This got me involved with Harvard as a system. And I got to know most of the guys in the House as a result of that campaign. That was pretty good. So I expected I would be able to come back the next fall knowing the guys and being comfortable enough, socially speaking, to do the academic work.

IT WAS IMPORTANT when my father got a nervous breakdown because then my family was split up. My mother was sick too and since we were a nice family, in most ways, we immediately found foster parents for the six kids. I lived in a lower middle class Italian-American family, very nice people. Three years preceding this I had become sort of a bookworm. So I get to this family and they expected me, since I was eldest, to lead the house and to be energetic. I was 13, just about 14. They expected more independence from me and I sorta developed it. But I still stayed a bookworm and eventually I went to a Catholic high school that was very select.

5. The dictatorship of the proletariat does not occur, but Christmas cards are, in fact, received

I EXPECTED it would be much better in the fall, except it didn't work out that way. When I came back, the people really hadn't changed that much. I did know the people, but the concern wasn't still so much on getting the education or getting the humanistic values or even ever having them; it was just on getting the grades and getting special training, getting into grad school and getting to be a big shot back home in the accepted social group.

And there was still quite a class difference. Harvard is mainly a middle class school. They come here and get their training and be what their parents were. It isn't a community in itself. It does have a variety of individuals, but for most of them it's merely a stopping place, a transient community. So for most people Harvard can provide a very comfortable time if they enjoy meeting other people of different types. It is a sort of entertainment, like going slumming or someth ing.tIi (bffi,t IRV.push or something. It is just a cultural activity, part of the necessary paraphernalia for an "education." For me it was much more because I had left behind my sort of lower class background and had attempted to identify with the broader culture.

Instead I found that in leaving behind the lower class I had come to a place where people were middle class rather than coming to a place where class was irrelevant and the culture was more a general one.

THEY TOOK mostly upper middle class kids at that select Catholic high school and a few lower class kids who were very able. In a class of 33 kids, 28 ended up as Merit Finalists. It was the cream of the crop of the Italian community of Cleveland. I quit that school after a year and a half or rather I was kicked out. I found the education irrelevant. I wanted to go to class and get B's, enough to get by, but outside of class I wanted to be on my own, read books I wanted to. Most of the kids were at school for other reasons, to pick up the skills, the necessary credentials, to enter middle class professional life. The education was not an experience for them, but rather serving time.

I wasn't there for that. Obviously I was lower class. I couldn't depend for my present security on status and money because I didn't have either. Doing work that was oriented toward training for the professional class was very threatening to me personally. I didn't want to train myself outside of class to work in that framework. So I didn't want to do a darn bit for school. But the Jesuits were rather disciplined and they didn't like that stuff.

So I got B's and didn't do any homework. They said I was a demoralizing influence. Christmas vacation I was supposed to memorize some Cicero. I didn't hand it in. The teacher gave me a couple of days. I still didn't do it. So he sent me to the principal. He talked to my teacher and found out I hadn't done the work in most of my courses. I had a couple of teachers who were pretty good. They let me do what I wanted. But that Latin teacher he wanted me to do the work as he told me to. But he I guess has rgeretted it because he's been sending me Christmas cards ever since.

6. Outside the dining hall, Americans are rich and lonely; Italians have lots of lonely friends. They don't know what they're missing

OF COURSE there were many members of the House I found who were more than just middle class. They were brainy, but besides being brainy they had a bit of understanding, I guess. Mostly in the leftist yptes were there politically aware and socially aware people. This was a subculture and I really identified with them and spent a lot of time talking to them.

But there is a difference between what goes on in the dining hall and what most people spend most of their time with. Most of the time is spent on their courses and their academic work which are very competitive individual business. You go to lectures and then you fight for the grade. Apart from this work is the culture developed in the dining hall, where people can be sociable and just enjoy this learning and then there's the private social life of girls on weekends. Sort of three separate often very fragmented aspects of a person's life here. And though I found an interest in academic life, I got to a point where I couldn't stand doing the work in isolation. I would have wanted . . . what was most important to me was this cultural-broadening aspect of the dining hall and I disliked having my situation here evaluated only in terms of ability to do well in classes, making grades, academic work, the important thing.

ITALIANS, EVEN in America, are capable and do exist in real communities where they do have relations with other people as something else than as roles in a large system. Of course, in giving up this idea of community Americans have gained higher material wealth.

Whereas I developed in a family which was tightly knit, most of the kids who are here have gone through life alone, isolated in grade school and high school. They have never belonged to a real family, only a couple of parents, a couple of siblings -- an American mobile urban society. They have no community lives in their memories to which they can compare this Harvard situation.

So in effect a lot of the people at Harvard who are isolated and lonely have come to expect this. It's normal and they will have it for the rest of their lives.