On a typical summer day in Cambridge, a steady stream of guided tour groups will pass by Harvard’s architecturally unusual Science Center building.

The stories these tourists are told are not always the same. Some guides say the structure is modeled after a Polaroid camera, while others insist that the architecture represents a stairway to heaven.

From the Admissions Office to commercial companies to local residents eager to discuss Harvard’s relationship with Cambridge, the proprietors of Harvard’s many tour options represent the University in subtly different ways.

Often equipped with backpacks, straw hats, or Victorian costumes, these guides direct thousands of tourists in and out of the gates of Harvard Yard every year—visitors who flock to Cambridge from almost every continent to experience the history of America’s oldest university.

Still, nearly every tourist on a tour will bump into a student, stop to pose and caress the foot of the John Harvard statue in an effort to gain some ancient luck or wisdom, and take a photo in front of Widener. Even as visitors learn different facts and stories about Harvard, shared experiences like these epitomize each tour’s common goal of sharing Harvard’s history as a cultural and academic landmark.

BECOMING THE HISTORY

In 2011, Daniel Berger-Jones co-founded Cambridge Historical Tours to immerse tourists in the Harvard of a former century. Dressed in period garb from the 1800s—including a top hat, three-piece suit, and suspenders—Berger-Jones assumes an accent usually missing from Harvard’s classrooms today as he strolls, cane in hand, through the streets. He wants to bring alive a long-gone Harvard.

“Our tour group is for folks who are trying to figure out why this place is so famous, the people, the stories, the legends,” Berger-Jones says.

Dressed in full Victorian attire and playing the role of individuals affiliated with Harvard during the 40-year term of University President Charles W. Eliot, Class of 1853, leaders for Jones’s company offer a 70-minute tour full of grand tales, personal narratives, and accounts of little-known facts about Harvard’s history.

“We stand outside the buildings and tell the stories,” says Max J. Pacheco, a Cambridge Historical Tours guide perhaps better known as his alter ego Irving Kolpeck, a sharp Harvard student and paperboy from the early 20th century.

Berger-Jones says that his tours are “98 to 99 percent accurate,” and added that the group looks at old articles, newspapers, and archives of Harvard correspondence to find its information.

THE OFFICIAL RECORD

When asked about the relationship between the University and private tour groups, University spokesperson Tania M. deLuzuriaga wrote in an email that Harvard “has no editorial control over the content of tours that are run by private entities.”

For its part, the University offers a number of official tours, including the Harvard Information Center’s Guided Historical Tour. More than 45,000 visitors have taken that tour since the beginning of 2013, according to deLuzuriaga.

H Luke M. Anderson ’14, a tour guide at the Information Center, says that he tries to disseminate information about Harvard and its history—without any fluff.

“It’s like when you go to any historical place. You want to get a good overview of it. You want to leave with something,” he says. “If you go to the Colosseum, you want to be provided with a good, non-biased history of the landmark. I think that’s what we provide, particularly in this office.”

As a tour guide, Anderson says he believes he should provide a holistic description of the University to the people that visit from all over the world. However, he adds, that does not mean that the tours exaggerate or fabricate information about Harvard in order to cover up its shortcomings.

“We definitely incorporate a lot about student life and anecdotes about the school that the tourists might find interesting, but [the tours consists of] pretty unbiased facts about Harvard’s history.”

Other official tour options include an admissions tour, a tour of the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, and tours hosted by the student-led Crimson Key Society. There is no administrative body within Harvard that coordinates with all of the institution’s affiliated and non-affiliated tour groups, deLuzuriaga wrote.

Both Anderson and Haley K. Fuller ’14, president of the Crimson Key Society, say that the University does not strictly control or monitor the content of either the Guided Historical Tour or the tours provided by the Crimson Key Society.

BLENDING FACT AND FUN

In the summer of 2006, Jordan C. Jones ’07 and Daniel A. Schofield-Bodt ’07 began giving independent tours of Harvard after sensing a lack of tour options for summer visitors. After administrators voiced concerns that Schofield-Bodt’s unofficial tours represented an inappropriate use of the Harvard name for student business purposes, the duo changed the company’s name and resumed business. Schofield-Bodt now owns Trademark Tours, which gives the iconic Hahvahd Tour for much of the year.

“What sets our tour apart is a focus on storytelling,” Schofield-Bodt says. With Harvard straw hats and a memorized script of fun stories and punchlines in tow, Hahvahd Tour guides show that “Ivy League schools have a softer side,” Schofield-Bodt said.

The Hahvahd Tour focuses on three themes: Harvard history, Harvard culture, and famous Harvardians. “The dates, the times, the places, those are all important… but the real entertainment value is… the story behind them,” Schofield-Bodt says.

Hahvahd Tour guides narrate stories about a Harvard-mandated swim test, a riot-proof Canaday, a polaroid-camera-modeled Science Center, a naked primal scream. They sometimes quip that John F. Kennedy ’40 got “shafted by the University” when elevator construction destroyed his old room.

Some of these anecdotes highlight inconsistencies between tours. For example, the Hahvahd Tour asserts that Eleanor Elkins Widener included a mandatory swim test for all Harvard students as a condition for donating her son’s book collection to found Widener Library after he drowned with the Titanic. This contradicts the Cambridge Historical Tours, which note that Harvard’s swim test was instituted because administrators at the time had served in the Navy and would not have been content if Harvard boys could not swim.

In between tour stops, or “stages,” as Schofield-Bodt describes them, guides field questions about admissions or current student life, allowing for a more modern and personal perspective of Harvard.

From historical role play to lighthearted satire to direct exposition, the varying natures of Harvard’s many affiliated and unaffiliated tours provide tourists with diverse options to shape their usually brief experiences of the University. Nevertheless, each tour is grounded in the presentation of Harvard as a landmark whose history and character are continually being shaped and unveiled.

“People from all around the world are coming, and they’re coming because they’ve heard great things and they want to experience it,” says Anderson, Information Center tour guide. “I think that we give them the chance to experience it firsthand.”

—Staff writer Theodore R. Delwiche can reached at tdelwiche@college.harvard.edu.

—Staff writer Alexander H. Patel can reached at alexanderpatel@college.harvard.edu.