Gregory Corso
I read the article about Beat poet Gregory Corso’s semi-unauthorized stay in Eliot House in 1954 (“The Trespassing Poet of Eliot House,” September-October 2026, p. 36) with great interest. My mother had a close friend who was romantically involved with Corso, on and off, during the 1970s. Peggy—a free spirit who lived in the Chelsea Hotel, which at the time was the epicenter of New York’s counterculture scene—told me about a visit the two of them made to Harvard, during which, under the influence of some mind-altering substance, they stumbled into Memorial Hall only to find a blood drive in progress. The combination of the Gothic revival architecture, stained glass windows, and people laid out on tables with tubes drawing their blood freaked them out in a memorable way.
I found the story amazing, not least because I was a resident of Eliot House, albeit not until 1975. And although John H. Finley Jr. was no longer the master of Eliot House when I lived there, I was lucky enough to take Hum 3 with him, as Corso also did. Thanks for clearing up a mystery and reviving some old memories.
Natalie Wexler ’76
What a brilliant, illuminating piece on Gregory Corso’s literary development at Harvard. This vivid portrait provided a missing chapter for me in Corso’s creation myth, as I was a teaching assistant for him at Naropa University during the late 1980s.
I was assigned to Corso by MFA program director and poet Anne Waldman and another cofounder of Naropa, poet Allen Ginsberg. I would soon learn my duties had no similarity to my previous roles with Beat novelist and consummate gentleman William Burroughs ’36 or gracious playwright/poet Michael McClure. First, I had to pick up “Mad Gregory” from the airport, as he returned from Italy disheveled and alienated after a forced seven-year exile from the United States.
He demanded that I take him to Denver’s most dangerous neighborhood, so he could procure non-prescription drugs. I then chaperoned him to an informal gathering of Naropa students, where he described to the group how he committed an unspeakable crime on the balcony of a Hell’s Kitchen tenement during his troubled youth. Next was an all-night poker game with ragtag poets consuming copious amounts of cocktails and beer, after which I put him to bed.
Upon return late the next morning, I was at wit’s end making sure he was ready for the next day’s major reading in a large, sold-out Boulder auditorium. Waldman and Ginsberg worried about how he could pull it off, but he delivered a memorable reading of his highly descriptive and provocative verse, punctuated with sublime poems from memory of Shelley and Keats. Residency salvaged.
Thank you for providing the fascinating genesis of a hungry talent forged in the improbable crucible of foster care, Dannemora Prison, and Eliot House.
Warren Karlenzig
I wanted to commend the article on Gregory Corso in Eliot House. It was as unexpected as he was offbeat (pun intended). Constantine Valhouli writes very well about the cast of characters, many of whom gave candid interviews. I suspect there were more anecdotes too off-color to repeat, but the ones he recounted were fascinating. If Corso had really belonged at Eliot House as an undergraduate, I bet he would eventually have been featured in your Vita series.
Malcolm Mitchell ’57
Your article on Gregory Corso reminded me of a reading/performance by Allen Ginsberg at the Quincy House Arts Festival in 1973. Corso was in the audience, and he heckled Ginsberg a bit. It was all in good fun, as one would expect from two old friends.
John McCarthy ’75
Abby Phillip
Your profile of Abby Phillip and her NewsNight program (“The Referee,” September-October 2026, p. 40) calls her guests “opinionated savants from the left and right.” In reality, they’re almost entirely partisan hacks, as your typical guest list shows. It also claims her guests talk to each other; in reality, they talk at each other. And finally, situations where everyone is talking simultaneously (basically shouting at each other) do not qualify as “debating,” even if you add the adjective “fiery.”
Steven L. Patt, Ph.D. ’75
I’ve stopped watching Abby Phillip because she doesn’t seem able or willing to control her panelists. They shout over and interrupt each other, leaving at least this watcher with a sense of chaos and rudeness. I’m all in favor of debate on the crucial issues confronting our country. It is essential for the survival of our democracy. Wouldn’t it be more convincing to all sides if it were civil?I admit to being a senior citizen. It would not surprise me if others of my advanced age are skipping Abby and then tuning back in at 11 p.m. for more reasoned discussion led by Laura Coates.
Mary Kilgour, Ph.D. ’82
FAS Restructuring
One dramatic change at Harvard over the last 50-odd years is the increase in administrative personnel (“At University Hall, the Restructuring Begins,” September-October 2026, p. 9). Some of this may have been regrettable necessity, such as hiring more guards, more security, lawyers to defend against the government, and providing better Wi-Fi (which was not available when I graduated in 1971), but a lot of it grew out of the bureaucratic imperative: a bureaucrat’s importance depends on the size of his staff. The article on the restructuring briefly mentions a goal “to protect teaching and research,” but Humphrey Appleby, the permanent secretary of the department of administrative affairs on the 1950s British sitcom Yes Minister, would have described the process better and recommended a committee to study the issue.
James Kardon ’71
Antisemitism and the Courts
It takes a certain audacity for Harvard to take umbrage at President Trump for fighting antisemitism on campus (“News in Brief,” September-October 2026, p. 13). Harvard calls it the pretext of antisemitism, meaning Trump is using Harvard’s antisemitism as an excuse to fight and defund Harvard. Could you imagine any other group suffering [the treatment Jewish students faced on campus after the October 7, 2023, Hamas terrorist attacks in Israel] and the response being that the claimed outrage is pretext? If it was any other group, the campus elites would be applauding the government’s effort to crack down on an -ism.
Harvard’s Jewish enrollment has fallen by roughly half in the past decade to about 7 percent. As a Jewish alum, I actually hope Jewish enrollment declines to zero, as Jews reject Harvard instead of Harvard rejecting them. Any group treated in such a manner should vote with their feet and instead embrace schools dedicated to ethical, earnest, and rigorous education, not rewarding mob-led virtue signaling.
William Choslovsky, J.D. ’94
Grade Inflation
I’ve been working in the field of educational improvement in K-12 public schools for almost four decades. One of the threads woven through all those years is the question of how to appropriately and validly assess student learning and performance.
There have been thorough critiques of the A-F grading and testing systems, which originated from the late-nineteenth-century eugenics movement, yet for the most part we still use that archaic and inequitable system today. The good news is, there is substantial research and practice supporting a move away from that system to either competency-based assessment, which assesses against a set of criteria for mastery of content or skills development, or performance-based assessment that looks at public demonstrations of learning after lengthy work on a particular topic.
That Harvard would debate back and forth how to modify the A-F approach and not seem to notice that a whole other way of assessing learning is out there seems odd to me. Even odder is the choice to return, in effect, to a norm-referenced system that has mostly been discredited everywhere (i.e., a grade is given in comparison to the norm curve of your peer group, which is pretty much what limiting A’s to 20 percent in any class means).
Surely Harvard professors can think more deeply, and in less of a confined binary, about grading than this decision suggests?
John M. Watkins, Ed.D. ’97
Errata
Due to an editing error, a letter about the consequences of satellite constellations on light pollution (September-October 2026, p. 3) mischaracterized a recent action by the Federal Communications Commission. In approving a company’s application to launch its first satellite, the agency deemed the company’s deployment of a solar reflector—not the satellite itself—to be “beyond the scope of the Commission’s authority to regulate.”
