It is Reunion Week in Cambridge. Along Massachusetts Avenue, in the Yard, and at nearby country clubs another contingent of "old grads" is celebrating the traditional week of re-awakening friendships, tinkling (and crashing) glasses, and dissolving inhibitions.

This time, however, something is different. Below the surface frivolity a quiet revolution, already more than a decade old and still gathering steam, is gradually transforming every aspect of Harvard's alumni affairs.

Perhaps the most startling change is in the nature of Class Reunions themselves.

They have always been a problem. Back around 1730 the Corporation tried keeping the date of Commencement secret until a week or two before, and transferring the day to Friday, "so that the rest of the week would not be consumed in Saturnalia." However, as Harvard historian Samuel Eliot Morison continues, "this was held an intolerable grievance, not only by the public, but by the country clergy, for whom a Friday Commencement gave insufficient time to sober up and get home for the Sabbath."

Since that time, authorities here, as at most other colleges in the nation, have learned simply to expect the worst each June when a new group of dignified, responsible, and highly educated adults returns to pay homage to its Alma Mater.

Bluntly, alumni Class Reunions--especially the 25th--have become characterized as drunken brawls. A typical description tion, appearing in The New York Times Magazine several years ago, spoke of "the grotesque costumes, the irrational deportment, and the genial acceptance by the institution's money-raising departments of disorder which at any other time would cause the High Command to put in a hurry call for the campus Gestapo to get in there and do its stuff."

On the basis of this traditional concept of reunion activities, many observers before the last war would have agreed with Socialist leader Norman Thomas, Princeton '02, who once said:

"The last audience in America to which I would make a serious address would be a reunion of college graduates. In such reunions men honoring ancient shrines of learning with one accord breathe one prayer: 'Make me a sophomore just for tonight.' And few prayers are more unfailingly answered."

Today, however, the program at Harvard for Reunion Week, 1956, shows that many prominent men decidedly disagree with Thomas's pronouncement (as with many of his other ideas, no doubt). Three such persons, it may be presumed, are John H. Finley, Jr. '25, Master of Eliot House, John U. Monro '34, Director of the Financial Aid Office, and McGeorge Bundy, Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, all of whom actually will dare to address a Reunion audience seriously when they take part Wednesday morning in the symposium on "The College: Its Future Size and Shape."

The fact is that Reunions in Cambridge now are significantly different from what they were a decade or two ago. There are symposia (an innovation begun in 1949, expanded ever since); there are instructive tours of the University's facilities; there are more professors and fewer coaches on the speaking platforms; for the 25th Reunion Class there is even a "Back to College Day" several months in advance, when Class members can attend lectures, inspect the Houses, and talk with Faculty members in a less hectic atmosphere than prevails in June. In sum, there is now a process of actually "re-educating" the alumni.

This new trend in Reunion behavior has been developing for some time. Edward A. Weeks, Jr. '22 spotted it back in the thirties, and commented: "It is no longer necessary to break three hundred glasses and fifteen windowpanes in order to prove that you've been college graduates for six years. Amen! Amen!, sigh the hotel proprietors on the Cape."

Reunions Somewhat Tamer

Or, as Peter E. Pratt '35, Secretary of the Alumni Association, puts it: "There's getting to be less and less of the 'Bright College Days' stuff, thank God!"

The reason Harvard Reunions have become somewhat tamer lately is not that after three centuries the University authorities are finally beginning to crack down. Nor is it, as one observer suggested last year, that the Classes currently celebrating their 25th anniversaries "graduated during the depression and have never gotten over it."

The revolution that during the past decade has been affecting all phases of alumni activity, both at Harvard and elsewhere, is much more fundamental than that. While all of its implications are not yet evident, one thing is already sure: