Education: Campus Publicity

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For thousands & thousands of U. S. college seniors, who hate the prospect of hunting jobs, a prime ambition is to start some campus enterprise which they can take with them when they graduate. This year four Princeton seniors have built up such a business in Campus Publicity Service. Last week, however, they were thinking less about their plans for future expansion than about charges that they had been taking a low advantage of their fellow students.

Last October one of the four, Brooke Alexander, had the idea of creating a high-pressure organization to mould campus opinion for national advertisers. To help him he took in three classmates, John Harlow, Robert Burrows and Reo Kelly. First problem was to get a client. They sold the idea to Philip Morris & Co. The next was to build the organization. In 39 Eastern colleges they acquired agents, all of them prominent students and most of them on college papers.

Soon, on campuses all over the East, students began to hear from one or two respected classmates glowing descriptions of Philip Morris cigarets. Football players found their prowess rewarded with "flat fifties." Any man who was elected to a class office or chosen as a Rhodes Scholar was presented with "flat fifties." College sports editors were asked to run score-predicting contests with Philip Mor- ris cigarets as the prize.

Philip Morris & Co. paid young Alexander some $400 a month for the service and he divided it among his associates and agents. Soon Campus Publicity Service began to get new accounts. It began also to get outside attention. The New Republic branded it a whispering bureau. The four owners were reported to be planning a poll of student preferences with the results guaranteed to be favorable to the advertisers who sponsored it. Last week the owners hotly denied that they harbored any such plan, pointed out that their work was all open & aboveboard, that college authorities had given their approval.