"I don't feel compelled to behave in a certain way with them," another said, "but the threat of rejection is still there and you're a little nervous. But they just try to have fun with you. Once you're in, you definitely feel like an equal."

The partying lasts for six weeks, and is followed by a "moratorium" on punching activity. The selections are made. "It's simply not true that they don't punch or won't accept people from a certain background--that's just not true anymore. They won't exclude anyone they like," a punchee said.

If the club members feel a student won't "fit in" they won't elect him. Furthermore, a candidate can be shut out by "blackballing"--when any one club member adamantly opposes a certain student's election.

Nevertheless, you are likely to find some diversity within most of the final clubs. "Even the Porc," said a clubbie. Blacks, Italian surnames, Irish surnames are found among the Cabots and the Lowells.

"It's not any kind of racial or ethnic discrimination I'm bitching about--it's a different kind of elite than it was years ago. They're making judgments on people according to their personalities and their values--and that bothers me," one student who (like almost evervone else) wished to remain anonymous said. He was afraid of losing some friends. He was also "checking out" the punching season.

Once admitted to a club, a student must usually pay a $100 initiation fee and, on the average, a $300 fee for annual dues. The dues cover a limited number of free meals and drinks, and they do not begin to cover a club's yearly overhead. Property taxes on some of the clubs take as much as $30,000 every year.

"People say it's wrong to spend so much money for pleasure, but I don't see anything wrong with it. It's fun," another punchee said.

But for every clubbie who calls himself a hedonist rather than an elitist, there are ten other non-clubbies who can't see the high striding tuxedos as anything but an attempt at elitism. Fun or vanity, final clubs have and will continue to constitute an economic and social elite at Harvard.

Archie C. Epps III, dean of students, admits that club alumni are often "wealthy and powerful." During the '60s, he said, 80 per cent of Harvard's governing boards, Board of Overseers and Corporation were former clubbies. Epps said that ten per cent of the University's individual donors--many of whom are clubbies--supply 80 per cent of Harvard's donations.

Many club alumni take an active role in their clubs as members of the club's graduate board. While the graduate board does not determine the club's day-to-day operation and social activities, they can make the final decision about any club policy or activity. Last year, for example, the graduate board of the D.U. overruled the club's decision to admit women to their ranks.

Names like Roosevelt, Kennedy, Saltonstall, Cabot, Lodge, Lowell and Conant are laced across Harvard's final club history with inbreeding and nepotism. There is even a story of J.P. Morgan, who at Harvard was already every bit the stormy and ruthless baron who glares from the pages of history books. Refused membership in the Fly Club, an insulted Morgan decided to build his own final club, the Delphic. For years it was called "the Gas" because its steward kept the gas lights burning all night, making the club appear as a social beehive to passing outsiders. Unquestionably, by tradition and present practice, final clubs constitute an economic and social elite of a sort.

When asked about how he felt about being part of an elite, one final club member snapped back over his dinner at Lowell House, "So what? There will always be elites, there have to be elites--why shouldn't I be part of one?"

"We're not trying to put anyone down," a candidate said, "we're just going to a place where we know we have friends."

Harvard's administrators neither defend nor criticize final clubs. Cleveland Amory wrote that Harvard officials at the time considered the clubs "a necessary evil," from which much of the University's wealth was drawn. One of Amory's friends wondered why it was necessary to have a group of men who "dress alike, look alike, walk alike, talk alike, and, if pressed, think alike."

"I guess you gotta have them around," Joseph A. Incagnoli '80, a punk rocker and non-clubbie, said, "they pay for my education."

To have a chance for membership in a final club a boy must be, to start with, what is called 'club material'... These clubs for which the Pudding acts as a sort of proving ground, are the real be-alls and end-alls of Harvard social existence, and since there are but ten of them and in lean social years some have been known to take as few as four members, it is not a life for everyone. --Cleveland Amory '39, from The Proper Bostonians, 1947