Your independent source for Harvard news since 1898

Your independent source for Harvard news since 1898

September-October 2018

Download a PDF

Letters

Letters on faculty diversity, general education, advanced standing, and more

President Bacow looks ahead to his new freshman year.

Making the most of Harvard’s “ultimate option”

The College Pump

Joshuah Brian Campbell ’16 serenades a boogieing President Drew Faust at her pre-retirement party in Sanders Theatre.

Photograph by Jon Chase/Harvard Public Affairs and Communications

Spiders and ties, “Fair Harvard” encore, and Faust’s farewell

Treasure

Image gift of Laurence K. Marshall and Lorna J. Marshall ©President and Fellows of Harvard College, Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology. PM# 2001.29.641

Family snapshots of living off the land, in the Kalahari

In this Issue

Lawrence S. Bacow and Adele Fleet Bacow, shortly before the February 11 announcement that he would become president.

Photograph by Kai-Jae Wang/©President and Fellows of Harvard College

Lawrence S. Bacow, a career educator, is schooled in making decisions.

Davis relaxing in 1910 at Devil’s Thumb, on the Continental Divide near Corona, Colorado

Photograph courtesy of the Houghton Library

Brief life of William Morris Davis, pioneering geomorphologist

Illustration by Taylor Callery

The “Tenth Justice” and the polarization of the Supreme Court

(Click arrow to see full image) The Game, 1911, ending in a less glamorous tie score than in the 1968 version

Photograph courtesy of the Library of Congress

Boosting the game, and The Game

Letters

Letters on faculty diversity, general education, advanced standing, and more

President Bacow looks ahead to his new freshman year.

Making the most of Harvard’s “ultimate option”

Right Now

Illustration by Jim Frazier

Could place-based policies solve regional economic and social problems?

Illustration by Sam Falconer

New research on extinctions shows that their ecological impact can’t be measured in numbers of species lost.

Illustration by Martin Hargreaves

In the antebellum South, slavery was paired with modern business practices.

Harvard Squared

Autumnal mist over Spot Pond

Photograph by Mike Ryan

Just north of Boston, a wild park is filled with forests, lakes, and rocky hills.

Every human-powered vehicle must stand the test of traveling on asphalt, through mud, and into the Merrimack River.

Photograph by Lucinana Calvin/Courtesy of the Lowell Kinetic Sculpture Race

Watch human-powered machines prevail—or not—in Lowell.

Nighttime in the North End

Photograph by Dennis Tangney Jr./Getty Images

“Stories the Chamber of Commerce doesn’t want you to hear”

Diners, bar-loungers, and chefs share one big room at Comedor.

Photograph courtesy of Comedor

An intimate place for Chilean-American food in Newton

Photograph courtesy of Oldways, www.oldwayspt.org

Creative Classes in Cambridge and Boston

John Harvard's Journal

Photograph by Rose Lincoln/Harvard Public Affairs and Communications

With greetings to the community, and a major faculty appointment, new Harvard president Lawrence S. Bacow sets to work.

New filings in a lawsuit against Harvard over admissions allege discrimination against Asian-Americans.

Durba Mitra

Photograph courtesy of Durba Mitra

Harvard’s first professor appointed solely in gender studies

Illustration by Mark Steele

Headlines from Harvard’s history

“Connections” and “Transformations” are both organized around frequent critique sessions,…

Image courtesy of Megan Panzano

Design courses enlarge the College curriculum.

A Medical School real-estate deal, and a busy post-presidency for Drew Faust

Students at the Graduate School of Design created the lion’s share of posters used by student activists in 1969.

Poster courtesy of the Harvard University Archives

An exhibit on Harvard in 1969 opens at Pusey Library this fall.

Photograph by Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Public Affairs and Communications

New FAS dean, biomedical momentum, and more University news

At Harvard African Students Association’s Africa Night (from left): Tom Osborn ’20 of Kenya; Joshua Benjamin ’21, of Phoenix, Arizona (whose ancestors are Angolan but were first brought to Charleston, South Carolina, in the late seventeenth century); Tawanda Mulalu ’20 of Botswana; and Mfundo Radebe ’20 of South Africa

Photograph by Christabel Narh

The Undergraduate looks at Harvard through an African filter.

Isa Flores-Jones and Catherine Zhang

Photographs courtesy of the subjects

The Ledecky Fellows provide an undergraduate perspective on life at Harvard.

Arguably the Ivy League’s most dangerous offensive weapon, the Crimson’s return man and wideout Justice Shelton-Mosley ‘19 is a threat to score every time he touches the ball.

Photograph by Gil Talbot/Courtesy of Harvard Athletic Communications

Justice Shelton-Mosley needs only the tiniest bit of space to go the distance.

Montage

Nell Painter, a professor emerita of American history at Princeton, now works as an artist in Newark, New Jersey.

Photograph by John Emerson

Nell Painter reflects on leaving the ivory tower for art school at age 64.

Sharmila Sen

Photograph courtesy of Sharmila Sen

A “first-gen” American explores race and assimilation in the United States.

Davóne Tines (left) and Michael Schachter presenting Were You There at the American Repertory Theater last December

Photograph by Evgenia Eliseeva/American Repertory Theater

An oratorio adapted from Langston Hughes

Laura van den Berg

Photograph by Paul Yoon

In Laura van den Berg’s fiction, the deeply strange is ordinary.

Illustration by Phil Foster

Jill Lepore excavates the history of America, down to its bedrock values.

Du Bois and his students inked and watercolored some 60 charts for display at the 1900 World’s Fair.

Courtesy of the Library of Congress

Recent books with Harvard connections

Alumni

Gerald López on a pedestrian bridge two blocks from his childhood home in East Los Angeles. For him, rebellious lawyering is not just a legal theory, but a way of being.

Photograph by Coral von Zumwalt

Gerald López’s radical theory—and practice

Margaret M. Wang

Photograph by Jim Harrison

New HAA president Margaret Wang ’09

The admissions office honors alumni volunteers.

Sofia Cigarroa Kennedy and KeeHup Arie Yong

Photograph courtesy of the Harvard Alumni Association

Two seniors who help make Houses into homes

The 2018 Harvard Alumni Association Award winners

ClassACT HR73 rallies classmates to engage in social change.

Recollections and Reflections from the Harvard class of 1957—a benchmark reunion project

Sandler relishes having her office within MoMA.

Photograph courtesy of Alexis Sandler

Solving legal challenges at MoMA

The College Pump

Joshuah Brian Campbell ’16 serenades a boogieing President Drew Faust at her pre-retirement party in Sanders Theatre.

Photograph by Jon Chase/Harvard Public Affairs and Communications

Spiders and ties, “Fair Harvard” encore, and Faust’s farewell

Treasure

Image gift of Laurence K. Marshall and Lorna J. Marshall ©President and Fellows of Harvard College, Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology. PM# 2001.29.641

Family snapshots of living off the land, in the Kalahari