By Any Other Name

DOES THIS SOUND familiar? The Northeast, Massachusetts, Eastern Massachusetts. Yes, the Boston area. No, over towards MIT. You know Brigham's, outside the T-stop? Well, it's right across from there. Yeah, (cough) Harvard.

What's missing are the questions. Where do you go to school? Where in the northeast? Where in Massachusetts? In Boston? What, BC? Look, I haven't got all day, is it in Cambridge or Boston? Oh, Harvard.

Before I became a Harvard student, one of my best friends, already a student here, told me that the hardest thing about this place had nothing to do with exams or roommates or even Harvard-style, gut-wrenching, hair-tearing love affairs.

"The trouble with going to Harvard," he said, "is that you spend the rest of your life trying to live it down."

Though his words resound within my skull now, I didn't understand what he was talking about at the time; I could only think of living it up in Cambridge. After being rejected once as a transfer student I was applying again. The idea that I was 1) spending all that money, and 2) answering questions like "Describe your favorite book and why it changed your life irrevocably" and "Where do you see yourself in twenty years? What sort of tax shelters will you be using?" for the third time, all so I could attend a school whose name I'd be ashamed to mention . . . Well, that seemed odd.

IT WAS ALSO a Widener Library-sized leap in approach from that favored by Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, where I used to go to school. You won't find t-shirts in the Wesleyan school store that read "Wesleyan, Carleton of the East." Instead, you'll find a very popular shirt that lists a number of other schools in the country which have "Wesleyan" in their title (there must be at least 30)--making it clear that that the Middletown version is not related to any of the others. At the bottom of the shirt is the most telling line: ". . . And it's not an all-girls [sic] school outside of Boston."

The Wesleyan shirt aspires to snobbiness. It says, "I am discerning enough to know the difference between these schools with very slight name differences, and you are not. Not to mention that you probably thought I said, 'Wellesley.'"

Of course plenty of people at Harvard are deservedly proud of being here, and when asked where they go to school, probably just answer "Harvard." It makes sense.

But I'll wager that the majority feel the twinge of anti-snobbishness (sometimes known as "slumming") that came into vogue along with Bob Dylan and "relevance" in college classes. What could be less relevant than a school which can't forget, even for a moment, its 350-year history?

There are different ways of dodging the word. One friend consciously evokes the long-A, Brahminesque "Hahvahd," to lampoon the implication, that he might actually speak that way.

And just a few weeks ago, on the David Letterman Show, Letterman wandered out from behind his desk to talk to the audience. He called on a young woman I recognized from campus and asked her what she did. She said she was a student, "in Cambridge." Letterman, unfortunately--or maybe fortunately for her--didn't push for more.

Those who believe in belting it right out--"Harvard. Yes, I go to Harvard"--have honesty on their side, and probably think the rest of us are a bit mushy-headed. But an experience I had a few years ago makes me think the avoiders have something going for them.

When I turned 18, an event whose biggest implication these days is that you must register for the draft, I happened to be living in Central Square. Late one fall afternoon, as the sun cast long shadows and (I remember this vividly) the sky clouded up in preparation for rain, I marched over to the post office on Massachusetts Avenue and, being the law-abiding sort, filled out my registration card. I had no moral objection to filling out the card, but the thought of what it might eventually get me into was hardly pleasant.

I walked up to the one open window in the deserted office and chokingly asked whom to give the card to.

The kindly attendant, noticing in me a bit of worry, said something I'll never forget. He clenched a fist and gestured with his thumb westwards up the street.

"Ahh, don't worry," he said. "They'll take the Harvard guys first."