Div. School Is Requesting Fund Grants

The Divinity School has turned to private foundations for the $2.3 million it needs to build a new dormitory and two more floors on its library.

It hopes to get at least enough money by the summer of 1968 to begin work then on the 52-man dormitory--planned as a new wing of Andover Hall.

The two projects are part of a $6.8 million improvements drive which the Divinity School announced last March.

At that time it was hoped individual contributors would come up with all the money.

But individuals have not been able to provide "leadership gifts"--the large contributions that influence others--which the dorm and the library addition require, Wayne W. Horvath, director of Development in the Divinity School, said yesterday.

$1.5 Million Dorm

The dormitory will cost $1.5 million and the library addition will cost $800,000 under present plans, but the largest single gift Horvath has come up with so far is $150,000.

In the past, theological schools have had little luck with the nation's large philanthropic foundations, Horvath said. He cited the major speech given by Samuel H. Miller, dean of the Divinity School, last month in which Miller said that the foundations fear that if they give a grant to one denomination, they must give to all.

Miller--and Horvath yesterday--pointed out that this attitude does not prevail when the foundations give money to the sciences or the arts.

Nothing for Divinity

"The large foundations, like the Ford Foundation, do almost nothing for theological education," Horvath said.

Government funds also are not available for religious education--even for building dormitories, he said, and private corporations either do not give at all, or only to the denominations of the family that may run them.

Horvath said that competition from other schools with current fund drives also has hurt the effort for individual donors, because most Divinity School graduates are not big contributors.

"Most of the ministers are poor--unless they've had a fortuitous marriage," he said. So the School counts heavily on doctors, lawyers, and businessmen: men who are "friends of the Divinity School" but still have conflicting allegiances to their own grad schools.