They also have fun at Harvard!

Though the young lad, aged around 10, stood on his toes, he could not reach the left boot of the statue of John Harvard after whom the university in Massachusetts, Boston, is named. His mother pitched in and hoisted her ward up and made sure he gave the foot a good rub. A typical case of parental pressure. The popular belief, call it superstition, is that if you touch the protruding left boot of the statue you are guaranteed to get admission to the prestigious university.

“I would not do that,” a student and our tour guide, advised us. “There is this notion that Harvard students are very serious. I can assure we also have a sense of fun.” And John Harvard’s left boot gets a dose of it almost every night. “I don’t even want to go into what is smeared on it,” she added.

Yes, if Boston, Massachusetts, is the Mecca of education, then Harvard is its main altar. Nuggets of information studded our 70-minute walkabout of the main campus in the company of the sprightly young student who chipped away at its almost impregnable aura with her slightly wicked sense of humour and wit.

To start with, we were informed that the statue of John Harvard with his hand-polished left boot is that of an imposter. When the university decided to honour him with a memorial, they realised that there were no images of the clergyman. So, they worked with one of his grandsons and passed him off as the real McCoy.

And how did John Harvard get the honour of having the oldest institute of higher learning in the US named after him? In 1639, he donated half his estate and his collection of 400 volumes of books to what was then known as New College, a college for clergymen, founded three years earlier. Sadly, his entire collection of books, except one volume, was destroyed in a fire which gutted the library building in 1764. The single book that survived the disaster had been checked out by a student. Ironically, he was penalised for not returning an overdue book!

Today, the university’s collection, one of the largest in the world, is housed in the Harry Elkins Widener Memorial Library, which was built on a donation of $2 million from a grieving mother who lost her son Harry Elkins Widener, along with his father George, her husband, on the maiden voyage of the Titanic. Harry, a businessman and avid book collector, graduated from Harvard in 1907. The library was thrown open in 1915, had 50 miles of shelf space and a capacity to hold 3 million volumes. Within 15 years, it was filled to capacity. Underground vaults and reading chambers were added to the building to accommodate the university’s rapidly growing collection.

The university, however, lost out on another offer from the rather unpretentious looking parents of another young alumnus who died in an accident. The president of the university haughtily dismissed the couple thinking they wanted to erect a statue of their son. “We were thinking of donating a building,” the couple countered.

“Do you realise that we have over $7 million worth of property on our premises?” he sniffed.

“That’s all?” they retorted. “In that case we will build our own university.” Mr and Ms Leland Stanford did just that and established Stanford University in California.

Harvard was originally a male bastion and it was only in 1879 that the university reluctantly opened Harvard Annex for its first batch of 27 female students. Later, in 1894, the annex was rechristened Radcliffe College. More than a century later, in 2007, the university appointed Drew Gilpin Faust as its first woman president. The gutsy lady made it a point to stress in her acceptance address that she was not the first woman president of Harvard but the president of Harvard.

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