Students Barred From HSA Course

After a series of inaccurate pronouncements and misunderstood e-mails exchanged with a top administrator of Harvard Summer School, Harvard Student Agencies (HSA) officers said yesterday that they would no longer allow any individuals taking Summer School classes to enroll in their popular bartending course.

Christopher Queen, dean of students for Harvard Summer School, decided to withdraw permission for HSA to market its course on campus after one family expressed concerns about advertising a alcohol-oriented class to an audience composed largely of minors.

He also denied HSA the right to enroll any Summer School students—a prohibition with which HSA officers said they initially agreed to comply because they thought Queen’s request did not encompass Harvard undergraduates taking summer courses.

Several clarifications of the term “Summer School students” ensued before HSA officers told The Crimson yesterday that they would, in fact, meet both of Queen’s terms.

Following an initial round of e-mail correspondence about the course, Queen sent an e-mail to Summer School proctors on June 29 announcing that the bartending class had been entirely cancelled for the summer at his request.

“Harvard Student Agencies has agreed to discontinue the Harvard Bartending Course this summer as a result of complaints that the course was incompatible with the Summer School’s strict policies regarding alcohol for Secondary School Students,” Queen wrote at the time.

But HSA President Abhishek Gupta ’04 and Vice-President Anthony Ekmekjian ’04 said yesterday that the course was not cancelled—nor had it ever been.

“There was some misunderstanding on both sides,” Ekmekjian wrote in an e-mail. “The course itself was not cancelled.”

Queen pointed out yesterday that a cancellation of the course would not have been within his reach.

“Harvard Summer School doesn’t have any legal authority to close a program offered by HSA,” he said.

But Queen had already exercised some power over the bartending course. In an e-mail dated June 24, he withdrew permission for HSA to advertise the bartending course on campus.

That decision still stands, Gupta and Ekmekjian said, and was complied with immediately.

But, they said, definitional confusion in another part of the June 24 e-mail led Queen to declare the bartending class dead prematurely.

Queen’s message also denied permission for HSA to enroll Summer School students in the summer bartending course.

Gupta wrote back to Queen on June 25, assenting to the request in no uncertain terms.

“We asked HSA if they would discontinue the course, and the president agreed to that,” Queen said yesterday. “That’s where it stands as far as I’m concerned.”

But according to Gupta, he had intended at the time to agree to a far more limited accommodation of Queen’s wishes, because he misunderstood the dean’s request.

“We agreed to not enroll any Summer School students thinking that that group of students would not include Harvard College students that are in Cambridge working as Summer School proctors or Harvard College students cross-registering for a Summer School class,” he said. “Our confusion regarding term-time Harvard students stemmed from the fact that these students can take the course in September, and we therefore wouldn’t have thought to exclude them in our July and August courses.”

But Queen’s e-mail to the proctors last Sunday implied a more comprehensive ban on anyone taking the bartending course.

In response, HSA General Manager Robert Rombauer wrote Queen on Tuesday asking for clarification on what set of students the June 24 request had meant to encompass.

Queen replied yesterday to Rombauer confirming that he had intended to ask that HSA stop enrolling all students taking Summer School classes in its bartending course—including Harvard College students, who would be allowed to take the course during the academic year.

And Gupta told The Crimson yesterday that HSA would now comply with this larger definition.

“Moving forward…we have no problem in excluding these students from the course,” he said. “However, this course will continue to be offered to members of the Cambridge and Boston community, and to any students not enrolling in the Summer School.”

Queen said his attention to the bartending course resulted from a complaint lodged by the parents of a secondary-school student enrolled in the Summer School. The parents objected to the large banner with which HSA advertised the course in Harvard Yard during Summer School move-in. HSA’s promotion of alcohol to an audience including many minors, they wrote in an e-mail to Queen, was inappropriate.

Queen said he felt the lone complaint carried the weight of many.

“One parent took the trouble to send us a letter, but we’re assuming that there were others offended by it as well—the silent majority, as it were,” Queen said. “Since we have 1000 high school students attending, the largest constituency of the Summer School, we agree with the parents.”

Ekmekjian stressed that HSA has never let minors into its bartending course.

“We have a strict policy of not admitting anyone under 18, because that’s Massachusetts law, and we abide by that,” he said. “We never had any intention of enrolling anyone else, regardless of what school they were at, under that age.”

And he said that Queen had seen the banner in question and approved it before it was displayed.

“All the approvals were set in place,” said Ekmekjian.

Queen said that the advertisement itself was not ultimately that important in his decision, citing instead a philosophical incompatibility between the Summer School and the bartending course.

“Taking bartending doesn’t fall high on the priority of human needs as studied by psychologists over the last 100 years,” he said. “We don’t feel that’s up there with fans, linens and clean clothes,” some of the other services provided by HSA to Summer School students.

“If HSA is creating an impression that the bartending course is an offering of the University, we’d like to correct that impression,” he added. “If we have to say yes to the question, ‘Is bartending taught to Summer School students?’ then we have explaining to do.”

With the major miscommunications from his e-mail correspondence with Queen finally ironed out, and HSA assenting to the dean’s requests, Gupta said the course would not suffer greatly.

“I think there was a misunderstanding, in that the Summer School was under the impression that the course exists solely to enroll Summer School students, when in fact Summer School students tend to comprise approximately 15 percent of the people that enroll,” he said.

—Staff writer Simon W. Vozick-Levinson can be reached at vozick@fas.harvard.edu.