Andrew Delbanco, a professor of literature at Columbia University, has a ravishingly written and emotionally charged essay, "The university in a time of war," in the last hard-copy edition of TNR that is also available online. It deals with the intellectual, moral, and spiritual distance between war and the experience of it at home and from a distance in time. This is not about Vietnam, save inter alia, and it is not really about Iraq. But the experience of both is in its reasoning. At the end of his essay, Delbanco muses about the fact that there seems not to be a memorial or memorials anywhere on campus to Columbia men and women who died fighting for their country in its wars. This happens not to be the case at Harvard where I taught for decades and near which I live. In fact, there seem to me many memorials for each of the nation's wars, including the war which split the nation. But, on that war, there is still dispute. The Harvard men who fought for the Grand Army of the Republic are commemorated in somber dignity. The men who fought for the Confederacy are no where mentioned, not on a single plaque together, or on individual plaques separately, as the Union dead are. Of course, Harvard sees itself very much enmeshed on the side of the Union. Robert Gould Shaw commanded a black regiment, immortalized in "Ode to the Union Dead," a poem by Robert Lowell, and in the movie Glory, directed by Edward Zwick (the director of Blood Diamond out this week). Throughout his entire career, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. memorialized the war and measured men by whether they had participated in it. More Harvard men died in the Second World War than in any other war, and in Memorial Church their names are listed so that all can see and remember. Even one of its alumni who died in German ranks is noted on this stark wall. The two who died in the Japanese Army are not. Anyway, given Delbanco's meditation on war and universities and his observation about Columbia, I thought some of our readers might be interested in a different experience with war dead. And it is here from The Harvard Crimson three years ago.