Student Activism for a Worthy Cause

Lots of students are protesting these days--in Chapel Hill it was over former Attorney General Michael Mukasey, who was UNC Law School's graduation speaker; in Indiana, it's over President Obama's speech at Notre Dame.   

 Save the energy for a useful project. ...  Like this one ...  getting a better looking diploma!  From Christopher Francese's op-ed in the New York Times:

I know that getting rid of the Latin diploma will not be easy. While most  colleges and universities now issue English diplomas, some prominent holdouts — including Yale, Princeton and the University of Pennsylvania — still use Latin. Many students and alumni cherish the tradition. In 1961,in the “diploma riots,” when Harvard switched to English diplomas, about 4,000 students protested and criticized the new documents as “Y.M.C.A. certificates."

Gotta love it--a protest because my diploma was going to be in English rather than Latin. Oh, my friends who work on class issues in the academy would just love this--Harvard students looking down their noses at the YMCA. An important reminder that we dispose of tradition at the risk of a high cost.

You want a diploma in Latin? Here's an image of James Madison's diploma.

Update: This is a lot better than I'd imagined. Going back to The Crimson's on-line archive, I see that four people received five day jail sentences over the Diploma Riot. (One for drunkenness--the others, apparently, for disturbing the peace.) Apparently, discussion of the shift had been going on for some time--back at least to the mid-1950s. There was opposition not just from students, but from faculty, too. According to one pre-riot story, Elliott Perkins '23, a master of one of the undergraduate houses said "I think it's very bad  .... The new diploma's not as dignified as the old."  

So this is a story of elite people rioting to maintain their privilege. Great story in there, I'm sure. And I also see that Pete Seeger sang there that spring--so perhaps there is a connection between Seeger's activism and the students? A story of transferred issues, perhaps? Hard to know--and very speculative.

But this is the best: a greeting-card company made a print to commemorate the riot. From a Crimson story:

Avant Gardes--the company issuing the etchings--destroyed the printer's plate after making only 1000 copies in an effort to turn the etchings into "real collectors' items." The students involved in the company estimate that all the cards will be sold by this weekend. Several local bookstores, newsstands, and photographic stores are carrying the prints. 

The original for the prints was drawn by George Haling, a graduate student in Fine Arts at Boston University. Dennis L. Milford '63, a Loweb House classics major, supplied a Latin caption engraved in diploma script.

God, I love America: a riot to keep Latin, then one of our businesses commemorates the riot!   This has all the makin's of an undergraduate honors thesis.

Comments

[eric]

A friend of mine went to law school at Harvard. When he got his diploma, identifying the school in Latin as Universitate Harvardiana, his father (a very witty man with a very charming Middle European accent that makes him seem all the wittier) expressed mock chagrin: "You mean I just spent all that money to send you to Harvard, and now everyone is going to think you went to Indiana?!"

[Orin Kerr]

I googled around a bit, and it seems that the "diploma riot" was initially intended to be a joke -- a bunch of students put on togas and protested *in Latin*. You can find a description here:

http://books.google.com/books?id=hxpvsfxjfMAC&pg=PA212&lpg=PA212&dq=1961+harvard+diploma+riots&source=bl&ots=qChwMZ24kF&sig=_-Q6oIX_EgG1-1PNvHKIEl8M-oM&hl=en&ei=nIQQStv4EsaFtgeS3rCBCA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=4

From a letter of the editor of the Harvard Magazine, here's description of the guy who started the "riot":

************************
He was Philip Alston Stone ’62, a son of Oxford, Mississippi, and a true godson of William Faulkner. His novel, No Place to Run, was published by Viking Press our freshman year. The fifth-reunion class report noted that, "At Harvard, Phil’s celebrity as a novelist, his wit, and his enormous comic talent quickly brought him renown as a raconteur….His finest performance was the night of April 26, 1961, when, on the steps of Widener, he delivered the Latin oration denouncing the hated English diplomas. Attired in two Quincy House curtains and a wreath of oak leaves, he spoke the language of Cicero in the accents of Earl Long. Few who were there that night will ever forget the great pause in ‘Linguam anglicam amamus, sed…’ Phil revelled in the crowd’s delighted roars."

John Sando ’62
Bethesda, Md.
*************

It seems that things got out of control the next night, as the University President who made the decision to switch was genuinely unpopular because he ignored student wishes: The issue, although trivial, apparently tapped into some more serious complaints students had about the University.

That's what a bit of googling suggests, at least.

[Alfred]

I love this, Orin!