dormitories on Oxford Street. One of his advisers spoke with a strong East Indian accent. Another, poorly dressed and seemingly frightened by his approach, could respond only in Spanish. Along the way he listened to passersby to see if he could hear the famous Harvard accent.
"There is no such thing as a Harvard accent," his roommate, a black minister's son from Gabon in Africa, said to him when he finally arrived at Richards Hall. "That's not what this place is all about. Welcome to Harvard."
31
HARVARD: THE WORLD'S greatest university, they called it up there. Certainly at least a global university, with a culture as different from that of Clayville, Alabama, as it was possible to get and still remain in the United States. The ambience of Harvard University comes not so much from its profusion of museums and libraries, or the rat's maze of its narrow streets, but from its compression of time and space that speak centuries of history.
A cannon shot away from Cambridge Common, where Washington took command of the colonial army, lies Harvard Yard, where students rioted in 1969 against the Vietnam War, "Power to the people!," in the same small space trampled by their predecessors in the Food Riot of 1766, "Behold, our butter doth stink!" The site of the college at its founding in 1636, the Old Yard, is faced by University Hall, where hang the flags of visiting heads of state next to that of Harvard, crimson and emblazoned with the word VE-RI-TAS. Behind University Hall is the open space called the Tercentenary Theatre, which in turn is flanked by Memorial Church to the left and straight ahead by Sever and Emerson Halls, respectively the haunts of great preachers and philosophers, and to the right by massive Widener Library, given by a wealthy family to memorialize their scion who perished on the Titanic. The library, gathering place of all students and some of the world's greatest scholars, is also where a thief was severely injured falling from a window clutching Harvard's Gutenberg Bible. The library's countless front steps seat many of the twenty-four thousand that crowd into the Tercentenary Theatre on each June Commencement Day. The ceremony is marked by the conferring of honorary degrees on up to ten famous people. Their identity is kept secret until the banquet in their honor is celebrated by hundreds the night before in cavernous Memorial Hall, built in 1872 to honor Harvard men who died in the War Between the States--Union dead only, Raff noticed, not Harvard Confederate dead. The Victorian structure, whose clock tower once sheltered a nest of peregrine falcons before the species nearly went extinct from pesticide poisoning, gives way southeastward to several of the greatest art museums in America, and westward to the towering, modern Science Center, neo-ziggurat in design and devoted with imperial grandeur to undergraduate science education. Only a block northeast from Memorial Hall is the even more towering quasi-skyscraper William James Hall, housing the social sciences, and whose vicinity is avoided during winter due to the galelike arctic winds that whip around it, the shape and apartness of the building having been designed inadvertently to make it an inside-out wind tunnel. Thence on northward down Divinity Avenue and Oxford Street are met the buildings and humming bustle of the popularly named Science City, dominated by the glassy palaces of molecular and cellular biology, crowding and dwarfing historic Divinity Hall, home of nineteenth-century great thinkers, and reducing to insignificance other venerable, mostly wooden buildings that house the largest privately owned collection of plants and animals in the world. In the Museum of Comparative Zoology reside a ten-foot moa skeleton from New Zealand, two of the thirty-two specimens of the extinct great auk known to exist, the world's largest fossil turtle, the reference specimen of a new species of bird collected by Lewis and Clark, and over five million carefully curated insect specimens from all over the world. And then finally, beyond to the northeast, on the margin of the university both metaphorically and literally, apart and serene, resembling nothing so much as a squashed-down cathedral, is the Divinity School, with its magnificent book collections, sometimes referred to by skeptics among the nearby scientists as the Library of Revealed Information.
Altogether a human anthill, a kaleidoscope of specialists, whose lives are molded to ensure their own well-being through service to the greater good. The most distracting concern to this son of the Gulf Coast was the length and cruelty of the winter. For