Rivalries & rituals / A birthday investigation · 1974–2028
Collegiate would like ten more candles
The school was already very old. Its age still needed a little work.
Collegiate sent its head librarian to Holland to investigate the school’s beginnings. This was in 1974. The headmaster and a trustee had arranged the trip, which seems a considerable effort for a school already well past its three-hundredth birthday. I would have been prepared to take its word for being old.
The extra decade lay between 1628 and 1638. By 1984, teacher Massimo Maglione was arguing for the earlier date, based on teaching that had taken place in Manhattan before Collegiate’s official beginning. Officially, he acknowledged, it was still 1638. That must be an awkward birthday to put on a form.
Imagine trying to explain this on a school tour. You reach the founding date, a subject on which you might reasonably expect to relax. Now there is a follow-up question. You had been ready for homework, lunch, and whether a shy child would find friends. You had not prepared to defend the seventeenth century.
The proposed date put Collegiate ahead of Harvard. Coincidence, said Collegiate’s college-guidance director. Harvard’s response was that its claim concerned colleges, not schools. Just when someone has found ten extra years, you discover you are attending a different birthday party.
Collegiate’s headmaster, meanwhile, described the matter as more of an intellectual argument than a date of real importance. I picture our tour parent nodding very carefully at this point.
Today the boys’ school on Manhattan’s Upper West Side uses 1628 and looks forward to its four-hundredth anniversary in 2028. I hope whoever is in charge of the candles has placed a firm deadline on further historical discoveries.