August 13th, 2006 11:00pm

By John Smyntek

Oh, those collegiate rivalries. CEO of NBC Jeff Zucker's Golden Boy is Conan O'Brien, who will take over Jay Leno's place as host of "The Tonight Show" in a few years.

But Zucker wasn't always a fan of the comic. On Plum TV's "Open Exchange" -- Plum is a cable service seen in only the nation's richest report communities (Vail, Colo., Palm Springs, Calif., etc.) -- Zucker reveals to host Jonathan Tisch that he once tried to get O'Brien arrested.

When O'Brien was two-time president of the Harvard Lampoon, Zucker was the president of rival publication the Crimson.

"We (at the Crimson) were putting out a serious newspaper every day, and they didn't have anything to do because they put out a magazine once a month if they were lucky," Zucker recalls.

"So they would often just steal stuff from us and come in and take our prize possessions. And one time they did that I called the Cambridge police and tried to have them arrested."

In retrospect, good thing he failed.