I’m dubious. I went to Harvard, and most of the time, most of us grabbed utensils in the dining hall before grabbing food from the servers. All the forks came out of a bin of forks, and they were all equivalent.
Harvard did have “finals clubs” (Yale had secret societies and Princeton had eating clubs.) They were a fairly minor part of the landscape until the drinking age went up, and they (not directly regulated by the college) became the only places that could easily host “wet” parties and suddenly became far more important. But I don’t think they went in for formal dining with lots of fussy forks. I think they went in more for drunken raucous parties with finger food.
My grandmother set a very formal table, and I leaned which fork to use as a child. It’s not a skill I’ve ever found terribly useful. I think “oh no, which fork should I use!” is just a literary trope, like “we must remove the bullet!”
I just meant the part about some students at elite schools knowing each other from prep school or lacrosse camp or the yacht club or wherever. But you kind of have that everywhere. I’m sure pretty much every school dining hall issues forks and other utensils in a giant bin.
I was explicitly told by someone that if I wanted to be considered for a certain job at Harvard, a formal dinner would be part of it and it would absolutely make a difference how I comported myself. Then again, that goes way beyond merely knowing which fork to use, and it is not quite unique to Harvard and Yale: other places that can pick and choose their colleagues would not exactly be picking my name out of a hat and flipping a coin when deciding whether or not to hire me.
Did you read the article? Cocktail parties, strippers, sexual harassment… I still think they go more for drunken raucus parties with finger food than with formal dinners where you have to choose among forks.
No, I wasn’t a member. I’m female. And no one I knew was a member, or cared what they did. (Except a friend of the boyfriend of a friend, who told some pretty nasty stories about the Porcellian and how they hazed new members.) They were on their way to becoming obsolete and irrelevant until the drinking age was raised, and they suddenly became one of the few place where students could drink.
"You show up in a coat and tie and then you eat and change into athletic clothes and you throw a football and smoke a cigar and play croquet,” said the former president. After that, the list is cut to 50. “The next event is typically a date event at a castle in Newport, Rhode Island, that costs $25,000 to put on. You put on a coat and tie and get bused down there with your date,” he added.
After that, it’s cut to 30.
So, an elitist bunch of snobs who judge you on how well you do at a series of formal dinners.
“Any elitism doesn’t have to do with social economic background,” said the former president. “It more has to do with us wanting . . . the coolest kids on campus to be in our club.”
Good luck being the coolest kid on campus if you don’t know which fork to use.
I took that at face value, but now you’ve explained that, being female, you were never in contention, I’m more inclined to believe the Harvard Admin, JD, the “past president” and the other sources I’d heard from.
I also believe that is is probable that most people go to Harvard and never notice elitism: I find that easy to believe. It would have been true about my university. The elites didn’t spend time talking to me or my friends, and I only came in contact through the most remote unlikely events.
So, like many Harvard alum, I’ve followed Harvard’s war on the finals clubs pretty closely. They didn’t go after them because they were “too elite”. As the article quotes someone, more students are upset about not getting into a popular class than about not getting into a finals club. They went after them because they were responsible for a large fraction of the sexual harassment on campus, as well as a lot of other alcohol-inspired issues. But, as you can imagine, having a small group of young men be the gatekeepers for the only “wet” parties on campus became a problem for quite a lot of people.
I mean, are they one of the places where old money/scions of socially powerful families connect? Yes, they are. Or they certainly were. But honestly, there are a lot of other places to do that at Harvard. And they weren’t the most important such venue in my time, although I believe they had been, once upon a time. In my era, it may have been more important to get into Elliott House. (houses are now randomly assigned.)
But this isn’t a thread about social elitism, it’s about forks. And none of the “elite groups” required you to know which fork to use – the “in” people already know who else is “in”. There’s nothing new about social networking. And while it’s true that the “elite” groups liked to add a few “cool” kids to salt it up…you know what? Cool kids are cool in part because they are really good at picking up on social cues. And you can tell which fork to use by picking up yours a fraction of a second after your host picks up his.
I actually was invited to a fancy luncheon at one of the secret societies at Yale, once. I even got to see their copy of a Shakespeare first folio. I was invited by an elderly alum, when I was college shopping, so it was a staid affair with lots of old people, not a drunken party. The cutlery was unremarkable and not at all intimidating.
Relistened to those lectures: It’s the Dan Mulligan plays, by Harrigan and Hart:
“Dan Mulligan demonstrates his ignorance of polite society manners when, during a fancy luncheon, he wipes his mouth on the tablecloth, wipes his nose on his napkin, dips his napkin in the cuspidor, brushes his hair with the crumb brush, and then breaks a loaf of bread over his knee.”
No explicit mention of silverware, but I’ll bet it happened
I do recall that questions about proper silverware usage were used in early IQ tests to skew the results according to class. So the idea of silverware as a class filter was certainly out there, regardless of how often it was used in actual dining.
There is the almost certainly apocryphal story of the Duke of Connaught visiting northern BC, sometime between 1911 and 1916 and eating with his entourage in a diner. After the main course, as the waitress cleared the plates she whispered to the royal, “Keep your fork, Duke, there’s pie.”
