In 1820, Ralph Waldo Emerson was in the exact same position as five students will be tonight--vying for the honor of a Boylston Prize in Elocution.

The future poet and essayist only took second place in the competition, perhaps indicative of the high standards students were once held to for elocution.

In Emerson's days, Harvard overseers mandated that students spend two years in a course that combined rhetoric and moral philosophy. The Boylston Prize, established in 1817, provided a competitive atmosphere for students to hone their skills.

This year, only about twenty people competed for this once-illustrious honor.

"There was a time when the prize and the contest fit in very well with courses of study. Now it is seen as a rather separate event related to what students do in theater or debate or presentations of study at the IOP," says English Professor James Engell, who administers the prize.

The prize was endowed by Ward Nicolas Boylston in honor of his uncle, Nicolas Boylston, who himself established the Professorship of Rhetoric and Oratory in 1772.

Awarded for the "delivery of memorized selections from English, Greek or Latin literature," it is open only to upperclass students.

The prize is one of the few dinosaurs of the rhetorical tradition that remains at Harvard. In a university rife with students preparing for careers that require public speaking, rhetoric's decline seems unwarranted to some.