WAR IS PEACE. Ignorance is Strength. Freedom is Slavery. Scallops are made from cod. Exams should be after vacation.

If you're in any bad place long enough, you lose your grasp on reality. Worse, while you think Big Brother is your friend, the Big Guy is laughing himself silly.

University Hall is chock full o' deans chuckling in their Brooks Brothers lapels. For their own convenience, they've imposed a deviant scheduling system known nowhere else (outside of New Jersey). They've made us take exams after vacation. Christmas holidays, which for most college students are times of release and partying without restraint, become two-week guilt trips. Of course, we have a four-day intersession to do all the partying we need.

And what's really funny, U-Hall's got certain up-perclassmen defending the system with all they've got. The Politburo should be so lucky.

According to these Harvard veterans, if we didn't have our two-week reading period, all extracurriculars would be abandoned, there'd be no Harvard Crimson, no sports, no PBH community work. Right. Like Yale, Brown, Columbia, Michigan and 400 other other schools with no extracurriculars.

Better yet, these deluded upperclassmen say that the administration teaching us to be better blow-offs. If not for the Harvard schedule-makers, we'd have to do all the work during the semester, like the demi-humans in Cabot Library. The administration's helping us be non-students. Okay. And that was veal you had last night.

I guess the administration learned this from their Jersey friends. Princeton, too, has exams after vacation. I guess that's why everyone at Princeton doesn't do any work.

ACTUALLY, the administration's policy caters to the creatures who do all the reading and take down the name of every optional book the professor mentions in class.

The typical Harvard student carries a load of books home for Christmas and consults his friend Smirnoff about whether he or she ought to be studying. On the other hand, certain lower forms of life masquerading as Harvard students will, in fact, open the books they bring home. Often.

So, not only is my drinking rudely interrupted by thoughts of the angst-ridden early writings of pre-war female Ukrainian poets and the exact date of Kandinsky's first non-expressionist painting, but the same people who I dream of torturing in section are getting two extra weeks to screw up the curve. And you can be fairly sure they're not going to lend me the briefcase full of notes they recopied back home under the Christmas tree.

Then, thanks to our buddies in the administration we get to fly back to pupu platters two whole weeks earlier than our friends at the other 99 percent of American colleges and begin three weeks of fun, fun, fun.

The surreal aspect about all this is that those people ready to die for exams after vacation are really fighting for the extra two or three weeks in September.

I love reading period. I didn't need my friends at University Hall to teach me that work is bad and to be avoided. I, like most other Harvard students, turned down Princeton and the lure of the mandatory junior thesis. We could have our two-week reading period if we were willing to come back, say, September 4.

While the less time spent here the better, I can give up a couple of weeks in September. Sorry Pete, we had to sell our house at Newport to pay the tuition. I want a Christmas vacation filled with the Chicago Bears and with Budweiser, not Kant, Durkheim and other people--all not my friends--who worry a lot about Weltanschauung.