All hail Harvard! With a month-and-a-half to go in the 20th century, that illustrious institution on the Charles has done it again. It's a new cultural innovation--the fourth meal.

Seems that students are staying up later and later in order to keep ahead of the pack. Between classes, work-study, athletics, campus organizations, honors theses, political commitments, public service and answering all the daily pages, e-mails and voice-mail messages, our nation's best and brightest find themselves at 3 a.m. flat out and famished.

Gone are the dormitory room popcorn poppers of the 1970s, even the mini microwave ovens of the '80s. Students these days are demanding serious meals to match their serious 18-hour workdays.

There's no way around it. The longer hours and extra fuel are necessary in order, as one ambitious undergraduate put it, to max out one's opportunities. The occasional all-nighter--that quaint relic of the past--seems as pass as the typewriter.

To assist the students in "maxing out," Harvard has come up with the idea of the fourth meal. Details are still being worked out, but something served "warm and fresh" around midnight seems to be the best suggestion for keeping these future captains of industry plugging along until morning.

You've got to hand it to them. Harvard deans have found a way to keep academic excellence high while keeping at bay those irritating little impediments to progress.

Take breathing fresh air, for example. Back in the idle days of Crimson collegiate life, students used to take mid-evening study breaks and saunter around the streets of Cambridge in search of a slice of pizza from Tommy's or one of Mr. and Mrs. Bartley's great, juicy burgers.

Things are different now. Everything is hurry up and go. No one has time to linger at the big democratic center table at Bartley's Burger Cottage. Few diners slowly sip their lime rickeys while reading the sports page or striking up a conversation with a stranger sitting at the next chair.