1940 Harvardians Offered Frank Ranking of College Women

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

September 5, 1940: Off-Campus Entertainment Varies from Girls' Colleges to Local Bars

Confidential Guide and official literature to the contrary, Harvard students do not concentrate exclusively on studying, trying out for the football team, or going to see the Dean. A good deal of a freshman's spare time is spent on the campuses of neighboring women's colleges, and in bars, dance halls, night clubs, theaters, and restaurants of Greater Boston.

Last year an exhaustive poll of the senior class taken for the Senior Album revealed, among other useless information, that the class of 1940 rated girls' colleges in the following order of popularity: Radcliffe, Wellesley, Smith, Vassar, Bennington.

Radcliffe, Harvard's little sister, is the traditional butt of Harvard humor. The typical Radcliffeite is pictured as a bony female wearing flat-heeled shoes, and horn-rimmed glasses, and carrying half a dozen textbooks; usually her slip is showing. But the vote of the Class of 1940 seemed to belie that conception—or else last year's seniors liked them that way. Radcliffe is conveniently close, the girls are generally more intelligent than at other colleges, and they don't mind riding subways or sitting in the balcony. At the beginning of the year the Radcliffe Houses hold "get acquainted" teas. If you're too shy to go by yourself, you can get someone who knows the ropes to take you.

September 8, 1980: Race Report Meets the Real World

It took the College committee on race relations almost two-and-a-half years to compile its 138-page report, the first in-depth examination of interracial contact in a college environment. The student-Faculty committee, chaired by Archie C. Epps III, dean of students, issued forth pages of recommendations, all aimed at making the College, in the committee's words, "more forthright in expressing its support for the minority presence at Harvard and the necessity of good race relations on campus."

Now that the report is out and the College is in a position to act on the recommendations, administrators and students are raising questions about, respectively, the newness and merit of these proposals. Administrators who will play key roles in bringing about the changes recommended in the report—such as increasing the number of minority faculty members, tutors and proctors, promoting minority admisions and introducing Core courses on ethnic groups—say these recommendations offer nothing new; they are simply a reaffirmation of goals the College has pursued for several years.

September 7, 1986: Food, Glorious Food

"It's good to be king," deadpanned funnyman Mel Brooks, in his movie "History of the World, Part I."

There has yet to be a Part II to that less-than-classic flick. But if anyone were ever to produce a "History of Harvard" movie, a line that would be worthy of inclusion in the script would be, "It's good to be a rich alum."

While undergraduates living on campus during the academic year are forced to ingest such upscale prison fare as broccoli-cheese pasta, scrod that never had a chance, and produce that would make a P.O.W. think twice, alumni living in the Houses are being feted to meals fit for a French Sun King.

—Compiled by Julie M. Zauzmer