It Keeps Turning Up

The Southwestern Company may be able to claim that its student salesmen earn an average of $2700 a summer, but in one respect at least it seems closer to a penny than a more sizeable amount.

Southwestern representatives turn up every spring to persuade Harvard students that their real ambition in life is to spend a summer selling the company's dictionaries door-to-door in some remote area of the Southwest.

Since the company was banned from recruiting on campus in the fall of 1974 because Archie C. Epps III, dean of students, felt its on-campus recruitment meetings could endanger the University's non-profit status, Southwestern recruiters have taken to other methods of attracting students' attention than they once used.

Ads and posters--appearing in independently-owned newspapers and on non-Harvard telephone poles--have announced meetings somewhere off-campus for mysterious "Summer Job Opportunities."

But this week the company took a less legal route to approaching Harvard students. Ira B. Wilson '79, a student recruiter for Southwestern, held ten meetings for the company at the Phillips Brooks House (PBH), calling the series "Ira Wilson conferences."

PBH officials said this week the meetings violated their organization's rules, which do not allow private companies to use the premises.

More importantly, Epps--who is already investigating Southwestern's student recruiters' telephone calls to other students--said this week he believes the meetings directly violate University rules.

Although Wilson claimed the meetings were attended only by students already signed up to work for the company this summer, Epps called the explanation "an attempt at subterfuge," and said he will investigate the matter further.