The lower class were the journalists, and they were so low down in the structure that they were barely noticed at all.

--Tom Wolfe,The New Journalism

THE CRIMSON, as legend goes, has been for most of its history the refuge of Harvard's Undesirables.

With the exception of the classroom, life inside the Ivy walls had little to do with merit, and everything to do with old money and "social grace." These lay at the foundation of the final clubs--always a blend of legacy status and the characteristics that Abbot Lawrence Lowell called "quality."

The Undesireables weren't quality. So they became reporters. Rather than the elegant tradition of Lowell, they identified with big city newspaper hacks--low paid, poorly educated men who slapped stories together for deadline, then sprung away to follow another story: Or to the nearest bar.

In the 1970s, college graduates started to choose journalism as a career, changing the face and nature of the industry. Tom Wolfe and the New Journalists invented the concept of non-fiction literature, newspaper and magazine writing that was actually good prose.

These days, then, newswriting is (almost) as respectable for the literati as law or teaching. In high schools like mine across the country, editing the paper is part of trying to be school superstar.

But at Harvard--even the Harvard of public school kids on financial aid--those superstars don't always head for student publications. They scramble off in a thousand different directions from the time their feet land in the Yard.

Sometimes, those directions are polar opposites,

To wit, my upstairs neighbor, a St. Paul's alum, strolled towards the Hasty Pudding club. I found myself in the newsroom of The Crimson.

INEVER REALLY was that interested in the final club scene. Still, that scene was never interested in me--a fact which threw a wrench in my grand scheme of self-righ-teousness.

To be honest, the final clubs, even in their elitist social cocoon, did appeal in some way. Parties. Beer. Abdicating all claims to social responsibility. Nevertheless, I avoided the final clubs. I turned down a friend's offer to punch me for the Phoenix.

Last fall, however, final clubs came back into my life. Rumors drifted into the newsroom about a group of women who had formed their own final club, called the Bee.

The rumors developed into genuine scuttlebutt, then matured into full-scale gossip. The stroy fell within my beat, so I began to poke around.

As it happens, the Bee was very much alive. I didn't know it, but there were early morning meetings for breakfast and outings to the ballet. By November, I squeezed a list of names out of a socialite friend of mine. She wasn't in the club, but she was a Wannabee. I called the women on her list.