Word: bursars
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Meanwhile, the identimats are delivered and Harvard is going to use them somehow, palm prints or no. Students entering the dining halls will have to slip their bursar cards into the slot and push down on the machine, just as though their palm prints had been encoded, while the checkers check them off the old way. The whole business is worse than pointless--it's easier than ever to lend your card to someone else, and the dining hall personnel have the extra burden of supervising machines that are just there for show. People practicing on the new machines...
...thing is that Hall has reason on his side. If you ignore his less-than-deft handling of the whole affair and set aside the question of why he didn't simply tell the checkers to look more carefully at people's bursar card photographs, the Identimat plan begins to make a certain amount of sense. It's possible that Hall did his thinking on a purely financial basis and failed to consider anything else, but it's also possible that he decided rationally that the hand-print machines were ideologically innocent...
...point of view he would be right. A machine that records the shape and transparency of your fingers on a strip of magnetic tape--no central files are kept, so the authorities don't know anything about your hand--is no more invidious than the cameras they use for bursar cards now. People who don't balk at showing an ID card every time they want to get into the dining room or the library stacks should have no qualms about hand prints. It's the same principle. The new system is only a way of letting a michine...
Harvard is different from Leavenworth, in any case. One imagines that if Leavenworth had identimats they would be used on different sorts of occasions. Around here a bursar card, with or without hand print, is a mark of privilege--let's face it, you pay $5000 a year so that you and not somebody with a different shaped hand can have Harvard's food and library books. Charging totalitarianism when your palm is scanned in the Harvard dining halls is no more reasonable than complaining when a bank teller checks your signature before handing over the money...
Baskin-Robbins came to Bow Street in the fall of 1971, with the class. Bursar's cards had photographic identification for the first time. The Lampoon went co-ed. The manager of the Club Casablanca, Govert K. van Schaik '62, was shot to death at the Club during prime drinking hours. The SDS still made news. Students continued to occupy administration buildings on campuses across the nation, and in April a group of Harvard students took over Massachusetts Hall for a week...