Crimson History

‘Ivy Group’ Now Legal Term

For years just a sportswriter’s label, the “Ivy Group” became official this summer. Under a pact called the “Ivy Group Agreement” which calls the so-called Ivy colleges the “Ivy Group,” the eight presidents also expanded regulations controlling intercollegiate football.

Signed by the presidents of Harvard, Yale, Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Pennsylvania, and Princeton, the football agreement tightens eligibility requirements and puts on college presidents additional responsibility for keeping college sports clean and in proper perspective.

—Sept. 19, 1952

Shorts Too Short at ’Cliffe, Sloppy Jeans Bad Say Deans

Short shorts, sloppy blue jeans, and “indecorous conduct” in public places came up for discussion at the Cedar Hill meetings last weekend.

Radcliffe officials said they hoped ’Cliffedwellers would recognize such conduct as being in “bad taste,” and that the “pressures of public opinion” would force students to observe “more ladylike appearances” in the Yard and Quad.

—Sept. 20, 1952

25 Years ago

Changing the Face of Harvard

Under a new housing plan set forth earlier this year, for the first time in its 300-year history, Harvard Yard this fall will house the entire Harvard-Radcliffe freshman class.

The traditionally all-male Yard became coed in the fall of 1972 after Harvard and Radcliffe signed a “merger non-merger” agreement in June 1971, but the merger also bought the Radcliffe College dorms into Harvard College’s House system.

Three coed Quad Houses were born and some 10 to 20 percent of the freshman class has lived in them for each of the past four years. But this year, the Quad Houses will join the other nine residential Houses as three-year residences.

—Sept. 1, 1977

CIA Papers Link Harvard to Mind-Control Project

The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) informed University officials this week that Harvard “was involved in one way or another” in two research projects conducted under the agency’s MK-ULTRA human behavior control project, Daniel Steiner ’54, general counsel to the University, said yesterday.

Steiner said the University received substantial financial records from the CIA outlining Harvard’s involvement in the controversial mind-control program.

He refused to release any details about the documents yesterday, but said the two research projects in question did not include any drug experimentation.

The CIA secretly operated the MK-ULTRA research project for 12 years beginning in the 1950s to study the effects of alcohol and various narcotics on witting and unwitting human subjects at a number of American universities and colleges.

—Sept. 28, 1977