Harvard College Baccalaureate for the Class of 2024 , May 21, 2024

Harvard College Baccalaureate , May 21, 2024
Tuesday, May 21, 2 p.m. Tercentenary Theatre
The Baccalaureate Service has long been associated with the commencement exercises of American colleges and universities and forms a link between these increasingly secular institutions and their religious origins. The term baccalaureate is derived from two Latin words, bacca, or “berry,” and laureus, “laurel,” which might refer to the wreaths of laurel with which new graduates were crowned in European ceremonies of the medieval period.
Harvard’s first Commencement, that of 1642, is the first recorded such ceremony in English North America, and in it are rudiments of its Cambridge University ancestor, whose thirteenth-century statutes describe a Baccalaureate sermon preached while a candidate “sat with bowed head over which his hood was drawn, a picture of abject humility and utter embarrassment.” No seventeenth-century Harvard Baccalaureate sermons survive: eighteenth-century specimens are post-revolutionary, with the 1794 sermon of David Tappan, third Hollis Professor of Divinity, one of the oldest. One symbol of continuity maintained in this service is the singing of Psalm 78 to the tune St. Martin’s. The text and tune have been sung at Harvard Commencement and Baccalaureate at least since 1806.
In the nineteenth century, the seniors in Harvard College routinely extended an invitation to the President to address them, and with few exceptions this tradition has been maintained. For some years it has been our happy custom to include the readings from scriptures sacred to the many religious traditions of the Class and to invite members of the Harvard Chaplains to offer prayers in behalf of the Class, the University, and the world. The occasion is both joyful and solemn, intimate and public, filled with the exuberance of youth and sustained by venerable and weighty tradition. Next to Commencement itself, Baccalaureate is perhaps our oldest public occasion.