MANHOOD AT HARVARD:
William James and Others
By Kim Townsend
Norton, 384 pages

opening the crimson covers of Kim Townsend's new book "Manhood at Harvard," suddenly I was a 20-year-old sophomore again. I am standing on a chair, wearing a blindfold, chanting Greek letters at a stuffed moose shot by Teddy Roosevelt. I am teetering; hands catch me ... Dissolve to the sloping roof of a clubhouse. I declaim "To An Athlete Dying Young" to a less-than-delighted dorm across the street. Scotch sloshes out of my insigniaed glass. You get the point.

Nowadays I often ask myself: Did I? And if so, what was it? I wasn't, after all, an obvious candidate for campus hijinks (Jewish, New York, day school). In high school I always took "preppy" to be a shortened form of "preposterous." Yet soon after I got to Cambridge, I was dressing in corduroys and old tweed jackets and holding doors for Radcliffe students who could certainly open them on their own. There was a lot of peer pressure, of course — college is college — but that's remarkable in itself, since it suggests that there were others at Harvard who shared my enthusiasms. In fact, we were legion. By the hundreds we attended final club pajama parties and teas, joined literary magazines and lunch clubs and wrote light verse to each other. Obviously, we were unbearable, but that's beside the point. The point is that we had come to the modern university, to Harvard Inc., and found it confusing. We needed some narrower path to take us from boy to man.

One thing was clear to me even then: Our behavior had to do with women. Though women often participated in our efforts, subtly, we denied them parity. You could make the claim Harvard was still male turf — I'm thinking of those long rows of black-and-white photos of young men looking down at us — and when we boys sensed the power this gave us, we surrounded ourselves with it. It was as if we were on some sort of archaeological dig, blowing dust off old customs — senior proms, garden parties, final clubs — to get to some earlier, entirely male sense of what a college student should be. But whose? And what had they been hoping to accomplish?