Harvard Gets Yale Through 250 Historic Years

In the Year of Our Lord 1718 an affluent London merchant who had been born in the American colonies received several visits from a Bostonian named Jeremiah Dummer about a struggling institution of higher learning in Say-brook, Connecticut called The Collegiate School. These visits, along with some very persuasive letters from another Bostonian named Increase Mather, succeeded in convincing the London merchant to give a substantial donation to the small school, which was promptly named Yale College in his honor. Today that college celebrates the 250th anniversary of its founding.

The remarkable fact is not that Yale is 250 years old today, but how it managed to get that old. For Yale, which is now Gothically situated in New Haven, was spawned, nursed, and sent out into the Great World by Harvard men. In return for this loving care Yale, like Frankenstein's monster, has turned on its creator and done all sorts of outrageous things--such as beating the Crimson quite regularly in football. This type of thing is quite like Yale, which has capitalized on Harvard's temporary weaknesses all through its life.

Even in its first fifty years Harvard had a reputation as being the place where rich merchants sent their idle sons. This, coupled with its aura of religious liberalism, was enough to set wealthy Connecticut burghers to thinking about a college of their own as early as 1650, but nothing was done about it until 1701.

In that year a group of ten stern-faced men gathered in the parsonage of Abraham Pierson in Branford. Connecticut and each tossed some books on a table as their contribution to the founding of a college. These men were all ministers who outraged at Harvard's unenthusiastic attitude toward such Calvinistic doctrines as infant damnation and predestination, had decided to establish a rival institution. All but one of the ton were Harvard graduates.

Until 1718 the Collegiate School wandered around in various small Connecticut towns, always under the heavy influence of Harvard and Harvard men. Its first full-time instructor was Daniel Hooker 1700. Its first B.A. was awarded to John Hart, a transfer student from the Harvard Class of 1704. Indeed, The Collegiate School seemed rather anxious to accept Harvard transfers, while Cambridge authorities were at first unwilling to recognize Collegiate's degrees.

Commencements Sinful

Harvard officials, however, were from the first quite friendly toward the pathetic school to the South. Benjamin Colman 1692, despite the fact that he was dead set against Yale's Calvinism, opposed Harvard's admitting any Connecticut students so as not to shut off The Collegiate's supply of Bright Young Men.

Both Dummer and Mather, the two men who persuaded Elihu Yale to make his gift, were Harvard graduates. Dummer, in fact, was one reprimanded by a classmate for boasting that "in a little time that nursery Yale would exceed Harvard." As for Mather, he was president of Harvard at the time he was soliciting so strenuously for Yale. He never did quite get into the swing of things at Cambridge, however, once denouncing Harvard Commencements as "very expensive and the occasion of much sin."

Harvard's helping hand to its Connecticut rival was exemplified by Edward Holyoke 1705, who became the seventh president of Harvard. During his 30-year term of office he corresponded regularly with his counterparts at Yale, sagely advising them on matters of College administration. He warned President Thomas Clap of Yale against putting gutters on his buildings because the students would undoubtedly clog them up with refuse. He also advised against lining Yale's windows with lead, writing Clap that the students would probably steal the lead and sell it.

Despite the administration's cordial attitude toward the rapidly-growing school in New Haven, individual Harvard graduates were apt to be a bit contemptuous of Yale. Peter Thatcher 1704 had a son twice refused for admittance by Harvard, and then wrote a friend that "I might send him to Yale, which takes many inferior scholars." Jacob Eliot 1720, lived near New Haven and once visited a Yale Commencement. It was, he bitterly wrote to a friend. "Dull, dull, dull."

Flogging Cut Out

In its own bumbling way Yale tried to do the Massachusetts school favors in return. When President Holyoke of Harvard died, President Ezra Stiles of Yale recommended a certain Rev. Samuel Locke to the Harvard Corporation as a worthy successor to him. Locke served three years until 1773 and then resigned suddenly and without apparent reason. His motive was uncovered recently when the publication of Stiles' diary revealed that his protege had made a maidservant "great with childe."

Yale's ingratitude began to manifest itself more obviously in the middle of the 18th century, when, by stoutly defending the stern Calvinism of Edwards, it succeeded in attracting students whose parents were growing suspicious of Harvard's increasing "liberalism." Harvard, by this time had abandoned the custom of flogging students for college offenses.

By 1836, Yale was graduating the largest class of A.B.'s in the East. The Albany Journal reveals that during the spring the New Haven college granted 81 degrees; Union 71; Princeton 66; Dartmouth 44; and Harvard only 39.

100 Years of H-Y Crew

In contrast the Blue's athletic debuts against Harvard were singularly unsuccessful. Exactly a century ago, an old Harvard shell, the Oneida, defeated New Haven crews in the morning and afternoon. The 100th anniversary crew race will be celebrated this spring. Sixteen years later, the Crimson won the first baseball game of the rivalry, 25 to 17. In 1875, Harvard won the football opener by four goals and four touchdowns.

Yale's gridiron fortunes soared, however, during the 80's and 90's, when she lost only twice to her former patron. So bad was the situation for the Crimson that the Harvard Daily Herald was prompted to remark in 1882 which may sound familiar to 1951 readers: "Harvard cannot defeat Yale at football unless she consents to place on her team men who will substitute roughness for skill and professional enmity for amateur courtesy. But such a team will never represent Harvard and may never bear its honorable name. A few such contests as that of Saturday will blast forever the reputation of football as being a commendable intercollegiate sport."

By 1908 the shoe was on the other foot, and Percy Haughton was enthusiastically strangling bulldog pups in the pre-game locker-room meetings and urging his team to go out on the field and do the same.

"Rowdy and unmanageable" are the words one observer used to describe the Yale undergraduate body during the post-Civil War era. Statistics of the period show that the average student strongly inclined toward "moderate" drink and that only 13 out of 17 undergraduates refused to be classified as card players.

Bi-Centennial Lacked Splendor

In 1901, Yale was two hundred years old. Describing the bi-centennial celebration in New Haven, Charles Eliot Norton of Harvard wrote," It was a great success as an advertisement and interesting in many ways. But there was a total lack of splendor; there was not dignity or stateliness in the arrangements. The most serious lack was the absence of any presentation of the true ideal of a great university and of its supreme function in a modern democratic society."

It took the only president of Yale since 1766 who was not a Yale graduate to get the New Haven college (actually a university since 1887) on the move again. During his tenure in office from 1921 to 1937, James Rowland Angell of Michigan probably did more to produce the Yale which exists today than any other man. He erected 37 buildings, quadrupled endowments; formed a new engineering school, an observatory at Johannesburg, and the first U. S. graduate school of nursing; pulled the law and medical schools out of the rut, and set up a drama department under George P. Baker, an immigrant from Harvard.

Harkness Millions

During this period, Yale inadvertently did its Cambridge rivals a favor. Edward S. Harkness, in 1928, offered the New Haven school three million dollars to establish the beginnings of a House system. Discouraged by the arguments and delays of the Yale Corporation, Harkness lost patience and offered the money to Harvard instead. Historians claim that it took President Lowell only ten seconds to consider the offer and accept it. In a few weeks Harkness raised the gift to ten million dollars and Harvard's House system was underway.

"Thus," says Harvard historian Samuel Eliot Morrison '08, "a Yale man became the greatest benefactor to Harvard in our entire history, making a noble return for the part that Harvard men had taken in founding his alma mater." Three years after Harvard's House system was in operation, Yale, had its College system, also as a result of a gift from Harkness.

President A. Whitney Griswold of Yale, who replaced Charles Seymour last year, suggested last fall that student conferences between representatives of the two colleges might be useful to eliminate the "10 to 25 percent margin" between the Harvard student's apathy toward extra-curricular and college life and the Yale man's overzealousness.

Griswold thinks the Yale student "must learn to do things for their own sake" and not enter extra-curricular activities "to prove he's a big shot."

Yale, traditionally conservative, traditionally waiting for others to lead and then taking the middle path, has shown increasing signs of liberality recently.

One indication of this has been the move to make parietal rules more lenient. The fact that Yale now allows women in rooms until 11 p.m. over the weekends may, however, not be surprising to those who remember the school's founder: Elihu Yale, born in Scollay Square