Word: sputniked
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...October 4, 1957, the Soviet Union launched man's first artificial earth satellite, Sputnik I. The event was to affect the lives of most Americans, including hundreds of high school seniors throughout the country who were at that time contemplating attending Harvard College in Cambridge, Mass...
Most high school seniors thought that they were getting out just in time. Self-appointed critics in the post-Sputnik days said that the United States was "lagging behind" the Russians and advocated a stiffening of the school curriculum and an increase in high school science training...
...admitted--discovered that Harvard College was too stable a place to be changed over-night by a crash program "to catch up with the Russians." At a time when radical changes hit all of American secondary education and many other colleges, '62 experienced no direct effects of the post-Sputnik era. The Faculty in the last four years continually attempted to straighten out the honors-non-honors program and wondered about the place of specialization in science courses for non-scientists, but these debates were routine compared to previous changes in undergraduates' education at Harvard...
...more significant event for those who would join the Class of 1962 was the announcement one year before Sputnik that Harvard would launch a massive effort to raise $82.5 million for higher education...
...their savings against inflation's ravages (those who hung on to war savings bonds lost more by the decline of the dollar than they made on interest). The new gamblers thought they were in on a sure thing if they picked and chose correctly. The cold war and Sputnik would force the U.S. Government to spend lavishly on anything even vaguely related to defense; the population was going up, and to serve it the U.S. economy would boom as never before in the new decade that was being alliteratively billed as the "Soaring Sixties.'' Operating on these...