WHAT WAS most shocking about the whole Caroline Isenberg affair was how shocked we all were.

Of course, in one sense we should have been shocked by the brutal, senseless killing of this Harvard graduate, who was stabbed seven times outside her Upper West Side apartment. But not-withstanding the obvious news angle to this story ("Pretty Aspiring Actress Slain"), its coverage revealed something about our society. Of the hundreds of murders that happen yearly in New York City, this was one of the few that merited front-page placement in The New York Times, and then the continuous attention of the nation's major news media during the following week."

And it revealed something about our life here at Harvard--this bastion of Establishment liberalism--that in the days that followed, informed public opinion, as gauged by this amateur pulse-taker, swung decidedly in favor of the death penalty. "Kill the mother-fucker" was the gist of the reaction I got from friends and acquaintances. Velma Barfield's victims were one thing, but this was one of our own.

I don't mean to belittle in any way our sense of revulsion against this brutality. I knew Caroline, liked her, and can attest to the glowing words that friends used to describe her in newspaper accounts of her death. But there was something in the reaction here that conjured up that gnawing feeling we don't like to admit to ourselves--that the liberalism here often runs only skin-deep, that there is an insularity to the Ivy-covered walls surrounding us.

Harvard Liberalism, A healthy regard for toleration, diversity, and the rights and interests of the underclass. Galbraith, Schlesinger, the Kennedys. That's the model that draws us here, but how much of it is real? How much of what is asserted in the name of liberalism on this campus is merely enlightened self-interest that disappears when out own lives are at stake? Does principled opposition to the death penalty evaporate when the victim is one of us? The evidence does not support the answer we like to hear.

THERE ARE ALL kinds of insularities bred by the walls around us, and they can be noticed in the causes we espouse and in the attitudes that color the way we conduct our lives. The most salient example is the soap-box posturing that now passes for campus politics. The Engelhard Library flap, the controvers over the McCloy fellowships. South Africa investments recent history at Harvard is littered with the remnants of feel good politicking that leaves little to show for itself except the staking out of a position for which one has no responsibility. (And the Crimson editorial page cannot be wholly exempted from this trend).

The record of Harvard students on connecting their politics to their real lives is not consistently good. Graduates of the late 1960s, who so vociferously protested the war in Vietnam, now look back with shame to their decision to evade the draft and their effective decision to leave the burden of that war on the poor of this country. In a poignant article he wrote for The Washington Monthly in 1975, the journalist James Fallows, a member of the Harvard Class of 1970, recalled that rationalizations he and his classmates used for their action, most notably the argument that it was their duty to withhold themselves from the clutches of America's war machine. Fortunately, as he pointed out, this meant that the course of action that kept them alive was also politically correct. Now Fallows regrets what he did for having contributed to a legacy of class divisions in this country.

The point here is not to second-guest the Class of 1970, but to suggest the ways in which Harvard works to shut us from responsibility for our politics. This trend cuts both ways. The little Podhoretz's in Eliot House today telling us to protect our "interests" in Central America would be singing a different tune were they getting draft notices in the mail next week rather than invitations to work for Morgan Stanley. Happily we don't have to make the life and death choices Fallows had to make, but indications are that we still haven't learned the dangers of posturing.

Of course it would be wrong to focus so exclusively on the political tenor of what is now largely an apolitical campus. There are other aspects of insularity as well, and these have been well documented. Predecessors of mine have filled this page in years past with reams of statistics suggesting the narrow career-minded focus of most Harvard students, and they are largely correct. It's not so much that I object to my classmates' overwhelming decision to pursue law, business, or medicine--all worthwhile professions--as to the unthinking way in which many seem to hop on the assembly line. It is no new insight to say that Harvard students are conformists, nor would it be novel to note the insular nature of a laundry list of everyday student concerns, the food in the dining halls, the extension we need to get, the study card that has to be signed, the party in Quincy House...

We are, in other words, human.

NONE THE LESS, THE isolated atmosphere bred by Harvard present us with a host of challenges that begin with one dilemma, how to seek social consciousness without preaching, hectoring, of hypocrisy. Most Harvard students I know want something more out of life than self enrichment, but what is the personal price they are willing to pay to achieve this?

A portion of Harvard students, of whom I am deeply respectful, has found the answer to this question in social service work, notably through the Phillips Brooks House. They have chosen to break through the insularity by putting their hands and feet where their mouths are--in the public schools of Cambridge, in the homes of in dochinese refugees, in the streets of Boston's poorest neighborhoods.

Harvard as an institution, by contrast, has not always followed this example--as is amply demonstrated by its deplorable behavior as a Cambridge landlord, or it foisting of a costly power plant on the people of Mission Hill. To the University's credit, though, the last few years have seen marked improvement in its willingness to back up materially its professed ideals of service to society. Last year the Law School set aside some money for students wishing to pursue low paying public service work during the summer, rather than the prices corporate work so many seek. The Medical School has began work on a new curriculum that will put greater emphasis on the ethical and personal issues doctors control; Through the School of Education. Harvard is stepping up practical efforts to improve public education in this country.

On educational issues especially, Harvard has demonstrated keener awareness of its enormous social responsibilities President Bok's instincts that universities should stick to pontificating about educational issues are essentially right, and Harvard has spoken up on affirmative action in admissions: secrecy in research technology transfer, and financial aid In the area of financial aid, in particular. Harvard does not get enough credit for its extensive lobbying efforts to head off the worst of Reagan's budget cuts in 1981, cuts that would have harmed not Harvard students by and large, but lower and middle class students at other universities and colleges. These measures go a long way toward-breaking down barriers between the Harvard community and the outside world.

BUT ALTRUISM, on both a personal and institutional level, is not the only quality at issue here. There are different kinds of insularities that are tougher to break, as was suggested by our reaction to the Isenberg murder. Feel-good polities are only the most extreme manifestation of a professed liberalism whose roots may not be as strong as we like to think.