Alan L. Hart
Hart attended Albany College (now Lewis & Clark College), then transferred with classmate and romantic partner Eva Cushman to Stanford University for the 1911–1912 school year before going back to Albany. Hart graduated from Albany College in 1912, and in 1917 obtained a doctor of medicine degree from the University of Oregon Medical Department in Portland (now Oregon Health & Science University); during this period, Hart also returned to Northern California to attend courses in the summer of 1916 at the Stanford University School of Medicine, then located in San Francisco. Hart was deeply unhappy that the medical degree was issued in his female name, limiting his opportunities to use it in any future life under a male name. College records show that at least one of the senior staff was sympathetic; his graduation records were indexed internally with the suffix "(aka Robert L.), M.D.". Nonetheless, Hart knew that if he presented himself as Robert, any prospective employer checking his credentials would discover the female name or find no records for him at all. After graduation he worked for a short while (presenting as a woman) at a Red Cross hospital in Philadelphia.
Albert Bushnell Hart
Hart was born in Clarksville (now Clark), Mercer County, Pennsylvania. He graduated from Harvard University in 1880. He was a member of Phi Beta Kappa and a classmate and friend of future U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt. He studied at Paris, Berlin and Freiburg, and received his doctorate under Hermann Eduard von Holst at Freiburg in 1883. Harvard President Charles Eliot appointed Hart an instructor in 1883 to teach the only course in American history that the college offered, despite the fact that Edward Channing, already an assistant in European history, wanted to teach the course himself. Hart served as instructor in history from 1883–87, assistant professor from 1887–97, and became a professor in 1897. In 1910 he was appointed Eaton Professor of the Science of Government. He was on the Harvard faculty for 43 years, retiring in 1926. In retirement he continued to write and edit from a room in Widener Library. He maintained a summer home in New Hampshire near Mount Monadnock.