Candidates for the A.B. degree delivered their Latin disputations on stage.

Two Seniors were charged with creating a broadsheet listing the candidates’ thesis topics.

Everyone president, from University Overseers and Faculty to alumni could interrogate seniors on the spot on any aspect of their thesis or aspect of the Harvard curriculum.

For the Seniors the preceding weeks were a rare chance to act rowdy.

“All other days of college life were pallid in comparison with the great festival of Commencement,” wrote

historian Samuel Eliot Morison Class of 1908.

A massive mid-day feast held between the two halves of the commencement exercises was often reported as the a favorite part of the commencement tradition.

The President began the feasting festivities with a blessing and gave thanks at the feast’s end. Guests would then hand around a communal “loving cup” or “grace cup” from which all the guests would drink ale.

After the meal and several rounds from the grace cup, the dinner guests would start into a round of songs.

An unofficial tradition was for graduating students and their parents to serve wine and plum cake at small parties in the students dorm rooms.

In 1693 the “truculently virtuous” President Increase Mather Class of 1656 cracked down on this tradition,

announcing that “for the Commencers to have Plumb-Cake, is dishonourable to the Colledge” and instituting a

fine of twenty shillings for each cake-possession offense.

Attempts to rein in the revelry continued into the eighteenth century. The College passed a rule in 1722 to prevent students from providing “distilled liquors or any Composition made therewith, upon pain of being fined twenty shilling and the forfeiture of the provisions and liquors, to be seized by the tutors!”

By the 1730s, however, the popular evasion of this declaration led the Overseers to recommend and the Corporation to consent to a provision making a special exception for tippling at Commencement.