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Talking about Talking
As the spring semester began, Harvard faced the difficult challenge of clarifying its free speech policies and securing community adherence to them. After a tumultuous autumn with sharp campus divisions over Hamas’s terrorism and the resulting …
Issue: March-April 2024
Thinking Archaically
Romolo Del Deo ’82 knew his sculpting career was going well. In his opinion, perhaps too well—unsustainably well. He was teaching at Harvard shortly after graduating himself, receiving grants, winning awards. The whole “system” of academic art seemed to …
Issue: January-February 2024
Endowment Value Declines 29.5% as Investment Return Is Negative 27.3%
Harvard Management Company (HMC) reported today that the University’s endowment was valued at $26.0 billion as of June 30—29.5 percent less than the record $36.9 billion reported for the prior fiscal year. That result reflects a negative 27.3 percent …
A Smaller Surplus—and Endowment Returns Turn Positive
Harvard’s annual financial report for the fiscal year ended June 30, 2023, published today, suggests that a post-pandemic new normal is largely in place. Operating revenues rose, but less than in the prior year, when students who had deferred admission or …
Free to Fly
Inside the conservatory , it doesn’t take long for one of them to land on Kathy Fiore’s forearm. The large rice paper butterfly, a silvery yellow with black veined lines, hails from Southeast Asia. Although it flies in a gentle, floating manner and is now …
Issue: November-December 2023
Decoding the Deep
Click, click, click. Sharp staccato reports, like firecrackers, or a spitting log as it burns, end in a crescendo of sound resembling a rapidly spinning cog rattle, followed by a final extra click. “Dive,” one sperm whale is saying to another. This is the …
Issue: July-August 2024
Commencement 372 7/8
During the baccalaureate in Tercentenary Theatre on Tuesday, May 21, interim president Alan M. Garber told the class of 2024, “On Thursday, we of divergent minds will process together into this space.” Come May 23 , perhaps with a sense of premonition, he …
Issue: July-August 2024
Reengineering Arts and Sciences
Far from the fall-semester headlines about Harvard, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) pursued ideas across its disciplines to spur intellectual growth, enhance research, and maximize effective use of resources—the final stage of the strategic …
Issue: March-April 2024
Learning to the HILT
The Harvard Initiative on Learning and Teaching (HILT), unveiled in October, was inaugurated on Friday, February 3, with an all-day, invitation-only symposium principally featuring, and aimed at, faculty members, at the Northwest Building on Oxford …
Crimson Construction
In 2020, pandemic-induced fears about a recession and prospective deficits led Harvard to curtail capital outlays sharply. Spending on new buildings and renovation—always significant at an institution with more than 600 structures spread across Cambridge, …
Issue: September-October 2024
The State of Harvard’s Arts and Sciences
Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) Dean Hopi Hoekstra and colleagues issued their annual financial and other reports during an Election Day faculty meeting Tuesday afternoon, while also broaching other matters—among them, the desirability of students …
Harvard's New-Normal Financial Results
The University’s fiscal year 2015, concluded last June 30 and detailed in the annual financial report released today, in many ways mirrors the outcome of the prior year : Harvard again operated modestly in the black, following a couple of years of modest …
Coping with Alzheimer’s
In the summer of 2006 Harvard professor emerita Barbara Gutmann Rosenkrantz ’44, RI ’69—long revered for her work on the history of public health and for promoting women at Harvard (she was among the earliest full female professors and the first female …
Issue: September-October 2013
Football: Harvard 31- Penn 28
In the 151 years of Harvard football there have been many players who have stepped into the breach to rescue the Crimson. (Think Frank Kenneth Champi ’69, “Harvard Beats Yale, 29-29.”) Now the name of Charles P. DePrima ’25 must be added to the annals. On …
Silent Study-Ins
Last December , approximately 100 pro-Palestine students filed into Widener Library’s Loker Reading Room, taped flyers to the back of their laptops, and read for an hour. This “study-in,” billed as “silent” and “non-disruptive” by the student organizers, …