To the 10,000 Would-Be Men of Harvard

How can we keep the stock of the Puritans alive?

Annenberg Hall in 1878.

Right about now, the last few members of the Class of 2029 are deciding whether they will entrust themselves to Harvard’s care for their undergraduate education. Since they began looking seriously at college admissions—certainly since they began receiving acceptance letters—those future students have, no doubt, been advised by well-meaning advisors who say that what really matters when making this decision isn't cost, location, or prestige, but fit. Well-meaning though it may be, this advice does little good for someone without any personal connection to the institution. Visitas is fun, no doubt, but it is an extended sales pitch, not a clear picture of Harvard life. Still, Harvard is known, or historically was known, at least, for having some of the most distinctive students anywhere. We therefore ought to rediscover what kind of men they were.

At first glance, explaining the character of the Harvard Man is akin to archeological research, in that one is exhuming something which has been buried. Perhaps the main difference is that people actually want the archaeologist to find the object of his study. Our incessant focus on diversity, however, necessarily cuts against any vision of the university as a formative institution that makes our characters more uniform. Without such uniformity, there can be no Harvard Man. Nor does the College’s mission statement help us here. It speaks of “transformation,” but it does not provide a clear image of what we ought to become.¹ Its mention of Harvard students as the future “citizen-leaders of our society” suggests a mild civic responsibility. Without enumerating the qualities necessary for citizenship or leadership, however—much less how a liberal arts education is meant to inculcate them—it is too insubstantial to serve as a real guide to that transformation.

Nor is this apparent aimlessness new to the College. To understand its historical character, one ought to look to the writings of men with long connections to it, who might thereby have a clear picture of it not merely in their own times but over the years. Henry Adams, the scion of many of Harvard’s most distinguished families and a sometime professor, is such a man. But in his autobiography, The Education of Henry Adams, one finds mostly criticism. “Any other education,” he writes, “would have required a serious effort, but no one took Harvard College seriously.”² He moderates this critique somewhat by suggesting that Harvard was no more harmful than any other university, but this is faint praise for a college which, “if successful, resulted in an autobiographical blank, a mind on which only a water-mark had been stamped.”³ William James, writing in 1903, when Harvard was beginning to achieve not just national but international significance, paints a similar picture, though in much more approving terms. In James’ view, Harvard men—the “true missionaries” of the “inner spiritual Harvard”—are drawn to “her persistently atomistic constitution, of her tolerance of exceptionality and eccentricity, of her devotion to the principles of individual vocation and choice.”⁴

This independence is perhaps the one trait that has been most clearly passed from one generation of Harvard men to the next; as President James Conant noted in 1936, “heresy has long been in the air.”⁵ It is this independence that brought them to protest rancid butter, betray the Crown, and abandon Trinitarianism. One can see the progressive revolutions that so often overcome campus not as a rejection but as a continuation of a long Harvard tradition. Even conservative students feel and are moved by this spirit. This solitary spirit often becomes destructive, but we must acknowledge it as our own nonetheless.

This insistence on freedom does not seem so distinctive when one looks broadly at American academia, but before despairing that the Harvard Man is illusory, one must remember how many of our predecessors really were great. No matter what faults we may find in this institution across the ages, those men built a glorious nation. Alongside the statesmen, philosophers, and poets stand those who found glory in sacrifice; we have educated the most recipients of the Medal of Honor of any institution of higher education (besides, of course, the service academies).⁶ Our alma mater, I think, equipped them for these great deeds with more than simple freedom. Their formal lessons, one hopes, carried some force. We have never entirely escaped our Puritan origins (nor should we hope to); always has there been some moral mission set before us, whether it be Christo et ecclesiae or, less formally, patriae et mundi.

Yet I do not think the Harvard Man of yore—certainly not her students today—are primarily formed in the classroom. Instead, students at this college become Harvard Men by engrafting themselves into the tradition that hangs over Harvard Square like a fog. This is no mere reverence for the past; conservative though such an impulse may be, it is not unique to our campus. Harvard’s particular magic is to put us in a position of formal equality with the Great Men who have previously filled her halls despite the obvious inequalities that nevertheless persist. They, like us, were students once; they, like us, made their deepest friendships here; they, like us, grew into manhood upon the Yard. It is not simply that we feel it necessary to prove ourselves against them; such sentiments are present everywhere. We become the inheritors, and thereby the guardians, of the civilization they built. What is most important about Harvard is not what one learns here but that one lives here, that one weaves himself into her history.

This spirit, this mix of confidence and ambition, preexists our time. To refer just once more to the writings of our predecessors, it shines through the Harvard Register, a monthly student-run journal published in the 1820s. The introduction to its first essay, written by Cornelius Conway Felton, who would later go on to be president of the university, explains its purpose thus: “The essays that appear in our work will necessarily show what are the most prominent objects of affection among us, and thus afford a means of comparing the present with the past. In an institution like this, and in an age and country where improvements of every kind are going rapidly forward, each successive class of students ought to advance somewhat beyond the point attained by their predecessors.”⁷ Felton further explains that, “We are aware, too, of the danger of attempting to follow in the high paths where genius has gone before. That we have not adopted their advice must not be imputed to a self-complacent idea that we are capable of rivalling our distinguished predecessors.”⁸ Of course not; it would be impious to suggest otherwise. But they followed those high paths nonetheless.

The true Harvard Man does not shrink when the time comes to make his mark on History. Harvard the institution will always fall short of Harvard the ideal; often, it falls short even of any reasonable standard for a university. But nevertheless, generation after generation, she has been able to conjure up in men’s minds the image of an America—and of a West—worth sacrificing for. The memories of past glory enchant us into the belief that these buildings are more than mere brick and mortar. Even if it is grounded in nothing else, her prestige is justified by her ability to give men of every age the self-assurance necessary to assert themselves in defense of the culture they inherit upon matriculation here.

Nearly anyone with enough academic ability to keep up will find that he fits somewhere at Harvard, because it is rare that she demands her students be a certain type of man. In fact, today it is only the man who comes expecting that he will be not merely taught but formed who will feel entirely out of place here. But that does not mean there is no way to know who should fit at Harvard. The true Harvard Man is the one who uses the freedom offered by this lack of active formation not as a shield from responsibility but as an arena in which to practice those manly virtues that will serve him well when he leaves these gates and finds his fate in his own hands. In this regard, we are handicapped in relation to our predecessors, given that most of us lack the classically-informed education and personal familiarity with great men that they once had before they even matriculated. But this is no excuse for failing to follow after them—of trying to stretch beyond them.

As with many of us, I have been asked countless times why I chose to attend Harvard. I usually answer, honestly enough, that between the financial aid and the prestige, I didn’t feel that I could go elsewhere. But the other, more sincere, reason is that I hoped to find whatever it was that made John Adams and Theodore Roosevelt into the men they were. I think I have seen that sacred fire. It glimmers from under the occasional dorm room door and from the fifty-yard line of Soldiers Field. It darts between the stacks in Widener and gleams in through Annenberg’s stained glass windows. It even deigns, from time to time, to enter a classroom. Its light is no less beautiful for the urgency with which it flickers, and even today it is warm enough to set a man afire. There is only one question necessary to determine whether someone will fit at Harvard: will you keep that great American flame alive?

MARCUS PORCIUS CATO

A version of this article originally appeared in Patriot Dreams, the May 2025 print issue of the Salient.

1. “Mission, Vision, & History,” Harvard.

2. Henry Adams, “The Education of Henry Adams,” in Henry Adams, edited by Ernest Samuels and Jayne N. Samuels, Library of America, 1983, p. 769.

3. Ibid, p. 770.

4. The Harvard Book, edited by William Bentinck, Harvard University Press, 1982, p. 11.

5. Ibid, p. 1.

6. Paul E. Mawn, “Medal of Honor Recipients from Harvard University,” April 10, 2025.

7. The Harvard Register, Hilliard, Metcalf, & Co., 1828, 2. Emphasis added. This introduction is anonymous. I possess, however, a bound copy of the volumes of the Register, from the collection of Sen. Robert C. Winthrop ‘28, who wrote for the journal, in which Felton’s name is penciled next to its title.

8. Ibid, 3.