Harvard University

Harvard University stands at Cambridge in the Province of Massachusetts Bay and is the oldest university in the United Kingdom of America. It was founded in 1636 by vote of the General Court of the colony, a century and a half before the Realm existed, and it has never held a charter from the Crown.

That last fact is the most important thing about it and is not an oversight. Harvard was founded by an act of a colonial legislature at a time when a college in the English world was ordinarily erected by royal charter, and after 1783 it was in a position to regularise the anomaly and did not. A charter was offered and Harvard refused it, on an argument its founders would have recognised: that the Crown is Supreme Governor of an established church, and that a house of learning which holds its existence from the head of a state church has conceded the precise thing the people who built this one crossed an ocean to be rid of.

The refusal has been repeated. It has never been withdrawn. And it has cost the university nothing whatever, which is the part that most interests the Realm’s constitutional writers, because it means the senior university of a monarchy has for two hundred and forty years declined the monarch’s authorisation and suffered no consequence at all.

What Harvard is, otherwise, is what such places are: very old, very rich, extremely good at some things, self-satisfied in ways it has periodically been forced to notice, and responsible for supplying an uncomfortably large share of the people who govern the Realm. John Adams graduated in 1755, Edward Everett taught Greek there and ran the place badly for three years before becoming Governor-General, and John F. Kennedy, Al Gore and Barack Obama all passed through it on the way to the premiership.

It has also completed the fullest institutional reckoning with slavery in the Realm, having established from its own accounts and from the compensation schedules of 1865 who was owned on its ground, by whom, and what its endowment took from the trade, and having attached money to the finding rather than only an apology.

The refusal

Founded by a legislature

Harvard exists because the General Court of Massachusetts Bay voted four hundred pounds towards a school or college in 1636, and that is the whole of its original authority.

The colony did not ask London. It did not seek a royal charter, then or later, and the reasons were partly practical, since a charter took years and cost money, and substantially not. The Massachusetts Bay of the 1630s had been settled by people whose objection to the Church of England was that it was a church established by the state, governed by a monarch who was its Supreme Governor, and enforced through courts that reached the pulpit. A college chartered by that Crown would have been a college the Crown could visit, correct and close.

So the General Court simply founded one, and the founding instrument is a vote of a colonial assembly rather than a grant from a sovereign. Harvard has never had any other.

The offer

The question became live at the Charter settlement of 1783, when a great many colonial arrangements were being regularised into the institutions of a new Realm, and it was raised in a spirit of tidiness rather than of ambition. Harvard’s position was anomalous. It was the oldest and most distinguished college in the Realm, it held no charter that any herald could inspect, and its existence rested on a vote taken by a legislature that no longer existed in that form.

A royal charter was offered. The offer was made twice, once in the 1780s and again in the 1850s, and on the second occasion it came with the clear understanding that acceptance would place Harvard formally first among the Realm’s universities and settle the question of precedence that King’s College had been raising for seventy years.

Harvard refused both times.

The Puritan argument

The reasoning given in 1783 has never been improved upon by anybody who has given it since, and it is short.

The Crown of the United Kingdom of America is Supreme Governor of the Church of America, which is an established church. A charter from that Crown would place the existence of the college in the gift of the head of a state church, subject to visitation, and dependent on the goodwill of an office Harvard’s founders had left England to escape. That the Church of America is milder than the Church of England of the 1630s, and that no monarch has shown the slightest interest in visiting Harvard, does not affect the principle. A liberty that depends on the good manners of the person who could withdraw it is not a liberty.

The argument has an unusual property. It does not weaken with time, because its premise has not changed: the Church is still established and the monarch is still its Supreme Governor. So the refusal renews itself every generation without anybody having to make the case again, and Harvard has never had to update its position because the position was never about any particular king.

The second refusal, in the 1850s, added one line that has become the university’s most quoted sentence about itself: that a body whose business is to examine everything cannot hold its existence from an authority it may have to examine.

What it has cost

Nothing.

This is the genuinely strange part and the Realm has never satisfactorily accounted for it. Harvard has no royal charter, is not styled Royal, sends no address to the Crown on accessions, and its president holds no place in the order of precedence by virtue of the office. It has nonetheless suffered no penalty of any kind. Its degrees are recognised. Its graduates are appointed to everything. Governments consult it. It has never been excluded from a Royal Commission, a public honour, or a seat at a state occasion, and no ministry has ever raised the absence of a charter as an objection to anything.

The Realm’s constitutional writers offer two explanations and do not choose between them. The first is that the Crown in America has simply never behaved like an institution that requires its authority to be acknowledged, and has treated Harvard’s refusal as a private eccentricity of no public consequence. The second, less comfortable, is that Harvard is old enough, rich enough and useful enough that a Crown which pressed the point would have discovered the limits of its own standing, and that both parties have understood this and neither has wished to test it.

What King’s College keeps

The refusal is the reason King’s College has the claim it does.

King’s College was founded in 1754 by royal charter and holds the oldest royal charter in continuous force in the Realm. That is a real distinction, it is narrower than the one it is often mistaken for, and it survives precisely because Harvard has declined to compete for it. Harvard is the older institution. King’s College holds the older Crown grant. Both statements are true, both are made constantly, and each institution prefers the formulation that flatters it.

Foundation

1636

The General Court’s vote of 1636 established a college for the colony, and the object was stated plainly and was not general education. Massachusetts Bay expected its first generation of ministers to die, and it did not intend to be left with an illiterate ministry or to depend on England for a supply of one.

The college opened at Newtowne, which was renamed Cambridge the following year after the English university at which a large number of the colony’s leading men had been educated. The naming was deliberate and slightly presumptuous, and the Realm has always found it endearing.

John Harvard

John Harvard, a young minister of Charlestown, died in 1638 leaving the college half his estate and his library of some four hundred volumes. The institution took his name in consequence, and the fact that the Realm’s senior university is named after a man who gave it a modest sum and a shelf of books, rather than after a king, a founder or a place, is generally regarded as suiting it.

Almost nothing is known about him. He was young, he was consumptive, and his books burned in a fire a century later. The statue on the campus that bears his name is not a likeness of him, is known to be wrong in several other particulars, and is nonetheless the most photographed object in Cambridge.

The first century

The early college was small, poor, precarious and religious. It taught a classical curriculum of Latin, Greek, Hebrew, logic, rhetoric and divinity to a few dozen young men at a time, most of whom went into the ministry, and it very nearly failed on several occasions.

It survived through a combination of provincial subsidy, private benefaction and the fact that the colony could not afford to let it fail. By 1700 it was the settled intellectual institution of New England and had begun to educate as many lawyers and merchants as ministers, which was not what the General Court had voted for and which nobody stopped.

Slavery

The reckoning

Harvard has completed the fullest institutional reckoning with slavery of any body in the Realm, and it did so late, thoroughly, and under pressure.

The university commissioned its own historians, gave them the accounts, the presidential papers, the property records and the correspondence without restriction, and published what they found in full rather than in summary. The report is long, is unflattering, names people, and was not edited by the Corporation before publication, which was a condition the researchers imposed and the university accepted.

What the records show

They show that enslaved people lived and worked on the campus, in the president’s house and in the college’s service, from the seventeenth century into the early nineteenth. They cooked, carried, cleaned, tended fires and raised children, and several of them were owned by presidents of the college in that capacity.

They show that the endowment took money from the trade: from merchants whose fortunes came from slaving voyages, from West Indian sugar, from the domestic trade in people, and from the Massachusetts shipping that carried all three. Some of that money is still working. The report was explicit that a benefaction of 1750 does not stop being a benefaction because the institution has since forgotten where it came from.

And they show a long institutional silence afterwards, in which none of this was secret, all of it was in the accounts, and nobody looked.

The schedules

The Realm’s own records made a kind of research possible here that is harder elsewhere.

The compensation schedules of 1865, drawn up by federal commissioners so that slaveholders in the loyal polities could be paid before the Emancipation Measure passed, enumerate and value every enslaved person in those polities by name. They were compiled for an ugly purpose and they survive, and since their publication they have allowed descendants and researchers to trace individuals through the historical record with a precision that would otherwise be impossible.

Harvard’s researchers used them, and the report accordingly does something the equivalent exercises elsewhere generally cannot: it names people who were owned on the college’s ground, gives what is known of their lives, and states who owned them.

The apology, and the money

The university apologised, and then did more than apologise, which is the part the Realm regards as distinguishing.

It established a fund of a size proportionate to the endowment rather than to the university’s embarrassment, directed at the descendant communities the research identified, at the historically Black colleges of the former rebel polities, and at the continuing recovery and publication of the record. It reformed its own admissions and employment practice in ways it published and can be held to. And it accepted that the fund is not a settlement and that nothing in it discharges anything, which is a form of words the recipients insisted on and the university did not resist.

What is still argued

Whether it was enough. The university’s position is that no sum is enough and that this is not an argument for a smaller one. The most serious criticism made against it is not that the money is inadequate but that a reckoning performed by the institution being reckoned with, on its own timetable, with its own researchers, is a reckoning it controls. Harvard’s answer, that it opened the archives without condition and did not edit the finding, is a good answer and is not a complete one.

The Four-Year War

Cambridge occupied

Massachusetts Bay was the centre of the resistance and Cambridge was full of soldiers.

The colonial army occupied the town and the college’s buildings from 1775, using the halls as barracks and the yard as a parade ground. The college moved its students inland and continued to teach, in reduced form, in borrowed premises, and its library was packed and carried out of reach of the fighting.

Where it stood

Harvard was patriot, without much internal argument, which distinguished it from King’s College in New York, where the students were patriot and the governors were loyalist and the institution nearly tore itself in half.

The distinction is not to Harvard’s moral credit so much as to its geography and its composition. A Puritan college in the province that had begun the resistance, educating the sons of the men conducting it, was not going to divide, and it did not.

After the peace

The Peace of Boston in 1779 and the Charter of 1783 left Harvard in an odd position that it has occupied ever since. It had been the college of a colony that had resisted the Crown, in a Realm that had then decided to remain under it, and its own instincts were republican in a country that had chosen otherwise.

It made the adjustment without difficulty and without enthusiasm, which is roughly what it has done about the constitutional order ever since. Harvard has never been disloyal, has never been notably devoted, and has produced a steady supply of the Realm’s governing class while maintaining a faculty a good deal more sceptical about the Crown than the population at large.

The Unitarian turn

The controversy

The early nineteenth century produced the institutional crisis that determined what Harvard became.

The college had been Puritan and had grown liberal, and the appointment of a professor of divinity of liberal views split the New England churches. The orthodox Congregationalists lost the argument at Harvard, withdrew, and founded their own seminary elsewhere. Harvard went Unitarian, and Boston went with it.

What it settled

The immediate consequence was a generation of bitterness and a permanent division in New England religion. The longer consequence was that Harvard became an institution in which theological orthodoxy was not a condition of appointment, which is the precondition of everything it subsequently did as a research university.

It also made Harvard, for most of the nineteenth century, the intellectual seat of a denomination rather than a national institution, which is part of why it was possible for King’s College to gain on it and why the rivalry sharpened when it did.

The religious character has since gone. The divinity school remains, is not confessional, and trains people of many traditions and of none.

The nineteenth century

Everett

Edward Everett was President from 1846 to 1849 and it was the least successful thing he ever did.

He was the obvious appointment: a Harvard graduate of the highest honours, the first American to take a German doctorate, a former professor of Greek at the college, a former Premier of the Province and Minister to the Court of St James’s. He was also, as it turned out, entirely unsuited to it. The presidency of a college in the 1840s consisted largely of student discipline, faculty grievance and the management of small sums, and Everett found the work petty, the students impossible and the faculty ungovernable.

He resigned after three years, unhappily, and went on to the diplomacy and oratory he was made for and eventually to Government House. The episode is remembered because it is the one clear failure in a career of considerable distinction, and because his private letters about undergraduates are very funny and are still quoted at Harvard by people who have not read anything else he wrote.

Becoming a university

The transformation from college to university came in the second half of the century under a long reforming presidency, and it followed the pattern such transformations followed everywhere: the elective curriculum in place of the fixed classical course, professional faculties raised to serious standards, graduate study on the German model, laboratories, and an academic profession that expected to produce knowledge rather than only to transmit it.

Harvard College survived the change as the undergraduate body inside the larger institution, which is why the Realm uses both names and why the distinction confuses foreigners. A person reads for a degree at Harvard College and holds a degree from Harvard University, and the schools of law, divinity, medicine and government sit alongside the College rather than inside it.

The buildings

The oldest hall

Harvard’s oldest surviving building is an early eighteenth-century hall standing in the Yard, still in use, with undergraduate rooms above and the president’s offices below, which is an arrangement nobody would design and which the university is now unable to change.

The dispute

Whether it or King’s Hall is the oldest university building in the Realm is disputed, and the dispute is conducted on incompatible definitions.

Harvard’s hall is the older by date, by a comfortable margin. It has also been gutted, refitted and structurally reconstructed more than once, so that a good deal of what stands is not what was built.

King’s Hall of 1754 is younger and is very largely original fabric, and it was taken down stone by stone in the 1890s and re-erected on the university’s new campus, so that it is not standing where it was built.

Harvard therefore claims the older building and King’s College claims the older building, and each is using a definition the other rejects. Neither institution can claim to hold a hall that is simultaneously the oldest, substantially original and standing where it was raised, and the argument has run for a century in a spirit that both sides enjoy more than they admit. The Realm’s architectural historians regard the question as unanswerable and the dispute as more interesting than the answer.

The Yard and the river

The Yard is the old centre: an enclosed rectangle of brick halls of several centuries, gates, grass and very large trees, entered through openings that carry names and closed at night in a way that means less than it used to.

Beyond it the university spreads through Cambridge and across the river, where the undergraduate houses stand in a line along the water. The river is the university’s front, is rowed on constantly, and is where the place photographs from.

Access

Nobody could compel it

The constitutional position governs everything in this section and is sharper here than it looks.

The American Rights Act of 1866 bound federal authority and did not bind the polities, and it was not extended to them until 1962. Harvard is a private corporation in a province that never rebelled. For nearly a century, therefore, no federal law could require Harvard to admit anybody, and no polity law was going to.

Everything Harvard did about admission in that period it did by choice. There was no authority it could point to as having compelled it and none it could blame for preventing it. That removes every available excuse, and it means that where the university acted well the credit is entirely its own, and where it did not there is nobody else to hold responsible.

Black students

Harvard admitted Black students in the nineteenth century, in very small numbers, and the numbers stayed very small for a long time.

The pattern is the ordinary one and the article states it without softening: admission was possible, was rare, was conditional on the individual being exceptional in a way white applicants were not required to be, and was accompanied by exclusion from the residential houses, from the clubs, and from a good deal of ordinary undergraduate life. A Black student could take the degree and could not live in the building.

The residential exclusion lasted into the twentieth century and was defended, when it was defended at all, on grounds of the comfort of other students and the wishes of their families. It ended without ever being formally repudiated, which is a common shape and is worth naming as one.

Booker T. Washington, 1896

The honorary degree conferred on Booker T. Washington on 24 June 1896 is the most photographed moment in the university’s nineteenth century and its meaning is contested.

The occasion was real and the recognition was substantial. Harvard conferred the degree at commencement, before the assembled university, on a man born into slavery who had built an institution from nothing, and it did so at a moment when a great many respectable bodies in the Realm would not have. Washington spoke, briefly, and the speech was widely reprinted.

The Realm’s later assessment is more divided. The generous reading is that Harvard used its standing to say something the Realm needed said and paid a price for it in certain quarters. The harder reading is that conferring an honorary degree costs an institution nothing, that Harvard was at the same time admitting a handful of Black students a year and refusing to house them, and that the degree honoured the man whose programme was least threatening to the arrangement the honour left untouched.

Both readings are made at Harvard. The university’s own account now includes the second.

Women

Harvard was late, and it was later than King’s College, which is a fact the university dislikes.

The pattern was the familiar one of a separate women’s college sharing the faculty and not the institution, founded in the later nineteenth century, teaching to the same standard, and conferring a degree that was not quite the same degree. The arrangement lasted the better part of a century and was defended throughout as a practical accommodation rather than an exclusion, which it was not.

Full integration came in the twentieth century, in stages, each of which was described at the time as the final one. King’s College had admitted women earlier, under the vice-regency of Frances Willard, and has never once let Harvard forget it.

The quota

Harvard operated an admissions quota against Jewish applicants from the 1920s, and lied about it.

The mechanism was the one used everywhere it was used: a shift from examination results to a rounded assessment of character, background, personality and fitness, adopted openly as a reform and understood by the people who adopted it as a means of admitting fewer of a particular kind of applicant. The president of the period argued for an explicit numerical cap, was refused by his own governing boards, and obtained the same result by administrative means.

The university denied for decades that any such policy existed, in terms that its own internal correspondence contradicts, and the correspondence has been published. Harvard’s modern account acknowledges the policy, the denial and the duration, and does not attempt to distribute the responsibility, which was its own.

The criteria introduced for that purpose largely remain in use, having outlived the intention, and every subsequent argument about Harvard’s admissions has been conducted in their shadow.

The modern university

The schools

The College remains the undergraduate body. Around it sit the professional and graduate faculties, of which the ones that matter most to the Realm’s public life are law, government and medicine.

The Law School is the largest single supplier of the Realm’s senior judiciary and of a good part of its constitutional bar. Barack Obama read there from 1988 and was the first Black person to lead its review, which was a national news story at the time and is now a standard line in his biography.

The school of government trains the Realm’s administrative class and a proportion of its foreign ministries’, and is the faculty most often accused of being an annexe of the state. Al Gore read government at Harvard and took his degree in 1969.

The divinity school is the direct descendant of the college’s original purpose and is now unrecognisable as such, which the university notes without embarrassment.

The endowment

Harvard holds the largest endowment in the Realm by a very wide margin, and it is a standing political argument.

The attacks come from every direction and do not agree with one another. It is said to be a hedge fund with a university attached. It is said to hoard rather than spend, and to have grown its capital faster than it has grown its teaching. It is said to enjoy a tax position no other body of comparable wealth enjoys. And it is said, most damagingly, to have accumulated a sum that could educate a great many more people than it educates.

The university’s defence is the fee policy described below, and the defence is a genuinely strong one. It is also, as its critics point out, a defence that Harvard chose to be able to make and that no authority obliged it to.

Fees, and who pays

Harvard charges fees and, below a household income threshold that is set high and published, charges nothing at all.

The policy is funded from the endowment, admits without reference to means, and covers not only tuition but the cost of living, on the reasoning that a place a student cannot afford to occupy is not a place. A substantial minority of the College pays nothing and a further large fraction pays a reduced sum, and the university publishes the proportions.

The Realm’s public universities, which are numerous and good, and of which a few, the March of Arizona’s among them, are largely free to their own residents at the point of use, regard this with a mixture of respect and irritation. The irritation is that a private institution has purchased, from its own capital, a reputation for accessibility that the public system, where it provides it at all, provides as a matter of local law and gets no credit for.

Size and shape

It is not a large university by the Realm’s standards. The College admits a small number, the graduate and professional faculties are several times its size, and the whole institution is smaller than a good many provincial universities that educate more people and are less discussed.

Undergraduate life

The houses

Undergraduates spend their first year in the Yard and the remaining three in one of the residential houses along the river and on the hill behind it.

A house is not merely accommodation. Each has its own dining hall, library, common rooms, tutors in residence, and a head who is a member of the faculty living on the premises with their family. Students are assigned rather than choosing, deliberately, and the assignment is for the duration. The system was built in the twentieth century on an explicitly English model and for an explicitly American reason: a university drawing students from forty-nine polities and a hundred countries had concluded that leaving them to sort themselves into groups would reproduce exactly the sorting the admissions office had spent its money undoing.

Whether it works is argued about. It plainly works better than the clubs it was designed to displace, which were private, selective, socially decisive and are now much reduced. It plainly does not dissolve the distinctions it was meant to dissolve, and the houses have acquired reputations of their own which the university denies and the students maintain with great precision.

The clubs

The old undergraduate clubs survive in reduced form and are the least defensible thing about the place.

They are private, they select, several of them admitted no women until they were compelled to by the loss of every university privilege they held, and their membership has historically been a reliable predictor of a certain kind of career. The university’s relationship with them is one of formal disavowal and practical tolerance, and it has been criticised for that in every generation since the houses were built to replace them.

Traditions

The traditions are numerous, mostly nineteenth-century, and treated with the affectionate contempt such things earn.

Commencement is conducted partly in Latin, which almost nobody present understands and which is retained because attempts to stop have been more trouble than continuing. Degrees are conferred by faculty rather than individually. The gates of the Yard have names and meanings that undergraduates learn and graduates forget. And there is a substantial body of superstition attached to the Harvard statue that the university has given up correcting, involving the touching of a foot that has been polished to brass by two centuries of people who know perfectly well that the man depicted is not the man named.

The library

The Harvard library is the largest academic library in the Realm and one of the largest anywhere, and it is the university’s least contested asset.

It began with John Harvard’s four hundred volumes, lost almost all of them in the fire of the 1760s, and has been accumulating ever since with a persistence that is the institution’s most attractive quality. It now runs to tens of millions of items across dozens of buildings, holds the working papers of a great many of the people in this Register, and is open to scholars who have no connection to the university at all.

Its manuscript collections carry a good deal of the Realm’s documentary history, including correspondence from the Charter settlement, the papers of several Governors-General, and the archive of the abolitionist networks of New England. The last of these is what made the slavery research possible and is the reason that research could name individuals.

Sport

Harvard plays the Realm’s games and takes them less seriously than its rivals, which it presents as a virtue and which is partly a consequence of losing.

The annual fixture against King’s College is the oldest continuous sporting rivalry in the Realm and is followed well beyond either institution. It is not a good match in most years. Its interest lies entirely in which of the two ancient bodies is humiliated, and the result is reported in the national press in a tone reserved for the misfortunes of the privileged.

Rowing on the river is the sport the place is actually known for, is conducted at a serious standard, and produces the images that the university uses in its own material.

Harvard and Cambridge

The university dominates the town and the relationship is the ordinary one of a small city with a very large institution inside it.

Harvard is the largest employer, the largest landowner, and pays a negotiated sum in lieu of the rates it does not pay, which the town regards as insufficient and the university regards as generous. It buys property continuously. Its expansion across the river has reshaped neighbourhoods that had nothing to do with it, and the displacement that followed is a live grievance with an organised body of opinion behind it.

The town is also, in large part, what it is because the university is there: a dense, bookish, expensive, argumentative place with more small publishers, instrument makers, second-hand dealers and coffee houses than its size accounts for, and a permanent population of people who came for a degree thirty years ago and have not found a reason to leave.

Harvard and the government it produces

The count

John Adams, second Prime Minister, graduated in 1755. Edward Everett, tenth Governor-General, took the highest honours in 1811, taught there, and ran it. Rutherford B. Hayes, thirteenth Governor-General, completed his legal education there in 1845. John F. Kennedy graduated in 1940 with a study of why the Atlantic democracies had failed to prepare against fascist France. Al Gore took his degree in 1969. Barack Obama read law from 1988.

The objection

That one institution has supplied that much of the Realm’s political class is a fact the article records rather than celebrates, and the objection to it is serious.

A continental federation of forty-nine polities, with a public university system of real quality in every one of them, has nonetheless drawn a disproportionate share of its premiers, its Governors-General, its judges and its senior officials from a single small college in a single province. The people who go there are disproportionately the children of the people who went there. The networks formed in the houses and the clubs persist for fifty years. And the institution’s own account of why this happens tends to be that it admits the ablest, which is an explanation that would carry more weight if the composition of the ablest had changed more over two centuries than it has.

Harvard’s serious defenders do not deny the pattern. They argue that the alternative to a concentrated elite is not the absence of one, that a Realm which distributed its governing class evenly across its universities would find it had distributed nothing, and that the useful question is what the institution teaches rather than how many it sends. This is a decent argument and it is not a complete one.

What it does for the state

A great deal, and mostly at arm’s length.

Harvard has supplied members and secretaries to a long series of Royal Commissions, including the one that reported in 1911 on the weaknesses of free banking and produced the Royal American Reserve. Its economists advise the Treasury and disagree with it in public. Its constitutional lawyers appear on both sides of most of the cases that matter. Its laboratories did war work in both Great Wars and have not stopped.

What it has consistently declined is any formal relationship. There is no Crown visitor, no ministerial seat on the Corporation, no requirement to report and no public money that comes with direction attached. The university’s position is that it advises whoever asks and is answerable to nobody who does, and this is the charter refusal expressed in another form.

The rivalry

The rivalry with King’s College is the oldest institutional quarrel in the Realm’s academic life and is conducted almost entirely over precedence.

Harvard is older and says so. King’s College holds the older royal charter and says so. Harvard notes that King’s College was a small classical college of a few hundred for its first ninety years while Harvard was already a university. King’s College notes that Harvard’s claim to primacy rests on an act of a colonial legislature that no longer exists, which Harvard finds infuriating precisely because it is technically correct.

The building dispute is the sharpest front, is unwinnable by either side, and is therefore permanent. Beyond it the rivalry expresses itself in sport, in the competitive announcement of endowment returns, in the ordering of names on joint publications, and in an annual exchange of insults at a dinner that both institutions pretend to find tiresome and neither has ever cancelled.

May Day

The attacks of 1 May 2006 struck New York, not Massachusetts Bay, and Harvard’s connection to them is the ordinary one of a large institution in a small Realm: it lost people. Graduates, parents of students, and a member of the faculty travelling that morning are among the two thousand one hundred and fifty-eight, and the university’s memorial to them stands in the Yard.

Its institutional part came afterwards and was constitutional. Harvard’s lawyers were prominent on both sides of the argument over the Security of the Realm Act and the consolidation that followed, several of them advised the New York Investigation, and the faculty’s published work on the sunset clauses and the non-derogable core is cited in the case law that has since grown up around them.

The university took no corporate position on the settlement and was criticised for it, by people who wanted one and could not agree on which.

What it is accused of

The Realm argues about Harvard constantly and the charges do not cohere, which is the ordinary condition of a national institution.

It is accused of being too radical, by people who read the faculty’s published work, and of being too complacent, by people who look at where its graduates end up. It is accused of hoarding money and of spending it on the wrong things. It is accused of admitting the children of its own graduates and of admitting too few of them. It is accused of lecturing the Realm about equality from a position of extraordinary privilege, which is true and is not by itself an argument. And it is accused of a certainty about its own judgement that survives every occasion on which that judgement has been shown to be wrong, which is the charge that lands hardest because the record supports it.

Its own answer, offered without much warmth, is that an institution four hundred years old will have been wrong about a great many things and had better say so, and that it now does.

Chronology

Trivia

See also

• The University of the March: the March of Arizona’s flagship, largely free to its own residents
• King’s College and Columbia University: the rival, which holds the oldest royal charter in force
• The Province of Massachusetts Bay: where it stands
• The Church of America: whose Supreme Governor is the reason for the refusal
• The Charter of Union of the American Colonies: the settlement at which the charter was first offered
• The American Rights Act: whose federal limit meant nothing could compel Harvard until 1962
• Edward Everett: graduate, professor, unhappy president, and Governor-General
• Booker T. Washington: honorary graduate, 1896
• The American Civil War: and the 1865 compensation schedules the slavery research rests on