Word: firsts
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Discarding President Eliot's system of free electives, he began the present program of concentration and distribution, tutorial, and general examinations. He fought for the House system and the construction of the first seven Houses. He championed the British tradition of College Fellows until the University was convinced of its merit, and then, when the plan for Harvard House Fellows languished for lack of money, quietly supplied $1.5 million of his own to endow the program permanently...
While guiding the University through the chaotic two decades of the First World War, the roaring twenties, and the slump of the Depression, he stepped up such a building campaign that the College was never without a corps of plumbers, plasterers, and heavy construction workers. Significantly, more University buildings were erected during his administration than in all of Harvard's previous history...
...content with that alone. Lowell immediately went on to further academic reform. Within a year the College had adopted his plan for concentration and distribution, which took first effect with the Class of 1914. Under President Eliot, any student who had successfully completed 16 courses was eligible for the degree. The free elective system imposed no limitations whatsoever upon the choice of courses or their relevance to each other, so that any student who could "cram and pass" 16 times in succession was graduated. Although Lowell had vigorously and consistently attacked the system while Eliot was still in office, nothing...
Since no undergraduate department would take him up on the idea of general examinations. Lowell turned to the graduate schools. The Medical School was the first to think favorably of his plan and accordingly, in 1911, the graduating class there took the first compulsory generals in University history. The next year the Divinity School followed suit, and two years later, convinced by enthusiastic reports from the two graduate schools, the undergraduate department of History, Government, and Economics began to require generals. Within ten years, President Lowell was able to report with evident satisfaction that all departments except Chemistry and Engineering...
Thus in the first decade of his administration, Lowell had reshaped the pattern of undergraduate study and laid the foundations for a comparable change in student attitude. With the new requirements for concentration and distribution, tutorial, and general examinations, undergraduates found their academic life substantially changed. The would-be dissipators could no longer expect to graduate on a few weeks of annual cramming and only the very industrious could hope to graduate in three years...