I DIRECTORSHIP OF THE CENTER FOR POPULATION STUDIES, 

 HARVARD UNIVERSITY, 1964 



[15 August 1985]##* 



9 Bow Street 



Sharp: One of the things we didn't really talk about yesterday, 

 and I think we need to, is how exactly the appointment to 

 Harvard came about. Maybe we could do that first. 



Revelle: The dean of the School of Public Health was a man named John 

 Crayton Snyder, who was a Pasadena High School boy and 

 turned out to be a classmate of Ellen's at Pasadena High 

 School. He was a very humane, decent man in the tradition 

 of public health. His own research was on trachoma. He was 

 particularly interested in building up the School of Public 

 Health and raising money for it, and he got the idea that we 

 could have a Center for Population Studies which would be a 

 source of funds and an area of expansion of the School of 

 Public Health. 



So he approached some of his philanthropic friends. 

 He was very good at money raising. One of the policies of 

 Harvard is that every tub stands on its own bottom. What 

 that means is that everybody raises his own money, and they 

 had an elaborate fundraising apparatus to help you do that. 



For reasons that I don't quite understand or know, — 

 I do know that Harold Thomas, my friend from the Pakistan 

 project, was a member of the faculty of the School of Public 

 Health as well as of the faculty of Arts and Sciences and 

 the Division of Engineering and Applied Physics. It was 

 probably he who put the idea into Jack's head that I might 

 be a possible candidate for director of this new Center for 

 Population Studies. 



The other people I had worked with from Harvard on the 

 Pakistan project were Bob Dorfman in the Department of 

 Economics, who would not have had much contact with Jack 

 Snyder, Bob Burden, who was a colleague and sort of an 

 assistant to Harold Thomas, Wally Falcon in what they called 

 the Development Advisory Service in Harvard part of the 

 Center for International Relations. But none of those 

 others had much contact with the School of Public Health. 

 But Harold did. So they asked me to come back and be 

 interviewed, be a candidate for the job of Director of the 

 new Center. 



I gave a talk to them about our Pakistan work and what 

 I saw as the problems of developing countries, of which 

 certainly one of the most important components was rapid 

 population growth. That certainly was true of Pakistan. 

 Jack had gotten Richard Saltonstall of the famous 

 Massachusetts Saltonstall family to endow a chair, the 



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