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The Phenomenon of Parenting

Harvard Magazine — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 13:24:25 -0400

Two new parenting memoirs, Bad Mother by Ayelet Waldman, J.D. ’91, and Home Game by Michael Lewis, have been getting lots of press. In the June 29 New Yorker, Jill Lepore offers a fresh take rooted in the American past. The perspective makes sense: Lepore is Harvard’s Kemper professor of American history.

The concept of parenthood is relatively new, she notes:

An ordinary life used to look something like this: born into a growing family, you help rear your siblings, have the first of your own half-dozen or even dozen children soon after you’re grown, and die before your youngest has left home. In the early eighteen-hundreds, the fertility rate among American women was between seven and eight children; adults couldn’t expect to live past sixty. To be an adult was to be a parent.

As the birth rate declined and the average age at first birth rose, adulthood and parenthood began to emerge as separate phenomena, Lepore writes—and she introduces us to Clara Savage Littledale, the founding editor of Parents’ Magazine and, as Lepore tells it, the leader of a charge to make Americans think they couldn’t figure out how to be a parent without the help of a magazine.

Lepore brands the new books by Waldman and Lewis “memoirs by parents determined to profess their parental ineptitude,” and confesses she does not find these books as “winsome” as most apparently do. She agrees that Americans “are more inexperienced and more unskilled at caring for [children] than ever,” but prefers Anne Lamott’s “wry and smart” memoir, Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son’s First Year.

The New Yorker website also has an audio interview in which Lepore discusses her parenting article.

From the Harvard Magazine archives, read about the book Lepore herself recently cowrote—not a parenting memoir, but a novel set in 1760s Boston, in the form of fictional letters. And for more on Ayelet Waldman as stay-at-home mom, see “Quantity Time.”

Attacking Gang Violence, One City at a Time

Harvard Magazine — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 08:49:11 -0400

In case you missed it, the June 22 New Yorker had a fascinating article about a John Jay College of Criminal Justice professor’s radical approach to solving gang violence. And that professor has Harvard ties: from 1993 until 2004, he was a senior researcher and adjunct professor in the Harvard Kennedy School (HKS) program in criminal justice policy and management.

Author John Seabrook paints David Kennedy as an intriguing figure, noting that he studied moral philosophy at Swarthmore College and worked as a freelance science writer in Boston before taking a job writing case studies at HKS—a job that ignited an interest in criminal justice that would form a vocation. Seabrook writes: “…his lack of formal schooling in either the practice or the theory of crime control may be his strongest qualification for the job.”

Kennedy broke with the orthodoxy of zero-tolerance policies, espousing an approach more preventive than punitive. Developing this approach in the mid 1990s, he took his cues from a successful program being run by the Boston Police Department’s Youth Violence Strike Force. Hallmarks of the approach include participation from leaders in the communities where the violence is taking place—to offer both deterrence (informing young men about the consequences of gang involvement) and support (in the form of actual jobs, not just training or counseling).

The article focuses in particular on Cincinnati, where police, with Kennedy’s cooperation, have used social-networking software to target key gang members for arrest. And it paints a nuanced picture of fighting crime as a two-steps-forward, one-step-back endeavor, detailing some setbacks and quoting Kennedy’s critics.

For background, see David Kennedy’s faculty page or the homepage for the HKS program in criminal justice policy and management.

Sijo: Korea's Answer to Haiku?

Harvard Magazine — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 12:09:51 -0400

Haiku is downright famous in the United States; American schoolchildren commonly learn its 5-7-5 syllable pattern. But for some reason, sijo, an ancient Korean poetry form with three lines of 14 or 15 syllables each, hasn’t caught on the same way.

David McCann, Korea Foundation professor of Korean literature and director of Harvard’s Korea Institute, wants to change that. As described in the June 30 Boston Globe, McCann is mounting a campaign to popularize sijo (pronounced shee-jo) that includes a nationwide contest for schoolchildren and creation of an online sijo journal in English. (The article page also features a lively audio interview with McCann, in which he explains sijo and then demonstrates how it was traditionally sung.)

The campaign also includes a sijo contest; enter through Friday (July 3) at http://www.boston.com/living.

The Globe article includes two samples, including this one that McCann, who first encountered sijo as a Peace Corps volunteer in Korea in the late 1960s, wrote in English at Charlie’s Kitchen in Harvard Square two years ago:

All through lunch, from my table, I keep an eye on your disputes,
Green lobsters in the bubbling tank by the restaurant door.
Slights, fights, bites—whatever the cause, make peace and flee, escape with me!

and this one from the fourteenth century:

The spring breeze melted snow on the hills then quickly disappeared.
I wish I could borrow it briefly to blow over my hair
And melt away the aging frost forming now about my ears.

See McCann’s faculty webpage for more information about him, including the courses he teaches.

Reading the "Five-foot Shelf" of Harvard Classics

Harvard Magazine — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 10:49:19 -0400

Princeton alumnus Christopher Beha records the life-affecting experience of reading his way straight through the “Five-foot Shelf” of Harvard Classics, the Great Books famously published in 1909 under the editorship of Harvard’s towering president, Charles W. Eliot. Harvard Magazine contributing editor Adam Kirsch guided readers on a witty and urbane tour through the collection in “The ‘Five-foot Shelf’ Reconsidered,” published in these pages in 2001.

Beha’s book, The Whole Five Feet: What the Great Books Taught Me About Life, Death, and Pretty Much Everything Else (Grove Press), was reviewed in the New York Times Book Review on June 28.

Harvard Layoffs Update, and More "Reshaping" to Come

Harvard Magazine — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 12:11:03 -0400

Harvard’s layoffs of staff members begun last week prompted a labor protest and extended public comment on news-media websites. Meanwhile, communications from deans to faculty and staff members at the affected schools reveal more about their financial situations; and details have emerged about the working groups charged with finding ways to “reshape” the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) to close its remaining $143-million budget gap, and about the constraints on the University’s endowment funds, invested by Harvard Management Company (HMC).

Layoffs. On Thursday, June 25, members of the Harvard Union of Clerical and Technical Workers, other labor groups, student labor activists, and other supporters of the anti-layoff campaign rallied in Harvard Yard (see photo); read the Crimson report on the protest. News accounts of the first wave of layoffs sparked vigorous discourse (see the comments at the Harvard Magazine story), ranging from discussions of endowment management to calls for salary reductions, job-sharing, or reduced work hours to preserve jobs. The Boston Globe article on the layoffs, by education reporter Tracy Jan, attracted a couple of hundred comments, covering the waterfront, many of them harshly critical of the University.

These reactions aside, the individual schools’ communications revealed a good deal about their separate financial circumstances, and about the broader measures—apart from the identified layoffs—being undertaken to reduce their costs in reaction to lowered distributions of funds from the endowment and to broad economic pressures.

Harvard Business School (HBS) eliminated 16 positions by laying off those staff members. Of note, HBS had very high participation in the voluntary early-retirement incentive program, with 42 of 103 eligible staff members (41 percent) accepting the offer. Combining the early retirements, layoffs, and other attrition (people who left their HBS jobs for other reasons), the school has trimmed its staff (excluding faculty members) of 1,187 by 80 full-time equivalents (about 6.7 percent), and has trimmed its contractor and temporary-worker population by another 50 equivalent positions: a 130-person decline. HBS relied on endowment distributions for about 20 percent of its revenues in the fiscal year ending June 30, 2008, but student income (particularly executive-education programs for businesses) and its large publishing operation are both sensitive to the recession, with pressure on both those major sources of income.

Harvard Law School (HLS), which relied on endowment distributions for 37 percent of its fiscal year 2008 revenue—about 3 percentage points above the University average—laid off 12 staff members. Together with other measures, including 25 early retirements, elimination of current vacancies, and ending of limited-term appointments, the school indicated that it expected its staff to decline by nearly 10 percent. Endowment distributions to HLS are now forecast to decline as much as $19 million from the level in the fiscal year ending this June 30—more than 10 percent of the current operating budget overall. Acting dean Howell Jackson reported that faculty members and senior administrators have put in place measures to reduce faculty allowances and certain stipends, and to increase the share of teaching conducted by permanent (as opposed to visiting) professors—and noted that faculty and senior administration members have pledged to donate several hundred thousand dollars and have waived other compensation to ameliorate the job cuts.

Despite significant dependence on endowment distributions (39 percent of operating revenue in fiscal year 2008), the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences announced that it would not have to impose any staff reductions. Similarly, the Harvard School of Public Health (the school least reliant on endowment funds, at 13 percent in fiscal year 2008) and most dependent on sponsored-research funding (73 percent of fiscal year 2008 revenues) has been able to get by without making any cost-related layoffs now.

The Crimson reported on layoffs in the Harvard library system.

FAS Restructuring. As reported, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, having identified $77 million of budget cuts, still faces closing a $143-million gap, a reflection in part of its proportionally very heavy reliance on endowment distributions (which are being reduced sharply in fiscal year 2010 and again in fiscal year 2011) for operating revenue (52 percent in fiscal year 2008, and certainly higher in the year ending this June 30). As announced in April, FAS dean Michael D. Smith has now appointed a half-dozen working groups (all of which will also interact with the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, whose operations overlap all FAS teaching and research areas) to address the fundamental “reshaping” required to bring the faculty’s operations into line with its reduced resources. This is an especially onerous challenge, given that spending on financial aid, debt service, and sponsored research totals perhaps one-third of FAS’s expenses, will not be cut, and in fact will each likely grow.

According to a June posting on the FAS planning website, the working groups are “embarking on a process to prioritize [FAS’s] academic and intellectual activities to guide further budget reductions and to reshape its programs to be sustainable over the long term.” In pursuing their mandates, “The groups exist to both generate informed recommendations, drawing on the latest financial and organizational information, and to delineate clearly the sacrifices we will not make as we size our activities to match our shrinking budgets. Each working group will provide important intellectual principles and academic priorities that will guide further cost cutting efforts. With this guidance in hand, we will be able to evaluate ideas and suggestions generated by all parts of our community for further cost-savings while maintaining the character of our programs, our students, our faculty, and our staff.”

The working groups and their chairs are:

College Student Services, Evelynn M. Hammonds, dean of Harvard College (with members including three students, several student-affairs deans, administrators, and two House masters)
College Academic, Hammonds (with members including three students, tutors and resident deans, the directors of Expository Writing and of Freshman Seminars, three House masters, and others)
Arts and Humanities, Diana Sorensen, Rothenberg professor of Romance languages and literatures and of comparative literature, dean of Arts and Humanities (with a dozen full professors as members)
Sciences, Jeremy Bloxham, Mallinckrodt professor of geophysics and professor of computational sciences, dean of Science (with four full professors as members)
Social Sciences, Stephen Kosslyn, Lindsley professor of psychology, dean of Social Science (with a dozen full professors as members, their ranks divided into two separate phases, as yet unexplained)
School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Frans Spaepen, Franklin professor of applied physics, acting dean until June 30, and Cherry Murray, dean as of July 1 (with both Spaepen and Murray and seven full professors and four SEAS administrators as members).

According to a timeline on the website, the working groups were scheduled to: meet through June; collect and analyze data during the summer months; resume meeting from August into early autumn; begin engaging the community on recommendations as the academic year began and throughout the fall term; and work with the Academic Planning Group (Dean Smith’s principal academic deans, the College and graduate school deans, and a few senior administrators), into December to prepare final plans for implementation beginning toward the end of the calendar year, as the fiscal year 2011 budget is drawn up.

Endowment. The cover story in the June 29 issue of Barron’s, the financial weekly (online access restricted to subscribers), dramatically titled “The Big Squeeze,” details the extent to which the endowments of Harvard, Yale, Stanford, and Princeton are invested in relatively illiquid assets (private equity, hedge funds, real estate, commodities). It further examines the likely performance of each school’s endowment, based on their disclosures year-to-date and estimated returns for assets in the class.

Barron’s reporter Andrew Bary then calculates the extent to which each institution has made future commitments, through its investment partnerships, to advance funds in the future to the managing partners for those assets (in real estate, private equity, and so on). By Bary’s calculation, Harvard has $11 billion of future commitments to such investment partnerships (as disclosed in its annual financial statements and reported in Harvard Magazine; these commitments extend over the next decade), and an endowment now valued at $25 billion. Bary calculates that Yale has $8.7 billion of future commitments to its investment partnerships, and that its endowment is now valued at about $17 billion; Stanford’s future commitments are not disclosed; and Princeton is carrying $6.1 billion of future commitments, and has an endowment now estimated to be valued at $11.4 billion.

The challenge is funding those future commitments at a time when liquid resources are limited—not least because existing investments in those asset classes are not generating cash distributions to Harvard and other limited partners (or at least not in any significant volume). For more discussion, see this background posting from Harvard Magazine on the University’s debt issuance last December, and this report on a recent Moody’s analysis of University finances. HMC does not describe its investment strategies, and is not expected to report on fiscal year 2009 results or asset allocations until early September.

Not previously reported (and not in Bary’s article), is the very rapid growth in in Harvard’s forward commitments in recent years. According to University financial statements, at the end of fiscal year 2005, the endowment was valued at $25.9 billion, and future commitments to investment partnerships during the ensuing decade totaled $3.4 billion; in the next fiscal years, the comparable figures were, respectively:

2006: $29.2 billion and $7.2 billion
2007: $34.9 billion and $8.2 billion
2008: $36.9 billion and $11 billion

This suggests a proportionally increasing appetite for investments in these (as it now turns out) relatively illiquid asset classes from mid decade on, as the endowment itself appreciated continuously. Thus, as the endowment value grew 42 percent during this period, future commitments to investment-managment partners for each following 10-year interval more than tripled.

Year-end financial reports will reveal how accurate Bary’s estimates prove to be. But his reporting appears to have identified a central issue in these and similar institutions’ investment challenges going forward. They must strive to maintain above-market returns in what have historically been very productive asset classes, while balancing their parent institutions’ need for liquidity—particularly in light of lessened endowment distributions to pay for academic operations, at the same time that adverse economic conditions are expected to restrain income from tuition, philanthropy, and sponsored-research funding.

Arianne Cohen Tells Tall Tales

Harvard Magazine — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 17:21:33 -0400

Arianne R. Cohen ’03, a Ledecky Undergraduate Fellow at Harvard Magazine in 2001-2002, has just published The Tall Book: A Celebration of Life from on High (Bloomsbury), as noted in the current issue. The Boston Globe gave the book a long and favorable review on June 28, amusingly illustrated by a photograph of basketball star Yao Ming towering over his former coach, Jeff Van Gundy.

Cohen’s Undergraduate columns for the magazine covered topics such as women’s studies, students’ fierce antipathy to getting enough sleep (widely cited and even distributed to students on other campuses—to little if any effect), and the elements of campus dating and romance.

On Cutting-Edge Cancer Research

Harvard Magazine — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 10:41:43 -0400

Associate professor of medicine George D. Demetri ’78, of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, is overseeing high-risk, high-reward research being conducted by instructor in medicine Ewa T. Sicinska, according to the New York Times. In a June 28 front-page article, “Playing It Safe in Cancer Resarch: Grant Money Goes to Projects Unlikely to Break Much Ground,” the newspaper’s Gina Kolata documented the difficulty of securing federal funding for leading-edge research that promises breakthroughs. One example she cited was Sicinska’s foundation-financed attempt to grow human cancers in mice, which would accelerate the development and testing of drugs as compared to current, more limited techniques.

Demetri’s pioneering work in developing “smart” drug cancer therapies was narrated in detail by David G. Nathan ’51, M.D. ’55, in Harvard Magazine’s January-February 2007 cover article, “Ken’s Story,” about a patient suffering from an abdominal cancer that was treated with Gleevec on an experimental basis. Nathan, president emeritus of Dana-Farber, has another article in the current issue of the magazine, “Lessons from an Unexpected Life,” recounting his lifetime of caring for a patient with a chronic blood disorder. Both narratives detail the interaction of basic and clinical research, pharmaceutical-industry drug development, and the modern healthcare system in academic-medical settings.

When Field Work Means Putting Your Life on the Line

Harvard Magazine — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 11:12:47 -0400

Kit Parker is a professor of bioengineering. But right now, Harvard’s Cabot associate professor of applied science is serving as a U.S. Army major in Afghanistan with the 10 th Mountain Division. His job is to participate in missions, analyze them, and then help engineer future operations so that they can be executed more efficiently. Harvard Magazine profiled Parker’s stateside bioengineering breakthroughs in January.

Layoffs Begin

Harvard Magazine — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 07:22:29 -0400

The University announced this morning that it would begin laying off 275 employees and reducing the hours of 40 other employees or limiting them to an academic-year work schedule. Although the total number of layoffs and reductions is relatively modest compared to Harvard’s total workforce—there were approximately 12,950 full-time-equivalent non-faculty staff members as of last October—the symbolic import of a large, stable employer like Harvard resorting to such actions surely looms larger.

In a note e-mail to the community, President Drew Faust cited other actions to cut costs—a salary freeze for faculty members and non-union staff, a voluntary early-retirement program (531 staff members took the incentive program; see further details at “Early-Retirement Program and Other Cost-Cutting Measures”)—but said, “[W]e nevertheless have more we must do.” Noting the relatively modest scale of the workforce reduction, she called the action “nonetheless painful for the people directly affected, as well as for our community as a whole.”

A more detailed letter from Marilyn Hausammann, vice president for human resources, said that about half the positions eliminated are administrative or professional jobs, and most of the rest involve technical or clerical work. Service and trade employees are largely unaffected, she wrote.

The layoffs will be announced in most of the professional schools first; they will be followed by reductions in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS), Harvard Medical School, the central administration, and several allied institutions next week. Affected employees are being offered 60 days of pay from the time of notification; lump-sum severance payments of one to two weeks per year of service; an additional four weeks of pay; and the opportunity to purchase health benefits for 18 months (including the first year at subsidized rates).

The layoffs and reduced hours affect about 2.4 percent of Harvard’s non-faculty workforce; the earlier retirement program reduced the staff employee count by 4.1 percent. The faculty ranks have not been affected by either action. (The faculty census numbered 2,325 full-time equivalents in the fall of 2007, the last published figure, including lecturers, visiting professors, and others; faculty appointees in the affiliated hospitals are not included in that total.)

When combined with other moves to cut expenses, such as the salary freeze, limits on hiring, slowing the pace of Allston construction and other capital projects, and so on—all driven primarily by the projected 30 percent decline in the value of endowment assets—these staff-workforce reductions will make an impact on the looming budget pressures in several of the schools and allied institutions. But they do not nearly close the biggest gaps, such as the $220-million deficit looming over FAS. As reported, FAS had identified just $77 million of the expense savings it anticipates needing to make; presumably whatever staff reductions are being announced now within FAS were counted as part of that initial $77 million of cuts, leaving $143 million in costs still to be removed from the core academic budget.

For coverage of community concern about the prospect of layoffs, and student opposition to workforce reductions, see “Looming Layoffs.” For complete coverage of the University’s financial straits, see the “University Financial Crisis” site at the Harvard Magazine homepage.

Here are the full texts of the statements by Faust and Hausammann:

Dear Colleagues,

As all of you know, this past year has created a set of extraordinary financial challenges for our university as it has for others. I am grateful for the continuing efforts made by people across Harvard to confront these new realities with thoughtfulness and care, and with an emphasis on sustaining the strength of our core academic programs.

With compensation accounting for so high a proportion of our budget, we will enter the 2009-10 academic year with salaries held flat for faculty and exempt staff; we have also offered a voluntary early retirement program in which more than 500 staff members across Harvard have chosen to participate.

While these actions have helped us reduce expenses, we nevertheless have more we must do. In the coming days, Harvard’s Schools and units, as well as its central administration, will be carrying out a reduction in the size of our workforce - modest in comparison to the overall size of our University-wide staff, but nonetheless painful for those people directly affected, as well as for our community as a whole. Most of the Schools will carry out the process this week; the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, the Medical School, the central administration, and several of the allied institutions will follow, beginning on June 29.

Such decisions, in their human dimensions, are among the hardest that an institution like ours can make. But difficult circumstances have called for difficult decisions across the University.

As we proceed through this complicated transition, I want again to express my appreciation to all of you for your dedicated efforts on Harvard’s behalf. A letter from Marilyn Hausammann, our vice president for human resources, explaining more about the planned reductions, appears below.

Sincerely,

Drew Faust

Dear Colleagues,

I am writing to let you know that most of the Schools, allied institutions, and units in the central administration at Harvard will be carrying out a reduction in our workforce over the next seven business days.

The size and scope of the reductions will vary across the Schools and units, but when taken together these changes will result in the elimination of approximately 275 staff positions. About 40 more staff members will be offered positions with reduced work hours or an academic year schedule. Deans at the affected Schools and department leaders will be communicating directly with their staff members about the changes taking place in their local communities over the coming days.

We regret the impact this will have on the lives of our valued colleagues. This decision was driven by the financial challenges facing the University after a projected 30 percent drop in our endowment, as well as pressure on other revenue sources, and it should not be allowed to diminish the many contributions made by these staff members during their time with the University.

Over the past six months, managers across the University have scrubbed their budgets for non-personnel savings, canceled or curtailed travel, and limited other discretionary spending. We have slowed development in Allston, strictly limited hiring, and reduced our reliance on outside contractors. We have held salaries flat for the coming year for our faculty and exempt staff, a move affecting more than 9,000 individuals. And the Voluntary Early Retirement Program that was offered to about 1,600 employees attracted more than 500 participants.

These steps have helped to keep the number of involuntary reductions as small as possible. Unfortunately, further cuts are needed in order for Harvard to adjust to the institution’s new economic reality.

About half of the positions eliminated are administrative or professional positions, and almost all of the remaining ones are clerical or technical jobs. Service and trade workers will be largely unaffected.

The University is taking a number of steps to support staff members facing layoffs. These include:
60 days of pay from the time of notification,
lump-sum severance of one to two weeks of pay for each year of service,
enhanced severance benefits that include an additional four weeks of pay, and
the opportunity to continue medical and dental benefits for 18 months, with a full year at subsidized rates.

Employees will have access to information about their benefits in individually prepared materials, on HARVie, and at a special walk-in Employee Support Center.

Administrative/professional and non-union employees wishing to begin a new job search are eligible for outplacement services and employment coaching. Harvard case management will be provided for HUCTW members. And, effective immediately, Harvard will institute a 30-day external hiring freeze for staff jobs to focus our efforts on matching qualified internal candidates with current job openings. I know that this is difficult news both for our colleagues whose positions are being eliminated and for those of you who will miss working alongside them. I think it is important to note that all of the steps that we have taken to reduce spending over the past six months have been taken with the aim of sustaining the academic and organizational capabilities Harvard will need for the future, while minimizing the impact on our workforce.

To those of you who are directly affected by this reduction in force, please know that we will do everything we can to make your transition as smooth as possible.

And to the entire University community, please know that we appreciate your dedication in this challenging time. With your help, Harvard will continue to be a vital and engaging place to work.

Sincerely,

Marilyn Hausammann
Vice President for Human Resources

Harvard Puzzle: "House"

Harvard Magazine — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 14:12:46 -0400

Download the Puzzle | Download the Hints | Download the Solution

UPDATE: the puzzle was updated on June 22 after a solve alerted us the error. If you downloaded before then, you might have better luck with the latest version!

E-mail decuevastiac [dot] net (John de Cuevas) the revealed phrase. Solvers will be listed below in the order received. Check back July 15th for the hints and solution!

You can find all 35 puzzles published in Harvard Magazine between 1986 and 1998 at John de Cuevas’s website—puzzlecrypt.com—under Harvard Puzzles. You will also find additional puzzles and contact information there and can subscribe to his mailing list.

Vautin Named Acting VP for Administration

Harvard Magazine — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 16:41:38 -0400

Thomas E. Vautin, the University’s associate vice president for facilities and environmental services, will become acting vice president for administration on July 1, President Drew Faust announced today.

Vautin assumes the post that Sally H. Zeckhauser has held since 1988, but is vacating with her June 30 retirement. He had previously been named as one of the people accepting an early-retirement incentive; the news release says he now plans to retire “during the next academic year.”

Faust said she was “delighted” to announce Vautin’s appointment, calling him “a dedicated member of the Harvard community for more than three decades.”

Another top administrative post will become vacant on August 1, when executive vice president Ed Forst departs. Faust said Vautin would “provide important continuity in…key administrative functions” during the search for Forst’s replacement.

The full text of the news release appears below.

Vautin to serve as acting vice president for administration
President Drew Faust announced today that Thomas E. Vautin will be Harvard’s acting vice president for administration (VPA), effective July 1. Sally H. Zeckhauser, currently the vice president for administration, is retiring at the end of June.
With more than 31 years of experience at the University, Vautin will take interim responsibility for coordination of Harvard’s major service units, including University Operations Services, Harvard Real Estate Services, and Harvard University Dining Services, pending his own retirement during the next academic year.
“I am very grateful that Tom has agreed to take on these duties,” said Faust. “Tom has served Harvard over many years with exceptional effectiveness and dedication, and he will provide important continuity in these key administrative functions as we carry out the search for the next executive vice president.”
“My primary objective will be to support the University during the transition of leadership within her senior administration,” Vautin said. “In addition, I will be working to address several key positions and functions in these departments that will be affected by the voluntary early retirement program. My personal goal will be to ensure that the VPA organization is fully engaged and ready to work with the new leadership.”
Vautin has served as associate vice president for facilities and environmental services for Harvard University since the mid-1990s and in that role he has overseen the University Operations Services group. Additionally, Vautin’s responsibilities have included co-founding the Harvard Green Campus Initiative. As chair of the University’s Incident Support Team, he played an instrumental role in Harvard’s response to the emergence of H1N1 influenza.

Martha Minow Appointed Dean of Harvard Law School

Harvard Magazine — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 12:04:20 -0400

President Drew Faust has appointed Smith professor of law Martha Minow dean of Harvard Law School, effective July 1; she succeeds Elena Kagan, now solicitor general of the United States. Minow, a member of the faculty since 1981, is described in the official news release as pursuing scholarly interests that range from “international human rights to equality and inequality, from religion and pluralism to managing mass tort litigation, from family law and education law to the privatization of military, schooling, and other governmental activities.” Minow’s faculty profile is available here.

Minow co-led the school’s effort earlier this decade to overhaul its curriculum, as described in a Harvard Magazine report here (and the strategic planning that preceded those curricular changes are described here). Excerpts from her 1999 Phi Beta Kappa oration, on memory and tribunals in countries torn by war or torn apart by repression, appear here. Her engagement in a project researching children and families, in the mid 1990s, is described here.

Because the law school recently completed a major fundraising campaign (see here and here), Minow will not face that decanal responsibility in the immediate future. She will have to cope with the departure of many faculty members, including Kagan, to Washington, for service in the administration of President Barack Obama, J.D. ’91. The school has considerably expanded financial aid for students entering public service, and is building a very large addition to its campus (see here), scheduled to come on line about two years from now; absorbing the costs of those initiative in the school’s future budget will pose management challenges as the endowment’s value has declined.

This is the full text of the University news release:

Martha Minow, the Jeremiah Smith, Jr., Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, will become the dean of the Faculty of Law on July 1, President Drew Faust announced today (June 11).
A member of the Law School faculty since 1981, Minow is a distinguished legal scholar with interests that range from international human rights to equality and inequality, from religion and pluralism to managing mass tort litigation, from family law and education law to the privatization of military, schooling, and other governmental activities. She is also a widely admired teacher who chaired the Law School’s curricular reform efforts of recent years and was recognized with the School’s Sacks-Freund Award for Teaching Excellence in 2005.
“Martha Minow has been an intellectual leader, a devoted teacher and mentor, a collaborative colleague, and an exemplary institutional citizen across her nearly three decades of service on the Harvard Law School faculty,” said Faust in announcing the appointment. “She’s a scholar of remarkable intelligence, imagination, and scope, with a passion for legal education and a deep sense of how the law can serve essential public purposes. She has played an important and influential role in the institutional life of the Law School and the University over the years, and I am delighted that she has agreed to serve as dean during a critical time in the long and storied history of the School.”
“I am deeply honored and humbled by the opportunity to serve as the next dean of Harvard Law School,” said Minow. “I am grateful to Drew Faust for inviting me to assume this vital role, and I will do my best to enhance and build upon the extraordinary leadership of past deans Elena Kagan and Robert Clark, and the wise and thoughtful stewardship of Acting Dean Howell Jackson. In this time of both challenge and promise for this country and for the world, Harvard Law School faculty, students, staff, and graduates are already playing pivotal roles in the search for financial stability, national security, peaceful international relations, and legal order. I am eager to help the remarkable community of people at the Harvard Law School, in concert with colleagues across Harvard and beyond, continue to pursue the promise of the rule of law, the ideal of justice, the practical solution of problems, and ever deeper understandings of legal institutions and commitments.”
Minow’s appointment comes in light of the March confirmation of Elena Kagan, the Charles Hamilton Houston Professor of Law, to serve as solicitor general of the United States after nearly six years in the deanship. Howell Jackson, the James S. Reid, Jr., Professor of Law, has served as the School’s acting dean in recent months.
“Howell Jackson has done an extraordinary job these past few months guiding the School with great professionalism and dedication,” said Faust. “I am very grateful to him for having been willing to lead the School on an interim basis through a challenging transitional time. And, once again, I want to recognize and thank Elena Kagan for a deanship that had a transformative positive impact on Harvard Law School.”
In addition to many articles in legal and other journals, Minow’s publications include the books “Partners, Not Rivals: Privatization and the Public Good” (2002), “Breaking the Cycles of Hatred: Memory, Law, and Repair” (2002), “Between Vengeance and Forgiveness: Facing History After Genocide and Mass Violence” (1998), “Not Only for Myself: Identity, Politics, and the Law” (1997), and “Making All the Difference: Inclusion, Exclusion, and American Law” (1990). She is co-editor of casebooks on civil procedure, women and the law, and family law, as well as volumes including “Government by Contract: Outsourcing and American Democracy” (2009, with Jody Freeman), “Just Schools: Pursuing Equality in Societies of Difference” (2008, with Richard Shweder and Hazel Rose Markus), “Engaging Cultural Differences: The Multicultural Challenge in Liberal Democracies” (2002, with Shweder and Markus), and “Law Stories: Law, Meaning, and Violence” (1996, with Gary Bellow).
Minow co-chaired the Law School’s curricular reform committee from 2003 to 2006, an effort that led to significant innovation in the first-year curriculum as well as new programs of study for second- and third-year J.D. students. She has taught courses on a wide range of subjects including civil procedure, constitutional law (with a focus on the First Amendment, the structure of government, and the 14th Amendment), nonprofit organizations, family law, law and education, jurisprudence, and the legal profession. She is a senior fellow of the Harvard Society of Fellows as well as a past member of the Harvard University Press Board of Syndics. She twice served as acting director of what is now Harvard’s Safra Foundation Center for Ethics (1993-94 and 2000-01), where she remains a member of the governing faculty committee, and she co-chaired Harvard’s Project on Justice, Welfare, and Economics (2001-03), where she also continues to serve on the faculty committee.
A member of the Independent International Commission on Kosovo, she played a leading role in the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees’ “Imagine Coexistence” project, aimed at promoting peaceful coexistence after violent ethnic conflict. In addition, she has co-directed a multidisciplinary study of U.S. responses to recent immigrants, as well as a federally sponsored center supporting access to the general curriculum for public school children with disabilities. She chairs the board of the Charles H. Revson Foundation, and has also served on the boards of the Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law, the Covenant Foundation, Facing History and Ourselves, and the Iranian Human Rights Documentation Center.
After completing her undergraduate studies at the University of Michigan, Minow received a master’s degree in education from Harvard and her law degree from Yale. She clerked for Judge David Bazelon of the United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit and then for Justice Thurgood Marshall of the Supreme Court of the United States. She joined the Harvard Law faculty as an assistant professor in 1981, was promoted to professor in 1986, was named the William Henry Bloomberg Professor of Law in 2003, and became the Jeremiah Smith Jr., Professor of Law in 2005. She is also a lecturer in the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
Minow’s appointment marks the culmination of a broad-ranging search that began in early January, after President Barack Obama nominated Elena Kagan as U.S. solicitor general. “The search gave me the opportunity to meet with many of the Law School’s faculty, as well as with key groups of students, staff, alumni, and others,” said Faust. “I learned a great deal about the state of the School and its future opportunities and challenges, and I’m very grateful to everyone who took the time to offer constructive advice along the way. I’m especially thankful to the dozen faculty colleagues who served on my advisory group for the search, for their candor, their collegiality, and their good counsel in helping arrive at an excellent outcome.”

A Kindle Connection

Harvard Magazine — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 12:36:48 -0400

“What applications might they suggest, William A. Sahlman asked his students, for ‘electronic ink’—particles and dyes, embedded in a surface, that could be charged to form changing texts without the bother of paper and printing? The class snapped to attention, and a swarm of ideas buzzed down from the semicircular banks of seats in Aldrich 9. Price tags (retailers wouldn’t have to re-mark them for discounted sales). Billboards. Sheet music (self-turning scores). Eyeglasses with news headlines projected inside the lens (prompting Sahlman to interject, ‘So, as you’re purportedly watching me…’). Newspapers with built-in refreshable video. Menus (no more regrets from the waiter that the daily special is sold out). Maps. Camouflage clothing that changes in different lighting (Sahlman again: ‘So if you hadn’t read the case and wanted to disappear…’).”

That account, from a 2001 Harvard Magazine article, “Who Wants to be an Entrepreneur?”, may seem like archaeology, but it is in fact an early unveiling of the E-Ink company (founded in 1997) and technology that have become increasingly popular with the spread of Amazon’s Kindle, the electronic-book device. (On the company’s visionary then-chairman, Jerome Rubin ’44, G ’46, LL.B ’49, who imagined electronic newspaper delivery, see here.)

The discussion reported in the article featured an elective course, “Entrepreneurial Finance,” taught by the Business School’s William A. Sahlman, who is D’Arbeloff - MBA Class of 1955 professor of business administration (and now also a senior associate dean; for more on his research and teaching, see here). The d’Arbeloff Chair was established in 1986 to support teaching and research on the entrepreneurial process.

During the class discussion, Russell J. Wilcox ’89, M.B.A. ’95, co-founder of E Ink and then its vice president and general manager, joined in, and, as the article reported, explained “how the company planned to sell as an initial product a wireless network of billboards and displays. National retailers like Wal-Mart and J.C. Penney could assure uniform signage throughout their stores, and could change prices without printing and shipping paper signs—and hoping store managers posted them. He acknowledged that the scientists, who are driven by discovery, aren’t much moved by selling sneakers. But in one essential way they supported the company’s strategy of having ‘our eyes in the sky but our feet on the ground,’ Wilcox said. ‘Scientists aren’t less greedy than other people’—they realized that retail displays were a first step, followed by entry into the capital-intensive, highly competitive market for flat-panel displays, in order to raise the money needed to develop the holy grail of ‘radio paper.’ Reaching that frontier, and a potentially huge market, was perhaps $200 million of research spending in the future,” Wilcox forecast.

Unlike many other start-ups that suffered an early death, it appears Wilcox was spot-on about his firm’s prospects: the Kindle has validated E-Ink’s technology, and the company—billing itself the leader in “electronic paper displays,” agreed on June 1 to be acquired by Prime View International, its largest customer, for $215 million. Wilcox is chief executive. For more on E-Ink and the deal, see here.

The Early Retirees

Harvard Magazine — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 11:59:51 -0400

The University has disclosed how many staff members, by school, were offered and accepted the voluntary early-retirement incentive—for those 55 years and older, with 10 or more years of Harvard service—one of the principal cost-saving measures implemented so far. (For background, see here ). The offers were made in two waves, concluded in early May. In all, 531 of 1,628 eligible employees—32.6 percent-accepted.

This exhibit, with data from Harvard Human Resources, was published in the June 2009 issue of the Harvard Resource, the employee newspaper.

Off-the-Bench Opinions

Harvard Magazine — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 15:56:43 -0400

The first woman seated on the U.S. Supreme Court, Sandra Day O’Connor, an associate justice from 1981 until 2006, received the Radcliffe Institute Medal on June 5 and spoke at the Radcliffe Day annual luncheon. Barbara Grosz, dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, introduced O’Connor, who stepped to the lectern and announced, “She could have…just introduced me as an unemployed cowgirl.” (Grosz did mention that O’Connor, an Arizona native, was the first Radcliffe Institute Medalist who had been inducted into the Cowgirl Hall of Fame.)

O’Connor spoke approvingly of the nomination by President Barack Obama, J.D. ’91, of Sonia Sotomayor to the U.S. Supreme Court. After noting that half of law students are female, but only 16 percent of equity partners in law firms “and 11 percent of Supreme Court justices” are, O’Connor asserted that “positions that have more power tend to have correspondingly fewer women.”

But she also observed that a century ago, these percentages had been approximately “zero percent,” and hailed the progress women had made in the legal profession since then. She described the “cult of domesticity” that branded women as intrinsically different from men in ways that disqualified them from legal practice. “Women were pure,” for example, she said, whereas “lawyers had to be morally flexible.” O’Connor summarized: “The view that women could not cut it as lawyers enjoyed an embarrassingly long shelf life in this country.” She drolly cited a “medical condition” that apparently disqualified a female aspirant to the bar: she had “two X chromosomes. One was OK, but the second ruled out practicing law.”

O’Connor praised the first woman to serve on a state supreme court, Florence Ellinwood Allen (1884-1966) of Ohio, whose name was mentioned as a potential Supreme Court appointee to both Franklin D. Roosevelt ’04 and Harry S. Truman. Truman demurred on naming Allen to the high court on the grounds that her presence would make the male justices uncomfortable: “They say they couldn’t sit around with their robes off and their feet up and discuss the problems.” O’Connor’s rejoinder was that “I would have been able to tell President Truman that they all got comfortable pretty fast when I showed up.”

After graduating near the top of her class at Stanford Law School, O’Connor was at first unable even to get an interview for a job at a law firm—women were simply not being hired in the early 1950s. She finally did get an interview, but was told that the firm did not hire women associates—though if she could type, she might find work there as a legal secretary. Her first actual legal job was working for San Mateo County in California, where she began by volunteering to work without pay. But “I loved my work, pay or no pay,” she said.

Justice O’Connor expressed concern about a new generation of gender stereotypes, citing an article whose author “wrote that my opinions differed in a peculiarly ‘feminine’ way from those of my male colleagues.” She listed some allegedly “feminine” aspects of legal opinions, like compassion and evaluating facts in context, as opposed to applying abstract principles. “This new ‘feminism’ troubles me,” she stated, “because it so nearly echoes the Victorian myth of the true woman, which kept women out of positions for so long.”

In her own life, Justice O’Connor expressed satisfaction with the balance she has struck between her family and her judicial career. “I’ve enjoyed the growth of my grandchildren, as well as the legal subtleties of the ‘free exercise’ clause,” she said. She did take off five years from law when her children were young, and worried that it might be tough to get another job, as it had been so difficult when she began. “But,” she said, to laughter, “it seemed to work out reasonably well.”

The Prodigal Doctor Returns

Harvard Magazine — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 18:29:57 -0400

“O my God—this is the end of civilization as we know it.” Such was the reaction of a physician friend of Stephen Bergman ’66, M.D. ’73, on hearing that Bergman would be the principal speaker at this year’s Class Day ceremonies at Harvard Medical School (HMS). The friend, fictionalized as “Eat My Dust Eddie” in Bergman’s celebrated 1978 novel The House of God (published under the nom de plume Samuel Shem), was simply acknowledging the improbability of the choice.

The House of God, which has sold more than two million copies worldwide and continues to be popular with young doctors and others who work in healthcare, is a lacerating black comedy, a bruising exposé of the realities of medical internship. Bergman’s own internship at Boston’s Beth Israel Hospital, an HMS affiliate, was the basis for the novel, and the unblinking, uproarious narrative once made its author persona non grata in certain medical corridors. “Some say the novel is bitter,” Bergman declared. “It was rewritten seven times, to get the bitterness out.“

All is forgiven now. Bergman spent decades on the HMS faculty, teaching young psychiatrists-in-training at McLean Hospital. (This led to a second medical novel, Mount Misery, on psychiatric training.) And Shem/Bergman’s critique of medical training has, over the years, gained considerable traction in the field. Confronted on the afternoon of Commencement with the HMS class of 2009, the author reviewed some favorite passages and “laws” from The House of God, then offered the new graduates “four suggestions for how to stay human in medicine.”

His first tip was, “Stay connected.” Bergman asserted that “Isolation is deadly; connection heals.” In large medical hierarchies like hospitals, he said, “…someone always has power over you, and you have power over someone else”; then he explained that in such “power-over” systems, the only true threat to the dominant group “is the quality of connection among the subordinate group. So in your training, please remember: stick together.” He added that the best predictor of our own happiness is “not Lipitor, but the quality of our relationships.”

“When you’re in trouble, do not withdraw,” he continued. “The way to stay human is to move toward others. Lean into life, not away. America places a terribly high value on the individual. But happiness is not an individual matter.”

His second principle was “Speak up,” an action that he called “essential to your survival as a human being.” The third was “Learn empathy.” Bergman called the increasing prevalence of women in medicine one of the most encouraging aspects of the field, noting that women composed less than 10 percent of his class, but more than 50 percent of the class of 2009. “Women are valued for being the carriers of caring in our culture,” he said, “and bring particular qualities to being doctors—empathy, nurturance, emotion—which have often been seen as weaknesses. These are not weaknesses, but strengths.” His final suggestion was “Learn your trade, in the world”—to remain aware that all patients, and all healthcare providers, are embedded in a worldly context of families and friendships, an environment and a culture.

The novelist/doctor also delivered the “bad news”: “You are about to enter a disaster area: the healthcare ‘industry.’ ” Bergman observed that “The issue is crystal-clear: the for-profit health-insurance industry spends 30 percent on administrative costs—over $300 billion a year; the government-run systems Medicare and the Veterans Administration spend 3 percent per year. Coverage and satisfaction with for-profit is low; that for government systems is high.” He then thundered, “Why in the world should healthcare be for profit?” to the biggest applause of the day.

The “Shem plan” of healthcare reform includes a universal-coverage federal system. “Anything less is just palliative, whistling past the graveyard of American healthcare,” Bergman explained. “The for-profit system can continue, for the wealthy.”

Secondly, he advocated tort reform, to attenuate defensive medicine. Third, paying for all medical education, in return for service, including a crowd-pleasing proposal to forgive all student loans, “starting retroactively, from today.”

To pay for reforms of this magnitude, it would be necessary to revise our priorities, Bergman asserted, noting that “A whole year’s budget for the National Institute of Health is a few days’ budget for the Department of Defense.” Ambitious as his agenda sounded, Bergman reminded his listeners that “We are the workers.” He asked, “Has anyone ever heard, in a crowded theatre when someone collapses, the call go out: ‘Is there an insurance executive in the house?’ ” Bergman shared a message of self-recognition and strength with the new doctors: “We do the work. We have the power. Without us, there’s no healthcare.”

Commencement Day 2009

Harvard Magazine — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 18:03:28 -0400

The morning Commencement exercises featured three traditional student addresses: the Latin Salutatory, Aetates Hominis Harvardiani [“The Ages of Man at Harvard University”], delivered by Paul Thomas Mumma ’09; the Senior English Address, This Shaking Keeps Us Steady, delivered by Lois Elizabeth Beckett ’09; and the Graduate English Address, The Harvard Elm Crisis, delivered by Joseph Smith Claghorn, M.L.A. ’09. (Read background on the student speakers in this University Gazette article.)

At the afternoon’s annual meeting of the Harvard Alumni Association, President Drew Faust spoke about three “essential characteristics of universities” and the risks to both universities and the nation if these engines of social mobility, scientific creativity, and national conscience falter in the current economic downturn.

Principal Commencement speaker Steven Chu, U.S. Secretary of Energy, blending the arts and the sciences, offered a light summary of the expected graduation speech talking points and a blunt assessment of the urgent challenges posed by climate change.

Ceremonial Scenes

Harvard Magazine — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 10:46:01 -0400

In Esteemed Company

Harvard Magazine — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 08:48:29 -0400

Ten men and women were awarded honorary degrees from Harvard this year. Besides the Commencement speaker, U.S. Secretary of Energy (and Nobel laureate in physics) Steven Chu, the group includes a filmmaker, a jazz musician, a novelist and New Yorker writer, a political scientist and longtime Harvard professor, scholars of religion and evolutionary biology, and pioneers in biomedical engineering and AIDS research.

The recipients were honored at a dinner on the evening of June 3, then presented with their degrees during the Morning Exercises on June 4.

Below are brief biographies. Their honorary-degree citations follow the biographical entries.

Pedro Almodóvar, Doctor of Arts. One of the world’s most original directors and screenwriters, Pedro Almodóvar has created films known for their distinctive blend of fantasy and reality, satire and raw emotion. Born in rural Spain, he moved to Madrid as a young man with amibitions to make movies. He performed with the avant-garde theater group Los Goliardos as well as a rock band before making his first feature film, Pepi, Luci, Bom and Other Girls on the Heap, which immediately became a cult classic. His subsequent work includes Law of Desire (1986), Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1987), Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! (1989), All About My Mother (1999), Talk to Her (2001), and Volver (2006). The colorful irreverence, sensuality, and passion of his films have made him an icon of contemporary Spain. His many honors include Academy Awards for best foreign language film and best original screenplay and Cannes Film Festival prizes for best director and best screenplay.

Ingenious man of La Mancha, bold avatar of a new Spain,
an auteur, provocateur, and fabulador
whose labyrinths of passion excite the imagination
and enliven the art of film.

Steven Chu, Doctor of Science. A Nobel laureate physicist, Steven Chu took office in January 2009 as the nation’s twelfth Secretary of Energy, following unanimous confirmation by the United States Senate. He previously served as director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, one of the nation’s leading scientific institutions, while also a member of the faculty of the University of California at Berkeley. He received his bachelor’s degree from the University of Rochester and his Ph.D. from Berkeley, then worked early in his career at Bell Laboratories. There he developed methods to cool and trap atoms using laser light, research for which he shared the 1997 Nobel Prize in physics. Later he served as the Theodore and Francis Geballe professor of physics and applied physics at Stanford, where he focused his research increasingly on challenges in biophysics and polymer physics. In recent years he has emerged as a forceful exponent of scientific and technological solutions to climate change.

Grand master of atomic cooling,
grand marshal against global warming,
a lucent laureate whose generative mind
now powers the quest for alternative energy.

Joan Didion, Doctor of Letters. Essayist, novelist, and screenwriter, Joan Didion is known for her acute observations on American culture and politics as well as her precise and elegant prose. A graduate of the University of California at Berkeley, she emerged as a pioneer of “the new journalism” and became a regular contributor to such publications as The Saturday Evening Post, The New York Review of Books, and The New Yorker. Her first seven books of nonfiction, beginning with the essay collections Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968) and The White Album (1979), have more recently been published as We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live (2006). Her novels include Run River (1963), Play It As It Lays (1970), A Book of Common Prayer (1977), Democracy (1984), and The Last Thing He Wanted (1996). She received a National Book Award for The Year of Magical Thinking (2005), a memoir written after the sudden death of her husband. Her honors include the National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters and the Gold Medal for Belles Lettres from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Coolly laconic, drily ironic,
discerning America’s mores and moods,
a writer of uncommon keenness and power
who pictures the ways in which things fall apart.

Wendy Doniger, Doctor of Letters. Wendy Doniger is the Mircea Eliade Distinguished Service Professor of the history of religions at the University of Chicago. An eminent scholar of Hinduism, she is also a leading authority on the interpretation of the myths of many different cultures, known for her striking juxtaposition of material from diverse places and times. After graduating from Radcliffe, she completed doctorates at Harvard and Oxford, and went on to teach at the University of London and the University of California at Berkeley before joining the University of Chicago faculty in 1978. Past president of both the American Academy of Religion and the Association for Asian Studies, she received the Academy’s 2008 Martin E. Marty Award for the Public Understanding of Religion. Her many interpretive works include Women, Androgynes, and Other Mythical Beasts (1980), Dreams, Illusions, and Other Realities (1984), Other People’s Myths: The Cave of Echoes (1988), The Implied Spider: Politics and Theology in Myth (1998), and The Hindus: An Alternative History (2009). She has also translated numerous ancient Sanskrit texts including selections from The Rig Veda and The Laws of Manu.

Freely traversing eras and borders,
inventively bridging East and West,
she finds in the myths of manifold cultures
a microscope and telescope on how we live.

Ronald Dworkin, Doctor of Laws. Ronald Dworkin is the Frank Henry Sommer professor of law and professor of philosophy at New York University and emeritus professor of jurisprudence at University College London. One of the world’s foremost legal and political philosophers, he is known especially for his theory of “law as integrity” and for bringing fundamental philosophical ideas to bear on practical concerns in law, politics, and morality. After receiving undergraduate degrees from Harvard and Oxford, Dworkin graduated from Harvard Law School and then clerked for Judge Learned Hand. He taught at Yale from 1962 to 1969, then served for nearly three decades as professor of jurisprudence at Oxford. His books include Taking Rights Seriously (1977), A Matter of Principle (1985), Law’s Empire (1986), Freedom’s Law: The Moral Reading of the American Constitution (1986), Sovereign Virtue: The Theory and Practice of Equality (2000), and Is Democracy Possible Here? (2006). His recent honors include Norway’s Holberg International Memorial Prize and the Thomas Jefferson Foundation Medal in Law.

Venturesome explorer of law’s empire,
learned expounder of equality’s virtue,
he draws constitutional meaning from the wellsprings of morality,
insisting the law be respectful of all.

Anthony S. Fauci, Doctor of Science. A distinguished biomedical researcher and scientific administrator, Anthony Fauci has served since 1984 as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. There he has emerged as a principal figure in combating HIV/AIDS worldwide and in strengthening preparedness against emerging infectious disease threats. Chief of the Institute’s Laboratory of Immunoregulation since 1980, he has made seminal contributions to the basic understanding of the human immune system as well as the means by which the AIDS virus overcomes the body’s defenses. A graduate of the College of the Holy Cross, he received his M.D. degree from Cornell University. His many honors include the National Medal of Science, the Albany Medical Center Prize in Medicine and Biomedical Research, and the Mary Woodard Lasker Award for Public Service. In 2008, he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom for bringing “hope and healing to tens of millions in both developed and developing nations.” He is a prominent spokesman for the ambitious pursuit of science to improve medicine and public health.

At the helm, on the Hill, in the lab, on the ward,
a preeminent investigator of human immunology
and a tireless leader in striving to conquer
the world’s most insidious ills.

Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, Doctor of Science. A renowned anthropologist and primatologist, Sarah Blaffer Hrdy is professor emerita of anthropology at the University of California at Davis. She is known for her pathbreaking multidisciplinary studies challenging traditional aspects of evolutionary biology, especially in regard to gender roles and the nature of motherhood. A graduate of Radcliffe, with her Ph.D. from Harvard, she gained early recognition for her field research on the behavior of langur monkeys in India. Her books include The Langurs of Abu: Female and Male Strategies of Reproduction (1977), The Woman That Never Evolved (1981), and Mother Nature: A History of Mothers, Infants, and Natural Selection (1999). Her most recent book, Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding (2009), explores human beings’ singular capacity for empathy. Past editor of the series Foundations of Human Behavior, she has been recognized with such honors as the American Anthropological Association’s Howells Prize for Outstanding Contribution to Biological Anthropology, the University of California’s Constantine Panunzio Award, and the Centennial Medal of Harvard’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.

Interrogating Darwinian dogma, investigating primates’ ways,
an intrepid evolutionist with a revolutionary flair
who has introduced us anew to Mother Nature.

Robert Langer, Doctor of Science. One of history’s most prolific inventors in medicine, Robert Langer is an Institute Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he has served on the faculty since 1977. A pioneer in biomedical engineering, he is known for his fundamental contributions in the fields of controlled drug delivery and tissue engineering. He has published more than 1,000 scientific articles and holds more than 700 issued or pending patents worldwide, and his work is credited with improving the health of millions. After graduating from Cornell University, Langer received his Sc.D. from MIT in 1974, and accepted a postdoctoral position at Children’s Hospital in Boston, working with cancer researcher Judah Folkman. A past chairman of the United States Food and Drug Administration’s Science Board, he has received many honors including the National Medal of Science, the Charles Stark Draper Prize, and the Millennium Technology Prize, awarded in 2008 for his role in inventing and developing techniques that have had a significant impact in the fight against cancer and other diseases.

Transforming the ways in which drugs are delivered,
devising new methods to synthesize tissues,
an Edison of biomedicine with a patently magical touch.

Wynton Marsalis, Doctor of Music. Wynton Marsalis is one of his generation’s most acclaimed and influential jazz musicians. A brilliant trumpet player, he is also a major bandleader, composer, and advocate for the arts, whose performances, lectures, workshops, and writings have elevated attention to jazz worldwide. Trained in both classical and jazz music, he studied at the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts, the Berkshire Music Center, and The Juilliard School. Early in his career he played with Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers before launching his own group. He cofounded Jazz at Lincoln Center in 1987 and has served as its artistic director since 1992. With a discography that includes more than 50 albums, he is the recipient of nine Grammy Awards and is the only musician to have won Grammys for both jazz and classical performances in the same year. In 1997 he became the first jazz artist to be recognized with a Pulitzer Prize for music, and in 2005 he was awarded the National Medal of Arts.

Virtuoso and impresario, maestro and messenger,
whose golden horn of plenty feeds the soul, lifts the heart,
and does the Crescent City proud.

Sidney Verba, Doctor of Laws. An illustrious political scientist and exemplary university citizen, Sidney Verba is Harvard’s Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor emeritus and former director of the Harvard University Library. Educated at Harvard and Princeton, he served on the faculties of Princeton, Stanford, and the University of Chicago before joining the Harvard faculty in 1972. Known for his seminal work on electoral politics, he is the author or coauthor of books that include The Civic Culture (1963), Participation in America (1972), The Changing American Voter (1976), Equality in America (1985), Designing Social Inquiry (1994), and Voice and Equality (1995). Past president of the American Political Science Association, he received the organization’s James Madison Prize in 1993, and in 2002 he was awarded the Johan Skytte Prize for distinguished contribution to political science. As director of the Harvard University Library from 1984 to 2007, he led the library system through a period of profound change brought about by the rise of new technologies.

Superlative political scientist, savvy university citizen,
sage steward of volumes galore,
he has shaped our sense of civic culture
and gently personified the professorial ideal.

“Service Connects Us to Each Other and the Community”

Harvard Magazine — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 19:14:59 -0400

public service and family figured prominently in the Commencement ceremony held at the Harvard Kennedy School (HKS) on June 3. Dean David Ellwood began by noting the dozens of national flags decorating the room, each representing the country of one or more of the school’s imminent degree recipients, and then thanked all the students’ families “for sharing a loved one with us.” Soon he invited M.P.P. candidate Ned Sebelius to introduce his mother, U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius, the guest speaker: the former governor of Kansas, a visiting fellow at the school in 2007, is the daughter of the late John J. Gilligan, a fellow at the Institute of Politics in 1969 who served in the U.S. House and as governor of Ohio.

Sebelius, who invited the degree candidates to thank their families with applause, said that she sees family and public service “as two points in the same continuum…my family has always been my support network. It’s from them that I draw my inspiration to serve others, and my encouragement along the way.” Serving in political office, she continued, “has always been less about the wins and the losses, and more about finding common goals and the best way to accomplish those goals.” Her political heroes, she noted—her father, John and Robert Kennedy, and Barack Obama—“always stressed the importance of their families in keeping them centered and measuring how we should treat one another.”

That grounding by friends and family, their own previous achievements, and the educational and collegial experiences provided by the Kennedy School, she said, would give the new graduates the tools they needed to navigate in a changed world while making improvements to benefit those most in need. “It’s not the title you hold, but the work you do,” she reminded them, whether the field is children’s education, healthcare, climate change, or political service.

Addressing these issues, she acknowledged, would not be easy: “Your ideals and beliefs will be challenged, your self-interest may be at stake. Making choices will require some moral courage, what Robert Kennedy described as a rarer commodity than bravery in battle or great intelligence: the one essential vital quality of those who seek to change a world which yields most painfully to change.” Her own years in public service, she said, have taught her that moral courage

is rare and powerful. It’s a source of tremendous strength when the odds are long; it’s a foundation that will help you both defend and challenge your own beliefs, and in situations where you may be tempted to silence or sit back, your moral courage will be your greatest advantage.

“I hope you remember Robert Kennedy’s words and are never without your moral courage,” she concluded. “I hope you will take comfort in being uncomfortable, that you’ll choose to serve and contribute…I hope you’ll embrace this incredible moment…and work with your generation to solve the problems that have plagued our world for too long….

“We can’t wait to see what you do next.”

The Solicitous Solicitor General Returns

Harvard Magazine — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 19:37:26 -0400

From the first introduction of Elena Kagan, J.D. ’86, the former dean of Harvard Law School who was nominated to the post of U.S. solicitor general in January, students cheered for the woman who as dean did so much to improve student life.

Kagan’s advice to the class of 2009 centered on the importance of loving one’s work. She has “a three-part test for whether a job is worth doing…,” she said. “First, does the job challenge you intellectually? Does it make you stretch your mind? Does it make you think hard every day…?” Second, “Do I feel as if I am contributing something, making a difference in the world?” And third, “Can I just not wait to get to work in the morning?”

Her advice was attuned to the effect of the current economic downturn on the school’s imminent graduates. “I don’t think there has been a class at Harvard Law School for many, many years that has had some of the difficulties that this class has had: in terms of jobs and financial security,” she said. “Of course, you are still much more lucky than most people in the world and the difficulties that you’ve had don’t compare with the difficulties that many people out there are having. And yet in comparison with some of the classes that have gone before, you have had a harder time of it. And you’ve faced somewhat more constricted choices.”

But she emphasized that “the greatest challenges produce the biggest opportunities.” She recalled a commencement speech given by Franklin Delano Roosevelt during the Great Depression, “an even tougher period than exists right now.” Roosevelt told the class of 1932, “Yours is not the task of making your way in the world, but the task of remaking the world which you will find before you.” For the class of 2009, Kagan said, “within all this difficulty there is also incredible potential and promise, and yours is the task of finding that promise by remaking the world”—in that process, “young Harvard-trained lawyers are going to play an absolutely pivotal role.”

Furthermore, Kagan, who as dean was instrumental in increasing the amount of pro bono work performed by students, said she sees a silver lining in the current economic crisis, in that it will force graduates who might otherwise have succumbed to the lure of enormous salaries and bonuses to ask themselves, “What direction do I really want to go in? Where do I really want to serve? How can I really make a difference? And what will make me get up every morning with that smile on my face?”

Kagan proffered two other nuggets of wisdom: make friends along the way and keep them, and listen: “The most important talent you can cultivate is a talent for listening. Because nobody ever learned anything while they were talking.”

Ultimately, she told the graduating class, the most important question is “whether you will use all of that power and influence and impact for good purposes: to advance the rule of law; to promote justice; to serve people other than yourself; and to enhance human well-being; that’s what I hope for you, and knowing you as I do, that is what I expect of you. Fellow graduates, all my warmest congratulations and all my deepest love.”

The ceremony was not without lighter moments. The school’s Sacks-Freund Award for Teaching went to Gottlieb professor of law Elizabeth Warren, an expert on bankruptcy, consumer debt, and commercial law who currently oversees the release of funds from the government’s Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP). Speaking of her own love of her job, she said, “So many mornings over the last three years, I lie in bed and I think, ‘Ah, today I’ll begin by roasting a few students.’ It always makes me smile. In other words, I love what I do.” Dean of students Ellen Cosgrove, whom the class of 2009 chose for the Suzanne Richardson Staff Recognition Award, noted during her acceptance speech that she was “the only woman on this stage over the age of 40 who is not running a major aspect of our federal government. We have our economy,” she said, referring to Warren, “and our legal system,” referring to Kagan—“and I do the midnight pancake breakfast.”

Management Maxims from HBS Class Day

Harvard Magazine — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 18:32:17 -0400

Early in this academic year, when the world’s financial system seemed literally on the verge of collapse, Harvard Business School’s Centennial Global Business Summit convened a panel—among many other events—on “Leadership for the Twenty-First Century.” On the October day when the federal government announced plans to inject $250 billion into U.S. banks—some of them unwilling recipients—and as presidential candidates discussed whether to lend and guarantee $25 billion or $50 billion to Detroit automakers, the panelists included James (Jamie) Dimon, M.B.A.’82, chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase, and G. Richard Wagoner Jr., M.B.A.’77, chairman and CEO of General Motors.

In an eerie echo of that tumultuous week, Dimon returned to the Business School (HBS) campus on June 3 as its Class Day speaker: two days after General Motors filed for bankruptcy (having previously shed Wagoner as its leader); and one day after JPMorgan sold 142 million shares of common stock, raising $5 billion in new equity, in part to buy its way out of the federal financing imposed on it last autumn.

Dimon has deep ties to the school. He noted that his wife is an alumna, and that their oldest daughter and her fiancé—as of last Sunday—will both enroll in HBS next fall.

And he is a blunt speaker. In the October presentation, explaining that businesses are about solving problems and improving performance, he said the most important management wisdom could be encapsulated by the cartoon slogan, “We suck less.”

In returning to campus, he was asked by the students to address careers, leadership, and business leaders’ obligations to society and to each other. The latter tied in to the new student-initiated movement to swear an “M.B.A. Oath,” discussed below.

Dimon began with a joke, in light of a rival institution’s misfortunes: “I just want to make it absolutely clear I left Citigroup 10 years ago.” As he later made it clear, “left” meant that he had been fired from his job as president there.

Talking about careers, Dimon said that the principal factor in making oneself successful was to pursue lifelong learning—a pursuit that consumed 50 percent or more of his own time, through reading, talking with others, and watching how other people act in different circumstances. As for “building your brand,” as it would be put in HBS-speak, he said, “There is already a book on you,” as teachers, friends, and parents could characterize an individual’s work habits, ethics, and more. Each individual, he said, should “write it the way you want it to be written up”—including quitting when asked to do something improper or unethical. And every individual should be expected to deal with failure, as leaders like Nelson Mandela and Abraham Lincoln repeatedly did. A year after he was fired, Dimon said, he called his former boss to break bread and ask about his own shortcomings—and, he joked, “He acknowledged my mistakes.” That was a part of being true to oneself—which in his case required him to develop his emotional intelligence and to learn to curb his expression of anger.

Leadership, Dimon said, was an honor and a privilege—and brought with it deep responsibility. A leader who makes a mistake, he said, “could hurt a lot of people,” from customers and communities to parents and other family members. The role inherently “is personal,” for the leader and those whose lives his leadership affects. Leadership therefore depends on a wide array of characteristics, including discipline; fortitude—the “fierce resolve” to act in face of pervasive resistance to change; setting standards for performance, integrity, and the drive to “look at the facts in a cold-blooded, honest way all the time,” emphasizing negative factors and risks; openness, so that debates will be not about the quality of information but about its implications and what to do about them; loyalty (in the sense of building a superb organization that gives all its constituents the best possible opportunities and results); commitment to treating everyone equally; getting compensation “right” so that performance, accurately measured, is fairly rewarded; and having real “humility” about the actions of others, in prior times, that enabled one to succeed. Good leaders, he said, “don’t make the decision, but make sure the best decision is made,” by enabling a team to be candid, realistic, and well informed.

As for social obligations, he said, among the seven billion people on Earth, Americans—and by implications his HBS audience—were especially privileged by their accidents of birth and upbringing, and so had a “deep obligation” to serve. Leadership is not about money, or about yourself, he told the students before him; it is “about what you leave behind,” as measured by your service to your family, to humanity, and to your country. For him, passionately working to make JPMorgan Chase excellent supported everything good that employees, customers, and communities could derive from the enterprise.

In a larger sense, although Dimon was confident that America would get through the current economic crisis, and that the nation remained a “shining light,” he was “deeply troubled by the notion that success is a given. It’s not a given,” and so business leaders had to help formulate policies that made America better, and the planet better. He cited the nation’s unwillingness to tax energy, despite three energy crises and the emerging environmental crisis; and he deplored the embarrassment of tolerating an education system that saw half of inner-city school children drop out of high school.

Assessing what one’s obligations were, he said, it was useful to think of one’s own epitaph. Without indulging in reflections on his own tombstone, Dimon said, he would like to be remembered this way: “We’re gonna miss the S.O.B., and the world is a better place for his having been here.”

Dimon has been in the center of the economic maelstrom during the past year. His astonishing (for the format) 28-page letter to shareholders, in the JP Morgan Chase 2008 annual report (itself an astonishing 236 pages long), reads like a novel, as Dimon chronicles the collapse and sale to his company of the Bear Stearns investment bank (“we were buying a house on fire”), Washington Mutual (the largest bank failure in U.S. history), and more. He recounts a “largely unprecedented and virtually inconceivable” year and a strong sense that “The way forward will not be easy. We do not know what the future will bring” amid signs of “continued deterioration of the economy….”

He also offers a multi-factored explanation of the crisis, citing the housing bubble; excessive leverage throughout the system; “structural risks” in the capital markets far beyond the banks themselves; regulatory lapses and errors; policies that stimulated, rather than dampened, frothy growth and lending; and world trade and financial imbalances. Naturally, his prescriptions for the future suggest complex changes in regulation, policy, and management.

Though not the subject of his class day address, those ideas, as laid out in the annual report, do have some relevance on campus. Among the points he made there, in his description of excessive leverage throughout the financial system, this one strikes close to home: “Even pension plans and universities added to their leverage, often in effect, by making large ‘forward commitments’”—by which he presumably meant commitments to future investments and future financing arrangements. The implications for Harvard of both of those commitments are discussed here and here.

Wallet-sized cards on each chair at the Class Day ceremony gave the text of the “M.B.A. Oath.” Following the event, members of the audience departed the lawn in front of Baker Library for the student M.B.A. Oath ceremony—a voluntary commitment for which nearly 400 students signed up (see the official website).

Reflecting the temper of the times, the preamble states as a manager’s purpose serving “the greater good by bringing together people and resources to create value that no single individual can build alone”—value that benefits “society over the long term.” Those who take the oath promise to act with “utmost integrity,” to “safeguard the interests of my shareholders, co-workers, customers, and the society in which we operate,” and to “take responsibility for my actions,” among other stipulations.

Jamie Dimon presumably would approve.

“Today” Comes to Class Day

Harvard Magazine — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 18:11:06 -0400

Ohio University graduate Matt Lauer feigned awe at the start of his Harvard Class Day oration on June 3 by encouraging audience members with digital cameras to e-mail photographs to him afterwards: “I’m going to need proof of this!” He recalled trying to convince his high-school guidance counselor that he was academically qualified to apply to Harvard, citing SAT scores of 780 verbal and 800 math. But, he reported, the counselor reminded him that “You do not get to add up the scores for all three times you took the test.”

The Today show cohost nonetheless linked himself to Harvard through NBC colleagues like the show’s executive producer, Jim Bell ’89, and Jeff Zucker ’86, president of NBC Universal. Yet Lauer warned the College seniors not to hire him in the future. “Stay out of my way—I’m sick and tired of working for Harvard graduates,” he declared. “I’ll be your worst nightmare. What I lack in academic pedigree, I make up for in pettiness and aggressiveness.” He offered still another caveat regarding this year’s Commencement speaker, U.S. Secretary of Energy Steven Chu, who was scheduled to speak the following afternoon. “Sexy!” Lauer enthused, adding that “Unless he gives each and every one of you one of these nitrogen fuel-cell cars to keep, you are in for a long afternoon.”

Despite the abundance of hilarity, Lauer did have some serious counsel for the imminent graduates. First, he advised them to “Have kids. Have lots of kids.” Children, he felt, were a leavening influence on their parents’ lives; he cited an interview he did with President Obama on Super Bowl Sunday for a television audience of 45 million or 50 million. Lauer took his seven-year-old son, Jack, to the White House for the event, and during the interview, he glimpsed the utterly unfazed boy with a finger in one nostril.

Second, Lauer said, “Make sure you bring one person into your life who will always look you in the eye and tell you the truth.” Third, he observed that although the modern world pays undue attention to “the trimmings” of material possessions, for him, a touchstone is a remark by Horace Greeley to the effect that “the only thing that remains constant is character.”

Lauer told the future alumni to “use all your tools,” including kindness, compassion, and generosity, and “Don’t take yourselves too seriously.” He also admitted to the seniors that “You are the object of my enormous jealousy,” saying that he would gladly trade places with them. “You are the best and the brightest,” he said. “I will be standing on the sidelines cheering wildly for you.”

The realities of current economic life obtruded into several of the student speeches that preceded Lauer. One of the two Ivy Orators, Alison H. Rich ’09, asserted that when “people talk to me about the future and the ‘real world,’ I reply,”—putting her hands over her ears— “La, la, la! I can’t hear you! La, la, la!” The other Ivy Orator, William Houghteling ’09, began by calling his classmates “the most intelligent, accomplished, and unemployed class ever to graduate from Harvard.” Shortly thereafter, he bluntly announced, “We are screwed.” Houghteling got the day’s biggest laugh with a deadpan line: “Harvard is an indestructible American brand—like Lehman Brothers, or General Motors.”

The Class Day exercises began with the First Marshal of the class of 2009, Lumumba B. Seegars, quoting the opening lines of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass: “I celebrate myself, I sing myself.” Seegars returned to the singing theme in his closing remarks, citing a song that he felt epitomized the way he hoped his class would treat each other after graduation. He then sang, in a rich, proficient baritone, the entire first verse of Bill Withers’ 1972 anthem to mutual support, “Lean on Me.” The audience, Matt Lauer included, clapped along.

Leadership Tips from a "Soldier Scholar"

Harvard Magazine — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 17:51:28 -0400

The eight graduating Harvard seniors about to be commissioned as military officers on June 3 had already received an exceptional education, General David H. Petraeus, Commander, U.S. Central Command, noted: a Harvard degree, and an excellent Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) program. “As you prepare for your first assignments,” he told them, “you should draw confidence from the fact that you are well prepared for what lies ahead.”

Petraeus therefore kept his advice to the seniors pithy. He joked that, given 10 minutes to speak, he’d asked a colleague how he could possibly impart everything he knew in that short interval, and the colleague had replied, “Sir, I suggest you speak very slowly”—a joke Petraeus acknowledged was swiped from George Bernard Shaw (“There is a footnote in the speech, but thanks for laughing”).

The general then presented five “critical admonitions for effective leadership”:

Lead by example. “Your troopers will look to you and follow your lead.” Keep a good attitude; it spreads.
Be humble. The people you’ll be leading already have on-the-ground conflict experience. “Listen and learn.”
Don’t hesitate to make decisions. “When the listening is done and the time for decision has arrived, you have to make the call….There will be many moments when all eyes turn to you for a decision. Be prepared for them. Don’t shrink from them. Embrace them.”
Be a team player. “Your team’s triumphs and failures will, obviously, be yours.”
Don’t take yourself too seriously, but do take your work seriously. “Your troopers want someone who knows his or her profession and is technically and tactically competent, not someone who is too cool for school.”

Although there is considerable tension about the fact that Harvard ROTC cadets must travel to MIT for their classes (see articles here and here), Petraeus praised President Drew Faust for her “navigation of the always tricky waters that swirl around institutions of higher learning.”

“It is clear,” he said, “that Harvard is in very good hands indeed.”

Photograph by Jim Harrison

Darnell M. Whitt

The fiftieth-reunion speaker, retired U.S. Navy Captain Darnell M. Whitt ’59, recalled that his own commissioning ceremony had involved 121 cadets, and said the United States needs a large corps of officers who may not plan on a military career, but are ready to step into service if needed.

“We congratulate you for your personal achievements,” he told the cadets, but added that 50 years from now—when one of the officers commissioned in 2009 stands up to give a similar address to the ROTC class of 2059—“I hope that number will be much greater than the few in your cohort.”

The status of ROTC at Harvard couldn’t have been far from anyone’s mind. Whitt lamented the program’s unofficial status, and as the audience waited for the ceremony to begin, the Advocates for Harvard ROTC distributed a newsletter reaffirming their goals: formal recognition of ROTC by the Harvard Corporation; a tri-service ROTC office annex on campus; and increased participation of Harvard undergraduates in ROTC.

When Faust said, upon taking the stage, that she had an announcement to make, the crowd went silent. The announcement, it turned out, was nothing to do with ROTC, but prompted spirited applause nonetheless.

Faust said the University will participate in the Yellow Ribbon GI Education Enhancement Program, in which Harvard will allocate funds—matched dollar for dollar by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs—to pay tuition for military veterans. Harvard College, the Extension School, and all of the graduate and professional schools will participate, she said: “Under this partnership, as many as 150 veterans will be able to receive substantial assistance to study at Harvard this fall.” (Read the official University news release here.)

The program website includes a list of participating schools. (A check of the website immediately following Faust’s remarks found that the list did not yet include Harvard; schools have until June 15 to notify the government that they plan to participate.)

Faust went on to laud Petraeus’s devotion to “the ideal of the soldier scholar.” He is a good leader in many ways, she said, but “one of the most important is that he is a thinker.” She quoted from his writings: “The most powerful tool any soldier carries is not his weapon but his mind.”

A Harvard education, she told the new officers, “has taught you to think, to analyze, to make judgments, to turn information into understanding.” They, too, are soldier scholars, she said—and challenged them to remain so, and conduct their careers accordingly.

“War,” she said, “is arguably the most consequential activity any nation or society can undertake. …War represents the proverbial moment of truth, where we define ourselves, our most fundamental purposes and values.”

Faust presented each new officer with a copy of Just and Unjust Wars by Michael Walzer, a former Harvard professor of government, and quoted one sentence: “War is the hardest place; if comprehensive and consistent moral judgments are possible there, they are possible everywhere.”

“To you,” she said, “we entrust this enormous complexity.”

Significant Contributors to Society and Scholarship

Harvard Magazine — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 14:17:10 -0400

Since 1989, the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (GSAS) has awarded its Centennial Medal to alumni who have made significant contributions to society and scholarship. This year’s medalists include an art historian who encouraged viewers to simply look; an historian who explored the impact of slavery; an economist who pioneered game theory as an approach to conflict resolution; and an astronomer with a passion for pulsars.

Brief biographies appear below. The full citations, read aloud at the annual luncheon on June 3, follow.

Svetlana Leontief Alpers ’57, Ph.D. ’65, is a noted American art historian. She became a member of the faculty at the University of California, Berkeley in 1962. Now professor of Northern Renaissance art emerita, her specialty is seventeenth-century Dutch art. She is the author Rembrandt’s Enterprise: The Studio and the Market (1988) and The Vexations of Art: Velazquez and Others (2005), among other works, and serves as a consultant to both National Public Radio and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
David Brion Davis, Ph.D. ’56, Sterling professor of history emeritus at Yale, is noted for his study of slavery and abolitionism. He taught for 14 years at Cornell before moving to Yale in 1970. He is director emeritus of Yale’s Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition, which he founded in 1998 and directed until 2004, and has served as president of the Organization of American Historians (1988-89). In 1967, he won the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction in 1967, as well as the National Book Award and the Bancroft Prize, for his book The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture, and in January 2007 received the American Historical Association’s Award for Scholarly Distinction.
Thomas Crombie Schelling, Ph.D. ’51, Distinguished Professor at the Maryland School of Public Affairs, University of Maryland, College Park, and Littauer professor of political economy emeritus at Harvard, is an economist with expertise in foreign affairs, national security, nuclear strategy, and arms control. He was awarded the 2005 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences (shared with Robert Aumann) for “having enhanced our understanding of conflict and cooperation through game-theory analysis.” Schelling served with the Marshall Plan in Europe, at the White House, and in the Executive Office of the President from 1948 to 1953. He wrote most of his dissertation on national income behavior by working at night while in Europe. He left government service to join the economics faculty at Yale, and in 1958 was appointed professor of economics at Harvard, later joining the Kennedy School faculty.
Joseph Hooton Taylor Jr., Ph.D. ’68, McDonnell professor of physics and former dean of the faculty at Princeton, is the winner of the 1993 Nobel Prize in Physics (with Russell A. Hulse) “for the discovery of a new type of pulsar, a discovery that has opened up new possibilities for the study of gravitation.” He taught at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, from 1969 to 1981 and then joined the Princeton faculty. In addition to the Nobel Prize, Taylor has been recognized with many other awards, including the first Heineman Prize of the American Astronomical Society, the Henry Draper Medal of the National Academy of Sciences, the Carty Award for the Advancement of Science, the Einstein Prize, and the Schwartzchild Medal. Among the first group of MacArthur Fellows, he has served on many boards, committees, and panels, co-chairing the Decadal Panel that produced the report Astronomy and Astrophysics in the New Millennium that established the United States’s national priorities in astronomy and astrophysics for the period 2000-2010. The Dannie Heineman Prize for Astrophysics is jointly awarded each year by the American Astronomical Society and American Institute of Physics for outstanding work in astrophysics.

Full citations, delivered by Pope professor of the Latin language and literature Richard Tarrant, at the luncheon honoring the 2009 GSAS medalists:

Svetlana Leontief Alpers, A.B. ’57, PhD ’65, fine arts

The Washington Post art critic Blake Gopnik has written “if the world were fair, Svetlana Leontief Alpers would have won a Nobel Prize by now, just like her dad.” Gopnik argued that, while Wassily Leontief’s contributions have helped to reshape the practice of economics, his daughter’s work has had an equally profound affect on something as significant, and perhaps even more universal: the way people think about, talk about, and indeed look at great works of art.

Alpers’s impact on the discipline of art history has been both deep and wide. In the words of Seymour Slive, her dissertation reader and now the Gleason professor of fine arts emeritus at Harvard, Alpers is a scholar “whose numerous, seminal—and sometimes controversial—publications have energized discussions on Renaissance and Baroque art in the international community of historians for more than a quarter-century.” Even before she became widely known, with the publication in 1983 of her groundbreaking book The Art of Describing, her work possessed a remarkable confidence, fueled by the seemingly simple desire to look at paintings in and of themselves, not to look through them for hidden symbolism or layered meanings.

Alpers was born and raised in Cambridge by a father who was a leading Harvard economist and a mother, Estelle Marks, who was a poet. It must have been a creative and invigorating upbringing, one that encouraged and rewarded curiosity and careful study.

She earned a B.A. in literature at Radcliffe in 1957, and that part of her education is often cited as an important source of two of the traits that make Alpers distinctive. One is what Gopnik called her “radical close looking” — an approach to artwork that mirrors the kind of close reading practiced in literary study. The other is her distinctive writing style. According to the New York University art historian Mariët Westermann, Alpers “makes you remember her interpretations by their pithy phrasing, apt literary reference, or sudden summations. ‘Is art history?’ ‘No telling, with Tiepolo.’ The language never feels pedantic, recondite, or forced; forceful would be a good word for it, and visual even better.”

Alpers received her Ph.D. in 1965. Her dissertation focused on the mythological works of Rubens, laying out themes and an approach she would employ throughout her career. “No one has tried to deal with the force and meaning of works so much of whose ‘art’ is contained in their narrative surface,” Alpers wrote, “in the sensitivity and brilliance with which Rubens handles the ‘artificial rind of Fable’ itself.” By demonstrating the nature and importance of narration in Rubens’ mythological works, her study provided a new way of understanding his most important series of such works, the pieces he designed for the Torre de la Parada, the hunting lodge of Philip IV.

Rubens’s storytelling was direct and dramatic, Alpers said. The same can be said for her own work. Says Westermann, “From her first article—the remarkable re-reading of Vasari’s Vite as staking out a new aesthetics (1960)—Alpers has surprised, delighted, and, one of her favorite words, vexed her readers with novel readings and viewings of artists about whom, it would seem, we had said it all: Vasari, Bruegel, Rubens, Velazquez, Tiepolo, Rembrandt, Vermeer.”

Her books have profoundly influenced the discipline of art history, and The Art of Describing reached beyond that discipline to stimulate new thinking across the humanities. Her later books include Rembrandt’s Enterprise: The Studio and the Market (1988), which won the College Art Association’s Charles Rufus Morey Book Award in 1990; Tiepolo and the Pictorial Intelligence (1994), written with the late Michael Baxandall; and The Vexations of Art: Velazquez and Others (2005), in which Alpers looks backward and forward in time to understand Velazquez’ painting The Spinners. She also founded the interdisciplinary journal Representations with Stephen Greenblatt at the University of California, Berkeley; she remains a corresponding editor.

Alpers is professor emerita of the history of art at Berkeley. She began teaching there in the early sixties and remained until her retirement in 1994. She has also been a visiting scholar in the department of fine arts at NYU. “Her emphasis on looking first has been as central to her teaching as to her writings,” says Westermann. “Her Ph.D. students have assumed leadership positions in the field, pursuing tracks set out by Alpers but charted with the independence of mind she exemplifies and cherishes.”

One of those former Ph.D. students, Walter Melion, the Asa Griggs Candler Professor of Art History at Emory University, praises those same qualities. “Svetlana’s…students…were encouraged to follow her in searching for modes of interpretation fully responsive to the viewer’s experience of pictorial presence. As she moved from one book project to the next, so the ways in which she construed images and the questions she raised about them changed; and so, accordingly, did the student cohorts she was training change, as they adapted their notions of pictorial form and function, manner and meaning, visual address and conditions of viewing, to the interpretative challenges she set herself. She was demanding, as are all truly inspiring teachers, but also generous, and above all she urged us to think independently.”

In retirement, Alpers has engaged more directly than ever with the processes of working artists. Together with painter James Hyde and photographer Barney Kulok, she recently completed a series of photographic prints based on three Tiepolo paintings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The series, Painting Then For Now: Fragments of Tiepolo at the Ca’ Dolfin, was exhibited to acclaim in New York in 2007, and parts of it were acquired by the Museum of Modern Art—the perfect home for a creation of this most devoted of art lovers.

David Brion Davis, Ph.D. ’56, history of American civilization

As a young soldier stationed in the occupied Germany of 1945 and 1946, David Brion Davis was profoundly shaped by witnessing at first hand the ruination of war. But it was not only the destruction that affected him. On the boat to Europe, he found that black soldiers were confined to the lowest hold in slave-ship-like conditions. In Germany, he saw violent conflicts between white and black American troops, and he heard racist speeches from his commanding officers.

That wartime experience spurred some thoughts about a career. In a letter he wrote to his parents in October 1946, when he was 19, Davis said, “I’ve been thinking over the idea of majoring in history….I believe that the problems that surround us today are not to be blamed on individuals or even groups of individuals, but on the human race as a whole—its collective lack of perspective and knowledge of itself. That’s where history comes in.” Teaching history, Davis believed, should be “an unearthing of truths long buried beneath superficial facts and propaganda…

“Perhaps such teaching could make us understand ourselves,” he continued. “It would show the present conflicts to be as silly as they are. And above all, it would make people stop and think before blindly following some bigoted group to make the world safe for Aryans, democrats [with a lower-case D], or Mississippians.”

Those words proved to be prescient, at least with respect to his own approach to scholarship and teaching. David Brion Davis, the Sterling professor of history emeritus at Yale University, is widely considered today’s foremost scholar of slavery and its role in shaping U.S. and world history. Throughout his distinguished career, he has fearlessly pursued the goals he set out as a 19-year-old: to strip away propaganda and to dig beneath the accepted truths, to look at things as they are—even when the view reveals what he has called “the darker underside of the American dream.”

Davis received his B.A. from Dartmouth College in 1950 and his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1956. As he was finishing his dissertation—an investigation of beliefs and ideas about homicide, as revealed in American fiction from 1798 to 1860—he made a significant new acquaintance in Kenneth Stampp, a visiting professor on leave from Berkeley. Stampp was the author of The Peculiar Institution, a history of American slavery distinguished by its assumption of equality between blacks and whites, and Davis was deeply affected by their talks. His realization of how seldom the subject of slavery had arisen in his studies thus far, combined with his interest in issues of human morality, would become the driving force in his career.

“The moral imagination has animated all of David’s historical inquiries,” says Nancy Cott, the Trumbull professor of American history at Harvard. “He has stated eloquently his conviction that ‘nothing in history is absolute or clear-cut; that truth is always framed in ambiguity; that good and evil are won at a cost; that all choice involves negation.’ This tolerance for ambiguity is a hallmark of the brilliance of his writing.”

Davis broke new ground with The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture, published in 1966, which won the Pulitzer Prize and established a transnational direction for research into societal attitudes toward slavery and its contradictions. Since then, he has written or edited 17 other books, among them The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution (1975), Slavery and Human Progress (1984), and most recently, Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World (2006). He has won the American Historical Association’s Albert Beveridge Award, the Bancroft Prize, a National Book Award, the Society of American Historians’ Bruce Catton Prize for Lifetime Achievement, and, in 2007, the AHA’s Award for Scholarly Distinction.

Davis taught for 14 years at Cornell University before moving to Yale in 1970, remaining there until he retired. He is also the director emeritus of Yale’s Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition, which he founded in 1998.

His effect on his students and colleagues has been perhaps as profound as his impact on the scholarship of slavery and anti-slavery. Professor Cott was a student of Davis’s at Cornell and a colleague at Yale. On the occasion of his retirement, she wrote “It is no surprise that when a group of David’s former students put an anthology together in his honor, they called it Moral Problems in American Life. David’s moral integrity stands out in the mind of all his colleagues. One day-to-day place we see it is in his utter conscientiousness: whether the task is a prize committee, or graduate applications, or evaluating dissertations or candidates—it is part of his own ethics never to coast but to be fully responsible.”

John Stauffer, professor of English and of African and African American studies at Harvard, is another former student deeply inspired by Davis. Stauffer calls him “one of the two or three most influential humanities scholars today, in large part owing to his extraordinary mentoring. The list of students he has worked with, either officially as a dissertation advisor, or unofficially because of his boundless curiosity and generosity, is simply staggering.”

Richard Wrightman Fox, professor of history at the University of Southern California, was Davis’s research assistant in 1972, a year Davis spent at Stanford. “I learned a lot about slavery and anti-slavery that year,” Fox recalls, “but I also made a friend, and I got a lasting lesson in the daily discipline of scholarship. I remember the rustic wood-plank walls of the simple square room that was his office, the bicycle propped carefully against one of the walls, the sharpened pencils waiting on the desk, the books and articles spread across it, the absence of a telephone that might threaten [his] concentration…. Somehow a book was emerging from the play and work of David’s mind upon his neatly organized array of written sources.

“David was writing that year, not teaching,” Fox continues, “but he inadvertently taught one second-year graduate student that if you rode your bike to the office every day, and applied your brain and heart to a subject of passionate interest, a book would surely follow, as night the day.”

In every way, Davis was a model for his students. And his scholarship will stand as a model for generations of students to come.

Thomas Crombie Schelling, Ph.D. ’51, economics

In a career spanning more than a half-century, Thomas Schelling has analyzed all manner of threats to humanity: nuclear arms proliferation, crime, drugs, and global warming, to name several. An economist by training and a true social scientist by inclination, he has never been bound by departmental or disciplinary walls. Having been swept up in the great events of World War II and its aftermath, he found homes in both government service and academia, shaping policy and turning his early interest in bargaining strategy into a body of work on game theory, arms control, and conflict resolution that would ultimately be recognized with the 2005 Nobel Prize in economics.

The Nobel committee wrote in announcing the prize, “Against the backdrop of the nuclear arms race in the late 1950s, Thomas Schelling’s book The Strategy of Conflict set forth his vision of game theory as a unifying framework for the social sciences. Schelling showed that a party can strengthen its position by overtly worsening its own options, that the capability to retaliate can be more useful than the ability to resist an attack, and that uncertain retaliation is more credible and more efficient than certain retaliation.” The book became a classic, and its insights have had lasting relevance for conflict resolution and the prevention of war.

Schelling is today a Distinguished University Professor emeritus at the University of Maryland and the Littauer professor of political economy emeritus at Harvard. Born in Oakland, California, in 1921, he received his B.A. from Berkeley. As he told the Nobel committee, “I was brought up during the Great Depression, and when I went to college, I felt that the worst problem we had was the problem of depression and unemployment, so I majored in economics.”

He spent a year and a half as an analyst with the U.S. Bureau of the Budget before coming to Harvard for graduate work. He was appointed a Junior Fellow of the Society of Fellows, but he resigned the fellowship to join the administration of the Marshall Plan, spending a year in Copenhagen and a year and a half in Paris. He wrote much of his dissertation in Europe, working at night.

That thesis, National Income Behavior: An Introduction to Algebraic Analysis, was published by McGraw-Hill in 1951 in its Economics Handbook Series. Schelling sought to develop an algebra of national-income analysis that wouldn’t require previous knowledge of mathematics. The result showed, wrote Schelling, that “a wide range of theoretical problems in the field of national-income behavior can be analyzed efficiently by the use of some fairly simple mathematics.”

That emphasis on simplicity would mark Schelling’s work for the rest of his career — a characteristic emphasized by Graham Allison, Harvard’s Dillon professor of government, who calls Schelling “a living exemplar of the proposition that profundity does not require obscurity.”

In the early 1950s, Schelling was a member of the White House staff of the foreign policy advisor to the President, the office that managed foreign-aid programs. He left the government to join the economics department at Yale University, then in 1958 was appointed professor of economics at Harvard. He joined the faculty of the newly created John F. Kennedy School of Government in 1969.

But his involvement in government affairs and more broadly in world affairs never ended. He began publishing on bargaining strategy in the 1950s and soon saw the applications that his approach to game theory could have for foreign policy, especially nuclear weapons policy. In the 1960s he advised the Kennedy Administration, chairing the interagency committees that brought into being the hotline between the Kremlin and the U.S. government and that initiated the process leading to the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. “He was a seminal influence in the conception of ‘arms control,’ says Allison, “a member of the first generation of ‘wise men’ who demonstrated the value of independent analysis of the challenges posed to the world by nuclear weapons.”

In the 1970s and 1980s his interests took a new turn. After serving on a substance-abuse committee of the National Academy of Sciences, he became interested in the idea of commitment—how people commit themselves, successfully or not, to avoiding bad behavior and embracing good. Several essays on the subject appeared in two later publications, Choice and Consequence, in 1984, and Strategies of Commitment, in 2006. He also grew fascinated by the ways in which individual behavioral choices could aggregate into social phenomena that were unintended or unexpected. As he later wrote, “One part of this work involved modeling spatial ‘segregation,’ the ways that people who differ conspicuously in binary groups—e.g. blacks and whites, males and females, officers and enlisted personnel, francophones and anglophones—get separated spatially, in residence, in dining halls, at public events. Without knowing it I was pioneering a field of study that later became known as ‘agent-based computational modeling.’” Much of this work was published in Micromotives and Macrobehavior in 1978.

In 1980, the National Academy of Sciences invited Schelling to chair a committee to advise President Carter on the so-called “carbon dioxide problem,” on the agenda of an upcoming European summit. He learned a lot, quickly, and a few months later was asked to join the Carbon Dioxide Assessment Committee of the National Academy of Sciences, where he says he “became an extremely well educated amateur” and wrote a report on the policy and welfare implications of climate change.

As Richard Zeckhauser, the Ramsey professor of political economy at the Kennedy School, writes, “Thomas Schelling’s remarkable contributions help us to understand how the world works. He has provided us with deep insights into the behaviors of individuals, groups, and nations, and thereby into problems such as addiction, racial segregation, and global warming. Most important, his studies of conflict and its avoidance have made the world a safer place to live.”

In his essay for the Nobel committee, Schelling writes that the subject of global warming continues to interest him greatly. In his words, “Mobilizing to do something about prospective global warming and climate change is what I expect to be, during this century, what nuclear arms control was during the century just past.”

We can only hope that this time there is a Thomas Schelling around to lead the charge.

Joseph Taylor, Ph.D. ’68, astronomy

Joseph Taylor’s family could have had no inkling that his early, sometimes mischievous experiments with ham radio would lead to a Nobel Prize. And yet, reading the evocative essay he wrote for the Nobel committee in 1993, it’s easy to trace a direct line from boyhood exploits to science’s highest honor. His youthful adventures—driven by curiosity, encouraged by a large, caring family, and fueled by Taylor’s sense of fun and his love for discovery—seem integral to the groundbreaking astrophysics he would go on to do.

Taylor, the McDonnell Distinguished University Professor of physics emeritus at Princeton University, was born in Philadelphia but passed most of his childhood on his family’s farm in New Jersey. He spent hours setting up large, rotating ham-radio antennas on the roof of the farmhouse. As he wrote, he and his brother “filled most of the third floor with ham-radio transmitters and receivers. Our rigs were mostly built from a mixture of post-war surplus equipment and junk television sets. We learned by experience that when you need high voltage, the power company’s 6,000-to-120-volt transformers work admirably in reverse; and that most amplifiers will oscillate, especially if you don’t want them to.”

Taylor attended Haverford College, where he awoke to the delights of physics and the satisfactions of the scientific process, and where he built a working radio telescope as part of a senior honors project. Having found the field he wanted to pursue, he came to Harvard, where he later wrote that his work in astronomy, physics, and applied mathematics was the hardest he’d ever done. His dissertation, on lunar occultations of radio sources, was aided invaluably by his mentor, Alan Maxwell, who, among other things, taught him the importance of clear, well-crafted writing in a scientific paper. His thesis research also fortified him with knowledge that would become important years later in his study of pulsars.

Jonathan Grindlay, Harvard’s Paine professor of practical astronomy, was, in 1968, a Harvard graduate student a few years junior to Taylor. He recalls those days as being filled with creative play like that which marked Taylor’s boyhood. “We used to do statistical analysis on the Coke bottling plants (with those wonderful old glass bottles, stamped on the bottom with whatever bottling site had produced them),” said Grindlay. “In the days before easy graphics, some of our…colleagues made elaborate maps of the density distributions of Coke bottles that had migrated through the distribution system to the Harvard College Observatory. Sounds rather quaint, but chalk it up to future productivity in mapping the universe—or, in Joe’s case, the distributions of pulsars in the galaxy.”

Pulsars—rapidly rotating neutron stars with strong magnetic fields—had been identified in 1967, and when the finding was published the next year, just after Taylor completed his Harvard dissertation, it immediately attracted his attention. He was beginning a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard and looking for an interesting new project in radio astronomy. He devised a computer algorithm for recognizing pulsar signals, and by June of 1968, he and his Harvard colleagues had discovered the fifth known pulsar in the galaxy.

He continued his work at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where he was a member of the faculty from 1969 to 1981. In 1974, he and his then-graduate student, Russell Hulse, using the 1,000-foot radio telescope at Arecibo, Puerto Rico, were the first to discover a pulsar in a binary system, with two neutron stars orbiting each other. The discovery had enormous significance, because it provided the first proof of gravitational radiation and the strongest support yet for Einstein’s general theory of relativity. It continues to yield new findings to this day. In recognition of their discovery of what the Nobel committee called “a space laboratory that could test one of Albert Einstein’s most important theories,” Taylor and Hulse won the Nobel Prize in physics in 1993.

Taylor joined the faculty at Princeton in 1980 and continued to look for pulsars and to mine their significance. Of his Nobel partner, Russell Hulse writes: “I have always said that it took a special sort of scientific ability, rigorous attention to detail, and many years of patience fully to realize all of the exciting scientific promise of the binary pulsar discovery. Joe is the perfect scientist to have met the challenges of that research and delivered such superb results.”

Taylor has received many other awards, including the first Heineman Prize of the American Astronomical Society, the Henry Draper Medal of the National Academy of Sciences, the Carty Award for the Advancement of Science, and the Einstein Prize. He was among the first cohort of MacArthur Fellows, and he co-chaired the National Research Council’s Decade Survey of Astronomy and Astrophysics, a panel whose report set U.S. priorities in astronomy and astrophysics for the period from 2000 to 2010. His scientific publications comprise approximately 200 articles and book chapters.

He is still animated by the same spirit of adventure and love of discovery that drove his boyhood experiments. In his Nobel essay, he wrote, “I have noticed in recent years that many budding scientists worry much more than I ever did about what the future may bring: how to get into the best university, work with the biggest names, find the best post-doctoral fellowship, and secure the ideal university position. My own psychological bent, insofar as it has influenced any professional decisions, is to pursue a path promising enjoyment along the way, without looking too far ahead.”

Certainly not as far as Stockholm.

Life As Improvisation: The Baccalaureate Service

Harvard Magazine — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 17:10:01 -0400

in last year’s Baccalaureate address, President Drew Faust urged graduating seniors to make career choices for love rather than money; she began this year’s address by noting just how much has changed since then.

Alluding to bank failures, financial fraud, and the swine flu, she deemed this “the year when the world shifted.”

Last year, Faust had to prompt students to look beyond financial-sector jobs; this year, she said, “the world has changed that for you.”

Her advice for the class of 2009: view the uncertain climate not as reason for caution but as opportunity. “It may not seem like a gift now,” she said, “but it is. Instead of waking up when you are 45 suddenly wondering what your life means, you get to try something adventurous and uncertain while you are young and resilient.”

Looking back to her own graduation year, 1968, Faust saw a similar crossroads: “My class believed we would do nothing less than end racism, poverty, and war. The only question in our minds was whether we’d get it done by the time of our fifth reunion.”

But gradually, she said, “I watched that sense of possibility…erode, as later graduates retreated into the private sphere, into adults making the best life they could for themselves.”

Now, she said, “you have been given that world back—the world of the possible—in a way that hasn’t been true since my generation.”

Uncertainty “demands new things from us,” she said: “not just going through the motions, in default mode, but improvising our way to new solutions.”

Faust considered the nature of improvisation, noting that the word itself comes from the Latin “not foreseen.” She quoted jazz musician Charlie Parker—“Master your instrument, master the music, and then forget all that…and just play”—and Paul Simon: “Improvisation is too good to leave to chance.” She challenged students to find “that magical crossroads of rigor and ease, structure and freedom, reason and intuition”—even if it is within the financial sector, which, she said, “needs fresh eyes and strong constitutions.”

The whole world, she said, “needs good improvisers.”

in what is perhaps Harvard’s oldest public ceremony besides Commencement itself, Faust kept her own references modern. Besides Parker and Simon, she quoted writer Joan Didion, physicist David Bohm, physician and Harvard Medical School professor Atul Gawande, film director Mike Leigh, TV host Stephen Colbert, and President Obama.

Keeping in mind that the audience for the address changes from one year to the next, she used some familiar jokes:

Last year was my first Harvard baccalaureate, and I marveled at the thought I was standing in a pulpit dressed in the garb of a Puritan minister. I was sure that the very thought would have prompted the likes of Increase and Cotton Mather into the first Mather Lather. They might even have renewed calls for the extirpation of witches.

Her reduce-reuse-recycle approach apparently worked: laughs could be heard over the speakers in Tercentenary Theatre, where the service was being simulcast for relatives because the limited seating in Memorial Church accommodates only the graduating class.

And there were also new jokes: “In keeping with other reductions of the times, I have cut my remarks by 30 percent.”

The service, a Harvard tradition since the seventeenth century, also included remarks from Peter J. Gomes, Plummer professor of Christian morals and Pusey minister in the Memorial Church. It included readings from the Analects of Confucius, the Hebrew Bible, Hindu scriptures, the Quran, and the New Testament, and the singing of Psalm 78 to the tune of St. Martin’s, a Baccalaureate tradition since at least 1806.

As Gomes’s message in the program said, “the occasion is both joyful and solemn, intimate and public, filled with the exuberance of youth and sustained by venerable and weighty tradition.”

It is meant, Gomes said, to imbue seniors with “a few last bits of godly advice” before they are “thrust” forth into a world “little prepared for you, and you perhaps less prepared for it.”

Harvard, Gomes reassured them, “nevertheless maintains high hopes for you.”

listen to the 2008 Baccalaureate address (Faust’s first) here, and the 2007 address by interim president (and president emeritus) Derek Bok here.

See the full schedule of Commencement week events here.

"Habits Are Values in Disguise": The Phi Beta Kappa Exercises

Harvard Magazine — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 14:13:50 -0400

The Phi Beta Kappa Literary Exercises, held the Tuesday morning of each Commencement week in Sanders Theatre, are in a way the most intellectual and cultural of the graduation events, complete with poems, song, and a history-laden oration (see program).

Chapter president Howard Georgi, Mallinckrodt professor of physics and master of Leverett House, opened the 219th exercises with a bit of history, enlivened with the observation that the Yale chapter was revived in 1884, just 125 years ago. He also sounded a theme that will no doubt recur this Commencement week, referring to times that are “turbulent and difficult” and thanking President Drew Faust and Harvard College dean Evelynn Hammonds for attending even as they work diligently to sustain the University’s future.

Chapter vice president Ann Blair, Lea professor of history, recognized the three winners of PBK teaching prizes, which are voted by the honored students themselves: assistant professor of statistics Joseph Blitzstein; Marquand professor of English Daniel Donoghue; and Francke professor of German art and culture Jeffrey Hamburger (who is in Germany with students; his award was accepted by his retiring colleague Irene Winter, Boardman professor of fine arts).

Emeritus professor Everett Mendelsohn conferred honorary chapter membership on Frank Griswold III ’59, former principal bishop of the Episcopal Church; Jane Jervis ’59, historian of science and former president of Evergreen State College; Roberta S. Karmel ’59, lawyer, law professor, and the first woman to serve as commissioner of the Securities and Exchange Commission; the retiring Ralph Mitchell, McKay professor of applied biology; and poet Albert Goldbarth.

Blair introduced Goldbarth, the only poet to win the National Book Critics Circle award twice, and winner of the Mark Twain Award for humorous poetry. She alluded to wide reading-including of comic books and instruction manuals for toys-and his remarkable collection of tin toys and manual typewriters (see http://www.poetryfoundation.org/journal/article.html?id=179326).

Goldbarth said he would read two poems. The first, “Voyage” (audio appears above, text here), appears in The Kitchen Sink: New and Selected Poems, 1972-2007. Facing an audience of “smart people,” he said, he wished to present a “smart-person protagonist,” such as Darwin, who is featured in this poem, about optimism and moving forward into the future with vim and vigor. He saw that attitude as an antidote to the worldview of Michelle Pfeiffer, who said in a recent magazine interview he had read that there were perils in being “too smart”-that “that kind of personality can sometimes lead to hopelessness.” To that he would then append a brief new poem, “Days With the Family Realist” (audio appears above, text here), which he intended to temper the first poem’s perhaps overweening optimism. In it, he recalled his grandmother’s earthy, deflating advice, in the face of a man “planning his own small/parthenons and relativity theories,/bank heists, moon shots, deathless poems.” Her advice: “Go milk a fish.”

The Kitchen Sink: New and Selected Poems, 1972-2007 (Graywolf Press)

As it happened, Goldbarth’s Darwinian theme fit with the subject of the subsequent oration. This year’s orator, Gurney professor of English literature and professor of comparative literature James Engell, chair of the department of English (see his recent Harvard Magazine review here; see his faculty profile here), made the most of his opportunity by delivering a powerful, 47-minute address on the urgency of changing human habits, education, and ethics to effect radically needed changes in mankind’s impact on the natural environment.

The oration is titled “Planting Beach Grass: Managing the House to Sustain It,” a reference to that hero of environmentalists and writers, Henry David Thoreau. “In his journal about Cape Cod,” Engell noted, Thoreau observed that residents of Truro, a storm-washed Outer Cape beach community, “were regularly warned…to plant beach grass…. In this way…they built up again that part of the Cape…where the sea broke over in the last century…. Thus Cape Cod is anchored to the heavens, as it were, by a myriad little cables of beach-grass, and, if they should fail, would become a total wreck, and ere long go to the bottom”-as lovely a passage on his broader theme as one might find.

Engell also brought in contemporary concerns about the economy by making analogies to overdrawing mankind’s balance with nature: “Nature has zero ethical responsibility for us,” he said. “She will let us take out large, unsecured loans. When we can no longer meet payments, she will silently and surely, with no sentiment whatsoever, repossess the house. After all, we’re only tenants.”

Fueled by good intentions and entrepreneurship, but also by greed and self-interest wrongly understood, the recent financial meltdown took a decade to develop. Fueled by the same human qualities, the environmental meltdown has taken two centuries to heat up. It’s insidious, pervasive, and fiendishly difficult to calculate, its reversal inestimably harder to achieve. The environmental meltdown is far more dangerous.

As might be expected of a literary scholar, and coeditor of the recently published Environment: An Interdisciplinary Anthology, Engell made frequent and rich use of texts, from Romeo and Juliet to William James, throughout his address. In perhaps the central passage of his argument, Engell addressed the complacency-call it “habit”-that prevents people from seeing the emergencies before them and from acting appropriately:

The environmental challenges we’ve created require: basic and applied science, technological innovation, entrepreneurial business, institutional actions, organizations and movements dedicated to change, as well as government regulation and incentives.
Three elusive but indispensable elements are also needed: reformed habits, redesigned learning, and new ethics. Inaction on any of these three fronts will thwart all those other efforts. Aristotle remarks that courage is the most important of virtues because without it the others cannot be exercised. Without changed habits, learning, and ethics, we will not only not be able to manage our house in the environmental era, we will not even be able to conceive of actions for adequate management. The great change must first come from within.
Habit is a huge force. Plutarch and Montaigne call it second nature. It’s more than that. Habit is twice nature. William James in the brilliant chapter on habit in his Principles of Psychology (1892) states, “Habit is…the enormous fly-wheel of society” (PP, ch. 10). More than anything else, it resists change. The worst habits are insidious in the scientific and ethical sense: slow, hurting over time by imperceptible degrees, therefore easily ignored or denied, addictive, stealthy, treacherous, literally lying in wait for ambush. Smoking is insidious. Extinction of a species is often insidious. Burning big amounts of coal is insidious. Business as usual is insidious.
Habits are values in disguise. They constitute what we buy to wear and what we build to live in, habit and habitat. Our habits can easily destroy the habitats of other creatures. The killer is that because insidious habit is so slow, and so thorough, none of it rises to a “catastrophe.” Yet, like lung cancer, it’s usually too deadly to reverse. The enormity of such habit is that any warning that it’s creating a crisis in slow motion seems powerless to stop the addiction; which is the essence of tragedy. Shakespeare’s King Lear doesn’t listen to his Fool. When the king at last recognizes his own foolishness for what it was all along, it’s too late to stop the suffering.
Moreover, whenever a short-term crisis comes along-the ailing economy, flu, violence at home or abroad, immigration woes, or problems with Medicare, we tend to forget on what they all depend. Every day, slowly but certainly, the way we treat the natural world affects health, the risk of war and terrorism, motives for immigration, all future economies, and resources for social programs and sustainable jobs. The affluent have abused the natural world and now fall short in their responsibilities to help the developing world avoid more abuse. Giving comparatively little in foreign aid and structuring loan and trade agreements as we have, we fail to provide poorer nations and the people in them with the help they need to obtain a higher standard of living, to stop deforestation, pollution, and other damaging practices.
In the last presidential campaign, Americans rated environmental concerns at number 17, like fake window shutters instead of foundation stones for the house itself. It’s good leadership to have an administration that puts them high, in concert with other concerns. The current administration knows that in the end a better economy depends dramatically on a better environmental economy.
Yet, habits die hard, especially in Congress. Although it could cover the budget shortfall of a national healthcare plan, we’re unlikely this year to have cap and trade legislation for carbon, and more unlikely to pass what we really need, a carbon tax.
All this means sacrifice, an emphatic change of personal habit and custom, those elusive qualities long regarded at the core of a liberal education. And it means smarter use of natural capital, starting with the trillions of megawatts of power falling on Earth each day from the Sun, and, through the Sun and Earth’s rotation, latent in wind.
Let’s see this another way. If it were known that an asteroid hurtling toward Earth would, with a probability increasing each month, strike this planet in 40 years, raise sea levels 25 feet, put one-quarter of known species in danger and force many extinctions, set off plagues and disease, flood parts of nations, submerge populated islands, render coasts uninhabitable, bring longer droughts and larger floods, permanently evacuate thriving cities, intensify hurricanes, super-typhoons, and tornadoes, and shorten or end the lives of millions, then every government would be working furiously to discover how that asteroid could be diverted or destroyed. There is no such asteroid (as far as we know), but all the rest in this scenario is likely true, with evidence for it mounting a little each hour. It’s happening insidiously, from billions of daily habits thrown together like unscrupulous pebbles until their combined force matches the impact of a heavenly body. It’s our own burning of carbon.
To those graduating, you now start to exert power that will grow, domesticated through technologies you will invent, guided by policies you will formulate, enforced by laws you will write, enlivened by goods you will produce, exercised by societies you will help to govern. Yet, the bedrock of all the power you exert comes straight from habits of thinking and acting that even now are tempering themselves into values, values that hold Earth and all its inhabitants in the balance.

Engell wed these overarching observations with specific instances of change he felt were urgently needed, none more daunting and imperative than addressing climate change. “Between now and 2050,” he said, “in this country, we need to change from emitting 20 tons of carbon dioxide per person per year to one.”

Addressing his audience directly, and incorporating his own youthful experiences, Engell said:

If the odds stick, it’s a fair bet one or more of you will receive a Nobel Prize, a good chance at a Pulitzer, and an excellent outlook to win a MacArthur “genius grant.” Then, remember what William James said-and had they existed in his day, he could have won all three of those honors: “Genius, in truth, means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way” (PP ch.20). We’re now engaged in a revolution whose aim is not to secure freedom from a tyrant, but to free us from the tyranny of our own habits…. When I was a student, I sat in this theater reading Robert Frost’s poem “It’s Almost the Year 2000” and thought, foolishly, how far away that year was.
When I was a boy, at night, in high summer, I’d hear through screens of the dormered bedroom in the lakeside cottage my grandfather and uncle built, the voice of the whippoorwill, repeated from the forest floor, moving across the old dirt road. It haunted my nights and promised an enchanted world in this world, not to dominate or develop, but to receive as a natural blessing that makes life richer, more bearable, more lovely. The whippoorwill is gone, deeper into the woods. Ornithologists don’t know exactly why the bird has declined so drastically, but I suspect my own habits have had something to do with forcing it on its way.

In his conclusion, Engell underscored the inevitability of action for those who wish to live a moral life:

The final dismissive response to an environmental era is, “I know all this. Tell me something I don’t know.” A clear reply comes from William James: “No matter how full a reservoir of maxims one may possess, and no matter how good one’s sentiments may be, if one have not taken advantage of every concrete opportunity to act, one’s character may remain entirely unaffected for the better” (PP, 1892, ch.10).
Not to exaggerate, but for plain emphasis, let me say that none of us can yet conceive how unrecognizable, even unimaginable, will need to be changes in our habitual actions. We will be as amazed as those first passengers riding in a railway carriage who feared that traveling at the ungodly speed of 25 miles an hour would annihilate their bodies and rip apart their limbs to send them flying through space.

Finally, he held out the promise of success for those who embrace change:

There are solutions, even with off-the-shelf technologies available now. It is possible to manage this house. If reform is everywhere within, then the leadership you now begin to assume, while arduous, will achieve success, success shared with other communities and passed on to the next generation with decent hope, not massive debt. Let us continue our sacrifices so that we may sustain our gifts. There is in life a sustainability of spirit that, if we greet it generously, intelligently, compassionately, links generation to generation, and also humanity to its larger house, which is our only home.

In closing the exercises, Howard Georgi made reference to Harvard’s brave new frontier: the coming academic calendar change that will bring Commencement forward in time next year. He adjourned the Phi Beta Kappa exercises until May 25, 2010.

Commencement Kickoff: Phi Beta Kappa Literary Exercises

Harvard Magazine — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 09:31:57 -0400

Our Commencement coverage begins with the Phi Beta Kappa service, featuring poet Albert Goldbarth and Gurney professor of English literature and professor of comparative literature James Engell.

The Sanders Theatre event honors graduating seniors who have been inducted into the Phi Beta Kappa Society, which recognizes outstanding scholarly achievement.

Click here for a list this year’s Phi Beta Kappa graduates. Listen here to last year’s Phi Beta Kappa address, by Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg, formerly Higgins professor of physics at Harvard. At the 2007 event, C.D. Wright (Guggenheim Fellow, MacArthur Fellow, and professor of English at Brown University) read one of her poems, and Jeremy Waldron, University Professor at the New York University School of Law, explored the Bill of Rights in the context of the international movement to secure universal human rights through the actions of individual countries. Hear Wright read here and Waldron’s speech here.

In This Mass Extinction, the Enemy Is Us

Harvard Magazine — Wed, 27 May 2009 06:49:15 -0400

Writing in the May 25 issue of the New Yorker, author Elizabeth Kolbert quotes Fisher professor of natural history Andrew Knoll on the subject of mass extinctions. Kolbert cites recent, worldwide losses of certain species of frogs, and also the decimation of bat populations due to a fungus, as examples of a larger phenomenon now under way: the mass extinction, attributable to human causes, of as many as 50 percent of the species of plants and animals worldwide by the end of this century. Kolbert asks Knoll to compare the current loss of species with past extinction events. When an asteroid struck the Yucatán, he tells the magazine, “it was one terrible afternoon. But it was a short-term event, and then things started getting better. Today, it’s not like you have a stress and the stress is relieved and recovery starts. It gets bad and then it keeps being bad, because the stress doesn’t go away. Because the stress is us.”

Follow this link to read an abstract of the article, with links to the full text (registration required).

EVP Forst to Leave Harvard

Harvard Magazine — Tue, 26 May 2009 13:32:19 -0400

Executive Vice President Ed Forst ’82, who joined Harvard last fall from Goldman Sachs, where he oversaw management of hundreds of billions of dollars of investment assets (and previously served as chief administrative officer), is leaving the University as of August 1. The announcement comes after Forst had played an important role in leading Harvard’s response to the international credit-market crisis and recession—for example, the planning that culminated in the University placing $2.5 billion in new debt offerings last December, to reduce liquidity risk and protect the institution’s financial flexibility in straitened circumstances; and directing efforts to consolidate operations and trim administrative expenses. (See below for interviews with Forst and President Drew Faust, and for the official announcements of his departure.)

As Harvard’s first executive vice president, Forst was the “principal ranking operating officer” at the University, responsible for overseeing financial, administrative, and human-resources functions (each run by a vice president) and administrative information technology. His webpage at the Harvard homepage details Forst’s formal operating responsibilities, and lists his committee memberships, including the administrative deans council, the Harvard Management Company board of directors, the capital resource planning committee, the University science and engineering committee, the Allston strategy group, and others.

As recently as May 19, Forst attended a regular Faculty of Arts and Sciences faculty meeting, during which Faust referred to his role in response to a question from the floor concerning Harvard’s systems for communications during University emergencies. His impending departure leaves a gap in shaping the University’s financial strategy, at a time when the decline in the value of the endowment and other economic pressures have made that role critically important, and when the June 30 retirement of long-time vice president for administration Sally Zeckhauser opens questions about how best to organize and manage those large, diverse operations.

In a late-afternoon telephone conversation, Forst said that his departure resulted from a “combination of professional and personal” reasons, which he described as necessarily “complex,” a decision that had “evolved” over time. He had thought through the matter for a while, he said, but it was neither something that had been percolating for six months, nor the result of a sudden decision “last Friday” to meet with Faust and tell her he was leaving. Forst said he and Faust were in constant communication as they worked together, meeting directly every day when they were both in Cambridge and maintaining daily telephone contact when they were in different locations. Asked if any changes in University strategy or implementation might result from his leaving, Forst said that “from what I know, I can’t see this signals any changes” from the course that Faust and the deans of the schools had set. After he leaves his position, he noted, Faust had asked him to be involved in a senior volunteer capacity on the Committee on University Resources (the executive-level advisory group on fundraising) and on the Debt-Asset Management Committee, and he was eager to remain engaged in those roles. He had “great affection” for Harvard, kindled from his arrival at the College as a freshman in 1978. Emphasizing his enthusiastic support of the institution, Forst said, “I can’t feel any more affection or affiliation” for Harvard than he already does, the change in his employment notwithstanding.

Were there profound differences between Goldman Sachs and Harvard? Forst said, “Every organization is different from the next,” citing differences in operations and management norms even among firms within the financial-services industry. Decisions are made differently, the organizations are run differently, and the priorities differ—and for a place like Harvard, with its more than 300 years of history, which has done so many things well for so long, “It is different and it should be different, for good reasons,” he said. Newcomers to such institutions, he emphasized, ought to listen, acquaint themselves with the leadership and management teams, and learn.

Turning to personal matters, he would say only that weighing his work in Cambridge with his ties to New York was “complicated.” He described his working relationship with President Faust as strong, saying, “From before I started, through today, and through August 1, Drew Faust has been a big supporter of me, of me coming here, of what we tried to do together, what we have in motion.” He went out of his way to compliment the work of other colleagues as well, including Dan Shore, vice president for finance and chief financial officer; Jane Mendillo, president and chief executive officer of Harvard Management Company; President Faust again and her staff; and the deans and their leadership teams. Working as executive vice president had been “an incredible opportunity,” one that extended well beyond philanthropic involvement with the University. He hoped that his work had brought Harvard “a step farther along,” and said that he was “stronger for the experience” himself.

Although the formal announcement said Forst would return to the financial industry, he said he had not yet lined up his new position. His focus, he said, remains on fulfilling his Harvard responsibilities through the date of his planned departure, being sure that his colleagues have a clear direction for their work, and preparing to relocate his family to the New York area.

In a subsequent telephone conversation, on May 28, Faust said of the timing of Forst’s departure, “He and I began talking about this several weeks ago.” The decision to leave Harvard, she emphasized, came from him: “It was really him. He said, ‘I need to make a change.’” While leaving it to Forst to characterize his reasons for that decision, Faust stressed that “he was enormously important to me this year,” particularly as the University felt the consequences of the world financial upheaval (notably, the sharp decline in the value of the endowment). She said that she had turned to Forst both for specific measures related to Harvard’s response—such as the bond offerings last December—and for general context on financial concerns newly relevant to her leadership of the institution, from measures of stock-market volatility and international interest rates to the University’s credit rating. Faust echoed Forst’s words on their close working relationship and daily interactions, and said, “He’s been great to work with.” In light of his willingness to continue being involved with Harvard through high-level committees, she said that she looked forward to staying in touch after his formal departure on August 1.

Forst brought to the new role of executive vice president deep experience in both administration and financial services. The latter skills became unexpectedly important as his arrival on campus last September coincided with the most dangerous moments in the credit crisis. Looking ahead, Faust said, the role has been “redefined by the new world we find ourselves in.” With Sally Zeckhauser’s retirement, she noted, the leadership and organization of many central administration functions and services would be reconfigured. With the pace of planning, development, and construction in Allston changed “because there’s not so much activity over there” as had been envisioned only a few months ago, that central administration priority will be reconfigured as well, she noted. And in light of tight budget constraints, Harvard’s “schools are perforce considering collaborations…that many of us would not have been in a position to consider a year ago,” putting a premium on coordination of administrative and support systems. All those changed circumstances make the executive vice presidency—a position Faust said she had strongly advocated since her appointment as president—“even more important now.” Financial planning and strategy have been made more important by the external climate, as well, but the new “organizational imperatives” figure large in the portfolio of Forst’s successor “from the get-go,” Faust said. “It’s an enormous portfolio of assignments and skill sets,” she acknowledged, as a search begins.

How will decisions concerning financial strategy be made in the interim? Faust noted that Forst would remain at Harvard through July. She noted that CFO Dan Shore was “terrific,” that Harvard Management Company CEO Jane Mendillo and University Treasurer James Rothenberg were involved in important, continuing roles, and that Harvard Business School dean Jay Light (who is a director of the management company), among others, also remained regularly involved in advising on such matters.

In a letter to the community announcing Forst’s departure, Faust wrote:

Ed Forst has decided to step down Aug. 1 as Harvard’s executive vice president in order to return to New York, his longtime home, and to the financial services industry, where he has spent nearly all of his distinguished career.
I am very grateful for what Ed has done to shape the role of the executive vice president and to help Harvard chart a sound course through what has been an economically challenging time for our University, as for many others. His financial experience and expertise have been particularly important, and I know we will continue to benefit from his advice as a long-devoted alumnus and to build on a number of the initiatives he has set in motion.
We intend to move expeditiously on the search for a new executive vice president, and Ed and I will be working together with others to assure a smooth transition.

The full announcement read:

Edward C. Forst has decided to step down as the University’s executive vice president as of Aug. 1, to return with his family to New York and to resume his career in the financial services industry.
“Ed has been a leader in the financial industry for 26 years,” said President Drew Faust. “His expertise and experience have played a central role in shaping Harvard’s response to the extraordinary upheaval in the financial markets this year. I am grateful for what he has done to help us navigate a year of particular challenge and change, and I wish him all the best in his plans to return to New York, his longtime family home, and to the financial world, his longtime professional home. He will remain a valued alumnus and adviser, and I know we will continue to benefit from his knowledge and insight.”
Forst will continue in his role through the end of July, and after that will remain an active adviser to the University on financial and capital planning matters. Forst will continue to serve on the University’s Debt-Asset Management Committee and will join Harvard’s Committee on University Resources.
“I have been devoted to Harvard since I arrived here as a freshman in 1978,” said Forst. “It has been a privilege to lead the University’s financial, administrative, and human resources teams during such an unprecedented time in the University’s history, and I am very proud of all that has been accomplished by the talented colleagues I’ve worked with at Harvard. I look forward to continuing my close engagement with the University as an adviser and volunteer.”
Forst is a 1982 graduate of Harvard College and received his M.B.A. from Wharton in 1988. He has served as co-chair of the reunion gift committee for his 20th and 25th Harvard College reunions and as vice chair for his 15th reunion. From 2005 to 2008, he co-chaired the University Committee on Student Excellence and Opportunity, which was established to explore ways of reducing financial barriers to attending Harvard.
Forst came to Harvard in 2008 from The Goldman Sachs Group, Inc., where he was a member of the Management Committee, and most recently served as the firm’s global head of the Investment Management Division. He is currently a trustee of Carnegie Hall and previously served as a trustee of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, a private nonprofit ocean research, engineering, and education organization.
Faust said she would be moving expeditiously with the search for a new executive vice president, in consultation with deans, key administrators, and others.

Faculty of Arts and Sciences Details Initial Budget Cuts

Harvard Magazine — Mon, 11 May 2009 11:05:50 -0400

The Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) today unveiled a website with information on $77 million in cost-saving measures it is implementing now and in the fiscal year beginning July 1: www.fas.harvard.edu/home/planning. Dean Michael D. Smith told a “town hall ” meeting on April 14 that this resource would be forthcoming; he disclosed then that FAS’s total budget gap was $220 million, leaving more significant and difficult cuts to come. The website and Smith’s message today do not address what he then called the larger “reshaping” of how the faculty performs its core academic mission to realize those additional savings in programs and people during the next two years (see the full text of his message, below).

In announcing the website, Smith wrote to the community, “We anticipate that most of these measures will be staffing neutral. In implementing them, we will eliminate some positions and cease their associated activities. This will result in the reallocation or redeployment of staff where possible. However, as I have said before, the size of the financial challenge before us makes it increasingly likely that staff reductions will eventually be necessary.”

Separately, the University announced that 534 of 1,628 staff members eligible for an early-retirement incentive—about 33 percent—had accepted the offer. (FAS made offers to 521 staff members, of whom approximately 30 percent accepted early retirement.) The early retirements will ease, but likely not eliminate, the need for layoffs, as Smith’s statement suggests. Indeed, Marilyn Hausammann, vice president for human resources, wrote to the community that “Although Harvard’s schools and departments are now analyzing the impact of the pending retirements on their budgets, and for many schools further reductions in force will likely be necessary to meet budget targets, we remain hopeful that this program will help to reduce the need for adjustments to our workforce.”

As of October 2007 (the latest date for which figures have been published), the University employed about 12,500 non-faculty staff members (full-time equivalents), a number that likely grew further as research funding was received and programs were launched with endowment support. For the year ended June 30, 2008, compensation accounted for 48 percent of Harvard’s expenses ($1.7 billion); given budget reductions likely as a result of the Corporation’s decision to reduce distributions from the endowment for the next two fiscal years, personnel cuts are widely expected. (So far, no retirement-incentive program for faculty members has been announced. The staff program is funded by excess assets in the staff pension plan; faculty members are covered by a different plan, with different financial characteristics.)

Among the changes being implemented in FAS now—including reductions in the use of outside planning firms to prepare for building projects, reduced travel and entertainment, and lessened reliance on consultants—the website details the following (but provides no dollar figures of cost savings):

•Athletics: Malkin Athletic Center is closed this summer; the junior-varsity teams in hockey, basketball, and baseball are being changed to club status; and travel budgets are reduced.

•Dining services: Beginning in September, Houses will no longer offer hot breakfasts on weekdays; full breakfasts will be served in Annenberg Hall.

•Energy: Thermostats are being reduced to 68 degrees in winter and raised to 75 degrees in summer, cutting heating and cooling costs 3 percent.

•Exam proctors: Beginning this fall, faculty, graduate students, and staff will proctor exams, eliminating the need to hire additional staff.

•Graduate enrollment: As previously announced, the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences has reduced its entering Ph.D. class size for this fall.

•Libraries: Print journal subscriptions are being reduced, in favor of on-line subscriptions. The Quad Library, in Hilles, is being closed.

•Salaries: As previously announced, faculty and non-union staff salaries are frozen for the next fiscal year; nor will any bonuses accrue during the fiscal year.

Smith’s complete statement reads:

Dear Faculty, Staff and Students,

I am writing today to announce the creation of a new web resource to provide faculty, staff, and students with up-to-date information on many of the cost-saving measures being implemented in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. At www.fas.harvard.edu/home/planning, you will find detailed information about specific changes in services and programs, as well as cross-cutting administrative changes. This resource will be enhanced with additional features in the coming months, and will be updated as new measures and strategies are approved and implemented.

The Current List of Service and Program Changes
Last fall, departments and administrative units in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences began a planning process to identify a range of possible cost-savings to bring short-term and long-term budgets in line with our new economic reality. Of the more than $90 million of possible savings identified, $77 million were chosen for implementation.

The planning website does not present all of the cost-saving measures that we will begin implementing immediately. We have focused here on changes (in hours, offerings, and services) that will be visible to our community, as well as broad administrative changes that will affect units and departments across the FAS.

Individual departments, centers, and units have made other difficult trade-offs in support of the FAS’s cost-saving goals. Though the majority of those more local changes are not listed here, I want to acknowledge the critical importance of these efforts.

We anticipate that most of these measures will be staffing neutral. In implementing them, we will eliminate some positions and cease their associated activities. This will result in the reallocation or redeployment of staff where possible. However, as I have said before, the size of the financial challenge before us makes it increasingly likely that staff reductions will eventually be necessary. We are engaged in thoughtful and deliberative consideration of these actions and their potential impact.

A Two-Phase Process: Resize and Reshape
These measures represent the completion of the first phase of a two-phase process. In this first phase, administrators, faculty, and others expended enormous time, effort, and energy in finding innovative ways to resize their activities, i.e., to reduce costs through better use of resources and increased efficiencies. I am extremely grateful to everyone who worked so hard on this difficult, but critical resizing effort.

As our plans for resizing are implemented and the $77 million in cost-savings are realized, we as a community must now move forward with the second phase. As I described in the Town Hall Meeting on April 14, $77 million represents only 35 percent of the total $220 million annual deficit we face in academic year 2010-2011. It is not possible for us to rely solely on further resizing of our activities to eliminate the remaining annual deficit, and we clearly cannot operate indefinitely spending $143 million more each year in expenses than we receive in income. To address the rest of the looming annual deficit, I have called for a reshaping of the FAS in support of our teaching and research mission through a careful consideration of our academic and programmatic priorities.

The Next Phase: Targeted Working Groups
The nature of this second phase is quite different from the first, and will result in significant and visible changes to the way we pursue our teaching and research mission. Our approach to this second phase, therefore, will also be meaningfully different and will thoroughly and thoughtfully include input from our entire community. I have formed targeted working groups in each of the three academic divisions (Arts and Humanities, Science, and Social Science), two in the College, and one in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. These groups will produce proposals which I will consider between now and the spring semester of 2010.

Students, both graduate and undergraduate, will play an important role in the activities of these working groups. Harvard College Dean Evelynn Hammonds, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dean Allan Brandt and I will develop mechanisms to engage the broader student community throughout the next year in considering the proposed visions for the future of our institution that emerge from our efforts. As always, we welcome your thoughts and suggestions at prioritiesfas [dot] harvard [dot] edu.

Contact and Questions
Each of the measures posted on www.fas.harvard.edu/home/planning is accompanied by contact information and links to unit or program websites and resources.

The Future
New ideas and visions of the future have always been our strength. With all of your help, I remain convinced that we can use this financial crisis to build a stronger, healthier, and more vibrant institution. We cannot stand still, and, as dean, I refuse to let this crisis diminish our unsurpassed commitment to academic excellence, innovation, and discovery.

Ashbery Accepts Harvard Arts Medal

Harvard Magazine — Fri, 01 May 2009 15:19:14 -0400

Fifty years ago, John Ashbery ’49 was living in Paris and short on cash. He needed money to continue writing poetry, so he took up a job translating cheap detective novels from French into English. One novel meant one month of creation. Ashbery’s work, however, did not please his American editors. They wanted bodice-rippers, not crime tales. “I had to stop the action every once in a while and insert a sex scene,” the poet recounted during his April 30 visit to campus to accept the Harvard Arts Medal.

Ashbery’s poetry is often called obscure or difficult—he has said that he writes about the “experience of experience.” It is also incredibly vernacular. His poems, like the bodice-rippers, are filled with the vocabulary of daily life, even as they seek to express its deconstruction.

Nowadays, Ashbery no longer writes to please an editor—he sets the standard. Standing among the most respected and acclaimed poets of the twentieth century, he has earned almost every American award for poetry, from a Pulitzer Prize in 1975 for Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror to a MacArthur Foundation “genius grant” in 1985. He now holds one more honor: the Harvard Arts Medal.

The medal celebrates alumni and faculty members whose excellence in the arts has served education or the public good. Ashbery joins a distinguished and wide-ranging group of artists—past recipients include composer John Adams ’69, film director Mira Nair ’79, and musician Pete Seeger ’40.

The medal is conferred annually at the beginning of ARTS FIRST, a celebration of the arts on campus. Besides recognizing Ashbery’s achievements, the informal and relaxed ceremony (held in a packed New College Theatre) celebrated the legacy and future of the arts at the University.

The ceremony began with readings of Ashbery’s poems, including “Some Trees” and “What is Poetry,” by eight young poets, students of Boylston professor of rhetoric and oratory Jorie Graham. Arranged in two lines across the stage, the students declaimed passages; the manuscripts and proofs of the poems were projected on a large screen behind them. As each spoke Ashbery’s words, the audience could follow the poet’s scrawls and corrections, as if tracking the poem back to its original source of creation.

After a brief introduction by John Lithgow ’67, Ashbery took the stage with Daniel Chiasson, Ph.D. ’02, a poet, critic, assistant professor of English at Wellesley College, and Ashbery scholar, for a discussion of his life and writing.

Chiasson began by asking Ashbery about his childhood. Ashbery said he had little access to poetry as a child in rural upstate New York, and that the poetry he did read was “cozy and reassuring,” with “a lack of aesthetic daring.” “I outgrew that sort of thing,” he said.

When he arrived at Harvard, Ashbery recalled, “I started enjoying myself right away.” From his freshman year, he immersed himself in the vibrant poetry scene on campus, taking a workshop with the poet Theodore Spencer. “I was so thrilled to have an actual poet read my poetry,” he said. His time at Harvard was a particularly fruitful one for the arts: he recounted crossing paths with poets Kenneth Koch, Robert Creeley, and John Hawkes, and as an editor on the Harvard Advocate, he published poems by Frank O’Hara.

Although both would later be part of the “New York School of Poetry,” Ashbery did not know O’Hara until his senior year of college. O’Hara seemed intimidating, Ashbery said: “He didn’t look like someone who would tolerate fools. It turned out he did, all too gladly.” When the two finally met, they quickly became good friends.

It’s often said that Harvard students learn as much from each other as they do from their professors; from O’Hara, Ashbery said he learned about artistic innovations his professors weren’t aware of. Ashbery said his friend knew about each ground-breaking development in the art world and was eager to share them: he read Samuel Beckett when the poet and dramatist (who would go on to win the Nobel Prize for literature) was still unknown to most. He introduced Ashbery to Shostakovich by playing him the Russian composer’s experimental pieces on the Eliot House piano.

The discussion also touched on the poet’s collages—many of which he composed in his room in Dunster House. Ashbery said he had originally wanted to be a painter, and visual art has had a large influence on his work. He wrote art criticism for Newsweek before shying away from deadlines, which, he confessed, have proved “a fertile source of nightmares ever since.” He took his inspiration for Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror, his best-known poem, from a work by the Italian painter known as Parmigiano. Ashbery said cutting up and rearranging images for collages helped him develop his distinct deconstruction of language:

I would look at magazines and make collages out of words. It was a way of looking at language and finding out what made it tick. I cut it up with the idea that when I had found out what made it work, I would glue it back together again.

At conversation’s end, President Faust bestowed Ashbery’s medal—suspended, appropriately, from a crimson ribbon. “As we launch our celebration of the arts,” she said, “we can think of no greater honor than to intersect with John Ashbery once again on his great voyage.”

The Week's Events

Harvard Magazine — Fri, 01 May 2009 00:00:00 -0400

The rituals of graduation peak on Commencement day, which this year includes addresses by President Drew Faust and U.S. Secretary of Energy Steven Chu. For further details and updates, visit www.harvardmagazine.com or www.commencementoffice.harvard.edu.

* * *

MONDAY, JUNE 1

50th Reunion Presentations, 1:30. Jane Mendillo, president and CEO of Harvard Management Company, reports on the University endowment; a discussion with dean of admissions and financial aid William Fitzsimmons follows. Science Center.

50th Reunion Address and Dinner, at 5, remarks by President Drew Faust and dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences Michael D. Smith. Sanders Theatre. Dinner at 7, Science Center tent.

Harvard Kennedy School Class of 2009 Picnic, 4-7. HKS Courtyard.

TUESDAY, JUNE 2

50th Reunion Memorial Service, 9:3o. Memorial Church.

Phi Beta Kappa Literary Exercises, at 11, with poet Albert Goldbarth and orator James Engell, Gurney professor of English literature and professor of comparative literature.

50th Reunion Symposiums. At 1:30, “Environmental Change”; at 3:15, “Staying Healthy through Our 75th Class Reunion.” Sanders Theatre.

Baccalaureate Service for the Class of 2009 and their families, at 2. Tercentenary Theatre, followed by senior class picture, Widener steps.

Kennedy School Class Day Awards Ceremony, 1-4. Kennedy Forum.

Senior Class Family Dinner and Party, at 6. Reservations and tickets required. Athletic complex.

Harvard Extension School Alumni Banquet, cocktail reception at 6; dinner and program at 7. Reservations required. Quincy House.

WEDNESDAY, JUNE 3

ROTC Commissioning Ceremony, at 11:30, with President Drew Faust and General David Petraeus. Tercentenary Theatre.

Senior Class Day Picnic Luncheon, at noon. Reservations required. The Old Yard.

Divinity School Luncheon, at 1. Andover Lawn.

50TH REUNION SYMPOSIUMS. At 1:30, “The Future of the Global Economy”; at 3:15, “Understanding America and the World.” Sanders Theatre.

Senior Class Day Exercises, at 2, with the Harvard and Ivy Orations and NBC broadcast journalist Matt Lauer as guest speaker. Tercentenary Theatre.

Kennedy School Commencement at 2, with guest speaker Kathleen Sebelius, governor of Kansas and nominee for U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services. Kennedy Forum.

Law School Class Day, 2:30, with speaker Elena Kagan, J.D. ’86, Solicitor General of the United States and former dean of the school. Holmes Field.

Business School Class Day Ceremony, 2:30, with speaker Jamie Dimon, M.B.A. ’82, chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase, followed by a reception at 4. Baker Lawn.

Masters’ Receptions (time varies by House) for members of the senior class and guests. The Undergraduate Houses.

Graduate School of Education Convocation, at 3. Welcome by Dean Kathleen McCartney, among others, and award presentations. Radcliffe Yard.

Graduate School of Design Class Day at 4, with a reception to follow. Speaker to be announced. Gund Hall.

Harvard University Band, Harvard Glee Club, and Radcliffe Choral Society Concert, at 8. Free and open to the public. Tercentenary Theatre.

THURSDAY, JUNE 4 — COMMENCEMENT DAY

Yard Gates open at 6:45.

Law School Champagne Breakfast, at 7. Jarvis Field tent.

Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Breakfast, at 7. Lawn behind Perkins Hall.

Senior Chapel Service, at 8. Memorial Church.

Alumni Procession, 8:30. The Old Yard.

Academic Procession, 8:50. The Old Yard.

Medical School Faculty Symposium, 9-noon. “Healthcare Policy,” with faculty panelists. Registration required. Tosteson Medical Education Center.

Medical School Class of 1984 Reunion Symposium, 9-4:30. “From 1984 to the Brave New World—Journeys in Medicine.” Tosteson Medical Center.

The 358th Commencement Exercises, 9:45. Tercentenary Theatre.

Divinity School Diploma Ceremonies, at noon. Memorial Church. Lunch at 1, Andover Lawn.

Business School Luncheon, 11:30, for graduates and their guests. Tickets required. Shad Auditorium and tent.

Senior Luncheon and Diploma Ceremonies, 11:45. The Undergraduate Houses.

The General Alumni Spread, 11:45. Tickets required. The Old Yard.

The Tree Spread, for College classes of 1919-1958, noon. Alumni are guests of the College; all others must reserve a ticket. Holden Quadrangle.

Law School Luncheon and Diploma Ceremony, 11:45. Holmes Field.

Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Diploma Ceremony, 11:30, in Sanders Theatre, followed by a champagne reception and luncheon on the lawn behind Perkins Hall.

Extension School Diploma Ceremony, at noon. Loeb Drama Center.

Kennedy School Diploma Ceremony, 12:15, followed by luncheon. By ticket only. JFK Park.

Graduate School of Design Diploma Ceremony, 12:15. A luncheon follows. Gund Hall.

Graduate School of Education Diploma Ceremony, 12:15. Radcliffe Yard.

Business School Diploma Ceremony, 12:30. Baker Lawn.

Alumni Parade, 1:30. The Old Yard, in front of Harvard Hall.

The Annual Meeting of the Harvard Alumni Association, 2:30, with speeches by President Drew Faust and U.S. Secretary of Energy Steven Chu. Tercentenary Theatre.

Business School Reception for graduates and guests, 3-4:30. Shad Auditorium tent.

School of Public Health Diploma Ceremony, 2:30. Academic procession, followed by an address by author and surgeon Atul Gawande, M.P.H. ’99. Kresge Courtyard.

Medical and Dental Schools Class Day Ceremony, at 2, with guest speaker Stephen J. Bergman (“Samuel Shem”) ’66, M.D. ’73, novelist and author of The House of God. HMS Quadrangle.

Harvard Gay and Lesbian Caucus Annual Commencement Dinner. Cocktails at 5, followed by dinner and guest speaker Evelynn Hammonds, dean of the College and Rosenkrantz professor of the history of science and of African and African American studies. Lowell House. Reservations required for dinner. For details, visit www.hglc.org/dinner.html.

FRIDAY, JUNE 5

25th Reunion Symposia Day, 9-4. “Searching for Meaning—25 Years Later.” Sanders Theatre.

Radcliffe Commemorative Service, at 9. Christ Church Cambridge, Zero Garden Street.

Medical School Alumni Day, 9-12. The alumni association’s annual meeting, followed by a presentation (“Doctors as Writers”), remarks by Dean Jeffrey Flier, a luncheon, and class photos. HMS Quadrangle.

Radcliffe Awards Symposium, 10:15-noon. “Seeking Harmony in a Tumultuous World: How Does an Individual Make a Difference?” moderated by Joan Meschino ’87 with alumnae panelists. With presentation of the Alumnae Recognition Awards, the Jane Rainie Opel ’50 Young Alumna Award, and the inaugural Radcliffe Fellowship Award. Loeb Drama Center.

Radcliffe Institute Annual Luncheon, 12:30, with an address by Sandra Day O’Connor, former associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, and recipient of the 2009 Radcliffe Institute Medal. Registration required. Radcliffe Yard.

25th Reunion Symposia and Life Dialogues, at 2. Location to be announced.

* * *

For updates on Harvard reunions, Radcliffe Day, and events for graduating seniors, visit www.commencementoffice.harvard.edu, or contact the Harvard Alumni Association (124 Mount Auburn Street, Cambridge) at 617-495-2555; haaharvard [dot] edu; or www.haa.harvard.edu. Information on all other professional or graduate school events may be found at their respective websites.

The Harvard Information Center, Holyoke Center, is open every day but Sunday, 9 to 5 (telephone: 617-495-1573).

Shared Interest Group Gatherings

Friday, June 5

Alumnae and Friends of Radcliffe College, at 2:30. Radcliffe Gym, Room 112.

Saturday, June 6

Harvard Alumni Entrepreneurs Reunion Reception, at 2. Straus Hall Common Room.

Harvardwood Third Annual Reunion Mixer, at 2. Tommy Doyle’s.

Harvard Veterans Alumni Organization Meet and Greet, at 3. Legal Seafoods Outdoor Bar, The Charles Hotel.

Harvard Humanist Alumni Reunion, at 3. Casablanca Café.

Science Fiction Alumni Reunion, at 3. Sever Hall.

Harvard Black Alumni Society Seventh Annual Reunion Reception, at 3. Ticknor Lounge, Boylston Hall.

Harvard Jewish Alumni Network Reception, at 4. Smith Hall, Harvard Hillel.

The Dalai Lama Visits to Speak—and Plant a Tree

Harvard Magazine — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 16:19:51 -0400

His Holiness the Dalai Lama spoke to a capacity crowd at Harvard’s Memorial Church on April 30, as the guest of the Harvard Divinity School and the Harvard Graduate School of Education. The visit had been so eagerly anticipated that members of the University community entered a lottery for tickets to his talk. Those fortunate enough to find themselves in the pews witnessed an opening performance of dance and song by eight dancers in long dresses, colorful serape-like blankets, and beaded headdresses. A solo musician accompanied them on the Tibetan piwong, a two-stringed instrument related to the violin, and the eight-string Tibetan mandolin. There was also a sounding of the long horn, a sacred Tibetan instrument that welcomes people to a religious ceremony. After removing his shoes and pulling his feet up on his chair beneath his crimson robe, the Dalai Lama discussed “Educating the Heart.”

A central theme was the Buddhist virtue of compassion. The Dalai Lama enumerated a lengthy list of ways in which people differ from each other (age, sex, race, etc.), but stressed that “fundamentally, there are no differences,” and that we must practice compassion for each other. “By nature, the human brain is potential,” he said. “By nature, we all have compassion. Material prosperity alone is not enough. Education alone is not enough. Is there another alternative?”

He spoke of a fellow Tibetan monk who cited a danger he faced during 18 years as a prisoner of the Chinese: “Danger of losing compassion for the Chinese.” The Dalai Lama expanded this idea to the notion of “compassion for your so-called enemy. Compassion now looks very useful and very important.” (In an ironic coincidence, Harvard’s Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies kicked off a four-day scholarly conference, “The People’s Republic of China at 60: An International Assessment,” on the evening of the Tibetan leader’s visit to campus.)

One question from those submitted by the audience asked, “Have you ever doubted your faith?” The Dalai Lama began with a simple, amused “No.” He then explained that “Buddha made it very clear that ‘My followers should not accept my teachings out of faith, but out of investigating for themselves.’ ” Another questioner asked whether, if His Holiness had the military might of the United States, he would use it to defend the Tibetans. The Dalai Lama provoked laughter with his facetious response: “If I had that power, I should act like Saddam Hussein.” He spent some time explaining that anyone who commits violence will have to deal with the consequences of that violence: “Killing your so-called enemy, you have a problem. When there are 100 killed, more problems—1,000 killed, more problems.”

After the talk, the Dalai Lama went outdoors to plant a tree ceremonially in commemoration of his visit. Divinity dean William A. Graham and education dean Kathleen McCartney wielded shovels alongside him, as did President Drew Faust, who called the tree—a hybrid of a monarch birch from Asia and a paper birch from North America, created especially for the occasion at the Arnold Arboretum—“a reminder of our interdependence.” The Dalai Lama used the sapling as an occasion to speak about ecology. “Ecology is unlike war,” he said. “War has images of dying and destruction, but [destruction of] ecology happens invisibly, silently. Taking care of ecology should be part of our daily life.”

Video: High-Tech Golf Lesson

Harvard Magazine — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 06:45:00 -0400

Watch this video to sit in as a golf expert analyzes Emily Balmert’s swing and gives her tips (filmed at a nearby GolfTEC facility on March 19).

The Bells Return to Russia

Harvard Magazine — Sun, 26 Apr 2009 19:13:53 -0400

The April 27 issue of the New Yorker featured an in-depth exploration, by Elif Batuman ’99, of the journey a set of church bells from Russia’s Danilov Monastery to Harvard and back again. (To read the article, start with the abstract here, then either log in or register with the site to get the full text.)

Batuman lived in Lowell House as an undergraduate and has less-than-fond memories of the bells—for instance, the “peculiarly tuneless variations on melodies like ‘Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star’” played by the Lowell House Klappermeisters on Sunday afternoons.

But a decade (and a doctoral dissertation in comparative literature) later, she finds herself delving deep into the bells’ history. She probes their meaning in Russian culture, stretching all the way back to the eleventh century and supporting her claims with literary references. She tells the oddly poignant story of Konstantin Saradzhev, the young Russian who came to Lowell House in 1930 to oversee the bells’ installation. And she quotes Lowell House master Diana Eck, among other Harvard figures mentioned, on the complicated process of returning the bells.

Businessman and philanthropist Charles R. Crane, LL.D. ’22, bought the bells and gave them to Harvard to save them from being melted down, the sad fate that many other historic bells met as Soviet authorities dismantled places of worship. On March 17, the bells were rung for the first time since their return to their original home.

Hear Batuman discuss her article in this podcast (which also includes the sound of the bells themselves). Visit Batuman’s blog for additional related links and a behind-the-scenes account of what it’s like to write for the New Yorker.

Read Harvard Magazine’s account of the bells’ removal from Lowell House last summer (with photographs) here; for previous coverage, see these items in the magazine’s College Pump column:

Zvon Song?

Bell Swap

A Peal Before Leaving

Report on Harvard University Police Department Released

Harvard Magazine — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 16:37:20 -0400

A committee appointed by Harvard president Drew Faust last year to review “how best to assure the strongest possible relations and mutual understanding” between the Harvard University Police Department and the University’s “highly diverse community” has issued its report. President Faust has asked Provost Steven E. Hyman and Executive Vice President Ed Forst to review the group’s recommendations to determine which can and should be implemented.

For background, see “Probing Policing,” in this magazine’s November-December 2008 issue.

Click here for the University’s press release, containing a link to the report itself.

On the Medicalization of Our Culture

Harvard Magazine — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 11:52:08 -0400

There are perhaps few academic topics of equal interest to scholars of history, law, anthropology, neuroscience, and literature. But this was part of the point when scholars of these disciplines gathered on April 22 for a symposium on medicalization—a phenomenon, they argued, that has infiltrated nearly every facet of modern life.

This explains how Christopher Lane, a professor of literature at Northwestern University, came to write a book about social anxiety disorder and commercial interests’ role in the condition’s definition and in the approval of drugs to treat it.

In the introduction to his talk, Lane offered these general comments:

Medicalization isn’t the most elegant noun…but it’s the best one we have for describing how common emotions and traits are turned into treatable conditions. Bad breath becomes halitosis, for example, and impotence erectile dysfunction. Even overdoing plastic surgery gets a brand-new name: body dysmorphic disorder. To put it bluntly, this process of pathologizing has gotten out of control. It’s become a juggernaut that no one seems able to stop.

Lane outlined the history of social anxiety disorder, as presented in his book: a name change from “social phobia”; the 1997 action by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to relax restrictions and allow direct-to-consumer advertising (which only one other country, New Zealand, allows); a subsequent ad campaign that likened the disorder to being “allergic to people,” created by an advertising agency that also served such major corporations as Visa.

Jennifer Fishman, assistant professor in the department of social studies of medicine at McGill University, divined a similar conspiracy in the definition of erectile dysfunction and the development and approval of Viagra. Until the 1960s, she said, impotence was regarded as a natural part of aging. With the sexual revolution, impotence was reenvisioned as a psychological condition treatable with psychotherapy; in the 1980s, she said, Western society began to move toward its current view, actively encouraged by the field of urology. With too little business for the number of practicing urologists, Fishman asserted, a group of doctors founded the International Society for Impotence Research in 1982 and, in 1989, a journal for the study of impotence. The development of penile injections and implants in the 1980s, also by urologists, shifted the view of arousal from a process governed by the mind to something more physical, she said.

But the discovery of Viagra itself came about by accident, Fishman said: the drug was originally tested as a treatment for hypertension and coronary artery disease, and it was only when a suspiciously high number of subjects refused to return their leftover supplies at the study’s conclusion that Pfizer realized the drug had a different effect that could also be marketed. Fishman displayed a selection of ads showing how Viagra’s marketing campaigns have evolved since it received FDA approval in 1998. The earliest ads featured elderly couples, but more recent examples feature younger models and hint at recreational use rather than disease treatment.

In analyzing ads for statins—cholesterol-lowering drugs such as Pfizer’s Lipitor—Jeremy Greene, a physician and historian of science at Harvard, argued that pharmaceutical companies have looked to “the suburbs of disease” for new customers. That is, Greene contends that because most people with very high cholesterol are already taking medication, drug companies are targeting people with moderately high cholesterol—levels within what some would define as the healthy range. Displaying a Merck ad that read “Stop! Do you know your cholesterol number?” and showed a stoplight with numerical values assigned to the red, yellow, and green lights, Greene said that such messages helped to enshrine the cholesterol level as a relevant measurement every American should know.

Nearly 60 percent of Americans age 50 or older meet the current specifications for being prescribed statins, although only 400,000 people have cholesterol high enough “to clearly constitute a disease,” Greene said. He displayed a 1960s illustration of “hypercholesterolemic xanthomatosis,” in which people had cholesterol levels so high that the substance collected in growths on their eyelids, elbows, knees, and buttocks. At that time, the cutoff for this condition was defined as 400 milligrams per deciliter—the extreme right tail of the bell curve for the American population. Standards today deem anything greater than 240 mg/dL as “high risk,” and the range from 200 to 240 mg/dL as “borderline high risk.” Greene noted that, at an FDA hearing on Merck’s bid to sell a statin drug over the counter, the company argued that anyone with cholesterol over 150 should take a statin daily. Using this standard, he said, 90 percent of Americans would qualify.

The scholars outlined the multiple societal forces that feed into the trend of medicalization:

the very existence of health insurance (costs are only reimbursable when associated with a definable medical condition
death certificates (the need to give a name to what caused a person’s death)
research funding (funding is more likely for problems defined as diseases)
drug trials and approval
and even a desire to wash one’s hands of blame for one’s condition (for instance, by considering obesity a disease that assails people rather than the result, at least in part, of one’s own actions and lifestyle).

In the domain of criminal law, Harvard Law School professor Martha Field said, there has been a move away from medicalization, at least with regard to one concept: insanity. Use of the insanity defense tapered off, she says, after states made their laws stricter in the wake of John Hinckley Jr.’s acquittal, by reason of insanity, in the shooting of President Ronald Reagan in 1981.

The area of disability law, on the other hand, “has been medicalized for a long time,” Field said, although people with disabilities have mixed feelings about the phenomenon. In general, they would like to be regarded as part of a normal range of life circumstances, she said, but in order to gain protections, they have had to envision their disabilities as medical problems, at least for some purposes. Physicians, she said, serve as “gatekeepers,” determining whether a given individual qualifies for a handicapped parking permit; deciding whether a patient qualifies for disability insurance; testifying that a patient is able to perform a particular kind of job with specific accommodations for his or her disability.

In the realm of reproductive rights, Field argued that medicalization has at times reached too far, encroaching on decisions that should properly remain moral and personal. She recalled the “120 Rule” that was common in hospitals before being struck down in a 1973 suit against a Worcester hospital: the hospital refused to perform sterilization on any woman for whom age, multiplied by the number of children already born, did not equal at least 120.

As genetic analysis capabilities have developed, Field added, she hears many complaints from expectant parents who feel pressured by their physicians to have amniocentesis done—even if the parents don’t intend to abort their fetus under any circumstances—and then, if the test does reveal a disability, who report further medical pressure to abort. In cases involving conjoined twins, Field said that national laws and practices vary widely, though they all claim to be based in sound medicine. Where the American system favors keeping the twins conjoined, Field noted, a British court required separation in a recent case, even though the twins’ parents opposed it. “The question,” she said, “is not a medical one. The question is a personal one.”

Offering an ecosocial perspective, Harvard School of Public Health professor Nancy Krieger highlighted some benefits of medicalization. Child abuse was not defined as a phenomenon until 1962, she pointed out; it surely existed before then, she noted, but its naming led to the ability to prosecute cases, as well as a cultural shift toward disapproval. She also cautioned against throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Although in some cases medicalization’s reach does extend too far, she allowed, “we cannot ignore the fact that injustice has biological effects and causes health problems.” (For more on Krieger’s work, see this article from the Harvard Magazine archives.)

The presenters devoted much discussion to the DSM-IV (that is, the current, fourth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for mental disorders). For Lane, the manual was the object of scathing criticism: : “The DSM criteria grow longer and more commonplace with each edition of the diagnostic manual, and the prevalence rates are revised upward so many times that more and more adults and children are defined every year as mentally ill.”

University provost Steven E. Hyman, noting that he serves on the committee for the DSM-V (the forthcoming revised edition of the DSM-IV), said that he agrees with “almost everything” in Lane’s critical view of medicalization—“and yet,” he added, “I have shamelessly used medicalization to achieve what I believe are very good ends in other parts of my life.”

Hyman, a neuroscientist who directed the National Institute of Mental Health from 1996 until 2001, agreed that the manual is flawed, but cautioned his colleagues not to discredit it entirely. By systematizing the definitions of various mental illnesses, the manual has enabled research—without it, there would be no way to evaluate grant applications and allocate funding fairly, he said. “We needed to have a shared nomenclature if we were going to make any research progress, if clinicians were going to be able to communicate with each other, if we were going to be able to prescribe drugs.”

The manual—and the medicalization of mental illness—have helped put mental disorders on par (or at least closer to equal treatment) with other diseases, and to give psychiatrists the same dignity as cardiologists, Hyman said. As a major victory he cited the federal law barring health insurers from imposing lower coverage limits on mental-health services than they do on other medical treatments. (Congress passed the so-called mental-health parity law in 1996, but allowed it to expire; a permanent version passed in 2008 as part of the TARP financial bailout bill.)

Hyman noted, for example, historical differences in the way the healthcare system treated schizophrenia and Parkinson’s disease. That one is considered a mental illness and one physical is seemingly random, he said, given that both diseases are, at a basic level, disorders of dopamine. Still, he said, much of the manual is based on a faulty assumption—rather than a clear boundary of “ill” or “not ill,” mental disorders are, like elevated cholesterol, “quantitatively continuous with what is normal.” Hyman was skeptical that the revision committee could make such a fundamental change; that, he said, would be akin to “repairing the airplane while it’s flying.”

But he did voice hopes that the committee could make the manual’s descriptions of mental disorders better and more accurate in ways that ease the path for research. For example, he said, the current definition of schizophrenia carries no mention of one of the condition’s most disabling symptoms: the inability to hold information in one’s mind long enough to form a plan and execute it. Until that symptom becomes part of the definition, he asserted, it will be impossible to get funding to research the impact, if any, of drugs’ effect on it.

While acknowledging a general impulse to name ever more disorders, Hyman argued that people with mental illness would actually be better served by reducing the proliferation of distinct disorders into “families” of related conditions that (though different in some details) might share some aspects of treatment. “The only way to get some chance of modeling nature better is to get back to a far smaller number of disorders,” he said—and there is strength in numbers in the sense that clinical trials are more accurate (and more easily funded) when they involve a larger sample size.

no matter how far medicalization goes, Monrad professor of the social sciences Charles Rosenberg reminded his listeners, we remain stubbornly human and flawed:

Sickness, pain, and disability remain ultimately individual and idiosyncratic. We can choose, for example, to avoid the behavioral admonitions built into the guidelines for chronic-disease management. Some of us employ alternative healing practices; others opt out through what is euphemistically termed noncompliance or non-adherence. We choose, that is, not to take our prescribed pills and have our regular blood tests, mammograms, and colonoscopies. We may eat the guilt-inducing cheeseburger or smoke the ever more guilt-inducing cigarette. A woman may opt for a bilateral mastectomy or simply choose to live with what is, after all, a heightened statistical risk and not a disease.

So strong is our impulse toward the individual and idiosyncratic, toward viewing ourselves as agents capable of choice, toward viewing our lives as stories, Rosenberg said, that we keep reintroducing value judgments into the bland, emotionless world of medical terminology:

Health and illness cannot be reduced to morally neutral terms. We are commended for fighting cancer, for mastering impulse, for adhering to medical discipline. We can also blame ourselves and judge others for actions that seem, in retrospect, to have invited sickness. There is, for instance, a comforting order in the link between cigarette smoking and lung cancer. Disease trajectories are narratives, and thus stages on which we perform as individuals and moral actors. In the West’s bureaucratic and technology-dependent environment, it is ironic that, in some ways, pain, sickness, and incapacity remain a final and ultimately inaccessible citadel of human idiosyncrasy. We are shaped by our diagnoses. We are not reduced to them.

In the opening remarks, Humanities Center director Homi Bhabha had noted the stark distinction between American attitudes and those he observed growing up in Bombay:

I remember seeing friends and relatives tyrannized by medically treatable conditions that the family or the community couldn’t bear to recognize for fear of public shame. Serious disorders were absorbed into the realm of spiritual life and normalized by religious custom or ritual, to the relief of all, until suddenly the illness ripped apart both the individual and supportive institutions—family, temple, community. A sense of moral failure haunts and humiliates those who must endure their illnesses as a failure of will because society cannot face up to its responsibilities.

Bhabha’s point spoke to an observation, by Graduate School of Arts and Sciences dean Allan Brandt (a historian of science with appointments in the faculties of arts and sciences and of medicine), that medicalization is not inherently, or simply, good or bad, but—like most phenomena that cut such a wide cultural swath—complex.

General Petraeus Speaks at the Kennedy School

Harvard Magazine — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 12:52:20 -0400

U.S. Army General David H. Petraeus, commanding officer of U.S. Central Command, spoke yesterday to a capacity crowd at the Harvard Kennedy School (HKS) at an event that honored Harvard’s student veterans. U.S. Marine Corps veteran Maura Sullivan, a joint-degree student at HKS and Harvard Business School, noted in her introductory remarks that more than 1,200 Harvard alumni have given their lives in military service. She also called on the University to reinstate an on-campus ROTC program and to support the “Yellow Ribbon” program in the new GI Bill, which would help veterans attend Harvard.

A standing ovation welcomed Petraeus, who gave a detailed description of the “Anaconda” strategy—steps taken to pacify on-the-ground conditions in Iraq during the past two years. He explained, for example, the importance of “getting the big ideas right” before committing energies to policies or tactics. In Iraq, one such big idea was to have the troops live with and among the people, rather than barricaded in military compounds. (“You can’t commute to the fight,” he said.) Living in close proximity to Iraqi citizens helped build local trust for the military effort, and also helped identify the real enemy actors. He told of how he pressed his officers to take initiatives in the nation-building effort: “We met this morning with the council of sheiks,” one reported to him. “Now I’m working on getting air conditioners into the mosque.”

In Afghanistan, Petraeus explained, the big ideas and strategies will have to be adapted for the indigenous society and culture. Troops will not be moving into mountain villages to live alongside local residents; instead, they might camp on the edge of the village. He said that although he is optimistic about the long-term prospects in Afghanistan, in the short term, things may well get worse before they get better. In both Iraq and Afghanistan, he noted, the military strategy aims to build cooperative relationships with moderate local leaders, and puts emphasis on separating the “irreconcilables” (hardcore terrorists and extremists) from “reconcilables.”

After the HKS talk, Petraeus attended and spoke at a dinner honoring the military veterans now studying at the University. He reminisced about his years at Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, where he earned a Ph.D. in international relations in 1987, and thanked the Harvard veterans “for your decision to push yourself intellectually. Leadership,” he told them, “requires thoughtful, nuanced, out-of-the-box thinkers.”

See here for the Harvard News Office report on the Petraeus talk.

Ancestral Influences

Harvard Magazine — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 22:16:06 -0400

Phillip Charette, M.Ed. ’94, says his artistic style has evolved during the decade he’s spent as a professional artist. Particularly influential, he says, was a 2003 trip to the Smithsonian Institution to view Yup’ik masks from the museum’s collection. Charette’s art had always combined traditional Yup’ik symbols and his own modern touches; at the Smithsonian, he encountered new symbols, and masks that used familiar elements in a new way. Below is a selection of Charette’s creations (both pre- and post-Smithsonian-visit); each mask appears alongside a historical mask from the Smithsonian’s Yup’ik collection that uses some of the same motifs. (In each pair, Charette’s pieces are on the left, the Smithsonian’s on the right.)

Left: Courtesy of Santa Fe Indian Market-SWAIA; Right: Courtesy of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of the American Indian

In Yup’ik lore, the crane connotes stealth, power, and insight. The human face on the bird’s belly (in both masks) represents its yua, or spirit—the part of the animal that understands, and can relate to, humans. The pair of hands (also seen in both masks) are a typical Yup’ik symbol indicating that the mask is for use by a shaman. Historical Yup’ik masks—at least those that have survived—were made of wood; Charette crafts his from clay, but often tries to give the appearance of wood.

Left: Photograph by Mitchel Wienken/Portland Art Museum; Right: Courtesy of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of the American Indian.

Both these masks depict Amikuk, a creature of Yup’ik legend. Writing in the early twentieth century, the collector and Alaska resident A.H. Twitchell described Amikuk as “a spirit that lives in the ground. He comes out at times but leaves no hole in the ground. He sometimes dislikes men and will jump through them, but leaves no mark. The man then lies down and dies.” The “teeth” (which are wood in the Smithsonian mask, and not animal bone but porcelain, hand sculpted by the artist, in Charette’s mask) serve as a reminder “to use our gifts for good effect, or they will consume us later in life,” says Charette. Objects that hang from the bottom of the mask ward off evil spirits with their sound (as in a windchime).

Left: Courtesy of Stonington Gallery; Right: Courtesy of the Smithsonian Institution

Charette’s Arctic Dancer mask and this Smithsonian mask display similar asymmetrical treatment of the eyes. In the Yup’ik tradition, white dots on a black background represent stars in the sky and the spirits of ancestors.

Left: Courtesy of Phillip Charette; Right: Courtesy of the Smithsonian Institution

In both Charette’s Grandpa’s Life dance stick and this hanging dance ornament from the Smithsonian collection, small figures are appended to the piece’s main body. In Charette’s sculpture, the figures are crafted from Styrofoam fishing floats that he recovered, after his grandfather’s death, from a spot where they used to fish together; Charette attached small “singing spirit” masks, symbolizing the traditional Yup’ik view of death and the afterlife, to the floats. The Smithsonian piece features two walruses, a whale, a seal, and a fish—and holes for three more figures that were lost.

Left: Courtesy of Phillip Charette; Right: Photograph courtesy of the Smithsonian Museum

In Yup’ik lore, the walrus is a symbol of strength. Charette’s version incorporates “singing spirit” masks and other details that connote ancestors. The Smithsonian mask, also collected by A.H. Twitchell, depicts “the spirit that drives the walrus, sea-lions, and seals towards the shore so the hunter can get them,” Twitchell wrote.

Left: Courtesy of Stonington Gallery; Right: Courtesy of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of the American Indian

This mask by Charette is one of a pair depicting Negaqvaq, the North Wind spirit. The appendage coming out of the head leads to three rings that represent the wind spirit’s breath. The Smithsonian mask represents Tomanik, the “windmaker” figure of Yup’ik lore—the light-colored tube (top) being for winter, and the black tube (bottom) for summer. (Charette uses wild turkey feathers in place of the owl feathers used traditionally because owls are said to travel with the spirits and be strongly connected to the spirit world.) The masks’ thumbless hands are an invocation against greed, says Charette: they warn the viewer to hold back from overharvesting natural resources and to be a good steward of the earth. Charette cut holes into the hands of his masks as points of entry for spirits. Each mask features a pair of wooden rings whose significance Charette describes this way: “The inner ring represents the here and now of our existence in the physical world. The outer ring represents the unseen part of our existence where spirits move freely and may be found. Both rings are connected to each other, symbolizing the traditional Yup’ik belief in the constant connection between the physical and the spiritual worlds.”

Left: Courtesy of Phillip Charette; Right: Courtesy of the Smithsonian Institution (main image and inset)

Charette intended this mask, from his Poisoned series, as direct commentary on his Smithsonian research. In the process, he comments on the practice of collecting and displaying Native American artifacts in general, and more broadly on the relationship between Native Americans and European settlers. Charette saw many Yup’ik masks that had been treated with arsenic as a pesticide when the museum acquired them, and then further defiled by being stamped with the word “poisoned” once the dangers of topical exposure to arsenic became known. This mask represents his take on a common Yup’ik form (the Smithsonian mask being one example). Charette uses red paint to stand in for the blood that would line masks’ mouth and eye openings in historical masks (particularly visible in the inset image, a rear view of the Smithsonian mask). A book on Yup’ik masks and their history relates that one Yup’ik woman, viewing photographs of masks such as this Smithsonian piece, “recalled the well-known story of the child with a mouth from ear to ear that ate its mother and then went from house to house eating people.”

Left: Courtesy of the Hallie Ford Museum of Art, Willamette University; Right: Courtesy of the Smithsonian Institution

Charette’s Old Sea Bird Yua mask is part of the permanent collection at the Hallie Ford Museum of Art in Salem, Oregon. The book on Yup’ik masks describes the Smithsonian piece as “delicate mask, both bird and face, collected by J.H. Turner on the lower Yukon, 1891” and offers the following story from a Yup’ik woman: “There was an angalkuq [shaman] who was very prominent, who was approached by a little calling bird out in the ocean. While he was on ice early in the morning, a little bird landed above him and began to sing. As he listened to it singing, he understood its call saying, ‘It is going to get stormy. Don’t stay there, go up to the land.’ …When he understood what it was saying he went up to the land. Shortly after that, it got very stormy and pieces of ice began to break off and float out to the ocean. That little bird was probably his little tuunraq [helping spirit].”

Left: Courtesy of Stonington Gallery; Right: Courtesy of the Smithsonian Institution

Charette says his horsehair firing method represents “the chaos Yup’ik are in as a result of forced assimilation and acculturation.” This falcon mask from his Transformation series follows a time-honored Yup’ik form seen in the Smithsonian piece, described as “simultaneously a bird and a human face, collected by J.H. Turner from the lower Yukon, 1891.”

Left: Courtesy of Phillip Charette; Right: Courtesy of the Smithsonian Institution

Charette’s wolf mask (one of his few wooden pieces) is a very modern twist on a traditional Yup’ik form. He carved the mask from a piece of wood given to him by an artist friend as a “challenge.” Inspiration for this piece came from a personal encounter Charette had with the powerful animal while hunting with relatives in Alaska. Charette recalls looking down to see a footprint the size of his hand—with water seeping into it, indicating its freshness. Charette never saw the wolf, but heard it walking close by, he says: “It seemed that we were listening to each other for about a half hour before the wolf moved on to something else. In that time, I did not sense danger but felt a deep sense of curiosity with a strong presence.”

Images of objects from the Smithsonian Collection are reproduced with permission from The Living Tradition of Yup’ik Masks: Agayuliyararput (our way of making prayer) by Ann Fienup-Riordan; photography by Barry McWayne; University of Washington Press, 1996.

New Vistas in 3-D

Harvard Magazine — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 23:00:52 -0400

Press the “play” button in the video screen above to take a guided tour of the 3-D PDF with Alyssa Goodman. Then explore the Perseus molecular cloud for yourself: click here to view the 3-D PDF. Try out the features on your own, or follow the instructions below.

Important: The above-linked PDF loads properly only in Adobe Reader or Adobe Acrobat (version 8 or newer). The 3-D functions do not work correctly when viewed in a Web browser or other PDF viewer such as Preview. Download the Adobe software free of charge here.

The image that loads by default shows the L1448 region of the Perseus molecular cloud, analyzed using the dendrogram algorithm developed by Erik Rosolowsky, Alyssa Goodman, and colleagues. Using your mouse, click and drag the image to rotate it and view the same region from the side, from behind, or from above or below. You can always click the “home” button in the toolbar to return to the original view.

To zoom, click the “magnifying glass” image in the toolbar and then drag your mouse upward (to magnify) or downward (to shrink) along the image.

You’ll see two sets of options on the left-hand side of your screen. Both allow you to add different categories of data to (or remove them from) the image. “Dendrogram decomposition” refers to what you see in the default image, the output of the dendrogram algorithm. “CLUMPFIND decomposition” refers to the output of the older algorithm that didn’t acknowledge hierarchical structures (very dense areas nested within other dense areas). Check one box and uncheck the other to view these two separately; keep both boxes checked to see how the two analyses of the same Perseus region overlap. The “billiard markers” provide a set of landmarks to help you keep your bearings as you examine and rotate the two images: they mark the locations of the four most significant self-gravitating structures (see below). The last option in this list allows you to turn on or off the labels of the axes (two dimensions in space and one of velocity).

The second menu offers several more different views of the dendrogram and CLUMPFIND output. Note, in particular, the second option in the list, “dendrogram: self-gravitating structures.” Self-gravitating structures are pockets of matter so dense that the particles are close enough to one another that gravity takes hold. Scientists look for these pockets as clues to where stars will form. If you rotate this image to view it from the side, you can see that the self-gravitating material in this region divides into two patches, one bigger and one smaller. Without 3-D imaging software—adapted from medical-imaging software by Michael Halle and colleagues at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and the Initiative for Innovative Computing—the scientists could not have learned that these two patches are separate; the gap between them is not visible from the front view, or the perspective from the direction of Earth, which is all telescopes can provide.

Linking Brain to Behavior

Harvard Magazine — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 16:26:45 -0400

A fruit-fly maggot navigates its environment as it searches for food. The
simple behavior of the larva as it responds to stimuli can be recorded,
analyzed, and quantified, providing an opportunity to describe the precise
relationship between behavior and activity in neurons.

C. elegans roundworms navigate a temperature gradient from warm (right side of the plate) to cold (left side of the plate). Worms acclimate to the specific temperatures at which they are grown; when exposed to higher temperatures, the worms will move toward the temperature they are accustomed to. By quantifying the trajectories of these movements, shown in green, Aravinthan Samuel’s lab is uncovering the basis of this behavioral strategy: how a sensory response hard-wired in the worms’ neural circuits is transformed into an observable behavior.

Videos courtesy of Aravinthan Samuel

Science and Song

Harvard Magazine — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 14:26:08 -0400

The following tracks are posted here courtesy of Pardis Sabeti.

“Coming Up”

Sabeti wrote this song at Oxford, while working on her doctoral dissertation (an analysis of natural selection as seen in resistance to malaria in African populations). She would work in the lab every day for 14 to 16 hours, then come home and pick up her guitar to relax. One day, she says, “out popped the song.”

“Absence”

This song expresses the angst Sabeti felt over having to choose between a career in medicine and a career as a research scientist. “It was about not knowing what you want to do in life, and so staying on the fence forever, and essentially losing in the waiting,” she says. Although Sabeti now works as a research scientist at the Center for Systems Biology, she earned an M.D. from Harvard Medical School in 2006 (and in fact was the third woman ever to graduate summa cum laude). She considers her medical training essential to her research work, adding a focus on the whole organism to the focus on individual genes and molecules.

“Days Go By”

This song is based on the story of the MIT Blackjack Team, as told in the book Bringing Down the House. Sabeti, who earned a bachelor’s degree in biology from MIT in 1997, knew some of the book’s main characters.

“Headlight Waves”

The concept for this song came to Sabeti “as an image,” she says. She describes the scene: “A bunch of people are sitting around a table in an old diner, chewing on chicken, eating in a very greedy, ravenous way, and looking angry and hateful. Then a headlight shining through the window casts a beautiful light on the scene, transforming everyone to reveal great kindness and warmth.” The idea, she says, “is that there is so much darkness in the world, with corruption, violence, selfishness, but every once in a while you see something beautiful and kind that shines through.”

A Pioneer in Family Planning

Harvard Magazine — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 04:00:00 -0400

On display through September 30 at the Center for the History of Medicine are selected items from the papers and effects of John C. Rock ’15, M.D. ’18, and other items related to his work.

Rock, a professor of gynecology who taught clinical obstetrics for three decades at Harvard Medical School (HMS), is remembered for two landmark professional achievements, both grounded in the notion that women should have control over their own reproductive systems.

Rock (pictured at right) pursued these two tacks with equally intense conviction, said Margaret Marsh, Distinguished Professor of history at Rutgers University and coauthor of the 2008 biography The Fertility Doctor: John Rock and the Reproductive Revolution, at a March 26 symposium to mark the exhibit’s opening. Marsh said that Rock, a practicing Roman Catholic, believed couples should have as many children as they had means to support, but that they should also have the power to stop their families from expanding.

The image gallery includes two samples of family-planning devices from the days before the pill. Rock would have given the “scientific prediction dial” or a similar device to patients in his early days at the Rhythm Clinic, which he founded in 1936 at the Free Hospital for Women (now Brigham and Women’s Hospital). The Rythmeter (circa 1944) came with a more complicated set of instructions. At the time, the rhythm method was the only legal form of contraception in Massachusetts; it was at Rock’s clinic, in the early 1950s, that the first trials of hormone-based birth control took place. Rock advocated for the Food and Drug Administration to approve oral contraceptives (which it did in 1960), and for his church to change its position on birth control (which it did not).

It was also in Rock’s lab that the first successful in vitro fertilization took place. In the image gallery is a photograph of the fertilized ovum from this experiment, which Rock conducted along with HMS colleague Arthur Hertig and laboratory assistant Miriam Menkin in 1944. Research in this area was later banned in the United States; the first in vitro baby, Louise Brown, was born in England in 1978. Since then, more than a million children have been born through this method.

Since 1882

Harvard Magazine — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 03:25:03 -0400

Download the Puzzle | Download the Hints | Download the Solution

“Since 1882” solvers
(The first ten are listed in the order their solutions were received, the others alphabetically)

1. Judy Adamski — Jenison, MI
2. Rick Kasten — Alexandria, VA
3. Steve Tice — Great Falls, VA
4. Stan Kurzban — Chappaqua, NY
5. Jim Christenson — Port Townsend, WA
6. Stan Rehm ’68 — Madison, WI
7. Robert Leavitt — Fredericton, NB, Canada
8. Carolyn G. & Robert M. Smith — Massena, NY
9. Lewis Gee — Poway, CA
10. Stan Francuz — Forster NSW, Australia

Peggy Bedell — Northampton, MA
Robert Brown — Albuquerque, NM
Cathy Childs — Pompano Beach, FL
Charlene Coates — Coatesville, PA
Patricia Coppersmith — Venice, FL
Elizabeth Falkner — Sarasota, FL
Warren Fraser — Marmora, Ontario, Canada
Richard Friedman ’71 — Silver Spring, MD
Michael N. Geselowitz — Cedarhurst, NY
Kris Green — Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Wayne Jones — Worcester, NY
Doug Kouril — Arlington, VA
Richard Letourneau — Bonita Springs, FL
Daniel J. Milton — Vienna, VA
Paul Noack — West Bloomfield, MI
Mary Lyndal Nyberg — Manhattan, KS
Andrew Oakes — Half Moon Bay, CA
Patrick D. Phillips — Bainbridge Island, WA
Ned Robert — Los Gatos, CA
Charles J. Rohrmann, Jr. — Scarsdale, NY
Mordy Rosen — Berkeley, CA
Donald Stanley — Littleton, CO
Edward Stejskal — Raleigh, NC
John Stuelpnagel — Baltimore, MD
Margaret Webster — Medford, MA
Thomas Wilson — South Williamsport, PA
Jay Winter — Farmington Hills, MI

FAS Dean Details $220-Million Budget Gap; Working Groups to Address "Reshaping" Academic Activities

Harvard Magazine — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 22:12:38 -0400

Updated April 15, 3:00 p.m.

At a “town hall” meeting in Sanders Theatre on the afternoon of April 14—held in place of the regularly scheduled faculty meeting—Michael D. Smith, dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS), outlined what he called the “sizable and somewhat daunting challenge in front of us”: a budget deficit that would reach $220 million in the 2010-2011 academic year, were FAS to continue on the operating and expense trajectories in place during the current year. Savings achieved during this year ($4 million) and those budgeted for the 2009-2010 year (a further $73 million) fill only about one-third of that gap, so Smith forecast a fundamental reshaping of the faculty’s academic and intellectual activities, leading to a future in which “it is increasingly likely…that we will not have a need for as many faculty and staff ” as FAS has today.

For perspective, Smith noted that the faculty’s budgeted expenses for this year are $1.16 billion; that modest cost savings had been realized versus the current-year budget (through reductions in travel and food, and decisions not to hire personnel to fill vacant positions); and that a further, more substantial savings had been identified in the budget for the academic year just ahead (the University’s fiscal year 2010, which begins July 1), through what he characterized as efficiencies and squeezing out of costs (but did not otherwise detail). That means that based on known revenues and expenses, FAS faces a deficit of $143 million in the succeeding academic year, far more than it has available in reserve funds (see here and the prior dispatches linked there)—so very significant changes in operations and expenses loom. That sum, Smith emphasized, is “not a one-time deficit that we need to overcome,” but a recurring problem.

[These sums align with the estimate reported in late March for publication in “A New Economic Reality,” the lead article in John Harvard’s Journal in the May-June Harvard Magazine. That article notes that, given projected endowment distributions for the fiscal year beginning July 1, “deans in the aggregate face operating their schools with nearly a third of a billion dollars less than they expected as recently as last summer. For fiscal year 2011, the difference between the distribution planned now and what might, until recently, have been anticipated widens to a half-billon dollars or more.” The entire issue will be on line at harvardmagazine.com next week, when printed magazines should also arrive in the mail.]

Smith—in shirtsleeves on the Sanders stage, with just a stool to sit on and a table for his laptop—began by outlining the FAS budget. The $1.16 billion of current-year income derives from distributions from the endowment ($650 million) and from tuition and fees, research grants and contracts, current-use gifts, and other sources (totaling $510 million). FAS’s large and growing reliance on endowment-derived income has been outlined previously. As its own endowment appreciated from approximately $10 billion in 2005 to approximately $17 billion at the beginning of the current year, distributions rose from $400 million to the current $650 million, and FAS’s total spending swelled from $812 million to the current $1.16 billion. Even early in the decade, when the endowment dipped slightly, FAS was able to continue increasing its outlays, Smith noted. That largess enabled FAS to add more than 60 new faculty positions and 230 new staff members during the past five years; about one million square feet of new facilities; and substantial additional funding for undergraduate financial aid—about an extra $50 million annually. (As he noted later, FAS now has 1,100 faculty members—two-thirds are tenured or tenure-eligible “ladder” faculty—and 3,500 staff members.)

But now, with the value of the University’s endowment assets expected to decline by 30 percent during the current year (and with current spending reducing that value further), FAS expects its endowment assets to decline to about $11 billion by year-end: the level of mid decade.

As reported, and now confirmed by Smith, the Corporation has determined that the endowment distribution will decrease by 8 percent for next fiscal year and—in a surprising announcement—by “at least” that amount the following year when, Smith said, for planning purposes, FAS had been directed to assume that the reduction would be 12 percent. That would reduce FAS’s endowment distribution from $650 million now to $600 million next year and $525 million in academic year 2010-2011—a $125-million decline.

Smith next projected the grim arithmetic of the accumulating deficit:

•a current, continuing $30-million deficit accruing from FAS’s decisions earlier in the decade to make more faculty appointments and to hire more staff, to build new facilities, and to augment financial aid; plus
•the $125-million reduction in endowment distributions; plus
•$10 million in lost income from “underwater” endowments (endowment funds that have declined in value below the gift amount, from which, under Massachusetts law, distributions may not be made; this amount of lost income will obviously depend on actual year-end asset values); plus
•$5 million of other lost revenues; and
•$50 million in anticipated expense growth (from prior faculty appointments already in the pipeline; debt service, utilities, and operating and maintenance costs on new facilities; and presumably—Smith mentioned this factor in earlier presentations, but not in Sanders—increased financial-aid costs).

Against that steady-state deficit looming in the fiscal year beginning just 15 months from now, Smith said FAS had achieved the $4 million in current savings and identified the $73 million of budgeted savings. Those steps in total reflect $43 million in savings from administrative and academic-support costs; and $34 million in savings in the core academic units. The only tangible example he gave, from the latter category, was not making visiting faculty or fellow appointments.

The relative size of the savings achieved or scheduled to be realized in the next year only underscores the remaining $143 million in annualized cost reductions to be identified. Smith said FAS had to move from “reduc[ing]” to “reshap[ing]”—that is, to go beyond trimming costs of current operations to rethinking, fundamentally, what it is able to do in its core academic and intellectual enterprise. Passively awaiting better economic conditions is not an option, he said (particularly since the faculty’s reserves are only about $100 million), and merely resizing its affairs—the savings identified to date—would not be adequate to the task. Given the challenges, Smith said, he was encouraged that FAS and all its constituents—faculty, staff, and students—were driven by the “power of ideas.” Nonetheless, he emphasized, the challenge was “daunting.”

To proceed, he will, during the next two weeks, appoint six working groups: one each for the social sciences, arts and humanities, natural sciences, School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, College life, and College academics. They will be charged with defined financial goals, and responsible for proposing “changes to our academic programs and our intellectual activities,” not just squeezing out existing costs. Given the institution’s intellectual priorities, the working groups will identify current activities that cannot be sustained. The Graduate School of Arts and Sciences is so intertwined with all of these working groups, Smith said, that it will simply engage with each of them, rather than forming a separate working group.

What are the implications for FAS’s people? Smith pointed out that slowing hiring and offering an early-retirement incentive were elements of a program to control costs while giving current FAS staff members a way to sort out their own needs and opportunities. (Half of FAS’s costs are for people: salaries and benefits total $553 million this year.) The retirement program had been extended to 521 eligible FAS employees; as of the town hall gathering, 153 opted to participate, or 30 percent—slightly more than 4 percent of FAS’s total staff cohort. Those two measures combined would create some flexibility, Smith said: not all those who retire or leave Harvard will be replaced—nor will all of their functions be filled in the future.

Summarizing his half-hour presentation before taking questions, Smith said the faculty faced an “important and fairly large financial challenge.” He hoped for cooperation among all FAS constituents, and for the advancing of “wonderful ideas” to improve the faculty’s finances and to improve and strengthen the organization itself as everyone works to “continue to push forward our excellence” within the reshaped entity that would evolve. While some further operating efficiencies remained to be achieved, he said, principally through collaboration with other schools and the central administration (there are University task forces working on revenues; business operations—information technology, real estate, procurement; “endowment liberation,” seeking to determine whether funds can be redeployed; and human-resources practices), the emphasis is clearly shifting now to rethinking FAS in more fundamental ways.

Questions and Answers

Wertham professor of law and psychiatry in society Diana Eck, the Lowell House master, said that House masters had been asked to cut their budgets 15 percent, a target that had been raised to 25 percent that morning. Houses are critical to undergraduate academic life, she said, in maintaining academic records, preparing letters of recommendation, and so on. These cuts were draconian, were little understood by the teaching faculty, and seemed disproportionate to the growth of staff elsewhere in FAS—in the new divisional deans’ offices and supporting staff, for instance. Cutting House staff further, the week after the College released its report on House “renewal,” was “really a disaster,” she said, urging that new administrative positions be cut before House staffing, which had long been stable, was reduced.

Dean Smith said that he shared Eck’s commitment to a strong House system, a commitment he said FAS donors shared as well. During the past six months, he said, FAS’s staff had grown by about 50 positions, 40 of which reflected growth in sponsored-research funding, clearly a positive for the faculty. He would have to investigate prior growth in the staff between administrative and research-related or other academic positions. As for the divisional deans, he said, he had given them administrative support to ensure that the commitments they make to the faculty are implemented; other staff members were merely moved from prior positions, and did not represent new personnel or slots.

Professor of Greek and Latin Richard Thomas sought assurance that budget cuts were not being circumvented by personal lobbying by star faculty members or favored coaches—morale, he said, depended on equity of treatment. He further asked whether the budget reductions Smith outlined needed to be taken as swiftly as he proposed, given the likely damage to FAS academic programs, to the library collections, and so on. He wondered whether Corporation members fully understood the damage being done on the ground—the Corporation had not been fully aware of conditions on campus earlier in the decade, he suggested. Finally, he urged that department chairs be made members of the working groups, since those charged with making judgments on the worth of programs to be retained or eliminated would no doubt bring to their decisions evaluations shaped by the eye of the beholders.

Smith said his decisions were driven by having the best available data, supported by a strong staff, so that personal preferences would not be a factor. Nonetheless, he said, reductions would not be equal across FAS. They would vary, based on FAS’s strategic assessment of its priorities and goals. Smith hoped that it would be possible to have salary increases in the year after next, because the freeze now in place was difficult for everyone; he recognized that Princeton and Yale, for instance, had chosen to freeze upper-level salaries so that lower-paid faculty and staff members could have increases this year; while FAS chose a different course, he was glad that it had not had to change its plans, as those other institutions recently did.

As for the pace of budget cuts, dictated by the Corporation’s decision on the endowment distribution, Smith said his “hands were tied,” but that he had advocated FAS’s needs and perspectives forcefully before the Corporation and the president, with whom he had a good relationship. He had described “exactly how painful things are.”

Malkin professor of public policy Robert Putnam said that FAS, like the country at large, had spent phantom wealth from the “bubble” during the years of ebullient endowment performance. That decision was not made in bad faith, he said, but he did wonder what incremental spending had been made since fiscal year 2005, and whether understanding those decisions would inform the present cost-cutting.

Smith said, “I’m a very forward-looking person.” The present circumstances, he said, were “a new time,” with problems different from those FAS faced five years ago, and even a changed student body. He defined FAS’s challenge as reshaping its future from its present circumstances. Nonetheless, looking back, he noted:

•Harvard was under substantial outside pressure, from Congress and elsewhere, to spend more of its appreciating endowment.
•FAS had its third great spurt of facilities growth in the decade now ending, following the 1930s spurt (when the Houses were built, during the Depression) and the 1970s (also a weak economic time, but one when science facilities were spurred on). He acknowledged that Harvard had in the distant past been “much more conservative than we are now” in undertaking such building projects; then, fundraising was paramount; of late, buildings were financed with debt, on the assumption that a rising endowment would make it possible to bear the costs. Henceforth, he said, debt would not be used for capital projects; they had to have funds in place to proceed.
•Of the 230 additional staff people, the largest number were added in academic centers, whose endowments presumably appreciated, too; computers and information technology required new personnel; and expanding scientific and sponsored research were the third principal impetus for hiring.

An undergraduate representative of the Student Labor Action Movement unfurled a “Greed Is the New Crimson: No Layoffs” banner from the balcony (a wry reference to the “Green is the new Crimson” banners hung in Tercentenary Theatre last October for the sustainability celebration keynoted by Al Gore ’69, LL.D. ’94, and left in place throughout the academic year) and asked why Harvard had not tapped student ideas—as MIT, Princeton, and Duke did, she said—to save money and reduce layoffs. She mentioned Arizona State’s decision to put senior administrators on unpaid leave; and she noted senior-management salary cuts (at Stanford and elsewhere) and pay freezes for upper-tier workers as ways to divert funds to lower-paid employees or to avert layoffs among cherished dining hall, janitorial, security, and library staff members.

Smith said the College working groups would have student members, and that FAS sought partnerships “with them.” Because faculty and nonunion staff would not receive salary increases in the coming year, he said, that was effectively a cost-saving pay cut. And students were involved in other ways, he said, and would be, “before we are moving forward on any kind of drastic actions.” He intended to do the best that he could for FAS’s people. But “the size of our challenge is not going to be” changed by “collecting a few dollars here and there.”

Further student questions, on membership in the working groups and on the decision to close the College during the weeks between semesters next January, rather than offering academic and extracurricular programs as had been hoped, elicited from Smith the statement, “You’re hearing everything as we understand it.”

Pforzheimer University Professor Robert Darnton, speaking as director of the Harvard University Library, noted that library staffing and collection funds had already been cut at the beginning of the decade, and that the libraries’ position “already was slipping” well before the recent downturn. How did Smith see its prospects?

Smith emphasized his deep commitment to the library system. On the other hand, he said, the only investments FAS could make depended on redeploying funds from other purposes or places within the faculty. New spending, he said, meant “cutting more deeply someplace else. There are no incremental dollars.”

A Lamont Library staff member, speaking on behalf of unionized employees, said rumors of job cuts were rampant, and that workers were “terrorized.” The University endowment had been $4.5 billion when he joined Harvard. Last year, Harvard Management Company senior staff members were paid $3 million to $6 million each, “and the job those people did was to manage the endowment.” It had adopted higher-risk strategies in 2000, and while they paid off handsomely in the short term, when the markets reversed, those strategies had failed. The University continued to receive huge donations, some of the largest in its history in recent years, and continued to buy multimillion-dollar properties for future development in Allston. In this perspective, “It is very hard for us as staff to feel that we should bear the burden here.”

Smith said he knew friends and spouses who had been laid off, and appreciated deeply the disruption that caused. He had nothing to do with Harvard Management Company—it’s “not part of my job description”—and so did not comment on the endowment. [The diversification of the endowment in fact began more than two decades ago, and it has outperformed less diversified portfolios, including in the recent downturn; the portfolio managers’ pay, for the fiscal year ended June 1, 2008, reflects performance during the prior three years, when endowment returns on investment were 16.7 percent, 23 percent, and 8.6 percent for 2006, 2007, and 2008 respectively. See here.]

This town-hall meeting, Smith said, showed that all members of the FAS community were affected by current events, and counted in the solutions. He said there was “no more blood to squeeze out” in staffing efficiencies or pure expense reductions; henceforth, FAS’s core intellectual mission had to be reshaped, and the organization reorganized accordingly. He did not know right now about layoffs, but they were not off the table, either. The focus had to be on reshaping FAS’s core mission, given the size of the budget deficit.

Sheila Rish, a member of the Fine Arts Library staff, asked if FAS was still being assessed for Allston costs [the “strategic infrastructure fund”], given that Allston construction had stopped.

Smith noted that each school had its own endowment, on which central assessments were imposed; all remained in place, including the Allston assessment. He was not certain how the funds were used. [For more discussion of the assessment, see here and here.] As for the science complex in Allston, construction had slowed but not stopped.

FAS human-resources officer Joseph Levy thanked Smith for holding the town hall (and suggested repeating the event monthly, to which Smith responded with a chuckle), and said that staff members wanted “your priorities for the FAS as a whole”—that there was a hunger for “a real person with real priorities,” and an understanding of where Smith placed layoffs among those priorities.

Smith said his priorities were supporting the undergraduate experience, academically, residentially, and extracurricularly; enhancing teaching and learning; strengthening Harvard’s communities, by reaching out, for example, to the graduate- and professional-school faculties; and reshaping a unified campus in Cambridge and Allston. The working groups were not to set priorities, of which there were plenty; they will be charged with thinking creatively about how to do things differently, in intellectual and academic terms.

“I have no desire to do layoffs,” Smith emphasized, “but it is increasingly likely as we adjust that we don’t need as many faculty and staff going forward.” The past lush years had given FAS the fortunate luxury of adding personnel; now, he said, FAS had to deal with the hand it had been dealt.

Dalai Lama to Speak at Harvard

Harvard Magazine — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 09:57:23 -0400

His Holiness the Dalai Lama will give a public address at Harvard on April 30, the Graduate School of Education and the Harvard Divinity School jointly announced yesterday (April 13).

The talk, titled “Educating the Heart,” is scheduled to begin at 9:30 a.m. in the Memorial Church. Come back to the Harvard Magazine website for event coverage and a link to the University’s live webcast. (Harvard faculty and staff members and students can visit this site to sign up for a ticket lottery, which closes April 15 at 5 p.m.)

As part of the same trip, the Dalai Lama will speak at Gillette Stadium, in Foxborough, Massachusetts, on May 2. Appearances in New York are also scheduled.

The Dalai Lama last came to Harvard (and spoke in the Memorial Church) in 2003. On that visit, President Lawrence H. Summers received the Buddhist leader in his office; read the Harvard Magazine account here.

More About the Fat That Could Make You Fitter

Harvard Magazine — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 10:24:41 -0400

Evidence is mounting for the metabolic firepower of brown fat, the energy-inefficient tissue that burns off calories as heat—as reported in this article on the work of Bruce Spiegelman from the Harvard Magazine archives.

Today’s New England Journal of Medicine (accessible here for those with a subscription) carries three original articles on brown fat: one by Harvard Medical School researchers, and two others by researchers in the Netherlands, Finland and Sweden.

Scientists suspect that brown fat (unlike its sister tissue, white fat) may promote health by fending off obesity, and therefore we would be better off to have more of it. While infants have sizable brown-fat stores to keep them warm, the medical community had long thought that adult humans had little to none of the tissue type. With the advent of PET scanning, doctors stumbled on brown-fat deposits in adults quite by accident, noticing mysterious hotspots for glucose uptake in scans meant to search for tumors (which also burn through glucose at a rapid rate). Scientists then turned to efforts to find out just how much brown fat adult humans have; what causes the variation among adult humans; and what effect these brown-fat stores have. The studies published today examined evidence from biopsies and PET scans. (Read the New York Times account, with images from the papers, here.)

Women are apparently more likely than men to have significant amounts of brown fat: the Harvard researchers observed “substantial collections of brown adipose tissue” in the scans of 7.5 percent of female patients and 3.1 percent of male patients.

The team of scientists (led by instructor in medicine Aaron M. Cypess of the Joslin Diabetes Center) noted that these estimates should be considered “minimal estimates” for the percentage of the population with significant amounts of brown fat, because no action was taken to stimulate brown-fat activity (e.g., patients were not subjected to cold temperatures) before making the scans.

People may be able to beef up their brown-fat deposits by spending more time in cold environments (“Previous studies of biopsy specimens in northern Finland revealed more brown adipose tissue in outdoor workers than in indoor workers,” the Harvard researchers noted). Indeed, the new study by Finnish and Swedish researchers found enhanced glucose uptake, as seen on scans, when the five subjects’ feet were dunked in cold water, and the Dutch researchers found heightened brown-fat activity (as seen on a PET scan) in 23 of their 24 subjects (all of whom were men) when subjects were placed in a cold room (about 61 degrees Fahrenheit).

Although some studies have not found the same link, the papers published today found an inverse correlation between brown-fat mass or activity and body-mass index (in the Harvard study, obese or overweight subjects had less brown fat; in the Dutch study, brown fat responded less to cold temperatures in obese and overweight subjects).

Assuming this inverse relationship exists, it’s not entirely clear yet what’s cause and effect: are subjects thin because they have more brown fat, or is the extra brown fat somehow a product of being thin? The obese subjects in the Harvard study displayed a greater discrepancy between core temperature and skin temperature when exposed to cold. It’s possible that different ways of responding to cold (generating heat vs. conserving it through constriction of blood vessels at the periphery) explain differences in body weight. But, Francesco Celi of the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases noted in an editorial on the three papers, it’s also possible that the body adopts a different way of responding to cold because it is heavier: vasoconstriction is more effective at conserving heat in bodies with more white adipose tissue to insulate them.

The scientists whose work was detailed in the Harvard Magazine article (professor of medicine and professor of cell biology Bruce Spiegelman, associate professor of cell biology Pere Puigserver, and postdoctoral fellow Patrick Seale) were not directly involved with the studies published today, but the new papers reference their work. In 2008, Spiegelman and Seale published a paper showing that brown fat is more closely related to skeletal muscle than to white fat; also last year, the Dutch team had observed, in skeletal muscle, the same “uncoupling” of mitochondrial respiration from ATP production that gives brown fat its thermogenic power—suggesting that skeletal muscle, too, may function to heat the body and dissipate excess calories even while the body is at rest.

While many tantalizing questions still beckon, Celi writes, “Taken together, these studies point to a potential ‘natural’ intervention to stimulate energy expenditure: turn down the heat and burn calories (and reduce the carbon footprint in the process.”

Celi notes that the body might foil this strategy with hunger, spurring people to compensate for the calorie expenditure by eating more. Nevertheless, he writes, the studies point to brown fat’s potential value “as a target for interventions, pharmacologic and environmental, aimed at modulating energy expenditure.”

Financial Update: Harvard Retains Triple-A Rating, Princeton Foresees Deeper Cuts

Harvard Magazine — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 16:41:12 -0400

Moody’s Investors Service, the credit-rating agency, has issued a review of Harvard’s creditworthiness, and maintained its Aaa and associated ratings on $5.8 billion of outstanding debt, with a “stable” outlook for the future. Its evaluation, released on April 1, took into account “the deleterious effects of the global financial crisis and recession” on University finances. Separately, on April 6, Princeton President Shirley Tilghman told her community that deeper endowment investment losses (30 percent, rather than a previous estimate of 25 percent) were now forecast for the fiscal year—in line with Harvard’s public estimates since last December 2—necessitating deeper budget cuts, and longer-term adjustments than had previously been forecast. The latter assessment accords with Harvard’s recent decision to reduce endowment distributions for each of the next two years, and fits with the larger environment influencing university finances generally as described by Moody’s.

In summarizing Harvard’s financial situation, Moody’s noted that the principal short-term impacts of the credit crisis and recession are “large losses in the University’s endowment, which combined with stress in the debt and swap markets, have created liquidity pressures.” During the next few years, “the University will face constraints in its capital program while also dealing with a significant reduction in revenues available to support its operations from endowment”—references to both the reduced distribution of funds from the endowment and the decision, announced in February, to slow and possibly stop construction on the Allston science complex.

Moody’s then specified “substantial” recent actions taken by University leaders that have “boosted liquidity” significantly, confirming prior reports about Harvard’s financial challenges in recent months (see here, on Harvard’s $2.5-billion debt financings in December, and concerns about liquidity within the endowment, exposure to losses on University interest-rate swaps, the institution’s central “bank” for short-term funds, and possibly “underwater” endowment accounts). Among the items Moody’s highlighted:

Endowment. “Large losses in the investment portfolio,” reflecting market declines, “reduced the valuations of the liquid portion of the University’s endowment” and “raised concerns that large future capital commitments to private investments may not be funded from previously expected distributions from other private holdings,” squeezing liquidity even further. (See here for more explanation of this problem, with a particularly helpful explanation from the management of the University of Virginia’s investment funds.)

As for “capital commitments to external money managers” who invest endowment funds in private equity, venture capital, and other private investment vehicles, Moody’s found that the University has future commitments “exceeding $11 billion,” extending to 2018. “[E]ven under extreme circumstances well beyond the University’s actual projections, no more than half of this commitment would be called in the next year,” as the general investment partners call on their limited-partner investors (like Harvard) to advance cash. The timing of such cash calls, Moody’s noted, is related to conditions in the credit and investment markets; moreover, Harvard’s existing “illiquid investments” still hold “substantial value and could be a source of liquidity over the medium term,” although the market for selling such investments has been “challenging.” (Harvard’s endowment is described here, here, and in subsequent dispatches.) Obviously, large calls for cash to invest in the near term would place Harvard and Harvard Management Company in a challenging position: such calls would presumably reflect investment managers’ perception that the opportunities exist for attractive returns—particularly if interest rates remain low and prospects for businesses and economic growth begin to look more favorable—but coming up with the money to fulfill such calls would be very difficult under current strained circumstances

Harvard’s borrowings. “[T]he general disruptions in municipal variable-rate debt markets last fall increased the perceived risk that Harvard could experience a failed remarketing” of its own short-term, variable-rate borrowings. That risk forced the university to “reserve a large share of its liquidity for this contingency because all of the University’s variable-rate debt and commercial paper is backed by its own liquidity.” As reported, restructuring this debt and reducing this risk were motives for the University’s December issuance of new long-term taxable and tax-exempt debt.

Swaps. “[R]apid declines in long-dated swap rates led to substantial declines in the fair value of the swap portfolio. Under the provisions of its swap agreements, counterparties demanded large collateral posting requirements, reducing immediately available liquidity.” (The University’s exposure to large losses on interest-rate swap agreements it put in place in late 2004 as part of forward financing for planned construction in Allston is reported here.)

Moody’s detailed the December 2008 financing, and the resulting reduction in variable-rate debt, as important measures to buffer Harvard against further adverse developments in the credit markets. At the same time, it said, “The University has also taken a number of steps to reduce the liquidity risks of its swap portfolio, including terminating several existing swaps and entering into new swaps that counteract the fair market values of existing swaps. The effect of its actions should limit how quickly these requirements would grow should interest rates fall further.”

Current liquidity. Looking ahead, the Moody’s analysts found Harvard’s “liquidity position…significantly improved.” Its “self-liquidity debt” has been reduced, with daily limits of $250 million on commercial paper maturities, and weekly limits of $500 million in any five-business-day period. As for the “swap portfolio” and the exposure to future demands for collateral, “we believe that the University has sufficient liquidity to manage the necessary collateral posting even under highly stressful scenarious, including a 200-basis-point move lower to a 30-year swap rate of less than 1.25 percent.” (The decline in interest rates caused losses on the interest-rate swaps to balloon, because the University put in place variable-rate borrowings and arranged fixed-rate swaps in the the expectation that interest rates would increase from the time the financing was arranged in mid decade.)

Moody’s forecast that Harvard would withdraw $1.5 billion to $2.0 billion from the endowment to fund University operations in the current and forthcoming fiscal years, but noted that Harvard projected that distributions would be “at the low end of this range or lower”—and that has now been confirmed, with plans to use $1.4 billion in fiscal year 2009 and 8 percent less in fiscal year 2010. (These figures apparently do not include any additional “decapitalization” such as the use of endowment resources for the administrative assessment to fund campus development in Allston; in recent years, decapitalizations have amounted to as much as another $400 million of endowment funds dispersed.)

In all, Moody’s said, as of February 28, Harvard held $3 billion of money-market funds, $2 billion of U.S. Treasury securities (excluding securities used in lending programs or pledged as collateral), and could liquidate as much as $9 billion of the general investment pool (which includes endowment assets) within one year. Further, it maintains a $2-billion line of credit.

Measures to maintain a financial flexibility and strength. Beyond the steps taken so far, Moody’s noted that Harvard is “considering significantly reduced capital spending plans, and has already announced budget actions to bring endowment spending to levels in line with a long-term spending policy.” Beyond the initial Allston science complex—with an estimated project of cost of $1.1 billion and an expected completion date of 2011, now likely to be deferred—Harvard’s planning “had previously called for a rapid and significant expansion into Allston.” Combined with other capital projects, that would have pushed capital spending to $1 billion annually, funded by “as much as $3 billion in new debt over the next three or four years”—for which the 2004 futures borrowing had presumably been arranged. (In fiscal year 2008, Harvard spent $591 million on capital projects and acquisition of land and buildings, the latter principally in Allston. The Faculty of Arts and Sciences Northwest Building and Laboratory for Integrated Science and Engineering—very large, expensive projects—were completed then, although not completely fitted out for scientists’ use. The Law School was well along in its Northwest Corner project then. But the Allston science complex had just begun, and the Fogg Art Museum renovation and reconstruction were still in the planning stage.) In light of new economic circumstances, Moody’s forecast, the University “has put several projects on hold and is planning for a reduction in both capital spending and projected new debt issuance, potentially in the range of 50 percent lower than prior projections.” Whether Harvard could or would attempt even that reduced level of new borrowing, in the present circumstances, is uncertain. Stronger fundraising or better economic growth could enable Harvard to “shift back to a higher level” of capital spending, Moody’s reported. That is the context in which the review of the Allston science complex’s future is taking place, as administrators decide whether to continue, “pause,” or redesign the project.

Finally, Moody’s noted the reductions in endowment spending and in expenses—through early-retirement incentives, salary freezes, and so on.

What could threaten Harvard’s Aaa rating? “[T]he University is more exposed than other organizations (outside of higher education)…to rapid and large additional declines in investment markets, given the magniture of its balance sheet and equity exposures and the high reliance on endowment income over the long term for operations.”

Princeton retrenches. In a letter on April 6, President Shirley Tilghman wrote:

Unhappily, the news from the financial markets has not improved since January. Indeed the markets have continued to decline in value, and Andrew Golden, the President of the Princeton University Investment Company, has now advised us that we should be planning for a 30 percent decrease in the value of the endowment on June 30, 2009, the end of our fiscal year, rather than the 25 percent we have been using in our budget projections for next year. This is, of course, a “best guess,” but it is one that we must take seriously.

Accordingly, Princeton will reduce its Fiscal Year 2010 budget further. Faculty and staff members whose salaries exceed $75,000 have agreed to do without increases, so the funds can be directed to lower-paid members of the community, a transfer of $4 million. Because spending from the reduced endowment will represent a distribution rate of 6.7 percent, versus the university’s long-term goal of 4 percent to 5.75 percent, academic units are being directed to reduce nonpersonnel administrative budgets 5 percent, and spending from endowment income 8 percent, in the coming fiscal year; combined with administrative savings, the budget for that year has been trimmed $88 million (about half the reduction Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences faces)—a 6.8 percent decline from actual spending of $1.3 billion in the current year. In the following fiscal year, Tilghman outlined a further 8 percent reduction in endowment spending (in line with what Harvard has now mandated University-wide), yielding two-year savings of $170 million.

As similarly situated institutions have increasingly concluded (see reports on Yale and Stanford), Princeton, Tilghman said, still will not be in compliance with its long-term endowment-spending policy for at least another year after the reductions contemplated during the next two academic years: that is the reality of sharp declines in endowment values and the increasing reliance on endowment-derived income for operations during the past favorable decade of high investment returns. As a result, “The steady growth in both faculty and staff that we have enjoyed over the last 10 years will end, and the university will have to contract in size.” As at Princeton (which is in the middle of a large capital campaign), so likely at Harvard (which has deferred its fundraising plans). Finally, construction is on a new leash: “The slowdown in all new projects, which we put in place in January, remains in effect, and any decision to go forward with a renovation or new construction project will be made on a case-by-case basis, contingent on having 100 percent of the funding in hand.” Planning will proceed, so Princeton can be “shovel ready” for its highest-priority arts and sciences projects should funding materialize .

Harvard College Won't Offer Programming for January "Experience"

Harvard Magazine — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 15:43:01 -0400

In an e-mail message to students, faculty, and staff members today, Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) dean Michael D. Smith and Harvard College dean Evelynn M. Hammonds announced that the January “experience” or ”term” created by the new University calendar, beginning with the 2009-2010 academic year, will not include Harvard-sponsored mini courses, innovative short-form academic experiences, or organized international or extracurricular activities. Instead, the time that has been made available as a result of moving fall-term reading period and examinations before the Christmas-New Year’s holiday has become an extended vacation in 2010.

According to their announcement,

During the first part of this period, over the holidays, from December 22, 2009, through January 9, 2010, Harvard College will be closed. Thereafter, from January 10 through January 22, only students with a recognized and pre-approved need to be on campus will be permitted to return to College housing. Students with a need to be on campus may potentially include varsity athletes, international students, thesis writers, students conducting lab-based research, and others who cannot reasonably accomplish their work in another location. Freshman dorms and upper-class Houses will be open to all students beginning January 23, 2010, and the first day of classes for the second semester will be Monday, January 25, 2010.

Implicit in the arrangements described above is our decision not to create a separate, structured “January experience” with programming offered by the College. We have made this decision for important reasons. The global economic crisis has forced Harvard, like all universities, to evaluate its priorities and focus on programs and functions that are central to its mission. One of our very top priorities is to strengthen the undergraduate experience—both in curricular and co-curricular dimensions. We are concerned that mounting a new, compressed, short-term set of offerings in January—particularly at a time when resources are highly constrained—would in fact distract from the College’s focus on other more central aspects of the undergraduate experience.

During their deliberations on the new general-education curriculum and their discussion of the calendar change, FAS members had raised the idea of exploring noncredit short courses, structuring nonacademic experiences, or organizing travel-based or other participatory programs, but little actual planning had advanced, and Smith earlier this academic year told colleagues that any such programs would have to be essentially costless, given the financial pressures facing the University.

The decision apparently governs only next January at this point; depending on the availability of resources in the future, it could presumably be revisited. In the meantime, Smith and Hammonds wrote, they will focus on improving the core elements of the undergraduate experience, such as full-scale implementation of the new general-education curriculum beginning this fall (for background, see this Harvard Magazine article). In the meantime, they observed,

[W]e view the extended winter break as an exciting opportunity for students to pursue a range of off-campus activities that are of educational or personal interest to them. Students may choose activities that best suit their individual situations, whether spending time with family and friends or pursuing research, service, internships, travel, or other activities. As it does for the summer break, the College will work with students to identify interesting opportunities and help them make the connections to pursue them.

The 2009-2010 academic year will represent our first opportunity to observe how students and faculty choose to use the extended mid-year break. We expect to learn a great deal, including how to best encourage students to use the time in beneficial ways. Next year will teach us a great deal and will inform decisions about how best to organize this period in the future.

The message is silent on financial-aid concerns (and on room-and-board contracts); implicit is the decision that activities such as “pursuing research, service, internships, travel, or other activities” will have to be undertaken as a personal venture.

Chu to Speak at Commencement

Harvard Magazine — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 11:11:09 -0400

The University announced today that U.S. Secretary of Energy Steven Chu will be the principal speaker at Commencement, on the afternoon of June 4. The official news announcement is available here. Chu shared the 1997 Nobel Prize in physics; his work is described on the Nobel website here and here.

Thus, a year that began with Al Gore ’69, LL.D. ’94, focusing campus attention on global warming and energy conservation will close on a similar note. As energy secretary, Chu will be the Obama administration’s point person for alternative and renewable energy policy, as part of a broader agenda on climate change.

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Harvard Magazine — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 12:46:25 -0400

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Hertzberg, Marx, Wood Score Award Nominations

Harvard Magazine — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 14:50:09 -0400

The American Society of Magazine Editors (ASME) announced the finalists for the 2009 National Magazine Awards this week, and the list includes some names that will be familiar to Harvard Magazine readers.

Patricia Marx ’75 was profiled in our March-April 2008 issue, and ASME also took notice of her New Yorker columns on shopping, nominating her in the “leisure interests” category.

We profiled Hendrik Hertzberg ’65 back in 2003; three of his columns from the New Yorker’s Talk of the Town section won him award consideration in the “columns and commentary” category.

Also writing for the New Yorker, James Wood, professor of the practice of literary criticism in Harvard’s English department, garnered a nomination for three of his articles in the “reviews and criticism” category.

Arts Administration in Challenging Times

Harvard Magazine — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 14:50:06 -0400

Michael M. Kaiser doesn’t believe in deficits.

Kaiser—who spoke at the New College Theatre yesterday, in an event sponsored by the Office for the Arts at Harvard and moderated by Harvard Theatre Collection curator Fredric Woodbridge Wilson—took his first job in arts administration with the Kansas City Ballet not because he was enticed by the prospect of bailing out the ballet company, which was on the verge of insolvency, but because it was the only place that would take him. Kaiser, a former management consultant, had served on the board of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and was interested in making arts administration his profession. He didn’t have his pick of positions when he made the jump, eventually made a name for himself by turning around ailing arts organizations. He went on to erase deficits at the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, the American Ballet Theatre, and the Royal Opera House in London.

Among the secrets Kaiser shared with his Harvard audience: “I pick my situations carefully. I tend to enter organizations that are so sick that people are just desperate.”

The comment was tongue in cheek, and drew laughs from listeners, but Kaiser wasn’t entirely kidding. The boards that oversee organizations with long histories often resist change, he said—but when the organization is in deep financial trouble, board members are often more willing to try new ideas as a last resort.

Kaiser, the author of The Art of the Turnaround: Creating and Maintaining Healthy Arts Organizations, is now president of the Kennedy Center. He took questions from audience members, many of whom identified themselves as arts professionals from around Boston. But he also offered advice for students: first and foremost, consider a career in arts administration. “It’s the best career in the world,” he said, and a more defined career path now than it once was. Although not all the skills involved can be learned in a classroom, Kaiser (who majored in economics and music at Brandeis and earned a master’s degree from the Sloan School of Management at MIT) said there is a set list of abilities that can be learned on the job to make one a good candidate for a leadership position. On that list: marketing, fundraising, financial planning, and of course an understanding of the art form the organization practices or promotes. “The order in which you gather than information isn’t crucial,” he said, “but you have to have a plan for your life.”

The Kennedy Center recently launched Arts in Crisis, a program to counsel struggling arts organizations throughout the United States, and Kaiser noted during his talk that all organizations—not just those that have been mismanaged—are now facing financial hardship. (It is no different at Harvard; President Drew Faust and a task force are trying to forge ahead with changing the role of the arts on campus even as the endowment’s value has fallen sharply, Allston construction plans are being reexamined, and staff buyouts and layoffs loom.) Kaiser said he sees a long period of austerity ahead: “I’m planning for at least another year and a half of problems, because arts organizations suffer earliest and recover latest.”

Other advice he offered included:

Maintain a positive attitude: Audience members “find inspiration and solace and refuge and entertainment in our organizations. We have to have the discipline not to make them depressing places….You’re trying to get people to have trust and faith and excitement about the future, so you can’t sit around and mope.”

Be an advocate for the arts: “We do a very bad job of marketing ourselves. We tend to talk about what the government can do for us, rather than talking about what we do for society.”

Support creativity: Although administrators of arts organizations must consider budget concerns, Kaiser said this translates too often into an adversarial approach: “Most times, executive directors act like the angry parent, with the artist being the naughty child. The naughty child says ‘I want, I want, I want.’ The parent says, ‘No, no, no. We can’t afford it.’ ” Instead, Kaiser said he works with artists to find a way to make their ideas financially feasible: “My job as an administrator is solely to make artistic people’s dreams come true.”

Plan ahead: “If you think today about projects you want to do three, four, and five years from now, you have a lot of time to find the resources.”

Pay attention to what is happening in the economy: “It’s so much easier to cut a budget before your fiscal year starts than in the middle of it.”

Don’t let saving be your only strategy: “I’m not saying you don’t cut your budget when you need to,” he said, “but that’s not the path to health. That’s just a way of surviving during a bad time. …Arts organizations that think they’re going to save their way to health are going to get sicker and sicker and sicker, because they keep cutting and cutting and cutting.”

If you do have to cut, don’t cut programming: “Unfortunately, most arts organizations, as a knee-jerk reaction, cut those things first.” But cutting the number of shows or works performed each year, he said, causes the organization to “get smaller and smaller and sicker and sicker.” For example, as Kaiser tried to do more with less at the Kennedy Center, he decided to stop providing free coffee to employees. The savings of $30,000 a year was enough to pay for a modern-dance company—and, he said, “I would much rather have a modern-dance company than have coffee.”

To weather the storm, Kaiser said, “My feeling is, we have to compete harder for the money that’s out there. And that means doing interesting work; doing really good marketing; really trying to promote your organization as exciting, entertaining, inspiring and important; and making cuts in areas that don’t make your organization less vital.” By heeding this advice, he said, “you recover much more strongly… Those organizations that appear vital during this time are going to benefit most when the economy turns around.”

Endowment Distribution to Be Reduced 8 Percent; Budget Cuts Loom

Harvard Magazine — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 12:26:11 -0400

On March 18, the University advised schools and other units that distributions from the endowment to support operations will be cut 8 percent for Fiscal Year 2010, beginning July 1, and an additional 8 percent for Fiscal Year 2011. The reduction is driven by the sharp decline in the value of endowment assets first reported last fall (see here for the November 10 announcement and here for the December forecast that the endowment investments would depreciate by 30 percent during this fiscal year; more generally, see the continuing University financial coverage). But the magnitude of the change in endowment support for operations—apparently the result of a recent Harvard Corporation decision, deferred from last fall, when the credit crisis and recession were just unfolding—is larger than many units had anticipated. The Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS), for instance, had been building budgets on an assumption of level endowment distributions next year, or a possible 5 percent cut; the former figure would have left FAS facing a $100-million gap in FY 2010, and the 5 percent reduction, a $130 million gap—a problem that will now exceed $150 million in the coming year. Although FAS is particularly dependent on endowment distributions, the new budget guidance foreshadows significant reductions in operations and personnel in many parts of the University, to be announced later this spring.

The budget guidance. A memorandum to administrative and executive deans (the schools’ principal financial officers) from Dan Shore, vice president for finance, circulated on March 18, cited “unprecedented financial circumstances that challenge not simply Harvard, and not simply the higher education industry, but practically all industries across the global economy. When the University began its annual budgeting activities several months ago, we had limited visibility regarding both projected endowment investment results for the current fiscal year, and the trajectory of the endowment’s potential recovery. While our visibility is not meaningfully greater today, our strong sense is that an eventual recovery will take longer, and that we must therefore begin to accommodate a new economic reality for the University.” (For similar recent statements by Stanford and Yale, see here and here; both institutions, which had promulgated initial budget reductions earlier, indicated that they were now making deeper cuts, given their expectations that the impairment of endowment values, and pressure on other financial resources, would be more severe and protracted than previously assumed.)

“With this as context,” Shore’s message continued, “we will be decreasing the endowment distribution for operations by 8 percent in FY 2010, and we expect in FY 2011 to decrease the distribution by at least the same magnitude. We do not take this guidance lightly, as it inevitably will require you to consider profound changes in how your schools operate. While this presents opportunities to consider new strategies or structures for fulfilling the University’s mission, we recognize that the process will ask much of staff who already are working extremely hard to support our core teaching and research activities.”

To put these figures in context: in the year ended June 30, 2008 (the last for which University financial statements are available), distributions from the endowment for operations totaled about $1.2 billion—nearly 34.5 percent of Harvard’s operating revenues in the period: about 15 percent more than in the prior year. Clearly such distributions have been the principal engine for funding enhancements in financial aid, academic programs, faculty hiring, physical expansion, and so on. (These figures exclude the $400 million of administrative assessments for Allston development and “decapitalizations” also disbursed from the endowment in FY 2008, and comparable items in the prior year.) Endowment distributions for operations were provisionally estimated to rise further in the current fiscal year, to $1.4 billion or so. Faculties made long-term investments under guidance and the expectation that endowment distributions would continue to grow by some measurable amount annually; instead, they will decline by perhaps $100 million or more in each of the next two years. For FY 2010, that means Harvard must absorb a swing of $200 million to $300 million, compared to the resources only recently expected to be available for budgeted spending from the endowment, with a widening gap in the subsequent fiscal year; at the same time, even with increased spending on sponsored research provided by the federal government’s stimulus package, the prospects for research funds are uncertain; donations may come under further pressure; and the need for financial aid is forecast to increase significantly.

FAS Outlook. The Faculty of Arts and Sciences—Harvard College and the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences—faces the largest absolute problem (although Harvard Divinity School and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study are, in relative terms, more dependent on endowment revenues). Its expenses have risen significantly in recent years, driven by factors such as a 22 percent rise in the professorial ranks (126 new positions) this decade; a debt-funded $800-million investment in science laboratories (for which debt- service payments are now rising, and for which the faculty now bears operating expenses); and multiple rounds of expanding and enriching financial aid. Dean Michael D. Smith told his faculty that FAS initially expected endowment operating distributions to rise from $650 million in the current fiscal year (when the budget is $1.15 billion; the distribution had been $550 million in FY 2008) to about $750 million in FY 2010, enabling the FAS to deal with an existing structural deficit and those rising costs. During the winter, he projected level endowment distributions, and a resulting $100-million budget gap in FY 2010, even after freezing salaries, reducing the number of faculty searches sharply, and curtailing hiring.

In a message to his colleagues yesterday afternoon, following the release of the University’s budget guidance, Smith wrote,

The guidance instructs us to plan for the funds paid out from the endowment in support of our operations to be reduced by 8 percent in FY 2010, and for a decrease of at least that same magnitude in FY 2011. For the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, this guidance will mean a $52 million reduction in FY 2010 funds vis-à-vis our FY 2009 budget.

Because we in the FAS have been planning for a range of aggressive scenarios, we have the ability to absorb some of this decrease in funding by adjusting our FY 2010 budgets to implement more of the measures proposed in our planning. I deeply appreciate all the hard work, sacrifice, and institution-mindedness that has driven our planning to date. In addition, the academic deans and I will continue to work with senior administrators and our colleagues at other schools and in the [central administration] to find additional cross-cutting efficiencies. Whatever gap remains after those efforts are complete will be closed using our limited reserve funds.

Please know that we are taking every possible measure to protect our core mission, to support our priorities and even to pursue some new initiatives in the midst of this crisis. We are each joined here together in the pursuit of excellence in teaching and research, and we must support, in the best ways we know how, our very special community. The additional measures we pursue now will all be guided by these core principles. With this news, I ask again for your partnership, your understanding, and your patience as we continue to navigate uncharted terrain.

Smith reported in December that those “limited reserve funds”—the monies available for unrestricted use—amounted to about $100 million. Clearly, that is not sufficient to absorb large, multiyear budget shortfalls. Moreover, to the extent the reserves are expended to cover holes in existing programs’ finances, they are unavailable for investment in new programs or fields—the lifeblood of intellectual renewal.

Smith’s message did not address the implications for future years, but in an explanation of FAS finances distributed to the faculty in December (see pages 7-8 of “FAQs About the Endowment, 12/5/2008” here), he illustrated the long-term challenge to restoring the endowment’s value under certain conceivable investment-return and spending assumptions. There, he projected a level distribution rate (which is of course sensitive to the amount of funds distributed, relative to the total endowment assets). But there is no guarantee that the Corporation will be comfortable with either a level distribution of dollars, as it has now shown, or an elevated payout rate (the result, today, of the decline in endowment value) over a sustained period. And of course, financial-aid costs will continue to rise, salaries cannot be frozen indefinitely, and so on.

In a February 17 message about FAS’s voluntary early retirement incentive program for staff members (no equivalent plan has been announced for faculty members), Smith noted, “With more than half of our $1 billion annual operating budget dedicated to compensation costs, it is clear that realigning FAS for the future will depend on some changes to our current workforce. Let me assure you that we continue to explore every option available in order to limit staff changes forced solely by our budget challenges. We hope that the level of participation in the voluntary early retirement program will mitigate the need for further staff reductions. Such considerations will be made after the program has closed and results are assessed.”

In prospect. The early retirement program was offered first to eligible staff members of FAS and Harvard Medical School (HMS); other schools and central administrative personnel are just receiving their incentive offers this week. The response from the 1,600 or so affected personnel will be known by early May. Thereafter, deans and other administrators will proceed to fit their FY 2010 budgets to the newly reduced level of funds. As in FAS, so throughout Harvard, compensation and benefits make up about half of University expenses, so workforce reductions—possibly extensive layoffs—seem inevitable. Already, contracted workers, such as janitors at HMS, are being let go, and other, sporadic cuts are being imposed (large layoffs at the Faculty Club, for example, where dining and meeting revenues declined beginning last fall, and where new, lower-cost services are being rolled out).

Many other adjustments are taking hold, or are in the offing. Some of the elevators in Holyoke Center have been shut down, for instance. As reported, the University has slowed construction on the marquee science laboratory complex in Allston, and will likely “pause” construction later this year or even explore redesigning the buildings to trim costs on what had been budgeted as a $1.1-billion complex; that action will, by year end, reduce the need for capital spending by many millions of dollars per month. Later this year, the University will have to decide whether to proceed with another high-profile, but expensive, capital project: the renovation of the now-mothballed Fogg Art Museum. Renzo Piano has been working on a complete reconfiguration of this central art complex, and major gifts to underwrite the cost have been announced, but the project as a whole has been estimated to cost $350 million to $400 million, posing further challenges unless the price tag can be reduced significantly.

Not yet visible are the changes in the core activities of teaching and learning. As FAS and other schools have imposed limits on the use of visiting or other temporary professors, there will be consequences for course availability as faculty members take scheduled leaves. The Crimson has reported that the economics department, the largest College concentration as measured by undergraduate enrollments, may be forced to curtail its junior seminars—a recent innovation, and the only small classes regularly offered by the department faculty. Some such rumblings may be heard in the lobbying over resources, but it is likely that the academic smorgasbord Harvard students have come to expect will be less well stocked in future semesters. Adjustments in student and faculty life and amenities will certainly follow.

The hard work of, in Dean Smith’s words, “taking every possible measure to protect our core mission, to support our priorities, and even to pursue some new initiatives in the midst of this crisis,” is nowhere near done, and in many respects, may be only just begun.

A Walk through History, with Justice Ginsburg as Guide

Harvard Magazine — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 15:39:15 -0400

Case by case, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, L ’59, has chipped away at laws that have disadvantaged women and reinforced notions of men as breadwinners and women as dependents: first by arguing cases before the Supreme Court as an attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), later in her service as a justice on that very court.

Slowly, things began to change. Today, “it’s amazing how the laws of that genre are all gone,” Justice Ginsburg said last week. Speaking during “Gender and the Law: Unintended Consequences, Unsettled Questions,” a conference organized by the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the associate justice led listeners through some of the historic cases that overturned those laws.

Ginsburg’s fellow panelists wondered whether young women today realize just how much has changed. They “have had the privilege of coming of age professionally in a world that Ruth Bader Ginsburg helped to make,” said moderator Linda Greenhouse ’68, who spent three decades covering the Supreme Court for the New York Times (read a review of her book on Justice Harry Blackmun here).

None of the women on the panel holds a law degree from Harvard: Ginsburg attended Harvard Law School, but finished her degree at Columbia in 1959. Sandra Lynch—who last year became the first female chief judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit—recalled attending Boston University Law School (from which she graduated in 1971) when it was considered radical for admitting enough women to constitute 10 percent of each incoming law class. At the time, Harvard and Yale, where panelist and U.S. district judge Nancy Gertner earned her degree the same year, admitted far fewer women—Ginsburg was one of nine women in a class of more than 500.

Lynch described the open hostility that some of her law professors directed toward female students; Gertner recalled interviewing for a prestigious clerkship and being asked whether she ever planned to marry and have children. “I told him, ‘Of course not,’ ” she recalled. (She now has two.)

As Drew Faust, former dean of the Radcliffe Institute and the first female president of Harvard, listened in the first row, Ginsburg described how back in 1868, the Fourteenth Amendment’s drafters planted the seed of the women’s-rights movement—probably unwittingly, since their focus was not on gender but on giving full citizenship to “all persons born or naturalized in the United States” regardless of race.

Ginsburg came of age as an attorney at the same time women’s rights were first coming to the Supreme Court’s attention. Until 1971, she said, the court had no doctrine on gender discrimination. That year, Ginsburg wrote a brief in Reed v. Reed, which challenged an Idaho probate law that said “males must be preferred to females” in appointing estate administrators. (At the time, many states had similar language on their books, she recalled.) It was the first Supreme Court case she worked on in which the court issued a decision, and was an auspicious start: the court ruled in her client’s favor.

Ginsburg founded the ACLU Women’s Rights Project in 1972 and, in the eight years before her appointment as a federal judge, argued or wrote briefs in more than a dozen major women’s-rights cases.

Especially in the beginning, she said, it was important to choose sympathetic cases: those whose plaintiffs were demographically similar to the Supreme Court, and in some cases similar in gender to members of the court. She therefore took on some cases involving discrimination against men, on the premise that any discrimination on the basis of gender should be eliminated from statutes—not just discrimination against women. In one such case, 1975’s Weinberger vs. Wiesenfeld, the court struck down a federal law that had entitled widows, but not widowers, to child-in-care benefits after a spouse’s death.

And it was important to recognize that full equality of citizenship carried responsibilities as well as rights, Ginsburg said, citing Duren v. Missouri, a Supreme Court case she argued, and won, in 1979. In what would be the last case she argued before the court (she was appointed a federal judge in 1980, and served until her 1993 Supreme Court appointment), she maintained that a Missouri law making jury duty optional for women should be struck down because it treated women’s service on juries as less valuable than men’s.

The days of explicit discrimination are so far gone, Lynch said, that the stories seem implausible to today’s young women. Back then, Gertner chimed in, “everything seemed so clear.” Today’s discrimination is more subtle, she said.

For these reasons, Lynch said she worries that young women today will fail to see threats to their equality and lose ground inadvertently. In 2007, she noted, the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that a 180-day statute of limitations applied to gender-discrimination claims against employers—a decision Congress overruled this past January with legislation stating that the clock begins ticking on the statute of limitations at the moment a person realizes he or she has been discriminated against. The plaintiff in the case, Lilly Ledbetter, did not learn for 19 years that she had consistently been paid less than any of her fellow managers, all of whom were male.

Greenhouse wondered aloud whether similar concerns might have led Justice Ginsburg to read her dissents aloud from the bench, an unusual practice she used twice during the 2007 session. (Ginsburg was relatively circumspect in her reply, but her friend Cynthia Fuchs Epstein, a sociologist at the City University of New York, said in a 2007 Times article Greenhouse wrote on Ginsburg’s oral dissents: “Now she is seeing that basic issues she’s fought so hard for are in jeopardy, and she is less bound by what have been the conventions of the court.”)

Ginsburg admitted that her zeal for gender equality explained, at least in part, her quick recovery from surgery for pancreatic cancer earlier this year. She returned to work less than three weeks after the surgery, and the same week attended a major public address by President Barack Obama. When asked by USA Today why she insisted on attending, she answered, “I wanted people to see that the Supreme Court isn’t all male.” (She is, of course, the second female justice; Sandra Day O’Connor was appointed in 1981 and retired in 2006.)

However, Ginsburg voiced less concern about backsliding than her fellow panelists. She closed by saying that given how much has changed in a single generation, “I remain optimistic about the potential of the United States.”

In a panel on single-sex education, Kimberly Robinson, J.D. ’96, a professor at Emory University’s law school, detailed the recent resurgence of gender-segregated programs in private and public schools.

This is cause for concern, said Emily J. Martin, deputy director of the ACLU Women’s Rights Project, which is challenging 2006 revisions to the Title IX regulations that govern single-sex schools. These revisions expanded the conditions under which such schools can be created.

Said Martin:

Even if there are some excellent single-sex programs in the world, it’s difficult or impossible to construct a legal regime that permits those excellent programs without opening the door to a rash of programs in public schools based on what I think are insidious and false notions of gender difference that threaten to seriously compromise equal educational opportunity for boys and girls. There is a reason for tight legal restrictions on sex segregation.

Without extremely close monitoring, it is all too easy for notions of gender bias to creep in, the panelists said, referencing the 1996 Supreme Court case that struck down the Virginia Military Institute’s men-only admissions policy.

The court used the rationale that the school, which receives public funding, had not provided an equivalent program for women, but the school’s real problem was something harder to quantify—an intensely misogynistic culture—said Duke University law professor Katharine Bartlett, A.M. ’69. But when Bartlett voiced disappointment that the court hadn’t gone further in its decision and prescribed what should and should not be allowed in single-sex educational programs, Lynch responded with a sharp warning against expecting judges to legislate from the bench. “There is a need for regulatory clarity,” she said. “Courts decide cases. Courts do not provide regulatory clarity overall.”

In expecting courts to provide this clarity, she said,

you have shifted the focus of responsibility in our political system off the political branches and onto the judiciary. That is inherently a very bad thing to do. We are there to uphold the Constitution and to uphold the laws. You should not, out of convenience, thrust onto the courts things that are properly the responsibility of some other branch.

The Virginia Military Institute case, Lynch said, “didn’t answer a number of questions it would be valuable to answer” because “the parties didn’t raise them. No evidence was introduced. Courts are captive to this small body of information and the self-interest of the parties who are the litigants.”

Smith professor of law Martha Minow argued that it may be time to rethink how the United States, as a society, evaluates the success of educational programs. If a single-sex program raises scores in reading and math, she said, it’s still important to ask how it helps students with “twenty-first-century skills like teamwork and getting along with others.”

Martin used harsh words in describing the work of single-sex-education advocates Glenn Sacks and Michael Gurian. Based on “overbroad generalizations and what I think it’s fair to call junk science,” she said, these advocates make the case that “boys’ brains and girls’ brains are so different that they can’t possibly both succeed in the same classroom.” And their arguments are influential, she said: “This is becoming, more and more, conventional wisdom among educators.” Minow commented: “It’s troubling to think that the old ideas about natural differences between sexes come in to fill in the gaps because we don’t know to solve a hard problem.”

In a panel on “The Market, the Family, and Economic Power,” Sharon Rabin-Margalioth, a professor of law at Israel’s Radzyner School of Law (and visiting professor at New York University), reminded listeners that a wage gap still exists between men and women in the United States.

She said women are paid, on average, 20 percent less than men, and summarized for her audience arguments that courts have accepted, in recent cases, for paying women less than men for the same work. Those arguments, she said, include:

taking into account prior wages as a guideline for pay: the argument that to attract desirable employees, the employer must match their earlier pay, so if men earned more at their previous jobs, this justifies paying them more;
setting salaries based on negotiation—so if male employees more frequently negotiate upward from an employer’s original offer, they end up being paid more; and
matching external offers to keep valued employees—so if men are more likely to use such offers as a bargaining chip, they command higher pay.

“Courts are buying into these arguments,” she said, “because they feel that these arguments sever the connection between sex and wages.”

Rabin-Margalioth suggested that the U.S. legal system shift the burden of proof: instead of leaving it up to the employee to prove that her employer’s pay scheme is discriminatory, she said, it should be incumbent on the employer to prove that a gap between male and female employees’ pay is not discriminatory—in other words, when a pay gap exists, courts should assume it’s due to discrimination, unless truly unusual circumstances suggest otherwise. A difference in productivity, she said, should be the only acceptable reason for a pay gap between male and female employees with the same responsibilities.

In other components of the two-day conference, panelists considered:

women’s changing role in the workplace and the family, and the law’s role in those changes
the institution of marriage and prospects for new legal frameworks
the role of women in Muslim societies
family-leave laws in the United States
labor laws and their effect on women in China
changes in how U.S. states have defined marital property and allocated it between parties in a divorce, and how those changes have affected women
the ongoing wage gap between men and women in the United States, and
the treatment of abortion and rape in the United States and other legal systems.

View video from the conference, along with the full schedule and panelist bios, here; read the University Gazette account here.

Cherry A. Murray Named SEAS Dean

Harvard Magazine — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 16:35:42 -0400

Cherry a. Murray will be the next dean of the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) dean Michael D. Smith announced this afternoon.

Murray, who begins work at Harvard on July 1, is principal associate director for science and technology at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, which specializes in research and development of national-security science and technology. From 1978 until 2004, she worked at Bell Laboratories, where she was hired as a staff scientist and ended her service as senior vice president for physical sciences and wireless research.

Her research focuses on soft condensed matter and condensed fluids; according to the University news release, she is also

well known for her scientific accomplishments using light scattering, an experimental technique where photons are fired at a target of interest. Scientists can then gather insights into surface physics and photonic behavior by analyzing the spray of photons in various directions from such collisions.

Murray replaces interim dean Frans Spaepen, Franklin professor of applied physics, who has led SEAS since Venkatesh Narayanamurti stepped down last September after 10 years of service that included overseeing its transition from a division to a full-fledged school within FAS.

Narayanamurti—Armstrong professor of engineering and applied sciences and professor of physics—called Murray’s appointment a “tremendous coup” for Harvard. He worked with her at Bell Labs, where he was formerly director of solid-state electronics. ”I have known Cherry Murray for many years as a colleague, researcher, and scientific leader,” he said in the release. “She has a deep understanding of the interplay between basic and applied research and the role of engineering and applied science as a linking and integrating discipline—rooted in science, focused on discovery and innovation, and connected to the wider world of technology and society.”

Murray holds a bachelor’s degree and a Ph.D. in physics from MIT. She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is also the current president of the American Physical Society.

Vice President Sally Zeckhauser to Retire

Harvard Magazine — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 13:35:58 -0400

Sally Zeckhauser, Harvard’s vice president for administration (VPA) since 1988, will retire at the end of the academic year, effective June 30, the University has announced. She informed her staff earlier today. No details about succession were included in the news release.

In a statement accompanying the news, President Drew Faust said, “Sally Zeckhauser has been one of Harvard’s most dedicated and effective administrative leaders for more than 35 years.…She has brought to her wide-ranging responsibilities a keen sense of Harvard’s mission and distinctive culture, and a feel for not just the institutional but the human dimensions of any given situation or challenge. For me, as for so many others, she has been not only a valued colleague but a good friend.” Former President Neil L. Rudenstine said Zeckhauser’s service during his administration “was critical to the renovation of the freshman residences in Harvard Yard, and to the creation or revitalization of such facilities as the Barker Center, Widener Library, and Memorial Hall. Her role as leader, administrator, partner, and University citizen has been invaluable, and Harvard’s debt to her is very great indeed.”

Zeckhauser’s presence in Massachusetts Hall provided management continuity during the tenure of five Harvard presidents and a large and changing cast of other senior executives and deans; she is today one of seven vice presidents who, along with the recently appointed executive vice president and the provost, make up Faust’s nonacademic leadership team.

In her message to staff colleagues, Zeckhauser wrote, “I realize that I am leaving Harvard at a time of significant challenge, and my departure will add another element of change. But it is important to remember that change has always been a cornerstone of Harvard’s success and a touchstone of VPA activities.…Harvard would not be where it is today if we were still operating with a 1660s model—or a 1920s model—or even a 1990s model. Change is rarely easy, but Harvard is better for it.”

Zeckhauser’s responsibilities span Harvard’s principal staff operations: University Operations Services (engineering and utilities, environmental health and safety, buildings and grounds operations and maintenance, transportation); dining services; real estate (owned and leased apartments, affiliate housing, and so on); physical planning and development; the Faculty Club; and management oversight of several allied institutions, including the Arnold Arboretum, Harvard University Press, and Harvard Magazine (whose publisher reports to the vice president for administration for financial purposes).

Under her auspices, an annual “Harvard Heroes” celebration held each June in Sanders Theatre has recognized the performance of outstanding administrative personnel from throughout the University; before colleagues and, in many cases, family members, employees have been recognized for everything from coping with blizzards to improving food service to automating financial systems—and have been saluted with a degree-like certificates presented by the president. These staff recognition events have taken on special importance in the University context, given the status accorded to faculty members and students within the community. Harvard Heroes (which will be suspended this June, in light of budgetary constraints) and professional-development retreats for VPA middle managers (featuring experts from Harvard Business School, among others) have become rallying points for staff morale, and have made Zeckhauser well known across the University for leading efforts to enhance employees’ skills and opportunities. She also led the creation of the Bridge to Learning and Literacy Program, which offers skills, language, and other training to hundreds of service and clerical/technical workers, and has helped many attain citizenship.

Before assuming her current responsibilities, according to the news release, Zeckhauser served from 1979 to 1988 as the first president of Harvard Real Estate Inc., responsible for the University’s nonacademic real-estate holdings. From 1973 to 1978, she directed a research group that provided financial analysis and decision-making support to Harvard’s senior leadership. A 1964 graduate of Bryn Mawr College, she received a master of public administration degree from the Kennedy School of Government in 1973. She has been a trustee of Bryn Mawr College since 1995 and chair of its board since 2000. She also serves as vice chair of the Lalor Foundation, which funds research fellowships in reproductive science and supports social initiatives in reproductive planning

Alongside her extensive operating and management responsibilities, Zeckhauser played a leading role during the administrations of Presidents Derek Bok, Rudenstine, and Lawrence H. Summers in assembling land for future campus development in Allston, and in early planning for those properties. (Earlier in this decade, as the Allston program gained critical mass and moved toward initial construction—now at least partly in abeyance, in light of current financial pressures—those activities were collected in the Allston Development Group, a separate unit reporting directly to the president.)

Zeckhauser’s husband, Richard Zeckhauser, is Ramsey professor of political economy at the Harvard Kennedy School (see here for recent coverage of his diverse work from Harvard Magazine).

Stanford Imposes Deeper Cuts, Too

Harvard Magazine — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 11:36:44 -0400

Updated March 10, 2009

Citing worsening economic and financial conditions, Stanford’s provost, John Etchemendy, has told that University’s faculty senate that deeper budget reductions would be required. In a presentation on March 5, the provost announced that Stanford’s $800-million “general funds budget” would be trimmed by nearly $100 million for the fiscal year beginning on September 1. In a subsequent statement released on March 9, Etchemendy indicated that “Most administrative units are entirely funded through general funds, while schools receive between seven and 35 percent of their revenue from this source. Schools that depend heavily on their own endowed funds will, of course, see declines in these revenues comparable to the general funds decline”—which he indicated would be 15 percent across the board. (Stanford derives $900 million from endowment distributions for its annual operating revenues; at Harvard, the comparable figure is approximately $1.4 billion currently.)

The new decision represents an acceleration of plans put in place last fall, when Stanford foresaw a $100-million reduction phased in during the next two fiscal years, and means that the budget is to be reduced about $30 million more in the first year than recently anticipated. To achieve the goal, Stanford will now impose a salary freeze for the fiscal year, a step it had not previously planned to take. In addition, Stanford has already announced that it would cancel or delay $1.3 billion in proposed construction, and has laid off staff members and reduced the number of faculty searches. Additional layoffs are now expected in coming months.

(In its initial statement on the fiscal crunch early last autumn, Stanford said that its general-funds budget—for faculty and staff salaries, administrative operations, and non-research expenses—would need to be reduced $45 million in the 2009-2010 fiscal year, with further reductions of equal magnitude in the following year. While resisting “across-the-board” layoffs or salary freezes, Etchemendy then anticipated that “some jobs will be lost” and salary adjustments “will certainly be smaller than in recent years.” Every unit, academic and administrative, was accordingly asked to prepare budget reductions of 3, 5, and 7 percent, as the basis for allocating expense cuts. Because Stanford’s endowment spending policy operates so as to “buffer the effect of sharp volatility” in investment returns, Etchemendy said, it was then assumed that the university could effectively postpone budget reductions—but spread them out over “several years.” Finally, he forecast last fall, “Will all the projects in the capital plan be built at the speed we had originally hoped? No.” The aim was to curtail both construction outlays and the accompanying debt service. Stanford deans were told, he said then, “that we do not intend to add any new projects to the capital plan at this time.”)

The tighter belt-tightening echoes Yale’s recent, similar action.

The statement accompanying Etchemendy’s March 5 announcement did not say that the Stanford endowment had deteriorated further; it saw “a steep decline in the university endowment, which has fallen 25 to 30 percent”—in line with the results reported or forecast by other universities with large, similarly diversified endowments, including Harvard, Princeton, and Yale.

But the March 9 statement has a more ominous tone: “Our budget planning assumptions estimated a loss in our endowment of 20 to 30 percent; that figure is now trending higher, and it is increasingly clear that it will be a long time before we see the endowment’s value return to previous levels.” The implication, underlying the deeper cost-cutting, is clear: “Since the endowment is the university’s primary source of investment income, the result will be a long-term decrease in university revenue,” even though Stanford, unlike Harvard, is in the middle of a multibillion-dollar capital campaign (as are Columbia, the University of Pennsylvania, and Yale; Brown, Dartmouth, and Princeton are conducting somewhat smaller campaigns), which has helped bring in significant new cash and pledges: Stanford reported raising $785 million in fiscal year 2008.

Thus, this second round of austerity, like that at Yale, suggests a darkening forecast for everything from the length and depth of the recession to the outlook for donor support and access to credit (for capital projects) on acceptable terms.

Jim Yong Kim Named Dartmouth President

Harvard Magazine — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 16:24:08 -0400

Jim Yong Kim, director of the François-Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights at the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH), has accepted the presidency of Dartmouth College.

He will be the first Asian-American president of an Ivy League university, the New York Times reports. The article quotes Kim as saying:

At some point, you have to decide whether you’re going to keep throwing your body at a problem, which is what I’ve always done. You realize that one person can’t do that much. So what I want to do is train an army of leaders to engage with the problems of the world, who will believe the possibilities are limitless, that there’s nothing they can’t do. Being the president of an Ivy League university is an amazing opportunity.

Besides his HSPH appointment, Kim chairs the department of global health and social medicine at Harvard Medical School and heads the division of global health equity at the Harvard-affiliated Brigham and Women’s Hospital. With Presley professor of social medicine Paul Farmer, he helped found and lead Partners in Health, a nonprofit organization that treats tuberculosis and AIDS patients in countries such as Haiti, Rwanda, and Peru. While on leave from Harvard, Kim has worked for the World Health Organization, overseeing AIDS treatment and prevention programs. He received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2003 and was named one of the world’s 100 most influential people by Time magazine in 2006. Kim holds both a medical degree and a Ph.D. in anthropology from Harvard, and a bachelor’s degree from Brown University. He is a member of the Institute of Medicine.

Kim will take up his post at Dartmouth in July, according to the official announcement from Dartmouth (featuring a YouTube interview with the future president).

Ed Halderman, chairman of Dartmouth’s board of trustees, said Kim “embodies the ideals of learning, innovation, and service that lie at the heart of Dartmouth’s mission,” and that he “follows in the long tradition of Dartmouth presidents who have made a significant mark both in higher education and on the world stage.”

View Kim’s Harvard faculty webpage here; read about his work in this article from the Harvard Magazine archives.