In high school, she was student body president, editor of the yearbook and a straight-A student.

Now she's a self-described "Grille Rat" who attends class when it doesn't interfere with catalog-shopping, mall-hopping and hangover-stopping.

How priorities change.

Some undergraduates refuse to conform to the College stereotype of over-committed overachievers. Instead they lead "alternative lifestyles," motivated more by TV Guide listings than professors' office hours.

Granted, they are a minority. But if you look past the hustle of hectic Harvardians, you can (easily) find them in their bedrooms, e-mailing, browsing the Web or most likely napping at any given hour.

They are the few, the proud, the Harvard slackers.

Official State of Denial

Most undergraduates have had personal contact with a slacker or two--a former roommate, a friend of a friend, that girl from the first-year proctor group who never made it to Annenberg. But when you ask around in the hallowed halls of Harvard's administrative offices, the official response varies.

Former Assistant Professor of History Patricia N. Limerick found the phenomenon of slackerhood so pervasive that she wrote an article on what she calls the "Harvard phantom."

Limerick, who served on the Student Affairs committee in the early 1980s, says she was most disturbed by these phantoms who "had all the faculty resources of Harvard available to them but did not make anything of that opportunity."

But Limerick says she also recognizes the correlation between phantoms and slackers.

"Phantoms were not necessarily slackers, though many of them were, in my judgment, performing considerably below potential because of their disengagement," Limerick, now a professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder, writes in an e-mail.

Some recognize that slackers exist in the College and attempt to explain their existence through basic psychology.

"Some people just prefer to be alone," Dean of Students Archie C. Epps III quips.

Others offer more extensive analyses.