HSA: Where Free Enterprise Flowers

One of the largest, most exciting, and most frequently criticized of local agencies is that amalgam of student-run enterprises, the Harvard Student Agencies, Inc.

The HSA's businesses run from the ordinary, like the Harvard Stadium Concessions and the Harvard Class Ring Agency, to the intriguing, like the Information Gathering Service, which conducts surveys and undertakes translations. And HSA's businessmen range from the more or less indifferent student who takes the HSA job because the work is interesting and the pay is good to the high-powered, high-geared super-salesman who enjoys wheeling and dealing and is attracted by potentially high salaries.

The Beginning

In its conception ten years ago HSA was designed, it seems, primarily to provide work for scholarship students rather than to allow fledgling Big Businessmen to test their mettle. Indeed, "Financing Higher Education through Student Enterprise," is still HSA's motto. But the ease with which funds from one business can be used to aid in capitalizing another, and the willing and open minds with which HSA's student executives and graduate directors greet the idea of creating new businesses have made the place a haven for latter-day entrepreneurs.

Given the average Harvard student's apparently natural disdain for business, and the predilection of HSA types for the style and affectations of businessmen, the scorn HSA receives is understandable. A look at the HSA offices or a few minutes' chat with some of its officers is enough to indicate that mnay HSA executives do emulate and cultivate the style of their Madison Avenue or Congress Street big brothers.

Secretaries scurry about the HSA offices in the cellar of the Esquire Theater, phones ring, personnel move ponderously up and down the corridors. The red wooden doors constantly open and shut. It's all very busy and all that's missing is an executive washroom.

If you call up a friend there who happens to be a manager, the dulcet voice receptionist announces "I'll ring Mr.--'s line for you." Another sweet female voice answers, "Mr.--'s office." By this time you've stopped calling your friend by his first name and starting calling him "Mister," or "Sir."

Some managers, obviously those with titles on the door, rate wall-to-wall carpeting, acoustic ceilings with inlaid lighting, and handsome darkwood desks and chairs. There's nothing wrong with a little rank and privilege, and, of course, a job well done entitles the doer to some sort of reward. But as one former worker for HSA said, "Sometimes ` the whole thing smacked of a bunch of little kids playing big business."

The real test of whether HSA has abandoned its original purpose lies not in how irritating or ludricous some HSAers are, but in the amount of money that's actually going into students' pockets.

Last year the Information Gathering Service of HSA grossed $100,000 in sales; $40,000 went to student wages. The percentage of IGS funds devoted to wages is probably a bit higher than in most other HSA agencies, but not much higher, and it's not a bad percentage. Hourly wages on the IGS averaged about $2.50. Some went as high as $8 an hour with many getting $4 or $5 an hour.

The IGS provided work for more than 200 students last year, and if you have no strong objection to working for a bunch of budding free enterprisers you can probably find some interesting and good paying work there. Telephones, marketing studies, and translation work are the IGS's staples.

Another HSA agency that doesn't require you to act like a Rotarian is the bartending service. Still another is the data processing agency, which hasn't gotten off the ground. Other agencies, like the refrigerator rental business or the stationery agency, require somewhat more aggressive Yankee Pedlar types.

One of the most frequently voiced criticisms of the HSA relates to the HSA's exclusive right to enter dormitories during the first few weeks of school to make sales. It's doubtful that other groups will be allowed the right to go from door to door, but an increasingly self-conscious HSA has done something to reduce the irritation its salesmen caused by eliminating some of the agencies. You can't buy a non-breakable beer mug from them anymore.

HSA provides opportunities, then, for people who are just interested in some cash to defray expenses or to make life a little easier and, also, for people who want the satisfaction of running a business, of setting it up and watching it grow or fail. So long as the latter--the smaller but more visible of the two types--continue to imitate the style, thought, action, and affectations of the business world, there will be criticism of the HSA as a group of money-grubbers. But so long as HSA continues to provide interesting, good-paying jobs for students who want them, it'll be worthwhile to tolerate the eccentricities of the Organization Men.