One other quaint U-Hall tradition; it changes hands now and then when students here get mad enough about something, like they did nine years ago about Vietnam, etc. Sometimes students just sit down in front of the building and prevent access to it, as they did last year to protest the University's policy of retaining investments in firms with operations in South Africa. When there is a protest to be held, it is a tradition to hold it at University Hall, but don't expect the building or its inhabitants to pay much attention.

Strolling around behind University Hall we see the other major section of the Yard, dominated by the glowering bulk of Widener Library.

Widener is famous for its great size, (it is the third largest library in terms of volumes owned, in the country), and for the horror stories people tell about it. Some tell tales of the Wandering Graduate Students who prowls the lower levels of the stacks feeding on old critiques of Medieval Scholaticism and accosting wayward freshmen who have lost the golden thread which they tied to the entrance of the stacks in order to find their way back. This stuff is just not true, nor are the tales of skeletal remains found in carrels or those of people who got locked in the stacks for weeks. Frankly, unless you have absolutely no directional sense at all you cannot get lost in the stacks; nervous, may be, but not lost.

Widener is linked to a more tangible Hardvard tradition through the very reason for its existence. You see, Harry Elkins Widener'07 was a young Harvard graduate when he sailed innocently enough on the Titanic. In the subsequent disaster, he died when he was unable to swim 100 yards to a lifeboat. When Mrs. Widener, his mother, gave Harvard the library as a memorial to her bibliophile son (all that money came from owning the Philadelphia trolleys) she stipulated that every Harvard graduate must be able to swim. This is why you have to swim 100 yards before you can graduate. Believe us, through, this is the least of your worries.

Widener is an impressive, very "Harvard" place but it isn't where you will spend a lot of your time as a freshman unless you have a compulsion to watch graduate students work their brains into naval jelly over their dissertations. A place where you might spend more time is Emerson Hall.

If you walk around Emerson and look up carefully at the eaves you will see the inscription, "What Is Man That Thou Art Mindful of Him?" This inscription plaque was originally going to bear some sort of fruity paean to the excellence of man but President Abbot Lawrence Lowell, class of 1877, decided that he was going to teach the faculty a lesson in humility and he ordered that the less than exuberant quotation from Job be chiseled in.

The Whale Tale's Significance

Harvard tradition that obliquely involves Emerson is "Boats," a History course on oceanic exploration taught by a professor affectionately known as "Commodore" Perry. Legend has it that a student took the course (something of an easy rid) and wrote a very bogus paper on whales and whaling. Figuring that he would need to dress up his anemic effort a little, he pasted a whale, cut from a National Geographic, onto the front cover of the paper and handed it in.

He got an A- on the paper, much to his surprise, and he naturally kept it. Next year, a friend took "Boats" and borrowed the same whale paper for the course. He rewrote it a bit, affixed an even more decorative whale to the title page and turned it in. He too got an A-. Naturally, the next year another member of the group took Perry's course and decided to hand in the same paper but calculated that the whale would be a dead giveaway by this time, so he left it off. When the paper came back he was dismayed to find that he had gotten a C-. The only comment was, "Where's the whale?"

You are probably asking yourself, "Why in hell would anyone be so stupid as to turn in the same paper three years in a row?" The point is not so much that it was the same paper, it is that the paper was successful, and that is what really counts here after all. For Harvard's one, mainline, true-to-life tradition is success. That is what a great number of your predecessors at this august institution worship as their common bond. The traditions of elitism, and the closeness Harvard has with the power structures of business and government cannot be truly conveyed by the ivy and the red brick, they are an intangible part of the aura here.

The Crimson Key gives you one, the stories above are another, but when you buy into Harvard you will soon discover that the reason why this place is not just another college is because from the beginings of modern American history. The country's chosen have been almost one and the same with the chosen who sweat through the "rigors" of academic life here. Perhaps what is chiefly to be gained from the stories and legends that have formed around Harvard is a sight of the humanity of those here who have pretended for so long to know exactly why everyone should be mindful of men so great as themselves.