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

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photographs of each member of the class, that of the year of publication being placed alongside that of graduation. The Class of 1853, to which I belong, was the first one to have photographs (ambrotypes) taken at graduation; and it was also the first one to issue an album of the comparative photographs, the interval in that case being forty years. I was dressing for dinner one evening about twenty years ago when a foreign visitor was announced. Ten minutes later I found the visitor to be a French gentle- man who had been for some years in the service of a foreign government as a libra- rian. He had in his hands a volume of the comparative portraits of the Class of 1853, and had been turning over its pages while waiting for me. He stated briefly his business and was quickly satisfied with my answers ; and then he asked me. with great apparent interest, what this book in his hand meant, and how it was constructed. He kept turning over the pages, and making remarks about the development of the individual members, a development which seemed to him to represent the result of living forty years as an educated and busy man. He inquired about the variety of professions represented in the volume, and called my attention to the extraordinary change wrought in the young faces by forty years of life. Finally he said : There is one face in this book which is not so good at sixty as it was at twenty, thus proving himself to be a keen observer, for the career of the person in question matched this Frenchman ' s observation. Reluctantly he closed the book and remarked: Mr. President, this is the most optimistic human document I have ever seen. The Harvard Class Reports have already become deposits of trustworthy vital statistics in which insurance actuaries and students of heredity, environ- ment and eugenics find a large ' value. They demonstrate the value of college training towards success in any one of the great variety of professions, includ- ing the profession of business administration, and in the life of the scholar, 8 VIEW FROM THE MINING BUILDING

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OUWB Permanent Class Organization Harvard College has long had a class organization which has proved very enjoyable and useful to the suc- cessive classes and very serviceable to the college, and has set on foot modes of consecutive action which in the course of generations will pro- vide a large body of interesting vital statistics. For these reasons it may be profitably imitated by other educa- tional institutions. It is the candidates for the degree of Bachelor of Arts and Bachelor of Science who together maintain this organization during undergraduate life and shortly after graduation elect the permanent officers who direct the asso- ciated action of each class until surviving members are too few to keep alive the organization. The most important of these permanent officers is the class secretary, who is responsible for keeping and publishing the class records; but he is usually supported by a class committee of three to five per sons. Some classes elect also a treasurer. Shortly before graduation each member of the class is expected to furnish the permanent class secretary with a sketch of his career to date and to have a photograph taken for deposit with the class secre- tary and in the college library. The class records include not only the men who actually receive the degree of Bachelor of Arts or Bachelor of Science at one and the same Commence- ment, but also temporary members of the class; and these recognized temporary members need not have been more than a single year in Harvard College. The class secretary ' s records contain for every member of the class the place and date of birth, his father ' s name, his mother ' s name, the date of his marriage, the maiden name of his wife, the births and deaths of children, and at last the date of his own death. At stated intervals the class secretary publishes a report which contains all the class statistics and a sketch of each man ' s career to date. These reports are not published by even- class at the same intervals, but there is a tendency to issue reports in the fifth, tenth and fifteenth years after gradua- tion, and so on. In these reports the class secretaries include comparative 7

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teacher, scientific investigator, social sen-ant, and publicist. They also prove that a college training greatly increases the individual ' s chances of winning a life of intellectual satisfactions and enjoyments, and of companionship with men of sound bodies, active minds, and high purposes. The class secretary is selected by his classmates at the age of twenty-two or thereabouts, sometimes in advance of any clear indications of what is to be his professional or business success. Nevertheless, the judgment of the succes- sive classes is usually justified. The replacement of a class secretary, as the life of the class goes on. is unusual except in case of death. It has, however, become the practice in more recent classes to allow the class secretary to employ expert assistants in making up his records in the year that the class report is issued ; and the different class secretaries manifest a tendency to employ the same expert: so that a certain degree of uniformity has been introduced in the structure of the various class reports. The strength and serviceableness of the present class organizations I have described has increased very much since the size of the Harvard classes rose from a hundred or thereabouts, fifty years ago. to five hundred or thereabouts in recent vears. What is called class feeling has also much increased during LOOKING NORTH FROM CAMPANILE cz: