Harvard and the 250th
Lest we hurry to congratulate ourselves for our support for the American Revolution, consider the following: many years ago, touring Nova Scotia, Canada, we came across a public plaque that commemorated “the 50 percent of then-living Harvard graduates who emigrated to Nova Scotia in the wake of the American Revolution.” Clearly, they were Tories. Shades of “Evangeline”?
Marc Hertzman ’65, M.D. ’69
As a liberal-leaning resident of southwestern Ohio’s politically conservative Warren County, I was surprised to learn that this county was named in memory of “the greatest incendiary in all of America”: major general and physician Joseph Warren, A.B. 1759, A.M. ’62 (“‘The Greatest Incendiary in All of America,’” May-June 2026, p. 30).
Your page-turning profiles of Harvard revolutionaries on the eve of America’s 250th birthday—and your casual reference to Revolutionary War veterans naming “streets and towns in his honor, as they settled the frontier as far west [!] as Ohio”—sparked this reader’s curiosity. Major General Warren’s death at the Battle of Bunker Hill did not end his memory or his cause, thanks in part to Harvard Magazine writer Daniel B. Cunningham’s profile in courage.
So often my incendiary junior high history students ask, “Why are we learning this? How does this help us?” With revolutionary fervor, they, too, challenge contemporary tyrannous teachings. Fortunately, you’ve answered their militant inquiries. The places we inhabit today bear the marks of heroes who still inspire. Thank you, brave Major General Warren, for taking one for the Revolutionary team. Your liberating legacy lives on in this conservative Ohio county.
Christopher Kraus, M.T.S. ’85
Major General Joseph Warren might have been described by one British lord as “the greatest incendiary in all of America.” But it was Joseph Hawley of Northampton whom Massachusetts Lieutenant Governor Thomas Hutchinson blamed for the American Revolution. Hawley was selected to go to the Continental Congress, but declined from ill health, so John Adams, A.B. 1755, was sent in his place. Adams wrote Hawley regularly for advice once there. But when histories were written in the 1790s, the younger generation (like Adams) left the older generation (like Hawley) out of them.
Did I mention writing my revisionist Harvard senior thesis on Joseph Hawley, graded and praised as “important” by Professor Bernard Bailyn?
James Berkman ’77, J.D. ’82
This Magazine is to be commended for its issue highlighting Harvard’s role in the American Revolution. The articles skillfully blend historical fact with whimsical illustrations by Mark Steele. However, I have one quibble and one observation about those illustrations.
Quibble first: In the illustration accompanying the article, “A Revolution in Their Midst” (May-June 2026, page 28), I object to the expulsion from the famed Tory Row of its most historically Georgian home, the Vassall-Craigie-Longfellow House, from its central position to an outlying street. I could also express dismay that the Hooper-Lee-Nichols House, built in 1685 and until recently home of the Cambridge Historical Society, which I ran for a brief period in the 1980s, is not depicted. But that is being unnecessarily picky.
Observation: I strongly suspect that the artist knows of the similarly whimsical illustration of Harvard (and Radcliffe) drawn almost 70 years ago by my godmother, Alva Scott Garfield. A Southern lady from Montgomery, Alabama, she came north to Wellesley College and in the mid-1950s drove me there in her convertible to convert me into considering attending. I did, and I still fondly remember driving back through Sudbury with the radio streaming Sibelius’s Symphony No. 6. My late husband, John Merrill Norton ’56, and I spent our honeymoon at her summer home in Madison, New Hampshire. “Auntie” Alva also drew maps of Boston and Concord, Massachusetts.
Bettina A. Norton
In a letter to Thomas Jefferson in 1815, John Adams asked, “What do We mean by the Revolution?” He then answered: “The War? That was no part of the Revolution. It was only an Effect and Consequence of it. The Revolution was in the Minds of the People, and this was effected, from 1760 to 1775, in the course of fifteen Years before a drop of blood was drawn at Lexington.”
Shortly after Great Britain’s parliament passed the notorious Stamp Act in 1765, Adams’s second cousin, Samuel, A.B. 1740, A.M. ’43, organized the Boston Sons of Liberty to oppose the stamps as an unconstitutional tax. For the next 10 years, as British hostility to the Americans’ rights hardened, Samuel’s activism progressed from resistance to rebellion to demands for independence. That, according to John Adams, was the revolution. The War for Independence that began in 1775 and led to the Declaration of Independence 250 years ago is best understood as the result of the revolution in the minds of the people.
It is sometimes said that history is an argument without end, but this issue is not quibbling about words. It poses profound questions about causation and context as July 4, 2026, approaches.
Steven S. Berizzi ’73
A Year of Turmoil
“A Year of Turmoil” (May-June 2026, p.14) opens its timeline on January 21, 2025—Trump’s first day. Start four days earlier and the story changes.
On January 17, Harvard signed a resolution agreement with the Biden administration’s Office for Civil Rights, finding the University had failed to protect Arab, Muslim, and Palestinian students. On January 21, Harvard settled two private federal lawsuits over anti-Jewish discrimination—one brought by the Brandeis Center and Jewish Americans for Fairness in Education, another by Students Against Antisemitism. None of this appears in the article.
When the story begins with Trump, Harvard’s antisemitism problem becomes a partisan flashpoint. That framing lets the community off the hook. Harvard’s own Presidential Task Force said it plainly in June 2024, months before any Trump pressure: the situation of Israeli students was “dire,” and the complaint process was broken. Those findings belong to Harvard, not to any administration.
Antisemitism on this campus is a civil rights issue. It was one before January 20, 2025. It will remain one long after the current political moment passes.
Jason E. Klein, M.B.A. ’86
AI and the Economy
We were surprised to see that the panelists featured in your article “At Harvard, AI Meets ‘Post-Neoliberalism” had little to say about AI and central economic planning. Yet the current scholarly and public buzz around AI has prompted reconsideration of issues long thought settled, including the democratic capacity for rational economic planning. Since the rise of AI, Nobel laureate Daron Acemoglu and many others have wondered, as he puts it: “What if the computational power of central planners improved tremendously?” With enough computing power, perhaps an AI regulator could model an economy, decide what is to be produced or consumed, and solve the “knowledge problem” that doomed twentieth-century planned economies and produced untold suffering.
We suggest a fatal flaw in this renewed optimism: if an authority possesses AI advanced enough to manage the economy, millions of dispersed actors will also deploy AI to pursue their idiosyncratic goals. This proliferation will make the economy more complex and, thus, harder to model. Seen in this light, AI advances will make the central planner’s task less visible, not more. Worse still, the private information required for AI-driven planning would demand mass surveillance of virtually (perhaps exactly) every economic choice, of our fleeting expressions of attention, and of even our most minor behaviors and preferences. Deploying such data in planning would also require outsourcing to machines the individual acts of valuation that create market prices in the first place.
Even setting aside the dangers of powerful AI falling into the wrong hands, we should think twice before we risk letting machines displace our humanity. The danger here is that of atrophying the human capacity for generating personal valuations, in markets and beyond, that makes life meaningful.
Gregory Robson, A.L.M. ’08, University of Notre Dame
Andrew M. Bailey, National University of Singapore
Justin Tosi, Georgetown University
Life on the Mississippi
The second paragraph of The College Pump (May-June 2026, p. 63) ends by describing Life on the Mississippi as “Twain’s 1883 memoir of his time as a steamboat captain.” He wasn’t a captain—the position he eventually reached was that of pilot. And just one page, the one-page Chapter XXI of the book, is devoted to his being a pilot. Then, “Time drifted smoothly and prosperously on…”— but then the Civil War broke out, and he had to seek other occupations. (The rest of the book concerns a trip on the Mississippi River he took as a passenger, 21 years later.)
George Bergman, Ph.D. ’68
Dear Primus McPumpus,
Most of what [Mark Twain] described in Life on the Mississippi was the skill and apprenticeship of being a pilot. Which I think is quite different from being a captain. I don’t know if he ever became a captain per se. But I am too lazy to go look into the book again (actually I listened to it, and you can’t easily scan for the key info on CDs played in the car). So, I’ll prime your pump and you can go look it up.
Rob Hamm, Ph.D. ’79
A Rabbi’s Journey
Tim Murphy’s article, “A Queer Rabbi’s Very Long Journey” (March-April 2026, p. 43), refers to Rabbi Amichai Lau-Lavie’s rather exotic religious practices as “progressive.” Fair enough. However, the headline of the article alludes to “the tension between ancient and contemporary Judaism.” I wonder if the term “ancient” is appropriate here, as those practices were essentially universal during the first 15/16ths of Jewish history and continue apace today. Murphy’s article does give insight into (some) contemporary Jewish people, but of the Jewish religion, not so much.
Richard S. Laub
The Grade Inflation Conversation
Two letters in your May-June 2026 issue (pages 4 and 8) identify a major source of grade inflation: student evaluations of faculty. So why not go to the heart of the matter and separate entirely the teaching and grading functions? Oxford and Cambridge have been doing this for two centuries or more by basing a student’s graduation status not on course grades (there are none) but on a formidable set of examinations—often six hours a day for several days—graded by a faculty board.
There are drawbacks, of course, to judging academic performance on just a few days of examination. Nevertheless, a great merit of this arrangement is that it transforms the relationship between teacher and student from one of natural adversaries into one of allies, intent on defeating the examiners.
Until several decades ago, Harvard made a restrained effort to follow this example by requiring students to pass a comprehensive exam in their concentration. The effect was twofold: it encouraged students to choose courses broadly enough so that they would be ready for the exam, and it gave departments insight into the quality of course grading so that the profligate awarding of A’s might, over time, be caught out. Isn’t this an opportune moment to consider something similar?
Charles C. Nickerson ’61
I beg to differ with two letters in the last issue of Harvard Magazine [that cited faculty evaluations as a contributor to grade inflation]. In my years as a student, the professors I admired the most were those who were tremendously demanding and made me work hard. Achieving good grades in their classes filled me with pride. They are the ones for whom I would give highly positive evaluations.
I particularly dislike this sentence: “I’ll pretend that you’re a good student if you’ll pretend that I’m a good teacher.” Good professors have their standards and stick to them. As a high school science teacher, I considered an A to mean perfection. My students and their parents could tell you that an A in one of my classes was rare.
Judith Pierce Livingstone, M.A.T.’61
Errata
In “A Year of Turmoil” (May-June 2026, p. 14), the text should have stated that Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 “prohibits discrimination based on race, color, and national origin.” Religion and sex fall within the scope of Title VII.
In “‘The Greatest Incendiary in All of America’” (May-June 2026, p. 30), the provided date for the Battle of Bunker Hill was incorrect. The battle was fought on June 17, 1775.
