Harvard Expansion

Today "the age that is waiting before" presses harder than ever on the crust of conservatism that has always surrounded Harvard with tradition. For several years college administrators throughout the country have been looking with alarm at the problems facing them in the next decade, when the now legendary deluge of "war babies" will flood admissions offices with applications for college entrance.

The national population at college age now stands at about eight and a half million; in 1970, according to present estimates, it will be over 13.6 million. And of those 13.6 million, 4.6 million will be enrolled in college, a rise of 130 per cent over this year's total.

To increase national college facilities by more than double is undoubtedly the greatest challenge facing the country's educations today. Harvard has made its response in the "Program for Harvard College," the $82.5 million fund drive aimed at widespread improvement of the Harvard undergraduate school. In conjunction with this Program, President Pusey announced early this year that the College would expand 15 to 20 per cent during the next ten years.

This decision was not unexpected but neither was it unanimously approved. There are several ways of meeting rising applications, and several of them do not involve the expansion of colleges like Harvard. One solution is the decentralization of education--the formation of new colleges, perhaps as offshoots of already existing institutions.

Harvard, many claim, can fulfill its educational responsibility to the nation by creating a branch college outside of Cambridge. This, they say, would avoid overcrowding the University's already expanding facilities in Cambridge, and at the same time bring the benefits of a Harvard education to a larger part of the country. Talk of such a project was circulating among administration and faculty members of on a very tentative basis this fall.

Branch College Unlikely

There is little doubt that new colleges will have to be founded; clearly not all American institutions of higher education can suddenly decree a 130 per cent expansion program in order to meet the demands of increased population. But there seems little chance of Harvard's entering such a branch college operation at this time.

Another recourse would be the creation of a great many more junior colleges than now exist. President emeritus Conant has advocated this plan, claiming that a considerable number of the people that now go to college are interested in nothing more than be gotten out of a two year course. Furthermore, about half of the nation's college students, he maintains, drop out after two years of study.

Finally, there is the possibility of expanding present colleges. For state colleges this will be a necessity; they will be forced to do so by the state legislatures on which they depend for financial support. For private institutions like Harvard, there is a choice--a choice based not primarily on money but on educational ideals, which makes it all the more difficult to decide.

The people who favor Harvard's expansion center their case around a single argument: in a national educational crisis such as that presented by the imminent surge of college applicants, Harvard, as one of the country's leading private universities, cannot stand aside and simply let the other institutions cope with the problem. Harvard has a duty to make some contribution towards the national effort.

The first two solutions to the problem--the founding of new colleges or of junior colleges--are unfortunately inadequate, the expansionists claim. It would be impossible to start a college today and staff it with anything approaching the quality of faculty that Harvard now possesses. Harvard can offer a much better education than can any newborn college. Nor does an increase in junior colleges solve the problem; it is a four-year college degree that today's young men are seeking, whether or not they are interested in the course of study.

The only solution left is the expansion of existing colleges, and, the argument runs, if Harvard is to keep her place as an educational leader, this means the expansion of Harvard. Of course this could be only a token expansion. To increase Harvard's enrollment by 130 per cent is a move that has never been seriously considered. But the 20 per cent expansion predicted by President Pusey would be enough to demonstrate Harvard's willingness to carry a share of the national burden. As Pusey said in announcing the move, "The leader must make a concession."

There is a second reason for expansion, totally unrelated to any idealistic duty, which Dean Bundy hastens to point out to anyone who may consider expansion a radical or extraordinary proposition. The college, he says, has a natural tendency to grow in harmony with the constant growth in human knowledge. College faculties are continually expanding to incorporate new fields of study, and a rise in student enrollment to meet this expansion is only natural. Such a process of gradual growth has been going on at Harvard for some time and will undoubtedly proceed for many years to come.

The anti-expansion faction answers with the claim that Harvard will have to sacrifice quality if it is to increase quantity. The University admittedly has a duty to the nation, they say, but that duty is to preserve the high standards of scholarship that it now maintains. Any compromise with the quality of a Harvard education is a disastrous price to pay for an increase in admissions which can cover only a fraction of a per cent of the national total.

President Pusey would be the last to deny the legitimacy of this claim, but he challenges the statement that Harvard must lower its quality in order to expand a moderate amount. This is inded the crucial point of contention between the opposing faction: how would a 20 per cent increase in enrollment affect Harvard and the education it offers?

Preserving Faculty Strength

To preserve the strength of the faculty is the key task involved in any expansionist program. Any increase in the student body must be accompanied by growth of the faculty. The Program for Harvard College has allocated $5 million for the establishment of about 12 new Chairs. But the junior teaching staff--instructors and teaching fellows--must also grow, and it is to this increase that the opponents of expansion point with alarm.

In 1945 Harvard had 304 faculty members above the rank of instructor and 237 on the junior teaching staff (this last figure includes part-time teachers and this is not directly comparable to the figure for senior members). By 1954 the number of senior members had risen to 453 while that of junior faculty had jumped to 529. This represented a 49 per cent increase in senior faculty and a 123 per cent increase in junior faculty.

Dean Bender, one of the critics of expansion, sees in this marked disparity of increases "a watering down of the quality of Harvard instruction." He claims "One of the weakest spots in Harvard education today is the high proportion of undergraduate teaching done by Teaching Fellows. I am not indicating Teaching Fellows as a group. Some of them are doing a first rate job and all are gaining valuable experience. But they are uneven in quality, they get little help or supervision from their seniors, and they are, by definition, inexperienced.... If we add a thousand or more undergraduates we shall inevitably have to use Teaching Fellows even more extensively, with a further decline in the quality of instruction."

The acute shortage of teachers at present severely aggravates this problem. Will Harvard be able to find enough competent teaching fellows to meet the requirements of expansion, and if it can will it be able to keep them? Other colleges even more hard-pressed than Harvard will be only too eager to snatch teaching fellows away to higher positions elsewhere. It may even become difficult, as Bender points out, for Harvard to keep its instructors and assistant professors.

Dean Bundy admits that the junior faculty problem is critical, but not so critical as to prevent expansion. Harvard ought to be able to discourage faculty poaching by other colleges if it makes the major increases in faculty salaries projected by the Program for Harvard College. The Program has earmarked $16 million for salaries, to produce an expected raise of about 25 per cent by 1960.

Physical Problems

Then there is the purely physical problem of finding space--dormitories, libraries, laboratories, and athletic facilities--for an increased undergraduate body. The House system, dividing the college living quarters into self-sufficient units, makes things considerably simpler here. New Houses can be added without diluting the advantages of the old ones. The Program calls for three new Houses, one of them to be completed by 1959. This eighth House will be used to siphon off the overcrowding from the present Houses, but the two additional ones can be devoted primarily to new students.

Various other items of physical expansion that must be completed before numerical expansion can begin are also covered by the Program for Harvard College. A new chemistry research and teaching center, to be connected to Mallinckrodt, has been planned, as has a Behavorial Sciences building to expand the facilities of the Departments of Psychology and Social Relations. Increased library space has not been provided for, however, and certainly with Widener and Lamont as crowded as they are, some addition must be made before 800 or so additional students can be comfortably accommodated.

Expansion will also create new problems in financial aid. Even now the College has to pay $400,000 a year out of the free funds of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences in order to meet the requirements of its vastly increased scholarship and loan program--a program that amounts to about $1,850,000 annually. This $400,000 expenditure means less money for faculty salaries and other needed projects. To relieve this situation, the Program for Harvard College hopes to raise $4 million for increased financial aid endow ment. Even with these extra funds, however, the scholarship and loan program will put a severe financial burden on the University, and with a 20 percent increase in enrollment, the burden would be that much heavier.

John U. Monro, Director of the Financial Aid Office, predicts that the pressure of expansion will result in sweeping changes in the financial aid policies of American colleges. First, there will probably be a substantial increase in loans rather than scholarships to meet the rising tide of enrollments. More people can be assisted through loans, Monro explains, and they put less of a drain on college resources.

Whether Harvard will adopt such a policy, it is too early to tell. Certainly scholarship money will always be available here for able students who have a pressing need, and Monro hastens to say, no one will be denied admission merely for the inability to pay the full cost. But a 20 per cent increase in students is going to tighten pressure on the Financial Aid Office, and an increase in loans rather than scholarships would be one way of relieving it.

Monro's second prediction is that college tuitions will rise sharply in the next few years. There are a great many people who could pay more than the $1000 that Harvard charges and thus reduce the annual excess of expenditure over income per student. The money saved here could be poured into aid for needier students and into faculty salaries. It seems quite likely that Harvard will have to raise its tuition soon. In an article on faculty salaries, Dean Bundy has said, "We face needs so great and urgent that we shall probably have to plan for both new endowment and tuition increases."

The nationwide problem of expansion also touches graduate schools; it is in them that sufficient teachers to staff new and expanded colleges must be trained. Without an increase in the country's Ph.D. production, the teacher shortage may paralyze efforts at undergraduate school expansion.

The size of Harvard's Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, according to Dean J. Petersen Elder, depends on the size of the senior faculty in the various departments. Because graduate work involves a much closer professor-student relationship than undergraduate study, there is a strict limit to the number of graduate students any one department can handle.

In the smaller departments where there are only a few applicants, Elder feels that more students could be enrolled if they were qualified. In larger departments there is no problem finding exceptional applicants; the difficulty is not overloading the faculty. With the faculty at its present size, the Graduate School could admit about 50 more students, Elder estimates, mostly in the small departments. If new professorships are created under the Program for Harvard College, this number might be raised accordingly.

Parallel Expansion

In any case, the graduate and undergraduate schools are closely intertwined; both have the same faculty, both use more or less the same libraries and laboratories. Any program providing for a marked expansion of one would probably also permit a parallel expansion in the other. But Dean Elder and many others would oppose any increase in graduate enrollment that would break sharply the present proportion of size between the GSAS and Harvard College. If the College is able to expand 15 to 20 per cent, the graduate school could probably grow a similar amount, but no more.

And it appears almost certain that the College will expand. The groundwork for growth has been laid by the Program for Harvard College. Harvard's decision to expand is by no means a radical one. In the past Harvard has gradually enlarged in order to meet the demands of the future, and now, when the years ahead hold an unprecedented rise in college applications, the reasons for expansion are especially great.

The 15 to 20 per cent enrollment increase predicted by President Pusey is a fairly moderate one, considering the fact that Harvard has grown by 24 per cent since 1940. The problems involved are acknowledged to be great, but they have been faced and solved before. If, as Pusey has said, "today's Harvard College is the strongest Harvard College yet achieved," the challenge of expansion can surely be met once more.