"Harvard University, the oldest and one of the foremost of American educational institutions, situated chiefly in Cambridge, Mass., but also in Boston and other places."

This is the terse and unsatisfactory description you find when you look up Harvard in the Encyclopedia Brittanica, fourteenth edition. Ask a middle western business man about Harvard, and he will tell you that Harvard is a hotbed of radicals and crackpots. Ask a communist, and he will explain that Harvard is a citadel of reaction, and that the University's much-vaunted liberalism is so much window-dressing. Ask a Cambridge citizen, and he will inform you that Harvard is a fur-lined cradle for the idle and arrogant sons of the rich. Go to Mickey Sullivan, the Donald Duck of Cambridge politics, and he will embrace all these concepts--he will picture the typical Harvard student as a wealthy young snob, driving madly to a deb party in his sixteen cylinder-convertible, and distributing communist literature as he goes.

But if you really want to know what Harvard is like, look for yourself; it's well worthwhile. If you regard the University merely as a microscope through which to study the world, you may overlook the comedy and tragedy, the richness of University life itself. Of course you can go to the other extreme, and bury yourself to the ears in the petty trivialities of a college community, a failing to which even the students of a great university located in a metropolitan area are not immune. But there's little danger of that, when talk of war--in classrooms, in meetings, in newspapers, on the air, and almost daily in this column--will do its best to make you scorn the humdrum and familiar pattern or university life, a life which can be both dramatic and exciting.

A month after you register in Memorial Hall you may think you know all about Harvard because you are aware of the difference between the Weld and Newell boat houses, and between the Harvard Union and the Student Union. "If you're still not quite satisfied, you might try reading Weller's "Not to Eat, Not for Love," a comprehensive and moving account of Harvard undergraduates written by a man who came to Cambridge to study Harvard, rather than to study at Harvard.

You can learn a lot by observing and participating in the community you are going to live in for four years. If there's anything more you want to know about it, just ask a Sophomore.