Grades, campaigns and other reasons

leave wind up remaining at Harvard. "Just knowing that the option exists is often enough. Once the student feels that there is a choice, that he has make his own decision, he then feels that it is possible to stay in school."

The bureau does not have a follow-up procedure for those who do take time off, while the average period of consultation for a student not seeking remedial help in a specific area is only four-to-six visits, Morimoto says. As for the success of years off, judging again only from his personal knowledge of cases, Morimoto is fairly positive. "Generally people have found it quite helpful to take time off. But very often expectations are too high and it turns out to be considerably less of a success than what they'd hoped for."

Wes Loegering, who started Harvard in September 1973, the same time as Dawn Hudson, was having a very good time at school when he left. Satisfied both socially and academically, Loegering's decision was prompted by an anxiousness to get involved in politics in some way, 1976 being a presidential year. Loegering's original goal was to gain experience working in an interesting campaign, although he had no particular campaign in mind, and went home to Edina, Minnesota in June without a job, planning to look around. Had this year not been an elections year, Loegering thinks he would have remained in school, but summers spent as an intern and aide in Governor Wendell Anderson's office gave him an interest in politics, a few contacts, and a sense that he could be useful in a campaign.

Arriving back in Edina, a new idea began to crystalize in his mind. A Minneapolis magazine had rated the Republican state senator from his district, a career politician named Otto Bang, one of the 10 least effective legislators in the state. Bang would seek reelection in November, and as of June no serious effort to unseat him had gotten underway. Loegering sought the official endorsement of the Democratic-Farmer-Labor party that month and it was his practically for the asking. Primary day was September 14, but Loegering, on the strength of the party endorsement, was unopposed. Since June he has been organizing a campaign for the general election in November, in which he will face the winner of the Republican primary, probably Bang.

"We hope to raise about $8000," Loegering said last week from his home in Edina. "We should be getting about $2000 in public funds, and $500 from the D-F-L. We've had one good coffee party fund raiser already and we're scheduling others." Loegering is buoyant and optimistic, having gotten an influential Edina Republican to serve as chairman of his campaign comittee, and having completed work on the formation of a Republicans for Loegering Committee, to be announced next week. But, as Loegering readily admits, the fight is still very much uphill. His opponent in the fall will certainly have more money, the district is largely upper-middle class and staunchly Republican, and Loegering's campaign staff is composed entirely of volunteers working part-time, save for his campaign manager, Thomas S. Blanton '77, a full time volunteer and former roommate who is also taking a year off.

In political terms, Loegering would classify himself as "pragmatic, a traditional liberal, but one who is concerned about high taxes, about bureaucratic waste, and about the failure of business to move into our area."

Too busy since June to have given any serious thought to the idea that he is not going back to school for the first time in 18 years, Loegering says that if he wins the general election, he might not be back at Harvard for a long time--sessions of the legislature, which meets from January to June, will be his first priority. And if he doesn't win... well, that's something Loegering isn't giving any thought at all to right now.

While Loegering and Hudson felt very differently about Harvard and their reasons for leaving it, a common fact in both their cases was that financial concerns played no role. Neither Loegering nor Hudson had to leave in order to earn money, and indeed neither was particularly concerned about finances in the process of deciding what to do with their time away. For Ann-Marie Moeller '77, simple economics was the primary factor. A pre-med, Moeller felt she wanted to have the experience of working in a lab under her belt, both for her own satisfaction and because medical schools are said to view such activities with favor. But lab jobs rarely pay and she simply could not afford to spend a summer doing volunteer work.

Moeller's plan was to take a year off, find both a volunteer job in a lab and a paying job, and live in Cambridge, rent-free if possible. The paying job turned out to be cleaning bathrooms on a Harvard dorm crew for $3.50 an hour, a lab job also came through, and only the rent-free place to live, which demanded cooking in return for room and board, turned out to be less that what she had hope. Moeller remedied this situation by finding a house-sitting job, and all else went according to plan.

In the end, however, Moeller was only able to take a semester off. Just as financial limitations had necessitated her departure from Harvard, so did they force her return. "My parents both lack job security and they wanted to make sure I got through school as quickly as possible." So Moeller shortened her year off into a semester, and in retrospect, save for her time spent cooking, she judges the experience to have been a complete success.

Oddly enough, one substantive change of heart transpired during her time away: she decided not to go to medical school, the original reason for her anxiousness to work in a lab. But Moeller has retained her lab job, and in fact she will now be paid. And during her semester off, she focused on a new area of interest--population studies. Much of her time this year will be spent on Plympton Street at the Center for Population Studies, and she returns to Harvard with her academic goals clearly defined.

Japes Emerson '77 began to sense "a vague dissatisfaction with things" during his sophomore year at Harvard, and during the spring of that year, while he was casually pondering taking time off, "a perfect job just sort of fell into my lap." Emerson had been active in theater while at school, performing at the Loeb and in House productions. The perfect job was steady work as an actor with The Proposition, a Cambridge-based improvisational performing troupe. Emerson remained with The Proposition for 15 months, rising, due to a heavy turnover rate, from low man on the totem pole to senior member of the resident company. He lived in Cambridge, but says that he was very conscious of wanting not to depend on Harvard for his social life. "I had a lot of free time, spent a lot of time reading, and a lot of time alone. I probably suffered socially from being slightly out of context--none of the other actors were in school, all were older, and it was clear that I had to take things far less seriously than they did." Emerson has decided that he does want to make a go of it as an actor, but says he also developed a strong sense of the insecurity attendant on a career as an actor. He returns to Harvard without apprehensions, but with a feeling of distance between himself and the University. "I feel like I have one foot in the outside world and one foot in Harvard. My sights are focused beyond Harvard now." He attributes his lack of anxiety about coming back to school after more than a year away to the fact that, having spent his time in a non-institutional, non-regimented environment, he gained confidence in has ability to be self-reliant and self-motivated.

Brad Collins '77, like Dawn Hudson, was in very rough shape during his last term at Harvard. For Collins, difficulties came during his sophomore year. "Freshman year there was still an excitement about having to cope with all these new things. By the beginning of sophomore year I started thinking about taking time off. I couldn't study--it felt like I was banging my head against a wall. I started getting headaches, I was flunking a course, and a general distaste for Harvard had kind of set in." he says.

Collins, who had started psychoanalysis that year, was not in any sense desperate, and didn't give any serious thought to just packing up and leaving in the middle of the term. But he was also sure that he wasn't ready to face any serious decisions about his life at Harvard, decisions which he felt would confront him the following year. Relying for support on friends, particularly on a sympathetic roommate, on an encouraging tutor, and on his analyst, Collins finished out the year. By the summer after, the only thing definite about his plans for the year off was the place where the time would be spent--"I had to remain in Cambridge in order to continue seeing my analyst. Analysis played an important part in my decision to take time off because I felt that if I could make some headway in analysis, I would be much more ready to face the last two years."

The year off turned out to be "something like a protracted vacation," he says. Collins wrote music reviews irregularly for The Boston Phoenix, usually in spurts of several articles, with long breaks in between each spurt. He relied on his family for financial support, and aside from regularly scheduled sessions with his analyst, lived largely on a day-to-day basis. "In a sense I was really longing for regimentation. I found it difficult to provide internal discipline. By the end of the year, I was tired of having to make my mind up about what to do each day."

But for Collins, the year off was at least partially successful in that he fulfilled two of his primary goals. One accomplishment was that he did make progress in analysis. "I also wanted to find out what I really liked,"--liked to do, liked to study, simply liked. He saw "hundreds of movies" during his time away, but he also found himself genuinely motivated toward reading in psychology, his primary area of interest. And during the summer following that year, this past summer, Collins discovered through taking a summer school course that he was again able to work.

"I'm kind of excited about going back to school and much more comfortable about my potential for working." He will again live on campus in a Harvard House--socially Collins does not rate the year off as having been a huge success. He didn't meet many new people, and spent much of his time with college friends around Harvard. Like Emerson, he also spent a good deal of time by himself, and his primary reason for deciding to live on campus was "to meet people and to be with people."

It is clear that the success of the leave of absence varies with each individual depending on the original motivation for taking time off and the expectation of what should be accomplished. But a substantial number of those who do take leaves return to Harvard with some sense of success. And it seems that, bolstered by recent court decisions specifically forbidding graduate and professional schools to discriminate against applicants on the basis of age, the number of students who take a term or a year off while at Harvard will continue to be fairly significant. Whether, as in the case of Ann-Marie Moeller, the economy will force students from low and middle income backgrounds to try and get through as quickly as possible, and leave years off an option available only to the wealthy, remains to be seen.ANN-MARIE MOELLER