Term Themes

President Drew Faust, speaking at Morning Prayers in Appleton Chapel, opened the 2015 fall term by talking about diversity—a frequent theme, sharpened in this case by a lawsuit attacking Harvard’s admissions practices that she characterized as a challenge to Harvard’s “most fundamental values.” More broadly, she said that “simply gathering a diverse mixture of extraordinarily talented people in one place does not in itself ensure the outcome we seek.” She exhorted the community to work toward “genuine including and belonging,” with each member playing the role of “generous listeners.” Her full text is reported at harvardmag.com/diversity-15. (Three weeks after she spoke, the U.S. Department of Education concluded that complaints against Princeton for allegedly discriminating against Asian applicants—similar to the issues in the litigation against Harvard—were unwarranted.)

Rakesh Khurana
Photograph by Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Public Affairs and Communications

At Freshman Convocation, Harvard College dean Rakesh Khurana reminded his new charges, “You were already admitted to Harvard, and you all belong here,” so they could relax and get beyond application-oriented résumé-building. Doing Harvard “the right way,” he suggested, involves intellectual exploration and being willing “to connect with others different from you.” Holding forth the prospective of a transformative Harvard education, Khurana hoped “your experience of college will be one not of showing the world what you can do, but, rather by discovering what you want to do….” Full convocation coverage appears at harvardmag.com/convocation-15.

Economists’ Exodus

Harvard’s top-ranked economics department has suffered a brain drain, losing five full professors to Stanford’s department and business school in recent years. And the Crimson department has failed in recent attempts to recruit Cardinal prospects—developments notable enough to rate coverage in The New York Times (“The Star Rising in the West,” September 13). Goldman professor of economics David Laibson, Harvard’s chair, told the Times, “Stanford’s keen interest in recruiting Harvard faculty is testimony to our strength,” but the losses sting: microeconomist Susan Athey; education expert Caroline M. Hoxby; econometrician Guido W. Imbens; behavioral economist Alvin L. Roth; and, this term, Raj Chetty, acclaimed for work on poverty and opportunity. Roth is a Nobel laureate; Athey and Chetty were John Bates Clark medalists, the top prize for work in economics by a scholar under the age of 40. Whatever the reasons (access to Silicon Valley’s innovation economy and big-data capacity, proximity to the Pacific region, attractive offers of spousal employment, consulting opportunities, the weather), the momentum has come to administrators’ attention. Responses may include a concerted recruiting effort to bring new members to the department, and finding resources to reconfigure and augment its quarters, in Littauer, which professors have long complained discourage collaboration and increasingly are ill-suited to large-scale, data-intensive research projects. 

Health Benefits, Year Two

In 2014, when the University announced that it would impose coinsurance and deductibles on faculty and nonunionized staff members’ health-insurance coverage, in an effort to rein in costs for employee benefits, it encountered sharp criticism from many professors. That prompted President Drew Faust to disclose data underlying the decision and to promise to revisit benefit offerings this fall, for coverage during 2016.

The result, communicated to the community in late August and mid September, is an additional, higher-premium health plan, for participants who wish to eliminate the risk of incurring deductibles or coinsurance charges. The progressive features of Harvard’s health offerings (premiums graduated by income cohorts, and reimbursement for out-of-pocket costs) were made more so—a move perhaps intended to appeal to unionized employees, whose contracts, being renegotiated, still provide them health plans without the cost-sharing features introduced in 2014. None of the new changes will likely lessen the escalation of health costs in the expensive Greater Boston market; indeed, Harvard informed employees that premiums will on average increase 7.3 percent in 2016, more than reversing the reductions realized this year as a result of the shift of costs from the insured portion of their coverage to coinsurance and deductible payments. Full coverage and analysis is available at harvardmag.com/benefits-15.

A New Admissions Architecture?

An 80-institution Coalition for Access, Affordability, and Success—including all the Ivy League universities and their peers, many of the nation’s selective liberal-arts colleges, and numerous public institutions—is unveiling a free portfolio-based suite of digital tools for high-school freshmen, sophomores, and juniors in an effort, it said, to “recast the college admission process from something that is transactional and limited in time into a more engaged, ongoing and educationally reaffirming experience.” The transactional process is the default mode in this era of plunging admission rates, multiple Common Application submissions, test-tutoring, and other maladies (see “What Ails the Academy?” page 64). The member institutions “also hope to motivate a stronger college-going mindset among students of all backgrounds, especially those from low-income families or underrepresented groups who have historically had less access to leading colleges and universities” (because they lack good guidance counseling and the means to secure proprietary private help).

The digital tools are intended to “reshape the process of applying to college as the culmination of students’ development over the course of their high-school careers, reducing the unfamiliarity of the application and leveling the playing field for all students.” The application portal will enable each institution to tailor its essays and other individual requirements as well. And because public coalition members have need-based financial aid for in-state residents, and private institutions are committed to meeting admitted applicants’ financial needs in full, the coalition obviously has an ambitious social mission, and perhaps even the intent of pushing back against teaching-to-the-test in primary- and secondary-school curriculums.

Dean of admissions and financial aid William R. Fitzsimmons said of the new program, “Harvard has always done everything possible to ensure that the college application process is accessible for all students. We will continue to honor the Common and Universal Applications, and will also now accept applications from the Coalition Group.”

Science Center Schematic

Harvard planners have introduced the design for the science and engineering complex in Allston, encompassing 586,000 square feet of new construction and repurposed space at 114 Western Avenue. The new building will house much of the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences; a rendering of the south-facing side, shown here, shows green space—sites for future development. The center, the first academic anchor of Harvard’s expanded campus, is to begin construction next year, with occupancy scheduled in 2020. For details, see harvardmag.com/seascenter-15.

Gender Gains?

At a time of heightened campus interest in diversity and inclusiveness (see “News Briefs”), and addressing sexual assault (see “Harvard’s Sexual-Assault Problem”), The Harvard Crimson reported two challenges to traditionally male campus enclaves: The Spee, a final club, extended invitations for its membership “punch” to women, an initial step in prospectively going coed, and women tried out for acting parts in the all-male Hasty Pudding Theatricals drag revue. The Pudding declined to cast any women (who have long held technical, writing, music, and support roles), at least for this year.

Retaining Recruits

Faculty of Arts and Sciences dean Michael D. Smith’s 2015 annual report, released in early October, highlights a troubling phenomenon, persistent since 2007, in efforts to diversify faculty ranks: a smaller percentage of eligible women than men decide to stand for tenure, departing before the scheduled review year. Tenure-track women in FAS reported lower satisfaction with faculty membership than their counterparts in any other Harvard school. Interviews with departing women uncovered “striking” dissatisfaction with departmental culture; the report stated that respondents said the culture “was not conducive to their productivity and was a significant factor in their decision to leave.” Smith has asked academic deans to review departments’ formal mentoring plans, and FAS will launch seminars and symposiums on leadership and other subjects important for tenure-track faculty members’ careers.

Photograph by Gil Talbot/Harvard Athletic Communications

Cold Comfort

Bright-Landry Hockey Center has expanded and renovated in recent years, with new locker rooms, sports-medicine and workout facilities, and more. This season, it’s the fans’ turn, as the rink features new, very Crimson-friendly seating.

Teaching and Learning

Peter Bol, vice provost for advances in learning, has combined the separate research organizations serving HarvardX, which produces online courses, and the Harvard Initiative for Learning and Teaching, which has convened faculty members and made grants to encourage innovations in classroom practice and learning assessments. The integrated research group reflects convergence in online and classroom techniques and trends, and professionalizes the scholarship of the group, which is hiring full-time research scientists. Professor of government Dustin Tingley directs the new group; he has pursued a deep interest in experiential learning in the social sciences. Professor of education Andrew Ho, who directed HarvardX research, will now chair a faculty committee advising Tingley’s staff.

Learning Online

Harvard and MIT researchers for edX have documented the new phenomenon of cheating in online courses, as registrants use multiple identities to tease out quiz answers and then enter the correct ones in their main account. That perversion of “experiential” engagement aside, researchers from Carnegie Mellon demonstrated the teaching power of exercises (as opposed to mere watching of videos) in online courses—as in classrooms. Nobel laureate Carl Wieman, now a professor of education at Stanford, has proposed evaluating teachers (always a fuzzy art) objectively by measuring their use of practices shown to promote student outcomes, at least in the sciences. Coursera, edX’s for-profit rival, raised a $49.5-million round of new financing, and published a survey of registrants who completed courses, revealing career advancement as an even greater motivation for enrolling than general educational advancement. And Harvard Business School began offering its HBX courses for college credit through the Extension School.

On Other Campuses

The University of Michigan has launched a $100-million Data Science Initiative, aiming to hire 35 new faculty members during the next four years to augment work on “big data” issues. (In a September interview with the Harvard Gazette, President Drew Faust disclosed that planning for an academic “Gateway” building in Allston may encompass “a big-data initiative [that] can be moved forward intellectually and also in terms of a physical presence there in the years to come”—near the Business School and the science and engineering complex. Units such as Harvard’s Institute for Quantitative Social Science have long been bruited about as possible candidates for that location.) Separately, the University of Wisconsin, squeezed by state budget cuts, announced that a matching-gift program had raised $250 million to endow professorships and chairs, doubling the number to 300.

Nota Bene

Ethan Lesser
Photography courtesy of Ethan Lesser


A. Cassandra Albinson
Photograph by Antoinette Hocbo

Curatorial cohort. Refreshing its curatorial ranks, Harvard Art Museums has made four appointments, effective this fall. Ethan Lasser is now Stebbins curator of American art and head of the division of European and American art (he joined the staff in 2012 and had been acting head since December 2014). A. Cassandra Albinson, arriving from the Yale Center for British Art, is Winthrop curator of European art. Elizabeth M. Rudy, a staff member since 2011, is now Weyerhaeuser associate curator of prints. Rachel Saunders, her Harvard dissertation just completed, is Rockefeller associate curator of Asian art.

Humanities honorands. Thomas professor of history and of African and African American studies Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham has been recognized with the National Humanities Medal, conferred by President Barack Obama on September 10. Everett L. Fly, who in 1977 became the first African American to earn a master of landscape architecture degree from the Graduate School of Design, was also honored. Their work is described at harvardmag.com/fly-15.

MacArthur fellows. Two professors and two alumni are among the MacArthur Foundation’s 24 fellows for 2015 (each receives $625,000 of unrestricted support): associate professor of sociology and of social studies Matthew S. Desmond (whose work on eviction and poverty was featured in “Disrupted Lives,” the January-February 2014 cover story); assistant professor of neurology Beth Stevens (cited for work on brain development); Heidi Williams, Ph.D. ’10 (a healthcare economist at MIT); and Peidong Yang, Ph.D. ’97 (an inorganic chemist at the University of California, Berkeley).

Genetics giants. Mendel professor of genetics and of medicine Stephen J. Elledge and Evelyn M. Witkin of Rutgers have been awarded the Lasker Basic Medical Research Award, a preeminent honor in biomedical science, for their studies of DNA damage and responses to protect the cell.

Dueling developments. As Harvard proceeds to clean the site and plan for its future “enterprise research campus” along Western Avenue and the Charles River (see “A New Era in Allston,” March-April, page 18), MIT is proceeding to add six buildings with offices, labs, housing, and stores along Main Street, and Boston Properties is pursuing rezoning for 1 million square feet of new development along Broadway. Both sites are in Kendall Square, perhaps the nation’s strongest market for biomedical and technology research space. The Harvard zone, when developed, could be a competing venue for such tenants.

Soldiers field rip? Harvard Athletics has renamed Soldiers Field, the lacrosse and soccer venue, in honor of sports benefactor Gerald R. Jordan ’61, and reflagged the previous Jordan Field, home of field hockey, the Harvard Field Hockey Stadium. Left somewhat in the lurch is Soldiers Field itself, the 1890 gift from great University benefactor Henry Lee Higginson, LL.D. 1882, whose donation was “absolutely without condition of any kind,” but memorialized his friends who served during the Civil War (see “Civil Soldiers,” The College Pump, May-June 2002, page 76). The Soldiers Field name lives on, generically, for the area as a whole, and for softball games. 

Miscellany. Amid extensive building at Harvard (see “Campuses Under Construction,” September-October, page 16), the University’s chief for all things construction-related, Mark R. Johnson, vice president for capital planning and project management since 2010, departed in late October to join a private developer undertaking a huge project in east Cambridge.…Consumer advocate Ralph Nader, LL.B. ’58, in September opened the American Museum of Tort Law in Winsted, Connecticut, his home town.…Architect Richard Rogers has reportedly donated to the Graduate School of Design a house he co-designed in 1967 near Wimbledon as a home for his parents; it is intended as a center for advanced architecture students to stay and study when their work takes them to London.…Former School of Engineering and Applied Sciences dean Cherry A. Murray has been nominated as director of the office of science in the U.S. Department of Energy.… Robert Steven Kaplan, formerly Marshall professor of management practice and senior associate dean for external relations at Harvard Business School—a capital-campaign leadership role—has been appointed president and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas. He was previously vice chair of Goldman Sachs.…The Crimson reported that qualifying students enrolled in the Humanities 10 colloquium will be able to use it to fulfill their 20-level Expository Writing course, a departure from the prevailing required writing class.

It’s a football axiom: To win, you must establish the running game. Last Saturday at Fisher Stadium in Easton, Pennsylvania, the Lafayette football team failed abjectly to achieve that aim against Harvard. After 30 minutes, the Leopards’ total on the ground was minus-four yards. That was their good half. At game’s end, Lafayette’s rushing number was minus-18 (on 19 carries). It is little wonder, then, that the Crimson numbed the Leopards 42-0. The victory, which capped Harvard’s 2015 non-conference schedule, ran the Crimson’s record to 5-0. (Harvard is 2-0 in Ivy League play.) Lafayette dropped to 1-6. Harvard’s nineteenth triumph in a row—a streak second in NCAA Division I only to that of Ohio State (20)—was also the Crimson’s thirteenth straight road win, best in school history.

The shutout was the second of the season for Harvard, which had blanked Lafayette’s fellow Patriot League member Georgetown 45-0 on October 2. This year’s squad has not allowed a touchdown in 188 minutes and 41 seconds of play (since the fourth quarter of its 53-27 defeat of Brown on September 26). In its victories the Crimson has scored 221 points—the most in its first five games since the ’92 team piled up 231. That’s the 1892 team, which also shut out its first five foes. (Ominous note: That squad would lose once—at Yale, 6-0.)

“We’re a good tackling team,” said Harvard coach Tim Murphy afterward. “We really work hard at that. We try to find out what the other team does best and the best way to beat them, then, is to take it away.”

On a sparklingly cold day and before spectators who included ESPN commentator Jon Gruden—whose son Deuce, a senior backup running back for the Leopards, gained three yards on two carries—the Crimson, controlling the line of scrimmage, was not tested. To be fair, Lafayette has been wracked by injuries. Its quarterback, Drew Reed (23 of 42 passing for 215 yards), was restricted to short routes; he lacks the arm strength that might have loosened the Harvard defense, which was headed by linebacker Eric Medes ’16 (seven tackles, including a sack). In running his record as a starter to 11-0, Crimson quarterback Scott Hosch ’16 (playing three quarters) finished a turnover-free 17 of 29 for 272 yards and a touchdown. (He was sacked for the first time this year.) Running back Paul Stanton Jr. ’16 again was the battering ram, rushing for 123 yards and two touchdowns on 18 carries; Noah Reimers ’19 chipped in with 57 yards, mostly between the tackles, and a score.

As has happened with regularity this season, Harvard scored early and often. The first touchdown came at the end of a five-play, 70-yard drive marked by a personal-foul penalty on Lafayette, incurred when Stanton was shoved after going out-of-bounds. Two plays later, from the Leopards 16, he cut through a cavernous hole and sprinted into the end zone. Kenny Smart ’18 kicked the extra point. Harvard 7, Lafayette 0, with 5:49 gone in the first period.

Harvard’s next drive, which began on its 23, was highlighted by a sweet 40-yard completion from Hosch to Justice Shelton-Mosley. The freshman wideout caught a short square-out, then left his defender grabbing the air before racing down the right sideline. Hosch capped the seven-play drive with a one-yard plunge. Smart booted the point. 14-0. (After this score, Harvard committed perhaps its most egregious error of the season: the Crimson was penalized five yards for delay of game before the kickoff.)

For the remainder of the half Lafayette pluckily held its ground—until the end. The Crimson might have gotten away with one, as they say, when on a Leopards punt Harvard’s Sean Ahern ’16 made contact with kicker Ryan Forrester but was not flagged. The Crimson took the full advantage, going 44 yards on nine plays, with Stanton eventually barreling in for the score. Smart again converted. At the half, 21-0.

The first drive of the second half, which began at Harvard’s 20, saw Hosch spread the ball to receivers Seitu Smith II ’16, Tanner Wrisley ’16 (who has been gradually working into the rotation), and twice to tight end Ben Braunecker ’16. The second time, “Bronk” was wide open in the middle; he caught the ball and took it the few remaining yards for a 32-yard score. Smart booted and it was 28-0.

Lafayette hung in there and actually appeared to score a touchdown on a Reed-to-Matt Mrazek pass—but Mrazek’s circus catch was negated by a holding call. When Harvard got the ball back, Hosch and Braunecker put on a show, hooking up for four completions. The drive was also marked by the heady rushing of Smith, who displayed his versatility by moving to running back and gaining 19 yards on four carries, sifting the final six into the end zone to cap the 10-play, 90-yard drive. Smart’s kick made it 35-0 with 33 seconds to go in the period.

In the fourth quarter Jimmy Meyer ’16 took over at quarterback but otherwise nothing changed. With Meyer setting the table with a 14-yard completion to tight end Jack Stansell ’18, the Crimson scored its final touchdown on a four-yard Reimers run. Smart punctuated to make it 42-0. Lafayette drove to Harvard’s 14, but the Leopards’ hopes of breaking the shutout were snuffed when linebacker Chase Guillory ’18 sacked Reed on fourth down.

For Harvard, the non-conference portion of the schedule is now complete. From now on, it’s all Ivy, all the time. Or as coach Murphy put it, “Our playoffs start with the Princeton game.”

Weekend Roundup

Brown 38, Princeton 31
Penn 42, Columbia 7
Dartmouth 34, Central Connecticut 7
Sacred Heart 31, Cornell 6
Yale 21, Maine 10

Coming up: Next Saturday Harvard returns to the Stadium to take on Princeton. Kickoff: Noon. The game will be shown on the American Sports Network and the Ivy League Digital Network, and broadcast on WXKS 1200 AM and 94.5 FM-HD2, and WHRB FM 95.3. Princeton leads the series 54-46-7; the Crimson won last year in New Jersey 49-7. As Eric Medes noted, Princeton is the one team against which this year’s seniors have a losing record, having fallen 39-34 as freshmen and 51-48 (in triple overtime) as sophomores. The 2015 Tigers are 4-1 and 1-1 in the Ivy League. Coach Bob Surace’s team is dangerous; the Tigers have been potent offensively behind the quarterbacking of junior Chad Kanoff. Their loss at Brown was a surprise; all credit must go to Bears coach Phil Estes for resuscitating his charges after Harvard massacred them. But that’s Ivy League football, where the unexpected is expected.

 The Score By Quarters 

Attendance: 7,108

At game’s end last Friday night at Harvard Stadium, a reporter from The Harvard Crimson turned to her colleagues in the press box and held up her hands. “How,” she asked, “did we win this game?”

The young lady may be forgiven her partisanship, usually taboo in that setting. She had just seen arguably the most improbable victory in an important game in Harvard’s 142-season football history. In a showdown of Ivy unbeatens, the Crimson shrugged off an epic goal-line stand, scored two touchdowns in the final seven minutes—the second set up by a fumble forced by linebacker Jake Lindsey ’16—then staved off a game-winning field-goal attempt to outlast Dartmouth 14-13. Translated to baseball terms, this was Game Six. (Mets and Red Sox fans will know what we mean.)

The victory moved Harvard’s record in the 2015 season to 7-0 overall, and 4-0 in the Ivy League, putting the Crimson alone in first place; the Big Green is 6-1, 3-1 (tied for second with surprising Penn). With three games left, the Crimson has its destiny in its hands in the Ivy title race. The triumph was Harvard’s twenty-first in a row, tied with Ohio State for the longest winning streak in Division I. It also was the Crimson’s eighteenth victory over Dartmouth in the last 19 games between the two ancient rivals. (This fact is almost unbelievable to those who recall the green-clad juggernauts of the Bob Blackman era.)

“We stole one today,” said Harvard coach Tim Murphy afterward. “We did the thing we do best: we just found a way to win.” Though Murphy was relieved, he admitted that he felt badly for the Big Green—“I can’t say enough about Dartmouth”—and its coach, Murphy’s lifelong friend Buddy Teevens. “My emotions are a bit conflicted,” he added.

Teevens was understandably crestfallen. “It’s a hard loss,” he said. “We’ll go back to work tomorrow.” 

What made defeat more galling for Teevens and his crew was that for most of the night they had Harvard hornswoggled, never letting Crimson power runner Paul Stanton ’16 (21 carries, 67 yards) get in gear behind his vaunted offensive line. Dartmouth took the lead behind quarterback Dalyn Williams on the opening series, smartly marching 59 yards to the Crimson 16. The drive stalled, but Alex Gakenheimer booted a 33-yard field goal. Dartmouth 3, Harvard 0.

Two minutes later the Big Green got the ball back, and this time Williams (24 of 42 passing for 311 yards) led them on a clock-chewing, 17-play drive that resulted in a three-yard touchdown run by Ryder Stone. (A facemask call on Crimson defensive lineman James Duberg ’16 helped keep the drive alive.) Gakenheimer nailed the point, and the Crimson was in a 10-0 hole.

Now commenced the myriad frustrations that would bedevil Harvard on this chilly Devil’s Night. On the ensuing kickoff, a 70-yard return by Andrew Fischer ’16 was negated by a holding penalty. Nevertheless, quarterback Scott Hosch ’16 drove the Crimson to the Dartmouth seven. On third down and goal, Hosch tripped and lost seven yards. On the next down, kicker Kenny Smart ’18 flubbed his field-goal attempt.

Then it was Dartmouth’s turn to flub. Williams moved the Big Green all the way to the Harvard one-yard line—where offensive lineman Dave Morrison was called for a false start, bringing the ball back to the six. Williams misfired on two pass attempts (hurried on the second by defensive linemen Duberg and Miles McCollum ’17), then Gakenheimer sent a field-goal attempt wide left.

Late in the half, it looked as if the Crimson at least would put points on the board. A 53-yard Hosch-to-Fischer hookup brought the ball to the Dartmouth 27. Five plays later, with the ball on the 15 and 19 seconds left in the period, Hosch tossed one into the middle—right into the hands of Big Green linebacker Will McNamara. The half ended.

The pattern was repeated on the first series of the second half. Again, the magnificent Fischer (177 all-purpose yards) performed his heroics, taking the kickoff 53 yards to the Dartmouth 35. On fourth-and-one at the 26, offensive lineman Max Rich ’17 was called for a false start. Fourth-and-six. Hosch rolled left, threw right—right into the hands of McNamara, that is. Drive over.

The Harvard defense held the fort and forced a 27-yard Ben Kepley punt that gave the Crimson the ball at its 35. Back Harvard came, down to the Dartmouth 17. On first down, Stanton made two yards—and coughed up the ball when Big Green linebacker Folarin Orimolade hit him. Safety David Caldwell recovered. Foiled again!

Now Dartmouth could have, should have put the game away. A 29-yard Williams-to-Ryan McManus pass took the Big Green to the Harvard 27. On the next play, Williams pitched to McManus in the left flat. Nominally a receiver, McManus stopped and tossed a beauty into the end zone, where receiver Victor Williams was waiting—all alone. The ball came down…and Williams dropped it. Two plays later, Gakenheimer eked a 39-yard field goal over the crossbar. Dartmouth 13, Harvard 0.

Next came one of the most bewildering sequences in recent Harvard annals. Again, Fischer did his job, returning the kickoff 39 yards to the Dartmouth 48—but in the process pulling a hamstring. (He may be out for the rest of the season.) Using a 22-yard pass to tight end Anthony Firkser ’17 and short rushes by Stanton, Hosch brought the ball down to the Dartmouth one-yard line. First and goal. The Crimson had five smacks at getting into the end zone (the extra try was afforded when the Big Green was flagged for offside): three by Hosch, one by Stanton, and another by Seitu Smith II ’15 (’16). Stacked up by a Green giant wall that included McNamara and mammoth defensive tackle A.J. Zuttah, the befuddled Crimson did not cross the goal line (and even needed to burn a timeout during the series).

“It was a legendary goal-line stand,” said Teevens afterward. “It was pretty cool to sit back and watch it.”

At this point, already several minutes into the final period, it was amazing that Harvard, despite its failure to cash in, was still in it. So naturally, when the Crimson did score a few minutes later, the points came when everyone least expected them. From the Dartmouth 39, Harvard faced a fourth-and-12. If it failed to produce at least a first down, the game was over. Hosch dropped back and saw Smith running down the left sideline on a pattern called “stutter and go.” Hosch threw and at the left pylon Smith leaped, twisted his body—and made a magnificently acrobatic grab. Touchdown! Smart kicked the point. Dartmouth 13, Harvard 7, with 6:38 to go.

The Harvard defense again did its job, forcing Dartmouth to punt. But on its series the Crimson could not make a first down. There were just under four minutes left to play, and Harvard faced fourth down and five from its 30. Do you go for it so deep in your territory? That never crossed his mind, said Murphy: “The reason you punt it away is that you think you’re going to get it back.”

Which is what happened. “We’re in desperation mode there,” said Harvard’s Lindsey afterward. On first down from the Crimson 49, Dartmouth’s Stone ran to the right side, where Lindsey hit him—“I felt if I went over the top [of the blocker], I could make a play,” he said. And how: the ball came out, and fellow linebacker and Crimson captain Matt Koran ’16 fell on it.

Now Hosch, whom we have previously compared to Bart Starr, conducted his version of the immortal Green Bay 1967 Ice Bowl drive against Dallas. In going half the length of the field in 11 plays and in 2:16, he used short tosses to Stanton and then an 18-yarder to Firkser to work the ball down to the Dartmouth nine. On third and goal from the five, he rolled right, then saw receiver Justice Shelton-Mosley ’19 just over the goal line. The freshman “was like the third option,” said Hosch. Hosch flipped, Mosley caught—his team-high ninth grab of the day, and his most important. When Smart kicked the point, it was, unbelievably, Harvard 14, Dartmouth 13. (Hosch finished 24 of 38 passing. His most important statistic is his record as a starter: 13-0.)

Thirty-eight seconds remained, but it was not over, especially when Smart sent the kickoff out of bounds, giving Dalyn Williams a chance to start a drive from his 35. Using passes to Victor Williams and McManus, he got the ball to the Harvard 29, then tossed a bomb over the head of Jon Carrier in the end zone. The clock read 0:00, and the Harvard partisans stormed the field. But hold on! The officials put one second back on the clock—time for a Gakenheimer 47-yard field-goal try, hardly a chip shot. When the Big Green kicker booted, the ball met the left hand of leaping, 6-foot-3 Harvard defensive lineman Stone Hart ’18 and bounded away. Now the game was over.

There are ones for the record books. This is one for the legends book.

Weekend roundup
Penn 48, Brown 28
Columbia 17, Yale 7
Princeton 47, Cornell 21

Coming up: Next Saturday, Harvard travels to New York City to play Columbia at Wien Stadium. Kickoff: 1 p.m. (The game will be seen on the Ivy League Digital Network and heard on WXKS 1200 AM and 94.5 FM-HD2, WHRB FM 95.3.) The Lions are 2-5 and 1-3 in the Ivy League. Harvard leads the series 58-14-1 and has won the last 11, including the last three by shutout.

Can you say “trap game?” The once-toothless Lions suddenly are ferocious, having beaten Yale (Columbia’s first Ivy win in three years) after having played Dartmouth tough the previous week. This is the first time the Crimson will face Columbia under coach Al Bagnoli, who moved to Morningside Heights this year after a brilliant 23-season stint at Penn. Bagnoli is the only Ivy coach to have a winning record (11-10) against the Harvard teams of Tim Murphy.

The score by quarters

Attendance: 13,058

Behind every discussion in late October’s wide-ranging conference at Harvard on the future of research universities—design and architecture, digital infrastructure and online learning, student curricula and faculty collaborations, partnerships with government and industry, relationships to local and global communities—lurked one big question: what’s next for Allston? 

 Few definitive answers emerged at the two-day event, which took place in the same month University officials released designs for a six-story building in Allston that will house the Harvard Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. But answers were less the point than questions and ideas. Sponsored by the provost’s office and titled “Building the Research University of the 21st Century,” the conference drew attendees from universities around the world, and speakers found themselves discussing everything from the native curiosity of the human spirit to the optimal dimensions of faculty meeting tables. Their conversations yielded, if not specifics, at least a few evocative and recurring threads of thought.

 Alex Krieger articulated one of those threads in his talk tracing the history of university campus design—from medieval English cloisters to Thomas Jefferson’s “academical village” at the University of Virginia, to the open expanse of land-grant universities and the mazelike enmeshment of today’s urban campuses. A professor of practice in urban design at the Graduate School of Design and a longtime adviser on plans for the Allston campus, Krieger noted the conundrum for institutions that expand beyond the symmetry of a central quad and an orbit of buildings. The quad comes to be less the center than “a representation of a sense of center,” he said, with diasporal expansions that can feel ungainly and disconnected, out of place. That’s a challenge with which the future Harvard-in-Allston will have to grapple. “So,” Krieger asked, “how do we overcome the notion of a cherished center and barely tolerated peripheries?” How to build something that feels whole and of a piece?

 He didn’t have the answer. But he said that before determining what the buildings or even the campus at Allston will look like—before deciding whether it should try to echo or replicate Harvard Yard or take a new direction—Harvard officials must figure out something deeper and more conceptual: “a narrative about the idea of a campus.” “It’s an important question,” he continued. “And I think people have been struggling with it, and they continue to struggle.” 

 Later, Lizabeth Cohen, Jones professor of American studies at Harvard and dean of the Radcliffe Institute, asked about the tension between an intentional plan and a campus that grows up organically, and how those divergent trajectories might influence the likelihood of cross-disciplinary collaborations—a frequent topic of concern throughout the conference. “Should we be master-planning our campuses,” she asked, “or should we be somehow trying to invite more natural evolution and spontaneity?”

Krieger’s answer: “Well, it’s always going to be something in between. A fair amount of planning is under way in Allston, not so much about future buildings,” but about physical infrastructure: bus lines, bicycle racks, parking. “Because in fact all of those things also contribute. All those things matter as well in terms of fostering a certain amount of connectivity and increasing the chance of meeting.”

 In his closing remarks as the conference adjourned, University provost Alan M. Garber picked up on a few other threads that bear on Allston’s development: the prospective role of the humanities and the scientific and technical disciplines in a new campus (and the risk of prioritizing science in a way that excludes the humanities: “We must not let the arts flourish in adversity,” one speaker cautioned); the importance of having flexible building spaces that will accommodate changes in technology; and the difficulty and yet necessity of having a 50-year vision for development (“You think about how quickly things have changed in past decades,” Garber said, “and it makes you a little bit humble”). But by far the biggest theme running through the discussions, he said, was “community”—internal and external, local and global, virtual and digital. And when it comes to Allston in particular, “There’s also an issue about what kind of community you want to have there. It’s not just about which academic activities are there, but a mix of the kind of small-town feel that you have in the Allston community today and looking at the technology boom in Boston and the huge preponderance of pharmaceutical and biotech industries based in Boston. And we’re thinking about how what we do in Allston will fit with that.”

“We’re all keenly aware,” he added, “that what we do in Allston will have everything to do with what Harvard looks like in 50, 100, 150 years. So there’s a lot at stake.”  

The new dean of the Harvard Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences has been in his post for barely a hundred days, but now, after listening to his faculty and meeting with leaders from across Harvard’s diverse schools and constituencies, Francis “Frank” J. Doyle III is starting to form ideas about SEAS’s future.

What attracted him to Harvard, he says, was “a harmonic convergence” of circumstances: the prospect of expansionary growth in Allston; the ability to marshal resources for big initiatives due to “Harvard’s generous alums” (notably, large gifts from Steve Ballmer’77 and from John A. Paulson, M.B.A. ’80, after whom the school and Doyle’s deanship are now named); an “unusually creative, inquisitive, brilliant study body at the undergraduate and graduate ranks”; and faculty colleagues who are “luminaries in their fields,” but organized in a boundary-free way (SEAS lacks departments) so they “span a continuum of engineering and applied-sciences fields.” This, he says, gives many faculty members a “multidimensional character.”

Doyle himself is multidimensional: the former chair of chemical engineering at the University of California, Santa Barbara, trained in that field, but is now focused predominantly on biosystems engineering (he is on the verge of introducing, through a start-up, an artificial pancreas for the treatment of diabetes, on which he has been working for 20 years). He also teaches in the fields of controls (in its simplest iteration, think of a thermostat on the wall, regulating temperature) and dynamics: an applied math thrust. Off the clock, he referees high-school and college soccer matches; his enormous black watch, equipped with GPS, enables him to overlay the positional data on a map and see how well he is covering the field. 

The $400-million gift from Paulson, which Doyle learned about only after accepting the deanship, is much more than a financial resource, he says. “More powerful is the attention that it has brought to engineering as a priority mission here at Harvard. He has shone a giant spotlight on us that has attracted the attention” of students and colleagues not only at the University, but literally, around the world—a “tremendous benefit.”

Now, Doyle sees his job as “helping the faculty to realize the visions and dreams that they have in their individual areas.” He avers that he is “still gathering ideas and thoughts that will help to sculpt a good model for the school,” in order to frame some “grand interdisciplinary challenges that emerge from the faculty’s passion.” Certain of these initiatives will be anchored in Allston, where the school’s new building will begin to rise this coming summer, with a probable occupancy date in 2020. Others will remain in Cambridge.

Some foci, though, are already clear. Computer science, in which he will make 10 senior appointments in the years ahead, will grow in Allston. The department, strong already in the theoretical realm, looks to add expertise in applied directions like machine learning and optimization (developing efficient solutions for problems: a simple example is how to get from point A to point B in the shortest time). Bioengineering is another area poised for growth. Its presence within SEAS is relatively small, but “There is so much more we could do” working with Harvard Medical School, he says, particularly with the quantitative-leaning departments such as systems biology and the newly formed department of biomedical informatics. At a recent meeting with the systems-biology faculty, he reports, he was heartened to hear not only requests for collaboration but an offer: “What can we do for you?”

He sees enormous opportunity, as yet unrealized, for cross-school collaboration. SEAS already offers a collaborative degree with the Graduate School of Design, but Doyle says Harvard has “arguably the world’s leading business school, the world’s leading medical school, and the world’s leading law school,” all with faculty members eager to explore the potential of partnering with engineers. He points as one example to the critical mass of 239 faculty members throughout the University who are working in some way on the climate-change problem. In SEAS and the Faculty of Arts and Sciences alone, he sees a top-10 team of researchers poised to become one of the top three in the country. He envisions taking the efforts of this group to the next level, perhaps even to make it “the number one program in the country.”

As with climate change, “The nature of these big challenges in [engineering] research going forward,” he asserts, “is that they are going to touch on policy issues, legal issues, computing, data-privacy issues.” Personalized medicine, for example, an area that he and “a number of our bio-oriented faculty are interested in,” is bound to affect the healthcare discussion, get into legal issues of privacy, and have an entrepreneurial dimension, thereby involving the schools of business, medicine, law, and public health, in addition to SEAS. These are problems “that require rallying something on the order of a couple hundred people to tackle,” he explains. “We weren’t well-positioned” for these kinds of partnerships in the past. “Today we are.”

More than 500 people filled the chapel at First Parish Church in Cambridge last Friday afternoon to celebrate the opening of Y2Y Harvard Square, a homeless shelter for young people founded by Sam Greenberg ’14 and Sarah Rosenkrantz ’14. There were thanks and praise and giddy eruptions of applause, a vocal quartet singing “Lay Up Your Treasures in Heaven,” and a gospel artist belting out Mariah Carey’s “Hero” to a grand-piano accompaniment. There were rousing speeches and performance poetry, a presentation of awards, and, amid an interfaith blessing, a bright string of origami cranes unveiled from a Tupperware container by John Bach, the Quaker chaplain at Harvard. 

One of several public officials to offer remarks, U.S. senator Elizabeth Warren kicked off the event by telling the audience that any given night in this country sees an estimated 39,000 youths homeless, and that 20 to 40 percent of them are LGBTQ. “Which means,” she said, “it’s a pretty tough street out there.” Turning to Greenberg and Rosenkrantz, she continued:  “They saw the problem. They had a vision for how to fix it, and that’s what’s going on downstairs. And I’ve got to tell you—it is beautiful.”

The shelter—scheduled to open in the church basement in December, just as winter descends—will offer 22 gender-inclusive beds for 18- to 24-year-olds, each of whom may stay up to a month as they transition their way out of homelessness. The renovation project was designed by Studio G of Jamaica Plain; construction firms Skanska USA and Essex Newbury donated their services. A $1.25-million fundraising campaign for the shelter reached its goal just last week.

Y2Y has been more than two years in the making. As undergraduates, Greenberg and Rosenkrantz volunteered at Harvard Square Homeless Shelter, a 24-bed, student-run emergency shelter for adults. They noticed that the organization had to turn away dozens of would-be volunteers (there wasn’t enough work for them to do) and many homeless people—among them young adults—because there wasn’t enough room for them to sleep. That’s when the two started laying plans for Y2Y. After they graduated, they began working full time as co-directors of the project. Said Warren, “The key is local people saying, ‘I may not be able to fix it all; I may not be able to take on all 39,000 homeless youth. But what we can do is, we can make a start right here in Cambridge.’ And by making a start, we make a real difference, person to person.”

A program of Harvard’s Phillips Brooks House Association, Y2Y Harvard Square is the nation’s only student-run overnight shelter for young adults. It fills a critical gap: although the AIDS Action Committee of Massachusetts offers daytime services for homeless youth—space, food, laundry, showers, and a range of social and medical services—there has been no place in Cambridge for young people, who often feel unsafe at adult shelters, to spend the night.

At the opening event, Jamila Bradley, a Y2Y youth advocacy coordinator, explained how much it means to have a brick-and-mortar shelter for people her age. When she first moved to Boston from her native Florida, she said, “I was enamored by the brick.” The buildings were solid, sturdy, permanent—“a place built to last.” She craved that stability when, almost two years ago, she found herself sitting in the dining hall of First Parish Church, “realizing that I had less family to turn to than I expected, fresh from a violent assault, and new to the world of youth homelessness.”

Other young speakers and Y2Y co-organizers offered their own stories of homelessness (“Oftentimes when you’re on the street as a young person, hope is the very first thing that you lose,” one said), and reiterated how important the shelter’s solid walls would have been to them and will be to others. They called it an amazing triumph, and a long time coming. “Generally when I speak to grantees, legislators, or even care-providers,” Bradley said, “I speak with a candor and transparency that I think they’re entitled to, despite the fact that it betrays my anger. But today isn’t like that, and it’s refreshing.”  

As the celebration wound to a close, Greenberg and Rosenkrantz took the podium, to a standing ovation and a cascade of cheers. They spent several minutes thanking everyone they could think of, and then Greenberg looked up at the crowd filling the balconies and side aisles and said, “And yet, the real work starts when we open next month, when there are 22 meals to serve every night, when there are hundreds of dishes to wash, when there are bags of laundry to fold. When we open next month, we will have a sanctuary to create, momentum to sustain, and I think most importantly, a future to build. In a lot of ways, our journey is just getting started.” 

Jeffrey S. Flier, dean of Harvard Medical School (HMS) since 2007, today announced that he would step down on July 31. Flier, an endocrinologist who specialized in the causes of obesity and diabetes, wrote a brief note to his colleagues conveying his decision; he will take a sabbatical year and then return  to the faculty. He came to the deanship with extensive experience in planning for scientific research across the University, and as a leader of one of the school’s affiliated hospitals.

His decision means that the University is searching for new deans for both public health (Julio Frenk departed last summer to become president of the University of Miami) and medicine.

Flier said in an interview Thursday that he never imagined he would remain in the job any longer than 10 years, and that in the last month he had come to the conclusion that many of the initiatives he was “most closely associated with and deeply involved in creating” were now “durable and will go forward with or without me as the leader.” He explained that the job requires a “forward-looking vision to implement things that often take years to develop.” He realized, he said, that “positoning the medical school” (which stands at the center of 16 affiliated hospitals—in competition with each other—which are the home to 12,000 teaching faculty members beyond the 160 HMS employs at its Longwood quadrangle) and its basic science departments for the next 10 years of success was going to require some ongoing reshaping, investment, and rethinking of the approach that we take,” and was therefore going to be “better handled by someone who has a future 5- to 10-year horizon. And my sense was that I had done everything I could to set the table well, for whoever follows me.”

The medical school, which unveiled its $750-million capital campaign one year ago this week, reported most recently that it had secured about 63 percent of that total. Presumably, Flier’s successor will assume responsibility for completing the fundraising. A successor will also oversee the roll-out of the school’s new M.D. curriculum (launched this semester), and pursue expansive initiatives like the department of biomedical informatics and in systems pharmacology.

That work takes place under challenging circumstances: HMS is operating at a significant deficit, and is particularly affected by the decline in federal support for sponsored research (in fiscal year 2015, 39 percent of the school’s revenue was from sponsored support—a higher proportion than any Harvard school but public health). One challenge a successor will not have to face is shutting down the New England Primate Research Center, the disposition of which, according to the University’s latest financial report, incurred costs of $70 million during fiscal 2014 and 2015. 

Flier touched on some of these challenges. He recalled that the strategic plan developed in 2007-2008, which had called for one or two departments to be moved to Allston, had to be completely rethought just as he presented it to the faculty. In the wake of the financial crisis and Harvard's belt-tightening came the “shocking realization that the world had changed,” he said. “But we didn't look back. We went ahead and we solved problems, though differently than we might have... and most of them were highly successful despite the dearth of new capital to invest, even in everyday activities. That’s something I am proud of, that we made the best of a tough situation and did some really good things.”

Flier’s successor will continue to grapply with financial challenges, he noted. “How do you reconcile the extraordinary opportunities that present themselves in biomedical research right now with a funding environment that is getting more challenging every year? People who lead organizations like mine” know there is “no diminution of the value of what we are doing.” On the contrary, the possibilities are more compelling than ever. “But the traditional combined sources of federal funding, philanthropy, and endowment payouts fall short of covering the costs.” Given that change in federal funding of research is not likely, “you have to find some extraordinary new philanthropy... or you have to somehow reorganize your approach so that it is both powerful but less costly. That,” he said, “will be what my successor will have to figure out.”

Flier’s note to colleagues and friends read:

As I approach the midpoint of my ninth year as Dean of the Faculty of Medicine and my 38th year as a member of this remarkable faculty, I have decided that this is an appropriate juncture to consider transition from my role as dean of HMS.

Last week, I met with President Faust, who offered me the privilege of serving in this role, and informed her that I plan to leave this office effective July 31, 2016. She has accepted my decision.

After I step down, I will take a sabbatical year. At its conclusion, I intend to resume my position on the Faculty of Medicine with a renewed set of personal and professional goals in research, education and policy.

It has been an extraordinary honor and privilege⎯more than words can possibly convey⎯to have been given the opportunity to serve as your dean and to have been a colleague to so many remarkable people in our extended HMS community.

I have strived every day over these past eight years to sustain and enhance the sacred mission of the world’s leading medical school—set within the world’s greatest university—which is closely associated with the finest teaching hospitals and research institutions anywhere. Together we have accomplished so much over these past eight years to strengthen our core missions of education, research and service. Working together, this large, complex and remarkable community has made great strides⎯as the HMS mission statement promises⎯toward alleviating suffering caused by disease.

I look forward to working with you during my remaining months as dean, and to then joining you once again as a faculty member and colleague. I hope you know how greatly I have valued your friendship, your partnership and your extraordinary contributions over these past years.

Read the University announcement here. A search for a successor will be launched soon.

In November 2007, in just his sixth game as Harvard’s coach, Tommy Amaker and the men’s basketball team faced off against Providence College, a traditional power from the more-prominent Big East Conference. The matchup provided an early barometer of whether the Crimson could fulfill Amaker’s vision of competing at the national level. The results were dispiriting: Harvard lost 93-70, as the Friars scored 54 points in the second half. 

Since then, Amaker’s squad has enjoyed enormous success, winning five straight Ivy League championships, reaching four consecutive NCAA tournaments, and twice cracking the national top-25 rankings.

But this past Saturday, Amaker and his team faced a situation remarkably similar to the one posed by that first matchup: following the graduation of seven of last year’s Ivy League champion players, can Harvard still compete at a national level? If paired with the Crimson’s 59-39 drubbing of MIT the night before, Harvard’s competitive performance in a 76-64 loss against the Friars suggests that the answer is yes. Although Harvard is extremely young and inexperienced, the team exhibited the ability to implement Amaker’s offensive and defensive strategies—coupled with tenacity and impressive individual talent. Those attributes will not guarantee another Ivy League crown, but they are an excellent foundation on which to build. 

Harvard Hardwood
Sign up for Harvard Magazine’s basketball e-mail and follow the Crimson all season long! David L. Tannenwald ’08 will provide the latest news, game summaries, and insights as the Crimson chase another Ivy title and NCAA berth!

A Defensive Stand 

When the team began its season last Friday evening against MIT, the scene at Harvard’s Lavietes Pavilion was slightly different from years past, when Harvard has benefitted from a boisterous student section. This time, the MIT faithful were a forceful presence. In another change, Amaker—who typically dressed in an open-collared shirt on the sideline—was wearing a necktie. More substantively, the number 23, worn for the past four years by all-conference star Wesley Saunders ’15, now belonged to Weisner Perez, one of three freshmen who played substantial minutes on Friday night. (His classmates Corey Johnson and Tommy McCarthy were in the starting lineup.)

The new-look Crimson resembled their predecessors in one crucial way: they played suffocating defense, particularly during a 10-minute period in the second half when Harvard went on 26-4 run to expand a 26-24 lead to a 24-point advantage. For a quarter of the game, MIT barely scored. “It’s been a calling card in our program, and it’s part of our identity,” Amaker said after the game, “and it’s so important for us to feel like we’ve lived up to that defensively.”  

The defensive pressure also demonstrated the prowess of Harvard guards, chiefly McCarthy. Following a season-ending injury to star point guard Siyani Chambers ’16, McCarthy—who registered a steal during the Crimson’s pivotal second-half run—showed that he has the ability, like Chambers, to command the defense. (With 12 points, McCarthy also led the Crimson in scoring, rounding out a performance in which Amaker lauded the young point guard for showing “pizazz.”)

But the team’s stout defense revealed above all what seniors Evan Cummins and Agunwa Okolie described as a sense of “urgency.” That the squad is playing with such intensity, and that his senior leaders are articulating the significance of doing so, suggests that Amaker’s message has resonated. One week removed from a surprisingly close 69-66 win in an exhibition game against McGill, Harvard’s 20-point thumping of MIT represented a return to form. 

A Stiffer Challenge

The victory over MIT, however, comes with an asterisk. The Engineers are a Division III team (albeit one of the best in the country at that level), and the Crimson was expected to defeat them handily. Saturday’s matchup in Providence represented a far stiffer challenge. The talented Friars lineup is led by point guard Kris Dunn, a potential national player of the year.

Dunn stuffed the stat line with 32 points, eight steals, five assists, and six rebounds. He also dominated when it mattered most. After Harvard tied the game at 41 on junior Zena Edosomwan’s dunk with 14 minutes to play, the Friar’s star scored 14 points in a 18-5 Providence run that put the game out of reach.

Harvard had no answer for Dunn, and the Crimson’s 22 turnovers were alarming, but the team came away from the game with two major positives. Heading into a matchup that some thought would blow the Crimson off the court, the players remained competitive against a nationally relevant program for three-quarters of the game. They also demonstrated the ability to do something last year’s team often struggled with: implementing Amaker’s inside-out offense.

During the 2014-2015 Ivy League title campaign, the Crimson often passed the ball around the perimeter until late in the shot clock, at which point Saunders or Chambers would try to break down the opposing defense. This partly reflected their extraordinary talent, but also hinted at one of that team’s shortcomings: it had only one bona fide three-point threat, Corbin Miller ’15 (’17). That meant other teams could mark him on the perimeter and pack four defenders close to the basket, daring Saunders or Chambers to shoot from distance or drive into a crowded lane.

On Saturday, this year’s squad learned that it has at least two players who can shoot the three. Miller sank three treys against the Friars, while newcomer Johnson, who had nailed three three-pointers against MIT, made five long-distance shots against Providence—the most by a Harvard player in a single game since Laurent Rivard ’14, the school’s all-time leading three-point shooter, sank six in a contest in 2014.

With Providence forced to guard Harvard’s perimeter shooters more closely, the Crimson guards were able to get the ball inside through dribble penetration and passes to the post. Harvard’s big men then delivered: Cummins demonstrated a deft passing touch, dishing to Edosomwan in the second half for an uncontested dunk. And Edosomwan, despite struggling at the free-throw line, had the first double-double of his career, with 13 points and 16 rebounds.

Harvard did not get the result it wanted on Saturday night, but its offensive performance against a talented foe bodes well.

“Going Through The Fire” 

Can Harvard manage to decrease mistakes (turnovers and missed free throws) and improve enough to sustain Amaker’s defensive and offensive systems throughout a full game by the start of conference play in January? 

If the opening weekend of college basketball is any indication, that will be imperative—because the rest of the league is as good as advertised. Yale, which shared the Ivy League title with Harvard last season, won its opener against Fairfield behind a strong performance from sophomore Makai Mason. Princeton pulled away from a tough Rider University team for a 64-56 win. And Dartmouth, expected by most to finish in the bottom half of the conference, hung tough with Seton Hall (eventually losing 84-67), another high-major opponent, thanks to 25 points from freshman Evan Boudreaux.

For now, the Crimson remains focused on its non-league slate, which continues with a game at home against the University of Massachusetts on Tuesday and a visit to Boston College on Sunday. Members of the highly competitive Atlantic 10 and Atlantic Coast Conferences, respectively, UMass and BC have traditionally ranked above Harvard in the local college basketball pecking order. Under Amaker, though, Harvard defeated UMass last year and won six straight matchups with BC before faltering against the Eagles last January.

The contests will also provide Harvard with an opportunity to improve. As Amaker explained after the Providence game, his freshmen and less experienced upperclassmen are “going through the fire” as they learn what it takes to play high-level college basketball.

Tidbits

• On Friday, Harvard Athletics announced that the Crimson will begin the 2016-2017 season with a game against Stanford in Shanghai for the Pac-12 conference’s second annual China Game. The matchup will pit Amaker against former Duke teammate and current Stanford coach Johnny Dawkins.
• The Harvard women’s basketball team began its season this past Friday, with a 64-53 loss at home against Maine. The Crimson was led by Shilpa Tummala ’16, who scored 17 points and sank five three-pointers. Harvard also benefitted from strong performances by freshmen Sydney Skinner, who started at point guard, and Madeline Raster, who played 31 minutes off the bench. Head coach Kathy Delaney-Smith, beginning her thirty-fourth season, lauded the team’s seven freshmen for “how hard they compete.” She also emphasized that she is excited to know that the full team will “learn from what went wrong [in the first game] and then realize how good we can be if we keep going forward.”
• Throughout the season, the men’s and women’s basketball teams will wear patches on their uniforms with the initials “TS” to honor Thomas G. Stemberg ’71, M.B.A. ’73. A long-time supporter of Harvard basketball, Stemberg—who endowed the men’s basketball head coaching position last season—passed away last month.

David L. Tannenwald ’08 is a Cambridge-based writer.

Harvard Law School (HLS) affiliates entering Wasserstein Hall Thursday morning found a startling scene: portraits of every black professor in the school’s history defaced with black tape, an incident University police are investigating as a hate crime. Hours later, President Drew Faust e-mailed the Harvard community on the subject of race, announcing the results of a more than year-long study of diversity and inclusion at the College. These and other developments unfolded in a rapid sequence, as echoes of the student protests at campuses around the country reached Cambridge.

The day before, Faust had stood with dozens of University affiliates who gathered in the Science Center Plaza in solidarity with student activists at Yale, the University of Missouri, and elsewhere. Invoking these and other demonstrations, Faust called the University community to action in her message Thursday afternoon: “We have much work to do to make certain that Harvard belongs to every one of us, that the diversity we strive to achieve also becomes belonging,” she wrote, echoing comments made earlier this year.

Following the HLS incident, Faust wrote a separate statement posted on the Harvard website Friday morning: 

We join together as a University in deploring the defacing of portraits of African American faculty at the law school. Such acts of hatred are inimical to our most fundamental values and represent an assault on the mutual respect essential to our purposes as a community of learning and inquiry.

An early advocate of desegregation and a historian of the American South, Faust frequently has used her platform to speak about America’s stained racial legacy. In recent months and years, she has expanded that role amid renewed calls for racial justice on the streets of cities and college campuses across the nation. Student protests came to a head this month, following the resignation of University of Missouri president Tim Wolfe after racist incidents there and widely publicized controversies over racial exclusion (extending from disagreements about culturally insensitive Halloween costumes to matters of faculty diversity and the content of the curriculum) at Yale. Those demonstrations have raised difficult questions about the role that universities should play in censuring insensitive or hateful speech.

Law students and faculty gathered for a meeting Thursday to address the defacement of the portraits. There, Dean Martha Minow acknowledged that the community faces significant problems with racism.

Climenko professor of law Charles Ogletree, one of the those whose portrait was defaced, said in an interview he believes the incident represents constitutionally-protected free speech. “I’m a firm believer in the First Amendment, even for speech that might be ugly or hateful….I don’t think any of these actions are criminally prosecutable. I think they’re freedoms of expression. Nothing was burned or damaged,” he said. “I don’t like it, I’m very unhappy with it, but that happens in a free society….I would like to confront and dialogue with those responsible.”  

Student activists have suggested that the Harvard administration has not done enough to address racism at the University. “I’m disappointed in the administration’s response every day up to and including yesterday,” said Michele Hall, a second-year law student who wrote a widely circulated blog post on Thursday’s incident at the school. 

“Yesterday was an anomaly because it was so overt, but students of color are working through these issues every day,” she continued. “The law is taught to us as if it was created in a neutral world by neutral actors and imparted on neutral people….That’s how the entire pedagogy is set up: not to address the issues of marginalization that are at the forefront of the law.”

Student activists have called for structural changes at the law school, including curricular changes that would address racial bias in the law, greater faculty diversity, and an office for diversity and inclusion. The student group Royall Must Fall has called for the removal of the crest of the slave-owning Royall family from the school’s official seal. (Isaac Royall Jr.’s will endowed the first faculty chair at the school.) “Physical symbols are an expression of who we are and what we value,” the group wrote in the Harvard Law Record. “The most ubiquitous of these symbols, the seal—which adorns all of our buildings, apparel, stationery, and diplomas—honors a slaver and murderer.” (The controversy echoes similar issues at Yale, which is considering whether one of its undergraduate residences should be named after alumnus John C. Calhoun, and at Princeton, where students have objected to the naming of a residence hall and a school after Woodrow Wilson, who served as president of the institution.)

At the College, student advocates have expressed similar concerns—some of which have been echoed officially. “Harvard College’s aspirations have always run ahead of its realities,” states the report of the College Working Group on Diversity and Inclusion. The working group was established in 2014; its findings were announced by Faust on Thursday and circulated to students by College dean Rakesh Khurana. The 37-page report recommends areas of improvement for inclusion at the College, including small suggestions such as avoiding “unnecessary markers of social distinction” in the way Harvard distributes services to low-income students, and larger ones, like asking academic disciplines to consider how their methods of inquiry may exclude some groups. Faust plans to appoint a task force to implement the recommendations. (Read the full text of the report here.)

Despite the tensions at the law school and elsewhere on campus, the working group ended on a high note. “The care, respect and thoughtfulness demonstrated by members of the Harvard community inspire us,” the report concludes. “In this critical moment, Harvard must commit and recommit itself to the practices that best reflect our institutional mission and ideals.”

On Saturday at the Yale Bowl, Justice was swift. Justice was sure-footed. Justice was elusive. Justice prevailed.

With magical wide receiver Justice Shelton-Mosley ’19 scoring three touchdowns, Harvard defeated Yale 38-19 to win The Game for the ninth straight year (the longest streak by either team in the series’ 132-game history) and for the fourteenth time in the last 15 outings. The victory gave the Crimson an overall 9-1 record and a 6-1 mark in the Ivy League, good for a share of the title with Dartmouth and Penn. (Yale dropped to 6-4 overall and 3-4 in league play.) The championship was Harvard’s third straight, unprecedented for the program. Harvard coach Tim Murphy’s record in The Game now stands at 17-5 and the Ivy title was his eighth. He was especially proud of the way his team had rebounded after its 35-25 loss to Penn the week before, its first defeat in 23 games. “Our kids were in a little bit of a shock,” Murphy said. “I’m really impressed the way we turned it around.”

Yale coach Tony Reno (a onetime Murphy assistant) lamented what might have been: “We had plenty of opportunities that we didn’t capitalize on and Harvard did.”

Shelton-Mosley (five catches for 119 yards) was incandescent, but hardly the only Crimson player to cover himself in glory. Operating the attack with aplomb, quarterback Scott Hosch ’16 completed 23 of 37 passes and tossed for four scores; with well-timed scrambles and keeper plays, he even led the team in rushing with 60 yards on 11 carries (a fact that seemed to gobsmack Murphy when it was presented in the postgame media conference). In the process, the native of Sugar Hill, Georgia, became Harvard’s all-time single-season passing leader: his 2,827 yards in 2015 surpass the 2,655 of Neil Rose in 2000. Hosch, who never went into a season as the team’s number-one quarterback, also ran his record as a starter over two seasons to 15-1. He departs with the fervent thanks of his teammates and coach. Lauded Murphy, “He’s got an understated toughness. He can really produce under pressure. He is like Tom Brady in this regard. He is not a great athlete, he does not have one of the three or four strongest arms in our league, and yet, game after game, he gets better, and he produces. It’s a remarkable story.”

Other stalwarts? The senior-laden defense, led by linebacker Jake Lindsey ’16 (team-high 11 tackles), limited the Elis to 34 net rushing yards on 19 carries and kept them off the scoreboard in the middle two periods. (As a group, the Crimson class of 2016 leaves with a 36-4 career record, tied for the program’s best in the Ivy era with the class of 2015.) Ben Braunecker ’16 showed why he may be the next Crimson tight end to play in the NFL, leading the team in receptions with six, including two for touchdowns. Finally, in the absence of injured star runner Paul Stanton Jr. ’16 (torn ACL suffered in the loss to Penn), the Smith siblings—Seitu II ’15 (’16) and Semar ’18—literally carried the load in the backfield, each gaining 53 yards, often tough ones up the middle. “I’m really happy for the Smith brothers,” said Murphy afterward.

In the beginning, it appeared that this might at long last be the Bulldogs’ day. Hardly had the crowd of more than 50,000 (with seemingly at least that many more stuck in traffic outside the Bowl) settled into their seats on a brisk, breezy afternoon than Yale had moved smartly down the field in 10 plays. On the capper, a fourth-and-12 from the Harvard 28, quarterback Morgan Roberts (38 for 65 passing on the day) found splendid receiver Christopher Williams-Lopez (game-high 13 catches) in among several Crimson defenders for a touchdown. Bryan Holmes kicked the extra point. Yale 7, Harvard 0.

The Elis’ lead lasted 53 seconds. Asante Gibson ’16 returned the kickoff 24 yards to the Harvard 46. On third down from the 47, Shelton-Mosley ran a deep post pattern and blew past Yale safety (and captain) Cole Champion. “The line held up and Justice ran a great route,” said Hosch afterward. “The ball was thrown a little farther than I would like, but he just bailed me out.” And how—Shelton-Mosley stretched and grabbed it, then ran into the end zone. Kenny Smart ’18 kicked the extra point. Harvard 7, Yale 7. Just like that.

The second quarter was where the game was won. Aided by a questionable pass-interference call, Hosch took the Crimson 66 yards in five plays. From the Yale 35, he evaded the rush, flipped one over the middle to Shelton-Mosley, who dodged a defender, then cut to the left and beat everyone to the end-zone pylon. (“He makes routine plays great,” Hosch said of the freshman. “He just catches that thing and makes 40 yards out of it.”) Smart converted. Harvard 14, Yale 7.

With just over five minutes left in the half, Harvard took over on its 11. The Crimson went 89 yards in 11 plays, the most spectacular being a one-handed, 29-yard snag by tight end Anthony Firkser ’17, who was blanketed by two Bulldogs. On third and four from the Yale 17, Hosch connected with Braunecker, running deep in the left corner of the end zone. (“Scotty laid in a beautiful ball, and I clung [to it] for dear life,” said Braunecker.) Smart booted. Harvard 21, Yale 7.

Only 2:27 remained in the half, but the Bulldogs bade to make it a one-score game. Roberts took Yale from its 26 to the Harvard 13. With eight seconds to go, the Bulldogs lined up for a field goal. Twice the Crimson took a time out in hopes of “icing” kicker Holmes. Usually this gimmick fails abjectly. This time it didn’t. From the 30, Holmes booted—wide right.

At the start of the second half, Harvard put the hammer down, ramming the ball 74 yards into the end zone. (Not even two false-start penalties could deter the Crimson.) Just as important, the drive ate up six minutes and 28 seconds and featured a nifty 14-yard dash by wide receiver Andrew Fischer ’16. The touchdown came on a third-down, two-yard pass from Hosch to Braunecker, who bent down for the ball in the back right corner of the end zone. Smart again split the uprights. Harvard 28, Yale 7.

The Elis tried to answer, reaching the Harvard 37, but the Crimson defense forced Roberts into three incompletions to turn the ball over. Only seven plays later Harvard padded its lead. The team’s field-goal kicking had been erratic this season, but this time Smart coolly drilled a 39-yarder. Harvard 31, Yale 7.

Now the Crimson began exchanging yards for time. Yale scored on a one-yard Roberts run, but it took the Elis a precious four minutes and 30 seconds to go 82 yards. Seeking to make it a two-score game, the Bulldogs went for a two-point conversion, but Roberts’ pass fell incomplete. Harvard 31, Yale 13.

Then came Yale’s opportunity to build some momentum. Harvard was forced to punt, and kicker Zach Schmid ’18 had trouble with a bouncing snap. The Elis took over on the Crimson 26—but Roberts threw four incompletions.

With darkness closing in, Hosch led Harvard on a money drive. Normally, this would have been Stanton time. Instead, the 12 plays (consuming seven minutes and six seconds) included eight runs by the Smith brothers and two by Hosch himself (including a 19-yarder down the uncovered right side). The touchdown came on a run in which Shelton-Mosley came from the right side, took the ball from Hosch, sliced through a hole created by the blocks of Firkser and Semar Smith and cavorted eight yards to the left end-zone pylon. Smart punctuated. Harvard 38, Yale 13.

Little more than five minutes remained. Roberts took the Elis to another touchdown, an eight-yard toss to Stephen Buric. But the two-point attempt—another pass—again was no good.

The 2015 Game finished with defensive back Sean Ahern ’16 (one of the most aggressive Crimson hitters in recent memory) getting in his last licks on a pass breakup, Murphy getting a Gatorade shower from captain Matt Koran ’16, and the Harvard Band tootling happily away. In the end, Justice had triumphed.

Weekend roundup

Dartmouth 17, Princeton 10
Penn 34, Cornell 21
Brown 28, Columbia 23

Final standings

Coming up: The annual 42-week hiatus, followed by the kickoff of Harvard’s 143rd football season, on September 17 at Harvard Stadium against Rhode Island.

Tidbits: Hosch was named the College Sports Madness Ivy League Offensive Player of the Week. For the season, he led the Ivy League in total offense (303.3 per game) and passing yards (282.7 per game). At week’s end, he ranked sixth in the nation in passing yards per game, seventh in total offense, ninth in yards per pass attempt (8.86) and ninth in passing yards per completion (14.32)…Murphy’s 17 wins are the most for any coach in The Game’s 132-year history…Harvard’s win was its fifteenth straight on the road, the Crimson’s longest streak ever….The most delighted onlooker in the Bowl might have been  longtime Harvard football superfan John Norton, who witnessed his sixty-eighth consecutive Yale game.

The score by quarters

Attendance: 52,126

The Rhodes Trust has announced that five Harvard seniors have been awarded American Rhodes Scholarships this fall. Among them, one is vice president of the Harvard Islamic Society and co-founder of the Ivy League Muslim Council, a second is pursuing Islamic studies, and a third, the son of a Syrian immigrant, is studying global human-rights institutions. The winners are:

• Neil M. Alacha ’16, a social-studies concentrator, from Rockaway Park, New York, and Quincy House;
• Grace E. Huckins ’16, a neurobiology and physics concentrator, from Weston, Massachusetts, and Eliot House;
• Rivka B. Hyland, ’16, a Near Eastern languages and civilizations concentrator, from Philadelphia and Lowell House;
• Garrett M. Lam ’16, a joint concentrator in neurobiology and philosophy, from Wellesley, Massachusetts, and Lowell House; and
• Hassaan Shahawy ’16, a concentrator in history and in Near Eastern languages and civilizations, from Pasadena and Mather House. 

The Trust provided the following descriptions of the five winners:

Alacha is “concentrating in Social Studies. For his senior thesis, he is studying global human rights institutions and examining their effect on local practices in Jordan. He is head captain of the Harvard Mock Trial Association, and the CEO of the Harvard Model Congress, the country’s largest annual simulation of the U.S. government for high school students. Neil is also active as a peer tutor. He is the son of a Syrian immigrant and is interested in the movement for Islamic human rights.” Alacha plans to pursue an M.Phil. in modern Middle Eastern studies at Oxford.

Huckins is “concentrating in Neurobiology and Physics. Her passion is computational and theoretical neuroscience. She hopes to uncover the mathematics that govern the networks of neurons that make up the brain, and particularly those that create the thought and feelings that differentiate human beings. She has done research in neuroscience in the U.S., Japan, and France. Grace is also the Arts Chair of the Harvard Crimson, and was the President of the Radcliffe Union of Students. She has qualified several times for U.S. National and Junior Olympic fencing championships.” Huckins will pursue a D.Phil. in neuroscience.

Hyland “majors in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations (Islamic Studies). Her primary academic interest is the common intellectual heritage of medieval Islamic and Christian theologians. With advanced proficiency in eight modern and classical languages, she is especially interested in how medieval philosophy, with roots in ancient Greece, can offer insights into modern attitudes towards international and intercultural understanding. She is a leader in community and campus work, especially addressing the problem of sexual assault. Rivka is also captain of her intramural rowing team.” Hyland will pursue an M.Phil. in scholastic theology.

Lam is pursuing “a joint concentration in Neurobiology and Philosophy. He is interested in philosophical problems of free will, moral responsibility, and punishment, and has career interests in criminal justice reform. He is an active advocate of the effective altruism movement, was editor-in-chief of the Harvard Review of Philosophy, was one of two undergraduates on Harvard’s Committee on General Education, and is Executive Editor of the Harvard Crimson. He also holds the Guinness World Record for the longest time standing on a Swiss Ball.” He will pursue a B.Phil. in philosophy.

Shahawy “is pursuing a double major in History and Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations. He has devoted himself to working with marginalized communities to correct social injustices and improve access to opportunity, while also studying Islamic jurisprudence and global health and medicine. He worked with Los Angeles County inmates with the American Civil Liberties Union, as an intern in rural health clinics in Kenya with Vecna Technologies, and as an analyst with small-business lender Liwwa Inc. in Amman, Jordan. He has also conducted research on transplant surgery at Massachusetts General Hospital and on the causes of Saudi Arabia’s private sector labor shortage at the Harvard Center for International Development. Hassaan is the Vice President of the Harvard Islamic Society and Co-Founder of the Ivy League Muslim Council. He has volunteered at the Children’s Cancer Hospital in Cairo, Egypt and mentors prison inmates in Norfolk, Massachusetts.” Shahawy will pursue an M.Phil. in Islamic studies and history.

The Harvard Crimson report on the Rhodes winners appears here.

Read the Rhodes announcement, and short biographies of all 32 winners from the United States, at links provided by the Rhodes Trust website.

An Australian Rhodes was subsequently awarded to Yen Pham ’15, a second-semester senior in Dudley House concentrating in English.

The Rhodes Trust described Pham as follows:  “A John Harvard Scholar, she completed a thesis on representations of female experience in contemporary literature. Yen has a broad range of academic, creative and social justice interests that often intersect. She interned at the Harvard College Women’s Center. In 2014 she worked at n+1 magazine and served as fiction editor of the Harvard Advocate, where she championed issues of inclusivity and diversity in the arts. She has hosted a radio show on WHRB 95.3FM, interned at an education non-profit in New York, served as an overnight shift volunteer at the Harvard Square Homeless Shelter, and co-led a Habitat for Humanity trip to Decatur, Alabama. Before transferring to Harvard, she volunteered for many years with the Australian Youth Climate Coalition. She speaks Vietnamese, French and Italian. At Oxford, she will pursue an M.St in English (1900-Present) and an M.St in Film Aesthetics.”

Tommy Amaker, the Stemberg head coach of men’s basketball, usually delivers leadership lessons on the sideline. But on Sunday, November 15, one day after his team’s loss to Providence, he ventured across the river to address students in the Harvard Kennedy School’s executive education program, “Leadership Decision Making: Optimizing Organizational Performance.”

He highlighted the importance of perseverance. According to Errol Toulon Jr., a student in the program and the deputy commissioner of operations at New York City’s department of corrections, Amaker described being fired from the University of Michigan, mentioned his team’s setback at Providence, and shared a memorable coaching adage: “A setback is a setup for a comeback.”

After suffering back-to-back losses to UMass and Boston College this week, Amaker needs to impress the same point on his players. Harvard has already played some extremely talented teams, but with a 1-3 record, the Crimson needs to make offensive and defensive adjustments—and recognize these early setbacks as a learning opportunity—if it is to contend for a sixth consecutive conference championship.

 Okolie’s Offense

When the players took the floor against Massachusetts on Tuesday, the fans at Lavietes Pavilion burst into applause—for the Minutemen. The sold-out crowd, heavily weighted toward UMass, was even more boisterous in the second half, when the visiting team went on a 17-6 run to stretch a 38-34 halftime lead to 55-40 with 11:30 remaining.

The next nine minutes proved the Crimson’s most impressive stretch this year: Harvard went on a 19-6 run to slice the deficit to two, effectively implementing Amaker’s inside-out offensive strategy: getting the ball inside, either through a pass to a post player or dribble penetration. The player on the interior then has two options: shooting, or passing the ball to an open three-point shooter.

There’s no doubt that Harvard has a strong center: Zena Edosomwan ’17 is averaging 14.3 points and 11.5 rebounds a game. And despite shooting 5-27 from three-point range against UMass, the team also has talented snipers in Corey Johnson ’19, Tommy McCarthy ’19, and Corbin Miller ’15 (’17). But what had been missing is a player who can drive into the paint and finish or draw the defense and dish the ball to an open teammate. In the comeback against UMass, senior Agunwa Okolie played that role. He began the run by getting into the lane on back-to-back possessions (first by dribbling and then by cutting) and passing the ball to Miller and Andre Chatfield ’18 for threes. Then an Okolie jumper made it a seven-point game. He followed that up with a pair of assists and a layup to bring the team to within two.

Harvard ultimately lost the game 69-63 (a miscommunication between McCarthy and Edosomwan led to a turnover that sealed Harvard’s fate), but it learned a valuable lesson about Okolie’s potential. As Amaker said after the Crimson’s subsequent matchup with BC, Okolie’s “calling card” is defense (he routinely guards the opposing team’s best perimeter player), but in scoring or assisting on six Harvard baskets during the UMass comeback, the senior proved that he can make a major contribution on offense, too.

A Decimated Defense

Harvard had fourdays off before traveling to BC for a Sunday matinee against the Eagles. The team seemed rusty at first, failing to score for the first five minutes and posting just 20 points in the first half. Fortunately for the Crimson, the Eagles were worse, and Harvard went into halftime up by four. But BC played significantly better after halftime, sinking seven three-pointers and scoring 53 points en route to a 69-56 victory.

Although Harvard lost a winnable game, there were several positives. First, Edosomwan was a force, notching 20 points (a career high) and nine rebounds. Eagles head coach Jim Christian, who noted that Edosomwan played just three minutes in last year’s matchup, called him “the most improved player in the country.” In addition, the Crimson made seven of 13 three-point attempts. The building blocks of a good offense are intact.

But troubling signs remain. The Crimson made just nine of 23 foul shots; the main culprits were Edosomwan and sophomore Chris Egi, who together missed 10 free throws. BC’s strategy was to stay close to Harvard’s three-point shooters and not double-team Harvard’s post players; this forced Edosomwan and Egi to beat the Eagles one-on-one or at the foul line. If other teams replicate this strategy and Harvard’s post players do not improve their free-throw shooting, the offense could stall.

Another looming concern is defense. After playing very strong defense in the opening 20 minutes, the Crimson gave up those 53 points in the second half. To some extent, this was the result of a talented opponent (BC plays in the high-powered Atlantic Coast Conference) coming alive and starting to hit shots. Amaker has always emphasized aggressive man-to-man defense, but thus far this year, he has been willing to use zone defense; the team’s second-half performance may point to the need to give more playing time to Andre Chatfield ’18, an athletic wing and skilled perimeter defender who is averaging just 9.5 minutes per game.

Finally, Harvard needs more stability at point guard. Against UMass and BC, McCarthy had 10 turnovers and just one assist. Growing pains are par for the course for a freshman up against stiff competition—and with 13 points against the Eagles, he contributed substantially. But if he is to quarterback the team successfully, he needs to decrease giveaways and put his teammates in position to score.

 A Tipping Point

At 1-3, the Crimson is off to the worst start of the Amaker era. But in Providence, UMass, and BC, the Crimson has faced—and remained competitive with—three teams from higher-profile conferences. And Harvard made demonstrable progress in each of those contests.

During the next 10 days, Harvard faces three teams that have traditionally been less competitive (Bryant, Holy Cross, and Northeastern). The schedule thus grants the Crimson the opportunity to start translating its incremental improvement into wins. The team, in Amaker’s adage, is set up for a comeback.

Tidbits

• Junior point guard Matt Fraschilla is out for the season after tearing his ACL against Providence. Already without star point guard Siyani Chambers ’16 (’17), who tore his ACL during the offseason, the Crimson now have only two players on the roster—McCarthy and Corbin Miller ’15 (’17)—with experience at the point.

• On Friday afternoon, Crimson players past and present gathered at BC’s Conte Forum for a ceremony celebrating the late Tom Stemberg ’71, M.B.A. ’73, a longtime Harvard basketball supporter. Amaker, whose coaching position Stemberg endowed last season, spoke at the ceremony.

• After winning two of three games, the Harvard women’s basketball team is 2-2 on the season. Co-captain AnnMarie Healy ’16 and Shilpa Tummala ’16 are leading the way, averaging 15.3 and 14.7 points per game, respectively. The Crimson has also received strong performances from a trio of freshmen—Madeline Raster, Nani Redford, and Sydney Skinner—all of whom have seen substantial time in the backcourt. Head coach Kathy Delaney Smith’s squad will look to push its record above .500 when it plays Boston University on Tuesday.

The mid Octoberannouncement of Harvard Global Institute (HGI) and a “University-wide effort…to create a globalization strategy” elicited both a sense of promise and some puzzlement, perhaps in equal measure. The University news release observed that advisory groups had “recommended against establishing a large physical presence—such as an overseas campus,” but that “certain University activities will require a greater level of engagement with both distant regions and with academics expert in local aspects of problems and cultures.” To that end, in support of research, HGI will

provide larger grants to projects involving teams of established faculty members, as well as smaller grants to faculty members exploring more experimental topics. HGI’s grants are intended to foster research into topics that transcend disciplinary and regional boundaries, such as climate change, urbanization, education, water, and migration.

If funds become available, research proposals will be solicited from faculty members and vetted by a small group; President Drew Faust will then make the final awards (see discussion below).

HGI moved from theory to practice with the receipt of a gift from Wang Jianlin, chairman of Wanda Group, the Beijing-based company that describes itself as the world’s largest commercial real-estate enterprise (among other lines of business). (See the company account and transcript of his recent appearance at Harvard Business School here.) Accompanying the news about HGI’s formation was an announcement of its first grants. The Wang funds (to be spent within the People’s Republic of China and administered by the Harvard Center Shanghai), as reported, will initially support continuation and enlargement of research on climate change, energy, sustainable development, and associated policies in China. That work has long been pursued by Butler professor of environmental studies Michael B. McElroy; Morris University Professor Dale W. Jorgenson; and Chris Nielsen, executive director of, and many of his colleagues at, the Harvard China Project, with dozens of collaborators at Tsinghua University and elsewhere in China. A separate, smaller grant will explore from a humanities perspective how communities in China—and populations worldwide affected by China’s ecological footprint—have grappled with pollution-related diseases.

Larger questions naturally arose in the wake of these announcements: How does the institute operate generally, and how might this model apply to other Harvard research ventures around the world?

How the Global Institute Is Geared

HGI in fact is designed to thread several needles. The best guide to the University’s decisions is Walker professor of business administration Krishna G. Palepu, whom Faust appointed senior adviser to the president for global strategy in early 2012.

During a recent conversation in his office at Morgan Hall, Palepu recalled a committee that preceded his appointment, chaired by Nitin Nohria, dean of Harvard Business School (HBS). It examined Harvard’s global engagements, broadly defined: the schools’ international centers and offices, the scope of professors’ work, and the opportunities to build on those activities. Involving HBS’s leadership in the work made eminent sense: the school has an especially wide global footprint, with research and case-writing offices in Hong Kong, Shanghai, Tokyo, Mumbai, Paris, Istanbul, Buenos Aires, and São Paulo—plus smaller outposts in Singapore, Dubai, and Mexico City. (The Shanghai center also includes a full-size, theater-style classroom for HBS executive-education and other teaching, and the Mumbai center has access to such a facility nearby.) At the time of his appointment as senior adviser, Palepu was also the school’s senior associate dean for international development.

In his telling, Faust and the Harvard Corporation, aware that Yale (in Singapore) and Duke (outside Shanghai) were establishing joint-venture campuses, and that New York University appeared to be cloning itself around the world, both asked, “Are we missing something?” They charged the committee with thinking deeply about what Harvard ought to do.

After consulting with administrative leaders throughout the University and scholars active globally, Palepu said, the committee reached two conclusions. First, Harvard ought not to invest in an overseas teaching campus, given the emerging options for online outreach and the limitations of being anchored in only one place. Second, Harvard ought to focus on intellectual impact: research. The basic notion, he said, is pursuing the question, “How can we bring the entire power of the One Harvard community together and link it with intellectual capacity in the regions, with scholars in various parts of the world” to address complex problems of global import? (He noted that President Faust in 2012 laid out as a principle for Harvard's strategy, “We seek the largest intellectual footprint with the smallest physical footprint.”)

That confronted the committee with Harvard logistics. In this very decentralized institution, most potentially promising research is organized by school, individual research program, or region; cross-disciplinary work arises only by chance. For the most complex problems that might be most susceptible to the full range of Harvard’s legal, policy, public-health, social-science, engineering, and other intellectual capital, he said, there was no systematic “linking capacity,” even though some of the regional and area-studies centers do support some broader research programs. The global institute was therefore conceived as that glue, focused on facilitating and enabling such research possibilities (with teaching and other programs to follow if warranted).

What, then, is HGI, and what is its modus operandi? As Palepu described it, HGI is a Cambridge-based, virtual organization. Its role is to mobilize financial resources centrally, and then provide them to faculty leaders and groups of faculty colleagues who work on globally important problems across school boundaries. That work is to be supported through the infrastructure of Harvard’s existing regional offices and centers around the globe, like HBS’s research outposts, the [Corrected November 27, 5:15 p.m.; previously described, in error, as a Faculty of Arts and Sciences center] interfaculty David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, a forthcoming Center for African Studies facility in Cape Town, South Africa [Corrected November 24, 1:45 p.m. Erroneously reported earlier as Johannesburg], and so on. Those offices—already funded by endowments or as part of their schools’ core operations—will accommodate visiting faculty researchers and graduate students, convene conferences with colleagues in the host nations, disseminate findings, and so on. The institute, as a conduit for funding, thus aims to support and scale up existing work and enable new research, without adding a new central program or entity. HGI, he said, is “bringing the whole community together.”

Wang Jianlin’s gift, Palepu continued, is the first proof of concept, “jump-starting it with one anchor gift.” The funds are “basically meant to do research on China,” but on problems salient around the world. The McElroy-Jorgenson program on climate change certainly satisfies both, and the grant ($1.25 million annually for the first three years, with two renewal years possible) very much grounds work on a global issue in an important country’s local context. Given their long history of working in this field in the People’s Republic, Palepu said, the research was “shovel-ready” for an infusion of funds under HGI’s auspices. (For more on their work, see McElroy’s “A Warming World,” from this magazine’s November-December 1997 issue; a report on the China Project’s inception; “Connecting with China,” from a 2008 research conference in Beijing; “Greening China,” by Jorgenson and colleague Mun S. Ho; and the recent feature on Jorgenson’s comprehensive work on taxing carbon and applications in the United States, China, and around the world.)

As HGI sponsorship of work in China proceeds, Palepu envisions a formal request-for-proposal process this coming spring or fall, emphasizing multidisciplinary content, faculty teams, scaling up existing projects, and salience to the People’s Republic with wider resonances. Meanwhile, HGI is at pains not to underwrite a unidirectional transmission of knowledge from Harvard to the world, Palepu said. Whatever scholars discover ought to enrich and contribute to the academic enterprise in Cambridge and Boston (much as the hundreds of cases written in centers around the world have flowed into HBS’s classrooms). 

As noted above, the general mechanism for allocating grants involves soliciting faculty research proposals, a process organized by a small group of senior, University-level officials (currently Palepu; vice provost for international affairs Mark C. Elliott, who is Schwartz professor of Chinese and Inner Asian history; vice provost for research Richard McCullough; and vice president for strategy and programs Leah Rosovsky). They consult with subject-matter experts, and make recommendations to President Faust, who makes the final decisions. This is, Palepu said, a “presidentially directed initiative.” Five to 10 years hence, he hopes to have the resources to support similar research around the world. That will happen if people who care about intractable problems in India, Latin America, Africa, and Europe—or who appreciate the potential of applying diverse Harvard research expertise in the global context—come forward with philanthropic support.

In Prospect

HGI is very much“learning how to do this” work, Palepu said, given that the China projects are the first it has been able to support. Beyond the potential to work on climate change and other issues identified in the news announcement, he can envision global research teams addressing the sources of and solutions to challenges such as inequality.

But advancing along the trajectory its University founders anticipate is not a given. HGI-backed programs are explicitly donor-funded, not an investment of unrestricted Harvard funds (like those used to start the edX online-learning venture with MIT). And as outlined so far, the programs depend on a very special species of donor: one who has an interest in her or his country, in global challenges, and in Harvard’s potential to solve them—but who is willing to entrust the funds in a relatively unrestricted way for the president and her advisers to allocate to specific research projects. Thus the search is on, presumably, for globally active business and philanthropic leaders with strong Harvard ties: one thinks of Ratan Tata, AMP ’75, of India’s Tata Group, who underwrote an HBS executive-education building, and Jorge Paulo Lemann ’61, the Brazilian investment banker who has underwritten the São Paulo office and Brazil studies, among other benefactions. (Presumably, some of those prospects are members of Harvard’s Global Advisory Council, which was organized to support global activities across the University, including HGI. It is chaired by David Rubenstein of the Carlyle Group, a co-chair of The Harvard Campaign and chair of the Kennedy School’s fund drive. Wang Jianlin, the council's vice chair, met in China with both Palepu and Faust before the announcement of his HGI-launching gift.)

Wang Jianlin’s engagement is emblematic of such philanthropy in the current decade. During the Campaign, the University has been the happy recipient of four large gifts anchored in the new fortunes created by Chinese property developers: the Evergrande Group gift that has endowed the Center for Green Buildings and Cities at the Graduate School of Design, and other programs (and thought to be in excess of $100 million over several years); a surprise $15-million scholarship fund for Chinese students studying at Harvard, from SOHO China Foundation; the $350-million naming gift for the public-health school, originating from the family of the late T.H. Chan, which established its fortune in the Hang Lung Group Limited, in Hong Kong (these two gifts are described here); and now, the HGI founding gift (thought to be larger than the SOHO fund), proceeding from the success of Wanda Group. In these cases, the confluence of new, enormous, property wealth and especially favorable relationships among the University, China’s leadership, and scholars with deep ties in the People’s Republic, have happily converged to underpin an experiment in international outreach. Except for the Evergrande funds, the gifts are relatively unconstrained, giving the University valuable flexibility to apply the proceeds to presidential or school priorities.

For Harvard scholars, the timing could not be better. Research funding is increasingly scarce. HGI dollars will not, by themselves, rescue the humanities or bail out basic medical research, but the infusion of funds across many applied disciplines and professions is welcome. Local vetting of grant proposals may be less cumbersome and fraught than the external and peer reviews that accompany, say, federal sponsored-research applications. And the mechanism of presidentially directed grants or centrally administered University research funds has become increasingly common in recent years, from Harvard Initiative for Learning and Teaching competitions, to entrepreneurship challenges at the iLab, to the president’s Climate Change Solutions Fund. In an era where permanent, or at least long-term, research funding is insecure, anything helps. The faculty will be rooting for development officers to find broad-minded, global benefactors, and for HGI to progress from experiment to a set of Crimson paths and footprints around the planet—the scope and shape of which depend, of course, on the resources that may be forthcoming.

The 2016class of Marshall Scholars includes seniors Bianca Mulaney and Rebecca Panovka. Mulaney will study at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE); her research interests include assessment of the economic impact of antimicrobial resistance in agriculture, according to the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, where she served as a Frank Boas Fellow and Undergraduate Associate. Panovka, a resident of Quincy House concentrating in English who will study at the University of Cambridge, has served as editor-in-chief of the Harvard Book Review and a fiction board member of the Harvard Advocate, where she is editing an anthology that will be published in 2016 to celebrate the organization’s 150th anniversary. In March of 2015, she was awarded an artist development scholarship to travel to South Africa and Botswana to intern for Emmy award-winning documentarian Mandy Jacobson to create a short documentary on safari tourism.

The scholarships support two years of study toward a degree in the United Kingdom, but may be extended by the Marshall Commission for a third year.

Amid a challenging start to the men’s basketball season, Crimson fans looking for a hopeful analogy might think about senior forward Patrick Steeves ’16. One setback after another seemed to define his career in Cambridge. After leading the team in scoring as a freshman during the Crimson Madness preseason scrimmage, he broke his foot. Sidelined for the season. Sophomore year? Torn ACL. Last year, complications from the ACL surgery led to more surgery, forcing him to sit out again. During the most historic run in Harvard basketball history—three-straight NCAA tournament appearances and two tournament wins—Steeves watched from the sideline.

But he remained upbeat. “Third time’s a charm,” captain Evan Cummins ’16 recalled Steeves saying as he went in for his third surgery. And even though he could not play, he found ways to get better: strengthening his upper body and learning coach Tommy Amaker’s offense and defense.

Harvard Hardwood
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Finally, during the past three games, Steeves has played his first meaningful minutes for Harvard. And he has made them count, stuffing the box score with 27 points, 20 rebounds, and 12 assists. “Every bit of time that he gets is very meaningful for him,” said Amaker, “so [he’s] a huge example in our program and for his teammates.”

Fans might hope so: the opening weeks of Harvard’s season have played out a lot like the first three years of Steeves’s career. Most recently, after throttling Bryant 80-45 on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, the Crimson dropped back-to-back games to Holy Cross and Northeastern. With a record of 2-5, they are approaching the toughest game on their schedule: a visit this Saturday to fourth-ranked Kansas.

Buzzing Bryant

Facing the Bulldogs, Harvard controlled the opening tip, and freshman point guard Tommy McCarthy sent a long pass to Agunwa Okolie ’16 for a layup. 2-0 Crimson. On the next possession, McCarthy drained a three, giving Harvard a 5-0 lead less than a minute into the game. The rout was on. Harvard scored on its first seven possessions, and clamped down on defense, en route to its first victory over a Division One opponent this autumn.

The matchup showed just how good the team can be. The offense was balanced, with three starters scoring double figures (led by McCarthy’s career-high 16 points), and the defense held the Bulldogs to 26.7 percent shooting. “There’s been something different every single game that we’ve been disappointed with,” Cummins said after the win, “and it felt great to finally put it all together.”

Halting at Holy Cross

Against Holy Cross, though, the wheels failed to turn. Harvard fell behind 9-0 within four minutes, and Amaker sent four starters to the bench. The second unit, propelled by two first-half threes from Corbin Miller ’15 (’17), staked the Crimson to a 23-21 halftime lead, but then the Crusaders went on an 8-1 run to start the second half, eventually stretching the advantage to 10 points (45-35). Despite a late Crimson comeback, Holy Cross knocked Harvard off by a single point for the second straight year.

In his post-game remarks, Amaker said he was disappointed with Harvard’s performance, especially its free throws: the team shot three for eight. Those numbers indicate a two-fold problem: players not getting to the free-throw line often enough, and not making their shots when they do get there.

Amaker ideally wants the Crimson to start a possession with a fast break or a quick scoring opportunity on a secondary break, before the defense has time to get set. From there, they look to play inside-out, by getting the ball in the paint with a pass or dribble penetration. The goal is to pressure the defense, leading to open shots—or trips to the line. In previous years, Harvard players could draw contact and get a foul call. This year, Harvard’s guards in particular are not getting to the free-throw line, and the forwards, who get there rarely, frequently miss their shots.

Holy Cross attempted twice as many free throws (16) and converted 13. That made the difference.

Nixed by Northeastern

The start of the Northeastern game was frustrating and strange. The shot clock on the Crimson’s side of the court repeatedly malfunctioned, creating multiple delays. Even so, Harvard had one of its best offensive halves of the season, scoring 42 points and shooting a blistering 62.1 percent from the field. Unfortunately, Northeastern was even better, draining six three-point shots to take a 46-42 lead. During the second half, Harvard’s offense slowed, and the Huskies pulled away, leading by as many as 17 points on the way to a 80-71 victory.

Harvard again got just eight free throws and made only three. (Northeastern was 14 of 17 from the line.) The defense also looked weak, in part reflecting Northeastern’s strengths: a veteran ball club, the Huskies have excellent outside shooters and a strong interior presence. Still, if Harvard is to be competitive in the Ivy League, it cannot give up 46 points in a half.

After the game Amaker said the team showed progress, despite the loss: freshman Weisner Perez scored 13 points in 12 minutes off the bench; McCarthy had a career-high nine assists; and Steeves continued his strong play, scoring 13 points in 27 minutes.

But there were also signs of frustration. Amaker clutched his knees after one miscue and several players scowled and one screamed as Northeastern pulled away.

As Harvard prepares for its visit to Kansas, it needs to focus on the long haul. The most important part of the season for defending last year’s Ivy title begins in late January, when conference play opens in earnest. By then, the Crimson could be far more competitive. Northeastern coach Bill Coen pointed out after that game that Harvard is young and has faced strong teams. “What you are going to see as the season goes on,” he said, “is that—come Ivy League play—they are going to be extremely formidable.”

After the victory over Bryant, Steeves—finally on the court after three years of injuries—said that Harvard has “to start climbing the ladder.” Two losses later, the ascent seems not insurmountable, but much steeper.

Tidbits

Last night, the Harvard women’s basketball team fell 86-59 against the twenty-fourth-ranked University of South Florida, dropping the Crimson to 4-3 on the season. Last Saturday’s outcome was brighter: the team defeated Rice in Texas 67-61. Against the Owls, Kit Metoyer ’16 led with 15 points, while AnnMarie Healy ’16 and Sydney Skinner ’19 tallied 13 points apiece. Head coach Kathy Delaney-Smith’s squad finishes its road trip with a visit to Florida Gulf Coast University on Saturday.

Molecular biologist and developmental geneticist Shirley M. Tilghman—2004 Harvard honorand and Radcliffe Medalist—now has a new Crimson credential to go with her tiger-hued service at Princeton University, where she was president from 2001 to 2013 and remains a faculty member: she has been elected a Fellow of the Harvard Corporation, the University’s senior governing board. She will begin her service January 1, filling the vacancy created by the sudden death of James F. Rothenberg ’68, M.B.A. ’70, last summer.

Beyond the obvious value of her experience in leading a preeminent research university, Tilghman brings to the Corporation several perspectives of immediate interest to Harvard.

•The liberal arts, in residential campus settings. As an academic institution, Princeton is more institutionally weighted toward the arts and sciences, at the undergraduate and graduate levels, than Harvard, given that university’s relatively modest professional schools. Tilghman’s experience thus may be of some comfort to Harvard’s arts and sciences faculty members, given local and national debates about the role of liberal-arts education; the prowess of Harvard’s professional schools; and the recent emphasis on growth in engineering and applied sciences—but see below, too. (Harvard president emeritus Neil L. Rudenstine was a Princeton administrative alumnus, too, and brought some of that sensibility to his interactions with the arts and sciences faculty.)

During her presidency, Tilghman oversaw construction of an undergraduate residential college, the introduction of a four-year college system, and expansion of the undergraduate student body—all useful engagements at a time when campuses like this one are grappling with issues of diversity and inclusion. She is also now a trustee of Amherst College—an even more intimate liberal-arts institution, and one where the issues of diversity and inclusion have boiled over with particular heat in recent weeks, providing a clear window on such concerns within academic communities.

•Life sciences. At the same time, Tilghman is herself a biologist of the first rank (she was a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator, recognizing the importance and quality of her research). And she happens to have broad, deep, current knowledge of the field at Harvard, at a time when biological and biomedical sciences are considered particularly promising—and particularly vulnerable to declining federal research funding. She chaired a comprehensive review of the life sciences at the University, undertaken at the direction of the president and provost, this fall; no word has issued from its work, but it is understood to have encompassed the relevant parts of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) and the medical and public-health schools. She previously chaired the visiting committee to Harvard’s then-department of cellular and developmental biology, and served on the visiting committee to the division of medical sciences, the Medical School-FAS joint Ph.D. program that trains biomedical researchers in six interdisciplinary fields. 

Tilghman is also a director of the Broad Institute, the MIT- and Harvard-affiliated genomics powerhouse, an anchor for the biotechnology and life-sciences enterprises clustered in and around Cambridge’s Kendall Square. Many faculty members are affiliated with the Broad and its vast research programs. During her Princeton presidency, Tilghman launched a significant neurosciences initiative.

•Engineering. As Harvard invests enormously in the growth of its relatively young and small engineering and applied sciences school (scheduled for rapid faculty expansion funded within the FAS capital campaign, and separately, with centrally raised funds, for a new laboratory and teaching complex in Allston), Princeton is already home to a top-tier school in those disciplines. Its regular engineering faculty members number 145—about 70 percent larger than the Harvard school; and it counts 1,300 undergraduates—nearly 50 percent more than Harvard concentrators in those disciplines. Thus, as the Corporation contemplates further expensive investments in these disciplines, Tilghman’s insight may be of special significance (as may the growth of Princeton’s energy and environment initiative during her administration).

In any event, her engagement with engineering at a minimum complements the related expertise of Senior Fellow William F. Lee (whose litigation practice focuses on intellectual property cases for technology companies, such as Apple, and life-sciences enterprises); and the technology-focused financial acumen of Corporation member James W. Breyer (Updated December 7, 3:55 p.m. Breyer is founder and CEO of Breyer Capital, a personal investment vehicle he established in 2006; he remains an emeritus-status partner at Accel Partners, a venture-capital firm based in Palo Alto, having reduced his role at that firm in mid 2014); and the experience of Corporation member Lawrence S. Bacow, former chancellor of MIT. She also brings to bear on this field her experiences as a director of Google. 

•The arts. As The Harvard Campaign provides incremental resources to begin implementing items from President Drew Faust’s art agenda—notably, the launch of the undergraduate concentration in theater, dance, and media—the huge expansion of art-making that Tilghman launched is nearing its physical completion, in the form of a new “arts neighborhood,” bringing together facilities to create a critical mass on campus.

More generally, Tilghman knows Harvard and its leadership already. She served on the committee that advised the new Radcliffe Institute’s founding dean, Drew Faust, on how to organize such an entity (she is a trustee of the freestanding Institute for Advanced Study, which is located in Princeton), and is vice chair of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, where Corporation member Jessica Tuchman Mathews was president.

Since the Corporation began its expansion to 13 members, from seven, in 2011, it has gained considerably in financial experience and fundraising reach, with the appointments of Breyer; Kenneth I. Chenault (longtime chair and CEO of American Express); Paul J. Finnegan (a private-equity investor); Karen Gordon Mills (much of whose career was in private equity and venture capital); and Joseph J. O’Donnell (a businessman, investor, and philanthropist)—alongside other appointees, like Bacow and Mathews. No doubt, in the wake of the 2008-2009 financial crisis and then the gearing up for the $6.5-billion Harvard Campaign, now well under way, such expertise was particularly relevant.

In a statement, Faust and Lee said of Tilghman:

Shirley Tilghman is one of the nation’s foremost molecular biologists and one of higher education’s most admired and perceptive leaders. Her deep scientific expertise will bring valuable insight to the work of our governing boards in an era of transformative change in the life sciences and allied fields. Her broad experience in leading one of the country’s great universities will bring fresh perspectives and beneficial knowledge to our consideration of Harvard’s opportunities and challenges at a pivotal moment for universities.

Beyond her remarkable resume, she is a person highly regarded for her intellectual curiosity and creativity, her collegiality and incisiveness, her nuanced understanding of complex organizations, and her dedication to advancing the progress of the institutions she serves. We greatly look forward to welcoming her.

Tilghman said:

It is a great honor to be asked to serve on the Harvard Corporation. As one of the world’s most respected research universities, Harvard has the capacity to influence education, scholarship, and discovery in ways that extend well beyond its own campus. At this moment when there are so many challenging issues facing universities and colleges, I am very much looking forward to working with President Drew Faust and colleagues on the Corporation to help guide Harvard’s future course.

One of the items on this Corporation’s agenda is certainly going to be Harvard’s presidential succession. Tilghman herself stepped down after completing Princeton’s Aspire campaign. President Faust shows every sign of pressing Harvard’s fund drive through to its scheduled completion in 2018, and an astounding total. But having reformed Harvard’s governance as one of her legacy achievements, she and the expanded and replenished Corporation must be in a position to secure the ultimate transition in University leadership, likely later this decade, hopeful that the institution’s financial foundation has been secured. Having in place as members of the senior governing board experienced educators such as Bacow, Nannerl Keohane (president emerita of Wellesley College and Duke University; her Corporation term would logically end in 2017), and now Tilghman would seem an important asset when that time comes.

Read the news announcement here.

In his first annual letter, disseminated in September, Harvard Management Company (HMC) president and CEO Stephen Blyth described both sluggish recent investment returns and—far more consequentially—significant changes in asset allocation and investment management for the University’s endowment. Several weeks later, he invited Harvard Magazine to visit HMC’s offices, in the Federal Reserve Bank tower overlooking the harbor in downtown Boston, to discuss the evolution under way at the organization. That evolution, he explained in detail, was driven by challenges in the investing environment at large—and by significant issues internal to HMC and Harvard.

Blyth’s perspectives on the financial challenges facing HMC and the University in the wake of the 2008-2009 financial crisis were perhaps the most detailed insight into those issues offered on the record by a senior Harvard official. Among the matters he outlined were:

• very real constraints on taking investment risk and committing funds, imposed by the University's limited liquidity during and after the crisis, when its central cash funds were tied up in endowment investments and it had to post collateral and absorb enormous losses on interest-rate swaps—causing it to borrow heavily, at relatively high interest rates; and
• associated strains on relationships with external investment managers—particularly in important asset classes such as private equity, venture capital, and absolute return (hedge funds)—imposed both by University financial limitations and by turnover in HMC personnel. [Note that as of fiscal year 2008, HMC was reported to have had outstanding funding commitments to external investment managers totaling some $11 billion—an enormous obligation for an endowment that decreased in value by that sum in the next fiscal year; as of the end of fiscal 2015, last June 30, when the endowment finally regained its nominal value of 2008, future funding commitments totaled just under $6 billion.]

Following his assessment of past challenges, Blyth looked forward. He described the origins of HMC’s new mission statement; quantitative investment-return and -performance objectives; and a new asset-allocation process that, among other attributes, encourages fresh investment ideas and approaches at a time when competition has made it more difficult for all institutional investors to achieve high real returns using strategies that worked a decade ago.

Throughout, he was forceful about enhancing performance. For example, asked about HMC’s traditional emphasis on a hybrid model of asset management—with a portion of funds invested internally (and at what HMC historically reported as significant savings on investment-management expenses), and the remainder entrusted to expert external managers—he responded by focusing on results, not expenses:

I have no target, I’m agnostic about target. There’s no, “We want to get this amount internally” or “We want to get this amount externally.” This is an obvious statement: we just want to make sure we have the best investors in everything we’re doing. If we have an external manager who’s not good enough, we’re going to redeem. If we have an internal portfolio-management team that is not good enough, we will have to upgrade. It’s symmetric.…

Ultimately, it’s all about those investment objectives. I can’t say, “I’ve missed our investment objectives but I’ve saved this amount of money in management fees,” right?  Our investment objectives do not include minimized management fees. They’re not there.

A lightly edited transcript of the conversation follows.

Harvard Magazine: The point of departure in your letter is seeking improved investment performance—and you are at pains to explain that aggregate out-performance has lessened, that performance relative to peer institutions’ endowments has lagged. When you looked at what had happened, how do you sort out, on the one hand, internal execution and selection of outside investment managers, from the many external factors you talk about in a changing world—a different external environment? They both are at play—how do they rub up against each other?

Stephen Blyth: I talked briefly about each of our three investment objectives and how each of them has been on a declining path: long-term real return, downward trend; relative out-performance versus market indices and industry benchmarks, downward trend; and relative performance versus peers, downward trend. Those investment objectives are all written up here on my board actually: delivering a real return of 5 percent or more; achieving 1 percent outperformance (relative to market and industry benchmarks); and being in the top quartile relative to the next 10 largest university endowments.

Now, they’re all interlinked in slightly different ways. The latter one really should be orthogonal to any market conditions, because we’re all under the same market conditions. So, in some sense, the latter performance metric is more of an indicator of executional issues—investment process, manager selection decision-making, portfolio construction, asset allocation, et cetera: all the things that make up investment decision-making, plus in that latter one, factors that have affected Harvard idiosyncratically [see discussion below] relative to that other peer group of 10. Actually, people say 10, that’s too small a group, but those numbers look very similar if you compare Harvard against the largest 20 endowments, which take you down to about $5 billion [in assets under management].

So this metric, I would say, speaks much more toward execution and idiosyncratic Harvard-related issues. As a statistician, having done an analysis and thinking about explanatory variables and thinking about decision points and thinking about conditions, I recognize that a lot has been written about Harvard during the financial crisis and subsequent consequences which have played out in a number of ways. Those issues impacted our ability to deliver on the third investment objective.

For the first two objectives, I think [the role of internal performance versus external conditions] is a fair question. On the first one, the 10-year rolling average real return declined from double digits to just over between 5 percent and 6 percent annually. That is highly related to the fact that interest rates have declined dramatically over that period. I mention in the letter that 10-year, essentially risk-free real rates have declined from 4.5 percent to 0.6 percent and 30-year real rates are now one point something percent. In order to generate 5 percent real return 10 years ago, you could just buy mostly TIPS [inflation-adjusted bonds] and then take a little bit of risk. Today, you need TIPS plus 4 percent of real return [from taking risk], so, clearly, that must be harder to do. One could also say that the lowering of real returns has some execution element to it.

Relative return, the second objective, I always feel is more nuanced—has a different set of factors applying to it. To me, it’s the opportunity set to outperform markets. I think a jury of 12 reasonable people would say that the opportunity set to outperform markets is less rich than it was certainly in 2000, or it is harder, or there are more people trying to do it or the universe of potential mispriced parameters or dislocated markets is more closely examined versus 15 years ago. I’m sure if you ask Jack Meyer [HMC’s president and CEO, 1990-2005] that question, he would say, “Your job in that regard is much harder,” because in the late 1990s, early 2000s, which was the time when HMC had its optimal out-performance relative to market indices, the competition from hedge funds, the capital in hedge funds, et cetera, was much lower. It was clear that HMC in the late 1990s/early 2000s was outstandingly good, where they had essentially very, very smart investors here with less competition. That environment has certainly changed.

But equally, we can ask, have we been executing less well in the last five years? Certainly, I believe we have room to improve on that front.

But equally, we can ask, have we been executing less well in the last five years? Certainly, I believe we have room to improve on that front.

So, for the second element—how much is execution, how much is market?—I’d say that’s more balanced than the real return. Again, this is qualitative, but reduction in real return is a market-wide phenomenon. Reduction in our relative performance is more balanced. And then reduction in our standing versus peers is heavily an execution/Harvard issue. It’s almost like there’s a spectrum across those.

Stating the Mission, Changing the Culture

HM: You’re trying to deal with those different circumstances to get a better outcome. Take me through your thinking about the problems that poses. What paths are you pursuing, to respond?

Stephen Blyth: Actually setting out those investment objectives, as described in my letter, was an extremely important step to improving performance. We’ve now got very well defined metrics of success, but in order to improve what qualitatively has been generally viewed as disappointing returns, we do need at least to have well-defined objectives. That was actually a non-trivial exercise, to understand what those objectives should be. They really did flow from the re-statement of our mission.

The mission, which had been superior returns over the long run for Harvard, which is noble and correct, still holds. But it didn’t actually define success. We have delivered high returns for Harvard over the long run, but then we’ve also been generally viewed as under-performing peers over the last five or six years. It wasn’t clear.

Many investors would say an annual horse race against other investors is just highly detrimental to long-term investment performance, which speaks to why all these objectives are for a minimum of five years.

A number of my staff said, hang on a sec. First of all, I’m supposed to beat my benchmark, and then I’m supposed to deliver over 8 percent or a planning assumption. We’ve done both of those, but now I’m supposed to beat Yale, too. Where did that come from and how do we actually clarify and get clear in people’s minds why that might be important—and should it be? So, we had that discussion. Many investors would say an annual horse race against other investors is just highly detrimental to long-term investment performance, which speaks to why all these objectives [discussed above and spelled out in Blyth’s letter] are for a minimum of five years.

So, setting the mission correctly is important [It reads: To help ensure that Harvard University has the financial resources to confidently maintain and expand its preeminence in teaching, learning and research for future generations.], even though it is a bit of motherhood and apple pie. It’s actually worded very carefully so that the investment objectives in some way drop out of it automatically, or at least are consistent with it—to provide the financial resources so that Harvard can maintain its preeminence.

Why did we add that “confidently”? Well, we can’t guarantee, because there’s obviously going to be some risk. “Future generations” clearly means we have to maintain the real purchasing power of the endowment, so we need to be making a real return after whatever we’re distributing to the University. The distribution rate has slowly ticked up over time. Over the last five years, I think it’s averaged 5 percent. Over the last 20 years, maybe 4.3 percent. Hence the 5 percent real return target, and at a minimum 5 percent, because we’d ideally like the real value of the endowment to increase, not stay static. That’s number one.

Then, to maintain Harvard’s preeminence really gave us intellectual clarity about having a peer-comparison element to our performance, not as a response to the score sheets on the front page of TheWall Street Journal, but, ultimately, if over the last 10 years we were 1.1 percent behind Stanford, 2.3 percent behind Yale—if you think about the institutions with which we compete for faculty and staff, if they end up with larger endowments, that has a significant effect on Harvard’s ability to be preeminent. So that is actually very important to have out there.

That actually tied in to the first thing I did here, which was set the new narrative for HMC. I viewed it as setting a new path or setting a new narrative—not drawing a line under the financial crisis, but at least starting a new paragraph or new chapter. I communicate with my staff largely through town halls because I think it shows conviction. We have 260 people here and they can all fit on one floor, and I’ve had probably eight town halls since I’ve become CEO, and the first one in early February was this shift of narrative, which was: let’s recognize that Harvard had a tough war, had a very difficult financial crisis, and its liquidity position was worse than other comparable institutions' for a number of reasons that you’re well aware of. The liquidity was worse in a very critical period. Jane [Mendillo, HMC president and CEO, 2008-2014] was a magnificent leader through that crisis, she stabilized the situation. She rebuilt the organization, which had been decimated by spin-outs [departures of investment professionals to start their own asset-management firms, often funded in part with assets managed for HMC] and turnovers of CEOs, and so on. She improved liquidity, improved liquidity at the University, and generated double-digit returns. Let’s etch those real accomplishments into stone, put them on a tablet and recognize them.

But then let’s realize the following: that our investment performance over the last five or six years has been lagging peers who are trying to do the same things as us. We’ve been 2 percent behind Yale, 1 percent behind Stanford. We’ve been bottom of the Ivy League three out of five years. Our return has roughly equaled that of the NACUBO [National Association of College and University Business Officers] mean return, but has been below the TUCS [Wilshire Associates Trust Universe Comparison Service] median for five years.

Let’s just recognize that—and let’s realize that our job is to improve investment performance.

This is the new path. This is about moving from recovering and qualification to competing.

Interestingly, there was a sense of relief from the organization that that was just said publicly, internally. This is the new path. This is about moving from recovering and qualification to competing. That’s almost a mandate that I had as the new CEO. So the first step to achieving this is to ensure that everybody at HMC is aligned with high performance, being competitive, being best in practice, et cetera, rather than being in the mode of, yes, things are challenged at Harvard: we’re in recovery, if our performance somewhat lags, that’s just a function of how we’re in crisis recovery.

The analogy that I’ve used a lot is a soccer analogy. I’ve tried to find an American sport analogy, but then I realized it would be completely inauthentic for me to try to make an American sports analogy. A soccer analogy is that in the months and years following our financial crisis, HMC was necessarily in what I’ve called “qualifying mode.” England always qualifies for the soccer World Cup—to do that, you just need to beat Lichtenstein, beat San Marino, beat Estonia, and maybe not lose to France once and then you qualify for the World Cup. In order to do that, you need to have players behind the ball. You need to minimize risk. You need to make sure you don’t give the ball away. You don’t want to move players forward; you certainly don’t want to move too many players forward and run the risk of someone scoring against you, and you’ll qualify.

If you get to the World Cup, you need to compete. If you’re just in qualifying mode, you’re going to get nowhere—and that’s what always happens to England: they always get knocked out in the first round or the round of 16.

In order to compete, you need to be prepared to take appropriate risk. You need to be able to move players forward. If you have the opportunity, say someone’s gone down the right wing and is about to cross, you need someone in the box ready to head the ball into the net. If you don’t have someone there to take advantage of the opportunity, you’re not going to score.

It doesn’t mean play recklessly. It doesn’t mean moving all players to the front and being hit on the break, but it’s a different mindset. It also involves having everybody on board with tactics and strategy.

That analogy only stretches so far, but if there’s some encapsulation of what I’m trying to do in terms of the culture shift here, that analogy is good. I would say that being in qualifying mode was truly appropriate for HMC from July 2008 for a number of years.

However, as an organization, one has to guard against culture becoming cumulative or becoming in-built, imbued either subliminally or subconsciously. I know how bad things were, it was absolutely appropriate in early 2009 to say to people, do not do this investment that could lose this amount of money because our liquidity constraints are so intense that that would be very damaging to the overall position of the University—a right decision to have made. If I’m an investor at HMC in 2009/2010 when liquidity across the University is still very tight, the swaps are still on and we’re still posting a lot of collateral, the central bank still has units invested with HMC [Harvard’s pool of centrally managed cash and other funds, much of which was invested in relatively illiquid endowment assets in the middle of that decade], if I’m going to invest, even if there’s an opportunity, I need to make sure that it does not show up on the downside if something goes bad, so that means a sizing issue. I need to do it on a smaller scale. As a direct result, it’s not going to show up on the upside if things go well. So, there’s a conviction-to-scale mismatch.

If we think about one sort of explanatory variable about why others recovered in a different way than we did over the last five years, it’s the conviction-to-scale mismatch. Even if we were making the same decisions, we were doing trades in 50 or 100 lots for a $30-billion endowment and others were doing 100 to 200 lots for a $20-billion endowment, which is probably appropriate. Say we wanted to do a one-percent investment in a high-conviction manager or asset, we were doing a quarter- to half-percent investments where others were doing one- to one-and-a-quarter-percent investments, so that is something that we need to shift.

I talk a lot about conviction and building conviction to scale. The natural follow-up question would be, how does one build conviction? That’s about investment debate, dialogue, challenge—and that speaks to reinvigorating the investment discourse at HMC, introducing the investment committee, reengaging with a lot of external managers, peer institutions, et cetera. There’s a whole range of really engaging and fascinating and interesting things that we’re doing, that all investors love doing, that we can now do because we’re in that position where we do want to build conviction—and if we do, we can do things in the appropriate scale.

When I use that analogy, people have often said, does that mean it was conservative and now you’re going to be aggressive? I said, no. Now, we’re just going to take advantage of the appropriate risks when the opportunities present themselves. I’ve been very clear to the board and very clear to the company that we’re not doing a hypercorrection here. This shift is not one of now we just do things bigger and take more risks; it’s just getting back to the appropriate investment culture for HMC.

Rebuilding External Investment-Management Relationships

HM: On a specific point about execution and selection: in the most recent letter, you obviously talked about the disappointing results in absolute return [HMC’s category of assets invested in hedge funds]. Over time, HMC has done very well in managing public securities, and the things that stand out mostly relate to private equity and absolute return—some of the big categories of investments managed externally. Those typically had positive returns, but they’ve typically lagged other institutions’ performance in those classes. Holding aside the overall analysis you talked about, are there particular HMC concerns about access to such investments, manager selection, or other issues in private equity and absolute return?

Stephen Blyth: The answers are slightly different for each asset class, but they also have similarities. Let me broadly say one of the things that, again, is somewhat a manifestation of the response to the financial crisis: in the years following that, HMC retrenched significantly and in a number of ways. It was unable to give capital to subsequent funds from high-conviction managers simply because our liquidity constraints were so tense. We sold certain interests at a discount, as is well documented. As a result, the relationships with private-equity managers as a particular case were affected following the financial crisis. Again, I think those decisions, you could understand those being taken.

But the relationships that we have with the top-tier private-equity managers and venture-capital managers are just incredibly valuable. Those are assets that need to be managed and looked after in the same way we would look after financial assets. That’s an area that I personally, the executive team, the private-equity team are highly focused on—developing those relationships back to a place where they are valuable assets. That’s been a focus.

How does one go about building relationships? It takes time. Just putting my statistician hat back on, you can regress performance against a number of different explanatory variables. If the explanatory variable is the number of CEO turnovers, it’s very interesting. This year the bottom-performing Ivy League school is Cornell. I think it’s had more CEO turnovers than we have. But I had breakfast yesterday with Andy Golden [president of Princeton University Investment Company]. He’s been there 20 years. I’m the sixth CEO at HMC since 2005, including the two interims, Peter Nadosy and Rob Kaplan. Relationships can’t be optimized when there’s turnover in the CEO’s seat.

I’m the sixth CEO at HMC since 2005, including the two interims. Relationships can’t be optimized when there’s turnover in the CEO’s seat.

As you know, we have a newish head of private equity, Rich Hall, class of 1990. He reports directly to me. We talk about investment-management structure. He travels a lot and he and I and members of his team have been out both individually and in groups. This is groundwork. For instance, we went out to California in March and met nine or 10 general partners at venture-capital firms, all of whom we’re invested in, all of whom are Harvard graduates. We had dinner. My biggest stress was knowing what to wear because my wardrobe is just suits and jeans and T-shirts. They said, “Do not wear a suit.” It was just a great dinner because I was able to say, “This is who I am. This is what we’re planning at HMC. These relationships are valuable.”

We did the same with private equity in the summer: 13 private-equity managers in a room with our private-equity team, and, of course, there were individual meetings. The same with hedge-fund managers in New York: we went to see founders of some of the high-conviction hedge funds.

Building the relationship is so important for us to really develop conviction in the managers and understand—it just helps us in the execution of manager selection.

The question about those returns being positive but lagging—it relates to continuity of personal relationship and capital relationship. We’ve had gaps in both of those. All investment managers want their LPs [limited partners: the investors whose money they manage] to have a good relationship, to be able to discuss investments and so on. But they want them to be consistent capital partners with them. That’s something that we will strive to do in the future.

[By the way], I’m actually a believer in the value of an absolute-return portfolio [a subject of some debate in institutional-investment circles of late], and our absolute-return portfolio, especially in this kind of market environment with equities generally fully priced, private equity at high valuations, some venture capital at extreme high valuations, et cetera—so the value of the uncorrelated return stream, if it exists, to me is only higher in this environment.

Last year it performed poorly. It’s an interesting analog in the same way that there was a huge dispersion of returns across different asset classes and managers, across all endowment space: so some biotech funds were up 70 percent, some venture-capital firms were up almost 200 percent, some emerging-market equity funds returned minus 10 percent. It was the same within our absolute-return portfolio, we had a very large dispersion: some funds were doing extremely well, some funds were doing poorly, and overall we did poorly. But the value of that portfolio, to me, in this environment, of having an appropriate portfolio, is high.

Rethinking Asset Allocation

HM: When I reported on your letter in September, I think I misunderstood, or didn’t represent appropriately, the wide-ranging classes that you presented for HMC’s asset allocation for this fiscal year. Perhaps you want to talk through how you’re trying to move from certain kinds of asset “silos” toward different kinds of investment discussions across classes, and then applying that in a given year?

Stephen Blyth: Let’s talk about the new asset-allocation approach, its origins—not too much about the technicalities, but what it means in practice.

The origins are important. Again, the retrenchment that was necessary at HMC meant that we had not reviewed our asset-allocation approach thoroughly. We’ve actually reviewed it, but we have not completely overhauled it or taken a big-picture view. It’s not as if it was just put away and black-boxed for many years; I don’t want to mischaracterize it.

But to me, the process had become ossified in the sense that we were using a very standard mean-variance approach: put in capital-market assumptions, return assumptions, volatility assumptions, and correlation assumptions for the 12 or 13 asset classes, run it through a mean variance, optimize it to get an efficient frontier, and then either pick the required return and a risk comes out or pick a required risk and the return comes out. It was mathematically rigorous, but it had been ossified.

There are many problematic issues. One is that the inputs are highly uncertain. A five- or 10-year return assumption for a number of asset classes is just, who knows? Probably the most researched topic in financial economics is the equity-risk premia—we have the experts sitting up in Littauer, like [Olshan professor of economics] John Campbell, and [Bates professor] Luis Viceira at Harvard Business School. There are some researched topics, but if you think about what’s the 10-year return on natural resources or private equity, it’s hard.

As a statistician, I appreciate that estimating correlations is probably one of the hardest things for humans to do or understand.

But more problematic is, what are the covariances between them? As a statistician, I appreciate that estimating correlations is probably one of the hardest things for humans to do or understand. You can do it, obviously, just empirically from data, but the data are nonstationary; they change over time. It’s just highly uncertain: even if you had an estimate, the standard error of the estimate is vast. Purely just reviewing what we were doing, we realized it made no sense to come out with point estimates, individual numbers, for the individual asset classes, because there was vast uncertainly about them.

One of the things that I remember clearly was my first day on the job here, the second of January, which was a University holiday. There were about 20 people here. Then on Monday when I came in, there were 270 people here and that morning, I brought in Jake Xia, our chief risk officer and 20-year veteran of Morgan Stanley, with a Ph.D. from MIT, and I said, “We need to overhaul our asset-allocation approach,” and he said, “I totally agree.” So we started a project that was very thorough, led by Jake and his senior vice president, Mark Szigety, who has a D.B.A. from the business school. The three of us—mostly the two of them, I did little more than just adding direction—did a thorough review of the literature, of the experts, of peer institutions. There’s a vast literature. There are also many, many different approaches to asset allocation from the different institutional investors. I thought, okay, we’re taking on something really onerous here—this is a big mountain to climb.

I banned the phrase at HMC, “This is a good investment for the endowment but it doesn’t fit.” That to me is an oxymoron.

They did a great job and we had some direction as we went. First, we wanted something that was flexible at the end. We cannot have an answer that is just a point estimate, because we have to be incorporating uncertainty along the way. Second, we wanted something that did not prevent us from doing investments that were good for the endowment, so I banned the phrase at HMC, “This is a good investment for the endowment but it doesn’t fit.” That to me is an oxymoron. We also wanted to be more comfortable about any assumptions or forward projections. We needed to feel more confident about those than we did about this 13-by-13 covariance matrix, about which we had no confidence.

As we looked at the various approaches, there’s a very simple approach called a “reference portfolio.” It says, essentially, the capital markets are made up of 60 percent equities, 40 percent bonds, or 65 percent equities, 35 percent bonds. That’s your passive portfolio. Anything you do needs to beat that. If you’re going to deviate from 65/35, show me why it improves risk/return characteristics. That’s the reference portfolio.

The second approach was just pure bottoms-up or the “best-ideas” approach, which is just do what you think’s good: just look for great investments. I think there are some other institutional investors that do that.

There’s a third approach, which is different from where we are. It’s factor-based investing, where you look for where are risk premia? What are the factors that drive returns? That, itself, is a huge topic. What are the factors that generate returns? Those can be either standard risk premia, like equity risk premia, or they can be style factors, like value or momentum. One then maps your asset allocation in terms of factors as opposed to asset classes. It’s a different approach. There’s much debate there about, are factors asset classes or are asset classes factors? There’s a whole academic debate, but at least it’s a new way of looking at it.

So, we thought, there are lots of different advantages to all these methods. What came out in a period of several months is we distilled out a lot of the benefits of each of these different asset-allocation approaches, because we felt it was getting the best out of each of them.

First of all, we said, a reference portfolio is very simple: equities and bonds. But it’s too restrictive because you can’t actually span basic risk premia just from equities and bonds. It gets very complicated. How do you express a hedge-fund investment in terms of equities and bonds? So we said, can we expand the reference portfolio to have maybe five key risk drivers instead of two? That becomes more of a factor approach, so that’s why we ended up with the five factors: equities, bonds, credit, inflation, and currency. Then that allowed us to apply the rigor of mean-variance optimization to the five factors. To do that, we just need return and covariance assumptions for five factors rather than 13. It’s still a difficult estimation problem, but we can do that. That was the first stage: an optimal allocation of these five factors.

We do believe we can do better because we think there’s excess return in private equity, in venture capital, in hedge funds. If there weren’t, we wouldn’t be doing it.

However, we can implement those optimal five factors with a whole range of different asset classes. We might believe we can do no better than doing equities, bonds, credit, and inflation—but we do believe we can do better because we think there’s excess return in private equity, in venture capital, in hedge funds. If there weren’t, we wouldn’t be doing it.

So the next step is saying, of the return from, say, private equity, how much is explained by equities, bonds, credit, inflation, and currency; and how much is residual return and residual risk; and how much illiquidity is there? That’s what we call mapping the asset classes to the factors. We still have this five-factor base and then whatever [the investment], we map the asset classes to the factors.

It doesn’t have to be an asset class we’re mapping; it can be any investment we like. Here’s where the flexibility comes up. If we see some big investment where we are investing in land but we may be able to grow crops and then generate biomass that we can burn to generate electricity, what is that investment? It’s a whole lot of different things: it has private equity, it has energy, it has land, but in order to incorporate within our portfolio, all you need to do is take out the five systematic factors and understand what’s the residual return and residual risk.

Finally, there are obviously infinitely many portfolios that satisfy those five factors. That’s the “I” for “Indeterminate” in FIFAA [Flexible Indeterminate Factor-Based Asset Allocation, the name Blyth, Szigety, and Xia have given the process]. This method does not come up with one solution. This indeterminacy—I rather embrace it. What we said is, there are many what we call permissible portfolios, combinations of assets that give us the appropriate five factor risks—the appropriate equity, bond, credit, inflation, and currency risks—but have all sorts of other, different characteristics. Let’s just optimize for maximum residual return, minimal residual risk, and some illiquidity constraint. Even with all those, then there are many portfolios that will satisfy that.

An additional step that leads to the type of asset-allocation ranges described in the letter is an acknowledgment that this process has uncertainty—and how do we capture the uncertainty. What we wanted to do is explicitly capture the uncertainty, so we added error to the mapping of each asset class to the factors. We said, “Of course we don’t know exactly what that mapping is, so let’s put some error in there and then re-run the optimization.” That will give you a range of possible portfolios and explicitly give these ranges of the individual asset classes, which are the fifth and ninety-fifth percentiles. All we’re saying is that for the set of permissible portfolios, some of them have private equity at the maximum level and if they do, they’d probably have public equity much lower. There’s a whole range.

That gives us flexibility to operate, but then it behooves us now to actually think more deeply about our overall allocation of our capital. Before, if you had a point estimate—12 percent domestic equity, 11 percent foreign equity, 9 percent emerging market equity [an asset allocation like that in HMC’s prior “policy portfolio”]—if you state that, even if the board or our mandate says you can deviate from that (which it does, as it should), it’s hard to deviate from that because of the natural pull to that [allocation]. Whereas if we’re explicitly saying we have this flexibility, all these portfolios are permissible, it allows us now to incorporate the best-ideas concept. I think that’s something that is going to be additive going forward. We no longer have things falling between the gaps. We’ll no longer be having, “This does not fit in my bucket” or “My bucket is full; I can’t fit any more in.” Things that are just suboptimal from an investment perspective yet are natural results from a fixed asset allocation are no longer in play. That’s such a shift to actually get people thinking along these lines; it takes time. The investment committee is the driver of all these decisions, but the mechanisms for implementing this are still being developed.

HM: And then you have a more refined allocation for the year, a tighter allocation than these ranges?

Stephen Blyth: Correct. That basically tells people where we feel we can deviate given the capital-market assumptions to the main factors, given the mapping, and we will deviate from there as the opportunities present themselves.

A More Fruitful Investment-Management Organization

HM: In your letter, you then discussed the investment process, which obviously ties into the kind of culture you’ve been talking about: discussions across asset classes, collaborations, partnerships, and vehicles, new ways of doing things, and investing at scale. For a lay reader, can you give any examples?

Stephen Blyth: We have changed the investment-management structure at HMC in an important way. We’ve essentially taken out a layer of investment management. Under Jane Mendillo, I was head of public markets, Andy Wiltshire was head of alternative assets. Andy then had four asset classes reporting to him. I had public equities, public credit, public commodities, and public fixed income reporting to me. The debate across that second layer and what was then a third layer was low and to me suboptimal. When I became CEO, I didn’t replace myself. Andy retired and is now back in New Zealand, and I’m not replacing that head of alternative assets role. In some sense, as CEO, I dropped down to sit on top of the investment committee, which is now the portfolio-management heads. That means the discussion is less vertical and more horizontal just by construct. That changes the decision-making process significantly.

The discussion is less vertical and more horizontal just by construct. That changes the decision-making process significantly.

What does that mean in practice? For instance, one of the biggest shifts in the U.S. and world economy is shifts in energy production and energy supply, driven mostly by increased U.S. supply of crude oil but also natural gas. A significant impact on geopolitics is essentially the reversal of the pipeline. It used to be crude oil came through Louisiana, was piped up to Cushing, Oklahoma, and then distributed out. That’s been reversed because the U.S. is now exporting or will export liquefied natural gas (LNG), so the pipeline is now going down from Cushing and pipelines are reversing, going to the Gulf. There is an interesting investment opportunity about storage in the Gulf because they’re waiting for things to go out.

The whole dynamic is changing all the time: the story was LNG will completely decimate coal in Asia, which would be positive from an environmental point of view, but then coal has gotten so cheap that LNG needs to get cheaper. That is a huge shift in the U.S. and world economy.

It’s a huge shift in where capital goes. Think of that in isolation—we’re just going to look at debt of companies that are building LNG plants, or just equity of companies that are going to ship the LNG from the U.S. to Europe. It’s suboptimal. Having that cross dialogue—whether it’s in the private-equity space, debt, public equity, whether it’s with external managers—just understanding how that plays out across the capital structure and different asset classes, it’s incredibly important.

Another fascinating example is biotech, which is obviously a hugely transformative field. Prices of biotech stocks have been highly volatile for a number of reasons. It’s an incredibly volatile and tricky area. But if you think about the growth in biotechnology led by Harvard, MIT, Stanford, the things that the Wyss Institute [for Biologically Inspired Engineering, at Harvard] is doing, you think about that ecosystem from scientists at the Wyss coming up with an idea, getting the patent, maybe getting some funding internally for developing some ideas, then needing mid- to late-stage funding from venture capital, then needing public funding when they do the IPOs after clinical trial X, and then they need lab space. You can’t determine the value of the lab space without determining the whole ecosystem.

This is a very tangible example that we’ve had here, thinking about an investment where we’ll transform offices into labs in one of the big biotech hubs in the country. Then we said, we really need to know about the capital structure of all the companies who may be leasing the labs. Is it publicly funded? Is it venture-capital funded? Then we also need to know a bit about the science.

That discussion took place here. We just held a life-sciences roundtable, a really enjoyable afternoon where we had entrepreneurial faculty from Harvard and Stanford—all of them had set up companies or had developed patents. We had venture capitalists from the U.S. and China, all of whom had invested in mid- to late-stage biotech companies. We had public investors from the U.S. and India who had all invested in either late-stage or pharmaceutical companies, and we had real-estate developers from the east and west coasts who had all developed lab space in places like Kendall Square or South San Francisco and San Diego. That kind of interaction is essential in order to really understand the field. It’s important for HMC but also for developing connections with external constituents. [Professor of bioengineering] Don Ingber, the head of the Wyss, was there; I sat next to him. He said, that was fascinating, and I said, not as fascinating as it was to me. The discussion had a tangible effect on whether we invest in this substantial office building that we can convert into wet lab space near a cluster where demand for labs is incredibly high, but we need to be sure that the leases are going to be signed by mid-stage biotech companies whose funding will not dry up.

Personnel Changes

HM: A fact question. Obviously, Andy Wiltshire left and some other people have left. When people left in the last month, you said their portfolios had been unwound. Should we expect big changes in investments in natural resources or timber because of those departures?

Stephen Blyth: There’s a distinction. Andy retired. He and I are good mates—we go climbing each year, a big mountain out West. In July, we’re going to climb again.

First of all, the culture here is changing, the strategy is changing, the management structure is changing, the investment process is changing, the asset-allocation process is changing, and the compensation scheme will change. We are inevitably going to have change in personnel. We’re going to add people. I’m not sure whether there will be more turnover.

In natural resources, Andy retired and Alvaro Aguirre-Simunovic [natural-resources portfolio manager] resigned to pursue his own endeavors. In natural resources itself, I’ll say the following: Natural resources plays an incredibly important part of the Harvard portfolio for two economic reasons and one structural reason. One is it generates real return. Second is it’s highly uncorrelated with other risk factors: obviously trees grow when stocks go down and trees grow when stocks go up. Almonds grow when stocks go down and then when they go up. Those two elements make it a very attractive asset class if suitably priced. Third, the structure of our capital means that investors can really only be involved in natural resources if you have a long-term portfolio period because once you plant the trees, depending on how you rotate them, you may want to take out thinnings, you may want to do it for pulp, but if you want to do hardwood, that’s decades. That will be important.

However, there is an opportunity now for us to reassess the natural-resources portfolio and that’s what we’re doing, given the departures. We’ve lost talent, so we will add people into natural resources. We will be hiring for natural resources and we will have a significant natural-resources portfolio.

Are there areas you want to concentrate on? Are there areas you want to de-emphasize? Is there some diversification we ought to be doing? Is this portfolio right for the future?

Actually, it was a good opportunity to assess the portfolio as it is. Are there areas you want to concentrate on? Are there areas you want to de-emphasize? Is there some diversification we ought to be doing? Is this portfolio right for the future? It’s done very well for us over the last 10 years. As you can see from the numbers, the returns have been much lower over the last five years, but over the last 10 years, natural resources has generated 9.7 percent and the endowment 7.6 percent, so you can’t say it’s a low-returning uncorrelated asset class.

Certainly, there are two things that are relevant to natural resources looking forward. One is low commodity prices, and the second is low inflation. If we’re in a deflation environment and you have protection against inflation, then it’s not going to perform. That will be a reassessment in that portfolio.

There were two departures, Satu Parikh [in commodities] and Marco Barrozo [in fixed income], both from the public side on the trade floor. We may replace them in-kind; we may replace with someone different. They’re both talented people. Marco I hired eight years ago, Satu I hired four years ago.

Hybrid Management and the Cost of Managing Harvard’s Endowment

HM: Do you anticipate HMC maintaining the hybrid model with 40 percent or 50 percent of funds managed internally and the rest externally? Do you still think you’re getting the same kinds of cost advantages from internal management that HMC has reported historically? I ask that because language to that effect was missing in the report this year when it’s been there all the time.

Stephen Blyth: I tried to change all the language. I was hoping much would be different from last time.

Right now, we have just under 60 percent of our assets managed externally. We have approximately 15 percent what I call direct investments, where we own assets essentially ourselves. And we have about 25 percent of the assets managed on this trade floor. That has not shifted much in the last two or three years. The direct component has gone up, certainly, driven by direct real-estate investment, which has been a very successful venture.

As a statistician, I smile because if you look at the last eight years, endowments that have a hybrid model versus endowments that did not have a hybrid model, the one endowment with a hybrid model was bottom quartile against the other 10. That would argue against. However, of course, in the period from 1995 to 2005, which were the years where Harvard was top quartile, it had 70-plus percent of its assets managed internally. These arguments are of course way too simple.

It’s also the case that institutions with assets under management of $40 billion-plus, where we are, are building up internal capability because they cannot get appropriate scale or quality with external managers. I’m thinking about the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan fund or the Canadian Pension Plan. Obviously CPP’s assets are now much bigger than ours, maybe $C270 billion—I believe they have gone from a handful of investment staff to a thousand investment staff, with a significant proportion of that managing money internally in a similar way that we do, with direct investments and with internal capabilities in public markets to generate out-performance.

At the recent Harvard Business School asset-management conference, some people said, you should do way more internally, and some people said, you should do way more externally, which would probably mean we’re about right.

There is a conceptual issue: at a certain scale, is it necessary to have internal capability because one can’t get scale in external management? At the recent Harvard Business School asset-management conference, some people said, you should do way more internally, and some people said, you should do way more externally, which would probably mean we’re about right.

I have no target, I’m agnostic about target. There’s no, “We want to get this amount internally” or “We want to get this amount externally.” This is an obvious statement: we just want to make sure we have the best investors in everything we’re doing. If we have an external manager who’s not good enough, we're going to redeem. If we have an internal portfolio-management team that is not good enough, we will have to upgrade. It’s symmetric.

I strongly believe that if we have the appropriate relationships with external managers and direct-investment capabilities and internal-platform capabilities, that must stochastically dominate—i.e., be better in all states of the world than just having external relationships, since we have the option to do internal and to do direct. However, that only holds if having an internal platform does not deteriorate or diminish our ability to develop excellent relationships with external managers. It’s a question of culture; it’s a question of time allocation.

One thing I’m very aware of, having come up from the internal public side, which has done well and I do believe adds value, we want to assure that the amount of time my executive team, I myself, and the investment committee, think and spend on the internal capabilities does not diminish our ability to execute in [external] manager selection (right from your first question). I don’t think it should. I think there are other factors that have affected our manager selection, such as turnover and so on and these interrupted relationships.

The fixed-income team here has had a tremendous track record since HMC was formed. Dave Mittleman and Maurice Samuels [highly successful, and highly compensated, HMC domestic and foreign fixed-income managers a decade and more ago] had a tremendous track record. The international fixed-income portfolio here has had a tremendous track record over the last nine years and continues to do so. It’s outperformed its market benchmark by 650 basis points per annum for nine years in all sorts of market environments. If those people were doing that job with the same amount of capital, but sat somewhere else externally, they would be paid more; that’s just factually correct.

The reason it’s not in my letter is that ultimately we have to look at the overall performance of the fund, and I think it was you who made the totally valid point—it’s all very well if our cost of management is low, but if our returns are actually lower than others, then our gross investment returns [before investment-management expenses] must have been even lower. It’s totally true. But it is also true that we have cost benefit and many other advantages that come from having assets managed and owned by Harvard, like flexibility, liquidity, et cetera.

HM: But it’s net returns.

Stephen Blyth: Net returns. Ultimately, it’s all about those investment objectives. I can’t say, “I’ve missed our investment objectives but I’ve saved this amount of money in management fees,” right?  Our investment objectives do not include minimized management fees. They’re not there. But it is true that our returns in fixed income would have been lower if we’d been managing externally. Equally, our returns in direct real estate would have been lower if they’d been managed externally. That’s even with the head of real estate who will be paid well and the heads of fixed income who will be paid well. Their compensation would have been much higher outside.

When Harvard Management Company (HMC) president and CEO Stephen Blyth reported on endowment investment returns last fall, he bluntly described declining performance; laid out a new mission statement and investment goals; detailed a new asset-allocation model; and sketched changes in operations and compensation. In November, he invited Harvard Magazine to HMC’s offices to discuss these changes in depth. Blyth directly addressed an altered investment environment that is reducing returns; University constraints in the wake of the 2008-2009 financial crisis that limited investing options; and other aspects of HMC’s execution that affected endowment performance. He also reviewed the cultural changes under way that aim to put HMC on a post-crisis footing, in pursuit of better investment results. The full transcript of the conversation is available here. Highlights follow.

•On the investing environment: HMC’s “10-year rolling average real return declined from the double digits to just over between 5 percent and 6 percent annually. That is highly related to the fact that interest rates have declined dramatically…Ten-year, essentially risk-free real rates have declined from 4.5 percent to 0.6 percent….In order to generate 5 percent real return 10 years ago, you could just buy mostly TIPS [inflation-adjusted bonds] and then take a little bit of risk. Today, you need TIPS plus 4 percent of real return” from taking risk.

•On the University’s constraints, and their effect on endowment investments: At a town hall meeting with his staff last winter, Blyth said, “[L]et’s recognize that Harvard had a tough war, had a very difficult financial crisis, and its liquidity position was worse than other comparable institutions for a number of reasons….”

He subsequently amplified: “[I]t was absolutely appropriate in early 2009 to say to people, do not do this investment that could lose this amount of money because…that would be very damaging to the overall position of the University….If I’m an investor at HMC in 2009/2010…, even if there’s an opportunity, I need to make sure that it does not show up on the downside if something goes bad, so that means a sizing issue. I need to do it on a smaller scale. As a direct result, it’s not going to show up on the upside if things go well. So, there’s a conviction-to-scale mismatch.…

“[W]e were doing trades in 50 or 100 lots for a $30-billion endowment and others were doing 100 to 200 lots for a $20-billion endowment….Say we wanted to do a one-percent investment in a high-conviction manager or asset, we were doing a quarter- to half-percent investments where others were doing one- to one-and-a-quarter-percent investments, so that is something that we need to shift.”

•On changing HMC’s culture:“[T]he first thing I did here…was set the new narrative for HMC. I viewed it as…not drawing a line under the financial crisis, but at least starting a new paragraph or new chapter.” Having recognized prior constraints, he continued, “Let’s just…realize that our job is to improve investment performance.

“Interestingly, there was a sense of relief from the organization that that was just said publicly internally. This is the new path. This is about moving from recovering…to competing.”

•On relationships with external investment managers:“HMC retrenched significantly and in a number of ways. It was unable to give capital to subsequent funds from high-conviction managers….We sold certain interests at a discount, as is well documented. As a result, the relationships with private-equity managers as a particular case were affected following the financial crisis.…

“But the relationships that we have with the top-tier private-equity managers and venture-capital managers are just incredibly valuable. Those are assets that need to be managed and looked after in the same way we would look after financial assets. That’s an area that I personally, the executive team, the private-equity team are highly focused on—developing those relationships back to a place where they are valuable assets.”

•On a more flexible asset-allocation model:“[I]f we’re explicitly saying we have this flexibility, all these portfolios are permissible, it allows us now to incorporate the best-ideas concept. I think that’s something that is going to be additive….We’ll no longer be having, ‘This does not fit in my bucket’ or ‘My bucket is full; I can’t fit any more in.’ Things that are just suboptimal from an investment perspective…are no longer in play.”

•On reorganizing to foster investment decisions:“We have changed the investment-management structure at HMC in an important way. We’ve essentially taken out a layer of investment management.…I was head of public markets….[with] public equities, public credit, public commodities, and public fixed income reporting to me. The debate across that second layer and what was then a third layer was…suboptimal. When I became CEO, I didn’t replace myself.…and I’m not replacing the head of alternative assets [who retired].…[A]s CEO, I dropped down to sit on top of the investment committee, which is now the portfolio-management heads. That means the discussion is less vertical and more horizontal just by construct. That changes the decision-making process significantly.”

•On HMC’s hybrid model of investing assets internally and externally:“I have no target….There’s no, ‘We want to get this amount internally’ or ‘We want to get this amount externally.’ …We just want to make sure we have the best investors in everything we’re doing. If we have an external manager who’s not good enough, we’re going to redeem. If we have an internal portfolio-management team that is not good enough, we will have to upgrade.”

For background coverage, see “Endowment Gain—and Gaps,” November-December 2015, page 22, and “Harvard Endowment Rises to $37.6 Billion on 5.8 Percent Investment Return.”

As legal education and the profession face substantial change—with law graduates’ careers developing in increasingly varied, often global, contexts—Harvard Law School (HLS) kicked off its “Campaign for the Third Century” on October 23, becoming the last school to unveil its fundraising ambitions within the University’s $6.5-billion capital campaign. At the celebratory dinner following afternoon speeches and panel discussions that hinted at transformations in practice and pedagogy, campaign co-chair James A. Attwood Jr., J.D.-M.B.A. ’84, announced a $305-million campaign goal—and revealed that the development staff had not been idle during the protracted “silent phase” of fundraising: $241 million (79 percent) had already been given or pledged.

HLS priorities include financial aid and clinical education, both deemed critical to the school’s mission of advancing justice, increasingly among the underserved. Since her appointment in 2009, Dean Martha Minow said in an earlier interview, the school has nearly tripled spending on financial aid and loan forgiveness. Meanwhile, clinical education, which gives students hands-on experience, often through work with low-income clients, has become more important in the curriculum, despite the added expense of its low student-to-faculty ratios.

Increasingly, graduates enter fields outside the legal profession.

Increasingly, graduates enter fields outside the legal profession. As if to illustrate, U.S. senator Mark Warner, J.D. ’80, of Virginia, a businessman (he was an early investor in Nextel) and later a politician, kicked off the launch-day luncheon by saying, “I’ve never practiced a day of law.” After lunch, the assembly of alumni, faculty, and students broke up to attend presentations on international human rights, corporate governance, the making of a civil-rights lawyer, and the school’s veterans legal clinic (founded in 2012 with twin goals of pedagogy and service). TED-type faculty talks, 10 minutes or less each, followed. In the evening, President Drew Faust touched on HLS’s history (its bicentennial is in 2017) and future, noting its impact in producing presidents, senators, Supreme Court justices, and CEOs. “We need the Law School and the extraordinary leaders it creates,” she said. “We need the clarity that it brings to confusing and divisive times. We need its capacity to civilize, and we need lawyers wise in their calling.”

Noting the school’s growing number of international students, Dean Minow touted the global reach of its skills-based curriculum. “The value of high-quality legal education, the need for legal order, have never been more apparent. The hunger for justice around the world has never been greater….We do and we must include the imperative of advancing justice in our core mission, in our reform efforts, and our preparation of students” so that they can “solve hard problems and imagine better worlds.”

For more on the campaign launch, and the challenges facing law schools, see “Harvard Law Launches $305-Million Campaign”.

The Campaign, Comprehensively

With HLS’s goal now public, the nominal allocation of objectives under The Harvard Campaign’s umbrella lines up this way: Faculty of Arts and Sciences (including nonbuilding priorities for engineering and applied sciences), $2.5 billion; Business School, $1.0 billion; Medical School, $750 million; Kennedy School, $500 million; School of Public Health, $450 million; HLS, $305 million; Graduate School of Education, $250 million; Graduate School of Design, $110 million; Radcliffe Institute, $70 million; Divinity School, $50 million, Dental School, $8 million—a total of nearly $6 billion.

That would make the central administration parts of the campaign, and goals not otherwise associated with a school, a half-billion dollars. These include priorities such as the engineering and applied sciences complex in Allston—some part of which might well be funded with debt; financial aid and other critical support for schools with alumni largely clustered in lower-paying professions; cross-school scholarly and pedagogical collaborations; and projects such as the conversion of part of Holyoke Center into Smith Campus Center.

Since the last progress report (“$6 Billion-Plus,” November-December 2015, page 20), two other schools have detailed their results. The Kennedy School said it had secured gifts totaling $460 million as of last September 30; its extensive campus expansion, previously reported as budgeted at about $125 million (for which fundraising was to have been completed before breaking ground), now is shown as having realized $90 million in support toward a goal of $155 million. The medical school reported fundraising of $475 million as of September 30—63 percent of the goal. Gifts and pledges to support research and discovery, the largest campaign aim at $500 million, have reached $318 million; some $37 million has been realized toward the $160 million sought for “education,” as the school implements its new M.D. course of study (see“Rethinking the Medical Curriculum,” September-October 2015, page 17). The campaign’s conclusion, it was disclosed in November, will rest with a new dean.

Klarman, Cabot, and Library Largesse

Meanwhile, the fruits of donor support continue to appear. The business school—with Tata Hall open and Chao Center construction well along (both are focused on executive education)—has filed the plans for Klarman Hall and the associated “G2 Pavilion.” The two-part project will yield a new 1,000-seat auditorium, with contemporary communications and media gear (81,100 square feet of new construction). Once that is built, 18,000 to 24,000 square feet of meeting and classroom space will be erected separately, in part on the site of Burden Hall, the 1971 auditorium designed by architect Philip Johnson ’27, B.Arch. ’43. The naming gift, from Seth Klarman, M.B.A. ’82, and Beth Klarman, was announced in June 2014. The work will also yield an enlarged central campus green. Construction is tentatively planned from early this year until August 2018—preceding the engineering and science center across Western Avenue. The latter complex, simpler and smaller than the four-building design being pursued before the financial crisis, has been shorn of meeting and conference facilities, so Klarman Hall represents another possible synergy between the business and engineering schools.

Back to brick: a rendering of the Business School’s Klarman Hall
Courtesy of Harvard Business School

In Cambridge, the faculty group responsible for reenvisioning the undergraduates’ Cabot Science Library has unveiled a “design brief” for redoing the first floor of the Science Center, integrating the library, Greenhouse Café, and courtyards “to create a dynamic, 24-hour student commons and a technology-integrated library,” complete with “mobile discovery bar.” Construction is to begin after Commencement; the work is funded by Penny Pritzker ’81, who was slated for a leadership role in the campaign before her appointment as U.S. Secretary of Commerce.

Cabot Science Library and environs, reimagined for today’s student researchers
Rendering by Mack Scogin Merrill Elam Architects

The library system more generally is also in campaign mode. Sarah Thomas, vice president for the Harvard Library and University Librarian, reported to the Faculty of Arts and Sciences in early November that the system had weathered the difficult and even demoralizing transition to a shared administrative system, new financial model, and unitary collecting and services begun in 2012. According to figures provided by the library system, its fiscal year 2009 and 2015 expenditures and full-time equivalent staffing were $123 million and $111 million, and 1,094 people and 741, respectively. Those changes reflect both the transfer of functions (human resources, technology, and so on) to other parts of the University, and consolidations, retirements, and downsizing. Expenditures on materials were $46.5 million in the earlier year, and $45.9 million last year—a rising share of the budget. Now, the library system is pursuing a $150-million campaign aimed at collections, spaces, staff, digitization, and preservation; $52 million has been secured, Thomas reported. She is proceeding on projects ranging from the Cabot makeover and information services for the new engineering complex to a prospective purchase of space in a depository facility in Princeton shared with that university, Columbia, and the New York Public Library; given its continuing acquisitions, Harvard’s library system contemplates exhausting the storage space in its own Massachusetts depository within the next several years.