Fight Fiercely, Harvard

[4] In speaking about "Fight Fiercely, Harvard" and the rest of his satirical repertoire that brought him a certain level of fame as an undergraduate, Lehrer says he did not write to gain popularity but rather: I mostly thought these songs weren’t of interest to anyone!

[5] Lehrer has also said of his undergraduate songwriting: The only one of those songs that eventually made it into my repertoire was 'Fight Fiercely, Harvard,' which was written in 1945 and shows it.

[1][5][9][10][11] On visiting Harvard for the first time in decades, Lehrer was pleased to find that his song had been performed at every home football game for many years.

In talking to his audience, Lehrer explains that he wanted to create a college fight song different from those performed, as he says with a hypercorrective use of a Latin plural for a common English word, "in comparable stadia."

And on occasions like that…one did come to realize that the football fight songs that one hears…have a tendency to be somewhat uncouth, and even violent, and that it would be refreshing, to say the least, to find one that was a bit more genteel.

Lehrer, who is actually Jewish and from New York City, performed the song in the stereotypical Boston Brahmin accent of his on-stage persona and pronounced the words "fiercely" and "Harvard" with a non-rhotic drawl.