Extension: It's more Cinder- than -ella at the Extension School

The young men caught my stealthy entrance to The Crimson's 102nd 'Comp' and approached hesitantly.

"The Comp is only for undergraduates," he began, wary of my purpose.

My courage failed, but ago does lend a certain bravado in the face of anticipated rejection.

"You may find this hard to believe," I replied, "but I am an undergraduate, in Extension Studies."

A long deferred impulse led me to confront my more journalistically practiced juniors, if only to determine the meaning of 'Comp.' But I never dared ask until a few days later, when actually requested to write up for publication the thoughts I'd garbed out that night, unprepared to justify my presence, at The Crimson.

Yes, nearly 25 years after not graduating from a Bolivian 'high-school' whose last trimester conflicted with early orientation at the North-American college of my choice--where 'comp' meant 'comprehensive final exams,'--I am again a degree candidate, accredited now by Fair Harvard herself.

Four continents, three children, and as many colleges later than that first trans-cultural entry into higher education at a tender 15, I am soon to be entered in the rolls of the academically adept. Yet I quail before the suggestics that I might not belong in the more 'legitimate' learning atmosphere of our college-age young.

For those who may still think of Extension study as recreational pap to pacify bored housewives and a variety of drop-outs, let me emphasize at the start that Harvard's Commission on Extension Courses is no cognitive picnic. Ranging through Architecture, Afro-American Studies, Geology, Physics, Urban Studies. Visual Arts, Zoology, and seven foreign languages, to mention only a modest selection, Extension embraces a constellation of germinal courses demanding concerted mental investment from widely disparate consumers. A broad cross-section of men and women at all levels of formal and experiential ability enhance the academic process with diversity, enthusiasm and commitment, attracting many of the most respected professor of Harvard and member institutions dedicated to the challenge and excitement of teaching, despite late hours and additional burdens on already full schedules.

I first came to Extension in 1960, a returned Fulbright bride at once delighted and confined by responsibilities to a professionally over-committed young husband ('55, '58) and our first-born. Having temporarily relinquished my prospects for continuing formal education, I was thrilled to imagine that despite biological destiny I might have my family cake and conquer it, too. I enrolled in "A Survey of Spanish-American Literature" under Professor Juan Marichal, now chairman of the Department of Romance languages, and have been translating Pablo Neruda slowly ever since.

The motivations for engaging in Extension studies are too numerous to assess adequately, but the popular misconception ascribing them to dilettante-ish dabbling in a surfeit of spare time has, life most stereotypes, never been true. Today some 6,000 people draw sustenance and substance, practical exercise and professional preparation, daily enriching their lives and increasing their options, from 150 courses and seminars offered at accessible times by the Commission on Extension Studies, with the support of Greater Boston's finest institutions: the bright high-school student who wants to pursue a subject unavailable in secondary school, or advance further in a language, or acquire credit before college; the full-time college student by-passing a time conflict by taking the desired course in Extension instead; the employee in business or industry whose firm provides tuition refunds and other incentives for following a pertinent course of study, promising advancements and salary increase on completion; the family person charged with raising future citizens and leaders intelligently, who blends daily social relations and child development in a weekly 'upper-level' seminar' and finally, the closest approximation to the out worn gadfly images of yore, the person momentarily in transition from one life-stage to another, facing the uncertainties of new directions through pragmatic academic exploration.

Ann J. Lindemulder will graduate from college when she receives her Harvard A.B. Extension degree in the next 12 months.

Reginald H. Phelps, long-standing direction of University Extension, notes that the proportion of younger to older students has been increasing steadily over the last seven or eight years. Perhaps a growing awareness of the program as an accessible channel for complementary study exposes its potential as an alternative vehicle to formal accreditation for those unable to continue in college for financial or other reasons.

The Extension is in its 65th years. It has granted an officially accredited degree validating the equivalent of four years' undergraduate work, in Harvard's three traditional areas of concentration, under various names:

"Associate in Arts," until that term came to imply a two-year program; "Adjunct in Arts" since 1933, when Harvard also approved the awarding of the degree to both men and women, an early milestone in equal educational access and recognition for women: and finally admitting its recipients to unequivocal first rank standing in 1960, with the change to the more generally recognized title of "Bachelor of Arts in Extension Studies," preceded if desired by the two-year "Associate in Arts."

The Commission on Extension Courses was founded in 1909-10 through the Lowell Institute, established late in the last century by the will of that peripatetic Boston patrician, John Lowell, who expressly intended that the student in the "more abstruse, erudite, and particular" courses offered need not pay a sum "exceeding the value of two bushels of wheat." Under the impetus of his descendant, Harvard's new President A Lawrence Lowell, the Commission was formed, bringing together the rich institutional resources of Boston College, Boston University, MIT, Simmons, Tufts, Wellesley and others, including the Museum of Fine Arts, to provide to thin day the same high quality of advanced education envisioned so long ago, at a phenomenally low cost still underwritten by the Lowell funds.

In the past two years there are estimated to be some 200 approved degree candidates on file at any given time; between 80 and 90 of these are graduated annually, slightly over half being granted the A.B. after a minimum of six or seven years juggling schedules and multiple responsibilities to reach this retrospectively sweet moment.

A relatively recent concession to the quality and dedication of advanced degree candidates in the Extension does permit us access to Harvard faculty not directly teaching in Extension in one particular year: Independent Study. Credited as a half-course, it allows the serious student to explore an idea or a project under the guidance of any member of the Harvard Faculty, equivalent to the 91 r "Directed Reading." This spring I am researching and documenting recent developments in Chile with Professor Harvey Cox at the Divinity School, in conjunction with his course of "Religion and Society in Contemporary Latin America."

This Harvard degree of ours is paid in long, weary years rather than cash; it is a crowded economy flight that gets you there. Although the cost of wheat, like everything else, has risen, the $30 to $50 per half-course, or $130 to $160 for seminars, is still incredibly low for the price of the ticket. Yet, our quality education suffers from the lack of cultural breadth that a Harvard degree implies.

On the theory that productive learning is measured by the credit-mile, and extracurricular acclimatization is a luxury inconsequential to one's ultimate distinction. Extension degree candidates have no established access to such revitalizing facilities as sports, drams and music groups, clubs or scholarship funds, not to mentions, until now, a voice in The Crimson, Certainly the small--though growing--proportion of seriously continuing students would hardly deplete Harvard's physical and financial endowment. with many younger people breaking the traditional four year syndromes is embark on necessary remunerative work during their "college years," the option to participate fully in all aspect of University life, however irregularly, is as potentially important to present undergraduates in the College as to the graying heads grinding through the Extension program, at whatever chronological age.

Like its students, the Extensions has taken longer than the usual 21 years to come into respectable maturity. And like its middle-aged academic minors it suffers unrealistically--albeit understandably--from a certain unconscionable timidity in asserting its newly acknowledged stature along the traditional progression in full citizenship. It has finally achieved for members admitted so degree candidacy the privileges, partial but vital, of library facilities, parking places, its own half building in the Yard (Lehman Hall), with a lounge for TV courses, a donated infant library of its own, use of the cafeteria, below, and vocational and educational guidance services. But it still retains an sure more cinder-than-ella before the hard heart of the central University administration.

An artificial generation gap between the College young and their extended elders deprives everyone of valuable resources. In college activities volunteer participation by older student experienced in a particular field can provide not only solid advice (solicited or not!) but also access to job opportunities, at the very least a chance to explore the working world guided by a friend. For the busily aging "undergrad" who may be preparing for career change, sharing the learning process in extracurricular activities at the College can be crucial, especially gratifying in company of other admitted novices a rare circumstance indeed in the real world, where the forty-plus-year-old dares not acknowledge a fear of inadequacy and inexperience.

The response to my own tremulous assault upon the unsuspecting young at the Crimson sharpens my belief that suffering the uncertainties of embarking upon new seas and mastering a fractious new craft together can only benefit us all.

In these uncertain times it seems a waste of people power to deny any segment of society, by reason of race, sex, national origin, religious preference, or age, a channel of learning that does not depend on academic or economic performance or on familiar ties. Many of us pursuing later dreams need just as much encouragement and new experience as our juniors, and are often more open to new perspectives from unrelated younger friends than from our own recently-sprung progeny.

Harvard's aging foster-child needs sympathetic siblings for full development to integrated membership in this academic family.