Deviancy—Round Two

Up Mass Ave from Widener to The Square
By itself, my digression into semi-independent study wouldn’t have set off any alarms downstairs in Longfellow Hall. That mechanism was already programmed into whatever early computers created the transcript, and other folks did it, fairly routinely. If there were still academics who believed that a course catalog and a syllabus book could contain everything modern graduate studies must offer, the coming world was turning them into an endangered species.
The other half of my transgression? It’s called cross-registration. Harvard’s system allowed for it, too, but the way I exploited it seems to have caused the administration more distress.

All my four years at MIT, you see, I’d been abstractly aware that, in principle, cross-registration put the full curricular riches of Harvard1 at my disposal. But MIT offered so much, and that so much more conveniently, that I never did seize the opportunity. As an undergraduate, moreover, I wasn’t really ready to venture outside the well-traveled curricular paths.

My Stanford experience lasted only twelve months and was heavily scripted, affording little leisure for digressions and elaborations.2 It wasn’t designed and hadn’t sufficed to retrain the attitudes and expectations that I’d developed at MIT. At Stanford, I did as I was told, but distant Cambridge continued to represent in my mind an environment where initiative and distinctiveness would be more the order of the day. The fundamental contrasts between MIT and Harvard hadn’t really come through: how radically comfortable Harvard was in its structures and prescriptions, nor how threatened some of Harvard’s well-integrated minions could feel in the face of deviation.

And then Ward Low mentioned that he had come across a technology for, as he put it, “quantifying relevance.” Given what I’d been learning about guiding policy with knowledge from research, that boinged for me. I cornered him and came away with an introduction to Professor Jay W Forrester, of MIT’s Sloan School of Management.
1And, for that matter, of Wellesley.
2Seminary, in particular, really did make it add up to an overload.
Ed.D 1967-68: Independent Study S.A.C.C.H.A.R.I.N.E. Reunion in Paris Thesis AAI Disaster
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