Philadelphia: Brotherly Alumni

PHILADELPHIA--The alumni in Philadelphia are homeless. They have a club and a building fund--$15,000 committed to finding a place that can be called a clubhouse--but chances are the money will never be spent that way. For most of the 1100 Harvard alumni in this city of over two million residents, particularly the more than 800 metropolitan-area members currently on the Harvard Club rolls, the problem of finding a place to gather for lunch or a few drinks is not a pressing one. And yet this lack of a clubhouse and the question of what to do with the spare $15,000 are two issues that go a long way towards explaining how alumni in a given city operate. And in Philadelphia's case, the issues illuminate the roles that alumni play both as an elite in a major American city, and as graduates of a college that still strongly holds their interest.

C. Walter Randall, '36, is the archetype of the old-school Harvard grad. Not a Philadelphian by birth but a fairly long-time resident in a wealthy hidden-away province, southwest of the city. Randall represents the interests of a small faction of older alumni interested in restoring some element of "clubbiness" to Philadelphian graduates. Randall sees the present club's chieftains--who do a great deal to mold the policies of the alumni in the city--as a looseknit, often too business-like group of younger turks who believe the club's only duty is soliciting new membership dues.

While the younger alumni pile into Penn's Franklin Field or Princeton's Palmer Stadium to catch a glimpse of Joe Restic's boys, Randall's always out there cheering on the more unheralded Crimson ambassadors--the cagers, the hockey players, and even the anonymous tennis and track teams on occasion.

The dichotomy, however, runs much deeper than sports attendance. Randall is one of what he calls six stalwarts who eat lunch regularly at the Harvard Club's last vestige of an address, a small suite of rooms in the Princeton Club. It is both a source of embarassment to the traditionalists to have to dine in an Ivy rival's club and a constant reminder that the club should augment its $15,000 endowment and take up residence in its own clubhouse where Harvard gentlemen can sneak a smoke and a quick drink between court cases and bank transactions. But the recent grads, including most of the Harvard Club's one-year-old slate of officers, brush off the old school's contentions. "Look, Philadelphia is a Princeton town," says David R. Scott '60, a lawyer in one of the town's largest law firms and vice president of the club, explaining the odd placement of the Harvard room. "We are the poor sisters in this city, and other schools like Penn are not even social pretenders."

Anyway, Steven Simpson '66, also a lawyer and co-chairman of the powerful Harvard schools and scholarships committee of Philadelphia, says many of the alumni belong to the exclusive Merion and Philadelphia Cricket Clubs and other private clubs that make owning a large Harvard clubhouse in town superfluous. Simpson explains that most alumni nowadays don't live in center city, but more often come home to the Main Line in fashionable southwest Philadelphia or Chestnut Hill, the silkstocking district that barely falls within the city's northwestern limits.

Scott finds the question of Harvard's clubhouse to be simply one of the issues that are causing Harvard's club members in Philadelphia to ask themselves "Why are we existing?" He cites waning attention at club functions--110 at the big annual dinner. 60 Harvard grads and 50 wives--and a couple of affairs with Harvard luminaries like the luncheon with John H. Parry. Gardiner Professor of Oceanic History and Affairs, that attracted only 40 members. "Maybe we are spreading ourselves too thin?" he asks. "But we are still an active organization."

The man many alumni are looking to for the answers confronting the club and the role of Philadelphia alumni in general is Martin A. Hecksher '56, also a lawyer and a resident of Chestnut Hill. Hecksher is not anxious to discuss specifics about the club's problems with finding a home, except that a study being made on the question has made no recent progress--but he does place the club's priorities far away from any goal of increased clubbiness He says he sees his role in the club as three-fold: to maintain Harvard ties; keep up on the intellectual end of the school, specifically finding qualified candidates to send to Harvard; and fund raising, especially for area boys going to Harvard.

As for his first goal, he says, "I'd break my neck to get up to Harvard more often." He and many other alumni who don't get up to Harvard more than a couple of times a decade keep contact with the school through Harvard Today and through scuttlebut from their own and neighbors' sons. Some, like Scott, have at times subscribed to Harvard Sports News and Views, and Randall notes that those who dine at the Harvard room glance at the Independent, Gazette, and Crimson for the latest Harvard news. But as for common identification with the school in terms of everyday life, football games seem to be the only time Philly alumni will cheer together on the same side. Philadelphia alumni rarely coalesce on the same issue, Hecksher says. "Even when Clark [Joseph S. Clark '23, blue-ribbon mayor in the city during the '50's and later a Pennsylvania senator] was running for mayor there were only stray followers." Louis G. Hill '46 of Chestnut Hill, a mayoral candidate whom Mayor Frank Rizzo overwhelmed in a recent primary, also failed to engender much Harvard-related support, Hecksher says.

"I'm not aware of any evidence that Philadelphia alumni are a cohesive group which has any special view," says Thomas A. Masterson '49, a former federal district court judge who retired into private practice last year. "Nor am I aware of efforts to articulate any special view or approach." Masterson notes that "Harvard alumni are active in all the major businesses, professions and educational institutions in Philadelphia," and that "a fair number of people are at the top of those institutions." But he is quick to add. "Their political and social philosophies encompass a wide range of views with no identifiable single force. In short I doubt there is any controversial issue in present day society which the majority would agree upon," he says.

Nor do the Harvard alumni act as a particularly unified elite. Simpson, of the schools and scholarships committee, says despite the proximity of many of the club members, most of whom, he says, live and work within 1000 feet of each other, the really cohesive and identifiable group in town is not Harvard at all but the Princeton grads who exert a noticeable economic and social power. "If you put ten Princeton men and ten Harvard men in a room together, you'll be able to pick out the Princeton grads immediately," he explains.

Where many alumni do exert a unifying force is in their more casual interests about who gets into the College from the Philadelphia area. Almost all of the Harvard Club's officers were gleeful to see that Harvard this year admitted 23 students from the area, an increase of six over the previous year. A common strain of complaints issued by those involved with the Philadelphia end of admissions is that the metropolitan area should not be lumped in a region including the prolific Long Island school district, because the grouping heightens the competition for places to its fiercest level in the nation. "But last year we really squawked about it and this year we are higher," Hecksher exclaims proudly.

William A. Humenuk '64, co-chairman of the schools and scholarship committee, does more to determine the make-up of those 23 admittees than almost any single alumnus in the Philadelphia area. It is Humenuk's job to notify Harvard of particularly attractive candidates, to go into the schools and meet guidance counselors, attend high school college nights and check the local papers for write-ups of exceptional scholar-athletes that may appear. Humenuk, a lawyer from Chestnut Hill, has been at the job for an exhausting four years. In that time he has tried to redirect, as much as one man can, the Harvard admissions office from choosing solely from Philadelphia's more prestigious prep schools--as has always been the case--to at first some unexamined outer suburban schools, and then the forgotten parochial and inner city schools.

Humenuk says he is a little dissatisfied with the way the admissions process currently works. He complains about getting little assistance from other alumni who prefer the easier candidate interviewing to going into the non-traditional schools and trying to convince guidance counselors to encourage their kids to apply. And one of the single biggest obstacles he faces is little direction from the Harvard admissions office directors, whom he regularly asks to spend more time in Philadelphia recruiting in the unexamined schools. With the exception of a list of basketball and football players worth checking from the Athletic Office, Humenuk says he receives few orders or suggestions from Harvard.

This lack of direction and local aid may be the reason for the lopsided distribution of the 23 acceptances, which reveals that with the exception of a few students from exclusive Main Line suburbia and one student from the city's "private" public school--Central High--almost every student coming to Harvard from Philadelphia will be from the same old traditional private schools. Not one student was admitted from the almost all-black inner-city schools or from any of the poor white Catholic schools.

"I think the Philadelphia alumni is one of the best groups for getting quality candidates," says E. Bradley Richardson '53, associate director of Harvard admissions and the man who handles Philadelphia for the office. But Richardson says. "The thing that worries us is recruitment in inner-city schools. We met two weeks ago with Philadelphia alumni to try to get some kind of established committee to look into why we can't get more students to apply from the inner city. I think we can do a better job in Philadelphia." But Philadelphians claim if the University wants to get more students from these untapped schools, it will have to do more than supply once-a-year encouragement.

Richardson places Philadelphia's strong point in admissions in the works done to get students to come to Harvard once they are admitted. "They do a hell of a job in making some kids get here by holding pienics and other functions," Richardson says.

Stephen Simpson makes up the other half of the schools and scholarship committee leadership. Simpson's function is to coordinate the more than 40 Philadelphia alumni interviewers who spring into action after he receives the names of all who applied to Harvard from the Philadelphia area. The job is time-consuming--he tries not to miss a single one of Philadelphia's more than 140 applicants--and pressed into saying why he takes the time away from family to run the interview program, he says. "Like a sponge I soaked up a lot of Harvard when I went there and now I want to give some of it back."

Simpson said he feels his work with the interviewing is the most he can do for Harvard right now--"I can't give $10,000, so I do this." As for the motivation behind alumni interest in seeing who gets in from the area, and their desire to play a role in who does, Simpson sees the drive as a blend of civic and old school pride as well as the desire to repay the school for pleasant memories and opportunities.

Simpson makes it clear that Harvard only counts alumni interviews as important if the applicant is a borderline case. "Our interviews don't really matter if they are sure either way on a candidate," he says. Randall, the senior interviewer in the town, who has quizzed high school students for more than 25 years simply because he says he likes to do it, insists he's happy the University counts the interviews more lightly than other items in the candidates' folders. He cites instances where some alumni get to meet with the student for only a few minutes and fail, because of time considerations and often lack of perception, to get anything out of the student, thus making the interview an unreliable indicator.

Randall says he often likes to spend a whole interview leading up to a last question pitting the interviewee against six other imaginary applicants--to simulate the one-in-seven chosen situation and by asking him to distinguish himself "and tell me why we should take you over the others."

Randall and other interviewers, however, insist they don't try to create a certain type of Harvard man by recommending students they would like to see as later leaders of the nation after graduation. "Harvard is not a ticket to anything." Randall insists, "and sending someone there does not necessarily mean you're doing the best thing for the student." Simpson concurs: "We don't try to mold anybody," in the recruiting or interviewing process.

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Philadelphia alumni on the whole are a wealthy group by national standards, and when it comes to Harvard fund-raising efforts they have always been near the top of the heap. Mason Furnald '40, associate director of the Harvard College Fund, points out that last year the 1100 Philadelphia alumni gave over $67,000 to the Fund as compared to $43,000 for Los Angeles's 1429 and $79,000 from San Francisco's 1700. "They are right in there," Furnald says, "and on the whole they are a very loyal and generous contingent of alumni."

But just as the schism over the clubhouse funding rages, so goes the debate over the large Fund figure. Some of the newer slate of officers would like to see both the $15,000 endowment and more money from local alumni used for funding scholarships for area students, an area where Philadelphia's Harvard Club lags far behind others, Humenuk says. Philadelphia's alumni are wealthy but they regularly give to their class instead of the local-level scholarships, Randall says not un-approvingly. He claims the Philadelphia alum's give most religiously, especially when the funds are badly needed, regardless of what is happening on the campus--including the strike of 1969 and the elimination of ROTC from campus, which made all the local papers.

With the exception of a drastic cutback in men or a dramatic increase in the size of the College to accommodate more women, most of the big givers don't care very much what happens at Harvard. They have no clear indication from Harvard of what is going on academically, and University academia is a topic rarely broached when they do congregate (most of the alum's don't recognize the name Henry Rosovsky as dean of the Faculty). Even the interviewers, many of them recent graduates, can only answer questions about the broad tutorial and House systems, and nothing more specific.

But more important, to most alum's the impact of even the most startling events happening at Harvard are like that of "a flea bouncing off a wall," says Frederick C. Calder '57, headmaster of Germantown Friends School, one of the area's most successful schools for getting people into Harvard. Calder, who more than most is interested in what is happening educationally at Harvard, said he became acutely aware of the conservative nature and security of the institution when he received a mimeographed statement from then-president Nathan M. Pusey '28, sent out after the 1969 strike, comparing it in intensity and violence only to the great Harvard riots of the 1830's.

Only an issue like the implementation of a one-to-one male-female ratio (few alumni were aroused by what they knew of the Strauch report's "equal access" recommendations, most thinking it won't change the existing ratio) or quarrels over Philadelphia being shortchanged in the number of acceptances would inspire any sort of a letter or phone call campaign by alumni. But even then the feedback would probably come mostly individually, with the club itself not acting as any sort of interest group. Such was the case when Episcopal Academy, ego badly bruised by a series of admittance-less years, spoke up and garnered three acceptances in this year's crop.

Most alumni feel that their individual relationship with the College is fairly typical as far as city-to-Harvar links go. Many feel that the Philadelphia alumni represent a fairly accurate sample in terms of the workings of alumni groups throughout the nation. Some even feel they are not alone in the quest for further club de-socialization and greater interest in the admissions and scholarships for local boys. They know they are united in opposing any increase in the number of women at the expense of a decrease in the number of men, and in the desire to increase the number taken from the area.

If the Philadelphia group can be considered atypical at all it would have to be in its relation to President Bok. In Philadelphia, where Mark Twain once said they ask you first who your parents are, Bok comes with the finest credentials. Both Bok and Curtis, his middle name, are synonymous with Philadelphia high society in everything from publishing (Curtis Publishing) to music (Curtis Institute) to art patronage. "Everybody knows he had his roots here," Hecksher says. And when Bok spoke in Philadelphia several years ago, Philadelphia's. Hecksher recalls, "welcomed him with open arms," with a turnout of more than 700 people--the largest attendance for a club function in as long as most can remember. But while looking on Bok as a local boy made good may be comforting, it probably has little to do with the Harvard-Philadelphia relationship. As one long-time resident with what may be a firmer grasp of harsh realities recalls. "You've got to be kidding if you think Bok is one of Philadelphia's sons. They packed him off to boarding school before he even knew where Philadelphia was."CrimsonMary B. RidgeE. BRADLEY RICHARDSON '53, associate director of Harvard Admissions.