Yesterday’s News

From the pages of the Harvard Alumni Bulletin and Harvard Magazine

Illustration of a career consultant reading from a paper while seated on a statue pedestal, with a long line of students waiting nearby.

Illustration by Mark Steele

1920 

The football team, playing its first and last postseason game, defeats Oregon, 7-6, in the Rose Bowl.

1925 

Five hundred students appear on January 10 for a final dinner in Memorial Hall before the University reluctantly closes the 50-year-old “Commons,” a money-loser since the end of World War I. Plans for the hall’s future employment, say the Bulletin’s editors, will be “awaited with a lively interest.”

1930 

The College creates a new post for a “Consultant on Careers,” who will work with the Alumni Placement Service and Student Employment Office “to make careers as clear [to] undergraduates as the limitations of available information will permit.”

1975 

Construction of Pusey Library, which houses rare books, maps, and manuscripts, finishes after 20 months of excavation work in the south Yard. The cost of building totals $7 million.

1980 

The Corporation approves a 12.6 percent increase in the term bill, raising the total fee to $9,170, and making the cost of Harvard College second only to that of attending MIT.

1985 

The Reverend Peter J. Gomes, Plummer professor of Christian morals and minister in the Memorial Church, travels to the Capitol in January to deliver the benediction at the presidential inauguration of Ronald Reagan.

1995 

Harvardians returning from winter break discover that Elsie’s, the unpretentious Mount Auburn Street eatery that dispensed definitive roast beef sandwiches for 39 years, has gone out of business.

2010 

Even with construction paused on the Allston science and engineering complex, interior demolition of the Fogg Art Museum starts in January, beginning the long conversion into the Harvard Art Museums complex.

2020 

Advocating governance reform and fossil-fuel divestment, Harvard Forward places five nominees on the Board of Overseers ballot (and three succeed in the spring voting).

Click here for the January-February 2025 issue table of contents

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