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Divestment Debate, Overseer Slate
T he debate over whether the University should divest any investments in fossil-fuel production from the endowment, begun nearly a decade ago, has reached a new level of intensity in recent months. In the fall, faculty advocates of divestment, who had …
Issue: January-February 2020
Building Toward a Kidney
“All right,” says David Kolesky, Ph.D. ’16. “The moment of truth.” As many times as he’s done this, there’s still always that pause. Wearing blue latex gloves and a white lab coat, Kolesky is about to see what the morning’s work has yielded. In front of …
Issue: January-February 2017
Brevia
Solar Expanse Have 1.5 acres of flat roof space, will go solar. Borrego Solar Systems installed 2,275 solar photovoltaic panels (Harvard’s largest campus solar array) atop the Gordon Indoor Track and tennis complex, creating 591.5 kilowatts of clean- …
Issue: September-October 2012
Debating Divestment in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences
This afternoon, at its regularly scheduled faculty meeting—which happened to fall on the day after President Donald Trump moved formally to withdraw the United States from the Paris Agreement on climate change—the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) …
Rebecca Henderson: Does Capitalism Need to be Reimagined?
Climate change is out of control, leading many people to question whether it isn’t just fossil fuels, but our entire economic system, that needs to be replaced. In this episode, Harvard Business School economist Rebecca Henderson talks through her …
Two-Term President, Two-Time Poet Laureate
The annual Phi Beta Kappa Literary Exercises in Sanders Theatre—in many ways the intellectual center of Commencement week exercises, at least for College seniors and their families—this year features two particularly interesting guests. The poet will be …
Learning, and Teaching, As Peers
How can professional teachers and educational institutions integrate peer learning into their pedagogy? This was the subject of the eighth annual Harvard Initiative for Learning and Teaching (HILT) conference, which convened hundreds of professors, …
“One Less Investment Banker”
On a rutted dirt road in rural Henan Province, Chung To, A.M. ’91, entered a destitute farmhouse. Before a dimly lit family altar with images of the Buddha, Mao, and departed kin, two grandparents nudged their granddaughter to greet the visitor. To …
Issue: September-October 2011
Movement Ecology
The afternoon was cloudless, a brief window of calm in an otherwise hectic spring semester. Alejo and I sat in the backyard of the Dudley Cooperative house, regarding the pots of planting soil and trowels before us. That morning our house tutor had …
Issue: September-October 2019
Funny, Weird, Macabre
New England is filled with peculiar places, and J.W. Ocker plans to find them all. The New Hampshire-based explorer—and creator of the OTIS: Odd Things I’ve Seen travel blog, podcast, and related books—gravitates to anything offbeat, haunting, or macabre. …
Issue: September-October 2019
A New Way of Being in the World
Sitting in her kitchen in Peterborough, New Hampshire, Elizabeth Marshall Thomas ’54 is talking about animal consciousness when her two dogs, chihuahua Chapek and pug mix Kafka , begin madly snarling at each other. “What are you doing, and why?! ” she …
Issue: September-October 2019
Brevia
Public Health Professor Paul Farmer, M.D. ’88, Ph.D. ’90, has been appointed the first Kolokotrones University Professor. He had been Presley professor and chair of the department of global health and social medicine at Harvard Medical School and a …
Issue: March-April 2011
Eating Greener
It started with apples. In the 1990s and early 2000s, Harvard University Dining Services (HUDS) focused on small changes to the food-buying process as it sought to become more sustainable. What kinds of foods could it buy locally? Apples worked. “It was …
Issue: July-August 2019
This Financial Meltdown, and the Next One
A panel of professors convened by Faculty of Arts and Sciences dean of social sciences Stephen M. Kosslyn on February 11 analyzed the causes of the financial crisis of 2007 to 2009, the resulting near-brush with what one of them called "Great Depression …
Stinging the Blues
The bulldog got stung again in the final minutes of The Game. To football-loving Old Blues, these acts of Harvard waspishness must seem to repeat themselves like a recurring dream. The archetype is the 1968 game, when Harvard scored 16 points in the last …
Issue: January-February 2010