The lanky 6'6" Frank A. Pasquale III '96 muses over his "portly" stature in sixth grade, when during a regional spelling bee his chair collapsed underneath him as he sat down.

"The whole place, probably 400 people, cracked up laughing," Pasquale remembers.

He won the spelling bee.

That was in Oklahoma, one of seven states where Pasquale has spent his life. (The others are New York, Kentucky, California, Arizona, Texas and Massachusetts.)

According to Pasquale, because of his frequent relocations, often prompted by downsizing and layoffs in the steel and oil equipment industries in which his father worked, his parents have imparted to him a sense of injustice and an "aggrieved attitude toward life."

"Then I started asking whether this anger was justifiable, and that's when I started to look for a grounding for a social criticism," Pasquale says.

His father is now a systems manager at a drugstore in Newton and his mother is a customer service representative for Blue Cross/Blue Shield. But their only child has turned into a political theorist extraordinaire.

Pasquale savors law reviews and political philosophy. He says the Unabomber developed a sophisticated social theory, and he worships theorist Jurgen Habermas as the one who crystallized "all my latent Marxist, critical theoretical and radical democratic intuitions about what had gone wrong with the American public sphere."

But of course, says Pasquale, as references to the canon of social theory roll off his tongue, he prefers Habermas' work for its social theory rather than its philosophical conclusions. He finds Charles Taylor a much more interesting philosopher.

One of his favorite books is Taylor's Ethics of Authenticity because it "articulates a version of moral perfectionism at the levels of both personal identity and political organization which conveys a succinct yet illuminating account of the main obstacles to further democratization of our daily lives."

Sipping tea, Pasquale says he has become more interested in practice as he reaches the limits of the disputes in political theory. In his senior honor thesis titled "Participation as Deliberation: Reconceiving Justification for Campaign Finance Reform," he pointed out the flaws in John Rawls' justification of campaign finance reform and proposed an alternate paradigm.

In addition to these changes, Pasquale says he also has a plan for the first-year curriculum: make philosophy and poetry required courses.

Despite the economic upheavals that have affected his family and perhaps due to lessons learned in these difficult times, Pasquale has collected an impressive array of achievements at Harvard. He says he has always taken to heart his father's advice, "work with your head, not with your hands."

With the exception of four A-s, Pasquale sports an impeccable academic record. The key is to "grind," Pasquale says.

"In order to do well in a course you really have to end up attending to everything," he says. "It's a lot of jumping through hoops, and if you have the tolerance for that, you'll probably do well."

While most social studies concentrators cringe at the thought of Social Studies 10 and its infamously overwhelming reading list, Pasquale lists it as one of his favorite courses.