Nothing But the Truth

Impartially stamped on cocktail glasses and diplomas, Veritas is the familiar emblem of Harvard College. But acceptance of this Latin noun came only after a haphazard beginning and two centuries of neglect and controversy.

Historian A. K. Moe credits a chance meeting with inspiring the motto:

"One day, as Prexy Dunster was walking through the Yard to his palatial residence (a log hut with Dutch brick trimmings), he met a student coming from the reading room with three books under his arm.

"What are those volumes, my little man?" quoth the President.

"'I cannot tell a lie, sir,' answered the grind. 'They are the necessary books I have just succeeded in drawing from the library.'

"'Veritas, veritas, veritas!' Prexy mused; and the next day in Chapel he announced that henceforth the College seal would represent three books with the legend Veritas on them."

Unfortunately, sturdier data must supplant this episode from Moe's fanciful History of Harvard. Veritas was one of several religious mottoes suggested in the early years of the College. At that time a spiritual team, Veritas was translated as "divine truth," the meaning Dante had given it.

The choice of three books as a background was not an inspiration, however, but a last resort. john Harvard's family had no coat of arms, so it was impossible to follow the Oxford custom of adopting a benefactor's shield. Instead, the Overseers patterned the design after those of the colleges of Trinity and the Sorbonne, which both used books as a part of their arms.

The completed shield, never adopted officially in those early days, was forgotten for nearly two hundred years. Meanwhile, Christo et Ecclenas, another motto suggested in the seventeenth century, gained a wide following.

Searching through the archives for interesting his torical data before the bicentennial of 1836, President Josiah Quincy came upon a rough sketch of college arms: Veritas and the three volumes. The last of the volumes in the original drawing was not opened like the first two, but was half-closed with the inscription on its back binding. Apprehensive lest such a placement be interpreted as a critique of education, Quincy revised the scal so that each book was spread open.

At the celebration in 1836, undergraduates for the first time raised a banner with the new scal, and seven years later, the Corporation officially recognized it as the first and authentic shield of the College.

During his turbulent presidency from 1846 to 1849, Edward Everott administered with on chief assumption: everything his predecessor had down was wrong. Everett favored the religious tone of Christo et Ecclesiae, a tone which veritas has not retained. He requested the aid of Samuel Adams Eliot, then treasurer of the Corporation, in restoring the "Spiritual and Godly Shield." Eliot, he soon found, was not the man to enlist in this cause. Unknown to the President, Eliot had been instrumental in getting Veritas recognized a few years before. The letters exchanged between the two men were lengthy, heated, but always, of course, scrupulously polite. Each held to his position, but Everett was President and his view prevailed. He chortled, at the abolishment of the Veritas arms, "This fantastical and Anti-Christian Veritas seal has been removed to the forgotten corner of the records where it slept undisturbed for two hundred years."

Everett's triumph was short-lived. In 1885, an effort was once again made to restore the banished seal. Oliver Wendell Holmes led the movement with a sonnet which ended:

"Life to the morning star they marble brow!

Cast thy brave truth on every warring blast

Stretch thy white hand to that forbidden bough,

And let thine earliest symbol be thy last!"

Harvard's two hundred and fiftieth anniversary was celebrated in November, 1886, with two innovations: academic gowns were worn for the first time at the University, and Veritas, now Truth neither "divine" nor "anti-Christian," was once more the official aspiration of Harvard College.