"Contrary to popular belief," says Lowe, a computer science major, "you can meet a lot of different types of people."

With time, many disadvantaged students overcome their sense of isolation from the rest of Harvard. But as they become acculturated, many discover they have lost contact with their past, and now feel cut off from their old communities. Their friends and family at home often cannot understand the students' new lives. Students from non-college backgrounds may be made outcasts by their encounters with academia.

Recalling her family's reaction when she was accepted to Harvard, Dynarski says, "They were proud. But with my sisters there was hostility. I got baited [then] and even more so now. I was like them when I came in; now I get ragged on for being a Harvard snob."

Me, Preppy?

When Von Redden went home for the first time this Thanksgiving, he was shocked by a cool reception. "So many a friends accused me of being preppy. I thought that was absurd. Me, preppy?" he asks incredulously.

While Craig's family is very supportive, and her younger siblings now aspire to Harvard, she says after she left for college her older siblings "expected me to be different--as if when I cut myself, blue blood would spill out."

After several years here, Craig, Dynarski, and Coughlan all say they feel at home. With the passage of time they have realized that there is more to Harvard than the stereotypes. But that realization process has, they argue, been largely one sided.

For many students from working-class backgrounds, one of the most painful practices of "conventional" Harvard undergraduates is their habit of generalizing about things they know nothing about.

"Making assumptions about 'the poor' is risky, especially for someone who's never been there," says Craig. "The idea of the disadvantaged is so stereotypical it leaves no room for the individual."

Craig remembers an incident in `Justice'--Moral Reasoning 22--when the section was discussing poverty. "Someone said if there was a poor man with 10 kids, and he needed money, then of course he would kill someone to get it. I didn't get mad, but I was saddened that she was so deluded."

The Harvard administration tries not to make assumptions when dealing with underprivileged students in order to avoid just such delusions, says Dean of Freshman Henry C. Moses. The University has designed no special problems for working-class students because, Moses says, any such program would force Harvard to generalize unfairly about problems facing the economically disadvantaged.

"I've always taken working-class kids as they come, and never made any assumptions about the effect of their family background," Moses says. "It is very hard for me to generalize in a way that might be useful."

Craig echoes this sentiment, but nonetheless believes students from economically disadvantaged backgrounds bring an important alternate viewpoint into their encounters with affluence. Too often, she says, these experiences are ignored by a system unused to dealing with diversity.

"There's an assumption here of equality which overlooks what each students has to offer individually," Craig says. "If one were to assume that every student at Harvard was essentially the same as every other student, that would be overlooking what each student has to offer on his or her own--the unique perspective each has."