BETWEEN THE COVERS of Harvard's Courses of Instruction lies a panoramic outline of the world's knowledge, probably unparalleled in United States education. In one description we are invited to learn about ancient history from an archaeological perspective; in another about the energetics of muscle contractions: in still another the scientific influence of Islam. There are in those 55 pages, descriptions of courses on cosmology and developmental psychology on quantitative methods for political science and quantum mechanics.

Nowhere are we told how we can learn to cope with the real world from a human perspective however and too few of us are taking that course on our own Harvard teaches us how to analyze, not how to understand how to quantify not how to live. Its Ivy may be the most effective material ever developed for insulating people from the harsher realities of the outside world.

While thousands more people were filing in and out of the nation's unemployment offices last week wondering how they would be able to feed and clothe their tammes most people here were filing in and out of Memorial Hall and the Science Center wondering how their exam grades would look on their graduate school applications. While people in the United States and abroad died of starvation. Harvard and Radcliffe students complained of the amount of turkey tetrazzint dished up by Food Services. While the clattering of artillery and the whistling of bombs financed by our tax dollars continued in Vietnam, we studied in the cerie silence of Lamont and Hilles.

The inequities are nothing new, but the lack of attention we're giving them is. The New Mood on Campus that the media touted in 1972 is now firmly entrenched. Most of the overt resistance to the United States's war-making machine is gone, or at least in hiding. The people-oriented movements it seems to have spawned--urging equal rights for women, blacks, the poor--are in hibernation, if not retreat.

The American Council on Education polls in-coming freshmen every year, trying to spot trends among our ranks. It found that about one-third of the Class of '78 believes that "the activities of married women are best confined to the home and family": that more than half feel "there is too much concern in the courts for the rights of criminals"; that people are leaving the "left" and "far left" and moving to more moderate positions--the most moderate class since the poll began nine years ago.

IN A HARVARD SQUARE BAR not long ago, a friend lamented to me that "people don't care about students any more."

"That's only fair," I replied. "Students don't care about people any more, either." That piece of inebriated wisdom has haunted me for the last month or so; it has a lot of convincing evidence on its side.

A quarter of a lifetime ago I really believed that students would change the world. Antiwar sentiment was growing: I joined other high school and college students to help organize the October 1969 moratorium in Allentown, Pa. We talked for long hours among ourselves and with others about what the United States government was doing in Southeast Asia, and why it should be stopped; we raised money and printed leaflets; we lined up speakers. When a high school principal refused to declare October 15 a legal day of absence and threatened suspension for moratorium participants, we spent hours in the county courthouse with the help of a friendly law librarian finding a precedent that showed his action at least marginally illegal. He changed his mind. I thought then that I would like to become a lawyer--that it would be the most effective way to stop the injustices that seemed to be strangling the country. A surprising number of people in our organizing group felt the same way.

Come October 15, we spent the day on the street corners of downtown Allentown, talking to people, I remember the icy stares of some, the sympathetic conversations with others, the words "fuckin' hippie" that were spat at me more than once that day. I remember shuttling leaflets and leafletters back and forth from Muhlenberg College to outposts, and the traffic accident I caused on one run. The woman in the old Falcon with the "War is not healthy for children and other living things" bumper sticker found out what I was doing and decided to ignore it; I never told my parents.

Most of all, I remember the feeling that this small band of students had taken on the United States government and had, in a small way, won.

BUT THAT was a quarter of a lifetime ago, and things have changed. I kept in touch with many of the people who helped organize the moratorium for a while, and some of them actually did make it to law school. Most of those who have graduated are now firmly ensconsed in corporate law firms somewhere, because "that's where the money is": others are on their way. I don't write to them any more. Nor do I want to be a lawyer.

Few of the growing number of pre-law students I know now make pretensions to helping the oppressed obtain their rights as the main reason for their following the road to the courts; rather, they say they are trying to find some certainty in an uncertain future. Nor do the swelling ranks of pre-meds talk so loudly about opening a clinic in a ghetto neighborhood and improving health care for the poor, or starting a practice in a rural community without a doctor, most would rather keep with the trend and stay in the more lucrative urban and suburban areas.

"Students don't care about people any more, either." And things don't seem to be improving. The ACE poll discovered that this year's freshman class, the Class of '78, is even more disinterested than last year's. As Richard Nixon went through the last throes of hanging onto his sick, tattered presidency only 36.6 per cent of the incoming freshman class was saying that it was interested in "keeping up with" or influencing political affairs."

It showed up in Mather House last year: large numbers of students and tutors would gather in the Junior Common Room each night after dinner to watch the network news shows--Walter Cronkite for the early eaters. John Chancellor for the later diners. One day last spring, as the dragnet lightened around the White House, CBS watchers found a small hand of Star Trek viewers occupying the tube they were outvoted at first, but soon their numbers grew to the point that Captain Kirk phasered Walter Cronkite, and another tradition was over.

And still the retreat continues. Last week. President Ford asked Congress for an additional half-billion dollars to prop up the Thieu and Lon Nol regimes in Vietnam and Cambodia; more money to visit more death from the skies upon innocent people. The conductor has changed, the orchestra is different, but the composer, Henry A. Kissinger '50, and the symphony of murder and repression are the same. Yet we sit quietly listening to the strains of death, and our voices are still.