Timeline: 1972-1976

September 1, 1972: Assistant Professor of Clinical Psychology Martina S. Horner assumes Radcliffe presidency. She presides over a Radcliffe dealing with the aftermath of the “non-merger merger,” which gave Harvard control of Radcliffe’s daily operations and finances.

September 1, 1972: Women integrate the Yard as 200 reside in five freshmen dorms.

September 28, 1972: A record 600 students enroll in Chemistry 20: Organic Chemistry, surpassing the 1971 figure by almost 300 students. The grade a pre-med receives in the course is thought to be the decisive factor in medical school admissions.

October 3, 1972: A Registrar from the Board of Elections comes to Harvard to argue with students about their commitment to the state of Massachusetts. Three students were not allowed to register to vote and over 100 students left due to the long line.

October 5, 1972: Politicos Martin H. Peretz, Daniel P. Monyihan and Richard Goodwin meet to discuss the issues of the 1972 presidential campaign between Richard Nixon and George McGovern at South House.

October 12, 1972: George McGovern defends his plan for peace in Vietnam to over 6,000 people at the Armory in Boston. The same day, the U.S. mistakenly hits the French embassy in Hanoi.

October 27, 1972: Riots erupt in an East Cambridge housing development to protest the death of 17-year-old Lawrence P. Largey who died while in policy custody a few hours after being arrested.

November 3, 1972: The Committee on Undergraduate Education starts to request evaluations of its most popular courses.

November 7, 1972: Composer Leonard Bernstein ’39 begins his year on the Harvard Faculty, serving as Norton Professor of Poetry. Of his appointment, he said, “The basic function of the Norton lecturer is to be involved with students.”

November 8, 1972: Nixon is re-elected President . McGovern garners a mere 17 electoral votes from Massachusetts and D.C.

November 15, 1972: A Harvard junior, Michael C. Obuchowski ’74 becomes the second youngest representative in Vermont’s statehouseat age 20.

November 27, 1972: The day after Yale trounces Harvard Football 28-17, the Yale Daily News publishes a fake Crimson announcing Kissinger’s return. The farce “fooled students, many of whom were still hung over from post-game partying.”

November 29, 1972: Nixon names three alumni to his cabinet, Elliot L. Richardson ’41, Former Crimson President Caspar W. Weinberger ’38 and Roy L. Ash Harvard Business School ’47.

December 4, 1972: Harvard’s Memorial Church ordains its first female minister. The ordination marks the first time a woman has been named a minister by the university since its founding in 1636.

December 15, 1972: The board of Harvard Student Agencies vetoes selling contraceptives in the Freshman Union.

December 17, 1972: Nixon orders stepped-up bombings of Vietnam despite assertions that the United States and North Vietnam are near a cease fire.

December 19, 1972: Marxist Economist Arthur MacEwwan is the fourth radical economist denied a new contract by the Unversity’s Economics Department.

January 11, 1973: Dean of the Faculty John T. Dunlop resigns to take a post in the Nixon administration.

January 24, 1973: The Harvard Crimson turns 100.

January 26, 1973: The military draft officially ends.

February 10, 1973: Harvard’s administration assuages fears that the energy crisis gripping the northeast will affect the University. The University is heated by waste steam created by the Cambridge Electric plant.

March 19, 1973: After voting in the beginning of the month to revive a union, graduate students and teaching fellows begin a strike to protest a new financial aid plan.

March 27, 1973: Marlon Brando refuses to accept an Oscar for best actor, citing the treatment of American Indians by the film industry.

April 6, 1973: Greek coins stolen from the Fogg Museum. The coins, from 5th and 6th century BC, are valued at $90,000.

April 14, 1973: The Crimson discovers the location of Cambridge’s CIA office, located at 545 Technology Square.

May 1, 1973: Nixon accepts the resignation of his top four aids. He says that he must bear the ultimate responsibility for his staff.

May 14, 1973: Harvard women decide to form an employee’s organization to discuss affirmative action and create task forces to study women’s issues.

May 18, 1973: Archibald Cox ’34, Williston Professor of Law, is named the special Watergate prosecutor.

September 1, 1973: Henry Rosovsky takes over as Dean of the Faculty.

September 1, 1973: Students return to find Pusey, Currier and Canaday under construction. Overcrowding also reaches crisis levels with six River Houses converting office space to bedrooms.

September 24, 1973: Shuttle buses from Radcliffe to the Yard begin out of security concerns. The buses will run from 4 p.m. to 2 a.m.

September 27, 1973: Ec 10 enrollment reaches a record 1,200 as students cram Lowell Lecture Hall.

October 1, 1973: War breaks out in the Middle East as tank battles rage along the Suez Canal and the Golan Heights.

October 6, 1973: Harvard breaks a 71-year tradition and endorses three women for the formerly-male restricted Rhodes Scholarship.

October 10, 1973: Spiro T. Agnew resigns as Vice President, pleading no contest to charges of tax evasion.

October 13, 1973: Gerald Ford is nominated Vice President.

October 20, 1973: A crime wave at Harvard begins, with three assaults and two armed robberies over the course of the week. Nationally, Nixon fires Cox in the Saturday Night Massacre. Warburg Professor of Economics John Kenneth Galbraith says, “This is it. Nixon will be impeached.”

November 3, 1973: Dean of Students Archie Epps III considers hiring more police to combat the wave of muggings by Mather, Dunster and Leverett.

November 10, 1973: Harvard announces that power cutbacks are likely to take place over the winter. Brownouts, typically seen during the summer, are predicted for the winter season.

November 16, 1973: In a letter, the Harvard Republican Club asks Nixon to resign.

November 19, 1973: American Indians at Harvard demand funds from the University and question the admission office’s recruiting practices.

November 29, 1973: Harvard allows secretaries to leave work before dark after a secretary has a brick thrown in her face.

December 3, 1973: Thieves net 5,000 coins in a heist at the Fogg. Their value is reputedly close to $5 million.

December 5, 1973: The Committee on Housing and Undergraduate Life discusses a proposal to put all first-years in Yard housing.

December 21, 1973: Harvard announces a plan to begin “mothballing,” or keeping Harvard rooms at 62 degrees in rooms over the extended winter break.

January 29, 1973: The John F. Kennedy Library releases the assassinated president’s personal files.

January 30, 1973: Martin H. Peretz, A lecturer on Social Studies and Master of South House, considers buying the New Republic.

February 4, 1973: Professor Robert J. Keily, Master of Adams House and Professor of English reveals two questions on the final exam for his class on the contemporary novel to a small group of students in an Adams House review session.

February 6, 1974: Harvard defends its minority admissions policy to the Supreme Court in a brief that contends universities have the right to make decisions while consciously considering race as a factor.

February 11, 1974: Harvard’s hockey team beats Boston University 5-4 in the final minutes of the Beanpot finals, winning the championship for the first time since 1969.

March 1, 1974: A federal grand jury indicts seven top White House aids on charges of conspiring to impede the Watergate investigation.

March 1, 1974: Record numbers of first-years apply to live in Leverett and Mather House in an effort to outsmart a new computerized housing program and avoid living in Radcliffe housing.

March 11, 1974: Several hundred people, mostly Harvard students, demonstrate against Vice President Ford while he is in Boston accepting his Man of the Year award from Harvard’s Young Republicans Club.

March 21, 1974: Harvard’s Economics department refuses to accept a committee recommendation to require Marxian theory for graduate economic students.

April 9, 1974: Thirty-two of Harvard’s Printing Office workers go on strike for a wage increase.

April 27, 1974: About 150 students demonstrate in Forbes Plaza in support of the striking printers, who now demand a 5.9 percent increase in wages.

May 7, 1974: Typesetters join printers in their strike for wage hikes. The typesetters voted to join the local printer’s union.

May 15, 1974: After watching the printer’s strike, clerical employees consider forming a union.

June 7, 1974: Architect I. M. Pei promises to scale down plans for the JFK library, eliminating the 85-foot glass pyramid and the two 350-seat theaters. The changes were made in response to the outrage by community members against the large size of the library.

September1, 1974: First-year students move into Canaday Hall. The newly completed dorm is equipped with wall-to-wall carpeting and soundproofing.

September 17, 1974: Twenty Harvard summer school students face disciplinary action for using prepared exam codes for the Physics S-1 exam. On the same day, Reverand Peter J. Gomes is named minister of Memorial Church and Plummer Professor of Christian Morals.

October 4, 1974: Seven thousand protestors march on Broadway in South Boston, protesting integrated busing efforts. School attendance drops by 50 percent during the first day of the mandatory busing efforts.

October 28, 1974: Harvard Dining Services begins to check student identification cards.

November 5, 1974: Michael S. Dukakis becomes Governor of Massachusetts.

November 20, 1974: HMS professor emeritus Dana K. Farnworth suggests drug law reform so that possession of less than an ounce of marijuana is no longer a criminal offense.

December 2, 1974: Derrick A. Rall Jr., the only black professor at Harvard Law School, threatens to resign if HLS does not substantially increase efforts to hire minority faculty.

January 15, 1975: Ford’s State of the Union Address proposes tax cuts, higher fuel costs and ways to alleviate recession.

February 6, 1975: After 10 years of conflict, the Kennedy Library Corporation decides not to build the museum portion of the complex on the Cambridge site.

March 23, 1975: Four undergraduates are assaulted outside of Leverett and Mather house in separate incidents.

April 17. 1975: After a woman is raped in Lamont, women’s bathrooms are moved to the first and fourth floors and combination locks are installed on doors.

April 28, 1975: The U.S. withdraws its last personnel from Vietnam.

May 17, 1975: Thousands swarm the Boston Commons calling for an end to public school segregation.

September 1, 1975: Harvard and Radcliffe admissions merge, as same standards apply to both male and female applicants.

September 1, 1975: Dean Archie C. Epps III announces course reviews for minorities in order to overcome the “barrier” preventing blacks from communicating freely with professors.

September 24. 1975: The Senate Intelligence Committee discloses that the CIA was monitoring some Harvard mail.

October 4, 1975: Harvard and 14 other colleges release the first version of the Common Application.

October 7, 1975: Boston Red Sox sweep win the American Leaugue pennant, sweeping the Oakland A’s, the reigning world champion.

October 17, 1975: Harvard Medical School researchers suggest that marijuana may be the most effective drug to relieve nausea for patients undergoing chemotherapy.

November 15, 1975: Muhammed Ali visits Harvard Square and spends his afternoon signing autographs .

November 20, 1975: Generalismo Francisco Franco, ruler of fascist Spain for 36 years, dies.

December 9, 1975: F. Skiddy von Stade Jr. ’38, Dean of Freshman and Master of Mather House, announces his retirement after over 30 years of work at Harvard.

December 9, 1975: Ex-Georgia Governor Jimmy Carter predicts win in ’76 presidential race. He says, “The next president of America will be a nuclear engineer who grows peanuts in Georgia.”

December 13, 1975: Harvard claims that Law School student Spiro M. Pavlovich used false transcripts to obtain admissions to the Law-Business program.

December 14, 1975: Doris Kearns, associate professor of Goverment weds Richard Goodwin, a political writer and a former top aid to Presidents Kennedy and Johnson.

January 12, 1976: Harvard students return after winter break to find more than 20 suites in four River Houses flooded after pipes burst over break.

February 9, 1976: Magnetic strips are added to students’ bursar cards in order to limit access to University facilities. The University plans to experiment later in the spring with shoebox-like readers that scan the magnetic strip to determine the validity of ID cards.

February 13, 1976: Six students are evicted from South House for disorderly conduct.

February 18, 1976: Harvard’s Office of Admissions begins early acceptance.

February 27, 1976: Michael L. McHugh ’77 is elected president of the D.U. Club. He is the first black president of a final club.

February 1976: Scott Meadow ’77, an “esthetic bodybuilder,” wins Mr. New England, aided by a diet of egg whites and water.

March 5, 1976: Shuttle bus service is extended to daylight hours. “I felt guilty at first about not walking,” Meredith Beth ’76 told The Crimson.

March 16, 1976: A group of Radcliffe juniors send out letters to alumni asking for help starting a female final club.

April 16, 1976: A study finds Radcliffe women play dumb in order to boost the ego of their male counterparts and maintain a “normal heterosexual relationship.”

April 20, 1976: High jumper Mel Embree ’76 qualifies for the Olympic trials with a 7’2 (1/4) jump.

May 5, 1976: John H. Finley ’25 gives his final lecture in Humanities 103 on the “Great Age of Athens.” Finley says he is “about to embark on God’s freshman year.”