Taking time out of his efforts to pick a new dean of the Faculty, President Bok this year renewed his fight against big-time collegiate athletics, though not as successfully as he had in the previous year. As chairman of a committee of college presidents, Bok led a drive last year to toughen the academic standards required of athletes to be eligible for intercollegiate competition.

This year however, the committee's attempt to give college presidents greater say over athletic policy--by setting up a panel of college presidents with veto power over the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA)--ran into opposition at the NCAA annual convention in January. After a watered-down version of the plan was approved. Bok said he would retire from his prominent role in the debate in order to spend more time on fundraising and appointments.

Bok also made headlines closer to home in October when he lashed out, in a rare public statement, against a binding referendum that would make Cambridge a nuclear-free zone by banning research on nuclear weapons within city limits. Bok said the so-called "Nuclear Free Cambridge" proposal violated tenets of academic freedom, a view that residents of Cambridge apparently share. The resolution was decisively defeated by Cambridge voters in November, following a contentious campaign between supporters and heavily financed opposition groups, which included several Harvard professors.

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India's fight for independence and the American civil rights movement revealed both the power and the potential of non-violent political action. At least that's the notion Gene Sharp is assuming under a new program he set up this year at Harvard's Center for International Affairs (CFIA) to study non-violent means of political struggle.

Sharp, a CFIA associate and professor of Sociology at Southeastern Massachusetts University, started the program this year with $100,000 in donations and will focus on non-violent means of combatting war, dictatorship, genocide, and oppression.

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The National Institute of Education (NIE) decided in the fall to award Harvard's Graduate School of Education nearly $8 million for a center to explore the uses of computers to aid elementary and secondary schools' education. The center has been getting rave reviews for some of the innovative ideas it has been considering.

One problem. Bank Street College in New York thought it could have done a better job with the money. In fact, it thought it could do the job with only $4.4 million, significantly lower than Harvard's bid. And it has charged that the government, in awarding the money to Harvard, violated normal contract procedures.

While there is no indication that Harvard has perpetrated any wrong-doing in obtaining the grant, government investigators are currently exploring whether the officials who oversaw the grant wrongly pulled strings to get Harvard the money.

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Two years ago, the Supreme Court ruled that Grendel's Den, a Cambridge restaurant, could not be denied a liquor license because of the opposition of a nearby church. The ruling marked a personal triumph for the Law School's number one Constitutional expert. Laurence H. Tribe '62, who argued the case for Grendel's. And he felt he was worth every penny of the legal costs up to $300,000 worth.

But State Attorney General Francis X. Belloffi didn't agree, calling Tribe's figure for seven years of work on the case exorbitant. U.S. District Court Judge Joseph F. Tauro finally ruled in March that Tribe be paid about $175,000 for his efforts which translated into roughly a $275 per hour rate, still well below the $525 fee he sometimes charges.

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The news was bright this fall for prospective applicants to Harvard, when the admissions office said it was considering making SAT scores optional in students' applications. Instead of the traditional test scores, students would be allowed to send in the scores of five Achievement tests in selected fields.