Mary has only the best memories of Larry as a proctor, and says that he did a good job of helping her to discover her own opinions. "He didn't shape my political views, but he helped me voice them," she says. But others are not so sure. "I sometimes think it wasn't fair for Larry to do what he did, us being naive freshmen," says Rich. "He didn't force his ideas on us, but he argued very persuasively," Kathy, who was often active in COCA, has perhaps the bluntest assessment: "I know some time the next year I looked back on it and wondered how I got involved in all that. It was sort of like being in a cult."

After three years, it is difficult to look back on one single year and extract meaning from it. Certainly Lionel residents have taken an unusual route through Harvard, but Gary's question remains: whether we were strange when we came in, or did we become strange. Looking at the time off taken by Lionel residents provides just one indication that, as Mary says, "more people in Lionel struggled with more aspects of their Harvard experience" than otherwise seems to be the norm. It is not just the sheer number of Lionel people who decided to take time off to try and find themselves--eight of the original 18--but also where they chose to look. There wasn't one "typical" Harvard time off job, not one Capital Hill job or journalism internship. Two, Mary and Fernando, went off separately to work in the Catholic workers movement, dishing out food in soup kitchens and doing other volunteer work. Two took jobs at schools, Kathy teaching "survival skills" at a school for blind children, and Rich teaching at a private school in Brookline. Tim went off to Africa to do Mennonite church work. At the other extreme, two Lionel residents, Shawn and Suzy, were both working at Mug and Muffin.

It's hard to pinpoint a legacy. Certainly, a few members of Lionel broke away from the group. While 10 members went to Dunster House and three to Currier, several left all Lionel people and took off for other Houses with other roommates. But even those who did so did not necessarily leave Lionel behind. Rich, who left his Lionel roommates and went to Leverett House recalls that he "regretted it partly sophomore year. You really got close to people freshman year."

Yet there seems to have been something more to Lionel than just the people who comprised it. If there was a single ethos, it was probably the almost forced encounter with diverse people and views. To some extent, those who were best able to handle Lionel, and those who held strongest to the legacy, were those who opened themselves up fully to its diversity.

Some, like Rich, seemed to have contemplated Lionel's lessons over the years, and are still profiting from the Lionel legacy. He notes that Lionel was an often rigorous intellectual environment because of the constant diversity of viewpoints. "I had all kinds of checks and balances working on me. I had Larry saying one thing, Manny saying the opposite, and Jeff saying something totally different."

Others like Daniel, managed to incorporate some of the ideas that they heard in Lionel into their academics. He notes that his high school in Revere, Mass., did not even have a Democratic club, yet somehow, he ended up taking a term abroad in Columbia, and ultimately wrote his Social Studies thesis on that country. Daniel notes that without Larry and Lionel, Latin American issues "wouldn't have occurred to me," adding, "I still feel Larry's influence shaping my college career, not a direct influence, but something more subtle."

Of course, it is still early to tell what Lionel's final legacy will be for the 18 freshmen who lived there. While two are going on to Harvard Law School in the fall, and two are going immediately on to medical school, there are many who are still wrestling with the same questions about their future that they struggled with while at Lionel.

Kathy speaks for a whole contingent of Lionel when she says. "I'm going to try to finish school, which may be difficult." While speaking vaguely of perhaps switching out of her current joint major of Applied Math and Biology into straight Biology, Kathy says, "Maybe someday I'll go to med school, maybe I'll drop out of school." Jeff speaks of returning in the fall after a two-and-a-half year absence, although he is not sure what he ultimately wants to do with his life. Daniel is going to work for the City of Baltimore and considering law school, Rich wants to teach high school history. At the furthest extreme, none of Shawn's friends have heard from her since December. Kathy isn't sure, but she thinks Shawn may have simply gone to bed.

Yet oddly enough, Kathy may have summed up the Lionel experience best when she said "I always thought of us as pretty typical. Looking past time off, past the inability to communicate and the near fist-fights, past the violent clash of cultures, it may just be that Lionel was somehow "typical"--like the rest of Harvard, only more so. If Harvard is about special people, leaders of their respective communities, people who refuse to follow the beaten path, then Lionel wrote the book on all of those qualities freshman year. If Harvard is about diversity, and people learning from people who are different from them, this describes virtually every moment of life in Lionel, from talking politics to arguing over which channel to watch. And at the very least, the legacy of Lionel is having spent a year living with 18 of the most diverse people ever to live under a dorm roof. "When I run into anyone from Lionel, even though they may have changed, I still feel I can have a real conversation with them," Mary says. "I know more than just their face--I feel I know them. "It was Harvard at a dangerous voltage, good while it lasted, but also good when it ended. As Carol recalls, "A lot of it looks very humorous now, and I was laughing even then, but I would never live through it again."