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Articles by Lydia Carmichael
Harvard Houghton Library 75th anniversary exhibition
Houghton Library was conceived in 1924, in a letter by Archibald Cary Coolidge, director of the Harvard University Library, who imagined an “enchanted palace on the raised ground close to Widener.” Consistent with the times, and with his very name, he envisioned the repository in elite terms: “a beautiful building…in which we store all our works of great rarity and value…[and] works dear to the book-lover, a place where we could keep what we valued most and show it to those who appreciate...
Much Bigger Than the Police
“Policing, at present, is trapped in an intractable dilemma caused by the gap between a just society and the one we inhabit,” said Harvard political theorist Brandon Terry, leading off a Radcliffe Institute online conversation Monday afternoon on American policing and protest. His sentiment set the tone.
Harvard Single-Gender Social-Club Rules Rescinded
The University announced Monday that in light of seemingly insuperable legal challenges, it is rescinding its policy on unregulated single-gender social organizations (USGSOs: the undergraduate final clubs, fraternities, and sororities). The policy was proposed by President Drew Gilpin Faust and Harvard College dean Rakesh Khurana in May 2016 and finally imposed by the Corporation in late 2017 after a protracted, divisive debate (summarized here) within the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS).
Calhoun-Fall
Peter H. Wood ’64, Ph.D. ’72, an emeritus history professor at Duke University and former member of Harvard’s Board of Overseers, submitted this essay reflecting on the recent removal of the massive John C. Calhoun statue in Charleston, South Carolina—a timely contribution toward putting current events, controversies, and decisions into their long-simmering, historical context.
College Yield Drops 3 Percent During COVID-19
Articles News more News Fall academic plans from four different New England institutions—and what Harvard faces 6.23.20 Beds were set up for Spanish flu patients outside the Harvard-affiliated Peter Bent Brigham Hospital in 1918. Photograph courtesy of the Brigham and Women's Hospital Archives Fall semester interrupted, a century ago 6.23.20 Research more Research Beds were set up for Spanish flu patients outside the Harvard-affiliated Peter Bent Brigham Hospital in 1918.
Turkish-inspired Delights
Your independent source for Harvard news since 1898 | SUBSCRIBE Log-In | Register Search form Search Articles News more News Fall academic plans from four different New England institutions—and what Harvard faces 6.23.20 Beds were set up for Spanish flu patients outside the Harvard-affiliated Peter Bent Brigham Hospital in 1918.
Protecting the press as a foundation of democracy
When America’s Founders drafted the First Amendment, including its protection of a free press as key to self-governance, they could not foresee the twenty-first-century media landscape: Twitter and Facebook, filter bubbles that feed readers stories that reinforce their beliefs, and the shrinking number of local newspapers, now considered “legacy” media.
Profile of Harvard diver Georgina Milne
Georgina Milne ’21 stands straight, preparing to execute a daunting front three-and-a-half tuck. One of the country’s best collegiate divers from the three-meter springboard, she knows the seven half-rotations will take unwavering focus, tight execution, and serious core strength. Milne focuses on the little things. As she finishes her hurdle to the front of the board, she points her arms straight up—mindful of her tendency to arch them forward.
Harvard students’ personal speeches build community and communication skills
Every year around Valentine’s Day, traffic on the Lowell House Speeches Project’s Vimeo page spikes. The first time this happened was the night of February 13, 2011, just after Meghan Cleary ’11, L ’16—then a Lowell House senior—gave the eighteenth Lowell Speech. Cleary spoke of being at pre-season cross-country training, a few weeks before the start of her freshman year, when her dad suffered a cardiac arrest.
Harvard course requirements quantitative reasoning
Although the College has developed the roster of courses for the reenvisioned General Education portion of undergraduates’ curriculum, debuting this coming fall semester, a final piece of the puzzle remains.
Harvard College course shopping period
Harvard College students’ cherished “shopping week”—for sampling classes at the start of each term before registering formally—may not have nine lives, but it has attained at least a second or third—albeit with a possibly significant modification.
| Harvard Magazine
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.
College Admits 4.5 Percent of Applicants to Class of 2023
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.
Lydia Shire
Lydia Shire at Scampo Photography by Lydia Carmichael Rosenberg/The Thirty-One Percent When remembering the highs and the lows of her long career as one of Boston’s most pioneering chefs, Lydia Shire always returns to two things: the lessons she learned, and food.
Katrina Jazayeri
Katrina Jazayeri Photograph by Lydia Carmichael Rosenberg When starting a business, it can be hard to let go of every small detail and see the big picture. But by setting out to change the way a restaurant could be run and building a team that is just as invested, literally, in the success of the business as its owners, Katrina Jazayeri has—along with her partner, Josh Levin—found a way to step back.
Princeton Preps
Prep schooled. The best training to become a Harvard dean? A Princeton undergraduate education. Or so this evidence, published in the November 7, 2018, issue of our peer magazine, Princeton Alumni Weekly, strongly suggests. Upstaging John Harvard (and, like all Tigers, stoic—or heedless—in face of sartorial criticism), are Michelle Williams, Princeton ’84, public health; Douglas Elmendorf ’83, government; Bridget Terry Long ’95, education; and Francis Doyle III ’85, engineering and applied sciences.
Mass Audubon’s early spring events
The Parker River National Wildlife Refuge stretches along the coast of Plum Island, near Newburyport. In addition to prime beach and walking territory for humans, the 4,700 acres provide diverse habitats, from dunes and mudflats to marshlands, that are especially important for birds. Mass Audubon’s nearby Joppa Flats Education Center holds events and excursions that explore these precious ecosystems, including “Falconry & A Raptor Road Trip,” on March 16.
Harvard renames art film department
Harvard’s department of visual and environmental studies (VES) will emerge, like a butterfly from a chrysalis, with a new identity better reflecting what it actually does, if the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) embraces a proposal to change its name to the department of art, film, and visual studies.
Raj Chetty Will Return to Harvard
Raj Chetty, professor of economics at Stanford and one of the world’s foremost researchers on economic mobility and inequality, appears headed back to Harvard this fall. Chetty was a professor of economics at Harvard from 2009 through 2015, and his departure was part of an exodus of several of the University’s star economists to Stanford in recent years.
Court Filings Allege Discrimination Against Asian-Americans in Admissions
Hundreds of pages of analysis of Harvard’s admissions practices became public Friday in the latest development of a lawsuit alleging the University discriminates against Asian-American applicants in its admissions process. The suit, filed in 2014 by the anti-affirmative action group Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA), alleges Harvard uses a “racial quota” to cap the number of Asian-American applicants it accepts to the College each year—an allegation Harvard has repeatedly denied.
Soyoung Lee named chief curator at the Harvard Art Museums
The Harvard Art Museums has named Soyoung Lee, an expert in Korean art and curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, its new chief curator, effective September 28. Lee’s appointment concludes a lengthy search process—she succeeds Deborah Kao, who retired from the position in January 2017. “When I tell people who are not in the arts that I work at the Met, it sounds so glamorous,” Lee said in an interview.
Blake Family Ranch and Nursery
Three weeks before calving season at Keewaydin Ranch, two ranch hands yell and swat at the cows—“Hey! C’mon. Git. Git in there!”—ushering them out of a corral and into a squeeze shoot. The metal compartment holds the 1,200-pound creatures still enough for Alex Blake ’96 and his father, Francis Blake ’61, to inject a vaccination and mineral supplement.
Underground: The Story of Harvard’s Class of 1968
“I didn’t want to say no—I mean, who gets to have a movie made about their undergraduate senior thesis?” Ariel Smolik-Valles ’17 was standing in a short black dress just outside the Harvard Archives, waiting for filmmaker Peter Coonradt ’68, who was setting up his camera, to call her over for a close-up of the flowery, ’60s-throwback ankle boots she was wearing.
Mass Hall Facelift | Harvard Magazine
The construction scaffolding that has grown like aggressive ivy around campus buildings in recent years now enshrouds Massachusetts Hall, Harvard’s longest-surviving building and the second-oldest academic building in the nation, as the site undergoes renovations this summer.
Air quality’s critical impact on U.S. mortality rates
Editor’s note: On June 4, President Drew Gilpin Faust sent a letter to Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Scott Pruitt, objecting to the EPA’s proposed rule, “Strengthening Transparency in Regulatory Science.” We are therefore pre-publishing this pertinent article from the forthcoming July-August issue. Faust’s letter may be read here.
“Above All Else, Do Not Lie”
“My name is Chimamanda,” said author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie at Class Day this afternoon, in her soft West African lilt. “In Igbo, it means ‘My personal spirit will never be broken.’ I’m not sure why, but some people find it difficult to pronounce.” She recalled a woman who was to introduce her at an event in London, who spelled the name out for herself phonetically, and rehearsed it again and again. “I could tell she was very eager to get it right.
After Five Decades, Dean Dingman Bids Harvard Farewell
Last November, as the debate was raging over Harvard’s policy to sanction membership in unrecognized single-gender social organizations, dean of freshmen Thomas Dingman made an impassioned speech about the place of final clubs at the College. “I am not accustomed to speaking in a faculty meeting, but this topic seems too important on which to take a pass,” he said then. “Students accepting our offer of admission should, I believe, feel that they are eligible to participate in all of Harvard.
Students from Parkland on gun violence
In the five weeks since a gunman killed 17 people and injured an additional 17 at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, students there have coordinated a sustained national gun-control campaign unseen in the aftermath of any other modern mass shooting.
Director Agnès Varda visits Harvard for the Norton Lectures on Cinema
At the Harvard Film Archive, the staff called it V-Day: the date of Agnès Varda’s arrival in Cambridge, for appearances at screenings of Faces, Places (2017) and Vagabond (1985), and for her 2018 Norton Lectures on Cinema the next week. When the French film director walked onstage at Sanders Theatre on February 26, wearing queenly purple and her maroon-dipped bowl haircut, the crowd greeted her with a standing ovation.
| Harvard Magazine
We create ourselves out of the stories we tell about our lives, stories that impose purpose and meaning on experiences that often seem random and discontinuous. As we scrutinize our own past in the effort to explain ourselves to ourselves, we discover ? or invent ? consistent motivations, characteristic patterns, fundamental values, a sense of self. Fashioned out of memories, our stories become our identities. Historians tell stories, too.
Library of Congress names Harvard alumna Tracy K. Smith as new Poet Laureate
TRACY K. SMITH ’94 has been named the new U.S. Poet Laureate by the Library of Congress, succeeding Juan Felipe Herrera. While the role doesn’t carry many specific official duties, it has traditionally involved raising awareness of, and increasing access to, poetry. “I am excited about the kinds of social divides that poetry may be able not just to cross but to mend,” Smith said in an interview with the library.
Harvard President Drew Faust to Step Down in 2018
Drew Gilpin Faust, who assumed office as Harvard’s twenty-eighth president on July 1, 2007, announced today that she would conclude her service at the end of the next academic year, June 30, 2018.
Fred Glimp, a Harvard legend, dies at 91
Idaho high-school graduate Fred Glimp was serving in the Army Air Corps in Germany after World War II when he decided to “take a whack at Harvard” under the GI Bill. “I didn’t think I’d get in,” he told journalist David McClintick ’62 in an interview for this magazine in 1997. He did.
These Bots Were Made for Walking
Harvard researchers have designed robots to address various medical applications, from helping hearts pump blood to fighting cancer. Now, they’re adding a new accomplishment to their list: improving mobility. Two research teams have tackled this challenge by designing a special type of robot called an exosuit: a soft, flexible robotic device that people can wear like another layer of clothing.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn's biting, iconoclastic 1978 Harvard Commencement speech
In 1974, the Soviet Union deported dissident writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Litt.D. ’78, author of The Gulag Archipelago and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, and winner of the 1970 Nobel Prize in literature. After living in Cologne, Germany; Zurich, Switzerland; and at Stanford University, he settled in Cavendish, Vermont, in 1976. Two years later, Harvard awarded the 59-year-old Solzhenitsyn an honorary doctor of letters degree and chose him as its Commencement speaker.
Harvard Commencement student speakers 2017
As newcomers to a Crimson graduation may not realize, the prize speaking parts in the morning ceremony belong to students.
Harvard’s 2017 Honorary-Degree Recipients, from A to Z
DURING THE MORNING EXERCISES of the 366th Commencement, on May 25, Harvard planned to confer honorary degrees on six men and four women. Among them are: Two of the American honorands rose to greatness from humble, adverse circumstances in Mississippi. Two have won the National Medal of Arts. One was born in the now war-torn Mogadishu, and another—an esteemed neurogeneticist—fled war-torn Beirut.
Wordsworth seen anew and other recent books
Civil Wars: A History in Ideas, by David R. Armitage, Blankfein professor of history (Knopf, $27.95).The planet has not been globally at war since 1945, but “The world is still a very violent place,” the author notes, as “Civil war has gradually become…the most characteristic form of organized human violence,” prompting this original history of the idea and its unfortunate metastasis.
Harvard economist Claudia Goldin examines the gender wage gap
It’s deceptively easy to calculate how much—or how little—women in the United States earn relative to men. “You take everyone who’s working 35 or more hours a week for the full year, find the median for women, find the median for men, and divide,” says Lee professor of economics Claudia Goldin, explaining how to arrive at the ratio repeated by public officials: 78 cents to the dollar.
Joseph Koerner on the significance of Max Beckmann's "Self-Portrait in Tuxedo"
Thomas professor of history of art and architecture Joseph Koerner, an affiliate of the department of Germanic languages and literatures and a senior fellow of the Society of Fellows, spoke last April at a Radcliffe Institute conference on the “University as Collector.” At Harvard Magazine’s request, he revised and extended his remarks into the following essay.
Atul Gawande: surgeon, health-policy scholar, and writer
One Wednesday last April, Atul Gawande was in his office at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, trying to make some progress on a New Yorker article about disparities in healthcare spending. He kept getting paged when other physicians thought their patients might need surgery. By late afternoon, there had been a few false alarms: he visited patients and ruled against operating.
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