"No, it doesn't matter who you are, you were cheating," the proctor said.

"Do you know who I am?" the student demanded even more arrogantly than before.

"No," said the proctor, "I have no idea, just give me the blue book, fella."

"Look, Do You Know Who I Am?" the student repeated for the benefit of the professor of the course who had come over to investigate the ruckus.

"Certainly not," said the professor.

"Good!" the student exclaimed as he thrust his blue book into the anonymous pile on the table and bounded away before anyone could identify him. Truly a case of success snatched from the jaw of failure.

Another Mem Hall tradition is Mr. Test When you take your first Mem Hall exam you will see him; a rotund man, his bald pate rimmed by electro-shock curly hair, a bottle of soda surgically grafted to his hand and his mellifluous bass vice oozing out of the corners of the giant mead hall in which exams are given.

"Izz everybody seated?" he croons. "Thozzze of you seated in rowzz two through 48 will be able to see the clock at the back of the room. The rest of you, start counting seconds when I say, Begin. The exam is three hourz long. Please suspend all bodily functionzz azz three izz only one bathroom."

Mr. Test does have a name, but he has transcended it by becoming a Harvard tradition.

The Lying Statue

As we leave Mem Hall and re-enter the Yard we soon come upon the famous statue of John Harvard. This is often referred to as the statue of the Three Lies. The statue is not of John Harvard, the date is wrong and he is not the true founder of Harvard College.

Why, then, you ask, does a University which has as its motto "Veritas" or "Truth" put up with an object which in and of itself embodies three patent falsehoods? Because, dear friends, the real motto of Harvard is "Appearances." There is supposed to be some kind of statue languishing in a central place on every Ivy league campus so that tourists will have something to pose in front of and students will have something to deface. Harvard was founded by an act of the Massachusetts colonia; legislature, but it seized upon John Harvard as a convenient norminal founder, and used him as an excuse to erect a statue so as not to disappoint anyone.

But if three lies are not enough, you could check out University Hall, the building directly behind the statue. University Hall might be called "The Building of the Many Obscurities." From this building come statements from Deans about such shrouded mysteries as "The Core" and "The Hot Break-fast Plan" and "The Housing Lottery." Why are these related? Because no one, including the Deans whose names are attached to the plants, knows the slightest bit about how the plans will work or how they will affect students.

Any protests by bureaucratic mysto-fog.

It is a Harvard tradition for most of the students here to believe that, given a chance, they could run the University ten times more effectively than the current administrators. It is another Harvard tradition for the people in charge never to allow the students any chance to find out if their suspicion is correct.