Untangling Schizophrenia the Genetics of Mental Illness

Poetic Voices • Commencement • Liberal-Arts MakeoverMakeover

JULY-AUGUST 2017 • $4.95

Untangling Schizophrenia The genetics of mental illness

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 S:7” S:9.25”

MERCK INVENTS TO KEEP JOY ALIVE So today, on Claudia’s wedding day, her grandfather Eduardo is there for the milestone event. Creating another special memory for the both of them. For more than a century, Merck has been inventing medicines and vaccines for many of the world’s most challenging diseases. Today, we’re exploring entirely new approaches in our search to prevent Alzheimer’s. So people remain healthy and present, able to share every precious moment with the ones they love. Learn more at Merck.com/InventingForLife Keep Joy Alive Copyright ©2017 Merck Sharp & Dohme Corp., a subsidiary of Merck & Co., Inc., Kenilworth, NJ USA. All Rights Reserved. CORP-1210605-0005 06/17

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

170701_Merck.indd 1 5/17/17 3:31 PM JULY-AUGUST 2017, VOLUME 119, NUMBER 6

FEATURES 32 Poetry, Voiced | by Sophia Nguyen Preserving the treasures of the Woodberry Poetry Room

38 Vita: Blanche Ames | by Laura J. Snyder Brief life of an intrepid botanical illustrator: 1878-1969 p. 32 40 Probing Psychoses | by Courtney Humphries Genetic and genomic clues to understanding schizophrenia p. 15 47 An Educated Core | by John S. Rosenberg Three bold attempts to redesign the liberal arts

JOHN HARVARD’S JOURNAL 14 Abdi, Biden…Zuckerberg: the 366th Commencement, animated, academic—and political. Plus graduate-student unionization, photography professor, the 1932 eclipse, faculty diversity, top teachers, maths, more on single-gender p. 14 social clubs, new House and Harvard Law leaders, online learning, the College meme culture, and a wrap-up of spring sports p. 76 DEPARTMENTS 2 Cambridge 02138 | Letters from our readers—and how Washington misunderstands research 3 The View from Mass Hall 8 Right Now | The rise of veganism, U.S. companies versus U.S. jobs, big names in the voting booth 56 Montage | Creating Master of None, a Bengali trilogy, 1760s extracurriculars,

THE BOSTON GLOBE GETTY VIA IMAGES; the elite’s “class cluelessness,” children’s gardens, and more 63 Alumni | A better pipeline to college, Graduate School honorees, Harvard Medalists, senior alumni, election winners, and more p. 8 68 The College Pump | Overhauling “Fair Harvard,” a Soviet schooling, quiet campus corners On the cover: Imaging of human neurons implicates the gene C4 (in green) in excess pruning 76 Treasure | Jun ceramics—and their secrets—on display of synapses, a process linked to schizophrenia. Image courtesy of Heather de Rivera/Steven 69 Crimson Classifieds McCarroll Laboratory CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: STU ROSNER; KEITH BEDFORD/ JUNGYEON ROH; COURTESY OF HARVARD ART MUSEUMS; ©PRESIDENT AND FELLOWS OF HARVARD COLLEGE www.harvardmagazine.com

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

LETTERS

editor: John S. Rosenberg senior editor: Jean Martin Cambridge  managing editor: Jonathan S. Shaw art director: Jennifer Carling Academic class gaps, “Fair Harvard,” final clubs associate editors: Marina Bolotnikova, Sophia Nguyen staff writer/editor: Lydialyle Gibson digital media manager: Oset Babür assistant editor: Nell Porter Brown LINGUISTIC SIGNS wide, she was shouting berta greenwald ledecky I read “A Language Out of with joy. When they pulled undergraduate fellows Nothing” (by Marina Bolot- in tight, she was whispering Matthew Browne, Lily Scherlis nikova, May-June, page 50) furtively. I didn’t hear what with great interest. I was happened as the story un- daniel steiner undergraduate thrilled to see that ASL has folded, I lived through it. editorial intern: Alisha Ukani returned to Harvard, and The fact that ASL is en- contributing editors that the University embraces tirely visual certainly distin- John T. Bethell, Lincoln Caplan, John what has always been obvi- guishes it from spoken lan- de Cuevas, Dick Friedman, Adam ous to me: ASL is a language. guages, but does not make it Goodheart, Elizabeth Gudrais, Jim That idea was once treated any less a language. ASL’s dif- Harrison, Courtney Humphries, with hostility. While an ferences should be studied, Christopher S. Johnson, Adam Kirsch, undergraduate student at the University not denigrated. I’m glad Professor Davidson, Colleen Lannon, Spencer Lenfield, Stu of Maryland in the late 1970s, I debated my with Harvard’s support, has chosen to do so. Rosner, Deborah Smullyan, Mark Steele linguistics professor over the validity of Andy Shipley, J.D. ’84 her pronouncement that hearing children Vienna, Va. harvard magazine inc. of Deaf parents “suffer from retarded lan- president: Margaret H. Marshall, Ed.M. guage development.” As none of the CODAs I read with interest about the emergence ’69. directors: Peter K. Bol, Jonathan (Children of Deaf Adults) I knew (including of Nicaraguan Sign Language, but I question L.S. Byrnes, D.B.A. ’80, Scott V. Edwards, my sister, my three cousins, and numerous one passage: “[R]esearchers from linguistics Thomas F. Kelly, Ph.D. ’73, Ann Marie friends) suffered from “retarded language and other felds have come to doubt that a Lipinski, NF ’90, Lars Peter Knoth development,” I pressed for the empirical language instinct even exists, pointing out, Madsen, John P. Reardon Jr. ’60, evidence in support of her statement. She for example, that it takes children years to Bryan E. Simmons ’83 admitted she had none; she had deduced it successfully acquire a language, and they must be so because, in her mind, ASL was pick up the rules piecemeal, not system- Board of Incorporators not an actual language. To some, her state- atically.” That ran counter to what I wrote This magazine, at ﬁrst called the Harvard Bulletin, was ment could be viewed as one born of sloppy about [then Lindsley professor of psychol- founded in 1898. Its Board of Incorporators was char- scholarship. To me, it reflected the same un- ogy] Roger Brown for the magazine in the tered in 1924 and remains active in the magazine’s governance. The membership is as follows: Stephen J. fortunate and uninformed bias against and September-October 1990 issue. Bailey, AMP ’94; Jeffrey S. Behrens ’89, William I. Ben- condescension toward Deaf people I had Brown was the frst to study in a system- nett ’62, M.D. ’69; John T. Bethell ’54; Peter K. Bol; Fox witnessed my entire life. atic way how children learn language. He Butterﬁeld ’61, A.M. ’64; Sewell Chan ’98; Jonathan S. I have tried on occasion to explain the and a group of his graduate students record- Cohn ’91; Philip M. Cronin ’53, J.D. ’56; John de Cuevas ’52; James F. Dwinell III ’62; Anne Fadiman ’74; Benja- beauty of ASL to those who see only hands ed the speech of three children ranging in min M. Friedman ’66, Ph.D. ’71; Robert H. Giles, NF waving aimlessly in midair, but it is as diffi- age from 18 to 27 months, one of them for 11 ’66; Richard H. Gilman, M.B.A. ’83; Owen Gingerich, cult as explaining to my mother what Celine months, the other two for several years. The Ph.D. ’62; Adam K. Goodheart ’92; Philip C. Haughey ’57; Brian R. Hecht ’92; Sarah Blaffer Hrdy ’68, Ph.D. Dion sounds like. ASL conveys the sublime three children, from different social and eco- ’75; Ellen Hume ’68; Alex S. Jones, NF ’82; Bill Kovach, in ways the written and spoken word can- nomic backgrounds, exhibited a similarity in NF ’89; Florence Ladd, BI ’72; Jennifer 8 Lee ’99; Ran- not. My mother could not read aloud to me, the way they acquired language that Brown dolph C. Lindel ’66; Ann Marie Lipinski, NF ’90; Scott but her hands, her facial expressions and likened to the biological development of an 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 her body movements wove a moving tap- embryo. In a book titled A First Language he McClintick ’62; Winthrop L. McCormack ’67; M. Lee estry that none of my less fortunate child- described and explained what the recordings Pelton, Ph.D. ’84; John P. Reardon Jr. ’60; Harriet Ritvo hood friends (those with hearing parents) revealed. I quote from the article: ’68, Ph.D. ’75; Henry Rosovsky, JF ’57, Ph.D. ’59, LL.D. could understand. When her hands flung He identifed fourteen morphemes ’98; Barbara Rudolph ’77; Robert N. Shapiro ’72, J.D. ’78; Theda Skocpol, Ph.D. ’75; Peter A. Spiers ’76; Scott H. Stossel ’91; Sherry Turkle ’69, Ph.D. ’76; Robert H. Weiss ’54; Jan Ziolkowski. 2 July - August 2017

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

The March for Science

arly on a chilly Saturday morning in April, I gathered in Cambridge with a hearty band of Harvard scientists and supporters of science to help launch the March for Science, an international demonstration of support for scientifc Ediscovery and its extraordinary potential to better our lives. Col- leagues in Longwood were assembling at the same time, and our students, faculty, and staff joined more than a million people at hundreds of sites around the world—some 70,000 of them on Bos- ton Common—to celebrate research that provides a foundation for our health, our prosperity, and our possibilities. The event was, for me, a very powerful reminder of the scope and scale of work that happens every day across our campus, of efforts that drive economic growth, improve human lives, and protect the planet. Our future depends upon the future of science, and evidence and fact-based reasoning must continue to provide the basis for policies that guide our society and our world. These ends are not achievable without a strong partnership between America’s research universities and its federal government, an alliance that has propelled discovery, growth, and prosperity in our country since it was established just after the end of the Second World War. I have devoted a signifcant amount of time this past semester to making hood epilepsy; and soft exosuits are increasing human endurance the case for continued federal commitment to support for basic and and strength—and making rehabilitation possible for children and applied research with members of Congress from across the country, adults limited by devastating movement disorders. Award-winning many of them alumni of the University. Members on both sides of work to understand the DNA-damage response, a mechanism that the aisle in the House and the Senate have been excellent partners informs a cell of DNA damage, triggers repairs, and prevents muta- in advancing the argument that science teaching and research sup- tions, offers a promising path forward for cancer prevention, and plies us with the tools to build a better world, and their advocacy implantable vaccines designed to reprogram immune cells may ad- has helped secure important sources of funding through this fscal vance cancer treatment. Stem cell science, once tenuous, fraught, year. But signifcant challenges lie in the budgetary battles ahead. and uncertain, is on the edge of helping humanity conquer blood And I have shared with them the importance of pursuing ideas not diseases with the creation of immune-matched blood cells—and just to reach particular ends, but also to support the power of cu- may one day lead to interventions that will slow the effects of aging. riosity, to develop deeper understanding—and ultimately greater Science at Harvard and elsewhere encourages progress and in- outcomes—than anyone could have imagined. vites innovation; research universities are essential to these pur- Research undertaken at Harvard and funded by the Defense Ad- poses. If we care about the well-being of our society and about the vanced Research Projects Agency, the National Institutes of Health, future of life on the planet we share, we must continue to make the National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy, and the case forcefully and frequently for the meaning and value of our other government agencies illustrates the power of a longstanding efforts. We must continue to create knowledge, convene experts, and fruitful partnership. During the 2014 Ebola epidemic, for ex- and champion partnerships across sectors to spur discovery. We ample, Harvard geneticists and their counterparts around the world must remind our friends and neighbors—our fellow citizens—of quickly sequenced the genome of the virus, creating opportunities the extraordinary value and ubiquitous good of scientifc research, for greater understanding of its transmission and spread, as well as and we must work together, now and always, to ensure that science possible targets for diagnostics, vaccines, and therapies. Meanwhile, marches on at Harvard, in Massachusetts, and across the country. new battery technologies are making the storage of renewable energy cheaper and safer; engineered organs-on-chips are revolutionizing Sincerely, clinical studies and reducing reliance on animal testing; illuminated neurons are driving targeted therapies for specifc subtypes of child-

Harvard Magazine 3

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

Letters that children learning English ac- then contracted (as in “that’s”). quire essentially in the same order, To Brown there was no doubt that we are ranging from the present progres- born with a language instinct. How else to sive (-ing) and the prepositions in and account for the remarkable similarity in the on, which are the earliest to appear, ways children acquire English? Brown’s re- publisher: Irina Kuksin through the past tense, the posses- search methods have been applied to children director of circulation and sive, and the defnite and indefnite learning other languages, with similar results. fundraising: Felecia Carter articles (a, the), to auxiliary verbs, at John de Cuevas ’52 frst uncontracted (as in “that is”), Cambridge donor relations and stewardship manager: Allison Kern 7 WARE STREET director of advertising: Trump to Research: vard received $435.8 million in direct sup- Robert D. Fitta port for federal sponsored research—and an new england advertising manager: additional $161.5 million in indirect support: Abby Shepard Drop Dead about 37 percent beyond the direct research classified advertising manager: President Donald J. Trump’s initial spend- costs, or 27 percent of total federal support. Gretchen Bostrom ing plan for the fscal year beginning Octo- But “wet lab” research already operates at ber 1, “America First: A Budget Blueprint a loss; Harvard compensates with endow- creative marketing director: to Make America Great Again,” unveiled in ment funds and other revenues. Higher-ed- Jennifer Beaumont mid March (and its May elaboration), pro- ucation advocates point out that curbing or production and design assistant: posed much more money for the Pentagon, eliminating indirect-cost payments would Lydia S. Carmichael and much less for diplomacy and environ- decimate many public universities’ research: gift processor and office manager: mental protection. In the succinct view of they simply could not cover the resulting Robert Bonotto Office of Management and Budget director losses—not a particularly populist outcome. Mick Mulvaney, “You can’t drain the swamp This upending of research is unlikely to ivy league magazine network and leave all the people in it.” But legislators survive congressional scrutiny. (Indeed, in director of operations: noted that they would have something to do the near term, Rubio was right: the congres- Heather Wedlake, Heatherwedlake@ with determining the nation’s priorities; ac- sional budget for funding through Septem- ivymags.com cording to Senator Marco Rubio, the Florida ber 30 increased NIH’s fsc by $2 billion.) Republican, “The administration’s budget But the deliberate, or inadvertent, targeting isn’t going to be the budget.” of indirect costs as expendable frills ought to editorial and business office 7 Ware Street If “swamp” is used in a different sense— be doubly troubling. As a political message, it Cambridge, Mass. 02138-4037 the miasma of the unknown, the source of may resonate among audiences unschooled in Tel. 617-495-5746; fax: 617-495-0324 diseases and other threats to human well-be- how research is paid for, or unsympathetic to Website: www.harvardmagazine.com ing, or your metaphor of choice—the budget the researchers who conduct it. E-mail: [email protected] would impose a disaster on universities and Closer to home, places like Harvard, re- @ all who beneft from the research conducted nowned for making consequential discover- harvardmagazine there, likely hobbling long-term economic ies, but at high costs (some schools’ nominal facebook.com/harvardmagazine growth as well. One headline fgure: Trump indirect-cost rates approach 70 percent— proposed chopping National Institutes of but generate less in practice), need to speak Harvard Magazine (ISSN 0095-2427) is published bi- Health funds by $5.8 billion, or 18 percent. up in support of research, of course, but also monthly by Harvard Magazine Inc., a nonproﬁt corporation, 7 Ware Street, Cambridge, Mass. 02138-4037, Health and Human Services secretary to be acutely aware of expenses. The Trump phone 617-495-5746; fax 617-495-0324. The magazine is Tom Price subsequently testifed before budget is another challenge, among several, supported by reader contributions and subscriptions, Congress that that sum could be saved with- to University revenues—a frequent topic advertising revenue, and a subvention from Harvard University. Its editorial content is the responsibility of out damaging research per se by trimming, for Harvard’s leaders . The new science and the editors. Periodicals postage paid at Boston, Mass., or eliminating, overhead reimbursements to engineering complex arising in Allston (a and additional mailing offices. Postmaster: Send address changes to Circulation Department, Harvard research institutions—so-called “indirect billion-dollar project, in which Harvard Magazine, 7 Ware Street, Cambridge, Mass. 02138-4037. costs.” Direct grants pay for the scientists hopes productive research will proceed, and Subscription rate $30 a year in U.S. and possessions, $55 Canada and Mexico, $75 other foreign. (Allow up to and staff members who do the experiments. be reimbursed, for decades) is described as 10 weeks for ﬁrst delivery.) Subscription orders and Indirect reimbursements pay for the structure more efficient and cost-effective than the customer service inquiries should be sent to the Cir- within which they work: institutional op- four-building design originally envisioned. culation Department, Harvard Magazine, 7 Ware Street, Cambridge, Mass. 02138-4037, or call 617-495-5746 or erating costs, buildings, libraries, and so on. In a much more challenging environment 800-648-4499, or e-mail [email protected]. Do away with the latter, and good luck con- for research funding, that kind of value en- Single copies $4.95, plus $2.50 for postage and han- dling. Manuscript submissions are welcome, but we ducting the former en plein air, so to speak. gineering needs to become gospel across the cannot assume responsibility for safekeeping. Include The sums are not trivial. The rates of re- institution. That is even more the case for stamped, self-addressed envelope for manuscript return. Persons wishing to reprint any portion of Harvard imbursement, based on each institution’s disciplining administrative expenses—now, Magazine’s contents are required to write in advance for costs, are negotiated every several years. and perhaps for decades to come. permission. Address inquiries to Irina Kuk- sin, publisher, at the address given above. In the fscal year ended June 30, 2016, Har- v john s. rosenberg, Editor Copyright © 2017 Harvard Magazine Inc.

4 July - August 2017

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

Finally. Acorrectdiagnosis— andsomehope. For additional letters on class, final clubs, Real recovery starts with the right diagnosis. The Pavilion is research-backed, with and more, visit a proven history of uncovering the true harvardmag.com. reasons why people struggle with a cycle of treatment failures.

Thank you, Marina N. Bolotnikova, for Let us help you today. your article. How true that “The study of Call 844.454.1347 language has shown that there is no need to discriminate against people who use signed languages.” How sad that this message is not widely understood. The default paradigm is that everyone hears, or should hear, and signed languages, although fascinating, are associated with “impaired” people. Professor Davidson’s work, her hope that McLean Pavilion: Boston, MA ASL can be “a more natural part of what’s McLeanPavilion.org going on,” promises to chip away at Aud- ism, which spawns discrimination leading to police brutality, denial of communication access in health care, employment, education, or lack of access to the arts, cinema, and a plethora of other situations. We inherit a longstanding practice of linguistic and cultural oppression, where the powerful seek to limit language and cultural expression other than their own, and force assimilation—in this case, auditory- vocal over visual-gestural. ASL signers form what can be thought of as a large country without borders. Distinct sign languages in other parts of the world mirror this po- Calling All Harvard Authors! sition, though Harvard excludes them all equally. Absurdly, ASL does not meet Harvard’s foreign-language requirement. This fore- closed my option about 15 years ago to pur- THE DEADLINE IS: SEPTEMBER 14, 2017 sue a degree as a staff member part time in to showcase your book in the November-December issue of Harvard the Extension School. My credits in ASL Magazine and reach 255,000 Harvard alumni, faculty, and staff. from Northeastern University could not be transferred, my study of linguistics stalled, We’ve listened to your feedback and updated the format of our popular as further years becoming profcient in an- special advertising section. Your book ad other language was impractical. will now include: a book jacket photo that’s 30% larger as well as an Let us hope ASL will be soon be honored as a foreign language thanks in part to the additional line of text for a total of 8 lines. Your ad will appear both in initiative of Davidson and her department. printHarvard and Authors’online. Go Bookshelf to: harvardmagazine.com/hauthors for pricing The prequel to the currently planned ASL and information, or call 617.496.6686, or email [email protected].

Harvard Magazine 5

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 Letters courses and events were classes taught by koe have long discovered what some in the we are not all without college educations. visiting scholar Marie Jean Philip, a Deaf medical community have not yet accepted; The “gap” is not a gap, but an unbridgeable woman who was studying for her Ph.D. in that for the educational advancement of the gulf between the progeny of Burke and Ad- cultural anthropology at Boston Universi- Deaf community, Deaf children need to be ams, and the progeny of Rousseau and Marx. ty while teaching ASL courses at Harvard exposed to American Sign Language and A better name for the “elites” is the utopians. in the early 1990s. She was an ambassador Deaf culture early in addition to any other All utopians begin on the left and eventu- from the country of the Deaf, much loved approach. ally move to the totalitarian right. Inside and honored by Harvard students. Philip Jacob Buchholz ’09 every utopian is a religious zealot. Unfor- was a credit to the University; with her pas- Pomona, Calif. tunately, the utopians now control our en- sion for teaching, academic ingenuity as a tire educational system and can convert the cultural anthropologist to promote under- ACADEMIC CLASS GAPS vast majority of their students (80 percent standing of culture as well as language, and Being one of the college-educated (and at Harvard!) to their faith in a free lunch, her staunch defense of Deaf children’s right then some) whites who voted for Donald without opposition from those who have to learn ASL. Trump, “Harvard’s Class Gap” (by Richard experienced otherwise. Rachel Herman D. Kahlenberg, May-June, page 35) was all The utopians’ iron hand in velvet glove General cook, Lowell House I expected it to be from the frst paragraph revolution faced a conservative counter- Billerica, Mass. to the last. The worldview of the author and revolution in 2016. The United States are the other self-proclaimed “elites” for whom no longer united, and we are no longer one I come from a family of genetic and cultur- he speaks has virtually no similarity to mine, country. We are a house divided against it- al deafness that has worked for generations which is shared by roughly half of those who self in which a civil war is unfolding. Not to advance the rights of the Deaf community. voted in the election. being utopian and zealous, and being op- Marina Bolotnikova’s article on linguistics The condescending conviction of the posed by all ivory tower dwellers, the con- and American Sign Language was simply “elites” in the vast superiority of the “elite” servatives are likely to lose, while the uto- superb. Her article and the research she de- worldview is astonishing. The “class gap” is pians seize total control of the house and scribes will go a long way toward promot- a misnomer. Those who voted for Trump are enforce uniform obedience to their mythol- ing justice for and recognition of the Deaf not a “class.” We are not all white, we are ogy. There goes the last best hope. Too bad. community. Linguists since William Sto- not all blue collar, we are not all poor, and I’m glad I didn’t entirely miss that won-

an energY-eFFIcIent “green” HoMe IS BuIlt WItH non-toXIc MaterIalS anD FeWer natural reSourceS, MInIMIZIng ItS enVIronMental IMPact.

Completely renovated and new construction in 2003 by the award-winning interior designer Trudy Dujardin, FASID, LEED AP + ID + C, this healthy oasis less than 50 miles from New York City was designed for comfort, beauty, and health.

On pristine property, free from chemical applications, the home is a stone’s throw from Long Island Sound and 63 feet above sea level, with fresh ocean breezes and cool, clean air. $1,649,000 88 olD Saugatuck roaD norWalk, ct

Broker contact: christine Poppy, realtor [email protected] Direct: 203-417-2182 William raveis real estate Westport, ct To see more award winning interiors like this one, please visit www.DujardinDesign.com

6 July - August 2017

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 Letters derful historical anomaly of freedom and faculty members discourage careers in the points to heart or we will not be able to save democracy. armed forces. The result: Harvard’s influ- our democracy. How easy it is to live smugly Stan Prowse, J.D. ’73 ence is largely absent in the development in a bubble these days. Carlsbad, Calif. of military strategy and operations, a major Frederick Sterns, J.D. ’54 instrument of national power that has life Plymouth, Mass. I applaud Kahlenberg for chronicling and death consequences. “Harvard’s Class Gap.” Harvard needs to Lawrence Spinetta, M.P.P. ’95 I do not agree with Kahlenberg’s prem- take affirmative action tof x this appalling Austin ise that universities such as Harvard should lack of diversity. The gap extends beyond don hair shirts for failure to be interested class and politics. I noted in the same is- I take vehement exception to the article’s in admitting more students from working- sue (“Yesterday’s News,” page 22) that 40 calling America’s white working class “Don- class families. The fundamental purpose of percent of freshmen in 1952 were enrolled ald Trump’s ‘forgotten’ Americans.” They fnancial assistance for undergraduates is to in ROTC. Today, less than one half of 1 per- deserve far better than to be labeled his. include students who are qualifed and well cent of the graduating class serve in the They aren’t his. To get elected, he conned motivated but cannot afford to attend with- military. The nation suffers when Harvard millions of them. Now, with policies that fa- out aid. This includes students from work- students eschew and left-leaning, elitist vor the wealthiest Americans, he is screwing ing-class families. How many more students all of them. You could say that he has forgot- from working-class families must Harvard SPEAK UP, PLEASE ten them...but, then, he had them in mind and other universities admit to prevent an- Harvard Magazine welcomes letters only very briefly and only for his beneft. other Trump from becoming president? on its contents. Please write to “Let- James Parry ’64 Robert W. Raynsford, Ph.D ’66 ters,” Harvard Magazine, 7 Ware Street, Darien, Conn. Washington, D.C. Cambridge 02138, send comments by e- mail to yourturn@harvard.edu, use our The most signi fcant article I’ve read in “FAIR HARVARD” website, www.harvardmagazine.com, any Harvard publication since graduation The last thing that anyone could ex- or fax us at 617-495-0324. Letters may from the Law School. Everyone, especial- pect to fnd in Harvard Yard in 2017 is a be edited to ﬁt the available space. ly the political elites as well as the rest of living, breathing Puritan. And yet the very us know-it-alls, should take Kahlenberg’s word, or idea, of (please turn to page 73)

2017 FOOTBALL TICKETS ON SALE NOW

Justice SHELTON-MOSLEY ‘19 ACADEMIC INTEGRATION AND COMPETITIVE EXCELLENCE IN DIVISION 1 ATHLETICS

BUY TICKETS ONLINE AT GOCRIMSON.COM/TICKETS

SEPT. 16 SEPT. 23 SEPT. 30 OCT. 7 OCT. 14 OCT. 20 OCT. 28 NOV. 4 NOV. 11 NOV. 18 at Rhode Island BROWN at Georgetown at Cornell LAFAYETTE PRINCETON DARTMOUTH at Columbia PENN at Yale

Harvard Magazine 7

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

LETTERS (continued from page 7) represented in hallway portraiture across country, sports teams are getting at least as campus? Shall we tear out pages from books much negative exposure for bad behavior as such a being is apparently too much for assigned for classroom reading, when the fraternities. Yet there is no casual mention at today’s Harvard to endure. The news [see content doesn’t square with modern norms? Harvard of single-gender sports teams being page 68] that Harvard would be holding Please, Harvard, get a grip, before you be- “odious” [to quote the authors of the article] a contest to change the last line of “Fair gin to do exactly what you’ve always pro- and no larger effort to eliminate them. Harvard,” which includes the phrase, “Till fessed to stand against. In 1972 the Fly Club was as diverse as the the stock of the Puritans die,” raises the William E. Pike ’95 all-male university we attended. We had school, its students, and its administration Greencastle, Ind. several black members and international to a new level of caricature. boys from Mexico, France, England, Hong I have to wonder how, as a scholar of FINAL CLUBS Kong, and Liberia. Through the club, I got history, President Drew Faust can sanc- Your May-June John Harvard Journal to know law students and lawyers, busi- tion with ease the editing of a song writ- prioritized the “Social Club Saga” as the ness students and business people, future ten over 180 years ago, and also the eradi- lead article (page 18). I want to share a few politicians, authors, journalists, capitalists, cation of the school’s founding sect from thoughts about the larger issue that led to and others. I paid for my club dues with my collective traditions. The line simply notes sanctions on students belonging to single- summer earnings and had little left over to an optimism that the institution will last gender organization. spend, but it was worth it. It was a unique throughout history—indeed, as recipients Times have changed since I graduated in class leveler. of a Harvard education, every student and 1972. The club I belonged to (The Fly) was Girls were allowed in the club only as graduate is an intellectual heir of those orig- no more a bastion of male privilege than the visitors to a tiny guest room inside a sepa- inal founders. Shall we disregard them now two sports teams I participated on, which in rate entry, where they had to be signed in simply because they were white, or Chris- spite of coeducation today, still function as and out during restrictive hours. For social tian, or “intolerant” by twenty-frst century single-gender programs. The surveys whose life with women, we were drawn back to standards? responses referenced club membership as Harvard’s Houses, where there were no re- Furthermore, where do we stop? If we correlated with sexual assault, also pointed strictions on overnight guests or parties can edit music, why not literature? Why not to athletic team participation being corre- that I recall. art? Shall we paint over undesirable faces lated. Judging by recent headlines across the In a recent conversation with under-

What scientists say about why print magazine ads work.

Reading on paper is slower and deeper; paper readers remember more

higher comprehension preferred by majority and recall (even millennials)

stimulates emotions more focused attention and desires less distraction

slower reading drives sensory involvement speeds which contributes to impact on readers

Advertise in the Ivy League Magazine Network and reach 1,200,000+ alumni from Brown, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, University of Chicago, University of Pennsylvania, and Yale with a print ad in our 9 publications. Visit: ivymags.com to learn more.

Source: “What Can Neuroscience Tell Us About Why Print Magazine Advertising Works?” A White Paper from MPA– The Association of Magazine Media, Scott McDonald, Ph.D., Nomos Research, October 2015

Harvard Magazine 73

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 Letters graduates at the club, I came to understand that socializing in the Houses has been Trying to make gender separation on campus cramped—if not stifled—by virtue of the number of undergraduates now housed. go away completely is not going to help this This resulted in more liberal use of club facilities for co-ed functions. I have no doubt generation meet the challenges of this decade. that social functions at the Fly Cub are now better controlled than many or all that stu- [who later resigned]. And let’s not forget lieve; it is impossible (and unnecessary) to dents have attended at Harvard: guest lists former Harvard administrators….By virtue force anyone into practicing politically cor- are strictly enforced, bartenders, bouncers, of membership alone, are these leaders and rect gender balance. and strict codes about alcohol consumption the many others to be lumped together with I applaud Haig’s objections and hope he cut off anyone inebriated and provide chap- founding fathers who owned slaves? and his colleagues can kill this cancer be- erones to make sure those who’ve had too Trying to make gender separation on cam- fore it spreads. much to drink get home safely. Learning to pus go away completely is not going to help Bertram G. Waters III ’60 drink alcohol responsibly is something that educate this generation to meet the challeng- Brookline, Mass. may not happen outside such a structured es of this decade, let alone this century. I be- environment. lieve that males need to come to understand I was moved to respond by the indepen- I expect that what brought the Universi- the unearned privileges of “maleness” in our dent reporting during the past year on ty’s initial focus and wrath on to fnal clubs culture. I also believe women need to under- the USGSO [unrecognized single-gender —sexual assault—is not now a problem as a stand the important role their gender plays social organization] social-club saga. As result of the Fly Club. No surprise that, hav- and has played in our culture. But I don’t be- a member of AD Club and a participant ing targeted fnal clubs as a large contribu- lieve this kind of understanding is inhibited in University organized sports, lacrosse tor to the sexual assault problem, the dean by virtue of choosing to spend some time and hockey, I am dismayed at the way the and the president expanded their complaint in the company of others of their gender. It University/College administration has with clubs to be one they thought that pop- might even be helped. There will be prob- handled this. ular opinion would embrace: exclusivity and lems, and attitudes will need to be adjusted. I read with interest and admiration the male privilege. Sanctions are not the way to accomplish this. piece on “Exclusivity from the Inside” [The The issue of male privilege needs to be seen Edward R. Devereux ’72, Ed.M. ’78 Undergraduate, May-June, page 27] by Lily in the context of changing times. Fifty years Needham, Mass. Scherlis which addresses this broad top- ago, George W. Bush at Yale could amuse ic, but leaves the question open for debate himself with pranks and dice and secret The push by the administration to pe- (contrary to the College’s actions). rituals, expecting that after four years of nalize students who join fnal clubs is de- The very notion of an oath to be admin- loafng and partying his family name and spicable. As a Jew who graduated from a istered to undergraduates as a requirement connections would get him where he want- public high school, I could not have joined to participate in University organizations ed to be. Today, employment recruiters are a fnal club even if I had wanted to. I did horrifes me. Did we not learn from the Mc- screening potential candidates by their have close friends who found such mem- Carthy era? numbers: GPAs. bership a valuable part of their under- Joe Prahl ’64, S.M. ’68, Ph.D. ’68 As for exclusivity, all elite institutions, graduate experience. To deny students Cleveland Heights, Ohio their courses, and their extracurriculars that possibility is typical left-liberal tyr- are selective. Most of the country sees this anny. Remember the principle: I can dis- INSIDE THE ADVOCATE as elitism, regardless of what Harvard says agree with what those students want to I haven’t seen anything as deliciously it is. Club members are selected on the basis do while defending vigorously their op- chilling as Lily Scherlis’s vivid report on of character and personality. One does not portunity—indeed, their right—to do so. life inside the Harvard Advocate’s “crum- need wealth or privilege to become a mem- John P. Blass ’58, M.D., Ph.D. bling white clapboard home on South ber in a fnal club. Many clubs are able to New York City Street” (The Undergraduate, “Exclusivity, help students who can’t afford the full dues. from the Inside,” May-June, page 27) since The fact that the authors of the article As an alumnus of a fnal club, I appreciate I read Kenneth Grahame’s account of how allowed a balanced article to include this the latest article and wish to comment on the stoats and weasels behaved after occu- phrase—“a gender-exclusive social club the position of Professor David Haig. Not pying Toad Hall. may be odious”—says much about the incidentally, of my most lasting friendships Paul Alkon ’57 broad-scale characterization which the from Harvard, many are club alumni. Los Angeles University has drifted into making about The whole idea of a loyalty oath of any kind organizations which for over a century being mandated by the administration is a C’mon Harvard, lighten up! So Harvard has have served Harvard students and gradu- travesty. Had I known of such a thing when clubs for men only! Horrors! The dean is lean- ates, some of whom who have gone on to I was 18 and applying for admission, it would ing over backwards so far his feet are off the become celebrated U.S presidents, senators, likely have sent me to Dartmouth (heaven ground. How about a little laissez-faire? You representatives, and governors, including a forbid) or Berkeley. This is not Nazi Germany. remind me more of our early, bossy Puritan living governor of our state, Massachusetts America has freedom of expression I be- forefathers than twenty-frst-century liberals

74 July - August 2017

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 Letters (or is “liberal” a bad word now?). Down with the magazine for 40 years. I never skip it. lore”—as a fellow member of the College deanly meddling and purity oaths. Sometimes it’s the only thing in an issue I class of 1968. Weidman was profled him- To top this off, The Undergraduate, by read. I think it could be a pretty interest- self in “Storytelling with Sondheim” (Jan- Lily Scherlis, writes with guilty feelings ing book that assembled them all together uary-February 2011, page 15). three pages about the clubbiness of The Ad- under one cover. Designer’s data: In case any readers were vocate and scarcely mentions publishing a Dan Flath, Ph.D. ’77 confused, Justin Lee (profled in “How literary magazine. One would like to think St. Paul, Minn. Buildings Move People,” May-June, page that literary talent would be their aim. A 60) is an architect in practice in Somerville, non-Harvard person would be left won- ERRATA AND AMPLIFICATIONS Massachusetts, who designs exhibitions for dering what function The Advocate served. Curatorial correction: The May-June Treasure the Harvard Art Museums. He is not a mem- I suspect than an undergraduate who had (“Anthropology Anew,” page 80) misspelled ber of the museums’ staff. serious literary ambition would ignore The the name of Peabody Museum curator Diana Date of death: Elaheh Kheirandish, Ph.D. Advocate altogether. Time will tell. Loren; we apologize for the error. ’91, noted that Alhazen’s date of death falls Wanna bet? Author’s alterations: Daniel Ziblatt, whose post c. 1040-1041, rather than the 1039-1040 Shane Riorden ’46 book was reviewed (“Making Liberal De- given in the catalog for the Houghton Li- Newtown, Pa. mocracies,” May-June, page 64), wrote to brary exhibition covered in “An ‘Enchanted FAN MAIL advise that the title changed in production; Palace,’” March-April, at page 40. The May-June 2017 issue was so outstand- the correct title is Conservative Parties and the At sea: Jonathan Kutner, M.B.A. ’59, of ing….The thorough coverage, fne range of Birth of Democracy. Dallas, which lies a goodly distance south- all important and interesting topics, writ- Theatrical credits: Conn Nugent ’68 wrote west of Cambridge, writes to note that ing and editing…really top flight. Will fle to point out that the profle of James Bundy Brevia (May-June, page 25) rendered Yale for reference. ’81 (“Dual Dean,” May-June, published on afloat (“stirrings to the southeast”); recent Diane B. Wunnicke ’62 page 68, as it happened) failed to identify fact-checking conducted on foot confrms Denver John Weidman—whom Nugent identifed that New Haven remains terrestrial—and as “collaborator with [Stephen] Sondheim even if climate change raises the sea lev- I just wanted to say that your one-page on Pacific Overtures, with Susan Stroman on el a lot, it will still remain southwesterly of brief lives section has been my favorite in Contact; Tonys, Emmys, commendations ga- Harvard.

More Harvard Magazine

Curated content delivered to your in-box

Sign up for Harvard Magazine email and never miss a story. Select weekly or monthly news digests, sports, classifi eds, and more....

harvardmagazine.com/email

Harvard Magazine 75

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

House-email-responsiveweb.indd 1 2/6/17 10:14 AM Right Now The expanding Harvard universe

MEAT-FREE MACHO ies belonging to the likes of Tom Brady and Beyoncé have been fueled by vegan diets. Sociology graduate student Nina Gheih- The Rise of Vegan Culture man is researching social aspects of veganism’s spread. Veganism was at first closely bound to the ideology of the animal-rights movement, istant are the days of Annie Hall, in the plant-based protein producer Beyond she explains, which initially aimed at a range when Woody Allen resigned Meat. (The company’s best-known prod- of targets, like wearing fur and testing prod- himself to a plate of alfalfa uct, the Beyond Burger, is pinkened with ucts on animals. Once activists shifted focus D sprouts and mashed yeast. Over beet extracts and reportedly sizzles when to farm conditions and food, veganism took the years, vegan eating has gone from taste- grilled.) No longer fettered by associations on the features of what scholars call a “life- less to trendy to making inroads into the with hippie kooks or radical politics, vegan- style movement.” Over time, it’s become more mainstream. One sign of the times: in 2016, ism has ascended to the astral plane of aspi- closely associated with general environmental Tyson Foods, the largest meat processor in rational living. These days it keeps mixed, concerns and a “healthism” mentality, bound the United States, bought a 5 percent stake and more glamorous, company: famous bod- up with notions of perfecting the body. Trust- worthy numbers on how many people identify as vegan are hard to come by, says Gheihman, but a growing number practice veganism in some way: incorporat- ing meat and dairy substitutes in their meals, or restricting their diets at certain times of day or for a period of weeks. Social scientists have studied veganism as it relates to animal- rights activism, but there’s been less research into the current lifestyle movement’s mecha- nisms and structure. Gheih- man is especially interested in analyzing leading figures whom she’s provisionally termed “lifestyle advocates,” arguing that they have changed the nature of lifestyle activism. They usually come from fields not typically associated with activism, she says, especially entrepreneurship—and the “cultural work”

8 July - August 2017 Illustration by Jungyeon Roh

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 Right Now they do isn’t strictly defined by their official claim to help “athletes and active individuals occupations. This work has expanded veg- stay at their peak” and “maximize your per- Explore More anism beyond its ideological core, enabling a formance on the playing field” for $78 a week.) greater variety of people to participate even Gheihman plans to conduct field research if they don’t conform all aspects of their lives and interviews to examine the evolution of For more online-only articles on to all its tenets. veganism in two other national contexts. The research, see: Gheihman sorts these players into three first is France, “the obvious place to study a categories. Some lifestyle advocates create food movement, because it is so central to the Studying Zika opportunities for consumption—for exam- notions we have around what makes good Harvard research- ple, by starting a vegan meal-kit subscrip- food, or proper food.” The country’s cuisine ers race to stem the tion service, opening a restaurant, or stocking might seem inimical to cashew cheese, or disease’s deadly plant proteins in their grocery stores. Anoth- chickpea runoff (called “aquafaba”) as an spread. er group works in what she calls “knowl- egg-white substitute, but the hierarchical harvardmag.com/ edge production,” creating the educational structure of its food culture could pave the zika-17 resources—films, books, and blog posts— way for dramatic change. In recent years, that people circulate to share culinary tips haute cuisine chefs, catering to a high-end We’ve Heard All about Fake and advice, or to persuade others to change international clientele, have had to experi- News—Now What? diets. Third, and most abstract, is the kind of ment with vegan menus and pastry-making. The Berkman Klein Center hosts a advocacy involved in what she calls “meaning Their trickle-down influence has been am- panel on concrete tools to combat fake COURTESY OF MARCIA CASTRO production” or “interpretive work.” These plified by a network of vegan food blogs and news. harvardmag.com/ figures change the cultural associations of cookbook writers—even as other institu- fakenews-17 veganism: “the symbolic essence of what veg- tions resist the spread of this lifestyle. The anism means,” as Gheihman puts it. Brady is a French ministry of health, Gheihman points mandate a dairy product with every meal. striking case: by lending his name to a line of out, warns that following a régime végétalien The second case is Israel, where by some meal-kits from vegan start-up Purple Carrot, will result in nutritional deficiencies and estimates, nearly 5 percent of the population he links veganism with the macho physicality long-term health risks, and the government’s is vegan; Tel Aviv has earned a reputation as of pro football. (“TB12 Performance Meals” nutritional standards for school cafeterias one of the vegan capitals of the world. The Is-

Planning a visit this summer? You can’t get any closer to Harvard.

1 BENNETT STREET • CAMBRIDGE, MA • 800.882.1818 • CHARLESHOTEL.COM

Harvard Magazine 9

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 Right Now raeli Defense Force even provides animal-free lifestyle has evolved within Israel’s cultural Vegan Society, the Ivy League Vegan Confer- menus in mess halls, and leather-free boots context, undergirded by national symbolism ence, and the Boston Plant-Based Millenni- and helmets to vegan soldiers. But beyond the surrounding land and water usage, and in- als, which hosts monthly potlucks. “There’s numbers, Israel provides an interesting con- formed by the country’s farming traditions one this Sunday, actually,” she adds, not quite trasting example, Gheihman explains, in part and Mediterranean diet. casually. vsophia nguyen because veganism there remains firmly rooted Gheihman’s own vegan lifestyle, mean- in animal-rights concerns, and is practiced while, reaches well beyond the radius of nina gheihman website: across the political and the religious spec- her individual plate. She’s involved with https://scholar.harvard.edu/ trum. She is also interested in how the vegan the Council for Sustainability, the Harvard ninagheihman

THE ON-CALL CALAMITY in alternative work arrangements: comprising not only those who are either on-call or placed through a temporary help agency, How U.S. Companies but also contract workers and freelancers. More than one in five of those individuals worked in health services or education; only Stole American Jobs 2.6 percent found manufacturing jobs that had been contracted out. Katz believes that making these “alter- hirty or 40 years ago, companies professor of economics Lawrence F. Katz, native” jobs more meaningful and reward- like General Motors and Chase erecting physical walls or championing pro- ing—both in compensation and career de- Manhattan Bank hired their own tectionist legislation won’t staunch the loss- velopment—is the key to building a robust T janitors and clerical staff, not just es. The truly responsible parties, he says, are workforce today. “We’re just not going to top executives and engineers. Today, low- American companies that subcontract jobs bring back 1950s production jobs and manu- skilled jobs are often outsourced, with ef- in areas such as security, custodial services, facturing,” he says. “And even if we did, no one fects that are rippling across the American and dining. And complicit in this mount- wants to buy black-and-white TVs or drive workforce. ing problem of eroding job opportunities are Studebakers, which is essentially what we’d Throughout the 2016 election cycle, immi- American workers themselves, who are in- have to be doing to produce jobs like that.” grants and globalization proved politically creasingly moving toward “alternative work The “alternative work arrangement” spec- popular scapegoats for the disappearance arrangements” as temps and freelancers. trum encompasses very different experienc- of American jobs. But according to Allison Although traditional labor statistics es for the workers themselves. Freelancers suggest that self- are theoretically able to choose their own employment and hours, set their own rates, and accept work multiple-job hold- that challenges or intrigues them. But for ing are in decline, on-call or temporary workers, the situa- the increase in tax tion is far less desirable: “Theirs is a much filings indicating more precarious situation where they don’t sole proprietor- get the same benefits,” says Katz. “And the ship and multiple nontraditional schedules of on-call workers sources of income cause [them] a lot of dissatisfaction.” Some- during the past what surprising to those unfamiliar with the few years led Katz labor market, the alternative workforce does to doubt this. He not consist predominantly of young people and Alan B. Kru- with full-time jobs who want to make a ger, Bendheim few extra dollars on the side. Katz finds professor of eco- that in reality, the niche provides ample nomics and pub- opportunities for those of retirement age. lic affairs at Princ- The one group with rising labor-force par- eton, teamed up to ticipation, he says, are those over 55, “and it conduct their own doesn’t seem to be that…they’re desperate research, examin- for work.…This is a way to combine activi- ing data from Feb- ties like caring for grandchildren, but still ruary 2005 to late doing work and staying involved.” 2015. They docu- Involuntary displacement—being fired or mented a 4.9 per- laid off—is another key reason for people cent increase in to turn to alternative work engagements, workers engaged of course. Katz has found that workers are

10 July - August 2017 Illustration by John Holcroft

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 Right Now roughly three times as likely to transition would both be better off if they could pool a more generous earned-income tax credit into such arrangements after a job loss, and for some kind of insurance,” he points out, to expand the safety net for Americans who that 76 percent to 80 percent of these invol- “but the current legal environment means it currently reap fewer of its benefits, such as untary temp workers desire permanent jobs. makes no sense for Uber to want to do that.” young people without dependent children In contrast, 80 percent of those Americans To rectify the situation, Katz envisions the or older workers whose children have left who find themselves in the alternative work- government supporting a portable-benefits home. “We’re trying to test whether [mak- force as freelancers and independent con- system that would allow workers to pay into ing] work pay will help make work for more tracters value the flexibility and agency they a fund for necessities like health insurance people,” he says, referring to a related sur- gain by doing so. or retirement benefits, regardless of how an vey he is currently conducting among low- Yet challenges abound for the 16 percent employer classified them. income Americans in New York City and of the U.S. workforce engaged in alternative His recent research has left Katz some- Atlanta. But expanding the earned-income work arrangements. “The way our labor laws what skeptical about the potential to re- tax credit alone is insufficient to even the are written,” Katz explains, “a lot of issues… duce inequality in the United States. Em- playing field for all workers. The real chal- arise from the use of freelancers and contrac- ployers are placing an ever higher premium lenge, Katz says, lies in finding ways to make tors.” He cites Uber as a popular example of on education, he says, and those with col- alternative work engagements higher paid a company that has resisted calling drivers lege degrees are almost certain to earn more, and more meaningful. voset babür “employees,” because doing so would give enjoy more job security, and have steadier them collective-bargaining rights; instead, access to benefits than someone with a lawrence f. katz website: all Uber drivers are independent contractors. high-school diploma, regardless of loca- https://scholar.harvard.edu/lkatz/ “There are cases in which Uber and drivers tion. As one palliative measure, he calls for home

Faced with many candidates from the same party, as in the 2016 Republican primary, voters tend to choose celebrities.

or not is heavily influenced by the electoral system. The general assumption among political scientists, he stated, has been that name recognition matters only in “low information elections,” in which voters know or care little to nothing about candidates’ EIGHT IS ENOUGH policy platforms. The idea is that if voters are concerned about candidates’ stands on the issues, or their incumbency or ideology, they Star Power in Politics won’t cast their vote based on “a simple cue like mere recognition. But we know from extensive studies in psychology and deci- hy do people vote for ce- fellow in the program on U.S.–Japan rela- sion theory,” Reeves said, that people don’t FREDERIC J. BROWN/AFP/GETTY IMAGES BROWN/AFP/GETTY J. FREDERIC lebrities? When surveyed, tions at the Weatherhead Center for Inter- always use the most relevant information to voters say that they pre- national Affairs (WCFIA). make decisions. In certain circumstances, W fer elected representatives Candidates often “dedicate considerable they gravitate toward the least intellectually who are not famous for reasons unrelated resources to getting their names out in public demanding approach. to politics. Yet actors, sports figures, TV using flyers, yard signs, and stickers”—out- Because individuals experience a kind of commentators, and authors, for example, reach that is “often totally devoid of policy cognitive overload when faced with many frequently win elections. Because nothing content,” said Reeves, who has written about choices that are hard to tell apart, Reeves is more fundamental to democracy than electoral reform in advanced democracies, and hypothesized that when many candidates casting a vote, the question of how voters is currently studying the causes and conse- from the same party are running against choose among candidates—and the extent quences of celebrity engagement in politics. In each other, mere recognition would be more to which name recognition influences that a lecture this spring, he argued that even such likely to affect the outcome of elections. choice—is both important and poorly un- simple name recognition can, in fact, boost Faced with a plethora of indistinguishable derstood, says Justin Reeves, a postdoctoral support for a candidate—but whether it does choices, many voters may abstain; those who

Harvard Magazine 11

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 Right Now do vote may be influenced by name recogni- “Even a modest increase in cognitive demand can tion or even irrelevant details such as ballot order. If his theory is true, one reason to care influence the way people make ballot decisions.” about it, he said, is that such circumstances occur frequently in U.S. primaries (the 2016 from a single party, Reeves argued, create but identical background information. Republican presidential slate, for example), the conditions that favor the famous—thus Celebrity status, he found, did not influ- and are even more common in countries “leading to outcomes that are at odds with ence the results on the short ballots. But on such as Japan, Finland, Brazil, and Greece, voters’ own stated preferences.” the long ballots, celebrities not only did better where electoral rules can lead to elections To see if his findings would hold up in than all their opponents, they received triple with slates of 50 to 200 candidates. other democracies with long ballots of like- the support of their control-group counter- Using data from Japan spanning from 1962 minded candidates, Reeves analyzed election parts with identical backgrounds. And among to 2013, Reeves found that when celebrities data from Finland from 2003 to 2011. There, the voters, Reeves found no differences by ran for seats in the upper house in national too, he found that celebrity candidates en- gender, age, and levels of education, income, legislative elections (which have high lev- joyed a significant advantage in a crowded and political engagement in people’s willing- els of intraparty competition), they won field. He then tried an experiment, asking ness to support celebrity candidates. “This more than half the time. But in elections for Japanese survey subjects to participate in a suggests,” he said, “that even a modest in- the same office run at the local (prefectural) hypothetical election in which all the can- crease in cognitive demand can influence the level, which are held under different electoral didates came from the party they most fre- way many people—not just those who are less rules involving fewer candidates and great- quently supported. One group received a politically sophisticated—make ballot deci- er competition between parties, celebrities ballot with just three candidates, including sions.” And it suggests that, in democracies won less than a third of the time. When sur- one celebrity. The second group received a around the world, electoral reforms that al- veyed, Japanese voters overwhelmingly reject ballot with nine names, including one ce- low voters to choose among smaller numbers celebrities in the abstract, so the data, Reeves lebrity. For each candidate, Reeves supplied of candidates might lead to more thoughtful said, suggest “a disconnect between what a photograph and educational and occupa- outcomes. vjonathan shaw voters say they want and what they end up tional background information. In his two doing in the voting booth.” Electoral rules corresponding control groups, he replaced justin reeves email: that lead to large numbers of candidates the celebrity with a different name and face, [email protected]

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

Research the possibilities... Host your next event in the contemporary New Research Building at Harvard Medical School. • Distinctive conference center in a unique location • Elegant Rotunda Room with views of the Boston skyline • State of the art amphitheater with seating for up to 480 • Catering provided by

77 Avenue Louis Pasteur, Boston, MA 02115 | 617-432-8992 | theconfcenter.hms.harvard.edu

12 July - August 2017

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

We simply could not produce this publication Your generosity allows us to hire the best- Harvard Magazine WITHOUT SUPPORT FROM ALUMNI qualified writers to report on the latest in is one of the best LIKE YOU who value quality reporting and an research and teaching being done at the journals in its league. independent voice. University—such as the article about linguists’ Excellent in content and search to explain the human capacity for Each year donations from readers like you allow in relation to today’s language (see “A Language out of Nothing,” on us to remain editorially independent—which page 50 of the May-June 2017 issue). world and the future. means that Harvard Magazine is written, edited, - Harvard Alum and produced with your interests foremost in And your gifts allow us to to report on Harvard mind. These gifts also ensure that we are able alumni and faculty who are making a difference to produce a publication of the highest quality. around the world—like Neiman Fellow Maciek Nabrdalik documenting the refugees fleeing Your donations enable us to go in-depth war to seek safety in Europe (see “In Flight,” on when covering University issues. We report page 45 of the January-February 2017 issue). relentlessly on your behalf: detailing not just the size of the endowment, but its intellectual You have a huge impact on what we are able to importance to donor and institution alike report on your behalf, so please donate—in any (see “Minding the Gap,” on page 6 and amount—today. ”Graduate Admissions in Lower Gear” on page 23, both in the May-June 2017 issue). SMALL GIFTS MAKE A BIG DIFFERENCE.

HARVARDMAGAZINE.COM/DONATE

170710_Fundraising-full.indd 1 5/26/17 2:56 PM Harvard2 Cambridge, Boston, and beyond

12B Extracurriculars Events on and off campus through July and August

12D New England Contemporary takes at the Boston Athenaeum

12L A Day in Lincoln A stylish, rural retreat from urban hubbub

12F Reflections on a River Paddling the Merrimack in Lowell and Lawrence 12O The Eating Is Easy Restaurants nestled in the Massachusetts countryside

HARVARD MAGAZINE/ NELL PORTER BROWN

Harvard Magazine 12A

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

Ceramics Program www.ofa.fas.harvard.edu Extracurriculars The “(It’s) All About the Atmosphere Invitational Exhibition,” curated by in- Events on and off campus during July and August structor Crystal Ribich, features a range of objects and celebrates a long tradition of SEASONAL meats, produce, breads and pastries, ceramicists gathering to fire their works The Farmers’ Market at Harvard herbs, pasta, chocolates, and cheeses— together. (June 17-August 19) www.dining.harvard.edu/food-literacy- along with guest chefs and cooking dem- project/farmers-market-harvard onstrations. Science Center Plaza. Swingin’ on the Charles Established in 2005, the market offers fish, (Tuesdays, through November 21) www.swinginonthecharles.blogspot.com Celebrate the tenth anniversary of this From left: Frank Stella’s Star of Persia II (1967), at the Addison Gallery of American Art; from “(It’s) All About the Atmosphere Invitational Exhibition,” Harvard Ceramics lively evening event. Lessons for newbies

Program; a Japanese N o- theater costume (1800-1850), at RISD start at 7 p.m.; dancers of any age and abil- FRANKFROM © 2017 LEFT: STELLA / ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY (ARS), NEW YORK/COURTESY OF THE ADDISON GALLERY OF AMERICAN ART; COURTESY OF THE HARVARD CERAMICS PROGRAM/HARVARD OFFICE OF THE ARTS; COURTESY OF RISD

One might be tempted to describe Harvard alumnus Dr. John Truman using the titles he’s held or the places he’s worked. And Pursue certainly, there’s much to say about an accomplished pediatric hematologist- oncologist who held appointments at some your of the nation’s most respected institutions before moving to Edgewood Retirement Community. But listen closely and you’ll passion also hear the faint skirl of the bagpipes drifting through the woods as this man here. of science skillfully and lovingly pursues another passion — bringing his Scottish heritage to life.

HOW WILL YOU EXPRESS YOURSELF? Discover a rich, multidimensional lifestyle at Edgewood. To learn more about Life on the Life on the Edge. Edge, call 978-482-7784. 575 Osgood Street | North Andover, MA 01845 978-482-7784 | EdgewoodRC.com

12B July - August 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

CAMBRIDGE, MA CAMBRIDGE, MA $ 2,500,000 Price Upon Request

SOMERVILLE, MA CAMBRIDGE, MA $985,000 $595,000

Building Community One Home at a Time

Proud supporters of: US Fund for UNICEF, The Mt. Auburn Hospital, Huntington Theatre Company, The Guidance Center and Cambridge Community Foundation

170714_Coldwell-GailRoberts.indd 1 5/24/17 10:03 AM Harvard Squared ity can swing ’til 11 p.m. Community Boating NATURE AND SCIENCE Harvard Museum of Natural History Inc., Boston’s Esplanade. (August 19) Tower Hill Botanic Garden www.hmnh.harvard.edu www.towerhillbg.org World in a Drop: Photographic Explo- MUSIC Live music and tattoo demonstrations, food rations of Microbial Life features gran- Harvard Summer School Chorus trucks, artisans, drawing activities, and gar- ular and instructive images by photogra- www.boxoffice.harvard.edu den tours abound at the inaugural Botanical pher, writer, and biologist Scott Chimileski, The ensemble performs Mozart’s Requiem. Tattoo Weekend. (July 8-9) a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard Medical Sanders Theatre. (July 28) School. (Opens August 26) Arnold Arboretum FILM www.arboretum.harvard.edu Harvard Art Museums Harvard Film Archive Weekend walking tours with, or without, www.harvardartmuseums.org www.hcl.harvard.edu/hfa themes, like From Seed to Tree (August 5), The Philosophy Chamber: Art and Sci- In response to uncertain political times, along with family-focused events, such as ence in the Teaching Cabinet, 1766- Summer Cinema of Resistance aims to Let’s Get Buggy! Exploration of Insect 1820. Artifacts, artworks, and specimens spark discussion with guest speakers and Pollinators. (July 8). that have played a crucial role in research and screenings that include Luis Valdez’s Zoot teaching at Harvard, and beyond. (See “The Suit, Jean Renoir’s Life Is Ours, and Spike Lee’s EXHIBITIONS & EVENTS Lost Museum,” May-June 2016, page 42.) Do the Right Thing. (Through August 6) Cooper Gallery of African and African American Art Addison Gallery of American Art Saturday Matinee offers a wonderful set www.coopergalleryhc.org www.andover.edu of family-friendly films, like Hayao Miyaza- Anchored by photographer Dawoud Bey’s Frank Stella Prints: From the Collections ki’s Howl’s Moving Castle, the environmental series “Harlem, USA” (1975-1979) and of Jordan D. Schnitzer and His Family tragicomedy WALL-E, and The Little Fugi- “Harlem, Redux” ( 2015-2016), Harlem: Foundation. The retrospective offers more tive—the classic 1953 American tale of a Found Ways also includes mixed media and than a hundred works by the meticulous seven-year-old Brooklyn boy who reacts to installation art that explore one of New abstract artist. (Through July 30) a prank played by his brother by fleeing to York City’s most dynamic and historically Coney Island. (Through August 19) influential neighborhoods. (Through July 15) RISD Museum www.risdmuseum.org Designing Traditions Biennial STAFF PICK: Capturing New England V: Student Explorations in the Asian Textile Collection reflects From skyscrapers to stormy seas, “New England on Paper,” at both new pieces by emerging art- the Boston Athenaeum, offers 56 contemporary works. They reflect ists and traditional woven, knit- “responses to the region’s built, natural, and cultural environment,” ted, printed, and other handmade says Catharina Slautterback, curator of the library’s 100,000 prints objects. (Opens August 11) and photographs. Using the Japanese hanga technique, New Hamp- shire wood-block artist Matt Brown ’81 created Moon Over Mt. Des- New Britain Museum of ert Island (2010, at right). Three impressions of the image hang as a American Art triptych because Slautterback loves how, in “relating to one another, www.nbmaa.org they show the passage of time.” All of the works were bought with Cubism and abstract expression- help from a print fund for regional artists that honors Francis Hovey ism collide with “sun-drenched, Boston Athenaeum Howe ’52, Ed.M. ’73. (The art collector laid back, fetishistic Southern Cal- www.bostonathenaum.org and Athenaeum member was also an ifornia” car, surfer, and drug cul- Through September 3 early-childhood educator instrumental in tures in the alluring exhibit Cali forming Harvard’s first fornia Dreaming: Ed Moses, daycare centers.) Slaut- Billy Al Bengston, & Ed Ruscha. terback clearly seeks a (June 23-October 15) diversity of styles. Eric Goldberg’s poignant etching Deep in the Val- Peabody Essex Museum ley (2006), pairs expansive Connecticut www.pem.org River valley farmlands with an intimate Nearly 200 works, from paintings and mod- view of a woman reading a letter. Realist els to furniture and textiles, explore Ocean painter Kate Sullivan used pastel and wa- Liners: Glamour, Speed, Style. Co-curat- tercolor in End of the Line, Cleveland Circle ed with London’s Victoria and Albert Mu- (2012, at left). “It all results in a loud cheer- seum. (Through October 9) fulness,” the artist wrote in the wall label, “and a distinctive sense of place.” vn.p.b. Events listings are also accessible at www.

COURTESY OF THE BOSTON ATHENAEUM (2) harvardmagazine.com.

12D July - August 2017

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 IGNITE SOMETHING ONLY THE PERFECT CUT CAN UNLEASH A DIAMOND’S BRILLIANCE.

HEARTS ON FIRE STORES, AUTHORIZED RETAILERS, HEARTSONFIRE.COM

7675-LBG.indd 1 5/1/17 12:08 PM 170715_LuxBondGreen.indd 1 5/24/17 10:34 AM EXPLORATIONS

Reflections on a River Paddling the Merrimack in Lowell and Lawrence by nell porter brown

From left: Lone paddlers take in the sunset; the UMass Lowell Kayak Center (above) rents boats and runs classes and trips; kayakers explore Stony Brook

and a historic canal; a bird’s-eye MAGAZINE/NPB HARVARD view of an urban stretch of the Merrimack Valley

hubs of Manchester and Nashua, then swings east into Massachu- setts through Lowell, Lawrence, COURTESY UMASS CENTER LOWELL KAYAK and Haverhill to Newburyport n May, 15 UMass Lowell seniors, gradu blue heron perches on telephone wires. Bird and the Atlantic Ocean. (To the north, the ation day in sight, push off from the city’s songs fill the air. Everyone stops to listen. Contoocook River Canoe Company of- Bellegarde Boathouse for an afternoon of “This is a great time to be here,” says trip fers scenic river outings from the town of I kayaking on the Merrimack River. Here leader Kevin Soleil, assistant director of Boscawen, New Hampshire.) the waterway, first harnessed to power tex- outdoor and bicycle programs at the uni- Two urban stretches in Massachusetts tile mills in the 1800s, is about a thousand versity’s recreation department. “The wa- hold a different sort of fascination: in Low- feet wide and smooth, thanks to the Paw- ter is really high because of all the rain, and ell, it’s the six miles from the boathouse to tucket Dam. Paddling upstream, toward the birds are migrating through. It’s also a Tyngsborough; in Lawrence, it’s a paddle New Hampshire, the group soon turns off great time to find a piece of trash and pick that begins near the Great Stone Dam. There to duck, single-file, under the granite arches it up—like those cans and plastic bottles the Merrimack is “ ‘beautiful river meets ur- of the historic Stony Brook Railroad Bridge, floating over there.” ban development.’ A real mixed bag,” says in North Chelmsford. There are wilder sections of the Mer- Soleil, who grew up in Nashua, another for- They enter a calm section at the con- rimack. At 125 miles, it snakes through 30 mer mill city. His Irish and French-Canadi- fluence of river and brook, surrounded by cities and towns: from rural Franklin, New an ancestors were among the thousands of reedy banks and sun-dappled trees. A great Hampshire, down into the former industrial immigrants who flocked to the Merrimack

12F July - August 2017

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 Document1Document1 11/20/03 11/20/03 11:51 11:51 AM AM Page Page 1 1

Harvard Squared

ASSISTEDASSISTEDLIVINGLIVINGRETIREMENTRETIREMENTCOMMUNITYCOMMUNITY Independent and Assisted Living Here’sSpecializedHere’s what what Memory people people Care are are Whatsayingsaying do Harvard about about us. alumni us. have in common? Cadbury Commons A Remarkable Senior Residence

Name:Name:MiltonMilton R. R. JAMIE BOUDREAU AIRGOZ AERIAL PHOTOGRAPHY Occupation:Occupation:PostalPostal Supervisor, Supervisor, Retired Retired Hobbies:Hobbies:Reading,Reading, Walking, Walking, Exercising Exercising Nevertheless, many Lifestyle:Lifestyle:Independent,Independent, Active Active people increasingly seem ChoiceChoice of Senior/Assisted of Senior/Assisted Living: Living: CadburyCadbury Commons Commons to view the river as an The Harvard alumni who chose asset, as something to be “ThereCadbury“There is a is stable aCommons stable and and gentle gentle may atmosphere atmosphere have enjoyed—and protected. of helpof help and and empathy empathy throughout throughout the the community.retiredcommunity. from I feel Iwork, feelassured assured but that not thatI am fromI partam part oflife. of The few urban parks are others’others’ lives, lives, as they as they are ofare mine. of mine. For Formyself, myself, well used. More public I feelIMuseum feel that that Cadbury CadburyVisits Commons • CommonsPlay Reading provides provides a a access points and trails wellSymphonywell trained trained and andcaring Selections caring group group of •people ofLecture people who who are interestedare interested in my in welfare.”my welfare.” are planned, and hous- Series • Yoga • Organic Gardening CallCall (617) (617) 868-0575 868-0575 to arrange to arrange a personal a personal es and condominiums tour,Calltour, (617) or visit or 868-0575 visit www.cadburycommons.com www.cadburycommons.com to arrange a personal tour, along the river are cov- WhereWhereor visitThe www.cadburycommons.comThe Emphasis Emphasis Is On Is OnLiving Living eted, many marketed 66 Sherman6666 Sherman Sherman Street, Street, Street, Cambridge, Cambridge, Cambridge, EQUAL EQUAL MA MA02140 02140 ◆ (617) ◆ (617) 868-0575 868-0575 HOUSING HOUSING as “riverside.” A rising MA 02140 • (617)868-0575 OPPTY OPPTY number of visitors (last year more than 2,000)

COURTESY UMASS CENTER LOWELL KAYAK are taking trips on boats Valley for work, first in the water-powered from the UMass Lowell Kayak Center at the factories, then in those fueled by steam. Bellegarde Boathouse, which rents kayaks, ® “My grandmother grew up in Lowell and canoes, and stand-up paddleboards through Teaching the World worked as a teen in the mills of Manches- September 5. Soleil and his staff also give boat- ter,” he says. “And yet you go up hiking in the ing lessons and run guided paddling tours for White Mountains in the Pemigewasset Wil- families, along with outings at sunset or by derness, and you drink from Pemigewasset moonlight. A Saturday 11 a.m. shuttle car- River headwaters—and that’s this water,” ries paddlers and their gear from the Lowell he says, gesturing out over the Merrimack. boathouse to a launch in Tyngsborough: the “It’s an urban waterway, but it’s connected trip back downstream takes between two to these places we think of as pure wilder- and four hours. “People are often surprised ness. And then you’ve got the history. This when they get out on the water that the river’s was the birthplace or cradle of the American as beautiful as it is,” says Soleil. “They’re ex- industrial revolution.” pecting all the bad things an urban waterway In Lowell and Lawrence that legacy still can have, but it can be very peaceful, serene.” dominates the downtown landscapes. For On their spring outing, the UMass Low- paddlers on the river, architectural arti- ell students paddle farther up Stony Brook, Open House facts—smokestacks, railroad crossings, and then squeal and holler as they pass through SATURDAY, JANUARY 21, 2017 dams—can loom large. At the same time, rov- a nearly pitch-black tunnel that runs under ing the river’s creeks and crannies reveals a congested Middlesex Road and below a red- PREPARE9am YOUR-12pm CHILD “vibrant ecosystem,” Soleil reports. Hawks brick building. Built in 1897, it was once the PreschoolTO THRIVE and Kindergarten AT and eagles, beavers, turtles, woodchucks, storehouse for a mill complex that produced deer, and foxes live here, too, despite the ar- thousands of pounds of worsted yarn per ArlingtonTHE Campus:NEXT 17 LEVEL Irving Street ray of pollutants—industrial and household week (for which the brook produced pow- waste, raw sewage, cars, tires, TVs, and fur- er via a canal). Turning around and travel- To learn more, call 617.499.1459 niture—that have continuously endangered ing back to the pond-like section, everyone or visit www.isbos.org ISB is accredited by NEASC (New England Association of Schools and the river for more than two centuries. looks up and watches a Pan Am Railways Colleges), CIS (Council of International Schools), MEN (French Ministry of Education) and IB (International Baccalaureate).

Harvard Magazine 12G

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

freight train rumble by on the old tracks. 13 years. But there’s more insidious pollu- The Ayer Mill clock tower, restored in ISTOCK At such close range, the rush of locomotive tion as well, which is likely the main source 1991, still presides over Lawrence. Each summer, thousands of Merrimack Valley power is exhilarating. It also sounds as if of the bacteria that threaten public health. children participate in the Greater the world is ending. Parts of the sewer systems in the older, most Lawrence Community Boating program. “Do you swim in the Merrimack?” one populated cities along the river are “com- young man asks Soleil. The answer is bined,” meaning rainwater runoff, sewage, ments of 1972 (later dubbed the Clean Wa- yes—and no. “Much of the time it’s okay,” and industrial waste are funneled through ter Act), MRWC’s mission is to “protect, Soleil answers. “But in the summer, E.coli a single pipe, according to Robert “Rusty” improve, and conserve” a watershed—the can form.” Tangible trash is still routinely Russell, J.D. ’82, the new executive director fourth-largest in New England—encom- dumped in the water, although the nonprof- of the Merrimack River Watershed Coun- passing 214 communities with 2.5 million

it Clean River Project has hauled out more cil (MRWC). residents. “When it rains a lot or you have COURTESY OF GREATER LAWRENCE COMMUNITY BOATING than 100,000 tons of garbage, including 73 Established in the wake of the Feder- a big snowmelt, the [combined sewer] sys- cars and more than 8,000 tires, in the last al Water Pollution Control Act Amend- tem gets overloaded; the treatment plants

WHY I JOINE D THE HAR VARD CLUB OF BOSTON

There are many dierent reasons to join the Harvard Club of Boston. Kay Foley, 28, is a Harvard alum and former co-captain of the Harvard varsity women’s swimming and diving team. Here’s why she joined:

“My time spent at Harvard was the best 4 years of my life so far. When I graduated, I wanted to maintain a connection to the tremendous people I had met and a connection to the College. I joined the Harvard Club of Boston to do just that. The Harvard Club has become my go-to spot in Boston. I go to the club for social events, to meet with people, and now to work out as well. It’s a great feeling to have a place in the heart of the city to connect with existing friends and to make new ones along the way.” - Kay Foley ’10

For more information visit harvardclub.com

12H July - August 2017

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 WE ARE | connected worldwide

C | 221 M. A S. U:511 C | 1564 M A C | 168 B S Harvard Square: Light fi lled fl at in one of Harvard Incredible Harvard Square location just steps from HARVARD SQUARE - This Grand home was Square’s most desirable concierge buildings. Easy the Cambridge Common. 4 beds 3.5 baths, chef’s built in 1888 and features an eclectic interior and access to the Charles River, 2 BR, 1 bath, pet friendly, kitchen, and the stuff that urban living dreams are storied history. deeded storage & parking made of: 2 fi replaces, roof deck, offi ce, dressing www.168BrattleStreet.com www.221MTAuburn511.com room, mudroom, laundry room, private two-car $8,800,000 $788,000 garage! 1564MassAve.com SUSAN CONDRICK | 617.842.4600 LINDSAY ALLISON & LISA MAY | 617.429.3188 $1,988,000 LAUREN HOLLERAN | 617.913.2203

B | 55 L W | 190 P R W | 320 W S The grand foyer, with its high ceilings, sets the New listing. Stunning Wellesley Estate Majestic gated residence in one of the most tone for this magnifi cent home & leads into a featuring 5+ bedrooms, 6 full and two half affl uent suburbs. Separate guest house. Seven desirable open concept fl oor plan. baths. Beautiful 3 Acre private lot bedrooms, seven full & four half baths. www.55LeicesterStreet.com on scenic Pond Road. $17,750,000 $10,500,000 $4,950,000 JULIE HARRISON | 617.413.6332 JULIE HARRISON | 617.413.6332 JULIE HARRISON | 617.413.6332

B B | 68 C #1 B B | 254 M #3 H | 53 N M S Exceptionally maintained, spacious Back Bay Located on the quiet and beautiful Sprawling estate surrounded by a beautifully brownstone. Stunning original details include: Marlborough Street, this stunning three landscaped yard and conservation land. The 12+ foot ceilings, spectacular moldings, detailed bedroom Penthouse has every luxury that quality, craftsmanship, elegance and design of with gold leaf. Direct view of the beautiful you could ever ask for in a Back Bay home. this custom masterpiece are second to none. greenery of the Commonwealth Mall. Private elevator with direct access into this Five+ bedrooms; a centerpiece for luxury living. $4,225,000 magnifi cent duplex home. OldeNorthMill.com ALLISON MAZER | 617.905.7379 $3,250,000 $1,750,000 ALLISON MAZER | 617.905.7379 ALLISON MAZER | 617.905.7379 844.667.6663 | [email protected] | GibsonSothebysRealty.com Gibson Sotheby’s International Realty has 8 offi ces in and around the Boston area | Each offi ce is independently owned and operated

170719_Gibson-Sothebys.indd 1 6/8/17 9:52 AM Harvard Squared

Dennis Houlihan’s and consistent, coordinated water testing, narrated river the MRWC also reaches out to valley res- tours benefit the Clean River idents and visitors, offering more than 15 Project. paddling adventures this year throughout the watershed. A “Trash Patrol” gathers in that the Merrimack Nashua on September 2, and there’s an easy- is the second-largest to-moderate river trip in and around Law- surface-based source rence on September 16 (see the website for of drinking water in other trips, details, and registration.) Also New England af- of interest: the National Park Service runs a ter the Quabbin 90-minute “Working the Water” boat tour Reservoir. Both are of the Pawtucket Canal that formed part of subject to the same the mill complex in Lowell. laws that theoreti- Other small groups are also working to cally safeguard the improve the river and protect dozens of en-

COURTESY OF THE CLEAN RIVER PROJECT water quality, “but dangered fish, birds, and other wildlife spe- can’t handle [the volume],” he says. To avoid with different expectations,” says Russell. cies across the watershed. New Hampshire flooding the treatment plant or nearby “Quabbin must remain pristine; not so the contractor Rocky Morrison founded the pipes, safety valves exist that divert over- Merrimack. And therein lies the problem”: all-volunteer Clean River Project because flow—essentially raw sewage and whatever every developed surface—paved roads and he was fed up with seeing the Merrimack else gets washed into street drains—directly driveways, building foundations, even lawns trashed. “People just pull over by the side of into the river. with packed soil—prevents natural filtration the river and throw out their TVs and tires More than 600,000 valley residents drink of precipitation. The Environmental Protec- because they don’t want to pay the recycling Merrimack River water. That number is rising tion Agency cites polluted storm-water run- fee,” he says. “In Haverhill, we have a place with housing and commercial development, off as the primary threat facing the Merri- we call Tire Cove because we found more especially in southern New Hampshire, Rus- mack over the long term. than 4,000 there alone.” sell notes. Many people don’t realize, he adds, As it pushes for increased land protection So far, Morrison’s effort has relied on

8 SPARKS PLACE 203 PEMBERTON STREET Sun-Splashed Cambridge Townhouse. Contemporary ﬁ nishes, parking. 2+BR, 2BA. $899,000

3 MURDOCK STREET Inman Square Duplex. Renovated, open kitchen/ Charles River Duplex Condo. Quintessential Cambridge. 2BR, 1BA. living. 2BR, 2BA. By Appointment Only. $1,150,000 $625,000

SPENCER & LAUREN LANE 39 WORCESTER STREET [email protected] | 617-872-0030 Harvard Lawn Multi Family. | Follow us on: SpencerLane.com Solar-powered facebook.com/cambridgeproperties & EV ready and @SpencerandLaurenLane Investment Property. 5BR, 3BA. $1,399,000

12J July - August 2017

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 Harvard Squared grants and donations, and people like Dennis Step Outside with Houlihan. He lives on the river in Methuen and runs pontoon-boat tours: each passen- ger’s $20 goes directly to the project. He takes Outward Bound Professional! passengers toward Lawrence, and explains the valley’s industrial history this way: Fran- “The Outward Bound experience has been a powerful way cis Cabot Lowell, A.B. 1793, “learned about the mills from England, came back to Amer- to set the tone for the year. As a direct result I am seeing a ica, and built and opened one in Waltham.” higher level of gratitude, teaming, and active leadership.” Other entrepreneurial businessmen followed suit, building a mill complex in Lowell, and - Barbara Best, Director of Student and Fellows Program, then more in New Hampshire. Lawrence de- Harvard Kennedy School Center for Public Leadership veloped later, in the 1840s, as a more comprehensive planned metropolis, with canals running along both sides of the river to maximize the water power. The Clean River Project covers only the 15 Massachusetts river communities—about 44 river miles—and has requested munici- pal funding to hire staff and expand operations. Out on a spring boat tour, Jed Koehler, executive director of the Greater Lawrence Community Boating Program, points out Clean River’s yellow booms bobbing near Photo by: Tom Fitsimmons the shore after his boat clears the founda- THOMPSON ISLAND (617) 830-5114 tions and steel girders of the Interstate 93 OUTWARD BOUND [email protected] bridge. “Trash floats down the river like EDUCATION CENTER www.thompsonisland.org tumbleweeds in the old frontier towns,” Boston Harbor Islands he says, applauding the group’s efforts. A cleaner river is important to his program’s success. It’s the largest public boating program in the Merrimack River Val- ley, and serves about 2,200 kids a week in the summer. They learn about water safety and how to row, sail, and paddle, and do other day-camp activities; the majority of them are on full scholarships, and 42 per- COME FOR A VISIT. MEET OUR STAFF. cent live in single-female households. “The parent is often working one to three jobs,” EXPERIENCE THE COMMUNITY. says Koehler. “The boathouse is a safe place for their kids to be.” COME FOR A VISIT. MEETA Not-For-Profit OUR STAFF. Assisted Living Community But anyone can join the program for the • Special Memory Support • Two Acres of Secure Gardens season and take out boats, or purchase a day Neighborhood and Walking Paths pass. Launching from the Lawrence dock,EXPERIENCE THE COMMUNITY. • Daily Fitness and Social Events • Private Studios now available paddlers can travel about an eighth of a mile downstream, toward the Great StoneA Dam,Not-For-Profit Assisted Living• A Warm, Community Inclusive Community • * Short Term Stays Available on Bodwell’s Falls, which is on the National• Special Memory Support • Two Acres of Secure Gardens Register of Historic Places. When completNeighborhood- and Walking Paths ed in 1848, it was the largest in the world, 165 CHESTNUT STREET, BROOKLINE • Daily Fitness and Social Events • Private Studios now available and is so solidly constructed that it’s never WWW.GODDARDHOUSE.ORG required significant repairs, and is still• A usedWarm, Inclusive Community • * Short TermLANCE Stays Available CHAPMAN AT 617-731-8500 EXT. 105 for hydroelectric power. COME FOR A VISIT. MEET OUR STAFF. EXPERIENCE THE COMMUNITY. Beyond the dam, and visible from a boat, stands one of the city’s still-ubiquitous A Not-For Profit Assisted Living Community 165 CHESTNUT STREET, BROOKLINE red-brick smokestacks. It’s part of the Pa- • Building Community • Progressive Minded • Inclusive Culture cific Mills power plant, according to Jim WWW.GODDARDHOUSE.ORG• Socially Engaging • Intellectually Stimulating Beauchesne, the Lawrence Heritage State LANCE CHAPMAN AT 617-731-8500 EXT. 105 Park visitor-services supervisor—one of 165 CHESTNUT STREET, BROOKLINE | WWW.GODDARDHOUSE.ORG CALL LANCE CHAPMAN AT 617-731-8500 EXT. 105

Harvard Magazine 12K

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 Harvard Squared the factories that manufactured fabric for 1980s and 1990s, says his older board mem- be,” he says. Steering away from the dam, up military uniforms for the Civil War through bers tell stories of how the river used to “run the river, he turns into a creek and touts the World War II. And there’s the Ayer Clock in colors”—most often vivid green—from wildlife: American bald eagles, deer, nesting Tower. Built in 1910, it’s still one of the vats of dyes dumped by textile firms. “In Canadian geese, dam-building beavers. Tur- world’s largest; its four glass faces are only the 1950s and 60s, the parents would check tles lay eggs in the boathouse’s yard. Once slightly smaller than those on Big Ben. The behind their kids’ ears to see if they’d been the hatchlings have emerged and “are trying heritage park’s museum, located in a restored swimming in the river,” he explains, “be- to make their way to the water, across the 1840s mill-workers’ boarding house, lays out cause the kids would wash themselves off backyard where a hundred kids are about the city’s history and is well worth a visit. in front of a mirror, and never remember to to run around,” he, the staff, and the chil- Yet industry came at a stiff price. Koehler, get out the ink or dye behind their ears.” dren gently move them to the shore of the whose father ran the boathouse during the Today, “the river is cleaner than it used to creek. For city kids, Koehler notes, the riv-

ALL IN A DAY: A Rural Retreat

Just 19 miles from hot and congested downtown Boston lies the bucolic town of Lincoln. Even before postwar suburbia arose, Lincoln’s leaders and residents eschewed sprawl. As a result, more than 38 percent of the community is protected land. Eighty public trails, some of which begin at the MBTA commuter-rail station, skirt Walden Pond and wind through farmland, woods, and meadows. The star cultural destination is the 30-acre deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, dotted with 49 works. Jona- than Gitelson’s existential billboard asks: Are You Here? (2016). Visitors walk right into Dan Graham’s Crazy Spheroid—Two En- trances (2009), a half-circle of two-way mirrored glass, and they play The Musical Fence (1980), a vertical aluminum xylophone by A summer exhibit at the deCordova Paul Matisse ’54. Easy walking paths lead to a café, picnic spots, Sculpture Park and Museum (above) highlights abstract art, including the and shady lawns; the museum’s stone terrace overlooks Flints atmospheric Untitled (1979), by Jeanne Pond. On exhibit inside, through September 17, is “Expanding Leger. Clockwise, far left: the formal Abstraction: New England Women Painters, 1950 to Now,” cel- Codman Estate; Gropius House; and ebrating contributions by Natalie Alper, Reese Inman ’92, Kath- Codman Community Farms erine Porter, and Barbara Takenaga, among others. surround a Georgian mansion built by judge Not far away is a modernist enclave anchored by the Gropius and politician Chambers Russell, A.B. 1731, House, the former family home of Bauhaus architect and influ- A.M. ’66 (who left it to a Codman relative). ential Harvard Graduate School of Design professor Walter Russell also was instrumental in the founding Gropius. It’s now owned by of Lincoln in 1754; it’s named for his ances- Historic New England, and tral home in Lincolnshire, England—not open for tours, as is the Cod- for the American president. man Estate nearer to the A short trail walk leads to the town-owned Codman Com- town center. Beautiful gardens munity Farms. Visit the barnyard, take classes, volunteer to AARON USHER/HISTORIC NEW ENGLAND work, or buy eggs, meats, produce, and flowers. Nearby, on a larger scale, Mass Audubon’s Drumlin Farm Wildlife Sanc- tuary runs an animal farm and Community Supported Agricul- HISTORIC NEW ENGLAND ture (CSA) program, along with year-round events and workshops. For food and drinks, head to Lincoln’s only commercial cluster, next to the train station. Dip into Do- nelan’s Market or the Trail’s End Café for picnic fare, or sit down for a meal at

Lincoln Kitchen. vn.p.b. COURTESY OF THE DECORDOVA SCULPTURE AND PARK MUSEUM (2)

The Lincoln Land Conservation Trust and Rural Land Foundation

COURTESY OF CODMAN COMMUNITY FARMS CODMAN OF COURTESY http://lincolnconservation.org/trails

12L July - August 2017

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 A historic city. A 21st-century brokerage.

Since 2013 Compass has built the first modern real estate platform by bringing together the area’s most seasoned agents and the world’s brightest professionals across technology, business, and design.

Whether you’re looking for a new home or considering a move, Compass Cambridge will guide you through a smarter, simpler, and more sophisticated search and sell experience.

Boston 126 Newbury Street Cambridge 1073 Massachusetts Avenue 617.303.0067 Chestnut Hill 1330 Boylston Street compass.com

Compass Massachusetts, LLC d/b/a Compass is a licensed real estate broker located at 126 Newbury St, 5th Floor, Boston, MA 02116. Real estate agents affiliated with Compass are independent contractor sales associates and are not employees of Compass. All information contained herein is compiled from sources deemed reliable, but Compass makes no warranty or representation as to the accuracy thereof. Equal Housing Opportunity.

170725_Compass.indd 1 5/30/17 2:00 PM Harvard Squared er is often their primary contact with nature—and plenty of adults, he adds, don’t realize what a respite it offers. “Every eve- Premier Properties ning, the orange sun sets—right there!” he OBSERVATORY HILL MARTHA’S VINEYARD says, pointing upstream from the boathouse. “Right down the center of the river, every night. It’s like Aruba!” About three-and-a-half miles upriver from the Lawrence boathouse are places to pull in and explore. People walk and picnic on a finger of land called Pine Island, owned by the MRWC. Koehler says the island was once home to a hermit who had a “little shack and a rowboat he used to get Impeccably renovated 2-bedroom townhouse back and forth from the shore.” Long before, with chic modern design offers luxurious, yet archaeological evidence shows, the island comfortable, living on three levels. Carport hosted a Penacook Indian settlement. parking, private garden and roof deck, 3 baths, The Penacooks once moved freely along the 1,713 square feet, between Harvard Square and Huron Village! $1,395,000 This is a waterfront treasure seldom seen in Merrimack River, hunting and fishing. “Dur- today’s market. Three-bedroom, two-bath beach ing the last quarter of the seventeenth cen- house and adjoining one-bedroom, one- tury, the Penacook In- bath guest cottage on 0.91 acres. Large panoramic windows, expansive decking dians were feared by at the main house and separate, private the residents of An- decking for the cottage, overlooking 145 dover,” according to VICTORIA KENNEDY BARBARA CURRIER MAGGIE CURRIER feet of private, sandy beach and affording expansive views over Sheriff’s Meadow the Andover Village WWW.BARBARACURRIER.COM and the Vineyard Sound. $3,475,000 The Currier Team, Coldwell Banker Improvement Soci- 171 Huron Ave, Cambridge, MA 02138 508-693-0222 | VIEWPOINTSMV.COM ety (AVIS) website. Call or text 617.593.7070 | [email protected] 71 Main Street, Vineyard Haven, MA 02568 “In 1675, the Indians attacked from the north, crossing the river, killing some set- tlers, and taking others hostage.”

Adjacent to Pine COURTESY OF THE CLEAN RIVER PROJECT Island is the 131-acre The joy of finding Deer Jump Reserva- frogs tion, owned by AVIS. Its banks run about four feet high, but paddlers can travel up side streams, tie boats to a tree, and scram- ble ashore. A riverside trail offers easy hiking, and the land is home to hemlock groves and a meadow, an AVIS warden reports, along with fisher cats, otters, wild turkeys, foxes, coyotes, and skunks. Historic Brick Rowhouse Back in Lowell, Soleil agrees the river offers $2,375,000 | 4 BED | 3.5 BATH | 3,366 SF “a real connection to nature that people are Less than a block away from The Cambridge Public not expecting.” At the end of their trip, the Library near Harvard Square, find this stately and celebrating seniors pull up to the docks and elegant single-family with four levels of living, two-car [email protected] pull out their kayaks. It’s 5:30 p.m. Everyone is parking, and a private European-style terrace with 617.835.5008 a bit wet and wind-blown. The mood is con- corner tiered fountain. 423Broadway.com vivial as they thank Soleil for a fun time before 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. bounding away to other evening activities. “It is what it is,” he says, almost shrugging when pressed to say more about the Mer- If you would like to list a property in our September-October issue, rimack’s “mixed bag.” “My position is that contact Abby Shepard: 617.496.4032 the more people we can get out to experience the river, the more people would care about it, and the better off it would be.”

12N July - August 2017

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

The Eating Is Easy A summer sampling of Massachusetts countryside restaurants COURTESY OF CARTER AND STEVENS FARM (2) COURTESY OF CANTINA 229 (2)

ummer in New England is a time to late 1700s. There are three small relax, eat well, and have some fun. dining rooms, a tight-knit bar, Restaurants, from the eccentric to and a simple terrace with views S the refined, offer the chance to do of woodlands, perennial gar- just that, while showcasing local produce dens, and old stone and products in verdant settings. walls. Chef/owner Cantina 229, on five pastoral acres in Dan Smith follows New Marlboro, is a beautiful post-and- a locavore ethic, beam barn-style space with glass walls. Eat cooking whatev- inside or out. Picnic tables sit on the grass, er’s freshest, with where “kids run around and visit the pigs, no showboating and free-range chickens come right up,” about it. One night says Emily Irwin, who opened the restau- that was Wolfe rant last year with her chef-husband Josh Spring Farm’s as- Irwin. Lawn toys—Frisbees, horseshoes, and paragus (grown in “corn hole” gear (a.k.a. bean-bag toss)—help nearby Sheffield). foster schmoozing within a gustatory crowd Crisp and tasting that often includes the Irwins’ parents and of minerals, it was

friends. The menu has an Asian twist, thanks tossed with organ- COURTESY OF LODGE DREAM AWAY to Josh Irwin’s year of traveling in India, ic greens, tart chèvre, and toasted pistachio Dusk dining at Cantina 229, and a dish of its Thailand, and China. Korean bibimbap and nuts. The roast chicken breast entrée, faintly Cambodian pork belly and noodles; Carter and Stevens Farm (top) runs a summer pa jun, a pancake filled with leeks, scallion, sweet with a perfect garlic confit, came with BBQ shack that serves fresh meat with all and chives, are mainstays, along with a hefty fennel and a handful of polenta fries. The the works; a glimpse of the Dream Away cheeseburger topped with grilled onions and restaurant sits just four miles from Mount Lodge’s charming country eclecticism turmeric pickles. Tuesdays are Taco Night. Washington State Forest: go for a hike there, (Entrées $15-$28; www.cantina229.com) or a trip to Bash Bish Falls, before tucking Back toward Boston, in the town of Beck- To the west, past Great Barrington, is the in for drinks and dinner. (Entrées $28-$38; et, is the un-pigeonhole-able Dream Away lovely John Andrews Farmhouse Restau- bar menu, $13-$25; www.johnandrewsres- Lodge. For 90 years, this magical spot on the rant, set on a homestead site dating to the taurant.com) edge of the October Mountain State Forest

Harvard Magazine 12O

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 Harvard Squared has attracted fine artists, musicians, showpeople, and anyone else devoted to the creative spirit. In 1997, the restaurant was bought and re-birthed by trained actor and “theater-maker” Daniel Osman. There are live bands, art shows, and performances—of cab- aret, poetry, and plays. Ballet classes: age 3 - teen, The oft-changing menu, adult and pointe. devised by veteran Berk- shires baker and chef

Please view Summer Amy Loveless, is a tasty COURTESY OF JOHN ANDREWS FARMHOUSE RESTAURANT mix of basic, affordable fare (burgers, mac The John Andrews Farmhouse Restaurant, & Fall schedules at: and cheese, spinach salad) and more elevated not far from Great Barrington, balances comfort and elegance. www.freshpondballet.com entrées (tarragon chicken, seared scallops, rack of lamb). It tends to fill up, especially on was in 1922 when Giuseppe Briasco founded Visit us on Facebook: weekends, so call for a table. “My thought is the Briasco Inn, a rooming house and speak- facebook.com/FreshPondBallet that when driving into the middle of the for- easy that served spaghetti and steaks. Now est for dinner, you should always make res- rechristened The Oregon Club, the menu of- Nina Alonso, Director, FPB ervations,” Osman says, with a good laugh. fers well-prepared homey classics (chopped 1798a Mass Ave And avoid using GPS to find this gem: real salad, steak, lamb shanks) plus its signature Cambridge, MA 02140 directions are on the website. (Entrées $12- spicy mushroom soup. (Entrées, $18-$28; 617.491.5865 $28; www.thedreamawaylodge.com) www.theoregonclub.com) Perhaps even more casual are the wood- Far more orchestrated is the dining expe- fired BBQ stand and new Stone Cow Kitchen rience at Just Right Farm, in Plympton, on and its brewery, at the Carter and Stevens Boston’s South Shore. Up to 36 diners may Farm in Barre. “It’s nontraditional because arrive as early as 6 p.m., tour the gardens, and the menu is always changing,” says Molly sip drinks before being ushered into a taste- to Our Valued Advertising Partners DuBois, part of the fourth generation to ful cottage where the walls are all screens, at Cadbury Commons run this spectacular 1,000-acre hilltop farm. 7 p.m. A five-course, prix-fixe menu is served; “Last week we did tacos with our own mi- dining takes about three hours. The $140 per The Charles Hotel cro greens, and at the brewery we grow our person tab, paid in full when the reservation Coldwell Banker / Barbara Currier own ingredients for the beer as well.” The is made, does not include tax, tip, or booze. Coldwell Banker / Gail Roberts restaurant, open until 6 p.m., serves a range of But patrons can bring their own; the menu Compass Real Estate / Greater Boston salads, soups, and sandwiches, but the real goes online a few days ahead, with recom- Compass Real Estate / Carol Kelly Team draw seems to be the BBQ shack. People mended wine pairings. Dujardin Design travel for the farm’s own grass-fed beef burg- “We are an authentic, 300-year old Cape Edgewood Retirement Community ers and hot dogs, smoked ribs and chick- house on a 10-acre farm with ash trees you Fresh Pond Ballet en, and piles of hot, hand-cut French fries. can’t reach around,” says Kimberly Russo. Meals are served outside every Friday and She owns the property with her husband, Gibson Sotheby’s International Realty Saturday evening in July and August. And Mark, a veterinarian, and runs the res- Goddard House Assisted Living sometimes there’s live music. (BBQ menu, taurant with Elaine Murphy and Marilyn International School of Boston $2.99-$16; www.carterandstevensfarm.com) Browne. “We grow 80 percent of the pro- Lux, Bond & Green Fine Jewelry Enter The Oregon Club, and step back duce we serve,” she adds, “which is start- McLean Hospital into an older, more relaxed era. On a sum- ed from seeds in our greenhouse.” She also Outward Bound Professional mer evening, diners can sit at an outdoor constructed the 10-foot-long ash tables Viewpoints MV Real Estate table on a country road in the Ashland Town shared by all during what she thinks of as Welch & Forbes LLC Forest and look out at a peaceful green field a large “dinner party.” A chocolate tart of- across the street. Eating and drinking also ten concludes the meal. The trio serves it, William Raveis / Christine Poppy happen indoors in cozy rooms (where a fire- taking time to talk with guests before bid- Support from these advertisers helps us produce the independent, place crackles in winter). Although only ding them good night. Diners stroll back high-quality publication Harvard alumni five minutes off Interstate 90 (near Fram- along a tree-lined way to their cars, and if rely on for information about ingham), the restaurant’s ambiance recalls it’s clear, the stars are shining bright over- the University and each other. a 1920s roadhouse, which is exactly what it head. (www.justrightfarm.com) vn.p.b.

12P July - August88 2017 Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 JOHN HARVARD’S JOURNAL COMMENCEMENT 2017

Family Spirit, Wetly

Cap and gown: check. Poncho, coat (if available), gloves, scarf, hat (ditto): check. In 2010, when Harvard’s deciders moved Commencement forward from early June, they focused on the delights of late May (and were rewarded with 92-degree heat midweek, leading Baccalaureate suppli- cants to beg for an air-conditioned Me- morial Church—a prayer answered this spring). This year, they got April.

On Thursday, the rain began shortly after After a rain delay (and a merciful shortening Wet, dry, loud (clockwise from upper left): 7:00 a.m., and intensified; the temperature of the formalities), the afternoon exercises Haiyang Zhao, LL.M. ’17, adjusts a rain poncho from the Law School; Medical never broke the mid 50s. At the Chief Mar- proceeded with President Drew Faust speak- School standard bearer Erica R. Kiemele, shal’s luncheon, Alumni Association execu- ing in a black coat and scarf (see page 22); one M.D. ’17, honors her Blackfoot and GETTY VIA IMAGES tive director Philip Lovejoy joked that the wag suggested that the next speaker, newly Taiwanese heritage with handmade attire relocation from the Lamont Library lawn to minted Dr. Mark Zuckerberg, natty in blue and the crimson stole of Harvard’s Native American Program; Dins (from left) Widener Library, effected in 2015, was then suit, white shirt, and tie, revert to form and Jacques Berguig ’18, Brian Rolincik ’18, and welcomed because be provided with a Harvard hoodie. His ad- James Baskerville ’18 salute John Williams; GLOBE BOSTON THE Visit harvardmag.com/ the new venue was dress, streamed live, was always going to play and imminent Ed.M.s Keya Wondwossen, commencement to read Sara Trail, Rashaida Melvin, Dorothy air-conditioned; this to a larger audience online; with the physical Mrema, Kidus Mezgebu, Alysha English, Vic additional coverage of all the events year, it provided dry one dramatically reduced (but loyally includ- Quintanar, Monique Hall, and Tiffini Hyatt mentioned in this article. shelter and warmth. ing his wife, Priscilla Chan ’07—on hand for take part in Black Commencement. MIDDLE JON RIGHT: CHASE/HPAC; BOTTOM KEITH RIGHT: BEDFORD/

14 July - August 2017 www.harvardmagazine.com/commencement

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 rains on Harvard Commencement—even Clockwise from top left: Umbrellas were when it rains.” For a champion of Veritas, Thursday’s accouterments of choice; new masters of public health Ashley Cheng, it seemed a shocking attempt to spread Trush Patel, Namit Choski, and Anu fake news. The meteorologists had not Ghuman exult; Ph.D. recipients Adam hedged: the official forecast for Thursday Stack (anthropological archaeology), read “Chance of precipitation is 100%,” and Nancy Khalil (social anthropology), and their fellows cheer; Priscilla Chan ’07 the scientists clearly won out. Even so, the applauds her husband, Mark Zuckerberg candidates got their degrees. The vener- ’06, LL.D. ’17; Class of ’17 marshals Jarrod able rites were plenty festive: Winthrop Wetzel-Brown, Rebecca Ramos, and residents, this year’s campus refugees as Taylor Carol (at left) and Eliot House members Ashley Collins and Rachel Stein, her tenth reunion, too—gamely coping in a their House is being renewed, seemed to have honoring diversity, were among those plastic poncho; see above), the ratio was even a fine time celebrating with their families, in joining the “fellowship of educated persons.” more skewed. Friday morning dawned even close quarters, under the tent on Lamont’s worse: the overnight deluge tapered to wind- lawn (helpfully vacated by the Chief Mar- la, does it also display its academic essence: driven rain, but the temperature had fallen to shal’s spread to accommodate just this use). identifying big ideas and great challenges, 48 degrees. At least the faucet was turned off So Faust’s larger truth was borne out: mere advancing debate. This year, at a divided for the Radcliffe Day tent luncheon. rain could not drown the spirit of Harvard’s moment across the wider world, Harvard

MIDDLE LEFT: STEPHANIE MITCHELL/HPAC STEPHANIE LEFT: MIDDLE parade. pursued celebrations and fruitful conversa- Wednesday evening in Annenberg Hall, Nor did it obscure the unusual character tions about consequential issues. TOP LEFT AND BOTTOM ROSE LEFT: LINCOLN/HPAC; ending the dinner for honorary-degree recipi- of this 366th Commencement. The Univer- ents, Faust had, hopefully, repeated the old sity always throws a world-class fête during The first theme of these campus con- chestnut for the assembled glitterati: “It never its graduation gala. Rarely, amid the hoop- versations arose, de facto, in the first formal

All photographs by Jim Harrison, unless noted otherwise Harvard Magazine 15

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 JOHN HARVARD’S JOURNAL • COMMENCEMENT 2017 event of the week. Phi Beta Kappa (PBK) the political context in mind (she talked social-media posts and e-discourse on the orator Sherry Turkle, who probes the effects about reclaiming “our communities, our de- efficacy and empathy engendered in, you of emerging communications media, spoke mocracy, and our common purpose”). But know, actually talking with other humans. about her generation’s embrace of digital her deepest argument was about the cor- These issues were certain to be joined technology (see page 18). She certainly had rosive effect of “efficient,” carefully curated once Facebook CEO Zuckerberg was named

erary critic, co-author of The Honoris Causa Madwoman in the Attic and the three-volume No Man’s Land, on Six men and four women received honorary degrees lable as his cryptosystems are nineteenth- and twentieth- at Commencement. University provost Alan M. uncrackable. century literature, respective- Garber introduced the honorands in the following ly. Doctor of Laws: Casting novel order, and President Drew Faust read the citations Dame Judi Dench. Winner light where shadows shrouded wom- (two, fittingly, in iambic of eight Olivier Awards for en’s writing, crafting poignant po- pentameter). For fuller outstanding acting on the ems that both inspirit and enlight- background on each, see British stage—more than en, a pioneer of feminist studies for harvardmag.com/ anyone—and 10 awards whom the personal is the political honorands-17. from the British Academy as well as the poetical. of Film and Television Arts. Dame Judi Dench Hawa Abdi Di- Doctor of Arts: With fair Titania’s powers of en- Huda Y. Zoghbi. A medical researcher who blawe. A physician chantment and Cleopatra’s plenitude of charms, a has discovered the gene associated with humanitarian who venerated queen of screen and theater with whom Rett syndrome and teased out clues to au- has sheltered and we feel a fond familial bond. tism, Parkinson’s, and Alzheimer’s. Doctor cared for tens of of Science: From dauntless young woman who nev- thousands of refu- Norman R. Augus- er lost nerve to eminent expert on the nervous sys- gees in her war-torn tine. Past chairman tem’s workings, she patiently translates the language country, Somalia. and CEO of Lockheed of life so that patients might realize the promise of life. Doctor of Laws: Con- Martin, a global lead- Hawa Abdi fronting the ravages of er in aerospace and James Earl Jones. Renowned actor on Diblawe war and famine, offering technology, chair of a stage and screen, winner of the National succor to those in dire need, she fearlessly faces the National Academies Medal of Arts forces of darkness and keeps aflame the light of hope. commission that ad- and lifetime vocated support for awards from Walter E. Massey. Past director of the Na- basic research, and a the Screen Ac- tional Science Foundation, past president Norman R. trustee at Princeton, tors Guild and of the American Association for the Ad- Augustine MIT, the University of the American vancement of Science and of his alma ma- Maryland, and Johns Hopkins. Doctor of Academy of ter, Morehouse College, now chancellor of Laws: Energized by the promise of the endless fron- Motion Pic- the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. tier, devoted to science in the nation’s service, a tiger ture Arts and Doctor of Laws: Traversing two cultures as an of industry with a zest for adventure; be it ideas or Sciences. Doc- academic leader, advancing useful knowledge as a rockets, he has an eye for what will fly. tor of Arts: An James Earl Jones citizen of science, a splendid mentor always poised actor of inimitable power whose roles bespeak his sin- to open doors for others, a model man of More- John Towner Williams. The composer of gular resources; when he a round unvarnish’d tale de- house—steadfast, honest, true. music for more than 100 movies, who has livers, there’s never any doubt with whom the force is. been nominated for more Academy Awards Michael O. Rabin. Pioneer- than any living being, ter- Mark Elliot Zuckerberg. CEO of Facebook ing computer scientist, Har- restrial or extra-. Doctor of and, with his wife, pediatrician Priscilla PRESS SENNE/ASSOCIATED STEVE vard’s Thomas J. Watson Sr. Music: The Superman of music for Chan ’07, founder of the Chan Zuckerberg Research Professor of com- the movies whose scores of scores Initiative, addressing disease, education, puter science, winner of the propel great stories skyward; his community, and opportunity worldwide. Turing Award. Doctor of Sci- melodies dwell deep inside our Doctor of Laws: Genitor maximus Libri ence: Prime aficionado of algo- memories, his harmonies induce Facierum [“Great creator of the book of faces”]; rithms and automata, high-capac- our hearts to soar. from a whiteboard in Kirkland House to One Hack- ity hard drive of Harvard computer er Way, he has forged a transformation through the science, whose impact is as incalcu- Sandra Mortola Gilbert. Poet power of connection and set his sights on how bold Michael O. Rabin and pioneering feminist lit- new ideas can serve the world.

16 July - August 2017 www.harvardmagazine.com/commencement

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 the guest speaker at the Thursday afternoon shout-out to “the incredible Harry Lewis”— exercises. Introducing him at the honorands’ the professor in his first Harvard lecture, dinner, Faust uncontroversially said Face- Computer Science 121, and former College book “has changed how the world works.” dean who informally led opposition to the In his address, Zuckerberg spelled out his sanctions policy during the faculty’s as yet optimistic and expansive vision of “building inconclusive debates.) community across the world” (see page 22) As all those currents swirled, the presi- in ways implicitly enabled by his software dent’s Task Force on Inclusion and Belong- platform (and presumably others). Related ing presumably toils along, aiming next year issues, like privacy, are grist for Harvard’s to recommend ways Harvard can build on Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Soci- increased demographic diversity to achieve ety, whose faculty director, law and comput- real inclusiveness among all members of the er-science professor Jonathan L. Zittrain, community. (One of its ideas is discussed in served as the honored guest’s escort. The College Pump, page 68; co-chair Dan-

On Friday morning, the Radcliffe Day ielle Allen—Conant University Professor SNIBBE/HPAC KRIS panel, on “(Un)Truths and Their Conse- and a political philosopher very attuned to Selfie presence: At Class quences,” was the latest in a series of cam- equality and the quality of discourse—was Day, featured speaker Joe Biden, former U.S. vice pus symposiums on fake news (perhaps the on the Radcliffe journalism panel.) Faust president, summoned most popular subject of concern for such touched on some of the hard issues facing College dean Rakesh Khurana for sessions during the spring). Although not Harvard in her Thursday afternoon address, a photo op. (Biden also adorned specifically Facebook-focused, the social- on free speech (see page 21). the event media credentials.) media channels for disseminating rumor, opinion masquerading as fact, and out- From an interior focus on diversity and in- like. And indeed, the third through-line right falsehoods (or even more abhorrent clusion, it was a small pivot (via fake news of this Commencement week was the Unit- material) are clearly implicated. And so, in and the communities mediated online) to ed States and its global village pre- and post- its informal way, the University managed opposite concerns in the wider world be- November 8. both to honor an interesting, and globally yond: border walls, immigrant bans, and the Some of this was subtle. The PBK poet, important, former student while paying him the further tribute of taking what he has wrought very seriously. A second theme—internally focused, on Commencement matters of diversity and inclusion within the University—arose repeatedly. On Tues- Highlights day morning, as the venerable PBK exercises celebrated brilliant Collegians, a group of graduate students launched Harvard’s Find more in-depth coverage of Commencement week from across first Black Commencement; at day’s end, Harvard’s schools at harvardmagazine.com/commencement. the third LatinX graduation ceremony took place. (Kente-cloth and Clase del 2017 stoles What’s Worth Fighting For: Former Acting were proudly evident during Thursday’s Attorney General Sally Yates Speaks at conferring of degrees; see pages 14 and 15.) Harvard Law School In her Baccalaureate address Tuesday af- The former Justice Department leader explains ternoon, President Faust got laughs with a why she defied President Trump. joke (this works only at Harvard, and only harvardmag.com/commyates-17 this year) aimed at the “Final Report of the Implementation Committee for the Policy “Bravery, Not Perfection” on Membership in Single-Gender Social Reshma Saujani, founder of Girls Who Code, Organizations”—a reference to the fero- addresses Education School graduates. cious debate about the sanctions to which harvardmag.com/commsaujani-17 the freshmen who enroll this August and their successors will be subject should they join a final club or similar entity. Those dis- “There’s Nothing Beyond Our Capacity” agreements pit inclusion (opposing groups In his Class Day address, the former vice president that discriminate on the basis of gender) urged graduating seniors, “You have to engage.” against free association, professors’ author- harvardmag.com/commbiden-17 ity to enact policy for students, and the basis on which academic recommendations visit harvardmagazine.com/commencement are made. (In his talk, Zuckerberg gave a FROM TOP: HERATCH EKMEKJIAN/COURTESY OF HARVARD LAW SCHOOL; HARVARD GRADUATE SCHOOL OF EDUCATION; JIM HARRISON

Harvard Magazine 17

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 JOHN HARVARD’S JOURNAL • COMMENCEMENT 2017

Mark Doty, nodding toward New York real- conviction in this country, policymakers and year, claiming for it the inspiration for his estate developers who assume other roles, politicians—albeit many of them reluctant- subsequent activities. And then, in a dubi- crafted a new, political work, riffing on “pre- ly—they will listen,” making it imperative ously legal but inspired bit of computer craft, cious glitter,” titled “Air Rights.” Senior Eng- for experts to communicate with the pub- hackers disrupted The Harvard Crimson’s web- lish speaker Auguste (Gussie) Jennings Roc lic at large. site at the hour appointed for the afternoon ’17 drew on her experiences on 9/11 and dur- exercises, posting contents that were, um, ing the Visitas weekend disrupted by the There was plenty of fun as well. The not respectful of the honored guest speaker. Boston Marathon bombing manhunt to af- morning exercises featured two made-for- firm that “love and courage trump hate and video entertainments (a signature of Faust- Zuckerberg himself—speaking without destruction”—even in a world where there is era graduations). When the provost made a prompter, and seemingly without resort- “fear of deportation, fear of walls and bans” to introduce John Williams, he cut his text ing to his text—began by aiming a number (see page 21). Graduate English speaker Wal- short so the Din & Tonics could perform of sharp arrows in his own direction before ter Edward Smelt III, M.T.S. ’17, drew upon an animated a cappella medley of the com- turning to an expansive exhortation to “cre- the authority of “Rumi, an immigrant from poser’s famous film scores—an interlude ate a world where everyone has a sense of what is now Afghanistan to what is now that extended the conferring of honorary purpose” (see page 22 ). Acknowledging that Turkey, an immigrant from the thirteenth degrees to nearly 40 minutes, but probably this is an “unstable” time, he pushed back century to our own, a Muslim mystic” (see took the crowd’s collective mind, briefly, against “the forces of authoritarianism, iso- page 21). And one of the honorands, Hawa off its collective wetness. And after Pusey lationism, and nationalism.” In the sweep of Abdi Diblawe, is herself a brave humanitar- Minister in Memorial Church Jonathan L. his ambitious vision, and the detailed, emo- ian from Somalia—a geographically incon- Walton offered the benediction, he then tional precision of his anecdotes, he sound- venient fact that made it more than a little wished, especially for the class of 2017— ed—despite their differences of origins, age, difficult to gain her access to this country, while ceding to James Earl Jones of the fa- experience, and means—more akin to Joe in the wake of President Donald Trump’s mous voice—“May the Force be with you.” Biden than to any other speaker on cam- (contested) executive orders banning im- As was noted more than once, Zuckerberg pus this week. migration from six predominantly Muslim had a Star Wars-themed bar mitzvah, so this And perhaps that dialogue across gen- nations. Zuckerberg choked up while talking alignment of honorands was kismet, or cos- erations was exactly the right thing for the about an undocumented high-school stu- mic, or something. University during Commencement—in dent whom he is mentoring—whose identity The students were not the only people 2017, or any other year. Thursday morning, he felt compelled to protect. commencing. Ending, law dean Martha Mi- in the gathering drizzle, Law School career- Some of it, inherent in the guests’ iden- now presented her gavel-wielding throng services staffer Paula Garvin, on duty as a tities, was very direct. College Class Day for their degrees for the last time. Beginning, monitor guiding her charges to their seats, speaker Joe Biden, the former vice president, medical and public-health deans George Q. surveyed the scene thus: “All the rest of the assured the students that “this condition Daley and Michelle A. Williams (identifying year, it’s just the Yard, but today it has a dif- is temporary,” and summoned better all- herself as “the freshman dean”) performed ferent pulse. It’s thrilling. People come from American angels: “We’re a nation that has their formalities for the first time. all over—the medical school, the law school… always thought big, not small. I’m so tired At the luncheon in Widener, the Chief it’s like a family coming together. And every- of both political parties talking about in- Marshal—Massachusetts attorney general one fits in.” It would take a lot more than rain crementalism. America has always thought Maura Healey ’92—gave Zuckerberg the to wash that Harvard spirit away. big, and boldly! What has happened to us?” Kirkland House directory for his entering vjohn s. rosenberg (see page 21). Sally Yates, dismissed from her leadership of the Justice Department for refusing to defend the first executive order she argued. “For the on immigration, counseled the lawyers-to- Commencement failing connections of be to be prepared “to decide who you are our digital world,” she and what you stand for.” Former secretary Talk 2017 said, “conversation is of state John Kerry, addressing the Harvard Oratorical highlights the talking cure.” From Kennedy School just days before the centen- her conclusion: nial of the late president’s birth, said that his We need to re- recent travels had revealed to him a global Reclaiming “What We Know about claim what we community “unsettled about the leading na- Life” know about life. tion of the free world…walking away from a MIT’s Mauzé professor of the social studies of science When we reclaim century of thoughtful, carefully conceived and technology, Sherry Turkle ’69, Ph.D. ’76, a critic of our attention, our Sherry Turkle economic and strategic leadership.” And in social media, titled her Phi Beta Kappa oration “How solitude, and our Longwood, former Environmental Protec- Technology Makes You Forget What You Know about friendship, we will have a better chance to tion Agency administrator Gina McCarthy Life.” “Curated” conversations by social media and reclaim our communities, our democracy, told the public-health graduates that citi- email, stripped of the “boring bits” and the frustrations and our shared common purpose. We had Drewzens Fausthunger for facts and scientific truths, of human discourse, may be technologically efficient, a love affair with a technology that seemed and that when people “speak with very clear but they are shorn of human efficacy and empathy, magical. But like great magic, it worked by

18 July - August 2017 www.harvardmagazine.com/commencement

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

Familiar Paths Trod The Harvard Crimson’s senior survey (to which 790 students, about half the class, responded) reveals that among graduates heading for a pay- check, “In keeping with past classes, most working graduates will join the consulting, finance, or technology in- dustries, which have drawn 18, 18, and 16 TRADITIONS NEW AND OLD: In its tenth year of elevation from percent,” respectively: 52 percent of those a division of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, the cutting-edge about to begin employment. That brings School of Engineering and Applied Sciences got its own, very traditional, orange/gold crow’s-foot device for master’s degree to mind the meme (described by The students’ gowns this year. And honorary-degree recipients’ Undergraduate, on page 29) of the Har- triple crow’s feet were restored after an inexplicable three- vard-bound baby’s first word: “M-m-m… decade-plus omission. Commencement aficionados can learn McKinsey and Company.” Separately, more at harvardmag.com/regalia-17. Departing from tradition, all Harvard Law graduates won a one-year dispensation to wear among survey respondents “23 percent puffy tams rather than mortarboards, to mark the school’s reported having cheated in an academic bicentennial; that headgear is typically the prerogative of Ph.D.s context at Harvard” (up from 17 percent, and equivalent degrees like the S.J.D. (law), D.B.A. (business), and Ed.D. (education). 19.5 percent, and 21 percent in the prior three classes)—a depressing tally that provided some context for the Crimson’s cluded dean of science Jeremy Bloxham of state, and U.S. presidential candidate reports about a large Honor Council in- (son William) and senior associate vice Hillary Clinton—was the commencement vestigation into alleged academic miscon- president Robert Cashion, effectively the speaker at her alma mater, Wellesley, on duct among students enrolled last fall in chief fundraiser for the Faculty of Arts and Friday.) the popular Computer Science 50 course. Sciences (son Nicholas). The Wired Yard Family Ties I Family Ties II Among the innovations this year were President Faust having conferred M.B.A.s Lissa Muscatine ’76, a 1977 Rhodes Schol- brighter, higher-resolution video screens on the Business School candidates, their ar (the first cohort to include for the throng seated farther dean, Nitin Nohria, added a shout-out women), and now co-owner back during the Morning from the Commencement platform to of Washington’s Politics & Exercises (Harvard retained his daughter, Reva, minutes from receiv- Prose Bookstore with her a new audio-video vendor), ing her bachelor’s. Provost Alan Garber, husband, Bradley Graham, and a question-provoking who leads the degree-conferring continu- saw daughter Wynne Mus- device attached to one of ity, refrained from similarly embarrassing/ catine Graham, of Currier the video-camera stands in delighting his son, Ben. Other parents House, get her A.B.—in phi- Tercentenary Theatre: a se- with College class of 2017 progeny in- losophy, and summa cum laude, curity cam? a Facebook Live no less. A big week for the device? Nothing so exotic: family: Wynne’s twin brother, Cole, merely a new robotic camera for Harvard’s graduated from Swarthmore. (Lissa’s AV/news team, capturing panoramic im- former employer—senator, secretary ages. Next year, e-tickets, anyone?

STALWARTS: The fiftieth-reunion class of 1967 is, characteristically, studded with successful leaders, some of them importantly involved with alma mater, including two Corporation members: Joseph J. O’Donnell and Jessica Tuchman Mathews. Also attending the festival rites were Harvey V. Fineberg (and M.D. ’71, M.P.P. ’72, Ph.D. ’80!) past dean of public health a nd Harvard provost, and actor John A. Lithgow, Ar.D. ’05, honored this year for founding and leading Arts First. But it is a safe bet that none of them can match the long Harvard service of Bill (okay, William R.) Fitzsimmons ’67, Ed.D. ’71, dean of admissions and financial aid since 1986 (left), who has known thousands of undergraduates from before they were undergraduates; and Thomas A. Dingman ’67, Ed.M. ’73, who as dean of freshmen has settled the newbies since 2005—the latest post in 44 years of study and administration here during the past half-century. HARVARD MAGAZINE/LC HARVARD

Harvard Magazine 19

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 JOHN HARVARD’S JOURNAL • COMMENCEMENT 2017

in public health. The bicentennial divinity candidates earned 106 degrees, and the sesquicentennial den- tists totaled five dozen plus one.

The Power of Connections Harvard boasts of the human connections it enables. Despite their combined 12 decades or so of acting, honorands Dame Judi Dench and James Earl Jones reportedly met for the first time at Commencement.

Victors and Vanquished ROSE LINCOLN/HPAC ROSE

HARVARD MAGAZINE/LC HARVARD To Latin Salutatorian Jessica (Jes- si) Rachael Glueck ’17 fell the hap- CELEBRITY SIGHTINGS: Notable guests at A PLACE FOR PRINT: As any Commencement included Uganda prime newspaper or magazine publisher py and sad obligation of reminding minister Dr. Ruhakana Rugunda and his wife, knows, Alphabet (Google) and her classmates of their triumphs Jocelyn Rugunda, present for son Kwame’s Facebook vacuum up most of the new and tragedies: Arma virosque canimus, M.P.A., and New York governor Andrew digital advertising (and a good deal of qui primi longas per noctes cum Scientia Cuomo, whose daughter Cara Kennedy-Cuomo clients’ former print dollars as well). (a government concentrator!) got her A.B. But physical product promotions live Computatoris Quinquagenta vel Scriben- on, if only in banner form, as attested do Expositoris vel Oeconomicis Decem by this welcome from the Harvard Alumni Association to graduate- and certaverunt; qui postea, iactati maximis labori- Zapping Zuck professional-school students queueing bus, theses difficillimas superaverunt.…Sunt etiam On Thursday, when it came time to con- in Sever Quad for the morning illi in corpore validi, lusores nostri pedifollis. Ut in fer degrees, Graduate School dean Xiao- exercises. Troia olim Achaici, sic in Li Meng, the rare hoc anno Elienses indigne statistician known By the Numbers illos vicerunt…. [“We for his humor, de- The University awarded 7,066 degrees and sing of arms and he- parted considerably certificates on May 25. Among the notable roes, who first fought from the script. figures were 1,541 degrees in the College through long nights Having paused to and 362 Ph.D.s. The Business School con- against Computer elicit Ph.D. candi- ferred 930 M.B.A.s; there were 857 diverse Science 50 or Exposi- dates’ cheers and Extension degrees; 720 degrees, principally tory Writing or Eco- applause, then at the master’s level, in the Graduate School nomics 10; who after- thank them for Jessi Glueck of Education; 561 degrees from the Kenne- wards, tossed about their efforts, he dy School; 781 in law (including 602 J.D.s); by the greatest labors, defeated formidable said, “To return the favor, I want to dou- 378 in engineering and applied sciences, theses.…There are also those who are strong ble-check with each of you whether you and 353 in design; 233 in medicine and 640 in body, our football players. The Yalies un- really want this degree, because many of justly conquered you realize this is your last chance to be them this year, a Harvard dropout”—a sly reference for- as the Greeks ward to Mark Zuckerberg, one among conquered un- many zingers directed at the honorand fairly at Troy and afternoon speaker (who made sev- long ago….”] eral sharp jokes at his own expense, too).

BUNDLED AND UN-: During the afternoon exercises, Wellesley and Duke president emerita Nannerl O. Keohane, LL.D. ’93, demonstrates proper late-May attire; she is concluding a dozen years of service on the Corporation—24 years after the conferral of her own Harvard honorary doctorate. Provost Alan Garber employs a little body language to diminish the wind’s chilly, wet impact. Former vice president for policy Clayton Spencer, now president of Bates College, standing to receive her Harvard Medal, braves the elements. Was this a sign of her Down East cred? she was asked later. Not at all: “I was freezing, but I didn’t have a

KRIS SNIBBE/HPAC KRIS coat.”

20 July - August 2017 www.harvardmagazine.com/commencement

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 commanding our attention by the manhunt after the Boston from Rumi. “Sell your cleverness and buy and we took our attention off Marathon bombing—and from the bewilderment.” Harvard graduates will each other. Now we are ready, kindnesses shown in each case: that change the world, one way or another, be- across the generations, to re- “love and courage trump hate and cause we’re clever. But we must be more member who we are: creatures destruction.” than that. We must be willing to become of history, of deep psychology, I have learned that the world bewildered: neither approaching a prob- of complex relationships, and can be a scary place. But I have lem arrogantly, sure that we already know of conversations artless, risky, also learned that: in the face of the answer, nor throwing up our hands and and face-to-face. The choice fear, we have a choice. Who walking away. Becoming bewildered means ahead will not be easy, but per- will we choose to be when we admitting some problems don’t have quick haps neither hard nor easy, but are presented with the oppor- fixes. It means learning from mistakes, those other opposites of easy: Auguste Jennings Roc tunity to care about, to stand learning from the other, learning what it is complex, evolved, and demanding. with, to speak up for, to give we can’t learn. It’s time to make the corrections, and take up something of ourselves as a simple act of And those are things Rumi can teach us stock of all the skills we’ll need—and of how humanity? Many of us have gone to bed in about. Rumi, an immigrant from what is little technology is going to help us unless fear—fear of discrimination, fear of depor- now Afghanistan to what is now Turkey, we remember all the things we know about tation, fear of walls and bans and rollbacks. an immigrant from the thirteenth century to life and living. We have been afraid. But, among us are the our own, a Muslim mystic. Rumi has some- courageous. I know because I’ve seen it. I’ve thing immensely valuable to tell us, but we “You Will, Because You Must” eaten next to it in the dining hall, I’ve stud- have to listen really hard for it, with humil- Former U.S. vice president Joe Biden, the College’s ied across from it in the library, I’ve walked ity, and for the rest of our lives. Class Day speaker, was relentlessly optimistic about by it in Harvard Yard. I know the mark of …[A]fter a few years here, I’m sure you’ll the prospects for the country, even as he disagreed with courage, and I’ve seen it here with you. agree that knowledge is hard. But wisdom is current political and policy decisions. But he noted So, as we prepare to graduate and walk even harder. We’ll need both…because this that the class of 2017 had an obligation it could not through those gates one final time as stu- world is complex and contradictory, and if shirk: dents, let us choose our weapons wisely. Let we’re not bewildered sometimes, we’re do- “Just this week, the Crimson reported that Courage be our defense against cowardice, ing it wrong. But we’ll go forth anyway, to 37 percent of your class who had been consid- Hope our defense against despair, Compas- change the world and also to be changed ering a job in the federal government changed sion our defense against destruction. by it, to write our own books. Those books your minds in the wake of last year’s election. Let’s choose Love as our ultimate defense may be made of paper or published digitally, Forgive me, but I think that’s the wrong reac- against fear, because in the face of fear, lies or…may simply be the legacy of the acts that tion. You have an obligation to get engaged. the golden opportunity to shift the narrative make up a life. Regardless of their form, your You have the capacity to make things change. by being someone who is willing to walk a books will be good books if you are willing It’s within your wheelhouse to do it.” six-year-old to a safe place, through a hole to be bewildered, if you take on this messy, He concluded with an admonition from his former in a chain-link fence.… tragic, lovely world and confront its prob- philosophy professor: lems in good faith. As if I was supposed to know, he said, On Being “Bewildered at Harvard” “Remember what Plato said, Joe.” And I was Graduate English orator Walter Edward Smelt III, “Our Wild Rumpus of Ideas” thinking, what in the hell does that mean? M.T.S. ’17, gave an address that was seemingly about In her Commencement afternoon remarks, Presi- Plato said, “The penalty that good people his love of books and libraries. But he took a differ- dent Drew Faust talked about free speech. She was pay for not being involved in politics is being ent direction, toward a larger mean- mindful that “recently, we can see governed by people worse than themselves.” ing—and along the way drew upon here at Harvard how our inatten- Let me say that again. The penalty that good a source that might seem subversive tiveness to the power and appeal of people pay for not being involved in poli- in an age of immigration bans and conservative voices left much of our tics is being governed by people worse than border walls. An excerpt: community astonished—blindsid- themselves. So you have to engage. You have [S]ome problems just come ed by the outcome of last fall’s elec- to be involved, even in this dirty business of with being human, and they tion. We must work to ensure that politics, you have to, for your own safety’s need to be confronted again universities do not become bubbles sake. And I have no doubt you will, because by each generation. No new isolated from the concerns and dis- you must. technology, no printing press or course of the society that surrounds app, is going to settle the prob- them.” But she was also concerned “The World Can Be a Scary Place” lem of greed, or death, or hate. Walter Edward about other aspects of speech on the In “When We Fall in One Piece,” Senior English ora- And at the Divinity School, we Smelt III contemporary campus. An excerpt: tor Auguste (Gussie) Jennings Roc ’17 spoke of what think about these problems, Campus conflicts over in- she’d learned from two terrifying experiences—be- and about how people have dealt with them vited speakers are hardly new. ing blown out of her Lower Manhattan apartment, through the ages, and how to do what right Yet the vehemence with which these is- on the first day of first grade, by the cataclysm of 9/11; we can in the face of all that’s wrong. sues have been debated in recent months not and having her Harvard Visitas weekend shut down As it happens, that reminds me of a line just on campuses but in the broader public

Harvard Magazine 21

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 JOHN HARVARD’S JOURNAL • COMMENCEMENT 2017 entation, nationality—that may have made nationalism. Forces for the flow of knowl- them uncertain about their right to be here edge, trade, and immigration against those in the first place. Demonstrating such fear- who would slow them down. This is not lessness is hard; no one should be mocked a battle of nations, it’s a battle of ideas. as a snowflake for finding it so. There are people in every country for glob- Hard, but important and attainable….But al connection and good people against it. the price of free speech cannot be charged This isn’t going to be decided at the UN, ei- just to those most likely to become its target. ther. It’s going to happen at the local level, We must…nurture the courage and humility when enough of us feel a sense of purpose that our commitment to unfettered debate and stability in our own lives that we can demands from all of us. And that courage open up and start caring about everyone. means not only resilience in face of chal- The best way to do that is to start building lenge or attack, but strength to speak out local communities right now. against injustices directed at others as well. And with barely controlled emotion, he related this story from one of his own communities: President Drew Faust “A Battle of Ideas” Remember when I told you about that Mark Zuckerberg exhorted the Tercentenary Theatre class I taught at the Boys and Girls Club? sphere suggests there is something distinc- crowd (and several million Facebook followers) “to One day after class I was talking to them tive about this moment. Certainly these con- create a world where everyone has a sense of pur- about college, and one of my top students troversies reflect a highly polarized political pose: by taking on big meaningful projects together, raised his hand and said he wasn’t sure he and social environment—perhaps the most by redefining equality so everyone has the freedom to could go because he’s undocumented…. divisive since the era of the Civil War. And… pursue purpose, and by building community across the Last year I took him out to breakfast for his free-speech debates have provided a fertile world.” The scope of the challenges he identified would birthday. I wanted to get him a present, so I substrate into which anger and disagree- fit well with Joe Biden’s exhortation for Americans to asked him and he started talking about stu- ment could be planted to nourish partisan think big; on equality alone, he said: dents he saw struggling and said, “You know, outrage and generate media clickbait. But We should have a society that measures I’d really just like a book on social justice.” that is only a partial explanation. progress not just by economic metrics like I was blown away. Here’s a young guy who Universities themselves have changed GDP, but by how many of us have a role we has every reason to be cynical. He didn’t dramatically in recent years, reaching be- find meaningful. We should explore ideas know if the country he calls home—the only yond their traditional, largely homogeneous like universal basic income to give everyone one he’s known—would deny him his dream populations to become more diverse than per- a cushion to try new things. We’re going to of going to college. But he wasn’t feeling sorry haps any other institution in which Ameri- change jobs many times, so we need afford- for himself. He wasn’t even thinking of him- cans find themselves living together.…Harvard able childcare to get to work and healthcare self. He has a greater sense of purpose, and College is now half female, majority minority, that aren’t tied to one company. We’re all go- he’s going to bring people along with him. religiously pluralistic, with nearly 60 percent ing to make mistakes, so we need a society It says something about our current situa- of students able to attend because of financial that focuses less on locking us up or stigma- tion that I can’t even say his name because I aid.…[Yet many] of our students struggle to tizing us. And as technology keeps chang- don’t want to put him at risk. But if a high- feel full members of this community…in which ing, we need to focus more on continuous school senior who doesn’t know what the people like them have so recently arrived. education throughout our lives. future holds can do his part to move the They seek evidence and assurance that—to Acknowledging the current distemper, he said: world forward, then we owe it to the world borrow the title of a powerful theatrical piece [W]e live in an unstable time. There are to do our part too. created by a group of our African-American people left behind by students—…they, too, are Harvard. globalization across Mark Zuckerberg The price of our commitment to freedom the world. It’s hard of speech is paid disproportionately by these to care about people students. For them, free speech has not in- in other places if we frequently included enduring a question- don’t feel good about ing of their abilities, their humanity, their our lives here at morality—their very legitimacy here. Our home. There’s pres- values and our theory of education rest on sure to turn inwards. the assumption that members of our com- This is the strug- munity will…actively compete in our wild gle of our time. rumpus of argument and ideas. It requires The forces of free- them as well to be fearless in face of argu- dom, openness, and ment or challenge or even verbal insult. And global community it expects that fearlessness even when the against the forces challenge is directed to the very identity— of authoritarianism, race, religion, gender, ethnicity, sexual ori- isolationism, and

22 July - August 2017 www.harvardmagazine.com/commencement

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 John Harvard's Journal News Briefs HARVARD PORTRAIT Graduate-Student Unionization Following the National Labor Relations Board’s (NLRB) tentative decision in April to order new balloting in the Harvard Grad- uate Student Union-United Auto Workers campaign to organize graduate students, the University filed an objection. The path forward remains unclear: a new election could take place as early as next fall, or, if the case gets tied up in more legal hearings, much later, or not at all. In April, the hearing officer ruled that Harvard had excluded from its eligible voter list many students who should have been able to vote in last November’s election, and thus a new election should take place if the final vote count does not result in a union victory. That decision has not yet been approved by the NLRB’s Boston regional director. The union has argued that Harvard’s exclusion of some eligible students from the voter list created confusion over eligibility and discouraged voting. In rebuttal, Harvard spokesperson Anna Cowenhoven wrote in a statement: “Ques- tions about the list of eligible voters—the basis for the Harvard Graduate Students Union-United Auto Workers (HGSU- UAW) claim for a new election—ignore the facts. Thousands of students voted, including a majority of those found by the NLRB Sarah Lewis Hearing Officer to have been omitted from the voter list, and most of those ballots have Sarah Lewis ’01 remembers being approached by painter Jacob Lawrence while on already been counted. Students were highly a family visit to the Museum of Modern Art in New York. “I was very young—tiny—and engaged, and after nearly two years of orga- I remember him breaking away from whatever storied crowd was around him, just to nizing on campus by the HGSU-UAW, thou- say hi to this African-American family in the museum.” Lewis’s parents weren’t artists sands voted in the November 2016 election— themselves, but “They made sure I understood the importance of African-American a majority in opposition to unionization.” culture.” Now assistant professor of history of art and architecture and African Amer- Harvard’s protracted election process ican studies, Lewis grew up with interests in painting, photography, and dance, thinking now increasingly resembles those else- she’d continue them at the College. Instead, she was drawn to the social and political where. At Yale, where a majority of students dimensions of the arts. Her clarity of thought on race in the arts has earned her pub- in some departments voted to unionize, or- lic recognition rare for her field. In her course “Vision and Justice,” students look at ganizers undertook a hunger strike in an at- daguerreotypes commissioned by Harvard naturalist Louis Agassiz, who attempted to tempt to force the administration to begin prove different races were descended from different lineages. “The categories of race contract negotiations. Yale has challenged and citizenship are deeply tied to the category of aesthetics,” Lewis explains. “These were photographs that were instrumentalized for racial science.” While working on her Ph.D. at Yale, she came upon a previously unstudied speech by Frederick Douglass, IN THIS ISSUE who lived during the birth of both racial science and photography. Douglass antici- pated the power of that new medium not just to dehumanize, but also to “read African 24 Yesterday’s News Americans back into the human family,” Lewis argues with arresting precision, her 25 University People self-possession mirroring Douglass’s own. This was why he became the most photo- 27 Brevia graphed American man of the nineteenth century: “Not the most photographed Af- 29 The Undergraduate rican-American man—the most photographed American man.” vmarina bolotnikova 31 Spring Sports

Photograph by Stu Rosner Harvard Magazine 23

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 John Harvard's Journal the legitimacy of the department-by-department balloting and has asked the national Yesterday’s News office of the NLRB to review its case; if the From the pages of the Harvard Alumni Bulletin and Harvard Magazine board agrees to hear it, that could put cases at Harvard and elsewhere on hold. Finally, a reconstituted NLRB under President Don- 1932 Guided by meteorologists’ ad- 1962 U.S. Secretary of Defense ald Trump might revoke the right of private vice to find a spot in the lee of a large Robert S. McNamara, M.B.A. ’39, is university students to unionize, rendering lake—to avoid the cumulus clouds typical awarded an honorary doctor of laws the elections at Harvard and other univer- of New England August afternoons—the degree: “With vigor and courage he sities moot. 17-member Harvard Eclipse Expedition directs our nation’s huge responsibility Read more at harvardmag.com/union- sets up camp east of Lake Sebago, in Gray, for the free world’s defense.” appeal-17. vmarina bolotnikova Maine, and successfully completes its scientific studies of the August 31 total solar 1967 The major Harvard and Rad- Diversifying the Faculties eclipse. cliffe Commencement speakers, Edwin A decade ago, more than two-thirds of O. Reischauer, Ph.D. ’39, and Barbara tenured professors and nearly one-half of 1942 The path from University Hall to Tuchman ’33, criticize U.S. policies to- tenure-track professors at Harvard were Johnston Gate has been widened by the ward Asia in general and the Vietnam white men. Since then, the composition of Navy to accommodate formations of War in particular in their addresses. the faculty has evolved considerably, most marching men from the Harvard Naval notably among tenured professors: 25.8 per- Training School. 1972 Among going-away gifts recent are women and 18.8 percent are minori- ceived by retiring Radcliffe president ties, up from 20.5 percent and 12.6 percent in 1947 Members of the newly formed Mary Bunting is a specially bred purple 2008. The share of tenured underrepresented Harvard Youth for Democracy stage a cow (the product of a Charolais-Holstein minorities, including African Americans and protest outside the Old South Meeting cross) for her New Hampshire farm. Latinos (Harvard has no Native American House in Boston at a July 13 speech by professors), increased to 7.7 percent from 5 the anti-Semite Gerald L.K. Smith. The On the twenty-fifth anniversary of the an- percent in the same period. 35 students picket the Meeting House nouncement of the Marshall Plan, If these changes sound small, that with signs reading “No Free Speech to West German chancellor Willy is because faculty turnover is Preach Murder.” Brandt, LL.D. ’63, announces slow. Harvard has added 49 the creation of the German tenure-track and 42 tenured 1957 The proprietors of all stores in Marshall Fund in a speech at faculty members this year, the block slated to become Holyoke Cen- Sanders Theatre. The new within a total body of just ter are invited to meet with the Univer- fund will underwrite academ- under 1,500. “With the fac- sity’s planning coordinator and the dean ic and scientific programs to ulty not changing in size, and of the Design School; they are assured stimulate American involve- very few retirements, this ac- that Harvard proposes to render every ment in European questions and tually reflects a real push on the assistance possible during construction to promote mutual cooperation. part of the leadership of the Univer- and to grant them space in the new build- sity,” says senior vice provost Judith Singer, ing once it is completed. 2002 who directs the office of faculty development Harvard agrees to participate in the and diversity. Harvard’s schools hire one fac- “Scholars at Risk Network,” which offers ulty member at a time, and recruitment is temporary positions to scholars threat- a very intensive activity. Of tenure-track ened in their homelands; the University and tenured appointees made in 2015-2016, will host researchers from Iran and Ethi- 19 percent are minority men, 16 percent mi- opia in the new academic year. nority women, 22 percent white women, and 43 percent white men.

24 July - August 2017 Illustration by Mark Steele

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 University People Kaneb professor of national security and professor of computer science; Rachel I. military affairs. The council’s Marquand Wilson, Martin Family professor of ba- Top Teachers… Prize for exceptional advising and coun- sic research in the field of neurobiology; The Faculty of Arts and seling was conferred on and Junying Yuan, Hay professor of cell Sciences has conferred Gregory Bruich, lec- biology. five-year Harvard Col- turer on economics; lege Professorships—its Avik Chatterjee, tu- A Pulitzer Passel highest honor for under- tor in Currier House; Winners of Pulitzer Priz-

graduate teaching, advis- MITCHELL/HPAC STEPHANIE and Gregg Peeples, es this year include David

ing, and mentoring—on Amanda Allston Burr assistant MITCHELL/HPAC STEPHANIE Fahrenthold ’00, of The Amanda Claybaugh, Ze- Claybaugh dean, Winthrop House. Stephen Washington Post, for his cov- Rosen

murray Stone Radcliffe The Graduate Student erage of the presidential COURTESY OF FAHRENTHOLD DAVID professor of English (see Harvard Por- Council’s Mendelsohn Excellence in Men- election campaign; nov- David trait, May-June 2012, page toring Award was conferred on García- elist Colson Whitehead Fahrenthold 42)—a previous winner Peña (making her a two-time honorand); ’91, for The Underground of the Graduate Student Barbara Grosz, Higgins professor of natu- Railroad (read a full pro- Council’s award for excel- ral sciences; Jerry Mitrovica, Baird profile, “A Literary Chame- lence in mentoring; Me- fessor of science (featured in “The Plastic leon,” from the Septem- lissa Franklin, Mallinck- Earth,” September-October 2016, page 46); ber-October 2016 issue,

COURTESY OF MELISSA FRANKLIN rodt professor of physics Ahmed Ragab, Watson associate profes- page 32); Loeb associate

Melissa (see “Learning by Doing,” sor of science and religion; and Xiaofei professor of the social WHITEHEAD COLSON OF COURTESY Franklin May-June 2014, page 18); Tian, professor of Chinese sciences Matthew Des- Colson Gonzalo Giribet, professor of organismic literature. Finally, Elena mond, in nonfiction, for Whitehead and evolutionary biology; Marko Loncar, Kramer, Bussey professor Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City Lin professor of electrical engineering—a of organismic and evo- (profiled in “Disrupted Lives,” January- prior winner of the Undergraduate Coun- lutionary biology (she is February 2014, page 38); cil’s Levenson Memorial Teaching Prize; also department chair and composer Du Yun, Ph.D.

and Tommie Shelby, Titcomb professor MITCHELL/HPAC STEPHANIE a Harvard College Profes- ’06, for Angel’s Bone; and, of African and African American studies Xiaofei sor), and Martin Nowak, for their part in teams and of philosophy. Tian professor of mathematics recognized for collabor- and of biology, received the Cox Prize for ative work, David Sanger

…and Other Outstanding Instructors Excellence in Science Teaching (which is CHASE/HPAC JON ’82, of The New York Times, David Cox, assistant professor of molec- accompanied by a $10,000 personal award Matthew in international reporting ular and cellular biology and $40,000 in support for teaching and Desmond for work on Vladimir Pu- and of computer science, research). tin’s projection of Russian power abroad, and Lorgia García-Peña, and Peter Newbatt Smith ’83 and Rich- assistant professor of Ro- Special Scientists ard P. Sia ’75, staff members of the Interna- mance languages and lit- Faculty members newly elected to the Na- tional Consortium of Investigative Journal- eratures and of history tional Academy of Sciences include David ists, recognized for explanatory reporting JON CHASE/HPAC JON and literature, were hon- Charbonneau, professor of astronomy (see on the Panama Papers. Details and links ored with the Abramson David Harvard Portrait, March-April 2008, page are available at harvardmagazine.com/ Award for outstanding Cox 57); Noam D. Elkies, professor of math- pulitzers-17. undergraduate teach- ematics; David D. Ginty, ing and their sensitivity and accessibility Lefler professor of neuro- to undergraduates. The Undergraduate biology; Barbara B. Kahn, Council’s Levenson Memorial Teaching Minot professor of medi- Prize was conferred on Oliver Knill, pre- cine; Ariel Pakes, Thom- ceptor in mathematics; Anna Klales, pre- as professor of economics; ceptor in physics; and Stephen Rosen, Madhu Sudan, McKay

OVERSEERS’ LEADERS: Scott A. Abell ’72, past president of the Harvard Alumni Association, has been elected president of the Board of Overseers for 2017-2018, and Tracy P. Palandjian ’93, M.B.A. ’97, will serve as vice chair of the executive committee. The service will conclude their six-year terms as Overseers. They succeed Kenji Yoshino ’91, and Nicole Parent Haughey ’93, respectively. COURTESY OF SCOTT A. ABELL PALANDJIAN AND TRACY P.

Harvard Magazine 25

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

Pending Business: could be hired at a time of fiscal constraint. Harris therefore withdrew the motion at Maths the May 2 FAS meeting, pending further dis- The academic year ended cussion with the mathematicians and refine- with two important matters ment of the proposal. Presumably, the issues affecting undergraduates’ Har- will return this fall—making for a sprint to vard lives—intellectual and so- the following academic year, when students cial—left very much pending. begin selecting courses to fulfill their new At its April 4 meeting, the gen-ed requirements. vj.s.r. Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) discussed a reconceived Pending Business: empirical and mathematical reasoning requirement under Social Organizations the revised undergraduate Separately, at the May 2 meeting, FAS Program in General Educa- members adopted changes to the Harvard Col- tion, which takes effect in the lege Handbook for Students for the 2017-2018 aca- fall of 2018—and introduced a demic year—an annual routine. “In keeping new Harvard acronym, TwD, with the University’s articulation of belong- for “Thinking with Data,” re- ing and inclusion,” gendered pronouns will flecting a bent toward data sci- be rendered gender-neutral. Other passages ence (see harvardmag.com/ concerned Expos, advanced standing, email mathreq-17). accounts and email privacy, and the new gen- Dean of undergraduate edu- ed requirements (with a caveat: “Until the cation Jay M. Harris present- new Quantitative Facility requirement is ed the report of the commit- finalized and takes effect, students must tee charged with refining the complete the current Empirical Mathemati- course, which asserted that cal Reasoning requirement”). Separate lan- all Harvard undergraduates guage addressed marijuana (given the Mas- “should be able to understand, sachusetts law permitting recreational use interpret, and manipulate the for adults); smoking (of tobacco, including An evolving, and increasingly tenured, professoriate data they will encounter in vaping); and final examinations in absentia. emerges from these data published by the office of the their lives beyond the Univer- But the Handbook remains silent about the senior vice provost for faculty development and sity, as well as comprehend the controversial new policy on student mem- diversity. “URM” means underrepresented minority. basic quantitative concepts bership in unrecognized single-gender so- More data and details appear at faculty.harvard.edu. that are essential to many ac- cial organizations (USGSOs, such as final ademic disciplines, across all clubs, fraternities, and sororities), the sub- Diversity still varies widely at the depart- the divisions.” The proposed “arc” of the ject of divisive FAS debate for most of the mental level. “The [Faculty of Arts and Sci- required course options envisioned five ac- year (see “Social-Club Saga,” May-June, page ences] divisions that are doing particularly tions students would take in learning to 18). It denies members of USGSOs the re- well are, not surprisingly, the places where work with data: “‘Ask, Get, Analyze, Iter- quired College recommendations for pres- the graduate-student pools are themselves ate, and Communicate’ with consideration tigious scholarships and fellowships, and more diverse,” Singer says. The arts and of ethical issues embedded in each step.” prohibits leadership positions in recognized humanities division has the University’s Harris asked that an implementation com- clubs and athletic teams. Students who seek largest fraction of tenure-track women: mittee be authorized to proceed. such recommendations or leadership posi- 63 percent. The schools of education and But faculty members raised several con- tions must affirm that they do not belong to divinity have relatively high shares of un- cerns. Those in mathematics, engineering, such groups. Alleged untruthfulness would derrepresented minority faculty members, and applied sciences (including applied be subject to review by the Honor Council, reflecting the makeup of Ph.D. programs mathematics) found the proposal too fo- created by the faculty to hear cases of aca- in those fields. Singer also gives credit to cused on data science at the expense of demic misconduct (cheating on examina- high achievers in fields that typically aren’t math, logic, and related disciplines. Some tions, plagiarism, and so on). as diverse. Women represent 46 percent of speakers worried that finding nearly 1,700 Both the policy and its implementation tenure-track faculty in FAS’s science divi- seats annually might prove infeasible, par- are under review, but for now, it remains sion, for example: “That is really high.” In ticularly when nearly half of entering stu- in effect for freshmen arriving this August. the school of engineering and applied sci- dents each year require extra help in entry- They would not join USGSOs during their ences, underrepresented minorities now level calculus. Among the issues are who first months on campus, in any event—but make up 15 percent of tenure-track faculty. will teach (faculty members, or adjuncts they would still be affected by the rule be- Additional details are available at har- or preceptors, as in Expository Writing), cause the affirmation requires that students vardmag.com/facdiversity-17. vm.b. and whether sufficiently skilled teachers attest that they have not been a member of a

26 July - August 2017

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 English, Enlarged On Other Campuses Beginning this fall, new English concen- MIT’s The Engine, a venture-capital and trators will be required to fulfill a “diver- Brevia accelerator initiative aiming to support sity in literature” requirement. The lan- local startups in biotechnology, robotics, guage of the faculty’s proposal “asks our medical devices, and related fields, with a students to engage with the facility in Central Square, has ongoing histories of patriarchy, attracted some $150 million in empire, and heteronormativ- initial funding. The institute ity in and through literature” contributed $25 million; the by “encountering the creative balance came from outside in- achievements associated with vestors.…The Stanford Board alternative traditions, counter- of Trustees visited Harvard publics, and archives of dis- and MIT during its April resent.” The topics will include, treat. A Stanford News report among others, “the historical said that during their Harvard construction of markers of dif- day, the trustees heard presen- ference such as race, ethnici- tations on sustaining the arts, ty, class, gender, and sexual- humanities, and social scienc- ity” and “the imaginative and es alongside physical sciences formal innovations produced and engineering. At MIT, they by disenfranchised groups.” learned about the application of Qualifying courses (which in- digital technologies to teaching clude “Early Women Writers,” and learning; entrepreneurship; “The Rhetoric of Frederick nanoscience; urban studies; and Douglass and Abraham Lin- the social implications of tech- coln,” “Global Fictions,” and nology.…Yale’s pilot program others) will be so designated; of applying a carbon charge to over time, the requirement is 20 campus buildings proved ef- expected to affect the design of fective in reducing carbon emis- other courses. Separately, Yale sions, according to an initial overhauled its English require- assessment.…Duke’s arts and ments this year, too; students sciences faculty tabled a pro- will be expected to gain expo- posed revision of the under- sure to literature from more graduate curriculum, according periods, and the department to Inside Higher Education; the ef- HEADS OF HOUSES. Martignetti professor of philosophy will also increase the number Sean D. Kelly and senior lecturer on philosophy Sheryl Chen fort sought, among other goals, of courses featuring works by have been appointed faculty deans of Dunster House; they to simplify complicated course women, people of color, and succeed Roger Porter and the late Ann Porter (who died on requirements and to “rethink May 17 after health challenges accelerated unexpectedly). authors from non-English- Kelly led the recent overhaul of the undergraduate general- our vision for disciplinarity as speaking countries who wrote education curriculum (see harvardmag.com/gened-rev-15). embodied by the curriculum,” in the language—a concerted The couple have two sons, Ben and Nathaniel. Lakshminara but has not yet attracted the effort to reflect the diversity of yanan “Maha” Mahadevan, who is England de Valpine desired degree of consensus to professor of applied mathematics, of organismic and Anglophone literature. evolutionary biology, and of physics, and Amala Mahadevan, a proceed to a vote. senior scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution Guggenheim Fellows and faculty member at MIT, have been appointed faculty Nota Bene deans of Mather House; they succeed Christie McDonald and The John Simon Guggenheim Michael D. Rosengarten. Maha’s research was featured in Admit them…And they will ap- Memorial Foundation has con- “The Physics of the Familiar,” the magazine’s March-April parently come: the College referred fellowships for the com- 2008 cover story (the year before he won a MacArthur ported that nearly 84 percent of ing year on faculty members Fellowship), and in many articles since. The couple’s children, applicants offered admission to Aditya and Kausaly, both attend Harvard College. Adriaan Lanni, Touroff-Glueck the class of 2021 have accepted: professor of law; Martin Puch- the highest “yield” since 1969, ner, Wien professor of drama and of Eng- uate program in theater, dance, and media when 83.1 percent of invited class of ’73 lish and comparative literature (Harvard (see the report in the May-June 2016 issue, members opted for Cambridge. Portrait, May-June 2013, page 50); and Na- page 18), will also be resident at the Cull- tasha Warikoo, associate professor of edu- man Center for Scholars and Writers at the …Or not. As this issue went to press, The cation. Puchner, who chairs the undergrad- New York Public Library during the year. Harvard Crimson on June 4 reported on a

Photograph (top) by Stephanie Mitchell/HPAC; Harvard Magazine 27 (bottom) Courtesy of Lakshminarayanan Mahadevan and Amala Mahadevan Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 John Harvard's Journal

LEADING LAWYER. John F. Manning, Bromley professor of law, has been ic year are 11 Harvard affiliates, including appointed dean of Harvard Law School, Pforzheimer University Professor and effective July 1, succeeding Martha University Library director emeritus Rob- Minow. A member of the faculty since 2004, Manning, a scholar of public law, ert Darnton; former U.S. ambassador to teaches on subjects ranging from the United Nations Samantha Power; and administrative law to statutory interpre- former Law School dean Martha Minow. tation. Read more at harvardmag.com/ hlsdean-17. The complete roster is available at harvardmag.com/rias-fellows-17. ing levels of difficulty. Whether the idea takes hold or not, it is indicative of chang- Arts in academia. ing criteria (such as making standardized Dan Byers, previously

STEPHANIE MITCHELL/HPAC STEPHANIE tests optional) and methods of assessment senior curator at the In- darker side of memes (the subject of The spreading across the admissions landscape. stitute of Contemporary Undergraduate column, opposite): the Art/Boston, has been ap- College’s decision to withdraw offers Earnings update. Harvard’s annual dis- pointed Robinson Fami- JON CHASE/HPAC JON of admission to members of the class of closure for the fiscal year ending June 30, ly director of the Carpen- Dan Byers 2021 who shared explicit and derogatory 2016, reveals that President Drew Faust ter Center for the Visual memes “mocking sexual assault, the Ho- earned $1, 404,848—up from $816,370 in the Arts. Separately, Damian locaust, and the deaths of children” in a prior year—reflecting $536, 449 of deferred Woetzel, M.P.A. ’07, a for- closed Facebook group. compensation awarded for “exceptional mer principal dancer with service” and to “encourage retention” during the New York City Ballet Admitting them…The Mastery Tran- the years from 2012 through 2014, plus accrued (and visiting lecturer at

script Consortium, comprising more than investment earnings on the payments, which Harvard Law School), has BAIANO ERIN 100 private schools nationwide—includ- vested and were paid out in 2015. Harvard been appointed president Damian ing elite institutions such as the Dalton Management Company’s departed president of the Juilliard School. Woetzel School, Cranbrook Schools, and the Phil- and chief executive officerStephen Blyth lips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts— was paid $14.9 million. Full details appear Harvard Law’s ladder. After a three- has proposed doing away with traditional at harvardmag.com/earnings-17. year trial run at the College, the Law School high-school transcripts. Instead, members is extending its Junior Deferral Program. propose that students present evidence Radcliffe fellows. Among the Rad- Beginning this fall, any college junior can of proficiency in diverse skills at vary- cliffe Institute’s 52 fellows next academ- apply for admission; acceptances will be conditioned on successful graduation and ADAMS HOUSE ON DECK. Even as the two-year reconstruction of Lowell House a minimum of two years of work, study, or gets under way (the picture shows the former Harvard Community Garden, research or fellowship opportunities. Be- established in 2010, which has yielded to a staging area for the work), Faculty of Arts and Sciences dean Michael D. Smith announced that architects will begin drawing up yond maintaining a strong pool of appli- plans for the renewal of Adams House, the next undergraduate residence to be cants in an increasingly competitive envi- updated and reconfigured for the twenty-first century. The work would not begin ronment, the program encourages students SILVIA MAZZOCCHIN/HPAC SILVIA before 2019; read who study science, engineering, and related more at harvardmag. fields to consider preparing for legal careers. com/adams-redo-17. HARVARD MAGAZINE/LC HARVARD

28 July - August 2017

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 USGSO for a year prior to assuming a lead- struction in any of thousands of courses for offer 15 to 20 online degree programs by the ership role or accepting a scholarship, and which the content is relevant. It also yields end of 2019, including master’s degrees in that they will not join a USGSO in the year more applications from Harvard’s extensive innovation and entrepreneurship, and in ac- following. Pending the outcome of the pol- investment in developing and posting the counting. Both ventures illustrate how on- icy review, these matters may come before online courses, which can easily amount line programs are taking a more professional FAS again in the fall—an outcome most fac- to tens of thousands of dollars or more per tilt, more oriented toward revenue (compa- ulty members would probably like to avoid. new offering. rable to HBX and HMX, from the business vj.s.r. and jonathan shaw In other online developments, edX—the and medical schools; see harvardmag.com/ Harvard-MIT-led consortium and tech- hmx-17 for additional details)—a mission nology platform through which HarvardX distinctly different from HarvardX’s nonde- Education, Ever More Online distributes its online courses—in April gree, liberal-arts brief and its predominantly HarvardX, the online course initiative, has launched a “Professional Certificate” pro- free distribution. begun piloting the disaggregation of con- gram for career-related courses created by Taking market logic one step further, also tents—course videos, recorded lectures, companies and edX-affiliated universities. in April, Purdue announced its acquisition illustrations, and exercises—so profes- The programs, lasting two to six months of Kaplan University—the credential-issu- sors across the University can search them (and thus shorter than MicroMasters, in ing operation of the Kaplan higher-eduction and incorporate them into their classroom which students begin online and then trans- business, encompassing 32,000 students at teaching as of this fall. The HarvardDART fer to on-campus instruction), are explic- 15 campus locations. Purdue has announced (Digital Assets for Reuse in Teaching) tool itly related to career applications. Among that it intends to create a nonprofit, online thus makes it possible to repurpose material them are “Data Science for Executives” from university, operating under Purdue’s name, heretofore available only through full edX Columbia, “Retail and Omnichannel Man- that focuses primarily on adult learners. online courses—advancing the goal of ap- agement,” from Dartmouth, and “Microsoft About 85 percent of those Kaplan students plying discoveries from online teaching and Professional Program in Data Science,” from are in fully online programs; the rest are in hy- learning, through the dozens of full cours- Microsoft. Meanwhile, Coursera, a for-prof- brid (online and classroom) settings. vj.s.r. es now in existence, to campus-based in- it competitor to edX, announced a plan to

THE UNDERGRADUATE Our Memes, Ourselves by matthew browne ’17

stare at a stock photo on my Face- tive Teens, to Yale Memes for Special Snow- book feed of a blond woman leaning flake Teens. The groups are forums dedicat- over an infant, both caught in a de- ed to sharing memes—a reference-heavy sort lighted gaze. The generic rendering of humor that’s grown up on Internet social- Iof motherly bliss has been repurposed into media platforms—related to each university. a two-panel comic, with text Photoshopped It’s essentially a big game of passing inside on top. In first panel, the infant says “M-m- jokes back and forth, isolating quirks of col- m-,” and the elated mother reacts, “Oh my legiate culture and exploiting them for fun. among friends, or an op-ed in the Crimson. god! The baby! He’s saying his first words! On-campus recruiting by financial and Now, an accompanying flood of memes adds Mama? Mom? Mommy?” In the second consulting firms is just one of dozens of pop- another layer of commentary. By providing panel, the infant finishes: “McKinsey and ular targets in HMFEOPT. To scroll through a space for people to share such observa- Company.” the group is to wade through a swift current tions, HMFEOPT has become the site of a This is just one of the hundreds of images of allusions to all corners of Harvard life, new type of dialogue on campus. I come across while scrolling through Har- from the particulars of swiping into certain This subculture of wry analysis has vard Memes for Elitist 1% Tweens. HMFE- dining halls, to the challenges of catching grown alongside concerns about how to OPT, as its users abbreviate it, is a Facebook the Quad shuttle, to the seeming impossibil- create a school-wide dialogue on difficult group started in February that’s become a ity of getting a good night’s sleep. No school issues. Generating such a dialogue is partic- phenomenon on campus, one in a string of norm is safe from being identified as a trope ularly difficult at Harvard, where students such groups cropping up at schools this year, and turned into a punch line. In the past, the spread themselves thin across dizzying ar- from UC Berkeley Memes for Edgy Teens, to only analysis you might get of a slice of Har- rays of commitments, academic and other- Brown Dank Stash of Memes for Unproduc- vard life might be a conversation, in person wise, and social organizations tend to di-

Memes by Lydia Carmichael/Harvard Magazine Harvard Magazine 29

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 John Harvard's Journal vide the student body into self-selected, happening on cam- experience, when a like-minded groups. As a result, for better pus that night. The meme has sparked or for worse, HMFEOPT might be the clos- student writes that a more substantive est thing we currently have to a campus- he’s “heard about conversation, it al- wide forum. As of this writing, the group a couple things,” ways circles back to has 27,463 members. (This exceeds the total to which Khurana how “right” a meme College population because current group responds, “lol like got it. Memes make members can accept requests from any Face- a party with alco- different people book user who wants to join.) It’s difficult to hol and music?” aware of their com- estimate exactly how many undergraduates and then adds, mon experience. If a use the group, but that total suggests that a “how about u slide into some elegant attire meme takes a critical perspective on some is- large number do. Any of these thousands of & read Chaucer out loud w me as we dine sue, it can bring opinions to the surface that members can post memes, making HMFE- over HUDS food @ the dhall?” About 1,000 individuals may otherwise have kept to them- OPT a centralized, crowd-sourced trove of people liked this meme. By my count, about selves, thinking they were alone. Memes can chatter that cuts across the student body. 20 other Chaucer memes that day received be politically constructive when they amplify While much of the content addresses more than 100 likes. discussions in real life—though the thrust of inane topics, the group has also been a site By liking these memes, sending them to the conversation tends to be about the joy and for sharing memes about a slew of charged friends, commenting on them, and creat- ingenuity of the humor. issues. Following the release of the final ing their own in response, HMFEOPT’s report of the College’s Implementation members were participating in an oblique If you follow the group regularly, it’s Committee for the Policy on Member- discussion of campus politics, but it’s hard hard to stop noticing, in real time, those mo- ship in Single Gender Social Organizations to tell where such conversations go. Yes, ments it skewers. When a friend I haven’t (see harvardmag.com/usgso-implement-17), HMFEOPT’s inundation with Chaucer seen in a while suggests that we grab lunch members seized on one particular sentence memes showed students that their class- sometime to catch up and we never do, I that proposed, as a theoretical alternative to mates thought the administration was out think of the meme of a skeleton sitting on final clubs and Greek organizations, a pro- of touch. But to what ends? The group seems a park bench, captioned “Still waiting to gram of College-recognized Inter-House to give its members the ability to ridicule the ‘catch a meal sometime.’” When the over- Dining Societies: “Societies might set spe- committee’s report only at a strange angle bearing competition on campus starts to cial themes for some of their meals, purchase that revels in lunacy and doesn’t necessar- make me feel down, I think of the meme of special desserts, invite special guests, eat in ily translate to building a robust critique. the definition of “self-esteem” with the cap- elegant attire, read Chaucer out loud, or any- This is what’s perplexing about HMFEOPT. tion, “Since y’all Harvard kids know everything else they might enjoy.” The idea that Because so many people use the group, it thing, what’s this?” Chaucer could compete with final clubs’ remains tempting to think that the memes To feel as if you’re often receiving your exclusivity and lavish parties was ripe for might represent the desired—if idiosyncrat- experience of the world through pre-digest- a meme encapsulating the feeling that the ic—inclusive discussion about Harvard. But ed tropes produces contradictory effects. administration was out of touch with its if HMFEOPT does represent a new forum of It can make your experiences feel hollow, students. cross-campus discourse, it’s one fueled by as if they don’t have the unique, authen- That day, students flocked to HFMEOPT hyper-ironic playfulness. Any criticism that tic imprint that you romantically imagine to see how creative- has teeth is a fringe they might. But the memes are also popular, ly their classmates benefit. I think, because they generate the affirma- could spin the joke. Still, at least one tion that comes with being recognized and Theories developed aspect of memes understood. Your reactions to the often ab- about dean of Har- makes me optimistic. surd conditions of life at Harvard are vali- vard College Rakesh Like all observational dated by other people who see some of the Khurana and his humor, they create a same things and feel some of the same ways. secret love of the loop of recognition. Maybe paying attention to our tropes can fourteenth-centu- The humor comes work toward socially productive ends. But, ry poet. Never be- from being in on at bottom, HMFEOPT demonstrates the fore had the cover the reference—rec- dizzying effect of how mediated our lives of The Canterbury ognizing the trope are. Memes turn campus life into a sort of Tales been so heav- that the meme iso- hall of mirrors: you recognize the things you ily Photoshopped. lates. Memes work do being recognized by other people rec- One popular post like old Jerry Sein- ognizing them as things that other people featured a mock feld bits that have do—and you get to laugh along with it. text-message con- you saying, “That’s so versation between a true” after he points Berta Greenwald Ledecky Undergraduate Fellow student and Khura- out things people do Matt Browne ’17 is waiting for the special concentra- na about what was on airplanes. In my tion track in memetics.

30 July - August 2017

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 Heavyweight women’s crew first-place finish. Two Spring Sports weeks earlier, the team had swept Northeast- ern to win its twenti- Track and Field eth consecutive Smith After a season of big wins and broken records, Harvard’s Cup, and before that track and field team sent three women to the NCAA champi- had swept all five races

onships in Eugene, Oregon, as this issue went to press. Two against a higher-ranked WILLIAMSON ZACK seniors—sprinter and hurdler Jade Miller, and shot-putter and Princeton team to bring home the Compton Cup for the first discus thrower Nikki Okwelogu (a 2016 Olympian for Nige- time in three years. As the magazine went to press, the Crimson ria)—punched their tickets to the tournament with strong was preparing for the 152nd Harvard-Yale Regatta in New Lon- Jade Miller performances in the NCAA East don, Connecticut. (Last year’s varsity contest was declared, preliminary meets in late May. So controversially, to have no official winner, after Harvard’s boat did standout sophomore sprint- sank in rough waters within the first half-mile of the course and er and jumper Gabby Thomas, the race was called off with Yale ahead.) who this spring helped the wom- The men’s lightweight team, meanwhile, hoisted the Jope Cup en’s team to its fourth straight Ivy at the Eastern Sprints, winning the championship for the first Outdoor Heptagonal Champion- time since 2011. Rowing at home in late April, the Crimson had ship title—and with it, for the first beaten No. 1 Yale and fourth-ranked Princeton to capture the time in program history, a “triple Goldthwaite Cup, adding to the spring’s existing haul of the crown”: a sweep of all three titles Wales-Kirrane Cup (versus Columbia and Georgetown), the in cross country, indoor track, and Biglin Bowl (versus Dartmouth and MIT), and the Haines Cup outdoor track. (versus Navy and Delaware). The men’s team took fourth place in the Outdoor Heps, miss- After an up-and-down spring, the eighteenth-ranked women’s ing third place by a single point. Senior Efe Uwaifu, a jumper, heavyweight crew won gold at Eastern Sprints, placing first in five qualified for the NCAA tournament in Eugene as well, reaching of its six races on a late-April afternoon during which competi- ninth place overall with a 51-foot, 5.5-inch triple jump in the East tions were delayed by lightning. The Radcliffe lightweights also regional preliminary round. finished first at Eastern Sprints, winning gold in the varsity eight race, silver in second varsity, and gold in third varsity. A week Golf earlier, the Radcliffe lightweights had upset third-ranked Princ- After finishing second in early April at the Princeton Invita- eton on a cool and foggy Saturday in Cambridge to win the Class tional, the men’s golf team won its second straight Ivy League of 1999 Cup for the second year in a row. championship at the end of that month, defeating the field of seven other teams by 15 strokes, earning a trip to the NCAAs; Tennis the Crimson had topped the leaderboard on each of the tourna- Closing out its season in late April with a 17-8 overall record ment’s three days. At the NCAA regional competition in mid May, (5-2 Ivy), women’s tennis handed losses to Ivy rivals Princeton, Harvard senior Kendrick Vinar placed thirteenth overall with a Yale, Columbia, Brown, and Dartmouth this past spring. Toppling final score of 218 (plus-two, 76-69-74), the highest NCAA finish Princeton 5-2 in the final win of the season, the Crimson earned for a Harvard player since 1982. a share (with Dartmouth) of the Ivy League trophy for the The women’s team, after tak- Kendrick first time since 2009. Sophomore standout Erica Ooster- ing third in the April 1 Harvard Vinar hout secured the winning point in that contest. A first-team Invitational and winning first a All-Ivy player who won seven of her last 10 matches, week later in the Navy Spring Oosterhout was 18-9 overall in singles competition this Invitational at Annapolis, Mary- season, and 16-9 in doubles when partnering with senior land, placed second in a field of captain June Lee. seven in the Ivy championship. Men’s tennis finished with an 18-9 overall record (6-1 Sophomore Anna Zhou led the Ivy), clinching a share of the conference title on the final day way with a final score of 231 of the season, with a dual match win over Penn. The team (plus-15, 77-76-78). had won nine of its last 10 matches, marred only by a 4-2 loss to Cornell (with whom it would share the Ivy crown, along Crew with Columbia). In singles play, the Crimson was led by junior In mid May, the men’s heavyweight crew took second place at Jean Thirouin (with a 16-4 overall record) and sophomore Andy the Eastern Sprints Championships in Worcester, Massachusetts. Zhou and junior Kenny Tao (both 14-7). The doubles pair of During a wild afternoon on Lake Quinsigamond, the varsity eight sophomore Christopher Morrow and freshman Logan Weber was barely beaten by Yale after making a furious comeback; the led the team with an 18-6 record; Tao and senior Brian Yeoung second varsity boat took fourth, and the third boat rowed to a followed close behind with 16-6. vlydialyle gibson

Photographs courtesy of Harvard Athletic Communications www.gocrimson.com

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 Works “unspool” in the POETRY, VOICED Woodberry Poetry Room.

n 1928, Frederick Clifton Packard Jr. ’20, head of Harvard’s pub- with speech impediments. lic-speaking department, improvised a cutting-edge audio-re- He also loved literature, es- by sophia nguyen cording studio in one of the Yard’s oldest buildings, installing pecially the way it sounded, a telegraphone in Holden Chapel. The device, about the size of and at studio set-ups scattered around campus—in the Germanic a small radio and roughly resembling a typewriter, was deemed Museum, the Cruft Memorial Laboratory, the basement of Memorial I“decidedly unimpressive in general appearance” by The Harvard Crim- Hall, and elsewhere—he pursued another of his eccentric projects: son, though “ingenious and almost uncanny” in its power to cap- the Harvard Vocarium, one of the earliest commercial recording ture speech. Most thrilling, and disquieting: “The record may be labels for poetry. Its first few records were released in 1933 and fea- preserved for eternity or simply be rubbed out.” tured T.S. Eliot, A.B. 1910, Litt.D. ’47, but slotted the future Nobel Packard had always loved the spoken word: he produced amateur laureate in what seems today a peculiar lineup—alongside record- plays around Boston while at college, and afterward pursued an ings of two Harvard professors reading from the Bible and Chaucer. acting career in New York and Europe before returning to his alma The Vocarium started up just as sound recording technology was mater to conduct linguistics research and help students and faculty disrupting literary mores surrounding poetry and performance.

32 July - August 2017 Photograph by Stu Rosner

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 Frederick C. Packard (left) envisioned a library where Packard recorded whatever visitors could enjoy both “the printed book and the luminaries he could coax into a ‘talking book,’” and got his wish when the Woodberry Poetry Room, designed by Alvar Aalto, opened in Lamont studio session while they were Library in 1949 (middle row). Next door, the Lamont visiting campus: the now-famous Forum Room (top row) featured a two-turntable playback voices of Tennessee Williams and for “group listening” and “poetry concerts.” Opposite Dylan Thomas, and others whose page: a 1948 record from Packard’s Harvard Vocarium label, T. S. Eliot: Reading His Own Poetry, on a turntable in a work in any format has grown console designed by Aalto and engineer Jack L. Weisman. obscure, like the political poet Muriel Rukeyser and 1938 Pu- Though poetry’s associa- litzer Prize-winner Marya Zaturenska. But he also carefully cast tion with voice is as old professionals to read non-contemporary verse: English thespians as the art itself, the rise Flora Robson and Robert Speaight were recruited to perform Shake- of radio in the 1920s dra- speare, and scholars pronounced whole albums of Anglo-Saxon POETRY, VOICED matically reconfigured and Latin poetry. that relationship. It had Packard used his coinage “vocarium” to refer to an idea much long been assumed that more ambitious than his commercial label: he imagined a “library poets were not the best of voices” that preserved speech for posterity, a place people could performers of their work, actually visit to immerse themselves in words. One day, there might Lesley Wheeler writes in be “vocariums” in local schools and libraries all over the country. her book Voicing American Poetry, but broadcast media made trained, Fulfilling his dream of a space where the “talking book” could be polished voices ubiquitous. Audiences became more invested in the appreciated alongside print text, the Woodberry Poetry Room concept of writers’ authentic presence, as conveyed by their idio- was relocated to the recently opened Lamont Library in 1949. The syncratic, physical voices. Author readings became more common, space, specially designed by Finnish architect Alvar Aalto to em- while verse recitals by amateurs and professional performers alike phasize listening, could accommodate 36 patrons at a central table fell out of favor; in schools, pedagogical weight shifted from elocu- and at auxiliary “listening posts,” where visitors could “browse”— tion to interpretation. It became integral to the careers of poets like eavesdropping at will on whatever others were playing at the time. Robert Frost ’01, Litt.D. ’37, and Edna St. Vincent Millay to share Next door was the soundproofed Forum Room, where classes could their work with listening audiences—he in public events; she over gather for group listening sessions. (The “student motion picture the airwaves. group,” Ivy Films, also screened its first complete film there.) By

Photographs courtesy of the Woodberry Poetry Room Harvard Magazine 33

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 The Packard Collection includes metal parts used in manufacturing (upper left, in a paper sleeve), as well as the published Harvard Vocarium records with their printed sleeves (bottom left and right). At upper right are four stages in the production of a T. S. Eliot disc (counterclockwise from upper left): lacquer disc, metal master, test pressing, and produced vinyl disc. On the facing page are Poetry Room curator Christina Davis (left) and assistant curator Mary Walker Graham. 1950, the library had almost 500 discs in addition to its sizable When Porter University Professor Helen Vendler was a gradu- book collection. ate student at Harvard, women weren’t allowed in Lamont Library The Harvard Vocarium might be best known today for making the except in the summer, when that part of campus became temporar- earliest recordings of American modernist poets like Robert Lowell ily co-ed. At the time, she didn’t especially like modernist poetry, ’39, Elizabeth Bishop, and Ezra Pound. “Recording technology allowed and particularly disliked Wallace Stevens, Frost’s classmate, whose poets, to a certain extent, to model how free verse might sound,” says work “didn’t look like the poems I knew,” she told an audience at Woodberry Poetry Room curator Christina Davis. As William Car- a Poetry Room event in 2012. But a friend visiting the Woodberry los Williams entreated, in a 1951 reading at Harvard recorded for the Poetry Room with her insisted on listening to him, and eventually, Poetry Room: “Listen! Never mind, don’t try to work it out; listen to said Vendler, “Once I had become familiar with his voice, I thought it. Let it come to you. Let it—sit back, relax...Let the thing spray in of all the poems as mysterious packages that had something for me your face!” A ripple of laughter went through the audience. His reedy inside.” As she recounted in an interview for The Paris Review, “Sud- voice, almost wheedling, continued, “Get the feeling of it; get the tactile denly, this voice was unspooling. I didn’t even know what the poem sense of something, something going on. It may be that you may then was about. All I knew was that there were these wonderful lines perceive—have a sensation—that you may later find will clarify itself that I would never have willingly walked away from.” as you go along. So that I say, don’t attempt to understand the modern The writer in question harrumphed, in a 1953 letter, that “I have poem; listen to it. And it should be heard. It’s very difficult sometimes always disliked the idea of records,” and claimed that his Harvard to get it off the page. But once you hear it, then you should be able to visit had been taped without his consent. Still, perhaps grudgingly, appraise it. In other words! If it ain’t a pleasure, it ain’t a poem.” Stevens marveled at the communion with poetry that the Vocarium Even now, long after these writers have been canonized, their encouraged. “On the one occasion that I visited the Poetry Room sound retains the power to shock. “Once you hear Ezra Pound in the new library at Cambridge, there were a half-dozen people screaming and beating on a kettle drum—I mean, you’re just never sitting around with tubes in their ears,” he wrote, “taking it all in the same,” enthuses Poetry Magazine editor and former curator Don the most natural way in the world.” Share. In one recording, he says, “There’s a little bit of laughter at the end. The people in the room got a kick out of the poem, and The Harvard Vocarium label stopped publishing in 1955. Its you can hear them laughing! Who would believe a thing like that?” exact cause of death is ambiguous—the venture was only sporadi-

34 July - August 2017 Objects courtesy of the Woodberry Poetry Room. Photographs by Stu Rosner

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 times only loosely related to Packard. The Poetry “My office was filled with these discs and tapes, just stuffed Room had to acquire special equipment to play some of the stuff, including a hand-built tape recorder and bamboo needles. “You just never to the windows, and nobody knew what they were.” saw such a strange collection,” he says now, chuckling. cally documented—but funding had always been difficult to come Since 2013, curator Christina Davis and assistant curator Mary by, and according to a 2011 interview with his granddaughter, Jo- Walker Graham have been taking inventory of what’s formally known sephine Packard, Packard had begun to experience symptoms of as the Frederick C. Packard Jr. Collection, the founding sound archive early-onset Alzheimer’s. But he continued to gather and make re- of the Poetry Room. Sitting in slate gray boxes neatly stacked in Da- cordings, and throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Poetry Room direc- vis’s office, its contents are surprisingly unruly—some 2,500 objects tor John (“Jack”) Lincoln Sweeney assumed Packard’s mantle. He in all. Of these, 1,500 are vinyl and shellac discs—mostly overstock made recordings of poets from Sylvia Plath to Audre Lorde, and from Packard’s label—which can be heard on a record player. There established a tradition of Harvard curators collecting the voices are also odds and ends from the recording process: the original record- of the great writers of their moment, building sonic time capsules ings created in the cutting room, on lacquer discs; the series of metal of contemporary literary culture. parts called masters, mothers, and stampers, used in manufacture; When Don Share became curator in 2000, he set about digitiz- various test pressings, B-sides, and recording sessions which never ing these holdings. “My office was filled with these discs and tapes, made it to publication. On one disc, Marianne Moore can be heard just stuffed to the windows, and nobody knew what they were,” he asking Packard about whether she’d been speaking too quickly. On recalls. Others at the library dismissed them as unplayable junk be- another, Weldon Kees—a writer and abstract expressionist painter, yond repair, telling him to toss it all, to free up some space—“and of who disappeared in 1955—stops reading with an abrupt, “Sorry, kill course I stockpiled every bit of it.” More than that: Share put out a it!” (“We gasped when we heard that,” says Davis.) call within the University, and then further afield, for Vocarium and Davis likens the collection to an archive with several incarna- Harvard-related materials. “Underwriting every poem was a collections of a book—its final published edition, but also copyedits and tion of objects, correspondence, bits and pieces of audio, sometimes galleys, and a stray handful of orphaned pages of the original manu- other things. I felt like it was my job to assemble that constellation.” script, and then, perhaps, a reading with interesting annotations People from all over the world mailed him audio objects, some- from generations of passing visitors.

Harvard Magazine 35

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 Views of the Woodberry Poetry Room today (above and far right), refurbished in 2006, with laptop tables added to the two remaining Aalto- designed consoles. Its audio archive includes rarities like an early recording of Sylvia Plath (top right, featuring the poet’s own handwriting), and recordings of Ezra Pound (opposite page, delaminated) and Robert Frost (right, gouged) previously thought to be “unplayable.” the fragility of various items posed a physical challenge, requiring “And not just one book,” adds Graham. “Hun- custom-built enclosures to keep them safe—and the sheer eclecti- dreds of books in fragment form.” cism of the collection posed an organizational one. “With no living editor,” finishes Davis. “So the mysteries are The stewards also faced a nagging ethical and epistemological di- many.” lemma: how to deal with the various discs that were too delicate to be Their survey revealed the collection’s surprising breadth, includ- played. Some objects had markings, paper sleeves, or related ephemera ing hundreds of non-Harvard Vocarium discs. Packard collected that gave some hint as to what audio might be on them, but the cu- recordings of writers and performers working in Haitian Creole, rators had been surprised before. “If you say, ‘Unknown author, un- Afrikaans, Danish, Yiddish, and Gaelic; he recorded rehearsals of known title, unknown year,’ that thing will never get played,” Davis Orson Welles’s radio plays, Mexican folk songs, and works in San- says. “On the other hand, if you say too much, you mislead people.” skrit by the Indian playwright Bharati Sarabhai. Packard’s love of “We’re a good team,” says Graham. “Because I tend to err on the voiced literature had global range, says Graham. “I think if he could side of, like—the only thing we can say about this is that it’s a 13-and- have, he would have recorded in every language.” a-quarter-inch disk that’s lacquer on metal and has some edge dam- His desire to document the spoken word went well beyond the age. And Christina’s more like, ‘But I think we could probably say…’” arts. In addition to the students he recorded for his speech clinic, “We’re like a cop show,” Davis confirms. Packard captured addresses by visiting dignitaries; he also acquired “Processing the collection is about finding the balance,” says memorials, sermons, and many hours of Japanese language lessons. Graham. One record, labeled “hypophysectomy—rat. parapharyngeal ap- Because of its fragility, the survey of the Packard collection is, proach, to accompany a 16 mm color film of that title,” contains for now, necessarily incomplete—as is the even more ambitious audio from a medical surgery. “Packard seemed to see an oppor- project of making all of the audio listenable. But the curators hope tunity, with the introduction of sound recording, to almost defy the finding aid will alert scholars of the possibilities for further discipline,” says Davis. investigation. As Davis puts it, “It’s not the key to the door—it’s The Poetry Room will release a finding aid for this collection over building the door frame.” the summer, a project that sounds simple on its face: it’s an inventory of the holdings, linked to the Harvard Library catalog, alerting “Y’all can hear me, right?” tossed off the poet Tyehimba Jess, researchers to the existence of its various and sundry treasures. But sauntering away from the podium at a Poetry Room event last No-

36 July - August 2017 Photographs of room by Rose Lincoln/Harvard Public Affairs and Communications. Photographs and objects courtesy of the Woodberry Poetry Room Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 Records, Rescued The rarest and most delicate artifacts in the Packard Col- lection are his original lacquer discs. During World War II, when aluminum was scarce and radio stations across the U.S. and Britain donated records to contribute material to the war effort, manufacturers switched from metal to glass for these discs’ base material; sometime over the intervening decades, some Vocarium originals have shat- tered. But the format is also inherently unstable. The soft lacquer coating is prone to cracking or flaking off, warp- ing, curling—separating from the rigid base material in a process known as “delamination.” Assistant curator Mary Walker Graham uses the standard preservation term, not hyperbole, when she calls the damage “catastrophic.” It’s almost impossible to ascertain what was recorded on these discs just by playing them—an ordinary stylus would rip that outer layer right off. A new technology capable of “playing” these discs does exist: the IRENE system. (The name officially stands for Im- age Reconstruct Erase Noise Etcetera, but is really a tribute to the first record its inventor reconstructed, a copy of the Weavers’ “Goodnight, Irene.”) A 3-D camera scans the audio material, and software builds maps of the groove shapes, converting those images into sound. It’s hoped scholars might browse Harvard’s holdings with a perfect seal on the historical record. Questions the new finding aid, pointing out the most promising candidates for digitiza- gust in through the cracks. Who was the woman tion, and that this academic interest would attract funding; the process is too who came in late? Who held the camera, and what expensive to apply to the collection wholesale. In 2014, the Woodberry Poetry did that person do to prompt the poet to make eye Room successfully resurrected Ezra Pound’s 1939 recording of “The Cantos,” and contact—first warily, then warmly, like sharing a private joke? a gouged recording of Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken,” among other objects. Davis makes event audio available on the Poetry Room’s online Listening Booth, and puts a copy in vember. At first he declined the hand-held mic Davis proffered. In an in Harvard’s digital repository; sometimes she also uploads the video undertone, she explained that they needed a clear, direct feed. “Oh, on YouTube. Her time with the Packard Collection has made her won- for the camera, huh?” he grinned. At Poetry Room events, posterity der if she ought to keep files in some second format, perhaps physically. is the other, invisible audience. Davis plans with the archive in mind. She’s leery of repeating the mistakes of the past. WAV (Waveform Especially in recent months, she’s taken an experimental ap- Audio Format) files are standard now, and can be played by almost proach to programming. Last semester’s calendar included a con- any personal computer, but one day that equipment might be scarce. versation about criminal-justice reform, a workshop in which at- These days, Packard’s listening posts take the form of earbuds and tendees collectively translated a poem by a Cuban dissident, and a iPads, loaded up with digitized audio files, screens glowing, though “protest-writing session,” in which the public was invited to make the curators sometimes bring out the actual artifacts, by advance re- posters and banners together over snacks. But occasionally, the room quest, for individual study. Davis likes to say that the Woodberry Po- hosts the odd Packardesque session. No conceptual twists: just the etry Room’s archive tells the history of transfer. Through it, one could writer and the work. The guest of honor is seated at a table in front trace the history of recording technology: voices were reincarnated of a microphone. Attendees sit at eye level and nearby, in a crescent from discs to reels, and then to cassettes, then to CDs—“surprisingly of comfortable chairs. These events feel less like “readings”—stiff fragile,” she adds—and now to digital files. Each curator sought to and pseudo-liturgical, the community duly gathering to reify high preserve the Vocarium audio on what was then the state-of-the-art literature—than like a much more basic pleasure: being read to. format; each curator freely exercised editorial discretion about what The recording sessions do look and feel a little like a throwback to copy over, whether due to a format’s physical limitations or their to a long-gone time, but it also has a way of distilling the experi- own aesthetic preferences. Sometimes records were altered in trans- ence of the poem. “Oddly, by putting a big, slightly retro-looking fer, the original tracks re-ordered or left off. One reel she and Graham microphone in front a human being,” says Davis, “your attention found seems to contain a recording of Robert Frost, and also, inexpli- gathers around the voice, and less around the total performance cably, a lute performance. and the physicality.” It’s very humbling, Davis says, to think that the future may laugh Video encodes more sensory data than audio. Someone could watch at you: “Every generation is arrogant in thinking what it invented video of, say, Rowan Ricardo Phillips’s reading in 2014, and note what is going to last.” he was wearing, the Starbucks cup at his elbow, the snow falling outside. But no volume or density of additional information can put Sophia Nguyen is associate editor of this magazine.

Photograph courtesy of Sarah W. Newman/Courtesy of the Woodberry Poetry Room Harvard Magazine 37

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

Brief life of an intrepid botanical illustrator: 1878-1969 by laura j. snyder

lanche (ames) Ames and her husband, Oakes Ames, profes- most authority on the area’s orchids. The sor of botany at Harvard and director of the Arnold Arbo- specimen was lost en route; its only ghost Bretum, were in the middle of the Yucatan jungle when their was a watercolor drawing that had been car stalled. As Oakes and the driver stood by helplessly, Blanche made before it was sent. Because the drawing did pulled a hairpin from her chignon, extracted a bullet from her re- not show enough detail to classify the orchid, and volver, and set to repairing the carburetor. She started the car—to no further specimens had been found, the species remained in a this day, no one knows how—and the expedition continued. kind of scientific limbo. Returning later from an expedition to The intrepid mechanic, daughter of one Civil War general and Brazil’s Mount Itatiaia, Oakes and Blanche found a large fallen tree granddaughter of another, had graduated as president of her class blocking their path. Growing on that tree was a single orchid—in- ©BLANCHE AMES at Smith College in 1899 with a degree in art history, a diploma credibly, it was a specimen of the lost species. Blanche, not Oakes, from the art school, and the dream of becoming a professional was given the discoverer’s honor of the taxonomic name: Loefgreni- artist. (“My ambition is soaring on the art line,” she told her par- anthus blanche-amesiae. ents. “You see I am puffed up and my fancies take wild flights.”) Oakes’s remarkable herbarium, now part of the Harvard Univer- When she met Oakes Ames, A.B. 1898—no relation, but a friend of sity Herbaria, was another joint effort. Most of the sheets include her brother’s—he began courting her with gifts of “the queerest plants dried and pressed by Blanche, as well as her sketches and orchids,” as she described them to her mother. After they became watercolors of the living specimens, together with Oakes’s notes, engaged, he presented her with a microscope so that she could ex- photographs, and journal clippings. Comprising thousands of pag- amine and draw the botanical specimens he collected. es, the herbarium remains a valuable resource for botanists—espe- Blanche Ames was soon renowned as the foremost American bo- cially the copies Blanche made, during a visit to Berlin in 1922, of tanical illustrator of the age. Using the microscope and another op- the herbaria sheets of Rudolf Schlechter and Rudolf Mansfeld of tical device, a camera lucida, she captured the intricate form of or- the Berlin-Dahlem Herbarium. When the originals were destroyed chids: the delicate root hairs and rhizomes, the anther cap perched during the bombing of the city during World War II, Blanche’s over the pollen bundles, the succulent pseudobulbs. Thanks to copies became the only remaining documentation of some species dark shadowing and crosshatch highlights, her elegant pen-and- these botanists had discovered. ink drawings boldly depict the plants against the white page. They Many research papers published in the Harvard series Botani- are at once scientifically exact and artistically brilliant. cal Museum Leaflets were also graced by her drawings. She sup- Blanche illustrated all seven volumes of Oakes’s seminal work plied the orchid illustrations for the first posthumous edition of the Orchidaceae: Illustrations and Studies of the Family Orchidaceae (1901-1922). Manual of the Botany of the Northern United States by Harvard professor The orchid family had been considered a crucial case study of the Asa Gray, the foremost American botanist and Darwinist of the theory of evolution by natural selection ever since Charles Darwin nineteenth century, and illustrated the books of other botanists as published his Fertilization of Orchids in 1862, speculating that orchids well. The American Orchid Society commissioned her to design its and their pollinators had adapted to each other or “co-evolved.” medallion (at right): a Native American, modeled on her son Oliver, But research on orchids was hampered by pervasive confusion gazing upon a branch of orchid blossoms. Today, her motif adorns over the proper way to classify them. Oakes undertook a compre- the seal of the society as well as its gold medal of achievement, hensive overhaul. By the end of his life he had become the most which was first awarded in 1924—to Blanche and Oakes Ames. celebrated orchidologist in the world. A woman of many talents, Blanche Ames was also a sought-after Blanche shares the credit for placing orchid study on a firm sci- portrait painter, an inventor who held four patents, and a political entific foundation, and not only for her incredibly precise draw- activist engaged in the struggle for women’s suffrage and birth-con- ings. During their 50-year marriage, she was more than an illustra- trol rights. But her greatest impact was upon the scientific study tor; she was her husband’s co-investigator, and he justly referred to of orchids, a field still considered central to the study of evolution, her as his “colleague”: they traveled together to the Caribbean, the especially for investigations of species interactions. Her botanical Philippines, and Central and South America in search of specimens. illustrations exquisitely embody Darwin’s view of orchids and their Oakes is acknowledged as the discoverer of more than 1,000 new parts as “multiform and truly wonderful and beautiful.” species. Many of these he found side-by-side with Blanche. Once, in Rio de Janeiro, Oakes learned of a Brazilian orchid that Laura J. Snyder is the author, most recently, of Eye of the Beholder: Johannes had been discovered decades earlier and sent abroad to the fore- Vermeer, Antoni van Leeuwenhoek, and the Reinvention of Seeing.

38 July - August 2017 Quotes from letters of Blanche Ames to her mother, April 24 and December 5, 1898, appear with permission of the Ames Family Papers, Sophia Smith Collection at Smith College Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 THE AMERICAN ORCHID SOCIETY ORCHID AMERICAN THE

Photograph courtesy of the Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University Harvard Magazine 39

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

40 July - August 2017

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

ndrew LeClerc knew something was wrong when he heard voices when no one else was around. Some were those of people he knew, others were unfamiliar, but all had the authentic mannerisms of real people, not his imagination. He was in his early twenties, unsure of his direction in life, and had been taking synthetic marijuana to ease stress from past traumas. Disturbed by the voices, he sought help in an emergency room and voluntarily admitted himself to a psychiatric hospital, not realizing he would be kept there for six days. He was diagnosed with psychosis, but had little interaction with a therapist. “You mostly sit around with coloring books,” he says. It felt like a punishment, when all he wanted was help. Afterward, he contacted therapists, but many were booked. An online search led him to a research study at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston for people newly diagnosed with psychotic disorders. In January 2014, he entered a two-year study that compared two approaches to psychotherapy to help manage cognitive impairments and other symptoms. He was also prescribed an antipsychotic medication. AEventually he was diagnosed with schizophrenia. Now, about four years later, at 26, LeClerc is learning to live with the condition. “It’s hard for a person who’s diagnosed with schizophrenia to be told something’s not real when they think it’s real,” he says. He continues to take antipsychotic medications that help control his hallucinations and lives in an apartment below his parents in Middleton, Massachusetts. He’s hoping to start a small business, putting his love of gardening to work as a landscaper. But more importantly, he’s learned to make peace with his mind. He likes to say: “I don’t hear voices, I hear my own brain.” When voices do appear, he recognizes them as a product of an aberrant auditory cortex, and he thinks about engaging his prefrontal cortex—the decision-making part of the brain—to help him distin- guish fact from fiction. “I have tools to pull myself back to the moment,” he says. Not everyone who struggles with schizophrenia is able to find such stability. The illness takes many forms; symptoms may include hallucinations and delusions, lack of motivation, and cognitive problems similar to dementia. It tends to strike in the late teens and early twenties, robbing young people of their mental stability Andrew LeClerc in his home garden just as they’re entering adulthood, beginning careers, or pursuing a college degree. Some improve, while others experience a long mental decline. “The treatments that we have are useful but not great,” says Matcheri Keshavan, Cobb professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medi- In understanding cal School (HMS) and the leader of the study that LeClerc participated in. The medications used to treat schizophrenia are decades old, and only ameliorate symptoms. Like other psychiatric illnesses, schizophrenia, genes have schizophrenia has suffered from a lack of investment from pharma- ceutical companies. Says Keshavan, “We need better medications “an awful lot to say.” that really address the underlying cause of this illness.” Probing Psychoses But those causes are still mysterious. What scientists do know

Photographs by Stu Rosner Harvard Magazine 41

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 Steven Hyman, director of the Stanley Center for Psychiatric Disease Research

is that schizophrenia tends to run in families. About 70 percent search on illnesses like cancer, heart disease, and diabetes marched to 80 percent of a person’s risk of developing the illness, Keshavan ahead. Schizophrenia in particular is challenging to study because says, can be explained by genetic factors. Recently, there’s been a it’s uniquely human. Scientists can study limited aspects of psychi- surge of effort to capitalize on that fact. Advances in genetics have atric illness in animals if they can measure an observable behavior, made it possible to search not only for clues about schizophrenia such as avoiding social interactions or grooming excessively. But and other psychiatric illnesses hidden within thousands of human psychosis is a problem of thinking; animals, as far as is known, don’t genomes—but also for potential new treatments. experience it in any way we can measure. It’s also challenging be- As a result, there’s been a renaissance in research on schizophre- cause brain tissue is so inaccessible. “We were really hampered,” nia and other psychiatric disorders, and some cautious optimism. Hyman says, “and I, frankly, didn’t know all that much more when “It’s been possible to make real if still early progress in understand- I was at NIMH in the late 1990s than careful observers knew at the ing what genes and molecules influence these illnesses,” says Steven turn of the twentieth century.” McCarroll, Flier associate professor of biomedical science and ge- When he left the position, Hyman was interested in researching netics. At Harvard, the leading force is the Stanley Center for Psy- psychiatric disease but didn’t see a rigorous path to do so; instead, he chiatric Disease Research at the Broad Institute, which is pouring accepted a position as Harvard’s provost—taking what he now refers new funding and resources into amassing data on the genetics of to as a “10-year timeout.” During that time, a revolution occurred. mental illness. Genetic technologies and vastly expanded computer power opened new paths for studying the biological basis of complex diseases. Filling in an Incomplete Picture The Broad Institute launched the Stanley Center in 2007 under Bringing the power of genomics to psychiatric disease fulfills a inaugural director Edward Scolnick, thanks to an initial $100 mil- long-held goal for the Stanley Center’s director, Steven Hyman, lion in private funding from philanthropists Ted and Vada Stanley, professor of stem cell and regenerative biology. An HMS profes- aiming to bring much-needed innovation to treatments for psychi- sor of psychiatry before becoming head of the National Institute atric disease by harnessing the power of genomics. (The Stanleys of Mental Health (NIMH) in 1996, Hyman was frustrated by the provided another $650 million in 2014, an unprecedented gift for sluggish progress on the science of psychiatric disorders, as re- psychiatric research.) Partly as a result, the center has gathered the

42 July - August 2017

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 world’s largest collection of DNA samples for studying not only psychiatric diseases—including schizophrenia, autism, ADHD, and bipolar disorder—but also healthy control subjects. The resulting data are freely available to the public. “The human genome has started to give us a really powerful way into the problem,” Steven McCarroll explains, “because the key source of scientific leverage that we have is we know that schizophrenia and other psychiatric illnesses are heritable—they aggregate in families. Their molecular 1 2 secrets are almost certainly hidden in the way our genomes vary from person to person.” Much of the research on genetics and disease has focused on what McCarroll calls “ ‘genetic sledgehammers’—genes

that when mutated would almost certainly make you sick.” 2017 But schizophrenia, like most common diseases, is genetically complex. The hereditary component of the disease may be a NATURE product of tens to hundreds of “genetic nudges,” variations that don’t cause disease by themselves, but together make 3 4 people vulnerable to illness. QUADRATO ET AL./ Studying genetic nudges requires amassing large num- Researchers from Harvard and the Broad Institute have grown human bers of DNA samples to achieve the statistical power to find brain organoids, three-dimensional organ models cultured from stem cells, to study the genetics of psychiatric illness. This series shows growth subtle variations that may contribute to disease, a project at 1, 3, 6, and 9 months, with development of synapses indicated in green. that’s taken enormous collaborative effort by many scientists and institutions around the world. The Psychiatric Ge- genomes in finer-grained detail by directly reading each letter of nomics Consortium—the largest scientific collaboration involving the DNA sequence. Such work is time-consuming, but it can help psychiatric disease—formed in 2007 and comprises hundreds of in- uncover rare genetic differences that are linked to disease, many vestigators in 38 countries and nearly a million genetic samples. The of which have a stronger effect than common variants. Work by Stanley Center has served as the hub for data sharing, aggregation, the consortium has also analyzed areas of DNA that are deleted or and analysis to further the consortium’s discoveries. duplicated, called “copy number variations.” People with schizo- One of the key tools for uncovering the genetic basis of disease is phrenia tend to have more such variations overall, and the genes the “genome-wide association study” (GWAS)—a way of quickly they affect can provide clues to the disease’s origins. sorting through the common variations in genomes to find those Meanwhile, the Stanley Center and other institutions are working that are more common in people with a given trait or disease than to collect thousands more DNA samples from people with schizo- in those without. Associate professor of medicine Mark Daly, who phrenia and other psychiatric disorders, hoping to identify even more leads the analytic hub of the consortium, says that scientists origi- genetic associations of risk. Hyman doesn’t see such data-gathering nally thought such studies might uncover a handful or two of DNA as an endless project. “We should kill this problem,” he says, “mean- variants that could be statistically correlated with schizophrenia. ing in some reasonable number of years—seven to 10—we should But rather than identifying a few standouts, the consortium’s have proceeded so far in the genetics of schizophrenia, bipolar dis- Schizophrenia Working Group found a crowd of genetic associa- orders, autism, perhaps some other disorders, that we’ve reached diminishing returns in terms of biological “We know that schizophrenia and other psychiatric information.” But so far, the picture is still incomplete. illnesses are heritable—they aggregate in families. The vast majority of genetic samples, for instance, come from people of European ances- Their molecular secrets are almost certainly hidden in try. “From a purely scientific point of view, the way our genomes vary from person to person.” it means we’re missing a large proportion of the world’s genetic diversity,” says Karesten Koenen, professor of psychiatric epidemiol- tions, each contributing just a tiny amount of risk. A landmark paper ogy at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Most of that published in 2014 in the journal Nature, led by Michael O’Donovan of diversity is in Africa: There is much more diversity in African genomes Cardiff University, described 108 different locations in the genome than in those of people from other parts of the world. that harbored variants associated with schizophrenia. Koenen is leading an effort through the Stanley Center to launch GWAS studies can identify only stretches of DNA: like flags on genetic research on psychiatric disease in Ethiopia, Uganda, Kenya, a zoomed-out map of a city, they provide a neighborhood, not the and South Africa. Their researchers are partnering with researchers exact address. “We know where the variants are, one of which is and academic and clinical institutions in those countries and will likely to be the causal variant, but can’t say for sure which one,” says be gathering DNA samples and clinical information from people assistant professor of medicine Ben Neale, who is developing meth- diagnosed with schizophrenia. “We really want to build local ca- ods to analyze genomic data. Another approach is to sift through pacity,” she says, and develop sustainable research programs that

Harvard Magazine 43

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 can be led by local scientists and clinicians. The center also plans beginning to use data to classify patients based on their risk of to extend the effort to Latin America, beginning in Mexico. developing complex diseases, including schizophrenia. But these This effort will help fill in the genetic picture of psychiatric ill- risk profiles, Koenen says, lose accuracy when applied to people of ness, and will also help correct a vast imbalance. Geneticists are African descent. As this kind of profiling makes its way into medicine, she says, “There’s a risk that if we don’t extend this research to Africa, the health disparity and treatment gap will widen.” Prediction and Prevention Nibbling at Synapses What will all this data amount to? There’s a misconception, Genetic research may someday bring new treatments and McCarroll says, that the goal of this research is to conjure up a understanding to psychiatric disease, but clinical researchers “crystal ball genetic test” that will give people personalized treat- are already using other kinds of information about their pa- ments based on their unique portfolio of genes. That’s not the aim. tients to guide their treatment. Cobb professor of psychiatry “Our goal,” he says, “is to understand the core biological processes Matcheri Keshavan, who is based at Beth Israel Deaconess Medi- in the illnesses, so that innovative treatments can be developed cal Center, says that the variability of schizophrenia is a major that can treat anyone.” Scientists hope that the dizzying array of challenge. “No one patient is like any other in terms of how the schizophrenia-related genes will converge onto a few basic pro- disease behaves over time,” he says. Some people have a single cesses in the brain, once the function of those genes is understood. psychotic episode and then recover. Some are able to manage But even as scientists have made dramatic leaps in discovering the condition with medications, and go on to find jobs and start genetic risk factors of complex diseases, the task of understanding families. Others experience cognitive decline and are unable to how those genes work is a different, and slower, task. function in society. What clinicians call schizophrenia, he says, McCarroll was lead author of a study making one of the strongest is “probably a collection of multiple different syndromes, each links between a specific genetic variant and its role in schizophre- of which might have a slightly different causation.” nia. Working with Aswin Sekar (then a graduate student, now a One challenge to defining the illness is the lack of a “biomark- research fellow), he focused on the most powerful signal of risk in er” that can be identified with a blood-draw or an MRI scan. GWAS studies to date, a stretch of DNA in chromosome 6 that was Keshavan and other researchers are investigating strategies to known to harbor many genes involved in the immune system. They use a combination of brain imaging, clinical tests, histories, and focused on one called C4, which has a high degree of variability in other techniques to stratify patients. Eventually, he hopes, this humans: each of its different forms may be present in multiple cop- clinical effort will begin to connect with the emerging science ies in one individual. By using both genetic data and postmortem of schizophrenia genetics, so that “down the road, we will able brain tissue, they found that people with schizophrenia are more to identify a specific biological [schizophrenia] subtype which likely to have variants of the C4 gene that lead to higher levels of may have a specific causal factor.” one gene product, C4A, in brain cells. Schizophrenia runs in families, but is not solely a genetic dis- C4A is one of several proteins involved in a type of immunity called ease. An identical twin of a person with schizophrenia, for in- the complement pathway, which helps clear damaged cells and harm- stance, has a 50 percent risk of getting the disease, in spite of ful microbes from the body. As part of their study, McCarroll and sharing all of their risk genes (a fraternal twin, in contrast, has Sekar collaborated with associate professor of neurology Beth Stevens, only about a 15 percent risk). Environmental factors that have been whose previous research with mice clarified an ingenious connection associated with the disease include a history of abuse or neglect, between the complement pathway and the brain. Scientists know cannabis use, having an older father, and growing up in a city. that as the brain develops, it churns out new cells, which form billions Keshavan has been leading long-term studies on people with of connections called synapses. In adolescence and early adulthood, schizophrenia as well as young people at risk for the disease some of these connections are pared back, a process called synaptic because of family history and other factors. The goal is to de- pruning. In mice, Stevens has found, this pruning is mediated by the termine whether it’s possible to better predict who might de- complement pathway, which triggers immune cells called microglia velop schizophrenia, and if so, to intervene early to help with to attack neural connections: “literally nibbling at synapses.” treatments, including cognitive therapy. Sekar, McCarroll, and Stevens also worked with professor of pedi- A family history of schizophrenia can be a heavy weight atrics Michael Carroll, who had developed mice with varying copies for individuals like David, a 22-year-old participant in one of of the C4 gene, and showed that too much C4 activity in the animals Keshavan’s studies. His older sister began to have delusions can lead to excess pruning. “It’s too much of a good thing,” Stevens about people being in contact with her, and was diagnosed says. Their finding suggests that schizophrenia, in some cases, may be with schizophrenia several years ago. Knowing his higher risk, caused by loss of synapses in adolescence—an especially promising David is careful to manage stress, eat well, and exercise. “I my- result because it supports clinical observations: synaptic pruning self have had a lot of anxiety issues in the past, and have in turn coincides with the age when schizophrenia typically emerges, and put a huge premium on my health and wellness,” he says. His brain imaging shows that many people with schizophrenia experi- sister, meanwhile, has been able to hold a job and live a stable ence a thinning of the prefrontal cortex in the early stages of disease. life thanks to medication. But the illness has been difficult for McCarroll emphasizes that the C4A variation contributes only a the family to speak about, he says: “The pain of the experience small amount of risk of disease, but may collude with other variants and the stigma surrounding mental health are so palpable.” to tip the brain past a threshold. “There are a lot of genetic findings that map to synapses,” says Hyman, so some of those other variants

44 July - August 2017

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 Steven McCarroll, Flier associate professor of biomedical science and genetics

may contribute to a larger disruption in how synapses are formed and C4 study by creating “humanized” mice that carry human C4 genes, maintained. But other processes are likely at work in schizophrenia as which may make it possible to study their function in a living brain. well. Some genetic risk variants relate to a chemical signal in the brain Other researchers are trying to develop new ways to study psy- called glutamate, and others to ion channels, proteins that determine chiatric disease in humans. Paola Arlotta, professor of stem cell and how electrical signals propagate in brain cells. “There are also oth- regenerative biology, explains that when scientists are able to get ers,” Hyman adds, “that, frankly, just have us scratching our heads.” samples of human brain tissue—from patients undergoing surgery, postmortem donations, or even tissue from fetuses—the cells die There Is No Playbook quickly. They can’t be propagated and studied in a laboratory, so The work on C4 offers an example of how genetics is beginning “there is no renewable source of the actual endogenous tissue.” to help neuroscience move forward. “It’s opened up a ton of new Stem cells have emerged as a way around that problem. Scientists directions and strategies for our group,” says Stevens. Across Har- can now take cells from the skin or hair and transform them into vard and the Stanley Center, a growing community is launching induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells that are capable of becoming other cell types, including brain cells. (At Environmental factors that have been associated with the the Stanley Center, Arlotta and other scientists are exploring how to transform iPS disease include a history of abuse or neglect, cannabis cells into specific types of brain cells.) The iPS cells allow scientists to study how cells use, having an older father, and growing up in a city. derived from a person of one genetic background differ from those of another person. collaborative projects with the goal of taking psychiatric disease Scientists can also use the genome-editing tool CRISPR-Cas9 to research into new territories. introduce specific genetic changes and study their effects. One priority is developing new models for teasing out the role of But there’s very little that can be learned about psychiatric dis- genes in the brain. Scientists have been able to study some behaviors ease from isolated cells: brain activity depends on the constant chat- that relate to mental illness in animals, but there is no animal model ter of many cells that are intricately connected. Arlotta has been for schizophrenia. Michael Carroll is now working to extend the investigating whether neural stem cells can be spun into something

Harvard Magazine 45

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 that behaves more like human brain tissue. So-called organoids— within and between disorders such as schizophrenia, bipolar dis- clusters of millions of cells up to a few millimeters in diameter— order, depression, and autism, which are usually defined by clini- can be formed from growing stem cells in a nutrient-rich solution. cal categories outlined in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Organoids have already been used to study events that happen in Disorders. But Robinson says the idea of distinct boundaries sepa- early development: last year, a team of researchers used them to rating these disorders is not necessarily consistent with biology. study the effects of the Zika virus on developing brains. Genetically, psychiatric disorders look more like Venn diagrams But since psychiatric diseases like schizophrenia emerge later in with large overlaps. People with schizophrenia share 60 percent to life, Arlotta wants to make organoids grow larger and live longer, 70 percent of genome-wide variation with those who suffer bipolar and to understand whether they can mimic some of the properties disorder, and about 25 percent with autism. of an older brain. “This is a new tissue we’re making,” she says, “and Similarly, there is no simple dividing line between people who so the questions that we want to answer are: can we develop them have a psychiatric illness and those who don’t. “Genetic risk for for a very long time, can we understand the cellular composition, schizophrenia is not something you either have or don’t have,” she can we see if these organoids make actual networks and commu- says. “There’s a little bit of risk in all of us.” Natural variations in nicate with each other?” many different genes, she explains, have been shown to relate to To better characterize these cell-based models, Arlotta and her the way people perform on tests of cognitive or emotional skills. colleague Kevin Eggan, a fellow professor of stem cell and regen- Schizophrenia may emerge from some combination of factors that erative biology, are collaborating with Mc- Carroll to apply a technology his lab devel- “Genetic risk for schizophrenia is not something you either oped—DropSeq—that makes it possible to analyze gene activity in individual cells. have or don’t have.” The disease may emerge from some The technology will provide a detailed, cell-by-cell understanding of what these combination of factors that are part of normal variation. models may reveal. In a Nature paper published in April, Arlotta’s team demonstrated that it’s possible to are part of normal variation in the development and functioning of cultivate human brain organoids for nine months or more. Analysis the human brain. This is true for other complex diseases and many revealed that the organoids are filled with a diverse mix of brain-cell normal traits, she adds: height, for instance, is largely determined by types, and that these cells actually form interconnected networks, genetics, but there’s no single gene—or even handful of genes—that suggesting they may begin to function in ways that brains do. controls it. It’s a quality that emerges from many genetic inputs. But how much meaningful information about psychiatric disor- Robinson believes that scientists could learn more about these ders can be gleaned by studying individual cells or clusters of ar- disorders by cutting across diagnostic boxes and studying genetic tificial tissue remains unclear. And an even bigger question is how variants that are linked to multiple traits and disorders. Only by to use these models to study the effects of genetic nudges. Disease understanding how these variants affect the brain can researchers genetics, typically, has been studied by altering or removing genes, begin to understand how they contribute both to normal brain one at a time, in an animal. Studying a whole suite of subtle genetic function and to the risk of disease. variations in a model system is a completely new idea. Such research could help demystify the experiences of people like “There is no playbook,” says Hyman. He acknowledges that the Andrew LeClerc. He has learned to talk about his schizophrenia as work is risky; many of these projects are possible only because the something he struggles with, not something that defines him. He Stanley Center’s open-ended funding makes it easier for labs to work describes his condition as a “mental difference.” together to pursue new ideas. “We spend many tens of millions of LeClerc also appreciates that not all the voices in his head are nega- dollars a year, and we’re accountable only at the end of the year to tive: he sometimes hears words of encouragement or helpful warn- our scientific advisory board, and we tell them our strategy,” he says. ings. As he speaks, his thoughts don’t always follow the linear paths “It gives us enormous flexibility, but it’s an enormous responsibility.” of normal conversation, but they can take him into deeper places; he has a keen understanding of how humans’ brains create their own A Little Risk in All of Us realities. He sees an analogy to his condition in the once-expensive Some scientists and clinicians believe that gathering genetic glass pieces he has begun collecting from his local dump. Glass that data and studying cells is a misguided strategy for alleviating psy- seems like trash, he says, can be reused or recycled, so it isn’t really chiatric illness. They see it as reductionist, and argue that it em- broken. He describes himself the same way: “I’m fragile, not broken.” phasizes the inborn biological origins of illnesses rather than other It may take decades before genetic research on schizophrenia factors—like abuse, trauma, drug use, and emotional stress—that yields new treatments for people like LeClerc, but clues about the are known to play a role in their development. Hyman answers, biological underpinnings of schizophrenia could help in other ways. “Genes are not fate, but genes have an awful lot to say.” Genetics “Patients with psychiatric disorders get blamed for those disorders and the environment both undoubtedly contribute to disease, but in our culture in a way that people with diseases in other organs both ultimately must act on the brain—and genetics happens to don’t,” says McCarroll. If this research can provide a firmer bio- be a more tractable way to study what’s happening in the brain. logical understanding of what’s happening in the brain, he says, “I Genetics is already providing insights that could help alter the would hope that we could generate more empathy.” way psychiatric disorders are defined. “People have studied disorders with a box around them,” says Elise Robinson, assistant Contributing editor Courtney Humphries is a freelance science writer in Boston professor of epidemiology, who has analyzed genetic differences and a recent Knight Science Journalism fellow at MIT.

46 July - August 2017

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 An Educated Core Rethinking what liberal-arts undergraduates ought to learn, and how by JOHN S. ROSENBERG

“What to teach and how to teach it are likely to become such matters as an alumnus, and as a member of the Harvard Col- central issues for colleges in a way that they haven’t been for a long lege visiting committee and the American Academy of Arts and time,” wrote Nicholas Lemann ’76 in early 2016 in The Chronicle of Sciences’ Commission on the Future of Undergraduate Education. Higher Education. Past experience as dean of Columbia’s Graduate Until now, he continued, “most selective institutions…that School of Journalism, where he revised the curriculum, steeped emphasize an undergraduate liberal-arts education have gotten Lemann in professional schools’ natural focus on best equipping themselves off the hook of having to…decide what all degree recip- students for their chosen careers. For teachers of “the great major- ients must have learned.” Today, he observed, “If colleges can’t or ity” of U.S. undergraduates who “are taking mainly skills courses” don’t want to clearly define what they’re about academically, they to become accountants, engineers, K-12 educators, and so on, the are left unarmed against what has become the intense pressure to academic issues are largely professional, too. But “In the better- define undergraduate education in terms of acquiring only those Yale-NUS, an ambitious resourced, more-selective colleges that a skills that have an obvious, immediate, practical applicability and Singapore-based lucky minority of students attend”—lib- will enhance a graduate’s chances of employment.” (Humanities experiment in liberal eral-arts institutions—“the curriculum have become an obvious casualty.) Pragmatically, such colleges arts, is built around this is usually both less practical and less pre- “have something to learn from professional schools about better central courtyard. scribed,” Lemann noted. He knows about defining themselves academically.”

Photographs courtesy of Yale-NUS, unless otherwise noted Harvard Magazine 47

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 More broadly, Lemann observed, as colleges compete for ap- appear so numerous or the rationale for any particular path so faint. plicants, an institution “offering a wide variety of options from At a time of lagging college completion, such undergraduate uncer- which students can select…has to maintain a large, expensive set tainty may become a problem for society (see “America’s Higher- of departments and courses.” As those costs collide with rising fi- Education Agenda,” September-October 2016, page 64). nancial aid, often small (or nil) endowments, and changed student Given the long-term value of being broadly educated in a rapidly expectations, many liberal-arts schools face existential questions. changing, complex world, it is encouraging that efforts to rethink “In undergraduate education,” he concluded, “the best way to undergraduate education are under way. Three very different ex- anticipate change would be to define, state, and put in effect a clear amples expand the range of possibilities: a significantly reconceived academic mission.” Envisioning “what you stand for academically” liberal-arts college 10,000 miles from the eastern U.S. epicenter of and a means to “ensure that every student’s experience encom- elite higher education; Lemann’s proposed refitting of liberal arts passes that” led him to contemplate an education in a “set of mas- for the twenty-first century; and a venture-capital-funded startup ter skills” (interpretation of meaning, drawing inferences, and so in San Francisco, complete with structured curriculum, techno- on—“a canon of methods rather than a canon of specific knowledge logical pedagogy, and an asset-light model that does away with the or of great books”) that in concert would “make one an educated, typical campus accouterments: no classrooms, dining hall, labora- intellectually empowered, morally aware person.” tories, or library. Such prescriptions run against the grain in most colleges to- These experiments—two tangible, one theoretical—all proceed day. Students admitted to selective schools are considered mature outside established institutions (perhaps a separate cause for con- enough to pursue their preferred studies. They may proceed with cern). But that they exist suggests welcome attempts to revise what some guidance (from the structured core curriculums at Columbia students should learn in a liberal-arts course of study, and how. and Chicago to Harvard’s increasingly relaxed program in general education: see “The Harvard College Curriculum,” page 55)—but The Residential College, Redefined most receive relatively little (distribution requirements) or essen- Imagine conceiving a college that establishes as its first principle tially none (as at Amherst and Brown). Research-oriented faculty “articulate communication,” defined this way: members teach, in departments and concentrations, about their Collegiate communities of learning come into being large- disciplines and scholarly interests; where general-education courses ly through substantive conversation among their members. exist, they are typically created separately. At the most fortunate “Open, informed, and reflective discourse”—an activity of schools, the resulting smorgasbord speaking and listening, writing and reading, that is partly offers hundreds or thousands its own end, in which participants assume that others will of course choices. In theory, pay attention, and through which they hope to come to know with less structure, every- something they did not know beforehand—this is the central one finds it easier to nav- and distinctive activity of collegiate education in the liberal igate the undergradu- arts and sciences. It follows that colleges should emphasize ate years—and to term the importance of speaking and writing, and also of the vi- the result liberal arts. sual and performing arts and other modes of engaging in sub- But this is not neces- stantive communication…between individuals who cannot sarily the ideal solution. self-segregate into like-minded groups as easily as they can Beyond the corrosive online…, who find a meeting planned for one purpose yield- effects of careerism on ing an unexpected discussion about wholly different mat- student decisions, the ters.…[The] curriculum puts great emphasis on face-to-face significance of a lot of lib- encounters and on the practices of articulate communication eral-arts courses may be appropriate for intellectual conversation. suspect, even apart from This is not a pipe dream. It underpins a functioning college with a their relevance to employ- distinctive common curriculum; an international faculty assembled ers. And students’ increasing- to craft, teach, and renew it; and a purpose-built campus to house ly diverse preparation and back- 1,000 undergraduates ultimately (more than 800 will be enrolled grounds mean that many this fall). The first class educated in the program shaped by “ar- may find it daunting ticulate communication” graduated this past May. to plot a coherent The excerpt comes from a 2013 report reflecting the views of the academic pro- inaugural curriculum committee of Yale-NUS College (Yale’s joint gram where venture with the National University of Singapore), and of the first

the choices few dozen faculty members recruited to create this new institution COURTESY OF NICHOLAS LEMANN/COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY

The Yale-NUS common curriculum assures

Nicholas Lemann that students discover they “all have something draws on his professional- school deanship to to learn—it’s incredibly effective” in building suggest new directions “academic and communal identity.” for undergraduate learning.

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 by collaborating in a deliberately nondepartmen- tal way. Its chair was political philosopher Bryan Garsten ’96, Ph.D. ’03, who is professor of political science and humanities and chair of the humanities program at Yale. In conversation, he recalled, that period coincided with the peak of the frenzy over massive open online courses (MOOCs), prompting the committee members and professors to “think through what a college is, and particularly what things could be held in common” among its con- stituents. The new colleagues, in other words, used the opportunity to devise a college that addresses the questions Lemann subsequently summarized as “what to teach and how to teach it.” Of course, Yale-NUS’s genesis reflects far more than that 2013 prospectus. It is in fact the latest step in Singapore’s purposeful pursuit of progress in higher education. In a conversation last winter, executive vice president Tan Tai Yong, for- Instruction at the new “what a young person must learn to lead a mer dean of the school of arts and social sciences at NUS college emphasizes responsible life in this century,” as he put it, seminars and discussions, (the new college’s funding partner), described that arc. a relative rarity in Asian the curriculum had to embrace quantitative First came an emphasis on training professionals—like higher education. reasoning, scientific inquiry, analysis of social doctors, lawyers, engineers, and civil servants—on a dis- institutions, and understanding of modern ciplinary model borrowed from the British. Then, the education social thought. The new college set out establish itself as “a model system supported more research and development, though still community of learning,” he said: a residential school whose educa- with an eye on the economy. Now, in this millennium, resources tional program would be shaped by a broad “common curriculum.” have been poured into building student residences—a novelty for In its present form, that comprises 10 courses: the small city-state—and experimenting with general education • Literature & Humanities (L&H) 1 and 2 and Philosophy and for students pursuing certain professions. Tan called this last stage Political Thought (PPT) 1 and 2 (both freshman semesters); a liberal-arts “halfway house.” • Quantitative Reasoning, Comparative Social Inquiry (CSI, both An evolving Singapore, said Tan, a South Asian historian, has first freshman semester), and Scientific Inquiry 1 (second fresh- raised its sights from problems of “engineering” to “problems of man semester); social understanding,” encompassing its own complex, diverse pop- • Modern Social Thought and Scientific Inquiry 2 (first sopho- ulation, its ability to navigate among emerging Asian giants with more semester); and their own interests, and the furious pace of economic and tech- • Historical Immersion (any junior or senior semester). nological change. Given a need to “produce people with different The titles suggest the courses’ broad, non- (or at least inter-) abilities” who can “change disciplines very easily,” the logical next disciplinary nature. During the past academic year, L&H students step was a full-fledged liberal-arts college, where students would read The Ramayana, The Odyssey, Herodotus, The Decameron, the Han learn to “deal with diversity and uncertainty.” (Tan himself faces dynasty historian Sima Qian, Aladdin, The Tempest, Sudanese novelist those challenges now: he became Yale-NUS president on July 1.) Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North, and more. The PPT syl- Yale-NUS enjoyed two important advantages as it began to define labus—engaged with concepts of the self, the state, individuality, itself. In a separate interview on the Singapore campus, founding national self-determination, and other issues—spanned sources president Pericles Lewis (from 2012 through this past June, when from classical Chinese philosophers, The Bhagavad Gita, Plato, Aris- he assumed Yale’s vice presidency for global strategy), highlighted totle, and Marcus Aurelius to Descartes, Hobbes, Mill, Nietzsche, the value of starting from scratch and attracting faculty members Gandhi, and Arendt. CSI examines the state, markets and corpo- interested in both institutional innovation and a strong focus on rations, social movements and social change, class, race, gender, teaching undergraduates. The prevailing American model for liberal and family: fields of interest to scholars of government, economics, arts, he noted, had devolved to distribution requirements (humani- sociology, and anthropology, among others. ties, social sciences, sciences)—typically liberalized so they became The mix of disciplines in these common courses is already dis- easier for professors to teach and students to fulfill. “So obviously,” tinctive—and other aspects of their design have further, significant he continued, “we took the opposite approach.” implications for students and faculty members. Yale’s Directed Studies—an optional year-long freshman se- To begin with, the common-curriculum courses are faculty- quence of immersion courses in Western philosophy, literature, owned and -operated—not by a single professor, but genuinely and historical and political thought—provided a sort of template in common. Teams of scholars have hammered out the syllabi and that was then broadened significantly. Lewis, previously a Yale pro- related assignments together. Associate professor of humanities fessor of English and comparative literature, said Yale-NUS had a Mira Seo, part of the initial cohort who contributed to the Garsten global vision beyond merely extending a traditional great-books report, described the exhaustive, iterative process of designing L&H program into an “Asia and the West” survey. And in considering classes that teach students “to see works in dialogue with each

Harvard Magazine 49

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 other, in a pre-disciplinary way”—not a natural act for experts may join future iterations. The faculty’s ownership of the common accustomed to advancing their own fields. A classicist who chose curriculum has been maintained beyond Yale-NUS’s launch: the in- Yale-NUS over a tenured position at the University of Michigan, augural science sequence has already been pared down and recast she recalled the faculty group moving away from a forced march to focus more on the nature of scientific inquiry and foundational through Homer and The Aeneid—and the specialist’s desire to “mas- questions, despite students’ differing levels of preparation; and a ter” certain texts—toward a synoptic approach: one that included separate course on contemporary issues has been jettisoned because more and different kinds of texts. They determined that the ap- it overlapped the examples being used in other courses. (This pace propriate goal for liberal-arts undergraduates was “your capacity to of change would astonish at most U.S. colleges.) master a text,” placing the emphasis on increasing student skills. Overall, said future president Tan, Yale-NUS’s collectively con- Such goals impose on professors an obligation to collaborate (all ceived and taught common curriculum differs significantly from a had to be committed to “charitable reading and good listening”) separate general-education sequence that “no one owns.” that echoes the college’s aspirations for “articulate communication.” Because all students take the common courses on a coordinat- The faculty group read Salih’s book, for instance, and decided they ed schedule during their first semester and in the subsequent two could not teach it effectively—until a new member of the group terms, they encounter new material and learn new skills together, made the case for it; it was added to the syllabus last year. “This is in a way that is additive. To encourage a focus on learning per se, more work, it’s more maintenance,” Seo said, “but it’s improvable during the first semester, grades are not recorded on transcripts the way a canon is not.” and there are no final exams; evaluations and comments focus on The common courses are team-taught as well. Rather than div- papers, team projects, oral presentations, and students’ reflections vying up the lectures by discipline, for example, an anthropologist on their progress. delivered the second Modern Social Thought lecture on Tocqueville. Professor Jane M. Jacobs (an aptly named urban-studies scholar), The director of the common curriculum, Terry Nardin, professor of another of the initial faculty cohort and now director of the division political science at Yale-NUS and NUS, a scholar of modern Euro- of social studies, highlighted this “common experience.” The first- pean political theory, said faculty members everywhere are reluctant semester social-inquiry content complements the material in phi- to “teach things that are strange,” and admitted finding the learning losophy and political thought, she noted. Pericles Lewis underscored curve “steep” when preparing to teach about Asian political phi- the resulting benefits to the hoped-for “community of learning,” as losophers. But “This is the very spirit of a liberal-arts college,” he students take their intellectual conversations outside the classroom. argued, “where people are interested in things outside their field. In a student body that is internationally far more diverse than those We ask our students not to prejudge things,” not to track themselves at U.S. colleges, with a variety of prior school experiences and cultural into a professional course too early. “We need to have a faculty that traditions, the first semester more or less assures that “all the students matches the expectations we have of our students.” are equally scared out of their minds” as they confront unfamiliar ideas Moreover, the teachers do all the teaching: Yale-NUS doesn’t have and their own weaknesses, Seo said. They discover that they “all have graduate students, and does not delegate coursework to teaching something to learn—it’s incredibly effective,” and underpins “aca- fellows. A typical common course has one lecture each week (where demic and communal identity.” For all the freedom to choose courses the faculty members steel themselves to learn from one another, as that U.S. students may enjoy, their individual schedules may preclude Nardin described) and two seminar sessions (where the professors such community benefits. have greater scope to draw upon their disciplines). Each teach- The course sequence also reinforces acquisition of skills. Both ing team collaborates on rigorous assessments at the end of each L&H and PPT have writing assignments that progress from analysis semester, to strengthen courses and as a guide to colleagues who of a close textual reading toward assembling of evidence and making comparative analyses. CSI, separately, requires Pericles Lewis (left), students to produce a longer research paper. This founding president of Yale-NUS, and “structured skill acquisition, integrated across the then-Yale president curriculum,” Nardin said, equips students to write Rick Levin, who well in multiple disciplines. Introducing quantita- partnered with NUS tive reasoning in the first semester equips students to use data and algorithms in the scientific-inquiry and other courses that follow. The schedule also incorporates “cocurricular” ex- Pericles Lewis emphasized two advantages Yale-NUS has had in defining itself: starting from scratch, and attracting faculty members interested in innovation and undergraduate teaching.

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 periences that extend learning beyond the classroom. During Above: The new campus, a common “Week 7,” first-semester students engage in field foreground, in front of experiences—some in Singapore, some elsewhere in Asia and NUS’s residential towers; far beyond—with their professors. These are followed by pre- central-quad detail (right) sentations: an opportunity for speaking and visualization exercises. Similarly, spring-break and two-week, year-end “labs” tied Penprase, who di- to faculty members’ research provide academic experiences in the rects the college’s wider world. Students’ interests and academic paths are deliber- Center for Teaching ately integrated when they study abroad, too—a nearly universal and Learning, is an choice. Trisha Craig, dean of professional and international experi- astrophysicist who ence, emphasized that all these opportunities are tied to learning: might be expected they are “not drive-bys.” Professor Bryan E. Penprase, another of to celebrate depth the initial faculty members, said that, as intended, the design of the in concentrations. common curriculum enabled students to enhance their learning “in In fact, he is a strong their cocurricular activities and their conversations”—a major step advocate for limiting toward building a “new academic culture.” them this way. Stu- Accommodating 10 term-length common courses has led Yale- dents can certainly

NUS to limit concentrations in one way that the faculties at Har- pursue a physics or MAGAZINE/JSR HARVARD vard and other research institutions might reject: across all fields, chemistry track, he said, but the broader physical-sciences major students’ majors require only eight courses and two terms of work is “more vibrant.” After the “lived experience” of the common cur- on a capstone project (research, a policy analysis, or a work of riculum, he added, juniors began their concentration courses with art or performance). “Does a philosophy major need 15 courses?” “a unique breadth,” preparing them “to be more integrative or inter- Pericles Lewis asked. The common courses are “not introductory disciplinary” in their major fields. (Apparently, there is a collateral courses, not preparation for advanced study in any field,” as Nar- effect on their teachers: as he put it, “We’re all a faculty ofscience .”) din put it, so students can take electives that are a bridge into, say, A former faculty member at Pomona, a school praised for its teach- economics or a particular scientific field. But the emphasis remains ing, Penprase said that Yale-NUS students acquired communication very much on integrative, liberal-arts education, rather than as- experience and “lateral skills” that outweigh any potential deficit suming that most students seek graduate academic training. The from limiting “deeper disciplinary training earlier.” The result is “a concentrations themselves are what Jane Jacobs called “short, fat very powerful kind of education and autonomy. They have become majors”—14 in all, including such broad fields as arts and humani- more interesting, creative humanists or scientists.” ties, life sciences, and physical sciences. Do these structures and decisions work? Yale-NUS is pioneering

Harvard Magazine 51

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 liberal arts in Asia, and the fledgling college has no track record graduate…able to zoom out and zoom in” to identify problems, define of graduates’ subsequent success. But at least a few of the current options, and build relationships that span cultures and boundaries. To students were enthusiastic. Over lunch in one of the residential din- cope in a “multicentric” world, he said, “We need a lot more breadth, ing halls (which offer halal food lines), Jason Carranceja, a junior with rigor.” (The president, a renal specialist, has managed this feat from the Philippines who chose the school over Amherst, said the himself: he has for decades undertaken rigorous treks deep into Asia— first-term common courses had made him “better able to appreciate and then illustrated accounts of his journeys with his own drawings diverse perspectives in other people”—and that they redirected his and paintings in the style of classical Chinese masters.) studies from physical sciences and mathematics to a global-affairs Tan credited Singapore’s government for its “long-term thinking concentration. A grant to study Spanish led to an eye-opening sum- and willingness to make long-term partnerships” with institutions mer abroad in Argentina; he is now exploring east-west and north- like Duke (medical sciences), Johns Hopkins (music and art), and south relationships as South America and South Asia interact. And now Yale. In the new college, NUS was “responding to the need for before she came to Singapore, said Ruchika Goel, a sophomore from creative thinkers who are familiar with Asian as well as Western New Delhi, she had little sense of the differences among Asian na- perspectives,” ultimately in service to Singapore and throughout tions. Her schooling in India was test-based, and devoid of writ- Asia. To that end, he pointed to the “more purposeful link between ing. Now, her suitemates encompass six Asian countries and eight what people learn within the classroom and outside it.” Students languages; as part of her studies, she conducted her first research who work on a sustainability project in a Cambodian village with project, on gender rights in India, and had a faculty-directed lab their professor, he said, learn about economic development and the experience in Cuba. This summer, she is studying contemporary environment but also “discover more about themselves and how they culture in Korea, after a semester immersion in the language. relate to other people and situations.” Meanwhile, familiar signs of collegiate exuberance were evident. The effects of the Yale-NUS experiment—a common curriculum Protest posters about the college’s rules for student-organization with experiential learning, residential education, and the melding meetings were hung (politely, with nonmarking adhesive) on the of traditions—will become manifest in 10 or 15 years, Tan said. His pristine white walls of the campus. A resident rector (faculty dean, core criterion seemed to align with the essence of the liberal arts: in Harvard parlance) had invited students to a Super Bowl party— “Will the graduates be leaders in different sectors in Singapore, beginning at 7:00 a.m. to accommodate the 13-hour time difference. Asia, and the world—and will they be able to be influential agents And on a blackboard, seniors had chalked items from their bucket of change in their own spheres?” lists, ranging from “Fame and riches” to “Hang out with frenz.” Southeast Asia, meet liberal-arts undergrads. A Curricular Prospectus How will NUS know if this enormous investment pays off? Tan Where Yale-NUS moves the curriculum toward a common set Chorh Chuan, the university’s president, noted that higher educa- of courses defined by thesubstance of the liberal arts (think of Har- tion in Singapore “came from a British foundation, with early, nar- vard’s former Core Curriculum), with better integrated instruction row specialization,” but now, “We have to think about a future-ready in writing and other skills, Lemann seeks a curriculum different in kind. He focuses on core courses explicitly designed Has the academy embraced his proposal, to create the competencies he thinks students will or at least reacted? Not in any organized way, need as adults. Mastering these skills, he wrote, would yield an understanding of “what it means to be a col- Lemann said—not at all to his surprise. lege graduate, regardless of one’s major, that would be as clear and strong as stipulating what it means to be a professional-school graduate.” In a conversation, Lemann cited diverse benefits beyond developing foundational skills. For new students who lack the highest level of academic preparation, this sort of structured curriculum would be “an introduction to how to operate in the university.” The core courses, he said, would be “part of a system that would be more efficient at acclimating kids to higher education,” boosting their graduation rate. Recalling his own Harvard education, he cited gaps in statistical and quantitative methods that he had to remedy, for example, before he could formulate a critique of Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray’s 1994 book The Bell Curve. A thoughtful set of courses on how knowledge is created would correct such omissions. Writing in the Chronicle again nearly a year after his first essay, Le- mann fleshed out a case for the liberal arts that would be “stronger, Tan Chorh Chuan, the physician-trekker- or at least more specific, than calling for ‘critical-thinking skills’ artist-administrator and ‘education for citizenship,’” without succumbing to an educa- who has guided tion in “employment skills that have a demonstrable payoff.” He NUS’s educational outlined a set of first- and second-year courses in: experimentation and outreach • information acquisition: the sociology and sources of knowl-

COURTESY OF NATIONAL UNIVERSITY OF SINGAPORE edge in the Internet era;

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 Yale-NUS has the full suite • cause and effect: defining a question, forming of educational spaces and lectual skills that together would empower a stu- hypotheses, and testing them; amenities found on U.S. dent to be able to acquire and understand informa- • interpretation: close reading of texts; residential campuses. tion across a wide range of fields, and over the long Mira Seo helped shape the • numeracy: engaging with quantitative reason- common courses—and the term,” as she sought “a more successful education ing, probability, and statistics; college’s teaching culture. and also a more successful career and life.” In other • perspective: how different people experience words, a refreshed program in liberal arts. the world; And has the academy embraced his proposal, or • the language of form: seeing, using, and producing visual at least reacted? Not in any organized way—not at all to his sur- information; prise, he responded. There is no organized constituency for such • thinking in time: historical perspective and a sense of contin- change among professors and students (and no direct voice for those gency; and outside the academy). Presidents focus on who is in the student • argument: written and spoken presentation body—and not “what the university is teaching.” Although a course on cause and effect would necessarily involve Having shed his own administrative duties, Lemann wrote as a the scientific method, for instance, and one on thinking in time faculty member, with the freedom that confers to say what is on would engage with historical content, Lemann made clear that he his mind unburdened by the necessity of implementation. He did means something distinct from science or history classes, per se. so knowing the many reasons “why core-curriculum discussions For instance, “cause and effect” are difficult and unpopular, and why methods are not an explicit is something like a course in the basics of the scientific meth- or primary focus of undergraduate education. But the result is that od, aimed at people who aren’t necessarily going into sci- the balance has shifted too far away” from the kind of teaching and ence. The core thinking process entails stating what question learning he has sketched. A conversation that began to shift that you’re trying to answer, then establishing a hypothesis…, then balance back, he wrote, “would make liberal education stronger finding a way to test the hypothesis by gathering material and more sustainable.” that would settle its degree of trustworthiness. The title of the course refers to the idea that causation is a key concept in And Now for Something Different almost all fields of inquiry…. [F]or years I have been teaching From the Silicon Valley perspective, Yale-NUS is yet another ex- a version of it to journalists, using news stories as the main pensive venture, replete with overhead and catering to elite stu- material. What might explain, for example, why violent crime dents, and Nicholas Lemann’s curriculum retrofit a mere face-lift has decreased so much more in New York City than in Chi- for commodity colleges—both ripe for disruption. The clearest cago? What’s important is conveying the idea that making attempt to effect that disruption is Minerva Schools at KGI, the inferences is a skill, and that a series of thinking techniques undergraduate operation of the venture-funded Minerva Project, is powerfully helpful in performing it. founded by Ben Nelson, a graduate of the University of Pennsyl- Similarly, “thinking in time” means “to do more than teach peo- vania’s Wharton School and former CEO of Snapfish, the photo- ple to do historical research per se. To most students arriving at hosting service. The school has enrolled students since the fall of college, the past often seems safer than it actually was, outcomes 2014, immersing them in a reconceived kind of college significantly more inevitable than they were, and operative assumptions closer shaped by Stephen M. Kosslyn: its founding dean, now its dean to the ones we use today.” Historical perspective “can make stu- of arts and sciences, and for three prior decades professor of psy- dents see that everything could have turned out differently, that chology, department chair, and dean of social sciences at Harvard. individual people always operate within social, economic, and cul- Much has been written about Minerva’s distinctive structure tural contexts.” and teaching. In pursuit of radically lower costs, the school has Lemann has aimed to prompt discussion about a “suite of intel- essentially done away with all the fixed assets of a campus. Stu-

Harvard Magazine 53

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 dents live in leased units with kitchens in San Francisco their and colleagues detail the Minerva system in a book forthcoming first year, and then sequentially, in subsequent semesters, in six from MIT Press late this year.) other cities around the world (thus far, Berlin and Buenos Ai- Such practices may become more widespread as educators exam- res, with Seoul on tap), where they literally study abroad to- ine Minerva’s methods. It may be a greater stretch to imagine other gether. They attend “class” by laptop, in a sense inverting the institutions embracing the radically revised, pared-down course of HarvardX MOOC model: instead of aggregating faculty members study in which Minerva deploys its pedagogy. If the substance of in Cambridge and Boston and disseminating their work around Yale-NUS’s common curriculum is a recognizable version of liberal the world, Minerva aggregates its students and connects them arts, and Lemann’s “canon of skills” and methods would be taught online to dispersed teachers. using the substance of the liberal arts, Minerva at the very least When they log on for class sessions via the Active Learning inverts the telescope. Its curriculum, perhaps its most significant Forum, Minerva’s software platform, teachers (who work on a innovation, aims at what it calls “practical knowledge”: tools that contract basis) and students can all see each other, since all in- equip students to solve real-world problems. Thus, rather than struction is in seminar format. The lesson plans used by each fac- offer a course in, say, the history of art or music, Minerva views ulty member build in myriad engagement and reinforcement tools art and music as interpretative tools students can expect to use or derived from research on learning (electronically arranged small encounter in communicating throughout their lives. breakout groups to brainstorm a problem and report on options, From the outset, Nelson promoted a vision of a highly struc- polling and voting to solicit feedback, collaborative whiteboards). tured general-education curriculum. As Kosslyn recalled from By observing each student through the platform, the instructor early discussions in late 2012, Minerva sought explicitly to pre- can make certain each is remaining continuously involved, and pare graduates to develop their capacity for leadership, innovation, tallies each one’s participation in discussions. adaptability, and global perspective; he plunged into the academic The software minutely details every learning objective and activ- literature, looking for agreed-upon “characteristics of successful ity built into the lesson plan for each class session. Faculty members leaders,” innovators, and creative people, and testing his findings go through a four-week Minerva boot camp to master the pedagogy with employers. The process, Kosslyn said, was “very top-down.” before teaching students. The aim is an intensified version of the His inquiries identified three core competencies that underlay the active learning achieved in other institutions’ “flipped classrooms,” outcomes Minerva’s education aimed to prompt: two cognitive which assume prior familiarity with readings and recorded lectures skills—creative thinking and critical thinking; and an interper- so students’ time with their instructors focuses on problem-solving sonal skill—effective communication. After a consultation with and learning concepts by applying them. Harvard Business School Harvard’s Balkaniski professor of physics and applied physics Eric students might see a Minerva class as an online equivalent of their Mazur (a pioneering educator, profiled in “Twilight of the Lecture,” own carefully structured case discussions, on steroids. The similar- March-April 2012, page 23), the latter competency was divided, ity is no accident: Kosslyn mastered creating a fourth category: effective interaction. Stephen M. Kosslyn, the approach during three years as Immersion in acquiring those competencies, rather than con- Minerva’s founding dean co-leader of the Mind of the Market ventional course content and information, became the subject of and dean of arts and sciences, has driven a lab with Gerald Zaltman, now Wil- students’ first year, when they take four “cornerstone” courses: radical redesign of liberal son professor of business adminis- • Formal Analyses (thinking critically with logic, statistics, al- arts and pedagogy. tration emeritus. (Nelson, Kosslyn, gorithms, computation, and formal systems); • Empirical Analyses (thinking creatively by framing problems, developing and testing hypotheses, and recognizing biases, as in science and social science); • Multimodal Communications (speaking, writing, debate, design, and visual and artistic expression); and • Complex Systems (human interactions, collaborations, networks, negotiations, and leadership). “It all looks very coherent,” Kosslyn said, “and it is.” During the year, the students are introduced to about 10 dozen habits of mind and foundational concepts (HCs, in Minerva’s shorthand, each with its own hashtag) that the curriculum designers have determined are embedded in the overarching competencies: fitting communications to the context and audience, for an example of the former, and distinguishing correlation from causation, for the latter. The skills are engaged not through traditional subjects (literature, his-

COURTESY OF THE MINERVA PROJECT tory, biology, and so on), but by addressing big problems: feeding

Minerva’s curriculum design was “very top-down.” As a result, “It all looks very coherent, and it is.”

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 the world, climate change, securing water supply, or maintaining peace. The Harvard College Curriculum In the second year, students begin to apply these concepts to their fields of in- Beginning in the fall of 2018, Harvard undergraduates will find themselves on a terest, choosing among five majors (arts somewhat altered academic trajectory, as the revised Program in General Education and humanities, computational sciences, takes effect. Following review of the Gen Ed curriculum that took shape a decade natural sciences, social sciences, or busi- ago—under which students had to take one course each from eight broadly defined ness)—each with three “core” course pre- areas—the faculty decided in 2016 to alter its earlier handiwork. The resulting new requisites—plus diverse electives. To date, framework requires one course each from four broad “perspectives” (Aesthetics & for Minerva’s pilot students and two sub- Culture; Histories, Societies, Individuals; Science & Technology in Society; Ethics & sequent cohorts—numbering about 300 Civics); a distribution requirement (one course each from arts and humanities; social in all from 2014 through this year—those sciences; and sciences and engineering); and a new course demonstrating “quantitative electives have consisted of the core courses facility” (the current definition of which, “thinking with data,” remains to be clari- from the other majors. fied, given some concerns recently raised by mathematicians—see “Pending Business: Concentrations within the five majors Maths,” page 26). are to follow in the third year: a prescribed This segment of their education aims to “prepare students for meaningful lives of grid of six tracks, typically, each in turn civic and ethical engagement in an ever changing world.” The faculty’s intent in defin- requiring three defined subject courses, ing the Gen Ed categories and devising the courses that qualify is to “help students to designed to span theory, empirical find- understand the deep relationship of scholarly work to some of the most important as- ings, and applications. Those concentra- pects of life beyond college. Gen Ed aims to produce practical wisdom: it asks Harvard tion courses are now under development students to consider how they will best use their liberal arts and sciences educations, as Minerva pedagogical experts team with and their lives, in the service of both knowledge and humanity.” faculty subject-matter experts to define The College’s requirements thus comprise the Gen Ed courses; the distribution the content, syllabus, and learning plan courses; expository writing; and learning (or testing out of) a foreign language. Along- for each—all under decanal supervision. side that architecture, the Harvard learners pursue concentrations. In any student’s When all are created, Minerva’s catalog progress through the College, concentration courses outnumber general-education will number perhaps six dozen structured and distribution requirements; and most ultimately aim, at least in honors fields, for courses in total; in their third and fourth focused research at some frontier of that discipline—a taste of what graduate study years, students also take electives from might entail. The rest of students’ academic work consists of whatever other electives the other majors, and pursue increasingly move them and fit their schedules. independent work on capstone research projects and in Oxbridge-style tutorials. For arts and humanities, for instance, the core courses are Global date. However its vision unfolds, Minerva has usefully pushed the History, Morality and Justice, and The Arts and Social Change. For limits on content and the application of cognitive science to test an their subsequent concentrations, those students will choose among alternate version of liberal arts, and put it before students who are humanities analyses; humanities foundations; humanities applications; willing, like their peers in Singapore, to try something very different. historical forces; philosophy, ethics, and the law; and arts and litera- • • • ture. Among the nine courses available, a “humanities applications” concentrator would enroll in Uses and Misuses of History, Creating Yale-NUS, uniquely supported by two powerful universities and Ethical Political and Social Systems, and Using the Arts and Litera- backed with unprecedented resources, may be emulated in its ture to Communicate and Persuade. Underscoring Minerva’s em- entirety by a few of the emerging Asian nations with the funds phasis on practical liberal arts, illustrative career options accompany to invest in liberal arts. Its curriculum may have a broader dem- the description of each concentration: for a humanities-applications onstration effect on established U.S. colleges seeking to bolster concentrator, these include communications specialist, political sci- general education within familiar disciplinary buckets—or, at a entist, public-policy expert, film maker, urban planner, and attorney. minimum, to extend their definition of the literary canon beyond To liberal-arts traditionalists, Minerva’s rubrics may seem for- the usual European and North American icons. Lemann’s skills- mulaic or rigid. Having course designers and curriculum specialists based curriculum may find a readier audience, if not among the figure so prominently in course development departs significantly most prestigious elite institutions. Some elements of Minerva’s from the convention of relying on the individual professor’s knowl- technologically driven, lower-cost model will have a financial ap- edge—and from the teamwork embedded in Yale-NUS’s common peal to hard-pressed colleges, public and private, and its edgier curriculum or any likely implementation of Lemann’s ideas. It is a substantive version of the liberal arts is designed to have an ap- good bet that many of the American students who enroll in the top peal that builds bridges to career options after college. But what- tier of selective liberal-arts colleges now might chafe at Minerva’s ever their particular paths toward wider influence, each represents holistic application of learning science. a serious effort to challenge prevailing assumptions—perhaps But that is for the market to decide—and its business plan aims while reminding educators and their future students of the en- much more at students, many of them international, who do not during power and potential of an education in the liberal arts. now have ready access to liberal arts, and who are, overwhelmingly, not enrolled in the major liberal-arts programs that have evolved to John S. Rosenberg is editor of Harvard Magazine.

Harvard Magazine 55

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

59 Open Book 60 “Class Cluelessness” 60 Off the Shelf 63 Chapter and Verse

Comic License Jaunts to Nashville and Italy aside, Master of None stays, and Alan Yang, writing in Hollywood NETFLIX is filmed, in New York City (top). On set in the subway, castmates by sophia nguyen Lena Waithe (left) and James Ciccone confer with co-creators Aziz Ansari and Yang. n the television show Master of None, Though the sons That episode won an Emmy two Asian-American friends treat their have some explicit Alan Award in 2016, its initial seed parents to dinner. Awkwardly, one an- takeaways from the Yang coming from the family lore of

nounces the purpose of the meal: “We encounter (“What COURTESY OF ALAN YANG series co-creator Alan Yang ’02.

KC BAILEY/UNIVERSALKC TELEVISION/NBCU PHOTO BANK VIA GETTY IMAGES I wanted to learn more about you and how an insane journey! My dad used to bathe in Yang grew up in southern California’s Inland you got here.” But when prompted to share a river, and now he drives a car that talks Empire, and at Harvard found two refuges a story, his father is stoic: “I cannot think to him!”), the episode’s deeper insight is from culture shock. The first was playing in of anything noteworthy.” The son persists. conveyed by inference: how, without out- a punk-rock band in the Boston suburbs; the “Come on—there’s got to be something, ward conflict or obvious angst, the children second was The Harvard Lampoon. For many, the right? Like, well, what did you do when of immigrants become deracinated. A gen- campus humor magazine has been a career you were growing up in Taiwan?” “I worked erational gap can become a feature of the chute straight to Hollywood, and he began to very hard.” “Okay, did anything particular- landscape without anyone thinking to ask pursue comedy in earnest while on staff. Still, ly interesting happen?” A long pause. “No.” how or when it opened. Yang maintains that there was a fundamental

56 July - August 2017

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 Montage innocence to the activity. “Look, one of the The second season has Dev face greatest things about the Lampoon is, it’s a very both heartbreak (right) and career challenges (below, with pure point in your writing life, where you’re his reality-TV producer-boss, basically writing to please yourself and maybe played by Bobby Cannavale). 10 other 19-year-olds that you’re friends with in that building,” he says. “That’s a very pure In recent years, cable networks and thing to do! You’re not trying to write to sell a online players have thrown money script, or to get famous, or anything like that.” and creative control at promising The friendships formed in the red-brick writers. Such boom times have en- stronghold on Bow Street provided a ready- couraged an exploratory, sometimes made support system throughout Yang’s shaggy, approach to storytelling— postgraduate un- and underemployment especially on streaming-only platforms, in Los Angeles: “That alone gives you the where the series format has found new stamina to stay with it.” The time spent with flexibility. For the new season ofMaster of NETFLIX (2) his college band also came in handy during None, this manifests as a kind of whimsy: one his first substantial staff writing job, on the episode is a black-and-white riff on Italian NBC sitcom Parks and Recreation. Yang played neorealist cinema; another features the Jab- bass guitar in the fictional band of a first- bawockeez, a masked, silent hip-hop dance season guest star, “as basically an in-joke for crew, who help judge a cupcake contest. the writers’ room”; by the sixth season, that One of Yang’s favorite moments in the sea- character had been promoted to a series reg- son arrives in an episode called “The Dinner ular, and Yang got to share the stage with the Party,” when a lovelorn Dev says goodnight likes of Wilco. Starting as Parks’s most junior to a crush, who’s returning home to Italy writer, Yang learned the ropes of TV produc- with her boyfriend the next morning. They tion over its seven-year lifespan. There, he hug goodbye, and minutes later she sends season would have been all about public- also befriended the show’s most junior cast a jokey, flirtatious text message. The cam- ity tours. In the past, he’s described Master member, comedian Aziz Ansari, bonding era stays on Dev for the rest of his solo cab of None as a product of and about its makers’ over shared interests in nightlife and travel. ride—three full minutes of him sitting, glum “dying single years.” “Those single years are When Yang and Ansari struck out to co- and silent—and the episode ends just as he still continuing!” he says now, with a long, create their own series (in which Ansari gets out. “When I first saw that in the cut, I loud, burst of laughter. also stars), those enthusiasms were core to said, ‘Whatever happens, we cannot change Meanwhile, he’s gone on other explora- Master of None. Released by Netflix in 2015, this,’” Yang declares. “We’ve all sat in that tions. A trip to Asia inspired a screenplay it follows a young actor and foodie named cab! We’ve all gotten that text! The fact that he intends one day to produce and direct: Dev, living in New York with a plateauing you see him get out of that Uber is crazy to a country-hopping, intergenerational fam- career and a stalled relationship. If the last me. I love that.” On a traditional network, he ily drama, drawing on anecdotes he heard generation of urbanite sitcoms were hang- adds, “There’s no way you’d get to do that.” while traveling with his father in Taiwan. out shows, anchored at a bar or apartment Time, and the freedom to spend it, have “He told me these stories that I out and out and offering the cozy feeling of home,Mas - been essential. The show’s looser produc- stole, and put in the movie,” says Yang. As ter of None is a wandering show—a chatty tion calendar allowed the writers to gath- ever, research was halting. “It was a lot of city walk with no particular destination in er new experiences and to hone them into me texting my mom and dad, and them not mind, making pit stops at food trucks and ideas—otherwise, claims Yang, the new answering.” restaurants. It’s stuffed more with incidents than plot turns—auditions for bit parts, weekend trips out of town, babysitting for friends—all cut with observational humor. Though some episodes home in on specific A Postmodern Youth topics, like cultural stereotypes or sexism, the show is most concerned with the para- Tahmima Anam’s Bengal trilogy finds a resting place. dox of choice. Dev maintains an epicurean, cheerfully noncommittal existence—under- by marina bolotnikova written by material security (he’s dining out on a lucrative Go-Gurt commercial), nagged by a creeping existential itch. In one epi- ubaida Haque, narrator of The ing the 1971 War of Independence. People sode, he and his friend tucker themselves Bones of Grace, envies the moral knew what was right and what was wrong out trying to decide where to go get tacos. clarity of her adoptive parents’ then, Zubaida imagines; Bengali national- This relaxed, leisurely air, premised on a Z generation. They grew up in ism had forever animated their lives with a sense of abundance, seems emblematic of Bangladesh when it was still East Pakistan, purpose that hers lacks. Four decades lat- the television industry’s rapid expansion. serving in the national liberation army dur- er, the family has grown wealthy through

Harvard Magazine 57

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 Montage her father’s textile busi- even though old bound- ness. Zubaida’s upper- Tahmima Anam aries have collapsed: a class, postmodern youth colleague on a dig in feels maddeningly easy Pakistan is suddenly next to theirs, so easy arrested and dragged that she’s crushed by the away, caught in a tribal weight of everything she conflict; a little boy and must choose, all the pos- girl are maimed at a ship- sibilities of her academic breaking site, where gi- life in America and her ant decommissioned duties at home. Near the ships (and often human end of the novel, when bodies) are stripped to she comes upon a roomful their skeletons. of laborers mutilated by The recurring meta- Chittagong’s shipbreak- phor of bones extends ing industry who’ve been to Zubaida’s hunt for the deprived by their boss of fossils of an extinct walk- medical care, she is final- ing whale, and to her al-

ly moved by her moth- ANAM TAHMIMA OF COURTESY most metaphysical belief er’s imperative: “The sight of those work- fighters, attending college and graduate in the importance of flesh-and-blood rela- ers changed what I knew about the world school in the northeastern United States, al- tionships—an obsession that eventually be- and my place in it. It made everything else ways feeling on the outside of things. Anam gins to unravel. “When I studied the fossils shrink.” The modern world is still filled says she usually draws her characters from of Ambulocetus and Pakicetus, I told myself the with moral catastrophes. real life: “There’s a joke in my family that no souls of those ancient creatures were in their Bones concludes the Bengal trilogy that one should ever tell me anything because it bones,” she reflects. “But now, confronted by Tahmima Anam, Ph.D. ’05, began more than will show up in a book. It’s either that I lack these fragments of people, a room in which a decade ago, each novel a self-contained the imagination to make up people, or it’s the atmosphere had been thinned by the portrait of a generation of the Haque fam- that real people are so fascinating.” fleeing of hope, my knowledge of bones ily. A Golden Age follows The narrative is gave me nothing, no explanation, no pre- Zubaida’s grandmother, pushed forward by scription.” The plot’s epic scale would be a widow during the war. Zubaida’s romance with unconvincing, were it not for Anam’s hu- In the sequel, The Good Elijah, a philosopher manizing prose. Muslim, Zubaida’s moth- whom she improbably Bones is filled with ordinary people er, a doctor who works meets at a piano con- crushed by the machinery of modernity, with women raped dur- cert in Sanders Theatre. recalling Anam’s training as an anthro- ing the war, makes sense But she has a long-term of a reconstituted Ban- boyfriend in Bangladesh, gladesh, suddenly more whose marriage propos- Explore More religious and autocratic, al she feels pressured to eager to forget the past accept. This is not, as and embrace ties with some reviews have sug- For more online-only articles on Pakistan. Bones, the lon- gested, an arranged mar- the arts and creativity, see: gest and most ambitious riage; her parents are too of the trilogy, expands the modern for that. The re- A Certain Slant orbit of Anam’s story be- lationship is more sub- of Light yond Bengal to Pakistan, tly fraught, colored by A new film Dubai, and Cambridge, where its protago- Zubaida’s longing for security, her worry illuminates Emily nist is studying paleontology at Harvard. about estranging their two families, and her Dickinson’s daily life Zubaida, much more than her mother and fear, which she recognizes only after meet- and eternal poetry. grandmother, must “cobble together an ing Elijah, that she can repay the debt of her harvardmag.com/dickinson-17 identity,” as Anam puts it in an interview, adoption only by doing what her parents because no great historical moment has an- expect. Bones reaches its central question A Literary Wake for the chored her generation. when Zubaida realizes that she isn’t okay Obama Era Bones reads with the intimacy of a novelist with not knowing who her birth parents Harvard Review editor Major Jackson, RI who knows her heroine so well she’s afraid were, that she must know. That need takes ’07, linked 200 poets in this unique COURTESY OF MUSIC BOX FILMS. of revealing too much—perhaps because her through a deeper understanding of her- verse tribute to the former president. © A QUIET PASSION/HURRICANE FILMS/ Zubaida and Anam are almost the same per- self and her country, each tangled subplot harvardmag.com/obamawake-17 son: both raised by former Bengali freedom revealing a world still captive to the past

58 July - August 2017

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 Montage pologist. “Of all the social-science disciplines,” she says, “anthropology is the most open to questioning what the truth is and o p e n b o o k looking at the truth subjectively, understanding [that] the truth is contextual.” Yet while interviewing freedom fighters 1760s Extracurriculars for her dissertation on historical memory in postwar Bangladesh, she felt confined by the requirement to tell the truth. With- Colonial America was home to nine colleges still in existence. Institutional histories in the constraints of academic research, “I cover their founding and leadership, but lack some of the gritty essence of students’ wasn’t fully able to explore the truths that daily lives then. In Pedagogues and Protestors: The Harvard College Student Diary of Stephen we can only discover by making things up.” Peabody, 1767-1768 (University of Massachusetts Press, $27.95 paper), superb editor So after her dissertation, she enrolled in a Conrad Edick Wright ’72, director of research at the Massachusetts Historical Soci- creative-writing program in London and ety, has made accessible perhaps the best source for such a perspective. This excerpt gave herself a year after finishing her first is from his introduction about an “unexceptional collegian.” novel to find a publisher, or else look for an academic job. A Golden Age was published Since Stephen Peabody’s diary pro- 1767, engaged him and other observers. in 2007. vides the best available entrée into the There was nutting, which Stephen and Anam’s need to “make things up” does Harvard community in the late 1760s, a some friends did on October 3, a day not mean she’s uninterested in factual ac- close look at his day—how he spent it and when the trees were full of chestnuts. counts of Bengali history—her stories are with whom—repays the effort. Without Singing was a popular pastime, and Pea- about the relationship of facts to national an acceptable excuse there was no easy body reported informal harmonizing, usu- identity. She assiduously researched the de- way around certain obligations, including ally with other undergraduates, at least 60 tails of the War of Independence: its mas- morning prayers, daily recitations and lec- times. There were evenings with school- sacres, war crimes, and underground op- tures, and Sunday services; as long as Ste- mates—often for pleasure but every Sat- erations. Bones, the novel set furthest from phen was in town he hardly ever missed urday for prayer and discussion of matters the war, asks what those facts should mean them. Then it was important to study of faith at the weekly meeting of some of now. One of its smartest moments takes enough to avoid faculty harassment. the college’s more pious undergraduates. place outside of the courthouse where re- There were other ways to pass the time, There were recreational excursions, inal-life Bengali politician Ghulam Azam has though, and Peabody was only too happy cluding a day-long outing Stephen took just been convicted of war crimes. A mas- to succumb to them. A multiday wrestling with a friend on May 25, the second day sive crowd, dotted with people Zubaida competition between the freshmen and of the journal, which steered him along a knows, screams “Death!” and “Hang him!” the sophomores beginning on August 20, great loop from Charlestown to Boston, Azam, now 90, emerges Brookline, Watertown, and then back to looking tiny and shriv- Cambridge. And there were errands to eled in a wheelchair, his run, sometimes a few paces outside Har- hands cuffed in front of vard Yard in what is now Harvard Square, his body. He will die in or more appealingly in Boston, where an prison a year later. What outing might include attending a minister’s is the value in the convic- weekday lecture, viewing the muster of a tion of an almost dead militia company, dropping off a short ar- man, or the tribunal’s ticle for publication in one of the town’s fact-finding exercise? weeklies, or dining with acquaintances as For Zubaida’s mother, well as visiting the metropolis’s shops. who provided testimony Most of all, there was reading. With a in the case and spent her substantial provincial library at Peabody’s life obsessed with the fingertips it would be a waste not to read, war, the moment is the and he did so avidly. Whether or not Ste- proudest of her career, phen wrote in his diary about his curricu- a way to neatly avenge lar reading, apparently a subject of pre- her country’s humiliat- cious little consequence to him, his ing past. But this is not reading during his free time almost always Zubaida’s battle. She merited a mention. In the course of the gapes at the incident, year Peabody’s diary covers he reported struggling to feel some- reading 72 titles…. thing, and returns to her search for the facts of her Stephen Peabody, 1809, by John Johnston

own life. SOCIETY ANTIQUARIAN AMERICAN

Harvard Magazine 59

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 Montage the resentment of ru- “Class Cluelessness” ral voters toward the White Working Class: “liberal elite” in The Overcoming Class The powerful resentments shaping American politics today Politics of Resentment: Cluelessness in America, Rural Consciousness in by Joan C. Williams by andrea louise campbell Wisconsin and the Rise (Harvard Business of Scott Walker (2016). Review Press, $22.99) J.D. Vance described onald J. Trump’s victory in elites? Or does the logic of the Electoral Col- his own family’s predilections in Hillbilly the 2016 presidential election lege require a cross-racial, geographically di- Elegy (2016) and sociologist Arlie Russell spawned a maelstrom of finger- verse coalition of the non-elite centered on Hochschild reported that right-leaning folks D pointing and soul-searching with- economic issues? The analyses and recom- in Louisiana bayou country felt they were in the Democratic Party. How could the party mendations intended to prevent another 2016 Strangers in Their Own Land. Economist Robert of FDR, LBJ, and, for that matter, Bill Clinton, for the Democrats are just beginning. J. Gordon ’62 revealed why they might be so have lost touch so thoroughly with the white Pre-election warnings weren’t lacking. upset in The Rise and Fall of American Growth (re- working class that had been central to its co- A host of books detailed the growing dis- viewed in the May-June 2016 issue, page 68). alition for years? Which way should the party contents of lower-income white workers. If Democratic Party elites (and Hillary go in its identity and future strategy? Should Harvard political scientists Vanessa Wil- Clinton’s campaign officials) missed the it veer left, in the Bernie Sanders direction, liamson and Theda Skocpol wrote of the warning signs, Joan C. Williams, J.D. ’80, of or stay centrist? Should it continue to piece frustration of Tea Party members in The Tea the University of California’s Hastings Col- together an electoral coalition of racial and Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism lege of the Law, offers an early post-election ethnic minorities, single women, and coastal (2012), while Katherine J. Cramer uncovered analysis in White Working Class. Expanding

Heading West? Because It Is So ate account, by a former federal prosecu- Beautiful, by Robert Leonard Reid tor, now law professor, of the harsh reality Off the Shelf ’65 (Counterpoint, $26), collects es- that “There has never, not for one minute Recent books with Harvard connections says from decades of infatuated wan- in American history, been peace between dering from Santa Fe through the black people and the police.” Yukon. For context, pack Cattle For some serious beach reading: Maile Kingdom: The Hidden History The Magic of Children’s Gardens: In- Meloy ’94 returns to writing fiction for of the Cowboy West (Houghton Mifflin spiring through Creative Design, by adults with Do Not Become Alarmed Harcourt, $29), by Christopher Knowlton Lolly Tai, M.L.A. ’79 (Temple University (Riverhead Books, $27.00). Rapid and ab- ’78. His account of the capacious open- Press, $75). A copiously illustrated survey sorbing, if sometimes schematic, it follows range era explains developments like the of enchantments that can be made real— a family cruise vacation gone wrong, and shaping of Teddy Roosevelt, and the near through commitment and savvy design— charts the waters of misfortune and privi- annihilation of the bison herd. in public parks. The author is professor of lege. Pair with the aloofly lyrical debut of landscape architecture at Temple. Jesse Ruddock ’04, Shot-Blue (Coach The Color of Law: A Forgotten His-

House Books, $19.95), about a single moth- tory of How Our Government Seg- The Idea of the Muslim World: An In- BY er and her son squatting in a cabin by a re- regated America, by Richard Rothstein tellectual History, by Cemil Aydin, Ph.D. mote Canadian lake. ’63 (Liveright, $27.95), is a searching exam- ’02 (Harvard, $29.95). An associate profes- ination of the de jure seg- sor of history at the University of North regation of American cities. Carolina at Chapel Hill deconstructs the Geyser University Professor prevalent misunderstanding that the world’s William Julius Wilson calls it 1.5 billion Muslims are a homogeneous “the most forceful argument community, or religious or political entity— ever published” on the legal a fiction arising from the fact that Muslims creation of neighborhood are not Christians. Useful reading for poli- segregation. Chokehold: cymakers and the public alike. Policing Black Men, by Paul Butler, J.D. ’86 (New Paolo Veronese and the Practice of Press, $26.95), is a passion- Painting in Late Renaissance Venice, by Diana Gisolfi ’62 (Yale, $75). A compre- THE MAGIC OF CHILDREN’S GARDENS: INSPIRING THROUGH DESIGN, CREATIVE Children’s grotto cave at hensive examination of the sixteenth-cen- the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center, tury painter, whose lush work for the Vene-

60 July - August 2017

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 Montage upon her much-read November 2016 Harvard an additional 6 percent who have higher are. Don’t they understand that manufactur- Business Review article, Williams serves as incomes but no college degree. We might ing jobs aren’t coming back? Why won’t they tour guide and translator in explaining the term such folks the middle class, but since take the pink-collar jobs that are growing? worldviews, anxieties, and political choic- Americans try to elide class differences by Why do they refuse to get the training they es of economically precarious white voters. calling everyone “middle class,” she settles need to better their lot—and why don’t they Although cynicism comes easily about yet on calling this middle 53 percent “the work- send their kids to college? Why do they cling another member of the coastal elite class- ing class.” Below the working class on the to their guns and their religion? Above all, splaining for the rest of us, the book is full income spectrum are “the poor” and above why do such people vote Republican and vote of pithy observations and plausible theories. are “the professional-managerial elite,” who Trump? Don’t they want health insurance and Her basic message is that white liberal elites in addition to having incomes in the top 20 a higher minimum wage? And how dare they and the progressive lawmakers who repre- percent also have at least one college gradu- criticize the poor when so many of them are sent them have abandoned the white work- ate per household. This “PME” group has a on government disability or unemployment. ing class, scorning their lifestyles and beliefs median income of $173,000. Williams spends most of this short, tren- while failing to offer policy solutions that chant book explaining the worldview of the would truly help them. No surprise then Williams asserts that the professional- working class: why they believe and behave when that group returns the favor by aban- managerial elite have a bad case of “class clue- as they do. And her message for the pro- doning Democrats in the electoral arena. lessness.” We (if you’re reading this review, fessional-managerial class is blunt: just as Williams defines the working class as you’re probably in the PME) think the work- elites ascribe structural reasons for poverty, Americans with incomes above the bot- ing class consists of racist, sexist, homopho- so too should they recognize the structural tom one-third and below the top one-fifth bic, and anti-immigrant “deplorables.” We factors behind the attitudes and behaviors ($41,000 to $132,000 in 2015, with median can’t understand why all those people in fly- of the working class. income around $75,000). She also includes over country refuse to move where the jobs She walks through the sources of finan- the scale and technique are astonishing. By after she attends law school, when he a professor of art and design at the Pratt is in jail for murder. Institute. The Ruler’s Guide, by Chinghua Stuck in the Shallow End: Education, Tang, M.B.A. ’85 (Scribner, $22). The Race, and Computing (updated edition), wisdom of the great Chinese emperor by Jane Margolis, Ed.D. ’90, and colleagues Tang Taizong, made accessible for lead- (MIT, $25 paper). A close study of Los An- ers today. At a time of fraught relations geles schools documents the “virtual seg- between the People’s Republic and the regation” that discourages African-Ameri- United States, 1,300 years later, per- can and Latino students from progressing haps one might make fresh use of the in computer science. The author’s work ancient leader and archer’s discovery, was covered in “Computing in the Class- upon learning that he had been using room,” this magazine’s March-April 2015 flawed bows: “I really don’t know their cover story. secret. I must know even less about

governing a country.” SUPERINTENDENT OF ARTISTIC AND ARCHITECTURAL HERITAGE OF VENICE Let Us Watch Richard Wilbur, by Rob- Detail from The Banishment of Vashti, 1556, ert Bagg, G ’60, and Mary Bagg (University A Description of the New York Cen- by Paolo Veronese. of Massachusetts, $32.95 paper). A “bio- tral Park, by Clarence C. Cook, A.B. 1849 graphical study” of the poet, A.M. ’47, JF ’50, (New York University, $25). A new facsimile day. About greater delegation of powers to who was the subject of “Poetic Patriarch” edition, with introduction by Maureen Meis- the executive, he notes, “Unlimited, take- (November-December 2008, page 36). The ter, of the 1869 book by the art critic that all-the-marbles power at the top seems a Songs We Know Best, by Karin Roffman provided crucial support for the famous, bad idea for a heterogeneous society like (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $30), examines but embattled, Olmsted-Vaux design for today’s United States.” Hear that, senators the “early life” of John Ashbery ’49, Litt.D. New York’s brilliant park. and representatives? ’01, and traces the influence of his youth on his poems. The Imprint of Congress, by David A Rendezvous with Death: Alan R. Mayhew, Ph.D. ’64 (Yale, $35). The au- Seeger in Poetry, at War, by Chris Dick- Reading with Patrick, by Michelle Kuo thor, Sterling Professor of political science on (New Street, $24.99), is the first modern ’03, J.D. ’09 (Random House, $27), is a per- emeritus at Yale, the dean of congressional life of Seeger, A.B. 1910, the subject of the sonal account of a Teach for America corps scholars, takes a sweeping view of the po- magazine’s Vita (November-December 2016, member’s engagement with a student in Ar- litical role of the country’s unloved legis- page 54), published during the centennial kansas—and her return to mentoring him, lature, from the eighteenth century to to- year of his death in battle in World War I.

Harvard Magazine 61

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

Where the coastal “professional-managerial elite” are not: view of a closed coal facility from Green Mount Cemetery, Waynesburg, Pennsylvania but rather the professional-managerial elite at whose hands they suffer daily affronts (“the doctor who un- thinkingly patronizes the medical techni- cian, the harried office worker who treats the security guard as invisible”). Unions help only a few people, and public unions repre- senting teachers and bureaucrats take money from working people’s pockets. Support for Republican candi-

BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP/GETTY IMAGES SMIALOWSKI/AFP/GETTY BRENDAN dates whose policies cial insecurity and hopelessness among significant than elites’ ludicrous “mind- reflect these attitudes is perfectly logical, that group. Jobs have vanished, job retrain- fulness” and pursuit of self-actualization. as is rejection of Democrats’ policies, which ing is useless. Higher education is no sure It provides crucial structure, hopefulness, may help the poor, but not the working class step up for their children. Many working- status, and a financial safety net in times of (a $15 minimum wage does little when a $30 class kids live in “education deserts,” miles need, when government often falls short. In wage is what’s needed for a modest living from any college or university. The return a world of structural inequality and lack of standard in most parts of the country). on education can be low, and the resultant opportunity, the family, too, is paramount. Williams’s analysis is most original when debt cripplingly high. The workplace has Lacking financial resources, members of the skewering elites’ assumptions. As she notes, vastly different meanings as well: as Wil- working class rely on friends and relatives elites who look down their noses at work- liams sardonically notes, for elites, “‘disruption’ means founding a successful start-up. Religion and family provide crucial structure, Disruption, in working-class jobs, just gets you fired.” hopefulness, childcare, and a financial safety net These structural constraints help explain worldviews and lifestyles. Above all, the when government often falls short. working class wants to work. Sure, they may be on unemployment and disability now, to provide the childcare, elder care, and help ing-class folkways do so from the perspec- but they qualify for those programs only be- with home and car repairs that elites simply tive of their own folkways. Elites may think cause they were workers in the past—un- purchase. Moving would mean the loss of they hold more liberal racial attitudes, but like the poor, who violate cherished norms these irreplaceable networks. in fact we’re “all a little bit racist,” accord- of hard work and self-discipline. They re- ing to the musical Avenue Q and the inexora- sent Democrats for providing social assis- What are the political implications of ble results of the Implicit Association Test. tance to these “shiftless” poor—handouts these patterns of belief? Here, too, Williams Elites may think they hold superior gender that the white working class wouldn’t stoop is good at explaining what seem to progres- attitudes, and deem working-class men sex- to accept (and for which their incomes are sives and elites perverse patterns: the work- ist because they prefer their wives to stay at probably too high to qualify anyway, despite ing class’s embrace of tax cuts for the rich, home when they can. But how about those their financial insecurity). And they resent resentment of unions, and support for Re- elite male M.B.A.s who, surveys show, expect progressives for mandating sympathy for the publican candidates. Tax cuts for the rich their future wives to stay at home, too? Turns poor, for women, and for minorities, while could create jobs; less government revenue out the average working-class father spends heaping scorn on them. could result in benefit cuts for the resented more time with his children than the average Elites may scoff at religion, but for the poor. Plus, the working class doesn’t resent elite man. Elites may think moving (away working class it is an institution far more the rich, with whom they have no contact, from friends and family) for a higher-status

62 July - August 2017

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 ALUMNI job is the ultimate professional achievement. But the working class sees work devotion as narcissism, and change as loss. Elite wom- C hapter & Verse en may look down on working-class house- Correspondence on not-so-famous lost words wives, but job-applicant studies show that non-elite women get more callbacks than elite women, who are perceived as flight More queries from the archives: “the boredom of living versus the suf- risks who will leave their own jobs, once “Nothing is more likely to propel us fering of being” they have children, to engage in the inten- headlong down the path to barbarism “When you see the word ‘primitive,’ sive mothering and “concerted cultivation” than a single-minded obsession with the always substitute ‘complicated’” now expected in affluent circles. concept of spiritual purity” and “Feigning “The dew…In down-soft slippers…the deafness may be forgivable, but taken to dew has seemed like teardrops ever since…” If the book is strong, albeit rather sweep- extremes, it may cost one’s life”—two ing, on diagnosis, it is weaker on solutions. remarks cited by Japanese author Jun Send inquiries and answers to “Chapter Williams calls for better civic education, Ishikawa without precise attribution. and Verse,” Harvard Magazine, 7 Ware which many have fruitlessly called for in “When the action gets heavy, keep the Street, Cambridge 02138 or via email to the past. Perhaps her ideas about videos in rhetoric cool.” [email protected]. which citizens extol what government has done for them could help. She’s on firmer ground in calling for elites to realize the folly In sum, Williams offers an effective tour tax code, such as the home-mortgage inter- of their, well, elitist ways and to offer poli- of working-class resentments arising from est deduction, that are costly, invisible, and cies that would actually help the working structural forces and the snobbery of the disproportionately benefit the affluent). But class, not just the poor (such as effective in- elite. She draws widely on research in sociol- in the end, Williams offers a concise, witty, dustrial policy and job credentialing). She ogy and psychology (relegated to footnotes and thought-provoking account of the pow- also advocates new coalitions embracing to maintain readability) and throughout erful resentments underlying contemporary common interests, observing that immi- shares amusingly telling examples of class American politics. grants and the white working class share cluelessness that she received in reaction to the same values of hard work and family, her HBR piece. The account might have been Andrea Louise Campbell ’88, Sloan professor of po- that progressives and the working class further enriched with the relevant political- litical science and chair of the department at MIT, share an interest in marshaling govern- science research as well (such as the exten- is the author of Trapped in America’s Safety ment to fight against overreaching corpo- sive literature on the “hidden welfare state” Net: One Family’s Struggle, reviewed in the rate interests. of social policies implemented through the September-October 2014 Harvard Magazine.

ALUMNI Widening the College Pipeline The Posse Foundation aims to develop a “new national leadership network.” by nell porter brown

oon after Jwahir Sundai start- the applicants are chosen) and uses a “dy- recalls, laughing. In another task, she helped ed at Cambridge Rindge and Latin namic assessment” process to measure quali- build a LEGO robot and run a discussion lab School, she began searching for “any ties like boldness, resilience, creativity, and “to test how we were in a group, and how resources I could get that would ability to work in a team, rather than relying we would work as a posse.” Shelp me get into a good college.” A visit- on the traditional standardized test scores, Each year, the foundation takes students ing admissions recruiter told her about The class rankings, and GPAs. from 10 metropolitan areas across the coun- Posse Foundation, an unusual college-access Sundai’s guidance counselor nominated try (the others are Atlanta, Chicago, Houston, and leadership program through which high- her as a candidate, and she soon found her- Los Angeles, Miami, New Orleans, New York achieving students attend top-tier institu- self “acting like a chicken,” along with all City, San Francisco, and Washington D.C.) tions within supportive groups—posses—of the other Boston-area applicants. “During and places them at 57 partner educational in- like-minded peers. The selection process is the first round, we did different activities stitutions. The year Sundai applied, she got rigorous (typically fewer than 5 percent of that took us out of our comfort zones,” she one of the 10 spots allotted to Boston-area

Harvard Magazine 63

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 ALUMNI high-schoolers at Bryn Mawr, where she is The Posse Foundation “identifies particularly now a rising junior studying global health. On campus, she is not only part of her own talented kids, kids who would blow you away, class’s Boston posse—a group that has grown close through working, socializing, and learn- kids you’d want in any classroom.” ing together during the last three years—but also part of the school’s larger Posse commu- lot of college-access programs in the United scholarship bills, “which is why we are able nity. Because Bryn Mawr takes two posses States and many focus on minorities and di- to be so big,” Bial explains, while Posse re- per class, there are always, theoretically, up versity,” she continues. “They focus on a def- lies on contributions and grants to operate. to 80 members on campus to whom Sundai icit: ‘poor,’ ‘underprivileged’; something is The foundation has always been head- says she can turn for anything: “Posse allows wrong that the program is addressing. Posse quartered in Manhattan, where Bial lives us to have a community in our schools that does not do that—and this is really impor- with her husband, former New York Times supports us both surviving and thriving at the tant. It underlies everything we do. Posse op-ed columnist Bob Herbert, and across undergraduate level—and beyond.” is a strength-based model that, although it the river from her hometown of Teaneck, More than 3,500 Posse students are cur- also addresses diversity, identifies particu- New Jersey. Her father played the bassoon rently enrolled in four-year undergraduate larly talented kids, kids who would blow and contrabassoon for the New York Phil- programs, says Posse founder and CEO Debo- you away, kids you’d want in any classroom.” harmonic for 38 years, and her mother was rah Bial, Ed.D. ’04. (There are 74 partnerships The ultimate goal, she clarifies, is “to build “the public-relations person” at the New in all because a third of the partners take more this new national leadership network in the York State Psychiatric Institute. than one posse in a class.) Students receive United States,” to shepherd students who At Brandeis University, she majored in Eng- full-tuition scholarships and extra support “can become senators and CEOs, who can lish, then worked briefly as a paralegal be- from on-site mentors/advisers and from Posse run the hospitals and newspapers and sit fore taking a job at the nonprofit CityKids staff members before, during, and after their at the table where the decisions are made.” Foundation. There—and Bial has told this undergraduate years, along with connections story often—she met a young man who had to research opportunities, internships, and Bial, a 2007 MacArthur Foundation fellow, dropped out of an Ivy League college, who comprehensive career guidance. There’s also has a spot at the table herself, having built said, “I might have stayed if I’d had my posse a network of more than 4,000 Posse alumni. the foundation into a force for social change with me.” That’s the whole concept. “If you Posse screens for students “who are al- with 10 offices around the country, 170 em- grew up in the Bronx and you wind up in ready really driven and motivated, the kids ployees, and $80 million in assets (includ- Middlebury, Vermont, or Greencastle, Indi- we think of as leaders,” says Bial, who estab- ing a $50-million endowment). Partnering ana, without anyone you know or your family, lished the foundation in 1989. “There are a educational institutions foot their students’ it’s not surprising that you might say, ‘Forget it, I’m going home,’” she says. “The Deborah Bial culture shock is tremendous. But if you manage to figure out a way to find your niche in that community, and a group of friends who can back you up, it changes the whole equa- tion. I think everyone needs a posse.” Within a year, at 23, she had started the foundation as “just an idea.” Vanderbilt’s Peabody College “took a chance on a program with no track record,” she says, and accepted five New York City students in 1989— “And the idea worked. That first group of kids was incredible.” For the next decade, Bial and a small

JIM HARRISON JIM team focused on designing the “dynamic assessment” tool and a pre- collegiate program for successful applicants, then added new partners—Brandeis, Middlebury, and DePauw, among them. (During this time the foundation officially in- corporated, with Michael Ainslie, M.B.A. ’68, as the inaugural board chairman.) Bial herself returned to school in 1995, earning a master’s de-

64 July - August 2017 Photograph by Robert Adam Mayer

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

The Graduate School of Arts and Sciences’ Centennial Medal, first awarded in 1989 on the occasion of the school’s hundredth anniversary, honors alumni who have Students Aiming for Top Tier Colleges... made contributions to society that emerged from their graduate studies. It is the highest honor GSAS bestows, and awardees include some of Harvard’s most accomplished alumni. The 2017 recipients, announced at a ceremony on May 24, are: Russell A. Mittermeier, Ph.D. ’77, a primatologist, herpetologist, and conservation advocate;

Sarah P. Morris, Ph.D. ’81, a classicist and archaeologist; Thomas F. Pettigrew, Ph.D. Receive strategic advice, tools, and guidance from ’56, an expert on racism and intergroup relations; and Richard Sennett, Ph.D. ’69, a the nation’s premier college consultants, helping sociologist who writes about cities, labor, and culture. For more about the medalists, students for over 20 years: see harvardmag.com/centennial-17. DR. MICHELE HERNANDEZ Former Assistant Director of Admissions at Dartmouth Author of A is for Admission

MIMI DOE Parenting guru, educator & author of Busy but Balanced

• Unparalleled success rate • Advising and facilitating every step of the way • Lessen stress and increase college choices

Join our small group of students for personal admissions consulting. Call now for information.

toptieradmissions.com 781.530.7088 [email protected]

Discover...

Graduate School of Arts and Sciences honorees (from left) Mittermeier, Morris, Luxury Barge Cruises Pettigrew, and Sennett gree, and later her doctorate, at Harvard while ‘Welcome home.’” They were other, older simultaneously fine-tuning the foundation. In Posse members at Bryn Mawr. Especially 1999, she began replicating the Posse model, important is her go-to Posse mentor, pro- opening a second office in Boston. fessor and chair of mathematics Leslie C. Further expansion, between 2007 and 2016, Cheng. Sundai’s had challenges, like decid- P.O. Box 2195, Duxbury, MA 02331 800 -222 -1236 781-934 -2454 under the board leadership of Jeff Ubben, co- ing whether to pursue STEM studies and/ www.fcwl.com founder and CEO of the San Francisco-based or humanities, and says, “I don’t know who hedge fund ValueAct Capital, brought 47 new I would talk to if I didn’t have Leslie. She is partnerships and increased foundation assets supportive, patient, dedicated, amazing— CALLING ALL PRIVATE SCHOOLS! to $80 million. Today, alongside additional fi- she has helped me so much in my time here.” Advertise in our Sept-Oct nancial supporters, Bial has well-connected That quality—tending “to look external- or Nov-Dec special section... advocates within higher education, including ly when they’re challenged, to think in terms former Harvard president Derek Bok, who of teams solving a problem,” Bial says—is private serves on the national advisory board. often a factor that differentiates successful These resources help fund the on-site students, and is something the foundation school support for Posse students that Bial con- looks for in candidates. “They are more like- open siders critical. At Bryn Mawr, Sundai meets ly to succeed than the kid who locks herself regularly with posse friends to talk, share up in a room and withdraws, who thinks she house meals, study, hang out. On her very first day is the only one she can rely on. We tend to For pricing and info, email: on campus, she recalls, “People I didn’t even think of leaders as individual success stories, [email protected], know came up and hugged me and told me, but they are successful because they know or call: 617-496-6686. Deadlines: 7.17.17 and 9.15.17

Photograph by Tony Rinaldo/Courtesy of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Harvard Magazine 65

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 ALUMNI how to build relationships.” Bial explains; the inaugural fellows have po- What’s next? By 2020, Bial expects to have It’s also why access to internships and ca- sitions in the offices of U.S. congressman a 6,000-strong Posse alumni network and reer help is built into the program. Generous and civil-rights leader John R. Lewis, LL.D. 26 more educational partnerships, which backing led to this spring’s announcement ’12 (“He’s my hero,” she adds); film producer would bring the number of Posse students of a new Posse summer-fellowship program, Jason Blum (Whiplash, Kicking and Screaming); in the pipeline and on campuses at any given honoring Jeff Ubben, for five high-perform- and Nobel Prize-winning economist and time to about 5,000. In addition, she is ex- ing scholars annually. These “once-in-a life- Columbia University professor Joseph Sti- panding another cohort of the Posse popula- time” internships come with $7,000 stipends, glitz, among others. tion, which began in 2012: post-9/11 military

member of the Friends of Harvard Track and rarely misses a home The 2017 Harvard Medalists meet, or football, or women’s hockey game,” according to a statement from the HAA. “For Harvard’s 350th, he created an exhibit Three alumni received the Harvard Medal, for extraordinary of Harvard’s athletic memorabilia. The pro bono curator of the service to the University, at the Harvard Alumni Association’s an- Lee Family Athletic Hall of History, Little has collected Crimson nual meeting on the afternoon of Commencement day. They are: treasures, refurbishing many for display.” A former executive director of both the Cambridge Historical Society and the Higgins Henry N. Cobb ’47, Armory Museum, he was also a director of education at the New M.Arch. ’49, a former England Aquarium and a teacher and coach at the Rivers School. professor and chair of Little has also long served as secretary for his College class. the architecture de- Dedicated volunteer, poetic orator, mentor to many, and friend to all with partment at the Grad- a keen sense of history and humor, you have selflessly carried the baton for uate School of Design your class, Crimson athletics, and the entire Harvard community—equally (GSD) and former comfortable in a top hat and tails at Commencement or a raccoon coat at The president of the GSD Game, and always wearing your Association. Cobb de- H on your sleeve. signed several local buildings, including A. Clayton Spencer, A.M. the terra cotta-clad ’82, who assisted four dif- Henry N. Cobb Center for Govern- ferent Harvard presidents ment and Internation- across 15 years. She was a al Studies (CGIS) complex on Cambridge Street. CGIS is “rep- senior administrator dur- resentative of Harry’s contributions to the University and the ing the late 1990s and early Harvard community, and of his vision as an architect,” says GSD 2000s, a period of signifi- dean Mohsen Mostafavi. Cobb still teaches occasionally at the cant change for the Univer- school as a visiting lecturer, serves as an honorary member of its sity, and was involved in campaign committee, and contributes actively to Pei Cobb Freed the merger of Harvard with & Partners LLP, the architecture firm he helped found in 1955. Radcliffe College and the re- Visionary architect with an eye for building community, you have helped sulting creation of the Rad- shape Harvard both physically and pedagogically as a designer, writer, educa- cliffe Institute; the creation A. Clayton Spencer tor, and leader for the Graduate School of Design—enhancing the beauty of of the financial-aid initia- the built environment on campus and around the world with works of subtle tive, which made the College tuition-free for low-income fami- elegance and profound eloquence. lies; and other high-profile University projects. Since 2012, she has been president of Bates Col- Warren Masters Little ’55, who lege—President Drew Faust spoke at her instal- has devoted decades of service to lation ceremony. Drawing on her extensive ex- Harvard’s alumni, athletic, and perience, Spencer reviewed Lesson Plan: An Agenda other organizations. “Renny” for Change in American Higher Education, by William Little has served on numerous G. Bowen, for Harvard Magazine (September-Oc- HAA committees since 1977, in- tober, 2016, page 64). cluding the Happy Observance With conviction and humility that underscore your of Commencement Committee fierce commitment to higher education, you have served for 33 years—18 as its secretary. as an astute and forthright advisor to four Harvard “An avid Harvard fan, he served as presidents, providing the driving force and steady hand vice president and is an advisory behind transformational University moments, including committee member for the Har- the launch of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, vard Varsity Club. He is an active and the expansion of financial aid.

Warren Masters Little 66 July - August 2017 www.alumni.harvard.edu

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 ALUMNI veterans. “These are people Leon Starr with a lot of experience al- The Senior Alumni ready, who are returning to Rhoda Lesser Diamond ’42, of Martha’s Vineyard, and Leon college for degrees, and the Starr ’40, of Rye, New York, were the oldest Harvard and Rad- average age is 27,” she reports. cliffe alumni present on Commencement Day. Each wore rain “Their first choice is not to gear and had seats on the Tercentenary Theatre stage (to avoid go to school with a bunch the sloppy weather) during the afternoon program, when they of 19-year-olds out of high were publicly honored by Harvard Alumni Association president school. But to have other vets Martin J. Grasso Jr. ’78. “I was here 70 years ago when George with you? That changes the Marshall delivered his famous speech Rhoda Lesser whole thing.” Some 80 Pos- that saved the world,” noted Starr, Diamond se veterans are enrolled at “and now we’re here and going to partner schools Vassar, Dart- hear from Mark Zuckerberg about mouth, and Wesleyan, with the Brave New World.” Starr turns another 30 arriving this sum- 99 in June and was accompanied by mer, and Bial wants to bring his wife, Jacquie, and his son, Jona- at least eight more partners than ’69. Asked about how he’s lived on board. so long, and so well, Starr credited Bial revels in continuing to build the or- “clean living, lots of exercise. I played tennis and squash. ganization and hone the “dynamic assess- And the love of two good women.” (“He means me, and ment” process that asks candidates to build his first wife,” a smiling Jacquie piped up.) Nearby, the those LEGO robots, offering examples of the 96-year-old Diamond said she had traveled from her is- knotty questions posed to applicants: Are land home “to celebrate my seventy-fifth reunion.” She you more proud of how you think or how was flanked by her sons, Paul ’82 and John, a Yalie, who you act? Do you generally give people a sec- quipped: “We’ve always been a Yale-Harvard family—but ond chance? Explain. we’re more Harvard today.” Challenged to answer one herself—What does happiness feel like?—she responds: “I’m a pretty happy person. I like movement, New Harvard Overseers ’14, Milwaukee. Superintendent, Milwau- so I want to always feel like I’m learning and kee public schools. I want to feel that Posse is always contrib- and HAA Elected Directors Carla Harris ’84, M.B.A. ’87, New York uting, always learning and growing. I want City. Vice chair of wealth management and to feel like I am of value.” The names of the new members of the managing director, Morgan Stanley. Kids do, too. This past April, Bial was at a Board of Overseers and elected directors Leslie P. Tolbert ’73, Ph.D. ’78, Tucson. Posse event in Chicago with Facebook COO of the Harvard Alumni Association (HAA) Regents’ professor, department of neuro- Sheryl Sandberg ’91, M.B.A. ’95, and Whar- were read during the HAA’s annual meeting science, University of Arizona. ton School of Business professor Adam on the afternoon of Commencement Day. For elected director (three-year term): Grant ’03, co-authors of the new book Op- For Overseer (six-year term): Martha Abbruzzese Genieser ’91, Lon- tion B, which examines how people over- Paul L. Choi ’86, J.D. ’89, Chicago. Part- don. Director of philanthropy, Alan How- A. Clayton Spencer come hardship and obstacles. “Adam was ner, Sidley Austin LLP. ard Family Office. talking about how kids really need to feel Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar ’93, San Sangu Julius Delle ’10, J.D.-M.B.A. ’17, they matter,” Bial reports. “Posse’s job, our Francisco. Justice, Supreme Court of Cali- Accra, Ghana. Chairman and CEO, Gold- job, is to make that clear—not just to them, fornia. en Palm Investments Corporation; found- but to the world we’re in.” Darienne B. Driver, Ed.M. ’06, Ed.D. er and president, cleanacwa. Sachin H. Jain ’02, M.D. ’06, M.B.A. ’07, Cerritos, California. President and CEO, Cambridge Scholars CareMore Health System. Elena Hahn Kiam ’85, New York City. Four seniors have won Harvard Cambridge Scholarships to study at Cambridge Co-owner and creative director, K-FIVE University during the 2017-2018 academic year. Halah Ahmad, of Milwaukee and LLC d/b/a lia sophia; co-owner and non- Currier House, a comparative study of religion concentrator, will be the Lionel De executive marketing director, Cirrus Jersey Harvard Scholar at Emmanuel College; Ezinne Nwankwo, of Los Angeles Healthcare Products. and Winthrop House, an applied mathematics concentrator, will be the William Ronald P. Mitchell ’92, M.B.A. ’97, Shirley Scholar at Pembroke College; Eesha Khare, of Saratoga, California, and New York City. CEO, Virgil Inc. Leverett House, an engineering sciences concentrator, will be the Charles Henry Paola A. Peacock Friedrich, S.M. ’06, Fiske III Scholar at Trinity College; and Kevin Xiong, of Cambridge and Cabot Ed.L.D. ’14, Marblehead, Massachusetts. House, anJohn economics H. McArthur concentrator, will be the John Eliot Scholar at Jesus College. Human capital management consultant, AchieveMission.

Photographs by Jim Harrison Harvard Magazine 67

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

“Puritans” Passé?

(see page 7). The Puritan community has not yet weighed in.

“Your wooden arm you hold outstretched An article in this issue to shake with passers-by.” discusses the liberal arts (page 47). A memorial minute presented recently to

n 1994, Kendric T. Packer ’48 wrote to the Faculty of Arts and Sci- EARLE/HPAC THOMAS The Pump’s Primus IV to propose ren- ences, on Svetlana Boym, the late Reisinger on the calendar for next spring, when the dering the first line of alma mater “Fair professor of Slavic languages and literatures redbuds, now mature, blossom; their leaves, Harvard” gender-neutral. (“Fair Har- and of comparative literature, alluded to a clear yellow in autumn, merit a visit sooner. Ivard! thy sons to thy Jubilee throng” was the different education model. “In Soviet Lenin- The redone Science Center courtyard, for- troublesome text.) In April 1997, Faculty of grad,” it noted, “she early on showed signs merly an al fresco extension of the Green- Arts and Sciences dean Jeremy R. Knowles of…independence, once refusing to disas- house Café, is now mostly for viewing: a announced a celebration of the role of wom- semble and clean an AK-47, a required part pleasing mini landscape of sedum-covered en at the College, and Packer turned to him. of her school program.” She emigrated in her hillocks and a few sentinel pines—visual re- After due consultation, a version forwarded late teens, leaving “without her parents, Yuri lief from the surrounding built bulk. Across to and tweaked by Packer (“Fair Harvard! and Musa Goldberg, engineers whose ap- the Charles, the new terrace behind Harvard we join in thy Jubilee throng”) became the plication to emigrate would continue to be Business School’s Chao Center, in a reimag- approved one. With that, Knowles said, denied for nearly another decade (a young ined quadrangle of executive-education fa- “[W]e have moved to a decent inclusive- KGB officer named Vladimir Putin told them cilities, is growing in beautifully. ness for the next 361 years.” they would never see their daughter again).” The Radcliffe Institute’s garden (shown Not so fast. On April 5, President Drew above), comfortingly surrounded by brick Faust’s Task Force on Inclusion and Be- walls to shut out Garden Street traffic noise, longing homed in on the last line (“Till the remains the best refuge; it always rewards a stock of the Puritans die”) and declared, Harvard’s ever-evolving campus some- walk. As now replanted with ferns, its ap- “We think it’s time for a change.” The full times seems at risk of too-intensive devel- peal extends from early irises through fall. bureaucratic force of the University is on opment. The Kennedy School, for instance, board: the website (http://inclusionandbe- is building more facilities underneath, with- longingtaskforce.harvard.edu) has a “Revise in, and around its central courtyard. Bits of the Alma Mater” tab complete with expla- land, like the plot south of Malkin Athletic Another memorial minute, on John Max nation of the competition for new word- Center, have been nibbled away by (admit- Rosenfield, Rockefeller professor of East ing, deadlines and timetable, FAQs, and a tedly lushly landscaped) parking spaces. Asian art emeritus, looked at his journey panel of judges (three faculty members, two But splendid pockets of greenery remain, to fine-art scholarship: “In high school he culturally savvy alumni). A winner is to be awaiting visitors during the clement months. showed an aptitude for painting, although announced next spring. The walled courtyard at Busch Hall, com- later he would speak disparagingly of his Beyond to-be-expected media censure plete with pond, is a lunchtime favorite. The own efforts, referring to his canvases as ‘re- for political correctness, the proposal has courtyard bounded by the Converse, Naito, gionalist landscapes with cacti and an oc- engendered some of the same from alumni Bauer, and Fairchild laboratories should be casional jackrabbit.’” vprimus vi

68 July - August 2017

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

Palace Pottery The art and science of Jun ware

rectangular pots (with is the largest outside Beijing and Taipei). holes to drain wa- Susan Costello, associate conservator of ter) and footed basins, objects and sculpture, has x-rayed all 60 mostly. All are num- specimens. Swirls and bered (1 for largest, 10 striations under the for smallest), and from glaze reveal that they Visit harvardmag.com inscriptions on the bot- were wheel-thrown to learn more about tom, imperial collection before finishing in the the conservation and catalogs, and scenes in molds. (She has also scientific analysis of these Jun ceramics. a few paintings, they done masterly restora- appear to have been tion of some samples.) The stoneware pieces used for growing bulbs were fired at high temperatures (1,200 de- and small plants in the grees centigrade). Iron in the clay helped to Forbidden City. Dwor- produce the blue or green; copper oxide or sky associate curator metallic copper produced the plum or red. of Chinese art Melissa Beal Family postdoctoral fellow in conser- Moy, who began study- vation science Lucy Cooper has used x-ray ing the pieces (about fluorescence and a scanning electron micro- half of which are ex- scope to see how the thickness of the glazes hibited) for her mas- and their firing affect the result: tiny glob- ter’s thesis, notes that ules of glass in the glaze, smaller than the some of the inscriptions wavelength of blue light, scatter that color; tie to the Hall of Mental what viewers see is primarily structural, not ven the Qing emperors, near- Cultivation and other rooms in the palace. a pigment effect. More remains to be learned ly four centuries ago, recognized Despite that evidence, mysteries abound. about the relative chemical composition of Song dynasty (960-1279) Jun The dating of the work is imprecise, and the clay and glaze, and variances in firing, to fully ware—a distinctive opalescent methods of manufacture resist modern rep- understand the product. Eblue, sometimes splashed with organic- lication. The precise modeling (exact align- That essential science aside, modern seeming, almost foliate lobes of plum—as ment of interior and exterior indentations), viewers, like Ming collectors or the diligent one of the five great achievements of China’s perfection of shapes (see the lobed flowerpot Danes, can see the plainly ravishing result. astonishing ceramic legacy. In contemporary and basin, above left), and forms (such as vjohn s. rosenberg perspective, Jun techniques in fact persisted the vase above), Moy says, much longer, at least into the Ming era (1368- suggest the late fourteenth 1644): the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. century, when Ming ceram- One unusual set of such vessels is the icists began using dual in- subject of Harvard Art Museums’ exhibi- terior and exterior molds. tion “Adorning the Inner Court,” on display Demand would have arisen through August 13. For his fiftieth reunion, from construction of the Ernest B. Dane, A.B. 1892, and his wife, Helen Forbidden City. But there Pratt Dane, donated a ceramic and jade col- are few objects to study and lection to the museum, including 60 pieces compare (Harvard’s collec- of “Numbered Jun” ware: various lobed and tion of the numbered ware

Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 Not a bank. A beneﬁt.

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

HUECU_July_Aug17_FINAL_outlines.indd 1 5/22/17 2:39 PM S:7”

YOUR WORLD IS HYBRID S:9.25”

THE INFRASTRUCTURE PLATFORM FOR DRIVING BUSINESS OUTCOMES Your right mix of hybrid IT is infrastructure that’s secure, software-defined and composable, giving IT the flexibility, agility, speed and control they need to deliver at the speed of business. It fuels the unique apps and data of your enterprise today, and gives you the ability to say yes to the challenges of tomorrow.

Discover your right mix at hpe.com/hybrid-it

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

170718_HPE.indd 1 5/24/17 11:50 AM