Summer Absurdities

EVER SINCE I had a Latin teacher in high school named Mr. Constantinople, I thought I had heard it all--that is, until I started flipping through Harvard Summer School 1984: Official Register of Harvard University. Under the section labelled history, there's a course called "The Great Age of Greece" taught by, you guessed it, Pericles Georges.

There's whole lot of other interesting stuff too. Harvard has a lot of skeletons in the closet. Really, Like the Harvard Ukrainian Summer Institute. Or the Institute on College Admissions (some people actually think that's what the whole summer school is about). There's also some interesting stuff that's not there--tenured professors from Harvard, for instance. I count eight on the summer school faculty listed towards the back of this book, but for the life of me I can't figure out what they all teach. Adam Ulam is cited in the back, but, as far as can be told, he is nowhere to be found--even in the listings of offerings in his very own Government Department.

But this is to be expected at the Harvard summer school, a place of unpredictability, strangeness, extremes...well...Kareem Abdul-Jabbar showed up one summer to study Arabic. It's almost the exact opposite of staid regular-year Harvard, which cruises along tradition-bound and stuffy. Summer School Director Marshall R. Pihl '55 would rather not have us believe this. He wants us to believe in Traditional Harvard. He writes in the introduction,

"The growth and diversification in student enrollments over the past few decades have earned the Harvard Summer School a commanding reputation today as a truly cosmopolitan center of learning during the summer months in Cambridge."

Hmm.

"A summer at Harvard traditionally is a memorable experience for most of our students."

Double Hmm.

But the calm Voice of the Administration, exuding almost 350 years of Harvard know-how, belies the confusion and proliferation of courses, students, and teachers that is the summer school these days. Derek Bok tells us Harvard is changing--that its vital task in the coming years will be to learn how to deal with this proliferation of nontraditional students, who come not only in the summertime, but at night and for short courses and for mid-career programs.

Let's talk summer, though. How can you be Harvard traditional when you're teaching "Professional Writing" courses? That's right, there's CREA S-165, summer bureaucratese for "Writing Grant Proposals," which is a guide to "the preparation of writing and thinking necessary to win grants." You can also take CREA S-175, "Lega Writing"; CREA S-180, "Effective Business Communications"; or CREA S-185, "Technical Writing."

IN A STRANGE WAY, the practicality, the pre- or even post-professionalism that is openly touted throughout the course book, is almost cathartic. The anti-liberal education tendencies that float below the surface of the Harvard that exists between September and June explode in an orgy of blatantly useful computer or financial or writing courses.

In a perverse way, even the courses that pander to the high school crowd that has flocked to Cambridge for the summer hold out the promise of pragmatism, only more subtly. What possible reason is there to take "our Mobile Earth," or "history of the English Language," or-get this--"Political Man, the Community, and the State," except to say you have sampled the liberal-mindedness of the Harvard education--which some poor, misguided soul from New Trier or St. Albans might think will help him or her get into this esteemed institution by the end of the year?

But enough of cynicism!. Now is the summer of all our content. Let a thousand flowers bloom. Get you to your Ukrainian Institute, and you to Wigglesworth Hall. And you enjoy your "Survey of Western Art 1300-Present," and you your "Financial Accounting." And you from West Palm Beach, Florida, meet your roommate from Omaha, Nebraska. May the admissions office choke on that ghastly word diversity, but Harvard Tradition, struggle as we may against it, is sure to bring us all down in the end anyhow. There is Vertias in what this book has to tell us after all.