Harvard's 300th

P: On Oct. 28, 1636, the General Court of the Massachusetts Bay Colony set aside "-L-400 towards a schoale or colledge."

P: In the autumn of 1638 John Harvard, a young clergyman who lay dying "at Charlestown, of a Consumption," bequeathed "one half of his Estate (it being in all about -L-1,700) towards the erecting of a Colledge, and all his Library" of 260 volumes.

P: Two New York Dutchmen visited Harvard in 1680, found "eight or ten young fellows, sitting around, smoking tobacco. . . . We inquired how many professors there were, and they replied not one. . . . They knew hardly a word of Latin."

P: When in 1692 Harvard's President Increase Mather shuffled before King William III, announced, "We have in New England an Academy, a Colledge," King William replied, "I know it.''

P: Under the late great Charles William Eliot Harvard University expanded until the whole world knew about it. There were many professors, much Latin. Boston State House, in the words of Professor Oliver Wendell Holmes, was the ''Hub of the Solar System." Harvard University was Boston's axle.

Last week in Harvard's Sanders Theatre proud Harvard's 25th president, James Bryant Conant, uprose before 400 friends & alumni who, commemorating President Eliot's birthday, were attending the first event in this year's celebration of the Harvard Tercentenary. Said he: "In my opinion the time for pruning has arrived. . . . How to stop this movement of expansion, how to eliminate and condense ... to my mind these are the great educational questions of the future. . . . One of the unfortunate results of the expansion of our activities . . . has been the resulting lack of fluidity in our funds. Almost all the income of this university ... is mortgaged ... to specific enterprises to which we are committed."

To many a U. S. schoolteacher Harvard, which fought clear of ecclesiastical domination in the early 19th Century, was formally severed from state support in 1865, seems gloriously free. Of freedom President Conant said: ''This is a time of peril for the universities of the world. . . . The issue is between those who have confidence in the learned world and those who fail to understand it and hence distrust it, dislike it, and would eventually curb it. ... We are . . . permitted an opportunity to reaffirm our belief in the ideals which the Puritans had before them when they dared found a college in a wilderness to 'Advance Learning and Perpetuate it to Posterity.'"

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