Summer Session: College Funland

The cab driver turned around slowly. "You want to know the best pick-up spots in town," he intoned. "Well, I can take you to one down in South Boston. No, that woudn't be safe for a guy looks like you. Better try Harvard Yard."

When it's hot, the University metamorphoses. Elsie's closes earlier,--Wigglesworth is off limits, the frontiers of learning do not retreat quite as quickly. To a large extent, Cambridge becomes a father Elliott's Girls' Town; and the news it makes is largely a matter of statistics, the data of a sociological experiment.

The transformation, of course, is not instantaneous; even after the last exam postcard is sent, the rituals of Commencement and Reunion remain. President Pusey cautioned the outgoing seniors on the growth of secularism, and Ivy Orator Harold Fitzgibbons suggested that the Program could be boosted by converting Soldiers Field into a dog track. Nothing came of the second suggestion.

The Class of '33, first to spend its freshman year in the Yard, turned out for the largest reunion in College history, and got a special treat. Its members saw the first public exhibition of the Kronosaurus sea monster, skeleton of what was once the largest flesh-eating reptile in the ocean. There were also cocktails, a day at the Essex County Club, panels on education, and the Yale baseball game.

But June's last day saw severance of the last ties with the formal academic year as another record crowd arrived--the largest number ever to register in Summer School, nearly 3500. From all 48 states they came, and Alaska too, reported the Summer News. An indignant wife from Grays 33 promptly wrote in that the Virgin Islands was also represented. "I am here and I know," were her words.

And so the mob came, to be entertained by panem and circenses. The panis was 600 gallons of rather watery punch, served on Wednesday afternoons in the Yard. The circus consisted of a plenthora of diversions, from concerts at Tanglewood to mixers in the Union.

From the back of an envelope, Dean Bundy attempted to tell the newcomers what the Summer School should be like. Speaking from notes on the back of a small folder, he used Woodrow Wilson's definition of a University atmosphere: "What students talk about when they are not engaged in academic pursuits." Mere residence could not associate anyone with Harvard: "You have to make it yours," he told them. "It does not come to you."

His audience solemnly agreed. And in a poll taken by the Summer News, most students gravely declared that they had been academically motivated in coming to Harvard Summer School. The opportunity to take courses not offered elsewhere was mentioned as an intensely significant factor.

But statistics are revealing. The most popular courses in terms of enrollment were American Literature Since 1920, Aspects of the Impressionistic Novel, Modern Poetry, and European Intellectual History of the 19th Century, in that order. This subject-matter sounds less than esoteric for a good normal school.

Another startlingly unperceptive conclusion comes out by analogy with the action of a great automobile corporation. This corporation sent out questionnaires asking people what type of car they wanted to buy next. Responses were quite uniform. Everyone wanted a rather small, conservative economy car with little ostentation.

On the same questionnaire, however, each man was asked what kind of car his neighbor wanted. Unfailingly, he reported that the man next door panted for a garish, lavish, multicolored hunk of chrome. The company declared large dividends by producing a car for the neighbor.

In a similar manner, despite their own intentions, most of those answering the poll gave "social" motives as the reasons for other students' decision to attend Summer School. "Fun," "marriage," or "curiosity" were listed three times more frequently than a desire to take courses. "The majority," one girl said, "seem to have come for the social life." (Her own reason was to "pick up a course I didn't have time for during the year.")

The University did its part with four mixers, three square dances, and a Messenger Service in Grays which relayed in formation to any student upon receipt.

There were many who took full advantage of these services, and spent their summer in the steps of Wigg. These characterized the Harvard type: "so engrossed in thought as to walk through red lights," "falsely English," or "fish-belly white."

But some--albeit outnumbered--found time for the nonsocial side of summer Harvard. Regular College students studied the details of the new Honors Program Fund, established by President Pusey and sustained by a $100,000 gift from the Procter and Gamble Corporation. Of noncurricular interest were the readings by Robert Lowell, John Crowe Ransom, and other poets of the Fugitive group.

About 35 years ago several under-2