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 from. 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.

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 course 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-race."

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 iemonade on the lawn every Wednesday day 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 limited 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 students.

The rules are enforced with ferocity. 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 offense would go on her "permanent record."

Crooks explains the rules in terms of expediency--"we want to keep it uncomplicated and simple"--rather than as an attempt by the Summer School to legislate morality. He, and every other administrator, points out how much the summer situation differs from the regular session. "People come with a great variety of backgrounds. It's a two-month get-together, not a community." To change the rules, Crooks maintains, would be "opening a can of worms. There's just no reason to get mixed up in it." Even taken at face value, that the Summer School simply finds it easier to say "no parietals" or "in by 1," the approach is not that of the Harvard that people go to in the winter.

So they do not find Harvard, these thousands who come looking, if indeed such a place is to be found enclosed, and taken home as a souvenir at any time of year. And they probably wonder -- "summies" and Harvard-Radcliffe both--as the heat wave enters its eighth day, draining whatever energy was left for that afternoon jaunt to the Cape, if the Cambridge summer-time mystique was all that it promised to be in the chill of early May. Don't ask them then. Ask about it on some November afternoon, of better yet in the middle of January. Ask what summer school is like, or about the Square in August. And start looking for an apartment