But such rationalizations soon found more substantial support, for Rumplestiltskin began to notice that Harvard's version of excellence was not exactly the same as that affirmed by many others. Indeed, he found, Harvard prized only a very peculiar sort of excellence.

This excellence was certainly not moral. Nobody was concerned about the goodness of undergraduates. Indeed, the University required only that they keep out of trouble with the police, and that they obey a certain minimum of administrative regulations most of which had to do with two national preoccupations: money and sex. Bills must be payed immediately and girls must never be used overtime in rooms.

Beyond this minimum, the University not only required no virtues, it did not even discuss them. Virtue was a minor topic in the philosophy department, seldom discussed since the rise of "modern" analytic methods.

But if the University's attitude towards moral excellence was purely punitive, its attitude towards physical virtue was the reverse. Rumplestiltskin found that while the University encouraged athletics for all, it encouraged the athletic endeavors of the naturally proficient with especial fervor. The most excellent athletes were given rewards of cash and kudos, and put into the entertainment business on weekends. And yet, strangely, the University did not seem to believe that excellence was the only standard, for it also required the physically incompetent to perform alarming feats during their first year of residence. It seemed to be a case of "everybody's being physical, but some people being more physical than others."

But it was in the realm of the intellect that the University made its greatest demands for excellence, and it was in his examination of the intellect that Rumplestiltskin discovered his best excuses for denying the importance of excellence.

1/16 of a Calculator

The first measure of intellectual excellence was given even before he arrived in Cambridge, a series of tests in which people asked him to manipulate verbal and mathematical symbols very rapidly, asked him to give "correct" answers to ambiguous questions, and tested his capacity for making or discovering analogies. Rumplestiltskin, it appeared, could do all of these things about 1/16 as fast as the University's electronic calculator, and so he was immediately admitted to the University as a distinguished student.

It was several months later when he discovered that there were other phases of intellectual excellence. One of the most important was the capacity to talk facilely about subjects of no importance to him. He learned that he could use words for anything and everything, as a substitute for excellence or a demonstration of it.

Especially, he learned that words of many syllables were a demonstration of the great virtue, intelligence, and that they could fill the silences at cocktail parties and examinations, which was apparently absolutely essential under the University ethic.

He learned to talk about creativity as the dynamic element in the human situation, and to treat all ideas as forms of other ideas, just as he had learned to treat all behavior as a substitute for some other kind of repressed behavior. And when he had related the configuration of events to the total pattern of incidental perceptions he found that a meaningful relationship existed between the transient and the intransient elements of the situation, which was worth an 'A' and therefore equated with intellectual excellence.

Overwhelmed with his own success he often fooled even himself into thinking that he was becoming something more than human, and began to believe that a liberal education was worth more than he had originally thought. He was only slightly disturbed upon those occasions on which he noticed that these symbolic manipulations were of absolutely no relevance to any of his most imminent dreams, and seldom if ever seemed to stir him from his invariably supine intellectual position.

He also noticed that intellectual excellence on the undergraduate level was in no way equated with his puritanical notions about the need for work. Apparently anticipating the fact that the proto-academics would soon be required to suffocate in book dust sixteen hours a day, the University granted a four year respite in which intellectual sophistication plus a few hours of work per week would pass for genius.

In terms of actual requirements, he observed, the University was even more lenient. While the implicit expectation of high grades could make many students intensely anxious about their inattention to their studies, the actual requirements could be met with almost no effort by anybody actually admitted to the University.

But requirements did not, of course, end with excellence, because excellence alone does not define the University's concept of "a liberal education." Indeed, some maintain that excellence has very little to do with liberal education, and is but an inescapable phase of America. These voices added that since excellence was less emphasized by Harvard's anomic culture than by most universities, a Harvard education was perforce more "liberal."

The exact meaning of liberality was extremely hard to define. Primarily it seemed to have to do with freedom, and at Harvard this freedom was more related to unlimited choice than to the absence of compulsive objectives.