QUICK: WHO WEARS double-breasted suits, does honors work in economics and chemistry, is going to Harvard Law next year, and manages to erect gulags in the Yard in his spare time?

Saied Kashani '86, that's who.

Kashani is probably best known as the guiding force behind Harvard's Conservative Club, masterminding a series of events that have ruffled the feathers of the left. But he was also one of the prime movers in the Harvard Model United Nations for four years, an academic dynamo in two disparate fields, and occasional journalist for both the Crimson and the Salient.

To put it mildly, Kashani is controversial. And like all controversial personalities, he has strong supporters and committed enemies.

Kashani himself recognizes that he elicits strong feelings, and rarely flinches from giving others cause to display them.

With the same determination as his more notorious conservative counterparts at Dartmouth, Kashani frequently has assumed the role of a foil to many anti-apartheid protesters on campus. Instead, he believes that Harvard should divest from companies doing business not with South Africa, but the Soviet Union.

As two-time president of the 40-member strong Conservative Club, Kashani was primarily responsible for building a Soviet gulag and a black tower in the Yard this spring, a few days after the the South African Solidarity Committee (SASC) erected a makeshift shantytown in front of University Hall.

"[The Conservative Club] discussed that long before the shanties went up. We said if the SASC people put up shanties, we should put up anti-shanties. We were discussing that long before the shanties went up. And then when they went up, a lot of people--many just interested people we called--set them up, and just built these shanties."

Kashani admits that the shanties, like several other of his club's ventures, had less to do with the South African issue than with campus politics.

"After a while these people, these radicals start believing what they say so they get wrapped up in what they're doing. They just treat themselves so seriously. So we thought that by putting up a gulag we could protest the fact that the University is basically caving in to these people. And also maybe puncture [SASC's] balloon of seriousness."

WHILE NOT AGREEING with some of Kashani's tactics, former Republican Club president Mark G.P. Lagon '86 says that he respects what his ideological ally does. "He tries to push liberal sensitivites to an extreme by testing people's double standards."

Last year, for example, one week after the day-long SASC sit-in at the Harvard Corporation's headquarters at 17 Quincy St., Kashani invited the South African consulate general to address a closed meeting of conservative at Lowell House. A mob of students, including many SASC members, blockaded Lowell House, preventing the departure of the South African diplomat until the police were able to extricate him. Following this incident, the University revived a Vietnam-era disciplinary committee which eventually placed 10 students--all SASC members--on academic probation for the Lowell blockade.

This incident "was nothing but a ploy to anger the liberal community," says SASC member Evan O. Grossman '87-88, who currently works for a Massachusetts Democrat. "I think most members of the liberal wing would argue that Kashani is a grandstander. They view him as someone who likes to be annoying."

Kashani doesn't quite see the incident in exactly those terms. The impetus behind inviting a representative of the government, Kashani says, was that "if you want to know where SA is going right now, then you have to ask them. Now if the situation changes, if there's a revolution, all that will change."

Which isn't to say that Kashani was happy about how the incident turned out. "If we did it again we'd set up a forum or we'd have someone else speaking for an opposing viewpoint, and also we wouldn't ask him to speak on apartheid. We'd ask him to speak on security issues, on issues of Soviet involvement in Southern Africa, and the Cape route and the minerals, and that sort of thing, and in a long term strategic sense more important."