A FRIEND OF THE FACULTY

To the Editors of the CRIMSON:

My attention has been called to an assertion in your columns that the Faculty has been selfish about scholarship funds. Since your zestful editorialist has directed against others an attack that should properly be aimed at me, I write to remind you that the Faculty as a body does not make financial decisions. The Administration makes them, subject to the final authority of the President and Fellows. Under Mr. Pusey's supervision, I made the decisions on financial aid between 1953 and 1960. The selfishness therefore was mine--and I think Mr. Jencks should understand that any Dean who is not regarded as ungenerous by everybody is a failure.

My annual budgetary fights with Dean Bender were invariably as lively as they were cordial, and I recall no year in which he protested my eventual decisions; few Harvard men will attribute his silence to timidity. Moreover, each year I reported to the Faculty our use of unrestricted money for financial aid (a policy begun by Mr. Buck, against all tradition), and I do not recall that a single colleague ever "selfishly" protested those allocations. It does no service to Dean Bender's last report to set up a false issue of faculty selfishness on this point.

What is ironic is that Mr. Jencks, the scourge of the faculty, is like nothing so much as a faculty member in his view of academic finances. This is particularly clear in his notion of what should be done with unrestricted funds. He believes that the Administration should feel "obligated to contribute a portion of tuition" to financial aid no matter what other funds may be available. This is exactly what every endowed department believes. (I wonder if Mr. Jencks will some day be a professor of Music or Chemistry--to speak only of the best-endowed and the most amiably greedy.) It is a prescription for disaster, because it would make the University a mere holding company for financial decisions made by others.

Harvard's firm administrative control over unrestricted funds has more to do with her greatness, in my judgment, than any other aspect of her constitutional tradition except the freedom of her faculty, her students and her wayward press. The Corporation and the Administration may be right or wrong, but they can never be irresponsible. No other final judgement than theirs must govern the distribution of unrestricted funds, and one element in this judgment must always be the availability of other money. The basic Harvard document on this point fittingly bears the signature of the late Learned Hand.

Perhaps in Bender's time and mine we spent too much on financial aid; perhaps we spent too little. Perhaps the President and I let the budget of the central Faculty grow too fast--or perhaps we were too cautious. But the standards used by Mr. Jencks simply do not bear upon these questions. McGeorge Bundy,