Word: summa
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...descendant of early New England settlers, including Roger Williams, Chafee was born in Providence R.I. on December 7, 1885. He was raised there and attended the town's university. At Brown, which the left in 1907 carring a Phi Betta Kappa Key, a summa citation, and an A.B., Chafee's chief interests were writing and Latin translation. In fact, he considers his two greatest achievements to be drafting the Federal Inter-pleader Act of 1934 and translating the anonymous Latin Poem Pervigilium Veneris while at Brown. After a few years of working for his father's manufacturing firm, reading Blackstone...
...first began storing up when, at 13, an attack of infantile paralysis set him haunting the galleries of Manhattan's Metropolitan Museum in a wheelchair. Convinced that he wanted to become a museum man, Walker went to Harvard ('30), breezed through the Fogg Museum training course summa cum laude, found time on the side to found (with Balletomane Lincoln Kirstein and Esthete Edward M. M. Warburg) the Harvard Society for Contemporary Art (profaned by other Harvard-men as the Society for Contemptuous Art) and contribute to Kirstein's then fashionable, upperbrow Hound and Horn...
Professor Perry Miller, who delights in refuting this myth, remembers when Schlesinger was "a shy little sophomore drama critic taking orders from seniors on the Advocate." Miller tutored Schlesinger when he wrote his summa thesis on the radical Jacksonian reformer Orestes Brownson, but "I was really only a nominal tutor," Miller says, "since Arthur's first drafts seldom needed any revision." The thesis was published as a book shortly after his graduation. "If you plan to write a book, college is the best time," according to Schlesinger. "You'll never again have so much free time or be so innocent...
Delayed Degree. When Sigmund was four, the family moved to Vienna. A bookworm, he graduated from high school summa cum laude at 17. It was then the fashion in polite strata of most European society to lock sex in a darkened bedroom and pretend that otherwise (except for haut-monde libertines and the licentious "lower classes") it did not exist. For whatever inner need, the adolescent Freud accepted this viewpoint, once even warned his sister Anna off Balzac and Dumas...
Honors undoubtedly represent to the layman academic achievement of any kind, but in scholarly circles they have always indicated a particular excellence--in the writing of a thesis. The very terms-- summa, magna, and cum laude, --stem from awards given in the Middle Ages for the reading of theses or discourses. At present, however, a number of Harvard graduates get honors degrees without writing theses, through the program of Cum Laude in General Studies. While CLGS is often used to allow people with low marks as lowerclassmen to write theses, it also allows people with high marks to avoid this...