Rituals Dining Reunion Goings On





The celebration of Harvard's bicentennial in 1836, Emerson's "College Jubillee." Illustration from Josiah Quincy's History of Harvard University (1840)


I went to the College Jubillee on the 8th instant. A noble & well thought of anniversary. The pathos of the occasion was extreme & not much noted by the speakers. Cambridge at any time is full of ghosts; but on that day the anointed eye saw the crowd of spirits that mingled with the procession in the vacant spaces, year by year, as the classes proceeded; and then the far longer train of ghosts that followed the Company, of the men that wore before us the college honors & the laurels of the state--the long winding train reaching back into eternity.

~Ralph Waldo Emerson, Journals, 1836

First, connect with your classmates. Discover--remember--that they're fine people. Next, connect with Emerson. In the sunlight and shadow of the Yard, get into that long winding train reaching back into eternity and acknowledge, unequivocally, that you are a graduate of what Boston Globe columnist Alex Beam likes to call the World's Greatest University, you are part of a continuum of fine people, and you are near the head of the parade. Most of the time you maintain a decent silence about this.

Then, transfer these warm allegiances to alma mater. It is an institution where long ago you may have felt lonely, perhaps, or insufficiently cared for, but which you are now prepared to forgive because she allied you with all these people, some of whom have been your friends, some of whom may give you jobs--fine people. Everyone feels insufficiently cared for at 19, you now see.
At last year's alumni parade.PAULA LERNER

Only connect, and you will have successfully fulfilled the requirements of a Harvard-Radcliffe (or Harvard, or Radcliffe) reunion. Listen to members of the class of 1971 commenting on the experience of their twenty-fifth last year.

Says Barbara Molony, Ph.D. '82, professor of history at Santa Clara University in California, "I floated in waves of euphoria. It was wonderful to be with the ones we cared for as young people while possessing the maturity that the last quarter century has given us. It was wonderful to see how nice we turned out to be, and how interesting and wise."

"I realized after arriving home in Anchorage," says Jeff Lowenfels, president and CEO of Yukon Pacific Corporation and a garden columnist, "that today, and for a long time to come, I am not going to be surrounded by hundreds of stimulating people who inexplicably didn't have to work at being a community."

"I had a transcendent time at our reunion," declares composer and pianist Philip Aaberg of Oakland, California. "The bitter taste left at our Commencement was washed clean, and I was able to see how I've changed, how it is possible to have consciousness raised."

To begin, you must come. This isn't so easy. You need to tame your anxiety. You haven't as much hair as you would like. You ought to lose 30 pounds. Perhaps you won't know anybody. Maybe you are not as accomplished as your peers expected. Are you as happy as you should be? You are not sure you're up for the soul searching you suspect may be involved in the occasion. Are you ready for a public private moment in your life? These fears are standard, says Jessica Barry, major-reunion coordinator at the Harvard Alumni Association. In overcoming them, you'll have help from old friends. They will call you on the telephone or send you a letter saying, Please come. You won't like to refuse a personal invitation.

"Many alumni didn't much like Harvard but loved their classmates," says Barry. "Reunions are about keeping people connected with each other, and that will be their most important connection with Harvard. So the first thing that happens at a reunion is an informal social gathering of classmates." Anne Henry of Seattle, another of last year's twenty-fifth reunioners, enjoyed the get-together aspect of the six-day event: "Besides the obvious external differences (hairlines, waistlines, bottomlines) that exist among us, it was gratifying to find that everyone's attention was on the stuff that really matters."

The twenty-fifth reunion class breaks up briefly into House groupings on the second day of their reunion to bring strong glue to the bonding process. And the intellectual content of the reunion begins to unfold. Numerous seminars feature members of the class and of the Harvard faculty debating how to care for one's aged parents, the moral education of the next American generation, or whether to legalize pot. Other reunioning classes, gathering in Cambridge for five days or four, attack the world's problems in similar discussion groups, bringing the perspectives of their differing ages to the fray. The twenty-fifth class repairs with their children to the relative country one day for horseshoes and tennis, and has a night out at the Pops. Each of the major reunion classes has a dinner dance--the twenty-fifth in a tent at the Stadium, the fiftieth at the Park Plaza.

Popping round from one event to the other--sometimes to make speeches, mostly to schmooze--are the presidents of Harvard and Radcliffe, the dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and other hostly figures. "The presidents and the dean spoke to us for almost two hours on the Monday of our reunion about the state of Harvard and Radcliffe," says Paul Goodoff '71, a financial/management consultant and cochair of last year's twenty-fifth. "My goodness, they're busy people. Yet, they and other faculty members were very generous with their time. Your exposure to Harvard during a reunion is quite considerable. You realize what an exceptional opportunity it was for you and is for others. Of course, most of us couldn't get into Harvard with today's admission standards, and that makes us particularly glad we got in when we did."

All Harvard reunions occur during Commencement Week except the thirtieth, which enlivens October. Most colleges and universities could not manage the logistics of housing and feeding so many seniors and alumni all at once, and, indeed, the challenges of doing that are hefty. Harvard rents 70,000 chairs for Commencement Week, 46,000 of them for reunion events specifically, as well as 5,000 tables and more than 100 tents.

Five full-time staff members work all year in the classes and reunions part of the Harvard Alumni Association. They have two counterparts at Radcliffe. Five other staffers put out the class reports, in which alumni record the state of their lives at five-year intervals. Vast sums are expended for reunions. The twenty-fifth costs more than $1 million to stage. Two-thirds of that comes as a subsidy from the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and Radcliffe, the rest from the reunioners, who this year will pay up to $990 per family, which covers everything except tips for the babysitters. Last year the gift to Harvard from the class of '71 was more than $10 million.

Alumni have gathered at Commencement for intemperate feasting and merriment since olden days, but the first stirrings of a sensibility among graduates that they were not only alumni of Harvard but were particularly members of this or that class came in the 1790s, says Harley Holden, curator of the Harvard University Archives. What today's revelers would recognize as proper class reunions--with a dinner and a program-- started in the 1820s. That was about the time that the College, which had always been needy, began to look to the alumni in a concerted way for funds.

The presence of reunioners shapes Commencement Week. At most colleges and universities, the dignitary giving the principal commencement address does so in the morning, to students. At Harvard he or she attends the formal exercises in the morning, receives an honorary degree, and speaks in the afternoon, to alumni--a long day. The lengthy proceeding in Tercentenary Theatre in the afternoon is the annual meeting of the Harvard Alumni Association. Because it is, the star attraction--the king of Spain, perhaps, or Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn--sits on stage while others step to the podium to conduct a great deal of family business, about an hour's worth. Helmut Kohl or Colin Powell (who cannot complain, having become alumni themselves) hear remarks from the president of the HAA, learn who the next Overseers will be, and enjoy a detailed account of the money each of the reunion classes have given to Harvard. (Last year the 14 reunion classes gave a total of $97,621,292.)

Reunions happen during Commencement Week mostly so that alumni can get a look at the seniors and vice versa. Filing into Tercentenary Theatre on Commencement morning, the alumni pass through lines of seniors and can see what the current product looks like. In the afternoon, those same seniors, now alumni, march with their elders in the great parade of graduates and are absorbed, nourishingly, into the alumni body.

Reunions may be addictive. Mercifully, the late William P. Ellison '27, a manufacturer, provided for his class the wherewithal for all members to attend reunions cost free, for so long as such reunions occur. Diane Jellis, associate director of the HAA for classes and reunions, expects at least 30 nonagenarian members of the seventieth reunion class, with attendants, to come to Cambridge this June for three nights at the Inn at Harvard and two days of meetings. (That's $1,100 in hotel accommodations per, but Ellison's foundation will see to it, and to travel, meals, and everything else.) Seventieth reunions are not unheard of; there was one in 1993. As graduates live longer (see "The College Pump"), such gatherings may become commonplace. For this one, the reunioners of '27 will attend a gala dinner at their hotel, a lunch at the Faculty Club, and a memorial service for departed classmates. They will view a film of their tenth reunion in 1937. They will connect with Emerson's train.

~ Christopher Reed


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