Did you know Alumni Bulletins from 1969 to 1974 are available to view online in the Digital Archives?
These bulletins include interesting gems from when UMass Dartmouth was the Southeastern Massachusetts Technological Institute and Southeastern Massachusetts University. Class notes, campus news, sports updates, alumni events, employment opportunities, photos, and more can be found within their pages.
In November 1969, construction of the library started and was big news: “The new structure, the focal point of the inner campus, will hold 400,000 books, seat 1,800 students, and provide space for a map room, rare book and special collection rooms, audio-visual carrels, a computer laboratory, two fully-equipped television studios, TV control room and a 235-foot communications tower.”
In February of 1971, updates included the donation of a color computer: “The computer will be utilized by the students in the advanced dyeing course to enable them to compute rapidly the types of dyes used in producing a given shade, and also the concentrations of each particular dye used to arrive at an exact color match… With the use of the computer, dyeing becomes nearly an exact science and real, accurate dye formulations are accurately produced.”
In May of 1973, an alumni event resulted in an elaborate description in the bulletin: “Scores of alumni lived it up at a swinging time at the annual Alumni Award Dinner-Dance and bacchanalia that fermented on Friday May 25th in the SMU Campus Center. They greeted old buddies, toasted each other with a few schnapps, returned time and again to the heavily laden festive buffet, and floated around the dance floor in a dazzling display of terpsichorean virtuosity. The description, of course, is an outrageous exaggeration. Actually, it was a reasonably respectable affair and nobody called the local gendarmes. Everyone simply had a jolly good time. So why don’t you come next year!”
The Alumni Bulletins are chock-full of tidbits of this institution’s history. You can see the early costs for living in the first dormitory on campus, an announcement for a production of Fiddler on the Roof, and the details for an alumni-sponsored trip to Copenhagen. This 8-day trip included accommodations, breakfast every morning, bus tours, tickets to the Royal Danish Ballet, and more. The cost in 1970? An extraordinarily-low $262.90.
You can check out the alumni bulletins here.
Nicole O’Connell, Graduate Student in Professional Writing and Communication
