September Journal

I know that when I see you in the street this week, you're going to ask me one question. So here it is in advance: what I did this summer.

Well, I began June in Colorado, learning to parasail over the Rockies. Turned out I was a natural, and after four days I was off to Nairobi to lead safari tours in the African jungle and study subsistence farming in low-salt areas. On June 8, I flew down to Australia to do thesis research on venereal disease in Sydney's elderly population. Picked up a couple of thousand Australian dollars and some sort of aboriginal chicken pox along the way.

I was deep in the heart of Texas by June 12, digging for oil, swatting mosquitoes and checking out dance clubs for Let's Go on the side. On June 16th, I started my internship--one of America's Top 100--on Wall Street, raking in $90 an hour brokering at Morgan Stanley. I had my own treadmill, two secretaries and three personal workstations.

Come June 21, it was vacation time. So I hopped in the Jeep and drove down to Florida. Just south of Charleston, S.C., an officer stopped me for speeding. She claimed I was doing 110 in a 55-mile-an-hour zone; I protested, she cuffed me, I spent a couple of nights in county jail teaching inmates the basics of Habermas' Theory of Communicative Action.

One Tuesday, I guess it was the 24th, I got bored, and ended up singing "Memory" in drag in Beach Bums cabaret in Miami. That gig lasted a few days, until my voice broke and my stockings ran.

On June 30, I arrived by boat in Hong Kong. Just in time for the festivities, I enjoyed plenty of spring rolls and cold noodles with sesame sauce as I helped usher out the Brits.

Then on July 4th--well, maybe I'll save that for next time. After all, I really want to hear about your summer....

Just what was the designer of this year's Courses of Instruction thinking?

When you have to look at the cover of one book more times than the Bible or, even, TV Guide, you don't want it to have more colors than the new Tommy Hilfiger department at the Coop.

The new dining hall at Adams House has edged out the Barker Center for the 1997 Harvard Renovation of the Year award.

Adams' new eatery is well-lit, spacious, colorful and welcoming. The refrigerator doors are see-through, lending an air of modernist industrialism perfectly offset by the New England charm of the wooden-shelved cereal area. You almost feel like you're standing in Martha Stewart's enormous, immaculate country kitchen.

And, on top of it all, Adams now has both Powerade and two flavors of frozen yogurt. It's even worth dodging the house's notoriously unfriendly interhouse restrictions to bask in the dining splendor.

In second place is the Barker Center, which, while equally spacious and immaculate, lacks the user-friendliness of the Adams dining hall. Perhaps it's the ski lodge smell, or the endless number of office administrators smiling behind glassed-in department cubicles, or the towering front doors that refuse to open, but somehow it doesn't yet feel like home.

As for Annenberg Hall, which, of course, easily took the 1996 Best Renovation award, things are looking bleak. There's no fro-yo in sight, upperclass students are as unwelcome as ever, and the line for dinner during orientation week regularly stretched to record length, past the fountain and into the plaza in front of the Science Center.

Has anyone noticed that the Harvard Film Archive raised its student admission fee to $5? What a rip-off. The screen is too small and the films are, in general, too old to be charging almost as much as Sony Harvard Square.

Plus, as a campus resource, the HFA should be geared toward enriching our appreciation and understanding of film, not squeezing pennies from our wallets. The $5 price tag puts those films a bit out of the bargain range.

Year in and year out, the Core office makes the same mistake on the first day of shopping period: putting Core classes into classrooms too small to accommodate first-day attendance, and then having to move the classes to larger rooms during the class itself or before the next class meeting.

Take Historical Study A-51: "The Modern World Economy." According to Professor of Government Jeffry Frieden, the Core office expected 40 students, at most, if that, and so assigned the class the small Sever 102. When more than four times that number showed up yesterday, spilling out into the hall, Professor Frieden decided to move to the considerably more spacious auditorium at the other end of the building. By the time he began lecturing, more than half an hour had been wasted.

The same thing happened with Literature and Arts A-46: "The City and the Novel," which was moved from the cramped Emerson 305 down two flights to the much larger Emerson 105.

Wouldn't it make more sense to start the classes off in the bigger lecture halls--if they're available--and then move to a smaller space if need be?

The best thing about not letting upperclass students move into their houses until Wednesday: students had two more questions to ask each other--in addition to "How was your summer?" and "What classes are you taking?", we had "Where are you staying this week?" and "What are you doing back early?" Social life was greatly improved as a result.

The worst thing about not letting upperclass students move in until Wednesday: pressuring parents to take time off from work to come up mid-week, or being forced to move in without your stuff for three days. Maybe Harvard should reimburse parents for the time they missed at work this week driving us, or driving our stuff, to Cambridge.

Meteorologists predict that due to an unusually strong El Nino in the Pacific, we could see enormous snowfalls here in the Northeast this winter--perhaps even topping the record set two years back.

So get out there and enjoy the sun and warmth while they last. We may be buried in the white stuff before you know it.

Geoffrey C. Upton's column appears on alternate Tuesdays.