The lead stories

Taking time out of his efforts to pick a new dean of the Faculty, President Bok this year renewed his fight against big-time collegiate athletics, though not as successfully as he had in the previous year. As chairman of a committee of college presidents, Bok led a drive last year to toughen the academic standards required of athletes to be eligible for intercollegiate competition.

This year however, the committee's attempt to give college presidents greater say over athletic policy--by setting up a panel of college presidents with veto power over the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA)--ran into opposition at the NCAA annual convention in January. After a watered-down version of the plan was approved. Bok said he would retire from his prominent role in the debate in order to spend more time on fundraising and appointments.

Bok also made headlines closer to home in October when he lashed out, in a rare public statement, against a binding referendum that would make Cambridge a nuclear-free zone by banning research on nuclear weapons within city limits. Bok said the so-called "Nuclear Free Cambridge" proposal violated tenets of academic freedom, a view that residents of Cambridge apparently share. The resolution was decisively defeated by Cambridge voters in November, following a contentious campaign between supporters and heavily financed opposition groups, which included several Harvard professors.

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India's fight for independence and the American civil rights movement revealed both the power and the potential of non-violent political action. At least that's the notion Gene Sharp is assuming under a new program he set up this year at Harvard's Center for International Affairs (CFIA) to study non-violent means of political struggle.

Sharp, a CFIA associate and professor of Sociology at Southeastern Massachusetts University, started the program this year with $100,000 in donations and will focus on non-violent means of combatting war, dictatorship, genocide, and oppression.

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The National Institute of Education (NIE) decided in the fall to award Harvard's Graduate School of Education nearly $8 million for a center to explore the uses of computers to aid elementary and secondary schools' education. The center has been getting rave reviews for some of the innovative ideas it has been considering.

One problem. Bank Street College in New York thought it could have done a better job with the money. In fact, it thought it could do the job with only $4.4 million, significantly lower than Harvard's bid. And it has charged that the government, in awarding the money to Harvard, violated normal contract procedures.

While there is no indication that Harvard has perpetrated any wrong-doing in obtaining the grant, government investigators are currently exploring whether the officials who oversaw the grant wrongly pulled strings to get Harvard the money.

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Two years ago, the Supreme Court ruled that Grendel's Den, a Cambridge restaurant, could not be denied a liquor license because of the opposition of a nearby church. The ruling marked a personal triumph for the Law School's number one Constitutional expert. Laurence H. Tribe '62, who argued the case for Grendel's. And he felt he was worth every penny of the legal costs up to $300,000 worth.

But State Attorney General Francis X. Belloffi didn't agree, calling Tribe's figure for seven years of work on the case exorbitant. U.S. District Court Judge Joseph F. Tauro finally ruled in March that Tribe be paid about $175,000 for his efforts which translated into roughly a $275 per hour rate, still well below the $525 fee he sometimes charges.

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The news was bright this fall for prospective applicants to Harvard, when the admissions office said it was considering making SAT scores optional in students' applications. Instead of the traditional test scores, students would be allowed to send in the scores of five Achievement tests in selected fields.

Part of the impetus for the proposal was a study conducted by the Office of Instructional Research and Evaluation, which found that achievement scores best predicted the way students would perform at Harvard. No word in yet on when the proposed change might be implemented.

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"SoHo. So there," the long-time motto of many Quad residents, was finally laid to rest this year, when South House was renamed Cabot House.

The house was named in honor of two long time Harvard benefactors--Thomas D. Cabot '19 and Virginia Cabot--whose gifts have included more than a million dollars to upgrade the Quad facilities.

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There will probably be a number of Jewish seniors not in attendance at Commencement today. Not because they don't want to, either Commencement this year was scheduled to coincide with the Jewish holiday of Shavuot.

Students throughout the year tried to get the University to change the date, writing 3 petition to President Bok, among other actions--but to no avail Harvard officials said that Jewish legal authorities had told them that it is acceptable for stu- dents to attend Commencement ceremonies after attending morning holiday services. They did promise, though, to make every effort to make sure such a conflict did not arise in the future.

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Citizens of Woburn have been concerned for over a decade about the hazards of toxic waste stored in a city dump site. Their worst fears were confirmed this February by the release of the results of a two-year study carried out by two researchers from the School of Public Health.

The study--undertaken by Associate Professor of Biostatistics Stephen W. Lagakes and Professor of Statistical Science Martin Zelen--showed that contaminated well water was responsible for the unusually high rate of childhood leukemia and birth defects in the town's population.

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Membership in the Harvard Law Review is usually a sure-five stepping stone to prestigious clerkships or fancy positions in corporate law firms, but getting past the tough selection standard is skin to crossing the Ohio State goalline--it doesn't happen often. But this may change now, in light of new pressure placed on the Law Review this year to reform its ways and open up its selection process.

Both students and some faculty challenged the review's practice of picking some of its editors solely on the basis of grades--a standard they charged was far too arbitrary. The pressure seemed to work. In February, the review editors voted to eliminate the practice of solely counting grades for some students, making selection contingent on both grades and a writing competition.

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For several years, members of the United Automobile Workers union have waged a bitter campaign to organize clerical and technical workers in the Harvard Medical Area. It has fought and lost two close campaigns to win the right to represent these workers.

Their job didn't get any easier this year. In a major victory for Harvard, which has stubbornly opposed the union, the National Labor Relations Board overturned an earlier ruling which separated Med workers from the rest of the University.

The decision backed Harvard's position that all clerical and technical workers should be considered a single bargaining unit. This now means that, in order to win recognition, the union has to win support from workers throughout the University--a strikingly more difficult task, but one which union officials vowed they would pursue.

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Since 1980, Harvard's Graduate School of Design has run a deficit. Students have charged that the school suffers from a lack of direction. Outside professors have said the school, once the premiere architecture school in the country, has slipped in prominence.

The school has begun to take notice.

In the fall, President Bok proposed creating three joint professorships between the Design School and the Kennedy School of Government in housing, transportation, and urban development. And in the spring, school officials began discussing a major expansion of its academic scope and ways to alleviate its financial problems.

Administrators said that specialized advanced degree and post-professional programs are needed to expand the curriculum and being in new sources of funding for the school.

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Littauer Professor of Political Economy Thomas C. Schelling has made his academic reputation for his path-breaking work in games theory. He was one of the early strategists of the nuclear age, and he has studied the effect of arms sales abroad.

But now Schelling is training his analytic guns on an entirely different problem--getting people to quit smoking. With the help of a $658,000 grant from the Carnegie Foundation, Schelling this spring founded a new interdisciplinary center at the Kennedy School of Government to study cigarette smoking and to come up with policy suggestions to help smokers quit.

Schelling already chaired a smoking behavior study group formed of scholars from the K-School, Med School, and School of Public Health. He also won a $216,000 research grant in January from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation.CrimsonJi H. MinARCHIE C. EPPS III