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A More Generous, Capacious America
When Werner Sollors was a boy, growing up among the ruins of postwar Germany, he had at best an indistinct idea of the distant country he would spend his adult life trying to understand. There was no sign yet that he would, decades later, become one of …
Issue: January-February 2025
Faculty Room Facelift
The Faculty Room, the soaring second-floor space at the center of University Hall—designed by Charles Bulfinch, A.B. 1781 (who provided his services in exchange for tuition payments for son Thomas, class of 1814—an early legacy!) and completed in 1815—is …
Issue: March-April 2025
"Resizing," before "Reshaping"
No weekday hot breakfasts in House dining halls. Continued constraint on faculty appointments (a total of just 15 to 19 junior-faculty searches in 2009-2010, down from as many as several dozen in recent years), and severe limits on visiting faculty, …
Issue: July-August 2009
Citing Recession, Yale Makes Deeper Cuts
In a letter disseminated to Yale faculty and staff members on February 24 , that university's president, Richard C. Levin, outlined "a more aggressive approach to budget reductions for the coming fiscal year" than he disclosed last December 16 , when he …
Sasha
When Sasha joined Harvard’s staff in August 2022, she became the first non-human to receive a University ID. The Labrador Retriever recently graduated from Puppies Behind Bars, a nonprofit that trains incarcerated people to raise service dogs for veterans …
Issue: May-June 2024
Harvard Records $130-Million Deficit in Fiscal 2011
Harvard reported a $130-million operating deficit in the fiscal year ended last June 30—about 3 percent of total expenditures—according to the Harvard University Financial Report released on October 28. Although the report characterized the deficit as …
Harvard’s Nobel Prize Incubator
A striking phenomenon in the biomedical sciences is that great scientists sometimes arise in clusters at a particular time and place that fosters outstanding scientific achievement. Certain institutions, indeed certain places within institutions, succeed …
Pigskin Programs
Between 1890 and 1919 , Harvard won seven college football national championships. Though the next decades featured strong teams and significant fan support, Crimson football never regained its national prestige. Harvard’s gameday football programs from …
Issue: November-December 2023
Barbara Lawrence
When a forest fire broke out on the Wyoming dude ranch where Barbara Lawrence was working as a teen in the 1920s, she threw herself into feeding the exhausted men returning from fighting the blaze. When it was all over, the grateful foreman said, “Bobby, …
Issue: January-February 2025
Omnia Mea Mecum Porto
Last year , Ronnie Mae Weiss and her husband, Richard Sobol, moved out of their longtime Lexington, Massachusetts, home, where a lovely stream ran through the backyard. Now in Cambridge, they live in a townhouse about half their old home’s size, lacking …
Issue: July-August 2012
Harvard Football: New Season, New Coach
The winter , spring, and summer of our discontent having concluded, Harvard’s 2024 football season kicks off this Saturday—appropriately enough, the first day of autumn—at noon ET in Harvard Stadium against Stetson. (The game will be streamed on ESPN+, …
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
Winthrop Bell: Harvard Philosopher, MI6 Spy, and Early Forecaster of the Holocaust
Nearly six feet tall, Winthrop Bell (A.M. 1909) was a handsome, blond, blue-eyed philosopher, prisoner of war, and MI6 spy. An athletic outdoorsman, he had survived arduous employment as a surveyor in the wilds of northern Canada before coming to Harvard. …
Issue: March-April 2024
Studying Zika
To understand the outbreak of a disease like Zika, and ultimately to fight it, researchers must work on multiple levels. There are questions of molecules and chemical processes: how does the virus infect a cell, and what components provoke an immune …
Sam Altman’s Vision for the Future
“I really like things that, if they work, really matter—even if they don’t have a super high chance of working,” Sam Altman, cofounder and CEO of OpenAI, told a crowd of students who packed Memorial Church to hear him speak on May 1. He explained what …