The problems have always been the same, but things used to be different for administrators like Crooks; everyone else in the University has been touched by the recession and the way President Bok's administration has dealt with it. "It's hard for us in administrative positions to deal with," he says. "Before, we used to know everybody. We knew how to deal with them. Our pain threshold is very low on economic matters. We hurt quickly. After thirteen years of benign neglect there's some positive, detailed interference in ways there wasn't before."

The particular import of all this for Crooks is the way it affects the Summer School, which, being like Crooks on the edge of things here, is less than sacred to financially pinched administrators. So Crooks is worried--worried that in pulling back to essentials Harvard will leave the Summer School behind, that it will "exploit" summer students for high fees, that the nature of the Summer School will change substantially. "The central concern of the Faculty," says Crooks, who has just learned that Summer School enrollment had dropped nearly one quarter from last year, "is to pull into itself. That leads to excessive tuition and the kind of excessive control that makes it undesirable to run a summer school."

He is thinking, therefore, of changing the Summer School a little himself, of making it a little less dependent upon the Faculty. Now the Summer School is straightforward and traditional in much of what it offers, mostly as a concession to Harvard students who want to get credit for summer work. The Summer School course catalog even has to get the Faculty's approval every year, something that's routine but nevertheless says something about the way things stand. So Crooks thinks about making summer courses shorter or more innovative, perhaps emphasizing more and more the arts-related courses that have become so popular and successful lately. It's a delicate situation--at bottom Crooks needs Harvard, but he's straining at his reins a little at the same time.

Very little of this--not even the fact that Crooks is worried--will get through to John Dwinell, the director of the Harvard Graduate Society, an alumni organization for people who studied for their doctorates here. Dwinell, a large and florid man, has a proposition for Crooks this morning--or, more bluntly, he needs a favor. Dwinell's constituency now gets half-price on Summer School tuition, but he's trying to put together a special package to increase their loyalty to Harvard.

"I don't know John," Crooks tells him. "I'm under pressure to produce no deficit, possibly even a surplus. I have to be careful about freebies."

"So you couldn't have a reduction from half-fare?"

"I don't think so."

"The best way is just to inform them of the opportunity." Dwinell stops and thinks a while. "What can I do to make them come? They've already got Ph.D.s. Why come?"

"Nostalgia. Continuing research."

Dwinell is puzzled; he shakes his head and says. "But Tom, many of them have unpleasant memories of Harvard."

The last think Crooks wants to be is brusque, so he offers a suggestion: a deal with Widener Library. "But John," he says gently before Dwinell leaves, "nobody is going to cooperate unless it means some dough. You know that."

Dwinell, who is trying to start a scholarship fund for graduate students, nods.

* * * * *

Dwinell was Crooks's last appointment of the day, so now he has a chance to think, and he leans back and looks around. His office is big enough to embarass him; it has a desk, two tables with chairs around them, and views in two directions, and it is not especially homey or cluttered. Crooks is a big, leathery-faced man, and when he stalks around the office he looks the slightest bit uncomfortable.

He wanders over to a wall, where there are a set of photographs of Seminole, the town in Pennsylvania where he was born in 1917, a town he has only recently developed enough affection for to want to hang pictures of it on his wall. It's a dead town, a coal-mining town, and Crooks had nine sisters and brothers and a poor miner for a father. Crooks was the youngest son, and his mother decided he would never go into the mines like his brothers; so she hired a man named Mr. Henry who smelled like vanilla extract to give Crooks piano lessons, and she hoped.