Love and Waterbeds

Erich Segal, the famed runner who finished the Boston Marathon last week with a time of under three hours, has quit his teaching job at Yale at least until September.

Criticism from the national press concerning certain of his moonlighting activities has been "seeping in and cording the good will of my classes," Segal claims. "Slick publications weren't satisfied with attacking my writing. They impugned my personal integrity."

A smaller, less slick publication has also launched an attack on Segal. In a pamphlet entitled "The Truth About Love Story" (an obscure reference to one of Segal's works), two students from San Diego, California, are attempting to demonstrate that the analysis of love presented in Segal's latest work is a fraud.

Monograph

Segal, a professor of Classics at Yale, recently published a short monograph on love in the form of a case-study of a Harvard-and-Radcliffe couple.

To contradict the views expressed by Segal, the two are distributing their pamphlet at Harvard and Radcliffe and will be conducting interviews with students during the next few weeks. The data from the interviews will be incorporated in a book called The Basic Haman Issue -an examination of the way people attempt to mask their innate egotism while deluding themselves that they are unselfish, according to co-author Paul Treegarden.

"Love," the pamphlet claims, is notan unselfish emotion but a response to the challenge and "psychic masochism" of the love-power relationship. Winning a girl is "like conquering Everest or reaching the moon," the pamphlet explains. "Why do you suppose the moon-that big bubble in the sky-has such a special significance to 'lovers' anyway?"