Doug Schmidt paused for a moment, leaned further back in his armchair, and lifted a coke bottle to his lips. When he put down the bottle, he said, "I guess what I'm saying is that this little germ got planted three or four years ago, and has spread hierarchically."

Douglas M. Schmidt '76 is the new president of Phillips Brooks House, as of March 1, and this "germ" is going to be the central concern of his presidency.

The 30-member "cabinet" of PBH has decided to shift the House's emphasis away from social service toward a commitment to social change. The members have adopted a more wary attitude to pure social service programs. They are ambivalent about oiling squeaky school systems with tutoring programs, about maintaining reading programs they believe can and should be shut down. PBH ended its tutoring program in the Brighton school system in 1972 because volunteers "saw themselves being used by the superintendent of the school as an excuse not to provide facilities," says retiring PBH president Stephen D. Cooke '75. In 1973, PBH stopped organizing dramatic productions at the Longfellow School in Cambridge, because the volunteers didn't see any long-term beneficial results from the program. A big brother/sister program at Columbia Point succumbed for similar reasons in 1972, and aspects of several other PBH programs have been dropped in recent years because the House did not see any real improvements coming from them.

Schmidt says this year is going to be "a deciding one." He says the members of PBH are going to have to take a stand on four questions:

* "How much does PBH owe to the Cambridge community?"

* "How much is PBH a part of Harvard?"

* "How much is PBH adding to the problems it is trying to solve?" and,

* "What does it mean to volunteer?"

For the past several years, the members of PBH's cabinet have been meeting every two or three weeks in a wood-paneled room on the second floor of PBH's ivy-covered building in the Yard; the smaller group of executives convenes twice every week; and the entire staff has been going on two weekend retreats each year. The new cabinet already met for ten hours last week.

Since early last spring, these leaders have gradually and collectively decided the PBH needs some up-to-date answers to those four questions--questions which PBH leaders have not formally reassessed since the era of late-sixties activism.

PBH has begun to create committees and renovate existing ones to try to direct its energies from social service to social action. Joseph E. Sandler '75, retiring chairman of Prisons, one of the twelve committees now standing, says Prisons was one of the first committees to "change over." He says the committee to "change over". He says the committee really began to change direction in the summer of 1973, when he himself was working for a Massachusetts organization, the Ad Hoc Committee for Prison Reform. During that summer, John Boone, commissioner of correction, who was working for the elimination of correctional institutions, was fired after holding office for a year. Phillips Brooks House decided to join the loose coalition of people and organization in the state pressing for radical change in the penal system, particularly the completion of Boone's goals.

"Most of the movement acknowledges that teaching behind bars doesn't work. It's an artificial environment. It's destructive and dehumanizing. Yet most of the committee is still teaching in the institutions, this represents a conflict," says Sandler.

The Prisons Committee's conflict is typical of the problems of the whole House. Massachusetts penal reform groups have brought the committee more abruptly face-to-face with the inconsistencies of its programs: last summer a prison official cited the work of PBH volunteers as evidence of Bridgewater's positive correctional facilities. In a suit brought by the Prisoners' Rights Project.

Prisons has since moved into the area of political and family service for prisoners, by placing volunteers at the Families and Friends of Prisoners Center in Dorchester, and does research and mailing work pushing for legislation to standardize parole eligibility. Yet with the simultaneous continuation of teaching programs, Sandler says he believes that the Prisons committee has compromised itself.

The Community Medical Program, on the other hand, is a committee whose changes give PBH executives more cause for optimism. During the last two years, the committee has moved away from placing volunteers in clinics, and has attempted to make available medicine, health care, and nutrition to more people who need them. Last year the committee started a hot lunch program for elderly people, and it is instituting a year-off program for students who want to work in rural medicine. Volunteers now create programs where they see a need for them.