The Summer School: Harvard's Fling With Populism

The application for admission to Harvard College is a 22-page packet of forms; applicants have to write a lengthy essay and send in a battery of transcripts, test scores and recommendations. The admissions office takes about one out of every ten applicants.

All you have to do to get in to the Harvard Summer School is send in a one-page sheet of factual information or show up on registration day. It helps to be a college student, but the summer school makes plenty of exceptions.

Open admissions is what makes the Summer School different from the College. It is as close as Harvard gets to non-elitism, and depending on who you ask, the Summer School is either a second-rate version of the College or the shape of things to come.

Thomas E. Crooks '49, director of the Summer School, says it "wouldn't be correct to say Harvard lowers its standards during the summer."

"I couldn't care less for the standards during the regular year," Crooks says. "Open admissions is one of the main reasons why I stay here. The exclusionary atmosphere here during the school year often becomes stifling. I see the summer school as being on the frontier, as being typical of what colleges will be like in the year 2000."

The final figures won't be in until after registration day, but this year's Summer School should have between five and six thousand students--3500 in the regular Summer School courses, the others in a variety of special programs. About one-fourth of the regular students will be Harvard undergraduates, and the rest will come from all over--some from other Ivy League schools, some from other colleges in the Boston area and some from small black and Chicano colleges in the South and Southwest There is always a sizeable contingent of foreign students, mostly from Japan, as well as a chunk who live in and around Boston but go to college in other parts of the country.

The most popular courses are those that satisfy pre-med requirements, with Chemistry S-20, "Organic Chemistry," leading the pack with about 200 cut-throat competitors, many of them Harvard undergraduates who want to get it over within eight weeks. The male-female ratio is about one to one, as opposed to the College's 2.5 to 1--"another way we're ahead of the academic year," Crooks says.

All but about 55 of the students will pay a hefty $290 per half course intuition. Over $600,000 of the total tuition money will come from outside grants, which means that although low-income students don't have to pay for the Summer School out of their own pockets, Harvard still makes money on them. Unlike the College, the Summer School has little trouble breaking even.

Crooks vehemently denies, however, that the Summer School is primarily a money-making venture. "This money business is one of the oldest shibboleths about summer Schools," he says. "The whole University just sits here during the summer, and it would be idiocy not to put it to use. Harvard stopped that idiocy in 1871, and lately other Ivy schools have been trying to start similar programs of their own. It's harder to do now, because it's harder to make money." Universities trying to avoid wasting all their resources during the summer have tended lately to set up a summer term of the regular school year, like Yale did last year, instead of starting separate summer schools from scratch.

The Summer School cycle starts each year almost immediately after the session ends, when Crooks starts looking for a faculty, only half of which comes from Harvard. "Every fall we sit down with the department chairmen," he says, "and we talk about who we'd like. Most of the outside people who come were at Harvard at one time, got their Ph.D. here or something. A lot of departments remember old Jones who wanted to come back, and ask for him."

The professors are by and large not big guns. They tend to be non-tenured people at Harvard and not-too-famous people from elsewhere who want to see Harvard, do research at Widener, or impress a department enough to garner a job offer. They get one-fifth of their regular academic-year salary if they teach a full course-load.

The applications start to come in in the winter, some in response to the full-page ads Crooks takes out in the Globe and the Phoenix during Christmas vacation. "One of the things I like best about the summer school," Crooks says, "is that by and large people select us instead of us selecting them."

The annual operating budget of the Summer School is about $2 million, about the same amount that comes in in tuition and other fees. "There's no way for the Summer School to pay back Harvard," Crooks says. "We pay $44,000 for the library system, and that doesn't even cover the cost of Lamont. I could keep a set of books that would show a huge deficit for the Summer School, or I could keep a set of books showing a huge profit, but we try to pay all explicit costs, things like rent for our offices. I also try to keep summer students from being exploited with high room and board charges--it costs summer students more to eat than undergraduates during the school year, even though there's only one dining hall open for the regular summer school."

Besides its student body and financial setup, the Summer School has an entirely different power structure from the College. Its offices are scattered around the fringes of the Yard, in Holyoke Center, Memorial Hall and Lehman Hall. Crooks, a

Open admissions is what makes the Summer School different from the College. It is as close as Harvard gets to non-elitism, and, depending on who you ask, the Summer School is either a second-rate version of the College or the shape of things to come.

relatively obscure man during the academic year, runs the show and has a special dean of students, Joshua M. Rubins '70, to help him out.

Rubins, who graduated from the Law School in June, is in charge of all the activities that have earned the Summer School the occasional nickname of Harvard Summer Camp. He plans an elaborate series of University sponsored activities and social events--movies, mixers, bridge and chess tournaments and teas are among them--that usually go on under different auspices during the academic year.

"We can't hope to create the same texture of life here as in the winter," Rubins says, "but we try in part to recreate it--people come here in part for that. There are more direct University-sponsored activities during the summer because there are very few other activities. We'll have ten to fifteen student organizations doing things during the summer, but in large part we have to directly run things."

Rubins got his job through Crooks, who was master of Dudley House when Rubins was a Dudley undergraduate. Last year Rubins was Crooks's assistant for cultural affairs, and this year Crooks recreated the then-defunct deanship and put Rubins in the post. Asked what his job entails, Rubins replies, "Let's see, what's on my desk right now? I'm going over the rules for the chess and bridge tournaments. I'm looking at a list of proctors, and working on publicity for the animation course. There's some material on our arts contests here too. Everything here that's not involved with courses is our responsibility--it goes from the most mundane things to giving students a place to come for advice and to hang around. We do what all the Houses and other non-academic organizations do during the winter."

Rubins says some of the summer students come to find out what Harvard is like or to see Boston, but that the Summer School is "most special for its special programs." "A lot of the courses tend to be very career-oriented," he says. "People are trying to find a course that'll change their life. Some people come to find out what it's like here, but others come to take the one course that's important to them."

The 75 people who will take the Radcliffe Publishing Procedures course, one of the summer school's ten special programs, are like that. "This is the shortest grad school in the world," Helen Venn, director of the course, says. "We help people get positions in books or magazines. Publishers look favorably on the course, because so many of them have helped us as faculty. I don't want young people coming here just to get a job; I always say that we're not just an employment agency. But I almost insist that they go out and work immediately afterward."

The publishing course, now in its 27th year, takes its students on a six-week whirlwind tour of the publishing--and that does not mean just the journalism or writing--world, often spending less than a day on an entire field, for a steep $1000. The students all seem to get jobs with publishing houses, university presses and magazines almost immediately upon their graduation, partly because the course has a prestigious reputation and a lot of alumni in a position to hire people.

Not all of the special programs are as career-oriented as the publishing course. There is Alumni College, where Harvard graduates learn about China, Japan and Classical Greece from big-name professors. Then too, there's the Dance Center, the Institute in Arts Administration and a week-long workshop for college teachers in "Personalized Self-Instruction," better known as self-paced learning, a technique developed in Harvard science courses. Probably the most career-oriented program besides the publishing course is the Health Careers Summer Program, a course designed to prepare low-income educationally disadvantaged college students for med school or medical-related fields.

The health careers program's emphasis on careers seems nobler than the publishing course's, mostly because all of its students are poor and come to Harvard on some sort of grant. This year the Department of Health, Education and Welfare is paying for 150 of the program's 162 students and the Woodrow Johnson Foundation the rest. But the program has been controversial this year because it is primarily designed for minority students--blacks, Chicanos, Puerto Ricans and American Indians--to the near-exclusion, as it turns out, of equally disadvantaged whites.

In the fall of 1972, a group of poor white student at the Medical School started to agitate for the inclusion of more whites in the program. Last year there was extended wrangling over the issue and the program ended up with five whites, four of them added fairly late in the game. Towards the end of last summer three members of the group and Dr. A. Stone Freedberg, professor of Medicine, wrote a letter to President Bok complaining about the exclusion of whites from the program. After University inquiries, HEW confirmed that the program is primarily intended for minority students.

All winter the charges and counter-charges flew back and forth, with the group repeatedly calling for Crooks's ouster, until in February the Council of Deans appointed an eight-member committed to oversee the program. The committee met with various groups interested in the program, including the poor whites and Freedberg. This year there will be ten poor whites in the program--if the admissions committee's guesswork as to the race of applicants is correct--and the med school group seems to have calmed down. Now a Chicano group is mad at the program and has written a letter of complaint to President Bok calling, once again, for Crooks's firing.

Crooks oversees this motley assortment of courses, activities and programs from an office high up in Holyoke Center, where he gazes out the window at his short-lived annual domain while he talks about the summer school. "The trouble is that Harvard is institution-oriented, not people-oriented," he says. "I come from a background where this kind of elitism is anathema, but I'm pulled both ways."

"In the 1860s there was a big controversy here over whether Harvard should be just a top-flight college or just a grad school, and President Eliot made a landmark speech, saying that Harvard should be both. We have the same kind of problem facing us now, except that the conflict is between elitism and populism. And again, we've got to have both.