Conclusion to President Pusey's 1962 Report on Harvard

(Following is the conclusion to President Pusey's report on the University for 1961-62. Earlier in his report, Pusey noted the beginning of operation of the Cambridge Electron Accelerator, the organization of the new computing center, and the gaining of the halfway mark in the million Program for Harvard as noteworthy events during this year.

The President warned in his report that "there are few departments in the University which are not now" pressed for funds--among them, the Divinity School, the Graduate School of Design, and the center for Italian Renaissance I Tatti.)

This summary of the activity of the academic year 1961-62 began with an account of the new Cambridge Electron Accelerator, symbol of a scientific age. The University's involvement in science, in research and in the upper reaches of graduate and professional education will grow and strengthen in the years ahead--strengthen, deepen and lead on to increasingly intense specialization.

This is inevitable and if we are to continue to play the role in the advance of knowledge which is an essential part of our function, I should like in concluding, however, to assure you that the University though buoyed up by many exciting new developments in science, has not become so giddy as to have lost sight of its ancient concern for humane learning.

I have mentioned the new centers for research in the humanities, a center for the study of classical Greek culture and another for Italian Renaissance culture. Additional evidence can be cited: the largest single building effort the University has yet undertaken, the William James Hall, is about to get underway to provide a new home for the Departments of Social Relations and of Psychology. A study made here a year and a half ago, of increased expenditures in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences showed as great, if not greater, improvement in the basic budgetary situations in various departments of literature, history, the fine arts and music as in any others.

A majority of the 78 new professorial chairs established during the past nine years are in the areas of the humanities and the social sciences--an impressive number of them in such centrally humane fields as history, religion, languages and literatures, music and the arts. New physical facilities have been acquired for the study and practice of the drama and the arts, as well as new library buildings--or at least new and increased library space--for music, Oriental languages and literatures, German and French, the fine arts, the Law School and the Divinity School.

Much has been done to strengthen "the environment of learning in the Houses. Enrollments in the humanities and the the social sciences in the College and in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences have held their own. History, which at Harvard is classified with the social sciences, had the largest single enrollment last year; the social sciences with 44.6 per cent of the graduate students and 45.7 per cent of undergraduate concentrators have far the largest share of both graduate and undergraduate enrollment. And if it is true that there is now a great deal more outside support available for graduate students in the sciences than in other disciplines, perhaps one can see in this circumstance at least part of the explanation of the concomitant happy development that 40 per cent of the funds spent in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences to help Teaching Fellows, and nearly a third of the Faculty's graduate scholarship funds, are available to graduate students in the humanities, who constitute less than one-fourth of the total graduate population.

Similarly, outside of Harvard, because of the availability of large Federal funds for support in the sciences, in an era of extraordinary national need for science, it has been possible for such foundations as the Woodrow Wilson and the Danforth to concentrate their efforts on helping graduate students in the fields of the humanities and social sciences. And there are even provisions of the National Defense Education Act designed to assist in these areas.

So it does not seem to me justified--certainly not in regard to Harvard--hastily to conclude tthat the present dramatic advances in the natural sciences are being effected at the expense of the humanities and social sciences, or that these disciplines are now suffering indifference and neglect. The Program for Harvard College was designed in considerable measure as at least a temporary safeguard against such an unhappy result.

There is the further relevant consideration that if one is today to be active at all in the sciences, almost astronomical sums are required for modern laboratories and for the enormously expensive equipment which technological advance has made available to them. For example, the Cambridge Electron Accelerator itself, which is of interest as a research tool to only a very few members of our Physics Department, cost $12 million to build and will cost between $4 million and 5 million a year to operate. Funds of this magnitude are quite beyond the power of any university department to provide. In this instance they are being furnished by the Atomic Energy Commission. Fortunately such very large sums are not needed by all departments, even by all departments in science.

For the long-range health of our universities one can hope that individuals in positions of power in the Federal Government who seem now to be on fire to advance only the special missions of Health, Derense, and Space, will develop greater awareness of the basic importance of education, especially higher education, and with it, a broader understanding of its full reach, and of the importance of its many varieties. Perhaps in time this will come. Meanwhile I am happy to be able to report that, with private support, concern for disciplines other than science is being deliberately fostered and rigorously maintained at Harvard, and I am confident this will continue.

The humanities have a very special place in a university, especially perhaps because of the pleasure they give, but also because of the heightened effects which experience of them can produce in individuals in terms of enlivened imagination, increased responsiveness, broadened interest, clarified purpose and in the end also, quickened ethical sense. It is my private hope, not only that the influence of humane learning will remain strong in this University, but that it will continue pervasively to penetrate every area of its far-ranging activity

The President warned in his report that "there are few departments in the University which are not now" pressed for funds--among them, the Divinity School, the Graduate School of Design, and the center for Italian Renaissance I Tatti.)

This summary of the activity of the academic year 1961-62 began with an account of the new Cambridge Electron Accelerator, symbol of a scientific age. The University's involvement in science, in research and in the upper reaches of graduate and professional education will grow and strengthen in the years ahead--strengthen, deepen and lead on to increasingly intense specialization.

This is inevitable and if we are to continue to play the role in the advance of knowledge which is an essential part of our function, I should like in concluding, however, to assure you that the University though buoyed up by many exciting new developments in science, has not become so giddy as to have lost sight of its ancient concern for humane learning.

I have mentioned the new centers for research in the humanities, a center for the study of classical Greek culture and another for Italian Renaissance culture. Additional evidence can be cited: the largest single building effort the University has yet undertaken, the William James Hall, is about to get underway to provide a new home for the Departments of Social Relations and of Psychology. A study made here a year and a half ago, of increased expenditures in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences showed as great, if not greater, improvement in the basic budgetary situations in various departments of literature, history, the fine arts and music as in any others.

A majority of the 78 new professorial chairs established during the past nine years are in the areas of the humanities and the social sciences--an impressive number of them in such centrally humane fields as history, religion, languages and literatures, music and the arts. New physical facilities have been acquired for the study and practice of the drama and the arts, as well as new library buildings--or at least new and increased library space--for music, Oriental languages and literatures, German and French, the fine arts, the Law School and the Divinity School.

Much has been done to strengthen "the environment of learning in the Houses. Enrollments in the humanities and the the social sciences in the College and in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences have held their own. History, which at Harvard is classified with the social sciences, had the largest single enrollment last year; the social sciences with 44.6 per cent of the graduate students and 45.7 per cent of undergraduate concentrators have far the largest share of both graduate and undergraduate enrollment. And if it is true that there is now a great deal more outside support available for graduate students in the sciences than in other disciplines, perhaps one can see in this circumstance at least part of the explanation of the concomitant happy development that 40 per cent of the funds spent in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences to help Teaching Fellows, and nearly a third of the Faculty's graduate scholarship funds, are available to graduate students in the humanities, who constitute less than one-fourth of the total graduate population.

Similarly, outside of Harvard, because of the availability of large Federal funds for support in the sciences, in an era of extraordinary national need for science, it has been possible for such foundations as the Woodrow Wilson and the Danforth to concentrate their efforts on helping graduate students in the fields of the humanities and social sciences. And there are even provisions of the National Defense Education Act designed to assist in these areas.

So it does not seem to me justified--certainly not in regard to Harvard--hastily to conclude tthat the present dramatic advances in the natural sciences are being effected at the expense of the humanities and social sciences, or that these disciplines are now suffering indifference and neglect. The Program for Harvard College was designed in considerable measure as at least a temporary safeguard against such an unhappy result.

There is the further relevant consideration that if one is today to be active at all in the sciences, almost astronomical sums are required for modern laboratories and for the enormously expensive equipment which technological advance has made available to them. For example, the Cambridge Electron Accelerator itself, which is of interest as a research tool to only a very few members of our Physics Department, cost $12 million to build and will cost between $4 million and 5 million a year to operate. Funds of this magnitude are quite beyond the power of any university department to provide. In this instance they are being furnished by the Atomic Energy Commission. Fortunately such very large sums are not needed by all departments, even by all departments in science.

For the long-range health of our universities one can hope that individuals in positions of power in the Federal Government who seem now to be on fire to advance only the special missions of Health, Derense, and Space, will develop greater awareness of the basic importance of education, especially higher education, and with it, a broader understanding of its full reach, and of the importance of its many varieties. Perhaps in time this will come. Meanwhile I am happy to be able to report that, with private support, concern for disciplines other than science is being deliberately fostered and rigorously maintained at Harvard, and I am confident this will continue.

The humanities have a very special place in a university, especially perhaps because of the pleasure they give, but also because of the heightened effects which experience of them can produce in individuals in terms of enlivened imagination, increased responsiveness, broadened interest, clarified purpose and in the end also, quickened ethical sense. It is my private hope, not only that the influence of humane learning will remain strong in this University, but that it will continue pervasively to penetrate every area of its far-ranging activity