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Admissions Agenda
Edward Blum is certainly lucky. In late 2014, when his Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA) filed suit against Harvard and the University of North Carolina (UNC) aiming, as its website puts it, to “eliminate race and ethnicity from college admissions,” …
Issue: July-August 2022
The Best of Times…
Harvard’s annual financial report, for the fiscal year ended June 30, 2016 (released in late October), was full of good tidings: operating revenue up 5.6 percent (more than a quarter-billion dollars), to nearly $4.8 billion; operating expenses up 5.3 …
Issue: January-February 2017
Celebrating Cinema
Four nights a week , anyone can saunter down to the lowest level of the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, buy a ticket, and slide into a cushy seat at the Harvard Film Archive’s (HFA) cinémathèque to view “rare and scholarly works of art, films that …
Issue: January-February 2017
An Extraordinary Season
Regardless of your distance from greater Boston, you likely know that Harvard slogged through a semester of record-breaking—and patience-testing—winter weather. The type of meteorological event immortalized by Ralph Waldo Emerson in “The Snow-Storm” as …
Issue: May-June 2015
“Like Driving at Night”
It may seem odd that Maggie Shipstead ’05, whose third novel, Great Circle , arrives this spring, didn’t grow up wanting to be a writer. The current Los Angeles resident—born in Orange County, but peripatetic for a few years in-between—remembers reading …
Issue: May-June 2021
Harvard Proponent
Photograph by Jim Harrison Walter H. Morris Jr. The Harvard Alumni Association’s new president, Walter H. Morris Jr. ’73, M.B.A. ’75, may have left the University’s classrooms years ago, but he has never stopped learning at Harvard. He often returns for …
Issue: September-October 2008
A Tale of Two Detectives
Lauren Mechling writes in the thriving young-adult genre. Above: The author's first solo novel. While preparing to interview Cecile von Ziegesar, author of the wildly popular Gossip Girl series, for a London newspaper, Lauren Mechling ’99 spent a week in …
Issue: September-October 2008
How to Make a Mammal
“What a mess ,” Sharad Ramanathan thinks, contemplating a group of cells growing in a glass dish. There are different cell types everywhere, the random “daughter cells” produced by a stem cell population. A mathematician and physicist by training, he …
Issue: January-February 2024
Off the Shelf
“Much of the time we spend in gatherings with other people disappoints us,” warns professional facilitator Priya Parker, M.P.P. ’12. After this deflating introduction, The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters (Riverhead, $28) offers a breezy …
Issue: September-October 2018
What Makes (and Remakes) a House
The Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) , in planning a major renovation of the 12 undergraduate residential Houses, has appointed a House Program Planning Committee “to examine the mission and purpose of House life and to develop an architectural space …
Issue: July-August 2008
The “Toxicity of Low Expectations”
At a time when less than 50 percent of Americans grow up to earn more than their parents, how can higher education help move the needle, especially for low-income students? This was the overarching question in the Radcliffe Day panel discussion moderated …
Flocking to Finance
Recent graduates may take for granted the migration of one-fifth of their classmates into finance-sector jobs, but things haven’t always been this way. In a survey of 6,500 Harvard graduates from selected classes between 1969 and 1992, Claudia Goldin and …
Issue: May-June 2008
Theatrical Debut
Hasty Pudding Theatricals (HPT) returns to its historic home this year for its 160th production. (Since the inaugural show in 1844, the group has missed only four years, taking a hiatus during each of the two world wars.) But the theater at 10-12 Holyoke …
Issue: January-February 2008
Ghosts in the Yard
Richard Lawrence Robert Crowder, M.P.A. ’07 Kennedy School of Government, delivers the Graduate English Oration titled "Ghosts in the Yard" for Harvard's 356th Commencement Exercises. (Speech as prepared ) Some of you may have entered Harvard Yard today …
The Arts as Essential Goods
“No man is an island; every book is a world.” The motto, adapted from John Donne, appears on a weathered sign for the ailing bookshop owned by the irascible A.J. Fikry. The depressive air is no mistake. Novelist Gabrielle Zevin ’00 wrote The Storied Life …
Issue: July-August 2020