Alberta Arthurs gave a thumbnail sketch of today's Harvard students, prefacing her description with the caveat, "You have to realize that I'm speculating, I'm guessing, I'm generalizing, and I may be wrong. If there are undergraduates here, they would undoubtedly correct me." And then she said of today's undergraduates:

*"They're incredibly interesting students, and incredibly articulate students. That's no change."

*"They are terribly hard working students--earnest, directed, career-minded."

*"They are critical, they are constructive, they are very carefully intelligent about Harvard as they are about anything else, and about everything else. They care a bit more than earlier generations of students have."

*"They manage, despite the fact that they are earnest, hard-working, intelligent, directed students, they manage to have a terribly good time. The freshmen class this year held its first annual semi-formal dance."

*"They turn out, participate, listen, learn at every opportunity."

*"There are more people in church in recent years than there have been, and that includes young people. The students are asking for ethics courses. They are cramming for exams, but they're also interested in ethics courses."

*"They're dressing better than they have in quite a long time. And they worry about money a lot. They carry many of the concerns here that their parents are feeling at home."

Yes, Alberta Arthurs was saying, everything you've heard about the changing personal and sexual mores of these students is true. But aren't they wonderful people? The Class of '51 applauded warmly.

Dean Rosovsky was the grumpy voice of Harvard past. Excessive permissiveness, he said, has weakened liberal education. General education has lost its "zest" as fewer faculty these days are able to handle the large survey courses. There is too much academic specialization. And students aren't getting enough guidance.

"I think that at the moment our curriculum resembles rather too much a Chinese menu at a very good restaurant," he said. "But I think that a Chinese menu in the hands of a novice can often result in less than a perfect meal. I would like to supply a few waiters."

The Class of '51 laughed, and then gave the dean loud applause.

In the brief question period that followed, classmates served up four cream-puff questions to Bok and his colleagues. Then, on their way to lunch, alumni scrambled up the steps of Widener, where Harry Selig, barking through a bullhorn, choreagraphed them into an enormous wedge for the official class portrait--his 50th.