Headlines from Harvard history

From the pages of the Harvard Alumni Bulletin and Harvard Magazine

Illustration by Mark Steele

1911

The Bulletin notes that A Lawyer’s Recollections, by George Torrey, A.B. 1859, LL.B. 1861, reveals that in his day the only requirement for an LL.B. was that the candidate enter his name as a student at the Law School and pay his term fees.

1916

Newly planted elms in the College Yard are restoring greenness to a “blinding wilderness,” observes a Bulletin editorialist, applauding a decision to “check an increasing disturbance of the academic peace” by closing certain roads in the Yard against “the menace and noisiness of the automobile.”

1936

Dedication exercises for the Old Yard’s restored College pump are held, 35 years after it was blown up by a secret undergraduate society, the Med. Fac. Senior College alumnus Henry Munroe Rogers ’62 takes the first drink.

1946

Phi Beta Kappa poet W.H. Auden describes a university in which undergraduates with “nerves that never flinched at slaughter/Are shot to pieces by the shorter/Poems of Donne” and “Professors back from secret missions/Resume their proper eruditions,/Though some regret it.”

1976

The Adams House Raft Race draws more than 25 entries from Harvard, Radcliffe, and Cambridge public schools to the Charles. The Collegium Musicum’s craft finishes first, its crew singing as they paddle. (Many contestants sink early.)

1991

Under a consent decree, all eight Ivy League colleges agree to abandon shared guidelines for undergraduate financial aid, given a Justice Department contention that such cooperation violates antitrust laws.

2001

A 21-day “living-wage” sit-in at Massachusetts Hall, apparently the longest such protest in Harvard history to that date, ends on May 8, after negotiations in which the University agrees to freeze further outsourcing of jobs and accelerate a contract renegotiation with the union for its custodial workers.

You might also like

In Sermon, Garber Urges Harvard Community to ‘Defend and Protect’ Institutions

Harvard’s president uses traditional Memorial Church address to encourage divergent views.

Highlights from Harvard’s Past

The Medical School goes coed, University poet wins Nobel Prize. 

Free Speech, the Bomb—and Donald Trump

A Harvard cardiologist on the unlikely alliances that shaped a global movement to prevent nuclear war

Most popular

Harvard art historian Jennifer Roberts teaches the value of immersive attention

Teaching students the value of deceleration and immersive attention

How MAGA Went Mainstream at Harvard

Trump, TikTok, and the pandemic are reshaping Gen Z politics.

Shakespeare’s Greatest Rival

Without Christopher Marlowe, there might not have been a Bard.

Explore More From Current Issue

John Goldberg

Harvard in the News

University layoffs, professors in court, and a new Law School dean

Renaissance portrait of young man thought to be Christoper Marlowe with light beard, wearing ornate black coat with gold buttons and red patterns.

Shakespeare’s Greatest Rival

Without Christopher Marlowe, there might not have been a Bard.

Two women in traditional kimonos, one lighting a cigarette, in a scene from Apart from You.

Harvard Film Archive Spotlights Japanese Director Mikio Naruse

A retrospective of the filmmaker’s works, from Floating Clouds to Flowing