A la Recherche de 1965-66

(This is the first installment of a review of the year's most important events. The second installment will appear tomorrow--Ed.)

As the summer ends, 1211 Harvard and 3rd Radcliffe freshmen join 3500 male and 900 female upperclassmen in the nation's oldest and richest College and its annex. Mrs. Bunting returns to Radcliffe from the Atomic Energy Commission. A faculty committee calls the Ed School's guiding philosophy "basically sound" but does suggest that there might be better teaching and an emphasis on advanced work.

October

Paul Tillich, who taught at Harvard from 1955 to 1962, dies in Chicago.

The Government Department seeks Faculty approval of an ungraded senior tutorial, but decides not to end "the total anarchy of sophomore tutorial." Harvard policemen begin protecting Radcliffe, and the unarmed nightwatchmen they are replacing ask the state to interven.

The Gen Ed debate resumes at a level of exquisite complexity as the Committee on Educational Policy urges, among other things, that lower-level Gen Ed courses be made optional. Master Finley fears for the integrity of the Gen Ed concept, Master Gill sees the proposal as "a very positive step," and Paul M. Doty thinks everything will depend on how it's administered.

Richard Cardinal Cushing of Boston absolves the undergraduate who wore a bishop's vestments and who sprinkled water on the Harvard football team during the Holy Cross game. "I hope and pray there will be no disciplinary action taken against you," Cardinal Cushing writes. Alas, the Administrative Board has already admonished the prankster.

The Arnold Arboretum suit--brought eight years ago to compel the University to return 57,000 books and 600,000 plant specimens to Jamaica Plain--is argued before the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court. Timothy Leary, making his first public appearance here in two-and-one-half-years, says that he is beginning to understand the simplest means "by which an individual can be induced to get out beyond his mind." Henry A. Kissinger goes to Vietnam.

Harvard's endowment, buoyed by 275,000 shares of General Motors, grows 6 per cent to reach a value of $1,013,000,000. The Administrative Board agrees to consider whether students accused of disciplinary infractions should be allowed to testify in their own behalf. P. L. Travers, creator of Mary Poppins, arrives at Radcliffe and promises to stay "until the wind changes." Three Harvard students are knifed on Weeks Bridge. The CRIMSON makes its Fall announcement that the Graduate School of Education will build a new library.

Richard M. Nixon, in Cambridge to hire Law students, says that "the Vietnam war is going better for the United States." John Kenneth Galbraith, H. Stuart Hughes, and Mark DeWolfe Howe defend students' right to protest, and there are an antiwar rally in the Yard and an antiwar march to the Boston Common. Graduate students and undergraduates who were 2-S are reclassified 1-A.

Dean von Stade bans freshman parties for a weekend after a 15-year-old girl consumes five drinks in 20 minutes at one. Robert B. Woodward drinks a moderate amount of champagne at a press conference after winning the Nobel Prize in chemistry. Julian S. Schwinger, who has won the Nobel Prize in physics, stays home all day with his phone off the hook.

Radcliffe uglifies the English language by agreeing to let 20 girls Ive off.off-campus. Sheldon Diets accuses the Harvard Cooperative Society of lying about is loading dock. A survey shows that although Harvard freshmen date twice as much as freshmen in other Ivy schools, only half of the Class of '69 is happy with its social life.

November

Arthur M. Schlesinger Sr., a pioneering social historian, dies in Boston at the age of 77.

A student's cigarette starts a $135,000 early-morning fire in the new section of Quincy House. Four suites are destroyed; no one is injured, but at least five locks on emergency doors fall to function. Sheldon Diets wins a partial victory in the loading-dock controversy; he says it proves "we're neither crackpots nor troublemakers."

Dean Monro warns that student testimony "could erode the personal way . . . Matters are taken up" by the Administrative Board. Most undergraduates reclassified 1-A find out that even the government considers it a mistake. General Hershey comes to Harvard and urges colleges "to clean their own stables." Radcliffe begins a $16 million fund drive to overhaul housing.

Mrs. Bunting asks the Radcliffe Government Association to consider abolishing the signout system for upperclassmen. Four monkeys going to the School of Public Health escape from their crates at Logan Airport and enjoy 14 hours of freedom. Seven drunken, machete-swinging Ecaudorans attack the curator of birds at the Museum of Comparative Biology, his wife, and a Harvard senior under the impression that they are government officials coming to confiscate land. The senior obtains help by running six miles through the jungle in his bare feet. The Gov Department makes grades in Gov 99 the letter equivalents of thesis ratings.

The University joins the rest of the Northeast and part of Canada in a four-hour blackout, during which the Faculty approves the CEP's Gen Ed program. Master Finley, admitting that he had been "a bit hasty" in judging the proposal, predicts that the old Gen Ed system "will be the tune, and this new business the obligatto," Harvard decides to install emergency generators.

The Harvard College Fund raises a record $2,400,725. Lady Bird Johnson visits Harvard to get ideas for the LBJ Library. The CRIMSON prints its only funny editorial of the year (Nov. 3).

Harvard establishes the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History with a $7 million grant from a former Overseer. Tom Wolfe brings news of the status dropout. An undergraduate who has taken an overdose of LSD attracks "considerable attention from the neighbors" and has to be forcibly taken to the Massachusetts Mental Health Center, Hogan's Goat opens.

December

Hogan's Goat moves to a bigger house. Professor Alfred announces that he will take a sabbatical next year to work on a couple of other plays. The federal government gives the Graduate School of Design $2 million for a new building. The Harvard Undergraduate Council suggests that non-Faculty members be made Masters. When it and the Harvard Policy Committee hold a referendum on retaining the present form of student government, the 40 per cent of Harvard that bothers to vote gives the present form an 87 per cent vote of confidence.

Four students are put on probation for smoking marijuana after one of them tells his mother. A female phychiatrist begins studying why "women's intellectual attainments seem to go to seed" after college.

The salaries of junior Faculty members are raised 8 to 11 per cent to meet competition from other universities. The Faculty establishes a new committee to administer the new Gen Ed program. The first Negro ever elected to a final club becomes a member of the Spee. No one feels much like commenting, and those who do probably regret it.

The Cambridge Board of Zoning Appeal refuses to evict the Coop from its new Palmer St. annex. The City Council approves Harvard's plan to build a pedestrial mall between the Yard and the Law School. Twenty second-year Med students ask for independent study instead of lectures and lab sessions; professors criticize the request as foolish, unwise, and economically unsound. The CRIMSON reports that Cliffies will begin using Lamont next Fall if President Pusey approves. The Harvard Undergraduate Council disapproves, citing "the male emotional stability factor." Only a third of the freshmen polled by the Yardling credit Cliffies with having good personalities and only a seventh think them good-looking. The John F. Kennedy Institute gets $2.5 million, most of it from the Ford Foundation.

January

The Harvard-M.I.T. Joint Center for Urban Studies gets $1.4 million, all of it from the Ford Foundation. Timothy Leary is arrested at the Mexican border when customs officials find five ounces (later three ounces; then possibly less than half an ounce) of marijuana in his car. The Ed School adopts almost all the proposals its faculty committee put forward in September. An expedition co-sponsored by the Peabody Museum discovers two 10,000-year-old Indian huts in Hell Gap, Wyo. They are the oldest known houses in the Western hemisphere.

President Pusey and Dean Monro support a draft exam, and the Selective Service System says that's precisely what it has in mind. The HUC reports that 12 colleges enthusiastically favor an exchange program with Harvard. "It doesn't seem to make very good sense," Pusey says of the idea.

Dean Ebert of the Med School approves the second-year students' independent study program; five of the students add they want to be exempted from some exams, too. The Faculty Club announces a $350,000 expansion. The Ed School's Roy E. Larsen Hall is dedicated. "Now that they mention it," says the architect, "it does look something like a castle."

Judges in the HRO Concerto Contest are unable to find a soloist good enough to play with the HRO. Radcliffe raises its room fee and requires girls living off-campus to pay the full amount for board. A WHRB disc jockey predicts the result of the Playboy Jazz Poll so accurately ("I had to prostitute my own taste") that he wins a weekend with a Playmate.

The Psychology Department replaces its introductory course and adds several middle-level courses to give students more time for experimental work. The Supreme Judicial Court splits 3-2 in deciding the Arboretum case in Harvard's favor. The new Gen Ed committee votes to expand its lower-level program. The HUC polls users of Lamont and finds that 62 per cent oppose the admission of girls.

In his annual report, President Pusey says that Harvard will have to raise $35 million for science education, and kicks off the largest fund drive in ten years. Can Harvard's purpose "indeed be anything less to contribute to the best of our ability to the furtherance of civilized life?" Pusey asks." . . . There continue to be pressing needs for additional capital funds in the School of Education, the Divinity School, the Business School, the School of Public Health, still in the Medical and no less in the Dental School, in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, in Radcliffe College, for the Nieman program and the Harvard Center for Renaissance Studies and I Tatti, and in a variety of other centers, departments, and institutions within the University," he notes.

Harvard pays about $1 million for land behind Burr Hall; the Graduate School of Design will move there. Otto Preminger says he will make a movie about the "aimless rebellion and search for intense senory experience of today's college students." "We are not making a movie about Harvard or about Alpert and Leary," his screenwriter explains, "but the Harvard story is certainly relevant to our purposes." Harvard Faculty members urge that schoolchildren be taught to drink and that intra-uterine devices be supplied to young girls.

Freshmen -- no longer asked to name their first, second, and third choices among Houses -- are encouraged to write letters to Dean Monro if they have "a substantial preference." An ex-professor at New York City's Polytechnic College filches from Harvard its good name, together with 327 other good names, by registering them in Monaco and acquiring exclusive European rights to their use. The owner of the Brattle and Harvard Square Theatres says that "Harvard Square audiences are the most sophisticated in the United States. . . . they stamp their feet, boo, whistle, and write letters." The CRIMSON elects a girl managing editor and the entire country behaves like a Harvard Square audience.