(The author is a graduate student in American Civilization and a tutor in American History and Literature.)

WHEN I was in high school, I played football. Football games in the late 1950's were still public events through which the community attempted to express its group identity. For me, as for many other members of the team, this representative function worked its way back into the home, for fathers had played football for the same town team, as had brothers. Thus, for many of us, there was the combined problem of actively competing to belong to the team which in its turn signaled authentic membership in community and family traditions. The emotional and physical exertion of this role assumption made football more often a matter of stern social duty rather than a pleasurable sport.

Every Friday during the football season, the entire high school would meet for a mass rally in the gymnasium. The team would sit conspicuously on folding chairs placed out in the middle of the floor, and the cheerleaders would begin their chant:

"We're from Brookline, And no one could be prouder. And if you don't believe us, We'll yell a little louder."

Gradually, as this chant of identity was repeated louder and louder, it would spread from the nine cheerleaders to the entire student body, almost shaking the impersonal wood and brick of the functional, modern gymnasium. Here was my first experience of being a representative person.

Later, in 1959, when I went to Dartmouth College, it was a recapitulation of the same process of identification. The Ruskinian-Romanesque college chapel at Dartmouth had been built in the memory of an ancestor of mine, Daniel Gustavus Rollins. I had been reading the Dartmouth Alumni Magazine since the fourth grade, had attended football games played by my brother Phillip, had heard of my father's kicking a field goal which helped Dartmouth beat Princeton in 1929. With all of this lore behind me, I studied the freshman manual, learned all of the Dartmouth songs before I arrived on campus, never went out those first few months without my freshman cap (which meant that during freshman week I carried a lot of furniture for upperclassmen) and got myself royally drunk (i.e., in Dartmouth fashion, to the point of unconsciousness) before the first football game.

As if to solder the final link in this chain of traditionalism, I joined the Marine Corps' Platoon Leader Corps (ROTC). My father had been a Captain in the Marines during WWII, my brother had been a Corporal in the Korean War, and a publicity sheet called The Marine Corps Reservist had come to my home every month along with the Dartmouth Alumni Magazine.

BY JUNE OF 1961, I was very tired of Dartmouth. My football career terminated with the end of the third-string team's season. I soon discovered that undergraduate life at Dartmouth was depressing, isolating, and that all that was bad about the historical Sparta (including the community of women) was also wrong with the Big Green.

After a summer of six weeks in a Marine boot camp, I also discovered that I was not able to suppress the disgust which my peers in the officer training program (as well as the training and its goals) elicited.

By January of 1962, I felt that I had given Dartmouth College and Rollins Chapel enough time to come around. I applied to Harvard College as a transfer student, pleading the intellectual aridity of Dartmouth as sufficient cause for moving from one Ivy League school to another. This was my first break with an externally imposed role.

Later that year (the academic year of the Bay of Pigs fiasco) I began to inquire about the nature of a conscientious objector status. Here began my second break with the posture of representative manhood. Ironically, after being granted a tentative conscientious-objector release from the Marine Officer Program. I decided to rejoin it. This return, however, did not represent a swing of a pendulum from a rebellious position back to a formerly rejected one. Rather, it was the end-product of my study of various radical and dissenting movements in American history, and a rejection on my part of the kind of separatism and apocalypticism which has characterized many of them. The reading of Reinhold Niebuhr's The Irony of American History and his Moral Man and Immoral Society during the era of Kennedy nationalism was a significant ingredient to this assumption of active responsibility by me.

PARADOXICALLY, the Harvard identity was as difficult to bear as had been the former Dartmouth identity. The new difficulties came from a new source, however: rather than my own rejection of an imposed definition of self, the new conflict arose from the reactions of others to what they saw in me as a Harvard man. During my three years in the Marine Corps, my Harvard background represented an ever present threat to young officers around me. Most of them felt an almost brutalized sense of their own inferiority in the presence of a Harvard man. Within the Marine Corps' sense of priorities, the earning of twin expert rifle and pistol badges stood on the same level of demonstrated merit. To the chagrin of many, I earned both of these coveted symbols of mastery.

Ever since this recurrent set of experiences in the Marine Corps became part of my sense of presence when dealing with people, I have encountered a new kind of conundrum. Before, the problem of group identity had been one of adopting roles traditionally presented to me for acquisition. All of them had been imposed by an outside agency, all had taken a certain amount of effort to attain, but all had needed to be reassessed and either put off, or reassumed on a different basis.

The role of a Harvard man has been difficult, but for entirely different reasons. Anyone who has gone to Harvard knows how many "Harvards" exist under the umbrella of the institutional title. Yet to others I have met, it has always meant something either essentially threatening or something which has conveyed upon the bearer of it an almost beatific quality. From my Marine training I remember: a platoon commander from West Point screaming in my face that I had written "Harvard College" rather than "Harvard University" on my registration forms as some kind of subtle joke; peers in training stunned and disturbed when I was required to attend study hall because I had flunked an exam on the. 45 caliber pistol; a few confused, but sincere peers projecting upon me all of their own intellectual aspirations and longings for status. Gradually, I came to realize that being a "Harvard man" for me had little to do with what one had been told he must be by his family, his community, but was some kind of screen upon which those who sense their own inferiority in the American middle-class world either projected their resentment or their reverence.

Ironically, after all of my independence and transvaluation of the values of my family and its traditions, I had become a stereotype, not for myself or those intimate with me, but for those with whom I was to deal in the world of work. (The converse has also been interesting-being a former Marine Officer in the Harvard Graduate School of 1970!)