When it opened in 1931, alcohol was not yet served in accordance with Prohibition restrictions—and the Club would not obtain a license for wine or beer until 1960. Men were required to wear coats and ties; women only received full membership in 1968.

Not even all of Harvard’s male faculty members were fully integrated into the community of the Club. Only tenured professors, for example, congregated around the long table. It was much more difficult for junior faculty, who came and went and lacked long-standing institutional ties, to penetrate the tight-knit social circle of senior professors.

And at some point in the early 90s, the tradition of long table lunch gradually faded, replaced by a dozen smaller tables scattered across the room. Seats were closer to each other, but oddly, the new setting felt less intimate.

A DIFFERENT MENU

Nearly every wall of the Faculty Club is covered in frames: oil portraits of bygone presidents and benefactors, black-and-white photographs of old sports teams, seemingly ancient maps of Harvard, and a cascade of priceless works lent from the Harvard Art Museum’s collection.

Many of the images are a reminder of the “importance” that faculty members remember, the institutional pedigree and elite patronage for which the Club was known. At one time, for example, men would not have entered the Club dressed in anything but suits and ties.

Now, Rosovsky gestures to his own tie-less collar—the new normal. “The University has changed in a way—the ‘clubbiness’ of the whole university in a sense has declined,” Rosovsky muses. “Clubbiness is not contemporary.”

The Club is still bustling, but staff members cater to a different crowd. Potential departmental hires, celebrities, and foreign dignitaries are all likely to pass through, escorted by faculty members trying to impress. Professors frequently rub shoulders with relatives at family weddings, but less frequently share a meal with their colleagues. And students march over the Club’s carpeted interior for information sessions, special dinners, and interviews.

Even those spaces unique to faculty members have evolved. After the Long Table stopped serving, an inexpensive lunch buffet was introduced, tucked under the spiral staircase that faces the Club’s entrance and named after the many vintage posters framed along its blue-paneled walls. In many ways a less formal version of the Long Table, the buffet welcomed professors, lecturers, graduate students, and their guests, offering a quick and relatively inexpensive bite.

“You’d get out of there for under 10 bucks,” Sociology professor Christopher Winship says. “They made you a sandwich and there was specialty pizza.”

For Abernathy, a daily highlight was the fruit bowl, where faculty served themselves. “You can pile on as much as the bowl, and I was very good at being able to walk with a pyramid,” he says.

Though the buffet closed abruptly in 2011, faculty can still eat lunch in the conservatory—and rave about the food and service when they go—but the bill can easily tally at three times the prices they paid for the buffet.

FLOATING APART

Some professors suggest that some of these spaces have disappeared because of financial constraints, But they also admit that as academic culture has changed, faculty members no longer look to the Faculty Club as their Club.

When Abernathy took his meals at the Long Table, lunch was a mandatory occasion for him and his colleagues on the Third Floor of Pierce Hall. “Someone would pound on your door,” he says, and an excuse of “‘I got to get this lecture done,’” was quickly overridden.