Summer Scholars

Across the U.S., summer schools were buzzing like clover patches. Gone is the concept of the summer-camp campus, peopled by bored schoolteachers and hostile flunkees; in their place are ambitious students who are turning the dolce far niente of the hot months into a time of busy--and sometimes oddball--learning.

Out in the Arizona desert, University of Maryland Senior Eileen Van Tassell is using $2,000 worth of transistorized tape-recording equipment to eavesdrop on water beetles and classify their sounds. At Stanford Arthur Bleich, 27, is studying film production by making a 7 1/2-minute documentary called The Rise and Fall of the American Breast--"a serious critique of America's fetish about female bosoms." Stanford is also giving eight-week crash courses in Chinese and Japanese, in which students are required to converse, eat and drink in the style of the language they are studying--or at least try. "I'm going to hwei-jya, change my yi-shang, jump in my chi-che and pick up my syau-jye for the dyan-yingr" said a beginner in Chinese.("I'm going back to my house, change my clothes, jump in my car andpick up my girl friend for the movies.")

Radcliffe is teaching a"Publishing Procedures" course to 43 men and 13 women, who hear authors and editors, and learn, in the words of a girl who took the course last year, that "the purlieus of publishing contain powerful people for whom English is a vestigial appendage." Students at Syracuse University are working with Painter Kenneth Callahan on a mural for a new dormitory, are painting smaller murals of their own. Says Thomas E. Black, 27, a painting major: "Being together and talking together is a kind of rubbing-off process; he comes in here and I'm working here. I go in there, and he's working there."

At U.C.L.A., a class is taking the nation's only college course in Berber. In a symposium offered by the University of Minnesota, Tennessee Williams and Actor Douglas Campbell are lecturing drama students aboard the university's air-conditioned showboat afloat on the Mississippi. And in the desert of southwestern Utah, 74 U.C.L.A. anthropology students and their professor are poking about the remnants of Pueblo villages and digging in mounds for arrowheads, bones and pottery. Edith Sanders, 17, from Beverly Hills, admits that she signed for Anthrop. 197 on a whim, but now she is enjoying it. "It's just fascinating to think that I am handling things that are 900 years old," she says.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.