Another Lamont? Where?

If we expand by 25 per cent do we increase the faculty, including full professors, by 25 per cent, and if so, how much will this cost with $400,000 now required to endow a chair? How much more scholarship endowment will be needed to maintain the present ratio of scholarship holders? At least two more Houses would be needed, at $5,000,000 a piece or more. Where do we put all these now Houses? Lamont is jammed now. Do we build another Lamont, and if so where do we put it? Do we build a second Indoor Athletics Building, and where would it be located? Where do we find additional playing fields and tennis courts for 1,000 more students if we are to maintain our athletics-for-all program? How much more laboratory and classroom space, how many more lecture halls holding 500-1,000 will have to be provided and where will the new buildings be placed? And what is the city of Cambridge going to say? The Yard isn't going to get any bigger, although there is, admittedly still some vacant space in front of University Hall, and we are hemmed in on all sides by the city.

We could easily spend another $25,000,000 or more to take care of the basic needs for an expansion of this dimension. Perhaps this amount, plus the sums needed before we do anything about expansion, can be found, but nothing in the experience of the last ten years indicates that it can be. . .

1,000 More in the Square

There are, finally, the intangible, the subjective factors to which each one will respond according to his lights, his prejudices and his glands. How big is big enough? The same arguments for adding 1,000 now can be used with equal force for adding another 1,000 and then another and another. Where do we stop? Somewhere I trust. But after all there will be two and a half million more students in college by 1970 they say and the pressure to expand will be continuous.

We have already added 1,200 students since the early 1930's, plus 200 at Radcliffe (and all the Radcliffe students are now in the Yard) plus the graduate school increases. How much more noise, crowding and confusion can we stand without destroying all possibility of serenity, gentleness, the contemplative life and simple human relationships? Can one be anything but appalled by the thought of adding 1,000 more undergraduates to the chaos that is Harvard Square now, 1,000 undergraduates plus x numbers of additional Radcliffe and graduate and law and business and divinity and education and design students? What will further expansion do to the whole tone and quality of Harvard life? Pressure, impersonality, bureaucracy, mass-production and big business methods, all will eventually expand, with obvious effects on intellectual life and the development of the individual student. The bigger we get, beyond a certain size, the more we lose the sense of the whole, the more we retreat into our specialties, our departmentalizes, our little personal refuges, the harder it is to maintain any sense of unity, of follow ship, of community, the more difficult it will be for the single human being in his full individuality, the Harvard man, old-style, to count. We turn things over to the IBM machines and the formulas.

Decentralized Solution

I make this point not alone for Harvard. I am against megalopolis and gigantism everywhere in education. After a point, size is the enemy of quality, mass is the enemy of the individual, complexity is the enemy of humanity. I do not share the common American belief that bigger is better, that one cannot be "dynamic" without forever expanding in numbers, that it is un-American not to get always larger. I do not believe that Harvard's contribution can be measured quantitatively, and I do believe that quantity can destroy something very precious for Harvard.

Industry has learned that there is a law of diminishing returns operating against the expansion of individual units beyond a size where management can function effectively and the worker feels some identification with his job. Decentralization is the current pattern of economic development. I suggest that America and education and the individual student and teacher will be better served if the educational expansion which must take place in the next generation is also decentralized. We will be in a far healthier condition in all kinds of ways if there is a multiplication of community colleges, and a limited expansion of the smaller and presently less fully utilized colleges rather than a concentration of 50,000 students in state university x, or 5,500 at Harvard