Harvard. Those students—that small minority—who insisted on taking their studies seriously, who worked hard and made no effort to conceal their academic ambitions, were known as “digs” and were naturally outcasts. Socially, they had no chance. As the Crimson advised, only a little in jest, digs might be “eminently worthy” as people and it was “well to have a pleasant, bowing acquaintance with them, for they may turn out in the future to be very great men,” but their manners, like their clothes, were “apt to be bad; and except at class elections, their friendship is of no sort of use.”

