On Tuesday afternoon, two stalwarts of the Harvard faculty gave the last lectures of their careers: medical anthropologist and psychiatrist Arthur Kleinman and computer scientist Harry Lewis. After teaching at the University for a combined 95 years, both men—celebrated scholars in their fields and beloved mentors on campus—are leaving the classroom. Over the decades, they’ve ushered generations of students in and out of Harvard’s gates, including some with famous names: Paul Farmer, M.D. ’88, Ph.D. ’90; Bill Gates ’77, LL.D. ’07; Mark Zuckerberg ’06.
But something else, too, connects Kleinman and Lewis: throughout their careers, they’ve warned, loudly and consistently, about the necessity of humanism and human relationships in science and technology. “That presence in care is very important,” Kleinman told his students during his lecture on Tuesday, deploring medicine’s turn toward bureaucratic efficiency. “That’s what Paul Farmer meant by accompaniment—the human [act of] being there with you, whatever time it takes. ‘You’re not in this alone. I’m here with you.’ That’s what you want to have, need to have.”
Kleinman, the Rabb professor of anthropology, professor of medical anthropology, and professor of psychiatry, has been a pioneer in medical anthropology, as well as numerous other disciplines including cultural psychiatry, global health, social medicine, and the medical humanities. As a researcher and ethnographer of Chinese society, he has studied health, illness, and aging, and what it reveals about individuals’ social experience and personal lives. He spent years examining the effects of the China’s Cultural Revolution, studying how “social suffering” and the embodied memory of trauma profoundly changed the modern Chinese psyche (often in ways that contradicted Western assumptions). Kleinman’s books—perhaps especially Patients and Healers in the Context of Culture (1980), The Illness Narratives: Suffering, Healing and the Human Condition (1988), and The Soul of Care: The Moral Education of a Husband and Doctor (2019), a memoir of the decade he spent caring for his wife Joan, who died from Alzheimer’s disease—have become touchstones and textbooks.
Kleinman arrived at Harvard in 1970, after graduating from Stanford medical school and spending a year in Taiwan doing research. In Cambridge, he was initially a research fellow in comparative medicine, then a psychiatry resident at Massachusetts General Hospital, a graduate student in social anthropology (earning his master’s in 1974), and a postdoctoral fellow. After that, he spent eight years as a professor at the University of Washington, while living and working on and off in China and Taiwan. Returning to Harvard in 1982, he founded the University’s program in medical and psychiatric anthropology, with a faculty and curriculum split between Harvard Medical School and the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.
This Tuesday, Kleinman in fact delivered two final lectures: one to the 30 or so students in this semester’s course on the future of medical anthropology (“It’s been my honor to be here,” he told them), and then a second, more formal presentation to an auditorium full of listeners in Sever Hall. In that talk, looking back over the many threads of his life and work, he said, “The core wisdom in all of this for me is the recognition that care is a fundamental value in life everywhere, and the essential basis of medicine, health, and social welfare. How we understand care and practice is not only crucial for how we think about society and seek to reform it, but also for how we live a practical life of purpose, passion, goodness, meaning, and joy.”
More than once, he invoked the memory of Partners in Health co-founder Paul Farmer, the renowned physician, humanitarian, and advocate for those living in sickness and poverty. Farmer died from a heart attack in 2022, at age 62. Kleinman said, “Paul’s wonderful insight was simply that the idea that some lives matter less is the root of all that is wrong with the world.”
A panel of former students and colleagues spoke after Kleinman. Among them was Pressley professor of global health and social medicine Ann Becker ’83, M.D./Ph.D. ‘90, one of the first students to enroll in Kleinman’s medical anthropology class in 1982, and Lawrence Cohen ’83, Ph.D. ’92, an anthropologist at the University of California, Berkeley, who remembered how Kleinman always pushed his students to ask about “what’s at stake” in situations of suffering and struggle. Jim Kim, M.D. ’91, Ph.D. ’93, a Partners in Health co-founder and former president of Dartmouth College and the World Bank, spoke of Kleinman as a father figure who’d altered the course of his life.
So did Harvard Medical School professor Salmaan Keshavjee, M.Sc. ’93, Ph.D. ’98, who abandoned an intended career in biochemistry to study anthropology under Kleinman. Now he is an expert on drug-resistant tuberculosis treatment and the anthropology of health policy, focusing on the Middle East and North Africa. “Paul Farmer used to say that problems are historically deep and geographically broad, and Arthur’s work speaks to that,” Keshavjee said. Davíd Carrasco, Rudenstine professor of the study of Latin America, who co-taught a course with Kleinman called Quests for Wisdom, recalled the lessons he’d learned from him. “Lesson number three is the hard one,” he said. “A life of learning and caretaking is a fight.”
Afterward—after the applause and the standing ovation, and after Kleinman’s current students swarmed him for a group photo—everyone headed down the block where a reception had been set up. “Let’s go be together,” Kleinman said.
Meanwhile, on the other side of campus, Harry Lewis, McKay professor of computer science emeritus, was holding court during a much looser, more raucous celebration, which had been organized as a surprise. Five years after he officially retired, Lewis had decided that this semester’s Classics of Computer Science would be his final course, and a group of colleagues and teaching fellows had put out a call to Lewis’s family, friends, and former students to attend his last class and say a few words. And they did—by the dozens, filling a huge classroom in the Science and Engineering Complex in Allston. Even more joined on Zoom, including Lewis’s older brother, Richard Alan Lewis ’65, an ophthalmologist at Baylor College of Medicine. “My God,” Lewis said, looking out at all the faces as he finished speaking. “Um, so, this is quite overwhelming.”
Members of the Harvard University band arrived to play a musical salute, with kazoos handed out so that members of the crowd could take part. Gary Sabot ’85, S.M. ’85, Ph.D. ’88, presented his old professor with a Harry Lewis bobblehead “clutching in his hands a vintage computing device: a slide rule.” Larry Denenberg ’76, Ph.D. ’84, gave Lewis a “fully functioning” PDP-8, one of the minicomputers first introduced in the 1960s and still in use in Lewis’s office when Denenberg began studying with him 10 years later. Many in the audience wore crimson-colored T-shirts that Matthew Lena ’82 and Kenneth Ledeen ’67 commissioned, featuring lines of ASCII script encoding a quote from Lewis’s 2006 book, Excellence Without a Soul: “To learn who they are, to search for a larger purpose in their lives, and to leave college as better human beings.”
Lewis, a former dean of Harvard College who’s won awards for undergraduate teaching, has spent most of his life at Harvard. He arrived in 1964 as a freshman and, after a postgraduate stint working as a mathematician and computer scientist for the National Institutes of Health, returned in 1971 to begin graduate school in applied mathematics. In 1974, a month after earning his Ph.D., he began teaching at Harvard, and that’s where he has been ever since. Known for his research in computational logic, he’s authored or co-authored 18 books on computer science, higher education, and society (including the bestselling 2020 book Blown to Bits: Your Life, Liberty, and Happiness After the Digital Explosion). And in five decades in the classroom, he has mentored more than 300 teaching fellows and taught countless students.
Those were the folks who, for more than an hour, passed a microphone from hand to hand, recounting stories about how Lewis’s courses, or his warmth as a teacher and mentor, had changed their lives. (It was the party that Lewis’s seventieth birthday celebration in 2017 had foreshadowed.) Boo Gershun ’80, one of four women dressed in matching T-shirts that read “OWICS”—a nickname Lewis had given them, which stood for “original women in computer science”—read a poem the group had written for their friend and mentor. A 1968 graduate of the College, who had been one of only 460 women in a class of 1,600, recalled Lewis’s generosity and eagerness to help every student. “Harry continues to be the only man we all turn to,” she said.
Joseph professor of computer science and applied mathematics Salil Vadhan ’95 said that Lewis’s “inspiring lectures” in Computer Science 121 were what had made him want to be a computer scientist. “Harry finds exactly the right way to put something so that it sticks in your mind forever, in his voice,” Vadhan said. Geoffrey Knauth ’83 told Lewis that his Applied Mathematics 110 class “was the one at Harvard that I remember to this day—everything that you said in that class. It has affected my view of computing from that day forward. Things that, before, I didn’t know were possible in computing, you taught me.…It really has meant the world to me, and that was just one class. I wish I had another lifetime so I could take all the rest of them too.” Larry Lebowitz ’82, M.B.A. ’88, recalled, “Harry was my undergraduate adviser. He’s described that role as a ‘tenured position,’ and he’s been my adviser in the truest sense ever since.”
It went on and on like that, until finally there was a lull, and Lewis said, smiling, “Can we call this a day?” Then: cookies and conversation, during which something Lewis had said earlier in the afternoon seemed to echo. “My life has been completely about Harvard students,” he said. “It’s been an amazing privilege to be able to come to work every day and see such amazing people and feel like you’re forever part of the future. So, thank you all.”
