Harvard University - Red Book Yearbook (Cambridge, MA)

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and the W HE participation of Harvard experts and scholars in government planning under the New Deal became of greater size and importance after September 1939, and in- creasingly so since December 7th. Our entry into the war did not create an original condition, but intensihed the in- tegration of faculty activities in national efforts as it had effected a reorientation of university policy. Financial and legal experts, political scientists and historians, had been known to visit Washington prior to the war, but neither in such numbers nor with such frequency as later. As the needs of the National Defense Program increased, younger men, especially, had the opportunity to make considerable contributions in research and administration. Pre-war work done by Faculty men has often fitted into the trend of events, and they have adopted themselves to war conditions. john D. Black, author of the AAA pro- grams, has turned to work on Allied food problems, Rupert Emerson is an adviser on foreign and colonial arfairsg and Alvin Hansen's dehcit hnance plans have been adapted to war time needs. james M. Landis, William Y. Elliott,-lohn H. Williams, and other experienced men are devoting all or part of their time in civilian war capacities. Many men have almost entirely removed themselves from Cambridge to do war work, including Arthur N. Holcombe, special adviser in the WPB, Lincoln Gordon and Merle Fainsod in the OPA. William Langer, Donald McKay, and Edward S. Mason pro- vide the Office of Strategic Services with vital information. The amount of secrecy that has come over their work is indicated more by the removal of scientific research in Cambridge from the public view. Details which are now necessarily obscured will provide an illuminating record of Harvard's contribution to victory. The amount of special consultative and research work that is being carried on by Harvard scientists is of great diversity and magnitude, and anticipating the minutest needs of total war. Many commissioned faculty men are already close to the nerve points of action. Perry Miller, Charles Taylor, james Casner, Mason Hammond, and Myron Gilmore are in such positions. Crane Brinton and Bruce Hopper are among others on secret missions of a civilian nature. In these four wartime capacities-Military, Civilian, Scientific, and Consultativeh-over 400 Faculty men are now engaged. As Harvard further adjusts herself to final victory, increasing numbers of trained men will turn to the vital and varied tasks which the government has already indicated it demands of our universities. Prof. Alvin H. Hansen describes his views on economic post-war President Conant, on the day after Pearl Harbor, speaks to a planning in a nationwide Town Meeting of the Air broadcast. huge Sanders Theater audience on the role of Harvard in the war. fail

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THE FACLI LTY President Conant fvigbrj leaves the White House with Bernard President Roosevelt on the national rubber problem. As in the Baruch and Karl T. Compton of M. I. T., after reporting to last War, Mr. Conant is again doing vital scientific research. iso?

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af- HE humanities were under fire in our universities for several years before the war. At Harvard, as the Dean has announced, the nineteen twenties were the last period when the humanities had the largest group of concentrators. In the thirties the trend was to the social sciencesg and the forties have already been promulgated as the decade of the exact sciences. It cannot quite be claimed that we planned it that way, although the Tercentenary, with its overwhelming preponderance of honorary degrees in the sciences, symbolized a marked break with what Harvard had traditionally been. Nothing could be more futile at this point than stirring up again the rear guard action of the formerly entrenched humani- ties against the inroads of newer disciplines. And nothing could be more obscurantistic than to deny that the charac- terizing productions of our age have been owing to those disciplines. But the most perceptive scientists now grant, as they did not do in the eta dominated by simple mechanistic views of progress, that there are limitations to their kind of knowledge, that there are modes of truth which the arts and philosophy and religion alone can articulate. It is the role of the student of the humanities to recognize those limitations and to raise questions of value. A magnificent concrete instance ofjust such discrimination is furnished by one of the great achievements in modern painting, Frederick G.White flepj, instructor in English, chortles with Professorsjames B. Munn, Howard M.jones, and H. E. Rollins Rivera's frescoes in Detroit. Their main subject is the building of the Ford car, and as a modern man the painter was fascinated with studying every technical aspect of that process. But as a humanist he was also concerned with scrutinizing the ends to which our industrial age was moving, and in two companion panels he contrasted beneficent science, finding its expression in the hospital laboratory, with male- volent science, producing poison gas. It is these very discriminations that war tends to oblit- erate, and that thereby compels the humanities to re-examine their role. We have not yet begun to comprehend what the war is doing to our educational system, or how drastically that system may be transformed as the war goes on. What we can be aware of on every hand is the upsurge of a narrowly pragmatic frame of mind that has been part of the American character since pioneering days. Everything not immediately useful tends to be lopped off, and in so far as this curtailment is required for winning the war, there can be no quarrel with it. Nor is it necessary to deplore the further extension of vocational training in our schools, since one lesson that the years of the depression taught us was that the education of millions of our citizens had not fitted them at all for the world in which they had to live. The long-run solution is to break down any rigid divisions in our high schools between in aWarren House office. jones, Conant appointee, is prolific magazine contributor. Munn and Rollins are Elizabethan scholars , uv- 'W F-I -I :-