University News | July 13, 2017

S. Allen Counter Has Died

The director of the Harvard Foundation passed away after a brief illness.

by Jonathan Shaw

S. Allen Counter has died after a brief illness. Counter was the inaugural and longtime director of the Harvard Foundation for Intercultural and Race Relations, and was a part-time professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School. His speech at the Phi Beta Kappa ceremony in 2015 was covered in this magazine. A brief obituary appears on the Harvard College website.

An example from the magazine’s archives of how his work changed Harvard appears in this article describing how the Harvard Foundation began commissioning oil portraits of minority and female Harvardians for display on campus.

Read the Gazette article about his life here. Read The New York Times’s obituary here.

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