Rites of Spring Kissing Off The Interim

"ALL GOOD things." the up-and-coming assistant professor of Philosophy postulated cheerfully while scraping the jimmies out of the bottom of his dish at Brigham's, "must come to an end." Which is the attitude we must all take in the next few weeks as we reluctantly release our grasp on the Interim.

The Interim has lasted since September. Through the auspices of an Interim Committee, we have been exercising our Interim rights and bearing the (discounted) weight of our Interim responsibilities. Dining Hall doorways have sprouted Interim reports. But it's March. The snow is melting, leaves are sprouting, committees are disbanding (or just fading away), dogs are in heat on the Lars Anderson Bridge, and this year ending the Interim will be one of the rites (and responsibilities) of Spring.

But how will it happen? Will the end come with trumpet flourishes and 4000 deans and administrative vice presidents singing hosannas and halle-Lujas?

Will the University News Office dump 15 boxes of press releases outside University Hall in the dark of night, each release with an eight-by-ten glossy photograph of one of the members of the Corporation? (Kiddies: Be the first on your block to collect the whole set! "OK, Johnny, I'll give you two Calkinses for a Burr, but if you get Blum before I do so help me . . .")

Or will the Subcommittee of Six merely awaken one morning with the certain knowledge that something is gone forever, without ever being sure exactly what?

Perhaps the Interim is just a state of mind, that will die when we all stop believing in it, like Tinkerbell in Peter Pan. Adherents of this view have organized themselves through a voting scheme called Schizophrenic Representation (in which a member of each campus fringe group votes for himself five times-in order of preference) into a Committee for a Permanent Interim, or the Permanent Interim Committee. At their first meeting last week in Holyoke Center, Lowell Lec, and Burr A and B, the committee passed a resolution saying unanimously that they believed in the Interim, that three of them didn't believe, and five weren't sure.

Do you believe?