December 8, 2011

December 8, 2011

December 8, 2011

December 8, 2011

December 8, 2011

December 8, 2011

ROTC was banned from campus in 1971 during the Vietnam War protest — though starting in 1976 Harvard ROTC students could train at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. By the mid-1980s, antiwar fervor at Harvard had been replaced by disappointment that gays and lesbians could not openly join the Armed Forces, a circumstance that kept ROTC from campus for decades more. That changed on Sept. 20. When the U.S. policy known as “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” expired, the doors of the military were opened to sexual diversity. Harvard captured the moment, thanks to initiatives begun years before by President Drew Faust, a Civil War historian and the daughter of a World War II veteran.

ROTC students at Harvard, present and past, are grateful that the military is back. “Every one at Harvard is serving their country in some way,” said Catherine Philbin ’14, midshipman third class with the Naval ROTC. “This is just the way we’re serving.”

Harvard’s “long crimson line” of military service stretches back to the 17th century, and includes 17 recipients of the Congressional Medal of Honor, the most of any university outside the service academies. Harvard’s relationship with ROTC dates to 1916, the year Army ROTC was established. The University’s “Harvard Regiment,” mobilized that year with 1,000 students, was among the first ROTC units in the country.

The Harvard Radcliffe Orchestra performed, accompanied by a chorus of over a hundred student voices followed by a solo performance by our own international celebrity cellist, Yo-Yo Ma ‘76.

The study of classics is not generally thought of as an empiricist discipline. But in 1934, Milman Parry, assistant professor of classics at Harvard, began a series of experiments in remote regions of the kingdom of Yugoslavia that overturned centuries of received wisdom about the Homeric “Iliad” and “Odyssey.”

Equipped with a state-of-the-art recording apparatus, a hypothesis about the nature of oral poetry, and a set of diagnostic protocols designed to measure a singer’s ability to manipulate material in performance, Parry spent 15 months collecting epic songs and personal narratives from Muslim and Christian singers. The data he collected eventually succeeded in sweeping away many stale and static debates over the origin of the “Iliad” and the “Odyssey,” and set the understanding of the Homeric epics — and indeed, of epic poetry in many traditions, from “Beowulf” to the chansons de geste — on a new foundation that was based on the aesthetics of oral tradition.

After Parry, whose work inaugurated a new era in Homeric studies, scholars the world over were compelled to recognize the inadequacy of criteria derived from cultures of literacy, and learned to appreciate anew the very different canons of orality.

Parry died tragically at age 33, just three months after completing his epoch-making field research, but his work was continued by his student, Albert Lord, over the course of a long career at Harvard, culminating in his appointment as Arthur Kingsley Porter Professor of Slavic and Comparative Literature, a position he held until his death in 1991. Lord extended the reach of Parry’s results to numerous other disciplines.

Meanwhile, Parry’s vast collection, including some 3,500 aluminum phonograph discs and many hundreds of notebooks, became the core of the Milman Parry Collection of Oral Literature, which occupies a modest room in Widener Library. A large-scale digitization effort, begun in 2002, has made thousands of Parry’s recordings and photographs — more precious than ever in the wake of the destruction of cultural treasures during the wars in the former Yugoslavia — available to researchers.

Oct. 16, 1846, is perhaps the most celebrated day in the entire history of medicine. On that morning at the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), local physicians and medical students gathered in the wide-domed surgical amphitheater (designed by esteemed Boston architect Charles Bulfinch) to witness a hastily planned clinical experiment.

At the center of the surgical theater stood John Collins Warren, the nation’s most renowned surgeon and first dean of Harvard Medical School, and his young patient, a house painter, Gilbert Abbott, afflicted since birth with a tumor on the left side of his neck. The proposed procedure was no different than hundreds that Warren had previously conducted. But in this instance he had invited William T.G. Morton, a Boston dentist, to provide the patient with a preparation that he claimed would make the procedure pain free.

Morton rushed onto the stage some 20 minutes late and administered his preparation through an inhalation tube to Abbott, who quickly fell into a deep sleep. Warren, working with deft quickness, excised the tumor. When the patient awoke, he confirmed that his only sensation had been a slight scratching of the skin. Warren declared, “This is no humbug!” and the assembled audience erupted in applause. In an operation of under 10 minutes, the world of medicine and surgery had been forever transformed.

But the story — as such stories always are — is much more complex and exposes the intricate character of medical innovation. Morton’s preparation was ether, a compound well known in chemistry and medicine, first identified in the 14th century. Indeed, for decades, medical students and others reportedly had experimented with ether as a recreational drug, participating in “ether frolics.” During that time, however, the potential application of ether (and other drugs) for surgery seemed to have been almost universally overlooked.

To tackle the problem of driving after drinking, the leading cause of death among young adults in the nation, the Harvard School of Public Health’s (HSPH) Jay Winsten created the designated driver campaign in 1988, mobilizing Hollywood’s first industrywide initiative to tackle a societal problem. The campaign secured more than $100 million a year in donated airtime to inculcate a new social norm — “the driver doesn’t drink” — into American culture, importing the concept from Scandinavia.

Rather than exhorting the public to change behavior, Winsten encouraged TV writers to model a new social norm by depicting the use of designated drivers in story lines of shows such as “Cheers.” More than 160 prime-time episodes incorporated the message. Surveys showed that a majority of the American public quickly embraced the concept. The international export of Hollywood’s products led to diffusion of the designated driver concept around the world.

When the campaign began in 1988, alcohol-related traffic fatalities in the United States exceeded 23,000 annually. Four years later, fatalities had dropped by more than 25 percent, thanks to tough laws, strict enforcement, and widespread use of designated drivers. Today, annual fatalities stand at less than 11,000, and the concept is a permanent fixture in American culture.

The Chronicle of Philanthropy noted: “Many grant makers say it was the success of the campaign that persuaded them that skillful work with news and entertainment media can bring about social change.” Winsten’s Center for Health Communication at HSPH helped to establish “health communication” as an important field in public health.

The laptop tucked away in your backpack, the tablet computer on your coffee table, even the smartphone in your pocket all can trace at least part of their lineage to Harvard. The Mark I, built 8 feet high, 3 feet deep, and 50 feet long, was the first programmable computer in the United States. The brainchild of longtime Harvard Professor Howard Aiken, Ph.D. ’39, the Mark I launched the computer age, introducing automated computation as a tool to address problems in the natural, applied, and social sciences.

Consisting of 765,299 parts and 530 miles of cable, the Mark I in 1944 was easily the most complex electromechanical device ever constructed. To build it, Aiken relied on the ingenuity of engineers at IBM, demonstrating the importance of government funding and industry cooperation in large-scale, academic science and engineering projects.

The art of modern programming was also born with the Mark I. Robert Bloch, Robert Campbell, and, most famously, Grace Hopper developed some of the earliest instances of subroutines, branching techniques, code compression, and debugging procedures while at Harvard. Hopper not only wrote the manual of operation for the Mark I, but she documented the first physical bug — a moth found in the machine’s electromechanical relays — and helped usher the term “debugging” into common usage.

Automatic checking and debugging support were critical components of the design of the Mark I, because it produced accurate answers less than 95 percent of the time. Today it is unthinkable that our computing devices would incorrectly sum a column of numbers. But as we make the tiny transistors in modern devices ever smaller and faster, we also make them less reliable and reopen the concerns that Aiken and his team wrestled with 70 years ago.

On Aug. 31, I started my contracts class by calling on a hapless first-year student to recite the facts of the first case in the book. In doing so, I was following what my predecessors have done for almost 150 years, since Christopher Columbus Langdell, the Dane Professor of Law at Harvard University, published the first casebook: “A Selection of Cases on the Law of Contracts.”

The revolution that Langdell began in 1871 has now become the standard procedure of all law schools — so much so that it is sometimes hard to remember how great its impact is. But teaching the law by analysis of judicial opinions — the Law School case method — is entirely different from teaching by lecture or through textbooks.

Law students work from the same materials that professional lawyers use. They work from the particular facts to general principles and back again. They study opinions that, being the product of controversy, invite controversy. And the work of putting the cases together so they make sense is work that Langdell, and all of us who follow him, expected the students to do.

This is education that is active, skill developing, and, in the hands of its master practitioners, exhilarating. It has had influence far beyond its home ground, inspiring, for example, the case method that has become the standard form in business schools.

Of course, Langdell’s method is also old. It is a tribute that it has survived so intact; it is not surprising that it does not answer all the needs of modern legal education. In an age in which most new law comes from the legislature or administrative agencies, it overemphasizes the courts. In an age in which lawyers mediate and arbitrate, draft and negotiate, lobby and monitor regulatory compliance, it overemphasizes litigating.

The Law School is addressing these needs — we now have a required first-year course in legislation and regulation, and a required first-year problem-solving workshop — and we hope that here, too, we are setting the pattern for legal education.

Harvard has a long history of innovation and leadership in sports medicine. Augustus Thorndike, A.B. 1884, M.D. 1888, at the Massachusetts General Hospital is considered the father of sports medicine because he recognized the special health risks faced by athletes. Because he understood those, he developed the first helmets to be used in football and hockey.

The consistent use of such protective gear and the provision of specialized medical care for athletes is a relatively recent development. The first piece of protective equipment in American sports, the baseball catcher’s mask, was developed at Harvard. The mask was worn by James A. Tyng, A.B. 1876, in either a game between Harvard and the Boston Red Stockings that year or between Harvard and the Live Oaks team from Lynn in 1877.

Catchers had started to inch closer to home plate to better field bunts, throw out base runners, and frame pitches. Since Tyng had been struck by several foul tips in the head and face, he had become “more or less timid,” according to Harvard baseball manager Frederick W. Thayer, A.B. 1878, who designed the first catcher’s mask for Tyng. The mask was modeled on a fencing mask with eyes holes cut into it, and it was made by a Cambridge tinsmith.

There have been many variations in the design of catchers’ masks to maximize facial protection, minimize obstruction to visibility, and minimize weight. The latest designs closely resemble the goalie’s mask in hockey.

Throughout its 31-year history, the A.R.T. has been a pioneer in American theater, bringing together distinctive leading artists from across disciplines — composers, visual artists, directors, actors, and playwrights — to create theatrical events that have redefined the form. From Robert Wilson’s “Civil Wars” to Andrei Serban’s staging of “The Juniper Tree,” these productions created unbelievable visual tableaux that told stories in ways that made one question the limits of tradition.

I first encountered the A.R.T. when I was an undergraduate at Harvard in the 1980s. I was exposed to the work of world-class artists such as Wilson, Serban, Julie Taymor, and Philip Glass. Those works revolutionized the way I thought about theater, and opened my eyes to the groundbreaking possibilities that theater could conquer. As A.R.T.’s artistic director, I have devoted my energy to taking A.R.T.’s mission “to expand the boundaries of theater” into the 21st century by nurturing collaborations with the next generation of artists who are changing the way we think about the theater and its possibilities.

President Drew Faust’s belief that theater and the arts are integral to the cognitive experience has inspired the A.R.T. to become more fully integrated into the life of the University. Recently, we have created innovative courses, such as the course on our recent production of “The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess,” that give undergraduates the opportunity to experience theater in new ways: studying the texts, learning the history behind the work, observing rehearsals, interacting with artists, and attending performances. Our goal is to rediscover the power of theater, to push our audiences and our students into experiences that challenge their notions of art and of themselves, and ask the question of how they can be more fully engaged as active citizens in a changing world.

To B.F. Skinner, the observables of behavior — whether it be the measurable peck of a pigeon’s beak or the bar press of a rat’s paw — constituted the only legitimate foundation on which a science of psychology could be built.

The Harvard professor emphasized the importance of “orderly data” and repeatedly refined his methods in order to make for systematic evidence. His methods, the most famous of which is the eponymous Skinner box, enabled the precise timing of events and the objective recording of responses, giving psychology the paraphernalia typical of the older natural sciences.

In understanding why any organism behaves the way it does, Skinner saw no place for dwelling on a person’s “intentions” or “goals.” For him, it was outward behavior and its environment that mattered. His most important contribution to psychological science was the concept of reinforcement, formalized in his principles of operant conditioning (in contrast to Ivan Pavlov’s principles of classical conditioning, which along with J.B. Watson’s extreme environmentalism strongly influenced his own thinking).

Behavior increases in probability when its outcomes are reinforced. In other words, a behavior such as a smile or even a complex pattern of behavior (e.g., superstitious behavior) occurs because similar previous responses have been rewarded in particular contexts. Of course, behavior had to be broken down into smaller steps to achieve optimal reinforcement, and each step had to receive feedback to shape new and highly complex strings of behavior.

By Skinner’s standard, very little of today’s science of psychology would be regarded as scientifically legitimate. Looking at the human mind itself, which has been psychology’s primary focus since the cognitive revolution, simply horrified him. But while psychology has moved in new directions, Skinnerian procedures have been effectively applied to the understanding and modification of human behavior in contexts such as industry, business, government, education, prisons, and mental institutions. His work also provided insight into methods by which children are raised, with specific applications to attachment and separation distress, crying, imitation, social referencing, and the acquisition of skills.

The intellectual implications of geographic information systems (GIS) are enormous, and their practical applications are now in worldwide use.

Since its origins in the 1960s, GIS has enabled designers, planners, developers, public agencies, and communities to make better decisions about the shape of urbanization and its impact. GIS improves design and planning by using geographically referenced data on subjects ranging from the economy to ecology and beyond.

GIS was an innovation that emerged from the Laboratory for Computer Graphics at the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD). The “Lab” was founded by Harvard College and GSD graduate Howard Fisher in 1965 with a grant from the Ford Foundation. The grant was intended to explore the role of computer graphics in solving the social, spatial, and urban problems of the American city. A primary goal of this work was to aggregate ecological, sociological, and demographic data and to spatialize that data through computer mapping.

Much of the early intellectual energy of the Lab went into computer mapping and modeling tools such as SYMAP and other applications that aided the development of GIS. In 1968, William Warntz, professor of theoretical geography, became director of the Lab and extended its work into spatial analysis.

Two contributors to the early research and development of GIS played particularly significant roles. Carl Steinitz, professor emeritus of Landscape Architecture, focused on environmental analysis and theoretical frameworks for planning. In 1967, he led a design studio with GSD graduate candidates that used SYMAP to analyze and map urbanization in relation to natural systems in the Delmarva Peninsula. The early work was a major breakthrough in the development of what would become GIS. Over the intervening half century, Steinitz emerged as the most significant voice of his generation on the theory and practice of landscape planning.

Jack Dangermond, M.L.A. ’69, joined the Lab in 1967 and aided in developing SYMAP. At the time, Harvard had one supercomputer, and Dangermond had to assemble unwieldy stacks of punch cards for processing. Finding processing times faster at night, Dangermond succeeded in printing his first computer map after a month of night work. He later founded the prominent company ESRI to make these tools broadly available for public and private clients.

ESRI remains among the most important venues for the development of tools and techniques for the geographic analysis of design and planning decisions.

In recent years, humanities scholarship throughout the world has been transformed by the determined effort to interpret works of art in their historical, cultural, and anthropological contexts. This new practice came as a challenge to the entrenched method of analyzing these works in isolation, as if they had been created in a vacuum. To shift to a new perspective — one that grappled more directly with the lives of the makers and consumers — was the product of a generational insurgency, one in which I proudly played a part.

But the ground for this insurgency had already been long prepared at Harvard in a remarkably innovative program created in 1906: the undergraduate concentration known as History and Literature. The concentration, Harvard’s first, was hardly meant to be intellectually radical; it was originally proposed by Professor of English Barrett Wendell as a conservative antidote to Harvard’s free-elective system.

But institutional innovations often have unpredictable consequences. The pedagogical power of History and Literature lay in the touching together of two wires: canonical works of art and the documentary records of history. Art was not cordoned off from the traces of lived life, and those traces in turn could be subjected to the same interpretive pressure brought to bear on a poem or a play. The result was not only unusually lively classroom experience but also an intellectual ferment that helped inspire my generation’s literary and historical scholarship and continues to generate powerful insight.

In 1983, when Howard Gardner introduced the concept of multiple intelligences to the world in his book “Frames of Mind,” it paved the way for a seismic shift in how we view learners and permeated every aspect of education.

It introduced the research basis for an expanded notion of human intelligence and began the conversation that enabled us to move beyond IQ notions that heavily weighted mathematical/logical and linguistic/verbal ability over other forms of intelligence. It immediately made sense to the best teachers who implicitly recognized the varied strengths of their students, and it opened the floodgates of change for those who focused more narrowly.

I was a public school administrator and teacher at the time, and the work enabled me to frame the district’s academic enrichment offerings through a multiple-intelligences model, and to acknowledge and support the talents of a much broader range of children.

The shift has changed the lives of many learners whose intelligences are appreciated and accommodated as a direct result of the work by Gardner, the John H. and Elisabeth A. Hobbs Professor of Cognition and Education at the Graduate School of Education. His work resulted in a cascade of effects — causing educators to re-evaluate practices such as tracking, narrowly selective gifted and talented programs, and so forth.

Further, its impact has reached well beyond the classroom, resulting in enduring changes in our psyche and a much more textured notion of what it means to behave intelligently in the everyday world, in business, and beyond. The outcomes for society have been profound as we build and capitalize upon the wealth and range of human capacity.

In the mid-20th century, psychology was no longer “the science of mental life” (as William James had defined it), but “the science of behavior.” Mentalistic concepts —thoughts, memories, goals, emotions — had been banned as unscientific, replaced by associations between stimuli and responses.

But new ideas about computation, feedback, information, and communication were in the air, and psychologists realized they had enormous potential for a science of mind. Four Harvard scholars used them to launch the “cognitive revolution.”

George Miller noted that people could label, quantify, or remember about seven items at a time, whether they were tones, digits, words, or phrases. That meant the human brain must be constricted by a bottleneck of seven (plus or minus two) units, which Miller called “chunks.”

Linguist Noam Chomsky, while at the Harvard Society of Fellows, noted that people can produce and understand an infinite number of novel sentences. They must have internalized a grammar, or set of rules, rather than having memorized a list of responses. Children are not taught this grammar, and so are equipped with a “language acquisition device” that instantiates a “universal grammar.”

Jerome Bruner co-authored “A Study of Thinking,” which analyzed people as constructive problem-solvers rather than passive media as they mastered new concepts. His colleague Roger Brown analyzed the relationship of concepts to language and initiated a new science of language development in children.

In 1960, Bruner and Miller founded the Harvard Center for Cognitive Studies, which institutionalized the revolution and launched the field of cognitive science. Today the study of the human mind is among the most exciting frontiers of science. Its practical applications include the design of software, the diagnosis of neurological disease, and the formation of public policy, and its theories have revolutionized our understanding of ancient problems such as consciousness, free will, and human nature.

Harvard Business School (HBS) was founded in 1908, in the words of future Harvard President A. Lawrence Lowell, as a “delicate experiment” — a five-year trial, to be exact, as approved by the Harvard Corporation. It began with 15 faculty members, 24 regular students, and 35 “special” students housed in space borrowed from the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.

While other undergraduate schools of commerce already existed, as well as some institutions that offered graduate courses, HBS was the first to require that entering students possess an undergraduate degree, and it created the master in business administration (M.B.A.) to confer upon its graduates (with, notably, Harvard’s first diploma written in English rather than Latin).

Edwin Gay, the School’s founding dean, defined business as the activity of making “a decent profit, decently.” From the start, HBS sought to develop general managers — people with competence and character. This meant training students for the tasks of manufacturing and selling, thereby developing in them “a habit of intellectual respect for business as a profession.” It also meant developing in them “a sympathetic tact, a certain kindness of spirit.”

In its first century, HBS pioneered the adoption of the case method for management instruction (as well as the unique tiered classroom to support it), executive education (offering the first “war retraining” course in 1943), a residential campus to enhance the learning environment, and numerous fields of study, including strategy and entrepreneurship.

That spirit of innovation continues today in the School’s use of educational technologies, in the development and dissemination of path-breaking management ideas, and, most recently, in the launch of the field method, which seeks to provide students with intensive, immersive, and experiential small-group learning opportunities. It is the School’s aspiration to be no less than a beacon of innovation in management education.

For many years, I taught a House seminar on Vladimir Nabokov, and another on great alienated Cambridge writers among whom he figured. The noted Russian-American writer lived in Cambridge longer than anywhere else in the United States. Here at Harvard he wrote his ars poetica, “Fame.” Here he wrote his first great English-language novel, “Bend Sinister.” Here he gave classes the first mimeographs of his translation of the “Igor” epic. Here at the Museum of Comparative Zoology, he classified Lepidoptera.

Vladimir Vladimirovich is one of many extraordinary, creative literary minds who walked Harvard’s halls and meadows and whose spirits hover over us. Jorge Luis Borges, while staying here to lecture, had a ghostly encounter with his double, on a bench on the banks of the Charles. After graduating from Harvard, William S. Burroughs Jr. wrote his first subversive short story, about the sinking of the Titanic, while living on Mount Auburn Street. T.S. Eliot, who lived a few blocks away on Ash Street while teaching at the College, kept a manuscript of “The Waste Land” in a chest at the back of the house. The list goes on: Seamus Heaney, E.E. Cummings, Wallace Stevens, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau …

One of the greatest and least known American writers of the 20th century, Delmore Schwartz, author of “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities” and other short stories and poems studied, taught, and wrote at Harvard. Saul Bellow wrote a novel about Schwartz, “Humboldt’s Gift.” My favorite Schwartz abode is 9 Story St., and I often walk home that way from work. It reminds me that out of the incidents of the day, the many lives around the square, the very air (trembling with electricity in autumn, sere in winter, sweet in spring), stories are woven, and each of us can write his or hers.

Joseph Murray successfully transplanted a kidney between identical twins on Dec. 23, 1954, at what was then the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital, having perfected the operation in the research laboratories at Harvard Medical School. The terminally ill patient recovered, married his nurse, fathered two children, and lived normally for the next decade.

This unique approach quickly posed new challenges for the team. Among them: how to substitute a healthy donor organ for a failed one in a genetically dissimilar recipient. With knowledge of the intricacies of the host responses against foreign tissues advancing in parallel, Murray’s research team and a few other investigators were able to improve functional survival of transplanted kidneys with a newly defined immunosuppressive drug.

With gathering clinical experience and the introduction of increasingly effective pharmacologic agents to inhibit host responsiveness, the transplantation of a spectrum of solid organs has become increasingly routine throughout the world, currently saving the lives of tens of thousands of patients. The biologically unexplained but compelling success of the transplantation of composite grafts — hands and faces — has become a recent harbinger of even more dramatic advances to come.

The early laboratory and clinical studies of Murray and his successors (for which he received the Nobel Prize in 1990) revolutionized transplantation, have evoked novel approaches against cancer and immune disorders, and opened a range of applications of biology. This venture has evolved into one of the most important scientific advances of our time.

Harvard lays claim to one of the longest-running archaeological digs in Egypt and the Sudan. For more than 40 years (1905–1947), the Harvard-MFA Expedition was headquartered at “Harvard Camp,” a modest complex just a short walk west of the famous Pyramids of Giza. Sculptural masterpieces, monumental temples, pyramids, fortresses, exquisite gold jewelry, and objects of daily life are all part of the expedition’s legacy. Even more significant, these treasures came to light in the context of the most advanced and responsible scientific excavation of its time.

Thanks to the efforts of expedition director and Harvard Professor George A. Reisner, Class of 1889, today we can reconstruct ancient settlements and cemeteries, marvel at the world’s oldest royal furniture, and translate countless hieroglyphic inscriptions, from legal testaments to autobiographies and historical texts. Twenty-three archaeological sites are preserved in 45,000 documentary glass-plate expedition photographs, and in thousands of diary pages, notes, object-register books, drawings, and publications.

Reisner’s work forms the basis of our understanding of the Pyramid Age, or Old Kingdom (about 2469–2150 B.C.), the first classical era of ancient Egyptian civilization. He excavated hundreds of decorated tombs of Egypt’s governing elites there, along with the mortuary temples of King Menkaure, revealing some of the greatest royal statuary ever discovered. In the Sudan, he solved the mystery of the hidden entrances to ancient Nubian royal pyramids. His survey, documentation, and publication techniques revolutionized archaeological method for all future generations.

The opera epitomizes the inclusive, roll-up-your-sleeves-and-pitch-in spirit of the House. It utilizes only undergraduates for its cast, staff, and orchestra. This means that everyone shares multiple roles, with singers assembling sets shortly before they go onstage to deliver their arias. For many members of the cast, it is their first experience with opera. Performances take place in the Dunster dining room, which each night is quickly transformed from a sea of tables and chairs to a stage. This season’s performance was the operetta “Die Fledermaus” by Johann Strauss II.

The camaraderie built on the set by producers, singers, and stagehands working side by side extends through the House. Diana Suen ’11 summed that up nicely: “Since my first day at Dunster, when I was smothered with hugs from our House mascot, I have never felt for want of a friendly face. There is nothing that compares to the bonds formed over intense IM games, late nights in the dining hall slaving over problem sets with friends, ice cream study breaks hosted by the Masters and resident tutors, and, yes, even the sometimes-too-cozy intimacy of walk-through rooms. Dunster truly feels like my home away from home.”

Kirkland House, home of co-Masters Tom and Verena Conley, is all of the above and more. The following “Ode to Kirkland” was penned by onetime resident Eric Lesser ’07, and the accompanying photos serve as my very own ode to Kirkland.

Oh Kirkland, Oh Kirkland! You are so good to me!
Oh Kirkland, Oh Kirkland! You are the place to be!
Oh Kirkland, Oh Kirkland! D… you are so fine!
Oh Kirkland, Oh Kirkland! Thank God that you are mine!