Silent Partners

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.

Heiskell says his particular sphere of influence within the Corporation is in helping pick the people to receive honorary degrees at each year's Commencement, and in explaining why he serves on the governing body, he reflects some of the same liberalism as does Calkins. "I don't know--I suppose there's a certain pride in being on the Corporation, and I guess most of us are in the position to return some of the goodies we have gotten from the system."

The newest member of the Corporation, Colman M. Mockler Jr. '52, also has the lowest profile. He came to Harvard as a junior, having grown up in St. Louis, and transferred from Fordham College in 1950. A devout Catholic and strong family man, he majored in economics here and was a member of the Catholic Club.

From Harvard, Mockler went to Business School, where he later served as a research associate and doctoral fellow from 1955 to 1957. And in 1957, he joined Boston-based Gillette as a comptroller staff assistant for insurance matters--beginning a long climb which culminated in a heady nine-year whoosh to the top from the office of treasurer. He took five big steps up the corporate ladder from 1967 to 1971, became president and chief operating officer in 1974, and finally chairman in 1976.

Officials at Gillette and other organizations on whose boards he serves--including Simmons College, the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the Museum of Science--say Mockler is exceptionally bright and deeply moral. He is credited with turning Gillette's balance sheet around during the 1970s by refocusing the company's dwindling resources out of new product lines and into better organizing and advertising. At the same time, he takes credit for Gillette's strict adherence to the Sullivan Principles, a set of progressive labor rules for companies with South Africa operations.

"He's a fantastic man," says Simmons's administrative vice president, Priscilla L. McKee. "When you sit in a meeting and you have a problem, he's a good listener. But when he's called on he can make an analysis better than anyone. Every college is looking for a genius, and he is our genius."

"He truly has an unusual brilliance, an ability to see solutions in business terms," says Milton L. Glass, who now holds Mockler's old post as Gillette treasurer.

But at the same time, Mockler is known as a deeply cautious, conservative Boston businessman. He rarely gives Crimson reporters interviews and even less frequently agrees to comment on Harvard affairs. His involvement with Harvard's governing boards dates back to a stint as chairman of the board of Overseers and an advisor to Bok on University-industry relations. At the time he was chosen, Harvard needed a replacement for 28-year Corporation member Francis H. Burr '35, a lawyer with the local firm of Ropes and Gray. And Mockler was perfect replacement Like Burr, he is a solid, cautious, but forceful and committed, successful middle-aged Bostonian.

Much like Mockler, George Putnam Jr. '49, who as Treasurer also holds the title and responsibilities of a Fellow, is a successful Boston businessman. Very much a Brahmin, Putnam oversees the huge Putnam Family of Funds, a group of 19 different mutual funds.

But Putnam seems to have come into moneymaking as an afterthought. At Harvard, where he wore the number 54 jersey on Eliot House's intramural football team and yukked it up with the Lampoon, Putnam majored in biochemistry.

Putnam did some postgraduate work in analyzing margarine and shortening, but ultimately took an MBA from the Business School in 1951 and immediately joined Putnam Funds that year, "to please my father, whose health was failing rapidly," he wrote in his class's 25th reunion report. If joining the investment world was an after-thought for Putnam, it has definitely worked out well for him. Under his leadership the Putnam Family of Funds has grown into a vast array of different trusts, totalling more than $20 billion.

In addition to managing the Putnam Funds and holding the office of Treasurer since 1974--he will step down at the end of the month and a new Treasurer is expected to be named as early as this week--Putnam has also managed to find time to serve on the boards of St. Mark's, his prep school in Southborough, Mass., McLean Hospital, Massachusetts General Hospital, Brookwood Country Day School and Shore Country Day School. He just stepped down recently after serving 18 years on the board of Wellesley College, from which his wife, the former Barbara Weld, graduate in 1949.

And even with his official duties, Putnam still says he has found time to pursue his own hobbies, which include sailing and tennis. "Also, I'm sort of an amateur carpenter--I love to build things," Putnam says, adding that he has constructed several greenhouses for his wife, a living room and music room addition to his house, an A-frame on some land in Maine and a few boats.

As Treasurer, Putnam's major responsibility has been Harvard's endowment and major capital expenditures, but he also takes part in bi-weekly Corporation meetings, and votes as a Fellow. When he assumed the position from George Bennett '33 in 1973, Putnam made the fairly radical decision to start up an in-house management group to handle Harvard's endowment, and the Harvard Management Company was born the next year--with a Putnam protege, Walter M. Cabot Jr. '55, at the helm.

The only real academic in the group--except possibly for Mockler, who started out as a teacher at the Business School and has said he may be interested at some point in returning to it--is Charles P. Slichter '45, a highly regarded physicist at the University of Illinois's Center for Advanced Study and the author of Principles of Magnetic Resonance, published in 1963. He also has written many articles on topics like electron spin resonance, solid state physics and chemical physics.

The son of a famous economics professor at Harvard, the young Slichter chose electron physics as his field. He graduated from Harvard College in 1946--after his studies were interrupted by the war--and earned his Ph.D in 1949. Slichter enjoyed what may have been one of the most interesting school-year jobs available at the time--a research assistant at the underwater Explosives Research Laboratory in Woods Hole from 1943 to 1946.

Since graduating, Slichter has advised a variety of federal agencies, served on the Presidential Committee on the National Medal of Science, and been an Alfred P. Sloan Fellow from 1947 to 1963. But, he says, "Most of all I like to be a professor of physics. Most administrative jobs require that you quit the primary job of being a professor. The Corporation job lets me do both."

Slichter says he feels he was chosen for the governing body because of his insider's knowledge on government funding and problems in natural science fields, as well as understanding the problems of faculties.

Of Robert G. Stone Jr. '45, Corporation cohort Calkins says. "He's the world's finest fundraiser. When you talk about the sheik of somewhere who might have an interest [in giving money to Harvard], his eyes light up and he's off to the airport." Calkins also credits him with being able to tell people point-blank that they aren't offering enough money.

But Stone himself if is more humble about his bigtime panhandling skills, which he has honed since being chosen as a co Class Agent for the Harvard College Fund in 1953, and which he now exercises as one of the Harvard Campaign's three national co-chairmen. "I guess I was just the sucker who got tapped," Stone says. "I'm the only one with a really strong business background, and that's why I'm interested in the money matters like the Campaign and the endowment."

Originally from Brookline, Stone came to Harvard, Kirkland House and the Owl Club via Milton Academy, and since graduating with a degree in economics, has gone on to make money in a variety of ways. He is president of West India Shipping Co., a New York-based firm, and has headed States Marine Lines, which owns and operates a fleet of cargo ships. He also serves on the boards of Corning Glass Works, Chase International Investment and several other companies.

Apart from his corporate commitments, Stone says his big hobbies have been fundraising for Harvard and working with the New York Harvard Club. He says fundraising is essential for preserving the basic goals of the institution teaching and research. "You have to get at those basic issues," Stone says, "and that takes money."CrimsonPeter H. Schwartz17 Quincy St., the Corporation's headquarters.