OKLAHOMAN DESCRIBES TYPICAL HARVARD MAN

The following article, written by F. L. Dennis 1G., and a graduate of Oklahoma University, is reprinted from the University of Oklahoma Magazine.

There is, 1 believe, a certain glamour about Harvard that helps to set it apart from all other American universities. Whether that peculiar fascination has its basis in Harvard's age--its 294th freshman class is at present engaged in struggling with "English A" or whether it springs from Harvard's pre-eminent scholarship, or whether those factors are minor, are questions which I am attempting to decide.

I went to Harvard from Oklahoma expecting to find a vast difference between the two, and my anticipation was not ill-founded. But the difference was not exactly that which I had expected.

Oklahoma, which "put up with me," as it were, for four years before evicting me upon good grounds and later graciously sending me my degree, is one of America's youngest universities, and one of the most democratic, by any definition which may be assigned that vague word. Oklahoma is a kind of rough-and-ready school, young and

lusty and somewhat boisterous. Harvard, I imagined, would be different in the way that the aristocrat is different from the democrat.

At Harvard I expected to find a certain dignified aloofness, as different from Oklahoma's "howdy-ness" as is a Boston debutante from an Osage maiden.

Well, all these things I have found at Harvard, and they do not comprise the "thing", and they do not comprise the that sets Harvard apart.

Classic Charm of Charles

Perhaps that unique "something" is comparable, in a way, with the classic calm of the near-by Charles River. And now I think I have hit upon it. Harvard somehow seems eternal. You wander through old Harvard Yard in the twilight, and the whispering trees seem to tell you that Harvard will survive forever, waiting in serene expectancy for youth to come and share its treasure of knowledge. You wander across the Oklahoma oval, and the thought crosses your mind that perhaps the next legislature will decide to cut off the university's finances and give the money to the teachers' colleges.

The heart and soul of Harvard is the College. The College it was when the Puritan boys entered it in 1636, and the College it will be when the Near East ceases to need relief. Of course Harvard officially is a university, but the undergraduate student body makes up the College, and the undergraduates are the epitomizing part of any school.

College Most Important

That is to say, the undergraduates typify the spirit of a school. You are not a Harvard man if you are an alumnus of another school and do graduate work at Harvard. Yet I believe that the unsurpassed excellence of the graduate school makes Harvard Pre-eminent scholastically among American educational institutions.

But it is the undergraduate group, the lads in the College, which typifies Harvard, to put it tritely. The Harvard undergraduate has an air about him; some call it indifference, and some term it affectation, but at all events it is not empty-headedness.

Whether Harvard has given him this unique attitude or whether he had it with him when he reached Cambridge, is difficult to determine. But it certainly exists. Perhaps its essence is best expressed in the story of the Harvard alumnus who is quoted as saying: "The charge that we of Hahvud are snobbish is absolutely untrue. Why, the year I rowed on the crew, I knew every man in the boat except two or three who sat away down in the stern!"

Or perhaps Flandrau put his finger on it in the following rather long paragraph in his delightful story, "The Class Day Idyl":

"Of course there is no such thing as the typical Harvard man, although it interests--or irritates--people who didn't go to Harvard to believe every now and then that they have discovered him. If a well-dressed youth with a broad 'A', and an abnormal ignorance of the life practical, appears in a Western town, the business man from whom he seeks employment, after sounding the profoundest depths of his incap-