ADVISORY COUNCIL

Convinced that since President Eliot's time, the faculty had grown too large to become sufficiently unified, the Board of Overseers, at its last meeting, completed arrangements to elect annually a group of sixty men which would represent the entire faculty and which could assume some of the administrative duties now being performed by committees. The primary importance of such a group, however, lies in its ability to maintain close contact with the president through frequent meetings and so would increase materially the reach and unity of the central executive power.

Under the conditions which have been developing during the past three or four decades, the actual control of the University has passed into the meshes of a complicated bureaucracy; the necessary number of professors and instructors has increased to such a degree that it has become impossible to accomplish anything at meetings of the whole faculty; and the advisory council of the president has been transformed into a group of committees and boards. But with the restoration of his advisory council the president has created a government which is centralized and efficient. The boards and committees remain to perform their very necessary duties connected with the machinery or running the University. But the avowed purpose of a university is to teach, or at least to furnish students with opportunities to learn, and this revived advisory council will carry out equally necessary duties concerning both theories and practice of educating.

The rapid growth of Harvard into a vast university has caused such an increase in the complexity of the administrative structure, that the present mesh or red tape is almost impenetrable. Close contact between the administrative and academic divisions is essential and this can be achieved only if the two are fused into a small representative unit which at once controls both phases of activity.