"You can teach an old dog new tricks, but it takes too long," Barry Goldwater told the Harvard Young Republicans yesterday afternoon at Sanders Theater. "Our generation has gotten the country into trouble, and we want you to get us out."

Calling the increased interest in politics on college campuses "reassuring," Senator Goldwater warned students against viewing the New Frontier as anything more than a rehash of the New Deal. "I lived through that other period," he said, "and we didn't come out of the Depression until World War II."

There is no evidence of economic props ever doing any good, Goldwater maintained. Yet the Kennedy Administration, he claimed, has been characterized by continuous public interference in private affairs.

At the inauguration, Goldwater recalled, Kennedy urged the people to consider what they should do for the government, not what the government should do for them. This attitude seems to have disappeared, he noted.

Goldwater particularly criticized the present Administration tendency to tell the American people to "just go on with your gin rummy, work hard, and make the money so we can take it away from you and spend it on things you never said you wanted."

"This business of conservative and liberal is a matter of semantics more than anything else," he declared. But he described the middle-of-the-road position as very dangerous. Such a position, he explained, is a confusing combination of "part good and part bad."

"So we can find out what's on each other's minds and if we have minds," Goldwater reserved substantial time for questions. In answer to a query concerning neutralism, he called neutral countries not so much "immoral" as "weak." "There are too many neutral nations--we must get rid of them or shift them to our side."

In response to another question, Goldwater reiterated his proposal to withdraw diplomatic recognition of Russia. "We have got to convince the world that we mean to win the cold war, not just end it," he said.