JOHN HARVARD'S JOURNAL
Taking Harvard's Measure T h e College's 350th anniversary is here. T h e occasion seems to prod us to take Harvard's measure—to calibrate its growth and dimensions as a human enterprise, to weigh its impact on higher education and its value to society. Because of Harvard's standing and its vencrability as an American institution, many skillful analysts are already hard at it, but can anyone's instruments catch the whole of Harvard? We think not. "Most of what a university does," wrote the late Samuel Eliot Morison in 1935, "cannot be measured by statistics, represented by graphs, weighed, or counted—or where it can be counted, as in Harlow Shapleys work on stellar galaxies, we cannot follow him much beyond the first hundred million lightyears!" Since Morison wrote, Scientific exploration has grown far more recondite and difficult to follow and the work (and workings) of universities far more complex and multifaceted, adding force to his argument. Morison wrote on the eve of the Tercentenary. In Three Centuries of Harvard, then in press, he had ably charted the institutional growth of Harvard from Puritan times to the start of the Conant administration. But even Morison, perceptive historian that he was, could not have foretold the continued growth that has altered the University in the last fifty years. Some of the alterations are primarily matters of scale—but in orders of magnitude that would have been almost unthinkable in Depression days. Faculty appointments (part time as well as full time) have increased from fewer than 600 to some 2,860. Staff positions have
proliferated, from 1,290 to 8,300. Enrollment in the College and ten graduate schools was 7,700 in 1936; it has since leveled off at a shade under 17,000. College tuition has gone from $400 a year to $11,390 (with another $5,000 billable for room, board, and fees). T h e University's annual budget has grown from $14 million to $650 million. Endowment, valued at $140 million in 1936, now exceeds $3.5 billion. Library holdings, an index that need not be adjusted for inflation, have grown from 3 million volumes to II million, and continue to accumulate at a rate of 60.000 a year. As for the number of living alumni, we have expanded more than threefold, from 76,000 to 234,000. Fair Harvard is fairer in 1986. T h e 16,936 degree candidates enrolled in all schools of the University in the last academic year included 6,709 women, or 40 percent of the total. Women constituted only 13 percent of the student community in 1936, and the entire alumni body of Radeliffe numbered onlv 8,(X)0. Last vcar one out of seven
Harvard has grown in orders of magnitude that would have been almost unthinkable in Depression days.
students represented an ethnic minority: all told (in round numbers), there were 1,000 Asians, 850 blacks, 500 Hispanics, and 50 Native Americans. No one was keeping track in 1936, but the comparable figures would have been minuscule. Thanks in large part to the advent of jet travel. Harvard is now far more cosmopolitan than she could have been fifty years ago. Last year she enrolled
Left: Changing Cambridge, as things stood on June 26, 1986. We are looking southwest from an airplane near the top of William James Hall (right foreground). T h e brick pueblo-like complex by the river is the new Charles Square, with the Kennedy School just to the left and a Harvard commercial development to the right. The photograph is by Laurence Lowry. SBI'TKMRKR-Ocn'OBF.R 1986
195