Tucked away in Dean Hanford's safe in University Hall is a 12 by 6 piece of worm-eaten brown oak with a common look that hides a three-century history of Harvard significance. It's a piece from a doorway in Emmanuel College, Cambridge, England, and antiquaries feel sure that once upon a time when John Harvard was going to college at Emmanuel, he must have brushed against the wood with his gown.

Naturally, there's no definite proof that the Founder ever did brush up against it, but the facts indicate that he probably did. The wood was discovered in 1934 during the reconstruction of the Old Library of Emmanuel into an additional dining hall. Workmen on the job were stripping away the south wall when they hit into a massive oak panel, hidden by the centuries and nine inches of plaster and brick.

Wood from Chapel

When the Cambridge Antiquarian Society got to work, they found that they had stumbled onto woodwork from the portal to the Old Chapel of Elizabethan days; the chapel where John Harvard worshipped and received his degree. Samples of the wood were kept, but it wasn't until 1936 that T. S. Hele, Master of Emmanuel College, realized the meaning of the wood to Harvard and brought it along with him to the Tercentenary.

Since then Dean Hanford has kept it for Harvard, and he likes to think of the homely oak block as the symbol of good-will between the two Cambridges and the two great western democracies. When Hele presented it, he also turned over other relics. The wood is kept as a reminder that after the war, the famous Lionel DeJersey Harvard Studentship to Emmanuel will be re-established.

Scholarship Cements Bonds

It is this coveted scholarship which gives the wood its significance. The award was made from 1924 until the war to outstanding Harvard graduates for study at Cambridge, and it has deeper importance than most scholarships. The Associated Harvard Clubs, who originated the honor in memory of Lionel De Jersey Harvard '15, descendant of John Harvard, calls it "An Ambassadorship of Goodwill."

Winners of the Studentship live in the very rooms in the Old Court where John Harvard himself lived. Langdon P. Marvin '98, one of the men behind the plan, says it is "a real Anglo-American bond."