Early Memories by Henry Cabot Lodge

Author:Henry Cabot Lodge [Lodge, Henry Cabot]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781411454286
Publisher: Barnes & Noble
Published: 2017-02-21T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER VIII

HARVARD: 1867–1871

IF my career at Harvard was singularly devoid of either distinction or interest, it at least came at a very memorable period in the life of the college. I went in under the old system and came out under the new. I entered the college, which had remained in essence unchanged from the days of its Puritan founders, the college of the eighteenth century with its "Gratulatios" and odes and elegies in proper Latin verse when a sovereign died or came to the throne, the college with the narrow classical curriculum of its English exemplars, and I came out a graduate of the modern university. Doctor Thomas Hill was president when I entered, then came a year of interregnum, and then President Eliot. I think that I cannot add anything to this bare statement by way of describing the revolution which took place at that time in Harvard, and my class happened to come just at the parting of the ways. We realized that a great change had occurred, but naturally did not grasp its meaning or even dream how fast and far the change thus begun would go. No one, I think, could have imagined the vast growth of the university in every direction under the administration of President Eliot. My class, to take a single illustration, numbered one hundred and fifty-eight at graduation. It was much the largest class which had ever entered the college or graduated from it, and was not surpassed in numbers for some years afterwards. Now a class at Harvard is three or four times as large as mine, and a single class has not infrequently more members than all the undergraduates together in 1867–1871.

The enormous increase in the number of students, however, is, after all, only one manifestation of the changes wrought at Cambridge during the last forty years. As I am not writing a history of modern Harvard, I shall not attempt to describe, still less to analyze or criticise, this great revolution in the oldest university in America, which in its course has had a profound effect upon all education in the United States. I shall allude to only two things: one, the passing of an old custom in which I was concerned and which marked by its departure the rapid obliteration of the eighteenth-century college then in progress, while the other was the effect which one of the most important of the modern reforms had upon me personally.

In the old days there was a solemn and public performance which took place in the autumn, consisting of exercises like those of commencement, with orations, dissertations, and addresses, and preceded by a procession, as on the great occasion of graduation. This ceremony was called the "Junior Exhibition," and had given rise to a burlesque version which was known as "mock parts," and which took place at the same time. The real "Exhibition" had been abandoned before I entered college, but the parody survived. A committee of the junior class was

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