In the startup world, failure is often worn as a badge of honor. But it’s usually not the path to Harvard.

Andrew Rosenthal isn’t your average student, however. Two years ago, he arrived at Harvard Business School (HBS), not from the world of consulting or finance, but fresh off the implosion of his first online business venture. He wasn’t looking for a ticket to a Fortune 500 firm.

“I came here because I wanted to build things,” said Rosenthal, 28. “And I didn’t want to wait until I left to do it.”

What Rosenthal helped to build at HBS wasn’t another company, but a newly energized community of entrepreneurs on campus. While the Business School has long nurtured enterprising M.B.A.s (roughly half go on to found companies within 15 years of graduating), student interest in startup culture has exploded in recent years. And wherever you turn, one name seems to pop up: Rosenthal.

“The way he’s integrated the Boston tech community into Harvard, and Harvard into the Boston tech scene, is very unique,” said Jeff Bussgang, a senior lecturer at HBS and a general partner at the venture-capital firm Flybridge Capital Partners. “I’ve never seen a student do that, ever.”

Rosenthal, who grew up in Portland, Ore., had long been interested in the intersection of business, technology, and health. After graduating from the University of Pennsylvania with a degree in health policy and bioethics, he stayed on to work with noted psychologist Martin Seligman at Penn’s Positive Psychology Center.

In 2008, building off of Seligman’s research, Rosenthal and colleague Doug Hensch launched Happier.com. The consumer health site, billed as “a personal trainer for your happiness,” secured 50,000 users and $1 million in funding in its first year. Soon, however, Rosenthal’s mentors began warning him that Happier.com was on shaky financial footing.

“It wasn’t until Dec. 16, 2009, watching a video of myself airing on CNN talking about the company — and knowing full well that that night we’d have no money left in the bank — that I really got it,” he recalled. “I knew there was so much I needed to learn.”

Two weeks after his company went bust, he flew to Portland to take the GMAT, then scrambled to make the January application cutoff at HBS.

“My parents knew I was serious when everyone was going skiing, and I was like, ‘No, I need to stay here and study and write essays.’ ”

Early in his first year at HBS, he met Jess Bloomgarden and Dan Rumennik, two fellow M.B.A. students who shared his “impatient, optimistic enthusiasm” for entrepreneurship. The trio founded Startup Tribe, a group designed to offer hands-on support for students interested in starting companies right away, not 10 years down the line.

“There’ve always been people on campus who cared about entrepreneurship,” Rosenthal said. “All we did was help put a name on it.” But Startup Tribe did more than simply amass an amorphous group of would-be Zuckerbergs.

“We explicitly said to each other: We’re going to be a support group,” Rosenthal said. “When everybody else is interviewing for banking and consulting jobs, we’ll be there to give each other permission. We’ll be there to help each other out.”

With Bloomgarden and Rumennik, he led a campus effort to persuade HBS to launch the Minimum Viable Product Fund, a $50,000 annual appropriation for students hoping to begin businesses using the Lean Startup method, a process designed to bring new products to market as quickly as possible.

Last summer, Rosenthal landed an internship with Massive Health, a startup that is designing mobile apps and other user-friendly tools to help people track their own health. The San Francisco-based team of engineers and designers wanted Rosenthal to drop out and become their chief strategy officer.

He took the job but stayed in school. Though routine cross-country flights on a red-eye to make his 8:30 a.m. classes “weren’t fun,” he thought that his HBS education gave him an invaluable perspective on traditional industry — and, of course, more connections.

“I think plenty of my friends would say I didn’t spend enough time hanging out and playing squash,” Rosenthal said, reflecting on his time at Harvard. “But how cool is it to be able to come somewhere full of smart people, great resources, and all these opportunities, and to then be able to make something from it? I feel unbelievably lucky.”

In the end, those efforts led to a full-fledged exhibition at the Harvard Art Museums/Arthur M. Sackler Museum, developed in tandem with museum officials and four committed undergraduates, that sheds light on the works of one of America’s master contemporary artists.

“Jasper Johns / In Press: The Crosshatch Works and the Logic of Print,” which opened Tuesday at the Harvard Art Museums/Arthur M. Sackler Museum, focuses on the artist’s distinctive crosshatch technique of intersecting lines and the importance of the print medium in his work.

Roberts developed the course as a tutorial, with small seminars that allow for intimate and incisive conversations with students. She and her student team, all juniors with concentrations in the history of art and architecture, took up Johns’ painting “The Dutch Wives,” exploring its relationship to other objects in the museums’ collections and investigating the possibility of creating a show.

“It’s a work that has always intrigued me,” said Roberts, professor of history of art and architecture, and the show’s curator.

After spending hours in front of the painting observing the smallest details, and poring over extensive writings about Johns and his works, Roberts and the students  started to brainstorm. “At first, we really had no idea what we were going to do,” said Roberts. But slowly a theme emerged.

They noticed the grid of pencil marks in the work. They discerned the work’s prominent black and white hues, its incorporation of pasted-on strips of newsprint, its almost identical images placed side by side, and Johns’ renowned crosshatch method of bundled parallel lines, based on an ancient printmaking technique used to indicate shading and shadow. The closer the lines, the more shadow is created.

“From that point, we felt that we had a pretty interesting connection that we might want to follow through on,” said Roberts.

With Roberts’ guidance, the students explored the collections, culling the Harvard Art Museums’ extensive holdings of Johns’ prints and drawings. They also drafted descriptive text for the show and created online essays explaining themes in Johns’ work. They even prepared gallery talks that they will deliver during the show’s opening days.

“It was just amazing,” said student Phillip Y. Zhang of preparing the exhibit. “It definitely helped me appreciate what goes into the work that curators do, and it reinforces what we have been doing in terms of getting that very critical perspective on art, and the way we make and consume and present art.”

Many of Johns’ works in the show capture the artist’s ability to stretch the notion of printmaking, like the evocative “Skin with O’Hara Poem.” To create the piece, Johns covered his face and hands with a black greasy liquid known as tusche, rolled them on a lithographic stone, and then pressed a paper to the same surface. The resulting ghostly images seem almost to jump from the paper.

To add historic perspective, the new exhibition also includes works by other artists that illuminate the development of Johns’ style. A work by Pablo Picasso, a master at collage, reveals how Johns’ newsprint creations, the catalog states, “are indebted to Pablo Picasso’s collage experiments.” The inclusion of an engraving by the German artist Albrecht Dürer offers an early look at the use of crosshatching.

“The students had a huge amount of input and say into what actually happened with the show because they were really building it from scratch with me,” said Roberts.

The show was also a useful dry run for what museum officials anticipate with the completion of the renovated home of the Harvard Art Museums. The building on Quincy Street will include 3,000 square feet of curricular gallery space.

“For the first time in the Harvard Art Museums’ history, we will have generous space to experiment in faculty- and student-generated exhibitions,” said Susan Dackerman, the Carl A. Weyerhaeuser Curator of Prints, and the museums’ director of academic programs. “The Jasper Johns project is a model for that. It was our chance to try it out before the new building is finished … and we have found it’s been a great success.”

Dackerman helped to create the show, along with Roberts, Jennifer Quick, a Ph.D. candidate in Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences’ Department of History of Art and Architecture and an Agnes Mongan Curatorial Intern, as well as with students Jacob Cedarbaum, C. Andrew Krantz, Mary Potter, and Zhang.

On a recent walk-through of the show, which runs to Aug. 18, Cedarbaum reflected on the art on the walls and his role in getting it there.

“Professor Roberts presented us with this really unique opportunity to turn the tutorial into something so much more,” said Cedarbaum. “It’s definitely been this amazing, only-at-Harvard kind of experience.”

“Jasper Johns / In Press: The Crosshatch Works and the Logic of Print” will be on exhibit at the Harvard Art Museums/Arthur M. Sackler Museum, 485 Broadway, Cambridge, through Aug. 18.

Pedrag Stojicic was studying medicine in his native Serbia in 2005, planning to become a surgeon, when a girl approached him in a Belgrade café and told him he just might have saved her life.

Stojicic wasn’t practicing medicine yet, but had helped to found a nonprofit that educated young Serbs about HIV/AIDS and urged them to get tested for the disease. The girl, worried that she was infected, was afraid to get tested until she heard Stojicic on television say that there was help even for those who were HIV-positive. Her results came back negative, but she thereafter took precautions.

Stojicic never saw the girl again, but she affected his life as much as he did hers. The encounter convinced him that his future was in public health.

Stojicic has taken a winding path from Serbia to Boston, where he is part of the Harvard School of Public Health’s (HSPH) Class of 2012. Along the way, he received his M.D. from Belgrade University and an M.B.A. from Serbia’s Faculty of Economics, Finance and Administration.

In addition to founding the HIV/AIDS nonprofit, he worked on health care reform in Serbia and then established a second nonprofit to fight corruption in the Serbian health care system.

In 2008, Stojicic came to the United States to work on Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, convinced that Obama would overturn government restrictions on international aid for programs that distribute condoms, an essential tool in the fight against HIV. Stojicic was impressed with the campaign’s grassroots nature and, while doing Internet research, read about Senior Lecturer in Public Policy Marshall Ganz’s Harvard Kennedy School class on organizing.

Stojicic found a syllabus online, got some of the materials, and began reading. The next year, he took the class on the Internet as a distance education student. The following year, while still in Serbia, he became a teaching assistant in the class.

Ganz described Stojicic as a “people person” who is dedicated to learning the craft of organizing and who has a rare knack for developing excellence in others.

Stojicic finally made it to Harvard and met Ganz last fall, when he enrolled in HSPH’s one-year master’s in public health program. Stojicic has continued as a teaching fellow with Ganz as he has pursued his public health studies. Stojicic said he has been impressed with HSPH’s expert faculty and the School’s emphasis on translating scientific knowledge into public health practice. He is eager to engage with classmates and alumni as they work to improve health around the world.

“I really appreciate being exposed to an environment with a lot of expertise, a lot of people who really understand public health problems,” Stojicic said.

While at HSPH, Stojicic has worked with John McDonough, director of the Center for Public Health Leadership and professor of the practice of public health. McDonough met Stojicic early in the school year and described him as having a “magnetic personality,” being highly motivated, and eager to get all the knowledge he can from HSPH.

Stojicic will spend much of the year after graduation as a half-time fellow at the Center for Public Health Leadership and at the Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations.

When he returns to Serbia, Stojicic said he will resume his efforts to fight corruption in the public health system. Many physicians in the system, which is supposed to offer universal free care, demand payment from patients for treatment, Stojicic said.

“I think he’s going to go back and make a huge difference in Serbia,” Ganz said.

Patrick Staropoli ’12 has a lot of drive. In four years at Harvard College, hard work and determination propelled him to a 3.94 grade point average and earned him a place in Phi Beta Kappa, as well as in the lab of leading Harvard Medical School (HMS) neuroscientist Robert Stickgold. But when folks in Staropoli’s home state of Florida talk about his drive, they’re usually not referring to his academic achievements.

“I race super late-model cars,” says the Fort Lauderdale native. “If you were to rank my touring series, we’d probably be about two steps lower than NASCAR. It’s definitely at a professional level. A lot of NASCAR teams have development teams here to bring up the next generation of drivers.”

Staropoli doesn’t just race; he wins. Since joining the super late-model series, the Mather House resident has won four races and finished in the top five 10 times. He took his first victory lap of 2012 at Auburndale, Fla., in March in only his second race of the year.

Staropoli inherited his passion for fast cars from his grandfather, Nick Staropoli Sr., who raced in New York state, and from his father, Nick Staropoli Jr., who moved the family to Florida and raced super late-model cars at Hialeah Speedway and other venues. Staropoli said his parents started bringing him to his dad’s races when he was 6 months old. He started helping out with the race team while still a boy and, around the time that his father stopped racing in 2001, started driving go-karts competitively himself. That’s when his dad made a deal with him.

“I had to get good grades in school to keep racing,” he said. “I was 13. I was always motivated to do well in school. So in middle school and high school, I kept my end of the bargain, and got to keep racing.”

Spurred by the dream of being a race team engineer for NASCAR, Staropoli developed an interest in the math and science that he needed to work on high-performance vehicles. The career ambition drove him to the top of his class at Plantation High School and into Harvard Yard.

Shortly after he arrived in Cambridge, though, the recession hit. The racing industry, like so many others, went into a slump. Staropoli realized not only that his chances of working on a NASCAR team were slim, but also that his interest in engineering didn’t extend beyond the speedway. Looking for a new academic and career path during his sophomore year, he sat in on a panel for prospective neurobiology concentrators.

“I was pretty interested,” he said. “They had people who majored in neurobiology and went on to different fields. One was a doctor. Another was a researcher. Someone else was in advertising, I think, and they talked about how the field influenced their career. I saw that I could do a bunch of different things. I went home for Winter Break, came back, and changed my concentration from engineering to neurobiology.”

Since then, Staropoli has worked with Stickgold, one of the world’s leading researchers on cognition, sleep, and dreams.

“We ask subjects to play the game ‘Dance, Dance, Revolution,’” Staropoli said. “We wake them up after a period of rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, and have them tell us what they were dreaming about, then go back to sleep. Elements of the game show up in their dreams, particularly during sleep onset. So now, when I dream, I try to find certain parts of it that make me think ‘Hey! That happened to me yesterday!’ I’m more cognizant now.”

Staropoli also gives back to the community. He has worked with Unite for Sight, a nonprofit organization that provides eye care to underprivileged patients around the world.

“The people we meet might not get care if we didn’t come into the community and deliver it,” he said. “I was amazed at how many people are unaware that they even have vision problems. The change is so gradual that they don’t know they have a problem. It’s even more amazing to see how things turn around for them when they get the problem fixed. It changes the way they view the world around them, and even their relationships with people.”

Staropoli has been admitted to several medical schools, but doesn’t yet know which one he’ll attend in September. Still, he says, he plans to continue racing.

Racing “is the most freeing feeling you can have,” he said. “You’re completely focused on the task at hand. Anything else that’s bothering you goes away when you get in the car. The only thing you’re focused on is winning that race. When I’m not racing, all I can think about is going racing. And when I am racing, it’s all I can think about too.”

Katherine Johnson has spent four years at Harvard Medical School (HMS), learning not only the skills, but also the language, of medicine. Now graduating as a physician, Johnson wants to translate that language into words that everyday people understand.

During her time at HMS, Johnson developed a passion for community medicine. She also realized that there is often a large gap between physicians and patients, who frequently rely on friends and relatives instead of on their doctors for medical information.

Among her activities while at HMS, Johnson designed a survey, conducted over the summer between her first and second years, that explored teenagers’ attitudes toward pregnancy. One thing she discovered is that teens sometimes misunderstand basic terms, such as “family planning,” which some teens thought meant a program for those interested in having a family, rather than those interested in contraception.

“Teens went to their friends for advice, or their moms, but not really physicians,” Johnson said. “There’s a big gap between physicians and teens in terms of communication and feeling comfortable. These are themes that have stayed with me as I think about what’s important to me and what kind of physician I want to be.”

Johnson, who grew up in Hawaii and attended Yale University, began studying patients’ knowledge, expectations, and attitudes toward medicine while still an undergraduate. Though she entered Yale wanting to be an engineer, she changed her mind after a summer working at an engineering firm and volunteering at a home for mentally ill homeless people. She found the work with the mentally ill refreshing.

The following summer, she shadowed a physician at a hospital on Oahu, where several seriously ill patients from the Marshall Islands were being treated. Johnson became interested in understanding the barriers to medical access in the Marshalls that caused the patients to seek medical care late. The following summer she traveled to the Marshalls to find out, interviewing medical professionals and the heads of women’s groups to explore attitudes related to cervical cancer.

At HMS, Johnson carried on that work. In her first year, she helped to design the teen survey under the guidance of Hope Ricciotti, an associate professor of obstetrics, gynecology, and reproductive biology at HMS and Harvard-affiliated Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC), and director of obstetrics and gynecology at the Dimock Center in Roxbury. The Dimock had been having problems getting teens to participate in family planning programs, and Ricciotti wanted to know why. Johnson worked on designing the study in January, then conducted interviews the following summer.

“It went very, very well,” Ricciotti said of the project. “She’s kind of a dynamo and a self-starter.”

Ricciotti said Johnson published the results and returned that fall to present findings to the Dimock staff, something no student had previously done and which is now a requirement.

Johnson also worked with General Education Development (GED) students at Action for Boston Community Development Inc. to create a health literacy module to be offered as part of a future GED course. She also co-founded a student organization focused on health literacy.

This spring, Johnson went to Argentina, where she did a rotation at a community health center in Salta and at private medical clinics in Cordoba. She took advantage of travel options in her fourth year partly because she enjoys seeing new places, but also because she knew that perfecting her Spanish would be an important tool for work in U.S. health clinics.

Johnson matched to a residency program at BIDMC in obstetrics and gynecology, where she’ll work again with Ricciotti. She hopes to return to the community setting at Dimock.

“I really would like to work in a community setting and think about program implementation, always keeping in mind who we’re trying to serve,” Johnson said. “Providing a service isn’t sufficient. You have to think about who it is you’re trying to serve and what are their needs, their thoughts, their perspectives, and how we can use that to develop programs that are more appropriate for the population.”

Sonya Soni, her Hindi relatives have long maintained, just might be her great-grandmother reincarnated.

It’s not just that Soni shares the family matriarch’s quiet determination. There’s also the uncanny connection she has always felt to a particular spot in the foothills of the Himalayas: the orphanage for Indian girls founded 74 years ago by her great-grandmother, a cast-out widow turned close follower of Mohandas Gandhi.

“It’s the most sacred place in the world,” Soni said.

Soni long ago decided to become a doctor and to make the orphanage — which houses more than 50 girls and widows, educates 300 local children, and provides health care to the community — her life’s work. What she didn’t count on was how much her ideas of service, social justice, and the orphanage’s mission would evolve over the past two years at Harvard Divinity School (HDS).

“The hardest thing I’ve ever had to go through was understanding that the orphanage was doing more harm than good,” said Soni, 27, a graduating student in the master of theological studies program. “It’s treated like a charity, not like a place where the girls can be leaders and make it their home. I’m trying to change that.”

Growing up, Soni straddled two worlds. For most of the year, her family lived in affluent Orange County, Calif., where her parents immigrated before she was born. Every summer and winter, they returned to Dehradun, a city near the intersection of the Tibetan, Nepali, and Indian borders, to help local villagers manage the orphanage. Soni continued her semiannual pilgrimages through her years at the University of Southern California, where she earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in public health.

“My parents thought it was important for us to understand our roots, not just our ethnic background, but our religious background and our values,” she said.

Spirituality has always been central to Soni’s life. Her early Catholic education immersed her in liberation theology, while her mother’s Buddhism and her father’s Hinduism taught her the importance of “being in love with what you do and putting in full passion, but also being detached from the outcomes.”

But she came to Harvard in 2010 skeptical of faith-based organizations’ role in the public health world. In fact, she planned to study whether ideology rather than evidence guided such groups’ decisions in providing health care to the poor. At HDS, her views broadened.

“Now, I wonder how I could separate spirituality from social justice,” she said. “In academia, we tend to abandon the moral underpinnings of our work, because it can’t be supported rigorously. But it guides so much of what we do.”

While at HDS, Soni served as a teaching fellow for an undergraduate course co-taught by Partners In Health founder Paul Farmer, and performed research under Nobel Prize–winning economist Amartya Sen at the François-Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights.

Their example taught her “that you can live what you preach,” she said. “Dr. Farmer never sees his work as service. He sees it as solidarity.”

She has already taken that attitude back to India. She is fighting to get young women more involved in the leadership and management of the orphanage, and is encouraging the board to work more closely with the Indian government to find long-term sources of aid. She hopes to shift the focus of the girls’ education and put them on the path to college and careers, not just to marriage and motherhood, when they leave at 18.

For now, Soni is deferring her acceptance to medical school to spend a year working as a health policy adviser to Newark, N.J., Mayor Cory Booker. After medical school, she hopes to return to India to work as a physician anthropologist. Her long-term goal, she said, is to bring attention to child health, human rights, and the politics of orphanhood in her family’s native land.

Her plans read like an ambitious road map for a long journey, but Soni insists that divinity school was more than just a detour along the way.

“More than anything, Harvard has taught me that education is not about the knowledge that you build. It’s about building character,” she said. “Intellectually and personally, I really found my voice here.”

Clara J.K. Long is graduating from Harvard Law School — surely the only member of her class who once lived in a landfill.

That was in 2001. Long was a Brown University undergraduate helping to organize trash pickers in Brazil. She lived next to sliding mounds of trash for a month, the experience an emblem of the eccentric verve with which Long has so far lived.

As a teenager, she toured Russia, roamed Central America with just a backpack and bravery for company, and hiked 500 miles of the Pacific Crest Trail. In her 20s, she worked alongside peasant socialists in Brazil, summered as a grant writer in Tanzania, spent a year on human rights work in the Amazon basin, lived as a “fixer” in Venezuela for visiting American reporters, and took a year off from law school to teach filmmaking to youngsters in Burundi. With those years came three other degrees: a bachelor’s from Brown University (2004), a master’s from the London School of Economics (2005), and another, in journalism, from Stanford University (2007).

All along, her passion for adventure came in tandem with an equal passion for human rights. In fact, the life Long has lived so far was summed up nicely years ago by Paul Tillich, the Protestant theologian: “In every act of justice, daring is necessary, and risk is unavoidable.”

Her sense of daring had its start in Fairfield, Calif., a city of 100,000 in the fertile Central Valley. Long’s mother is a geoscientist; her father an urban activist and former city manager who once dropped out of Brown to join the Army, bound for Vietnam. Long’s sense of justice likely began in elementary school, where through 11th grade she sat alongside the children of migrant workers. “I remember feeling a lot of discomfort,” she said, “about the contradictions that came up.”

And 12th grade? That’s the daring part. Long finished high school in Fontainebleau, France. By dint of immersion (and dreaming) in French, she earned a baccalauréat degree. Starting at Brown, “I was really concerned about doing what mattered most,” said Long, who first majored in biology. Then came a spring semester in Belém, Brazil. “That totally changed the trajectory of my life,” she said, and turned a passion for tending the environment into “something that was much more about people.”

In 2003, with her senior thesis under way, Long left Brown to work in Brazil’s Tocantins state with Xavier Plassat, an activist Dominican monk. By October 2004 she was at the London School of Economics to earn a master’s in environment and development. She then lived in Venezuela as a radio freelancer and by 2006 was a Stanford graduate student in journalism. During her studies there, Long interviewed a young Latina mother who — terrified by the possibility of arrest by U.S. immigration authorities — had not left her house in two months. “I felt really helpless,” Long said, and came to see law school as a way of acquiring “tools for dealing with injustice.”

Long is also co-producer of “Border Stories,” a mosaic-like collection of videos about tensions and realities along the U.S.-Mexico border. Listen to the self-told tales of a bewildered teenager deported to Mexico (a country he never knew), a one-eyed border minuteman, and a ranching couple beset by border crossers.

Her first year at Harvard, a fire hose of work, taught Long to love legal analysis. During her first summer and second year, she put her new training to work in Florence, Ariz., a city with 11 prisons, and in Brazil with the School’s International Human Rights Clinic. Injustice and abuse there are woven into the culture of roughneck national prisons.

This year Long helped to coordinate a multi-law school project on U.S. protest rights regarding the Occupy movement. (A report is due out this summer.) It’s part of her recent focus, to broaden human rights work in the United States, where violations often simmer unseen. “It helps us,” Long said of Americans, “not to think of ourselves as an exception.”

Like many of his classmates, Gregg Moore came to Harvard to continue his studies after receiving his undergraduate degree, in his case at Humboldt State University in California. Unlike many of his classmates, however, Moore was in his late 50s when he arrived in Cambridge, with two children old enough to be his classmates.

Now 59, Moore is set to receive a master’s degree in Arts in Education from the Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE). He plans to use the degree to foster community arts programs, with a particular emphasis on music education, as a way to bring disparate groups together. It’s an idea, he said, that was developed over 25 years of encouraging the community-building power of music in Europe.

“When I came back to America, I thought maybe this is a place where we can use music to bring people together,” Moore said. “People, whether they’re Democrat or Republican, they tend to like music. And, in a lot of cases, they like the same kind of music. If there was a way to promote this idea of coming together — for instance, in a band — maybe people would get out of their individual silos, start talking to each other, and realize they have a lot of the same goals in common.”

Over three decades in Europe, Moore worked as a professional musician, first in Amsterdam, where he became deeply enmeshed in the city’s alternative music and theater, and later in Portugal, where he learned the tradition of the village band.

“In Portugal, I was impressed with the ability of the bands to bring together whole swaths of the society of the village. You would often see a schoolteacher sitting next to a lawyer sitting next to a field-worker,” he said. “I gradually came to understand that music was a community-building exercise, and that got me interested in thinking about the social and community uses of music, and the arts in general.”

After returning to the United States a few years ago, Moore enrolled at Humboldt State University in California, where he studied everything from grant writing to business administration to organizational communications. It was while he was finishing his degree that the idea of attending Harvard first came up.

A participant in HONK! Festival, an annual event organized by activist bands from across the country, Moore befriended former University of Massachusetts, Boston, professor Reebee Garofalo, who introduced him to Steven Seidel, the Patricia Bauman and John Landrum Bryant Lecturer on Arts in Education and director of the Arts in Education program at HGSE, who in turn convinced Moore to apply to Harvard.

“It was only three weeks before I took the GRE that I realized there was something called the GRE that I would have to take,” Moore said with a laugh. “I don’t know how it happened, but I was accepted into the program, and I thought, this is something I can’t turn my nose up at. So I went ahead, and now I’m down to the last couple weeks of the program.”

With the program wrapping up, Moore plans to return to California to work with a small nonprofit, the Ink People Center for the Arts, to organize community music and arts events. He also plans to take over operation of Humboldt Music Academy, the Humboldt State Music Department’s community outreach program, with an eye toward expanding it to include more adults and more types of music and programming.

“It’s been a fascinating experience,” Moore said of his time at Harvard. “Many of my classmates are young enough to be my own kids, so there’s often a dynamic where I see them as young people. But I’ve learned to be ready when they open their mouths, because something profound is going to come out. In that way, it’s been very encouraging, because for some people in my generation, it can be discouraging sometimes to see how young people conduct themselves. But working with these people has been incredibly encouraging. It really gives you hope for the future.”

Zakaria, who delivered the 2012 Commencement speech during the Afternoon Exercises, cited recent research showing that violence is at a historic low and economic growth is high. The economies of 80 countries are growing 4 percent annually, even after the financial crisis. Poverty has fallen more in the past 50 years than in the previous 500, and life expectancy continues to rise, with a third of all babies born in the developed world expected to live to 100. There’s also a boom in college graduates, whose numbers, among men, have increased fourfold over the past 40 years. For women, their ranks have increased sevenfold.

Despite this progress, Zakaria warned against complacency. The many problems facing the world — including climate change, disease, and terrorism — are real and must be addressed. But he said the world today is better at meeting these challenges than ever before.

“When we look at the problems we face … keep in mind that these are real problems, but also that the human reaction and response to them will also be real,” Zakaria said. “I’m betting on the graduates of this great university…. Your efforts will make a difference.”

As an example of an international problem dealt with head-on, he mentioned the H1N1 virus, which broke out in Mexico in 2009. With modern technology, communications, and sophisticated public health responses, a threat that in the past might have taken millions of lives was contained so successfully that some people wondered whether there had been an overreaction.

“As we reimagine ourselves for the 21st century, we recognize that history teaches us not just about continuity — what is important because it is enduring. History also teaches us about change,” said President Drew Faust.

Even the financial crisis, Zakaria said, could have been much worse. A global financial meltdown was avoided largely through the coordinated actions of the world’s governments. Similarly, after the 9/11 terror attacks, most countries cooperated to fight the threat, sapping the terrorists’ strength.

Zakaria delivered his speech before graduates, alumni, parents, family, and friends, who gathered for the annual meeting of the Harvard Alumni Association, which traditionally constitutes Commencement Day’s Afternoon Exercises in Tercentenary Theatre.

Zakaria, who was born in India, earned a B.A. from Yale College before receiving his Ph.D. in government from Harvard in 1993. He is the host of  “Fareed Zakaria GPS,” the CNN network’s international affairs program, and is an editor-at-large of Time magazine, a Washington Post columnist, and an author.

Zakaria was the last of several speakers, including outgoing Alumni Association President Ellen Gordon Reeves and Harvard President Drew Faust, who spoke about the importance of history as the University marked its 375th anniversary. Harvard’s history dates to the nation’s earliest colonists, and helps to define its present and its future, Faust said. But among the University’s honored traditions and practices is its own ability to change, she said.

Faust said Harvard has transformed as necessary to meet the times, morphing from the small local college of its founding to a research university in the late 19th century, to its transformation into a national institution and its development into an engine of scientific discovery and economic growth after World War II. In recent decades, Harvard has continued to change, opening its doors wide to women and minorities, students from around the world, and those from economically disadvantaged backgrounds.

Tercentenary Theatre remained filled through most of the day — from Morning Exercises into Afternoon Exercises. Photo by Amanda Swinhart/Harvard Staff Photographer

Harvard continues to adapt, she said, with globalization and technology-driving initiatives, such as that seen at the i-lab, which opened this year, and the upcoming online education portal edX, a partnership with MIT.

“As we reimagine ourselves for the 21st century, we recognize that history teaches us not just about continuity — what is important because it is enduring. History also teaches us about change,” Faust said. “Harvard has survived and thrived by considering over and over again how its timeless and unwavering dedication to knowledge and truth must be adapted to the demands of a new age.”

Though change and innovation are an integral part of modern Harvard, tradition was front and center on Commencement Day, from the call of the high sheriff of Middlesex County that opened the Morning Exercises to the final singing of “Fair Harvard” that ended the afternoon ones.

In between, there were processions of graduates new and old, along with poetry and song, fellowship and food, and the honoring of both the accomplishments of the past and the promise of the future.

Ben Smith, a history of science concentrator who had just graduated, sat during the afternoon’s speeches with his mother, May Pian-Smith of Lexington, a 1981 Harvard graduate. While Smith was enjoying the pomp and tradition for the first time, for his mom, the afternoon mingled pride in her son and nostalgia for her own past.

“I had no idea what to expect,” Smith said. “It was great, a lot of tradition, a very cool experience.”

Scott A. Abell, Boston
Former CEO of Abell & Associates Inc., a financial services company, past president of the Harvard Alumni Association, and former dean for development in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. He received his A.B. from Harvard College in 1972.

James E. Johnson, New York
Partner in the law firm of Debevoise & Plimpton and former undersecretary of the treasury for enforcement. He is a graduate of Harvard College (A.B. ’83) and Harvard Law School (J.D. ’86).

Michael M. Lynton, Los Angeles
Chairman and CEO of Sony Pictures Entertainment. He received his A.B. from Harvard College in 1982 and his M.B.A. from Harvard Business School in 1987.

Tracy P. Palandjian, Belmont, Mass.
Co-founder and CEO of Social Finance, which aims to connect the social sector with capital markets. She is a graduate of Harvard College (A.B. ’93) and Harvard Business School (M.B.A. ’97).

Swati A. Piramal, Mumbai, India
Director of Piramal Health Care, a leading drug discovery company in India, and director of the Piramal Foundation. She received her medical degree from the University of Bombay (M.B.B.S., 1980) and later studied at the Harvard School of Public Health, earning an M.P.H. in 1992.

Kathryn A. Taylor, San Francisco
Co-founder and CEO of One PacificCoast Bank, a financial institution focused on community development. A 1980 graduate of Harvard College, she received her M.B.A. and J.D. degrees from Stanford in 1986.

Five of the six new Overseers were elected for six-year terms. The sixth-place finisher, Michael M. Lynton, will complete the two years remaining in the unexpired term of Paul J. Finnegan, who stepped down from the Board of Overseers on May 23 in light of his election to the President and Fellows of Harvard College, better known as the Harvard Corporation. The Overseers were chosen from a slate of eight candidates, who were nominated by a Harvard Alumni Association committee in accordance with election rules. Harvard degree holders cast 27,638 ballots in the election.

The primary function of the Board of Overseers is to encourage the University to maintain the highest attainable standards as a place of learning. Drawing on the diverse experience and expertise of its members, the Board exerts broad influence over the University’s strategic directions, provides essential counsel to the University’s leadership on priorities and plans, has the power of consent to certain actions such as the election of Corporation members, and directs the visitation process by which a broad array of Harvard Schools and departments are periodically reviewed.

Elected directors of HAA

The following six alumni have been elected as directors of the Harvard Alumni Association — to serve for three years each:

John F. Bowman ’80, M.B.A. ’85 of Santa Monica, Calif.

Yvonne E. Campos, J.D. ’88, San Diego

John H. Jackson, Ed.M. ’98, Ed.D. ’01, Cambridge

Michael T. Kerr ’81, M.B.A. ’85, Canyon Country, Calif.

E. Scott Mead ’77, London

Brian Melendez ’86, J.D. ’90, M.T.S. ’91, Minneapolis

Radcliffe grad, Class of 1944

The oldest Radcliffe class represented at Commencement was 1944 — 15 years more recent than the Class of 1929, represented by 103-year-old George Barner of Kennebunk, Maine.

In the shade of a tent behind Hollis Hall at lunchtime, Frances Downing Vaughan ’44 was aware of the disparity. “I’m only 90,” she said.

Vaughan lives in Cambridge, within walking distance of her alma mater. “I can’t think of a greater place to grow old in,” she said.

Vaughan remembers a wartime college era when Harvard boys were scarce and you met them at social gatherings called “jolly-ups.” At Radcliffe, she remembers the 10 p.m. curfews and the standard fashion of “socks and shoes, sweaters and pearls.”

A longtime poet — “I was a writer by age 7” — Vaughan is at work on her first book, “90 at 90.”

George Barner '29 belongs to the oldest class year but is younger than Donald Brown '30 by 24 days. Photo by Jon Chase/Harvard Staff Photographer

Overwhelmed by ceremony

Chen Zhang was still trying to process the sweep of his Harvard experience on Thursday afternoon as he made his way to the Harvard Divinity School (HDS) campus from Tercentenary Theatre.

His undergraduate commencement at Stanford University, which was held in the school’s football stadium, had a more informal, West Coast vibe, he said. That ceremony included a healthy amount of “wacky dancing,” and an appearance by the school’s mascot, the Stanford Tree. In contrast, Zhang was overwhelmed by Harvard’s elaborate ceremony, and by its pomp and circumstance. “I really, really liked this, maybe more so than my own.”

His experience at HDS, and its environment of inclusion also overwhelmed Zhang. While some students will go on to the ministry, academia, education, or, like himself, to a joint law and social work degree program with the aim of a career in public service, everyone at HDS, he said, was encouraged “to pursue their diverse interests within a common set of curricula.”

“HDS is really a unique community; I don’t know of any other place that caters to both the secular and the religious worlds so effectively.”

In the world of work, amid change

As she waited in a long line to enter the tent behind Longfellow Hall for her official diploma ceremony, Justina Wang reflected on her time at the Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE) and the importance of her degree. Since mid-May, Wang has been putting her master’s in education from the Education Policy and Management program to good with the Chicago Public Schools system as a positive behavioral support specialist. She headed to the job as soon as she was done with her finals, and made a quick return trip to Harvard for Commencement.

“All of these things we have been talking about [at HGSE] have been playing out in the real world,” said Wang, who only regretted one thing about her time at Harvard. “I wish,” she said, “it could have been longer.”

To kick off the diploma ceremony, HGSE Dean Kathleen McCartney took the podium, encouraging students to cheer for the faculty and staff at HGSE, and their families and friends, which they did with verve. She then offered some parting thoughts.

“You are now a member of a community like no other I know. You will take sustenance from this place, for it will serve as your intellectual home now and always,” said McCartney, Gerald S. Lesser Professor in Early Childhood Development. Recalling the words of a departing student, she told the new graduates that they “have to hit the ground listening,” in order to be ready to answer important calls to action, like the fight against bullying.

“Our job as educators and parents is to support our children and their efforts to create community standards where they work and play,” she said. That work will require modeling the way forward by building open and inclusive environments where different opinions and constructive dialogue are welcome, and where “we forgive and ask for forgiveness.”

“And then,” she continued, “we need to talk honestly about these efforts with the children in our lives.”

‘Inspired by the Harvard experience’

Jesus Manuel Alvarado Rivera emerged from under the tent where he had just received his Harvard Law School (HLS) degree with a megawatt smile and a death grip on his new L.L.M. diploma.

“It’s done. It feels real now,” said the beaming graduate, who pointed to the document and praised the HLS faculty as both amazing teachers and educators and great human beings. “It’s a great place to be,” said Rivera, who will head back to his native Puerto Rico to work for a law firm for several years, and then hopefully for Puerto Rico’s executive branch, developing policy. “I definitely have been inspired by the Harvard experience.”

Voices of experience

The oldest Harvard College graduate to attend Commencement this year was 103-year-old retired archaeologist Donald F. Brown ’30 of Stowe, Mass. (He turns 104 on Nov. 26.) For the occasion he wore a baseball cap with the legend, “My life is in ruins.” Just 24 days younger: George Barner ’29, a retired lawyer living in Kennebunk, Maine, will turn 104 on Dec. 20. “I just go along with the change of time,” said Barner, who waited in the shade of Harvard Yard for the Alumni Procession to begin. He attributes his good health to never smoking and to a lifetime of playing tennis. Barner’s family had a regulation court in his hometown of Webster City, Iowa. He gave the sport up in his 90s, “when I had trouble moving backwards without falling.” But so far, in life, he is still moving forward. Said Barner in parting, “I will see you next year.”

Table talk

Two luncheon tents behind Hollis and Stoughton halls were reserved for “Division I” classes — those from 1921 to 1956. General Curtis R. LeMay’s banker was there, along with a graduate in his 90s who still runs a sawmill, a former Jesuit (Class of 1951) who was keeping a conversation on Blaise Pascal alive, and graduate of that era whose Philippines boyhood was darkened by the Japanese occupation. At one table sat Donald F. Brown ’30, age 103, the oldest man at Commencement 2012. Just past noon you could hear the Harvard University Band approaching for its traditional serenade of the oldest classes. Brown sat up straight in his wheelchair and waved his arms like a maestro. “That’s his medicine for the soul – his music,” said Brown’s daughter, Alyson Toole. A chair away was her brother, Christopher Brown, marveling that his father could be at a graduation exercise 82 years after his own graduation. How is he doing so well?  “I think it was that comet,” said the younger Brown, referring to the 1908 airburst of a comet fragment over Siberia the year his father was born. “Cosmic dust must have landed on my dad.”

— Corydon Ireland and Colleen Walsh

Bridging the visual arts, dance, and animation, Catherine Musinsky ’86, a graphics assistant with the Museum of Comparative Zoology, will process for Harvard again this month.

She earned her undergraduate degree in East Asian languages and civilizations. Now, Musinsky is a digital media arts and sciences concentrator in the Extension School’s master of liberal arts program in information technology. Her thesis, a 3-D reconstruction of skeletal and muscle movement for a kinetic and functional study of chewing in herbivores, combines her scientific focus with a lifelong love of movement and art.

“Animation fascinates me because I’m a dancer, so I’m always moving,” said Musinsky, who also holds an M.F.A. degree from the Tisch School of the Arts. “I’ve been obsessed with dance ever since I was a kid, and still am.”

One of Musinsky’s greatest challenges may have been how she has overcome illness by transforming a devastating experience into art. In 2006, she was diagnosed with Stage III breast cancer. The life-threatening illness led to intense treatment, including a mastectomy and reconstructive surgery, as well as several months of chemotherapy and radiation.

Just a week before her surgery, Musinsky performed a dance with Lorraine Chapman The Company. “It was both a ritual preparation for the surgery and the chemical rite of passage I was about to go through,” she said.  “All told, I went through about 18 months of treatment, and I just wanted to be still — not eat, not move, just be still. It was as close to being dead as I have ever felt.”

After her treatment, Musinsky struggled to come to terms with her life and body, and to find a new concept of normal. A friendship with documentary filmmaker Brynmore Williams, a multimedia and digital video specialist with the Division of Continuing Education, prompted her to embark on a film project.

Inspired by the SCAR Project, a series of photographs of semi-nude women who have had mastectomies or lumpectomies, Williams envisioned a film that would focus on Musinsky and her relationship with her body after surviving cancer. The film could aid breast cancer awareness. “I was very shy about my mastectomy and reconstructive surgery,” Musinsky said. “So I asked Genevieve Levin, a henna tattoo artist, to come and do a design on the breast that had been surgically reconstructed.”

The four-minute documentary film focused on the application of the henna tattoo, and a subsequent semi-nude dance performance by Musinsky. “Unchastened” has won numerous awards on the film festival circuit.

“To be honest, I never really understood public nudity,” Musinsky said, laughing. “I thought people should generally keep their clothes on, and I didn’t really want to be ogled. But this project had nothing to do with that. This was about something that I was struggling with, something that I was ashamed of, and how revealing what’s hidden can take that shame away. It was really about finding acceptance with my body as it now was.”

For Williams, the film’s success is directly linked to Musinsky’s openness, honesty, and vulnerability. “The fact that she surrenders so much on film prompts very revealing conversations among audience members who have dealt with breast cancer themselves,” he said. “They feel comfortable to share their own perspectives and anxieties, tell their own stories, and celebrate what they have. The most powerful thing is that, in a way, the film has helped people to see that there’s light at the end of the tunnel.”

As Musinsky prepares — for a second time — to process in Harvard’s Commencement ceremony, she might just break into a few dance steps. “When you hear music, your body just starts to move,” Musinsky said. “When I don’t dance, I feel less human. There’s no way, at least for me, to keep still.”

Commencement address by Fareed Zakaria [as prepared]

May 24, 2012

Thank you so much, President Faust, Fellows of the Corporation, Overseers, Ladies and Gentlemen, and graduates.

To the graduates in particular, I have to tell you, you’re way ahead of me already. I never made it to my commencement, either from college or graduate school. I went to college south of here, in a small town called New Haven, Connecticut. And, well, I celebrated a bit the night before the ceremony. The honest truth is, I slept through much of my commencement. Then, after I had finally made it to Harvard for graduate school, I took a job before I had finished my Ph.D., and wrote the final chapters while working in New York. I couldn’t get away from work for Commencement, and I got my degree in the mail. So, 19 years later, it is a great honor to receive, in person, a Harvard degree.

Harvard was, for me, a revelation. Contrary to the conventional wisdom on this campus, it is possible to receive a fine education at Yale, and I did. But Harvard’s great graduate programs have an ambition, energy, and range that, for me, made it a dazzling, electric experience. Getting a Ph.D. involves many hours of grueling work, but, if you do it right, also many hours of goofing off with friends, acquiring new hobbies and interests, and working your way through the great resources here — from the libraries to cafes. I fully availed myself of these opportunities, and the time spent not working (in a formal sense) was as valuable as the hours in seminar rooms. I learned from students, faculty, and visitors. Harvard is really where I learned to think, and I owe this University a deep debt of gratitude, as most of you do as well — something the University will remind you of from time to time.

I have always been wary of making commencement speeches because I don’t think of myself as old enough to have any real wisdom to impart on such an august occasion. I’d like to think I’m still vaguely post-graduate. But there’s nothing like having kids to remind me of how deeply uncool I am. So I accept this task, with some trepidation.

The best commencement speech I ever read was by the humorist Art Buchwald. He was brief, saying simply, “Remember, we are leaving you a perfect world. Don’t screw it up.”

You are not going to hear that message much these days. Instead, you’re likely to hear that we are living through grim economic times, that the graduates are entering the slowest recovery since the Great Depression. The worries are not just economic. Ever since 9/11, we have lived in an age of terror, and our lives remain altered by the fears of future attacks and a future of new threats and dangers. Then there are larger concerns that you hear about: The Earth is warming; we’re running out of water and other vital resources; we have a billion people on the globe trapped in terrible poverty.

So, I want to sketch out for you, perhaps with a little bit of historical context, the world as I see it.

The world we live in is, first of all, at peace — profoundly at peace. The richest countries of the world are not in geopolitical competition with one another, fighting wars, proxy wars, or even engaging in arms races or “cold wars.” This is a historical rarity. You would have to go back hundreds of years to find a similar period of great power peace. I know that you watch a bomb going off in Afghanistan or hear of a terror plot in this country and think we live in dangerous times. But here is the data. The number of people who have died as a result of war, civil war, and, yes, terrorism, is down 50 percent this decade from the 1990s. It is down 75 percent from the preceding five decades, the decades of the Cold War, and it is, of course, down 99 percent from the decade before that, which is World War II. Steven Pinker says that we are living in the most peaceful times in human history, and he must be right because he is a Harvard professor.

The political stability we have experienced has allowed the creation of a single global economic system, in which countries around the world are participating and flourishing. In 1980, the number of countries that were growing at 4 percent a year — robust growth — was around 60. By 2007, it had doubled. Even now, after the financial crisis, that number is more than 80. Even in the current period of slow growth, keep in mind that the global economy as a whole will grow 10 to 20 percent faster this decade than it did a decade ago, 60 percent faster than it did two decades ago, and five times as fast as it did three decades ago.

The result: The United Nations estimates that poverty has been reduced more in the past 50 years than in the previous 500 years. And much of that reduction has taken place in the last 20 years. The average Chinese person is 10 times richer than he or she was 50 years ago — and lives for 25 years longer. Life expectancy across the world has risen dramatically. We gain five hours of life expectancy every day — without even exercising! A third of all the babies born in the developed world this year will live to be 100.

All this is because of rising standards of living, hygiene, and, of course, medicine. Atul Gawande, a Harvard professor who is also a practicing surgeon, and who also writes about medicine for The New Yorker, writes about a 19th century operation in which the surgeon was trying to amputate his patient’s leg. He succeeded — at that — but accidentally amputated his assistant’s finger as well. Both died of sepsis, and an onlooker died of shock. It is the only known medical procedure to have a 300 percent fatality rate. We’ve come a long way.

To understand the astonishing age of progress we are living in, you just look at the cellphones in your pockets. (Many of you have them out and were already looking at them. Don’t think I can’t see you.) Your cellphones have more computing power than the Apollo space capsule. That capsule couldn’t even Tweet! So just imagine the opportunities that lie ahead. Moore’s Law — that computing power doubles every 18 months while costs halve — may be slowing down in the world of computers, but it is accelerating in other fields. The human genome is being sequenced at a pace faster than Moore’s Law. A “Third Industrial Revolution,” involving material science and the customization of manufacturing, is yet in its infancy. And all these fields are beginning to intersect and produce new opportunities that we cannot really foresee.

The good news goes on. Look at the number of college graduates globally. It has risen fourfold in the last four decades for men, but it has risen sevenfold for women. I believe that the empowerment of women, whether in a village in Africa or a boardroom in America, is good for the world. If you are wondering whether women are in fact smarter than men, the evidence now is overwhelming: yes. My favorite example of this is a study done over the last 25 years in which it found that female representatives in the House of Congress were able to bring back $49 million more in federal grants than their male counterparts. So it turns out women are better than men even at pork-barrel spending. We can look forward to a world enriched and ennobled by women’s voices.

Now you might listen to me and say “This is all wonderful for the world at large, but what does this mean for America?” Well, for America and for most places, peace and broader prosperity — “the rise of the rest” — means more opportunities. I remind you that this is a country that still has the largest and most dynamic economy in the world, that dominates the age of technology, that hosts hundreds of the world’s greatest companies, that houses its largest, deepest capital markets, and that has almost all of the world’s greatest universities. There is no equivalent of Harvard in China or India, nor will there be one for decades, perhaps longer.

The United States is also a vital society. It is the only country in the industrialized world that is demographically vibrant. We add 3,000,000 people to the country every year. That itself is a powerful life force, and it is made stronger by the fact that so many of these people are immigrants. They — I should say we — come to this country with aspirations, with hunger, with drive, with determination, and with a fierce love for America. By 2050, America will have a better demographic profile than China. This country has its problems, but I would rather have America’s problems than most any other place in the world.

When I tell you that we live in an age of progress, I am not urging complacency — far from it. We have had daunting challenges over the last 100 years: a depression, two world wars, a Cold War, 9/11, and global economic crisis. But we have overcome them by our response. Human action and human achievement have managed to tackle terrible problems.

We forget our successes. In 2009, the H1N1 virus broke out in Mexico. Now, if you looked back at the trajectory of these kinds of viruses, it is quite conceivable this one would have spread like the Asian flu in 1957 or 1968, in which 4,000,000 people died. But this time, the Mexican health authorities identified the problem early, shared the information with the WHO, learned best practices fast, tracked down where the outbreak began, quarantined people, and vaccinated others. The country went on a full-scale alert, banning any large gatherings. In a Catholic country, you couldn’t go to church for three Sundays. Perhaps more importantly, you couldn’t go to soccer matches either. The result was that the virus was contained, to the point where, three months later, people wondered what the big fuss was and asked if we had all overreacted. We didn’t overreact; we reacted, we responded, and we solved the problem.

There are other examples. In the 12 months following the economic peak in 2008, industrial production fell by as much as it did in the first year of the depression. Equity prices and global trade fell more. Yet this time, no Great Depression followed. Why? Because of the coordinated actions of governments around the world. 9/11 did not usher in an age of terrorism, with al-Qaida going from strength to strength. Why? Because countries cooperated in fighting them and other terror groups, with considerable success. When we can come together, when we cooperate, when we put aside petty differences, the results are astounding.

So, when we look at the problems we face — economic crises, terrorism, climate change, resource scarcity — keep in mind that these problems are real, but also that the human reaction and response to them will also be real. We can more easily map out the big problem than the thousands of individual actions governments, firms, organizations, and people will take that will constitute the solution.

In a sense, I’m betting on the graduates in this great audience. I believe that your actions will have consequences. Your efforts will make a difference.

And turning to the graduates, I know I am expected to provide some advice at a commencement. Should you go into nanotechnology or bioengineering? What are the industries of the future? Honestly, I have no idea. But one thing I do know is that human beings will reward and honor those talents of heart and mind they have always honored for thousands of years: intelligence, hard work, discipline, courage, loyalty and, perhaps above all, love and a generosity of spirit. Those are the qualities that, at the end of the day, make you live a great life, one that is rewarded by the outside world, and a good life, one that is rewarded only by those who know you best. These are the virtues that people honor, that they built statues for 5,000 years ago. Well, nobody builds statues anymore. They build weird, modernist sculptures with strange pieces of metal falling off of them, but you get my idea. Trust yourself; you know what you should do. You know the kind of life you should live. You don’t need an ethics course to know what you shouldn’t do. Just trust in your instincts, be true to them, and you will make for yourself a great and a good life. And, in doing so, you will change the world.

I said that at my age I don’t feel competent to give you much advice, but I will give you one last piece of wisdom that comes with age. For all of you who are graduating students or, really, anyone who is still young, trust me. You cannot possibly understand the love that your parents have for you until you have children of your own. Once you have your own kids, their strange behavior will suddenly make sense. But don’t wait that long. On this day of all days, give them a hug, and tell them that you love them.

Thank you, ladies and gentlemen, and to the graduates of Harvard University’s Class of 2012, Godspeed.

When his honorary degree was announced, the Hon. John Lewis, the 72-year-old son of Alabama sharecroppers who went on to become the minority leader of the U.S. House of Representatives, received a standing ovation. Photo by Kris Snibbe/Harvard Staff Photographer

For Lewis, a standing ovation

People who murmur under their breath that nothing important ever changes haven’t been paying attention.

Among the slate of distinguished honorands at Morning Exercises was John Lewis, who half a century ago was a young ally of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. during the Civil Rights campaign to end segregation in the South. During that effort, Lewis, who headed the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and was one of the original Freedom Riders, was arrested more than 40 times. He was beaten repeatedly and spat upon. At one point, police fractured his skull.

America still has its problems. But, with an African-American in the White House, it has been learning to be inclusive about race.

Lewis eventually entered politics as well. He became a U.S. congressman from Georgia for the past quarter century and an unswerving champion of the underprivileged. When his honorary degree was announced, the packed crowd and those onstage in Tercentenary Theatre responded with a rare standing ovation, recognizing a life of service that helped to transform a nation.

The family ties that bind

After Morning Exercises, undergraduates dispersed to their Houses to receive their degrees. On the Eliot House lawn, Housemaster Gail O’Keefe handed out diplomas as co-Housemaster Doug Melton read where each graduate will be headed next. Their plans ranged from the precise (medical school, Fulbright grants, jobs in high finance and high fashion) to the vaguely optimistic (hopes of conquering the Appalachian Trail, gap years to figure it all out) to the blissfully undetermined (“will be doing things somewhere on planet Earth”).

Oscar Zarate, who will work in environmental consulting next year, bounded off the stage directly into the photo-ready embrace of his large family, who had flown in from Chicago to celebrate. In their “very close” brood, Zarate explained, a Harvard degree “means a great deal.”

“It’s an amazing feeling; there are no words to describe it,” said his father, Octavio Zarate, who emigrated from Mexico with Oscar’s mother, Beatriz, to give their family a better life.

“I hope there are more stories like Oscar,” he said.

An emotional day: Octavio and Beatriz Zarate embrace their son, Oscar. Photo by Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographer

A farewell to Dean Graham

It was also graduation day, of sorts, for Harvard Divinity School Dean William Graham, who is stepping down from that post after a decade. Though Harvard’s Commencement Morning Exercises, where the degrees are conferred in Tercentenary Theatre, are heavily scripted, there is a smidge of wiggle room for notable occasions such as this. But just a smidge.

Harvard Provost Alan Garber took that room during the nearly rote conferring of degrees when introducing the Divinity School and Graham, “with gratitude for his decade of service.” Graham, who joined the Harvard faculty 35 years ago, will take a year’s leave and then return to resume his teaching duties.

Garber made no mention, however, of the fact that this was his first Commencement — on stage. A member of the Class of 1977 who later earned his doctorate in economics from Harvard, Garber is no stranger to the proceedings. He even had a second excuse for attendance: his 35th reunion.

Heaney reprises his poem from 350th 

Of the 19 lines in Seamus Heaney’s “Villanelle for an Anniversary,” which he recited at Morning Exercises, none encapsulated the graduate experience quite so aptly as this one: “The future was a verb in hibernation.”

The poem itself was awakened from hibernation in honor of the University’s 375th anniversary. Heaney returned this week to Harvard, where he once was a professor and poet-in-residence, to recite the villanelle, which he composed for the 350th anniversary in 1986. In addition, the Commencement Choir sang a musical rendition of the poem commissioned by the University for the anniversary.

Graduate orator Jonathan Service also turned to poetry, a haiku by the Japanese master of the form, Bashō, to highlight nature’s (and the world’s) benign indifference to what seems like the most momentous of occasions. “Everything will change as of today,” Service said.

Perhaps graduates could take heart in the more plainspoken words of the late Rev. Peter J. Gomes, as quoted by undergraduate orator Anthony Hernandez.

“It is what it is. I am what I am,” Gomes once said of his many complexities. “It confuses people — which gives me great pleasure.”

Seamus Heaney recites his "Villanelle for an Anniversary" at the Morning Exercises. Photo by Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographer

John Adams of Harvard, and Leverett House

Among those getting honorary degrees was another John Adams, at least the third noteworthy holder of that name to graduate from Harvard, after the second and sixth U.S. presidents, who have a House named after them.

This Adams, the minimalist composer who added an honorary doctor of music award to his five Grammys, Pulitzer Prize, and Harvard Arts Medal, was notable during his Harvard years for, among other things, conducting Mozart’s “The Marriage of Figaro” in the dining room of his home on campus, which was not Adams, but Leverett House.

A smart person in a sea of smart people

It takes a lot to impress a Harvard crowd, but Walter Kohn, who received an honorary doctor of science degree during Morning Exercises, did the trick. Provost Alan Garber introduced Kohn, recipient of the 1998 Nobel Prize in chemistry, with some biographical background. Born in Vienna in 1923, Kohn fled the Holocaust, spent time in a Canadian internment camp during World War II, and afterward worked as a lumberjack for 20 cents a day.

Instead of partying with his newfound “wealth,” Kohn bought math and physics textbooks, and eventually ended up at Harvard. Here, he only hoped to survive his first year of graduate school, Garber said. Instead, he went on to earn a doctorate in physics in 1948, after just two years. He got a wow from the crowd on that one.

Joy Choi '12 celebrates the victory that is Commencement. Photo by Kris Snibbe/Harvard Staff Photographer

Blue is the new crimson, this year

Among the reunion class banners hanging on the side of Hollis Hall in the Old Yard were the banners from 1937, 1943, 1955, 1951, 1958, 1957, all in Harvard’s standard crimson. But there was also the 1955 class banner, in blue.

The aberration was explained during Class Day ceremonies on Wednesday as the revival of a tradition, where in addition to the crimson School colors, each class had “class colors,” passed down to an incoming class by the graduating seniors. The Class of 2012, then, whose banner is crimson trimmed in blue, is passing blue down to the incoming class.

How to grow future alumni

Two children stood outside one of Harvard’s main gates and watched as seniors from the River Houses processed into the Yard. They were there with their father, alumnus and Cambridge resident John Buten ’91, who likes to bring his children to the festivities each year when the weather is nice to “create a little aspiration and inspiration.” Showing that she may have just the aspiration needed to succeed, daughter Rosemary Di Troia, 9, was eager to follow the seniors into the Yard. She mused to her father, “We could climb over the gates.” Buten, in a gentle tone, advised against it.

Evan Covington '12 (center) cheers on his fellow graduates. Photo by Jon Chase/Harvard Staff Photographer

‘The most important thing in life‘

As is custom, the graduating seniors marched into the Yard and the Memorial Church for one of the first official events of the day, morning services. The students filled the church to capacity, sitting in the aisles and crowding into Appleton Chapel. When they were there two days earlier for Baccalaureate, they used their mortarboards as slight shelter from the rain, but this time they used them as impromptu fans, cooling themselves from the rising heat of the day.

Using the words of a song by the pop singer John Mayer, the Rev. Wendel W. “Tad” Meyer, acting Pusey Minister in the Memorial Church, urged the seniors to remember how fleeting life is. “As much as you might want to stop the train and get off and go home again,” Meyer read, “the train of time continues to fly forward, and with each passing year it picks up speed as it hurtles along the measure of our days.” But such awareness about life shouldn’t breed fear and angst, he suggested. Instead, it should “inspire us to be even more passionate about embracing life and celebrating living,” and finding out what truly matters, like the love of oneself, and others.

“Intimate relationships, my young friends, are the most important thing in life, gladdening our own hearts and those of others, and you neglect that reality at your extreme peril. It is the loves of our lives that truly create our happiness, define any real and lasting sense of success, and provide us with all that is really valuable in life. To ignore, deny, or abuse those cherished relationships is to create a hole in your heart, in your soul, that no amount of knowledge, power, money, or success will ever fill.”

Meyer’s message is something “you don’t learn in school,” said Alek Sudan, a middle school administrator who was graduating from the Extension School with a degree in liberal arts. “It’s definitely awesome to hear. It’s absolutely wonderful.”

Harvard President Drew Faust (left) and former President Lawrence Summers (right) process past undergraduates. Photo by Rose Lincoln/Harvard Staff Photographer

A reunion for bagpiper, Dixieland band

Bagpiper Bob Cameron, who has led members of Cabot and Mather Houses into the Yard for the past 19 years, enjoyed his own mini-reunion with members of a Dixieland band who played outside the Memorial Church after leading the residents of Dunster House there. Cameron, who is also a tuba player, happily reconnected with former bandmates. “This is our little village within a village,” he said.

Mortarboards that weren’t boring

Several seniors from Dudley House kept alive the tradition of decorating their mortarboards. Iman James covered her hat with tarot cards, political references, and a black veil that was “mourning the death of my childhood. I will lift the veil,” she said, “once I get my diploma and move on.”

Paul Vankoughnett had “an uncontrollable urge” to tell everyone about his love for the ’70s pop band Devo, so he topped his hat with rings of pink paper to mimic the group’s curious conical headgear from the video for the hit song “Whip It.” Samra Girma studied religion, and on her hat put the Buddhist term for loving kindness, Metta, along with an array of bright paper flowers. “I wanted to incorporate my studies,” she said, “and make something beautiful.”

And the last shall be … last

The procession of undergraduates into Tercentenary Theatre during Morning Exercises is a leisurely affair, with the Houses lined up in the Old Yard well in advance of filing in. Before the students move, the president and other Harvard officers process through their ranks, moving from the back to the head of the line — the last becoming first — and leading all into the theater.

Undergraduates are arranged by their Houses, with Eliot House taking up the rear this time. At the end of the Eliot contingent was the trio of Patrick Bane, Dave Salutric, and Chris Liberge, friends who viewed the end of their Harvard years with mixed emotions.

“It’s pretty bittersweet to say goodbye,” said Liberge, who said that the weeks the seniors get to stay on campus after exams end provide a great opportunity to spend time together before parting.

The three were among 11 students who were together in undergraduate dorms and then moved to Eliot for the next three years. After Commencement, they head to New York, Chicago, and other parts of the country.

“I want to drag it out as long as possible,” Bane said.

Remembering a friend

Every year, each School shows its pride with a prop. Harvard Medical School raised replicas of the human heart, Harvard Kennedy School students tossed blow-up globes, and Harvard Law School students waved gavels.

Some Harvard Business School students donned a deeper symbol of solidarity among their class. Before Commencement, M.B.A. students handed out small buttons printed with “NGB”: the initials of Nathan Bihlmaier, their Section C classmate who passed away early Sunday morning, just days before he was to receive his degree.

A different beat

To draw graduates into the Yard in the wee hours of the morning, it only makes sense to rouse them with a little music. Some Houses were led in by a New Orleans jazz band, some by bagpipers, others by a fife-and-drum group.

After leading their Houses to the Yard, musicians and Somerville residents Babaca Sck and Malick Niam sat on the steps of Dudley House retying the colorful ropes that decorated their sabar, the traditional drum of their native country, Senegal. The sabar, which is held between the knees, proved a troublesome instrument to play while leading a procession. But Sck seemed unconcerned about winning over his audience.

“You just need animation,” he said.

Michael Raleigh (left) and David Abarca, both Harvard Band percussionists, belt out "10,000 Men of Harvard." Photo by Rose Lincoln/Harvard Staff Photographer

C’mon, don’t you love me?

Ryka Christopher, who was running a flower and balloon stand on the north side of the Yard, said business was slower this year than in the past. Flowers were selling better than balloons, and most popular were a dozen roses for $30. Thirty bucks? What the heck, it’s Commencement.

From Bah Hahbah to the Yahd

Ashley Robinson, a government concentrator from Maine, brought a piece of home into the Yard this year. Robinson was among the small group of students who lived in the Dudley Co-op, a cooperative-living alternative to House life located in two houses a few minutes’ walk from campus.

Robinson followed the Dudley Co-op tradition of decorating her mortarboard, creating a sculpture reminiscent of her Maine home, replete with feathers, small flowers, and driftwood that her mother brought from Maine.

Where has the time gone?

Harvard School of Public Health students gathered on Quincy Street around 8 a.m. to wait their turn to move into Sever Quadrangle, where they’d wait their turn to process into Tercentenary Theatre (where they’d wait their turn to get their degrees). One group of students who would receive their master’s in health policy and management had taped HPM to the tops of their mortarboards to recognize their educational journeys, which went by in a blur.

“I feel like it hasn’t been two years,” said Christina Papirnik.

Papirnik was among a small group who met earlier at a friend’s nearby apartment for breakfast. So what was the special breakfast for Commencement morning’s champions?

“We had some cereal. Wheaties with no milk,” said Patrick McGhee.

Zachary Stone of the Graduate School of Arts & Sciences waves a flag in celebration. Photo by Kris Snibbe/Harvard Staff Photographer

Um, you’re forgetting something

Zanny Alter, who was getting a degree from the Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE), had the kind of Commencement morning that many students fear. Alter got to the assembly point for the HGSE’s procession into the Yard in plenty of time and then realized she had her robe, but had forgotten her hood and mortarboard.

“I realized I had left half my regalia and had to run home,” Alter said.

Luckily for Alter, Commencement proceeds at a ceremonial pace, which allowed her time to run home and still catch up to her class before it entered the Yard. Friend and fellow HGSE graduate Becca Steinberg had her back, too. She was waiting with an extra egg sandwich for breakfast, prepared by her mom.

All is forgiven

At 8:30 a.m., a group of deans milled about outside University Hall waiting to be photographed and to assemble for Morning Exercises, where each would join President Drew Faust in conferring degrees upon their School’s graduating students. But Harvard College Dean Evelynn M. Hammonds was still feeling the fallout from a degree she didn’t give — to Class Day speaker and mischief-maker Andy Samberg.

In his speech on Wednesday, the comedian accused Hammonds, several times, of dangling a false promise of an honorary degree. Was Hammonds aware beforehand that she was in for a major dis from Samberg?

“No — I’d never met him,” she said, adding, “but I’d seen him on TV.”

It’s hard to say if Hammonds got off better or worse than the graduating senior who introduced Samberg, Matthew DaSilva, who in return received a dramatic kiss. But Hammonds maintains there’s no bad blood.

“I still think he’s a funny guy,” she said. In fact, her favorite part of the Class Day festivities, she said, was when Samberg “hugged me at the end and said, ‘No hard feelings.’ ”

Hair-raising heat

The designated first-aid stations at Thayer, Weld, and Sever Halls saw a few heat-weary guests and (regrettably unmet) requests for sunscreen. But as of 11 a.m., at least one station remained free of any major medical incidents.

“Normally it’s a lot of Band-Aids and icepacks,” said Tina DeLouchry, a nurse practitioner at Harvard University Health Services and a relative newcomer to the proceedings, who was stationed in Sever for her second Commencement.

That said, DeLouchry was ready and able to attend to fashion emergencies.

“I’ve had several people come back here to fix their hair,” she said. After running through her personal supply of hair ties and bobby pins, she resorted to handing out paper clips to female graduates desperate to pin back their locks. “It’s just too hot to wear your hair down, I guess.”

‘Linsanitatem’

In past years, the Latin oration at Morning Exercises has seemed more like a formality than a Commencement highlight. Though the Commencement Office has been distributing English translations of the speech for the past several years, actually listening to five minutes of Latin can feel like a visit from the unintelligible ghost of Harvard past.

Luckily for this year’s audience, Michael Velchik knows how to steal the spotlight.

His speech wasn’t exactly rousing at the start. “For some of you, this is the climax; life is only downhill from here,” Velchik said in the ancient tongue. “You will spend the rest of your life always looking backwards and often reminding those around you that you went to college in Boston — well, actually, in Cambridge.”

But his thundering intonation, classical gestures, and call outs to various Schools (“some to be lawyers, other doctors … some to straighten out teeth, others petulant students”) earned the Dunster House senior many laughs and a standing ovation.

And if you’ve ever wondered what the Latin word for “a pandemic-like craze for an unlikely basketball phenomenon” was, you can now thank Velchik: it’s “Linsanitatem.”

— By Alvin Powell, Colleen Walsh, and Katie Koch

The club is a blend of the competitive and the collegial. It faces off against some of the top college teams in the country and welcomes all skill levels. Beginners start by swinging a mallet while standing on the ground, then graduate to a wooden polo pony, and eventually to the real thing.

“What’s most gratifying for me is working with so many interesting, sharp, and committed undergraduates,” said Crocker Snow ’61, who, like his wife, is an accomplished player. “Unlike many college teams, most of our players have no polo experience at all, and some have no riding at the outset. Those who get hooked put in a lot of hard work riding and practicing to the point that the varsity teams now have winning records.”

At a practice in Hamilton, Mass., last fall, the more experienced riders and players helped the newcomers to ready the horses, and rode in tandem with them in an enclosed outdoor arena.

“I have a longer way to go than most people on the team,” said freshman Ethan Samet, who had only ridden a handful of times before signing up. “But I feel like I have been getting better and better each time.”

Recently the ponies hobnobbed on campus with polo enthusiast Tommy Lee Jones ’69, the recipient of this year’s Harvard Arts Medal. An avid polo player, Jones regularly hosts members of the polo club at his Texas ranch and at his home in Florida, and has donated numerous ponies to the Harvard program. The actor took part in the “Adopt a Horse Auction” held at the Murr Center to support the club’s efforts to purchase a permanent base, a small farm with a barn and riding ring adjacent to the Myopia Hunt Club in Hamilton, where the club has its home competitions.

This summer, members of the club will head to Europe for a series of matches in Italy, Switzerland, France, and in England, where they will compete at the famed Guards Polo Club against a team from Yale University.

Horsing around

The Harvard University Polo Club dates back to the early 20th century. Three of today’s players Jane Amero (from left), Mike Kapps, and Katie Gamble roll their ponies’ bandages before riding.

Mallets

Polo mallets stand at attention.

Heavy duty

New rider Ethan Samet struggles with his saddle and saddle pad.

Out in the country

Cissie Snow (on right, wearing vest) coaches her junior varsity women before their match against the University of Pennsylvania at their home arena in Hamilton, Mass. Snow and her husband, Crocker Snow Jr. ’61, lead the polo club.

Minor adjustments

Snow leans over to adjust a player's saddle strap before heading to the arena.

The art of the mallet

Isabella Roden '13 (left), a varsity player, teaches newcomer Ethan Samet '15 how to hold his mallet in the arena.

Jockeying

Roden (left) and Samet cast late-day shadows on the boards of the arena.

Hoisted

Helping Harvard’s Sarah Amanullah (right) get a leg up is opposing player Spencer Marston of the University of Pennsylvania. They competed at Harvard's home arena in Hamilton, Mass.

Goal setting

In the match, Amanullah reaches for the ball, eventually working her way toward her first goal.

Fanfare

Players and parents watch on the offensive end of the arena as the women’s junior varsity team goes on to beat UPenn.

Watchdog

Poppy, one of the Snows’ two Labrador retrievers, keeps watch while ponies and riders circle inside the arena.

Idyllic

The sun sets behind ponies and riders at the Harvard University Polo Club.

Photo slideshow: Horse whisperers

Rose Lincoln/Staff Photographer

Now, researchers at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute (DFCI) and Harvard Medical School (HMS) have proposed an answer, linking resistance to seizures to a protein that modifies cellular metabolism in the brain. The research, to be published in the May 24 issue of the journal Neuron, may lead to the development of new treatments for epilepsy.

The research was led jointly by Nika Danial, HMS assistant professor of cell biology at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, and Gary Yellen, professor of neurobiology at Harvard Medical School. The first author was Alfredo Giménez-Cassina, a research fellow in Danial’s lab.

Epilepsy is a neurological disorder characterized by an electrical storm in the brain that can manifest as convulsions, loss of motor control, or loss of consciousness. Some epilepsy cases can be improved by a diet that drastically reduces sugar intake. Such a diet causes neurons to switch from their customary fuel of sugar to fat byproducts called ketone bodies. The diet, which mimics the effects of starvation, was described more than 80 years ago and received renewed interest in the 1990s. Recent studies corroborate that it works, but shed little light on how.

Yellen was introduced to the ketogenic diet by his wife, Elizabeth Thiele, professor of neurology at HMS and director of the Pediatric Epilepsy Program at MassGeneral Hospital for Children, who was not involved in the study.

“The connection between metabolism and epilepsy has been such a puzzle,” said Yellen. “I’ve met a lot of kids whose lives are completely changed by this diet. It’s amazingly effective, and it works for many kids for whom drugs don’t work.”

The discovery involves a protein with the tongue-twisting name of “BCL-2-associated agonist of cell death,” or BAD, which has a role in the normal process of cell death. Danial had previously discovered a second function for the protein: It also regulates glucose metabolism.

Giménez-Cassina further discovered that certain modifications in BAD switched metabolism in brain cells from glucose to ketone bodies.

“It was then that we realized we had come upon a metabolic switch to do what the ketogenic diet does to the brain without any actual dietary therapy,” said Gimenez-Cassina. He went on to show that these same BAD modifications protect against seizures in experimental models of epilepsy. Still, it wasn’t clear exactly how.

Yellen suspected the answer involved potassium ion channels. Ion channels are pathways through cell membranes that allow the passage of certain kinds of charged molecules that, among other things, help carry nerve signals. Potassium channels tend to suppress cell electrical activity.

Yellen’s lab had previously linked ketone bodies like those from the high-fat epilepsy diet to the activation of a type of potassium channel in neurons. Yellen hypothesized that the diet worked because ketone bodies from fat provide enough neurons to fuel normal function, but when a seizure threatens, the associated potassium channel can shut the storm down. Dietary effects, however, are broad and complex, so it was impossible to say for sure.

The effects that Danial’s lab had discovered — BAD’s ability to alter metabolism and seizures — offered a new avenue for studying the therapeutic effects of altered metabolism. Together, the researchers decided to investigate whether Danial’s protein switch governed Yellen’s potassium pathway, and whether they could reverse engineer the seizure protection of a ketogenic diet.

They could. Working in genetically altered mice, the researchers modified the BAD protein to reduce glucose metabolism and increase ketone body metabolism in the brain. Seizures decreased, but the benefit was erased when they knocked out the associated potassium channel — strong evidence that the protein-channelpathway conferred resistance to epileptic seizures. Further experiments suggested that it was indeed BAD’s role in metabolism, not cell death, that mattered. The findings make the BAD protein a promising target for new epilepsy drugs.

“Diet sounds like this wholesome way to treat seizures, but it’s very hard. I mean, diets in general are hard, and this diet is really hard,” said Yellen. “So finding a pharmacological substitute for this would make lots of people really happy.”

The day will begin with a morning panel discussion and conclude with a luncheon in Radcliffe Yard featuring a formal address delivered by the Radcliffe Medalist. The Radcliffe Institute Medal is presented to an individual whose life and work have substantially and positively influenced society.

This year, the Radcliffe Institute medal recipient and luncheon speaker is Margaret H. Marshall, Ed.M.’69, who has been a force for justice and equality throughout her life, beginning with her early years in South Africa and continuing through her service as the 24th chief justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court. Her decisions — including the historic case of Goodridge v. Department of Public Health, which legalized gay marriage in Massachusetts — illustrate the power of law to improve society, further equality, and affect legal policy beyond a local jurisdiction.

“We look forward to honoring Margaret Marshall as a true pioneer in her field — as the first woman to serve as Massachusetts chief justice and as the first justice in the country to make the landmark decision to legalize gay marriage,” said Radcliffe Dean Lizabeth Cohen, the Howard Mumford Jones Professor of American Studies. “She has dedicated her life to advancing social justice and to using the law to improve the lives of citizens.”

Today, as senior counsel at Choate Hall & Stewart LLP and senior research fellow and lecturer at Harvard Law School, Marshall continues to set an example for how the law can make a difference in the lives of individuals, organizations, and society more broadly.

The morning panel, “From Front Lines to High Courts: The Law and Social Change,” explores the possibilities and limits of the law in making social change. The panel will be moderated by Harvard Law School Dean and Jeremiah Smith Jr. Professor of Law Martha L. Minow, Ed.M. ’76, who is an expert in human rights with a focus on members of racial and religious minorities, and women, children, and persons with disabilities.

The panel discussion she moderates will feature four prominent women who, as legal scholars and committed practitioners, will grapple with what the law can and cannot achieve in effecting social change:

• As a scholar and activist of labor and immigration law, practice, and reform, Jennifer Gordon ’87, J.D. ’92, is dedicated to changing how the law and our society recognize vulnerable workers. She is a professor of law at Fordham University School of Law, where she focuses on immigration law, labor law, public interest law, and law and the economy.
• Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Linda Greenhouse ’68 was a longtime Supreme Court reporter for The New York Times whose work and writing draw on legal history to explore questions of law and inequality. She is a senior research scholar in law, Joseph Goldstein Lecturer in Law, and Knight Distinguished Journalist-in-Residence at Yale Law School. She continues to write a biweekly column on law for The New York Times.
• As a professor of law at Suffolk University Law School, Renée M. Landers ’77 focuses on health law, constitutional law, and administrative law. Landers was the first woman of color and the first law professor to serve as president of the Boston Bar Association. She has championed social justice with a focus on civil rights and equal access to education. Landers is also a member of the Radcliffe Institute’s Dean’s Advisory Council.
• Panelist Kathleen M. Sullivan, J.D. ’81 — a Partner at Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan LLP and Stanley Morrison Professor of Law and former dean at Stanford Law School — will examine the constitutionality of same-sex marriage through the lens of a constitutional scholar and experienced litigator. She was the first woman dean of any school at Stanford and is the author of the nation’s leading casebook in constitutional law.

Last year, on Radcliffe Day, Cohen was introduced to the Radcliffe community as the interim dean. Having recently been named dean by Harvard University President Drew Faust (herself a former dean of the Radcliffe Institute) Cohen will lead her first Radcliffe Day with Faust, alumnae, fellows, University colleagues, and friends of the Radcliffe Institute in attendance.

“During Radcliffe Day we pause in the present to celebrate Radcliffe’s illustrious past and to pay tribute to an individual who has helped to build a better future,” said Cohen.

He is not alone. More than 30,000 College alumni are inspired to give back annually — most notably with gifts that can be used today to empower remarkable innovation, fuel substantial levels of financial aid, and inspire new teaching and learning initiatives at Harvard. Rallying toward an ambitious goal of raising $50 million in immediate-use funds by June 30, alumni are steadily closing in on their target.

This year, more than 550 volunteers, inspired by the chance to play an active role in shaping the Harvard experience, gave their time and resources to their 2011-12 reunion campaigns. Their diligence translated into outreach to more than 4,200 peers.

“For Harvard to be the best and keep on growing, it needs alumni support,” says Krumholz. “I know that my great College experience was only possible because of the generosity of generations of alumni who came before me.”

Many alumni give in order to be a part of this legacy. “I was a financial aid recipient and want to keep that virtuous loop of support going,” says Mary Eileen Duffy Cannon ’97. She and her husband, Colbert Cannon, serve as 15th reunion gift committee chairs. “Harvard opened so many doors for me: a great education, social experience, and lifelong friends, including my husband.”

Geraldine Acuna ’92 likes to think of how these gifts — large or small — enable opportunities for students and faculty. “I meet the people who get this money and see not only how it affects their lives at the College but also how it empowers them to pursue their goals in the wider world,” says Acuna, who mentors students and helps interview for the College, in addition to serving as gift chair for her 20th reunion.

Mary Cannon frequently hears from her peers that they give to Harvard to further leadership and excellence in a wide variety of fields. “It’s easy to show how Harvard is providing cutting-edge research across the board,” she says. “Harvard is such a well-managed, well-run institution — it leverages the dollar that you give.”

Giving and volunteering are another way to stay engaged with the Harvard community, says Acuna. “As a class leader, I’m talking with classmates that I have never had the chance to meet before,” she says. “Any kind of connection back to Harvard is life enhancing.”

For many, giving back to Harvard is just as important as a visit back to the Yard.

“I always get teary-eyed when I walk through the Yard and hold my son’s hand,” says Acuna. “It’s not until you are further away from it that you really appreciate the fruits of your education and how it helped to develop your character. It’s the gift that you’ve received.”

“You’ll walk into the building and feel like this is a student space,” said OSL’s Doug Walo, manager of the SOCH. “You’ll feel like this is a social space. It will be vibrant and active.”

The renovation will cap the latest round of enhancements to undergraduate social spaces across campus. Over the past year, the Mather Multimedia Lab, the Eliot Grille activity space, the Cabot Café, and the Quad Grille lounge space in Pforzheimer House all saw improvements, including new lighting, flooring, seating, sound systems, and games.

“House life is the center of the undergraduate experience at Harvard,” said Evelynn M. Hammonds, dean of the College. “At the same time, we know that students are hungry for new and better spaces to meet and connect. Last year’s enhancements — and the ones scheduled for the SOCH this summer — build on the more than 57,000 square feet of social space we have added or renovated since 2006, despite significant constraints on our ability to expand the physical footprint of campus.”

The product of extensive meetings, discussions, and focus groups involving OSL staff and undergraduates, the SOCH renovations will address three social spaces: the event hall, the community room, and the living room. Walo says that the event hall — already popular with undergrads for performances, rehearsals, and parties — will be more fun and functional.

“Students wanted improved AV systems and infrastructure to support concerts and late-night parties,” Walo said. “So we’re installing lots of speakers and party lights and making the system very user-friendly. Students will be able to come in and, with just a little bit of training, plug and play without having to roll in speakers and run wires. It will all be built into the room. We’ll also have a green room, where performers can queue up and hang out before they go onstage.”

Walo said that the community hall will be a dynamic space that helps undergraduate organizations to connect with members and with each other. New furniture that rests on casters will enable configurations suitable to a big meeting, a small team discussion, or an informal dinner. The hall will have an ice machine, refrigerator, sink, and other kitchen facilities to support food and beverage service. Walo likens the space to another new and popular spot on campus.

“Its use will be similar to the way that the new Innovation Lab (i-lab) is used,” he said. “It can be used for impromptu meetings, because students can walk in and it will already be set up. There will be a small conference room, but students can adapt the space as they need.”

The most dramatic changes will take place in the lobby, which will be transformed into the living room. The space will support events taking place throughout the SOCH, and also serve as a casual meeting spot where students can come in, hang out, and have fun.

“There will be synergy between the spaces,” he said. “If you’ve got a late-night party in the event hall, students can sit down in the living room and chat. For conferences and lectures in the community hall, the living room will be a spill-out space. It will also be a place where students can meet casually and watch DirecTV on a flat screen, do some gaming, or play pool.”

SOCH users are enthusiastic about the changes. Daily Guerrero ’14 is the president of the Dominican Students Association, which was recently assigned an office in the building. In the spring, Guerrero took part in one of the focus groups that informed the planning.

“I liked that the focus was truly on student input,” Guerrero said. “It was clear that the architects and designers had listened to the wishes of the students. Their overall goal was to create a place that the students would use.”

Guerrero said the improvements will help the SOCH — host in the past year to more than 140 organizations, 150 events, and 550 meetings and rehearsals — to provide more support for her group and for undergraduate life.

“These changes have the potential of attracting many students to the quad,” she said.

This year, SAI has hosted more than 34 seminar series focusing on topics related to global health, Pakistan, social enterprise, urbanization, water, and climate change. The South Asia Without Borders seminar series focuses on the arts, humanities, and social sciences. Additionally, the “Health in South Asia: Lessons for and from the World” symposium, held in April, engaged Harvard faculty, area experts, and government officials in discussions of challenges and innovative solutions to health and health care.

SAI’s regional presence in Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan plays a crucial role in supporting Harvard faculty and students in research, teaching, and field experience. This summer, aided by SAI, 58 undergraduate and graduate students and seven faculty members have been funded to travel to all corners of South Asia to conduct research, perform fieldwork, participate in internships, and pursue study of South Asian languages.

For more information about SAI.

The HCF’s steering committee, composed of faculty across the University’s Schools, has identified three core objectives:

Students: To prepare Harvard students for their lifelong engagement with China, and to support Chinese students coming to Harvard for graduate and professional education.

Partnerships: To promote interdisciplinary teaching and research about and in China, in collaboration with institutions across Greater China.

Presence: To strengthen Harvard’s capacity to address challenges facing China through the Harvard Center Shanghai.

The Harvard China Student Internship Program is a collaborative effort involving Harvard’s Office of Career Services and Office of International Programs, in partnership with Chinese corporations, NGOs/NPOs, and multinational companies in China. Students experience modern China through their internship placements and gain an introduction to Chinese history and culture, all while learning firsthand about life in the workplace. The structure of the program includes a 10-week internship, a weeklong field trip, and numerous cultural events. The program seeks to create transformational experiences for Harvard undergraduates as they prepare for a lifelong engagement with China.

The Harvard China Student Service Program supports students in performing public service in China. Visiting underdeveloped areas enables these volunteers to contribute — and reflect — on the complexities of Chinese society. Harvard undergraduates and Chinese students are paired together to teach English, conduct poverty alleviation research, and visit rural villages. Summer 2012 will feature a collaboration with Tsinghua University’s Summer Service Learning Program, including an introduction to Chinese language, culture, and history.

For more about HCF and a list of this year’s student participants.

In 2011-12 the Fairbank Center assisted the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences in providing three dissertation completion grants and six summer stipends to doctoral students pursuing research on China in various disciplines. The center also provides graduate student grants for conference travel, language study, and dissertation research. For undergraduates, the Fairbank Center provides grants for student organizations, optional winter term experiences, language study, and summer research. The generosity and foresight of many donors have made the student grants possible by establishing funds such as the Desmond and Whitney Shum Graduate Fellowship, Liang Qichao Travel Fund, Elise Fay Hawtin Travel and Research Fund, Fairbank Center Challenge Grant, Harvard Club of the Republic of China Fellowship Fund, John K. Fairbank Center Endowment, and John King and Wilma Cannon Fairbank Undergraduate Summer Travel Grants. Student grants in Chinese studies are also supported by contributions from Fairbank Center affiliates.

View a list of current student grant recipients.

Horace Gray Lunt II, Samuel Hazzard Cross Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures, Emeritus, at Harvard University, passed away on August 11, 2010, in Baltimore, Maryland.  At Harvard he had been a member of the Slavic Department faculty from 1949 to 1989 and had served as its chair from 1959 to 1974.

After receiving an M.A. in Russian at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1942, he was drafted into the army.  His aptitude for languages earned him an assignment to the Counter Intelligence Corps, and ultimately a stint in Italy interviewing Yugoslav refugees while improving his knowledge of Serbian, Croatian, and Slovene.  In 1946 he met the eminent émigré philologist and structural linguist Roman Jakobson, a figure who would have a profound effect on the entire trajectory of his career.  Following a year-long stay in Prague to study Czech, Lunt entered the Ph.D. program at Columbia in the fall of 1947 to study under Jakobson’s supervision.  When Jakobson moved to Harvard in 1949 to join the newly founded Slavic Department, he brought Lunt with him as an assistant professor.  A golden age of Slavic studies was about to commence, and it would be the Harvard Slavic Department, with the addition of a number of distinguished, mostly émigré, scholars to its faculty, that would fundamentally alter the field by training scores of new American Slavists to take up college and university posts across the nation over the next several decades, especially after the launching of Sputnik in 1957.

Lunt’s beginnings at Harvard were largely devoted to creating new course materials for teaching the Russian language and Old Church Slavonic (OCS), the oldest written form of Slavic, whose mastery is vital for Slavic studies.  His efforts resulted in the publication of his Old Church Slavonic Grammar (1955) and his Fundamentals of Russian (1957).  Old Church Slavonic Grammar, now in its seventh revised edition (2001), remains one of the best OCS grammars in any language because of its comprehensive coverage, its clarity of explanation, and its rich exemplification.

Lunt’s meticulous attention to detail was nowhere more evident than in his signature course, “Old Church Slavonic,” typically taken by first-year graduate students.  Unlike many instructors who introduced a few Gospel selections at the end of the term, Lunt presented a brief overview of the grammar and then immediately plunged students into the reading and analysis of the texts themselves.  It was a baptism of fire that was both intimidating and salutary, eliciting strongly positive reactions from both linguistic and literature students, who viewed Lunt’s OCS class as one of the most intensive, well organized, and analytically stimulating courses they had ever taken.

Developing an earlier interest in the newly official Macedonian language of Yugoslavia, Lunt produced A Grammar of the Macedonian Literary Language in 1952, the first such work in English.  The grammar sparked the ire of Bulgarian nationalists, who viewed Macedonian as a western dialect of Bulgarian.  A Bulgarian newspaper that denounced Yugoslav language policies and sharply criticized all attempts to establish a standard Macedonian language stated that “the hapless Yugoslavs were obliged to import a spy to create the language for them.  We need no help from any Horace Lunts!”  “Luntism” was designated an anti-Bulgarian scourge.  Lunt later recalled “feeling flattered at the powers attributed to me, and rather pleased at the notion of a political heresy named after me.” The Greeks, on the contrary, were outraged that the name Macedonian could be assigned to a non-Greek tongue and its people.  Both disputes rage on to this day.  Lunt refused to remain silent on such matters, readily dismantling the flimsy arguments of those manipulating linguistic and historical facts to stifle the cultural, political, and linguistic authenticity of minority ethnic groups.

In September 1973, Omeljan Pritsak, the Director of the newly founded Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard, suggested convening a weekly seminar to discuss Lunt’s ongoing translation of the Primary Chronicle, the most important source for the early history of the East Slavs. Lunt would pre-circulate several pages of translation, which would be evaluated on the basis of the most recent edition published in 1950 by the doyen of Soviet medievalists, Dmitrii Likhachev.  The seminar met faithfully every week for six straight years and was attended by the major figures of Slavic medieval studies at Harvard: Ihor Ševčenko (Byzantine studies), Edward Keenan (East Slavic history), Pritsak (Turkic studies and East European history and geography), and Lunt.  A single sentence, phrase, or even word could ignite an arcane interchange of expert opinion with the result that often no more than a half page of Lunt’s translation would be covered in a session, though only the occasional tweaks were recommended in the end.  Lunt served as senior consultant for a new reconstruction of the Primary Chronicle that appeared in 2003.  Weeks before his death, he gave final approval to the text of his nearly four-decades-long translation project, now slated for publication by the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute.

Lunt was promoted from assistant professor to associate professor in 1954 and received a tenured full professorship in 1960, the same year he was named a Guggenheim Foundation Fellow.  In 1973 he succeeded Roman Jakobson as the Samuel Hazzard Cross Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures, an ironic reconnection to the very mentor who had advised him to steer clear of Russian as a field of concentration.  He is survived by Sally Herman Lunt, his wife of forty-seven years, daughters Elizabeth Gray Lunt and Catherine Lunt Greer, son-in-law David S. Friedman, and five grandchildren.

Respectfully submitted,

Patricia Rowe Chaput
Morris Halle (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
Edward L. Keenan
Michael S. Flier, Chair

Harvard’s study of Asia is spread across the University’s departments and Schools, and a wide array of disciplines comes together under the auspices of the Asia Center. Through such a convergence, the center brings a layered, multifaceted approach to probe questions of history and culture, economics, politics, diplomacy, and security, and the relationships among them.

View a complete list of grant recipients.

Doering’s parents, both musicians, met at the conservatory in Leipzig, Germany. The couple moved to the United States in 1915 and secured positions on the music faculty at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth, where William was born and spent his early childhood. Doering was raised in a Germanic environment, and he retained an affinity for things German most of his life. He kept a flat in the Black Forest where he hiked yearly, welcomed German postdoctoral fellows into his group and collaborated with many of them for the rest of his career, and occasionally even came to his Harvard laboratory clad in knickers and cape.

Doering’s father quickly found medicine more to his liking, and joined the faculty of the Harvard School of Public Health. William spent his school years at the Shady Hill School and Belmont Hill, becoming fascinated with science, Latin, the crafting of model airplanes, and explosions. As a Harvard undergraduate, he was attracted to the study of organic chemistry after taking courses with Louis Fieser, Elmer Kohler, and Paul Bartlett. Doering excelled in organic synthesis and considered pursuing graduate work in the subject, but mechanistic organic chemistry had greater appeal. He completed doctoral work in 1943 with Reginald Linstead on the stereochemistry of catalytic hydrogenation, then worked on the synthesis of anti-mustard gas compounds in Fieser’s laboratory until concerns were raised about a second cousin who had served as President of the Reichsbank under Hitler. Doering was recruited by Woodward to apply his expertise to a less sensitive project funded by the Polaroid Corporation, which became the synthesis of quinine. Towards the end of that project in 1943, Doering took up his first independent post at Columbia, returning to Harvard at intervals to complete the final, crucial steps.

Having almost been ejected from Harvard because of his family connections, Doering often described himself as an outsider and tended to avoid any research area that he perceived as crowded. Beginning with his Columbia appointment, Doering’s group deduced novel mechanistic insights, systematically exploring and relinquishing topics when others entered the field. His early work included the pioneering synthesis of the unusually stable tropylium ion, which opened the field of nonbenzenoid aromatic compounds, fundamental studies of carbenes, and the elucidation of the mechanism of insertion of singlet methylene into the carbon-hydrogen bond. Doering moved his graduate research group to Yale in 1952 and again to Harvard in 1967 when he became Mallinckrodt Professor of Chemistry. By the time he arrived at Harvard, his work had been recognized by election to the National Academy of Sciences, an honor achieved subsequently by five of his former graduate students. Doering eventually received many of the American Chemical Society’s top prizes, and he remains the only person ever to receive the ACS’s highest awards for both organic synthesis and mechanistic organic chemistry, an achievement that underscores the richness of Doering’s work, which extended over eight decades.

One of Doering’s signature achievements was his work on the mechanism of the Cope rearrangement, a tranformation considered so difficult to study that it was termed a “no- mechanism” reaction. Doering’s explorations led to elucidation of the transition state structure of the Cope rearrangement using a brilliantly simple stereochemical labeling experiment that has ever since been a mainstay of all advanced textbooks. Further efforts led to the prediction in 1963 and subsequent synthesis of a small hydrocarbon called bullvalene in honor of Bill “Bull” Doering. This extraordinary molecule rapidly undergoes over 1,000,000 different Cope rearrangements, resulting in each of its ten carbons becoming equivalent to one another.

Reform of Harvard’s undergraduate organic chemistry curriculum was another priority for Doering, with overhauls of Chemistry 20, for which he received standing ovations from his undergraduates at the end of every term, and the introduction of a laboratory course, Chemistry 135, that taught proficiency in synthetic technique and the planning of reactions. Both courses remain popular to this day. Doering took emeritus status in 1986 but continued to supervise postdoctoral fellows and publish for another 22 years. One of his greatest achievements in later years was opening the door to Chinese scholars. Realizing the dearth of knowledge of professors during a 1980 visit to China, he proposed a graduate program to bring promising students to universities in North America. The Chemistry Graduate Program, directed by Doering with support from the Chinese Ministry of Education, brought over 250 students universities in North America. The effects were enormous: the thousands of young Chinese who studied chemistry in North  American Ph.D. programs as a direct result of Doering’s program established a new generation of chemical leaders in China. The CGP-Doering Foundation, named in his honor, continues to promote scientific exchange.

Doering’s many interests outside the lab included international politics. During the 1960s and 70s, he served as Chairman of the Board and President of the Council for a Livable World (CLW), which supported nuclear non-proliferation and arms control by lobbying and contributing to U.S. Senate campaigns.

William Doering is survived by two sons, Christian and Peter, and a daughter, Margaretta Doering Volk.

Respectfully submitted,

Richard Holm
Eric Jacobsen, Chair

Oleg Grabar was born in Strasbourg, France, in 1929.  As the son of André Grabar, the eminent historian of Byzantine art, he was raised almost from the cradle to be an art historian.  Thanks to that upbringing, he harbored a special fascination with the Byzantine and late antique heritage of the Mediterranean world.  This fascination extended to his explorations of early Islamic art at the beginning of his career, with seventh- to eighth-century Umayyad architecture forming the core of his scholarship, even when it broadened later on to embrace a much wider spectrum.

Grabar’s early education in France was followed by an A.B. magna cum laude in Medieval History from Harvard University in 1950.  He continued his higher education at Princeton University, where he began to develop a passion for Islamic art, obtaining his M.A. (1953) and Ph.D. (1955) in Oriental Languages and Literatures and the History of Art.

In 1969, Grabar joined the Harvard faculty as Professor of Fine Arts and was the first ever to teach Islamic art at the University.  Always generous to students and colleagues, he was also a thoughtful faculty member of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies.  His wide-ranging and substantial knowledge of the Middle East—not only its art and architecture but also its peoples, cultures, and history—gave him a magisterial perspective on possibilities for lecturers, projects, and thematic emphases for Center programs.  As a teacher, he would mesmerize students with his flamboyant, exciting, and always substantive lectures. His remarkable charisma derived largely from his contagious enthusiasm for challenging intellectual problems and for the subject matter and questions he was addressing at any given time.

Grabar wrote over 20 books and more than 120 articles.  He was primarily a medievalist, but his publications covered a wide range of subjects, including early Islamic architecture, the architecture of Jerusalem under Islamic rule, Arabic and Persian painting, and Islamic ornament. Among his best-known books are The Formation of Islamic Art (1973), The Illustrations of the Maqamat (1984), The Art and Architecture of Islam 650–1250 (co-authored with Richard Ettinghausen, 1987), and The Shape of the Holy: Early Islamic Jerusalem (1996).

Grabar’s seminal work, The Formation of Islamic Art, is perhaps the masterpiece among his innumerable publications and remains a classic.  This sophisticated and inspired work grew from his early studies on the origins of Islamic art.  In one obituary, it was judged “more a work of cultural than art history,” springing as it does “from a deeper familiarity with the thought-world of early medieval Islam than any of today’s Islamic art historians possess,” and revealing that he was “more interested in ideas and context than in the close-focus study of surface detail or indeed the objects themselves as works of art.” Grabar prided himself precisely on this methodological approach.  He succinctly distinguished his approach from that of Professor Ettinghausen—the other contemporary luminary in the field, whom he admired and collaborated with in the preparation of their highly influential survey of Islamic art and architecture—in the advice he gave to one prospective graduate student: “If you wish to start with ideas and then choose relevant objects, come here to Harvard; but you should go to the Institute of Fine Arts if you prefer to move from objects to ideas.”

The global reach of Grabar’s scholarly achievements had an impact not only on his own field but far beyond as well.  He had a very special talent for making Islamic art and architecture seductive to non-specialists, thereby vastly broadening the recognition of the field.  He boldly posed sweeping questions about the nature, meaning, and dynamics of Islamic art at a time when very little was known about this subject.  In addition to cultivating world-class advanced scholarship and research in the field of Islamic art, he asked questions that often challenged Euro-American perspectives more generally.

Grabar’s creative approaches made the field appear wide open to hugely exciting questions of cultural and social history and aesthetics, captivating the minds of generations of scholars and amateurs alike.  His mental agility and nondogmatic flexibility made him an extraordinarily inspiring mentor.  He would encourage graduate students to work on entirely unexplored subjects because he was deeply concerned about shaping the parameters of a field whose rapid expansion both pleased and worried him.

Grabar literally trained scores of students, many of whom went on to become leading scholars, educators, and curators around the world, particularly in the United States.  He brought passion and vision to his work, and his expansive personality, generosity of spirit, collegiality, conviviality, and humor were truly infectious.  Grabar’s resounding impact on expanding the scope of the Islamic field far beyond its former spatial and temporal limits will be his lasting legacy.

Oleg Grabar is greatly missed and the field will not be the same without him.

Respectfully submitted,

William Graham
Thomas Lentz
David Roxburgh
Gülru Necipoğlu, Chair

The exhibition will go live on June 4 and will be available here.

The deadline for her upcoming book “A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America,” was fast approaching, and there were “holes in the work.”

“I needed to clone myself,” recalled Cohen, who did the next best thing. She partnered with an enthusiastic Harvard College history concentrator. “We would brainstorm, and then I would send her off to Widener to dig around and see what she could find. It was tremendously helpful, and rewarding for both of us.”

Cohen, dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, took advantage of the longtime Radcliffe Institute Research Partnership Program, which pairs students with the institute’s fellows: artists, scientists, scholars, and professionals who delve into a dynamic range of subjects during their Cambridge year.

Over the past decade, more than 500 students have taken part, teaming with the fellows to study such diverse topics as the history of the brownie, the search for new planets, the connection between language and cognition, the impact of Olympic stadiums on urban infrastructure, hip-hop culture, and more.

Participants agree that the benefits of the paid research positions, which require an average of five to 10 hours a week from a student, extend well beyond the financial rewards or having an extra pair of hands. “We make it clear,” said Cohen, “the students are to be true partners.”

For Dan Smail, the life of the secluded scholar is nothing new. As a medieval historian, he has spent countless hours alone in archives deciphering texts written in ancient scripts. Working with just your source material, admitted the Harvard professor of history, “can be very lonely.” But over the past academic year, Smail received some welcome company.

Through the research program, Smail and three student collaborators created a humanities lab in his Byerly Hall office. They met weekly, for five hours at a time, lunch included, and tried to unravel material mysteries of the Middle Ages.

Smail enlisted their help for his book “Goods and Debts in Mediterranean Europe,” which uses archival records generated by the process of debt recovery to examine the material culture of the time.

He employed the Latin skills of a classics concentrator to help him complete a computerized glossary of ancient terms. His two student researchers skilled in Excel pored over his notes and transcriptions of thousands of archival documents and entered the monetary value of household items into a comprehensive spreadsheet.

“The most striking conclusion of that project was the fact that the investment in movable goods (including linens, but especially clothing and fine metal wares made of silver and jewels) rivaled the investment in real estate,” said Smail.  “That discovery sprang out of this work.”

Smail said he loved working with a team and the opportunity to bounce ideas off of a readership he would like to reach, “smart, interested people,” he said, “with no special knowledge” of medieval history. If they found ideas he broached interesting, Smail said he was “sure to pursue them.”

While some students look for projects connected to their fields of study, others gravitate toward those that simply pique their curiosity, or allow them to apply their skills to something new. Math concentrator Shelby Lin welcomed the chance to work with Michael Brenner, the man behind the wildly popular sessions called “Science and Cooking: From Haute Cuisine to the Science of Soft Matter.”

Harvard’s Glover Professor of Applied Mathematics and Applied Physics used his Radcliffe year to examine how to solve scientific questions raised in the kitchen with the help of mathematical models, along the way tracking history of two popular sweets.

Lin’s team of four student researchers combed the extensive cookbook collection at the Schlesinger Library for old cookie and brownie recipes, and contacted celebrity cooks, including the pastry chef at the White House, looking for the same. They even hit the kitchen, experimenting with the ratios of ingredients in cookies and brownies.

Lin fed the collected data into a spreadsheet and developed a statistical graph that plotted the evolution of recipes for cookies and brownies over time.

“I wanted to see ways to apply math to new and interesting things,” said Lin. The project did exactly that, she said, teaching her new analytical skills, while offering her insights into the evolution of the treats.

The exchange of ideas is a critical component of the program for the fellows and students alike.

Music concentrator Zach Sheets ’13 used his computer skills to help composer John Aylward more efficiently capture notes on the page for his works of modern classical music. Sheets, a flutist and composer, instructed Aylward, who often still works with paper and pencil, in the nuances of the music notation software Sibelius. In turn, Aylward helped Sheets with his own arrangements, offering him suggestions on things like “musical aesthetics and how to think about beginning a composition.”

“I have definitely learned a lot from talking to someone, not just once or twice but very often,” said Sheets, someone “who thinks very differently about how music is constructed, or about how he constructs music or his working process.”

Surgeons at Harvard-affiliated Brigham and Women’s Hospital perform face transplant surgery.

JULY 2011

The city of Boston launches bike-sharing program Hubway, and University officials ink a deal to bring the program to Harvard’s main campus and to sponsor five of Boston’s Hubway stations.

AUGUST 2011

Harvard becomes the first institution of higher education in the world to achieve 50 Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) certifications.

The Harvard School of Public Health is awarded a $10 million grant from the National Cancer Institute. The grant will fund a new research center to study the relationship between obesity and cancer.

SEPTEMBER 2011

The Harvard community commemorates the 10th anniversary of the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, with an installation in Harvard Yard, candlelight vigils, panel discussions, and an evening of remembrance at Sanders Theatre.

An image from the 9/11 commemoration. Photo by Jon Chase/Harvard Staff Photographer

College Dean Evelynn M. Hammonds announces plans for substantial enhancements to undergraduate social spaces across campus, including the Mather Multimedia Lab, the Eliot House Grille, the Student Organization Center at Hilles, the Cabot Café, and the Quad Grille in Pforzheimer House.

Dozens of students, professors, and others turn out for “Ask What You Can Do: Inspiring Public Service” at Harvard Kennedy School’s John F. Kennedy Jr. Forum. The talk is a kickoff not just for the new semester but for HKS’s 75th anniversary, which is celebrated throughout the year.

The University announces that Professor of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology and Molecular and Cellular Biology Hopi Hoekstra and Professor of Astronomy David Charbonneau have been named recipients of the inaugural Fannie Cox Prize for Excellence in Science Teaching, which was created to recognize outstanding teaching in introductory science courses.

Nine researchers from across Harvard receive more than $15 million in special National Institutes of Health grants designed to foster innovative research with the potential to propel fields forward and speed the translation of research into improved public health.

Three Harvard faculty members — Roland Gerhard Fryer Jr., Robert M. Beren Professor of Economics; Markus Greiner, associate professor of physics; and Matthew Nock, professor of psychology — whose research ranges from the spatial organization of ultra-cold atoms to the effect of racial differences in America to the psychology of suicide and self-injury, are among the recipients of this year’s MacArthur Foundation “genius” grants.

The School of Engineering and Applied Sciences’ (SEAS) Science & Cooking Public Lecture Series returns to campus. The series features highly popular talks by guest chefs from around the world.

OCTOBER 2011

Rita E. and Gustave M. Hauser donate $40 million to support excellence and innovation in learning and teaching at Harvard. The gift will launch an initiative for learning and teaching and serve as a catalyst for transforming students’ educational experiences University-wide. The fund will enable the University to marshal its considerable intellectual resources to engage a new generation of students with pioneering teaching practices, building on the long history of educational reform at Harvard. The new gift combines the Hausers’ passions for technology, a global outlook, and teaching and learning with a desire to make an impact on both a University-wide and global scale.

Faculty, students, alumni, and staff celebrate the 375th anniversary of Harvard’s founding, undeterred by rain that often falls in sheets and turns much of Tercentenary Theatre’s turf to mud. In her remarks, President Faust makes three birthday wishes: that Harvard create a future that graduates of the past would be proud of; that people at Harvard work together to serve the University’s greatest goals, “to teach, to learn, to expand the realms of knowledge”; and that Harvard continue to be committed “to open access and inquiry.”

The giant 'H' cake made especially for Harvard's 375th anniversary celebration. Photo by Jon Chase/Harvard Staff Photographer

The Graduate School of Design celebrates its 75th anniversary with an exhibition and special alumni weekend festivities.

Seven Harvard alumni are recognized with 2011 Nobel prizes: The Nobel Prize in economics is awarded to Christopher A. Sims of Princeton University and to Thomas J. Sargent of New York University, both of whom earned a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (GSAS) in 1968. Sims also graduated magna cum laude in mathematics from Harvard College in 1963. Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, a Harvard Kennedy School alumna, is a co-winner of the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize. Saul Perlmutter ’81, Brian P. Schmidt, Ph.D. ’93, and Adam G. Riess, Ph.D. ’96, win the Nobel Prize in physics. For the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine, the late Ralph M. Steinman, M.D. ’68, is honored posthumously.

Harvard announces that it will rename its historic New College Theatre building Farkas Hall in recognition of the generosity of alumnus Andrew L. Farkas ’82.

The Harvard Art Museums announce a gift of 38 drawings, paintings, and sculpture from Didi and David Barrett’s 20th-century American collection of self-taught, folk, and outsider art, expanding the museums’ holdings of American contemporary art in a new direction.

Harvard Divinity School announces a $2.7 million gift from the Robert H.N. Ho Family Foundation to support and expand its program in Buddhist ministry studies. The gift will fund the Buddhist Ministry Initiative — the first of its kind at a divinity school within a research university.

NOVEMBER 2011

Harvard senior James McAuley is awarded a prestigious Marshall Scholarship. As a Marshall Scholar, McAuley receives two years of graduate study in the United Kingdom at the university of his choice.

Several hundred demonstrators set up equipment on the Harvard campus to express their support for the Occupy movement.

The Harvard football team (9-1, 7-0 Ivy) concludes another Ivy League championship season with a 45-7 thrashing of Yale in the 128th edition of The Game. Tim Murphy, the Thomas Stephenson Family Head Coach for Harvard Football, becomes the School’s all-time winningest football coach with an overall record of 120-59 in his 18th season with the program.

Harvard officially launches the Harvard Innovation Lab with a ribbon-cutting ceremony and remarks by President Faust, Boston Mayor Thomas M. Menino, and Business School Dean Nitin Nohria. The i-lab, as it’s called, is designed to foster team-based and entrepreneurial activities and to deepen interactions among students, faculty, entrepreneurs, and the Boston community. It supports Menino’s innovation agenda by encouraging and supporting entrepreneurship and creativity.

Mark Zuckerberg returns to campus to recruit computer science and engineering students for jobs and internships at Facebook, the popular social networking site that he created when he was a Harvard undergraduate.

Photo by Rose Lincoln/Harvard Staff Photographer

Seniors Brett Rosenberg of Chappaqua, N.Y., Spencer Lenfield of Paw Paw, Mich., Samuel Galler of Boulder, Colo., and Victor Yang of Lexington, Ky., are named 2012 Rhodes Scholars.

Along with the aforementioned undergraduates, Matthews Mmopi, a recent Harvard graduate from South Africa, and David Obert, a second-year Harvard Medical School (HMS) student, are also selected as Rhodes Scholars, and will join the College’s four U.S. Rhodes winners at the University of Oxford next fall.

DECEMBER 2011

Seven hundred and seventy-two students are notified of admission to the Harvard College Class of 2016 through the reinstated Early Action program.

Donald Ingber, the Judah Folkman Professor of Vascular Biology at HMS, and founding director of the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, is awarded the 2011 Holst Medal.

Singer Lionel Richie receives the Harvard Foundation’s inaugural Peter J. Gomes Humanitarian Award for his contributions to breast cancer research and beyond.

Hello, it's Lionel. Photo by Kris Snibbe/Harvard Staff Photographer

JANUARY 2012

President Faust visits India in an effort to further Harvard’s ever-expanding involvement in the country and in South Asia over the past several years, a trend catalyzed by Harvard’s South Asia Initiative, which was founded in 2003 to foster the University’s engagement in the region. India ranks fourth in the number of students a country sends to Harvard, with 232 studying at the University in 2011-12. Harvard has approximately 1,500 alumni in India.

Nine nonprofits receive Harvard Allston Partnership Fund grants totaling $100,000 to support programs in the Allston-Brighton community.

Nine hundred students travel to emerging market economies as part of a new supplement to Harvard Business School’s long-standing curriculum, called Field Immersion Experiences for Leadership Development, or FIELD. In teams of six, the students fan out across a dozen locations — from Cape Town and Mumbai, to Shanghai and Warsaw, to Istanbul and Buenos Aires — to tackle business challenges with real companies.

Wintersession 2012 at the College offers nearly 150 activities — from financial education to participatory performance art. College officials also expand the length of the period during which students may optionally return to campus from eight to 12 days.

As part of its 375th anniversary, Harvard launches a lecture series that brings programs to every branch of Boston and Cambridge public libraries. President Faust gives the inaugural address of the new John Harvard Book Celebration. “This lecture series is an incredible opportunity for residents and families all across Boston to interact with some of the world’s brightest minds at their own neighborhood library,” says Boston Mayor Menino.

Tech-savvy undergraduates at SEAS help to develop an algorithm that could speed hurricane relief efforts in the future. The work is part of a January competition held by SEAS’s Institute for Applied Computational Science.

Hasty Pudding Theatricals honors actors Claire Danes and Jason Segel as Woman and Man of the Year.

President Faust travels to Davos-Klosters, Switzerland, to attend the World Economic Forum, anchoring a panel on innovation titled “The Education-Employment-Entrepreneurship Nexus.” Faust also hosts an event for 200 Harvard alumni and friends attending the global forum.

FEBRUARY 2012

Pop sensation Lady Gaga launches the Born This Way Foundation during an Askwith Forum sponsored by the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Also in attendance are special guests Oprah Winfrey and U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius. The nonprofit organization is partnering with Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society to address issues of self-confidence, anti-bullying, mentoring, and career development through research, education, and advocacy, in large part by harnessing the power of the Internet.

Lady Gaga, escorted by bodyguards. Photo by Kris Snibbe/Harvard Staff Photographer

Harvard GSAS Dean Allan M. Brandt, who pioneered a new approach to curricular development with the launch of the Graduate Seminars in General Education, announces that he will step down as GSAS dean this spring owing to health considerations. Richard Tarrant, Pope Professor of the Latin Language and Literature, will serve as interim dean while the search for Brandt’s replacement takes place. Tarrant previously served as acting dean from 1995 to 1996.

Wynton Marsalis continues his two-year lecture series at Harvard with an exploration of root styles of American music in Sanders Theatre.

Wynton Marsalis. Photo by Jon Chase/Harvard Staff Photographer

Eight all-star Harvard faculty gather at Sanders Theatre for Harvard Thinks Big 2012, an undergraduate-organized event in which each faculty member speaks for 10 minutes on big questions related to topics like happiness, stem cell growth, runaway obesity, and the exploding American prison population.

Faust and Provost Alan Garber share reflections on the Harvard libraries, and outline changes to the fragmented system of 73 libraries.

Two from Harvard are awarded 2011 National Humanities Medals by President Barack Obama: economist and philosopher Amartya Sen, Thomas W. Lamont University Professor; and historian Robert Darnton, Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor and University librarian. Harvard Overseer Emily Rauh Pulitzer, founder and chair of The Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts, is also honored as a recipient of the National Medal of the Arts.

The University announces the launch of the President’s Innovation Challenge, which, in conjunction with the i-lab, encourages students from across the University to find entrepreneurial solutions to pressing social problems. By leveraging the resources available at the i-lab — from programs to mentors — the challenge gives students concerned about global issues an opportunity to translate ideas into action.

FAS Dean Michael D. Smith launches the first of two faculty panel discussions led by Professor Maya Jasanoff on the future of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at 400. The events mark the second year of the Conversations@FAS series, which considers innovative teaching and learning across the faculty.

MARCH 2012

Harvard resumes a connection with the Army Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) that started in 1916, giving, for the first time since 1971, an Army ROTC unit an office on campus. The official physical presence marks another step in Harvard’s reconnection with the military that began a year ago.

An ROTC officer turned out to see President Drew Faust announce the reinstallation of ROTC on campus. Photo by Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographer

Letters and email notifications of admission to Harvard College are sent to 2,032 students, 5.9 percent of the applicant pool of 34,302. More than 60 percent of the families of students admitted to the Class of 2016 who will enter this coming August will benefit from an unprecedented $172 million in undergraduate financial aid, paying an average of $12,000 per year for tuition, room, board, and fees combined.

A storybook season comes to an end for the Harvard men’s basketball team with a 79-70 loss to Vanderbilt in the NCAA Division 1 Men’s Championship Basketball Tournament. The game marks the team’s first appearance in “The Big Dance” since 1946, and caps a 26-5 season in which the Crimson won their first outright Ivy League championship in program history.

The Harvard men's basketball team watches the selection announcement for the NCAA Tournament at the Murr Center. Harvard was seeded 12th in the east bracket, and played SEC champions Vanderbilt in Albuquerque on March 15. Photo by Jon Chase/Harvard Staff Photographer

Well-known Boston business executive, philanthropist, and Harvard Corporation member Joseph J. O’Donnell ’67, M.B.A. ’71, and his wife, Katherine A. O’Donnell, donate $30 million to the University.

President Faust appoints Lizabeth Cohen, an eminent scholar of 20th-century American social and political history and interim dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study since last July, dean of the institute.

SEAS Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering Robert J. Wood receives the Alan T. Waterman Award from the National Science Foundation (NSF). The annual award, the NSF’s most prestigious honor, recognizes an outstanding researcher under the age of 35 in any field of science or engineering that the NSF supports.

David Hempton is named dean of Harvard Divinity School, effective July 1. Hempton, the Alonzo L. McDonald Family Professor of Evangelical Theological Studies at the Divinity School, succeeds William A. Graham, who last September announced his intention to step down from the post at the end of this academic year.

The women’s basketball team becomes the first program in Ivy League history to record a victory in the Women’s National Invitational Tournament when it knocked off Hofstra, 73-71. Led by All-Ivy League first-team honorees Brogan Berry and Christine Clark, and second-team selection Victoria Lippert, the Crimson finished the year with an 18-12 record and earned the program’s third postseason appearance in four years.

APRIL 2012

Former secretary of state Henry Kissinger ’50, A.M. ’52, Ph.D. ’54, returns to campus for a Sanders Theatre talk to reflect on the art of statecraft and foreign policy. “I’ve spent all my life thinking about these problems,” says Kissinger, who served during the Nixon and Ford administrations and who oversaw the end of the Vietnam War, the opening up of China, and America’s Cold War policy of détente with the Soviet Union.

President of Brazil Dilma Rousseff arrives at Harvard to witness the signing of a five-year agreement with the government of Brazil to eliminate financial barriers for talented Brazilian science students pursuing undergraduate and graduate studies at Harvard.

Jonathan L. Walton, Professor of Religion and Society at Harvard Divinity School, is named Pusey Minister in the Memorial Church and Plummer Professor of Christian Morals, effective July 1. He succeeds the beloved Rev. Professor Peter J. Gomes, who died in February 2011.

After nabbing the National Book Award in November, John Cogan University Professor of the Humanities Stephen Greenblatt wins the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction.

Pulitzer Prize-winner Stephen Greenblatt. Photo by Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographer

The University announces plans to refurbish the Science Center plaza, with the goal of transforming the site from a pedestrian walkway into a vibrant meeting space for Harvard student, faculty, and staff events, and the surrounding community. Part of the Common Spaces program, the renewal project includes installation of a permanent bamboo grove and several new trees for shade, as well as a hard surface throughout, which will allow for a variety of programming options. New seating and tables will be installed.

Arts First, the annual festival showcasing student and faculty creativity at Harvard, celebrates its 20th year with four days of nonstop art. Highlights include the presentation of the 2012 Harvard Arts Medal to Tommy Lee Jones ’69 in a ceremony featuring John Lithgow ’67 and the Boston premiere at Widener Library of David Michalek’s “Slow Dancing,” an outdoor installation featuring large-scale, slow-motion video portraits of dancers.

Harvard Arts Medalist Tommy Lee Jones. Photo by Rose Lincoln/Harvard Staff Photographer

Also during Arts First, a group of students, led by Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory and poet Jorie Graham, present a communal recitation of poetry that draws from hundreds of years of poets at Harvard titled “Over the Centuries: Poetry at Harvard (A Love Story).”

MAY 2012

Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology announce the launch of edX, a transformational partnership in online education. Through edX, the two institutions will collaborate to enhance campus-based teaching and learning and build a global community of online learners. EdX will build on both universities’ experience in offering online instructional content. The technological platform recently established by MITx, which will serve as the foundation for the new learning system, was designed to offer online versions of MIT courses featuring video lesson segments, embedded quizzes, immediate feedback, student-ranked questions and answers, online laboratories, and student-paced learning. Certificates of mastery will be available for those motivated and able to demonstrate their knowledge of the course material.

Nearly 81 percent of students admitted to the Class of 2016 choose to matriculate at Harvard College. The last time the yield on admitted students reached 80 percent was in 1971 for the Class of 1975. The yield for the Class of 2015 was 75.9 percent.

Leverett Professor of Mathematics Benedict Gross, Agassiz Professor of Zoology Farish Jenkins, Rabb Professor of Anthropology Arthur Kleinman, Cabot Professor of Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value Elaine Scarry, and Samuel H. Wolcott Professor of Philosophy Alison Simmons receive Harvard College Professorships in recognition of their dedication to undergraduate teaching.

Harvard College Dean Hammonds, FAS Dean Smith, Quincy co-masters Deb and Lee Gehrke, alumni, and students break ground on the Old Quincy House Test Project. The initiative, which is scheduled to run through the 2012-13 academic year, will provide students with a 21st-century residential experience and will inform Harvard’s efforts to renew the entire House system.

Further details of the Australia-Harvard Fellowship can be found on the club’s website: http://hcag.org.au.

Today — bluff and kind and 73 — Heaney will be back at Harvard, on hand from Dublin to read a poem at Morning Exercises. As Harvard celebrates its 375th anniversary, he will reprise his 1986 “Villanelle for an Anniversary,” composed for the University’s 350th.

The villanelle relies on the rhetorical power of repetition, in this case, alternate rhyming refrains lifted from the first stanza. “There’s a kind of bell-ringing quality to the villanelle,” said Heaney in a trans-Atlantic interview, “which makes it easy on the ear.” The 19-line anniversary poem has two repeated lines. The first is “A spirit moved. John Harvard walked the yard.” The second reads, “The books stood open and the gates unbarred.”

Heaney remembered writing just two poems during his years at Harvard, semesters when he taught and read a lot. “I tended to regard the Harvard stint as a kind of executive moment in life,” he said. “Your public self was on.”

The two poems were the anniversary villanelle and “Alphabets,” composed for the Phi Beta Kappa Literary Exercises in 1984. “Traditionally the Phi Beta Kappa poem is about learning,” he said. “So mine was [about] making the first letters at primary school.”

An early line starts: “There he draws smoke with chalk the whole first week / Then draws the forked stick that they call a Y. / This is writing.”

“Alphabets” is a tribute to reverie, childhood, longing, and to graduated learning. Over time, letters on a slate become boyhood Latin and then become a poet’s alphabet of the real, a “new calligraphy that felt like home.”

“The letters of this alphabet were trees. / The capitals were orchards in full bloom, / The lines of script like briars coiled in ditches.”

Heaney has read the anniversary poem a few times since 1986, but only once to 20,000 people. The repeating lines make the villanelle handy for reading over loudspeakers, he said. “If you’re going to read a poem in the open air, over large speakers, to large crowds, make sure it’s very clear.”

Heaney began teaching at Harvard as a visiting professor in 1979, was elected Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory (1984-95), and eased into a final Harvard rhythm as the Ralph Waldo Emerson Poet-in-Residence, a post he held until 2006. During all his part-time residences at Harvard, he lived in Adams House. “The arts and bohemia were represented there,” he said. “It was a desired address.”

Every semester-long visit began the same way, said Heaney: “Go straight to Adams House, set up, and then go straight to the bookshops.” Then he always stopped at One Potato, Two Potato, a modest restaurant on Massachusetts Avenue that is no longer there.

Then there was Heaney’s fondly recalled, physical Harvard. “I still remember the excitement of driving along Storrow Drive and seeing the outlines of the Houses,” he said, “which was a kind of moment I would remember always.” Some evenings Heaney would slip away to smoke a cigar outside Apthorpe House on Plympton Street. And he enjoyed a few quiet corners at Harvard, the library at Adams House, for one, and the Woodberry Poetry Room. “It was quite easy to sit down,” said Heaney of the Lamont Library hideaway, “and doze off, even.”

Then there was Harvard Yard itself, he said. It was both the inspiration for the villanelle, and — as a former cow yard — a place that evoked his own country boyhood in Northern Ireland. “I don’t know where the gates come from,” he said of inspirations for his anniversary villanelle. “But I definitely know this: that the word ‘yard’ is very characteristic of Harvard as Harvard, but from my point of view goes very far back into infancy, to the farmyard, you know. The word has a complete world and a complete charge and almost a complete anthropology.”

Along the way, Heaney read that founder John Harvard was the son of a butcher (though one with ties to Shakespeare’s Stratford-upon-Avon). “The Yard really was a yard in those days,” said the poet of Harvard’s 17th century. “So I felt at home with John Harvard, in a special way.”

And commencements? Belonging to a university for a span of time gives you “a little history of your own, at a place, at a time, with friends,” said Heaney. “It gives you some kind of latitude and longitude for memory.”

Reeves’ turn at the HAA helm, which coincided with Harvard’s yearlong 375th anniversary celebration, has been filled with highlights. Last fall, Reeves and HAA Executive Director Jack Reardon, A.B. ’60, led the 375th alumni parade through the streets of Cambridge. She has since joined Harvard Club leaders and other alumni for 375th celebrations and meetings in Washington, New Jersey, and Houston; coming up next are New York and her hometown of Providence, R.I. She has traveled to Warsaw, Cartagena, Colombia, and Paris, and participated in 375th events in Mumbai and New Delhi with Harvard President and Lincoln Professor of History Drew Faust. “If I thought I loved being involved with Harvard before,” says Reeves, an author and teacher, “this year only deepened my attachment and commitment to the HAA and to the University. It’s easy to forget what an extraordinary influence Harvard and its president have on the world until you see it firsthand, far away from home.” (You can read more about Reeves’ year as HAA president on her blog.)

Reeves is leaving the HAA in good hands as she prepares to pass the baton to Carl Muller, A.B. ’73, J.D. ’76, M.B.A. ’76, a two-time Harvard parent. Muller, a lawyer in Greenville, S.C., wants to encourage alumni to explore their Harvard “past, present, and future” during his tenure, a goal that seems especially apropos on the heels of Harvard’s 375th birthday. “For our alumni, their years at Harvard were among the best of their lives,” Muller says. “My goal is to stir those memories and honor those whose foresight and devotion over the centuries created this great gift for us and the world.”

Muller’s past work with the HAA includes chairing the nominating committee, helping to revise the HAA constitution, and strategic planning as a member of the executive committee. Those efforts, along with Reeves’ initiatives, have propelled the HAA to extraordinary growth as University-wide alumni engagement opportunities increase, in the U.S. and abroad. The success is a testament to strong alumni volunteer leadership and the dedication of Reardon’s HAA team, led by Deputy Executive Director Philip Lovejoy.

“I’m so excited for Carl because I’m sure he has no idea just how much fun is in store for him next year,” Reeves says. “Beneath that bow tie and soft-spoken Southern charm lie an incisive legal and literary mind and a terrific sense of humor — complemented by an affinity for great barbecue.”

“Ellen is living proof that Einstein was right,” Muller says. “Matter and energy are interchangeable. The energy in Ellen Reeves is mind-boggling. She has done 10 years’ worth of work for Harvard in just one.”

Graphic by Jason Figueiredo and Sarah Sweeney/Harvard Staff

This year, two Fay Prize recipients were chosen from 81 Thomas T. Hoopes Prize winners for outstanding scholarly work or research.

“The work of Victoria Koski-Karell and Justin Wymer was so distinguished and distinctive that we felt compelled to honor both students and both theses,” said Cohen when she presented the awards. “Their fields of study, anthropology and poetry, are very different, but we found that both students shared an exemplary commitment to original, inquisitive, and rigorous work.”

Koski-Karell’s thesis, “Coping with Kolera: Encountering the Unknown in North Haiti,” incorporates anthropology, biology, and history to explore the recent cholera outbreak in Haiti. Her insights and analysis shed new light on the difficulties of containing the epidemic and treating those afflicted. Her suggestions for new approaches, in the words of a committee member, “will save lives.”

Wymer’s thesis of original poetry, “Genius Loci,” (The spirit of place) consists of 51 poems that describe places where Wymer has lived or visited. It was selected by the committee for both “pushing poetry in a strange and shocking direction” and its “fresh, original voice.”

View the full list of Fay Prize nominees and more information about the winning theses.

The $10,000 award, established with a gift from Edward Abramson ’57 in honor of his mother, goes each year to members of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) “in recognition of his or her excellence and sensitivity in teaching undergraduates.” Recipients are chosen on the basis of their accessibility, their dedication to teaching, and their ability to communicate with and inspire undergraduates.

“Jenny Hoffman and Eric Beerbohm are outstanding young scholars who also have the ability to inspire students’ curiosity in the classroom and beyond,” said FAS Dean Michael D. Smith, the John H. Finley Jr. Professor of Engineering and Applied Sciences. “Each has a passion not only for their fields of study, but also for helping undergraduates to learn and explore. On behalf of the College and the entire FAS, I offer my thanks and congratulations.”

Jenny Hoffman

Hoffman, associate professor in the Department of Physics, said that she is flattered to receive this year’s Abramson Award, but she’s not entirely comfortable with the term “teaching.”

“It’s kind of a funny word,” said Hoffman, who teaches “Wave Phenomena” and has created the freshman seminar “Building a Scanning Tunneling Microscope.” “Students do the learning. I try to guide them and to provide an environment that fosters self-confidence and curiosity. But the most important learning happens outside of the classroom, when they work together in the lab or on the problem sets.”

Hoffman’s willingness to go where the learning happens is part of what makes her a remarkable teacher. Rather than holding her office hours in the Department of Physics, she holds them in the Houses the night before her problem sets are due. There, she not only answers students’ questions about physics, but also advises them on their academic careers.

“I usually show up at 8 or 9 p.m. and leave around 11 p.m. or later,” Hoffman said. “Half the class comes. We do physics and have life conversations. I talk to them about where they’re going to graduate school and what they’re doing for summer research. Sometimes they gripe about being up late and doing their problem sets, but mostly they seem to think it’s fun.”

Hoffman said that as an alumna she understands that many of the students in her classes won’t become research scientists, but physics teaches students problem-solving skills that will serve them well, regardless of what they choose to study or do for a living later.

“Are they going to remember all the quantum mechanics formulae?” she asked. “Probably not. But physics is great for problem solving. It teaches you that, if you think and dig hard enough, there’s a right answer at the end. Students get a good education here at Harvard, then take those skills into whatever else they do.”

Hoffman plans to use the award money for something that’s even more important to her than physics: motherhood.

“The award will pay my maternity leave,” she said, smiling. “So, in a way, I guess I’ll still be teaching.”

“In my teaching, I try to convey the hazards of living in a representative democracy like ours — the way we can be implicated in the acts of our state, even if we attempt to opt out of political life,” said Eric Beerbohm, one of this year's Roslyn Abramson Award. Photo by Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographer

Eric Beerbohm

Beerbohm, associate professor in the Department of Government, teaches students about democracy. And, like most good teachers, he tries to put concepts into practice.

“For those of us who work in democratic theory,” Beerbohm said, “breaking down the authoritarian relationship between the lecturer and student can help us clarify the concept of democracy itself.”

In class, Beerbohm pushes students intellectually to get them to push back. He engages them in a “thought experiment of the day” to get them to consider how people ought to govern themselves, and to sound out the students’ convictions. He also uses technology, running a live online feed of students’ comments during his lecture. He says that undergraduates’ questions about political theory not only further their learning process, but also help him to advance his own studies.

“It’s extremely difficult to do political theory — at least sustainably — without teaching,” Beerbohm said. “In political philosophy, we need a sense of where peoples’ convictions lie before they delve into the canon in political thought. We need to see how they react when they try on a theory for size.  In some cases, student expressions of bewilderment at the premises or conclusions of a theory can be just as important to my research as engaging with published work in the field.”

Beerbohm said that political theory isn’t optional for those who live in a democracy. It’s crucial for students to reflect on values such as equality, liberty, and dignity in order to be good citizens. He pointed out that everyone is political in a government of the people, by the people, and for the people.

“In my teaching, I try to convey the hazards of living in a representative democracy like ours — the way we can be implicated in the acts of our state, even if we attempt to opt out of political life. If democracy has this hazardous character, there’s a sense in which political theory is a mandate that falls upon all of us privileged enough to have the time to reflect on the justifiability of our political institutions.”

The fact that political theory is a practical exercise in no way detracts from its intellectual rigor, Beerbohm contends. On the contrary, he believes that students develop as intellectuals precisely by breaking theories down and seeing whether or not they can withstand rigorous scrutiny.

“Reducing a political theory to its component parts and testing it is enormously difficult,” he said. “That’s part of what makes it such a rewarding activity. In class, I try to show how the moments of surprise — when the conclusion of an argument isn’t expected or even welcome — are evidence that one is doing it right. That’s the excitement of following the argument where it leads.”

Beerbohm will use the proceeds from the award to develop new undergraduate courses on theories of law and lawmaking.

I started college locally at the end of February. Receiving a congratulatory email from the Harvard Admissions Office on April Fools’ Day felt quite wonderful, but also rather perplexing. I had never left Australia before, I am legally blind, and, quite apart from anything else, Harvard was still more a Platonic idea than an actual institution.

I grew up on the campus of the Melbourne College of Divinity, where several professors have Harvard connections and were more than forthcoming with their advice.

One, concealing any sign of levity as only a scholar of the Reformation can, said, “Marina, it’s like ‘The Godfather.’ Harvard makes you an offer … you don’t refuse.” Others, as might be expected, were most concerned with my spiritual upkeep: I could attend chapel services at the Episcopal Divinity School; there was Emmanuel Church in Boston, or the Memorial Church in Harvard Yard. “You will, of course, have to join a choir,” said another professor.

And while at the time I was more interested in reading the College course catalog and discovering where T.S. Eliot had lived during his freshman year, their concern was well informed, and has been invaluable. Because, when all is said and done, I am a homebody, and home has always been, even literally, in the church, and singing in a church choir.

This is my fourth year as a member of the University Choir at Mem Church. I sing for the daily Morning Prayer service, as well as on Sundays. And the place, people, and music really have given me a home here, somewhere to start from.

It has something to do, I think, with the convergence of the divine and the extraordinarily mundane and solid, with each providing its own necessary form of comfort. The church itself, a robust structure, “strong rock and house of defense,” sits reassuringly, certainly at the geographic center of the University. It is fixed, also, as a dependable constant, impervious to the chaos and excitement of all that surrounds it, and that can sometimes be overwhelming.

Most of all, though, I love the community, and the music. I love that my day begins (it often ends, too) in song.

I know the route from Lowell House to the basement entrance of the church so well that my cane is almost superfluous. (There is a cluster of missing bricks in the sidewalk along Holyoke Place, an ill-positioned signpost on the corner of Mount Auburn and Linden Streets to which I have been introduced, several times.) And the morning ritual of rehearsal and worship is, I have found, the most effective antidote to the exhaustions, anxieties, and petty melancholies that are bound to rise in all of us from time to time.

Choral singing is, for me, a truly powerful faithful practice. It is communal, and for community; it has a purpose to it, and, like any worship, it requires work, drudgery, to achieve something sacred. There are some mornings I will make a mistake, or several — forget to take note of an accidental, or misread something — or when the choir troops downstairs after Prayer or Sunday service somewhat sheepish, knowing we haven’t sung as well as we ought.

Many days, we will sing well. But on others, something more happens. More than a seamless performance, it is perhaps that the music approaches the numinous, or that the sacred is present in the music making. I’m not sure which it is. All I know is that these are the times I sing for, that I have always sung for. And find my place in.

There is something romantic about the idea of self-reinvention, adventure, itinerancy, and these were some of the reasons I left my Australian home. I have made another at Harvard, engaging and rich in friendship. I made it almost immediately, and it bears, in some aspects, an alarming resemblance to the one I left, upholding, perhaps, the, ‘you can run, but you can’t hide’ principle.

I often wonder if so much time spent in church is good for my sanity, but I am grateful for this first Harvard home, it is where I start from every day. It is a good home to start from.

If you’re an undergraduate or graduate student and have an essay to share about life at Harvard, please email your ideas to Jim Concannon, the Gazette’s news editor, at Jim_Concannon@harvard.edu.

For the past 20 years, working under the auspices of four Harvard presidents and two University marshals, Commencement Director Grace Scheibner has been responsible for the detailed planning and execution of the Harvard Commencement Morning Exercises, the largest event held on campus every year.

“I start the day after Commencement,” Scheibner said. “When you think of all the groups of people that have to come together — the degree candidates and their families, members of the administration, faculty, alumni, honorands, and special guests — it’s almost like a big movie set. Except here, there’s no rehearsal and no re-take. It has to be perfect, and it has to be flawlessly timed.  When it comes to logistics, there can be no ambiguities.”

Coordinating a complex event with such scope, detail, and history has seen Scheibner compared to both a military commander and director of a major motion picture. In 2010, the Commencement speaker, retired Supreme Court Justice David Souter, sent a letter to Scheibner after the event, saying he had recently been discussing the D-Day landing in France with a colleague. “I’m convinced you could have staged the invasion of France flawlessly,” Souter wrote.

“When you receive feedback like that, you know that you did your job, and that the year of hard work was worth it,” Scheibner said.

As Commencement director, Scheibner has been responsible for managing special requests from more than 200 honorands and 20 speakers, a task that has led to some last-minute scrambles.

“In 2004, two weeks before Commencement, I was told that our Commencement speaker required a private jet to fly him to Commencement,” Scheibner said, smiling. “How many people do you know who can immediately pick up a phone and hire a private jet? Everything else went on hold, and my entire attention became focused on the jet and added United Nations security. We were able to coordinate it, and everything was taken care of.”

Another time, just before Commencement began, one honorand realized that she had left her personal cap, which she wore whenever she processed at an academic institution, back in her Boston hotel room. “We were already lined up for the procession,” Scheibner said. “We dispatched the driver to the hotel, had the concierge let us into the room with the honorand’s permission, retrieved the cap, and raced back to Cambridge.  I walked to the rear of the platform just as the procession was coming up and handed the cap to the honorand as she took her seat.”

Despite such last-minute challenges, Scheibner says that her passion for the Commencement ceremony is a reflection of her own Commencement experience, when she graduated from the Harvard Extension School with an A.L.B. in psychology in 1990.

“I want to give back to Harvard what Harvard has given me in the way of an education,” Scheibner said. “At my Commencement, as people began to show up in their caps and gowns and we began to process, I saw the banners and the stage and was awestruck.  I didn’t know then that within two years I would return to Harvard and be offered the Commencement director position, one which I have taken very seriously ever since.”

Despite the presence of dignitaries, Scheibner said she never loses sight of who Commencement is really for: the degree candidates from the 13 undergraduate Houses and 12 graduate and professional Schools, and their families and loved ones.

“Something magical happens to this campus on Commencement morning. There’s an anticipation in the air. We bring the Harvard family together, under a beautiful canopy of trees and foliage, and everywhere you look you see magnificent crimson banners.  Graduating students and their families realize that this is the culmination of what they’ve been working toward for so long.

“I feel a deep commitment in making sure the Commencement ceremony is a lifelong, cherished memory for them,” Scheibner said.  “After all,” she added, “Harvard deserves the very best.”

But if anniversaries are a good time to reflect on what has gone well, they’re also a time to set challenges — to imagine what could become even better. If anything, 2011-12 was the year when Harvard began to focus more heavily on how students learn and teachers teach.

Evidence of a renewed commitment to teaching and learning could be found across the University. Rita E. and Gustave M. Hauser’s $40 million gift, announced in October, led to the launch of the Harvard Initiative for Learning and Teaching. In November, the Harvard Innovation Lab opened its doors to the public, drawing students, faculty, and researchers across the Charles River to collaborate across disciplines.

And this month, Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology unveiled their joint education venture, edX, which promises a future in which online learning both opens Harvard’s doors to the world and provides valuable data and insights to make traditional classrooms even more effective.

“The vast technological and societal changes of recent years require us to rethink our role in educating our own students, to reconfigure higher education for a global century,” said President Drew Faust. “Harvard has a responsibility not just to educate our students, but to determine how young people learn best, and why the best teachers are so effective.”

As the 375th anniversary draws to a close, the Gazette asked 11 professors to answer the question: “What’s the one big idea that will transform teaching and learning before Harvard celebrates its 400th?”

Their answers varied as widely as their disciplines, but they share an excitement for new technologies and insights, a willingness to experiment, and a desire to position Harvard at the forefront of the educational future.

A smarter network
Jonathan Zittrain is Harvard Law School professor of law, School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) professor of computer science, and co-founder and faculty co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society.

Imagine a world where students learn not from pricey textbooks, but from a priceless community. We will transform teaching by making course texts digital and networked, among professors as well as students.

Professors will be able to browse syllabi from around the world, and then drag and drop the most fitting elements for their own classes. They’ll contribute their own changes back to the commons, making for rapid microevolution of the texts and criticisms that spark student reaction and discussion. And, thanks to the networked system, a teacher can be alerted when an assigned text is being read and digested elsewhere, creating opportunities for well-defined debate and criticism from students in Harvard Yard to those in Singapore or Saudi Arabia. Machine translation is becoming good enough to allow communication not just across culture but across language, too.

Universities were central to building the Internet. They can build networked teaching, too, in the public interest, free and open to all who want to learn.

Bringing the world to Harvard
Maya Jasanoff is a professor of history in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS).

Digital initiatives like edX, the new Harvard-MIT online learning platform, let Harvard open its classrooms to the world. I use digital technology to confront another challenge: How can I bring the world into the classroom?

My course “Societies of the World 14: The British Empire” covers 200 years in the history of an entity that once dominated a quarter of the earth. I have to show students the great diversity of this empire while also conveying broad, overarching themes.

Google Earth offers a great way to do both. I can “fly” students to different locales, and animate these with embedded video, images, and music. To understand the imperial dimensions of World War I, for instance, we “visited” war memorials from Flanders and Gallipoli to Basra, Dar es Salaam, New Delhi, and Ottawa. To appreciate the sweep of decolonization, we “traveled” to Kingston, Accra, and Kuala Lumpur and watched period footage of new citizens cheering their independence.

While millions may enter virtual Harvard classrooms by 2036, I believe students on campus will enjoy an enriched classroom experience in which digital tools help join multimedia content, interactive learning, and live performance. There’s a reason lecture rooms are called theaters. And, thanks to the digital revolution, Harvard students over the next 25 years are in for a rewarding show.

Getting our hands dirty
Gu-Yeon Wei is Gordon McKay Professor of Electrical Engineering and associate dean for academic programs at SEAS.

Engineering is about solving real-world problems. More often than not, these problems are messy, ill defined, and fraught with practical constraints. Instead of focusing on the transfer of knowledge from teacher to student, we are shifting our educational paradigm to engage students with the problems they face and to encourage them to get their hands dirty.

During this past January term, a “design thinking” workshop brought students together with industrial designers for a week of creative thinking — an excited flurry of activity by teams with diverse skills, who scurried about an open-seating venue, posting notes on walls to document iterations of the design process. In our junior engineering design practicum, a group of students developed computational tools to tackle the problem of gang violence in collaboration with the Massachusetts State Police. Some courses have experimented with clickers, iPads, and even automated recognition of facial gestures to understand how students learn from one another. Others have used new classrooms, a simple approach that nonetheless makes it easier to encourage dialogue, teamwork, and active problem solving.

In short, experimentation is what will transform teaching and learning over the next 25 years. At Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, we are refining how we learn, think, and do.

Practice, practice, practice
Iris Bohnet is academic dean and professor of public policy at Harvard Kennedy School (HKS) and director of its Women and Public Policy Program.

Harvard’s reach has always gone well beyond the walls of the ivory tower. I expect that our engagement with the world of practice will completely transcend these walls before this University turns 400. At Harvard Kennedy School, we are increasingly trying to solve problems rather than problem sets. Under the leadership of Professors Linda Bilmes, Marshall Ganz, Jeff Liebman, Lant Pritchett, and others, our students have worked in, learned from, and advised a number of local, state, and federal governments in this country and abroad on how to improve public service delivery, budgeting and accounting, and general public management.

Activity-based costing, for example, allows cities to understand better how much it costs to plant a tree, fix a pothole, or collect the garbage, and then to allocate money wisely and identify potential savings. Mayor Joseph Curtatone, M.P.A.’11, and his team “are turning little Somerville into one of the most innovative and dynamic places in the country, in terms of its budgeting,” Professor Bilmes said.

And our students love it. They engage with real problems and spend countless hours studying conceptual frameworks, collecting data, interviewing people, crunching numbers, running regressions — applying what they have learned in class to the problems in the world.

But it is not only off campus that new forms of collaboration between academics and practitioners are emerging. A group of behavioral and decision scientists at HKS and Harvard Business School is working on workshops focused on co-developing policies, products, and organizational practices that address the problems the practitioners bring to the table. Ideally, several of these new ideas will then be implemented and evaluated in the laboratory and the field, maximizing the learning for the scientific community, the organization, and the world.

Portable, visual information
Peter Manuelian is Philip J. King Professor of Egyptology in FAS.

Traditional instruction sometimes forces a kind of “tethering” onto students: tethering to the classroom, the lecture format, the textbook, and to linear modes of study. Detaching the tether presents the greatest opportunity, and also perhaps the greatest challenge, to education in the years ahead.

Portable devices, 3-D visualization of data, and nonlinear modes of knowledge acquisition are all here already. But when will the infrastructure catch up to truly support all students — and teachers — everywhere? When will our devices truly take us from the paragraph to the picture, to the slideshow, to the movie, and then to the interactive exercise and back to the text? In some of my classes, we take students to the Giza pyramids, courtesy of a large screen, 3-D glasses, and a real-time navigation system — not a linear video — that allows for visits to any part of the site. No two classroom sessions are ever the same.

But wallowing in technology for its own sake is never the answer. How do we balance these new approaches while preserving the fundamentals of a given subject? Untethered options will require instructors to rethink some very basic assumptions about teaching.

Where experts become enablers
Nancy Kane is professor of management and associate dean for educational programs at the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH).

The ideas I am most excited about involve changing the role of the instructor in the classroom from the “expert” delivering knowledge to the “enabler” of learning. Education is evolving from an individual to a team sport, where the instructor as coach designs a curriculum that guides active student learning through multiple channels. Students learn not only from readings and lectures, online vignettes and videos, but from discussions with each other, and sometimes with a global community of learners. Class time is spent exploring the gray areas of knowledge, the places in every discipline where theories conflict or remain incomplete, or where judgment is required to come to meaningful understanding of a concept.

It is not so much one big idea but a collection of ideas, reflecting significant advances in the science of learning — of how adults learn and think — that are likely to transform education in the 21st century. I don’t have the one big idea that will transform our educational institutions into organizations that embrace this kind of change, but leadership and investment are critical ingredients. The Hauser gift and the Harvard Initiative for Learning and Teaching together represent a great beginning.

From multidisciplinary to interdisciplinary
Robert A. Lue is professor of the practice of molecular and cellular biology and director of life sciences education in FAS.

Long before Harvard celebrates its 400th, we will witness a novel unification of interdisciplinary research with teaching and learning.

As a world-class research institution that grew up around an undergraduate college, Harvard presents an exceptional opportunity to transform what it means to receive a liberal arts education. We have an academic milieu that is rich with interdisciplinary connections. Our research centers in the sciences, humanities, and social sciences provide abundant evidence of how deeply we have embraced interdisciplinary collaboration with colleagues.

While multidisciplinarity has long been at the core of a liberal arts education, in which students learn how different disciplines might separately tackle the same issue, Harvard’s burgeoning interest in interdisciplinary research is increasingly expressed in our teaching as well. Interdisciplinarity provides synthesis born of collaboration, as it integrates the perspectives of several fields in the service of solving a problem.

The creation of our foundational life sciences courses was an unparalleled interdisciplinary effort, and their content largely reflects the power of a more synthetic approach when it comes to understanding biology, chemistry, genetics, and evolution. Our General Education offerings include many new courses that similarly express interdisciplinary perspectives, and as we see 100 flowers bloom in this regard, it is a growing reflection of Harvard’s research environment. It is this interdisciplinary transformation of the liberal arts in the university context that will be one of Harvard’s ongoing contributions to the wider world of higher education.

Straddling worlds
Rahul Mehrotra is professor and chair of urban design and planning at the Graduate School of Design.

As virtual reality moves from the domain of individual engagement to that of social networks, new forms of interaction will transform teaching and learning in the next 25 years by blurring the physical boundaries of the classroom. This will enable teachers and learners to engage with multiple conditions across the globe where innovation will arise in unexpected locations.

In this construct, we will be able to access, engage with, be challenged by, and immerse ourselves in multiple realities as part of our educational repertoire in real time, every day. Different cultural sensibilities and conditions will coexist and collide, and the real world will be intrinsically linked to the virtual world, more than ever before. Teaching will then take the form of facilitating open-ended and unpredictable interactions. Equipping learners to slide effortlessly between these worlds — to empathize, speculate, synthesize, and project new realities — will prepare them well for leadership in the future.

Putting teaching in the spotlight
Xiao-Li Meng is Whipple V.N. Jones Professor of Statistics and chair of the Department of Statistics in FAS.

For an institution, no pedagogical idea can be truly transformative without the progressive endorsement of the vast majority of its faculty. One way to effectively promote new pedagogical ideas is to encourage and incentivize a culture where the competing demands for time and energy between research and teaching are not perceived as distinct from those of conducting multiple research projects.

In theory, we understand well that both research and teaching are essential to the discovery and dissemination of knowledge. Research engages us in specific-purpose creativity, while teaching inspires general-purpose creativity. In practice, we already integrate the two effectively in our advanced research courses. Online methods of dissemination, such as iTunes U, now make it possible for classroom teaching to be as globally and permanently visible as research articles, permitting broader exchanges of pedagogical ideas and external evaluation of our teaching activities, just as we do with research findings.

The rapid advance of technologies has highlighted the necessity of ensuring the relevance of the university experience for future generations. It is therefore more critical than ever for Harvard to continuously lead the effort of building institutions where faculty are universally known both for their beautiful minds for research and beautiful hearts for teaching.

Connecting with the community
Ronald Ferguson is a senior lecturer in education and public policy at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and HKS, and faculty director of the Achievement Gap Initiative at Harvard University.

Before Harvard celebrates its 400th anniversary, advanced electronic media will bring the world into our classrooms and our students into the world to a degree that we cannot now imagine. Authentic learning experiences will become increasingly feasible at the same time that simulated experiences will become increasingly realistic. These experiences will teach our students about the challenges awaiting their talents and build their skills to become effective problem-solvers across a range of important domains.

My own work with the Achievement Gap Initiative at Harvard and the Pathways to Prosperity project at the Graduate School of Education is focused on achieving excellence and equity in pre-college education and smoothing transitions from school to career. I hope and expect that the technological and cultural changes I anticipate will increase the involvement of Harvard students from across the University in this important work.

For example, I imagine holograms of Harvard students in virtual visits to their home communities, to help 15-year-olds understand why topics in mathematics, science, art, and literature are interesting and important to understand.  More generally, Harvard students from all racial, ethnic, and sociocultural backgrounds will be involved routinely with children and youth in their home and other communities across the globe.  Much more so than today, our students, staff, and faculty will debate ideas, confront challenges, and provide inspiration through these connections. Along with like-minded others, they will serve as models of intellectual engagement in a global community of learners focused on achieving shared ideals.

Some things never change
Jules Dienstag is Carl W. Walter Professor of Medicine and dean for medical education at Harvard Medical School.

In 25 years, Harvard will be at once both very recognizable in its adherence to core values and very different in its adoption of new pedagogy that engages students and enhances learning. We can imagine but cannot know what the technology of the future will be, nor do we really know the best way to incorporate current technology into the classroom. Accordingly, while our Schools can provide a physical scaffold of technology-capable classrooms and innovative, multipurpose learning spaces, we will rely on the inventiveness of creative, change-embracing faculty and students to explore and tell us how to use new technologies and learning environments to imagine the classroom of the future.

In the future, universities will rely not so much on an online delivery model publicized by for-profit universities, but instead will incorporate the enhancements of digital technologies to perpetuate an environment that is compellingly interactive, that fosters critical thinking, that allows students to take ownership of — and make a committed investment in — their own learning. Online-only education, which leverages the opportunity for students to work at their own pace and schedule, does not have the same intimate, interactive, very personal ingredient that characterizes an in-person learning experience. Even when technology allows asynchronous participation in large and small student teams, the physical isolation of students working exclusively “at home,” rather than on campus, is a poor facsimile of the face-to-face university experience in all its richness.

Incredible students of promise and faculty of distinction will continue to be drawn here. And, from the unique cauldron in which they interact, unimagined approaches to pedagogy will emerge. Although we will embrace, even thrive upon, innovations, one constant that will continue to distinguish an institution like Harvard well into the 21st century and beyond is the environment of scholarly inquiry, discourse, and discovery — a presence between faculty and students that anchors a unique, inspirational teacher-learner partnership. This is the true measure of an education, whether in 2012 or 2036.

In the wake of the March 11, 2011, earthquake and tsunami in Japan, officially named the Great East Japan Earthquake, the Reischauer Institute, in cooperation with the Harvard Club of Japan, the Rotary Club of Okayama, Doshisha University, the Harvard Japanese Language Program, the Office of Career Services, the Harvard Summer School office, the Office of International Education, and other entities in Japan and across campus, has thrown wholehearted support behind the maintenance of Harvard student participation in activities and programs in Japan.

For graduate students with a Japan interest, RI has provided dissertation completion grants, language study grants, and other travel and research awards. In the case of undergraduates, RI has provided support for research, Japanese language study, internships, Harvard Summer School in Kyoto, volunteer relief efforts in the aftermath of the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake, and other activities across Japan. Now, more than ever, RI seeks to enable students to go to Japan to study, to work, to learn, and to grow as scholars and as human beings. View the full list of students supported by RI during the 2011-12 academic year and summer of 2012.

Graduate and undergraduate students may conduct thesis research in Korea, and undergraduates may participate in study and work abroad opportunities in Korea through a variety of programs such as the Harvard Summer School-Korea, study abroad at Korean universities, Korean language study and internships.

For more information on the Korea Institute and a full list of this year’s Korea program awardees and participants.

Brent Suter flat-out loves helping others. No life-changing experience spurred him to enter the public service arena. He’s just built that way.

In fact, Suter’s coming-of-age story is fairly standard: a natural athlete, the Midwestern-born Suter played baseball and basketball from a young age. Always academically strong, he was also involved in student government at his Catholic high school in Cincinnati, and worked with organizations like Big Brother and Little Buddies. During his senior year, Suter’s pitching really took off, earning the attention of Harvard coaches.

His left-handedness makes him a valuable commodity, but Suter is not just the exceptional sportsman. He’s the exceptional all-arounder. During his years at Harvard, Suter maintained his affinity for helping others, simply because he has “always loved serving the community.”

“It does give me this sense of joy to see the happiness you can bring to other people’s lives,” he said. “But overall, it’s a necessary thing to give back to the community to remind yourself of how blessed you are, and to use the position you’re in to help others who sometimes aren’t so fortunate.”

This year, Suter was one of 30 national athletes nominated for the Lowe’s Senior CLASS Award. To be eligible, a student-athlete must be an NCAA Division I senior and have notable achievements in four areas of excellence: community, classroom, character, and competition.

Suter, a double concentrator in environmental science and public policy and a pre-med student, is a third-year volunteer tutoring first-generation immigrant third- and fourth-graders in literacy and math at the Cambridge After School Program of Phillips Brooks House Association. He’s the baseball team’s central figure in its Friends of Jaclyn program, which benefits Alex Wawrzyniak, who suffers from pilocytic astrocytoma low grade glioma, a form of cerebral tumor. Suter is also active with the Harvard Square Homeless Shelter and the student group Athletes in Action, and he is co-chair of the Student Athlete Advisory Committee. There, he was instrumental in leading events such as the Bench Press for Breast Cancer in 2010 and 2011, shoe drives for Africa, toiletry drives for the homeless, and charity balls.

But wait — there’s more.

Last year, Suter founded the Harvard Baseball-Watertown Cuniff Elementary Program. Harvard baseball players travel each Friday to the elementary school to tutor and mentor students in an effort to provide a positive male role model in their lives. “A couple of weeks ago, the school invited us over for a schoolwide pep rally,” recalled Suter. “And then they all came out to our game against Boston College at home, and they gave us a lot of cheers, and it was a lot of fun. We ended up winning the game. It was a really special moment.”

Now, Suter’s off to Indianapolis to teach remedial math for Teach For America — unless the majors come calling. “I really want to play professional ball,” said Suter, who is awaiting the June draft. “I’ve had interest from a lot of teams, so we’ll see.”

The pitcher, who throws in the high 80s to lower 90s, said that while at Harvard he has “grown from a boy to a man.”

“My four years here have been wonderful. Even the baseball losses taught me good lessons about perseverance, and just taking a step back to realize how lucky we are,” he said.

Perhaps Suter’s one regret was not making the cut during a singing tryout for one of Harvard’s campus music groups. His talents and activities are enough to ruin one’s self-esteem forever: music on top of Harvard, on top of baseball, on top of volunteering?

“But,” said Suter, laughing, “I’ve actually wanted to do more in my college career.”

First awarded in 1981, the Harvard Medal recognizes extraordinary service to the University — from teaching, leadership, and innovation to fundraising, administration, and volunteerism. President Drew Faust will present the medals at the Annual Meeting of the Harvard Alumni Association on May 24 during Commencement’s Afternoon Program.

2012 Harvard Medalists

Charles W. Collier, M.T.S. ’73, is a nationally recognized expert on philanthropy and family wealth consulting. He has not only established a widespread reputation for deep knowledge of his field but also has been a thought leader in advancing its development. He has worked with a national audience to broaden the concept of family wealth to embody dimensions of human, intellectual, and social capital in addition to financial assets.

As Harvard’s senior philanthropic adviser, Collier used family systems theory to explore the challenges that families face in making decisions about their wealth and legacy. His approach has put Harvard at the forefront of providing alumni with a new resource. His book, “Wealth in Families,” has had as much influence as any other publication in encouraging family “breakthrough conversations” about inheritance and charitable giving.

The fruits of Collier’s labor are visible everywhere on campus. He has been instrumental in crafting many of the largest gifts the University has received in the past 25 years, including one unusual donation in 1992 when Harvard received the Aspen Highlands Ski Resort. While doing this, he shared his knowledge of planned giving with donors and colleagues. In one of his letters of support, it was noted: “His persuasive abilities are legendary. He can make anyone feel good about giving twice what they thought they could give.”

Collier has published articles in Trusts & Estates, the ACTEC Journal, Family Business Review, the Journal of Gift Planning, Advancing Philanthropy, and Gift Planning Today. He has been quoted in the Boston Globe, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, and Forbes.

Collier is a graduate of Phillips Academy, Andover, and he holds a B.A. in religion from Dartmouth College and an M.T.S. from Harvard Divinity School.

Ellen R. Gordon, G.S.A. ’69, and Melvin J. Gordon ’41, M.B.A. ’43, care deeply about Harvard and have served the University together in various capacities. Ellen served as the chair of a previous Harvard Medical School (HMS) campaign, and her high-profile fundraising savvy and clear endorsement provided HMS with what it needed to succeed. She is currently an honorary co-chair of the new HMS campaign. She has shared her wisdom about organizational management and good business practice with HMS deans for more than 20 years and has been a member of the HMS Board of Fellows since 1991. She is also a founding member of the HMS Systems Biology Council and a former member of the visiting committees for the Medical and Dental Schools and the Committee to Visit the Food Service.

Throughout the 1970s, Melvin served on the Board of Overseers’ Committee to Visit the Russian Research Center. He is a stalwart volunteer for his College class and has served on his Harvard Business School Reunion Fund Committee. An avid sports fan, he has missed only a handful of home football games since World War II and is a member of the Harvard Varsity Club. Varsity athletes have benefited from the Ellen and Melvin Gordon Conditioning Center, located at the Malkin Athletic Center, and in 2006 Melvin received the Harvard Club of Boston’s “Harvard Club President’s Special Award,” presented each year at the Harvard football team’s annual dinner, in recognition of his contributions to Harvard athletics.

Together, the Gordons made a monumental commitment to Harvard Medical School. In 2000, HMS’s Building A was renamed the Ellen R. and Melvin J. Gordon Hall of Medicine. The naming was in recognition of their generosity, which established a professorship, funded the creation of the Department of Systems Biology, renewed the building’s skylights, which were blacked out during WWII, and funded basic research “at the discretion of the dean” for many years.

Ellen and Melvin have four daughters: Virginia L. Gordon; Karen Gordon Mills ’75, M.B.A. ’77; Wendy Gordon ’79, M.D. ’88; and Lisa Gordon ’93.

Harry L. Parker, the Thomas Bolles Head Coach for Harvard Men’s Crew, is widely regarded as the premier rowing coach in the United States. In his 50 years as head coach, he has led his crews to 21 undefeated regular seasons, 24 EARC Sprints varsity titles, 21 JV Sprints crowns, eight official and eight unofficial national championships, including three IRA championships since 2003, and a 42–7 record over Yale in the Harvard-Yale Boat Race. He worked with every U.S. Olympic Rowing Team from 1964 until 1992 and also served as the coach of the first U.S. women’s national eight, which won a silver medal at the 1975 World Rowing Championships. He coached the women’s crew again in 1976 when they won a bronze medal at the Olympic Games in Montreal.

Parker’s Harvard crews have also enjoyed great success in international competition, with impressive victories throughout the world, particularly at the Henley Royal Regatta in England. During Parker’s tenure, Harvard crews have won more than 20 Cups at Henley in seven different events, including the Grand Challenge Cup, the premier event of the regatta. Harvard is widely regarded as having the strongest university rowing program in the world.

Parker is renowned for his innovations in training and technique as well as for his dedication to his oarsmen. According to Bill Manning, associate head coach of men’s heavyweight rowing, Parker is “concerned for the well-being of every student in the program, trying to ensure that each and every oarsman has a successful and satisfying rowing experience while at Harvard.” He is widely acclaimed by his former rowers, Olympians and fourth-boaters alike, for instilling in them traits that led to success not only on the water but also throughout their lives.

This past December, Parker received the USRowing Medal of Honor, the most coveted award in rowing.

Susan S. Wallach ’68, J.D. ’71, has demonstrated a strong commitment both to Harvard and Radcliffe. Devoted to interdisciplinary collaboration and advancing women in the University, she has served as a Harvard Overseer, a Radcliffe College Trustee, a member of the Committee on the Status of Women Undergraduates, and a member of the advisory committees to both the Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America and the Harvard Children’s Initiative.

She played a central role in the negotiations between Radcliffe College and Harvard, leading to the creation of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. She has been a member of the Radcliffe Institute’s Dean’s Advisory Council since its inception, and currently serves as its chair. She has been an active and energetic volunteer and has chaired or co-chaired numerous reunion gift committees. Her invaluable counsel to the Radcliffe Institute was recognized with the Radcliffe Distinguished Service Award in 2003.

As an Overseer, she demonstrated a commitment to University-wide citizenship. She has maintained close ties to Harvard Law School, of which she is a graduate, serving as a member of its visiting committee since 2003 and chairing or co-chairing many reunion gift committees. She is a director of the Harvard Law School Association of New York City. She serves on the visiting committee to the Harvard Graduate School of Education, where she has been involved in supporting the new doctor of education leadership degree (Ed.L.D.) program. She chaired the Overseers’ Standing Committee on Humanities and Arts in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and serves on the visiting committee to Harvard College and to departments within the FAS.

CES undergraduate senior thesis travel grants fund summer research in Europe for juniors in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences preparing senior theses. Graduate dissertation research fellowships fund students who plan to spend six months to a year in Europe conducting dissertation research, while graduate dissertation writing fellowships are intended to support doctoral candidates as they complete their dissertations. These grants and fellowships are funded by CES and by the Krupp Foundation.
For more information, visit http://ces.fas.harvard.edu/.