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Yesterday's News
1925 The Associated Harvard Clubs’ Committee on Service to the University suggests that descendants of Harvard graduates be given preference in the admission process; the Bulletin’ s editors write, “Inbreeding within the student body would be quite as …
Issue: May-June 2005
Fiction in Counterpoint
In 2005, while waiting to pay in the Bob Slate stationery store in Harvard Square, Thomas P. Wolf ’05 spotted a Moleskine composer’s notebook with gray-lined staves on the pages. “It was something I wanted to mess around with,” he says. He bought it. …
Issue: September-October 2012
Shaping Cities
A new interchange was coming to Cincinnati, and it was about time. The I-71 thoroughfare had connected the city to its suburbs since the 1970s, but its lanes also separated neighborhoods and worsened travel within the city—lengthening commutes and …
Issue: March-April 2021
Cambridge 02138
Judge Posner I have to praise Lincoln Caplan’s article on Judge Richard Posner (“ Rhetoric and Law, ” January-February, page 49) for largely avoiding the gushing worshipfulness of the typical Harvard Magazine piece. But I still must demur on some points. …
Issue: March-April 2016
Off the Shelf
Why We Vote, by Owen M. Fiss, LL.B. ’64 (Oxford, $27.95). Yale’s Sterling Professor of Law emeritus argues that the commitment to democracy is embedded within the Constitution—and secured by citizens’ right to vote, have those votes counted equally, and …
Issue: May-June 2024
“We Must Cross Over”
In his Commencement address, President Summers reviewed his priorities. A detailed report on his tenure will appear in the next issue. Today, I speak from this podium a final time as your president. As I depart, I want to thank all of you—students, …
Issue: July-August 2006
A Life in Harmonica
It was the night before a final exam and Scott Albert Johnson ’92 had some studying to do. Only he wasn’t studying. A suitemate who came to ask Johnson a question heard through the door an instructional cassette tape and a small, reedy instrument. “What …
Issue: May-June 2021
Blue, Yellow, Crimson
When he was president of Harvard, Neil L. Rudenstine made the case for universities’ role as custodians of human histories, cultures, and languages by telling a story from his service as provost at Princeton. In 1979, following the Islamic Revolution and …
Issue: May-June 2022
Juneteenth Is Now a University Holiday
Harvard will be closed on Juneteenth—the holiday celebrated on June 19 marking the day in 1865 that enslaved African Americans in Texas were told that they were free—University president Lawrence Bacow announced in an email on Tuesday. “All faculty and …
S. Allen Counter Has Died
S. Allen Counter has died after a brief illness. Counter was the inaugural and longtime director of the Harvard Foundation for Intercultural and Race Relations , and was a part-time professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School. His speech at the Phi …
A Presidency’s End
Claudine Gay’s truncated 185-day term as Harvard’s thirtieth president came undone with astonishing speed from October 7—when Hamas terrorists attacked Israel, setting this and other campuses aboil—through her resignation on January 2 (see …
Issue: March-April 2024
The Faculty’s New Faces
Harvard’s faculty ranks have, gradually, become increasingly diverse. The intersection of lifetime tenured appointments; no mandatory retirement age; a decade of very constrained growth; and the long time it takes students to progress from studying a …
Issue: May-June 2019
Can Memory Be Related to Creative Cognition?
Fuhgeddaboudit! Or maybe (and as many of us prefer) don’t. As it turns out, “episodic memory”—the ability to relive specific moments from past experiences—may be related to a person’s creative capacity. “Memory is not just for going back into the past …
Brevia
Cash Conservation Crimson Style The Harvard Financial Aid Initiative aims both to attract applicants and to enroll more students from modest economic circumstances. But what happens when they land in pricey Cambridge? This funky Shoestring Strategies for …
Issue: March-April 2006
Yesterday's News
1920 Thanks to the Endowment Fund campaign, President Lowell approves a new salary scale for faculty members under which full professors will receive $6,000 to $8,000 annually (an increase from the previous $4,000 to $5,500), and instructors will receive …