Harvard and eight peer universities filed a friend-of-the-court brief with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) on Monday urging the board not to require private universities to recognize graduate-student labor unions. The brief argues that the relationship between graduate students and universities should remain academic, not managerial, and that requiring universities to recognize student labor unions “would significantly damage private sector graduate education in this country.” 

Harvard joined Brown, Cornell, Dartmouth College, MIT, the University of Pennsylvania, Princeton, Stanford, and Yale on the brief. Columbia University, the only Ivy League school that did not participate, is directly involved with a case now before the NLRB that could overturn existing precedent and force private universities to recognize labor unions formed by graduate students. The National Right to Work and Legal Defense Foundation, a conservative organization that opposes mandatory union membership, also filed a brief against student unionization in the case. 

“Both collective bargaining and arbitration are, by their very nature, adversarial,” the brief filed by Harvard and peer schools argues. “They clearly have the potential to transform the collaborative model of graduate education to one of conflict and tension.” The brief also maintains that nothing has changed, legally or circumstantially, that should call for a change in the NLRB’s position on graduate-student unionization.

The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) and the National Association of Graduate-Professional Students separately filed amicus briefs urging the NLRB to grant graduate students collective bargaining rights. “Throughout the American economy, employers and their lawyers are devising methods to manage labor forces performing the company's core services while avoiding the legal responsibilities inherent in the employment relationship,” the AAUP's brief argues. “The fact that graduate student assistants have an educational relationship with the university does not mean they are not also employees when performing the work of teaching or research for which they are paid.” 

The case’s outcome hinges on whether graduate students engaged in teaching and research should be considered students who complete teaching appointments as part of their academic training, or employees with collective bargaining rights. The NLRB ruled in the former direction in a 2004 case involving Brown, overturning a 2000 decision that had granted graduate students collective bargaining rights. The board agreed to consider the question again last year, in cases involving Columbia and the New School, and is widely believed likely to rule in favor of employee status.

In a message to faculty, Michael D. Smith, dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, wrote, “The decisions in these cases would affect graduate students at Harvard and at every private university. We believe that graduate students join a university as students, not as employees.”

The case comes amid movements to form student labor unions at Harvard, Yale, and other prominent universities. The Harvard Graduate Students Union (HGSU) has gathered signatures in favor of unionizing from a majority of graduate students whom they consider workers—those who teach or work in labs as part of their degree programs.

“I'm hopeful that the NLRB will make the right choice and restore graduate workers’ collective bargaining rights,” said HGSU organizer Sam Klug, a doctoral candidate in history. “We're not surprised, but we are disappointed that Harvard chose to file this brief, and we're disappointed that the Harvard administration is standing against the majority of graduate student employees who have expressed their desire to form a union.”  

HGSU organizers argue that students deserve to have a voice in University decisions that affect them, and that an academic relationship with the university is not mutually exclusive of a labor relationship. They also suggest that a union contract would benefit both students and the University by creating clear expectations and working conditions. “A contract would create baselines and standards that can only improve the health of the relationship [between students and faculty], so that you can focus on academic issues,” HGSU organizer Aaron Bekemeyer, a doctoral candidate in history, said in an interview.  

New York University (NYU) is the only private university to voluntarily recognize a student labor union. Harvard’s amicus brief cites the example of NYU, arguing that student unionization there “demonstrates the burdensome and disruptive effect such bargaining has on graduate education.” NYU's union has filed grievances concerning the selection of teachers for particular courses, which, the brief argues, undermined the university's ability to make academic decisions. NYU’s union also has been cited by HGSU, which argues that collective bargaining has helped graduate students there secure better pay and benefits.

Should the NLRB grant employee status to graduate students, the University’s brief maintains, the status of doctoral candidates ought to be considered separately from that of master’s and college students in teaching and research positions. “Few private sector institutions would be inclined to make these opportunities available if they were accompanied by an obligation to bargain about such things as workload or financial aid,” the brief says. 

Read more coverage of the movement to form a graduate student labor union at Harvard, and recent changes to graduate student benefits. 

Although the University has not issued a year-end 2015 update, it appears that The Harvard Campaign has become the largest-grossing higher-education fundraising effort on record. Indeed, individual schools’ results (see “The Schools’ Status,” below) suggest that the campaign overall is close to its nominal goal of $6.5 billion.

At the public launch, in September 2013, the fundraising effort had already secured $2.8 billion of prior gifts and pledges. Campaign leaders, full of animal spirits, vowed they would be able to exceed the unified total. They obviously knew whereof they spoke; in short order, the fundraisers logged these milestones:

• $5 billion as of the end of 2014 (meaning the campaign had raised gifts and pledges of $2.2 billion during the first 15 months of its public phase); and
• $6 billion as of last June 30 (a further billion dollars in the ensuing six months).

Based on partial results from schools, more than $200 million has been committed since then, and fundraising activities continue at full speed. In fact, the next “Your Harvard” gala is scheduled for this evening on the Harvard Business School campus, before the Greater Boston home crowd. Even beyond such headline benefactions as a $150-million gift earmarked mostly for undergraduate financial aid, and the $350-million and $400-million endowment pledges for public health and engineering and applied sciences, respectively (the stuff of fundraisers’ dreams, if not anything they can confidently count on in advance), the momentum is impressive.

The new, unofficial tally puts Harvard’s campaign atop the $6.2-billion Stanford Challenge (not adjusted for inflation), concluded at the end of 2011, as the largest higher-education fund drive of all time. (Stanford, of course, is not resting on its laurels; it has subsequently had mini-campaigns for undergraduate education and its university hospital, and on February 23 announced gifts of $400 million, $100 million, and $50 million for a new campus-based graduate- and professional-student leadership program, a sort of Rhodes-Marshall-Gates-Schwarzman scholars program in Palo Alto, to be led by its retiring president, John Hennessy; more than $700 million of the planned $750-million endowment is in hand.)

In an environment of some public, and congressional, questioning of private institutions’ endowments, Harvard is maintaining a low profile about how much the campaign has raised. Nor does there appear to be any appetite for raising the marquee number, when the subject is broached, perhaps because of recent publicity about the share of higher-education philanthropy flowing to a relatively select cohort of institutions. Instead, the mantra is to focus on the academic priorities established during planning for the capital campaign—and on seeing to it that they are in fact fully funded, if at all possible.

Goals with Three Years To Go

With the campaign still scheduled to proceed through the end of 2018, University and school development officers and their armies of volunteers have almost three years to go to try to ensure that every school meets its individual goal, plus the overarching Harvard objectives. Among the latter, these in particular loom large: endowments for financial aid; construction of the engineering and sciences complex in Allston; undergraduate House renewal; and support for basic science.

Financial aid. The Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) earmarked about one-quarter of its initial $2.5-billion goal, or roughly $600 million, to endow undergraduate aid, a priority that was the beneficiary of that $150-million gift and other substantial commitments. Nonetheless, fundraising for financial aid continues for the College, graduate-student fellowships, and no doubt in many of the professional schools. The University campaign goal for financial aid and “the student experience” (which may include projected investments in athletic facilities such as renovation of Harvard Stadium and a new basketball venue) was 25 percent of the initial $6.5-billion target, or some $1.6 billion. And even though supporters have traditionally rallied to financial aid, it is easier in some schools than others to secure substantial scholarship and fellowship funds, given their graduates’ differing capacities to make gifts proportional to the identified need.

Capital projects. Fundraising for the College’s House-renewal program continues apace. The project has always depended on raising huge sums, and building renovation is a notoriously difficult goal. But as supporters and prospective donors have been able to see the physical effects of completely redoing a House (like Dunster, reopened for this academic year) and take in student reaction to their reenvisioned quarters, progress is apparently being made.

Similarly, now that the Allston engineering and applied sciences facility has been designed—with renderings available and an academic program taking shape—the vision becomes a tangible plan with which to seek philanthropic support.

Basic science. Unlike the building priorities, which were identified early in the campaign but have evolved as bricks were pointed up and architects drafted their plans, fundraising for science has emerged with a new focus in the last couple of years. Until last year, the research budget of the National Institutes of Health (the major source of federal sponsored support) had been held essentially level for several years, steadily eroding in purchasing power. For all the advances in appliedscience (and Harvard Campaign objectives of hundreds of millions of dollars for new engineering and applied sciences faculty positions and research funds, plus the Allston complex), that meant an increasingly difficult search for basic-science support in FAS, the Medical School, and elsewhere. Hence recent fundraising emphasis emphasis on securing support for basic research, cutting-edge inquiries that have not yet matured sufficiently to win more conventional competitive grants, and the substantial costs of setting up young investigators’ laboratories.

Other aims. Efforts are also under way to raise funds for the library system (which has wishes amounting to $150 million); for teaching innovations (like the Harvard Initiative for Learning and Teaching and online activities under HarvardX); and, for the first time in a University-wide capital campaign, for the arts.

The Schools’ Status

Data provided by the schools for their winter campaign totals (on dates ranging from December 31 and January 31 into February) indicate that they appear to have secured gifts and pledges of more than $200 million since the figures compiled for the report on the $6-billion milestone, published last fall. (Given varying reporting dates and the schools not reported here, the sum raised is certainly larger.) The following schools reported these recent fundraising tallies:

• Harvard Business School: as of January, nearly $925 million toward the $1-billion total outlined at the launch in April 2014 (when more than $600 million had already been received or pledged). Dean Nitin Nohria’s annual message to the school, just posted, cited remaining focal points: innovation in the MBA program; accelerating the development of the online HBX; increasing the number of endowed chairs for associate professors; and building programmatic bridges with the school of engineering and applied sciences in advance of its arrival in the neighborhood.
• Harvard Divinity School: $26.5 million committed as of February 15, more than halfway toward the $50-million goal announced in April 2014. The support has to date underwritten new professorships (including a chair in religion, business ethics, and the economic order, in cooperation with the business school), and the Buddhist Ministry Initiative. The most significant challenge on the agenda is renovating the center of campus, Andover Hall.
• Graduate School of Design: $77 million as of January 31, or 70 percent of the $110-million goal outlined in September 2014—when 63 percent of the total sought was already in hand or pledged (in part reflecting a portion of a major gift to fund the Center for Green Buildings and Cities). The school reports significant success in funding its research aims, focused on broadening “design thinking” internally and across Harvard; financial-aid funds remain a significant priority. The school, landlocked and squeezed for space, has also sought campaign support for facilities renovation and expansion.
• Harvard Graduate School of Education: $187.4 million as of January 31—75 percent of the $250-million goal unveiled in September 2014, and up from 44 percent at that date. Recent benefactions include support for By All Means, an initiative to help communities take a comprehensive view of schoolchildren’s lives in an effort to eliminate the link between socioeconomic status and academic achievement.
• Harvard Kennedy School: $489 million as of February 19—within 2 percent of the $500-million goal disclosed in May 2014, when about two-thirds of the money had been raised or pledged. A recent substantial gift will underwrite the Belfer Center’s cybersecurity project.
• Harvard Medical School: $512 million as of January 31, 68 percent of the $750-million goal publicized in November 2014 (when 50 percent of the target had been raised or pledged). Notable commitments include $44 million, given anonymously, to launch the Center for Primary Care, and $14-million and $12-million gifts for work in neuroscience and neuroengineering. Dean Jeffrey Flier, who is stepping down this summer, is focusing on renovation of teaching facilities as part of the school’s new M.D. curriculum; financial aid for M.D. and graduate student fellowships; and faculty growth in therapeutic and regulatory science, among other priorities.
• Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health: $696 million as of year-end 2015—robustly ahead of the $450-million goal publicized during its centennial year, in the fall of 2013, when just 37 percent of the funds sought had been committed during the campaign’s private phase. The outperformance reflects that $350-million gift of vitally important unrestricted endowment funds (for which the school was renamed); excluding that, the school would still have raised 77 percent of the funds it sought (and is no doubt still pursuing), despite the transition in its deanship.
• Radcliffe Institute: some 75 percent of its $70-million goal, up from 37 percent at its public launch in October 2013.

This list will be updated as other schools weigh in.

Award-winning actor, producer, businesswoman, and philanthropist Sarah Jessica Parker will speak at Harvard Law School’s (HLS) Class Day ceremony on Wednesday, May 25. The invitation is issued by the marshals of the graduating class of 2016.

Best known for her role as Carrie Bradshaw in the former HBO series Sex and the City, Parker has been an advocate for arts education, serving on the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities, working with The Turnaround Arts Initiative—a group that uses arts education as a tool to help turn around struggling schools—and aiding former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg with fundraising for public schools.  Parker will return to HBO later this year in the new television series Divorce, in which she stars and serves as an executive producer.

“We’ve seen unbelievable evidence of the difference in a child's daily life when you bring arts into a school,” Parker told The Belfast Telegraph this past fall. “With more arts, all of a sudden attendance goes up, kids pursue higher education...families are brought back into schools, which makes a big difference in the life of a child.”

The Class Day ceremony will take place from 2:30 to 4 p.m. on May 25 on Holmes Field at Harvard Law School. 

Toni Morrison, Litt.D. ’89, delivered her first Norton Lecture on March 2. Tickets to the event, which became available at noon that day, reportedly sold out within 30 minutes. An hour before the event, attendees shivered in the cold and clutched their tickets, standing in a line that snaked around the Memorial Church. Filling Sanders Theatre, the audience—which included students from local high schools and universities as well as members of the Harvard community—fell into a hushed silence as Morrison was wheeled onto the stage. When she took her place at its center, behind a table draped in red, they gave her a standing ovation.

“Shall we go?” asked Homi Bhabha, director of the Mahindra Humanities Center, inclining his head to her. With Morrison’s gestured go-ahead, Bhabha proceeded to introduce the Nobel laureate and Pulitzer Prize winner, likening her appearance on campus to that of Maria Callas singing Bellini. Callas was said to have effected “a subtle change in the weather” with her high E, he said, and so, too, would Morrison—“a force of nature”—cause Cambridge to feel “the sublime effects of climate change.” 

Introducing the lecture series, The Origin of Others: The Literature of Belonging, this first lecture was brief. Morrison began with an allusive personal anecdote, remembering how her “tar-black” great-grandmother, “majestic head of our family,” called Morrison and her sister impure, telling their mother, “Your children have been tampered with.” This, the author told the audience, was when she first began to learn that “Categories of difference are about power, and the necessity of control.”

She then discussed two literary attempts at “Romancing Slavery,” the title of her talk. Her first example was the diary of Thomas Thistlewood, an eighteenth-century plantation overseer in Jamaica, where amid the detached accounting of business transactions and activities in English, he recorded sexual assaults against slaves in a literary Latin. The next was a scene from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, in which Master George has dinner with Uncle Tom and Aunt Chloe. 

“How do you make it safe to enter black space?” Morrison asked. Stowe, she argued, participated in a kind of “literary protectionism” by giving the white character “excessive benign signs of safety.” The cottage is tiny and covered in flowers; on its dirt floor, the black children play and are thrown scraps of food from the dinner table—“an odd scene, I think designed to amuse”—and ultimately to “cosset” the white reader. 

The writer connected these readings to her own literary project, spanning her first book, The Bluest Eye, about “the harm of racial self-loathing,” and her most recent one, God Help the Child, about “the self-destruction of colorism.” And, she added, her novel-in-progress (emphasis hers) will engage the questions addressed in her upcoming lectures: “How does one move from the nonracial womb to the womb of racism?” and, “What is it, race, other than genetic imagination?” Morrison posited that racism offers the comfort of belonging. A stranger defines himself against the other, she suggested, “as a crowd-seeker is always the lonely one.” 

Morrison spoke for a little more than half an hour. While others might turn to science or politics for answers, “I look to literature for guidance,” she said, “and that’s what I’ll do.” Then she collected her glasses and slipped her rings back onto her fingers, and exited the stage.

In the coming weeks, Morrison will give five more lectures: “Being and Becoming the Stranger,” “The Color Fetish,” “Configurations of Blackness,” and “Narrating the Other,” concluding with “The Foreigner’s Home” on April 12. Morrison’s three talks in the 1990 William Massey Lectures in the History of American Civilization were later published by Harvard University Press as Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. Her analysis of how authors like Herman Melville, Willa Cather, and Mark Twain have tried to define the condition of being white became a classic work of American literary criticism. She has visited Harvard on several other occasions since: she was named a Radcliffe Medalist in 2007, and gave the 2012 Harvard Divinity School’s Ingersoll Lecture on Immortality, on the subject of altruism and “allowing goodness its own speech.”

Established in 1925, the Charles Eliot Norton professorship of poetry has been awarded to important figures in the arts, including T.S. Eliot, Igor Stravinsky, Jorge Luis Borges, and Nadine Gordimer. Morrison’s immediate predecessors were Orhan Pamuk, William Kentridge, and Herbie Hancock.

AFTER THREE MONTHS of deliberation, a committee of Harvard Law School (HLS) professors, students, and alumni recommended abandoning a controversial shield linked to slavery as the school’s official symbol Friday.

HLS’s shield displays the crest of the slaveholding Royall family, whose fortune endowed the school’s first faculty chair. Dean Martha Minow created the committee to study the shield in November, after portraits of African-American law professors hanging in Wasserstein Hall were found defaced with strips of black tape. A student group calling for the shield’s removal, Royall Must Fall, began organizing early last fall. Their demands gained currency after a wave of protests of racism on university campuses, at Harvard and elsewhere, during the last academic year. 

Reclaim Harvard Law School, a racial-justice group formed in the wake the defacement of the portraits in the fall, welcomed the recommendation to drop the shield on its Facebook page, but stressed that it would continue to call for larger reforms at HLS. Among the group's central and most ambitious demands are changes to the legal curriculum, which group members say does not adequately address the role of white supremacy in American legal history.

The report recommending dropping the shield discusses the Royall family’s connection to slavery and to HLS. Isaac Royall, Jr., who owned estates worked by slaves in the Caribbean and Massachusetts, left a bequest of land to Harvard upon his death in 1781, which was later sold to fund a law professorship. The shield was designed more than a century later, in 1936, but the committee did not find evidence that the Harvard Corporation knew the Royall family built its wealth on slave labor. Nonetheless, the report continues, “Few people in 1936 would have asked such questions…this reflects both the historical invisibility of African-Americans and the long-standing inability of modern Americans to acknowledge the centrality of slavery and its legacy in American history.”

“The Committee was unanimous in recognizing that modern institutions must acknowledge their past associations with slavery...For the Law School, this means reminding ourselves and others of the role of wealth derived from slave labor in its founding and using that knowledge as a spur to promote racial justice,” the report argues. “We cannot unsee what we now know, nor should we. The Law School would not today honor Isaac Royall and his bequest by taking his crest as its official symbol.” 

“We had to dig really deeply into the connection among the law school, the shield, and Isaac Royall,” said Professor Bruce Mann, who chaired the committee. “This was not a matter of anachronistically judging Isaac Royall, a man of the 18th century, by the standards of the 21st century. Instead, we were asking whether an institution in the the 21st century should be represented by a man of the 18th century, whose only legacy was his money.”

The committee solicited opinions from 1,000 HLS students, alumni, and staff in making its decision. Mann said the diverse responses did not fall along age or political divisions. “This was not a political issue, and I think the responses demonstrate that abundantly.”

Minow endorsed the committee’s recommendation in a message to the Harvard Corportation, which will make a final decision about the shield. “I endorse the recommendation to retire the shield because its association with slavery does not represent the values and aspirations of the Harvard Law School and because it has become a source of division rather than commonality in our community,” she wrote in a separate e-mail to the HLS community. “Whatever the Corporation decides about the shield, at HLS we will be committed to addressing our history, and ongoing questions of injustice within our community and beyond.”   

Despite its recommendation, the report takes a restrained approach to the Royall family’s history, disputing a claim made by some activists that the Royalls were responsible for the murder of 88 slaves involved in a revolt. 

Two of the committee’s 12 members, including Professor Annette Gordon-Reed, one of those whose portrait was defaced in November, wrote a dissenting opinion that argued that abandoning the shield would distance HLS from a legacy of slavery that it should instead confront honestly. “Disaggregating the benefit achieved from the labor of the enslaved—the money accrued from the sale of Royall land—from the ‘burdens’ of being constantly reminded of from whence that money came, and of letting people outside the community know from whence it came, would be an abdication of our responsibility to the enslaved and a missed opportunity to educate,” the dissent argues. 

Gordon-Reed distinguishes her position from that of critics who condemn student activists for demanding that colleges repudiate offensive language and symbols. “Certainly, the blanket condemnation—‘these kids today!’—is just a case of the well-known practice of the older generation looking at the youngsters and finding them wanting...Many complaints about offensive symbols are totally legitimate,” she wrote in an e-mail. But unlike symbols like the Nazi and Confederate flags, which were created and wielded as symbols of oppression, she believes the Royall family’s crest can be reimagined to remember Harvard’s link to slavery, and even to recognize the enslaved that created Isaac Royall's wealth. 

Mann, himself a historian, along with other committee members, said abandoning the shield would not mean erasing Harvard’s connections to slavery. “Historians have a professional and moral imperative to confront the past unflailingly,” he said. “Retaining the shield would be an impediment to engaging that part of our past.” Many American institutions, he pointed out, have benefitted from wealth built on slavery, which they can interrogate without being captive to slavery’s symbols.

The committee’s recommendation follows the announcement last week that the College would drop the “House master” title—which House heads and some students felt alluded to slavery—in favor of “faculty dean.” Similar symbolic changes are taking place at peer universities. Princeton announced last fall that it would stop using “master” in its residential college system. Yale affiliates are debating doing the same, as well as renaming Calhoun College, a residential college named for white supremacist Yale alumnus John C. Calhoun.

But Mann stressed that the changes taking place at HLS are not merely symbolic. “If it’s simply dropping the symbol and not any more, then we have failed,” he said, pointing to Dean Minow’s efforts to draw students’ attention to the Royall family’s connection to Harvard. “We remind incoming students that lawyers must do more than merely know and follow the law. They must ensure that the law itself is just.”

A University task force charged with making recommendations for the prevention of sexual assault at Harvard issued its final report today. It calls for changing the campus culture (including such fixtures as single-sex undergraduate final clubs) and for speedily developing plans for sexual-assault training for all University students.

The report recommends that:

• The University develop a plan before the beginning of the fall semester (emphasis added) to implement sexual-assault training and education.

• Each school’s plan should include mandatory annual training for all students in the prevention of sexual assault (emphasis added).

• The training should cover values, alcohol use, and healthy sexuality as well as policies, and should be developed with student input so that it resonates with the student body.

• The president should create a new position within the Office of the Provost to oversee this work and “be responsible for coordinating and supporting the work of OSAPR [Office of Sexual Assault Prevention and Response], the Title IX office, and the Schools in addressing sexual assault and sexual harassment.”

• The University should allocate additional resources to the Bisexual, Gay, Lesbian, Transgendered and Queer (BGLTQ) community, in which the incidence of sexual assault is disproportionately higher.

• The president should direct the College to address the problem of final clubs and Greek organizations by taking actions that result in “expanded membership practices that include all genders.”

Because the report calls for a change in campus culture, it “not only addresses specific factors that increase the risk of sexual assault,” according to its authors, “but also considers what it means to be a citizen of this campus and the nature of our responsibilities to one another.”

In a letter addressed to the Harvard community, President Drew Faust lauded the report for providing a strong empirical base on which to ground actions and, in the future, to measure their success. In particular, she cited its “recommendation for more regular, values-based training” for recognizing “that students help shape—and to a significant extent are responsible for—the cultures in which they live, play, and study.”

She also drew attention to the “clear and powerful call for the University to address issues presented by final clubs,” noting that these relate “not only to sexual assault but also to the implications of gender discrimination, gender assumptions, privilege, and exclusivity on our campus. The need to bolster support for members of the BGLTQ community is important because of what a sexual-conduct survey [released last fall—see below] told of their distressing experience here and at other universities,” she continued. “But it matters equally as part of broader and ongoing efforts at Harvard to foster a community in which all members are fully respected and fully belong.”

Sexual assault is inimical to the University’s educational mission, she wrote: “As an academic community, we are dedicated to the possibilities of transformation—intellectual and personal—that are inherent in the search for knowledge. Sexual assault and harassment threaten those possibilities and undermine core institutional values.”

The Sexual-Assault Survey

The task force’s final recommendations follow a September 2015 report that presented the results of a survey on student sexual conduct at Harvard and 26 other private and public Association of American Universities (AAU) institutions. At that time, former University provost Steven E. Hyman, who has chaired the Harvard Task Force on the Prevention of Sexual Assault since it was formed by Faust in 2014, called “the incidence of nonconsensual sexual contact by physical force or incapacitation” at Harvard “unacceptable.”

Among that survey’s findings were that, by the time they were seniors, 16 percent of Harvard undergraduate women had experienced sexual assault that included nonconsensual, completed or attempted penetration—and that when nonconsensual touching was included, the proportion rose to 31.2 percent. The survey also found that only 16 percent of female undergraduates thought it very or extremely likely that campus officials would take action against offenders (compared to 25 percent of female undergraduates at peer private institutions included in the survey). Furthermore, half or more of all undergraduate and graduate students said they knew little or nothing about: what happens when a student reports an incident of sexual assault or sexual misconduct; where to make such a report; or even how sexual assault or misconduct is defined. More than a third indicated they wouldn’t know where to get help if they or a friend experienced such an incident. At that time, Hyman said that any solution to the problem would require “concerted action from the entire community.”

Focusing on the Community

In addition to making specific recommendations to address the problems uncovered by the survey, this final task-force report takes a broad view of the issues and their solutions. It states “that to respond effectively to the president’s charge, we must ask what sort of community we aspire to be…,” adding that

The University has a special responsibility in this area: The actions of its leadership, the policies it advances, and the seriousness and effectiveness with which its leaders commit themselves to the problem of sexual assault provide the underpinnings necessary for a stronger community. Responsibility also lies with students, faculty, and staff, whose day-to-day interactions with each other largely define the community we form together. [Sexual assault] is a problem affecting all of higher education—and, indeed, society as a whole. It speaks to broader aspects of our culture and perceptions of gender, gender identity, sexuality, race, and equality. Given these overlapping responsibilities at the individual, leadership, and societal levels, it is only through the joint engagement of all parts of our campus that Harvard will make durable and significant progress in addressing the serious and longstanding problem of sexual assault.

The report provides detailed explanations of how its conclusions might be implemented—suggesting where deficiencies now exist.

For example, the recommendations enumerate the resources that the University has already created—including Title IX officers, the Office for Sexual Assault Prevention and its network of trained tutors in the freshman dormitories and the upperclass Houses, and a multitude of websites and apps—but indicate a pressing need for better coordination and organization of this infrastructure both within the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and the graduate and professional schools. The authors note that a single session of training during new student orientation is insufficient to “help students internalize” the community’s expectations. Further, the task force recommends that all resident advisers, tutors, and proctors “engage in sexual assault prevention training and response education…,” and that faculty members be provided a “primer” with information on how to direct students to campus resources.

For everyone, the quality of education must be improved: “Education must be delivered not in the spirit of a bureaucratic box to be checked, but as lessons that will be attended to, taken seriously, and internalized. Education must reach beyond the small portion of the community that is intensively involved in conversations about sexual assault; it must also make a significant impact on the larger population of students. The measures of success must focus not only on delivery of these materials, but also on outcomes.”

Because the College presents “distinctive issues” as a consequence of the age of its students, its size, and its residential nature, the task force addresses specific recommendations to undergraduates, including mandatory alcohol and sexual-assault prevention education for students and student organizations holding parties; a variety of strategies for mitigating the presence and effects of alcohol (the principal risk factor for sexual assault); and the creation of a bystander-intervention program, echoing the call of Vice President Joseph P. Biden to the audience watching the Academy Awards that they all take a pledge: “I will intervene in situations where consent cannot or has not been given.” (The Obama White House has taken an active stance against sexual violence on campuses, pressuring institutions nationwide to reform or risk losing federal funding.) The recommendations even include creation of an undergraduate course— subject to faculty approval—on sexuality, taught from a variety of disciplinary perspectives.

Final Clubs

Because “final clubs present special concerns related to impact on campus culture, gender equality, sexual misconduct, and the role of alcohol” in the College, the report includes an additional section on these unique student organizations, which are private but whose membership consists of Harvard College students. “While final clubs are not the exclusive or even the principal cause of sexual assault at the College,” the report notes, “we also do not see any solution that does not involve addressing the disturbing practical and cultural implications they present in undergraduate life.” Although 75 percent of sexual assaults take place in dormitories, 17 percent take place in a space “used by a single-sex student social organization,” making such locations not only the next most common site where assault occurs, but also disproportionate contributors to the problem, given the small numbers of students who are club members.

The task force writes: “We are not suggesting that the problem of sexual assault at Harvard is solely or even principally a byproduct of the activities and influence of final clubs. The behavioral and cultural problems run deep and implicate a range of institutional structures and behavioral choices that extend well beyond the clubs.” But task-force interviews with undergraduates indicate that the clubs have “a disproportionate influence on campus culture—and, more importantly, one that is in many respects negative and helps perpetuate an environment where sexual assault occurs with the frequency reported in the AAU survey. As we have noted throughout this report, culture—both on our campus and in society at large—matters tremendously, both in creating an environment where nonconsensual sexual assaults can take place and for any prevention efforts to be sustained and successful.”

As private organizations, final clubs present a particularly thorny problem for Harvard College’s attempts to comply with Title IX (the federal law barring discrimination on the basis of gender). The task force therefore urges the College “to continue to engage with the final clubs toward the objective of nondiscriminatory and open membership practices.” (Some of the clubs have already taken steps to admit women.) But “If those conversations fail to make progress, or if the transition by the clubs to open and nondiscriminatory membership practices fails to address the issues we have identified in this report,” the report states, “we believe the University should not rule out any alternative approaches. We also urge the College to continue in its efforts to re-center student life on the Houses and on-campus activities” by developing new social spaces, even before the Smith Campus Center’s scheduled opening in 2018.

The Harvard Art Museums has named Martha Tedeschi its new Cabot director, effective July 2016. She succeeds Thomas W. Lentz, Ph.D. ’85, who left last July.

Tedeschi has spent her entire professional career at the Art Institute of Chicago, arriving as an intern in 1982 and becoming a full curator in 1999. In 2012, she was named to her current position, deputy director for art and research. Responsible for managing the conservation department, publications department, and libraries and archives, Tedeschi directed a staff of nearly 225. She also assisted the Institute’s 11 curatorial departments, and served as its liaison to local universities and foundations.

This lengthy tenure overlapped with that of Lentz’s predecessor as Cabot director of the Harvard museums, James Cuno, Ph.D. ’85, who subsequently led the Institute from 2004 to 2011. Cuno oversaw that institution’s Renzo Piano-designed major construction project—its Modern Wing, adding 264,000 square feet of floor space to the tune of $370 million—before leaving for Los Angeles, and the Getty Trust, in 2011.

Tedeschi’s immediate predecessor as director, Lentz, served from 2003 to 2015. He announced his resignation mere months after the renovated museums reopened in November 2014—another Piano project. The search for a replacement began immediately, amid general upheaval in Boston’s art scene as two other longstanding museum leaders, Malcolm Rogers of the Museum of Fine Arts and Anne Hawley of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, announced their retirements within a short span.

This appointment comes as the latest and largest in a series of changes in the Harvard museums’ staff. Narayan Khandekar replaced Henry Lie as director of the Straus Center for Conservation and Technical Studies in February 2015, and two new curators arrived the following September: A. Cassandra Albinson in European art, and Rachel M. Saunders in Asian and Mediterranean art. The museums also made two internal promotions to fill newly endowed positions: Ethan Lasser was tapped to lead the division of European and American art and named Stebbins curator of American art, and Elizabeth M. Rudy became Weyerhaeuser associate curator of prints. Deputy director Maureen Donovan and Clay chief curator Deborah Kao have served as interim co-directors since Lentz left.

Provost Alan Garber, in announcing the appointment, highlighted Tedeschi’s educational initiatives at the Art Institute: “Martha’s passion for teaching students across all disciplines and experience in training the next generation of scholars, curators, and conservators will enable her to advance the Museums’ academic and cultural missions.” These projects included a partnership with the University of Chicago and Northwestern University to train graduate students in objects-based art history research, and a program to mentor undergraduates from underrepresented groups who have an interest in curation.  

Educated at Brown, the University of Michigan, and Northwestern, Tedeschi specializes in British and American art, and particularly in the history of print-making. At the Art Institute of Chicago, she curated two well-received exhibitions of watercolors by John Marin and Winslow Homer. She is also an expert on the painter James McNeill Whistler.

Read the University announcement here.

Update: A previous version of this story's headline stated that Tedeschi will be the first female director of the Harvard Art Museums. Other women have led the museums, including Marjorie Cohn,  who served as acting director before and after James Cuno's tenure, and Agnes Mongan, who was  director of the Fogg Museum from 1969 to 1971.

Academy Award-winning director, screenwriter, and producer Steven Spielberg will be the guest speaker at Harvard’s 365th Commencement on Thursday, May 26, the University announced today. Calling Spielberg “a genre-defying filmmaker whose unparalleled creativity has fueled countless imaginations,” President Drew Faust said he “has challenged us to dream and to see the world anew, and I am very much looking forward to welcoming him back to Harvard.”

Spielberg is known for his historical films, among them the 1993 Holocaust drama Schindler's List, which won seven Academy Awards, including his first win as best director. Saving Private Ryan, a World War II drama told from the perspective of American soldiers in Europe, earned his second in that category. His 2015 film, the Cold War drama Bridge of Spies, earned his sixteenth Oscar nomination, for best picture. Most recently, Spielberg has been in talks to produceHaunted, a horror film inspired by the classic Henry James novella, The Turn of the Screw.

Spielberg has received other honors, including the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Directors Guild of America, the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the Kennedy Center Honors, and most recently, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor. His philanthropic contributions include establishing the Righteous Persons Foundation—an organization that works to strengthen Jewish identity and community in the United States—with his earnings from Schindler’s List, and founding the USC Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education, which has recorded more than 53,000 interviews with Holocaust survivors and witnesses.

“An extraordinary storyteller, he has given voice to the silenced and brought history to life,” Faust said. “The wonder of Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T., the suspense of Jaws and Jurassic Park, the thrill of Indiana Jones and Minority Report, the power of Saving Private Ryan and Schindler’s List, the inspiration of Lincoln and Amistad: these unforgettable experiences connect us to one another, entertaining and inspiring us as they underscore what it is to be human.”

(Harvard officials teased the public earlier today with a 40-second video on their social media channels encouraging readers to guess the speaker’s identity.) 

See a video showcasing Spielberg’s work in 30 memorable shots.  

Following the announcement of a five-person petition slate of candidates in this spring’s voting for members of Harvard’s Board of Overseers, and certification of the petitioners for placement on the ballot, a number of alumni have formed an opposing Coalition for a Diverse Harvard.

The coalition is aiming squarely at the petitioners’ “Free Harvard/Fair Harvard” platform (“abolishing tuition and increasing admissions transparency at Harvard College”). The coalition makes the case that the petition slate’s central issue is opposition to the University’s ability to consider applicants’ merits and characteristics broadly, in an effort to create a deliberately diverse student body. The coalition’s website frames the petitioners’ challenge this way:

Issues of diversity—particularly racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic diversity—at Harvard and beyond have been pushed to the fore of the upcoming Harvard Overseers election….

As reported in The New York Times [in the mid January article that announced the petition slate], four of the petition slate’s five candidates “have written or testified extensively against affirmative action,” and “several [members of the group] are known for their past advocacy against using race in admissions.” “Their positions are in lock step with claims in a federal lawsuit” that if successful, Harvard says, “would overturn its efforts to build a racially diverse class.”

As Harvard alumni and students, we call on members of the Harvard community to join this Coalition against the petition slate—and in favor of race-conscious and holistic admissions practices that support campus diversity.

We support a process that seeks to admit students whose unique passions, talents, and personal qualities from across geographies, socioeconomic backgrounds, gender identities, sexual orientations, religions, and racial and ethnic backgrounds will contribute to Harvard’s greater sense of community.

Assembling a diverse student body and creating an environment where all students can thrive is central to Harvard’s mission of improving the quality of education and creating successful citizens and leaders in a diverse nation and world. We believe there is no formula that can create this special mix of individuals, nor can the merit of the individuals be measured by test scores or grades alone.

Framed this way, the campaign—and it now appears there will be a vigorous one, waged through social media and perhaps other channels—juxtaposes contending worldviews about diversity, affirmative action, and the parameters applied in undergraduate admissions. That brings into the Overseers’ election some of the issues being fought out in continuing litigation about higher-education admissions practices:

• the Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin case reargued before the U.S. Supreme Court last fall, now awaiting a decision, which aims directly at the use of race as an admissions criterion at public institutions; and
• the Project on Fair Representation-organized lawsuit filed against Harvard, a private institution, seeking “the outright prohibition of racial preferences in university admissions—period.”

(Detailed background on these cases in the context of several decades of related litigation about affirmative action in college admissions appears here.)

Consistent with its aims, the coalition has asked each Overseer candidate to respond to these questions:

• How important should student diversity be at Harvard? What strategies should the University pursue regarding this? 
• Please state your views on affirmative action.
• Please state your views on race-conscious college admissions (if not specified in your answer to question #2).
• Please state your views on whether Harvard should be more transparent about its college admissions process, particularly about how the mix of students is created.
• What steps have you taken to bring diversity to your workplace or to an organization that you have participated in?

It plans to post the responses, and to recommend candidates for election from among the eight Harvard Alumni Association nominees and the five petitioners. (Qualifying voters receive ballots in early April, and may vote for up to five Overseer candidates in each annual election.)

The rest of this report examines coalition positions on the petition slate’s principal platform issues (concerning admissions and College tuition); recent comment on the issues by Harvard president Drew Faust; and some of the arguments and data invoked in the admissions debate.

Admissions

As reported,the petitioners’ slate“demand[s] far greater transparency in the admissions process, which today is opaque and therefore subject to hidden favoritism and abuse.” It goes on, by reference, to suggest“strong evidence of corrupt admissions practices at Harvard and other elite universities, with the children of the wealthy and the powerful regularly granted admission over the more able and higher-achieving children of ordinary American families. In some cases, millions of dollars may have been paid to purchase an admissions slot for an undeserving applicant.” It then pivots to an historical point (“[J]ust as their predecessors of the 1920s always denied the existence of ‘Jewish quotas,’ top officials at Harvard, Yale, Princeton and the other Ivy League schools today strongly deny the existence of ‘Asian quotas’”); makes a claim about current admissions practices concerning Asian and Asian-American applicants (“But there exists powerful statistical evidence to the contrary”); and then makes a call to action based on that claim: “Racial discrimination against Asian-American students has no place at Harvard University and must end.”

(This claim is at the heart of the Project on Fair Representation lawsuit against Harvard. In a related matter, in May 2015, several dozen Asian-American groups filed a complaint with the federal departments of education and of justice alleging that Harvard discriminated against Asian-American applicants; a larger number of Asian-American organizations coalesced to express their opposition to the complaint and their support of affirmative action, including consideration of race in university admissions. The education department dismissed the complaint, in light of the pending similar litigation; read the Crimson’s account here.)

Referring to The New York Times article about the petition slate’s debut, Jeannie Park ’83, said, “Who’s against ‘free’ and ‘fair’? That sounds pretty good.” But, she continued in a telephone interview, “Four of the five are pretty well known for their writings and activism against affirmative action, and particularly race-aware admissions.” Park, former executive editor of InStyle and People magazines and an active member of Harvard’s Asian-American alumnae/alumni community, said, “The fact is that Harvard needs to be a place where diversity is a fundamental value,” throughout its student body, faculty, and staff, and “race is just one of many, many factors that are considered and should be considered in the admissions process.” And so, as she talked with friends and classmates, she found “quite a lot of people, as we knew there would be, who felt similarly”—leading her to be an early supporter and organizer of the Coalition for a Diverse Harvard. (By coincidence, Ron Unz, who organized and leads the petition slate, is also a member of the class of 1983.)

In support of current practices and their aim, Park said that all applicants seriously considered for admission to the College present grades, test scores, and other quantitative evidence of their ability to undertake Harvard-level academic work (the metrics by which admissions decisions should be made, Unz has argued). The larger aim of evaluating candidates’ recommendations, statements of interest, extracurricular pursuits, and so on is to evaluate their broader qualities, too, so as “to build a class to provide each one of the students with the opportunity” to have the fullest undergraduate experience possible, not only in formal classroom settings but also, Park recalled, “what we learned from our classmates in crazy late-night arguments with people you’d never agree with.”

The result, she said, was for many students “the most diverse experience they’ll ever have”—an experience that “shapes all of us as alumni in our lives and work.” Constructing that kind of student body, she said, depends on evaluating candidates broadly, and including among the factors consideration of race: “The University has only gotten there because it has been able to use race as one of the factors in the admissions process.” Overall, she said, “Harvard strives for some ideal mix. To deprive Harvard of one of the ways they are able to get there would be to the detriment of everyone.” Comparing current College classes to her own, Park said, “I only wish my class could have been as diverse as Harvard is now.”

In contrast, Unz has written at length in favor of what he considers objective “meritocratic” and academic criteria—grades and standardized test scores—suitable for admissions evaluations. (He has gone so far as to suggest that extracurricular talents, like musical performance or athletics, be excluded from consideration for admission to institutions like Harvard, and that admissions for a large part of a typical class might be by random lottery.)

Park said that the coalition, which launched its website with a core of 125 or so supporters, had since attracted a “very broad-based group” (about 600 have now signed on), diverse in gender, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, and class year.

As for the suggestion in the Times article that Asian Americans would be “energized” by the petitioners’ slate, Park called that “a galvanizing statement. The slate does not speak for all Asian-American Harvard alumni.” She cited a history of “Asian Americans being used to drive a wedge into affirmative-action” debates, and said, “This is not what all Asian Americans feel,” even for issues surrounding higher-education admissions.

(The coalition of groups opposing the May 2015 complaint to the federal departments, cited above, is one indicator of divided opinion on the issue.)

Should Harvard Be Free? The Impact on Applications

The petitioners’ platform demands “the immediate elimination of all tuition for undergraduates since the revenue generated is negligible compared to the investment income of the endowment.” While recognizing that “Harvard does exempt from tuition families earning less than $65,000 per year,” the platform maintains that “relatively few less affluent families even bother applying because they assume that a Harvard education is reserved only for the rich.”

As a rationale for this significant financial decision, the platform continues, announcing a tuition-free Harvard College education would make headlines, “and soon nearly every family in America would be aware that a Harvard education was now free. Academically successful students from all walks of life would suddenly begin to consider the possibility of attending Harvard. Other very wealthy and elite colleges such Yale, Princeton, and Stanford would be forced to follow Harvard's example and also abolish tuition. There would be considerable pressure on all our public colleges and universities to trim their bloated administrative costs and drastically cut their tuition.”

Presumably, that would have the result, locally at least, of promoting greater socioeconomic diversity, and thus lessening the pressure to resort to other evaluation measures in constructing a diverse class. Several of these perspectives. advanced in the context of critiquing affirmative action, are clearly laid out, in legal terms, in the amicus brief filed with the Supreme Court during the 2012 first round of the Fisher case by Stuart Taylor Jr., J.D. ’77, a member of the petition slate, and Richard Sander ’78. They are coauthors of Mismatch: How Affirmative Action Hurts Students It’s Intended to Help, and Why Universities Won’t Admit It.

(On the financial details, see a discussion of the University endowment, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences’ share of those assets, and its cash flows. A related issue, perhaps to be clarified during the election campaign, is whether the platform pertains only to the tuition part of students’ term bill, $41,632 in the current academic year—as its four-year, $180,000 cost calculation suggests—or also to the associated room, board, and fees, amounting to about $19,000 more annually.)

Coalition for a Diverse Harvard supporter Kevin Jennings ’85—active both among alumni who were the first members of their families to attend college, and in class and reunion activities—critiqued the petitioners’ proposal on the grounds of both efficacy and equity.

For first-generation students, he said in a telephone interview, the “central issue of access to Harvard is not financial aid.” To the extent that some of the petition candidates have advocated focusing on applicants’ scores on standardized texts, they are at odds with their own expressed goal of enhancing socioeconomic diversity: as Jennings put it, “Most first-generation students come from lower socioeconomic families, who can’t afford tutors, prep courses,” and other means of improving performance on the SAT or ACT that are within reach of higher-income families. So a test- and grades-focused or less holistic admissions process “excludes more people like me. It’s not a serious proposal.” Enacting the petitioners’ complete platform, he said would enable applicants from upper-income backgrounds to “totally take over and get to go to Harvard for free. To me, that sounds less fair.”

Focusing on that equity concern, Jennings said that eliminating tuition would make the College free to children of the wealthy, who are already very advantaged, further skewing admissions—a result that would make first-to-college students feel “more excluded.”

He hastened to note the significant challenges facing prospective applicants from lower-income and first-generation families who might consider applying to selective, elite institutions like Harvard—ranging from their access to proper preparation and enrichment (alluded to above), to the social challenges presented by their new environment and community when they arrive on a campus. Attempting to pursue broader socioeconomic diversity by promoting a “free Harvard,” he said, is “not a sincere effort to understand what first-generation students need to succeed. It’s a gimmick. I’m offended” that the petitioners’ platform invokes the issue in this way.

Circling back to the broader coalition position, he said, “The idea that somehow ‘qualified’ people are being shut out of Harvard is based on a fundamental notion of qualifications that I don’t agree with.”

Campaign Logistics

Thus far, each campaign has established a website (linked previously). The petitioners obviously activated their networks of friends and supporters in the process of circulating physical petitions and gathering signatures. The coalition group has, as Jennings put it, had “a lot of conversations with people,” talking through issues and soliciting supporters to sign up. In the weeks ahead, one would expect a significant social-media campaign, particularly when the coalition posts candidates’ responses to its questionnaire and makes endorsements—timed to the distribution of ballots to alumni voters at the beginning of April.

Ron Unz, who is a veteran of statewide ballot-proposition campaigns in California, is himself a prolific writer-advocate; in addition to the dispatches collected at the campaign website, he has recently collected his many essays into an enormous volume. As the initial Times article on the petition effort suggests, he is skilled in attracting news coverage of his work; in a conversation in Cambridge on February 1, he noted that “general media” coverage was the most effective channel for such campaigns, and that in any campaign, the platform and its key themes were a “very useful media hook” to interest journalists and, in turn, to stimulate broader discussion of the underlying issues. Although he expressed confidence that the petition slate could secure election, he also said that “the campaign is as important as the final vote.”

Alumni can clearly expect to read more in coming weeks, in their e-mail and social-media accounts, and possibly in the media at large.

President Faust’s Perspectives

During the course of a regular news interview on March 8, President Drew Faust addressed both elements of the petitioners’ platform.

Tuition:“Free tuition is a really bad idea. It would mean we would be subsidizing significantly people who could afford to pay Harvard tuition, and our sense has always been that Harvard’s resources should be devoted to enabling those who otherwise would be unable to come to Harvard, to come to Harvard and thrive here. When we think about the wide range of purposes to which we devote resources, they include more than tuition. They include spaces, faculty salaries, research—and if we were to subsidize those who were not in need of subsidy, we would be taking resources away from those very important purposes at Harvard.”

Admissions:“I also have a deep commitment to our admissions process, which looks at students as individuals and considers the wide range of attributes that they possess and would bring to bear on this community, because so much of what this community is about is the interactions between and among students as well as what they learn directly from the faculty members. So who will be a vibrant member of this community, both within the classroom and beyond the classroom, is a very important part of our assessment of student qualifications. And we therefore want to take into account many of these attributes as we consider admissions, and having the diversity of backgrounds, experiences, identities, origins among our student body is a critical part of that. Race as one factor considered among all of those has been an important dimension of how we’ve thought about this diversity, and we are involved in sustaining that approach to admissions.”

Diversity Data

Beyond the differences of worldview and values represented by the Free Harvard/Fair Harvard slate and the Coalition for a Diverse Harvard, some of their proponents have advanced various factual claims supporting their arguments.

The foundational text for Unz’s efforts is his 2012 essay, “The Myth of American Meritocracy,” discussed in some detail in earlier reporting about the Overseers’ election. After publication, in fact, Unz’s work was subjected to vigorous scrutiny and critique of his data, analyses, and conclusion. Harvard Magazine’s earlier reporting did not note this debate—much of which is captured in the statistical blog maintained by Andrew Gelman, Ph.D. ’90, professor of statistics and political science at Columbia.

(Close readers of the texts may find that Unz’s own views are diverse, and appear to have evolved over time; at one place in his 2012 “Myth” essay, he observes that measured by one test, “[T]here appears to be no evidence for racial bias against Asians…”, and in a 1998 Wall Street Journal op-ed he references in the essay, based on his estimates of Harvard’s enrollment then, he found significant overrepresentation of Asian and Jewish students.)

This entry point to the Gelman blog posts links to many of the exchanges. Among the significant entries were several focusing on the “Myth” essay’s analysis of the proportion of enrollment made up of Jewish students, their academic performance, and the enrollment of non-Jewish whites. Gelman drew on an analysis by Janet Mertz, McCoy professor of oncology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health, whose studies of students who excel in the leading mathematics competitions led her to doubt Unz’s use of those data. She found that “Unz employed a mixture of methodological approaches with different sources of large errors that were additive, including at least one highly subjective one.” On one measurement, she wrote, Unz’s data were off five-fold, and she challenged other sets of data, the tools used to gather them, and the use made of the information in analyzing enrollment.

Also figuring in the discussion was an analysis prepared by Nurit Baytch ’00 (like Unz, a physics concentrator). She challenged Unz’s estimation of Jewish student enrollment in the College, his analysis of National Merit Scholarship (NMS) semifinalists (one of his core proxies for academic proficiency), and much of the ensuing analysis. From her summary:

The greatly varying NMS qualifying scores by state render the set of NMS semifinalists a flawed proxy for the pool of Harvard applicants, especially in light of the negative correlation between a state’s NMS qualifying score and its % of non-Jewish whites. Hence, the demographics of the national set of NMS semifinalists cannot be used to predict the expected ethnic/racial composition of Harvard. I will also discuss other respects in which comparing the demographics of NMS semifinalists to that of Harvard undergraduates is a flawed methodology to deduce bias: the average NMS semifinalist likely has a lower [P]SAT score than the average Harvard undergraduate; the distribution of intended majors among National Merit Scholars is weighted more heavily toward science and engineering than among incoming Harvard freshmen; Harvard College students are disproportionately drawn from Harvard’s geographical region, the Northeast (which is considerably more Jewish than the US in general), just as Stanford and Caltech undergraduates are disproportionately drawn from the West Coast (which is disproportionately Asian). The Weyl Analysis results from Stanford’s public directory yielded the estimate that 3-5% of Stanford undergrads are Jewish, which no more proves that Stanford discriminates against Jews than the higher percentage of Jews at the Ivies proves that they discriminate in favor of Jews, as asserted by Unz. [The Weyl technique generates an estimate of the percentage of Jews in a large data set based on the frequency with which specific distinctive Jewish surnames appear.]

As these excerpts suggest, much of the criticism (interlaced in Gelman’s blog with Unz’s responses) focused on the “Myth” essay's claims about Jewish student enrollment and performance—and therefore, in Unz’s analysis, what he concluded was relative underenrollment of non-Jewish white students.

Baytch’s essay also has a section on whether Harvard, Yale, and Princeton discriminate against Asian-American applicants. Her analysis suggested that average performance data for white and Asian-American students are skewed, because there is a bimodal distribution of test scores for white students (legacies and recruited athletes have lower test scores than others). She also pointed to differences related to geography (the populations from which East and West Coast schools draw differ demographically, as noted above); academic interests (Asian-American students “are disproportionately represented among STEM majors” and thus not strictly aligned with the broad liberal-arts offerings of the HYP institutions, versus, say, MIT or Caltech); and student-self description (no race or ethnicity indicated, or bi- or multiracial) as among issues bearing on the question. Consistent with her overall critique, she concluded:

I would like to emphasize that I am not asserting that HYP do not discriminate against Asian-Americans but rather that the data Unz presented do not prove or disprove this question (nor am I defending admissions preferences for legacies or athletic recruits); in addition, there is no evidence in the data sets that Unz examined that Jewish students are the recipients of admissions preferences or that non-Jewish whites are victims of discrimination.

Summarizing these critiques, Gelman concluded:

Unz’s argument has two parts, a numerator and a denominator. First, that Ivy League colleges were admitting tons and tons of Jews: 25% at Harvard, Yale, and Columbia and “this same general pattern” in the other five Ivy League schools. Second, Unz writes that the academic credentials of American Jews are not so impressive, with Jews representing “less than 6 percent” of National Merit Scholar semifinalists, a number which Unz presents as “an extreme upper bound to a more neutrally-derived total.”

This seems pretty clear. You have a group that’s 6% of the top achievers, getting 25% of the places in top colleges. A factor of 4, that’s a lot. Sure, Unz’s reasoning can be questioned on the edges: Ivy League schools draw more students from the Northeast, and Unz’s estimates are only approximate. Unz acknowledges some of these issues, writing, “any of the individual figures provided above should be treated with great caution, but the overall pattern of enrollments—statistics compiled over years and decades and across numerous different universities—seems likely to provide an accurate description of reality.” In short, a factor of 4! That would seem pretty solid.

Nope. When you look at the numbers carefully, though, that factor of 4 erodes and erodes until there’s nothing left.…

In his article, Unz claims to have found that elite college admissions underrepresent Asian-Americans (in comparison to their academic talent achievements) and overrepresent Jews, leaving non-Jewish whites squeezed out. Looking at the statistics more carefully, we see no evidence that Jews are admitted preferentially compared to other whites. Unz’s error arose because he used different sorts of information with different biases that did not cancel out but actually reinforced each other, underestimating the proportion of high-achieving Jews and overestimating the Jewish presence among Ivy League students.

Readers with a deep appetite for the vivid interplay of statistical analyses bearing on significant issues, and with an interest in Harvard, may wish to plumb these exchanges in detail. It is unlikely that the Overseers’ election will fully engage many voters with the full range of these debates. But they exist, and suggest the deep currents underlying much of this year’s unusual contest for the governing-board seats.

The Harvard Corporation has agreed to abandon the controversial Harvard Law School (HLS) shield, per the recommendation of a committee of HLS faculty, students, and alumni released early this month.

“[T]he Corporation agrees with your judgment and the recommendation of the committee that the Law School should have the opportunity to retire its existing shield and propose a new one,” President Drew Faust and Senior Fellow William Lee wrote in a letter to HLS dean Martha Minow Monday. “While we accept the request to change the shield, we do so on the understanding that the School will actively explore other steps to recognize rather than to suppress the realities of its history, mindful of our shared obligation to honor the past not by seeking to erase it, but rather by bringing it to light and learning from it,” the letter adds.

Minow had appointed the committee to study the shield—which displays the crest of a slaveholding family whose fortune endowed Harvard’s first law professorship—in late fall, after portraits of African-American law professors hanging in Wasserstein Hall were found defaced with strips of black tape. Racial justice activists at HLS had been calling for the change throughout the fall, and their demands gained currency after the incident.

In its report recommending dropping the shield, the committee argued that “[M]odern institutions must acknowledge their past associations with slavery. For the Law School, this means reminding ourselves and others of the role of wealth derived from slave labor in its founding and using that knowledge as a spur to promote racial justice…We cannot unsee what we now know, nor should we. The Law School would not today honor Isaac Royall and his bequest by taking his crest as its official symbol.”

Two of the committee's 12 members, Professor Annette Gordon-Reed (one of those whose portrait was defaced in November) and second-year law student Annie Rittgers, presented a dissenting opinion. They argued that abandoning the shield would improperly distance Harvard from its historical links to slavery:

Disaggregating the benefit achieved from the labor of the enslaved—the money accrued from the sale of Royall land—from the ‘burdens’ of being constantly reminded of from whence that money came, and of letting people outside the community know from whence it came, would be an abdication of our responsibility to the enslaved and a missed opportunity to educate. 

Poet Robyn Schiff and Cogan University Professor of the humanities Stephen Greenblatt will speak at the 266th Phi Beta Kappa literary exercises on May 24, during Commencement week. Undergraduates elected to PBK will also honor outstanding teachers. 

Schiff, who earned her M.F.A. at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 1999, now teaches in the University of Iowa’s English department. Her first collection of verse, Worth, opens in the grand establishment of couturier Charles Frederick Worth and ends with a diamond thief named Adam Worth (with appearances from Marie Antoinette, Mary Pickford, and Marilyn Monroe in between); her second, Revolver, examines objects displayed at the Great Exhibition of 1851. 

A Woman of Property, released last week, is characterized by that same capacious sense of curiosity. This time, though, her exploration of the boundaries of ownership and belonging strays onto anxious territory closer to home. Describing her as “a poet of family life” with the “comic, fastidious” precision of Marianne Moore, critic Dan Chiasson, Ph.D. ’01, notes in TheNew Yorker that Schiff’s poems, “with their Hitchcock-like distrust of appearances, their alertness to hidden binds and snares, offer something few poets ever discover: a vision of the whole world.”

Greenblatt, a renowned scholar of Renaissance literature, has taught at Harvard since 1997. He is widely regarded as one of the founders of New Historicism, which is concerned with the political function of literature, and seeks to understand literary texts through the prevailing ideas of their time. Greenblatt has written more than a dozen books, including the 2004 biography Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award, and The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, which won both. (For more on these works, see “The Mysterious Mr. Shakespeare,” from the September-October 2004 issue, and “Swerves,” from the July-August 2011 issue.)

Earlier this month, the Norwegian government awarded Greenblatt its annual Holberg Prize, for outstanding contributions to research in the arts and humanities, social science, law, or theology. His latest book, The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve, is due to be published next year. Greenblatt is also the general editor of TheNorton Shakespeare and The Norton Anthology of English Literature.

In a 2006 lecture, Greenblatt advised students:

I do not at all think that everything one writes should have an immediate bearing on the present. On the contrary, one of the crucial achievements in a liberal education is the understanding of worlds far removed from our own. That understanding is never complete, any more than one can escape entirely from one’s own body or one’s own culture. But the ability to suspend the craving for immediate relevance and to project oneself at least part way into difference and otherness is an invaluable resource. But that projection depends not upon neutrality or indifference but rather upon carrying one’s passionate energies into an alien world. That is, you should write about the other as if your life depended on it…

I am not suggesting that you keep the television news on constantly when you are writing your papers. I am suggesting only that you should try to write well—and that means bringing to the table all of your alertness, your fears, and your desires. And every once in a while—say, every third paper—tell yourself that you will take a risk.

His full remarks appear in “Writing as Performance,” from the September-October 2007 issue.

With the ferocious U.S. presidential primaries in temporary abeyance, Harvard’s own 2016 campaign begins: ballots are scheduled to be in the mail April 1 for the annual election of members of the Board of Overseers and directors of the Harvard Alumni Association (HAA)—see the full slates here.

As previously reported, the election of five new Overseers is contested this year: in addition to the eight candidates put forth by the HAA nominating committee, five petition candidates qualified for the ballot. Their “Free Harvard/Fair Harvard” platform, challenging admissions and tuition practices, has in turn been vigorously opposed by a group of alumni, organized as the Coalition for a Diverse Harvard, who defend the University’s policy of considering race and ethnicity as one factor in evaluating applicants for admission, in pursuit of a diverse student body.

As alumni voters begin considering their choices and voting (ballots must be returned to the University by May 20), they may wish to inform themselves of several recent developments, reported below: candidate statements in response to a questionnaire; endorsements and reactions; and a written statement on the issues by past presidents of the Board of Overseers.

The Coalition’s Questionnaire

In keeping with its plan to solicit Overseer candidates’ views on what it defines as the core issues of affirmative action and diversity-promoting admissions policies, the Coalition for a Diverse Harvard has published the responses in full here. They make interesting reading, presenting distinct worldviews on issues of importance to Harvard, and suggesting differences among candidates. The responses are often nuanced, and come at the issues from different ways, so voters are well advised to read them in full and consider the arguments in depth; brief excerpts appear here.

At one end of the spectrum, for example, Ketanji Brown Jackson ’92, J.D. ’96, an HAA-nominated candidate, had to make an understandable recusal:

Thank you for posing these insightful and significant questions. As a sitting federal judge who was nominated by President Obama and confirmed by the Senate in 2013, I feel duty bound not to express my personal views on matters of significance that have the potential to come before me in Court. As you have indicated, diversity and affirmative action in higher education are among the hotly contested social issues that are currently working their way to, and through, tribunals across the country. Consequently, I must respectfully decline to provide specific answers to your thoughtful inquiries.

Ron Unz ’83, who organized the Free Harvard/Fair Harvard slate, wrote in response to Coalition questions about affirmative action and workplace diversity:

I have always been personally opposed to racial/ethnic affirmative action. However, since the candidates on our Free Harvard/Fair Harvard Overseer slate have a wide variety of different views on the contentious matter, this position is not part of our platform.

and

I’ve spent very little of my career as part of any large organization and anyway have serious doubts about the value of “diversity” for its own sake.

HAA-nominated candidate Helena Buonanno Foulkes ’86, M.B.A. ’92, president of CVS Pharmacy, wrote:

I believe the intent of affirmative action, as it applies to educational institutions, is to provide equitable access to higher learning for historically under-represented groups. It has enabled institutions like Harvard to make tremendous progress toward that goal, but there is more progress to be made.

Affirmative action remains an important tool for mitigating environmental, cultural and institutional barriers to access and opportunity, and it would be a mistake for Harvard to deprive itself of that tool.

When considering applicants to Harvard, it is not only appropriate but necessary to take race into consideration, along with other forms of diversity that can benefit all students—including ethnic diversity, religious diversity, cultural diversity, and diversity of gender, sexual orientation, talent, socioeconomic backgrounds, and place of origin, among many others.

Petition candidate Lee C. Cheng ’93, chief legal officer of Newegg Inc., wrote:

I believe that race can be considered in college admissions—it is a legitimate aspect of what makes every person different and diverse. However, I oppose racial discrimination—there is nothing affirmative about racial discrimination.  Race-determinative admissions, where individuals, often from socioeconomically disadvantaged backgrounds, end up being discriminated against based on race and ethnicity, is morally repugnant to me. It is never justifiable to favor someone rich over someone poor. It is never justifiable to require one applicant to have to work harder, and achieve more, to have the same outcome, because of their skin color. Race can be used, in my opinion, as a thumb on the scale of two equally qualified candidates, but it should not be used to justify different scales altogether.

And petition candidate Ralph Nader, LL.B. ’58, the activist/consumer advocate, wrote:

Student diversity is an indispensable element in education and should be a primary concern at Harvard University. I believe that universities and all institutions should demonstrate respect for people from all walks of life and that universities should work especially hard to eliminate prejudice based on race, gender, religion, ethnicity, age, and socio-economic status.

I strongly support affirmative action and reparations for African Americans.

I support race-conscious college admissions with historical wisdom.

Coalition Endorsements

The Coalition announced at its inception that consistent with its stand “in favor of race-conscious and holistic admissions practice that support campus diversity” it would endorse Overseer candidates, based on their responses to the questionnaire. On March 25, it endorsed the following five HAA-nominated candidates:

Lindsay Chase-Lansdale ’74, Evanston, Illinois. Associate provost for faculty and Frances Willard professor of human development and social policy, Northwestern University

Ketanji Brown Jackson ’92, J.D. ’96, Washington, D.C. Judge, United States District Court

John J. Moon ’89, Ph.D. ’94, New York City. Managing director, Morgan Stanley

Alejandro Ramírez Magaña ’94, M.B.A. ’01, Mexico City. CEO, Cinépolis

Damian Woetzel, M.P.A. ’07, Roxbury, Connecticut. Artistic director, Vail International Dance Festival; director, Aspen Institute Arts Program, DEMO (Kennedy Center), and independent projects

In making its selection, the Coalition said on its website, it had chosen the candidates “who we believe will best support campus diversity,” based on evaluation of their responses to the questionnaire, their official ballot statements published by the University, and research conducted by Coalition candidate-review committee members. Their evaluation, the statement noted, “did not alter the Coalition’s opposition to the ‘Free Harvard/Fair Harvard’ slate.”

Members of the review committee are identified as Jane Sujen Bock ’81, Maria Carmona ’85, Margaret M. Chin ’84, Tamara Fish ’88, Kevin Jennings ’85, Robert Lynn ’88, Jeannie Park ’83, Kristin R. Penner ’89, Tab Timothy Stewart ’88, Michael Williams ’81, and Rashid Yasin ’12. (An earlier report on the Overseers’ election incorporated remarks from Jennings and Park, elaborating their views on the petitioners’ admissions and tuition planks.)

The Petitioners’ Response, and Another Campaign

In an e-mail, petition candidate Stuart Taylor Jr., J.D. ’77, an author and journalist, wrote, “I think we will do well among people who have time to read our platform and our individual views, as detailed on the highly informative website that Ron created for us, in our detailed answers to the Coalition’s questions, and in [news] coverage. I also hope that our answers will be circulated broadly among Harvard degree-holders because I suspect that a large majority of those who read them will find them persuasive even if the Coalition does not.”

In a telephone conversation, Ron Unz did not comment on the Coalition endorsements. “I think we have strong ballot statements,” he said. Most eligible voters, he continued, likely will become aware that there is a contested election only when they receive their ballots in the mail. He noted that news coverage of the election has perhaps been overshadowed, compared to his hopes, by the overwhelming media focus on the U.S. presidential primaries. (Unz’s media savvy is considerable. The Free Harvard/Fair Harvard slate announced its effort to secure petition slots on the Overseers’ ballot via a front-page story in The New York Times, and the effort is covered anew in an article on university endowments in the March 26-April 1 edition of The Economist.)

Similarly, he said, just a small percentage of alumni are aware of “how negligible the tuition dollars are relative to the rest” of the University’s revenues.” So he sees the Free Harvard/Fair Harvard effort prompting discussion about those matters (the subject of the article in The Economist)—an effort he would like to advance in a debate with HAA-endorsed candidates at or near Harvard, even if no such forum has been arranged to date. Whether or not the campaign succeeds in electing Overseers, he said, “some of the issues and ideas we’ve raised may reverberate down the road, even if it takes a bit longer than we’d like.”

Meanwhile, alongside his leadership of the petition slate, and publication of a collection of his writings (titled The Myth of American Meritocracy and Other Essays, after his magnum opus on admissions, discussed in some detail here, with critics’ views here), Unz has decided to multitask still further, making himself a candidate for the Republican nomination for a U.S. Senate seat from California. In an e-mail dated March 21, he wrote:

As some of you may have already heard, a few days ago I made a last-minute decision to enter the U.S. Senate race for the seat of retiring Sen. Barbara Boxer in California. I took out my official papers early Monday morning and returned them with the necessary 65 signatures of registered voters on Wednesday afternoon, the last possible day for filing.

I am certainly under no illusions that my candidacy is anything but a tremendous long-shot.…

The primary factor behind this sudden decision on my part was the current effort by the California Democrats and their (totally worthless) Republican allies to repeal my 1998 Prop. 227 “English for the Children” initiative. Although the English immersion system established in the late 1990s was judged an enormous educational triumph by nearly all observers, and the issue has long since been forgotten, a legislative ballot measure up for a vote this November aims to undo all that progress and reestablish the disastrously unsuccessful system of Spanish-almost-only “bilingual education” in California public schools.…

After considering various options, I decided that becoming a statewide candidate myself was the probably the best means of effectively focusing public attention on this repeal effort and defeating it.…

[I]f I were a statewide candidate myself, heavily focusing on that issue, my standing as the original author of Prop. 227 would give me an excellent chance of establishing myself as the main voice behind the anti-repeal campaign. I also discussed the possibility of this race with some of my fellow Harvard Overseer slate-members, and they strongly believed that my candidacy would be far more likely to help rather than hurt our efforts, which…was another major consideration in my decision. Furthermore, running for office provides me with an opportunity to raise all sorts of other policy issues often ignored by most political candidates or elected officials.

This last point is one that I have frequently emphasized to people over the years, that under the right circumstances, the real importance of a major political campaign sometimes has relatively little connection to the actual vote on election day. Instead, if used properly, a campaign can become a powerful focal point for large amounts of media coverage on under-examined issues. And such media coverage may have long-term consequences, win or lose.

Past Overseers’ Presidents Weigh In

Finally, the magazine received a letter to the editor from five past presidents of the Board of Overseers, weighing in on the issues raised in the election to that governing board. It will appear in the printed and online versions of the May-June issue, available to readers in late April, about midway through the balloting. Given that timing, it is excerpted here, with brief identifications of the correspondents and their years of service as president of the Overseers:

This year’s election is particularly important to the future of Harvard because a slate of five alumni has petitioned to join this year’s ballot in support of an ill-advised platform that would elevate ideology over crucial academic interests of the University.…[T]hese five alumni propose “the immediate elimination of all tuition for undergraduates,” including those whose families can afford to pay full tuition. They also suggest that Harvard’s admissions practices are “corrupt” and that Harvard discriminates against Asian-American applicants.

The proposal to eliminate tuition for all undergraduates is misguided. Harvard’s financial-aid program, among the most generous in the country, already ensures that Harvard is affordable for all students. Roughly 20 percent of Harvard undergraduates—those whose parents earn less than $65,000—already attend free of cost. Students from families earning between $65,000 and $150,000 receive a financial-aid package designed to ensure that no family is asked to pay more than 10 percent of its income. And hundreds of students from families earning more than $150,000 receive financial aid. In total, more than 70 percent of undergraduates receive some form of aid.

Harvard’s focus on affordability also ensures that tuition from those who can afford to pay continues to provide a significant source of funding for Harvard’s extraordinary educational programs. It simply does not make sense to forgo this considerable sum in order to make tuition free for students whose families can afford to pay. Although the candidates propose that free tuition could be funded by Harvard’s endowment, that simplistic premise fails to recognize that the endowment must be maintained in perpetuity and that much of it consists of restricted gifts. Rather than eliminating tuition, Harvard should continue to ensure that the cost of attendance remains affordable, and we have full confidence that the administration is committed to this important goal.

The allegations of corruption and discrimination in admissions are wholly unfounded, and mirror allegations raised in a lawsuit filed against Harvard by activists who seek to dismantle Harvard’s longstanding program to ensure racial and ethnic diversity in undergraduate admissions. In reality, Harvard’s admissions process—which considers each applicant as a whole person—has long been a model for undergraduate admissions at universities around the country. The current admissions policies ensure that Harvard maintains a diverse student body with a range of talents and experiences that enriches the experience of all students on campus. President Faust has recently reaffirmed Harvard’s “commitment to a widely diverse student body,” and has stated that Harvard will pursue a “vigorous defense of [its] procedures and…the kind of educational experience they are intended to create.” We fully endorse her commitment to defending diversity.…

The Harvard Alumni Association has already proposed a slate of eight strong candidates for the Board of Overseers with a wide range of talents and expertise.  We urge you to consider their candidacies carefully and to select the five candidates whom you think will best serve the interests of Harvard in the years to come. The candidates running on the “Free Harvard, Fair Harvard” slate, while accomplished individuals, are committed to a platform that would disserve the interests of the University about which we all care deeply.

Morgan Chu, J.D. ’76, Partner, Irell &  Manella LLP (2014-15)

Leila Fawaz, Ph.D. ’79, Professor, The Fletcher School, Tufts (2011-12)

Frances Fergusson, Ph.D. ’73, BI ’75 President emerita, Vassar (2007-08)

Richard Meserve, J.D. ’75, President emeritus, Carnegie Institution  for Science (2012-13)

David Oxtoby ’72, President, Pomona (2013-14)

The University announced today that Steven D. Fessler will become head of enterprise real estate, effective April 18. The appointment to this new position signals progress toward developing a 36-acre Allston parcel designated for development of an “enterprise research campus” that would rise across Western Avenue from Harvard Business School and east of the complex (expected to begin construction this summer) that will house much of the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. (Background on the enterprise campus, the broader Allston plan, and a map showing the site are available in this 2015 report.)

Fessler, founder of SDF Properties LLC (apparently a private investment and advisory firm), will report to executive vice president Katie Lapp, who is responsible for Harvard’s Allston activities. In the news announcement, Lapp said:

The enterprise research campus is a bold development: a new innovation district offering a broad mix of uses, including new spaces to live, work, play, research, adapt, innovate and collaborate, all while enhancing links to Cambridge, Longwood Medical Area, Boston’s Innovation District, and other regional nodes. As Harvard continues to advance its plans in Allston, I look forward to working with Steve to engage communities within and outside of Harvard in charting the pathway forward for these critical parcels.

The announcement suggested the scale of Harvard’s ambitions for the program, noting that “this development area is envisioned to support millions of square feet of development—a hub for commercial, non-profit, startup, venture capital, and investment enterprises.” (The list of potential uses is an interesting amplification; see discussion below.)

Provost Alan Garber said in the announcement that “Massachusetts offers a density of academic institutions, hospitals and business that is unmatched anywhere else in the world. Harvard wants to create a venue for research-based businesses to thrive and promote interaction across fields, disciplines and institutions.”

The Long March

The idea for the enterprise research campus emerged from the Allston Work Team, which issued its report in 2011. As explained then, the idea was “to ‘open a gateway to a collaborative community for business, investment capital, research and science development’—in other words, a commercial facility similar to Research Triangle Park situated between three universities in North Carolina.” The vision was very much to proceed with partners—a way of developing Harvard holdings that could advance more rapidly than the University could then achieve on its own, and with less financial strain on its balance sheet. (A small version is the Continuum residential and retail development, shown here, at Barry’s Corner, at the intersection of Western Avenue and North Harvard Street, which began leasing last fall; it was erected by a commercial developer, under a land-lease agreement with Harvard.)

An enterprise research campus planning committee was formed in 2014, under the provost, to advance work on “a community of commercial and nonprofit” entities. Its members were selected to bring to bear perspectives from the academy (heavily focused on engineering, applied sciences, and entrepreneurship), urban planning, and the financial and real-estate markets. By early 2015, the campus was being described as an “innovation district,” where offices, laboratories, and perhaps even housing (desperately needed in Boston’s tight residential market: 400-square-foot studios at Continuum start at a monthly rent of $2,405) might be sited, once the area is cleared of materials left over from its long use as a rail yard, and plans advance for relocating the complicated Massachusetts Turnpike exit ramps. Garber told Harvard Magazine then that

[T]he “time is propitious” for such a commercial development. “Boston has an extraordinary concentration of intellectual capital and of research activity, particularly in the life sciences and technology,” he pointed out. The city is also “an extremely attractive location for knowledge-intensive industries, and virtually every major pharmaceutical company has or seeks to have a research presence in the Boston area.” Kendall Square, the epicenter for such tenants, near the MIT campus, totals 30 acres, he said. Elsewhere in Boston, “There are pockets of land where research-intensive businesses can be developed, but nothing quite like this [parcel] that I am aware of.”

Because Harvard, Boston University, MIT, and Tufts are all near the site, he continued, “If you wanted to develop your plan for dealing with malnutrition in Africa, you have access to scientists and to students who will be passionate about solving worldwide problems. You’ll have also access to a philanthropic community…committed to many of these causes. We believe that the enterprise research campus will be a very attractive location for large research-intensive companies, for commercial startups, and for social enterprises who want to tap into the wealth and talent that are available in our area.”

Such activity will, in turn, “contribute to the academic environment, in part by enabling those members of our community who wish to interact with companies to do so,” Garber said. What construction will appear on the enterprise campus (beyond [a planned] hotel and conference center detailed in [Harvard’s regulatory filing for Allston]) has not yet been decided, but Lapp indicated that the “goal is to create a 24/7-type community,” implying a broad mix of uses.

At that point, Garber estimated that construction on the enterprise research campus might begin within three to five years, subject to “many potential sources of delay.”

The description of possible uses and users in today’s announcement suggests either a broadening of Harvard’s definition of the innovation and enterprise ecosystem, or a market-tested definition of prospective tenants and developers in Greater Boston today, where financial and investment firms are significant users of office space.

Perspective

Among the challenges facing the project will be competition from continued torrid area development. Kendall Square, the commercial zone near MIT, has emerged as the epicenter of biotechnology ventures, pharmaceutical companies, high-tech enterprise, and venture capital for much of the eastern United States—pushing demand for laboratories, and the accompanying rents, to a level unprecedented in Greater Boston. Cambridge recently approved one million square feet of residential and commercial development there, to be built by Boston Properties; a 14-acre site controlled by the federal government is going to be redeveloped; and MIT is pursuing an additional 1.4-million-square-foot, six-building program in Kendall. Rapid development also continues on Boston’s waterfront, now dubbed the “innovation district,” anchored not only by office buildings but also by the headquarters of Vertex, the pharmaceutical company. GE, now based in Connecticut, recently announced plans to relocate its corporate headquarters nearby. That competition, and the commercial real-estate and biotech-finance cycles—both conceivably long in the tooth locally—may influence the timing and execution of Harvard’s plan.

Today’s announcement, and the plans for the enterprise research campus, suggest how different Harvard and its Allston ambitions are from those hatched a decade ago, before the financial crises of 2008-2009 roiled the University’s endowment. Harvard envisioned millions of square feet of academic development, unfolding at a rapid pace, and in 2005 hired Christopher M. Gordon, director of the $4.4-billion Logan Airport modernization, to be chief operating officer for a dedicated Allston Development Group, reporting to Lawrence H. Summers, then president.

In his mid 2007 report as interim president, Derek Bok noted, “Work on developing Allston has also gone forward on schedule,” with the filing of a master plan, designs for the science complex advancing “so that construction can begin within the year,” and a pending renovation to house the Fogg collections during the reconstruction of the museums. The science center, of course, had to be mothballed in early 2010, after the financial crash—worsened for Harvard in part by its advance-funding arrangements for the anticipated Allston construction. And the museum plans did not proceed; the museums used swing space in Somerville, and moved back into their new home in late 2014.

Bowing to those new realities, Gordon stepped down in mid 2010, observing, “The work I came here to do will be happening at a slower pace and intensity…and that reality led to today’s announcement.”

Now, Harvard will develop its own academic facilities at a much more measured pace, and will pursue development of a significant piece of its Allston property in a way that both complements the University’s interest in entrepreneurship and innovation, and fits its “new-normal” financial resources and appetites. (Constrained federal funding for research makes it more difficult to recover the costs for University-owned science facilities. The resetting of the endowment’s value, and the prospects of more modest long-term investment returns, mean there will be a lower projected assessment on endowment distributions to pay for Allston programs, or to service debt that might be incurred to build there.)

Partnering with developers would radically diminish Harvard’s required investment—initial infrastructure costs in the Allston enterprise zone will be daunting—while bringing new uses to the land perhaps decades earlier than it could be repurposed for academic tenants. And, of course, that modus operandi could turn a fallow asset into a rent-producing source of revenue—perhaps from tenants developing intellectual property created in Harvard labs, and paying royalties to use it.

For now, Harvard has an executive responsible for sorting out what kinds of partnerships to pursue, what mix of development might be feasible, and how to cut the multiple Gordian knots that will certainly need to be untangled on a project of this scope in a heavily regulated city like Boston. Fessler, a Stanford political-science major who then earned a master’s in construction engineering and management, has worked at Beacon Properties Corp., Copley Real Estate Advisors, and Leggat McCall Properties, all Boston-based. He is a director of NAIOP Massachusetts, the commercial real-estate development association. He will certainly call on everything he has learned, and all the experiences he has accumulated in area development, to move the enterprise research campus ahead in the years to come.

 Read the University announcement here.

“Many of us are here because we want to bear witness,” said Diane Davis Wednesday night in Gund Hall’s auditorium, leading off a three-day Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD) conference exploring issues of racial justice in St. Louis. Bringing together planners, politicians, activists, and scholars, “Voices & Visions of St. Louis: Past, Present, Future” continues a national conversation that began in August 2014 in nearby Ferguson, where protests erupted in the streets after the killing of unarmed teenager Michael Brown.

The conference, which continues through Friday, examines the urban planning and design decisions that have excluded and dispossessed St. Louis’s African-American community during the past two centuries, and what today’s planners and designers can do repair the damage. Calling St. Louis “not just a place but a metaphor for our national condition,” Davis, the GSD’s Norton professor of regional planning and urbanism and chair of the school’s department of urban planning and design—and a native St. Louisan—said, “We have allowed pockets of poverty and social stigma to become normalized in our cities.…This is a clarion call to rethink how cities are built, by whom, and for what purposes.” 

In the keynote lecture and panel that followed her remarks, Joseph Heathcott, an urban-studies professor at New York’s New School, and a Midwesterner who spent a dozen years working and teaching in St. Louis, described the roots of racial tension in what he called “this weird, borderland city.” He traced the area’s history from the Civil War through World War II and the years just beyond, a period when race became a central factor in St. Louis’s politics and planning. “In the decades following the Civil War, white racial hostility towards black people was a constant feature of life in St. Louis,” Heathcott said. But Jim Crow didn’t emerge on its own. “It was carefully constructed by white politicians, real-estate networks, neighborhood groups, and business associations over the course of five decades.” Segregation deepened throughout the early 1900s, so that by World War II, the separation between whites and blacks was nearly absolute.

Those decades also included the 1917 race riots and massacres in East St. Louis (just across the river in Illinois), the violence that flared in 1949 when a group of black children attempted to integrate St. Louis’s Fairground Park pool, and the downtown lunch-counter sit-ins and protest marches that predated the Civil Rights era by more than a decade. “Amid the worst days of segregation in St. Louis,” Heathcott said, “black men and women honed the very tools needed to dismantle apartheid, and so for us have left a legacy and model to follow in terms of challenging racial injustice in America.” 

Jamilah Nasheed, a Missouri state senator whose district includes some of St. Louis’s most desperate and impoverished neighborhoods, spoke about the city’s failure to invest in jobs, schools, and infrastructure, describing block after block of abandoned, crumbling buildings left to rot. “Many are missing entire walls, the bricks literally stolen away by thieves,” she said. The frustration, shame, and resentment of those living next door, she said, can be overwhelming. “When our government’s actions tell people they are not worth the most basic investment of its time and money, it should be no surprise when they start to believe it.”

Sharing her own experience, Nasheed talked about growing up in St. Louis public housing, the child of a father murdered before she was born and a mother who killed herself two years later. Nasheed was raised by her grandmother, and she joined a gang and fell into violence before pulling her life together. “Growing up in St. Louis is like a coin flip that so many lose,” she said. “We cannot keep leaving these lives up to chance.” 

In the Q&A that followed, audience members—many of whom were from St. Louis, or else taught or went to school there—probed the connections between St. Louis’s problems and its built environment, and between St. Louis and other troubled cities around the country. Don Roe, a planner who works with St. Louis city government, urged young planners to “take it personally,” and to design cities with passion and compassion for the people who will live in them. Following up on a lecture he’d given earlier in the week in the same auditorium, David Harvey, the GSD’s Senior Loeb Scholar and a CUNY professor of anthropology and geography, observed, “There’s a vast amount of investment going on in cities which is about making cities good places to invest in, rather than making cities good places to live in.” In other words, he argued, cities find money to put toward corporate building projects and high-end condominiums and “rich stuff downtown,” but not for “rebuilding those parts of the city that really need it.…I think it is a scandal in this country that the conditions of life in many of the central cities have deteriorated over time.”  

A few minutes later, Nasheed drove the point home: “When those children, each and every day, have to walk up and down those streets and see those buildings”—empty, abandoned—“it really decays their minds,” she said. “I mean, what do you expect out of them? What do you expect out of them other than hopelessness?”

The conference, a partnership between the GSD and the Divided City Initiative at Washington University in St. Louis, continued on Thursday with panel discussions that delved deeper into the city’s social and racial history, the geographic conditions and land-use decisions that affected it, the role of design in the city’s character, and the policies of exclusion in the urban environment. On Wednesday night, GSD dean Mohsen Mostafavi noted that the conference follows a year and a half of discussion and events grappling with design and social equality: “The conversation has really affected our work in the school, our pedagogy, our project.” This conference, he said, is intended to launch years more of multidisciplinary discussion on injustice, inequality, race, and exclusion.  

The portraits hung on the walls of the Faculty Room in University Hall—where the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) conducts its business meetings—have for some time been lightly coeducational. Historian Helen Maud Cam, installed as a professor in 1948, ending FAS’s all-male history (though still barred from the Faculty Club’s front door, and from Lamont Library), was recognized in permanent form when her likeness was installed on the walls in February 1995.

Her solitude was broken in February 2002, when she was joined by Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, Ph.D. ’25—Phillips astronomer in the Harvard College Observatory without limit of time and lecturer on astronomy, and later professor of astronomy and department chair—a pioneering observer of stars, who published important papers and books on their chemical composition. (Updated April 1, 8:45 a.m.: A likeness of Elizabeth Cary Agassiz, first president of Radcliffe College, now hangs in the room as well.) The Payne-Gaposchkin portrait was commissioned by Nobel laureate Dudley Herschbach, then Baird professor of science, and his wife, Georgene Herschbach, then associate dean of the College; as a longtime advocate for more women faculty members, he had, as he put it, agitated for “affirmative action for portraits.”

Now affirmative action for FAS portraits has taken a further step, with the recognition of another faculty member who communed with the heavens—albeit in a very different way. On the beautiful spring afternoon of March 31, a likeness of the late Reverend Peter J. Gomes, Plummer professor of Christian morals and Pusey minister in the Memorial Church from 1974 to 2011, was unveiled in the Faculty Room, integrating the images on display. The painting is by portraitist Yuqi Wang, who is based in New York.

A backbencher during faculty meetings, Gomes enjoyed speaking on those occasions and rose often to do so (and colleagues evidently enjoyed his full voice and High English form of address, as relief from the official proceedings). So he would have taken particular pleasure in the venue and this occasion. A champion of ritual and tradition, he would have approved his rendering in academic and religious regalia, Bible in hand, with the baton he used to steer his flock of College graduates-to-be as they filed out from the senior chapel service and into Harvard Yard to queue for their graduation Morning Exercises: the high point of Gomes’s presence before the community each year. His Memorial Church congregation, Harvard-history seminar students, and Commencement listeners would instantly recognize that confident, and amused, visage.

Suitably, the portraits in the room were rearranged so that Gomes could hang high on the southwest wall, directly over the bench where he habitually sat for faculty meetings. (His immediate companions include presidents Neil L. Rudenstine and James Bryant Conant.) As one wag put it, the Gomes in oil is placed in his familiar spot, “where he can look down on the faculty,” much as he stood above his congregation. 

The Ceremony

Among those who spoke at the memorial service for Gomes on April 6, 2011, were President Drew Faust; then-Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick ’78, J.D. ’82; and the Reverend Wendel “Tad” Meyer, then-acting Pusey minister. (Gomes was also remembered in an FAS Memorial Minute, read before the faculty in 2014.) They spoke again at the portrait ceremony—Patrick now equipped with his LL.D. conferred last May, and Meyer now as a senior associate of Memorial Church.

The proceedings were introduced by FAS dean Michael D. Smith, who noted that the Faculty Room has for more than two centuries been “the symbolic and literal heart” of his faculty—a storied history to which Gomes would now be added in permanent fashion. Smith noted that during faculty meetings, when he sits at a round table in front of the east wall, his angle of vision is directly toward Gomes’s habitual seat—a vantage point that enabled the dean to “read his face” as business was transacted. With the portrait hung, Smith continued, he will “expect to see Peter there, sitting in judgment.” He was “delighted and proud,” the dean said, “to have him join the rest of the incredible people in this room.”

President Faust noted that installing a portrait in the Faculty Room “doesn’t just happen,” a perhaps bemused comment on Harvard’s workings in general. She thanked the faculty committee responsible for managing this matter: Burden professor of photography Robin Kelsey (recently named FAS’s dean of arts and humanities, effective this summer); Phillips professor of Early American history Joyce Chaplin; and Dumbarton Oaks professor of the history of Pre-Columbian and Colonial art Thomas Cummins. She also saluted the artist (present with his wife and daughter), and noted that his works hang in the national portrait galleries of both Britain and the United States.

“Peter was never to be forgotten or ignored,” Faust said. “I am afraid once we hang this portrait, it will begin to speak,” perhaps about “some dangerous intrusion of the present upon the past.” She recalled him as “out of the box and out of the closet,” a self-described “Afro Saxon.” Summoning an anecdote she told in 2011, about the time when Gomes visited her at Radcliffe upon learning about her appointment as president and pronounced, “Madam, I come to pledge my fealty,” she said the unveiling was a time to say, “Today, we pledge you ours.”

Reverend Meyer, up from retirement in Florida, said that he had heard people saying there was already a portrait of Gomes in Memorial Church, and a likeness at Bates College, his alma mater. Weren’t there enough images already? He then said that in preparation for Easter, he had led an Episcopal study group of 20 men in reading the final chapters of the four canonical gospels, and that some of them were surprised and even unsettled that the accounts differed in chronology, characters, and even in the depictions of Jesus himself. He replied, “Wasn’t it wonderful, I suggested, that we had four different portraits of this enigmatic character?” He then said, “Like his Lord and Savior, Peter Gomes was a delightful enigma.” Having many ways of remembering him seemed fitting: “Like the Gospels, portraits…are invitations to engage the mystery of another human being,” Meyer said, and not a snapshot in time.

“The Peter Gomes I knew and loved would never think there could be too many attempts” to capture his complexity and mystery, he continued, to laughter. He was, for the assembled, “our preacher, our pastor, our colleague, and our friend,” and Meyer was delighted that the portrait would hang in the Faculty Room for people of every race, creed, sexual orientation, political belief, and religion.

Faust introduced Governor Patrick as “a graduate of the College, the Law School, and the School of Peter Gomes.” Patrick said that when he was asked to talk, he wanted it known that he was out of the speech-making business. Given the oratory that preceded him, the only thing he could think of to say was, “Now it’s time to pass the plate.”

He had a vision of Gomes seated in the Faculty Room, near a door, “where you could imagine him stirring up trouble” and then making an exit, with mischief in his eyes. Gomes, he continued, had “a classic way of reminding us, in these very rare environments, neither to forget our blessings nor to take them for granted.”

Wherever he encountered Gomes, the governor continued, he was making “sweeping” entrances and exits. “What I got from Peter…on Sunday mornings, at dinner tables,” and in many other places, was a reminder always to “try a new perspective, to think in fresh ways about the things we take for granted,” and to reach for new ways of seeing “each other and ourselves.” The portrait itself, he concluded, with its “loving, whimsical, witty, wise expression,” would be an inspiration to all to try new perspectives.

The Faculty Room, Integrated

With the installation of the Gomes painting, the coeducational Faculty Room portrait gallery has been integrated, too. The unveiling is, by coincidence, one in a series of events this semester that bring issues of race in America, and at Harvard, to the forefront of campus conversations: the change in Harvard Law School’s shield (associated with a slave-owning family); the change in undergraduate House leaders’ title from “master” to “faculty dean”; and the placement of a plaque on Wadsworth House, scheduled for April 6, memorializing the four slaves who lived and worked there for eighteenth-century Harvard presidents Benjamin Wadsworth and Edward Holyoke.

Harvard College announced today that 2,037 students have been offered admission to the class of 2020 (including the 918 previously notified that they were granted early-action admission). The College received 39,041 applications, up 4.6 percent from the 37,307 candidates last year. The admission rate accordingly declined modestly, to 5.2 percent, from 5.3 percent in the prior year. (For a time series of applications, admissions, and admissions rates, consult the Harvard University Fact book here.)

In the College news release, dean of admissions and financial aid William R. Fitzsimmons observed that, “For the class of 2020 admissions, economic diversity has increased, and records were set for both African-American and Asian-American students.” The release went on to amplify that “A record 14 percent of the admitted students are African-American and 22.1 percent are Asian-American, also a record. Latinos are 12.7 percent after last year’s record 13.3 percent; Native Americans are 2.2 percent (1.5 percent last year) and Native Hawaiians 0.4 percent (0.5 percent last year).” Of the admitted students, 48.4 percent are women (up fractionally from last year), and about 15 percent are first-generation college students.

As for their expressed interests, “Compared to last year, larger percentages of admitted students intend to concentrate in the humanities (16.9 percent vs. 14.8 percent), engineering (14 percent vs. 12.4 percent), math (7.5 percent vs. 6.4 percent), physical sciences (7.3 percent vs. 6.9 percent), and computer science (7.2 percent vs. 5.9 percent). There were declines in the social sciences (21.9 percent vs. 26 percent), biological sciences (18.9 percent vs. 20.1 percent), and undecided (6.4 percent vs. 7.6 percent).”

Looking only at their quantitative credentials, the release noted, “About 13,600 students scored 700 or above on the SAT critical reading test; 15,700 scored 700 or above on the SAT math test; 13,600 scored 700 or higher on the SAT writing test; and 3,300 were ranked first in their high-school classes.”

The Admissions Frenzy

Perhaps reflecting a bit of a backlash during a populist moment in the nation’s history, the annual frenzy surrounding the admissions decisions by selective institutions elicited some notable comment this week. New York Times columnist Frank Bruni skewered the process (“College Admissions Shocker!”) by imagining Stanford achieving admissions heaven by rejecting every applicant to the class of 2020. Sample passage:

“We had exceptional applicants, yes, but not a single student we couldn’t live without,” said a Stanford administrator who requested anonymity. “In the stack of applications that I reviewed, I didn’t see any gold medalists from the last Olympics—Summer or Winter Games—and while there was a 17-year-old who’d performed surgery, it wasn’t open-heart or a transplant or anything like that. She’ll thrive at Yale.”

(Where You Go Is Not Who You’ll Be, Bruni’s recent book on admissions, was reviewed recently in Harvard Magazine.)

Separately, a FiveThirtyEight analysis suggested that journalists cover the nation’s non-selective institutions of higher education, where the overwhelming majority of students are enrolled.

The Term Bill

The announcement of the coming year’s undergraduate term bill—tuition, room, board, and fees—traditionally accompanies the admissions statistics. This year, it was released earlier in the week, when the College disclosed that the term bill will rise to $63,025, up 3.9 percent—or $2,366—from $60,659 in academic year 2015-2016. (This represents a slight acceleration from the prior year’s 3.5 percent increase; the fact book provides a time series of undergraduate term bills extending back to 1985—when the bill, not adjusted for inflation to today’s dollars, was $14,100. The bill crossed the $20,000 threshold in academic year 1991; $30,000 in 1998; $40,000 in 2006; $50,000 in 2011; and $60,000 in the current year.)

An Aid Experiment

The list price, of course, does not reflect any financial aid. Harvard College remains free for students from families whose income is less than $65,000; for those with family incomes of up to $150,000 and typical assets, the term bill grades up to 10 percent of income.

In the tuition announcement, the College also disclosed an experimental “start-up” grant. For students enrolling this fall whose family income is $65,000 or less—about 20 percent of the anticipated matriculants—a $2,000 grant will be awarded, in equal sums at the beginning of each semester. These funds are atop current awards, and are unrestricted, so students can use them to participate in social activities, go out for meals, or spend on any other purpose they choose. (Existing financial-aid packages and other funds, the College reports, included $3.3 million in 2015 to help low-income students pay for health insurance, course books, travel costs, winter coats, and admissions to events and performances; the new grants thus supplement the existing financial support.)

The grants are intended to ease students’ transition to life at the College, enabling them to participate fully in the academic experience and other resources Harvard offers.

The program is described as experimental: a three-year trial is planned, for freshmen entering this fall and in the College classes of 2021 and 2022. Undergraduate aid has been budgeted at about $170 million for the past few years. This enhancement is limited both as a three-year pilot (during which students’ transition to their new environment can presumably be assessed), and in aggregate cost. Assuming that one-fifth of each entering class qualifies, the additional outlay is about $660,000 for each of the three years—a modest increment compared to a structural change in the aid formula, such as raising the family income threshold for free attendance.

Data in the announcement detail aggregate financial-aid spending since 2005, when the present aid system was adopted. During that period, the College has succeeded in attracting more applicants overall, and in enrolling a larger proportion of students from lower-income families and students who are the first members of their families to pursue a college degree. In this year’s election for members of the Board of Overseers, a group of petition candidates is campaigning on a platform of abolishing tuition for all students; they argue that the list price of attendance inhibits applications from lower-income families, and that the financial-aid system is too complex, discouraging efforts to attract a more socioeconomically diverse undergraduate class.

Comedic actress Rashida Jones ’97 will be the principal guest speaker for Harvard College seniors celebrating their Class Day in Tercentenary Theatre on May 25. She was chosen and invited to speak by a subcommittee of eight class marshals, who considered speakers suggested by classmates as part of a senior-class survey.

“I am truly honored to come back to campus and speak at Class Day 2016. Harvard was such a transformative place for me in so many ways,” Jones said in a statement. “It’s where I first had the idea for Facebook, which went on to make me billions of dollars and change the world. Oh wait, that wasn’t me…”

Jones, an accomplished screenwriter, philanthropist, and comic-book author, is best known for her roles in more than 20 films, television shows such as The Office and Parks and Recreation, and, most recently, as the title character in the TBS comedy Angie Tribeca. The daughter of musician Quincy Jones, D.Mus. ’97, and model turned The Mod Squad star Peggy Lipton, Jones said of her parents in a recent Vanity Fair profile that she is “the genetic expression of all their secret academic dreams.” 

According to Harvard officials, nine alumni have been selected to deliver the Class Day address since 1968, with Jones not only the fourth consecutive alumna to give the address but also the first relative of a former Class Day speaker (her father, in 1997) to receive the honor.

“As a Harvard College alumna, Rashida Jones knows what it is like to balance commitments—whether it was her involvement with the Harvard-Radcliffe Dramatic Club, the Signet Society, or the Black Students Association—with academics and the many other facets of college life,” class marshal Gabriela Ruiz-Colon ’16, co-chair of the speaker-selection committee, said in a press release. “She has taken this experience and shown an extraordinary ability to use her celebrity platform to make the world a better place.”

Class Day events will take place in Tercentenary Theatre beginning at 2 p.m. on Wednesday, May 25, and will also be streamed live online. 

Republican members of the United States Congress have periodically sought to jawbone endowed private colleges and universities into spending more of their income and assets—particularly on undergraduate financial aid, and sometimes for other purposes. Shortly before the financial crisis vaporized a scary proportion of those assets (about $10 billion, or nearly 30 percent, in Harvard’s case), Senator Charles Grassley, of Iowa, led colleagues in investigations of institutions’ endowments, the possibility of mandating a 5 percent annual distribution rate (like the rule governing nonprofit foundations), and related subjects.

As reported this winter, Representative Tom Reed (New York) proposed legislation that would require that 25 percent of endowment income be spent on financial aid for lower-income students. (In Harvard’s case, that formula would seemingly require spending far more than the total cost of tuition in some years.) And in February, Senator Orrin G. Hatch (Utah; Committee on Finance) and Representative Kevin Brady (Texas; chair, Committee on Ways and Means) and Representative Peter Roskam (Illinois; chair, Ways and Means Oversight Subcommittee) sent a very broad set of questions pertaining to endowments, aid, investment management, and financial practices to the 56 private institutions with endowments valued at $1 billion or more. (Read their letter here.) The Hill reports on the political landscape.

Responses were due by April 1: the same day, as it happens, that Harvard mailed ballots to eligible alumni for this year’s election of five members of the Board of Overseers—an election that is contested by a slate of petition candidates who are critical of certain endowment policies and advocate devoting University financial resources to the elimination of undergraduate tuition.

In that context—under obligation to respond to the members of Congress, and with other issues and claims at stake closer to home—the University’s response makes fruitful reading. It would be fair to say that even within the Harvard community, not many people know what the endowment is, how it is owned and functions, and so on. Some of those matters are broadly addressed. (Others—like intra-Harvard transfers of funds and various assessments made on endowment distributions to the schools to fund University operations—remain opaque, perhaps to be revisited on other occasions.) Interested readers may find the entire University letter worthwhile, both for financial insights and as a peculiar form of institutional literature; some highlights are presented here.

The Case for Endowments

In her cover letter to the legislators (“I write with appreciation for your deep interest in higher education and your shared commitment to advancing its purposes throughout your careers”), President Drew Faust took the opportunity to “enable a fuller understanding” of the nature of endowment funds and Harvard’s academic reach. She outlined the multipronged model that has sustained universities (at least until recently, when many states have slashed support for higher education at public institutions, and federal commitments to sponsored research and financial aid have become more constrained):

America’s colleges and universities are admired the world over because of a long-standing and shared commitment—among citizens, institutions, and state and federal governments—to educating individuals regardless of their backgrounds, to driving discovery and innovation, and to serving the public. The federal government is a vital partner in this effort, providing strong federal student-aid programs, tax benefits to encourage students to pursue higher education, funding for basic and applied research, and support for charitable organizations, as offered in the tax code.

After noting the fundamental purposes of nonprofit organizations, she continued:

[W]hile alumni, philanthropists, and others are primarily motivated to give to Harvard to support students and scholars, the incentives in the tax code efficiently encourage their support and have helped build an institution that continues to advance the public good through the pursuit of knowledge.

Generations of philanthropy and investment exempt from taxation have produced the endowment, now “the University’s largest asset and our largest source of financial support,” through distributions of funds amounting to 35 percent of the operating budget in fiscal year 2015. Moreover, that role has grown: “Tuition alone does not cover the costs of educating a student, and research grants do not cover the full cost of the research enterprise. Increasingly, endowments play a significant role in bridging these gaps and making it possible for Harvard to pursue its mission. Reliance on endowment spending has grown substantially in recent years. Less than 20 years ago, one in five dollars spent was from the endowment; today, it is one in three.” And to underscore the point about libraries, laboratories, and professors, Faust noted, “A cost that is borne by the endowment is one that does not have to be paid with tuition dollars.”

Within the formal response to the congressmen, Harvard first inserted a prologue, underlining three points:

• The endowment supports activities across the University’s teaching and research mission—to the tune of $1.6 billion in fiscal 2015, and including substantial spending on financial aid.
• Most endowment funds are restricted, by use and by ownership: “Endowment funds are generally not transferable for use across schools; in other words, an endowment given for the unrestricted support of the Harvard Kennedy School cannot be used to support financial aid at Harvard College.” 
• And, in a point stressed repeatedly, the endowment distribution (the “payout rate”) “reconciles two competing goals”: enabling stable, predictable distributions that fulfill donors’ intent to support faculty members, students, libraries, and so on; and maintaining the value of endowment assets over time to fulfill their purposes in perpetuity (thus offsetting inflationary decreases in purchasing power). Harvard, like many institutions, has reconciled these tensions by aiming for an annual endowment distribution of 5.0 percent to 5.5 percent of market value, smoothed for market fluctuations. (But see a different approach, at Princeton, discussed below at “In Comparative Perspective.”)

The Q&A’s: Managing the Endowment

Harvard’s responses to broad questions about endowment investments and restrictions on assets follow the data available in the annual report of the Harvard Management Company (HMC), which invests those assets, and the annual University financial report, which is of course audited. The University does point out:

Nonuniform ownership of endowment assets. The four largest schools (Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Medicine, Business, and Law) command 70 percent of the endowment assets. Because of donors’ wishes over time, “The distribution of the endowment across Harvard’s schools is not in any way equal. This results in substantial differences across Harvard’s schools in their reliance on the endowment to support their operations.”

Donor priorities. The purposes for which restricted endowments are restricted are, in decreasing order, professorships; financial aid; teaching and research programs; and other lesser categories of intended use.

The endowment’s lost purchasing power since 2008. Although in nominal terms the endowment as of June 30, 2015, finally exceeded its prior peak value, just before the financial crisis in late 2008 ($37.6 billion vs. $36.9 billion), “In real (inflation-adjusted) dollars, the endowment remains below the fiscal 2008 value, by approximately $5 billion.”

This may be the first published estimate of the loss in purchasing power; it is calculated using the Higher Education Price Index, which differs from (and is generally larger) than the Consumer Price Index, reflecting educational institutions’ characteristic categories of expenses. The fact that the University in effect skipped a capital-campaign cycle during the first decade of the millennium (following the change in presidencies and then the financial crisis and recession) exacerbated the depressing effects of the crisis on the value of endowment assets.

The report also hints at the costs of managing endowment assets. Harvard has always insisted that its hybrid management model (with HMC investing a portion of the assets itself, and less expensively, and external managers investing the rest) provided important economies. It has not detailed those economies to any significant extent, other than reporting, as in the fiscal 2014 HMC letter, that its studies suggested savings of “approximately $2.0 billion over the last decade as compared to the cost of management for a completely external model” delivering equivalent investment returns.

The response to the congressional query notes that the management cost for internally managed funds is “generally below 0.75 percent” and that for externally managed funds “generally averages 1-2 percent of assets under management.” These figures presumably exclude investment expenses, like trading commissions, and performance-based compensation to external managers, which is typically considered a share of investment returns, not a “cost of management.” The cost differential also may reflect, in part, HMC’s internal management of equity and fixed-income portfolios, which command lower fees than less liquid asset classes, such as private equity and hedge funds.

Making a back-of-the-envelope calculation, and applying the fiscal 2014 distribution of 40 percent of assets internally managed and 60 percent externally managed to the fiscal 2015 assets ($37.6 billion) yields, very roughly, $110 million of internal costs (at 0.75 percent) and $225 million to $450 million of external management costs (at 1 percent to 2 percent). Presumably, private-equity and hedge-fund managers’ “carried interest” (often 20 percent of investment gains) would be atop those fees, and would be paid by subtracting them from HMC’s realized and reported investment returns.

For a comparison, see Princeton’s response to the congressional inquiries: that university’s PRINCO unit does not manage funds internally. Accordingly, Princeton reports roughly 42 full-time-equivalent people at the university working on the endowment, with associated fiscal 2015 costs of $21 million; and external management and custodial costs of $299 million—amounting to about 1.4 percent of the endowment’s fiscal 2015 market value of $22.7 billion. Princeton notes, “Consistent with prior reporting and conventional accounting, [these management costs] do not include the external managers’ performance-based compensation, which is properly understood as a share of returns rather than a cost of management.”

Using the Funds: Distributions and Financial Aid

As noted, the decision on how much investment income to distribute, and other distributions, balances present use versus future needs. Harvard repeatedly stresses the importance of maintaining the endowment’s integrity and spending power for the long term, noting, for instance, that “a key factor is the expectation of future inflation.” As operating costs inflate, “the value of the endowment must increase apace in order to maintain its contribution, in real terms, to the University’s mission.” Failing to achieve that (letting purchasing power erode) would constitute a “potential violation of stewardship obligations to…donors and state law.” Accordingly, “our target payout rate is calculated to spend a portion—but not all—of the annual endowment return.”

Regular annual distributions can be supplemented by “incremental payouts for priority funding areas on a fund-by-fund basis.” Such extra distributions “must be time-limited, financially prudent, and consistent with donor restrictions. As examples, Harvard’s response identified one-time funding for acquisition of laboratory equipment and “to upgrade undergraduate student housing and dormitories.” The Faculty of Arts and Sciences’ annual financial reports, for instance, document “decapitalizations” of some $390 million during the past four years, a significant portion of which underpins the House renewal project—accounting in part for the slower rate of recovery in FAS’s endowment compared to Harvard’s overall. 

The University counts the operating and incremental distributions together to arrive at its consolidated payout rate for any given year. Again, the effects of the financial crisis stand out starkly:

• In fiscal 2010, the payout rate rose, to an unusually high 6.1 percent—but given the endowment’s sharp depreciation, the sum distributed, in absolute terms, decreased by $100 million from the prior year.
• In the longer perspective, the toll of the financial crisis on the University’s financial trajectory is especially clear. Endowment distributions paid out rose from $1.063 billion in fiscal 2006 to $1.656 billion in fiscal 2009; declined to $1.427 billion in fiscal 2011; and have since averaged in a range of $1.7 billion to $1.8 billion per year. In other words, Harvard downshifted from a period of vigorous, endowment-fueled growth, to a period of sharp constraint, and has now been in a multiyear period of “new-normal” stability, with essentially flat contributions from the endowment. Over time, endowment gifts from The Harvard Campaign ought to help revive asset growth and distributions.

Distributions for financial aid are of particular interest, to Congress and in the Overseers’ election. Among the features of the undergraduate aid program detailed in the response to the congressional queries, Harvard highlights the structure of the financial-aid initiative begun in 2004, which now provides:

• coverage of all costs of attendance (tuition, room, board, fees, and other costs) for students from families with incomes of $65,000 or less—about 20 percent of current undergraduates;
• coverage of all tuition costs for students from families with incomes from $65,000 to $160,000 (whose cost of attendance scales up from 1 percent to 10 percent of income); and
• grant-based aid packages that do not require loans. Students who chose to take out loans (one-quarter of the class of 2015) had median debt of $10,900.

Of interest:

• The undergraduate aid program was 82 percent funded by endowed sources in fiscal 2009; following the loss of endowment value and greater need in the financial crisis and recession, that portion decreased to 53 percent in fiscal 2011 (one reason FAS is seeking $600 million in endowed undergraduate-aid gifts in its capital campaign). At present, grant aid is 62 percent funded from endowments. (The rest comes from FAS’s unrestricted revenues: current-use gifts, tuition, and other cash.)
• One-quarter of the annual endowment distribution, approximately, is spent on tuition aid, University-wide.
• Within the College, since the introduction of the financial-aid initiative in fiscal 2004, the proportion of students who receive Pell Grants (commonly used as a measure for lower-income students) rose from 10 percent to 19 percent in fiscal years 2011 through 2014, and to 18 percent in fiscal 2015. Similarly, the percentage of freshmen considered the core beneficiaries of the financial-aid initiative (with family incomes below $80,000) rose from 14 percent (fiscal 2004) to 26 percent (fiscal 2008), and has since fluctuated between 23 percent and 26 percent. 

In Comparative Perspective

The university filings make it possible to compare institutions. Princeton’s (referred to above, on investment-management experiences) provides a financial snapshot of a peer institution that differs in revealing respects from Harvard.

Princeton is of course much smaller than Harvard, and much more focused on undergraduate and graduate liberal-arts education. It has a very substantial commitment to engineering and applied sciences (far larger than Harvard’s expanding school), but almost none of the professional schools (business, law, medicine, and so on) that loom so large in Boston and Cambridge, and that figure so significantly in Harvard’s finances. The medical school, for instance, is a very large and expensive research operation. (It is, at present, operating at a loss, as is FAS.)

So it is financially consequential that Princeton’s endowment per student is much larger than Harvard’s—in recent years, about $1 million per capita. Ignoring what may be differences in operating expenses in their communities, the fact that Princeton is heavily endowed, and does not have equivalent costs like those associated with medical research, gives it a great deal of flexibility.

First, according to its congressional filing, Princeton derives about half its operating revenue (47 percent in fiscal 2016) from endowment distributions (versus Harvard’s 35 percent).

Second, it has had very ample financial-aid programs, as well. Undergraduate aid has been loan-free since 2001, a pioneering step. In recent classes, Princeton reports, just 17 percent of undergraduates have assumed some sort of educational debt, and their average loan amount upon graduation is $6,600: a lower proportion of the class, and perhaps a lower debt load, than the Harvard College figures reported above. The proportion of students receiving Pell Grants rose from 7.2 percent in the class of 2008 to 18.0 percent in the class of 2018—comparable to Harvard. (Princeton reports that it is no-cost to students with family incomes below $65,000, like Harvard. From $65,000 to $100,000 of family income, tuition is free and families pay half the cost of room and board; up to $140,000, tuition is free and a smaller proportion of room and board is covered by aid. And so on.)

Finally, Princeton—apparently given its strong endowment and its institutional cost structure—is comfortable with a higher distribution rate than Harvard wishes to maintain. From 1979 to 2009, it reports, the target payout rate was 4 percent to 5 percent. In fiscal 2009 the upper bound was raised to 5.75 percent. And effective last July, the upper bound was raised again, to 6.25 percent. Given recent strong endowment investment returns and fiscal restraint after the financial crisis, Princeton’s actual spending rate has progressively declined in recent years, reaching a low of 4.2 percent in fiscal 2015—a different way of portraying its relatively strong financial position (particularly given its heavily endowment-funded operating budget).

In the tradeoff of present versus future spending, in fact, Princeton has been able to strike a different balance than the one Harvard outlined in its congressional report. The Strategic Planning Framework published in late January (the basis for the recommendation to boost the payout rate) has this to say:

The board noted that, over time, the University’s spending policies, although designed to achieve intergenerational equity, tended in practice to favor future generations. Despite the downturn of 2008-09, the payout from the University’s endowed funds today is in general higher, even after adjusting for inflation, than at the time when the funds were created.

The board also noted that relatively low spend rates might under some circumstances disadvantage both current and future generations. That is true because the University depends on three different kinds of capital: financial capital (especially the endowment); physical capital (buildings and grounds); and human capital (faculty, students, staff, and alumni). The University’s human capital is the most critical of all: a university’s quality correlates directly with the quality of the people on its campus, and a university relies upon its human talent not only for its current operations but to plan for the future and to attract new talent. If a university fails to spend aggressively enough to sustain the quality of its human capital, it may have to spend even more in the future: the cost of rescuing or rebuilding a second-tier department is generally higher than the cost of sustaining an outstanding one.

This is, obviously, an enviable position to be in: an endowment, relative to the demands placed on it, that virtually no other institution can match. In light of that position of strength, the strategic and opportunistic investments Princeton decided to make (expanding the undergraduate student body, focusing on further growth in engineering, and so on), are also meant to signal different balancing among competing interests:

[The higher payout rate] will also reduce the likelihood that the University will make decisions that favor future generations at the expense of present ones, or that favor financial capital at the expense of human and physical capital.

Again, perhaps no other institution could make that decision. In that respect, the congressional inquiries have the useful, if unintended, effect of helping outsider observers distinguish among the fortunate, elite colleges and universities that enjoy significant endowments, suggesting that they in fact have differing costs structures, needs, and financial resources at hand. The absolute size of any one school’s endowment matters, but perhaps less than the size of its endowment relative to its enrollment, programs, and specific operating costs.

The University has announced that Kenji Yoshino ’91, the Chief Justice Earl Warren professor of constitutional law at New York University School of Law, has been elected president of Harvard’s Board of Overseers for the academic year 2016-2017. Nicole Parent Haughey ’93 has been elected vice chair of the Overseers executive committee for the year.

The elections are a routine matter: annually, two Overseers in the final year of their six-year term are elevated to these posts. (One of Yoshino’s predecessors as president of the board, in 2009-2010, was Merrick Garland ’74, J.D. ’77, chief judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals, District of Columbia Circuit, and current nominee to the U.S. Supreme Court.)

Yoshino’s election creates an interesting coincidence. As a slate of petition candidates for election to the Board of Overseers has alleged discrimination against Asian-American applicants to Harvard (also the subject of pending litigation), and the carefully scrutinized admissions figures for the College’s class of 2020 detail new levels of diversity on several dimensions, three Asian Americans—of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean descent—occupy senior leadership roles at the University:

• William F. Lee ’72, senior fellow of the Harvard Corporation (the senior governing board, to which he was elected in 2010, following previous service as an Overseer);
• Yoshino, incoming president of the Board of Overseers (the elected and advisory governing board); and
• Paul L. Choi ’86, J.D. ’89, current president of the Harvard Alumni Association (to which post he was elected last year, following long service as an elected director and officer of the association).

Although it has not been a secret, Harvard’s past connections to slavery are hardly well known. The student-inspired Harvard and Slavery Project, dating to 2007, sought to examine those connections. During four semesters of inquiry, according to Bell professor of history Sven Beckert (who worked closely with graduate student Katherine Stevens), the students found much that was “surprising”:

Harvard presidents who brought slaves to live with them on campus, significant endowments drawn from the exploitation of slave labor, Harvard’s administration and most of its faculty favoring the suppression of public debates on slavery. A quest that began with fears of finding nothing ended with a new question—how was it that the university had failed for so long to engage with this elephantine aspect of its history?

… But perhaps the most important lesson we learned in the seminars was that there is yet so much more to find out. We only understand some small parts of the story, and it will be [up] to future generations of student researchers and others to explore this history.

Still, now is the moment to share some of our findings with the larger community. We want to inspire others to dig deeper into this history, but even more so we want to encourage a broader debate on what this history means for us today. While the students could not agree on what acts of memorialization, remembrance, or restitution would be appropriate responses for Harvard, they all agreed that a broader community needs to be drawn into this discussion. It is the community as a whole that needs to decide what needs to be done.

Some of the things done were personal and temporary gestures, like the paper sign posted outside Wadsworth House last year, noting that it was not only a home to Harvard presidents, but to their slaves.

As of April 6—with the unveiling of a permanent plaque on Wadsworth House that recalls Titus, Venus, Juba, and Bilhah—these enslaved people who lived and worked there will begin to be remembered as members of the households of presidents Benjamin Wadsworth (1725-1737, for whom the house was custom-built as a residence) and Edward Holyoke (1737-1769). “Not one of the slaves,” the Harvard and History project reported, “had a recorded surname.” The presidents’ names, of course, are already memorialized in the house itself, and the towering University office building across the street, now being renovated as Smith Campus Center. (The Harvard and Slavery Project’s 2011 book provides much more detail about this “forgotten history”—for example, Juba’s 1747 marriage to Ciceely, a slave owned by professor of Hebrew Judah Monis; copies of the book, reprinted, were distributed to participants at the unveiling ceremony.)

The plaque adds to those building names this information:

Wadsworth House
Titus & Venus
Lived and worked here as enslaved persons in the household of President Benjamin Wadsworth (1725-1737)

Juba & Bilhah
Lived and worked here as enslaved persons in the household of President Edward Holyoke (1737-1769)

A simple message, but an amplification of the history to be found in such standard works as Samuel Eliot Morison’s Three Centuries of Harvard, which covers the house and the presidencies, but does not mention these residents.

President Drew Faust (whom Beckert, author of the Bancroft Prize-winning Empire of Cotton: A Global History, cites for sponsoring the publication of and “encouraging yet deeper consideration of the implications of our students’ research”) has signaled her deep interest in examining this history thoroughly. In an op-ed published in The Harvard Crimson, she said, “I write today about history, about legacies, and about our responsibility to our past and our future.” She continued:

Although we embrace and regularly celebrate the storied traditions of our nearly 400-year history, slavery is an aspect of Harvard’s past that has rarely been acknowledged or invoked. The importance of slavery in early New England was long ignored even by historians, and the presence and contributions of people of African descent at Harvard have remained a largely untold story. But Harvard was directly complicit in America’s system of racial bondage from the College’s earliest days in the seventeenth century until slavery in Massachusetts ended in 1783, and Harvard continued to be indirectly involved through extensive financial and other ties to the slave South up to the time of emancipation. This is our history and our legacy, one we must fully acknowledge and understand in order to truly move beyond the painful injustices at its core.

The plaque, she wrote, “is the beginning of an effort to remember them and our shared history”—an effort that will be extended in at least two more ways:

• the appointment of a “committee of historians from our faculty to advise me about other sites on campus that should be similarly recognized as significant symbols of Harvard’s connections to slavery” (Beckert and Thomas professor of history and of African and African American studies Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham were named co-chairs at the April 6 event); and
• a Radcliffe Institute conference in March 2017, focusing on universities and slavery, “offering a broader exploration of the complexities of our past.”

Beyond remembering the slaves and “our shared history,” Faust wrote:

There is a second essential purpose in confronting the distressing realities of America’s racial past and Harvard’s place within it. We need to understand the attitudes and assumptions that made the oppressions of slavery possible in order to overcome their vestiges in our own time. It should not be because we feel superior to our predecessors that we interrogate and challenge their actions. We should approach the past with humility because we too are humans with capacities for self-delusion, for moral failure and blindness, for inhumanity. If we can better understand how oppression and exploitation could seem commonplace to so many of those who built Harvard, we may better equip ourselves to combat our own shortcomings and to advance justice and equality in our own time. At its heart, this endeavor must be about Veritas, about developing a clear-sighted view of our past that can enable us to create a better future.

The past never dies or disappears. It continues to shape us in ways we should not try to erase or ignore. In more fully acknowledging our history, Harvard must do its part to undermine the legacies of race and slavery that continue to divide our nation.

This has been a semester of multiple such acknowledgments, beginning with the change in Harvard Law School’s shield (associated with a slave-owning family); extending to last week’s installation of the first portrait of an African American in the Faculty Room; at least peripherally touching on the change in undergraduate House leaders’ title from “master” to “faculty dean”; and now in the plan to explore the University’s deeper history.

Beyond her personal and professional engagement with the issues of slavery in the United States, Faust—a Virginian by birth (in the era of segregation), and historian of the South—has devoted considerable presidential energy to the project. Her rare spring 2015 Morning Prayers address on the civil-rights march in Selma, Alabama, highlighted both that focal event, in which she participated as a 17-year-old, and her return to the scene to commemorate its fiftieth anniversary. Given his central role in the movement, and in Selma, where he was grievously injured, the return of U.S. Representative John R. Lewis to campus (he was awarded an honorary degree in 2012) to participate in the April 6 unveiling ceremony obviously complemented Faust’s larger aims.

“These Stolen Lives”

At the 10:00 a.m. ceremony in Dudley House, William F. Lee, Senior Fellow of the Harvard Corporation, welcomed guests to a “very special and very important occasion.” Understanding and learning from history, he said, are fundamental to any academic institution, and especially this one. The search for Veritas, he said, underpinned a community “genuinely committed to learning and to understanding.” But for all its pride in its past accomplishments, Harvard has found it “harder to shine a light” on disturbing, confounding elements from the past—elements “that we might prefer to leave in the shadows.”

Citing the letter he and President Faust wrote communicating the Corporation’s decision to endorse Harvard Law School’s decision to discontinue using a school shield associated with slavery, Lee invoked the community’s obligation “to honor the past not by seeking to erase it, but rather by bringing it to light and learning from it.”

He welcomed the presence of Representative Lewis, and introduced Faust.

President Faust began by saying, “We’ve gathered today to contemplate our past and its meaning; we join together to acknowledge our history in order to transcend it and to commit ourselves to a better future.” She continued:

Today we take an important step in the effort to explore the complexities of our past and to restore this painful dimension of Harvard’s history to the understanding of our heritage. Harvard takes legitimate pride in its nearly four centuries of learning, discovery and service and in the generations of extraordinary people who have worked, taught and studied here. But today we acknowledge a very different aspect of our past and remind ourselves of individuals whose lives and contributions to our history have been left invisible.

Wadsworth House, she noted, was built

… for the “reception and accommodation” of President Benjamin Wadsworth in 1726, and it housed Harvard’s presidents until the end of Edward Everett’s term in 1849. A remarkable constellation of luminaries used the house at one time or another. It was George Washington’s initial headquarters when he came to take command of the Continental Army in 1775. Ralph Waldo Emerson boarded in the house when he was a student. Andrew Jackson held a reception of students in the house in 1833 after he received his honorary degree. Later in the century, Henry Adams lived there as an assistant professor.

Titus, Venus, Bilhah and Juba lived there, too, as enslaved workers in the households of Benjamin Wadsworth and Edward Holyoke. They did not leave the diaries and letters or other written records that have enabled us to write the history of Wadsworth’s more privileged occupants. But we can glean a few facts about their lives. Venus was purchased by Benjamin Wadsworth in 1726 when she was described as under 20 years old. Church records indicate that she was baptized in First Church Cambridge in 1740. Titus was at least part Native American, and he was baptized and later admitted to full communion. Bilhah appears in Holyoke’s records over a 10-year period, ending with the note of her death in 1765, four years after she had delivered a son. Juba appears both in Holyoke’s papers and in Cambridge city records. Their work, and that of many other people of color, played a significant role in building Harvard. The plaque is intended to remember them and honor them, and to remind us that slavery was not an abstraction but a cruelty inflicted on particular humans.  We name the names to remember these stolen lives.

Quoting her Crimson essay, she said,

“If we can understand how oppression and exploitation could seem commonplace to so many of those who built Harvard, we may better equip ourselves to combat our own shortcomings and to advance justice and equality in our own time….The past never dies or disappears. It continues to shape us in ways we should not try to erase or ignore.” We must never forget.

Faust said of Representative Lewis, “There is no living American who has done more to confront and overcome our national legacies of injustice and oppression. His presence inspires us to recognize what is possible when you make, to borrow his words, the ‘necessary trouble’ to do the work of freedom.” She concluded her remarks by observing:

Despite more than 40 arrests, physical attacks, serious injuries, he has always kept his eyes on the prize. He has always kept his faith that we can build a future better than our past. As President Obama acknowledged on the day of his first inauguration, so much of our racial and human progress in this country over the past six decades is, and I quote our president, “Because of you, John.”

Representative Lewis began by addressing “my beloved brothers and sisters.” Today’s action, he said, helped to reclaim “what has lived too long in silence.” The nation’s people, he said, “have gone to great lengths to wipe out every trace of slavery from American memory,” in face of 400 years of voices calling out to be remembered. “We have been tossing and turning for centuries in a restless sleep,” struggling with those memories. But, “We are a people haunted by amnesia,” because “we just can’t summon the truth of what it is.”

His great-grandfather was a slave, Lewis recalled; when he was elected to Congress to begin service in 1987, he found strange the absence of any commemoration of the contribution slaves had made to building the White House, the Capitol, and other national icons: “Not one word was ever mentioned about their sacrifice.” Now, after he set about remedying this universal erasure, the U.S. Capitol visitor center has an Emancipation Hall, and a plaque there commemorates slaves' role. Slavery is covered in Capitol tours, and there is a bust of Sojourner Truth. He cited Martin Luther King Jr.’s affirmation that “True peace is not merely the absence of tension: it is the presence of justice”—the compelling rationale for going to the “necessary trouble to bring the truth to light.” It is fitting of Harvard to do so, he said.

Citing a new day for the University and for America, Lewis thanked Faust for “keeping the faith by giving these souls some of the dignity and honor they did not receive in life but have deserved for centuries.”

After a sustained ovation, Lee introduced the Kuumba Singers of Harvard College. (The student chorus memorably sang in Harvard Yard in 1998, when Nelson Mandela received his honorary degree.) On this April occasion—after unseasonable snow, and given persistent cold—the singers performed inside Dudley House, rather than on the plaza outside, as originally scheduled.

Updated 4-16-16, 2:00 p.m.: Kuumba conductor Sheldon Kirk Reid observed in an e-mail that the singers had performed “One More Time,” a traditional song handed down through time; it was chosen, he said, for its role as “a celebration of continuance, community, survival, and perseverance.” The song, rooted in call and response, is simplicity itself, he wrote:

“One more time! One more time! He allowed us to come together one more time!…”

Acknowledging that some have not made it thus far; the soloist then calls out additional lines which are then echoed by the choir:

“He allowed us to pray together…”

“He allowed us to sing together…”

In addition, we have overlaid the text from Psalm 133, verse 1:

“Behold, how good and how pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity.”

“All in all,” Reid concluded, “a song that we feel is closely tied to our desire to leave a place better than we found it.” And one that seemed perfectly chosen to perform for, and to, Representative Lewis.

And then the crowd went out into the bright, crisp morning for the unveiling and a reception.

Race and Slavery in Context, on Other Campuses

During this academic year, these issues have arisen on other campuses as well.

On April 4, following a review of the legacy of Woodrow Wilson, a former Princeton president (who pursued strict racial segregation and exclusionary policies as president of the United States), that institution rejected student demands that it remove his name from its public-policy school and one of its residential colleges. At the same time, Princeton will take steps to put his legacy in context; the university will be “honest and forthcoming about its history” and transparent “in recognizing Wilson’s failings and shortcomings as well as the visions and achievements that led to the naming of the school and the college in the first place.”

Princeton will also support initiatives to create a multifaceted understanding and representation of Wilson on campus, and to bring attention to “aspects of Princeton’s history that have been forgotten, overlooked, subordinated, or suppressed; diversify campus art and iconography to reflect the institution’s contemporary diversity; change its informal motto from "Princeton in the nation's service and in the service of all nations" to "Princeton in the nation's service and the service of humanity"; and encourage more students from underrepresented groups to pursue doctoral degrees. Inside Higher Education reported the news in detail.

The definition of suitable context for racially charged messages and iconography also arose in the heart of the Deep South. This week, Inside Higher Education (in the same article) and The Chronicle of Higher Education both reported that historians at the University of Mississippi have challenged language on a newly installed plaque next to a campus statue of a Confederate soldier. The language on the plaque reads:

As Confederate veterans were passing from the scene in increasing numbers, memorial associations built monuments in their memory all across the South. This statue was dedicated by citizens of Oxford and Lafayette County in 1906. On the evening of September 30, 1962, the statue was a rallying point where a rebellious mob gathered to prevent the admission of the University’s first African American student. It was also at this statue that a local minister implored the mob to disperse and allow James Meredith to exercise his rights as an American citizen. On the morning after that long night, Meredith was admitted to the University and graduated in August 1963.

This historic structure is a reminder of the University’s past and of its current and ongoing commitment to open its hallowed halls to all who seek truth and knowledge and wisdom.

The historians maintain that that text does not address slavery as central to the Civil War. Nor does it acknowledge the “Lost Cause” ideology and the subsequent record of white supremacy and segregationist law. To better recognize the context in which the monument arose, the historians have proposed this language to provide realistic context:

From the 1870s through the 1920s, memorial associations erected more than 1,000 Confederate monuments throughout the South. These monuments reaffirmed white Southerners’ commitment to a “Lost Cause” ideology that they created to justify Confederate defeat as a moral victory and secession as a defense of constitutional liberties. The Lost Cause insisted that slavery was not a cruel institution and—most importantly—that slavery was not a cause of the Civil War. It also conveyed a belief, widely accepted throughout the United States, in white racial supremacy. Campaigns for legally mandated “Jim Crow” segregation and for the disfranchisement of African-Americans accompanied celebrations of the Lost Cause; these campaigns often sparked racial violence, including lynching.

Historians today recognize slavery as the central cause of the Civil War and freedom as its most important result. Although deadly and destructive, the Civil War freed four million enslaved Southerners and led to the passage of constitutional amendments that promised national citizenship and equal protection of laws, regardless of race. This monument, created in 1906 to recognize the sacrifice of Mississippians who fought to establish the Confederacy as a slaveholding republic, must now remind us that Confederate defeat brought freedom, however imperfect, to millions of people.

The University of Mississippi administration is considering whether to revise the plaque.

Out of the Shadows, at Harvard

At Harvard, the debates have perhaps not risen to that level of institutional consequence and identity. But from now on, when tourists flood into Harvard Yard, as so many do each day, and students and faculty members pass between Wadsworth and Dudley, the University will call to their attention a shadowed place from its past, finally brought into the light.