Near the bicentennial of Thoreau’s birth, a look at his Harvard years
Like countless students before and since, Henry David Thoreau, Class of 1837, had his problems with Harvard. It was too fixed on drilling and grades for him, his classmates were too rowdy, and on the whole he would rather have been in the woods of Concord. Indeed, he was in those woods, he wrote in his class book, for “hours that should have been devoted to study.” In 1840, he dismissed the unearned master’s degree that Harvard offered him, as it did then to all alumni three years after graduation. “Let every sheep keep its skin,” he sniffed. And when Ralph Waldo Emerson said that Harvard taught all the branches of knowledge, Thoreau replied: “Yes, all the branches and none of the roots.” Now, however, as we celebrate the bicentennial of his birth, on July 12, 1817, it is clear that his protest should not be taken too seriously. Harvard profoundly influenced...