If, at my death, my executors, or more properly my creditors, find any precious MSS in my desk, men here I prospectively ascribe all the honor and the glory to whaling, for a whaleship was my Yale College and my Harvard. Herman Melville Moby Dick. 1851

Long before the first proverbial pig was skinned for athletic use. Harvard and Yale had been hoped together in friendly rivalry in baseball crew. But even before sports became the official channel for intramural hatred, the two schools had developed a friendly loathing between them. It is in their institutional roots.

John Harvard, an Englishman converted to Puritanism, sailed to the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1637 to preach his belief. He died a year later "of a consumption" and left 400 books and $800 to a recently formed school in the American Cambridge.

It turns out that Harvard sailed on the same boat with Edward Hopkins, the uncle of Elihu Yale, a man who did a similar favor for a struggling New Haven college in 1718. Never mind the differences in the patron saints--Harvard was a stern religious man while Yale, the governor of Madras, used his official position to reap a fortune in the diamond trade and sent his wife off to England alone while he lived with a Portuguese mistress

Yale was established largely out of concern that the 65-year-old Massachusetts school was slipping and nine out of 10 ministers were Harvard graduates. The competition was set from the beginning and the incessant comparison has lasted nearly three centuries.

Charles Franklin Thwing (Harvard Class of 1876) once said about the two institutions that "Harvard stands as the mother of movements, and Yale as the mother of men." That epithet best sums up the comparative images from the colonial days through the Derek C. Bok-A. Bartlett Giamatti era. The older school pioneers educational reform, the younger cares about who it's educating, or so the perception goes.

Indeed, even looking at the histories through blue tinted lenses, one can hardly dispute the first half of the axiom. George W. Pierson has been affiliated with Yale since his 1922 graduation, and he is currently its Larned Professor of History emeritus. His-not-completely unbiased two-volume examination of his school's history from 1871 to 1937 consistently portrays the sons of Eli as vascillating on reforms, adhering to the traditional values until another institution, usually Harvard, paved the way.

It was Harvard, for example, that scrapped its Latin and Greek requirements in the late 19th century--over the vociferous objections of Yale administrators; Yale followed 30 years later. Harvard, Princeton and Columbia had all adopted honors programs before Yale complied in 1913. Harvard has drawn national attention for major curriculum reforms--the General Education programs of the 1940s, and the Core Curriculum repudiation of Gen Ed in the 1970s. Yale currently has a specialized gen ed program.

But the episode most indicative of the relative progressive nature of the two schools is the decision to establish the House Plan at Harvard in 1928, followed shortly by the Residential College system at Yale. Edward S. Harkness (Yale Class of 1897) first proposed the mini-college idea to his alma mater in 1926, and promised the necessary funds. He met with agonizing debate and indecision. Two years later he was frustrated enough to make a jaunt up to Cambridge to offer a similar proposal to President A. Lawrence Lowell (Harvard Class of 1877). "It took Mr. Lowell about 10 seconds to accept," writes Samuel Eliot Morrison in his Three Centuries of Harvard. The next April, Yale finally accepted a similar plan, and Harkness funded that one as well.

The defense raised by New Haven loyalists is that Harvard has railroaded through changes for prestige, ignoring the concerns of its charges. Sure, they say, Charles William Eliot, who ruled Harvard with an iron fist for 40 years past the turn of the century, succeeded in transcending a small school into the preeminent university in the world. But it was at the expense of the College. At Yale, they insist, the University has been built up around the college, and undergraduates receive primary attention.

Today, recipients of Yale B.A.s will probably has seen more tenured professors and fewer lecture halls than their Harvard counterparts. They will also have taken more courses--36, compared to 32

This "Harvard may be better, but Yale students better" line goes back a long way. When Harvard philosopher George Santayana took a road trip for the 15 version of The Game, he left with some sobering comparisons.

Similarly, Santayana observed that Yale was more "American" In fact, throughout its first two centuries. Yale had a more geographic diversity. The less affluent New Haven had no equivalent of the Boston Brahmin and hence was less status conscious. It was hardly a Jacksonian democracy, but it was more open than Harvard. Sociologist David Riesman (Harvard '33) describes the differences during his undergraduate days, writing that at Yale, membership in secret societies was based on personal characteristics, but "at Harvard, it was ascribed not achieved. No matter how much of a lout you were you could get in a final club [with connections]. There wasn't anything you could do by effort."

...Yale is in many respects what Harvard used to be. It has maintained the traditions of a New England college more faithfully. Anyone visiting the two colleges would think Yale by far the older institution. The past of America makes itself felt there in many subtle ways: there is a kind of colonial self-reliance, and simplicity of aim, a touch of non-conformist separation from the great ideas and movements of the world.

The more-populist image has persisted even in recent years. During the turmoil of the late '60s, Harvard President Nathan M. Pusey '28 sent club-wielding cops into University Hall to end the student takeover. Yale head Kingman Brewster avoided violence by stating at a press conference that Black Panthers probably could nto get a fair trial in the United States. Current Harvard President Bok has a reputation for distance from the undergraduates and political priggishness. Giamatti holds office hours and has publically denounced the Moral Majority.