Events Will Be Set Amid Reminders of Its Rich History : Harvard Throwing Party for Its 350th Birthday

The 600-foot helium-filled polyurethane rainbow is ready. So are the fireworks depicting a giant hand signing graduate John Hancock’s name. Security forces have been assembled for the visit of England’s Prince Charles and other dignitaries. Fresh sod has been planted in Harvard Yard, and steps climbed by generations of students have been repaired. A big white speakers’ tent has been erected in front of Memorial Church.

After months of careful planning, Harvard’s party preparations are in place.

The university’s 350th birthday party, beginning today, will be far more than students and faculty gathered around a table blowing out crimson candles. There will be three convocations, 100 or so smaller symposiums, a gala stadium finale, songs by Yale’s Russian Chorus, music by the Boston Pops, prayer services, the issuance of a postage stamp and the narration of the university’s history by Walter Cronkite--not to mention that plastic rainbow spanning the Charles River.

A Sheik and a King

The guest list is a who’s who of power and prestige. Joining Prince Charles will be the Aga Khan, Sheik Ahmed Zaki Yamani of Saudi Arabia, the king of Nepal, three U.S. Supreme Court justices, Secretary of State George P. Shultz, Secretary of Defense Caspar W. Weinberger, leaders of business and the arts and 8,000 alumni. President Reagan, who was invited to speak, declined, but only after the university announced that it would not issue honorary degrees.

Harvard’s birthday will be a celebration of the university’s secure place in the pantheon of higher education. (Its faculty has 29 Nobel laureates and has won 27 Pulitzer Prizes.) But the birthday of the nation’s oldest university is also a celebration of higher education itself and of the role of a very complex university in a very complex time.

“I think it provides an opportunity to suggest to a larger audience something about what a modern university is--and why what it does really matters,” said Harvard President Derek C. Bok in an interview. “It provides an opportunity for many of us to think about where we’ve come and where we might be going in the next few years.”

Book by Bok

As part of the anniversary, Bok has written a book discussing the problems and opportunities faced by universities and their presidents. In “Higher Learning” he sketches the present scope of Harvard, an institution founded with a single master and a dozen students 16 years after the arrival of the Pilgrims at Plymouth:

“Within the past few years, colleagues of mine at Harvard have helped to write a tax code for Indonesia, created a new program for educating medical students, conducted seminars for recently elected members of Congress, won a Nobel prize for research conducted in Geneva, taught physics to high school students in the surrounding community, briefed several heads of state on domestic and international issues, designed major construction projects in Jerusalem, written hundreds of books, given thousands of lectures and taught tens of thousands of students.”

Some of this diversity will be on display at birthday symposiums featuring Harvard professors. Topics range from “The Universe: The Beginning, Now and Henceforth” to “The Role and Social Value of the Large Law Firm.”

The symposiums, stretching over three days, surround three major convocations--centerpieces of the celebration. Prince Charles, who will deliver the main address at the opening convocation on Thursday, is a graduate of Cambridge University, where Harvard’s founder, John Harvard, was educated.

Shultz to Speak

On Friday, Secretary of State Shultz will be the main speaker at a convocation with the theme “The University in a Changing World.”

The third convocation, on Saturday, will consist of a meeting of the Harvard Alumni Assn. with Bok as speaker.

Harvard’s party will begin this evening with a light and laser show along the banks of the Charles River, which will be spanned by the 600-foot helium-filled arch. It will close Saturday night with pageantry and fireworks in Harvard’s football stadium, a show directed by Tommy Walker, who produced the fireworks for the Statue of Liberty weekend.

For some faculty members, the fireworks and the plastic rainbow have come to symbolize a frothy celebration that is out of character with Harvard’s underlying seriousness. But the anniversary was planned by a committee of faculty members and administrators, some of whom felt a touch of show business would liven an otherwise too cerebral occasion.

All of the birthday events will be set amid reminders of Harvard’s rich history. Eight Harvard graduates signed the Declaration of Independence. Six U.S. presidents were Harvard graduates. The oldest continuing chapter of Phi Beta Kappa was formed at Harvard in 1781. Ralph Waldo Emerson, T.S. Eliot, Robert Frost, e.e. cummings and John Dos Passos attended Harvard. Henry David Thoreau was a budding campus essayist. When the class of 1904 filled out its 35th reunion questionnaire, one of the questions asked was: “Any public service performed?”

“President of the United States,” F.D. Roosevelt answered.

Final Strips of Sod

The other day, while workmen put down the final strips of sod covering bare spots in the Harvard Yard, while a late summer’s breeze stirred the trees outside the window of his office in Massachusetts Hall--a structure built in 1720--Bok discussed the university and its future.

Since he became Harvard’s 25th president in 1971, he said, Harvard has changed considerably. The number of women students, faculty members and managers has grown dramatically, Bok said. So has the sophistication of Harvard’s administration, partly in response to greater federal involvement in higher education and the pressures in recent years of massive inflation, the recession and an uncertain stock market, all of which made managing the university’s huge endowment much more difficult.

“We were unbelievably undermanned, under-administered for the complexity and size of the institution,” Bok said.

” . . . There has been an enormous feminization of Harvard, not just the fact that Radcliffe and Harvard are coeducational. When I came there was a quota on men and women graduates . . . . I think it is very important to look at it as a tremendous surge of new talent at a time when new talent was very much needed. Now, one does not get floods of enormously able intellectuals from Europe to staff our faculties. Really, it is the involvement of women in academic life that is the biggest flow of new talent that we have.”

New Core Curriculum

In recent years, Harvard has strengthened its undergraduate education with a new core curriculum of required courses and worked to broaden professional education, stressing not only competence but also ethics and the larger role of professions in society. The Harvard Medical School is undergoing fundamental reform, with seminars instead of large lectures, computer simulations of health problems and other improvements designed to help physicians cope with the evolving nature of medical practice.

But Harvard’s president says more needs to be done. Bok believes higher education should develop the capacity to critique itself better and to tailor teaching techniques to students who learn at different rates of speed. Continuing emphasis should be placed on improving the quality of instruction, he says.

“All I can say is I think it is a substantial deficiency that needs to be addressed,” Bok said. “ . . . We have no real way of demonstrating how far students progress. I think it is hard to excuse.”

In an effort to strengthen the teaching process, Harvard has convened a seminar lasting for several years to study the problems of assessment and evaluation of its education.

Bok sees major decisions ahead for Harvard in the next 25 years. He can see the day when much of the third year of law school might be spent as a bridge to professional practice. Based on the model of teaching hospitals in medical school, it would give students experience with law firms, government offices and legal service agencies.

More Foreign Students

There will be greater pressure to increase mid-career and adult education in the years ahead, he said. And more foreign students are applying to Harvard and other American universities.

“What is an interesting issue for 25 years from now is who do we want to teach in the university,” Bok said. “You start with this problem of old versus young. But then I think you are going to get increasing numbers of foreign students . . . . You will get a bigger pool of kids whose parents would like them to come study here. At some point, you are going to get American parents saying, ‘Wait a moment. It’s our tax dollars, my family has always supported Harvard. It’s wonderful to have some foreign students. It provides a background--but 25%? They’re taking all our slots.’ You’re already getting people perking up their ears.”

Foreign students make up 5% of the class of 1989 at Harvard.

College presidents face their own comprehension gap, Bok suggested. By nature, he said, college presidents are forced to be generalists, administering universities where research knowledge is increasingly complicated and esoteric. Keeping up to date to make informed decisions has become far more difficult.

What is the biggest lesson Bok has learned in his 15 years as Harvard’s president? “I suppose patience,” he said, smiling. “Getting things done in academic life is necessarily a patient exercise . . . . Bearing in mind nothing important in the university can ever be done without the assent--not only the assent, the active support--of a substantial number of people, that’s a patient enterprise.”