For many others, the discovery that Harvard is not an intellectual utopia and that brilliance is not tantamount to social acceptance brings a crisis in the whole attitude toward knowledge. A vision of Harvard which anticipates social success arising from intellectual ability is often reason for coming, and the discovery that no synthesis exists, that the academic conscience which drove them through school does not bring adequate rewards, and that, more intelligent or no, others are clearly more sophisticated, all can be profoundly disturbing.

Since the intellectual often feels some guilt at hoping for acceptance through intellectual skill, which he may regard as a corruption of knowledge, any failure to attain this success is likely to have fairly subtle repercussions.

The all-around-boy who combined academic, athletic, and social virtues at school may quickly abandon illusions of being well-rounded when he discovers how many fields he can enter only as a second-rater.

Innumerable bits of confusion can be added to this emerging pattern: the advanced standing student, who, having received recognition of his ability, becomes more sensitive to failure, but, because he has moved into a higher level of competition, can also excuse failure more adequately. Similar in some ways is the erstwhile student leader who may come to College without expecting his accustomed success, but is still peculiarly sensitive to success and failure in this field.

This is only a sketch of the way pre-College experience reappears during the Freshman year, but it virtually discredits the frequent claim that the first year is good because it forces students to reexamine themselves, draw on their inner resources, and grow in stature. In fact, many of the changes a Freshman goes through are progress only because the Freshman year is considered a time of progress.

A suggestion that illusions could be broken more gently is not simple humanitarianism. The shock of newness does not always a bring reactions best suited to overcoming barriers, and often it results in retreat from competition.

For all this, however, one should not slip into the delusion that the student without expectations is best off. The same expectations which, unfulfilled, are so disturbing, are the foundation of any interest in education. Without idealistic hopes, a student would be little more than a memory bank, useful perhaps, but scarcely worth Harvard's time or effort.

Although the Freshman year often strikes the new student as a series of disillusionments, it has a positive aspect as well. For in addition to focing him back on his own past, it provides him with certain attitudes and characteristics which are the hallmark of a Harvard education. Like any human institution, the Freshman year is more than the sum of its parts: it has a culture of its own and is a meeting ground for tradition and official culture as well. It is as important for what it makes of the student as for what it forces him to make of himself.

Student culture can do more to determine matters about education and what the means than all the efforts of Faculty and administration. But the studies of student have been made in relatively homogeneous " institutions" which so control the environment that activities, goals, and rewards are held in common. Despite emphasis on standing, and honors, and despite the experience of living in the Yard and eating the Union, Harvard certainly lacks the uniformity of, say, a medical school.

In an honors thesis, Robert W. McCarley studied the Freshman year with extensive and examined the "total institution" . Although his conclusions suggested reservation on the "totality' of the Freshman year, he a student culture, and found that rather representing the upper class values of the Harvard stereotype, the College was dominated by a middle class outlook. Indeed, showed that their emphasis on ascribed and experiencing college put students from upper class backgrounds under greater stress than middle class contemporaries who emphasis achieved status and looked at the College opportunity for further achievement.

Yet it is astonishing that a perceptible should exist in such a diverse, diffuse, and group as the Freshman class. The would seem few ways for this culture, admitting its existence, to penetrate the circles of friends which dominate the beginning of the year, the time when McCarley found greatest changes. One of the best explanation can be found in the traditional references to impersonality of the Union, the living in the Yard, and the inchoate nature most other common Freshman experiences.

The official pre-digested explanations of General Education convey little to a Freshman familiar with either the actual historical of the program or the way concentration and he is almost forced to look elsewhere for explanation. The Union does little to bring R-