Sometimes I get the feeling that life at Harvard is a dull three-cornered routine: classes, meals, library. But then I stumble on an issue of, for example, the Record American. HARVARD stands tall in the headlines. "Harvard," I reflect with a quick thrill of self-recognition. Harvard/5000 equals me.

Reading about myself in newspapers and magazines is one of the great extracurricular delights that I enjoy as a Harvard student. A wealth of headlines and articles remind me how unusual, how intriguingly subversive, how wild and exciting Harvard really is. For instance, Business Week, March '61 describes a brilliant high-powered Harvard and its ruthlessly competitive admissions procedure, noting that "The 'tigers' who survive are forcing the college to change its approach." In Look Magazine, Andrew T. Weil tells of the drug-taking set who formed a "Transcendental community where they could maintain a level of experience which cuts beyond routine ego and social games," noting also that "there were stories of students using hallucinogens for seductions, both heterosexual and homosexual." But it was The New Yorker and Gent magazine that did the most to refurbish my faith in the glamor and excitement of life at Harvard.

In his New Yorker articles, Christopher Rand finds that Harvard, along with MIT, is in the midst of nothing less than a renaissance of world importance. "Before long I concluded that I had found a Renaissance in Cambridge," says Rand. "Nobody planned roads leading here that I could see. And yet, Cambridge is a great center, as great perhaps as any in the world now. It has a strange magnetism..."

Later in the article, expanding on the theme of strong magnetism, Rand observes:

Yet there is an unexplained magnetism, whether emanating from the old buildings, the undulant brick sidewalks, or the vibrations of scholars past and present that far outweighs these things. You can get its full impact while walking a block or two up Brattle Street from Harvard Square,...

I am grateful to this article because otherwise I might have become one of those Harvard men who, thirty years from now, must ask themselves "Where was I when they had the Renaissance?"

But if Rand's overview of life around the square is credible, it took Gent magazine to really probe beneath the surface, to discover the hidden sources of this "strange magnetism." Foreign observers often have the deepest insights into a society--it took a De Tocqueville to see the real United States, a Halevy to see the real England, and it took Gent magazine to see the real Harvard.

The article "More Sex on Campus" by Ted Alexander shares top coverbilling in Gent's October issue with "So you want to get a Mexican Divorce!" and is concerned almost exclusively with Harvard. ("So You Want to Get a Mexican Divorce!" is listed in Gent's "travel" department.) Alexander leads with the headline "If X is equal to Y--then why not?" then gets right down to business, seizing immediately on the famous slogan of our impulsive dean:

Dean John U. Munro's letter to the Harvard Crimson exposed the whole thing. He charged that the so-called Parietal Rules allowing female visitors to the college room on certain hours week-days and week-ends had become "a license to use college rooms for wild parties and sexual intercourse."

According to Munro, the Ivy-covered halls of dear Harvard have become as free as a breeze from off the River Charles. Such goings on as Old John never dreamed in his wildest eroticism.

A recent peek into a student's room off the Harvard Yard one Wednesday evening indicated an empirical approach to Biology on the college level with an obvious attempt at the study of live anatomy, female.

Three young ladies, au natural (sic), were being chased around the room by two Harvard lads intent upon study. The bare facts indicated that the boys were likewise nude. And not too sober. The girls were over and under the beds...

On one Saturday night there were no less than six hall parties going on at once on a dormitory floor, in an orgy of drinking and intercourse that overflowed from room to room.

Boston newspapers have only hinted at these goings on, but that college muffled drum the Harvard Crimson, crawled behind Mother's Skirts, figuratively pleading boys will be boys and Harvard lads are really little goodles.

According to Dean Munro, things are not that simple. He hints at misbehaviours that would shock.