Most Harvard students, I would say, are coopted. Those who are already members of Brahmin society stay there. Those just beneath jump at the opportunity to wear club ties, to wallow in the comfortable life.

Students take different tacks, some relying on friendships and others on study. Both paths work. Gentlemen do not believe in the strict merit system, they hire friends because they know and trust them. Gentlemen also enjoy competence, and hire the best new crop of lawyers or MBAs. And if you are one of the best and the brightest, why not work for the wealthy and the powerful and take the fringe benefits?

By going to Harvard, you are almost destined to be part of the top. To reach the top, all you have to do is follow the game plan, roll with the punches, take the path of least resistance. The good life rubs off on every Harvard student, each one gaining a familiarity with comfort. Contempt for this comfort is rare, most are willing to passively accept it, a few even grovel for it. If you do not make any decision about what you want to do, in essence you will have decided to take the easy road and become coopted.

Perhaps most amazing is that student radicals who were at the heart of the 1968-1970 disruptions have now chosen the easy life. Students who fought the police at University Hall, students who were ready to close the University, are now studying law, medicine, and business. They carry some spark with them from the rebellions, but for the most part they have chosen comfort.

The turnabout is complete. in 1969, the University was so threatened that a group of vigilante professors set up a round-the-clock guard in Widener Library to protect the books and catalog. Early this year, when The Crimson held its centennial celebration a Crimson editor from the Class of '70 sent his check for the dinner with a note on embossed stationary from Washington magazine where he works. In fountain pen script, the note started: "My wife, Debbie, and I..." The turnabout is complete.

One must actively choose to give up the good life in order to displace the system of the elite. Radicalism on campus is not necessarily the way to fight the system, studying day and night may be preferable. To make valuable counter-offers to our society, you must be an expert, ready to stand by your conscience.

Thus when Paul M. Sweezy '31, a leading Marxist economist, spoke at Harvard last January, he told of the situation in 1940 when he was ushered out of his position as an economics instructor. "The Economics Department never did me a greater favor," he said. Daniel Ellsberg '52, speaking in Lowell Lecture Hall in 1972, warned students to stay out of the "center of the web," noting that Harvard graduates had almost singlehandedly engineered a decade of death and destruction in Indochina.

The warnings by Sweezy and Ellsberg are worth taking to heart. They spoke of refusing to take the easy road, of making the hard decision to abandon "success" in favor of conscience. They are also unusual cases, for they came out of it standing up, prominent in their own counter-societies.

So if nothing else comes out of four years at Harvard, you will have to decide whether or not to take the path of least resistance. The dilemma, of course, is that the easy life comes for free. If you are lazy, it is the only way to go. If you want to get rid of the jimmies, you have to shake them off.