This article was thought so important that Harvard sent it to the parents of all undergraduates.

The implication was: you're paying a lot of money for Harvard, so your kids had damn well better take advantage of all these nifty opportunities they have.

The second implication was: if your kids ever complain about Harvard, just remember that it's not our fault, that we offer them more than they want.

I find these explanations degrading, based as they are on preconceptions of a faultless Harvard and a ungrateful/lethargic student body.

I'D LIKE TO forward two alternative explanations for the lack of student interest in student-faculty contact.

The first is that very few Harvard undergraduates are planning to go into academia. Few will choose to socialize in later life with professors. And yet it is assumed willy-nilly that these people should be our mentors, our role models, and our primary contact with an earlier generation.

The second reason, to bring back the notion of the two-class university, is that Harvard has worked so hard to raise its faculty to the level of demigods that students have learned to leave them alone.

It's like Greek mythology: mortals learned to avoid the capricious and powerful gods at all costs, except when they needed some special favor.

So office hours and SCR meals are attended only by the sycophants... and by those who have seen the emperor's clothes and realize the faculty to be human.

What is needed, perhaps, is some mass debunking of the Harvard faculty. We have to show the Wizard of Oz for what he really is--minus the amplification and smokescreen. We have to jump on Gulliver like the Lilliputians (the metaphors are really piling up now) and rip off the false nose and mustache.

In other words, we have to counteract the age-old Harvard attempt to glorify its professors and debase (at least in relative terms) its students.

Only then will students start attending SCR's--at least, the ones which they are allowed to attend.