1936 Harvard adopts a new parietal rule, stating that "Students living in the Houses will be given permission to entertain ladies in their rooms without a chaperone only if there are two or more ladies present." The rule provokes a slew of petitions for "one sole woman" and the Bulletin's editors comment that "females have never treated with much respect man-made rules intended to control their activities....Until this restriction is removed, there'll be breaking and entering on the part of single, defiant misses, till the students scream for help."
1956 A new faculty designation has been established "to further the University's continuing interest in education through television." Two Lowell Television Lecturers, appointed for an academic year, are expected to give a course on WGBH-TV, of whose operating council Harvard is a member. Professor of psychology Edwin G. Boring and University Professor emeritus Zecheriah Chafee Jr. are appointed for 1956-57.
1966 Creation of the Institute of Politics is officially announced at a dinner on October 17, held in the newly completed Holyoke Center and attended by eight members of the Kennedy family. The Institute's director, Professor Richard E. Neustadt, Ph.D. '51, declares that its main activities will involve "a fellowship program, policy studies at the faculty level, and extracurricular programs for undergraduates."
1971 After a trial run during the summer, Harvard's first day-care center moves from the basement of Memorial Hall to a permanent location in the former ROTC building near the Divinity School. The center has 24 children, and a waiting list of 19. Two Radcliffe day-care centers are already in operation.
1981 After completing its first inventory in a century, the library of the Museum of Comparative Zoology acknowledges the loss of "hundreds of books and manuscripts"--including plates from John James Audubon's Viviparous Quadrupeds of North America, which have a replacement value estimated at $50,000. The total replacement value of the lost books is "conservatively" estimated as "in excess of $500,000."
