If you're one of the 80 per cent of the Summer School students who are studying at Harvard for the first time, then you'll probably soon encounter a certain personality type that will have great influence over your stay here: the Harvard administrator.

The Harvard administrator is generally intellectual, urbane, aloof, paranoid, businesslike, fashionably liberal, well-dressed, pipe-smoking (if male), and often impervious to student efforts to make him or her see the lighter side of student mischief.

Michael Shinagel, the director of the Summer School, is the man in charge. He is responsible more than anyone else for what you like and dislike about your stay here. In his forties, Shinagel is a former English professor, confessed sybarite, and moustache-sporter.

His office at 20 Garden St. across from the Sheraton Commander is packed with great works of literature, especially 18th century novels.

On his desk are about two dozen pipes. "I have to get my oral gratification some way," he says. His hair is moderately short, graying on the edges and combed back in front. A picture of former President John F. Kennedy '40 with his arms folded and looking somberly toward the ground hangs on one wall.

Shinagel likes his job. He abandoned a tenured position as chairman of the English department at Union College in Schenectady, N.Y., to direct the Summer School and Continuing Education programs. "Many jobs define you. What I like about this job is that I define it," he says. "You can do a lot of good for the community and the world."

Shinagel was born in Vienna, Austria, where his father was a successful textile merchant. However, at the age of 4, his Jewish family was forced to flee from the Nazis. They moved to France, where his father was imprisoned in Marseilles by the Vichy government. Eventually, he was released, and the family caught the last Vichy ship to America.

In America, Shinagel grew up in Washington Heights in upper Manhattan. His parents both had to work, and Shinagel attended Bronx High School of Science-one of the best public schools in the country.

Shinagel didn't like Manhattan much, and dreamed of the pastoral life. He applied to a special Cornell major in dairy farming, only to go through what he calls an "existential crisis" in a mandatory program the summer before he enrolled.

As Shinagel explains it, he was standing on a huge pile of cow manure in upstate New York on a hot, muggy day with flies swarming around his face. Suddenly, in a moment of revelation, he knew the simple life of a dairy farmer would not be the answer. He finished up his first year at Cornell, and then volunteered to fight in Korea.

While in the army, Shinagel made friends with someone who went to Oberlin College; Shinagel transferred there after two years of service in Korea.

At first, he majored in psychology, but then switched to English when he decided it was more fun to read books than to work in a laboratory testing rats. He did well, graduating in the top ten in his class.

After Oberlin, Shinagel came to Harvard to get a Ph.D, supporting himself through a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship and the G.I. Bill. His thesis was about Daniel Defoe; his adviser was two-time Pulitzer Prize winner William Jackson Bate, who Shinagel says helped dispell his feeling that Harvard was a cold place.

Soon afterward he went to Union College, only to be eventually lured back to Harvard when he was selected to his current post over 300 other candidates.

Marshall R. Pihl '55, associate director of the Summer School, also smokes a pipe and keeps several on his desk.