DEAN BENDER COMMENTS

To the Editors of the CRIMSON:

The story in last Friday's CRIMSON about the comments on College admission policy in President Pusey's report may have given some readers the impression that my last report on Harvard admissions was critical of present admission policy, critical that is, of what is now being done by my successor, Dean Glimp, and the current Admission & Scholarship Committee. I owe it to these gentlemen, for whom I have the greatest respect and sympathy, to make it entirely clear that I was not, directly or indirectly, criticizing them. In fact, since my report was written in the fall of 1960, before any students had been admitted by the Admission Committee under Dean Glimp's leadership, it could not have attacked current admission policies.

For the record I probably ought to go further and say that at no time, either before 1960 or since, have those responsible for Harvard College admission policy accepted what my report called the "top-one-per-cent" policy. By "those responsible" I mean not only the Admission Committee and staff, but also the President, the Dean of the Faculty and the governing boards, especially the Corporation. These men have consistently supported an admission policy which put weight on a variety of non-academic factors in the selection of students and which sought for the College a student body with a diversity of qualities and backgrounds within a considerable range of academic ability. There are individual faculty members who believe in the "top-one-per-cent" policy, and they may be right, as my report pointed out, but this has never been and is not now Harvard policy. It would be most unfortunate for the College and unfair to Dean Glimp and his Committee if anything I have said should give the public the impression that Harvard is now following such a policy.

The purpose of my report was, among other things, to call attention to, and to try to define more sharply, the admission policy issues now faced by Harvard and other selective colleges. I wanted to stimulate more thinking about and discussion of these important matters in the hope that out of this would come a better basis for admission policy than we now have. There has certainly been a lot of talk about these matters in recent months, but it has been a disappointment to me that the proponents of the "top-one-per-cent" policy have so far failed to express their views publicly. While my prejudices are clear enough I freely admit that no one has any right, in the present state of our thinking, to be dogmatic about what is the best long-run policy for the Harvard College. W. J. Bender.