Revisiting Thy Halls

Refined tastes make the College better for all

Most people implicitly recognize the correlation between the age and the beauty of a Harvard building. One can find which buildings are beautiful by sorting them by their construction date and drawing a line at 1950: Memorial Church – 1744; Memorial Hall – 1870; Sever Hall – 1878; Widener Library – 1915; Dunster House – 1930; Lowell House – 1930; Winthrop House – 1931; Adams House – 1931; “New” Quincy – 1959; Smith Center – 1960; the “F” and “G” towers of Leverett House – 1960s; the Science Center – 1968; Mather House – 1970; the Carpenter Center – 1972; Canaday Hall – 1974.

The beauty of the early buildings was only possible through the generosity of wealthy, aristocratic donors with longstanding connections to elite universities like Harvard. The construction of Widener Library in 1915, for instance, was entirely supported by the fortune of Peter A.B. Widener, an American industrialist who helped found US Steel and the American Tobacco Company. Similarly, the seven beautiful houses—Dunster, Lowell, Eliot, Winthrop, Kirkland, Leverett (just McKinlock Hall), and Adams (Russell Hall)—were constructed in the 1930s with a $10 million grant from Edward Harkness, a Yale graduate and the son of an oil baron.¹ The men responsible for the beautiful Georgian architecture of the seven Harkness houses were their architect, Charles Coolidge, and by proxy President Lowell, who was close friends with Coolidge and chose him to design the buildings.² Both Coolidge and Lowell were of the “Boston Brahmin” class: the aristocratic Bostonian families that trace their lineages back to the early colonists. These Brahmins built the better half of the College according to their tastes, which we all—rich and poor—enjoy today.

The Fogg Museum stands as another shining example of good taste. The museum was originally donated by William Hayes Fogg, a Brahmin who made his fortune trading goods from China.³ It expanded into its present location with an enormous donation from Edward Waldo Forbes, the grandson of Ralph Waldo Emerson.⁴ In The Boston Raphael, Belinda Rathborne describes the creation of the new Fogg building:

“[Forbes] closely oversaw the architectural plans by Charles Coolidge – from the outside, a simple brick neocolonial; inside, a spacious, skylit courtyard modeled, down to the last detail, on a High Renaissance facade in Montepulciano, in Tuscany, creating a sanctuary from the day-to- day bustle of Cambridge. Forbes insisted that this be finished, like the original, in travertine, at the then- extraordinary cost of $56,085. Harvard president Abbott Lawrence Lowell balked. A simple plaster finish would cost about $8,500. The travertine was not only expensive, Lowell asserted, it was ostentatious. But Forbes was adamant. How can you educate people in the language of materials, he asked, if they are exposed only to cheap imitations?”⁵

But while Harvard has not given up its reliance on wealthy donors to expand the university, it has become self-conscious about the enterprise. Relying on the rich, and certainly privileging their tastes, is dissonant with the egalitarian sentiments cherished by Harvard’s current leadership.

This change is in large part due to the efforts of James Bryant Conant, who was president of the university from 1933 to 1953. He was one of the first Harvard presidents to rise by merit alone: he was born to a working-class family and earned his way into Roxbury Latin School through its competitive exam. While there, his prodigious facility with chemistry inspired his science teacher to lobby for Conant’s admittance to Harvard.⁶ In his famous essay “Wanted: American Radicals,” he describes his ideal “American radical of the 1940s,” which seems to have also been his ideal Harvard student:

“...he will be lusty in wielding the axe against the root of inherited privilege. [...] For the American radical could not indulge his taste for ‘Old World culture’ without a twinge of conscience. Therefore he would be impelled to sponsor a most difficult undertaking: the work of redefining culture in both democratic and American terms. He would have little patience—too little patience—with antiquarians, scholars, and collectors. The idea that culture is aristocratic would find no sympathy from his kind. This is one of the few points on which the American radical joins hands with his other radical friends and the Russians of the new day; his concept of art and culture would be terms of the present and the future, in terms of every man and woman and not a special privileged few.”⁷

Armed with this new, self- righteous ideology, Conant’s successor Nathan Pusey continued this movement against the old order through wide admissions reform and the construction of nearly every architectural monstrosity on campus: Leverett Towers, Mather House, the Smith Center, the Science Center, the Countway Library of Medicine, GSD’s Gund Hall, and the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts.⁸ It was also under his tenure that the Latin study requirement was removed and student dress codes relaxed. Despite these changes—or perhaps precisely because they sensed Pusey’s administration could be pressured—rioting students stormed University Hall.

Though the university had adopted egalitarian ideals, it mostly left the old traditions alone during this period. In the past forty years, however, the Harvard of old has been torn down brick by brick. Perhaps it was understood in Massachusetts Hall that people still preferred the products of Harvard’s older culture; Harvard would only fully embrace Conant’s vision when there was no alternative left to it. Perhaps one of the most atrocious instances of Harvard’s newfound revisionism was the death of the Harvard Union, today the Barker Center for the Humanities, in 1996.

Ironically, the Harvard Union had been a shining example of how the university’s legacy and vast resources could benefit all her students. Prior to the Harkness- sponsored construction of the housing system in 1930, social life was mostly restricted to clubs that were open only to the most wealthy. To address the socioeconomic divisions this created, Major Henry Lee Higginson donated $150,000 in 1900 to construct the Harvard Union, which was a more accessible social club. It had a picturesque library, billiards room, dining hall, and smoking room, all accessible for just a $10 yearly membership fee. His hope was for it to be somewhere that “pride for wealth, pride of poverty, and pride of class would find no place.”⁹

The redesign divided the main hall into what are now the Kresge and Thompson rooms. In vain, over 60 alumni formed the “Committee to Save the Great Hall of the Freshman Union.” One, H. A. Crosby Forbes '50, said that the renovation was “an act comparable to homicide.”¹⁰ Leland Roth, an architectural historian, wrote that the renovation was “well- intentioned, but [...] very much like what the Goths and the Vandals did to Rome.”¹¹ For his part, Philip Parsons, who spearheaded the effort in favor of the remodeling, argued that the original dining hall, which according to Harvard Magazine was a “90-foot room with carved paneling and a 30-foot-high barrel-vaulted plaster ceiling adorned with rosettes and ‘H’s intertwined with garlands,” would serve no use after the freshmen dining hall moved to Annenberg.¹² Parsons saw the room, which occupied a quarter of the building’s volume, as a waste of space which could be filled with offices and classrooms. The great Harvard alumni who donated the money to support the Union—and the many more who fondly remember patronizing the Union—were left to lament a Harvard that was no more.

Ultimately, the pursuit of egalitarianism has inherently made things less equal and everything more divided. Students bring to Harvard a hyper-competitive attitude left over from their high school pursuits; little effort is made to temper that impulse until they burn themselves out. Social life has similarly worsened, concentrated as it is in a few hyper-selective pre-professional clubs, many of them with physical off-campus spaces. The men that built this place are long gone, remaining only in the portraits adorning the walls of our beautiful dining halls. But we can strive to preserve their vision; we need not abandon our respect for the dignity of every student, rich or poor, in doing so.

Rather than fearing the rebirth of a “caste system,” as Conant warned against, and entrusting the preservation of Harvard’s culture to career- focused students and administrators that come and go, we should cultivate a sense of admiration for Harvard’s lost traditions. Student privileges, like the ability to easily provide alcohol at student organization events, might be restored, and marks of appreciation for the trappings of culture, like the long- gone policy requiring jackets and ties in the dining halls, might also return. Eventually, perhaps, we might once more build beautiful spaces like the Harvard Union. For the congenial culture of Harvard’s past to be restored, however, the university must renew its appreciation for the aristocrats, such as Harkness, Ford, and Higginson, who built these beautiful halls and traditions in the first place. Far from making Harvard unwelcome to those outside their social circles, these men gave Harvard’s middle-class and FGLI students the opportunity to partake in the same class and beauty as the most privileged.

MENGZI

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1. Craig Lambert, “Harkness and History,” Harvard Magazine, November-December 2013.

2. Rose Lincoln and Stephanie Mitchell, “The House that will be Home,” The Harvard Gazette, Mar. 10, 2021.

3. Wendy Pirsig, “William H. Fogg (1817-1884), China Trader,” Old Berwick Historical Society, 2020.

4. Belinda Rathborne, The Boston Raphael, (Boston: David Godine, 2014), p. 47.

5. Ibid.

6. James Hershberg, “James B. Conant: Harvard to Hiroshima and the Making of the Nuclear Age,” (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993), pp. 17-18.

7. James Conant, “Wanted: American Radicals,” The Atlantic, May 1943.

8. Deborah Smullyan, “Nathan Marsh Pusey,” Harvard Magazine, January- February 2002.

9. Hillary McLauchlin, “A ‘Great, Grave, Noble Hall,’” Fifteen Minutes, Feb. 19, 2018.

10. “Concerning the Union, Disunion,” Harvard Magazine, March 1, 1996.

11. Ibid.

12. Ibid.