Long Hours, Hard Sell for Southwestern

When a Harvard student tells you that he made $4200 last summer, and then tells you that he can help you land the same kind of job this summer, it's hard to resist the offer.

Slowly but surely, you learn the details of the job. You will go to a city or suburb in the Southwest and sell two dictionaries and another set of books door-to-door.

Then you find out that you will be working 75 or 80 hours each week, that you have no guaranteed salary, and that any profit you make depends entirely on the amount of your sales.

Don Nicholson '76 approached Thomas J. Curley '78 that way last spring, and Curley was interested. He didn't have a job lined up for the summer, and the money certainly sounded good. But after a few weeks of working for Southwestern Publishing Co. last summer in Tucson, Ariz., Curley packed up and went home.

Dennis J. Rinehart '77 had been recruited in a similar way in the fall of 1974, through a friend he worked with on the dorm crew. Rinehart also left his Southwestern job in Phoenix--after four weeks--and went home after writing Southwestern a check for $120 to pay for the books he sold. Later, they sent him a check for $150. There was no $30 profit, however. Rinehart paid his own transportation from Boston to Nashville, where he went through a week of training, and from Nashville to Phoenix, along with his hotel and meal costs.

Southwestern Publishing sells dictionaries and encyclopedia-like book sets to student salesmen, who then sell the books door-to-door. Southwestern employed 6800 college students last year, more than anyone but the federal government, and expects to hire between 7000 and 8000 this summer.

Archie C. Epps III, dean of students, banned Southwestern from recruiting on the Harvard campus last spring, and warned students not to act as agents of Southwestern here.

Curley and Rinehart say their week of sales training in Nashville was very regimented. They woke up at 6 a.m.--or earlier--and took a cold shower, on the instructions of their Southwestern sales managers. Until 8 a.m. they read "inspirational materials," which Rinehart says seemed to be written by life insurance salesmen.

From 8 a.m. until about 9 p.m., the prospective Southwestern salesmen sat through lectures, and practiced their sales pitches on each other.

The lectures, delivered to about 500 salesmen in an auditorium in the Tennessee state house, were punctuated by questions to individual salesmen in the students' letter.

In a similar situation, sophomores in Canaday's Kirkland House entry requested late last month that the House Committee guarantee them a choice of the first 50 spots in the sophomore housing lottery.

They said members of the House administration promised them this last year.

The Kirkland House Committee, however, voted later last month to guarantee the students a choice of only the first 70 spots.

James A. Cox '77, chairman of the committee, said yesterday that the committee had chosen to award a different guarantee because it was not clear what if any promise had been made to the students