The Summer School Legend Lives On

If the topic of the Summer School comes up during wintertime dinner table conversation at a Harvard House, the course the talk will take is fairly predicable. One student will moan about the hours he wasted at Yard punches, while a second will cut him off by reminiscing about "that girl from --" that he met at the self-same punches. A third, after throwing in a few comments about sunbathing on the banks of the Charles, will end the conversation with a conclusion running along the lines of "All in all, it's not a bad excuse for playing away the summer."

Such are the views of many, perhaps most Harvard students. To them, the Summer School is not their Harvard, but rather a strange sort of recreational activity that takes over Cambridge during the warmer months of the year. It's the sort of attitude that make buttons reading "I Go Here in the Winter" fast moving items among Harvard students summering in Cambridge a few years ago.

Mention this legend of the Summer School to H. Francis Wilkinson, acting director of the school, and you'll first get a measured silence, and then a firm rebuttal to the legend. It's no longer a rest camp, if it ever was," he says. Queried about the percentage of Summer School students who come for relaxation and little else, Wilkinson replies, "There are some, but there are some in Harvard College too." He hastens to point out that, last summer, two-thirds of the summer students received only honors grades.

"The majority of the Summer School students are really now coming to the Summer School either to go more rapidly through their college education or to take courses outside their normal field of concentration," he comments.

So where does the legend of the Summer School come from?

In part, it probably originates with the offhand elitism of many Harvard students--with their assumption that any institution bearing the name "Harvard" couldn't be quite up to par unless they and their peers participate in it.

Another source of the legend is the history of the school. In its early years, it served two functions: allowing teachers to come back to college for refresher courses, and permitting students to make up courses they failed during the regular academic year.

After a while, Harvard Summer School attracted a third group of students, as Wilkinson puts it, "a group of people who didn't know what to do with themselves in the summer." Attracted no doubt, by the name, many flocked to Cambridge, where plunking down the admission fee was once tantamount to acceptance at the Harvard Summer School.

In recent years, however, the school has tightened up its admissions policy--in effect making a shift toward selectivity which Harvard College, itself once not very selective academically, made only two decades ago.

Though no one pretends that the Summer School is, or should be, as academically geared as winter Harvard, today's summer students appear to be spending more time in the Lamont Library, and less roaming the streets of Cambridge looking for their lifelong (or summerlong, at least) mate. In fact, a few Faculty members who have taught summer classes have even been heard to murmur that their summer students study more seriously than the Harvard-Radcliffe breed.

The Summer School is, of course, not a world apart from, (pardon the expression), "the real Harvard." To School goes into the coffers of the begin with, the income from the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. In 1967, the books showed a profit of $192,000 for the School. In one sense, the profit is only a paper one, since the charge which the School contributes to, for example, Widener Library, is only an approximation of what the summer use of the library's recourses costs. On the other hand, many of Harvard's overhead expenses--libraries, administration, custodial care, etc.--would go on in the summer even if there were no Summer School. Though Harvard might, in a given year, lose money on the school, it would certainly lose more if there were no Summer School at all.

About half of the faculty of the Summer School hold regular Harvard appointments. The remainder, those who don't teach at Harvard during the winter, are recommended for Summer School appointments by the Harvard departments. And many of this second group either received graduate degrees from Harvard, or taught here at one time or another as junior or senior Faculty members.

Harvard departments sometimes give new courses a shakedown cruise, as it were, during the Summer School, before including the courses in their winter offerings.

As for the 4500-member summer student body, about 30 per cent go to Harvard or Radcliffe during the winter months. Despite their substantial numbers, however, the H-R students are probably not as evident around the Summer School as those who come from other colleges.

For the most part, the Harvard students live off-campus in the summer--inhabiting apartments scattered over Greater Boston. Some do reside on-campus, but not in the Yard with the "summies." Instead, on-campus Harvard students stay in the Houses, enjoying, in some cases, the "Gin and Tonic Societies" which several Houses sponsor to satisfy the souls of House members standed in Cambridge during the summer.

Both courses and extracurricular activities also keep the H-R students out of sight. They tend to flock toward the time-consuming laboratory courses, such as the infamous Chem S-20(organic chemistry--60 lectures, 100 hours of laboratory, 13 exam hours of it during the summer._ Outside of course, the H-R students, continuing their winter habits fragment into innumerable small groups centering about activities ranging from the drama to the pinball machines at Tommy's Lunch. (Certain fans of both tend to claim that these two activities are not entirely dissimilar.)

Given the relative invisibility of H-R students in the Summer School, the girl who came to Cambridge looking for a Crimson husband may eventually give up, shrug her shoulders, and head for Lamont. This, no doubt, is another factor pushing the Sum- mer School toward a more serious academic orientation.

Besides the normal Summer School courses, a number of special programs exist under the auspices of the School, and they too help to make the school more serious than it once was. The programs include:

* The Intensive Summer Studies Program, begun in 1966, which brings 70 students from Southern, predominantly Negro colleges to Cambridge for the summer. The students take one regular summer course, and also a special tutorial. (The program is a joint venture with Yale and Columbia, which also take a similar number of the students each summer.)

* The Faculty Audit Program, which plays host to 20 faculty members of Southern Negro Colleges. The faculty members in this program audit Summer School courses and also attend special seminars.

* The International Seminar (originated by presidential aide Henry Kissinger, when he was a Harvard government professor). Under this program, about 30 foreign officials, scholars, labor leaders etc--whom Kissinger described as "standing on the threshold of national prominence"--study at Harvard during the summer.

Despite such special programs and what appears to be an increasing seriousness on the part of the students, the Summer School still remains a most relaxed way to come to Harvard, if only for two months. It is perhaps symptomatic that the second paragraph of the Harvard News Office release describing the 1969 session read as follows:

"As usual the eight weeks of intensive study will be alleviated by plays, tours concerts, lectures, dances, sports, and Wednesday afternoon punches in the shade of the Yard."

What this means is that the Summer School legend continues, indeed perhaps that there is still some truth to it, at least enough truth that come the Winter of 1969-70, the dining hall conversions may once again turn to the triumphs or tragedies experienced under the Cambridge summer sun