NEWS ITEM: 47.6 percent of the college presidents surveyed by U.S. News and World Report last week named Harvard as one of the five best places for undergraduate education. Many commentators played up the slightly higher fraction (48.8 percent) who placed Stanford University in the top five. But that ignores the truly outrageous implication of the first figure. Applying subtraction, one finds that 52.4 percent of these college presidents evidently think Harvard doesn't rank in the top five undergraduate colleges.

College presidents say many silly things. Who are these people? Why should we care what they say? Let's face it: Most college presidents are losers. Our own Derek Bok may be President of the College, Roscoe Pound Professor of the Law, Curator of the Peabody Museum, head of the oldest self-perpetuating corporation in the Western World, and a published author. But what does the President of, say, Florida State University, do? To quote a customer at Emack and Bolio's yesterday between 3 and 4 p.m., "I don't know."

Do these people think they're funny? This is no joking matter. If they wanted to tell jokes, they should have hooked up with Rodney Dangerfield and put on a show at the Park Street T-station. Jokes belong in the Johnny Carson show, the Yale Daily News, or the Democratic Party platform. They don't belong on the cover of national news magazines. So there.

Asking whether Harvard belongs in the top five is like asking whether the U.S. is one of the top five nuclear superpowers. Snide, you say? Maybe, Arrogant? Probably. But it's the veritas nonetheless. Harvard may not be the best of all possible collegiate worlds, though that's a distinct possibility, but who are our real world "competitors"?

Stanford? Certainly some college presidents prefer that tennis club by the Pacific. You know the place: You've seen one Coppertone commercial, you've seen Stanford. Some people get mugged traversing the Cambridge Common. But at least no one in the Yard dies a violent death from runaway frisbees or errant golf balls. Stanford students like to say Palo Alto is more laid back, but there's a medical term for that: coma. We have crew races on the Charles River. Stanfordites sail on a man-made cesspool christened "Lake Lagunita." For non-Romance language afficianados that translates as "Lake Lake."

What other schools were named frequently in the survey? Yale got 37.8 percent. But what can we say? We said it all in the Yale Supplement, Page 2: "Yale Hates Harvard. Harvard Doesn't Care." So there. Princeton--named by 28.0 percent--is in New Jersey. Imagine an entire campus quadded. Their shuttle buses don't run to New York City, let alone Harvard Square. How do they get to the Science Center?

Christopher "Loin Cloth" Atkins could probably go to the University of California, Berkeley, named by 24 percent of college presidents. Christopher Atkins, we hope you won't recall, stripped for Princeton's Brooke in Blue Lagoon, posed naked with a snake (Nastassia looked better) for a pin-up poster, showed all to Playgirl, and go-go danced for Lesley Ann Warren in his latest flick. A Night in Heaven. At Cal/Berkeley, he could get degree credit for that. Even we could get Cal/Berkeley degree credit for stripping. Need we say more?

GIVEN ALL THIS, why did 53 percent of college presidents still not name Harvard in the top five? If it was a joke, we, like Queen Victoria, are not amused. But college presidents aren't funny--not intentionally. We must assume they meant it. This is terrifying. If college presidents believe Harvard's not up there, what else don't they believe? Is not John Paul II one of the five leading Catholics? Is not the Pacific Ocean one of the five largest bodies of water on the West Coast? Is not the moon one of the five largest celestial bodies orbiting our planet? We think so. But 52.4 percent of college presidents probably don't.

Maybe they're just jealous. Of the 14,000 people who apply to Harvard College each year, 12,000 don't get in. Many become college presidents. After all, every college professor or academic deep down inside wants to live in Massachusetts Hall--but they don't. We can pity them. We also pity the burns in Harvard Square, but we don't make them college presidents. Evidently 52.4 percent of American universities have.

Perhaps the college presidents just didn't understand the question. Illiteracy among college presidents remains one of our hidden national tragedies. If Johnny can't read, why is he a college president? Perhaps reporters for U.S. News and World Report should have had them point at photographs of prominent colleges instead. A more disturbing thought: Just one day after this newspaper publicized the survey results, $1500 worth of rare jewelry was stolen from the Harvard Semitic Museum. That's just too much of a coincidence for us.

So what do we do now? We could make existing college presidents rip their clothing and shout, "Unclean, Unclean," to warn innocent bystanders. But that doesn't solve the problem.

We need replacements for these men. How about the astrologer at Harvard Square? For two bucks, he'll tell your fortune. For four, he'd probably run Appalachian State College. What about the penguin in Bloom County? Is he a college president? Why not? He's dressed for it.