THE chic new student organization on campus deserves credit. Never before at Harvard has a group of book-loving introverts attracted so much attention. The dozen or so diehard academics who constitute the Society of Nerds and Geeks (SONG) have been receiving more national press lately than many small European nations.

They basked in their 15 minutes of fame (coverage in The Crimson, anyway) and then stayed on stage for more. A bite-size article in the Wall Street Journal was next, followed by a feature in the New York Times, a wire story by the Associated Press, interviews with radio stations around the country and the coup de grace, last month's interview on CBS Morning News.

Publicity is one thing; but every organization needs an agenda. SONG's wish list includes a 24-hour library on campus and regular shuttles to the biology labs. They want Harvard Nerds ("You know who you are," they say with a wink) to join them at one of their Friday night study breaks.

But more importantly, they want respect. "Until the words `nerd' and `geek' become terms of approbation and not derision," reads their Manifesto, "we do not stand a chance."

YES, they have a Manifesto. Maybe it was those long 15 minutes of fame, or maybe it was just an overdose of calculus. But somewhere along the line, the Nerds broadened their agenda.

Campus issues shrink before the lofty questions they now pose. Here's one: What happened to American economic hegemony?

The Nerds will tell you in two words: anti-intellectualism. "There are very few places in this world," says the Manifesto, "where anti-intellectualism runs as high in popular culture as it does in the United States."

If America wants to remain technologically and economically competitive, SONG members insist, it must adopt the Asian (and, to a lesser degree, European) reverence for education.

It's a straightforward, attractive doctrine. No Gramm-Rudmann, no protectionism, no comprehensive industrial policy. The war for economic competitiveness will not be won on the battlefield of finance, they say, but on the battlefield of values.

WHERE is this battlefield? It's in the mind of all Americans. Take Steve Olson, for example. Olson is a self-proclaimed spokesman for the blue-collar work force of America. Writing in a Newsweek commentary, he railed against the Nerds--the same ones he used to beat up in grade school--who are now running the factory where he works, the newspaper he reads and the rest of his country.

Olson doesn't hide his blue-collar prejudices against academics and others. "At least our bigotry is open and honest and worn out front like a tattoo," he proclaims.

The Nerds say that anti-intellectuals like Olson are stunting the improvement of American education. The prevalence of Olson's attitudes in schoolyards across the country, they say, is a considerable social barrier. It's so much easier for a 10-year-old to reject nerdy virtues than to suffer humiliation.

Whether attitudes like Olson's diminish American competitiveness is unproven. But taken to its extreme, anti-intellectualism demonstrably impedes technological progress. During the Cultural Revolution, for example, when professors were ridiculed and universities were shut, China suffered a "lost generation" of technical experts and academicians, a loss it is still trying to make up.

For the Japanese, however, with their ferociously competitive university entrance exams, academic achievement is the highest mark of individual distinction. Jews, who comprise an undergraduate constituent at Ivy-League institutions far out of proportion to their numbers, are a similar example.

The Geeks' vision is an America where all citizens revere education as much as do the Japanese and Jews.