Harvard: A Long, Strange Journey

While the campus has recently been embroiled by the Faculty of Arts and Sciences’ distaste for outgoing University President Lawrence H. Summers, Harvard has historically been a difficult campus to please. For example, students risked expulsion in 1766 for criticizing rancid butter served in the Commons, and in 1768, they revolted against raising academic standards by smashing tutors’ windows. In the “Great Rebellion of 1834,” students raised a black flag of rebellion and burned University President Josiah Quincy, Class of 1790, in effigy. And in 1969, University President Nathan M. Pusey ’28 famously called in Boston and Cambridge police to forcibly remove students that had taken over University Hall to protest ROTC recruitment on campus.

It certainly seems that University President Edward Holyoke, Class of 1705, was right when he said, “If any man wished to be humbled and mortified, let him become President of Harvard College.”

However, Harvard has survived these past brouhahas, rising from the backwater woods of colonialism to become a world-renowned educational institution. The University has been guided by a history of opinionated leaders and active students, and their tumultuous stories are the subject of “Veritas: Harvard College and the American Experience” by Andrew B. Schlesinger ’70, whose father and grandfather were also both distinguished Harvard historians.

Schlesinger’s account is one of short, specific anecdotes that intensely examine events in Harvard’s “seedy” history and its significant place in the broader story of American history. He tells of a time when traveling Dutchmen confused Harvard for a tavern, and when William Stoughton, Class of 1650—who donated £1000 to the building of Stoughton Hall—helped convict George Burroughs, Class of 1670, during the Salem witch trials. Schlesinger describes how students were already debating about slavery during Commencement in 1773, how U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt, Class of 1880, revolutionized the rules for modern football based on his undergraduate experiences, and how University President James B. Conant, Class of 1914, helped pioneer the now-ubiquitous SAT as a tool for determining Harvard’s National Scholarships.

One of the book’s dominant themes is the University’s involvement in political and social affairs. “Veritas” catalogues the theological and financial troubles that faced the college for much of its history, its stance against religious extremism during the Great Awakening, and its role in quartering George Washington’s troops during the Revolutionary War.

Schlesinger relates how the undergraduate community was split during the Civil War, how University President A. Lawrence Lowell, Class of 1877, generated controversy after refusing to allow African Americans to reside in the Yard with other freshman, and the relatively recent acceptance of women and homosexuals into the Harvard community.

Not all of the stories are so weighty. Although Harvard scholars are stereotyped these days as unhappy and overly serious, the University’s history certainly debunks that myth. Schlesinger describes Commencement in the early 1700s as a drunken affair that attracted visitors from afar, including Natick Indians, “the singing dwarfs, the dancing bears,” “cripples, [and] lunatics.…” In 1818, a fight in the Commons between the freshman and sophomore class led to the throwing of “cups, saucers, and dishes,” resulting in the total destruction of Harvard’s tableware. Five years later, during the “Great Rebellion of