Fred Glimp: A 'Naturally Cussed' Idaho Kid Who Became the Dean of Harvard College

Fred Lee Glimp, a colleague has said, is "naturally cussed." He is willing to admit that, back in 1946, he was.

He read in Life Magazine about Harvard's struggle to deal with thousands of applications from returning veterans. Somehow that attracted him. "If it was so hard to get into, it was worth trying," he remembers telling himself.

There may have been other, commoner reasons for being impressed with Harvard and wanting to get into it. But none of them were enough to make Glimp go to any great trouble. He had asked the Army Air Corps to drop him off, on his return from the service, on the East Coast, so he could take a look at Harvard and get interviewed there. The Corps left him on the West Coast instead. So he went back to Boise (before the Army, he had never been outside of Idaho), got a job, sent Harvard an application and-forgot about the interview.

Sitting in Cambridge, all John Monro could say about Glimp's folder at first was "maybe." Glimp was just another veteran--and the criteria for admitting veterans were still uncertain. His application didn't exactly cry for attention. "My record wasn't exciting," Glimp recalls. "Neither was I." His lack of an interview also hurt him.

What Monro saw in the forms Glimp submitted he can't really explain; it must have been more than Glimp's being rural and mid-Western, though that was something Harvard wanted. For whatever reason, he put the folder aside and read it again--and again. Then, with some misgivings, he recommended that the College accept the man who would 20 years later succeed him as its Dean.

Glimp spent the first few months wondering if it had all been a mistake. He was taking the equivalent of three Gen Ed courses and Gov 1, but it seemed like too much. His exams marks were low. Finally Monro called him in and practically ordered him to change two of his courses.

"I was furious," Glimp remembers. "It was just the way I had pictured Harvard, an old Yankee insulting young Idaho." But he did it, and got scared, and worked harder, just making it through his freshman year.

Though he worked at a number of odd jobs (including chauffering President Conant) and played baseball, his marks began to inch higher. He made Phi Beta Kappa, got a magna on his Economics thesis and won a Fulbright.

The University renewed Glimp's scholarship when he got back from England, somewhat to his surprise. He spent the next three years tutoring and researching a dissertation on Schumpter. He also married into the Boston Irish. By 1954, he was well on his way to a doctoral degree in Economics. But he wasn't happy about it.

"I was 28 and I had never really worked," he says. "I was sick of being on a dole." Whatever the reason, he was tired of being just a graduate student. One day he stopped F. Skiddy von Stade Jr. '38 (dean of freshmen) in the Yard and asked about an administrative job. Von Stade sent him to Wilbur J. Bender '27, dean of admissions.

To Bender, the veterans of the late '40's-who came from more diverse backgrounds and received more financial aid than other undergraduates--seemed, for many reasons, the best possible student body for Harvard. He suggested joining the admissions and financial aid offices and became their first dean in the hope of recruiting that kind of student body.

He picked young assistants because he was sure his kind of admissions office would be a perfect testing ground for their administrative skills and interest in students. Monro was hired by Bender in 1946, when all this was still an idea; eight years later, Monro was in charge of financial aid. And that year, with the same instinct, Bender hired Glimp.

Many of the folders which Glimp read had been drawn in by Bender's efforts to recruit in high schools and in regions where Harvard had never been very active, and to offer more financial aid there than Harvard had ever done before. They came from poorer urban neighborhoods, from foreign countries--and from the mid-West.

Glimp was fascinated. He was soon named director of freshman scholarships, a post in which he had to read about half the applications for every class. For this half he developed an important loyalty. "There is something about the freshmen on scholarships," he says, "not that they're more interesting--that's unfair to the rest. But they add variety to the class, somehow hold it together."

By 1960, Glimp had worked so hard and so well that there was no more logical successor to Dean Bender. "Everyone said that no one could take Bender's place," a colleague remembers. "Glimp did."

* * *

It is easy to be a good dean of admissions; it is hard to be a very good one. The routine varies little from year to year. Every fall, like others on the admissions staff, the dean takes a few states (usually quite distant from each other) and goes out recruiting. He will spend three days or so listening to alumni talk about this year's prospects, chatting with principals, addressing student groups and occasionally interviewing applicants.

The problem is that the routine is deceptive, to those inside it as well as those outside. Most guidance counsellors and alumni are well acquainted with Harvard's own summary of its admissions policy: roughly 15 per cent of every entering class are "really brilliant students who appear to possess sound character and personality"; the rest, given adequate academic ability, are accepted on the basis of an incredible variety of factors ranging from "rural or small-town background" to "concern for the public good."

This vagueness gives Harvard recruitors--especially the first recruitors, the alumni--practically a free hand in deciding which students are worth going after. Most alumni are aware of this vagueness, but many of them add to it their own conception of "what Harvard wants." And that conception may stay fixed while Harvard's actual wants--the kinds of students the dean of admissions and his staff hope to recruit--change a great deal. The dean may be hoping to bring in, for example, more small-town, rural students or Negroes; the alumni in Montana or New Jersey may be concentrating on the high schools that have produced most Harvard men in the past.

Glimp has made no radical changes in the recruiting procedure, but he and his staff have spent more and more time outside the normal recruiting circuits, and have let the alumni handle more and more work in the "reliable" schools. What Glimp is looking for has not always been well defined; he argues that a search for students with unusual backgrounds is justified in itself.

"The 100 fellows in each class who are different have more to do with undergraduate education than almost anyone else," he says. They are the people who, time and time again, make a tutorial or a seminar come alive."

Glimp has reduced the number of students who are admitted from private preparatory schools and sought successfully to increase the number and amount of scholarships offered to each entering class. When he became dean, six years ago, 25 per cent of the freshmen class received scholarships; 40 per cent will next year. A total of $1.2 million in scholarships were held by students six years ago; the total next year will be $2.7 million.

Some of these scholarship holders next year will be students that Glimp and his staff personally recruited--like, possibly, a Midwestern senior interested in public affairs whom Glimp went out of his way to interview this fall not only because the senior was such a strong prospect but also because his school's response every previous year has been "Nope, nothing for Harvard."

But there is a limit to recruitment. The most important differences between the Class of 1964 and the Class of 1971. Glimp is the first to admit, are the results of national trends the admissions office has no control over.

The most dramatic has been, simply, in numbers. When Glimp became dean, the office was handling about 5000 applications; this year, it has gotten more than 7000. The rise in application, initially, had something to do with the post-war "baby boom," but, even though those babies are now upperclassmen, the rise continues. Glimp has only one explanation that links the rise to Harvard as an institution--that President Kennedy identified Harvard with "public service," especially in the minds of young people. It is true that "public service" is something an increasing number write about on their application.

The rise has not meant a decline in the quality of applicants; just the opposite. Glimp estimates that in the current bunch of applicants there are 1800 to 2000 who scored 700 or better in verbal aptitude and 2800 to 3000 who scored 700 or better in math aptitude. The result is that, every year, a smaller percentage of those who apply with high test scores make it.

During Glimp's term as dean, then, many of the criteria usually thought reliable indicators of admission to Harvard have been a little, if not greatly, shaken--high test scores, the "right" prep school, even being the son of a Harvard man. What has not been shaken, and so is becoming of more and more importance, is a category the admissions staff calls "personal quality." They rate it, as they do the other categories, on a scale of 1 to 6, and a 1, plus a satisfactory academic record, is practically a guarantee of admission.

Trying to figure out "personal quality" on the basis of one interview--or even worse, on the basis of 15 or 20 pages of recommendations and auto-biography--isn't easy. The man who can explain precisely what he likes and doesn't like, and persaude others that he's right, can influence a large number of decisions.

Glimp has always excelled at this kind of persuasion. He doesn't do it intentionally or overtly; it's just that what he says and the way he says it command attention.

The process begins with Glimp's comments as a "reader" of several folders. (Each gets two or three formal readings in which the applicants are ranked on the 1 to 6 scale in several categories and the contents are summarized.) "He knows how to say things," a colleague remarked. "Most people will tell you someone is 'well-rounnded.' I remember Freddie once writing that a fellow he liked who was strong in only one or two areas was 'spear-headed.' It turned a possible criticism nicely into praise."

The reading stage this year is over. Beginning tomorrow, the 23 voting members of the Admissions and Scholarships Committee (including several Faculty members) sit down for the month of talks in which the final decisions are made. If past years are any indication, Glimp will be persuasive here too.

"He has a way of sitting quietly as if there was all the time in the world, a colleague said. "Then he'll sum up at just the right moment, in a way that makes his suggestion seem perfectly sensible."

Glimp, in other words, is more of a