Core of This University is the Yard Asserts California Professor Who is Harvard Graduate

The following article on Harvard University was written by B. H. Lehman '11, Professor of English in the University of California. It is reprinted from the current issue of the "California Monthly."

A University is many things. It is a campus a local habitation and a name. It is an apostolic succession of great teachers. It is an aggregation a continuity of students perennially renewed in numbers maturing in a cocoon of lightly spun traditions. It is a network of laboratories and libraries where knowledge of the world and the individual is advanced and stored. It is a corporation which acquires and husbands a great endowment. All these things Harvard has been and more or less still is in such fashion that not only her sons but the general citizenry may think of her as a type. And especially is this true of the changes which have been worked in the ancient institution.

"Fair and Comely Edifice"

The original equipment of a single "very fair and comely edifice" was a sort of boarding school with "a larger library with some books in it." The books were of course mostly theological. Today there are among other departments a great system of chemical laboratories a beautiful and elaborately devised medical school around which hospitals cluster observatories in Cambridge and South America and Arizona a branch school of medicine in China a main library with millions of books charts manuscripts; there are museums of a dozen specializations in short Harvard has become a great storehouse of our knowledge of man's past and of the earth and of the universe before and beyond man's own little history. And with this storehouse it has affiliated research units to advance our knowledge of whatever is a too small or, too remote, or too old, or too complex for the human senses to make direct account of.

Vast Equipment Exists

Partly this vast and intricate equipment exists for research and scholarship, but it is chiefly arranged to the advantage of the students who in short generations use it and pass on. In the college and university world for a little while withdrawn from the instant demands of their times young men mature their minds and establish their bodies in healthful ways. At Harvard for almost three hundred years now they have been moving toward these ends in an atmosphere of traditions subtly and slowly changing and yet preserving something characteristic from the beginning. Once Harvard was small now it is great. The first graduating class numbered only nine; of late commencement degrees are awarded to more than a thousand. At the outset all the graduates were trained to teach or to preach, which latter function was as much a matter of theology as the former was a matter of "the classics."

They Mllked the Cow

Now most men leave their alma mater bent upon a hundred careers; they are trained business executives, landscape architects, and spectroscopists as often as teachers and more often than they are preachers. Once they walked for exercise and milked the college cow; now they are highly specialized athletes or men who have developed a superb technique of sitting in stadiums and an amazing lung power. In the seventeenth century they devoted themselves with the part singing of hymns and endless discussion of theological subtleties in the twentieth they hear a symphony go to the theatre or dine at a roadhouse a hundred miles from Cambridge. For decades they walked across the fields to visit with one of the five or six thousand families settled about Massachusetts Bay, then they rode post coaches to Boston in an hour later they came home from debates across the Charles their feet buried in straw on the floor of a horse car later still in electric street cars they made the trip from Marleave's Cafe in twenty five minutes and now they drop into the subway and are rushed under the river get a drink at a Boston blind pig and are back for their next class. After a couple of centuries of carrying water to the washbowls or splashing themselves at the college pump they have come by the luxury of individual bathrooms and running hot and cold water.

Something Persists

A multiplicity of changes the dropping out of customs, sometimes their return the growth of new ways and evolution very striking when observed in its terminal manifestations. Yet certainly after the very earliest years a continuos core of something persists. Perhaps it is the dream of freedom and the fight for freedom necessary to the seeking of that Truth which in Latin is inscribed upon the Harvard seal. Perhaps it is the never failing presence in Harvard classes of a man or a few men who in college give promise and in later life make the promise good of signal distinction and usefulness in the world.

William James upon an occasion observed that the greatness of Harvard was secure in the "persistent atomic tendency" of her student body in her fostering of lonely self contained creatures who were not invaded by typical interests of the group.

Campus Above All

Before all however to the freshman coming to college to the graduates of other years returning to the outsider visiting the impression of the University comes in the form of a campus. At Harvard it is called The Yard. The original Yard has expanded its glorious elms dying of the gypsy moth have given place to red oaks or other trees the ancient wooden fence is replaced by delightful wrought iron and brick. Coming out of the subway one crosses riskily the traffic torrent in "Mass" Avenue turns to look across the hurly burly of what was once a quiet country square enters the Yard. There past a copper beech lies a long rectangle of shaded lawn enclosed by ten or so buildings of all styles simply beauty of ancient Hollis architectural bathos of Weld. Behind University Hall a lovely Hall indeed is an other rectangle into which, crowds the monstrous dignity of Widener Library. Through these spaces move the students the faculty sauntering past squirrels who live by a wisdom of their own in this colossus of learning. In winter boardwalks are put down and fur coated the young men go their open galoshes clattering above the crunch of rubber on snow.

Circle Ever Widens

Beyond in ever widening circles the life of the great institution carries itself on in Fogg Museum (the new elegance that replaces "Norton's pride" and house beauty of other times); Memorial Hall, where great men in their inconspicuous youth have taken their meals and later in its theatre spoken greatness or received honoring degrees; the Freshman dormitories (Lowell's dream, Lowell's babies), the new school of Business Administration the "spotless town" of the forgotten advertisements made actuality by five Baker millions; Soldiers Field, Higginson's gift its stadium the focus of all conscious competition with other universities; the Medical School and its beneficent brood of hospitals the Arnold Arboretum miles away hundreds of acres of rare and exquisite shrubs of all possible varieties; even in Arizona astronomers observer the invisible planetary phenomena. The circle widens. But at the Center is the Yard where Harvard College has its being. It was the origin of the University, it is still the core.