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The Endowment: Up, and Upheaval
A strong year for investors generally was a very strong year for the University. Harvard Management Company (HMC), concluding its first full year under new leadership, reported on August 21 that the endowment had risen to $34.9 billion during the fiscal …
Issue: November-December 2007
Overseers Petitioners Challenge Harvard Policies
As campaign announcements go, it was as splashy as could be: a page-one story in The New York Times of January 15, headlined “How Some Would Level the Playing Field: Free Harvard Degrees.” The article detailed a plan by five people to petition for slots …
Designing for “Changing Climates”
Tourists visiting the Notre-Dame de Paris cathedral in Paris might be seeking a religious or aesthetic experience. But they often leave feeling woozy for other reasons. In the increasingly hot Paris summers, visitors queueing outside are doubly baked by …
Thinking about Space
In a seminar room on the fifth floor of the Graduate School of Design’s Gund Hall, instructor in architecture Lisa Haber-Thomson is looking over a 3-D rendering of a tall and skinny apartment complex comprised of bright red, off-kilter stacked cubes and …
Issue: September-October 2018
Ripening Nicely
Soon Harvard’s sidewalk superintendents will turn their attention to Allston because that’s where the hardhats will go. For the next 50 years, idle observers will oversee workers as they erect 10 million square feet of buildings there and increase the …
Issue: May-June 2007
“One Community, One Harvard”
Standing alone on a Nantucket beach during a spectacular sunrise, Harvard Alumni Association president John West, M.B.A. ’95, tilted his iPhone camera to share the stretch of golden sand and blue Atlantic Ocean with viewers of his Class Day speech to …
Issue: September-October 2020
An Original Magna Carta, Hidden in Plain Sight
In December 2023, David Carpenter was deep in the digital stacks of the Harvard Law School Library, sifting through unofficial copies of the Magna Carta for a book project, when he stumbled upon a document unassumingly titled “HLS MS 172.” On the …
Michael Pollan’s Crooked Writing Path
Whether he is writing a book on big farming and the way Americans think about food, or interviewing terminal cancer patients who have had life-altering experiences through hallucinogenic drugs, author Michael Pollan’s career as a writer has been anything …
Harvard Discloses Top Earners
The University’s annual tax filings covering the fiscal year ended June 30, 2019, and the accompanying disclosures released today, include the earnings of the most highly compensated Harvard administrators and those at Harvard Management Company (HMC), …
The Perfect Amateur
For John Updike ’54, Litt.D. ’92, visiting museums is not a chore but a pleasure, one that brings back fond early memories of trips to the Reading (Pennsylvania) Museum with his mother. As the writer makes clear in his—barely—fictional 1967 …
Issue: March-April 2006
Being Black at Work
Diversity, equity, inclusion: these are the watchwords for companies hoping to foster the best talent, regardless of race. But do their efforts, like anti-bias workshops meant to train employees to recognize their own prejudices, really help minorities …
Issue: March-April 2022
Who Let the Dogs Out?
The Yale bulldog, muzzled by Harvard for five straight years, broke loose at the Stadium on November 18 and went on a tear. Closing out an Ivy League season made memorable by the exploits of Crimson running back Clifton Dawson, Yale’s 34-13 victory gave …
Issue: January-February 2007
Cornering COVID-19
Only immunity can bring an end to the current pandemic—whether through vaccination or the potentially deadly ordeal of infection. Unfortunately, it’s not a given that either a bout of COVID-19, or any of the experimental vaccines now in development, will …
Issue: July-August 2020
Brevia
Professorship Undone A $2.5-million gift to Harvard Divinity School by United Arab Emirates president Sheik Zayed bin Sultan al-Nahyan , made in 2000 in support of a professorship of Islamic religious studies, has been returned. Students and others had …
Issue: November-December 2004
“To Heal and to Help”
Perhaps more than any other group of graduates on Thursday, the new doctors receiving their degrees from Harvard Medical School (HMS) stand at the edge of a precipice. They will enter their profession in the midst of a global pandemic, for which there is …