Education: Happy Birthday, Fair Harvard!

It hardly seems the sort of thing that Harvard would do, but Harvard is surely doing it. Through four glittering days this week, the first and, by many estimates (including its own), still the finest institution of higher learning in America will revel through a 350th anniversary fete. There will be, expectably, a stately convocation and more than 100 symposiums on topics ranging from the U.S. Constitution to the structure of a Beethoven string quartet. But the overriding tone of the festivities is pure glitz, in which an illuminated gas-filled plastic rainbow will arch 600 feet across the Charles River from Harvard's campus in Cambridge to Boston. Along the riverbank, a larger-than-life marionette of the university's natal benefactor, John Harvard, will prance to the music of a female samba group called the Batucada Belles. Saturday night the fete will peak in a pyrotechnical dazzle put on by Tommy Walker, who helped stage the finale of the Statue of Liberty centenary. Skyrockets will spell out the name JOHN HANCOCK -- one of eight Harvard men, thank you, who signed the Declaration of Independence -- and at the climax a 700-sq.-ft. Harvard logo will be emblazoned on the night sky as the band plays Fair Harvard.

Such ostentation seems out of keeping with the solemnity and surviving Brahmin spirit of the university, whose early masters forbade the setting of "bonfires and illuminations" or "making tumultuous or indecent noises." And some Harvard faces have gone crimson at the prospect. Historian Oscar Handlin was quoted as saying, "I would have liked it to be more scholarly and less show biz." The hoopla and hustle will include the licensed sale of memorabilia like goldplated watches to pull a few more dollars into Harvard's $3.5 billion endowment (already the biggest of any private U.S. university).

But if any American establishment is entitled to celebrate itself, if ever a baby has come a long way from rustic origins, it is Harvard University. Despite the continuing challenge from such superb schools as Stanford, the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Texas at Austin, Harvard, under its patrician president Derek Bok, remains the gauge against which others are measured. As the Rev. Theodore Hesburgh, president of Notre Dame, puts it, Harvard is "the standard bearer and symbol of excellence."

Because of this enduring preeminence, Harvard and the people drawn to it have imposed as powerful an influence upon the nation as has any other private institution. Six Presidents, from John Adams to John F. Kennedy, came from Harvard, bringing with them some potent Cambridge-bred notions and cronies. Franklin D. Roosevelt had his New Deal, whose underlying Keynesianism, says Harvard Economist John Kenneth Galbraith, was imported from Cambridge. J.F.K. had his best and brightest, including Defense Secretary Robert McNamara and National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy. Harvard's Henry Kissinger surely was the most powerful figure in the Nixon and Ford Administrations.