Every other Monday, seven men get together in what used to be a bedroom in Harvard's official President's Mansion and discuss the future of the University. They are the men who comprise Harvard's governing Corporation and they have final authority on all matters of University policy and finance. Their workings, however, remain some-what mysterious to a large part of the University community. Many professors and almost all students go through their time at Harvard without ever coming in direct contact with the Corporation. The President and Fellows of Harvard College, as the Corporation is officially called, tend to work quietly, methodically studying the issues before acting and remaining in the background when their decisions are implemented. On only a handful of issues--most notably investor shareholder responsibility--does the Corporation receive much public notice. The public sees little of the day-to-day workings of the Corporation, the meetings, reports, budgets, and deliberation which make up most of their chores. The Crimson begins a three-part series which will examine the Corporation, its membership, its history, and how it functions: a complete analysis of the seven men who make up what has been called "the oldest self-perpetuating body in the Western Hemisphere."

In many ways, the five Fellows and the Treasurer of Harvard College, who--along with the President--make up the governing Corporation, are very much the same type. They are all middle-aged, white, male and well-off, and each is considered a success in his own area.

Corporation members themselves don't hesitate to acknowledge that a good deal of tokenism goes into who is selected--the board includes a token professor, a token Boston-area businessman, a lawyer, and a token handyman for whatever project currently occupies the University's attention. And filling those roles are one of the country's leading physicists, the chairman of the mammoth Boston-based Gillette Corporation, the head of a large group of Boston mutual funds, a star Cleveland tax attorney, and the president of a huge shipping company who doubles as one of the $350 million Harvard Campaign's three national co-chairmen.

But many critics of the Corporation say that even with the strengths of its individual members, it cannot serve Harvard adequately because it has never had a woman or minority member. The Corporation's distinction of being the oldest self-perpetuating body in the Western Hemisphere also makes it a gross example of the strength of the Old Boy network, critics say.

In some ways, charges of old-boyism do seem borne out by the make-up of the group: three members of the 1945 class of Harvard College, two Harvard Business School graduates, and four graduates of elite New England prep schools like Exeter, Milton, St. Mark's and Browne and Nichols.

Hugh M. Calkins '45 is the elder statesman of the Corporation; appointed in 1968, he is the senior member and the head of the board's most watched subcommittee, the Corporation Committee on Shareholder Responsibility (CCSR). During debate over the University's investments in companies which do business in South Africa over the last six years, Calkins has been the Corporation's point-man on the issue.

Calkins has a history of being the most visible member of the publicity-shy governing body. During the turmoil of 1969, Calkins acted as de facto spokesman for the administration, often replacing the isolated and hostile President Nathan M. Pusey '28 on local TV talk shows and in public meetings.

As perhaps the most liberal member of the Corporation--he made an anti-war speech in 1969 in Dunster House which helped him land on president Nixon's second "Enemies List"--Calkins was a natural for dealing with disgrunted students. During the strike, he penned masterful press releases for the Corporation and once even stormed into The Crimson--where he had served a brief stint as President in 1942--to type a rebuttal to what he felt was a distortion of his views on a Yard poster.

In Cleveland, where he is a partner in the 366-lawyer Jones, Day, Reavis & Pogue, the city's top firm, Calkins seemed one of the city's leading liberal hopes of the 60s. He was elected in 1965 to a four-year term on the school board, and for a while, his reputation in the city was excellent and his opportunities seemed limitless.

But Calkins's experiences at Harvard and in Cleveland seem to parallel each other; voters lopsidedly removed him from the school board after one term, Harvard replaced Pusey with President Bok, and the Corporation gained new faces who seemed to reflect a new latent desire, both at Harvard and around the country for less visible, dynamic men.

His original decision to move to Cleveland from Newton, where he grew up, and Phillips Exeter, where he graduated near the top of his class in 1941, was calculated to give him the opportunity to exercise his talents as a liberal activists. "I decided to practice law in a large representative city such as Cleveland," Calkins wrote in his class's 25th reunion report, "on the hunch that in this way I could find effective and independent involvement with whatever turned out to be the action and passion of our time."

Calkins moved into law with a shining record: at Harvard Law School he was elected president of the prestigious Harvard Law Review, and later served clerkships with Chief Justices Learned Hand and Felix Frankfurter. Now 60, he remains a highly regarded tax and corporate lawyer, and while less active with liberal causes than he was 15 years ago, his concerns continue to reflect a deep-seated desire for social justice.

"I am concerned about the possibility that we will again have a problem--a serious problem--with access to Harvard," Calkins says. "The number of applicants keeps going up and the yield rate stays up, but I worry about whether the increasing cost of quality colleges such as Harvard is changing the mix of those who apply." He acknowledges that statistics don't really back up his concern, but he remains worried nonetheless.

Calkins says his favorite solution to making sure that everyone who is qualified feels comfortable applying to Harvard would be "a much bigger investment in forgiveness of loans for students who go into low-paying occupations. I think those debt loads are sufficiently large that they affect the career choices people make."

Andrew P. Heiskell '28, a 1937 Business School graduate, has a more remote connection with Harvard than do Calkins and most of the other Corporation members. He recently retired as chairman of Time, Inc. and, as a trustee of New York Public Library, recently directed a major fundraising effort which many say has helped turn the system around. In addition, he serves on the board of the liberal think-tank Brookings Institution and as a trustee of the University of Pennsylvania.