Campus & Community

This month in Harvard history

1 min read
  • Feb. 27, 1971 – At Currier House, Radcliffe sponsors its first annual prelaw conference.
  • February 1972 – Harvard purchases the 180-room Hotel Continental (Garden St. and Concord Ave., Cambridge) for $1.2 million, with a long-term goal of converting it into graduate-student housing and a possible short-term goal of using it for the College’s first coresidential freshman dormitory (starting in fall 1972).
  • Feb. 7, 1972 – The Monroe C. Gutman Library opens at the Graduate School of Education.
  • Feb. 24, 1972 – Black students lead a protest over Harvard’s holdings of Gulf Oil stock. “The group of 54, many of them Harvard students, represented the Pan African Liberation Committee. They charged that Gulf ‘facilitates the daily slaughter of Africans,’ through its operations in the Portuguese colonies of Mozambique and Angola.” (Quotation: “Harvard Bulletin,” March 1972)
  • February 1977 – The Harvard Institute for Learning in Retirement opens in the Division of Continuing Education.
  • Feb. 4, 1978 – At Soldiers Field, Harvard’s Olympic-size (50-meter, 10-lane) Blodgett Pool is formally named and dedicated. The $4.2 million pool holds 750,000 gallons of water; the facility seats 1,200. The pool is named for principal donor John W. Blodgett Jr. ’23, owner of a timber-and-lumber business based in Grand Rapids, Mich.– From the Harvard Historical Calendar, a database compiled by Marvin Hightower