The Real Harvard

Sometimes I get the feeling that life at Harvard is a dull three-cornered routine: classes, meals, library. But then I stumble on an issue of, for example, the Record American. HARVARD stands tall in the headlines. "Harvard," I reflect with a quick thrill of self-recognition. Harvard/5000 equals me.

Reading about myself in newspapers and magazines is one of the great extracurricular delights that I enjoy as a Harvard student. A wealth of headlines and articles remind me how unusual, how intriguingly subversive, how wild and exciting Harvard really is. For instance, Business Week, March '61 describes a brilliant high-powered Harvard and its ruthlessly competitive admissions procedure, noting that "The 'tigers' who survive are forcing the college to change its approach." In Look Magazine, Andrew T. Weil tells of the drug-taking set who formed a "Transcendental community where they could maintain a level of experience which cuts beyond routine ego and social games," noting also that "there were stories of students using hallucinogens for seductions, both heterosexual and homosexual." But it was The New Yorker and Gent magazine that did the most to refurbish my faith in the glamor and excitement of life at Harvard.

In his New Yorker articles, Christopher Rand finds that Harvard, along with MIT, is in the midst of nothing less than a renaissance of world importance. "Before long I concluded that I had found a Renaissance in Cambridge," says Rand. "Nobody planned roads leading here that I could see. And yet, Cambridge is a great center, as great perhaps as any in the world now. It has a strange magnetism..."

Later in the article, expanding on the theme of strong magnetism, Rand observes:

Yet there is an unexplained magnetism, whether emanating from the old buildings, the undulant brick sidewalks, or the vibrations of scholars past and present that far outweighs these things. You can get its full impact while walking a block or two up Brattle Street from Harvard Square,...

I am grateful to this article because otherwise I might have become one of those Harvard men who, thirty years from now, must ask themselves "Where was I when they had the Renaissance?"

But if Rand's overview of life around the square is credible, it took Gent magazine to really probe beneath the surface, to discover the hidden sources of this "strange magnetism." Foreign observers often have the deepest insights into a society--it took a De Tocqueville to see the real United States, a Halevy to see the real England, and it took Gent magazine to see the real Harvard.

The article "More Sex on Campus" by Ted Alexander shares top coverbilling in Gent's October issue with "So you want to get a Mexican Divorce!" and is concerned almost exclusively with Harvard. ("So You Want to Get a Mexican Divorce!" is listed in Gent's "travel" department.) Alexander leads with the headline "If X is equal to Y--then why not?" then gets right down to business, seizing immediately on the famous slogan of our impulsive dean:

Dean John U. Munro's letter to the Harvard Crimson exposed the whole thing. He charged that the so-called Parietal Rules allowing female visitors to the college room on certain hours week-days and week-ends had become "a license to use college rooms for wild parties and sexual intercourse."

According to Munro, the Ivy-covered halls of dear Harvard have become as free as a breeze from off the River Charles. Such goings on as Old John never dreamed in his wildest eroticism.

A recent peek into a student's room off the Harvard Yard one Wednesday evening indicated an empirical approach to Biology on the college level with an obvious attempt at the study of live anatomy, female.

Three young ladies, au natural (sic), were being chased around the room by two Harvard lads intent upon study. The bare facts indicated that the boys were likewise nude. And not too sober. The girls were over and under the beds...

On one Saturday night there were no less than six hall parties going on at once on a dormitory floor, in an orgy of drinking and intercourse that overflowed from room to room.

Boston newspapers have only hinted at these goings on, but that college muffled drum the Harvard Crimson, crawled behind Mother's Skirts, figuratively pleading boys will be boys and Harvard lads are really little goodles.

According to Dean Munro, things are not that simple. He hints at misbehaviours that would shock.

Lusty Grunt

Moving from description to analysis, Gent remarks:

Well understood are the tensions of college life. In order to break the tensions of mental strain, students of many universities have staged panty raids on the dormitories of nearby women colleges. To the more sophisticated Harvard male, this seems so Juvenile. After all, his women hardly ever wear any in the first place. At least not in his presence...

Parietal Rules are the necessary laws governing college residence. But the Harvard man has applied his own meaning. A time for relaxing his pent-up sexual emotions in the comfort of his college abode.

Holdelburg, dear old Holdelburg, raised stein and sword in a flashing salute to the glory of their institution. Harvard takes its whiskey straight and its pleasures with a lusty grunt.

It's noticeable the moment one walks into a Harvard man's room. Generously pillowed. Besomy red bundles of satin, as if they were blushing at the uses to which they are applied. For a properly pillowed female, exquisitely tilted, makes for the most enjoyable of evenings.

Towel-whipping and other vulgar abnormal sexual expressions are carried on. Of course, the Harvard Crimson denies all this in a namby-pamby whitewashing of the facts. Lacking as it does an editorial maturity that is surprising before the factual evidence of the college's own watchful guardians.

As well as offering this intimate description of life at Harvard, Gent feels obliged to express its moral outrage.

The shocking sex and drinking habits of the Harvard Male would sicken more gentle hearts. The wild excesses are almost unbelievable, seemingly based upon the days of the Roman Baths or the orgies of the early Britons and ancient Scandinavians.

Drinking bouts lead to sexual orgies that seem out of place in our times. And these are the men and women who may someday lead America's thinking! Still many of Harvard's Deans prefer to wear cultural horse-blinders to what is going on.

The sum and substance of Dean Munro's investigation into Harvard's moral sins indicates clearly that Harvard men are far removed from being Mother's sweet little angles, working diligently for higher learning. There is a definite lack of maturity, an unbelievable freedom as they explore an area pashed with moral dynamite.

Waves of personal disaster strike down otherwise exceptional students...

Suspicious Hasty Pudding

Alexander closes with a few alarming intimations, a few dark hints that the worst part of the scandal has yet to be rooted out.

Close proximity to the hill down the River Charles from Cambridge, Boston's famed Beacon Hill, has given to Harvard another kind of sex life. It's far removed from the norm. While not evident to the outside world, it is easily recognizable to those aware of such things.

The Hasty Pudding Shows may only b- a revelat on of college fact when they stage boys dressed not as men but as fanciful women. Perhaps the female garments are not as unfamiliar to the Harvard male as one would suppose.

Many natives of Beacon HUI being what they are, it is easily understood why their influence extends down the Hill and across the River.

Intellectuals lean towards homosexualism. Rumors indicate that many a Harvard Professor leads his attractive boys to the male bosom. To his Beacon Hill apartment Radcliffe girls are never invited. Just boys, Young innocents of the dear old CRIMSON...

To add murder to mayhem, as it were, shortly after the good Dean's exposure of sex at Harvard, the Lampoon brought out a special but phony addition of the HARVARD CRIMSON with headlines announcing that women were to be banned from the Harvard rooms.

Authorities rushed to deny this story before the suicide rates leaped to frantic heights.

As with the New Yorker article, I am greatful to Gent for showing me a new aspect of manifold Harvard. I don't want to be one of the many who wonder, "Where was I when they had the wild parties based on the Roman Baths and Scandinavian orgies?"

When I put the magazines aside, I can see that life at Harvard is for from boxing. Harvard is a land of tigers, transcendentalists, renaissance leaders, and seducers. My image of myself is revitalized. Now I'm a bold rebel against morality and society, now a figure in an Intellectual renaissance; now I'm Jack Kerouac, now Lorenzo de Medici. The old routine beckons irresistably ahead