NEXT WEEK, on the 350th anniversary of Harvard's founding, the College is throwing a special party for undergraduates. The odds are that you're not invited.

While the four-day, University-wide celebration earlier this month may have been among the best of times for thousands of Harvard alumni, the undergraduate festivities promise to be an embarrassment and an insult to every student. What should be a celebration of the College at its best pays homage to Harvard's worst traditions of elitism and exclusivity.

In planning the celebration, the dean of students, Archie C. Epps III, and his small, select group of student assistants demonstrated a callous disregard for the community at large.

They made only superficial efforts to solicit the views of any wider segment of the student population. They made no effort to seek the advice of the Undergraduate Council, the only arguably representative body in the College. Nevertheless, Undergraduate Council Chairman Brian C. Offutt '87 and other council members were aware of the 350th planners' intentions almost every step of the way, and they betrayed the people who elected them by failing to raise objections.

The result reflects the narrow mindedness of the planners and the process they employed. Woefully out of touch with the student mainstream, Epps and his aides catered their affair to suit a Final Club social set and a favored few undergraduates.

Four of the featured events--two luncheons, a tea, and a dinner, all with distinguished guests of honor--are by invitation only. For example, a luncheon to honor writing at Harvard, an event that might interest a wide audience of students, has been closed to all but 60. The coordinators in University Hall have already drafted the guest lists. The bulk of the invitations will soon land in the mailboxes of students who hold positions of perceived power or prestige in campus organizations. In demographic terms, your 17 percent chance of gaining admission to Harvard was more than double the likelihood of your copping an invitation to one of the exclusive gatherings.

If Epps and his helpers understood that false selectivity offends the average undergraduate, they could have saved themselves long hours laboring over guest lists. Special events should have been designed with broad participation in mind, and admission should have been extended to all interested students. Where limited admission was unavoidable, lotteries could have resolved problems efficiently and equitably.

One highlight of the celebration is the "Grand Ball," a lavish black tie affair on October 11. It will no doubt prove a memorable evening for those fortunate enough to attend. But even appropriately attired students willing to pay $15 per ticket will be left to their own devices that night, because entrance to the ball has been limited to 4500.

Dean Epps observes that passes to The Grand Ball are "the hottest tickets in town." The dean says the demand caught him by surprise: he didn't expect that many undergraduates to be interested in a formal soiree.

That astonishing statement leaves us scratching our heads and wondering why Epps planned the event in the first place--and for whom it was really intended.

The astonishment doesn't stop there, however.

Beyond a few exceptions, Epps says, the undergraduate 350th offers something for everyone. And of course, the dean is right. If you can't dance beneath an ice sculpture of John Harvard or dine with the master of John Harvard's alma mater, you can always attend the Harvard-Cornell football game, or listen to a "New England Bandstand Concert" featuring various undergraduate performing groups.

Even the events that are generally accessible, however, offer a sad commentary on the state of Harvard College in 1986.

Much of the hoopla revolves around the presence of "distinguished guests" at the houses. These honored guests include Powell Professor of American Literature Alan Heimert '49, the master of Eliot House, Geyser University Professor Henry Rosovsky '59, a member of the Harvard Corporation, and John Kenneth Galbraith, Warburg Professor of Economics Emeritus.

The "presence of distinguished alumni and affiliates in the houses," so pompously promoted for the 350th, is supposed to be an everyday occurrence. The fact that it takes a very special occasion indeed to bring Henry Rosovsky to Mather House offers an honest but ironic commentary on the distance between undergraduates and Harvard's elder elite.