Pavlovich Case Spurs Official Change

Spiro M. Pavlovich III, the Law School student indicted last February for forging documents to secure admission to Harvard, has long since gone underground, but the famed hoax he allegedly perpetrated is bringing permanent changes to admissions procedures at the Law School.

Before this year, applicants were permitted to submit their own transcripts, but in the wake of the Pavlovich case, all transcripts must be forwarded to the Law School by the registrar of the applicant's undergraduate institution.

"People can't just walk in with them [the transcripts] anymore," June Thompson, assistant director of admissions for the Law School, said yesterday. "We will be much stricter."

As part of Harvard's efforts to protect itself against similar cases in the future, Daniel Steiner '54, general counsel to the University, sent a memo over the summer to all University admissions offices which suggested that applicants be reminded of the severe consequences of submitting inaccurate information.

Steiner's suggested message to applicants would warn them that "in most cases" misrepresentations are discovered. Such inaccuracies would be passed on to "such other universities and testing services as are appropriate," the memo said.

While the Law School will use the proposed insert in this year's application, the College, GSAS and Business School either received the suggestion too late for their 1976-77 applications or felt the message was adequately conveyed elsewhere in their admissions materials.

Pavlovich, who was expelled from the Law School once before for submitting a bogus application, re-applied under an alias and allegedly slipped a second transcript past unsuspecting admissions officers.

To the embarrassment of administrators, it was law firm recruiters suspicious of his boasts, not Harvard, who precipitated Pavlovich's arrest by the FBI last December on charges of falsifying applications for federally insured loans. His case is still pending.

Pavlovich's wife Monette, a Harvard Business School student who went under the alias Cary Monica Cabot, was arrested in January on similar charges. She was convicted over the summer in New Orleans, placed on probation and required to repay a $1250 Harvard loan.

Reminders of the bizarre Pavlovich saga continue to turn up. Eric Roberts, an Applied Math tutor, discovered a set of Harvard Trust Co. checks with the name "S.M. Pavlovich III" in a gutter earlier this week.

Pavlovich, who went under the name Jason Scott Cord at Harvard, has been unavailable for comment for months