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JOHN HARVARD’S JOURNAL

titled Health Systems Performance Assessment. toral study would be augmented, too. Bohen, who will take on the grittier Second is a selection of research priori- details, is a veteran of multidisciplinary ties. Murray envisions comparative work, projects at Harvard. She helped organize possibly including American healthcare the medical school’s division of addic- and systems in other developed nations, as tions and substance abuse and then the well as those in the industrializing world, University’s interfaculty program on and scholarship on problems of inequality. mind, brain, and behavior, both launched Based on his meetings with colleagues by Hyman during his professorial days. thus far, he can readily imagine involving Her most recent assignment was manag- professors from SPH, the Medical School, ing the Hauser Center for Nonprofit FAS, the Kennedy School, the Business Organizations at the Kennedy School. School, and the Law School, to “harness Murray expects that the health initia- the enormous advances that have come tive will have refined its initial subjects of and are coming” in biomedical research, inquiry by the end of the academic year. and sophisticated social-science and In the meantime, he anticipates three ethical analyses. modes of action. The first is education. As Finally, the initiative expects to pro- President Summers told an SPH gather- mote large doses of international travel ing in October, “I hope and I expect that and study abroad—for students and fac- we will provide instruction to our under- ulty members based in Massachusetts, graduates in issues relating to global and for experts from other nations com- health that will bring together in an in- ing to Harvard to collaborate. Bohen terdisciplinary way their thinking in the terms this two-way process “engage- Christopher Murray social sciences and in the sciences in ment.” She sees it as an important pilot much the same way that we do with issues for the globalization of the University en- journ, Murray began studies of the most like environmental sciences.” (Discussion visioned in the undergraduate curriculum e≠ective organization of healthcare, within FAS is only exploratory so far, given review—and so an initiative that crosses the first fruits of which have just been the current work on revising the College Harvard boundaries and international published in a massive coedited volume curriculum overall.) Graduate and postdoc- ones as well.

Creating Community, “The issue of the place of gays in our soci- classes, all Harvard-hosted can be ety is going to be the hot-button culture- read by anybody on the Web. On-line and Off wars issue of 2004.” Harvard’s blogging project stems from Meanwhile, one particularly prolific a November 2002 conference, sponsored The weeks leading up to Thanksgiving commentator, known on-line only as The by the Berkman Center, to examine the were especially busy for Harvard bloggers. Redhead, waxed wistful about single life. University’s “digital identity.” Provost Robert John Bennett ’68, who’s writing a “How is it that some people find their Steven E. Hyman challenged those pre- novel on-line, posted chapters 4 through 12 soulmates (if there is such a thing) at 16?” sent to use the Internet to unify their fa- of Part V (“Harvard—The Fourth Year”) she mused one bleak November afternoon. mously decentralized institution, build- on his —short for Weblog, or on-line “Where are all the beautiful souls in this ing bridges among isolated departments journal. Another blogger, Cynthia Rock- city (they’re too young, or they’re married, and schools. “The question became how well, a sociology department sta≠ member or they’re smokers, or they’re in love with we could set up the di≠erent parts of and freelance movie reviewer, debated th