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.

Now with the new fourth meal, students can avoid strolling along side streets and listening to all that rambling chit chat. They can just slam down the books, dash over to the dining commons and slug down a "warm and fresh." It's a beautiful system, really. As sleek and efficient as a fax.

Then there's the whole issue of setting priorities. With the fourth meal, Harvard says to students: Your work is everything. If it takes 18 hours a day to complete, then trim back extraneous details like eating and sleeping and get to it! You never know who may be staying up one hour later than you.

This competition marathon is undeniably good practice for life after Harvard. Graduates will have developed a keen eye for looking over their shoulders and constitutions that feed on the endless challenge of more and more work. After all, getting ahead is what matters. Who needs something as unproductive as a languid autumn afternoon?

The fourth meal also avoids that archaic concept of everyone eating together at the same time. "If Harvard wants to be a diverse school, it has to have diverse meals," one junior declared.

Dining diversity eliminates the need for actually conversing with a wide range of classmates, people with whom a student may not have much in common--at least not at first gulp. With dining options closely resembling a "cruise ship," Harvard undergraduates can indeed cruise in and cruise out without ever docking for more than a quick fill-up.

Harvard's deans soon will begin hashing out details about the fourth meal. Besides giving substance to the whole "warm and fresh" concept, the deans no doubt also will have to confront the significant challenge of what to name the innovation.

If the deans opt for a hybrid name based on the "brunch" model, the choices could include "brupper," "dinfast" or "breakner." But then with such a cutting-edge invention, the name needs to more millennium-minded. Some newly coined word that captures the dash of the times, our 24/7 immediacy. Something that has just the right alignment with our own Internet-worth: "Food.edu."

One hopes that when the deans meet that no one brings up two old dreamers, those roamers of open fields, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Class of 1821, and Henry David Thoreau, Class of 1837. Writing of his fellow alumnus, Emerson observed, "He declined to give up his large ambition of knowledge and action for any narrow craft or profession, aiming at a much more comprehensive calling, the art of living well... He was therefore secure of his leisure."

Leisure? How antediluvian! But what do you expect from a couple of three-mealers?

Martha Ackmann is a women's studies professor at Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts.