William C. Kirby, Ph.D. ’81, who has served for nearly seven years as president of the Harvard Magazine Board of Directors, will step down in September. Bill has played a fundamental role in the magazine’s ability to fulfill its mission: informing readers about the University’s work and people, and connecting them to one another and the institution. The president must defend the magazine’s editorial independence, hold the staff to the highest standards in the exercise of that independence, and help it sustain the resources it needs to operate.
It comes as no surprise that Bill has been an exemplary president. Like such distinguished predecessors as James O. Freedman ’57, L ’60, Daniel Steiner ’54, LL.B. ’58, Margaret H. Marshall, Ed.M. ’69, L ’76, Ed ’77, LL.D. ’21, and Henry Rosovsky, JF ’57, Ph.D. ’59, LL.D. ’98 (Dartmouth’s president, two Harvard general counsels, and a dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and University Professor), Bill has combined a deep understanding of Harvard in all its complexity with an unwavering commitment to the scholarship and learning it enables. He champions speech within and about the Harvard community. And he understands and values the continuing engagement of alumni worldwide with their alma mater.
As Faculty of Arts and Sciences dean in the early 2000s, Bill articulated and defended the faculty’s interests. As Chang professor of China studies and Spangler professor of business administration, he embodies the bridges increasingly being built across Harvard schools and has encouraged this magazine’s reporting on research and teaching at the interdisciplinary frontiers. As faculty chair of the Harvard Center Shanghai, he has prompted us to be attuned to the University’s global reach and the growing cohort of international alumni.
An adept early adopter of online education, Bill has helped shape the magazine’s digital investments. And as a leading scholar of higher education around the planet (his books include Empires of Ideas: Creating the Modern University from Germany to America to China), Bill has challenged his beloved Harvard, this magazine’s reporters, and readers at large to think deeply about what has made this University great—and what maintaining such excellence requires.
We are indebted to Bill Kirby for imbuing Harvard Magazine’s governance with his intellectual prowess, organizational savvy, and energetic belief in independent alumni journalism, all on readers’ behalf. And as colleagues, we cherish and will always learn from the warmth and puckish humor with which he pursued our joint aims.
—The editors and staff of Harvard Magazine
