Yesterday's News

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

Harvard Coop’s Changing of the Guard

New leadership for a staple Square retailer

Harvard Students form Pro-Palestine Encampment

Protesters set up camp in Harvard Yard.

Artificial Intelligence in the Academy

Harvard symposium assesses the new technology.

Most popular

The Deadliest War

Drew Faust speaks on how the Civil War’s astounding death toll reshaped American society.

Harvard Coop’s Changing of the Guard

New leadership for a staple Square retailer

Artificial Intelligence in the Academy

Harvard symposium assesses the new technology.

More to explore

Harvard Cardinal Robert W. McElroy on the Changing Catholic Church

Cardinal Robert W. McElroy on how the Catholic Church has moved towards inclusivity.

AI as Cancer Oracle?

How is artificial intelligence (AI) being used for cancer detection and prevention?

The Harvard Graduate and Early Vegetarian Benjamin Smith Lyman

Brief life of the vegetarian trailblazer, 1835-1920