John Harvard's Journal
Yesterday’s News
From the pages of the Harvard Alumni Bulletin and Harvard Magazine
1913
Capping a 9-0 football season—with Harvard scoring a total 215 points to their opponents’ 21—the Crimson achieves its first victory (15-5) over the Elis in the 10-year-old Harvard Stadium.
1943
A Bulletin editorial laments that “Too many boys…are coming to Harvard and other American colleges…woefully unprepared in speaking and writing ” English, and praises English A’s remedial courses for their important wartime role.
1958
Plans are complete for an extension of Leverett House, which has given Mather Hall [renamed Old Quincy, and now Stone Hall] to Quincy House. For the first time, the University will build high: two 12-story glass-and-limestone towers will house 280 students.
After a letter in the Crimson reports that some landlords registered with the Harvard Housing Office refuse to rent to blacks, the office draws up a pledge of nondiscrimination that all landlords using its services must sign.
Three faculty members spend three weeks in Russia trying unsuccessfully to visit the Soviet space program’s computing center. Astronomer Fred Whipple remarks that the Russian rocketry program is definitely military, and being pushed at an enormous pace. Allen Hynek, associate director of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, comments: “The United States may be losing the race for scientific supremacy because Americans are more interested in prosperity than posterity.”
1973
The Yale Band, playing at halftime during Yale’s game against Cornell, forms an H on the field to honor the victims of President Richard Nixon’s “Saturday night massacre”—Archibald Cox ’34, LL.B. ’37; Elliot Richardson ’41, LL.B. ’44, and William Ruckelshaus, LL.B. ’60.
1988
The University’s Association of Black Faculty and Administrators calls for an affirmative-action plan to ensure that black, Hispanic, and Native Americans comprise 10 percent of Harvard faculties by 1990, the centennial of the College graduation year of W.E.B. Du Bois, who later became Harvard’s first black Ph.D. recipient.
