Wisely & Well

Around 9:30 in the morning on two Mondays in every month, seven sedate and prosperous-looking gentlemen file into Harvard University's Massachusetts Hall and seat themselves around a long polished table. There, for some five hours, with time out for lunch, they sit talking of university policy, investments and endowments. By tradition, they never take a vote unless they are all pretty sure that it will be unanimous. Thus, with one single august voice, do four lawyers, one chemist, one investment counselor and a physician mastermind the affairs of the nation's oldest university.

Usually the seven members of the Harvard Corporation* are done with their business by 3:30 in the afternoon. But this week, after their Monday meeting, they stayed late. They gave themselves a banquet, invited the 28 "Honorable and Reverend" members of the Board of Overseers and the nine deans of the university to join them. The celebration marked their 300th anniversary as the oldest continuing corporation in the Western Hemisphere and the model of university boards of trustees throughout the U.S.

Tolls in Wampum. In that time, except for a brief 15 years around the turn of the 18th Century, there have never been more or less than seven members of the corporation--the president of the university, the treasurer and five life-term Fellows. The corporation began its work in 1650, when President Henry Dunster and six scholars got a charter of incorporation from the General Court of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and thus became the administrative masters of 14-year-old Harvard's single wooden building, its 800 books, and the -L-30 to -L-40 worth of wampum collected each year from the tolls of the Boston-Charlestown ferry.

During their first years, the Fellows were teachers for the most part. But as the affairs of the university became more complicated, the self-perpetuating corporation began tapping the more worldly and wealthy men of Massachusetts. Among them: John Quincy Adams, Navigator Nathaniel Bowditch, half a dozen Lowells, three Eliots, and two Cabots. Almost to a man, Harvard's trustees have been graduates of Harvard College, and New Englanders. The sole present exception: Maryland Lawyer William Luke Marbury, an Amherst man but an LL.B. from Harvard Law School, who goes to Cambridge twice a month from his Baltimore home.

Bonds in Sewers. Today the corporation's domain includes 165 buildings, 11,000 students, 5,000,000 books, an endowment of $177 million. It owns bonds in the sewers of Baton Rouge, La. and in the Province of Alberta. It has stock in every sort of industry from Jacob Ruppert (brewers) to the A. & P., and real-estate from the Kentucky coal fields to some island parcels off the coast of Maine.

Though the corporation elects Harvard's president, it does not otherwise interfere with academic matters; unlike many another board of trustees it has consistently refused to yield to alumni pressure, either to fire unconventional professors or to favor the admission of the sons of influential graduates and overseers. In all its 300 years of ruling wisely and well, the corporation considers it has suffered from only one lapse of a member's decorum. That was during the Revolution, when Treasurer John Hancock decided to move Harvard's accounts and funds to Philadelphia. Though Harvard tried for 20 years, it never persuaded Treasurer Hancock or his heirs to send the -L-1,054 back.

* The members: President James Bryant Conant, Treasurer Paul Codman Cabot, Dr. Roger I. Lee, Lawyers Grenville Clark, Charles A. Coolidge, Henry L. Shattuck and William L. Marbury. A nonmember who sits at Conant's elbow is Secretary David W. Bailey.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.