THUS when I attended my first professional gathering, the American Studies Association convention in 1969, I was somewhat prepared to be the Harvard man, but not as prepared as I ought to have been. I went to survey what those outside Harvard who were working in the interdisciplinary field of American Studies thought about the field and its challenges. Some of this kind of information was provided by the papers and informal discussions, but so was another aspect of academic life: I discovered that my name tag, covered with shining, transparent plastic, was to most of the attendants a kind of eye-searing lamp which exposed to them their own sense of insufficiency. Because I wore a sign reading:

"Peter C. Rollins Harvard University" on my lapel, I was invited to the president's suite for cocktails, deferred-to in discussion, stared at by older, more knowledgeable men. My wife and I heard the same message over and over again in discussions: "You are from Harvard. What you think is important. What we in the lesser Establishments throughout the country say doesn't weigh as much. You talk, we will listen."

Because I attended that professional meeting with something of an outsider's detachment-I read no paper, participated in no formal discussion-I dismissed this attitude of inauthentic identity as a product of the atmosphere of Toledo, Ohio.

UNFORTUNATELY, I discovered to my perplexity that when attending the American Historical Association (Boston) and the Modern Language Association (New York) meetings this Christmas vacation, I encountered the same kind of defensiveness on the part of those who interviewed me for jobs. No matter how justified or unjustified the ultimate judgment may be on an absolute scale, there is something which non-Harvard people see about the candidate who is a Harvard man.

One interviewer from a Southern state college almost fell back onto his unmade bed when I showed him my credentials. While waiting outside his hotel room, I had talked to those in line. When I dared to question the selection of 1876 as a terminal date for the job description ("American History to 1876"), my competitor for the position gave me a short and slashing lecture on the process by which distinct historical eras come to a close or begin. When I mentioned my reservations about the quality of the students, he dismissed my maunderings with the statement that I might as well apply to Harvard or Yale if I was worried about the quality of students. Then to enter the untidy room of the interviewer:

"Oh, I like these credentials. Harvard, huh? I spent a wonderful summer at your summer school many years back, and have fond memories of my stay in Cambridge....

"Here, let me show you our school."

He showed me a slender glossy pamphlet on the school. When the library was described, a peculiar emphasis was placed on the wall-to-wallcarpeting, while little was said about research facilities. Turning to the front page which bore the face and words of the college president, I indicated to the interviewer that gracing the shelf behind the president's head and just out of the camera's focus was a set of The Harvard Classics, that six foot shelf of great books collected by President Eliot over fifty years ago. On the cover of this promotional pamphlet were the ".. words by Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes [which] express the philosophy and purpose of this university and were the inspiration for the university seal:

'Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul, As the swift seasons roll! Leave thy low-vaulted past!'"

Thus I discovered that down at the deepest foundations of the soul of this country are images of a few institutions of legitimacy which determine what shall and what shall not be considered worthy of thought and literate consideration.

In another interview with a professor from a Western school, I found myself apologizing for assigning too much reading to my students and promising (if I were hired) not to press so much work on the students of his university. Furthermore, I found myself explaining that not only would I not be hastily disappointed by the quality of the student body at his school, but even arguing that I really and truly had retained the common touch: he pressed me to explain what I had done in my creative writing class at the Massachusetts Women's Prison; how I had taught my three illiterate privates in the Marine Corps to read; that I really could treat average human beings with respect.

In one of my most important interviews, I was told another, related story of personal identity. A very bright, heavily published, thirty year old assistant professor explained to me how he had weathered an interview of his own at Wisconsin. The senior interviewer had been a dean at Princeton. This former dean opened the interview by noting that while the young Westerner had indeed published, he had not published in the best magazines. The young man went on to tell me that after this opening gun he had been cowed to such a degree that he gave up any effort to sustain a good impression for the rest of the interview, and that he proceeded to get thoroughly drunk immediately after the session. It had been sufficient to be accused of inauthenticity by an Eastern intellectual to be thoroughly unmanned. And not so unexpectedly, this same assistant professor said that he liked me because I did not conform to what he considered to be the Harvard stereotype. What he did not say (possibly even what he did not know) was that the Marine Corps stereotype had somehow shattered the Harvard stereotype in his mind, and that the other Harvard applicants for the same position had not been similarly divested of the Harvard mantle. Thus, his liking for me was not a matter of kindred spirits interacting, but really due to accidental malfunctioning of stereotypes, so that my physical presence was less threatening to him, less cold and less detached than that of others whom he had interviewed from Harvard and Yale.

MY FINAL INTERVIEW brought into play an uglier side of the stereo-type and its effects. In this particular setting, the director of an American Studies program at a Western school interviewed me for his own pleasure more than as an academic necessity. After the usual jockeying for a topic to discuss, he gradually worked himself into a discussion of the (to him) shameful neglect with which Harvard's American Civilization program is supervised. One could sense the need of this tenured man from a coastal tomato field to assert his own identity by striking out at that oppressive ogre in Cambridge, through me, the local embodiment. Suddenly, I found myself defending Harvard's tough-mindedness, its neglect of graduate students in the name of intellectual individualism. I was rebuking this man of the West with all the hauteur of the mythical Harvard man ! It was only a final touch of logic that the Chamber of Commerce pamphlet which described the town in which this man's college was located, showed, in its street guide, that every street and avenue bore the name of an Eastern college (a Harvard Avenue) or historical figure prominent before the westward expansion of the nineteenth century.

Before flying back from the Modern Language Association convention in New York, I attended a cocktail party given by my friendly assistant professor. His friends were there, many of them in search for jobs as I was, and as I listened to them, so unassuming in their intelligence, so self-depreciating in their manner that they were almost ashamed to look me straight in the eye. At one point in the random discussion, my interviewer reported that he had just lost his first choice, "the one David Reisman said he found intellectually intimidating."

My respect for David Reisman not withstanding, I answered in true Harvard fashion that such an effect was not difficult to obtain. Such a retort in a Harvard setting would be considered fair play, a verbal means of keeping one's own balance by staying out of the magnetic attraction of a world-renowned intellectual presence. How many times have Harvard students walked through the streets around Harvard Square without seeing such figures as James Baldwin, J.K. Galbraith, Eric Erikson, Edmund Wilson, James Dickey, Robert P. Warren, Norman Mailer, to name only those whom I have personally seen. These men seem to belong in the Cambridge setting, even if in many cases they visit Harvard only as guest lecturers. It would be impolite to be too impressed by their presence, just as it would also be dangerous to the self to be too worshipful of them.