Writing a column about Yale is so easy it's difficult.

I could begin with an outright joke about the inferiority of Yalies, whether intellectually, socially or athletically, but that would be mean-spirited, and in the presidential campaign, we learned that mean-spiritedness has no place in Ivy League politics.

I could crack wise about the city in which their institution of lower learning is located, but that would do an indirect disservice to the University of New Haven, which should not be lumped with such a dismal city and a dismal university.

I could go low and talk about their mothers, but I have a friend at Yale (Yalies need friends, so I see it as a kind of public service) and his mother is nice to me, so I won't make broad generalizations that hit below the belt.

Or I could talk about their silly vocabulary--"residential colleges," "teaching assistants," "majors"--but Harvard Assistant Professor of Linguistics Bert Vaux might take away my A- in Linguistics 80 for lambasting a group of people because they speak differently. Nontraditional dialects do not necessarily indicate ignorance.

But going to Yale sure does.

I really shouldn't have said that. Mistakes were made. I wasn't entirely truthful.

Truth is, Harvard and Yale are like two shades of the same color, like two political parties sticking a leg over the center of the fence, like two football teams that will struggle for 60 minutes and end up with the same score.

In American culture, Harvard and Yale are lumped together into one entity: both are considered colleges to which the best and brightest students aspire. It doesn't really matter which name you use; the effect is the same in Joe Schmo's eyes. Harvard, Yale, Princeton--they're all the same to him. It's those elitist East Coast colleges that supply the nation with an unhealthy dose of its politicians, scientists, CEOs and cultural icons.

But if we want to split hairs and try to make distinctions, it is possible.

I heard once that cultural references to Harvard far outstripped those of Yale, probably because of Harvard's pervasive control of Hollywood. The Harvard Lampoon, that semi-secret Sorrento Square social organization that used to occasionally publish a so-called humor magazine, has become somewhat of a feeder system for many of television's best (and worst) comedies. Yale-bashing jokes abound in "The Simpsons," as do jokes about Brown, Radcliffe and other illustrious institutions of advanced study.

Moreover, it's timely that this fall's presidential race, a contest between expanding market forces and the widening responsibilities of the state, featured a Harvard man, Vice President Al Gore '69, and a Yale man, Texas Gov. George W. Bush. Bush also graduated from Harvard Business School, although it didn't seem to help him in the Texas oil business.

People tend to think that the two men are only marginally different from one another. They are members of political parties moving towards the center of the spectrum, elitist organizations fighting over that American--the elusive "undecided voter"--who votes conservatively on financial issues and liberally on social issues, or vice versa.

But the candidates are somewhat like the schools from which they come. The universities also fight for the narrow middle ground.

Both schools fight for that undecided elite student who may succeed in politics or medicine or business or culture and eventually boost the endowment with a generous gift that would otherwise go towards a soup kitchen or cancer cure.