Harvard Underground
The tunnels underneath Harvard’s campus are darker than you’d expect, with dim industrial light bulbs struggling to penetrate the shadows. They’re smaller, too. Sometimes, when the walls close in on you, you have to crouch, squeezing into the tight corridors. The boiling pipes exude waves of languid steam over your body. It’s hot. It’s as if the labyrinth rejects you, as if humans are not meant to walk the snug steam tunnels that stretch silently beneath our feet.
On a serene Friday afternoon, College Fellow in History Zachary B. Nowak led his students on a "nooks and crannies" tour of Harvard that ended in the steam tunnels of University lore, accessed via a nondescript entrance to the Science Center basement. The tunnels, which extend for around three miles beneath the ground, were built in 1927 to allow easy access to the pipes that heat campus. A visit to the tunnels is strictly off-limits for tourists and Harvard students alike, as was our peek into the tucked-away Memorial Hall attic, with its low-hanging wooden cross-beams and the musical hum of its bulky air vents.
This was no regular tour, and Nowak’s course, History 1636: “Intro to Harvard History: Beyond the Three Lies,” is no typical Harvard history class.
Previous history of Harvard courses, Nowak observes, have been “really cool,” but “very focused on the presidents of Harvard.” Nowak’s course tries to do something new. “I'm not super interested in whether my students will remember who the seventh president of Harvard was,” he says. He adds with a smile, “I don't even know who that is, to tell you the truth.”
Nowak’s course seeks to move beyond the canonical historical depiction of Harvard as solely “a white, male, elite institution,” a narrative which, to Nowak, ignores the lives of those who contributed to the development of the University from the beginning, often from the margins.
“I think the argument of this class is that way more people made Harvard ‘Harvard’ than just the guys in the starch suits in the 1886 photographs,” Nowak explains.
For instance, in History 1636, Nowak teaches about Caleb Cheeshateaumuck, class of 1665 — Harvard’s first Native American graduate. He also lectures about the group of women who, in the 19th century, revolutionized planetary science at the Harvard observatory. Though these figures often went unrecognized in their own time, Nowak tries to avoid reproducing that oversight, choosing to reincorporate those who are usually overlooked into the arc of Harvard’s history.
Though this is the first semester that Nowak is teaching the course, many students have been drawn to the course’s reconceptualization of Harvard’s history — 135 students enrolled this semester.
Nicole A. Fintel ’23 was drawn to taking History 1636 at Visitas last spring, when Nowak led another unconventional tour.
“Rather than solely looking at events and people that have been recorded and recounted in Harvard’s history… we use archival resources, as well as primary documents, to put together stories of people who have often been left out of the narrative,” Fintel says of the class.
As we explored the claustrophobic corridors beneath the ground, above us stood the monument that garners much more attention on standard tours: the John Harvard statue, which is itself a site of reinterpretation for Nowak.
The statue is the source of the “Three Lies” from which the course gets its name. The first two lies of Harvard history are that John Harvard did not actually found Harvard, and that Harvard began in 1636, not 1638, as the statue states.
However, the third lie, Nowak argues, is more sinister. The statue is not actually John Harvard, but is modeled off of a Puritan, blue blood Harvard student from the early 20th century, when the statue was built. Amidst a massive influx in immigration to the United States, constructing the John Harvard statue reasserted the image of a quintessential undergraduate on campus, and more broadly, the kind of person who belonged in power.
“You could make an argument for that statue being a symbol of white supremacy,” Nowak argues. “That statue, for me, is an expression of anxiety on the part of white elite men… realizing that ‘Oh man, this isn't just us anymore.’”
For Nowak, the narratives of Harvard that highlight privileged voices are merely surface level. In the tunnels and winding attic staircases, students find more sequestered narratives, hidden by time and protected by dust. They find initials and signatures etched into wooden shafts and engraved along steam pipes; they find the lives and stories of people who fought for their own legacies, so long as they know where to look.
—Magazine writer Alec P. Kahn can be reached at alec.kahn@thecrimson.com.