I asked a fellow student about the microscopic triangles of bread with no crust and a smidgen of filling. She said they were watercress sandwiches. I didn't bother to ask what watercress was, since I figured it might lead down a bottomless pit of words I'd never heard, and I didn't want to admit my ignorance more than I already had.
I knew that one isn't supposed to eat in a library, so eating and drinking while surrounded by old expensive paintings felt like a transgression.
Someone told us to get on what I now know is a "receiving line". When we got to the head of the line, we were greeted by a regal woman who chirped like a bird. She chirped the same phrase to everyone. To me, it sounded something like "SISSA labock".
After going through the line, I approached a group of classmates who were all asking each other, "Who was that woman, and what was she saying?"
Someone among the cognoscenti replied, "She was saying `Sissela Bok'. That's her name. She's the wife of Derek Bok, the Harvard president."
I felt indignant that the hostess and presumed role model at the reception for female Harvard students was someone who was there as the wife of the college's president, rather than someone who was there in her role as an acclaimed academic. (Sissela Bok did go on to eventually make a name for herself in her own right, though she is perhaps best known as a daughter of accomplished parents, each of whom won a Nobel Prize.) Surely there were distinguished female professors we could have met instead? Little did I know that there were very few female faculty at Harvard, and that that would remain the case for decades.
This was one of several times where Harvard seemed to convey the message that a woman's path to success was more likely to be based on whom she slept with, than on her intellectual accomplishments.