Oldest Major Turns 100

Harvard’s first and oldest concentration turned 100 this weekend—and some of the College’s most distinguished alumni flocked to campus to offer a centennial toast.

“Beyond the Gates,” a day-long symposium, celebrated History and Literature’s 100th anniversary. The event featured talks and panel discussions with graduates of the program, including New York Times columnist Frank Rich ’71, New Yorker staff writer Nicholas B. Lemann ’76, and former Clinton administration speechwriter Edward Widmer ’84.

The symposium attracted a mixture of alumni, former tutors, undergraduates, and faculty.

Professor of History Jill Lepore, the chair of the program's steering committee, gave the opening address to an audience of around 50 who gathered in Emerson Hall.

The speakers reminisced about their undergraduate days and discussed how the program helped shape their tastes and career choices.

Widmer, who helped guide the writing of Clinton’s autobiography “My Life,” said the program was “the perfect place to study if you didn’t know what to study.”

The program’s rigorous scholarship “kept saving him,” Widmer noted, recalling how his knowledge of an arcane fact from class impressed Clinton, who subsequently sought his advice on “My Life.”

Los Angeles Times op-ed columnist and Professor of Law at Georgetown Rosa Brooks ’91 described the program “as the home of the dilettante.”

The program showed her how “stories shape and constrain the world,” she said. “It gave me a fascination with taking narratives apart,”

Speakers also praised the concentration for cultivating an “enlightened skepticism” in its students.

“My whole view of the world came to life as a Hist and Lit student,” said Rich, who was a chair of The Crimson’s editorial board.

“It’s an education that picks up on distinguishing between how things are presented and how they are backstage,”

The speakers didn’t hesitate to inject humor into the discussion.

Commenting on the rigor of these oral examinations, Widmer tied other panelists’ interest in combatting torture to the History and Literature requirement that still exists today. “Our interest in human rights and torture probably stems from the oral exam,” he joked.

Widmer also read aloud the prepared remarks of an alumnus who could not be in attendance—talk-show host Conan C. O’Brien ’85.

O’Brien applauded History and Literature for offering a place to those who suffered from a “fear of commitment.”

The program did the world a favor by steering him away from important fields like science and government, O’Brien said.

Many said they were compelled to attend by the intellectual stature of the speakers.

Cabot Professor of American Literature Lawrence Buell said he was drawn to the symposium by the “intellectual brio of the speakers rather than any sense of civic duty.”

“On one hand, this is typical Harvard self-congratulation,” said Anne Lounsbery, assistant professor of Russian and Slavic Studies at NYU and a former graduate student in the program. “But you come because it is great content—the level of discourse is guaranteed to be high, even if it’s self-consciously high.”

Former headmaster at St. Paul’s School in New Hampshire William Oates ’38 said his fond memories of the program compelled him to attend.

“The teaching was magnificent, and I remember so strongly the warm personalities of the tutors,” he said.