"I was fortunate in that the people I knew came back," Wolfe says.

Academics

The demands of the war had a lasting effect on academics for both Harvard and Radcliffe.

Many graduate students and professors were involved in the war effort, leaving Harvard short-handed.

Frost notes that one of his tutors was a retired high-school teacher who Harvard had hired to teach while the Faculty was depleted.

"More responsibility was put on [the student]," he says. "There was less guidance."

Still, students at Harvard were working harder during the war than ever before. V-12 participants and those in the ROTC were required to take a fifth course every semester in physics, engineering or naval history.

"The Navy imposed sort of a national standard that if you didn't take five courses, you weren't working hard enough in college," O'Donnell says.

Harvard added a summer term so that students could complete their degree requirements more quickly. Unlike the relaxed peacetime summer school, the wartime summer term featured a full list of course offerings.

Fall 1945, the first post-war term, also marked the end of Harvard's free elective system and the inauguration of the General Education Program.

The Gen. Ed. program required students to take courses in each of three broad course areas--natural sciences, social sciences and the humanities.

The class of '47 also witnessd the beginning of "joint-education," as Harvard and Radcliffe classes combined in 1943 in response to the reduced Faculty.

Perhaps the most significant effect of the war, joint-education gave Radcliffe students the flexibility and variety of a Harvard education.

"It completely broke down the separation between Radcliffe and Harvard," Wolfe says. "The [Harvard course] catalog was completely available" to Radcliffe women.

Mixed classes led to the integration of the Widener reading room in the fall of 1945. Previously restricted to the much smaller Radcliffe Study in Widener--often dubbed the "black hole of Calcutta" by disgruntled students--Radcliffe yearbook tables in what the Radcliffe yearbook referred to as "Harry's Club,"? a reference to Harry Elkins Widener '07, the library's namesake.