A return to normalcy never occurred. The College, bloated from the 3,500 students for which it was designed to the 5,300 which it took in 1946, grew even larger in the next few years. Administrators expected the Class of 1950 to undergo "shrinkage" as the veterans simmered in Harvard's crucible, but the veterans' success undid their plans.

The next two entering classes were even larger as Harvard hedged its bets on the Korean War draft, accepting more students than it could handle to compensate in advance for the students it would lose to conscription.

The losses never came, and Bender, looking back on those years, saw the increased enrollment as "a surprising and regrettable fact." In an annual report he lamented the heavy burdens on faculty and facilities and ascribed them to "the continued remarkably low rate of loss of students because of academic failure."

A resilient Harvard accommodated the growing classes. Lamont Library opened in 1949, and the undergraduates entrenched in the overcrowded Widener Library reading rooms left the University libraries for their own.

In many ways, the sudden arrival of those 1645 first years made Harvard College the school it is today. Enrollment jumped from 3,500 to 6,000 that fall, and never came down. (??????????? Did it not decrease in the mid 1950s back to 1,000 students a class?)

The WASP Meets the Westerner

While the embattled gym-dwellers and Quonset huts announced the G.I. Bill's influences on Harvard to any who saw the campus, a more subtle but critical shift occurred. The Class of 1950 was not only huge and half veteran, it was the end of an era.

The entering class showed the diversity that would characterize the College through the second half of the twentieth century as it slowly expanded its admissions from New England preparatory schools to encompass the nation.