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Steering Softball
Head softball coach Jenny Allard, who has led Harvard’s team for more than half of its existence and ranks among the Ivy League’s most successful coaches, doesn’t want this to be a story about her. “Write about the team,” she says. “Write about what …
Issue: March-April 2018
Off the Shelf
Safe Spaces, Brave Spaces: Diversity and Free Expression in Education, by John Palfrey ’94, J.D. ’01 (MIT, $19.95). The author, previously Harvard Law’s vice dean for library and information resources, now head of Phillips Academy, Andover, plunges into …
Issue: January-February 2018
Robin Kelsey: Is a Photograph a Work of Art?
What makes a photograph art ? A great photograph may be the result of skill and intention, or it may be the result of dumb luck: a fleeting, perfect composition captured by chance. At a time when there is a camera in every pocket, how do curators …
The Paintings Behind the Books in the Harvard Botanical Museum
When Richard Evans Schultes ’37, Ph.D. ’41 became director of the Botanical Museum of Harvard University in 1967, he could not have imagined that he would soon discover a collection of beautiful paintings hidden behind a shelf of books in the …
The Rub on the Pub
Undergraduates will soon be able to relax in a new campus pub, scheduled to open early in April. The gathering spot is part of a $4.5-million overhaul of Loker Commons, the student space below Memorial Hall, which will include music practice rooms, places …
Issue: March-April 2007
How Buildings Move People
The museum gallery is a space designed to be in permanent flux. In 2008, artist Michael Asher sat down with 10 years of exhibition blueprints from the Santa Monica Museum of Art, reviewing the designs of 44 shows that had gone up in the main gallery. He …
Issue: May-June 2017
Ballet’s Geometry, Torqued
In an overheated basement studio at Barnard College, a dancer twirls with smartphone in hand, eyes fixed on an inches-wide video of the steps she should take. Two others windmill their arms, looking like Olympic swimmers warming up poolside. They’re …
Issue: May-June 2017
A “Players’ Coach”
When the final buzzer sounded last November in the game that won the Harvard men’s water-polo team its first conference championship—and clinched a spot in the NCAA tournament (another first), where the Crimson would go all the way to the Final Four …
Issue: March-April 2017
Trends in Harvard’s Hiring and Promotion of Women and Minority Faculty
With a possibly contentious debate over the College’s current policy sanctioning student members of unrecognized single-gender social organizations averted , the main focus of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) on February 7 was a report on the hiring …
University Hits Emissions Target
Harvard reduced its greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 30 percent during the past decade, the Office for Sustainability announced today. The University’s reduction goal, adopted in 2008 and measured from a 2006 baseline, was met despite 15 percent growth …
Williamina Fleming
As 21- year-old Williamina Paton Fleming steamed across the Atlantic toward Boston in November 1878, she had no idea how brightly the stars overhead would shine in her future. One of nine children of a Scottish craftsman and his wife, she already knew the …
Issue: January-February 2017
The Harvard Globetrotters
Last Saturday in Shanghai, the Harvard men’s basketball team played a rematch that was a decade in the making. And although the Crimson lost the game, the event offered a glimpse of how far the team has come. Back in 2007, Stemberg men’s basketball coach …
Divinity School Launches New Degree Programs
Harvard Divinity School (HDS), long focused on preparing religious leaders and training religious scholars, this fall adds a third mission. It is launching its first new master’s degree program in more than 50 years, the master of religion and public life …
Issue: September-October 2021
In Defense of Liberal Arts
I didn’t fully realize the value of a liberal arts education until I was removed from it. Though even as a high schooler I knew that I wanted to go to a “liberal arts school,” that was mostly because I didn’t yet know what I wanted to do with my life. I’d …
Issue: September-October 2023
Focus on Faust
The memories may be fading, but Harvard roared into the new millennium. In the wake of the $2.6-billion University Campaign, Neil L. Rudenstine bequeathed to his successor a $165-million surplus—a huge cushion in an annual budget then totaling $2.1 …
Issue: July-August 2018