(Mr. Glassman is a reporter for the Boston Herald Traveler; he was Managing Editor of the CRIMSON in 1968.)

DEMONSTRATIONS have become the major cultural events of our time.

There are the big demonstrations, when the assistant professors pack the wife in the DR dress and the little blond kids and the collie into the Volkswagen and take off for Washington. They stay there a day or so and come back with blue buttons, which the wife wears for the next few weeks, and they tell you what a great FEEEEEELING it was to be with all those people who were so dedicated in their desire and actually very clean ...

Then, there are the small demonstrations. At Harvard, according to my own unofficial count, there have been three major building takeovers this year (including one in which two buildings were taken over) and more than a dozen minor demonstrations (including mill-ins, raids, name-calling sessions with Mrs. Bunting and a host of others).

These small demonstrations are easier to examine as cultural phenomena. One notices, for instance, that three separate groups of camp followers nearly always show up.

The first group includes politically active students, whose own political group does not happen to be sponsoring the demonstration but who turn up to find out what is going on and generally to soak up the atmosphere.

For example, whenever SDS (which is Worker-Student Alliance SDS at Harvard) has a demonstration, November Action Coalition (NAC) people like Mike Ansara and Barry Margolin are on hand. When NAC has a demonstration, WSA is there. John Berg is always there. WSA people usually ask political questions of the other demonstrators, while NAC people usually talk among themselves and laugh a lot. When Afro and OBU has a demonstration, both WSA and NAC people show up. They yell, "Right on!" whenever an Afro guy says anything; they keep a discrete, almost reverent distance; and they are always asking what they can do to help, which is usually nothing.

Included in the group of political camp followers are the political "outs" -most notably Steve Kelman of YPSL, who is gathering material for his new book or his next article in the New Leader, and a fellow from Young Americans for Freedom, who managed to get inside University Hall last week with some sort of press pass.

THE SECOND group includes non-political camp followers, who want to see what the youth of America is up to. Faculty members like Marty Peretz and Michael Walzer are usually there, and so are Cambridge types like Sheldon Deitz, House Masters and Senior Tutors are there too, but mainly just to get names. Still, Joel Porte and Alan Heimert tend to tell jokes and liven up the show.

But the third group, by far the most interesting, is the press. At many demonstrations there are more reporters, photographers, cameramen, cameramen's helpers, off-duty reporters, and off-duty photographers than there are demonstrators. At the height of the latest OBU occupation, about 50 journalists were inside University Hall with another 10 or 20 outside.

Covering demonstrations is not something that the press does very well, but it is something that the press does very frequently. Demonstrations come in neat packages. Readers like them. It is easy to tell what is going on. Demonstrations dramatize all the big issues of our time, like Vietnam and racism. And they usually end before 5 p. m.-in time for the 6:30 News.

Of course, demonstrations, like most of the other "events" the press covers (such as interviews, press conferences, ship launchings) are not real events (Daniel Boorstin calls them "pseudo-events"). They are not spontaneous; they are merely shows for the press. They "demonstrate" that people are dissatisfied with things. They are not a real reaction to the dissatisfaction.

Of course, the new kinds of "demonstrations" (Weathermen raids, the M. I. T. disruptions) are not so much demonstrations as military actions, designed to hurt the enemy. Most demonstrations are not like that, however. They are symbols of discontent at conditions; a riot, on the other hand, is a real reaction to conditions.

THIS gets complicated, and before we go on we should introduce the cast-the men of the press who cover Harvard and, in the process, create their own subculture:

BOSTON GLOBE -The Globe's editor, Tom Winship, really goes for Harvard in a big way. He once said that Cambridge is one of the two or three best beats in the country. And he has spread around the wealth. No fewer than half a dozen Globe reporters and correspondents cover Harvard. The main ones are Crocker Snow, a preppy-looking fellow with a dark complexion who handles the intellectual side and talks quite a bit to Faculty members, and Parker Donham, a former CRIMSON editor and longtime Harvard student who has a beard that goes all over his face and down the back of his head. Occasionally, the Globe's education writers turn up-Nina McCain and Larry Van Dyne-but they usually stay in the office and read important papers. Also seen frequently are big-time political writers like Jerry Murphy and Robert Healy. As if that were not enough, the Globe has two stringers, both of them CRIMSON editors or former editors, depending on whom you talk to-Bill Kutik,, who has a beard like Parker's but with more on top than on the bottom, and Alan Geismer, who wrote stories for the Globe last summer on wounded GI's. The Evening Globe, which is a separate paper all by itself, has George Croft, who knows quite a lot about Cambridge and is fond of doing crossword puzzles.