University of California Berkeley - Blue and Gold Yearbook (Berkeley, CA)

Page 31 text:

Above all else, perhaps, there stands out as a feature of the life at Har- vard its wonderfully cosmopolitan character. In its registration this year, for example, every state in the Union is represented by one or more students, as are also the District of Columbia, the Canal Zone, Hawaii and Porto Rico. Twenty-nine foreign countries are represented with a total of one hundred and thirty-four students. Although Massachusetts and New York naturally send to Harvard more students than do any other two states in the Union, many of the Yestern and Southern states send a large number of men. California alone, for example, sent seventy of hers sons to Cambridge this year. In an address given at Yale University recently, LeBaron Russell Briggs. Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard, and probably the most widely known and best loved member of the Faculty, said of Harvard ' s cosmo- politan character: The wonderfully cosmopolitan mixture now found at Har- vard does good service in widening Harvard sympathy and revealing varied points of view. And this is certainly true. The young man who comes to Harvard with a desire to know and be known has wonderful opportunities in the way of meeting men and becoming interested in a variety of interests, intellectual, social and athletic. This complexity of life results in a maze of interests and activities apt to bewilder the student who is not sure of what he wants to do. Xo matter in what the individual student may be interested, he may feel perfectly sure that there are many others interested in the same thing. He has only to search to find. To the undergraduate who is at all active in College, it is extremely amus- ing, although at times somewhat disturbing, to hear some of the adverse criti- cism passed upon Harvard by would-be reformers and malicious defamers. One of the criticisms sometimes heard is that Harvard students are snobbish and that the College is but a hot-bed of young and conceited Boston aristocrats. THE YARD. HARVARD

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UNIVERSITY HALL AND YARD AT HARVARD hundred and forty-one students, and the Medical School with two hundred and ninety students, there are hundreds of men registered in the various other departments, including the Divinity School, Dental School, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Graduate School of Applied Science, and Summer School. The College, founded in 1636 upon an appropriation of four hundred pounds by the General Court of the Colony of Massachusetts Bay, received in the second year of its existence a bequest from John Harvard of his library and half his property. For one hundred and fifty years it did not begin to add the professional schools which have combined with it to form the University, and today it still remains, by tradition, by weight of numbers, and by reason of the fundamental importance of liberal studies, the very heart of the University. As far back as 1740, and even earlier, admission to the College has been by examination, and from the first considerable latitude has been permitted to candidates in the selection of subjects for examination. At the present time, by a general group examination system. Harvard is able to offer to schools far remote equal opportunities with private and public schools near Cambridge in the way of preparing boys for the entrance requirements. A candidate ' s record in school is always taken into consideration if he enters under the new group plan.

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Just how Harvard has acqu ired any such reputation is hard to see. There are, to be sure, a few men in Harvard (as in every community of any size that may be mentioned) who prefer to be exclusive, and who in their very exclusiveness find a certain sense of conceited satisfaction. But these men never amount to anything outside of their own insignificant little circles and so far from being a dominant influence at Harvard they are the most nearly perfect type of nonentity existent in the University. APPLETON CHAPEL, HARVARD In the College there are forty or more social clubs, only an insignificant number being secret societies or fraternities. Most of the clubs have club houses and boarding accommodations, but few have dormitory accommodations. Non-membership in a social club is by no means a conspicuous fact and is not in itself a matter of grave concern. What may be called Harvard ' s all-inclusive club is the Harvard Union, its membership being open to all members of the University upon the payment of a small fee. The Union, unique among col- lege institutions in America, has become the social center of University life and is the accepted place for mass-meetings and large student gatherings. 8 1