"They sat around for three years festering, and no matter which house you went to, they said, 'I didn't want to be here.'"

Not a Bastion of Elitism

Heimert's critics claim his effort to preserve House personalities was a way to perpetuate Eliot House as the last bastion of old-style Harvard elitism.

But Heimert fires back at his opponents, trying to debunk the "obsession" with "Eliot House and preppies."

"If Eliot House didn't exist, some people would have to invent it" as a concept, he says. For critics of Eliot House, "it was a way to establish your own egalitarian legitimacy even though...once you got into Harvard you are no longer in an egalitarian setting."

Heimert further attacks preppy-bashers, saying they support a "compulsive anti-elitism which strikes me as acting from guilt." He groups them with supporters of random housing assignment and critics of selective concentrations like Social Studies and History and Literature.

The former Eliot master rejects accusations that he was the last guardian of Old Harvard, pointing to his Midwestern, public school background.

He claims that as an undergraduate "if I had applied to Eliot House, my neckties would have been too wide."

But after all, Heimert says, today "preppies are not what they used to be."

"I remember back when preppies were really preppies and clubbies were really clubbies," says Heimert. "You could tell by the way they talked with a lockjaw and they dressed different. Now everybody dresses the same. Everybody looks like they're going to Michigan State."

Heimert laments the drop in the number of undergraduate preppies from about 60 percent of Harvard students 30 years ago to less than 40 percent now, claiming a metamorphosis in Harvard's social atmosphere.

"The social standards of the public high school have come to dominate Harvard rather than the prep school," he says. "When I was an undergraduate, everybody wore Oxford shirts and socks as opposed to baseball caps and fishnet underwear."

Heimert also slams the pre-professional "Kennedy School syndrome" that has become a regular affliction among non-preppy undergraduates, who increasingly demand "a sense of the cash value of anything [they] are learning."

"There are probably more people now who are here for their diploma, not their education," says Heimert. "They want the Harvard degree."

Preppies, on the other hand, are more interested in a broad-based, liberal arts education than in a diploma with the Harvard seal.