Horton Plans Divinity Fund Annual Drive

The Divinity School will break tradition by beginning a large-scale drive for annual funds, Dean Horton announced yesterday.

"Although we have never done much in annual giving," Dean Horton said, "we have to enter the field." He added, however, that this would in no way interfere with the Program for Harvard College. "The school shall never make any solicitation except after discussing the matter with the people running that drive."

He further asserted that the Divinity School would begin its drive for annual non-endowment gifts "as soon as we can." This money will be used to meet expenses, and the solicitations for annual funds would continue "indefinitely," Horton added.

The following improvements were spotlighted by the dean:

1) A new wing for the Divinity School library and a dormitory for married and unmarried students. "It is only now," Horton said, "after we have established our basic faculty, that we are thinking about new buildings." He estimated that each of these buildings would cost $1 million.

2) Faculty replacements. Because of "retirement and other factors," Horton said, "We shall have to secure faculty members in the departments of Old Testament, Church History, and pastoral theology."

3) Expansion of the Divinity School curriculum. "We would like very much to enter the interdisciplinary fields of religion and the arts, religion and business, and other similar areas where pioneering needs to be done," he said.

4) Addition of a professor of Comparative Religion. "He would view religions not as dead things, but as living faiths, and treat them with the same techniques of research and criticism that we apply to our own Christian faith," Horton explained.