Summer at Camp Harvard

This summer at Harvard was much like previous summers: with the majority of the student body and many of the faculty members away, very little out of the ordinary happened. But once in a while, something would come around to break the routine. ***

The Summer School's six-year decline in enrollment ended in June, as more than 2000 students signed up for courses--a five- to six-per-cent increase over last summer. About 250 of the students entered under a new effort to attract high school students, which Summer School Director Michael Shinagel said fully accounted for the increase.

The Summer School plans to admit more talented high school students--located through test scores--next summer. And since any profits the Summer School makes go right back into the Faculty of Arts and Sciences' budget, it's hard to see how anyone here during the year could alter the suggestion that it's hard on these high school students, many of whom seem to believe a summer in the Yard is an automatic entree to the College.

In another successful effort to increase Summer School enrollment, the Summer School expanded its four-week, intensive courses, and attracted more than 600 students.

About 160 of these came to take courses in Ukranian studies; their tuition was paid by the Ukranian Studies Fund, a Harvard-affiliated organization that is phenomenally successful at raising money in the U.S. Ukranian community.

Magazine Directors Resign

The day after Commencement, six directors of Harvard Magazine resigned, charging that the University has tried to curtail their editorial integrity following a financial takeover by restructuring the editorial board. The University, which has supported the magazine through years of deficits, insists it should have a number of representatives on the board. However, University administrators claimed Harvard did not want full editorial control--just financial.

Harvard's Role in McCarthyism

Until this year, Harvard has been generally considered one of the few universities that refused to comply with the efforts of the late Senator Joseph R. McCarthy (R-Wis.) to rout Communists from institutions of higher learning. But this summer, the New York Review of Books followed the charges by Columbia sociologist Sigmund Diamond that Harvard fired him because he was a communist--which the magazine printed this spring--with similar charges by University of California sociologist Robert N. Bellah '48.

Bellah charged that then dean McGeorge Bundy and other Harvard administrators threatened to cut off his graduate student fellowship unless he confessed all political activity and cooperated with the FBI. Bundy responded in a subsequent issue of the New York Review, saying that he did not in fact ask Bellah to cooperate with the FBI.

Med Area Workers Vote Down Union

The Distributive Workers of America--commonly referred to as District 65--was temporarily halted in its three-year bid to organize workers at Harvard's Medical Area when the workers voted, 436-346, against the union this summer. Sixty-six ballots were contested, but would not have altered the election's outcome.

The vote came after a two-and-a-half year legal battle, during which Harvard fought the union's right to represent the workers. When the National Labor Relations Board found in favor of the union organizers, Harvard mounted a publicity campaign to persuade workers the union would not act in their interests. Apparently, Harvard was persuasive. But District 65 organizers said this summer they plan to try again in a year, when they are entitled to hold another election.

Police Contract Negotiations Dragged On and On and...

Negotiations between the Harvard Police Association and the University dragged on through the summer, as the two parties approached agreement and then backed off time after time.

One of the sharpest debates occured in early June, when the union discovered the contract--which they were then on the verge of signing--called for biannual physical examinations for policemen. The Police Association argued that the twice-yearly checkups were an effort to force older patrolmen off the force, while University administrators claimed the once-every-two-years checkups were a routine precaution. It all boiled down to semantics (biannual can mean twice a year or once every two years, depending on your dictionary), but the contract still hasn't been signed.

The Oranging of Cambridge

The Midget Deli, a favorite student retreat made famous in "Love Story" as the meeting place for Ryan O'Neal and Ali McGraw, closed down this summer. It will be replaced by a representative of that well-known chain, Howard Johnson's.

Jensen Takes a New Line

Berkeley psychologist Arthur R. Jensen, who caused an academic furor in 1969 when he declared blacks are genetically inclined to lower I.Q.s than whites, moderated his position this summer.

Jensen's study of blacks' and whites' I.Q. scores in a small town in rural Georgia revealed a 30-point decline in blacks' scores between the ages of five and 18 relative to whites' scores between the same ages--suggesting, he said, that "blacks in the rural South must be exposed to environmental effects that lower I.Q. scores."

Ukrainian Students Protest Soviet Arrests

Remember those 160 students who came here to study Ukranian? Thirty-seven of them staged a well-publicized hunger strike for 24 hours this summer, in protest of the Soviet Union's arrest of several prominent Ukrainians. More than 100 others joined them demonstration in the Yard, gathering signatures on a petition the students sent to President Carter.

Bok in Court

Well, almost. President Bok and several other Harvard officials were summoned to appear in court in July, to testify in a suit prompted by the University's refusal to release papers of former president A. Lawrence Lowell about the 1920s trial of Niccola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti.

Bok and company did not have to testify, as the judge ruled the University did not have to release the papers until the date Lowell's will executor set when he gave the papers to Harvard.

The judge ruled that the Cambridge researcher who wanted the paper will have to wait the full 50 years--which end this December--to discover whether Lowell can light on the anarchists murder trial.

Tufts Comes to Cambridge

Because more people accepted places at Tufts than the University expected to do so, about 200 undergraduates will live this year at the Sheraton Commander, right in between the Yard and the Quad.

CIA Mind Control

Throughout the summer, the national media exposed the CIA's 25-year attempt to control human behavior, and Harvard was not left untainted. CIA records released under the Freedom of Information Act disclosed that during the '50s the CIA funded experiments with LSD at a Harvard-affiliated hospital, experiments that were performed by Harvard-affiliated researchers on college students, including some from Harvard.

Details about the experiments' subjects were not available. Kyio Morimoto, associate director of the Bureau of Study Council who was one of the researchers, said he and the other researchers in the Massachusetts Mental Hospital study were unaware of the money's source.

The CIA channelled the money for this project and many others through the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology, and the Boston researchers--who were interested in the use of LSD in understanding and treating schizophrenia--did not know the agency was involved, he said. All the results were published anyway, he added.

Discrimination in the Police Department?

Jean White, a black and the only woman on Harvard's police force, was fired this summer because of what the police department called inexcusable absences. White charges that the department was looking for any excuse to fire her, and has filed her claims with the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination. She has the support of the Police Association.

I Scream

Steve's Ice Cream, long renowned as the source of the best ice cream in the area, is under new management. Stephen Herrell, the store's founder, sold it to Joseph Crugnale of Somerville, and he says he feels as if he'd been through a divorce. But before you melt in despair, take heart: Crugnale promises neither the ice cream nor the name will change.

Security Guards May Be Replaced

Under a long-range plant that has already been implemented at the Quad Houses, Harvard may replace its entire force of College building guards with lower-paid, non-unionized members of the Student Security Patrol. However, management spokesmen said the police department will only replace guards with students as members of the police force retire or leave--no one, they promised, will be laid off to make way for students.

1618 New Faces in the Yard

The freshman dean's office expects 1617 new faces the day the Class of 1981 registers--with an all-time low male-female ratio of 1.86-1--but really, it will see 1918 new people. One of them will be Henry C. Moses, the new dean of freshmen. He said this summer he is looking forward to the challenge of breaking into Harvard's traditional bureaucracy, as well as the challenge of meeting and dealing with the problems of the other 1617 freshpeople. ***

It was, when all is said and done, a typical Cambridge summer.