Empire Building

At Harvard's highest administrative level, a body of seven men functions as the University's board of trustees.

However the workings of the board remain relatively mysterious to most of the University community. The President Treasurer, and five Fellows who make up the Corporation prefer to remain in the background letting others implement their decisions. Today, in the final two installments of a three part series. The Crimson examines the history of the Harvard Corporation, how its role has hanged over the last 334 years and how it governs the University today.

The Corporation is often referred to as "The Oldest Self-Perpetuating Body in the Western Hemisphere" because it has continually replenished its ranks without outside interference since 1650, as Samuel Eliot Morrison and Seymour Martin Lipset describe in their histories of Harvard. But during the past 334 years its role within the University has changed considerably. The Corporation has always supervised Harvard's finances, but after 250 years of relatively easy management, the job has become increasingly complex in this century.

The Corporation has also eased away from scholarly matters: its early days it played a vigorous day-to-day role in the academic administration of the College, but today it only exerts a final check on all but the most extreme issues of teaching and research.

Harvard was founded on October 28, 1636, with a grant of *400 from the Massachusetts Legislature, but its governing boards did not take their present form until 14 years later. A year after the College's founding the first Board of Overseers was appointed with six magistrates and six ministers, and they chose Nathaniel Eaton of Trinity College, Cambridge, and the University of Frankener in the Netherlands, as Harvard's first Master President. But Eaton did not survive his second year after he was indicted for assault for nearly bludgeoning his assistant to death with a walnut club The board fired him.

For the next 12 years the College endured great financial hardship. It did secure a few large donations, most notably John Harvard's, but it also depended on the help of the legislature, which granted Harvard the revenues of the Boston-to-Charleston ferry and a special tax called the College Corne--Each New England family was required to donate a peck of wheat for the College's support.

The Overseers of the 1640s also established a precedent which would continue for more than 200 years, that of incessant meddling in the College's day-to-day affairs. Harvard's second president. Henry Dunster, was continually hampered by the overseers' intrusion into mundane administrative decisions and the small budget they allowed him.

At Dunster's urging the legislature redefined the College's governance in 1650, establishing the bicameral system that has persisted with only one major modification until today. The Corporation, composed of the president, treasurer, and five Fellows, won primary control over the institution. The Board of Overseers became a supervisory group composed of clergy and local magistrates to represent the community. The Overseers were designed as the higher board, but then as today, they met less frequently and were supposed to cede day-to-day power to the Corporation. Until the boards escaped from control of the state legislature in 1865, the two continually locked horns over who would actually run the fledgling Harvard.

Much of the controversy centered on religion. The College, first a Puritan Seminary, became enmeshed in pitched theological battles as other denominations won seats on the governing boards. At the end of the 17th century, President Increase Mather fought unsuccessfully to turn the College into a Calvinist seminary. He failed, but after King William III nullified the College Charter in 1697, the debate began in the legislature. Mather continued to try to block non-Congregationalists from serving on the Corporation but still failed to have his wishes put in writing. Ultimately he was forced to resign.

His dismissal began one of the periodic battles between the Corporation and the Overseers--which continued until 1865--over who should be appointed president. The Corporation nominated John Leverett, but the religiously conservative legislature blocked his appointment--which they could legally do because Harvard was operating without a charter. But Governor Thomas Dudley was a friend of Leverett's, and he overrode the King's order, disempowering Leverett's opponents, and paving the way for his friend's presidency.

Leverett supervised the most significant change in the Corporation's history, introducing outsiders to the group. Since its founding the body followed the English model, in which all of the Fellows were also tutors in the College, but in 1717 three of the Fellows died and were replaced with outside ministers, not tutors.

The tutors, led by Nicholas Sever, complained that the move treated them as second class citizens, and they argued before the legislature for the right to a monopoly of the Corporation. The fight lasted three years, and in the end the tutors won in what is considered an early victory for academic freedom, an issue the Corporation has had to deal with repeatedly since 1650.

Sever had been dismissed from the board because of his religious and political beliefs, but in 1725 he won reinstatement. For the next half century the Corporation continued in the English tradition with at least three Faculty members serving on the board. Not until 1780 did the neat, modern division of academic and supervisory policy power between the Faculty and Corporation became permanent.

Despite Sever's political victory, the Corporation was not a real exponent of academic freedom in the 18th century. It still engaged in frequent battles with the Overseers over University business and frequently hired and fired professors for their personal beliefs. Harvard would have to wait over 100 years, until the term of President Charles William Eliot, before the University's hiring policy truly reflected respect for academic freedom.

In this period the Corporation was expanding Harvard into the research and teaching institution we see today, and taking greater interest in the University's finances. Hollis, Massachusetts, and Harvard Halls all rose in the 1760s, and the colonial College was on the way to becoming a true University.

But one of Harvard's worst financial crises ever occurred during the Revolution, when noted patriot John Hancock served as the Corporation's treasurer.

Hancock, one of Boston's wealthiest merchants, gave generously to his alma mater and the Corporation rewarded him by naming him treasurer. But Hancock had little taste for the job and spent most of his time travelling on business or political missions, neglecting the University's finances. He failed to collect term bills or pay debts and complicated matters by carrying the University's financial records with him on his travels.

On April 11, 1775 President Samuel Langdon sent Hancock a letter threatening to replace him, but the treasurer did not respond. A series of follow-up letters went similarly unanswered and the situation deteriorated until the Corporation sent a tutor to look for Hancock, then in hiding during the Revolution, and retrieve the records. He failed and Hancock remained treasurer until his death, when he left *16,000 of unsettled University accounts and a personal debt to Harvard of *1495, for money he had unscrupuously borrowed.

For a time the financial situation became so severe that academic requirements were drastically relaxed. On July 18, 1780, a student arrived in Cambridge for the first time and paid his $300 tuition. That afternoon he passed oral examinations in seven subjects and was awarded his A.B. degree on the spot.

Ebenezer Storer, a Boston merchant, replaced Hancock in the early 1780s, and with the help of fellow Fellow John Lowell he turned the University's finances around and made Harvard financially independent of the legislature. In 1789 the College held public securities worth more than *10,000. By carefully watching market rates they converted Harvard's assets to dollars, so that in, 1793 the College's portfolio amounted to more than $182,000., three times as much as 15 years before.

Another significant innovation involved petitioning the legislature for property tax exemptions, which paved the way for Harvard to develop its vast real estate holdings, now worth billions, including more than one-third of the land in Cambridge. Becoming financially independent was the first step to severing Harvard's ties to the state 75 years later.

A recurring theme in the power struggles between the Corporation and the Overseers of the 18th and 19th centuries was the debate over student morality. The more conservative Overseers generally favored greater restrictions on behavior than the Corporation, but they agreed in a few famous examples of student unrest.

The first undergraduate uprising was the famous "butter riot" of 1766. Bad food had been a student complaint since the University's founding, and the rebellion started when Asa Dunbar, grandfather of Henry Thoreau, confronted an administrator and complained: "Behold, our butter stinketh and we cannot eat thereof." For inciting the ensuing demonstration, Dunbar was demoted by the Faculty, but the students rallied behind him and agreed to boycott breakfast. The Corporation and Overseers conceded that the butter was rotten, but they insisted that the students apologize for their insubordination or resign. They apologized.

A second controversy arose after the turn of the century as students began exercising more freedom and spending more time in taverns than at their studies. Concerned, the Corporation successfully petitioned the legislature to draft a law preventing innkeepers from advancing credit to students. And in 1823, 43 of 70 students in the graduating class were expelled for a combination of discipline problems including bonfires in the Yard, cannonballs dropped from windows, strategically placed ink buckets, and class disturbances.

As a result of this Great Rebellion the Overseers and Corporation agreed on a code of 153 regulations in 13 sections, dictating everything from vacations to the requirement that the President submit an annual report to the Overseers. The Corporation now consisted completely of outsiders, and the Faculty began lobbying again for representation, but this time the Overseers stood behind the board and the movement was unsuccessful. This activity reflects the birth of the modern Harvard. The Medical, Law and Divinity Schools had been founded and the governance was almost as it remains today.

The climatic change occurred in 1865 after a bitter 10-year power struggle between the two governing boards. The University was still tied to the state, and the Corporation and Overseers engaged in running feuds with the legislature and each other over issues such as admissions, curriculum, and whether the University should support Unitarianism. In 1850 Governor George Bartwell tried to obtain for the legislature the power to elect members of the Corporation for six year terms. The bill was defeated, but after vigorous debate a compromise was reached which signaled the end of the old system. The Corporation was left alone, but the Board of Overseers was changed to one of 30 members elected by a joint ballot of both legislative houses. This new board fought bitterly with the Corporation for control of the University and the two remained deadlocked for nearly a decade.

The controversy reached a head in 1862 when the Corporation chose Thomas Hill as president. In a strong show of force the Overseers blocked his appointment for six months before capitulating in April 1865 the legislature relinquished control of the Board of Overseers to the alumni, the system in place today. Harvard thus became the first university to give alumni a major role in its governance, a practice which has since become widespread.

Since then the governing boards have remained virtually unchanged. The Corporation oversees the University's finances and long-range planning and sets University-wide policy in its biweekly meetings. The Overseers are more ceremonial, rubber-stamping major Corporation decisions such as appointments and serving as a breeding ground for Corporation members. The members work primarily through a host of committees considering various areas of the University.

The Corporation includes the same sorts of men it has for the last 100 years--wealthy, successful, middle-aged. The board tends to be dominated by lawyers and businessmen, but this changes from time to time, with professors, doctors, and clergymen occasionally taking their turn. In many ways the tone of the Corporation is set by the president. Eliot was arguably the first great university president, forging the model on which the University is still run today in his 30 year term of office. Under him the average age of undergraduates and faculty increased, the requirements of dorm residence and regular chapel attendance were dropped, and professors became more professional. He introduced an elective-based curriculum and was the first president to address one of the few academic issues that consistently occupies the Corporation, academic freedom. Except for one incident involving an economics professor's textbook, he introduced the doctrine that Harvard stood for "an absolute freedom from all restriction--governmental, academic, or social--on freedom of thought or speech."

Yet during the McCarthy period the Corporation turned strongly anti-Communist. They once issued a statement which read in part, "In the absence of extraordinary circumstances, we would regard present membership in the Communist Party by a member of our faculty as grave misconduct justifying removal."

Academic freedom is one of the few issues the Corporation has spoken out on. It has remained silent, eschewing political statements, through four wars, and only coming into the public eye when attacked. The student uprising of 1969 over ROTC and Harvard's treatment of its tenants brought the Corporation into public view, but while the body stepped into the crisis and dealt with the ROTC issue, it left most of the debate and all matters of discipline to the Faculty.

The turbulence of 1969 is generally regarded as a turning point in the University's history, but Corporation members disagree Francis H. Burr '35, who retired in 1982 after 28 years on the board, says that while the events of 1969 greatly affected the lives of the people involved, it was merely a bump in the road for Harvard. "There was a lot of rhetoric thrown around," he says, "but I don't think there were many substantive changes."

Since 1969 the Corporation has been visible only on scarce issues of concern to the University community: academic-industrial relations and the question of whether Harvard should divest its holdings from companies doing business in South Africa. Both issues have received a great deal of attention, but Corporation members say they were not the most difficult of the last decade. Instead they point to something very routine and very much a part of their everyday agenda: how to manage the University's budgets and endowment during the recession of the middle 1970s.