10,000 Names of Harvard

"WHAT'S so great about Harvard anyway?" my prospective freshman sister growls over the phone. Remembering my own grumpy wait for that admissions letter, I mumble some sympathetic words about "hanging in there" and "it's not the end of the world either way" stuff, but the question sticks in my mind. Maybe Harvard isn't such a great school anymore.

When I applied, the prestige was overwhelming, or at least I thought so. After all, Time featured the school on its cover that fall for the 350th anniversary. Other magazines wrote mysteriously about the "Harvard Factor." Famous people like David Brinkley's son taught there. Half of Reagan's cabinet were Harvard graduates. The Red Sox had all the makings of a future Series winner. The prospects couldn't have looked brighter for any college, and I began shopping early for my doubleweave Harvard sweatshirt.

LOOKING back, maybe I should have taken the free Harvard shop t-shirt and run. Harvard beat Andy Warhol's prediction by 349 years and 45 minutes, but its moment in the spotlight seems to be over. Our most famous professor (John Rawls) gets confused with a bad singer (Lou). The ghost of Bill Buckner still haunts Fenway Park. America's president is a Yalie and, even more disappointing, we lost The Game this year.

Things wouldn't be so bad if the vultures out there would just leave us alone in our graceful dotage. Instead the smart alecks at U.S. News and World Report have to get in the act by dumping us to fourth place in their university survey, behind some vo-tech school and that other college in Connecticut. To add insult to injury, Dan Quayle, who could spell Harvard with the help of a dictionary and RogerAiles, denigrated us during his nationally televised debate with Lloyd Bentsen. But of course Quayle was just following George Bush's lead in making "the Harvard boutique" (Store 24?) an issue in the campaign.

WHY is my sister putting herself through this torture for a college that's devaluing faster than the Mexican peso? Maybe she is applying because over the phone I recite all of the good things Harvard still represents.

"For example," I say smartly, "many famous people went here. Six presidents, from the Adamses to the Roosevelts to Kennedy and Cleveland (law school counts), graduated from Harvard. Plenty of senators and members of congress are alumni. Even Fred Grandy spent time in Cambridge."

"So what," my sister snaps, "what about now? What's good about Harvard now?"

"Writers, too," I respond more thoughtfully. "Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, the other Adamses (Charles, Francis and Henry), T .S. Eliot, John Reed, Wallace Stevens, Ursula LeGuin, Walter Lippman, John Updike and Erich Segal."

"What about the student-teacher ratio?" she asks, well trained in the arts of admission pamphlets.

I laugh at that bit of Princeton nonsense. "How can one quantify the worth of a Stephen Jay Gould?" I retort haughtily. "Isn't he worth more than some two-bit rock digger from South Jersey State."

"We have had great professors teach here, names that will live forever in Byerly Hall," I continue. "George Santayana, William James, Frederick Jackson Turner, Arthur M. Schlesinger Sr. (and Jr.), Louis Hartz, Oscar Handlin, McGeorge Bundy..."

"ENOUGH with the famous people!" my sister cries in disgust. "What is the study environment like? Is there a residential college system? How are the counseling services?" She rattles off the questions in a frustrated tone.

"If the current global warming trends continue," I intone ominously, "then soon the average daily temperature in Boston will be hot enough to make Back Bay a spring break paradise. On the flip side, Duke University will sit in a scorched wasteland and Columbia will be lost forever in a tropical rainforest. Speaking of science, Louis Agassiz, B. F. Skinner..."

"IS THERE OR IS THERE NOT DIVERSITY?" The receiver rattles with my sister's growing rage.

How can I make her understand? Harvard is not comparable to other schools. We live differently, get treated differently and think differently. When people ask us what's so great about Harvard, we shoot back things like "Normal Mailer" and "Henry Kissinger."

The idea is that if those people survived four years of bad food and long winters, then so can we and future generations of Harvard students. At other schools, students demonstrate school pride by painting themselves blue and taking off their shirts in sub-zero weather at nationally televised football games. We drop names. And in an age of declining prestige, we should thank the Lord ('00) that we can still do that.