"It was a little difficult to take a public posture against a move like that, because of the clientele." Malin says now, "but I thought all along it would be one we would pay for."

As director, Malin will deal with only "a handful" perhaps 180 all year--of the students who pass through the aid office every year. His primary contact is with those who are appealing their financial aid decisions, though he occasionally handles routine "walk-in" cases if the staff if seven is busy. "We'd hate to have a director who never saw any students." Jewett says, but adds immediately that the job is becoming more managerial and organizational with each new regulation from above and its resultant bureaucratic detail. Until the office goes computerized with the rest of the major administrative offices this spring, the thick files crammed with parental 1040 forms and financial data will continue to dominate operations.

And from those interviews he does conduct. Malin says his impressions contradict the widespread feeling that more people are squeezing, that safety cushions are smaller than they were five or 10 years back. He counters suggestions of confusion and concern with tales of the madness affecting his first summer in the director's job--the summer directly following the earliest demonstrations of the turbulent late '60s.

Whereas the admissions office managed some-how to maintain its image as a quiet oasis through all the protests and disillusion of the times, the aid office--by nature quieter and more deliberate still--was thrown headlong into the festivities by virtue of a rule that withdrew the scholarships of any student who was placed on probation. In late 1968 a small group staged a demonstration in Paine Hall, a sort of pre-skirmish to the larger battles to follow. One of those placed on probation was the senior running back of the football eam. Innocently, the aid office took the usual steps. "We sent them off ordinary letters of notification." Malin says and grabs his head in both hands. Several protests later, the problematic rule was struck from the books: Harvard meanwhile substituted general beneficiary funds" for scholarships.

* * *

The passion for people watching which unites Malin's sports and admissions worlds will lose some targets this fall, as the director foregoes his usual recruiting trips to D.C. and to the West Coast. "Admissions is fun and all that," he says, "but I can't say I'll be too unhappy about not going to Beverly Hills High School and talking endlessly about do graduate students teach all the courses at Harvard and all those other tiresome questions." But tiresome or not, the admits--especially those who pass through the aid office--furnish him with years more of reflection on "how being here changes some people's lives." And occasionally circumstances allow him to continue the observation, through the expedient of a seat on the committees a that award the Sheldon, the knox, or the Luce. "You get a firsthand experience of the intensity of scholarly work--this incredibly esoteric stuff on the tsetse fly or whatever they a want to work on."

In the interim, while the admitted freshmen grow up, there are always the soccer trips. Last Monday, for example, he emceed the farewell dinner for the Brazilian Carlos Alberto one of the Cosmos retiring greats.

"Well, the sports world is full of interesting people." Malin says, and allows an offhandedness that could almost be called smug to creep into the apparent unconsciousness of anything unusual about this life. "I guess there are worse things, he says. "What to work for Harvard are and the New York Cosmos."