QUICK TAKES

Sometime in the middle of January, a Bantam salesman made the rounds of Harvard Square bookstores to peddle an item called The Harrad Experiment. It was sure-fire, he said, light, sexy and with a Harvard-Radcliffe angle; a natural for post-exam period. The Coop ordered 500 copies, the Harvard Book Store got in 200, the rest followed suit. And a quick check this week revealed that sales were every bit as good as the man from Bantam predicted. So there's really no point in telling you what the book is about. You've all read it.

Now how can we bring its wonderful vision to reality? How can Harvard begin the reorientation of its students toward free love the way Harrad College does in the novel? Rimmer gives us a start.

His book concludes with a four-page reading list, which will, he warns his, change all our ingrained attitudes toward life and society--meaning sex.

Here Harvard is already on its way. Two of the authors listed by Rimmer are already on the Harvard Faculty. Yes, Gordon W. Allport, Richard Clarke Cabot Professor of Social Ethics, and Pitirim A. Sorokin, professor of Sociology Emeritus, have made Harrad's golden circle of authors with Becoming and The American Sex Revolution respectively. It surely wouldn't be asking too much for Allport and Sorokin to organize a Harvard course in "Human Values," like that required of all Harrad students. Harvard students could be taught the history of contraception in the opening lecture, as at Harrad, and move on from there to the new, free love society.

Of course it would probably have to be a fifth course, pass-fail or not. But the Harrad students take their "Human Values" course, as you know, at night after returning from normal classes at the established educational institutions in the Boston area. Admittedly their coed rooms might spur them to the higher academic efforts, but Harvard students could muddle through until the lessons of the new courses led to similar housing practices.

The other basic part of the Harrad experience is the sex diary which each student must keep for four years. As you know, the novel is told through excerpts from four such diaries, culminating in the group marriage of the four -- plus two extras who apparently didn't like to kiss and write.

Well, the General Education committee has been searching for a sixth upper-level Expository Writing course, and here it is right under our noses. Expos Writ 106 -- "Sex Diaries" -- would be a natural for A.P. sophomores seeking something they didn't get in high school.

Who would teach it? Why, who else but the man who has written the four sex, diaries we've just finished reading, Robert H. Rimmer himself. Some of you may quibble that a man who has already managed to turn four fictional sex diaries into dull, tortured writing would not be the proper person to teach others how to write them. But tell the truth now, was your own Gen Ed section man such at hot shot? And Rimmer reads like an easy grader