Most undergraduates here feel generally that they're getting the short shrift; the conventional wisdom is that if it's just a good college education you're looking for, rather than the Harvard mystique, you should have gone elsewhere. You won't get much individual attention from faculty members, and you're mostly allowed to go your own way. Harvard leaves you alone.

A selling point of this theory is that Harvard College doesn't have the indisputably high ranking among colleges that, say, Harvard Law School or Harvard Medical School have among law schools and medical schools.

If asked to elaborate, a proponent of the Forgotten Undergraduates Theory would blame faculty members for his plight, explaining that they're all either trying to publish, or making pots of money doing consulting work, or off skiing in Gstaad. The system for rising through the academic hierarchy here does not, after all, reward teaching ability.

6 Mother Theory

Harvard is like a womb, sheltering you for four years. As Samuel Pitts Duffield '92 put it in a Class Ode,

"Fair Mother, we pray for thy help ere we turn Toward the doubt and darkness ahead;

May the fires of thy beacons flash high as they burn

And illumine the path where we tread."

7 Lover Theory

Harvard is like a coquettish woman, always tempting you with its glories while holding them back. From another Class Ode, by Henry Copley Greene '94:

"Fierce maiden, true life, whom we wooed with grim fight,

In past dreams to thy conquest we woke."

A cruder version is the Whore Theory, which goes like this: "Harvard is like a whore, see, 'cause you pay to get screwed."

This is also probably a sexist theory.

8 Left-Wing Bastion Theory