Features

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Harvard Commencement 2025

Harvard passes a test of its values, yet challenges loom.

by Jonathan Shaw

Chad Cowan

Stem-cell science evolves

Stem cells are being used as tools in regenerative medicine and drug discovery.

by Jonathan Shaw

Li prepares to dissect a pangolin, from a popular pamphlet, <i>Li Shizhen: Great Scholar of Medical Drugs</i> (1955).

Biographical sketch of Chinese pharmacologist Li Shizhen

Brief life of a pioneering pharmacologist: 1518-1593

by Carla Nappi

At the Merkers salt mines in central Germany, American GIs admire Édouard Manet’s <em>In the Conservatory,</em> one of the thousands of rare works and documents stored there by the Nazi regime late in World War II. Monuments Man George Stout (see next image), a Fogg Museum conservator turned U.S. Army lieutenant, supervised the rescue of 40 tons of art from the site in April 1945.

The Monuments Men: Rescuing art from the Nazis

Harvard’s Monuments Men at war

Professionalization in the academy

On the professionalization of faculty life, doctoral training, and the academy’s self-renewal

by Louis Menand

The iconic <i>Silence=Death</i> neon sign, 1987, by the Silence=Death Project, appropriated (and inverted) the pink triangle used by Nazis to identify known homosexuals; the message, in poster form, preceded the formation of ACT UP. This is a copy of the original from the collection of the New Museum, New York.

From AIDS Activism to Art

View video from an exhibition at the Harvard Art Museum that explores the visual legacy of ACT UP’s campaign to galvanize action against a new epidemic.

Children from New Hope orphanage in Busia, Uganda, make their nightly walk to get water for drinking and washing. They handle all the chores themselves—an important part of director Ken Mulago’s strategy for running the orphanage. “We want our children to behave as responsible adults,” he says. “We don’t want to raise them up just to think about themselves.”

Harvard students volunteer in Africa

Students and service at a new frontier

by Elizabeth Gudrais

New media transform college classrooms

Visual, audio, and interactive media are transforming the college classroom

by Craig Lambert

Biographical sketch of Ayn Rand

Brief life of an iconoclastic individualist

by Jennifer Burns

A risk-management plan to help prevent financial crises

Financial regulation, moral hazard, and the end of “too big to fail”

by David A. Moss

Biographical sketch of French artist Adélaïde Labille-Guiard

A brief profile of an enterprising French artist

by Laura Auricchio