All in all, an intriguing mixture of the ridiculous and the sublime. I'm still not sure what to make of it.

BUT THIS I DO KNOW. In he year I served as associate managing editor of The Crimson, we ran dozens of editorials, signed and unsigned, about President Derek C. Bok. I cannot remember a single instance in which Bok bothered to write back to us. Nor does our former editorial chair. According to our production supervisor, Bok hasn't written to The Crimson in at least five years.

And one of our old editorial cartoonists, Bentley Boyd '89, was once told that Bok had never even heard of the cartoon that ran in this space five days a week for four years.

The mayor of the city of New York responds to articles in the highbrow New York Times and the lowbrow New York Post. Whey does the chief executive of Harvard feel no similar obligation?

A footnote to my story: I wrote back to Rudenstine, attempting to clarify my remarks. I expected the correspondence to end there. It didn't. He responded with another letter--this one only a single page.

This time, I didn't need to look far to find the hidden message. Rudenstine took the time to respond to what I had written. That meant he had read it. It meant that he had taken it seriously and tried to understand it. The subtext of those letters is simple: Rudenstine cares about what students have to say.

And that, at least, is a detain that matters.