Quotation from "The Harvard Book"

By Sean O’Faolain
It is really the undergraduate who makes a university, gives it its lasting character, smell, feel, quality, tradition. You can never know a university, or even belong to it, by entering it as a graduate student; it may even be that no professor coming to it late from another university will ever know it as well as his newcome sophomores, juniors and seniors. It is these whose presence creates it and whose memories preserve it---its rakes, rapscallions and idlers, it rebels and its aberrants, no less than its scholars, sloggers and bright stars. It is to those that the first toast should be drunk at every university dinner: To every shade who here once was happy, because he was young. I think that it is in recognition of this truth and not from snobbery that your true Harvardian says, with just the faintest emphasis, that he went to Harvard College.