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His name was Yale. He had just completed his freshman year at Harvard (yes, he gets the irony) and was working as a student guide, conducting tours of the 371-year-old university in Cambridge, Mass., founded 16 years after the Pilgrims hit Plymouth Rock. On a rainy summer afternoon, he provided a more eye-opening look than he realized at what $50,000 (U.S.) – the annual undergraduate costs, according to Harvard's website – can buy.

Our group consisted of about two dozen middle-aged parents from around the world, some towing teenagers along. Like so many other tourists every year, we had come to soak in the romantic atmosphere of America's premier university and perhaps pique our children's interest. Harvard, for better or worse, is a place of legend, featured in countless books and films, not to mention in the shattered and/or realized dreams of anyone who ever went to college.

Yale himself was adorable, well-built and friendly, with dark, curly hair. He wore a button-down shirt, jeans and a shell necklace that would have been called pukka beads 30 years ago. He was a business major, from Florida. (He told us that a lot.) From the outset of the hour-long tour, he was determined to correct any impression we may have that Harvard's 18,000 degree candidates were nothing but nerds.

Correct it he did.

We entered Harvard Yard, a tree-filled greensward crisscrossed with paths, home to freshman dormitories and academic buildings. First stop, Massachusetts Hall. Like all of Harvard's original buildings, it's red brick and modestly grand, a physical manifestation of ambition. Well after the tour, I researched some facts about it: Built in 1720, it's the oldest building on campus and the second-oldest academic building in the United States. It housed Continental soldiers during the Revolutionary War and served as an informal observatory after a 24-foot telescope was donated in 1722.

The university's president, provost and treasurer have offices on the first three floors, and highly select freshman live on the upper floors.

Here's what Yale said about it: “Matt Groening, creator of The Simpsons, lived there. He once left his bathtub running when he went out, and the tub crashed through to the office below.” Yale chuckled. “I don't know anyone who lives there now.” The way he shook his head told us everything we needed to know about those nerds.

We strolled past Hollis Hall and Stoughton Hall, which Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, Al Gore and Tommy Lee Jones had called home. Yale didn't mention them. He didn't discuss the seven U.S. presidents who were Harvard grads, from John Adams and both Roosevelts through John F. Kennedy and George W. Bush. Nor did he mention alumni including 50-odd Nobel Prize winners, scores of Supreme Court justices, politicians and talents as varied as William S. Burroughs, T.S. Eliot (BA, MA and PhD), Al Franken, Robert Frost, David Halberstam (the late author whose book The Best and the Brightest glorified his alma mater), Alger Hiss, Oliver Wendell Holmes (both Jr. and Sr.), Philip Johnson (the architect), Ted Kaczynski (the Unabomber), Henry Kissinger, Jack Lemmon, Yo-Yo Ma, Barack Obama, Conan O'Brien, Sumner Redstone, John Reed (the journalist played by Warren Beatty in Reds), Janet Reno and Susan Sontag. Maybe they were too nerdy.

Oddly, Yale did mention e.e. cummings (1894-1962; BA, 1915; MA, 1916), but not by profession (poet). “She was a great lady,” Yale said. Cummings, of course, was a man.

To be fair, Yale also mentioned two other illustrious alums: actress Natalie Portman, class of 2003 (“She sometimes had a bodyguard,” he said) and actor Jonathan Taylor Thomas, who played the voice of Young Simba in The Lion King. “His roommates played that soundtrack all the time – to drive him crazy.” (No nerds there!) Yale added that his dorm had been built in the 1970s, “without central hallways so students couldn't gather,” he said. “Because the riots that happened on campus in the sixties started in places where students gathered. And that was bad.”

He limited his discussion of the vast Science Center, built in 1972 by Josep Lluis Sert, to one essential fact: Its Cabot Library “is great for napping in.” He gestured toward a building where English classes are held. “Some day I'll have to go in there, I guess,” he said. “But I've avoided it so far.”

He chose not to point out the sloped transparent roof of Gund Hall, the graduate school of design, which floods its four floors with natural light; or the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, bisected by a curving ramp, the only building in North America designed by Le Corbusier. Nor did he point out the Houghton Library, which contains furniture from Emily Dickinson's home. (Hey, Harvard has a lot of buildings.) He did mention the Fogg Art Museum, housing the world's largest academic art collection – 150,000 medieval to modern works from around the world. “You should go there if you have extra time,” he gushed.

Of the Holden Chapel (1744) – where in 1755 a professor delivered early lectures on seismology and where in 1783 medical students performed autopsies – Yale told us, “There's a really old pipe organ in there that students are allowed to play. You sign up on a sheet and then you show up at your time. So at, like, 2 in the morning one time, I went with my friend and we played it. That's just one of the many cool things about Harvard.”

In Memorial Hall (completed in 1878), the cathedral-like building whose wall plaques list 136 Harvard students who died fighting for the Union in the American Civil War, Yale told us more cool things. “Harvard has so many clubs and societies, name any club and we have it,” he said. “And if we don't, you can get money from Student Services and start your own. And they'll give you money to throw parties. We're about a lot more than just studying here.”

That information we had absorbed. But one South American tourist did not quite get how great this party-money perk was. “Are any of the groups socially minded?” she asked.

“Oh, they're all social,” Yale answered.

“No, civic-minded,” she said. He didn't seem to understand.

“All this money, is it only for parties?” she persisted.

He craned his neck forward and lowered his voice conspiratorially. “Harvard,” he said, “has the second-largest endowment in the world. Second only to the Vatican. It is” – here he paused like Dr. Evil, who is not an alum – “30 million dollars.”

“Thirty million?” a skeptic asked. “Are you sure?” Yale nodded solemnly.

Okay, he was wrong, but only by one letter: Harvard's endowment is $30-billion. Yale, you'll recall, is a business major.

Our disappointment was becoming palpable. The mind of any North American with a modicum of academic ambition will at some point have alighted on Harvard – will have pondered how it might feel to step out of one of those buildings into the snowy blue twilight, arms full of books, head spinning with ideas. The discoveries and connections that have been made here – that can be made here still – are intoxicating. But Yale was sobering. Not only didn't he indulge us with any of that, he didn't seem to indulge in it himself. He was all about pop culture and money, and that we could get anywhere.

Yet the Yale-est moment of the tour was still to come. We stopped by the steps of the sprawling Widener Library, built in 1914. (Tough to nap in, Yale remarked, “because there's always someone outside, protesting hunger or war or something.”) Its namesake, Harry Elkins Widener, class of 1907, died aboard the Titanic. His mother funded its construction with the stipulation that its bricks and mortar never be changed, so much of the library's stacks have been built underground, 3.2 million volumes on 50 miles of shelves. “I've never been down there, and I hope never to go,” Yale said. “Spooky!”

His fondest memory of this palace of learning – the largest and arguably finest academic library in the world – didn't even occur inside. One frigid night last winter, he and his buddies stole cafeteria trays and sledded down the frozen steps into the wee hours. “It was a blast,” Yale said.

He ended our tour at a bronze statue of John Harvard, dedicated in 1884 and posed for by a student, because no portraits exist. On its base is Harvard's crest, which depicts three open books – two face-up, one face-down. “No one knows why one book is face-down,” Yale said. “I like to think it's because we Harvard students are supposed to study a lot, but we're also supposed to put our books down and do other things.” One-quarter of the way through his $200,000 education, Yale was a fine example of that.

Tours of Harvard are available year-round (except for spring break). For more information, call 617-495-1573 or visit www.harvard.edu/siteguide/faqs/faq18.html.

Special to The Globe and Mail