Education: Unconquered Frontier

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Abbotts &Zizzamias. Today's students run the gamut from A (Abbott, Adams, Atwater, Atwood) to Z (Zalecki, Zapata. Zen, Zezza, Zizzamia). The 1.278 freshmen represent 526 different schools, more than half of them public high schools, and four out of every ten students get financial aid. It is quite possible, says Classicist John Finley, to have in one house "the grandson of one of the greatest modern novelists [James Joyce], the grandson of one of the greatest modern painters [Henri Matisse], and the great, "great, great, great, and ad infinitum grandson of God [i.e., the son of the Aga Khan]." But the days of ancestor worship are more or less over, and in point of prestige, the Harvard clubman has become the vanishing American. Once, Theodore Roosevelt, 1880, could happily blurt to the Kaiser that his son-in-law was Porcellian ("A mighty satisfactory thing to be in the Pore"). In 1954, such fathers-in-law are rare.

There are still cliques—of the literary, the fashionable, and the wonks (latterday meatballs). But there is also an amorphous ruck of plain Eugene Gants, one of whom Thomas Wolfe described as "prowling the stacks of the library at night, pulling books out of a thousand shelves and reading in them like a madman." A student can go through four years at Harvard and never say a word to the man who lives in the room next door. He may never go to a football game, never see the medical school, never sign a petition nor participate in a riot.

Sewers & Stocks. About the only homogeneous group left at Harvard are the seven gentlemen who run its finances as members of the oldest corporation in the Western Hemisphere. On two Mondays every month, the Corporation (including President Pusey and Treasurer Paul Cabot ex officio) meets and argues out the problems until decisions can be approved with complete unanimity. Yet the Corporation is an empire that includes an endowment of $326 million, bonds in Baton Rouge sewers and Oklahoma highways, an island off the coast of Maine, stocks in every sort of industry from groceries (A. & P.) to beer (Jacob Ruppert) to General Motors.

Even the Corporation's 170 buildings seem a procession of contrasts. Though the seven collegiate houses (i.e., the upperclassmen's living quarters) are uniformly Georgian, rising into golden spires out of the clutter of crooked streets, Harvard has sampled the whole history of U.S. architecture, from colonial to Bui-finch, to H. H. Richardson, to Walter Gropius. The unofficial part of the Yard—the shops and stores that rim it—are a jumble all their own. Bookshops and soda fountains jockey for position; haircuts, haberdashery and history are all for sale. There is a pharmacy that once doled out pills to Longfellow and Emerson; there is a bank that has been called the "most literate bank in the world" (among the 100 "books published by our customers in the past two years" it once displayed: James Conant's Education and Liberty, Arthur Schlesinjer's Cotton Kingdom, Geologist Reginald Daly's Igneous Rock & the Depths of the Earth).