The COVID-19 evacuation wasn’t Harvard’s first, explain historians

A look at how the coronavirus pandemic upended classes and life at Harvard, when the University sent students back home and began online learning, in an extraordinary measure that has only one precedent in its 384-year history.

The evacuation of campus two months ago due to the mushrooming coronavirus outbreak was a jarring but orderly affair. But then, it turns out, Harvard has had significant and varied experience with upheaval.

In 1775 George Washington’s Continental Army occupied the campus, and the Massachusetts Committee of Safety ordered Harvard to vacate its grounds. Professor Joyce Chaplin reminded her students of that earlier crisis during their last on-campus class on March 11 as a way to offer some comfort by putting the move to distance learning into a historical context.

“I wanted to try to reassure students that this was not unprecedented,” said Chaplin, the James Duncan Phillips Professor of Early American History. “The assumption was that Harvard had never had to do this before.” And other experts of the period note that not only has Harvard faced other trials, but the one in the early days of the Revolution left many students then with a renewed sense of commitment to make a difference. In that earlier evacuation students were told to leave the campus on May 1 and move to nearby Concord, where they stayed for eight months. Commencement was postponed “in consideration of the difficult and unsettled state of our public affairs,” according to records of Harvard’s Board of Overseers from that time. Students reconvened in Cambridge on June 21 the following year.

This year, March brought similar changes. As the threat from COVID-19 rose globally in the first part of the year, the disease drew inexorably closer until reaching the Boston area. Before it struck hard, but when it became clear it would, Harvard decided to conduct the rest of the semester remotely through digital learning. Students shortly left for spring break, but this year not to return. Faculty had about 10 days to pivot their teaching toward online platforms. Staff members had to adapt to doing their jobs remotely, or to add masks, gloves, and caution to their campus routines if they were essential personnel.

For a major university, these were lightning-quick changes. But in the weeks to come, the internet systems held strong, professors taught, students learned, and Harvard continued its mission, to the point of having its graduation ceremony, this year called “Honoring the Harvard Class of 2020,” on line this Thursday morning. The program begins at 10:30, with the ceremony starting at 11. A grander, in-person celebration of the class will await safer times.

Harvard has weathered other disruptions during its long history, though they were more common in the University’s early years, said Zach Nowak ’18, a College Fellow at the History Department.

In 1639, Harvard shut down for a year after Nathaniel Eaton, the School’s first head, was fired over allegations that he’d severely beaten students and that his wife had served them spoiled fish and hasty pudding that had somehow been laced with goat dung.