Yesterday’s News

Headlines from Harvard history

1915

The Bulletin salutes the fiftieth anniversary of the Harvard Club of New York with particular praise for its activism: more than 30 years earlier, the club “set on foot” the movement to elect non-Massachusetts residents to the University’s Board of Overseers.

 

1925

The Harvard Fund is officially established to provide a way for alumni to support the University through annual contributions, as distinct from special gifts to a particular campaign.

 

1930

Harvard proves one of the largest employers of construction labor north of New York, the “business depression” notwithstanding, with five new undergraduate Houses, new buildings for the physics department and the geography school, new freshman dorms, a biological lab, a faculty club, and a $700,000 addition to the Medical School powerhouse under way.

* * *

An ad in the Bulletin by the Harvard Alumni Placement Service states, “Unemployment, widespread and serious, is causing many Harvard men to look for jobs for the first time in their lives.” Fellow alumni are asked to forward information about job openings.

 

1940

“A decade ago,” note the editors, “any Harvard man who rode a bicycle was thought at least eccentric.” But “since the universal recognition of carbon monoxide,” bicycles have made a comeback in Cambridge, with more than 250 counted in daily use around the Yard and the Houses.

 

1955

The Business School and Radcliffe announce that Radcliffe’s Management Training Program will become the Harvard-Radcliffe Program in Business Administration. Its directors note a “significant demand for trained women for market research and sales promotion positions.”

 

1960

The Center for the Study of World Religions opens. Scholars from the United States and six foreign countries, representing the Hindu, Buddhist, Jewish, and Christian faiths, are already in residence, and a Muslim scholar from Iran is expected shortly.

 

1990

Harvard and the City of Cambridge sign a document calling for the University to give $1 million in annual payments to Cambridge in lieu of taxes.

* * *

The “French chef” gives 2,000 cookbooks from her collection to Radcliffe’s Schlesinger Library, with a promise of more to come. Julia Child hopes her gift will promote cooking as a respected profession and academic field of study.

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