While You Were Away

End-of-semester news and fun from around campus

Vegan muffins, hash, bacon, and other plant-based options are served at a cafeteria counter

This year's Campus Services holiday breakfast featured a "plant-forward" station. 
Photograph by Robert Fitta/Harvard Magazine

Ian Frazier ’73, the journalist and humorist who has taken up the pen for The New Yorker’s year-end “Greetings, Friends!” poetic tribute to annual high- and low-lights, worked in an especially topical couplet in that magazine’s December 23 issue. Frazier (profiled here) niftily memorialized the unusual doings during at The Game this past November thus:

Just as at halftime, Harvard-Yale,
Climate alarm has ripped the veil. 

Read a news account of the divestment protest appears here.

Locally, the humorists at Satire V celebrated the end of the semester by melding the debut of the new Gen Ed. curriculum (and its marquee course, “Tech Ethics”) with increasing concerns about the role of online behemoths—like Facebook, famously founded by Mark Zuckerberg ’06, LL.D. ’17—in subverting privacy, circulating false information, and lending themselves to heightened political polarization. “Facebook ‘Primed and Ready’ to Hire All Students that Fail GENED 1058: Tech Ethics” is a model satire, except, perhaps, for the “that” in the headline, where a “who” is preferred.

The Campus Services holiday breakfast—an annual fête in Annenberg Hall that brings together dining-hall workers, facilities and grounds staff, and many others (including staff members of this magazine) in a lovely, relaxed, social setting—upped its game this year. Alongside the traditional eggs, lox and bagels, and more, a “plant-forward station” offered quinoa “hash” and a plant-based “bacon.” Another harbinger of things to come, consistent with emerging thinking about how to tame the climate-change impact of agriculture and food production, and dining services’ earlier response to changing student requests

Read more articles by John S. Rosenberg

Related Topics

You might also like

Tips of the Hat(s)

On regalia, a Jack-of-all-trades retirement, and a Bok’s office bon mot.

Yesterday’s News

Including profundity and pretzels

An Original Magna Carta, Hidden in Plain Sight

A rare original surfaces at Harvard at an “almost providential” moment. 

Most popular

Harvard’s Hiring Freeze Continues

University leaders say $1 billion per year is at risk due to federal actions

Harvard Retains Winthrop Name

Committee undecided on whether owning slaves merits denaming

The Professor Who Quantified Democracy

Erica Chenoweth’s data shows how—and when—authoritarians fall.

Explore More From Current Issue

Harvard’s Plant Collection Meets Space Science

Light-based analysis of botanical collections link plants to Earth’s changing climate.

Garber, Trump, and the Fight for Harvard’s Future

Introducing a guide to the issues, players, and stakes.