While the campus has recently been embroiled by the Faculty of Arts and
Sciences’ distaste for outgoing University President Lawrence H.
Summers, Harvard has historically been a difficult campus to please.
For example, students risked expulsion in 1766 for criticizing rancid
butter served in the Commons, and in 1768, they revolted against
raising academic standards by smashing tutors’ windows. In the “Great
Rebellion of 1834,” students raised a black flag of rebellion and
burned University President Josiah Quincy, Class of 1790, in effigy.
And in 1969, University President Nathan M. Pusey ’28 famously called
in Boston and Cambridge police to forcibly remove students that had
taken over University Hall to protest ROTC recruitment on campus.
It certainly seems that University President Edward Holyoke,
Class of 1705, was right when he said, “If any man wished to be humbled
and mortified, let him become President of Harvard College.”
However, Harvard has survived these past brouhahas, rising
from the backwater woods of colonialism to become a world-renowned
educational institution. The University has been guided by a history of
opinionated leaders and active students, and their tumultuous stories
are the subject of “Veritas: Harvard College and the American
Experience” by Andrew B. Schlesinger ’70, whose father and grandfather
were also both distinguished Harvard historians.
Schlesinger’s account is one of short, specific anecdotes that
intensely examine events in Harvard’s “seedy” history and its
significant place in the broader story of American history. He tells of
a time when traveling Dutchmen confused Harvard for a tavern, and when
William Stoughton, Class of 1650—who donated £1000 to the building of
Stoughton Hall—helped convict George Burroughs, Class of 1670, during
the Salem witch trials. Schlesinger describes how students were already
debating about slavery during Commencement in 1773, how U.S. President
Theodore Roosevelt, Class of 1880, revolutionized the rules for modern
football based on his undergraduate experiences, and how University
President James B. Conant, Class of 1914, helped pioneer the
now-ubiquitous SAT as a tool for determining Harvard’s National
Scholarships.
One of the book’s dominant themes is the University’s
involvement in political and social affairs. “Veritas” catalogues the
theological and financial troubles that faced the college for much of
its history, its stance against religious extremism during the Great
Awakening, and its role in quartering George Washington’s troops during
the Revolutionary War.
Schlesinger relates how the undergraduate community was split
during the Civil War, how University President A. Lawrence Lowell,
Class of 1877, generated controversy after refusing to allow African
Americans to reside in the Yard with other freshman, and the relatively
recent acceptance of women and homosexuals into the Harvard community.
Not all of the stories are so weighty. Although Harvard
scholars are stereotyped these days as unhappy and overly serious, the
University’s history certainly debunks that myth. Schlesinger describes
Commencement in the early 1700s as a drunken affair that attracted
visitors from afar, including Natick Indians, “the singing dwarfs, the
dancing bears,” “cripples, [and] lunatics.…” In 1818, a fight in the
Commons between the freshman and sophomore class led to the throwing of
“cups, saucers, and dishes,” resulting in the total destruction of
Harvard’s tableware. Five years later, during the “Great Rebellion of
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