"The aloof, elite sense that one gets from a superior class was dissolved," he says. "The whole place was opened up. The business of chasing club membership seemed silly."

Ousley himself was invited to join the Hasty Pudding Club and says, "It gave me the greatest pleasure to refuse it."

But this newfound egalitarianism could not overcome the divisions within the Class of 1946 caused by the war.

The men of the Class of 1946 had no orientation week, no simultaneous moving into dorms and did not even eat in the same dining hall. There was no time for class bonding with war looming on the horizon.

"It was terribly fragmented," Ousley says. "It bothers me now when I read the yearbook. There were people I should have known that I never knew at all."

Others agree that service in the armed forces often dictated who a student's friends were.

Because many of the men on campus--both graduate students and undergraduates--were in military training programs or were actively serving in the armed forces, students tended to make friends based on the service to which they belonged, rather than their graduation class.

"I knew most of the people from the Navy," says James J. Collins '46, who enrolled in the Navy's V-12 program, which meant that he was sent to midshipman school after the Navy determined that he had been sufficiently educated for the job.

"Initially, I lived in Kirkland House with the V-12, where I knew everybody," he says. "When I got out of the Navy and lived in Adams House, I knew very few people from my class."

If the Class of 1946 could not learn lessons from textbooks, at least they got an education in the brutal classroom of war.

"That experience of being thrown together with people from other parts of the country and totally different outlooks on life...was one of the most valuable things," Nordell says.

And Dee agrees: "Without any doubt we had acquired at least some more wisdom."

"I always felt pretty damn lucky," Ousley says. "I owe a great deal to the school. It was more of a challenge then I was ready to face."

Entering the War

Harvard, like much of America before Pearl Harbor was somewhat complacent about the gathering clouds of war. But there was one figure at the University who defied the isolationists and the appeasers--Conant.