ABSTRACT
For students—there were plenty of others who took no part and could not care less—the guts of the Harvard social system were the so-called final clubs, which one might be invited to join no earlier than one's sophomore year. Harvard University had gradually bought them up, but continued to operate them as if it too were simply a real-estate agent. For instance, it provided no common dining rooms as it did in the freshman dormitories. The houses would become communities to which all members of Harvard society would naturally belong. Harvard had not been a community of this sort for a century. The house was Kirkland, named after a distinguished president of Harvard in the early part of the nineteenth century. Harvard today would be a far worse place if we abandoned them and returned to something like the old regime. Lowell, with Eliot but in a very different way, was one of the two great modern presidents of Harvard.
