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The following is an excerpt from “Heaven + Hell = Harvard,” a short-form memoir written by Jason W Park.

By sophomore year, we Harvard elite had gotten over our freshman insecurities, and the campus cliques started to form. This was quite apparent in the Kant tutorial, and reminded me of the slogan on the original Caddyshack movie’s VHS dust-jacket cover: “The snobs versus the slobs!” And what was I? A slob! And what were they? Snobs!

Two of my fellow classmates, Rachel and Paul, were most demonstrative of the diversity in the room. Rachel was of the affirmative action-wise “women and minorities” faction, while Paul represented the “White Anglo-Saxon Protestant” male tradition. It was interesting to see the two of them juxtaposed at the same rectangular table, let alone the same room. They commanded my respect because even though they were not of the same ilk, they were polite and civil to each other: they agreed to disagree. Both were, to me, above me. Why? I was simply from a solid middle-class upbringing, with all the trappings of a meritocrat, not someone who had come from a background of leisure and privilege. I was at Harvard only because I had some middling talent, and I had worked incredibly hard to get in. But did I really want to paint them as snobs? Maybe that was too much of an accusation. Perhaps I was just insecure about myself. Whenever I met fellow classmates like them, I would always feel provincial. But truth be told, they actually were quite accessible to me.

Rachel was a West Coast transplant from Los Angeles. She was the child of an African-American music mogul and a white TV sitcom starlet. She had had every advantage: grew up in the wealthy neighborhood of Bel-Air, went to the finest schools, wore fashionable name-brand clothes, had an army of coaches and tutors. She was also incredibly attractive; her tan mixed-race skin glowed healthily, showing off to maximum affect her balanced, well-proportioned features, while her designer outfits hugged her petite, curvy body.

Rachel and I had met as freshmen since she and I occasionally hung out with the kids down at the other end of the hall from my suite of rooms in Weld. She was a religion concentrator, not philosophy; for her, this tutorial was an elective. Rachel was, despite her fame, very agreeable and amiable, with none of the neurotic hang-ups that many at Harvard struggled with at the time (myself included).

Now Paul was a different story than Rachel. He was a blond-haired, blue-eyed Caucasian fellow who hailed from deepest New England. Paul, too, had had every advantage: educated at a major private boarding school on the Upper East Coast, raised in the exclusively wealthy neighborhoods of Connecticut, wore nothing less than the finest haberdashery, and had private teachers and instructors to cater to any and all of his academic needs. I was not sure if he had been a legacy of sorts, but I would have been very surprised. He had none of the neurotic eccentricities that many Harvard “dorks” suffered from. I had struggled with the dork “problem” myself in high school, and was more than willing to shed that label once I was in college.

Rachel and Paul were worlds apart, and they did not have much to say to each other, even though they sat literally inches away from each other at the same conference room table for our weekly discussions. There was little communication between them, but I did not detect any animosity. It must have been hard for the two to find common ground. Of course, they communicated with Arata, and so he was a conduit for their talking to each other, about Kant. But, as I mentioned before, they were still equals, in a sense, because they came from money, power, and family. Each had played their worldly advantages to get into Harvard: Rachel played the race card; Paul played the boarding school. I had had no such advantage.

But both talked to me, not necessarily because I was from their neck of the woods, nor because I was a V.I.P., but probably because, as a sophomore, I was absolutely in love with college. I loved the freedom, I loved the choice, I loved the experimentation, I loved the college lifestyle. Of course, I took all these freedoms seriously precisely because they were reserved for me once I graduated high school. And I appreciated how lucky I was to have parents who placed no strictures on my college experience, so that I could choose whatever concentration I wanted without fretting about what I would do with it in the real world. And there were other choices that were part of campus life. My fashions included baggy jeans and pierced ears. My diet included pizza by the slice and beer by the pint. My books included philosophical treatises and comic books. My music included Grieg’s Piano Concerto in A Minor and electronic dance music (E.D.M.).

One day, during a break in the tutorial, Rachel and I sat down next to each other in a general common area just outside the classroom. She asked how the previous weekend had been for me.

“I went to a house party,” I said. “Wow, I’ve never had that much fun in my life.” I grinned from ear to ear. House parties were typically private, underground affairs, held among the in-the-know crowd of the street youth, who danced to E.D.M. Harvard’s campus also offered the opposite experience: formal concerts hosted by a cappella men’s choirs in tuxedos, and given rapt attention by the hoity-toity who lived in Eliot House. I wanted to impress Rachel with my “cool” experiences and demeanor. Yeah, right, REAL cool.

“Oh yeah, house parties are a lot of fun, totally,” she replied, then looked away.

I didn’t know what she meant. What? Had she been to one before? I didn’t bother asking; the moment passed. It was too much to believe, because she was not dressed like a house partyer. At least I guessed she could tell that I was telling the truth. By this time, I was always wearing baggy pants, an apple hat, flat-soled skate shoes, and T-shirts or short-sleeved plaid-patterned tops covered by an oversize parka in the dead of winter. This was in contrast to the skinny blue jeans, leather boots, and flannel shirts I had worn as a freshman. Rachel herself was way too much haute couture for a house partygoer, and I was too much in contrast not to be, what with my homeless waif or street urchin appearance.

As for Paul, I recall leaving the seminar with him one day and walking out the door into the cool November night air. He had his bike in tow.

“You really got that idea of the Kantian synthetic a priori down pat, don’t you?” Paul offered as an opening and grinned.

“If I can remember what exactly I just said!” I replied good-naturedly, to which we both laughed.

“Well, I tell you, I really struggled with it,” Paul admitted.

“It’s a pretty difficult concept to understand.”

“I’m sure you’ll figure out the categorical imperative too next week!” Paul quipped.

“I hope so! I don’t even know what that is,” I deflected, though I knew I would try hard. But how did he know about it already, and I didn’t? Maybe he read ahead, although I had stopped doing that in college. But it was interesting that we connected on a school subject, rather than the other things that roused my curiosity, such as the nightclubs and raves.

The primary readings took all my time, and I gave up reading the secondary sources. I remember asking my freshman men’s lacrosse teammates about this out loud, and their sole explanation was:

“Ah, you know what they’re looking for!” The key was the secondary readings, which I had mostly neglected. In other words, reading the professional opinions of philosophical commentators was just as important as reading Kant himself. One needed the distance away from the primary texts in order to understand them better. But I just did not have the time or the energy to read them. I was having one hell of a time alone getting through the primary texts. By the time I had finished reading them, I had to tear myself away. I was starting to get headaches in my sophomore year that required lengthy naps on my bed. And besides, I had other classes I needed to prepare for. Gotta move on!

Meanwhile, I was viewing college as an end in itself, as a place of invaluable freedom, as an experience like no other. But for guys like the ones on my lacrosse team, Harvard was simply the next thing after high school, and just a training ground for whatever professional school they planned to go to post-college. I was starting to suspect that when someone like Paul attended a boarding school, where a lot of students were expected to go to Ivy League colleges, there was a tradition, and that it was to be respected. People who had gone to Harvard in the yesteryears passed on the same information to succeeding generations. Besides, if you thought about it, how could a teacher spin Kant in different ways? That stuff was etched in stone! For me, it was brand spanking new. For Paul and his people, it was old hat. Still, why was Paul struggling with the material? I do not think he really was. Maybe he was trying to gauge my reaction to his comments. After all, why did he anticipate the following week’s material, the categorical imperative? I did not know anything about that. It seemed as if he had already gone through it. I don’t know.

So, Paul and I said our goodbyes and parted.

*****