"How about some Harvard flavors?" Radcliffe friends have gaily teased us.

"Harvard Men don't come in flavors," is our moribund reply.

But finally the time has arrived for our little brother school to attempt some generic master-synthesis, some Hegelian superstructure.

Harvard men are even more dogged than their Radcliffe counterparts in insisting that awesome individualism and, consequently, unfathomable multiplicity, are their only measure. To snip ungainly squares out of the brilliant patchwork that is Harvard would be the most impudent and absurd of tasks. Harvard men will not suffer themselves to be set in little boxes. Nor should they.

Then by what standards, with what vocabulary, may we begin to classify this unclassifiable body of scholars? We must look, clearly, for what is designated in lower level English courses as the Unifying Theme. With some exuberant exceptions, the Unifying Theme for Harvard undergraduates is malaise. It is a vague malaise to be sure. Most often only a brooding ostenato to gayer melodies, but there nonetheless. No simple response to those thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to, the Harvard Malaise is a nagging self-dissatisfaction, a dearth of inner order, despite any personal triumph. The fact that the undergraduate rarely enjoys unqualified happiness registers not so much a nebulous mal du siecle as a fairly specific mal de Universite, a heavy burden of melancholy, a perrenial discontent of spirit. He doesn't know why. He just feels "sort of lousy."

Are there, indeed, characteristic, discomfiting Cantabridgean frames of mind?

* * *

The Expulsion From Eden Complex

The neurasthenic symptoms of the Expulsion Complex are at once disquieting and difficult to pin down. Longfellow (as a member of the Harvard faculty) unwittingly described its primary orientation:

A feeling of sadness and longing

Not akin to pain,

Resembling sorrow only

As the mist resembles rain.

The freshman, so highly motivated, so industrious in his pre-college years, assumes listless habits of dress, spends an inordinate amount of time in activities best described as "frittering," and suffers from mild abulia (a psychological disorder characterized by loss of will power).

By any rational measure Harvard, stacked up against high or prep school, is a paradise. But psychologically, to the freshman, it is post-Adamic. To the question "What is Harvard like?" a freshman most frequently mumbles about how intelligent and talented all his classmates are (roommatees will use each other as examples), indicates that he was an idolized Mr. Everything back at So-and-So High, and then hastitly and sheepishly assures you that of course he realizes at Harvard he will be merely a face in the crowd.