A student came into the office and asked Miss Crowe, "Are you Miss History and Lit?"

"I guess I am," she said.

Suppose there was an MBTA strike next week and Mayor Collins asked everyone who was not absolutely essential to his job to take a few days off. Who would show up at Harvard University the next day?

Section men? Perhaps a few, but most would roll over and get some extra sleep. Tutors? Skipping a tutoral wouldn't cripple the careers of America's budding scholars. The Deans? People could go on probation a week later. President Pusey? A perfect opportunity for a well-earned

But one group would show up enmasse. Harvard's secretaries, those invisible people of the University, could no doubt look in their mirrors, shrug their shoulders, and walk, run hitchhike, or even skate to their desks. If any group is truly essential to the day-by-day operation of Harvard, it is the University's 1000 secretaries.

"They make this place go," says Nicholai F. Wessell, Associate Director of Personnel, and he should know. His office fills 300 to 400 secretarial positions a year in a never-ending battle against marriage, pregnancy, and retirement.

Harvard's secretaries come from all kinds of backgrounds and fill all sorts of jobs. Judith Hill, of the Personnel office, who is responsible for hiring most secretaries, has divided them into four general categories. According to Miss Hill, there is the young single girl, the graduate student's wife ("we have a lot of them," says Miss Hill), the woman whose children have just gone to school and has little house-work to do, and the career secretary, a vanishing breed.

For the past ten years, secretary recruiting teams have set out from the Personnel Office to interview girls at about two dozen colleges a year. These colleges are mostly in New England (Miss Hill has just returned from a tour of Smith, Mt. Holyoke, and U.Mass), but every now and then they venture further.

"We go further afield once in a while to see what's in the netherlands," says Wessell. "But we expect the girl at Oberlin to apply anyway."

The Oberlin girl will probably come because she has seen Harvard's recruitment folder, entitled "Harvard Offers More." It reaches over 500 U.S. colleges a year and makes a powerful pitch.

Above the cover words, "Harvard Offers More," is a photograph of the John Harvard statue and a Harvard Yard-ful of mature, serious-looking men. The inside lists all the female job openings, the higher pay rate, the great opportunity for advancement, the responsibility and judgment asked of each employee, and the cultural opportunities of Harvard and the Boston area.

All of this is very true, but if it isn't enough, there's always the famous men. Interspersed with the job data are photographs such as one showing a pretty girl flanked by two handsome fellows and captioned, "A Skidmore graduate enjoys her work as Secretary to the Senior Tutor of Lowell House."

The advantages and the opportunities, financially, culturally, and socially, get the girls here. The Personnel Office then has to decide where to place them.

Who gets a Harvard secretary? Any person or organization that wants one and can afford her salary. It's a process not unlike calling Elsie's for a roast beef special, and specifying "no Russian," A professor, for example, will call up the Personnel Office, say he needs a secretary, and suggest how much he can pay her. He is asked to list, as completely as he can, his secretary's duties. The professor may also request a "type" of girl, such as married. The Personnel Office sends over as many girls for interviews as could possibly fit the "order".

Professor usually specify "married" after they've lost one or two secretaries to the altar. The Government Department, for example, has lost two secretaries in a row to marriage; the male culprit in each case was a Harvard graduate student. Miss Hill reports an embittered professor's "order" for a secretary who was middle-aged, lived in Cambridge, and wore glasses.