Language and Mind L Inguistics Then and Now

The Lost Museum • Academia’s Class Gap • Yellow Wolf

MAY-JUNE 2017 • $4.95

Language and Mind L inguistics then and now

KATHRYN DAVIDSON

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170509_AdvancedLeadership.indd 1 3/20/17 12:56 PM MAY-JUNE 2017, VOLUME 119, NUMBER 5

FEATURES 35 Forum: Harvard’s Class Gap | by Richard D. Kahlenberg The academy and overlooked Americans

40 Vita: Yellow Wolf | by Daniel J. Sharfstein Brief life of a Native American witness to history: c. 1855-1935

42 The Lost Museum | by Jonathan Shaw Recreating Harvard’s “Philosophy Chamber”

50 A Language Out of Nothing | by Marina N. Bolotnikova p. 15 Linguists’ search for the nature of speech

JOHN HARVARD’S JOURNAL 18 Bridge with a view, social-club saga continued, Commencement CEO, cranes on campus, fleet elephant, Dunster departure, fewer graduate admissions, Allston ambitions, online updates, Mark Zuckerberg returns, diving into data science, exclusivity in extracurriculars, sailor from Mongolia, basketballers’ seesaw seasons, and a winter-sports summary p. 18

p. 80 DEPARTMENTS 4 Cambridge 02138 | Letters from our readers—and investment prospects

5 The View from Mass Hall 12 Right Now | Social-media smokescreens, epigenetics explained, making green buildings healthier 16A Harvard2 | Events on and off campus, Mount Auburn Cemetery, American bird art, Commencement week, caffeine and sweets in the Square, and more 58 Montage | Choreography reconceptualized, a literary lens on finance (and vice versa), designing museum exhibitions, Martha’s Vineyard, how liberal democracies came to be, and more 68 Alumni | Hands-on drama dean, and Overseer and HAA director candidates 72 The College Pump | Golf hazard, rowing the contaminated Charles, and the ultimate spider man p. 60 80 Treasure | The Peabody’s anthropological anniversary On the cover: The linguistics formulas model the 73 Crimson Classifieds meanings of sentences. Photograph by Jim Harrison CLOCKWISE FROM LACHINE; TOP: PAUL JIM HARRISON PEABODY (2); MUSEUM OF ARCHAEOLOGY & ETHNOLOGY © PRESIDENT AND FELLOWS OF HARVARD COLLEGE www.harvardmagazine.com

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LETTERS

editor: John S. Rosenberg senior editor: Jean Martin Cambridge  managing editor: Jonathan S. Shaw art director: Jennifer Carling Houghton Library, coddled campuses, labor law associate editors: Marina Bolotnikova, Sophia Nguyen staff writer/editor: Lydialyle Gibson digital media manager: Oset Babür JUSTICE BREYER assistant editor: Nell Porter Brown A comment from an un- Speech that they greatly berta greenwald ledecky informed foreigner. It seems disagree with is labeled as undergraduate fellows to me that the U.S. Supreme fascist, or communist, or Matthew Browne, Lily Scherlis Court is the very insurance racist, or sexist, or some that the government reflects other smear word. Rarely contributing editors what people want, to some do they want to allow it. John T. Bethell, Lincoln Caplan, John extent anyway, that many The same is true of any de Cuevas, Dick Friedman, Adam foreigners look on with envy “democracy.” Even true de- Goodheart, Elizabeth Gudrais, Jim (“A Workable Democracy,” mocracies are intolerant. Harrison, Courtney Humphries, by Lincoln Caplan, March- They only grudgingly allow Christopher S. Johnson, Adam Kirsch, April, page 48). In the U.K., others to speak, if they can- Colleen Lannon, Spencer Lenfield, Stu decisions of the courts are subject to govern- not discourage it, or ban it, or intimidate it, Rosner, Deborah Smullyan, Mark Steele ment modifcation. I wish that they were not. or call it names like “rude” or “disruptive” harvard magazine inc. Hugh Quick, M.B.A. ’56 or “nasty” or “uncalled for.” president: Margaret H. Marshall, Ed.M. Ilminster, Somerset, England The people in power try to do the same ’69. directors: Peter K. Bol, Jonathan thing. They do not want to lose their power, L.S. Byrnes, D.B.A. ’80, Scott V. Edwards, I was delighted to read the comprehen- and they do not want to answer criticism of sive and thoughtful article discussing Justice their power. If people in power are able to Thomas F. Kelly, Ph.D. ’73, Ann Marie Stephen Breyer, my much beloved former censor, they will try to censor. If the people Lipinski, NF ’90, Lars Peter Knoth boss. I enjoyed the article tremendously, but out of power strongly object to being cen- Madsen, John P. Reardon Jr. ’60, also noted a small error. On page 51, the ar- sored, the people in power might back off, Bryan E. Simmons ’83 ticle refers to one of the Justice’s earlier aca- especially in America—a nation that has a demic works. The proper title for the book tradition that encourages free speech and Board of Incorporators is Breaking the Vicious Circle, not Breaking the Vi- condemns censorship. This magazine, at ﬁrst called the Harvard Bulletin, was cious Cycle. Sometimes organizations, like homeown- founded in 1898. Its Board of Incorporators was char- Aileen McGrath, J.D. ’07 ers associations, forget that free speech is tered in 1924 and remains active in the magazine’s governance. The membership is as follows: Stephen J. Law clerk to Justice Breyer, October term 2008 the rule in America, not the exception—not Bailey, AMP ’94; Jeffrey S. Behrens ’89, William I. Ben- San Francisco a gift that citizens should be grateful for, but nett ’62, M.D. ’69; John T. Bethell ’54; Peter K. Bol; Fox a right that they should fercely defend. Butterﬁeld ’61, A.M. ’64; Sewell Chan ’98; Jonathan S. Editor’s note: We are grateful for the correc- Dr. Edward Vogt, J.D. ’68 Cohn ’91; Philip M. Cronin ’53, J.D. ’56; John de Cuevas ’52; James F. Dwinell III ’62; Anne Fadiman ’74; Benja- tion, and in awe of McGrath’s sharp eye. Walnut Creek, Calif. min M. Friedman ’66, Ph.D. ’71; Robert H. Giles, NF ’66; Richard H. Gilman, M.B.A. ’83; Owen Gingerich, When I taught political science at UC A SCHOLARLY TEMPLE Ph.D. ’62; Adam K. Goodheart ’92; Philip C. Haughey ’57; Brian R. Hecht ’92; Sarah Blaffer Hrdy ’68, Ph.D. Berkeley, I told my students that they did As a graduate student in history, I quick- ’75; Ellen Hume ’68; Alex S. Jones, NF ’82; Bill Kovach, not really favor free speech and thought. ly came to regard Harvard’s Houghton Li- NF ’89; Florence Ladd, BI ’72; Jennifer 8 Lee ’99; Ran- Since the 1960s, the students were for brary as a scholarly temple whose treasures dolph C. Lindel ’66; Ann Marie Lipinski, NF ’90; Scott mostly leftist views. In the 1950s, the closed- surprised and enthralled (“An ‘Enchanted Malkin ’80, J.D.-M.B.A. ’83; Margaret H. Marshall, Ed.M. ’69, Ed ’77, L ’78; Lisa L. Martin, Ph.D. ’90; David minded students of America were for more Palace,’” March-April, page 36). My favorite McClintick ’62; Winthrop L. McCormack ’67; M. Lee rightist views. of its holdings, a journal kept by Transcen- Pelton, Ph.D. ’84; John P. Reardon Jr. ’60; Harriet Ritvo But whether the national pendulum is at dentalist writer Margaret Fuller during the ’68, Ph.D. ’75; Henry Rosovsky, JF ’57, Ph.D. ’59, LL.D. ’98; Barbara Rudolph ’77; Robert N. Shapiro ’72, J.D. the right or at the left, they all have in com- republican revolt in Rome in 1849, had been ’78; Theda Skocpol, Ph.D. ’75; Peter A. Spiers ’76; Scott mon that they are against truly free speech. recovered from Fuller’s fatal shipwreck off H. Stossel ’91; Sherry Turkle ’69, Ph.D. ’76; Robert H. Weiss ’54; Jan Ziolkowski.

4 May - June 2017

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 THE VIEW FROM MASS HALL

The Work of the Whole Life

ver the years, I have often been asked how many students attend Harvard, and I have quickly respond- ed “about 22,000.” If you visit the official “Harvard At a Glance” page online, you will fnd this same fgure. OBut I have come to realize that “about 22,000” signifcantly un- derstates the number of students who come to learn on our campus each year. It fails to acknowledge fully what is becoming an increasingly important part of our educational mission because it only includes those formally enrolled in degree programs. There is, in fact, another Harvard—a less visible but no less vibrant universe of learners who devote anywhere from a day to months of their time to deepening their knowledge in continuing and executive education programs offered throughout our schools. Their share in our community might surprise you: in any given year, Harvard educates approximately seven non-degree students for every one of its degree students (a fgure that does not include the millions of learners we reach online through HarvardX). Non-degree programs attract everyone from high school and college students to working professionals to retirees. They enroll with goals as varied as their interests are, seeking to challenge themselves communication and growth long after coursework has concluded. with new material, to expand their understanding of a topic for the At the same time, non-traditional learners, who are often active sake of their own enrichment, to enhance their careers in business, practitioners in their felds, provide our faculty with insights to law, medicine, public health—the list goes on. Individuals from cor- incorporate into their case materials and other course content, as porate and nonproft organizations expand their skills alongside well as platforms to experiment with new pedagogical approaches their counterparts as policymakers and public servants take time and instructional technology. to discover common ground. Design programs invite practitioners Education, as one of my predecessors put it, “should be the work of to consider urban homes, real estate, and the walkable city; divinity the whole life.” A few years ago, I received a memorable letter from a programs provide intensive language study in Arabic, Greek, He- successful Harvard Law School graduate who wanted to share with brew, and Latin, and training for the teaching of religion in public me his thoughts not on his degree program, which had served him schools; and humanities programs encourage wide-ranging explo- very well, but on his non-degree program. Ten years after leaving rations of art, history, literature, and philosophy. These examples campus, he returned for an executive education program and devel- offer just a glimpse of hundreds of learning opportunities that exist oped relationships that led to collaborations with faculty in both outside of traditional degree programs. the Business School and the Medical School, as well as learning op- Underlying and driving these non-degree programs is the Uni- portunities for undergraduate students. His experience represents, versity’s mission to generate and disseminate knowledge, to reach in my mind, some of our greatest aspirations for lifelong learning at out to committed and talented learners from around the world, Harvard: deeply engaging programs that expand knowledge, spark and to share our intellectual resources with far more individuals and sustain connections, and improve the lives of individuals. These than would otherwise be possible. Through diverse offerings that aspirations will continue to guide us as we think about and plan for are online, in-person, or some combination of the two, we create a future in which the University reaches more people in more ways the circumstances necessary for people to exchange ideas and to than ever before in its history. This will be the century of lifelong build relationships that lead to more success and opportunity than education, and Harvard is poised to lead the way. any one person could achieve on his or her own. Non-degree pro- Sincerely, grams designed for business leaders and entrepreneurs; for education, health, and fnance ministers; and for primary and secondary school principals, higher education administrators, and college and university presidents shape peer cohorts that support continued

Harvard Magazine 5

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Letters Long Island after she sailed home to Amer- the sensory and the intellectual—to bridge ica. The pages musty, the ink still blurry, its the gulf of time. I recall Fuller’s loud pleas scribblings fery in defense of Italian free- amidst Houghton’s anachronistic hush, as dom, it managed—through a magical mix of she daily recounted the progress of a Ro-

7 WARE STREET the past decade (see, respectively, harvard- publisher: Irina Kuksin mag.com/distribution-16 and harvardmag. Minding the Gap director of circulation and com/endowment-drop-16). The sweeping fundraising: Felecia Carter Four days before last Christmas, the changes at Harvard Management Compa- donor relations and stewardship $300-billion California Public Employees’ ny announced this past January by its new manager: Allison Kern Retirement System (CalPERS), the nation’s president, N.P. Narvekar, are intended, ur- largest pension plan, announced that it would gently, to enhance returns (see harvard- director of advertising: reduce the expected rate of return on its in- mag.com/hmc-overhaul-17). Robert D. Fitta vestments from 7.5 percent to 7 percent. That In the meantime, in the midst of the larg- change might seem modest, and its context— est capital campaign in higher-education new england advertising manager: an underfunded public-pension plan, like history, with well more than $7 billion given Abby Shepard those run by many states, cities, and teacher or pledged, that gap in endowment returns classified advertising manager: or uniformed-services retirement funds— shows up across the University. The medical Gretchen Bostrom might seem remote from Harvard’s concerns. and engineering schools, busily investing in But the direction of the change and its promising research, continue to show op- creative marketing director: implications serve as a useful, cautionary erating losses; the Faculty of Arts and Sci- Jennifer Beaumont analogy. CalPERS adjusted its rate-of-re- ences, having drawn down endowment and production and design assistant: turn assumption after failing to earn it for an unrestricted funds to pay for House renewal Lydia S. Carmichael extended period. Resetting the rate means (and still straining to fnance that huge proj- that it expects a higher share of costs to be ect), expects to fall back into the red next gift processor and office manager: paid by its member government agencies, as year, a victim of endowment-driven bud- Robert Bonotto the contribution from investment returns is get constraints. Having effectively frozen diminished. In addition, CalPERS blandly the number of professors for several years, ivy league magazine network noted, employers will see increases in their it will continue to do so—and disclosed in director of operations: “unfunded actuarial liabilities.” The fgures February that graduate admissions will be Heather Wedlake, Heatherwedlake@ are not small: the state expects its direct cut by more than 4 percent (see page 23). ivymags.com pension costs to rise 40 percent, or $2 bil- Given modest expectations for tuition lion, annually, and plan sponsors generally income and federal support for research, can expect their costs to rise 1 percent to 5 Harvard’s pursuit of its academic mission editorial and business office percent of payroll. Unfunded accrued liabil- depends very much on the success of Narve- 7 Ware Street ity payments, to be made over 20 years to fll kar and his colleagues—a multiyear proj- Cambridge, Mass. 02138-4037 Tel. 617-495-5746; fax: 617-495-0324 the existing gap, will rise 30 percent to 40 ect; continued philanthropic largess; and Website: www.harvardmagazine.com percent. In other words, spending on pub- a tighter rein on spending than has been E-mail: [email protected] lic safety, education, and parks must be re- the norm. But today’s changing invest- duced—or towns and school districts must ment opportunities threaten the Univer- @harvardmagazine fnd more revenue to maintain such services sity’s basic fnancial assumptions. As the facebook.com/harvardmagazine while they cover the higher pension costs. 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Persons wishing to reprint any portion of Harvard Magazine’s contents are required to write and preserve future purchasing power as that Harvard could face the equivalent of in advance for permission. Address inquiries to Irina higher-education costs inflate. But actual the painful trade-offs now facing California. Kuksin, publisher, at the address given above. returns have averaged 5.7 percent during v john s. rosenberg, Editor Copyright © 2017 Harvard Magazine Inc.

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HAA_MayJune17.indd 1 3/22/17 12:32 PM Letters man representative assembly and fnally the me there was genuinely almost zero support French invasion that restored papal rule. for his campaign on campus.” Here, in this “enchanted palace,” past and I was delighted to learn that Harvard stu- present melted into one, ink and blood and dents aren’t coddled and that the College is water blended on the page, and the short- doing an incredible job admitting a diverse lived European strivings of 1848 yet survive. student body. I was inspired to send a crate To this day, in life’s daily din, I close my of Kleenex in response to the next solicita- COME FOR A VISIT. MEET OUR STAFF. eyes and imagine the big tables with the ar- tion from Harvard. I’m certain there must EXPERIENCE THE COMMUNITY. chival boxes, snow serenely falling in the have been progress since my day. But when I Yard, Charles Sumner’s oil portrait gazing was at Harvard, students weren’t shy about A Not-For-Profit Assisted Living Community down upon us—and the Italian nationalist proclaiming every view from the extreme • Special Memory Support • Two Acres of Secure Gardens Giuseppe Mazzini entering Rome in triumph. right wing to communism. We had lively Neighborhood and Walking Paths Yonatan Eyal, Ph.D. ’05 dinner table debates, yet remained friends. • Daily Fitness and Social Events • Private Studios now available Cincinnati Somehow, I think that was a better atmo- • A Warm, Inclusive Community • * Short Term Stays Available sphere for intellectual freedom and learning. COME FOR A VISIT. MEET OUR STAFF. IN PRAISE OF QUIET Sam Levin ’80, J.D. ’83 EXPERIENCE165 CHESTNUT STREET,THE COMMUNITY. BROOKLINE Lydialyle Gibson’s excellent profle of New York City WWW.GODDARDHOUSE.ORG A Not-For Profit Susan Cain and her associates highlights a LANCEAssisted CHAPMAN Living AT 617-731-8500 Community EXT. 105 very disturbing cultural trend, and it isn’t Matthew Browne notes that he hasn’t only introverts who are affected (“Quiet, “had a substantive conversation with a fel- • Building Community Please,” March-April, page 31). The whole of low undergraduate who vocally identifes • Progressive Minded • Inclusive Culture our lives have become noisy lives. Our elec- as a Trump supporter.” Then he avers that • Socially Engaging tronic devices and instant access through the “Clintonite consensus and shock of the • Intellectually Stimulating so-called “social media” have shrunk our at- electoral result weren’t a product of an echo tention spans to a dangerous degree. Like- chamber wherein no alternative viewpoints 165 CHESTNUT STREET, BROOKLINE wise, the demand that we respond to ev- are discussed.” Indeed. Is critical thinking no WWW.GODDARDHOUSE.ORG CALL LANCE CHAPMAN AT ery stimulus, social, political, and personal, longer taught at Harvard? Perhaps it’s merely 617-731-8500 EXT. 105 threatens to turn us into mere reacting or- been buried under a pile of snowflakes. ganisms. The egoistic instinctive reactions Mike Szymonifka ’80 of tweets and selfes hang in the atmosphere Clark, N.J. like a toxic miasma of inane blabberings. How to return to the virtues of silence? A jewel rewards the reader near the end How to make room for reflection, contem- of Matthew Browne’s thoughtful, informa- Miss the deadline for our plation, and the digestion of our experienc- tive, courageous, and well-written column. Summer Reading List? es? The relentless exteriority of our lives is a Still, I fear he misuses “coddling.” Echo very real threat to our humanity and to the chamber, which Browne uses correctly, can cultivation of sensitivity and feeling which exist among adult equals. When John Stuart alone can form the platform from which real Mill in On Liberty said “truth is burnished by help can come to a suffering world. its collision with error,” he was rejecting the Harvard Authors! To quote Lao Tzu, “Do you have the pa- conformism of an echo chamber, not assail- tience to wait until your mud settles and ing nurturing in a primary school. the water is clear?” For as the Master of Tao I feel Browne is too hard on students for Advertise your book in knew, “Silence is a source of great strength.” “making careful decisions that ensure secu- Jeffrey Antman, M.T.S. ’79 rity.” This is prudence, not self-coddling. But the Holiday Reading List. Lebanon, N.J. he may be too soft on faculty and administrators (he barely mentions either), who are the THE DEADLINE IS: CODDLED CAMPUSES real problem. The echo chamber is real on the SEPTEMBER 14, 2017 At least I got a nice chuckle out of “A faculty, at Kirkland House, and to a degree at Coddled Campus?” (The Undergraduate, by the Fairbank Center (three places I happen For information about pricing Matthew Browne, March-April, page 22). The to know from inside), and the worst part is and ad specifications, go to: author describes the “funereal spirit” at Har- that its existence is unrecognized. harvardmagazine.com/hauthors vard following Trump’s election; how “people Example: After George W. Bush’s reelec- contact Gretchen Bostrom cried, phoned loved ones, hugged, slumped…;” tion in 2004, the Fairbank Center held a pan- at 617-496-6686, or email and how the entire town had “the glaze of el, “Bush’s foreign policy in Asia in his sec- [email protected]. something sinister.” When asked by friends ond term.” The fve panelists were all liberal and family if there was anybody at Harvard Democrats. No Republicans were asked. (I who supported Trump, the author admits he noticed the omission as I was advising Vice TURN TO PAGE 54 knows of no one who did, and that “it strikes President Cheney on China at this time.) to browse the Summer Reading List

8 May - June 2017

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17-162 Hmag NovDec Final.indd 1 9/21/16 9:27 AM Letters Leaving aside unfairness, it was pedagogi- by manners and experience. cows get their own cally flawed to exclude anyone from Bush I’m sorry to tell Browne that angry people nutrients, after all). circles, who just might have a clue to plans waving banners may be coddled as well as For those unsure Visit harvardmag.com for the second term not known to Sinolo- living in an echo chamber. And the profes- how to transition for additional letters. gists of the opposing party. sor who “criticizes the world deliberately to a plant-based This is so normal that a similar example— and forcefully” is not necessarily burnish- life, free resource guides include the kick- shocking to Mill’s insistence that truth can ing truth by rubbing it alongside (what he start program offered on the frst of every only be burnished by brushing error—came considers) error. month by the Physicians Committee for Re- upon Trump’s election, when the Asia Cen- Anyway, Browne is an icon of true liberal- sponsible Medicine, guidance from the hit ter and the Fairbank Center mounted a pan- ism compared with many of his “superiors.” movie Forks Over Knives, or Lani Muelrath’s el “Trump and Asia.” No one from Trump’s Ross Terrill, Ph.D. ’70 The Plant-Based Journey: A Step-by-Step Guide. appointees or circle was on the panel. Boston Ellen Kennelly ’85, M.Div. ’90 Browne says he feels no “gag order” to Bellingham, Wash. conform. You don’t need a gag order to keep BAD BEEF Harvard leftist. We few conservatives are Many, many thanks for publishing the ar- HENRY KNOWLES BEECHER constrained to a self-generated gag order ticle on Gidon Eshel and his superb advocacy I didn’t know much about Henry Knowles (“Eating for the Environment,” March-April, Beecher before I read Jack El-Hai’s Vita Document1Document1 11/20/03 11/20/03 11:51 11:51 AM AM Page Page 1 1 SPEAK UP, PLEASE page 11): “lose the beef” indeed. I would add (March-April, page 42), but then I only met Harvard Magazine welcomes letters only that dairy products are as bad or worse and chatted with Dr. Beecher for about an on its contents. Please write to “Let- than beef from an environmental, nutritional, hour, in the fall of 1954. ters,” Harvard Magazine, 7 Ware Street, and ethical standpoint, and for all the same He was in the news for his study of how Cambridge 02138, send comments by e- reasons. Concerned about calcium? Fear not: opioids worked to kill pain—science, not mail to yourturn@harvard.edu, use our Harvard’s own Walter Willett and School anecdotes. I needed a third-year-paper topic, website, www.harvardmagazine.com, of Public Health call federal dairy recom- was interested in law and medicine, and my or fax us at 617-495-0324. Letters may mendations “egregious” and make clear we best friend’s father, who’d suffered a heart be edited to ﬁt the available space. will get even better forms of calcium (and attack that summer, had changed his will in protein) directly from plant sources (where the hospital under the influence of opioids.

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10 May - June 2017

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 Letters Expecting nothing, I phoned Beecher, got salary, or working as an independent con- In the interests of balanced dialogue, an appointment, and found him very inter- tractor in the “gig economy,” is forbidden surely the author could have found some- ested in my topic: medication as a threat to unless you qualify through multi-factorial one to provide the counter-argument? testamentary capacity in will contests and tests. Choose the wrong category, and the Laura Fleming ’93, J.D. ’97 in advising medicated clients. The paper employer faces penalties far exceeding any Dubach, La. was published in 1957. I went on to teach and “damage” to the worker. write on law and medicine, and grew up with “Labor Litigator” (by Marina Bolotnikova, CLARIFICATIONS the institutional review board movement. March-April, page 64) introduces attorney Information provided by Harvard athlet- I learned from Beecher what it was to be Shannon Liss-Riordan as she prosecutes a ics led to the misidentifcation of Sofa Car- received and inspired by an ethical medical “wage-theft” case. Her clients were work- rera-Justiz as Haley Bowe in a caption for the investigator. ing on salary but now claim they should story about water polo coach Ted Minnis (“A David J. Sharpe, LL.B.’55, S.J.D. ’69 have been paid hourly. Liss-Riordan states, Players’ Coach,” March-April, page 26). Hudson, N.Y. “You’re a company that brought in $600 mil- Megan Marshall, author of the Elizabeth lion in revenue last year. You can afford to Bishop biography reviewed in the March- LABOR LAW hire a lawyer to explain these things to you.” April issue (page 61), notes that her fnished In America, we have three categories of The whole system, which she works to book describes Robert Lowell’s work as workers: hourly, salary, and independent con- great advantage, is wrong-headed. If em- “comparatively neglected,” not as “compar- tractor. Hourly employees have the least risk, ployees voluntarily work on salary, there atively forgotten,” which was cited from a independent contractors the most. Nonethe- is no “wage theft” involved. Indeed, where galley in the review. The young Bishop was less, the riskier categories provide the most a company hums along for years paying as- dangled over the railing of a second-story freedom, and potentially the most reward. sistant managers an agreed salary, it is theft porch balcony, Marshall writes in her chap- In a free society, you would think work- for the government to enable collection of ter “Balcony,” not from a second-story win- ers and employers could choose their own devastating penalties after the fact. And why dow. Marshall herself did not, while a stu- pay arrangements. But no—our Department are labor laws so complicated you can’t under- dent in Bishop’s class, break Bishop’s rule of Labor insists workers be paid hourly, the stand them without an attorney? For years I and submit a poem “that she had previous- lowest-risk and lowest-reward category, un- have advised on the tests for overtime eligibil- ly workshopped in another class,” although less they meet an exception. Working on ity, which are anything but “straightforward.” Bishop mistakenly believed she had.

“That is the geopolitical question of our age. This important and fascinating book extracts lessons for how we can avoid such a confrontation.” —WALTER ISAACSON

“Graham Allison is one of the keenest observers of international affairs around. That’s why I regularly sought his counsel both as a senator and as vice president. In Destined for War, Allison lays out one of the defining challenges of our time.”—JOE BIDEN

“One of the most insightful and thought-provoking books I have ever read on the most important relationship in the world.” —General (Ret.) DAVID PETRAEUS

Harvard Magazine 11

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 Right Now The expanding Harvard universe

MASS DISTRACTION written about widely by journalists, academics, activists, other social-media users, but evidence for these claims has been China’s Social-Media hard to find—until recently. In a study (to be published this year in the American Political Science Review) that has already prompted a Smoke Screen startled response from Beijing, Weatherhead University Professor Gary King, the director of Harvard’s Institute for Quantitative t has long been suspected that the it’s called, because each fake post suppos- Social Science, confirmed the suspicion: the Chinese government, as part of its effort edly earns its author 50 cents. 50-cent party, he says, is real, although much to control the Internet within its bor- The phenomenon has been talked and of the rest of what everyone believed about I ders, surreptitiously floods social media it is wrong. For one thing, the fake post- with fake posts written by a vast army of ers likely aren’t paid 50 cents. Most aren’t hired promoters posing as ordinary people. independent contractors: they’re govern- The “50-cent party,” ment employees writing online comments on their off time, and there’s no evidence they earn extra money for it. More surprising, the purpose of these fabricated posts is not to argue with other social-media users, but to dis- tract them. To perform the study, King and his two coauthors—Jennifer Pan, Ph.D. ’15, and Margaret Roberts, Ph.D. ’14—analyzed a trove of leaked emails sent between local government offices and the propaganda department in one county in southeastern China. “A big giant mess of a dataset,” King recalls, from which the researchers harvested nearly 44,000 fabricated social-media posts from 2013 and 2014. Across all of China, they calculated, that suggests about 450 million posts per year. In those King and his team read, 50-cent party members “are not ar- guing with anybody at all,” he says. They don’t jump into fights when other users complain about the regime’s repressions or corruption among local officials. Instead, they change the subject. “They’ll say, ‘I woke up this morn-

Illustration by Whooli Chen

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 Right Now ing and thought about how important our zard of attention, there was enormous dis- on social media, think it’s not a good idea martyrs were to the history of China,’” King cussion on Chinese social media about the to be censoring and fabricating posts.” says. “Or, ‘What a beautiful day it is today.’ paper and the government’s answer to it. “So vlydialyle gibson Lots and lots of these—and not just ran- we downloaded all the posts commenting domly. They’ll post them in big bursts when on it,” King says. The finding? He smiles. gary king email: they need them.” King’s team found large “Well, it turns out that the Chinese gov- [email protected] batches of fake posts turning up around ernment’s claim in their editorial is incor- gary king website the same time as crises, holidays, and oth- rect. Eighty percent of the people, at least http://gking.harvard.edu er events that might stir up public action: the Shanshan riots in June 2013, the Urumqi Railway explosion in April 2014, Martyr’s ON AGAIN, OFF AGAIN Day, Tomb Sweeping Day, Communist Party meetings to discuss national policies. “It’s almost like when you’re having an all-out Is Epigenetics Inherited? fight about something with your spouse or your kids,” King points out, “and you want to end the argument, and so you say, ‘Hey, pigenetics, which governs whether In a monarch butterfly, the caterpillar, co- why don’t we go get ice cream?’” specific genes in the body are turned coon, and winged stages of its lifecycle— This finding—that 50-cent party mem- on or not, has broad effects on health all different expressions, or phenotypes, of bers are less interested in controversy than E and development, ranging from the the same underlying DNA—are also under in cheerleading—fits with King’s previous propensity to develop cancer to a disposi- epigenetic control. But what is distinctive research on China’s social-media control tion to become fat or thin. That has made about epigenetic switches is that they can (see harvardmag.com/china-censors-13), in epigenetic inheritance—the idea that these change. Diet, psychological state, exposure to which he found that the government would patterns of gene expression can be passed cigarette smoke, exercise, financial status: ignore comments disparaging the regime or from parents to children, grandchildren, a whole range of environmental or lifestyle local leaders, while posts about organizing and beyond, the subject of profuse research. factors can modulate gene expression, turn- protests, or even pro-government rallies, Some investigators have begun to treat it as ing genes on or off. were invariably censored. “They don’t care settled science. But Karin Michels, Sc.D. ’95, Research published recently in scientific what you say or what you think,” King says. brought bracing skepticism to the question journals such as Cell, Nature, and Nature Genetics “They only care what you can do. They don’t of whether epigenetic information in mam- has suggested that epigenetic information can want people in the streets.” mals can be transferred across generations be passed from one generation to the next. Last spring came an unexpected twist, during a talk earli- when a Western reporter got hold of an un- er this year at the finished draft of the 50-cent party research Radcliffe Institute, paper and called King with some questions where she has been for an article. King answered them and then, a fellow. realizing that his research would be going Every cell in a public ahead of schedule, posted the paper human body has on his website. The reporter published his the same DNA, or article, and about an hour and a half later, underlying genetic another publication picked up the story; 72 code, explained Mi- hours after that, some 5,000 articles had ap- chels, who chairs peared worldwide. the department of That’s when the Chinese government re- epidemiology at sponded. In an editorial in the pro-govern- UCLA’s Fielding ment Global Times, the regime “for the first School of Public time admitted the existence of the 50-cent Health. Epigenetics Generation I Generation II Generation III party,” King says, and attempted to explain governs how those A woman who smokes while pregnant induces epigenetic to its citizens the reason for this “‘public genes are expressed changes in three generations at once: in herself, her unborn daughter, and her daughter’s reproductive cells. opinion guidance,’ which is their term of at every stage of art for information control.” Basically, the life. During de- government argued that without such con- velopment, for example, epigenetic mark- But that may be incorrect. A grandmother trol, the country would fall into strife and ers govern the differentiation that makes who smokes, thus altering her own epi chaos. “And,” King adds, “they said that the a muscle cell different from a kidney cell genome, could in theory pass on the harmful Chinese people are in agreement about the purely through the genes that are activat- epigenetic configuration caused by her habit. necessity of this public opinion guidance.” ed—and then maintains that program from Research has shown that smoking can cause As it happens, that was an assertion King one generation of cell to the next, so muscle abnormal increases in hormones that signal could check. After the international bliz- remains muscle, and kidney remains kidney. hunger, and if this is heritable, that could lead

Illustrations by Jude Buffum Harvard Magazine 13

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 Right Now to obesity in her granddaughter. in mice. A pregnant yellow-furred Agouti But has science proven that these are fed a diet rich in methyl donor groups (a Explore More transgenerational effects? Far from it, said stand-in for a healthy diet), has predomi- Michels. First, she pointed out, evolution nantly healthy offspring with brown coats. militates against epigenetic inheritance. But if fed regular mouse food, the mother For more online-only articles on Epigenetic changes take place through gives birth mainly to obese, yellow-furred research, see: three different mechanisms, the best stud- offspring in poorer health. This is clearly ied of which is DNA methylation. Methyl an epigenetic effect, Michels said, but it “Old” Food groups, a methane-derived group of atoms is not transgenerational. It results instead Reduces Lifespan that are layered on top of DNA molecules, from exposure to a transient environmen- New evidence provide instructions for which genes should tal stimulus—the food the mother mouse strengthens the be turned on or off—but during reproduc- eats—during a critical period of fetal devel- theory that aging tion, mammalian cells go through two full opment. Such exposure can induce perma- results from cycles of demethylation. That process strips nent changes in metabolism and susceptibil- molecular damage. all methyl groups, and thus epigenetic in- ity to chronic disease, but doesn’t mean that harvardmag.com/oldfood-17 formation, from germ and embryonic cells. the epigenome of the mother passed to the To date, there is no evidence that epigenetic offspring. Instead, the effect is more like the Does Journalism Still Have a Future? In-utero exposures can induce permanent A panel on the future of an anxious profession, and re-establishing trust changes in metabolism and susceptibility to with the public, in a post-truth era harvardmag.com/journalism-17 chronic disease, but don’t prove inheritance. information can survive two rounds of this changes seen in honeybee larvae. Those fed biochemical cleansing. royal jelly become queens: large, long-lived, stantiate in humans, Michels explained: the Second, proving that an epigenetic con- fecund, showing low brain activity. Those effects would need to carry across four gen- figuration can be passed transgenerationally fed worker jelly are short-lived, small, but erations in the maternal line to prove that would require ruling out the possibility that much more neurologically active. the effect was inherited. That is because fe- any observed effect might have resulted from Claims that epigenetics has influenced male reproductive cells are fixed even be- exposure in the womb. Michels, an epigen- multiple generations in families whose fore birth. Smoking by a pregnant mother etic epidemiologist, studies such exposures founders survived famines or other trau- would therefore affect the mother, her un- and cited one famous experimental example matic events are especially difficult to sub- born child, and also (if that unborn child is female) the third generation through the reproductive cells of that unborn child (see illustration). In males, be- IC MODU NET LAT cause sperm is generated continuously IGE IO EP N throughout life, only three generations are required to prove epigenetic inheritance. but even that timespan is too long for any researcher studying humans. Even in laboratory animals, Michels said, no researcher has proven transgenerational epigenetic inheritance. Despite claims to the contrary in the most distinguished scientific journals, she asserted, every experiment to date could be explained by in-utero exposures or other mechanisms. She allowed just one exception, which occurs through a distinct and poorly understood mechanism called genomic im- printing. This transgenerational inheri- EP N IG IO tance seems to be limited to genes that ENE LAT TIC MODU control growth during fetal development. In general, the male allele of genes Environmental exposures, stresses, diet, and lifestyle can all induce epigenetic changes that determine whether genes are turned on or off. for growth is turned on, while the female allele is turned off; this memory of which

14 May - June 2017

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 Right Now allele is turned on or off is dutifully passed across generation after generation. (For an evolutionary theory explaining this tension over the size of unborn children, see “Pre- natal Competition,” September-October 2006, page 18.) In closing, Michels emphasized that epigenetic inheritance may exist—but it has not been proven. And given the current epi- demic of sedentary behaviors and obesity, she concluded, perhaps the mechanisms that strip our reproductive cells of the memory of such epigenetically modulated states from one generation to the next are “a good thing!” vjonathan shaw

karin michels website https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/ karin-michels

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Harvard Magazine 15

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 Right Now sity Center for Excellence, where knowledge Workers in optimized environments scored far workers, such as architects and engineers, went about their regular workdays as Al- better in tests of cognitive function. len and his team manipulated environmental factors. “We weren’t looking to test an and optimal thermal conditions approved tial health benefits of better ventilation, as unattainable, dream-state workplace. We by the American Society of Heating, Re- a counterweight. Their findings indicated wanted to test scenarios and conditions that frigerating and Air-Conditioning Engi- that those benefits represented roughly would be possible to replicate,” he explains. neers (ASHRAE, which promotes well-be- $6,000 to $7,000 dollars per person per year, They adjusted ventilation rates, carbon di- ing through sustainable, environmentally not including the co-benefits to health from oxide levels, and the quantity of airborne conscious technologies). Although these re- diminished absenteeism and the avoidance VOCs (volatile organic chemical compounds sults confirmed the correlation between en- of other so-called sick-building symptoms that are emitted by common objects such vironmental factors and workplace perfor- such as headaches and fatigue. “If you’re as desk chairs and white boards). At the mance that the team derived from the first the building manager, $40 a year [per per- end of each day, the team asked workers to phase of this “CogFX” (cognitive function) son] might be a lot in your budget,” Allen complete cognitive-function assessments in study, Allen knew he still had a major hur- acknowledges. “But if you’re the executive nine key areas, including crisis response, de- dle to overcome: “The decisionmaker on the and you can juxtapose the $40 cost [with] the $7,000 gain on the HR side, it’s a no-brainer decision.” Allen has lec- tured internation- ally about “healthy buildings” and led investigations of hundreds of structures housing people in many fields, yet facilitating communication among different decisionmak- ers, he says, remains a serious challenge. At Harvard, he ad- vises the recently launched Healthy Building Materials Academy, an initiative that aims to close that knowledge and management gap by educat- cisionmaking, and strategy. “We saw pret- building-management side”—focused on ing buyers for campus facilities, department ty dramatic effects,” he reports: workers in bottom-line heating and cooling costs, for managers, and those in charge of construc- optimized environments scored 131 percent example—“isn’t always aware of the facts tion and renovation projects. In the corpo- better in crisis-response questions, 299 per- on the health side, and vice-versa.” rate sector, companies like Google and Kai- cent better on information usage, and 288 Allen and his colleagues realized they ser Permanente have also started putting percent higher in strategy. needed to translate their results into ac- research about healthier buildings to use In the second part of the study, the team tionable steps for building managers, devel- in their institutional decisions, he adds. tested existing conditions in 10 green-cer- opers, and owners. “The question we got Smart, progressive business leaders who tified, high-performing buildings nation- right away was, ‘Well, if I double the ventila- understand the financial value of incorpo- wide, one of them Harvard’s own Black- tion rate, that’s going to cost me something rating health into their balance sheets, he stone South building, which has a double real, and what’s that look like?’” In fact, the believes, will be those who take the most LEED Platinum certification. Workers in group found that doubling ventilation rates decisive steps toward enhancing workplace such green-certified spaces performed 26 would cost the average American business environments in the name of health—and percent better on cognitive-function assess- between $10 to $40 per person per year. productivity. voset babür ments than those in non-certified buildings, That’s usually when the analysis stops. and occupants enjoyed a 25 percent increase Instead, Allen and his team wanted to go healthy buildings website: in sleep scores as a result of better lighting one step further and quantify the poten- www.forhealth.org

16 May - June 2017 Illustration by Paul Lachine

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Harvard 16B Extracurriculars Cambridge, Boston, and beyond Events on and off campus in May and June

16F Industrial Origins Waltham’s Steampunk Festival

16J Birthing a Legacy Centennial celebrations for John F. Kennedy

16R Birds in Hand A trip to Mass Audubon’s unique art museum

16U Commencement Highlights of the week’s events

16H Land of the Living Springtime at Mount Auburn Cemetery COURTESY OF MOUNT AUBURN CEMETERY 16X Take a Break Harvard Square’s caffeine Plus Harvard Commencement & Reunion Guide and calories—galore

Harvard Magazine 16A

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The Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics Extracurriculars www.cfa.harvard.edu/publicevents “First Probe to the Stars” looks at light-pow- Events on and off campus during May and June ered space travel, Breakthrough Starshot, and the possibility of reaching neighboring NATURE AND SCIENCE Botanical artist Susan Pettee ’62 and writ- star system Alpha Centauri. (May 18) The Arnold Arboretum er Mary Taylor Simeti ’62 have worked www.arboretum.harvard.edu together for more than a decade to cap- THEATER From Sicily to the Arnold Arboretum: ture the splendid essence of Mediterranean American Repertory Theater Sicilian Wildflowers in Art and Words. flora. (May 12- July 16) www.americanrepertorytheater.org In Arrabal, sultry Argentinian tango and the From left: A creation from “Reusable Universes: Shih Chieh Huang,” an exhibit at the Worcester Art Museum; Round and Round (detail), a quilt by architect Stefani Danes at the live music of the Buenos Aires band Bajo-

Fuller Craft Museum; from the A.R.T.’s music and dance theater piece Arrabal fondo help tell the story of one woman’s FROM COURTESY LEFT: OF SHIH CHIEN HUANG/WORCESTER ART MUSEUM; COURTESY OF THE FULLER CRAFT MUSEUM; COURTESY OF A.R.T.

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170519_Remax_v2.indd 1 3/28/17 11:11 AM Harvard Squared journey to understanding the political violence that has wracked her country. Book by Spotlight John Weidman; directed and co-choreo- Beautiful, hand-crafted furniture graphed by Sergio Trujillo. (May 12-June 18) and cabinetry, violins, jewelry, and leath- er-bound books are on display in the LECTURES North Bennet Street School’s Annual The Radcliffe Institute for Celebration of Craft, a student and Advanced Study alumni exhibit, May 16-31. Located in www.radcliffe.harvard.edu Boston’s North End, the school was A look at “Title IX Over Time” features founded in 1885 by Pauline Agassiz Shaw International Olympic Committee member (a daughter of Harvard’s influential pro- and Olympian Angela Ruggiero ’02, M.B.A. fessor of zoology and geology, Louis ’14, Massachusetts attorney general Maura Agassiz) to train the city’s growing im- through eight full-time programs, helping Healey ’92 (a former professional and col- migrant population in increasingly relevant students to “achieve meaningful lives, and lege basketball player herself), and WBUR/ industrial trades. She livelihoods” through hands-on work. A NPR sports and society reporter Shira also helped establish host of continuing-education classes and Springer ’97. Co-sponsored by WBUR. and support kin- workshops are geared to anyone, from (May 16) dergartens in Bos- beginners to seasoned professionals. ton’s schools, child- Admission to the annual exhibit is free, EXHIBITIONS & care centers, and but the items are for sale. All proceeds, EVENTS settlement houses and those from a ticketed May 11 preview The Peabody Museum of that, unusual for the dinner and opening reception (two sepa- Archaeology & Ethnology time, were open to rate events), benefit operations and schol- www.peabody.harvard.edu people of all races and arships at the nonprofit organization. “Where the Roads All End: The Mar- ethnicities. Today, the shall Family’s Kalahari Photography.” school still teaches North Bennet Street School

Curator of visual anthropology Ilisa Barbash trades and craftsmanship www.nbss.edu COURTESY OF NORTH BENNET STREET SCHOOL (2)

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16D May - June 2017

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 170536_LuxBondGreen-Patek.indd 1 3/28/17 12:41 PM Harvard Squared

STAFF PICK: Industrial Origins American industrial revolution, and is thus directly tied into the festival’s On May 13, the Watch City Steampunk Festival takes over themes, Perry notes. The complex downtown Waltham, Massachusetts. Expect fire-breathers and grew out of the nation’s first integrat- aerialists, blacksmiths, live theater, and rock and folk bands with ed textile mill, a four-story brick a ragged edge, like Frenchy and the Punk. There will also be loads structure built by Francis Cabot Low- of artists with an industrial bent, like Waltham’s Todd Cahill, ell, A.B. 1793, established there in along with vendors offering “steampunk” clothing, accessories, 1814. It predated the ultimately larger and contraptions, and patrons wearing them (below). factories around which Lawrence and Science-fiction writer K.W. Jeter coined the term in the 1980s, Lowell were built—and paved the way and the aesthetic movement has evolved to playfully merge “neo- for many subsequent Waltham-based Victorian fashion with retro-futuristic industries, including the Waltham technology,” says festival organizer Bob Watch Company, which operated from 1854 to 1957, engender- Perry, director of the Charles River Mu- ing the “Watch City” nickname. seum of Industry & Innovation (at right), Also worth a visit on May 13 is The Waltham Museum. It’s an reflecting motifs from both the Age of Dis- eccentric place filled with artifacts—from watches, radios, and covery and the Industrial Revolution. (The automotive and airplane parts to an iron stove and an “Orient bi- museum will be open during the festival.) cycle built for two”—that enliven the region’s manufacturing his- Artist Cahill is a mechanical engineer and tory. Moreover, Perry adds, the museum was “created as a longtime self-described “interpreter of technology”; labor of love” by a man named Albert A. Arena, who was the last he constructs models of nineteenth-cen- person to work the oil-fired boiler that is the centerpiece of the tury engines in a studio fittingly located in Charles River Museum of Industry & Innovation: “So, you see, the the complex of former mill buildings lo- artists and the industrialists, and cated downtown, along the Charles River. the city, and the festival—we are Watch City Steampunk Festival Waltham was a centerpiece of the all connected.” vn.p.b www.watchcityfestival.com

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16F May - June 2017

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 Harvard Squared highlights archival images from 1950s Na- Museum of Natural History, Peabody Mu- mibia that document the Ju/’hoansi and G/ seum, Semitic Museum, and the Collection wi people, among the world’s last hunter- of Historical Scientific Instruments. (June 21) gatherers. (May 10) Museum of Fine Arts Harvard Art Museums www.mfa.org www.harvardartmuseums.org Memory Unearthed: The Lodz Ghet- A New Light on Bernard Berenson: to Photographs of Henryk Ross. More Persian Paintings from the Villa I Tat- than 200 images offer an intimate look at life ti. Illustrated manuscripts and detached under Nazi occupation. (Through July 30)

folios collected and bequeathed to Harvard ARCHIVE FILM HARVARD by the great art historian (a member of the Worcester Art Museum From Rules of the Game at the Harvard class of 1887) are displayed for the first time www.worcesterart.org Film Archive anywhere apart from his villa in Florence, Reusable Universes: Shih Chieh Huang. welcome for a special day of quilt-related now Harvard’s Center for Italian Renais- The Taiwanese-born artist transforms ordi- storytelling, gallery talks, and fiber-art ac- sance Studies. (May 20-August 13) nary objects like wire, plastic bags, and tivities. (May 13-October 22) household electronics into Harvard Museums of ethereal sculptures. FILM Science and Culture (Opens June 24) Harvard Film Archive www.hmsc.harvard.edu www.hcl.harvard.edu/hfa The Summer Solstice Fuller Craft Museum A Jean Renoir Retrospective presents Celebration offers activi- www.fullercraft.org Grand Illusion and Rules of the Game, among ties, live music, and free Some 25 coverlets by art- other masterworks by the French director. admission at the Harvard ists riff on a pattern theme (June 9-August 11) in Circular Abstrac- Lodz Ghetto: Young Girl (circa 1940-1944), by tions: Bulls-Eye Quilts. Events listings are also found at www.har-

THETHE CATERED CATERED AFFAIR AFFAIR holiday parties. awards dinners. cocktail receptions The Catered Affair is the caterer for the Harvard Art Museums thecateredaffair.com/harvardartmuseums | 781.763.1333 Harvard Art Museums, artwork © Carlos Amorales

Harvard Magazine 16G

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

Land of the Living Springtime at Mount Auburn Cemetery by nell porter brown

n April and May, birders flock to The Asa Gray Garden (above) Mount Auburn Cemetery. Dressed in honors the Harvard botanist; birders at play; nestled in the fleece and caps, binoculars slung around arms of a copy of Lorenzo their necks, they enter by the Egyp- Bartolini’s 1833 statue, Trust in I God; Bigelow Chapel tian Revival gateway at 7 a.m., and spread stealthily across the sculpted 175-acre land- the cemetery since he was a boy, scape. Winding pathways and grassy knolls and currently leads bird walks lead to Halcyon and Auburn Lakes, or to on Thursday mornings through the wooded Dell. Water and the flowering May 18. Rarer, he adds, are sight- shrubs and trees attract thousands of mi- ings of petite, jittery palm war- grating birds to this urban oasis each year. blers, bay-breasted warblers, The birders’ hopes of hearing them, if not yellow-rumped warblers: “On seeing them, rise with the sun. a good day you can hear over 20 Red-winged blackbirds. Grackles. Scarlet different species.” tanagers. Baltimore orioles. Eastern phoebes. Bird walks, formal and informal, occur al- as it’s emerging from a long, bleak winter. All of them are fairly common, says Jeremiah most every morning during migration sea- May brings flowering dogwoods, azaleas, Trimble, assistant curator in the ornithol- son, but other visitors are drawn throughout and rhododendrons, along with weigela, ogy department at Harvard’s Museum of the day to the cemetery’s historic arboretum mountain laurel, and Japanese snowbell. Comparative Zoology. He’s rambled through and stunning array of plant life, especially There are approximately 18,000 accessioned

16H May - June 2017 All photographs courtesy of Mount Auburn Cemetery, unless otherwise noted

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 Harvard Squared Step Outside with Outward Bound Professional!

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Forsythia blooms wildly behind solemn headstones; a common yellowthroat takes shelter; serene Willow Pond Harvard Museum of Collection of Historical plants on the grounds, of which about 5,000 Natural History Scientiﬁ c Instruments are trees, including 1,500 different conifers. The Ware Collection of Scale: A Matter of Perspective Each year, the cemetery’s greenhouses also Blaschka Glass Models of Plants grow upwards of 32,000 annuals for plant- ing in ornamental beds and within family plots. “The flowering trees and shrubbery have all the insects, which are what the birds are looking for,” Trimble notes, and lots of crevices for nesting. “Mount Auburn is just a very beautiful place to be in the spring.”

That was always the point. Established Harvard Semitic Museum Peabody Museum of in 1831, Mount Auburn Cemetery was at Mesopotamia Archaeology & Ethnology Opening December 2017 once a practical solution to Boston’s burial- All the World Is Here ground crisis, and “the first designed land- Honoring the Peabody’s 150th

Harvard Magazine 16I

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 Harvard Squared scape open to the public in North America,” nist, and Harvard professor Jacob Bigelow, ton mayor Josiah Quincy III, A.B. 1790, who says Mount Auburn’s curator of historical A.B. 1806, were leaders of the Massachu- would become Harvard’s president) envi- collections Meg Winslow. Boston’s popula- setts Horticultural Society. They seized sioned a tranquil landscape with ornate gar- tion, spurred by increasing industrializa- the chance to develop an expansive “cem- dens, sculptures, funerary art, grand monu- tion, had grown enormously by 1825, and etery”—they were also the first to use that ments, lakes, and exotic trees and plants. even its cemeteries were overcrowded, she word, derived from the Greek “place of As Bigelow wrote in A History of Mount Au- explains: “They were burying so many bod- sleep,” Winslow adds, instead of “grave- burn, it was to be a sacred place, where “na- ies that you might come upon bones and yard”—on a hilly rural property that would ture is permitted to take its course, when coffins sticking out of the ground.” double as a place where people could escape the dead are committed to the earth under Yet Mount Auburn’s principal founders, the rising congestion of urban life. The men the open sky, to become earthly and peace- Henry A.S. Dearborn and physician, bota- and their supporters (including then-Bos- fully blended with their original dust…

CURIOSITIES: Birthing a Legacy

A few days after President John F. Kennedy ’40, LL.D. ’56, was assassinated on November 22, 1963, crowds flooded a tree-lined block in the Boston suburb of Brookline. A simple outdoor memorial service took place in front of 83 Beals Street, where Kennedy, a beacon of hope and progress for a young, baby-boom generation, had spent the first three years of his life. Now a National Historic Site, the modest home is still a point of pilgrimage, and is open for guided tours from May 5 through Columbus Day. This year, May 29 marks the hundredth anniversary of Kennedy’s birth; to celebrate, the National Park Service has planned a day of music, cake, and guest readings of his iconic speeches (e.g., his inaugural address, “Ask not what er brother, Joseph Jr., in the small your country can do for you, but for what you can do for your nursery down the hall that’s dec- country”), along with an evening “1960s Birthday Party” with orated by a strip of wallpaper music, dancing, and food. Special centennial activities will con- featuring marching drummers; tinue throughout the season, and the home will be open for a Kennedy’s christening gown wreath-laying ceremony, hangs next to his white wicker John F. Kennedy National Historic Site “JFK Remembered,” on No- bassinet. The girls, Rosemary and www.nps.gov vember 22. Kathleen, shared a separate bed- Kennedy’s parents, Joseph room. Downstairs, the dining P. Kennedy ’12 and Rose room is set with family china, and The Brookline birthplace of (Fitzgerald) Kennedy, both the boys’ silver porridge bowls sit John F. Kennedy features his nursery and parents’ hailed from political families on a pint-sized table. The kitchen bedroom (above), and a and moved to the Colonial has a coal-fed stove, a soapstone cozy kitchen. Rose Kennedy Revival home as newlyweds sink, and a bean pot used for Sun- (far left) restored the house, in 1914. Four (of their ulti- day suppers. which opened to the public in 1969. mately nine) children lived Much at the house now ap- there before the family pears essentially as it did in 1917. The family bought back the moved in 1920 to a bigger property in 1966, and Rose Kennedy restored the interior using home nearby, and then to their own furnishings, housewares, personal belongings, and Riverdale, New York. photographs. For the dedication of the historic site in 1969, she The future president made a series of audio recordings that can be heard during the was born in his parents’ tours, piped into the rooms. By that time, another son, Robert upstairs bedroom. The F. Kennedy ’48, who served as his brother’s attorney general, bed is there, above it a had also been assassinated, and all four of the children who had minute copy of a Re- lived on Beals Street were gone. Joe Jr. ’38, a U.S. Navy lieuten- naissance-era painting ant, died in World War II, Kathleen died in a plane crash, and of the Madonna and Rosemary, born with cognitive disabilities, lived in an institution. Child. (Rose Kennedy “We were very happy here,” Rose Kennedy says in the recording, was a devout Catholic.) reflecting on those early days. “We were enthusiastic and opti- He soon joined his old- mistic about the future.” vn.p.b.

16J May - June 2017 Photographs courtesy of the National Park Service, John F. Kennedy National Historic Site

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 170534_JFKLibrary.indd 1 3/28/17 11:52 AM Harvard Squared (1954-2002) through interviews with her sister. Born and raised in Iran, Rafieezadeh moved to Boston for graduate school. She loved traveling, art, and the work of Iranian poet Forugh Farrokhzad, a line of whose “Let us Believe in the Beginning of The Cold Season” marks her gravestone: “Will I ever again dance on wine glasses; will the door- AL PARKER AL bell call me again toward a voice’s expectation?”

The current artist-in-residence is singer, musician, and composer Mary Bichner. She’s composed 12 “classi- pop” pieces—about scam- pering chipmunks, bees and butterflies, the orbiting sun, seasonal changes—and performs them in live concerts at Mount Auburn on June 3 The rejuvenated Harvard Hill (top left) and November 4. The music will ultimate- and a stunning kingfisher; views of ly be released through the cemetery’s new Harvard and beyond (above) from the top of Washington Tower (left). Below: phone app, she says, which will “allow visi- artists-in-residence Roberto Mighty and tors to listen to the compositions while in Mary Birchner the settings that inspired them.” The first of where the harmonious and ever-changing six pieces in her Spring Suite, for example, is face of nature reminds us, by its resusci- ers and artists. Emily Dickinson wrote for a soprano and two altos, and expresses tating influences, that to die is but to live about her visit in 1846, and local wildlife her experience of standing atop the ceme- again.” artist Clare Walker Leslie often sketches tery’s highest point, the 62-foot Washington It was a major success. By the 1840s, other there. The Friends of Mount Auburn Cem- Tower, at dawn. (Visitors may also climb rural garden cemeteries had sprouted up, etery, a nonprofit conservation group, has to the top for a panoramic view of Greater and Mount Auburn rivaled Mount Vernon also begun an artist-in-residence program. Boston.) and Niagara Falls as a tourist destination. Inaugural artist Roberto Mighty, a film- Mount Auburn is likely the only ceme- Today, this National Historic Landmark is maker and photographer, began visiting the tery in America to have such in-house art- the top Cambridge attraction on TripAd- grounds in 2015, and this past February com- visor, Winslow says, and attracts about pleted his resulting 29 short videos entitled 250,000 visitors annually. Many come to pay “earth.sky” (viewable at www.earthdotsky. tribute to their loved ones, or to the luminar- com). He describes the series as “a medita- ies buried there. The more than 98,000 in- tion on life, death, ritual, history, landscape, terees include social reformer Dorothea Dix, nature, and history.” The pieces spotlight artist Winslow Homer, art patron Isabella the cemetery’s unearthly beauty, and offer Stewart Gardner, behaviorist B.F. Skinner, insight into several individuals buried there. Ph.D. ’31, JF ’36, S.D. ’85, and the essayist, A one-minute segment on Bernard Mal- poet, and physician Oliver Wendell Holmes, amud (1914-1986), author of the Pulitzer

A.B. 1829, M.D. ’36, LL.D. ’80. Prize-winning novel The Fixer, features his © ROBERTO MIGHTY Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, LL.D. tombstone inscription—“Art celebrates 1859, “still reigns supreme as a well-known life and gives us our measure”—and for- and beloved resident” who attracts visitors, mer U.S. poet laureate Robert Pinksy read- according to Bree Harvey, vice president of ing an excerpt from Malamud’s 1984 address cemetery and visitor services. Christian at Bennington College: “I don’t regret the Science founder Mary Baker Eddy follows years I put into my work. Perhaps I regret close behind. Her memorial, a white gran- the fact that I was not two men, one who ite neoclassical temple on the edge of Hal- could live a full life apart from writing, and cyon Lake, was inspired by the Tower of the one who lived in art, exploring all he had Winds in Athens, and required 34 marble to experience and know how to make his carvers to complete in 1917. work right.”

The landscape has always inspired writ- Mighty highlights Soheyla Rafieezadeh JOHNSTON JEN

16L May - June 2017

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 1730 Massachusetts Ave Cambridge, MA 02138 www.gailroberts.com 617 245-4044

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170511_GailRoberts.indd 1 3/20/17 1:26 PM Harvard Squared writer and social activ- ist Julia Ward Howe, author of the Moth- er’s Day Proclamation as well as “Battle Hymn of the Republic.” • Service of Com- memoration (May 24) and Bigelow Open House (May 28). Both events are held in and around Mount Au- burn’s first chapel, Spruce Knoll, which was designed and built by cemetery Story Chapel, and co-founder Jacob Bigelow in the 1840s. (The a blue heron ists, Harvey says. It’s also one of the few chapel will be closed for renovations start- to encourage birding, and to offer a full friends Chris Ber- ing in July.) plate of other year-round arts and edu- lin, M.Div. ’06, Dar- • “Dances of the Spirit” (June 24). The cational events celebrating what Win- ren Becker, M.Div. ’15, New York City-based company Dances by slow calls “this very special community and Andrew Stauffer, Isadora performs Isadora Duncan’s “mourn- resource.” M.Div. ’18. ing” pieces. A glance at the spring schedule • “Memories of shows: Mothers” (May 14), Long before Mount Auburn was created, • Satigatha Interactive Music and a walk with docents the landscape and farmland were “beloved” Chanting (May 7 and June 4). Buddhist to explore funerary walking grounds for residents and Harvard and yogic songs, and devotional mantras and art symbolizing maternity and some of the students, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, live music led by Harvard Divinity School prominent mothers buried there, such as A.B. 1821, LL.D. 1866, according to curator

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16N May - June 2017

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 Creative Cuisine, Guest Accommodations, and Iconic Venues events at harvard

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170505_HFC-new.indd 1 3/20/17 1:21 PM Harvard Squared

A Baltimore oriole two years, was donated to the College in ed by his classmates and friends.” adds a splash of 1833 by philanthropist and physician George Not far away are the graves of renowned orange. Shattuck, A.B. 1831, M.D. 1835. Among the Harvard philosophy professors John Rawls Winslow. Dubbed earliest burials were those of students such and Robert Nozick (although the academic “Sweet Auburn” after as Edward Thomas Damon, A.B. 1857, who competitors might not have approved such Oliver Goldsmith’s was then enrolled at the Medical School. close proximity), and of legendary professor 1770 poem “The De- One of Roberto Mighty’s videos focuses and playwright William Alfred, Ph.D. ’54. serted Village,” the on this 24-year-old, who died in 1859 after When Harvard Hill was donated, the

AL PARKER AL property had seven contracting smallpox—most likely from his new burial ground also reflected a cultural hills, woodlands and meadows, and ponds. work treating diseased patients quarantined shift in views of mortality. The more puni- Just below Washington Tower is “Har- in a hospital on Rainsford Island, in Boston tive, Calvinistic approach to death as grim, vard Hill.” The 5,226-square-foot section, Harbor. The chipped stone that marks his as something to be feared, Winslow says, overhauled and cleaned up during the last grave is inscribed: “This monument is erect- was giving way to the more romanticized notion of “eternal sleep.” Also influential in the cemetery’s design was the growing interest in the “picturesque” aesthetic (which would later inspire pioneering landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted). Many assume “that because Mount Auburn is a nineteenth-century designed greenscape, Olmsted designed it,” Winslow clarifies. “But he was a young boy of about 10 when the cemetery opened. Mount Auburn predated but set the stage for him and the entire American parks system.” Jacob Bigelow was especially dedicated to the cemetery project, pushing it along for decades, and ultimately becoming the cemetery’s second president (after Joseph Story, A.B. 1798, an associate Supreme Court Justice and Harvard law professor). In the cemetery’s early years, Bigelow designed not only Washington Tower and Bigelow Chapel, but also the neoclassical Egyptian Revival gateway. These principal structures set a visual tone of grandeur and gravitas, contributing

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16P May - June 2017

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 Harvard Squared to an overall design ethic rooted in English Some 2,000 people gathered for the cem- of our souls. We gardens and the Père Lachaise Cemetery, in etery’s consecration in September 1831. Jo- shed our tears; but Paris. The idea was to enhance the natural seph Story gave the address, according to they are no longer topography, balancing its inherent artistry Winslow, while still grieving the scarlet- the burning tears of with man-made sculptures, monuments, fever death of his 10-year-old daughter: agony. They relieve and other funerary art, according to The Art ….these repositories of the dead caution us, by our drooping spir- of Commemoration and America’s First Rural Cem- their very silence, of our own frail and transi- its. We return to the

etery, a booklet by Winslow and Melissa W. tory being. They instruct us in the true value world, and we feel PARKER AL Banta, a consulting curator at the cemetery, of life, and in its noble purposes, its duties, ourselves purer, and Cedar waxwings and a curator at Harvard’s Weissman Pres- and its destination…As we sit down by their better, and wiser, strike a regal pose. ervation Center and Baker Library (see “Jolly graves, we seem to hear the tones of their af- from this communion with the dead. Tippler, Good Dog,” May-June 2016, page 76). fection, whispering in our ears. We listen to the He died in 1845, and anyone can visit his The Sphinx, sculpted by Martin Milm- voice of their wisdom, speaking in the depths grave, too. Lot 313, Narcissus Path. ore in 1872, sits on the Bigelow Chapel lawn, and commemorates the Civil War. A model of it was transported from Milmore’s Bos- ton studio by horse and carriage, and the statue was carved across the street from its final resting spot, from a 40-ton block Whether we’re ﬁ ghting Redcoats of Maine granite. Another favored sculpture marks the grave of William Freder- or wearing lab coats, ick Harnden (1812-1845). The entrepreneur developed one of the first express-package Bostonians love a good revolution. companies, but died of tuberculosis at age This is a city of game-changers, from the American Revolution 31, Banta and Winslow write: “he’s buried to the healthcare revolution. And Boston Medical Center is leading next to his daughter Sarah, who had died the charge. BMC has a distinctive reputation as the largest safety two years earlier at the age of 10 months.” net hospital in New England and the busiest trauma center in the The granite, marble, and bronze monument region. Caring for all members of the community we call “home” consists of a base with a four-pillar canopy is central to our mission. BMC’s Department of Orthopedic Surgery covering marble-slab gravestones and a Gre- seeks to bolster this mission by naming its ﬁ rst endowed Chair cian urn, along with a life-size statue of an and Professorship at Boston University School of Medicine. English mastiff, above which is inscribed: “Because the King’s business requires haste.” “Everyone thinks they know about Mount Auburn Cemetery, but every time you come here you learn something new,” Winslow says. “And it’s a good place to meet, because as you walk through the landscape, you naturally talk about a wide range of topics—art and history, birds, and plants, death and life. We are so lucky to have this place.”

Your gift will help chart a course for ongoing clinical excellence as well as basic and translational orthopedic research that is bold, challenging and visionary. Some might even call it revolutionary. To learn more about this exciting naming opportunity, please call 617.638.8916 or email [email protected].

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Harvard Magazine 16Q

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 ALL IN A DAY

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At the Daniel Webster Sanctuary in She bequeathed her estate to Mass Audu- Marshfield, Van Dusen set up his stool, art bon in 1989, along with the surrounding supplies, and binoculars beside a swath of 121 rural acres, which are also open to the wetlands, and was lucky enough to watch public. Woodland trails snake along pine a Virginia rail and her chick. The secre- and oak groves, vernal pools, and Pequit tive, long-toed birds dwell deep in the cat- Brook—prime wildlife-watching territo- tails, but here “wandered around together ry. This spring, listen for wood frogs and in the open and picked at a pollywog,” he singing birds like Baltimore orioles, scarlet CAMBRIDGE | 36 BOWDOIN STREET reports, enabling him to produce a wa- tanagers, and wood warblers. 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SUSAN CONDRICK 617.842.4600 JOHN O’NEIL 617.308.5638 focused on American art inspired by birds.” It opened in 1999, but its art collection began by John James Audubon himself to Pop Art growing almost as soon as Mass Audubon silkscreen prints of a bald eagle and Pine was founded nearly a century earlier. There Barrens tree frog (donated by their creator, are thousands of works—from engravings Andy Warhol) to the exquisite carved decoys, coveted by collectors, of Anthony Elmer Crowell. The Cape Codder built his career as a gunning guide, then as a craftsman, through a group of CAMBRIDGE | 66-70 OTIS STREET CAMBRIDGE | 95 ALPINE STREET, #1 & #2 EAST CAMBRIDGE | POINT 262 Harvard sportsmen, includ- Six gorgeously renovated luxury Two newly renovated luxury townhouses Each of the 55 units in this concierge ing noted conservationist and townhouses! Min. 3 bed 2.5 baths, off street located just footsteps away from the highly development includes luxury features such public servant John C. Phillips, parking. Some outstanding features include sought after John M. Tobin Montessori as balconies, gourmet kitchens, and garage B.S. 1899, M.D. 1904. “The con- modern interior floor plans, gourmet School and charming Huron Village. parking. Visit Point262Condos.com nections between Harvard and Sub-Zero/Wolf kitchens, sprawling ceiling Starting at $985,000 Prices start in the mid $500,000s heights. For further details please inquire! the early American conserva- TED PIETRAS 617.549.2078 MARIO MASSIMINO 617.352.8883 MARIO MASSIMINO 617.352.8883 tion movement are strong, and KEN SMITH 617.592.3249 most of the gunners were early 1008 Massachusetts Ave, Cambridge | 617.945.9161 | GibsonSothebysRealty.com Each office is independently owned and operated Watercolor paintings courtesy of Barry Van Dusen, photographs courtesy of the Museum of American Bird Art Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746

170526_Gibson-Sothebys.indd 1 3/24/17 12:30 PM WE ARE | connected worldwide

BOSTON | 254 MARLBOROUGH ST, #3 BOSTON | 179 MARLBOROUGH ST, #2 BROOKLINE | 55 LEICESTER STREET Located on the quiet and beautiful This property gives you endless options The grand foyer with its high ceilings sets Marlborough Street, this stunning three for dining, entertainment, shopping & the tone for this magnificent home & leads bedroom Penthouse has every luxury that transportation. Private outdoor space & into a desirable open concept floor plan. you could ever ask for in a Back Bay home. direct access parking space www.55LeicesterStreet.com Private elevator with direct access. $2,450,000 $12,800,000 $3,250,000 ALLISON MAZER 617.905.7379 JULIE HARRISON 617.413.6332 ALLISON MAZER 617.905.7379 CAMBRIDGE | 168 BRATTLE STREET

CAMBRIDGE | 36 BOWDOIN STREET Beautiful 1894 home near Radcliffe and HARVARD SQUARE - This Grand home was built in 1888 and features an eclectic interior vibrant Harvard Square. 4 bedrooms, 4.5 and storied history. Designed by architect Arthur Little, this home invokes all classical baths; fenced yard and 2-car garage. Please orders of design including Greco Roman details and intricately carved Indian Teak Salon visit www.36Bowdoin.com. by the American Aesthetic Movement’s Lockwood de Forest. www.168BrattleStreet.com. $3,488,000 $8,800,000 LAUREN HOLLERAN 617.913.2203 SUSAN CONDRICK 617.842.4600 JOHN O’NEIL 617.308.5638

CAMBRIDGE | 66-70 OTIS STREET CAMBRIDGE | 95 ALPINE STREET, #1 & #2 EAST CAMBRIDGE | POINT 262 Six gorgeously renovated luxury Two newly renovated luxury townhouses Each of the 55 units in this concierge townhouses! Min. 3 bed 2.5 baths, off street located just footsteps away from the highly development includes luxury features such parking. Some outstanding features include sought after John M. Tobin Montessori as balconies, gourmet kitchens, and garage modern interior floor plans, gourmet School and charming Huron Village. parking. Visit Point262Condos.com Sub-Zero/Wolf kitchens, sprawling ceiling Starting at $985,000 Prices start in the mid $500,000s heights. For further details please inquire! TED PIETRAS 617.549.2078 MARIO MASSIMINO 617.352.8883 MARIO MASSIMINO 617.352.8883 KEN SMITH 617.592.3249 1008 Massachusetts Ave, Cambridge | 617.945.9161 | GibsonSothebysRealty.com Each office is independently owned and operated

170526_Gibson-Sothebys.indd 1 3/24/17 12:30 PM Harvard Squared

The gallery has soaring other early conservation activists with the ceilings. Van Dusen used passage of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act watercolors to render this nesting tern and chick at of 1918.” The art museum, Montague adds, Mass Audubon’s Sampsons thus tells the “stories of the changing rela- Island Wildlife Sanctuary. tionships between humans and the natural world over the centuries.” nated a separate Hemenway Also at the museum through May 14 is Gymnasium to Radcliffe after “Birdscapes: Recent Oil Paintings by James her husband, public servant Coe,” class of ’79. Coe studied biology at and philanthropist Augustus Harvard before going to art school, then Hemenway, A.B. 1879, donated worked for more than 15 years as a field- the first Hemenway Gymna- guide bird illustrator. He now paints pri- sium to Harvard), she was appalled by the marily rural landscapes—and often the slaughter of birds to feather fine ladies’ hats birds living within them—in and around so she drafted a group of like-minded, in- the Hudson Valley, where he lives. fluential women and men to help protect A day trip to the museum could include wild birds. “Museum visitors have been sur- stops at Mass Audubon’s oldest and largest prised to see shorebird decoys,” Montague preserve, the Moose Hill Wildlife Sanctu- says, “because it’s hard for us today to imag- ary (five miles away), and the nearby Elea- ine…plovers, red knots, and dowitchers as nor Cabot Bradley Estate, a sprawling brick delicacies for diners. [But] market gunning country home with formal gardens, owned was a lucrative enterprise, and huge quan- by The Trustees of Reservations, where sea- tities of these birds were shipped from the sonal concerts and events are also planned. conservationists,” Montague explains. shore to restaurants in Boston, New York, For lunch in Canton, try the Amber Road Mass Audubon was co-founded by an- and Philadelphia in the nineteenth and early Café or sushi at Takara, or head to nearby other Canton resident, Harriet Lawrence twentieth centuries. This practice was end- North Easton, for a more elaborate meal at Hemenway. An independent spirit (she do- ed through the efforts of Mass Audubon and The Farmer’s Daughter. vn.p.b.

Harvard THE JOSEPH B. MARTIN Conference Center Medical School AT HARVARD MEDICAL SCHOOL

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16T May - June 2017

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 HARVARD COMMENCEMENT & REUNION GUIDE The Week’s Events STEPHANIE MITCHELL/HPAC STEPHANIE

OMMENCEMENT WEEK includes A Special Notice Regarding addresses by Harvard president Harvard University’s 366th Commencement Exercises Drew Gilpin Faust and Facebook Thursday, May 25, 2017 co-founder and CEO Mark Zuck- C To accommodate the increasing number of people wishing to attend Harvard’s Com- erberg ’06. For details and updates on event speakers, visit harvardmagazine.com/ mencement Exercises, the following guidelines are provided to facilitate admission into commencement Harvard Yard and Tercentenary Theatre:

* * * • Degree candidates receive a limited number of tickets to Commencement. Their par- TUESDAY, MAY 23 ents and guests must have tickets, which must be shown at the gates in order to enter. Seating capacity is limited in Tercentenary Theatre; there is standing room on the Phi Beta Kappa Exercises, at 11, with poet Widener steps and along the Theatre rear and sides. For details, including an overview and memoirist Mark Doty and orator Sher- of the restricted bag and stroller policies, please visit: commencement.harvard.edu. ry Turkle ’69, Ph.D. ’76, Abby Rockefeller Note: A ticket allows admission, but does not guarantee a seat. Seats are available Mauzé professor of the social studies of sci- on a first-come basis and cannot be reserved. The sale of Commencement tickets ence and technology at MIT, and founder/ is prohibited. director of the MIT Initiative on Technology • A limited supply of tickets is available to alumni/ae on a first-come basis through the and Self. Sanders Theatre. Harvard Alumni Association: alumni.harvard.edu/annualmeeting. Guests may view the Baccalaureate Service for the Class of Morning Exercises on video screens in the Science Center and in most of the under- 2017, at 2, Memorial Church, followed by graduate Houses, as well as at graduate and professional schools. These locations pro- class photo, Widener steps. vide seating, and tickets are not required. Both the Morning Exercises and Afternoon Class of 2017 Family Reception, at 5. Program may also be viewed live via www.harvard.edu or Comcast 283 in metro Boston. Tickets required. Science Center plaza. • College alumni/ae attending their 25th, 35th, and 50th+ reunions will receive tickets Harvard Extension School Annual Com- at their reunion mencement Banquet, at 6. Tickets required. OVERVIEW Annenberg Hall. • The Morning Exercises begin following the academic procession into Tercentenary Theatre. The three student orators deliver their speeches. The Deans of each school introduce the candidates for their respective degrees, which the president then confers. Towards the conclusion of the ceremony the graduating seniors are asked to rise, and their degrees are conferred on them as a group by the president. Honorary Degrees are then conferred before the exercises are adjourned. • Diploma-Granting Ceremonies and Luncheons follow immediately after the Morn- ing Exercises, when new graduates, parents, and guests return to their undergraduate Houses, graduate and professional schools, and alumni/ae attend reunion luncheons, or purchase tickets for lunch at the Alumni Spread. • The Afternoon Program features an address by Harvard President Faust and the Commencement speaker. Formally called the Annual Meeting of the Harvard Alumni Association, this program also includes the Overseer and HAA director election results, the presentation of the Harvard Medals, as well as remarks by the HAA president. vThe Harvard Commencement Office and The Harvard Alumni Association JON CHASE/HPAC JON

Harvard Magazine 16U

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 HARVARD COMMENCEMENT & REUNION GUIDE

WEDNESDAY, MAY 24 president Susan Morris Novick ’85, and a religious Commencement Service for the ROTC Commissioning Ceremony, at 11, guest speaker. Tickets required. Tercente- Class of 2017, at 4. Memorial Church. with President Faust and a guest speaker, nary Theatre. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences General John Hyten ’81, U.S. Air Force. Ter- Harvard Kennedy School Commence- Dudley House Faculty Dean’s Reception, centenary Theatre. ment Address, at 2, by former U.S. Secre- 4-6. Senior Class Day Picnic, at noon. Tickets tary of State John Kerry. JFK Memorial Park. Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public required. The Old Yard. Law School Class Day, 2:30, with featured Health Award Presentation and Celebra- Senior Class Day Exercises, at 2, with speaker Sally Yates, former U.S. deputy at- tion, 4-7. Kresge Courtyard. the Harvard and Ivy Orations, remarks torney general for the Obama administra- Faculty Deans’ Receptions for se- by incoming Harvard Alumni Association tion and former acting attorney general for niors and guests, at 5. The Undergraduate the Trump administration. Houses. Holmes Field. Harvard University Band, Harvard Glee Business School Class Club, and Radcliffe Choral Society Con- Day Ceremony, 2:30, with cert, at 8. Tercentenary Theatre. David G. Bradley, M.B.A. ’77, owner of Atlantic Me- THURSDAY, MAY 25 dia, publisher of The Atlan- Commencement Day. Gates open at 6:45. tic. Baker Lawn. Academic Procession, 8:50. The Old Yard. Graduate School of De- The 366th Commencement Exercises, sign Class Day, at 4, with 9:45 (concluding at 11:45). Tickets required. guest speaker Katherine Tercentenary Theatre. Farley, M. Arch. ’76, chair All Alumni Spread, 11:30. Tickets re- of Lincoln Center for the quired. The Old Yard. Performing Arts. Piper Au- The Tree Spread, for the College classes ditorium, Gund Hall. through 1966, 11:30. Tickets required. Holden

STEPHANIE MITCHELL/HPAC STEPHANIE Divinity School Multi- Quadrangle.

MARTHA’S VINEYARDP P OFF BRATTLE STREET RENOVATED ANTIQUE WEST CAMBRIDGE

Beautiful 5BR historic home conveniently located in downtown Vineyard Haven. Skillfully renovated by the owner/architect, this home lovingly incorporates the charm of old and functionality of new. Enjoy the easy living from a large screened-in porch overlooking a manicured SET BACK FROM SPARKS STREET AND THE lawn, lovely plantings, and white picket fence. CHARLES RIVER, the quintessence of Cambridge Exquisitely renovated 2-family. 12 rooms with 6 Central air, multiple fireplaces, and state-of-the-art quietly awaits you. This idyllic townhouse offers a bedrooms and 6 baths. Separate-entry 1-bedroom kitchen are just a few of the wonderful amenities. south facing two-story atrium, brick accents, and apartment. State-of-the-art systems including solar. Exclusive - $1,725,000 a private courtyard. Price upon request Beautifully landscaped garden. Huron Village Area convenient to transportation, shops, restaurants, SPENCER & LAUREN LANE and Fresh Pond. Price upon request Bobbi Flake Reed, Principal [email protected] VICTORIA KENNEDY BARBARA CURRIER MAGGIE CURRIER 617-872-0030 | SpencerLane.com Beth Welch | June Flake WWW.BARBARACURRIER.COM FOLLOW US ON: The Currier Team, Coldwell Banker Idalyn Macchia Gilstad | Emily Flake fb.com/cambridgeproperties 71 Main Street, Vineyard Haven, MA 02568 171 Huron Ave, Cambridge, MA 02138 @SpencerandLaurenLane www.viewpointsmv.com | 508-693-0222 Call or text 617.593.7070 | [email protected]

If you would like to list a property in our July-August issue, contact Abby Shepard: 617.496.4032.

16V May - June 2017

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 HARVARD COMMENCEMENT & REUNION GUIDE

Graduate Schools Diploma Ceremonies, the Environmental Pro- from 11:30 (time varies by school). tection Agency. Kresge GSAS Luncheon and Reception, 12 to 3. Courtyard. Tickets required. Behind Perkins Hall. Medical and Dental College Diploma Presentation Ceremo- Schools Class Day Cer- nies and Luncheons, at noon. The Under- emony. Ticketed lun- graduate Houses. cheon at noon, followed Alumni Procession, 1:45. The Old Yard. by a speech, at 2, by the The Annual Meeting of the Harvard new HMS dean, George Alumni Association (HAA): The Com- Q. Daley ’82, M.D. ’91. mencement Afternoon Program, 2:30, includes remarks by HAA president Martin FRIDAY, MAY 26 J. Grasso Jr. ’78, President Faust, and Com- Radcliffe Day this year mencement speaker Mark Zuckerberg; focuses on the role of Overseer and HAA director election results; journalists and the and Harvard Medal presentations. Tercen- news. The morning

tenary Theatre. panel discussion, “(Un) CHASE/HPAC JON Harvard T.H. Chan School of Pub- Truths and Their Consequences,” is fol- vid Brooks and a conversation between lic Health Diploma Ceremony at 2, with lowed by a luncheon honoring the 2017 Rad- Woodruff and Aspen Institute president Gina McCarthy, former administrator for cliffe Medal recipients:PBS NewsHour broad- and CEO Walter Isaacson ’74. Tickets are cast journalist Judy Woodruff and her late required. The events will be webcast live Follow @harvardmagazine colleague, Gwen Ifill. (Former NPR radio at www.radcliffe.harvard.edu. For updates as we capture fun and host Michele Norris will accept the award on Commencement week and related ac- memorable moments during on Ifill’s behalf.) tivities, visit alumni.harvard.edu/annual- Commencement week. The luncheon, 12:30-2, includes com- meeting or commencement.harvard.edu/ #Harvard17 ments by New York Times columnist Da- morning-exercises.

WHY I JOINE D THE HARVARD CLU B OF BOSTON

There are many dierent reasons to join the Harvard Club of Boston. Mike Seward is a Harvard alum and former varsity hockey player for the Crimson. Here's why he joined.

"I joined the Harvard Club in my freshman year, and brought my Harvard friends as well as friends from other colleges to the fun events like Pop Up Night at the Downtown Clubhouse. Five years later, I'm still a member because of the people and the programs oered by the Harvard Club. Every month, there is an exceptional line-up of activities, like food and wine or beer tastings, networking events, and access to Red Sox and Bruins tickets. And the wide range of people in the Club is also a huge reason I stay. The Club has members from many dierent schools, like MIT, Boston University, and Holy Cross - not all the members are from Harvard. And I get great career and life advice from them." - Mike Seward ’15

For more information visit harvardclub.com

Harvard Magazine 16W

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

Take a Break Caffeine—and calories—galore

nyone taking a late-day stroll in search of coffee or tea and something sweet would no- A tice that Harvard Square has moved happily beyond the multiple Star- bucks and Dunkin’ Donuts outlets—but almost to a ludicrous point. Most lavish are newcomers Tatte Bak- ery & Café and Flour. Both offer Europe- an-style baked goods in brightly lit, airy spaces, and loads of counter staff. Tatte (ww.tattebakery.com), near the Harvard Book Store, has tiled floors and glass cases brimming with a lifetime’s supply of sugary treats: brownies, glossy fruit tarts, nut tarts, cups of cheesecake and Flour’s light- tiramisu, along with “chocolate coconut filled interior (right) and cloud” meringues the size of salad plates baked treats, ($3.25-$6). Define decadence by the “Halva like lemon- Bomb,” a chocolate-mousse cake wrapped raspberry cake around a core of halva, and covered with (above); breads at Tatte Bakery dark-chocolate ga- (left); Jenny’s on hand ($5 a slice/$26 nache ($7 a slice/$50 Café, a minimal- whole). But there’s for the whole, eight- ist’s dream (far other delectable stuff, left), serves hot inch shebang). Cof- drinks and pastry too: the blueberry-al- fee drinks are per- (top left). mond tea bread ($3) fectly percolated. and the “magic” bars That partly ex- jammed with chocolate and peanut-butter plains the buzzing chips, pecans, and shredded coconut ($3). vibe that pervades prized meeting Petsi’s big airy scones, notably the butter- Tatte’s two floors. Swing by for fresh-baked spot, despite the shared farmhouse table and milk currant ($2.25) are the best around. bread after 4:30 p.m. backless stools in the front. (The rear mezza- Hidden away, but a perfect place to read, On the other end of the Square, on Mount nine is more private.) Artisanal George How- write, or meet a friend, is Jenny’s Café, at Auburn Street, the latest branch of Flour ell coffee comes in all permutations, and the the Harvard Art Museums (www.harvard- (www.flourbakery.com), founded and run baked goods feel more home-grown than the artmuseums.org). Open to the public with- by chef Joanne Chang ’91, also serves ter- art forms at Flour and Tatte. Especially good out an admission fee, the café serves drinks rific coffee, but in a less hectic setting. The are the cookies: try chocolate walnut mud- like cinnamon French toast latte and berga- cakes are divine—a lemon-raspberry option slide ($2.25), or the giant oatmeal ($3.25). mot iced tea, and patrons can sit at tables in is layered with lemon curd ($6/slice)—and Akin to Crema, but more of a neighbor- the adjacent Calderwood Courtyard. Take a the kouign-amann (that’s kween ah-mon) is a hood haunt, is Petsi Pies (www.petsipies. break before or after moseying through the butter-rich Breton pastry with caramelized com) on Putnam Avenue, just outside the galleries: they offer unusually close views of sugar ($4). The brioche au chocolat ($3.50) lifts Square. Walls feature local artwork and cus- works by Van Gogh, Munch, Matisse, and any sour mood, as does the dreamy coconut- tomers—students, parents with children, others. On loan from the Musée d’Orsay cream pie ($5 a slice/$30 a pie). and a host of laptoppers—tend to settle through July is Winslow Homer’s lyrical CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: KRISTIN TIEG/FLOUR ; JOYELLE WEST/FLOUR; HARVARD ART TATTE; MUSEUMS; FLOUR TATTE; More casual and bubbly is Crema (www. in. Amazing pies do predominate: pecan, painting Summer Night (1890). cremacambridge.com), on Brattle Street. It’s a mixed berry, and apple crumble are reliably On Bow Street, Café Pamplona (www.

16X May - June 2017

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

Stunning New Cambridge Townhome

Price Upon Request 4 BED | 4.5 BATH | 3,000 SF Crema has a cozy mezzanine (top). At Petsi Pies, the caffeine pairs well with Unparalleled excellence of design and finishes in homemade “pop tarts” and muffins. this stunning Cambridge townhome. Special features 1073 Massachusetts Avenue include a floating fireplace, two private decks and Cambridge, MA cafepamplona.weebly.com) is still a soft a beautifully landscaped garden. place to land in the afternoon. Try artfully [email protected] 617.835.5008 prepared espresso, cappuccino, or a pot of thecarolkellyteam.com tea. Light fare is available, too, and the place is open until midnight, a respite from the Compass Massachusetts LLC d/b/a Compass is a licensed real estate broker. All information presented herein is subject to errors, omissions, and changes without notice and Compass makes no warranty or representation as to the accuracy thereof. thumping bar scene. Algiers Coffeehouse (www.harvard-

FROM TOP: COURTESY OF AND CREMA PETSI (1) PIES (2) square.com/algiers), another beloved icon, is in front of the Brattle Theatre. Its interior red-painted walls, many mirrors, octago- nal café tables, and a soaring wood-paneled domed ceiling resemble a jewelry box. The baked goods are generic, but go instead for the ambient warmth, breakfast and Middle Eastern food served all day, and its drinks. The Arabic coffee with cardamom ($3.25) packs a wallop; the smoky lapsung souchong tea ($3.25) soothes. (The café is now run by the owner of Central Square’s Andala Coffee House—another relaxing, Middle Eastern- styled haunt with strong brews.) A last word, on teas. Dado (www.dadotea. com), with locales on Church Street and Mass. Ave., takes equal care with coffee con- coctions and with loose teas steeped in a mug or pot—and the place is relatively quiet. But Tealuxe (www.tealuxe.com) takes the (tea) cake. More than a hundred high-quality teas are on hand in tins behind the counter, and Atlifecare Brookhaven living is as good as it looks. brews rotate daily. Staffers patiently and aptly Brookhaven at Lexington offers an abundance of opportunities for describe any of them, and sniffs from the tins intellectual growth, artistic expression and personal wellness. Our residents are encouraged. The shortage of seats is less share your commitment to live a vibrant lifestyle in a lovely community. of a problem in warm weather: customers can Call today to set up an appointment for a tour! take their cups of royal coconut pouchong or turmeric ginger, sweetened with organic hon- A Full-Service Lifecare Retirement Community www.brookhavenatlexington.org ey, to a bench by the Charles River. vn.p.b. (781) 863-9660 • (800) 283-1114

Harvard Magazine 16Y

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 3/31/17 2:52 PM harvardsquare.com 34th Annual MayFair (rain date 5/21) (rain date MayFair 34th Annual Day Mother’s in Bloom of Patios Kick-o Commencement 366th Harvard Community World for Dance Mateo Jose / la Musique de Fête 10th Annual Square Music Harvard Make Day Father’s Squared Salsa 4th Annual 5/7 7/21 7/21 5/23 5/14 5/25 6/17 6/18 6/18 6/10 SHOPPING SHOPPING GUIDE SPRING & SUMMER EVENTS IN HARVARD SQUARE IN HARVARD EVENTS SPRING & SUMMER 2

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Colleges), CIS (Council of International Schools), MEN (French Ministry shop local shop

HARVARD SQUARE BUSINESS ASSOCIATION ADVERTISING SECTION 170527_HSBA.indd 4 JOHNJOHN HARVARD’SHARVARD’S JOURNAL

the measure, the policy itself, and its imple- resources and desirable private facilities in Social-Club Saga mentation—and the issues may well remain Harvard Square) and the newer fraterni- unresolved for months to come. ties and sororities are organizations that, de As of May 6, a full year will have passed The policy, as originally propounded, jure, exclude members of the opposite sex in since Harvard College dean Rakesh Khura- withholds from undergraduates who join close proximity to the College, which strives na announced a policy that would sanction a USGSO the College endorsement required to be maximally inclusive; and that the ven- students enrolling this coming August and for prestigious fellowships (the Rhodes, ues where these groups congregate may be thereafter if they choose to join an unrec- Marshall, and so on), and prohibits their conducive to evasion of age-related alcohol ognized single-gender social organization holding positions of leadership in recog- regulations, and lead to sexual assaults. (USGSO—final clubs, fraternities, or soror- nized organizations and athletic teams. Although many faculty members and ities; see harvardmag.com/finalclub-16). Varying rationales have been invoked to students support implementing the policy, Throughout this academic year, the Faculty support the policy, principally focusing on many others do not. Among professors— of Arts and Sciences (FAS) has been entan- the fact that the long-established male fi- including some who have long deplored gled in disagreements over the rationale for nal clubs (which enjoy substantial financial behavior associated with the final clubs—

18 May - June 2017 Photograph by Jim Harrison

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

objections crystalized around three points. the one Khurana propounded is a matter for The Larz Anderson Bridge, finally First, no matter how odious a gender-ex- faculty legislation, not administrative fiat. renovated, spans the Charles River seamlessly again. An au courant addition: clusive social club may be, so long as it and These themes coalesced in a motion draft- new lighting, seen from downriver. its conduct are legal, the College has no ed by Gordon McKay professor of comput- business intruding on students’ decision er science Harry R. Lewis, himself a past to affiliate themselves with such a group: dean of the College. Its language specified IN THIS ISSUE the right to associate is theirs. Second, an “that Harvard College shall not discriminate administrative decision pertaining to social against students on the basis of organiza- 20 Harvard Portrait activities the College officially dislikes must tions they join, nor political parties with 21 News Briefs not intrude on a faculty member’s preroga- which they affiliate, nor social, political or 22 Yesterday’s News tive in recommending a student, based on other affinity groups they join, as long as 23 University People her or his academic work, for a fellowship those organizations, parties, or groups have 25 Brevia like a Rhodes or Marshall scholarship. And not been judged to be illegal.” 27 The Undergraduate third, as a matter of governance, a policy like Debate on the motion consumed the No- 30 Sports

Harvard Magazine 19

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 John Harvard's Journal vember and December FAS faculty meet- HARVARD PORTRAIT ings (see harvardmag.com/finalclub-fas-16 and harvardmag.com/finalclub-fas2-16) and appeared likely to do so again in early February. But in late January, Khurana said he would ask FAS dean Michael D. Smith to appoint a committee, including faculty members and students, to evaluate the policy itself, in search of improvements. Lewis and colleagues decided to stand down. The faculty appeared headed toward regular discussions of other pressing business. Not so fast. The committee Khurana had earlier appointed to figure out how toimplement the USGSO policy issued its report on March 6 (it had not been notified, prior to his Janu- ary announcement, about the creation of the policy-review committee). The implementation measures, described in full at harvardmag.com/gendersteps-17, expanded the range of fellowships that would fall under the sanctions and called for extending them to leadership positions in the elected student government—the Undergraduate Council—and The Harvard Crimson, whose leaders promptly and vigorously objected. (Khurana said he would study those two applications further, while accepting all the other recommendations.) The implementation measures also called for the policy to extend not only to gender and racial Stephan Magro discrimination, but also to socioeconomic discrimination. To bolster enforcement, Stephan Magro once conjured up 250 red peonies, months out of season, for a the implementation group advised requiring dinner in honor of an important donor: with a couple of phone calls, they were flown students to sign a statement acknowledg- in from Alaska. While he declines to name other miracles from his 15 years of planning ing awareness of Harvard’s nondiscrimina- events for the Development Office, he does say this: no sooner did he become Com- tion policy and affirming “compliance with mencement director in July 2016 than he was flooded by special requests from parents, that policy” before receiving a scholarship faculty, and alumni. Equal parts discretion and showmanship, the job demands sincere or fellowship endorsement, or assuming a love of pageantry and mastery of detail, down to each seat-monitor’s training and position of leadership in a recognized or- every hood’s hue. Magro, who dresses in button-up vests and scarves, likens himself ganization or athletic team. Violations of to a magician—after all, his job involves robes and wands, he jokes. Then he immedi- the policy would be reviewed by the Hon- ately self-corrects: it’s a baton. “This is a real artifact that’s used in our traditions! And or Council, the body set up to adjudicate it’s so fun.” But traditions aren’t dictated by some arcane office of lore, he adds: “It’s instances of academic misconduct such as us.” Magro grew up in Massachusetts and spent summers with family in Italy, where cheating. (Some of the council’s student he holds dual citizenship. In college, he studied sociology and journalism; through members promptly told the Crimson they event planning, he became fluent in floral décor and wine pairings. And just as doctors had not been advised of this enlargement make bad patients, he’s a guest who can’t relax. Magro recalls that at his sister’s wed- of their responsibilities, and opposed it). ding, he felt compelled to intervene with the caterers to expedite the meal service. These recommendations overshadowed (His own took place one October in Salem, amid tourists and costumed witches.) the implementation committee’s discus- Graduation ceremonies, like those for marriage, have a performative logic: participants sion of programs (such as “inter-house din- and the community collectively invest the ritual with meaning. With Commencement, ing societies”) and new social spaces that Magro is in charge of a show, older than the United States, in which 32,000 well- might accommodate student needs better wishers witness the conferral of degrees. He says, “You tell me something that’s more than the final clubs—in the Smith Campus like a spell than this.” vsophia nguyen Center (now being renovated), a repurposed Queen’s Head Pub (underneath Memorial

20 May - June 2017 Photograph by Jim Harrison

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 Hall), the elegant Loeb House (home to the governing boards), and elsewhere. No cost estimates or timelines accompanied these ideas, and given FAS’s current, enormous spending on House renewal, significant new investments are not likely immediately.

The next day, Dean Smith unveiled the MITCHELL/HPAC STEPHANIE initial membership of the committee that will review the USGSO policy—including Experience Commencement 2017 Khurana as co-chair (see the full list at har- with Harvard Magazine vardmag.com/usgso-com-17). He charged it with: This year’s Commencement will feature Mark Zuckerberg, John • reviewing existing policy, reports, and Kerry, Sally Yates, and others. Read our in-depth coverage of the data; • considering “whether there are other events, faces, and themes of Commencement week, May 23-26. means of achieving our stated goals, including and especially that of fully advancing the harvardmag.com/commencement non-discrimination objectives reflected in the current policy, and to evaluate whether any would be more effective than our cur- with “the College’s policy regarding ment declared particular kinds of rent policy”; and the principle of non-discrimination, organizations illegal and demanded • proposing, “should more effective means particularly with regard to member- oaths of non-membership from all be identified, changes or expansions to the ship in unrecognized single-gender college students. The faculty would current policy or a new approach.” social organizations.” What happens be on firmer ground to resist such A report is due for public consumption by if a student refuses to take this affir- demands if it did not require similar next fall (at which point the existing policy mation on the principle that they are oaths from our students. presumably will have taken effect). opposed to such oaths? Would they Hence, the motion—which is deliberately Putnam professor of organismic and evo- be in contempt of the College’s policy phrased to test the sense of the faculty, and lutionary biology David Haig is a member and thereby ineligible for the afore- the implementation mechanism, rather than of the new policy-review committee. He was a mentioned awards and offices? What to address matters such as faculty versus proponent of Harry Lewis’s motion oppos- happens if a student cannot in con- administrative jurisdiction or the underlying the sanctions policy; that motion, as not- science affirm they are in compliance ing policy itself. If it proceeds to full air- ed, is now suspended during the policy re- with the College’s policy because the ing before the FAS, it will be interesting to view. As he wrote then, “The current policy student sincerely believes in a differ- see whether the objections to enforcing an attempts to coerce the choices of students, ent principle of non-discrimination? oath-like affirmation are widespread among by changing their self-interest, without a Where is the space for dissent? Who the professoriate (see harvardmag.com/ fundamental change in their values. We risk determines the policy and what are usgso-oath-17). changing the choice without changing the the mechanisms of revision? Are there In the meantime, the debate over formal- chooser.” constraints on unilateral changes (by ly single-gender social organizations has Now, in reaction to the implementation self-appointed arbiters of student vir- grown far beyond the bounds that anyone committee’s recommendation that students tue) of the policy to be affirmed? conceivably imagined, and continues to ab- affirm their compliance with the College’s I consider the requirement for such sorb an extraordinary amount of the fac- USGSO policy, and its enforcement mecha- an affirmation to be a dangerous prec- ulty’s time and attention. nism—both accepted by Khurana—Haig edent. What if some future govern v john s. rosenberg and jonathan shaw has introduced a separate motion objecting to that process. He has asked for consideration of language that reads, “This faculty mencement. The Business School’s Klarman does not approve of Harvard College re- News Briefs Hall conference center is well under way, as quiring a student to make an oath, pledge is renovation of the adjacent Soldiers Field or affirmation about whether the student Cranes Crescendo Park apartment complex. Just across West- belongs to a particular organization or cat- The already torrid pace of construc- ern Avenue from that campus, below-grade egory of organizations.” tion around campus is about to intensify. construction for the $1-billion science and As Haig explained the motion: The renovation and expansion of Winthrop engineeering complex has proceeded for The laudable aim of gender-in- House, the largest undergraduate-residence months; come May, steel is expected on site clusivity has metamorphosed into a “renewal” to date, will surge toward comple- for the visible superstructure (pointing to- proposal that students seeking cer- tion in August—and the even larger Lowell ward a 2020 opening). And Harvard Kennedy tain awards or offices are required House makeover, itself a two-year project, School continues to remake virtually its en- to affirm that they are in compliance is scheduled to begin promptly after Com- tire campus from the inside out.

Harvard Magazine 21

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 John Harvard's Journal Alongside those projects and other, lesser ones—in all, $2 billion of capital invest- Yesterday’s News ments, give or take—still more construc- From the pages of the Harvard Alumni Bulletin and Harvard Magazine tion is on tap. Harvard Planning Office’s “Town Gown Report” to Cambridge iden- tifies multiple pending projects, including 1927 The debating team has won four lems in implementing a Chicano-Boricua three major ones: of six matches during a spring-break tour studies program at Harvard. • The Law School has secured zoning ap- of the Middle West, the editors note. In proval for a new, 21,000-square-foot building each debate, Harvard supported the af- 1997 The Faculty of Arts and Sci- at 1607-1615 Massachusetts Ave., replacing firmative side of the question: “Resolved, ences adds a new quantitative reasoning vacant one-story storefronts at the corner that the American College is a Failure.” course requirement to the Core Cur- of Everett Street, to house public-service riculum, replacing the former test-out clinical programs; construction is planned 1952 “Korea—symbol of the unde- option. late this year. clared war between East and West— • The University is preparing to reno- continues to dominate the academic year Harvard’s first chair devoted exclusively vate the Arthur M. Sackler Building, whose 1951-52,” with the University “steering a to environmental issues is endowed by collections have been consolidated at the course somewhere between total mobi- Gilbert Butler Jr. ’59 to honor the mem- renovated Harvard Art Museums (HAM), lization and business as usual”; 40 percent ory of his father. freeing its extensive galleries for other uses. of the freshmen are enrolled in the army, Among them will be programmatic space navy, and air force ROTC programs. More than 300 people gather in the Yard for the history of art and architecture de- for the unveiling of a plaque on Matthews partment, the main tenant already based 1962 Joseph Russin ’64 guides the Hall commemorating Caleb Cheeshah- there; the Arts@29 undergraduate art-mak- four-plus-ton Sonita to a sweepstakes teaumuck, A.B. 1665, and the other four ing center (relocating from Garden Street trophy for Harvard at the first Intercol- initial Native American students at Har- to within a block of the Carpenter Cen- legiate Elephant Race at Orange County vard’s Indian College. ter, home to the principal studios); and the State College in Fullerton, California. Graduate School of Design, which is land- 2002 Following a year of debate and locked and still planning its own on-site 1972 East Asian studies becomes Har- data-gathering, the Faculty of Arts and expansion. Construction is expected this vard’s newest concentration.…Mexican- Sciences makes it easier for undergradu- year. (Not involved is relocation of the fine American and Puerto Rican students ates to study abroad, and more difficult arts library, which was moved from Werner schedule a conference to explore prob- for them to earn academic honors. Otto Hall before it was razed to make way for the HAM project. The library continues to reside in semi-exile from the art historians, in the basement of Littauer Center, near the Law School. At some point, Littauer itself will be reconfigured to better suit the evolving needs of the huge economics department, the major occupant—but it is not known when that work will advance.) • And in the dreary- but-essential category, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences also plans to re- place the entire heating, ventilation, air conditioning, and exhaust system for its huge Biological Labora- tories complex. Thus, University building budgets remain intact, even as pressure on schools’ operating budgets becomes evident (see next item). vj.s.r.

Illustration by Mark Steele

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 Secretary of Labor.…Sep- University People arately, Sharon Block, who had been principal Dunster Departures an interim basis. She has deputy assistant secre- Dunster House faculty deans Roger B. been director of graduate tary for policy and senior Porter, IBM professor of business and gov- studies for the classics de- counselor to the secre-

ernment, and Ann Porter announced in partment, and in 2015 won tary at the Department U.S. DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE early March that they would step down at a faculty prize for men- of Labor under Presi- Alexander Acosta the end of this academic year, concluding toring graduate students. dent Barack Obama, J.D. 16 years of service. They took the House, Meng is pursuing research MITCHELL/HPAC STEPHANIE ’91, has been appointed executive direc- and its students and staff, through the first pertinent to statistics and Xiao-Li Meng tor of Harvard Law School’s Labor and whole-House renewal, under the continu- data science, and assum- Worklife Program, which focuses on ing renovation program (reported in detail ing leadership roles in labor law, training union leaders, and re- at harvardmag.com/new-dunster-15). two statistics professional lated issues. societies during the year. Dean Dench One statistic he leaves to …and Other D.C. News With Xiao-Li Meng, Jones professor of interim dean Dench: the Tom Perez, M.P.P-J.D.

statistics, taking sabbatical during the planned reduction in the LINCOLN/HPAC ROSE ’87, who served as Sec- 2017-2018 academic year, Emma Dench, size of the entering GSAS Emma Dench retary of Labor in the McLean professor of ancient and modern cohort, for financial reasons (see below). Obama administration, history and of the classics, will assume his has been elected chair of administrative role as dean of the Gradu- Labor Leaders… the Democratic National U.S. DEPARTMENT OF LABOR ate School of Arts and Sciences (GSAS) on President Donald J. Trump has nomi- Committee and charged Tom Perez nated Alexander Acosta ’90, J.D. with revitalizing the party.…Separately, ’94—the dean of Florida Interna- President Trump’s initial choice to be tional University Law School and Secretary of the Navy, private-equity a former member of the National executive Philip Bilden, M.B.A. ’91, took Labor Relations Board (among himself out of the running, citing finan- other public-service roles) as U.S. cial and family obligations.

WRITERS’ REWARDS: Coolidge professor of history Maya Jasanoff, author of the National Book Critics Circle-winning Liberty’s Exiles, on loyalists during the American Revolution, has been awarded a Windham-Campbell Prize, created to support writers and administered by Yale; it comes with a $165,000 hono- rarium. Her next book, The Dawn Watch: Joseph Conrad in a Global World, will be published in November.…Separately, professor of history Jane Kamensky, Pforzheimer Foundation Director of the Radcliffe Institute’s Schlesinger Library, has received the New-York Historical Society’s $50,000 annual book prize in American history for A Revolution in Color: The World of John Singleton Copley. “Facing Harvard” (November-December 2016, page 42), on Copley’s Maya Jasanoff Harvard portraits, complements her research for the book. ROSE LINCOLN/HPAC ROSE

Graduate Admissions FAS dean Michael D. Smith as attributing among other steps: summer research fund- the downsizing to “the flat endowment dis- ing, fifth-year and dissertation-completion in Lower Gear tribution that we will see next year and the support, professional-development funding, The harvard crimson reported in mid Feb- drying up of some funds that we’ve used and financial assistance for students expect- ruary that the number of admissions to in the past to help admit some students,” ing or adopting a child. the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences whose education and living expenses are “In the process of developing the fall 2017 (GSAS) would be reduced 4.4 percent, af- typically covered by the University. admissions targets in conjunction with the fecting students seeking to enroll this com- A statement provided by FAS elaborated graduate financial-aid budget,” the statement ing fall. The reduction reflects an adjust- that the GSAS “is fundamentally commit- continued, “it became clear that a modest ment by the Faculty of Arts and Sciences ted to ensuring that current graduate stu- year-over-year reduction in class size would (FAS) to the prospective flattening of the dents thrive during their time at Harvard.… be necessary in order to ensure no disrup- distribution of funds from the endowment, Most Ph.D. students now receive a generous tion of support for current students,” driven the faculty’s largest source of revenue, fol- financial-aid package guaranteed for at least in part by the endowment results. “GSAS, the lowing recent weak investment results (see five years, which pays for tuition, fees, health FAS dean, the [engineering and applied sci- “The Endowment Ebbs,” November-Decem- insurance, and other benefits.” It also cited ences] dean, the FAS divisional deans, and the ber 2016, page 18). The newspaper quoted recent improvements in support, including, offices of the president and provost worked

Harvard Magazine 23

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 John Harvard's Journal together to ensure the smallest possible per- have any effect on the availability of teach- and Applied Sciences (see “Academic Allston, centage reduction in admission targets for ing assistants or section sizes. At Last,” July-August 2016, page 22), and per- FAS-based Ph.D. programs.” A final observation: this outcome illus- haps HBS support for the proposed Gateway Two points merit consideration. First, trates the overwhelming importance of the research building and data sciences, of import this does not appear to be an effort to down- endowment in funding the University and to both faculties (see page 27). size certain graduate programs where de- FAS (which derived 51 percent of its operat- Nohria also addressed the migration of the mand for academic hiring has diminished ing income from endowment distributions in school’s experience-based FIELD curricu- (notably, the humanities, languages, histo- fiscal year 2016). Even in a period when The lum into the fall and spring M.B.A. courses of ry, and related fields)—a subject of under- Harvard Campaign has raised well more than study; rapid change in executive education; standable anxiety within the affected fields. $7 billion in new gifts and pledges, core aca- and a goal of making the online HBX opera- Second, exactly how GSAS sets its ad- demic operations remain vulnerable to per- tion “cash-flow positive by 2019.” (Given that missions targets is as much an art as a sci- sistently weak endowment earnings. vj.s.r. HBX collects tuition for its courses—$1, 950 ence. Some tiny doctoral programs admit for the three-unit basic business-skills se- one or two candidates annually; others wel- Allston Ambitions quence—this hints at the costs of such of- come scores. The yearly allocation varies Harvard business school (HBS) dean ferings, and perhaps the continued reliance by program, prior enrollment yields among Nitin Nohria’s annual letter to his faculty is on philanthropy to support the University’s those admitted, new faculty appointments especially interesting this year. The headline HarvardX online courses; see next item.) (and leaves and retirements), funding vi- item—that HBS exceeded its $1-billion capi- Nohria also observed that the academic cissitudes, and so on. For whatever rea- tal campaign goal in 2016, and formally raised gaps between men and women in the M.B.A. son, GSAS is providing only the percent- it by $300 million—matters less than the in- program, and their different levels of satis- age guidance on admissions overall—not tended aims: more associate professorships faction, had been closed. He identified the specifying how many new graduate stu- and practitioner-teachers; more fellowships; need for additional support for students who dents it aims to admit, nor the absolute further flexible funding for innovation; and receive financial aid, and highlighted a fifti- change from last fall or any differential ef- “realizing the vision of One Harvard by sup- eth-anniversary celebration of the African- fects among disciplines. At least in the near porting work across the University and…in American Student Union, in 2018. vj.s.r. term, College officials have said that the re- Allston.” The latter may point to deepening duced graduate-student cohort should not engagement with the School of Engineering Online Updates The online version of “Super-Earths and Life,” by Phillips professor of astronomy Dimitar Sasselov, director of Harvard’s Origins of Life Initiative (see “Life’s Begin- nings,” September-October 2013, page 29), Explore More is the first HarvardX course to incorporate adaptive-learning technology that tailors Harvardmagazine.com brings you continuous coverage of content and exercises to student mastery of material. Early assessments demonstrate University and alumni news. Visit to find these stories and more: clear gains in learning and students’ speed through the course. As Schoenhof’s Shutters, a Look at the Turning to revenue-producing online Square’s Independent Bookstores programs: Georgia Tech has introduced a A business model struggles to stay alive. second, lower-cost master’s degree, in an- harvardmag.com/schoenhof-17 alytics, complementing its popular computer-science degree launched in 2014. Meanwhile, edX members including Bos- Harvard College’s Cross-Charles Classes ton University and Penn rolled out 16 more A tradition transformed, to prepare for blended online and in-person “micromas- undergraduate education across the river ters”—in career-oriented fields like data harvardmag.com/schedules-17 science, business analytics, and cybersecu- rity—bringing the roster of such revenue- generating courses to several dozen. “A Vast Slave Society” Inside Higher Ed reported that Simmons Col- A Radcliffe Institute conference highlights lege, in Boston, has increased online revenue universities’ role—and debates how to come to from $5.4 million in the year ended June 30, terms with their past. 2014, to $45 million in the most recent fiscal harvardmag.com/slaveowners-17 year—nearly equal to its classroom-based graduate tuition revenue, and closing in on visit harvardmagazine.com undergraduate income. Master’s programs

FROM BOTTOM: TONY RINALDO/RADCLIFEE INSTITUTE; HARVARD COLLEGE; CHENSIYUAN/WIKIMEDIA COMMONS in nursing and social work account for the

24 May - June 2017

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 Venerable Schools nating major diseases.…Cornell has received Harvard Divinty School, née 1816, is well a $150-million naming gift from alumnus H. into its bicentennial celebration (see har- Brevia Fisk Johnson and the SC Johnson company vardmag.com/hds200-16), and Harvard for its recently constituted College of Busi- Law School, 1817, will begin blowing out ness, comprising its schools of applied eco- the candles with several events commenc- nomics and management, hotel adminis- ing this fall. Also meriting at- tration, and management.…The tention is Harvard School of Bill [’77, LL.D. ’07] & Melinda Dental Medicine, 1867, the Gates Foundation has commit- Medical School’s Longwood ted $279 million to the Univer- cousin, which has consolidated sity of Washington’s Institute information for its sesquicen- for Health Metrics and Evalu- tennial, highlighting landmark ation, which develops tools to research and clinical advances, improve population health.… at 150.hsdm.harvard.edu. Santa Clara University has received $100 million from alum- Lowell House Renewal nus John A. Sobrato and Susan The College has unveiled plans Sobrato to fund a facilty for sci- for the renovation of Lowell ence, math, and technology edu- House, scheduled to begin cation.…Peter and Paula Lunder after Commencement and to have given the Colby College conclude by the fall of 2019: the Museum of Art more than 1,000 first two-year reconstruction artworks and funds to establish project, and the largest to date. an eponymous research center on According to an announcement American art—their second such in early March, on the façade $100-million benefaction to the facing Mount Auburn Street, institution. a new entryway will connect the second-floor library, new From Combat to Campus senior common room, and a Ashton B. Carter, who conclud- lower-level, 75-seat screening room (re- SPEAKERS OF NOTE: The speaker at ed his service as the twenty-fifth U.S. Sec- the Commencement afternoon placing two squash courts). The wing is exercises, on May 25, will be Mark retary of Defense at the end of President being named Otto Hall, honoring a gift Zuckerberg ’06, co-founder and CEO Barack Obama’s administration, is return- from Alexander Otto ’90, M.B.A. ’94, a of Facebook. His appearance among ing to the Harvard Kennedy School (HKS). member of a German family that owns the honorands and at the lectern He will be Belfer professor of technology and follows by a decade that of Bill Gates retail and real-estate assets worth many ’77, LL.D. ’07—another celebrated global affairs, and director of the Belfer Cen- billions of dollars. The dining hall, as pre- dropout whose software prowess ter for Science and Inter- viously announced, has been named Lee (Microsoft) has also yielded one of the national Affairs—the locus world’s largest fortunes and enabled Hall; that recognizes support from Kew- philanthropy on a gigantic scale. of much of HKS’s work on song Lee ’86, M.B.A. ’90, now one of the Zuckerberg’s wife, Priscilla Chan ’07, a international security and highest-ranking private-equity execu- pediatrician, is among the College diplomacy, environmental tives of The Carlyle Group, and his wife, tenth reunioners. For a full report, see and resource issues, and harvardmag.com/zuckerberg-17. The Zita Ezpeleta ’88, J.D. ’91, who met at the Radcliffe Medalists, to be honored May science and technology U.S. DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE House and previously established a chal- 26, will be journalists Gwen Ifill, policy. Dillon professor of Ashton B. lenge fund to advance House renewal. Also posthumously, and Judy Woodruff— government Graham Al- Carter the latter in conversation with Walter planned: a “maker space,” complete with Isaacson ’74. For complete Com- lison, HKS’s founding dean in its modern 3-D printers and work stations, adjacent mencement information, visit incarnation, has been director since 1994. to Otto Hall. harvardmag.com/commencement. Campaign Calendars On Other Campuses As the University drives toward the mid The University of California, San Francis- to support innovative research. The funds 2018 conclusion of The Harvard Cam- co—the system’s health-research and clin- complement two recent gifts, totaling $285 paign, stirrings to the southeast point to ical-care campus—received a $500-million million, for neuroscience, and a partnership the schedule for its likely successor in the gift from the Helen Diller Foundation: $400 with the $3-billion Chan Zuckerberg Initia- decade to come (Harvard having missed a million in endowment funds to support fac- tive (founded by Priscilla Chan ’07 and Mark campaign during the first decade of this ulty members and students, and $100 million Zuckerberg ’06; see above) aimed at elimi- century amid leadership upheaval in Mass.

Photograph courtesy of Facebook Harvard Magazine 25

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

Hall). The Yale Daily News reported in ear- the iLab, Launch Lab, and Life Lab— pany’s board of directors; he is also a Johns ly March that Yale, having concluded a has spawned a new kind of growth: early Hopkins trustee.…The McGovern Insti- $3.88-billion drive in June 2011, is now well March job postings advertised positions tute for Brain Resaerch at MIT has con- into the two-year planning period that pre- for associate directors of business develop- ferred its Scolnick Prize in Neuroscience, cedes the two-year “quiet phase” of its next ment and of social enterprise, each carry- an annual honor recognizing outstand- campaign, to be led by Peter Salovey, who ing the University salary range of $72,900 ing advances in the field, onCatherine became president in 2013. He subsequently to $124,700; an assistant director of tech- Dulac, Higgins professor of molecular suggested to the News that Yale might want nology programming; and student “com- and cellular biology (see to pull together its research and teaching munity assistant” positions. “The Mr. Mom Switch,” on public-policy matters, perhaps launch- May-June 2015, page ing a new school in the field, like those at How about working at harvard? Charles 11).…Election-law expert Harvard and Princeton, and Brown’s na- Skorina, who runs a San Francisco-based Heather Gerken (Har- scent school. Separately, Yale announced search firm focusing on investment man- vard Portrait, March-

that its department of statistics would agers, devoted his late-February and early- April 2002, page 65), who NIENHUIS JOHN morph into a department of statistics and March newsletters to Kim Y. Lew, M.B.A. taught at Harvard Law Heather data science (“DS squared”), complete with ’92, chief investment officer of the Carnegie School from 2000 to 2006 Gerken a new undergraduate concentration, and Corporation, in New York City. Turns out before decamping for New Haven, has would make nine new departmental and that Lew, who oversees somewhat more been appointed dean of Yale Law School, joint faculty appointments—accommo- than $3 billion, has realized an 11.1 percent the first woman to hold that office.…Syl- dating rising student and scholarly inter- annualized rate of return for the 5 years via Mathews Burwell ’87, who served as est and, no doubt, donor support as well. ending in 2015, and an 8.3 percent rate of U.S. Secretary of the De- (See page 27 on data science locally.) return for Skorina’s most recent 10-year partment of Health and period, ranking among such leaders as the Human Services under Nota Bene University of Virginia, MIT, Princeton, and President Barack Obama, Coming to the college. On March 30, the Yale—and far ahead of the results for Har- has been appointed presi- College announced that 2,056 of the 39,506 vard Management Company, where N. V. dent of American Univer-

applicants to the class of 2021 had been Narvekar is now making sweeping chang- U.S. DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH & HUMAN SERVICES sity, effective June 1.…John offered admission: 5.2 percent, essentially es. Perhaps he should give Lew a call. Sylvia Holdren, who served as level with the admissions rate last year. Mathews national science adviser Burwell Some 15.1 percent of those admitted are the Miscellany. Classical phi- in the Obama adminis- first members of their families to attend lologist Martha Nuss- tration, has returned to Harvard Ken- college. The bill for tuition, room, board, baum, Ph.D. ’75, Freund nedy School as Heinz professor of envi- and fees for 2017-2018 (in other words, the Distinguished Service ronmental policy.…Hilary Lewis, G ’08, list price, before financial-aid awards) is professor of law and ethan expert on architect Philip Johnson $65,609, up $2,584, or 4.1 percent, from the ics at the University of ’27, B.Arch. ’43, has been appointed chief

current academic year. Read full details at Chicago, will deliver this RYAN SALLY curator and creative director of the Na- harvardmag.com/admits-17. year’s National Endow- Martha tional Trust for Historic Preservation’s ment for the Humanities Nussbaum Glass House, the celebrated house John- Better than entrepreneurship? The com- Lecture, on May 1.…Brian C. Rogers ’77, son designed in New Ca- plex of innovation centers at the edge of M.B.A. ’82, chairman and chief investment naan, Connecticut (see the Harvard Business School campus— officer of T. Rowe Price Group, which has “Modern and Historic,” more than $800 bil- September-October 2007, lion of assets un- page 32F). Johnson also der management, designed the Business

has joined Harvard School’s soon-to-be-re- NASA/BILL INGALLS Management Com- placed Burden Hall. John Holdren

LAW LEGACY, AND MORE. The family of the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, LL.B. ’60, has donated his papers to the Harvard Law School Library. Materials will begin to become available for scholars in 2020.…Separately, whatever their original intent, students from diverse fields of study who decide to pursue the law can now submit Graduate Record Exam results, rather than the Law School Admissions Test, with their Harvard Law applications. The change takes effect this fall, and is intended to broaden access to the school and to diversify the academic backgrounds of prospective students in an era where Maureen Scalia scientific and technical knowledge is broadly relevant.

26 May - June 2017 Photograph by Martha Stewart/Harvard Law School

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 growth; they enroll more than 2,500 students. Harvard Paulson School of Engineering and And in late February, Caroline M. Hoxby, Applied Sciences (SEAS, which will have Bommer professor in economics at Stanford, a new home on Western Avenue by 2020), analyzed online learning in a working paper, Harvard Business School, the i-lab incuba- “The Returns to Online Postsecondary Edu- tor and its affiliates—and research-intensive cation.” As summarized in the abstract, the businesses that the University expects to at- research found “little support for optimistic tract to its Allston “enterprise research cam- prognostications about online education.” pus.” (For an overview, see “Why ‘Big Data’ Drawing on the cohort of students enrolled Is a Big Deal,” March-April 2014, page 30.) full time, or very substantially, in online pro- Harvard has the ingredients needed to

grams (thus heavily at for-profit institutions, do “world-leading data science,” said Col- SNIBBE/HPAC KRIS many of which have been discredited in recent ony professor of computer science David C. David Parkes and Francesca Dominici, years), she concluded that their online work Parkes, area dean for computer science in co-directors of Harvard’s new data-science initiative was “not substantially less expensive than SEAS, and co-director of the data-science comparable in-person education,” as mea- initiative defining the path to an institute, new programmatic spaces—one in Cam- sured by tuition or the schools’ costs. More- together with professor of biostatistics bridge and one in Boston (“to help us boot- over, “Online enrollment usually does raise a Francesca Dominici, senior associate dean strap what we want to be,” Parkes said, “un- person’s earnings, but almost never by enough for research at the Harvard Chan School of til we get to a permanent space”); and hiring to cover the social cost of the education. There Public Health (HSPH). Harvard has “meth- professional data scientists to work with is scant evidence that online enrollment odologists; compelling applications ques- students and faculty members. moves people toward jobs associated with tions; and…the context of society. That is the These moves complement the launch of higher labor productivity”—meaning that magic triangle,” Parkes said. With leading three data-science master’s programs, one taxpayers are unlikely to recoup public costs professional schools and affiliated hospitals, each at HSPH and Harvard Medical School, through higher tax revenues, and, indeed, that each with its own data-science expertise, launching this fall; and one in the Faculty of many of the students would struggle to repay the University has many resources already Arts and Sciences beginning in fall 2018. their loans. Many educators criticized Hox- in hand. “We need to somehow bring them Dominici and Parkes declined to compare by’s student and institutional sample, and her together,” he said, “and go from this distrib- Harvard’s data-science plans to those else- aggregation of results among different kinds uted excellence” to creating a place where where, or to put a timeline on the physical of learning situations; but most agreed her the people and their skills “sing together.” data-science institute in Allston. But Domi- metrics are relevant for assessing online pro- The initiative plans several early steps: nici said, “I think we are going to end at an grams’ costs and potential. creating an interdisciplinary postdoctoral unprecedented scale and a most important One interesting cost (which HarvardX fellows program in which each fellow works impact.” Read a complete report at harvard- has also encountered) involves making on- with multiple faculty members; outfitting mag.com/datascience-17. vjonathan shaw line content accessible to people with disabilities—usually by captioning. In March, the University of California, Berkeley, announced that it was ending public access THE UNDERGRADUATE to more than 20,000 legacy audio and video files, in response to a federal order that they be made accessible. YouTube, the iTunes U, and Berkeley websites will remove the Exclusivity, items. Its edX courses continue to be made accessible, and future contents will accommodate users with constraints. vj.s.r. from the Inside Developing Data Science by lily scherlis ’18 Harvard plans to build a data-science institute in Allston to support research, education, and entrepreneurship in what was the kind of kid who would actu- ary magazine. I was very angry at having to University leaders call “a new discipline.” ally respond to the mass email freshly prove myself to win a spot in an extracur- Data science is central to research in public appointed Dean Rakesh Khurana sent ricular. Here we all were, already at Harvard, health, the physical, social, and biological to the incoming freshman class. I didn’t still chasing after prestige. The social scene sciences, and medicine; it has become in- Irealize he was the kind of dean who would felt like a forest of ladders all stretching up creasingly important in all fields that involve reply, asking to meet me. toward the sunny warmth of feeling includ- empirical research, such as law, government, At the time, I was deep in the throes of ed, wanted, comfortable. and even the study of culture. The institute competing with other prospective under- “I hate all these social hierarchies and would provide a commons for collaboration graduate literati to join the staff ofThe Har- power structures,” I told him. “I just want among almost every school—especially the vard Advocate, the College’s long-lived liter- to work on a magazine and make friends.

Harvard Magazine 27

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 John Harvard's Journal they’re still exclusionary. The line dividing members and nonmembers persists. Two and a half years later, it’s weird to think that my conversation with the dean was a grain of sand in the administrative dune that may or may not be slink- ing toward South Street. Groups that exclude on the basis of a relevant skill— as opposed to organizations that select members using solely social cri- teria—have been largely ignored by the College, though there are rumors we’re Why do I have to be formally assessed and ing down on exclusive social spaces. These next after the final clubs. Nevertheless, comps declared good enough by my peers before efforts force me to consider my own posi- are often accused of contributing to the power they’ll let me hang out with them?” tion more carefully. I don’t want to attack hierarchies that plague our social spaces. In He told me I could be the one to change the organization that has become my family early March, the Undergraduate Council an- the socioextracurricular landscape. I here. I also don’t want to make excuses on nounced that it would build a comp evalua- shrugged. “I’m not positioned to do any- its behalf: it has been hard for me to make tion system to help students make informed thing,” I said, unwilling to be empowered by the Advocate into a home. I’m lucky to have decisions about which organizations to at- an inspired administrator. “Once you have it. Being irrevocably personally tethered to tempt to join—a system that will implicitly enough power to change these spaces, you the Advocate makes me at once protective of double as a way to hold organizations ac- have no personal stake in doing so. You don’t it and obsessed with holding it accountable. countable to popular opinion. need them to change for you to feel included: Op-eds and College-wide emails tend to you already are.” skate over the human messiness of being an The Advocate has a long-standing image These days I’m the magazine’s president. individual trying to navigate campus organi- problem grounded in frustrating histori- Most of my closest friends are Advocate mem- zations responsibly. We are all learning how cal realities. It was founded in 1866, and for bers. I’ve forked almost all of my college ex- to handle having power over each other. At most of its history, systematically excluded perience over to this organization. I’m in its the Advocate, we are college kids selected by potential members on the basis of class, race, headquarters, a crumbling white clapboard other college kids to select other college gender, religion, or sexual orientation (usu- home on South Street, a good 50 hours a kids as the certified Harvard literati—and ally in tandem with the College’s own barri- week. I have laughed and cried on every we’re not always older or more experienced ers for admission). We have framed portraits chair and couch in the building. than the people we assess. of long-dead young white men on our walls But I haven’t forgotten. The freshman-fall For most of us, this is the first time our and dusty tomes full of the juvenilia of ma- iteration of me has taken up residence in the social capital has been reified through an jor poets to match. When friends heard I back of my head. She likes to tease me about explicit institutional process. This process was comping, they’d turn their noses all the having sold out to the great machine of insti- is called “comp,” which stands for either way up and tell me the Advocate was preten- tutionalized validation. “Don’t worry about “competition” or “competence,” depending tious, the worst accusation you can make of it,” she says sarcastically, “You’re just per- on whom you ask. It’s the standard Harvard a Harvard organization besides insinuating sonally responsible for perpetuating a mean term for the semester-long training and as- that it doesn’t have sufficient prestige. The and exclusionary system and too blinded by sessment that some extracurriculars use organization has been accused of picking your position to see it.” to select and prepare new members. Most only its members’ friends, or worse, being comps happen every semester, are open to a home only for well-off private-schooled In the two and a half years since I met with all students, and can be repeated as many white kids. We hear about students who him, Khurana’s push for more inclusive so- times as desired. Selective comps all claim self-select out of comp due to the percep- cial spaces has come to define his adminis- to strive for meritocracy, but even if they al- tion that only some kinds of people can feel tration. This has involved substantial crack- ways select those most deserving candidates, at home in this organization.

28 May - June 2017 Illustraton by Daniel Baxter

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 As a comper I would have been surprised Sometimes there are tangible ways to with selection. It would mean saying, if you to learn how fervently the Advocate tries to do so, like banning sexual relationships want to be a part of this, come on in. Why make its comp less daunting. We say things between compers and members during not? The response goes like this: first and about the process that try to make it seem the comp. And we are always implement- foremost, we are a community. Our maga- approachable, to dispel rumors of biased ing little changes that seem like they might zine is dependent on our social cohesion, assessments, to increase transparency. We help—like serving refreshments to comp- which we feel (maybe incorrectly) depends mean them. But the picture we paint also ers and cutting the part of the first meeting on clear lines between inside and out. Our serves to reassure the membership that where compers schmooze with board heads production cycles are fueled by how much comp is just, and justifiable. one on one under the guise of “asking ques- members care, which might correlate to how We say that our comp requires no expe- tions not covered.” But the next semester hard they worked to join. And besides, we rience, and will equip you with any and all we’d inevitably bring back the Q&A, be- have only a small building and limited re- skills you need. The idealized educational cause it put a face to the power structure. sources. Boards can’t function if they’re too comp assesses how well you’ve osmosed the And we’re still going back and forth about big and if people don’t develop working re- information and skill set we’ve supposedly whether to hold a celebratory social event lationships with each other. Leaders can’t provided, whether that involves analyzing for compers: some say it’s a nice treat, and lead an amorphous mass. poetry or fixing our website. This is a com- forting thought: it makes the comp sound …a lot of these well-intentioned conversations like a sort of benevolent free educational program, a productive use of time inde- serve as exercises in ethical reasoning or group pendent of prospective membership. Some members challenge that labeling the comp therapy, assuaging our discomfort. “educational” is condescending. I worry that claiming no experience is required obscures gives a taste of the integral social aspect We feel the need to be selective because the preparation gap between, say, an Eng- of the magazine; others complain that the everything else is. Harvard itself employs lish concentrator who went to prep school event puts enormous, needless pressure on merit as a grounds for exclusion. No won- and a STEM concentrator who didn’t. We compers to impress us. At the very least, der the student body subdivides into im- say our comp is entirely non-social, that talking about comp sets a social standard permeable little social cells: many of us are your chances are not remotely affected by among members of being nice to compers. trying to recreate the ecstasy of the moment whether our members like you on a personal But the ideological debates seem to swim in of acceptance into the College, the moment level. But when many boards select mem- circles, week after week, semester after se- when we first tasted real prestige. bers based on how well candidates analyze mester. I have begun to believe that a lot of creative work in a discussion setting, how these well-intentioned conversations serve Since 2014, we’ve been asking members can social skills not play in? And still: many as exercises in ethical reasoning or group to fill out an anonymous annual survey. It compers do sign up because their friends therapy, assuaging our discomfort with turns out that we are indeed dispropor- are members. Those members either cold- playing a hand in the power relations that tionately rich, white, private-schooled, shoulder their friends at meetings or risk once made us feel small. and from New England. Based on this making other compers feel disadvantaged Nonetheless, I’m glad they exist. In the year’s sample of 55 respondents out of 78 by their lack of connections. face of complacency, we need to insist that current members, we’re 64 percent Cau- There’s uncertainty over whether to ac- change, however superfluous, is possible. casian, compared to 53 percent of the class knowledge the power differential, and how. We find ourselves arm-wrestling with 150 of 2018. Though more than 65 percent of Some want to professionalize the process, years of history: it is tempting to feel that Harvard students receive financial aid, 68.6 hoping that clarity and transparency will these hierarchies are the very bones of the percent of Advocate members receive none. file down the ragged emotional edges of rejec- organization, that all we can do is allow our (The Advocate does not have monetary dues: tion. Others want to humanize it, earnestly re- small bodies to be pushed through its di- members are expected to spend two hours minding prospective members that they, too, gestive tract. attempting to sell subscriptions to local were once terrified compers. Some attempt businesses each semester, and may request to undermine the hierarchy, insisting that the “Exclusivity,” in the vocabulary of current an alternative two-hour task if they are coming assessment is totally meaningless. campus discussions, denotes only that there uncomfortable doing so.) Just over 60 per- We feel the need to go over and over how is a boundary between members and non- cent of us went to private schools. We’re we can be a positive force on campus, or at members, but connotes arrogance and unfair also perfectly gender balanced, and only 72 least not an arrogant menace. At first, such discrimination. “Inclusivity,” in turn, comes percent straight, compared to 90.2 percent conversations gave me immense hope that to mean everything from demographic di- of the class of 2018. The average member change was imminent, or at least possible. versity, to goals the Advocate already consid- values the personal importance of the Advo- I believed that there were correct answers ers imperative (like selecting members only cate community at 7 out of 10. As members to these questions: that if we were sensitive on the basis of their ability to contribute to who have taken any statistics whatsoever and good enough, we could design a kind- the publication), to vague fantasies of happy frequently remind us, the numbers, which er and more wholesome and more merito- students holding hands. fluctuate 10 percent or more year to year, cratic comp. True inclusivity would mean doing away have little statistical significance. I still

Harvard Magazine 29

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 John Harvard's Journal think they mean something. building or to interact with people in it.” to grit your teeth through insecurity and The survey also includes open-ended “I’d be most proud,” wrote one member, “if exclusion. You assumed that when you fi- questions, asking members to report in- a nonmember left our building thinking not nally got these doors open—the doors that stances when they have been made to feel ‘Wow, The Advocate is so cool I wish I were keep compers from members and the Advo- uncomfortable on the basis of class, race, on,’ but instead ‘Wow, those people are so cate’s social periphery from its core—they gender, or sexual orientation. “I think the nice and really like each other.’” Some com- would stay open. You would be kinder and Advocate is in the process of developing plained about cliques: “Oftentimes it seems fight to make the community a better and a strong culture of inclusion and open- like a certain group of people own the build- more welcoming place. After you everyone else would be able to stroll through, as if you Bias can make it difficult to distinguish between were Moses parting the Red Sea of exclusivity. But the doors lock behind you. institutional problems and personal ones. Being jaded won’t help. The beauty of college organizations is their rapid turnover: ness, which was not necessarily the case ing and are not particularly welcoming to you can make drastic changes and in four when I first comped,” wrote one member. those who do not fit their mold.” years no one will remember things were But mostly—as is expected when you ask As a new member I was confronted by a ever not that way. I cannot eliminate the people to complain—they’re critical. “The conglomerate of well-dressed upperclass- barriers to full inclusion, but I still have an Harvard public generally thinks of us as men who spoke eloquently about books I imperative to be kind and welcoming and pretentious ivory tower aesthetes,” anoth- hadn’t read and music I hadn’t heard of. I to wring every last drop of cynicism out er member wrote. Some are deeply upset- was faced, like high-school students every- of my demeanor. We need to be encour- ting: “I began to dread going to meetings to where, with a clique I desperately wanted to aging, to remind those who come after us the point of feeling physically ill because I be a part of and didn’t know how to break that doors can open, that belonging is pos- felt so stupid and uncomfortable around into. When my parents visited that fall I sible—and so is change. Some doors will everyone.” cried to my dad for three hours about how still stick, however frequently we apply We’ve spent a lot of meeting time this I was never, ever going to make friends or the WD-40 of institutional self-reflection spring trying to make sense of the respons- be one of the cool kids. It turns out making to their rusty hinges. We will keep apply- es. In a small organization where every- it into the magazine’s membership doesn’t ing it. This building with its sticky doors one knows everyone else, bias and other guarantee inclusion. has become our home, and we do not want noise can make it difficult to distinguish Eventually, with effort, you make friends. to be alone here. between institutional problems and per- You’re not necessarily happy or cool, but sonal ones. Still, anonymity gives a mega- you’re comfortable. You’ve had to wrench Berta Greenwald Ledecky Undergraduate Fellow phone to those who might otherwise nev- open a number of closed doors to get here, Lily Scherlis ’18 has not yet left the building. er speak up, and I think it’s important to take each response seriously in its biased yet vital subjectivity. As a whole, though, members are split between feeling things SPORTS are getting better and getting worse, between prescribing modifications and feeling it’s hopeless. “Feeling Fast” Our conversations about inclusivity in- advertently and almost invariably become conversations about comp. Comp is an obvi- Nomin-Erdene Jagdagdorj’s “very Mongolian attitude” toward water ous proxy for otherwise abstract issues: it’s a concrete ritual with clear rules and clear outcomes, a ritual we explicitly control. We ith roots in Mongolia and nesota, where her friend’s family had a cabin have a fresh shot at it every semester and Missouri, Nomin-Erdene and a little Sunfish. “My friend and her sib- can see our changes play out in real time. Jagdagdorj didn’t exactly lings were bored with this boat,” Jagdagdorj But this conversational slippage makes the have sailing in her blood. recalls. “But her grandfather was like, ‘I love line between members and nonmembers W“Yeah, we’re not really an aquatic people,” sailing.’ And I was like, ‘What is a boat?’” seem like the only frontier in the fight for says the senior, who last year co-captained She soon found out. After joining the team, belonging. Harvard’s sailing team. “For Mongolians, she spent a year mostly on the practice ros- The most emphatic survey responses con- and Missourians too…water is kind of a for- ter, learning her way around the mast and the cerned the Advocate’s internal social scene. eign concept.” Maybe that’s what drew her mainsail and the jib and the halyard and the Many felt the community had “become to it. Before trying out as a walk-on sail- bow and the centerboard—and the water. tighter and more good-natured.” Others or during her first semester in Cambridge, The Charles River, Harvard’s home field, “is still felt unwelcome: “I definitely feel like she had been in a sailboat exactly once: on a famously shifty venue,” she says. “A lot of I need to put on a bit of an act to be in the a “tiny, tiny lake” one summer day in Min- people get frustrated with that. The para-

30 May - June 2017

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 digms you expect on the water aren’t there. Or you do something that gets you really far in one race, and the exact same thing puts you last in the next race.” But she found that the river’s unpredictability freed her to make mistakes and recover from them, know- ing that a bad race or an upturned boat wasn’t always her fault. Collegiate sailing is both a spring and a fall sport, and after two semesters as crew to a new skipper each week, Jagdagdorj was paired with Nick Sertl ’18, a skipper who’d been recruited out of high school, who’d led his youth teams to championships, whose mother was an Olympic skier. That year, he and Jag- dagdorj took home numerous first-, second-, third-, and fourth-place afternoon in late March, days after the two Far from Missouri: Nomin-Erdene finishes, helping Harvard to first place in the had helped Harvard take second place in a Jagdagdorj on the choppy, cold Charles BU Trophy regatta and runner-up in the Sis- race at MIT, they scrimmaged with team- with skipper Nicholas Karnovsky ’19 ter Esther regatta in Newport, Rhode Island, mates. The Zakim Bridge and the rooftops of straightens out nearly parallel to the water, plus other top-10 finishes. Then last spring, Boston gleamed in the distance as the team clutching a rope and leaning hard into the the two were voted co-captains. rehearsed complicated, difficult moves to wind, with all the weight of her five-foot- “Nomin’s a really good athlete,” says head slow another boat: by tacking upwind to two-inch frame, to keep the boat from roll- coach Michael O’Connor. Harvard recruits “pin” it, or sidling up into the opposing ing sideways. “Your thighs are burning, your only a few sailors a year, and the team relies boat’s “shadow” to steal its wind. O’Connor, abs are tight, you’re choking on water, and on walk-ons to fill out the rest of the roster— who was circling in a Boston Whaler, shout- you’re thinking, ‘Almost there, almost there, some with prior experience, others without. ed instructions to his sailors through a red 30 seconds, almost there.’ You start saying Jagdagdorj, he says, is the kind of newcomer megaphone, while his black lab, Sophie, whatever you need to say to stay in that po- he tries to cultivate: one who’s smart, tough, lounged on the bow. “One of the things that’s sition. If you come up for even one second, adaptable, and who “doesn’t mind being hard here,” he said, “is that the crews have you can lose a whole boat length.” It’s the cold and wet a lot.” Some years, he adds, a to react to what the skippers are doing, and crew, she says, who has to keep the boat flat. dozen or more students will come out in the very often before the skippers have time to That’s true in more ways than one. Along- fall with ambitions to sail. “And then after a communicate what they’re doing.” side the tactical responsibilities, crew must month, two or three are left.” Jagdagdorj was In the two-person Flying Junior dinghies act, Jagdagdorj says, as an onboard sports one of those. Last fall, O’Connor paired her that Harvard races, the skipper sits at the psychologist and occasional mind reader. with skipper Lucy Wilmot, a freshman who stern and controls the rudder and the main- Tempering excitement, soothing despair, was this year’s top recruit. “We have high sail, and the crew, in the bow, controls the keeping things even: that’s the job within hopes for Lucy and we felt it was important jib. That barely begins to capture the role, the job. “You want to be aware of the skip- to give her an experienced crew right off the though, says Jagdagdorj. While the skipper per’s mental state at all times,” she says, “and bat, someone very level-headed,” O’Connor reads the wind and makes decisions for the make him or her feel OK about what’s hap- says. “Nomin fit the bill perfectly. We knew boat—when to tack or jibe, when to ease pening, even if they’re making mistakes.” it would be a seamless transition for Lucy not or trim the sails—the crew is responsible Because, she adds, “feeling fast is almost as to have to worry about anything going on in for the countless tiny adjustments that can important as actually being fast.” When you the front of the boat.” make the difference between winning and feel slow, the whole atmosphere in the boat Jagdagdorj spent much of this spring’s losing. And sometimes not-so-tiny adjust- changes, and sailors start wondering which sailing with another of the team’s top skip- ments: “When it’s really, really windy,” she one of them is to blame. Skippers steer more pers, sophomore Nicholas Karnovsky, and at says, “you hike.” That’s when she tucks her anxiously, the crew jerks at the sails, they practice out on the Charles one brisk, sunny feet into the straps at the base of the boat and fall out of synch. “And to maneuver the boat,

Photographs by Jim Harrison Harvard Magazine 31

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 John Harvard's Journal despite the weather. But golia, to which she returned during sum- then, sailing around the mers growing up and where her distant last mark to head down- relatives remain nomadic herders, helped wind to the finish, the launch her into the sport. “Mongolians have boat flipped over. And the such a strong tie to nature,” she says. It is a rudder, which wasn’t tied country full of ancient beauty, where you down, fell out. They got can drive out into the desert or the steppe the boat upright, but then and look back 800 years. “A big part of the they couldn’t steer. Hud- nomadic culture is sustainability,” Jagda- dled in the hull together, gdorj says. “There isn’t really even a word they started to really feel for it, because there is no other way.” (This it then: the hail and the same experience led her to major in envi- cold and the wet. And the ronmental engineering.) lost race. She talks about the particular hill in the That’s when Jagdagdorj southeast that she and her family return to Back on terra firma: Jagdagdorj at the knew she was serious about sailing. She’d whenever they’re there, and the ritual they Harvard Sailing Center seen it at its worst and still came back for perform: the men climb to the top, while you have to be in unison and trust that the more. To her family, this was all somewhat the women circle the base three times. “It’s other person is with you; you have to be baffling. Born in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, she about respecting and being grateful for slamming your weight over at exactly the came to the United States with her parents the land you’re in.…And I think what’s re- same time, to give the boat the momentum at five years old, when her mother began ally beautiful about sailing is that you can’t it needs.” graduate school in journalism at the Uni- help but respect nature. You’re at the mercy She remembers a race at Tufts that soph- versity of Missouri (she’s now an instructor of the wind. You’re going out in a very tiny omore year, one of the last regattas of the there; Jagdagdorj’s father works for IBM). In carbon-fiber boat into large bodies of water. fall, when it began to hail. (“Unless there’s the early months after Jagdagdorj joined the People die sailing. Things can get out of con- lightning, we race,” she says. “We’ve sailed team, there were worried phone calls from trol really quickly.” She thinks about that, in snow, in really torrential downpours, in her grandmother back home in Mongolia; even now, whenever she pushes off the dock 50-mile-per-hour winds—in zero wind. her grandparents kept asking if she’d given into high wind or heavy waves. “There’s still Sometimes you’re wearing a drysuit and up sailing yet. She kept having to tell them that one flip of my stomach, like, ‘All right, an entire winter outfit underneath it, and she hadn’t. Then she had to tell them she’d here we go.’ You can’t ever get complacent you’re still frozen at the end of the day.”) Jag- been named co-captain. with water. And that’s a very Mongolian dagdorj and Sertl were doing well, going fast And yet her origins in landlocked Mon- attitude.” vlydialyle gibson

tenth-best recruiting class in 2016. A Hardwood Foundation After both teams lost in the Ivy League Young basketball teams’ seesaw seasons tournament semifinals in March, what can the women (who finished the year 21-9 over- During the 2016-2017 season, a construc- goals for that growth: a twelfth Ivy League all, 8-6 Ivy) and the men (18-10 overall, 10-4 tion crew labored outside Lavietes Pavilion, championship under the leadership of wom- Ivy) learn from their up-and-down seasons the home of the Harvard basketball teams. en’s head coach Kathy Making incremental progress on a project Delaney-Smith, who to refurbish the 91-year-old building, the just completed her thir- workers were mostly waiting for the season ty-fifth season leading to end and the teams to vacate the premises, the Crimson (see “‘Act- so they could gut the second-oldest arena ing As If’ for 35 Seasons,” in college basketball (see harvardmag.com/ November-December lavietes-redo-16). 2016, page 31); and a deep The construction parallels the rebuild- NCAA tournament run ing projects under way this winter on the for the men, whose seven hardwood within. Both the women’s and freshmen were rated by men’s squads depended heavily on under- ESPN as the country’s classmen: the men started four freshmen, Katie Benzan ’20 and the women started two freshmen and was a first-team All-Ivy a sophomore. These talented young players honoree and led the were striving for Ivy League championships, team in scoring (13.4 points per game) but they were also laying the foundation for and assists (4.2 assists several years of team growth. Among the per game).

32 May - June 2017 Photographs courtesy of Harvard Athletic Communications

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 to build toward future gains?

After a middling 2015-2016 campaign during which the Crimson went 14-14 overall, Delaney-Smith welcomed a freshman class headlined by forward Jeannie Boehm— just the third McDon- ald’s All-American in conference history—and Katie Benzan, a shot two for 14 from the field highly touted point guard. Paired with a in the second period, the Ti- returning nucleus led by sophomore guard gers pulled away—ultimately, Madeline Raster and senior forward Destiny for a 68-47 victory. Among the factors sepa- Co-captain Destiny Nunley ’17 (above Nunley, the team had one of its most talent- rating the Quakers and Tigers from her own left) was an All-Ivy honorable mention designee. She and head coach Kathy ed and balanced rosters in recent memory. young players, the coach said, is the fact that Delaney-Smith (above) led the Crimson to During the first two-thirds of the season, “they believe in themselves.” a 21-9 overall record and a third-place the newcomers successfully demonstrated The players had a chance to bolster their finish in the Ivy League. their potential. The year started with a 103- confidence when the Crimson received an 87 loss at Minnesota, but then the Crim- at-large berth to the Women’s National In- The team began to find its footing in a son reeled off 16 consecutive wins, tying vitational Tournament (WNIT), the most stretch from early December through late the longest streak in school history. The prestigious tournament after the NCAAs. January, winning 10 of 11 games, including run included victories at Kansas (from the Harvard capitalized on that opportunity, a 57-56 win over Houston, one of the Crim- high-powered Big 12 Conference); against defeating the University of New Hampshire son’s best non-conference opponents, and a Temple, which earned a seven seed in the 69-56 in the opening round, before falling to sweep of Dartmouth and a victory at Cornell to start Ivy play. Still, Harvard’s lone loss during that period—82-71 at Vermont, an Harvard Hardwood: Review the men’s and women’s seasons in detail NCAA tournament team—portended the with game dispatches, analysis, and profiles at harvardmag.com/basketball. difficulty of winning close games against more experienced squads on the road. NCAA tournament; and four consecutive St. John’s University 62-57 in the round of 32. That problem recurred repeatedly. During wins to start conference play. “The takeaway for those kids coming back,” the remainder of the Ivy season, the Crim- Looking back, Delaney-Smith suggested said Delaney-Smith, “is you can play with son won all but one home game but lost that, ironically, the win streak may have anybody in the Ivy League and then some of three road contests—including the last two “hurt us more than it helped us.” It raised the stronger teams in the country.” games of the regular season, at Princeton the pressure and expectations on a young and Penn. Harvard’s four Ivy losses came squad. And it camouflaged some weakness- The women began the season on a tear, but by a combined 11 points and, as Amaker es: inconsistency, turnovers, and rushed the men lost their first four games against said, stemmed in part from bad luck: three decisions. The Crimson won five games by Division I competition, includ- five or fewer points and needed last-second ing an 80-70 defeat by Stanford heroics on several occasions—including a in the season opener in Shang- game-winner by Raster with 4.9 seconds hai. The setbacks left some won- left in a 70-68 home victory over Columbia. dering if Stemberg coach Tom- Those flaws came into sharper relief during my Amaker could get his large, the last month of the season when the Crim- talented roster—which includ- son lost six of 10 games, including four against ed proven All-Ivy talents point Penn and Princeton, the teams that finished guard Siyani Chambers ’16 (’17) ahead of Harvard in the Ivy standings. In and forward Zena Edosomwan those losses, a troubling trend emerged: if ’17, along with the highly regard- the Crimson’s shots were not falling, and ed freshmen—to coalesce. the other team made a run, Delaney-Smith’s Bryce Aiken ’20—Ivy League squad would fade. That happened in the Ivy Rookie of the Year and a first-team All-Ivy honoree— tournament semifinals against Princeton. led the Crimson with 28 points Harvard trailed by just one point (12-11) af- in the league tournament ter the first quarter, but when the Crimson semifinals against Yale. www.gocrimson.com Harvard Magazine 33 Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 John Harvard's Journal teams defeated the Crimson after hit- ting challenging last-second shots. Still, turnovers (18 in a 73-69 loss at Princeton in the penultimate game of the season), spells of ineffective play (the Crimson fell behind Princeton by nine or more points in both games), and a defense that was good but not great yielded a second-place finish for Harvard. The conference tournament gave the Crimson another opportunity to compete for a coveted NCAA berth. Coach Tommy Amaker (above) and co-captain Siyani But many of the same problems that Chambers ’16 (’17), a first- undid the team in the regular season team All-Ivy honoree (right), reappeared in a 73-71 loss to Yale in the led a young Crimson squad semifinals. The players struggled to de- to a second-place finish in the Ivy League before falling fend the paint; in the second half, the to Yale in the conference offense was anemic except for Bryce tournament semifinals. Aiken ’20, who scored 28 points; and although Harvard had just five turnovers, and four starters. The men lose Edosomwan fans can look forward not only to more it gave the ball away on the final possession. and Chambers, who garnered first-team modern amenities but also to two teams, Although both teams fell short of this all-conference honors, but bring back four with talented and tested nuclei, looking to year’s goals, the women return Benzan, a freshmen starters, including their top two make their own improvement to the spiffed- first-team All-Ivy honoree; Boehm, who had scorers, Aiken and Seth Towns ’20. When up arena: a pair of championship banners. seven blocks against St. John’s in the WNIT; the refurbished Lavietes Pavilion reopens, vdavid l. tannenwald

Fencing Sports in Brief After a regular season during which both men’s and women’s fencing won Beanpot trophies—the tenth for each (Harvard has Men’s Hockey won the competition every year since it began)—the program Blazing through what a Boston Globe headline deemed a “season sent 11 athletes to the NCAA tournament in Indianapolis, Indi- of redemption,” the men’s hockey team in late March, for the first ana, in late March. Sophomore Eli Dershwitz, a 2016 Olympian, time in 23 years, secured its return to the Frozen Four, the NCAA won an individual championship in men’s sabre, and Harvard semifinals, with a 3-2 win over Air Force in the tournament’s finished fifth overall, one spot behind rival Princeton. Senior second round. That Adrian Jarocki, the defending national champion in women’s sa- triumph, before a bre, took fifth place this year. sold-out crowd in Providence, Rhode Swimming and Diving Island, capped a re- Led by freshman standout swimmer Dean Farris, men’s swim- markable six weeks ming and diving routed its opponents to win the Ivy League cham- that saw the Crim- pionship in mid March, after an unbeaten regular season. Ulen- son bring home its Brooks head coach Kevin Tyrrell was named Ivy coach of the first Beanpot trophy year. Four swimmers and five relay teams went to the NCAA since 1993, close out tournament, where Farris finished fourth behind a trio of former the regular season Olympians in the 200 freestyle. Men’s swimming finished twenty- with an unbroken seventh overall.

MADDIE MEYER/GETTYMADDIE IMAGES string of wins and a Women’s swimming and diving sent two athletes to the NCAA In the momentum-building Beanpot share of the confer- tournament: first-year swimmer Mikaela Dahlke, who competed victory: Crimson forward Alexander ence title, and then in three events and finished thirty-sixth overall, and junior diver Kerfoot skates against Boston University. capture the Eastern Jing Leung, who came in thirty-second after defending her title College Athletic Conference championship. Four players—for- as NCAA Zone A platform-dive champ. With strong perfor- wards Ryan Donato ’19 and Alexander Kerfoot ’17, defenseman mances by Dahlke, Leung, and sophomore swimmers Brittany Adam Fox ’20, and goalie Merrick Madsen ’18—earned all-confer- Usinger and Meagan Popp, the women’s team took second place ence honors. The team was warming up for its first Frozen Four in the Ivy League championship, finishing just behind Yale and contest, on April 6, against Minnesota Duluth, at the United Cen- crushing third- and fourth-place finishers Penn and Princeton. ter in Chicago as the magazine went to press. vlydialyle gibson

34 May - June 2017

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 F he gap between coastal vocated banning Muslims from enter- elites and America’s white ing the country, claimed a federal judge O working class has been was inevitably biased because of his R growing for decades, but in Harvard’s Mexican-American heritage, and was U the wee hours of Novem- exposed as bragging on camera about M ber 9, America’s intellectu- his ability to commit sexual assault. als discovered that they had For many (myself included), voting for Tbeen drowned in a tidal wave of anger Trump was unthinkable. and frustration. Harvard students may Class Gap Yet millions of our fellow Ameri- have supported Hillary Clinton over cans did so and, in a democracy, it is Donald Trump by 80 percent to 6 per- critical to understand why. Racism cent, and 91 percent of Harvard facul- Can the academy and sexism have always been potent ty members’ campaign contributions forces in American history, and there may have gone to Clinton—but none of understand Donald Trump’s was plenty of evidence of both at play that mattered as non-college-educat- in the election. But as commentator ed whites delivered a convincing elec- Van Jones notes, people voted the way toral college victory to a man whom “forgotten” Americans? they did “for complex reasons.” The many elites abhorred. If selective col- idea “that if you voted for a bigot, you leges are the place where smart high- are a bigot,” is an oversimplification, school kids begin to enjoy the “re- by richard d. kahlenberg he says. What explains the Barack venge of the nerds,” election day 2016 Obama supporters who switched to was something like the very opposite: Trump? Were the millions of female the comeuppance of the intelligentsia. Trump voters endorsing sexism? Why For some, the gap exposed by the election has given rise to un- were white workers so open to an appeal that they were “forgot- derstandable feelings of moral superiority toward benighted Trump ten” by the political class? Might white working-class voters have voters. Their candidate ran a hideous campaign in which he ad- noticed, as journalist Harold Meyerson wrote, that “deplorable”

Illustrations by Taylor Callery Harvard Magazine 35

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 is a term Hillary Clinton ascribed to many of them, but never to from white parents, she would silently pray for them. Coles later Wall Street bankers who savaged the economy? remarked that Ruby’s parents, who had little formal education, had raised their child to have more empathy and moral strength than Robert Coles: Empathy for the White Working Class many children of the highly educated. t behooves the academy to understand the behavior of white In 1968, Coles served as informal adviser to liberal hero Robert working people. In a system of self-governance that values the F. Kennedy ’48 in his quest for the Democratic presidential nomi- Iopinions of everyday people, it is important to know why so many nation. (He wrote the last speech the candidate delivered before Americans were apparently so frustrated that they were willing to his assassination.) Coles was fascinated by the way Kennedy was vote for a candidate bent on blowing up the system. able to connect simultaneously with black Americans, who ap- A good place to start is within the academy itself. No one there preciated his passionate support for civil rights, and with work- has promoted the understanding of Middle Americans more than ing-class whites, some of whom had voted for George Wallace Robert Coles, the brilliant professor of psychiatry, now emeritus, for president four years earlier, by appealing to shared economic who began teaching at Harvard in 1965. Coles is well known for his interests. He told the candidate, “There is something going on Pulitzer Prize-winning books on Children of Crisis and has received here that has to do with real class politics.” Kennedy appealed to the Presidential Medal of Freedom, but his greatest talent has been lower-middle-income whites, Coles told me, because they thought, his ability to research and write about class in America in a way “This guy isn’t going to use us to show those rich Harvard-types that connects people across color lines. what a great guy he is [by labeling us as backward]. He may be The son of a Midwestern mother and an English immigrant father, for them [African Americans], but he’s for us, too.” A few years before Kennedy’s assassination, Coles’s research had taken a controver- sial turn. His writings about Ruby Bridges and his association with Kennedy earned liberal plaudits—but his decision to spend time with white blue-collar families who felt left out and ignored was not so well received by the liberal intelligentsia. In the early 1970s, he published The Middle Americans: Proud and Uncertain, which explained, with deep empathy, the experiences of white firefighters, facto- ry workers, shopkeepers, and farmers. He was vili- fied for his new research Coles grew up with both an American sense of racial injustice, in by many of his friends in academia, who could not understand why a country whose original sin is slavery, and a British sense of class Coles would devote his considerable talents to a group of Americans inequality, rooted in that nation’s feudal history. His father, Coles whom many progressives viewed as reactionary, racist, and sexist. told me a number of years ago, had been raised in a society where Then, in the mid 1970s, Coles crossed the line for many Harvard people “knew what class they belonged to, and they used that word liberals again. When Boston was aflame over court-ordered busing again and again and again, with much more sociological accuracy to desegregate its public schools, most of the Harvard community than we’re inclined to find in ourselves in this country.” was understandably aghast as white working-class people threw Coles graduated from Harvard College in 1950, went to medical bricks at buses carrying black students to white schools. Coles school at Columbia, and ultimately specialized in child psychiatry. condemned the violence but caused an enormous stir when he said In the early 1960s, after a stint in Mississippi as an Air Force doctor, that he understood white working-class resentment of compulsory he became intrigued by the battles over school desegregation. He busing policies that left out wealthier surrounding communities came to fame when he wrote an article for The Atlantic that provided such as Wellesley, Newton, and Cambridge. a moving account of his interactions with a courageous six-year-old In October 1974, The Boston Globe devoted nearly the entire op-ed black girl, Ruby Bridges, who helped integrate the New Orleans page to an interview with him. “I think the busing is a scandal,” he schools in the face of virulent white hostility. He was particularly said. “I don’t think it should be imposed like this on working-class struck that as Ruby was tormented by the most hateful chants people exclusively. It should cross these lines and people in the sub-

36 May - June 2017

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 urbs should share in it….” Coles argued that the socioeconomic status of a child’s the “ultimate reality is the reality of class…. Both working-class classmates has a much more profound That’s the real struggle here.” Working- impact on student achievement than his class whites and blacks, he said, have “got- classmates’ race. (Today, 100 school dis- ten a raw deal….Both groups have been ig- whites and blacks, Coles tricts and charter schools educating 4.4 nored. Both of them are looked down upon million students in 32 states are pursuing by the well-to-do white people.” integration policies by socioeconomic Coles didn’t romanticize blue-collar said, “are looked down status.) In another of my books, Coles’s whites in Boston; they were known, he lens prompted me to suggest that just said, to hurl racial epithets not used in upon by the well-to-do as the Civil Rights Act protects against polite society. But he added: “I don’t think discrimination based on race and ethnic- that all these experts…these various social ity, so it should provide similar protec- scientists and those in favor of integra- white people.” tions to people of all races who are try- tion like myself should be in a position to ing to organize a union in order to join deliver sermons to the people of Boston… the middle class. The neglected injuries until we have been made a part of all of this.” Of people living in of class that Coles emphasized also helped me think through my wealthy suburbs, he said, “Their lives are clean and their minds are books on affirmative action and legacy preferences in college ad- clean. And they can afford this long, charitable, calm view. And if missions (see page 38). people don’t know that this is a class privilege, then, by golly, they don’t know anything.” Inequality in Today’s Academy Two decades later, Coles recalled that his comments about busing oday, a modest number of Harvard professors are writing pow- and his empathetic treatment of working-class whites in The Middle erfully about class, including William Julius Wilson, Matthew Americans constituted the “two times in my life when I got into a TDesmond, Robert Putnam, and Theda Skocpol. Elsewhere, Nan- lot of trouble for what I’ve said.” He continued, “I’ve never heard cy Isenberg of Louisiana State University recently explored the some of the scorn that can be mobilized against people expressed impact of economic inequality in White Trash: The 400 Year Untold His- so vividly as on both of those occasions from people who take great tory of Class in America, and Berkeley’s Arlie Hochschild wrote of pains—and commendably so—to try to understand people of dif- conservative whites in Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning ferent racial backgrounds [emphasis added]. The same people can on the American Right. speak about working-class people of their own race with no great But these are the outliers. Among sociologists, race and gender have charity and often times no great effort at understanding.” swamped class. The University of Illinois’s Walter Benn Michaels has As an undergraduate in the early 1980s, I soaked up Coles’s think- observed, “Although no remark is more common in American pub- ing on race and class in his legendary course, “The Literature of lic life than the observation that we don’t like to talk about race, no Social Reflection,” in which we studied authors from Charles Dick- remark... is more false.” He explains, “|I]n fact, we love to talk about ens and Ralph Ellison to George Orwell and Flannery O’Connor. race. And, in the university, not only do we talk about it; we write Dubbed “Guilt 101,” the course was easy for cynics to ridicule, but books and articles about it, we teach and take classes about it, and students flocked to it. I well remember the class during which a we arrange our admissions policies in order to take it into account.” In member of The Harvard Lampoon burst into the room and, as part of part, Michaels suggests, we talk about race to avoid talking about class. an initiation rite, began imitating his style of lecturing. Coles asked Labor law, for example, grapples with the great issue of class in- the student to leave and then stood, in pained silence, clearly dis- equality. Teaching the subject was a smart move for rising young tressed. After a few moments, a student yelled out from the back Harvard academics like Derek Bok and Archibald Cox. But in re- row, “We love you, Doc.” Four hundred students jumped to their cent decades, Harvard labor-law professors took to spending a lot feet and began to clap furiously. of time on other topics such as sports law. If anything, many pro- I went on to take Coles’s course on “The Literature of Chris- fessors see labor unions as a threat, as graduate students seek to tian Reflection,” which stood out at secular Harvard, and came to organize for better treatment. know him better when we had long discussions for my senior the- The irony is that just as class inequality was becoming a less sa- sis on Robert Kennedy’s ability to reach working-class whites and lient topic in the academy, issues of class were becoming increasingly blacks in his 1968 presidential campaign. As a law student, I took urgent in American society. If you ask Americans what development his “Dickens and the Law” course, which used novels such as Bleak they are most proud of during the last half-century, many will sug- House and Great Expectations to ask important questions about the gest the advance of the civil-rights revolution. To be sure, not enough role of lawyers in society. He later wrote the foreword to my 1992 progress has been made, as recent events remind us—and women, book, Broken Contract: A Memoir of Harvard Law School, which played too, continue to face serious bias. But it is undeniable, as Putnam out those larger themes. His call to pay attention to larger class is- notes in his recent Our Kids, that over the past 50 years, “the power sues that affect black and white alike has been the touchstone for of race, class and gender to shape life chances in America has been my writing during the last 30 years as I’ve tried to apply civil-rights substantially reconfigured.” remedies to larger issues of class inequality—in K-12 education, Racial intermarriage, for example, has become more common— higher education, and employment law. but marriage across class lines is less frequent than it once was. In writing a book on school integration, I discovered that Coles’s Where single-parent household formation used to be heavily pre- insight about Boston touched on an important educational truth: dicted by race, now it is increasingly associated with social class.

Harvard Magazine 37

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 Housing segregation by race is slowly declining, while such segre- representation of low-income students at selective law schools is gation by income is on the rise. And the achievement gap between “comparable to racial representation fifty years ago, before the civil black and white students has slowly diminished, but during the past rights revolution.” In the recent best seller Hillbilly Elegy, J.D. Vance 25 years, the income-achievement gap has widened by 30 percent. articulated how out of place he felt as a low-income white law stu- Unconscionable racial gaps in life expectancy remain, but in recent dent at Yale: “Very few people at Yale Law School are like me. They years, the big news, as reported by Princeton’s Angus Deaton and Anne may look like me, but for all of the Ivy League’s obsession with di- Case, is that life expectancy has fallen for working-class whites, re- versity, virtually everyone—black, white, Jewish, Muslim, what- flecting the ravages of alcoholism, drug overdoses, and suicide. When ever—comes from intact families who never worry about money.” the findings were released, it is telling that some liberals immediately The virtual absence of working-class students on elite campuses found an uncharitable racial explanation: in “What’s Eating White has consequences broader than those for the students themselves. It is America?” for instance, Jared Keller wrote about Deaton and Case’s detrimental to the research conducted by professors. It makes it easier findings: “For poor whites who lacked much economic power in the for academics to engage in lazy stereotypes about groups of students first place, the ascendency of women and minorities is particularly they do not know. It also makes it more likely that faculty will avoid alarming (just look at the racial anxiety of the Tea Party.)” Apparently, talking about hard issues of class. Moreover, because faculty members we are to believe, white working-class people are slowly killing them- themselves are drawn mostly from the ranks of elite colleges, the pau- selves because of the gains of women and minorities. city of working-class students in one generation becomes a paucity Elite disdain of white working-class people has only increased of professors with working-class origins in the next. since the 2016 election. The analysis of liberal pundits, as Barbara Eh- The economic segregation of selective universities is the highly pre- renreich notes, has boiled down to: “What’s wrong with them?...Why dictable result of a number of admissions policies that generally ex- do they believe Trump’s promises? Are they stupid or just deplor- clude working-class students, particularly those who are white. While ably racist?” After the election, for example, the Daily Kos published holistic admissions policies are supposed to include consideration of a particularly cruel article entitled, “Be happy for coal miners losing economic hurdles that students have overcome, careful analysis by the their health insurance. They’re getting exactly what they voted for.” late William Bowen, a former Princeton president, published in 2005 The reaction to white working-class Trump voters raises a profound that elite colleges do not in fact weight economic disadvan- found question: why do white intellectual liberals, privileged by tage in the way they do other factors. Looking at 13 selective colleges both race and class, seem to have so much more race guilt than (including Harvard), Bowen found that for a student with a given class guilt? And what is to be done about the liberal academic academic profile, being a recruited athlete boosted one’s admissions blind spot regarding white working-class people? chances by 30.2 percentage points. Being an underrepresented minority increased one’s chances by 27.7 percentage points; a legacy, by 19.7 The Elite Academy: Who Belongs? percentage points; a first-generation college student, by 4.1 percentage hanging policies to genuinely consider class disadvantage in points; and in the bottom income quartile, not at all. Another study admissions is an important place to start. In the context of race of elite private colleges, by Princeton’s Thomas Espenshade and his Crelations, Harvard professor Gordon Allport’s well-known “con- coauthor, Alexandria Radford, found that, holding academic ability tact hypothesis” suggested that prejudice is reduced when people of constant, upper-middle class whites were three times more likely different races come into contact on a basis of equal status. Expos- than low-income whites to be admitted to selective private colleges. ing professors and fellow students to more bright young men and Imagine how a white working-class student would think about women of working-class backgrounds may deepen empathy and these findings. Legacy preferences are the biggest slap in the face, be- reduce the likelihood that academics will stereotype blue-collar cause they give extra points to a competitor who already has enjoyed people as stupid or backward. considerable educational advantage. (And research suggests legacy Harvard, to its enduring credit, has made great strides on ra- preferences don’t even boost alumni giving.) Similarly, consideration cial diversity. The admitted class of 2020 is 13.7 percent African of race obviously doesn’t help white working-class students, and in American, 22.1 percent Asian American, 12.6 percent Hispanic, fact tends to aid relatively advantaged minority students: Bowen and 2.6 percent Native American or Pacific Islander. and Derek Bok found in a seminal study that 86 percent of African But its economic profile looks nothing Americans at selective colleges are middle like America’s. Despite concerted efforts or upper class. Is it any surprise that when to boost financial aid in recent years, enor- Legacy preferences a demagogue comes along and tells white mous gaps remain. Looking at individuals working-class people that the system the born between 1981 and 1991, Raj Chetty elites have built is rigged against them, of Stanford and his colleagues found that give extra points to a they follow him? Harvard students from the most affluent Progressive leaders used to know this. 10 percent of the population outnumbered When faced with the question of how to those from the bottom 90 percent. Indeed, competitor who already remedy our nation’s history of discrimi- by income, about as many Harvard stu- nation, Martin Luther King Jr. said class- dents came from the top 1 percent as from based policies would disproportionately the bottom 60 percent. has enjoyed considerable benefit black people but would also be Elite higher education as a whole fac- inclusive of lower-income whites. “It is a es the same problem. As Richard Sander simple matter of justice,” he wrote, “that of UCLA Law School notes, the under- educational advantage. America, in dealing creatively with the

38 May - June 2017

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 task of raising the Negro from backwardness, should also be rescu- opening for America’s first presidential-level demagogue. And the ing a large stratum of the forgotten white poor.” In addition, King was failure to admit meaningful numbers of working-class whites to keenly aware of the politics of leaving out disadvantaged whites. He selective colleges has made it much more difficult for professors to wrote: “It is my opinion that many white workers whose economic understand an important and alienated swath of their own society. condition is not too far removed from the economic condition of his It is not a healthy thing for our democracy when many of America’s black brother, will find it difficult to accept a ‘Negro Bill of Rights,’ leading minds know much less about white working-class people which seeks to give special consideration to the Negro in the context than do white nationalists like Steve Bannon [M.B.A. ’85]. of unemployment, joblessness, etc. and does not take into sufficient The heartening story of George Wallace voters turning to Robert account their plight (that of the white worker).” Kennedy in 1968 has now been reversed, as a twenty-first-century I saw a beautiful manifestation of King’s vision—and Robert Ken- version of Wallace—who attacked minorities, the press, and an nedy’s political coalition—when I spoke last year at Harvard to a independent judiciary—garnered the votes of some who had pre- multiracial audience of first-generation college students from across viously supported America’s first black president. the Ivy League and other selective institutions. The students, dispro- The irony is that the faculty neglect of white working-class peo- portionately African American and Latino, reflected the reality that ple is likely to have the most devastating impact on the very racial race continues to affect economic status. But these students, who and religious minorities whom elite faculty members do, to their had impressively overcome odds, were fully allied with the white and credit, care about. Journalist Fareed Zakaria [Ph.D. ’93, LL.D. ’12] Asian students in the audience, who also faced educational disad- noted after the election that if the primary sin of the right is rac- vantages. The group represented the very mix of students who had ism, the cardinal sin of the left is elitism. Robert Coles has shown been pitted against one another in Boston’s busing crisis, but here it is possible to avoid both vices. Now, driven to the precipice, will they were, fighting for a common cause: raising the tiny numbers of the academy follow his lead? economically disadvantaged students at top colleges. Richard D. Kahlenberg ’85, J.D. ’89, is a senior fellow at The Century Foundation, The Stakes in 2017 and the author or editor of 16 books including Broken Contract: A Memoir he exclusion of low-income and working-class students from of Harvard Law School (1992); The Remedy: Class, Race and Af- selective campuses has always been an issue of serious moral firmative Action (1996); All Together Now: Creating Middle-Class Tconcern, but the 2016 election raised the stakes: we now face a Schools through Public School Choice (2001); Affirmative Action for genuine crisis in American democracy. The failure to provide more the Rich: Legacy Preferences in College Admissions (2010); and (with avenues of success for lower-middle-income whites has created an Moshe Marvit), Why Labor Organizing Should Be a Civil Right (2012).

Harvard Magazine 39

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

Brief life of a Native American witness to history: c.1855-1935 by daniel j. sharfstein

or the first 50 years of his life, Yellow Wolf preferred si- Big Hole River in Montana, and wrongly hailed Joseph as a battle- lence and solitude. As a boy, he journeyed alone into the field genius, some combination of Achilles, Hannibal, and Napo- Fmountains ringing Oregon’s Wallowa Valley, fasting until leon. Joseph, Yellow Wolf maintained, was not a war chief, tending animal spirits appeared and gave him his power as a hunter and instead to the women, children, and elderly and to the horse herd. warrior: to strike like thunder, to sense enemies from far away. The Beyond the factual corrective, Yellow Wolf’s words had the al- spirits instructed him to fight alone whenever possible during his lusive power of myth. At the conflict’s outbreak, he was untested first and last war, waged from June to October 1877 between the and carefree. By the surrender, when he hid his rifle in his pants U.S. Army and several hundred Nez Perce families who resisted leg, crossed the army’s siege line, and escaped to Canada, he was leaving ancestral lands for an Idaho reservation. Yellow Wolf was 21 a respected leader. His coming of age happened by degrees, from during the Nez Perce War. In the decades that followed, while his summer solstice to first snow, with each soldier he killed, each of uncle Chief Joseph drew large crowds for speeches about the injus- his own narrow escapes from death, and every friend he watched tice of his people’s plight, Yellow Wolf said nothing of his months die—with each new land that he encountered and every dream of in combat, not even to his children. the world he had left behind. But he spent his last three decades in running conversation. Ex- The story inspired McWhorter to spend decades tracking down iled with Chief Joseph’s band to the Colville Indian Reservation in Nez Perce War survivors. He hired Yellow Wolf and other warriors Washington, he began spending summers in the Yakima Valley as to perform at rodeos and fairs so he could interview them during off a migrant hops picker, earning a dollar a box. On his way home to hours. To maintain off-season contact, he hired them to make feath- the reservation in October 1907, he left an ailing horse with Lucul- ered headdresses for movie studios and theater companies: some of lus Virgil McWhorter, a local sheep rancher. The next year, Mc- the first filmed Westerns may have featured war bonnets made by Whorter returned the horse and invited Yellow Wolf and the rest Yellow Wolf. McWhorter also took Yellow Wolf on extended road of his band to camp on his land. McWhorter, who had moved west trips to battlefields, so he could map the events of the war. And with from Ohio specifically to be near Native Americans, tried talking every hops harvest, the two men would sit down and talk. with his guests. The children knew enough English to say that they After 25 years of conversation, Yellow Wolf hoped he would live were Chief Joseph’s band. McWhorter asked Yellow Wolf if he had to see the book McWhorter was writing. Nearing 80 and frail, he fought in the summer of 1877. understood the power of his words. The government, he told Mc- Chief Joseph had died four years earlier. Yellow Wolf was 52. De- Whorter, had “robbed us of all our country, our homes. We got spite fearing reprisals for the blood he had shed, he decided to find nothing but bullets.” But the stories he had held onto created an an interpreter. “I am going to say things, and I need you!” he told a unimpeachable claim to land, liberty, and equality. “White people… young Nez Perce man fluent in English. “It is hard work for me— are smothering my Indian rights,” he said. “The young generation MCWHORTER, L.V. BY COPYRIGHT: THE CAXTON PRINTERS CALDWELL, LTD., IDAHO, 1940 & 1968. WWW.CAXTONPRESS.COM this talking. Like the heaviest lifting, it buzzes in my head!” behind me, for them I tell the story. It is for them! I want next gen- Yellow Wolf described himself as the son of a wealthy Nez Perce eration of whites to know and treat the Indian as themselves.” rancher and a woman who was close kin to Joseph. As a boy, he He died five years beforeYellow Wolf: His Own Story was published. dreamed of being a warrior, designing a war club with a long han- McWhorter died in 1944, struggling to write a larger, more general dle so he could kill from the saddle. After his parents traded a horse history of the war. His papers went to Washington State Univer- for a 16-shot rifle, he hunted bear and buffalo. When he traveled sity, which expected a few Indian artifacts for its “Treasure Room.” YELLOW WOLF: HIS OWN STORY, home to Oregon from a hunt in Montana, he carried enough money Instead, it received 26 linear feet of interview transcripts, corre- to ride the last leg by stagecoach. spondence, and other manuscripts about Nez Perce life, lore, and McWhorter, like many Americans, was familiar with the Nez religion. The gift forced Washington State to change how it funded Perce War, when 750 men, women, and children outran and out- its library, and turned it, in essence, into a modern research univer- fought the army across some 1,400 miles through the northern sity. The collection, rooted in Yellow Wolf’s words, is one of the Rockies and the buffalo plains, only to be captured a day or two most important archives of the Native American experience. shy of the Canadian border. But Yellow Wolf caught McWhorter by surprise. For one thing, his story gave the lie to official accounts, Daniel J. Sharfstein ’94, a professor of law and history at Vanderbilt, is the au- which greatly exaggerated the number of Nez Perce warriors, cov- thor of the newly published Thunder in the Mountains: Chief Joseph, ered up a vicious massacre of their women and children along the Oliver Otis Howard, and the Nez Perce War (W.W. Norton). DIRECT QUOTATIONS REPRINTED PERMISSION BY FROM

40 May - June 2017

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 COLLECTIONS THE WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY AT STATE LIBRARIES LUCULLUS MCWHORTER V. COLLECTION/MANUSCRIPTS, ARCHIVES AND SPECIAL THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

A portrait of Yellow Wolf circa 1909, and a snapshot taken in 1909 showing him seated between rancher Lucullus McWhorter and their interpreter, Thomas Hart, a younger Nez Perce man who had served in the U.S. Army during the Spanish-American War and spoke good English. Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 wWWW The

LTeachingsos oft the M Philosphyuseum Chamber, recreated by Jonathan Shaw and Jennifer Carling

our years ago, Ethan Lasser was searching in Harvard’s archives for clues to the whereabouts of a portrait by John Singleton Cop- ley, missing since the Amer- ican Revolution, when he stumbled across records of something even Fmore compelling: a lost museum. Repeatedly, the archives referred to a place called “the Philosophy Chamber.” This was “so intrigu- ing and mysterious,” says the Stebbins curator of American art, “that the name got me digging a bit deeper.” He discovered that, in addition to three massive Copley portraits that once hung together on the east wall of Harvard Hall, “there were all kinds of other South Front of Harvard Hall

objects and activities in this room.” This launched at Cambridge in New England (1767), an ink, pencil, and Lasser on a quest to find the objects, many now watercolor drawing on paper scattered in obscure attics and on dusty shelves at by Pierre du Simitière. The Harvard and beyond. “Uniquely in North America,” Philosophy Chamber was on he says, “a significant proportion still survive.” He the second floor. aimed to reunite them, to recreate this lost museum. Benjamin Franklin, A.M. 1753, In the eighteenth century, when the collection was while in England protesting formed, objects were understood to hold information. the Stamp Act, helped Harvard They were instructive. Instruments such as pendulums secure new scientific instruments from abroad after and prisms, as well as paintings, minerals, natural history a devastating 1764 fire. This specimens, and plaster casts of classical sculptures were jointed mahogany steeple among the many objects used to teach students—and (George Adams I or II, c. 1765) may have been among them. were considered as critical to pedagogy as books. When struck with electricity When a 1764 fire destroyed an earlier Harvard from an electrical machine Hall and the College’s “philosophical appa- (see next page), the structure ratus,” for example, Hollis professor John topples, unless grounded with a lightning rod—a Franklin Winthrop suspended his course in physics, invention. mathematics, and astronomy.

In an essay titled “Harvard’s Teaching COURTESY LEFT: AT OF THE COLLECTION OF HISTORICAL SCIENTIFIC INSTRUMENTS. © PRESIDENT AND FELLOWS OF HARVARD COLLEGE. ABOVE: COURTESY OF THE LIBRARY COMPANY OF PHILADELPHIA

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 Cabinet,” Lasser writes that this was because “the central theories that students needed to master in order to understand the workings of nature” could not be explained without the use of “the balance, pulley, lever, screw, wedge, and inclined plane to illustrate the ‘mechanical pow- ers’…pendulums and projectiles to show the laws of motion…and prisms to separate light into the colors of the spectrum.” Winthrop also used an orrery, a mechanical model of the solar system, to explain the “motion of the Moon round the Earth & of both round the Sun as their Lost Museum Center.” His class resumed in 1766, when Har- vard Hall had been rebuilt and the apparatus partially replaced. The layout of the reconstructed building, where all Harvard’s books, instruments, and collections of objects were housed above the first-floor chapel and common room, also suggests that, pedagogically, texts and objects were on equal footing: a library occupied the west room, and the Philosophy Chamber, with its elegant woodwork and flocked wallpaper (a fragment of which survives in the archives), occupied the east. George Washington visited the chamber; Benjamin Franklin, then in Lon- don on a diplomatic mission, helped procure scientific instruments; and Copley, even as an expatriate after the war, sought to ensure that his work was displayed there, suggesting that the importance of this space was more than purely academic (see “Facing Harvard,” November-December 2016, page 42, on the Copley paintings). And the chamber’s implications for pedagogy reverberate into the present: the idea that objects em- Turning the crank of this cylinder electrical machine body knowledge that texts cannot (built by Benjamin Martin, c. underlies the recent redesign of the 1766) generated an electrostatic Harvard Art Museums as a teaching charge used in scientific machine for the modern University demonstrations. (see “Unleashing Harvard’s Art Mu- The Harvard Corporation thanked Franklin in 1769 for sending from London this “fine bust” (c. 1766-69), by Joseph Wilton, of William Pitt the Elder, Earl of Chatham, “that great assertor of American liberties….” “The Great Commoner” advocated for the repeal of the Stamp Act in 1766. Among Harvard’s first sculptures, this bust stood in the Philosophy Chamber in the years before the Revolution.

A faded sample of the bold, block-printed, and flocked wallpaper (British, 1764-66), donated by John Hancock, that hung on the Philosophy

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: COURTESY OF THE COLLECTION OF HISTORICAL SCIENTIFIC INSTRUMENTS. © PRESIDENT AND FELLOWS OF HARVARD COLLEGE;ANTHONY HARVARD ART MUSEUMS. SIGEL. © PRESIDENT PHOTOGRAPH AND BY FELLOWS OF HARVARD COLLEGE; HARVARD LIBRARY IMAGING SERVICES. © PRESIDENT AND FELLOWS OF HARVARD COLLEGE Chamber’s walls.

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 range of transatlantic investigationsrange oftransatlantic in rooted to this date period, Glasgow the same around time, notes that thata whole originated museum atthe University the great ofThe of Hunterian, director thehardlyin isolated 1760s.exercise an deputy Mungo Campbell, T Transatlantic Exchanges ofHarvard.” thein history place forthis museumown moment toits consider isagreat “This the Philosophy Chamber, reinterpret recreateand that will it: puts Roberts, the to humanities the Jennifer exhibition acontributor L. seums trace an origin to the Greeks? modeled on the Athenian city-state, creating a new society the verge of C from aRembrandtfrom insects, geological asfrom art specimens, and knowledge asreadily generate should lar ideasthat acollection by simi says heart,” amuseum with atits “guided sity Campbell, dynasty. byGöttingen the Hanoverian was auniver “Göttingen the in the 1730satthe onefounded University like of collections philosophy, the physical and ofnature universe) the study was wonders of ancient sculpture. Professor of Greek literature (and (and literature Greek of Professor sculpture. ancient of wonders the about students taught objects These (c. 1803). Getti André Jean- by Laocoön, of head the of cast plaster this like ductions Sons the sculpture original Laocoön and capturing marble His After he creation ould North America, then on ould North

during an invasion of Italy, the French began selling repro selling began French the Italy, of invasion an during ,” November-December 2014, page 18).As Agassiz professor of of science, alongside Sir Isaac Newton. Isaac Sir alongside science, of patron 1745, anoted A.B. Bowdoin, James governor Massachusetts and Franklin Benjamin place case ny mahoga the ring that statuettes gilded The arts. the and science in prowess American establish to equally was purpose its 10 satellites, their and planets known the of six of motions the demonstrate to designed system solar the of Amodel diameter. in feet half and five is which (c. 1776-87), orrery” “grand this created aclockmaker, Boston, of Pope Joseph lost of during Rome the destruction in antiquity. was what of magnitude the at hinted they that wrote 1811, A.B. Everett, Edward president) Harvard later of the Philosophy Chamber (named for natural - - - -

FROM TOP: HARVARD ART MUSEUMS DEPARTMENT OF DIGITAL IMAGING AND VISUAL RESOURCES. © PRESIDENT AND FELLOWS OF HARVARD COLLEGE; COURTESY OF THE COLLECTION OF HISTORICAL SCIENTIFIC INSTRUMENTS. © PRESIDENT AND FELLOWS OF HARVARD COLLEGE (4) CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: COURTESY OF THE COLLECTION OF HISTORICAL SCIENTIFIC INSTRUMENTS. © PRESIDENT AND FELLOWS OF HARVARD COLLEGE; HARVARD LIBRARY IMAGING SERVICES. © PRESIDENT AND FELLOWS OF HARVARD COLLEGE; HARVARD ART MUSEUMS DEPARTMENT OF DIGITAL IMAGING AND VISUAL RESOURCES. © PRESIDENT AND FELLOWS OF HARVARD COLLEGE pean, British, and French discus French and British, pean, ofEuro catalyst kinds forall proved impossible. the markings’ meaning kings.” Consensus on century,teenth the Vi the nine “in then and Chinese, says Lasser, onthe centered ries markings. theo Later attempt tothe decipher copy, could experts soits own commissioned its ety were made. The Royal Soci thoughtions matched, many ofthe inscrip renderings two no ofthe continued, rock As study the workerosion, tides? of countless the Greeks? Or were the marks caused by on the Athenian city-state, to origin trace an onthe verge modeled then anewsociety ofrecreating America, by somescholars to North Could sailors. Phoenician attributed museum’s storage. that up in rolled drawing Museum, had the found full-scale Massachusetts. Lasser, curators help with from at the Peabody zone atthetidal mouthofthe Taunton southeastern in River onamassive inscription ofan a in found rock vibrant, still 1768, from on paper 11feetthree feetinks longand high,with finds. This tracing was a ofLasser’s of the mostilluminating Philosophy Chamber. for the designated those objects finding in his colleagues (seeLasser May-June Portrait, Harvard 2016, page 20) and copy onrock a at for “a of the figures Taunton”), guided These atbest(an records, somevague acknowledgement the donors. thanked that and arrived Cambridge, in kind money in and recorded theporation then numerous gifts The replacements. Cor England in colonies and seeking appealsthroughout the published the College onloan, out that had been ing nothing but the books instruments and formed. been Museum hadBritish initially the modelonwhich modeofcollecting, even the antiquarian knowledge, says away and Campbell, an from the advancement to support of catalogued and gathered specifically logicalcollections nomically adecisiveresented movement toward taxo ordered, Hano of this vard, Yale, “part heexplains, were all, Princeton and books.” The repositories at the Royal inLondon, at Har Society changes. pressure hydrostatic of effect the demonstrating memorably danced, figures the tube, the atop membrane elastic an on imperceptibly pressed instructor the As water. with filled tube athree-foot-long in changes pressure to response in down 1765) and up c. dove Martin, Benjamin by (created Divers” “Cartesian glass these devils, or acrobats, clowns, as Rendered “The drawing became the became the drawing “The In century, the eighteenth onthe were rock the inscriptions out to beone Theturned rock” ona “copy ofthe figures leav the of1764 fire collections, After decimated Harvard’s verian world teaching.” ofresearchand verian They rep

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

- - including formal education, until the age of 15. of age the until education, formal including protected from of the complexity society, his contention that children should be be should children that contention his Rousseau used the image to underscore underscore to image the used Rousseau Harvard’s library in 1774), Jean-Jacques 1774), in Jean-Jacques library Harvard’s Émile meaning, too: in the frontispiece to medallions Wedgwood jasperware heel). The scene had pedagogic pedagogic had scene The heel). depicting scenes from antiquity (except where she grips him by the the by him grips she where (except river Styx to render him invulnerable invulnerable him render to Styx river Thetis dips Achilles in water from the Here, century. eighteenth the in students for life to classics the brought , Or, On Education (which entered Education On Or, H arvard M agazine 45 sions about who was in North America first,” Lasser continues. “So that mysterious entry unlocked not only this extraordinary object but also this story of transatlantic communication, America’s role in global history, and Harvard’s role in creating the specimens upon which global history was built.” Eighteenth-century attitudes toward indigenous peoples in North America and elsewhere blinded most of the scholars who studied the markings from seeing what now seems obvious: that the Wampa- noag peoples of southeastern Massachusetts made them. (For more on evolving interpretations in anthropology, see the Treasure on the Peabody Museum, page 80.) Denouement for a Collection And then, for the Philosophy Chamber, “the end comes abruptly,” Lasser says. “They are continuing to receive donations and then in the 1810s, comes a proposal. ‘There are so many books coming in that there is no room for them all. Let’s take over the Philosophy Cham- ber.’ There is no record in the minutes of someone saying, ‘No, that is a terrible idea,’” he recounts. “About five years later, the Corporation contracts with a carpenter to remove the partitions that separate the library from the Philosophy Chamber to actually make it one room.” “Why did it happen so easily?” Lasser asks rhetorically. “Harvard was growing and knowledge was breaking apart into disciplines, each taught in its own physical space. Whereas natural history, astronomy, physics,

and biology were once all taught in one room, now there is a chemistry lab. [It’s] an era of specialization with professors for different fields. The idea of a room to contain the whole body of knowledge—by 1810, it is just not how they think anymore.” The centrifugal force of specialization was not limited to the academy. In Harvard’s case, collections were spun off to the natural history museum in Boston, to a coin collection at the Boston Athenaeum, and to the Massachusetts Historical Society.

At the same time, Lasser says, “The objects are decaying. Bugs are getting into taxidermy, things are breaking, scientific instruments are checked out like a book and never returned. The collection is literally crumbling.” Still, he continues, “It is not insignificant that the library takes over. Do you want to learn from things or from books? Clearly—and it is not unique [to Harvard]—the decision is to go with texts, not with coins, say, or minerals. That is another

This copy (1719-20) by Ameri- can artist John Smibert of Anthony van Dyck’s Cardinal Guido Bentivoglio (1623) was donated by artist John Trum- bull, whose portrait of George Washington also hung in the Philosophy Chamber. The Bentivoglio was both given and received with the hope “that this copy will be highly useful to beginners.”

In 1778, a “Miss Meriam” donated a flattened rattlesnake skin like this one for the study of natural history.

Professor of natural history William Dandridge Peck prepared fish specimens by slitting them in half, removing bones, organs, eyes, and flesh, and sewing the skins to paper. Specimens like this flattened lumpfish were used to teach Linnaean classification in the

Philosophy Chamber. FROM TOP: HARVARD ART MUSEUMS DEPARTMENT OF DIGITAL IMAGING AND VISUAL RESOURCES. © PRESIDENT AND FELLOWS OF HARVARD COLLEGE; COURTESY OF THE HERPETOLOGY DEPARTMENT, MUSEUM OF COMPARATIVE PHOTOGRAPH ZOOLOGY. JEREMIAH BY TRIMBLE. © PRESIDENT AND FELLOWS OF HARVARD COLLEGE; COURTESY OF THE ICHTHYOLOGY DEPARTMENT, MUSEUM OF COMPARATIVE PHOTOGRAPH ZOOLOGY. ANDREW BY WILLISTON. © PRESIDENT AND FELLOWS OF HARVARD COLLEGE

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 TOP: COURTESY OF THE MINERALOGICAL AND GEOLOGICAL MUSEUM. PHOTOGRAPHS BY THERESA SMITH. © PRESIDENT AND FELLOWS OF HARVARD COLLEGE (4); BOTTOM: COURTESY OF COMPTON VERNEY ART GALLERY AND PARK, WARWICKSHIRE, U.K. meaning from otherwise mute objects. Outside the realm the realm Outside muteobjects. otherwise from meaning to do that.” expected major would be century,” a geology “only she explains, Butby the specimen. twentieth amineral ed to identify forexample, mightbeexpect student, Harvard century bition to have them be am isnolonger there an and longer legible, universally it means,” Roberts says. these are objects no “Suddenly you whatat a piece offeldspar tell and what itisand anyone read presumably, can abook, notanyone look can to acquire. “Whereas areexpected knowledge students of Patience,” November-December 2013, page 40.) Power “The onaCopleyobjects—focusing painting—in 200 (Read years.” with on working views her more about going that hasbeen on forthe last intoedge information ofabstraction There ofknowl isthis kind important.’ history, these books onnatural all that iswhat ismost specimens, butwe have history natural ofthe actual rid imagine that 1816, in they areable ‘We to think, aregetting I forthe objects. masquerade that can asasubstitute ogy technol- ofeconomicalinformation isakind book “The In this sense, or of instruments. objects for a collection space” thatknowledge than required amuchsmaller in of you comprehensive have collection createdatruly you to “allows imagine that lection ofbooks alibrary in decisive. and swift Jennifer that out acol Roberts points movement: that we don’t any the objects longer.” trust 1768. in night of dead the in out cut was heart the which from Bernard, Francis Sir governor royal despised of portrait Copley Singleton John the ing replac Chatham, of Earl the of bust the near fireplace the above hung lost, now work, Asimilar pedagogy. of service the in science with art united Volaire, by (1767), Night at Erupting Vesuvius barite. and silver, sulfate, barite fluorite, are left) (from Shown missing. remain to Chamber the from object largest the and time, the at England New in furniture case of piece largest the perhaps long, 18 feet cabinet acustom in housed were minerals 800 than More Art historians are still trained to extract information and and to trained extract information are historians still Art of kind The ofknowledge alsoaffects the specialization was lectures and basedontexts The to pedagogy shift

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 universally legible. An eighteenth An eighteenth legible. universally

Pierre-Jacques - - - - - H arvard M agazine 47 48 May-June 2017

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 collection. the in objects crafted intricately most the among are this like Featherworks Hawaii. to native honey creepers, small, rare birds birds rare small, creepers, honey feathers plucked fromfeathers living helmet made from 10,000 include this mahiole, the owners and crew crew and owners the globe—and donated by globe—and circumnavigate the American ship to the the Columbia brought home by that is embedded in material objects,that things material isembeddedin that aren’t ornumerical.” textual the now in academy right toward the knowledge information and unlocking to abstract away ability “an about only things. from So, isalotofmovement there the notbe fieldshould and isphilosophicalknowledge there objects” in “maybe that Philosophers materialism.” are allowing of “new term theunder catchall More professors are accordingly integrating forms of experiential learn of experiential More forms professors are accordingly integrating Objects Objects —the first first —the

a “ There are forms of intelligence areof There forms embedded in interactions pressure, sequence, and movement that is central to the to movement the and that iscentral sequence, pressure, It knowledge of astickshift. isabodily tions fordriving the instruc down howthey would write ask students example that I use,” she says, to things.making “The “is acquires by artisan knowledge that a skilled experiential oftactile, isthe kind form Onesuch into text.” translatable that aren’t objects with interactions in straightforwardly embedded ofintelligence areforms that “there ognizes tinues, an approach akin to the art historians’ has arisen hasarisen historians’ totinues, the art approach akin an that can’t into text.” translated beefficiently way the ofcar, in you world you if drive this kind exist but with objects thataren’t Even in philosophy and literary studies, Roberts con studies, Even in philosophy literary and straightforwardly a renaissance in object-based in teaching, onethata renaissance rec rare. Now, that may bechanging. Roberts describes translatable intotext.” of visual culture, however, culture, have of visual become skills such Cherokee culture. alized the imminent decline of moor’s memori also donation Dins negotiations. treaty during smoked often were ing, promote mutual understand to thought Pipes, Chamber. this one to the Philosophy like bowl pipe astone donated to the Cherokee people, Washington’s agent appointed W. Dinsmoor, Silas George visitors. Western with trade probably made for specifically wooden doll, which was the by illustrated is lip lower the extend to labrets these of use The Northwest. Pacific indigneous women in the by worn ornaments lower-lip fascinated by the wooden Columbia the on Sailors

were were ------

COUNTERCLOCKWISE FROM TOP: PEABODY MUSEUM OF ARCHAEOLOGY AND ETHNOLOGY, PM# 99-12-70/53559 (DIGITAL FILE 99170068). © PRESIDENT AND FELLOWS OF HARVARD COLLEGE; PEABODY MUSEUM OF ARCHAEOLOGY AND ETHNOLOGY, PM# 99-12-10/53093 (DIGITAL FILE 60741707). © PRESIDENT AND FELLOWS OF HARVARD COLLEGE; PEABODY MUSEUM OF ARCHAEOLOGY AND ETHNOLOGY, PM# 99-12-10/53119 (DIGITAL FILE 60740101).© PRESIDENT AND FELLOWS OF HARVARD COLLEGE; PEABODY MUSEUM OF ARCHAEOLOGY AND ETHNOLOGY, PM# 87-18-10/41093 (DIGITAL FILE 99320183). © PRESIDENT AND FELLOWS OF HARVARD COLLEGE Paintings (c. 1770-1790) by Agostino Brunias, an Italian artist working in the Carib- bean, depict free and enslaved women of mixed and African descent. The works, donated

by the Boston-born attorney general of St. Kitts, idealize plantation life, showing a French Mulatress of St. Dominica and a Negro Woman and Mulatresses and Negro Woman Bathing, as a white peeping Tom observes. Labels on the backs of these paintings suggest they may have been used to teach theories of racial classification in the natural-history curriculum.

ing into their teaching, she says. “Instead of having students sit and listen to you talk for an hour, you give them something to do with their hands, a puzzle to solve, some kind of multidimensional experience. In a way,” she says, “we are circling back to this eighteenth-century moment, when it was assumed that if you wanted to understand a complex physical law, the most effective way to learn that was from a scientific demonstration in a classroom, where the instructor would show something or provide a bodily experience.” And so, at this moment of pedagogical rediscovery, after 200 years in obscurity, the “lost museum”—itself rediscovered—will reopen on May 19 as an exhibition at the Harvard Art Museums, with close to 100 of the original objects on display. (The exhibition will travel to The Hunterian in 2018.) Viewers who become especially intrigued, take note: many of the objects are still missing.

The fame of Dighton Rock, a 40-ton boulder in southeastern Massachusetts that lay in the mouth of the Taunton River, outlasted the Philosophy Chamber itself, because the inscriptions on its face were thought to be key to understanding the peopling of America. In this 1853 daguerreotype taken by Horatio King of Seth Eastman, an artist active in recording Native American life, the rock face may have been “chalked” to enhance the visibility of the inscriptions. In the eighteenth century, an indigenous origin for these petroglyphs was thought unlikely. The life-size, 11-foot-long by three-foot-high tracing (below)—which Stephen Sewall, A.B. 1761, made of the inscriptions in 1768— was seen variously as evidence of visits by Norsemen, ancient Phoenicians, East Asians, Egyptians, or Israelites. Yale president Ezra Stiles cited the carvings as evidence that Native Americans were the cursed children of Canaan destined by biblical prophecy to be the slaves of the white colonists. CLOCKWISE FROM PEABODY TOP LEFT: MUSEUM OF ARCHAEOLOGY AND ETHNOLOGY, PM# 975-5-30/9416B (DIGITAL FILE 99320188). © PRESIDENT AND FELLOWS OF HARVARD COLLEGE;© PRESIDENT PEABODY AND MUSEUM FELLOWS OF OF HARVARD ARCHAEOLOGY COLLEGE; AND COLLECTION ETHNOLOGY, PM# 975-5-30/9416D OF THE MASSACHUSETTS (DIGITAL FILE 99320190). HISTORICAL SOCIETY, BOSTON; PEABODY MUSEUM OF ARCHAEOLOGY AND ETHNOLOGY, PM# 967-28-10/45474 (DIGITAL FILE 99270006). © PRESIDENT AND FELLOWS OF HARVARD COLLEGE

Harvard Magazine 49

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 A Language Out of Nothing Searching for the nature of speech, sign, and universal grammar

by Marina N. Bolotnikova

or the first time in She isn’t a signer of ASL—most lin- more than two decades, guists who conduct research on a Harvard began offering language aren’t necessarily fluent an American Sign Language (ASL) course last fall. As- speakers. Davidson is a semanticist, which means she’s interested sistant professor of linguistics Kathryn Davidson, who in how human beings can hear (or see, in the case of sign languages) Fworks on sign languages, happened to join the linguistics depart- infinitely many new sentences they’ve never heard before and un- ment in 2015—at the same time that students were calling for ASL derstand them. She gesticulates in excitement when she talks about classes—and signed the paperwork to get the course approved. language, almost flailing: “What is thisthing that we’re so good at?” When she was a graduate student at the University of California, Even for the educated public, understanding what linguists San Diego, Davidson says, sign language researchers were every- do can be an ordeal. The simplest definition—that linguistics is where; at Harvard, ASL is much less visible, and she hopes, through “the scientific study of language”—does not say much. We all ASL classes and interpretations at events, to make sign language use language, so what could be so complicated about studying “a more natural part of what’s going on.” But she doesn’t teach the it? People often assume that linguists are concerned with en-

class, and language instruction has little to do with her research. forcing prescriptive rules about language—one shouldn’t end a BACKGROUND: ISTOCK Kathryn Davidson discussing her research

50 May - June 2017 Photographs by Jim Harrison

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 sentence with a preposition, use a split infinitive, and so on—but can’t unambiguously communicate anything that a speaker wants linguists actually have no interest in top-down rules. (At a dinner to say: you can’t write the Bible in emoji.) party, an especially bellicose linguist might point out that both Sign languages are fertile territory for answering questions about of those “rules” were forcibly imported by nineteenth-century human language capacity, because they stretch the medium of lan- grammarians and have nothing to do with English grammar.) guage transmission from the auditory to the visual. They’re often What they find much more interesting are the naturally occur- used by people who had limited aural language input as children. ring rules of language that people pick up effortlessly as small While she was postdoctoral fellow at the University of Connecti- children. People’s innate capacity for language might also explain cut, Davidson studied the English abilities of deaf children with why it’s hard to understand what linguists study: we’re so good cochlear implants. Many deaf children born in the United States at internalizing the rules of language that it’s difficult to surface are given such implants early to restore their hearing, with vari- them as rules that even need studying. able rates of success, and often their parents are advised to focus But Davidson finds that when she tells people she works with sign on English and avoid sign language. “The medical community has language, they get it: “Somehow that gives people the signal that you’re expressed repeated concern about ‘visual takeover,’” Davidson ex- interested in the brain and how different languages differ.” Davidson’s plains. “Under this view, if you’re exposed to sign language, your work on sign languages spans the divide between applied and theoreti- brain will not put the effort into using the cochlear implant to pro- cal linguistics, contributing to both abstract debates about language cess speech because sign language is just too easy in comparison.” in the mind and questions with immediate impacts on people’s lives. (Within the organized deaf community, cochlear implantation is an Harvard’s small but formidable linguistics department thrives on its issue of some debate: restoring the hearing of deaf children allows interest in the union of theory and empirical research. “Our depart- them to communicate with the rest of society, without the use of ment retains its ties to languages, plural, in a way that a lot of other an interpreter, but it also threatens the survival of deaf culture, of modern linguistics departments don’t,” Davidson says. “We definitely which sign language is a central part.) have strong theorists…but all of them are really also strongly tied to To determine whether fears of a “visual takeover” could be sup- working on specific languages that aren’t English.” ported, Davidson and her coauthors Diane Lillo-Martin and Debo- To explain the human capacity for language, MIT linguist Noam rah Chen Pichler focused on a group of deaf children with cochlear Chomsky, JF ’55, LL.D. ’00, supposed that there must be a uniquely implants, born into deaf families, who had regular exposure to human language “organ” embedded in the DNA, with neural hard- both ASL from their parents and spoken English from outside the ware devoted specifically to acquiring and processing language. home. She gave them standardized English tests—for comprehen- Chomsky composed the now-famous sentence, “Colorless green sion, articulation, basic vocabulary, and literacy—and compared ideas sleep furiously,” as an example of an utterance that makes the group’s results to a control group of hearing children born to no sense semantically, and yet any native English speaker could deaf adults, who also grew up signing ASL with their parents and recognize it as a grammatically valid English sentence. He pro- using English elsewhere. The deaf children performed just as well posed the language organ to account for our ability to assimilate as the hearing group; in fact, they did better than deaf children new sentences, regardless of their semantic content. Drawing on with cochlear implants who lack exposure to ASL typically do. Chomsky, Johnstone family professor of psychology Steven Pinker Those findings appear to confirm Chomsky’s intuition about lan- popularized the concept of language as a discrete endowment in guage capacity. “Early ASL input was doing whatever bilingualism his 1994 book, The Language Instinct. would naturally do, but it wasn’t putting [the deaf children] at any Whether such an endowment really exists remains an open ques- disadvantage for learning spoken language,” Davidson says. “They tion within linguistics. At the other extreme, some academics ar- were processing English phonology very well. They were on the gue that language is merely a consequence of humans having a lot high end of cochlear implant users, and they did much better than of gray cells—that it does not differ fundamentally from any other would be predicted by their age of implantation and other factors learned skill, like adding numbers or playing the piano. Those who about their implants. You might conclude that this is because they believe the latter tend to come from fields outside linguistics, says had sign language, not in spite of it.” Diebold professor of Indo-European linguistics and philology Jay The worry that a visual language could “take over” the aural Jasanoff. “Linguists are infinitely appreciative of how unique and realm, making deaf children unable to process spoken language, special this language capacity is,” he adds, and tend to take for seems consistent with what the medical community already knows granted that a language organ, in some form, exists. about the brain. In deaf and blind people, for example, neuroplasti- In the twentieth century, linguists recognized that ASL and other city allows the parts of the brain normally used for auditory or visual sign languages were languages in their own right, rather than just processing to be used to process other senses instead. If language attempts to gesture in lieu of real language (see “Social Justice in is just another learned skill processed through the senses, then al- Linguistics,” page 78). That difference—between a full or “natural” lowing a deaf child to use sign language could encourage her visual language and any other system of communication—isn’t a trivial capacity to eclipse the auditory realm, making it harder for her to one. A natural language has to be acquirable by children during understand spoken language via cochlear implants. the critical period for language acquisition, up to around age 12. Davidson’s findings, and those of the linguistic community in It also must be able to say anything that a person might want to general, provide evidence of a generalized capacity for language— say. So the Bible, for example, can be—and has been—translated a language organ—which is exercised with sign languages just as into Cherokee, or ASL, or any other language. (In the introduc- it is with spoken ones. Sign language doesn’t appear to take over tory linguistics course that she teaches, Davidson recalls students space used for processing spoken language. In fact, early expo- discussing whether emoji are a language. They aren’t, because they sure to ASL may aid processing of spoken English. Because early

Harvard Magazine 51

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 larly generous view of research on the semantics of words relat- ing to human relationships in a language of the Amazon. You’re going to say that’s all low-level stuff that doesn’t concern the main questions.” Linguists now can name many things that all languages have in common, and many things that no language is able to do, but they remain far from understanding what the universal grammar actually consists of. Recently, more researchers from linguistics and other fields have come to doubt that a language instinct even exists, pointing out, for example, that it takes children years to successfully acquire a language, and they pick up the rules piecemeal, not systematically. The theory of a language organ, they argue, is so vague as to be unfalsifiable. Chom- sky had famously refuted Har- vard behaviorist B.F. Skinner’s view of language as a form of Jay Jasanoff behaviorist learning, where children merely learn to asso- language exposure is central to children’s language acquisition, ciate words with meanings. Like structural linguistics, behav- depriving deaf children of ASL input early in life, before they get iorist psychology was concerned only with behavior outside the implants, Davidson suggests, does much more harm to their lan- mind, because mental processes weren’t empirically observable. guage ability later. Now, Chomsky’s opponents worry that linguistics has swung too far in the opposite direction, that his purely computational The Chomskyan program theory can’t account for the role of learning in language. The more A central assumption of the Chomskyan paradigm is not just interesting views fall somewhere along the spectrum: “I think a language organ but a universal grammar: a notion that all natural it’s vain and arrogant to suppose that we’re really at the point of languages must have a common, underlying structure in order to being able to figure out exactly what the language organ is, and be processed by the language faculty. Linguists use the term uni- that our language abilities are due 100 percent to the language versal grammar more or less interchangeably with language organ or organ and 0 percent to generalized gray matter,” Jasanoff says. “I language instinct to refer to the theoretical language blueprint innate think it’s clear that there is some universal grammar, something to humans. Pre-Chomskyan linguistics, which arose from the work that we are endowed with that apes don’t have, but there’s a of Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, was concerned with the great continuum between having an extremely structured view structure of languages: how they combine different sounds and of what this is and having the view that it’s nothing.” pieces of words to form utterances. Saussure was also interest- Jasanoff completed his undergraduate training in linguistics at ed in how languages change over time, and made the important Harvard in 1963, a few years after Chomsky published Syntactic Struc- observation that words are arbitrary. Linguists are still invested tures. The object of study in the Chomskyan tradition, also called in language change over time and the structure of individual lan- generative linguistics, became not individual language systems guages, but those questions have been in significant part displaced but the human mind. Significant resistance to Chomsky emerged by the debate over Chomskyanism. In his review of Chomsky’s among the old guard of linguists—“violent anti-Chomskyanism,” foundational book Syntactic Structures, the study that would begin a as Jasanoff calls it—but it never animated Harvard’s linguistics paradigm shift in linguistics, MIT linguist Robert Lees wrote that department the way it did some institutional peers. It maintained its approach would elevate linguistics to an abstract science with good relations with MIT’s department and remained generative in explanatory power, rather than a catalog of the world’s languages its outlook. At Columbia, once one of the strongest U.S. linguistics and their grammars. “If you really believe strong claims about uni- departments, the faculty was so unable to cope with the Chomskyan versal grammar,” Jasanoff says, “you’re not going to take a particu- wave that it eventually disintegrated.

52 May - June 2017

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 Linguistics at Harvard cally enrolled 20 to more than 30 students; when last he offered it, in Harvard’s department remains one of the most distinguished spring 2015, 35 students signed up. This spring, 68 students did—so linguistics programs in the nation, reflecting the strength of its many that he moved the class to Boylston Hall’s Fong Auditorium as faculty and its ability to draw on the University’s language and “an emergency measure.” Jasanoff attributes the growth to Harvard’s area-studies programs and psychology department. But even at new General Education system, which lets students take any linguis- Harvard, linguistics suffered a crisis in the decades after Chom- tics course to satisfy the arts and humanities requirement. (Previous- sky. Nearly all the department’s current faculty members arrived ly, linguistics courses didn’t satisfy any Gen Ed requirements.) “The during the last two decades; the department fell into disrepair in reason this is popular,” he says, “is this stuff isextremely interesting. the 1980s and 1990s, during what Jasanoff calls a “perfect storm” of It piques the interest of a lot of kids. For a lot of students, when they dysfunction among senior professors and low morale among junior first take linguistics, scales fall from their eyes.” faculty, who at the time lacked a straightforward path to tenure. For historical and bureaucratic reasons, linguistics is wedged “There was a contagion among Ivy League deans to save money by into the Faculty of Arts and Science’s arts and humanities divi- doing away with linguistics,” Jasanoff says. (Linguistics was also sion, but methodologically, it isn’t a straightforward fit anywhere. There’s little interpretive work in what “The historical mutation of language forms Jasanoff does, he says, using old written records to reconstruct, for example, the into others is exactly like the historical accent pattern in a Slavic language. He first became aware of historical change mutation of a fin into a tetrapod limb.” in language in high school, a process he viewed with a scientist’s eye: “My fas- nearly eliminated at Yale in the early 1990s.) By 1993, Harvard had cination with linguistic evolution exactly paralleled my fascina- announced it would eliminate its department: “The two senior pro- tion with biological evolution; the historical mutation of language fessors who were leading [it] were called into the dean’s office and forms into others is exactly like the historical mutation of a fin told that a committee would be appointed to study ways of cover- into a tetrapod limb.” ing linguistics at Harvard without a department.” Generative linguistics relies on formal logic to model meaning. Da- Recalling that period, the Slavic department’s Michael S. Flier, vidson entered linguistics through mathematics, thinking that she’d Potebnja professor of Ukrainian philology, writes, “I immediately be a math professor. She stumbled into the field in college at Penn, wrote a letter of concern to Jeremy Knowles [then dean of the Fac- through a general education requirement. (Had she gone to Harvard ulty of Arts and Sciences], emphasizing how important it was for in that era, she might never have found it.) “A very common entry into Harvard to have a strong representation in linguistics.” And the linguistics in the post-Chomsky era (please turn to page 78) following summer, the department was placed into a kind of receivership under Flier, who was charged with putting it back in order. Linguistics was permitted to make new appointments (among them Jasanoff, who started in 1998 as the department’s In- do-Europeanist), and to move, as Flier puts it, “out of its claustro- phobic space in the basement of Grays Hall.” The department now has three full-time tenured professors and a fourth shared with the classics department, and, during a period of general austerity for the humanities at Harvard, is con- ducting a search for a new senior colleague. For years, Jasanoff has taught “Introduction to Indo-European,” an entry-level historical linguistics course in which students reconstruct Proto-Indo-European, the parent language of the languages of Europe and parts of Central and South Asia, probably spoken more than 5,000 years ago. It has typi- Annemarie Kocab

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 A LANGUAGE OUT OF NOTHING ence at Harvard than elsewhere. Davidson toral fellow in Davidson’s lab next year) (continued from page 53) points out that Harvard attracts the kinds of worked with Jennie Pyers, a psychologist undergraduates who don’t like to be limited who studies Nicaraguan Sign Language is people who have really math-y and analyti- by the arbitrary boundaries between disci- (NSL), a language that emerged in Mana- cal minds and like to think about cognitive plines; for them, linguistics can feel liberat- gua in the 1980s, and today has more than science, how you model mental processes, ing, allowing them to draw on many different 1,000 native speakers. For linguists inter- how you translate from one language to an- intuitions. “Harvard students in particular ested in language emergence, NSL offers a other,” she says. “Those are questions that were good at learning all their high-school rich and rare natural experiment. “[I]t’s the don’t involve any lab science, but still sci- languages and were taking advanced calcu- first and only time that we’ve actually seen a entific questions you could approach with lus,” she says. “It’s natural for those kinds of language being created out of thin air,” Ste- a mathematical apparatus.” people to be excited about linguistics.” ven Pinker has said. Plenty of students enter the field through NSL’s origins trace to an attempt by the humanistic passions, too, like a love of lan- The birth of a language Nicaraguan government in the late 1970s to guage, or anthropology. Entire subfields are When she was in college at Welles- establish a special-education school that devoted to the social and political dimensions ley, Annemarie Kocab (now a psychology drew dozens of deaf students. The program of language, though they have a lesser pres- graduate student who will be a postdoc- initially tried to teach them Spanish through techniques like lip-reading; these largely failed. What followed was much more in- “Social Justice in Linguistics” teresting: the children began to use gestures with one another that weren’t comprehensi- Kathryn davidson’s role in bringing an ASL class to Harvard, on one level, was ble to their teachers. Within several years, it incidental. The students calling for the class needed a faculty member’s signature, became clear that this was the birth of a new and an ASL researcher happened to arrive at the right moment. On another level, it language. American academics have been mirrors the much more substantial relationship between the linguistic and deaf com- traveling to Nicaragua since the late 1980s munities. Though it contributes to the debate over the language organ, Davidson’s to gain insight into how languages emerge. work on deaf children is much more applied than most of her papers, which wade In spoken language, the closest analogy to deep into theoretical semantics. She views applied research as part of “the social re- NSL’s emergence might be pidgins and cre- sponsibility of running a lab that studies sign languages.” The study on children with oles. Pidgins arise in situations of cross-cul- cochlear implants became her most cited paper, because of its importance to studies tural contact, like trade or colonialism, where of the deaf community. Linguists have been the first to discredit unsupported myths adults speaking two different languages must about language, like the notion that it’s harmful find a way to communicate. The resulting pid- to raise children to be bilingual, or that sign lan- gin, a makeshift mixture of both languages, guages were merely systems of gesture. lacks the grammar and vocabulary of a natural ASL “is one of the best cases of social justice in language. When a new generation of children /GETTY IMAGES linguistics,” Davidson says. During the last half- acquires the pidgin, they rapidly fill in seman- century, linguists, led initially by the late William tic and syntactic gaps, producing creoles: full, Stokoe, have documented the ability of sign lan- stable languages, like Haitian Creole. guages to do all the things spoken languages can, A similar pattern emerged in Nicaragua. but do them by using three-dimensional space in- The first cohort of NSL signers, from approxi- stead of sound. Stokoe is widely credited with se- mately the late 1970s through the mid 1980s,

ANNE TIMES CUSACK ANGELES / LOS curing ASL’s status as a real language. During the began to converge on a common vocabulary same period, disability-rights activism produced the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, and and sentence structure. “The first cohort later the Americans with Disabilities Act, the federal laws that gave people with dis- tends to sign more slowly, at a more measured abilities rights to certain accommodations, like sign-language interpretation. pace, and they don’t consistently use what we Psychology graduate student Annemarie Kocab, who is deaf, grew up going to a would call grammatical ‘space,’” Kocab ex- hearing school with a sign-language interpreter. (“I was what you would call ‘main- plains. (In sign languages, the space in front of streamed,’” she signs, as the interpreter by her side simultaneously translates her the signer is used systematically to communi- words.) Her hearing parents took the unusual step of learning ASL to communicate cate grammatical information. A signer might with her. Whatever progress has been made to advance the rights of deaf people, Ko- introduce someone in a particular location, cab is bothered that many physicians remain at odds with the deaf community, and for example, and refer back to that location with linguistics research, in their view of language: “Many doctors advise parents to to talk about that person.) The next cohort give their deaf children cochlear implants, and say, ‘You need to focus on spoken lan- began to sign faster and more fluently, and guage only and don’t sign or use ASL,’” she says. “If the spoken language approach fails, made grammatical use of space. More than 30 well, then, they say, ‘Maybe you could try ASL.’ But we know that’s not how language years have passed since the emergence of the works.” That may be changing, though: a widely cited 2015 paper in Pediatrics, titled first cohort of speakers, allowing Kocab and “Should All Deaf Children Learn Sign Language?” advised, “The benefits of learning other researchers to begin to make general- sign language clearly outweigh the risks.” izations about the language’s development. Kocab is interested in how NSL signers

78 May - June 2017

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 develop ways of communicating about com- the hands asymmetrically. But, strikingly, course, because NSL signers are deaf, they plex topics, like events ordered in time. In NSL speakers appear to have taken only a don’t necessarily model how pre-lingual one study, she and her coauthors, psychol- few generations to converge on an effec- hearing humans would have behaved. ogy professors Ann Senghas of Barnard and tive means of conveying complex tempo- Jesse Snedeker of Harvard, showed signers ral language. Language and mind videos of events in different times and asked William Stokoe, the linguist who first Much linguistic research today, like them to discuss them. Participants were suggested ASL was its own language, be- Davidson’s work on deaf children and Ko- drawn from the first cohort, the second co- lieved that human language in general, both cab’s on language emergence, contributes in hort, who entered the signing community in spoken and signed, emerged out of hand ges- some way to understanding how language the late 1980s, and the third cohort, who en- tures. Gesture evolved into sign language, functions in the mind. It’s odd, then, David- tered in the 1990s. All of them began signing he argued, and only after this did language son says, that linguists are so often asked to as young children, and today are adults in become primarily spoken. Any “big-bang justify why their research is of any use to their twenties, thirties, and forties. Some of theory” of language emergence is difficult society. “Language is basically as complex the findings seem intuitive: signers from all to test empirically, but NSL might be in- as memory, and it can be hard to live a good three cohorts successfully described simple, structive. A key assumption in linguistics human life if you’re struggling with language linear successions of events, like a woman is that words are arbitrary: there’s nothing or memory,” she continues. “But no one asks drinking from a bottle, then buttoning a inherent in the word pen that resembles a computational neuroscientists, ‘Why are coat, then hanging a picture. pen. Iconic words, on the other hand, do re- you coming up with a model of how memory The more complex tasks asked signers semble the things they represent. In spoken works in the brain?’ even if it’s not immedi- to describe overlapping actions that took language, iconicity is observed in onomato- ately applicable to medical research. We’re place at the same time, but started and end- poeic words like meow. Because words in sign doing the same thing with language.” Build- ed at different times—events that in Eng- languages exist in the same space as objects ing a model of how language works in the mind will in turn enable linguists to under- The study of language has shown stand how human problems like language disorders work. More ambitiously, it could that there is no need to discriminate contribute to better and more human-like translation algorithms. against people who use signed languages, Other branches of linguistics, like Ja- sanoff’s research into the mutations languag- because they, too, offer the full range es underwent hundreds of years ago, have of human expression. even less obvious applications. Why might that work matter? Jasanoff probably speaks lish would require words like while and dur- in the real world, they exhibit much more for many linguists when he replies acerbi- ing. The first-cohort signers had the most iconicity than spoken languages. ASL uses cally, “Because we’re human beings and we difficulty completing the task, successfully movement with the hands, for example, to like to know stuff.” Knowledge of language communicating the events less than half the discuss movement in the world. represents another way of understanding time; they tended to use words like stop, There’s an active, heavily debated line of human history and the human experience. wait, and next to signal divisions between research, in fact, into whether NSL began Another answer comes from Saussure, the actions. Second- and third-cohort sign- as a system of hand gestures that evolved who famously wrote, “[O]f what use is lin- ers were more likely to express overlap and into a full language, Kocab explains. Before guistics? Very few people have clear ideas on simultaneity through dual use of hands, a deaf children in Nicaragua came together to this point…there is no other field in which technique common to sign languages that form NSL, they used their own “home sign” so many absurd notions, prejudices, mirages uses each hand to describe a different event. systems: gestural systems that are used to and fictions have sprung up…the task of the The technique may take time to develop communicate with parents and caretakers. linguist is, above all else, to condemn them because of the cognitive difficulty of using The first cohort of signers developed a lan- and to dispel them as best he can.” The guage distinct from each of their home signs, study of language has shown, for example, Harvard Magazine (ISSN 0095-2427) is pub- she explains, though the words frequently that there is no need to discriminate against lished bimonthly by Harvard Magazine Inc., display iconicity. Over time, NSL words ap- people who use signed languages rather than a nonprofit corporation, 7 Ware Street, Cam- pear to have become less iconic, suggesting spoken ones, because sign languages, too, of- bridge, Mass. 02138-4037, phone 617-495-5746; that a greater degree of abstraction develops fer the full range of human expression. Much fax 617-495-0324. Periodicals postage paid at after a word has been coined. as Saussure and the early linguists couldn’t Boston, Mass., and additional mailing offices. There are important limitations to using have known the social contributions their Postmaster: Send address changes to Circula- tion Department, Harvard Magazine, 7 Ware NSL as a window into language emergence. field would make, today’s linguists can only Street, Cambridge, Mass. 02138-4037. Sub- It arose within the confines of an institution. imagine what social problems the study of scription rate $30 a year in U.S. and posses- Whatever the barriers to their language ac- language has yet to answer. sions, $55 Canada and Mexico, $75 other for- quisition, the deaf children who formed NSL eign. (Allow up to 10 weeks for first delivery.) still grew up in a contemporary society, with Marina N. Bolotnikova ’14 is an associate editor of access to modern notions like time. And, of this magazine.

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60 How Buildings Move People 62 Off the Shelf 64 Making Liberal Democracies 66 Chapter & Verse

Claudia Schreier (shown near left in rehearsal) won the Breaking Glass competition for emerging female choreogra- phers in 2014 with her ballet Harmonic (far left).

ographer’s idea made concrete. Do- ing this requires that she convey to the dancers not just how the piece should look, but how it should feel. “Harmonic,” driven by busy, rhythmically complex music by Dutch composer Douwe Eisen- ga, feels restless, almost anxious. Ballet’s Geometry, Torqued The piece asks the dancers to hold themselves in suspension—Sch- A choreographer’s career taking shape reier has likened the sensation to the tipping point at the top of a by sophia nguyen roller-coaster—and also for them to make themselves miss the music’s beat and then rush to catch n an overheated basement studio at Bar- Schreier creates neoclassical and contempo- up. The press of time, of course, is something nard College, a dancer twirls with smart- rary ballets, and has worked with profession- that ballet dancers—like few artists but many phone in hand, eyes fixed on an inches- als from companies like the New York City elite athletes—know intimately. Training I wide video of the steps she should take. Ballet and American Ballet Theatre, as well as starts in early childhood; the extent of an in- Two others windmill their arms, looking students from top academies like the School of dividual’s potential is commonly thought to like Olympic swimmers warming up pool- American Ballet and the Ailey School. In this have revealed itself by adolescence; perfor- side. They’re practicing a piece called “Har- rehearsal, she is setting her dance on mem- mance peaks not long afterward. monic,” trying to get the swings’ arc and bers of the Columbia Ballet Collaborative, for Growing up, Schreier studied classical bal- momentum just right. “It’s really unnatural!” the group’s tenth-anniversary performance in let and dreamed of being a dancer, but was one of them says. Supervising, choreogra- April. “To set a dance on” someone basically frustrated by her physical limitations: “Bal- pher Claudia Schreier ’08 instructs, “Don’t means to teach them the sequence of steps, but let is built to make you hate yourself. You’re let those get too pretty.” the phrase evokes something deeper: a chore- striving for perfection every time, and it’s un-

58 May - June 2017 Photograph at left by Lindsay Perry, and at right by Rosalie O’Connor

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 Montage attainable.” The trick is to find a sense of freedom in the art, she says, and not fight against Harvard Business School has a ven- its impossible ideals. Then she adds, with a o p e n b o o k erable tradition, anchored in its general- laugh, “It’s the love of my life, so…” management unit, of drawing on the This trajectory seems to have defined her humanities to illuminate problems in idea of choreography’s essential joy: “You en- Humanizing capitalism (see “Questions of Charac- vision how you want to dance, or how you ter,” July-August 2006, page 12). Now think dance should look, and you’re pro- Mizuho Financial Group professor of fi- vided with bodies that can achieve what Finance nance Mihir A. Desai, an expert on taxa- you can’t.” When Schreier went to college tion, aims to “humanize finance” through rather than conservatory, she found kindred literature, history, and more. His new book, The Wisdom of Finance (Houghton Mifflin spirits in the undergraduate ballet company Harcourt), is an effort to rescue the field from excessive focus on self-enrichment; and contemporary dance ensemble: unsure along the way, Desai also applies financial tools to the humanities. Recoiling from the if they wanted to, or could, pursue dance villains like Theodore Dreiser’s Financier and Gordon Gekko, he makes this discovery, professionally; unsure what they would do from the final chapter of O Pioneers! instead. “I got to work with these dancers who were—fearless, in a way that I can only …Willa Cather’s portrait of Alexandra about their crops and to the women truly appreciate now. It’s part of the Harvard Bergson is the story that truly belongs in about their poultry.…She learned a great mentality,” she continues. “You just go, go, go, every finance textbook. Alexandra is a deal.” go.” Her classmates were energetic and un- first-generation immigrant from Sweden She discovers option value in the near- jaded, and they trusted her enough to take living on the plains of Nebraska, respon- by land. Other properties hold limited physical risks and test out her ideas. sible for a family farm and three younger risk and limited return. “Down there they Through the Harvard Dance Program, brothers at the turn of the last century. have a little certainty, but up with us Schreier took classes that exposed her to She is a model financier who employs there is a big chance.”… modern dance technique and training. They many of the lessons of finance without Her brother Lou seeks certainty about stoked her interest in exploring moves out- slipping into the traps that those antihe- her prediction: “But how do you know side the ballet lexicon: heaving chests, un- roes do. that land is going to go up enough to pay dulating backs, hips turned in a different Consider Alexandra: just as her broth- the mortgages?” Alexandra knows that way. The challenges of her in-between style ers exhort her to sell their land at rock- the risk is insoluble and replies, “I know, became most apparent last spring, she says, bottom prices during a crisis, she pro- that’s all. When you drive over the coun- when she crisscrossed Manhattan each week poses…using leverage to go in the exact try you can feel it coming.” Experience to choreograph at the Ailey School and Bal- opposite direction by buying more near- and imagination allow her to confront the let Academy East. The Ailey students all had by land.…Her complex financing plan, uncertainty.… ballet training, but gravitated toward mod- which involves mortgaging the home- Finally, as Alexandra contemplates ern material, and had to be reminded to hold stead, features debt service payments what to do with her land and the legacy themselves up and their cores in. On the flip well into the future that will only work if of her success after she is gone, she con- side, with the classically tutored BAE stu- she’s right about the future of land prices. siders gifting it to her nieces and dents, “I had to kind of take them on this …How does she assess the risks? She nephews.…“The land belongs to the fu- journey through realizing that I wasn’t try- samples. She and her youngest brother, ture…; that’s the way it seems to me. ing to undo their ballet training, I was just Emil, take a trip to explore all the neigh- How many of the names on the county trying to use it in a different way.” boring counties and “talked to the men clerk’s plat will be there in fifty years? I Pieces like “Harmonic” torque ballet’s might as well try to will the sunset over usual geometry. The shapes look familiar, Willa Cather, there to my brother’s children. We come finance expert but the way the dancers get into them and go, but the land is always here. And seems less placed, and more organic. The the people who love it and understand it rhythm is deceptively loose. At the same are the people who own it—for a little time, Schreier’s work often seems gov- while.” She understands herself to be a erned by a sense of cool rationality. At steward, a link in an ongoing chain, times, the dancers look like marionettes charged with taking care of resources.… testing the hinges of their bodies, system- For Cather, there are ultimately only a atically measuring their range of motion. few stories that all of our lives end up The way she arranges them in space is resembling. Some of them, as we’ve seen, reminiscent of Muybridge photographs, are tales of hollow accumulation and in- breaking down a horse’s gallop or a bird satiable desire. Some are tales of heart taking wing. Because she never danced and hard work. It is up to us to choose professionally, Schreier told an interview- amongst them wisely. I recommend Al- er in 2015, she hasn’t felt confident creat- NEBRASKA HISTORICAL STATE SOCIETY exandra Bergson’s story. ing partnered dances. But when she was

Harvard Magazine 59

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 Montage invited by her mentor Damian Woetzel, point, she’s almost completely hidden from M.P.A. ’07, to show new work at the Vail the audience’s view, encased in his arms and International Dance Festival last sum- torso. The romantic ideal so central to many mer, a duet became the centerpiece. pas de deux—of femininity made virtuosic, and Her piece “Solitaire” begins with three put on display—takes on a disturbing cast. male dancers dexterously spinning a fe- This is one of Schreier’s most narrative works, male soloist into various positions, then and in it, exploration of form gives way, just supporting her in triumphant, acrobat- a little, to feeling. ic lifts with her limbs fully extended. This summer, Schreier will return to the Then two of the men exit; in Schreier’s Vail festival, and present two evening-length telling, “It goes from very presentational performances of her work at New York’s Joyce and very regal, and all of a sudden, ev- Theater. Only recently has she gained a stream erything goes awry.” Scored with Alfred of commissions sufficient to enable her to leave her day job in arts administration and pursue choreography full-time. (Her work has also been enabled by a program at the New York Choreographic Institute and a fellowship from NYU’s ballet center, both offering financial support and studio space.) Danc- ers, Schreier jokes, can be fatalistic, and she’s come to accept that her career will be unpre- dictable. She sees her recent successes less as growing momentum than as a run of good luck: “It makes me appreciate the moment more, because it’s not promised.” A recent knee injury—and her thirtieth birthday— triggered another realization about her craft: Schreier works with New York City Ballet “The beauty of it is, it can be forever. Dancing, soloist Unity Phelan in preparation for I would be done by now.” As a choreographer, Solitaire (left); the piece culminated in a duet between Phelan and fellow NYCB her career is just beginning. soloist Zachary Catazaro (top). After the last run-through of that day’s rehearsal, the Columbia dancers wait for Sch- Schnittke’s dissonant strings and tinkling reier’s notes. She begins by thanking them music-box piano, the woman gets maneu- for their good work; her biggest critique is vered, almost manipulated, into different that everyone is anticipating the music too shapes by her partner. He holds her in what much, so they’re a little ahead of the count. comes to seem like Svengali-like sway; at one Instead, she tells them, “Sink into it.”

something the institution wants to hide: the How Buildings Move People bones of the gallery itself. A similar sensation comes up in conver- Museum exhibition designer Justin Lee sation with Justin Lee, exhibition designer at the Harvard Art Museums. He knows by lily scherlis the new museum better than anyone, having designed the building as project architect while affiliated with the Renzo Piano he museum gallery is a space merly gave them substance. All past con- Building Workshop, which Harvard hired designed to be in permanent flux. figurations were present simultaneously, to renovate the museums. Lee earned a mas- In 2008, artist Michael Asher sat filling the room with a dense metallic lab- ter’s in architecture at Harvard’s Graduate T down with 10 years of exhibition yrinth. The original walls had been built to School of Design in 2004, so when the work- blueprints from the Santa Monica Museum disappear into the background, in order to shop took on the project, he was the natural of Art, reviewing the designs of 44 shows highlight the art they displayed; Asher’s pick for the job. (As a student, Lee lived on that had gone up in the main gallery. He then reconstructions exposed the transience of the corner of Prescott Street and Broadway, reinstalled the underlying armature of each that art, and the off-putting flexibility of mere feet away. Each morning and evening, and every temporary wall, now only metal the space it inhabited. Looking at images he strolled past the museums’ previous in- skeletons stripped of the drywall that for- of the work feels like catching a glimpse of carnation, unaware that he would effect a

60 May - June 2017 Photographs by Erin Baiano

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 Montage drastic change in the landscape of his design education.) Justin Lee To Lee, the museums’ activities fall roughly into two categories. First, there’s the internal: the business of collecting items, and then researching, storing, and preserving them. Then there’s the more visible task of making these works available for visitors to experience. Harvard Art Museums’ at- tachment to a university further compli- cates matters: the museum caters first to the needs of students, classes, and instructors, and second to those of the general public. The space was specially designed to facilitate each of these functions without inhib- iting any of the others, he explains. The building channels different groups—staff, students, and the public—along distinct routes, designed so each type of museum- goer becomes invisible to the others. You see only what you are supposed to see. He points out the elevators as an example: if you visit frequently, he says, you’ll notice that After the renovated museums complex he says, no one can tell he’s done anything one set of doors never opens. Though it looks opened its doors, Lee stayed on to design at all. When he’s visited spaces by design- like the other two, this particular lift is for staff the exhibitions. He’s responsible for trans- ers who flaunt their personal style, his ex- moving art between the research centers on lating vast curatorial dreams and concepts perience of the art got lost beneath thinking the upper floors and the compact high-densi- and narratives into concrete physical space. about the layout. This isn’t his way. If his ty storage below ground. The button visitors Exhibition designers are always playing gallery space does its job right, it enables press will never call it. On days when one of catch-up, he says. By the time he arrives visitors to get lost in the artwork, oblivious the other two public lifts is out of service, a flip on the scene, the curator has already been to the room around them, and then to find of a switch makes that special third lift avail- researching and conceptualizing an ex- their way out again. able to museum-goers, none the wiser that hibition for months, if not years. Usually Lee has worked on diverse exhibitions, they’ve been given special access to something there are far more pieces that fit well with including “Everywhen: The Eternal Present normally off-limits. Lee’s work requires him an exhibition’s theme than can actually fit in Indigenous Art from Australia,” which to deeply consider how people move through into the space. Every piece has a different ended this past September, and “Inventur,” buildings—or rather, how buildings move story to offer, a whispered message which, a show on 1940s and ’50s German art that people. His explanation is reminiscent of the together with all of the other works, cre- will open in February. On view in May is body’s circulatory and lymphatic systems: two scendos into the overarching narrative of “The Philosophy Chamber: Art and Science entirely separate circuits of sealed-off channels the show. It’s the curator’s job to decide in Harvard’s Teaching Cabinet, 1766-1820” carrying distinct substances through a single which message to send; Lee’s is to make (see “The Lost Museum,” page 42), featur- body. Good architecture makes navigating a sure each little voice is heard. ing some of the earliest items Harvard col- space fluid and unconscious. When he’s designed an exhibition well, lected. In the beginning, the museum was a single large room. Well-to-do patrons and ordinary citizens who traveled the world would return with mysterious trinkets and artifacts and add them to the College’s holdings. Rarely did these early collectors know anything about the items on display; objects were categorized merely by their date of arrival. Knowledge of the world, as embedded in these artifacts, was not yet differentiated. As the collection grew, its caretakers learned more about its contents and about how to classify and categorize them accordingly; the campus grew and divided in tandem with its museum. Vari- Justin Lee’s rendering of an exhibit on Iranian art, opening next fall

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(Bloomsbury, $27). She observes er School, traces the city-state’s ascent in well, beginning with the “garage terms of geography (at the neck of the Off the Shelf band of trees, talking back” as their Straits of Malacca), history (British gover- trunks, in distinct timbres, resisted nance, clearly separated from local com- Recent books with Harvard connections curious scientists’ hand-turned cor- merce), and (of relevance at the current ing tools, extracting the story em- moment) coexistence among a radically bedded in each bole. heterogeneous mix of resident nationali- The Crucible of Islam, by G.W. Bower- ties and ethnicities. sock ’57 (Harvard, $25). The staggeringly The Corruption Cure, by Robert I. Rot- learned professor emeritus of ancient his- berg (Princeton, $35). The former director My Father & Atticus Finch, by Joseph tory at the Institute for Advanced Study of the Kennedy School’s program on intra- Madison Beck, LL.B. ’68 (W.W. Norton, provides a brisk, succinct, and bracingly state conflict and conflict resolution con- $25.95). An Atlanta attorney mines the clear account of the chaotic conditions in ducts a searching, global review of the graft family history to reconstruct the role of his sixth-century Arabia, where Muhammad’s and rot that undercut public and business father (“a real Alabama lawyer”) in State of message took root—amid intersecting institutions—“the harsh political disease Alabama vs. Charles White, Alias, represent- empires and contending Christianity, Juda- of our era”—and points to the cleansing ing a black man who had been arrested and ism, and polytheistic beliefs.…The faith effects of civil society and, where available, charged with raping a white woman—a that spread from those origins is, as Cemil capable leadership. trial that took place when Harper Lee was Aydin, Ph.D. ’02, makes clear in The Idea 12.…A very different life appears in Fake of the Muslim World (Harvard, $29.95), The Fact of a Body: A Murder and a Smiles: A Memoir, by Tony Rogers, J.D. now followed by 1.5 billion people world- Memoir, by Alexandria Marzano-Les ’66 (TidePool Press, $26.95). An antiestab- wide who are anything but unitary in their nevich, J.D. ’05 (Flatiron, $26.99). As the lishment son’s growing up with an establish- national, political, and cultural identities. subtitle suggests, the author’s notions ment father, William P.—attorney general The sooner other humans around the about the death penalty abruptly confront and secretary of state, respectively, in the planet understand that, the better. the facts of a murder case, and, at a deeper Eisenhower and Nixon administrations (“I level, her unexcavated family history. could safely bet I’d be the only cab driver A Meeting of Land and Sea, by David whose father was secretary of state”). R. Foster, senior lecturer on biology and One Nation Undecided, by Peter H. director of the Harvard Forest (Yale, $40). Schuck, J.D. ’65, A.M. ’72 (Princeton, Adaptive Markets: Financial Evolu- A beloved, high-end island retreat/resort, $29.95). The author, now emeritus from tion at the Speed of Thought, by An- Martha’s Vineyard is also endangered: it is Yale Law School, presumably having begun drew W. Lo, Ph.D. ’84 (Princeton, $37.50). “disappearing,” Foster notes, as climate this long book before the advent of “fake The author, of MIT’s Sloan School, ob- change accelerates erosion, and being con- news,” proposes “clear thinking about five serves that “financial markets don’t follow sumed from within by rapid development. hard issues that divide us” (the subtitle). In economic laws.” Fear and emotion under- A comprehensive natural and cultural his- an era of “woefully deficient” public debate cut the rational assumptions of efficient tory, and a guide for conservation. Sumptu- and public-policy disputes that have be- markets, prompting him to explore at ously illustrated.…Meanwhile, back at the come “more protracted, more impervious length biological, evolutionary, and adap- Harvard Forest, Seattle Times environmen- to reasoned debate,” he offers fresh per- tive models—a major challenge to the tal reporter Lynda V. Mapes tells a similar spectives on poverty, immigration, cam- prevailing worldview. story, subtly, in Witness Tree: Seasons paign finance, affirmative action, and reli- of Change with a Century-Old Oak gious freedom. A welcome contribution, The Murder of Willie Lincoln, by Burt especially when the cur- Solomon ’70 (Forge Books, $25.99). A rent forms of discourse reimagining, in fiction, of the death that fall out of fashion. further darkened Abraham Lincoln’s White House during perhaps the darkest Singapore: Unlikely days of the early Civil War. Power, by John Curtis Perry, Ph.D. ’62 (Oxford, North Korea’s Hidden Revolution, by $29.95). The author, pro- Jieun Baek ’09, M.P.P. ’14 (Yale, $30). Tapping fessor of maritime history her contacts with defectors, the author ex- at Tufts University’s Fletch plores the emerging “information under- ground” that is, she says, opening perhaps The Vineyard’s south the world’s most closed society. Given re- shore, from the We- cent developments—missile tests, the mur- quobsque Cliffs to Lucy Vincent Beach: inviting— der of the leader’s relative outside the coun-

DAVID R.DAVID FOSTER and endangered try’s borders—one hopes she is right.

62 May - June 2017

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Barney, by Michael Rosenthal ments in the nation’s institutions ’58 (Arcade, $24.99). Rosenthal, and practices. an emeritus English and comparative literature scholar at Our Bodies, Our Data, by Columbia, has undertaken the Adam Tanner (Beacon, $28.95). biography of a champion of un- Not the most original title, but the popular literature: Barney Ros- author, a journalist and fellow at set, of Grove Press and Evergreen Harvard’s Institute for Quantita- Review, who fought the legal tive Social Science, probes the battles to publish Lady Chatter- market for your medical informa- ley’s Lover and Tropic of Cancer. tion. The first sentence—“Soon (Later transgressions included after you tell your doctor about an distributing I Am Curious Yellow.) intimate medical problem, data about your condition are sold The Age of Responsibility: commercially to companies that Luck, Choice, and the Wel- have nothing to do with your fare State, by Yascha Mounk, treatment…”—should be arrest- Ph.D. ’15, lecturer on governing enough.

ment (Harvard, $29.95). In an age COURTESY OF THE BOOK of workfare and other efforts to Inequality illustrated, from Tabacus: The Company Magazine of A Fraught Embrace, by Ann tie social, public assistance to the British Tabulating Machine Company (1957) Swidler ’66 and Susan Cotts personal, individual “responsibil- Watkins (Princeton, $35). What ity” or worthiness, the author thinks executive coach, urges you to junk that could be more worthy than the altruistic through the consequences for equity, what “cult,” creating space to “unlock the pow- extension of AIDS support for devastated were presumed to be common values, and er” of mindless (but strategic) wandering— Africans? Two sociologists examine the the terms on which we are all going to plan the fount of creativity and innovation. He aid-givers, their beneficiaries, and brokers to live together.…At the same time, as concludes with “The Tinker Manifesto.” who connect them, in Malawi, and point Jonathan Morduch, Ph.D. ’91, and Rachel toward “a tempered modesty,” aimed at Schneider document in The Financial Programmed Inequality, by Marie Hicks helping the Malawians pursue their own Diaries: How American Families ’00 (MIT, $40). Fans of the movie Hidden aims, rather than altruism framed as a “ro- Cope in a World of Uncertainty (Princ- Figures may be interested in this scholarly mance” intended to transform their lives. eton, $27.95), it is harder than ever to be analysis of goings on across the Atlantic, by “responsible,” even for those with the an historian of science at the Illinois Institute Boston’s Massacre, by Eric Hindraker, training to do so, given contingent and out- of Technology. Her deep dive into “how Ph.D. ’91 (Harvard, $29.95). A University sourced jobs, self-managed retirement Britain discarded women technologists and of Utah historian reexamines the storied plans, and pervasive economic volatility. lost its edge in computing,” the subtitle, is a confrontation of March 5, 1770, from its Revealing data based on current families’ sobering tale of the real consequences of context and the initial, conflicting accounts narratives of their straits. gender bias—a problem that persists in through the uses to which the events were many technical fields today. put in later eras. Read My Lips: Why Americans Are Proud to Pay Taxes, by Vanessa Wil- Inventing American Excep- liamson, Ph.D. ’15 (Princeton, $27.95). The tionalism, by Amalia D. Kessler subtitle may appear to overreach, but the ’94 (Yale, $35 paper). Much as author has looked beyond the headline the Constitution itself was acti- hatred of paying taxes to “attitudes about vated in formative early cases public spending,” giving lie “to the notion like Marbury v. Madison, which that Americans are knee-jerk opponents established judicial review, the of government.” Useful background, per- adversary legal system evolved haps, at a moment when doing in the Af- from alternative, judge-driven fordable Care Act is proving to be more procedures, as a young Stanford than a click of the heels. legal historian demonstrates—a development that reflected and Tinker Dabble Doodle Try, by Srini Pil- in turn shaped broader develop- lay, part-time assistant professor of psy- An 1856 version of the death of chiatry (Ballantine, $28). All those exhorta- Crispus Attucks during the LIBRARY BRIDGEMAN ART tions to focus? The author, who is also an Boston Massacre

Harvard Magazine 63

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 Montage ous buildings sprang up to house the new- vantage point what the building contains, Visitors float in and out; Lee’s exhibitions ly distinct departments, and the museum’s and be able to enter from both sides. The materialize and dematerialize on seasonal contents were scattered across campus. In individual rooms of the galleries should cycles. The museum itself gets renovated the exhibition, Lee is interested in break- melt into one another, facilitating a seam- and eventually will be renovated again. ing down these barriers to allow these ob- less viewing experience. Daylight is crucial: The institution is designed to accomplish jects to once again inhabit the same space, Lee doesn’t want a labyrinth of sealed, artifi- the paradoxical task of harnessing tran- centuries later. cially lit ice cubes. For him, blocked daylight sience to ensure permanence: it has to make Indeed, permeability is a major ethos provokes suffocating claustrophobia that the slice of the past with which it has been of the post-renovation museums. Passers- disorients visitors and detracts from the art. entrusted both secure and accessible. Lee by should be able to tell clearly from any The building has its own set of rhythms. makes it look effortless. Making Liberal Democracies Lessons from Europe by daniel j. solomon

n the wake of Brexit and last Novem- dom’s Tories built a robust par- ber’s U.S. election, with many citizens and ty organization that attracted scholars fretting over the fate of the liberal the votes of middle- and work- I order, a Harvard government professor is ing-class people drawn by na- offering a novel argument about how that tionalist and religious appeals. order arose in the first place. According to British conservatives spent crit- Daniel Ziblatt’s Conservative Political Parties: ical decades in the mid-nine- The Birth of Modern Democracy in Europe, the con- teenth century cultivating so- tinent’s liberal democracies in the nineteenth cial clubs, interest groups, and and twentieth centuries lived or died not as a grassroots activists that drove result of rising living standards, the agitation success at the polls. of the working and middle classes, or quirks Theirs was a difficult road, of national character, but rather due to the and some worried they might factional strength of be the country’s last conserva- Conservative Political the countries’ old- tives. Both elites and their op- Parties and the Birth of regime elites. ponents suspected mass voting Modern Democracy in Democracy men- would upend class relations Europe, by Daniel Ziblatt aced the socioeco- and lead to land reform—or, (Cambridge University nomic power and even worse, revolution. And po- Press, $99; $34.99, paper) basic moral ideas of litical competition contained a these notables. But paradox for conservatives who the elites themselves were hardly monolith- believed influence and money ic, navigating different options with differ- were theirs by right. As Zib- ent implications for democracy in different latt writes, electoral appeals, in countries. Where conservative factions de- grounding old social relations veloped parties that could win at the ballot- in a new language of consent,

box, old-regime elites tolerated the exten- “would alter the very inegali- GETTY IMAGES sion of voting rights and the expansion of tarian and hierarchical world that mid-cen- A Conservative Party poster, circa 1900, political competition. Where this proved dif- tury conservatives sought to preserve.” the year the precursor of the Labour Party first participated in a general election ficult or impossible, they thwarted politi- But the party’s central leaders achieved cal change, causing democratic transitions mastery of mass politics sufficient to risk the Germany, Ziblatt asserts, presented a re- to collapse into far-right or fascist regimes. extension of the franchise and the edging out verse image. After the country’s 1870 unifi- Ziblatt focuses the bulk of his analysis on of undemocratic institutions like the House of cation, all males had the franchise, but that two test cases, democratic evolution in Brit- Lords. And their bet paid off: Conservatives mattered little. The German Conservative ain and Germany, though he applies his con- crushed their Liberal and Labour opponents Party, the voice of the semi-authoritarian clusions to the whole of Western Europe. in the two decades that followed the 1884 kaiser, managed to hold onto power through In the first case, he argues, the United King- adoption of near-universal manhood suffrage. an elaborate scheme of electoral manipulation

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170537_HUPress.indd 1 3/28/17 12:58 PM MONTAGE and tiered voting systems that overvalued the less worried about democracy as their abil- Western Europe as a whole. voices of elites. That permitted conservatives ity to compete at the polls increased. Ziblatt also comes up short in treating to run the country until the First World War, Previous writings have traditionally fo- religious cleavages within Western Eu- even without much of a popular mandate. cused on other explanations to make sense rope. Protestant sects dominated in Britain, But their power in the Reichstag belied of democratization, such as a rise in society’s Scandinavia, and Germany, while Catholi- their organizational impotence. Lacking wealth or the formal institutional design of cism was the religion of the vast majority in much central structure or electoral machin- a country’s political system. Ziblatt’s work Portugal, Spain, Italy, and France. Religious ery, the party was a bottom-up affair, with adds to a nascent literature that explores establishments in these countries resisted local grandees getting out the vote and de- how informal structures, i.e., parties and in- the march of liberal democracy to various termining office nominations. And because terest groups, exert strong influence over degrees. But it’s important as well to recall it lacked facility in mass politics, the party democratic evolution, and is part of an ever- the Catholic Church’s unique role in stymie- refused to countenance slight measures to more critical field of political science: the ing and reversing democratic transitions in expand democracy. study of democratic quality and transition. southern Europe. Pope Pius IX forbade Cath- It also rendered the German Conserva- Still, Ziblatt’s theory has its limitations. olics to participate in the new Italian state’s tive Party vulnerable to the predations of He emphasizes that differences in national parliamentary elections and denounced lib- the outside interest groups it relied on for wealth between Britain and Germany could eralism in the 1864 document known as the votes: the country’s Agrarian League and, not explain their variable outcomes for de- Syllabus of Errors. France’s post-1870s dem- far more dangerously, anti-Semites. Gaining mocracy, because both countries were al- ocratic consolidation owes significantly to leverage for a brief spell in the 1890s, that sec- most equally prosperous. But his argument the steps leaders took to remove the Church ond constituency inserted a denunciation of appears harder to sustain when he applies from its role as a provider of education and Jewish “influence” into the party platform. that logic to Western Europe writ large. other services. More than a half-century lat- Weakness on the right outlived the Second He judges that Belgium, Holland, Britain, er, Spanish clerics actively helped Francisco Reich, overthrown in 1918 and replaced with Sweden, Norway, and Denmark succeeded Franco overthrow republican government in the Weimar Republic. And Ziblatt argues in their democratic transitions, whereas the run-up to World War II. that, as much as structural forces, this failure Italy, Germany, Portugal, and Spain failed. Despite these gaps, Ziblatt’s book reso- to build a healthy right or center-right party France, he avers, moved from the second to nates in the present context of democratic created space for the Nazis to fill. the first category in the 1880s. retreat in Europe and the United States. As He posits that much of the divergence But with the exception of Germany, an the author points outs, both “face a fero- between German and British conservatives industrial powerhouse with a high standard cious right-wing populist politics, which had to do with timing. The Tories laid the of living, the second group was considerably threatens to swallow older, self-identified groundwork for their party structure in the poorer than the first, as southern European conservative political parties.” Calling this middle of the nineteenth century, prior to the nations lagged their northern peers on most development “ominous,” Ziblatt expresses working class getting the vote and socialists indicators of economic and social health. As a hope that “the age of democracy’s birth incorporating them into their new political Ziblatt himself acknowledges, his theory may serve as a vital and cautionary tale for networks. German conservatives scrambled works best when it explains “specific and our age of democratic crisis.” to organize themselves while facing an orga- important anomalies” that a wealth-based And indeed, it’s difficult for the contem- nized Social Democratic Party in the 1880s account of democracy would not clarify. It porary reader not to see disturbing paral- and ’90s, a far more daunting prospect. To- might help us grasp disparities in democrat- lels between Donald J. Trump’s co-opting of ries also had more incentive to adapt to the ic evolution between Germany and Britain, today’s Republican Party and the far-right new age. Their leaders did not enjoy the ca- or Germany and Sweden. But the wealth ex- takeover of the turn-of-the-century German pacity to coerce votes and rig elections that planation remains critical when examining Conservative Party. But Ziblatt also reminds ultimately damned German conservatives. Ziblatt marshals an impressive set of evidence to argue his point, tallying statistical analyses, sorting through the ancient Tory C hapter & Verse political memos—even using bond rates to Correspondence on not-so-famous lost words discern the attitude of old-regime elites: volatility in markets for government securities, Orrin Tilevitz is seeking the origin of fetz sent word that this slightly misquoted in his view, reflects elites’ level of confidence “That’s right, Private Aberthistle, put my phrase comes from the poem “Running,” in the survival of a regime. As the British stump right over there, and give me a by Richard Wilbur, A.M. ’47, JF ’50. It ap- working classes began to demand greater hand up.” He found the quotation in a pears in part III, “Dodwells Road (Cum- rights in the 1830s, for example, the markets letter from his late father-in-law, “a well- mington, Massachusetts).” appeared far stormier than usual as Parlia- educated officer in Europe during World ment enacted the First Reform Act expand- War II.” Send inquiries and answers to “Chapter ing suffrage. A few decades later, the securi- and Verse,” Harvard Magazine, 7 Ware ties exchange hardly registered the Second “the thing which man will not sur- Street, Cambridge 02138, or via email to and Third Reform Acts—which Ziblatt as- render” (January-February). Jeanne Hei [email protected]. serts bears out his thesis that the elites grew

66 May - June 2017

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Harvard Magazine 67

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 ALUMNI Guiteau manhandles Sara Jane Moore, should he grope her left or right side? Bundy considers the audience’s perspective. “It should be her right, for storytelling.” The next day—for storytelling—they head to a local gun range, so the actors can learn how it really feels to shoot.

Bundy’s pedigree—familial and professional—feels like the natural outgrowth of Harvard and Yale’s entwined institutional histories. In 1925, English professor George Pierce Baker left Harvard, taking his play- writing course with him, to found the Yale School of Drama; in 1980, YSD dean and Yale Rep founding director Robert Brustein reversed the trip, decamping for Cambridge to start the American Repertory The- ater. Bundy’s grandfather and pater- James Bundy, on the Assassins set nal uncles were all Yalies, as was his father, McGeorge Bundy, JF ’48, LL.D. ’61, who was the dean of the Faculty ALUMNI of Arts and Sciences at Harvard before serving in the Kennedy administration. James was a senior at Groton, applying to con- servatories and intending to study acting, Dual Dean when “My parents arranged for me to speak to Robert Brustein,” he recalls, with a faintly The man behind the curtain of Yale theater embarrassed laugh. “He made a very cogent case. He said all of the interesting artists he by sophia nguyen knew had great educations, and that there was plenty of time to train after I went to college.” Bundy matriculated at Harvard, “a hile John Wilkes Booth cutting cups from the budget next year.” At very desultory English major” who got deep looks on with something the exaggerated outcry, he continues, “It’s a into the College’s drama scene, acting under like fatherly pride, Lee big sustainability measure. We’re going to the now acclaimed director Peter Sellars ’80 Harvey Oswald kneels in save $2,000. And a tree!” and staging Brendan Behan’s The Hostage and Wthe Texas Book Depository and sights the Today is mostly devoted to combat: teach- Tom Stoppard’s Albert’s Bridge. scope of a rifle, right at James Bundy ’81, ar- ing the actors how to handle their prop weap- After graduation, he trained as an actor tistic director of the Yale Repertory The- ons in a way that looks realistic, and how to at the London Academy of Music and Dra- atre and dean of the Yale School of Drama scrap and scuffle in a way that is safe. The fight matic Arts, and for five years took roles in (YSD). Bundy’s default expression—genial, choreographer goes through a few options for various productions in California and Or- watchful—doesn’t change. He’s directing a blocking the scene. Oswald could throw the egon. But he began to sense his limits as a rehearsal of Assassins, the spring production rifle back to Booth like this, or he could hand performer: “I knew I was a skilled actor and of the Yale Rep’s fiftieth anniversary season. it back like that, the way Oswald’s U.S. Ma- I could do the work, but I also knew I was a The musical, by Stephen Sondheim and John rine training would have taught him—“it all balding 24-year-old—well, actually, by that Weidman, brings nine attempted and suc- depends on what the boss wants.” time I was 29, and even balder.” cessful killers of U.S. presidents together in Mostly, the boss listens—legs crossed, In 1989, toward the end of his acting ca- a hallucinatory revue. The gun’s a period- chin in hand—and during the six hours of reer, Bundy was playing Feste in the Oregon appropriate prop; the “scope,” though, is rehearsals on this late February afternoon, Shakespeare Festival’s (OSF) Twelfth Night made from a disposable paper cup wound he gives nary a “no.” What if, in this num- when his friends Bill Rauch ’84 and Alison in masking tape. ber, the narrator gets lifted into the air by Carey ’82 came to town with their travel- “What’ll we do without these?” grins the the throat? “Try it!” What if, in that song, ing ensemble, the Cornerstone Theater actor playing Oswald. the murderer gets blocked from the micro- Company. Taking the chance to transition “He’s teasing me,” explains Bundy. “We’re phone? “Sure, let’s try it.” When Charles to arts leadership, he joined the board and

68 May - June 2017 Photographs by Jim Harrison, unless otherwise noted

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 ALUMNI became managing director. “It was a really vital two years,” says Rauch, during which Bun- dy opened the group’s office in New York City and produced its 10,000-mile national tour. But he found himself in a de- pressive spiral. After he and his wife, actress and singer Anne Tofflemire, had their first child, “I discovered being in the office was no good for me,” he told the audience at a Yale event celebrating the Rep’s anniversary

last September. “And it became CAROL ROSEGG (3) clear to me—in a therapeutic context, frank- In these scenes from Assassins, American ly—that I wasn’t going to be a good parent if I history is a nightmare from which nobody can awake. “It is definitely not the couldn’t be in an artistic environment.” They feel-good musical of the year,” James moved to New Haven so Bundy could pur- Bundy allows, “but the music itself is sue his master of fine arts in directing. Then transcendent.” and now, it was unusual for students to have young families. “The prerequisite for being a tite to wrangle theater professionals and graduate student at Yale with children is hav- academics and donors, run a school, teach ing a spouse who is a saint,” he says. “My wife students, and direct shows. What’s more, did the lion and a half’s share of the childcare.” Yale was going through a difficult period: as After earning his degree in 1995, Bundy with many drama schools at the time, enroll- worked at The Acting Company in New ment was down; so was theater attendance. York, and then as the artistic director of the It did take time to adjust to the insti- Great Lakes Theater Festival in Cleveland, tution’s split focus, Bundy acknowledges. directors,” says Sterling Professor of theater where he lowered debt, raised attendance, While discussing technical notes for a Yale and English Joseph Roach, who headed the and started a new educational program. In Rep show, he’d suddenly realize that three- search committee, “but some of the incum- 2001, six years after he graduated from Yale, quarters of the room was thinking about the bents have favored one role or another.” Bun- Bundy—noticeably young, and still a rela- homework that awaited them after rehearsal, dy somehow made it all seem like one job. tive unknown in the theater world—suc- and the classes they had to wake up for the And while his predecessors (like U.S. presi- ceeded his mentor Stan Wojewodski Jr. as next morning. “I would actually argue that if dents) typically have served two terms, he dean and artistic director. The search had you’re going to run the best school in the na- was named to his fourth last fall. been public and difficult, with rumors -fly tion, that school has to be in charge of a pro- Colleagues describe Bundy as hyper-ar- ing anytime a big name in regional theater fessional theater,” he says. “If you were going ticulate and humble, easy to work with. But came to New Haven for lunch. Its dual re- to run the absolute best professional theater his most useful gift, both as an administrator sponsibilities made the position particularly in the nation, I think you probably wouldn’t and as an artist, might be his eye for talent. tough to fill: “I know people who wouldn’t commit to running it with a school.” “He’s got a real sense of pageantry, including touch that job,” says Chris Arnott, longtime Both institutions have grown during his getting important actors and giving them theater critic at the New Haven Register and tenure. More students receive financial aid; challenges,” says Arnott, the theater critic. Hartford Courant. Few people had the appe- at the theater, compensation doubled. So did “He takes people seriously when they talk the amount spent on produc- idly about a project they’d like to do.” “He tions, reports Rep managing was really masterful with dealing with peo- director and YSD deputy dean ple,” James Bland, an actor in Bundy’s M.F.A. Victoria Nolan: “The scale of thesis show, told the Yale Daily News in 2001. our work grew exponentially, “I hesitate to use the word ‘politician,’ but in a good way.” The school has he is a great politician. James gets actors to also gained a new department do what he wants with very little direction. for projection design, and Bun- At Yale, he got us to do what he wanted in dy drew the largest gift in YSD three words or less almost every time.” history, $18 million, to finance Rauch, who has collaborated with Bundy the Binger Center for New throughout their respective tenures at Yale Theater, which commissions and OSF, calls him “one of the kindest peo- and develops plays. “We’ve had ple in the American theater. He’s such a gen- great deans and great artistic tle communicator. He’s so kind and so clear

Harvard Magazine 69

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 ALUMNI about what he wants and what he needs.” Be- always designed to be topical. But the pres- but at Yale. As August Wilson was for for- yond that, Bundy can also identify the same ent has its own funny way of catching up. mer YSD dean and director Lloyd Richards thing in others. Back in 1999, when Rauch was The fall opener was the world premiere of (himself described by The New York Times as still creating community theater with ama- Scenes from Court Life, in which playwright “one of the most influential figures in mod- teur casts over at Cornerstone, Bundy invit- Sarah Ruhl remixed Stuart-era England with ern American theater”), Ruhl—piquantly ro- ed him to Cleveland to stage any play Rauch the United States under the Bush family; the mantic, slyly witty—may become the writer wanted, with an all-professional cast. “And work was conceived when the electoral field most associated with Bundy’s tenure. He re- I burst into tears,” recalls Rauch. “He knew seemed primed for a duel between their dy- members reading her play Eurydice, start-to- what I needed before I knew.” nasty and the Clintons. When Donald Trump finish, while standing in his kitchen: “It was won the Republican nomination, Bundy says, pretty undignified, because by the end of it, Straddling as it did both sides of the “in a way, it turned into sort of an elegy for I was sobbing onto my butcher block!” 2016 election, the Rep’s current season was decency.” The play was Ruhl’s fourth to de-

Overseer and Partner, Sidley Austin LLP. Director Candidates Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar ’93, San Francisco. Justice, Supreme Court of This spring, alumni can vote for five new California. Harvard Overseers and six new elected Darienne B. Driver, Ed.M. ’06, Ed.D. Martha Nathaniel Q. Sangu Julius directors of the Harvard Alumni Associa- ’14, Milwaukee. Superintendent, Mil- Abbruzzese Belcher Delle tion (HAA). waukee public schools. Genieser Ballots, mailed out by April 1, must be Carla Harris ’84, M.B.A. ’87, New received (at the address indicated) by York City. Vice chair of wealth manage- noon, Eastern Standard Time, on May 16 ment and managing director, Morgan to be counted. Election results will be an- Stanley. nounced at the HAA’s annual meeting on Lane MacDonald ’88, Boston. Presi- May 25, on the afternoon of Commence- dent, FMR Diversified Investments. ment day. All holders of Harvard degrees, Elizabeth D. Samet ’91, West Point, Drew Engles Sachin H. Jain Elena Hahn except Corporation members and officers New York. Professor of English, U.S. Mil- Kiam of instruction and government, are en- itary Academy. titled to vote for Overseer candidates. The Craig R. Stapleton ’67, M.B.A. ’70, election for HAA directors is open to all Greenwich, Connecticut. Senior adviser, Harvard degree-holders. Stone Point Capital. Candidates for Overseer may also be Leslie P. Tolbert ’73, Ph.D. ’78, Tuc- nominated by petition if they receive a pre- son. Regents’ professor, department of scribed number of signatures. (The dead- neuroscience, University of Arizona. line for all petitions was February 1.) Ronald P. Paola A. Leslie Miller For Overseer (six-year term): For elected director (three-year term): Mitchell Peacock Saiontz Paul L. Choi ’86, J.D. ’89, Chicago. Martha Abbruzzese Genieser ’91, Friedrich London. Director of philanthropy, Alan Howard Family lar surgeon, Akron Children’s Hospital. Office. Sachin H. Jain ’02, M.D. ’06, M.B.A. Nathaniel Q. Belcher, ’07, Cerritos, California. President and M.Arch. ’92, University Park, CEO, CareMore Health System. Pennsylvania. Professor of ar- Elena Hahn Kiam ’85, New York City. chitecture, Stuckeman School Co-owner and creative director, K-FIVE of Architecture and Land- LLC d/b/a lia sophia; co-owner and non- Paul L. Choi Mariano- Darienne B. Carla Harris scape Architecture, Pennsyl- executive marketing director, Cirrus Florentino Driver Cuéllar vania State University. Healthcare Products. Sangu Julius Delle ’10, Ronald P. Mitchell ’92, M.B.A. ’97, J.D.-M.B.A. ’17, Accra, New York City. CEO, Virgil Inc. Ghana. Chairman and CEO, Paola A. Peacock Friedrich, S.M. ’06, Golden Palm Investments Ed.L.D. ’14, Marblehead, Massachusetts. Corporation; founder and Human capital management consultant, president, cleanacwa. AchieveMission. Drew Engles ’87, Akron, Leslie Miller Saiontz ’81, Miami. Lane Elizabeth D. Craig R. Leslie P. Ohio. Hand and microvascu- Founder and president, Achieve Miami. MacDonald Samet Stapleton Tolbert

70 May - June 2017 www.alumni.harvard.edu

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 ALUMNI Political upheaval may have given Ruhl’s sa- HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO US! tiric portrait of the ruling class a sepia-toned pathos, but Assassins repels nostalgia; its pack TRADITIONAL HARVARD CHAIR of lone wolves howl their underdog delusions, HONOR THE COOP’S 135 YEAR HERITAGE and refuse to be put down by history. Since its 1990 premiere, its funhouse reflection of the The perfect addition to your American dream has only grown clearer, and office, study or dorm room. more disturbing. “I believed at the time when Available in all school or we were programming it that it would be rel- house seals. evant by the time we produced it,” says Bun- dy. “Either because President Hillary Clin- Regular Price: $660.00 ton would be enduring the worst backlash in Member Price: $550.00 the history of backlash, from disenfranchised Seat Cushion: white men whose sense of entitlement led to Regular Price: $55.00 a kind of enraged hostility. Or that we would Member Price: $49.50 actually be governed by the ethos of enraged, disenfranchised white men.” Visit thecoop.com Somewhere on the slippery spectrum be- to order tween Everyman and bogeyman, the actors Members receive an have to trigger the spine-chill of recognition additional 10% off in the audience—this is what goes bump in the national night—and Bundy has to help shape their performances. In late February, the cast was reviewing the number “How I Saved Roosevelt,” in which FDR’s would-be murderer Giuseppe Zangara gets strapped to an electric chair, singing a deranged tarantella. *Offer valid through 6/30/2017. Shipping and Handling is $70.00 within the Continental USA. The song ended, and Bundy quietly conferred Personalization with brass plate at additional cost. with the actor playing Zangara. Afterward the performance was perfectly modulated: less bug-eyed, his grin’s wattage turned down. IT’S NOT TOO LATE Attention Juniors The other challenge comes with the genre. TO BECOME Enroll Now... “Musicals are simply more densely packed,” A DOCTOR Bundy explains. Compared to straight plays, • Intensive, full-time preparation for medical they require a director to work with collabo- school in one year • Early acceptance programs at select medical rators—the choreographer and musical di- schools—more than any other postbac program rector—with far greater creative input. “It’s • Supportive, individual academic and unbelievably fun and gratifying to be able to premedical advising turn to more people and say, ‘What do you VISIT US AT WWW.BRYNMAWR.EDU/POSTBAC think about that?’” he says. “It’s simultane- [email protected] ously a greater level of coordination, but the 610-526-7350 tradeoff is, you have that many more terrific College Application Boot Camp® BRYN MAWR COLLEGE minds at work.” 4-day Intensive Camp Assassins is Bundy’s first musical. Then August 2017 in Boston, MA again—as with his dual job at Yale—what Complete your college applications with other people might see as a daunting array leading admission pros: of competing priorities, he sees as getting to DR. MICHELE HERNANDEZ have it all. Asked if he wants to direct more Former Assistant Director of Admissions musicals in the future, Bundy blurts, “Oh TURN TO PAGE 74 at Dartmouth; Author of A is for Admission God! Oh, yes! I can’t wait until I direct the MIMI DOE next one. I’m having such a good time.” He TO VIEW OUR Parenting guru & author of Busy but Balanced hasn’t dared to allow himself a wish list of SPECIAL SECTION – Last 13 years sold out – possible shows just yet. “I guess maybe I— I’m conflicted about getting to do so many things that I like to do.” A few weeks into SPOTLIGHT ON the rehearsal process, he reports, “I’m hav- NEW ENGLAND ing a hard time managing the level of fun I’m ApplicationBootCamp2017.com having, because it’s so pleasurable.” 781.530.7088 [email protected]

Harvard Magazine 71

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

Spring Sports, Spider Man

where. I apologized endlessly but couldn’t flict between East and West, Communism quite suppress my grin: Wow—greater than and Democracy, so clearly outlined as on the a hole in one, any day!” Charles River. A nightmare is haunting today’s single sculler: the vision of a motor- boat filled with little boys. The little boys are armed with rocks, and they pursue him “Your wooden arm you hold outstretched Less whimsically, David Halberstam relentlessly until he is capsized into the nu- to shake with passers-by.” ’55 wrote “Death of a Sculler, in Three Acts” clear waters of the Charles, Cambridge’s first (originally titled “Obit on Sculling”) for the casualty from radioactivity.” Harvard Alumni Bulletin, the then-incarnation pring, and young men’s thoughts of this magazine, in the spring of his senior turn to…exercise. The New Yorker’s ev- year. (The essay appears in Everything They Had, er-young Roger Angell ’42, acclaimed a 2008 anthology of his sports writing.) He Certain kinds of collecting also lend them- for his baseball writing, summoned catalogued the lethal threats to rowers along selves to clement weather. A Memorial Min- Sanother sport, from his undergraduate days, the Charles: the traditional stone age (boys ute read to the Faculty of Arts and Sciences on in a 2011 letter included in his most recent col- throwing rocks, or dropping February 7, commemorating the late Herbert lection, This Old Man (2015): bigger ones into boats, from Walter Levi (a refugee from Nazi Germany “I don’t mind passing the bridges); the machine age who tried to enlist in the U.S. Army, was re- along the golf shot of my (wakes from passing pow- jected as an enemy alien, and later came to life. This came while I was er boats); and, dismay- Harvard as a curator and ultimately became still at Harvard, and was ingly, the new nuclear age Agassiz professor of zoology), observes that playing with another hack- (the discovery of abnor- he “documented spiders incessantly until his er pal of mine one week- mally elevated radioactiv- death. He published more than 200 scientific end at a suburban course ity in Cambridge’s water). papers and described 1,254 new spider spe- in Wayland, Mass. There Taking stock, Halberstam cies, 1,204 of which are still considered val- was a party of three just wrote of Cold War threats id….” He understandably earned “immense” ahead of us on the course, that, read today, anticipate re- respect in the “arachnological community,” and I waited for them to cently renewed international with “more than 40 species, and two genera, get a decent distance tensions and anxieties: named after him.” ahead on some hole be- “In the spring of 1953 and Spring thoughts also turn to sex, and we fore I stepped up and 1954 people would turn to learn that “Herb’s holistic view of spiders led somehow hit the longest me and say: him to produce detailed species descriptions, drive of my life, which be- ‘Look, if sculling’s that beautifully illustrated and incorporating gan to fade ominously in dangerous, if people are al- multiple views of their genitalia, a practice their direction.…The ball ways throwing at you and try- that has become standard in descriptions hit a couple of yards being to sink you, why not quit? not only of spiders but also of many other hind them and then I saw one Why do you do it?’ arthropods.” Mind you, in the service of sci- of them begin to writhe and jump ‘Escape,’ I would answer. ‘No prob- ence: the spider man’s “superb drawing skills about oddly. He didn’t go down, but when I’d lem of coexistence on the river. No Iron Cur- enabled the interpretation of highly complex gotten to within his cursing distance we dis- tain, only the Larz Anderson Bridge….’ structures such as the spiders’ copulatory covered that the ball had come down inside his That was in the old days. Now atomic bulb—one of the main characteristics for collar and had ended up down his back some- fission is everywhere. Nowhere is the con- identifying species of spiders.” vprimus vi

72 May - June 2017 Illustration by Michael Witte

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 TREASURE Anthropology Anew The Peabody’s prized collections

hen the Peabody Museum is keynoted by a dog sledge used in and meanings in their makers’ of Archaeology & Ethnol- Greenland, from Admiral Robert Peary’s lives. The Copán section in- ogy unveils “All the World Arctic expeditions: a potent symbol of corporates information on Is Here” on April 22, it cele- exploration. Surrounding areas high- 3-D technology now being Wbrates both the institution’s sesquicentennial light Putnam’s directorship, teach- employed to reconstruct a and (part of the exhibition’s subtitle) “the in- ing, and research (like the mica stairway and its corroded vention of American anthropology.” Hopewell face excavated from hieroglyphs. In video re- Castle McLaughlin, curator of Ohio’s Turner Mound Group, cordings in the physical North American ethnography and left); some of the ceramic anthropology display, a principal in creating the exhi- pots collected in the scholars including bition, explains that under 1880s during expe- Henry Ford II pro- Frederic W. Putnam, ditions privately fessor of human the museum’s direc- underwritten by evolution David tor from 1875 to 1909, Mary Hemenway Pilbeam address it became respectable to (here, a Hopi wa- subjects like the extend the study of man ter pitcher shaped changing concep- from Greece and Rome, the like a female spirit be- tion of “race.” ancient pinnacles of West- ing); and items gathered by One archetype of race ern civ, to the contemporary Alice Fletcher, whom Putnam mentored introduces the rear part of the exhibition, species. That prompted orga- and trained: an outstanding ethnogra- drawn from the World’s Columbian Expo- nizing donated treasures from the Chi- pher active among Native American sition, the great “all the world is here” Chicago na trade, or vacuuming up Native Ameri- peoples (see Vita, March-April 1980, page 35). fair of 1893, where Putnam organized the ex- can ceremonial wares—the precursors to and McLaughlin notes that visitors will per- hibits introducing fairgoers to anthropology. fledgling work of scientific anthropology. It ceive anthropology’s changing methods—and (The Javanese village shown then is echoed in also became academically sound to treat the values. Where once collections assessed items the shadow puppet, left.) Peabody curators Mesoamerican past, at sites like the Maya in physical terms (typologies of Hopi ceram- Diana Lauren and Ilisa Barbash have opened capital at Copán, with the same respect ac- ics by size and decoration, for this section with the 1893 figures of the “aver- corded Athens—a simultaneous broaden- example), contemporary age” male and female: archetypes derived from ing of archaeology. This era coincided with research emphasizes Harvard and Radcliffe students measured at Harvard president Charles W. Eliot’s objects’ uses Hemenway Gymnasium. 40-year transformation of a classi- Recreating Victorian anthropology in cally oriented New England college a museum dating in part to that era, rein- into an ambitious research univer- terpreted for twenty-first-century viewers, sity, curious about everything. provides a kaleidoscopic overview of human Not quite everything can be cultures, anthropology’s origins, and, displayed on the splendidly refur- the evolution, in real time, of both. bished fourth floor: the Peabody In sensitively interpreting what holds 2.75 million objects, plus more McLaughlin justly calls these than 500,000 historic images. But the “incredible” artifacts, one also more than 600 items exhibited are a re- senses gains in understanding warding plenitude. the rich diversity of the human

The front two-thirds of “All the World” enterprise. vjohn s. rosenberg IMAGES COURTESY OF THE PEABODY MUSEUM OF ARCHAEOLOGY & ETHNOLOGY/ © PRESIDENT AND FELLOWS OF HARVARD COLLEGE

80 May - June 2017

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

Harvard Alumni Association (HAA) Harvard Museums of Science & Culture (HMSC) Harvard Business School (HBS) PHOTO: DAVID RUSH

ULTIMATE TANZANIA SAFARI: ACROSS PATAGONIA PUEBLA & OAXACA Exploring the Cradle of Humankind November 5–17, 2017 November 6–12, 2017 November 4–18, 2017 Study leader: Study leaders: Study leader: James Costa Leeanne & Alfonso Alonso Benedict Gross

FOR MORE INFORMATION VISIT: FOR MORE INFORMATION VISIT: FOR MORE INFORMATION VISIT: HMSC.HARVARD.EDU/TRAVEL ALUMNI.HARVARD.EDU/TRAVEL/TRIPS/HBS ALUMNI.HARVARD.EDU/TRAVEL

LEARN For more information, please call 800-422-1636 or 617-496-0806, MORE email [email protected], or visit ALUMNI.HARVARD.EDU/TRAVEL

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