Return to Greatness

Registration is still more than a month away, but the midsummer drought is over for at least one section of the Harvard underworld--the well-hidden, but by no means small group that thrives on magazine articles about college students.

Esquire's Back-to-College issue hit Cambridge newsstands this week, and with at least two more major magazines scheduled to run "College Issues" this fall, Harvard's mag-addicts were beaming.

"When I came to Harvard in the fall of 1962, disarmament was very big," one reader observed. "I was going to get involved in the movement, but I decided that the best thing to do would be to catch up first on what these kids were thinking.

"Well, I picked up a Nation and a New Leader at the Out-of-Town Newsstand, and that was it. These articles were just fascinating. They talked about kids with real, blood-and-guts ideas, kids who seemed much more interesting than the ones I met back home."

By now the boy, who said his name was Roger, was hooked on the magazines. Once disarmament died out, a brief spate of articles on "A Generation Without Committment" was followed by what Roger describes as "the highlight of my own Harvard career"--the Great Harvard Sex Scandal.

Some of you may have forgotten the commotion created back in the fall of 1963 when a Harvard dean's innocent statement about parietal hours was translated by the Boston press into a "confession" of orgies behind the ivy-covered walls. Roger hasn't forgotten. "It was just wonderful," he recalls. "There was the Record-American ("Radcliffe Girls Blush at Harvard Disclosures," he remembered, drooling), and the rest of the Boston papers. When that got over with, I had to hunt a bit to find reading matter, but I finally picked up a copy of Whisper that had something about "Sex Perversions Rock Harvard." Once I'd found that the rest was easy. I worked through True, Gent, Look, See, Gasp, Startle, and Shudler that spring."

After the interlude, articles about present student leftists seems relatively tame. "This Berkeley stuff, I just don't get it," Roger observed. "For a while I was hopeful of a good juicy drug scare, but that seemed to die out."

This summer, like most, has been a hard one on Roger. "The kids leave the campus, you know, and the editors store up on their good stuff for the fall." Existing on such skimpy fare as Mademoiselle's campus issue ("Campus Activists Discuss Their Lives") and Gentleman's Quarterly ("Bill Bradley, Princeton '65," and "Robert Morris Taylor, Ohio State Celeb") Roger pined for fall.

"I even took to reading the Summer News," he said with a sigh, "but you know, even you have to admit it's pretty dishonest."

"Dishonest?"

"Well," he said "you aren't writing about the real news around Harvard. These kids you write about in your pages, you know, they just don't ring right.

"Now here,"--he pointed to the crumpled copy of Esquire--"this is how students really live. For instance, I know that in the summer you date girls like this." He pointed to pictures of four "townies" who, according to the article, "often date Berkeley men." One was a secretary at Warner Brothers, one a model.

"Or this," he said, "why don't you have stories like this?" It was an article called "28 People Who Count," People who were "Heroes of the California rebels (and as Cal goes, so go the rest)." The list included Ralph Ginzburg, the publisher of Fact magazine; Bishop James Pike ("Because he's a kid's kind of troublemaker, always in hot water, always on the liberal side: birth control, capital punishment. The Bomb, and all that"); Caryl Chessman; Norman Mailer; and, good God, B.F. Skinner ("Because he points to the cool world of 1984").

"Or you take this article on college youth," Roger added. "See this interview with a girl who went to a college that kept its own abortionist? And see, they've got a girl to answer her. 'I really feel sorry for these people... They're just using the rebellion bit as a rationalization for their own inability to cope with society or the pressures of academic life.' That's pretty hot stuff. You guys just don't know what you're missing in college."