22 Harvarder- Than-Thou Theory

This is the popular image--Harvard men as snobs, outwardly cynical and blase and self-assured (that's the part Harvard taught them) and inwardly ambitious (that's the part they came with). People have been talking about Harvard snobs for at lest two hundred years and for two hundred years it's been at least partly true. It will be strange, because while at first it will seem more foreign than anything in the world, after a couple years you'll notice--on a trip home, maybe--that without even wanting to you've picked up some of the Harvard manner, too.

23 Not Everyone Can Be One Theory

Dr. Chase N. Peterson '52, vice president for alumni affairs and development, went on local talk show a few years back when he was Harvard's dean of admissions. He talked about Harvard and truckdrivers. "Truckdriving is still an honorable and well-paid profession," Peterson said. "All youngsters are not equipped to go to college... all of them have different aptitudes and attitudes." Harvard fit into things thusly: "Harvard stands for excellence and high standards and there is nothing wrong with that." The Boston Globe called Peterson "outspoken" for all that, which is true in that a lot, maybe most, of the people at Harvard probably agree with him but almost none would say so on TV.

The Harvard Life

24 Sex Theory

There was a great 60s junk novel called The Harvard Experiment that was about a college in Cambridge, Mass. (Har-Rad, get it?) where they put all freshman in rooms with members of the opposite sex, just so the could be fully educated. The point is that if you were going to hint plausibly that any American college is a sex haven, you'd hint that it's Harvard. The old tabloid Hearst newspaper in Boston liked that Harvard the best: "HARVARD BARES WILD PARTIES" was its banner headline one day.

On the surface, perhaps it's justified: there are coed dorms here, even coed bathrooms, and everyone talks about sex all the time. You will be able to tell your parents Harvard sex stories that will shock them. But as always with such things, the talk outweighs the action. Harvard's generally exotic image is what makes the sex-haven tag fit.

25 Psychological Meat Grinder Theory

You'll hear a lot of this one this year--in this issue of the Crimson, for instance. One self-acclaimed Harvard savant used to say, "The thing about Harvard is that if you're cool, it's cool. It's only if you've got some flaw, some weak point. Harvard will find it, and bring it out." People are always talking about how intense it is here, how they've changed, how high school seems long ago. Maybe people are happy at Harvard but they're hardly ever

The reason this probably happens is that it's a tremendous shock for people who are used to being big shots to come here and have to adjust to being just like everyone else.

26 Place of God Theory

For much of its early existence Harvard's function was primarily to train young men for the Protestant ministry; the University was founded in piety, and, some say, that piety lives on (it's just a little harder to find these days, having become sort of secularized). On the surface Harvard is a fairly Godless place, and President Pusey used to attract a great deal of derision by saying things about "the present low estate of religion at Harvard." Someone once asked Pusey what the single most important quality for a Harvard president was, and he answered "a belief in God," but nobody says that sort of thing any more.

27 Seat of Learning Theory

The first thing written about Harvard that anyone has been able to dig up is a pamphlet called "New England's First Fruits," apparently designed to entice people into emigrating here. It says the University was founded "to advance learning and perpeutate it to posterity." Years laters Tomas Wolfe's fictional hero, Eugene Gant, came here and started reading books like crazy because "he simply wanted to know about everything on earth; he wanted to devour the earth and it drove him mad when he saw he could not do this." If there was anywhere you'd expect a modern Dr. Faustus to turn up it would be Widener Library, but these days, alas, people mostly talk about how they learned what they learned at Harvard outside of classrooms and libraries, how they had "learning experiences" here.