The Harrad Experiment

by Robert H. Rimmer

  It would be understood by Phase 2 students that the sexual environment was designed to encourage happy, joyous, noncommitted premarital sex with each alternate roommate but that in each case foreplay to intercourse would be a mutually agreed-upon decision.

  Obviously, in a total educational program of this kind, some students would be oriented toward their own sex. In Phase 1 this would occasion no problem since roommates would be of the same sex, and those with homosexual or lesbian orientations would find each other. Young people would grow up seeing loving heterosexual lovemaking on television and in films. While the basic thrust in human society is to encourage male and female mating, same-sex mating would carry no stigma. In all probability, in this new world of education young men and women who were sexually unsure of themselves would try the Phase 2 experiment. Flagrant, unstructured, multiple sexual contacts (either homo- or hetero-) in either phase would be cause for expulsion.

  The logistics of gouping forty-eight students with two graduate students to run the weekly human-values seminar could be worked out easily in the present dormitory arrangements of many colleges. Obviously, student housing would have to be greatly expanded but with hundreds of army and navy installations no longer needed, they could be converted easily to student housing, and thus would take care of the “pork barrel” for many politicians.

  The group of forty-eight students would give students a common identity. It is similiar to the house plans of some universities and would provide a much more normal coed environment for the four undergraduate years than now exists in sex-segregated sororities and fraternities. The required human-values seminar would create a group interaction and learning experience that is unavailable in most colleges and universities. Phase 2 students, with a healthy outlet for their sexual drives and a shared learning experience with a roommate of the opposite sex, would find a sense of purpose and the intellectual stimulation that do not exist in most academic environments today.

  Delaying the entry of millions of young people into the employment market and creating an entirely new work force of minimum-wage employees in the thirteen-week work/study cycle will solve some economic problems and create others. What to do with the million or so young people no longer needed in the armed forces would be resolved. All students on the work cycle would agree to job rotation and any kind of work to which they might be assigned. During the four years they would not only do much of the low-level, nonskilled “service sector” type of work but also under a carefully planned program they would gain experience in the business and industrial world in both the manufacturing and the advanced service sectors.

  Many service businesses would be happy to relocate to university or college areas, where there would be a continual supply of minimum-wage workers. Citibank, with its headquarters in New York City and its worldwide credit operation in Sioux City, Iowa, is an example of what I am talking about.

  At this point you may agree that, because of the growing costs of undergraduate education, the work/study proposal has some merit. But you may be still dubious about Phase 2. When The Harrad Experiment was first published, I received many letters asking when I personally was planning to create a real-life undergraduate Harrad College. My answer was and is that all some progressive college has to do is offer the other-sex roommate program, along with the human-values seminar to an incoming freshman class. This would receive wide publicity, and the college would undoubtedly receive many applications from both sexes.

  Thus far no educators have dared challenge openly what seems to be public morality. Surprisingly, in the past twenty-five years hundreds of parents and students have tried to locate Harrad in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and thousands of those who read the novel were enthusiastic about the concept.

  What would happen if a Phase I and Phase 2 undergraduate program, as I have outlined, came into existence? My guess is that initially only about 10 percent of the students and/or their parents would risk or approve of the arrangement that alternated roommates of the other sex.

  But that would produce several hundred thousand students annually who would try and “survive” the Phase 2 experiment The interesting question is how this would affect their postmarital sexual lives and their sense of a life purpose and well-being. While no hard statistics are available, most young people, even those who have some premarital experiences, are not so promiscuous as some of the popular magazines would lead you to believe. My guess is that a majority of young people still marry the first and only person with whom they have a premarital sexual experience. The minority, who may or may not have had as many sexual experiences as the Harrad/Premar concept envisions, rarely experience day-to-day intimacy with a partner of the other sex in a socially permissive environment over a longer period of time—especially in an environment that allows them to communicate and share their experiences in an ongoing human-values seminar not only with uncommitted partners but also with other uncommitted couples as they become friends and lovers.

  Young people who had experienced a Phase 2, four-year mental and emotional intimacy with four members of the other sex and continued to live with a person of their own choosing during their last two undergraduate years would presumably be better able to choose lifetime marriage partners. Whether they ultimately chose to marry one of the roommates they had lived with or delayed marriage until later, they would know how to choose marriage partners who would reinforce and confirm them as total human beings. In a very real sense, unlike most marriage partners today, Phase 2 graduates would be educated for each other and they would have a much better chance of making a primary pair-bonding that would last a lifetime.

  These primary pair-bondings would not necessarily have to be monogamous. You will remember that at the conclusion of The Harrad Experiment each of the pairs, Harry and Beth, Sheila and Stanley, Jack and Valerie, were married to each other but also as a group. Later, in graduate school they are involved in a warm and loving, six-way, postmarital sexual exchange. In reality, they created a new style of family and remained closely involved as friends and lovers throughout their lives.

  If you read my novel Proposition 31, at the end you will discover in some detail what happened to the InSix many years later, the Proposition 31 concept is actually a continuation of the kind of multiple, postmarital relationships that I originally proposed in Harrad and later in Premar. The premise is that if we give young people sound training in interpersonal relationships we can create new types of family structure beyond monogamy. With a Phase 2 background, up to three couples after they pass the age of thirty (hence the title Proposition 31) could merge their families and form family corporations where all members, including the children, were equal shareholders.

  In many other novels I have proposed that we should legalize on an a priori basis other forms of interpersonal relationships such as bigamy, corporate marriage, and synergamy. As we approach the 21st century and the increasing financial problems of living independent single or monogamous lives, throughout a lifespan that is now close to 80 years, I’m sure there will be revived interest in creating small communal family groupings and new family structures that will give individuals the financial security and emotional strength that no longer exist in many nuclear American families.

  Whether you agree that the Harrad/Premar premises carried to their logical conclusion would pave the way for stronger families, I’d like to argue that the roommate structure of Phase 2 is not so shocking as you might think. During question periods, after I have lectured to college audiences, inevitably some young woman will raise the question: “Do you mean that I’d have no choice? I enjoy music, books, and poetry. What if my roommate was a football jock who was studying to be a plumber?”

  My answer with a chuckle is: “That is the best thing that could happen to you or him. In a Phase 2 environment you would quickly learn how to accept one another with more open minds. You both might even begin to think about a more creative world where sports and activities were coed and played for fun and not watc
hed like big-league football or hockey to sublimate aggression.”

  Both Harrad and Premar have, in the past, been promoted by my publishers as extensions of computer-matched dating services. In actuality, attempts to match people of similar tastes—on the same “wavelength”—are never very successful. Living with an “opposite” can be not only a learning experience but it can also become a loving experience, if two people can laugh at themselves. Four years of undergraduate education integrated by the human-values seminar would ultimately create a common bond of understanding between you and a wide variety of people. Even more important, it would eliminte at a young age the adversary relationship between men and women.

  You would learn how to maintain a loving relationship with many different kinds of people of the other sex. Lifetime friendships would ensue between people who had shared complete self-disclosure and mental and sexual intimacy. Keep in mind that Phase 2 would not be a sexual free-for-all. Roommates of the opposite sex wouldn’t immediately jump into bed with a total stranger. Rather, over a period of weeks or months, a person would slowly discover the sheer wonder of divergences from and similarities with another person. You’d learn how to share your fears and hopes. Guided by the discussions in the human-values seminars, you’d gradually reveal and dare to become the kind of person you want to be, and your roommate would be responding in the same way.

  In every sense, this 21st-century education would be a four-year adventure in self-discovery. Unlike typical undergraduate students today, a student would dare share himself or herself with many people as a total human being. Young people wouldn’t experience the deep loneliness that many college counselors say is typical of the undergraduate experience.

  Already, in our new, sexually open world we have to cope with a million teenage pregnancies annually and the social and financial cost of unwanted children, some of whom become future derelicts and criminals. We live in a world where a million or more divorces a year, involving more than six million children under the age of 17, has become a lifestyle. The nuclear family—husband and wife with two or more children—now represents only a third of the households in the United States; dwellings occupied by one person (or mothers on welfare) represent 30 percent of the seventy million households. We live in a world where single parenting has become a way of life for millions, and children try to find roots and security as they are shunted between high-rise apartments and condos or among a variety of slum dwellings. Many are among the homeless, either with one parent or as runaways.

  We live in a world where various age groups no longer mingle, and millions of senior citizens move to a Sun Belt state, if they can afford it, to enjoy the mental comfort of their own peer group, as well as escape the cold climate. We live in a world where singles live with singles, a world where if singles wed they can’t afford single-family housing and must continue to live in apartments, with no patch of earth of their own or for their children. We live in a world where if you are past 60 and haven’t escaped to warmer climates, you may end up in a retirement center or a low-cost senior center from which in a few more years, you’ll leave by the back door—so as not to disturb the tranquility of those still living—to a nursing home or the cemetery.

  The Harrad/ Premar solution is not a daydream. A financial guarantee to every young person of a complete education through their 21st year could prove as important as our historical funding of universal secondary education has been. Furthermore, there is proof that free education has supported democracy and capitalism that work better than any communist or socialist system. Combining a guaranteed Phase 1 undergraduate education with a Phase 2 for those who wish it, in a Harrad/Premar style of environment would give millions of young men and women a renewed vision. It would confirm the joys of their human sexuality, and let them discover the joys of loving and caring for one or more person of the other sex throughout a lifetime. It would open the door to many new styles of families.

  It’s up to you to dare to venture into a new world of human relationships and stop the drift to disaster that now prevails. Believe me, millions of Americans are ready now to climb to the next level of mental, sexual, emotional, and economic freedom, based on a deeper sharing of their lives with others.

  Notes

  1 I imagine the leadership among government personnel and politicians might be found within the framework of a new, liberal version of one of the present American political parties.

  2 Nongraduates of high school could later take an equivalency test for voting eligibility.

  3 This novel is currently out of print, but may be in libraries or secondhand bookstores. It sold a million copies in paperback (published in 1976 by New American Library), preceded in 1975 by a hardcover edition from Crown Publishers.

  ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY

  The annotated bibliography that appeared in the first edition of The Harrad Experiment contained fifty-six entries. It set at least one precedent. It was probably the first time a bibliography appeared in a noveL I suggested that any college or university could use the bibliography to run a human-values seminar. It is still my feeling that such a required seminar would integrate undergraduate learning in many ways.

  In 1966, when Harrad was first published, very few colleges offered courses on marriage and the family. Today, many courses are available, with textbooks that not only cover all aspects of human sexuality in great detail but also explore the new sexual and family lifestyles that have become a way of life over the past twenty years. Many of these textbooks recommend The Harrad Experiment and Proposition 31 as outside reading. When I was on the college lecture circuit in the 1970s I was surprised at how few men took these courses; marriage and the family was still the domain of women.

  In 1978, before Bantam issued the 40th printing of Tfre Harrad Experiment (after which it went out of print until 1990), I decided to revise the bibliography almost completely and confine it to fifty-two entries so that it would parallel the human-values reading program, which also underlies the thirteen-week work/ study program described in The Premar Experiments. The idea, not fully developed in Harrad, but detailed in Premar, is that in addition to regular courses Harrad/Premar students would cover a book a week in discussions with seminar leaders, who would be graduate students.

  If you have read the preceding essay, “The Harrad/Premar Solution,” you will realize that I am proposing this as a practical 21st-century approach to educating the younger generation. You will also note that I have suggested that Phase 2, or living with a roommate of the opposite sex, is an option. The following bibliography is proposed for those who take this option. It should be understood that the following list is not cast in stone.

  The idea of reading a book a week, in addition to required reading for courses, may seem like a formidable problem, but keep in mind that students, particularly in Phase 2, would be covering the same books with their roommates and would be meeting several times a week in the seminar. They would learn the art of skimming, plus the joy of absorbing ideas that are being explored by their peers at the same time.

  Keep in mind that the seminar is in a very real sense a “deconditioning” process. Students would be guided throughout their undergraduate years in examining and reexamining values acquired from their teachers and parents during the first seventeen or so years of their lives. They would gradually build their own values—subject of course to continuous evaluation and possible modification—as the sine qua non of living a fully realized life.

  During the past twenty-five years I have learned something about bibliographies. Some books have longevity, some don’t! Less than twenty books have been retained from the original bibliography, and another ten or more have been deleted from the 1978 edition. Many of the books are concerned with every aspect of human sexuality, a prime concern of young people in a Harrad/Premar kind of environment. These same books will be of interest to people past their college years who may still be searching for answers. I have also included books that deal with every kind of
problem facing us in the 1990s, and well into the 21st century.

  If I were guiding a human-values seminar for teenagers (note that I haven’t said “teaching,” which implies indoctrination), I would concentrate on the books on human sexuality for the first month or so, including several on contraception which I have not listed, and then gradually broaden the subject matter. Thus, the numerical order in which I have listed the books might not be others’ preference.

  Harrad/Premar may be a few years down the road, but I firmly believe that a new style of education that embraces all Americans is inevitable. Capitalism and democracy are still viable ideas in a society prepared to toss out the shallow values of television that still inundate too much of our lives. You may not agree with me, but I think the only way to expand horizons is with the printed word. Turn off the tube a few hours a day and read ... read ... read. Harrad/ Premar students quickly discover that the key to living a full, self-actualized life is shared reading and the pursuit of knowledge with a loving friend.

  1. Alex Comfort, The Joys of Sex and More Joys (New York: Crown, 1972 and 1974). Many Harrad/Premar students may have already discovered these volumes, but if they are used from the beginning of the human-values seminar they will give young people a common frame of reference.

  2. Patricia Raley, Making Love: How to Be Your Own Sex Tlrerapist (New York: Dial Press, 1976). It’s a tossup whether this book or Comfort’s should come first. Raley’s book has photographs of loving couples, instead of the warm, erotic drawings which appear in Comfort’s two books. Obviously, interest in both Raley and Comfort will continue for many months beyond the first two weeks.

  3. Edwin J. Haeberle, The Sex Atlas (New York, Seabury Press, 1978). An illustrated guide. Every Harrad/ Premar student will probably want to own a copy or at least share it with his or her roommate. It’s an encyclopedic textbook covering every aspect of human sexuality with excellent text and hundreds of unique and lovely photographs.