Has there ever been a case of a mistaken admittance? Jewett says a few years back the admissions office was considering two boys with the exact same names right down to the middle initials. One got rejected while the other was admitted. The letters fell into the wrong hands. The admissions office solved the problem magnanimously enough, however. The student receiving the letter of rejection was called and told he could come, while the student who should have been rejected was never told anything. "They were close enough in standing that we didn't think there was anything wrong," Jewett says.
Sometimes Harvard isn't as benevolent. A student who was supposed to receive a rejection letter was fortunate for a few days, at least, to believe he had gotten into Harvard when he was sent a letter of admittance. But admissions officials quickly notified the boy that it was all a mistake. They eventually convinced the parents not to take threatened legal action to admit their son because, Jewett says, it would have been an academic disaster if their son had been enrolled.
In one slip up this year an accepted male student received a Radcliffe letter of acceptance as a result of a computer error. He had one of those borderline names like Leslie, Jewett says, and the computer had his name stored in the female file.
Jewett remembers the time that the Freshman dean's office got a call from an alumnus in praise of Harvard's crew. It seems that Coach Parker was up to his old trick of mass-mailing recruitment. This alumnus just wanted to say that he knew Harvard had an incredible crew team already, but he had to tell somebody that he was really impressed this year because his 6-feet, 4-inch, 210-pound son had gotten a letter asking him to try out as a coxswain.
From his position in the freshman dean's office, W.C. Burris Young has the best view of the goings on in the Yard in the last few decades. Young tells these stories about life in the 1960s, before and during the revolution.
Street People
Young likes to tell stories of the 1960s when street people used to make a profession of hanging out in the Yard. It seems that there was this one group of freshmen from Wiggles worth which was absolutely obsessed with street people. They simply loved to bring hoards of them in to their suite and shelter them.
Well, the situation began to get desperate and by the spring the Wiggles worth proctor gave up on the kids and got a University policeman to look into the suite to see what was going on. As soon as the policeman walked in he found eight street people strewn comfortably on the floor. As the cop proceeded through the suite the sound of a flushing toilet could be heard as more street people discretely disposed of their wares. The trip to the bathroom revealed eight more brethren. A final jaunt to the bedroom saw nine more residents--25 freeloaders in all. Young explains the street people couldn't resist this group of freshmen. "They knew a good touch when they saw one."
Parietals
Up until the late 1960s, Young recalls, parietals ruled the Yard. Of course, parietals were supposed to be the bane of the existence of sexually permissive students. But someday a revisionist Harvard historian will no doubt put together a different story about parietals, one which would lead you to believe that parietals worked in favor of just what they were supposed to be discouraging. Young says, under the rules, women were allowed in the mens' rooms from four until seven p.m. on the weeknights and four until eight p.m. on the weekends. "If a guy and a girl were studying past seven p.m., say until 7:30, then she just had to stay the night," Young says. "Otherwise if she were seen leaving the dorm after hours she would be nabbed by a Yard cop."
Twice each term parietals were suspended until midnight. "Those were some of the most godawful nights--really a horrorshow," Young says. Everybody went wild. There were gallons and gallons of beer flowing. There used to be a lot of raids up to the 'Cliffe then too, Young says. "But the 'Cliffies just threw stuff at the raiders. They were very uninterested in the freshmen," Young says.
Panhandlers
Before the construction of the Science Center, a building named Lawrence Hall stood on the site. During the 1960s the street people more or less took over Lawrence Hall and set up makeshift stoves and beds. Young says the University really didn't mind because the building wasn't in use at the time. In face, the University encouraged the street people to use the showers in Thayer North. The relationship, he adds parenthetically, broke down when a woman was about to deliver a baby in the Thayer shower.
Young said he established communication with the street people by reading them poems. "They were a fairly intelligent bunch of runaways," he says. "We got them to wash and not to cook openly in the building." Anyway, they played by the rules. But one day, Young got a call from the Cambridge police telling him to look out his window. Flames were leaping from the hall. The building was soon a charred shell.
The upshot of the story is that the inhabitants of Lawrence were such good panhandlers that in one day they raised enough money in the Square to head off to a farm in Vermont.