Portals to Eden

This is matriculation season at American colleges and universities, which means that on many campuses, it is a season of gates—specifically, the ritual of passing through them (or posing in front of them) to celebrate the rich range of possibilities and relationships associated with the life of the mind.  The passage, crucially, is spatial as well as temporal. Gates aren’t mere entrances and exits—neutral dividers between town and gown, street A and quad B. At their best, from Harvard’s Johnston Gate to the University of Chicago’s Cobb Gate to Berkeley’s Sather Gate, they’re extraordinary objects and stirring thresholds, charged with powerful meaning and leavened by campus lore.

Many ungated European universities, like the Sorbonne in Paris, are interspersed with the business and busyness of city life. Other institutions, however, are tranquil refuges. At Trinity College, Oxford, one enters through delicate iron gates flanked by muscular stone piers. Affording a view of the college’s lush lawns and picturesque buildings, Trinity’s Broad Street gates are at once an imposing portal and an inviting picture frame. In the same vein, at Harvard, the formidable brick piers and lacy ironwork of Johnston Gate frame an enticing view of the Edenic precinct of Harvard Yard. The broad outlines are similar enough to the Trinity portal to make you wonder whether it influenced the Harvard gate’s architect, Charles McKim of the celebrated McKim, Mead & White firm.

Almost all gates, of course, exist for practical reasons. Railroads need them to prevent trains from colliding with vehicles and pedestrians. Ranchers need them to keep livestock in. The reverse was true at rural American institutions in the mid-19th century; some built utilitarian gates and fences to keep livestock out, lest roving cattle chew up campus lawns. Then, as America urbanized in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, city campuses may have sought to build gates to shield their placid, leafy quadrangles from screeching streetcars and other hurly-burly. But in all likelihood, there was more to it than that.

The campuses themselves were being transformed from small, colonial-era colleges into huge, modern research institutions. Their old borders—at Harvard, a simple post-and-rail fence—no longer expressed their identity and aspirations. Campuses needed a new architectural declaration—not just monumental buildings within their boundaries, but impressive entryways at their edges. The impulse behind this shift dates back to the time of ancient walled cities, when gates, by virtue of their prominence, assumed heightened, symbolic significance. Consider that when Moses reiterated God’s commandments to the Israelites in Deuteronomy 6:6–9, he urged not only that the commandments be obeyed but also that they be put on public display: “Write them on the doorframes of your houses and on your gates.”

McKim’s Johnston Gate, completed in 1889, did much to set the modern American template for such portals with its breathtaking composition of brick, stone, and wrought iron. Like the tablets of the Ten Commandments, stone panels that adorn the gate’s brick piers express Harvard’s reverence for truth, evident in the three-book shield that spells out “VE-RI-TAS.” To enable the gate to fit in with nearby Massachusetts Hall, constructed nearly 170 years earlier in 1720, McKim chose overburnt bricks, called “culls,” whose varied colors and weathered textures made the new gate seem as old and authentic as its colonial-era neighbor. This very American process—call it instant aging—accentuated the sense of authority. Johnston Gate’s Georgian revival style and “Harvard brick” became the university’s design DNA.

In the next quarter century, other major universities—among them Berkeley, Brown, Chicago, Columbia, Penn, and Princeton—built their own grand entrance gates. Women’s colleges including Radcliffe, Smith, and Mount Holyoke joined the trend. A tune sung at the formerly all-male Amherst College may have referenced the portals at nearby Smith and Mount Holyoke with these romance-tinged lyrics: “First she gave me candy, / And then she gave me cake, / And then she gave me gingerbread, / For kissing her at the gate.”

Designed by and named for architect Henry Ives Cobb, the University of Chicago’s Cobb Gate further reveals how such sentries have insinuated themselves into campus life and lore. New students process through the Gothic revival structure to signify their entrance into the university community. Over the decades, as the architecture writer Jay Pridmore has observed, campus wits have assigned meanings to the mysterious stone figures that line the gate’s steep gable. At the base are “dragon-like concoctions with long necks and predatory expressions” (admissions officers). Then come grotesques climbing the gable with increasing confidence (first- , second- , and third-year students). Finally, you see a large griffin at the top, “enjoying the position of a fourth-year upperclassman, basking briefly in his success before taking hypothetical flight.”

To this day, lighthearted mythology attends many campus portals. After entering the main gate for the first time, such superstitions hold, a student should pass through again only after graduation. To do otherwise is supposedly bad luck.

Despite such froth, campus gates can occasion a genuinely toxic mix of anticipation and trepidation. (“I’m glad I made it through these gates, but when will everyone realize I’m an imposter?”) They’ve also turned into political battlegrounds. Columbia shut its gates following pro-Palestinian demonstrations in 2023, and the following year, Harvard locked gates in response to a pro-Palestinian encampment. Also in 2024, demonstrators locked Chicago’s Cobb Gate and blocked Berkeley’s Sather Gate, long a site of picketing and protests. Such closures invariably divide opinion. On one hand, when an institution locks its gates, outsiders lose the opportunity to join students and protest on previously open university grounds. On the other hand, members of a university community who oppose or feel threatened by demonstrations might welcome such a closure. There are two sides to every gate controversy, which is fitting because, in Roman mythology, Janus was the two-faced god of doorways and ceremonial gateways.

That many protestors chose gates as the platform for their views speaks to the symbolic power of these portals. Although gates typically occupy the campus edge and are diminutive compared with the massive university buildings to which they lead, they’re often central to a university’s identity. At Penn’s Class of 1893 Memorial Gate, the iron arch proclaims, Inveniemus viam aut faciemus—“We will find a way or we shall make one.” The three columns of the Arch at the University of Georgia are said to represent the state motto of  “Wisdom, Justice, Moderation.” Harvard’s Dexter Gate, built in 1901 as a mother’s memorial to a son who died of cerebrospinal meningitis only four years after his Harvard graduation, bears similar symbolic weight. Harvard President Charles William Eliot composed its noble, often-quoted, outward-facing inscription: “Enter to Grow in Wisdom.” The gate’s inward-facing inscription, however—“Depart to Serve Better Thy Country and Thy Kind”—reads like something from another time.

It’s worth asking: Are gates anachronistic holdovers from a more formal, less egalitarian age? A 2025 New York Times story about the Columbia shutdown suggested as much, asserting that the “gates were mere emblems of exclusivity and elitism, of the wealthy and powerful whose names adorn the university’s buildings.”

Recent campus construction suggests that there’s much more to gates than this two-dimensional, journalistic caricature would have it. Gates continue to resonate, though they are now often built without lockable, hinged doors and are valued more as symbolic passageways than as security-related protectors. Indiana University’s Sample Gates, dedicated in 1987, provide a setting for graduation photos and protests, not to mention a showcase for Indiana’s limestone industry. Similarly, Northwestern’s Weber Arch, completed in 1994, each fall hosts a rite of passage known as “March Through the Arch,” which features a marching band, cheering onlookers, and the campus mascot. And at Harvard, a playful gate built in 2020 and inspired by beloved children’s books like The Tale of Peter Rabbit and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland was designed to be left in the open position—more a bridge between town and gown than a barrier between them.

Such examples remind us that campus gates can bring us together as well as separate us. The finest display exemplary beauty, articulate an institution’s highest ideals, and endow otherwise undifferentiated space with a memorable framework for essential human transitions.

Why slam the gate on that?