September-October 2005 > John Harvard's Journal

Yesterday's News

Yesterday's News

From the pages of the Harvard Alumni Bulletin and Harvard Magazine

1920 The Graduate School of Education registers its first female students, making them the first women ever admitted to candidacy for a Harvard degree.

 

1925 The College establishes a board of faculty advisers to counsel freshmen.

 

1930 Six hundred students move into Dunster House and Lowell House, the first completed units of the House plan.

 

1935 Massachusetts passes a law requiring every U.S. citizen teaching in the Commonwealth to swear to “support” the state and federal constitutions. President Conant, who opposed the bill’s passage, says he will take the oath and urges all faculty members to do the same, to avoid involving Harvard in a technical controversy regarding its enforcement of the law against its own teaching staff.

 

1945 Paul H. Buck, dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, is named Harvard’s first provost—“a further step,” according to President Conant, “in arranging for the organization of modern Harvard…commensurate with its size and vast complexity.”

 

1950 “Joint instruction” is extended to Radcliffe freshmen, allowing them to take most of their courses with their Harvard counterparts.

 

1955 An administrative decision lifts the ban on TV cameras in the Stadium, allowing Harvard football games to be broadcast regionally; officials still refuse to allow games to be shown nationwide. Maintaining its commitment to scholarship and athletics, Harvard states that it will not take part in “big time” football.

 

1965 In an address to Harvard freshmen, dean of the College John U. Monro urges caution in exploring the “wonderful, happy, healthgiving, and finally dangerous world of women,” warning that D.H. Lawrence, Norman Mailer, and Paul Goodman may not be the most reliable guides on this complicated and explosive matter.

 

1975 President Bok loses a World Series bet (an unspecified amount of baked beans, reports the Crimson) to the president of the University of Cincinnati when the Red Sox lose to the Reds in seven.

 

1985 In response to antiapartheid protests and demands by 300 alumni that the University divest, President Bok declares his continued opposition to blanket divestment and emphasizes “the need to respond to social problems affirmatively, instead of trying to cut all one’s ties with the situation.”