The Faculty Sifting Freshmen. (Click anywhere on the photo to enlarge.)
As we again welcome freshmen this week for the 376th time, I thought you might enjoy two views of the process from a 1900 Harvard Lampoon in our collections. The first is entitled “Faculty Sifting Freshmen” showing the the College administation as a grizzled old gardener sifting potting soil.
The second is a little ditty entitled The Freshman’s Meditation. I may be wrong, but this ancient verse makes a neat little modern rap:
Click anywhere on the image to enlarge
Incoming freshmen take note: the chorus girls have entirely disappeared, and you shan’t have till next October “to make it up” should you decide to partake of the fizz.
Oh, those were the days…
I know you’ll all join me in welcoming the Class of 2016 to Cambridge, and the class of 2015 to Adams House.
On the Freshman Meditation song: end of third stanza – “Midnight bats, and all that biz.” It may be common knowledge, but in this context “bats” refers to parties, perhaps as we might later say “bashes.” At a local school in Albany, the girls still celebrate a “bacon bat,” an annual outdoor get-together of games and picnic at which, in the early 1900s, they roasted bacon, rather than hot dogs.