14 



Sharp: 

 Revelle: 



Harvard a General Education course, not a departmental 

 course. It didn't lead to a major, but all the Harvard 

 students have to take a certain number of GE courses. Gen 

 Ed it was called. Each of these courses had names. This 

 course was called "Pops and Rocks". 



[laughing] Did you mind that? 



Oh no, I loved it. That showed students were paying some 

 attention to it. 



Sharp: Sure, anything that would make it more popular too for the 

 kids to take it. 



Revelle: At first it was rather a dull course. The Harvard students 

 put out something they call the Confidential Guide which is 

 primarily a guide to Gen Ed courses . I remember the first 

 time it was mentioned they said, "Professor Revelle is a 

 nice old guy, but he puts people to sleep." 



Sharp: Did you come up in your ratings after a while? 



Revelle: I think I did because in the end I had about 300 students 



in the course, starting with about 75. It got more and more 

 popular, and I got better at it. At first I used too many 

 figures, and too much statistics, spent too much time 

 writing on the blackboard. Some of my teaching fellows 

 criticized this, particularly a very impressive man named 

 Maris Vinovskis, who is now a professor of history at 

 Michigan. Another one was Ashok Khosla, who is an Indian 

 who has now gone back to India and has a little enterprise 

 he calls Development Alternatives, trying to make 

 technological developments for Indian villages, like better 

 stoves. 



Sharp : 

 Revelle : 



I had quite a few other teaching assistants. In the 

 end about twelve of them because of this big class. There 

 were two lectures a week and one section. The sections were 

 divided twenty-five students per section, so if you have 300 

 students you have to have twelve section men, as they are 

 called. Then you have to have a head section man. 



This worked best when the head section man was a woman 

 who was an anthropologist. Her name was Wormser [spells 

 it] . She was a very courageous, remarkable woman. She did 

 her doctor's thesis on the tribes of the Northwest Frontier, 

 the ungovernable tribes, where nobody's life is worth very 

 much and women are worth about twenty-five cents . 



In which country was she working? 



That's the Northwest Frontier between Pakistan and 

 Afghanistan, the hill country, the mountain country which 

 nobody has ever been able to govern. 



Pakistan nominally has control of it, but the guy that 

 runs it (which is in a vale, the Valley of Peshowar) , his 

 primary job is to organize raiding parties in the hills when 

 the hill people come down and steal women or steal cattle or 

 kill people. The Khyber Rifles still exist in the Khyber 



