AT HARVARD, a holier-than-thou attitude toward TV and TV-viewers abounds. And I've had enough of it.

For instance, no Harvard library carries TV Guide. Apparently, there's no room for the country's biggest-selling weekly magazine among the Harvard libraries' scant 103,000 periodical holdings.

The library's overall collection about TV's effect on society is equally abysmal. Harvard makes plenty of primary and secondary material available for students of literature. But try to find a tape of last week's CBS Evening News. Or a tape of anything, for that matter.

The College's academic offerings on TV are just as sparse. A handful of courses mention the subject, but hardly any dwell on it. The Core Curriculum steers students towards 16th century literature, but offers no courses in the media literacy needed to understand today's information age. Undergrads looking to study TV must turn to the Kennedy School. But even there the thrust is news, not TV as a medium.

The most damning evidence of Harvard's anti-TV attitude is the University's stonewalling of efforts to bring cable television to Harvard's houses. Harvard has claimed that money was the problem. But when Harvard had a chance to get cable on campus cheaply, it passed it up.

The installation of the Harvard University Network last year would have been "the perfect time" to wire Harvard's dormitories for cable, according to a Continental Cablevision spokesperson. Technicians had to struggle to pull two telephone wires through centuries-old walls into each student room. Pulling a cable connector along would not have added much to the workload. The University's decision to ignore cable when rewiring the whole campus can only be attributed to a desire to keep cable out of the dorms--or, perhaps, sheer stupidity.

HARVADIANS look down their noses at anyone who dares to mention TV in a non-pejorative context.

During the Gulf war, people loved to complain that TV news was doing an inadequate job. "They haven't said anything about the environmental effects," one classmate of mine insisted.

"It's all been military strategy. The networks never have anyone on talking about why we shouldn't go to war," complained another.

As you might imagine, these TV-haters don't watch much TV. As a result, they were often wrong in their broad-brush assertions about TV. Night-line did examine the damage war can do to the environment. Other network programs ran similar stories. And obviously, war coverage was not "all military strategy."

So the TV-bashers back down, arguing that one side or the other--or the whole issue--wasn't given enough airtime. Finally, we're down to a criticism that can be evaluated and discussed. But the transparent way in which many in the Harvard community are willing to ignore the facts to criticize TV leads me to conclude that they are driven by an irrational hatred of the medium rather than a reasoned distaste.

One graduate student who spends a lot of time studying television news broadcasts says her colleagues scoff at her field of research. "People look at me funny," she says. She shouldn't look for much support from Mass. Hall in future years. Neil L. Rudenstine reportedly bought his first TV set just two months before his selection as Harvard's next president.

Of course, the problem of unthinking TV-bashing isn't limited to Harvard, Boston University Associate Professor Alan M. Olson wrote in a recent book that "intellectuals find it possible, even chic, to say nasty things about television anywhere, anytime, without fear of reprisal."

Neil Postman, a visiting professor at the Kennedy School, has deftly identified several reasons why television causes "learned" people such angst. He notes that every past transition in means of communication has made people angry. The Catholic Church was not amused when the printed book was introduced. Even something as seemingly innocuous as the alphabet had its critics--mainly those elders who were proficient in hieroglyphics.

But after painting opponents of past changes as reactionaries, Postman goes on to conclude that TV is evil. Like so many others, Postman allows his visceral dislike for TV to taint his academic work.