Job Applicants Crowd Radcliffe Yard

Nearly 600 students, lured by lucrative wages for temporary dorm crew jobs, jammed Radcliffe Yard early yesterday morning to be among the first applicants for over 200 positions being offered by the Student Employment Office.

Sleeping bags and blankets littered the grass outside Byerly Hall hours before the office opened at 8:30 a.m. The special dorm crews will stage a "precommencement clean-up" of the campus next month.

Some of the applicants said after the sleep-out they thought the jobs, which will pay $150 for a week's work, should have been offered solely, to students on financial aid.

But Charles O. Honnet, assistant director of the Employment Office, said yesterday that two-thirds of the jobs will go to students receiving aid, according to their order of application.

The office will award the remainder of the posts on a first-come first-served basis, Honnet said.

"One week of clean-up that we open up to non-financial aid students seems to me to be a reasonable thing to do," Honnet said.

He added that financial aid students receive absolute preference on other student jobs such as positions on the year-round dorm crews.

John S. Harwell, director of the Employment Office, said yesterday that it has not previously been the office's policy to award total preference to financial 'aid students when considering applications for the special dorm crews.

Still, many of the students waiting in line seemed unaware of the advantage for financial aid recipients and jockeyed for position, thinking that only those at the front of the line had a good chance at winning a position.

Bad Vibes

"There was really heavy tension--a lot of bad feeling in the air," Cynthia Gordon '77 said after the crowd began to move inside the building.

Several students said they were upset by the fact that their places in line were taken by late-comers who parked themselves in front of the side entrance to the building while the other were sleeping on the grass in the center of the Yard.

For many, though. the night was a welcome change of pace from the pressure of late-semester studying. A badminton game and the scattered remains of midnight snacks gave the Radcliffe Yard a campground atmosphere that startled some passers-by on their way to work.

Students who came at dawn, expecting to get a jump on the rest of the competition, were also startled to find the area already filled. Some students arrived as early as 11 p.m. on Monday.

While some of the late arrivals left the scene in despair, others simply accepted the situation with resignation.

"This was simply a wonk race, like everything else at Harvard--and this time I just got out-wonked," Michael D. Kendall '79 said as he took his place at the end of the line.