relatively obscure man during the academic year, runs the show and has a special dean of students, Joshua M. Rubins '70, to help him out.

Rubins, who graduated from the Law School in June, is in charge of all the activities that have earned the Summer School the occasional nickname of Harvard Summer Camp. He plans an elaborate series of University sponsored activities and social events--movies, mixers, bridge and chess tournaments and teas are among them--that usually go on under different auspices during the academic year.

"We can't hope to create the same texture of life here as in the winter," Rubins says, "but we try in part to recreate it--people come here in part for that. There are more direct University-sponsored activities during the summer because there are very few other activities. We'll have ten to fifteen student organizations doing things during the summer, but in large part we have to directly run things."

Rubins got his job through Crooks, who was master of Dudley House when Rubins was a Dudley undergraduate. Last year Rubins was Crooks's assistant for cultural affairs, and this year Crooks recreated the then-defunct deanship and put Rubins in the post. Asked what his job entails, Rubins replies, "Let's see, what's on my desk right now? I'm going over the rules for the chess and bridge tournaments. I'm looking at a list of proctors, and working on publicity for the animation course. There's some material on our arts contests here too. Everything here that's not involved with courses is our responsibility--it goes from the most mundane things to giving students a place to come for advice and to hang around. We do what all the Houses and other non-academic organizations do during the winter."

Rubins says some of the summer students come to find out what Harvard is like or to see Boston, but that the Summer School is "most special for its special programs." "A lot of the courses tend to be very career-oriented," he says. "People are trying to find a course that'll change their life. Some people come to find out what it's like here, but others come to take the one course that's important to them."

The 75 people who will take the Radcliffe Publishing Procedures course, one of the summer school's ten special programs, are like that. "This is the shortest grad school in the world," Helen Venn, director of the course, says. "We help people get positions in books or magazines. Publishers look favorably on the course, because so many of them have helped us as faculty. I don't want young people coming here just to get a job; I always say that we're not just an employment agency. But I almost insist that they go out and work immediately afterward."

The publishing course, now in its 27th year, takes its students on a six-week whirlwind tour of the publishing--and that does not mean just the journalism or writing--world, often spending less than a day on an entire field, for a steep $1000. The students all seem to get jobs with publishing houses, university presses and magazines almost immediately upon their graduation, partly because the course has a prestigious reputation and a lot of alumni in a position to hire people.

Not all of the special programs are as career-oriented as the publishing course. There is Alumni College, where Harvard graduates learn about China, Japan and Classical Greece from big-name professors. Then too, there's the Dance Center, the Institute in Arts Administration and a week-long workshop for college teachers in "Personalized Self-Instruction," better known as self-paced learning, a technique developed in Harvard science courses. Probably the most career-oriented program besides the publishing course is the Health Careers Summer Program, a course designed to prepare low-income educationally disadvantaged college students for med school or medical-related fields.

The health careers program's emphasis on careers seems nobler than the publishing course's, mostly because all of its students are poor and come to Harvard on some sort of grant. This year the Department of Health, Education and Welfare is paying for 150 of the program's 162 students and the Woodrow Johnson Foundation the rest. But the program has been controversial this year because it is primarily designed for minority students--blacks, Chicanos, Puerto Ricans and American Indians--to the near-exclusion, as it turns out, of equally disadvantaged whites.

In the fall of 1972, a group of poor white student at the Medical School started to agitate for the inclusion of more whites in the program. Last year there was extended wrangling over the issue and the program ended up with five whites, four of them added fairly late in the game. Towards the end of last summer three members of the group and Dr. A. Stone Freedberg, professor of Medicine, wrote a letter to President Bok complaining about the exclusion of whites from the program. After University inquiries, HEW confirmed that the program is primarily intended for minority students.

All winter the charges and counter-charges flew back and forth, with the group repeatedly calling for Crooks's ouster, until in February the Council of Deans appointed an eight-member committed to oversee the program. The committee met with various groups interested in the program, including the poor whites and Freedberg. This year there will be ten poor whites in the program--if the admissions committee's guesswork as to the race of applicants is correct--and the med school group seems to have calmed down. Now a Chicano group is mad at the program and has written a letter of complaint to President Bok calling, once again, for Crooks's firing.

Crooks oversees this motley assortment of courses, activities and programs from an office high up in Holyoke Center, where he gazes out the window at his short-lived annual domain while he talks about the summer school. "The trouble is that Harvard is institution-oriented, not people-oriented," he says. "I come from a background where this kind of elitism is anathema, but I'm pulled both ways."

"In the 1860s there was a big controversy here over whether Harvard should be just a top-flight college or just a grad school, and President Eliot made a landmark speech, saying that Harvard should be both. We have the same kind of problem facing us now, except that the conflict is between elitism and populism. And again, we've got to have both.