Autumn After Harvard-What?

LATE MONDAY afternoon, John Fox, the apparently wry director of the office of Graduate and Career Plans (OGCP), stood in front of this year's senior class in Lowell Lec to tell us about the future. That is, if you assume the future is synonymous with financial grants given to industrious college graduates by such families as Rhodes, Shaw, Knox, Sheldon and so on.

In any case, no one in the hall seemed much interested in this, Mr. Fox included. He announced that instead of giving the traditional rundown on what each fellowship means, this year he would merely correct two errors in the OG and CP's lengthy senior handbook ("After Harvard-What?") and then throw the floor open for questions.

And so we learned that on page 53, Professor So-and-So's Box Number was not 780, and that on some other page the So-and-So fellowship is now worth $X-thousand as opposed to $Y-thousand. The questions that followed were about as interesting, and, less than five minutes after Mr. Fox had started, members of Harvard '71, myself included, began to stroll out.

"After Harvard-What?" This is not only the title of the OG and CP's thoroughly incomprehensible guide to the real world, but perhaps the only question that most seniors have not yet learned to bullshit their way out of. Oh, there are the cute answers we give when we bump into each other on Mass. Ave.: answers like "After Harvard-Money" or "After Harvard-Not Much" or "After Harvard-Fuck" or "After Harvard-Librium." But few have any real answers these days and a lot of people are beginning to realize that to be a senior is to be lost.

Some are already panicking. Freaks, radicals and striving novelists of yesteryear now talk about "Law School." Other speak vaguely of such things as "living off the land" or "starving in a garrett someplace in Europe" or "getting this really neat house in Chile" (wherever that is). And there are the one-liners about marriage, the ministry, revolution, and that old Harvard standard, suicide.

It is a time for nostalgia for many-or, rather, anti-nostalgia. It does seem hard to remember things anymore. Like the contents of the books we dutifully place on our shelves, the number of pass-fail courses we can count towards our majors, which drugs we have taken (and when, and why), which people we hate and which people we love.

Nearly everyone I have talked to "found himself" or "got it all together" this summer-and nearly everyone I have talked to misplaced himself again as soon as he returned to Cambridge this week. Everyone agrees that Harvard does perverse things like that to our heads, but no one can conceive of not coming back here next fall to let it happen again. We want to be neither here nor there, but no one seems to be able to find the exact location of nowhere.

SO WHAT to do? We groan at each other in the street and take tranquilizers. We scream when we look at the catalogue and discover that the University has changed the numbers of all the courses, the kind of thing that will drive some of us to drink. We explain to each other that we are not depressed (we are not), merely delirious and confused.

We take heart in small things. For instance, there are many, many tidbits of practical knowledge that we did not possess three years ago. We now know that: it is not essential to spend half the day hating the HSA; there is never any reason in the world to go into Lamont Library; it doesn't make any difference which, Harvard House gives us shelter; it is not important which faction won at the SDS national convention; it does nothing for us to know that being a senior means easy admittance to some courses.

Last year, our friends in Harvard '70 warned us, in no uncertain terms, that this last school year would pose some new and unsettling problems. We listened, we sympathized, we failed to understand. Only Monday, when the honest Mr. Fox stood up in Lowell Lec and told us, in effect, that there was nothing to say did we realize that there is, well, nothing to say and little to do.

And that is exactly what we will do. We'll fail to use our choice senior seats at the Stadium. We'll not bother to make our rooms attractive. We'll lose our Coop cards and wear dirty underwear. We'll spend the best hours of the day at the movies, and, when everything has unreeled, we'll discover that the Bick has closed forever and Chile is in South America.