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Academic music theory in North America arose at the same time as the famous Mitford sisters of Britain. The Mitfords were upper class and so was nascent music theory in the academy. That facet of the discipline would be but a minor historical curiosity had not its undergraduate classes remained frozen in time. The world, of course, moved on. In this century, the field, long cruising blithely through the skies of academia like a jumbo jet packed with students, seems to have hit some turbulence. The knee-jerk reaction has been to accuse the field of racism and sexism, as if those effects were causes. In this essay I will argue that the shortcomings of music theory as exhibited in basic undergraduate courses, while doubtless many, stem from well-intended, early-twentieth-century solutions to problems faced by music departments weathering the same turmoil as the Mitfords. Those solutions strongly favored European models from the Protestant north (Germany, England) over models from the Catholic south (France, Italy), and resolved, for a while, the debate over whether music in the academy would be an artisanal metier or a subject for disinterested scholarship. Guiding these choices were strong traditions of social class and caste as defined and defended by various elites. Ironically, much of the strife over music theory past and present revolves around a word that originally meant a reconciliation of differences: “harmony.” I taught my first collegiate harmony class more than fifty years ago, so I can recount not only the objective circumstances that led up to music theory as practiced in classrooms today but also what it felt like to be both a participant and a dissenter in those developments.