Yesterday's News

From the pages of the Harvard Alumni Bulletin and Harvard Magazine

1912

The Associated Harvard Clubs have established scholarships for freshmen from southern and western states to ensure greater diversity within the University and wider influence without.

1922

No longer content merely to play traditional fight songs and marches at football games, the Harvard Band causes a sensation by “performing the most amazing sort of evolutions on the field”—a perfect wedge, a single file winding tightly into a circle and out again—while continuing to play in good time.

1927

Harvard’s hygiene department reminds undergraduates that “heretofore a certificate based on physical disability was the only one considered valid to excuse a student from his work. It is now recognized that a man may be equally handicapped by reason of emotional turmoil for which he is no more responsible than for an attack of pneumonia.”

1932

The Memorial Church, built in honor of the Harvard dead of “the World War,” is dedicated on the morning of Armistice Day.

1947

Harvard and Radcliffe Colleges have formalized arrangements to permit “joint instruction [of undergraduate men and women]…where separate instruction would be wasteful of Faculty personnel.” Most freshmen courses and all undergraduate activities remain separated.

1962

The Medical School has established a division of mathematical bio-logy, in part to investigate the role of the high-speed computer in problems of medical diagnosis and research.

1977

Lecturing at Radcliffe’s South House, 74-year-old Lillian Hellman says of “the dangerous desire of all young people for simple answers…a good college education should knock this idea out of everybody’s head right away. There are no simple answers to anything. You must not believe life or learning is simple. It just has to be fought through, and thought about.”

Click here for the November-December 2007 issue table of contents

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