VOLUME 13, NO. 1     DEC 1999

Harveys write field guide for college frosh

Sue and Bob Harvey

Between September 1988 and June 1997, Bob Harvey '70 (Ph.D.) and his wife, Sue, shared their lives with more than a thousand first-year students at Stanford University. While serving as resident fellows in Larkin House, Stanford's second largest all-freshmen dormitory, they learned enough about the care and feeding of the college "frosh" to write a book. So they did.

Virtual Reality and the College Freshman: All Our Friends Are 18 is a collection of "life lessons" illustrated by true stories of real Stanford freshmen. It is also the biography of two successful 50-year-olds who found themselves on the brink of empty-nest syndrome when the last of their three sons left home. Bob was president of Thoratec Laboratories Corp., a biomedical engineering firm specializing in cardiovascular support devices. Sue was a lecturer in Stanford's English Department and a freshman academic advisor. How she convinced Bob to leave a comfortable condominium for a boxcar apartment in Larkin House to cohabit with 18-year-olds is a story best told by the authors.

Many of the anecdotes in Virtual Reality are humorous, but some are heartbreaking. Chapters cover every aspect of campus culture in the '90s, from fraternities ("The Bacardi Brotherhood") to career expectations ("A Doctor in the House") to suicide ("She Just Needs to Cheer Up"). In "Keggers, Peer Pressure and the Frosh Fifteen," the Harveys observe that "most frosh can be located somewhere in that borderland between freedom and dependence, between irresponsibility and accountability, between autonomy and conformity." Through it all, the authors stick firmly to their belief that college should be more than a quest for good grades and a big paycheck.

In 1997 Bob returned to WPI to spend A-Term as entrepreneur-in-residence and distinguished professor of biomedical engineering, while Sue taught writing. "We left Stanford with a first draft of the book," says Bob, "but it was not at the top of our priority list." But the manuscript generated interest at WPI, where the Harveys were urged to seek a commercial publisher with the capacity for good marketing and wide distribution. Virtual Reality is dedicated to Stanford staff members and to Assistant Provost for Academic Affairs Lance Schachterle and his colleagues at WPI "for their encouragement and assistance."

"The readers on the WPI faculty and student affairs staff who work with first-year students thought there was much in the book that college professionals, as well as parents, would enjoy and would learn from," says Schachterle. "We had seen and appreciated how effective the Harveys were in relating to our incoming students during their stay here. It's not often that academic professionals can empathize so well with 18-year-olds and write so catchily about their interactions with them."

Now retired and living in Alamo, Calif., Bob Harvey is consumed with a new focus--Alamo Trails Press, which he founded to publish Virtual Reality and promote it through the Internet. "We've been making a series of very expensive mistakes as we learn about e-commerce," he laughs. "But we find that if somebody has six months of experience in this field, he's an old hand." Bob and Sue teach courses at community colleges and through the Elderhostel program for senior citizens. They also have several other books in the pipeline at Alamo Trails. For the first time in almost 25 years, the couple lives alone, in a private home. Notes Bob, "The silence is deafening."

--Joan Killough-Miller

Editor's Note: Excerpts of the Harveys' book are on the World Wide Web at www.alamotrails.com. Their e-mail address is bsharve@pacbell.net.