Winthrop

Winthrop is a small, tight clique of 475 people. You can't help getting to know the Master, the tutors, and your roommates, because they are all determined to get to know you. When you meet a Winthrop tutor, you don't have to worry when you call him by his first name.

The House is about 20 paces away from the IAB, but by any other yard-stick it is about as far from a gymnasium as Adams House. Its athletes, like its debaters, just happen to be a little better than most. There are a lot of Whizzer White types in Winthrop--hardly any Big Daddy Lipscombs.

Winthrop's tutorials are strongest in Gov, Ec, English, History, and Soc Rel, but they are all well-liked. Master Chalmers, always sitting quietly behind the scenes, has an uncanny knack for getting the best men to come to Winthrop House. His ability to get them is one of the reasons why Winthrop's incessant "tables" are so fascinating. No one wants to eat cheeseburgers at Dudley House when he can eat lunch with John Kenneth Galbraith.

Chalmers' impeccable British reserve doesn't entirely conceal a man who is wreaking a revolution upon Harvard's House system. This year's experiment with a "House course," Nat Sci I, an acknowledged success. Master Chalmers hopes to add another course to the House curriculum next year--a lower level Soc. Sci on current problems in American government, economics, and sociology.

The House library is very well stocked, especially in English and American literature. When you walk in, you see oval portraits of the countless generations of Winthrops staring out over the carpeted hush. You can feel free to kick off you shoes when you study there. It's Lamont with a gentlemanly front.

The Lion Rampant, the House's literary magazine, is rooted in Winthrop's early-sixties renaissance. Winthrop also has almost weekly play-readings, a booming new radio station, and, of course, assistant senior tutor Barney Frank, who combines the virtues of a political philosophers with those of a Jersey ward boss. Although Barney is giving up his position as assistant senior tutor next year to handle undergraduate affairs at the Kennedy Institute, he will be active in the House.

Once you're in Winthrop, you never want out. Barbara Pease, the House secretary, has a horrible time finding people who want to live office campus.