Have a Happy Birthday?

1986 would seem to be a banner year for birthdays. On July 4, as everyone knows, the Statue of liberty celebrated its 100th birthday. On September 4 through 7 and again from October 6 through 12, Harvard College will celebrate the 350th anniversary of its founding.

A century is nothing to sneeze at, but when one stops to consider that Harvard had already been around for 250 years when the statue was beginning to take shape in New York harbor, the enormity of our upcoming birthday starts to hit home. Apart from being a time for celebrations and congratulations, anniversaries are particularly well-suited for taking stock of strengths and weaknesses.

Rhetorically, for obvious reasons, emphasis tends to center on strengths. On July 3, as the sun set over Governor's Island, we all heard Chief Justice Warren Burgher wax grandiloquent on his own family's immigrant history in the Swede towns of the Midwest. On September 4, we can look forward to hearing His Royal Highness The Prince of Wales muse on the origins of Harvardiana at Emmanuel College, Cambridge University.

But what good are retrospectives if we fail to assess our failures as well as our successes? Fifty years ago, when Harvard was celebrating its Tercentenary, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt '04 commented that though general gaiety was the order of the moment, we would all do well to remember that as we celebrate the triumph of liberal ideals and the quest for truth, much of the world remains mired in chaos.

In 1936, the Fascists were victorious in Spain, and would remain so entrenched for fully 40 years. Hitler's Nuremberg laws ruled in Germany as he prepared for World War II. Mussolini made the trains run on time, but did little else that can be praised in the hindsight history affords us.

In 1936, the Statue quietly celebrated it's 50th anniversary. No fireworks, no high gloss hoopla. There wasn't much to celebrate really, 1936 not being a banner year for world liberty. The birthday was tactfully forgotten.

This was hardly the case with Harvard's birthday, however. Student representatives from over 30 universities from around the world were invited to come and join in the festivities in Cambridge. Dignitaries from Cambridge, Oxford and Paris's Sorbonne looked on at the Convocation like mature, experienced older siblings watching as a younger child abandoned its tottering baby steps and broke into a strong run.

This year, both the Statue and the College are celebrating their birthdays with a comparable amount of flair. Both parties are even being choreographed by the same person. That everyone involved with them had or will have a good time is relatively certain.

But what are we celebrating, and should we be doing it with such abandon? When death tolls from South Africa regularly appear on the front page of The New York Times, terrorists go unpunished for the murder of innocent tourists and dictatorial regimes are the rule in more than half of the countries on earth, can we truly rejoice in the principle of liberty?

Things are hardly better when we turn our attention to the current condition of academia. This year alone we have seen Harvard instructors convicted for child pornography, and others criticized for failing to disclose sources of funding.

Before we descend into a quicksand of depression and despondency, however, we do well to remember that although both Harvard's and the Statue's birthdays may have occured at times of trouble--the turmoil of the Continental Congress, the Post-Reconstruction birth pangs of a reconstituted nation, and the eve of World War II--the greatest moments in the lives of the Statue and the College were always on the heels of these birthdays or just over the horizon.

In 1776, ten years before Harvard celebrated its centenary, independence was won in the colonies. In 1945, nine years after the Statue celebrated its 50th, the Allied armies in Europe and Asia made peace, at least temporarily, in the world. With hindsight, some events which have occured in the recent past may become more significant than they now seem.

The incorporation of Radcliffe students into Harvard in 1972 may be regarded as a watershed in the history of the College in years to come. The invasion of Grenade and the bombing of Tripoli could also take on more historical significance than we now in their wake accord them. It's not yet clear how far we have come, but optimism and hard work will surely dictate how far we can go.