Graduate students aren't the only people you'll overhear discussing astrophysics or Assyrian art at Out of Town News. Harvard Square harbors a ragtag community of itinerant intellectuals, secret geniuses, closet poets and conspiracy theorists who have no official connection to the University ("I'm not enrolled at Harvard, I just go there").

It can even be hard to tell a genuine Harvard faculty member.

Look closely at the old man in ratty tweed, the one who's gazing intently at the pigeons as they peck at crusts on the sidewalk. Is he a brilliant professor emeritus on the verge of a breakthrough in animal biology? A vagrant hoping for a free snack? Or both?

In fact, if there's anything that unites many of the different groups in the Square, it's the academic air they possess. The book-filled backpack (the embodiment of "intellectual baggage," perhaps?) is the closest thing to a uniform Cambridge has to offer.

But despite the diversity of dress, personal appearance is very important here--particularly as a medium for political expression. For some of the graying couples you'll see, his ponytail and her braid--or vice versa--are an affirmation of the ideals of another decade.

Indeed, even though Harvard has provided President Bush with some of his top advisers, the principles of personal freedom and social tolerance have stayed strong in Cambridge. Harvard Square is still one of the few places in this country where you'll see two men holding hands in public, or a Black woman and a white man.

On weekend nights, when teenagers crowd the sidewalks, the left and the right, the hippies and the preppies and the punks, negotiate a peaceful coexistence. Often the snub-nosed Groton girls stand alongside the skate rats from Somerville High, all of them listening to the soulful entreaty of a street musician.

A few of the scruffier young free spirits spent their whole summer hanging aroundAu Bon Pain and the "T Pit." Barefoot, clad in thecastoffs of many cultures, these modern-day HuckFinns have made Mass Ave their Mississippi.

The green regularity of the Yard seems fardistant from the vague human traffic just beyondits gates. Yet the life of the Square, you willfind, centers ultimately here.

For it is on the University that all purposesconverge--to study there, to photograph it, tosell to it, to beg from it. Harvard, seen from theSquare, is like the court of a great king in theMiddle Ages, where beggars and wizards, sages andcharlatans, all find their place