Yesterday's News

From the pages of the Harvard Alumni Bulletin and Harvard Magazine

1937 A 1.2-million-volt x-ray machine has been installed in the Collis P. Huntington Memorial Hospital, a department of the University, to provide cancer treatments. The machine emits so much radiation that it must be run at half its full capacity.

 

1942 Queen Wilhemina of the Netherlands, in exile during the Nazi occupation of her country, visits the University as part of a two-day visit to Boston while on her way to her summer home in Lee, Massachusetts.

 

The campus Radio Network conducts a survey of its summer-school undergraduate listeners. Besides finding out that more than half the students listen to the station at least twice a week and prefer classical music, investigators also discover that "one-third of all undergraduates study without their trousers."

 

1947 Members of the newly formed Harvard Youth for Democracy stage a protest outside the Old South Meeting House in Boston at a July 13 speech by the anti-Semitic Gerald L.K. Smith. The 35 students picketed the Meeting House with signs reading "No Free Speech to Preach Murder"

 

1952 Enrollment at the summer school has dropped 21 percent from the year before in a season of record heat. The editors report enrollments are also down elsewhere, suggesting as a contributing factor "the Selective Service ruling that nine months of schooling a year is enough to maintain a student's status for deferment purposes."

1957 The proprietors of all stores in the block slated to become Holyoke Center are invited to meet with the University's planning coordinator and the dean of the Design School; they are assured that Harvard proposes to render every assistance possible during construction and to grant them space in the new building once it is completed..

 

1962 Summer-school enrollments have dropped noticeably from the previous year's record high. Director Thomas E. Crooks attributes the drop to "the self-elimination of prospective students who weren't prepared to take their sum- mer's work seriously." The school "made it plain that people coming 'for the ride' would find the riding hard."

kareem
Summer-school student, 1972

Timothy Carlson

Bathtubs have been replaced by showers in some older sections of Adams House and Kirkland House. "Undergraduates summoned from sleep," the editors suggest, "will certainly notice these, and appreciate them deeply."

 

1967 Harvard Medical School and MIT plan to collaborate and pool resources "to facilitate the evolution of the physical and engineering sciences and mathematics...to achieve a closer and more productive interrelationship with biology and medicine."

 

1972 On the twenty-fifth anniversary of the announcement of the Marshall Plan, West German chancellor Willy Brandt, LL.D. '63, announces the creation of the German Marshall Fund in a speech at Sanders Theatre. The new fund will underwrite academic and scientific programs to stimulate American involvement in European questions and to promote mutual cooperation.

 

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, the 7-foot, 2-inch, center for the Milwaukee Bucks, is a member of the summer-school student body. A convert to Islam, he is studying intensive elementary Arabic.

 

1977 More than 2,000 Cambridge "Golden Agers" enjoy the second annual Senior Picnic in Harvard Yard, jointly sponsored by the University and the city. President Derek C. Bok is the most popular dance partner.

       

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