Each of us has particular interests in the College. Some, like my Palo Alto friend, want to know about comparative mischief. Others are interested in what happens in the classroom, in social life, or athletics, or the socio-economic or geographic profiles of the classroom, or students' intended occupations. My own interests, I must admit, are more in the present and the future than the past While I retain a great interest in the arts, which first emerged in college, new topics come along which I find equally rewarding. Athletics, for example, which I experienced minimally twenty-five years ago through the freshman physical training requirement, now consumes a good deal of my time. I suspect the questions most alumnae and alumni ask about the College now are informed as much by their experience since College as their experience in it.

So the past quarter century has made me see things in the College I could not have seen at 20. My present position gives me ample opportunity to see the lure of nostalgia, or at least that unhappy form of nostalgia which leads one to wish one had taken better advantage of the College--"if only I knew then what I know now." But we did not; certainly I did not. Both as a middle-aged alumnus and as a dean. I have come to the conclusion that college is something which happens to us, where we strive to do the best we can with whatever limitations we have; and that we continue to change and grow in each decade which follows college.

Nevertheless, I think there are some things one can say about the College "then and now." Despite all the things that have so clearly changed about Harvard, all the new buildings, the creation of a genuinely coeducational college, a restructured curriculum and an increased selectivity (after all, almost half of those who applied for admission to the Class of '59 were accepted by Harvard, three times the proportion of those accepted today), one comes away with the view that the experience of the College is very little changed. Perhaps one might argue that the experience of going to college changes little, but that Harvard has changed a great deal. In the essentials, however, I do not think that Harvard has changed much. It challenges and rewards students today in ways very similar to those of 25 years ago and. I suspect, those of fifty, 75 and 100 years ago.

In my role as a freshman adviser I now welcome a small group of new arrivals to the College every year. In them I can often see my classmates. The sophisticates and geniuses are there as well as the tremulous. They encounter Harvard as we did. And they gain from it as we did.

I believe, in fact, that one of Harvard's enduring distinctions is the people it attracts and the standards it sets for those of us who have come. Few institutions in American life have set, implicitly and explicitly, such high standards for so long as Harvard has Twenty five years ago, virtually all of us. I think, left the institution with a commitment not only to do well at whatever we undertook, but with an additional sense that personal accomplishment did not account for much unless it contributed to the well being of society as a whole. We knew we had an obligation to society at least as great as the obligation we had to ourselves. Of all of Harvard's lessons that. I believe, is the most enduring.

The author is dean of Harvard College