Institution-building at PBHA

“It’s the first-ever reunion of Phillips Brooks House Association  volunteers,” says Francis H. Duehay ’55, Ed.D. ’68, speaking of  a get-together planned for November 10 and 11 in Cambridge. Formed  in 1904, and a student organization that today includes 73 programs  through which 1,800 undergraduates do volunteer work in Cambridge  and Boston, the association has very many veterans. This gathering  celebrates their common bond and affords an opportunity to help  stabilize PBHA—and their relationship to it—by a general opening  of purses in support of a capital campaign to be officially launched  on the occasion. 

Lee Smith in 1982, after 25 years on the job

Photograph by Jane Reed

The reunion begins with dinner and a keynote address. Panel discussions  the next day, opened by President Neil L. Rudenstine and participated  in by president emeritus and Three Hundredth Anniversary University  Professor Derek Bok, take up such matters as “public service in  the new economy” and “the role of service in public education,”  as well as an infrastructure session devoted to “forming a PBHA  alumni association.” 

Duehay is cochair of the $7.2 million campaign with Nancy Rahnasto  Osborne ’76. “We’re trying to endow the salaries of the director  and executive director, to fund the sort of training of student  program leaders that new government regulations require, and to  have seed money for innovative programs,” says Duehay. “The time  has come to provide stability beyond the year-to-year funding that  PBHA always has had.” 

When Duehay was an undergraduate, he served through PBHA as “a  tutor in what was then called a settlement house and in prisons.”  Now retired, he sat for 28 years on the Cambridge city council,  serving three terms as mayor. He is giving time to the campaign,  he says, because PBHA benefits not just students, but also Boston  and Cambridge. 

The reunion concludes with a reception honoring Lee Smith, who  has just retired after more than 40 years at PBHA. Her title officially—and  wholly inadequately, in the opinion of students who have known her  over the years—was administrative assistant. Since joining the  organization in 1957, she has been in her seasons big sister, mother,  and grandmother to a multitude of Harvardians.