Education: Cambridge Birthday

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(See front cover)

Early one morning last week in the heart of London the bells of Southwark Cathedral clanged to commemorate a distinguished act by an otherwise undistinguished Southwark citizen named John Harvard. Across the Atlantic in Cambridge, Mass., great scholars from the earth's four corners joined in solemn procession to pay homage to the school that John Harvard helped to found. After 300 years Harvard was not only the oldest and richest university in the U. S. but also one of the world's brightest lamps of learning.

Into the murk of old Sanders Theatre marched the 554 foreign delegates to Harvard's Tercentenary Celebration in their robes of black, scarlet, gold. Up to President James Bryant Conant and Harvard's Fellows, waiting on the dusty stage, they filed like graduates in some fabulous commencement. First, according to seniority, came swarthy Professor Saleh Hashem Attia from that most ancient university, Al-Azhar, founded at Cairo in 970 A. D. Lanky, bespectacled President Conant, trying to keep the golden tassel of his mortarboard from slipping forward as he bowed, pumped Professor Attia's hand, drawled: "How do you do?" Next came delegates from Bologna, Paris, Oxford. Then up to the stage marched smiling Physicist Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington and four other dons from Cambridge. As Chemist Conant grinned broadly at Physicist Eddington, the long line of waiting scholars burst into applause.

Cambridge to Cambridge, Thus signalized was a unique relationship in the family tree of Education. Elite of the young colonists to settle Massachusetts in 1630 were Cantabrigians, who six years later determined to set up a "colledge in the Wilderness." Six members of the Massachusetts Great and General Court which on Oct. 28, 1636 set aside £400 for that "schoale or colledge" were Cambridge men. From Cambridge came Harvard's first two Presidents, Nathaniel Eaton and Henry Dunster. The name of the site of the "schoale" was soon changed from Newetowne to Cambridge. Indeed, from Cambridge came John Harvard himself.

Son of a Southwark butcher, Harvard was converted to Puritanism at Cambridge, soon sailed to the Massachusetts Bay Colony to preach it. Still a young man, he died "of a consumption" a year later, bequeathing to the new school his library of 400 volumes and some £800 which enabled it to open its doors as Harvard College in the autumn of 1638. Last week no one knew what Benefactor Harvard looked like or where he was buried.*