But then we tend to blame Harvard too much for our difficulties. For honesty's sake, a few other rituals that are hardly of Harvard's doing must be mentioned. Around New England, sex is, as they say, pursued with a passion. Every weekend, Dartmouth boys, rubbers firmly in hand, hitch out of Hanover, while Yalies go off to visit their pill-swilling neighbors. Meanwhile, Wellesley girls, in tweed skirts and cloth coats, arrive in Harvard Square by the busload. Only Harvard men manage to sit relatively still. Of course, freshmen do tend to panic. For them, Radcliffe is out-at least until second semester, by which time most upperclassmen have warily dropped their all-too-serious Cliffies. Still, for most, Radcliffe must exist only as an ideal, a symbol of the Maidenhead Impermeable that one pursues through the head, not the heart.

For the most part, freshmen tend to concentrate on the junior college girls that Boston seems to soak up like a thirsty, sanitary napkin. Many of these girls, needless to say, are not known for being intellectually topheavy. But, if one's just looking for a little something to help him keep in practice, the i. c. girl is always there on a Saturday night.

My favorite story is told by a friend who was once invited to dinner at one of the junior colleges that blight Commonwealth Ave. As his date led him into a large, tastefully decorated dining room, she asked. "Don't you think this is lovely?" "Yes, very nice," he answered. "Yes," she agreed, then added wistfully, "too bad we're too dumb here to appreciate it."

There-this essay (from the French, essai, to try, test) has officially degenerated into a morass of egocentric affectations and Harvardian putdowns. It's the thing you've got to watch out for here. For I haven't told you about how Harvard tears you apart, because that is the part that is difficult to tell. (See John Updike's short story "The Christian Roommates" in his collection The Music School or, on a once-removed level read John Berth's The End of the Road. ) Despite, or maybe because of, our spurious elitism, we are an insecure bunch. Harvard is too small-in all senses of the word-for an individual to cope with. By the middle of freshmen year, you begin to tire of going around with the guys in your dorm, really just an artificial grouping of individuals anyway. You begin attempting to make it on your own.

IT IS then that you discover how few are the opportunities Harvard offers. While academically Harvard encourages a healthy dilletantism, extra-curricularly it delights in a frightening professionalism. The Loeb, the CRIMSON, even SDS, demand a commitment that few are willing to give.

So most Harvard freshmen are left with very little to do. There are always drugs, of course. As long as you're not a flagrant pusher. Harvard will keep you safe from the nares. (In fact, I'm sure many an administrator welcomed the advent of grass as one way to defuse revolutions.) Consequently, grass is plentiful, and cheap, mostly sold by Cliffies who don't need the money because their fathers live in Westchester and have all the money they need. But even drugs are becoming passe. They used to be the major social determinant of freshman year. There were those in the dorm who turned on and those who didn't and neither group really understood the other's existence. By now, that's all social history. Even trying to discover whether or not your proctor smokes is frivolous, since of course he does. If you're interested, you might want to keep track of who he's on friendly enough grounds to smoke with, but by then it's all become pretty much of a bore.

Spring at Harvard always brought one remedy for the malaise that creeps into the end of freshmen year. (And even preppies aren't exempt. If anything, their malaise begins even earlier.) Spring used to provide an opportunity for the Annual Freshmen Riots. Last year, the Riots were pre-empted by the occupation of University Hall, and suddenly romanticism had found its proper battleground.

For you, as a freshman, are actually to enter two Harvards: one is Pusey's Harvard (i. e., the Administration, the Corporation, some Faculty members and one or two classics majors) and the other is our Harvard (i. e., most students, younger members of the Faculty). Without our even asking, most of the members of the class of '73 will naturally join our Harvard-every year, the freshmen arrive more radical, less naive, more and more they have already tried dope, and like politics, they have gone beyond it. We just seem to sit back and marvel at such precosity, while remembering how painfully we reached the same kinds of consciousness. A few of you will try to defend Pusey's Harvard, and for you I feel kind of guilty. Because the rest of us will be trying to pull it out from under you, and it can get pretty frustrating to live for four years on the defensive.

IN EITHER case, though, you'd best expect a good bit of violence. Violence, along with a cataclysmic sense of emergency, has become pretty fashionable here of late. It makes life at Harvard alternately exciting, exhausting, and intolerable. Our Harvard-in its prose and its "politics" -practices a kind of blunt, immediate violence. Over dinner we argue about movies and rock, late at night we meet over beer or dope to argue about each other, and, once our ideas have reached a state of partial articulation, we confront and demand and we curse. O-K, so maybe we're sometimes wrong, but at least it's an open, honest violence. Pusey's Harvard-in the balanced sentences of its introductory pamphlets as well as the hidden workings of its corporate machination-practices a more insidious violence, one camouflaged by manners and traditions. But, it's there, man, it's there to recognize and hate.

Freshmen year isn't easy, but it is, like accepting one of the two Harvards, inevitable. And so, after each holiday, you come back to your dorm. First, the radical from the mid-West says right after Christmas vacation, boy, I can't go back there again. Then after Easter recess, a lot more begin to realize that Cambridge is their real milieu. A few, perhaps, try a final summer at home, but it rarely works. They too flee back to Cambridge in panic. And so, one day, you suddenly hear yourself saying. "I've got to get home." And home means good old Harvard College. Cambridge, Massachusetts. And that's it.

Your freshmen year rapidly becomes nothing more than a cliche. Yet, you'll think it the best year you spent at Harvard. Which is only a measure of what you can expect during the other three.