At Harvard, everyone knows the legacy kid. He’s the prep in the crest-emblazoned blazer and rep tie, sipping a pre-prandial G-and-T in his room before sauntering off to the Porcellian for a champagne-soaked dinner — while the plebes burrow into the library to grind out their pathetic A’s. A Dubya, in other words, transplanted to the Yard.

The only problem is, such a character, or even a distant approximation of such a character, is hard actually to find on a campus so rife with overachievers. It’s a bit like hunting Bigfoot: Everyone has heard of him, but no one has actually seen him. Partly it’s because legacies lay low, knowing they’re a highly charged subject. The Crimson regularly fulminates against legacies; the public gives a thumbs-down in opinion polls; and Sen. Edward Kennedy—himself a legacy who’d enlisted a classmate to take his Spanish exam—has filed federal legislation to help end such favoritism.

So legacies know better than to out themselves. “Certain people boast about partying all the time,” says Jessica Manners, a senior whose father was a Harvard grad. “But legacies? That’s a secret. Nobody boasts about that.” Adds fellow senior Spencer Berman Lazar, whose father, two of his father’s sisters, and grandfather all went to Harvard, “I like the anonymity of people not knowing.” Plus, as a believer in “distributive justice,” he finds it hard to defend. “It’s like something in my history I am not proud of.”

Thus most undergraduates have no clue who is one, and, truth to tell, don’t particularly care. Even legacies themselves have faulty radars for those Winston T. Z. Throttlebottoms of lore, although many of them think they have seen such a specimen, or at least hints of one. One sophomore legacy who preferred to remain anonymous described the process by which he detected one in a class during his freshman year. “He was less articulate than everybody else, and had not done the reading.” But was he a legacy? He hesitated. “Actually, I’m not sure.” Then he brightened. “But he was wearing a polo shirt.”

The truth is, legacy students aren’t much different from everybody else on campus. They’re as likely to be public-school graduates as they are to be preppies, and they come from all over the country. Yes, they are whiter, and richer, than non-legacies, but that simply reflects the socio-economic mix of Harvard’s admissions policy of their parents’ eras; as Harvard students become more diverse, so will their offspring. And yes, of course they had an advantage in getting in, or this would not be an issue, but the advantage is slight.

Daniel Golden, in his book The Price of Admission, which assails discriminatory admissions policies of elite colleges like Harvard, nailed other varieties of unfairness, showing how parental fame, parental money, and a student’s athleticism can win not-so-bright applicants a thick envelope in April. The case against legacies isn’t nearly so strong. In 2002, Harvard admitted 40 percent of legacies compared to 11 percent of other applicants — which certainly sounds unfair. But Harvard parents’ children are likely to be better students than the average, and the SAT shortfall of legacies is scant (just a 50-point difference, or about 3 percent, out of the possible 1600), which may be explained by the fact that legacies, confident of their admission advantage, don’t go nuts trying to push up their scores.

Rather than slack off at Harvard, most legacies seem to have an extra incentive to do well: They want to prove their detractors wrong. Spencer Berman Lazar, for example, felt a need “to prove to myself and to my family that I belonged.” An economics concentrator and straight-A student, he was an extracurricular whirlwind, active in the Model U.N., WHRB radio, the Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society, the pan-collegiate Current magazine (founded by 02138’s own editors Bom Kim and Daniel Loss), and an Internet consulting company. “I put in a lot of 16-hour days,” he says.

Freshman Julia Hornig freely grants that she caught a break. She was a fabled “Z-lister”— a well-connected admittee with a subpar academic record required to take a year off before coming to Harvard. At Dalton, she so rarely attended class that she ranked with the “degenerates,” the ones with no college ambitions. Her grades were unexceptional, and her SATs merely adequate. The legacy saved her. Now that she is at Harvard, she has vowed to make it up to the better students she displaced. “I owe it to them to take advantage of the opportunity,” she says. “It’s kind of a guilt thing.” So she cracks the books as never before, never skips class, does service work in Mission Hill, and, this year, was in charge of putting on the Hasty Pudding’s Woman of the Year parade featuring Scarlett Johansson.

Harvard defends the legacy privilege on the grounds that it offers graduates added incentive to shell out when the development office comes calling. It also deepens the institutional memory of a college, allowing Harvard parents to solidify their bonds to their old school. And oddly enough, legacies may take some of the pressure off a school that is otherwise packed with overachievers. “It’s a relaxer,” Hornig says. “It means I’m, like, normal, and we don’t all have to be geniuses. We can talk about sports.”

And that St. Grottlesex slacker? He’s largely a figure of yesteryear. One legacy kid had heard about such a fellow from his father. Raccoon coat, old-Boston lockjaw accent. After arriving late to section one afternoon, he explained what had delayed him: “I totaled the Jag.”

The most reliable recent sighting occurred in the Yard five years ago, when a St. Paul’s grad who must remain nameless did indeed, with a posse of his prep-school classmates, start mixing gin-and-tonics at 5 p.m., and then repaired en masse to the Fly Club, where they remained until well past midnight, getting nicely potted. Such ongoing antics presumed his transition from Harvard into the world would be as smooth as from St. Paul’s into Harvard. Well, not quite. “He’s now doing some shit job in Kansas City,” said an informant with a chuckle. “And I bet he’s thinking, ‘This is not how I planned it.'"