Residents seem to most fear the arrival of suburban sprawl. To buy groceries here, people must drive to neighboring Ayer or Leominster--and they like that just fine.

"I don't like to see too much growth because we have small country roads that can't accommodate cars," Zaitlin says. The general store, which also sells prescription drugs and camera equipment, is the only place where Harvard residents meet regularly. "I'm just working here because it's a good way to meet people and hear town gossip," Zaitlin says.

Harvard, Neb.

Like Harvard, Mass., this southcentral Nebraska town is rural, all white and uncrowded. But its poverty, crime and delinquency make it a world apart.

Of Harvard's 976 residents, 26.2 percent are under the age of 18. Crime runs high. The town has between 20 and 40 arrests a year, and a staff of three full-time police officers, "extremely high for a town of this size," according to Police Chief Mike Hagley. He says most of the arrests are for alcohol-related crimes, arrests and burglaries.

Nearly all the residents live in homes costing less than $50,000. The town is far from affluent: 14.2 percent of all residents, and 18.5 percent of children, live below the poverty line.

Here in the heart of the American Dustbowl, most of the residents work as laborers in the surrounding corn and soybean fields, in the beef-and pork-packing industries or in farm-equipment manufacturing. A group of 20 to 30 migrant farm workers, mostly undocumented Mexican immigrants, come for two months each summer to work in the corn fields, town officials say.

The median per-capita income is $9,449, well below the state average of $12,452.

The town is physically segregated--divided between lower-middleclass residents in the town center, and the Courts Addition, which houses 200 residents in a converted commissary warehouse. The warehouse was part of the Harvard Army Air Base, an Air Force station used in World War II that shut down shortly after.

The town is "fairly divided," Hagley says with a hint of sadness.

Harvard's fortunes are subject to the whim of the corn crop, which has been decimated by high wind and hail in the last two years. "There's many a farmer that has to stand out there every night and literally guard their field--pray for the hail not to come," says Brent Williamson, principal for the 4th through 12th grades at the Harvard Public Schools.

Williamson says two-thirds of each class matriculates at a two- or four-year college. None have ever considered applying to Harvard University.

"Kids in the Midwest, they're still pretty much respectful of you, unlike other places," Williamson says. The teenagers' favorite hangout is the parking lot outside the town's grocery store.

Although fights sometimes break out and some alcohol and drug abuse occurs, the biggest problem is domestic child abuse and sexual abuse. Williamson estimates he deals with five or six such cases a year. In a recent case, a father sexually abused his two junior-high-age sons, who then sexually abused a younger sister. The boys were removed from the home by the state's Child Protective Services.

The school is trying to create a better life for the students, buying 14 new computers recently and opening an Internet connection. But with a stagnant population, Harvard has gradually been losing state education aid money. Williamson predicts the school will eventually close and be consolidated with districts in the surrounding towns. "Once they lose the school, it's going to be difficult for the community to hang on," he says.

Young people aren't staying the way they used to. "They're going to the Lincolns and the Omahas and the bigger areas," Williamson says. "These houses you're going to see them go up for sale, and there isn't going to be a market to buy them."

Welfare changes don't affect just the big cities. Clay County, which includes Harvard, is part of a four-county pilot program in the state that requires welfare recipients to find work. Already, nearly a dozen families have left town. "The state services have been used a lot and probably abused.... People don't look for or try to find employment," Hagley says.

Still, a bittersweet humor persists in the heartland, even in towns that have known hardship, like Harvard. Williamson, the principal, was born in Oxford, Neb., and has lived throughout the state. "I tell people I was born in Oxford and educated at Harvard," he says, chuckling. "That's one for the books."

Harvard, Ill.

An eight-foot-long, five-foot-high fiberglass cow is this town's claim to fame.

Harmilda, according to the town's official written history, was built by two brothers named Jones in 1966, "when Harvard had the reputation of being the Milk Center of the World." The cow is named for the Harvard Milk Day Celebration, an annual festival held since 1942 to "salute the dairy farmers and the belief in our community," the history notes.

Smack in the middle of northern Illinois dairy country, and about 50 miles northwest of Chicago, Harvard is a typical Midwestern farm town. Most of the 5,975 residents work on dairy farms, in tool and plastics manufacturing, or in health care. In June, Motorola Inc., the telecommunications giant, completed a cellularphone facility, and is the town's largest employer. About 15 percent of the population is Hispanic.

The town was founded in 1855 when Elbridge and Mary Ayer, two natives of Harvard, Mass., bought 400 acres here and named the settlement after their hometown. Mr. Ayer later offered free land if the railroads leading to Chicago agreed to make every train stop at Harvard; the town blossomed.

The town is solidly middle-class. The median household income is $29,882, slightly below the state average of $32,252, but only 75 of 2,050 households are on public assistance.

Harvard entered the national spotlight in 1993 when it began a big-city-style crackdown on teenage gang members that raised eyebrows. The town passed an ordinance making it illegal to wear "colors, emblems or insignia" indicating gang membership or sympathies. The symbols included such articles as a star of David, a Dallas Cowboys jacket and a Georgetown baseball cap.

One boy was booked in 1994 for wearing a star of David. Town officials say the youth was not Jewish. The boy was convicted, placed under supervision and fined $25.

Harvard officials say their nearly zealous vigilance is necessary to prevent urban blight from afflicting their wholesome community. "We've seen what it does to other communities," says Harvard High School assistant principal Dean A. Albright. "We felt it was better to get on the ball and prevent it before it became a problem." Albright says the worst crimes he's seen are occasional vandalism, graffiti and minor drug use.

The high school--which Albright describes as "the biggest social event around"--has also taken a tough stance against smoking and drinking, conducting annual canine searches of the school for drugs and punishing violations with Saturday school, $50 fines and suspensions.

Indeed, the cohesion of this community--most of whose members are Catholic, German Protestant or Baptist--is evident in its epic defense of its beloved cow.

In 1991, the state Departmetn of Transportation offered the town $650,000 to move Harmilda, who stood at the intersection of Routes 14 and 173, which the state wanted to widen. Residents bristled and refused to budge.

Three years later, a compromise was reached. The cow now sits on a stone pedastal in nearby Five Point Park.

Harvard, Idaho

Tiny is probably the best way to describe Harvard, Idaho.

This northern Idaho town, about 90 minutes from Lewiston, got its name through a quirky set of circumstances.

The neighboring town of Princeton, was founded in 1896 by a native of Princeton, Minn. Shortly after, Homer W. Canfield, who owned land nearby, sold his property to the Wyoming, Idaho & Montana Railroad. The railroad wanted to name the new outpost for Canfield, but he declined, mischievously suggesting Harvard as a replacement, according to Keith Petersen, an editor at the Washington State University Press who has studied the region.

Later, college students working on the railroad during the summer named new outposts after Purdue, Vassar, Stanford and Yale, but only Harvard and Princeton remain.

The town sits at the border between the Palouse--one of the largest wheat-, pea- and lentil-growing areas in the U.S.--and the heavily forested timberlands of northern Idaho. "It's a real pretty little town," Petersen says.

Harvard's residents mainly worked as loggers, hauling wood to a sawmill in the nearby town of Potlatch, until the sawmill closed in 1980. Many of the residents are now retired, but some are wheat, canola and barley farmers.

"Everybody knows everybody and everybody knows everybody's business," says Joyce Gilmore, postmaster at the two-room Harvard Post Office (ZIP code 83834), which serves the 235 residents of the town and the surrounding flatlands.

The biggest town issue, according to Gilmore, is water quality--a water and sewer system was first installed in the early 1980s. Previously, residents used septic tanks and ground wells. Often, the sewer pumps have failed entirely. "The sewage doesn't flush," Gilmore complains.

There is one connection to the University. In the mid-1980s, someone donated a cast-iron sundial in John Harvard's name; it now sits in Hylton Park--"the Harvard park, we all call it," Gilmore says.

Harvard, N.Y.

"It's remained about the same" is the best way Hannah Rosenstraus, 90, can describe the town where she has spent her life.

Rosenstraus is the longest and oldest resident in this hamlet of 50 people, an unincorporated settlement near the town of Hancock in western New York. She was born, raised and still lives in the same house.

The town used to contain a grist mill, used to process grain, a blacksmith's shop, a dairy with 15 cows and a hostel, all of which have since closed. No businesses remain.

During World War II, a factory churned out acetate, vital to weapons production, and wood alcohol. "We always had chicken pies out on the Fourth of July," Rosenstraus says, but the tradition "stopped because people got too old to run it."

Today, many of the residents "work on the State Road in the summer and live off unemployment in the winter," says Rosenstraus, referring to New York's highway-repair project.

They also work on odds and ends, including construction work and driving eight-wheel tractors for maple-sugar and maple-syrup facilities.

No one, including Rosenstraus, seems to know the origin of the hamlet's name, but she speculates that the town's founders were from New England and named it after their alma mater.

Harvard Glacier

Jutting into southern Alaska's Prince William Sound, the Harvard Glacier, 1,500 feet thick and 20 miles long, fills the lefthand fork of the College Fjord. The righthand fork is, naturally, the Yale Glacier. Seven tributaries of the fjord are named after Ivy League sister schools, including Radcliffe.

The fjord is "the most scenic fjord in Prince William Sound," says Bruce F. Molnia, chief of international poller programs at the U.S. Geological Survey in Reston, Va. The fjord is currently being studied for evidence of global warming.

The fjord, and Harvard Glacier, are visited by between 30,000 and 50,000 tourists a year, Molnia estimates. Many take day trips by bus, train and boat, departing from Anchorage.

The Harvard Glacier got its name in 1899 when the Harriman family--which later included W. Averell Harriman, undersecretary of state under President Lyndon B. Johnson--took a vacation in southern Alaska. They were accompanied by Harvard minerology instructor Charles Palache; John Muir, founder of the Sierra Club; an Amherst College professor; and two U.S. Geological Survey employees.

"They took great delight in ignoring Princeton," says Molnia, author of Alaska's Glaciers.

The glacier is quite active, moving about 2 to 3 feet a day. Thousands of icebergs break off into the sound each year; about once a year, a ship hits one, but there have been no sinkings or drownings so far.

The glacier is more then just ice--bands of sentiment, known as moraines, sit astride the west side of the glacier. However, except for moss, the Harvard Glacier supports no life.

Mt. Harvard

Finally, there is Mt. Harvard, Colorado's third highest mountain, at 14,420 feet. The mountain, part of the Sawatch Range, is part of a chain called the Collegiate Peaks, which include Mts. Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia and Oxford, about 90 miles southwest of Denver.

Despite its height, climbing up Mt. Harvard is hardly a death-defying experience. "It's an undistinguished lump on a fairly undistinguished range; it just happens to be very high," says John C. Reed of the U.S. Geological Survey in Denver. Reed, who has climbed the mountain once, describes it only as "a long walk" of about three or four miles.

Nor is the view from the mountain especially scenic, compared with Colorado's other 54 mountains above 14,000 feet. "In terms of being spectacular, Mt. Harvard would not be really high on the list," Reed says.