YOU FIND THE TRUTH in the strangest places, and when you do you often like to leave it there. About five years ago it attacked me on a high school playground, where I had gone to play basketball, hardly expecting to be accosted in such a manner. My opponent was a young Catholic priest with a tough hook shot and a knack for sneaking sermons in during games of one-on-one. "You know what we all have in common, don't you?" he asked during a break. "Sure, we're all soldiers of the Lord, hallelujah," I answered, tossing up a set shot from the left side. "We're going to die," he said, spoiling my game for the rest of the day.

I came to Harvard because I didn't particularly care for that idea. This school, more than any other, wraps itself inside a vision of immortality, of the glory of knowledge eternal, rising with calm through the ages. There is a permanence to the walls, to the libraries, to the classic beauty of the Yard on a spring day, that mocks the passage of time. To descend into Widener in search of history is to forget that we will all be history soon enough, and be judged. This institution swallows up little men and women and tells them they will live forever, or at least that their ideas will, and issues them parchments to prove it. I came here believing that; many people still do.

The men who run Harvard believe it, and are comfortable in it. Three-and-a-half years ago Henry Rosovsky introduced himself to the Class of '79 in Sanders Theater with the reassuring thought that "the process of change at Harvard moves with glacial speed." We accepted that, partly because it was 9 in the morning and still Freshman Week, and partly because it was spoken with such a calm assurance--the easy arrogance of the truth.

And, of course, it was true--Rosovsky's own adventures, playing midwife to a Faculty that thrashed and groaned like an elephant for three years before giving birth to a mouse called the Core Curriculum, are proof enough of that. Harvard, so they tell us, will last forever, and it will not change--or change easily--because the institutional inertia of 340-plus years of imagined immortality will not permit that. And so the students who cry out to change Harvard actually find themselves faced with a much more difficult problem: making sure that Harvard does not change them. The trick becomes one of accepting the education the institution offers without surrendering to the arrogant complacency it breeds. It is, as they say, quite a neat trick.

THAT ARROGANCE is an attractive proposition. It breeds easily in an institution that professes to take The Long View of human affairs, to see The Big Picture it is the heady sense of self-importance that dawns when you realize you are looking way beyond the trivialities of daily life. It lets you forget a part of your humanity--the troublesome part, the conscience--because you are so busy studying economic models and abstract political theories. It patterns itself after the detached arrogance of the scholar, who must look beyond people to ideas, because people are only transients, while ideas live forever. But it goes beyond that. It also sees people as less important than institutions, because it believes the institution will last forever, too. It lets you think you can forget about your soul, the part that makes you human, because institutions do not have, or need, souls. It makes you think you are as important as the institution because you are a part of it--as important, and as impersonal. It teaches you to think like an institution, to quantify results and maximize outputs, to be reasonable and efficient. And to know, or think, that you are better than the rest.

That it why it is so easy to understand why the people who run Harvard run it the way they do--because it is really running them. When Harvard bleeds its unions at the bargaining table, when it spreads out into the city and evicts tenants along the way, when it tells its students they will have only the tiniest say in forming a new curriculum, and no say at all in deciding whether to get rid of certain lucrative stocks or a well-endowed name on its new library, there is always a good reason for doing so. There are budgets and timetables and procedures to be followed, all rational and reasonable and efficient, and the men and women who run the University have no real choice but to follow them. At least they do not have a choice as long as they imagine themselves parts of a machine, and not its masters. As long as that view holds the institution must come before the people--the evicted tenants, the shunned students, the workers huddled on a picket line--because it is bigger and will live forever.

THAT IS WHY it is too easy to see the people who run Harvard as villains. To say that Derek Bok is an evil man because he will not pressure the Harvard Corporation to take certain economic stands, and because he isolates himself almost completely from undergraduates who want to discuss those stands, is seriously mistaken. To say that Henry Rosovsky is an evil man because he has pronounced views on the role of an undergraduate education with which many students disagree, and because he believes it proper to enforce those views with little regard for those who disagree with him, is equally incorrect. These are, after all, good men--brilliant, resolute, high-minded men, firm in their conviction that they are doing what is best for the institution that has elevated them to positions of eminence. The Harvard they serve is likewise a great institution, a home for scholars and leaders and great ideas. The problem is that the institution dictates that the men--and the very few women--who serve it, see only the greatness, consider only the enormity of their positions, feel only the weight of history. It does not let them see the people who make up Harvard, who study here or work here or live next door in Cambridge. These men may know numbers and outputs, but they have not learned to quantify souls.

Dean Rosovsky summed it up best a few months ago, when he told a gathering of students: "You are here for four years, I am here for life, and the institution is here forever." You cannot argue with that logic. The truth of it is obvious, and ineffably sad.

BUT IT IS ALSO TOO EASY to resign yourself to sadness. It is one thing to understand why the men who run Harvard behave as they do; it is altogether a different thing to condone it. It is wrong to believe that Derek Bok is evil, but it is just as wrong to believe that he is not responsible, for his actions. Bureaucrats, administrators and scholars may spend their lives pretending that they are not human, that their august positions relieve them of the need to subscribe to common human virtues--but in 30 years, when they will have grown old and face the awful burden of their mortality, they will probably think differently.

In 30 years these men and women might look back and wonder if the institution they served so well, and which will even then be served well by younger editions of themselves, might not have been served differently. They might wonder if the demands of the institution might not have allowed some room for human considerations; they might wonder if the imperatives of imagined greatness, of dealing rationally and efficiently with a vicious world, precluded so completely a concern for the lives and feelings of those who were not great. If they are truly human, they will consider these matters in 30 years; if they are truly wise, they will consider them now.

To be fair, the administration has considered them, to a small degree. President Bok, to his credit, has actively promoted the study of ethics at this university, to an extent that none of his predecessors thought necessary. He has tried to introduce a concern for ethics into the study of government, law and medicine and to all the other professional schools as well. He has even sought to introduce ethical considerations into the University's investment policy--following the lines laid out by John T. Simon '50, a former president of this newspaper and now professor of law at Yale, in his book The Ethical Investor. But the effort, although a noble beginning, clearly lacks direction and strength, because it is rooted in a weak sense of the purpose of ethics.

DEREK BOK HAS CHOSEN to emphasize professional ethics, the academic study of how moral principles can be applied to situations that arise in professional life. Professional ethics are, almost by definition, situational: they teach one how to react to moral dilemmas, how best to conduct oneself in a given set of circumstances. They rarely, however, strike at basic, absolute moral principles of right and wrong--they lay out the accepted lines of conduct, but rarely examine the difference between what is accepted and what is right. They set the standards of a profession, but they cannot set the guidelines for a moral life.

There is a virtue to this, of course. The purpose of ethics is to apply moral concepts to life, but that is often a tricky business; rather than impose one set of morals on a diverse group, situational ethics allow for a wide variety of moral codes, within a basic, minimal framework of what all men and women will accept. Certainly, there is no greater tyranny than the moral outrage of a majority working on those of a conscientious minority, and so situation ethics wisely shies away from broad pronouncements of right and wrong.

This is as it should be. Yet the problem with this type of thinking is that it is easily perverted: it makes the step from one world, where there are very few moral absolutes, to another world, where there are none, all too simple. The fact that many students of professional ethics are left to assume the basic moral principles of the world, leaves them the freedom to assume that they do not exist at all. "The ethics of the situation" obscure the morality of the human condition; living for the moment, for the immediate context, the professional men and women who emerge from Harvard need not always see that there are other contexts where their actions may be judged, and found lacking.

They do not have to learn this in a classroom. They need only look to the institution from which they have been graduated to see that a loose sense of ethics is more convenient than none at all--that it can justify, in an academic sense, almost any immorality. Harvard was, for instance, completely justified by its own lights when it accepted $1 million from the Engelhard Foundation, when it thwarted the efforts of clerical workers in the Medical Are to form a union, and when it set up a committee to punish student activists without regard to due process. These were the actions of men and women who have set up their own priorities, their own ethical standards, to cope with their own peculiar situations as august members of a massive bureaucratic institution.