Summer School Means Having a Great Time

THOMAS E. Crooks, director of the Harvard Summer School, grins at the question, and says, "I have an absolutely unqualified feeling that the majority of the students have a great time. I don't see how they can miss."

Although Crooks quickly adds that many students study hard and learn a lot, he and everyone else who has ever spent a summer in Cambridge know that having a good time is the quintessence of the summer school experience.

And it is difficult to see how they can miss. Harvard Summer School offers, at the very least, all the virtues of a good sleep-away camp: swimming, tennis, boating, dances, music, and companionship. And of course there are the various courses, the free lectures, the movies and theatre. But most important, perhaps, the Summer School offers a taste of Harvard to thousands who would not get it otherwise.

It is, however, a strange taste--limited, and in some ways, inaccurate. One of the most important components of the Harvard "winter" experience is the sense of fraternity and superiority which comes from the College's unmatched exclusiveness. Harvard College accepts 1200 students from over 7000 applicants; Radcliffe's ratio is similar. Justifiably or not, it does something to an adolescent's psyche to know he is one of this group, even though he knows the group was chosen through an elaborate, only partly meritocratic, admissions process.

The summer school, on the other hand, is almost open-door. Until 1962, it accepted anyone with a high school diploma who showed up, even without previously applying. Now, Crooks admits, it is turning some students down. "We are rejecting more each year," he says, but he won't say how many "because it is quite a different thing from the College."

"I get a little tired of the exclusivity in the winter," Crooks says. "I like the idea that we're not so exclusive during the summer."

The Summer School is different in other ways. It is more rigidly run than the academic year is: it has strict rules against men visiting girls' rooms and vice versa, although this year for the first time visitors will be permitted in certain common rooms. Women in dorms have early curfews. There is a social director to plan and sponsor group activities, something which wouldn't make sense for the fragmented Harvard community during the year. Many of these changes are necessary because of the nature of a summer school. In any case, they make Harvard a different place during the summer.

ABOUT one fourth of the students in the Summer School are Harvard or Radcliffe students, and there are several hundred more winter residents who stay around for the summer but do not attend the Summer School. Most of these tend to stick with one another, and generally are not found in the center of the Summer School social maelstrom, the Yard.

There is a kind of tension every summer, an unofficial segregation of the "summies" from the Harvard and Radcliffe students. It is in part snobbism, and in part due to the fact that Harvard and Radcliffe students live off-campus during the summer, while others tend to live in Summer School housing.

The tension, however, does not preclude socializing. The lure of the opposite sex whittles away at snobbery, and there is much mingling between transient summer students and those who will be around to remember.

FOR Crooks himself, the summer and winter are inseparable experiences. While also serving as Master of Dudley House, the House for Harvard undergraduates who live off-campus, Crooks begins preparing for the next summer in September, "as soon as department chairmen return from their vacations in Europe." He must hire professors, both from Harvard and outside, after consultation with the department chairmen.

By Christmas, Crooks has sent the catalogue to the printer, and the early spring is devoted to arranging social activities like theatre, music, and dance. In addition, Crooks must worry about such administrative details as reporting his budget to the dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. (The Summer School is the big money-maker in the Arts and Sciences budget, producing $192,000 in profit last year.)

The last months are devoted to examining questionable admissions applications, and a general administrative tidying-up. Last week, Crooks looked out from his seventh-floor office in Holyoke Center at his wide-angle view of Harvard Square. "Traffic in the Square has really been picking up the last couple of days," he said. "The summer school kids are coming, whether we are ready or not."