Class Day

Unlike most of Harvard's annual events, Class Day has no number. Tomorrow's commencement will be No. 297. The Yale game next fall will be No. 65. But today's events, while unquestionably "traditional," belong to a tradition that was never established as such, and then kept track of, and numbered, from year to year.

Class Day, in other words, evolved. It crept into existence. It started creeping in 1707--more than 100 years before it came to be known as Class Day--when the Fellows of Harvard College "treated" the graduating class. Just what a "treat" is nobody seems to know, but it caused one Joseph Sewall to put in his diary that he "too much indulged vain proud thoughts."

As long as this sort of puritanism held pre-Commencement activities in check, nothing like a genuine, festive Class Day existed. But in 1834, some-where, somehow, iced punch came into the Yard, and within the next four years, Senior celebrations had become so bachannalian that President Quincy put a ban on dancing and drinking, thereby threatening to nip Class Day in the bud. But when the actual day arrived, the ladies, who according to some dim nineteenth century logic had previously gone away from the Yard in the afternoon when the real celebrating began, were allowed to remain. Something in the sight of the couples and the sound of the band made President Quincy reverse his field and exclaim "Music! Young men! Young ladies! No dancing! Take partners for a cotillion!" And the resulting festivities were repeated annually, and improved, and finally officially named Class Day in 1850.

Thus was formed the tradition that is to be continued today. It is a tradition that has become more and more refined since 1834, a process that seems to have followed President Lowell's general rule that "men removed by a few degrees above the savage state, as youths on the eve of graduating from our colleges often are, put up with course amusements only because no refined ones are offered in their stead." Today, for instance, there will be a baseball game instead of the nineteenth century's dance around the Liberty Tree, which involved holding hands and skipping about and jumping frantically to get hold of a piece of a wreath. This, surely, is progress. And in the nineteenth century President Lowell exulted "What a glorious object is a Senior on Class Day to a maiden of sixteen." Today, there will probably not be a girl under eighteen in Harvard Yard, and this, too, is progress. It is the sort of progress that can create confidence in the future of Harvard College and in the future--all the more unlimited because unnumbered--of the institution of Class Day.