Harvard Today: Excerpts From the President's Report

In his annual report to the Board of Overseers President Conant pointed out many of the problems which face the University today. Selections from the report of interest to students have been compiled below. In future weeks the CRIMSON hopes to run features on the specific topics which the President refers to.

Reserve Groups

For a long time Harvard has joined with the Army and Navy in training future officers by means of a Reserve Officer Training units connected with the College; recently a third unit for Air Force officers has been added. The numbers involved in these military programs have varied enormously over the years. In the demobilization period after World War II, only a small percentage of the student body was interested in entering the R.O.T.C. courses, but within the last 12 months the enrollment figures have taken an abrupt upward turn.

This fall some 40 percent of the freshman class applied for and was admitted into the three programs of study leading to Reserve Officer commissions. If the trend continues and the military authorities are ready to expand the courses, another year may see a majority part of the physically eligible freshmen carrying on a military program as part of their undergraduate work.

If and when all four college classes are as much involved in R.O.T.C. work as the present freshman class, a number of problems will arise in regard to curricula, the transition from college to graduate professional study, and the sue of summer vacation for study work.

Government Work

Numerous members of the University staff are heavily involved as consultants in highly confidential scientific work connected with the armed forces. Indeed, many professors here and elsewhere find themselves perplexed as to how to divide their time between calls from the government and their responsibilities as scholars and teachers....

I need not repeat the well-known and compelling arguments as to why we must keep our universities active as scholarly centers even during partial mobilization. The arguments all turn on the premise--some may say the hope--that after a period of strain the time will come when the whole world moves in the direction of less rather than more military preparations.

For it is only by a severe twisting of our normal activities that we in the universities can make a contribution to the waging of a war. Every level of our education program, with the exception of the ROTC courses I have mentioned, and almost every aspect of our scholarly and scientific work is based on the belief that peace, not war, is the state that characterizes the relation between groups of individuals or nations....

Even now it may be on the diplomatic front rather than where armies meet that universities can make their greatest contributions. The Harvard Russian Research Center may serve as an example of what I have in mind.

Today it is generally agreed by those who have access to classified information that only in a few special instances is it necessary to call on the universities to establish secret laboratories and recruit scientists from other institutions on a large scale. At Harvard we have no such laboratories. No secret research is being done here at the present time, aside from a considerable study the Harvard Business School is undertaking for the Defense Department.

Cultural Activities

I might appropriately report also on a new and perhaps significant venture which we have undertaken to promote a different type of adult education on an informal community-wide basis. In association with the Lowell Institute and five colleges and universities in Greater Boston. Harvard has for more than four years been experimenting with the production of educational programs for broadcast on sustaining time over local commercial radio stations.

During the past year this advisory council of colleges has been enlarged by the inclusion of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. A non commercial educational broadcasting station has been set up to carry on and amplify the work already began. The new station, WGBH, has built a 25,000-watt frequency modulated transmitter in one room of the meteorological observatory on Great Blue Hill, and maintains studio in Symphony Hall, Boston.

In operation daily from mid-afternoon until late evening the station offers a great variety of programs which may fairly be described as ranging all the way from intellectual entertainment to organized instruction. It is our hope that in this way we may be assisting many listeners to supplement their education gained in high schools or colleges and to develop for themselves what President Eliot called the "durable satisfactions of life."

Theatre Fellowships

The success of the Nieman Fellows in Journalism and the Advanced Management Program in the Business School has led to the suggestion that a somewhat similar scheme might be established for the young men and women who are concerned with the stage, screen, radio, and television. This would not imply the founding of a school or department of the drama. Indeed, it might be considered as a move in a contrary direction, just as the decision to proceed with the Nieman Fellows meant the rejection of the idea of founding a school of journalism at Harvard.

Two essential conditions would have to be fulfilled before any scheme of fellowships connected with the dramatic arts could be successfully launched at Harvard. The first would be an endowment of at least two million dollars; the second would be the construction of a theatre building to serve as a focal center.

Indeed, quite apart from such an enterprise, the University's need for a theatre has long been recognized. Harvard is the only great university without such a theatre. The faculty is anxious to encourage those many undergraduate organizations that regularly produce plays; their efforts are now greatly hampered by the total lack of acceptable facilities.

What is required is a modest theatre, adequately equipped for the performance of plays and the showing of motion pleasures together with at least one small studio for the producing of films. TO those who feel that in this tense period of rearmament the universities are devoting too much attention to the natural and social sciences, such a project may appeal with special force.

Athletics

The continued significance of the intramural program of athletics should be stressed. Visitors unfamiliar with the extent of the program or the interests it arouses are often struck by the keen competition between the Houses for the various athletic trophies...

We have never reached anything like the goal of "competitive athletics for all." But we do have far more students participating in athletics than in the pre House days. That such participation is for the majority of students in our culture, an important part of learning "how to live together" is a premise that has been widely accepted by school and college teachers for many years.

From this premise developed, in the last century, the idea that games between rival colleges should be encouraged. Slowly at first and then with frightening acceleration, intercollegiate athletics developed in the United States in the twentieth century.

The status in 1952 needs no comment in view of all that has been written and said on the subject of football and basketball in the last eight months. But I should like to call the attention of the readers of this report to the restatement of Harvard's historic policy in a joint publication of Harvard, Yale, and Princeton on "admission and scholarship policies as the apply to athletes."

Professional Schools

The area of medicine and public health continues to present problems, chiefly of a financial nature. The whole future financing of medical education and the relation of medical schools to hospitals is a national problem. Recognizing this fact, a group of distinguished and public spirited citizens have formed the National Fund for Medical Education and are soliciting annual contributions from corporations. The money thus collected will be distributed among the medical schools of the nation...

Together with the School of Education the School of Public Health ranks at the top of the list of the needs of the University for new capital funds.

Harvard's Finances

To some, the major uncertainty about Harvard is whether or not it will be

destroyed by an atomic blast in the next few years. For those in this state of mind, it will seem foolish to talk about the need for new capital funds. But continuing to assume that there will be no global war, I conclude this annual report by urging again the significance of endowment. . .

Annual gifts and term grants from foundations we receive and welcome, but without capital funds for new buildings and without new endowment yielding a stable income, we cannot go forward with our work. . . Every proposal for expansion must be scrutinized with great care, therefore, to see whether or not it places in jeopardy our permanent resources. Many worthwhile projects supported by only a five-year grant or annual giving must be refused.

The largest source of temporary money today is the Federal Government (but) if we are to serve the future as we do the present, individuals of wealth and those who control philanthropic foundations must provide the solid basis on which the next generation of scholars may securely build