Shopping Around

You never can tell about Summer School; it's a good bet that one or two of the Assistant Professors SMITHs in the catalogue will turn out to be the type of lectures whom sleepy pleasure wonks leap out of bed at 8 a.m. to hear. Deferentially, the editors of the Summer News offer a few hot tips.

9 a.m

Early lectures are ignored at Harvard during the year, but in the summer they have their advantages; few classrooms are air-conditioned and by noontime, the big lecture hall become giant pressure cookers.

Social Relations S-147: George Goethals has attracted a fiercely loyal following among Harvard students; their protests, among other things, led the University to appoint him assistant dean of the College after he failed to win tenure in the Soc Rel Department. The course covers "Theories of Personality," Freud and his modifietrs, plus excursions into anthropology and sociology.

French S-165: It's only for students who can read French with facility, but the reading list (novels from Stendahl to Camus) is as good as any you'll find.

Education S-A-5: Kenneth Peters, the Superintendent of Beverly Hills school system, discusses the problems of school systems today: church-state relations, public control, and the status of teachers are on the agenda.

10 a.m

Social Sciences S-118: An absolutely sure thing. Louis Hartz is one of Harvard's best lecturers. His course deals with "Democratic Theory and Its Critics," and the reading list can't be beat. Hartz upper-level government course on "Nineteenth-Century Political Thought" is just as good.

French S-Cab: If you were making up a description of a dream course in intermediate French, it might sound very much like French S-Cab, which looks like the biggest sleeper of the summer. Its based on a study of six of the best French films of the last 27 years, from La Grande Illusion to Jules et Jim.

English S-164: Robert J. Kiely, a Rising Young Man in Harvard's English Department, gave an upper-level course that won raves from everyone who took it this spring. This study of the modern British novel should be an excellent course.

Visual Studies S-160: Designer Horace Armistead offers an ambitious course on "Visual Design in the Theatre," an attempt to discern how visual effects in a theatrical production affect the audience.

Slavic S-150: The course examines Russian literature from Dostoyevsky (whom Vsevolod Tsetchkarev loathes) and Tolstoi (whom he adores) to the present. Tsetchkarev is a popular lecturer, and his course has had a reputation as a gut.

11 a.m

Social Relations S-134: Kenneth B. Clark was a witness is Brown vs. Board of Education 11 years ago; today he remains one of the high priests of the civil rights movement, and a very controversial figure in his own right. The course is on "Race Relations"; Clark also will teach an upper-level course on "Social Power and Social Change."

Anthropology S-119: This study of "Social Organization in Southeast Asia" will permit you to drop the requisite number of comments on the habits of Vietnamese villagers into your next discussion of The Situation.

English S-150: Robert Langbaum of the University of Virginia has written a couple of well- thought of book; his course on romantic poetry should be worth a long look.

12 noon

Humanities S-9: It looks like a beaut: the course will study the five plays being put on by the Harvard Summer Players (Shaw's Millionaires, Pinters The Dumb Walter; Beckett's Happy Days; Chekov's Uncle Vanya; and Brecht's Trumpets and Drums). Students will attend some rehearsals, discuss the plays, and perhaps take a bit part in the Brecht for credit in the course. Lectures will be by the Load's three Faculty directors, Robert Chapman, Daniel Seltzer, and George Hamlin. A warning: you'll be competing for grades with some of the members of the Summer Players (They have to be enrolled in Summer School in order to Join the company, and some of them will be taking Hum S-9 for the surest A of their lives).

English S-151: Mercurial Edgar Rosenberg has a huge Cambridge fan club (much of it located at Radcliffe). But there are more than a few people who dislike his lecturets intensely. Audit a fan, if you like the course, you'll like it a lot, and if you don't there are a lot of good literature courses around.

Both Rosenberg and the aforementioned Robert Kiely will be teaching intermediate courses in creative writing. Either should be a great way for a budding literary genius to spend the summer.