Professors v. Prudence

Those people who believe that scholars are a woolly-headed tribe, hardly to be trusted with a dollar, are right. In the September Atlantic Monthly, Harvard's Purchasing Agent William Gibbons Morse documents this assertion with a collection of hair-raising tales-out-of-school, called Pardon My Harvard Accent (condensed from a book of the same title to be published this month--Farrar & Rinehart; $3).

Urbane, silver-haired Mr. Morse, Harvard '99, has been employed by Harvard since 1923 to see where its money goes. When he started his job, nobody knew; 150 Harvard departments had authority to spend, and used their authority with great absentmindedness. Mr. Morse saved Harvard a lot of money. Some of his tales:

> Roscoe Pound, former dean of the Law School, long refused to allow the Law School roof to be repaired because he needed the money for investigations in criminal law. When it rained, he put buckets around in the library to catch leaks and protect books. The dean also steadfastly held out against buying paper towels until it was demonstrated to him that the extra toilet paper students used for hand-drying cost more than towels.

> Once an eminent professor, enraged because Morse suggested that he use a second hand lecture chair instead of buying a new one, roared: "I beg your pardon, I have a nasty temper." Morse roared back: "So have I." The professor capitulated.

> The senior class used to go about $2,-000 in the hole every year. Morse found that 1) each class automatically ordered 10,000 folding chairs for Class Day, although 4,000 were never unfolded; 2) tradition dictated that bay trees must adorn Class Day dances, although the only bay trees available, always rented from the same company, had become "mangy" from age, storms and costly trips to & from Cambridge; 3) Japanese lanterns were strung up at an annual cost of $1,000 long after the arrival of daylight saving made them unnecessary. Morse cut Class Day and Commencement chair costs from $2,100 to $375.

> The head of the biology department bought five machine calculators, one for each floor (at $550 apiece), so that when the mood moved him he could calculate without climbing stairs.

> When Morse suggested to a faculty committee planning new biological laboratories that they could save $30,000 by installing steel instead of wood cabinets, a committeeman protested: "Why, Mr. Morse, should we save $30,000 when it will only have to be given back to the donor?"

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