IN 1970, during my freshman year, I asked an upperclassman why Harvard seemed to provide so little help for people who wanted to live and study off campus. "Harvard doesn't send people into the world," he said, "because Harvard thinks it is the world."

If Harvard, as an institution, often seems to represent that attitude, Radcliffe, in 1966, created one of the University's several exceptions to the rule. Mary I. Bunting, former president of Radcliffe College, founded Education for Action (E4A) to provide "earlier opportunities (for students) to test and develop capabilities that are not called into play by their academic assignments." She established a program of student summer internships with Peace Corps volunteers working abroad.

Seven years later, E4A is drastically different from the organization Bunting originally conceived. Its growth and change clearly reflect a more realistic view of the world beyond Harvard's reassuring walls. But, just as critically, E4A reflects the difficulties inherent in running a program of cooperative, student- controlled educational activities in a competitive University traditionally emphasizing other goals.

E4A's program currently involves three main kinds of activity: operating a clearinghouse for students seeking information on social action projects, sponsoring workshops and seminars on social and political issues, and helping to fund individual student- designed projects in a wide range of areas of social change.

It is the clearinghouse which has the potential for reaching the most students, and students associated with E4A say they wish more people would use its resources. The information center occupies a cramped office on the first floor of Aggasiz House, housing extensive files on educational innovation and on workshops and conferences on social issues. E4A offers access to probably the largest library on Latin American affairs on campus, dozens of publications on domestic and Third World politics, information on volunteer openings and opportunities for "alternative" careers, and publications which E4A sells on different aspects of social involvement.

The seminar program is E4A's latest addition, consisting, this semester, of two non-credit courses on China and Latin America. Though these discussion groups provide more continuity than one-time-only programs which E4A has run occasionally in the past, both groups are small and one is irregularly attended.

Shepherd Bliss, E4A project director and the coordinator of the Latin America group, said some students were apparently surprised to find a non-credit seminar demanding more of a commitment than regular courses. An advantage of his group, though, according to Bliss, is the contact it affords Harvard-Radcliffe students with people interested in Latin American issues from the local community and other colleges.

E4A, said Bliss, would probably offer more seminars if students asked the organization to provide programs unavailable elsewhere in the University. "We don't want our courses to be any less productive or useful than other courses," said Bliss, "but, if the resources are available, we will try to fulfill student requests."

But E4A's most unique function remains the support it affords student-initiated summer projects and, since 1968, term-time projects on social change. By last September, E4A had funded over 250 projects bringing students into contact with social action in communities in the United States and abroad.

Decisions on funding-like all E4A policy decisions-are made by the Student Board which controls the organization. Though they hire a project director to handle most day-to-day administrative tasks, the board's members-there are usually about ten-set the direction for E4A's activities and philosophy. Some guidance is provided by an Advisory Board of faculty, students, and alumni chosen for their involvement in education and social action. But E4A's aim is to provide organizational and policy-making experience for undergraduates, and a student-run structure sensitive to the needs of the students involved with it.

This Spring, two meetings were held to review term-time project proposals. Another will be held on summer project proposals after the April 23 deadline for submitting applications. Harvard and Radcliffe undergraduates who have planned summer projects will be interviewed individually. They will then present their projects to the board members and to each other as a group, to give all students submitting applications the benefit of the entire group's suggestions. Board members must evaluate the suitability of each project for E4A funding and the likelihood that the project will help both the applicant and the people with whom the applicant plans to work.

THE PHILOSOPHY behind E4A funding is central to the direction of the organization as a whole. In earlier years, E4A-and most social activists-thought the most constructive short-term experience would be a kind of "internship," working for social action agencies which couldn't otherwise provide students with salaries. The concept of a viable social project now centers on three criteria: the project's potential for advancing positive social change, its potential for enhancing the personal growth of the people undertaking projects, and the development of original student-initiated projects whose means seem well-designed for attaining the desired ends.

E4A projects thus no longer fall under the heading "social service." Rather than enrolling volunteers in already established structures whose relationship to the people they serve is unlikely to change through the person's involvement, E4A wants to help students to create new relationships among social activists and between activists and the disenfranchised sectors of society. Rather than trying to teach students about how things already work, E4A seeks people whose activities will educate themselves and the people they work with to the kinds of skills and relationships necessary to effect social change.

The political side of E4A's activities lies in its conception of education-the orientation of the individual and the direction of the person's growth towards greater involvement in the community in which the person lives. In this sense, E4A has goals which may be called political: the creation of cooperative relationships among social activists and community people; help for groups trying to overcome the difficulties in using resources controlled by hierarchical bureaucracies; enabling students to create fulfilling work roles in society; helping students to overcome the sense of fragmentation in their social interests and academic lives; and providing aid to people working for a healthier society in which all people's views of themselves as citizens are broader than the narrowly individualistic attitudes customary in U.S. society. E4A is based on the concept that only through intense social involvement can the individual's human nature be expressed. Though the organization's name is "Education for Action," its philosophical assumption might be called "education through action."

Generalizing further about the political inclinations of E4A is impossible because the attitudes of board members and the kinds of projects funded cover such a wide range of interests and expectations. Projects have focused on problems of public and mental health, drug abuse, prison education, economic and cultural development, civil rights, tenants' disputes, women's issues, and community education.