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Holiday Decorating on Steroids
Forget a lone Christmas tree, front door wreath, and even a slew of dangling baubles. For seriously dazzling holiday decorations, head instead to two Newport, Rhode Island, mansions meticulously dolled up for the season. The Preservation Society of …
Issue: November-December 2024
Arts and Science Transitions
The beginning of the end of a period of instability in the leadership of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) came on June 4, when President-elect Drew Gilpin Faust announced the appointment of Michael D. Smith as dean, effective July 15. Smith succeeds …
Issue: July-August 2007
Time in Space
Many who work in and around the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts have a weird relationship with the French modernist architect who designed it. Le Corbusier is a mythic figure for Harvard’s art students: his notoriety, when combined with the loudness …
Issue: March-April 2018
“I’m a Gambler with the Movies”
Some weeks after the news that his entire filmography, some 50 documentaries in 50 years , would finally be widely available via streaming services, the director Frederick Wiseman came to Harvard and explained what kept him going. “Documentary is fun!” he …
“House-Poor”
An unusual “Dean’s Letter on the Finances of the Faculty,” presented to the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) on October 17, during its first meeting of the year, details a significant “structural” deficit …
Issue: January-February 2007
Reconfiguring the Curriculum
Much work on refashioning the undergraduate curriculum remains for the next academic year, but the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) concluded its spring meetings by adopting several significant changes. Students will have more time to choose their …
Issue: July-August 2006
Francis James Child
Francis James Child , A.B. 1846, was a model of nineteenth-century academic achievement. Named Harvard’s Boylston professor of rhetoric and oratory at 26, he was one of his century’s leading Chaucer scholars and received honorary degrees from his alma …
Issue: May-June 2006
Off the Shelf
Who the Hell Are We Fighting? The Story of Sam Adams and the Vietnam Intelligence Wars , by C. Michael Hiam ( Steerforth Press , $25.95). Here’s a tightly written narrative history of what happened when the late CIA analyst Samuel A. Adams ’55, L ’61, …
Issue: May-June 2006
Hansjörg Wyss Boosts Bioengineering Innovation
The University announced today a gift of $131 million from Hansjörg Wyss, M.B.A. ’65, to support the operations of the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering. This is the third such gift that the Swiss-born entrepreneur has made to the …
Harvard Launches Center for LGBTQ Health
The Harvard Pilgrim Health Care Institute announced the launch of a new LGBTQ Health Center of Excellence on June 4, in partnership with the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health (HSPH). Citing both the LGBTQ community’s growing size in the US and the …
George Ticknor
By today's standards, Harvard College before the Civil War was a provincial academy, competent (judged Henry Adams) at preparing students to become "respectable citizens," but effectively indifferent to the advances in knowledge beginning to shape the …
Issue: January-February 2005
A Revised Gen Ed Debuts
After a years-long redesign , a reformed version of the College’s program in General Education launches this fall. The new Gen Ed intends to focus on “urgent problems and pressing questions”—to equip students for life outside of the classroom more …
Harvard Great Performances: Terence Patterson ’00
Had events not dictated otherwise, this week the Crimson football team would have been battling Brown at Providence. Instead we are taking another trip down memory lane. (As is Bloomberg News Radio, which on Saturdays this fall will rebroadcast classic …
Raising Her Voice
For many years, Reid Parsons ’15 didn’t think of her voice as something to be trained. It was always just there, a natural part of growing up with her musical family in Vermont’s Mad River Valley: singing “little ditties” with her grandmother, learning as …
Issue: January-February 2023
The War in Europe
Ukraine has proved to be a different kind of emergency. Unlike Afghan scholars, for whom the threat is so dire that the only choice is to evacuate as many as possible, many Ukrainians prefer, at least for now, Jane Unrue says, to remain in their own …
Issue: January-February 2023