The difference is ostensibly that the hierarchies in today's student groups, publications, government simulations, and such, unlike the elitist final club scene of Roosevelt's time, are based on merit. But anyone who has ever applied for a position and seen it go to a friend or roommate of the student making the decision knows this isn't true.

In that sense, things have gotten worse. Roosevelt didn't know who rejected him from the Porcellian, but he and everyone else knew why: that person, whoever he was, just didn't like Roosevelt. No one would have pretended there was any other reason.

Now, instead of transparent favoritism and elitism, we have something worse: the illusion of meritocracy. We waste countless hours--and reams of paper--elaborately pretending we're not just as likely to pick our friends and cronies as were our Gilded Age predecessors. Ironically, the final clubs, no matter what you think of them, are now some of the most honest organizations on campus. Everyone knows getting in is about who you are, who you know and where you're from.

I won't pretend to have an explanation for the rampant and enduring desire to impose hierarchies on student life. Maybe it's four years of high school, years that many of us treated like a giant scavenger hunt for college application fodder, that trains us to think that way. Maybe we're all just massively insecure.

Some things never change. Somewhere, some future president in the Class of '03 is about to suffer the trauma of rejection from Harvard Model Congress, or Let's Go, or any one of the selective student groups on campus. He or she is probably going to think it's because their writing sample wasn't good enough. Maybe, in their innocence, they'd never think it had something to do with whom the person who got the post is dating, or where they went to prep school.

Franklin Roosevelt would know better.

Alan E. Wirzbicki '01 is a history and literature concentrator in Eliot House. His column will appear biweekly.