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The President's Grandfather
H ARVARD HAS about 125 notable old clocks. Fifty came in 1943 from Grenville L. Winthrop, A.B. 1886, LL.B. '89 (who gave to the Fogg Art Museum 3,700 treasures in all: archaic jades, paintings by Gainsborough and Ingres, Wedgwood in quantity, French …
Picture-book Publisher
Children’s book publisher Claudia Z. Bedrick ’85 knows the value of childhood memories. “There’s an intimacy we have with the books we fall in love with as young readers,” she says, and as head of Enchanted Lion Books, she has devoted herself to bringing …
Issue: January-February 2014
Winthrop House Next for Renewal
Winthrop will be the next undergraduate residence renovated as part of Harvard’s plan to renew the House system, Faculty of Arts and Sciences dean Michael D. Smith announced on October 30. Winthrop is expected to close for 15 months, from Commencement …
Cambridge 02138
A Note to Readers We hope that you are safe and well—and that by the time this issue is posted online and reaches your mailbox, humanity will have made significant progress in reducing the baleful effects of the coronavirus (due in part to the …
Issue: July-August 2020
Tackling the Dental Care Desert
In Joplin, Missouri, a group of women that includes Harvard alumnae is creating a new college of dental medicine, helping to bridge a gap that seldom makes headlines: the scarcity of oral health care in rural America. Across the country, the number of …
A Workable Democracy
Justice Stephen G. Breyer, LL.B. ’64, sometimes says that his job and that of other members of the Supreme Court is to speak for the law. He does not mean that justices are Platonic Guardians, with ironclad power to impose their will on the nation despite …
Issue: March-April 2017
Giant Magellan Milestone
In Tucson's late summer heat , under the steeply raked eastern stands of the University of Arizona Stadium (“Home of the Wildcats”), technicians at the Steward Observatory Mirror Lab this past weekend cast the third enormous mirror for the Giant Magellan …
Living Large in Tiny Apartments
In the 1960s, Volkswagen became famous for ads featuring tiny pictures of their cars with the slogan, “Think small.” Now architects Eric Bunge, M.Arch. ’96, Mimi Hoang, M.Arch. ’98, and Alphonse Lembo, M.U.P. ’10, have put their own spin on that memorable …
Issue: May-June 2013
“Panic” and “Friendship” at Phi Beta Kappa
The 220th Phi Beta Kappa (PBK) Literary Exercises, conducted Tuesday morning at 11 in Sanders Theatre, began the formal activities of Commencement week, providing the customary intellectual and artistic launch for the academic and emotional celebrations …
Harvard Divinity School Receives Christian Studies Endowment
Harvard Divinity School (HDS) today announced that artist and activist Susan Shallcross Swartz and her husband, James R. Swartz ’64, have donated $10 million to establish the Susan Shallcross Swartz Endowment for Christian Studies, in support of new …
Finding a New Footing
Although summer provided a break from a financial annus horribilis , Harvard continued to grapple with the fallout from the projected 30 percent decline in the value of its endowment assets—and the resulting need to “do business differently,” as President …
Issue: September-October 2009
Designating Dunster
Harvard announced in mid July that Dunster will become the first of its 12 residential undergraduate Houses to be fully renewed under an ambitious, multidecade program . (Renovating the River Houses alone is expected to cost more than $1 billion .) …
Issue: September-October 2012
Harvard College Admissions Rate Falls to 5.9 Percent
Harvard College announced today that 2,032 applicants had been offered admission to the class of 2016, entering this August—5.9 percent of 34,302 applicants. The admissions rate last year was 6.2 percent (2,158 offers of admission extended to 34,950 …
Under (Green) Wraps
Nominally, Harvard’s official color is crimson. But this summer, a lot of the place went green—with numerous sites swaddled in or fenced off by construction wrapping, Christo-style, during another busy season of renewal, renovation, and repair. The …
Issue: September-October 2019
A Scholar in the House
Tradition and the twenty-first century were tangled together in Barker Center’s Thompson Room on the afternoon of February 11, when Drew Gilpin Faust conducted her first news conference as Harvard’s president-elect. Daniel Chester French’s bronze bust of …
Issue: July-August 2007