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.

Related topics

You might also like

Yesterday’s News

How a book on fighting the “Devill World” survived Harvard’s historic fire.

Yesterday’s News

A co-ed experiment that changed dorm life forever

A Forgotten Harvard Anthem

Published the year the Titanic sank, “Harvard’s Best” is a quizzical ode to the University.

Most popular

The True Cost of Grade Inflation at Harvard

How an abundance of A’s created “the most stressed-out world of all.”

What Bonobos Teach Us about Female Power and Cooperation

A Harvard scientist expands our understanding of our closest living relatives.

Readers Respond to Our ‘Law in a Lifeboat’ Survey

A sampling of answers about a moral dilemma

Explore More From Current Issue

Illustration of a person sitting on a large cresting wave, writing, with a sunset and ocean waves in vibrant colors.

How Stories Help Us Cope with Climate Change

The growing genre of climate fiction offers a way to process reality—and our anxieties.

A black primate hanging lazily on a branch in a lush green forest.

What Bonobos Teach Us about Female Power and Cooperation

A Harvard scientist expands our understanding of our closest living relatives.

A person climbs a curved ladder against a colorful background and four vertical ladders.

Harvard’s Productivity Trap

What happened to doing things for the sake of enjoyment?