Kenzie Greer

The College has admitted 1,950 of 43,330 applicants to the class of 2023 (935 of whom were admitted through early actionin December). The 4.5 percent admit rate is Harvard’s lowest ever, down slightly from 4.6 percent last year; it reflects the largest number of applicants in the College’s history. First-generation college students represent 16.4 percent of the admitted class, down slightly from 17.3 percent last year, when the College admitted its highest share of low-income students.

STEM-CELL RESEARCH Poor Jack, or is it Jill, pictured sitting atop a needle on the cover of your July-August issue ("Stem-Cell Science," by Jonathan Shaw, page 36). Jack or Jill has no chance of surviving, has he/she? Let's hope his/her murderers come to swift justice. Embryonic stem cells, being pluripotent and as treated in the unnatural environment of a laboratory, give rise not so much to bright prospects as to terrifying risks.

Abbott Lawrence Lowell, the University’s president from 1909 to 1933, looms large in Harvard history, repeatedly championing academic freedom and helping to create the undergraduate House system. “Less heroic was Lowell’s role in two disputes that became public in 1922,” wrote John Bethell, former editor of Harvard Magazine, in Harvard Observed, his history of the institution during the twentieth century.