- Donald Justice joins the English Department and teaches until his retirement in 1992. Justice won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1980 for Selected Poems. He passed away in 2004 in Iowa.
- The African and Asian Languages and Literatures department was founded. Although Arabic, Chinese, Hebrew, Japanese and Swahili had been taught on campus since the late 1960s, the college recognized the need to promote and enhance non-Western languages and cultures by a department committed to these areas. Haig Der-Houssikian served as the first chair of the department.