Education: Can Hip Harvard Hold That Line?

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AFTER living together for 25 years, Harvard and Radcliffe have agreed to merge officially. No longer will Cliffies merely attend Harvard classes, earn Harvard degrees and acquire Harvard husbands. Last week the Harvard Corporation began work on unification plans that by 1970 will enable Radcliffe women to live in the same houses with Harvard men, take all their meals in the same dining halls and be governed by the same administration.

However inevitable, the merger symbolizes a new Harvard that old grads would barely recognize. Almost every U.S. campus is changing drastically these days. As usual, though, Harvard seems to be outdoing the rest—or trying awfully hard. The nation's oldest university has gone hip, and no one is yet sure where the limits may lie. Junior Bob Telson from Brooklyn barely exaggerates when he says: "Today the only thing you could possibly be booted for is something you'd get two years for in the outside world."

Grubby Guerrillas. In a recent bust, federal agents in Boston seized $450,000 worth of marijuana bound for "the Cambridge market," a central distribution point for which is Harvard Square. Officially, the university frowns on drugs, occasionally will nail a student dealer and expel him. But Dean Fred Glimp views marijuana smoking calmly: "The ones who smoke pot now are the ones who ten years ago would go on benders on Saturday night." Asked what he would do if he heard a wild party going on at 3:30 in the morning and found a group of stoned students, an Adams House tutor undoubtedly spoke for a large segment of the younger teaching fellows: "Well, if I wanted to sleep, I'd ask them to cool it. If not, I'd join them."

The sidewalks of Harvard Square rival those of Berkeley's Telegraph Avenue as a parade ground for grubby guerrilla fashion styles. The whole scene is summed up by a sign in the Harvard Coop that sternly warns people not to go barefoot on the escalator (it can be a painful way to pare the toenails). For many undergraduates, alienation is more than a matter of drugs, dirty clothes and long hair. Rather than live within the gilded confines of Harvard's residential houses along the Charles River, a few hundred students have moved into nearby slum tenements like the one on University Road where Jane Britton, a 23-year-old graduate anthropology student at Harvard, was murdered in January. The embarrassed slum landlord turned out to be none other than Harvard itself, and the episode only further embittered some citizens of Cambridge who were already resentful of the university's increasingly inflationary impact on real estate values.

None of this is to suggest that Harvard's academic standards are suffering. Admission has never been harder; fewer than one in five applicants make it. The number of entering freshmen who score in the 90th percentile or better on the Scholastic Aptitude Test rises each year. With an unprecedented three out of four students planning on graduate work, even the gentleman's B is out. Some 70% of this year's senior class will graduate with honors.