Education: Tycoons to Harvard

Last week Harvard University announced that to its Graduate School of Business Administration had been added a new unit: “The 250 Associates of the Harvard Business School” whose prime purpose is to create an endowment fund “to stabilize and promote research work and the collection of material for the teaching of business.” Concurrently a list of 200 charter “Associates” was made public. Each one of them has promised to pay $1,000 annual dues for the creation and maintenance of the fund. Thus, to start with, the Associates have $200,000 for 1930. Later, at the discretion of the trustees, and as outside contributions reduce the need for revenue, dues may be lowered. Later, too, the remaining 50 Associates will be elected.

Heretofore research work in the Business School (founded 1908) has relied on private donations from Harvardmen and great concerns, has had no formulated and well-defined financial organization. Even so it has been a boon to U. S. business, as attested to by the adoption of its case & problem method in business administration schools throughout the land and abroad.

Each Associate will receive gratis all reports and publications of the School besides business books published by members of the Harvard faculty. Annual meetings will be held in December at Boston or New York.

Seldom has such a formidable array of tycoons been represented in a college activity. Tycoons great and small are included on the roster, new tycoons and old, Harvard and non-Harvard. Besides Founder-members George Fisher Baker and William Ziegler Jr., some of the old established Tycoon-Associates are: Cyrus Hermann Kotzschmar Curtis, John Pierpont Morgan, Adolph S. Ochs, Otto Hermann Kahn, Andrew William Mellon, Owen D. Young, Martin John Insull, Julius Rosenwald. The farflung scope of the new endowment was reflected in such names as H. Gordon Selfridge of London, James Drummond Dole of Honolulu, Hubert Fleishhacker of California. Samuel H. Halle and Oris Paxton Van Sweringen of Cleveland, Richard Pickering Joy of Detroit.

Facsimile Society

Quietly last winter was formed a new agency for scholarship called the Facsimile Text Society. Last week it received its first large publicity impetus when the President of the U. S. penned a letter of congratulation and thanks for presentation copies to its founder-executive officer Frank A. Patterson, Professor of English at Columbia University.

The idea for facsimile texts was born when Prof. Patterson and some colleagues were met with rebuffs and difficulties while working on a complete edition of Milton.* Last December Prof. Patterson told the Modern Language Association how helpful he had found the photostatic process for inspection and study of rare items. The idea was developed, the Facsimile Text Society formally organized. Members of other organizations joined as sponsors: the American Historical Society, History of Science Society, American Economic Association, Modern Humanities Research Association. The Carnegie Corporation contributed $3,500, but advised that “the idea is too good not to be self paying.” Today membership includes 400 charter, 100 additional subscribers, 75 libraries.

With facsimile copies made available, scholars and the owners of rare books will be spared mutual worry and bother in the scholars’ searches for emendations, textual changes, auctorial notations. Membership in the Society is open to anyone. Dues: $5. Each subscriber is entitled to $5 worth of items from the Society’s catalog (75¢ and up). Additional items are sold to members at a discount.

Twelve committees receive recommendations from members for reproductions to be made, in Literature & Language, History, Philosophy, History of Science, Economics, Political & Social Science. Where unique copies are reproduced no attempt is made to obliterate ink marks, remove notations, repair damaged pages, remove typographical errors. Negatives are taken page by page from cover to cover, and the books printed by offset process.* To date five facsimile volumes have been issued: John Donne’s Biathanatos (1644); Thomas Warton the Elder’s Poems on Several Occasions (1748); Poems on Several Occasions . . . By a Gentleman of Virginia (1736); Henry More’s Enchridion Ethicum (English translation, 1690); A Discourse of Trade from England unto the East-Indies (1621), already adopted by Harvard as a textbook. All are printed on rag paper, bound uniformly in blue and tan. Editions thus far have been limited to 1,000 copies.

Another method of making rare manuscripts available for general scholastic use is that employed by the Library of Congress. Financed by a Rockefeller gift fund of $450,000, the Library is making cinema films of source material in European libraries. About 15 ft. of film is made of each page or manuscript, giving about 150 “stills.” For legibility, an extra-wide (if in.) non-perforated film is used. The library will furnish desired films to research societies, libraries, scholars on request. Declares Thomas P. Martin, assistant chief of the manuscript division of the library: “Forty dollars for a projector would be well spent by a college that has no funds for buying manuscripts but could borrow or buy miniature films at such low prices.” With the projector method a single print of a valued manuscript costs about 1½¢ or $1.50 a roll. A full-sized photostat copy costs about 25¢.

* No complete edition has ever been published. Complete poems have been issued but a great deal of Milton’s prose has never been identified.

* Offset printing differs from the more common relief printing in that a planographic plate is used (smooth surface) and the impression made first on a rubber cylinder, transferred from there to paper. Many a magazine desiring perfect verisimilitude in type and engravings (viz. FORTUNE) employs offset.