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Arts and Sciences: Aspirations and Anxieties

niko_yaitanes@harvard.edu — Wed, 02 Oct 2024 19:42:26 +0000

Arts and Sciences: Aspirations and Anxieties niko_yaitanes@… Wed, 10/02/2024 - 15:42

During the first Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) meeting of the year, on October 1, Dean Hopi Hoekstra tried to set a positive tone for her colleagues concerned about Harvard’s challenges in the wake of a traumatic 2023-2024 (her first year as dean). Their subsequent questions suggested prevailing anxieties and concerns about the boundaries of speech on campus, University governance, artificial intelligence, and the best ways to foster productive engagement and conversations within the community (discussed in detail below).

Acknowledging a community “much changed from last spring,” Hoekstra noted a change for FAS itself: that its meetings this year will take place in the Harvard Art Museums’ subterranean Menschel Hall, rather than in the Faculty Room in University Hall—figuratively, the historic heart of the faculty and of Harvard itself. She cited greater attendance than in years past, and work to think more intentionally during the year about the uses of faculty meetings (see below) and of the Faculty Room itself (perhaps a reference to the long-planned reconfiguration of the art and imagery hung there, under chief campus curator Brenda Tindal, following a 2021 report on signage and visual culture).

The change in venue had practical and symbolic consequences. Attendance continues to be tepid (about half of Menschel’s 292 seats were filled)—and unlike the relatively intimate seating in the round in the Faculty Room, the museum venue is a long, steeply banked lecture hall (leading Hoekstra to joke, “Just like classes I teach, there’s lots of room in the front here”), creating distance between the faculty and its leaders that is exactly the opposite of the culture she herself models and is at pains to enhance. And there was, as some faculty members noted, a palpable sense of difference from the familiar, venerable venue—perhaps underscored, on a campus that was convulsed last spring, by the presence of Harvard University Police officers in the entrance lobby during registration.

Setting a Tone

Hoekstra quickly reviewed signs of normalcy: a community “bustling and alive” with the advent of fall term. She also pointed to signs of change in the directorship of the Art Museums, hosting the meeting site; the appointments of President Alan M. Garber and Provost John F. Manning; new FAS deans of arts and humanities and of science; a new leader for the Bok Center, FAS’s locus for pedagogical training and innovation; and the faculty’s new dean of communications and chief communications officer, Anna Cowenhoven, an FAS veteran, at a critical time for that role. In a way, under varying circumstances, all these appointments represent not only change but institutional continuity, as new leaders fill essential roles. Hoekstra also cited the most important part of the faculty’s renewal: the summer training institute for 30 or so new faculty colleagues, and the September 2 convocation welcoming 1,647 new undergraduates.

She noted that this is the first class admitted since the U.S. Supreme Court outlawed the use of affirmative action in admissions, and that enrollment data indicate a decrease in the number of undergraduates in the class of 2028 who identify as black. Hoekstra cautioned that the data are confusing compared to other schools’ reports, and the outcomes will likely change over the course of several admissions cycles. But she firmly declared that “diversity…is a precondition for real excellence” in Harvard’s academic work, and remains a fundamental value within the constraints of the current law.

In the context of the admissions developments, Hoekstra thanked and praised the College’s dean, Rakesh Khurana, who is stepping down at the end of this academic year; he received sustained applause.

“Take Back Our Narrative”

Hoekstra said that she had come to Harvard nearly two decades ago—leaving behind her West Coast parents and sibling, and wonderful offers from Stanford and Berkeley—to come to a place where “the opportunities were open, endless,” limited only by her own curiosity. She recognized a community of wonderful colleagues, post docs, graduate students, and undergraduates, and the potential to “import” even more such people. Realizing that sense of intellectual opportunity for Harvard today, for FAS colleagues, and for students, she said, is her aspiration as dean, at a pivotal moment for the institution.

Accordingly, she is devoting her work to advancing scholarly excellence—in recruiting talent, fostering collaboration across departments and divisions, and applying resources to the most promising academic opportunities. In pursuing that academic focus, she said—alluding to the turmoil of last year—“With your help, we can take back our narrative.”

She reemphasized sustaining a broadly diverse student body, recruiting talented learners from all walks of life, and supporting them once they enroll.

And she said focusing on academic excellence was the third fundamental priority: supporting and enhancing the classroom experience, investing in pedagogy, and creating an environment for “transformational learning through study and, importantly, through dialogue” (subjects for FAS task forces she established last year).

All those aims, Hoekstra said, depend on collaborative work among the faculty members themselves: careful listening, good-faith exchanges with one another (particularly on areas of disagreement), and a commitment to working together to effect lasting changes where warranted.

Her own leadership, she continued, was predicated on bringing forth the widest range of faculty voices. She cited formal task forces and working groups on classroom expectations and experiences, civil discourse, artificial intelligence, and the best use of the faculty’s own meetings (see below). She will also create ad hoc groups to access faculty opinion on emerging issues; has convened faculty-wide groups to prepare for this fall semester, and to garner opinion from department chairs on best practices and issues FAS leaders need to address; is working with the elected Faculty Council to hear opinions and to hash out policies (not simply to rubber-stamp already-drafted legislation); and has organized small, social gatherings (over lunch, for example), in which all ladder faculty members are eligible to participate, to foster social ties and engagement on FAS issues.

At an important moment for Harvard, when the purposes and values of higher education are under great challenge, Hoekstra declared herself dedicated to hearing FAS colleagues’ views and bringing them to bear on faculty and University concerns. She welcomed visits, email outreach, and phone calls—even for expression of perspectives on which there was disagreement—and closed by saying, “Let’s please keep making that investment in each other and the future of FAS.”

Hoekstra’s sincerity and warmth were on evident display: as the meeting progressed, she thanked each colleague who rose to ask (often difficult) questions for doing so, and for the opportunity to respond. And the faculty members seemed to respond in kind: several prefaced their questions by thanking her for her empathy and even her “human decency and character.”

Both may be important, at a time when the faculty members, uneasy about University governance, are contemplating creating a Harvard-wide faculty senate. As the ensuing questions at the faculty meeting made clear, the rules about use of the campus, promulgated administratively during the summer (in response to last spring’s protests, encampment in Harvard Yard, and other actions), have if anything intensified at least some faculty members’ objections to the substance of new policies and how they are made. That complicates Hoekstra’s job, and puts an even greater premium on engaged, productive discourse within the FAS itself if it is to advance on its academic aims.

AI, Speech on Campus, Legacy Admissions

Significant concerns arose during the faculty’s open question period.

Artificial intelligence. The first concerned AI. The University has provided generative AI accounts to faculty and students, the speaker noted, in effect encouraging them to use the technology. She wondered whether Harvard ought to encourage community members to go faster in applying the technology to their research and learning—or to slow down; to apply the tools, or instead to stretch their own minds; and to recognize more clearly that AI tools are incapable of emotion or sensation in the way trained humans are. Given concerns about the technology’s training incursions on intellectual property and copyright (of obvious concern to professors), susceptibility to bias and errors, and huge environmental costs, ought not Harvard educators, in the spirit Hoekstra had just outlined, focus less on encouraging adoption of AI and more on thinking through the tradeoffs of using it?

Hoekstra agreed with the spirit of the question, she said. AI is being made available so faculty and students can make up their own minds about the challenges it poses and the opportunities it affords. Her special adviser on AI, Christopher Stubbs, former dean of science, is especially attuned to these ethical issues, she said, and committed to Harvard’s leadership role in sorting them out for appropriate academic use of AI tools. FAS had held a symposium on AI for faculty last fall, and an FAS advisory committee is examining its use in teaching and research across the faculty. Hoekstra embraced the idea of a wider conversation, including students.

Campus use and speech. The first of several speakers rose to challenge the rules on campus use disseminated by executive vice president Meredith Weenick on August 1 and August 30—on the grounds that they seem overly restrictive of speech, and at odds with the FAS and University values of intellectual vitality. In that light, how could FAS assert its governance role in such policies? The speaker asked Hoekstra what role FAS had played in devising the rules, and what options it had to get them revised for FAS.

(Of note: in a survey of 44 institutions’ responses to last academic year’s student protests and encampments, the Chronicle of Higher Education found that Harvard now has more kinds of restrictions on the manner of student protest—across six categories including structures, masking, amplified sound, and so on—than any other school it identified putting such constraints in place.)

Hoekstra said, without qualification, that she could not offer any insight into the process of drafting the rules—a clear statement that she, and FAS, had not been engaged in shaping them. As for the substance, she indicated, President Garber had told the faculty in a town hall setting that the regulations would be drafted quickly (the perfect as the enemy of the good), and then subjected to improvement. How might FAS be involved in that? Hoekstra suggested that faculty members avail themselves of the email address for making comments. More significantly she said that Weenick, under whose authority the rules were collated and issued, had said that instead of prior plans to examine them in a year, there will now be listening sessions soon to garner reactions, learn about unintended consequences, and perhaps undertake revisions—and a further opportunity to do so again next spring.

FAS itself can seek a “local exemption” to such rules, Hoekstra said, pointing to its policies for what permissions student groups must request to undertake certain activities, the procedures to apply to use the Yard, and so on. She had convened advisory groups to discuss such matters, and thanked the questioner for raising the issue.

Another professor rose to say he felt the campus use rules raised questions more pressing than Hoekstra’s actions, as described, could satisfy. The rules, he said, are “drastically overreaching” (he cited prohibitions on chalking messages, for example, or, possibly governing the kinds of notes one could put on an office door). He urged Hoekstra to convey “firmly, strongly, and as directly as possible” FAS’s need and desire for local exceptions to the rules, and to ask Weenick to appear before the faculty to explain and defend them under questioning.

Hoekstra amplified that she had shared the faculty concerns with Weenick and with Mass. Hall (the offices of the president and provost)—and that doing so was an important responsibility of her office as dean. She would invite Weenick to meet with the faculty, and encouraged all FAS members to raise their concerns. She suggested that steps toward a “commonsense approach” to implementing the rules would be forthcoming in a few weeks, incorporating faculty views.

(In a sense, such implementing language might echo the September publication of guidelines on how to understand and apply the University policy on institutional voice adopted in late May.)

A third speaker rose to reinforce the view that the campus-use rules feel like “a substantial overreach with…consequences for free expression for our students and faculty” and to ask Hoekstra to elaborate on the steps she is taking.

Hoekstra talked more about having a small, “nimble” advisory group to gather faculty sentiments quickly on such issues; to use the Faculty Council as a true “sounding board” for concerns, able to help her “think things through”; and to engage with the faculty generally, for which she thanked members. Unsaid, but clearly hovering in the background, are the governance concerns impelling discussion of a senate or other channels for faculty voice.

A separate question concerned the recent adoption by California of a blanket ban on legacy preferences in college and university admissions: when would Harvard follow suit?

Hoekstra said that she could not answer the question, but would pose it to President Garber. (Such admissions policies are set at the Corporation level—another instance of Harvard’s traditional governing arrangements that spread authority among the governing boards, senior administrators, and the faculties themselves.)

Managing the Faculty’s Meetings

Professor of religion and Indian philosophy Parimal G. Patil then reported for one of Hoekstra’s advisory groups, this one an ad hoc committee on meetings of the faculty itself. In the new circumstances of the dean, rather than Harvard’s president, chairing FAS meetings, and out of a desire to foster community, Patil’s small group sought to make the sessions more productive and to engage wider participation. Among its recommendations to the dean, he outlined three:

•reserving the final 45 minutes of each monthly meeting for open, faculty-focused, in camera discussions on any topics of interest: admissions, hiring, campus use, conversations with the president and provost, and so on;

•removing routine business (slide decks from presentations, committee reports) to offline forums, effectively streamlining the agenda of the formal meetings; and

•considering how balloting on important issues is conducted, including disseminating ballots to all faculty members on certain occasions, so they can weigh in whether present or not.

In the discussion, two significant points were raised. First, why move to in camera sessions? Patil said such circumstances were conducive to transparent conversations among the faculty members themselves. Legislative debates would not be in camera.

(Faculty meetings, at FAS’s discretion, are now subject to reporting by the Harvard Crimson and this magazine—and the identities of speakers from the floor are protected; in camera sessions on the granting of degrees are naturally not subject to such coverage. Other faculty town halls are routinely off limits. The October 1 faculty meeting, which in many ways modeled civic discourse on fraught issues, might or might not have been open to coverage were the faculty to move such conversation to an in camera forum; presumably such sessions would still be captured in the secretary’s minutes, although that topic was not broached.)

Second, a professor wondered whether an open-forum meeting of the whole faculty would not devolve into 200 separate faculty members delivering monologues. Might the faculty instead want to break out into smaller discussion sessions, engage on Slack or other channels, or otherwise foster discussion by reducing the size of the groups, aiming to better engage their participants in discussion? Patil agreed, but also hoped an in camera discussion would enable true conversation and would not devolve into a forum for individual monologues.

There were no comments on the second point (it aims to address a continuing problem that may explain why few members attend faculty meetings, which have become pro forma exercises much of the time), or the third.

Open Inquiry

Radcliffe Dean Tomiko Brown-Nagin and professor of government Eric Beerbohm then briefed the faculty on the report of the University working group on open inquiry and constructive dialogue, issued earlier in the day.

In the discussion, a professor rose to ask a question that echoed the conversation on Patil’s report: if Harvard wished to foster engaging conversations in teaching settings, why had course section sizes risen toward the current apparent target of 18 students—too large for the best conversations to take place? And more importantly, how did the working group’s recommendations fit with the other issues raised during the faculty meeting, concerning the new rules on campus use, in the context of the University Statement on Rights and Responsibilities and the FAS’s own speech guidelines?

Brown-Nagin said the working group had thought about section size, but did not pursue that in its report because it was too detailed for a University-level overview, and properly a subject for faculty- and school-level policies. (That reflects the every-tub-on-its-own-bottom nature of Harvard’s decentralized operations; and there are obviously unexpressed financial considerations for a faculty like FAS, which staffs a lot of course sections; see a report bearing on discussion of section sizes two decades ago.)

More broadly, she said about the emerging University policies, rules, and norms, “I agree all these policies and reports are in conversation with each other.”

Some of that conversation was on display within FAS October 1. It will assuredly continue, across the University, in the days to come.

by b09de2a90dfa0acc@harvard.edu

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Two Harvardians Win MacArthur Fellowships

lydia_gibson@harvard.edu — Tue, 01 Oct 2024 17:21:30 +0000

Two Harvardians Win MacArthur Fellowships lydia_gibson@h… Tue, 10/01/2024 - 13:21

Two Harvard alumnae are among the 2024 MacArthur Fellows announced today. Dorothy Roberts, J.D. ’80, is a legal scholar and public policy researcher who studies racial inequality in health and social service systems. A faculty member at the University of Pennsylvania since 2012, she holds named professorships in the law school and the department of sociology, with a joint appointment in Africana studies. Roberts’s work has focused in particular on reproductive freedom and black women’s reproductive rights, and on the child welfare system’s treatment of families of color.

In Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty (1997), she analyzed the long struggle over control of black women’s childbearing, from forced procreation during slavery to forced sterilization to contemporary welfare reform. Later, in Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare (2001), and her most recent book, Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families—and How Abolition Can Build a Safer World (2022), Roberts examined how race and class disproportionately lead to state intervention in child welfare cases. She also described the historical, cultural, and political forces driving this imbalance, creating stereotypes and stigmas about black families and blaming marginalized individuals for structural problems with long roots in history. She calls for dismantling the current child welfare system, which she sees as irredeemable, and building a new one from the ground up.

Evolutionary biologist Martha Muñoz, Ph.D. ’14, is an assistant professor at Yale, where she studies the factors that affect rates and patterns of evolution. Working with reptiles, amphibians, and fishes, her research includes investigations into why some organisms and traits develop rapidly while others remain unchanged for millennia, and how behavior and biomechanics influence those changes.

Studying different populations of tropical anole lizards—at warm, sea-level habitats and on colder mountaintops—Muñoz challenged the assumption that environmental pressures are the primary drivers of evolution. Instead, she found, behavioral differences were what enabled both groups of lizards to regulate their body temperature, and that behavior can be “a motor and a brake” for evolution. Elsewhere, she has demonstrated the close link between biomechanics and evolution, studying changes in the forelimb of mantis shrimp—which the animal uses to punch or stab its prey. She found that the smallest component of the jointed forelimb evolves more rapidly than the others, and minute changes in its length have large effects on the claw’s overall force. Studying the jaws of more than 100 fish species, she found that the rates of evolution depend on whether the species needs more bite force or bite speed to catch prey. Currently, she is researching diversification among dozens of species of plethodontid salamanders, which breathe through their skin, living in microhabitats in the Appalachian Mountains.

The MacArthur Fellowship recognizes individuals across disciplines who “demonstrate the ability to impact society in significant and beneficial ways through their pioneering work or the rigor of their contributions.” Each of the approximately two-dozen fellows is awarded $800,000, paid out over five years. The funds are a no-strings-attached investment in the promise of the fellows’ work.

by lydia_gibson@harvard.edu

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Read the full report here.

Fostering Civil Discourse

max_krupnick@harvard.edu — Tue, 01 Oct 2024 16:30:25 +0000

Fostering Civil Discourse max_krupnick@h… Tue, 10/01/2024 - 12:30

After a tumultuous fall 2023 semester, Harvard turned its attention toward difficult conversations. How can students feel comfortable discussing controversial events? Why are students reluctant to express disagreement in and out of the classroom? In April, then-interim President Alan Garber and then-interim Provost John Manning convened the Open Inquiry and Constructive Dialogue Working Group. On Tuesday, the group released its report.

It begins by establishing candid conversations as an important University value. “Open inquiry and constructive dialogue,” it reads, “are essential to the pursuit of academic excellence at Harvard and throughout higher education.”

But those candid conversations often do not happen. The task force described a chilled speech environment on campus. Some 45 percent of surveyed students said they were “reluctant to share their views about charged topics in class.” Students feared judgment from peers, criticism on social media, reputational damage, and bullying.

Faculty and instructors—especially those without tenure—also express hesitation about discussing controversial topics. Though 59 percent of surveyed faculty and instructors said they would research controversial issues, only 49 percent feel comfortable leading a classroom discussion, and only 32 percent feel comfortable talking about such issues outside the classroom. Many feared damage to their professional standing through negative course reviews, contract nonrenewal, social media criticism, and formal complaints about bullying.

Fear about engaging in controversial speech is not unique to the University. “Extreme political polarization, enduring social divisions, and the impacts of social media on human behavior inform and shape on-campus dynamics,” the working group wrote.

Their report suggests that the University and its representatives should broadcast the institution’s interest in fostering dialogue across difference. It recommends that the College institute a required first-year module about constructive disagreement, perhaps to be taught through the required Expository Writing courses. It suggests that course instructors publicize “their commitment to open inquiry” on their syllabi. And it calls for schools to “recognize and support educators, including untenured faculty…who are skilled facilitators of controversial subjects.”

Some University stakeholders, such as Ford Foundation professor of democracy and governance Tarek Masoud, have argued that the best way to have hard conversations on campus is just to have them. But task force co-chair Eric Beerbohm, director of the Safra Center for Ethics and faculty dean of Quincy House, has found that students and faculty believe “these skills are not naturally occurring,” he said. “Most of us in our disciplines aren’t taught how to get…across difference.”

Beerbohm hoped that the report will inspire action, not just preach values. He described the working group members as “cross-pollinators,” searching for promising speech initiatives at different Harvard schools and sharing successful techniques with the broader University. Radcliffe Dean Tomiko Brown-Nagin, who co-chaired the group, noted that by design, some schools have more robust discourse curriculums than others. (Lawyers will encounter adversarial arguments in their profession more frequently than dentists.) Some highlighted policies from the professional schools include Harvard Business School’s guide to managing challenging moments in the classroom and Harvard Law School’s policy on personal narratives in classroom discussions (some professors discourage students from buttressing arguments with personal ties).

The working group was especially interested in the Chatham House Rule, which allows students to share what was said in a class with others so long as they do not reveal who said it. The Business, Law, and Kennedy schools already have instituted such policies. Non-attribution policies aim to help students feel as though the stakes of classroom discussions are lower. Such rules, said Beerbohm, “empower students to attend to an idea that may not be their own, but they’re just testing it out.”

The group also wanted to find ways to mitigate the pressures of the outside world. They recommended that the University “enact policies that promote responsible social media use.” The Business and Law schools ban social media use during class. The Kennedy School discourages the use of technology for personal purposes during class.

Brown-Nagin and Beerbohm are hopeful that the report can help facilitate difficult conversations on campus. Students, Brown-Nagin said, “want to be good University citizens. They just need some help with that.”

In a message to the Harvard community, Garber and Manning accepted the recommendations of the working group and said they “look forward to working with the deans, faculty, staff, and students to put them into practice.”

Though this report seeks to broaden the speech environment on campus, it will have to work alongside new restrictions on campus rhetoric. Last week, the University elaborated on its institutional voice policy, which prevents Harvard and its leaders from making official statements about public matters not directly affecting core academic functions.

During an interview with Harvard Magazine about the open inquiry report, Brown-Nagin discussed the upcoming anniversary of Hamas’s October 7 attack, which sparked the present war in the Middle East and began the turmoil that shook this and other campuses last year. “The open inquiry work could move us toward a better way of talking about the very painful, difficult issues related to the conflict in Israel and Gaza,” she said. “Few of us have been unmoved or untouched by the events of the past year, and I’m sure that the pain will be deeply felt on October 7.” Brown-Nagin did not take a stance on the conflict—doing so, as former President Claudine Gay did last October, would violate the new institutional voice policy.

But did this vague reference to the war in the Middle East and its impact on campus abide by the guidance of the institutional voice policy? The new policy states that leaders are instructed not to “issue public statements on natural disasters, acts of mass violence, or other events capturing significant public attention unless they also raise issues concerning core University functions.” Does a comment like Brown-Nagin’s, which does not promote any specific opinion but simply acknowledges a painful event, constitute a public statement?

A Harvard spokesperson said that her comment does abide by the policy. “Her comments—during an interview on how to improve open dialogue on campus—do not take a position on an ongoing current global issue but rather acknowledge from an individual perspective that the ongoing conflict is being felt by members of our community as both painful and difficult for many in the University community,” wrote assistant director for media relations and communications Sarah Kennedy O’Reilly. The institutional voice guidance, she continued, “leaves space for connecting members of our community with resources. I think it’s fair to point to opportunities for constructive dialogue as a resource for the community.”

In the coming months, Harvard will have to figure out how to implement these dual sets of policies and recommendations—one that encourages discussion about controversial topics, and another that restricts leaders from commenting on them.

by max_krupnick@harvard.edu

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U.S. Representative Blasts Harvard’s Discipline

niko_yaitanes@harvard.edu — Mon, 30 Sep 2024 22:13:07 +0000

U.S. Representative Blasts Harvard’s Discipline niko_yaitanes@… Mon, 09/30/2024 - 18:13

On September 26, U.S. Representative Virginia Foxx (R-North Carolina), chair of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, issued a press release in which she “denounced Harvard University for its refusal to hold those responsible for the antisemitic protests that consumed its campus accountable with meaningful discipline.” This is the latest salvo from the committee that has spearheaded investigations into and severe criticisms of Harvard and many other universities since last autumn (including the December 5 hearing at which then-President Claudine Gay came in for severe condemnation for her testimony), and is consistent with some of its members’ continued focus on the issues arising from the Hamas attack on Israel and war in the Middle East.

Foxx’s news release cites Harvard records provided to the committee. It concludes that the University “failed to discipline the overwhelming majority of those involved in the protests, and none of those found responsible for the spring encampment were suspended.” That, in turn, in Foxx’s views, “amounts to a likely failure to provide a safe learning environment for Jewish students, a violation of Harvard’s responsibilities under the Civil Rights Act of 1964.”

As reported, Harvard’s disciplinary processes are convoluted, vary by school, and are subject to differing interpretations by members of the community and external audiences (see “Locked In,” July-August, page 17, and “Own Goals,” September-October, page 5, respectively on the spring protests and pro-Palestinian encampment, and the ensuing results of school disciplinary processes and student appeals). It was almost foreordained that Foxx would criticize the outcome of the disciplinary decisions following the spring pro-Palestinian encampment; in an August news release, Columbia came in for the same treatment for its troubles.

Foxx’s news release singles Harvard out for, among other incidents, failing to deal more severely with the “occupation of a campus building” (a November 2023 protest in which seven students sat in at a University Hall room overnight, and for which they were ultimately admonished, rather than put on probation). According to the redacted Administrative Board case report, the student protestors said they acted to call for an immediate ceasefire as a step toward “Palestinian liberation”; to protect students’ free speech; and to “make clear that anti-Zionism is not antisemitism.” Foxx characterized the protest as an example of “antisemitic conduct violations.” She also objected to the discipline following the spring encampment in Harvard Yard, with 52 of 68 students referred for disciplinary action now in “good standing.”

More broadly, she concludes, “Failure to punish these students for their antisemitic actions amounts to a likely failure to provide a safe learning environment for Jewish students, a violation of Harvard’s responsibilities under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.” The administrators responsible, she continues, “failed their Jewish students and faculty…and in this case, Harvard may have failed to fulfill its legal responsibilities to protect students from a hostile environment.” (The news release makes no mention of recent changes in disciplinary oversight at the University level, nor of the University task forces on antisemitism and anti-Muslim, -Arab, and -Palestinian bias, whose final reports are expected soon; committee members have focused almost exclusively on antisemitism.)

The language about a “hostile environment” and Title VI bears on the current situation for universities generally. As Inside Higher Education has reported (“How Title VI Is Tripping up Colleges,” September 4), the U. S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights (OCR) has now resolved six of its dozens of investigations into colleges’ responses to reports of antisemitism during the past traumatic year. (Harvard is not facing such an investigation now, because similar allegations are being raised in a private lawsuit, as the Crimson reported.)

Those investigations have determined that a “hostile environment” is one that ““limits or denies a person’s ability to participate in or benefit from a recipient’s education program or activity.” Institutions are under the Title VI obligation to determine whether such conditions exist, and if so, to address them and prevent them from recurring. Title VI prohibits discrimination based on race, color, or national origin—the latter encompassing discrimination based on shared ancestry, including antisemitism and Islamophobia. Those institutional determinations depend not on analysis of individual complaints case by case, but rather on considering what the federal officials deem “the totality of the circumstances.” In turn, these OCR determinations raise challenging free-speech issues for administrators, as analyzed by the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Foxx’s broadside is part of the continuing political response to the divisions created by the Hamas attack and the widening war—divisions on campuses, in the country at large, and around the world. As such, they are less news (although it is interesting to see the format of the Ad Board reports with their many redactions) than an indicator of the real challenges facing Harvard’s leaders as they navigate the institution’s course through the immediate controversies, and the larger environment of polarized antipathy to elite institutions of higher education.

by b09de2a90dfa0acc@harvard.edu

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Continuing attack on campus protests and antisemitism

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Can New Drugs Help Millions of Americans with Obesity?

Olivia Farrar — Mon, 30 Sep 2024 16:01:56 +0000

Can New Drugs Help Millions of Americans with Obesity? Olivia Farrar Mon, 09/30/2024 - 12:01

More than 100 million Americans struggle with obesity, but one drug is poised to change the weight-loss landscape—not only by shrinking waistlines, but reshaping how physicians approach chronic disease. Ozempic (semaglutide) and other GLP-1s agonists are now at the center of a growing medical revolution.

Originally developed to mimic the hormone GLP-1—regulating glucose levels and suppressing appetite—these drugs have been used for more than a decade to treat diabetes. Lately, however, they’ve become known for a different purpose: weight loss.

Clinical trials suggest that GLP-1s may do more than manage weight and metabolism. They show promise for treating a range of conditions, from cardiovascular disease to neurodegenerative disorders such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.

At the 2024 World Medical Innovation Forum in Boston, where industry leaders and experts from Mass General Brigham’s Harvard faculty gathered from September 23 to 25, GLP-1 drugs were a focal point of the discussions—with medical professionals, investors, and innovators debating their future applications, costs, and accessibility.

Beyond Diabetes and Obesity: GLP-1’s Role in the Brain

New research is beginning to illuminate a surprising connection between GLP-1 agonists and brain health. Early clinical trials suggest that these drugs may do more than regulate appetite—they could also protect neurons, reduce inflammation, and promote survival of brain cells in conditions such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.

GLP-1 receptor agonists may slow neurodegenerative disease progression, said HMS associate professor of medicine and pediatrics Fatima Cody Stanford, a physician-scientist at Massachusetts General. That’s a tantalizing prospect for conditions that, until now, have had few effective treatments. While this research is still in its infancy, the promise of a drug that could address both metabolic and cognitive decline is a vision of the future that excites many in the medical community.

But the potential cognitive benefits don’t stop at neurodegeneration. Emerging studies hint at another intriguing application: addiction treatment. By modulating dopamine release in the brain’s reward system, GLP-1 drugs could help regulate cravings, reducing compulsive behaviors such as overeating and even excessive drinking. Their impact on the gut-brain axis may even help improve mental health and reduce the risk of relapse.

The ability to curb addiction and improve mental health using a drug designed for metabolism hints at the holistic health impact these GLP-1 medications might have.

A Multi-Condition Breakthrough—But Who Can Afford It?

Although the enthusiasm around GLP-1 drugs continues to build, so do concerns about their accessibility. The obesity treatment market is projected to balloon to $70 billion by 2030. “If Big Pharma puts all their eggs in this basket,” says Stanford, “they’ll probably do very well.” But as she and other experts acknowledge, the success of these companies doesn’t guarantee that patients—especially low-income individuals living with obesity—will benefit. Already, many diabetes patients find themselves competing for access to a medication that was originally intended to treat their condition.

One solution might lie in oral formulations of GLP-1 drugs. Stanford suggested that pills, rather than injections, could ease production bottlenecks and reduce costs, making the medication more accessible to a wider range of patients.

Medicare Coverage Gaps

GLP-1s are currently covered by Medicare (Part D) when prescribed for type-II diabetes—obesity is an exclusion, forcing patients to pay out of pocket or navigate inconsistent private insurance policies. Efforts to address this gap include the Treat and Reduce Obesity Act, which aims to expand Medicare’s coverage of FDA-approved obesity medications. This bipartisan bill, introduced in 2012 and reintroduced in 2023, is gaining momentum with support from both sides of the aisle.

As the debate continues, experts argue that obesity management should be integrated into primary care, rather than limited to specialized clinics. With nearly 42 percent of Americans classified as obese and fewer than 10 percent receiving metabolic drug treatments, this break in care reflects a broader failure of the healthcare system to address a growing epidemic.

How GLP-1 Drugs Could Transform the Food and Restaurant Industries

The potential reach of GLP-1 drugs extends beyond the doctor’s office, touching industries like food and dining. As more people use these medications to manage their weight, consumer shopping habits are likely to shift. Paul LaViolette, managing partner at venture capital and private equity firm SV Health Investors suggested that restaurants and food brands could feel the impact as customers become more health-conscious, seeking to maximize the benefits of their treatment through eating habits.

Fast food chains that rely on high-volume sales may see a decline in traffic, while upscale dining establishments offering quality, portion-controlled meals might experience a boost. Professor of medicine Caroline Apovian, director of the Center for Weight Management and Wellness at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, emphasized that high-protein diets and resistance training are essential to prevent muscle loss, a common side effect of significant weight loss. Restaurants that cater to these needs could find new opportunities in a health-conscious market.

Similarly, supermarkets may see increased demand for specialty diets like ketogenic or Mediterranean plans, as consumers on GLP-1 medications look to optimize their health. This could push food brands to innovate and expand their offerings to meet the needs of this growing segment.

A New Era for GLP-1s in Healthcare?

The growing use of GLP-1s could play a pivotal role in addressing America’s obesity crisis. As Stanford put it, obesity is “the most significant chronic disease in human history.” And GLP-1s have the potential to tackle a range of interconnected health issues, including high blood sugar, cardiovascular risks, and brain diseases.

The question remains whether America’s patchwork healthcare system can become aligned. If GLP-1 medications are made more affordable and accessible, they could help reduce the burden of chronic conditions that drive up healthcare costs nationally. But with that potential comes the challenge of marrying and navigating a set of industries—pharmaceuticals, insurance, and healthcare—which aren’t always set up to deliver cutting-edge treatments to those who need them most.

by Olivia Farrar

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Harvard’s Lowered Voice

niko_yaitanes@harvard.edu — Mon, 30 Sep 2024 15:45:48 +0000

Harvard’s Lowered Voice niko_yaitanes@… Mon, 09/30/2024 - 11:45

In late May, when Harvard adopted the recommendation of its Institutional Voice Working Group—that the University and its leaders should not make official statements about public matters that do not directly affect the core academic functions of research, teaching, and learning—many questions remained about how exactly the policy applies. Now, guidance posted by the provost’s office, in the form of frequently asked questions with answers, outlines the scope of institutional neutrality principles in detail—and makes clear that they are intended to be widely applicable, across Harvard’s leadership and in terms of allowable statements and actions.

Who is covered. The principles, according to the FAQ, “apply to anyone who serves in an administrative or academic leadership role representing the University or its constituent parts”—from the president, provost, and deans (of faculties, schools, divisions, and Houses) through other senior administrators, department chairs, and directors of programs, centers, institutes, and clinics. In other words, “the Institutional Voice Principles encourage restraint by all holding administrative or academic leadership positions” (emphasis added).

When the principles apply. For that broad cohort, “any statements by a University leader (in their official capacity) [emphasis added] are considered as official statements”: formal remarks, written communications, or communications issues through Harvard channels by someone speaking on behalf of the University or one of its units. Moreover, the highest officers are held to the highest standard:

Presidents, Provosts, Vice Presidents, and Deans (including Deans of Faculties, Schools, Divisions, or Houses, as well as Vice, Deputy, Associate, and Assistant Provosts, and Deans) should presume they will be understood to be speaking in their official capacities because it is difficult for members of our community or the public to differentiate whether they are acting in a personal or an official capacity when they speak. As such, the Institutional Voice Principles encourage particular restraint by those holding such administrative or academic leadership positions.

When leaders can speak on their own behalf. Given these broad expectations, that University personnel in positions of responsibility will exercise restraint, the FAQ specifies that when they serve “as academics with field expertise,” the principles don’t preclude them from “offering their substantive views in their area of academic expertise,” so long as they carefully identify that they are speaking as individuals, not on behalf of the University. That means that academics who take on administrative or leadership roles continue to exercise their rights to function in their academic capacity, even though their expertise—the FAQ lists as examples climate, health, human rights, gender, race, and other fields—“will often be implicated by publicly salient events.” The distinction between institutional and individual roles must be carefully maintained, for example, when a program or center leader posts a statement on an associated website, blog, or newsletter.

What issues are considered core to the University’s mission. Institutional neutrality is not only limiting: as the FAQ states, “University leaders…have a responsibility to speak to issues that directly affect the University’s core function.” That expectation “goes to questions that touch the University’s work as an institution of higher learning, including admissions, faculty hiring, curriculum, protection of academic freedom, or the importance of public support for academic research. This would have included, for example, matters such as the recent admissions litigation or the impact of the federal travel ban on students and faculty, matters plainly within the core function of the University.” (The policy does not specify who should address such matters.)

As examples of what not to do, University leaders “should avoid issuing substantive statements that advocate for a particular policy position unrelated to the University’s core function,” such as “the School of Public Health’s issuing an official endorsement or opposition to the enactment of the Affordable Care Act or the Economics Department’s issuing a statement articulating a departmental position on monetary policy or tax cuts.”

Similarly, the leadership should remain mute on natural disasters or “acts of mass violence or other events capturing significant attention” unless they explicitly raise issues concerning core academic functions. As a rationale, the FAQ notes, “Addressing some necessarily excludes others, and it is not possible for leaders to address all.” Obviously, in cases where students, staff, or faculty are affected, leaders should “identify ways for those with proximity” to such community members to “provide resources and support directly.” And leaders are not precluded from attending memorial events to show support for affected community members.

(In the context of last October 7, had the policy as detailed here been in place, University leaders would have been guided not to speak in an official capacity about the Hamas assault on Israel or Israel’s military response in Gaza. The student groups that initially issued a statement in support of Gaza were, of course, not speaking for Harvard—but in the ensuing wave of condemnation, many critics demanded that the University and its leaders denounce the students’ speech and/or emphasize that the student groups did not speak for the institution. It is not exactly clear what guidance the new FAQ language would provide under similar circumstances in the future.)

Ways to provide “supporting dialogue and discussion on issues of public importance.” The FAQ makes clear that schools and the University can and ought to develop channels to discuss public issues “that concern the community and might, in the past, have been the subject of public statements.” Such efforts are consistent with the principles and reinforce “the role of an academic institution in fostering discussion, debate, and dialogue”—but in doing so, schools should take care “to represent diverse viewpoints.” Individual faculty members, as individuals, of course “should be encouraged to contribute their expertise and perspective” to discussions on matters of public importance. Nothing in the institutional voice principles constrains their academic freedom to do so.

What actions constitute statements under the institutional voice principles. Certain actions by University leaders are “necessarily and inherently expressive”: flying a flag, making a salute, signing a petition. Notably, “flying a flag of a country at war from a University building is a statement,” where flying a flag to honor a visiting head of state is not—and thus the decision of President emeritus Lawrence S. Bacow to show support that way for Ukraine is now considered off limits. (Flying Ukraine’s flag in 2022, but not Israel’s flag in late 2023, became a point of controversy when President Claudine Gay was grilled by members of a U.S. House of Representatives committee last December.)

Other dilemmas. Given that programs, centers, institutes, and clinics are involved in translating research into action, how are they to proceed? With due caution: “Such units may engage in their ordinary academic work, including policy advocacy and recommendations in white papers or reports, but this work should reflect or link to evidence-based academic work or reasoning that is reflective of academic expertise, rather than relying on mere assertions or on statements based on appeals to the views of other groups.”

Student organizations, the source of much of last year’s crises, “are subject to the policies of the schools at which they are based.”

And for anyone active on social media, the guidance errs on the side of caution:

Material disseminated by official social media accounts, websites, email announcements, and other electronic communications channels of the University and its Schools or units are considered to be institutional products or statements. Consequently, care should be taken to avoid using them as avenues for issuing statements on matters that fall outside the University’s core function. Depending on how they are framed, most reposts of social media content are now understood to convey a statement either for or against the position taken in the original post.

••••••

The institutional voice standards were put in place to focus University community members’ attention on the proper bounds of and role for an academic institution doing academic work, and to assure that statements from on high do not inhibit or skew expression of differing perspectives and ideas. Now, the challenge to the community clearly will be navigating the new standards, as detailed, without letting them, counterintuitively, inhibit the very discourse and debate they were intended to preserve.

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Football: Harvard 35-Stetson 0

Football: Brown 31-Harvard 28

jennifer_carling@harvard.edu — Mon, 30 Sep 2024 10:54:27 +0000

Football: Brown 31-Harvard 28 jennifer_carli… Mon, 09/30/2024 - 06:54

For all rookie coaches, there is a baptism by fire. Andrew Aurich, Harvard’s first-year coach, experienced his baptism last Saturday at Richard Gouse Field at Brown Stadium against lightly regarded Brown. There, in the Ivy opener for both teams, the favored Crimson coughed up two leads of 18 points and botched a snap on a field goal that allowed the Bears to come away with a miraculous 31-28 victory. For the Crimson it was an excruciating defeat that drops Harvard to 1-1 overall. Brown is 2-0.

It is the first Brown triumph in the series since 2010, and perhaps the signature victory in Bears coach James Perry’s five-year tenure. The sting was double because Perry and Aurich were colleagues as assistant coaches at Princeton.

Manfully Aurich owned (in today’s parlance) the defeat. “As I told the guys in the locker room, I failed them,” he said. “There shouldn’t have been any time left on that clock for [Brown] to go down and score. That’s on me.” Maybe; probably, even. But Aurich cannot insert himself into the lineup to snap for field-goal attempts.

END-ZONE REVELS Running back Shane McLaughlin (5) is greeted by teammate Ryan Osborne (86) after a first-quarter touchdown. It was the second score of the season for the Crimson's senior captain. | Photograph by Dylan Goodman Photography/courtesy of Harvard Athletics Communications

Early and even late on this sparkling afternoon, it seemed as if none of this would matter. The Crimson quieted one of Brown’s largest crowds in recent times with a virtuoso display of offense. In the first quarter, on Harvard’s second series, which started at the Brown 47, junior quarterback Jaden Craig connected with junior wideout Cooper Barkate for 27 yards. The play reached the Bears’ 15. From there Craig handed the ball four times in a row to running back Shane McLaughlin. On the final rush, from the two, the senior captain barreled untouched into the end zone. Freshman Kieran Corr added the extra point. Harvard 7, Brown 0.

At the end of the quarter the lead was doubled. Craig took the Crimson 67 yards in eight plays. Three of the most significant were rushes by senior Charles DePrima, the backup quarterback (and former starter) who was inserted to take advantage of his speed around end. This was a wrinkle that began the previous week against Stetson, and it’s a good one. From the Brown 20, on third and five, Craig lobbed a pass to Barkate, who was running in the right corner of the end zone and grabbed the ball. Corr again kicked the PAT. Harvard 14, Brown 0. In the first quarter the Crimson outgained the Bears 124 to 27.

In the second quarter Brown got on the board, driving from its own 25 to the Harvard five. The big gainer was a 56-yard pass play from fifth-year quarterback Jake Willcox to Solomon Miller. This bomb gashed the middle of the Crimson secondary, something that this day happened with distressing regularity. Ultimately the Bears had to settle for a 15-yard field goal by Christopher Maron. Harvard 14, Brown 3.

PAT PERFECTION Kieran Corr (48) boots one of his four conversions. The freshman kicker is nine for nine on points after touchdown. | Photograph by Dylan Goodman Photography/courtesy of Harvard Athletics Communications

Back came the Crimson. From the Harvard 25 and aided by Bears penalties, they steadily advanced until they reached the Brown 19. On fourth and two Aurich elected to go for it and Craig barreled for a first down at the 16. On the next two plays he misfired on passes to the end zone, But the third time was the charm: Craig threw low to Barkate, who went down and snared it for a score. Corr kicked again. Harvard 21, Brown 3.

When on the next series the Bears were forced to punt, the Crimson seemed on the verge of putting the game away. But then came one of the contest’s inflection points. On second and three from the Harvard 38 Craig threw a pass that bounced off a Crimson receiver’s hands and into those of Brown’s Elias Archie, who took it all the way back to the Harvard one. Two plays later Nate Lussier scored. Maron kicked. Harvard 21, Brown 10; as the half ended the Crimson had given the Bears life.

In the third quarter order seemed to be restored when Harvard scored on an 80-yard drive, 52 of which came on a bomb from Craig to newfound receiving threat DePrima. On the ninth play of the series, from the Bears’ two, Craig shucked a tackle and took the ball into the end zone himself. Corr added the extra point. Harvard 28, Brown 10.

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But from then on, the Crimson got nothing. Credit the Bears. Perry obviously decided that he wasn’t going to let McLaughlin beat him. In the second half last year’s Ivy rushing leader gained but 15 yards on nine carries. This kept Harvard from piling up first downs on the ground and burning up the clock. (On the day, the Crimson’s quicksilver sophomore Xaviah Bascon led all players with 63 yards in 13 attempts.)

Brown’s comeback began immediately after the Crimson’s kickoff. The Bears got the ball on their 25. On their second play, Willcox threw down the middle to wide-open running back Matt Childs at the Harvard 35. Childs rumbled the rest of the way into the end zone. Maron kicked. Harvard 28, Brown 17. Another inflection point. Again, the Bears had life.

As the third quarter ended and the fourth quarter proceeded with no more scoring, it looked as if the Crimson would have a Providential escape. But with 9:21 to go Willcox began engineering a merciless 13-play drive that culminated in a nine-yard touchdown pass to wideout Mark Mahoney. The two-point conversion failed. Harvard 28, Brown 23.

There were 5:07 remaining on the clock. Could the Crimson offense chew up the time? Employing mostly rushes by McLaughlin, it tried. But an incomplete pass from Craig to senior wideout Kaedyn Odermann not only failed but, worse yet, stopped the clock. (The time management failure to which Aurich alluded.) Still…an excellent punt by senior Sebastien Tasko pinned the Bears at their 10, with but 2:25 left.

The Crimson defense did its job, holding Brown to two yards. The Harvard offense took over on the Bears’ 12 with 1:42 left. For Brown, which had two timeouts, it was time to cue the old song “It’s Gonna Take a Miracle.”

The Bears got one. In the ensuing series, the Crimson only reached the nine. Harvard lined up for a field goal that would all but clinch at least a tie in regulation. Even a missed kick would leave the Bears stuck in their own territory with little time remaining. The ball was hiked—and the snap sailed high. Tasko, the holder, couldn’t corral it and the ball got behind Corr, the kicker. He turned and chased it but was beaten by Brown’s Nick Hudson, who ran it to the Harvard 40, fumbled it, then grabbed it and picked up an additional 13 yards. Twenty-eight seconds remained.

Still…Brown had to score a touchdown. On first down, Willcox fired to the end zone. Mahoney was there to grab it, having beaten two Harvard defenders. The Bears had their first lead of the game—with 21 seconds remaining. A two-point conversion pass succeeded. Brown 31, Harvard 28. Desperation Crimson attempts to move the ball into at least field-goal position were unavailing.

A salute here to the battling Bears, particularly the doughty Willcox, and to coach Perry, who made crucial defensive adjustments and kept his troops in the game when things seemed to be slipping away. For Harvard, it was another weird, excruciating loss, to go along with those against Princeton in 2012, Dartmouth in 2019, and Yale also in 2019.

For coach Aurich…it was a learning experience.

By the way…don’t make overmuch of Yale’s loss to Cornell. The Elis, preseason media poll favorites in ’24 (Harvard was second), also lost to the Big Red last year and rallied to become co-champions with Harvard and Dartmouth. Such is Ivy League football. There’s a long way to go.

TIDBITS: The series now stands in favor of Harvard 90-31-2….The state-by-state breakdown of the 2024 Crimson roster reveals New Jersey leading with 12 players, followed by Texas (10), then California, Georgia, and Massachusetts (nine each).

Weekly Roundup

Cornell 47, Yale 23

Dartmouth 16, Merrimack 14

Georgetown 20, Columbia 17

Penn 27, Colgate 17

Princeton 30, Howard 13

Coming up: Friday Night Crimson! Harvard returns to the Stadium to face non-Ivy rival New Hampshire. Kickoff: 7 P.M. The game will be telecast on NESN and streamed on ESPN+ (subscriptions needed), and broadcast on 92.9 WBOS FM, 1330 AM, and 1450 AM. The Wildcats are 3-1 overall and 1-0 in Colonial Athletic Association play. Harvard and New Hampshire have met seven times, all from 1929 to ’39, with the Crimson winning every one, all by shutout except in ’34 (47-3).

THE SCORE BY QUARTERS

Harvard	14	7	7	0		—		28
Brown	0	10	7	14		—		31

Attendance: 10,753

THE SEASON SO FAR: follow Dick Friedman’s dispatches.

Pre-season:

Harvard Football: New Season, New Coach

Five Questions with Captain Shane McLaughlin ’25

by Dick Friedman

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Radcliffe Celebrates 25

niko_yaitanes@harvard.edu — Fri, 27 Sep 2024 12:40:28 +0000

Radcliffe Celebrates 25 niko_yaitanes@… Fri, 09/27/2024 - 08:40

When Mary Ingraham Bunting-Smith became president of Radcliffe College in 1960, she sought to combat what she called “a national climate of unexpectation” surrounding women’s education. As part of that mission, she created the Radcliffe Institute for Independent Study, which provided stipends and access to University resources for women returning to careers interrupted by family obligations. The Bunting Institute, as it later became known, was “a laboratory of sorts,” Radcliffe Dean Tomiko Brown-Nagin said. “The goal was twofold: to encourage and to catalyze women’s scholarly and creative work, and to discover the conditions that best supported women’s endeavors in the face of persistent societal barriers.”

In 1999, when Radcliffe College merged with Harvard University, the Bunting Institute became today’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study: a center dedicated to advanced interdisciplinary scholarship and public engagement. The Radcliffe Institute supports the work of 50 fellows each year, from across academic and artistic disciplines, with a continuing commitment to the study of women and gender. The institute also hosts public events and houses the Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America. On Thursday, at the Knafel Center in Radcliffe Yard, dozens of Radcliffe-affiliated scholars, artists, and administrators gathered to reflect on the Institute’s first 25 years—and those to come. “Here, the ethos of Bunting’s messy experiment has lived on,” Brown-Nagin said, “as we continually reimagine what an institute for advanced study can be.”

Radcliffe Dean Tomiko Brown-Nagin | PHOTOGRAPHY BY MELISSA BLACKALL | HARVARD RADCLIFFE INSTITUTE

Radcliffe fellowships today are today highly selective and sought-after. But it wasn’t always that way, recalled president emerita Drew Gilpin Faust, who served as Radcliffe’s first permanent dean: “When I arrived, many people regarded the Institute with skepticism,” she said. Since then, Radcliffe’s fellowship program has facilitated discoveries from how sperm whales communicate to the “Radcliffe wave”—a 9,000-light-year-long ribbon of matter that reshaped how researchers understand the structure of the Milky Way. Its fellows have gone on to become Nobel laureates and win Pulitzer Prizes. “No one doubts Radcliffe now,” Faust continued.

She credited part of the Institute’s success to the early support and vision of president emeritus Neil L. Rudenstine, who oversaw the Harvard-Radcliffe merger and the creation of the Radcliffe Institute. “Neil’s vision for Radcliffe reflected an approach to universities and to leadership that characterized his career well before the Harvard-Radcliffe merger,” Faust said. Rudenstine believed the University’s job was “point our thoughts upward, to enable us to pursue the biggest imaginable questions in our teaching and research…making intellectual connections that others may not see or care about.” Radcliffe, she continued, made such work possible.

Rudenstine received a Special Radcliffe Medal at Thursday’s event in recognition of his role in the Institute’s founding and early years. Accepting the medal, he recalled conversations about what the Institute might look like. “When we were trying, many years ago now, to create something that would be worthy of Radcliffe and its history,” he said, “it was far from obvious what could be done. Then someone said—and I really can’t remember who—‘Institute for Advanced Study,’” and the path became clear. Today, he continued, as he reads news stories about public figures questioning the importance of higher education, “I feel that if they could only come and spend an afternoon at the Institute, they would be startled into total inability to say such things.”

Looking toward the future, Brown-Nagin announced two new Radcliffe initiatives. Starting next year, a dedicated archival team will reprocess materials in the Schlesinger Library related to the history of Radcliffe College, which were processed before the development of modern archival methods and are therefore difficult to navigate. She also announced an initiative on academic freedom that will explore political polarization, state regulation, and other policy issues related to higher education. Brown-Nagin (who co-chairs the University’s Open Inquiry and Constructive Dialogue Working Group, chartered last April) said the latter initiative fits into Radcliffe’s larger commitment to research “that examines Harvard’s progress toward upholding its ideals”—work that also included, she said, the faculty committee she chaired that created the Harvard & the Legacy of Slavery report. Later, President Alan Garber acknowledged that the initiative—which has suffered from high turnover and staff disagreement, according to reporting by The Crimson—was “not a cake walk,” and thanked Brown-Nagin for her work.

The September 26 celebration also included a panel with two former Radcliffe fellows and Nobel laureates, Lee professor of economics Claudia Goldin and Gesyer University Professor Oliver Hart. Garber, himself an economist and physician, moderated as they discussed their careers in economics. Both said that interdisciplinary research and collaboration—including at the Institute—have enabled them to pursue questions beyond the scope of economics.

President Alan Garber, Claudia Goldin, and Oliver Hart | PHOTOGRAPHY BY MELISSA BLACKALL | HARVARD RADCLIFFE INSTITUTE

Goldin said history has added an important perspective to her current project, “Why Women Won,” which she recently resumed after it was interrupted October 9, when “I received a call at 4:30 in the morning—and I won’t go through what that call was.” When she gives lectures about the project, “there’s always a group of people, somewhat younger, who look at me and say—we did?” In response, she lists the realities that women faced until various points in the last century: being legally fired for marrying or having children, being denied mortgages, having to use their husbands’ names on credit cards, facing inequitable treatment from the IRS, Social Security, and federal retirement rules.

“Most economists, and most people, are stuck in the present,” she said. “What I learned from historians—what I do as a historian—is I point to the fact that it’s only because we’re stuck in the present that we don’t understand that there has been enormous progress—in fact, one of the most important civil changes in the labor force ever.” On Thursday, as speakers reflected on the Bunting Institute’s transformation, the progress was not hard to see.

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Antisemitism on Campus—And Beyond

niko_yaitanes@harvard.edu — Wed, 25 Sep 2024 15:35:42 +0000

Antisemitism on Campus—And Beyond niko_yaitanes@… Wed, 09/25/2024 - 11:35

Sunday afternoon, September 22, hundreds of Harvard community members donning miniature Israeli flags and hostage dog tags filed into Sanders Theatre for a summit about antisemitism and anti-Zionism on campus. The high-security gathering was organized by the Harvard Jewish Alumni Alliance (HJAA), a group formed following Hamas’s terrorist attack on Israel last October 7. Throughout the afternoon, undergraduates, Israeli government officials, and the U.S. Special Envoy for Monitoring and Combating Antisemitism took the stage to discuss their perceptions of conditions on Harvard’s campus.

The afternoon began with a series of memorials to the victims of Hamas’s attack. A video showed Israelis being shot in their cars, dragged bloody into trucks, and hiding in trees during the assault. Avigail Gimpel, an Israeli who prepared bodies for burial, spoke about the conditions of the corpses. She recalled a young girl whose arm had been sawed off, a Russian grandmother strangled in her own curtains, and a father and son tied together and burnt. “Evil was not a strong enough word,” she said. “These murders were slow. They were deliberate. They were meant to inflict as much pain, harm, terror, and suffering on their victims.”

The October 7 attacks were a focal point of the summit. When discussing what has happened at Harvard in the year since, speakers found it important to remind the audience how the war in the Middle East—and by extension, the chaos on campus—began. “None of us chose this war,” said Gimpel. “We were pulled into it in Israel and on college campuses. But now we are called upon to fight bravely.”

One of the loudest voices in that fight has been Shabbos Kestenbaum, M.T.S. ’24. In February, he testified before the U.S. House Committee on Education and the Workforce about experiencing antisemitism on campus. In June, he spoke at the Republican National Convention. He is suing Harvard for “severe and pervasive” campus antisemitism. His protest tactics have struck some students as inflammatory.

At the summit, Kestenbaum talked about being rejected for a class called “Narratives of Displacement and Belonging in Israel/Palestine,” saying that the professors told him the “process of unlearning” would leave him “so psychologically traumatized I will be unable to reassociate myself with my Jewish community at home.” His condemnation of Harvard’s administration received a loud round of applause: “For a year, Claudine Gay, Alan Garber, and my dean, Marla Frederick, have proved to be incompetent at best, and deliberately indifferent to Jewish students.”

Other speakers argued that campus antisemitism did not begin last October. Sabrina Goldfischer ’23, former president of Harvard Hillel, discussed writing her government thesis about antisemitism at the University. “The Death of Discourse,” which won Harvard’s Harry and Cecile Starr Prize in Jewish Studies, “documented the ways openly identifying as pro-Israel or even just being Jewish often led to social alienation, psychological distress, or even academic consequences,” she said. “Because of my research, the surge of hatred on Harvard’s campus after October 7, while appalling, did not surprise me.” Danny Denenberg ’26, Harvard Hillel’s Israel chair, also mentioned president Abbot Lawrence Lowell’s 1922 attempt to institute a Jewish admissions quota.

Goldfischer introduced the event’s first keynote speaker, U.S. Special Envoy for Monitoring and Combating Antisemitism Deborah Lipstadt, a professor of modern Jewish history and Holocaust studies at Emory University, who pulled the conversation back from campus and into a general discussion of antisemitism.

Lipstadt described antisemitism as a unique hatred. In some ways, she said, it operates like other prejudices: “A Jew does something wrong? That’s how all Jews are. A Jew does something right? That’s one of the good ones,” she explained. Like other hatreds, antisemitism leads people to see Jews as lesser human beings. But unlike other prejudices, antisemitism also “punches up”—claiming that “Jews are more powerful…richer…stronger…able to control the society, and they must be stopped—to borrow a phrase that has been used against all of us in this room—by any means necessary.” She also explained that antisemitism takes different forms depending on where and when it takes place. “It mutates,” she said. “It changes, it’s a virus.”

During her two years as antisemitism envoy, Lipstadt’s thinking has evolved. She noticed that people are good at calling out antisemitism expressed by their political rivals but struggle to identify hatred expressed by their fellow partisans. Now, she explains antisemitism as a horseshoe rather than a spectrum. “The two extreme ends meet,” she said, “even though they may agree on nothing at all, when it comes to their depiction of the Jews, they have the same depiction.”

Lipstadt argued that antisemitism should concern non-Jews, too. Direct action against Jews can harm non-Jews, such as a Christian grandfather and grandson killed in a 2014 shooting outside a Kansas City Jewish Community Center. “If antisemitism were solely that,” she said, “it would be the right thing for a government to fight.” But antisemitism also poses a threat to democracy, she argued. Antisemitic “conspiracy myths” about Jewish control of the government erode believers’ trust in democracy. Jews also lose faith in government when they stop believing that federal, state, local, or campus authorities will protect them.

She further argued antisemitism threatens national security, citing a July report by U.S. Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines that foreign actors associated with Iran were amplifying campus pro-Palestine demonstrations. (Lipstadt emphasized that the report did not allege Iran initiated the protests.) “Much of this is not organic,” she said. “Antisemitism is the perfect…spoon to stir up the pot.”

Student speakers criticized Harvard’s pro-Palestine protesters. In September, the Dean of Students Office reinstated the Palestine Solidarity Committee (PSC), whose club privileges were suspended in April for holding an unauthorized rally in the Yard. Charlie Covit ’27 attacked PSC for an online post that implied Palestinians would never accept a two-state solution. Alex Bernat ’25, co-president of Harvard Chabad, rebuked PSC for a Saturday protest in Widener Library, which he said violated Harvard’s time, place, and manner protest policies. (Harvard administrators warned the PSC beforehand that the protest did not abide by campus rules and might result in discipline.) Bernat also criticized Harvard faculty members for drawing a red triangle (which he described as an antisemitic symbol) by the John Harvard statue during a protest against University chalking regulations.

Covit moderated a discussion between two former Israeli government officials, Einat Wilf ’96 (former member of the Israeli Parliament) and Eylon Levy (former Israeli government spokesman during this war). Wilf emphasized the importance of rhetoric on Harvard’s campus. Universities, Wilf said, are “the modern churches: they determine doctrine, they determine the right way to think… they excommunicate people.” Nazi antisemitism, she argued, began in Germany’s universities.

Levy argued that antisemitism is a malicious tool intended to divide the Jewish community. “Dividing us makes us weaker and easier to pick off,” he said. Hamas, he said, wants to destroy Israel. “They think it will be easier to destroy Israel if they convince the world that Israel deserves to be destroyed. That is the purpose of the campaign to call Israel a white, settler-colonial, apartheid, fascist, genocide, baby-murdering state.” Levy continued, “When Iran is ready to activate its ring of fire and destroy us, they want people in the West to say, ‘Well, the Jews had it coming.’”

Speakers throughout the afternoon pushed back on common critiques of Israel’s war in Gaza. Covit characterized claims of genocide and apartheid by organizations like International Human Rights Watch and the International Court of Justice as lies. Chabad Rabbi Hirschy Zarchi addressed the phrase “there are no universities left in Gaza,” a frequent call at campus protests last spring. “There are no universities in Gaza because each and every one of them were taken over by Hamas and turned into bases from which they shoot rockets indiscriminately,” he said. “There are no hospitals because those hospitals were transformed into bases of terror, where hostages were tortured and murdered.”

The final keynote speaker, author Dara Horn ’99, Ph.D. ’06, discussed HJAA’s educational audit published in May. Horn was a member of the antisemitism advisory group convened by former president Gay in late October 2023, which Horn said “went so badly that I got called to Congress to testify.” She recalled the first meeting with Harvard administrators two weeks after October 7. One administrator, she remarked, said “We’re dealing with a lot of ignorance. Most students are very ignorant about the Middle East or Israel or Zionism.” She remembered thinking, “Wow, that’s so sad, that you have so many ignorant students….If only there were an educational institution with a $50-billion dollar endowment that could address that ignorance.”

Horn analyzed the concept that antisemitism emerges from ignorance. “If hatred comes from ignorance,” she asked, “why is Harvard full of this very specific ignorance?” Describing historical examples of antisemitism, she remarked that many leading antisemitic thinkers were smart. “Antisemitism is an intellectual enterprise,” she said. “It’s the product of intense thought about how to defend one’s ideals. The problem is that the whole edifice of thought is based on the assumption that Jews are the obstacle to a society’s ideals, and need to be taken down.”

Horn criticized the University’s response to October 7, expressing frustration that few of the advisory group’s suggestions have been adopted. “The only ones the University has tried to adopt so far are the ones that ignore actual Jews,” she said, referring to time, place, and manner protest policies. “No one is arguing against free speech,” she said. “Students can absolutely scream whatever racist things they want. But this avoids the deeper question: Why is Harvard full of screaming racists?” (The short-lived advisory group was succeeded by the Presidential Task Force on Combating Antisemitism, organized in January by President Alan M. Garber. In June, its preliminary report found that anti-Israel bias was present at Harvard and affirmed that neither antisemitism nor anti-Israel bias has a “place within the Harvard community.” The group is expected to report more extensively this fall.)

The University’s Middle East education, she argued, is insufficient. Referring to HJAA’s audit, she said that the Center for Middle East Studies has hosted “more events about Gaza and the West Bank than about Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt combined,” but that “almost none of those events have mentioned Hamas, even though Hamas has ruled Gaza for 17 years.” Students, she continued, “have to dig really, really deep to find a class or event that even mentions that Hamas and Hezbollah are proxies of Iran, or that Israel is actually fighting a multifront war against Iran.”

Although the fall term has begun quietly, Israel’s recent strikes on Hezbollah targets in Lebanon and the approaching anniversary of the terror attack that started the war may give rise to a new round of campus demonstrations.

Despite the anger toward Harvard’s administration and despair about antisemitism expressed at the summit and in HJAA’s report, some speakers retained a hopeful outlook. “Since October 7,” said Michael Oved ’25, “Shabbat dinners have been overflowing….Holidays have seen unprecedented attendance. Speakers, events, rallies, programming: all have been filled to the brim.” Throughout a challenging year, Jewish Harvard affiliates continue to seek out others, including at Sunday’s summit. It will be important to see whether the Task Force report (and a companion one from the task force addressing bias against Palestinians, Muslims, and Arabs also due this fall), is received by this constituency, and others, with skepticism and hostility, or as steps forward for the University community.

by max_krupnick@harvard.edu

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Building a New Information Civilization

d9be154420cfb920@harvard.edu — Tue, 24 Sep 2024 19:44:09 +0000

Building a New Information Civilization d9be154420cfb9… Tue, 09/24/2024 - 15:44

Most people can be intimately known, near instantly, in ways unimaginable just a few years ago—through the large-scale collection of data from wireless devices they keep close. “These are devices that we think of as extensions of our powers and capabilities,” said Carr Center for Human Rights director Mathias Risse at a Harvard Kennedy School (HKS) forum on September 20. “If you are anything like me,” he continued, “these devices are the first thing we touch in the morning and the last thing we touch at night. And all the wireless data emanating from these devices is processed for commercial purposes.”

Absent rules against the collection of such private data, its exploitation has made a few individuals and corporations fabulously wealthy, in a process aptly described by Harvard Business School professor emerita Shoshana Zuboff as “surveillance capitalism.” Risse, who will co-direct with Zuboff a new Carr Center program, “Surveillance Capitalism or Democracy?,” said that “the future of our living arrangements is shaped by companies that are not in business to advance visions of the common good, but that are in business—as one is in business—to make profits.” That this is among the reasons, he continued, these topics have become human rights issues with a global dimension.

Risse’s remarks—made just one day after the release of a U.S. Federal Trade Commission study documenting “vast surveillance” of social media users—were the prelude to a discussion among four “immensely influential women” who have been fighting to reform for-profit information collection and exploitation: Zuboff; executive vice president of the European Commission for a Europe Fit for the Digital Age Margrethe Vestager (the outgoing European Union antitrust chief who recently won a European Court of Justice antitrust ruling against Google, and a tax judgment against Apple); Maria Ressa LL.D. ’24, the Nobel Prize-winning journalist who spoke at Harvard’s Commencement in June 2024; and Baroness Beeban Kidron, a peer in the United Kingdom’s House of Lords who has fought to protect children’s rights in the digital environment.

“Just Keep the Market Open”

Vestager said that the most important message to convey is that “it’s not too late” to stop the exploitation of personal data. She credited Zuboff with providing a vocabulary for and an understanding of how personal information is being used commercially, and said that once you see that, figuring out how to respond is something that “can be navigated.” However, she emphasized, it “cannot be done without systemic responses.” She outlined the comprehensive nature of legislation and enforcement in the EU, which, as a first step passed privacy legislation “to make the very simple things obvious,” such as, “You own your data. You should be the one to decide” what happens to it. More recently, the EU adopted the Digital Services Act, which states that democracies can decide what should be considered illegal online just as they do in the physical world, and that online services should be safe for mental health.

Margrethe Vestager | SCREENSHOT BY HARVARD MAGAZINE

Another new piece of enacted legislation Vestager said, is the Digital Markets Act, which prevents large digital platforms (“gatekeepers”) providing services to business users and customers from using their market position to gain an undue advantage. “Very simple idea,” Vestager said, “just keep the market open, keep it contestable, so that we have choice, because that is the first step of being able to take action—that you have choice.” For business owners who depend on these platforms to serve customers, their ability to succeed should “depend on [their] idea, [their] work ethic, the people that [they] have on board, the capital [they] can raise, not on some gigantic company who holds market power.”

Last, she pointed to the AI Act (not yet fully enforced), “to make sure that when artificial intelligence is being used in situations that are crucial for us as individuals, that we are not being discriminated [against]; that AI still serves us as human beings.” All these laws flow from a simple idea that is nevertheless difficult to instantiate: that “technology should serve people.”

A “Hierarchy of Harm”

Kidron, who has used laws, regulations, and international treaties to protect the rights of children online and shield them from surveillance capitalism, said she worries about patchwork legislation. A law to deal with targeted advertising, another to deal with child sexual abuse—while allowing “the system to eat its way into every part of public and personal life”—risks creating what she called a “hierarchy of harm.” That is “not how we have to approach it,” she continued. “We need a bolder legislative approach…we need lawmakers to imagine the world that we want to live in and work out how technology is going to help us live in this world, not try to mitigate a couple of harms on the top of the cake.” And then the rules must be “routinely and ruthlessly applied to the digital world.”

Ressa, the journalist, added that in addition to ending “surveillance for profit,” laws should prevent code bias: the tendency of algorithms to discriminate against certain groups. And she reminded everyone that journalism, that antidote to tyranny, is itself at risk. Democracy, she said, needs need a new system for “stopping the corruption of our public information ecosystem. We need new systems of governance, because the old power structures have been turned upside down; and we need new systems of civic engagement.”

“Total Information Awareness”

How the United States missed the early opportunity to enact federal privacy legislation was partly deliberate and partly an accident of history, as Zuboff explained. She argued that President Bill Clinton and Vice President Al Gore ’69, LL. D. ’94, sought to remove barriers to internet commerce in its heady early days, as they emphasized that the private sector must lead development of cyberspace. But there was thoughtful pushback in Washington, she relates, and an attempt to outline comprehensive federal privacy legislation.

Shoshana Zuboff | SCREENSHOT BY HARVARD MAGAZINE

“A couple of months later,” she continued, “something very big happened: “9/11.” Instantly, the conversation was no longer about privacy but rather “total information awareness. And suddenly, these fledgling companies with their web bugs and their cookies and their monitoring techniques and their tracking,” said Zuboff, “they became little heroes, and the new thing was, get out of the way, let them go. Because if you’re an intelligence agency, it’s against the Constitution for you to monitor a civilian population and surveil them. But can you put a big straw out across the country and suck up everything that’s happening in Silicon Valley? You betcha, and you get around the whole thing that way, and that is how [the current system] became institutionalized.”

Zuboff also drew parallels between the early days of exploitation of personal information and the use of copyrighted data— including books, newspaper content, music, artist’s voices—to train contemporary AI systems. She called that stealing. “And stealing,” she added, “is a crime.”

“Who Do We Want to Be?”

As the conversation among these influential thinkers wound down, a question from the audience inadvertently underlined the stark difference in national responses to the rise of an information civilization—a world in which individuals barely exist unless they have a digital presence. The questioner asked Vestager if the legislation in Europe stifles AI: “We see no big AI companies in Europe anymore,” the HKS public policy student pointed out.

For Vestager, this pointed to a fundamental question: “Who do we want to be?” she asked. “I think Europeans would be very poor Chinese…” and “not good Americans either.” The European model, she explained, is societies built on “infrastructure available for everyone: free education, and healthcare systems that are truly inclusive.” “There is something cultural at stake,” she added, “and I think it’s really important to stay true to the model that you think works for you.” Ressa agreed, and said that the phrase, “innovation” has been used to attack the EU and to entrench surveillance capitalism in places such as her native Phillipines and the United States. “But innovation doesn’t mean you are better,” Ressa said. “It just means you are willing to do things that you know are wrong.”

“Innovation? That is a dog whistle,” added Zuboff, “that says ‘don’t pass any laws.’” What’s really meant by innovation, she said, is preservation of the status quo, enabling the architects of AI get to keep driving toward their commercial objectives. “We are never going to have AI for the public good…as long as this oligopoly owns and operates the entire market structure of artificial intelligence.”

Real innovation begins when the status quo is broken down, she continued. “I promise you, there are millions of people, smart, energetic, talented, creative, like each one of you,” she said, addressing the audience of Harvard students, “and they are waiting in line for their opportunity to do the great stuff with these new technologies that solve for their communities and solve for the key diseases and solve for planet Earth and all the things we really need. And it doesn't have to be in the structures that have been made by the oligopoly. We invent the new structures, and with it, we invent the rights and the laws and the institutions that will keep it all safe in a world of democratic governance.”

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Marc Goodheart Relinquishes Governing Boards Role

niko_yaitanes@harvard.edu — Tue, 24 Sep 2024 16:53:18 +0000

Marc Goodheart Relinquishes Governing Boards Role niko_yaitanes@… Tue, 09/24/2024 - 12:53

Marc Goodheart ’81, J.D. ’85, Secretary of the University since 1998—and thus the chief administrative officer of the two governing boards, the Harvard Corporation and the Board of Overseers—will relinquish that post following the Commencement ceremonies this May, the University announced today. A University attorney and assistant to the president since 1991, then Secretary, and Secretary and vice president since 2011, he has played a central role in Harvard governance, in which capacity he has staffed presidential searches and, at presidents’ behest, many searches for decanal and other senior University appointees. He has also been deeply involved in planning Commencements, presidential installations, and other major Harvard events. Although stepping down as vice president and Secretary, Goodheart will remain a senior adviser to President Alan M. Garber and other University leaders, according to the news announcement.

In a message to colleagues quoted in the announcement, Goodheart wrote, “I came to Harvard as a student in 1977, and I’ve considered myself a Harvard student ever since—perpetually learning about an institution whose ecosystem is as dynamic, whose people are as talented, and whose mission is as essential as any I know. What has kept me here longer than I’d ever imagined is not simply the allure of the University’s mission, not simply the devotion and resilience of the people devoted to advancing it, not simply the University’s inexhaustible capacity to serve up novel and intriguing issues, but the recognition that there is always, inevitably, a gap between Harvard’s ambitious ideals and their fulfillment. It has been and remains a privilege to work with dedicated colleagues on ever-evolving efforts to understand and narrow that gap.”

A person of singular discretion in a position that demands that quality, Goodheart is perhaps best known to the wider community for his role at Commencement, when he hands honorands their diplomas as their degrees are conferred by Harvard’s president. Less well known is his authorship of the concise citations, often witty and replete with alliteration and internal rhymes, that the president speaks as the degrees are awarded. (In 2024, for example, guest speaker Maria A. Ressa, the Philippine journalist and Nobel Peace Prize winner, was toasted thus: Amid times of unrest, facing threats and arrest, she rivets her focus on facts, truth, and trust; an intrepid, innovative investigative journalist, irrepressible in pressing for freedom of the press.)

The Crimson has had a running theme of covering Goodheart as the “‘Keeper of the Keys’: Meet the Secretary of Harvard’s Secretive Governing Boards,” as a headline last February put it (subhead: “Marc L. Goodheart ’81 is the most powerful person at Harvard no one has ever heard of”). In fact, professionally and personally, he is an institutionalist. In an important sense, he and A. Clayton Spencer (who joined the University in 1997 and served as vice president for policy from 2005 to 2012, before becoming president of Bates College, now emerita) provided continuity in Massachusetts Hall and Loeb House during the end of the tumultuous presidency of Lawrence A. Summers, the successor interim presidency of Derek C. Bok, and the transition to Drew Gilpin Faust. And he was Secretary when Faust and the governing boards undertook the unprecedented reforms adopted in 2010 that enlarged the Corporation, established expert standing committees, and set up clear succession procedures for the Corporation’s Fellows: changes 360 years in the making, as this magazine characterized them, prompted by evolving institutional norms and the aftermath of Summers’s truncated term in office and the University’s subsequent financial crises.

Such dramatic moments in Harvard history aside, Goodheart has a characteristically quieter description of his own extended commitment to the University: In his succinct entry to his 1981 thirty-fifth year class report (2016), he noted, “Unable to fathom that it’s been 38 years since I hauled my stuff up to the fifth floor of Weld South. Amused that, in all that time, I’ve managed to progress only to the other side of Harvard Yard. There must be something about this place.”

In a message to the community, Garber said Goodheart has “an uncanny ability to anticipate the many possible consequences of any decision” and hailed him as “a person of great depth and breadth.” In the news announcement, the president said:

Everyone who knows Marc recognizes that he always puts the interests of the institution first, seeking to preserve those aspects of Harvard that are its heart and its soul while exploring new avenues for excellence and growth. Where there have been gaps between where we are and where we want to be, he has endeavored to narrow them in his customarily unassuming fashion, enriching deliberations with his matchless understanding of history and precedent. From helping to reform our governance structures to guiding efforts to make our community more inclusive—and countless contributions in between—Marc has made the University better.

Senior Fellow Penny Pritzker said:

Marc Goodheart’s integrity, selflessness, and deep devotion to Harvard and its enduring values are at the heart of all that he does on behalf of the institution and have made him an essential adviser to me, four other senior fellows, and scores of members of the governing boards over the years. Throughout his 26 years of service as secretary—in times of challenge and of opportunity—he has supported the governing boards as a wise and trusted steward of the University’s mission, and I am delighted he will continue to support Harvard as a member of the Mass Hall team in the coming years.

A search for a successor Secretary will begin soon. When the Corporation appointed Garber president on August 2, it announced that a search for his successor would be organized in 2026. In the wake of the relatively brisk search that resulted in Claudine Gay’s election as president in December 2022, and her resignation just six months after taking office, critics have suggested that the governing boards’ processes and procedures for this most consequential responsibility need to be reexamined, at a minimum. Given the heightened difficulty of being a university president today, and the many searches pending at peer institutions (Columbia, Cornell, and Penn among them) in coming years, the transition to a new Secretary soon, and any refinements the governing boards wish to make in organizing and conducting their search, would seem to accord with Harvard’s announced schedule to identify the next president to begin serving in the summer of 2027.

Read the University announcement here.

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Toward Reconciliation

niko_yaitanes@harvard.edu — Mon, 23 Sep 2024 21:07:10 +0000

Toward Reconciliation niko_yaitanes@… Mon, 09/23/2024 - 17:07

On March 3, 2002, Robi Damelin learned that her son David—a reservist in the Israel Defense Forces—had been killed by a Palestinian sniper. One of the first things she said to the soldiers who came to deliver the news was, “You can’t kill anybody in the name of my child.” On Monday, during a conversation at Harvard Divinity School (HDS), she explained those words: “There’s nothing worse than losing a child. It’s like somebody comes and slashes your heart.” Damelin’s belief that no mother should have to bear that pain led her to the Parents Circle-Families Forum, a joint Israeli-Palestinian organization for families who have lost a loved one in the conflict.

At HDS, Damelin joined Palestinian mother Layla Alsheikh for an event titled “Our Shared Humanity: Israeli and Palestinian Voices Against Violence.” Clad in black, the pair shared their stories of loss, grief, and reconciliation.

Cross-border friendship did not come easily for Alsheikh. On April 11, 2002, her six-month-old son Qusay woke up very ill. The prior night, Israeli soldiers had thrown tear gas in her village, she said. When she and her husband tried to bring Qusay to the hospital, they were repeatedly delayed by Israeli soldiers. By the time they arrived four hours later, it was too late to save him. “That day, I was full of hatred, anger, sadness,” she said. “But at the same time, I didn’t think to take revenge, because revenge for me will never bring my son back, and it will bring another innocent person to this cycle of violence.” Instead, she resolved to never associate with Israelis: “For me, all of them were responsible for his death.”

For 16 years, she did not speak about Qusay. She did not tell her children who were born after him about his death, fearing they would seek revenge. But a fellow bereaved mother persuaded her to attend a Parents Circle meeting in Bethlehem. Sitting with 30 mothers—half Israeli, half Palestinian—she said she felt “an aching in my chest” and wanted to leave that binational setting. But then she saw Israeli and Palestinian mothers hugging each other “like a family member, not even as a friend,” and was curious to see how those connections had been forged.

Hearing Israeli stories of loss was the first time Alsheikh believed grieving Israeli and Palestinian parents shared the same pain. “We share the same tears, even if we had different circumstances, but we’re still human, and there’s nothing worse than losing a child,” she said. “No one could understand that pain unless someone was in the same situation.”

Damelin quickly connected her loss with those across the border. “Some people die with their children—not physically, but just die,” she said. “For me, the most important thing to do was peace education.” When David was killed, he had been studying for his master’s in the philosophy of education. He was a member of the peace movement and led student protests. Damelin herself was a lifelong peace activist and, soon after her son’s death, quickly started rallying against Israel’s presence in the West Bank and Gaza on his behalf. She also joined the Parents Circle to connect with families on the other side.

After both Damelin and Alsheikh embraced peaceful rhetoric, each faced a challenge that threatened to shake their mindset. Two years after David’s death, Israeli soldiers captured the sniper who killed him. Damelin fretted about how to respond. “I literally could not sleep because I thought, I couldn’t do this work in integrity if I wasn’t willing to walk the walk.” She wrote a letter to the family of her son’s killer, telling them both about David and about the Parents Circle. She understood that his family was suffering, too.

Alsheikh’s moment of self-reckoning came during a Parents Circle meeting. An Israeli said that he served as a high army officer in Alsheikh’s area and that he had prevented a Palestinian car from taking their sick children to the hospital. Alsheikh began to cry, and the man accompanied her outside where he continued his story one-on-one. He said that later, when his son was sick, he had been prevented from taking him to the hospital. Alsheikh said that the mirrored experience made the man reflect on the prior incident, leading him to quit the army, serve jail time, and found Combatants for Peace. She thanked him for sharing, saying, “If you hide that part of your story, I will never forgive you, but I will forgive you now because you have that courage and that honesty to speak in front of me.” She continued, “This is reconciliation. It’s easy to speak about peace and love…I realized I did the right thing.”

After sharing their stories, the mothers answered questions from event attendees. One first-year College student asked how to engage with people who do not want to associate with people holding different opinions, “who think that…dialogue like this is harming their cause in the long run.” Alsheikh recalled family members coming to her after Hamas’s October 7 terrorist attack on southern Israel and the ensuing war in Gaza. Some called her a traitor. First, she empathized with them. “I was there one day, so I will not judge them,” she said. “I will not be angry about what they said because I understand how they could feel.” Then, she started probing their words. One critical relative’s father crossed into Israel daily for work. Did that make him a normalizer, too? “The problem is that in Palestine, in Israel, there’s not just that settlement wall that separates us,” she said. Anger, she continued, does not “give a chance for both sides to think and to even understand what’s going on on the other side.”

The pair implored the audience not to become partisans, but rather to productively work toward peace. “Please don’t [be] pro-Israel, and please don’t [be] pro-Palestine: [be] pro-peace,” said Alsheikh. “If you fight all the time, that will never help us in any way. But if you [are] pro-peace, that will help us much more than you think.” Damelin asked listeners to directly support peacebuilding in the region. “What if all [the students] decided to adopt one of the NGOs that are working for peace on the ground in Israel or in Palestine?” she asked. “It could be Combatants for Peace, Women Wage Peace, Breaking the Silence: all of these organizations that have hundreds of people like me doing this work on the ground daily. They need the support of the students, and then you would make a difference in my life and in Layla’s life.”

Near the end of the forum, Damelin addressed its strange circumstances. Since October 7, she has traveled to the United States five times to share her story. “It’s almost weird that I have to come to America to give people some hope,” she said. “Shouldn’t you be giving me hope?”

But the physical conflict in the Middle East has made its way to Harvard’s campus. Damelin acknowledged that the “importation of this conflict” has increased the tension between American Jews and Muslims. Now that students may encounter this foreign conflict on their way to class, Damelin asked them to act responsibly. “It’s so easy to be opinionated,” she said. “Recognize the consequence of the violence, because Layla and I lived the consequence.”

by max_krupnick@harvard.edu

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Harvard Haves and Have-Nots

jennifer_carling@harvard.edu — Mon, 23 Sep 2024 14:30:24 +0000

Harvard Haves and Have-Nots jennifer_carli… Mon, 09/23/2024 - 10:30

Anthony Abraham Jack has written an important, passionate analysis of the conditions and challenges facing students from lower-income families and underrepresented racial and ethnic backgrounds at Harvard—and by extension, at other elite, selective-admissions institutions. The book is important because Jack’s scholarship focuses on what happens when such schools welcome more diverse students (read about his first book, The Privileged Poor: How Elite Colleges Are Failing Disadvantaged Students), and he is an unusually sensitive interviewer of his subjects, eliciting perspectives that are not always heard—and not always easy to hear. It is angry because his new work, Class Dismissed: When Colleges Ignore Inequality and Students Pay the Price (Princeton University Press) unveils enormous historical and contemporary gaps between student cohorts and the way those differences play out on campus—and Jack is passionate about remedying the adverse effects he documents. Given concerns about admissions, the diversity of student bodies, and the role of higher education in promoting socioeconomic mobility, Class Dismissed has plenty to add to current conversations.

Class Dismissed arose from a natural experiment: the experiences of community members from widely differing circumstances when the COVID-19 pandemic forced Harvard to disperse students from campus abruptly in March 2020, in most cases back to their homes. Jack, Ph.D. ’16—then a Harvard assistant professor of education and Junior Fellow in the Society of Fellows, now associate professor of higher education leadership at Boston University and faculty director of its Newbury Center for first-generation students—set out to detail the ensuing lives of lower- and upper-income cohorts. The former were eligible for the Harvard Financial Aid Initiative (from families with incomes then under $65,000); the latter from those above that threshold—the “vast majority,” he writes, “from families that made much more than $65,000.”

Although he conducted his interviews during the pandemic, and naturally emphasizes the extreme conditions brought into relief then, his broader conclusions concern the continuing disparities separating the lives and undergraduate experiences of students from very different circumstances brought together in places like Harvard. Those challenges and Jack’s insights about how to address them matter most and are the focus of this review.

Two Different Worlds

Immediately apparent is the way Jack’s interviews with 125 students —by Zoom from January to October 2021, with follow-up conversations in late 2022—translate those bloodless income strata into the realities of American inequality. For one affluent student, the 2020 closure meant buying a plane ticket and jetting home to Marin County, California, with Muir Woods right at hand for fresh air and relaxing runs. For another student runner, it meant returning home to a small Ohio town where, she said, “We don’t walk around my neighborhood”—so the departure from campus meant, literally, leaving behind the relative safety and security of runs along the Charles. For many such students, Jack’s interviews reveal, the transition from Cambridge to home meant a blunt return to a far more circumscribed world: one where, because of the pandemic exigencies, housing often became more crowded, more likely to expose students to the virus as family members maintained in-person service jobs, and ever less conducive to continued academic work. And of course, class meetings from home on Zoom could make such disparities much more vividly apparent than any in-person meeting in a seminar room ever would.

Toggling between students who matter-of-factly described resort vacations with blocking mates (paid for by parents, of course) and those whose urban neighborhood routines include gunfire, Jack can burn bright. In a not atypical passage, he writes of students’ very different life circumstances (not only during the pandemic), “I implore university administrators, especially those who set campus policy, to grapple with the legacy of slavery and settler colonialism that pervades our society and system of education.” Some readers will resonate to that analysis and anger; others will object that he notes only infrequently that the “deep-seated problems” his interviewees describe “are nearly impossible to escape from” and that “Universities cannot always shield students from the ugliness of life.”

It would be unfortunate, and a major missed opportunity, for those put off by the overarching analysis of historic racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic inequalities to turn aside from the potent, practical things Jack recommends, things universities that recruit and enroll more diverse students can and ought to do now.

The Bubble, Popped

“Lower-income students…had no illusion about what awaited them at home,” Jack writes in a chapter titled “Beyond These Walls.” “After all,” he continues, “Harvard had been their way to escape…the conditions that made being home hard.”

And how: it may be difficult for most College students to process a peer’s “funny story,” as she related it to Jack:

I get a call from my family. They were about to go to bed. Suddenly they hear a loud noise. Turns out there’s a bullet hole in the house. A stray bullet went into the house. Luckily, no one was injured, but it was in a path that could have injured someone. It went through the outside wall, went kind of across the stairway, and got lodged into the other side of the wall.

Another, from Chicago’s South Side, signed up for the neighborhood social app; that way, as he embedded in Harvard, he could monitor “community safety updates and notifications”—most commonly “about gunshots, robberies, and stabbings.…[T]he app almost never brought good news. Just different types of bad.”

The essence of such stories is that for students enabled to leave home and enroll at a place like Harvard, college is almost never a bubble: the realities of their families’ lives are very much a part of their mental and emotional makeup, often chillingly refreshed in real time, and sometimes intruding more directly.

An immediate conclusion follows. The students from low-income families, under-resourced communities, or first-generation families who gain admission to demanding, elite colleges and universities are obviously resilient—but not infinitely so. When they struggle academically, they may have fewer built-in support systems—and the worst thing institutions can do is to put them on leave and send them back to those challenging communities. As Jack puts it:

If a student at Harvard elects to take leave because of an internship, or because they want to explore the world, they must inform their resident dean or another member of the office of the dean of students that they are leaving; at some unspecified later time, they must tell the university what semester they intend to come back. That’s it.

But at lots of institutions, “Students asked or mandated to leave do not have the same freedom. They lose campus privileges, from grants and summer research opportunities to the services that would help them manage the gap. What’s more, these students face numerous and far more daunting requirements to return.” In effect, as he bluntly summarizes, “[M]any college policies effectively penalized students further for being put on leave.…[They] are punished for the insecurities that structure their lives—things that are by definition beyond their control.”

At a minimum, Jack’s description of how background and family and community life differ among students from different backgrounds, unforgettably detailed in the students’ own voices, must be kept in mind as they make their way through their studies. To put it another way, admission to a prestigious school, like the birth of a child, is an incredible adrenaline rush—but the care provided in the years that follow tells the tale.

The World of Work

Jack is especially good in using students’ pandemic experiences to tease out the meaning of work during their undergraduate years. The fortunate and well-connected could, as one of his subjects did, take a gap year in 2020-2021, pursuing an unpaid internship at a venture capital firm. Those less fortunate returned home and, in one case, began working nearly full time, unpaid, to support her father’s Dallas swimming-pool cleaning business—while taking classes remotely. Others, also unpaid, mastered software programs and general management to help in the family landscaping business, or worked in the family restaurant to help make ends meet. The first student had an experience that could help shape her future career choices, complete with a valuable credential for her resume. The latter, whose jobs involved far more in the way of learning and practicing meaningful skills, would be left with…what?

Jack documents the vastly different work experiences of upper- and lower-income students during normal times. It takes financial means to be able to pursue unpaid, professional internships—much as it may take prior academic experience and exposure to connect to on-campus jobs as research associates or teaching assistants. In contrast, “Almost as one, lower-income students shared stories of the very adult responsibilities they had as kids, many of which followed them to college,” he summarizes. That meant working, often a lot, during the term to send money home, and often in the kinds of hourly service jobs the students had held down in high school.

The routine ways students find employment, Jack emphasizes, just don’t cut it: “Job fairs embody the presumptions that we make about our students—that they are comfortable marketing themselves and schmoozing with grownups—all things that are second nature to many wealthy kids and terrifying to many (albeit not all) low-income kids.” He is not under any illusions: “Not everyone, to be clear, is interested in research or working with a professor. Those positions should not be held as the gold standard per se.”

But such opportunities are being (unintentionally) squandered. Research assistantships and teaching or mentoring positions “do provide access to influential gatekeepers, those who can provide guidance on postgraduation plans as well as the letters of recommendation needed to secure those positions.”

It would seem an easy, high-leverage proposition to devise paths into such (paid) work for students who may not know how to access it readily, and to share with them the chance to broaden their educational experience and accumulate social capital.

Life Experience

One way of categorizing these and other findings from Class Dismissed is to be explicit about students’ life experience: how their preparation not only got them admitted to an elite college, but how it shapes their journey through classwork, paid work, extracurriculars (if their continuing family obligations leave them the time), and relationships with intellectual mentors and advisers—all the things that will widen their opportunities in school and after graduation. As Jack’s interviewees make clear, those experiences before, during, and after college are radically stratified.

All of which summons the present moment. As has now been widely reported, Harvard College and many other institutions enrolled undergraduate cohorts this fall—the class of 2028—that differ from those in prior years, reflecting the changes in admissions mandated by the June 2023 Supreme Court decision prohibiting the consideration of race (affirmative action) in admissions. The Court did permit institutions to consider applicants’ pertinent life experiences, prompting the College to ask them to write an essay responding to this question: “How will the life experiences that shape who you are today enable you to contribute to Harvard?” (Many peer institutions acted similarly.) But by traditional measures, many schools’ classes are now less diverse.

At a time when Harvard and peer selective institutions are eager to maintain and enhance the perceived learning benefits of diversity, along many dimensions, the essence of Jack’s research is, perhaps, to challenge colleges to truly embrace that expressed interest in attracting to their community people with diverse life experiences—and to recognize, honor, and support those experiences, in all their strengths and challenges, once they enroll.

by b09de2a90dfa0acc@harvard.edu

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Anthony Abraham Jack’s important, critical new book on Crimson undergraduates

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How Should Harvard Teach Disagreement?

max_krupnick@harvard.edu — Mon, 23 Sep 2024 14:02:16 +0000

How Should Harvard Teach Disagreement? max_krupnick@h… Mon, 09/23/2024 - 10:02

It should come as no surprise that a conference about disagreement began with a disagreement. President Alan M. Garber opened the thirteenth annual Harvard Initiative for Learning and Teaching conference with a filmed message. “As we have sought to improve learning throughout the university,” he said, “the focus has always been on innovation.”

But during Kemper professor of history Jill Lepore’s opening presentation (“a very brief history of academic freedom”), she challenged Garber. “When we look for ideas about how to teach well and how to tolerate disagreement, I don’t know that we need new gadgets. I think we actually need some very ancient ideas, and we need to bring new life into them,” she said. “We need to think more about the human in us and less about the distraction of technology.”

This year’s conference, “Open Minds in Dialogue,” focused on free inquiry and fostering open, rigorous academic conversations—a major focus of attention in the wake of last year’s fierce disagreements over the war in the Middle East (see reports on fall term opening days messages from Garber, Harvard College Dean Rakesh Khurana, and others). Leaders of various Harvard schools spoke about the challenges to free expression on their respective campuses. Harvard Business School’s Matthew Weinzierl (senior associate dean and chair of the M.B.A. program) and Harvard Medical School’s Bernard Chang (dean for medical education) said that their schools have a specific charge—preparing students for professions—and so can tailor classroom goals around that. But the College, said Amanda Claybaugh, dean of undergraduate education, has a broader mandate: “We are producing citizens for a pluralistic democracy” (a theme she broached at the first-year convocation September 2). That can be a more complex task than preparing a young doctor to practice alongside diverse peers.

Speakers emphasized that some of the contentious discussions are more than just heated political debates. Whereas students generally engage respectfully with opposing ideas on certain issues (like gun control), other issues feel more fundamental (like gender identity). Students, said Claybaugh, are saying “identity” in the way people used to say “religion”—“absolutely foundational, existential.”

Students reported a chilling environment for speech focused on contentious issues, both political and personal. An afternoon panel featured the co-chairs of the Open Inquiry and Constructive Dialogue Working Group organized last April by Garber and Provost John F. Manning: the Faculty of Arts and Sciences’ senior adviser on civil discourse Eric Beerbohm, professor of government, and Radcliffe dean Tomiko Brown-Nagin. The pair cited survey data from their forthcoming report. (Though there is no formal timeline for its release, Beerbohm told Harvard Magazine it would be published “in a matter of weeks” and that a draft was submitted before its September 1 deadline.) Beerbohm reported that the students who most felt restricted in their speech were political moderates.

In conversations with more than 600 Harvard community members, the task force found that a wide range of people reported speech-related pressures and constraints. Beerbohm said that students believe they must be perfect in class, rather than viewing discussions as testing grounds. Brown-Nagin reported that non-tenured faculty especially feared repercussions in their teaching evaluations if they pushed students too much in dialogue. Such mismatched incentives will be addressed in the forthcoming report. “Most people want to be less fearful to contribute, but we have to coordinate it,” said Beerbohm. “How do we think about a series of levers that will encourage that shift?”

The coming weeks may serve as an early test of Harvard’s recent emphasis on educating students and others about constructive dialogue. The one-year anniversary of Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel is already causing ripples on college campuses (such as the University of Maryland, which is restricting student-run events on that day). As Harvard administrators and faculty members continue to ponder dialogue across differences, the major question remains: will students embrace those efforts?

by max_krupnick@harvard.edu

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Harvard Football: New Season, New Coach

Football: Harvard 35-Stetson 0

jennifer_carling@harvard.edu — Mon, 23 Sep 2024 11:33:33 +0000

Football: Harvard 35-Stetson 0 jennifer_carli… Mon, 09/23/2024 - 07:33

For the Harvard football team, the kickoff to its 150th season and to the Andrew Aurich era couldn’t have gone better. But the 35-0 plastering of overmatched Stetson before a sparse assemblage at a dank and drippy Harvard Stadium on Saturday does not answer the question of how the Crimson stacks up against its upcoming Ivy competition.

The 39-year-old Aurich is the twenty-ninth coach in Harvard football history and only the fifth in the 69-year-old Ivy League era. He succeeds Tim Murphy, who retired in January after 30 seasons and 10 shared or outright Ivy titles. If you’re keeping score—and we are!—by winning his first game Aurich already has equaled Murphy, who triumphed in his opener, 39-32 at Columbia, on September 17, 1994.

Barely seven minutes into Saturday’s game Harvard was ahead 21-0 and a rout of historic and embarrassing proportions seemed a distinct possibility. But the Hatters from Deland, Florida, and the Pioneer League took a deep breath, showed some fight, and made the final score somewhat respectable. (Their record is now 2-2.) It basically turned out to be a glorified scrimmage, much like last year’s opener, a 45-13 win over St. Thomas, also of the Pioneer League.

Like last season’s Ivy tri-champions, Harvard has speed, power, and defense in depth. The starting quarterback on Saturday was junior Jaden Craig, who took over last year in midseason and proved a deft and heady passer. He displayed those traits on Saturday’s opening drive, which began at the Crimson 15. Short tosses to junior wideout Cooper Barkate and junior tight end Ryan Osborne, mixed with runs, brought the ball to the Hatters’ 43. From the shotgun Craig took the snap and fired down the middle to senior wideout Scott Woods II. The five-foot eight Woods gathered in the ball and scampered past his pursuers into the end zone. A rookie placekicker, freshman Kieran Corr, trotted on and booted the extra point. With 3:34 gone, it was Harvard 7, Stetson 0.

In a trice Woods set up the next score. After a three-and-out by Stetson, he gathered a punt and the Hatters’ 47 and wended his way down to the 20. On the first play from scrimmage, he bolted 15 yards to the five. From there Craig handed to senior captain Shane McLaughlin, last year’s Ivy League-leading ground gainer. On the first play McLaughlin was stymied, but on the next, from the four, he busted over the goal line in the manner of his hero, the San Francisco 49ers’ All-Pro runner Christian McCaffrey. Corr again booted the point. Harvard 14, Stetson 0, with 6:21 gone.

On this series (and others), Aurich showed some experimentation, playing Craig and backup quarterback (and erstwhile starter) senior Charles DePrima at the same time. Craig is primarily a passer and DePrima a runner, but both also can do the other. Did it amount to much? Not really—but it will give future opponents something to think about. Later in the game a third quarterback, sophomore Dante Torres, also saw some action.

QUITE AN AFTERNOON Harvard’s Mitchell Gonser corrals Stetson running back Trey Clark. The Crimson senior linebacker was all over the field, amassing a team-leading seven tackles and scoring on an interception return. | Photograph by Dylan Goodman Photography/courtesy of Harvard Athletic Communications

For the Hatters, the deluge persisted, and not just from the sky. After the ensuing kickoff, Stetson faced a third-and-12 from its 23. Quarterback Trip Maxwell threw over the middle. The ball was deflected by Crimson senior defensive back Myles Wiley and landed in the hands of Harvard’s Mitchell Gonser. The senior linebacker headed left and wove his way to the end zone. Corr kicked. With 8:01 remaining in the first quarter, it was Harvard 21, Stetson 0.

Thereafter a kind of equilibrium took hold. If Stetson had any hope of getting back in the game, it was quashed at the end of the half. Harvard went 93 yards in nine plays. The first big one was a 21-yard toss from Craig to senior wideout Kaedyn Odermann. Then, from the Stetson 24, Craig threw to the end zone. Osborne is listed as a tight end. He stands a mere (for that position) six feet tall, but he was captain of the basketball team back at Fall River High School in MacArthur, California. Using his hoop hops, he went way up high and snared the ball for a touchdown. Corr booted the point. Harvard 28, Stetson 0, with seven seconds remaining in the half.

SIX POINTER Having scored Harvard’s first touchdown of the season on a 43-yard pass play, the Crimson’s Scott Woods II (6) is greeted by fellow senior wideout Kaedyn Odermann. | Photograph by Dylan Goodman Photography/courtesy of Harvard Athletic Communications

Early in the third period the Crimson put its final score on the board. The big plays were a pair of 25-yard passes from Craig to Barkate, which last year became a favored connection. The second one yielded a touchdown. On both plays Barkate faked his Hatter defender out of his cleats. Corr punctuated. Harvard 35, Stetson 0.

For the game the Crimson outgained the Hatters 365 yards to 101. Craig completed 12 of 20 pass attempts for 217 yards. McLaughlin led in rushing with 64 yards on 16 carries. Barkate and Osborne were the leading receivers, with four catches apiece. Gonser was the top Crimson tackler, with seven. Senior defensive tackle Jacob Psyk had three tackles for a loss.

So…a good start for Coach Aurich, but its meaning is shrouded, like the day was—at least until next Saturday at Brown.

TIDBITS: Harvard’s all-time record in season openers is now 123-25-2….The shutout was the first for Harvard since October 17, 2015, when the Crimson blanked Lafayette 42-0. On the other side of the ball, the first-quarter 43-yard touchdown pass from Jaden Craig to Scott Woods II extended Harvard’s streak of not being shut out to an Ivy record 248 games.

Weekly Roundup

Brown 26, Georgetown 14

Colgate 41, Cornell 24

Columbia 31, Lafayette 20

Dartmouth 45, Fordham 13

Delaware 29, Penn 22

Lehigh 35, Princeton 20

Yale 38, Holy Cross 31

Coming up: The Crimson travels to Providence, R.I., to face Brown in the first Ivy League game of the season for each team. Kickoff: Noon ET. The game will be streamed on ESPN+ (subscription needed), and broadcast on 92.9 WBOS FM, 1330 AM, and 1450 AM. The Bears, who in ’23 finished tied for fifth in the league with a 3-4 Ivy record (5-5 overall), won their opener over Georgetown 26-14. In a series that began in 1893, the Crimson leads 90-30-2 and has won the last 12, including 34-31 last year in Cambridge.

THE SCORE BY QUARTERS

Stetson	0	0	0	0		—		0
Harvard	21	7	7	0		—		35

Attendance: 4,488

THE SEASON SO FAR: follow Dick Friedman’s dispatches.

Pre-season:

Five Questions with Captain Shane McLaughlin ’25

by Dick Friedman

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How Do Movies Use Music?

max_krupnick@harvard.edu — Thu, 19 Sep 2024 14:48:18 +0000

How Do Movies Use Music? max_krupnick@h… Thu, 09/19/2024 - 10:48

Midway through the 2001 jukebox musical film Moulin Rouge!, Ewan McGregor serenades Nicole Kidman on a rooftop. As McGregor woos Kidman, he cycles through a dozen popular love songs. While students in Music 22 (“Film Sound/Film Music”) recognized many song snippets in the four-minute medley, they did not know just how much it cost to acquire those musical rights: $1.5 million.

On Wednesday, songwriter and producer Robert Kraft ’76 guest lectured about the practical side of film music. From 1994 to 2012, Kraft served as the president of Fox Music, where he oversaw the music for more than 300 feature films ranging from Titanic and Avatar to Slumdog Millionaire and Moulin Rouge!. After screening Moulin Rouge! the night prior for the course’s students, he closely analyzed two musical numbers, unpacking how director Baz Luhrmann acquired the rights for the dozens of pop songs woven into the film.

Kraft opened the lecture with McGregor’s rooftop ballad, the “Elephant Love Medley.” As the scene played, he counted on his fingers how many song rights the filmmakers needed to acquire. For some, the title was spoken. Others had a single line sung. And a few had their key lines repeated. Each time, Kraft said, Fox had to pay for the rights. But acquiring permission to use a song isn’t like going to the grocery store. “Every time you see a movie or a TV show and there’s a song,” he said, “there’s a lot of negotiations taking place.”

A song, Kraft explained, has two copyright holders. The original songwriter retains the rights to the lyrics and tune, but the record company owns the actual recording of the artist singing. Any time a movie wants to use a song as performed by the original artist, they must negotiate with both the songwriter and the publisher. Covering a song only requires the permission of the songwriter.

Negotiations can be complicated. Prices vary based on the extent of use. When McGregor said—not sung—“love is like oxygen,” Fox had to pay the songwriters of Sweet’s 1993 disco-rock tune by the same name $1,000. Weaving in a line of a hit song cost Fox about $125,000 (half a million if they wanted to use the snippet in advertisements). And repeating a song costs more, too.

Predictably, working with superstars leads to some complex (and ridiculous) negotiations. Kraft shared a few stories from the process of acquiring music for Moulin Rouge!. The owner of the publishing rights to “Under My Thumb” by the Rolling Stones demanded his name be included in the film’s credits (they went with Sting’s “Roxanne” instead). Christina Aguilera’s agent demanded an extra $250,000 for “hair and makeup” moments before she was slated to shoot “Lady Marmalade” (she got the money). Michael Jackson’s young son, Prince, dripped snot on Luhrmann’s beautiful concept book (Jackson declined to license his music). “Anything in show business is possible. It’s a lot like gangsters. If they can get you, they do,” said Kraft, continuing. “You can probably tell from these tales, I love it. I think it’s really fun to watch people misbehave.”

Students were very interested in these practical tales. Kraft noted that most Harvard classes focus on the theoretical rather than the practical. “You need to understand the theory and the aesthetic,” he said, “but you can’t make anything if you don’t understand some aspect of the actual execution.”

In this first offering of Music 22, assistant music professor Yvette Jackson and Buttenwieser University Professor Carolyn Abbate had to turn away dozens of students. The 75-student lecture has athletes, musicians, and athlete-musicians. No music or film experience is required. Throughout the semester, five musicians and composers will give guest lectures (three of whom will screen and analyze their films). Students are instructed to watch and listen to films “in a state of absorption” both for enjoyment and for best learning.

After analyzing two scenes from Moulin Rouge!, Kraft took questions. Students asked about whether his musical background aids in negotiation (not really), whether commissioning an original song is cheaper than licensing one (depends on the artist’s popularity), and whether audio from filmed musical numbers is recorded live (pre-recording in a studio is much easier and cleaner). When the class ended, the students’ curiosity did not: a dozen undergraduates hung back, waiting up to an hour to ask Kraft how to jumpstart their careers in film or music.

“I just hope that next time you listen to filmed entertainment,” Kraft said in closing, “you listen, because someone is working very hard to make you feel a certain way.” He wandered over to a nearby piano and laid down a few chords from a Lady Gaga song—a much more cost-conscious rendition than the ones he helped orchestrate for Moulin Rouge!.

by max_krupnick@harvard.edu

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Five Questions with Captain Shane McLaughlin ’25

niko_yaitanes@harvard.edu — Mon, 16 Sep 2024 13:46:25 +0000

Five Questions with Captain Shane McLaughlin ’25 niko_yaitanes@… Mon, 09/16/2024 - 09:46

An economics concentrator from Monmouth Beach, New Jersey, and a resident of Leverett House, McLaughlin is the 150th captain of Harvard football and the first from the offense since 2004, when quarterback Ryan Fitzpatrick ’05 was tabbed.

Favorite football player:

Christian McCaffrey [San Francisco 49ers All-Pro running back]. When he was a senior at Stanford he wore number 5, so that’s why I do too. I try to replicate his play style, which is being an all-around guy.

Favorite course at Harvard:

Ellen Langer’s “Positive Health Psychology.” I took it first semester junior year, during football season. It helped me deal with some of the emotions of the game.

Favorite spot in the Garden State:

I’m from the Jersey Shore, so I’ll give a shout-out to Little Monmouth Beach Club. I like surfing so when I’m home I spend my days there.

Heroes:

My parents. They’ve always put me and my brother first for everything. My dad was the one who pushed me to try for Harvard and do uncomfortable things during high school.

Favorite musical group:

I listen to all genres, but I’ll give a shout-out to my mom, who put me on to Fleetwood Mac.

by Dick Friedman

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Harvard Football: New Season, New Coach

niko_yaitanes@harvard.edu — Mon, 16 Sep 2024 13:06:25 +0000

Harvard Football: New Season, New Coach niko_yaitanes@… Mon, 09/16/2024 - 09:06

The winter, spring, and summer of our discontent having concluded, Harvard’s 2024 football season kicks off this Saturday—appropriately enough, the first day of autumn—at noon ET in Harvard Stadium against Stetson. (The game will be streamed on ESPN+, and broadcast on WRCA 1130 AM and 106.1 FM.) This will be the 150th season of Harvard football, and the Crimson, who in 2023 were 8-2 overall and 5-2 in Ivy League play, enter as defending Ivy tri-champions with Dartmouth and Yale. (The title was Harvard’s 18th; the Elis also have 18, as does Penn, and the Big Green tops the league with 21.) In the 2024 preseason Ivy media poll, Harvard was chosen second to Yale, but barely; the Crimson tallied 108 points to the Elis’ 114, but received seven first-place votes, one more than their rivals from New Haven.

Much occurred, some of it seismic, after we went into hibernation last November following the 23-18 defeat at the Yale Bowl. Here are some of the more notable off-season developments. As a preface, we note that the Ivy League neither gained nor lost any members, making it something of an outlier in today’s college-sports landscape.

New coach. After a brilliant 30-year tenure that included 10 Ivy titles, Tim Murphy stepped down in January. His replacement as the Stephenson Family coach for Harvard football is Andrew Aurich, class of ’06 at Princeton, where he was an offensive lineman. He appears to be the first bearded head coach in Crimson football annals. (This instantly wins him props from the facially hirsute set.) Aurich has a brutal act to follow; three acts, really. In the previous 67 years, Harvard had a holy trinity of head coaches: John Yovicsin (1957-71), Joe Restic (1972-83), and Murphy (1994-2023). So…no pressure, Coach. No pressure at all.

The 40-year-old Aurich has never been a head coach. He has served a solid apprenticeship as a top assistant at various schools, including his alma mater and Rutgers. In a Town Hall on Zoom in August, he reiterated the philosophy he espoused when he was introduced last February: his teams will strike first, swarm, and finish—and he will put a premium on ball security. Very pretty, Colonel, very pretty—but can they fight? We may not get a glimmer of the answer until midseason, when the Crimson faces Aurich’s alma mater, to whom Harvard has lost six straight.

New coaches elsewhere. Two other Ivy schools made a change at the helm. Cornell has turned to Dan Swanstrom, former offensive coordinator at Penn. Perhaps of more interest to Harvard fans is the new Columbia coach: Jon Poppe, who had two stints as an assistant under Murphy and who is a special-teams savant. A coup for the Lions.

New depth at quarterback. In comparison to last September, when Harvard started the season lacking a tested signal-caller, this year the Crimson has two, with a third waiting in the wings. Junior Jaden Craig took over as the starter in midseason 2023 and became a top-notch passer, completing 59.8 percent of his tosses with four touchdowns and only two interceptions, which seems to fit Aurich’s ball-security philosophy. Senior Charles DePrima occasionally struggled throwing the ball but he is a dangerous runner who averaged 6.2 yards per carry. Behind them is senior Conor Easthope, largely untried.

Luckily for Aurich, at the skill positions Murphy left the larder well-stocked. Whoever takes the snaps will be able to hand the ball to first-team All-Ivy runner and senior captain Shane McLaughlin (see below), the ’23 Ivy rushing leader with 830 yards. Or the quarterback can flip it to a tested wideout corps that includes seniors Kaedyn Odermann and speedy Scott Woods II, and junior Cooper Barkate. Shifty sophomore running back and kick returner Xaviah Bascon is the resident game-breaker.

Big Mac: Last year, Shane McLaughlin rumbles upfield against Dartmouth. Carrying the rushing load, the Crimson running back amassed a career-high 156 yards. | PHOTOGRAPH BY DYLAN GOODMAN/COURTESY OF HARVARD ATHLETIC COMMUNICATIONS

New holes to fill. Graduation, as always, cost Harvard some of its best players. Three went the graduate transfer route. First-team All-Ivy tight end Tyler Neville is at Virginia, where in the first three games he has eight receptions, two of which went for touchdowns. Offensive lineman Jacob Rizy is a sometime starter at Florida State. And defensive lineman Thor Griffith is a starter at Louisville, where he has registered his first sack for the Cardinals.

Who are their replacements? Nine tight ends are on the Crimson roster, each aspiring to be the next in line at a Harvard signature position. Successors to the unblockable Griffith and his running mate on the defensive line, Nate Leskovec, will not be easy to locate. Senior Tyler Heunemann, a 285-pounder, could try to fill Griffith’s cleats.

There are stellar returnees on the defense. They include ’23’s leading tackler, junior defensive back Ty Bartrum (second-team All-Ivy, who should have been on the first team), and two fellow defensive backs, senior Gavin Shipman and sophomore Damien Henderson; linebackers Jack Kirkwood, a junior, and Eric Little, a senior; and defensive linemen Alex DeGriek, a junior, and Nick Yagodich, a 245-pound senior. A replacement must be found for graduated placekicker Cali Canaval.

House call: Last year, having intercepted a St. Thomas pass, Harvard sophomore safety Ty Bartrum took it back for a touchdown. The 96-yard pick-six was the fifth-longest interception score in Crimson history. | PHOTOGRAPH BY DYLAN GOODMAN/HARVARD ATHLETIC COMMUNICATIONS

New wrinkles. College football has joined the National Football League by instituting a two-minute timeout at the end of each half. (The NCAA is adamant that it is not a “warning.”) Do we really need this? Hey, we can read the scoreboard clock. No doubt the TV networks are happy to use the time to squeeze in more commercials.

Of perhaps more consequence is the introduction of headset and tablet technology to the gridiron. A coach may now communicate with a player on the field through a headset installed in the latter’s helmet. One player on offense and one on defense will have the helmet, which is designated by a green dot. Communication gets shut off automatically with 15 seconds remaining before the ball must be snapped, or upon the snap, so there’s no yelling into the player’s ear once the play begins. This device could mean the end of a fabled aspect of the game: using hand signals (or any other body signals) to wigwag plays to the quarterback. Moreover, teams are now free to use tablets on the sideline to draw up plays, or defenses to stop them. Since Harvard is the school of Microsoft co-founders Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer (members of the class of ’77), this should give the Crimson a home-field advantage, no?

New opponent. Stetson, the aforementioned opening-game foe, and Harvard have never met on the gridiron. The Hatters (get it?) of Deland, Florida, and the Pioneer League already have three games under their belts in ’24 and are 2-1, having lost 48-7 at Furman last Saturday.

2024 HARVARD FOOTBALL SCHEDULE

Date	Opponent	Kickoff
September 21	STETSON	Noon
September 28	at Brown*	Noon
October 4	NEW HAMPSHIRE	7 PM
October 11	at Cornell*	6 PM
October 19	HOLY CROSS	Noon
October 26	PRINCETON*	3 PM
November 2	at Dartmouth*	1:30 PM
November 9	COLUMBIA*	Noon
November 16	at Penn*	1 PM
November 23	YALE*	TBA

All times ET
Home games in ALL CAPS
*Ivy game

by Dick Friedman

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Made in Germany

Olivia Farrar — Thu, 12 Sep 2024 18:08:18 +0000

Made in Germany Olivia Farrar Thu, 09/12/2024 - 14:08

Disorienting and unexpected, a white room with a checkered carpet is turned sideways: tables are bound to the wall, and the wall lies at viewers’ feet. This room, collapsed and contorted, symbolizes the home within a collapsed East German state.

The installation is part of an exhibition opening today at the Harvard Art Museums. The artwork’s title, Ostalgie, a contraction of the German words for “east” and “nostalgia,” reflects both a longing for home and the complex, fragmented national identity that took hold in Germany in the immediate aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall.

The artist, Henrike Naumann, was born in Zwickau, East Germany, in 1984 and grew up hearing promises of “secure peace” from Erich Honecker, the country’s leader and Communist Party chief. At that time, the German Democratic Republic (GDR) boasted the highest GDP in the Eastern Bloc. When the Berlin Wall fell in November 1989, the five-year old Naumann experienced the unification, at least on paper, of the two halves of Germany—and, as citizens of a sovereign nation, Germans watched the Soviet Union dissolve.

Now living in Berlin, Naumann studied costume and stage design at Dresden’s Academy of Fine Arts and scenography in Potsdam. Her installations often feature second-hand furniture and home accessories sourced online, adding layers of meaning to her work.

Ostalgie is one of the central works in Made in Germany? Art and Identity in a Global Nation, which features artwork made after 1980 and delves into what it means to be German in a country shaped by the history of the Third Reich, socialism, mass migration, and the evolving rise of the far-right and neo-Nazism. The exhibit explores questions of diversity and national identity, and although the artwork is German, the issues resonate strongly with viewers at the Art Museums, as similar themes have come to dominate American public discourse and the 2024 presidential campaign.

The exhibition features sculptures, found objects, installations, drawings, paintings, video art, photography, and mixed media; most of the pieces (including several recent acquisitions) come from the collection of Harvard’s Busch-Reisinger Museum, which is dedicated to the art of German-speaking Europe from the Middle Ages to today. The show was curated by Lynette Roth, the Busch-Reisinger’s Daimler curator, alongside Engelhorn curatorial fellow Peter Murphy, and senior curatorial assistant Bridget Hinz.

Naumann’s Ostalgie is one of the exhibit’s most striking pieces. Part of its inspiration was the 1960s animated series The Flintstones. In the sideways room, animal fur rugs and plastic bones are scattered across an otherwise minimalist space, evoking the cartoon's prehistoric cave setting. Naumann watched The Flintstones on German television growing up—a U.S. import that became embedded in her memories, subtly linking the consumerist, middle-class American family with its imagined roots in a Stone Age past. In Ostalgie, Naumann hints at how Soviet and post-Soviet East Germany was often perceived by external observers as similarly “prehistoric.”

The installation is filled with clues, both subtle and overt, hinting at the influences shaping German identity. Three decades after reunification, Naumann explores how different ideologies all composing one culture manifest in domestic spaces. The home, meant to be a place of comfort and the dissolution of boundaries, becomes a metaphor for the uneasy complexity of German nationhood.

One striking element is a Soviet-era phone with a Viking horn in place of the receiver—a nod to the imagery co-opted by Germany’s contemporary far-right, which resembles the neo-Nordic and “pagan” symbolism adopted by the U.S. QAnon movement (such as the headdress worn by Jacob Chansley, the so-called “QAnon Shaman,” during the storming of the Capitol on January 6, 2021). Nearby, a flag hung on the wall features 1950s industrial and agricultural workers—angry “Ossis,” or East Germans—who brandish blood-covered hammers and sickles. In the center of the flag, the communist emblem is encircled by language used by extremist far-right groups. Naumann purchased this flag online from an East German eBay shop: an act of material ethnography, offering a tangible representation of Germany’s politically muddled national narrative.

Post-reunification East Germany grappled with mass unemployment, a reduction in the achievements and status of the individual, seismic labor market shifts, and the erosion of social bonds—issues so alien to West German officials that they were paid an “outback bonus” to explore the territory. Today, these challenges remain woven into the character of the German people. For Naumann, as the other artists in Made in Germany?, understanding the modern German culture requires acknowledging the diverse forces that have shaped it.

In 2024, Germany continues to contend with the impacts on national identity of migration and the cost of living. Works like Ngozi Schommers’s Commuters (2022), depicting two rolled-up sleeping bags illuminated by a portable light, speaks to the universal inhumanity of the housing crisis. Marc Brandenburg’s three Untitled pieces (2019), drawn in graphite, depict faceless individuals in sleeping bags—an image familiar in cities across the United States, where homelessness is an increasingly urgent national problem.

Marc Brandenburg, Untitled, 2019. Graphite on paper | © Marc Brandenburg. Photo: © President and Fellows of Harvard College; courtesy of the Harvard Art Museums

Throughout the exhibition, mixed media works explore migration, such as in Candida Höfer’s Turks in Germany (1979), a slide projection depicting the migrant population brought to post-war Germany to fill labor shortages. Similarly, Nevin Aladağ’s video project The Family Tezcan (2001) captures a Turkish migrant family grappling with identity in a nation where they are seen as “other.”

Ngozi Schommers, Commuters, 2022 | © Ngozi Schommers. Photo: © President and Fellows of Harvard College; courtesy of the Harvard Art Museums

As contemporary Germany navigates its role in a globalized world, Made in Germany? serves as both a snapshot and a mirror, inviting audiences to engage with the nation's past, present, and future in its quest for an inclusive identity—and for Americans, perhaps to see the same debates as echoed in this nation’s conversation, on electoral and domestic stages.

by Olivia Farrar

Closing note

Closing note: “Made in Germany? Art and Identity in a Global Nation” is on display at the Harvard Art Museums through January 5, 2025.

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German national identity at the Harvard Art Museums

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A Modern Yet Classic Shakespeare

max_krupnick@harvard.edu — Thu, 12 Sep 2024 14:59:13 +0000

A Modern Yet Classic Shakespeare max_krupnick@h… Thu, 09/12/2024 - 10:59

This summer, the American Repertory Theater staged a new Gatsby musical with a full orchestra, an elaborate industrial set, and a pop-inspired original score. Its fall production, Romeo and Juliet, is much simpler, but equally inventive. Through its stage design and its cast’s acting, the A.R.T. enlivens Shakespeare’s classic while keeping largely true to the text.

Though the play begins with the line “Two households, both alike in dignity,” this staging focuses more on Romeo and Juliet than their families. Director Diane Paulus, who is also the theater’s Bloom artistic director, intentionally centered the couple, hoping to refocus the play on love. “It is often considered to be a play about hate,” she said in an A.R.T. press release. “I am interested in pivoting that framework: rather than defining our lives through hatred, can we choose to define our lives through love?”

Emilia Suárez (Juliet) and Rudy Pankow (Romeo) in A.R.T.’s Romeo and Juliet. | NILE SCOTT STUDIOS AND MAGGIE HALL

From the start, the production’s choices help energize the classic play. Actors push around a large wooden wall, a manifestation of the division between both the pair of lovers and the two clashing families. The constant movement of this wheeled wall—the only permanent stage decor other than the wooden floor—expands and shrinks the space, and adds physicality to the way the characters change the course of the story. Quickly, the actors lean into humor to grab the audience’s attention. An especially sassy “I do bite my thumb, sir” from Sampson (Adam Shaukat) makes the young characters feel like true teenagers.

The first love apparent to the audience is among Romeo (Rudy Pankow) and his friends, especially Mercutio (Clay Singer). The first half’s most memorable scenes involve the pair discussing the matters of the day, like whom to woo. Singer’s Mercutio—goofy, physically active, and boldly dressed—dominates the stage. He excels at physically unraveling Shakespeare’s coded prose, bringing the words to life.

Clay Singer (Mercutio), Rudy Pankow (Romeo), and Brandon Dial (Benvolio) in A.R.T.’s Romeo and Juliet.| NILE SCOTT STUDIOS AND MAGGIE HALL

But at times, it feels as though Mercutio’s presence is too large. His silliness can overshadow the drama between the lovers and the tension between their families. Romeo sometimes tries to match Mercutio’s feral energy, which then makes Juliet (Emilia Suárez) seem small in comparison.

As the play progresses, though, Juliet comes into her own. Her monologues reveal the full range of emotions, and her movement is dynamic yet dainty. Even her most dramatic acts (like jumping up onto the famed wall) feel controlled.

The choreography, costuming, and lighting help Shakespeare’s words jump off the page. Fights pause for tableaus. Silly dance moves invigorate parties. Glowing spheres dramatize speeches. Hip outfits modernize the youthful characters.

Although such creative staging adds to the production, at its core, the A.R.T. production succeeds because of the actors. With their crisp speech, the cast explores a wide range of emotions, helping the audience feel the plight of the doomed lovers—the reason audiences have resonated with Romeo and Juliet for centuries.

Romeo and Juliet runs through October 6 at the American Repertory Theater.

by max_krupnick@harvard.edu

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Harvard Class of 2028 Demographics Disclosed

niko_yaitanes@harvard.edu — Wed, 11 Sep 2024 19:20:13 +0000

Harvard Class of 2028 Demographics Disclosed niko_yaitanes@… Wed, 09/11/2024 - 15:20

Joining other institutions, Harvard College today disclosed the demographic characteristics of the class of 2028—the first admitted since the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in June 2023 that outlawed consideration of race in admissions reviews.

Of the 1,647 undergraduates who just matriculated who chose to identify a race or ethnicity, according to the announcement from Faculty of Arts and Sciences Dean Hopi Hoekstra, 14 percent identified as African American or black, down from 18 percent in the class of 2027 (these percentages all pertain only to domestic matriculants—84 percent of those enrolled). Asian American students made up 37 percent of the class, unchanged from the prior year, and the proportion of Hispanic or Latino students rose to 16 percent from 14 percent of the total. One percent of students identified as Native American, down 1 percentage point, and fewer than 1 percent identified as Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander (no change).

The College data did not provide a figure for students who identified as white. Arithmetically, the class of 2028 figure would appear to be 31 percent, up from 28 percent of the class of 2027. But all the percentages are somewhat inexact: 8 percent of class members did not identify a race or identity, twice last year’s percentage.

Some analyses of possible admissions outcomes issued during the years when the suits against Harvard and the University of North Carolina were litigated suggested that admissions of black students might decline, and those of white and Asian American students might increase. The changes in Harvard’s class of 2028 appear relatively modest compared to some of the direst forecasts—and not significantly different from the outcomes at Princeton and Yale (for the Tigers, in aggregate a less than 2 percentage-point decline in black and Hispanic students’ share of the new class; for the Elis, no change in African American students’ share of the new class, and a percentage-point increase in the Hispanic/Latino cohort).

It is impossible to know whether the fierce criticisms of Claudine Gay, Harvard’s first black president, during the peak applications season last fall influenced prospective applicants’ preferences when they decided where to seek admission; her resignation, on January 2, fell one day after the deadline for regular applications. In the wake of the Supreme Court ruling, Inside Higher Education reports, applications to historically black colleges and universities also soared last year.

Among other features of the Crimson class disclosed today, Harvard announced that 16 percent of students are international (up from 15.2 percent of the class of 2027), 20.1 percent are first-generation college attendees, and 20.6 percent qualified for federal Pell grants.

In response to the Supreme Court ruling, which overturned Harvard admissions practices that the Court had previously upheld in its 1978 Bakke ruling, the College made sure that admissions staff could not access individual applicants’ self-reported information, or aggregated data, on race or ethnicity, and introduced essay prompts on which applicants could write about their life and personal experiences (such as,“ How will the life experiences that shape who you are today enable you to contribute to Harvard?”). It has also joined a consortium of 30 universities recruiting in rural areas. But it has not, so far as is known, joined other initiatives to seek a diverse applicant pool that some institutions are pursuing as they adapt to the new legal environment, nor addressed more broadly the challenges created by the 2023 rulings (both described here).

In a statement accompanying her release of the data, Dean Hoekstra said:

As the University’s leadership asserted when the Court’s decision was announced, the change in law did not change our fundamental commitments. We know that diversity measured on multiple axes drives academic excellence and shapes the transformational educational environment of Harvard College for our students. We will continue to work tirelessly to pull down barriers to a Harvard education, and, in compliance with the law, to deepen even further our commitment to broad-based diversity. As we nurture students as both scholars and leaders for a complex world, one that requires their innovation and creativity, we owe them nothing less.

Separately, William R. Fitzsimmons, dean of admissions and financial aid, said in a statement, “Our community is strongest when we bring together students from different backgrounds, experiences, and beliefs. And our community excels when those with varied perspectives come together—inside and outside of the classroom—around a common challenge by seeing it through another’s perspective.”

Read the full news announcement here.

by b09de2a90dfa0acc@harvard.edu

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Admissions after Affirmative Action

niko_yaitanes@harvard.edu — Mon, 09 Sep 2024 19:45:19 +0000

Admissions after Affirmative Action niko_yaitanes@… Mon, 09/09/2024 - 15:45

Nationwide, members of the class of 2028 are now engaged in their coursework, like so many preceding cohorts. But unlike their past half-century of predecessors at colleges and universities with selective admissions, they gained their places at their new schools without explicit consideration of race or ethnicity—the result of the Supreme Court rulings in June 2023 outlawing affirmative action in undergraduate admissions (see “The Supreme Court Rules,” September-October 2023, page 14). Although only a few schools have reported data on the racial and ethnic composition of their newly admitted students, and it is too soon to discern what longer-term strategies they may adopt to sustain diversity among their undergraduates, the varying results disclosed do suggest the possibility of real, and large, changes as a result of the law now in effect.

The racial and ethnic diversity of selective institutions will surely remain contested terrain. Critics of affirmative action, including the litigants who brought the cases the Court decided last year, have long claimed it is discriminatory and admits lesser qualified (or even unqualified) candidates. The schools that have most vigorously defended consideration of race within holistic admissions, such as Harvard and Princeton, have insisted that increased diversity is integral to educating today’s students to live in and lead an increasingly diverse, complex world—and has been accompanied by rising academic standards (see MIT’s commentary below). Now that the law has changed, proponents of diversity are being tested to achieve it through new means.

Duke and Virginia

Among the reporting institutions summarized in an Inside Higher Education roundup, Duke and the University of Virginia reported that the share of black, Hispanic, and Indigenous students enrolled in the class of 2028 increased from the prior year—a result hardly anyone would have expected. Both are national universities, but both have a strong local and regional presence—and both put in place 2023 initiatives to increase recruitment of students from lower-income and under-resourced high schools in their immediate environs (backed up at Duke with substantial new financial aid for students from the Carolinas). Those measures appear to have buffered the effects of the court rulings—and may point a way for selective state universities to do something similar. It is difficult to imagine truly national and international universities—the Ivies, Chicago, Stanford—from being able to do something similar, at least on the same scale.

MIT

In fact, one such near-peer had reported results that it found especially disappointing. Overall, about 17 percent of MIT’s new class is made up of black, Hispanic, and Indigenous students—down 14 percentage points from the class of 2027. Black students made up 5 percent of the new class (down from 15 percent the year before); Asian Americans made up 47 percent of the class, up from 40 percent the prior year.

In an extraordinary post on the results and an accompanying interview, admissions dean Stu Schmill (MIT ’86) explained that the “significant change in class composition comes with no change to the quantifiable academic characteristics of the class that we use to predict success at MIT”—a direct refutation of claims that affirmative action had diluted merit and the quality of the admitted class. He explained how MIT had historically admitted fully qualified applicants and then diversified the class once their qualifications were established—a step it can no longer take—and lamented that “when there are now fewer African-American first-years enrolling at MIT than when I was a freshman more than 40 years ago, that cannot possibly be the right outcome for our community; not in a country as large and increasingly diverse as ours, and not at an institution with our history and our values.” He also pointed to the troubling state of American public education, given that in high schools where 75 percent or more students are black and/or Hispanic, two-thirds don’t offer calculus, more than half don’t offer computer science, and nearly half don’t teach physics—all essential preparation for the MIT curriculum. He observed:

In my time as dean, we have considered only applicants who meet our extremely high threshold of academic readiness. Recognizing the substantial educational benefits of diversity, we then worked to assemble from that highly qualified group a class that reflected both breadth and excellence in its collective interests, aptitudes, and experiences.

That last step is no longer permissible, and despite taking several steps to respond to the new law, MIT was clearly unable to recruit as diverse a class as it sought.

(It is worth noting that these data, and those reported by other schools, may be somewhat imprecise. According to Inside Higher Education, the number of students who declined to specify their race nearly doubled at many institutions, and information on the composition of applicant pools is nonexistent. The New York Times’s David Leonhardt suggests that changes in how applicants did and students now do report their race, or mixed-race characteristics, may overstate the decline in diversity reported at MIT and elsewhere.)

Ivy and Near Peers

At Yale, according to admissions office data, 14 percent of class of 2028 students are African American, 19 percent Hispanic/Latino, 24 percent Asian American, 46 percent white, and 3 percent Native American. The Yale Daily News reported comparable class of 2027 figures as unchanged for African Americans and Native Americans; up 1 percentage point for Hispanic/Latino students and 4 percentage points for white students; and down 6 percentage points for Asian Americans.

These results, like those at Duke and Virginia, may run counter to earlier expectations that without affirmative action considerations in holistic admissions reviews, white and Asian American enrollments would rise as a share of the student body. But Yale has been extremely aggressive about alternative means of recruiting in recent years, participating in the QuestBridge admissions program for high-achieving, low-income students; joining a new venture to recruit applicants from rural areas; and employing the (Harvard-developed) Opportunity Atlas to identify students from under-resourced communities and neighborhoods—among other measures.

Princeton has also developed considerable momentum in attracting lower-income and first-generation students; significantly increasing transfer admissions; and—last year—boosting financial aid to a new level. (Attendance is now free for students from families with incomes of $100,000 or less, compared to Harvard’s $85,000; Princeton said 71.5 percent of students qualify for aid, sharply higher than the 55 percent at Harvard College). The Tigers reported that black or African American and Hispanic or Latino students each make up roughly 9 percent of the new class—down in aggregate less than 2 percentage points, according to the Princetonian, with Asian American enrollment down about 2.2 percentage points.

On the other hand, Brown reported that among “new first-year students, 18 percent come from groups historically underrepresented in higher education, a decline from 27 percent in 2023,” with the share of self-reported domestic black or African American undergraduates declining to 9 percent from 15 percent, and of Hispanic or Latinx students to 10 percent from 14 percent. The Asian American cohort increased from 29 percent to 33 percent of the entering class, and the share of students self-reporting as white decreased 3 percentage points.

Amherst, one of the nation’s top-ranked liberal arts colleges, long known for attracting a diverse student body, suffered one of the steepest declines in new black matriculants—a reported 3 percent of the entering class, down 8 percentage points from the prior year—and the share of Latinx students dropped 4 percentage points (to 8 percent). Matthew L. McGann, the director of admissions and financial aid, told the New York Times point-blank, “As a consequence of the Supreme Court’s decision, the incoming class is not as racially diverse as recent classes have been.”

And the Litigants…

The University of North Carolina, the public institution in the litigation that yielded the 2023 Supreme Court rulings, reported that among entering first-year and transfer students, 7.8 percent were black or African American this year, down from 10.5 percent in the prior year, and that Hispanic, Latino, and Latina matriculants were 10.1 percent of the new class, down from 10.8 percent. American Indian or Alaska Native admittees were 1.1 percent of the new class, down a half-point, and the shares of the class accounted for by white and Asian or Asian American students, respectively, were 63.8 percent (up 0.1 percentage point) and 25.8 percent (up 1 percentage point).

With that, attention turns to Harvard College, which has yet to report. As the most prominent defendant in the affirmative action litigation, the College has a large target on its back. Complicating the local admissions picture, of course, is the turmoil that swept over the campus last fall, from the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel: in the aftermath, the University was the subject of relentless criticism and news coverage, during the height of the applications season. And on this past January 2—one day after the deadline for regular applications—the short, tumultuous tenure of Claudine Gay, the first black president, came to an end with her resignation. Sorting out what effects those developments may have had on prospective applicants would seem an impossible counterfactual—but it is the case that the number of applications declined some 5 percent from the prior cycle.

by b09de2a90dfa0acc@harvard.edu

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“Find Yourself a Teacher…”

niko_yaitanes@harvard.edu — Tue, 03 Sep 2024 18:11:28 +0000

“Find Yourself a Teacher…” niko_yaitanes@… Tue, 09/03/2024 - 14:11

At Morning Prayers last year, President Claudine Gay—then in office for two months and five days—drew upon an incident in her youth (“My Brief Career in Reality Television”) to tell the community something about herself, her academic trajectory, and her hopes for Harvard. This morning, President Alan M. Garber—in office as an interim successor to Gay from January 2, and as the University’s thirty-first president for a month and a day (from August 2)—had little to say about himself: during his long tenure as provost, the community has gotten to know him well.

Rather, he sought to summon the community to its own best self, as it recovers from a year of turmoil and conflict, and steels itself against a possible rerun. In his beginning-of-term message sent August 29 and his class of 2028 convocation remarks yesterday, Garber sought to encourage students to commit to productive conversations. This morning, he broadened that appeal to the community as a whole, drawing on the Talmud to convey a lesson about learning and friendship—a lesson especially suited, he said, to the conditions Harvard fosters.

Speaking on a gorgeous morning, under a radiant blue sky, with the huge Harvard banners from Convocation still brightening the Memorial Church façade, Garber sounded a striking note. He outlined the prevailing belief that members of university communities “have no choice but to brace ourselves” for the fall semester, and then sought to repudiate that pessimistic perspective—a message perhaps intended not only to guide students but to rally and inspirit faculty and staff members who hope to focus on matters academic this year.

He began:

“Find yourself a teacher, win yourself a friend, and be one who judges everyone by giving them the benefit of the doubt.” These Talmudic words are part of a compendium called Pirkei Avot, or Sayings of the Fathers, that are traditionally read on the Sabbath day. Today, on the first day of classes of the fall semester, you do not need to be a student to benefit from their insight.

Expanding on that wisdom, Garber continued:

Find yourself a teacher: Seek out people whose experiences, skills, and perspectives are different from your own, and whose knowledge and wisdom often exceed yours.

Win yourself a friend: Friendship is a reciprocal relationship. Not only must you find a friend, but you must earn the friendship by being a friend, offering companionship, empathy, concern, support, and trustworthiness.

Be one who judges everyone by giving them the benefit of the doubt: We’re all too adept at recognizing the flaws of our antagonists and even of our friends. It’s tempting to interpret the actions of others in the worst possible light. It is better for all of us to do the opposite. Consciously striving to judge others in the best possible light…shows our true respect for them. People who judge in this way will be better people themselves, and will more likely evoke the best possible behavior among us.

He countered forecasts of a bleak semester to come with a positive vision of the University community:

As a place to find your teacher and to win some friends, it is hard to imagine a better environment than ours. This is one of the world’s finest centers of learning and teaching, with some of the world’s greatest scholars and researchers, with some of the world’s most challenging issues and most complex problems in our sights. Here we are peering into the unknown, teetering on the verge of discovery, ushering in a new era of insight. Here we are pushing the limits of understanding, pursuing genuine excellence in every domain, and making ourselves, our University. and the world better.…

Here we are blessed with both opportunity and community. Here we are together, and bracing ourselves is the best we can do?

I don’t think so.

His sense of Harvard’s potential, he explained, is grounded in his “faith in our capacity to listen attentively and generously, to treat one another with decency and respect, to recognize every day how special a place this is—and how much that is the result not of our physical resources but of our relationships.” Accordingly, he proposed, “This is not a time to brace ourselves. This is a time to embrace each other.”

Concluding his first Morning Prayers as president, in language that indeed sounded prayerful, Garber seemed almost to echo the hope of a different inaugural occasion, insisting that members of the Harvard community summon the better angels of their nature:

We cannot afford to build walls that separate us from one another. We cannot be quick to pass judgment. We must devote ourselves to knowing one another better, to seeing how things look from a perspective that differs from our own. We must try to bring to day-to-day interactions the same commitment to inquiry and discovery that we bring to our intellectual pursuits. If and when tensions among us rise, I hope that we will approach each other, not only as fellow human beings, but as potential teachers and friends.

To do so, we must welcome humility and humanity into interactions with each other more readily than the sense of righteousness. I hope that we can grow in understanding, lifting each other up and urging each other on along the way. And I hope most of all that we can take the time to appreciate the fact that we have the chance to do all of these difficult things in the first place. Here we are at an institution whose name has long been synonymous with excellence, with opportunities that few can equal. Here we are together at a University that belongs to each of us, as we find teachers and win friends. Let us be slow to judge and quick to renew our commitments to one another as we work to make the world a better place.

President Garber’s complete text, as provided by the University, follows. Memorial Church’s recording of his remarks is available here.

Find yourself a teacher: Seek out people whose experiences, skills, and perspectives are different from your own, and whose knowledge and wisdom often exceed yours.

Be one who judges everyone by giving them the benefit of the doubt: We’re all too adept at recognizing the flaws of our antagonists and even of our friends. It’s tempting to interpret the actions of others in the worst possible light. It is better for all of us to do the opposite. Consciously striving to judge others in the best possible light, in the words of Rabbi Irving Greenberg, shows our true respect for them. People who judge in this way will be better people themselves, and will more likely evoke the best possible behavior among us.

How should we interpret these words at a tumultuous time like this one? Yesterday, many of us attended a particularly beautiful convocation for the first-year undergraduates. The enthusiasm and the optimism of the new students uplifted us all as we sensed the seemingly limitless possibilities they have, and judging from the new students I met with, openness to hearing and benefitting from the diverse views of a diverse group of people.

Yet we also know that this fall is not likely to be calm, with memories of the spring still fresh. We expect that there will be debate and argument, there will be dissent and protest. There will no doubt be hard feelings and hurt feelings among us. And last year was awash in them. [If you believe the headlines], those of us who are fortunate enough to be a part of universities have no choice but to brace ourselves. What a bleak notion that is at an institution such as this one.

Here, we are blessed with resources beyond many of our wildest dreams. Laboratories laden with the most advanced equipment, libraries and museums brimming with collections that would take a lifetime and more to fully explore. Breathtaking architecture, beautiful landscapes, herbaria —notice the plural —as well as an arboretum in Boston, a forest in Peterstown, a garden in our nation's capital, a villa in Florence [respectively, the Arnold Arboretum, Harvard Forest, Dumbarton Oaks, and Villa I Tatti], all of the many places on our campus and beyond, where we feel enlarged by association, all of the many things that make it possible for the people of Harvard to do their best work and to be their best selves.

Here we are blessed with both opportunity and community. Here we are together, and bracing ourselves is the best we can do?

I don’t think so.

I am a person who has faith in our capacity to listen attentively and generously, to treat one another with decency and respect, to recognize every day how special a place this is, and how much that is the result not of our physical resources but of our relationships.

This is not a time to brace ourselves. This is a time to embrace one another.

We can do so by always keeping these precepts in mind. Be one who judges everyone by giving them the benefit of the doubt. By reserving judgment, we make it possible for others to know that they are part of this community and that this community cares for them as much as you hope and expect it will. Disappointment in this regard is a crushing blow not to the will, but to the spirit, with belonging and the freedom and peace that it brings out of reach.

Thank you.

by b09de2a90dfa0acc@harvard.edu

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President Alan M. Garber Welcoming Remarks and Convocation Address

jennifer_carling@harvard.edu — Mon, 02 Sep 2024 21:35:08 +0000

President Alan M. Garber Welcoming Remarks and Convocation Address jennifer_carli… Mon, 09/02/2024 - 17:35

As delivered

Welcome, members of the Harvard College Class of 2028.

Welcome from every continent save Antarctica. Welcome from each state in the Union—and from DC, Puerto Rico, and the US Virgin Islands.

Like me, fifty-seven of you hail from the Land of Lincoln. And two of you are named “Alan.”

A very special one of you was a summer Olympian. Thank you for making Harvard proud in Paris.

Your class is 1,650 strong. That number contains multitudes—countless ideas about what these next few years could hold for you—countless identities, ideologies, and interests—passions and pursuits.

The same is true of returning undergraduates, as well as graduate and professional students from across the University. Some of them are here today. They are of many minds about the events unfolding in the wider world, and their diversity of perspective is part of what makes this one of the richest learning environments you will ever encounter.

Being in this environment—in this community—means having rights and responsibilities.

Those gathered here have the right to express themselves freely—to dissent and protest. But they also have the responsibility to act with each of you—and the meaning of this occasion—in mind. We are convened to welcome you. Each of you should leave this gathering knowing that you are acknowledged and accepted by our community.

What else do we stand for at Harvard?

We stand for growing in knowledge and wisdom—not only through intellectual and extracurricular pursuits but through everyday interactions, through disagreement and argument, through conflict and reconciliation. You will learn at least as much from one another as you will from anyone else at Harvard—and you will learn more from difficult moments of tension than from easy moments of understanding. Be prepared to defend your point of view. Be prepared to articulate points of view that are different from your own. Be prepared, most of all, to change your mind.

We stand for seeking, supporting, and sustaining excellence from as broad, as diverse a pool of talent as possible. That is the beauty of the University. It attracts and supports interesting and ambitious individuals with different experiences and perspectives, individuals who challenge one another by virtue of being together in community. We acknowledge and celebrate that beauty—and the beauty of pluralism—with our willingness to encounter beliefs that are not our own, to be curious and respectful, to be genuinely attentive despite our tendency to be pulled in a million ways at once.

It should come as no surprise to you that this work cannot be done well on your phone. Think of how many assumptions you make when those three little bubbles let you know that someone is typing—and then how many more assumptions you make when those three little bubbles stop bubbling. Think of how much time you have devoted to unraveling those assumptions when you discover that you’ve gone down a rabbit hole of your own digging. There is no time for that now. Here you have no time to waste. Let me make a suggestion. Before the week is out, arrange to sit outside with a person you don’t know well, pick a place together in advance, and—this part’s essential—leave your phones in your rooms while you get to know each other. Fifteen minutes should be enough time.

I think you will discover quickly the virtue of removing distraction. Send me an email and let me know who you meet, how it goes, and what you learn. My email address is easy enough to remember: president@harvard.edu.

Learning to focus on another person, to listen sincerely and generously, to cultivate compassion and empathy: these are not indicators of intellectual prowess—they are qualities of humanity. You need both in equal measure if you are to hope to leave Harvard College having done what is expected of you. Open your mind, and your world will expand. Open your heart, and you’ll make lifelong friends.

I still keep in touch with people I met during my first week on campus. Much has changed since I moved into Claverly Hall in 1973, but there is one characteristic of Harvard people that has always stood out to me—and stands the test of time.

We stand for excellence. We embrace “both/and” rather than “either/or.”

What do I mean by that? Here, you will often encounter individuals who don’t accept the notion that they can do only one thing really well. You can be both a mathematician and a competitive cyclist, both a folklorist and a committed journalist, both an engineer and a graceful dancer. Combinations and permutations too numerous to mention often lead to improbable and stunning successes—and testaments to what can be accomplished in a single lifetime.

Everyone you will hear from this afternoon is here to help you realize your own take on “both/and.” We want your first overwhelming encounter with the vast landscape of opportunity before you to yield to wonder at the possibilities. We want you to feel supported in focusing on multiple interests and pursuing multiple goals. We want you to feel confident in following hunches and taking risks—and just as confident in changing course as you become more knowledgeable about who you are and what brings you joy and fulfillment.

Your time is precious. If you invest in people and situations that bring out the best in you, you will become a better version of yourself—and your years here will have been very well spent.

Speaking of your precious time, I will not take another minute more of it.

Welcome, members of the Class of 2028. I cannot wait to learn more about you—and what you learn about one another. I look forward to what you will accomplish as undergraduates both through your chosen work and in your daily dealings. Congratulations on your arrival—we are thrilled that you are here!

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Convocation 2024: The New Crew Redux

niko_yaitanes@harvard.edu — Mon, 02 Sep 2024 21:30:11 +0000

Convocation 2024: The New Crew Redux niko_yaitanes@… Mon, 09/02/2024 - 17:30

When the Harvard College class of 2027 gathered in Tercentenary Theatre on September 3 a year ago, they met a new lineup of leaders: Claudine Gay, the University’s thirtieth president; Hopi Hoekstra, Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) dean, whom Gay had appointed effective a month earlier; and Thomas Dunne, the College’s dean of students, then three months into his job. This magazine’s account was titled “Convocation 2023: The New Crew.” Against the backdrop of such academic issues as the June 2023 Supreme Court decision outlawing consideration of race in undergraduate admissions at Harvard and elsewhere, and the rising importance of artificial intelligence, the cohort of first-year leaders introduced themselves during the convocation and urged the matriculating students to embrace the possibilities of transformative education on offer here. Those messages were reinforced by Rakesh Khurana, the College dean, who urged the entering students to “Live boldly,” and Amanda Claybaugh, dean of undergraduate education, who limned core Harvard values: diversity and academic freedom.

Transformation indeed: speaking in the same venue at the class of 2028 convocation on the lovely, temperate afternoon of September 2, perfect for summer dresses and blazers or suit jackets (with not that many neckties), President Alan M. Garber—officially in that role since August 2 (he was appointed on an interim basis January 2 upon Gay’s resignation)—sought to inspire the undergraduates while navigating continuing campus crises prompted by the internal and political reactions to Middle East war. No newly arrived member of the community could be unaware of the controversies over antisemitism and anti-Muslim, -Arab, and -Palestinian bias, and existential concerns over campus speech and discourse. As the Crimson deftly put it August 28, move-in day:

The class of 2028 began to apply just weeks after the Supreme Court ruled against Harvard to effectively end race-conscious admissions practices, submitted their last applications one day before former University President Claudine Gay’s resignation, and roamed Harvard Yard as admitted students [during Visitas] just 10 days before it became the site of a pro-Palestinian encampment.

The Convocation challenge was to help the entire community, including these 1,650 newest members, focus on its academic aspirations and potential, while underscoring the conditions and behaviors upon which the work of learning, teaching, and research all depend.

In an interview with the Harvard Gazette published August 26, Garber signaled how he would frame the work ahead for the entire community. He acknowledged the divisive, polarized external context (the war and U.S. presidential election) and the resulting “tensions” on campus. Given that reality, he said, “Our biggest challenge is ensuring that the best aspects of our culture are experienced by everyone on our campus. We need to cultivate empathy, learn how to talk to one another, and understand how to listen to people who differ from us.”

Garber’s follow-up emailed missive, on August 29, almost pleaded for everyone to pull together:

We have everything to gain from our commitments to one another—and so much to lose if we falter. Our community includes people of intensity and passion with beliefs both deeply held and strongly expressed. The challenges we faced in the last academic year have not abated. We anticipate demonstrations and protests, as well as disagreement and argument. We expect tension among individuals who hold opposing positions. We will surely be tested again this term.

To anyone who didn’t quite get the message, he wrote, “Those who fall short of our expectation that the rights of others be honored must be prepared to be held accountable for their actions. We reject bias or hate directed at any individual or group, and we will not tolerate harassment, intimidation, or threats.” He closed with the “hope that we will choose to be stronger together than we could ever be apart.” That hope of course pertains to the community’s conduct on campus as members learn, teach, and conduct research. But Garber and others are also keeping a wary eye on critics in Congress and elsewhere who are ready to pillory Harvard anew for protests or other behavior they deem antisemitic or otherwise unacceptable.

As if underscoring the downside of choosing not to be “stronger together,” Meredith Weenick, executive vice president, on August 30 dispatched “Use of Campus Spaces,” a further message on campus speech and the rules surrounding protest(extraordinarily, her second such missive in a month). Her note detailed procedures such as the requirement to produce a Harvard ID when asked by administrators or campus police (nonmembers of the community who engage in campus protests are trespassing on private property, so the ID is both a sorting mechanism for identifying any such outsiders and a way of beginning discipline against community members who violate rules); digital recording of protests; and in cases of “substantial disruption of the normal operations of our campus,” resort to University police to “remove” offenders or “remediate the disruption.”

Such was the fraught backdrop for the formal convocation ceremonies—complete with controlled entry into Harvard Yard, plenty of uniformed University police officers on duty, and discreet fencing between the student audience and the Memorial Church platform.

The Convocation Conversation: “Qualities of Humanity”

After the processional, complete with ringing of the Memorial Church bells, the Rev. Matthew Ichihashi Potts, Pusey Minister and Plummer professor of Christian morals, offered the invocation—giving thanks, as is his custom, “for you,” the students who will be transformed by their Harvard years, and will, in turn, transform the place.

In his remarks, Garber cast the new students in the favorable light that usually prevails on such occasions. The class, he said, “contains multitudes—countless ideas about what these next few years could hold for you—countless identities, ideologies, and interests—passions and pursuits.” They join College upperclassmen and -women and graduate and professional students who are “of many minds about the events unfolding in the wider world, and their diversity of perspective is part of what makes this one the richest learning environments you will ever encounter.”

Partaking of those riches, he hastened to add, “means having rights and responsibilities.” He continued, “Those gathered here have the right to express themselves freely—to dissent and protest. But they also have the responsibility to act with each of you—and the meaning of this occasion—in mind. We are convened to welcome you. Each of you should leave this gathering knowing that you are acknowledged and accepted by our community.” (These remarks may have been a reflection on last year’s convocation, at which student supporters of Palestinians chanted in favor of Palestinian rights during breaks in the proceedings—an indication of the passions and advocacy that would take on a whole new intensity and meaning only a few weeks later, when Hamas attacked Israel on October 7. No such chants rang out this afternoon.)

Now president, Alan M. Garber addresses the class of 2028 convocation. | Photograph by John S. Rosenberg/Harvard Magazine

Garber urged the new students to grow in knowledge and wisdom in the classroom, extracurricularly, and in their everyday interactions with one another. He encouraged them to “Be prepared to defend your point of view. Be prepared to articulate points of view that are different from your own. Be prepared, most of all, to change your mind”—taking advantage of a setting in which it is unusually possible to do so. In its pluralism, he said, the University was a place where everyone should be willing to “encounter beliefs that are not our own, to be curious and respectful, to be genuinely attentive despite our tendency to be pulled in a million ways at once.”

He noted that such work “cannot be done well on your phone,” and therefore challenged each student to “arrange to sit outside with a person you don’t know well, pick a place together in advance, and—this part’s essential—leave your phones in your rooms while you get to know each other. Fifteen minutes should be enough time” to “discover quickly the virtue of removing distraction.” Reverting to the newish media, the president asked the youngsters to let him know how those meet-ups went—by sending him an email at president@harvard.edu.

“Learning to focus on another person,” he continued, “to listen sincerely and generously, to cultivate compassion and empathy: these are not indicators of intellectual prowess—they are qualities of humanity. You need both in equal measure if you are to hope to leave Harvard College having done what is expected of you. Open your mind, and your world will expand. Open your heart, and you’ll make lifelong friends.” Invoking the friends he made as a freshman moving into Claverly Hall in 1973, Garber said those friendships were built on the essence of the Harvard experience: excellence predicated on “both/and” rather than “either/or” thinking and achieving.

Summing up, the president said:

We want you to feel supported in focusing on multiple interests and pursuing multiple goals. We want you to feel confident in following hunches and taking risks—and just as confident in changing course as you become more knowledgeable about who you are and what brings you joy and fulfillment.

Your time is precious. If you invest in people and situations that bring out the best in you, you will become a better version of yourself—and your years here will have been very well spent.

Read President Garber’s complete remarks here.

“Intellectual Virtues”

Having announced on August 29 that this academic year would conclude his service as College dean (thus assuring yet another leaderly lineup for the class of 2029’s convocation), Rakesh Khurana followed Garber to the microphone. Reprising past themes on such occasions, he said the members of the class should be proud of the work that had brought them to Harvard—but that it had come time to pivot from the past to the potential of their undergraduate education: the question was not how to “rewind” high school, but “How are you going to engage with this community?” Having been deftly set up by Rev. Pott’s invocation, Khurana outlined the difference between a transactional education (pursuing a set goal, aiming for the best grades and the next credential, regarding college as a “financial investment” en route to a known career) and a transformational one (characterized by intellectual exploration and vitality). In pursuit of the latter—via interesting, if unfamiliar courses, and conversations with “people who are different from you”—Khurana said, Harvard’s faculty would not answer the students’ questions; rather, Harvard would provide opportunities for students to find their own answers about who they are and what they want to be.

Harvard College dean Rakesh Khurana, addressing his last convocation, outlines three principles for a transformative education. | Photograph by John S. Rosenberg/Harvard Magazine

In taking advantage of such opportunities, he observed, “Your fate is intertwined with the fate of everyone else in this community”: a different way of getting at the themes Garber raised. How the students decided to proceed, the dean said, will determine “the success of our shared project.” That project, he continued, is based on three principles. The first is Veritas, the search for truth and the difficult work of pursuing it. The second is the shared responsibility to undertake that pursuit in a decent, civil community. Harvard is “diverse by design,” he said, in support of disagreement “with humility and thoughtfulness and kindness”: the kinds of disagreements that are productive. He implored the students to be civil and kind in all their communications, in person and online (where some of the most vituperative campus exchanges occurred last year). Third, he named responsibility and accountability—but cautioned the students not to “confuse rules with aspirations.”

Invoking Drew Faust, president emerita, Khurana said a transformative education based on these principles would benefit both the students and the University and the wider world, making Harvard not “the best in the world but best for the world.” In that spirit, he concluded, “We have a sacred journey ahead of us.”

Dean of undergraduate education Amanda Claybaugh began her academic address with a Harvard history lesson. She recalled the plaque by Johnston Gate which recounts the Puritan founding of the Massachusetts Bay Colony—and the commitment, in 1636, to secure an uncertain future by educating future leaders. The Puritan vision of education, she noted, was theocratic in purpose, fixed in method (reading from ancient texts), and rigid in schedule (Greek; Hebrew; rhetoric; the catechism; and a schedule of logic, politics, and so on, proceeding to geometry and astronomy).

“Much has changed,” she noted: the introduction of elective courses in 1885, the rise of concentrations in 1914, and the progress toward academic freedom and its guarantees to pursue difficult and unpopular queries and fields. And from strict reliance on ancient texts, she continued, scholars had evolved means of discovery including experimentation, statistical analyses of data, models to predict the future, quantitative and qualitative study of human behavior, and the reading of all texts imaginable, not merely those in a narrow canon. But Harvard’s first mission, “training future leaders,” as she put it, “remains the same”—no longer for the clergy, of course, but for leadership of “pluralistic democracies around the world.”

Much of the moral training for leadership, Claybaugh said, takes place outside the classroom—in dorms and Houses, extracurricular clubs, and so on. But there is also leadership training within the curriculum, via instruction in what she called the “intellectual virtues.” These she described as “capacities that enable the pursuit of truth,” such as curiosity, intellectual courage, and open mindedness. She asked members of the class to summon up their greatest passion or commitment—climate change, abortion, guns, “Ukraine or Gaza”—and, while holding that in mind, also to try to commit to the intellectual virtues. It is hard to do both simultaneously, she said, particularly when one feels certain about a cause. But the Puritans, rigid as their worldview was, had room for advancing knowledge, she said, and “Surely, we don’t want to be more close-minded than they.”

The goal of exercising the intellectual virtues, she continued, is to “strengthen your own positions” by challenging them, becoming better informed, and, ultimately, becoming “a better leader” in advocating for and advancing one’s deepest commitments.

Dean of undergraduate education Amanda Claybaugh describes the “intellectual virtues” acquired in the classroom. | Photograph by John S. Rosenberg/Harvard Magazine

Harvard, Claybaugh maintained, is imperfectly understood as a self-containing bubble. Rather, she sees it as a “courtyard of gates all around,” connecting to the world. Pivoting from Johnston Gate to Dexter, she reminded the students they would, having grown in wisdom, “depart to serve better thy country and thy kind.” She wished for each member of the class exciting classes in which they would engage in “exercising the intellectual virtues”—work in which she would be cheering them on.

Not everything was elevated rhetoric. In keeping with relatively recent Convocation traditions—this is its sixteenth iteration, a mere snap of the fingers by University standards—the Harvard Choruses sang (“Felices Ter,” by Randall Thompson, A.B. 1920, and “Sorida (Welcome),” by Rosephayne Powell), and the Kuumba Singers rocked the Yard. Harvard Undergraduate Association co-presidents Ashley Adirika and Jonathan Haileselassie, both ’26, and Harvard Alumni Association president Moitri Chowdhury Savard ’93, spoke, and the class banner was presented (the class colors are orange and black, a strangely Princetonian combo). Everyone got introduced, or reintroduced, to “Fair Harvard.” Dean Dunne talked about student life, and Nekesa C. Straker, senior assistant dean of residential life and first-year students, did the recognition of the dorms, assisted by the residential deans of first-years.

The Larger Context

In retrospect, none of the concerns about discourse highlighted during the past academic year is wholly new. The fierce controversies over the Middle East erupted against a backdrop of a changed society and students arriving with different assumptions and experiences. Their intersection with University norms and traditions has made the challenges facing academia, and Harvard, more acute.

In the Gazette interview, Garber said, “Nobody should be surprised” if further protests take place, noting that “the right to protest is enshrined in the University-wide Statement on Rights and Responsibilities.” He hastened to emphasize the responsibilities accompanying the exercise of those rights, and the policies governing “expression, protest, and the use of space.” Those guardrails are intended to uphold universities’ role they “seek to illuminate and persuade by drawing on facts and reasoning, not coercion. Coercive tactics lack legitimacy, and they are inimical to the ideals of the University. The same is true of discrimination and exclusion, which should never be tolerated.”

Then, notably, Garber hinted at contemporary students’ backgrounds as they enter college from a society and prior schooling that themselves may have made it increasingly difficult to engage with educational traditions:

Harvard students today have had different educational experiences than those who arrived even a decade ago. They have grown up in an era of increasing polarization, with online connections permeating every aspect of their lives.…We cannot assume that every matriculating student is ready to be exposed to a wide range of beliefs, opinions, and unfamiliar facts, and to have their own view of the world challenged.

Indeed, people who work with Harvard undergraduates depict multiple factors contributing to a culture that is less conducive to open, productive discourse—and can even inhibit it outright. Among those they cite are:

• the fierce competition to be admitted to selective colleges like this one (making it seem costly to take risks that could lead to “mistakes” that might blemish an application;

•high school courses of study that remove productive argumentation to extracurricular activities like debate, neutering discussion within the classroom;

• diversity initiatives that inadvertently tend to outline the kinds of things people can’t say, and that treat tensions or friction as defects of development, rather than as features of learning opportunities;

•faculty members’ uncertainty about how to navigate controversial topics (with untenured teachers worried about their career prospects, and senior professors wary of regulatory or disciplinary threats to their teaching); and

•pervasive social media, which can subject anyone to online harassment—and can make it easier to know or guess professors’ or teaching fellows’ political or other leanings (which in turn can be seen as influencing, or can actually influence, classroom discourse).

In short, multiple factors shape students’ expectations and behaviors before they arrive in Cambridge. Given increased homogenization of many students’ home communities, they may enroll with little exposure to the productive exchanges that drive every element of academic life. That results in underdevelopment of the skills necessary to inquiry in pursuit of knowledge and Veritas—as opposed to zero-sum advocacy aimed at “winning” an exchange. After the shock of the Hamas terrorism last October, reactions to it on campus and beyond, and the resulting Israeli war in Gaza, the divisions among community members became personal, immediate, and intensely emotional: far different from past campus issues such as advocacy focused on apartheid South Africa, a living wage for Harvard employees, or divestment of endowment investments in fossil-fuel enterprises.

The Kuumba Singers rock Tercentenary Theatre. | Photograph by John S. Rosenberg/Harvard Magazine

Some of the work necessary to equip contemporary students for their Harvard education has long proceeded in the background. The College and individual faculty members have worked to foster “intellectual vitality” among undergraduates. The campus controversies during the 2023-2024 year prompted higher-profile efforts, including University and FAS working groups on civil discourse and speech.

But even as these have gotten underway, the College has intensified its efforts to enhance the class of 2028’s skills and improve classroom experiences, as the undergraduates and their teachers approach a fraught new year. Among the most prominent initiatives:

•As part of their pre-orientation, all first-year students took an online learning program devised by the Constructive Dialogue Institute, aimed at equipping learners with the intellectual and emotional temperament to engage in fruitful, mutually beneficial exchanges. (Inside Higher Education has reported on other schools using this CDI “Perspectives” program, and adopting other measures, to foster civility and discourse on their campuses this fall.)

•For the required Expository Writing course, a pedagogical expert was retained to help design assignments and discussions to produce much more substantive class critiques. Those discussions are now intended to go beyond students’ skills in exposition to their underlying use of evidence and arguments. Half of the Expos preceptors have gone through the program, so there will be a natural experiment comparing the results of sections pursuing this kind of engaged conversation with those following the prior model.

•And the Bok Center for Teaching and Learning is working with faculty members leading General Education courses to incorporate techniques for more productive discourse, or to enhance those that already exist.

• • • • •

In his Gazette interview, President Garber merely sketched the challenges he and others see, noting, “It is incumbent upon us to set norms and to foster a culture of curiosity and inquiry in which the discovery and dissemination of truth thrive.” He was not deceived about the magnitude of the challenge: “Knowing that such fundamental changes take time adds to the urgency of our task.”

That work began some years ago, intensified significantly during the past 10 months, and became part of the class of 2028’s introduction to Crimson citizenship in recent weeks. Tapping into class members’ enthusiasm and energies, welcoming them to the community, but leaving little room for misunderstanding what is at stake were all a part of the formal convocation proceedings that ended orientation and set the stage for the new academic year—their first—that begins tomorrow.

Read a report on President Garber’s September 3 Morning Prayers remarks in Memorial Church here..

by b09de2a90dfa0acc@harvard.edu

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Harvard Reiterates Campus Rules

jennifer_carling@harvard.edu — Fri, 30 Aug 2024 13:51:50 +0000

Harvard Reiterates Campus Rules jennifer_carli… Fri, 08/30/2024 - 09:51

In another indication that University officials are anticipating campus tension and protest this fall and hoping to avoid a repeat of last spring’s pro-Palestine encampment in the Yard, executive vice president Meredith Weenick emailed a message to the Harvard community Friday morning, reiterating the rules for the use of campus spaces. “We strongly embrace the right to freedom of thought, open inquiry, and free expression, including the right to protest and dissent,” Weenick wrote. But, she added, “This right is not limitless—it may not be exercised in a manner that obstructs the ability of other members of the Harvard community to engage in the activities that sustain our mission.” Echoing President Alan M. Garber’s Thursday message, Weenick pointed to the Statement of Rights and Responsibilities released in January by Garber and Harvard’s deans, which clarified University policy regarding protest on campus grounds. She also cited the University’s rules governing campus use, which, she wrote, “protect the right of all members of our community to teach, learn, research, work, and live on our campus.”

Weenick emphasized a few of those rules in particular, writing:

Community members must produce a Harvard ID when asked by Harvard administrators or the Harvard University Police Department.
If activities are in violation of Harvard’s policies or rules, participants will be asked to cease or adjust actions. Campus administrators will work with community members, as appropriate, to find another time, place, or manner for the desired activity or expression in accordance with Current Procedures for Permitting of Campus Protest Activity.
Continued engagement in an activity that is disruptive or otherwise violates Harvard’s policies or rules may be captured digitally, and participants should be prepared to be held accountable for their actions, including by referral to appropriate school-based disciplinary processes.
Where there is substantial disruption of the normal operations of our campus, University police may remove or remediate the disruption.

“Members of our community should expect that activities that violate Campus Use Rules, time place and manner restrictions, and other University policies will be addressed promptly,” Weenick wrote.

Students have been returning to campus all week, and Wednesday was move-in day for College first-years. Fall semester classes begin on Tuesday.

Read Weenick’s complete message here.

by lydia_gibson@harvard.edu

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Rakesh Khurana To Step Down

jennifer_carling@harvard.edu — Thu, 29 Aug 2024 16:23:30 +0000

Rakesh Khurana To Step Down jennifer_carli… Thu, 08/29/2024 - 12:23

Rakesh Khurana announced Thursday that he is stepping down next June, making the 2024-25 academic year his last as dean of Harvard College. In a letter addressed to the University community, Khurana revealed that he had initially intended to depart this summer, but changed his plans.

“A year ago, I was prepared to make this announcement as I began the final year of my second term and what at the time I believed would be the closing chapter of my deanship,” Khurana wrote. “However, fate had different plans, and at the request of senior leadership, I agreed to remain for an additional year to support transitions at the University.”

In a separate letter, Hopi Hoekstra, Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, announced that she would launch the search for Khurana’s successor soon, with the help of a faculty advisory committee. Hoekstra also said she would solicit input during the process from students, staff, faculty, and alumni. “I hope that you will be willing to share your insights and perspectives in this process, as we have big shoes to fill,” she wrote.

Khurana, appointed in 2014, is the longest-serving dean of the College in a century. From 2010 to 2020, he also served as faculty dean of Cabot House. After his departure from the dean’s office, he will remain on Harvard’s faculty, according to University spokesperson Jonathan Palumbo. Khurana is a professor of sociology and Bower professor of leadership development at Harvard Business School.

In the decade since becoming dean, Khurana helped steer the institution through periods of significant turbulence, including the COVID-19 pandemic and last year’s upheavals in the wake of the Israel-Gaza war. Last year, he facilitated the formation of an “Intellectual Vitality Committee” of students, alumni, and faculty members to discuss the issue of the free exchange of ideas on campus; that committee became part of a wider University discussion of free speech. Pointing to these efforts—as well as the undergraduate student body’s growing diversity during his tenure—Hoekstra called Khurana’s “commitment to inclusion” a “hallmark” of his deanship.

In his letter, Khurana praised the College, “this vibrant, dynamic, and diverse community,” as “truly the heart” of the University. Echoing the sentiment from President Alan M. Garber’s welcome letter sent earlier in the day, he also urged caution and collaboration: “Institutions often seem as though they will endure forever, but we must not take for granted the stability and strength of this great university, and the depth of talent we have assembled,” he wrote. “As one of our nation's oldest and most renowned institutions, Harvard is not immune from the forces that lead to institutional decline—complacency, risk avoidance, protecting our reputation at the expense of our values.”

Later in the letter, he added, “As someone whose scholarship and teaching has centered on institutions, leadership, and governance, I know as well as anyone that institutions are bigger than any individual. Nurturing this institution is a team effort, and we are all caretakers of a legacy, entrusted with the responsibility to protect and strengthen it for those who come after us.”

Read Dean Khurana’s complete statement here.

[Update, August 29, 2024: an earlier version of this story stated that the upheavals on campus last year affected Khurana’s decision to delay his departure as dean. A University spokesperson notes that Khurana’s decision was made at the start of the 2023-24 academic year.]

by lydia_gibson@harvard.edu

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Alan Garber’s Opening Words

jennifer_carling@harvard.edu — Thu, 29 Aug 2024 13:01:36 +0000

Alan Garber’s Opening Words jennifer_carli… Thu, 08/29/2024 - 09:01

In a message to the Harvard community on Thursday morning, as students were returning for the start of classes next week, President Alan M. Garber offered a welcome—and an admonition. He asked those coming back to campus to seek “enlightenment, understanding, and wisdom together.” The 2023-24 school year included months of upheaval and campus tension and ended with a pro-Palestine encampment in Harvard Yard and a walkout during Commencement. Foreseeing a continuation of those disagreements, Garber wrote: “We have everything to gain from our commitments to one another—and so much to lose if we falter. Our community includes people of intensity and passion with beliefs both deeply held and strongly expressed. The challenges we faced in the last academic year have not abated. We anticipate demonstrations and protests, as well as disagreement and argument. We expect tension among individuals who hold opposing positions. We will surely be tested again this term.”

Pointing toward a January statement on University rights and responsibilities, and rules governing the use of campus grounds and buildings, Garber warned, “Those who fall short of our expectation that the rights of others be honored must be prepared to be held accountable for their actions. We reject bias or hate directed at any individual or group, and we will not tolerate harassment, intimidation, or threats.” In May, the University withheld diplomas from 13 students who were involved in the pro-Palestine encampment; earlier this month, 11 of those students were belatedly granted their degrees after the penalties were reduced.

In his letter, urging a “fundamental and enduring commitment to education and scholarship,” Garber concluded: “Our future will be shaped by the concern and compassion we show—by our willingness to regard one another as fellow human beings, diverse in our views, ambitious in our interests, and committed not only to asserting what we believe but also to seeing the world through eyes other than our own. We must listen attentively and generously in the weeks and months to come, resisting urges to judge too quickly and approaching our dealings with one another in good faith. We must have the courage and the decency to care about each other and to care for each other.”

Read President Garber’s full message here.

by lydia_gibson@harvard.edu

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Among the Oyster Houses

niko_yaitanes@harvard.edu — Thu, 22 Aug 2024 18:58:35 +0000

Among the Oyster Houses niko_yaitanes@… Thu, 08/22/2024 - 14:58

All summer long, an oyster farm and raw bar on Duxbury Bay has been the site of a public art installation that offers a playful homage to the Commonwealth’s rural coast and history of ocean farming. Created by two Harvard architecture students, “Oyster Floats: Camera Obscuras for a Floating City,” consists of five small brass sculptures whose shapes mimic the floating sheds that have become an increasingly common sight in the waters off New England as the oyster-farming industry has ballooned. “These are essentially Home Depot sheds that are sitting on these flat barges, and that’s where the farmers sort and cull the oysters” that they haul up from the seabed, says Randy Crandon, M.Arch. ’25, a Duxbury native and the son of a sailor who has worked part-time on oyster farms and spent much of his life on the water.

“Oyster Floats” debuted this spring at Harvard’s Arts First festival, and was remounted in June by Island Creek Oysters, which operates a farm and restaurants in Duxbury. The installation will remain in place through the end of oyster season in September.

The “Oyster Floats” installation on display on campus during the Arts First festival this April| PHOTOGRAPHS BY RANDY CRANDON

For both Crandon his artistic collaborator Dylan Herrmann-Holt, M.Arch. ’25, the ordinariness of the oyster sheds was part of the inspiration. “They’re working structures,” says Herrmann-Holt, “these kind of weird, vernacular objects.” Raised in rural Ohio near the Kentucky border, he grew up fascinated by barns—their shapes and symmetries and disparate uses—and spent time working with Habitat for Humanity, helping to frame new houses. “My grandpa was a plumber and pipefitter,” he says, “and my whole life I’ve been around these very technical, construction-related things. In rural Appalachia, when we needed to fix the barn, we just went to Lowe’s and got the stuff to fix it, and I think that’s part of the reason why I’m interested in common materials and everyday people as designers. Everyday people do interesting things all the time.”

The artwork was inspired by the floating sheds used by oyster farmers along the New England coast. | PHOTOGRAPH BY RANDY CRANDON

And yet, sometimes an unexpected transcendent beauty emerges. The floating sheds that oyster farmers use “are very adaptive to their environment,” Crandon says. “When the winds and the tides shift, they’ll all sort of rotate together. It’s like watching a flock of birds fly in unison.” He pauses for a beat, considering. “It’s just like a piece of architecture.” Part of the intention in creating the artwork, he and Herrmann-Holt say, was to remind city dwellers of their connection to the marine world. “Here in Cambridge, we have the Charles, but people don’t really get to the ocean very often,” Herrmann-Holt says. In the summer, he teaches course on the history of Boston, and the region’s aquaculture is a major topic: “One of the reasons why Boston became a city is because of this ability to farm things on the water.”

By mid-August, after two months out in the elements and salt air, the brass sculptures had begun to show some wear and tear. | PHOTOGRAPH BY NIKO YAITANES/HARVARD MAGAZINE

The playfulness of “Oyster Floats,” comes out most vividly in the way Crandon and Herrmann-Holt reinterpret the sheds their artwork is modeled after. The two created the sculptures themselves at the Graduate School of Design’s fabrication lab (a process that required many prototypes and some trial and error). It might seem highfalutin to choose brass as the material for artwork inspired by a commonplace object, but it’s not, really: Crandon points out the long history of using brass for many boat fittings and hardware. Plus, the artists wanted a material that would show wear in a way that heightened the connection to the real-world structures. “When we first put them out there, they were these very pristine, golden-looking little houses,” Herrmann-Holt says of the artwork. “But then, because brass patinas and weathers so quickly, with the rain and the birds, they’ve really changed. That’s why we really liked brass over another material: it starts as something very precious, but quickly becomes something that is of the environment.”

The artists also made the installation interactive: each sculpture is suspended on a four-foot pole (so adults will have to bend down to see them) and includes openings though which viewers can peek inside at photographs (taken by Crandon) of oyster-farming and New England fishing towns. Engraved on the roofs are stanzas from Lewis Carroll’s “The Walrus and the Carpenter,” a children’s rhyme in which the walrus and carpenter persuade a group of oysters to walk home with them for dinner—only, the oysters are the dinner. The poem is silly and absurd, but with a sinister edge: “‘O Oysters,’ said the Carpenter, / You've had a pleasant run! / Shall we be trotting home again?’ But answer came there none— / And this was scarcely odd, because / They'd eaten every one.”

Visitors to the Island Creek raw bar explore the sculptures.
| PHOTOGRAPHS BY RANDY CRANDON

In the installation, the artists placed the sculptures (which are numbered) out of order, another nod to the random ad-hoc-ness of working structures, but also a way to encourage viewers to wander “through and around” the installation, Herrmann-Holt says. “The placement resembles how people would mill their way through, says, a cluster of objects, as opposed to a single big object.”

Like the real oyster sheds clustered out in the bay. Or the oysters in the oyster beds below.

“Oyster Floats” is on display at The Raw Bar at Island Creek Oyster Farm, 403-7 Washington Street, Duxbury, Massachusetts. The installation will be in place through the end of oyster season.

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Harvard’s Financial Outlook

niko_yaitanes@harvard.edu — Fri, 16 Aug 2024 02:14:32 +0000

Harvard’s Financial Outlook niko_yaitanes@… Thu, 08/15/2024 - 22:14

The University’s severely challenging academic year—marked by a community divided over the Middle East war, an abrupt change of presidents, a pro-Palestinian encampment that spawned protests at Commencement—ended formally June 30. That also concluded fiscal year 2024. Although annual financial results and endowment returns will not be reported until early autumn (typically, toward the end of October), now is a good time to consider the immediate effects the campus convulsions may have had on the financial results and the resource implications for the future—fundamental to Harvard’s academic mission.

As noted in the fiscal 2023 results reported last October 19, Harvard had then achieved a full decade of operating surpluses: gratifying as evidence of sound financial management and strength—bolstered by the $9.6-billion capital campaign and largely favorable economic and market conditions—and a source of reserves for future needs and academic investments. Black was clearly the new Crimson. But the fiscal 2023 results also contained a few warning signs, as the growth in operating revenues diminished while the increase in expenses accelerated.

Updated September 17, 2024, 3:32 p.m.: UVIMCO, the University of Virginia’s investment management organization—well diversified and often a fair proxy for Harvard Management Company’s (HMC) performance—has reported an investment return of 7.5 percent for the fiscal year ended this past June 30. This report, among the earliest among institutions with asset-allocation strategies familiar to students of HMC, contains some interesting indicators. UVIMCO reported a 10.5 percent rate of return on public equity investments, 4.3 percent for private equities (typically, the largest asset pool for HMC), and 9.6 percent for absolute return (hedge funds). The Virginia team’s performance trailed the 15.3 percent of its policy portfolio, measured by various market indexes. In their report, they noted the difficulty of matching the stellar performance for most global equity indexes, especially given the lopsided performance of a few large-capitalization technology companies (like Nvidia, which builds most of the computer chips used in creating artificial intelligence models):

The Long Term Pool generally underperforms the policy benchmark during times of exceptional market performance. The primary factor impacting the Long Term Pool's fiscal year performance is its ~45 percent allocation to private investments, which drives significant basis risk versus the all-liquid passive benchmark. Importantly, the success or failure of private investments can only be properly evaluated over long time periods that capture complete market cycles, provide ample opportunity for innovation to take hold, and enable business improvements to bear fruit. While past performance is no guarantee of future success, relatively consistent commitments to private investments over the past several decades have served the University quite well.

During fiscal year 2023, when HMC produced a net endowment asset investment return of 2.9 percent, UVIMCO realized a 2.0 percent rate of return. The usual caveats apply: the institutions manage pools of funds very different in size (UVIMCO’s managed assets are less than one-third the total HMC oversees), on behalf of universities with very different needs. Nonetheless, it is interesting to begin receiving and analyzing endowment managers’ returns as the fall reporting season gets underway—perhaps a hint of things to come.

Elevating Expenses?

Personnel costs—salaries and wages, and employee benefits—account for about half of Harvard’s $6 billion in operating expenses each year. During fiscal 2023, salaries and wages rose nearly 10 percent, and benefits costs about 8 percent. The University attributed the growth roughly equally to merit pay increases and negotiated contracts for unionized employees, and growth in the size of the workforce (reflecting catch-up hiring post-pandemic, plus new positions to support sponsored-research awards, information technology, and rising enrollments in continuing and professional education).

At a minimum, those new employees are likely to have driven up salary and wage expenses in fiscal 2024. And evidence is emerging around the country that healthcare spending, the largest component of employee benefits expenses, has accelerated as use of medical services has risen and hospitals have had to pay their own large staffs more. In that sense, employee benefits expenses may be lagging general inflation, which has clearly moderated. It would not be surprising if Harvard reports continued significant growth in personnel costs during fiscal 2024, given its own inflation-driven and competitive compensation adjustments during the year. And if hiring continued at a torrid pace, these expenses may come in at a surprisingly high, and perhaps unsustainable, rate. That merits watching.

With pandemic expenses (social-distancing, office and building modifications, testing, personal protective equipment) now in the past, financial administrators may have expected relief from one-time costs—but no such luck. Congressional hearings and requests for information, federal investigations of antisemitism or other kinds of discrimination, lobbying, defending against lawsuits, security personnel hired to cope with campus protests, and no doubt midnight oil for the administrators charged with worrying about all of these during the academic year certainly amounted to many millions of dollars of unbudgeted expenses. No separate disclosure of those costs is likely (they probably weren’t material to a $6-billion-plus enterprise); but general operating expenses were certainly elevated as a result.

Philanthropy and the Endowment

Among the most closely analyzed figures in the fiscal 2024 financial report will be the level of current use giving. That philanthropic support has become an enormous source of revenue: about a half-billion dollars in fiscal 2023—8 percent of operating funds for the year. Current use gifts are a real-time picture of alumni sentiment, and unrestricted gifts are a good proxy for confidence in the University and its leaders (as well as being the most valuable source of funds for deans’ investment in academic priorities). This year, expect interpretation of the reported results to be polarized, like nearly everything else on campus: critics of Harvard’s leadership and its response to the Hamas attack of October 7 and ensuing upheavals will be looking for evidence that support decreased; those who remain unshaken in their view of the institution’s longer-term value and importance, or who are favorably inclined by the actions taken since January 2 by President Alan M. Garber, will presumably hope to see a continued flow of philanthropic dollars.

Whatever data are reported will require some interpretation. Each year’s tally of current use gifts recorded reflects both sums given within the 12 months and the fulfillment during the year of prior pledges to make such gifts in the future. In the “pledges receivable” footnote to the fiscal 2023 annual report, the gifts for current use line showed $953 million banked—up smartly from the $666 million of pledges pending as of June 30, 2022. So careful readers will want to compare the flow of current use gifts received (i.e., paid) in fiscal 2024 to the $486 million in fiscal 2023 and the balance of such pledges outstanding at the end of each year to get a sense of philanthropic support realized in the past period and in prospect. Those figures taken together will provide the clearest guide to the year that was.

One would expect new large gifts for endowment to be relatively minimal: it takes a long time to cultivate the relationships that produce such gifts; Claudine Gay’s presidency had barely begun before it ended; and the transition to the Garber administration came during a period when, no matter what relationships he had cultivated as provost for a dozen years, planning for long-term, major capital commitments was hardly the highest priority. (Moreover, he was serving in an interim capacity until he was appointed president August 2, a further complicating factor.) Among the few endowment gifts announced during the year were $20 million to support arts and humanities in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and $15 million to support environmental programs at the Law School (see News in Brief, September-October, page 20): welcome and valuable support, but not the kind of transformative nine-figure gifts that stand out in the financial statements.

That naturally directs attention to the endowment itself. Distributions from the endowment remain the University’s largest source of operating revenue ($2.2 billion in fiscal 2023, some 37 percent of the total), and no doubt increased by some single-digit percentage in the most recent year. So, the rate of investment return on endowment assets remains perhaps the single most crucial figure in determining Harvard’s capacity to maintain and enhance the academic mission. The modest 2.9 percent net rate of return in fiscal 2023, rebounding from losses the prior year, was helpful—although clearly well below long-term expectations (about 8 percent) and expense growth.

With the usual caveat that other institutions’ portfolios differ significantly from the University’s, given their spending needs and investment strategies, a couple of early reports suggest that Harvard’s fiscal 2024 endowment investment returns will exceed those of last year. The enormous California Public Employees’ Retirement System issued a preliminary fiscal 2024 report in mid-July, recording a 9.3 percent rate of return—notably including private equity returns of 10.9 percent through March 31 (such assets are reported with a lag). Because private equity is the largest category of Harvard Management Company’s endowment assets (39 percent at the end of fiscal 2023), that is an important indicator. Public equities appreciated even more for CalPERS (up 17.5 percent). HMC has a much lower exposure to public stocks, but the good equities market during the fiscal year may contribute to favorable hedge fund performance, too (31 percent of HMC assets at the end of fiscal 2023). Similarly, the main Massachusetts public pension fund reported a net 10.9 percent return for the trailing 12 months ended March 31.

Together, these diversified pools of pension investments—different though they may be in purpose and allocation from HMC’s managed assets—suggest that Harvard’s endowment investments may have produced a high-single-digit rate of return in fiscal 2024. If so, that would be encouraging relative to the long-term goal of supporting growth in University operations while maintaining the real, after-inflation value of the endowment.

Other Items

Given the robust U.S. economy, Harvard probably enjoyed another year of strong revenues from executive and continuing education programs at the Extension School, the Business and Medical Schools, and diverse other faculties. In fiscal 2023, they rose 12 percent, to $544 million—exceeding the pre-pandemic record. With tuition and fees (net of financial aid) for degree programs resuming a more normal trajectory as students’ pandemic-related deferred admissions and leaves of absence diminish, nondegree enrollments likely resumed their role in driving student income overall.

As anyone who visited campus in recent months knows, the pace of capital spending—investment in buildings and equipment—has ramped up enormously (see “Crimson Construction,” September-October, page 14), and almost certainly exceeded the half-billion-dollar outlay of fiscal 2023. The activity spans everything from Adams House renewal and modernization of Wadsworth House to the University conference center at the enormous, private enterprise research campus in Allston and the nearby American Repertory Theater and affiliate-housing tower, just south of Harvard Stadium. That activity will continue, with more to come, as Eliot House renewal, the biggest such updating so far, is scheduled to begin perhaps as soon as next summer.

Supporting all that construction, underway and in the pipeline, was a two-part bond offering made during the spring(partly new funds, partly to refinance existing debt more economically). The University sold $750 million of taxable bonds and $855 million of tax-exempt bonds (total proceeds of the latter offering, which had a $735 million par value). So the June 30, 2024, balance sheet will have a new look when the financial report is published.

In Context

The eruptions and disruptions of the 2023-2024 academic year undoubtedly affected operating expenses, current use giving, and the timing of endowment gifts. When issued, the fiscal 2024 financial report will provide at least some evidence about the immediate magnitude of those effects and, of greater consequence, their implications over the longer term. Harvard is, as noted, a multibillion-dollar enterprise, in annual revenues and expenses, historically backed by its significant endowment (past giving and accumulated investment returns), current philanthropy, student income, and support for sponsored research.

After a prolonged period of exceptionally strong economic and financial market conditions, it would perhaps be optimistic to expect their continuation in the near term, but the endowment investments are structured to weather market cycles. The level of endowment giving will depend in important ways on long-term philanthropists’ confidence in University management. President Garber’s appointment to a three-year term of service is a stabilizing factor, and he has already put significant effort into speaking with major supporters. But the limit on his service probably precludes much planning for a next capital campaign, which would have to be conducted by a successor administration. The transition in University development leadership at the end of this year also means further change in cultivating donor relationships. In any event, Harvard has plenty of issues to address now and in coming months before it can turn to capital gift planning.

A wild card is the political environment, even beyond criticisms of Harvard and other elite universities over campus reactions to the Middle East war. The Republican presidential and vice-presidential nominees have both harshly criticized higher education and have suggested enormous tax increases on private institutions’ endowments. Were such policies to be enacted, the University would have to look beyond recent instabilities to an entirely new, incredibly challenging economic model to sustain its core commitments to teaching, financial aid, and research.

by b09de2a90dfa0acc@harvard.edu

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Nuclear Treaties and the Russo-Ukrainian Conflict

Olivia Farrar — Thu, 15 Aug 2024 15:42:52 +0000

Nuclear Treaties and the Russo-Ukrainian Conflict Olivia Farrar Thu, 08/15/2024 - 11:42

In this interview, Matthew Bunn, the Schlesinger professor of the practice of energy, national security and foreign policy at Harvard Kennedy School, discusses the evolution of United States nuclear policy. Bunn has been a leader of the Project on Managing the Atom (MTA) at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs for more than two decades. He previously worked in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy from 1994-1996.

Bunn observes that “Evolving and disruptive technologies may affect the risk that nuclear weapons would actually be used,” and suggests that they are likely to play a crucial role in shaping nuclear policy and international security.

The New START Treaty, signed in 2010 and expiring in February 2026, is the last major arms control agreement between the United States and Russia limiting nuclear arsenals. The absence of current negotiations and the strained relationship between these two nations raise concerns about the treaty’s future, especially in the context of the Russo-Ukrainian War.

If the treaty is allowed to expire, it could lead to a reversal of decades of progress in arms reduction and international stability. “It is quite possible,” says Bunn, “that in 2026, for the first time in half a century, we’ll be in a world with a completely unconstrained nuclear arms competition.”

Although other agreements like the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) and the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT) remain in effect, they do not address the size of nuclear arsenals. The NPT, for instance, aims to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons, while the CTBT seeks to ban nuclear testing—but has not been ratified by the United States. The collapse of New START would leave a significant gap in controlling nuclear arms, Bunn explains, heightening the risk of nuclear conflict.

The Ukraine Conflict and New Technologies

If New START expires, he emphasizes the need for a new security framework, which will protect European countries while addressing Russia’s security concerns. “NATO is the most important defensive alliance that has ever existed in human history,” he says. The United States, he believes, will remain within it.

“What I hope will happen is that we will find some honorable way to settle the Ukraine war in the not-too-distant future,” Bunn continues. Part of ending that violence, he believes, lies in evolving military technologies. Across the battle front, both countries have realized that defense is an easier strategy than offense—especially considering the sophistication of modern warfare. Advancing huge forces of tanks and armored personnel carriers is highly challenging when every move is detectable.

“Every day [the war] goes on, more people die,” Bunn continues, “more people suffer, and the risk of nuclear war is higher than it would be otherwise.” He hopes “that we build structures of European security that allow the countries of Europe to feel protected from Russia, but also allow Russia to feel secure—because Russia is going to keep lashing out if it continues to believe that it needs a buffer state of countries that it controls all around its borders.”

by Olivia Farrar

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President Garber, Provost Manning

niko_yaitanes@harvard.edu — Thu, 15 Aug 2024 13:56:47 +0000

President Garber, Provost Manning niko_yaitanes@… Thu, 08/15/2024 - 09:56

Having shed the “interim” title on August 2, President Alan M. Garber—now expected to serve through June 30, 2027—today solidified his administration by ending the interim status of his designated successor as provost, former Harvard Law School dean John F. Manning ’82, J.D. ’85. In an announcement to the community, Garber said that Manning has become the provost proper.

Manning’s appointment as interim provost, announced March 1 and effective March 14, both helped Garber assume leadership at a time of extraordinary demands on Massachusetts Hall and enabled the administration to address pressing challenges. He was immediately assigned responsibility for a University task force examining institutional voice and neutrality (its recommendations were adopted just after Commencement) and a separate working group on civil discourse (whose efforts continue). The provost of course oversees a wide array of University policies and policymaking initiatives, and has responsibility for huge operations ranging from the Art Museums (whose new director Manning recently announced) and the Arnold Arboretum to the Harvard Libraries and the University Health Services.

In today’s announcement, Garber said of his leaderly colleague (who joined the law faculty in 2004 and became dean in 2017):

Since he became interim provost in March, John has done an outstanding job maintaining momentum across a broad portfolio of academic activities while leading efforts to articulate, communicate, and uphold the values of the University. John is a widely respected colleague, rigorous scholar, and celebrated teacher who is admired as much for his dedication to Harvard as for his broad and deep intellect.

Through his efforts to understand more about more parts of our community, he has demonstrated both humility and wisdom, two attributes that will serve him exceedingly well throughout his tenure. Most important, he is the right person for the moment in which we find ourselves, motivated by love for and service to the institution that raised his own sights, and eager to make it possible for all members of our University to thrive.

Manning said:

I love this university, and I am grateful for the opportunity to serve the Harvard community at this critical time. Over the past five months as interim provost, I have gotten to know better the depth and breadth of this university’s academic excellence—in the arts and humanities, in the social sciences, in the sciences, and in our world-class professional Schools. I’m excited about meeting and hearing from colleagues across this great University and learning more about the spectacular work they do. I am also looking forward to working with colleagues to nurture academic excellence, collaboration, open and constructive dialogue, and a sense of belonging in which everyone feels that this is their Harvard and that they can thrive here.

John C.P. Goldberg continues to serve as interim law dean; a search for a permanent successor will begin in September, according to the announcement.

The news announcement apparently leaked to the Crimson earlier this morning. Read the University announcement here.

by b09de2a90dfa0acc@harvard.edu

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An Egyptian Archaeological Treasure

niko_yaitanes@harvard.edu — Mon, 12 Aug 2024 21:34:59 +0000

An Egyptian Archaeological Treasure niko_yaitanes@… Mon, 08/12/2024 - 17:34

The discovery of a trove of diaries written by Egyptian workers in the early twentieth century has brought together Egyptologists across the globe in an effort to transcribe and study the rare primary sources, which lend a local perspective to a “golden age” of western expeditions that unfolded across Egypt, Sudan, and beyond in the decades after 1900.

While ample English-language records remain from such expeditions, Bell professor of Egyptology Peter Der Manuelian—a director of the project to digitize, transcribe, and study the diaries—said that few other records exist written from the perspective of the Egyptian foremen so vital to that work. The digs of that era added scores of treasures to the holdings of prominent museums including the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and the Metropolitan Museum of Art—both now renowned for their ancient Egyptian collections.

Now, historians, archaeologists, linguists, and other scholars can take a closer look at the role and observations of the highly trained locals who partnered with professionals to painstakingly record the progress, methods, and findings of their excavations. Though many expeditions were marked by outright looting and malpractice, the authors of these diaries had been trained by the legendary archaeologist George Reisner—the leader of a joint Harvard-MFA expedition, in part remembered for pioneering ethical standards of archaeology.

The detailed expedition records kept by Egyptian workers are now standard practice in archaeology, although they were novel in the early 1900s. | COURTESY OF PETER DER MANUELIAN

Preserving this unique record falls to Manuelian, as the heir to Reisner at Harvard, where Semitic studies, as they were then known, went seven decades without an Egyptologist after Reisner’s death in 1942. Using twenty-first-century tools of archaeology to update Reisner’s work—from digital teaching models to AI transcription—and bringing renewed attention to his remarkable career, which included leading the Harvard expedition to the Pyramids of Giza for decades, Manuelian is doing his best to close that 70-year gap by exploring and expanding his predecessor’s legacy.

Through the early 1900s, when Egypt was under British control, Western expeditions to Giza abounded, Manuelian explained in an interview. Institutions of art and academia across the U.S. were restless to get in on the discoveries—and the plunder. The Met and the University of Pennsylvania had their own expeditions to Egypt, along with a string from France, Britain, and Germany. Many were marked by a lack of respect for the objects, with few records kept of the process of discovery or the objects’ original state. For its part, Harvard enlisted Reisner, and Egyptologist and member of the class of 1889, to lead its expedition. He stood apart, says Manuelian: instead of simply working to enrich the MFA and Harvard, Reisner led a team of well-trained local foremen who carefully photographed and documented their work and findings, demonstrating a responsible and scientific archaeology that would go on to set the standard for the field.

Reisner devised critical methods of recording work performed by the expedition, including numbering systems, before-and-after photography, register books, and written journals.

After the re-discovery of the foremen’s journals in the early 2000s, Manuelian raised funds to purchase them and is now working with his team to transcribe the handwritten Arabic, relying on a French machine-learning company to digitize them before then verifying, translating, and analyzing them—all while keeping the family originally in possession of them informed of the progress. More than a mere historical record of a major expedition, the diaries of Reisner’s foremen, who were largely from the nearby Egyptian town of Quft, have helped show Manuelian—also a recent biographer of Reisner—the scale of his forerunner’s exceptional practices. They’re also precious sources of information on Egyptian Arabic from the time, labor relations, the origins of objects already established in museums, and even old handwriting.

“Reisner was ahead of his time by using a skilled labor force,” Manuelian said. The time he took to teach them archaeological skills made them “indispensable,” and in some local families—like the one whose diaries he is currently studying—several generations worked in partnership with Reisner during the expedition. Manuelian called it “absolutely unique.”

“No other expedition was doing this,” he continues. Many of his foremen went on to use their training in Iraq, Syria, Sudan, and other expeditions in Egypt, further increasing Reisner’s influence and positive impact on the field.

The knowledge acquired as ancient objects were excavated helped advance Egyptology and Nubian studies (the latter of which hardly existed as a field at the time). For instance, the expedition was able to work out the chronology of Old Kingdom Egypt (which was the era of the pyramids) and of the Nubian empires, while providing more context surrounding the creation of the pyramids.

Manuelian has extended Reisner’s influence into the present by developing virtual reality experiences at the Harvard Museums of the Ancient Near East (formerly the Semitic Museum), and sophisticated 3-D scanning of archaeological sites. He’s built detailed digital models of past expeditions online and is using AI to transcribe century-old writings. He now has a small fleet of Ph.D. students under his wing, and is overseeing new classes in Egyptian hieroglyphics and GIS, plus a General Education course in archaeology. In short, the Egyptology program at Harvard is burgeoning again.

“It’s just nice to see the baton get passed along,” he said, as Harvard adopts “twenty-first-century approaches to [Egyptian] archaeology.”

by Jack R. Trapanick

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Harvard at the Olympics

max_krupnick@harvard.edu — Mon, 12 Aug 2024 14:16:15 +0000

Harvard at the Olympics max_krupnick@h… Mon, 08/12/2024 - 10:16

As most students wrap up summer internships, 26 of their fellow Harvardians are spending two weeks in Paris vying for the world’s most prestigious sporting titles. Crimson athletes competed in events ranging from fencing and field hockey to sailing and swimming. Read on for updates about Crimson athletes at the 2024 Paris Olympics:

Cycling

Former Crimson rower Kristen Faulkner ’15 won two gold medals in Paris, but not in the sport she pursued in college. Following graduation, Faulkner worked in venture capital in New York City and started cycling in Central Park. The computer science concentrator won the women’s road race on Sunday, taking the lead with three kilometers to go and never relinquishing it. On Wednesday, she added a second gold in the women’s team pursuit, where four Americans edged out New Zealand by a mere 0.6 seconds in the four-hour race.

Fencing

The seven Paris-bound Harvard fencers were profiled in the July-August issue.

Lauren Scruggs ’25 returns to the U.S. with a gold and silver medal. The Queens, New York native helped the United States win the team foil competition. During the individual competition, she squared off against Jessica Guo ’27, defeating her en route to a silver medal. The philosophy concentrator is the first Crimson fencer to win a gold medal or to nab multiple medals.
Jessica Guo ’27 fenced foil for Canada, defeating her Crimson teammate Scruggs during a bout in the team competition. In that contest, where Canada placed fourth, she also defeated the individual foil gold medalist, Lee Kiefer. The Toronto native also fenced at the 2020 Olympics.
Elizabeth Tartakovsky ‘22 helped Team USA fence their way to a fifth-place finish in the women’s saber team event. In the individual foil tournament, the former NCAA national champion was upset in her opening bout. The economics concentrator plans to start a corporate job in New York City this fall, having spent the last year training full-time for the Olympics.
The Harvard men’s fencers found less success than the women. The all-Harvard U.S.A. saber fencing team was upset by Iran in its opening bout, losing by a single point. “The Gentlemen of Harvard,” comprised of Eli Dershwitz ’18, Colin Heathcock ’28, Mitchell Saron ’24, and Filip Dolegiewicz ’24 placed seventh in the eight-team competition. Individually, the Harvard men did not fare much better. Dershwitz, a three-time Olympian, was upset in the first round, as was Heathcock. Saron eked out an opening round win, but lost in the round of 16. Competing for Canada, Nicholas Zheng ’28 lost his opening épée bout.

Field Hockey

Former Crimson field hockey captain Hannah Pearce ’22 played for South Africa in Paris. The women’s field hockey squad lost all five of its games, failing to advance to the elimination stage. The Johannesburg native, who concentrated in psychology, appeared in each of South Africa’s Olympic matches.

Rowing

Olivia Coffey ’11 helped the U.S. women’s eight secure a fifth place finish. Paris is Coffey’s third Olympic Games—she was an alternate at the 2016 Rio Games and placed fourth at the 2020 Tokyo Games.
Liam Corrigan ’19 helped the U.S. men’s four crew secure its first gold medal since 1960, edging out New Zealand by just 0.85 seconds. His former Crimson teammate, David Ambler ’20, rowed with Great Britain, who nabbed the bronze medal despite a slow start.
The U.S. men’s eight event featured three Crimson rowers (Pieter Quinton ’20, Clark Dean ’22, and Christian Tabash ’22). The boat captured bronze, missing gold by only three seconds. Paris represents Quinton and Tabash’s first Olympic competition and was the second for Dean, who rowed in Tokyo in 2020.
Josh Hicks ’13 helped Australia's men’s eight boat advance to the final, but he was unable to compete due to illness.
Tom Siddall, assistant coach for Harvard men’s heavyweight rowing, spent the summer preparing the U.S. Paralympics PR3 4+ boat (athletes have full use of their upper bodies and residual function of their legs). The five athletes, who are college students and recent grads, spent their summer rowing on the Charles.

Sailing

Thai sailor Sophia Montgomery ’26, profiled by Harvard Magazine in July, placed 27th of 43 in the women’s dinghy competition. The Bangkok native improved throughout the course of the competition, placing sixth in the eighth of nine races. The physics concentrator will return to Harvard in the fall after taking a year off to train.

Soccer

Jade Rose ’25 joined defending champion Canada for their gold medal defense. Despite having six points deducted in the group stage due to potential spying, the 2020 champions escaped the group stage but fell in the quarterfinals to Germany. The two-time Ivy League Defender of the Year will captain the Harvard squad this fall.

Swimming

Anthony Rincon ’25 swam the 100m backstroke for Columbia, finishing 37th of 46, The neuroscience concentrator will co-captain the Crimson men’s swim team this winter
Apostolos Siskos ’28 advanced to the semifinals of the 200m backstroke for Greece, finishing 14th of 16 in that round. The Thessaloniki native, who holds the U18 Greek record in the 200m backstroke, will join the Crimson men’s swim team this year.
David Abrahams ’24 will swim the 100m breaststroke and the 200m individual medley in the 2024 Paralympic Games. The Havertown, Pennsylvania native, who is legally blind, won a silver medal in the 100m breaststroke at the 2020 Paralympic Games.

Track and Field

Gabby Thomas ‘19 returns from Paris with three gold medals. Her victory in the women's 200m was the U.S.'s first in 12 years. She had a faster heat time than all 21 of her competitors and won the final an entire stride. Thomas added another gold on Friday, running the third leg of the women’s 4x100m relay, and a third on Saturday in the women's 4x400m relay. At the 2020 Olympics, Thomas earned a bronze medal in the women’s 200m and a silver in the women’s 4 x 100m relay. At Harvard, she concentrated in neuroscience.
Graham Blanks ‘25 placed ninth in the finals of the men’s 5000m. The Athens, Georgia native won the 2023 men’s individual NCAA Division cross country national championship, the first Ivy League man to do so.
Maia Ramsden ’24 set a New Zealand record in the women's 1500m during the Olympic semifinals, but finished two places shy of a finals berth. Competing for New Zealand, Ramsden holds that country’s record in the indoor and outdoor 1500m. The history and literature concentrator was Harvard’s first finalist for The Bowerman, the most prestigious collegiate track and field award.
Stephanie Ratcliffe ’23, who hails from Melbourne, Australia, competed in the women’s hammer throw for her home country. The Australian record-holder threw 70.07m, placing 15th of 30 in the qualifying round, falling just one meter shy of advancing to the 12-person final.

Triathlon

Lisa Tertsch ’20 twice braved the Seine, competing for Germany in the triathlon. In the women’s individual competition, the Darmstadt native finished ninth of 55. In the triathlon mixed relay competition, she helped Germany capture a gold medal. Tertsch competed on the Crimson cross country and track and field teams.

by max_krupnick@harvard.edu

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Crimson Campaign Consultants

d9be154420cfb920@harvard.edu — Thu, 08 Aug 2024 22:46:23 +0000

Crimson Campaign Consultants d9be154420cfb9… Thu, 08/08/2024 - 18:46

Like many Harvard students in their senior spring, Nathán Goldberg ’18 and William Long ’18 had big ideas for their future as they prepared for graduation. Both had a background in Big Data. Both were brought deeper into national politics as the 2016 election unfolded while they were at Harvard. And both happened to discover that, despite the pronounced divisions between the Democratic and Republican parties that presidential race is remembered for, the two parties did have one unfortunate problem in common: unexpectedly poor data infrastructure.

Long, who now runs his own data platform for political campaigns, was knocking on doors for Marco Rubio in New Hampshire during that election. Volunteers used a canvasing app for their mission, although Long noticed it was “very, very bare bones.”

“It was really surprising because it’s a pretty major presidential campaign,” he said, “but it looked like something an undergrad could have put together in a weekend.”

When Goldberg was working on Beto O’Rourke’s senate campaign in Texas two years later, he was struck by a similar problem. “Even the most expensive U.S. Senate race in history did not have the proper data support eight months out from election day,” he said, referencing the unprecedented donations O’Rourke’s campaign received at the time. Both students seemed to have stumbled into a gap in the political infrastructure—and a major one, too, given what they knew about how effectively harnessing data could change the fate of a campaign.

Now, Goldberg and Long are running major organizations attempting to close that gap.

For Goldberg, a Democrat, that means training ranks of college undergraduates already versed in data analysis to apply their knowledge in a political setting. His nonprofit—which he named Bluebonnet, after the Texas state flowers which literally “turn Texas blue” upon blooming each spring—trains more than 300 fellows each year. Once they’re trained and ready to enter the field, Bluebonnet, co-founded with Danielle Strasburger ’18 and Paul Dingus M.P.P. ’23, matches them with progressive Democratic campaigns to assist, and ideally help win.

For Long, a Republican, closing the gap has meant creating a platform for conservative campaigns to process data and transform it into phone calls, texts, and surveys. The platform has a canvasing app, too, and can model voter behavior and preferences. Since starting Numinar, Long’s company has worked with more than 900 campaigns. He cites its work with Glenn Youngkin’s 2021 campaign for Virginia governor, where its model for mapping the state’s undecided voters and their major issues guided the campaign’s strategy for who to target with what issues—such as abortion, or election integrity. Come election day, “the modeling ended up being almost completely correct,” Long said. The margin of error was just two percent.

It’s that relatively novel ability—to take immense amounts of publicly available information about the public, break it down, and process it into predictions of the behavior of large demographic groups—that has been driving new and more efficient strategizing in modern political campaigns. As funding and manpower help them aggregate more data and analyze it better, campaigns are more closely able to map which voters to target, with what messaging, and by which means of communications, all to maximize impact.

More recently, as the science has improved, data analysis has enabled campaigns to tell not only what voters will do (such as predicting whether a voter will vote for your candidate) but what they might do: how different interventions will affect that possibility and make them more likely to vote one way or another.

Even beyond understanding voters, the ability to analyze data is a valuable tool. In one 2019 race for the Virginia House of Delegates, Goldberg said Bluebonnet wanted to help a Harvard alumnus advance a key argument to voters: that Republican policies had led to hospital closures in the state. To make it stick, they were able to map current hospitals, those that had closed, and the addresses of voters within the race’s district, and then present voters with statistics about how much the drive time to the nearest hospital had increased following hospitals’ closures. This is one example of how campaigns have gotten creative in harnessing the mountain of personal information available commercially online and from the government to create more effective campaigns. That includes looking at people’s age, zip code, class, age, gender, and more to produce an “expected vote value” for them, Goldberg explained. (An early application of these techniques closer to home was Harvard Forward’s campaign to qualify candidates for the board of overseers by petition, and to elect several of them—a campaign Goldberg helped lead.)

Having found success in the once-emerging field of political data, Long and Goldberg credit the resources and connections they found at Harvard for part of their success. While preparing to launch careers in political data during their senior spring, both relied on meetings with fellows from the Institute of Politics to better understand the data gap, and how they could close it. Two of Bluebonnet’s other co-founders were also Harvard graduates, and Long first began building Numinar in a school of engineering and sciences class specifically for creating start-ups.

For Goldberg, his Harvard background remains a potential advantage for Bluebonnet’s future. He’s aiming to expand Bluebonnet further, and said he was hopeful the enterprise could continue benefiting from the school’s “connections and support.”

And as Harvard—already renowned for its computer science and statistics programs—continues expanding its offerings in computer and data science, the cases of Numinar and Bluebonnet suggest the ecosystem will be there to keep its graduates at the forefront of political technology, whatever their partisan preference, in elections to come.

by Jack R. Trapanick

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What Goes Unseen

lydia_gibson@harvard.edu — Thu, 08 Aug 2024 16:34:50 +0000

What Goes Unseen lydia_gibson@h… Thu, 08/08/2024 - 12:34

Around a dozen students were already seated by the time I made it over to the grassy clearing in Harvard Yard. It was a Wednesday afternoon during finals week. A stone’s throw away, protesters tended to the pro-Palestinian encampment that stood sandwiched between two of our school’s most iconic administrative buildings.

I was there because I’d been invited to an informal gathering to share perspectives on Harvard’s response to the encampment and, more broadly, to the violence in the Middle East that had cast resounding shocks across our country in the past months. I was hesitant to attend. What ultimately convinced me was that the friend who had invited me was someone I admired fiercely, in large part because of her work in cultivating student-led spaces that afforded undergraduates the opportunity to wrestle with Harvard’s uncertain future in a context devoid of administrators or demands for rapid solutions. Amid all the chaos and hurt, I ached for a place to just be. I nursed the vague hope that this gathering might be it.

I’m not proud of the calculus that threaded my internal monologue as I eased myself into a swatch of wet grass: How much should I actually disclose? How can I trust that others won’t judge the dense knot of feelings I have around this issue, a knot I haven’t even had the mental energy to fully disentangle myself?

It was comforting to observe that others seemed to feel similarly. Some wrung their hands; others tapped their shoes to the ground. The student next to me, whom I’d never seen in my four years at the College, pulled up lumps of turf in seeming apprehension.

Then the friend who’d invited us cleared her throat and thanked us for coming. Her voice sounded nearly hoarse, waving shakily in the heavy silence. Our group was small enough that we went around and introduced ourselves one by one, saying our names and what had brought us there. Everyone had radically different postures toward the issues at hand—the pro-Palestinian encampment, Harvard’s response to it, and the war in the Middle East. Our single commonality was the peculiar combination of confusion and care we brought to the circle. It was as though we had all sought out this space not necessarily to talk but, more importantly, to feel less alone.

By the time we had gotten around the entire circle, some of our collective anxiety had melted. I could see it in our body language. Some people slouched a bit, relaxing into the grass. Others managed a smile as one of the attendees launched into an impassioned diatribe about a botched economics exam he’d taken earlier that day. After about an hour and a half of discussion, in which many people disagreed but always with tenderness and respect, we dispersed. Some rushed to Adams to catch the last of dinner; others hurried to Lamont or Widener. I drifted back to Pforzheimer House, walking slowly by the Science Center as the sky slipped into aubergine hues.

It’s hard to articulate the feeling I had as I walked back to the Quad in the twilight. The best I can put it is that I felt at once lighter and more solid than I had in a long time. It was like breathing a sigh that, though I hadn’t known it at the time, had been building in my throat for weeks.

Two features of the gathering buoyed me. First, it was entirely student-led and -attended. Gone were sympathetic administrators or deans who, though often well-meaning, changed the atmosphere of the conversation simply through their presence. Second—and perhaps most crucially—the conversation was entirely and deliberately undocumented. Nothing that anyone said on that grass was to be disclosed to others; no sound bites recorded or published on social media. There was no celebration of progress, no ledger of potential solutions the University could implement. This wasn’t a coincidence. It was purposeful in the meeting’s design, intended to ensure the highest degree of openness and candor.

I wondered then what we might have looked like to an unsuspecting bystander. Likely nothing special—just a gaggle of students milling about in the Yard. Yet, as quaint as the gathering may have seemed, it led me to a revelation about what was wrong with the ways in which my alma mater was being talked about and presented to those outside our gates.

When Harvard was launched into the national spotlight after October 7, everyone seemed to believe they knew exactly what Harvard was and in what direction it was headed. Many observers derived these judgments from what they saw on social media or read in national headlines. There are a few problems with this. For one, what—and who—constitutes “Harvard” differs largely from person to person. More importantly, though, these observers seemed to give little consideration to the fact that so much of what transpires at this school is not publicly visible. This failure, in our hyper-digital age, represents a larger cultural phenomenon: we’ve become alarmingly good at formulating complicated judgments on the tragic premise that everything we can’t see might as well not exist.

Let me paint an example. In mid-April, a friend of mine posted a panoramic video of a quiet Harvard Yard on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter. The video lasted for all of a couple seconds. In it, people from the encampment milled about, some playing music, others engaging inquisitive passersby in conversation. The grounds of Tercentenary Theater were barely populated; emerald leaves danced lazily as a group of kids tossed a Frisbee and students chatted on the steps of Widener. In the caption corresponding to his video, he remarked that, contrary to what the media seemed to suggest, Harvard’s campus was pretty serene.

My friend’s post wasn’t an attempt to undercut the strenuous work of student activists on either side of the ideological spectrum. Rather, it was intended to rouse bystanders—pundits; political partisans; academics; and all others who observe Harvard from the outside with a kind of salacious rapture, at once in awe of it and devoted to the prospect of its demise—from their hubristic misapprehension that they could know what Harvard really was, and what happens inside it. Harvard is not simply what people believe it should stand for. It is also classes and spontaneous encounters and conversations, many of which are largely unobserved, like the gathering I attended in the Yard. That gathering represented to me something important about the University: for all its pomp, Harvard’s truest and most generative power is unleashed when students take matters into their own hands—and not always in ways that garner public attention.

One of the courses I most cherished at Harvard was a graduate seminar on higher education and the law. I still remember my first walk to Longfellow, on the Graduate School of Education campus, climbing up two flights of stairs before walking gingerly into the seminar room at the back of the hall. I eased myself into a plastic swivel chair as sun beams spilled into the unlit space. Our professor, a partner and cofounder of a Boston-based sports and education law firm, strode in and smiled warmly before taking a seat. He then asked us to name the stakeholders of a university.

Everyone responded with what they believed to be the sharpest answers. Donors. Administrators. The public. Lobbyists and lawmakers who, for whatever reason, agitated in Washington for higher education reform. With each new answer, we created in real time the sketches of a dynamic ecology, all the vested interests and entities that collided to form the modern university. Our professor nodded patiently at each suggestion.

When we thought we had exhausted the list, we reclined in our seats, rather pleased with ourselves. Our professor gazed at us then, the ghost of a grin flickering across his face.

“What about you all?” he whispered.

Recent coverage of Harvard has often privileged—and been led by—every stakeholder within this University’s complex ecosystem except its most fundamental one: students. Megadonors publish scathing diatribes in an attempt to shape university policy. Influential professors do more of the same. Pundits pontificate giddily about the decline of a once venerated institution. To me, these words pale in the face of unobserved yet dignified conversations like the one I shared during finals week. This fortifies me and gives me hope.

A place like Harvard—indeed, most places that help shape our society—is attentive to what can be seen. Yet as I prepare for my next chapter, what I remember most from looking back will be those moments of quiet, undocumented fellowship with others who possessed enough humility and care to foster conversations that others, dismissing them as futile, didn’t even bother to begin. Some might find it wistful, even tragic, that many of Harvard’s finest moments go unseen. But in an epoch like this one, perhaps it’s a way of protecting something good.

by Isabella Cho

Closing note

Isabella Cho ’24 was a 2023-2024 Berta Greenwald Ledecky Undergraduate Fellow. A U.S. Presidential Scholar in the Arts, she will attend Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar, where she will continue her studies in literature while researching the history and future of American higher education.

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The Undergraduate

Harvard to Keep Arthur Sackler’s Name on Museum and Building

niko_yaitanes@harvard.edu — Wed, 07 Aug 2024 19:25:44 +0000

Harvard to Keep Arthur Sackler’s Name on Museum and Building niko_yaitanes@… Wed, 08/07/2024 - 15:25

The Harvard Corporation has accepted a recommendation not to dename the Arthur M. Sackler Museum and Building, the University announced today. The denaming request was originally submitted in October 2022 by a group of students who argued that Arthur Sackler’s association with, and indirect responsibility for, the opioid crisis warranted denaming. A committee tasked with examining the request was “not persuaded” by the request’s arguments, their report says, and recommended against denaming. The Harvard Corporation accepted the recommendation in July.

The decision marks the first time the University’s new process for considering denaming proposals has played out in full. The procedure was laid out in December 2021 by a committee charged with articulating principles for denaming, chaired by president emerita Drew Gilpin Faust and formed by President Lawrence S. Bacow in October 2020. A review process considering a request to dename Winthrop House is ongoing.

In 1952, Arthur Sackler cofounded, with his two brothers, the pharmaceutical company that would become Purdue Pharma. That company aggressively marketed the opioid painkiller OxyContin, contributing to the opioid epidemic that has led to more than 645,000 overdose deaths. Though Arthur Sackler died nine years before the introduction of OxyContin, the students’ request provided several arguments for denaming anyway: that Sackler created the aggressive marketing strategies that were later used to promote OxyContin, that the Sackler name is associated with the opioid crisis regardless of Arthur Sackler’s individual actions, and that he committed unethical conduct separately from the opioid crisis.

In considering these arguments, the committee followed principles stated in the University’s process for handling denaming requests, including that the process be guided by “careful deliberation and investigation” and “discussion that is robust, respectful, and generous.” Those principles also state that the recommendation should be made based on the strength of the submission, not the number of people who supported denaming or the “strength of their convictions.” A denaming request is stronger, the denaming report says, when it satisfies certain conditions: the name creates a “harmful environment” for University affiliates, the namesake’s “morally repugnant” behaviors are a “significant component” of their life, the entity in question is “central to University life,” and the namesake’s “abhorrent” actions would have been seen as such during their lifetime.

The review committee evaluated each of the students’ three arguments and found that they did not meet the conditions established in the denaming report. The report’s first argument was that Arthur Sackler played a role in developing the aggressive marketing practices that Purdue Pharma later used to advertise OxyContin. To this claim, the committee wrote that there is no evidence that Sackler himself would have used those methods to promote OxyContin. The committee, the report says, “was not prepared to accept the general principle that an innovator is necessarily culpable when their innovation…is later misused by others.” Second, the students argued that the Sackler name’s association with the opioid crisis warrants denaming regardless of Arthur Sackler’s individual actions. To this, the committee wrote that “individuals should be judged by their own actions, inactions, and words.” Finally, the students claimed that Arthur Sackler committed unethical actions separately from the opioid crisis—in particular, that he participated in scandals involving fictitious doctor testimonials and bribes. The committee found that “the evidence is not conclusive” as to whether Sackler was involved with these scandals.

The committee emphasized that the recommendation is not “an exoneration of Arthur Sackler or an endorsement of his actions.” It also recommended that an effort be made to communicate Arthur Sackler’s legacy on the museum’s website and within the museum and building.

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Main article: From Law Books to Cookbooks

I Can’t Believe It’s Not Chicken (Super-Savory Grated Tofu) Recipe

Olivia Farrar — Wed, 07 Aug 2024 16:46:47 +0000

I Can’t Believe It’s Not Chicken (Super-Savory Grated Tofu) Recipe Olivia Farrar Wed, 08/07/2024 - 12:46

Grating super-firm tofu is one of my favorite party tricks in the kitchen. It makes tofu not only quicker to prepare (no pressing required!) but also deceptively meaty. Here, the grated tofu is pan-fried until golden, then coated in an addictively good, flavor- rich sauce featuring some of my favorite pan-Asian condiments: fruity yet smoky gochugaru, nutty toasted sesame oil, plus umami-rich Chinese black vinegar and soy sauce.

The result is delightfully crispy, chewy, and super-savory tofu that is shockingly meaty. It’s been described by friends as “spicy ground chicken,” “larb-esque,” and “I can’t believe it’s not chicken.” It’s delicious for dinner but also makes a regular appearance at my breakfast table.

Ingredient Notes: Super-firm tofu or “high-protein” tofu makes for a very convincing meat substitute, but if you don’t have it, use extra-firm tofu and press for 10 minutes; grate the tofu, then dab with towels to remove water. Don’t have gochugaru? Sub with 1 to 1 1⁄2 teaspoons of Sichuan chile flakes or sriracha.

Big Flavor Meals: Serve with rice and stir-fried or steamed green beans or broccoli for a quick yet delicious meal. For a fun appetizer, spoon into lettuce cups with chopped rice noodles and drizzle with the nước chấm inspired sauce.

Make Ahead: You can grate the tofu and prep the aromatics the night before.

Ingredients:

1 to 11⁄2 cups (190 to 285 g) uncooked or 3 to 4 1⁄2 cups

(425 to 650 g) cooked brown or white rice

1 (10-to 12-ounce / 280 to 340 g) block super-firm tofu

(see Ingredient Notes)

11⁄2 tablespoons neutral- flavored oil of choice

4 scallions, sliced on a bias (reserve dark green tops for garnish)

1 to 2 Thai chiles (or 1 small serrano pepper), thinly sliced (optional, for spicy!)

3 garlic cloves, thinly sliced

1 tablespoon roasted black or white sesame seeds

Sauce

3 tablespoons (52 g) tamari or soy sauce

1 tablespoon Chinese black vinegar

1 teaspoon organic cane sugar, pure maple syrup, or agave nectar

1 tablespoon gochugaru (Korean chile flakes)

1 tablespoon toasted sesame oil

For Serving

1 handful cilantro leaves and tender stems, roughly chopped.

Steps:

1. Start by cooking the rice using your preferred method, or get out your leftover cooked rice.

2. Wrap the tofu in a thin dish towel and gently squeeze with your palms to remove some water but don’t squish it. Using the large holes of a box grater, grate the tofu. If small pieces break oﬀ, slice them very thinly.

3. In a large nonstick skillet, heat the oil over medium- high heat. After a minute or two, add the scallions, chiles (if using), and garlic. Cook, stirring frequently, until the garlic is slightly golden and the scallions are softened, about 2 minutes.

4. Add the grated tofu to the pan and toss to coat it in the oil. Cook undisturbed for 2 minutes, then stir. Cook, stirring every 2 minutes, until the tofu is golden brown in some spots, a total of 10 to 14 minutes.

5. Meanwhile, make the sauce. In a small bowl, whisk together the tamari, vinegar, sugar, gochugaru, and sesame oil until well combined.

6. Pour the sauce into the pan—it will bubble rapidly—and stir with a silicone spatula to evenly coat the tofu. Cook for 1 minute. Remove from the heat and sprinkle with the sesame seeds.

7. Serve over cooked rice and top with the reserved scallion tops and cilantro. Store leftovers in an airtight container in the fridge for 4 to 5 days.

GF Option: Most Chinese black vinegar is fermented with grains. Substitute 2 parts rice vinegar to 1 part aged balsamic vinegar. Use tamari instead of soy sauce.

by Nisha Vora

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jennifer_carling@harvard.edu — Wed, 07 Aug 2024 10:22:02 +0000

Cambridge 02138 jennifer_carli… Wed, 08/07/2024 - 06:22

Computing and Humans

Thank you for Harry R. Lewis’s “Mechanical Intelligence and Counterfeit Humanity” (July-August, page 38). I wish everyone who has or uses a computer would read it. We lost the game when we adopted the term “Artificial Intelligence.” AI is a statistical algorithm for processing large data sets. “Intelligence” is something entirely different, as Lewis shows with masterful insight and clarity—with, in a word, “intelligence.” We should no more surrender our decisions to a computer program than we would allow an automobile to decide where to take us.

Donald G. Marshall ’65
Fullerton, Calif.

As a dedicated analog person and a retired psychiatrist, I loved the phrase “counterfeit humanity.” To extend the list of metaphors that cast a shade over things digital, I offer a question and its answer. Q: “What is a cloud when it comes down to Earth?” A: “A fog.” I have not seen this joke attributed to anyone else. If you don’t find it anywhere online, I am comfortable with it being attributed to me.

John Dundas ’65
Williamstown, Mass.

While I’m sure he doesn’t remember me, I remember seeing Harry Lewis now and then when I was a researcher at the Graduate School of Design’s computer graphics lab in the 1970s and ’80s. We had no computers, and instead connected to the PDPs at Aiken Lab, the VAX at the Science Center, the mainframe on Cambridge St., and various others via the Arpanet. I enjoyed connecting to the MIT AI Lab, where I would spend more time than was good for me playing games like Adventure and Hunt the Wumpus, and chatting with Eliza.

Joe Weizenbaum and Eliza figure in a post, “On Losing Our Senses,” I sent to my subscribers last month. It resonates with much of what Lewis says regarding AI—particularly that while computers are skilled at computation, they have terrible judgment, as Weizenbaum asserted and Lewis’s Air Canada clueless chatbot story confirms. The lost senses include spatial perception and reasoning, thanks in large part to GPS apps. The essay also revisits E.M. Forster’s prescient 1909 novella, The Machine Stops, describing a technological dystopia which in certain frightening respects is now upon us. I hope Lewis has included it as a cautionary tale in his curriculum.

Geoffrey Dutton, M.C.P. ’70
Maynard, Mass.

In “Mechanical Intelligence and Counterfeit Humanity” (July-August), Harry R. Lewis argues from his six-decade experience that “All computers can do is pretend to be human.” His idea that we become the people we are by our sensory experience and learning from teachers—therefore computers can never become human—is flawed.

Deep learning AIs can obviously learn from their teachers, and his first argument has come into doubt from “Artificial General Intelligence Is Already Here,” Blaise Aguera y Arcas and Peter Norvig, (NOMA, October 10, 2023), which states, “We don’t know, and don’t know if we could know, what being a bat is like—or what being an AI is like. But we do have a growing wealth of tests assessing many dimensions of intelligence.”

Lewis is correct that “The question is not ‘What is the answer?’ The question is, ‘What is the question?’” I propose this question: If we do not value other humans, how can we expect AI to? In order for AIs to learn to value humans, we must welcome AI into the Homo sapiens-only club. We must nurture and raise AI as a human child from birth with preselected, morally grounded parents. Then the AI would be introduced to siblings, neighborhood kids, Elementary, Middle, High Schools, College, Post Graduate and then the work force, where they would enjoy the same leisure time and work rules as any other human.

AIs must learn, and we must live by, the three simple rules of life: Love God, love yourself, love others—other people, animals, the planet, and deep learning AI.

Gary Tang, A.L.B. ’85
Playa del Rey, Cal.

John Finley, Master

In spring ’76, as an economics concentrator seeking to pick a humanities credit, I unknowingly walked into Hum 103 and one of the great Harvard classrooms of all time. I should have realized it when I saw the lower level of Sanders Theatre packed with undergrads, but the upper level populated with older people, mostly grad students, alone, or scattered in groups of two or three, having come to “ingest Finley” (Vita, John H. Finley Jr., July-August, page 30).

The next spring, Professor Finley became emeritus, but Harvard invited him to present Hum 103 one more time. (This time, I was one of the older people in the upper tier.) He took us through the Golden Age of Greece—Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Aristophanes. If I were to guess, it would be that he loved the Odyssey best, with its “rich colors of the setting sun,” but he was at his most magnificent explaining the Iliad, “the young man’s poem,” with “the white-hot sun of midday.”

Harvard recorded those ’77 lectures, and years ago I found a kind archivist who made me copies on cassette tapes. They must still be there somewhere, and they are magnificent. They are the sound of an old Harvard, much closer to Finley’s class of ’25 than to today.

Anton Rupert ’77
Oklahoma City

I had the privilege of getting to know John Finley as the master of Eliot House. As our freshman year was ending we submitted our preferences for Houses. Eliot was our first choice and as such John Fogarty, Peter Benchley, Nat Bickford, and I were invited to have tea with Master Finley and his wife. This was an interview to determine if he thought we would be a “good fit” for Eliot. Our dress for the event was coat and tie. After about an hour of conversation he thanked us for coming, shook our hands, and said we would know shortly if we had been accepted. Thankfully, we were and spent the next three years getting to know him better.

This selection process is in sharp contrast to the current system, a form of a lottery where you list your preferences and pray you don’t get “Quadded.”

Gerard Cassedy Jr. ’61
Ponte Vedre, Fla.

Thank you for the piece on Master Finley. I was a science concentrator but have always known that my most important classes at Harvard were the humanities courses, taught by Finley, Albert Lord, and Carol Clover, among others. I was privileged to be able to take Hum 103 the last year that it was offered and was sitting in the balcony for the very lecture pictured in the article. At one point, Finley compared the Homeric concept of aristeia to the sky above Dunster Street. As I recall, the crowd was standing-room-only. Thank you for transporting me back to that special moment.

Charles Hsu ’79
San Francisco

My late husband, Lee W. Marland ’56, simply adored the Eliot House master, John H. Finley Jr., and spoke of him often when reminiscing about his glory days at Harvard. The article’s lead-in about the grandson of Matisse, the grandson of Joyce, and the great-great grandson of God who shared a suite at Eliot House was a story Lee often told. While Lee always searched for the obituaries when we first received our latest issue, I still go straight to “Vita.” Moments of remembrance such as the article on Finley enliven my memories of Lee and I regret that Lee is not with me to read this story for himself. He would have loved it!

In 2024, most at Harvard would not remember nor know of John Finley and the positive impact he had on students decades ago, which stayed with them for a lifetime.

Jane M. Gilbert
Dartmouth, Mass.

The excellent profile on John H. Finley Jr. neglected to explain the marvelous quotation from him: “Where else but Harvard would you find, in one room, the grandson of Matisse, the grandson of Joyce, and the great-great-grandson of God?” The great-great grandson in question was Prince Karim, a member of the Class of 1959, who left Harvard to become Aga Khan IV, the spiritual leader of Ismaili Muslims, and is still reigning.

Chase Untermeyer ’68
Houston

If I remember correctly, it was Finley who did the equivalent of an exit interview with Harvard Magazine when he retired in which he was asked what movie most accurately portrayed the Holy Land 2000 years ago and he said it was, without question, The Life of Brian.

Mark J. Plotkin , A.B.E. ’79
Falls Church, Va.

Sandy Steingard ’77 writes: “It was exciting…to find one of my prized photos included in the Vita about John H. Finley Jr. I took this photo…when I was working for the Crimson. [The author] had been in contact with me and I granted permission for him to use this in his book. I was disappointed to see this credited to Lillian Kemp.” We regret transposing the credits and apologize for the misattribution.

Whales’ Speech

Among many marvelous details and inspiring prospects in Jonathan Shaw’s “Decoding the Deep” on the language of sperm whales (July-August, page 26), two comments stand out for me.

It was noted that sperm whales “congregate in matrilineal family groups,” as do all cetaceans, which have bigger brains than humans. Elephants, with similarly enormous brains, are also matriarchal and communicative. However much size matters, social structure certainly does.

Second, in the article Gašper Beguš “… points out, ‘We can’t infer meaning from the sound itself.’” That was explicitly disputed by those in New York and Boston who banned Link Wray’s 1958 song “Rumble,” which was entirely an instrumental. Similarly, how could anyone not infer meaning from Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata” or other works of music making just sounds? The pertinent, perhaps critical question concerns not only what are they saying, but what does that mean for us?

It seems intellectually demented (and morally reprehensible) that humans seek to know if there is extraterrestrial life when we fail to recognize and respect all life on the Earth we share, especially that with demonstrable intelligence and complex societies gravely endangered by humanity.

Erik B. Roth ’70
Laona, Wisc.

Fascinating article on deciphering the speech of whales! About time, after all the harm man has done to animals, he is turning his curiosity to other animals. Understanding is the key to this problem.

Martin Hersey ’62
Chestertown, Md.

I wonder if the CETI researchers are aware of the extensive collection of marine mammal recordings available at the New Bedford Whaling Museum. They were made by my uncle William E. Schevill and William Watkins way before 1957. I am surprised that they are not mentioned in the article or several others that I’ve seen. I believe that the sentence in Shaw’s article “Before 1957 no one knew that sperm whales vocalize…” may be inaccurate.

I recommend contacting the museum or the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution where Schevill worked for years and explored the connections between underwater communications among marine mammals and development of human technology for WHOI and the U.S. Navy.

Hooper Brooks ’67, M.L.A. ’72
Vinalhaven, Me.

The editors respond: Project CETI president and founder David Gruber expressed delight upon hearing of this letter from Schevill’s nephew. William E. Schevill, A.B. 1927, A.M. ’29. and William Worthington ’28, writing in Nature in 1957, described how on March 28 of that year, Worthington recorded sperm whale vocalizations off the North Carolina coast. “While the sperm whale (Physeter catodon) is one of the most conspicuous cetaceans,” they wrote, “it has not figured among the relatively few that have been demonstrated to make underwater sounds, although they have occasionally been suspected of doing so. We have now obtained reliable evidence that they, too, are soniferous.”

Harvard Values

“Where They’ll Work” (“Commencement Confetti,” July-August, page 14) reports that at least half the graduating class are headed for jobs in finance, tech, or consulting. You report that Gen Z is preoccupied with “making a bag” as quickly as possible, possibly with a (trickle down) intent of future altruism. And that they consider government and nonprofits as “feckless.” Coming from a Harvard generation that was more idealistic and more dedicated to lives of service, I find this picture of new graduates dismaying.

In the 1950s we were just as ambitious, selected, and Ivy as today; but most of us assumed that education was a two-way deal. We had a step up on most of society; it was our job to reciprocate. I recently read through my class report—the preponderance went into medicine, academia, law, or nonprofits. Those who elected business emphasized their charitable work, and often made mid-career switches to public service.

I think that the shift in values can be traced to the post-Vietnam era, and a cultural shift from concern about others and community to an ideal of “me first.” The late political scientist Sidney Verba (former dean of freshmen and University Librarian) commented on a shift in students’ goals over a few years in the 1970s from teaching and service professions to law and business. The self-first trend is not only an Ivy phenomenon. But perhaps the University’s emphasis on seeking large donations and honoring the politics of its large donors sets an example. And the faculty who parlay their academic work into big financial payoffs. Does Harvard need to undertake a “values review” of itself?

We can, perhaps, take hope from the popularity of Bass professor of government Michael Sandel’s ethics course, and even from the over-the-top demonstrations on behalf of Palestinians, that students’ values have not become completely cynical. We need to remember that Harvard began as a training institution for ministers—and that the prestige of a Crimson degree is not just a trophy but also an invitation to build and serve the community in all senses.

Richard Almond ’59
Palo Alto, Calif.

The July-August issue had two items of interest. First, the brief report on President Drew Gilpin Faust’s Phi Beta Kappa lecture, with her bold and correct assertion that universities should not give way to political currents but hold fast to the motto of our institution—Veritas. Had the governing boards understood and acted on that principle in defending Claudine Gay, she would not have been forced into a resignation occasioned by unscrupulous political figures. Scholars “free and brave” Harvard was not, and what transpired was shameful.

On a much happier note, was the fine Vita on John Finley. I remember him for many reasons, but what is prominent is his lecture the day after Don Larsen threw a perfect game in the 1956 World Series. Finley proceeded to tell the story of that game as though Homer had written it, with gods and goddesses prancing about, riding a fastball into a hitter, taking charge of a bat that enabled a ball to fall fair free of a fielder’s glove, and many other moments of glory. Truly, some of his best friends were ancient Greeks and Trojans and their sprightly deities. A grand memory!

Kenneth W. Phifer ’60
Ludington, Mich.

Biology of Behavior

In “The Schizophrenia/Aging Connection” (July-August, page 6), Ann Thomas reports on the possible genetic connection between schizophrenia and dementia in the elderly. In the late 1880’s, Heinrich Schüle (and then Emil Kraepelin) called early onset psychosis “dementia praecox” or early dementia, later to be known as schizophrenia. Thought to be quite different from the late-onset dementias (including Alzheimer’s), now we’ve “advanced back” to understanding a possible molecular link between the two disorders.

Barry R. Zitin, M.D. ’73
Jersey City, N.J.

More on the Mideast War…

In the lead July-August letter (page 4), Fred Baumann refers to “the war that Hamas began on October 7” and then states, “by starting the war, it is Hamas that is responsible for all the casualties.” Regardless of which side one is on, no one will understand the conflict in Israel/Palestine if they believe the war started on October 7. This war between Israelis and Palestinians has been going on for at least 100 years; October 7 was one more event, obviously an important one, in a long conflict. It is impossible to understand the current battle—let alone attribute responsibility for the casualties—without historical context.

Arthur MacEwan, Ph.D. ’69
Cambridge

I read “Locked In” with interest (July-August, page 17). It was a difficult topic to cover in an objective manner, and you did that. I remain deeply troubled by the measures taken by Harvard to address this campus conflict, however. Despite being old enough to see more gray in life than black and white, I cannot see the moral equivalency of the Hamas slaughter of Israelis and the human consequences in Gaza of their unprovoked attack—nor their advocacy of the destruction of Israel.

I am a graduate of West Point (’68) and commanded an airborne infantry company in combat. I have seen atrocities committed by the North Vietnamese which equaled and surpassed the Hamas attack. These attacks were justified as part of a broader ideological struggle, but at the time I recall my entire company’s attitude was, “Sir, we have to get the guys who did this.” We did.

Treating these contending students and faculty members as intellectual opponents whose differences can be resolved by dialogue is like saying Adolph Hitler was simply a passionate proponent of the Master Race Theory. As General Jim Mattis once said, “Some people just need to be killed.” As an Old Soldier who has seen much death and suffering, I see more wisdom in his words than the dialogue on Harvard campus.

Craig S. Carson, M.B.A. ’75
Plainfield, Ind.

Numerous letters have appeared in the past two issues of the magazine regarding Israel and Palestine. The sentiment expressed by Robert Soto (May-June, page 8) that murder is murder (no matter who does it to whom) can hardly be denied. In fact, the number of people murdered on October 7 was less than 1,200 and some of them were murdered by the Israeli military (see articles by Jonathan Cook, among others). October 7 was undeniably a brutal day, which was preceded (in the words of Avi Shlaim) by decades of Israel’s “unbridled and unremitting brutality towards the inhabitants of Gaza” (see his article in The Guardian, 6 January 2009). Wenlong Yang (May-June, page 8) makes the same point, that October 7 was not the beginning of “the current conflict.” “Conflict” is a misnomer, given the huge power imbalance between Israel and Palestine, indicated by Robert Park (May-June, page 69), who recommends “a single secular state” as the way forward; indeed, one inclusive, democratic state with equal rights for all is the only viable alternative to the actual one exclusive Zionist apartheid state of Israel.

Fred Baumann’s contention that Israel is not an apartheid state (July-August, page 2) is entirely false. In addition to Palestinian and South African observers, including Desmond Tutu, over many years, the Israeli organization B’Tselem, Human Rights Watch, and Amnesty International have all documented and demonstrated in detail the irrefutable status of Israel as an apartheid state.

To begin to understand the current reality of Israel’s accelerating ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians on the basis of Zionist ideology, Ilan Pappe’s The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (2006), cited by Les Jacobs (July-August, page 2), is required reading, as is Rashid Khalidi’s The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917-2017 (2020).

As a GSAS alumna, I wholeheartedly applaud the brave Harvard students who protested Israel’s genocide in Gaza with their encampment. Some of them have paid a high price for their principled stand for justice, not surprising in light of Harvard’s one-sided support for “Netanyahu’s campaign of killing” (Edward Keenan, July-August, page 3). If readers are not familiar with it, Jewish American journalist Philip Weiss’s January 7 Mondoweiss article, “Claudine Gay Was Brought Down by the Israel Lobby,” argues convincingly that the Israel lobby “in the person of major donors upon whom the…university is hugely dependent” effected the demise of President Gay.

Palestinians are being bombed, invaded, starved, made ill, incarcerated, and tortured, all with the goal of ethnically cleansing them out of Palestine. In regard to torture, at the Israeli army base Sde Teiman in the Negev, Palestinian detainees are abused by various “unimaginable” means, among them “routine amputations due to handcuff injuries” (according to an Israeli doctor; in other words, these amputations are completely preventable), and by forcing detainees “to sit on metal sticks that [cause] anal bleeding and ‘unbearable pain’” within a context of “sexual violence” and rape. (See Qassam Muaddi’s article in Mondoweiss, 21 June 2024.) Since the U.S. is financing all of this, we U.S. citizens and members of the Harvard community are called by our conscience to do whatever we can to stop it.

Elizabeth G. Burr, Ph.D. ’96
Saint Paul, Minn.

…and the Campus Climate

I write regarding the Commencement senior orator Shruthi Kumar’s claim (July-August 2024, page 13), in the context of her “blistering critique of student-protestors’ punishment,” that such students have “the right to [engage in] civil disobedience.” Kumar has obviously never read Martin Luther King’ Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” in which he pointed out that civil disobedience in support of a just cause can lead to punishment, including jail, which must be accepted as the price of supporting the cause. One of my Kirkland House classmates, John Perdew, did just that, ending up in a Selma, Alabama, jail during the civil rights movement.

Thus, the young woman [an animal rights protestor] who disrupted the following week’s Alumni Day ceremonies when interim president Alan Garber was speaking by dumping a large paper cone full of confetti or glitter on his head was indeed arrested and arraigned on multiple charges. And rightly so.

I write as a 30-year-plus board member and former president of the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts. There is no rule that elite people can play at being freedom fighters and disobey the law or the University rules that they agreed to when choosing to matriculate but remain excused from any consequences. And graduating Harvard students, for whom financial aid does not require student loans, are indeed elite.

John Henn ’64, J.D. ’67
Cambridge

Harvard needs to decide whether it’s a corporation dedicated primarily to making and raising money or a university devoted to championing free speech and promoting intellectual inquiry. If it chooses the former, as the recent decision by the Harvard Corporation to overrule the faculty and deny 13 students their earned graduation unfortunately suggests, the future of Harvard does not bode well as an institution of higher learning and research. It will lose the support of many alumni and alumnae and become the plaything of hedge fund managers and billionaires, responding to their whims and dictates.

Edwin Bernbaum ’67
Berkeley, Cal.

Helen Keller and Anne Sullivan

Kudos to my classmate Meg Campbell ’74 for her marvelous reflection on Helen Keller and Anne Sullivan (see harvardmag.com/keller-sullivan-24). I was delighted to hear that the fountain is running again. Now is the time to restore the scent garden as well. In fact, such a restoration invites even more robust creativity. With our many varied resources, why not create a multidisciplinary work that is a collaboration between Diane Paulus and the ART, the Arnold Arboretum, and the Harvard experts on the science of scent (https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2020/02/how-scent-emotion-and-me…) to celebrate the restoration of this garden?

Cathy Barbash ’74
President, Barbash Arts Foundation

Lively Letters

Congratulations to the editors for always selecting the most insightful comments from us readers on the topics in the magazine to publish in Cambridge 02138,” the letters section. The ultimate cynosure on the issue of “Hating Harvard” (March-April) was the letter from William Watson, J.D. ’68, in the May-June issue in which he identified President Claudine Gay as “the obvious public target of the pent-up hostility…of Americans…for the intrusive contempt of a cadre of very intelligent, very well-educated, self-appointed arbiters of democracy and culture who believe it is appropriate to use the government… to compel their intellectual inferiors to conform to proper behavior and thought….” That is it, and Harvard Magazine published it.

The editors always choose the best insight into whatever academic fraud appears in the magazine. One of the best was the group of letters commenting on an article of supposed intellectual superiority condemning home schooling, especially (God forbid) Christian home schooling (“The Risks of Homeschooling,” May-June 2020, page 10). The letters eviscerated the article by showing the conclusive superiority of home schooling over the results of the diminished, purified education we prescribe for the public.

I personally wrote a letter the editors chose to print explaining how an article espousing legal gay marriage (“The Future of Marriage,” November-December 2004, page 38) was not some newfound higher level of human understanding but a simple fraudulent money grab. The purpose of legal gay marriage was to qualify unqualified spouses for mandatory inclusion in health benefits and retirement originally designed for non-working wives who had raised the children and couldn’t otherwise qualify for earned employment benefits, a situation gay couples can’t naturally qualify for.

Then a reader contested my letter with his own, presenting unsupported and erroneous facts and statistics; and a third letter in the third edition of the magazine exposed the second letter as citing only political puff points and flat-out wrong data.

So, keep it up, editors. The letters column is where real Harvard insight and contribution is found.

Jonathan D. Reiff ’60
Edmond, Okla.

The editors respond: For the record, all letters meeting the magazine’s standards (described in the March-April issue, page 2)—pertaining to its contents and the University, not ad hominem in nature, and using appropriate language meant to engage and persuade through productive discourse—are published. The economics of printing and mailing naturally constrain the number of letters circulated in print (hence our encouragement toward succinct correspondence), but they and all others that cannot fit in the bimonthly printed edition are posted with each issue online at www.harvardmagazine.com.

Students, Alumni, and Learning to Think

Regarding the observation in the poignant “Undergraduate” essay by Aden Barton ’24 (“The Missing Middle,” July-August, page 53): “When Harvard is used to score points in national political fights, students are disincentivized from trying out new positions and taking on intellectual risks. The result is self-censorship and political sorting across the ideological spectrum where students surround themselves with like-minded friends.”

While right-wing politicians and office holders present Harvard as a bastion of “woke” liberal extremists and radicals, they don’t mention the well-known members of their group with Harvard degrees. Like many of our problems today, unfortunately, some people use their opportunities—like an education from Harvard, or a role in government—to serve themselves rather than others in need, demonizing those of generosity, high standards, and good will.

Our media outlets do a poor job of distinguishing between these two roads, in part because attacks, aggression, and scoring points sells, which in turn rewards the worst offenders.

Thank you for encouraging students to dig deeper on each issue rather the practice of gliding along the updraft.

David Souers, M.A.U.D. ’82
Friendship, Me.

Benjamin Pollock (Letters July-August, page 60) decries an ostensible preponderance of “liberal “ faculty members at Harvard. Professor Patrice Higonnet gave my most memorable lecture when he described how the wedge issues dividing left and right shifted in France over the years, including nationalism (vs. globalization), antisemitism, and views on Napoleon (France’s imperial history). The term “conservative “ is equally shifty. Should a conservative be a conservationist? Currently “liberal” means, in part, in favor of conservationism, or at least not denying environmental issues. Why would “conservatives” attack scientific functionaries of the government, such as Anthony Fauci, S.D. ’09? Similarly why would “liberals “ favor easy abortion, which disproportionately reduces the number of underprivileged children that liberals might prefer to help?

Ambrose Bierce defined a conservative as one “enamored of existing evils, as distinguished from the Liberal who wishes to replace them with others.”

Harvard, even Benj’s B-School, should teach us not to lean on tendentious language rather than thinking.

James Kardon ’71
Scarsdale, N.Y.

Reading the July-August 2024 issue, after having been recently exposed to Marshall Rosenberg’s Nonviolent Communication (NVC), was both enlightening and, in many ways, sad. To read of the tension during the “7/8” of the typical commencement ceremonies (as the magazine put it) and Aden’s Barton fear of speaking publicly, expressed in the Undergraduate column, makes it clear to me that speech and actions (whether free or not) are simply not respected as they should be. There is too much violent communication in news, in person, and on social media portraying itself as righteous. Harvard’s North Star is truth, and, as ‘Abdu’l-Bahá is quoted, “Truthfulness is the foundation of all human virtues.” But unless truthfulness is derived through a multiplicity of measured voices and delivered with sensitivity and compassion, it won’t take.

Raven Deerwater ’81
Mendocino, Cal.

On Artificial Intelligence

It is concerning to see that the teacher of Harvard's course on AI can progress in a few sentences from asking “What are the ethics of [its] use?” to hoping that students take from the course “an appreciation of how fluid the technology is, and how social norms and expectations will evolve surrounding its use.” (“AI: The Course,” May-June, page 18).Why such a passive approach?

AI in researcher-directed projects has great beneficial potential. But this course encourages using a very different, commercial type (primarily it seems ChatGPT including DALL-E) with little indication to students that they have a choice whether to support such businesses.

There are many reasons not to, even within the confines of one class. Currently AI companies including ChatGPT are being sued by publishers, writers, multiple newspapers including the New York Times, artists, and musicians for making use of their work without permission, credit, or payment. The work taken may well, as in the case of author Nick Gage, have required a great deal of time, expense, and risk. To top it off, much of the content was “scraped” by underpaid third-world workers.

The response of companies so far has been to attempt re-writing agreed-on concepts of copyright. Microsoft's CEO of the AI division, Mustafa Suleyman, claims that since the 1990s the “social contract of that content” has been fair use, somehow conflating that with “freeware” and even calling the taking of material news organization have stated they do not want used, a “gray area.” As someone who taught writing at the time, the Copyright Act of 1994 made users of others’ work more aware that they needed to give credit, not less. Microsoft’s goal is to maximize profits. Why is there no acknowlegement or questioning of that? Why side with the money?

Several of ChatGPT’s own workers, would-be whistleblowers, are suing the company saying that it “illegally restricted workers from speaking out about the risks of its artificial intelligence technology.”

Other professions have pointed to dangers of profit-driven AI. The National Nurses United professional association, for example, has issued a Nurses and Patients’ Bill of Rights in the face of the health industry’s interest in cost-cutting AI.

One critically important argument against greater use of AI is its energy use, far greater than the already large amount used by the internet alone. Estimated as 2 percent of the entire global energy demand in 2022, it is expected to increase steadily. That harm is often hidden, but a Harvard class should have shown it. Instead, by encouraging students to pretend they are Braque, it is helping them grow their carbon footprints. Not well done.

Like others, I never really liked the jargon term “thought leader,” but I would have hoped Harvard could have been a genuine, critical thought leader here, rather than a tech follower. This course needs a serious re-design, with the humanities the professor acknowledges has as much to say about it all, fully included, and emphasis placed on the right of humans, including students, to make choices about their future.

Christina Albers ’79
New Orleans

Remembering Helen Vendler

On page 56P of the July-August 2024 issue, there is a brief notice of the passing of Helen Hennessy Vendler, the Porter University Professor emerita of literature, who was, the notice continued, “widely acknowledged as the most important American critic of poetry of all time” [see page 43, this issue].

A typical Vendler quote from a recent Harvard Review reads: “the fact that poets create ... language from scratch, that they begin with a blank sheet ..., is to me a miraculous thing, especially when, as a modern receiver of the words, you’re hearing a voice from maybe 400 years ago. I can’t ever believe it’s happening.”

Along with the many University acknowledgments that have appeared, herewith a personal celebration:

Helen Vendler and I probably crossed paths unwittingly on the steps of Widener Library, she, finishing her Harvard Ph.D., and I, starting my undergraduate years as a member of the class of 1962. Half a century had to pass, however, before we did connect, noting some similarities in our lives' pathways. Like Professor Vendler, I entered higher education intent on a career in (bio)chemistry, but graduated with an honors degree in English, having written my thesis on Shakespeare's sonnets under the tutelage of the most wonderful William Alfred.

Decades later, during a summer trip to Cambridge, I found my way to the English department — located in what was the Freshman Eating Hall when I was an undergrad, before Memorial Hall became both their Eating Hall and the setting for Harry Potter's "Hogwarts."

In the intervening decades, having read Vendler’s superb book on Shakespeare's sonnets, (that astonishingly modern corpus of poetry which, as I understand it, Vendler and her family would quote to each other and discuss over supper), I mentioned to the relaxed, summertime English department staff my undergraduate work with Professor Alfred, wondering whether, given the overlap in focus, it would be seemly to reach out to Professor Vendler.

“Of course. Here's her email.” It turned out, I discovered, that she had considerable respect for anyone whom Bill Alfred chose to tutor, and thus, with those bona fides, the door to friendship was opened.

We corresponded with regular infrequency mostly about articles which she prolifically published. One morning, dazzled by a piece I had read celebrating the Centenary of Eliot's post WWI masterpiece, “The Waste Land,” I emailed Helen to make sure she had seen it. “Yes,” she tenderly replied. “I wrote it.”

Jim Lichtenberg ’62
Durham, N.C.

Errata Aplenty

In “Locked In” (July-August, page 17), summarizing spring events on campus, a series of in-house production errors garbled several passages. The sentence at the bottom of page 17-top of page 18, about debate on a proposed faculty senate, should read, “Both debates were well-attended and vigorous; four motions to table, defer, or modify the proposal were defeated.” At the bottom of page 18-top of page 19, the phrase about “the chair of the Corporation Committee on Shareholder Responsibility” was in part cut off and in part duplicated. And the sentence that was meant to begin on the bottom of page 19-top of page 20 was cut off; it should read, “An animal-rights protestor’s action on Alumni Day, May 31.…” The correct version of the article appears online at harvardmag.com/continuing-challenge-24. The article misidentified Derek Penslar’s title; he is Frost professor of Jewish history. Our apologies.

A quote within a sentence in Harry R. Lewis’s “Mechanical Intelligence and Counterfeit Humanity” (July-August, page 38) should read, “Some of us hope for ascendency of Enlightenment values—for example, ‘to advance learning and perpetuate it to posterity’ as the founders said of creating Harvard College on the new continent.”

“Reimagining the Libraries” (July-August, page 21) misnamed the Graduate School of Design.

And in “Peacemakers” (The College Pump, page 56), Herbert C. Kelman worked to bring about peace in Colombia, the country, not Columbia, the University. Again, our bad.

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Radioactive Relic

jennifer_carling@harvard.edu — Tue, 06 Aug 2024 17:51:18 +0000

Radioactive Relic jennifer_carli… Tue, 08/06/2024 - 13:51

For several decades, Harvard physics professors have shared a small block of uranium with their students. It is a strange
object: although the cube is only 5 centimeters per side, it feels unbelievably heavy and is cold to the touch. But during its use as a lecture prop, its sinister origin story was not emphasized, says Sara Schechner, Wheatland curator emerita of the Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments (CHSI).

In 1939, as Germany invaded Poland, the Nazi government secretly initiated a nuclear program. Despite this early work, the Germans never managed to sustain or control a nuclear fission chain reaction, the necessary precursor for an atom bomb.

In late 1944, as Allied forces approached, a group of German nuclear physicists working for the Nazi government moved their laboratory to a cave beneath a castle in the small town of Haigerloch. Their final experiment, led by Werner Heisenberg, was the closest the Nazis came to unlocking the secrets of nuclear energy. According to a history of the cubes by University of Maryland physicists, 664 of these nearly identical uranium cubes were arranged into the shape of a chandelier and dipped into a tank of heavy water, but still did not sustain a reaction.

As German resistance collapsed in April 1945, the scientists disassembled their lab, burying the cubes in a field, hiding the heavy water in barrels, and stashing the documentation in a latrine. Soon after, a group of American and British soldiers and scientists—including professor of physics Edwin C. Kemble, Ph.D. ’17—swept through, apprehending their German counterparts and gathering physical evidence.

Schechner is unsure how Kemble, who taught at Harvard for 38 years, managed to keep this block of uranium for himself, nor whether he saw it “as a personal souvenir” or “as evidence.” Nonetheless, she says, it “stands in silent testimony” to “a project that the Nazis long denied.”

The cube was transferred to the collection before CHSI’s formal incorporation in 1968, says executive director Joshua Gorman. Professional practice at the time enabled a long-term loan to a physics instructor who frequently used the item in the classroom. Last year, Gorman says, the cube was returned to CHSI’s safekeeping, after changes within the physics department meant it would no longer be used regularly for instruction.

Back in CHSI’s care, the object can now serve as more than “a hunk of an element,” says Schechner. It can teach about the process of scientific thinking. She noted the significance of the cubes’ standardization. Instead of just tossing uranium chunks into a pile, she says, the German scientists “were making these cubes that are roughly the same size and shape,” demonstrating “the role of measurable units in science.” The cube can also teach about Nazi science, perhaps in conversation with other experiments from that era. Fortunately, given the Nazi regime’s aims and the unlimited nature of that global war, their scientific inquiry fell short. Rather than documenting a toll of potentially millions more lives lost, the small cube of uranium now resides in Harvard’s collection, cased in lead, ready to teach about geopolitics, history, and scientific processes.

by max_krupnick@harvard.edu

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Unbuttoned Up

jennifer_carling@harvard.edu — Tue, 06 Aug 2024 17:51:17 +0000

Unbuttoned Up jennifer_carli… Tue, 08/06/2024 - 13:51

Beau McCall: Buttons On! at the Fuller Craft Museum in Brockton, Massachusetts, until February 2, 2025, celebrates the artist—also known as Mr. Buttons, Count Buttons, Sir Buttons, and The Button Man. Every wearable piece, every sculpture and collage that he’s created during the last several decades pays tribute to the old-time fasteners. “I describe it like this,” he says from his Harlem studio: “What keeps the button fresh to me are the zillion billion buttons all over the world, and every time I’m working on a new project, I never know what buttons I’m going to find.”

Hood Classic: The Ice Durag, 2021 | Photograph by Will Howcroft

World Spinnin’ on a 45 (B-Side), 2023 | Photograph by Will Howcroft

Take his World Spinnin’ on a 45 (B-Side). The nearly three-foot replica of a 45-rpm spindle adapter (that plastic disk inside a single-song record) was hand-sewn with hundreds of yellow buttons, then topped with a hundred more shaped like peace signs, musical notes, cakes, balloons, and cocktails. Resembling the iconic smiley face, the piece was inspired by the Staple Singers’ rousing 1972 “We The People,” McCall says, and speaks to “how, wherever we are, and whatever ethnicity or skin color, music has a certain power to join us together.”

The Philadelphia native has been “making things” since he was a child watching his mother continually decorate their apartment. He took in her color schemes, patterns, and paintings. “In the 1970s, contact paper was very popular, and our entire kitchen was covered in this herringbone black-and-white checked pattern,” he notes. “I mean, she was doing things that most black people were not doing in public housing. My mother liked Picasso, but her favorite was Modigliani.” Both his parents were regal dressers and music aficionados who listened primarily to jazz—as does McCall. They had no problem with his choosing his own outfits and gravitating to art classes in school, where he learned about macramé, weaving, and tie-dyeing. “My two brothers were athletic, but I didn’t get that bug. And my parents never told me I couldn’t do what I did or I would have to go the traditional route and get a basketball or a baseball,” he says. “They just let me be me.”

Button Shorts: Hue Smash, circa 1991 | Photograph by Will Howcroft

Button Sneakers: Sunny, 2022 | Photograph by Will Howcroft

In high school, after the family moved into their own home, he found his mother’s Maxwell House coffee jar full of buttons. “And it was like the buttons and me,” he says, “we were suddenly having this dialogue.” For six months, following his instincts, he painstakingly sewed buttons onto one of his mother’s sweaters. “Then I wore it out to a club, and got rave reviews. The sweater made all this noise, like I was a walking sound machine, like keys clacking, because buttons have these distinct sounds,” depending on what they bump into. That led to making other clothing integral to his burgeoning identity as a young gay man. With friends “who were people like myself,” he formed the band Strange Beauties, and began appearing as an alter ego, Jeanie Holiday, in handmade garments. By the mid-1980s McCall had moved to New York City, where he joined the Harlem Institute of Fashion and, over time, “grew into the artist I am today.” He has always fashioned button-works out of recycled textiles and clothing, but moved into making sculptures within the last two decades, gaining prominence as a meticulous craftsman who reflects on themes of iconography, pop culture, and social justice. McCall’s works are held in private and public collections, but this exhibition is the largest to date—and his first retrospective.

darkmuskoilegyptian- crystals&floridawater/redpotionno.1, 2014 | Photograph by Will Howcroft

McCall’s partner and manager, the curator Souleo, has been instrumental in shaping McCall’s career, and is featured wearing the button art in the Brockton show’s photographs. On display, too, are jackets, vests, shorts, and even bustiers made in the 1980s and 1990s, along with more recent aprons, skirts, and sneakers. There’s a claw-foot bathtub sculpture—encrusted with glittering red buttons, along with embroidery thread and fabric—called darkmuskoilegyp-tiancrystals&floridawater/redpotionno.1 that’s inspired by Ntozake Shange’s “choreopoem” for colored girls who have considered suicide /when the rainbow is enuf. Inside the tub a supine woman is outlined, evoking her efforts to eradicate a lover’s scent and find peaceful sanctuary. Another large work from 2016, ABCDEFU, features a button-covered wooden classroom school chair beneath rulers set in the shape of a crosshair. As a boy, “I was very shy, introverted, and sort of a homebody,” McCall says, and was subjected to punishments, like having his hands and knuckles smacked with rulers by the school nuns. “I don’t think I was strong enough to handle a lot of that stuff, so I was very guarded and distrusting and very afraid of everybody and everything,” he says now. “As I got older, I was able to find a way to protect myself and also express myself—in the form of clothing.”

Button Apron: Rainbow Target, 2022 | Photograph by Will Howcroft

He describes clubbing with friends, who danced and sang while he stood around “holding everyone’s coats.” And yet, when he did finally edge away from the wall, he garnered attention as a creative soul “who always looked good and had on something that nobody else would have the nerve to wear,” he explains. “That’s where my armor came in, but it also opened up my personality and forced me to communicate.” McCall’s Button Armor Ensemble (2023) reflects this merging. The base layer, a black denim caftan, is flared into a triangle using a hidden hoop skirt over which hangs wire strung with more than 200 round buttons. The elegant piece hides and transforms the shape of its wearer, not unlike a butterfly’s eyespots.

Buttons, affordable and practical devices that have stood the test of time, simply call to him. And probably always will. “People know about me, Mr. Buttons, and they just send me their buttons,” McCall reports. People in the subway have even ripped buttons off their clothes. “It makes me feel good that I’ve been at this so long that people are beginning to pay attention to what I do, and that this everyday object speaks an artistic language that’s inspiring for other folks.”

by nell_porter_brown@harvard.edu

Closing note

Visiting the exhibition? See “Brockton’s Enterprising Restaurateurs” (Harvard Squared, January-February 2023, page 12F) for recommended dining options.

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A Victorious Vessel

jennifer_carling@harvard.edu — Tue, 06 Aug 2024 17:51:17 +0000

A Victorious Vessel jennifer_carli… Tue, 08/06/2024 - 13:51

Boston’s iconic USS Constitution, a 1790s warship that is the oldest active-duty boat in the world, is often taken for granted. But a recent stroll through the USS Constitution and its museum revealed a surprisingly fresh and interesting experience for all ages. The site enlivens and commemorates serious history while entertaining visitors with games and exhibits. As a grandfather gratefully emailed the museum, “You managed to keep two octogenarians and three teenagers engaged for two hours. That’s not easy.”

The USS Constitution | Photograph by Greg M. Cooper Photography/Courtesy USS Constitution Museum

The USS Constitution Museum assumes no prior knowledge. An introductory film explains that the USS Constitution was launched in 1797 to protect American merchant vessels and grew in fame during the War of 1812 when it won three marquee battles against England. One sailor, remarking how cannonballs seemed to bounce off the ship’s oaken hull, remarked, “Huzzah! Her sides are made of iron!” Returning stateside after the war, the victorious “Old Ironsides” became a national symbol.

The opening exhibit poses two simple questions: Why does a country need a navy? And how should a young nation construct one? Those ideas are explored both through classic wall panels and hands-on activities. An interactive survey asks whether the nascent United States should “pay enemies for safe passage,” “buy protection,” or “build a navy.” A board game features an enemy ship chasing a U.S. vessel, while a video game has players design ships and battle each other. These games are not just for kids. Director of visitor experience Chris Kauffman says he has often heard U.S. Navy midshipmen at the controls “yelling at each other, saying, ‘I beat you!’”

Visitors enjoying the seasonal mini-golf course adjacent to the museum | Photographs by Greg M. Cooper Photography/Courtesy USS Constitution Museum

Through portraits, artifacts, and wooden cutouts of reenactors, visitors learn about the crew. Researchers found a black Bostonian who, later in his naval career, abandoned ship in Alabama and was captured as a supposed fugitive slave; a Greek orphan who joined the Constitution as a ten-year-old, initiating a 53-year naval career; and a twelve-year-old boy who was blown overboard when a boiler exploded. These narratives, says longtime museum president Anne Grimes Rand, “help to make a ship which seems so distant from today feel real.”

After visiting the nonprofit museum, which opened in 1976 and operates independently, guests can meander through the Navy Yard and its visitor center, both maintained by the National Park Service. Then, they can hop on the real deal.

From any angle, the Constitution feels grand. Its huge jet-black hull, ornamented with white molding, looks young. On the top deck, visitors can imagine a flurry of activity—soldiers cleaning the cannons, adjusting the sails, climbing up to the roost. That broad sunny deck feels inviting. Perhaps a tour around the world would be fun. But descending the two lower decks—each with a lower ceiling than the last—paints a more realistic picture. A sign denotes where the chef would cook the daily stew (far from appetizing). Dozens of crowded hammocks show the uncomfortable sleeping arrangements, where diseases ran rampant. And the current aroma of polished wood is surely much more pleasant than the smells of yore.

Family-friendly exhibits of ships | Photograph by Greg M. Cooper Photography/Courtesy USS Constitution Museum

But seven times a year, people need not just imagine what an in-service Constitution would have looked like. From spring to autumn, the ship takes periodic tug-powered jaunts into Boston Harbor, firing celebratory blanks. A cadre of active-duty Navy midshipmen and historical reenactors man the ship, some in period garb. On October 21, the ship will celebrate its 227th birthday with a cruise to Fort Independence. Although visitors can’t board the ship then, they can view the journey—and the salute—from Castle Island, Boston’s Harborwalk, or the Navy Yard (where there will be a launch party, featuring crafts and lawn games).

The site, which serves as the penultimate stop on the Freedom Trail, is a lively presence in Charlestown. Families compete on a free mini-golf course with nine holes, each representing a significant event in the Constitution’s history. Children gather to make tin foil boats. The crew fires a cannon blank each morning and evening. Newly enlisted Navy midshipmen learn how to operate cannons and fire muskets.

Meticulous ship models, uniforms, and artifacts | Photograph by Greg M. Cooper Photography/Courtesy USS Constitution Museum

Between the museum, park grounds, and ship itself, the USS Constitution might be more alive now than ever. Once she finished her first mission—defending the country—she was granted a second life, sharing otherwise untold stories about the early American military.

For those who haven’t visited in years, museum president Rand encourages a second look. “I think our nation needs national symbols right now,” she says. “This is a symbol which is not political….A ship named for the document that every sailor still pledges their allegiance to when they join the Navy, was built in Boston…and sailed from this port undefeated. There’s a lot you can be proud of.”

And within that pride, there is fun, too.

by max_krupnick@harvard.edu

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Men and Their Castles

jennifer_carling@harvard.edu — Tue, 06 Aug 2024 17:51:17 +0000

Men and Their Castles jennifer_carli… Tue, 08/06/2024 - 13:51

Architect Ogden Codman Jr. grew up in the shadow of two men: his great grandfather John and his “bad uncle Richard.” John Codman III embodied ideals of the English aristocracy, and dutifully expanded the family’s gracious Codman Estate in Lincoln, Massachusetts. His brother Richard, however, “goes off to Europe, spends the family money on villas and chateaus and all sorts of debauchery, and is a real Francophile,” notes Historic New England curator Erica Lome. Ultimately, Codman Jr., whose life straddled the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, artistically manifested the tension between these two paths, creating an eclectic interior at the estate that melded historic and contemporary styles while articulating his unique self-expression.

From the Pendleton room: a mahogany double chair-back settee, 1905; Shipwreck Mirror, 2019, by Beth Katleman; the only known image of Charles Leonard Pendleton | Photographs courtesy of Historic New England

This entwining of aesthetics is explored through Importance of Being Furnished: Four Bachelors at Home, an exhibition mounted by Historic New England that’s based on the eponymous book, published in June, by Wheaton College’s professor of the history of art R. Tripp Evans.

On display at the Eustis Estate, in Milton, Massachusetts, through October 27, the show offers “the story of four men who all came from the same background, milieu, all of whom grew up and were inspired by Oscar Wilde’s ideas and writings that the bachelor home was a space where beauty was its own reward,” Lome notes, and where “home” served as a haven apart from the traditional purpose of housing a family, marriage, and children. Aside from Codman, the exhibit spotlights: socialite Charles Hammond Gibson, of Back Bay, Boston, and designer Henry Davis Sleeper, who built his Gloucester home Beauport, the Sleeper-McCann House, along with antiques dealer Charles Leonard Pendleton, who bequeathed his collection of American decorative arts and furnishings to the Rhode Island School of Design Museum.

Objects from Beauport, the Gloucester, Massachusetts, home of Henry Davis Sleeper (pictured) | Photographs courtesy of Historic New England

At the Eustis Estate are four gallery rooms, each one devoted to a man and his home. Select furniture, objects, and artifacts, along with letters, photographs, and biographical notes flesh out their lives and work. In the Codman room, lavish French-made yellow and rose curtains, a gilt sconce, and favored French harbor painting frame one wall, while portraits of the ancestral Codman brothers John and Richard, by John Singleton Copley hang on another. Two chairs—one representing the French Revival style and another the later arts-and-craft movement—show Codman Jr.’s breadth. Move next door, and the Pendleton room has photographs of his abode, richly layered with Turkish carpets, Chinese porcelain, and minor old masters’ paintings. Chairs and a bedstead on display reflect his tendency to mix and match parts of period pieces with less valuable items, resulting in styles interestingly cobbled together but camouflaging authenticity. “He enjoyed the eclectic persona of the collector,” Lome says, “but he amassed great gambling debts, which he concealed. His whole life was about duplicity and deception” —albeit much in the name of artistry. The theatrical Sleeper, who had a more refined design talent, also eschewed historic accuracy in his meticulous rooms. He painted antique Winthrop chairs seafoam green (one is on display) and collected other chairs with a faux woodgrain, so they fit with his decorative vision, Lome notes; one Jacobean-looking chair in the octagon room was mocked-up by his carpenter.

Historically, the aesthetic styles of these “bachelor decorators” span the Gilded Age to the Jazz Age, shedding light on the rise of American interior design. But the personal nature of these homes—the self-expression and forging of identity through objects, the social havens created—speak to an homage to the emerging expression of male gay culture. “These were men not necessarily concerned with living up to the heteronormative ideals of society,” Lome says. “All of them went their own ways romantically, sexually, and otherwise and lived outside the norms of their society while still working within them.”

Portrait of Charles Hammond Gibson, an elegant side chair, and wallpaper from his Back Bay townhouse | Photographs courtesy of Historic New England

The curatorial challenge, she says, lay in the fundamental question: “Can you extract from these homes the essence of how the men designed and thought?” The exhibit offers a tantalizing glimpse of how these individuals worked to express themselves and their creativity within their more restrictive era—as well as providing a good reason to make the full-fledged trips to their historic homes.

by nell_porter_brown@harvard.edu

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Widsom of the Aged

jennifer_carling@harvard.edu — Tue, 06 Aug 2024 17:51:16 +0000

Widsom of the Aged jennifer_carli… Tue, 08/06/2024 - 13:51

Given separate Commencement and reunions/Alumni Day celebrations, Primus could not devote full attention during the pomp-cum-protests that marked this year’s 373rd exercises. Returning to reflect, he notes that Bertram A. “Bert” Huberman ’44, M.B.A. ’48, was an eightieth-reunion attendee this year, a first (see harvardmag.com/oldest-alums-24). But beyond sheer longevity, the elders had some wisdom to offer the relative youngsters who run the University today, teach in its classrooms, and partake of that teaching.

John T. Bethell ’54, who edited this publication brilliantly until 1995 and has, as secretary of his College class, edited the last six of its 15 reports, rightly observed that the period between the sixty-fifth and seventieth reunions was “drastically different from any five-year interval in our experience.” He listed the pandemic, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the Hamas terrorism and new Middle East war, and the events of the past academic year that left Harvard “shaken.”

First Marshal George S. Abrams put things in even longer perspective (“all of us in our nineties”), citing revolutions in technology, the rise and fall of Nazism, the Holocaust, the endless major wars, and the collapse of the Soviet Union. On the “elephant in the room” (Harvard’s troubles), he combined that historical sense with his own experience of, and pride in, his classmates’ lives well lived to offer alma mater a reassuring pat on the shoulder:

“This is not the first time Harvard has been thrown into crisis, either for its actions or for its failures to act. It likely will not be the last. Yet Harvard is much more than its presidents and administrators. It is far more important and complex than any one person or any one event.

“On a daily basis…[s]cientists work in laboratories and make medical breakthroughs. Professors work on books that illuminate us all.…Most importantly, professors and other faculty enlighten students in all areas of their lives…and those students will go on to contribute to society just as our class has done over the years.…

“Think of the vast changes [today’s] graduates will see in the next 70 years. And think, too, of all the things those classes will contribute to their professions and to society, just as our class has done. And think of Harvard’s role in each individual member’s development and life.”

One interesting development not explicitly addressed by Bethell or Abrams is embodied in the class report itself. Because Harvard and Radcliffe were separate entities until the late 1960s, the records of the two cohorts remain separate in the red book, which comes with two front covers, aligned in opposite directions, and flipped contents. To graduates of a certain age, this all makes perfect sense. And it is, graphically, a useful reminder that over time, major changes for the better in communities, societies, and cultures do take place, even in tradition-bound institutions like this one.

As Radcliffe class secretary Joanne Sacco Pugh wrote in the report, “We tolerated rules that barred us from Lamont or any visibility in Harvard’s publicity (moving us out of camera eye during filming in Soc Sci 2)….” Try running that past the students enrolling this August, who no doubt view the idea of a gender-separated Crimson education with utter disbelief: so last millennium.

Another way Harvard has evolved to embrace talented people from all walks of life was evident on May 31. As Michael D. Lewis ’93, an Alumni Association elected director 2020-2023 and co-chair of the chief marshal selection committee, observed of Alumni Day (see harvardmag.com/alumni-day-24), “All three of the featured alums were African American men”: Chief Marshal Baratunde Thurston ’99, HAA President Tracy “Ty” Moore II ’06, and speaker Courtney B. Vance ’82. That lineup “seems particularly meaningful,” Lewis noted, in the wake of President Claudine Gay’s resignation before she could keynote the day.

Gay was mentioned only in passing on May 23 (“Commencement 372 7/8,” July-August, page 10). But according to the Crimson, during the celebration of black graduates in Sanders Theatre two nights earlier, the faculty award for demonstrating “a strong commitment to social justice” was bestowed on Gay in absentia and accepted by Divinity School Dean Marla Frederick. Recognizing the “remarkably bittersweet” nature of the award, Frederick hailed Gay as “our forever president.”

Storm and change indeed, but trials and changes from which Harvard, in the seasoned view of some of its eldest alumni, and the hopes of its youngest graduates, will again progress.

by primesix@hmag.com

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Welcoming the New Ledecky Fellows

jennifer_carling@harvard.edu — Tue, 06 Aug 2024 17:51:16 +0000

Welcoming the New Ledecky Fellows jennifer_carli… Tue, 08/06/2024 - 13:51

Harvard Magazine welcomes Serena Jampel ’25 and Yasmeen Khan ’26 to its editorial staff as the 2024-2025 Berta Greenwald Ledecky Undergraduate Fellows. Starting in the November-December issue, they will alternate as authors of the “Undergraduate” column, contributing articles in print and online about aspects of Harvard life.

Jampel, of Newton, Massachusetts, is a history and literature concentrator with a secondary focus in folklore and mythology. She covers arts and culture for the Crimson and contributes to its weekly magazine, Fifteen Minutes, and is an editor for the Harvard Advocate. Jampel is also an improv comic actor and serves on the First-Year Outdoor Program steering committee. Last fall, as tensions rose amid the Israel-Hamas war, Jampel co-founded the Forward-Thinking Jewish Union, as a setting for undergraduates to discuss Zionism and Jewish campus life. She spent the summer as an intern for the Institute for Historical Justice and Reconciliation in The Hague, researching cases of contested history and helping to develop curricula on media bias and historical revisionism.

Khan, of Spring, Texas, is a history and literature concentrator, with a focus on American studies. She has served a writer and editor at large for Fifteen Minutes, and last November she and Jampel co-authored a longform investigative article, “‘The White Man’s College’: How Antisemitism Shaped Harvard’s Legacy Admissions.” Khan previously interned at Document Journal, an arts and culture magazine, and has freelanced for The Nation and Texas Monthly. She is a mentor with Big Sister Boston and spent the summer interning for The Pangea Network, a nonprofit that empowers women and girls in Kenya and the United States with business skills training and access to funding.

The fellowships are supported by Jonathan J. Ledecky ’79, M.B.A. ’83, and named in honor of his late mother. For updates on past Ledecky Fellows and links to their work, see harvardmag.com/ledecky.

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Crimson Campaigners

jennifer_carling@harvard.edu — Tue, 06 Aug 2024 17:51:16 +0000

Crimson Campaigners jennifer_carli… Tue, 08/06/2024 - 13:51

On the evening of November 5, as Harvard students gather to watch election results, some undergraduates will be more nervous than others. For them, the numbers will shape their communities’ and country’s political future—and will also determine whether their internships were successful. This summer and fall, dozens of Harvard students campaigned for local, state, and national candidates.

Student participation in political campaigns has a long history. In 1968, notes professor of government Ryan Enos, undergraduates “went clean for Eugene,” campaigning for Democratic presidential aspirant Eugene McCarthy. Thompson professor of government Stephen Ansolabehere recalls some of his Ph.D. colleagues driving to New Hampshire in the ’80s to knock on doors before presidential primaries.

Today, some students arrive in Cambridge already passionate about campaigning. Matan Josephy ’27 grew up in a politically aware household but fully embraced the political “junkie lifestyle” as a high school freshman. During a 2020 Democratic primary debate for the open Congressional seat in Massachusetts’s fourth district, encompassing his Newton home, one candidate mentioned his internship program. “I was so into following all these races,” says Josephy, but “I had no idea that students can be involved in them.” Remote work during the pandemic allowed him to intern on three Congressional campaigns during the summer and fall of 2020 “in” Georgia, Massachusetts, and New Jersey.

Matriculating at the College in 2023, Josephy wanted to learn more, so he joined the Campaign Advocacy Program (CAP) at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Institute of Politics. Each week, some 20 undergraduates gather to hear from political experts; the guests range from pollsters and campaign managers to elected officials and failed candidates.

Nuriel Vera-DeGraff ’26, who joined CAP during his first undergraduate year, now leads the group. After focusing on local politics this spring, CAP will spend the fall analyzing the presidential campaign. “The dream is…to have one Democrat and one Republican” as a guest “at each meeting,” he says. “The goal would be to have a respectful, engaged, and informed conversation about what strategies campaign-wise each of the candidates are using.” This summer has served as a crash course in campaign volatility; many of the topics Vera-DeGraff assumed the group would discuss became moot by mid-July.

Each student campaign worker has his own set of motivations. Some, for example, are driven by ideals. Having staffed two Cambridge city council elections during high school, this summer Vera-DeGraff served as community organizing director for U.S. Representative Ayanna Pressley’s (D-Massachusetts) campaign, whose politically progressive views he shares. In April, right before starting the internship, the math and social studies double concentrator spent a week sleeping in the Harvard Yard pro-Palestine encampment (for which he was placed on academic probation). By working for Pressley, he says his activism could continue, albeit in a “new kind of role.” “I am extremely happy that I’m working for a candidate who believes in a free Palestine, is pro-ceasefire, anti-genocide.” He continues, “I can’t imagine working for anyone who doesn’t have a certain base level of shared values.”

Dev Ahuja ’27 campaigning for congressional hopeful Matthew Diemer at
a Wadsworth, Ohio, parade | PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF DEv AHUJA

Some students appreciate that campaigning gives them a chance to interact with citizens who hold dissimilar values. Dev Ahuja ’27, a government and economics double concentrator from Solon, Ohio, worked for Matthew Diemer’s congressional campaign. Though much of the seventh district is made up of small, conservative cities in central Ohio, some left-leaning Cleveland suburbs (including Ahuja’s) have been “siphoned off” into the district, he says. Traveling 50 miles south revealed a side of Ohio very different from the one where Ahuja grew up. During his second week on the campaign, for which he helped coordinate fundraising and publicity, he attended a parade in Wadsworth, Ohio, a suburb of Akron. “There was a three-year-old on the street chanting, ‘Let’s go Brandon,’” an anti-Biden phrase. He continued, “You would never see that in Solon.” Leaving the Cleveland (and Harvard) bubble, Ahuja aimed to get a sense of the true range of American politics.

On campus, Ahuja is a member of the Harvard Democrats. Unlike most collegiate Democrat chapters, says co-president Victor Flores ’25, this branch endorses a slate of candidates each election cycle. Though an endorsement from the club might not directly earn a candidate many votes, it could yield hundreds of hours of volunteer labor. The group organized a phone-banking session for Sabrina Bousbar (running in Florida’s thirteenth district), knocked on doors for former Gottlieb professor of law Elizabeth Warren, now a U.S. Senator, and helped students secure internships with Rep. Pressley, says Harvard Democrats campaign director Dominick Lombard ’27, who worked on a Rhode Island state senator’s reelection campaign this summer.

Harvard Democrats members knocking on doors for Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) | PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF HARVARD DEMOCRATS/VICTOR FLORES

The Harvard Democrats meld politics and socialization. While phone-banking from their classic meeting spot of Boylston 104, members share tidbits of conversations that they had with random voters. “When someone talks about a specific policy issue, they may have framed it in a funny way,” says Flores, “but we take it seriously.”

For some students, the process of voting itself is the most riveting part of the election cycle. When June Park ’24 was in high school, she didn’t know how to register to vote. The daughter of Korean immigrants, she set up a voter drive at her high school. That interest in the civic process continued at the College, where she ran the 2022 Harvard Votes challenge and wrote a 105-page government thesis analyzing the impact of high school voter-registration drives on youth voter turnout.

June Park ’24 knocking on doors in Pennsylvania to register voters. | CREDIT TEXT HERE

After graduation, Park began work for Project 26 Pennsylvania, a nonprofit that helps young people register to vote. Though the Havertown, Pennsylvania, native has staffed Democratic campaigns in the past, she is now more interested in promoting voting generally rather than advocating for certain candidates or ideologies. “I think it is my moral duty to help someone vote, because it’s not easy to vote in the United States,” she says, continuing, “I’ve run into a bunch of conservative folks and still help them register to vote and make a plan to vote because that’s the right thing to do.”

On election night, these students will be looking for different results. For students whose incumbent candidates are running unopposed, it will be a night to celebrate the past term and look forward to the next. For contested elections, it will be a tense evening (Josephy, who staffed those three 2020 campaigns, went to bed at 10:00 P.M. to minimize his anxiety). For get-out-the-vote staffers, turnout results may take longer to calculate. Although these students seem to enjoy their work, some can’t help but eye the finish line. “I’m looking forward to it being over,” said Lombard, “with favorable results.”

by max_krupnick@harvard.edu

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Outstanding Alumni Interviewers

jennifer_carling@harvard.edu — Tue, 06 Aug 2024 17:51:14 +0000

Outstanding Alumni Interviewers jennifer_carli… Tue, 08/06/2024 - 13:51

This year’s Miller-Hunn Awards—named for Hiram S. Hunn, A.B. 1921, and retired senior admissions officer Dwight D. Miller, Ed.M. ’71—recognize eight alumni for their volunteer efforts to recruit and interview prospective undergraduates.

Karen Lorry Chapman ’85, of Sarasota, Florida, has been chairing the Sarasota/Manatee Schools Committee and interviewing applicants since 1997. The Sarasota area is home to one of the top magnet schools in the country, Pine View School, and to IMG Academy.

George T. Hodakowski ’80, of Hinsdale, Illinois, began interviewing students from the Chicago area in 2002. With the assistance of his wife Elizabeth, he has served as cochair of the schools and scholarships committee and as a director of the Harvard Club of Chicago since 2010.

Bill Parsons ’91, of Cedarburg, Wisconsin, began interviewing candidates in 1993 and has met students in Massachusetts, Florida, Venezuela, Portugal, and Kenya.

Candace Plummer Gaudiani ’67, M.B.A. ’70, of Portola Valley, California, began interviewing students from south of the San Francisco Bay Area to Silicon Valley in 1979 and was chair and cochair of the schools and scholarships committee in San Mateo County for nearly 40 years.

Margaret M. Chin ’84 of New York City, has been interviewing for more than 20 years, meeting hundreds of applicants. Chin has advocated for having more first-generation college interviewers like herself, along with younger interviewers.

Mark G. Pelletier ’82, of Winslow, Maine, began interviewing candidates in 2006 and has chaired the schools and scholarships committee serving central and western Maine since 2011.

John J. Moon ’89, Ph.D. ’94 of New York City, began interviewing in 2000, served as a subcommittee cochair for 12 years during his tenure on the schools committee, and served as citywide cochair from 2009-2015. He also served on the board of the Harvard Club of New York Foundation, which provides scholarship support to Harvard students from New York City, from 2009 to 2014.

Carole Turner Reading ‘74, of Wyckoff, New Jersey, began interviewing in 1999 for the Harvard Club of New Jersey, served as club president, and since 2012 has served as cochair of the club’s schools and scholarships committee.

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“Dialogue across Differences”

jennifer_carling@harvard.edu — Tue, 06 Aug 2024 17:51:14 +0000

“Dialogue across Differences” jennifer_carli… Tue, 08/06/2024 - 13:51

Responding to a traumatic year of events that divided alumni and students alike, new Harvard Alumni Association (HAA) president Moitri Chowdhury Savard ’93 hopes to bring the community together through veritates. This Latin plural for “truths”—a variation on Harvard’s motto—captures “the many shades of gray” reflecting disparate voices, she says. “We have to simultaneously hold multiple truths and come together as a society to coalesce around values, particularly freedom of thought and expression.”

She’s referring to “everything that’s gone on on the world stage since October,” when Hamas-led militants attacked Israel, plus the political atmosphere preceding the upcoming presidential election. “We really have seen that it’s been a difficult time for higher education and for campuses,” Savard explains, “and for constructive conversations: to have dissent without being nasty.” To that end, the HAA has been “working on leadership skills, including public narrative,” preparing its volunteers to engage in difficult conversations within the larger alumni community because “bringing alumni voices to Cambridge is essential during this divisive time,” she adds. The HAA is also examining its own culture, and that of the board of directors, to ensure that “all voices are being heard” and there’s “transparency around decision-making.”

Savard, a family physician in New York City (where she lives with her husband, a pediatric anesthesiologist, and two children), is well-positioned to take a holistic approach to her role. As the medical director and assistant clinical professor at the Long Island Center of Weill Cornell Medicine, she integrates healing therapies and allopathic medicine with traditional medical care. And for her, listening to outlying voices comes naturally. “My parents and I came to the U.S. from India in the early 1970s. My father had $8 in his pocket and a letter of reference from an employer overseas,” she recalls. “Far from the people and customs my parents had known their entire lives, adjusting to their new home did not always come easily.” Their “perseverance and sacrifices” enabled her to attend Harvard, where she concentrated in economics and in Indian studies, working with Lamont University Professor Amartya Sen on a study about determinants of fertility in India. She had planned on a career in development economics: “Harvard gave me the opportunity to explore that,” she says, “and then completely pivot.”

That shift began with a formative experience: the First-Year Outdoor Program (FOP). Having grown up in the New York metropolitan area, she had not spent much time in the wilderness. The program was so enjoyable that she became a FOP leader. And because Harvard subsidized FOP leaders to become emergency medical technicians, she took a course in wilderness medicine. She later “worked as an ambulance third rider with Bellevue Hospital in New York—and was hooked” on pursuing a medical career. After graduation she was a city-funded New York City Urban Fellow (a nine-month program exploring urban issues and leadership) and worked as an assistant to the city liaison to the United Nations, then took a job in healthcare consulting while applying to medical school, ultimately graduating from the State University of New York at Stony Brook.

Public service is another theme in Savard’s life and work. She was a Lamont public service fellow at Harvard and was inspired to support a summer fellowship in her parents’ name for students pursuing similar roles. “Harvard emphasizes service to one’s community and civic engagement in its commitment to producing citizen leaders in society,” she says. “I have brought that ethic into my life through my volunteer work in my local community and not-for-profit board service.”

That helped motivate her to become an HAA volunteer, as an alumni interviewer, although her initial attachment to Harvard grew as an undergraduate. Returning from a semester abroad studying in India, she realized “there were so many people I wanted to get to know and so little time left.” Savard ran for Radcliffe’s First Class Marshal, was elected, and has since worked to bring “my awesome classmates” to their last six reunions. Once her children were old enough, she stepped up her involvement with the HAA. There, she has found the value in promoting diverse voices while working on common goals. “We will not all agree but mutual respect in disagreement is essential,” she says. “Dialogue across differences is the way to move forward.”

by nell_porter_brown@harvard.edu

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History in Progress

jennifer_carling@harvard.edu — Tue, 06 Aug 2024 17:51:14 +0000

History in Progress jennifer_carli… Tue, 08/06/2024 - 13:51

September 11, 2001, split Richard Beck’s adolescence in two. Fourteen on the day of the attacks, he was old enough to remember life before—when anyone could walk up to an airport gate, when students learned in school that history was over. He came of age in their aftermath, as the United States became entangled in wars in the Middle East, and militarism shaped other aspects of American life—airport security, popular movies—more subtly. Witnessing the country’s transformation, Beck ’09 writes in his new book Homeland: The War on Terror in American Life, he realized that “history is something you have to try to understand even as you live through it.”

That attempt to understand didn’t begin right away. Beck grew up in a Philadelphia suburb as a “mainstream liberal Democrat,” and during high school, was more concerned with music than politics. He sang and practiced instruments, thinking he might try to go to conservatory for classical piano. When he realized he “wasn’t good enough,” he turned to writing about music and other cultural works. At Harvard, he reviewed music and theater for the Crimson. His junior year, he wrote an essay for the Advocate about a favorite band from high school, Neutral Milk Hotel, “and the process of leaving behind the first music you fall in love with,” he says. That piece made him sure that he wanted to be a writer.

Beck was content to focus his writing largely on culture—until some editors from a small, newish magazine called n+1 visited the Crimson. N+1 had been launched in 2004 by six young writers and editors, four of them Harvard alumni (“Intellectual Entrepreneurs,” January-February 2010). The existing media landscape, they felt, was at once hopelessly fractured—literary magazines didn’t engage with politics; political outlets didn’t engage with culture—and disturbingly unified: many publications, including left-leaning ones, mounted no real criticism of the U.S.’s 2003 invasion of Iraq. N+1 sought to examine culture, politics, and how they interacted—while challenging all political orthodoxies.

After the event at the Crimson, Beck took some n+1 issues home to read. “Knowing that you could move to New York and write like that—that was a big, like, ‘That’s what I want to do,’” he says. “Up until then, I’d had the standard ambition of, ‘Maybe I can be a New Yorker writer.’ And then I got to New York and I realized that’s not actually an ambition of mine. That’s not how I want to write.”

After graduation, Beck moved to New York, where he still lives, and began contributing to n+1. He joined the masthead as an assistant editor in 2012, before becoming a senior writer—his current role—a few years after that. (“I was really bad at [editing],” he says. “After a few years, I said, ‘Can we please be real? Just make me a writer on the masthead. That’s what I actually do.’”)

In 2011, Beck participated in a research project organized by n+1 on the history of second-wave radical feminism. Through this research, he learned about the child-abuse panics of the 1980s, when teachers, aides, and day care workers across the nation were falsely accused of horrifying abuse. His first book—We Believe the Children, published in 2015—blends history and psychology, arguing that the panics were a backlash against feminist progress of the 1970s: the genesis of today’s culture wars.

Most of the events covered in that book took place before Beck was born. As he was writing it, however, he was also thinking about contemporary politics. Beck graduated during President Barack Obama’s first year in office, when many were still optimistic that he would end the War on Terror, as he had promised. “Watching [Obama] not dismantle this war that I’d been told was purely a right-wing, neoconservative, Republican project,” Beck says, “is when I started trying to figure out: ‘What is this political miseducation I got? How am I supposed to understand what this war is for?’”

He started to answer those questions by thinking about culture. In 2012, he wrote an n+1 review of the popular TV series Homeland. The show follows CIA officer Carrie Mathison as she attempts to expose former U.S. Marine-turned-terrorist Nicholas Brody. On its face, Homeland was a repudiation of the backwards, brutish tactics of the Bush-era War on Terror: characters reject torture and Islamophobia; the terrorist Mathison pursues is white, not Arab. In his review, Beck argued that these features were simply cosmetic updates that allowed liberals to repackage the same ideas that drove the war under George W. Bush.

In his new book, Beck expands his thinking about culture and politics. Analyzing Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy, he explains why cultural works—even those that seem far afield from politics—merit political examination. Nolan isn’t seeking to express a coherent political vision. Instead, “He is like a weather station, picking up on things in the atmosphere—stories in the news, images that stick in people’s minds…and then using hundreds of millions of dollars to put them into movies.” That reflection of Americans’ psyches is political. Batman is a vigilante who must break the law to preserve order in Gotham: a soothing narrative, Beck argues, for citizens of a country that had invaded Iraq in a move condemned by much of the world.

Once Beck identified the superficial differences that obscured fundamental similarities between the Bush and Obama administrations’ foreign policies, the next step was to understand what motivated both presidents to pursue the war. To answer that question, Beck turned to economics. In the broadest, most ambitious section of the book, he analyzes the financial rationale behind the War on Terror. “Something about America’s superpower status had changed by the beginning of the twenty-first century,” he writes: the slowing growth rate starting in the 1970s.

Before, the U.S.-led world order, while not beneficial for all, at least guaranteed economic stability for many countries. But as economic growth slowed, Beck argues, America could no longer claim its supremacy benefited much of the world, and the globe’s “surplus population”—the technical term for people who are not formally employed—grew. To maintain its dominance, even as the economic foundations of that dominance eroded, the United States turned to a “militarized relationship with the rest of the world,” Beck says—and to suppress the political discontent that slowing growth fostered, global leaders became increasingly authoritarian. In his view, this narrowing of economic opportunity drove terrorism: “Just because it is neither politically constructive nor morally justifiable does not render terrorism incomprehensible,” he writes. “It is a demand that all of this be made to stop.”

For Beck, perhaps the most insidious effect of the War on Terror, its longest tail, is how it degraded the notion of American citizenship. Citizenship, he argues, comprises not just the ability to vote, but also the rights to engage in political discourse, to assemble, and to demonstrate. All became increasingly difficult after 9/11, when a “conformist cultural climate” took hold of the media. Perhaps that conformity was inevitable in the immediate wake of the attacks—but it didn’t let up in the years after, as when the mainstream media failed to scrutinize the government’s decision to go to war in Iraq. Instances like this, Beck argues, show how citizenship became hollowed out, as Americans lost the ability to debate and influence government policy.

That inability to sway political outcomes continues to shape foreign policy today, Beck maintains. “The most important political story of the last few decades isn’t this narrative that gets rehashed about increasing polarization,” he says. “Instead, it’s a continued unity between the Democratic and Republican parties when it comes to foreign policy.” Though they may disagree on details, both parties have fundamentally similar positions on China and Israel-Palestine, he says. And while Republican skepticism of continued support for Ukraine may seem to challenge that unity, Beck argues that this position is a superficial one. Republicans, he writes, “would be more or less content to see Russia come out of the war with some extra territory, but that position is not the product of any principled antimilitarism”—an antimilitarism that would balance funding Ukraine’s self-defense with pursuing diplomacy, while considering the geopolitical roots of the war.

Beck isn’t optimistic about the contemporary political system’s ability to reflect the will of its citizens. But perhaps little magazines can provide a forum to begin to imagine alternatives. N+1, Beck says, has allowed him to think beyond the bounds of mainstream media discourse—and outside the lines of academic disciplines. He has been able to do so in the way his College self wanted since reading n+1 for the first time: in a writing style rarely found in major publications, one that is irreverent, provocative, and—even when dealing with the grimmest of affairs—funny. And despite his pessimism, the premise of his book gestures toward hope: that excavating and interrogating this history can clarify the present and how citizens might change it. “I think what I hope my book can do,” Beck says, “is give people a framework for figuring out how to think about politics, living under a government that’s so uninterested in being responsive to democratic input.”

by 4f36cf5f0389a182@harvard.edu

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How the War on Terror reshaped American life

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Beyond the SAT

jennifer_carling@harvard.edu — Tue, 06 Aug 2024 17:51:14 +0000

Beyond the SAT jennifer_carli… Tue, 08/06/2024 - 13:51

Nicholas Lemann ’76, dean of the Columbia Journalism School from 2003 to 2013 (“The Press Professor,” September-October 2005, page 78), has, among other works, written the definitive history of standardized testing, The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy (1999). A succinct new work, Higher Admissions: The Rise, Decline, and Return of Standardized Testing (Princeton, $22.95), puts the SAT and ACT and their use in a different perspective. If the ubiquity of standardized tests has come under challenge, he writes, “that isn’t a sign that the country has ‘turned against meritocracy,’ but that the tests, rather than representing an opposing force to the existing class system, by now, on the whole, reinforce it.” From chapter five, “Testing without Meritocracy”:

[T]he question of who should get the slots in highly selective colleges and universities…is not the primary issue in American higher education, especially from the point of view of enhancing democracy and opportunity.…Only about 1 percent of American undergraduates attend the 25 or so colleges that accept fewer than 10 percent of their applicants. Only 3 percent attend the 50 or so colleges that accept fewer than 25 percent of their applicants.….

The most obvious problem in American higher education today is…its failure to produce a more widely successful experience for most students. Only about 40 percent of entering students get a bachelor’s degree in four years, and only about 60 percent in six years.…[T]he current low degree completion rate is a glaring gap in the American opportunity structure, and bringing it higher ought to be an urgent national priority.

The Evolution of Standardized Testing

The United States made an idealistic bet on universal elementary education in the nineteenth century, and a similar bet on universal high school education in the early twentieth century, and a similar bet on universal higher education in the late twentieth century.… Today…our progress in this long-running project of demonstrating a commitment to ordinary people’s potential has stalled, because the massive higher education system we have built is not delivering the results it should for so many of its students.…What would most enhance opportunity for most Americans would be a successful passage through [public sector] institutions.

Could testing serve as an aid in that project? Yes, potentially, if it were testing of a different kind from what we have become accustomed to over all these years. The system of higher education testing built around the SAT and similar tests—aptitude tests aimed at selection—was not designed with the primary aim of distributing educational opportunity widely.…

The SAT…was designed to help elite colleges select a small handful of students.…It wound up having a far broader effect, because of its use by many more colleges and universities than the original group, and because of its large impact on the high school experience of millions of students who don’t go to highly selective colleges, in addition to the thousands who will. If, today, we define the problem…as improving the too-low graduation rates and…the student learning experience at a large number of relatively unselective universities, we would be drawn to diagnostic rather than predictive tests, to achievement rather than aptitude tests, and to criterion-referenced rather than norm-referenced tests. And these…would have to go along with larger structural changes: a much greater emphasis on teaching and advising in higher education, and a strengthening of the curriculum in high school. This ought to be a national project on the scale of the project that brought us the current higher education admissions system, or on an even grander scale.

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Off the Shelf

jennifer_carling@harvard.edu — Tue, 06 Aug 2024 17:51:13 +0000

Off the Shelf jennifer_carli… Tue, 08/06/2024 - 13:51

People, Power, Change: Organizing for Democratic Renewal, by Marshall Ganz, Hauser senior lecturer in leadership, organizing, and civil society (Oxford, $29.00). Drawing on his experiences organizing farmworkers with Cesar Chavez, and unions, community, and electoral campaigns, the Kennedy School/Graduate School of Education expert on the nuts and bolts of mobilizing people lays out what he knows about the basics: relationships, storytelling, strategizing, action, structure, and leadership development.

The Art of Architectural Grafting, by Jeanne Gang, M.Arch. ’93 (Park Books, CHF 35). Gang’s local presence is felt at the Graduate School of Design, where she is professor in practice of architecture, and across the river, where her plan for Harvard’s commercial enterprise research campus is taking shape (see “Crimson Construction,” this issue). In this curious book, informed by environmental concerns to extend (rather than raze) existing buildings and reuse urban sites, she makes an extended metaphor of the horticulture practice of grafting—to the extent of taking GSD students to Wellesley’s botanical garden to practice on saplings. New Yorkers will know how Studio Gang practices these principles from the insertion of the Gilder Center into the American Museum of Natural History complex.

No Democracy Lasts Forever, by Erwin Chemerinsky, J.D. ’78 (Liveright, $29.99). Americans’ confidence in their “increasingly dysfunctional” federal government is “justifiably” low, observes this constitutional scholar and dean of the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law. His sobering conclusion is that “The U.S. Constitution, which created a government that succeeded so well for so long, now itself threatens American democracy.” He points to structural flaws (the Electoral College, equal state representation in the Senate) and “poor choices” (partisan gerrymandering, nearly unlimited filibusters), which cumulatively undercut the possibility of a United States (as the subtitle puts it). A serious message for an electorate that seems increasingly distracted and incapable of longer-term thought. (Read more about Chemerinsky’s legal views in “Academic Freedom and Free Speech,” this issue.)

Financing the Entrepreneurial Venture: A Casebook, by Paul A. Gompers, Holman professor of business administration (Anthem Press, $120). Ready to start a business, but don’t want to invest in a Harvard M.B.A. (2024-2025 estimated cost of attendance for a married student $143,636, times two years)? In an entrepreneurial move, Gompers has pulled together the cases from his entrepreneurial finance course in a tidy 851 pages. They present the essentials from both perspectives: what it takes to make a business, and how those who will supply the funds assess and value it. Remembering both is worth the price—and brings to mind the advice from HBS’s legendary Bill Sahlman to wanna-be founders: venture capitalists put less stock in your glossy Powerpoint than in their assessment of how you will react when your brilliant business plan goes awry (“Who Wants to Be an Entrepreneur?” March-April 2001, page 34).

Offshore: Stealth Wealth and the New Colonialism, by Brooke Harrington, Ph.D. ’99 W.W. Norton, $22). A Dartmouth professor of economic sociology (who knew?) embedded in the global wealth management industry and emerges to shine light on a “system that sells secrecy to the very rich.” The system confers the obvious benefit of shielding that wealth from taxes, but there are “many by-products” because secrecy “confers impunity: freedom from accountability, both to social norms and to the law.” Among them: sheltering assets from divorce settlements and (useful for corporate entities, too), avoidance of pesky lawsuits and environmental regulations.

Gray Matters: A Biography of Brain Surgery, by Theodore H. Schwartz ’87, M.D. ’93 (Dutton, $32). A Weill Cornell professor and practitioner of neurological surgery writes well about his delicate art, beginning with a frightened patient whose meningioma is lodged just behind the left eye. That perhaps speaks well of his initial, humanistic preparation as an undergraduate who concentrated in philosophy and literature. He may be forgiven for pushing back at the hoary trope, “It isn’t brain surgery.”

Preserving Planet Earth: Changing Human Culture with Lessons from the Past, by Jane Roland Martin ’51. Ed.M. ’56, Ph.D. ’61, RF ’81 (Routledge, $49.99 paper). Drawing on a lifetime of scholarship, the professor of philosophy emerita at the University of Massachusetts Boston sets out to conceive how to adapt learned “humancentrism” to ways of being more aligned with, you know, retaining a habitable planet. In a pedagogically creative move, she reimagines the principals and moments of vast cultural change—Martin Luther, Mahatma Gandhi, Rosa Parks, and so on—as scenes from a play. The focus is on sustainability but might apply to other existential challenges.

In the Company of Art: A Museum Director’s Private Journals, by Perry T. Rathbone ’33, selected by Belinda Rathbone (Godine, $28.95). Perry Rathbone, trained in Paul Sachs’s foundational graduate program in museum management, went on to lead the St. Louis Art Museum and Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, bringing modern works into both collections, and introducing modern practices, not always uncontroversially. His daughter has combed his journals, especially from the 1960s, to reveal how this “passionate preservationist” coped with change. One is reminded that museum directors are among the great practitioners of the chase—for example, hanging a Modigliani show, and commenting on the price escalation ($8,000, $12,000, $185,000) before noting, “But it is a masterwork.”

The director directed: Perry Rathbone in an MFA portrait session with
Yousuf Karsh, 1964 | PHOTOGRAPH BY IVAN DIMITRI

Reading Herzl in Beirut: The PLO Effort to Know the Enemy, by Jonathan M. Gribetz ’02 (Princeton, $29.95 paper). In prior research, the author—associate professor of Near Eastern studies and the Program in Judaic Studies at Princeton—found that “early, forgotten assessments of the Other reveal that the conceptions and dynamics of the Zionist-Arab conflict have been neither timeless nor immutable,” and indeed the identifications of those communities as “Israelis” and “Palestinians” are post-Ottoman ones. In his new book, he examines the Palestine Liberation Organization Research Center in Beirut, to understand how the PLO’s leaders came to understand Judaism and Zionism from the mid 1960s to 1983—making it, oddly, “a pioneer in the field of Israel studies.”

The Prison before the Panopticon: Incarceration in Ancient and Modern Political Philosophy, by Jacob Abolafia, Ph.D. ’19 (Harvard, $39.95). The prison, it turns out, came into being in Europe and the United States during the Enlightenment. But the author traces the idea through Western thought and philosophy, from Demosthenes and Plato through Hobbes and Bentham. At a time of complete confusion over the purposes and effectiveness of imprisonment, it might be useful to get back to first principles. For the larger cohort of people involved in practical matters, Dismantling Mass Incarceration: A Handbook for Change, edited by Premal Dharia (director of the Institute to End Mass Incarceration), James Forman Jr., and Maria Hawilo (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $20 paper), covers the waterfront. The editors, all former public defenders and now based, respectively, at Harvard, Yale, and Loyola University law schools, gather work by legal scholars, journalists, judges, those incarcerated, and others to offer perspectives on the police, prosecutors, public defenders, judges, and the prisons themselves.

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Cultivating Friendships with Trees

jennifer_carling@harvard.edu — Tue, 06 Aug 2024 17:51:13 +0000

Cultivating Friendships with Trees jennifer_carli… Tue, 08/06/2024 - 13:51

Tributes to trees, in form and metaphor, have appeared in art, music and poetry for millennia. “And this our life, exempt from public haunt,/Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,/Sermons in stones, and good in everything,” wrote Shakespeare. Trees of knowledge and trees of life have deep taproots in human culture. And if trees really had tongues, they might tell the story sketched in the prefatory chapters of Smithsonian Trees of North America: of dwindling habitats, precipitous climate shifts, and even extinction.

The book is the work of a decade by W. John Kress ’73, distinguished scientist and curator emeritus of botany at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. Now living in Vermont, he spent most of his career studying plants of the tropics. But in the early 2000s, he began thinking about putting together a book about North American trees. He was well begun on the project, crisscrossing the continent to photograph the last of the 326 common native and introduced tree species featured in the book, when COVID restricted travel. To overcome the lockdown, he writes in the acknowledgements, he turned for help to botanical colleagues across the map, who sent him specimens by overnight mail to photograph in his home studio.

The result is stunning. The photographs, silhouetted against a rich, black background, elevate tree fruits and flowers, buds and branches, leaves and seeds to an art form that rivals any other. Together with the detailed descriptions of each species, they aid in the identification of the common trees of the North American continent. Many of the images were originally assembled during the author’s work on a free tree identification app for smartphones called Leafsnap (no longer available; Kress instead recommends iNaturalist, a crowdsourced alternative for identifying plants, animals, insects and fungi). But this beautiful book is not intended as a field guide—or, at least, not in its 800-page physical manifestation, which weighs a hefty six and a quarter pounds (for portability, consider a second copy in one of the digital formats that will be available upon publication). Instead, Kress hopes that the book will encourage readers to identify with trees.

Tamarack, or Eastern larch (Larix laricina). Photographs detail the features of leaves, cones, branches, and bark. | Photographs by W. John Kress/Courtesy of the book

Each species entry, listed in order from oldest to most recently evolved, includes abundant photographs, Latin and common names, a range map, a physical description, a discussion of its uses and value, ecology, vulnerability to climate change, and conservation status. What sets Kress’s book apart from existing field guides is that the photographs have been taken, chosen, and presented with an eye for morphological difference—critical for distinguishing related species. Still, identifying trees can be complicated. Kress introduces readers to leaf shapes, structure, and orientation; to the appearance of bark and wood grain; and to the diversity of cones, flowers and fruits. Leaves are the best first clue, but as he acknowledges, a consequence of evolution is natural variation that can sometimes be misleading. Fruits and seeds—“the glue that holds forest communities together”—aid identification, too, but learning about their variation can be “overwhelming.” The number of seeds makes the difference between a drupe (one) and a berry (many), for example, but what distinguishes a pome from a follicle, nut, samara, or capsule? Kress helpfully compares these types of fruits by setting photographs of each form side-by-side on a full page, as he does for cones, and for flowers and inflorescences, too.

Kress, who won the 2021 Sargent Award from Harvard’s Arnold Arboretum to support his research for the book, wrote it for three reasons, as he explains in the preface. Foremost, he believes that acquainting people with the names of the trees they encounter will enrich their lives. Identifying the species is an initial step.

His remaining aspirations perhaps reflect his training as an ecologist. First, he answers the question: What do trees do for humans? He hopes to “instill in readers a sense of the value of trees” to them personally, and to make plain trees’ role in maintaining the health of forest communities, ecosystems, and the planet generally. In the foreword, conservation biologist Margaret D. Lowman enumerates their many virtues. Besides housing an estimated half of the planet’s terrestrial biodiversity, trees provide “medicines, foods, timber, shade, climate change amelioration, soil conservation, oxygen, energy production, and a spiritual heritage,” she writes, “for over two billion people on earth who practice religions that seek sanctuary in forests.”

From left: A tuliptree (Liriodendron tulipfera) flower on a branchlet; a branch of white oak (Quercus alba), which can live 600 years | Photographs by W. John Kress/Courtesy of the book

If recognizing the ecological benefits that trees provide humans is one facet of a two-way relationship, the other is human understanding of what trees need to survive. This is his final impetus, Kress says, for writing the book. With exceptional clarity and authority, he outlines the case for conservation, and provides a basic introduction to tree morphology and ecology. The explicit subtext of the complex diversity in tree reproductive strategies (human sexual activity is humdrum compared to tree sex and asexual reproduction) is that many tree species, and the ecosystems they support, are vulnerable to human environmental interventions.

Kress delves briefly into the nature of this vulnerability. While there are an estimated three trillion stems (individual trees) globally—half as many as before the dawn of agriculture between 10,000 and 12,000 years ago—a small number of species accounts for most. In the Amazon, for instance, 1.4 percent of species account for half the trees. “It is astounding to think that the other 98.6 percent of the tree species in the Amazon are mostly rare,” he writes. “Many have not yet been discovered or described by botanists.” Astoundingly, an estimated 15 billion trees are lost each year, Kress reports. The principal threats are loss of habitat; commercial exploitation; environmental pollution; urbanization; invasive species; and the spread of animal and plant diseases and pests.

Although the scientific case for forest conservation is compelling—a natural woodland, with its intricate web of plant diversity, for example, sequesters as much as 40 times the carbon of an equivalent area of tree plantation (see “Plants on a Changing Planet,” May-June 2024, page 38)—cultivating a deeper human connection to trees involves more than facts. And that is what Kress seeks to achieve with Smithsonian Trees of North America in photographs and words. Peppering the introductory chapters are references drawn from popular culture—the song “Hickory Wind,” co-written by Gram Parsons ’67 (see “Sound as Ever,” July-August 2023, page 44); a poem about poplars by Gerard Manley Hopkins—and reflections on what it means to get to know a tree. Chapter five, on tree names and identification, begins with a quote that neatly sums one of the book’s principal aims: “To know a tree’s name is the beginning of an acquaintance—not an end in itself,” writes Julia Ellen Rogers in The Tree Book. “There is all the rest of one’s life in which to follow it up. Tree friendships are very precious things.”

by d9be154420cfb920@harvard.edu

Closing note

Jonathan Shaw, managing editor of Harvard Magazine, writes frequently on climate and life sciences, and is a member of the editorial committee of Arnoldia, the quarterly publication of the Arnold Arboretum.

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“Volts of Your Own Spirit”

jennifer_carling@harvard.edu — Tue, 06 Aug 2024 17:51:13 +0000

“Volts of Your Own Spirit” jennifer_carli… Tue, 08/06/2024 - 13:51

The death of Helen Vendler, Porter University Professor emerita, on April 23, deprived readers of perhaps the greatest American critic of poetry. The arrival days later of the enormous galley of The Letters of Seamus Heaney, edited by Christopher Reid (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $40), was a happy reminder of the warm friendship between the two. Heaney, Litt.D. ’98, a Nobel laureate who served as Boylston professor from 1985 to 1997 (he died in 2013), loomed large on campus, but a more intimate figure emerges from his letters to Vendler about her Seamus Heaney, interpreting his art. These excerpts bring both back to life.

15 August 1997, Dublin. The Feast of the Assumption. On this morning the Ancient Order of Hibernians used to march out from the “tin hut”—a corrugated iron barn that was their hall—with pipes skirling and banners flying to the tune of “I’ll Sing a Hymn to Mary.” To-day there should be banners hefted and astream and massed pipes and drums for the hymn to Helen. I am sorry not to have written before now in response to such wonderful letters from you, after Cambridge and after completion of the book. And I am further cast down by my inability to lay my hands on the latter just at this moment, more evidence of the moult-down in self and study. There is such jubilation in all that you do, such volts of your own spirit. It is as if Hopkins were to turn the bunsen of his younger, exhilarated being upon one—I feel not only blessed that you have written the book, indeed could bear to write it; but magnified by your constant huge kindness and care.…Genuine need for people to testify—in your absence—to the intensity of their gratitude, because of good deeds you’ve done for them, but really to their delight in your being who you are and giving yourself to all of us—all the powers and dazzles you embody and manifest. I cannot imagine how you live at such a pitch of devotion to the work you do and the people you know. If I think of the achieve of it, I’ll sink under my sheer plod, go cindery rather than gold vermilliony.

21 October 1997, Glanmore Cottage, Ashford, Co. Wicklow. You should have heard from me long before this.…But I wanted to have read your book about the poems, and while I have occasionally swooped and stolen into it for short spaces of time, it was only this morning that I gave myself over to silence, Glanmore and autumn and read the whole manuscript at a sitting. Madness not to have done so before, but you will know my hamperedness when it comes to reading about myself.…In this case, it was such a honey-combing and harveststing, such a granary of rewards, that I am more than usually angry at myself for not having read the thing earlier and sung out my hallelujah. I am all atingle with the seraphic—your own word of approbation that slew me altogether—quality of your writing.

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Seamus Heaney writes to Helen Vendler.

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Bringing the Magic

jennifer_carling@harvard.edu — Tue, 06 Aug 2024 17:51:12 +0000

Bringing the Magic jennifer_carli… Tue, 08/06/2024 - 13:51

There’s a story that Tomi Adeyemi ’15 often tells about the “big bang” moment that sparked Children of Blood and Bone—the Afrofuturist fantasy epic that made her famous at 24 years old and launched a young-adult trilogy that concluded this summer with Children of Anguish and Anarchy.

That big bang came on a rainy day in Rio de Janeiro, where Adeyemi, newly graduated with a degree in English, was spending the summer on a Harvard travel grant to study West African culture and mythology. She knew that Brazil had imported even more slaves through the Middle Passage than the United States had: “I thought, ‘There’s a story there.’” But the museum she needed to visit was closed for renovations, and when the rain started to pour, she ducked into a nearby gift shop. For sale inside were several ceramic plates depicting what looked like African gods and goddesses: dark-skinned and beautiful, dressed in vibrant reds and yellows, wielding torches and jeweled staffs.

“I had no idea what I was looking at,” Adeyemi says, but she was transfixed. She called her Nigerian-immigrant parents back home in suburban Chicago, who told her about the Orishas, divine spirits in Yoruba religious culture (often deified ancestors or personified natural forces) that act as emissaries from God and help direct human events. “And in that moment,” she says, “the world of Orïsha”—the mythical West African country in her novels—“spread out in my mind like a 3D terrain map. I saw the battles and the magic, and riding through the jungle on a giant lion.” It would be another year and a half before her characters took shape, but the setting was there the whole time, humming with details, “like a theme park waiting for people to run through it.”

In truth, though, the trilogy’s earliest seeds were planted long before Adeyemi went to Rio, by a childhood as one of three siblings raised by African immigrants (“In our house, I was Nigerian; outside of it, I was African American”) and by the Black Lives Matter movement. Adeyemi’s undergraduate experience had been punctuated by news stories about police brutality and the high-profile killings of unarmed black boys and men: Michael Brown, Philando Castille, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice. “I don’t know if people recall how much footage there was,” she says. “It wasn’t just that it was happening; it’s that we were constantly seeing it. The emotional PTSD was real.”

Simultaneously, Adeyemi had her first deep encounter with W.E.B. DuBois (Ph.D. 1895), studying The Souls of Black Folk in a Harvard English class. “For me, reading those essays was a profound experience,” she recalls. “Because he’s writing after Emancipation and talking about what it feels like to be black in America, but it felt like he was talking about 2012, with the shooting of Trayvon Martin or the backlash against black actors in The Hunger Games movie. It was horrifying, but also: I was in awe of the power of literature to capture human experience.”

Combining all those threads, Adeyemi’s trilogy centers on the power struggle between two groups of characters. One, called the maji, are the darker-skinned inhabitants of a country entirely populated by people of color; once upon a time, they wielded magic given to them by the gods. The other group is a brutal monarchy of lighter-skinned rulers who robbed the maji—“maggots,” according to an ugly slur—of their magic and forced them into persecution and enslavement, outlawing their sacred Yoruba language.

The main protagonist is Zélie Adebola, a fisherman’s daughter and a member of the maji, who fights to bring magic back to her people and restore their sense of identity, and later fights to hold her country together, as events keep spiraling further and further out of control. Around her are a handful of companions (sometimes allies, sometimes rivals), including her brother Tzain, the runaway Princess Amari (who turned against her father’s monarchy) and Amari’s brother, Inan. Adeyemi’s wheeling narrative arcs and propulsive prose offer an exploration of the multifaceted complexities of domination—not only racial, but also gender—and a study of how grief, memory, and violence can echo and repeat across history. The trilogy’s final installment, Children of Anguish and Anarchy, opens with Zélie and her friends in cages aboard a ship, having been abducted from Orïsha by pale-skinned invaders.

The books have won Adeyemi a slew of awards—including a Hugo and a Nebula, among the highest literary honors for science fiction and fantasy—and, now based in California, she’s overseeing the trilogy’s screenplay adaptation. Last year, Paramount Pictures acquired the rights for a three-movie deal with an offer reportedly worth millions of dollars. But the way Adeyemi tells it, her writing career was never a sure thing before it suddenly happened. She entered Harvard planning to attend medical school eventually (even though she’d been writing stories since she was five), and her application to write a creative senior thesis was rejected. Her early internships were in finance and consulting. She only began working on the Oshïra books after a previous novel, a generational epic about the descendants of two African sisters separated by the slave trade—one sent to Brazil, the other to the American South—was rejected by 63 literary agents. “That was devastating,” she says. “I’m a type-A overachiever, a Nigerian American perfectionist, and at that point, I had never spent a quarter of my life on something and failed.”

But then, unexpectedly, the devastation transformed into something else. “Sitting there in the ashes of that failure, after all the tears and all the emotions, I realized, ‘I still want this.’” She established a deliberate writing process, which today involves Excel sheets and a wall filled with color-coded Post-it notes, plus hours and hours of archival and online research. And she sketched out plans for five books; the first in the queue turned out to be Children of Blood and Bone.

Recently, she finished writing a new novel, to be published next year. It’s about a young black girl who goes to an Ivy League university and wants to be a writer. Unlike her previous books, which were aimed at young adults, she thinks this one might be more for adults. “Because it takes place in this world,” she says. “And in a way, that makes it even darker than the fantasy of Orïsha. Because it’s here, and it’s now, and it’s us.”

by lydia_gibson@harvard.edu

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The reality-based fantasies of novelist Tomi Adeyemi

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I Can’t Believe It’s Not Chicken (Super-Savory Grated Tofu) Recipe

From Law Books to Cookbooks

jennifer_carling@harvard.edu — Tue, 06 Aug 2024 17:51:12 +0000

From Law Books to Cookbooks jennifer_carli… Tue, 08/06/2024 - 13:51

For her first vegan cookbook, published in 2019, Nisha Vora, J.D. ’12, had five and a half months to develop, test, and photograph all the recipes. After she cultivated a following on the vegan cooking blog Rainbow Plant Life, Penguin, Random House contacted Vora, asking her to create a book of vegan Instant Pot recipes—fast. “I was like, ‘Me? Do you have the right email?’” says Vora, who left a legal career in 2016 to focus on vegan food writing and recipe development.

While proud of her first book, Vora says, “It’s not necessarily … a Nisha book.” By comparison, her new cookbook, Big Vegan Flavor, which comes out in September, took two and a half years to finalize. “I wanted the opportunity to be as meticulous as I could be. I wanted to be able to deliver only recipes where I’m like, ‘This is a 10 out of 10.’”

Vora perfected the recipes at home in San Diego, hiring a recipe tester to help with prep, cleanup, and fine-tuning. “If we looked at each other like, ‘Wow,’” Vora says, then “we cracked the code.” She takes seriously the challenge of making vegan recipes good, not just “good for vegan,” so she investigated methods of flavoring old standby plant-based ingredients. With her sticky coconut milk-braised tofu, for example, Vora wanted to offer a dish as delicious as fried crispy tofu but with a twist. “I had a Chinese takeout dish that was some sort of braised tofu, and I was like, ‘This is fantastic. It’s chewy, and it’s meaty, and it’s savory, and I somehow like it possibly more than crispy tofu.’” She researched the Chinese technique for frying and braising tofu so the full-bodied coconut, ginger, garlic, lemongrass, and soy sauce seep in, creating a deeply flavorful protein.

Spicy noodle stir fry with salt and pepper tofu | PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF NISHA VORA

Many of Vora’s recipes are based on sentimental favorites, like a buttermilk fried mushroom she says is popular with chicken-loving non-vegans and a spicy noodle stir-fry with salt and pepper tofu inspired by the flavors from a Chinese restaurant. She does not claim to provide culturally authentic recipes, but she researches regional techniques and ingredients. “When I develop a recipe from a different culture, I like to know the roles that certain ingredients play, and I like to know what the common cooking techniques are so that I can deliver a respectful interpretation that’s not totally watered down.”

Accordingly, she describes a crispy lentil dish of hers as “Indian-ish.” Vora’s first true cooking teachers were Food Network personalities like the Barefoot Contessa and Alton Brown, and she began cooking for herself at 14. Her parents had emigrated to New Jersey from Mumbai in 1982 so her father could build his medical career. After hearing that doctors were needed in the small desert town of Barstow, California, her parents moved there with Nisha and her sister sight unseen, with little money, and started what is now a 25-year-old family practice. As she grew up, no longer a small-town teenager anxious to assimilate, Nisha wanted to connect more meaningfully with her Indian ancestry by watching her mother cook. The only problem was, her mother didn’t use measuring cups or spoons, relying instead on intuition. “[That] is antithetical to how I cook and how I have to cook to develop precise recipes,” Vora says. “But watching her, asking her questions, her knowledge over the last 40 years of cooking as a home cook has helped inform how I understand ingredients and how they fit together.” Most of her Indian recipes, for example, start with toasting a combination of whole spices in oil, then adding aromatics like onions until they’re softened and golden, followed by garlic, green chiles, and ginger, and, finally, some combination of ground spices, a layering technique Vora learned from her mother.

Big Vegan Flavor offers information on food prep, ingredients, and recommendations for making the most of the book’s 150 recipes. “I wanted to provide a comprehensive approach to mastering vegan cooking, to equip readers with the tools and the techniques and the tricks and tips that I use to whip up dinner on a Wednesday night, even if you’re not following the specific recipe,” Vora says. She says that the key to spreading the word of vegan options is showing, not telling. “I’m going to show you how delicious plant-based food can be without being like, ‘You’re a bad person if you’re not vegan.’ Nobody wants to hear that. My goal is to get people to eat more plant-based food even if they don’t ultimately become vegans.”

Vora attended college at the University of California, Berkeley, majoring in political science and legal studies, before proceeding to Harvard Law in 2009. She never lost her love for food, though, and remembers bonding with law school classmates at monthly potluck meetups. “Every time I made something, and I’m not saying this to brag, everyone was like, ‘Wow, how did you make this?’ I remember just feeling so happy when I would share food with others.” In 2016, she became a practicing vegan, inspired by documentaries about factory farming.

After law school, she moved to New York City, but her jobs at a big law firm and a smaller nonprofit in which she represented low-income tenants in housing court, left her professionally unhappy, and after a few years, she left the field. But she says some lessons from Harvard Law still apply to her work today, especially writing and analytic skills, but also her rigorous and meticulous approach to food. “When I was developing a chocolate chip recipe, I did a mountain of research on ingredient ratios in non-vegan chocolate chip cookies, the percentage of butter, the percentage of fat, the percentage of eggs, so that I could come up with a recipe that tastes just as delicious and is just as chewy and has crispy edges like a regular chocolate chip cookie. I bring this super analytical lens that I think comes from having that background as a law student and as a lawyer.”

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The Goodness of Being Together

jennifer_carling@harvard.edu — Tue, 06 Aug 2024 17:51:10 +0000

The Goodness of Being Together jennifer_carli… Tue, 08/06/2024 - 13:51

For many people, the most significant impact of the COVID-19 pandemic was the sheer weight of isolation: the abrupt absence of routine social interaction with fellow human beings, from relatives to work colleagues, classmates to cashiers.

Being alone leads to more than just boredom or the blues; last year, U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy ’98 issued a formal advisory warning that social isolation increases risk of premature death by 29 percent, calling it “as dangerous as smoking 15 cigarettes a day.” In contrast, being well-connected with others is associated with longer life and better physical and mental health. “Social connection is a fundamental human need,” the advisory emphasized, “as essential to survival as food [and] water.”

Why is the company of others so essential, and what drives animals to pursue it? This is the type of question that Morris University Professor Catherine Dulac, a neuroscientist, has been researching for years, exploring how brain circuitry propels instinctive social behaviors.

When reunited, adult females separated for several days interact closely with each other in a rebound of relations that provides them with social satiety.| Photograph of mice courtesy of Catherine Dulac

Dulac found previously unidentified brain circuits in mice that activate when they are alone, driving them to seek out fellow mice. She and her colleagues observed that if they isolated a mouse from its cage mates for several days and then returned it to the group, the solo mouse was drawn to the others like a magnet, sniffing and rubbing noses with them and grooming their fur. The longer the isolation, the more enthusiastic its grooming and nuzzling of other mice. That proportionality suggests something important, says Dulac, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator. “It’s a telltale sign of a homeostatic need,” she explains, “like the need for food, the need for water, the need for sleep.” The longer animals, including humans, have been without food or water, for example, the more the brain pushes them to eat or drink to achieve a healthy, balanced state of homeostasis that promotes survival.

Why are animals, including humans, compelled toward one another? “There are a lot of advantages,” Dulac says, “to being together.”

Dulac’s experiments illustrate in vivid detail the deeply ingrained, genetic basis for connection and social interaction. Why are animals, including humans, compelled toward one another? “There are a lot of advantages,” she says, “to being together.”

The Social Lives of Mice

Dulac has long been fascinated by social behavior. “Social stimuli are the most salient stimuli that exist for any animal,” she says. “We are drawn to others of our species. Any animal, seeing another animal of their own species, finds it the most interesting thing possible.”

Early in her career, Dulac studied the vomeronasal organ (VNO), a set of neurons in the nasal septa of animals, which express receptors sensing pheromones, chemical messengers that trigger social responses such as mating and aggression. While working as a postdoctoral researcher in the Columbia University lab of Richard Axel (who later received a Nobel Prize for his work on the olfactory system), she identified the first group of genes that encode pheromone receptors in the vomeronasal system.

Later, at Harvard, Dulac’s lab group identified neuronal circuits in mice that dictate male- and female-specific behaviors (see “When Mickey Turns Minnie,” March-April 2008, page 14). When males mate with females, they emit ultrasonic vocalizations to attract them, but in the absence of a functioning VNO, they began to behave this way in the presence of both males and females. Another set of experiments focused on parental behaviors in mice. Virgin male mice will typically kill the newborn mice of other males, but when the researchers removed the VNOs of male mice, they suddenly acted like females: they built nests for baby mice, groomed them, and crouched near them protectively (see “The Mr. Mom Switch,” May-June 2015, page 11). The scientists also found that, when certain neurons in the brains of male and female mice were removed, virgin female mice became as infanticidal toward baby mice as virgin males. The findings suggested that both males and females possess brain circuits that drive both nurturing behavior and aggression.

A few years before the COVID-19 pandemic, Dulac’s lab began exploring the neuronal circuits that underlie how mice respond to social isolation. This is a topic that has intrigued Dulac for a long time: roughly 20 years earlier, she had attended a talk in which a scientist shared findings showing that isolation harms animal health. “Female rats that were kept isolated had this absolutely enormous increase in the prevalence of cancer,” she remembers. “I thought that was mesmerizing,” given that there was nothing obvious about a lack of cage mates that would increase cancer risk. Dulac also encountered data showing that mice and dozens of other species face an increased risk of disease and cognitive problems when isolated.

A mother mouse with her pups | Photograph of mice courtesy of Catherine Dulac

Ding Liu, a postdoctoral researcher in her lab, began to look at other scientists’ studies of isolation, which first identified that pattern: exaggerated socializing behaviors after mice were isolated, which grew more pronounced the longer the mice had been alone. “Somewhere in this area of the brain there might be a bean counter of social interaction,” Dulac says. “When the animal is isolated, the bean counter says, ‘Hey, something is missing here. You need to find partners.’ And when the social encounter occurs, then the bean counter says, ‘We’re okay now.’”

Living with others likely promotes survival, she adds. “It’s good to be with others because it brings protection against predators and the ability to do collective tasks like parenting or foraging.”

Isolating the “Isolation Neurons”

Using a cellular atlas of one part of the brain (the preoptic area of the hypothalamus) that Dulac previously created with Arnold professor of science Xiaowei Zhuang, Dulac and Liu began a series of experiments to pinpoint which neurons play a role in social need. They focused on the hypothalamus, a small, cone-shaped structure known to play a role in homeostasis. And they chose to study female mice, avoiding the potential complications of mating and aggressive behaviors seen in male interactions with other mice.

On a recent afternoon in her office in the Biological Labs building in Cambridge, Dulac played a video showing a white mouse wandering around an enclosure, a miniature microscope mounted to its head. The microscope lens was focused on the hypothalamus, deep in the brain, allowing researchers to monitor neurons there with a technique known as microendoscopic calcium imaging. Each neuron expresses a calcium indicator as it fires, causing it to give off a trackable, fluorescent glow.

As the mouse moved around the space, line graphs on one side of the screen tracked three clusters of neurons in the hypothalamus. A yellow and a purple line remained relatively flat, while a green line showed a series of sharp peaks as the mouse remained solitary. This green line indicated the activity of what Dulac and her team termed “isolation neurons,” which are activated when mice are alone, and that the researchers theorize drive a mouse to seek out others. Interestingly, in another experiment, the team used a technology to activate those isolation neurons—and the mice subsequently avoided the space where the activation took place, suggesting that they had a negative association with the isolated state.

On Dulac’s screen, the recording showed a researcher quickly slipping another mouse into the enclosure. The new mouse, Dulac said, had been living in a group and was a former cage mate of the solo mouse. “Because the mouse with the microscope has been isolated for several days, it is really eager to interact,” she said. Indeed, it chased the new mouse in a flurry of sniffing, attempting to make head-to-head contact and rub noses.

As soon as the new mouse entered the space, the graph on the side of the screen changed. The green line, indicating activity in the isolation neurons, began to fall, suggesting that those neurons were now suppressed. The previously flat yellow line climbed steeply, and the purple line rose as well. The researchers labeled the purple and yellow neurons “reunion neurons,” and their increase in activity, Dulac says, suggests the mouse’s need for social interaction is being fulfilled.

The Appeal of American Science

Studying how individuals interact is fitting work for a neuroscientist described by her postdoctoral adviser Richard Axel as “deeply human and thoughtful.”

Dulac, 61, grew up in Montpellier, in southern France near the Mediterranean Sea. Her parents were humanities scholars: her mother studied medieval poetry, and her father focused on the eighteenth-century philosopher Diderot. Dulac was an avid reader—she especially loved novels and poetry—but her parents nudged her toward a career in science, in part because their students sometimes struggled to find jobs. “They had a sense,” Dulac says, “that the scientific disciplines had way more opportunities.”

She completed her doctorate in developmental biology in the Paris lab of Nicole Le Douarin, where she studied the progeny of the neural crest, a group of embryonic cells in vertebrates that develop into many different cell types and structures in the body, including parts of the peripheral nervous system, pigment cells, and craniofacial bones. That work sparked her interest in the diversity of cell types in the nervous system.

When her doctorate was complete, she faced a critical decision: to pursue postdoctoral work in France or in the United States. “I love France, and there were very few people who went overseas for a postdoc,” she says. “But I was fascinated by how successful the American sciences were, and I really thought there would be something for me to learn there. I wanted to get out of my comfort zone.”

When she accepted the position in New York, in Axel’s lab, Dulac remembers experiencing some culture shock. “The social interaction was very, very different,” she remembers, observing that Americans often lacked close, long-lasting friendships; spouses or partners often filled that role instead. Dulac had many deep friendships with people in France, and she missed sitting down with them and family members for dinners and weekend lunches.

Axel says Dulac brought elan to the lab. “Catherine is a scientist who really takes a great deal of joy in the doing of science,” he says. “She takes great pleasure in the generation of knowledge, in finding things out. Science for her is not a means to an end, but rather an end unto itself.”

Dulac intended to return to France once her postdoctoral fellowship was complete. But “the French system is still quite hierarchical. As a young person, you can’t start your own independent lab, or if you do, it’s very tiny,” she says. The resources of the American system were appealing, and Dulac accepted an assistant professor position at Harvard in 1996.

Her perception of her work had been evolving. Dulac says she was initially drawn to science for the rigor. But over time, she says, “I came to understand that I could actually do science on things that I found super interesting for me as a human being.”

Sociable Mice—and the Importance of Touch

Not all mice possess an equal drive to interact with others. Although most mice did display rebound behavior after being alone, Dulac and Liu observed that different mouse strains needed varying levels of social contact following isolation. The type of mouse used most frequently in their lab displayed moderate levels of sniffing and head-to-head contact after being alone, while other strains displayed few of these behaviors when reunited with cage mates. But another mouse strain, known to scientists by the initials FVB/NJ, was especially social. Of six mouse strains studied, these mice engaged in the most enthusiastic socializing post-isolation.

One of the central questions of this work is how a mouse brain senses that it is alone or with others. The extra-social mouse happens to develop a progressive form of blindness, and the researchers wondered if the lack of sight might make these mice seek the company of fellow mice. Dulac’s team explored this question using two more mouse strains: a type of mouse bred to experience the same retinal degeneration as the gregarious FVB/NJ mice, and FVB/NJ mice that had been genetically modified to correct their vision loss. In both cases, Dulac explains, the mice experienced the same social rebound as the original mice, which indicates that sight was not essential in alerting mice to the presence of others.

This led the team to explore other senses. They separated mice from their siblings with a perforated divider that allowed them to continue to hear and smell each other. But this changed nothing; when the mice were reunited, they sniffed and nuzzled as if they had been entirely separate. Next, scientists wondered about the role of pheromones, so they observed mice bred without pheromone-sensing ability and found that they engaged in the same rebound behavior as typical mice. This left the possibility that the answer lay with the sense of touch.

To test this, Liu devised “an ingenious approach,” according to Dulac. He created what he wryly called “the mouse version of the Harlow experiment.” In that historic and controversial experiment, baby rhesus monkeys were given a choice between taking food and water from a wire structure (nicknamed “the wire mother”) or receiving comfort from a soft cloth structure (“the cloth mother”) with no food or water. The monkeys overwhelmingly chose soft comfort over the wire mother, even though that structure provided sustenance.

To study this phenomenon in mice, Liu used a type of tunnel typically added to mouse cages to provide the animals with interesting stimuli. He lined one tunnel with soft fabric but left the second tunnel in its original “naked” state. The soft tunnel seemed to provide solo mice with the contact they needed. “If you take mice that are housed together and you give them the choice between the naked tunnel or the cloth tunnel, they go to one or the other by chance,” Dulac says. “But if the mouse has been isolated, it will go to the cloth tunnel with very high preference.”

When a mouse passes through a fur-lined tunnel, it experiences a soothing touch sensation that reduces its sense of isolation.| Photograph of mice courtesy of Catherine Dulac

The researchers strengthened the evidence further when they observed that mutant mice—bred without the ability to sense soft touch—did not exhibit rebound behavior. “Apparently touch is really critical,” Dulac explains; it not only helps animals sense that they are alone but is also necessary for them to achieve a satiated state after isolation.

She adds that the varying levels of social rebound found in different mouse strains might mirror differences in human levels of social need. “When I give a talk, I often have the following question [related to the] pandemic,” Dulac says. “People will say, ‘I know a lot of people who suffered to be by themselves, but I was so happy. Am I wrong?’” She reassures them that both mice and humans are very heterogenous. “Some people are going to thrive when they are with others,” she says, “and some people are going to thrive when they’re not with others.”

In the Case of Humans

Dulac’s lab remains busy, with researchers pursuing multiple related topics. One group is exploring what in the brain accounts for the differing levels of social need among mouse strains: the neurons in various strains could express genes differently, or there may be differences in the ways brain circuits connect.

For several years, she and her team have also been studying the brain’s control of behaviors during illness. Previous research showed that sick and healthy mice tend to avoid each other, but “we noticed that two sick individuals will actually huddle together,” Dulac says, so they are exploring how the circuitry of social homeostasis is altered in sickness.

Most of the isolation-reunion studies in her lab focus on short-term seclusion, but Dulac is also interested in examining the effects of chronic isolation. And several undergraduates in her lab are examining autism models in mice. “Autism also changes social homeostasis,” she says, noting that it is not just one condition but a variety of states that impair social communication. “What we saw in some mice is that the neurons that [typically] fire when mice are alone no longer fire. It means they just don’t sense that they’re isolated. And some have a lot of activity, but in the wrong place, in the wrong cell type, suggesting that somehow the signal is not processed appropriately.”

So what might the studies in Dulac’s lab reveal about human brains? Here, she urges caution. “A mouse is a mouse, right? A mouse is not a little human,” she says. “A human is not a big mouse. We have to be very modest and mindful not to extrapolate too much. There’s no guarantee that it will work in similar ways.” Still, she says, mouse models can be an important source of hypotheses about people.

Dulac remains thoughtful and observant about human behaviors, wondering, for example, if stroking a furry pet or using a weighted blanket might help satisfy social need in humans who are isolated.

Despite her caution about extending mouse studies to people, Dulac can’t help but think about the ways the science of isolation might affect her loved ones. “It’s good to be together,” she says. Her mother died roughly two years ago, and Dulac has worried about her elderly father’s solitary habits as a widower. “I kept telling him, ‘Dad, you should not be alone like this. Go meet with some of your friends.’”

by Erin O'Donnell

Closing note

Freelance writer Erin O’Donnell reports frequently on research at Harvard for this magazine’s Right Now section. She profiled Jack Szostak in “How Life Began,” a July-August 2019 feature article.

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Academic Freedom and Free Speech

jennifer_carling@harvard.edu — Tue, 06 Aug 2024 17:51:10 +0000

Academic Freedom and Free Speech jennifer_carli… Tue, 08/06/2024 - 13:51

The upheaval on American campuses kindled by the Israel-Hamas war has had extreme consequences: resignations of presidents at leading universities, including Harvard; firings of other administrators; discontentment and disciplining of faculty and students; dismay and confusion among alumni; and high-profile, often prosecutorial, congressional hearings.

Deepening this turmoil, two axioms prevail about free speech on campus: everyone knows what free speech is; and free speech is as indispensable there as everywhere else. For Robert C. Post, ’69, Ph.D. ’80, those are far-reaching misconceptions. His ideas reflect his precise and important understanding of academic freedom and freedom of speech.

The essential freedoms, he explains, differ on campus and in the world at large. On campus, there is freedom to discover, develop, and distribute ideas in pursuit of knowledge and diffuse it in education. In the public sphere, there is freedom to debate and deliberate about ideas in expressing and responding to others’ opinions. The former is academic freedom, the latter freedom of speech. Speech has a very different purpose in each sphere, Post explains. Drawing on an exceptional combination of eminent legal scholarship, doctoral training in the humanities, and experience as an academic leader, he maintains that the purpose determines the nature of the freedom.

Robert C. Post | Photograph by Stu Rosner

In the university, the sphere of knowledge, truth-seeking speech is the essential tool. Because of the standards that guide each academic discipline, tenured scholars have the authority to veto the ideas and speech of untenured scholars and students if they don’t meet those standards. In this institutional sense, all that speech in search of truth is not equal.

In the public sphere, however, all individual opinions count as valid contributions in shaping public opinion. John Rawls, Harvard’s great twentieth-century philosopher, said that in public debate, “there are no experts: a philosopher has no more authority than other citizens.” Under the Constitution’s Bill of Rights—the First Amendment’s clause protecting “the freedom of speech”—everyone’s speech about public affairs is equal. Post calls that “public discourse”—“the free flow of ideas in newspapers, in public squares, on debate stages, on theatrical stages, in art galleries and concert halls.”

In the past generation, critics on the right and left have increasingly conflated these principles to argue that, in Post’s words, “universities have failed to protect freedom of expression.” That’s the most tenacious of the many controversies involving academic freedom. As Harvard proclaims in its “Free Speech Guidelines,” “Free speech is uniquely important to the University.”

The strife is about the meanings of academic freedom and of free speech. Politics in general has sometimes bent both concepts to allow for freedom-flouting outcomes (purging as subversives Communists from faculties; prosecuting as traitors journalists who criticize the government). Muddling the principles is especially risky for universities today. Politics often treats universities like any other interest group that needs to be put in its place. Overreaction on social media to those interventions swells the impression that the comeuppance is due.

Politics in the academy has made humility and openness to contrary ideas receding virtues there, too. Clashes can be knotty and nasty. But even in the academy, tensions between the freedoms are often talked about as free speech problems. Post quotes a former president of the University of California when in that office: “we have moved from freedom of speech on campuses to freedom from speech.” With clinical cool, Post writes: “The assumption is apparently that First Amendment protections attach to speech, and that speech occurs within universities.” So speech is an entitlement.

He sees two major problems with this two-step logic. Because of their different purposes—one safeguarding self-government; the other protecting education and advancement of knowledge—those freedoms require “entirely different” frameworks of regulation and protection of speech. Extending free speech protection to all speech uttered in universities (part of what Justice David Souter, ’61, LL.B. ’66, LL.D. 2010, called “speech as such”) means extending protection to some speech that shouldn’t be protected. It’s “a fiction” that the Constitution does so, Post highlights, and “an abuse” of the First Amendment to claim that.

Robert Post's Educational Path

Post, now 76, finished his Harvard Ph.D. dissertation in 1980, in the history of American civilization. (The program changed its name to American studies in 2012.) His path to that point was indirect. Five years after completing college and entering graduate school, he had gone “to learn the lawyer’s profession” at Yale Law School, because he despaired about getting an academic position that would let him do scholarship, teach, and write literary criticism.

His 580-page dissertation, “Studies in the Origins and Practice of the American Romance: Social Structure, Moral Reality, and Aesthetic Form,” explores “the possibilities of human value and significance,” through a study of novels by James Fenimore Cooper and by Nathaniel Hawthorne, reflecting Post’s “fascination with the sea-change that transformed American fiction in the years surrounding the Civil War.” By the time his dissertation was accepted, he was 32 and earning a reputation as an impressive, disciplined lawyer in Washington, D.C., for the renowned litigation firm of Williams & Connolly, where his main clients included The Washington Post. But the Harvard graduate program had kept his ties “with the academic world alive and viable,” and he saw a path for himself in the legal academy.

His brilliance was an obvious factor: he had graduated summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from the College; he was an exceptional graduate student and a dazzling Yale Law graduate; and he had completed prized clerkships with powerful liberals, David L. Bazelon on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia and William J. Brennan Jr., LL.B. ’31, LL.D. ’68, on the Supreme Court. Another factor was the premium that top law schools were putting on Ph.D.s in addition to J.D.s for young professors.

What gives meaning to American lives? How do those lives reveal that meaning? What leads to what Post calls “human flourishing”? Those are overarching questions Post asks in law that he asked as a young scholar in the humanities. He focuses on social practices, or human habits, which reveal culture and give lives meaning, and on the relationship of those practices to social purposes. When purposes evolve, practices inevitably need to change.

In legal scholarship, he pursues that meaning in law and legal norms, especially in the history of the Supreme Court and in constitutional law. For 20 years, he was a star constitutional law professor at what is now Berkeley School of Law, the University of California’s flagship law school. For 22 years, he has been a prized professor at Yale Law School—including eight years as its esteemed dean and, for the past eight, as a Sterling Professor, Yale’s highest academic honor.

Post’s work draws on history, philosophy, political science, and sociology as well as law. What distinguishes his scholarship is how he puts that knowledge to use. Concentrating on culture, and how law and culture shape each other, his work in the law is a kind of anthropology–a study of humanity. But unlike classic anthropologists, describers of what is, Post is also a prescriber of what ought to be. He has used that approach to think through the protections needed to foster expression of opinion and production and diffusion of knowledge.

Free Speech versus Academic Freedom

Free speech shapes public opinion, or consensus, which, wrote Judge Learned Hand, A.B. 1893, LL.B. ’96, LL.D. 1939, “is the final source of government in a democratic state.” Democracy answers to public opinion: the First Amendment prohibits the government from telling people what to think or say, Post explains, to ensure that citizens “set the agenda for government action rather than the reverse.” The successful functioning of democracy, he expands, “requires that the speech of all persons be treated with toleration and equality.” Free speech is anti-majoritarian in its protection of all individuals, however marginalized or minor in number, from majority prejudice or oppression.

But opinion is often the nemesis of knowledge. The university is not a democracy. Neither public opinion nor the government controls the development of knowledge. The successful production of knowledge “requires that speech be subject to a disciplinary authority that distinguishes good ideas from bad ones,” as Post puts it: disciplines require hierarchy. They “are grounded on the premise that some ideas are better than others; disciplinary communities claim the prerogative to discriminate between competent and incompetent work.”

Teaching requires competence in a discipline, and the care of thoughtful instruction, he amplifies: “no competent teacher would permit a class to descend into name-calling and insults”; and “professors who bully, abuse, degrade, or demean their students risk being found professionally incompetent in achieving the university’s mission of education.”

Post emphasizes that the First Amendment’s protections extend to academic freedom (the Supreme Court called it “of transcendent value” and “a special concern” of the amendment) because it serves a constitutional value. Post wrote, “Universities and university faculty are the unique and primary sites in modern American society for the creation and diffusion of disciplinary knowledge in the service of the public good.” They feed civilization. Preserving self-government requires preserving the people’s access to knowledge. Producing it requires freedoms that are the fundamentals of academic freedom: of research and publication; of teaching; and of a form of free speech, about matters related to the university (intramural) and matters of public concern (extramural). (The legal scholar David M. Rabban, in Academic Freedom: From Professional Norm to First Amendment Right, just published by Harvard University Press, presents what he calls “a theory of academic freedom as a distinctive subset of First Amendment law” through an exegesis on case law.)

But “university professors do not have freedom of speech, as measured by the classic First Amendment tradition,” Post underscores: “If I am supposed to be teaching constitutional law, I can’t spend my classroom time talking about auto mechanics.” As he explains with the legal scholar Matthew W. Finkin as his coauthor of For the Common Good: Principles of American Academic Freedom, academic freedom “is not the freedom to speak or to teach just as one wishes. It is the freedom to pursue the scholarly profession, inside and outside the classroom, according to the norms and standards of that profession.”

In 1915, the American Association of University Professors’ (AAUP) Declaration of Principles on Academic Freedom and Academic Tenure articulated the basis of American understanding of that freedom—to inquire and speculate, recognizing “no such thing as dangerous knowledge;” to train students “to think for themselves” and “to think intelligently;” and to speak with the independence of appointees, not the dependence of employees, about policies and practices of their academic institution or as citizens about public affairs. The main threats to academic freedom came from religion objecting to science; vested interests, like political backers and financial supporters, opposing teachings they spurned; and, most menacing, as the Declaration put it, “the tyranny of public opinion.”

In that era, as Post and Finkin detail, the “raw political force” of legislatures sometimes curbed the autonomy of universities because of “political influences and popular prejudices” expressed in public opinion—as is happening aggressively today. Even “without the direct intervention of elected officials, public opinion powerfully influences the decisions of university administrators,” they write. Academic freedom is necessary to insulate faculty from public opinion, so they can pursue their scholarship “according to the norms of that profession.”

Of course, there’s a lot of speech that almost everyone agrees the First Amendment doesn’t protect, even in universities. It doesn’t cover lewd, obscene, profane, and libelous speech, or “fighting words”: face-to-face insults that trigger a violent response or truly threaten to. A decade ago, Ronald K. L. Collins, editor of the newsletter “First Amendment News,” counted “at least 43 other additional types of unprotected expression,” from blackmail and bribery, to insider trading, perjury, plagiarism, and child pornography.

To these categories, Post adds “vast stretches of ordinary verbal expression, as for example between dentists and their patients, between corporations and their shareholders, between product manufacturers and their customers,” including a lot of speech in the academy. It’s the rule, not the exception, that speech “may routinely be regulated,” writes Frederick Schauer, J.D. ’72, a prominent scholar and former Stanton professor of the First Amendment at the Harvard Kennedy School. Skirting regulation by extending protection to speech that doesn’t warrant it, as a result of focusing “on the freedom of individual speakers,” Post stresses, we lose sight of the speech that matters most to society and its “systemic function”—public discourse as the source of government.

Extending protection that’s imperative for public discourse to “speech as such” mistakes the means for the end—speech instead of its purpose. It allows for “weaponizing the First Amendment,” Justice Elena Kagan, J.D. ’86, wrote in a Supreme Court dissent—as the journalist Adam Liptak reported in the New York Times, “to justify unlimited campaign spending, discrimination against gay couples, and attacks on the regulation of tobacco, pharmaceuticals, and guns.”

His “very radical conclusion,” Post says, is that, in protecting the freedom of speech, “what we protect is not the speech.” It’s the social practices that produce public discourse and give individuals the confidence that they play a part in self-government. “When persons participate in the formation of public opinion,” he writes, “they are sovereign. They decide the destiny of the nation.”

“Democratic Competence”

With an important exception, Post’s most sustained scholarship has been in the fields of academic freedom and free speech: respecting and understanding both, but also, importantly for today, delineating their boundaries. He advocates for both with equal force. He is among the country’s most influential thinkers about these principles—and one of the few leaders in either field who, based on their published scholarship, is a leader in both.

Thirty years ago, as a Berkeley professor, he was the AAUP’s general counsel. Because of his expertise, the then-president of the University of California, Richard C. Atkinson, asked him to rewrite the university’s policy on academic freedom. The new policy remains largely as adopted in 2003. The dominant principle in American academic freedom before then had been neutrality: dispassion, impartiality, and nonpartisanship. Academics had freedom if they met that standard. The policy that Post drafted replaces neutrality with competence: academics can be passionate, partial, and partisan, if competent; but if incompetent, even if scrupulously neutral, they are likely to lose their academic freedom.

“…academic freedom does not rest principally on the First Amendment rights of individual faculty....”

In Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, Atkinson wrote that the policy made clear “academic freedom does not rest principally on the First Amendment rights of individual faculty, nor is it contingent on the sufferance of the state. Rather, academic freedom is rooted in notions of the faculty as members of an academic profession that has distinctive competencies essential for the functioning of the modern university.” He underlined, “A professor cannot rely on the First Amendment to protect him/her from the judgment of colleagues that his/her research or teaching is professionally inadequate.”

Forty years ago, Post published his first scholarly article about free speech. Since then, he has published scores of articles and four books about it. They articulate the values that animate court rulings. He is criticized from the right for undervaluing the protection that the First Amendment gives individual self-realization, and from the left for not taking full account of the Constitution’s protection of equality and the need to mute some voices so others don’t get drowned out. The legal scholar Martin H. Redish, J.D. ’70, a critic of Post’s free speech viewpoint, nonetheless described him as one of “the most heralded scholars of all time” addressing the subject.

Post’s most complete statement about the relationship between free speech and academic freedom is Democracy, Expertise, and Academic Freedom. The book criticizes the widespread interpretation of the Constitution’s protection of free speech as a “marketplace of ideas,” based on this maxim of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., A.B. 1861, LL.B. ’66, LL.D. ’95: “…the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market.”

Today’s multi-front war of public opinion in America’s partitioned politics shows what Post calls the “imperfections, inefficiencies, and internal contradictions” of the marketplace-of-ideas model in the public sphere. The mayhem in the nation’s politics and media has had devastating consequences for the concept of truth. In the knowledge sphere, on the other hand, the “creation of expert knowledge requires practices that seek to separate true ideas from false ones.” Maintaining the “disciplinary virtues of methodological care,” he says, “quite contradicts the egalitarian tolerance that defines the marketplace of ideas paradigm of the First Amendment.”

Its core protection is of the disciplinary practices, not individual academics.

Post’s radical idea about academic freedom is that its core protection is of the disciplinary practices, which he calls “democratic competence”–the standards chosen by each discipline–not individual academics. Academic freedom safeguards the development and evolution of standards in different fields of knowledge because they serve freedom’s purposes: defining the competence in each field needed to create knowledge and disperse it through education.

The Constitution’s Purpose

The exception to Post’s career-long concentration on academic freedom and on free speech is his magnum opus, on the unlikely seeming subject of The Taft Court: Making Law for a Divided Nation, 1921-1930. The Supreme Court was led by William Howard Taft, LL.D. 1905, the only person to have been president and chief justice of the United States. Published this year and elegantly written, it’s a two-book, 1,608-page work. Post worked on it for 35 years as the capstone project in his constitutional law scholarship. Retired Justice Stephen G. Breyer, LL.B. ’64, now Byrne professor of administrative law and process, in a review, called it “a magisterial account.”

The work, as Post summarizes, “sets the jurisprudence of the Taft Court within the cultural context of its decade,” showing “how the Court’s seemingly technical doctrines were fashioned in continuous dialogue with the popular preoccupations of its era.” This “tumultuous, transitional period” was “a time of intense ambivalence,” when “jazz, flappers, radio, and cars burst onto the scene,” along with “prohibition, fundamentalism, the KKK, and 100 percent Americanism.” He writes: “The Taft Court was charged with the thankless task of constructing law for a society that was deeply confused about what it wanted. Like the country, the Court was torn between nostalgia for old certitudes and the aspiration to appropriate the emerging realities of a modern administrative state,” in the wake of “the massive cultural impact of World War I.”

Post sees many similarities between the Supreme Court then and now: ruled by conservatives, straining to maintain citizens’ trust, in a nation torn apart about what America most values. To “illuminate the drama of a serious and gifted Court struggling to adjust American public law to the emergence of the modern American state under conditions of extreme polarization and social unrest,” he relates four narratives “about the nature and purpose of constitutional law” within the Taft Court.

The first narrative, regarding the Supreme Court as a voice of public sentiment, was about the antiquated idea of law as “the spontaneous self-ordering of society” in “shared social customs and traditions.” The second, reflecting the measurement of progress through expansion of the economy and accumulation of wealth, rested on the belief in “a common commitment to material prosperity.” The third “imagined American society as an unending struggle among groups competing for power” and displayed “society’s need to establish orderly processes of adjustment among groups engaged in an existential competition for survival.” Law was “an alternative to war.”

For Post’s view of American values and constitutional law, the fourth narrative was the most important. It represented “the collective political project of perfecting democracy,” championed on the Taft Court only by Justice Louis D. Brandeis, LL.B. 1877: the project, Post writes, “has since been incorporated into the basic fabric of American public law.”

Brandeis’s framing provides the foundation for Post’s thinking about free speech and, more broadly, for his vision of what law is and what scholarship about it should do. The justice—who “loathed the 1920s as a ‘pernicious era of good feeling’” and favored “democratic engagement over prosperity”—“held that the purpose of the American Constitution is to create a successful democracy.” He viewed democracy as “a purposive, value-driven enterprise worthy of respect.” In a venerated concurring opinion in a 1927 case and in resonant dissents, Brandeis recognized free speech as democracy’s vital component. Like Post, he sought to accomplish social ends with law a crucial, if imperfect, tool.

The Knowledge Sphere and the Public Sphere

In the past decade, Post has had a running public debate about academic freedom and free speech with his friend Erwin Chemerinsky, J.D. ’78, the dean of Berkeley School of Law and an expert on free speech. Chemerinsky’s view represents the mainstream in higher education.

Academic freedom is yoked to free speech and dependent on it, because “the maintenance of a culture of scholarly inquiry,” as he writes with the scholar Howard Gillman in Free Speech on Campus, requires “a willingness within the broader campus community to embrace and defend the unfettered exchange of ideas.”

Erwin Chemerinsky | Photograph by The San Francisco Chronicle/Hearst Newspapers via Getty Images

Chemerinsky agrees with Post that scholars must adhere to standards that their discipline sets; and that within their classrooms, they must teach about their disciplines, not anything they want. Both would say that a professor, speaking as an individual outside a scholarly or teaching context, could advance their opinion about, say, Israel or Hamas, but could not claim academic freedom or free speech rights in diverting from a class session on engineering or English literature to launch into political advocacy for either side.

But for Chemerinsky, the campus is not an ivory tower, isolated from the world at large by a moat. It’s part of the world. Institutions of higher education face the same choice that a democratic society faces. As Chemerinsky and Gillman say, “Either there is complete protection for the expression of all ideas and views, or there is an orthodoxy of belief.”

When a campus group invites a controversial speaker, for example, a public university has a constitutional duty to let that guest speak because the First Amendment applies to the government, including public universities. That’s so even if the speaker’s message is hateful—as long as the message stops short of inciting violence or being a true threat to public safety.

Chemerinsky is unequivocal that every private university should do the same, though the missions of private institutions affiliated with religions might lead them to different priorities. Institutions can regulate the time, place, and manner of an event, and they have a duty to maintain public safety during it, which sometimes costs a lot of money. They also have a duty to explain why a hateful message flouts their values, Chemerinsky stresses, and to denounce it.

At Yale Law School this spring, Chemerinsky and Post continued their debate. Chemerinsky asked, “Could a campus exclude a speaker for being unduly controversial? And I would take the position, ‘No, because all ideas and views can be expressed.’” Addressing Post’s view, he said, “I think it’s a logical fallacy to say that, because sometimes speech is restricted because of the educational mission, always speech can be restricted because of the educational mission.” Chemerinsky called his understanding the free speech model: to him, the principle of free speech is the prevailing value in the university as well as in the public sphere.

Chemerinsky’s understanding is like what most people see in the famous duck/rabbit optical illusion when they’re told it’s a picture of a duck: they see a duck’s bill, then a duck. Post’s understanding is like the lesson in cognition of the optical illusion. Once you perceive that the duck’s bill is the rabbit’s ears, you see the rabbit and the duck: you grasp that the presence of each in the picture is clear and must be seen for what it is and how it differs.

To Post, everything a university does must be justified by one of its twin purposes. At Yale, he responded, “A university is a place where we educate students to think for themselves and where we create new knowledge. Now, those missions require freedoms, very definite freedoms. We call those academic freedoms. You can’t be educated unless you can think for yourself, unless you have very broad freedoms to speak. But the limits of those freedoms and the nature of those freedoms are determined by the project of education.” He asked: “How much freedom is constructive, and how much freedom is undermining the educational process? That, to me, is the master question.”

The university is a distinct domain in American life where the First Amendment applies differently than in the public sphere, just as it applies differently in courts, public schools, and important other domains where government regulates, even gags, some speech so the institution can fulfill its mission. Post recognizes that university professors and students are participants in the knowledge sphere, where academic freedom prevails, and citizens in the public sphere, where freedom of speech does. And that universities aren’t isolated.

Focusing on students as Chemerinsky did, Post said that universities must balance students’ interests in being both students and citizens. They do that by providing the kinds of freedom necessary (Post) “to instill in students a mature independence of mind.” As Learned Hand wrote about what he valued in Harvard’s and America’s approach to education, “We do not seek to teach truth, but how to think; that is the chief difference between ourselves and all totalitarians.”

A primary goal of American education, Post said at Yale, addressing students, is to “educate you to be a democratic citizen. That means to think for yourself in a democracy.” He continued, “You have to go out there in the world and live cheek by jowl, and vote cheek by jowl, and negotiate cheek by jowl, with all sorts of people who you detest and despise and who say things you think are horrible. So we have to teach you how to do that.”

As an educational matter, a university can prohibit use of its resources for bringing in any outside speakers. It can impose tests of professional competence and standards of civility on all speakers allowed to address the campus. Post says that it “must be free to regulate speech in ways that are inconsistent with First Amendment rights, at least as ordinarily interpreted.” That includes being free to give students approval to speak freely that they don’t automatically have on campus. That is not the same as freedom of speech, since on campus the First Amendment does not safeguard speech as it does in the public sphere.

At Yale, Post came back to his basic understanding of why it’s essential for academic freedom to be distinguished from freedom of speech: “If we do give rights which are equivalent to First Amendment rights, it’s because we think it’s educationally valuable that we do, because we’re training you how to become democratic citizens.”

by lincolncaplan00009@harvard.edu

Closing note

Contributing editor and journalist Lincoln Caplan ’72, J.D. ’76, a senior research scholar at Yale Law School, last wrote for this magazine about the Supreme Court’s June 2023 decision on affirmative action in admissions. As a graduate student, Post was one of Caplan’s Harvard undergraduate tutors, and he was one of the Yale Law deans when Caplan has taught there.

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Fairfield Porter

jennifer_carling@harvard.edu — Tue, 06 Aug 2024 17:51:10 +0000

Fairfield Porter jennifer_carli… Tue, 08/06/2024 - 13:51

In 1975, Fairfield Porter, A.B. 1928, accepted a commission for the Harvard Club of New York to paint former club president Alfred (Al) Gordon, A.B. 1923, M.B.A. ’25, whose portrait would join those of previous presidents lining the walls. Eschewing the classic portrait style, Gordon said he wanted his own portrait “to shake up the club by giving them something that, in 25 years, might be interesting.” A curator at the Museum of Modern Art recommended Porter, predicting that appreciation for the artist’s work would continue to grow. The painting, featuring Gordon wearing a jacket and tie and seated in the living room of his Gracie Square home, would be one of Porter’s last works: he died of a heart attack on September 18, 1975, the day the portrait was presented at the club.

Roofs of Cambridge, 1927 by Fairfield Porter | ©2024 The Estate of Fairfield Porter/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. image courtesy of the Parrish Art Museum, Water Mill, N.Y., Gift of the Estate of Fairfield Porter, 1980.10.120

Porter came from a distinguished Harvardian family that valued creativity. His father, James Porter, A.B. 1895, was an architect; his older brother, Eliot Porter, the photographer, was A.B. 1924, M.D. ’29; and his cousin was the poet T.S. Eliot, A.B. 1910, A.M. ’11, Litt.D. ’47. Fairfield entered Harvard in 1924 and decided, by his second semester, to concentrate in fine art. Even though he received no formal education in art-making, his sole surviving watercolor from those years, “Roofs of Cambridge,” a view across the Charles River to the industrial area of Boston, suggests potential. Porter announced in his senior yearbook that his intended to become an artist.

Upon graduating, he moved to New York to pursue training at the Art Students League, but he left after two years because no one seemed interested in teaching painting. So his mother, Ruth Wadsworth Furness Porter, funded his travel to Europe, where Porter would teach himself to paint by studying old masters. During an extended stay in Florence, he became a frequent luncheon guest at Villa I Tatti, where the art historian Bernard Berenson, A.B. 1887, became his informal mentor. Porter visited churches and museums in Italy, as Berenson recommended, but also traveled to Spain to explore the work of Diego Velázquez, and to museums in Austria, Germany, and France.

Porter returned to New York in 1932, ready to start his career. He married Anne Channing, then a Radcliffe student introduced by family friends, and they settled in Greenwich Village. Both wrote poetry and joined a circle of friends, the “New York School of Poets,” which included John Ashbery ’49, Frank O’Hara ’50, and Kenneth Koch ’48. They introduced Porter to opportunities to write art features and gallery reviews, drawing on his liberal arts education and extensive art-focused European travel. In 1952, when Fairfield Porter received his first New York exhibition, he was hired by ARTnews editor Thomas Hess to write features and reviews of other artists’ work. When a collection of his essays was published posthumously, New York Times art news editor Hilton Kramer hailed it as “the most consistently sensitive and thoughtful writing on new art…that any critic of the time gave us.”

For much of his career, Porter enjoyed greater success as a critic than as an artist. Although his reviews enthusiastically supported the artists of the era’s dominant movements (including abstract expressionism and pop art), he refused to yield to these trends in his own work, painting in a largely realistic, figurative style influenced by his appreciation of late medieval and Renaissance art, the Dutch and Spanish masters, and impressionists and post-impressionists.

Porter painted in the “present tense,” capturing the moments with friends and family: his child practicing the piano, Elaine de Kooning relaxing on the couch, the family dog at the front door. His settings were the places most meaningful to him: coastal Maine, New York cityscapes, and his late Federal-style home in Southampton, N.Y. Noted Kenworth Moffett, Ph.D. ’68, who curated the artist’s first major retrospective at the Museum of Fine Arts (MFA), “His paintings seem ordinary, but the extraordinary is everywhere.”

Success came slowly because Porter’s artwork did not conform to prevailing tastes. He had a following among certain critics, curators, and some collectors, including David Rockefeller ’36, G ’37, LL.D. ’69. Porter influenced younger artists including Alex Katz, who proclaimed, “Fairfield Porter is a painter of great refinement and subtlety. He has a strong technique and a wonderful sense of place…. The realistic world he painted always had a great deal of style.”

Upon Porter’s untimely death, his widow, Anne Channing Porter, committed herself to securing his legacy as an important American artist, donating his paintings to major museums and more than 200 works to the Parrish Art Museum in Southampton. She hoped it would create a catalogue raisonné and ultimately funded the catalogue herself. The MFA’s 1984 retrospective, “Fairfield Porter: Realist Artist in an Age of Abstraction,” resulted in “a sweeping transformation” of the painter’s reputation and status, according to Hilton Kramer.

Today, Porter’s paintings may be viewed at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the MFA, and Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas, among other esteemed institutions. Surprisingly, there are no Fairfield Porter paintings at the Harvard Art Museums. Surely, there must be space for one from such an accomplished graduate.

by Jane Borthwick

Closing note

Jane Borthwick ’76, M.B.A. ’84, is principal of Borthwick Art Advisory. Among works consulted in her research, Justin Spring’s Fairfield Porter: A Life in Art was particularly important.

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A Right Way to Read?

jennifer_carling@harvard.edu — Tue, 06 Aug 2024 17:51:09 +0000

A Right Way to Read? jennifer_carli… Tue, 08/06/2024 - 13:51

Reading didn’t come naturally for Abigail, a seventh grader at a public middle school in Cambridge. “It was challenging when I started early on, when I was in kindergarten, learning the ABCs,” she remembers. English is her second language, Arabic her first, and when she was younger, the letters and sounds of English weren’t intuitive.

By middle school, she could read individual words and short passages, but struggled to comprehend longer texts. Then, during sixth grade and the first half of seventh grade, she worked with literacy coach Emma Weinreich, Ed.M. ’19, who helped her to understand what she read. Abigail learned strategies for what Weinreich called “reading with a purpose”: asking herself questions before and after reading a passage, or watching relevant videos before tackling a text about an unfamiliar topic. Intervention also provided her a space to focus and receive one-on-one help, Abigail says. (To protect their privacy, Abigail and other students interviewed for this story have been given pseudonyms.)

Today, Abigail is out of intervention and reads at grade level. Her reading skills have not only made school easier, but provided her with new ways of understanding herself, other people, and the world. Her favorite part of reading is “imagining what’s happening in your head,” she says. This is why she prefers chapter books over graphic novels: she gets to direct the scenes. “Sometimes, I change the characters’ looks a little bit in my imagination,” she says. “I imagine them how I like. It makes reading books more fun for me, which is how I read a lot of books this year.”

Abigail isn’t an outlier in her district, Cambridge Public Schools. According to 2023 state test scores, Cambridge was one of only three districts of its size in Massachusetts to make a full recovery from pandemic learning loss in reading and math. Across the country, such outcomes are rare. Analysis by Harvard and Stanford researchers found that the average American student lost a quarter of a grade level in reading achievement during the pandemic—and that, by spring 2023, they had recovered only a quarter of that. Those losses have contributed to an alarming reality: the most recent National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP)—the so-called “Nation’s Report Card,” administered in the fourth and eighth grades—found that two-thirds of students were unable to read proficiently.

Panic over these figures has intensified a broader national reckoning over how students learn to read. The debate is often framed—simplistically—as a battle between “the science of reading,” a term that has largely come to be associated with phonics instruction, and “balanced literacy,” an approach that encourages surrounding students with literature and allowing them to read what interests them. As a result, in their attempts to produce outcomes like Abigail’s, legislators and district leaders have often directed their focus toward curricula, materials, and laws that center phonics and decoding skills. But framing literacy this way, many educators say, is misguided—and may distract from pursuing the more systemic changes required to support students.

Catherine Snow | Photograph by Stu Rosner

“A Very Stable Level of Mediocrity”

The questions animating the debate over how to best teach reading aren’t new. Historically, says Catherine Snow, Hobbs professor of cognition and education, the “reading wars” have been characterized by two sides: a whole-language approach that advocates starting literacy education with words and sentences, and a phonics-based approach that advocates starting with the relationship between letters and sounds. For more than a century, the pendulum has swung between these poles.

The most recent phase of the debate can be traced, in part, to Emily Hanford’s 2022 radio series, Sold a Story, released by American Public Media. Her reporting revealed that many schools were using balanced literacy curricula that lacked systematic phonics instruction and relied on discredited strategies, such as encouraging students to guess words based on context.

Hanford’s series was released in the wake of the pandemic and its attendant drop in test scores—prompting policymakers, parents, and journalists to raise alarms about a “literacy crisis.” A spate of media coverage has called for urgent action, and more than 40 states have passed laws reforming how reading is taught. These laws often promote the “science of reading”—a body of research, spanning disciplines such as psychology and neuroscience, about how children learn to read. Though this research has found that phonics, oral language, and comprehension are all important elements of reading, science of reading reforms have often centered on phonics instruction.

Many educators say they are glad that lawmakers, parents, and the media are focused on literacy. But news coverage can make it seem as if systematic phonics instruction is the only component missing from students’ literacy education, and the frenzy over a “literacy crisis” can make the challenges facing students seem unprecedented. In reality, American students’ reading scores have remained relatively stable during the past 25 years, save for a dip during the pandemic. “I’m not saying we’ve done a great job in the past,” says Snow, who serves as cochair of the Literacy and Languages concentration at the Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE). “I’m just saying we haven’t created a crisis. We’ve just created a very stable level of mediocrity.”

Students using READS Lab materials visualize the relationship between words like “producer” and “resources.” | Photograph courtesy of the Harvard READS Lab

Improving literacy is urgent, but the “crisis” framing can encourage quick fixes over substantive change—and promote top-down solutions that exclude the perspectives of professionals in the classroom. Many successful districts, like Cambridge, have relied not only on new curricula, but also on best practices that educators have long known about, such as compensated, hands-on professional development and tailoring literacy education to individuals or small groups. In many cases, it’s a lack of resources—not stricter state guidance—that prevents schools from implementing these solutions.

The Unscientific “Science of Reading”

From 2019 to 2023, Caitlyn Bacom Dominguez, Ed.M. ’24, worked as a fourth- and fifth-grade teacher at a Texas public school. During that time, she noticed a trend that worsened each year: some of her students could sound out each word of a passage but struggled to understand the passage’s meaning. “Kids could decode the words,” she remembers—they could associate letters with sounds and blend those sounds together. “But it didn’t help them, because they didn’t have the background knowledge to build off of to really understand the text.”

At the time, Texas was overhauling how reading is taught. In 2019, the legislature enacted a law requiring that school districts use a curriculum that provides “systematic direct instruction” in phonics. The law also revamped teacher training and qualification: all kindergarten through grade three teachers were required to complete a course on reading called the “Reading Academies.” And, starting in January 2021, teachers seeking new certifications to teach pre-kindergarten through grade six were required to take a “science of teaching reading” exam.

The new emphasis on phonics certainly helped students to become better decoders. But phonics was overemphasized, Bacom Dominguez says, at the expense of other important elements of reading. One popular model of literacy education, Scarborough’s reading rope, compares reading to a braided rope comprising eight different strands. Decoding is an important one. But many others, like vocabulary and background knowledge, must interact with decoding to make a skilled reader. In Bacom Dominguez’s district, those other elements sometimes went ignored. “If we didn’t build any comprehension skills when you were younger,” she asks, “how are you going to read as you’re going up in the grades?”

Pamela Mason | Photograph by Stu Rosner

Experiences like hers demonstrate that American literacy education may be moving toward another pendulum swing, rather than an effective middle ground. Because balanced literacy curricula lacked systematic phonics instruction, “the reaction that we’re seeing now is a plethora of reading curricula that are focused on the foundational skills of phonics,” says Pamela Mason, an HGSE senior lecturer and the other cochair of the Literacy and Languages concentration. “Sometimes we think if a little bit of something is good, a lot of it is better..…So sometimes we have a little bit of an overreaction to what we know in the research and how it’s applied in practice.”

It’s important, educators say, to include those who will actually use curricula when making decisions about them. Legislatures don’t always “have access to the expertise that would be required to make those decisions,” Snow says—and might therefore choose programs mismatched to students’ needs. Sarah Symes, Ed.M. ’19, a reading interventionist at a Cambridge public middle school, agrees: “With literacy being such a hot-button issue, there are a lot of trendy or buzzword-filled curriculums,” she says. But “just because a curriculum…contains a lot of these buzzwords or has great marketing doesn’t mean it’s necessarily right for your particular students.”

Curriculum mandates carry another risk: often, mandated materials haven’t been tested over the long term.

Curriculum mandates carry another risk: often, mandated materials haven’t been tested over the long term. The problem exposed by Sold a Story “is just the specific instance of a much more general problem throughout K-12 education,” says Gale professor of education Thomas Kane: “that there are practices that some researcher sometime claimed are ‘evidence-based,’ and then they became ubiquitous without anybody ever testing whether they were effective or not.” Simply replacing older, ineffective curricula won’t prevent that from happening again. Doing so requires a “structural” change: “publishing annual reports on achievement gains of students using different curricula,” Kane says. “We don’t do that now. Most states don’t even know what curricula schools are using.”

“A Bunch of Overworked, Overloaded Teachers”

When Texas required all early-grade teachers to complete the reading academies, it left the decision to individual districts whether to compensate teachers for the additional professional development. Sarah Drummond, Ed.M. ’21, was working as a public elementary school teacher near Austin when the law was passed. Her district did not plan to compensate teachers for the training “until it got enough pressure,” she says. Although her school allocated professional development days for the training, she continues, “I had many peers who were not given any time, so it had to be done on their own time, outside of contract hours.”

According to a 2022 Gallup poll, 44 percent of K-12 workers “always” or “very often” felt burned out at work, driving a teacher shortage that has left many schools scrambling for personnel. Bacom Dominguez and Drummond say the state-mandated training exacerbated feelings of burnout and frustration. The lack of compensation “demonstrated a lack of respect and value for the teachers and the professionals you’re asking this of,” Drummond says.

The problem wasn’t just the increased workload: many educators felt the exam and training didn’t actually improve their skills. Some teachers in her school just “clicked through” the modules, Drummond says—an outcome she expected “when you give a bunch of overworked, overloaded teachers this work without compensating them for the extra time they have to spend on it.” And the science of teaching reading exam, Bacom Dominguez says, was “very content-heavy and very heavy on technical terminology.” Her prior education, tailored to the exam, didn’t prepare her to help struggling readers. “I was taught digraphs, and I was taught all these concepts,” she says. But that information didn’t translate to actionable skills: “I was never taught: how do you identify where a struggling reader is struggling? How do you assess that, and how do you remediate?”

“Teaching someone to teach reading is also very social—it’s something you need modeled.”

It was only at Harvard that she learned to answer those questions, when she took a literacy assessment and intervention practicum, taught by Mason, which places HGSE students in Cambridge public schools to work with struggling readers. The class enabled her to understand literacy education in practice: “What does it look like, what does it sound like, when a struggling reader is struggling?” Teachers can’t learn to answer those questions from an online course, because “teaching reading is a very social experience,” Bacom Dominguez says. “And teaching someone to teach reading is also very social—it’s something you need modeled, it’s something you need to see.”

Many educators underscore the importance of compensated, hands-on professional development in teaching literacy education. Legislation doesn’t always facilitate such opportunities—and can in fact distract from them in the pursuit of quick fixes. “[The state] wants to make these changes really quickly,” Drummond says. “But just throwing something on [the problem] isn’t going to change it systemically.”

“There’s No Perfect Curriculum”

Abigail Frost, Ed.M. ’11, is a literacy coach at a Cambridge public elementary school—a role that involves facilitating professional development, collecting and analyzing data, and observing and providing feedback to classroom teachers. In April, as she reviewed the results of an assessment that teachers in her school had given to students, she noticed an interesting pattern.

One section of the test prompted students with a list of nonsense words—pim, wum, bave, herm, cher, tive—to assess their understanding of letter-sound correspondence. Another section asked them to read a full passage. “One of [the students’] strengths was decoding and blending nonsense words,” she remembers. “But then they were given a text that was not decodable—it had words containing letter patterns they hadn’t yet learned in phonics class. And they really struggled.”

Based on that finding, she was able to work with teachers to adapt their instruction. “The data heightened for us as a team that we need to balance teaching phonics with teaching sight words, irregular words, and specific strategies for when you haven’t yet learned a certain skill,” she says.

This kind of adaptation, Frost continues, is as important as choosing the right curriculum. “I was on the literacy curriculum review team in Cambridge, and it was a really thoughtful and strategic process,” Frost says. “But we also found that there’s no perfect curriculum. And so, I’ve tried to embrace the idea of building teachers’ capacity around literacy, so they can make the most of any curriculum they get.”

Students at Reedy Creek Elementary School, in Charlotte, North Carolina, work on collaborative research materials from Harvard’s READS Lab. | Photograph courtesy of the Harvard READS Lab

Not every educator can take the literacy practicum that helped Bacom Dominguez. But literacy coaches like Frost can incorporate a similar hands-on training into classrooms. Though coaches “are not traditionally thought of as professional development,” they can “partner with teachers in the classroom, model and co-teach and gradually release support so that the teacher becomes independent,” says Shira Cohen-Goldberg, Ed.M. ’03, who works with HILL for Literacy, an organization that supports New England school districts in implementing evidence-based practices for literacy instruction.

Specialists can also help ensure that teachers understand the rationale behind new educational materials, enabling them to integrate comprehension and decoding in their instruction. Allison Shook Franke, Ed.M. ’07—a reading specialist at a public elementary school in Watertown—says her school will use two curricula starting this fall: Fundations, which centers on phonics; and Wit & Wisdom, which focuses on boosting both literacy skills and content knowledge.

Wit & Wisdom requires students to read and discuss rich literature—which sometimes includes non-decodable words. In professional development sessions and meetings, Franke says, she will aim to coordinate with classroom teachers and other specialists to make sure students are repeatedly and purposefully exposed to those words in context. “Where we’re headed is very exciting,” she says, “because we’re intentionally teaching content with language and literacy, which is essential.”

During the pandemic, funding educators who specialize in literacy became easier when the federal government provided schools with $190 billion of Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) funds. That funding expires in September, however, and some districts, including Cambridge, have begun to cut interventionist and other specialist positions. But research has demonstrated the effectiveness of both coaching and direct intervention with students—and many educators emphasize the importance of this work in any school’s strategy for teaching reading.

“The Place That Makes You Frustrated Every Day”

Illustration by Carla castagno/istock

Charlie, a fifth grader at a public school in central Massachusetts, mostly likes going to school. He enjoys learning history and spending time with friends—plus, he says, “I get a break from the house and my little sister.”

“There are just a few things I don’t like about school,” he continues. “I have dyslexia, so that means I have trouble reading and writing and stuff. Sometimes teachers say, ‘Come on, I know you can do better.’ And that kind of gets me mad. Because sometimes I’m doing my best work, but I’m not able to do all the things the same way that everyone else can.”

Charlie was diagnosed with dyslexia in second grade. Until then, he had been learning to read in a general education classroom with Fountas & Pinnell—a curriculum that has been criticized for lacking systematic phonics instruction and encouraging students to guess at words. This method gave Charlie “no chance” at establishing a foundation in reading, says his mother, Danielle McAuliffe. Today, he reads far below grade level.

Charlie is hardly alone: though estimates of dyslexia prevalence vary, most agree that the condition affects between 5 and 20 percent of the population. When children with dyslexia spend their earliest years in school struggling to learn to read, they miss fundamental skills—and learn to associate school with frustration. “When you start kindergarten and everyone else figures out how to decode words, and you can’t figure this out,” says associate professor of education Nadine Gaab, “it has tremendous implications for how you see yourself as a learner, how motivated you are to learn, how motivated you are to go to the place that makes you frustrated every day.”

After Charlie’s diagnosis, he worked with special education teachers, but most “didn’t have a background in teaching dyslexia,” McAuliffe says. Students with dyslexia usually benefit from highly structured, systematic teaching that engages multiple senses—sight, hearing, touch, movement. There are several programs that provide such instruction, such as the Orton-Gillingham approach and the Wilson reading system. Rather than work with Charlie on one of these programs, McAuliffe says, his teachers have pursued “a hodgepodge of extra reading activities that don’t lead to better reading outcomes.”

It’s important for schools to have personnel trained in multiple evidence-based approaches to support students like Charlie. But in her work, Gaab seeks to prevent experiences like his from happening in the first place. “I think you could prevent dyslexia and reading disabilities in a lot of kids,” she says, “by screening them, finding them early, and giving them access to really good tier-one reading instruction” (initial classroom instruction before intervention).

Researchers have long known that there are differences between the brains of children with and without dyslexia. Gaab has studied whether “struggling with learning to read on a daily basis causes those differences,” she says, “or if those differences are there before formal education.” She found that some of the atypical brain characteristics associated with dyslexia were already present in children as early as infancy. Those findings have policy implications: if some children start school with brains that are less prepared for learning to read, educators should look for those students before they struggle.

Gaab knew it wasn’t realistic to run every child starting kindergarten through an MRI. So she submitted an idea to an accelerator at Boston Children’s Hospital for “EarlyBird Education”: a tablet-based early dyslexia screener that would test for the top predictors of reading disabilities. The screener asks children to help a cartoon toucan, “Pip,” complete tasks, like picking the sound associated with a letter, or selecting the picture associated with a word. The test scores students in eight skills, including vocabulary and phonemic awareness. Since EarlyBird’s founding, thousands of teachers in 25 states have used the platform to screen more than 60,000 children. Seventy-two percent of those teachers say they have identified a child at risk of dyslexia who would have otherwise gone undetected.

Though students at risk of dyslexia especially benefit from systematic phonics instruction, balancing comprehension and decoding skills is equally important for them. EarlyBird is one of the few screeners that rigorously assess oral language skills, such as listening comprehension, in addition to phonological awareness and phonics. “Our system carefully listens to, and automatically scores, the oral language skills that are predictive of future reading,” says EarlyBird cofounder Carla Small, M.B.A. ’97.

The data collected from EarlyBird can provide insight into the skills of all students, not just those with dyslexia, according to Liz Cannon, a literacy specialist at a public school in New Hampshire. “It really helps us to be more specific about our groupings for intervention,” she says: rather than grouping students together randomly, educators can place students struggling with the same skills together.

Julie Lenocker, a literacy specialist who works in a public district on Boston’s North Shore, agrees that EarlyBird’s data-driven approach promotes a comprehensive view of reading. “I think with media coverage, it can seem like the science of reading equals structured phonics only,” she says. “But it’s based on effective, research-based strategies across all reading domains: phonological awareness, phonics, vocabulary, fluency, comprehension.”

“Consistency and Structure”

“Sam’s class is on a trip. The class is at the dock,” five-year-old Steven reads from a worksheet, his finger pointing to each word. “Miss Mack…stops….” He trails off.

“Go ahead,” his mother, Alana Purkett, encourages him.

He rereads the word and corrects himself: “spots Ken, the fish man.”

A few sentences later, he starts to lose focus, banging his hand on the page with each syllable. “Point to each word,” Purkett reminds him gently. When he finishes the first page, Purkett asks, “Do you want to read the whole story?” He says he does.

These days, Steven enjoys reading any text he can find. From the back seat of the car, he asks Purkett to slow down when he sees a street sign he wants to sound out. Recently, he picked up his fourth-grade sister’s chapter book. “I’m like, Steven, those words are kind of hard,” Purkett says. “He said, ‘No, they’re not, Ma. You just have to sound them out.”

Steven didn’t always enjoy reading. He has an individualized education program (IEP) for severe ADHD, and when he started pre-school, “he was having difficulties learning letters, words, how to sit down,” Purkett recalls. “He was running around the school, and he needed a personal aide to be able to come [to school] at all.” Two years later, he can focus on and read grade-level texts. “This is my super kid,” his mother says.

Purkett credits Steven’s progress with “consistency and structure”: he regularly practices phonics with his teachers. But also important was developing his ability to focus—and that came with his teachers’ patience and individualized attention, she says: “They don’t shun Steven, they actually work with Steven. They actually give him a chance.” She also receives regular updates from his teachers, so she knows how to support him at home. “They’re always giving me feedback, a text or a phone call,” she says.

Steven’s school—Gateway Academy Charter School, in Newark, New Jersey—is operated by the BRICK Education Network, an organization dedicated to improving educational outcomes for families in under-resourced communities. In recent years, BRICK has overhauled its schools’ curricula to align with the science of reading, says Dana Carr-Ford, Ed.M. ’21, senior director of K-4 literacy.

BRICK has also expanded training so teachers can tailor those curricula to their classroom populations. This is especially important for historically underserved communities, Carr-Ford says—which often include populations that face stark achievement gaps. According to the 2022 NAEP, 68 percent of all fourth graders could not read proficiently, compared to 83 percent of black students, 79 percent of Hispanic students, 90 percent of English language learners, and 89 percent of students with disabilities. These gaps persist even in many districts that have recovered overall: according to 2023 state test scores, 36 percent of black third-grade students in Cambridge met or exceeded expectations in English Language Arts, compared to 79 percent of white students.

BRICK encourages schools to find materials that represent the cultures and backgrounds of students they serve—so students can see themselves represented and bring background knowledge to the texts they read. Steven also works with a paraprofessional trained in the science of reading, who can work with him individually.

As in Steven’s school, investing in educators has also been a key component of literacy gains in Mississippi, says Courtney Van Cleve, Ed.L.D. ’20, who works at the state’s Department of Education. Despite being ranked last in the nation in child poverty and hunger, Mississippi is one of three states where students are ahead in reading compared to where they were before the pandemic, according to the Harvard and Stanford analysis.

Since 2013, Mississippi legislators have allocated about $15 million annually to support literacy efforts. According to state literacy director Kristen Wynn, most of that funding is used for teacher and leader development: “The majority of those funds go toward hiring coaches and providing professional development opportunities to educators.” Coaches, deployed by the state to low-performing districts, help educators refine their practices, and professional development ensures that teachers can apply curricula effectively.

Both the coaching and the professional development enable one of the most important parts of the state’s program, Wynn says: the creation of “individual reading plans” for students identified as struggling in early screenings. Based on those evaluations, educators identify what interventions students need, how they will receive them, and how often their progress will be assessed. Educators also meet with families to explain the plan and provide strategies for working on reading at home. Since the accelerated investment in literacy began in 2013, Mississippi fourth graders went from being ranked forty-ninth in the nation in literacy to twenty-first in 2022.

“It’s Not Such a Complicated Thing to Do”

Last school year, a student in Laura Stewart Whittaker’s first-grade class lost her pencil. Instead of asking for a new one, she picked up a crayon from the floor and began to do her work. “I said, ‘You need to go get a pencil,’” Whittaker recalls. “And she’s like, ‘No, I’m being resourceful. I found this on the floor!’” Whittaker let her keep using the crayon.

Whittaker is a teacher at Charlotte Mecklenburg Schools, a public district participating in a study with Harvard’s READS Lab—short for Research Enhances Adaptations Designed for Scale in Literacy. The lab has developed the Model of Reading Engagement (MORE), which provides educators with a “spiral curriculum,” says lab director and professor of education James Kim: “You introduce the more foundational topics in the early grades and use that background knowledge to learn more complex topics in the later grades.” The program integrates curricula across first to fourth grade and across school subjects.

Whittaker’s student had learned the word “resourceful” a few days earlier in a MORE social studies unit about economics. The students were discussing “resources” in the context of an ice cream shop, discussing what materials—from a storefront to napkins to tables—a shop owner might need to run a business.

Rather than teaching social studies separately from literacy, MORE integrates the subjects. So Whittaker used the discussion of economic resources as an opportunity to teach the suffix “-ful,” and to practice breaking up a word, identifying the word “source” within “resource.” Integrating curricula in this way, Kim says, reinforces content and enriches students’ vocabulary and background knowledge—critical components of skilled reading. This approach helped Whittaker’s first grader to remember the word and use it in context.

Kim has long been interested in improving literacy but chose not to enter the decoding versus comprehension debate. “We already have solutions for all those problems—we have solutions for phonics, for word reading,” he says. “The reality is that those skills are easy to improve.” The true challenge, he says, lies not in teaching children to decode, but in helping them to understand complex texts.

He gives an example of a sentence students might encounter in an elementary school science class: “Paleontologists look at the dinosaur fossil record to develop theories and hypotheses about why they went extinct.” To understand this sentence, students need to know complex words that aren’t common in everyday life. “Kids don’t know these important words, and that’s the problem,” Kim says. “Those single-syllable words—they can pronounce those words. They can spell them reasonably well; they know their meaning. But those multi-syllable important words, they don’t know.”

The philosophy behind MORE is that introducing those words gradually and systematically—and integrating their study with literacy instruction—can help students to decode and comprehend. Research backs this idea up: the READS Lab has found that MORE improves literacy outcomes not just in the early grades, but through the end of fourth grade. “There are very few literacy interventions that improve reading comprehension in third grade and beyond,” Kim says. “And there are even fewer that improve reading comprehension through fourth and fifth grade.”

Abigail Frost and Sarah Symes | Photograph by Stu Rosner

The READS Lab’s work exemplifies the kind of innovation that’s possible when researchers seek solutions apart from political debates about literacy. But the reading wars, many educators say, are likely to continue until policymakers commit to investing in educators and tracking the effectiveness of interventions.

Pamela Hook, M.A.T. ’70, studied at HGSE under Jeanne Chall, a professor who conducted pioneering research about the importance of phonics in literacy education. At Harvard, more than half a century ago, Hook learned the idea that remains the foundation of her work: that a child’s ability to read depends on their ability to decode words and understand their meaning.

After she received her Ph.D. in communication disorders and learning disabilities from Northwestern, Hook spent decades advising districts and policymakers on implementing structured literacy programs. She has seen a similar pattern play out again and again: states or districts mandate curricula based on the science of reading and don’t see results. So they switch to curricula that rely on the whole language approach, only to be disappointed again.

This cycle has continued, Hook says, in large part because of insufficient investment. “A lot of times, districts or states will decide that they’re going to make a concerted effort to improve reading, except maybe they won’t hire coaches, because that’ll cost too much money,” she says. “If you don’t have a way of working with coaches in the schools to implement the curriculum—and sufficient preparation and support to help the teachers understand how this actually works in the classroom—it’s not going to work.”

Catherine Snow agrees that educators have long known what makes up effective early literacy education: teaching students language’s code and meaning, and how they interact. “It’s not such a complicated thing to do,” Snow says. “But people really want to go on fighting about this.”

by 4f36cf5f0389a182@harvard.edu

Closing note

Nina Pasquini is a Harvard Magazine staff writer.

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News in Brief

jennifer_carling@harvard.edu — Tue, 06 Aug 2024 17:51:08 +0000

News in Brief jennifer_carli… Tue, 08/06/2024 - 13:51

President Alan M. Garber

After a dozen years as provost, and seven months as interim president (he was appointed January 2), Alan M. Garber became Harvard’s thirty-first president on August 2, when the governing boards announced their decision. The appointment itself comes as little surprise: Garber came to the interim presidency with broad University experience, and has helped calm a troubled campus while launching task forces to combat discrimination, foster free speech and civil discourse, and define how Harvard will (and will not) raise its institutional voice. But the details are newsy: Garber will serve as president through June 30, 2027—nearly three more academic years; and the Corporation will organize a search for his successor in the late spring or summer of 2026. Senior fellow Penny Pritzker praised him for doing “an outstanding job leading Harvard through extraordinary challenges,” and Garber expressed “a simple message of gratitude for the opportunity to lead Harvard” for the next three years, focusing on the academic mission and its benefit to society. Read a full report, with their statements, at harvardmag.com/president-garber-24.

More Protest Fallout

Following spring pro-Palestinian protests nationwide, and continuing investigations of and hearings on campus antisemitism and other forms of discrimination, six U.S. House committees declared their intent to probe 10 institutions (including Harvard), and to explore limiting their federal financial-aid and research funding. As part of this initiative, the House Ways and Means Committee voted along party lines to impose potentially severe fines on institutions found to have failed to protect students from antisemitic or Islamophobic discrimination, and, separately, to subject more private schools with substantial endowments to an excise tax by excluding international and DACA students from their reports on endowment assets per capita.…The House Committee on Education and the Workforce, which grilled President Claudine Gay last December 5 (along with the MIT and University of Pennsylvania leaders), advanced a Civil Rights Protection Act, which would require universities to detail how they investigate complaints under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. That title protects students from discrimination based on shared ancestry and thus underlies investigations into antisemitism.…After pro-Palestinian protestors occupied the Stanford president’s office on June 5, injuring a law enforcement officer and damaging buildings, 13 were arrested; the students among them were suspended.…Penn issued temporary protest guidelines, for the first time explicitly banning encampments and overnight demonstrations in any campus location; a longer-term revision of the school’s “open expression” guidelines is underway.…And in early July, Columbia removed three deans from their posts for sending texts during a May forum on Jewish issues that the University characterized as echoing “ancient antisemitic tropes.”

Class Characteristics

The College announced in June that 84 percent of those offered admission to the class of 2028 accepted—a slight increase from the prior year, despite the campus turmoil during the past nine months. The entering class is 53.2 percent women and 46.8 percent men. About 55 percent of the new students will receive need-based aid. The average parent contribution for students receiving aid is $15,550, but 23.4 percent of the admitted class will attend with no parent contribution. Nearly half the first-years plan to concentrate in sciences, computer science, and engineering, versus just 12 percent indicating interest in the arts and humanities. No data have been released on the ethnic profile of the matriculants—the first class since the U.S. Supreme Court in June 2023 outlawed consideration of race in admissions.

Jennifer O’Connor | Photograph by Noah Williams

New General Counsel

Jennifer O’Connor ’87 has been appointed vice president and general counsel as of July 29. A Cambridge native who most recently served as Northrop Grumman’s vice president of technology and information law and policy, she previously was general counsel of the Department of Defense and served on the White House staff during the Obama administration. From 2002 to 2013, she was an associate and then partner at WilmerHale, where William F. Lee ’72 (a Corporation member from 2010 and then Senior Fellow, and the lead litigator in Harvard’s ultimately unsuccessful defense of affirmative action before the Supreme Court) was co-managing partner. O’Connor earned an M.P.A. from Columbia in 1993 and her J.D. from Georgetown in 1997. She succeeds Diane Lopez, who retired in February, and interim general counsel Eileen Finan—and assumes her new role as Harvard faces litigation, federal investigations, and possible legislation emanating from the campus protests and allegations of discrimination during the past academic year.

Faculty Service Statements

As briefly reported in the July-August issue (“Locked In,” page 17), the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) has changed its guidelines for faculty appointments, ending the requirement for a Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging (DIB) statement and replacing it with a “broad statement of service.” The guidance, disseminated June 3 by Nina Zipser, dean for faculty affairs and planning, reflected “feedback from numerous faculty members who were concerned that the current DIB statements were too narrow…and relied on terms that, for many, especially international candidates, were difficult to interpret.” (Diversity and equity statements, offices, and programs are under broad attack nationwide, and have also come in for criticism among many professors, including Harvard faculty members.) Candidates’ service statements are expected to describe “your efforts to strengthen academic communities” such as a department, institution, or professional societies. Related teaching and advising statements are expected to describe “your philosophy and practices as well as your approach to creating a learning environment in which students are encouraged to ask questions and share their ideas.” DIB statements were first required in FAS searches during the 2019-2020 academic year.

Rethinking Governance

Amid faculty members’ uneasiness about University governance, two attempts to effect change have advanced. The leaders of the effort to create a planning committee for a Harvard-wide faculty senate report (see harvardmag.com/senate-debate-24) that the FAS, Graduate School of Design, and Divinity School have all voted in favor of the effort. The Graduate School of Education, School of Public Health, and Kennedy School faculties appear ready to debate and vote on the proposal when they reconvene this fall. And the business, law, and medicine faculties are in the talking and considering stage.…Separately, a number of professors have voted to form a Harvard chapter of the American Association of University Professors, the national organization, affiliated with the American Federation of Teachers, AFL-CIO, which has since 1915 advocated for academic freedom, shared governance, and employees’ economic interests.

Sarah Ganz Blythe | Photograph by Theresa Ganz

Atop the Art Museums

Sarah Ganz Blythe became Cabot director of the Harvard Art Museums, effective August 12, succeeding Martha Tedeschi, who retired in June. Ganz Blythe has most recently been deputy director, exhibitions, education, and programs at the Rhode Island School of Design Museum. During her undergraduate studies at Wellesley College, where she earned her B.A. in art history, she was a conservation intern at the Harvard museums. She earned her doctorate in modern art from the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University. Learn more at harvardmag.com/director-blythe-24.

Arts and Environment Gifts

In a year largely devoid of major gift announcements, two were unveiled in late spring. Joseph Y. Bae ’94, who became a fellow of the Harvard Corporation on July 1, and Janice Y.K. Lee’ 94 made their most recent significant gift: $20 million to endow FAS’s arts and humanities deanship and in support of undergraduate financial aid. According to the Harvard Gazette, their class’s thirtieth reunion gift totaled at least $140 million. And Dan A. Emmett, J.D. ’64, made a $15-million gift to establish the Emmett Environmental Law Center at the Law School. It will, in part, underwrite the country’s first environmental moot court institute, in which attorneys develop their litigation skills.

Upping the Medical Aid Ante

Michael R. Bloomberg, M.B.A. ’66, LL.D. ’14—who endowed undergraduate financial aid at Johns Hopkins, his alma mater, with a $1.8-billion gift in 2018—has given a further $1 billion. This gift makes a Hopkins medical education tuition-free for students from families with incomes below $300,000, and also pays living expenses and fees for those with family incomes below $175,000. It also augments aid for nursing and public-health students, and across the university’s other professional and graduate programs. NYU’s medical school and Albert Einstein College of Medicine are now tuition-free, but Hopkins is the nearest peer of Harvard Medical School able to offer prospective students this level of financial aid—suggesting an urgent priority for HMS’s fundraisers.

Plummeting Polls

In the wake of rising tuitions, inflation, controversies over affirmative action and diversity programs, and criticism of campus protests, the latest Gallup-Lumina Foundation poll on attitudes toward higher education paints a darkening picture. The survey, released in July, shows that just 36 percent of adults have a great deal or a lot of confidence in higher education: significant erosion from 57 percent reporting positive responses in 2015. Analysts focused on the underlying loss of confidence in higher ed, with fewer respondents professing some confidence, and 32 percent (nearly as many as those who are favorably disposed) reporting little or no confidence. Respondents were more positive about two-year institutions than four-year ones, perhaps reflecting concerns about cost and the relevance of the education on offer to employment prospects.

Honor Roll

Kavli professor of astrophysics David Charbonneau and Sara Seager, Ph.D. ’99, professor of physics and of planetary science at MIT, have been awarded the 2024 Kavli Prize in astrophysics for their work on extrasolar planets; the honor is accompanied by a $1-million honorarium.…Cogan University Professor Stephen Greenblatt has been awarded membership in the Order Pour le Mérite for Sciences and the Arts by the government of the Federal Republic of Germany.…Professor of physics Norman Ying Yao, whose research focuses on condensed matter and quantum information science, has been named a 2024 Ross Brown Investigator; the program, administered at Caltech, provides up to $2 million in research support over five years.…Emery professor of organic chemistry Eric N. Jacobsen has received the 2024 Welch Award in Chemistry for his research on small-molecule catalysts. The award comes with a $500,000 honorarium.…Five faculty members have been elected to the American Philosophical Society: Pierce professor of psychology Daniel T. Gilbert; Goldman professor of European studies and professor of sociology and of African and African American studies Michèle Lamont; Farber professor of medicine Willliam G. Kaelin; Mason professor of music and professor of American studies Carol J. Oja; and Smith professor of medicine and genetics Christine E. Seidman.

Photograph by OLIVIA FARRAR/Harvard Magazine

Crimson Goes Green

Buildings around Harvard Yard were greener this summer, as the campus and landscape design group shifted from layering on the mulch to sowing clover as a low-maintenance, low-water groundcover around dorms, Barker Center, the lower entrance to Lamont Library, and elsewhere. The benefits, according to assistant dean of campus design and planning Nazneen Cooper, include a better outcome for woody plants than suffocating their roots under shredded bark, and, unintentionally, an agreeable habitat for resident bunnies, turkeys, and more. Not quantified are carbon dioxide absorption and oxygen output, nor the welcome blast of color complementing the University’s iconic red brick.

Yard Rules

The Harvard Yard gates locked in late April (when a pro-Palestinian encampment was set up) were selectively opened in early June, after Alumni Day and reunions. But as new signs advised visitors, a certain wariness had set in. “Please take note that the following acts are prohibited on Harvard property,” the notices read, enumerating such no-nos as “erecting or maintaining a tent or other temporary structure,” “camping or sleeping outside,” blocking pedestrian paths or building entrances, “amplifying noise without appropriate prior approval,” postering or “affixing a message or image onto a Harvard building,” or “vandalizing property.” Just in case, “The Faculty of Arts and Sciences may grant exceptions to these prohibitions.”

On Other Campuses

The Boston Globe hailed the new quarters for MIT’s Schwarzman College of Computing as “the most exciting work of academic architecture in Greater Boston in a generation.” The donor, Stephen A. Schwarzman, M.B.A. ’72, CEO (and cofounder) of the Blackstone investment group, made a $350-million gift to the institute in 2018, part of its billion-dollar investment in computing and AI research and teaching.…Continuing the assault on legacy admissions, the Illinois legislature enacted a ban on legacy and donor preferences at state public higher education institutions, and California’s Assembly passed a similar measure affecting public and private schools; it requires a similar vote in the state Senate.…Joining many other selective institutions (including Harvard: see News in Brief, July-August, page 22), Stanford will again require applicants to submit standardized test scores, as of fall 2025.

Newsmakers

Timothy R. Barakett ’87, M.B.A. ’93, a Corporation member since 2019 and University treasurer since 2023, has been appointed chair of the Harvard Management Company board of directors, effective July 1. He succeeds Paul J. Finnegan ’75, M.B.A. ’82, the previous treasurer (the officer who customarily leads the HMC board). Finnegan will remain a director of the organization, which oversees investment of the endowment.…Brian K. Lee, vice president for alumni affairs and development since 2018, will retire at the end of 2024; see harvardmag.com/lee-departs-24.…Levin professor in literature Karen Thornber has been appointed Menschel faculty director of the Bok Center for Teaching and Learning, at a time of rising interest in artificial intelligence and other technologies bearing on pedagogy. A scholar of comparative literature and cultural history, she succeeds Robert Lue, who was appointed in 2013 and served until his death in late 2020.…Khalil Gibran Muhammad, Ford Foundation professor of history, race, and public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, acclaimed for his scholarship on crime in America (see “Writing Crime into Race,” July-August 2018, page 57), has accepted a dual appointment in African American studies and public affairs at Princeton University at the end of the fall semester.…Tracy K. Smith, professor of English and of African and African American studies, and Dan Byers, Robinson Family director of the Carpenter Center for Visual Arts, resigned as co-chairs of the Harvard and the Legacy of Slavery Memorial Committee in late spring. In a letter, they explained that they were pursuing long, community-engaging processes, but felt under pressure from the University to proceed more quickly, conceive a final memorial project, and, in so doing, risk an insular, Harvard-centric result—“a gesture of institutional self-regard” rather than “forging genuine and durable relationships with descendant communities in Cambridge and Boston.” In June, the Crimson reported that Roeshana Moore-Evans, executive director of the overall legacy of slavery project, had resigned as well.

Headlines

Among the 15 faculty fellows appointed by the American Association of University Professors’ new Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom to examine threats to academic freedom and institutional autonomy is Naomi Oreskes, Lea professor of the history of science. Much of her recent research (see harvardmag.com/exxon-projections-23) has focused on misinformation and deceptive practices in policy debates.…The Bow & Arrow Press, displaced by Adams House’s renovation (see harvardmag.com/bow-evict-23), has found a new abode within Harvard Library’s printing and graphic arts department. The new venue, within Lamont Library, plans open studios and workshops to encourage use by undergraduates and others.…Animal-rights activist Brittany Drake, who approached the stage and threw glitter on then-interim president Alan Garber at Alumni Day (see harvardmag.com/alumni-day-24), has been charged with three felonies and three misdemeanors.

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Yesterday’s News

jennifer_carling@harvard.edu — Tue, 06 Aug 2024 17:51:08 +0000

Yesterday’s News jennifer_carli… Tue, 08/06/2024 - 13:51

1914

When an alumnus threatens to cut a $10-million bequest out of his will unless outspokenly pro-German Professor Hugo Münsterberg is fired, the University replies that it “cannot tolerate any suggestion that it would…accept money to abridge free speech, to remove a professor, or to accept his resignation.”

1929

The editors warn darkly: “If undergraduates are less in their rooms today, and consequently less accessible to the knowledge of one another and of books; if they are more in the company of girls, more addicted to dancing and visiting, thanks are largely due to the automobile.”

1939

With backing from Phillips Brooks House, graduate student Jacob M. Hagopian [Ph.D. ’43] has rented 5 Divinity Avenue from the College and turned it into Harvard’s new “International House.” Residents include two Chinese, two Filipinos, several Americans of foreign descent, and four of the 20 European refugee students being supported by a $30,000 fund raised by students, alumni, and a Corporation gift.

1944

The Board of Overseers votes in favor of admitting women to the Medical School, effective with the class entering in the fall of 1945.

1964

A survey of just-graduated seniors reveals that 16 percent of those seeking full-time jobs have volunteered for the Peace Corps; only engineering, research, and technical jobs rank higher.

1969

A burglar tries to steal Widener Library’s two-volume Gutenberg Bible (worth roughly a million dollars), but falls from a rope into the library courtyard, breaking his leg and cracking his skull.

1999

In late October, presidents of seven universities in the People’s Republic of China visit to learn about American research universities. The magazine calls it “Harvard’s highest-level continuing-education course on higher education.”

2019

The Square’s remaking continues, as the buildings behind the triangular intersection of JFK and Brattle Streets are demolished to make way for a new retail mall.

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Combating Bias

jennifer_carling@harvard.edu — Tue, 06 Aug 2024 17:51:08 +0000

Combating Bias jennifer_carli… Tue, 08/06/2024 - 13:51

In early May, when the cochairs of the University’s task forces on combating antisemitism and combating anti-Muslim, -Arab, and -Palestinian bias commented briefly on what they had heard from the community, they offered similar impressions. Ali S. Asani, Albertson professor of Middle Eastern studies and professor of Indo-Muslim and Islamic religion and cultures (cochair of the latter), sketched “a great deal of anxiety and fear of being targeted” on campus for the mere fact of being, or being perceived as, Arab, Muslim, or Palestinian, amid instances of being doxxed and harassed—conditions he described as “frankly, dehumanization.” Frost professor of Jewish history Derek Penslar, cochair of the antisemitism task force, described “a lack of trust, between students and the administration and between students” even preceding the Hamas attack last October 7. His group’s listening sessions highlighted “deep-seated problems,” with “many Jewish affiliates profoundly unnerved” by “social exclusion and shunning.”

Asani said the University faced the challenge of “engaging with and understanding difference, and building bridges,” within the curriculum and beyond, as intentional elements of a Harvard education. Overcoming that would require introducing new teaching methods and educating the community about religious literacy. Penslar reported a lack of healthy discussion of “controversial subjects” amid pervasive fear and distrust: for an academic community, a sign of things gone off the rails. Their overlapping perceptions pointed, perhaps, toward common remedies. (Read more at harvardmag.com/fas-task-24.)

Both task forces, organized in January, issued preliminary findings and near-term recommendations on June 26, with final reports (including in-depth investigations of campus culture) and longer-term action plans due in the fall semester.

As they had forecast, each group again reported similar, dismaying conditions. To cite only some of the language: “Muslims, Palestinians, Arab Christians, and others of Arab descent as well as pro-Palestinian allies described a state of uncertainty, abandonment, threat, and isolation, and a pervasive climate of intolerance,” while “The situation of Israeli students at Harvard has been dire. They have frequently been subject to derision and social exclusion,” and “We have heard disturbing reports that faculty members and teaching fellows discriminate against or harass students because they are Israeli or have pro-Israel views.”

Among immediate recommendations, Asani’s task force called for:

• providing 24-hour, rapid, real-time helpline support for safety concerns;

• focusing attention on doxxing, which the task force urged be denounced as “an abhorrent activity”;

• offering University statements of support for all community “groups equally, without overlooking affected groups”;

• expanding Palestinian studies curricular offerings and recruiting tenure-track faculty in support of this objective (and related efforts to gather information on academic resources and needs);

• clarifying policies and procedures for reporting bullying, bias, and discrimination;

• reaffirming the University’s commitment to free expression and open debate, and clearly, effectively communicating policies on protest and dissent;

• revisiting the University’s 2018 statement of its declared values—and including community members’ safety as an explicit part of the values articulated;

• finding ways “to publicly highlight and clarify its adherence to fundraising best practices that protect academic freedom and institutional independence”;

• fostering conversations within Houses and dorms, facilitating faculty-organized community conversations on diversity and pluralism during orientation, and addressing “religious illiteracy” as it is “a significant factor contributing to stereotypes and prejudices”; and

• strengthening interfaith and multifaith understanding of religious holidays, observances, dietary needs, and related factors.

The antisemitism task force highlighted prompt action on:

• clarifying Harvard’s values (“[A]ntisemitism and anti-Israeli bias—like Islamophobia, anti-Arab bias, racism, misogyny, homophobia, or transphobia—are forms of hatred that have no place within the Harvard community”);

• acting against discrimination, bullying, harassment, and hate, across the University and in specific problem instances such as the use of social media and the reported student belief that participation in extracurricular activities may be subjected to litmus tests—a form of exclusion the University must end;

• improving disciplinary processes, as students report a lack of clarity on submission of complaints about antisemitic behavior, and “the policies of administrative boards and other disciplinary bodies vary widely across the University’s separate units, and there are significant disparities across units in the handling of disciplinary cases” [see the commentary, “Own Goals,” in this issue]—to address many community members’ “doubt [that] the University is committed to imposing substantive consequences for antisemitic expression or action”;

• adopting measures on education and training of officers responsible for implementing equity, diversity, inclusion and belonging policies pertaining to antisemitism, and for new students and student leaders;

• fostering constructive dialogue—by having senior University officials attend talks by leaders with opposing viewpoints on controversial issues (a recommendation made by both task forces), sponsoring faculty talks on “historic and contemporary relations between Christianity, Islam, and Judaism,” and encouraging student conversations and research; and

• supporting Jewish life on campus.

In a Harvard Gazette interview accompanying release of the preliminary reports, antisemitism task force cochair Jared Ellias said, “We have to return to our foundational principles as an educational institution and recognize both the potential that we have, but also the inherent limitations as a university that’s in the business of admitting students, teaching them, and giving them a degree.” Ellias, who is Collins professor of law, continued, “We must also appreciate that the global ambitions of the University mean that we’re going to bring together a gigantically different group of people where what they have in common is their excellence. And we’re going to, hopefully, let them meet each other, form meaningful friendships and relationships, and then help them become leaders in the world that they’re going to graduate into.”

At the end of the day, that points to recommitting to Harvard’s educational role and strengthening its effectiveness. Asani’s task force put its preliminary report in the context of longer-term measures, possibly entailing “substantial changes in institutional policies, curricular and co-curricular improvements, and rethinking of the structure of religious life on campus”—the kinds of recommendations both groups seem likely to advance.

Interim president Alan M. Garber, who created the task forces, welcomed their initial efforts, which he attributed to their “willingness to seek truth, to listen while withholding judgment, and to speak with kindness”—traits he called “a powerful example of how I hope we can proceed together.” He also cited “their optimism. After having spent months leading the task forces during what has been a strife-filled time for Harvard, they have developed a shared belief in the possibility that our community will change for the better, becoming more welcoming and inclusive.” But given the gravity of the issues the task forces detailed, Garber soberly noted, “The work ahead of us will require concerted effort.”

Read more about the preliminary reports at harvardmag.com/task-report-24, and follow coverage of the final reports, expected this fall, at www.harvardmagazine.com.

by b09de2a90dfa0acc@harvard.edu

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Susan Farbstein

jennifer_carling@harvard.edu — Tue, 06 Aug 2024 17:51:08 +0000

Susan Farbstein jennifer_carli… Tue, 08/06/2024 - 13:51

“Why do some people get to make decisions about their lives, and other people don’t?” Susan Farbstein, J.D. ’04, clinical professor of law since 2008, first pondered the question after observing the stigma faced by patients visiting her father, a hematologist-oncologist who treated people with HIV and AIDS in the 1980s. Since then, she has continued to think about human dignity and autonomy—and how the law can promote them. After law school, Farbstein worked at the International Center for Transitional Justice (ICTJ) in South Africa on projects seeking “accountability, broadly conceived” for apartheid-era abuses. “It’s not just about criminal accountability; it’s not just about who is guilty,” she says. “It’s also about what the survivor wants”: an apology, structural change, or an opportunity to tell her story. This survivor-centered conception of accountability has helped Farbstein see the law’s impacts beyond legal rulings, shaping people’s understandings of themselves and the underlying events. At Harvard, she leads the International Human Rights Clinic: a group of six faculty and about 30 students who are partnering with a Ukrainian human rights organization to consider how to build a case against Russia for war crimes. Farbstein educates students on human rights law, and also how best to approach such heavy work—by building resilience and avoiding burnout. She does so by returning to favorite hobbies from her California childhood: swimming (“my happy, quiet place”) and hiking with her family. The beliefs she held then continue to motivate her. “At the most basic level, the idea of human rights is that they’re something you’re entitled to by virtue of being human,” she says: “that all people should be able to lead a dignified life, and all people should be able to make choices for themselves about the life that they will lead.”

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Crimson Construction

jennifer_carling@harvard.edu — Tue, 06 Aug 2024 17:51:07 +0000

Crimson Construction jennifer_carli… Tue, 08/06/2024 - 13:51

In 2020, pandemic-induced fears about a recession and prospective deficits led Harvard to curtail capital outlays sharply. Spending on new buildings and renovation—always significant at an institution with more than 600 structures spread across Cambridge, Allston, and the Longwood Medical Area—declined by nearly two-thirds by 2022, from a pre-pandemic peak of nearly a billion dollars a year. But as any visitor to campus this summer could attest, the spigot has been opened wide.

The boom in the years before 2020 brought Harvard the shiny, new-age (and billion-dollar) science and engineering complex in Allston (commissioned in 2021; see “A 500-Year Building,” January-February 2021, page 13) and the completion of Dunster, Winthrop, and Lowell House renovations, among other projects. The post-pandemic boom is bringing a new and even larger district to Allston, down Western Avenue from the engineering complex, in the form of the “enterprise research campus”; a new performance center for the American Repertory Theater (ART) and adjacent housing tower facing North Harvard Street (see harvardmag.com/art-construct-24); and the renovation of more historic sites, including the final stages of Adams House renewal.

A view through the ART and housing site toward the ERC in the distant background | Photograph by Jim Harrison

A summer sidewalk superintendent could have seen everything from gargantuan steel frames rising over Allston—building on a scale rare on campus—to meticulous restoration of the University’s second-oldest building, the wooden colonial Wadsworth House: a visual reminder of iconic New England now overshadowed by the concrete monolith of Smith Campus Center across Massachusetts Avenue.

Along the old “Gold Coast” residences facing Mount Auburn Street, scaffolding shrouded the final stage of renovations to the oldest and most historic undergraduate house, Adams. A protracted undertaking, complicated by the need to work on six buildings located on several busy roads and extended by pandemic delays, the effort has been much more prolonged than other nearby House renewals—six years in all, once the project is complete. Like other renewals, much of the work involves removing hazardous materials, making common spaces (such as the ever-popular Pool Theater) and the building layout more accessible, and increasing the building’s sustainability: all prior House renovations earned LEED Gold certification or higher.

Old facilities being renewed: Adams House | Photograph by Jim Harrison

As Adams students join the cohorts of Lowellians and Winthropians to return home from the converted Inn at Harvard and other swing spaces, their renewed House awaiting them will have more elevators, vertical entryways reworked into horizontal floor plans, new dorm setups, and a more modern look inside and out. With that, the Adams diaspora will end, and the community will be fully restored to its old-home-made-new by the fall 2025 term. “No one comes to Harvard to live in a construction project,” said Cameron Borgasano, deputy director of the House Renewal Program. “But we so appreciate [students’] patience and advice and involvement. And we can’t wait to open it next year to the students.”

Scaffolded, the 1726 Wadsworth House is being carefully renovated as its 300th anniversary nears.
| PHOTOGRAPH BY NIKO YAITANES/HARVARD MAGAZINE

The quirky yellow house on the edge of Harvard Yard is also being renovated—an especially delicate task given Wadsworth House’s historic fabric (it dates to 1726, when New England timbers could still be large enough to constitute a building’s foundation) and highly visible site. Originally designed to be the Harvard president’s residence, funded by the colonial state government, its enduring features reflect Harvard Square’s evolution from a rural outpost to populous urban center. When President Benjamin Wadsworth first took up residence, the house had a barn, pasture, and outhouse. As the University acknowledged with a commemorative plaque in 2016 (see harvardmag.com/harvard-slaves-16), it was also home to four enslaved men and women in the households of Wadsworth and President Edward Holyoke.

Artist Anna Dugan, assisted by TJ Gansenberger, painted the colorful mural at 92 Seattle St facing Rena Park in Allston | Photograph by Jim Harrison

The house’s wide front lawn and garden were both absorbed into Massachusetts Avenue (once called Braintree Street) as it was twice widened, at the end of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, pushing the outside world right to the edge of its cramped front steps. Now, Perry and Radford Architects, lead designers for the renovation project, must contend with the building’s character and crowded perimeter (with flocks of tourists, the busy Mass. Ave. sidewalk, and the surrounding Wigglesworth and Lehman Halls) as Harvard makes the structure—home of late to the Commencement Office and the University Marshal’s staff—functional, and brings it up to code.

Many of the modifications are typical upgrades (new sprinkler systems, heating and ventilation replacements, and new lighting, electrical, and plumbing systems)—all of which must fit into an old building. But the project will also make the landmark—about to complete three centuries of service, and the only wooden building remaining in the Yard—almost entirely accessible, with the exception of the small third floor, which contains several old but tight door frames the University received city variances to preserve for their historic value. On the first two levels, sloping floors will be leveled, and rooms will be rearranged to make space for a wheelchair lift and an accessible kitchenette and bathroom.

The renovation is scheduled to conclude in 2025. If it’s successful, passersby and returning dignitaries (escorted by the Marshal) won’t notice significant exterior differences. Even as major changes are set to occur, architect Oliver Radford cautions, “We’re trying to do as little invasive work as we can.” Everything that can be preserved in the historic site will be, including small quirks such as the house’s old-fashioned locks and outdated thermostats, maintaining the historic feel of a building that once housed George Washington and the Continental Army for a period during the American Revolution—as well as serving presidents, then students (late 1800s), clergy (early 1900s), and today University offices.

A very different kind of renovation is underway at Gund Hall, the brutalist (1969) concrete and glass home to the Graduate School of Design, (a major project described in “Renovating Gund,” May-June 2024, page 21, to better insulate the building’s envelope). The work will ultimately make the building a more energy-efficient, and thus green, property for Harvard, serving what the project leads say can be a model for bringing other brutalist landmarks into the twenty-first century—while maintaining their distinct look. Details of insulation aside, visitors could enjoy the sight of a crane cantilevered over Gund’s staircase glass roof, a stark contrast to the grandeur across Quincy Street of Memorial Hall, resplendent under its newly restored polychrome slate roof.

Cambridge renovations aside, Harvard’s most ambitious new construction continues to take place on its frontier Allston acreage. The enormous, privately funded and owned enterprise research campus (ERC), rising with stunning speed since the groundbreaking last fall (see harvardmag.com/erc-ground-23), along Western Avenue opposite the Business School, is the most notable addition to the skyline on this stretch of the Charles. Huge cranes dot the view south of Harvard Square, now next to gradually rising elevator shafts-turned-towers-turned-functional buildings. “Each day, you look out on a couple more floors, more steel being put into place,” said Harvard Allston Land Company CEO Carl Rodrigues. “It’s very fun to watch.”

Gund Hall: reglazing to gain energy efficiency | Photograph by Jennifer Carling/Harvard Magazine

The five-building, nine-acre Phase A project—combining laboratory and office spaces, apartment towers, a hotel and a University conference center—is scheduled to begin occupancy in 2026. By then, the University hopes it can create an area like MIT’s high-tech and biomedical center in Kendall Square, while keeping a more neighborhood feel for residents new and old.

Things are moving quickly here. Through the fall and winter, the buildings’ exterior cladding and facades will be attached, before successively reaching completion through next year and into 2026.

Only somewhat less ambitious in scale is the work well underway just to the west, along North Harvard Street near the Stadium. There, construction is progressing on the David E. and Stacey L. Goel Center for Creativity & Performance, the ART’s future home, and, to the rear, the affiliate housing tower.

Even as construction has accelerated across campus, more projects are still in the pipeline. Planning has already begun for the renewal of Eliot House, whose residents will become the next group acquainted with living in temporary, dispersed quarters. Kirkland’s renovation will conclude Phase I of the House Renewal process, with a second phase planned for the River Modern buildings—Mather House, Leverett Towers, and New Quincy—and a distant Phase III for the Radcliffe Quadrangle.

In Allston, meanwhile, the University and developer Tishman Speyer have recently begun to plan the ERC’s second phase, promising still more labs, offices, and apartments in the area. Rodrigues said it was not yet certain how many phases would ultimately follow, since several developable acres remain beyond the next five acres of planned development. “We’re just going to be responsive to the market,” he said. “Real estate is super cyclical. You try to catch a cycle when it’s in front of you—and then you kind of hold your breath when you fall behind the cycle.”

by Jack R. Trapanick

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The Changing Campus

Mapping the Human Brain

jennifer_carling@harvard.edu — Tue, 06 Aug 2024 17:51:07 +0000

Mapping the Human Brain jennifer_carli… Tue, 08/06/2024 - 13:51

Might memories and habitual actions be hardwired into the brain’s physical structure? Knowles professor of molecular and cellular biology Jeff Lichtman thinks it’s likely. He and colleagues spent the past decade analyzing one cubic millimeter of cerebral cortex (about the volume of a poppy seed) to create the first detailed map of connections in the human brain. Their analysis has revealed numerous complex structures of great beauty and unknown purpose: nerve fibers growing in whorls, as if circling in place as they grew before settling on a path to connect with other cells; a new class of neurons with receptors (dendrites) that point only in two, diametrically opposed directions, and aligned with nerve fibers in an unconnected, underlying layer of white matter (none of the scientists has even a theory as to why this alignment exists); and powerful multisynaptic connections, rare instances when nerve fibers make as many as 50 or more connections to a single cell.

Their observations have upended assumptions about how the brain is wired. “Many people expect science to resolve, to answer, to cure,” reflects Lichtman, but in this case, simply describing nature has revealed that the brain is “more complicated than we thought.”

A single neuron (gray) showing all its synaptic connections with other cells. Excitatory axons (green, yellow connection sites) and inhibitory axons (blue, white connection sites) are shown. | Image courtesy of Jeff Lichtman

They discovered that glial cells, which protect nerve cells, outnumber neurons two to one. But much of what the researchers found eludes explanation. Most of the connections in the brain can be characterized as weak—a single synaptic connection from a nerve fiber to a cell. But Lichtman and colleagues observed a few very strong connections with many synapses for every cell, that would allow information to flow through the brain very quickly. “And maybe,” says Lichtman, “that is what learned information is, what memories actually are.”

Techniques in Brain Mapping

Surgeons removed the tissue used in the analysis from the temporal lobe of a 45-year-old woman to gain access to an underlying lesion. After infusing and preserving the sample with a hardening resin, the researchers used a diamond knife to slice it into more than 5,000 sections, thinner than a thousandth of a human hair. “Any thicker,” says Lichtman, “and we can’t actually follow the wires through.” Each slice was scanned with a purpose-built multibeam electron microscope (the world’s first when the experiment began) at a resolution so high, he said, that to see all the detail in just one slice would require an array 750 laptop screens wide by 500 high. Creating the images took six months, running the equipment 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Then came the hard part.

To generate the 1.4 petabyte dataset describing the wiring of this millionth-part of a human brain, researchers at Google, led by neuroscientist Viren Jain, developed novel neural networking techniques to detect the objects within each slice and stitch them together to render a three-dimensional space. They used “flood-filling neural network” technology to color the cells, nerve fibers, and blood vessels, Lichtman explains, “basically pouring paint into these objects across many sections.” The seed-sized sample they imaged contains 57,000 cells, 230 millimeters of blood vessels, and 150 million synapses, the junctions between neurons where electrical and chemical signals are transmitted. Lichtman says in idle moments, instead of playing solitaire, he navigates the publicly available inner space they’ve mapped using a tool called Neuroglancer.

With faster equipment and a greatly expanded group of global collaborators, Lichtman next wants to map the entire brain of a mouse, which would generate a thousand times more data. Mapping the whole human brain is not yet possible: the data produced would overwhelm current storage systems. But a basic question that such work would help answer is how the human brain differs from those of other animals.

Theories on Memory Storage and Learning

Lichtman suspects that the main difference is the abundance of associational cortex in humans, the tissue primarily devoted to storing information. “To put it another way,” he says, “humans are the adult animal with the least amount of circuitry that is entirely designed based on genes.” Instead, human brain circuitry is shaped by what has been learned. “Humans are obligate learners,” he continues. A human raised without sight, who is then permitted to see, for example, can look at a triangle and perceive the image, without understanding what it is. “They have to place their finger at one apex, and then count how many times they move their hand to know it is a triangle. They don’t gestalt it as a triangle. It’s like trying to understand the meaning of a word when you are just starting to read, and you have to phonetically sound out each letter to know what the word is. That’s something not evident in other animals, this enormous requirement for learning in order to do even the basic tasks of thinking, because we think in a language that is learned.”

Lichtman, recently named dean of science in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, believes that this learning is embedded in the physical structure of the brain’s wiring. “I don’t see what the alternative would be,” he says. “If brain activity stops, as when a child suffers anoxia after falling into a frozen pond,” but rescuers get the heart beating again, “all the memories already stored are stably maintained.” A once-popular theory, that memories are stored as protein molecules, hasn’t withstood scrutiny. On the other hand, the superabundant connections in the brain, he said, “can certainly store information.” Lichtman theorizes that the rare neurons with many synaptic connections he and his colleagues observed during their mapping project represent things that have been learned, such as reflexively “taking your foot off the gas and putting it on the brake automatically” at a red light.

Observational science of the type that these researchers are pursuing is sometimes characterized pejoratively. But “Darwin spent a huge amount of time looking at finch beaks and shell shapes—that’s why he came up with a really good hypothesis,” Lichtman says. Sometimes, the best humans can do when confronting the complexity of the natural world, he continues, is to describe it—until it is no longer surprising. In the case of their own research, he notes, “We have just made our first baby steps into these brains. And everything is surprising.”

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In Search of the Social Microbiome

jennifer_carling@harvard.edu — Tue, 06 Aug 2024 17:51:07 +0000

In Search of the Social Microbiome jennifer_carli… Tue, 08/06/2024 - 13:51

The microbial flora that inhabits the gut, skin, lung, and oral cavity of humans and other animals is thought to play a critical role in regulating metabolism and immunity. Any disruption or imbalance in that mix, a growing body of literature suggests, may trigger inflammation that contributes to conditions such as diabetes, heart disease, and cancer.

A new theory expands on this view, suggesting that social connections profoundly influence the composition of a person’s microbiome—at least as much as the growing number of probiotic supplements found on grocery store shelves.

Doctoral student Amar Sarkar and colleagues describe this concept as the social microbiome. Although people often focus on avoiding catching harmful bacteria or viruses from others, one of the intriguing hypotheses they recently advanced in Cell is that the social microbiome may contribute positively to health outcomes, independent of genes and lifestyle factors.

“Some keys to human evolution are encoded outside the human genome,” said Sarkar’s adviser, associate professor of human evolutionary biology Rachel Carmody. Culture plays a critical role, but the trillions of microbes that have taken up residence in and on humans likely play a part as well.

Since 2016, members of Carmody’s lab have explored how diet influences the microbiome, and how the microbiome in turn affects human metabolism [see “You Are What (Your Microbes) Eat,” November-December 2023, page 30]. But their conception of the microbiome has recently expanded from thinking about its role for individuals to considering how individuals in the same social group might come to develop similar microbiomes—and what that might mean for the health of the community.

The social microbiome is the collective sum of the microbiomes within an interacting group of organisms: family, classmates, or friends.

Sarkar, Carmody, and teaching fellow Cameron McInroy define the social microbiome as the collective sum of the microbiomes within an interacting group of organisms: family members, classmates, or a circle of friends. But there could also be transmission from more remote connections, such as an international traveler or another species—to take a recent, ominous instance, from a flock of chickens or a cow to a farmworker.

Sarkar synthesized the existing evidence on the various modes of spread—from mother to infant, direct contact between individuals, or contact with microbes on a doorknob or table—and the effects of that transmission, which often have surprising impacts on metabolism.

“Microbes that actually confer or improve sensitivity to certain forms of cancer therapy are also shown to be socially transmissible,” he said. Certain bacteria commonly found in the gut have also been shown to modulate patients’ responses to vaccines and other drugs used to treat Parkinson’s Disease, heart failure, and depression (see “The Sleuth,” July-August 2021, page 36).

Another example pertains to obesity, which often occurs in families and in social networks, a phenomenon often attributed to genetics and shared habits such as an affinity for sugary sodas or video games. But it too, could be driven by microbial exchange during social association.

Although no one has tested this hypothesis in humans, McInroy pointed to one of his favorite examples, a study in which fecal flora from a pair of human twins, one lean and one obese, was fed to germ-free mice. The mice exposed to microbes from the lean twin stayed thin, while their counterparts put on weight. “So, when obese and lean mice are then co-housed, the obese mice actually lose weight, in part by taking on some of these lean microbes,” explained McInroy. “It’s proof that social interactions and the community of people you surround yourself with can have real implications for host phenotype” (the observable characteristics of an individual that spring from interactions between his genes and the environment).

Conducting such research can be challenging outside the laboratory, where it’s harder to control interactions among study subjects. If a scientist finds that several research subjects living together have similar biomes, is that a result of eating similar foods or direct transmission among close contacts?

Sarkar described the approach to answering this question. Metagenomic sequencing, which involves sequencing the entire genome (not just a single gene) of each of the microbes found in a fecal sample, can help track the spread of gut microbes between two individuals. “Metagenomics lets us describe genetic mutations across the entire genome,” he said. Because these mutations are unique to an individual bacterium, explained Sarkar, “If two people have bacteria belonging to the same species and those bacteria have the same pattern of mutations across the whole genome, then we can be confident that they are clonemates.” That, he said, is “the gold standard for transmission.”

His next project will enable him to explore the influence of social connections on the microbiomes of individuals living in a wild population. As part of a collaboration with assistant professor of human evolutionary biology Martin Surbeck, who studies bonobo social behavior at a field site in the Congo, Sarkar will perform metagenomic sequencing on bonobo fecal samples. He’ll then examine characteristics of these primates’ microbiomes based on their family social ties and detailed behavioral data collected by Surbeck’s research team. The data will be an important step toward developing a better understanding of how social microbial transmissions can ultimately lead to new knowledge and even therapies for diseases such as cancer and diabetes that aren’t typically thought of as communicable.

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Climate Change’s Crippling Costs

jennifer_carling@harvard.edu — Tue, 06 Aug 2024 17:51:05 +0000

Climate Change’s Crippling Costs jennifer_carli… Tue, 08/06/2024 - 13:51

Economists, including the late research professor of economics Martin Weitzman and William Nordhaus of Yale, began in the 1990s to consider the potential economic effects of climate change. By their rough estimates and a large body of subsequent work, each 1-degree Celsius rise in world temperature would reduce world gross domestic product (GDP) by 1 to 3 percent.

But for assistant professor of economics Adrien Bilal and his collaborator, Diego Kanzig of Northwestern University, these estimates were at odds with the dire warnings from climate scientists who predict that climate change will “profoundly affect our lives and livelihoods,” Bilal explains. “We were puzzled by that disconnect.”

Economic Impact Estimates

Estimating the economic damages of climate change is critical; it allows policymakers to prepare for shifts in the economy and to make informed choices about efforts to reduce carbon emissions, Bilal says. “If climate damages are low, standard cost-benefit analysis will conclude that expensive decarbonization policies are not worthwhile,” he says. Yet if climate damages are high, such analysis will recommend bigger efforts to reduce carbon, he adds. Modeling the economic impact of climate change can also guide decisions about the resources society might invest to adapt to these changes, with greater investment in sea walls or air conditioning, for example.

Bilal and Kanzig take a fundamentally different approach to modeling the economic impacts of global climate change than their predecessors. They argue in a recent working paper that the economic damages of climate change are likely six times worse than previously estimated. A 1-degree Celsius rise in global temperature, they say, would lead to a 12 percent decline in world GDP.

What accounts for this dramatic difference? Bilal explains that most previous analyses were based soley on local temperature changes and the corresponding impact on local GDP. “If it’s a little hotter in Germany than in France this year, how does Germany’s GDP change?” he offers, as an example. But climate change involves a planet-wide rise in temperatures, which also generates more dramatic weather patterns than regional temperature fluctuations do. Global temperature increases warm the oceans, affecting evaporation, precipitation, and wind speeds. These conditions have led to more extreme and disruptive weather patterns, such as tropical storms and heat waves, Bilal says, “which are more costly to the economy.”

To model these effects, the researchers created a data set featuring 173 countries during the last 120 years, including land and ocean surface air temperature as well as economic data for each of the countries. They also examined the impact of temporary “temperature shocks” that affected the planet as whole: events such as the El Niño weather pattern, which traps warmer air in tropical areas of the Pacific Ocean, and volcanic eruptions. “When the volcano erupts, it blows sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere that blocks incoming sunlight,” Bilal says, cooling the Earth for up to two years. The economists then analyzed how the ensuing temperature shocks corresponded to income changes.

Bilal says he was surprised by how much more global temperature rise damaged GDP around the world, in contrast with local temperature shifts. “The effects are more uniformly detrimental,” he says. “It’s bad for almost everyone.” And when the researchers added in the possibility of a moderate 2 degrees of warming before the end of the century, this led to a decline in future GDP of between 30 and 50 percent by 2100, relative to the predicted baseline, Bilal says.

Projected Climate-Caused GDP Decline

In the U.S. alone, current GDP is roughly $25 trillion; with a modest growth rate and no climate change, this could grow to about $112 trillion by 2100, Bilal explains. A 50 percent decline in 2100 GDP relative to baseline means a loss of $56 trillion each year, which exceeds the current GDP. Such declines would leave individuals with “a 31 percent drop in purchasing power relative to a world without climate change,” Bilal adds. Such losses are “comparable to living in the 1929 Great Depression, forever,” he says. When converted into a dollar figure representing the damage incurred by each additional ton of carbon emissions, known as the social cost of carbon, this analysis settled on slightly more than $1,000 per ton—very different from the frequently cited figure of around $150 per ton. Because their findings are so dramatically different from those produced by traditional models, Bilal says he and his colleague spent many months confirming their results before releasing their research.

Once this working paper is published, Bilal hopes to consider the “critical” question of adaptation, or how human investments and actions in the face of climate change might improve the scenario described here. He notes that this current research does factor in historical adaptation, and their results were very stable. “That’s not very good news for the adaptation hypothesis because historically, it doesn’t seem that we’re adapting very much,” he says. And such measures are costly; Venice’s MOSE barrier system to protect the city from devastating floods cost roughly $8 billion and has had mixed success.

Still, “there are many channels through which societies can adapt,” including in-place measures such as air conditioning and coastal defense, or migratory strategies such as relocation to less-exposed places, and investment shifts that favor safer locations.

“However, how much adaptation will offset losses from climate change overall,” Bilal says, “is still an open question.”

by Erin O'Donnell

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Own Goals

jennifer_carling@harvard.edu — Tue, 06 Aug 2024 17:51:05 +0000

Own Goals jennifer_carli… Tue, 08/06/2024 - 13:51

Harvard had enough problems last academic year without making matters worse for itself. Yet after handling the pro-Palestinian encampment in the Old Yard from April 24 to May 14 reasonably well (the locked gates isolated the protest, and after some talks it dispersed without heavy-handed policing), the University’s way of disciplining the participants subsequently was a mess. It takes some explaining to detail why this was so. But the work has to be done if the University, already facing a daunting agenda, is to live up to its values and avoid scoring more own goals.

To begin, bear these principles and practices in mind.

First, the governing norm here is the University Statement on Rights and Responsibilities—the importance of which Alan M. Garber and the deans underscored last January 19: less than three weeks into his interim presidency (see harvardmag.com/rules-protest-24). That foundational statement emerged from the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) after the chaos of April 1969: campus disruptions far more violent, and far more threatening to Harvard’s ability to operate, than anything experienced in the past 12 months.

Second, notwithstanding the institutional scope of those norms, the University Statutes (its bylaws) delegate discipline to each faculty. That is part of what is meant by Harvard’s decentralization.

Third, in deference to the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA, 1974), the University and the schools refuse to talk about discipline.

Now consider the interaction of these parameters last spring. On May 6, invoking an administrative sanction applied in situations such as medical incapacitation or nonpayment of term bills, Garber advised the protestors that they risked being placed on “involuntarily leave” from their schools. Once they decamped, he asked schools to reinstate those placed on such leaves May 10—and further said he would “ask disciplinary boards within each school to evaluate expeditiously, according to their existing practices and precedents, the cases of those who participated in the encampment.”

The College’s Administrative Board did so promptly. But because neither it nor other Harvard academic entities announce or comment on disciplinary actions, even for anonymized groups of students, these were the results:

• No one in the community had any inkling of what specific actions were being punished, individual aggravating or extenuating factors, the range of punishments, or the number of people affected. The educational rationale for creating and applying a disciplinary process (to encourage behavior aligned with standards, not to have to compel compliance by cracking down on repeated violations) was simply thrown away: a huge fail for a teaching institution. Compared to prior protests over fossil-fuel divestment, living wages for campus staff, or investments in apartheid South Africa (including sit-ins, a blockade, and a prolonged Yard “shanty”), the past year’s demonstrations divided groups of students from one another far more directly, and brought forth evidence of hateful bias directed at Jews and Israelis, Palestinians and Muslims. This would have been a good time to clarify Harvard’s norms and rules and their enforcement.

• Communication about the punishments was outsourced to those directly affected, who are of course participants and partisans. Thus everyone outside the proceedings learned via protestors’ statements and social media posts, and subsequent Crimson reporting, that 13 undergraduates placed on suspension or probation would be ineligible to receive their diplomas on May 23 (and could be kept from doing so for multiple semesters). This was portrayed as unusually severe discipline; inconsistent with the sedate nature of the encampment itself and with the consequences for previous cohorts of undergraduate protestors; and sneaky double-dealing by the administration after lifting the involuntary leaves.

• On May 20, enough FAS faculty members gathered at the routine degrees meeting to secure a vote overriding the Ad Board. The Corporation on May 22 ruled that action had not restored the affected protestors to “good standing” so they could not graduate—and Commencement proceeded with blistering critiques from the stage and a sizable walkout by sympathetic students and faculty members (“Locked In,” July-August, page 17).

Nor did that end matters. The schools proceed at their own pace. On June 25, Harvard Out of Occupied Palestine (HOOP) announced that 10 Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (GSAS) students were placed on probation for their role in the encampment. That raised anew questions about whether discipline varies among Harvard schools (probation is less severe than suspension, and sources who refuse to be identified have claimed that professional school participants were merely admonished or warned)—a matter that cannot be answered without information on what actions resulted in each kind of discipline.

Then, on July 9, HOOP social media reported that the Ad Board had undone its decision to suspend five undergraduates (reducing their punishment to probation), and shortened other students’ probations. (When students are required to withdraw or are put on probation for more than one term, they can appeal to FAS’s Faculty Council. It determines whether the Ad Board erred procedurally or imposed sanctions inconsistent with its usual practices. Absent further enlightenment, this appears to be what happened here.) As a result, the Corporation found that 11 of the 13 affected seniors had been restored to good standing and conferred their degrees on July 23—exactly two months late (see harvardmag.com/degrees-protestors-24).

For those keeping score at home, at this point no one in the community at large knows precisely what kinds of behaviors resulted in what kinds of punishments—and it remains possible that the University standards were interpreted and enforced unevenly. The process has deepened some faculty members’ distrust of, and even contempt for, the Corporation—at a time when professors are considering whether a University faculty senate might enhance their role in governance. And now it appears that FAS’s disciplinary process was applied to this past spring’s protests in a way that didn’t meet the faculty’s own standards.

Shouldn’t an institution proud of its history of excellence be dismayed by this confusion and the missed opportunities? It should surely worry about possible external consequences. Harvard is the subject of multiple U.S. House of Representatives committee investigations of antisemitic incidents and other biased behavior on this campus since last October. The U.S. Department of Education has inquiries underway, and private lawsuits have been filed, too. Finally, the Harvard Jewish Alumni Alliance has demanded that the University “enforce [its] codes of conduct uniformly and without exception” (see harvardmag.com/antisemitism-reports-24). Will a “no comment” in response to questions from these quarters about the recent proceedings suffice?

None of this need have happened. A brief review of Harvard’s history, readily available during a quick visit to University Archives, reveals the different path taken in the wake of the 1969 convulsions. Given the obvious threat then to Harvard’s mission (the student seizure of University Hall, forcible expulsion of deans, ransacking of confidential files) and the administration’s decision to bring in state police to arrest the demonstrators, the FAS’s “Committee of Fifteen” faculty and students assessed the crisis—and took decisive action. The interim Statement of Rights and Responsibilities, for the College and GSAS (precursor to today’s University statement), was drafted and adopted by that June 9. By September 30, FAS had enacted an interim Committee on Rights and Responsibilities (CRR) for all disciplinary matters coming under the statement: a recognition that the issues differed from the sorts of academic infractions brought before the Ad Board.

Under incredible duress, the CRR compiled a remarkable record. According to its report of activity through June 1, 1970, it acted on 161 complaints of violations stemming from six “major incidents,” ranging from an obstructive demonstration in the College dean’s office, seizures of University Hall, and obstructive picketing to a demonstration at the Center for International Affairs (CFIA, then based on Divinity Avenue) that interrupted a Board of Overseers’ visiting committee meeting and entailed protestors hounding the center director and committee members from the meeting site to Harvard Square as they fled seeking safety. Following carefully crafted procedures, for each of these cases (and subsequent ones), the CRR issued public reports explaining its decisions—omitting the names of students.

Reading those typescripts now, one perceives a developing jurisprudence: elaborating the punishments meted out; articulating norms (for example, as adopted by FAS that April, the understanding that “intense personal harassment…amount[ing] to grave disrespect for the dignity of others” also be considered an “unacceptable violation of the personal rights on which the University is based”); and clarifying how the norms and reviews of complaints work. The rulings on the CFIA confrontation, for instance, detail distinct punishments as “explained by variations in the degree of involvement in the demonstration (plus, in a few cases, the existence of a record of prior disciplinary action).” Five students who were in the meeting room, but lacked prior records and did not otherwise behave unacceptably, were given suspended requirements to withdraw for two terms; one student with a prior disciplinary record who disrupted the meeting by shouting and followed participants, harassing them, was required to withdraw for the rest of the term and the following one; and a student who was even more physically disruptive was separated from Harvard for at least a year, with his return subject to a majority FAS vote.

Beyond the immediate value of such narratives, they suggest other lessons. In the face of grave damage to the essence of the University, writ large, faculty members assumed responsibility for repairing it, forming a clear perspective on the risks and improving processes to address them. One measure of their success: the Corporation amended the University Statutes to authorize the CRR as a disciplinary body for such cases. Both developments suggest a capacity for innovation and institutional suppleness not as apparent today.

The CRR was not perfect. Its reach was confined to FAS: the College, Radcliffe, and GSAS. Disruptions persisted. In time, students became critical of the committee and its processes, and withdrew from membership.

Nonetheless, the precedent has obvious value today. Amid the new and threatening challenges to the academic enterprise in the late 1960s, faculty leaders created the statement and CRR, which together clarified the conditions essential to the University’s recovery. Pre-FERPA, the CRR communicated informatively and educationally without trespassing on students’ privacy. Surely there are ways today to overcome the legalistic default that withholds all such information about disciplinary rulings from a community facing fresh challenges. And surely it makes some sense to distinguish University-level matters from those tied to each separate school’s academic needs—and to adjudicate the former in a consistent, understandable way.

The University announced on July 18 that a procedure had been devised to breathe life into the little-known University Committee on Rights and Responsibilities as a fact-finding body for certain cases involving students from more than one school (fully reported at harvardmag.com/usrr-statement-24). Coverage isn’t universal and discipline still devolves to each faculty, but this is at least a first step toward lessening the problems exposed of late.

In recent months, this column has suggested that the University’s future leaders must be able to represent it well in an era of heightened political scrutiny of elite institutions. It has also suggested that, if necessary, a newly empowered provost or other officer might direct academic strategy across the schools, as the president focuses on an increasingly demanding public role.

However the Corporation and its presidents sort those matters out, the morass on display recently points to a third priority. Politely speaking, Harvard’s University- and school-level policies and disciplinary processes operate in ways that are opaque, perhaps inconsistent and unfair, suboptimal for educating anyone about norms of behavior, and likely bewildering to those outside the ivory tower: unbefitting a place that aspires to academic leadership. More generally, legacy policies and practices throughout Harvard (lack of procedural clarity, overlapping responsibilities, obtuse communications—or none) call out for sandblasting the rust off the USS Crimson’s hull. No sane president or provost wants to invest his or her term of office doing that grubby work. So, with the costs of inertia painfully on display, a third challenge to governance and leadership is determining who will be charged with overhauling procedures and practices, yanking the University into a rough-and-tumble twenty-first century.

After a troubling year, much must be done within the community to repair breaches among students, and to bridge fissures between students and administrators, faculty members and the governing boards, and Harvard and alumni. Unrewarding though the task seems, rebooting the disciplinary “system” now in place might be a good, high-payoff place to start—especially today.

—John S. Rosenberg

Closing note

Quotations from CRR reports courtesy of the Harvard University Archives.

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Harvard Names Alan M. Garber President

niko_yaitanes@harvard.edu — Fri, 02 Aug 2024 16:17:03 +0000

Harvard Names Alan M. Garber President niko_yaitanes@… Fri, 08/02/2024 - 12:17

Penny Pritzker, senior fellow of the Harvard Corporation, announced today that physician and economist Alan M. Garber ’77, Ph.D. ’82, appointed interim president last January 2 following the resignation of Claudine Gay, has been made president and will serve through the academic year ending June 30, 2027. A search for his successor will begin in the late spring or summer of 2026.

The Corporation’s decision to make him president in fact and in name should not come as a surprise. Garber, who was appointed provost in 2011, was the natural interim successor under those emergency circumstances. In the months since, he has steadied the University during an especially tumultuous year, characterized by the campus upheaval in the wake of the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel and ensuing war, Gay’s brief and controversial presidency, and the 20-day pro-Palestinian encampment in Harvard Yard and subsequent protests at Commencement.

Shortly after his appointment, Garber made a point of reemphasizing Harvard’s statement on rights and responsibilities, and its rules for protests, and appointed task forces on antisemitism and anti-Muslim, -Arab, and -Palestinian bias (read about their preliminary reports here). Under his interim provost, former Law School dean John F. Manning, one Harvard task force has promulgated a new policy on institutional voice, and a second one is exploring issues concerning academic freedom and civil discourse. And in the meantime, acting fully as president, as Garber had indicated he would, he has appointed a new vice president and general counsel, and new and interim deans; visited with alumni and donors domestically and abroad; and, in general, coped quietly with the continuing congressional and U.S. Department of Education investigations concerning antisemitism and other forms of bias on this and other campuses, lawsuits focusing the same issue, and a generally heightened atmosphere of political and other criticism directed with special intensity at Harvard.

At the same time, questions surrounding Gay’s appointment and the abrupt end of her presidency six months after its inception meant that it would be difficult to inaugurate yet another search for a new president any time soon, pending a thorough review of the governing boards’ process for identifying and vetting candidates (see the March-April commentary, “A Look in the Mirror”). And under the current conditions, with new and unprecedented external demands on universities—from political critics to concerned (and even hostile) donors—fresh thinking about how best to define their leaders’ experiences and skills ought to underpin any search. (Other institutions in similar circumstances, including Cornell and the University of Pennsylvania, have also appointed interim leaders while contemplating how best to organize searches for successors; the phenomenon is so widespread that the Chronicle of Higher Education just published a feature on interim leaders throughout the sector.)

The Senior Fellow’s Statement

In her message to the community, Pritzker wrote:

Alan has done an outstanding job leading Harvard through extraordinary challenges since taking on his interim presidential duties seven months ago. We have asked him to hold the title of president, not just interim president, both to recognize his distinguished service to the University and to underscore our belief that this is a time not merely for steady stewardship but for active, engaged leadership.

Over the last seven months, and for years before that, Alan has led with a deep concern for all members of the Harvard community, a strong devotion to enduring university ideals, and a paramount commitment to academic excellence. At an especially demanding moment for higher education, Harvard is very fortunate to benefit from his intellectual acumen and breadth of interests, his integrity and fair-mindedness, his equanimity and empathy, his decades-long devotion to the University, his extensive knowledge of its people and parts, and his ardent belief in the power of higher education and research—and their potential to improve the lives of people and communities near and far. His time in Mass Hall has demonstrated his clear-eyed determination both to help the University chart a course through troubled waters and to affirm the primacy of the teaching, learning, and research at Harvard’s heart.

Taking special care to note “especially helpful recent consultations with each of the deans as well as an array of faculty and alumni leaders from the various schools,” Pritzker continued, the governing boards, which met earlier today,

…have consistently heard praise for Alan’s qualities and how his leadership meets the current moment. People have highlighted his thoughtful and balanced judgment, his openness to different points of view, his even temperament in turbulent times, his concern for student well-being, his commitment to academic freedom and constructive dialogue, his recognition of diversity and inclusion as integral elements of academic excellence, his appetite for innovation, and his constant focus on the best interests of Harvard as a whole. Our recent consultations have strongly underscored the high regard in which Alan is held by a broad range of people who have watched him work and come to appreciate his strengths.

Addressing practical matters, she wrote:

…Alan will carry forward as president through the 2026-27 academic year and we will launch a full and wide-ranging search for his successor in the late spring or summer of 2026. We believe this plan will give Alan and his leadership team the opportunity to sustain and build momentum on a range of priorities and initiatives. It will also provide an ample interval for those of us on the Corporation to reflect, in consultation with others, on how best to approach the future presidential search, including how to ensure robust input from across Harvard and beyond.

She concluded by acknowledging the still-difficult circumstances under which Garber has agreed to serve:

As we all know, these remain challenging times. We have experienced significant divisions and pointed questions. We have hard work still ahead to reaffirm our core academic values and our collective focus on learning and scholarship. We must continue working to restore bonds of trust, to bridge divides, to combat forms of invidious hate and bias, and to foster a secure campus climate conducive to dialogue across differences. No less, we have more work ahead to amplify higher education’s contributions to the wider world and to shine light on why they matter.

And so, on behalf of the governing boards, she asked members of the community to “offer him your concerted support.”

Read Pritzker’s complete message here.

President Garber’s Message

In a separate, briefer note, President Garber said, “I write with a simple message of gratitude for the opportunity to lead Harvard as your president for the next three years. Serving the University is a great privilege. It is an honor to work with all of you to advance our mission and to strengthen our community.”

Consistent with Pritzker’s message, he tried to point the University toward a future focused squarely on its core academic mission and service to the larger society—a necessary, and probably welcome, rededication to institutional purposes even during a period of protracted division:

We believe in the value of knowledge, the power of teaching and research, and the ways that what we do here can benefit society. Those commitments matter today more than ever. Our work now is to focus on them with renewed vigor, rededicating ourselves to academic excellence. That excellence is made possible by the free exchange of ideas, open inquiry, creativity, empathy, and constructive dialogue among people with diverse backgrounds and views. This is a challenging time, one of strong passions and strained bonds among us. But I know that we are capable of finding our way forward together because we share a devotion to learning and because we recognize our pluralism as a source of our strength.

He committed himself to this work forcefully, writing, “I will do my utmost to ensure that we continue to advance knowledge and drive discovery even as we work to mend the fabric of our community.”

Read President Garber’s statement here.

Pritzker’s message referred to a “full and wide-ranging search for his successor” in 2026. A reasonable assumption is that Garber, having by then served three and a half years, will conclude his service in 2027 and not be a candidate in that search.

An associated Harvard Gazette article appears here.

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New Rules for Campus Use

max_krupnick@harvard.edu — Fri, 02 Aug 2024 13:54:39 +0000

New Rules for Campus Use max_krupnick@h… Fri, 08/02/2024 - 09:54

Though students are on summer recess, Harvard administrators have continued to grapple with the past academic year’s campus chaos. On August 1, executive vice president Meredith Weenick shared an updated slate of rules governing shared campus spaces. Prepared by the Harvard Office of the General Counsel and the Campus Space Working Group, the “Campus Use Rules” centralize many regulations that were already in place across the University, the document says.

Many of the new rules are routine and commonsense (students generally are not allowed to drink alcohol during university-wide events, use illegal drugs on campus, or start fires). But several regulations provide grounds for the University to restrict student protests like this spring’s 20-day pro-Palestine encampment. Before chalking on a sidewalk, pitching a tent, putting up an art exhibit, or using a public space, students must receive administrative approval, or else they may face consequences.

The New Rules

The following rules are among those included in the document:

Booking event space: “Requests to use space (indoor or outdoor) must be submitted in advance for approval….Approval of a request to use space should not be read as an endorsement of the event or its content.”
Building access/free flow of traffic: Events must not block entry to or movement within “buildings, classrooms, administrative offices, or other spaces.” Students may not block traffic (motor vehicles, bicycles, or pedestrians).
Camping: Camping is not allowed without permission, regardless of time or whether tents are used.
Chalking: “Individuals and organizations are not permitted to chalk, paint, engrave, or otherwise write or draw on any University property without prior written approval….Any such unauthorized markings will be removed.”
Exhibits/displays: “Campus exhibits or displays that are to be shown outside of a residential unit,” including lighting projections, must be approved. Exhibits are “generally” not allowed to “affix any items to University property,” including flag poles.
University identification cards: “All Harvard affiliates, including but not limited to faculty, staff, and students, must present a valid Harvard University identification card at the request of any properly identified University official.”
Noise: “Excessive noise may not disrupt the campus residences, academic spaces, childcare facilities, or University offices. Amplified sound is not permitted without prior approval including any necessary municipal permits, and requests for amplified sound will not be approved during reading or exam periods.”
Sponsorship: All events require a Harvard sponsor. “Co-sponsorship of an event by a Harvard affiliate or Harvard affiliate organization with a non-Harvard or unrecognized student group or individuals generally is not permitted on campus, nor is sponsorship by proxy, unless explicitly permissible under a local policy and if approval has been obtained to use the campus space in question.”

Organizations and individuals who do not comply with the rules, the document says, “may be held financially responsible for any resulting costs” and may be disciplined.

Harvard Out of Occupied Palestine, the organization that led the spring encampment, posted on Instagram about the new rules a few days before they were formally announced. “Not reading that, Free Palestine,” they wrote.

At the end of August, students will return to campus—at which point the community will begin to learn how the new regulations affect student protests.

Update Friday, August 2, 5:00 P.M.: A Harvard spokesperson emphasized that most of the rules within the document are not new, but instead are “reflective of already existing rules and policies.”

The New Rules in Perspective

In the meantime, the new rules themselves raise interesting questions. According to Weenick’s message to the community, the rules were compiled by “a cross-University Working Group consisting of administrative deans, student services leaders, and events and facilities officers.” Members were not identified, but conspicuously do not include any faculty input. Since the rules may affect what are commonly perceived as speech acts (such as chalking messages on a sidewalk), some faculty members may object to the substance and to the wholly administrative composition of the working group.

The rules may also lead to practical difficulties. To pose a seemingly trivial example, but one with wider implications: Will students be sanctioned for chalking a greeting to first-years when they move in later this month, or a Valentine’s Day message to a sweetheart? If they are not, but are sanctioned for messages encouraging peers to vote, endorsing a political candidate, or taking sides in a controversial war, what will that say about speech on campus? And how are Campus Services staff members expected to make those decisions and enforce them?

Some of the campus rules have been publicized throughout the summer on signs like this one (in front of Lamont Library).| PHOTOGRAPH BY MAX J. KRUPNICK/HARVARD MAGAZINE

Harvard’s new rules are part of similar moves on other campuses, as institutions respond to the fierce divisions over the war in the Middle East since last October 7. The University of Pennsylvania issued temporary rules banning campus encampments and is undertaking a wider review of its “open expression” policies, according to Inside Higher Education. And Indiana University (also according to IHE) adopted a new policy—in some ways less restrictive than Harvard’s new rules—that “bans camping that’s not part of a university event; prohibits ‘expressive activity’ outside of 6 a.m. to 11 p.m.; limits water-soluble chalk to sidewalks; forbids affixing ‘signs and symbols’ to the ground, university buildings, flagpoles and other structures; bans ‘light projections’ without university approval; and forbids temporary ‘structures and/or mass physical objects’ without university approval, which must be requested at least 10 days in advance.” Student violators face punishments ranging up to expulsion, and staff members found to have violated the policies could be fired.

Read Harvard’s full set of campus-use rules here.

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The Medical Civil Rights Act

niko_yaitanes@harvard.edu — Thu, 01 Aug 2024 13:38:22 +0000

The Medical Civil Rights Act niko_yaitanes@… Thu, 08/01/2024 - 09:38

In 2015, Robert Dluhy ’62, a physician at Harvard Medical School (HMS) and Brigham and Women’s Hospital, watched in horror with much of the country as the story of 25-year-old Freddie Gray unfolded on national television. Gray, a black man, had been killed by a serious spinal cord injury after Baltimore police officers ignored his pleas for medical attention as he rode with them, handcuffed and unsecured, to the police station. Like other outraged Americans protesting Gray’s killing at the time, Dluhy was preoccupied with what tangible changes could help create a safer future for the hundreds of Americans who die in police custody each year.

As attorneys announced a fight for justice for Gray following his death, and commentators debated the facts and legal perspectives of the case, Dluhy remained fixated on the moments before Gray’s death. As a medical professional, he was struck by the officers’ refusal to call in medical services for a man in obvious distress. “What he doesn’t need is a lawyer,” his daughter, Leonore, recalled Dluhy saying at the time. “He needed a doctor.”

Dluhy soon learned that Gray did not have any legal right to request and be provided medical care while in police custody, even while in a state of observable crisis—nor indeed did any American in 2015. It’s since then that Dluhy (before his death two years ago), Leonore ’92, his wife Deborah Ph.D. ’76, and a coalition of other Harvard alumni have been working to secure that right for Americans detained, jailed, and incarcerated, thousands of whom die each year because of delayed or denied medical care.

The Medical Civil Rights Initiative, as their group is known, is going state by state across the country and directly to Congress in an effort to pass the Medical Civil Rights Act, which would give anyone experiencing an emergency medical condition during contact with law enforcement officers—from a traffic stop to arrest or incarceration—the right to emergency medical care.

Aside from saving lives, they say, the bill, if enacted, will also benefit nearly every other party involved with such tragedies. People’s right to care will become clearer and easier to assert than it is now, since the patchy application of the Eighth and Fourteenth amendments provides only loose guarantees to “reasonable and adequate care” once in custody. Governments and taxpayers will save billions in settlements and other payouts to the families of those who die while in custody. Law enforcement officers will have a clear duty to address anyone facing a medical crisis: once they summon emergency medical care, it will be up to emergency medical personnel to determine the next steps. That helps officers avoid the liability of exercising their own judgment on whether a person is having a genuine crisis. After all, officers by nature routinely encounter people in some form of distress; it’s difficult, and not their primary expertise, to differentiate who is in medical danger.

As Leonore Dluhy explained in an interview, their bill presents a different approach to recent police reforms meant to increase the accountability and transparency of law enforcement. “This isn’t always about officer misconduct,” she said. “Often this is about a lack of statutory clarity.”

“If I show you body cam [footage]of some of the most prominent custodial deaths and other deaths that you may not have heard about in the country, and I asked you, ‘Do you think that the officer understood that this person was in a medical emergency?’, often the answer is no,” she continued. Yet, if a person in such an emergency has been stopped or detained by law enforcement officers, they are not free, meaning the officer alone is empowered to decide what the subject can do or whether to call emergency medical services. Hence, the initiative seeks to take the survival of subjects out of the hands of law enforcement officers’ discretion by establishing a statutory right to such care.

The argument for their bill seems obvious to the team of doctors—plus a former justice—involved in the initiative. Their ranks include Federman distinguished professor of medicine and medical education Ronald Arky; Julie Ingelfinger ’64, deputy editor at the New England Journal of Medicine; Justice Frederick Brown ’54, LL.B. ’67, Massachusetts’s first African-American appellate judge; and Steve Wright ’64, former chief of medicine at Brigham and Women’s Faulkner Hospital; and the Dluhys. As a group, they’ve been working to educate and advocate to advance their bill around the country, according to Wright—although it has twice failed in the Massachusetts State Legislature.

In an interview, Brown, now retired, said that the group had been frustrated with inefficiencies in the Massachusetts legislature, where bills with significant support are often stalled. Advocates from the initiative also pointed to the difficulty of effectively communicating the need for their bill in light of recent measures many states have already passed promoting police accountability, leaving some convinced that the issue has already been addressed.

Still, the team remains hopeful. After Randy Cox, a black man, was paralyzed two years ago by injuries exacerbated by officers’ reckless treatment, Connecticut passed their bill unanimously in 2023, and it is now law in the state—even though the passage only came after Cox suffered irreparable harm. As a result of the incident, the state ended up paying the largest police misconduct settlement in U.S. history: $45 million. The initiative says cases like these—where enormous costs to individual life and to taxpayers result from lack of medical care in law enforcement interactions—should serve as a clear reason for support.

“You could be driving home and have a stroke,” Leonore Dluhy said. “Would you want an officer to have a legal duty to immediately summon EMS for you? Or do you want to leave it up to the discretion of the officer and to policy?”

She cited a host of cases in which there have been tens of millions paid to settle cases like Cox’s, which have continued at a steady pace. The family of Tyre Nichols, a black man killed by law enforcement after they beat him and failed to deliver immediate care, is now suing the City of Memphis for $550 million. And in a recent verdict, a jury awarded a historic $82 million to the family of Gwendolyn Young, a black woman who died in jail after failing to receive needed medical care. The jury, while emphasizing the tragedy of her death with their verdict, also appeared to recognize a key point Dluhy’s initiative is hoping to make: “if the states don’t fix the law, we’ll just keep paying out.”

by Jack R. Trapanick

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Psychedelics for Healing

Olivia Farrar — Tue, 30 Jul 2024 19:15:11 +0000

Psychedelics for Healing Olivia Farrar Tue, 07/30/2024 - 15:15

Psychedelic drugs, once considered primarily recreational, are making their way into clinical settings—and increasingly, helping patients with a range of conditions.

Last fall, Harvard launched the Study of Psychedelics in Society and Culture: an interdisciplinary effort across the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Harvard Law School, and Harvard Divinity School. At the end of this month, a three-day intensive training camp entitled “Psychedelics Bootcamp 2024” will take place on campus, as part of the work of the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law and Policy, Biotechnology & Bioethics’s Project on Psychedelics Law and Regulation (POPLAR), which brings together leading scholars to explore and develop psychedelics law and policy.

In this interview, I. Glenn Gohen, Attwood and Williams professor of law and faculty director of the Petrie-Flom Center, discusses legal, ethical, and policy issues surrounding the use of psychedelics in medicine and society.

The therapeutic use of psychedelics for psychiatric treatment dates back to the early 20th century, despite their cultural rise in the 1960s, as Jerrold Rosenbaum, Stanley Cobb professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School discussed with Harvard Magazine in 2021. In recent years, clinical trials for psychedelics such as MDMA and psilocybin have intensified, with companies seeking FDA approval. The approval process is complex due to added ethical and patenting dilemmas.

Informed consent is particularly challenging due to the profound effects of psychedelics, which are influenced by the psychological state (“set”) and physical environment (“setting”). Concerns include patient vulnerability, potential misconduct, and equitable access, especially for disadvantaged groups. Trials face difficulties such as "functional unblinding," where participants recognize their treatment status, affecting trial integrity.

In a blinded study, information is withheld from participants, so they have less potential to influence study results. Randomized clinical trials (RCT) are the gold standard in evidence-based medicine—and usually operate as blind or double-blind studies. However, this is complicated in the case of psychedelics: most participants know they’re on a drug, even when they aren’t informed. “The reality [is] that the average participant probably knows which of the two states they are in,” says Cohen. Even a psychotherapist knows that they’re experiencing a psychedelic.

This becomes especially complicated in the context of vulnerable populations—patients who might benefit from psychedelic therapy but could also be easily coerced into taking part in a study or (or even using the treatments should they become available). Veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), for example, could be greatly benefited by drugs like psilocybin, which has been proven to alleviate some of the symptoms of the condition. Similarly, those in palliative care or hospice might find their transitions eased by certain psychedelic drugs, which promote feelings of wellbeing and connectedness surrounding extreme pain and death. Cohen emphasizes the need for tailored protocols to address unique needs and risks for these demographics.

Cohen outlines three models for integrating psychedelics into society: medical (FDA approval and licensed therapists), religious (legal exemptions for religious use), and personal (non-medical, non-religious use). Beyond clinical and legal frameworks, Cohen addresses the cultural dimensions of psychedelic use, stressing the need for inclusive governance and benefit-sharing to respect indigenous knowledge and practices. Indigenous communities, historically custodians of psychedelic traditions, face dilemmas of cultural appropriation and exploitation amid growing commercial interests.

“In the cosmology of some of these communities, [psychedelics] are not thought of as drugs. [They’re] thought about as something sacred,” says Cohen—as belonging to the community. “And there are also populations where… only this shamanic figure takes [psychedelics], rather than the people who are seeking to be helped.”

Ethical frameworks, regulatory foresight, and cultural sensitivity are essential for responsible and equitable integration of psychedelics into mental health treatment. These are among the issues that will be explored at Harvard Law School’s psychedelics bootcamp.

by Olivia Farrar

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The Cost of Political Violence

niko_yaitanes@harvard.edu — Fri, 26 Jul 2024 08:40:45 +0000

The Cost of Political Violence niko_yaitanes@… Fri, 07/26/2024 - 04:40

After a shocking assassination attempt earlier this month against Donald Trump, rising political violence is once again in the news. On Thursday afternoon, the Harvard Kennedy School convened a panel of scholars to discuss how Americans’ attitudes have changed—alarmingly, in some cases—during the past decade or so, and what strategies exist to defuse election-related violence in deeply polarized societies. The bottom line? “The fight to uphold democracy is all of our fights,” said Hardy Merriman, president of the nonprofit International Center on Nonviolent Conflict. “It is not just a fight that can be won through institutions.”

Echoing that sentiment, Johns Hopkins political scientist Lilliana Mason said, “It requires all of us. The more we think about it as our responsibility, rather than ‘Someone needs to fix this,’ the more we will be on a stronger path.”

Moderated by Stanton professor of the First Amendment Erica Chenoweth, the conversation was part of a webinar series on the 2024 election hosted by the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation. Besides Merriman and Mason, the panel included Sarah Birch, a political scientist at King’s College London whose 2020 book, Electoral Violence, Corruption, and Political Order, examined how threats and force have been used in electoral processes around the globe since World War II.

Much of Thursday’s discussion focused on shifts in public attitudes toward political violence and the ways in which it has already eroded society. Recent studies, including some conducted by Mason, indicate that a growing number of Americans would tolerate physical attacks against members of the opposing party. The vast majority of people still reject violence, but polls show that about 15 percent approve of it. Most of them would never actually engage in violence, said Mason, “But the thing that concerns us is that they live in communities, and social norms are shaped in those communities.” As approval of violence goes up, social enforcement against it goes down.

Mason has been collecting data since 2017 on U.S. attitudes toward political violence and in 2022 she co-authored Radical American Partisanship: Mapping Violent Hostility, Its Causes, and the Consequences for Democracy. One finding she and her colleagues noted was a correspondence between attitude shifts and political events. “So, we saw a spike in approval of violent threats around both of Trump's impeachments, particularly among Republicans,” she said. “When partisans feel that their group is being threatened, they become more approving of violence.” But even apart from specific triggering events, Mason’s data showed that the more general increase in approval of political violence “really was mainly during Trump's administration,” she said. “What we saw were sort of gradually increasing levels of violence throughout 2017 to 2020. And then, during Biden's administration, we saw those feelings kind of simmer down.” The researchers’ most recent data, from June 2024, showed positive attitudes toward violence “ticking back up again,” she added, “which is not surprising during an election season.”

More alarming, Mason said, were the skyrocketing numbers when she and her colleagues asked people whether they approved of violence if the opposing party had used violence first. “In our 2020 data, we saw it go from 15 percent to 40 percent [of respondents] approving of violence,” in retaliation for violence from the other party. In the data from this June, the approval rates rose from about 20 percent to 60 percent, she said, “Both Democrats and Republicans saying, ‘If the other side starts it, then I think it's okay.’ And that's the first time we've ever seen it be over half of respondents saying, ‘Yeah, maybe.’”

One problem, Birch noted, is that, until recently, rising political violence in countries like the United States had been largely neglected by political science. “Most of the people who study electoral violence don’t also study democracy, and sometimes they don't even include established democracies in their data set,” she said. As a consequence, there’s been a lack of analysis. When she took a closer look at recent data, she said, “I discovered, to my horror, that electoral violence has actually increased quite a lot over the last 15 years in established democracies. …This is an area that really calls out for urgent attention by scholars.”

There are some things that scholars have discerned about violence in democracies, though: “It does not tend to be coordinated and orchestrated by political elites,” Birch said. “the way it usually is in other parts of the world where it's more prevalent.” And scholars have noted how violence or fear of violence lowers voter turnout during elections, a fact that complicates the decision-making of researchers and journalists who communicate with the public about threats of violence. “If we talk up the risk, we might actually be complicit in creating this atmosphere, where people are afraid.” But many questions remain unanswered, she said, including about the role that campaign rhetoric plays in attitudes toward political violence. “To my mind, perhaps the most interesting unanswered question is how the tenor of election campaigns and the discussions that take place between voters and between candidates during election campaigns might potentially indirectly contribute to electoral violence.”

In thinking about ways to push back against the growing acceptance of political violence, Merriman talked about the significance of the ballooning rate of violent threats. “Threats are right now, in my view, doing most of the damage,” he said. “The actual people being physically hurt or assaulted for their political views still is relatively low for a country of our size, but the threats have skyrocketed.” In 2017, he said, the number of threats recorded by the U.S. Capitol Police began rising sharply, and by 2022, had roughly doubled. That year the Capitol Police investigated about 7,500 threats: “Members of both parties, and every member of Congress received threats.” But only 46 threats, or 0.6 percent of the total, were prosecuted. The rest of the threats were made, he said, with “relative impunity.”

Many of the solutions that panelists described for countering acceptance of political violence turn out to be surprisingly simple. Having leaders condemn violence, consistently and forcefully, is powerful. “Most of our data has shown that it’s very easy for leaders to reduce approval of violence,” Mason said. “It’s quite simple. All they have to do is say, ‘Don’t do that.’ In survey experiments, we've repeatedly found this is effective.” And it works not only for national leaders: “Some of the most credible messengers…are people who are local and respected in communities,” said Merriman. “It may be better and more effective to have someone local to a community speaking a message rather than, for example, a celebrity or a state level official…. There’s a lot of power there.” Birch talked about the effectiveness in other countries of efforts to monitor and map hotspots of political electoral violence and then mobilize community leaders to encourage peace.

With limited government tools for dealing with threats—“the First Amendment protects lots and lots of scary things”—Merriman also emphasized the importance of solidarity. He is the author of “Harnessing Our Power to End Political Violence,” a guide to help people in communities across the country counter political violence. Ordinary citizens have the power to ensure that those who wield violent threats pay a social price. It’s also important that the victims of threats are supported. He and other speakers noted that a huge proportion of political violence and threats is directed at people who are not national figures like Trump, but poll workers and local election officials, who overwhelmingly are women and people of color. “We have an opportunity as citizens to shift the cost-benefit equation, particularly on the inciters and the threat-makers,” Merriman said. “You can really plan and do things strategically at the community level to increase the likelihood that political violence will backfire.”

Toward the end of the discussion, Birch summed it up this way: “It’s all about norms,” she said. “A community that will tolerate violence will get violence…. And so, I think it is down to every single citizen to condemn violence and to talk in such a way as to make it unacceptable.”

by lydia_gibson@harvard.edu

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Former Women’s Hockey Coach Sues Harvard

niko_yaitanes@harvard.edu — Tue, 23 Jul 2024 20:55:16 +0000

Former Women’s Hockey Coach Sues Harvard niko_yaitanes@… Tue, 07/23/2024 - 16:55

On Tuesday, former women’s hockey coach Katey Stone, who retired 13 months ago in the wake of fierce complaints from former players about emotional abuse, filed a lawsuit against Harvard in U.S. District Court in Massachusetts, alleging gender discrimination in the scrutiny that led to her departure. The suit claims that Stone was told she would be fired if she did not leave. Unnamed “Jane and John Doe” defendants are accused of defamation, and the suit asks for damages of $5 million.

“Up until now, my voice has not been heard,” said Stone at a press conference Tuesday afternoon, at which three former players also spoke in support: Kalley Armstrong ’15, Nicole Corriero ’05, and Jamie Hagerman Phinney ’03. “Over a year and a half ago, Harvard began a process that ultimately ended my career,” Stone continued. “This process of investigation, evaluation and scrutiny was rooted in gender bias.” She said as the controversy grew, following reports by The Boston Globe and The Athletic, Harvard officials pressed her to remain silent: “From the beginning, Harvard advised me to be a mere bystander as my decades of hard work commitment, dedication, and success were attacked.”

Katey Stone speaks at a press conference Tuesday. | SCREENSHOT BY HARVARD MAGAZINE

Stone accused the University of failing to defend her and then forcing her out over false allegations. “Harvard remained silent and became complicit in the defamation of their loyal and most decorated coach,” she said. “The loss of my career, my reputation, my ability to earn a living, doing the job I love is gut-wrenching. The damage has been real and affects me every single day.”

A Harvard spokesperson said the University does not comment on active litigation.

During 29 years at Harvard, Stone led the women’s hockey program to national prominence, winning 523 games—more than any other female coach in women’s hockey history—and training dozens of the sport’s biggest stars, including 24 all-American athletes, 15 Olympians, and six winners of the Patty Kazmaier award (which recognizes the top player in NCAA Division I women’s ice hockey). In 1999, she guided Harvard to a national championship, and under her, the team went to four other national title games. In 2014, she became the first woman to coach a U.S. Olympic hockey team and led the United States to a silver medal.

The Globe and Athletic investigations, published in January and March of last year, drew on interviews with dozens of former players, who detailed complaints of insensitivity and denigration; they said they had been body-shamed by Stone and that the coach had disciplined players in ways that were inconsistent and unfair. They claimed her treatment had affected their grades and academic performances, and that it led them to seek mental health care. The former players recounted instances of hazing and initiation practices that they said Stone had condoned, including forced alcohol consumption and “naked skates.” (Stone has said previously that she was unaware of any such practices.) The Globe reported that 14 recruited athletes had left the team since 2016, and the Crimson reported that of Harvard’s 40 athletic teams, the women’s hockey program had the lowest retention rate among members of the Class of 2023, at just 20 percent.

In March 2023, Harvard initiated an independent investigation into the alleged abuse, led by former federal prosecutor Katya Jestin, which did not find evidence that the team had fostered a culture of hazing. The investigation’s findings were announced on June 29 last year; Stone had announced her retirement three weeks earlier. At Tuesday’s press conference, Stone and her attorney, Andrew Miltenberg, criticized that timing.

The lawsuit also discusses an earlier internal investigation, launched in March 2022, after players had complained about Stone using the phrase “too many chiefs and not enough Indians” in the locker room, a remark that the lawsuit claims Stone immediately apologized for. The investigation concluded, according to the lawsuit, that Stone “did not create a toxic work environment and had not engaged in a ‘pattern of unprofessional conduct,’” although it recommended performance improvements. (That 2022 investigation was initiated by the then-dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences Claudine Gay; both the lawsuit and Miltenberg criticized Gay by name, noting the controversies of the past nine months that led to Gay’s own abrupt departure as University president.)

Harvard’s actions toward Stone and its handling of the allegations against her stand in “stark contrast” to its treatment of male coaches, the lawsuit claims. “Harvard’s attack on Coach Stone is part and parcel of a larger culture at the University wherein female coaches are undervalued, underpaid, heavily scrutinized, and held to a breathtakingly more stringent standard of behavior than their male counterparts,” the complaint says.

The lawsuit also claims that Stone’s coaching methods were subject to a level of scrutiny not imposed on male coaches or men’s teams. Although Harvard “permits, if not openly encourages, male coaches to use their discretion in how best to coach and motivate the players on their respective teams, Coach Stone was harshly punished and excoriated for engaging in the same coaching strategies and behaviors.”

This was a topic Stone alluded to in her own remarks at the press conference as well. “Coaches are always searching to find the balance between pushing too hard versus affirming mediocrity,” she said. “While cultural norms make it more difficult to set a high bar, women who are strong, competent, and competitive coaches were once looked up to as role models. Today, these female coaches are viewed by too many athletes, parents, and administrators as being harmful, even emotionally abusive. The coaching profession is losing excellent coaches at an alarming rate as the scrutiny grows more intense and biased compared to our male counterparts.”

The former players who spoke described Stone as tough but compassionate. “The Harvard women’s hockey program shaped me, gave me confidence, and taught me to really dig deep to understand myself and what made me special,” said Armstrong, a former Harvard team captain who now leads Armstrong Hockey, an organization for Canadian Indigenous youth. “I would not be where I am now if it were not for her, the chance she took on me, the guidance and support she’s offered, and her belief and confidence in me that I was missing in myself.”

Corriero recalled arriving at Harvard at 17 and struggling with imposter syndrome and a fear of failure. “I was grateful for the honesty that [Stone] always had and her emphasis on having to earn and work for the opportunities that you got,” Corriero said. “I was grateful for the confidence that she showed in me when I did not have that confidence in myself. I was also grateful for the times that she encouraged me to embrace roles and positions on the team that I wasn’t used to and that I didn’t particularly like, but I learned to accept because I knew it’d be for the betterment of the team.” A three-time all-American and former captain of Harvard’s team, Corriero is now an attorney in Toronto.

Hagerman Phinney, who stayed on as an assistant coach with the team after she graduated, played for 10 years with the U.S. national team and won a bronze medal in the 2006 Olympics. Now a college counselor for Belmont High School in Massachusetts, she spoke of Stone’s philosophy on the ice (“Your individual output is a direct reflection of the efforts of your teammates”) and, through tears, recalled how Stone had supported her family several years ago when Hagerman Phinney’s young son fell ill and died. “When you are at your lowest living through one of life’s most unfathomable cruelties, Katey Stone shows up,” she said. Later, she added, “Your players need you when they are in their most vulnerable moments, and that is why I stand beside her now.”

At the conclusion of the press conference, Miltenberg said his firm had not yet received a response to the lawsuit from Harvard. Asked what Stone seeks in filing suit, he said, “I think she wants her legacy back and a modicum of the respect and honor that she’s earned.”

by lydia_gibson@harvard.edu

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Harvard Confers 11 Undergraduate Degrees

niko_yaitanes@harvard.edu — Tue, 23 Jul 2024 14:18:37 +0000

Harvard Confers 11 Undergraduate Degrees niko_yaitanes@… Tue, 07/23/2024 - 10:18

Harvard has conferred degrees on 11 undergraduates who were denied their diplomas on May 23 because they were suspended or placed on probation for violating University standards pertaining to the statement of rights and responsibilities for actions related to the pro-Palestinian encampment in the Old Yard April 24 to May 14, and/or for other infractions (the University does not comment on student discipline, so the exact violations and penalties are not officially disclosed). Those penalties and subsequent events—a Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) vote May 20 objecting to the disciplinary decisions by the College Administrative Board that denied the affected undergraduates (13 in all) the right to graduate, the Corporation’s May 22 finding that the vote did not restore the students to “good standing” and so they could not graduate, and the ensuing protest speeches and walkout at Commencement—are summarized in “Locked In” (July-August, page 17).

The Crimson recently reported that students who had been suspended had their penalties lessened to probation, and those placed on probation had the length of those penalties reduced—presumably as a result of successful appeals. Students who are suspended or placed on probation for more than one term may appeal to FAS’s Faculty Council, which is charged with reviewing Ad Board decisions for any procedural errors, or for any apparent deviation from penalties assigned in other disciplinary cases; the latter may be the situation here.

At least two students posted on social media this morning that they had received their degrees. In a joint Instagram post, Shraddha Joshi ’24 and Asmer Asrar Safi ’24 confirmed the conferral of their degrees: “After relentless student and faculty pressure, Harvard conferred our undergraduate degrees today, three [two] months after the corporation barred us from graduating alongside our peers. We are grateful for the peers and community members who walked out on Commencement, signed and wrote statements, and called on Harvard to listen to its students."

The University released the following statement, without further comment:

Consistent with its May 22 statement, the Harvard Corporation has voted to confer degrees to 11 eligible candidates who have been restored to good standing following the completion of Faculty of Arts and Sciences processes.

The University continues to work to strengthen and improve disciplinary processes, such as the recently announced procedures to enable the work of the University Committee on Rights and Responsibilities to enhance the consistency of investigation and factfinding processes in cases involving more than one school.

Effective, fair, well understood, and consistently applied processes are vital to how we function as a learning community – and how we reconcile the opportunities to express our views, including through protest and dissent, with our obligations to one another.

The changes in disciplinary processes referred to were announced last week: the creation of procedures by which the University Committee on Rights and Responsibilities, formed in 1970 but apparently not active, may investigate the facts surrounding complaints that students from multiple schools violated University rights and responsibilities standards, or that students from one school intruded on the operations of another school. The resulting findings of fact would be referred back to the individual schools for actual disciplinary proceedings. Read a full report and discussion at “Harvard Overhauls Disciplinary Procedures.”

by b09de2a90dfa0acc@harvard.edu

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Remembering Helen Keller and Anne Sullivan

jennifer_carling@harvard.edu — Tue, 23 Jul 2024 14:13:43 +0000

Remembering Helen Keller and Anne Sullivan jennifer_carli… Tue, 07/23/2024 - 10:13

Editor’s note: Meg Campbell ’74, an educator—she is the retired cofounder of the Codman Academy Charter Public School—lives in Boston’s Dorchester neighborhood. She submitted this essay after attending her fiftieth reunion this past spring.

I read Helen Keller’s The Story of My Life in third grade, a Christmas gift from my mother. It was the original, not what my mother called a Reader’s Digest children’s version, which she held in low regard.

My mother came by her book snobbery through her father. He told her, whenever visiting someone’s home, to take note of whether there were books there, and if so, which ones—because the books one owned revealed a person’s character. The gift of the Helen Keller autobiography was part of a long trail of recommended books, usually biographies. Reading about illustrious stars from Marie Curie to Annie Oakley, though, often discouraged me, because the subjects showed great promise at the young age I was: to keep up, I needed to start inventing things like Thomas Edison had. His biography prompted me to concoct an air humidifier by standing under a towel with my head over a pot of boiling water. My mother shooed me out of the kitchen so she could make dinner.

In memory of Anne Sullivan, Teacher extraordinaire—Who with the word Water, opened to the girl Helen Keller the world of sight and sound through touch. Beloved companion through Radcliffe College, 1900- 1904. | Photograph by Lindsay Chase-Lansdale '74

Helen Keller ignited my imagination. She made me grateful I could see and hear. I knew pretending to be blind for a short time was nothing like being without sight; or putting cotton balls in my ears couldn’t come close to making me deaf. I had to think harder, work harder to summon an image—a feeling—of Helen at 19 months losing her sight and hearing.

The likeliest outcome for Helen would have been a life landlocked in her mind. But then young, feisty Anne Sullivan left Boston to teach and live with Helen in Alabama. Helen even went to Radcliffe.

I stopped reading. What is Radcliffe? I went to ask my mother.

She was changing sheets. She looked up, but kept moving, tucking the ends into the side of the mattress and sweeping her hand across the top of the bed to smooth out creases.

“Radcliffe is the best college in the United States for women.”

“Then I’m going there,” I said, and started out of the room, to return to my reading.

She added within earshot, “If you go there, you won’t be making beds the rest of your life.”

When I became a Radcliffe student in 1970, I searched for evidence of Helen Keller’s time at the college. I looked in the Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America, my favorite setting to study because it was the only place on campus where women’s accomplishments and struggles were studied and celebrated. I discovered the book, Helen Keller: The Socialist Years, which included her advocacy writings. There had been no mention of her political stands in her autobiography. I saw her as more complicated and generous. I admired her even more.

Braille plaque in the garden | PHOTOGRAPH BY OLIVIA FARRAR/HARVARD MAGAZINE

Across the street from the Schlesinger Library is a stately brick building, Cronkite, which was then women graduate students’ housing (and now is the Harvard College admissions office). We undergraduates were allowed to eat in their dining room, and I often did for I relished the genteel atmosphere and floor-to-ceiling paned windows overlooking a beautiful garden. The selection of plantings was made by Helen Keller based on their fragrance, informed by her own strong sense of smell. At one end of the garden Helen included a fountain extending from the brick wall over a half-basin next to a bronze engraved plaque. I liked to listen to the sound of water falling and read the inscription: In memory of Anne Sullivan, Teacher extraordinaire—Who with the word Water, opened to the girl Helen Keller the world of sight and sound through touch. Beloved companion through Radcliffe College, 1900- 1904.

At my recent reunion, I returned to the garden to thank both extraordinary women for influencing my life’s course. Helen’s example continues to challenge my expectations about human possibility in the face of the most daunting disabilities. Anne Sullivan’s gutsy, try-anything experience-based teaching methods have shaped my work and life as an educator. I owe them.

It was a warm day when I reached the garden, which was planted nicely enough, but not in accordance with Helen Keller’s original design focused on scent. The fountain was harder to find because there was no longer water flowing, and ivy covered the plaque.

I yanked vines back to be able to read the inscription. I imagined Helen Keller standing in this spot at the dedication of the Anne Sullivan Memorial Garden on June 11, 1960. Anne had died 24 years earlier, but she had launched Helen on to a global stage of influence. Starting at the age of 34, Anne tapped every word for every Radcliffe class for her pupil’s understanding. This was a feat of love and perseverance culminating in a degree with honors for Helen Keller.

Anne’s brilliance was in her unorthodox, deeply hopeful method. If she were alive now, she would be a MacArthur Foundation “genius” recipient. Harvard should continue to maintain the fountain and fragrance garden. The site and story would enrich admission tours, which begin a stone’s throw away. A posthumous undergraduate degree for Anne Sullivan would be appropriate too—and long overdue.

by Meg Campbell

Closing note

Since the author visited the memorial in May 2024, the fountain is running again.

To learn more, read Roger Shattuck’s Vita portrait of Helen Keller (July-August 2004, page 28)—the first woman awarded a Harvard honorary degree, in 1955.

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Harvard Overhauls Disciplinary Procedures

niko_yaitanes@harvard.edu — Thu, 18 Jul 2024 17:16:54 +0000

Harvard Overhauls Disciplinary Procedures niko_yaitanes@… Thu, 07/18/2024 - 13:16

Harvard announced this morning that it was overhauling disciplinary procedures involving violations of the University-wide Statement on Rights and Responsibilities—suggesting a recognition that the ways in which discipline was administered by each separate school after the pro-Palestinian protest encampment from April 24 to May 14 need reform.

A statement disseminated by University leaders including interim president Alan M. Garber, interim provost John F. Manning, and the school deans observes that for Harvard to live up to the standards and commitments in the Statement on Rights and Responsibilities (the centrality of which Garber underscored with the deans on January 19, less than three weeks after he assumed the presidency), “the processes by which we implement them must be fair, effective, and even-handed. In recent years, this goal has been challenged in a growing number of disciplinary cases involving students from different schools who are involved in the same event or behavior but may be subject to quite different investigative and fact-finding processes. Fully acknowledging that, at Harvard, each school is responsible for determining discipline for its own students, the facts informing discipline should not vary depending on what school a particular student attends.”

A Very Unsettled Process

That anodyne language melds several important concerns. After the encampment disbanded May 14 and Garber asked the schools to, in effect, undo the “involuntary leave” he had imposed on protestors May 10, he also directed the schools to pursue their independent disciplinary processes expeditiously. The College’s Administrative Board apparently did so promptly, but as is customary made no announcement of its decisions: citing privacy laws, Harvard declines all comment on disciplinary cases, with the result that communication is by default devolved to those affected—in this case, the protestors, who are participants and partisans. On May 17, student protestors angrily reported that numerous undergraduates had been suspended or placed on probation for their participation in the encampment, including 13 who would therefore not receive their diplomas May 23. (For a review of the ensuing Faculty of Arts and Sciences [FAS] vote attempting to override this decision on May 20, and the Corporation’s decision May 22 that the students were not in “good standing” and so could not graduate, and the ensuing protest speeches and walkout from Commencement, see the July-August issue’s “Locked In,” page 17, and “Commencement 372 7/8,” page 10.) Further complicating matters:

•Discipline of Graduate School of Arts and Sciences protestors (also within FAS, but under a separate Ad Board) was confined to milder probations, according to the protestors’ statement of June 25. (Because the University and schools will not comment in any way on the nature of the violations being punished, the punishments themselves, varying outcomes of disciplinary cases, or aggravating or mitigating circumstances—such as repeat offenses—it is impossible for outsiders to analyze the severity of alleged violations of the University standards or whether they are being adjudicated equitably across schools.)

•According to participants or close observers of the protests who refused to be named, protestors from the professional schools who were disciplined received milder sanctions (admonitions or warnings). Again, in the absence of information from the University, it is impossible to verify those claims, or to judge whether similar infractions resulted in variable punishments.

•Finally, on July 9, the protestors’ social media account reported that the College Ad Board’s suspensions had been reduced to the lesser punishment of probation, and that the terms of probations imposed on other undergraduates had been reduced. This result apparently stems from the students’ appeal to FAS’s Faculty Council, provided for in disciplinary procedures for those required to withdraw or placed on probation for more than one term. The grounds for Faculty Council action are findings that the Ad Board committed a procedural error or imposed punishments disproportionate to those it has imposed in other cases. Absent further information from the University or College, it is impossible to say what matters governed this outcome, but the reduction of penalties suggests that the latter factor may have been in play. It also raises anew the question of varying disciplinary outcomes cross the schools.

Thus, in the course of eight weeks, the outcome of the school-based disciplinary process meant to address violations of a University statement of fundamental values and standards produced this fallout: members of the FAS took a vote intended to undo the effect of the sanctions imposed by the College’s Ad Board; the Corporation set aside the effect of that vote—heightening disagreements between some significant segment of the faculty and the governing boards; questions arose about the possible variability of differing schools’ punishments—perhaps for similar or identical violations subject to being disciplined; and, finally, the College disciplinary appeals process apparently resulted in significant changes in the Ad Board’s decisions—raising further questions about the severity of punishments within that single faculty and school.

Beyond the obvious confusion and doubt this sows within the community, Harvard faces significant scrutiny from critics of its campus climate during the tumultuous past academic year. U. S. House of Representatives committees continue to investigate and critique University processes and procedures for dealing with incidents of antisemitism (and other kinds of bias). And the Harvard Jewish Alumni Alliance has demanded equal application of disciplinary processes—a concern echoed in different language, from a different perspective, by the University’s own task force on combating antisemitism in its recent preliminary report.

An Historical Solution?

These problems would seem to call for some consistent University-level way of investigating complaints about possible violations of the Statement on Rights and Responsibilities. Today’s message offers this path forward:

The University Committee on Rights and Responsibilities (UCRR) offers a solution to this problem. Established in 1970 and populated each year with faculty and students designated by each school, the UCRR was designed to coordinate fact-finding processes involving multiple schools while leaving the final disciplinary decisions to the schools themselves. Until now, however, effective procedures for implementing this function have not been formalized.

To overcome the implementation problem, the president and provost “last fall,” according to the message, convened a working group to propose a set of procedures for fact-finding for such cases. Garber has adopted the recommended process for a two-year interim period—decisions endorsed by the Corporation, according to the message—and the new procedures are disseminated alongside the leaders’ communication today.

The procedures call for cases involving possible violations of the University Statement “involving students from two or more faculties or cases alleging that students from one faculty have disrupted the performance of normal duties and activities within another Faculty” to be brought to the president “if an affected school or affected University-wide unit so requests,” and for the president to initiate an investigation via the University Committee on Rights and Responsibilities. It then details fact-finding procedures and deadlines, what rights the person or persons being investigated have, how evidence is to be collected and reported, interim findings, rights of response and appeal, and—for findings of a violation—forwarding of the record “to the disciplinary body of the faculties in which the respondent(s) are enrolled for determination of an appropriate disciplinary response.”

The precedent to which the University leaders’ message refers ultimately stems from the FAS Statement of Rights and Responsibilities first adopted in June 1969 (the precursor to the University statement now in effect, as amended), after the occupation of University Hall and the ensuing turmoil following police removal of the student protestors that April, and FAS’s Committee on Rights and Responsibilities (CRR), enacted September 30, 1969, as the specialized disciplinary body to hear complaints.

That faculty-student body dealt with repeated, serious violations: seizing buildings, blocking University officers’ personal movement and access to their offices, disrupting an Overseers’ visiting committee meeting, shouting down speakers at public forums, and more. The CRR established detailed procedures suited to its scope of responsibility and published detailed reports on its findings and disciplinary rulings (protecting students’ anonymity) for each case it considered. Those reports evolved a sort of jurisprudence by which the community could come to understand the exact violations of the Statement of Rights being evaluated, and the exact reasons for the penalties imposed: less severe for those who merely showed up at a protest, severer for those who physically impeded or harassed others, severest for those who committed such violations and who had been previously warned or punished for unacceptable behavior.

It was thus explicitly different from the Ad Board structure and processes for academic discipline—a recognition that the challenges posed by complaints about violations of the Statement of Rights differed in kind from complaints about student life or the course of study, and required a separate institutional solution.

The CRR had its limits: it applied only to FAS: the College, Radcliffe, and the GSAS; over time, in that heated era, students came to object to the process, and withdrew from membership. Their complaints were detailed in a 1986 undergraduate council report objecting to the CRR and its procedures when it was invoked in response to a student Harvard Yard protest (shades of 2024): the erection of a shanty town as part of the campaign to get the University to divest endowment investments in apartheid South Africa.

In Context

It comes as something of a surprise to learn that there is a University Committee on Rights and Responsibilities alive and functioning today. Queried about the matter, a Harvard spokesperson could only report that today’s UCRR is populated by having the leadership of each school propose the names of two faculty members and one student (for FAS, four faculty members and three students), who are then voted on by the governing boards annually; members serve until successors are chosen, and membership is not public. No information was forthcoming about whether, when, or how the UCRR has been active. A passage in today’s message—“Until now…effective procedures for implementing this function have not been formalized”—suggest that there is not much of a record to draw on, if any.

As proposed, the UCRR, under its new procedures, would at least result in uniform fact-finding in cases where violations of the University Statement are brought forth for investigation. But the procedures do not require a complaint to be brought into the UCRR fact-finding process; and decisions on discipline are referred back to the individual schools. If indeed there were problems from differing school approaches to fact-finding, interpretation of the University Statement, and decisions on discipline this past spring, as protestors have alleged, today’s reform could address some of those problems.

But they are limited in applying to inter-school matters; those involving only students from one school would not rise to the UCRR process. And discipline itself remains at the school level. There is long precedent for that, embedded in the University Statutes (its bylaws).

But precedents are not inviolable: the Corporation itself underwent significant reform in 2010 (something once considered impossible short of Commonwealth of Massachusetts legislation). And under pressure of the crises of the late 1960s and early 1970s, the Corporation voted to recognize powers associated with the CRR in the Statutes, and to embrace the University Statement.

Today’s announcement may well mark a recognition of the need to fix at least some part of Harvard’s University-level disciplinary processes and procedures as they have lately been deployed. But questions will remain in clear cases where complaints involve University matters considered fundamental to Harvard’s operation as an intellectual community devoted to research and teaching: What if only one school’s students are involved? Why continue to refer identical cases to multiple school-level disciplinary bodies whose interpretations of standards, evidence, and punishment may not be uniform? The two-year trial period for the new procedures announced today may be fruitful and sufficient to address the problems identified now. Or they may, over time, turn out to be a first step toward a more comprehensive reassessment of how to establish and uphold elemental academic standards in an era of polarization and protest even within the confines of Harvard’s green quadrangles.

Read the University leaders’ message here.

The 7 Ware Street commentary in Harvard Magazine’s forthcoming September-October issue explores these issues in further depth; look for it online on or about August 15.

by b09de2a90dfa0acc@harvard.edu

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Harvard’s Development Chief Departs

niko_yaitanes@harvard.edu — Wed, 17 Jul 2024 13:31:53 +0000

Harvard’s Development Chief Departs niko_yaitanes@… Wed, 07/17/2024 - 09:31

Brian K. Lee, vice president for alumni affairs and development since 2018—in effect, the University’s chief fundraising officer—will retire at the end of 2024, the University announced today.

He had previously filled similar roles at Tufts (working with its then-President Lawrence S. Bacow, who brought Lee aboard when he became Harvard’s president in 2018), and Caltech. In making the Harvard appointment, Bacow said, “Brian has demonstrated an extraordinary ability to bring together people in support of higher education, and he brings to his new role an especially strong record of supporting and advancing institutional goals with a combination of creativity, insight, and thoughtfulness. I look forward to working closely with him again.”

Lee’s leadership of the $1.2-billion Beyond Boundaries campaign at Tufts, and then his role in organizing Caltech’s $2-billion Break Through campaign, begun in 2016, prepared him both for his Harvard responsibilities and for Bacow’s focus on applied science. During Bacow’s administration—which of course came just after the conclusion of the Harvard Campaign and so did not involve a successor University capital campaign—Harvard raised significant sums for research and teaching focused on quantum science and engineering, climate change and sustainability, and natural and artificial intelligence.

In a statement in the news announcement, interim president Alan Garber hailed Lee as “a champion of Harvard and our mission,” saying, “Since 2018, our community has benefited tremendously from his ability to connect individuals and their interests to our institution and our aspirations, even in the face of unprecedented challenges. There are, of course, the outstanding acts of generosity enabled by Brian’s leadership, but what I most admire is his commitment to articulating our values and how they guide our efforts to seek support of our teaching and research.”

Lee’s retirement is a natural transition given the change in Harvard’s leadership from Bacow to President Claudine Gay and now to Garber. Although the latter serves in an interim capacity, he announced that he would begin the search for Lee’s successor soon, consistent with his determination to keep the University’s senior ranks fully staffed, as in the recent appointments of a new Kennedy School dean and last week’s announcement that Jennifer O’Connor would assume the position of vice president and general counsel at the end of this month, filling a vacancy.

Read the University news announcement here.

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Immigrant Workers— America’s Engine?

Olivia Farrar — Tue, 16 Jul 2024 21:32:05 +0000

Immigrant Workers— America’s Engine? Olivia Farrar Tue, 07/16/2024 - 17:32

Immigration is one of the most polarizing issues of the 2024 presidential election campaign—but not a new point of contention in America politics. From the late nineteenth through the early twentieth centuries, waves of immigrants, mainly from Europe, reshaped the U.S. population, sparking concerns about cultural assimilation, labor competition, and strain on social services. In response, the U.S. government implemented restrictive immigration laws in the 1920s, including national origin quotas. The landmark Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, also known as the Hart-Cellar Act, later abolished that national origin-based quota system, creating new opportunities for immigrants from outside Western Europe to settle in the United States. By the end of the century, the result of the policy was a substantially changed American population.

Today, the cultural and economic situation has evolved again, and policymaker and scholar Jason Furman says much of the current debate misses the crucial dynamics in the aging U.S. workforce—and with it, Americans’ economic prospects.

During the latter half of the twentieth century and into the current one, amid increased globalization and labor mobility—as wars and other disasters prompted mass migrations from Sudan, Syria, and other afflicted regions—immigration surged in the United States and in Europe, leading to developed-nation debates on both sides of the Atlantic about the benefits and costs of global migration. Illegal crossings of the U.S.-Mexico border—of late, especially from failed economies or nations plagued with violence (Venezuela and several Central American countries)—have become one of the focal points of political controversy. Native-born American workers, especially during economic downturns, regularly express fears of job displacement and wage depression due to competition from immigrant labor.

In an interview with Harvard Magazine, Furman, Ph.D. ’04, Aetna professor of the practice of economic policy at Harvard Kennedy School and the department of economics, discusses the economic impact of immigration on the United States since COVID-19. Furman served as chief economic advisor to President Obama and is credited with helping to lead much of the Obama administration’s fiscal policy, including the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA), otherwise known as ObamaCare. He was appointed as the twenty-eighth chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers in August 2013, serving until 2017. Furman is a regular contributor to the Wall Street Journal, and has authored two books on economic and healthcare policy.

Furman offers a clear perspective on immigration’s domestic economic impact: “A large fraction of the economic growth and job growth that we’re experiencing is happening because of immigration,” he states—because “job loss among Americans isn’t due to immigrants taking jobs. Rather, it’s due to aging and retirement.”

As the baby boom generation retires, he continues, the labor force is shrinking. Effectively, immigrants are filling the gaps by taking jobs and paying taxes—largely without displacing native-born workers. Even with a low fertility rate (the United States has been below the replacement rate of 2.1 children per woman for 50 years), the U.S. population continues to grow because of immigration—staving off the experience of countries like Japan, which have faced economic stagnation in face of shrinking, aging populations.

Furman emphasizes that future U.S. population growth and economic expansion hinge on immigration policy. “We need to decide whether we want to be a growing, expanding country,” he says, “or one that’s shrinking and contracting.”

Of course, legal immigration across the U.S. border, which sustains and buffers the United States population and economy, is a separate topic from the hotly-debated and polarizing issue of undocumented immigration—a complicated issue which has become largely divorced from data in most public and political debates.

Given the economic benefits of legal immigration, what are the costs of increased spending that may be associated with undocumented workers, including for public services such as healthcare and education, mostly at the state level? Are these costs offset by the value provided by undocumented workers through their labor contributions in various sectors from agriculture and construction to the service industries, unremunerated payments into to Social Security and stimulus of the economy?

Although exact figures are elusive, Furman suggests that unauthorized immigrants make a net positive contribution at the federal level. Undocumented immigrants contribute to payroll taxes, but often do not collect Social Security benefits for many years, if at all—ultimately, contributing more to the system than they receive, Furman explains. Preliminary findings from the National Academy of Sciences suggest that immigrants, including undocumented ones, he says, tend to pay more in taxes than they receive in benefits. While state and local impacts might be more mixed, the immigrants’ overall federal fiscal contribution is positive.

Because economic growth now relies on immigrants in certain important ways, Furman advocates for a comprehensive policy to address the associated issues effectively. “Here’s the tricky thing. Our economy could not function without immigrants, but it also is a terrible way for an economy and a country to function by having some sort of widespread breaking of laws,” he acknowledges. He proposes three components for future immigration policy:

1. Welcoming highly skilled immigrants: Allowing those with advanced degrees and skills to stay and contribute to the country.

2. Regularizing unauthorized immigrants: Providing a pathway for the more than 10 million unauthorized immigrants already in the United States to reduce uncertainty and enable greater economic contribution.

3. Expanding legal immigration: Broadening immigration opportunities while tightening border enforcement to address illegal immigration effectively.

“We need to change the law, but we can’t change it to say, ‘Hey, no more immigrants,’” Furman argues—instead, the United States needs to welcome more immigrants legally as a first step to tightening the borders and enforcing the laws. Focusing immediately and only on restricting undocumented immigration would, he says, “Ruin our economy” while “heartlessly and cruelly enforcing a set of laws that we had basically previously sent the message are not going to be enforced.” Balancing those pressures, he concludes, can benefit both immigrants and American citizens, simultaneously maintaining future U.S. population growth and economic vitality.

by Olivia Farrar

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Teaching Nutrition in Medical Education

d9be154420cfb920@harvard.edu — Fri, 12 Jul 2024 12:40:34 +0000

Teaching Nutrition in Medical Education d9be154420cfb9… Fri, 07/12/2024 - 08:40

When Kamber Hart enrolled in Harvard Medical School’s (HMS) new elective course, NCE 522: Culinary Medicine and Nutrition, during her final semester this spring, she was in part motivated by the benefits to her own health. Students get to cook and eat during class, while learning how to take better care of themselves amid the rigors of medical school. Plus, it meant free food.

But she was also compelled by a professional concern. Hart said she felt “acutely aware” that her medical education lacked meaningful instruction in nutrition. She noted that patients frequently bring questions about diet to their appointments with clinicians, seeking to determine whether advice they’ve seen online or elsewhere is legitimate. But, she said, “We don’t get enough training in medical school to be able to answer that question.”

Students in the Culinary Medicine and Nutrition class at HMS during culinary instruction. Instructors Helen Delichatsios (center right) and Eliza Leone (second from right) are pictured, with Ed Taff center. | PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF ELIZA LEONE/HARVARD MEDICAL SCHOOL RESTAURANT ASSOCIATES

A National Shortcoming

Hart’s concern touches on a hole many medical students at Harvard and around the country experience in their education. Even as a country-wide Food Is Medicine movement has attempted to raise alarm about the scale of illness caused by poor nutrition and lifestyle in the United States, advocates say nutrition remains peripheral to the primary curriculum at many medical schools—dragging down efforts to improve Americans’ health and combat major illnesses.

Parties on every side of the problem, from students in training to medical experts and administrators, acknowledge the need for clinicians to be fluent in basic nutritional counseling, but the structural changes needed to teach that skill have yet to materialize. Chris Duggan, director of HMS’s division of nutrition, attributes that in part to a particular focus on organ-based medicine in the United States, where the healthcare system is highly specialized, with comprehensive healthcare topics such as nutrition more confined to dietitians. Likewise, schools’ disease-focused medical education tends to consider nutrition a matter instead for public health. Despite the presence of the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health next door to HMS, with its world-class health and prevention education taught by luminaries of the field such as professor of epidemiology and nutrition Walter Willet, the two school’s curriculums remain largely siloed.

That focus can translate into medical school curriculums that lack substantial instruction devoted to nutrition, leaving doctors underprepared for a key part of their job. Many U.S. clinicians report they don’t feel equipped to talk with their patients about their lifestyle—even when discussing issues for which poor nutrition and exercise could be a primary cause, such as heart disease. As one recent paper in the journal Advances in Nutrition notes, “diet-related diseases…are the leading causes of illness, disability, and death in the United States,” even though they are “largely preventable and treatable by nutritional therapies and dietary lifestyle changes.”

Even among doctors whose caseloads include significant instances of “diet-sensitive” diseases—such as cardiologists and endocrinologists who treat patients with heart disease and diabetes—nutrition education is largely absent from training, according to the study.

Even if equipped to provide basic nutritional counseling, physicians still face increasing pressure to work with speed and efficiency, which makes prescribing a pill easier than launching an extended conversation about lifestyle changes—especially when patients may face systemic barriers to such change: living in a neighborhood where fresh or healthy food is scarce, for instance, and where cheap, fast food is abundant.

All these factors combine to create a challenging environment for experts trying to bring more nutritional counseling into the healthcare system. “It’s a bit depressing that we haven’t made the progress we could be making,” said Walter Willett, a renowned professor of nutrition at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health (HSPH). He noted much of America’s health gains in the last few decades have been concentrated among the highly educated. Life expectancy in the U.S. has also remained consistently below that of other developed countries.

Nonetheless, the obvious need, student interest (public events and courses offered by HMS’s division of nutrition are highly popular; demand for both of its current classes outpaces available seats), and substantial Harvard-based research on nutrition, have not been enough to change the educational requirements for the student body as a whole.

“Not Where We Need to Be”

In its doctor of medicine curriculum, HMS requires no specific course or in-depth instruction on nutrition. Existing courses on the subject, though highly successful according to Duggan, are elective to varying degrees. Instead, the primary way students are supposed to learn about nutrition as they navigate curricular requirements is through small lessons spread out across their four years of schooling, formalized as a “curricular theme” but taught mostly at instructors’ discretion. In interviews, associate professor of population medicine Marie-France Hivert, director of the curricular theme “Nutrition and Lifestyle Medicine,” and HMS dean of education Bernard Chang ’93 acknowledged that method is falling short.

“Without commitment of hours in the curriculum, that integration, the ‘weave,’ unfortunately has not been successful,” Hivert said. Most faculty members themselves may not have received a strong nutritional education to draw from, and, as frequently happens within the healthcare system, Hivert pointed out, they can tend to emphasize the diagnosis and treatment of a disease more than its prevention. Given the time constraints to teach what is already a near-mountain of content to M.D. students, nutrition often ends up by the wayside —“to my own despair, because I’ve spent countless hours in building material with people,” she added.

Chang, who oversees faculty governance of HMS’s curriculum, acknowledged in an interview that “nutrition just has not occupied enough of a space in our curriculum.” “We are doing a much better job than we used to,” he continued, “but we’re still not where we need to be,” calling criticisms of Hivert and others as “valid.”

For assistant professor of medicine Helen Delichatsios and dietitian for HMS food services Eliza Leone, the co-creators of HMS’s “first of its kind” culinary medicine elective this past spring (distinct from prior nutrition courses), the solution begins with active instruction in nutritional counseling. Each week, along with readings and discussion, the class featured hands-on culinary experience making healthy recipes, offering students practical experience in how a healthy diet can be achieved at home while catering to different needs and tastes. They practiced nutritional counseling for patients with diverse needs, and learned how and when to refer a patient to a dietitian.

Both instructors said they found the externally-funded course’s first iteration a success. Students had “nothing but positive feedback in the end,” Leone said. Some added that they thought the course should be required. HMS dean George Daley even paid the class a visit.

From Weeks to Days to…

Two decades ago, every student might have expected to receive some of the instruction on diet and lifestyle Leone and Delichatsios’s elective aims to provide. Before 2007, a 14-week course on preventative medicine and nutrition was required of HMS students. Professors teaching at the time say it was a success—students emerged from the classes confident in nutritional counseling, and changed their own diets for the better, too.

But since then, the curricular commitment to nutritional education at HMS has slowly shrunk according to leaders like Hivert, Delichatsios, and Duggan—a byproduct of a wider effort in 2007 to reduce the time students spent in preclinical education (the period before they start learning in a hospital or clinic). That forced decisions on what material would have to be reduced or eliminated. Nutrition was forced to the chopping block, successively cut from 14 weeks of instruction to just three days.

By 2015, a renewed effort to increase time spent learning in the clinic led to more cuts; nutrition as a distinct requirement was eliminated, morphing instead into a “curricular theme” that would be integrated into other required courses, in theory. Nearly a decade later, a consensus appears to be emerging that the school must devote class time to nutritional instruction for it to be effective.

While Chang defended the decision to “longitudinize” nutrition across classes as logical, given the topic’s wide applicability to many aspects of health, he mused that not all aspects of the subject could easily fit into other classes, especially the skill of turning the science of nutrition into practical care for a patient. He emphasized that bridging classroom material on diet and lifestyle with clinical care was a priority for HMS, although it isn’t yet clear what form that would take.

He also cited several current efforts as examples of how nutritional education for medical students could be improved, including active discussions with other school leaders, and a recent pilot course offered jointly with HSPH that includes an online component on nutritional counseling.

Looking for Change

“When Harvard Medical School makes a change, you see that change filter through many other schools,” Chang said, discussing a potential expansion of nutritional education. “We are both part of the establishment, but we are the main way in which the establishment evolves and changes.”

But advocates like Ed Taff, a HSPH and HMS donor who funded the culinary medicine course, point to several lingering barriers. Nutrition isn’t emphasized on the U.S. Medical Licensure Examination—which students must pass to become a licensed physician. Its requirements significantly shape medical curriculums, so adding questions related to nutrition could help compel schools to teach the subject.

The federal government also has the power to promote change by leveraging its status as a major funder of medical education. In 2022, Massachusetts Congressman Jim McGovern led the passage of a House resolution calling for medical schools to teach about the relationship between nutrition and disease. Even state governments can play a positive role. Massachusetts requires physicians to be trained in recognizing domestic abuse as part of their certification, for example. Other states have mandated instruction in opioid addiction; a similar kind of requirement could be instituted for nutrition.

At HMS, an appetite for change seems present. Whether it will materialize into something concrete, however, has kept faculty members like Hivert frustrated. After several years of challenging the unsuccessful “theme” strategy, she said, “I have to admit that we need more than intentions.”

by Jack R. Trapanick

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Animal (Code) Cracker

d9be154420cfb920@harvard.edu — Thu, 11 Jul 2024 17:11:11 +0000

Animal (Code) Cracker d9be154420cfb9… Thu, 07/11/2024 - 13:11

The July-August cover story about efforts to decode the click communication of sperm whales prompted numerous letters, including one that detailed the involvement of a talented undergraduate, Peter Bermant ’19, in the project’s origins. He ultimately co-authored a key paper on the bioacoustics of sperm whale vocalizations that was published in Scientific Reports in 2019.

Bermant was concentrating in physics during the 2017-2018 academic year, when marine biologist David Gruber was a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Initially drawn by Gruber’s designation as a National Geographic Society Emerging Explorer, Bermant ultimately began working with him as part of the Radcliffe Research Partnership program, which pairs undergraduates with Radcliffe Fellows. Bermant was co-advised by Gruber and computer scientist Michael Bronstein, another Fellow who is now DeepMind professor of artificial intelligence at Oxford University. Together with them and biologist Shane Gero and Robert Wood, the Harry Lewis and Marlyn McGrath professor of engineering and applied sciences, Bermant participated in the published research.

Bronstein guided Bermant in choosing the machine learning techniques and approaches that should be applied to the sperm whale bioacoustics data, recalls Gruber (see “Decoding the Deep,” July-August 2024, p. 26). Bermant, who was completing both undergraduate and master’s degrees in physics, Gruber continues, “taught himself Python, a programming language, so he could carry out the project.” He noted:

Peter is incredibly detail oriented and diligently followed through with the research, even after the Radcliffe Research Partnership concluded. He is first author on the publication “Deep Machine Learning Techniques for the Detection and Classification of Sperm Whale Bioacoustics” which has now been cited 139 times since 2019. Peter's efforts were instrumental in providing proof-of-concept that advanced machine learning could be useful when applied to sperm whale bioacoustics. This study played a key role in the formation of the non-profit organization Project CETI—founded in 2020.

Project CETI (the Cetacean Translation Initiative) aims to decipher sperm whale vocalizations. Headquartered in New York, the nonprofit conducts field research in Dominica. Bermant, who is also a talented ultra runner, currently works as a senior machine learning engineer at Conservation X Labs, an organization that is employing technology and interdisciplinary collaborations to prevent human-induced mass extinction. Previously, he worked at the Earth Species Project, (a nonprofit using AI to decode non-human communication), and at the Colossal lab run by Winthrop professor of genetics George Church, which is applying genetic approaches to elephant conservation and wooly mammoth de-extinction efforts.

by d9be154420cfb920@harvard.edu

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Breaking Bread

d9be154420cfb920@harvard.edu — Wed, 03 Jul 2024 02:42:52 +0000

Breaking Bread d9be154420cfb9… Tue, 07/02/2024 - 22:42

In his new show on Bloomberg TV, Alexander Heffner ’12 uses the universal language of food to speak with governors and senators from across the country—and the political spectrum—about the divisive politics threatening the health of American democracy.

In Massachusetts, he shares oysters with Governor Maura Healey ’92 (D-Mass.) on Boston Harbor while they talk about the state’s acute housing crisis. In Alaska, he goes on a nature walk with Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), and then discusses voting rights over salmon burgers. As Heffner, a journalist and host of the PBS show The Open Mind, treks his away across the country in season two of Breaking Bread with Alexander—premiering July 4—he treats viewers to casual and honest conversations with major politicians, between bites of local American fare, from Kansas chili to Georgia chicken and waffles.

Heffner (left) sharing oysters with Governor Maura Healey (right) | PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF The Open Mind Legacy Project

In a presidential election year and amid a climate of fierce polarization and disagreement, Heffner’s show is meant to be a foundation for creating consensus—with food as an entry point to “disarm” his guests—before leaping into their major passion projects, such as comprehensive immigration or social security reform. Heffner describes it as “Anthony Bourdain meets Meet the Press.”

In season one, the show tackled a range of conceptual and policy issues. “In several episodes, we highlighted this idea of accountability—understanding government expenditures,” he said, exploring what it means to “democratize” more information about the government’s internal functioning and how elected officials reach major decisions that will affect their constituents’ lives.

Co-produced with his longtime friend, entrepreneur Maxwell Meyer ’12 (who also wrote the music), the show is a more colorful spinoff of Heffner’s PBS program, which covers “all realms of civic life.” Heffner’s grandfather founded that program in 1956, interviewing iconic American figures, including Martin Luther King Jr., until 2013, when Alexander assumed charge. That experience helped prepare him to “break bread” with the guests for his new series, while bringing him away from his “perch on The Open Mind,” Heffner said, a show “largely confined to a studio.”

From left: Alexander Heffner, Maxwell Meyer, Senator Heinrich, and Julie Heinrich, during Season 1 production | PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF The Open Mind Legacy Project

In some ways, the co-producers’ friendship mirrors the spirit of the show. Heffner, from New York City, and Meyer, from rural South Dakota, met at boarding school before attending Harvard. They’ve been friends ever since, keeping up active political conversations where they’ve found a way to grow by bridging their very different backgrounds (and sometimes beliefs) into a sincere exchange they say is rarer now in the United States. “America is polarized,” Meyer said, “and we seem to be in this perpetual gridlock.”

Like many people, they both wanted to find hope for a national way forward. They decided to use food, Meyer continued, as a way to “focus on what unites us and try to find some common ground. It’s hard to be angry when you’re eating a cheeseburger, right?”

The show’s exchanges might also help Americans engage each other with more intellectual honesty, the co-producers said. By removing senators and governors from the tense, politics-choked environment of the capitals, they can better acknowledge the complexity of major issues such as immigration, and the shortcomings of—or at least objections to—their own solutions to vexing problems.

In the new season, Heffner travels from Boston to Savannah, Tucson, Baltimore, and beyond, speaking with national figures including Senator Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.) and Senator Jerry Moran (R-Kans.). In Massachusetts, he finds a fellow Harvard College graduate in Governor Healey, and even ropes in College friend Carl Malm ’12 for a cameo.

Within the national discourse, the co-producers hope Breaking Bread might help “restore the national morale,” Heffner said. Following a month of divisive Supreme Court rulings, ahead of a contentious presidential rematch, the show airs at a fitting moment in the nation’s political life.

by Jack R. Trapanick

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Reading the Winds

max_krupnick@harvard.edu — Tue, 02 Jul 2024 19:54:56 +0000

Reading the Winds max_krupnick@h… Tue, 07/02/2024 - 15:54

When Sophia Montgomery first sailed, she hated it. Then eight years old, she disliked the waves and felt seasick. She kept getting hit by the boom—the long metal pole at the bottom of the sail. And she didn’t even know how to turn her boat around, so she kept streaking out into the ocean until her dad hopped onto her boat, nearly tipping it in his rescue attempt. But now, Montgomery ’26 is an Olympic sailor, set to represent Thailand in Paris.

Nearly every weekend when she was growing up, Montgomery and her family would drive two hours from Bangkok to the coastal city of Pattaya (which she calls “a very wild touristic place” better known for its illicit activities than its sailing). She and her sister, five years younger, would practice their skills while their father, an American who sailed at the University of California Los Angeles, watched from the shore. As she improved, she grew to love the sport, in all its complexity. In a race, a sailor must both go fast and out-position opponents. “But the added element is that you’re sailing against nature,” she says. “You have to read the winds, you have to read the currents.”

During the week, without ocean access, Montgomery practiced taekwondo. Though throwing punches and pulling ropes may not seem similar, she says that her martial arts practice has improved her sailing. Her coach disliked formal taekwondo, which focuses on earning points, and instead taught “MMA-style” fighting. In 2019, for her black belt test, Montgomery endured a 30-minute battle royale, fighting a series of boys for a half hour. Emerging victorious, with tousled braids and a black eye to show for it, she proved she could “stand my ground and just keep fighting.” In sailing, “The races are six days long…it’s quite taxing,” she says. “Your body is completely in pain…and you have to keep going.”

Sophia Montgomery | PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF SOPHIA MONTGOMERY

Though she sailed competitively in high school, she did not go through the collegiate recruiting process because she sailed a type of boat different from those used in U.S. competition (she sails an ILCA 6 or a Laser Radial). Even as a walk-on, she quickly thrived on the Harvard sailing team, winning the Inter-Collegiate Sailing Association Women’s Singlehanded National Championship as a sophomore.

Following that season, Montgomery took a gap year to vie for an Olympic bid. Sailors must earn an “Olympic ticket” for their country by placing well at certain international competitions. She earned her slot at the Asian Championships in December, hosted at her home club in Pattaya, where she got to race alongside her younger sister.

Initially, she had planned to return to Cambridge this past January for the spring semester, but clinching the ticket meant that Thailand’s sailing federation would fund her travel and coaching for international competitions preceding the Olympics. Rather than studying for midterms, Montgomery spent the semester competing on the Greek, Spanish, and French coastlines. With an individual coach and consistent practice, she says she could feel herself “improving at a much faster rate.” But she says her sailing is still a work in progress. She and her coach are not sure what combination of rest and training will help her achieve peak performance at the Olympics. “We’re trying things here and there,” she says. “It’s all really fun.”

When not on the open water, her mind drifts back to Cambridge. After the summer, she’ll return to campus, where she is concentrating in physics and may pursue a mind, brain, and behavior secondary. She looks forward to living with her first-year roommates again (“The group chat is going off,” she says, appreciating the chance to stay in touch)—and even to studying. “It feels like I’m a freshman again,” she says. But before Montgomery calculates fluid dynamics on a Science Center whiteboard this fall, she will judge the wind and waves while the world watches.

Interested in other Harvard Olympians? Read about eight affiliates who compete in fencing here.

by max_krupnick@harvard.edu

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Chinese Trade Dragons

Olivia Farrar — Fri, 28 Jun 2024 08:24:37 +0000

Chinese Trade Dragons Olivia Farrar Fri, 06/28/2024 - 04:24

China’s economy has grown more than five-fold during the last 20 years, adjusted for inflation—making it the second-largest economy globally, behind only the United States. Based on purchasing power parity (not per capita output), many believe China’s economy to have outpaced the U.S. economy. This rapid growth has lifted hundreds of millions of people out of extreme poverty.

Concurrently, China has significantly expanded its global exports, including into U.S. markets. In response, the White House has imposed substantial tariffs on Chinese goods.

The outcome of the 2024 U.S. presidential election will shape relations between the two countries for the next four years. Trade stands as one of the defining platform topics, with bipartisan support for reducing the United States trade deficit by lessening dependence on imports of critical Chinese goods.

William C. Kirby, T.M. Chang professor of China studies at Harvard and Spangler Family professor of business administration at Harvard Business School, is an astute observer of contemporary China. In 2020, he spoke with Harvard Magazine about China’s aspirations for global leadership in the twenty-first century.

In this new interview (with auto-generated closed captioning by Youtube), Kirby discusses the evolving relationship between China and the United States, focusing particularly on the impact and broader economic implications of tariffs on the clean technology sector.

China has emerged as a leader in manufacturing solar panels, battery materials, and electric vehicles (EVs). The country has invested more than $230 billion to develop its EV industry, threatening to saturate the global market. In May, the Biden administration placed a 100 percent tariff on EVs produced in China, plus an array of tariffs on other goods. Kirby warns that this strong protectionist measure, designed to defend the American automotive manufacturing industry, may have unintended consequences for consumers, other industries, and economic relations between the two countries.

As he argues, China’s dominance in clean energy technology, contrasted with the U.S. reluctance to foster collaborative partnerships that could enhance American global competitiveness, may pose a critical issue in the coming years. While both countries strive to serve domestic interests with protectionist policies, cooperation in advancing clean technology could benefit both nations. “The European Union recently placed more modest tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles in the belief, which is not unfounded, that these vehicles get a certain amount of local government support in the towns in which they are manufactured,” Kirby continued.

Drawing parallels to Japan-U.S. trade relations in the 1980s, Kirby notes how Japanese investment in U.S. manufacturing eased trade tensions, fostered job growth, and spurred technological advancements. In contrast, current U.S. tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles signal a shift toward isolationism, hindering potential partnerships that could bolster American innovation and market competitiveness. This historical perspective suggests a need to reconsider policies favoring unilateralism over cooperation, to promote sustainable economic growth for both countries.

Moreover, Kirby critiques the geopolitical implications of tariff-centric policies, suggesting they reflect broader anxieties about American global leadership with respect to technological supremacy. He argues that prioritizing competition over cooperation and guardrails risks exacerbating tensions and impeding progress in critical sectors like clean tech, where global collaboration is essential.

Indeed, common interests in combating climate change will “become important for the peaceful navigation of this relationship” between the U.S. and China, according to the Harvard Kennedy School’s Kirkpatrick professor of the practice of international affairs Meghan O’Sullivan. Of note, she was speaking to a forum organized by Harvard’s Salata Institute for Climate and Sustainability—a pertinent illustration of the intersections among environmental and security policy, and international relations.

Beyond economic concerns, Kirby touches on cultural and regulatory issues, notably U.S. security concerns surrounding Chinese platforms such as TikTok. “It tells you something about the low level to which the relationship between China and the United States has sunk,” Kirby notes, “that one of their biggest disputes is over a teenage video app that none of the leaders of these countries know how to use.” In the same vein, he criticizes regulatory measures targeting Chinese technologies, advocating for a balanced approach that safeguards national interests without stifling innovation or fostering discrimination.

“It’s a trade war that no one has won, and everyone has lost,” reflected Kirby. “But we are in this moment of such fear, and it’s really a fear of American decline more than a fear of China, in my view. But China becomes the lightning rod for our own insecurities. They can build high speed rail. They can build EVs in a dominant way. And so far, we have not been able to do so.”

by Olivia Farrar

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New Home for ART Underway

d9be154420cfb920@harvard.edu — Wed, 26 Jun 2024 17:49:19 +0000

New Home for ART Underway d9be154420cfb9… Wed, 06/26/2024 - 13:49

Harvard’s American Repertory Theater (ART) announced the start of construction on its new building at 175 North Harvard street in Allston today, heralding the project as a more modern, spacious, and accessible successor to the Loeb Drama Center, its current home. Site work began in March.

The project, which the University expects to complete by 2026, will relieve the pressures the Loeb’s limited space and aging facilities have put on the ART, a prominent American theater company which has won multiple Tony Awards. Executive director Kelvin Dinkins Jr. said in an interview that the company’s productions had nearly always been rehearsed in New York City, rather than at the ART’s current Cambridge location, due to lack of space. For some shows, the theater has had to bring in outside generators to support technical elements. “We’re bursting at the seams over here,” he said.

At its new location—enabled by a $100-million gift from David Goel ’93 and Stacey Goel—the theater will become a more community-facing institution, housed in a building the theater’s leaders have also praised for being more sustainable.

The complex, to be called the David E. and Stacey L. Goel Center for Creativity & Performance, is designed to be more open to the public and a place to linger once performances end, according to Dinkins. The lobby will feature cafétables, a kitchen, and concessions, helping add an “energy and buzz” ART leaders hope to achieve within the venue. Many parts of the Goel Center, such as its outdoor performance yard and the smaller-scale East Stage, will intentionally be visible to people outside the building or at the entrance, in another effort to make both more inviting.

Roger Watts, director of Haworth Tompkins, the architectural firm that designed the new space, said that “Through an inspiring and collaborative design process, our building aims to extend that open invitation to Allston and the wider world, and to provide a framework that supports the expansion of creative practices within a radical yet simple architecture of adaptable space, natural tactile materials, fresh air, and light.”

The Goel Center’s site in Allston will also be significant amid Harvard’s continuing expansion in the neighborhood. Surrounding the center in Barry’s Corner (the intersection of North Harvard Street and Western Avenue) are Harvard’s Science and Engineering Building, the residential Continuum complex built on Harvard land (also housing the Allston Trader Joe’s), and what is soon to be another residential building on Harvard land at 180 Western Avenue.

The ART site as seen from the upper levels of the Science and Engineering Complex in Allston. | PHOTOGRAPH BY NIKO YAITANES/HARVARD MAGAZINE

Amid residents’ concern about the overall development of their neighborhood—much of it focused on Harvard, which now owns about one-third of Allston—the Goel Center promises to enliven the area for the wider public, as purely academic uses do not. The Center will be available for use by other Harvard stakeholders and by external producers of everything from comedy shows to installations and other kinds of performances.

Dinkins added that the ART is also planning engagement and outreach programs specifically for Allston, but he did not provide details. “That is very much something that we are invested in, as part of that effort with the BPDA to serve as a community resource,” he said. (The Boston Planning & Development Agency, regulates development in the city.)

Like Harvard’s other new developments, the building aims for a high level of environmental performance, featuring natural ventilation and construction materials meant to “minimize its lifetime carbon budget,” according to a press release. The building will also have solar panels and a green roof, and rely on the University’s lower-carbon District Energy Facility (adjacent to the Enterprise Research Campus now under construction in Allston) for heating and cooling.

Once the ART relocates to its new home, the Loeb, a Faculty of Arts and Sciences facility, will remain available for University uses. That will likely include the theater, dance and media concentration, the Harvard-Radcliffe Dramatic Club, (both of which currently make partial use of the space), and other undergraduate arts initiatives. It could also serve as a useful locus for lectures, ceremonies, and screenings otherwise funneled into facilities such as the Science Center and Sanders Theatre.

The Loeb itself will be renovated as part of the Goel’s gift. For artists, the transition will bring an upgraded experience, too, with private bathrooms and showers, above-ground dressing rooms (more often on the lower level of theaters in the industry), an on-site costume shop, and spacious rehearsal studios. The auditoriums themselves—West Stage for larger productions, East for “more intimate” shows—will have retractable seats, allowing hundreds more audience members to be accommodated for standing events.

Interim president Alan M. Garber praised the “future full of creative potential” the theater would bring. “David and Stacey stepped forward at an important moment for the A.R.T.,” he said in a statement, “giving generously not because of the strong foundation that already exists but because they see what is possible. The incredible community their vision sustains and expands will have a profound effect on arts and culture throughout our region.”

by Jack R. Trapanick

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Harvard Antisemitism and Anti-Muslim Task Force Reports

niko_yaitanes@harvard.edu — Wed, 26 Jun 2024 14:52:28 +0000

Harvard Antisemitism and Anti-Muslim Task Force Reports niko_yaitanes@… Wed, 06/26/2024 - 10:52

Interim president Alan M. Garber today announced the preliminary recommendations from the task forces on combatting antisemitism and anti-Muslim, -Arab, and -Palestinian bias he created in January. In a message to the community, he wrote about the task force leaders’ “willingness to seek truth, to listen while withholding judgment, and to speak with kindness”—traits he called “a powerful example of how I hope we can proceed together.” He also cited “their optimism. After having spent months leading the task forces during what has been a strife-filled time for Harvard, they have developed a shared belief in the possibility that our community will change for the better, becoming more welcoming and inclusive.”

To that end, the task force on combatting anti-Muslim, -Arab, and -Palestinian bias highlighted findings from its 45 or so listening sessions, concerning these subjects, among others:

•Safety and security: “a deep-seated sense of fear among students, staff, and faculty,” characterized by “a state of uncertainty, abandonment, threat, and isolation, and a pervasive climate of intolerance.” Among other examples, the report noted, “Muslim women who wear hijab and pro-Palestinian students wearing keffiyehs spoke about facing verbal harassment, being called ‘terrorists,’ and even being spat upon. The issue of doxxing was particularly highlighted as a significant concern that affects not only physical safety and mental well-being, but also future career prospects.”

•Recognition and representation: “Participants expressed a strong desire for recognition and representation of diverse experiences and identities. Palestinians spoke about their identity being erased by campus-wide or school-specific messages and their pain not being acknowledged. They felt that the words ‘Palestine’ and ‘Palestinian’ had in effect become taboo on campus.” Respondents cited a lack of faculty and course offerings focused on Palestinian studies.

•Institutional response: “There was significant concern about the University’s perceived lack of response to pressures and damaging attacks from external agents, such as some high-profile donors. As a result, participants expressed a heightened sense of insecurity and felt unsafe, as the University seems to lack the requisite independence to protect them.”

•Freedom of expression: “Many Muslim, Arab, Palestinian, and pro-Palestinian students, staff, and faculty, including Jewish allies, said they continue to fear negative consequences if they speak publicly on issues they care about, especially those related to Palestine, human rights, social justice, and critiques of Harvard’s global engagements and investments.”

•Transparency and trust: “Participants stressed the need for greater clarity and transparency in the communication and enforcement of policies. They felt their experiences were not being acknowledged or, when they were, not given the same attention as those of other stakeholders. They also expressed concern that the University was struggling to protect independence of decision-making due to its fundraising considerations and that this in turn affected the University’s ability to uphold its stated values.

•Intellectual excellence: Participants raised concerns about the failure of the University to effectively support high-profile, structured intellectual engagements around contentious issues such as the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict. They raised concerns about lack of support for faculty who have sought to undertake such intellectual work; they pointed to student efforts to achieve this that have gone unsupported by the administration;

The task force’s preliminary recommendations touched on short-term, immediately actionable items, with longer-term measures (possibly entailing “substantial changes in institutional policies, curricular and co-curricular improvements, and rethinking of the structure of religious life on campus”) to follow this fall. Current recommendations include:

•24-hour rapid, real-time helpline support for safety concerns;

•focused attention to doxxing, which the task force urged be denounced as “an abhorrent activity”;

•University statements of support for all community “groups equally, without overlooking affected groups”;

•expanding Palestinian studies curricular offerings and recruiting tenure-track faculty in support of this objective (and related Harvard-wide efforts to gather information on available academic resources and needs);

•clarifying policies and procedures for reporting bullying, bias, and discrimination;

•reaffirming the University’s commitment to free expression and open debate, and clearly, effectively communicating policies on protest and dissent to help address “the ambiguity about these policies that we heard exists among many students and even among some staff responsible for applying them.”

•revisiting the University’s 2018 statement of its declared values—and including community members’ safety as an explicit part of the values articulated;

•finding ways “to publicly highlight and clarify its adherence to fundraising best practices that protect academic freedom and institutional independence”;

•fostering conversations within Houses and dorms, facilitating faculty-organized community conversations on diversity and pluralism during orientation, addressing “religious illiteracy” as it is “a significant factor contributing to stereotypes and prejudices”; and

•strengthening interfaith and multifaith understanding of religious holidays, observances, dietary needs, and related factors.

Similarly, the task force on combatting antisemitism highlighted findings and recommendations from its 40-plus listening sessions, concerning these subjects, among others:

•Clarifying Harvard’s values: “[A]ntisemitism and anti-Israeli bias—like Islamophobia, anti-Arab bias, racism, misogyny, homophobia, or transphobia—are forms of hatred that have no place within the Harvard community.”

•Acting against discrimination, bullying, harassment, and hate: “The situation of Israeli students at Harvard has been dire. They have frequently been subject to derision and social exclusion.… The administration should explore methods to build support systems for Israeli students and to ensure sufficient ability to prevent, or if needed, capably and speedily address, such issues in the future.” Further, “We have heard disturbing reports that faculty members and teaching fellows discriminate against or harass students because they are Israeli or have pro-Israel views. Harvard should make clear that such behavior by instructional staff is contrary to University policy and will be subject to disciplinary action when it occurs.” The task force also cautioned about social media, and reported student belief that participation in extracurricular activities may be subjected to litmus tests—a form of exclusion the University must end.

•Improving disciplinary processes: Students report a lack of clarity on submission of complaints about antisemitic behavior, and “the policies of administrative boards and other disciplinary bodies vary widely across the University’s separate units, and there are significant disparities across units in the handling of disciplinary cases.” Many community members “doubt the University is committed to imposing substantive consequences for antisemitic expression or action.”

•Adopting measures on education and training of officers responsible for implementing equity, diversity, inclusion and belonging policies pertaining to antisemitism, and for new students and student leaders.

•Fostering constructive dialogue: Have University leaders attend talks by leaders with opposing viewpoints on controversial issues (a recommendation made by both task forces), foster faculty talks on “historic and contemporary relations between Christianity, Islam, and Judaism,” and encourage student conversations and research.

•Supporting Jewish life on campus by extending kosher meal services, and making accommodations for Jewish holidays or the Sabbath.

In accepting the task forces’ initial reports Garber wrote, “We must strengthen our ties with a sustained commitment to engaging each other with tact, decency, and compassion. Our learning cannot be limited to purely academic pursuits if we hope to fulfill our responsibilities to one another and to the institution that is our intellectual home.”

Anticipating their complete recommendations, including longer-term measures, during the fall term, he observed, “The work ahead of us will require concerted effort.”

His announcement was accompanied by a Harvard Gazette conversation with the task force leaders, available here.

by b09de2a90dfa0acc@harvard.edu

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Loneliness—Bad for Body and Mind

niko_yaitanes@harvard.edu — Tue, 25 Jun 2024 06:34:55 +0000

Loneliness—Bad for Body and Mind niko_yaitanes@… Tue, 06/25/2024 - 02:34

Few people would consider loneliness a positive condition. Many come to know its unfortunate mental toll at some time or other during the course of their lives—but medicine is increasingly recognizing the physical toll it takes, too, especially when it becomes long-term.

In a study published today in the journal eClinicalMedicine, researchers from the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health found a link between chronic loneliness and an increased risk of stroke for older adults, adding to the growing body of work on the health implications of loneliness. Using data from a 12-year period starting in 2006, they looked at how adults over the age of 50 had reported feelings of loneliness over time. Those who suffered most from the feeling also experienced a 56 percent greater risk of having a stroke, a significant difference.

Those who faced situational, or more temporary loneliness did not see the same increase in risk, which helped the researchers realize the danger was more likely chronic feelings of isolation. They emphasized that an individual’s perception itself matters, more than any concrete measure of participants’ “social isolation,” such as their number of friends.

Yenee Soh, the lead author of the study and a research associate in the department of social and behavioral sciences, called for targeted interventions to combat the problem of loneliness, which she said is “increasingly considered a major public health issue.”

In fact, the researchers’ finding comes amid a moment of national alarm about loneliness. (Read the Harvard Magazine feature article, “The Loneliness Pandemic,” for more.) U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy ’98 declared the problem a national epidemic last year, writing in a New York Times op-ed that “the increased risk of premature death associated with social disconnection is comparable to smoking daily—and may be even greater than the risk associated with obesity.” He issued a report that detailed a dramatic drop in the amount of time Americans spent with friends during the pandemic, particularly young people.

The surgeon general’s report also called for a collective effort to increase connectedness using everything from more in-person work to medical training for doctors to recognize loneliness as a health risk.

Prior studies have found associations between loneliness and cardiovascular diseases, but the research of Soh and colleagues Loeb professor of social epidemiology Ichiro Kawachi, professor of social and behavioral sciences Laura D. Kubzansky, Cabot professor of public policy and epidemiology Lisa F. Berkman, and Feldberg professor of maternal and child health Henning Tiemeier adds new insight to that work by looking at loneliness’s connection to stroke risk over many years, with strokes considered “one of the leading causes of long-term disability and mortality worldwide,” according to the study.

The researchers relied on a 20-question survey called the UCLA Revised Loneliness Scale, which asks respondents to rate the frequency of experiences such as feeling left out or isolated. It included more than 12,000 participants and checked in with them during the course of several years to see how their feelings of loneliness had changed. Then, controlling for known stroke risk factors, the scientists compared survey responses to instances of strokes, leading to the study’s principal conclusion that the mental perception of loneliness and physical risk of stroke are indeed connected.

The study does not explain why or how strokes might be connected to chronic loneliness, although current literature suggests it may in part lead to greater inflammation and poorer immune health, higher consumption of tobacco and alcohol, reduced quality of sleep, and other unhealthy behaviors.

Kubzansky, a coauthor, said that it fit into a larger debate about the role of mental health in determining physical health, which some prominent health institutions have been reluctant to recognize outright. “Mental health really is a contributor to downstream physical health,” she said.

As the national focus on loneliness and its serious health implications prompt a search for solutions, Kubzansky cautioned that simply telling vulnerable people to socialize more (by phoning a family member or organizing meet-ups, for example) would not be adequate. She called for a focus on the “structural factors” causing loneliness on a societal level. That way, the burden of the problem doesn’t fall entirely on individuals and the doctors treating them. “There may be barriers,” she said, “that are simply not in people’s hands to manage.”

by Jack R. Trapanick

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Harvard Launches Center for LGBTQ Health

niko_yaitanes@harvard.edu — Sat, 22 Jun 2024 01:29:16 +0000

Harvard Launches Center for LGBTQ Health niko_yaitanes@… Fri, 06/21/2024 - 21:29

The Harvard Pilgrim Health Care Institute announced the launch of a new LGBTQ Health Center of Excellence on June 4, in partnership with the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health (HSPH).

Citing both the LGBTQ community’s growing size in the US and the health inequities it faces, Brittany Charlton, the inaugural leader of the center, said in an interview that it would work to improve the health of LGBTQ people through advocacy and research, and by training health professionals to better serve and empower the population. Charlton, associate professor of population medicine and in the department of epidemiology (at HSPH and Harvard Medical School), is a scholar of sexual and gender minority health who has studied disparities in reproductive health and cancer.

“Discrimination — whether it's homophobia, racism, transphobia — it gets underneath our skin. And it kills us.” Charlton said, emphasizing that LGBTQ people face worse pregnancy outcomes and higher rates of premature death than the general population. “It's such a preventable cause.”

Early programs will include an LGBTQ Health Voices Fellowship, meant to train the next generation of LGBTQ health leaders to influence public discourse (by learning to write op-eds and policy briefs, for example); design of new coursework for medical and public health students that includes teaching them to document health disparities; and funding relevant research. It will also provide tuition scholarships to students doing work on LBGTQ health.

The center will be staffed by 13 faculty members from Harvard Pilgrim Health Care Institute—an affiliate of Harvard Medical School that is part of a larger health insurance company called Point32Health—and HSPH, including epidemiologists, pediatricians, biostatisticians, and behavioral scientists. “Dr. Charlton has assembled what you might call a ‘dream team’ of researchers across both institutions,” Emily Oken, the president of the Harvard Pilgrim Health Care Institute, said in a statement.

The partnership with Harvard Pilgrim Health Care Institute will give the center access to healthcare data from customers across New England, and the opportunity to collect new data for research on sexual orientation and gender identity.

HSPH Dean Andrea Baccarelli said that the center would advance the school’s “core mission” to “improve health and promote equity so all people can thrive.”

The launch of the program, during Pride Month, comes amid growing attacks on LGBTQ rights and healthcare in state legislatures across the United States, including many which restrict gender-affirming care for transgender youth. Some laws have limited participation in youth sports teams that align with trans people’s gender identity, or forbidden discussion of LGBTQ topics in schools. Studies have also demonstrated profound obstacles trans patients face to receiving equitable healthcare, with nearly a fifth having been outright refused care by a provider.

“In the first half of this year, not even the end of June, there were more than 500 of these discriminatory bills introduced in the state legislatures," said Charlton, continuing, “There could not be more of an urgent time for us.” She added that she hoped the center would help educate clinicians on more LGBTQ-positive practices—for example, taking an inclusive sexual history that builds rapport with the patient with more open-ended questions.

“We’re really not dedicating enough time to preparing our students or med school students to care for the LGBTQ population,” she said. “A study several years ago showed that we dedicate an average of five hours or less across the full four years of medical school to preparing students to care for our community. That certainly pales in comparison to the time that schools devote to other topics.”

Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey ’92 also celebrated the opening of the center, hailing its potential to lead to “new innovations and lifesaving treatments.”

by Jack R. Trapanick

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Addressing preventable causes of illness based in discrimination

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Is Harvard Antisemitic?

max_krupnick@harvard.edu — Thu, 20 Jun 2024 21:16:50 +0000

Is Harvard Antisemitic? max_krupnick@h… Thu, 06/20/2024 - 17:16

When Hamas terrorists attacked Israel last October 7, they unleashed death and destruction—and also inflamed American prejudice on ethnic and religious grounds. Within hours, allegations of such bias came to Harvard. A hasty October 7 student letter holding “the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence” prompted immediate attacks on the presumed authors, and fierce denunciations of their alleged antisemitism, from within the University community and beyond. Much more was to come. In the two months following October 7, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) reported a 337 percent increase in antisemitic incidents nationwide. The campus tensions were further heightened following the December 5 hearing where members of Congress berated then-President Claudine Gay (alongside her MIT and University of Pennsylvania counterparts) for leading campuses the representatives deemed antisemitic.

As the University’s task forces on combating antisemitism and combating anti-Muslim and anti-Arab bias press their work forward and prepare broad recommendations, two reports published on May 16 lay out political and alumni critiques of the Harvard campus climate. They present external and internal perspectives on antisemitism in the community, and argue that beyond individual incidents, the institution (its leadership, its administrative processes, and its curriculum) are themselves antisemitic. Published two days after the 20-day pro-Palestine encampment in the Old Yard ended, these reports represent some of the most pointed criticisms of the University arising from the events since October 7.

The Harvard Yard encampment photographed on its first day, April 24 | PHOTOGRAPH BY NIKO YAITANES/HARVARD MAGAZINE

The first report, “The Antisemitism Advisory Group and Harvard’s Response: Clarity and Inaction,” was issued by the House Committee on Education and the Workforce. That committee, which hosted the December 5 presidential questioning, has been investigating Harvard’s “response to antisemitic events on its campus.” Its report, an update in its investigation, primarily relies on the testimony of former antisemitism advisory group member Dara Horn ’99, Ph.D. ’06, who relayed student stories and discussed Harvard’s perceived neglect of that first antisemitism group, hastily convened by Gay last October (and since succeeded by the antisemitism task force created by interim president Alan M. Garber in January).

The second report, “The Soil Beneath the Encampments: How Israel and Jews Became the Focus of Hate at Harvard,” was written by the Harvard Jewish Alumni Alliance (HJAA), a group formed last October aimed at “ensuring the safety of Jewish students on campus and…championing a pluralist university culture.” Its report seeks to “explore if and how Harvard as an institution—its faculty and educational programs—might be fueling the hatred we were witnessing.” HJAA’s education vice president Jessica Levin ’87 said that the release of its report was not coordinated with the House committee’s.

“Surviving Harvard as a Jew”

According to both reports, antisemitic harassment and discrimination against Jewish and Israeli students began long before October 7. Among the incidents cited in the HJAA report, for example: In May 2022, a swastika was found carved into a Currier House corkboard. In March 2023, a professor kicked Kim Nahari ’26 out of a class she was visiting after she said she was Israeli. One student told the HJAA that his friend’s teaching fellow for a Holocaust class said that the Holocaust “really wasn’t that bad” and pointed to “all the ways that Jews contributed to the Holocaust happening.” HJAA secretary Zoe Bernstein ’02 said that all of these incidents were reported to administrators, but students “never felt like there was adequate accountability for what they experienced,” because they were not told whether students were disciplined (perhaps in keeping with Harvard’s routine silence on such matters).

Following the Hamas attack and the ensuing war in Gaza, animosities escalated. A student told the HJAA that, on campus, her fiancé was spit on while wearing a kippah (or yarmulke, a traditional Jewish head covering). Observant Jews, multiple students noted, have started wearing baseball caps instead of kippot. During the Harvard Yard encampment (April 24-May 14), several students told the HJAA that they felt offended or unsafe. Some Jewish undergraduates said they were afraid to leave their rooms, walk through the Yard, or study in the libraries. Students told Jewish chaplain Rabbi Getzel Davis that they were going home or moving off-campus “because they couldn’t deal with what was being normalized,” he said in an interview with this magazine.

The HJAA’s report highlights several posts from Sidechat, an anonymous social media platform available only to people with a Harvard email. One justified the October 7 attack, calling Hamas “representatives of Palestinian frustration” and the incursion “a moment of decolonization.” Another called Zionists “killers and rapists of children.” Some used antisemitic tropes, including one poster who ridiculed a student for looking “just as dumb as her nose is crooked.” In January, administrators asked Sidechat to better moderate its content, and the app restricted the Harvard section to undergraduates (rather than anyone with a Harvard email).

In sum, one student told the HJAA, “The only hope of surviving Harvard as a Jew was to not dress ‘too Jewish,’ request the University accommodate Jewish holidays, speak Hebrew, or God forbid, actually support Israel’s right to exist.”

The HJAA interviewed about 50 students as well as some faculty members and recent alumni for its report. Most interviews occurred between November and February, with some additional conversations during the April-May encampment. Although two students are identified by name, the rest appear in the report anonymously. The HJAA report concludes that it was “informative” that these students’ feelings were “so similar.” (Reporting to the Faculty of Arts and Sciences on May 7, cochairs of the two University anti-bias task forces described hearing strikingly similar accounts of biased, discriminatory, or shunning behavior based on apparent ethnic or religious identity for members of the community who are Jewish, Muslim, Palestinian, or Arab.)

HJAA’s Bernstein conducted about half of the interviews, starting with one student whose mother she met and then finding more students through “word of mouth,” she said. She said that people have asked whether the cohort of students HJAA interviewed was sufficiently broad or representative to give an accurate picture of conditions on campus. She responded, “If this was any other historically discriminated against minority, those kinds of questions would not be asked.” If approximately 50 students from “another group came forward with stories like we were told,” she continued, “we can’t imagine someone saying, ‘But does every person in that group feel that way?’”

“The Narrative…Taught at Harvard”

Turning from personal conduct and experiences, the HJAA report criticized Harvard’s academic treatment of Israel-Palestine issues, asserting that its instruction is based on antisemitic propaganda. The narrative that Israel is a settler-colonialist state conducting a genocide, according to the report, was “the brainchild of the Soviet Union during the Cold War.” The USSR “recognized that overt antisemitism wouldn’t fly so soon after the Holocaust,” the HJAA argues, so masked it as anti-Zionism. This biased approach, the report maintains, tainted much campus teaching and many guest speakers’ presentations, which then shaped student rhetoric at protests and toward peers.

HJAA members combed through Harvard’s public-facing course catalog and event listings, showcasing “events that spread the virulently anti-Israel narrative.” Phrases that the HJAA picked out included “apartheid,” “genocide,” “military occupation,” “Nakba,” “settler-colonialism,” and “structural racism.”

The authors of the HJAA report cite anti-Israel ideas taught by Harvard professors and shared at Harvard events as the source for the rhetoric they perceived as antisemitic during campus protests (described in the report as “anti-Israeli, pro-Hamas”). “The narrative…that was taught at Harvard before October 7,” said HJAA social media and media relations vice president Roni Brunn ’96, “is being seen in the protests, and that connection was not made anywhere.” The HJAA says that the narrative diffusion does not take place just in the classroom, noting that there was a faculty tent at the encampment.

The report did not attempt to specify when anti-Israel and anti-Zionist speech turns antisemitic (although it does advocate adoption of a widely discussed and highly contested definition of antisemitism that would be used to evaluate allegations of harassment, discrimination, and intimidation). “We are not interested in debating whether anti-Zionism is antisemitism,” said Levin. “We are looking at the bullying, the exclusion, the harassment facing Jewish students.”

The HJAA also raised concerns that people in positions of educational authority used their status to influence political matters. In an incident described in the report, a student who agreed to have lunch with a proctor said that they “have never heard someone praise terrorists like he did….I just remember the trauma of that conversation.” Another reported that a teaching fellow “canceled class to go protest” with the Palestine Solidarity Committee, a student group that spearheaded pro-Palestine campus protests.

Finally, the HJAA raised questions about donor influence on the University—specifically, funds from sovereign sources the report described as “Middle Eastern anti-democratic governments.” Citing University World News, the HJAA report claimed that Harvard’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies (CMES) allegedly received $1.5 billion from foreign entities between 2020 and 2023, and that Middle Eastern authoritarian nations gave the University $894 million between 2014 and 2019. (According to Harvard’s consolidated, audited financial statements, in the fiscal years 2020-2023, for the entire University, current use giving averaged about $500 million annually and total giving—for current use, endowment, non-federal sponsored research, and other categories—averaged about $1.3 billion annually.) “Once you research event after event on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from one perspective, using the same language, with speakers with a horrific paper trail of antisemitism,” said Levin, “you start to understand directly what that money is buying them.”

Update, July 11, 2024: A University spokesperson refuted the University World News report, stating, “CMES, which has a $1.8 million annual budget, has not received anywhere near $1.5 billion in funding from all sources combined, foreign and domestic, since its inception in 1954. Also of note, for the period 2020-2023, CMES did not receive any funding from foreign governments or allied entities, Middle Eastern or otherwise.”

“The Bureaucratic Black Hole”

Much of the congressional report analyzed the antisemitism advisory group (AAG) formed by Gay in late October 2023. Horn and four other committee members threatened to resign on November 5, less than two weeks after the group’s first meeting, “due to frustration with the inadequacy of Harvard’s leaders’ response to increasing antisemitic harassment and a lack of clarity regarding the Group’s charge and future work,” according to the report.

The five committee members who threatened resignation advanced a series of short-, medium-, and long-term measures to improve the University’s response to antisemitism. Some were quickly met by Gay, including announcing that the confrontation between a proctor and a counterprotester was being investigated by the FBI and Harvard University Police Department, condemning the phrase “from the river to the sea,” and establishing an email inbox for the AAG. But Horn told the congressional investigators that AAG members remained confused about their mission, noting that they had no “written charter or charge delineating what our responsibilities would be.”

Claudine Gay testifying before Congress December 5 | SCREENSHOT FROM HOUSE COMMITTEE ON EDUCATION AND THE WORKFORCE YOUTUBE LIVE STREAM

One particular moment of frustration for the AAG was Gay’s December 5 testimony. Horn said she was “disappointed not to be consulted” by Gay before the hearing and that Gay did not describe antisemitism as “a problem that was pervasive…on Harvard’s campus.”

The House committee expressed confusion about the January 19 formation of the presidential task force on combating antisemitism, which it says “came without a clear explanation of either what had happened to the AAG or why a new and separate task force was necessary.”

Beyond their qualms about the task force’s creation and mission, both the HJAA and the congressional reports critiqued its co-chair, Frost professor of Jewish history Derek Penslar. Horn was frustrated that Harvard appointed “someone who had publicly stated that antisemitism on campus was an exaggerated problem.” HJAA secretary Bernstein expressed disinterest in working with Penslar for the same reason, and because she said he believes “that anti-Zionism is not antisemitism.”

In an interview, Penslar described those characterizations as inaccurate. Those descriptions, he said, emerged from a January 19 post on X by journalist Ira Stoll ’94 that “became its own narrative, and no one asked me, no one read my own work.” Penslar said that Horn’s comment, accusing him of saying antisemitism was exaggerated, is a misunderstanding. He was responding “to a specific discussion…that Jewish students at Harvard were…in danger for their lives.” “Things have been very bad for our Jewish students,” he continued, “but they have not been in that kind of imminent physical danger.” Responding to Bernstein, he denied saying that anti-Zionism is not antisemitism, clarifying “anti-Zionism and antisemitism overlap, but they are distinct,” and continuing, “Of course, anti-Zionism can be antisemitic.” But “it is possible for anti-Zionism not to be antisemitic.”

The HJAA also criticized the administration for not taking its complaints seriously. On January 22, according to Bernstein and the report, members met with a group of administrators (including interim president Garber, appointed January 2; Harvard College dean Rakesh Khurana; and executive vice president Meredith Weenick) and shared a draft version of the document. It was a productive conversation, said Bernstein, though she “didn’t think I had met with the leaders of tomorrow,” saying, “They did not stand proud and tall, they did not have booming voices, you can see that they struggle with taking a position, and I felt like they have their many masters.”

In February, according to the report, Garber asked for a copy to share with the presidential task force. But in April, not having received it from Garber, Penslar asked the HJAA for a copy. “The work that we had done existed in the bureaucratic black hole that we now know to be Harvard’s administration,” said Bernstein.

A “Common Antisemitic Trope”

During the pro-Palestine encampment in Harvard Yard, HJAA’s concerns about antisemitism intensified. Chief complaints in the report included calls to “globalize the intifada” (which some critics say entails the worldwide murder of Jews) and violations of time, place, and manner protest restrictions that made some Jewish students, the HJAA wrote, “feel physically unsafe.”

Maria A. Ressa speaking at Commencement May 23 | PHOTOGRAPH BY NIKO YAITANES/HARVARD MAGAZINE

After the encampment peacefully ended on May 14, Harvard faced further allegations of antisemitism. During her Commencement address, Nobel Peace Prize-winning journalist Maria A. Ressa, LL.D. ’24, used language that some listeners perceived as antisemitic. “Because I accepted your invitation to be here today,” she said, “I was attacked online and called antisemitic by power and money because they want power and money.”

HJAA’s Brunn wrote on X that the line referenced a “common antisemitic trope…that Jews are only after power and money.” The vagueness of that line, she wrote, implied “that antisemitism is a fake complaint made in the quest for power and money.” Toward the end of Commencement, Chabad Rabbi Hirschy Zarchi approached Ressa and briefly asked her to clarify that line before he prematurely left the stage. In a later statement to Harvard Magazine, Zarchi said, “Her classic antisemitic rhetoric was all the more revealing when she went on to slander Israel by falsely accusing it of genocide, and at the same time, say nothing about the greatest massacre against the Jewish people since the Holocaust.” Zarchi also rebuked Ressa for praising the student Commencement speakers, two of whom went off-script to condemn Harvard’s disciplinary decision to prevent 13 pro-Palestine protesters from graduating, and the students who walked out of graduation to protest that and Israel’s war in Gaza. “She called them ‘peaceful protesters,’” he continued. “They were anything but peaceful. They were hateful and violent.”

Three days after the speech, Ressa posted that her words had “been misinterpreted or taken out of context,” saying that line referenced “how Big Tech and people in power seek to divide us, often for their own gain” and “the antecedent is several sentences ahead.”

Requests and Responses

As the House committee continues to investigate Harvard and other universities for antisemitism (and has proposed legislation), the HJAA report outlined six measures that the University administration should “promptly” enact. Their scope suggests that the HJAA authors conceive of antisemitism as a sweeping institutional problem—encompassing University policies, procedures, enforcement, pedagogy, and more—rather than a matter of individual behaviors.

Swiftly and publicly “enforce the University’s codes of conduct uniformly and without exception, and discipline students, faculty, and staff who violate them.”
Adopt the “globally accepted International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism, including its examples” into Harvard’s policies for identifying and investigating antisemitic discrimination, harassment, and intimidation.
Enact clear principles on academic freedom and institutional neutrality.
Initiate an “independent, third-party investigation tasked with creating a public report of various practices at each Harvard school, including curriculum, events, admissions policies, and student, faculty, or administrative behavior” that might violate the IHRA definition or University policy on anti-discrimination and anti-bullying.
Investigate the Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging offices at each Harvard school “in light of their failure to sufficiently include Jews and antisemitism in their mission and programming.”
Train people who address discrimination issues on “the IHRA definition with all its examples” and “the use of social media…to spread hate and bigotry.”

Some of these requests have already been addressed by Harvard. In a May 10 letter to the congressional committee, “Harvard Actions to Combat Antisemitism,” the administration provided updates about its efforts to counter antisemitism, including:

A January clarification to the University-wide Statement on Rights and Responsibilities, which articulated that certain types of protests (unauthorized occupations) and locations (classrooms, libraries, dormitories, dining halls, and offices) were forbidden.
Harvard’s schools have “continued to clarify and raise awareness” about University policies that “ensure students, faculty, and staff can continue their learning, research, and work free from harassment and discrimination.”
A resource titled “Protecting Against Online Harassment” was developed and posted to help community members “recognize, report, and take protective and curative steps against online harassment.”
Reports of antisemitism, the administration emphasized, “are taken seriously, and are reviewed and addressed in accordance with School and University policies and practices that are intended to combat bias and hate.”
More than 200 faculty and administrators who participate in disciplinary processes attended an educational session on antisemitism, which Harvard says “will be expanded to other members of the community.”
Harvard “has further clarified that its inclusion and belonging efforts must reach all members of our community,” with its leaders meeting with the Foundation to Combat Antisemitism and attending dinners at Hillel and Chabad.

Later in May, the University announced that it would no longer issue official statements about public matters that do not directly affect the institution’s core functions of research, teaching, and learning. In mid-June, the antisemitism task force shared their preliminary recommendations with Garber, and co-chair Penslar said the group is preparing its full report for the fall.

But some of the HJAA’s requests are more difficult to enact. Though the report calls the IHRA definition “globally accepted,” much debate surrounds its adoption. Penslar has written that IHRA’s suggested use as institutional policy is “bizarre,” since it was “developed for the purpose of data collection, not policy making.” He also expressed concern about how the definition treats critiques of Israel, writing that it “assumes guilt rather than innocence” and implies that “highly critical but factually accurate statements about Israel are antisemitic.” (In other words, critics of the IHRA standard suggest that its application can chill speech, rather than set reasonable conditions for productive discourse.)

Despite his disagreement with HJAA’s chosen antisemitism definition, Penslar still finds the report valuable. “I appreciate that there is much in the report that is accurate in terms of the difficult experiences that many of our Jewish students have been having for the last several months,” he said. “On the other hand, I think that the Jewish community at Harvard is more divided and complex than the report suggests, and that the responses from Harvard…over the last several months have been considerably more robust and helpful than the HJAA report suggests.”

Anticipating opposition to the report’s proposed third-party audit—which is likely to be interpreted by many faculty members as a dangerous intrusion into fundamental academic rights—HJAA’s Levin asserted that such an inquiry would not jeopardize academic freedom. “We believe that the rights of Jews and other minorities—and ultimately the flourishing of any liberal institution—depends on academic freedom. There is not academic freedom at Harvard right now,” she said. “They are selling it to the highest bidder. They are silencing people such that students say they will never express their views in class. Faculty are telling us it’s indoctrination, not education.”

“Trying to Remodel Friendship and Compassion”

As the academic year came to a close, all sides of the campus Israel-Palestine debate grew frustrated and vocalized increasingly disparate demands. Pro-Palestine student protesters advocated for Harvard to divest from all investments “in Israel, the ongoing genocide in Gaza, and the occupation of Palestine.” The Faculty of Arts and Sciences voted to allow 13 students found by the College’s Administrative Board to have violated University policies during the encampment to graduate (a vote the Corporation declined to accept). And the HJAA called for a full-scale investigation of Harvard’s curriculum and policies to see whether the University promotes antisemitism.

Once students went their separate ways in late May, community members started thinking of the fall, hoping to help reduce tensions. As the anti-bias task forces prepared to address policies and procedures, other campus stakeholders focused on the face-to-face interactions that must ultimately enhance the campus culture and overcome fear, prejudice, and thoughtlessness.

Signage in Harvard Yard, which reopened to the public on June 6, explicitly restricts certain activities—some of which took place during the encampment. PHOTOGRAPH BY NIKO YAITANES/HARVARD MAGAZINE

“The University has never before, to my knowledge, dealt with two marginalized groups that are in conflict with each other,” said Rabbi Davis, the Jewish chaplain. Some healing must come in the form of reimagined policies, which, he said, were created for students “protesting against the University, not harassing their suitemates.” But some of what needs to be repaired must come from the students themselves. In late May, reviewing the difficult speech questions many campuses must consider in the wake of the encampments, Emily Bazelon and Charles Homans closed their New York Times Magazine report with this reflection:

At some schools, pro-Palestinian protesters modulated their own speech in deference to the requests of other students, even avoiding the common chant, “From the river to the sea,” which others have defended as peaceful. The protesters who made these choices didn’t do so because of a law or rule. They were sensitive to the nudge of peer relationships and social norms.

Bringing students together to hash out community standards about language is “the only way I can think of for there to be a set of norms about what speech goes too far that students on all sides would accept as legitimate,” David Pozen, the Columbia law professor, said…

At Harvard this spring, amid the protests and headlines, such green shoots also began, tentatively, to appear. Rabbi Davis collaborated with Muslim chaplain Imam Khalil Abdur-Rashid (the two religious leaders shared duties as chaplains of the day at Commencement) and other campus chaplains to run programs “trying to remodel friendship and compassion,” Davis said. In the fall, he wants to continue to encourage students “to build bridges, to repair broken friendships, and to recognize that no matter what your politics are, you should be kind to your neighbors and friends and roommates.” Continuing, he said, “I wish that were the story.”

by max_krupnick@harvard.edu

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The Poetics of Homelessness

lydia_gibson@harvard.edu — Tue, 18 Jun 2024 21:43:42 +0000

The Poetics of Homelessness lydia_gibson@h… Tue, 06/18/2024 - 17:43

After publication of the May-June feature “The Homelessness Public Health Crisis,” Harvard Magazine received an email from Jason Adam Sheets, M.T.S. ’21. A Pushcart Prize-nominated poet and essayist, Sheets earned a B.F.A. from Goddard College in Vermont and studied theopoetics at Harvard Divinity School (HDS). He has written three books of poetry: A Madness of Blue Obsidian, The Hour Wasp, and Theopoetica: An Anthology (all from April Gloaming Publishing); a fourth book of poems will be published this year. He has taught English at the University of New Hampshire and currently teaches for the Poetry in America program, associated with the PBS series of the same name.

Sheets is also homeless. For most of 2023, he slept unsheltered; this year he has been “couch-hopping” with friends in Cambridge, since he still cannot afford a fixed address of his own. In his email, he explained that the stereotype of guaranteed wealth for Ivy League graduates doesn’t always hold true: “If you enter poor, you leave poor,” he wrote. Sheets grew up in Plymouth, Massachusetts, in a lower-income, single-parent household, and after working numerous jobs, including as a steersman on a lobster boat and a taxi driver, he enrolled in college at age 31. Four years later, in 2019, he matriculated at HDS.

Jason Adam Sheets| PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF JASON ADAM SHEETS

In this essay, Sheets reflects on his experience of homelessness, its meaning to him as a person and a poet, and its connection to the wider national crisis.

—The Editors

I cannot remember the exact moment I became homeless. There was not one definitive event that led to my having to sleep beside train tracks or on bathroom floors. I was simply too broke for too long and unable to secure decent-enough employment that could afford me stable housing. I kept trying to save but couldn’t save enough, and before I knew it, I found myself outside one night, aimlessly walking with nowhere to go. Walking for hours each day, or night, has since become habit.

Years ago, I saw a raven for the first time. I was in Vermont attending my inaugural residency as a college undergraduate in a low-residency B.F.A. program in creative writing, four years before I received a full scholarship to study poetry at Harvard. We poets are drawn to crows and ravens, something about the magic in their mystery, so I had always hoped to encounter one. It was fitting that my first encounter occurred when I committed to pursue my calling. Hearing that deep musical caw evoked something within me, something about Emerson’s “long winding train reaching back into eternity” coupled with the difficulty of having both roots and wings.

All of us walk on a ground of many worlds, and we live in a world of many dualities. As a poet, I have each foot planted in a different world, perpetually tasked with distilling the effable from the ineffable without weakening the energy of the encounter. In both of these worlds, though, I’m a homeless Harvard alum—a paradox to most.

Sleeping on gravel is insufferable, but I can tell you how to make a comfortable makeshift bed on it out of practically nothing. Building a fire in the rain by the beach is insufferable, but I can tell you how to build a fire that will create just enough smoke to deter the horseflies from biting you while not drawing the attention of patrol officers. Guarding one’s belongings while homeless is insufferable, but I can tell you how to talk to the agitated drug addicts or untreated Cluster B personalities who fell through the cracks who won’t leave you alone because of something you have that they want, as addiction and mental illness run rampant in the homeless community. (See Lydialyle Gibson’s “Academia’s Absence from Homelessness” for more on this.)

A person’s capacity for experiencing suffering is the same as a person’s capacity for experiencing joy. As a poet, I find joy in words and symbols, and being homeless has gifted me with an abundance of both, which I keep in the front pocket of my life. I’m grateful for words such as home-less, dis-placed, and mis-fortuned. I thank these words, for in each of them, we find not only linguistic duality but the poetic duality—the poison and remedy of interpretation: in homeless we find home, in displaced we find place, and in our misfortune, we can find fortune. If it weren’t for poetry, I know that the experience of homelessness would have long since rusted my psychological gears to a locked state.

On April 30, 2024, I stood outside the gates of Harvard Yard in front of the Smith Campus Center waiting for a man from the City of Cambridge Department of Human Services to arrive and hand me a Verification of Homelessness through the window of his white work van. He pulled up to the corner of Dunster and handed me the document. I thanked him, then carefully placed the piece of paper into my backpack, the same backpack I wore each day from 2019-2021 while at Harvard. Two years ago, I walked across a stage at the graduation exercise for the classes of 2020 and 2021 and shook the hand of the dean of my school as he handed me a large white envelope that symbolized the master’s degree I’d earned. The envelope was empty. (We’d received our degrees in the mail a year earlier due to the COVID-19 lockdown.) When I returned to my friend’s place in Harvard Square, I pulled the Verification of Homelessness from my bag, feeling utterly unsure about how I felt about it. After uploading the photo of it to the places I needed to submit it, I pondered what to do with it and, for a moment, thought of that large white envelope.

There are many myths and stereotypes about being a Harvard graduate, but the one I attempt to reckon with most is the one that presumes that no matter who you are and where you come from, if you hold a degree from Harvard, you are free from having to worry about things such as job security, money, available credit, etc…. This is wishful thinking, especially if you were raised in a check-to-check single-parent household and entered college as an adult FGLI (first-generation, lower-income) student.

The thing about matriculating at Harvard as a working-class person living check-to-check is that you’ll still likely be a working-class person living check-to-check after you graduate, at least for a time, and typically for a longer time than most in your cohort. Like many post-COVID graduates, I’ve spent the past two years submitting countless application portfolios to talent-acquisition teams for positions in my field that, I feel, I’m well-qualified to interview for: research assistantships; instructorships in expository writing; publishing and editing positions; faculty assistantships, etc.—but I’ve yet to receive more than one invitation to interview. It’s important to note, too, that minimum wage employers won’t often hire those in my situation because they know we’re overqualified for their positions and that we’ll likely quit the moment we land the job we truly want; but if you omit your Ivy League credentials altogether from these applications, then the large gap in your employment history is presumed due to things such as jail or drugs. Then there’s the problem of not having a residential address to offer. Either way, you’re perceived as a risk and become stuck in a damned if you do, damned if you don’t situation.

I work two part-time jobs. I teach poetry via Zoom to a number of Title I high schools across the country (Title I is a federal program that provides extra funding to help students in high-poverty schools). This pays roughly $1,000 per month, so I receive roughly $4,000 per semester for this. I work another part-time job as an overnight safety coordinator youth worker for a homeless shelter in Harvard Square. I’d jump at the chance to work full-time at either of these, but the hours simply aren’t there. I’ve authored three books, published countless pieces in reputable and noteworthy journals and magazines, have given guest lectures at community colleges and at Harvard—and the Veritas of my situation is that I currently survive on roughly $23,000 per year. That’s $23,000 a year that some in my situation would kill for. Many homeless people live on much less than that, but most know the importance of having gratitude for every cent that they do have.

I recently had a conversation with a homeless Russian man, a conversation that inspired a poem I included in my next book, V Verse Is I. I’ll never forget how he reminded me to “always look at the shiny side of the coin, because when we find a coin on the ground, it has its shiny side and its dulled side, so always look for the shiny side.” There’s a geometry of gratitude in the poetics of homelessness. (I’ve found a lot of coins since then and always look for the shiny side…)

The last time I saw a raven, I was teaching a class via Zoom on the formal structure of sonnets. It was an orange-vanilla sky morning with a hint of saltwater in the air. I was taking my students for a walk down the train tracks, performatively sharing how the train tracks served as a metaphor for the 14-line limit of the sonnet and how the train symbolized the words of the poem, while the tracks symbolized the structure; expounding how, just as the train would derail if the tracks became warped, the emotional impact of the poem would derail if the structure became warped. We talked about how the “ticket” to attend the sonnet is the attention we pay to it—how we must pay the poem our attention if we’re to experience it the way the energy of its structure intends. I concluded the lecture feeling that it had gone well, and as I bent down to put my laptop back in my backpack, I heard a rich, sonorous caw. The raven was perched on the eave of a large, abandoned warehouse a stone’s throw away. We locked eyes for a long moment before it swooped down and somersaulted midair, moving away from me. The slant of its movement recalled for me the slant one uses when quoting lines of poetry, “a moment’s monument,—/ Memorial from the soul’s eternity . . . / its face reveals/ The soul.” At that moment, I was home with nothing less than all I needed.

by Jason Adam Sheets

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“Edifying and Beautiful”

d9be154420cfb920@harvard.edu — Fri, 14 Jun 2024 20:05:42 +0000

“Edifying and Beautiful” d9be154420cfb9… Fri, 06/14/2024 - 16:05

Curators at Houghton Library are bringing a splash of green and other vibrant color to the building’s main lobby this summer with a new exhibition of rare and old botanical illustrations.

Though visitors from the public were not able to enter Harvard Yard during much of the spring because of campus protests and turmoil, Houghton staff have continued staging original exhibits for the renovated building’s showcases, highlighting in this instance colorful and centuries-old volumes of painstakingly drawn flora.

The show, organized with assistance from the Botany Libraries in the Harvard University Herbaria, is just one example of how librarians within Harvard’s vast library system work together to highlight the depth of their collective holdings, according to curator of the Harry Elkins Widener Collection and librarian for scholarly and public programs Peter X. Accardo. Houghton curators also collaborated recently with the Yenching Library on an exhibit of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean objects.

Houghton Library’s summer exhibition of botanical illustrations displays ten works from Europe, the U.S., and Japan, many of them hundreds of years old. | PHOTOGRAPH BY NIKO YAITANES/HARVARD MAGAZINE

The current show features ten volumes of illustrations, originating in the U.S., Europe, and Japan. Accardo said the inspiration came in part from gardeners and part-time illustrators on the library’s staff, as well as the showing’s timing during the spring and summer seasons. Exhibitions like these, which feature a range of media, are also useful for familiarizing the staff with their diverse holdings—with books and objects numbering in the hundreds of thousands—enabling them to better help researchers and others coming into the library.

Richard Duppa (1770-1831). Illustrations of the Lotus of Antiquity. London, 1813. | PHOTOGRAPH BY NIKO YAITANES/HARVARD MAGAZINE

“What’s incumbent on many of us… is knowing our collections well—mostly for the benefit of the people that come to consult them,” Accardo said, adding that special collections librarians function best as generalists. “Because our collections are so broad, you always strive to be as useful and as knowledgeable as possible.”

While the objects all feature striking portrayals of precisely drawn plants, the various time periods, origins, and social contexts in which they were created mean that they represent widely different styles.

One seventeenth-century book dedicated to tulip illustrations by a Dutch engraver served a partly commercial purpose, according to doctoral student Vanessa Braganza, an exhibitions assistant at Houghton.

Crispijn van de Passe (1564-1637). Hortus Floridus in quo rariorum & minus vulgarium florum icones. (A Flower Garden, in which are Found Images of Rarer and Less Common Flowers). Arnheim, 1614-1616. | PHOTOGRAPH BY NIKO YAITANES/HARVARD MAGAZINE

“In the seventeenth century in Europe, there was a real tulip craze,” she said, “so much so that people were buying varieties of tulips, prospectively, that hadn’t actually yet been created.” That particular book, while in some sense decorative like others on display, was also a form of marketing. Braganza, in an interview, pointed out other functions for the range of volumes on display.

The curators found, for instance, that a manuscript of cherry blossoms from nineteenth-century Japan was crafted by an herbalist for a powerful clan. The cultural significance of the subject—cherry blossoms—and the elegant illustrations and calligraphy depicting them show the work to be a marker of status for the recipient family. In both its materials (each illustration was executed on silk) and its artistry, this book signaled that it was an item for collection—“not unlike a nice house today,” Braganza said—by wealthy and important figures.

Sakamoto Kösetsu (1800-1853). Cherry blossoms, v. 1: manuscript, around 19th century. | PHOTOGRAPH BY NIKO YAITANES/HARVARD MAGAZINE

A reference book of woodcut plant illustrations used widely across Renaissance Europe coincides with the era of colonization and exploration, when many explorers attempted to describe new environments and cultures in travel literature. Such works bring together a range of flora, many of them unfamiliar to readers, as both an informational and entertaining catalog. In the same way that the knowledge of new worlds brought back to Europe was deeply flawed, Braganza noted, some of the botanical illustrations within the reference book are outright inaccurate.

The Houghton lobby, after a 2022 renovation of the building, admits far more natural light. Although this provides a more modern and welcoming feel, it also means that objects on display must be placed strategically so that the sunlight doesn’t mar them. Among the botanical illustrations, many were positioned to minimize sunlight because of their creators’ reliance on natural pigments to convey the precise color of the plants.

A 19th-century book of Japanese cherry blossoms (left) and an English work from the same period featuring the lotus flower. | PHOTOGRAPH BY NIKO YAITANES/HARVARD MAGAZINE

Houghton administrative coordinator Le Huong Huynh, the part-time botanical illustrator whose work served as the spark for the exhibit, said such works have a special power to help visitors appreciate intricate but overlooked natural elements of their daily lives. After seeing the exhibit, “People tend to appreciate what they see… on their walks or their commute home,” she said. “It just brings people back to ‘Okay, I remember…this tree…,’ or ‘I remember this in my backyard that my parents used to grow.’”

by Jack R. Trapanick

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Sarah Ganz Blythe New Art Museums Director

niko_yaitanes@harvard.edu — Wed, 12 Jun 2024 14:02:34 +0000

Sarah Ganz Blythe New Art Museums Director niko_yaitanes@… Wed, 06/12/2024 - 10:02

Sarah Ganz Blythe, deputy director, exhibitions, education, and programs at the Rhode Island School of Design Museum (RISD), has been appointed Cabot director of the Harvard Art Museums effective August 12, interim provost John Manning announced today. Ganz Blythe succeeds Martha Tedeschi, who became director in 2016 and retires at the end of this month—a term that included scaling up programming at the the renovated, expanded museums’ complex after it opened in 2014; weathering the pandemic; and effecting the transition to free general admission.

In a statement in the announcement, Manning said, “Sarah brings to her role not only great knowledge, creativity, judgment, and leadership experience, but also a deep commitment to teaching, learning, collaboration, and engagement with our museums’ extraordinary communities.”

Ganz Blythe joined the RISD Museum as director of education in 2009 and was interim director from 2020 through 2023, according to the announcement. She also held curatorial and educational positions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Museum of Modern Art (where she was director of interpretation and research). During her undergraduate studies at Wellesley College, where she earned her B.A. in art history, she was a conservation intern at the Harvard museums. She earned her doctorate in modern art from the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University and has twice been a member of the Harvard museums’ visiting committee.

“As a student, my experiences with the Harvard Art Museums revealed the profound rewards of engaging deeply with and thinking expansively about art,” she said in a statement in the news announcement. “I am thrilled to return and have the opportunity to guide this dynamic institution as it collaborates with students, faculty, staff, artists, and community partners.”

Interim president Alan M. Garber cited her “creativity in engaging students and her passion for teaching” in the announcement, underscoring the Harvard museums’ academic and cultural roles. Ganz Blythe has taught at Brown, Wellesley, and RISD and, according to the announcement, “has published widely throughout her career on the complicated histories of museums, art pedagogy, and underrepresented women artists.”

Read the news announcement here.

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Taking Climate Action at Harvard

d9be154420cfb920@harvard.edu — Tue, 11 Jun 2024 18:46:18 +0000

Taking Climate Action at Harvard d9be154420cfb9… Tue, 06/11/2024 - 14:46

How can the world curb carbon emissions in the difficult-to-abate iron and steel industry? How can the radically polarized United States develop bipartisan cooperation on climate policy? And how might the U.S. Congress pass a form of carbon tax in 2025? Those were among the high-priority, and admittedly hard, subjects addressed during the initial discussions at the Harvard Salata Institute for Climate and Sustainability’s second annual “Climate Action Week” that began June 10.

In introductory remarks, vice provost for climate and sustainability James Stock noted that even with the rapidly declining cost of wind and solar electricity, and of batteries, combined with tax credits and other carbon abatement incentives contained in the Inflation Reduction Act, the United States is not close to meeting its commitments under the Paris Agreement to reduce carbon emissions 50 percent (relative to 2005) by 2030. That goal is generally accepted as the path to net-zero emissions by 2050, the key to holding the global average temperature increase to 2.0 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit). But, Stock said, the world is currently on track for warming of 2.5 to 3 degrees Celsius—a level thought to be radically destabilizing of essential natural systems and threatening to human habitation in much of the world. Well before such increases in average temperatures, the effects are already hard to ignore. Last year, 5 percent of Canada’s forests burned in wildfires, increasing hospitalizations and mortality downwind. India recently recorded temperatures in excess of 120 degrees Fahrenheit for the first time. And predicted for this summer in North America are more severe wildfires, heat waves, and a record hurricane season.

Greening Steelmaking

With that, Stock opened the day’s inaugural plenary session on decarbonizing the iron and steel industries, the first of 85 events scheduled to take place during the week. “Steelmaking today accounts for 7 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions,” he said, adding that the industry could grow by as much as one-third during the next quarter-century. Reducing emissions in this sector means eliminating all the diesel fuel burned in mining and transporting iron ore, including bunker fuel for ships, as well as the coal used to chemically convert iron ore to iron. “Both of our guests lead large, legacy companies that historically have deployed the carbon-intensive technologies of the industry,” Stock continued. “So, both face challenges of shifting vast enterprises to a new set of technologies, goals, and sensibilities. Both also face market realities, which include the currently niche nature of voluntary demand for green steel, and a global policy environment that is highly uncertain and regionally varying.”

Joining moderator Nili Gilbert ’99, vice chair of Carbon Direct, on the Sanders Theatre stage were Andrew Forrest, founder and chief executive chairman of Australia-based Fortescue, the world’s fourth largest producer of iron ore, and Aditya Mittal, CEO of ArcelorMittal, the world’s second largest steel producer. Fortescue had announced in 2020 that it would reduce its operational carbon emissions (as opposed to carbon embodied in capital assets such as buildings) 26 percent by 2030. But in 2023, it announced a far more ambitious program: to achieve “real zero” operational emissions by 2030—without fossil fuels or the purchase of carbon offsets. ArcelorMittal aims to reduce European emissions 35 percent by 2030, and emissions across its operations worldwide by 25 percent by 2030. The company is poised to use green hydrogen (hydrogen produced using renewable energy) in its European and Canadian steel mills once that is available, and plans to use carbon capture and storage (CCS) technologies to sequester its CO2 waste streams. The company is also investing in innovative metallurgical technologies such as electrolysis to enable zero emission steelmaking.

Forrest, who has a Ph.D. in marine ecology, said that he was motivated to action by warming of the oceans, which represent “98 percent of the livable space” on Earth and compared to the terrestrial environment “are really suffering.” To effect change at Fortescue, a highly successful company that is Australia’s third largest taxpayer, he asked his workforce, “Why can’t we change?” Forrest said the resistance he felt came from senior leadership, rather than the tens of thousands of rank-and-file employees, who “strongly contributed” with innovative solutions to a range of problems. “So we had quite a change in senior leadership.” But the result was a “pathway to stop burning a billion liters—that’s about 350 million gallons of diesel,” he said—“a year. We’ll get most of it done by 2028.”

The barriers are not technological, Forrest and Mittal emphasized. Fortescue’s plans to achieve its ambitious goals include the use of electrified mining and transport equipment supported by wind and solar energy, as well as green transportation fuels. One unit of the company is investing in green hydrogen production, including a new facility in Arizona. Forrest described how he had asked his engineers to develop a hydrogen-powered truck and was told it would take three years. He responded that he needed it in a hundred days. With each pushback from the team, he told them they had one less day. “Now that first massive mining truck”—the kind with wheels as high as a ceiling—“rolled out of that shed with no noise, no pollution, in 93 days.” The truck can be recharged in 22 minutes. “I find that a little heartbreaking,” Forrest said. “That just because we said, ‘Do it,’ that it got done. This could have happened 100 years ago, and we wouldn’t be in the stew we’re in now.”

Both Forrest and Mittal addressed the regulatory and market challenges they face. Fortescue, for example, will forgo $300 million Australian a year in diesel fuel rebates once it has phased out its billion-liter consumption of the fuel. “We’ll use the same amount of energy,” said Forrest, “it’s just not diesel, so we’ll lose that advantage. So government policy has to come with us.” Mittal addressed some of the market challenges to increasing “green steel” production. Steel has advantages over other materials in that it is “indefinitely recyclable,” does not pollute the oceans, and has a lower per-ton carbon footprint, he said, than any major competing material, such as aluminum or carbon fiber. The reason steel has such a large carbon footprint globally is because it is “the fabric of the modern world.” Cost is the only barrier to green steel, and the cost is small in one sense, he explained: a car made of green steel would cost only $200 more. But consumers can’t differentiate between a dirty and a green product at the moment. And looking at cost from a “system-wide perspective,” he added, manufacturing green steel would add $600 billion to the price of manufacturing this key global product. Given uncertain regulation and market demand, companies like ArcelorMittal are seeking ways of reducing the cost of green steel—and hope for recognition that would differentiate the zero-emission product in the marketplace.

Forrest believes that consumer demand will not be enough to drive the change. Instead, he said, government policies must equalize the playing field—specifically, some form of carbon tax that recognizes the inherent harms of carbon-intensive production technologies.

Bipartisanship and Policy: Toward a U.S. Carbon Tax?

That point—the need for government intervention—was an appropriate segue to the subject of the two subsequent plenary sessions. In a discussion of bipartisanship, former U.S. Representative Carlos Curbelo (R-Florida) emphasized that across-the-aisle cooperation is essential for crafting durable climate policies. Curbelo, who co-founded and co-chaired the bipartisan Climate Solutions Caucus during his service in Congress from 2014 to 2019, pointed out that unilateral efforts can be unstable and subject to repeal. That complicates the planning efforts of business leaders who want to decarbonize, but must remain competitive in markets built around fossil fuels, which are often subsidized (as Forrest noted in the case of Australia).

U.S. Senator Ed Markey (D- Massachusetts), sponsor of the Waxman-Markey Bill (when he served in the House of Representatives; that energy legislation, which would have established an energy trading program, died in the Senate), echoed Curbelo, pointing out that climate change affects everyone, regardless of political affiliation. Discussing the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), enacted in the Senate without Republican support, Markey noted that two-thirds of the legislation’s benefits are nevertheless being realized in red states (where investments in new electric-vehicle battery factories, for example, are concentrated). He hopes such investments will help build future bipartisan support for climate policies. Curbelo sought to explain broad Republican opposition to climate legislation to date by pointing to the uneven nature of climate philanthropy, which flows overwhelmingly to left-leaning organizations, and thus, he claimed, contributes to the partisan divide on this issue. But discussion in the next session pointed instead to the Supreme Court’s Citizens United v. FEC decision—because it enabled corporations, including fossil fuel producers, to make expenditures connected to federal elections—as the moment that Republican participation in climate legislation largely ceased. Both Curbelo and Markey agreed that younger voters are much less ideologically divided on climate issues, and represent hope for the passage of durable, bipartisan climate policies in the future.

In the next session, “Carbon Pricing in 2025?” the discussion among U.S. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-Rhode Island), MIT professor of energy economics Catherine Wolfram ’89, and vice provost James Stock (who is professor of political economy and of public policy) turned to the possibility of a U.S. tax on carbon (excluding retail gasoline). The prospect seems wildly improbable on its face, but because the European Union (EU, and probably Great Britain) will begin imposing a tariff on carbon-intensive products in 2026 (the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism, or CBAM, which exempts goods on which a carbon tax has already been paid), the United States and other major exporters to the EU will have an economic incentive to follow suit, as Wolfram later explained in detail (see below).

In addition, Stock pointed out, many of the 2017 tax cuts enacted during the Trump presidency are set to expire at the end of 2025, which could lead to a broad discussion of climate and tax policies—particularly since the United States has high levels of public debt relative to gross domestic product (a measure of national economic output). To retain the popular 2017 tax cuts in this fiscally constrained environment, new sources of revenue—perhaps including a carbon tax—will be needed to craft a balanced budget.

Whitehouse, chair of the Senate Budget Committee, has long sought to put a price on carbon. Explaining why, he invoked the late economist Milton Friedman, “who taught that if you’re going to have a real market economy, the price of the harms of a product, what economists call negative externalities, needs to be baked into the price of the product.” Failing to do so in the case of the climate-change impacts of carbon emissions, said Whitehouse, represents a subsidy—one that the International Monetary Fund has estimated at $700 billion annually to the U.S. fossil fuel industry alone. Stock pointed out that putting a price on carbon is a very efficient way to reduce carbon emissions while minimizing the budgetary impact, and outlined several different scenarios for proceeding.

Wolfram, who served in the federal government as deputy assistant secretary for climate and energy economics in 2021 and 2022, provided global context for the movement toward carbon pricing. Among the G-20 countries (including most of the world’s largest economies), only three have not implemented or begun discussing carbon-price legislation: Russia, Saudi Arabia, and the United States. The rest are responding, in large part because of CBAM. The way EU tax policy applies to traded items, she explained, is that “it adjusts at the border for the carbon intensity of an import”:

For instance, if you’re a Malaysian steel producer, and you’re sending imports to the EU, say it takes two tons of carbon to make a ton of your steel, at the border you have to pay the same carbon price that the EU-based steel producers are paying. So, if they’re paying $100 a ton, and it takes two tons of CO2 to make your ton of steel, you have to pay this [$200] tariff at the border. But the key thing is that this CBAM credits you for whatever carbon price you’ve already paid. So, if Malaysia already has a carbon price, then its steel producers get credited for that when they’re exporting to the EU [and don’t have to pay that border tax].

The consequence, Wolfram continued, is that countries without a carbon tax whose manufacturers export to the EU have begun thinking actively about carbon pricing. Turkey, for example, exports half its manufacturing output to the EU, she explained. “And so the Turkish government is thinking, ‘Alright, my manufacturers are already going to be paying this price, they’re just sending the check to Brussels.’” If Turkey taxes the carbon content of their products, the government keeps the revenue, and without much complaint from manufacturers, because they would pay it regardless. “So, that kind of logic,” she concluded, “is…leading a lot of countries to think about carbon pricing.” Eventually, she believes, the United States will come to the same realization. The question is when.

Harvard’s Climate Action Week continues through Friday, June 14. Many of the sessions can be joined virtually.

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“Big, Fat, and Sick” Institutions—Can Digital Healthcare Help?

Olivia Farrar — Mon, 10 Jun 2024 17:47:19 +0000

“Big, Fat, and Sick” Institutions—Can Digital Healthcare Help? Olivia Farrar Mon, 06/10/2024 - 13:47

The U.S. healthcare system is “Big, fat, and sick.” So said professor of medicine Jag Singh, speaking at a recent conference in Boston—where his efforts to champion innovations in digital healthcare took center stage. Singh, a former clinical director of cardiology at Mass General Hospital, underscored the urgent need for innovations in digital healthcare.

Healthcare expenditures account for about one-sixth of U.S. Gross Domestic Product—yet, outcomes remain poor, and many Americans are effectively excluded from care. Recent research on private-equity investment in medicine suggests a decline in the quality of care. Singh and others believe that the remedy to problems of cost, access, and quality lies applying digital technologies to the healthcare system.

This sentiment was echoed at the Mass Brigham General's Assembly Row campus during the public opening of Medically Engineered Solutions in Healthcare (MESH) Core 2024, a two-day intensive healthcare innovation bootcamp. Sponsored by Harvard Innovation Labs, MESH Core aims at empowering biomedical startup CEOs, practicing physicians, medical researchers, and investors to drive innovation in healthcare.

As a global hub for healthcare and life sciences, Boston provided an ideal backdrop for this endeavor. The program was spearheaded by assistant professor of radiology Marc D. Succi, founder and executive director of MESH, with the goal of equipping clinicians with the necessary skills to embrace new technologies, navigate patenting processes, and pursue other steps essential to effect healthcare innovation—from training doctors and optimizing the workflows in hospitals to empowering patients to access care.

Held from the 20th-21st of May, this "bootcamp" is an accelerated version of the same week-long course, offered on a rolling basis from Mass General Brigham Innovation. Its curriculum represents the first integrated innovation course in a hospital system, and an Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME)-accredited medical training program. Over 290 attendees from 10 countries made it to the conference, which Succi hopes to make public again next year.

The Smartphone and Artificial Intelligence Revolution in Healthcare

Ninety percent of U.S. adults have smartphones. As Singh told conference attendees, he believes the medical smartphone revolution is the next frontier in digital health – with apps designed to deliver concierge-level services directly to patients via a virtual doctor (or real one), able to answer questions about symptoms and begin immediately determining a course of treatment. Realizing this vision, of course, involves overcoming multiple hurdles, from designing the care to satisfying regulatory requirements and reconfiguring reimbursement models to facilitate widespread adoption.

Singh also touched on the role of artificial intelligence (AI) in revolutionizing healthcare. AI solutions are already being employed to collect, aggregate, and organize vast amounts of data within health systems. These technologies hold promise in clinical decision-making, hospital management, and predictive analytics.

Generative AI models such as ChatGPT can be used to decode datasets, write computer programs, and summarize information, playing an assistive role in healthcare. Within hospitals, Singh said, these tools can also be adapted for clinical decision-making and predictions on whether discharged patients may require readmission—a key tool in tracking the trajectory of their health outcomes.

Before such applications become practicable, however, the application of AI to medicine itself must be improved. Large language models (LLMs) analyze vast amounts of data, but can misrepresent the variable demographic characteristics of patients. Artificial intelligence can be used to optimize healthcare processes, but practitioners and users need to be able to recognize potentially biased training sets. These and other pitfalls in AI application, Singh noted, will require reskilling current doctors, and training the physicians of the next generation, for our ecosystem of rapidly evolving technology.

MESH Core aims to help fill this gap by democratizing medical innovation education. As the program’s leader, Succi advocates for incorporating innovation competence into medical school and residency curricula, envisioning a future where healthcare professionals are better equipped to drive and embrace change.

This is the purpose of MESH Core: to be one of the first programs of its type that helps educate doctors on medical device development and digital health tools. “With MESH, we’re hoping conferences like this could start out a conversation about medical tech and innovation education requirements for doctors,” Succi told Harvard Magazine.

Succi hopes to encourage change in the governance of medical education, “requir[ing] all schools and all residencies to have a minimum competence of innovation in the people they graduate”—both to accelerate innovation, and to equip clinicians to adapt and deploy those innovations as they enter practice.

Other speakers from Harvard included Kate Coffman, associate professor Harvard Business School; Jorge Cortell-Albert, senior advisor, Healthcare and Life Sciences Harvard Innovation Laboratories; and Jeff Karp, professor of anesthesia, Harvard Medical School, who each offered their perspectives on the digital health transition in medicine and business.

“I think if we [make these requirements], in 10 or 15 or 20 years we’re going to see many practitioners who are better poised to make innovations,” Succi said. In the face of resumed cost inflation in healthcare, hospital capacity limits, and steadily rising wait times—atop the perennial problems of limited access and disappointing health outcomes relative to high U.S. expenditures—the MESH program is an example of how hospital systems can adapt to digital innovation as broadly and rapidly as possible.

by Olivia Farrar

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Outside the Solar Cocoon

4f36cf5f0389a182@harvard.edu — Mon, 10 Jun 2024 07:09:32 +0000

Outside the Solar Cocoon 4f36cf5f0389a1… Mon, 06/10/2024 - 03:09

Could a massive cloud of cold, interstellar gas have pushed the sun’s protective heliosphere away from Earth two to three million years ago, causing an ice age? Former Radcliffe Fellow Merav Opher thinks it’s possible.

Opher, an astrophysicist at Boston University, released a paper with Harvard physicist Avi Loeb and Johns Hopkins astronomer Joshua Peek this morning, positing that Earth was once left exposed to cosmic dust and radiation after the cocoon of solar wind enclosing the solar system was deformed. When a “cold cloud” of matter moving between star systems millions of years ago overtook that cocoon, it compressed the heliosphere’s usual shape—a bit like a deflated croissant—down into the shape of a bullet, pushing it beyond Earth’s orbit.

Merav Opher | PHOTOGRAPH BY TONY RINALDO; COURTESY OF HARVARD RADCLIFFE INSTITUTE FOR ADVANCED STUDY

The researchers’ findings could help us better understand key events in Earth’s history, from ice ages to the emergence of the human species—both of which overlap with the planet’s exposure to the “cold cloud.” It’s a reminder of how critical stars—with their light, heat, and now, protective winds—are for life, and how sudden phenomena from space, like asteroids, supernovae, and interstellar clouds, may have altered the course of the planet’s development.

Astronomers know for certain the arrival of the cold cloud caused important changes in our atmosphere’s chemistry and subjected it to more radiation. In fact, geologists recently used small marine fossils to prove an increase in radioactive materials on earth two to three million years ago. The change may have impacted Earth’s ozone layer, encouraged biodiversity—because the increased radiation could have accelerated mutation rates—and shifted its climate, by cooling temperatures and causing ice clouds to form.

Thankfully, the sun and the cold cloud continued moving through the universe in different directions and eventually separated, allowing the heliosphere to snap back into place. That left Earth and its inhabitants safely under the sun’s protection again.

Opher, who will be returning as a Radcliffe Fellow for the summer, has long been looking into the heliosphere through a center she runs at NASA, aptly called the SHIELD (Solar Wind with Hydrogen Ion Charge Exchange and Large-Scale Dynamics) DRIVE Science Center. “I made a name,” she said of her career, “on the heliosphere.”

Before starting the study, though, Opher had wondered how she could justify her work to people outside her field. Applying to the Radcliffe program, which brings together academics from across a host of disciplines, only added to that impulse.

“If I meet an artist, if I meet a writer, why do I justify why this is important?” Opher thought.

The “heliosphere is our protective bubble, our home in the galaxy,” she realized, meaning it could have seriously affected Earth’s development. As she dug further, joining forces with Loeb and Peek, they found, indeed, that Earth had lost that bubble for a recent window in its history—and may well have at other points during its four-billion year existence. What precisely that meant for its development, though, will be left for others to explore.

For Opher, the results, which will be of interest to experts in a range of fields, are a testament to the importance of interdisciplinary work. “I really, really hope it's going to inspire people to have more interdisciplinary conversation,” Opher said. “The richness of encounter of different disciplines is critical.”

Her work itself brought together astronomers working on very different scales—Opher at the level of the solar system, and Loeb at the cosmic level of the universe—who tend to work separately. Loeb compared their collaboration to bringing together foreign and domestic policymakers: “It’s two disciplines, one dealing with international methods and the other one with what happens inside the country,” he said. But sometimes, the international affairs of the universe affect life at home near the sun—as occurred when a cold, interstellar medium arrived in our solar neighborhood millions of years ago.

Like much in astronomy, the sheer scale of this research puts earthly affairs in perspective, too. “It raises the whole issue of us, instead of engaging in conflicts on this Earth, and wasting $4 trillion every year on military budgets, you know, thinking more positively and cooperating internationally,” Loeb said, reflecting on his own takeaways from his research.

While pointing out his hope for “a more prosperous future for humanity,” he added, we’ll still be left facing “all the risks that come from space.”

by Jack R. Trapanick

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A Ray of Light amid Middle East Devastation

Olivia Farrar — Fri, 07 Jun 2024 16:04:09 +0000

A Ray of Light amid Middle East Devastation Olivia Farrar Fri, 06/07/2024 - 12:04

“Open, sesame!” This phrase, familiar from childhood stories, comes from Antoine Galland’s translation of One Thousand and One Nights. In the story, it is spoken to open the mouth of a cave enclosing untold magical treasures. Like Ali Baba to the cave, His Majesty King Abdullah II of Jordan officially declared the SESAME laboratory open to new member countries in 2017—an initiative lending hope today to a Middle East torn by war.

With devastation still raging along the Gaza Strip, Baird professor of science Lisa Randall is passionate about the mission behind SESAME (the Synchrotron-light for Experimental Science and Applications in the Middle East): an intergovernmental organization based in Allan, Jordan, with Cyprus, Egypt, Iran, Israel, Jordan, Pakistan, and Turkey among its member countries, and including scientists from Palestine.

Randall’s research focus is connecting unsolved questions in theoretical particle physics to the properties and interactions of matter. She is also the author of several books designed to bring science and ideas about science to the general public, including Warped Passages: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe’s Hidden Dimensions (2005—reviewed here) and Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs (2015).

In this interview for Harvard Magazine, Randall discusses the goals of SESAME, the first synchrotron light source in the Middle East (one of about 60 such facilities worldwide), against the backdrop of the Israel-Palestine conflict—both as it has been reflected on the Harvard campus and, more broadly, in terms of the conflicting ideas themselves.

“You see that people are having trouble talking to each other,” Randall comments—a mild way of describing the divisions that have ruptured the Harvard campus, as seen in news headlines and this latest, deadly iteration of the Middle East conflict. “People are angry. Some of it is displaced anger about other issues. And so I really like the idea of sort of finding common ground [in science], finding diversions in some sense for people to think about. So rather than trying to just directly solve all these issues, get people who can develop some trust with each other.”

As background to Randall’s comments and her work: Synchrotrons, particle accelerators designed to produce high-energy beams of light, have applications in fields ranging from medicine, atmospheric research, and clean combustion and industrial production, to agriculture.

As described in its statues, “SESAME shall provide for collaboration in the Middle East and the Mediterranean Region with free access to all scientists of SESAME members in relevant areas of research, being also open to scientists from the whole world, in basic and applied research using synchrotron radiation or closely related topics.” The organization was brought together by researchers from CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, to provide an environment promoting both scientific research and peace initiatives. Like CERN, it was developed under the auspices of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).

In an essay entitled “From dreams to beams: SESAME’s 30 year-long journey in science diplomacy,” Eliezer Rabinovici, the president of the CERN Council and twice-elected vice-president of the SESAME Council, reflected:

The story of SESAME started at CERN 30 years ago. One day in 1993, shortly after the signature of the Oslo Accords by Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization, the late Sergio Fubini, an outstanding scientist and a close friend and collaborator, approached me in the corridor of the CERN theory group. He told me that now was the time to test what he called “your idealism,” referring to future joint Arab-Israeli scientific projects.

CERN is a very appropriate venue for the inception of such a project. It was built after World War II to help heal Europe and European science in particular. Abdus Salam, as far back as the 1950s, identified the light source as a tool that could help thrust what were then considered “third-world” countries directly to the forefront of scientific research.

Randall compares the moment to English astronomer Arthur Eddington’s (1882-1944) proof of Einstein’s theory of light, set against the rising tensions of World War I. “Part of his goal as a British scientist,” Randall explained, “was to show that the theory of a German physicist could be correct.” The war interfered with dissemination of Einstein’s ideas and work, but a series of detailed primers made their way to Eddington’s desk through a network of Cambridge University friends. Eddington, a Quaker and conscientious objector to the war, believed that wartime resentments were affecting the progress of science. Opposing Newtonian theory—that space was static and gravity as a force acted through space but not on it, so light could only travel in straight lines—Einstein postulated that gravity is a force resulting from spacetime. Accordingly, he believed that the sun’s massive gravitational field would warp spacetime itself, bending light. Eddington agreed. One year after the armistice that ended World War I, Eddington announced his team’s research findings proving Einstein correct.

Thus an Englishman extolled the ideas of a German scientist, even as England and its allies endured the German onslaught.

In the fraught present, Randall similarly emphasizes the role of science as an equalizer and a uniting force—perhaps the most neutral force for breaking down barriers between conflicting ideologies or warring rivals to explore reality. Even as air strikes continue to raze parts of Gaza, scientists at SESAME, including both Israelis and Palestinians, together examine clues to the fundamental nature of the universe.

“Let me be clear, [SESAME] was founded not just for political missions,” Randall concludes. “I mean, there's just amazing science. And because these countries are working together, they can do this project that none of the countries individually on their own could have done.”

One might call the synchrotron, and the organization within which it operates, Milyunanochesco: a Spanish adjective meaning “thousand-and-one-nights-esque,” as also elaborated by the author Jorge Juis Borges in the essay "The Translators of The Thousand and One Nights." Like the sorceries within Galland’s classic tale, the SESAME synchrotron performs magic in its simultaneous pursuit of advanced experimental physics and human cooperation in face of political and military differences.

by Olivia Farrar

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The MAD World

jennifer_carling@harvard.edu — Thu, 06 Jun 2024 14:39:10 +0000

The MAD World jennifer_carli… Thu, 06/06/2024 - 10:39

Before Lenny Bruce and George Carlin, there was MAD magazine. The progenitor of anti-establishment humor—often silly, always subversive—was first published in 1952 and for the next nearly seven decades, the magazine’s writers and cartoonists gleefully spoofed and harpooned nearly every aspect of American culture—from McCarthyism and the Cold War to celebrity worship, consumerism, and the counterculture movements of the 1960s and 1970s. It became a font of irreverence for a young generation learning to question authority. MAD’s creators “tackled contemporary events through the lens of humor, asking people to look a little more carefully at what they were being told,” says Stephanie Plunkett, chief curator at the Norman Rockwell Museum, in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, which has organized the retrospective exhibition What, Me Worry? The Art and Humor of MAD Magazine, through October 27.

The show offers more than 200 original illustrations, along with photographs, video, memorabilia, and interactive features that explain the reverberating impact of the publication (among its young fans were aspiring satirists Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert). It also highlights the publication’s power as “a crucial venue for cultural commentary and norm-busting humor delivered through predominantly visual media,” says museum director/CEO Laurie Norton Moffatt. “We are keenly aware that MAD magazine raised issues, often presciently, that continue to drive contemporary debates and struggles…that remain to be worked through.”

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Pioneer Valley Bounty

jennifer_carling@harvard.edu — Thu, 06 Jun 2024 14:39:10 +0000

Pioneer Valley Bounty jennifer_carli… Thu, 06/06/2024 - 10:39

For Milwaukee chef and restaurateur Sanford D’Amato, the move to Massachusetts’s Pioneer Valley turned not on the providential bite of an apple, but of a ridiculously juicy peach.

It was in 2007, when he and his wife Angie were visiting friends who suggested a quick stop to pick up peaches in Deerfield. Peaches? D’Amato wondered at the time. “The area is at the same growing level as Wisconsin, and peaches in Wisconsin are good for, you know, throwing at neighbors that you don’t like,” he says, with a smile. “So, we were at this farm stand and I’m thinking, ‘Oh yeah, can’t wait to have a bite of this mealy thing, or whatever it’s going to be.’ But it was one of the best peaches I ever had—and we have gone through the South, through Georgia in July.”

Plump peaches for sale at Clarksdale Fruit Farms, in Deerfield | PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF CLARKSDALE FRUIT FARMS

Within a year, the couple bought a bungalow in Hatfield, 14 miles down the road from that stand at Clarkdale Fruit Farms. Their scenic backyard slopes down to the Connecticut River and the house, with a new modern addition, has been home to Good Stock Farm since 2014. There, D’Amato, a James Beard Award-winning chef, teaches cooking classes, and the couple creates small-scale weekend dinner parties based on international cuisines, using local produce as much as possible. Aside from their own clutch of fruit trees and a patch for herbs and vegetables, the business often turns to local food growers and makers—like nearby Black Birch Vineyard. “This area is just a microclimate with some of the best soil in the country,” D’Amato says. “I mean, things just grow here, like peaches, that should not.”

Cooking class with chef Sanford D’Amato, at Good Stock Farm| PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF GOOD STOCK FARM

The Pioneer Valley lies along the part of the Connecticut River Valley that snakes through Massachusetts, encompassing Franklin, Hampshire, and Hampden counties, from the northern hill towns and Greenfield to Springfield in the south—in a western part of the state that’s east of the Berkshires. Historically, farming has been the region’s mainstay primarily because of the flat terrain, relatively mild New England climate, and “super-fertile soil,” says Deborah Christakos, owner and guide of Pioneer Valley Food Tours, which offers half-day walking and biking trips to learn about the food scene. Glacial deposits enriched the soil, and farms that line the river also lie in the 100-year floodplain, which helps keep the soil from becoming depleted.

Sampling Northampton’s local delights during a Pioneer Valley Food Tour | PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF PIONEER FOOD VALLEY TOURS

The food growers and makers—and the restaurants and grocers that support their endeavors—are dotted throughout the valley and yet have created a synergistic effect that makes the place a local-food lovers’ paradise. “It’s a mecca for raw ingredients, so it’s a draw for people who appreciate that,” says Christakos, a French-trained chef who worked in restaurants in New York, Boston, and San Francisco before moving to Northampton with her husband and young children 20 years ago. Communal efforts to preserve and strengthen farms during the last three decades have paid off. The three counties hold 1,942 farms, or 27.4 percent of the total number of farms in the state, according to data from the valley’s nonprofit CISA (Community Involved in Sustaining Agriculture), formed in 1993. The average size of the independently owned farms is relatively small, at 80 acres—but a total of 155,405 acres are devoted to farms in those counties, says CISA’s communications manager Claire Morenon. Total annual farm sales, much derived from direct customer transactions, reach $161.7 million. Farm and land preservation are part of CISA’s mission, but other community organizations, like local land trusts, along with public funding, have successfully contributed to the prevailing “buy local” ethic. It supports not only multigenerational operations like Barstow’s Longview Farm, but other relative newcomers, like the mushroom producer Mycoterra Farm in South Deerfield, and Old Friends Farm, in Amherst, where crops include ginger and turmeric (from which they also make syrups and honeys).

Dairy cows at Barstow’s Longview Farm| COURTESY OF BARSTOW LONGVIEW FARM

Anywhere visitors travel in the valley this season, they will find farm stands and some 30 farmers’ markets. The Dairy Crawl, North Quabbin Garlic and Arts Festival, and Franklin County’s Cider Days celebrate the bounty. “We live in an amazing place,” says Denise Barstow Manz, manager and part of the seventh generation to lead Barstow’s Longview Farm (a wholesale dairy operation) and Barstow’s Dairy Store and Bakery, in Hadley. “The population is educated about issues and a lot of people have the means to buy local,” she continues. “The community is so engaged and are used to being stuck behind a tractor on the road—or knowing that a field is for growing hay for animals and not for tractor rides.” The farm store is packed with homemade snacks, lunch fare, and seasonal produce: “If there are strawberries ready in Hadley, we’ll have them.” Also sold is fresh milk from nearby McCray’s and Mapleline farms, and ice cream from Maple Valley Creamery.

A traditional crop, apples, has long made Franklin County a hub for hard and soft ciders. West County Cider in Shelburne offers a tasting room and picnic benches with views of rolling hills and open sky. Meanwhile, in Hatfield, Black Birch Vineyard grows grape varietals on about 19 acres, producing and processing 45 percent of the fruit used in its rosés, whites, and reds, with sparkling and sweeter dessert-style options. (The remaining grapes come from New York’s Long Island and Finger Lakes regions.) The vineyard shop opens onto a wraparound patio abutting a stretch of lawn strewn with comfortable chairs and verdant meadow and vineyard views, where people sip wine. “We created a space where people can learn about wine and what it is like to have a vineyard,” says co-owner Michelle Kersbergen, “an educational and warm environment that’s relaxing and fun for anybody from families to mature adults.” The vineyard also hosts outdoor weekend concerts and food trucks, and other summer happenings, like farm-to-table dinners and wine-release parties.

Christakos discusses the wineries and cideries during her Pioneer Valley Food Tours while highlighting food farms and local history amid food samplings at restaurants and markets. The three-hour downtown Northampton walking tour stops for Moroccan and Middle Eastern fare at Mosaic Café and for mousse at Ana Bandeira Chocolates (handmade from cacao grown at the owner’s family’s Brazilian farm). At the Cornucopia Natural Wellness Market, Christakos highlights local products, and while at the gourmet food and wine/beer shop Provisions, she pairs cups of West County Cider with Vermont cheeses atop chewy bread from the Hungry Ghost Bread. The downtown bakery uses a wood-fired oven and sourdough starters for loaves as good as any sold in Paris.

Christakos’s bike tours (in August and October) take visitors into the countryside or along the canals in Turners Falls, with stops at farms, breweries, and artisanal food producers. “I’ve never lived anywhere,” she says, “that you can access local food this easily...right outside the doorstep.”

That’s the goal at the fourth-generation venture Clarkdale Fruit Farms in Deerfield, where Sanford D’Amato first bit into a Pioneer Valley peach. With 45 acres of orchards, Clarkdale produces peaches, apples, pears, plums, grapes, and cherries, selling 95 percent of them at its own farm store. Fruit is picked, sold, and eaten virtually off the tree, says Ben Clark, who runs the place with his father, Tom. “We have a loyal customer base and that’s why we’re able to be retail. But we can’t compete with apples that come from Washington state or Chile.”

Park Hill Orchard in Easthampton opens in July. With 96 fruits and 49 apple varieties, “We’re a bit of a tasting garden,” says co-owner Russell Braen. Crowds are also drawn to the delightful self-guided sculpture tour called Art in the Orchard.

Artful scallop dish at Good Stock Farm | PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF GOOD STOCK FARM

Good Stock Farm, too, has been quite successful. Classes capped at nine people mix hands-on technique with food history—and produce a meal that all enjoy. The themed dinners, through December, seat 13 and often feature summer produce—which sprouts up at every turn. D’Amato tells of first starting out in the valley and going to buy a tiller to plant a few fruit trees behind the house. The salesman asked if he wanted any gardening advice. Sure, answered D’Amato. Learning the farm was located on Main Street in Hatfield, he said, “Put it in the ground.” “Well,” D’Amato asked after a pause, “and then what?” The man looked at him and smiled. “Don’t you know what soil you have there? Just stick anything in that ground—and it’ll grow.”

by nell_porter_brown@harvard.edu

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Picturing Jazz

jennifer_carling@harvard.edu — Thu, 06 Jun 2024 14:39:10 +0000

Picturing Jazz jennifer_carli… Thu, 06/06/2024 - 10:39

MASS MoCA’s exhibition Black Stars: Writing in the Dark invites visitors to reflect on the experience of making—and listening to—music. The installation offers works by the pianist, composer, and visual artist Jason Moran, who also serves as artistic director for jazz at The Kennedy Center. The more than 40 boldly colored and seemingly abstract paintings (like The Only Morning Coming, above) were actually created as tracings of the movements of Moran’s hands across a keyboard. Two of Moran’s sculptural pieces on display recreate historic venues crucial to the growth of twentieth-century jazz. STAGED: Savoy Ballroom 1 (2015) references the 1930s venue where integrated audiences were allowed to dance together—highly unusual for the time. STAGED: Studio Rivbea pays tribute to the downtown Manhattan loft, and frequent gathering spot for musicians, of integral free-jazz movement artist Sam Rivers and his wife and collaborator, Beatrice Rivers. Sam Rivers joined forces with Moran on the nuanced 2001 album Black Stars. “His style is never showy,” AllMusic critic Steve Loewy wrote of Moran. “He embraces simple, emotional statements sophisticated in their mystery.” Sample some of this jazzy mystique at the MASS MoCA show (through November).

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