But again--as with the myth of summer-time Cambridge--the "summie" stereotype can be misleading. Summer school admission is far from rigorous, which is the way the administration like it, but still, as Crooks points out, "we have to produce a student body that the facultly is happy to work with." And to an extent which would probably surprise most "winter" people, he has.

Visiting faculty members often tell him that their summer school course was "the best class I ever taught." Regular Harvard faculty members are occasionally more skeptical--"any teacher who looks out and sees a class with a high school junior and a Jesuit Father won't know quite what he's talking to," Crooks comments. But Harvard Faculty members too are often pleasantly surprised. One Harvard professor, who taught a popular summer school course with about two-thirds non-Harvard enrollment, recalled that "I was prepared for a disappointment, but it turned out to be some of the most rewarding teaching I've ever done."

If you wanted to maintain the Harvard snobbery, you could explain the "summies" performance by theorizing that during the summer Harvard-Radcliffe under-achieves, while the "summies" over-achieve. But you do not have to put it in those terms. The summer school students are impressed by Harvard, and by being at Harvard, and so take the school and themselves seriously. They study, they work hard (one Cliffie who shared a dormitory suite with three "summies" remembers that they were surprised by and even disapproving of her erratic study habits) and they do well--69 per cent of the grades last summer were A's and B's, and 71 per cent of the students received at least one honors grade.

The admissions policy reflects the role which the administration has always seen for the school. It is pretty much open-door. Before 1962 it was completely so, and the only requirements were a high school diploma and a completed application form. But things were beginning to get out of hand, so Crooks, who has been Director since 1960, added an application deadline and required approval of a student's program of study by his home college. That first year, enrollment fell by 500.

Mission

Crooks sees a "three-fold mission" for the Summer School, actually a kind of mission civilatrice for Harvard. First, he says, is the obligation of a university--any university--to be at work as much as possible: "Why shut down this magnificant plant all summer long?" Then there is Harvard's special role as one of the few liberal arts summer schools in the New England region, serving students who could not otherwise go to summer school. And finally there is the desirability of "people from all over the world having at least one Harvard experience."

Planning for the next summer's sessions begins in September, when Crooks meets with all the Harvard department chairmen and outlines the school's basic needs. Course offerings and faculty are up to each department, and Crooks himself exerts little direct pressure. "The departments know what fields they ought to cover, and they don't want much help," he points out. The number of courses has increased from 151 to 191 in the last five years. Most of the growth has come in languages and in offerings from architectural science, Celtic, history of science, and the Carpenter Center, which last summer drew a record 113 students to its courses.

Finding a faculty is something more of a problem than filling the course catalogue. Departments usually try to staff their courses with their own people, and last year 100 of the 191 summer school faculty members held academic-year appointments at Harvard, 30 of them permanent. Much of the visiting faculty, Crooks notes, is "actually more Harvard than it looks," since many of them have had either Harvard training or previous teaching experience here. The catalogue, complete with courses and staff, must go to press in January. "We always end up with a faculty, and we're always surprised." Crooks says, but he emphasizes that "the departments will not take anyone second-rate."

Quest

What awaits them, those students who arrive in July with that carefully prepared catalogue, 170 pages bound in dignified gray. Each is seeking his or her Harvard: do they find it?

They do, of course, in a concrete sense. Harvard is here, population changed but not very much diminished, business as usual in the Union and Lamont, "winter" students occupying their Eliot House suites, plays on the Loeb mainstage, presses running at the CRIMSON. But they see Harvard as one who stops at Churchill Downs in December and then says he has seen the Kentucky Derby.

What strikes you first is the lack of activity. The Summer News, a twice-weekly newspaper which the university pays the CRIMSON to publish, is filled with reviews, speech stories, features on the Newport Folk Festival, articles about Congressional hearings the draft, the peace campaigns, the Lampoon's janitor being beaten up. But it all seems distant, out of reach and somehow totally irrelevant to a life which centers around the green of the Yard and the grass of the River, to a university which serves lemonade on the lawn every Wednesday afternoon and maintains a "social and information" center with a fulltime staff in Matthews Hall. (The social director, last year a graduate student and this summer a class of '67 Cliffie, organizes mixers, tennis tournaments, trips to the Cape, and "amazingly successful" tours around historic Boston.

And then there are the rules. Almost no Cliffies and almost all "summies" live in Summer School housing, which uses many of the Yard dorms and the new wing of Quincy House. There are no parietals in either the girls' dorms or the graduate dorms, where summer school boys live. Last summer--the rules may be up for limit revision this year--girls had to be in by 1 a.m. on week nights, 2 a.m. on weekends. They are allowed three "late night" permissions for the entire summer, subject to prior blanket permission from their parents and specific authorization from their proctor, usually a graduate student.

The rules are enforced with a ferocity that would do an old-time Radcliffe dorm committee proud. One "summie," who lived near Boston went home for a weekend without signing out. She was not caught, but told her proctor of her mistake anyway. The proctor sent her to the Dean of Women who, instead of thanking her for her honesty; issued a stern reprimand and told her that her of-