Harvard’s long-ago student risings
On Nov. 1, 1818, in quiet Harvard Yard, undergraduates gathered for Sunday dinner at University Hall. As usual, each of the four classes assembled in its own dining room on the first floor. It was a peaceful collegiate scene, typical of Harvard in that period. Then all hell broke loose. A major food fight set off a cascade of disturbances, and within a week the entire sophomore class was expelled. That was the Harvard of that period too: a font of periodic student unrest. There were “rebellions” at the College in 1766, 1768, 1780, 1805, 1807, 1818, 1823, and 1834, with many smaller disturbances in between. But Harvard hardly had a monopoly on such strife. From 1760 to 1860, wrote historian David F. Allmendinger Jr., American colleges as a whole experienced “a rising curve of collective student disorder.” Harvard’s era of dissent began with the “Great Butter Rebellion” of 1766. It was the...