Imperial Harvard Rejects 'Colonialism'

Some prominent American colleges have thought about solving the applications deluge by starting affiliates in distant places, but Harvard apparently has no such ideas.

Time magazine, among others, has suggested an alternative to expansion: a Yale-in-Denver or a Harvard-in-Dallas. President Pusey said recently that the question has never been raised around the University, and--in the absence of a positive policy--Harvard probably has a policy against begetting other Harvards elsewhere.

For example, St. John's College in Annapolis, Md., hopes to keep its enrollment down to 300 and so will aim to reproduce itself in as many as six affiliates throughout the country. Its president has launched a $3 million drive to start a St. John's-in-California by 1964.

Stanford University seems to have gone one better--a liberal arts campus in Paris. Pusey said that no plans--regardless of how nebulous--have been presented for a Harvard undergraduate college abroad either.

Although Harvard will probably not duplicate its Cambridge edition elsewhere, the University does have numerous holdings throughout the United States and the world. The University extends far beyond the banks of the Charles, or the Medical School in Boston, or the Arboretum in Jamaica Plain. In Massachusetts the University also owns the Harvard Forest and Black Rock Forest (6000 acres) in Petersham, the Bussey Institute for agriculture and horticulture is Jamacia Plain, the George R. Agassis Station in Harvard, Mass, (part of the Astronomical Observatory system), and the Blue Hill Meterological Observatory.

In Washington, D.C., the University operates the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection for study in Bysantine and Mediaeval Humanities, and the recently established Center for Hellenic Studies.

Centers of the Astronomical Observatory system are located beyond Massachusetts in New Mexico, Colorado, Texas, Illinois, and South Africa. The Boyden Observatory in South Africa, from which the southern hemisphere of the sky is accessible for University research, was a Harvard station from its inception until 1955. It is now operated by institutions in six countries including the University.

In Soledad, Cuba, is located the Atkins Garden and Research Laboratory, founded by a University gift in 1901. Fear arose recently that the Castro regime had seized the 200-acre plot, which is devoted to tropical agriculture, ecomonic botany, and related biological sciences.

The University's latest foreign acquisition, Bernard Berenson's Villa I Tatti, is to be used as a center where promising scholars would be given adequate freedom and tools for research.

The Administration thinks that keeping these operations in order and keeping things under control in Cambridge are quite enough--without adding a Harvard-in-Dallas.