Welcome
This area of the website aims to document early Australian contacts with Harvard University. Click on the links in the column to the right for information on the different divisions of Harvard University. For the moment, the website will focus on contacts prior to 1945. An individual qualifies as ‘Australian’ if they lived in Australia prior to coming to study at Harvard. Several of these individuals probably did not think of themselves as Australian. Individuals are included who were considered Harvard Alumni whether or not they enrolled as degree students. Individuals who lived in Australia for the first time after studying at Harvard are not included here. This is a communal project, and David Haig would welcome corrections (and additions!).
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An Australian Graduate of Harvard Describes
Some Significant American Trends
AUSTRALIAN movie-goers are frequently shocked by the apparent childishness of American colleges. The life at these holiday institutions is portrayed in the films in terms of semi-professional football games, “co-ed” love-making, and the antics of fraternity initiations. Hollywood shows us little but the “rah-rah” spirit, the organised barracking directed by “cheer leaders,” and the moaning campus crooner.
The true state of affairs can more readily be appreciated by the recent efforts of Harvard and Yale to emulate English universities. Such changes, however, cannot be made overnight. …
The “House plan” at Harvard has been an unqualified success. Seven separate Houses were built, very similar to the colleges of an English university in their relative autonomy. Strikingly beautiful in their Georgian colonial brick style, they have towers reminiscent of Christopher Wren’s, and their walls are not unlike those of Hampton Court. They bear the names of some of the many illustrious men who have held the presidency of the University in the course of its 300 years’ history; there are John Winthrop House, Eliot House, Leverett, Lowell, Adams, Kirkland, and Dunster.
[The Argus (Melbourne): Saturday 26 November 1938]