CLUB TABLES A HABIT OF MANKIND, WRITES HART

The following article on Club tables was written-especially for the Crimson by A. B. Hart '80, Eaton Professor of the Science of Government, Emeritus.

To an old, old graduate who was a freshman fifty years ago the present eating habits of Harvard students seem trifling. From the foundation of the college to about five years ago the normal system of feeding the students was by a common table. For many years there was no other possibility inasmuch as the students were too numerous to be absorbed into private families. Sam Batchelder has shown us that for two hundred years there was a college commons and likewise a state of war between the steward for the time being and the students. In the good old days when the commons was on the ground floor of Massachusetts, and the pig stys were under the windows, if the students did not like the dinner, they threw it at the steward. Nevertheless, they hung together. In 1876 the board at Memorial Hall was about $3.90 a week, quite as good and of greater variety than the ordinary students' table nowadays.

At Memorial during its half century of efficiency club tables could always be formed by those who desired. The relator sat for three years in the same chair at Memorial Hall with the same eleven men; all of whom happened to be members of one society, though that was unusual. The friendships thus formed, the lively talk thus engendered, the sense of common interest, the responsibility for settling the great social and educational questions of Harvard, was worth as much to me as all that I got in the classrooms.

Club Tables Help Form Friendships

Of course, club tables are the habit of mankind, or was the habit till vast numbers of people took to living in flats or lodges and taking their meals rather at haphazard. Nevertheless, many of the private clubs, the Harvard Union for considerable periods, and private combinations outside of the college commons have always existed. Theodore Roosevelt, for instance, was a member of a dining club in a private house, throughout his college life, and friendships there made seem to have outlasted his total life.

Club tables are impossible without some time requirement, which have always been in my experience that everybody must begin his meal within a fixed hour or an hour and a half. When Memorial Hall was very crowded eighteen men were seated at a table seating twelve and they were expected as they came, in to shove up next to the men already seated. This was supposed to bring every man into direct contact with the other seventeen That seemed to work pretty well

Harvard Spirit a Common Spirit

My experience with German students and French students is that they gather together in knipes or corps or burschenschaften with a common table for the gang. English university students, of course, take their meals together in college halls, and that is conidered one of the great privileges. Harvard spirit is nothing if it is not a common spirit, a unified spirit and a spirit of friendship with a group of other men, such as educated men with intellectual interests will form and will enjoy all the rest of their lives.