The Harvard Crimson :: Commencement 2009

1984 Senior Gift Meets World Politics
The class of '84 placed its senior gift money in escrow until the University divested from Apartheid South Africa
By BRITTANY M LLEWELLYN
Amid a brewing global debate about how best to address the system of racial apartheid in South Africa, Harvard’s graduating classes in the mid-1980s sought to bring the issue closer to home.

Local Activists Go Nuclear
By MARIANNA N TISHCHENKO
In the spring of 1983, Cambridge became the battleground for a showdown between defense contractors and anti-nuclear groups. A grassroots movement spearheaded by voter mobilization group Nuclear Free Cambridge attracted national attention when members began to voice strong opposition to nuclear weapons.

Harvard Sets Tone for Future of ROTC
Ban on ROTC continued despite efforts to establish unofficial campus presence
By BORA FEZGA and EVAN T. R. ROSENMAN
In the decades since Harvard expelled the Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) from campus at the height of the Vietnam War, the relationship between the University and the marginalized program has continued to be a contentious one.

1984: First Class
By JULIA S CHEN
On the morning of Saturday June 6, 2009, while other reunion classes sleep in, the class of 1984 will already be awake and on banks of the Charles River. But alumni in town for their classes’ 25th reunion will not be there picnic or to laze on the river. Instead, they will be cleaning it.

Computing Gets Personal at FAS
In the 1983--1984 school year, Harvard students embrace PCs
By MARK J. CHIUSANO
Until the early 1980s—before the introduction of personal computers—Harvard exclusively provided centralized computing to students and faculty.

Ruggers Recall Historic Win
1984 Marks the unlikely rise of Harvard's rugby football team
By LINGBO LI and MARIANNA N TISHCHENKO
The 1984 Harvard Rugby Football Club was so busy raising the money to compete that its players did not see their own victory coming.

Substance, Not Procedure
By THE CRIMSON STAFF
A perception of powerlessness has deflated previous College governance structures, and the council must confront this dilemma sooner than perhaps even campus skeptics would have predicted.

The Darker Side
By ERROL T. LOUIS
Here we are in America, 1984, and it seems that only by a powerful act of deliberate self-delusion could one imagine that Blacks in America and elsewhere, are not, as a group, getting beat in the head by various American institutions, chief among them the United States government.

Nineteen Hundred and Eighty-Four
By RICHARD E. PIPES
It is self-evident that the year 1984 will not in the least resemble the nightmare anticipated by Orwell.

The Silent Generation
By JEAN E. ENGELMAYER
Today, like never before, students must lobby-with their minds and with their votes--to hold the hard-word advantages they secured years ago.

Blocking Democracy
By THE CRIMSON STAFF
"Warning: The Reagan Administration has determined that interacting with leftists could be dangerous to the American public's health."

Nothing but the Truth
By JONATHAN S. SAPERS
President Reagan trespassed a bit further on the freedom of the press last week when he ordered a Justice Department probe to discover who, among top administration officials, had leaked information that had jeopardized the safety of the administration's new top envoy to the Middle East Robert C. McFarlane.

Go for Quality, Not Quantity
By THE CRIMSON STAFF
The housing lottery held every spring for freshmen is the closest Harvard comes to polling undergraduates on the popularity of the Houses.

Breaking Away
By THE CRIMSON STAFF
In reality, the nine final clubs and the College are bound together in a complex web of connections—every one of which benefits the clubs directly, and discredits the College profoundly.