Last Spring, John Polazzo '69 became a famous Harvard person. He led a gigantic drive to increase parietals. Nothing happened, of course. Most people ended up hating his guts for being so pushy. Since then nothing still has happened. While the HPC has provoked academic change merely by lifting its collective little finger, nobody and nothing has provoked the administration to improve the way people live around here. John Polazzo, who used to live here, tried harder than almost anybody else. He finally quit in January.

BIFF: He's got no character--Charlie wouldn't do this. Not in his own house--spewing vomit from his mind.

HAPPY: Charlie never had to cope with what he's got to.

BIFF: People are worse off than Willy Loman. Believe me, I've seen them.

LINDA: I don't say he's a great man. Willy Loman never made a lot of money. His name was never in the paper. He's not the finest character who ever lived. But he's a human being, and a terrible thing is happening to him. So attention must be paid...Attention must be finally paid to such a person. You called him crazy--

BIFF: I didn't mean--

LINDA: No, a lot of people think he's lost his balance. But you don't have to be very smart to know what his trouble is. Arthur Miller,   DEATH OF A SALESMAN

1. Dean Glimp, who knows the trouble, says goodbye

I SPOKE to Dean Glimp the other day and told him not to let kids like me into Harvard or else to find the right institutions for us here. He saw my problem as that of many Negro kids taken out of slums and put here. They know that Harvard thinks a lot of them, bringing them here and all. But then they find that Harvard doesn't treat them very well. It just dumps them and leaves them alone. They tend to doubt how good they are when they run into a bunch of white kids who expect success and know exactly how to get along in this place which they don't. Harvard doesn't give them the continuing support to get by that their acceptance led them to expect.

2. Hello Harvard, sweet land of liberty

SOME STUPID asshole from my school applied to Harvard and I figured that if he was applying I could too and I could do better than he could. I used to read Saturday Review and Reader's Digest and it sounded like The Place, the intellectual community of scholars, the intellectual free place where everybody questions things.

They sorta liked my unusual background and I had very much of an attitude of being very constructive and socially responsible, enthusiastic about learning a lot.

Freshman year I was stuck with two roommates, one very much a physicist from the day he was born and the other one from Fieldstone in New York. He wanted to be a good doctor, his father was a doctor. He was a Jewish kid, very much concerned with getting the grades and getting into medical school. He was a nice guy just caught up too much in trying to be a professional and successful. He made a lot of sacrifices toward that end. Anyway, given these two roommates, it all didn't quite fit the Harvard image.

I expected it, the entry, you know, to be a real jolly place, so I went upstairs one night to an entry party and sat around drinking beer for a couple of hours. I had expected a little more interest in what was going on in the world. Everybody was saying nonsensical things. So I left. So I sorta felt alienated from that group and that cut off my relationship to the entry. Across the hall were a couple of socialite types and I didn't get along with them.

I WAS BORN in a small Catholic town in Italy. A town where everybody knew everybody else, 7000 people. My mother came from a well-to-do land-owning family, large, patriarchal. My grandfather had 24 people in his household at one time. My father's family was more in the businessman's style, small merchants. In Italy, my father had a sort of little business, leasing forests for wood to use for lumber and coal. But then the coal industry got bad 'cause of gas being used. So his business went dead. Instead of starting another business he came to the States, when I was ten. Here he was only qualified to be a working class man, not knowing any English. He had a variety of working class jobs, unhappy with most of them. Then we had a little brother dying. My father had a nervous breakdown. It was a combination of things. He was being embarrassed by those jobs. Back in Italy he had been one of the town's big politicos.