J. K. Galbraith Attacks Harvard, Calls Structure an Anachronism

Harvard's present governing structure is an anachronism, John Kenneth Galbraith, Paul M. Warburg Professor of Economics, charged in the current issue of the Harvard Alumni Bulletin.

Galbraith stated that the present governing board of businessmen, bankers, and lawyers was intended only as a transitional arrangement. The Corporation no longer serves its former purposes of inspiring confidence in donors and protecting against outside "witch-hunters," he wrote.

In his article, "The Case for Constitutional Reform at Harvard," Galbraith said, "The governing authority must have a range of professional and scholarly competence coordinate with the problems with which it deals."

He proposed an immediate study to survey possibilities of modernizing "the present non-government" of the University.

Defects

The chief defects Galbraith noted in Harvard's administrative structure were:

* The members of the Corporation communicate little if at all with the Faculty, yet they retain important powers, such as the naming of the new President.

* Because the members of the Corporation are "drawn from a rather special band of the American political and social spectrum," he said, they will be unable to cope with student protest against the Vietnam war, recruitment, and the draft.

* The Corporation cannot respond to the issues of "the real world," Galbraith said. The University has given little encouragement to those from Harvard who are working against the Vietnam war, he added.

Miffed

The Faculty is so large and complex, Galbraith said, that a governing board of businessmen cannot possibly understand it. The Corporation no longer controls the distribution of funds. Instead, professors and deans apply directly to the federal government and to foundations.

The present defects in Harvard's government "are both real and dangerous," Galbraith said, and can only be solved by increasing Faculty participation in the university government.

By preserving the sanctity of the Board of Overseers and the Corporation, Galbraith said, Harvard may eventually provoke a serious student revolt.

At Columbia, he noted, "Communication between a Board chosen for personal economic eminence, an administration of limited imagination and competence, and the Faculty, students, and community is agreed to have been gravely inadequate."

Window-Dressing

At Harvard, Galbraith said, "crises have been avoided by ad hoc action while various window-dressing efforts at student-Faculty consultation have been contrived." He added that such ad hoc action would not survive a serious emergency and that student-Faculty committees will not be taken seriously for long.

If a student revolt begins at Harvard, Galbraith said, "No one at Harvard will be trapped by the view--permissible to J. Edgar Hoover, perhaps, but to few others--that trouble is purely the work of self-motivated agitators. Like the tip of an iceberg, the agitators are ever only the visible part of the larger mass."

Galbraith called attention to the lack of over-all planning in the University. "The resources centrally controlled by the Corporation are heavily committed to maintenance rather than growth," he noted. Since growth has come to depend largely on federal grants, or support from industry, there is a high probability that only those disciplines which are "currently fashionable" or useful to the government will be adequately funded.

"The remedy one imagines to be a strong budget committee reflecting the full scientific and scholarly competence of the faculty to establish priorities and to guide money-raising and use," Galbraith concluded.

"This is not in sight," Galbraith observed. "The fact that the well-nourished fields do not complain and the others see little purpose in doing so should not persuade anyone that all is well."