Monday, Sep. 15, 1986

People

By Guy D. Garcia

"The suspense of this momentous occasion has been killing me," confessed Prince Charles, as he addressed a crowd of 18,000 last week after waiting through 105 minutes of learned perorations celebrating Harvard University's 350th anniversary. Not that H.R.H. had any reason to worry. No stranger to pomp and circumstance, Charles (B.A., Cambridge, 1970) was resplendent in his academic gown. He scored high marks with self-deprecating quips ("Have no fear, ladies and gentlemen. I am used to being regarded as an anachronism") and a serious speech, which he wrote himself, on the dangers of allowing the teaching of technology to supersede humanistic values ("A good man, as the Greeks would say, is a nobler work than a good technologist"). The American Cantabrigians were duly charmed, and while Charles went on to the rest of his brief, sans-Di U.S. visit, they resumed their four-day-long birthday party.