SOON AFTER the announcement, the university engaged the architectural firm of Leers Weinzapfel Associates, and announced plans to renovate the building for the benefit of all the college’s students. The Hasty Pudding Theatre, housed in the building, had become a very hot property. Concerned about losing undergraduate access to Agassiz Theater in Radcliffe Yard when the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study (the remnants of Radcliffe College) takes over the space in 2004, the university jumped at the chance to control the Pudding theater. " It’s a priority to save a theater so close to the Yard, " says Harvard spokeswoman Sally Baker. " There’s a real need for more performance space. This is a good acquisition for the university. "

With Harvard’s decisions about how the building will be used also come decisions about which of the organizations under the Institute of 1770’s umbrella will survive. The lucrative and popular Hasty Pudding Theatricals will certainly stay in operation, and there is little threat to the two a cappella groups, the Kroks and the Pitches. ( " The future will be very, very solid, " says one Kroks member. " Harvard seems to realize that the Kroks provide a tremendous resource to the school. " ) The restaurant has moved out, following the settlement of a series of legal wranglings that included a lawsuit against the Institute of 1770 that named a dead trustee. " It’s water under the bridge, " says Mary-Catherine Diebel. She and Hughes are currently working on a cookbook, and looking for another space in which to open a new restaurant with the same signature cuisine. The sign of the pudding pot and the name " Up Stairs at the Pudding " will not follow them.

But the fate of the Hasty Pudding social club is in serious doubt. " We’re still an organization, we’re just up in the air, " says Olshan, the current president. " We would like to continue to use the space after this school year. We have talked with [the administration] about doing so and are working together in a very cooperative fashion. "

According to David P. Illingworth, associate dean of Harvard College, the club will apply this fall for recognition as an official student organization — one that admits its members on the basis of merit. If it receives this recognition, it will exist in an almost unrecognizable form. " The Hasty Pudding Club must have a purpose beyond the purely social, " says Illingworth. " Like all living traditions it needs to change a little bit. It’s hard to characterize something 250 years old. It’s evolving. "

Another option for the club is to move, and return to its roots as a private, independent institution. " It’s not our first building and it doesn’t have to be our last, " says Olshan. The sale of the building left intact the club’s remaining endowment of $100,000, built up again since the depletion of the late ’90s. That money, combined with generous alumni support, could be enough to give the club another life and a lease on a new building despite the astronomical prices around Harvard Square.

But whatever the club was once — either in its historic heyday or in its more recent party years — it will not be again. Once the ownership of the club’s museum-quality posters and its treasure-trove of historic pictures, decorations, and knickknacks is resolved, the 206-year history of pudding pots and presidents will come to an end. So, for some, will a fondly remembered way of life.

Unsurprisingly, alumni aren’t happy. Some are simply nostalgic: " The Pudding building was another member of the cast, a permanent ensemble player, like New York in a Woody Allen movie, " says Aaron Zelman, a writer for the TV show Law & Order who graduated in the class of 1995. " I am very sad that the club will not exist anymore in that old little building that we knew and loved, filled with treasurers that can’t be replaced. "

But others are angrier. " I am extremely upset that the university has acted in such a peremptory and mean-spirited manner with a national treasure, not to mention a home base for so many hundreds of Harvard grads, " says David Binger, a 1948 graduate who was one of the four founders of the Krokodiloes. And others tie the club’s demise to Harvard’s gestures toward egalitarianism — gestures that they denounce as mere hypocrisy, especially when they cast a pall on the privileges that these graduates used to enjoy. " The Pudding was a great watering and eating hole and I am so sorry it’s biting the dust, " says Henry B.R. Brown, who graduated in 1947. " But the Harvard hierarchy have made it plain over the last 150 years that it hates the clubs. The socialist faculty believes they are elitist — but I believe that the faculty just doesn’t want any competition with their own phony elitism. "

" Harvard has always had a general dislike of the Pudding, " adds another graduate member. " The administration, at least these days, is very uneasy with the idea of anything in the universe being even remotely exclusionary. It’s peculiar when you consider Harvard’s acceptance rate. "

Although the university is most likely glad to settle its often-cantankerous relationship with the club, it may be these people — deep-pocketed alums who once partied in the Pudding and are now in a prime position to add to Harvard’s endowment coffers — who have the last word.

Says one former Pudding officer, " Harvard was a lame place and now it’s getting lamer. I wouldn’t send my kids there. "

Nick Snyder is a freelance writer living in New York City. He can be reached at ncsnyder@post.harvard.edu.