Other, less strictly academic reasons cause about 200 students each year to switch out of science. Many are concentrating in it because it is the particular subject in which they were best in high school. American secondary schools, particularly in large urban centers, are still haunted by Sputnik and the spectre of hordes of Soviet children learning special relativity. The notorious emphasis on science, with the concomitant decline of the calibre and sophistication of courses in the social sciences and the humanities, has led many to suspect that their future is in a scientific career. On arriving at Harvard, exposure to the Square, to the political and theatrical and journalistic and clubbie and athletic and literary and squalid worlds which live at Harvard in uneasy coalition, frequently makes them change their minds. The graduating senior who arrived intending to be a doctor but ended up heading toward a career in folklore and mythology is a classic example of the effect of immersion in the Harvard cauldron.

Science people, on the whole, spend more time working for their courses-long hours on problem sets, afternoons in the lab, preparing for frequent hour exams-than people in the humanities and social sciences. As a result, an unofficial stereotype surrounds the science student at Harvard: he is unread, wrapped up in his work, boring to talk to, has a slide rule attached to his belt, and knows pi to fourteen decimal places. Unfair as this characterization may be, it does play a role in establishing the caste system that determines who your friends are. If you spend most of your time writing for a newspaper or magazine, most of the people you know do the same kind of thing. If you're more often in lab than out, it's likely that your friends spend most of their time north of Kirkland Street, too.

"I feel that the sciences and humanities can coexist. The purpose of one is to check the other, but there is no reason that one must completely overrule and subordinate its companion." In fact, the only good scientist is one who throws everything he has into his work. A good scientist it Harvard eats, drinks, and sleeps only in terms of his research project. He keeps up the tremendously competitive pace precisely because his own identity is so bound up into his work. A professional failure, for a scientist here, is a personal one as well.

I came to Harvard and majored in chemistry. I took the hardest courses I could get into, started doing research in the middle of my junior year, and got a summa when I graduated. I'm never going to set foot into a laboratory again.

Who would have thunk it?

Harvard's Drug Scene: Chaos and a Good High

Just so you'll be ready, I want to describe the traditional semi-secret opening ceremony for Radcliffe and Harvard freshmen. Some years, students have come unprepared, and many have complained that their innocent surprise has made the crucial adaptation to the "Harvard way of life" more difficult.

On the third morning of freshman week, the Class of '74 will congregate in Harvard Yard. President Nathan Pusey will stand between the center pillars of Widener Library in a solid gold robe. F. Skiddy yon Stade '33, dean of Freshmen, will crouch in front of Pusey like a catcher in front of an umpire. Perhaps, if this is to be "one of those years" he will actually have on a catcher's mask, and will move his arms and upper torso rhythmically like a Kabuki dancer.

On either side of Pusey will be a tenured professor in a loincloth.

Behind them, muscular dean of Faculty John T. Dunlop, also clad in a loincloth, will open the ceremony by pounding a huge gong with a special "Veritas" mallet.

Following tradition, Pusey will then start a chant, at first in a low gravelly grumble, then rising to a triumphant benediction:

Earning... Learning... Earning...

Learning... Earning... Learning...

EARNING... LEARNING.

until the two are a mantra, mingled beyond any distinguishing.

As in the past, the crowd of freshmen at the foot of the Library steps will pick up the chant slowly, at first not understanding, hearing only the words. If the past several years are any indication, the rowdier girls and boys will make cynical comments like "what a lot of ??" or "fuck you," but the heart of the class will keep chanting louder and louder, if at first only out of respect for Harvard'sreputation and for all her big names.

But in a moment, the chant will be their own, echoing through their minds so loud that no discordant thoughts have any room to maneuver. By the end of the ceremony the chant will be so together that all voices will sound one resonance, the resonance of liberal academic tradition, and then suddenly Dean Dunlop will sound the gong once more, and the crowd will disappear, to be reconvened only at Commencement in about four years. But that resonance will keep reverberating.

OF COURSE you will not really get that ceremony. That one was made up by a cynical freshman a month through his first year. He was stoned, and, if I remember correctly, so was I. You will probably get one almost as incredible. My freshman year, all the heavies met with us in Sanders Theater, and President Pusey said we were the smartest group of human beings ever assembled in one room at one time in the history of the world, or something like that. And other people told us about our sacred responsibilities, and the faith the whole nation had in its baby elite, and then we all sang Harvard songs, and marched out. I was stoned for that one too, and my Harvard career, so far distinguished only by my inability to comprehend any of what the administration was talking about, was off and running.

Most of you already smoke lots of dope, so you can blow your minds on Freshman Week too. If you don't smoke dope yet, you will in a little while. Everybody does at Harvard. Many people, in fact, do nothing else.