"It gets heated," Whitla says. "A guy gets disgusted because someone else can't see his point. By the time the whole thing is over, you know everyone on the committee and where his psyche is."

Twelve or more hours a day, seven days a week in March and early April, advocates argue and re-argue their cases, votes are called, applicants are disposed of. As an advocate argues, the Dean pencils notes into his seven-inch thick loose-leaf filled with computer forms. In the notebook used by former admissions dean Fred L. Glimp two years ago, there are notes like "Yale son" in a circle, or "soccer" followed by two exclamation points. Next to each name is a red "A" for accept or a blue "R" for reject-or a red "A" crossed out and replaced by a blue "R."

It is an agonizing, seemingly irrational process, which only works if the men on the admissions committee have faith in it. And they do. "If you turn this many people away, you've got to believe you have a reason for it," Peterson says. "I think this is a very effective system."

Other members of the staff echo his faith in the selection process, which has remained essentially the same since World War II. Peterson's concept of how to improve the quality of Harvard classes is not to change the basic process, but to recruit better applicants, particularly in areas where few students feel impelled to apply to Harvard. As more recruiting has been done in the South over the past ten years, the dockets have been adjusted and more Southerners admitted.

While the selection process now approaches the ultimate in meritocracy, with each man considered as an individual who might or might not profit from four years at Harvard, there is nonetheless an incredible statistical consistency to the Harvard classes. The number of students admitted from California never doubles from one year to the next, and Exeter is never shut out completely. The number of Harvard sons admitted stays rather constant (although the number rejected is increasing rapidly), and the ratio of public school students to private school students changes at a slow and smooth rate, in the direction of the former.

Why does each class appear statistically like the one ahead of it, if "quotas" are not used? There seem to be two answers. First, each man on the admissions committee feels in his own mind that a "good mix" is a necessary thing for Harvard College. If the admissions committee has just okayed nine consecutive students from a small town in Oregon, it will become wary of admitting more. Perhaps, as Whitla suggests, the advocate himself will not be able to find it in him to argue a tenth case enthusiastically. More important, there is something of a quota built into the admissions process. This is the docket system. Applicants are divided into 22 dockets, according to the secondary school the student attended. Far from Harvard, the docket divisions are large geographical units; Docket B, for example, is The Rockies, and G is Ohio and Kentucky. But further East, Docket K is Cambridge, Docket I is entitled Andover and Exeter, Docket P is Boston Public Latin, and New York City's public schools have a docket of their own, separate from the metropolitan area's private schools. Peterson calls it "a New Englander's map of the United States."

After all the numerical parameters are available, a computer examines the evidence and announces an approximate quota for each docket, based on how many were admitted from this docket last year and how the numerical evaluations of this year's students in the docket compare with this year's applicants overall. Thus, if California's applicants suddenly become twice as good as last year (by the numbers) relative to the whole group, the computer will allot more places to California-but not twice as many.

Though these quotas are not adhered to strictly, "if you go over the quota in one docket, it's painful when you have to undercut another," Peterson says.

Humphrey Doermann, a member of the admissions committee and former admissions director, explains that the docket system avoids the possibility of admitting so many, say, from the West Coast-which the committee considers first-that there will be no room left in the class when the committee gets further east, in which case the members might get progressively stricter. This could, of course also be avoided by not classifying the students geographically at all. But that, officials say, would be administratively inconvenient. The advocate system depends on having applicants grouped by area so the advocates can visit their schools.

Peterson calls the docket system "a kind of quota based on the excellence of the boys involved." While it no doubt favors such places as Exeter and Andover, Peterson believes that "Harvard should maintain a Yankee flavor, and besides, schools like these were themselves selective in choosing their students." Dana M. Cotton, the senior member of the admissions committee with 23 years under his belt, points out that Exeter and Andover are not supplying as many Harvard students as they used to, "which the headmasters there understand but which is difficult to explain to a parent who sent his son to Andover so he could get into the college of his choice."

Admissions officials begin to squirm when the word "quota" turns up in conversation. "The only quota is the quota of common sense," says Cotton. Doermann doesn't think the docket system imposes any quota at all, "but I can see why someone wouldn't believe me."

Talk about quotas irks admissions staffers because they don't like to think of the admissions process as a mechanical one. And despite the statistical consistency of the class from year to year, admissions staffers work long and hard precisely because they refuse to rely on the numbers. Sandy Koufax's earned-run average always hovered around 2.0, but he sweated for every strikeout.