After Harvard, Cambridge

It's not as though there was some stigma about it, the Radcliffe graduate was saying. And yet wherever she goes these days, people give her a funny stare and say something like, "Are you still here?"

Yes, she tells them, I'm still here. And why shouldn't she be? Cambridge is as good a place to live as any--full of interesting people who always seem to be writing novels, or having brief and torrid love affairs, or writing novels about brief and torrid love affairs, or translating a professor's book, or devising new strategies for winning at pinball--things like that.

So when she graduated in 1975, the Radcliffe woman found herself drawn to Cambridge. She took an apartment with Law School friends, and now spends her time writing fiction (which she won't show anyone) and wry articles about people she knows, which she sends off to various magazines. Sometimes her articles are published and sometimes not, but she has enough money to make ends meet and isn't having a bad time of it--except that people keep asking, "Are you still here?"

Like the Radcliffe woman, many Harvard graduates who remain in Cambridge feel strange about it, and many prefer not to talk for publication. Matt, who graduated in 1975, spent much of the fall living in a friend's room at Radcliffe and unsuccessfully looking for work. Now, in his small rented room near the Square, he says, "I'd rather not talk about it. I'm sorry, I'd just rather not." Susan, who's been living in Cambridge since she graduated in 1974, says she's not sure she wants to talk about it, either, but will call back with an answer. She never does.

Nobody at Harvard can tell you exactly how many alumni hang around after graduation, working (or looking for work) in Cambridge.

Harvard's Alumni Records office has no geographical breakdown of recent classes. Officials say such information languishes on computer tapes somewhere. At the Office of Career Services and Off-Campus Learning (OCS-OCL), however, there may be a clue. A couple of years ago, an OCS-OCL project required the interviewing of alumni from the five most recent graduating classes. For convenience, OCS-OCL workers decided to interview only alumni living in the Boston metropolitan area. After culling names and addresses from the records, the office discovered that fully 20 to 25 per cent of recent graduates lived around here. Frank Fisher, director of the OCS-OCL, says now that he remembers being sort of surprised the figure was that high.

But Fisher says he can understand why alumni want to stay around. Cambridge, he says, is a "flag" to young graduates--saying, in effect, There are people like you here, plenty of them. He thinks Cambridge has eclipsed San Francisco in that respect, and now stands as a formidable post-graduate Mecca. Why should Harvard students, he asks, be immune to that lure?

There's not much that the OCS-OCL tells those who plan to stay around. The office publishes booklets and memos advising students on all sorts of career opportunities and pitfalls, but nowhere in that avalanche of print is there anything called "After Harvard, Cambridge."

"That doesn't come up as a special question,"

sher says. "Those people who stay in Cambridge the generally more knowledgeable about what they're getting into than people who are planning something else."

But sometimes there are unpleasant surprises. It isn't always easy to find work in Cambridge, even for alumni willing to settle for menial jobs. Unemployment in Massachusetts is now hovering between 11 and 12 per cent and in Cambridge, it is even higher: 12.8 per cent, compared to 11.4, for example, in the rest of the Boston metropolitan area. Harvard graduates can't collect unemployment compensation unless they have held a local job, their employer contributed to the state unemployment insurance fund, and they did not quit but were fired. Even then, the amount of unemployment money will probably be small.

To earn rent and food money (and Cambridge is an expensive place to live), many Harvard graduates patch together part-time jobs. Ann Wittington '75 has a typically checkered employment history: since graduating last June, she has worked as a proofreader for a feminist press (she earned $105 for 30 hours of work); for a Boston College professor working at the Radcliffe Institute (the job lasted six weeks); moving furniture one day, a job she got through a friend ($15 for one and a half hours); and now works four hours each Saturday at Schlesinger Library and ten hours a week at the Harvard College Observatory. (It is fairly common for alumni to work for Harvard, either full-or part-time.)

She is looking for a steady job, but like many who stay in Cambridge, she isn't bothered too much by meager job prospects. She's bothered by something else: the stigma, the funny stares, the unspoken notion that Harvard graduates should get out of town after Commencement, that they don't belong here.

"In September when people started coming back," she says, "I started getting paranoid about going down to the Square and seeing people I knew who'd say, 'are you still here?' But then I thought--this is a city, and I can live here if I want to."