Simon Boomlet

Harvard at 350

Harvard University now celebrates its 350th birthday. It has a magnificent history stretching back virtually to the beginning, all those Adamses and so forth, the Puritan divines and the Transcendentalists, the merchants and the Roosevelts: a great saga. It now has a decent president in Derek Bok, and perhaps the strongest faculty in the country. It is harder to gain admission to Cal Tech or maybe even Amherst, but that does not matter. Harvard’s endowment is $2.8 billion, dwarfing all rivals. There have been leftist faculty flurries about SDI and Ed Meese, petty, symbolic flurries: Harvard performs massive services for Washington, to the tune of one-fifth of Harvard’s annual budget, or $130 million. Pushed by Edwin O. Reischauer, for example, Harvard pioneered in Japanese and East Asian Studies, and the same is true in other fields.

JM

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John McLaughlin

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Harvard at 350

Harvard University now celebrates its 350th birthday. It has a magnificent history stretching back virtually to the beginning, all those Adamses and so forth, the Puritan divines and the Transcendentalists, the merchants and the Roosevelts: a great saga. It now has a decent president in Derek Bok, and perhaps the strongest faculty in the country. It is harder to gain admission to Cal Tech or maybe even Amherst, but that does not matter. Harvard’s endowment is $2.8 billion, dwarfing all rivals. There have been leftist faculty flurries about SDI and Ed Meese, petty, symbolic flurries: Harvard performs massive services for Washington, to the tune of one-fifth of Harvard’s annual budget, or $130 million. Pushed by Edwin O. Reischauer, for example, Harvard pioneered in Japanese and East Asian Studies, and the same is true in other fields.