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

They Might Be (Harvard) Giants

Two tales of University greats—and an encounter with a Tiger

A Harvard President’s VW Beetle That Kept On Giving

Derek Bok donated his car for a good cause.

The Year a Beat Poet Squatted at Harvard

In 1954, Gregory Corso moved into Eliot House. How he stayed there is a literary legend.

Most popular

To Promote Healthy Habits in Patients, Start With the Doctors

Why Harvard Medical School is training physicians to think more like coaches

Who Is Accountable for the Acts of AI Systems?

Establishing legal responsibility for autonomous agents

When Government Funding Dropped, Harvard Found Partners

The University is expanding industry ties and investing its own funds to support research, but neither will replace lost federal dollars.

Explore More From Current Issue

A girl in blue boots stands on a cliff, holding a leash attached to a glowing, digital dog.

Establishing legal responsibility for autonomous agents

Delicate green cocoa pods and small white flowers on a tree branch, surrounded by soft greenery.

Harvard researchers investigate climate’s impact on cocoa crops, innovations in nasal vaccines, and links between pain and skull marrow.

Two fans celebrate in front of a TV showing a football game.

A new Harvard Kennedy School project aims to harness the power of feral fandom.