NEWS BRIEFS

Police cleared Holyoke Center yesterday morning for two hours after an anonymous male caller told the switchboard operator that a bomb would go off in the building at 10 a.m.

This was the third time in the past week that a bomb threat forced police to clear a Harvard building, although no bombs have been found in any of the buildings.

The threat to Holyoke Center was received at 7:55 a.m., the same time as a call last Wednesday to Cambridge Police saying that a bomb would go off at 10 a.m. that day. A bomb scare occurred later that day at 1737 Cambridge Street, also a Harvard-owned building.

In all three cases, Cambridge police and fire officials cleared and searched the buildings before allowing anyone back in.

Although this week's scares are the first this year, there have been other threats here before. Last year, at the time of the strike, a caller said a bomb would go off in the Faculty Club. As is the case with this year's threats, police did not make any arrests.

One employee who was unable to enter the building until 10:15 a.m. called the affair "far out."

The Boston Diggers yesterday declared Saturday's Rolling Stones concert at Boston Gardens free and open to the public. Abbie Hoffman, Yippie leader, said he expects thousands of people, including the rock group Motor City 5, to gather outside the concert hall before it begins.

"Once it fills up, we won't have any trouble getting in," Hoffman confidently predicted. "And we do want to thank all those people who purchased tickets for making this all possible. They're beautiful ... and they're all suckers.

Applications for admission to Harvard College are coming in more slowly this fall than they did last year, but Harvard's Admissions Office doesn't think that the events of last spring have influenced the rate of application.

"It looks as if they're down about ten per cent as opposed to last year," Robert E. Kaufmann. Director of Admissions, said yesterday. "But we recorded a monumental increase in 1968. I'm not sure there's any reason for the decrease except statistical variation."

By last Friday, November 21, Harvard had received 2576 applications for admission to the College. On the same date last year, the Admissions Office had 2876 applications in hand; in 1967, however, it had only 2029.

The 2876 applications represent only about 35 per cent of the more than 8000 the Admissions Office expects to receive before its December 31 deadline.

Kaufmann-who has traveled to the west coast this fall to interview prospective students-said yesterday that "there hasn't been much reaction from the kids" he has interviewed or from their parents to Harvard's spring crisis.

"Even in the very places where you'd expect problems of acceptance by the general community, we haven't had any," he said. "Response has been better in Southern California, for example, though you'd assume that places like Orange County would be the most adversely affected."

The Harvard Undergraduate Council called Sunday for creation of a student-tutor committee to investigate the policy of the University Health Services and student complaints about the staff.

In response to criticism of a recent article by Dr. Graham B. Blaine, Jr. '40, HUC members asked the committee to determine whether there is a University policy barring doctors from writing about student psychiatric problems in non-medical publications.

The Blaine article, which appeared in the Herald Traveler, said that "adolescent rebellion" was characterized by "self-destructive behavior." John D. Hanify '71, president of HUC, said that articles such as Blaine's might discourage students from seeking psychiatric counsel at the Health Services.