Summer on the Charles

Going to Summer School is generally about as unpopular and unpleasant as handing in English A themes. But the bolstered-up requirements of the accelerated program are going to make those extra two courses that can be picked up during July and August mighty important to a lot of people. They're apt to mean the difference between getting a degree and entering the Army a couple of courses short of the University's graduation requisites.

If sticking around Cambridge for the summer is unpleasant to undergraduates in general, it's even less enjoyable to the hapless student from Dallas or San Francisco, who finds himself away from home for not nine, but twelve full months a year. And when he's likely to be toting a rifle for Uncle Sam at any time, those extra months at home mean a lot. An obvious answer to this problem lies in allowing him to receive at least partial credit for work done at an approved college near his home. But the University's present ruling which denies credit for courses taken at any summer school but Harvard's makes this way out nothing more than a blind alley.

When it comes to giving its reasons for this ruling, the Administration asserts that it hasn't the time or the money to investigate the calibre of the curriculum of other summer schools. But such an objection poses hurdles that are less trouble to climb over than officials seem to think. They aren't being asked to delve into the academic standards of Slippery Rock Teachers College or Bmidji Normal. A survey of the summer program of recognized schools like the University of California or Wisconsin would involve only a limited amount of investigation and expense-all of which seems warranted by the advantages that a change in the ruling would bring about.

As a matter of fact, this idea isn't entirely new to the University. The Geology department conducted an investigation of its own a few years ago, and decided that the Geology courses offered at the University of Colorado's Summer Session rated high enough to merit the granting of full credit to Harvard students who took them. If this can be done in regard to one department at one particular college, there's no reason for the same thing not to be done on a much wider scale. And Havard's prestige wouldn't suffer in the bargain.