Sixty years ago. . .

Sam Smith, It took less than 24 hours for the suspicion to arise that Harvard and I might not be well matched. Returning from my first Social Science 2 lecture, telling myself that I would understand it if I thought long enough, I sat down to read Max Weber. I was no further than seven pages along when I broke out into a cold sweat; I hadn't understood a word. Worse, in the days to come, I would find classmates discussing Weber as though they were critiquing the latest issue of Time. Some could even compare Weber with Marx, despite the fact that Marx was not even scheduled to be read for another two months. These students were prototypical proto-Harvardmen, already on their way towards what songwriter Allen Jay Lerner called Harvard's "indubitable, irrefutable, inimitable, indomitable, incalculable superiority."

Suddenly my cum laude from Philadelphia's Germantown Friends School seemed not much after all. I passed Soc Sci 2 with the help of cram sessions sponsored by indulgent brighter colleagues but my satisfaction in doing so was diminished by recognizing the gap between us. I didn't think like them; I didn't talk like them and, worse, I didn't want all that much to be like them. Whatever intelligence I possessed did not seem the sort required to excel at Harvard. Long afterwards I would figure out that much of what Harvard was about was a giant game of categories, in which real people, real events and real phenomena were assigned to fictitious groupings such as The Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, or the Freudian Tradition. To those immersed in this game, the imaginary assumed a substance of its own; as classics professor John Finley is said to have remarked, "Sometimes, I fear my son thinks that life is real."

I had come to Harvard full of passion for phenomena I could see, feel and touch; now it was implicitly suggested that these were childish things to be put away. The educated man concerned himself primarily with what they meant, with which other phenomena they belonged, and what theories could best explain their existence in the first place. I didn't want to spend my life putting things into little boxes; I wanted to take them out, turn them over, examine them closely, do something with them, and tell others what I had found. If you were brazen enough to think inductively, that is to say to examine evidence and consider what it might all mean -- in short to use one's innate capacity to imagine, to dream and to create -- you risked being regarded ignorant, or at least odd. You were, after all, being educated to digest grand principles, major paradigms and random certainties and then to sort and file all of life's phenomena by these convenient categories.

In such a cataloging system, the accidental, the chaotic, the imagined, the malevolent, the culturally unfamiliar, and the unique often got misplaced. I had come to Harvard with some vague notion that it would teach me how to use my own intelligence better, that I would learn how to educate myself. I didn't understand then, and wouldn't until many decades later, that the American establishment wasn't really all that interested in that sort of thing. From the intellectual epicenter of Cambridge to the political apex of Washington, education was something one received, rehearsed, and regurgitated. You didn't play with it, experiment with it, and you certainly didn't make it your own -- even if, like the shape of Harvard Square, it turned out not to be as officially described. Life at Harvard was thus several steps removed from life as I knew and hoped it to be.

The dean of freshman, F. Skiddy von Stade Jr, once said to me, "You people from Germantown Friends look so good on paper. Why do you do so badly here?" It was a fair question; a number of GFS graduates were on probation and one had dropped out. I couldn't answer the question, but I quickly contributed to his stereotype. I drifted into a schedule that kept me up drinking - once a whole fifth of bourbon before bed - and talking much of the night while sleeping through classes. By the middle of freshman year I received a postcard from my English instructor: "Mr. Coles requests the pleasure of your attendance at the next regular meeting of his course." I was quickly becoming, without malice aforethought, a Harvard dissident.

What I didn't know when von Stade asked me about Germantown Friends was that he had already vetted me and other students in a curious manner, almost as if I were applying to be a secret agent or a member of a holy order rather than merely a freshman. Years later I came across an exchange of letters between von Stade and my father in which the dean wrote, among other things:

I should like to ask you to write me as fully and as frankly as possible about the background, interests, and special needs of your son. If there are deficiencies in his earlier education, or handicaps in his personality or health, I sincerely hope that you will tell me about them. This information will be available only to your son's Faculty Adviser, to the Medical Department, and to members of this office.

Since discovering this exchange, I have occasionally wondered how many of these freshman dossiers ended up elsewhere in the interest of the state or of some prominent alumnus seeking a new assistant. As with much intelligence gathering, however, von Stade's efforts fell a bit short. Alston Chase gave an example years later in the Atlantic Monthly:

8 Prescott Street in Cambridge is a well-preserved three-story Victorian frame house, standing just outside Harvard Yard. Today it houses Harvard's expository-writing program. But in September of 1958, when Ted Kaczynski, just sixteen, arrived at Harvard, 8 Prescott Street was a more unusual place, a sort of incubator.

Earlier that year F. Skiddy von Stade Jr., Harvard's dean of freshmen, had decided to use the house as living accommodations for the brightest, youngest freshmen. Von Stade's well-intentioned idea was to provide these boys with a nurturing, intimate environment, so that they wouldn't feel lost, as they might in the larger, less personal dorms. But in so doing he isolated the overly studious and less-mature boys from their classmates. He inadvertently created a ghetto for grinds, making social adjustment for them more, rather than less, difficult. . .Whereas other freshmen lived in suites with one or two roommates, six of the sixteen students of Prescott Street, including Kaczynski, lived in single rooms.

One of those who lived at 8 Prospect Street under the guidance of proctor Francis Xavier Edward Murphy was my friend Ed Hinshaw who was several classes behind me. When I learned of this decades later, I was stunned. Hinshaw, who would drop out of Harvard, later becoming a leading TV anchor in Milwaukee and a top executive of his broadcasting company, had none of the characteristics of an anti-social over-studious grind. He was, in fact, one of the most hopelessly gregarious people I have ever known.

I never considered you a mad genius, I remarked to Ed, who replied that he had tired of living with one and told von Stade that he had to get away from his roommate. "We thought you'd be a stabilizing influence," replied von Stade to the freshman scholarship student unwittingly drafted for his social engineering project. Providing Ed with stabilizing influences was apparently not considered.

UPDATE

A reader asked about women and blacks at Harvard in the 1950. Some notes:

The Harvard student body was diverse by the standards of the 1950s, which is to say mainly that there was a rough parity between white male public and white male private school graduates. All the states were represented; there were foreign students, athletes, seminal scientists and so forth. There were Jews and even a handful of blacks. Harvard's job was to turn them all into Harvard men.

Women who were in every one of my classes are still non-persons of the Harvard Class of '59 because they were students of Radcliffe rather than of Harvard College. After all, one of the privileges of Harvard was to note only that which it wished to see. The worst thing that could happen to a Harvard student, in the eyes of Harvard, was that he be "expunged." The university simply denied he was ever in attendance.

I was reminded of this when I was on the Harvard sailing team and was censured and lost my first place in a race after a formal hearing by the New England Intercollegiate Sailing Assn. My sin: I had used a Radcliffe student as my crew.

Thirty years after she graduated in 1962, New York politician Elizabeth Holtzman would say, "Nobody protested. We didn't know yet what was unfair. I felt privileged to be getting a Harvard education." A New York Times article the year of her graduation said that "Radcliffe girls," like those from other women's colleges, "don't do much of anything beyond marrying and raising children." The article was written by a Harvard man. And in another NY Times piece, Peggy Schmertzler of the Radcliffe class of 1953 recalled, "I remember the deans' telling us an educated person made the best mother. . . She could sing French songs to her children."

"And the aforementioned F Skiddy von Stade said once: "When I see the bright, well-educated, but relatively dull housewives who attended the Seven Sisters, I honestly shudder at the thought of changing the balance of males versus females at Harvard. Quite simply, I do not see highly educated women making startling strides in contributing to our society in the foreseeable future. They are not, in my opinion, going to stop getting married and/or having children. They will fail in their present role as women if they do."

On the other hand, many of the Cliffies held their own. One of the stories told was of the professor chiding a woman student for knitting in class. "Knitting," he said, "is a repressed form of masturbation." Replied the student, "When I knit, I knit. When I masturbate, I masturbate."

As for the first woman professor to get tenure at Harvard, Cora Du Bois, see here: http://wp.me/p3pe2l-1FT

A READER NOTES:

I "knew" Dean von Stade when I was there.  He was a notable figure in the Yard and, I later learnt, quite a man in his own right.  His father and mother enjoyed the loan of his friend's private railroad car on their honeymoon, that of a Mr. Vanderbilt.  My second year at Harvard, I worked in the Bursar's office and one of my chores there was to put the faculty and staff paychecks in their envelopes for mailing in the University's internal mail system.  At one point, I was detailed to go to Dean von Stade's office and "respectfully" ask that he cash his paychecks, which he, apparently, was in the habit of tossing in a desk drawer and forgetting about.