Well over 40 years ago, in the days before fax machines, e-mail, or even reliable trans-Atlantic telephone service, a serious miscommunication occurred between the Extension Office staff and a distinguished full professor of philosophy at Harvard University on a summer vacation in Spain. The result? The catalogue listing for the following year carried the title and description of a course the faculty member didn't realize he was scheduled to teach! A few weeks later, in front of nearly 400 students in Lowell Lecture Hall, he began to speak, and the students realized that, at least according to the catalogue, the instructor was embarking on the wrong course.

A few students timidly raised their hands before the smoking break and reported that the lecture didn't seem to gibe fully with the catalogue's course description. The instructor pooh-poohed their remarks--what did beginning students know about philosophy anyway, especially when the first lecture was still in progress?--and, after the smoking break, pressed on.

Relaxing back in his Emerson Hall office after the class meeting, the noted Harvard professor flipped open the Extension School catalogue and realized he and the School's staff had different views of the course. Being a consummate Harvard gentleman, however, he bowed to the wishes of the catalogue, apologized to the questioning students at the second class meeting, and changed the remaining lectures to conform to the course description printed.

At least in that instance there was a course description, right or wrong, in the catalogue. A different calamity, a few years later, befell the late Dr. George Goethals, who annually offered large, popular courses in psychology. Upon being sent, early one August, his personal advance copy of the forthcoming academic year's catalogue, he discovered, to the Extension School staff's chagrin, that his course had been inadvertently left out.

The remedy for this unfortunate omission was the quick hiring of a small army of Harvard students to rubberstamp, in the gutter of the proper page of 20,000 copies of the catalogue, a message supplying the missing information about Dr. Goethals's course. Evidently a fire-red stamping really attracted attention, and when the opening meeting of the course rolled around in mid-September, students overflowed the lecture room.

And finally there was the student--in the heady days of the Extension School's outreach program, when courses were presented at the Old South Meeting House in Boston, at MIT, at the Roxbury Multi-Service Center, and even on board submarines on the seven seas--who, after glancing hurriedly at his catalogue and discovering that the language course he wished to take met in Boylston Hall, concluded that it meant Boylston, Massachusetts, Town Hall and drove to that bucolic community in earnest search of Elementary German II.

We invite alumni reminiscences for this section--the very human side of the Harvard Extension School and the Harvard Extension School family.