Harvard Quietly Turns 370 Years Old

Party-goers this past weekend dressed up and roamed the streets in drunken revelry, but they were not toasting in honor of their school turning 370.

Rather, Halloween weekend at Harvard seemed to overshadow the University’s birthday this Saturday.

On this day in 1636, the Great and General Court of Massachusetts voted to appropriate 400 pounds for “a schoale or college,” according to Harvard’s 1997 Reaccreditation Report, which provided an overview of University affairs.

Although classes did not begin until two years later and the College was not baptized until 1638, the date Harvard celebrates its origin is the day it got 400 pounds rather than the day it got its name.

“I think you will agree that it is more difficult than is commonly acknowledged to fix a precise date for the founding of Harvard,” Interim University President Derek C. Bok wrote in an e-mail.

In contrast to this weekend’s calmness, for its 350th anniversary, Harvard spent over $1 million to throw itself a four-day birthday party—including a Grand Ball—that attracted over 40,000 people to Cambridge and was eight years in the making, the Crimson reported in 1986.

“Not much attention is paid unless it’s a centennial, bicentennial or semicentennial,” said Morton Keller, who co-wrote the 2001 book “Making Harvard Modern,” with his wife, Phyllis.

For Harvard’s 350th anniversary, Jack Rosenthal ’56, former editorial page editor of The New York Times, ran a 1986 Times editorial notebook column, describing the birthday as a celebration not of elitism but of “the impulse to share.”

The tradition of celebrating Harvard’s birthday has come into play at a much later date in the school’s history. Harvard began its second century of existence in 1736 without festive parades or commemorative speeches, according to the 1997 report.