The Persistence of Print the Persistence Of

Life’s Beginnings • Learning from the Liberal Arts

September-October 2013 • $4.95 TThehe PersistencePersistence ofof PrintPrint

Helen Vendler Arion Press & The Radcliffe Campaign Invest in Ideas launching october 28, 2013 photo by stu rosner

To Sid and Susan, and to each member of the Institute’s advisory councils, thank you for your visionary leadership as we further our mission to advance new ideas and to share them widely. As A great university needs a place where we look to the Institute’s future, we have ambitious thinkers from across its campus and around plans to increase our the globe come together to take risks, explore photo by kathleen dooher photo by kathleen impact on students and new ideas, and connect theory and practice. faculty at Harvard and audiences around the world— through our highly selective Fellowship Program, At Harvard, the Radcliffe Institute is that the preeminent Schlesinger Library on the History place and is contributing to the future of of Women in America, groundbreaking research Harvard’s excellence and leadership. initiatives organized by our Academic Ventures program, and a full calendar of public events. Sidney R. Knafel ’52, MBA ’54, Campaign Co-Chair

Lizabeth Cohen, Dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Conceived as a bold interdisciplinary, inter- Advanced Study and Howard Mumford Jones Professor of American Studies generational, and international experiment, the Radcliffe Institute is now one of the world’s leading institutes for advanced study. Dean’s Advisory Council Schlesinger Library Council A vast range of pathbreaking intellectual Susan S. Wallach ’68, JD ’71 (Chair) Caroline Minot Bell ’77 Catherine A. Gellert ’93 Terrie F. Bloom ’75, MBA ’81 work happens in and across the sciences, Perrin Moorhead Grayson ’72 A’Lelia P. Bundles ’74 the humanities, the social sciences, and the Lea Paine Highet ’88 Phyllis Trustman Gelfman ’56 Leslie P. Hume ’69 Alice Geller arts. The Institute is a credit to Radcliffe’s David A. Jackson ’64 Marilynn Wood Hill Ralph M. James MBA ’82 Maisie K. Houghton ’62 history and Harvard’s future. Sidney R. Knafel ’52, MBA ’54 John W. Ingraham ’52, MBA ’57 Renée M. Landers ’77 Ralph M. James MBA ’82 Susan S. Wallach ’68, JD ’71, Campaign Co-Chair George M. Lovejoy Jr. ’51 Gish Jen ’77, BI ’87, RI ’02 Suzanne Young Murray ’62 Priscilla F. Kauff ’62 Diana L. Nelson ’84 Barbara N. Kravitz ’52, EdM ’53 THE HARVARD CAMPAIGN Melanie Mason Niemiec ’71, MBA ’75 Diana M. Meehan RADCLIFFE Nancy-Beth Gordon Sheerr ’71 Carol Smith Miller ’74 William A. Shutzer ’69, MBA ’72 Paula J. Omansky ’56, HRP ’57, LLB ’62 www.radcliffe.harvard.edu Prudence Linder Steiner ’58, AM ’76, PhD ’80 C. Andrew Pforzheimer ’83 Deborah Fiedler Stiles ’69, JD ’74 Elizabeth F. Rosenman ’54 For more information, please contact Leah Joy Zell ’71, AM ’72, PhD ’79 Susan W. Ware AM ’73, PhD ’78 [email protected]

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features 29 Life’s Beginnings Astronomers, earth scientists, geneticists, and others probe the origins of life on jim harrison jim this planet—and possibly elsewhere in the universe page 47 by Courtney Humphries

departments 2 7 Ware Street 34 A Nearly Perfect Book 3 Cambridge 02138 The collaboration between poetry critic Helen Communications from our readers Vendler and letterpress publisher Andrew 4 The View from Mass Hall Hoyem sustains the art of print in a digital era by Nathan Heller 13 Right Now The rise of the grassroots, post-9/11 World Trade Center visions, life on Earth: Vita: Henry Beston Sheahan the poster 40 Brief life of a nature writer in a machine 18 Montage age: 1888-1968 From cinema to cheese, avoiding a by John Nelson bloodbath in Johannesburg, sonorous saxophonist, writing Assassin’s Creed, the capitalist economy of the

slaveholding South, self-made maps 42 Self-Fashioning in Society of Manhattan, and more and Solitude Finding a life path, through a thoughtful stu rosner 28A New England Regional Section page 29 Autumn events, a museum guide, liberal-arts education Alzheimer’s care, and an Asian-infused by Nannerl O. Keohane luncheonette 64 The Alumni

A recession-inspired art gallery, Harvard 47 John Harvard’s Journal Alumni Association’s new president, An uncommon space, The Harvard Campaign…and and Hiram Hunn honorands its fnancial context, the external review of the e- 68 The College Pump mail investigations, sports-stadium skeptic, a legal Beating the heat afoot in Antarctica scholar for Education School dean, Radcliffe gradu- 76 Treasure ates’ matrimonial bent, innovation for the humanities Care for the Civil War wounded curriculum, women faculty, Allston plans advance, 69 Crimson Classiﬁeds the Undergraduate’s advice to herself, the College’s interim head, new Undergraduate fellows, coaching On the cover: Letterpress type from Arion Press, San Francisco. Photograph women’s rugby as an NCAA sport, and rowing’s by ToniBird Photography peerless mentor dan williams dan

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By coincidence, two features editorial and business office president: Henry Rosovsky, JF ’57, 7 Ware Street in this issue make the point vividly. Porter Ph.D. ’59, LL.D. ’98. directors: Suzanne Cambridge, Mass. 02138-4037 University Professor Helen Vendler is wide- Blier, Jonathan L.S. Byrnes, D.B.A. ’80, Tel. 617-495-5746; fax: 617-495-0324 ly known as the nation’s preeminent inter- Robert Giles, NF ’66, Alex S. Jones, NF Website: www.harvardmagazine.com preter of poetry. Less known is her decades- ’82, Thomas F. Kelly, Ph.D. ’73, E-mail: [email protected] long collaboration with Andrew Hoyem, the Randolph C. Lindel ’66, Lars Peter nation’s foremost producer of limited-edi- @harvardmagazine Knoth Madsen, Tamara Elliott Rogers ’74 tion letterpress art books. In a digital age facebook.com/harvardmagazine full of lamentations over the death of print (The Onion recently ran an obituary notice), Board of Incorporators Harvard Magazine (ISSN 0095-2427) is published bi- monthly by Harvard Magazine Inc., a nonprofit cor- with libraries’ role uncertain, the Vendler- This magazine, at first called the Harvard Bulletin, was poration, 7 Ware Street, Cambridge, Mass. 02138-4037, Hoyem partnership (page 34) reaffirms bril- founded in 1898. Its Board of Incorporators was char- phone 617-495-5746; fax 617-495-0324. The magazine is tered in 1924 and remains active in the magazine’s supported by reader contributions and subscriptions, liantly the art of critical interpretation and governance. The membership is as follows: Stephen advertising revenue, and a subvention from Harvard of careful artistic craftsmanship. Nannerl J. Bailey, AMP ’94; Jeffrey S. Behrens ’89, William I. University. 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2 September - October 2013 Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 Letters

about technical innovation ‘but deeply pessi- mistic about human behavior when it comes to protecting the natural world.’ ” From my perspective, that’s often precisely the prob- Cambridge  lem—human behavior. If it isn’t the hubris that says “I know what I’m doing,” it’s the Energy divestiture, drug discovery, worker in wood laziness or sloppiness that says, “That’s good enough. What could go wrong?” Then we get Geoengineering for Earth is blown up the predictable “Oops!” and Climate by a united, purposeful Examples of “oops” on a large scale are Change humanity. I doubt real numerous. Gypsy moths introduced into David Keith’s work life works that way, es- New England in the late 1860s to develop on atmospheric engineer- pecially when economic a silkworm industry here. No silkworm ing (“Buffering the Sun,” motives are present, and industry today, but plenty of gypsy moths. July-August, page 36) is the tools of deliverance The Indian mongoose was brought to Ha- obviously both thought- are so like the ones of waii (from Jamaica) in the 1870s to control ful and well-intentioned. depredation. the Norway brown rat (which jumped However, several aspects I wish I had a better ship, as rats do), but the diurnal mongoose are troubling, and though answer. Yet suspicion hardly ever met the nocturnal rat, so today Professor Keith recogniz- remains that technol- there are plenty of both animals but few- es and responds to these ogy is by its nature my- er native Hawaiian bird species. Kudzu, concerns, they are still opic: closer to what got brought in by horticulturalists to control worth pondering. The us into our predicament erosion, has been a great success, too, broadest one has to do with the law of un- than what will get us out. hasn’t it? The Everglades are now home to foreseen consequences. If past human his- Dan Breslaw ’59 breeding populations of Burmese pythons tory is any indication, nature’s secrets far West Corinth, Vt. (maybe they can eat some of the imported exceed in complexity and depth our efforts South American nutria there), and I see to plumb them. We don’t know what the I read with great interest about David from the Minnesota DNR’s website that consequences of geoengineering will be to Keith’s work in “climate engineering,” a term two large species of Asian carp, imported the planet, but we can be sure that many of covering various attempts to combat global to control plankton in southern aquacul- them will not have been anticipated. warming. It reports Keith as being “hopeful ture ponds, escaped during floods (sur- Another concern, similarly born of caution, is more specific: if the greenhouse effect can be reduced, might that very fact Explore More allow us to relax our efforts to move toward a sustainable economy? Will we use Visit harvardmagazine.com/extras to find these and other that breathing space to soften our impact Web Extras from the September-October 2013 issue. on the Earth, or to dig ourselves in deeper by maintaining our level of consumption? From Glitter to } Assassin’s Creed The model is clearly that of addiction. Any Goat Cheese page 22 | Watch a clip from “success” in altering the climate would be page 18 | Watch a video video-game writer Corey May’s comparable to finding an overlooked stash about Max and Trystan popular Assassin’s Creed—a of heroin in the closet: the pressure to quit Sandvoss, the brothers historical action-adventure

} would be off. There is only one bottom behind First Light Farm and series that has sold more line: humanity must learn to live in har- Creamery in upstate New than 55 million copies. mony with Nature’s limits or die. York, who produce artisanal goat cheese. Plus, try their A Tenor’s Tunes

A third concern is the barely men- t entertainment; f tioned fact that climate change is only recipe for chocolate } page 20 | Hear songs from the most pressing of many ecological cri- brownies with goat acclaimed jazz saxophonist f ubiso ses. Forceful attempts to solve this one cheese. Joshua Redman’s newest album, could well make others more acute. As Walking Shadows, includings hits so often with technology, an abundance Harvard in Allston such as “Adagio,” “Let of enthusiasm combines with a dearth of page 57 | See additional images } It Be,” and “Let Me perspective. of Harvard’s planning for its Down Easy.” Finally, although one can argue that the campus center in Allston. need for decisive action trumps all, how easy E lizabeth attenborough; boston redevelopment authority From top: steve potter; courtesy o it is to underestimate the messiness of hu- visit harvardmagazine.com/extras man affairs. In movieland, the comet headed

Harvard Magazine 3 Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 The View from Mass Hall

One Harvard

s the nation’s teachers and students return to classrooms this fall, a small, well-prepared group of education leaders will be ready to shape their experiences in novel ways and boost achievement in schools and school Asystems from Boston to Philadelphia to Des Moines to DC. Who are these new leaders? They are our first class of graduates from Harvard’s Doctor of Education Leadership, or EdLD, program—21 extraordinarily talented women and men who will be advancing curriculum reform, directing strategy, coaching principals, and recruiting teachers in schools, districts, agencies, and non-profits throughout the country. These graduates are uniquely trained, since their degree program was uniquely constructed. During their time at the Graduate School of Education, they discussed and debated the latest thinking in educational theory and practice with such faculty as Elizabeth City, Monica Higgins, and Jal Mehta. But they also studied politics and American public policy with Elaine Kamarck of the Kennedy and courses for HarvardX, a growing online learning initiative that School, explored child welfare and social justice with Elizabeth benefits students on campus and learners around the world. Bartholet and Jessica Budnitz of the Law School, and learned how If research and teaching are the heart of what we do at Harvard, to build and sustain a successful enterprise with Clayton Chris- the structure we have in place to support those priorities is our tensen, Chet Huber, Derek van Bever, and Stephen Kaufman of the lifeblood. In the past few years, we have adopted a University-wide Business School. They experienced one Harvard, its distributed calendar, integrated information technology, and reorganized the strengths within their reach as they gained insights across disci- Harvard Library. These significant changes make it easier for mem- plines that all come to bear on the daunting task of reforming and bers of the campus community to take full advantage of all that improving education. Harvard has to offer them. We also have created common spaces, I have been struck, especially in recent years, by the appetite including the recently renovated Science Center Plaza, to encour- among faculty for opportunities to solve problems that exist in the age spontaneous engagement. spaces between Schools and departments. Guided by questions Being surrounded by excellence raises expectations and inspires not easily answered through single disciplines, they seize on is- aspirations. It is one of the greatest benefits of membership in the sues such as energy or global health or urbanism. They lead efforts Harvard community. One month before the first EdLD students that reveal the foundations of human behavior, unlock the poten- graduated, I joined Pusey Minister Jonathan Walton to dedicate tial of neuroscience, and address new challenges posed by life in the Porch at Memorial Church. Standing among the chairs and the digital age. Their explorations take them from engineering to tables that now look out over Tercentenary Theatre, he captured the humanities, from medicine to public health as they advance re- beautifully the ideal of one Harvard, noting that the new common search in collaboration with colleagues who have complementary space belonged to every member of our community and that every expertise and skills. member of the community belonged in the space. This reciprocity Students, too, are eager to learn from and work with faculty is, in my mind, the essence of being a part of Harvard. Celebrating outside of their programs of study. Over the past four years, cross- all that the University is means having the courage to imagine all school registration has increased by more than 30 percent. Courses that it can be, all that it can do for the world when we work to- on the art of communication, design thinking, the basics of comput- gether and raise our sights. er science, and innovation and entrepreneurship attract individuals from diverse intellectual backgrounds, creating more occasions for students to consider issues from a variety of perspectives. Concen- Sincerely, trations in architecture and theater, dance, and performance are being developed, and will connect undergraduates with experts in the Graduate School of Design and at the A.R.T. At the same time, faculty from eight—and counting—Schools have created modules

4 September - October 2013 Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 Letters prise, surprise) and are now established in The article offers a fascinating glimpse upon us, rightly embracing the University’s the Mississippi River system. into modern geoengineering technology. But commitment “to ask and address the larger So after threescore years of watching the as a physicist whose research is into complex questions” through teaching and research human tragicomedy unfold, I quite agree systems, the “illusion of control” that rou- (see “They Said…,” July-August, page 44). with Keith. After all, what could go wrong? tinely plagues efforts to direct such systems This sounds only realistic. But realism Mark McTague comes immediately to mind. The climate requires a keen appraisal of the political Cockeysville, Md. is a prototypical such system: of massive and social forces in play, including a recog- complexity, with innumerable known and nition that the nation’s chief institutions In industry, particularly manufacturing, unknown feedback loops and a very large of power, investment, and legitimacy have when something goes wrong, they turn to a number of excruciatingly sensitive control largely defaulted. Our political, economic, formal process known as Corrective Action. parameters. We have not come close even to administrative, journalistic, and religious Probably its most important component is consistently modeling climate, as the next authorities have failed by purpose, mis- Root Cause Analysis, because it leads to ul- Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change direction, corruption, and inadvertence. timate rather than proximal solutions to the report will make painfully clear (hastily They appear to succeed only when judged problem. In the case of climate change, the awarded Nobel Prize notwithstanding). by conveniently narrow criteria. root cause is population growth. If we halve Caution: Let’s make certain it’s geoen- Central investment decisions are made auto emissions per car in the next five years, gineering we’re having at, not egoengi- by corporate boards so committed to max- but by then there are three times as many neering. imizing shareholder value as to be decep- drivers on the road, we have not gained much. Jeffrey Satinover, Ed.M. ’73, M.D., tive or indifferent to “negative externali- Unfortunately, I do not foresee any sig- Ph.D. ties” that make life less sustainable. The nificant cuts ahead in population growth Department of Management, Technology & political system is crippled by a political other than war, disease, and famine. No Economics, ETH, Zurich party that junks the overwhelming scien- CEO wants fewer customers, no religious New York City tific consensus. Cynical denial, ruthless leader fewer adherents, and no politician myopia, regulatory capture, political ti- fewer voters. Too bad. Energy Divestiture midity, and stupidity prevail. Peter Haas, A.M. ’79 At Commencement, President Faust ad- It is in this context of flat-out unreal- Acworth, N.H. dressed the immense climate change that is ism—or what C. Wright Mills memorably

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called “crackpot realism”—that the cam- Drug Discovery” (July-August, page 54), is 71192 paign to divest Harvard from fossil-fuel a useful case study for efforts to improve investment arises. Harvard is not only an the drug-development process. It must illustrious center of research and educa- be noted that this drug was developed at tion but a symbolic and moral center. a near-record pace. The first clinical trials Harvard’s actions—and inactions—speak were initiated in 2006 and five years later an volumes. Whether or not the institution application was submitted to the Food and chose this calling all by itself is irrelevant. Drug Administration (FDA)—much faster Harvard’s decisions—and refusals to de- than the seven to eight years the develop- cide—carry substantial symbolic weight. ment process typically consumes. Similarly, To recognize this is realism. To refuse to the FDA quickly recognized the promise of recognize it is to be blinkered. vemurafenib and approved the drug in less Actual realism requires recognition that than four months; the typical length of a re- SEE HOW OUR the fossil-fuel industry not only endangers view is 10 months. Although the emergence the earth, but fuels the destructive, fabu- of resistance to this drug is disappointing, FINANCIAL list cause of climate change denial. There- we should remember that vemurafenib rep- ADVISORS WORK. fore the Harvard Corporation, by investing resents an example of our drug-develop- in the industry, undercuts the University’s ment process working well and delivering Get insights about research and teaching commitment. a promising new drug at a breakneck speed. transferring generational A sharp-eyed appraisal of the political Additionally, the article laments the de- wealth. It’s part of a and social forces in play requires Harvard cline in the number of drugs approved by series of videos featuring to respond to the climate emergency by the FDA in recent years, asserting that the Morgan Stanley putting its investments where its teaching number of approvals “has declined from Financial Advisors. and research are. approximately 100 to about 30 per year in Todd Gitlin ’63 recent decades.” This is inaccurate. In 2011, View them all at New York City the FDA approved over 100 so-called new morganstanley.com/wealth. drug applications. Of these, 28 were totally President Faust believes Harvard is do- new medicines, which represent the great- ing its part to fight climate change by edu- est promise to patients. The number of cating future heads of the EPA. This is dis- these new medicines approved by the FDA ingenuous at best and seriously deluded at has risen sharply in recent years, and 2011’s worst. Having Harvard-educated alumni in tally falls in the 90th percentile of drug ap- positions of power is great, but for a real im- provals in the postwar era. At present, we pact, Harvard needs to align itself with those are not doing badly, but there is no doubt arguing for divestment and an Energiewende that much more can be done to accelerate (energy transformation) for the U.S. It is also the transition of new science from bench in Harvard’s narrow financial interests to get to bedside. The new Therapeutic Science out of the fossil-fuel business as soon as pos- program at Harvard Medical School will sible. Let’s keep working to achieve that goal. certainly contribute! Fighting fiercely and not relinquishing Nicholas S. Downing ’07 the ball, School of Medicine, Yale University Marc Strassman ’69 New Haven Valley Village, Calif. Krayer professor of systems pharmacology Peter Drug Discovery Sorger replies: We thank Mr. Downing for Vemurafenib, a promising new drug for emphasizing that the approval of vemu- melanoma that was described in “Systematic rafenib should be regarded as a triumph of genomic medicine and expeditious regula- speak up, please tory review. The question is whether the Harvard Magazine welcomes letters rapid emergence of resistance to the drug on its contents. Please write to “Let- (which can easily be detected in preclini- ters,” Harvard Magazine, 7 Ware Street, cal settings) might have been recognized Cambridge 02138, send comments by e- earlier and mitigated through develop- mail to yourturn@harvard.edu, use our ment of alternative agents or combina- website, www.harvardmagazine.com, tion therapy. In pointing out our system- or fax us at 617-495-0324. Letters may atic failure to study new drugs thoroughly, CRC701683 07/13 be edited to fit the available space. understand their precise mechanisms of action, and anticipate the emergence of

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Applications are accepted from August 15 to February 15. 275-HS-Harvard-mag Social Impact Bonds Ashley Pettus’s article on “Social Impact Read Tommy’s story and learn more about our program at Bonds” (July-August, page 11) maintains the www.scps.virginia.edu/Harvard convenient fiction that tweaking the nonprofit system—adding one more level of bu- reaucracy, another way for private investors to profit from the provision of public services—is the best we can do for this country’s “toughest problems,” i.e. the underclass. Make a donation There is no way that the nonprofit sec- tor can make up for the deep cuts to government programs under sequestration, to Harvard Magazine after decades of cuts to services for the poor and middle classes. Only the federal government can summon the resources to Your support helps us to: subsidize housing, food, childcare, and education, as well as services for the elderly, Launching edX • Commencement • Lear’s Animals • Keep you informed about sick, and disabled, at the necessary levels. Nonprofits burn out countless good University news and policies july-augus t 2012 • $4.95 America’s people trying to meet ever-increasing Damaged • Democracy needs locally instead of organizing to de- Provide you with in-depth On compromise, the franchise, and campaign cash mand adequate federal resources. They can analyses of research and teaching offer rich donors ego-gratification and tax benefits. But they can’t solve the problems • Keep you connected to the created by laissez-faire capitalism, which Harvard community and continues to make the rich richer at the expense of all the rest of us. To pretend your fellow alumni otherwise is to accept the federal govern- Cover_JA12.indd 1 6/6/12 3:41 PM ment’s abdication of responsibility to the 1 American people, and to follow Grover Your generous gifts provide /3 of our funding. Norquist’s [’78, M.B.A. ’81] prescription: shrink the government until it’s small enough to drown in a bathtub. harvardmagazine.com/donate Jane Collins ’71 Medford, Mass.

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Urban Joblessness to the bottom lines of producers and, as a sis can be accomplished if a) government I question the basic premises of the article consequence, to their stockholders. raises the minimum wage to a living wage, “The Urban Job Crisis” (May-June, page 42): But raising the minimum wage would enforces and reforms its tax code, and that the crisis would in part be alleviated not alone solve today’s job crisis. We launches programs to create jobs while by finding “paths toward employment for should look to our government and our b) corporations are encouraged to invest low-income blacks and Latinos” and that major corporations to contribute to the so- their excess surpluses. that path is to be found in educational op- lution. Our government can create millions Robert E. Simon Jr. ’35 portunities “that will enable them to find of jobs and now, belatedly, is the time to Reston, Va. stable jobs in the modern labor force and do it. No mystery as to how it can be done. work their way into the middle class.” The WPA and CCC did it in the 1930s and Supreme Court “Diversity” In my view, I question the implication ’40s, as does the Job Corps. Furthermore The reportage on Commencement 2013 that the modern workforce could exclude there are billions, if not trillions, of revenue (“Lows and Highs,” July-August, page 40) jobs that are now categorized as “low pay- dollars to be obtained by enforcing the tax included a curious “high-minded and seri- ing,” jobs such as those in the service in- code as it is and, additionally by reforming ous” observation by Jeffrey Toobin ’82, J.D. dustries. If it can be given that such jobs the code to mandate offshore income to re- ’86, during his Law School class day speech. will always be with us, then our focus turn back home to be taxed. The “distinguished Supreme Court report- could and should be on how to reward What could be done with those cor- er” noted that the current court “now has those people holding those jobs sufficiently porations, who are now sitting on huge five Republicans and four Democrats— so that they can support themselves and surpluses waiting to renew their faith in and that tells you most of what you need their immediate families in livable condi- our country before investing? My fantasy to know.” tions. The low pay from today’s minimum is that they could be encouraged to spend Really? wage is totally inadequate to meet these their lobbying funds on promoting the I believe that a more interesting and in- conditions. Raising the minimum wage common good and that the very act of bi- sightful observation would have been that to an appropriate level would accomplish partisan collaboration would stimulate the current court “now has six Harvard more than meeting basic human needs. It renewal of faith and release of funds for Law School matriculants, and three Yale would result in multiplying the numbers investment. Law School matriculants—and that tells of consumers. This, in turn, would redound In summary: resolving the urban job cri- you most of what you need to know.” (Jus-

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Harvard Magazine 9 Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 Letters tice Ginsburg later transferred from HLS, in my course. He asked for an extension on newal notice for my ju- and graduated Columbia Law School.) a paper on the grounds that he needed to nior year at the same sti- Visit harvardmagazine. Tom Reardon ’68 practice for the Harvard-Yale Regatta. Of pend was received from com to read additional Plymouth, Mass. course I said to myself that we undergrads the financial-aid office, letters to the editor. at U. Chicago would have never asked for an John Monro, director. Science Learning extension from a professor unless we were A good summer job and a new bride (an In “Science at Harvard: Collaborations and near death, in a hospital, and had a letter employable teacher) reminded me of my Transformations” (The View from Mass Hall, from a doctor to prove it. But this was Har- Depression-era father’s advice: “Never ask July-August, page 6), President Drew Faust vard, not Chicago. Crew was a Big Deal at for more than you need.” asserts that “getting students involved in re- Harvard. And the Harvard-Yale Regatta was After advising the financial-aid office I search early on is key to their engagement the pièce de résistance. So I gave him the could manage with less, a curt reply from and sustained interest in scientific careers.” extension. The only extension I ever gave Monro instructed me to report to his of- This view is influencing science education to a Harvard undergrad fice as soon as I hit the at Harvard and across the U.S. In my expe- without a doctor’s letter. Yard that fall. With great rience it often leads to “research opportuni- A tribute to Coach Parker. trepidation, fearing com- ties” that either have little value, or are more RIP. plete loss of stipend, I traditional learning opportunities rebranded Francis A. Boyle, J.D. did as instructed. After as “research.” If President Faust’s assertion is ’76, Ph.D. ’83 I entered the director’s true this may be worth it. I am curious what Champaign, Ill. office and identified- my the evidence for her assertion is? self, John Monro jumped Richard Taylor For coverage of Harry Parker, from his desk, grasped Princeton, N.J. the legendary crew coach my hand with a firmness who died on June 25, see page that matched his crew Vaulting with Verve 63 and http://harvardmag. cut, and said he wanted Being a lifelong, certifiable Track and Field com/parker-13; to read our to shake the hand of the Nut, I read with pleasure the article (“Up, 1996 cover article about him, first person to turn down Up, and Over!” May-June, page 55) about visit http://harvardmagazine. money from Harvard. champion pole-vaulter Nico Weiler ’12 (’13). com/1996/05/upstream-warrior. Honor my financial judgment he did, but It reminded me of watching a track meet he assured me of future aid should the during undergrad days in the early ’60s at More on Monro need arise. It did not, but I will never for- Briggs Cage, where indoor track meets were Here’s another story about the late John U. get that handshake and the value valida- held at Harvard. West Point was one of the Monro (Vita, May-June, page 30, and letters, tion it implied, an integral part of Monro’s teams competing, and their stellar vaulter, July-August, page 74). character, the “Monro Doctrine,” and his Dick Plymale, was jumping. The Cage was a In the fall of my junior year, I was invit- life after Harvard. bare-bones structure with a thin warm-up ed to compete for an executive job on the Ralph W. Stephens ’56 running track as a kind of balcony. Plymale Crimson, and I was chosen to become edito- Reno was far “above” any Ivy vaulters of the day, rial page editor. But neglect of my course so he didn’t need to do his best. The landing work that fall caught up with me during Amplifications and corrections pit in those days was made of a bag of soft the winter exam period. I experienced an Our article “Time Flying” (July-August, neoprene extrusions, which did not provide acute emotional breakdown and was hos- page 64) incorrectly identified fiftieth-re- very good cushioning. When Plymale took pitalized for six weeks at the Massachu- unioner John Fryer ’63, Ph.D. ’74, as a mem- his turn, the bar was set much lower than setts Mental Health Center in Boston. ber of the class of 1964. We regret the error. his normal height. As he sailed way above My return to the college involved an Robert C. Davenport ’44 wishes to cor- the bar, he just missed smashing into the interview with Dean Monro. During our rect the military rank mistakenly assigned upper running track. Then his momentum lengthy conversation, perhaps recalling his him in a caption for last issue’s College carried him to the back edge of the meager own turbulent college career, he remarked, Pump (“Philosophic Fun,” page 68). The pit. He hit hard and rolled onto the floor, “All of us are skating on thin ice.” I’ve never retired major general in the Massachu- but was not injured. That single vault was forgotten that comforting comment. setts Army National Guard, not in the U.S. enough to win, but it could have ended his I did return to Harvard, reclaimed my Army, writes, “It may seem a minor matter career. It was a vivid indication of the lowly job on the Crimson, and graduated magna to most people, but to soldiers it matters prowess of Ivy vaulters of the day and was a cum laude. Not a bad outcome, all things significantly. The qualification for promo- good reason to build a better facility. considered. tion in the senior ranks is demanding in David Wilson ’65 Stephen Clapp ’60 the federal system and tends to be more re- Placitas, N.M. Jeffersonton, Va. laxed in some State Guard systems. While I will defend my qualifications mightily, Coach Parker As the first Harvard Regional Scholar in only those who would have to work with When I was teaching Harvard undergrads 1952, I was blessed with the opportunity to me can make the final judgment.” We re- I had a member of the varsity crew team attend the College. Late summer of 1954, a regret the error.

10 September - October 2013 Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 I Choose Harvard...

Robert Beal ’63, David Golden ’80, MBA ’65 JD ’83

As an undergraduate, Robert As an investor in emerging Beal ’63, MBA ’65 studied his- companies, David Golden ’80, tory and government affairs, JD ’83 is always on the lookout but the most enduring lesson for technology-driven innova- of his Harvard College experi- tion. That’s why he took notice ence was about giving back. of Harvard’s foray into cutting- Now a real estate developer and edge online education. Golden investor in Boston, Beal has is making a significant gift to shared his time, expertise, and support HarvardX, which is generosity with the Faculty of helping faculty create digital Arts and Sciences (FAS) and across the University. To mark his content for courses offered through edX, the University’s new 50th reunion this past May, Beal plans to augment an endowment nonprofit partnership with MIT. “This is about taking the most fund he established five years ago to promote exemplary teaching interesting, vibrant intellectual property in the world and mak- in the FAS—especially to recognize and reward junior faculty. ing it accessible,” says Golden, a managing partner at Revolution He’ll also support House Renewal, the bold program to breathe Ventures in San Francisco. HarvardX will benefit Harvard new physical and programmatic life into the cherished under- College students by shedding light on how people learn and by graduate residences. Says Beal, who lived in Mather and Quincy providing campus classrooms with engaging multimedia mate- Houses and was active in politics, “Harvard taught me to become rials, notes Golden, who lived in Lowell House and concen- civically and philanthropically involved with my community, and trated in government. “I think HarvardX makes clear that the to become friends with many people.” University cares passionately about quality teaching.” To read more, please visiT www.alumni.harvard.edu/Beal To read more, please visiT www.alumni.harvard.edu/golden “ We have an opportunity to shape the future of

education.” —MichAeL D. S Mith, DeA n of the fAcuLty of ARtS AnD ScienceS

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david ascendant asks who will produce reliable journalism if all the big newspapers die. In politics, the Internet can fast-track a little-known can- Rise of the Little Guy didate to fame, but that could lead to the election of demagogues. And in the commercial sphere, as small-scale manufactur- n twentieth-century Western so- an alternative to big agriculture and food ing becomes increasingly viable, who will ciety, “big” became synonymous with conglomerates. guarantee the safety of products such as “powerful.” To connect with a wide au- But Mele makes clear that there are aircraft and pharmaceuticals? I dience, for example, a musician needed downsides as well in his new book, The Mele (pronounced me-lee), who led Web a contract with a big record company; an End of Big: How the Internet Makes David the New efforts for Howard Dean’s 2004 presidential author needed the promotional help of a Goliath (St. Martin’s Press), intended as a bid and now consults on Internet strategy, commercial publisher. But no longer, points wide-ranging wake-up call. He points out, teaches courses at HKS on digital strate- out Nicco Mele, a Harvard Kennedy School for example, that the Internet gives writers gy for political campaigns and on media, (HKS) adjunct lecturer in public policy. In a platform to reach millions of readers, but politics, and power in the digital age. He a new book, Mele explores how technological advances have combined with cultural and economic factors to tilt the balance of power in favor of the little guy, undermining and desta- bilizing big players who once seemed invincible. The new power of grassroots movements has its pluses, for sure. In the case of entertainment, the rise of the Internet has made it easier for the public to discover new music without the big recording companies. In politics, the Internet enables candidates to raise funds and pub- licize their platforms without backing from a major party. The local-food movement and proliferation of farmers’ markets give consumers

Illustration by Jon Krause Harvard Magazine 13 Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 Right Now

also serves on the advisory board of Har- killing jobs—with complete anonymity. those of the Pirate Party, active in several vard’s Nieman Foundation for Journalism. He warns that Bitcoin, a Web-based cur- European countries: its primary concerns Although opportunities now abound for rency system, could undermine national include protecting individual privacy and authors to self-publish, reflecting precisely currencies. He describes the Internet’s using technology to facilitate direct democ- the trend his book describes, he purposely dark side in dystopian tones: “Ten years racy. He notes that Iceland rewrote its con- chose a major publisher because he aims to from now, we might well find ourselves stitution using a process in which citizens reach leaders ensconced in large institu- living in constant fear of extremist groups participated via social media, and that, along tions who complacently assume those in- and lone individuals who, thanks to tech- similar lines, Furman professor of law Law- stitutions aren’t going away. nology, can disrupt society at will, shut- rence Lessig has joined forces with the Tea He reserves his harshest criticism, and ting off power, threatening food supplies, Party in calling for ordinary citizens to or- sternest warnings, for government officials creating mayhem in the streets, and im- ganize a constitutional convention. who fail to recognize the threat that new peding commercial activity.” Reimagining large, complex institutions technologies and grassroots forces pose. For It is time, he writes, to stop assuming that is no easy task, but in the age of the newly example, he writes about one community technology is solely a force for good. Instead, empowered individual, Mele believes it is near Atlanta that, dissatisfied with the local he declares, it “empowers both sides of the possible, with some creativity and effort government’s lack of responsiveness, priva- equation—pro-democracy human-rights ac- from each of us. For all his warnings, he tized all of its public services, effectively re- tivists and loose networks of terrorists.” But is also optimistic: “The average American placing city hall. This might appear an ef- if citizens make a concerted effort to reinvent spends 22 to 24 hours a week watching tele- ficient way to maneuver around red tape to institutions in line with the values they hold vision,” he writes. “You only need to devote get results, but if enough communities do dear—rule of law, due process, free markets, a few of those hours” to civic engagement this, Mele warns, government will lose its the protection of civil liberties—the present to have an “enormous impact.” authority altogether. holds tremendous potential. velizabeth gudrais He describes some truly chilling phe- Mele sees this moment in history as an nomena such as Silk Road, an online black opportunity to reimagine our institutions nicco mele e-mail address: market where literally anything can be so they can harness the best of technology [email protected] bought or sold—weapons, drugs, pornog- and pick up where technology leaves off. He mele book website: raphy, human-trafficking victims, contract identifies some promising efforts, including endofbig.com

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14 September - October 2013 Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746

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sausage-making and skyscrapers found; they were literally pulverized. A lot of families think of that ground as being filled with microscopic DNA.” Sixteen-Acre Battlefield There were also architects “who just wanted to make a place that represented the best in urban design and architec- n the first month after 9/11, Larry Sil- plicated decisions are made in the public ture.” Many architects had not viewed the verstein, the real-estate developer who arena,” she says. “It’s really ugly—there’s a World Trade Center (WTC) positively. owned the leases to the Twin Towers, lot of dysfunction. But this is it.” “It was a kind of urban-planning failure,” I received nearly 3,000 letters telling him The terrorist attacks transformed a Greenspan says. WTC exemplified the how and what he should rebuild. The pub- purely commercial space into, for many, a “superblock” style popular in the 1960s lic’s desires reflected various irreconcilable sacred burial ground. Those wishes: “revenge, rebirth, peace, the latest in who saw the 16-acre site as green design, a park, commercial space, af- sacred and those with a com- fordable housing,” writes Elizabeth Greens- mercial interest in the land pan, preceptor in expository writing, in her clashed politically, and as new book, Battle for Ground Zero. a cultural anthropologist, In 2001, Greenspan was a University of Greenspan studied the mean- Pennsylvania graduate student in urban ings people found in the site. anthropology; she went to Ground Zero “It wasn’t only because people to investigate, and has returned many were killed, but the way they times in the last 12 years, interviewing were killed,” she explains. “A virtually all the significant players in the thousand people were never resurrection of the area and writing dis- A former resident of the patches about it for The Atlantic’s website. neighborhood and his son The Ground Zero process “is a microcosm revisit the World Trade

of how things work today, and how com- Center site for the first time. elizabeth greenspan

Born a racer. Finished at charm school.

Harvard Magazine 15 Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746

and 1970s: “They’d take six blocks, bulldoze all the streets and sidewalks to create this giant undiffer- entiated space, then fill it with huge skyscrapers with huge footprints—massive buildings and no street life,” she says. “Architects felt that the tragic events of 9/11 might have a silver lining: rectifying the mistakes of the past and creating a Left: The Port Authority cleared the site of new neighborhood, a place homemade memorials in 2002 and barred where people actually lived.” chitectural consortium called THINK. future ones. Above: Floridians protest a Eventually, in “one of the slipperiest, Even so, Silverstein, the Port Authority, proposed Islamic Center and mosque two blocks from Ground Zero in 2010. most disingenuous moments” of the pro- and the governor always intended to hire elizabeth greenspan cess, the Lower Manhattan Development other individual architects to design the Ultimately, the sacred-versus-commer- Corporation (LMDC) ran a design com- actual buildings. “Hardly any of the pub- cial issue was resolved “very literally,” petition to create a “master plan” for the lic understood this,” Greenspan explains. Greenspan says, by dividing the land even- site—even though Silverstein, the Port “They looked at Daniel Libeskind’s draw- ly: half for a memorial plaza, half for office Authority, and the governor’s office had ing and said, ‘OK, this is what will be built, space. “It took more than 10 years to come already decided on all the elements the site and we’re excited about this.’ But Libes- up with that!” she says, wryly. “It doesn’t would contain: skyscrapers, a memorial, a kind’s tower, which everyone had fallen in seem like the most creative, imaginative train station. The competition was simply love with, was never going to be built. Larry solution, but it’s good enough. What I’ve a contest to map the site, to assemble these Silverstein had hired his architect, David learned about the democratic process is: pieces into an organized space. Architect Childs, three weeks after 9/11.” (Childs is the if you end up with something that is good Daniel Libeskind was declared the winner, architect of One World Trade Center, the enough, in our system, that’s actually not though only after Governor George Pataki primary building of the new complex.) “The so bad.” vcraig lambert and Mayor Michael Bloomberg, M.B.A. ’66, only thing remaining from Libeskind’s de- overruled the LMDC’s panel of judges, ar- sign,” Greenspan adds, “is the height of the elizabeth greenspan website: chitects who had chosen a plan by an ar- building—1,776 feet.” http://elizabethgreenspan.com/

t h e l i v i n g p l a n e t Geology Intersects Biology

acking the Earth’s 4.6-billion-year more complex story, stretching back to Using explanatory illustrations, the history into a two-foot-by-three the earliest evidence of life. “For the first poster draws connections between bio- poster—roughly three-quarters of several billion years of Earth’s history, logical and geological processes in Earth’s P a billion years per square foot—is it was a world of bacteria and archaea— history, including discussions of plate tec- no easy task. Yet scientists from Harvard only somewhat later in the game did we tonics, chemical cycles, the greenhouse and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute have eukaryotes,” says Fisher professor of effect, early photosynthesis, and, signifi- (HHMI) in Chevy Chase, Maryland, have natural history Andrew Knoll, referring cantly, the oxygenation of the planet. The teamed up to do just that with “Earth Evo- to single-celled microorganisms and or- story of oxygen, in fact, is really the story lution: The Intersection of Geology and ganisms whose cells contain a membrane- of Earth. Knoll and his colleagues at HHMI Biology”—a graphic display (opposite) of bound nucleus, respectively. “The most an- have therefore divided the planet’s history how geological and biological processes cient history most students have thought into three broad chapters based on this all- have dynamically shaped and molded the about—like trilobites or dinosaurs—is re- important gas: a long first chapter without world we inhabit. ally only the last 10 or 15 percent of the his- oxygen, which lasted until about 2.4 billion Classic visualizations of life on Earth tory of the planet and the history of life,” years ago; an almost equally long second typically pick up the tale 540 million years continues Knoll, who worked closely with chapter when the planet had some oxy- ago, when oxygen, land plants, and certain HHMI on the poster. (For more on Knoll’s gen, which lasted until roughly 550 million marine invertebrates became abundant. research into the origins of life, see “Life’s years ago; and finally, the most recent era, “Earth Evolution” tells a much longer and Beginnings,” page 29.) characterized by large amounts of the gas.

16 September - October 2013 Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 Right Now

The poster also addresses climate HHMI team were careful to avoid jargon change—there is a “key events” section and too much detail even as they tried on the left-hand side depicting the green- hard not to “dumb down” concepts. “Earth house effect as well as the geologic carbon has been a biological planet through most cycle and mass extinctions. “In the Pha- of its history,” he says, and “every kid has Travel the world with fellow nerozoic Eon—the ‘age of visible animals’ heard about dinosaurs,” yet they seem alumni and Harvard study that began 541 million years ago—mass “much less likely to have heard how we leaders. Choose from more extinctions have punctuated evolution- can reconstruct [Earth’s] environmental as than 50 trips annually. ary history,” Knoll reports. Although some well as biological history. This interesting are thought to have been caused by large picture of interactions over time is not so featured trips meteorites, he explains, “several are tied to common.” vlaura levis massive volcanism, which caused a rapid increase in atmospheric carbon-dioxide The “Earth Evolution” poster, which won honorable levels. The one process we know that in- mention in the 2012 International Science & Engi- creases CO2 at rates comparable to those neering Visualization Challenge, may be download- of massive volcanism is human industrial ed for free at www.hhmi.org/biointeractive/poster- activity, thus linking our biological past earth-evolution-intersection-geology-and-biology. and future.” Given their target audience of high- andrew knoll e-mail address: school students, Knoll said he and the [email protected] APRIL 25–MAY 9, 2014 turKish treasures STUDY LeADeR: JOHN “JAY” eLLISON

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Harvard Magazine 17 Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 Montage Art, books, diverse creations

19 Open Book 20 Saxophonically Speaking 22 Side Missions, Engines, Joysticks 25 “Global Whitemanism” 26 Off the Shelf 28 Chapter and Verse

Max Sandvoss until we retire to with some of his goats at the First do the work we Light Farm and really want to Creamery in do?” (To under- East Bethany, line his new iden- New York tity as a farmer, he changed his first name to Max.) Now they look after a herd of more than 100 Nubian and Alpine goats. The goats’ milk, along with organic milk from a neighbor’s Jersey cows, underlies a variety of cheeses and other products the brothers sell in area farmers’ markets and upmarket grocery stores. Their wares, includ- A Fever for Chèvre ing three varieties of chèvre, cheddar, jack, feta, and cheddar curds, plus The brothers Sandvoss moved from glitter to goat cheese. cream-top Jersey yogurt and bottled cream-top Jersey milk, are prized by by steve potter local consumers and have recently become available through a weekly or Max Sandvoss ’02 and his broth- grew out of long conversations during an “dairy share” program. “I’m so much more er, Trystan, the chores associated with extended vacation in the Pacific North- fulfilled now,” Max says. “I think to myself, making small-batch artisanal cheese west. They fantasized about having a farm this is what job satisfaction is supposed to F typically begin before dawn and, dur- and living an agrarian lifestyle. Max began feel like.” ing western New York’s cold, snowy win- acting in college and found work (as Steve Producing their gourmet foods involves ters, end well after dark. Sandvoss, his birth name) soon after arriv- the relentless rhythm of farm work. Max Their First Light Farm and Creamery in ing in Hollywood; he starred in Latter Days and Trystan milk their goats twice daily, East Bethany, New York, a rural town mid- (2003) and appeared opposite Jennifer An- with occasional help from local students. way between Rochester and Buffalo, is a iston in Rumor Has It (2005). He says, “Some (They aspire to afford full-time help some- long way from Hollywood, where Trystan people work for years as bankers so they day.) They handle all the other tasks as- was a producer and Max a film and televi- can afford to be painters. I’d made a little sociated with their modern, artisanal version actor. The seed for their career change money and I thought, why should we wait sion of the earliest type of food processing

18 September - October 2013 Photographs by Steve Potter Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 Montage themselves, augmented with the latest technology: in the pasture or the creamery, they conduct business with tablets, o p e n b o o k smartphones, and Bluetooth headsets. Yet the goats must be milked on schedule, and the milk, by law, must be processed within A Bloodbath, Averted 72 hours. Although the brothers grew up in West- chester County, their New York State Christa Kuljian ’84 traveled just a few miles from home, in Lexington, Massachu- roots didn’t draw them to this fertile up- setts, to Harvard. Her next step was longer: to South Africa, where she worked in a state farmland. The impetus came from school, and, after more studies and a few other stops, where she ran a [social-service] their mother, Joyce, whose second hus- foundation’s office for more than a decade, as the country became a democracy—and band (she was widowed when her sons her permanent home. She is now a writer. Her first book, Sanctuary: How an Inner-City were in high school) is a western New Church Spilled onto a Sidewalk (Jacana, and via http://www.sanctuary-book.co.za), de- York dairy farmer. Max and Trystan ap- tails what happened when refugees from oppression in Zimbabwe were given shelter prenticed as cheesemakers in Washington in a prominent church. From the prologue, set in May 2008, as xenophobic violence State and originally intended to start a swept South Africa: creamery there. But she persuaded them to buy an abandoned 20-acre horse farm near A chance remark by a police her husband’s 3,000-acre dairy operation. officer—“Zulus are attacking all A year of arduous work transformed the the foreigners”—overheard by equine facility into a small dairy farm. one man, was all it took. By 9 p.m. The artisanal cheese that “foodies” trea- over a thousand men had assem- sure takes its particular qualities not only bled on Pritchard Street outside from the ruminants that produce the milk. the Central Methodist Church in “Making really fine cheese starts with the downtown Johannesburg.…The land,” Max says, gesturing to the pasture men wore jackets and jerseys where the herd is nibbling. “The minerals and stamped their feet against and nutrients in the earth and the water the cold. In their hands they that falls on it all affect the richness of grasped their weapons tightly. the grass, which influences the milk and The weapons were unconven- ultimately the quality of what we make tional, hastily gathered. Mostly from the milk.” Seasonal changes also af- they consisted of wooden planks fect the flavor of the cheese—their chèvre that had been forcefully pulled Refugees from Zimbabwe take shelter in the Central is milder in the spring and more full- off the pews of the chapel inside Methodist Church on Pritchard Street, in downtown Johannesburg, March 22, 2009. bodied in the fall. Turning great milk into the church, and metal bars that great cheese is “not hard, but it requires had been wrenched from stair- the right equipment, attention to detail, way railings. Desperation and fear, and chance, with your sticks? Do you think and intense focus on the process,” Max the memory of another terrifying time that your sticks would defend you against adds. “My brother likes to say that you just a few months before, had prompted guns? We don’t want to start a war. You can’t make good cheese with bad milk, but these men to act, and they had pulled must bring all of your weapons up to the you can make bad cheese with good milk. the church apart…to defend themselves. front and drop them here.” We keep our goats healthy and make sure Some held the odd brick in their hands, Silence. Verryn waited. No one they have good grass, and they produce or the leg of a stool, but they stood ready moved. this amazing stuff. What we do after that and waiting, shoulder to shoulder.… Then two men came forward and honors the miraculous nature of the milk.” Word spread on the street that the dropped their metal poles in front of the “What’s the shelf life of milk?” asks Bishop [Paul Verryn, who had led the pulpit. The gathering shifted uneasily and Trystan, during a cheese-making work- church since 1997] was calling for ev- a low murmuring went around the room. shop they offer at the farm. Trick question. eryone to move inside. Gradually, re- Verryn saw their hesitation, but he con- “The shelf life is zero,” he says. “Nature in- luctantly, the men followed him into the tinued to stand in front of them, waiting, tends milk to be consumed immediately.” building and into the sanctuary, the large not speaking. Then another man walked He notes that milk goes directly from the main room of worship in the church. Ver- forward and dropped his wooden stick. mother to her offspring without even be- ryn stood in the pulpit and looked out Slowly, a motley pile of weaponry began ing exposed to air. across the restless crowd. He saw their to form.…The battle never happened. Bacteria turn milk into cheese, with anger. He saw their fear. Then, slowly and The bloodbath was averted. Central specific bacterial cultures required for calmly, he spoke. Methodist settled back into an uneasy each type. The cheesemaker, Max says, “Do you think that you would have any sleep. provides the ideal set of conditions for

Photograph by David Goodman Harvard Magazine 19 Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 Montage Art by renowned illustrator Isabelle Arsenault.

light-farm.com), making chèvre begins with a slow pasteurization that avoids the flavor damage caused by the high-temperature flash-pasteurization large dairies typically use. The brothers Visit www.harvardmag. heat their milk to 140 com/extras to view a degrees for 30 minutes, video of the Sandvoss then cool it quickly brothers in action. Plus, a goat-cheese to 70 degrees. Next recipe they inoculate it with the appropriate bacterial culture, gently stirred through the vat. After six hours they add rennet, which curdles the milk. Twenty-four hours later, the vat’s contents have become a gelati- nous mass, to be ladled into gallon-sized muslin bags hung to drain for another 24 hours before being hand-packed into eight-ounce retail containers. (First Light Trystan (left) and Max Sandvoss at milking nearby farms, all to minimize the chance trades the whey that drains off to a nearby time. By law, fresh goat milk must be processed within 72 hours. of contamination. farmer, to feed his pigs, swapping it for a Each of the First Light cheeses—based share of his organic pork products. The the bacteria to do their work, includ- on goats’ milk, Jerseys’ milk, or blends Sandvosses work hard and eat well.) ing proper temperature, pH, salinity, and of the two—has a recipe. Their chèvre is They normally give their one-day cheese- processing time. The entire process can particularly admired; creamy in texture, making workshops twice a month, except be thrown off disastrously if the wrong its subtle combination of flavors stands during early-spring kidding season. The bacteria or other microorganisms enter apart from the almost astringent quality workshops focus on fresh cheeses that re- the mix. That sort of contamination is of mass-produced supermarket chèvre, quire little or no aging, such as mozzarella. the bane of a cheesemaker’s life, and thus which has turned off many potential cus- (In contrast, First Light’s cheddar takes the Sandvosses are fanatics about clean- tomers. “First Light’s artisanal two years to mature.) Between liness and accuracy. In some ways, their cheeses, including their chèvre, the morning and afternoon ses- creamery resembles the clean rooms used are very high quality,” says An- sions, attendees enjoy a lunch to assemble satellites or electronic equip- drew Galarneau, food writer prepared by Joyce that features ment, including a positive-pressure venti- for The Buffalo News. “They are the farm’s products as ingredi- lation system designed to thwart airborne well regarded by owners of ents in each course. Homemade contaminants. The brothers change their specialty food stores, restau- brownies with a chèvre filling boots when they enter the processing rant chefs, and consumers.” are far more delicious than one Renowned Guidance area, and change yet again when visiting At First Light (https://first- might imagine. vsteve potter

get a flow going. I could create a narra- Saxophonically Speaking tive line in my solos, and bring surprise we have served families for generations, offering the counsel and advice needed to handle even the most complex and playfulness in, too. But playing next Joshua Redman’s sonorous voice on tenor to my dad, I realized how worthless these wealth management needs. To learn how we can apply our knowledge and experience to help preserve your family’s things were in relationship to his sound. He piphany arrived for jazz saxo- but “he was an influence from afar,” the had such a deep, warm, tenor-saxophone legacy, call Mark Graham at 302-651-1665, email [email protected], or visit wilmingtontrust.com. phonist Joshua Redman ’91 on one son says, “like other great saxophonists I sound—it was really a voice for him. He’d of the first nights he ever shared a had heard.” start playing a solo, and it made what I E stage with his father—Dewey Red- But by his early twenties, when he was playing sound like video-game music. man, a tenor sax player who had led bands first played regularly with his father, the I was just overwhelmed by his sound.” and played free jazz with Ornette Coleman, younger Redman had become an accom- So the younger musician, who had always Keith Jarrett, and many others. plished jazzman in his own right. “It was hated to practice, began applying advice his For the first 18 years of his life, Joshua one of the most inspiring and intimidating father had bestowed when he learned his rarely saw his dad. (His mother raised things, to play with my dad,” he recalls. “At son was playing the sax: “You’ve got to prac- him in Berkeley, California, while his fa- that point I perhaps had certain talents tice your long tones.” Long tones help develop ther settled in the jazz hub of New York and skills as a saxophonist. I had some in- the full, rounded saxophone sound that is FIDUCIARY SERVICES | WEALTH PLANNI NG | INVESTMENT MANAGEMENT | PRIVATE BANKING City.) He did see him play on occasion, teresting improvisational ideas and could so pleasing to listeners. The woodshedding ©2013 Wilmington Trust Corporation. An M&T Company.

20 September - October 2013 Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746

wt007751 IVY_MG_M.indd 1 6/25/13 4:13 PM 7751 IVY_MG 8.125” x 10.5” 130906_WilmingtonTrust_Harvard.indd 1 7/16/13 1:53 PM Art by renowned illustrator Isabelle Arsenault.

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career that began in 1993. The new when they can tell you disc includes his longtime associ- who played what on ates Brad Mehldau (piano), Larry every recording.” Visit www.harvardmag. com/extras to hear Grenadier (bass), and Brian Blade After college he de- several of Redman’s (drums)—plus, on six songs, a ferred matriculation at songs. chamber string orchestra, with Yale Law School and flute and French horn. “The strings moved to Brooklyn to live in Park Slope add a richness and a lushness, a with friends from the Berklee College of romanticism and even a touch of Music. “I guess I wanted a breather before nostalgia to the music,” Redman starting up” at Yale, he says. “I was hoping explains on his website (www. to relax, hang, party, get a relatively low- joshuaredman.com). Along with stress job, maybe volunteer some, hope- jazz standards like “Stardust” and fully play a bit of music on the side. I was “Lush Life,” as well as originals on a year’s deferment. Turned out to be a by Redman and Mehldau, Walk- never-ending year!” He won the Theloni- ing Shadows includes novel choices: ous Monk International Jazz Saxophone the Adagio from Bach’s Toccata in Competition in the fall of 1991 and “great C major for organ never sounded musicians started to call.” Within six so lyrical as here, and the Beatles’ months, he could pay his rent and “eat at

e nborough “Let It Be,” after an opening hom- least one square meal a day” on his jazz tt age to its gospel roots, takes flight earnings. “The more I had the chance to th A th Joshua Redman e as an energized, playful saxophone play jazz with some of the very best musi-

Elizab improv. cians alive,” he says, “the more I sensed its paid off:New York Times reviewer Nate Chin- Redman took up the tenor at age 10; he beauty, its profundity, and how essential it en has described Joshua Redman’s sono- is essentially self-taught. He didn’t make was to my life.” rous tone as having an “inner glow,” adding the Harvard Jazz Band on his first try- The saxophone “is an extension of that Redman “has stood for a notion of jazz out, but eventually played with them for yourself—not your body, but your self,” he that’s rigorous and porous, edifying and ap- two and a half years while finding time to explains. “In some rare moments, you are proachable, dying to prove nothing beyond graduate summa cum laude in social stud- so connected with your axe [instrument] its own quality of expression.” ies. He also had a period when he “really that the saxophone itself fades away, and Redman’s sound enriches his newest al- got into jazz as a listener—it was the only it’s just pure self-expression. That’s the bum, a collection of ballads titled Walking music I’d listen to,” he recalls. “Every jazz ideal we’re all striving for.” Shadows, the sixteenth CD in a recording musician goes through a ‘jazz geek’ phase, vcraig lambert Side Missions, Engines, Joysticks The video game Assassin’s Creed’s head writer

hile a feature film occupies Ordinarily, players work a video-game ning, climbing trees or buildings, hiding in its viewers for about two console that includes several buttons and rooms, or leaping across roofs. hours, a video game more joysticks. Other games use a computer Assassin’s Creed is an historical action-ad- W likely offers a 10- to 40-hour keyboard and mouse. The player controls venture series. Using a device that allows ride—roughly comparable to a book. Fur- the movements and, above, all, the deci- him to experience “ancestral memories,” thermore, unlike other entertainment me- sions of the main character or avatar, the Desmond travels to the time of the Third dia, video games are interactive. “Interactivity player’s alter ego. For example, in the As- Crusade (circa A.D. 1191) and, in later changes everything,” says video-game de- sassin’s Creed series, which includes several games, to the Italian Renaissance and the veloper Corey May ’99, head writer for the related games sold by Ubisoft Entertain- American Revolution. Thus players get to Assassin’s Creed games, one of the world’s best- ment (where May works), the main char- experience virtually the medieval Holy selling franchises. “We are not designing a acter, Desmond Miles, pursues an ad- Land, Florence, Venice, Rome, and Tus- passive experience. Entertainment usually venturous quest to find several artifacts cany in the fifteenth and sixteenth centu- means spectatorship—those who create it (“Pieces of Eden”) that embody extraor- ries, and the New England countryside of may have the audience in mind, but not audi- dinary powers and may even save human- Revolutionary times. Such settings make ence input in mind. It’s more immersive and ity from eradication by a solar flare. The research into historical milieux a major personalized when you have that partici- player determines how Desmond moves part of game development. One advantage pating audience.” through the game’s landscapes—run- of choosing Italy, says May, is that “80 per-

22 September - October 2013 Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 Montage cent of the architecture (AI) lines, which enable top-selling video game for several years, is still the same!”—al- reactions to the player’s is a “military shooter.”) A different engine lowing the creators to choices. might support a sports game, like football. use modern photographs. “AI is what drives all Some engines are versatile: Ubisoft has de- The Revolution, he says, the moving pieces inside ployed the Assassin’s Creed engine to make opened up “a fresh take the game,” May explains. other games as well. on environments. You “If you’re in combat with Building a video game is a collaborative could build in tree-climb- something, AI instructs process done by teams that can include ing or bow-and-arrow ac- your enemies on how to hundreds of artists, writers, computer tion.” react to you, how to ac- programmers, and designers who are Production on a video knowledge your presence. united “in pursuit of making cool stuff,” game resembles that for a It’s the brain inside the says May. (There are even translators: as computer-graphics film. other stuff on the screen, the market is global, the text and dialogue

But interactivity demands l and even inside the main appear in eight to 14 languages.) “There’s e far more content than character, so thatwhat when a tension in thewhat industry. We are ostensi- happens happens a movie. Screenwriting Corey May you push a button,with no the bly creating withentertainment. no But there is boundaries. boundaries. provides an instructive duhamSimon game knows what you an older mindset that’s more of, ‘We are comparison: screenplays average 120 pages want to do.” creating software,’ as if we were building and may take years to craft, but a video- Games are built with “engines,” collec- the next release of Microsoft Word. But game script can be 1,000 pages long, with tions of tools that include foundational we’re not making a word processor; we are the writing team cranking it out in three code and systems to determine things building things that, if they are not telling to six months. Assassin’s Creed III had seven like how to render graphics and manage stories, are creating experiences and evok- credited writers. May wrote the game’s AI. For example, an engine might enable ing emotions.” what what happens happens “main path,” which means, he says, “the building a “first-person shooter,”with no a game As a head withwriter, no May supervises teams of boundaries. boundaries. things you [the player] have to do,” while in which the player tries to shoot enemies writers for various games, and writes a lot colleagues knocked out “side missions,” while seeing the landscape through the himself. He has played video games since he onscreen text, and artificial intelligence eyes of the avatar. (Call of Duty, now the was three or four years old and still does, for

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at least two hours a day. “I will be playing (“I regret not trying”). Though he knows About nine years ago, sekretagent found video games until the day I die,” he says. “I little about writing code, he now works itself well positioned when videogame can’t imagine ever getting tired of it. I’m all closely with the “geeks” daily. He earned companies began scouring Los Angeles right as a player. I don’t think there is any an M.F.A. in film producing at the Univer- for Hollywood talent. “No one wanted to special advantage in being a game creator.” sity of Southern California, where he met write scripts for games then,” May recalls. In college, he worked part-time for a his future business partner, Dooma Wend- “It wasn’t movies or TV, it wasn’t sexy, and video-game company, telecommuting to schuh; together they launched sekretagent there wasn’t enough write stories for an online multiplayer Productions. Focusing on film production, money.” But May loved game, but concentrated in economics they sold one movie to Disney that “was in games, had a body of Visit www.harvardmag. and took no computer-science courses development hell for 11 years until it died.” work, and knew some com/extras to see a clip things about creating from Assassin’s Creed. drama and emotion on a screen. Before long he had connected with Ubisoft and moved to its largest studio, in Montreal. He works long hours and sometimes weekends, but only because he wants to. “You have a lot of freedom to dream and nt nt e experiment here, to play with narrative

rtainm structure and elements,” he explains. “It’s e nt like a playground, a laboratory, or a work- oft e oft s shop. And there are 2,000 other dreamers in this space with you creating these in- y may/ubi y

e credible, ambitious experiences.” vcraig lambert y of cor of y es A rooftop chase from the Assassin’s

court Creed III video game

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24 September - October 2013 Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 Montage

ton, steamboats, dizzying economic growth, and the nearly unlimited capital that made “Global Whitemanism” it possible. As with any work of political economy, it relies on abstractions, aggrega- The capitalist economy and dark dreams of the slaveholding South tions, and synthesis to cover ground quickly and to analyze the big picture. Commodifi- by michael t. bernath cation and capitalization, his subjects, are themselves, of course, methods of abstrac- his is a dark book about a dark and African American studies expands them tion, and this could easily be a book without subject. Walter Johnson burst outward in every direction. The new book, individual people. But it is not. onto the historical scene with the too, is rooted in an equation, or rather a con- To his credit, Johnson alternates between T 1999 publication of his influential version—“lashes into labor into bales into the macro and micro view, interspersing Soul by Soul, which positioned the slave mar- dollars into pounds sterling”—one that gov- richly detailed anecdotes and even chapters ket as the central institution of the antebel- erned the lives of planters and slaves, shaped within his larger analysis, and he populates lum South, shaping not only the southern the land, development, and society of the Cot- the Cotton Kingdom with captivating and economy, but also white self-conceptions ton Kingdom, and drove a global economy ex- repulsive charac- and black lives. With chilling efficiency, the tending to banks in London and mills in Lan- ters. For instance, Walter Johnson, River book unpacked the practical and psycho- cashire. The book is not simply the history of he provides an illu- of Dark Dreams: Slavery logical difficulties in commodifying what a region (the antebellum Mississippi Valley) minating examina- and Empire in the Cotton should not be commodified. Johnson sought or a work of political economy (what John- tion of steamboat Kingdom (Harvard to reduce slavery to its basic equation—“a son terms “slave racial capitalism”), though technology as well University Press, $35) person with a price”—and to show how this it is certainly both of these things. In a larger as lurid accounts omnipresent calculation permeated and un- sense, it is the history of a mentality out of of horrifying accidents and their increas- dergirded every aspect of southern life. which would emerge a vision of global empire ing frequency as boat owners and opera- In River of Dark Dreams, Johnson deals with premised upon the commodification of cot- tors pushed their machines and people some of the same themes, but the Winthrop ton and the human beings forced to tend it. well beyond the limits of safety and com- professor of history and professor of African Johnson’s is a story of land, slaves, cot- mon sense in a never-ending quest to best

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Harvard Magazine 25 Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 Montage their competitors and extract further prof- talists whose factories happened to be in their own. Still, slaves remained the most it. In these pages, one meets Charles Des- fields, Johnson has always come down on the valuable and liquid form of capital in the londes, the Creole slave who led an unsuc- capitalist side, but here he drives the point South, one that could be moved easily and cessful 1811 revolt in Louisiana only to be to the hilt. Mississippi Valley planters were sold anywhere, and it was the territorially gruesomely executed; the mysterious and not merely capitalists, he argues, they were bounded (i.e., domestic) slave market, John- murderous slave-stealer John Murrell; the global free-trade capitalists, whose obses- son argues, that made the South the South ill-fated, misguided, and almost pitiable Cu- sion with efficiency and productivity drove by knitting together the upper southern ban “liberator,” General Narciso López; and them to wring every last dollar out of their states and Deep South into a single slave the “shape-shifter” William Walker, that fields and their enslaved people. Measur- economy. For white slaveowners, the slave “grey-eyed man of destiny,” who rose from ing distance in dollars, not miles, planters market always remained “the factory of slav- obscurity to briefly conquer Nicaragua in always kept one eye on the cotton prices and ery’s future” and the “prime engine of spatial the name of advancing southern interests shipping rates in Liverpool, New York, and and temporal transformation.” and the progress of the white race. Through- New Orleans even as they kept the other The last quarter of the book deals with out, Johnson seeks to stress the human and carefully trained on their slaves for any sign southern visions of empire as Mississippi environmental resistance that always con- of slackening, resistance, or rebellion. Valley-boosters sought to reinvigorate their ditioned white ambitions, and to remind us Yet it was capitalism with a twist. Where- regional economy by seizing new lands that on the ground, “The Cotton Kingdom as in most capitalist societies, capital and la- and gaining new slaves in order to advance was built out of sun, water, and soil; animal bor are separate, usually oppositional, forc- “global whitemanism.” Johnson takes the energy, human labor, and mother wit; grain, es, here they were blended together in the imperialist aspirations of southern proslav- flesh, and cotton; pain, hunger, and fatigue; persons of slaves. Johnson pulls no punches ery advocates seriously, and he provides an blood, milk, semen, and shit.” in presenting slavery in all its dehumanizing in-depth examination of American filibus- In the longstanding historical debate over ugliness while also emphasizing the many tering expeditions in Cuba and Nicaragua whether southern planters should best be ways slaves found to resist their masters, as well as the efforts (mostly talk) to reopen viewed as premodern, paternalistic anticap- shape their environments, and, within the the Atlantic slave trade. For whites in the italists or as modern, market-driven capi- constraints of oppression, make lives of Mississippi Valley, he reminds us, the map

city. The result, subtitled “A Love The Numbers Game: Why Every- (and Sometimes Hate) Story in thing You Know about Soccer Is Off the Shelf Maps by 75 New Yorkers,” is clever, Wrong, by Chris Anderson and David engaging, and emotionally resonant Sally ’82 (Penguin, $16 paper). Anderson, Recent books with Harvard connections in all the ways that famous island of Cornell, and Sally, visiting associate pro- is itself. fessor of business administration at Dart- mouth, put aside their academics for their Wonder Women: Sex, Power, and The Federal Reserve: What Every- passion, and bring quantification and data the Quest for Perfection, by Debo- one Needs to Know, by Stephen H. analysis to “the beautiful game.” ra L. Spar, Ph.D. ’90 (Farrar, Straus and Axilrod ’48 (Oxford, $16.95 paper). As if Giroux, $27). The author, now presi- years monitoring the economy and fight- The Founding Conservatives, by dent of Barnard College, formerly of the ing inflation weren’t challenge enough, David Lefer ’93 (Sentinel, $29.95). The Harvard Business School faculty, begins by this Fed veteran, with long subsequent author, a former Ledecky Undergradu- remembering “the moment I knew I was financial-services experience, has written ate Fellow at this magazine, now indus- having it all”—and explores the burdens a reader-friendly, slender book, in ques- try professor at New York University’s that have resulted for “women of my so- tion-and-answer format, to demystify the Polytechnic Institute, examines how John called postfeminist generation.” central bank. Dickinson, James Wilson, Roger Morris, Silas Dean, and others helped Mapping Manhattan, by shape America’s original prin- Becky Cooper ’10 (Abrams, ciples and in so doing, the sub- $19.95). The author walked title says, “saved the American through Manhattan, handing Revolution” and planted the out blank maps and soliciting seeds for contemporary con- recipients’ drawings of their servatism.

Two New Yorkers’ self-made Every Love Story Is a maps of their Manhattan: a Ghost Story: A Life of Da- plot of places visited (or not), and a narrative of gloves vid Foster Wallace, by D.T. misplaced (and other, more Max ’83 (Viking $27.95, Pen- consequential losses). guin $17 paper). A New Yorker

26 September - October 2013 Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 Montage of the United States and the South remained E M of very much unfinished. As the steamboat economy reached its physical limit and railroads began to reorient western trade Healthcare eastward, instead of southward, southern spokesmen in the 1850s sought to expand their slave economy and establish the di- Leadership rect trade connections necessary to sustain it. In their view, Cuba was the natural and A program of intense study focused on leading inevitable gateway to the slave South, and transformation in American healthcare. Nicaragua offered a path west to connect the Mississippi Valley to the emerging Pa- cific economy. Although unsuccessful, these H A is undergoing rapid, efforts to bring new lands under southern disruptive, and persistent change. It will take white control and reopen the Atlantic slave visionary leaders to transform our healthcare trade, Johnson argues, shared a common vi- organizations in this dynamic environment. sion, one “that outlines what the world and the future looked like to slaveholders and other white men in the Mississippi Valley 16-Month Intensive Blended Program on the eve of the Civil War.” Online and On-Campus To be clear, this book is emphatically not about the coming of the Civil War. Johnson’s interest lies in the antebellum South as a re- Transforming Leaders. gion of global economy, one that sought eco- Transforming Healthcare. nomic revitalization through global integra- www.brown.edu/exec staff writer’s biography of the author of Infinite Jest, a suicide in 2008, explores Wallace’s graduate studies in philosophy at Harvard, from which he withdrew in crisis.

Reflections on Judging, by the Honor- able Richard A. Posner, LL.B. ’62 (Har- vard, $29.95). Drawing on 31 years of experience on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, the author—a remarkably prolific writer—weighs in on the practical details of advocacy, opinion-writing, and legal training, and on the [ e-mail ] virtues of legal realism as opposed to for- malist doctrine. He’s a fan of Holmes, Brandeis, Cardozo, Friendly, et al. Curated content delivered to your doorstep. Presidential Leadership and the Creation of the American Era, by Jo- seph S. Nye Jr., University Distinguished • Editor’s Highlights • This Week Professor (Princeton, $27.95). With the • Harvard Headlines • Football Arab world in transition, a newly power- • Arts • Science • Classifieds ful China, and other rising nations on the horizon, what is the role of the U.S. president in forging a new world order—or Sign up managing what is on the agenda, transac- tionally? Nye compares Wilson and Rea- harvardmag.com/email gan to Eisenhower and Bush 41, and finds the latter sometimes more successful.

Harvard Magazine 27 Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 Montage

The First Cotton-gin, by William L. Sheppard, published in Harper’s, Decem- ber 18, 1869, shows slaves at work—and masters who profited from their labor.

certainly would resist, steamboats that might (and often did) explode, cotton prices that might drop, shipping costs that might rise, credit that might evaporate, paper money that might be valueless, distant parties who might be fraudulent, not to mention the uncertain compliance of an envious nonslave- holding southern white majority, Mississippi Valley planters built their society and economy on a powder keg, and they knew it. In a place where nothing was fixed, identities were uncertain, and wealth or ruin could come in a blink of an eye, a deep-seated and very much justified anxiety weighed on every

ess planter’s mind and governed his actions. As Johnson puts it, “the Cotton Kingdom was less an accomplished fact than an ongoing project, less a fixed bastion of slaveholding library of congr power than an excruciating becoming.” Far tion and international free trade. In fact, he passes over this fact quickly, and there are from taking their ease on their verandas, dark finds the traditional narrative of sectional ten- several possible explanations, but a more dreams haunted the minds of the lords of the sions leading to armed conflict to be anach- thorough examination would seem to be Cotton Kingdom, and their power and profits ronistic and too “resolutely nationalist in its required, given the thrust of his argument. came at a terrible price. spatial framing” when it comes to under- Still, this is a monumental book, and per- standing the Mississippi Valley. Historians, haps Johnson’s greatest achievement is how Historian Michael T. Bernath, Ph.D. ’05, is Tebeau he charges, have projected the geographic effectively he conveys the uncertainty and associate professor at the University of Miami and Confederacy backwards, defining the South fear that pervaded the daily lives of slave- the author of Confederate Minds: The Struggle by what it would later become rather than holders. Dependent on weather and crops for Intellectual Independence in the Civil what it might have been. The imagined pro- that might fail, slaves who might rebel and War South (2010). slavery empire that he explores represented an alternative vision of the future, the direction in which white southerners thought they were headed before Confederate defeat for- c hapter & verse ever crushed their hopes. Correspondence on not-so-famous lost words That said, one must wonder about the representativeness of some these views, even among Mississippi planters. Johnson Taylor Chiu seeks a citation for words tor of The Yale Book of Quotations, writes in tells us that “a very large proportion of Val- attributed to Jane Austen: “Teach us that that volume that the quotation “does not ley slaveholders” supported the invasion of we may feel the importance of every appear…in Voltaire’s writings.” Nicaragua and the reopening of the Atlantic hour, every minute, as it passes.” slave trade, but he provides little concrete “Together” (July-August). Carmen Mun- evidence to demonstrate this widespread Eliot Kieval, intrigued by the famous nelly recognized Ludwig Lewisohn’s poem support. Instead, he relies on the writings of assertion “I disapprove of [sometimes, “Together,” which begins, “You and I by well-known proslavery spokesmen without disagree with] what you say, but I will de- this lamp with these/few books shut out much discussion of their larger resonance. fend to the death your right to say it,” the world…” and ends, “And this is mar- More to the point, if reopening the slave frequently attributed to Voltaire, is eager riage, this is love.” Jo Salas cited Grace Pal- trade was so popular and believed to be so to learn of any similar declarations, in any ey’s “Hand-Me-Downs,” from Begin Again: vital to the future of the South, then why language, that predate the 1906 publica- Collected Poems, for its similar theme. did delegates from the seceded states of the tion of The Friends of Voltaire, by “Stephen Deep South go out of their way to forever G. Tallentyre” (the pen name of English Send inquiries and answers to “Chapter prohibit it when they had their chance to writer Evelyn Beatrice Hall). The quota- and Verse,” Harvard Magazine, 7 Ware draft their own national Confederate consti- tion is reported to be Hall’s paraphrase Street, Cambridge 02138, or via e-mail to tution in February 1861? Why let it go with- of Voltaire’s attitude; Fred R. Shapiro, edi- [email protected]. out much more than a whimper? Johnson

28 September - October 2013 Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 New England Regional Section

although some require registration. • September 10 at 5 p.m. Extracurriculars Jane Franklin’s Spectacles: Or, The Education of Benjamin Franklin’s Sister. Seasonal The Arnold Arboretum Kemper professor of American history Jill An Evening with Champions www.arboretum.harvard.edu; 617-384-5209 Lepore reveals what she learned while re- • October 5 at 8 p.m. Registration is required. searching and writing Book of Ages: The Life • October 6 at 3 p.m. • September 28, 1-3:30 p.m. and Opinions of Jane Franklin. www.aneveningwithchampions.org Senior research scientist Peter Del Tredici • October 22 at 4 p.m. www.boxoffice.harvard.edu; 617-496-2222 explores the history and care of the Larz When Everything Changed. New York The forty-third annual ice-skating exhibi- Anderson Bonsai Collection, which in- Times columnist Gail Collins talks about ilm archive tion raises money for the Jimmy Fund of cludes large specimens of hinoki cypress how and why the national view of Ameri-

the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. that are between 150 and 275 years old. can women has shifted since 1960. arvard f

Bright Hockey Center. • October 3 at 6:30 p.m. Mahindra Humanities Center he H An Eden of Sorts: The Natural History of http://mahindrahumanities.fas.harvard. The Farmers’ Market at Harvard My Feral Garden. John Mitchell Hanson edu/upcoming-events www.dining.harvard.edu/flp/ag_market. shares what he’s learned from three de- • September 25 at 6 p.m. html. Runs through October. cades of experience, and experiments, in- Astrophysicist Mario Livio reflects on the In Cambridge, Science Center plaza creasing the biodiversity of suburban and ideas detailed in his recent book, Brilliant Tuesdays, noon-6 p.m. other developed lands. Blunders: From Darwin to Einstein, Colossal Mis- In Allston, 168 Western Avenue • Opening October 26 takes by Great Scientists That Changed Our Un- Fridays, 3-7 p.m. Dispersal showcases the delicate seedpod derstanding of Life and the Universe. images (both fine art and specimen por- Nature and science traits) of flora-focused writer, photogra- film The Harvard-Smithsonian Center pher, and producer Anna Laurent ’00. The Harvard Film Archive for Astrophysics http://hcl.harvard.edu/hfa www.cfa.harvard.edu/events lectures 617-495-4700 617-495-7461; 60 Garden Street Radcliffe Institute Check the website for updates and details • September 19 and October 17 at 7:30 p.m. for Advanced Study on screenings, lectures, and special events. t to right: harvardt to right: art museums; anna laurent/the arnold arboretum; T f Observatory lectures and night-sky view- www.radcliffe.harvard.edu • Through September 8

ing, weather permitting. All events are free and open to the public, Burt Lancaster highlights the career of the From le Left to right: A detail of the extensive scale model of the renewed galleries, from In-Sight Evening: Preparing for the New Harvard Art Museums; “Fleshy flowered spindletree,” by Anna Laurent, at the Arnold Arboretum; and a still from Vertigo, at the Harvard Film Archive

Harvard Magazine 28A Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 New England Regional Section

Hollywood icon who starred in more than 60 films as diverse asElmer Gantry, The Bird- man of Alcatraz, and Atlantic City. • Through September 28 The Complete Alfred Hitchcock is a retro- Ballet classes: spective of the British master’s works, in- age 3 through teen, cluding nine fully restored silent films. adult and pointe. exhibitions & events Enroll now Harvard Art Museums www.harvardartmuseums.org; 617-495- Fall classes start 9/4 9400/9422. The museum buildings and galleries are closed for renovation until the fall Nina Alonso, Director, FPB of 2014. Nevertheless, some special events will be held at other University locations. 1798a Mass Ave For details and to register for events, call Cambridge, MA 02140 617-495-4544. 617.491.5865 • September 18 at 6-8:30 p.m. In-Sight Evening: Preparing for the New www.freshpondballet.com Harvard Art Museums. An illustrated talk explains the guiding design principles for the new art galleries. • September 27, noon-1 p.m. vening with champions Harvard Treasures Tour: Rare Books and Special Collections at the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine. f yin li/an E Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts

www.ves.fas.harvard.edu; 617-495-3251 courtesy o • Through September 29, opening reception An Evening with Champions features on September 12, 5:30-6:30 p.m. renowned skaters such as Marissa Castelli and Simon Shnapir. Exhibition: New Faculty 2013-2014 highlights the work of Kalup Linzy, Catherine seum of Archaeology and Ethnology, and the Lord, Luisa Rabbia, Halsey Rodman, Heath- Harvard Museum of Natural History. er Rowe, and Roger White, among others. Collection of Historical Harvard Museums of Scientific Instruments Science and Culture www.fas.harvard.edu/~hsdept/chsi-exhibi- http://hmsc.harvard.edu tions.html; 617-495-2779 The HMSC is a consortium of the Collec- Science Center 251 tion of Historical Scientific Instruments, the 1 Oxford Street Harvard Semitic Museum, the Peabody Mu- • Continuing: Time and Time Again: How Science and Culture Shape the Past, Present, and Fu- ture explores how humans find, keep, make, measure, carve out, waste, and kill time—and the instruments used to do all the above.

rts Peabody Museum of Ar- chaeology and Ethnology isual A www.peabody.harvard.edu;

or the V 617-496-1027 • October 5, noon-4 p.m. Family Cruise #1.....One Life to Heal, by Kalup Linzy, Carpen-

arpenter center f ter Center for the Visual Arts C

28B September - October 2013 Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 R R R ond eosinddo ndes idesid m m men en en t t t m m m i i i a a a a a a l l l H H H

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Cambridge...A Cambridge landmark, two majestic Queen Anne style buildings on a View Hammond’s latest digital interactive prominent corner lot. Pictured is the Harvard St house,with 12,000+ sf, in seven units. Behind magazine online at: HammondMagazines.com. it, the Remington St. house has 5,000+ sf in 3 units. Both offer beautiful details throughout. Space available in our two fall editions. Call www.HarvardRemington.com $6,800,000 manager Davis Rowley at: 617-497-4400.

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130916_Hammond_v4.indd 1 8/1/13 3:00 PM New England Regional Section

Amazing Archaeology at Harvard. The findings from the “Digging Veritas” exca- Peabody and Semitic museums jointly of- vation on campus.

strophysics fer an afternoon of hands-on activities, Harvard Museum of Natural History or A or meetings with archaeologists, and gal- www.hmnh.harvard.edu; 617-495-3045 lery tours that explore everything from • September 26 at 6 p.m. enter f enter Maya glyphs and Giza pyramids to Egyp- Professor of human evolutionary biology tian coffins and animal bones, to recent Daniel Lieberman discusses his new book,

mithsonian C mithsonian The Story of the Human Body: Evolution, Health, S Discover new “alien worlds” (depicted at left) through lectures at the Harvard- and Disease. Reception to follow. Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. • October 26, 4-8 p.m. H arvard- Alfred Russel Wallace Day celebrates the work and life of this British scientist, who co- discovered the theory of evolution by natural selection. Visit the museum’s website for further details and for information on how to get tickets. • Through October 6 The Language of Color explores the many purposes of hues and shades in a wide variety of creatures.

music Sanders Theatre www.boxoffice.harvard.edu; 617-496-2222 • October 4 at 8 p.m. The Harvard-Radcliffe Orchestra per- forms Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. • October 25 at 8:30 p.m. The Harvard and Princeton glee clubs celebrate their centennial concert. • November 1 at 8 p.m. The annual “Montage Concert” features the Harvard Monday Jazz Band, Harvard Wind Ensemble, and the Harvard Univer- sity Band.

Theater American Repertory Theater www.americanrepertorytheater.org 617-547-8300 (box office) • September 13 through October 12 The East Coast premiere of All The Way, by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Robert Schenkkan. This dramatization of Lyndon Baines Johnson’s first year in office is directed by Bill Rauch ’84 (artistic director of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival), and stars Emmy Award-winner Bryan Cranston (who leads the cast of the critically acclaimed cable series Breaking Bad).

Events listings also appear in the University Gazette, accessible via this magazine’s website, www.harvardmagazine.com.

28D September - October 2013 Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 130501_LuxBondGreen.indd 1 2/26/13 11:41 AM New England Regional Section Art Across the Region From colonial furniture to colorful abstractions

Fall and winter are the ideal time to Currier Museum of Art visit New England’s many museums. What Manchester, N.H. follows is a selection of what’s on offer from www.currier.org; 603-669-6144 At left: Jere Osgood teak desk (1978),

Fuller Craft Museum; and Amy Stillman’s t the major institutions to the smaller, more Visual Dispatches from the Vietnam War, f painting Ocean 1 (1997), Institute of specialized collections. through November 11. The exhibit explores Contemporary Art the courage of frontline artists and how im- f contemporary art Bruce Museum ages deeply influence public opinion. costumes, movie posters—and more—cel- Greenwich, Conn. Farnsworth Museum ebrate the classic film’s seventy-fifth anni- brucemuseum.org; 203-869-0376 Rockland, Me. versary year. ochstrasser/Fuller cra Closer: The Graphic Art of Chuck Close, www.farnsworthmuseum.org; 207-596-6457 Fuller Craft Museum erns/institute o lex H

September 28-January 26. Prints reflect the The Wonderful World of Oz—Selections Brockton, Mass. A t: f artist’s long-standing interest in portraiture from the Willard Carroll/Tom Wilhite Col- fullercraft.org; 508-588-6000 rom le f and in the mechanics of vision. lection, opening October 12. Memorabilia, Made in Massachusetts: Studio Furniture museum; John B

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28F September - October 2013 Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 New England Regional Section

of the Bay State, October 12-February 9. Museum of Fine Arts This display of stylistically innovative works Boston by local artists is part of the collaborative www.mfa.org; 617-267-9300 “Four Centuries of Massachusetts Furni- Audubon’s Birds, Audu- ture” project (www.fourcenturies.org/), bon’s Words, through which includes seven exhibits on furniture May 11. Prints from Birds from the 1600s to the present. of America, writings, and Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) other illustrations eluci- Boston date the ornithologist’s ruce museum

B www.icaboston.org; 617-478-3100 life and work. Amy Sillman: one lump or two, October John Singer Sargent 3-January 5. This survey of the New York- Watercolors, October Above, left: Koji Tatsuno (1993 New Britain, Conn. ace prnts/ based artist (a 2010-2011 Radcliffe Institute 13-January 20. More than collection), Peabody Essex Museum; www.nbmaa.org; Chuck Close’s Self-Portrait fellow), offers more than 90 diverse works, 90 works from the early Woodcut (2009), Bruce Museum 860-229-0257 from drawings and paintings to her later-era 1900s by the American NEW/NOW: Fern ’zines and forays into short animated films. artist look at how he transformed wa- Berman, September 21-January 5. Abstract Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum tercolors into a freer, more expressive imagery and brilliant colors depict scenes eabody essex museum; P P Boston medium. of decay that encourage a closer look at our www.gardnermuseum.org; 617-566-1401 She Who Tells a Story: Women Photog- world. urbridge/ Sophie Calle: Last Seen, opening October raphers from Iran and the Arab World, Maurice Sendak, November 9 through Feb- 24. On display are two distinct series of pho- through January 12. The images explore war ruary 9. Original illustrations, lithographs, ichard B

t: R t: tographs, created by the French artist in 1991 and peace, national and personal identity, posters, documentary films, and personal f and 2012, respectively, that meditate on ab- and gender stereotypes. items celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of rom le f sence, memory, and loss. New Britain Museum of American Art the late artist’s Where the Wild Things Are. © lizlinder.com PHOTO:

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Harvard Magazine 28G Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 New England Regional Section

Peabody Essex Museum Making It in America, October 11-February Salem, Mass. 9. Paintings, sculptures, and decorative arts www.pem.org; 978-745-9500 from Colonial times to the early twentieth Future Beauty: Avant-Garde Japanese century explore the link between national Fashion, November 16-January 26. Simple art and identity. colors and flowing forms characterize major Shelburne Museum Above, left: Virgil Marti’s To design shifts in the 1980s and ’90s. Shelburne, Vt. Engender Pleasant Dreams (2013), Wads worth Atheneum; John Singleton Copley’s Impressionists on the Water, November shelburnemuseum.org; 802-985-3346 Portrait of Rebecca Boylston Gill (ca. 1773), 9-February 17. More than 50 works by Mon- Color, Pattern, Whimsy, Scale: The Best RISD Museum et, Renoir, Pissarro, Signac, and Caillebotte of Shelburne Museum, through December honor this beautiful, fluid medium. 31. More than 100 works from the perma- of American antiestablishment artist Paul Portland Museum of Art nent collection: folk art, furniture, paint- Thek, Marti examines sources of life and Portland, Me. ings, wallpapers, textiles, and costumes. death through objects and materials, such www.portlandmuseum.org; 207-775-6148 (Of note is one of six so-called “Harvard as “hippie-craft” (e.g., stained glass, velvet Ahmed Alsoudani: Redacted, September chests” painted with red-brick buildings fabrics, and macramé). 7-December 8. Beauty emerges from chaos akin to those on campus—although none Worcester Art Museum and distortion in recent paintings and draw- is thought to reflect actual structures.) Worcester, Mass. f design adsworth atheneum; ings by the New York-based Iraqi artist. The Wadsworth Atheneum www.worcesterart.org; 508-799-4406 W Winslow Homer’s Civil War, September Hartford, Conn. Looking West and Looking East: Landscape 7-December 8. Woodprints depict soldiers’ www.thewadsworth.org; 860-278-2670 Prints by Yoshida Toshi (1911-1995), through daily lives and the war’s social impact. Virgil Marti/MATRIX 167: Ode to a Hip- November. These colorful, carefully ren-

RISD Museum pie, through January 5. Inspired by a nine- dered images reflect the artist’s significant greenhouset: media/ f Providence, R.I. teenth-century “Keats Death Mask” (found contributions to his family’s artistic legacy, rom le f www.risdmuseum.org; 401-454-6500 in the museum’s collection) and the work his extensive travels, and a love of animals. erik gould/rhode island school o

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28H September - October 2013 Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 Vice President Vice President Vice President 1730 1730Massachusetts Massachusetts Ave Ave 1730 Vice Massachusetts President Vice President Ave Cambridge,Cambridge, MA 02138 MA 02138 Cambridge,1730 Massachusetts MA1730 02138 Massachusetts Ave Ave 617 245-4044617 245-4044 617Cambridge, 245-4044 MACambridge, 02138 MA 02138 617 245-4044617 245-4044

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130914_Coldwell_GailRoberts.indd 1 7/19/13 11:38 AM Coping with Alzheimer’s Families must weigh housing options, costs—and therapies • by Nell Porter Brown

disease, it wraps its tendrils around an entire family,” says psychologist Paul Raia, vice president of clinical professional services at the Massachusetts/New Hamp- shire chapter of the Alzheimer’s Asso- ciation. Often families know long before a diagnosis “that mother or father is not acting the way they used to, or should,” says psychiatrist James M. Ellison, M.P.H. ’93, director of the geriatric psychiatry program at McLean Hospital. Naming the cause of disturbing personality changes, disconnectedness, depression, or irrita- bility, is obviously distressing, but it can also bring relief. “A diagnosis opens doors to resources,” Ellison explains. “And it becomes clear where the family can turn for help.” The local chapters of the Alzheimer’s Association, for example, offer early-onset and later-stage support groups, some run by Raia and Debby Rosenkrantz, who know each other. The organization also has a 24-hour-help hotline, educational workshops, updates on disease research, and even social activities that help address n the summer of 2006 Harvard profes- Rosenkrantz, a social worker in Cam- rampant isolation for both patients and sor emerita Barbara Gutmann Rosen- bridge. “My stepfather was very busy try- caregivers. Rosenkrantz finds their care krantz ’44, RI ’69—long revered for her ing to keep things from unraveling. They consultations, an expanding service, espe- I work on the history of public health and were very much in love and had gotten cially helpful. Staff meet with families and for promoting women at Harvard (she was married late in life: when she was in her friends to help figure out what to antici- among the earliest full female professors and 60s and he was 71. They would have liked pate, how to prepare for it, what the op- the first female House master)—called her to have more years together.” That fall, tions are, and even to offer some financial daughter, baffled. “She was having trouble however, Barbara Rosenkrantz was admit- counseling. making a salad,” recalls Debby Rosenkrantz. ted to the Harvard-affiliated McLean Hos- Resources are aimed at keeping people Was it a case of low blood sugar, or maybe pital, where she was diagnosed with vas- with Alzheimer’s engaged in social, physi- related to a recent arm rash? “I came over cular dementia and Alzheimer’s disease. cal, and cognitive activities throughout the with some orange juice and helped her fin- course of the disease—and providing out- ish making the dinner.” Some 5.2 million Americans have the dis- lets and respite for exhausted caregivers. Yet other worrisome signs followed: ease, according to the Alzheimer’s Associ- “One thing we know is that if those with garbled e-mails, irrational arguments, in- ation, and that number is likely to nearly Alzheimer’s spend significant time doing somnia. “And she had notes to herself and triple, to 13.8 million, in 2050. nothing,” Raia explains, “they will have friends posted all over the house,” adds “Alzheimer’s is not just an individual more challenging symptoms and the ill-

28J September - October 2013 Illustration by James O’Brien Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 New England Regional Section ness will most likely progress more quick- husband (who moved to an assisted-living If the spread of Alzheimer’s continues as ly. A major issue for families is giving their community a year later) could not meet predicted, the disease could cost private and loved one purposeful engagement—for ex- her increasing needs. They tried home- public payers combined more than $1 tril- ample, having them help with cooking and based care, but found there were too few lion a year. Currently, regional assisted-liv- gardening—because the loss of meaning in substantive activities and their parents felt ing facilities cost between $7,000 and $9,000 life is so fundamental to this disease.” uncomfortable having strangers around. a month, and rely primarily on private pay- The first tier of care comes from adult Even a well-regarded day-care program ments that only a small fraction of Ameri- day programs, which Raia calls “the big- did not work out: “My mother spent the cans can afford. The vast majority of elders gest bang for the buck.” Five days a week, whole time in the front room waiting for will ultimately go to nursing homes that from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m., people can come and Nat to pick her up: it made her very anx- are typically covered by Medicare. On av- make friends, share meals, do activities, ious to be separated from him,” says Deb- erage, these still cost at least $30,000 a year, and get physical and cognitive exercise. by. “She wouldn’t engage with the activi- reports Harvard Kennedy School professor The costs range from $60 to $100 a day; ties or other people.” of public policy Amitabh Chandra, who is some also provide transportation for an Ultimately, they settled their mother at on the advisory panel for the Congressional extra fee. Medicaid pays if the individual Rogerson House, a progressive assisted- Budget Office. Overall, he adds, there will qualifies for “community-base Medicaid,” living community. Her Harvard pension be a growing need (and therefore increas- he says, which requires a lower income covers most of the cost, and the family ing public costs) for additional elder care, level. Families with more resources typi- sometimes pays for extra activities, such such as skilled nursing, home healthcare, cally pay out of pocket. as personal exercise sessions and physical and rehabilitation services. “Most people Debby Rosenkrantz (along with her therapy. “It was not a financial crisis for us, have not saved for retirement, let alone long- sisters, Louise and Judith ’74, and their fortunately,” Debby Rosenkrantz notes. term care,” he says. “It’s a challenge that our stepsister, Molly Marshall), worked to- “The hardest thing is when the decision country has never really grappled with. If gether as Barbara Rosenkrantz’s condi- about what you can do for your parents is we vote to cover this care, then we have to tion worsened and it became clear that her influenced by what you can afford.” decide: whose taxes are we going to raise, or

Harvard Magazine 28K Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 New England Regional Section which programs and benefits are we going ternative approach and Green Houses are orient reality” by asserting the truth but re- to cut? We don’t have a sensible mechanism slowly growing (see “At Home with Old sponds to the underlying feeling of sadness in the United States to confront these long- Age,” November-December, 2008, page 80). and loss by saying: “I hear your mother was term trade-offs.” The focus is on creating more homey a wonderful lady, let’s talk about her,” and Chandra does note that these projec- environments, with natural light and gar- taking out a photo of, say, a day at the beach tions for Alzheimer’s do not take into dens, and integrating features, such as col- mother and child shared, and talking about account the potential impact of scien- or-coded floors and walls, circular walk- it. This seemingly common-sense or com- tific breakthroughs that may offer hope ways, and fewer locked doors, that foster passionate approach nevertheless has had of slowing the disease. “Research on new calmness and independence, especially to be widely taught and integrated by care medical innovation and technology, of the among those with memory loss. An intan- organizations throughout New England, type that is conducted at Harvard and at gible goal, which requires building human including the 27 Massachusetts-run home- the Broad Institute,” he adds, “may save us relationships, is to meet elders’ emotional, care agencies. from the fiscal train wreck that awaits us.” cognitive, and even spiritual needs. And such principles still don’t consti- As scientists attack the disease itself, To that end, Paul Raia in 1989 developed tute the care norm. Massachusetts’ nurs- others have been working to improve “habilitation therapy”—a communication ing homes ranked twelfth in the nation in conditions for those already afflicted. The technique based on the neuropathology of terms of using antipsychotic medications, cultural movement to reform and hu- Alzheimer’s. “The ability to feel, perceive, says Raia, citing data collected from the manize American elder care, especially respond to, and evoke emotion is there in federal Centers for Medicaid and Medi- at nursing homes, began in the late 1970s. the brain until very near the end,” he ex- care Services for a 2010 Boston Globe analy- Spearheaded by The Pioneer Network, the plains. The therapy aims at creating positive sis. “The highest users of antipsychotic movement’s basic principles are also now emotion and sustaining it “in whoever peo- medications are the nursing homes with widely promoted by others, including the ple become as they move through the stages the lowest number of nursing minutes and Alzheimer’s Association and geriatrician of the disease.” If a patient wants to visit her least number of activities for patients,” he William Thomas, M.D. ’86, whose Eden Al- deceased mother, the caregiver does not “re- adds. “The medications are being used to

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28L September - October 2013 Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 New England Regional Section

Personal Excerpts: Alumni there was alarm and fear, but really, as I ing cars as if they should pick us up. As now recall it, no surprise.” puzzled drivers hesitate between the Write about Alzheimer’s brake and the accelerator, I try to turn Strange Relation: A Memoir of Making An Exit: A Mother-Daughter this gesture into merry waving.” Marriage, Dementia, and Poetry Drama with Machine Tools, (Paul Dry Books, 2011) Alzheimer’s, and Laughter The Last of His Mind: A Year in the by Rachel Hadas ’69 (Metropolitan Books / Henry Holt and Shadow of Alzheimer’s Rutgers University English professor Rachel Company, 2005) (Swallow Press / Ohio University Hadas recounts the medical interview during by Elinor Fuchs ’55 Press, 2009) which her husband of more than 25 years, George Yale School of Drama adjunct professor Elinor by John Thorndike ’64 Edwards, cannot correctly recall the year they Fuchs grappled with her mother’s larger-than- The author took care of his ailing father, Joe got married. life persona and how to love a difficult person. Thorndike, also a writer, a publisher, and one- The feeling was “a little too melodramat- Here she has just spent some time on her moth- time managing editor of Life. ic to call panic. It was, rather, a sharply er’s new special-care unit. “Sundowning is the depressed state that etched loneliness...that stepped out from “I take Mother out for a stroll around the often overwhelms the memory-impaired the shadows to which I had so far con- block, just to clear my head. We walk around dusk, and most days my father signed it right onto center stage. There inside a cloud of confusion. The distinc- sinks into it around four or five in the was also a queasy sense of shifting: shift- tion between sidewalks and parking lots, afternoon. He lies on his bed with a va- ing of power, of paradigms, of alliances, flowers and grass, people and objects, cant stare, unhappy and distant, never of allegiances. The center wasn’t holding, has vanished....Whether people who pass a glance my way. This afternoon, when and I was in the process, as I hung on to us on the street are with us, or the ones I suggested we go down to Red River my clammy water bottle for dear life, of we’re waiting for, or perhaps against Beach, he said, ‘Not now,’ even his po- casting about for a new center. In all this us—all is confusion. Mother flags pass- liteness drained out of him.”

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Harvard Magazine 28M Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 New England Regional Section

compensate for that and control behavior.” Despite the region’s medical and healthcare brain power, physician and Harvard Medical School professor of population medicine Muriel Gillick says that “safety concerns and medical interventions take precedence over mental comfort and quality of life” at most care facilities. Gillick is the author of Tangled Minds: Understanding Alzheimer’s Disease and Other Dementias; The Denial of Aging: Perpetual Youth, Eternal Life, and Other Dangerous Fantasies; and Lifelines: Liv- ing Longer, Growing Frail, Taking Heart. Regu- lations and costs are always going to be factors in health care, she acknowledges, but adds, “It’s not clear that some of these Atlifecare Brookhaven living is as good as it looks. more philosophical or psychological ap- Brookhaven at Lexington offers an abundance of opportunities for proaches actually cost so much more than intellectual growth, artistic expression and personal wellness. Our residents the traditional ones. It’s more about retool- share your commitment to live a vibrant lifestyle in a lovely community. ing and rethinking what it is you are try- Call today to set up an appointment for a tour! ing to do”—and encouraging families to assert their rights and priorities regarding A Full-Service Lifecare Retirement Community which (or whether) medical procedures are www.brookhavenatlexington.org (781) 863-9660 • (800) 283-1114 worthwhile at the end of life. Gillick says many elderly people with dementia have to come into the hospital for “painful or uncomfortable procedures and testing in a strange place, and they are frightened.” Even the patient-centered nursing uburban Serenity. homes—such as the one that houses Gil- lick’s father, who has moderate dementia Just minutes from Boston. and Parkinson’s—can be lacking. (She explored this topic in “Culture Change in the Nursing Home: Boon or Boondoggle,” a June post to her blog “Life in the End Zone.”) The old-model nursing home, she says, lined up residents in their wheel- chairs in the hallways, where staff could keep an eye on them. Her father has a private room, but he didn’t call for help when he needed it, “so they put him in the dining hall, where they can see him, and he sits there now and does nothing, staring ahead at whatever the day’s program is,” she reports. “It is the same as being lined up in the hallway.” Because the “continuum of care” has expanded, she says, with more people than ever before using home-care help, “nursing homes have come to serve a very impaired 617 • 489 • 4898 population, and assisted living in many re- TheWoodlandsAtBelmontHill.com spects occupies the position that nursing homes did” 20 years ago. Gillick and Raia Proudly presented by Northland Residential Corporation, agree that between 50 and 65 percent of New England’s premier developer of exceptional properties. those in assisted-living communities have

28N September - October 2013 Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 New England Regional Section moderate or later-stage dementia, and that choactive medications? What is the staff’s tioning and those that aren’t are baffling.” the number has risen within the last few philosophical/psychological approach to Perhaps most important: the Rogerson decades. She questions whether those fa- dementia? How are they trained? staff “are incredibly loving toward her, cilities can truly care for them. “These are Rogerson House, where Barbara Rosen- which can’t always be easy,” and know patients with what neurologists call poor krantz now lives, practices habilitation who emotionally connects best when executive functioning: they can’t plan, therapy and also provides programs in Barbara Rosenkrantz gets anxious. A low can’t organize, can’t figure out what’s go- music and art, excursions, and a beauti- dose of medication for anxiety, Debby ing on around them,” she explains. “They ful backyard. Even though Rosenkrantz Rosenkrantz also reports, “has been a life- need to be constantly reminded of what is now in mid-stage dementia, she goes to saver.” Her mother cannot be rationalized they are doing and engaged with through- concerts, which she loves, paints water- out of those feelings, but she can be dis- out the day. So the idea of maintaining colors, and still enjoys simplified cross- tracted by other topics and activities that someone’s independence and privacy is word puzzles. Research shows that arts override it. “My mother will sometimes nice, but I would be skeptical about how therapy/education offers immediate, “in say, ‘I don’t want to spend the rest of my often the staff in assisted living are keep- the moment” emotional and cognitive life here,’” she adds. “And I say, ‘OK. I hear ing up with someone, or whether they are experiences that are especially beneficial you. I know. We will keep that in mind just leaving them in their rooms.” to those with memory loss, Debby Rosen- and find out what else is out there. But for krantz reports. Barbara Rosenkrantz also now this is the best place.’ And that reas- Ideally they don’t. The Alzheimer’s As- picks up on many current events, such as sures her, because she knows that I will sociation offers a detailed consumer’s guide the Trayvon Martin case. “She is totally keep looking.” to evaluating any facility. Questions include: engaged and can have discussions and Is the unit quiet and are the rooms homey? opinions, which is bizarre to me,” her Sociologist John Zeisel, a 1971 Loeb Fel- Is the staffing ratio one-to-five during the daughter adds, “because there are other low and a former assistant professor of en- day? Are families active members of the care things she doesn’t remember for 30 sec- vironmental behavior studies at the Gradu- plan? What percentage of patients is on psy- onds. The parts of the brain that are func- ate School of Design (see “Life by Design,”

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Harvard Magazine 28O Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 New England Regional Section

January-February 1998, page 40), is the founder and president of Hearthstone Al- zheimer Care. He is a pioneer in targeting the emotional and neurological strengths of those with dementia through academic and Montessori-style classes as well as music, visual art, and theater. “The more people are treated like patients, the less they are treated like persons,” he says. “It’s a human- rights issue. We don’t consider older people or those with dementia as having the same TRUE NORTH COURSES & EVENTS rights as long as we see them on a down- ward spiral.” Hearthstone, with three residences in TRUE NORTH MUSIC SERIES: What DOES the Massachusetts and three in New York, Conductor DO? – In Celebration of the BSO’s new Music focuses on two key concepts. First, by en- Director Andris Nelsons with The Boston Conservatory’s gaging people in meaningful ways, “they avoid the four As of Alzheimer’s: anxiety, Elizabeth Seitz agitation, aggression, and apathy,” Zeisel THE FIRST ANNUAL CURTIN LECTURE ON says. “You can’t be screaming at someone if you are improvising a part in an absorb- AMERICAN LAW: 5-to-4: The Roberts’ Court and ing play. You cannot be agitated if you are American Public Policy – Dedicated to North Hill listening to Peter and the Wolf and trying to Resident John L. Curtin Jr. focus on which instruments represent which characters. This engagement— TRUE NORTH FILM SERIES: Two Great Gatsbys - not just ‘stimulation’—is the antidote to Robert Redford & Mia Farrow vs. Baz Luhrman with behavioral symptoms in dementia. And Culture Critic Joyce Kulhawik what’s more meaningful than culture and the arts?” Second, says Zeisel, neurologically, FOR MORE INFORMATION & TO RSVP: the arts draw on a distributive system in the brain, as opposed to tasks like word- Visit www.TrueNorthEvolution.org/Courses finding, which are more localized. The arts email [email protected] can involve repetitive actions—practic- or call 888-614-6383 ing drawing shapes and figures, painting layers of colors, reciting a script, hearing or playing rhythms, musical motifs, and NORTH HILL choruses. Through repetition, people with INNOVATIVE LIVING FOR PEOPLE 65+ 865 Central Avenue, Needham, MA 02492 dementia not only find joy in the moment of purposeful creativity, as anyone does, he explains, but they learn and remember more as well: “The arts draw on procedural learning and emotional memory, which Minot DeBlois Advisors LLC last until the end of one’s life.” Both are nonpharmacological approach- thoughtful and disciplined investment advisory services es “that reduce depression and increase engagement and, in the end, provide people with Alzheimer’s with a sense of personhood,” according to Zeisel. Two federally funded clinical studies currently run by the Hearthstone research division Dedicated Investment Management • Consistent Strategy • Accessible and Transparent explore whether other aspects of the arts Please contact Catherine Smith ’83 or Robert G. Bannish ’85 for information. can do the same: an improvisational the- 50 Congress Street, Boston • www.minotdeblois.com • 617-557-7407 ater project that ultimately yields a script Individual Accounts and IRAs • Trusts • Endowments • Foundations and a production, and a project that looks

28P September - October 2013 Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 New England Regional Section at the role of books in terms of both their ing, and folding laundry: these familiar This Green House approach lessens the narrative content and their form (e.g. sounds and sights can comfort persons need for psychopharmacological interven- page count, size of the print, weight). The with dementia. During a reporter’s visit, tion, Warner asserts. “We have intimate results could also enhance the cultural the staff seemed freer to be more respon- knowledge of who people are and what events, tours, and teachings specifically sive, doing things like making meatballs they are experiencing: we try to meet their designed for persons with dementia and with a resident who claims her recipe “is needs preemptively,” he explains. “That their families through ARTZ: Artists for the best,” playing catch with a ball, and minimizes manifestations of undesirable Alzheimer’s, co-founded by Zeisel and writing down the name and address of the behavior.” Nevertheless, he is not opposed Sean Caulfield, Ed.M. ’13. cottage for someone else who asks, “Don’t to the use of an anti-anxiety drug, for W&F Harvard Ad-175F:Layout 8 1/17/13 11:52 AM Page 1 I need something to tell me where I am?” example, “if it will help them have a bet- Concerts and dancing also take place at the White Oak Cottages. Part of the Fox Hill Village retirement community in West- wood, Massachusetts, these two 12-bedroom 175 2 013 residences are based on the Green House Ye g ars tin model envisioned by the geriatrician Wil- bra ele liam Thomas (whose work can be explored C at ChangingAging.org). Round-edged walls Charlie Haydock, CFA Adrienne Silbermann, CFA Chief Investment Officer Director of Research and color-coded carpeting make it easier for A.B. 1974 people to walk freely, while glass doors open, without a staff member’s key, onto a garden with a pathway and secure fencing. White Oaks is a soothing environment: classical music plays lightly and TVs, an intrusive presence in most facilities, are found only in patients’ rooms. In each house, a large open-plan common space with a cathedral ceiling offers living and dining areas along with a large kitchen—just like home. “When people wake up, they can come out of their rooms and smell coffee brewing and bacon cooking” and watch and even help nurses make Knowing wealth. breakfast, says Christopher Warner, a psychiatric nurse, who is the cottages’ Knowing you for 175 years “guide.” The term is specific to the Green House Why has Welch & Forbes model, which emphasizes communal life thrived for 175 years? that is determined not from above, but Relationships. by residents’ needs. “It’s the opposite of Relationships built on accessibility, a nursing home where there’s a schedule trust and stability. For us it’s the that everyone has to fit into. Here, it’s only way. imperative that we are flexible and even If you value an enduring relationship improvisational,” he says. “We bring our- with a firm expert in comprehensive portfolio management and tax, selves personally to the job.” During one trust and estate planning, call evening of dancing Warner and his son, Charlie Haydock ‘74 at 617-557-9800. the only males present, never sat down. AtWelch & Forbes, we know wealth. Warner’s father, a retired minister, also Jay Emmons, CFA President And we know you. comes in weekly to “discuss whatever is on peoples’ minds.” Every Wednesday, however, is hair-styling day: other women come over from Fox Hill and everyone www.welchforbes.com joins in the buzzing beauty salon. The nurses do not wear uniforms and 45 School Street, Old City Hall, Boston, MA 02108 | T: 617.523.1635 also do chores—such as vacuuming, dust-

Harvard Magazine 28Q Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 Document1 11/20/03 11:51 AM Document1Page 1 11/20/03 11:51 AM Page 1

New England Regional Section ASSISTED LIVING RETIREMENT COMMUNITY ASSISTED LIVING RETIREMENT COMMUNITY Independent and Assisted Living • Specialized Memory Care Here’s what people are Here’s what people are ter quality of life and they really cannot sayingWhat aboutdo Harvard us. alumni havesaying in common? about us. shake their anxiety. It’s one tool. But by no means do we want a bunch of zombies Cadbury Commons walking around here.” A Remarkable Senior Residence Warner finds that referencing whatever residents do retain about their identities, and giving credence to the truth of their concerns, goes a long way toward soothing agitation. “Many people here think they Name: Milton R. Name: Milton R. Occupation: Postal Supervisor, Retired Occupation: Postal Supervisor, Retired are at their summer homes,” he says. “You Hobbies: Reading, Walking, Exercising Hobbies: Reading, Walking, Exercising don’t want to force your ‘reality’ on them. Lifestyle: Independent, Active Lifestyle: Independent, Active It can be detrimental.” Why cause unneces- Choice of Senior/Assisted Living: Choice of Senior/Assisted Living: Cadbury Commons Cadbury Commons sary anxiety and anger—especially in those “There is a stable and gentle atmosphere “There is a stable and gentle atmosphere whose short-term memories are broken and of help and empathy throughout the of help and empathy throughout the are near the end of lives? “Ultimately, if you community. I feel assured that I am part of community. I feel assured that I am part of have caring people around you and you’re re- others’ lives, as they are of mine. For myself, others’ lives, as they are of mine. For myself, laxed and trusting and having fun,” Warner I feel thatThe Cadbury Harvard Commons alumni provides who a choseI feel Cadbury that Cadbury Commons Commons provides a well trained and caring group of people who well trained and caring group of people who adds, “who cares where you think you are?” are interestedmay in my have welfare.” retired from work,are interested but not in my from welfare.” life. Unfortunately, most people do not un- Call (617)Museum 868-0575 Visits to arrange • Play a personal ReadingCall • (617)Symphony 868-0575 Selectionsto arrange a personal derstand how dementia works or cannot tour, or visit www.cadburycommons.com tour, or visit www.cadburycommons.com • • cope with patients’ redundant questions, Where The EmphasisLecture IsSeries On Living Yoga Organic Gardening Where The Emphasis Is On Living seemingly nonsensical perceptions, and 66Call Sherman (617) 868-0575 Street, Cambridge,to arrange a personal tour, or 66visit Sherman www.cadburycommons.com Street, Cambridge, EQUAL EQUAL MA 02140 ◆ (617) 868-0575 HOUSING ◆ HOUSING constantly expressed need to find a foot- 66 Sherman Street, Cambridge,OPPTY MA 02140MA • 02140(617)868-0575 (617) 868-0575 OPPTY hold in an external world that is bewildering. “Often patients’ social skills are still present; they are polite and even charm- ing,” Debby Rosenkrantz explains. “They say things like ‘Isn’t it nice you came for a visit at Christmas?’ when it isn’t Christ- to Our anValued Advertising Partnersou mas. Or ‘This is a fine day’ when there’s a Boston Ballet snowstorm outside.” These interactions t k can be experienced as awkward or dis- h Brookhaveny Cadbury Commons turbing by old friends, thus visits tend to Canyon Ranch dwindle over time. The Charles Hotel Barbara Rosenkrantz still has strong Gail Roberts/Coldwell Banker relationships to her daughters and their Barbara Currier/Coldwell Banker families. She visits their homes, eats out Fresh Pond Ballet at restaurants, and is taken to her summer Carol & Myra/Hammond house on Cape Cod, a comforting place Brattle Office/Hammond to be, every few months. Concrete, short International School of Boston activities often work best for her, Debby Lux, Bond & Green Fine Jewelry Rosenkrantz says. Wash or cut vegetables. McLean Hospital & Pavilion Eat a meal. Take a walk outside. Look at Minot DeBlois Advisors the newspaper. Work in the garden. Listen e rhythm of Harvard Museum of Fine Arts, Boston to music. Make a collage or paint a picture. Square returns in autumn: North Hill Living These may seem like childish things, “but Northland Residential Let ﬁ ne French cuisine they bring positive feelings to every mo- be the melody. Sandrine’s French Bistro ment,” she maintains. “You have to direct Welch & Forbes the capacity the person has—and be will- Come try our $42 Support from these advertisers ing to improvise and leave your ego at the prix-ﬁ xe menu. helps us produce the independent, door. Good luck if you try to force it to be high-quality publication Harvard alumni some other way. For me, it is about accept- 8 Holyoke St., Cambridge MA rely on for information about ing my mother—for whoever she is when I (617) 497-5300 the University and each other. see her.”

28R September - October 2013 88 Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 tastes and tables Burgers, Fries, and Kohlrabi Remoulade A Watertown luncheonette morphs into a stellar restaurant.

trip T’s, which sits next to a conve- nience store on a busy street, not far from the Arsenal Mall, is a welcome S antidote to the market-research- driven restaurants that often pass as “fine dining”—even in Boston. Thank goodness for the outliers. Paul Maslow ran this very popular local haunt for more than 20 years. He served typical American fare: burgers, fries, soups, chicken wings, and Caesar salad, along with a sirloin-strip sandwich (for which the restaurant was named). His son, Tim, grew up there, of course, then moved on to train at the French Culinary Institute. Rising through the ranks of professional kitchens, he became chef de cuisine at Da- vid Chang’s famous Momofuku Ssäm Bar in New York—before returning in 2011 to cook in Watertown. Since then, Strip T’s has been reincarnat- remoulade ($8), comprised strips of raw potato purée. Also of note is the banh mi ed. Theoretically, the father runs the lunch- vegetable, sliced green onion, and diced (Vietnamese-style) sandwich ($10): slabs of es while the son takes on dinners, although gravlax slickened with buttermilk dress- fried tofu and blackened Japanese eggplant overlap occurs. Thankfully, they kept the ing, was a cooling complement. (a sweeter variety) are layered on a toasted unassuming décor: a counter and stools, The salad also teamed well with Tim baguette among cilantro, pickles, shredded linoleum floors, red laminate-topped ta- Maslow’s version of chicken wings with carrots, and a hoisin-like spicy sauce. bles, and tin ceilings. (Visitors must expe- “Moxie® sauce” ($9). This poultry is not Desserts are just as novel. The sugar- rience the bathroom, a.k.a. “throne room,” dumped in a fryer, then doused with Ta- glazed brioche donut filled with rhu- in the basement.) Instead, they innovated basco®. Rather, it’s first cured overnight barb-infused cream ($8) is topped with where it counts: in the food. Vibrant and in sugar and salt, simmered, then seared fresh herbs, like yarrow and ox-eyed complex, the often Asian-infused cuisine on the grill. The sauce, which should be daisy, that add bitter, dry notes. The co- is based on the old luncheonette menu, at bottled and sold at the register, is made of conut suman ($8), a Filipino dish made of least in name. an Indonesian chili paste and Moxie, the sticky white rice, came in squares with Try the soup of the day. We had the gentian root-based official soft drink of ripe mango slices and shards of salty, chilled summer-squash soup ($9): chunks Maine. When eaten, the lean, crisp wings tortilla-like crunchies. Shavings of de- of smoky roasted zucchini and yellow have a unique burnt-sugar BBQ flavor. hydrated black vinegar were sprinkled squash in a refreshing lemony yellow pu- Maslow also spins the mussels ($19) his around the plate. rée tasting of fruity olive oil, mint, and way. Steamed, then sautéed in an umami- Any change is difficult, especially for a parsley. A dollop of harissa, a North Afri- flavored broth, they are popular restaurant that is Strip T’s can pepper paste, lent zing. The kohlrabi thickly layered with crisp also a family business. Yet it onions that lend texture and 93 School Street appears that the Maslows Strip T’s nuanced fare, such as these sea Watertown, Mass. scallops with yellow curry and chante- contrast to the sweet meat. are working it all out— 617-923-4330 relles, is served in simple environs. Underneath all is a mellow much to our benefit. vn.p.b. www.stripts.com

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130912_HarvardClubBost.indd 1 7/19/13 9:27 AM Life’s Beginnings Studying how life bloomed on Earth—and might emerge elsewhere

by courtney humphries

re the inhabitants of Earth the only life forms in the universe, or could life exist elsewhere? As astronomers rapidly identify exoplanets—those beyond our solar system—the question has been transformed from a science-fiction trope to one discussed in scientific journals and conferences. And it quickly leads to another question: How did life start here on Earth? That question, says Dimitar Sasselov, professor of astronomy and director of the Origins of Life Ini- Atiative at Harvard, “is one of the big unsolved questions humanity has always asked.” And yet for various reasons it has been difficult to answer. Biology has been very good at describing how living organisms work; it has been far less successful at answering what life is to understand life on Earth, he says, it’s a historical question. is and how it could emerge from a non-living world. But if the goal is to understand how life emerges from particular “If you think of the two deepest and most challenging questions environmental and chemical conditions, then the answer is much we could ask about life, I think they’re ‘How did it begin, and are more fundamental. It raises the possibility that life could form in we alone in the universe?’ ” says Andrew Knoll, Fisher professor of different ways on different planets. And ultimately, Sasselov be- natural history. “And what I find remarkable when I think about lieves, it could help us move beyond simply describing life to unit is that we are really the first generation in human history to ask covering universal principles that govern it, akin to principles of those as scientific rather than philosophical questions.” planetary motion. The initiative (http://origins.harvard.edu), launched with seed money from the University in 2005, has brought together scien- Discovering other worlds tists from largely disconnected fields—astronomy, physics, chem- The first exoplanets discovered were hulking, puffy, Jupiter- istry, biology, earth and planetary sciences—to tackle these is- like planets that would not be able to support life as we know it. sues. Sasselov says such breadth of expertise is necessary because While all exoplanets are interesting in their own right, to anyone so many conditions influence life’s emergence. How did the Earth looking for life outside Earth, the true prize is small planets that aggregate from cosmic elements in such a way that it could sup- are dense and rocky like our own, and that exist in the so-called port life? What environmental conditions does life require? How “habitable zone,” where surface temperatures are consistent with do inorganic molecules begin to behave like living organisms: rep- liquid water, a requirement for familiar life forms. Scientists are licating, organizing into cells, growing, evolving? making rapid progress in hunting this smaller prey; in fact, they “In a certain sense our main question is really: what is the na- now estimate that small planets far outnumber large ones. ture of life?” Sasselov explains. “That’s why we call it the Origins of The challenge, of course, is not just to identify planets but to Life Initiative. The plural here is very intentional.” If the only goal know something about them and whether they could support life.

Harvard Magazine 29 Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 One of the initiative’s most significant accomplishments to date is Dimitar Sasselov, research team is now in the process of the development of a new resource, the HARPS (High Accuracy director of the gathering and analyzing data, which Origins of Life Radial velocity Planet Searcher) North instrument, which is de- Initiative, search- takes time because of the slow cycles of signed to detect and characterize exoplanets similar to Earth in es for planets planets around their stars. He says the mass and structure. NASA’s Kepler space telescope has detected around red dwarf instrument’s precision makes it possible thousands of potential candidate planets, but determining their stars. Because to begin studying the planets’ atmo- they are dim- mass, mean density, and composition requires a more precise in- mer and smaller spheric content. “The light from the star strument. HARPS is a spectrograph that can measure subtle wob- than our sun, red passes through the planet’s atmosphere bles in the stars the planets orbit, caused by the gravitational tugs dwarfs make ideal on the way to telescope,” he explains, targets for taking the planets exert. The first HARPS instrument is located at the images of the and the atmosphere’s signature on that European Southern Observatory telescope at La Silla, Chile. The extrasolar planets spectrum of light can be measured. newer HARPS-N—created through an international partnership that orbit them. Charbonneau’s next task is to design that included the Origins of Life Initiative, the Smithsonian Astro- experiments that can do just that: find physical Observatory and Harvard College Observatory, the Uni- signatures of molecules like oxygen within these spectra. tech l versity of Geneva, and other institutions—has been installed on In the longer term, the Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT), now a C

the TNG (Telescopio Nazionale Galileo), a 3.6-meter telescope at under development in Chile’s Atacama Desert, will also be paired /JPL- A the Roque de Los Muchachos observatory in the Canary Islands. with a sensitive spectrograph, dubbed G-CLEF (GMT Consor- S This telescope is trained on the same skies as Kepler, which makes tium Large Earth Finder), to enable more direct observations of HARPS North a powerful partner in characterizing planets. distant stars and their planets (see “Seeing Stars,” May-June, page David Charbonneau, professor of astronomy, says that after 32). “I can guarantee you that, 10 years from now, we will have making first observations with the instrument last spring, the spectra that will be extremely exciting and interesting,” says Sas- background image: NA

30 September - October 2013 Photographs by Stu Rosner Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 selov. Astronomers will join with colleagues in and hostile to life now, scientists have found evidence of a watery chemistry and biology to interpret those data, past and hope to encounter signs of microbial life. But Knoll says enabling scientists to know, for instance, if a that it now appears that any narrow window of habitability on planet has lots of oxygen or methane or carbon Mars had closed just as Earth’s was opening, around four billion dioxide, or whether it has other molecules not years ago. abundant on the Earth. “That’s the moment to With so many planets to choose from, scientists are discussing which we are building,” he says. the best ways to winnow down candidates for life. In an article The first characterizations, he adds, will in Science this past May, Sara Seager, a planetary scientist at MIT, almost certainly be of planets that are not in- argues that scientists should adopt a broader understanding of habited, “but they will teach us about some of which planets are habitable, given the diversity of characteristics the basics of geochemistry, and what the vari- of planets and their solar systems. In environments with differ- ety of different environmental conditions are ent pressures, temperatures, and chemical compositions, habit- beyond what’s available in the solar system.” ability might look quite different from what we expect. Sasselov That in itself might stimulate new ways of wants scientists to abandon the term “habitable zone” altogeth- thinking about how life arises. er, as it focuses on a particular region rather than specific planetary conditions conducive to life. He says the debate can be re- The conditions for life, on Earth and elsewhere With technologies available soon that may enable scientists to identify the condi- Emergence of a field tions conducive to life on other planets, the n its first few years, the origins initiative has forged question of which planets to study becomes new connections among faculty members in disparate de- critical. Despite their best speculations, scien- Ipartments and influenced similar programs at other uni- tists have only one model to work from: Earth. versities. It has led the investment in new tools and fostered But Earth’s surface is constantly turning cross-disciplinary research with postdoctoral fellowships. over and weathering down, so any signs of But launching such an endeavor has been challenging. sedimentary deposits from the planet prior Sasselov has served as the effort’s ambassador. “We’re try- to the appearance of life have been subsumed ing to answer a scientific question that may have few practical through plate tectonics or eroded. As Knoll applications—it’s a very big question,” he says. “The reason says, “When the curtain goes up on the geo- why we’re bothering is because there’s such big, exciting sci- logic record, life is already there. Every time ence to be done.” But calling the science interdisciplinary is you go by a road cut or a cliff, you are looking an understatement, he adds. There is simply no way to ad- at a chapter in the history of life.” dress it without broadening the typical scope of disciplines. Earth’s biological and physical history are The initiative’s regular meetings have helped the nearly 30 intimately linked. The planetary conditions associated faculty members explore connections within their on Earth shaped the life that evolved, and life research, and faculty are beginning to work collaboratively in turn dramatically altered the planet. The early Earth provided on papers. But the team has wanted more sustained funding elements like carbon and nitrogen needed to create organic mol- for students and fellows to do research between labs, which ecules, but as life evolved, photosynthetic bacteria filled the at- would help make theoretical connections reality. mosphere with oxygen. Long before the fossil record of plants Despite a growing interest in interdisciplinary collabora- and animals begins, scientists see evidence of microbial activ- tions in science, the system of training, funding, and rec- ity throughout the planet: single-celled creatures that left behind ognition still follows departmental distinctions. Sasselov’s physical structures like giant reefs as well as chemical byproducts larger goal is to ensure that when young chemists come to of their metabolic activities. In recent years, Knoll and other sci- the program to do cross-disciplinary research with astrono- entists have enhanced their ability to “read” this history, finding mers, they will go on to find positions that value that train- chemical signatures of life buried deep within ancient rocks. They ing, and fellow scholars able to evaluate grant proposals can use this information to understand better how the chemical and papers that require peer review. “What we’re trying to environment of the planet drove evolution, and vice versa. do is create a worldwide community of scholars...who are This knowledge can be applied to understanding the his- truly representative of this new field,” he says. Beginning tories of other planets. “Our experience of the Earth, it doesn’t this May, the Simons Foundation has made an eight-year exhaust the possibilities for life in environments elsewhere, but commitment to fund the Simons Collaboration on the Ori- frankly it gives us our only mooring point,” says Knoll. Just as the gins of Life, directed by Sasselov and Szostak, to connect Earth has changed throughout its history, other planets are also investigators from several institutions in support of faculty dynamic systems. Knoll has been on the scientific team analyz- research and postdoctoral fellowships in the area. ing data from the Mars rover missions, which have provided the Sasselov’s hope is that the current resurgence of interest in first chance to decipher in detail another planet’s geologic history life’s beginnings won’t get stymied again as it did in the mid- (and because Mars has no plate tectonics, its ancient history is dle of the last century, but will lead to a new way of under- better preserved than Earth’s). Though Mars is devoid of water standing life in the universe.

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 solved only with substantive research that defines exactly what Fisher professor came a huge gap, an unfathomable gap,” these conditions are—the initiative’s goal. of natural history Sasselov says. “And the initial excitement Andrew Knoll, curator of the actually led to a serious depression where Biology begins: a multitasking Harvard Univer- people left the field altogether.” molecule and simple cells sity Herbaria’s But in recent years, stalwart scien- In the 1950s, Stanley Miller and Harold Urey of the University paleobotanical tists have continued to experiment with collections. of Chicago published the results of a now-famous experiment to Behind him is an the chemistries of early Earth, and have test the possibility of creating organic compounds from the in- outcropping of made progress in understanding how organic milieu of a primitive Earth. By adding an electric spark ancient sedimen- life could have emerged. One of them tary Martian rock, to an apparatus that contained methane, ammonia, hydrogen gas, which he’s studied is Jack Szostak, professor of chemistry and water, they were able to transform the carbon in the methane for NASA’s Mars and chemical biology and of genetics at into simple organic compounds, including amino acids that are Exploration Harvard; two decades ago, he shifted the the basis for proteins in living cells. The Miller-Urey experiment Rover Mission. focus of his research from yeast genet- dazzled scientists and laypeople alike with the idea that life could ics (for which he shared the 2009 Nobel form spontaneously from a “primitive soup” of chemicals, and the Prize in Physiology or Medicine) to studying RNA molecules, ll

right conditions (like a lightning strike to supply the energy). which he thought could shed light on the next steps of life’s emer- C orne /JPL/

But Sasselov says that the initial excitement faded when the com- gence. “Once you have the right kinds of molecules,” he asks, “how A S plexity of DNA’s structure—solved by Francis Crick and James do they get together to assemble into cells that can grow and di- Watson at about the same time—was fully appreciated. It seemed vide and evolve?” Scientists studying the origin of life today face impossible that the elegant helix could arise from a primitive chemi- a chicken-and-egg problem: in modern cells, the genetic instruc- cal soup. “Suddenly the difference between the Miller-Urey experi- tions of DNA are translated and carried out by RNA and proteins, ment and the biomolecules of today, which are DNA and RNA, be- which perform cellular functions—including building DNA. So NA image: background

32 September - October 2013 Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 Scientists studying the origin of life today face a chicken-and-egg problem: how could any complex molecule have arisen without the aid of others? how could any of these complex molecules tic that we’ll figure out a way to get the chemistry working in a have arisen without the aid of the others? few years,” he says. Szostak, like many other scientists, has focused on RNA as the primary genetic mol- What it was like when life began ecule of early life. RNA is a less stable mol- Research focused on studying molecules in test tubes increas- ecule than DNA, but its instability comes ingly points to questions about what the early Earth was like. with added versatility, allowing it to per- “We’re starting to deduce what kinds of environments you’d have form multiple tasks, including some now to have to be compatible with the systems that we’re building,” performed by proteins. Szostak and others Szostak says—making it productive to collaborate with plan- hypothesize that in primordial times, RNA etary scientists to understand these scenarios better. One possi- served as a quick and dirty multitasking bility is that geothermal vents, like the kind found in Yellowstone genetic molecule, able both to store biologi- lakes, could have driven chemical reactions by creating drastic cal instructions and catalyze its own repro- fluctuations of temperature in the water. Certain kinds of chemi- duction; in later, more stable times, DNA cally active clays could help draw together molecules that would and proteins could have evolved and taken be unlikely to meet if circulating freely in water. over these functions with greater precision. There is also evidence that the amount and type of light was im- But how did an RNA-based biology emerge portant in the early Earth environment. In 2009, John Sutherland’s from the early Earth’s chemistry? lab at the University of Manchester made a major breakthrough in Szostak has used a technique called in origins of life research when it discovered a way that ribonucleo- vitro selection to screen large numbers of tides (building blocks of RNA) could form from a mix of chemi- molecules for forms that have a particular cals. But Sasselov points out that one of the steps required to make function. His lab has applied the technique one kind of ribonucleotide was the addition of ultraviolet light. to generate different kinds of RNA mole- The spectra of UV light available on the early Earth were differ- cules, particularly “ribozymes”—RNA mol- ent. Stars paradoxically become brighter as they age and deplete ecules that can catalyze chemical reactions their hydrogen cores, so the early Sun was 30 percent fainter, but it the way protein enzymes do—in the hope was spinning faster, creating a more powerful magnetic field that of creating an RNA molecule that catalyzes barraged the Earth’s surface with UV radiation that was 200 times its own replication, because an RNA mol- stronger than it is today. Sasselov is an expert in analyzing star- ecule able to catalyze its own replication light; rather than simply shining a UV bulb on chemicals in these would be a prime early candidate for life. In the process, they have experiments, he wants to recreate the spectra of the early Earth created diverse molecules that look much like RNA or DNA but more faithfully in experiments involving prebiotic chemistry. don’t exist in nature. “All these related molecules aren’t used in Research on microbes that live in unusual environments on Earth biology, why is that?” he asks. “Is it because it’s actually easier to has shown that life can survive extremes in temperatures, acidity, get to RNA, or a historical accident?” pressure, dryness, or radiation levels, and thrive on nutrients like More recently, Szostak’s work has focused on how the genetic iron and hydrogen sulfide. For the purposes of the origins initiative, material spelled out in RNA or DNA came to be bundled inside it’s also important to consider that life could have evolved differ- cells, which form the basis of all living organisms. The most es- ently than it has on the Earth. Researchers have speculated, for in- sential feature of a cell is its membrane: a thin layer of fats that stance, about life forms based on silicon rather than carbon. Another draws a critical boundary between inside and outside, self and difference might simply be the orientation of biological molecules; the rest of the world. With this physical isolation, Szostak says, many molecules are asymmetrical and can exist in two forms that potentially useful genetic sequences could begin to gain advan- are mirror images of one another, like right and left hands. But for tage for themselves. His lab has managed to coax interesting be- reasons not entirely understood, life generally prefers to use only havior out of simple “protocells” (membrane-bound vesicles): one of these mirror images (sugars in biological organisms are al- getting them to grow and divide under various conditions. ways “right-handed” while proteins are always “left-handed”). “We actually can have an environmentally driven ‘cell cycle’ George Church, Winthrop professor of genetics, has been in- in which the membrane grows and divides repeatedly,” he says. vestigating this question of handedness, or chirality, in his quest “What’s missing from that picture is the genetic material, and to synthesize functioning parts of cells from scratch. Sasselov says that, at the moment, looks like a harder problem.” He says there the initiative is supporting work in Church’s lab to build a mir- is still a laundry list of problems that must be solved to create a ror-image version of a synthetic cell, to see if it’s possible to create plausible scenario for RNA formation, and several labs around the functioning biological systems that have a different chirality than world are painstakingly working on each one. “I’m fairly optimis- those on Earth. This is just one of the (please turn to page 74)

Harvard Magazine 33 Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 Many poems enact wild rides of uniqueness. The approach runs con- the imagination, but John Ashbery’s A Nearly trary to mainstream trends in today’s “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mir- literary marketplace, and, like the ror,” which announced a new kind Ashbery poem, it rests on the value of of craft in 1974, is also vivid in con- precision: the physicality of the book creteness and its emphasis on form. Perfect Book as an object and the startling original- Referencing a Mannerist painting ity of the craftsman’s eye. “There’s a by Parmigianino, Ashbery carefully kind of human rhythm to this,” Hoy- elaborates size, angle, light, tex- em explains. “That’s what fine print- ture, and time (a “peculiar slant / Of The poetry critic, ing is—it’s about being perfect.” memory”) to tease out his poem’s in- In pursuit of that perfection, he tellectual shape—an approach that the publisher, and chose not to make “Self-Portrait in a draws particular attention to the Convex Mirror” a traditional book at piece’s own materiality. For a pub- all. Instead, he imagined the printed lisher of sensitivity, the work raises a the art of bookmaking pages as a physical object shaped by particular question: how to publish the poem’s imagery and cultural ver- a poem that brings the physicality of 1in a digital era nacular. The pages of the volume Self- seeing, reading, and writing so dis- Portrait in a Convex Mirror were not tinctly to the fore? trimmed to their dimensions, but That was one challenge that An- by nathan heller handmade as round sheets. Hoyem drew Hoyem, one of the leading printed the lines of the poem like letterpress printers in the country, faced 29 years ago when he spokes, radiating outward from the center of the page, with gen- undertook a new edition of the poem. Hoyem runs Arion Press, a erous space between. He stacked the round pages in a custom- fine-edition publisher in San Francisco. Some of the books it has made, film-reel-like canister for each copy, in lieu of binding, and, produced are set by hand, and all are printed in small editions on each canister’s exterior, fitted a convex mirror in which the whose volumes sell for hundreds or even thousands of dollars. Fol- viewer would see him- or herself. (“I see in this only the chaos / lowing tradition, Hoyem either melts down the type or returns Of your round mirror which organizes everything.”) He commis- it to its cases after the run is complete, preserving the volumes’ sioned eight artists, including Jim Dine and Willem de Kooning,

34 September - October 2013 Portrait by Stu Rosner Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 Porter University Professor Helen to respond to the Parmigianino painting, and inter- Vendler in Hough- They’ve done a good deal. In the years since the “Self- polated these new works among the wheels of text. ton Library with a Portrait” edition appeared, in 1984, Vendler has become Ashbery [’49, Litt.D. ’01] contributed a recording he’d copy of the Arion Arion Press’s most prolific contributor, and the two Press edition of made of the poem, and Hoyem included the LP, with John Ashbery’s have together produced 11 volumes, accompanied by the Parmigianino on its cover. All that remained was a “Self-Portrait in original work from artists such as Jasper Johns, Richard critical introduction. For that, he sought the counsel of a Convex Mirror,” Diebenkorn, and Sol LeWitt. Most recently, they col- his wife, Diana Ketcham, a former academic and a critic and publisher laborated on Stone from Delphi, a collection of classical- Andrew Hoyem at who is the press’s senior editor. Arion’s San Fran- themed poems by Seamus Heaney. Vendler helped select Ketcham proposed Helen Vendler—at that point a cisco quarters and introduce the poems, with an eye to their histori- New Yorker contributor and a relatively new face on the cal overtones; her introduction explains how “Heaney’s Harvard faculty. (She is now Porter University Professor.) The lyric poems drawing on the classics address motifs significant to proposal, Hoyem and Ketcham recall, struck them as a long shot, his own sensibility, ethics, and linguistic hunger, [and reclaim], but one worth trying. (“Early on, I had some advice from a much for modern ears, works inaccessible in their original language to older man,” Hoyem explains. “He told me, ‘Go to the top—ask.’ ”) the common reader.” The book is bound with a goatskin spine To his surprise, Vendler agreed. She wrote an introduction, which and printed on mold-made paper from Germany, with 16 water- Hoyem printed as “liner notes” to Ashbery’s LP. “What drew Ash- color illustrations of Greek and Roman statues by the American bery to this painting was its combination of extreme beauty and painter Wendy Artin, done exactly at scale and reprinted on a self-conscious expressive distortion,” Vendler explained in her es- high-grade Epson digital inkjet printer—a technology that Hoy- say. “A convex or concave mirror distorts what it represents; the em, a master of the old ways, not a vassal to them, calls “one of the principle can be taken to extremes (as with mirrors in a funhouse) major innovations in the history of printing.” There are only 300 or it can be used to convey the distancing effect of aesthetic self- copies on the market, and they are costly: $1,200 each. representation.” She quoted aptly from Wallace Stevens, Gerard Arion Press is now the only full-service letterpress left in the Manley Hopkins, and George Herbert. Hoyem and Ketcham loved United States. Although facets of traditional bookmaking lin- the essay. Vendler was much taken with the printed result, too. ger—some letterpress printing here, some hand-binding there— “I didn’t know, when I was asked to do it, that I would be given no other workshop houses the complete process, from the casting a copy—that stunned me,” she explained recently. “This gorgeous of type to the trimming of covers. In 2000, Hoyem and Ketcham object! So, from then on, I was willing to do anything that seemed launched a nonprofit, the Grabhorn Institute (named for two ear- within my powers with Andrew.” lier San Francisco printers), to oversee these efforts and help pre-

Portrait of Andrew Hoyem and photographs taken at Arion Press by ToniBird Photography Harvard Magazine 35 Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 serve the press’s repository of knowledge and machinery. Today, Today, Arion Press is housed in a spacious building on the edge its facility doubles as the country’s largest museum of working of San Francisco’s Presidio, a lush decommissioned military base letterpress equipment. of nearly three square miles cradled by the Richmond district and The case for preserving such technologies and methods seems Pacific Heights and swooping down toward the lower harbors of counterintuitive at first, especially in ecosystems as invested in the Golden Gate. Down a long hallway on the entry level, display the next new thing as twenty-first-century San Francisco and cases feature selected volumes, some of which grew from Hoyem’s Cambridge—two of the most digitally oriented communities in longstanding relationship with Vendler. Stone from Delphi is their the nation. Contemporary publishing favors open access; recent second book of Heaney’s poetry; in 2003, Vendler helped Hoyem advances in the technology of reading offer many text formats, assemble Squarings, a sequence of 48 Heaney poems, originally not the perfection of a single one. Data suggest that Americans from his collection Seeing Things. Sol LeWitt, the chosen illustrator, read more now than ever before, but how they read is increasingly answered with 48 drawings of his own—each six inches square unmoored from paper’s physical aspect. and based on a varying grid on which LeWitt produced “scrib- And yet the book persists, with something of a second wind. bles” (his word). The effect on the page is one of dazzling optical- Today, Arion Press leads a growing group of small Bay Area–based ity: forms that are at once rigorously geometric and diaphanously publishers placing a fresh emphasis on physical type and centu- undefined. In her introduction, Vendler explores the poems as ries-long tradition, revivifying the old arts at the heart of screen- evidence of a similar dance between the speaker’s ordering intel- age creativity. Users of the iPhone might forget that Apple’s early ligence and the free play of his imagination. “Imagined grids and rise in design-based computing drew from the traditions of ty- lines,” she explains, “are the latitude and longitude lines by which pography, but the press has not: it is among the leading custodi- mentality orders the world.” ans of that craft and one of the few remaining producers of cast Occasionally, Hoyem has found himself so strongly drawn to an type. (Arion’s in-house foundry, M & H Type, ships hundreds of existing work of art as the complement for poetry that commis- fonts of lead type every year.) Though reading habits are chang- sioning new work is unnecessary. That was the case when he un- ing, the values sought on a page—beauty, clarity, ease—are more dertook to publish T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, in 2007, again with a crucial than ever, and, in this context, Arion Press’s old mastery is Vendler introduction. He could imagine no more fitting work than as much a blueprint for the future as a preservation effort for the R.B. Kitaj’s 1975-76 canvas If Not, Not: a vivid, dreamy composition past. Like Ashbery’s poem, it helps trace out the porous bound- that Hoyem, picking up on the idea of an in-house master printer, ary between physical craft and feats of the imagination: how the presented across several pages, both as a whole and in fragments. word rests on the page and what we dream it might do. “I’m not Kitaj, while alive, also contributed lithograph portraits to an edi- doing it in order to uphold a standard of traditional letterpress tion of Allen Ginsberg’s Kaddish, White Shroud, and Black Shroud that books as against trade books, as against hardcover books, as the press published in 1992. And although Vendler is a not a scholar against paperbacks, as against e-books,” Hoyem says. “I’m making frequently associated with Beat poetry, she warmed to the project what I hope to have regarded as works of art.” as well. “It seemed to me it was a new line, obviously depending on Whitman, but it had a different rhythm than Whitman’s,” she Hoyem is a tall man with a stately bearing and the shambling says. “A kind of beachhead of gay pride, as we would call it now.” walk of somebody whose joints are worn from many decades spent Vendler’s own favorite Arion collaboration has been a collec- sitting, crouching, and hunching over work requiring extreme tion of Wallace Stevens poems that she introduced, in 1985, with precision and care. He likes bow ties, and suits heavy enough for original art by Jasper Johns—an artist whom Hoyem recalls as her the fog-drenched outer reaches of the San Francisco avenues. He’s special request for the project. (“He is the bald, with heavy-lidded eyes and a sharp, impish smile that shines poet I feel closest to,” she explains, “and I Arion casts and out from the depths of his reserve: it can feel, sometimes, like get- had always wanted to see the poems treated maintains a large inventory of ting a big grin from Mount Rushmore. Yet he rarely jokes about his with the dignity they deserve.”) The collec- letterpress type; work. Each book on the shelf emerged from a long parturition, and tion includes 122 poems selected by Vendler; the landmark each conjures memories of edition of Moby- the challenges it posed along Dick; stamps used to label wrapped the way. packages of fonts of type

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 the frontispiece, by Johns, was one of four works he later included on the pulpit in San Francisco’s Grace Cathedral. in his series The Seasons. It’s a local connection that fits with many in the press’s past. San After nearly three decades together, Hoyem and Vendler have Francisco has had a reputation as a printing town, from the Gold built a catalog within the press’s greater list—Yeats with original Rush era onward, and, in the 1920s, the brothers Edwin and Robert Richard Diebenkorn illustrations, Shakespeare’s sonnets bound Grabhorn helped set the cornerstone of local tradition. The Grab- in goatskin and Japanese cloth. Not every collaboration has gone horns were trained partly in the principles of “allusive typogra- wholly as planned. When Hoyem and Vendler hoped to produce phy”—the idea that typefaces ought subtly to echo the period and an edition of Emily Dickinson poems, the Harvard University style of the writing being typeset. And they believed that the moist, Press, which still holds rights to Dickinson’s oeuvre and exercises foggy air of San Francisco helped prime paper for inking. In 1930, them actively, wouldn’t let them be printed even in a small fine- they published a sumptuous 400-copy edition of Walt Whitman’s press edition. So Hoyem, working alone, devised a work-around, Leaves of Grass, set entirely by hand; it’s printed in a large, Goudy type using the public-domain early, edited versions of the poems, with on generous pages (14.4 by 9.75 inches), illustrated with woodcuts, art by Kiki Smith. “Harvard thinks it controls Emily Dickinson,” and bound in red goatskin and mahogany. Edwin Grabhorn called Hoyem explains, dryly. “I disagree.” the edition “the most perfect book we ever printed.” Hoyem thought so, too. He was born in South Dakota, but his Arion Press’s workshop is located on the lower floor of its fa- family moved to Iowa during the Second World War. In 1946, cility. At one end is the M & H type foundry: a stark, cavernous they relocated to the Mojave Desert so that his father, a physicist, space smelling of machine oil and metal. There is a kiln, where could take a job in weapons development. In 1946, they relocated Hoyem and his colleagues melt lead into ingots to be used for to the Mojave Desert so that his father, a physicist, could take a monotype; stations across the room contain casting equipment. job at what Hoyem fondly refers to as an “atom smasher.” Hoyem Since the 1990s, Hoyem has been using computer interfaces to went to college at Pomona, then enlisted in the navy. When his cast monotype directly from computer-generated text, expedit- service ended, he was accepted for graduate school at Columbia, ing the scrupulous work of turning sentence after sentence into in political science. But he put off installing himself in New York, lead. Some of the press’s most rarefied projects, though, are set keen to kill some time and make a bit of money in San Francisco, by hand. In deference to local printing tradition, Hoyem files his which was then in the heady throes of a print renaissance. In 1961, more than 100 tons of poured type largely in what are known on something of a whim, he took a job at Auerhahn Press, an early as California job cases, with the noncapital and capital letters organ of Beat poetry and the literary avant-garde. (It published kept in side-by-side arrays of compartments. More traditionally, William S. Burroughs ’36, G ’40, and Charles Olson, among others.) though, they’re stacked: the lower case and the upper case. “We were printing by letterpress mainly because it was a cheap Part of Hoyem’s duty as a master craftsman lies in training. way to get started,” Hoyem explains. At work arranging type, he He takes apprentices, as his predecessors did for centuries. It is fell in love. Auerhahn Press was located around the corner from the no mean commitment: an apprenticeship runs four years in the Grabhorns’ center of operations, and by 1964, he’d begun working foundry and press room, two in the bindery—and that’s only the there part time, in addition to his Auerhahn duties. groundwork. “To get the quality in press work that we demand, it Joining Grabhorn Press changed Hoyem’s life. Learning at the takes years,” he says. He enforces a schedule. Each morning, staff knee of the local masters, he trained toward exacting standards. members are on the job at 8:30; they get a short lunch and an af- And during the late 1960s, it was Hoyem who stepped in to sus- ternoon coffee break and leave promptly at 5. Otherwise, they’re tain the Grabhorns’ tradition. Partnering with Robert Grabhorn, at their stations. A visit to the bindery might find a couple of he launched a new iteration of their celebrated staffers hard at work making slipcases forStone from Delphi. At Squarings (2003), endeavor. In 1973, not long before Grabhorn died, one end of the room is a sewing machine that they use to sew illustrated with he arranged to take over all his printing machin- Sol LeWitt’s together many books’ spines, though the most labor-intensive self-described ery. Endowed with this historical equipment volumes are stitched together by hand, on frames. Hand-sewn “scribbles,” and and some aesthetic ambitions of his own, Hoyem bindings don’t break or gape or hang open to certain pages, the cover of the launched Arion Press in 1974, taking the name so they’re perfect for books that get lots of scrutiny and use, volume; Andrew from the Dionysiac poet who, according to myth, Hoyem with Stone like the landmark Arion Press Bible that, today, is the volume from Delphi, the was rescued by dolphins. new Seamus Heaney volume

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 case, buyers sliced the original Jasper Johns etch- ings out of an Arion edition and sold them as self- sufficient works. There is, always, the risk that the “I was aware of the French tradition of the livre d’artiste,” Andrew Hoyem market will trump the art. Hoyem explains—books produced with great craft and in with Arion’s Half a century ago, the main contours of liter- “California” job small editions, usually designed around, or prominently cases of cast ary connoisseurship were clear. The canon started featuring, original art. “My goal was to make artists’ books letterpress type; with the classics, swept up into Modernism, and that were entirely cohesive—so that you couldn’t separate a can of black ink left few major works of English-language poetry the art from the typography, visually or in concept.” In the (on the left) and and fiction unstudied along the way. High culture brass cans of late 1970s, he undertook to print a new edition of Herman type wash was, in large degree, a body of shared knowledge; Melville’s Moby-Dick, using the Grabhorns’ Leaves of Grass as scholars tested unknown works as one might as- a rough guide both in format and in ambition. The book would be sess porcelain: tapping them at crucial points and listening for large, 15 inches by 10, and hand-set, like the Whitman, in a Goudy the familiar, canonic ring. “Although most of the art of the past face. Hoyem commissioned 100 wood engravings from the artist falls away into what [Wallace] Stevens called ‘the trash can at Barry Moser, but he was particular about what they could depict. the end of the world,’ ” Vendler wrote in her Ashbery introduc- No main characters—including the whale—should appear in an tion, “the great European conservatories, the libraries and the illustration, he advised; no major action scene should be rendered. museums, keep our collective Western past in a condensed and The idea was to let readers create their own mental images of char- selective form.” Erudition leaves a material trace, as does its op- acters and scenes based on the author’s writing, with the engrav- posite. When Fitzgerald, writing in the 1920s, had Nick Car- ings there only to help them fill in the visual details (like whaling raway stumble into a vast library stocked with “absolutely real” equipment) that they weren’t able to envision on their own. books whose pages hadn’t been cut, the detail was intended to To study the Arion Press edition of Moby-Dick today is to have convey, quite literally, volumes about Gatsby’s habits of mind. an almost sacred experience of the power of physical print. Its ink The limited-edition art book for years benefited from this out- is black, with wide margins and initial letters in a dark, aqueous look. If a handful of texts were the measure of the culture’s strength, blue. The paper is a faint blue-gray, like the surface of the ocean what could be more appropriate than dignifying those canonic on a cloudy day. When the reader lifts a page to turn it, the water- works with material refinement? Then, in or about the 1960s, high mark of a whale shimmers through. Because the letter w is partic- culture changed. The idea of an absolute canon fell into question, ularly wide, Hoyem made the abutting spaces slightly narrower; and alternatives emerged. When serious critics today turn their at- every semicolon has a hairsbreadth gap before it, as if signaling tention to rock music, it is with the idea that Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts the partial stop. The result is something that one would not think Club Band may have exercised as significant an influence on the cre- possible: a nearly perfect book. ative imagination of its era as Mrs. Dalloway did in its own time. The challenge of the literary world today is not a dearth of quality. It is The audience for Arion Press’s work is small but devout, domi- an excess of excellence, contextually defined. nated by specialized collectors and subject to the rise and fall of The role of fine-press books, like those Arion Press publishes, the art market more than to the changing fortunes of the custom- has changed, too. There’s now the responsibility not only of per- ers of Barnes & Noble. The press relies a good deal on regular fection but of selection—what to publish at a time when so much subscribers, who collect the new books as they appear, and on may be worthy of attention. Arion Press has played both within institutions such as Harvard’s Houghton Library, which regularly that model and against it. The projects it produces have one foot orders volumes for its collection. (To augment his passion proj- in tradition. (After all, fine press work is virtually extinct.) But the ects, Hoyem takes commissions for private printings.) The ideal press also embraces a more idiosyncratic approach. Hoyem takes a buyer, he says, is someone whose interests lie at the intersection lot of pride in his new publication of The Moonstone, the Wilkie Col- of literature, art, and printing craft—and such people come along lins proto-detective novel, here presented in a luxurious edition more rarely than one might expect. “Most art collectors are not with original scratchboard drawings by Stan Washburn: an im- readers,” he explained. “They want big, splashy stuff on their portant, if not traditionally high-literary, text that’s dignified by walls to show how rich they are.” In more than one egregious a generous presentation. Even a reader paging through Stone from

38 September - October 2013 Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 have my best, ev’n all I had.’ I think bringing Delphi is encountering The Miller two- poems, well-dressed and clad, is a tribute poetry that’s still rela- color cylinder to the poems,” she went on. “I hope people press; Rochelle tively fresh. Youk cases in a wouldn’t see this as fetishizing—as they say Vendler, who’s built copy of The Day of so horribly—the text, but it’s paying the a scholarly career com- the Locust; Sarah text the honor it deserves.” muting between the old Songer applies Others have agreed. Since their early days crash (coarsely canon and new work, is in many ways a critical counterpart to woven cloth) as publishers, Hoyem and Ketcham have been this effort. As a doctoral candidate at Harvard in the 1950s, she to strengthen a surrounded, both professionally and socially, studied with I.A. Richards, himself a University Professor and an book’s sewn spine by a cohort of creative minds. (In the early enormously influential literary critic often cited as the modern- 1980s, Ketcham and Wendy Lesser ’73, the day father of what’s sometimes called “close reading”: a method founding editor of The Threepenny Review, organized an informal group of explication based on the idea that authorial intent and word- of local writers that met for lunch at Oakland’s BayWolf restaurant; by-word structure are mutually illuminating. His approach was regular participants included the then-local poets Robert Pinsky implicitly an empirical answer to the “why” of the canon: Why and Robert Hass.) Although Ketcham wryly describes Hoyem and might readers attend to Shakespeare more than to Marlowe? herself as “provincials from California,” they take pride in the milieu Why was the slippery modernism of Eliot worth teasing out, line they have assembled—and that milieu, in turn, enjoys the particu- by line? And it provided a standard of appraisal beyond the nor- lar creative opportunities that they provide. At one point, Hoyem, mal vagaries of taste. Like her teacher, Vendler is now known not designing an edition of The Great Gatsby, wrote to the architect Mi- only as a guardian and expositor of the poetic classics (her daz- chael Graves, M.Arch. ’59, to ask him about contributing art; he’d zling, line-by-line study of all of Shakespeare’s sonnets is today heard that Graves reread the book every year. Hoyem had been mis- considered the definitive guide through the Bard’s poetry) but as informed—it was actually the architect Robert A.M. Stern’s favorite a prescient arbiter of contemporary esteem. book—but Graves was delighted with the assignment all the same, Vendler first encountered Seamus Heaney’s work during a visit and, somewhere in the midst of completing his design for the Whit- to Sligo, Ireland, in 1975, and quickly became his most eloquent ney Museum addition (a project eventually abandoned), he submit- American critical champion. Heaney came to Harvard as the ted elaborate, intricate designs for everything from wine glasses to Boylston professor of rhetoric and oratory; he was succeeded, in garden landscaping for Gatsby’s imagined West Egg estate. Late this 1998, by Jorie Graham, another rising poet whose poems Vendler past spring, Hoyem and Ketcham flew to New York for a celebration helped introduce to readers. That critical relationship remains of one of their recent projects, Thomas Jefferson’s Paris Walks—written strong: as it happens, a volume of Graham’s poems is the next by Ketcham with photographs by Michael Kenna—at Hermès on project on which she and the press will collaborate. Madison Avenue, where the book was on display. The broad social orbit is as much about keeping an eye out for These days, Vendler lives the fast but quiet life of a late-career new talent as it is about sharing their wares. Hoyem is 77. He is literary lioness. Her critical opinions are among the most celebrat- beginning to think about retirement and about the future of the ed and distinctive in the nation; her schedule, even in these senior press. Lately, he’s been casting his gaze around for successors, years of her career, runs tight; and she’s accustomed, on the dais or people who share his exacting knowledge of fine press work and in magazines, to reach audiences of thousands. Why set aside the his big ambitions for the smallest arm of publishing. time and energy to contribute tens of thousands of words, across “It could possibly be someone from the art world, but I haven’t decades, to books whose press runs seldom exceed 400 copies, met a lot of people who have a strong literary bent,” he says. The and whose audience mainly comprises a small circle of collectors? trouble is, partly, the point: no one is inventing books quite like “It makes me think,” she explained, not too long ago, in the cozy those Arion Press makes. Hoyem isn’t too concerned, though, and book-lined office that she keeps in Harvard’s Barker Center. “It there’s reason to think everything will work out. So far, he has was strange to be doing these anthologies of so many different po- never had much trouble finding the right people for the task. ems. Taking on the problem of how to present Stevens to people, or how to present Yeats. Nathan Heller ’06, a former Berta Greenwald Ledecky Undergraduate Fellow “George Herbert says, in ‘The Forerunners,’ [that he brought at this magazine, is a film and television critic for Vogue and a frequent con- his] thoughts ‘to church well dressed and clad: / My God must tributor to The New Yorker.

Harvard Magazine 39 Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 Vita Henry Beston Sheahan Brief life of a nature writer in a machine age: 1888-1968 by john nelson

n 1925 Henry Beston ’09, A.M. ’11, bought land in the peninsular Landmark) in rural Nobleboro, Maine, in 1932. There, where Beston dunes of Eastham, on Cape Cod, and commissioned a carpenter lived the rest of his life, they wrote together, raised two daughters, Ito build a house on a mound facing the Atlantic, 30 feet in from befriended neighbors, tended their garden, chopped wood, pad- the beach. The Fo’castle consisted of a single room, 20 by 16, with a dled canoes, and explored the winter forest on snowshoes. wood stove but no electricity. On this “last fragment of an ancient His Maine books, like Northern Farm, sing of harmonious, self-reli- and vanished land,” the only neighbors were the hardy “surfmen” ant country living: uncramped, governed by seasonal rhythms, con- two miles north at the Nauset Coast Guard Station. Beston in- nected to all the generations who’d farmed the land before them. tended the house for summer visits but decided that first summer “Without a farming population,” he maintained, “a nation is never to spend a year there. His record of that year, The Outermost House healthy in spirit.” In Maine, he found “a way of life that has faced (1928), has become one of the most beloved books in American lit- the age of the machine and preserved its communal goodwill and erature. His protégée and friend, Rachel Carson, author of Silent the human values.” His great gift, his wife felt, was to help readers Spring, once said it was the only book that ever influenced her. discover what had been there all along—the forces that contour Beston (he dropped “Sheahan” in his thirties) was born a doc- the land, the first signs of spring thaw, and their own yearning to be tor’s son in Quincy, Massachusetts. After earning his master’s, he rooted in the earth. He was, she said, “a great opener of windows.” taught English at the Université de Lyon before returning to Har- In the anthology American Memory, Beston celebrated Native

vard in 1914 as an English instructor. The next year, he served as an Americans, the early European explorers, and the great rivers flow- n, o ambulance driver for nine months in World War I. His first book, ing through “a wilderness that is wilderness no more.” The St. Law- ages

A Volunteer Poilu (1916), written to honor his French comrades, nar- rence River (1942), a narrative of his many trips along the river, takes m ck i rates his experience at the Battle of Verdun. his readers on “an adventure beyond politics and frontiers into the Waldr urner Next, he wrote fairy tales, hoping, as one critic put it, to “cleanse older America of the forest, the cataract, and the shadow of trees.” the horrors of war from his soul.” The Outermost House never men- But he was appalled by what this America had become. “I see T N an o r tions the war, but, like Hemingway’s “Big Two-hearted River,” it is a no future for this form of civilization,” he wrote to a friend, “with graph ist by o postwar story about a solitary man immersed in the natural world its brutal egotism, its absence of poetic relation to the earth.” In o t und ph

“beyond the violences of men.” “It was on the dunes that he found the past century, he believed, America had suffered “an alienation o himself as a writer,” wrote his wife, Elizabeth Coatsworth, an ad-

from Nature unexampled in human history.” In college, a classmate utermost House auth ackgr ; b

mired author herself. “There he was alone most of the time with once scribbled a cartoon of Beston’s tombstone, engraved “He hat- y

only the sea, the sky, the beach, and the marshes for company.” ed machines.” Now, Beston was convinced, the Machine Age was ciet Beston described himself as a “scholar with a poetic joy in the destroying man’s “animal faith,” replacing responsibility with pas- visible world.” House is not a story that gazes inward or seeks dra- sivity, and debasing his very language. His daughter Kate Beston rical So ma in self-analysis. All the drama and mystery lie in the dunes, the Barnes, Maine’s first poet laureate, once said, “He would have been ist o waves, the night air, the “elemental presences,” the great tidal ri- horrified, just horrified, by the world of today.” valry between ocean and beach, and the struggles of men and birds In 1959, Beston was awarded the American Academy of Arts and ’castle, Journey by taken to O f the Maine H he Fo y o at sea to survive winter’s fury. His readers watch and listen with Sciences Emerson-Thoreau Medal. Two years later, due in part to ; T y urtes him, drawn in by an enraptured yet precise prose style that evokes the influence ofThe Outermost House, the Cape Cod National Sea- ciet o

Shakespeare and the King James Bible. From observation Beston shore was established. In 1964, Beston returned to Eastham one n So file c moves effortlessly to contemplation of nature’s secrets. “In a world last time to dedicate the Fo’castle as a National Literary Landmark. o older and more complete than ours,” he writes, fascinated by the The dedication plaque reads “wherein he sought the great truth n pr f the Best o y o mysterious synchronicity of migrating shorebirds, “they move fin- and found it in the nature of man.” He urged young visitors to the ; Best o y ished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have site to keep a reverence for nature in their hearts. The house was ciet urtes o n So lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are washed away by a hurricane in February 1978, but pilgrims still n c not brethren, they are not underlings, they are other nations.” In come each year to see the place where it stood. nature he finds the wisdom of humility and spiritual sustenance. ung Best o f the Best o o

Beston and Coatsworth married in 1929 and honeymooned at John Nelson ’68 is the author of Cultivating Judgment, on the teaching of y o site: Y

the Fo’castle. When they found suburban Hingham too busy and critical teaching skills, and has published nature essays in The Harvard o urtes o Opp trafficked, they bought Chimney Farm (now a National Literary Review, The Gettysburg Review, Shenandoah, and birding magazines. c

40 September - October 2013 Opposite: Henry Beston (in a Coast Guard uniform) on the Outer Beach in the early 1920s and later, probably during his years in Maine, and “The Fo’castle” in a photograph from the 1960s or early 1970s Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 Self-Fashioning On crafting a in Society liberal-arts education

and Solitude by nannerl o. keohane

Editor’s note: Each spring term since 2008, Hobbs professor of cognition and of Wellesley College and of Duke University, and a member of the Harvard education Howard E. Gardner and Pforzheimer professor of teaching and Corporation—met with a group of discussion leaders and students. She asked learning Richard J. Light—in cooperation with the Freshman Dean’s Office them to prepare for their conversation by reading “Self-Fashioning in Society and a group of facilitators—have offered “Reflecting on Your Life.” These vol- and Solitude,” remarks she had earlier shared with students at Stanford. This untary discussions, made available to all first-year undergraduates, provide text, adapted from those remarks, bears generally on the aims of a liberal-arts an opportunity to discuss ways to make life choices and to think about values. education, at the outset of a new year for the entire University community, and Last spring, Nannerl Keohane—a scholar of political theory, the past president particularly for entering members of the class of 2017.

elf-fashioning is part of the age-old pur- My purpose in this essay is to think with you about how you pose of higher education, particularly in the might use this time and these materials wisely, with full aware- liberal arts and sciences. The key point is to ness that this experience will be unique for each of you, but also be aware, sometimes, that this is happening— the conviction that since countless other men and women have to deliberately engage in fashioning—not just set out on the same journey, they can offer some perspectives that let events and experiences sweep you along will be helpful to you now. without your conscious participation. Richard Brodhead expressed this well in Advice from past sojourners his speech to the entering class as dean of ’ll begin with one basic piece of advice about how you Yale College in 1995: “You’ve come to one might approach this business of “self-fashioning.” It’s the of the great fresh starts in your life, one of Ivery familiar maxim carved on the temple of Apollo at Del- the few chances your life will offer to step phi: “Know Thyself.” away from the person you’ve been taken This may seem wholly paradoxical: I’m discussing your fluidity, for and decide anew what you would like your openness to new character and form, and I start by advising to become.” In this mood, students typically you to get to know yourself, what you already are like. But it’s not see college as a place where a new stage of life’s so paradoxical if you think it through: among the materials you journey begins. “Incipit Vita Nova” was one motto of my alma should use to form or shape or fashion yourself, the basic qualities mater, Wellesley, and it surely seemed appropriate at the time. and most durable features of your own personality surely have to You now have this incredible opportunity to shape who you be taken into account. Whatever you do here at Harvard, you will are as a person, what you are like, and what you seek for the fu- not be creating yourself from scratch. Sture. You have both the time and the materials to do this. You may For example, you already know whether you are quick to anger think you’ve never been busier in your life, and that’s probably or even-tempered; you can learn to adjust this internal barometer true; but most of you have “time” in the sense of no other duties to some extent, controlling your temper rather than exploding that require your attention and energy. Shaping your character is immediately. But you can’t turn yourself into a slow, patient per- what you are supposed to do with your education; it’s not compet- son if that’s not what you are. If you have a tendency to procras- ing with something else. You won’t have many other periods in tinate, there are ways to set real deadlines for yourself, but you your life that will be this way until you retire when, if you are won’t ever be the kind of person who finishes a paper several days fortunate, you’ll have another chance; but then you will be more before it’s due. If you are tone deaf, no matter how much you lis- set in your ways, and may find it harder to change. ten to concerts, you will not develop perfect pitch. You now also have the materials to shape your character and To understand better what you are working with when you your purposes: the rich context, resources, incomparable oppor- shape your “self,” I went to the unabridged dictionary. I was tunities that Harvard provides. And the combination of time and amazed to see that under the word “self” there are three and one materials is truly an opportunity to treasure. half pages, closely printed, of variations on the word—from self-

42 September - October 2013 Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 abandonment and self-abnegation to self-validation and self-will. packers spending weeks in the wilderness. These individuals Clearly the English language is as absorbed in “selfhood” as many have sought out solitude for its virtues in developing selfhood individuals are! and for its restorative qualities. But precisely because they are “Self” means “the total, essential, or particular being” of a per- already familiar with society, already shaped by it, we can’t see son, what distinguishes you as an individual from others, what these persons as totally isolated. They carry their social training, sets you apart and makes you unique; it also means your conscious- assumptions, equipment, and preferences around with them even ness of this separateness, this distinctiveness, this “you.” Harvard in solitude. professor Stephen Greenblatt offers a particularly elo- In describing the most negative form of solitude, the quent definition of “self” in his bookRenaissance fearsome punishment called “solitary confine- Self-Fashioning: “A sense of personal order, ment,” we hear men and women talk about a characteristic mode of address to the how deeply they miss the company of world, a structure of bounded de- their fellows, how devastating it is to sires.” Psychologists and neurosci- the human personality and mental entists have a good deal more to health to be always alone. It’s be- say about what “self” means, but cause these individuals have spent for the purposes of this essay, their lives in society that enforced I’m going to leave it at that. solitude is so unbearable. The There is another thought- contrast between being part of provoking maxim related a social group, and living only to but distinct from “Know in silence with no company thyself,” also grounded in but the insects and your own the Greek and Roman clas- thoughts, is what prisoners of- sics: “Take care of yourself, ten find most devastating. So attend to yourself.” This it’s hard to think about soli- variant was highlighted by tude without being aware of Michel Foucault in a lecture its counterpart and context, called “Technologies of the society. Self.” Foucault insists that Yet in his Discourse on the this “taking care of yourself” Origins of Inequality, Jean-Jacques is “a real form of activity, not Rousseau set out to give an ac- just an attitude.” It’s like taking count of a truly solitary individual. care of a household or a farm or a He wanted us to think about what hu- kingdom. That’s what we are talk- man beings would be like if we had never ing about in discussing “self-fashion- experienced society at all. He paints a vivid ing”: paying deliberate attention to portrait of a solitary individual wandering your “self,” taking good care of through an endless forest, finding food unit, tending and developing der an oak tree, living on acorns and wild it, not just taking it for plants, drinking from the nearest granted. brook, sleeping wherever there This all sounds ap- is a comfortable place. This pealing, but like person rarely encounters most young peo- other human beings ple, and most and shows no curios- people across ity when he does. He history, you are needs no instruments more likely to or machines; his own be self-absorbed than strength is fully suffi- self-abandoning. What we may all need most is reflec- Jean-Jacques Rousseau cient for his purposes. tion on the importance of community, of other selves. I’m going to link In such a situation, says Rousseau, “one is always carrying oneself, the two in this essay because I believe firmly that we fashion our so to speak, entirely with one.” “selves” both in solitude and in society. Rousseau didn’t claim that the life of the solitary savage would be especially happy; it would be quite boring, lacking intellectual The character of solitude stimulation and company. It seems brutish in the worst sense of the olitude in literature almost always involves individu- word—worse than the life of many social animals. The only thing als who have spent their lives in society but are separated that brings human beings together in this imaginary forest is sex, Sfrom it, either voluntarily or because they have been exiled, and when it’s finished, both savage man and savage woman fade off lost, or shipwrecked. On the positive side, think of Thoreau at into the forest, never thinking about the other individual and not Walden Pond, Buddhist and Cistercian monks, solitary back- even recognizing the person if they ever encounter each other again.

Portraits by Dan Williams Harvard Magazine 43 Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 It’s the ultimate one-night stand. stronger, smarter than we really are, and in this But wait a moment, you may ask: context, envy, greed and a proprietary sense of what if savage woman gets preg- family and household crowd out the basic nant? What happens to savage instincts of compassion and the simplicity child? And here Rousseau is of the savage life. forced to confront an insight As Montaigne (whom Rousseau that rarely comes up in the greatly admired) says in his es- classic works of political say “Of Vanity”: “Whatever it thought: our species comes is, whether art or nature, that in two sexes, and it cannot imprints in us this disposition always be true that whatever to live with reference to others, goes for males also goes for fe- it does us much more harm than males. An author may get away good. We defraud ourselves of with always referring to “Man” our own advantages to make ap- on some topics if nobody calls pearances conform with public him on it; but it won’t work when opinion. We do not care so much you are writing about reproduction. what we are in ourselves and in So Rousseau hypothesizes that his reality as what we are in the pub- imaginary woman, being a healthy lic mind.” Thus both Montaigne savage, has no problems with her and Rousseau make us aware of pregnancy, bears her child in isola- the formidable power of society tion and nurses him because both to shape us as individuals, leading the child and she need this, and us to behave in ways other people even comes to feel some kind of expect or want us to, rather closeness to the child; but as soon than in the ways that as the child can feed him- might be true to our self, he too melts into best selves. That’s the forest, and they a temptation to never see one an- which you should other again. be especially alert This hypothesis when you are sur- seems especially rounded by so implausible, for many intelligent, many reasons, but articulate, forceful it brings us back to fellow-students. Rousseau’s purpose in doing this thought-experiment: he wants For mostMichel of us—certainly de Montaigne those of us on a university campus— to figure out what’s most basic about our species, about our solitude is a relatively rare experience. If we are to fashion our- “self.” Unlike Hobbes, Rousseau didn’t think we would naturally selves, we will be doing so in the presence of other people, most make war on each other; unlike Aristotle, he saw no reason that of the time. We develop as selves through our interactions with we would naturally seek out society. Instead, in his view there other human beings—through relationships, beginning with the are only a few basic human traits, most of which we share with family and then the school and the neighborhood, through art, other animals: we have a natural interest in ourselves and our music, language, culture, ideas. Our selves are never, and cannot own preservation. And we also have a natural instinct of com- be, purely isolated beings: we are the products of our experience passion or pity if we see another being in pain. But two other and our environment, and we need to understand the self in and traits are distinctively human: we are unusually intelligent, and through society, not as a stand-alone cardboard cutout. we have the capacity for self-improvement, adapting creatively to The warnings of Montaigne and Rousseau about how this ex- circumstances, not just following instinct. perience can deform us, pull us away from our true selves, mis- Given these traits, the Discourse goes on to describe what hap- shape our selfhood, should be in our minds. But we should also pens as our population grows and the changing environment recognize that most of what is best about us comes from our in- throws human beings together more regularly. Rousseau as- teractions with other individuals. serted that the happiest era for mankind was when individuals gathered into families and small villages. They could then enjoy The path of education human companionship, love, friendship, art, and music without ow then can we fashion ourselves in society? And all the disadvantages that come with more complex societies. Yet what does your education have to do with this? the story of what happens in society is not completely positive, H In his novel Emile, Rousseau described in great detail by any means. Rousseau’s main point is how society shapes and the formation of a human being able to live comfortably with deforms us. We begin to compare ourselves with other individu- himself and also as a productive member of society. Education als, we start to have an interest in appearing more handsome, was the key, and the carefully designed format of Emile’s educa-

44 September - October 2013 Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 tion has been a spur and stimulus to thinking about education tory, novels and essays, and paying attention to how people you ever since. Emile had a tutor who managed every detail of his life admire handle challenges as they come along. from pre-school to young adulthood, ensuring that he learned just Yet society is not only a source of inspiring examples: it is even the right things at the right time and was not exposed to corrupt- more often, as Rousseau said so well, a source of profound pres- ing influences. Emile turned out perfectly, as a model husband, fa- sures to behave in certain ways. Society will surely shape you, ther and citizen. And Sophie, the young girl who is educated spe- the opinions and preferences and activities of your family, your cifically to be his wife and helpmate, to regard Emile as her god friends, your classmates and professional colleagues, everyone and take her instructions and happiness from him, is presented in with whom you spend any considerable amount of time. But too the novel as the perfect wife and mother. often the pressures are negative and will not help you in your But not surprisingly, in an unpublished sequel to Emile, Rous- self-fashioning, as all of us know when we reflect on peer culture, seau shows how the young man goes off the tracks because he websites, TV shows, and movies. For worthwhile self-fashioning, can’t function well without the familiar guidance of his tutor. you need a surrounding society that speaks to what is most im- And Sophie demonstrates that she has a mind of her own; she portantly human, and brings you together with others in reward- resents being placed in total submission to her husband/master, ing collective activities. longs for a wider scope in her life, and goes off with another man. In the fifth chapter of her powerful work of political philoso- So the formation of selfhood that depends on having someone phy, The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt discusses the connec- else shape you like a work of art falls short of forming a success- tions between individuals and political communities. She notes ful human being. And it’s not surprising that theories of educa- that each human being is “distinguished from any other who is, tion since the eighteenth century rely much more on individual was, and ever will be”—which is a vivid way of thinking about choices and taking a significant responsibility for your own in- selfhood. Yet precisely because each of us is a distinct individual, tellectual development. we need speech and action to communicate; I cannot just sense In college, you have an exceptional amount of freedom to choose instinctively what somewhat else is thinking. In speaking and from the bewildering variety of great courses listed in the catalog, and the amazing prolif- You should think about society not as a kind eration of extracurricular activities, including both those that are already established and of zoo or curiosity shop where you can pick those that you might help organize, as so many Harvard students do. If you sometimes think, up a persona that suits you. as you make these choices, about what kind of self this seminar (or this sport, or this club, or this office) will help acting, we “disclose ourselves” and thus expose ourselves to pos- you to become, you may find guidance here. Does this activity prom- sible misunderstanding or exploitation by others, but also to the ise to make you a deeper, fuller, more interesting person? Does it ex- rich possibilities of communication. pand your life in new ways, or build on what you have done before in Speech and action, in Arendt’s sense, cannot exist in isolation; ways that make you stronger? Does it challenge you to develop new they are meaningful only within human relationships. By the same mental or emotional muscles, so to speak? token, “human nature”—as distinct from our more animal quali- Taking too many familiar or “safe” courses, embarking on yet ties—depends precisely on our capacity for speech and action: it one more extracurricular activity without any particular passion is in fact through speech and action that each of us constitutes our for it, won’t allow you to answer these questions with a convinc- self. This is Arendt’s distinctive contribution to our discussion of ing “yes.” You have time here at Harvard to fashion yourself, but self-fashioning: the self is created not by each of us as individuals in isola- not enough time to dribble it away or remain locked in your old tion, but through the activities we share with other human beings—language, comfort zone. You should stretch yourself, take some risks. creativity, striving, politics. If your goal is to fashion a worthwhile self, As Montaigne says about travel: “The mind is continually exer- you should be mindful of your surroundings and choose compan- cised in observing new and unknown things; and I know no bet- ions and activities that will give you opportunities to develop ter school...for forming one’s life than to set before it constantly your language, creativity, striving, and politics in more depth. the diversity of so many other lives, ideas, customs, and to make it taste such a perpetual variety of the forms of our nature.” You Self-fashioning and citizenship can do this through actual travel, time spent studying or working his awareness of the importance of our relationships abroad, as many of you will during your Harvard years; but you with others in fashioning the self also highlights our re- can also do it through virtual travel—courses in history, litera- Tsponsibilities to those outside ourselves, and the ways ture, art, anthropology and other disciplines that expose you to in which your education should prepare you to discharge these “the diversity of so many other lives.” duties effectively. We have particular responsibilities as citizens of democracies that impose on us more weighty duties (and pro- Society and self-fashioning vide much richer opportunities) than those available to subjects ccording to these pieces of advice, you should think of an autocrat. And one of the main aspects of self-fashioning about society not as a kind of zoo or curiosity shop where that should concern you is preparing yourself seriously for good Ayou can pick up a persona that suits you, but as the source citizenship. Only in that way can you be one of those individu- of inspirational exemplars, diverse possible ways of shaping your- als who actively works to build a better community—political, self, fascinating models. This means reading biographies and his- social, economic—rather than one who just accepts what’s on of-

Harvard Magazine 45 Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 fer, accommodates to second or fifth best, lives with corruption, riences of members of the two sexes in all known societies are de- inertia, degradation of public life and public services, and mostly monstrably different in some important ways, from infancy to old retreats into private life. age. Some of this is culture, some of it is biology. That is why you The urge to retreat into private life—the gated community, the can’t just take for granted that anything that goes for men goes for corporate jet, the hired car, the private school—as the public women, too. But ignoring this fact, or assuming that a world around us decays is one of the most powerful woman is just a deficient version of a man, temptations you will face. You will of course enjoy is one of the most fundamental er- some of these private benefits if you are suf- rors of many past thinkers. ficiently privileged by wealth and good This point is made with luck. But if you are to have a whole, integrated, particular eloquence in complete self, you must resist becoming totally Virginia Woolf’s essay A immersed in private spheres. You must see Room of One’s Own, which it as part of your self-interest and your was originally a lec- moral duty to play your part in society, ture to undergradu- to give something of yourself away to ates at Cambridge others who are in need, to help sustain University in 1928. the common structures that make up our Woolf’s major point public life. If you fail to do this, you in this essay is that will become a shrunken and dimin- across history, ished self. Recognition of this fact men have been far is what Alexis de Tocqueville called more likely than “self-interest rightly understood,” or women to enjoy “enlightened self-interest”: not pure egoism certain advan- or selfishness, but caring for yourself in the tages—control of context of acknowledging your responsibili- wealth, higher edu- ties to others, which brings with it significant cation, opportunities moral commitments and deep rewards. for travel. These ad- At a time when democracy is passion- vantages have given men ately sought by people in countries a much better preparation for pro- around the world, and countries that fessional life, for writing books, for have long enjoyed democracy political life, for adventuring into are struggling to sustain it society, for self-fashioning in against multiple pres- whatever they may choose sures, education for to do. citizenship is one These resources of the most power- have also given men ful arguments for a more scope for soli- liberal-arts educa- tude. Men can shut tion. Our democracy themselves up in their needs citizens who can workshops or their li- think for themselves, assess arguments made by people who have braries and ignoreHannah the needs Arendt of children or the kitchen. Just hav- a stake in a particular outcome, attend to nuances in difficult pol- ing “a room of one’s own,” where you can retreat to think and icy situations, and respect the interests and the dignity of others write and work or simply be your solitary self, is a privilege that who are not like them. We need citizens who can empathize with relatively few women in history have enjoyed—only the compara- others and take responsibility for working with other citizens tively wealthy ones, who may sometimes have more solitude than to help fix things, not just throw up their hands and gripe about they would want because they are denied outlets into the world what’s wrong. And that is surely connected with self-fashioning. open to their brothers, husbands, and fathers. So whether they have too little solitude or too much, women Solitude, society, and the sexes have often had a different experience of solitude and society ow that we have established our rich and un- from men. Men can leave the house and go off on a journey in breakable connections to society, noted our obligations many societies where women can never travel alone. Women in Nto be fully participating members of the public sphere, most cultures have had much less opportunity than men to ex- and discussed the ways in which our relationships with other plore the world, follow their adventurous inclinations. And they selves powerfully shape our own individuality, we can appreci- have been less likely to have a place or time where they can enjoy ate more fully why occasional solitude is also important, and how solitude. It’s worth keeping this in mind when you read authors solitude and society can work together to fashion our full selves. who write about self-fashioning. You can sometimes stop and I note once again that our species comes in two basic variants, ask: Would this advice have worked for a woman in the society male and female. Both are fully human individuals. But the expe- this author is describing? Or are these (please turn to page 75)

46 September - October 2013 Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 John Harvard’s Journal UnCommon Space: The plaza between Harvard Yard and the Science Center has been remade as a campus crossroads. It features fixed and movable seating, anchors for reunion tents, wiring for movie nights and other performances, and a trilevel planting of ginkgo trees, sumacs, and ferns to soften the Science Center facade and provide shade and year-round visual interest. Chris Reed ’91 of Stoss Landscape Urbanism was the principal designer; for details, see http:// harvardmag.com/plaza-13. Photograph by Jim Harrison

Photograph by Les Vants Aerial Photos/courtesy of Harvard Art Museums Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 John Harvard's Journal

conducted two or more focus, atop schools’ priori- The Campaign Context fund drives in the interim); ties, to enable inquiry across and newly challenging eco- disciplinary boundaries. Contemporary university fundraising nomic circumstances (the • Internationalization. She drives collect stupendous sums: the Stan- $11-billion decline in the pointed as well to the impor- ford Challenge attracted $6.23 billion; the endowment’s value in fiscal tance of “enabling Harvard to University of Southern California has set year 2009, uneven invest- be global”—to take advan- a $6-billion goal. Given Harvard’s place in ment results since, and now tage of a more open world by American higher education, a similar sum is reduced federal research bringing people to campus to likely to headline coverage of The Harvard support). study and conduct research, Campaign at its public unveiling on Sep- University-wide, Faust and enabling students and tember 21. But the academic aims for which emphasized four broad professors to work world- Drew Faust the campaign seeks support, and the chang- themes: rose lincoln/harvard news office wide. ing context in which it is conducted, mat- • Access and talent. “What we are,” she • The digital world. “New digital op- ter far more to Harvard’s future. In summer said, “is going to depend in no small part portunities in higher education,” she said, conversations, President Drew Faust and on who we are.” Hence, a strong campaign impel broad focus on teaching and learn- Provost Alan M. Garber provided a broad focus on financial aid and on faculty re- ing, and on broader questions of privacy, overview of their capital-campaign goals. sources. data security, and so on. Dan Shore, vice president for finance and • Interdisciplinary scholarship and How these motifs play out as specific chief financial officer, put it in the context learning. Faust pointed to “the changing campaign goals will unfold over time—at of forces reshaping research universities (see nature of knowledge and the integration the September 21 launch events; during “Financial Focus”). of knowledge across fields”—a University the following 18 months as the individual The campaign aims to make Harvard “stronger in every way,” Faust said: intellectually, in facilities, and financially. The during the prior decade (when fundraising latter objective, she noted, sounds obvious Financial Focus had to be deferred), “There are things we but is not: gifts can initiate but not fully “About 75 percent of our revenues are didn’t feel we could wait to do.” One ex- pay for new programs that require addi- from the endowment, tuition, and spon- ample is financial aid. Since the undergrad- tional University funds. Such demands can sored research,” reports Dan Shore, Har- uate-aid initiative was liberalized in 2007 compete with the core goals: strengthen- vard’s vice president for finance and chief through the academic year just begun, ing Harvard’s capacity to attract superb financial officer. “And about 75 percent of spending on such scholarships has risen students and scholars and support their our expenses are for people and space. about 90 percent—an increase of nearly learning, teaching, and research; and se- The growth of revenue is challenged, and $90 million in the Faculty of Arts and Sci- lectively pursuing new priorities. In this the growth in expenses is tough to man- ences’ (FAS) annual budget. According to sense, Faust emphasized, the campaign is age and sticky.” FAS, in the wake of the augmented aid, carefully balanced. That reflects continu- Unpacking those realities provides a fi- greater family need during the recession, ing costs from Harvard’s robust expan- nancial setting for The Harvard Cam- and the depreciation of its endowment, sion during the past dozen years (in ex- paign—a context Shore and Corporation just 46 percent of current College scholar- pensive laboratories and other facilities, member James F. Rothenberg, the Univer- ship funding is underpinned by dedicated the professorial ranks, and financial aid); sity’s treasurer, began to detail in their endowments. That makes it challenging to the long period since the University Cam- preface to the annual financial report, pub- sustain aid, and sops up much of the avail- paign concluded in 1999 (many peers have lished last autumn (see “Sober Finances,” able unrestricted funding (from tuition and January-February, page 47). They wrote current-use gifts)—limiting FAS’s ability to about the challenges of volatile capital mar- invest in new priorities, or to replace lost In this Issue kets for an institution dependent on its federal research funding. University-wide, endowment and with a “disproportion- according to Shore, scholarships are a core 50 The E-mail Investigation ately fixed cost structure.” They pointed value, but with aid only about 50 percent 51 Harvard Portrait to University reliance on federal funding, endowed, Harvard needs to raise a lot of 52 Education and Opportunity especially for biomedical research, “when money to secure them. 53 Yesterday’s News the government’s projected deficits and Similarly, FAS has begun House renew- 54 Invigorating the Humanities accumulated debt create enormous pres- al, undertaking multimillion-dollar refur- 56 Where the Women Aren’t sure to reduce such discretionary dollars.” bishments of Old Quincy and Leverett’s 57 Allston Advances And they noted the costs of daily and de- McKinlock Hall, and proceeding with 58 The Undergraduate ferred campus maintenance. Dunster House’s roof, chimneys, and win- 59 Brevia “The campaign is incredibly important,” dows ahead of interior renovation—all 62 Sports Shore said in an early-July conversation— under way this summer, using FAS funds 64 Alumni in part because even absent new resources and some recent gifts. 68 The College Pump

48 September - October 2013 schools begin their own fundraising ef- quires for teaching and its during the next decade, much forts; and throughout the anticipated five- burgeoning interdisciplin- of it tied to campaign sup- year public Harvard Campaign itself, Faust ary, applied research in as- port—see “Allston Advances,” indicated. Some priorities will become sociation with other Har- page 57.) more concrete as academic leadership co- vard schools. That facility Faust sketched some of alesces around desired aims; she pointed will be the foundation for the inherently cross-school to the 2012 creation of edX, Harvard’s future Harvard growth programs the campaign will online-learning partnership with MIT, as in Allston. Another major attempt to support—many an example of a significant effort that did goal is the comprehensive pursuing new intellectual op- not exist two years earlier, when campaign renewal of the College’s portunities where research planning was already well under way. residential Houses—a and teaching can have “a real Alan M. But a few concrete objectives can be dis- $1-billion-plus program al- impact on the world”—in

Garber ose lincoln/harvard news office cerned now. Beyond financial aid, priorities ready under way. (Other, R fields such as global health; that loom large, Provost Garber said, in- substantial building plans include more energy and the environment; stem-cell clude a flagship intellectual goal and its as- investment in common spaces, like the re- science; and neuroscience. Presumably, sociated building needs: securing sufficient newed Science Center plaza (page 47), and elaborating such programs will also help endowment and other funds to support the especially the Allston construction and specify how Harvard wishes to define its School of Engineering and Applied Scienc- renovation envisioned for Harvard Busi- global footprint. es (SEAS, formally established as a school ness School [HBS] and the athletic facili- Harvard will also “foreground” peda- within the Faculty of Arts and Sciences ties, detailed in the University’s regulatory gogy and learning, Faust said, building [FAS] in 2007) and its planned expansion; filing with Boston authorities on July 26, on diverse elements such as the Harvard and providing the large new facilities it recovering 1.4 million square feet of projects Initiative on Learning and Teaching and

So the campaign must backstop these All these factors are at work at Harvard tinuing program to reduce debt, Shore very large programs; enable Harvard to Medical School (HMS). Following a $29-mil- said—and continues to examine other as- pursue what Shore called an “amazing set lion operating deficit in fiscal 2012, admin- sets. An April debt refinancing will yield of opportunities”; and guard against loom- istrators anticipate reporting a roughly annual savings of $10 million or so during ing problems. The importance of flexible $40-million deficit in the year ended June the bonds’ remaining couple of decades funding has if anything risen since that 2012 30. That reflects declines in sponsored- until maturity. financial report, simply to sustain the cur- research funding generally; routine increas- In the meantime, planning disciplines ad- rent research enterprise. Given the new es in salaries and costs for supplies; and opted since the roller-coaster circumstanc- federal budget “sequester” and continuing investments in new programs (like the sys- es of the prior decade have better equipped challenges to research grants, he said tems therapeutics initiative; see “System- Harvard “to operate as a truly integrated starkly, “a different social contract” be- atic Drug Discovery,” July-August, page 54). academic institution and administrative ap- tween government and universities is in In response, HMS’s Next initiative has iden- paratus,” Shore said, from capital planning prospect, raising the challenge of defend- tified possible savings within the school’s and annual and longer-term budgeting to ing “why universities are sufficiently im- administrative and operating expenses coordinated reporting to, and decisionmak- portant to justify the investment govern- (which make up about one-quarter of its ing by, the expanded Corporation and its ments make in us and with us.” He $625-million budget overall), and the new financial committees. Launching new described the situation as “an acute indus- school is seeking opportunities to realize programs, he said, has become “a much try challenge” for higher education. Har- new revenues from scientific discoveries. more challenging question”—a productive vard’s planning, he noted, also assumes Writ large, the same forces and respons- state of affairs, he maintained, given finan- less robust capital markets es are evident across Har- cial constraints and the sheer costs of op- and endowment returns vard. Even as fundraising erating a research university. Compared to than in recent decades. proceeds, Shore said, it will a decade ago, “We’re much better able to (Such concerns, raised for “have to be accompanied by focus the campaign’s targets on the things all of higher education by other things: changes that that are most important to us.” debt-rating agencies in the not all members of the com- “The campaign by itself, however suc- past year, were reinforced ffice munity will find exciting” cessful, won’t solve some of those prob- in an Inside Higher Ed sum- (from shared services to lems,” Shore said, referring to the mer survey of university changes in employee bene- changed external climate. But it matters chief financial officers: only O N ews H arvard fits). In the financial realm, especially now, he said, because even as small minorities expressed for example, Harvard sold all universities cope with large uncertain- confidence in their schools’ its Watertown Arsenal real ties, “The campaign is a way we can feel Dan financial models during the Shore estate this spring, realizing emboldened” to “take our destiny in our tephanie Mitchell/ tephanie next half-decade.) S $168 million, part of a con- own hands.”

Harvard Magazine 49 Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 John Harvard's Journal edX. This encompasses “hands-on learning” of a sort the University has not previously embraced, she noted, via the “mak- News from Our Website ing” aspects of cognition in at least two realms: engineering and applied sciences Harvardmagazine.com brings you continuous coverage of University and alumni news. (tying into the priority given to SEAS) Log on to find these stories and more: and the arts (aspirations detailed in a 2008 task-force report Faust commissioned The Gates of Harvard Yard early in her presidency; implementation A new e-book explores the history of has been slowed by the financial crisis Harvard Yard’s 25 gates. and recession). Comparable interest ap- harvardmag.com/gates-13 pears in HBS’s experience-oriented first- year FIELD course, which complements New EPA Administrator Gives Inaugural Speech the traditional case-based pedagogy, and at Harvard Law School in the Harvard Innovation Lab, used by Gina McCarthy affirms President Obama’s commitment students from many schools. (Discussing to addressing climate change. work on teaching across the University, harvardmag.com/epa-13 HBS dean Nitin Nohria recently said, “I’ve been struck by how much of the experi- Blake’s Whales mentation does have this quality of mak- Zoological artwork by Agassiz student ing learning more visceral, team-based, James Henry Blake is on display at the MCZ. and action-oriented.”) harvardmag.com/whales-13 As the emergence of applied-sciences and arts initiatives suggests, priority- setting for the campaign has itself been a stay connected - harvardmagazine.com protracted undertaking. Garber said the schools’ academic plans played the most ic substantive goals—will roll out in ticipation. During the planning process, important role, as refined through meet- turn (FAS, the Harvard School of Public Faust said, it became clear that this is a ings of the council of deans (who identi- Health, and the Radcliffe Institute are on “particularly salient moment for higher fied common and cross-school wants) and deck for late October). Faust mentioned education,” a time to think through Har- the work of such existing entities as the as examples the undergraduate concentra- vard’s priorities as higher education it- University Committee on the Arts (an out- tion in architecture and design and a pro- self changes—intellectually, and under growth of the 2008 report) and the Univer- posed program in theater and dance per- pressure from external economic and so- sity Science and Engineering Committee formance, both with teaching connections cial forces—and to help define directions (dating to 2007). well beyond the College. for the academy at large. “Rallying the Their recommendations were refined As the effort gears up, Faust and Gar- community on behalf of higher educa- using criteria developed by Reid professor ber both stressed the reinforcement of tion”—as she put it—during a period of of law (and former acting dean) Howell community among alumni—and not uncertainty, or even doubt, in the larger Jackson to identify goals of University sig- just for the hoped-for, tangible benefits society would in itself be an important nificance (whether multiple schools were of wide, successful philanthropic par- accomplishment. involved, potential intellectual impact, and so on). That helped Garber when he assumed his post in 2011 and, Faust joked, The E-mail Investigation ating found no intentional violation of any “became the repository of people’s aspira- requirement that resident deans be noti- tions” for campaign funding. Of late, he Three searches of Harvard College resi- fied of the searches (a point of ambiguity and colleagues have determined which dent deans’ e-mail accounts last Septem- in University policies—they were not no- initiatives have leadership in place, how ber—prompted by unauthorized disclosure tified), and stated, “[T]here is no evidence they fit with or augment existing proof Administrative Board communications that any of the individuals involved read the grams, and so on. A group of supporters during an investigation of widespread mis- content of any e-mails that were identified who helped test the feasibility of funding conduct on a final exam—“were undertaken as a result of these searches.” ideas has morphed into the campaign ex- in good faith” by people who “believed that Keating’s report was delivered to Faust ecutive committee. The result will be the they were acting in compliance with ap- and a subcommittee of Corporation mem- first truly all-University campaign, with plicable e-mail privacy policies.” So found bers on July 15, reviewed by the entire Cor- every school participating. an outside review conducted by attorney poration later that week, and made public Individual school objectives—how Michael B. Keating, LL.B. ’65, as requested on July 22. The detailed narrative covers many existing professorships to try to by President Drew Faust last April, after the brief period within which all the e- endow and where to try to establish new further e-mail searches were reported (see mail account searches took place and the ones, for instance, or discipline-specif- “E-mail Imbroglio,” May-June, page 46). Ke- targets of those searches, which extended

50 September - October 2013 Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 to resident deans’ communications harvard portrait with student advisees (presumably those concerned about involvement in

oag the misconduct investigation) oley H and with report- ers for The Har- vard Crimson (and, courtesy of F Michael B. it turns out, The Keating Boston Globe) covering the story. Among the details Keating uncovered: • Beyond conducting searches of accounts maintained by Harvard University Information Technology (HUIT) and by an outside vendor (where some resident deans’ accounts resided), HUIT “archived” or made copies of all the resident deans’ administrative accounts for possible review at a later date. • During the review of “metadata” for the 17 resident deans’ accounts, HUIT and the outside vendor, respectively, scanned 14,000 and 17,000 e-mail accounts’ information, in all—including, it is now known, faculty and staff members’ and students’. • The searches were apparently conducted within the interpretation by Harvard’s Office of the General Counsel (OGC) of some, but not all, of existing University e-mail privacy policies (some of Judith Grant Long which, it became clear after the fact, overlap, are inconsistent, or leave gaps). “Like most city planners, I’m a city planner and something else,” says Judith Grant Long, Responding to the report, Faust said in M.D.S. ’95, Ph.D. ’02, RI ’12, associate professor of urban planning at the Graduate School a statement that she was “reassured” by of Design. The “something else” involves sports and finance: once Canada’s third-ranked Keating’s conclusion that the individuals junior squash player, she later studied economics in college. Afterward, while work- who undertook the searches acted in good ing as a consultant, she realized that local governments often oversubsidize developers faith and in a manner they believed to be pushing big sports stadiums. She came to Harvard for a design-studies master’s, and consistent with policy and with “a guiding met Christopher Long ’82, M.B.A. ’87, while waiting for friends at Harvest. (The couple responsibility for safeguarding student recently celebrated their tenth anniversary there; they live in Concord with their two confidentiality and the integrity of the daughters.) Grant Long joined the GSD in 2005. Her first book, Public-Private Partnerships Ad Board process.” She continued: “Un- for Major League Sports Facilities, argues that big stadiums almost always cost taxpayers fortunately, the detailed factual account… dearly: Hamilton County, Ohio, for example, recently sold a hospital to cover debt pay- deepens my already substantial concerns ments on a Bengals stadium. But stadiums may confer other benefits, she says, in par- about troubling failures of both policy and ticular as redevelopment projects or sources of civic pride. Her current research on the execution. The findings strengthen my Olympics shows that hosts almost never recoup their investment, either, but often have view that we need much clearer, better, other motives for seeking the Games: “The classic example is Beijing in 2008, announc- and more widely understood policies and ing its arrival as a sort-of-free-market economy.” For smaller cities, Grant Long says protocols in place….” less-expensive soccer stadiums, which can be used by students and professional players Corporation member William F. Lee alike, are among the best sports-facility investments. Otherwise, she advises, build parks said in an accompanying statement that and recreation areas that serve both kids and adults. “I’d like to take the focus off the big Keating’s “detailed account…makes it even leagues,” she says, and encourage “sports, at the local level, that are multigenerational.” clearer than before that there is much work

Photograph by Jim Harrison Harvard Magazine 51 Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 John Harvard's Journal

ahead in improving the University’s poli- es knew about it.” airing diverse views on al- cies and protocols concerning privacy of, • The level at which fu- ternative courses of action and access to, electronic communications.” ture requests to conduct (including but not limited Lee pointed to the University task force such investigations must be to e-mail searches), on the examining such questions—chartered by authorized, and whether, in consequences of those al- Faust and chaired by Green professor of practice, the OGC attorney ternatives (versus search- public law David Barron—for those pro- or other authorizing per- es), on the mechanics and posed improvements. sonnel have the opportunity scope of any searches, and Among the issues the Keating investiga- to discuss the rationale for so on—even under time tion raises for task-force consideration are: and mechanics of a search, pressure. The community • The technological knowledge of the or to challenge the deci- will want assurance that administrators and OGC attorneys with sion to proceed with such these critical decisions and itchell/harvard news office news m itchell/harvard stephanie authority to approve and oversee such searches. William F. Lee actions take place within searches. In September 2012, the the context of improved, • The coordination of University and decisions to investigate resident deans’ coherent, and well-communicated poli- school policies, particularly given the e-mail accounts were made under ex- cies. The Barron task force has much im- finding that the OGC attorney did not re- treme time pressure (as detailed in the portant work to accomplish this fall. view a Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) Keating report). It is not obvious that a Read a detailed account of the Keating policy on the privacy of faculty electronic great deal was gained by proceeding, yet investigation, with a link to the full report, materials; in fact, according to Keating, much harm was done when the investi- at http://harvardmag.com/keating-13. An “in 2012, no attorney at the OGC appears gations were revealed, piecemeal, last analysis of the investigation, unanswered to have been aware of its existence. Also, spring. In the future, the University will questions, and issues facing the Barron neither the HUIT Employee nor the FAS no doubt want organizational structures task force is accessible at http://harvard- administrators who approved the search- and a culture in place that encourage mag.com/email-13.

James Ryan, the new dean of the Har- James Ryan vard Graduate School of Education (GSE), argues persuasively that the second most significant ruling about school desegregation is Milliken v. Bradley, which the Court decided in 1974. The decision was momen- tous for the opposite reason: it halted the startlingly short-lived national effort to desegregate public schools, heavily segregated by race because of widespread segregation in housing. The justices ruled, 5-4, that a metropolitan area could not desegregate a city’s largely black school district by consolidat- ing it with largely white suburban districts and transporting students between them, unless there was proof that suburbs had deliberately devised separate schools for blacks and for whites or were otherwise liable for segregation across district lines. The majority said de jure segregation (caused by the state or a local government) was different from de facto segregation (resulting from social and economic fac- Education and Opportunity tors, like lower housing prices in the city and white flight to the suburbs) and that it The Supreme Court seemed to close a the justices called for an absolute end to a was constitutional to address only the first long, fraught chapter in American history pervasive consequence of America’s racial through a metropolitan-wide effort. in 1954 when it held that the Constitution divide. The ruling is often called the most It is common among education reform- prohibits every state from maintaining sepa- important of the Court in the twentieth cen- ers to describe the country’s current edu- rate public schools for blacks and for whites. tury; it is clearly the most important about cation crisis as “the civil-rights issue of In Brown v. Board of Education, by a vote of 9-0, school desegregation. our time.” For Ryan, that is literally so:

52 September - October 2013 Photograph by Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard News Office Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 the crisis stems from the failure to desegregate public schools after the Supreme Court would not let remedies for reform Yesterday’s News cross the line between city and suburbs, a From the pages of the Harvard Alumni Bulletin and Harvard Magazine fundamental divide of geography, race, and class. He tells this far-reaching yet little- 1923 The College admits 940 appli- now be no such gallant abandon” as in the known story in Five Miles Away, A World cants, its largest class ever. For the first extravagant pre-war days. Apart, published in 2010. It contrasts the time, those in the top seventh of their experiences of the struggling Thomas Jef- preparatory schools have been admitted An Alumni Notes item summarizes news- ferson High School in Richmond, Virginia, without having to take entrance exams. paper accounts of the adventures of Lieu- and the thriving Freeman High School in tenant (jg) John F. Kennedy ’40 following the nearby suburb of Henrico County. 1928 Radcliffe College surveys its the sinking of his PT boat. Freeman was then 73 percent white and married graduates to find out “what sort 75 percent middle class. TJ, as the other of men its alumnae prefer to marry.” The 1948 The Graduate School of Design school is known, was 82 percent black and answer is clear: 53 percent chose Harvard joins the Schools of Education, Public mostly poor. Students at the first easily men, with MIT second (5 percent) and Health, Medicine, Dental Medicine, and exceeded Virginia’s academic standards on Yale third (2.5 percent). “Clearly,” the Public Administration in formally admit- statewide tests. At the second, they strug- editors add, “undergraduate charm de- ting women to its program, and the Crim- gled to meet them and didn’t see the point creases with the square of the distance.” son opens its comp to Radcliffe students. of the tests—even though the amount of money spent on the education of each stu- 1933 The editors report that “Inter- 1958 A new residential option, the dent was notably higher at TJ. est in football seems to be at a low ebb in Harvard Cooperative House—the first The book explains that today’s crisis Cambridge,” a trend prevailing at other of its type at the College—opens at 3 in American education in K-12 schools is colleges as well. They speculate that the Sacramento Street after more than 1,000 predominantly a crisis of the bottom 30 decline is due to a combination of stu- hours of refurbishing and renovations to percent, with students from low-income dents preferring to participate in athlet- the building. Future upkeep and other families in urban schools lagging badly ics, rather than cheer on their class- chores will be done on a rotating basis by behind students from middle-income and mates, and the possibility that its 29 residents. wealthier families in suburban schools in elaborate rules and coaching make every measure: test scores, graduation football “an uninteresting struggle.” 1968 Columbia University student rates, and rates of going to college. But revolutionary Mark Rudd, on concluding the isolation of low-income minority 1943 The Bulletin adopts its a brief Cambridge visit, observes that students in cities (and increasingly own “fighting format” for the du- Harvard students just don’t seem to have of low-income black and Latino ration. Type size and paper weight enough issues to protest about. students in racially segregated and are reduced, and alumni are asked isolated suburban schools) means to curtail their letters to the edi- 1983 Nuclear-disarmament activist that middle-class and wealthier tor, because “there Carla Johnston, the former deputy direc- white suburban students are also can tor of the Union of Concerned Scientists, isolated, at a measurable cost. becomes the first Peace Fellow at Rad- In an increasingly diverse na- cliffe’s Bunting Institute. tion, a substantial body of scholarship shows, it is best for students of all races, ethnicities, and backgrounds to learn from each others’ points of view. Stu- dents in integrated schools are more tolerant and less preju- diced, measured by the tendency to accept and connect with people of other races versus holding them at a distance and turning them into negative stereotypes. They are more likely to want to go to integrated colleges, live in diverse neighborhoods, and work

Illustration by Mark Steele Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 John Harvard's Journal with people from different backgrounds. tion can also “bring political benefits and allows schools to fulfill a civic mission, Since the Milliken ruling, there has been greater accountability,” through “a criti- seeking to teach students not only read- a vast effort to improve public education cal mass of active and engaged parents” ing, writing, and arithmetic, but also how for students from kindergarten through who are “more likely to have the clout to to be better citizens. In the twenty-first high school with an extensive range of fight successfully for resources,” to moni- century, Ryan wrote, that must include reforms. These include substantial spend- tor “principal and teacher performance,” “understanding and friendship across ing to boost student achievement in urban and contribute to the effectiveness of their lines of class and race.” schools, networks of charter schools as child’s school. alternatives in urban public districts, and A student from a poor family is much Ryan, who is 47, is a sterling example of academic benchmarks on standardized more likely to succeed academically in a what can happen when talent and drive tests for schools as well as students. school filled mostly with middle-class stu- are empowered by family and fine teach- From his sweeping research, however, dents than in one filled mostly with low- ers. He grew up in a blue-collar family in Ryan concluded that only one reform er-income students. And students from New Jersey, where his father worked for the would make a sea change of difference in middle-income families maintain their telephone company, repairing phone lines the overall performance and development achievement when they go to school with and then supervising repair crews, and his of American students. That reform would students from poor families, if the school mother was a bookkeeper. Neither went to mandate the most ambitious kind of inte- maintains a majority of middle-class stu- college, but they insisted there was no limit gration: with students of different classes dents. to what he could accomplish. Teachers of and races, from cities and adjacent sub- “The same is true for racial integration,” his in public schools reinforced that mes- urbs, transported across district lines to Ryan wrote. “The socioeconomic composi- sage. With a scholarship and other financial go to school together. tion of a school matters more to academic aid, he went to Yale, graduating summa cum This kind of integration makes schools achievement than the racial composition.” laude and Phi Beta Kappa in 1988. more likely to have the elements that im- But to “give up entirely on racial diversity,” He took a gap year after college—play- prove academic achievement, Ryan wrote: he went on, “is to accept the narrowing of ing rugby on a team made up of New Eng- “strong principals, talented and engaged expectations for public schools….” land college players who toured New Zea- teachers, reasonable class sizes, a rich cur- That narrowing refers to a focus solely land and Australia; working as a children’s riculum, high expectations on the part of on academic goals, with the abandonment ski instructor in Colorado; and, in rural students and teachers alike, adequate fa- of civic goals—like fostering ties that bind Kentucky, spending a couple of months cilities, and active parents.” Such integra- Americans as “We the People.” Integration volunteering, through Catholic Charities,

Invigorating the Humanities

Three new introductory courses in Harvard’s under- job market, or—in an argument graduate arts and humanities curriculum debut this more focused on Harvard and fall. “The Art of Listening,” “The Art of Reading,” and “The Art similar institutions—as a conse- of Looking” are “predisciplinary” introductions to fundamental quence of growing numbers of problems, histories of meaning, and critical methods in the arts students on financial aid. and humanities, effected through intensive study of exemplary But data gathered during the sounds, texts, images, and objects. A full-year arts and humanities study at Harvard, where the de- survey course for freshmen and sophomores will follow in 2014- cline has been most pronounced 15. The new courses were developed during an 18-month study during the past decade, show of the humanities at Harvard, where enrollments in fields such as that financial aid has little impact

English, music, and the visual arts have fallen by half since 1966. on which concentrations under- justin ide/harvard news office Commissioned by Faculty of Arts and Sciences dean of the arts graduates ultimately choose. Diana Sorensen and humanities Diana Sorensen and released as a collection of What the evidence shows in- reports in early June, the Harvard study, which involved 40 fac- stead is that students who indicate an intention to concentrate in ulty members, was reinforced nationally a few weeks later by an a humanities discipline “defect” to other concentrations at a much American Academy of Arts and Sciences report to Congress. higher rate than students who plan to study other fields. Among Both reports found, broadly, a dwindling proportion of students students who do choose to concentrate in humanities, satisfaction concentrating in the humanities. Theories to explain the decline is very high (93 percent). “We have less a ‘crisis’ in the humanities have ranged from general assertions that the humanities are less in Harvard College,” the report states, “than a challenge and op- relevant to contemporary society (or that technological gadgetry portunity”; and “we should arrest and reverse the decline of con- hinders efforts at sustained observation and reflection) to spe- centrator numbers by focusing on freshmen.” cific economic arguments: that preprofessionalism among under- “The point of an undergraduate education in the humanities,” graduates is rising, for example, either as consequence of a difficult Sorensen explained in an interview with this magazine, “is to

54 September - October 2013 Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 in a group home for disabled kids. and Ryan served together as members of not often done, to help solve fundamental On a full merit scholarship, Ryan went its board of trustees. The school, started problems in education. to the University of Virginia Law School, for young people who had been in the ju- The GSE’s focus is on the intersection where he continued to play rugby and venile justice system, now also teaches for- of scholarship, policy, and practice. Ryan’s graduated first in his class in 1992. He mer dropouts and students needing spe- mandate includes continuing to build its clerked for Chief Judge J. Clifford Wal- cial education. They are mostly black and two doctoral programs: its recent, highly lace of the United States Court of Appeals from low-income families. sought-after one in education leadership, for the Ninth Circuit and for Chief Justice “How much is Jim Ryan willing to roll which is training leaders for school dis- William Rehnquist of the Supreme Court, up his sleeves and help solve nitty-gritty tricts, government agencies, and other key and worked for two years as a public-in- problems?” Forman asked, and answered: organizations in how to apply current ef- terest lawyer in New Jersey, on a landmark “He analyzed school data to help the fective policies and practices; and its new, case in state court about increasing fund- school figure out how to boost the atten- cross-disciplinary program in education ing for poor school districts. dance rate of students who were chronic research, which in the fall of 2014 will be- Since joining the University of Virgin- no-shows.” The school gave points to stu- gin training future scholars, policymakers, ia’s law faculty in 1998, Ryan has focused dents who showed up, and rewards for and others in how to develop more effec- on how American law and politics have points accrued, like a day’s exemption tive policies and practices. shaped education and opportunity dur- from having to wear the school uniform. His most recent research, an example of ing the past half-century, often impeding Harvard president Drew Faust said the latter, explores why special education or undermining the progress they were in- she heard “a chorus of acclaim” when she in America’s public schools must change tended to bring about. His work has been spoke with people in education about because of compelling lessons from neuro- about root causes and basic solutions, re- Ryan as a candidate for dean. His belief science. The main federal law governing this moved from ideology. He was honored as that his life was transformed by the oppor- area of education assumes that learning dis- one of the university’s best teachers, and tunity he had to get a great college educa- abilities are internal—caused, for example, has also won a national reputation, as Yale tion is “all but inseparable,” she empha- by an injury to the brain. The law does not Law School’s James Forman Jr. has de- sized, from his passion for helping provide cover learning problems resulting from ex- scribed it, “as the best scholar in this niche similar opportunities for young Americans ternal sources, like growing up in poverty. of legal scholarship.” without great means. She is excited by Meanwhile, the learning disabled make Forman co-founded the Maya Angelou his excitement that being dean puts him up 5 percent of the country’s public- Charter School, in Washington, D.C.; he in a position, as being a law professor has school students, but draw more than 20 develop habits of mind, to develop a sense of how to reason rigor- will facilitate cross-divisional teaching and offer greater visibil- ously, how to express ideas in a compelling way, and how to write ity to courses that transcend the cultural and/or disciplinary well….We want to make that clear, and then find a way to draw boundaries into which departments are divided. By encourag- students into our courses.” ing cross-disciplinary teaching initiatives that reach beyond our To that end, the Rothenberg professor of Romance languages Division and even beyond FAS, this new Arts and Humanities and literatures and of comparative literature continued, the study section will enable our Division to promote intellectual ex- re-envisions the curriculum as “a platform to create courses that change and a more active culture of collaboration across the undergraduates care about: how do you build a meaningful life, University. what do you think about war, or what is the meaning of love?” Looking further ahead, the study suggests developing intern- Such a curriculum should also “forge ties that connect depart- ships that show students the desirability of humanities degrees, ments” she said, and “give our students a sense of a social and whether for finding jobs or for pursuing graduate study. (Half of academic collective to which they can belong.” admitted medical-school students, for example, have concen- The hope is that the new gateway courses, by providing a com- trated in one of the humanities.) Another proposal suggests fa- mon introductory experience that can be shared by a large num- cilitating an option for humanities study as a secondary field in ber of students, will reinvigorate recruitment, particularly during combination, for example, with physics or chemistry—perhaps undergraduates’ first year; and also improve integration within using the new introductory courses as a foundation. (According the division of arts and humanities. All three courses, and a few to its catalog description, “The Art of Looking,” taught by profes- other divisional arts and humanities offerings, should count for sors Robin Kelsey and Jennifer L. Roberts, will hone “skills of concentration credit, the study recommends. Further, to bolster visual, material, and spatial analysis through encounters with aes- the retention of likely concentrators, the report suggests im- thetic objects from Harvard’s collections” and also “approach proved advising and outreach as well as enhanced coordination looking through a consideration of key technologies from its his- and collaboration among clusters of freshman seminars in the arts tory, such as the telescope, the television, and the easel painting.”) and humanities. “Though varied in tack and emphasis,” Sorensen said, “these The study also calls for reviving an aggregration of arts and efforts share a common goal: the collective assertion of the hu- humanities course listings in the online catalog: manities as an essential foundational element in American liberal Reviving an Arts and Humanities section starting in 2013-14 arts education.”

Harvard Magazine 55 Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 John Harvard's Journal percent of all education spending—more to deficits in thinking, but he lays out evi- aspirations that followed. than $100 billion. Experts have been call- dence about strong correlations between “Equal educational opportunity is a ing for wholesale reform of this field; it is poverty and learning difficulties that foundational principle of our society,” he common for them to assert that special “provide converging strands of proof.” In has written, yet educational opportuni- education costs too much because it cov- his view, many students who are poor and ties “are far from equal in this country and ers too many young people. struggling in school should be covered by too often depend on where students live, Ryan’s view is the opposite. He argues special education because of the damag- on how much money their parents earn, that “the distinction between internal ing effects of “toxic stress.” He quotes the or on the color of their skin.” The nub of disorders and external circumstances is words of the neuroscientist Martha Farah: his book’s conclusion is that “separating increasingly untenable” because the severe “Growing up poor is bad for your brain.” the poor and politically powerless in their stress from living in poverty “can cause As Ryan and the GSE look for fresh, own schools and districts is antithetical learning problems in much the same way far-reaching ways to close the opportu- to the idea of equal educational opportu- that a brain injury or lead poisoning— nity gap for young Americans, Five Miles nity.” Anyone who deals with Ryan as dean which are explicitly included as bases for Away, A World Apart will be germane, even will be much better prepared if they un- special education eligibility—can cause though integration is not a priority in derstand this deep-seated conviction and learning problems.” education for either the Democratic or how it shapes his ambition for American Not all poor children are learning dis- Republican parties. The book presents education. vlincoln caplan abled, he emphasizes, but millions of a brief for what would be most effective school-aged children now living in pover- in improving American education, but Lincoln Caplan ’72, J.D. ’76, formerly a member of ty are not among the 6.6 million students also for what Ryan believes is compelled the editorial board of The New York Times, was enrolled in special education. There “is not by justice, despite the Supreme Court’s founding editor of Legal Affairs magazine and is yet a smoking gun” linking socio-econom- reversal between its decisions in Brown the author of five books about the law. He is a Visit- ic status to brain function or structure and and Milliken and the harshly diminished ing Lecturer in Law at Yale Law School.

Where the have awarded Ph.D.s to comparable FAS Faculty Composition proportions of women, measured Total Faculty Total Senior Faculty Women Aren’t in general categories: arts and hu- Female Faculty Senior Female Faculty Women now hold nearly 23 percent of manities, the sciences, engineering, 800 600 the tenured professorships in the Faculty of social sciences. But FAS’s tenure- 712 712 700 Arts and Sciences (FAS), more than double track cohorts consistently comprise 623 500 604 595 their 10.7 percent share of 20 years earlier: a smaller proportion of women than 600 557 they numbered 127 of the 557 senior facul- the doctoral pools, particularly at 509 400 500 446 421 ty members during the 2012-2013 academic the assistant-professor level, “un- 402 year. Yet their representation in the facul- derscoring our poor performance at 400 300 ty’s total ranks, including junior professors, recruiting women in recent years.” 300 200 has risen far more slowly, from 18 percent When the committee extend- 181 181 200 144 127 in 1993-1994 to 25 percent now (181 of 712 ed its analysis, Kramer reported, 107 112 103 81 100 faculty members)—and the latter propor- some fields and many departments 100 43 51 tion has held steady since 2007-2008. That across FAS “are doing well relative 0 0 reflects stubborn limits in the gender com- to peers [at other institutions] and 1993/ 1997/ 2002/ 2007/ 2012/ 1993/ 2002/ 1997/ 2007/ 2012/ position of tenure-track faculty: the female to the rate at which Ph.D.s are be- 1994 1998 2003 2008 2013 1994 2003 1998 2008 2013 proportion has fluctuated between roughly ing awarded.” Thus, she discounted 30 percent and 40 percent for nearly two de- general “leakage” from the academic pipe- inquiry. Lee professor of economics Clau- cades—and recently declined to 35 percent. line that siphons women out of Harvard’s dia Goldin, president of the American Bussey professor of organismic and evo- faculty ranks. Rather, she focused on the Economic Association, has begun inves- lutionary biology Elena M. Kramer, chair demographics of several large FAS depart- tigating the disproportionately male en- of the Standing Committee on Women, ments, compared to peer institutions’, to rollment in undergraduate economics presented these data, and accompanying highlight seemingly large disparities— concentrations. She has found pervasive analyses, to the FAS last spring. In a later with Harvard trailing well behind the peer unawareness of this gendered skew in conversation, she said that, given the rising mean proportion of tenure-track women economics departments, and suggests that proportion of women earning doctorates in economics, government, and English, women’s disproportional early attrition generally, and across diverse fields, the for example. She concluded that in at least from the field, after introductory courses, committee felt compelled to ask, “Why some instances, Harvard is doing less well raises the need to rework the curriculum can’t we break out of this 30 percent ceil- at recruiting, attracting candidates, and to stress the discipline’s utility in analyzing in our tenure-track appointments?” sustaining tenure-track women faculty— ing socioeconomic problems, not solely its Specifically, the committee found that “at every step of the process.” business and finance applications.) recently, Harvard and peer institutions (Such concerns have prompted deeper Several factors complicate hiring at

56 September - October 2013 Data from FAS Standing Committee on Women Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 Harvard, Kramer continued. When hiring an interview, she cited two ways of en- are widely available in the research lit- slows, as it has since the recession began, suring effective searches. First, echoing erature, but the knowledge “seems disen- a “conservative effect” takes hold, in busi- Kramer, she pointed to gathering good gaged from real decisionmaking.” Business- ness and in academia, making every search data, including annual examinations of es where she has lectured, and which hire more protracted, and perhaps inducing the “vibrancy, depth, and career stage” regularly, are eager to adapt their practices those hiring to look for people most like of all the candidates in a specific field so to better serve customers and sharehold- themselves. Moreover, FAS continues its that a search can be proactive, rather than ers, but academic recruiting—more limited slow transition to a tenure-track system, limited to submissions that arrive after its and episodic—has been slower to change. raising the bar for junior-faculty appoin- launch. “We need to have a culture that is In general, she said, people “don’t know tees (who were formerly regarded as more much more cognizant of everyone who is how to make good decisions,” but “we likely to be short-term colleagues). Finally, coming out” of the pipeline, she said. are discovering what gets in the way.” The she said, women candidates may be con- Second, Zipser said, departments need guidelines aim broadly at shedding light on servative about where they apply—and “really good search practices” that counter implicit biases in recruiting, and instilling avoid institutions lacking a strong history “implicit biases that preclude candidates processes that get better information be- of internal promotion. who aren’t traditional.” To that end, with fore decisionmakers. Within the psychol- In response, Kramer said, “We want de- the help of Cabot professor of social eth- ogy department, for instance, Banaji said, partments to think about these issues” as ics Mahzarin R. Banaji, senior adviser to faculty members must now attend a can- soon as they contemplate a search. That the dean on faculty development, Zipser’s didate’s academic presentation, or at least means analyzing their own composition office has promulgated revised “Recom- watch it on video, before voting; in years vis-à-vis those of peers elsewhere. It also re- mendations for Ensuring the Integrity of past, there was no such requirement. quires “tracking” the pool of talented young Faculty Searches” that reflect current re- “Every generation will have some lack scholars from the time they begin making search on factors that can lead to less op- of imagination about hiring the next,” academic presentations and earn degrees, timal outcomes. (Orchestras, for example, Banaji said. Now, when “everything is up to know where to find the best candidates. famously evaluated musicians differently for grabs in appointments” (candidates’ The most successful departments, Kramer when candidates performed anonymous- genders, ethnicities, degree-granting in- said, citing other institutions, are “always in ly.) Tenure-track search committees are stitutions), she added, it is essential for search mode.” Lest these steps seem onerous urged to include tenure-track as well as the scholars who appoint the next cohort or unnecessary, she said, FAS dean Michael senior professors. Search criteria should be of FAS professors to pause to ask explic- D. Smith is “very concerned about this is- set in advance, to avoid the risk of tailoring itly, “Are we making decisions that are in sue”—as he made clear during the early- them for a preferred candidate. And writ- Harvard’s best interest?” Among brilliant April faculty meeting where Kramer spoke. ten evaluations should be sought, lest any professors, the most humbling recogni- FAS’s dean for faculty affairs and plan- faculty members, particularly junior ones, tion might be, as Banaji put it, “This is not ning, Nina Zipser, is responsible for feel inhibited about speaking out. about being smart—it’s about being hu- translating that concern into action. In Such ideas, Banaji said in an interview, man” in making those choices.

Allston Advances jacent Soldiers Field Park housing complex. or graduate-student housing space associ- The University’s new 10-year Institutional A preliminary form of the IMP sub- ated with construction of a new basket- Master Plan (IMP), filed with the Boston Re- mission, including these projects, was ball pavilion, for example, has increased development Authority (BRA) in late July, de- unveiled in October 2012 as a basis for the project size from tails nine projects totaling 1.4 million square community discussion and negotiations. 200,000 to between feet for Harvard’s expanding campus across Several of the proposed projects have 270,000 and 340,000 Visit harvardmag.com/ the Charles River in Allston. Among them: an since expanded in estimated square foot- square feet. The demo- extras to see more addition to Harvard Stadium that will include age. Retail and institutional-affiliate and/ lition and replacement images from the plan. indoor seating and office space; a new, larger, basketball gymnasium; a 150- to 250-room hotel/conference center located on Western Avenue across the street from Harvard Busi- ness School (HBS); and various renovations and additions to HBS’s campus, such as a new auditorium for Burden Hall, faculty and administrative offices, and renovation of the ad-

Harvard’s new master plan for Allston shows projects scheduled to be built during the next decade in gold. The view is from Barry’s Corner, at the intersection of North Harvard Street and Western Avenue, looking back toward Cambridge.

Image courtesy of the Boston Redevelopment Authority Harvard Magazine 57 Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 John Harvard's Journal of Burden Hall (designed by renowned 15 years this has been held out by Harvard mayor and the BRA exercise significant architect Philip Johnson ’27, B.Arch. ’43), and the city as being this wonderful, thriv- control over development approvals. Har- will now run to 140,000 square feet. The ing town center of our community which vard’s Allston plans have been prepared “gateway” administrative office build- has never had such a town center,” said Task and reviewed by the community for sev- ing closest to Barry’s Corner, nearest Force member and longtime Allston resi- eral years, and are following a long-estab- the intersection of Western Avenue and dent Harry Mattison in a recent interview. lished timetable; even so, the IMP review North Harvard Street, has expanded “Harvard’s idea of Barry’s Corner is a bas- will take place in the context of this devel- from 200,000 to 300,000 square feet. And a ketball arena, some sort of office building, a opment boom and the first change in the slightly larger renovation of and addition giant parking lot….None of those things are mayor’s office in two decades. (Menino to Harvard Stadium, it is now reported, going to make this area great. None of them was awarded an honorary degree at Com- will result in a net reduction of approxi- will make this area even good.” Residents mencement this past May.) mately 8,000 seats. These projects, togeth- have asked Harvard, before construction, to Harvard officials have previously er with Allston campus work already un- address questions about retail and cultural stressed that the IMP projects would be derway or approved (including a science amenities, transportation (including resi- complementary to the University’s aspira- complex now designated as a new home dents’ use of the Harvard shuttle service), tions for Barry’s Corner. “We will be work- for the School of Engineering and Ap- parking, housing affordability, and public- ing very hard in our planning to make sure plied Sciences; a campus-services facility space planning, as well as about promised the ground plan, pathways, and streets at 28 Travis Street; and the Barry’s Corner “transformative community projects,” slat- work to connect these projects effectively housing and retail development slated for ed for discussion in August meetings as this to Barry’s Corner so that it is an intuitive groundbreaking later this year) will result magazine went to press. connection,” Harvard’s director of physi- in the creation of 2,350 construction jobs, As Mayor Thomas Menino prepares to cal planning, Harris Band, said in October according to Harvard’s estimates. leave office, developers rushing to take 2012, adding: “This is a very diverse vari- The IMP also sketches Harvard’s advantage of the improved economic en- ety of projects in terms of use, including long-term vision for its Allston campus, vironment and strong local demand for executive education, classrooms, faculty which—while in no way binding—would housing are “lining up to seek key approv- and administrative offices, a hotel and con- in future decades transform the area from als for billions of dollars of mega projects ference center, housing, retail, and other paved, vehicular-oriented, industrial and before the election of a new mayor who ground-floor uses and open space. That va- commercial uses to others that promote could upend or delay their plans,” accord- riety is very important because it combines the typologies of Harvard Square and its ing to a July Boston Globe report. Boston’s to make for a very dynamic area.” environs, with walkable green spaces, numerous transit options, retail districts centered on road intersections—and, of course, permeable, shady quadrangles with the undergraduate many substantial academic buildings. “This comprehensive plan will expand Harvard’s academic presence in Allston and build upon the shared goal of extending Dear Younger Self community programming, improving infra- structure and the public realm, and creating a new nexus where campus and community by cherone duggan ’14 meet,” said a news release from the office of executive vice president Katie Lapp, who oversees Allston work. “The plan includes… ince I was very young, I’ve rou- ing you like. For me, at least, the kind de- projects that support academics, research, tinely wished that my future self termined the topic. I’m bad at doing prob- executive education, assembly, office, hospi- could give me advice. Despite hav- lem sets, I don’t like exams, and I feel no tality, retail, culture, and housing.” Univer- ing some doubts about how stable personal obligation to, or connection with, sity officials hope to gain BRA approval for Sselves are over time, it’s something that I still my professor or teaching fellow when I’m the projects sometime this fall. wish for, from time to time—mostly when in large classes—and therefore don’t do my Some Harvard-Allston Task Force mem- I’m anxious, upset, bored, or overly philo- work (see upcoming: Statistics 104, sopho- bers have expressed concern about Har- sophical. And as of this column’s writing I’m more spring). So I take small, writing- vard’s plans: they worry that the Barry’s simmering in pre-senior-year, pre-“real-life” heavy classes (see: two-person freshman Corner project will not become the commu- thoughts and plans that have put me in a seminar). The sooner you realize that this nity hub the University is promising; that particularly time-travely and advicey mood. is how you and I work, the better. the new development will increase traffic So, though my time-travel advice can only Everything finally clicked for me when in the area; and that the new parking lots, be given fictively to myself in the past, these I realized that professors are really more particularly on North Harvard Street be- are the thoughts I wish I had been able to important than the subject matter. I read hind the proposed “gateway” administra- share with my 18-year-old off-to-college self: some great books, and looked up the au- tive office building, will be unsightly. “For 1. Learning: Realize what kind of learn- thors. A lot of the time, those authors are

58 September - October 2013 Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 MOOC Momentum term, beginning in the fall of 2014, with HarvardX announced fall online cours- a revised calendar that slightly shortens es on the edX platform in fields span- Brevia reading period, prohibits regular instruc- ning Chinese history, neuroscience, and tion during that period (except for inten- poetry (see http://harvardmag.com/ sive language classes), and—acknowl- harvardx-13). Meanwhile, edX formed edging the reality that examinations are its first partnership in India, as administered in fewer cours- the Indian Institute of Tech- es—bestows a new name on nology became an affiliate. In a slightly lengthened Final an interview with The Financial Examination and Project Pe- Times, edX president Anant riod. Final papers, take-home Agarwal predicted a purely on- exams, and other culminat- line degree offering by a partner ing assignments must be due university within less than one on or before the official exam year. Coursera, the for-profit date assigned to each course, company offering a wide array but no earlier than the fourth of massive open online courses day of reading period. (MOOCs), raised $43 million in a second round of financing, from Admissions Ruling new investors including a World The Supreme Court’s late-June Bank affiliate; that brings its procedural ruling in Fisher vs. capitalization to $65 million. Ac- University of Texas at Austin (see cording to news reports, Cours- http://harvardmag.com/rul- era aims to expand international ing-13), had the effect of up- outreach (in part by translating holding admissions processes materials and developing mo- at selective institutions that bile-device courses for students consider race in admissions. in Africa and elsewhere who President Drew Faust said lack computers); open its plat- in a statement, “We are heart- form to third-party developers Interim College Dean: Gray ened that the Supreme Court (edX is open-source); and double its staff professor of systematic botany Donald today has affirmed the vital interest of to approximately 100 (on a trajectory par- H. Pfister was appointed interim dean universities in bringing together students allel to edX’s reported plans). And Black- of Harvard College in early July, succeeding Evelynn M. Hammonds, from many different backgrounds and board, a classroom-software company, whose service concluded at the end of points of view.” Nonetheless, some educa- announced plans to provide free MOOC June. Pfister has been dean of Harvard tors who favor such admissions policies hosting for its customers, and threat- Summer School, and was master of felt that the court’s ruling in fact poses Kirkland House from 1982 through ened to undercut other enterprises’ fees. 2000. He said of his new charges, “The technical hurdles (a standard of “strict College is filled with talented, scrutiny”) that might invite still more Socially Conscious Investing energetic students who breathe so legal challenges and curtail such admis- The Corporation Committee on Share- much life into this University,” and sions practices. Columbia president Lee added that he looked forward to his holder Responsibility has chosen Par- continued engagement with them. C. Bollinger—a constitutional-law pro- nassus Equity Income Fund as the in- Faculty of Arts and Sciences dean fessor (and defendant in earlier cases vestment vehicle through which it will Michael D. Smith cited Pfister’s “deep when he was president of the University engagement with both undergraduate accommodate donors who wish to direct education and with the learning of Michigan)—expressed concern in The their gifts to a socially conscious invest- communities of the Houses.” Smith New York Times that the opinion “will em- ment vehicle (rather than to the general will convene an advisory committee to power lower courts, and, no doubt, liti- funds overseen by Harvard Management search for a permanent dean this fall. gants to challenge benign considerations Company). Each year, 20 percent of the of race—those that seek to advance le- fund’s beginning market value will be governance issues associated with the gitimate goals of diversity in education— made available for financial aid across the University’s investments. For more in- more easily than ever.” University. Separately, Harvard Manage- formation, see http://harvardmag.com/ ment Company, which oversees the en- pedicini-13. Fundraising Report dowment assets, has appointed Jameela As Harvard readies the public phase of Pedicini vice president for sustainable Reading Period Revised its capital campaign (see page 48), Rice investing, a new position responsible for The Faculty of Arts and Sciences has University announced that it had ex- investigating environmental, social, and voted to reconfigure the end of each ceeded the $1-billion goal it set for its ef-

Photograph courtesy of the Harvard Division of Continuing Education Harvard Magazine 59 Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 John Harvard's Journal

fort launched in 2008, and the University ganization decided that—with the Office Library, a new position, reporting to the of Virginia said it had met the $3-billion of Faculty Development and Diversity provost. She had been serving as Bodley’s target it established in 2004. Separately, and the Harvard College Women’s Cen- Librarian and director of the Bodleian Li- Stanford (for the past eight years the ter firmly established, and the creation of braries at the University of Oxford, and leading fundraiser among U.S.-based uni- a new Shared Interest Group, Alumnae/i was previously Kroch University Librarian versities and colleges) announced a new, Network for Harvard Women (www.har- at Cornell. As previously reported, Mary $151-million gift from alumnus John Ar- vardwomen.net), spearheaded by CEWH Lee Kennedy, senior associate provost for rillaga, a Silicon Valley real-estate devel- members—its goals had been achieved the Harvard Library since 2011, departed oper—its largest from a living individual. and it will dissolve this year. (For an up- in May to become chief library officer of And Danville, Kentucky-based Centre date on the numbers of female faculty the New York Public Library. College, enrollment 1,370, has received a within the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, $250-million gift, the largest ever to a lib- see “Where the Women Aren’t,” page 56.) Medical managers. Two senior Harvard eral-arts college, to fund 160 scholarships Medical School officials have moved on to for students concentrating in natural or Scientific Pursuits new posts. William W. Chin, executive computational sciences or economics. The Association of American Universi- dean for research since 2010, departed to ties has announced that eight campuses become executive vice president of science Women’s Transition will receive seed funding for pilot proj- and regulatory affairs for the Pharmaceuti- The Committee for the Equality of ects to enhance undergraduate education cal Research and Manufacturers of Ameri- Women at Harvard (CEWH; http:// in science, technology, engineering, and ca, effective July 1. And executive dean for world.std.com/~cewh) was founded in mathematics (the so-called STEM fields); administration Richard G. Mills, who had 1988 by concerned Radcliffe alumnae Brown, Penn, and Washington Univer- been at the medical school since 2005, has (many from the classes of 1953 and 1958) sity are the private institutions awarded been appointed Dartmouth’s executive vice who sought a significant increase in ten- grants. Elsewhere, the State University president and chief financial officer. ured women faculty and equity for all of New York has decided to separate the women at Harvard. (Among other steps, Albany campus’s College of Nanoscale Sci- Humanities honorands. Robert Put- it established the Harvard Women Fac- ence and Engineering as a stand-alone de- nam, former dean and now Malkin pro- ulty Fund to raise money to be held in gree-granting institution, emphasizing the fessor of public policy at Harvard Ken- escrow until matters improved.) During growing scope and importance of semi- nedy School—author of Bowling Alone, on reunion meetings this past May, the or- conductor and high-technology research community and social and industrial investments in capital—was awarded the region, as well as a renewed the National Humanities effort to compete for further re- Medal on July 10. Other

search funding in the field. honorands included a pair office news anaday/harvard of alumnae historians: Jill

Nota Bene Ker Conway, Ph.D. ’69, C Brooks Librarian in chief. Sarah former president of Smith Robert Thomas has been appointed College and author of The Putnam vice president for the Harvard Road from Coorain, and Natalie Zemon Da- vis, A.M. ’50, LL.D. ’96, whose works in- Checked out: The Inn at clude The Return of Martin Guerre. Harvard closed on July 15, pursuant to plans that were Miscellany. Rothenberg professor of announced a year earlier, Romance languages and literatures and and will be remodeled as swing space for those professor of comparative literature Diana undergraduates displaced Sorensen has been elected to the board of temporarily by the trustees of the National Humanities Cen- College’s extensive, multiyear residence-renovation ter, a private institute for advanced study program. The adaptation of in the field. (Bass professor of English Louis guest rooms and construc- Menand is also a trustee.) For more about tion of dining and social her work as dean of arts and humanities, spaces is expected to be completed in time for the see page 54.…Corporation member Theo- 2014-2015 academic year, dore V. Wells Jr., a prominent trial lawyer, when Dunster House will be has been retained as part of Steven A. Co- redone. Displaced workers were offered employment- hen’s defense team as his large hedge fund, agazine/jc related services and SAC Capital, contends with insider-trad- severance packages. ing criminal charges. harvard m harvard

60 September - October 2013 Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 Harvard professors. Take their classes Not taking yourself too seriously is even 4. Friends: People are, simultaneously, (see: historian of science Steven Shapin, better. So is giving people the benefit of the best and worst parts of life. Much like with whom I took a class junior spring). the doubt, as well as benefiting from your roommateships, the best friendships devel- If the authors of the thoughts or books own (see: “A Perforating Doubt,” January- op between people who have symmetrical you love aren’t currently living, or aren’t February, page 56). feelings and connections in one, or many, currently living Harvard professors, take 3. Money: Try to have some. Also, try moments. These symmetries can overlap classes in which they are read. Or make to make some. It’s generally useful—but for minutes, for months, or for what-seem- up an independent study and create your shouldn’t be the main criterion for any- like-forevers. Each type of overlap is valu- own syllabus that includes them. Better thing. You really don’t need much. Library able. And sometimes, these symmetries yet, just read them when you should be desk-jobs are great (see: unwittingly take round or pointy shapes. You’ll decide doing other, less interesting things. shrewd job decision, freshman spring). which shapes are the most enduring and Talk to your professors, teaching fel- My job makes me go to the library at cer- beautiful, though—and they can and will lows, and fellow students not just as a stu- tain times during the week, and makes me change, as you (and times) do. Also, the dent, but as the person you are. They really stay there. This has done wonders for my pop-culture definition of friends being are quite personable. Go to office hours personal, academic, and fiscal productiv- plentiful, steadfast, and of-the-same-age- with life-questions, not just course-related ity. Try always to have enough money in group as you isn’t necessarily true. My host questions. The relationships you have with our account for a last-minute return ticket parents have been some of the best friends people will be more important to you, and home, or a medical emergency—just in case I’ve ever found (see: “My Families,” May- to me, than any relationship we have with (see: the bad-tooth crisis, freshman fall). June, page 52). I’ve also been surprised by a grade or a prize. That means learning Fellowships are also great. Apply for them. which people I’ve stayed close to from high isn’t academic. It’s summers. It’s jobs. It’s Also, please, I beg of you—buy a good coat, school, and through college—sometimes, awkward situations. But mostly, it’s peo- good shoes, and at least one great dress— they’ve been the people I’ve least expected. ple. For thoughts and people are the stuff you will need them. You should also try Your best friends are ones you can be si- time and life are made of, at least for me. not to drink up or eat up too much of our lent with and still feel comfortable (see: Intertwine them. money. Instead, save it for me! siblings). Make sure you can be silent with 2. Living situations: yourself, too. But not Don’t, however, get too always: Asking things emotionally intertwined of yourself, and oth- in these. They can be fun, ers, is the best skill you and they can be flops. If can cultivate. People you temper your expec- can’t read minds (and tations, though, they can you certainly can’t read be perfectly comfortable. mine). So, when some- Whatever it is that you thing goes wrong, or want in a roommate at when you’d like some- any particular time will thing to go right—ask change. I’ve found that your friends for help. it’s almost better to room Much of the time they with people you’re not can, will, and love to completely emotionally give it. invested in as friends. Try 5. Love: (See: above to be the type of room- comments about roommate you would like to mates and friends, am- have (see: mirror). If your plified.) Love is not just definition of that match- a quality that naturally es your roommates’ defi- springs from romantic nitions, stay with them or semi-romantic situ- and be happy. If not, it’s ations. It’s what you better to change your be- and I feel for our fam- havior, your thoughts, or ily and the people, ac- your rooming situation tivities, and thoughts if something really isn’t in our lives that make working out. us feel honest. When I Time away, both realized this, I began to from solitude and from think differently about company, is good. Talk- what I did with my ing, instead of internal- time and the people I mulling, is also good. was surrounding myself

Illustration by Dan Page Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 John Harvard's Journal with. Deciding to be around people who love something—anything—passionately, makes caring for them and their cares a Fresh Fellows contagion. In terms of the physical and the purely whimsical, have fun, but make sure to cover your drinks at parties (see: Harvard Magazine’s Berta Greenwald sophomore summer). And, not being in any Ledecky Undergraduate Fellows for the 2013- romantic relationship is better than being 2014 academic year will be Noah Pisner ’14 and in a bad or draining one (see: well—she’ll Jessica C. Salley ’14—selected from among know it when she sees it). Remember that nearly two dozen applicants. The fellows join crushes flatten, and that most of the time, the editorial staff and contribute to the maga- there’s no predicting what will happen. zine during the year, writing the “Undergradu- Noah Pisner and Jessica C. Salley So don’t take things too seriously. You’re ate” column and reporting for both the print young—and anyway, you know very little publication and harvardmagazine.com, among other responsibilities. about how I will feel about things. Try to Pisner, of Fairfax, Virginia, and Winthrop House, transferred to the College follow- stu rosner take an educated guess. But don’t be cer- ing a year at the University of Southern California, where he studied cinema and tain—because you aren’t. Then again, if television production. In Cambridge, he is concentrating in social studies, with a focus you think you really love something, or like in international law and development, and pursuing a secondary field in English. He someone, just go for it. See what happens. serves as a features writer for The Harvard Advocate and as an executive editor of The 6. The Future: For a period, I was pretty Harvard Crimson’s magazine Fifteen Minutes. He spent the summer working as an edito- worried about what the future held for rial intern at McSweeny’s in San Francisco and doing thesis research in southern India. us, and how badly I was directing myself Salley, of Covington, Louisiana, and Dunster House, is concentrating in Near toward it. But then I figured: the future Eastern languages and civilizations and history, and expects to earn a language cita- is not something that will happen to me, tion in Turkish. Outside the classroom, she is the multimedia chair of the Crimson helplessly. It’s something I’ll live—not as and writes for Fifteen Minutes. During the summer, she conducted archival research another, better person who does all the for her senior thesis in Turkey before traveling to Armenia and Georgia to work on things I’d like to be able to do, like get- an archaeological field project. ting up early, or being an extrovert—but The fellowships are supported by Jonathan J. Ledecky ’79, M.B.A. ’83, and named as myself. Realizing which parts of you, in honor of his mother. For updates on past Ledecky Fellows and links to their work, and me, I can and cannot change has been see http://harvardmagazine.com/donate/ledecky-fellowships. important in terms of guessing what will make our future whole and better (at least, the part of your future I’ve lived so ture—but from an intertwining of both. yourself, and you and I will reunite again. far). I’m still learning those things. Make yourself that intertwine. Don’t Then, we’ll conquer time. In the meantime, just do things you get caught up in the mistakes or pres- like, and do them well, according to your sures of the past or the present, or the Cherone Duggan ’14 is a rising senior and former own standards. Then, you’ll get to where invisible, looming future ones I’ll surely Berta Greenwald Ledecky Undergraduate Fellow I am and realize that the present doesn’t make. Even the darkest of them fade. Let at the magazine. She would like to thank Cameron have to come from the past or the fu- them. Then, you can just be happy with Rejali ’82 for sharing his kind words of advice.

sports “There is an element of brute force,” con- cedes Parker, who most recently coached the women’s rugby team at the U.S. Naval Academy. “But you’d be surprised—there’s Scrums, Rucks, Mauls also tremendous technique involved. At Navy, we were a smaller team than a lot of those we played against. But if you Varsity rugby for women begins a new era in Crimson sports. have strong fundamentals, a less powerful scrum can still win the ball.” That’s rugby in a nutshell—a contact ugby has its own language. and push forward against a likewise engaged sport played without padding that re- Even if you haven’t watched a opposing team, all the while attempting to wards sheer strength while demanding full match (80 minutes, in two gain control of the ball (a chunkier, more the technical skills of passing, kicking, car- 40-minute halves), you may be fa- ovoid version of a football) with their feet. rying, and tackling in pursuit of a try, the Rmiliar with the scrum, a fun word to say, and, It looks like a mindless people pile-up. But five-point equivalent of football’s six-point for the uninitiated, a bizarre phenomenon to it’s not, as Sue Parker, Harvard’s first coach touchdown. (Kicking the ball through the watch: players link arms, bow their heads, of varsity women’s rugby, can explain. goalposts will earn two more points for a

62 September - October 2013 www.gocrimson.com Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 conversion; a field goal, worth three points, can be attempted at any time.) Players usually pass by throwing underhand, and can pass only backward or sideways, not forward; defenders can tackle only the player carrying the ball; and as soon as a player is tackled, anyone from either team can immediately pick up the ball and start a new attack by kicking, passing, or running with it. Sometimes players form an unruly pack, or a ruck, over a loose ball, in an attempt to push it toward the try line; a maul, on the other hand, occurs when players converge on an unfortunate ball-carrier who has been tackled but not taken to the ground. Holding a rugby ball, Sue Parker stands before rugby goalposts. The no-pads, high-contact aspect of She is Harvard’s first varsity rugby is part of its fearsome mystique, and coach in the sport. Parker teaches the art of tackling with great care. “We show where your feet need your opponents, and afterwards, eat pizza entary,” she says. She had always been a to be in relation to the ball-carrier, and the together,” says Parker. “There aren’t many student athlete, competing in the javelin proper angle of your torso in relation to sports where that’s the case.” throw and 800-meter run at the Univer- your hips and thighs,” she says. “Where do Rugby most often has 15 players to a sity of Maryland, but rugby was some- you squeeze and drive through [to make side, but can also be played with seven, thing completely new: “It had everything the tackle]?” (You do it in the ball-carrier’s which is how Parker first experienced I loved—raw speed, kicking, passing, and waist-thigh region.) “We repeat this slowly an unbelievable level of teamwork.” Parker and under careful observation until a play- To receive weekly football was hooked. She started playing on com- er has confidence that she’s doing it safely reports from “Cleat,” sign up at munity teams and worked her way up to and in the right position. Then we have the http://harvardmag.com/email coaching jobs, practicing law throughout. ball-carrier start running.” Through some Only now—with the Harvard position—is odd calculus, this close, sometimes ruth- the game as a law-school graduate in her she focusing on rugby full-time. less contact on the field creates a legendary early twenties. “I was working for a big Since her rugby epiphany in 1991, Park- culture of camaraderie off the field: “You firm in D.C. and not enjoying how my er has competed as a member of the USA play a brutal, super-intense match against lifestyle had become so completely sed- Rugby 7s Eagles, the country’s national amateur team, and gone on to coach that squad; the Washington D.C. Furies, a club team; and Navy. This summer, she took a Harry Parker team of Navy players to the World Uni- versity Games in Kazan, Russia, where The word “legend” gets applied al- He may be the most successful coach in they finished with a 1-6 record; they were most indiscriminately to sports figures the history of American college sports: the first American team to play rugby these days, but Harry Parker, head coach across the decades, his crews’ over- at these Games, where they competed of heavyweight mens’ crew at Harvard all winning percentage was in excess of against national teams from the other for 51 years, was the genuine article. .800; they won 16 official and unofficial countries. As chair of the USA Rugby national championships, and Women’s Collegiate Strategic Committee, never had a losing year. Even at Parker led efforts to promote the sport to age 77, Parker was still at the NCAA varsity status. peak of his powers: his last three Harvard is the first Ivy League college crews went undefeated in the to sponsor a varsity women’s rugby pro- ent m regular season. gram, which launches this fall—although He did this while coping with a as a club sport it dates back to 1982 for the rare form of blood cancer that women’s team and to 1872 for the men’s. took his life on June 25. Many The Crimson women won national titles oarsmen regarded him as their as a rugby club in 1998 and 2011. (Only the most important teacher at Har- women’s program is going varsity. Parker vard. (For more on Parker, see believes it will be good for the Harvard oore/harvard athletic depart athletic oore/harvard page 10, and coverage at http:// men’s club as well, and she has already

b rett m harvardmag.com/parker-13. ) reached out to the male ruggers.) The other Ivy colleges all have women’s

Photograph by Phil Hoffmann Harvard Magazine 63 Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 John Harvard's Journal club teams. Parker’s goals for the season in- to the more intense level of physical and extremely creative in how we apply strate- clude winning the Ivy Rugby Conference, mental commitment that a varsity sport gies and techniques from sports like soccer which embraces those club teams and Har- requires. And Parker plans to cast a wide and lacrosse to rugby, to see if we can catch vard’s varsity. (As the NCAA classifies rug- recruiting net. “I think the fact that I didn’t other teams off guard? No matter what by as an “emerging sport,” it sanctions offi- have significant team-sport experience your physical dimensions, there’s a place cial competition between varsity and club helps me relate to players who are coming for you on the field if you’re curious, moti- squads.) She also wants to support the to rugby for the first time,” she says. “Why vated, and devoted to becoming a student club players as they make the transition not bring everything to the table and be of the game.” vjulia hanna

The exhibit’s surprising success led to Alumni six more pop-up shows—and a full-time occupation for Katz. She is now executive director of Brooklyn-based Recession Art (http://recessionartshows.com), which An Artful Business moved into permanent gallery space in March and now represents more than 80 “of the best visual artists of our gen- Where inspired artists meet aspiring collectors eration—on the cusp of achieving their dreams.” The mission is to find, show, and sell affordable art: generally $10 to $1,000. iming to create their own “art and put on a show with our friends—and “The traditional art world is seen as stimulus package” during the have some fun.” too expensive and too elitist for the aver- 2008-09 economic downturn, More than 200 people turned out for age art-lover,” says Katz, a calm, organized Emma Katz ’06 and her sister, their Recession Art Inaugural in April 2009. woman who was named one of the “top 30 AAni, put together an exhibit at the Brook- It featured seven young artists—among influential art professionals under 30” by lyn Art Space. Her job as an assistant to a them Ani, now studying photography at Artinfo last year. “We are trying to engage Broadway producer had evaporated with The Columbia College of Art in Chicago, all levels of collectors, and let them know the recession so she was working shifts at and Jane Van Cleef ’06, Katz’s sophomore- that they can start even if they only have an organic bakery in the East Village. Ani, a year roommate, who makes and sells $50.” Developing this commercial niche— Yale graduate, was tired of cycling through stuffed toys (woodland animals and inter- a sustainable alternative-art market—is internships. “There seemed no good reason changeable outfits, such as Catalina Mouse, critical, especially for fledgling artists to wait around to get a job,” Emma recalls, who sports a red bonnet and flowered in need of support. “When you buy art, “when we could just do what we wanted skirt) through her company, Hazel Village. you’re doing it for yourself, to have an object that makes you think and feel more intensely,” says Katz, “and you’re doing it as a vote for the continued importance of art in society. That’s the big picture.” Brooklyn has seen an influx of artists and galleries, along with more affluent gentrifiers, during the last several decades. “It’s a great place for us,” Katz agrees. “People here have an appreciation for what’s different, what’s unique. Buying from someone they can meet and knowing the story of the piece or the person is important.” The gallery is

At her gallery, Emma Katz promotes sophisticated original work by young artists such as sculptor/photographer David Rodriguez, represented here (left to right) by A Love Song Played at a Very Specified Frequency, Holding Device, and The Thing About Distance.

64 September - October 2013 Photographs by Robert Adam Mayer Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 among the idiosyncratic, locally owned drawings and collages shops and restaurants that comprise hip sell for $100 to $350, Boerum Hill. It mounts solo exhibits and and smaller items group shows, as well as semiannual larger like original magnets, displays next door at the Invisible Dog Art coasters, and cards Center, a three-story former factory build- cost around $6. “I don’t ing from the 1800s used mostly recently want the gift-shop for belt-making. In 2009, the building was look, full of knick- converted into studios, spaces for exhibi- knacks,” Katz says. tions and special-events, and the Beam “We keep the more Center, which teaches technology and de- commercial items to sign to those under age 18. a minimum.” Notable One of Recession Art’s earliest artists, are cards and illustrations by Andrea Tsu- Recession Art’s home is a repurposed belt Ian Trask, reveals the inherent aesthetics rumi ’07, who lives in Queens and recently factory in Brooklyn. of waste materials: cardboard boxes, wood graduated from the School of Visual Arts in raise the gala’s needed $20,000. Katz had chips, and old forks and spoons, which he Manhattan. A set of digital reproductions always wanted to be involved with the once twisted into elegant chess pieces. The of her pen-and-ink drawings, 13 Witches, arts, but administration had not occurred center offered Trask an artist-in-residence depicting imaginary animals and eccentric to her as a career until “I started to real- post, Katz reports, “which meant he had people, sells for $20. Coming soon are her ize that I was more organized than a lot of a room in the basement filled with many two new children’s books: Andrew Jackson other people,” she says, “even a lot of very hundreds of rounds of belting materials, Throws a Punch (a comic loosely inspired by smart, very talented Harvard students.” At buckles, and adornments, all piled up all Jackson’s first inaugural and proclivity to- the Dudley Co-op, Katz was first elected over the place.” His resulting sculptures, ward violence) and But Suddenly, an Octopus United Steward, in charge of ordering all set in rectangular boxes or on recycled (a twist on Little Red Riding Hood). the food from wholesale vendors, and later wood, transformed simple webbed belting served as treasurer, then president. “Emma into gracefully interconnected spools and Tsurumi, who met Katz through their is at home among spreadsheets and check- lines of colors and swirling shapes sug- work in the Harvard-Radcliffe Gilbert & lists—which is not to say she is uptight or gestive of the gears and conveyer belts of Sullivan Players (HRGSP), calls her friend robotic. She is actually really warm, and early industrial-age machines. “Kids love “extraordinarily clear-sighted.” Running Re- she has a great sense of humor,” says Van his art because they recognize the urge to cession Art “brings together her love of the Cleef, her former roommate. “She is a natu- bend their silverware and play with color- arts, her logistical talents from theater and ral organizer, but tolerant of artistic types. ful balls of yarn,” Katz says. “Collectors event-planning, and her interest in working I think she’s proud that she can help them. love it because it engages a trend toward with other creative people. Recession Art And she really can.” DIY and recycling, but is also polished and has also made itself culturally accessible by As business manager for Van Cleef’s Ha- perfectly framed for their homes”—priced making ‘unpretentiousness’ a key goal. Most zel Village, Katz was pivotal in moving the from $25 to $5,000. of that has to do with Emma.” company beyond a one-woman operation. The June show, Facts and Fictions, was Katz emphasizes that she is an art- Katz not only worked out a business plan mostly photographs and video art co-cu- lover, not an artist. Growing up in Bay and marketing strategy, Van Cleef says, but rated by Ani, who maintains a small role in Shore, Long Island, she played the cello during the holiday season was also there to Recession Art while in school. It featured and learned traditional art appreciation help physically open booths at two lucra- arresting color portraits of older women, through visits to museums in New York tive Manhattan street markets in Union including one of a swimmer floating like City and Europe with her family (her Square and Columbus Circle. “I needed to melting wax in the water, by Barbara A. mother is Susan Barbash ’76). At Harvard, find and schedule a bunch of salespeople Diener, along with almost surreal images of she immediately joined the close-knit in- and general helpers—elves, basically,” says average people in modest settings that are stitution that is the HRGSP: “Half the Van Cleef, “and I had not planned ahead, offset by luminescent objects by Julie Renée people there were already really into Gil- naturally. But Emma stepped in, found the Jones, which cost between $550 and $1,800. bert and Sullivan before college,” she says. people and scheduled them, told me how (Ani knows both artists through Columbia “The other half wanted to do theater and much I owed them.” College, where they also studied.) Katz is stumbled upon it, and stayed.” Supporting women in business and in inspired by how Jones creates the myste- She played cello in the pit orchestra, other ventures is also an outgrowth of rious, ethereal light; it offers a poignant then was elected to the board, and soon Katz’s Harvard concentration in studies glimpse of hope amid mundanity. Art pro- became a driving force in producing the of women, gender, and sexuality. Her se- vides “a window into someone else’s per- organization’s fiftieth-anniversary cel- nior thesis was on the Queen’s Company, spective on whatever big questions they are ebration in 2005-2006. That entailed plan- an all-female Shakespeare theater group. grappling with,” she adds. “You take that ning for 15 events in four days comprising After graduation, she moved to Manhat- in and you can learn from it—or recognize more than 200 alumni, students, and their tan (where she now lives with her hus- your own thoughts and feelings in it.” guests, as well as building, from scratch, band, “C.J.” Christos Gineros, a computer The gallery also has a small store, where a 5,000-alumni database that helped her engineer), with plans, now on hold while www.alumni.harvard.edu Harvard Magazine 65 Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 John Harvard's Journal she builds Recession Art, to become a negotiation between the artists and buy- The fall group show (October 26-No- theater producer. Katz’s résumé includes ers, and I am the middleman.” vember 24) is curated by the gallery’s asso- a string of theater internships and jobs, Recession Art’s September 7-October ciate director, Christian Fuller, and further most recently with Frigid New York, an 13 solo show features new paintings by explores the fluidity of abstract and rep- independent theater festival. Producing an one of Katz’s favorite artists, Brooklyn resentational art. Works will include the art show, she has found, is not dissimilar. resident Megan Berk. Her work, includ- surreal topography of illustrator Maximil- “You’re bringing people together and seeing renderings of the mid-century glass ian Bode, abstract primordial landscapes ing everything that has to happen from and flat-roofed suburban California homes by Leo Castañeda, and the bold, tactile day one and making sure you have people designed by Joseph Eichler, has a spare, paintings of Summer Wheat. doing all these things” collaboratively, she moody feel, softened by lush, liquid-like Practically, “we need good variety, some- explains. Do artists need her? “I think so,” coloring. “Sometimes you can clearly see thing at every price, and something for she says, laughing. “There are plenty of art- that she is painting a landscape or a house everyone’s taste,” Katz says. Ultimately, ists who would never even think of put- and sometimes that landscape becomes though, what’s shown is based on what she ting up their own show.” just a flashing of light and color,” says finds interesting. “It’s very hard to sell any- In addition to Katz, the gallery employs Katz. The paintings appeal to a diverse thing you are not passionate about. When only two part-timers who assist especially group of people, she adds, such as those I think about owning visual art, I think with cultivating collectors. Galleries are “interested in traditional representational about having something in my life that is a constantly forming, nurturing, and balanc- painting, cutting-edge techniques, ab- representation of an idea or an emotion or ing relationships with those who make the stract art focusing on shapes and colors, a memory. If I connect with something on art and those who buy it. “We find our buy- architectural or interior-design aesthetic.” that level, it’s fantastic to be in its presence ers through targeted networking, using our Sales are consistent, even at higher prices: every day, because then every day can be a friends, artists, and neighbors as starting Berk’s large acrylic paintings, about five transcendent experience—outside of my points,” she reports. She has also partnered feet by six, go for around $5,000. own mind.” vnell porter brown with the Wassaic Artist Residency in upstate New York and the new Ground Floor Gallery in Park Slope (Brooklyn), and rou- Capital Connections tinely visits galleries, open studios, and the Affordable Art Fair, which has a similar mis- An energetic alumni leader emphasizes her “ability to listen.” sion, albeit at higher prices (around $10,000). “In general we are a very grass-roots opera- Catherine A. Gellert ’93, the new learned that this was the spirit of the HAA: tion,” she says. “I e-mail and call people indi- president of the Harvard Alumni Associa- folks who care deeply, who are experienced vidually about our openings, updates about tion (HAA), joined the organization as an volunteers, and who want to make a dif- artists that might interest them, events, and elected director in 2007. At her first dinner, ference for the betterment of the Harvard new artwork in the store.” “Everybody seemed to know each other,” community. I was hooked!” To make the monthly rent, Katz must and to want to catch up, she says. “I quickly Such enthusiasm will serve her well this sell $7,000 worth of art. “We’re not quite there yet,” she adds. “But that’s the goal.” She generally splits, 50-50, the selling price of a piece with its artist, and collects significant revenue from the semiannual open calls, based on given themes (such as Open Notions and Broken Boundaries, the fall group show): artists pay $30 per submission to the gallery committee that decides whether the art will be in the show and another $30 if they want critical feedback. In addition, Katz offers artwork documentation services and art-related administrative support, as for Hazel Village. Pricing art is an art.“There are no set rules and no obvious reference points. Even the artist doesn’t know,” reports Katz. “The biggest problem I have found in selling art is that customers hesitate because they don’t know how to gauge whether something is worth the price. And some artists don’t want to sell their art for below Catherine A. Gellert a perceived value they hold. It’s a constant

66 September - October 2013 Photograph by Jim Harrison Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 John Harvard's Journal year as the University begins the public Pudding Theatricals, was the H.A.N.D. schools.” A passionate traveler, Gellert is phase of a multibillion-dollar capital cam- (House and Neighborhood Development proud to have visited all seven continents paign (see page 48). Starting in September, coordinator) for Eliot House, and was in- by the age of 40; she also climbs moun- events will be held for alumni around the volved with CityStep, which teaches per- tains, skis, bikes, and golfs. To the HAA, world. “The HAA wants to engage alumni forming arts to Cambridge school children. Gellert brings a worldly view, sporty en- in the intellectual life of the University— In recent years, she has moved away ergy, and pertinent professional skills. But on the road, at educational events, and from money management to focus on just as important, she says, “is my ability through social media,” she says. “This is nonprofit work. She is a trustee of her to listen.” No doubt, as she travels for the a wonderful time to get involved. As part secondary-school alma mater, St. Paul’s campaign this year, she will meet many of the leadership, we all have to now put School, and a board member of both the alumni eager to talk. “I feel everyone has our oars in the water and row in the same International Women’s Health Coalition a story,” she adds, “and if we spent more direction—sharing in the vision and ex- and of the Lincoln Center Institute, which time listening to them, people would feel citement around how to make Harvard uses “the capacities learned through the better about their voices being heard and relevant in today’s world.” arts to enhance K-12 education in public reflected in the collective good.” vn.p.b. Gellert, who has an M.B.A. from Colum- bia, has worked in her family’s Manhattan private-investment company, Windcrest Hiram Hunn Awards its nominating committee. Partners. She is a former co-chair of the John Irving ’83, M.B.A. ’89, of Saint John, executive committee of the Harvard Col- Seven alumni are to receive the Hiram S. New Brunswick, Canada, has interviewed lege Fund and vice president of the HAA’s Hunn Memorial Schools and Scholarships students since 1983 and is a former chair of engagement and marketing committee. A Awards, presented by the Harvard College his local schools and scholarships commit- class reunion-gift chair, she also served as Office of Admissions and Financial Aid, at tee. He is also involved in other activities at treasurer of the Harvard Club of New York a ceremony in Cambridge on October 25. the College, Harvard Business School, and City before becoming HAA president. Hunn, a member of the class of 1921, re- the Graduate School of Design. During the last year she has focused on cruited and interviewed prospective stu- Margarita Montoto-Escalera ’78, analyzing University research (from fo- dents for many decades; this year’s winners, M.B.A. ’85, of San Juan, Puerto Rico, be- cus groups and surveys) on how alumni collectively, have performed more than 200 gan interviewing candidates as soon as she perceive their relationship to the institu- years of service. moved to the capital city in 1991, and later tion. Details of the findings have not been Marshall Allen, M.D. ’53, of Evans, served as president of the local Harvard publicized, but in general, Gellert says, 86 Georgia, has been inspired by applicants Business School club. percent of alumni “feel very positive to- for 48 years, sometimes even reading the Elaine Hoffman Morris ’58, of New ward the University and about 24 percent books they recommend. Two of his can- York City, has interviewed students for feel connected to Harvard.” Alumni also didates were accepted to the class of 2017. nearly 50 years, through her tenure as tend to be more closely attached to each T. Carter Hagaman ’60, of Maplewood, president of the Radcliffe Club of New other than to the institution. The HAA New Jersey, has served as chair of the York and then as co-chairperson of the and alumni groups, she adds, are now de- Harvard Club of New Jersey’s schools and Harvard Club of New York City. veloping better ways to “inspire and mo- scholarships committee, which covers Miguel M. Palos ’76 and Claudia Frie- tivate our alumni around their connection Greater Essex County (the northeastern derichs Palos, of Bradbury, California, to Harvard.” (That group includes her part of the state), since 2000. In addition, have done schools and scholarships work parents, Michael E. Gellert ’53 and Mary he is a former club president and chair of in the Los Angeles area for 25 years, first C. Gellert, a 1957 graduate of the Harvard as interviewers, then as area leaders in Radcliffe Program in Business Administra- the San Gabriel Valley. In 2006, they also tion, and her brother, John M. Gellert ’92.) received the Harvard Club of Southern At Harvard, she concentrated in fine California’s John Harvard Award. arts (now called history of art and archi- Milton Yasunaga ’77, J.D. ’81, of Ho- tecture) because it was a small, interdis- nolulu, has chaired his local club’s ciplinary department and offered superb schools and scholarships committee museum collections that functioned as Marshall T. Carter John Irving since 2001, but has been interview- Hagaman “laboratories.” By studying Italian Renais- Allen ing students sance painting, for example, she learned for more than about power structures and economies three decades. and allegory and symbolism—and how to He says he communicate what she learned to others. It aims to make was the “ultimate liberal-arts” degree, she the process says, “and while I have not pursued it pro- “enjoyable, en- fessionally, I would not change my concen- Margarita Elaine Miguel M. Palos Milton couraging, and tration were I to do it all over again.” She Montoto- Hoffman and Claudia Yasunaga helpful for all worked on the business side of the Hasty Escalera Morris Friederichs Palos applicants.”

Harvard Magazine 67 Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 The College Pump How to Beat the Heat

was their third attempt at reaching the sum- Harvard sophomores enrolled in the Har- mit,” 492 feet above. Then they saw a man at vard Grant Study of normal development. trailside sitting three feet from a 10,000-foot Participants were anonymous, but Profes- precipice and inching toward it. He later sor Bullitt revealed his role and told his col- said he thought he was on a ship and wanted leagues, ‘When they follow us out to our lat- to get off. He was removing his protective er years, they will get a shock.’ At the peak of clothing piece by piece. He had reached the his own career, he resigned his mastership to “Your wooden arm you hold outstretched summit the day before, but became delu- join the Peace Corps for two years in Bolivia. to shake with passers-by.” sional on the way down from lack of oxy- “While I was caught up in this nostalgia, gen. His guides said they tried to get him I took a look at the English course offerings o to the bottom of the world down the mountain but finally left him for in the four course catalogs from my years at and (almost) to the top. You’ll dead. Osborne and his team be cool. Alan Nawoj, S.M. ’04, a gave up the idea of summit- developer of mobile application ing and instead saved Lincoln Gsoftware from Lexington, Massachusetts, Hall, a 50-year-old Australian. was one of 92 punishers of the flesh from nine “Mount Everest is just a big countries to endure temperatures around hill,” said Osborne. 22 degrees Fahrenheit while negotiating the icy course of the Antarctica Marathon on March 30. Nawoj, 33, who has a personal- best marathon time of 2:52:27, went on to Read a book of Harvard win in 3:29:56. “It was certainly the most dif- history. That’s cool. Edward ficult marathon I’ve ever done,” he reports, Tabor ’69, M.D., of Bethesda, “and it was a true test of mental and physical Maryland, reports: “I recent- fortitude.” “He ran a great race under brutal ly came across Harvard Schol- conditions,” said fellow competitor Rich- ars in English, 1890-1990 (Har- ard Ehrlich, age 60, whose time was 5:27:57. vard University Press, 1991, Nawoj crossing the finish line in Antarctica. Shortly Nawoj aspires to complete a marathon on long out of print), edited by thereafter, he got “very cold very quickly” and spent all seven continents. He has one to go, Af- W. Jackson Bate et al. It is a three hours recovering from hypothermia. rica, and will choose between either the run collection of biographical sketches of 21 Harvard. I had not known that I would still in Marrakesh or at Kilimanjaro. professors of English. In the late 1960s, I have these 44 years after I graduated. I had In Antarctica with Nawoj was a friend, was an enthusiastic English concentrator, written notes in them while ‘shopping’ for Myles G. Osborne, Ph.D. ’08 (in African but I was surprised now to learn so much classes—including a notation that a tutor history), of Warsash, Southampton, U.K. about the English department of those years. in Winthrop House had said that Profes- The former Cabot House tutor, now at the For instance, Professor Douglas Bush was sor Bate’s course, ‘The Age of Johnson,’ had University of Colorado, Boulder, finished the known among the faculty for his extraor- ‘the hardest exam I ever took at Harvard.’ run in 5:33:10. He had a top-of-the-world dinary memory, and he had memorized the (I took the course anyway and have always adventure on Mount Everest in 2006. “It approximately 11,000 lines of Milton’s Para- been thankful that I did.) was 7 a.m. on the morning of May 26, and dise Lost and recited them silently to him- “Today’s Harvard students will not have Osborne and his team had been climbing self to occupy his time on a train journey the opportunity to browse through their for over seven hours since the night before,” to Chicago. I was surprised to learn that own College course catalogs 40 or 50 years the Harvard Crimson reported. “They were in Professor John M. Bullitt, the first master from now because the catalogs are now their tenth week on Mount Everest, and it of Quincy House, had been one of the 268 available only online.” vprimus v

68 September - October 2013 Photograph courtesy of Alan Nawoj Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746

LIFE’S BEGINNINGS evolution at the level of molecules is unfamil- and selection were already acting on mol- (continued from page 33) iar. But Nowak looks at the problem from a ecules. Only when some of them began re- mathematical perspective; to him, evolution producing, out-competing the others, did ways that synthetic biology—an emerg- “is a well defined process that can be de- life truly begin. Nowak hopes to carry this ing field that tries to redesign or construct scribed as precise mathematical equations.” line of thinking forward with the initiative, biological parts and systems for useful pur- Accordingly, he believes that the same prin- bringing his theoretical perspective to the poses—can inform origins of life research. ciples governing complex life forms must chemistry research already under way. “Is there a single biochemistry underly- have been present at the simplest levels— For Szostak, the question of when life ing any form of life anywhere, or are there otherwise scenarios for the origins of life de- began isn’t necessary to answer right now. alternatives?” Sasselov asks. “And if there pend on a collection of random events. “If we really want to understand the ori- are alternatives, do they depend on the Nowak argues that evolution is the gin of life, what we want to understand initial conditions of the planetary envi- driver of life, not an added feature. His re- is the process. It’s a whole pathway of ronments, so one planet will have one, search on humans and other organisms has steps,” he says. “Where do you draw the another planet will have another?” As sci- focused on cooperation, which he says is line between life and not-life? Well, dif- entists start to explore exoplanets, this a fundamental aspect of evolution. By the ferent people might have different places question will become increasingly practi- same token, he adds, “I believe that coop- where they like to draw the line. It doesn’t cal rather than theoretical. eration among really matter—what matters is getting tak s

Jack Szostak, molecules is es- some insight into the overall process.” zo The evolutionary engine professor of sential.” What Understanding that process might chemistry and Life requires more than just getting the he calls “prelife” make the definition of life a little less mys- chemical biology s Jack of y s right molecules together—it’s an engine and professor was not a pri- terious. “We want to understand exactly propelled by evolution. Martin Nowak, proof genetics. mordial soup of what it takes,” says Sasselov, “not just say, fessor of mathematics and of biology and a Behind him is an chemicals but an ‘Something magic happens.’” illustration of a member of the initiative, says that most bi- protocell, a vesicle active, generative ologists think of evolution as a process that containing frag- phenomenon in Contributing editor Courtney Humphries is a free- ments of RNA.

takes place among organisms that reproduce; which mutation lance science writer in Boston. courte image: background

74 September - October 2013 Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 SELF-FASHIONING IN SOCIETY Many active men (and a few women) that library and understand what his life AND SOLITUDE (continued from page 46) throughout history have specifically was like. sought places where they could occasion- Inspired by that beloved space, in his generalizations accurate only for the men? ally retreat to enjoy the felicities of soli- eloquent essay “Of solitude” Montaigne What, after all, were the women doing in tude even as they also enjoyed the advan- used the arresting image of “a back shop this society? tages of society and traveling. Montaigne, all our own, entirely free.” He thought of Virginia Woolf asks us to imagine that for example, lived a very active life, with his own mind as a kind of tower library Shakespeare had a sister called Judith, family, friends, political positions, much to which he could retreat even when he as talented as he. And Woolf asks: what travel; but he was exceptionally well was far from home; it was stocked with would have happened to Judith? Despite aware of the importance of occasional quotations from wise people and ex- being “as adventurous, as imaginative, as solitude. His favorite place for writ- perimental thoughts and jokes and an- agog to see the world” as Will, she was ing and reflection was the tower library ecdotes, where he could keep company not sent to school, had no chance of read- on his estate in southwestern France, to with himself. He suggested that we all ing Horace or Virgil, was scolded when she which he climbed by a series of narrow have such back shops in our minds, and picked up her brother’s books on the sly. staircases reaching to the very top of his I would add that the most valuable and She was betrothed by her father at an early domain, with a view of the vineyards and attractive people we know are those who age to someone she hardly knew, beaten grain fields, a ceiling carved with some of have rich and fascinating intellectual fur- when she protested, and even though she his favorite quotations, and lines of books niture in those spaces rather than a void loved her family, she ran away to London. and manuscripts around the shelves. between their ears. And this is surely But men laughed in her face. As a woman If you visit his estate, you can still see one of the most important purposes of a she could not get training or act any part liberal education: it is an extraordinarily in a play. Someone took pity on her and fine way to furnish the “back shop” of they became lovers. But she became preg- your mind. As a result, you will be a nant and in despair, Woolf says, “she much better conversationalist, so killed herself one winter’s night and that others will seek out your lies buried at some crossroads where company rather than regard- the omnibuses now stop outside ing you as a simpleton or the Elephant and Castle.” a bore. And you will also You students today, male and be better prepared to rel- female, are in the exceptionally ish solitude, whether you fortunate position of being choose it or it is imposed able to take all the eloquent on you. advice you have heard, all Let me close with a quote the inspiring and thought- from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s provoking books you have essay on “Self-Reliance”: “It is read, and act on what you easy to live in the world after the have learned. In the past, only world’s opinion; it is easy in soli- a few exceptionally privileged tude to live after our own; but the or exceptionally motivated men great man is he who in the midst of the were able to follow their adventur- crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the in- ous natures and travel widely around dependence of solitude.” the world. Only they could have found the This is the image I want to leave time and space to meditate about solitude you with: developing the ability to or enjoy its fruits. The major exception to maintain “with perfect sweetness” this generalization has always been mem- the independence of solitude—the bers of religious orders, male and female, integrity and wholeness of the self—in who could choose to retreat from so- the midst of the crowd. Your education ciety. But today, for each of you, these should give you the capacity to shape and wonderful aspects of the human ex- sustain your selfhood. It should both fur- perience are open before you. nish richly the back shop of your mind, and prepare you to be a productive mem- Solitude in society ber of whatever society you live in. And gainst that back- at best, it should also give you the ability ground, I’ll offer a to retreat into yourself even in the midst Afew more nuggets of a busy life when you need to get your of advice to help you think bearings, refresh your spirit, reaffirm your about self-fashioning in so- integrity, and confirm what is most impor- ciety and solitude. tant to your self. Virginia Woolf Harvard Magazine 75 Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 Treasure

Battle-Scarred What life was like for those who did not die

mericans can’t seem to get their Civil War out of their heads. It was blood- shed on home ground, Aand it was hugely bloody, with 620,000 killed in action or dead of wounds or disease. Last December, the Center for the History of Med- icine held a program to mark the one-hundred-fiftieth anniversary of the war. Drew Faust, Lincoln professor of history and president of Harvard, Charles Magnus in 1864, with the numerous fostered an industry in artificial limbs. The spoke on “Civil War and the End of Life.” hospital buildings surrounded by a village Salem Leg Company had an early lead due Jeffrey Reznick, of the National Library of of tents, gives a notion of the scale of the to a recommendation by the government. edicine Medicine, spoke on “Disability and the Cul- medical and human problems faced. But there was competition. Darwin De- tural History of Modern War.” (A video may All wars lead to advances in the treat- Forrest Douglass marketed an artificial leg be seen at https://cms.www.countway.har- ment of trauma, and much was learned that he claimed to be far superior to “those vard.edu/wp/?p=6531.) about amputations and cheap ephemeral substi-

A current exhibition at the Countway Li- artificial limbs from tutes known as ‘govern- ountway Library of M . C brary of Medicine, Battle-Scarred: Caring for the the Civil War carnage. ment legs.’” But consider

Sick and Wounded of the Civil War, examines the Charles T. Greene, above, this testimonial for Sa- rancis A F American Civil War from a particular per- had his leg amputated at lem legs from a soldier: “I spective, to commemorate those who died the knee after the lower work 10 hours every day, edicine/ in battle and also document the experience part was carried away and have to stand all the of the wounded and the ill and the men and by a cannon ball. The time. Besides that, I walk istory of M women who cared for them on the battle- photograph, by William to and from my meals field, in hospitals and prison camps, and on Bell, circa 1864, was one three times a day, and that the home front. The exhibition was curated of many examples of sur- is about three miles. As to by Jack Eckert and Dominic Hall; an online gical cases and specimens dancing, I have tried to enter for the H version created by Jennifer Hornsby appears published by the Surgeon three times; but as my leg on the website above. General’s office for the had not been to school, I This lithographic bird’s-eye view from edification of the medi- could not do it very well, the exhibition of the Satterlee U.S.A. Gen- cal profession. but expect to before win-

eral Hospital in West Philadelphia, done by The many amputations ter is over.” v c.r. images courtesy of the C

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