Our Perfect Past?

Glimpses of the Harvard Past

By Bernard Bailyn, Donald Fleming, Oscar Handlin, and Stephen Thernstrom

Harvard University Press; 149 pp.; $15.00

HARVARD'S DELUXE brochure in honor of the College's 350th anniversary is here. Glimpses of the Harvard Past, written by four Harvard history professors, Bernard Bailyn, Donald Fleming, Oscar Handlin, and Stephan Thernstrom, is a haphazard survey of the growth of the College from its foundation to the present day.

When thousands of sentimental alums arrive in Cambridge this September for the fireworks celebration, this slim volume--packed with a collection of pictures from the Harvard Archives--will undoubtedly sell out at local bookstores. Indeed, the book jacket predicts that Glimpses "will quickly take an honored place on the shelves of Harvardiana."

The question is whether it will be opened before it gets there. The collection of essays will most likely travel directly from shopping bag to airplane seat to coffee table to Harvard memorial bookshelf and a place of esteem next to Erich Segal's Class, last year's reunion volume. Alums should do themselves a favor by giving Class another read and leaving this 350th momento to collect dust.

AS A STATISTICAL approach, this perspective of Harvard history works quite well. That the Harvard Corporation recovered from the financial catastrophe of President Kirkland's administration (1810--1828) is a credit to the school's frugal Puritan origins. However, this same New England ethnocentrism accounts for the disturbing story of minority enrollment at the College.

During the 1920s, in response to the rising rate of Jewish matriculation (1 percent in 1881, 10 percent in 1918 and 22 percent in 1922), President A. Lawrence Lowell helped establish a new admissions system to combat the University's "Jewish problem." There were few Blacks at Harvard until the mid-20th century, only 160 before 1940. Black students were barred from the dormitories until 1923; they were segregated from whites in College residences until World War II. It seems that Harvard's much touted reputation for diversity and tolerance is a relatively recent phenomenon.

A morass of statistics provides a sound basis for objective discussion of Harvard's evolution as a world-renowned institution, but numbers alone do not make particularly enthralling reading. The authors seem to have forgotten that they do not have a captive audience in a lecture hall. Their writing is unoriginal, occasionally sloppy, and often repetitive. Facts overlap; the same figures reappear in separate essays, with the same glib descriptions: President John T. Kirkland is always "charming," President Charles W. Eliot is "the right sort," George Santayana is eccentric. All of the characters are flat. The authors, some of whom are quite popular for their lively lecture styles, seem to have thrown these essays together on a free weekend, using whatever information was easily available.

AND IF ANYTHING interesting has ever happened at Harvard, it seems to have been systematically excised from this bland account. Historians generally tend to focus on the significance of periods of upheaval, but these essays emphasize the placid progress of an educational institution over a shifting population of faceless students and teachers. Student riots are glossed over or ignored. Wartime turbulence is omitted. Conspicuously absent is any mention of the most recent Harvard crisis of student demonstrations in the '60s. Clearly, such a short book cannot include all significant events in the University's formation. Yet the lack of any detailed examination of some tumultuous events makes Harvard history seem excessively dull and rosy.

The accompanying photographs give the most vivid glimpse into the past Harvard community. They reveal a sense of humor which enlivens Harvard memories. The 1885 baseball team in their odd, unmatched uniforms, and the three football players bumbling a play, reach back to days when Ivy sports were less professional. An 1871 posed photograph of the Natural History Society in suits, bowties, and hats captures two mischievous members stuffing a small alligator into a jug. Only in these pictures might a nostalgic Harvard alum finally recover a piece.