In the 1940s, Harvard Had Waiters (and About the Same Number of Students)

Every week, The Crimson publishes a selection of articles that were printed in our pages in years past.

September 23, 1940: Council Asks Trial of Student Waiting

The following is a summary of the Student Council Report on Student Waiting prepared by a committee of eight undergraduates and adopted by the Student Council last June.

In its previous report the Student Council Committee on Board expressed the opinions that the members of the Houses are not receiving, a fair return for the present board charges and that better meals could be served at lower prices. Since it became clear during the course of this investigation that board rates might possibly be lowered by the partial substitution of students for waitresses, the Committees is issuing this supplementary report on student waiting. Nevertheless, it wishes to emphasize its belief that the question of student waiting is subordinate in importance to the remedying of the dining-hall inefficiency and waste pointed to by evidence in the first report.

The issues involved in student waiting are three-fold:

1. What effect would it have on board rates?

2. What are the arguments for an against it aside from this effect?

3. What is the altitude of House Masters and undergraduates toward student waiting?

September 23, 1946: Enrollment Reaches All-Time High

Today's expected total of 2,600 returning undergraduates will swell College enrollment figures to over 5,200, Registrar Sargent Kennedy '28 announced last night as he anxiously reviewed plans for accommodating the largest group of students in Harvard history.

Although the College population will materialize into a community well under last spring's predicted horde of some 5,500, the first meeting of classes on Wdnesday will still find many students harried by coming worries with a respectable handful sleeping, barracks style, in the Indoor Athletic Building.

Total University population is expected to crystallize at around 12,000 with the Law and Business Schools making up the bulk of the Graduate population.

Setember 26, 1966: Tradition Is Broken As Jews Hold High Holy Day Services in Mem Church

The University has quietly reversed a long-standing tradition by permitting Jewish High Holy Days services to be held in Memorial Church. The blowing of the ram's horn at sundown Saturday ended the first non-Christian service open to the public in Mem Church's 35-year history.

The decision to permit the services was made this summer by the Rev. Charles Price, Preacher to the University after Rabbi Ben-Zion Gold of Hillel House told him that it was difficult to find a hall large enough to house the Reform services, one of three sets of services held for the Holy Days. Price said yesterday that he discussed the matter with President Pusey, but that the decision was his own. The question was not discussed at all by the Corporation, Sargent Kennedy, secretary to the Corporation, said last night.

September 26, 1969: Brass Tacks: The Cambridge Project

To understand the Cambridge Project, we have to go back a few years, to the Pentagon's first disastrous brush with the new social science. In 1964 a program under the quaint name of Camelot was launched by the Special Operations Research Office of the U.S. Army. Camelot's purpose. according to an official description was to devise procedures for assessing the potential for internal war within national societies; to identify with increased degrees of confidence, these actions which a government might take to relieve conditions which are assessed as giving rise to a potential for internal war; and to assess the feasibility of prescribing the characteristies of a system for obtaining and using the essential information needed for doing the above to things.

Translated back into English, Camelot was intchded to enlist social science data-gathering and model-building techniques in the service of America's global efforts to prevent social revolutions ("internal war"). The project was to concentrate on the Latin American countries, where left-wing insurgencies were getting to be a pretty scrious problem in the early 1960's, and a major field office was to be established in the region to co-ordinate data-gathering operations.

September 27, 1974: Room Thirteen: A Little Help From Their Friends

Late one night during registration week, a telephone rang in the basement of Stoughton Hall. A co-director of "Room 13"--a counseling, referral and information service run for and by Harvard students--picked up the receiver, only to hear a familiar voice.

She was a chronic caller. As usual, she had a lot to say: descriptions of her problems and fantasies; the ramblings of a lonely person.

Pat M. Booker '75, the co-director, listened to the caller. He asked her questions, listened, then asked more questions. He was willing to listen to all she said because that is Room 13's business. When he finally put down the receiver, he had spent seven hours talking with her.

Compiled by Jared T. Lucky and Julie M. Zauzmer.