Reunion committees are gearing up.
Keep checking here for ways in which you can be involved,
and for details about the reunion program as it evolves.
We are excited to announce the Class Read for our May reunion: The Exceptions: Nancy Hopkins, MIT, and the Fight for Women in Science. It’s a fascinating book, published in 2023, by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Kate Zernike. In 1999, Zernike broke the story in the Boston Globe about longstanding discrimination against women and gender inequality at MIT that assured the beginning of change for women everywhere.
Zernike traces the career of Nancy Hopkins, a molecular biologist and protegé of Nobel prize-winner James Watson, as well as many other women competing for promotion, lab space, and grants at top-notch research institutions in the U.S. Until they began to compare their stories, many of these women, including Nancy Hopkins, had thought such discrimination was unrelated to their gender. The work contains references to women’s colleges where women in the 60’s and 70’s were well prepared to compete in many competitive fields but went on to endure discrimination. This was especially intense in the sciences. Nancy Hopkins as born in 1943, making her the same age of most of us in the class of 1965.