in its infancy, and Radcliffe women still had a curfew.

But during Lottman’s three years at Harvard, America was transitioning into a new era. Lottman—a former Crimson managing editor—would graduate into a changing world not quite culturally situated in the ’50s, but not fully in the ’60s either.

“When I was in school, I was totally oblivious to what was going on. A lot of us were,” he says. “It was a time of transition. I often thought, ‘I wish I had gone [to Harvard] a few years later.’”

But in this volatile time, Harvard administrators recognized a budding shift and sought to avoid becoming stagnant in the face of change. A short three months after Lottman’s class graduated, former Harvard Dean of Admissions Wilbur J. Bender ’27 declared in a report that Harvard should revise its admissions policies.

“Unless hereafter the steady stream of tuition increases slows down to what is justified by inflation, Harvard College will have to cut itself off from most of America,” Bender wrote in the report, which garnered national attention when it was released in Sept. 1961.

During the four years that the Class of 1961 spent as undergraduates, the College began to acknowledge the need to support socioeconomic and geographic diversity among the student body, a change indicated by the host of programs that, though young, were rapidly accelerating.

‘SCANDINAVIAN FARM BOYS’ AND ‘BRIGHT BRONX PREMEDS’

At first glance the figures from Bender’s report do not suggest that the College was becoming more exclusive, as more students of diverse backgrounds filed applications.

The total number of applications jumped from 3,602 for the Class of 1961 to 5,235 for the Class of 1964—an increase of 45 percent.

Furthermore, the total number of scholarship applicants rose by nearly 73 percent in that same period.

Students say they sensed that they were benefitting from a diverse class.

Christopher Wadsworth ’62 says that he had several roommates from the Midwest and enjoyed learning from their different perspectives, evidence of the increasing number of students from outside New England.

But looking closely at the numbers, Bender saw a different trend. His report noted that while on the whole the University was giving more financial aid, it largely benefitted students from upper middle class backgrounds rather than the genuinely poor who could not otherwise afford a Harvard education.

“In a decade of almost fantastic increase in our financial aid resources we were unable to increase significantly the proportion of the student body receiving financial aid from the College,” Bender wrote.

His 1961 report would serve as the basis of a change in philosophy that would distinguish the future classes from classes of the past.

“My prejudice is for a Harvard College with a certain range and mixture and diversity in its student body,” he said in the report. “A college with some snobs and some Scandinavian farm boys who skate beautifully and some bright Bronx premeds ...”

Today, University officials recognize Bender as the foundation of that shift from a predominantly upper middle class student body hailing from New England to a more diverse student body both socioeconomically and geographically.

“Students learn a great deal from one another in addition to what they get out of books and classes and the papers they write. That started in the ’50s with Bill Bender,” says former University President Derek C. Bok.

SMALL LOANS, BIG IDEAS

But while Bender and his ideas were ahead of their time in the world of college admissions, students themselves had already begun to make their own changes and lay the foundation for a more inclusive College.

Before Bender’s report, the Financial Aid Office struggled to find a practical answer to the question that Bender vocalized in 1961: With Harvard’s tuition on the rise, how could the University maintain and increase the social and economic diversity of its applicants?

Struck by the dorm room efforts of young entrepreneurs, then-Dean of Financial Aid John U. Monro ’35 assigned Director of Student Employment Dustin M. Burke ’52 to investigate student businesses as a mechanism for undergraduates to support themselves while on campus.

In response, Burke began the research that would culminate in the creation of Harvard Student Agencies, whose 1957 charter asserts that it serves “to conduct and supervise enterprises for the benefit of students at Harvard University who are in need of financial assistance to defray the expenses of their education.”

HSA became a major part of undergraduate financial support beyond what Harvard could lend to students through an aid program, Burke says.

Beginning in 1957 with a $7,000 investment and the acquisition of the rights to provide the weekly linen service customarily offered by the University, HSA quickly expanded to match student interest, providing funding to students who sought to start businesses of their own.

Although HSA began as an initiative of the Financial Aid Office, Burke stresses that its projects were founded and run by students.

“With a little selling knowledge and the genius nature of the student came the ability to find and start businesses,” Burke says. “We would give them a little desk and a telephone and leads to members of the community and alumni and it turned into a very active, positive group of people.”

Student employees became integrated in the Harvard community, serving hot dogs to eager peers at concession stands during Harvard football games and martinis to faculty during private parties.

And the growing number of relatively low-income students and their newfound position on campus were reflected in other ways.

“It really was a time when the social clubs were beginning to become more irrelevant to the vast majority of the students,” says Michael Churchill ’61, former managing editor of The Crimson.

Churchill says integration of social groups was “a long ways from where it was by the end of the ’60s.”

“There was in ’57 almost no attention being paid to racial or economic diversity,”

he says. “By ’61 that was beginning to change. By ’65 there was a complete transformation in students’ attention to those issues.”

—Staff writer Michelle B. Timmerman can be reached at mtimmerman@college.harvard.edu.

—Staff writer Justin C. Worland can be reached at jworland@college.harvard.edu.