Still, many Cantabrigians think of students as an inconvenience--if they think about them at all.

"In the summer, Cambridge residents are happy because all the Harvard students go home and everything is less crowded," said Edward B. Colby '02, a local resident and Rindge and Latin graduate who is also a Crimson editor. "Most of the people in my school didn't think about Harvard at all. They'd walk through Harvard Yard on their way home from school, but Harvard students didn't really have any impact on their lives."

"Undergraduates tend to be insular, staying in our rooms and studying, not exploring and interacting with the city," he adds.

Harvard remains little more than a massive institution in locals' eyes--"The Vatican of Cambridge," Highsmith calls it--a looming presence but one with little relevance to their lives.

"We never talked about Harvard," says Lu Yin '02, a Rindge alum. "It was just kind of there. [Cantabrigians] don't think about it any more than MIT or Lesley College. There wasn't any resentment; it was just an institution."

The gap between locals and students is hardly ever challenged, Highsmith says.

"[Harvard students] take up a lot of space and make a lot of noise, but they're pretty much separate," he says. "There are thousands of people in Cambridge who are unrelated to Harvard, and they don't care about what's going on at Harvard. I don't mean that in a bad way, it's just that they have their own lives and Harvard is not a part of that."

--Staff writer Benjamin D. Grizzle can be reached at grizzle@fas.harvard.edu.