Collegiate Found Ten Extra Years. Boston Latin Wasn't Impressed.

I have tried adding years to my age only once, at nineteen, at a bar, and was not believed.

Collegiate had been working on this for a while. In 1974, the Crimson reported, the headmaster and a trustee had sent the school's head librarian to Holland to research its origins. The evidence included two letters by Jonas Michaelius, the first ordained Dutch Reformed minister in Manhattan, who wrote that he had begun teaching there in 1628. Officially, the history teacher conceded, Collegiate still began in 1638, but there had been an informal setting where education was taking place before.

Then the quotes. Collegiate's director of college guidance said the timing was coincidental and there was no ulterior motive. The headmaster called it more an intellectual argument than a date of real importance. A secretary in the development office was less measured: "You'd better believe it. I don't care what anyone else says. We believe it!"

That is how you defend a founding date. I would like her on my side in every argument I have ever lost.

Harvard was untroubled. A university spokesman said Collegiate, being a high school, wouldn't really be in the picture for the oldest institution of higher learning, and then added, helpfully, that Boston Latin School was probably older than Harvard anyway.

Boston Latin agrees. Founded April 23, 1635, by the Town of Boston, it calls itself the oldest school in America. Its headmaster told the New York Times in 1985 that a founding date "is when the institution began as a school," and that Boston Latin was the oldest. Meanwhile Trinity School, Collegiate's athletic rival across town, calls itself the oldest school in continuous operation, because Collegiate was closed for part of the Revolutionary War.

The Times summed it up in one line: "In this situation, there is simply no final arbiter."

Collegiate has settled the question for itself. It uses 1628 and is planning its four-hundredth anniversary for 2028.

The youngest asked me last week how old I am. I told her. She said that couldn't be right, because her friend's dad is younger and has less gray. I said there was an informal setting in which I was younger, before. She said there was no ulterior motive in asking. I said I'd better believe it.