Billions of years ago, long before anything resembling life as we know it existed, meteorites frequently pummeled the planet. One such space rock crashed down about 3.26 billion years ago, and even today, it’s revealing secrets about Earth’s past.  

Nadja Drabon, an early Earth geologist and assistant professor in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, has questions about what our planet was like during ancient eons rife with meteoritic bombardment, when only single-celled bacteria and archaea reigned — and when it all started to change. When did the first oceans appear? Continents? Plate tectonics? How did all of those violent impacts affect the evolution of life?

Her new study in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences attempts to answer some of these questions, in relation to the inauspiciously named “S2” meteoritic impact of more than 3 billion years ago, for which geological evidence is found in the Barberton Greenstone belt of South Africa. Through the painstaking work of collecting and examining rock samples centimeters apart and analyzing the sedimentology, geochemistry, and carbon isotope compositions they leave behind, Drabon’s team paints the most compelling picture to date of what happened the day a meteorite the size of four Mount Everests paid Earth a visit. 

“Picture yourself standing off the coast of Cape Cod, in a shelf of shallow water. It’s a low-energy environment, without strong currents. Then all of a sudden, you have a giant tsunami sweeping by and ripping up the sea floor,” said Drabon. 

The S2 meteorite, estimated to have been up to 200 times larger than the one that killed the dinosaurs, triggered a tsunami that mixed up the ocean and flushed debris from the land into coastal areas. Heat from the impact caused the topmost layer of the ocean to boil off, while also heating the atmosphere. A thick cloud of dust blanketed everything, shutting down any photosynthetic activity. 

But bacteria are hardy, and following impact, according to the team’s analysis, bacterial life bounced back quickly. With this came sharp spikes in populations of unicellular organisms that feed off the elements phosphorus and iron. Iron was likely stirred up from the deep ocean into shallow waters by the aforementioned tsunami, and phosphorus was delivered to Earth by the meteorite itself and from an increase of weathering and erosion on land. 

Drabon’s analysis shows that iron-metabolizing bacteria would thus have flourished in the immediate aftermath of the impact. This shift toward iron-favoring bacteria, however short-lived, is a key puzzle piece depicting early life on Earth. According to Drabon’s study, meteorite impact events — while reputed to kill everything in their wake (including, 66 million years ago, the dinosaurs) — carried a silver lining for life.  

“We think of impact events as being disastrous for life,” Drabon said. “But what this study is highlighting is that these impacts would have had benefits to life, especially early on, and these impacts might have actually allowed life to flourish.” 

These results are drawn from the backbreaking work of geologists like Drabon and her students, hiking into mountain passes that contain the sedimentary evidence of early sprays of rock that embedded themselves into the ground and became preserved over time in the Earth’s crust. Chemical signatures hidden in thin layers of rock help Drabon and her students piece together evidence of tsunamis and other cataclysmic events. 

The Barberton Greenstone Belt in South Africa, where Drabon concentrates most of her current work, contains evidence of at least eight impact events including the S2. She and her team plan to study the area further to probe even deeper into Earth and its meteorite-enabled history. 

Harvard University announced today two new professorships in civil discourse and one in artificial intelligence made possible by a gift from alums Alfred Lin ’94 and Rebecca Lin ’94. These professorships are part of a wider donation that will also support these critical areas of work within the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

The gift comes as the University recently announced a new report on open inquiry, with recommendations for faculty and students on how to debate and disagree in classrooms and within the larger campus community. Edgerley Family Dean Hopi Hoekstra last year launched a Civil Discourse Initiative at FAS, and undergraduates engaged with the Intellectual Vitality Initiative, both of which promote constructive conversations within Harvard College. 

“Alfred and Rebecca’s support will help foster the practice and study of civil discourse in our classrooms and on our campus, as well as advance innovation and discovery in AI,” said Hoekstra. “Their formative experience as students and enduring commitment to Harvard is evident in this inspiring gift.”

The gift marks the Lins’ continued commitment to the University over three decades, and comes in celebration of their 30th Harvard College reunion. The new donation is part of a larger contribution from the Class of 1994, which this year set the record for highest grossing 30th reunion campaign in Harvard College history. A total of 599 members of the class donated more than $200 million.

The Lin gift will endow two Alfred and Rebecca Lin Professorships in civil discourse, and the Alfred and Rebecca Lin Professor in artificial intelligence in the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. The Lins’ gift will also launch the Edgerley Family Dean’s Innovation Fund for generative AI.

“As I like to say, Harvard students often strive to do ‘both/and’ rather than settling for ‘either/or.’ Alfred and Rebecca have demonstrated that spirit of possibility beautifully with their latest act of generosity,” said President Alan Garber. “By dedicating their support to civil discourse and artificial intelligence, they are both strengthening the foundation of our campus culture and pushing the boundaries of our teaching practices. Progress in these two areas is fundamental to our future as a University. I am deeply grateful for the support of the Lins and their vote of confidence in Harvard.”

“We came to Harvard with strong values. Some of those values were challenged; some of them were reaffirmed; and we believe that it continues to be a special place where dialogue moves important ideas forward,” Alfred Lin said.

“Alfred and I have tried to support Harvard when we could or consistently, but we also believe in supporting Harvard when times are challenging, and we want to help during those times,” Rebecca Lin said.

The Lins hope their gift will help support an environment where people can “disagree and not be disagreeable.” Alfred recalled auditing “Justice,” a government course previously taught by Michael Sandel, the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of Government, and Harvey Mansfield, William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Government, Emeritus (and recently renewed by Sandel). He remembers the two professors taking opposing political views on controversial topics in an effort to find truth. 

“They would argue the extreme sides. They were never disagreeable, and they would always make you think,” Alfred said. “We modeled what we learned about social discourse in ‘Justice’ or other classes when we were just talking around the table at Quincy Grille.”

The Lins’ endowment of two professorships on civil discourse builds on these memories. The Alfred and Rebecca Lin Professor of Civil Discourse will recognize, for a five-year term, faculty who have made significant contributions, whether through teaching, advising, or mentoring, to fostering students’ ability to engage in meaningful dialogue. The second Lin professorship will support a faculty member whose research and teaching focuses on civil discourse and dialogue, ethics, academic freedom, and freedom of speech. 

Alfred studied applied mathematics while Rebecca concentrated in physics at the College. The couple’s earlier gifts gravitated toward supporting financial aid for undergraduates pursuing applied sciences and engineering. Their interest in advancing computer science and artificial intelligence is reflected in their new gifts of the SEAS professorship and to the FAS Dean’s Innovation Fund, which is meant to foreground the importance of integrating generative AI tools into teaching and learning.

Alfred is a partner at Sequoia Capital, where he invests in early stage companies in financial tech, robotics, and healthcare, among others. He sits on several boards, including Airbnb, DoorDash, Houzz, and Zipline. Rebecca is an artist with storyboard credits on various Walt Disney Animation Studios television series and on the feature film “Recess, School’s Out.” She serves on the board of trustees at the California Academy of Sciences and the UCSF Foundation. The couple previously worked at Zappos, where Alfred served as Chairman and COO and Rebecca managed real estate.

When Olha Aleksic came to Harvard as a graduate student from Ukraine, it was to study the history of Christianity at the Divinity School. During an internship in Widener Library’s Slavic division, she discovered her passion for libraries, which then led to a career in collection development and a reference librarianship working with Ukrainian materials.

Nearly 20 years later, it was Aleksic, now Harvard Library’s Ukrainian bibliographer, who greeted the first lady of Ukraine, Olena Zelenska, at the Widener. It was a key stop in Zelenska’s visit to the University, which was celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute.

During the Sept. 24 visit, Aleksic introduced Zelenska to Harvard Library’s Ukrainian collections, one of the largest and most comprehensive outside of Europe. Among the valuable Ukrainian items in Harvard’s collections are Ivan Fedorov’s “Apostol” and “Primer” (1574), the first books printed in Ukraine.

“The first lady specifically chose to visit Harvard Library because libraries are places where history can be preserved,” noted Aleksic.

Zelenska was officially welcomed in the Widener Rotunda by Martha Whitehead, vice president for the Harvard Library and University librarian.

“We see our collections as a vital resource for Harvard’s Ukrainian Studies programs and as a treasure trove for the distinguished visiting scholars who come to work and study at the Ukrainian Research Institute,” said Whitehead. “Our Ukrainian collections will tell the story of Ukraine and its people far into the future.” 

Zelenska noted her deep appreciation for Harvard Library’s contribution to Ukrainian Studies, presenting Whitehead with “Ukraine and Ukrainians,” an art book by Ivan Honchar, to add to Harvard’s collection.

“This is a very important volume that provides in-depth information about Ukraine and Ukrainians. We’re so pleased to gift it to Harvard Library,” Zelenska said.  

Accepting the books on behalf of the library, Whitehead emphasized its longstanding commitment to its global collections and expanding world knowledge.

“We collect and preserve global voices for present and future generations of scholars,” she said. “Our collections are a vital resource for Harvard’s Ukrainian Studies programs, and we want the full range of Ukrainian thought and experience to be represented here.”

Zelenska also gave Harvard Library three war-damaged books: a children’s book by Oleksandr (Sashko) Dermanskyi; a novel translated from English to Ukrainian by Heather Gudenkauf; and an autobiography by Pavlo Belianskyi. The books were rescued from a ruined warehouse of the Faktor Druk printing house in Kharkiv, which was struck by a missile in May 2024.

Conservators at Harvard Library’s Preservation Services are currently creating custom enclosures for the books to preserve and protect them against further damage. Part of Harvard Library’s mission is to preserve knowledge for the future. It has long rescued and preserved books and cultural materials from places where they are endangered.

“One of our key strategic priorities is preserving knowledge for the future,” said Whitehead. “We have a fabulous team in our Collections Care Lab who will ensure the best care of these books, and our creative librarians will find opportunities to have our users experience their impact.”

Among her other stops, Zelenska also spoke at Harvard’s Ukrainian Research Institute. To view the video, visit its website.

Billionaires devote vast sums of money to anti-poverty initiatives and green energy reforms. But the world’s wealthiest also cause disproportionate harm to the environment.

A rousing debate, hosted last week by the Edmond and Lily Safra Center for Ethics, wrestled with the issues of extreme wealth and growing income inequality. Panelists representing fields including philosophy, political economy, and business administration staked contrasting and occasionally unexpected positions on whether the super-rich are a net positive for society.

“The top 1 percent emit the same amount of carbon as 5 billion human beings,” said Tom Malleson, associate professor of social justice and peace studies at King’s University College at Western University in Ontario, Canada. “The best thing you can do is to get rid of those billionaires by redistributing the wealth, particularly if you redistribute it to green technology.”

But billionaires like Bill Gates have invested in poor countries ravaged by climate disaster, argued Jessica Flanigan, Richard L. Morrill Chair in Ethics and Democratic Values at the University of Richmond. Market forces further incentivize the world’s wealthiest to provide jobs and pursue improvements to clean energy infrastructure, she added.

“Those are all presumptive reasons to think that billionaires are helpful toward the global poor and more reliably beneficial to those people than public officials, who are beholden to people in their own political community” who usually are not badly off.

Moderator Christopher Robichaud, a senior lecturer in ethics and public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, kicked off the conversation by citing recent reports that Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, is poised to become history’s first trillionaire. “What should we think about a world, maybe right around the corner, that has trillionaires?” he asked.

“Could you imagine a society or a set of institutions in which it would be perfectly just for there to be trillionaires?” asked Nien-hê Hsieh, Kim B. Clark Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. “It probably has features to ensure people’s basic needs are met. It probably has features to ensure that great inequality doesn’t lead to the corruption of public officials, or the breaking of the democratic fabric … Whatever that system is, it is not the system we have today.”

Shruti Rajagopalan, a senior research fellow at George Mason University’s Mercatus Center, noted how few of today’s billionaires inherited their money. Most of the modern era’s richest people earned their fortunes, she emphasized, largely through the stock market.

“There’s a big difference between Genghis Khan and Elon Musk,” she quipped. “And if Elon Musk is getting wealthy, it’s also every single schoolteacher out there whose retirement is invested in one of these funds.”

At one point, Malleson highlighted the role of luck in wealth creation.

“If you have a more productive body — if you have Michael Phelps’ wingspan or Taylor Swift’s voice — good for you,” they said, citing the late Harvard philosophy professor John Rawls’ writings on the arbitrary nature of these traits. “We should think of meritocracy as part of a doctrine of ableism. It’s a prejudice doctrine that says people should be rewarded for factors that are outside their control and others should be punished — particularly disabled people — for their lack of productivity.”

The conversation expanded to cover big business and low-wage workers, with Walmart proving a favorite lightning rod.

“The poorest families in the United States want to shop at Walmart because the prices are going to be the best,” Rajagopalan noted. “Your stereotypical single mother — trying to feed her children, trying to keep very difficult hours at her job — can walk into a Walmart and get all the basics cheaper than pretty much anywhere else.”

But the company “exploits its employees, crushes unions, and takes out dead peasant insurance policies on workers who are going to die,” Malleson countered. “Its products are cheap because they’re made in sweatshops with abysmal conditions.”

The solution is not so easy as taxing Walmart for redistribution to low-income employees and consumers, Rajagopalan said. “Then we’re assuming there’s a bureaucrat or central allocation plan that can provide those same loaves of bread and cans of milk. … That has been done before and hasn’t worked pretty much anywhere in the world.”

Nobody is talking about communist-style central planning, Malleson said. Alternatives include some form of democratic socialism.

“It would mean Walmart has unions,” they said. “It would mean Walmart has co-determination, where workers are allowed to elect half the board like in Germany. It would mean there are basic labor conditions; there are basic rights and regulations that are very common in many parts of the world, particularly the Nordic countries.”

Sweden has more billionaires per capita than the U.S., Flanigan pointed out, because it still has a market economy that generates sufficient wealth for financing its public institutions.

“How do we materially improve the conditions of the worst off? The best thing we have is a market-based society that encourages investment and innovation; that’s it!” she said. “And the kind of society that produces billionaires is the very same society that’s going to improve conditions for the worst off.”

Hsieh chimed in with yet another option for curbing inequality.

“As somebody here at Harvard who is a good Rawlsian, I want to put forward the idea of property-owning democracy,” he said. “There’s an idea where you do allow for market exchange. You do allow for the private accumulation of wealth. You do allow for private capital … but with a much more egalitarian distribution of property.”

The event was part of the Ethics Center’s Civil Disagreement Series, founded in 2019 to engage policy and subject experts on pressing current issues. Attendees included undergraduates from five universities participating in the Intercollegiate Civil Disagreement Partnership and well as proctors and tutors from Harvard College’s Houses who were selected for the 2024-2025 Fellowship in Values in Engagement.

In the discussion’s final minutes, Robichaud picked up on one of their questions about what constitutes a minimum standard of living. He asked panelists how each would propose meeting such a standard for all.

“To lift the poor, we shouldn’t just look at taxation,” Rajagopalan said. The world’s poorest 2 billion people are “living in conditions that are entirely unjust. … There won’t be many takers for this politically, but the single best way to improve their lives is to allow immigration to rich countries.”

The media keep calling the 2024 election “unprecedented,” said political historian Jill Lepore. They said the same thing about contests for U.S. president in 2016 and 2020.

“Since, I would say, the [2000] Bush v. Gore election, our political discourse is about falling off a cliff,” Lepore, the David Woods Kemper ’41 Professor of American History, told her students recently. “It has a weird torquing effect on how people experience daily life.”

Lepore is one of three well-known scholars teaching the brand-new “HIST 10: A History of the Present” this semester. Co-created with professors Maya Jasanoff and Kirsten Weld, the introductory course uncovers historic concepts and clichés that anchor perceptions of today.

“We’re going to approach the present in this classroom as historians — as people concerned with how individuals and collectives situate themselves in historical time and, most importantly, how they make meaning of it,” promised Weld, a Canadian-born historian of modern Latin America.

Jasanoff, the X.D. and Nancy Yang Professor of Arts and Sciences and Coolidge Professor of History, kicked off the first lecture with some history on the course itself. HIST 10 was once offered as a yearlong survey for actual and prospective concentratorsfocused on the Western world, especially Europe, she explained. But that framing slowly fell out of favor with students and faculty alike until the course was finally canceled in 2006.

“But we felt, and continue to feel, that history is something we all need to be educated in and conscious of,” said Jasanoff, a historian of the British Empire. “And so the three of us started talking about re-presenting a gateway course to revivify the sense that history is integrated into our consciousness, our lives, our society, our government, and much more.”

They designed a lecture course broken into three modules, each informed by individual interests and expertise. First Jasanoff is interrogating evolving definitions of ancestry. Lepore, who is also a Harvard Law School professor and New Yorker staff writer, will then lead a section on rights. And Weld will wrap things up with a unit on memory.

“What really drew me to the class were these conceptual frameworks,” said Victoria Rengel ’28, a Newark, N.J., native considering a joint concentration in government and history. “As the professors laid out in the first class, most human conflict can be broken down and understood through one of the three.”

Enrolled in the course are about 60 undergraduates, plus a sizeable contingent of auditors. “It’s packed,” observed A.J. Moyeda ’27, a history concentrator with a secondary in philosophy from South Texas. “I never imagined a history course with this many students.”

Mondays begin with scholarly takes on the students’ anonymously submitted questions. Wednesdays feature all three professors engaged with (and often debating) daily news. The first few conversations left Jacqueline Metzger ’27, a joint concentrator in history and in Theater, Dance & Media from the Washington, D.C., area, rethinking how election coverage is packaged.

“I really liked the conversation about things being unprecedented,” Metzger said. “It’s kind of an intimidating term, because it makes you feel we’re unequipped to handle what’s going on.”

Most of Day One was focused on the news cycle — a key tool for making sense of the present. Jasanoff invited everyone to pull out their laptops for some live polling on media habits and current events. Newspapers, social media, and word of mouth/group chats emerged as the go-to sources. Topping a ranking of 2024 issues were “the election,” “political polarization,” and “Palestine.”

The 75-minute session ended with Lepore lending rich historical insight to the 21st century’s confusing swirl of fact, fiction, and information technology. She started with the “long adversarial tradition” between America’s newspapers and its political leaders, beginning in the 1720s with the dogged New England Courant (published by Benjamin Franklin’s brother James).

This year’s candidates for U.S. president are hardly the first to try reaching voters without risking criticism by newspaper reporters. Lepore offered examples that bridge past and present including rallies, political postering, and President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s direct-to-listener radio broadcasts from the 1930s.

“It’s cool to see that much of what we’re dealing with has happened again and again,” Metzger said. “It’s such a grounded way to understand who we are and where we are in history.”

At one point, Lepore shared an advertising clip from President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s 1956 re-election campaign. It opens with an animated figure anguished over the firehose of political information from TV, radio, magazines, and newspapers.

“I’ve listened to everybody,” he cries. “Who’s right? What’s right? What should I believe? What are the facts? How can I tell?”

“Those are questions we still have,” Lepore emphasized. “They’re endemic to the age of mass communication we have been in for well more than a century. I hope that gives you some comfort.”

The University reported a budget surplus, along with robust endowment performance, and pointed to investments made throughout fiscal year 2024 in key mission-focused areas in its annual financial report released Thursday. Additionally, the report detailed philanthropic giving for the period, which continues to provide the resources to support increased financial aid and a range of academic and research priorities.

The Gazette spoke with Executive Vice President Meredith Weenick, chief financial officer and Vice President for Finance Ritu Kalra, and treasurer Timothy Barakett to learn more about how disciplined planning and sound financial management have positioned Harvard for progress in the years ahead. This interview was edited for clarity and length.

A year ago, the University had marked a full fiscal year return to post-pandemic normal operations, and we saw a corresponding operating margin that aligned with pre-pandemic performance. How would you describe the University’s financial position for fiscal year 2024, which ended with a surplus of $45.3 million?

WEENICK: Harvard continues to be in a solid financial position, grounded in thoughtful planning and careful stewardship across the University. This year’s surplus reflects the strategic decisions made by leadership across each of Harvard’s Schools. These surpluses are not merely financial metrics; they are vital sources of funds that allow us to strategically invest in educational and research initiatives aimed at tackling some of the most pressing global challenges.

“Our students, faculty, staff, and alumni leverage their knowledge and expertise to effect positive change through research, teaching, and community leadership at a global scale. The resources we steward support these efforts.”

Meredith Weenick

KALRA: Meredith makes an important point about the nature of Harvard’s operating result. It’s an aggregate reflection of the collective results across our Schools and units. These surpluses, plural — and in some cases deficits — are earned and managed locally. That local autonomy allows deans to direct resources to the areas they identify as their highest priorities.

This year, for the second year in a row, our operating expenses grew faster than our operating revenues — 9 percent versus 6 percent. That is not a long-run sustainable path. But the analysis begs an understanding of the nuance behind the numbers. Some of what looks like growing expenses are investments strategically intended to foster future growth. This year, those investments spanned several domains, including developing our technology infrastructure and AI capabilities and renewing our campus facilities to enable types of research that were unimaginable just a decade ago.

Of course, the pace of our recent spending underscores the need for prudence going forward. While it has been purposeful in the short term, it won’t be sustainable without a commensurate growth in revenue over the long term.

BARAKETT: This long-term perspective is essential. The University has investments it must make in the near future, including, for example, increased commitments to financial aid, which are vital to making Harvard and educational opportunities accessible. We must also continue to transform how we generate and distribute energy across the campus to meet our sustainability goals and commitments. At the same time, there are new opportunities we need to be poised to drive forward. For example, the transformative potentials of AI, quantum computing, and the life sciences will be made possible by the work of Harvard researchers across disciplines. In our planning for the years ahead, we must create the financial capacity to make room for these investments.

The academic year 2023-2024 was challenging for Harvard’s community, accompanied by frequent public criticism and scrutiny. Were there any financial impacts on the University?

KALRA: Throughout the year, our most immediate focus was to ensure our students had the resources needed to support their physical and emotional well-being. Senior leaders across the University and its Schools also invested enormous time and energy in cultivating a campus environment that fosters open inquiry and responsible civil discourse as a North Star for intellectual and personal growth. Each of those investments had a financial impact, though finances weren’t the drivers of those efforts.

The impact on philanthropy is less obvious. Across the higher education landscape, neither tuition revenues nor funding for research covers the full cost of an education. At Harvard, philanthropy, in the form of gifts for current use and the investment returns spawned by endowed gifts, is essential to make up the difference.

On both fronts, we are enormously grateful. In fiscal year 2024, current-use giving reached the second-highest level in Harvard’s history, and Harvard Management Company (HMC) generated a 9.6 percent return in the endowment portfolio. The future will be more complicated — both the level of giving and the level of returns may be difficult to sustain — but we remain grateful to our donors for their steadfast belief in Harvard’s academic mission. Their support is vital to everything we do.

WEENICK: I will also add that while we faced a challenging year on and off campus, Harvard never wavered from its commitment to excellence. The arenas in which we achieved that excellence span an astoundingly broad range. Dr. Claudia Goldin received the Nobel Prize in Economics last year, and Dr. Gary Ruvkun just won the Nobel Prize in Medicine. Ten of our students were named Rhodes Scholars last year, a record for Harvard and more than double any other school. And let’s not forget that our community excels at the highest levels outside of academics as well. Our student-athletes and alumni took home a record 13 medals at the Paris Olympics.

“While HMC’s performance is best measured over the long term, the endowment’s performance in fiscal year 2024 is certainly encouraging. It shows we are on the right track.”

Timothy Barakett

How will the most recent endowment return of 9.6 percent impact distributions in a way that benefits both current and future generations of students and scholars?

KALRA: The fiscal year 2024 endowment return will provide a welcome boost to distribution growth in the short term. However, as we caution every year, it’s critical to remember that the endowment is not a $53 billion checking account.

The endowment, in reality, is 14,600 different endowments, many of which belong to a specific School or are designated for particular areas of scholarship or programs. The distribution that supports those programs is meant to grow each year to keep pace with inflation, while the endowment itself is meant to last forever. That requires us to spend responsibly from the endowment, as we have to be able to support future generations of students and scholars even if we face periods of lower growth.

Harvard targets an 8 percent return. That accounts for an approximately 5 percent distribution to the University’s annual operations and allows the value of that distribution to grow each year by 3 percent to account for inflation. Under Narv Narvekar’s leadership, HMC’s return has been 9.3 percent over the past seven years, well in excess of the target.

WEENICK: As Narv shared in his letter in the financial report, there are a variety of factors that played into this year’s return, as is the case every year. Since HMC was founded, the endowment’s 11 percent annualized return has allowed distributions to grow dramatically. These funds support critical initiatives, from financial aid and faculty support to professorships and research.

BARAKETT: Harvard derives nearly 40 percent of its annual operating revenue from the endowment, so finding the right balance between return, risk, and volatility is critical. HMC’s performance was suboptimal before Narv’s appointment, and he inherited a portfolio that was overweighted in natural resources and real estate and underweighted in private equity and hedge funds.

Over the past seven years since his arrival, HMC has been restructured, and the portfolio has been substantially repositioned. Given the scale of the endowment, this took some time, and we are now well-positioned. While HMC’s performance is best measured over the long term, the endowment’s performance in fiscal year 2024 is certainly encouraging. It shows we are on the right track.

“Our reserves have been built over years through disciplined planning and sound financial management. We need to continue to build the capacity to invest in new programs and pedagogies in order to foster the academic excellence that is both Harvard’s hallmark and its aim.”

Ritu Kalra

A challenge of recent years has been rapidly rising interest rates. Yet bonds and notes payable increased from $6.2 billion in fiscal year 2023 to $7.1 billion in fiscal year 2024. Why did the University decide to issue debt at this time?

KALRA: It’s true that interest rates are elevated relative to the decade or so following the global financial crisis. However, that is not an interest rate environment to which we are likely to return, barring an unforeseen crisis. Yet we still need to invest in our buildings and maintain our campus.

There was a window last spring when credit spreads reached historically low levels, offsetting some of the impact of the rise in rates. The rating agencies reaffirmed Harvard’s AAA credit ratings, which reflects confidence in Harvard’s stability, and we took advantage of that market opportunity to borrow at an attractive all-in cost, right around 4 percent.

A portion of our bond issuance will go toward planned future capital projects, and a portion went toward refinancing outstanding debt that carried higher interest rates. Harvard’s overall financial condition remains very strong. We have ample levels of liquidity and ready access to the capital markets for future borrowings as needed.

WEENICK: As you can see from the construction activity while walking around our campuses, whether in Cambridge, Allston, or Longwood, we have a number of long-term capital projects underway. We also have plans for facility renovations and new construction, which are essential for the University’s infrastructure and growth. For example, we are making progress in Allston with the construction of the new home for the American Repertory Theater at the David E. and Stacey L. Goel Center for Creativity & Performance, along with the first University-wide conference center in the David Rubenstein Treehouse as part of the Enterprise Research Campus. This work also includes addressing other campus maintenance priorities and refreshed lab and classroom space to ensure the resilience and accessibility of our buildings.

One of the key themes found throughout this year’s financial report is advancing the public good. How is Harvard using its resources to support teaching, learning, and research priorities aimed at making a positive impact in the world?

WEENICK: Harvard’s commitment to academic excellence is the way we advance the public good. It’s at the core of everything we do. Our students, faculty, staff, and alumni leverage their knowledge and expertise to effect positive change through research, teaching, and community leadership at a global scale. The resources we steward support these efforts.

As a research university, Harvard is a powerful engine of innovation. In fiscal year 2024, our faculty were awarded $1 billion in external grants from government and private partners. On top of that, the University invests an additional $400 to $500 million a year to support research and early stage ideas. The discoveries made here have the potential to improve lives, transform industries, and create tremendous social and economic value. Harvard’s Office of Technology and Development plays a pivotal role in facilitating the translation of these discoveries into useful products and services that benefit society.

The University also serves as an epicenter of teaching, learning, and community service through initiatives like the Harvard Ed Portal, which connects the Boston and Cambridge communities to Harvard’s educational resources. Our partnership with our Harvard Medical School affiliates also provides access to some of the world’s best health and well-being resources.

Additionally, the learning that takes place on our campus also extends beyond the boundaries of the University. For example, in the Bloomberg Harvard City Leadership Initiative, our students include mayors from around the country, who return to their communities equipped to tackle challenges that improve their residents’ quality of life.

The University brings together community members worldwide at the start of each academic year for Harvard’s Global Day of Service. These civic engagement opportunities motivate students during their time at Harvard and inspire lifelong commitments to public service.

What is the projected financial outlook for next year and beyond?

WEENICK: While our financial position remains strong, we, along with all of our colleagues in higher education, must be conscious of the challenges in our current climate. As we have cautioned before, traditional revenues in higher education are constrained, and we must be cognizant of the pressures on tuition affordability.

As we move forward, it’s clear we need to prioritize activities that most significantly contribute to our mission, and we need to work efficiently so that more resources can go directly toward teaching and research.

KALRA: Projections are dangerous in a world of persistent uncertainty. Safeguarding the University’s financial resilience is vital in such a rapidly evolving landscape. Our reserves have been built over years through disciplined planning and sound financial management. We need to continue to build the capacity to invest in new programs and pedagogies in order to foster the academic excellence that is both Harvard’s hallmark and its aim.

BARAKETT: We are grateful to our community — faculty and other academic personnel, students, staff, alumni, and donors — for their dedication to the University’s mission. Together, we have ensured that Harvard remains positioned for progress and continues to deliver on its world-changing mission.

Leslie Valiant, the T. Jefferson Coolidge Professor of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics at the John H. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, has spent decades studying human cognition. His books include “Circuits of the Mind” and, most recently, “The Importance of Being Educable.”

Notions like smartness and intelligence are almost like nonsense. We think we know what they mean but we can’t define them with precision. Even psychologists can’t agree on one definition. And intelligence tests don’t tell one very much — they are usually justified in terms of correlations with other things.

How do you recognize whether someone is intelligent? There is not one answer; there are many, and they can be inconsistent. Some, like Howard Gardner, have emphasized that there are many kinds of intelligence. I think we’ve reached the expiration date for the usefulness of the term “intelligence” both for humans and machines. We should be able to do better.

I’m a computer scientist and I take a computational approach to understanding what the mind does. In computer science, the main questions, theoretically speaking, have been: What is easy to compute? and What is hard to compute? Some decades ago, I decided that the secrets of human cognition must also be hidden in this problem — that some things are hard to compute for the brain and some things are easier. The main advantage that computer science offers is that one can express capabilities that are more complicated than ones reasonably implied by conventional phrases, and, at the same time, evaluate their feasibility for the brain. 

I started working on a computational viewpoint on cognition 40 years ago. The fundamental challenge I set myself was to find a useful definition of learning. In “The Importance of Being Educable,” I define the concept of “educability.” My view is that it wasn’t “intelligence” that allowed humans to create civilizations, but educability, which involves three aspects.

The first is learning from experience. The second is being able to chain together the things you’ve learned; it’s a kind of low-level reasoning capability that even the simplest animals have because it’s so essential to life. The third is being able to incorporate knowledge acquired from instruction. This last one is very important for humans because this is how culture spreads and science progresses.

Educability incorporates both the ability to generate new knowledge by learning from experience and also the ability to transfer that knowledge directly to others. There isn’t the time or the need for everyone to gain the same experiences, such as repeating difficult scientific experiments.

I’d say that machines can be also made educable, and ultimately, we won’t be able to claim that we’re fundamentally different from machines. Current AI systems are not designed to be educable in the sense I define, but machines will likely become more and more capable in that direction. I don’t see AI as an existential threat; it’s just another powerful technology. Obviously, in bad hands, it can be misused, just like chemistry or nuclear physics. Computers will not take over the world just because they want to. This will happen only if we allow it to happen.

There is a downside of being educable. Educability gives us very powerful ways of acquiring new information — we can soak it all up. But we don’t have comparable abilities to check whether the information we get is true or not. We are not well-equipped for evaluating knowledge, theories, or facts. If someone tells us something, if we believe it, we will incorporate it into our knowledge. This can be dangerous. The only cure is to educate people about what propaganda has done over the centuries and make them aware of this human weakness. To inoculate ourselves against disinformation we need to acknowledge our basic weakness. 

— As told to Liz Mineo, Harvard Staff Writer

Which is better? The 1996 film adaptation of “Hamlet” starring Kenneth Branagh or a spoof on the Prince of Denmark’s “to be or not to be” soliloquy delivered by Homer Simpson? 

The question was posed last month to more than 800 undergraduates during “Justice: Ethical Reasoning in Polarized Times.” The legendary Gen Ed offering has returned to Sanders Theatre this semester after more than a decade of availability only as a prerecorded offering online. Originally launched in 1980, the course became wildly popular for its format: guided student debate of the hottest issues of the day, informed by study of classic theories on moral decision-making. 

“The first thing I want to know is which one you like most,” announced “Justice” creator Michael J. Sandel, the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of Government. Most in the room, dismissing the third option of a WWE body-slam clip, lavished applause on “The Simpsons.” 

But the conversation turned spiky on a second point: “Can we derive what’s higher, what’s worthier, what’s nobler, from what we like most?” Sandel asked. “Or is there a gap between the two?” 

One student stuck with “The Simpsons,” arguing that it was the most pleasurable. Another noted the cartoon excerpt owed its existence to Shakespeare’s worthier source material. Still others characterized the TV show as fleeting pleasure versus the intellectual and even spiritual nourishment of high art.

From the stage, Sandel invited these divergent responses while pressing the room to consider new angles. “It’s an opportunity for students to dive into why they think the way they do,” observed Darlene Uzoigwe ’25, a government concentrator from Brooklyn.

Generations of Harvard graduates, including U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson ’92, J.D. ’96, and former U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York Preet Bharara ’90, have cited the impact the course had on their careers and lives. In 2009, a recorded version went on to become the first Harvard course freely available online. 

“It was an experiment in using new technology to open access to the Harvard classroom,” Sandel said in an interview last month. “We never dreamt that tens of millions of people around the world would want to watch lectures on philosophy.” More than 38 million have viewed the course on YouTube, and millions more on foreign language web platforms.

The in-person offering was paused when the political philosopher noticed first-years enrolling despite having watched “Justice” in high school. “I tried for a couple of years to change some of the examples, stories, even the jokes,” Sandel said. “But I found I liked the original version and didn’t want to change everything. So, I decided to let it live online and teach other subjects.”

Most of these courses, including those on technology and globalization, were capped at 200 students. Trevor DePodesta kept trying to get a spot.

“It took me until now to get into one of his classes,” said DePodesta ’25, an Ethical Human-AI Interaction concentrator from San Diego. “I felt like the Harvard experience wouldn’t be complete until I sat in a lecture hall with him.”

As any alum of the course will know, the Homer-Hamlet matchup is really about exploring ideas about high and low pleasures outlined by 19th-century Utilitarian philosopher John Stuart Mill.

“I didn’t think you could discuss ‘Simpsons’ vs. ‘Hamlet’ for so long,” said Saskia Hermann ’28, a first-year from Germany. “What I’ve learned so far is that you can always look at something twice — once from your initial point of view, and then you can apply a certain philosophical idea to look at it from that perspective.”

Also familiar to “Justice” veterans are course readings by Mill’s Utilitarian predecessor Jeremy Bentham as well as Aristotle, Immanuel Kant, and John Rawls. Bringing the class back to Sanders means Sandel has now updated the ethically charged issues that test the philosophers’ ideas. 

The first weeks of the course, which carries, at times, the fizzy energy of a concert, covered readings and lectures on the philanthropic movement reportedly embraced by former cryptocurrency billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried, who was convicted this year on fraud charges. In one hypothetical, Sandel posed whether it was better to solve urgent medical needs in the developing world by becoming a physician or by making a lot of money in cryptocurrency and donating, say, $50 million to Doctors Without Borders. 

“It’s a test of the Utilitarian philosophy underlying the Effective Altruism movement,” he explained.

Later, students will delve into climate change, artificial intelligence, and the polarizing consequences of social media. “From the time the course was first offered in the 1980s we’ve discussed affirmative action,” Sandel added. “Now we continue the discussion in light of the U.S. Supreme Court ruling against race-based affirmative action in university admissions.” 

The real motivation for relaunching the course, Sandel said, was student feedback about the strained state of dialogue on campus. “It’s definitely true that there isn’t a lot of civil discourse going on,” said Maia Hoffenberg ’26, a linguistics concentrator from the Washington, D.C., area. “People have become entrenched in their own ideas.”

Sandel has been a supporter of other campus initiatives designed to boost civil discourse and intellectual vitality. Last winter he hosted a one-day session for faculty on cultivating healthy debate and another inviting students to grapple with the tangled ethics of artificial intelligence. At orientation this fall, Sandel offered a primer on engaging with highly disputed but important issues.

Hermann enjoyed the latter conversation so much she dropped a course to pick up “Justice.” “I really liked the way he asked questions and made us get to the point, rather than just lecturing on what he believes,” she said.

Others taking “Justice” have been reading Sandel since high school — and clearly consider themselves fans.

 “Yeah, that’s my boy!” called out one student as Sandel appeared for a lecture last month.

After class, a handful of devotees line up near the podium clutching dog-eared copies of Sandel’s “Justice” (2009) or “The Tyranny of Merit” (2020). “I’ve been able to snag him after class a few times,” DePodesta shared. “He promised that if I come find him outside of class, he’ll sign my books.”

Offering such a large-scale course meant Sandel spent the summer recruiting, interviewing, and hiring an army of “Justice” teaching fellows. A staff of 32 graduate students this fall helms a total of 64 sections, with many scheduled in the early evening at first-year dorms and various Harvard Houses. The goal is to “carry the learning beyond Sanders Theatre,” said Sandel, who won’t teach the course next fall due to a planned sabbatical. 

That encourages students to continue conversations about immigration, abortion, reparations, and extreme wealth — to name a few topics — over dinner. “My roommates and I have these intense debates after every single class,” shared Leverett House resident Hoffenberg. “We get mad at each other, but it’s all very lively and very academic. It’s honestly been one of the best things about taking the class.” 

They may be microscopic, but tardigrades are larger than life.

Called “water bears” because of their plump shape and lumbering movement, the ancient micro-animals are nearly indestructible, able to survive anything from deadly radiation and arctic temperatures to the vacuum of space. 

They can still be found anywhere there’s water today, but the evolutionary history of these eight-legged micro-animals remains relatively mysterious because of their sparse fossil record.

Now, in a new study published in Communications Biology, Associate Professor of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology Javier Ortega-Hernández and Ph.D. candidate Marc Mapalo were able to confirm another entry in the fossil record, which now stands at just four specimens. The research represents a significant advancement in the field of paleontology because it offers new avenues for exploring the evolutionary history of one of the planet’s most resilient life forms.

In their study, the researchers examined a piece of amber found in Canada in the 1960s that contains the known fossil tardigrade Beorn leggi and another presumed tardigrade that couldn’t be substantively described at the time. Using confocal laser microscopy, a method usually employed for studying cell biology, the researchers were able to examine the tiny structures of the fossil tardigrades in detail.

Ortega-Hernández and Mapalo’s study provides not only a definitive classification of B. leggi in the tardigrade family tree, but the identification of a new species of tardigrade as well. 

“Both of them are found in the same piece of amber that dates to the Cretaceous Period, which means that these water bears lived alongside dinosaurs,” Ortega-Hernández said. “The images of B. leggi show seven well-preserved claws, with the claws that curve toward the body being smaller than those curving away from it, a pattern found in modern-day tardigrades.”

The second, previously unidentified specimen, had claws of similar length on each of its first three pairs of legs, but longer outer claws on its fourth set of legs. The team named it Aerobius dactylus, from “aero” meaning relating to air — because the fossil appears to be floating on air in the amber — and “dactylo,” or finger, after its one long claw.

The impetus for applying this new technology to known fossils came when Mapalo, a self-described “paleo-tardigradologist,” came across the 2019 book “Water Bears: The Biology of Tardigrades.” 

“In one of the chapters, they had a photo of the oldest fossil tardigrade that was visualized using both normal microscopy and confocal laser microscopy,” Mapalo said. “And that gave me the idea to use that with the fossil that I’m working with right now.” 

That fossil, encased in a piece of amber from the Dominican Republic, turned out to be a new species of tardigrade. Mapalo, along with Ortega-Hernández and researchers from the New Jersey Institute of Technology, published their findings in a 2021 paper.

In their latest study, both fossils serve as critical calibration points for what’s called molecular clock analysis, which help scientists estimate the timing of key evolutionary events. For example, the latest findings suggest that modern tardigrades likely diverged during the Cambrian Period more than 500 million years ago. 

The research also sheds light on the origin of cryptobiosis, the technical name for the remarkable ability of tardigrades to survive extreme conditions by entering a state of stasis. 

“The study estimates that this survival mechanism likely evolved during the mid- to late Paleozoic, which may have played a crucial role in helping tardigrades endure the end-Permian mass extinction, one of the most severe extinction events in Earth’s history,” Ortega-Hernández said.

“Before I started my Ph.D., there were only three known fossil tardigrades, and now there’s four,” Mapalo said. “Most, if not all, of the fossil tardigrades were really discovered by chance. With the Dominican amber, researchers were looking for fossil ants, and they happened to see a fossil tardigrade there.

“That’s why, whenever I have a chance, I always tell researchers who are working with amber fossils to check if maybe there’s another tardigrade in there, waiting to be found.”

Genes are the control panel for an embryo morphing from a ball of cells into organs, muscles, and limbs, but there’s more involved than just genetics. There’s also physics — the shaping of tissues by flows and forces from cellular activity and growth. 

Two recent studies in Developmental Cell and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences shed light on the gene-mediated geometries and forces within embryonic development that give rise to different sections and shapes of the gut, including the large and small intestines. The findings bridge a critical gap between genetic signals and the physical formation of the early gut. 

The Developmental Cell paper, led by former Griffin Graduate School of Arts and Sciences student Hasreet Gill, shows how a set of developmental instructions called Hox genes dictate gut formation. For the study, Gill and colleagues traced the gut development of a chicken embryo as a model organism; Hox genes are also found in humans and all other vertebrates.

“I wanted to understand why different regions in the intestine, from the anterior, meaning esophagus, to the posterior, meaning large intestine, end up with different shapes,” said Gill, who co-authored both papers with her Ph.D. adviser Clifford Tabin, the George Jacob and Jacqueline Hazel Leder Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School. Gill was a student in the Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology’s Molecules, Cells, and Organisms program. 

The study connected experiment to computational theory through a collaboration with Sifan Yin, a former postdoctoral fellow in the John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, and L. Mahadevan, professor in applied mathematics, physics, and biology in SEAS and FAS. 

Gill’s study built on previous work looking at how Hox genes are involved in organ differentiation. The set of genes, highly conserved throughout animal evolutionary history, was the subject of the 1995 Nobel Prize when they were recognized for their role in segmenting a fruit fly’s body.  

Gill and colleagues discovered that measurable mechanical properties of the tissues that make up the large and small intestines of a chick embryo are directly involved in how they arrive at their final shapes. For example, the tissues that form the villi located in the small intestine, she found, have different stiffness parameters than those that shape the inside walls of the large intestine, which form larger, flatter, more superficial folds. 

To test the consequences of all these mechanical differences, the lab turned to its longstanding collaboration with Mahadevan’s lab, whose members, including Yin, carried out theoretical and computational analysis to define the impact of physical forces generated via differential growth on organ shape. 

It had long been known that Hox genes are the instructions that lay the groundwork for how different organs, including the gut, are sectioned off and shaped. But the detailed “how” of this process had been a mystery. 

To solve it, Gill and colleagues revisited a 1990s-era experiment from the Tabin lab that had investigated this question. In that experiment, they expressed a particular Hox gene in a small intestine and found it took on the characteristics of a large intestine. 

Gill’s team repeated the experiment while running physical tests on the mechanical characteristics of the different parts of the gut, considering things like wall stiffness, growth rate, and tissue thickness. They found that the HoxD13 gene in particular regulates the mechanical properties and growth rates of the tissues that eventually lead to the large intestine’s final shape. Other, related Hox genes may define those same properties for the small intestine. 

Crucially, they also illuminated the role of a downstream signaling pathway called TGF Beta, which is controlled by Hox genes. By tuning the amount of TGF beta signaling in their embryos, they could switch the shapes of the different gut regions. Seeing the importance of this pathway, long known to be involved in fibrotic conditions, was an important basic-science step toward fully understanding gut development in a vertebrate system. 

These insights could lead to new knowledge of conditions for colon cancer and other fibrotic diseases of the gut, Gill said. 

“One possibility is that the disease is co-opting a developmental program that can cause an excessive deposition of extracellular matrix, and this ends up being harmful to the patient,” she said. “Having this developmental context, especially related to Hox gene expression, might prove useful at least for understanding the broader context of why these diseases are happening in people.” 

The complementary PNAS paper, co-led by Gill and Yin, showed how geometry, elastic properties, and growth rates control various mechanical patterns in different parts of the gut.

“We focused on how mechanical and geometric properties directly affect morphologies, especially more complicated, secondary buckling patterns, like period-doubling and multiscale creasing-wrinkling patterns,” said Yin, an expert in theoretical modeling and numerical simulations of active and growing soft tissues. 

Added Mahadevan: “These studies allow us to begin probing aspects of the developmental plasticity of gut development, especially in an evolutionary context. Could it be that natural variations in the genetic signals lead to the variety of functional gut morphologies that are seen across species? And might these signals be themselves a function of environmental variables, such as the diet of an organism?” 

Yin said the two papers provide a new paradigm for studying how genes affect the development of shape, or morphogenesis. 

“Morphogenesis is driven by forces arising from cellular events, tissue dynamics, and interactions with the environment,” Yin said. “Our studies bridge the gap between molecular biology and mechanical processes.” 

If you’ve ever seen dolphins swim, you may have wondered why they undulate instead of moving side to side as fish do. Though they have a fishlike body, cetaceans, which include whales, dolphins, and porpoises, are mammals that descended from land-dwelling ancestors.

Cetaceans have undergone profound changes in their skeletal structures to thrive in aquatic environments, including the reduction of hindlimbs and the evolution of flippers and tail flukes, resulting in a streamlined body. Scientists still don’t understand how the transition from land to water, approximately 53 million years ago, impacted cetaceans’ backbone, a central element of their skeleton.

A new study in Nature Communications sheds light on how these marine mammals’ backbones were reorganized as their ancestors adapted to life in water. The international Harvard-led team found that, contrary to previous assumptions, the cetacean backbone is highly regionalized, despite being homogeneous in shape along its length. The way in the backbone is regionalized, however, is drastically different from terrestrial mammals.

The team also explored how regions in the backbone correlate to habitat and swimming speed. They discovered that species living farther from the coast have more vertebrae, more regions, and higher burst swimming speed. Species living in rivers and bays, so closer to shore, have fewer vertebrae and regions, but their regions differ more from one another, potentially affording them greater maneuverability.

“When their ancestor went back into the water, whales and dolphins lost their hind legs and developed a fish-like body,” said lead author Amandine Gillet, Marie Curie Fellow in the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard and in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University of Manchester. “But that morphological change also means the vertebral column is now the main part of the skeleton driving locomotion in an aquatic environment.”

The vertebral column of terrestrial mammals moving on land must provide support to help the legs carry the body weight. When cetaceans transitioned from land to water, the forces of gravity shifted from air to buoyant water, releasing the pressure to carry body weight. The new body structure and movements needed to move through water meant the backbone of these animals would have to shift in some way to fit their new environments.

Previous studies have looked at the backbone from a vertebral morphological view. In a 2018 Science paper, co-authors Stephanie Pierce and Katrina Jones explored the complex evolutionary history of the mammalian backbone using a novel statistical method first developed to study the backbones of snakes. Pierce and Jones revised the model to fit their study, which allowed them to demonstrate that the vertebral column of terrestrial mammals is characterized by numerous, distinct regions in comparison to amphibians and reptiles.

“It’s a challenge to understand how the regions of a terrestrial mammal’s backbone can be found in whales and dolphins, and one reason is because their backbone looks very different in terms of morphology, even though they evolved from them,” said Pierce, a professor in the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard and senior author of the study. “They lost the sacrum, a fused string of vertebrae bracing the hind legs, and a critical landmark needed to distinguish the tail from the rest of the body.”

The vertebrae of cetaceans are further complicated in that they became more homogeneous in their anatomical features. So the transition from one vertebra to another is gradual compared to the extreme transitions found in terrestrial mammals, making it more difficult to identify regions.

“Not only do they have very similar vertebrae, but certain species, in particular porpoises and dolphins, have many more vertebrae than terrestrial mammals, with some species having close to 100 vertebrae,” said Jones. “This makes it really challenging to translate regions found in terrestrial mammals to the backbones in whales and dolphins.”

Traditional statistical methods used to identify regionalization patterns require the exact same number of elements across specimens. The statistical method Pierce and Jones implemented (called Regions) allowed them to overcome this issue by analyzing the backbone of each specimen individually. While the method worked well for the constrained backbone of terrestrial mammals, it proved computationally challenging for the high counts of vertebrae in cetaceans. Gillet collaborated with the Data Science Services team at the Harvard Institute for Quantitative Social Science to rewrite the code, allowing the program to obtain results within minutes. The researchers made the new program, called MorphoRegions, publicly available for the scientific community as a computational software R package.

“This is definitely one of the biggest advances of our study,” said Pierce. “Amandine spent months refining the program so that it could analyze a system of high repeating units without crashing the computer.”

Gillet applied the MorphoRegions method to the data she had previously collected during her Ph.D. work. She visited six museums in Europe, South Africa, and the U.S. gathering information on 139 specimens from 62 cetacean species, two-thirds of the almost 90 living species. In total, Gillet measured 7,500 vertebrae and ran them through the analytical pipeline.

“Our large data set allowed us to demonstrate that not only does the organization of the cetacean backbone differ from terrestrial mammals, but also that the patterns vary within cetaceans as we identified between six and nine regions depending on the species” said Gillet, “We then worked from there to find commonalities across regions and identified a pattern common to all cetaceans, which is summarized by our Nested Regions hypothesis.”

The hypothesis proposed by the team introduces a hierarchical organization of the backbone in which a precaudal and a caudal segment are first identified. The two segments are then each divided into several modules common to all cetaceans: cervical, anterior thoracic, thoraco-lumbar, posterior lumbar, caudal, peduncle, and fluke. Next, depending on the species, each module is further subdivided into one to four regions, with a minimum of six and a maximum of nine post-cervical regions along the backbone.

“Surprisingly, this showed us that, compared to terrestrial mammals, the precaudal segment has less regions, whereas the caudal area has more,” said Pierce. “Terrestrial mammals use their tails for a variety of different functions, but not usually for generating propulsive forces, like cetaceans do. Having more regions in the tail may allow for movement in very specific regions of the tail.”

With a better understanding of the organization of the cetacean backbone, the researchers plan to next tackle understanding how these morphological regions correlate with function using experimental data on the flexibility of the vertebral column collected in the lab. These data collected on modern taxa should allow the researchers to infer swimming abilities of fossil whales and help inform how the backbone shifted from a weight-bearing structure on land to a propulsion-generating organ in the water.

Xi Jinping has managed to maintain his grip on power in the People’s Republic of China for longer than a decade. What will unfold when the 71-year-old president eventually steps down?

“I think it’s almost certain that he will choose a weak … successor,” said Yuhua Wang, a professor of government and one of three experts to participate in a symposium hosted by the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies.

“The People’s Republic of China at 75” kicked off two months of lectures, discussions, and film screenings organized by the center to mark the anniversary of revolutionary leader Mao Zedong’s proclamation of a new Communist state. Moderator and Fairbank Center Faculty Director Mark Wu, the Henry L. Stimson Professor of Law, got the event started by inviting panelists to offer reflections bridging past, present, and future. The theme of leadership transition rose to the fore as Xi struggles with a wobbly post-COVID economy.

Wang, author of “The Rise and Fall of Imperial China” (2022), rang a note of optimism by first underscoring the PRC’s resilience by historic standards. Over 2,000 years, the average Chinese dynasty lasted 70 years by his calculations. “If you think about comparative communist regimes, the Soviet Union lasted for 69 years,” Wang added.

But he quickly pivoted to commonalities between Imperial China and the PRC. The quality of governance during the Imperial period depended solely on leadership — never on the health of China’s institutions, Wang emphasized. And the PRC, despite its collectivist ideologies, has failed to break that cycle.

The comparative political scientist went on to cite “the crown prince problem,” a concept that explains why strong emperors usually select heirs who threaten neither power nor life. It played out again and again in Imperial China. And it also happened following Chairman Mao’s death in 1976, Wang argued. “What I worry most in the next 25 years is exactly this succession,” he said.

The Kennedy School’s Anthony Saich, Daewoo Professor of International Affairs and director of its Rajawali Foundation Institute for Asia, highlighted a few of the Chinese Communist Party’s consistent threads from its founding in 1921 to today. “One inheritance has been the inability to deal with leadership succession,” offered Saich, whose “From Rebel to Ruler: 100 years of the Chinese Communist Party” was released last year.

Xi, who also serves as general secretary of the party and commander of the armed forces, ascended to the presidency in 2013. In 2018, just ahead of his second five-year term, he mobilized the National People’s Congress to abolish term limits enacted by former leader Deng Xiaoping amid an era of reform in the 1980s. In effect, Xi’s move returned China to the one-ruler cycle that prevailed under Mao and the centuries of emperors before him.

“Xi’s decision to extend his rule pushes succession into a very uncertain and unpredictable future,” Saich declared.

Boston University’s Joseph Fewsmith, a professor of international relations and political science, grappled in his remarks with the contested legacy of Mao himself. Fewsmith highlighted a resolution on China’s history, implemented by Deng in 1981, that was pretty tough on the PRC founder. “It made no doubt that the Cultural Revolution and Great Leap Forward were very serious mistakes,” said Fewsmith, co-author with Nancy Hearst of the 10-volume “Mao’s Road to Power.”

More than 15 years later came proposed revisions that put a more positive spin on the Maoist period. Moves to formally adopt this version of events were blocked in the late ’90s. But Xi formally accepted them in 2013, Fewsmith noted. “We have been living with this interpretation of the Maoist period ever since,” he said.

How did things go in the intervening years, as Xi consolidated power and ensured his own longevity? Fewsmith pointed to slowing economic growth, the devastation of COVID-19, and a rising tide of nationalism over Maoist political thought.

Later in the conversation he challenged characterizations of Xi as a strong leader, citing as just one bit of evidence delays to the recent Third Plenum meeting of top party officials amid urgent economic concerns.

“I think we have a very rough future in China,” Fewsmith concluded. “And I would highlight succession as probably the most critical.”

Next up, on Oct. 25, JFK Jr. Forum – A Conversation with Ambassador Kevin Rudd. On Oct. 30, New York Times correspondent Edward Wong will discuss his new book, “At The Edge of Empire,” which blends family history and his own reporting on military efforts to maintain control over China’s border regions. For a complete lineup, visit fairbank.fas.harvard.edu.

For centuries, questions have loomed about two of Euripides’ lesser-known tragedies, “Ino” and “Polyidus,” with only a smattering of text fragments and plot summaries available to offer glimpses into their narratives.

Now, in a groundbreaking find, two Harvard alumni have identified and worked to decipher 97 lines from these plays on a papyrus from the third century A.D.

Yvona Trnka-Amrhein ’06, Ph.D. ’13, an assistant professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder, was the first to identify part of the text as an excerpt from “Polyidus,” a scene in which King Minos of Crete confronts a seer, demanding he resurrect his son. Trnka-Amrhein and colleague John Gibert, Ph.D. ’91, identified the remaining text as lines from “Ino,” a scene that probably depicts the title character boasting victoriously after orchestrating the deaths of her stepchildren. Their research was published this month in Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik, or the Journal of Papyrology and Epigraphy.

The papyrus was discovered in 2022 in a burial shaft at the ancient necropolis of Philadelphia, Egypt, by a team from the Egyptian Ministry of Antiquities. In June, Harvard’s Center for Hellenic Studies hosted a conference with Trnka-Amrhein, Gibert, excavation team leader Basem Gehad, and 12 other scholars from around the world to compare research, including Harvard Professor of the Classics Naomi Weiss. Classics Ph.D. candidate Sarah Gonzalez also participated.

“It’s arguably one of the most significant new finds in Greek literature in this century,” Weiss said. “I don’t expect there to be another find like this in my lifetime, in my particular field of expertise. For Harvard’s Center for Hellenic Studies to host the first public investigation into this material was really exciting.”

Weiss, whose research focuses on ancient Greek performance culture, especially classical Greek drama, discussed the significance of the finding. The following transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

Tell me about your experience at the New Euripides Conference?

That was a once-in-a-lifetime experience for a scholar of Greek tragedy. To be one of 15 scholars worldwide who got to see this stuff for the first time was really incredible. There was a core group of people there who were literally going through the fragments word by word and discussing whether Yvona and John’s readings of each part of the papyrus were correct. Some of it is hard to read, so individual words are contested.

What are your early takeaways from the new fragment of “Polyidus”?

It quite clearly seems to be a dialogue between King Minos of Crete and Polyidus the seer, where Polyidus is saying, “It’s wrong to demand that I revive your son from the dead, that goes against all laws of nature,” and Minos is basically saying, “Well, I’m king and what a tyrant asks for has to happen.” The passage seems to be really concerned with questions of tyranny and the extent of human power and free will, and how those can jostle against each other. How far can human power go, how far can human knowledge and skill extend? Even to the point of reviving someone from the dead? The fact that Polyidus does end up reviving the dead son is an example of how Euripides liked to play with plot twists and “happily ever after” endings. At the same time, he was deeply engaged with contemporary intellectual questions.

And the new fragment of “Ino”?

If the editors’ reconstruction is correct, then “Ino” is the only surviving fragment that has a dialogue between the two wives: Ino, the king’s first wife who was long presumed missing and has returned in disguise; and Themisto, the second wife. Each wife has two children. Themisto tries to kill Ino’s, but Ino tricks her into killing her own instead. Themisto commits suicide and then the king mistakenly kills one of his sons by Ino, and she walks into the sea with the other. In this excerpt, the meeting of the two wives brings to the fore the doubleness and repetition running throughout the play and it in turn makes us better appreciate quite how excessive this tragedy was, with multiple wives, multiple children, multiple deaths, multiple suicides.

Does this change anything about our understanding of Euripides?

“Ino” is a really gruesome tragedy. The only person left at the end is the king, and he’s lost all his wives and all his children. This seems like tragedy on steroids. It’s the sort of experimentation with how far you can push a tragic plot that may remind us of later plays of Euripides. “Ino” may well be a significantly earlier play — there seems to be a reference to it in a comedy by Aristophanes that was produced in 425 B.C. If that is a reference to “Ino,” we know the tragedy was performed before this date. We tend to think of Euripides’ super experimental plays as being from the last decade of his career, where he’s just going all out and questioning the very form of tragedy. If we are right in dating this earlier, then that changes our understanding of how tragedy developed through the fifth century.

Who might have written the excerpts on this papyrus, and why?

We don’t know. It’s a really open question. At the conference, one of the questions that kept coming up was, is it significant that these two plays, which have something to do with the death of children, were found in a pit grave where there were buried — at different times — the body of an older woman and the body of a child? But it’s very hard to make any reliable conjectures about that connection. Some people at the conference thought that these extracts may be part of what’s called the “anthology tradition”: Maybe someone was teaching Euripides’ plays or hoping to draw from them in their own compositions and compiled a set of useful passages from each tragedy. Another scholar at the conference thought that maybe these were written out to be part of a performance, essentially like a script for actors. All of these questions remain and will be debated.

How much do we know about Euripides’ work as a whole?

When we think of Greek tragedy, we tend to think of the “big three”: Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, who all wrote tragedies in the fifth century B.C. Of these three tragedians, we have much more surviving of Euripides. While we have seven full plays by Aeschylus and Sophocles, for Euripides, we have 19 full plays and 18 of those can reliably be said to be his. Then we have a lot of fragments. The fragments of plays are preserved across different media — a lot of them are quotations that come up in other authors, but we also have papyri. This is the latest find of tragedy on papyri. These fragments are unusual because they’re relatively long and give us a lot of information about plays that we previously knew less about.

Excerpted from “Blind Spots: When Medicine Gets It Wrong, and What It Means for Our Health” by Marty Makary, M.P.H. ’98. Used with the permission of the publisher, Bloomsbury.

“Hi, my name is Chase, and I’ll be your waiter. Does anyone at the table have a nut allergy?”

My two Johns Hopkins students from Africa, Asonganyi Aminkeng and Faith Magwenzi, looked at each other, perplexed.

“What is it with the peanut allergies here?” Asonganyi asked me. “Ever since I landed at JFK from Cameroon, I noticed a food apartheid — food packages either read ‘Contains Tree Nuts’ or ‘Contains No Tree Nuts.’ ”

Asonganyi told me that even on his connecting flight to Baltimore, the flight attendant had made an announcement: “We have someone on the plane with a peanut allergy, so please try not to eat peanuts.” And on his first day at Johns Hopkins, a classmate invited him to dinner. The invite went something like this: 1) Would you like to come over for dinner; and 2) Do you have a peanut or other allergy?

“What’s going on here?” Asonganyi asked with a big smile. “We have no peanut allergies in Africa.”

Faith, who had flown in from Zimbabwe, nodded in agreement.

I looked at them and smiled. “In Egypt, where my family is from, we don’t have peanut allergies either,” I said. “Welcome to America. Peanut allergies are real and can be life-threatening here.”

Their observation reminded me of when my friend’s school banned peanuts from the campus. School administrators actually inquired with security authorities if metal detectors could detect a peanut. And then one day there was an “emergency.” A peanut was found on the floor of a school bus. It was like discovering an IED in Iraq. The kids were ordered to quietly exit the bus single-file until someone arrived to “decontaminate” the bus. Luckily, the peanut did not detonate and harm the public.

How did we get here?

In 1999, researchers at Mount Sinai Hospital estimated the incidence of peanut allergies in children to be 0.6 percent. Most were mild. Then starting in the year 2000, the prevalence began to surge. Doctors began to notice that more and more children affected had severe allergies.

The 1990s was the decade of peanut allergy panic. The media covered children who died of a peanut allergy, and doctors began writing more about the issue, speculating on the growing rate of the problem. The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) wanted to respond by telling parents what they should do to protect their kids. There was just one problem: They didn’t know what precautions, if any, parents should take.

Rather than admit that, in the year 2000 the AAP issued a recommendation for children zero to three years old and pregnant and lactating mothers to avoid all peanuts if any child was considered to be at high risk for developing an allergy.

The AAP committee mimicked what the UK health department had recommended two years earlier: total peanut abstinence. The recommendation was technically for high-risk children, but the AAP authors acknowledged that, “The ability to determine which infants are high risk is imperfect.” Having a family member with any allergy or asthma could qualify as “high-risk” using the strictest interpretation. And many well-meaning pediatricians and parents read the recommendation and thought, Why take chances? Instantly, pediatricians adopted a simple mnemonic to teach parents in their offices: “Remember 1-2-3. Age 1: start milk. Age 2: start eggs. Age 3: start peanuts.” A generation of pediatricians was indoctrinated with this mantra.

I did a close read of that 1998 UK health department recommendation to see if it cited any scientific study to back up the decree. I found one sentence stating that moms who eat peanuts are more likely to have children with peanut allergies. In other words, it blamed the moms. The report cited a 1996 British Medical Journal (BMJ) study. So I pulled that up and took a close look.

I couldn’t believe it.

The actual data did not find an association between pregnant moms eating peanuts and a child’s peanut allergy. But that didn’t matter: The train had left the station.

How could “experts” make a recommendation citing a study that did not even support the recommendation?

Bewildered by how the study seemed so badly misconstrued, I called its lead author, Dr. Jonathan Hourihane, a professor of pediatrics in Dublin. He shared the same frustration and told me he had opposed the peanut avoidance guideline when it came out. “It’s ridiculous,” he told me. “It’s not what I wanted people to believe.”

I specifically asked him how he felt about his study being used as the source to justify the sweeping recommendation. “I felt crossed,” he responded, using a little UK slang for feeling betrayed. He had not been consulted on the national guideline.

The 2000 AAP guideline was published in the specialty’s top journal, Pediatrics, activating many pediatricians to evangelize mothers when they brought their babies in for a checkup. Doctors and public health leaders had their new marching orders. Within months, a mass public education crusade was in full swing, and mothers, doing what they thought was best for their children, responded by following the instructions to protect their children.

But despite these efforts, things got worse. By 2004, it was clear that the rate of peanut allergies was going the wrong way. Peanut allergies soared. More concerning, extreme peanut allergies, which can be life-threatening, became commonplace in America.

Suddenly, emergency department visits for peanut anaphylaxis — a life-threatening allergic swelling of the airways — skyrocketed, and schools began enacting peanut bans. By 2007, 18 percent of Virginia schools had banned peanuts altogether. And in 2016, the Parkway School District in Missouri, reported 957 students with documented life-threatening food allergies, most of which were to peanuts. The rate had increased 50 percent from just six years prior, and more than 1,000 percent from a prior generation.

As things got worse, many public health leaders doubled down. If only every parent would comply with the pediatrics association guideline, they thought, we as a country could finally beat down peanut allergies and win the war. The dogma became a self-licking ice cream cone.

But the groupthink could not have been more wrong.

Swimming against the current

Stephen Combs is a salt-of-the-earth pediatrician in rural East Tennessee. At one point, the other pediatricians in Combs’s group noticed something unique about his patients. None of them had peanut allergies. This despite the fact that his colleagues were seeing more and more kids with peanut allergies in their practices. What was going on?

I was curious to learn more about his impressive track record, so I traveled to the beautiful rolling hills of Johnson City, Tennessee, to visit him. (I often learn a lot when I get outside of the bubble of my urban university hospital.)

I discovered that all the pediatricians in Combs’s group were as impressive as he was: making house calls, staying late to see patients, and educating parents on how to raise healthy children. They all practiced pediatrics the same way.

Except for one thing.

Combs had never followed the AAP guideline for young children to avoid peanuts. The reason for his defiance was simple. Combs did his residency at Duke Medical Center in North Carolina, where he trained under world-famous pediatric immunologist Rebecca Buckley. When the AAP guideline came out in 2000 with a big splash, Buckley recognized that it violated a basic principle of immunology known as immune tolerance: the body’s natural way of accepting foreign molecules present early in life. It was like the dirt theory, whereby newborns exposed to dirt, dander, and germs may then have lower allergy and asthma risks. Buckley confidently told her students and residents, including Combs, to ignore the AAP recommendation, and in fact, to do the opposite. She explained that peanut abstinence doesn’t prevent peanut allergies, it causes them.

Her explanation turned out to be prophetic.

Since his training with Buckley, Combs has consistently instructed parents to introduce a touch of peanut butter (mixed with water to avoid a choking risk) as soon as a child is able to eat it. To this day, the thousands of children in East Tennessee lucky enough to have Combs as their pediatrician do not have peanut allergies.

Extrapolating the principle to other potential allergens, Combs also encouraged the early introduction of eggs, milk, strawberries, and even early exposure to dogs and cats. As a result, the children in his practice rarely developed an allergy to these things, and when they did, it was mild.

An embarrassingly simple study

Buckley and her trainees were not alone in bucking the AAP’s guidance. In fact, many experts in immunology had long known of mouse studies showing that avoiding certain foods triggers allergies to those foods. But the laboratory immunology community was largely disconnected from the clinical allergist and the pediatric community.

Gideon Lack, a pediatric allergist and immunologist in London, challenged the UK guideline. It “was not evidence-based,” he wrote in The Lancet in 1998. “Public-health measures may have unintended effects … they could increase the prevalence of peanut allergy.”

Two years later, the same year the AAP issued their peanut avoidance recommendation, he was giving a lecture in Israel on allergies and asked the roughly 200 pediatricians in the audience, “How many of you are seeing kids with a peanut allergy?”

Only two or three raised their hands. Back in London, nearly every pediatrician had raised their hand to the same question.

Startled by the discrepancy, he had a Eureka moment. Many Israeli infants are fed a peanut-based food called Bamba. To him, it was no coincidence.

Lack quickly assembled researchers in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem to launch a formal study. They found that Jewish children in Israel had one-tenth the rate of peanut allergies compared to Jewish children in the UK, suggesting it was not a genetic predisposition, as the medical establishment had assumed. Lack and his Israeli colleagues titled their publication “Early Consumption of Peanuts in Infancy Is Associated with a Low Prevalence of Peanut Allergy.”

However, their publication in 2008 was not enough to uproot the groupthink. Avoiding peanuts had been the correct answer on medical school tests and board exams, which were written and administered by the American Board of Pediatrics. Many in the medical community dismissed Lack’s findings and continued to insist that young children avoid peanuts. For nearly a decade after AAP’s peanut avoidance recommendation, neither the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH’s) National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) nor other institutions would fund a robust study to evaluate the recommendation, to see if it was helping or hurting children.

But things were getting worse. The more health officials implored parents to follow the recommendation, the worse peanut allergies got. The number of children going to the emergency department because of peanut allergies tripled in just one decade (2005–14). It spread like a virus. By 2019, one report estimated that one in every 18 American children had a peanut allergy. Schools began to ban peanuts and regulators met to purge peanuts from childhood snacks as EpiPen sales soared. Pharma exploited the situation by price-gouging the desperate parents and schools. Mylan Pharmaceuticals jacked up the price of an EpiPen from $100 to $600 in the U.S. (It’s $30 in some countries.)

The AAP recommendation had created a vicious cycle. The more prevalent peanut allergies became, the more people avoided peanuts for young children. This, in turn, caused more peanut allergies. Tunnel-vision thinking had created a nightmare scenario for which the only possible solution seemed to be the total eradication of peanuts from the planet.

As things got worse, a dissenting Lack decided to conduct a clinical trial randomizing infants to peanut exposure (at 4-11 months of age) versus no peanut exposure. He found that early peanut exposure resulted in an 86 percent reduction in peanut allergies by the time the child reached age 5 compared to children who followed the AAP recommendation. He blasted his findings to the world in a New England Journal of Medicine publication in 2015, finally proving what immunologists like Buckley had known for decades: Peanut abstinence causes peanut allergies. It was now undeniable; the AAP had it backward.

I reached out to Lack and had breakfast with him when he was traveling to Washington, D.C., for a medical conference in 2024. He told me that his initial hypothesis had been based on an early observation as a pediatrician that kids who got their ears pierced sometimes developed a nickel allergy around the piercing. But kids who had orthodontics didn’t. He realized that kids with orthodontics had prior exposure to nickel in the braces, making them immune. This observation was consistent with the concept of “oral tolerance” that he’d studied in mice experiments conducted at the University of Colorado in the 1990s.

He had an interesting observation from his childhood that reminded him that conventional wisdom can change. His grandfather had a heart attack, which doctors treated with strict bed rest — a recommendation that was eventually replaced with cardiac rehab exercise. As a 6-year-old, Lack recalled that his grandfather was not allowed to leave his bed. The family members had to take him his meals. His doctors managed his damaged heart by weakening it further.

“In science, we tend to get in a rut and then dig in,” he told me. “We have to be open-minded.”

Lack is now recognized as a hero in the field of allergy. But when he did his big study, he was heavily criticized.

It would take the AAP two years after Lack’s randomized trial was published to reverse its 2000 guidance for pediatricians and parents. It would also take two years for the NIH’s NIAID division to issue a report supporting the reversal.

Did they really need two years? Where was the sense of deep remorse? The affected families deserved to have the medical establishment move with a sense of urgency to correct their recommendation immediately following Lack’s definitive study. Hugh Sampson, another trainee of Rebecca Buckley, led the NIAID report that undid the recommendation. He told me that working with the government agency was frustrating. Sampson is one of the country’s leading allergists. When I asked him what he thought about the entire saga, he told me, “The food allergy community has been appropriately chastised [for getting the peanut recommendation wrong].”

An entire generation — millions of children — had been harmed by groupthink, and many still are feeling the effects. Now, at least the faucet of bad advice was turned off.

Copyright © Ladner Drysdale LLC, 2024.

Millions of Americans, from hourly retail staffers to corporate vice presidents, wrestle with the demands of work while parenting young children, caring for a sick spouse or aging parent — or both.

That juggling act is made even tougher by rigid practices and rules set by employers, such as inflexible or unpredictable work schedules, and employers’ failure to grasp how employees are struggling and to provide them with support, according to a new Harvard Business School report.

That disregard harms both workers and companies. Care-related issues are the single most common reason employees leave the workforce. Companies also pay a price, both directly and indirectly, often in waysthey don’t fully understand, the report found.

The Gazette spoke with its author Joseph B. Fuller ’79, M.B.A. ’81, professor of management practice and co-chair of the Managing the Future of Work project at HBS, about the problem and what companies can do. Interview has been edited for clarity and length.

There are 50 to 60 million caregivers in the nation. They make up the largest portion of a cohort you study known as “hidden workers” — those who want a job or more hours but are thwarted by employer policies. Who is in this group and why do they leave the workforce?

They are people who have some significant care obligations within their household. Those range from things that would strike people as very ordinary — a two-parent household with kids — or it could be something much more exotic — they have a chronically ill child or spouse. An apogee group is what we call the “sandwich generation,” where they’re caring for dependent children, from a newborn to a teenager, but they’re also caring for one or more seniors — a parent, an in-law.

Well over 50 percent of workers report they have some caregiving obligation. The question becomes: Do the terms and conditions of their employment and the nature of that obligation mesh? A lot of traditional expectations of employers, but also coworkers and even customers, don’t always jibe with the cadence of care.

We can see this in things like work schedule. If I have a child with a chronic condition, anything from severe asthma to a behavioral issue, stuff happens. And if I have to go see the principal of the school tomorrow because of a disciplinary problem or it’s a bad air-quality day and my child really shouldn’t be outdoors, I’m going to keep them home from school. As a normal working adult, I don’t have money to hire a service, so I’m going to miss a day of work.

Fifty percent of women who have left the workforce and say they would have preferred to remain working left because they could not reconcile the obligations of the career path they were on with caring for kids.

Primary caregiver by gender and age

Caregiving, along with higher education and healthcare delivery, has among the highest real-dollar increase in cost in the last 10 to 15 years. Childcare is more expensive than it’s ever been in real dollars. If you’re paying $1,200, $1,300 a month for full-day childcare, for an average American job, that would be equal to the average after-tax, discretionary income that a worker is left with at the end of the month. So, economics underlies many people’s considerations. But it’s also a combination of career considerations and the specific caregiving needs of the family.

You found that hiring processes used by employers have contributed to the difficulties caregivers face when trying to return to work after some circumstance forces them to leave the workplace for a time. Why is that?

Unfortunately, several things start happening if your work history gets interrupted. The first is something that virtually every employer uses to assess candidates called the continuity of employment filter, which is used in an AI-powered tool called an applicant tracking system. It asks an employer: If someone has a gap in their work history, how should I treat that? If there’s a gap of more than six months, 50 percent of employers will drop a person from the candidate pool.

How does the struggle to manage work and caregiving typically manifest on the job? Do most employers even realize some workers are having a hard time?

First of all, employees in most companies only go to their boss or to their company to discuss a caregiving issue as a last resort. Their concern is: If I bring this up, I’m certainly not going to be a candidate for promotion. It’s going to affect my performance evaluation. They fear they’ll be viewed as less committed, that they’re going to be suspect.

The biggest two effects of having caregiving responsibilities that are hard to reconcile with your job are absenteeism and presenteeism. Either you’ll miss work, or you’ll be so distracted while you’re at work you won’t get much done.  

For a lot of frontline lower-wage jobs, companies have a rule that if someone is late to work three times in a month or has an un-preplanned absence three times in a quarter, by rule you’re just fired. And that’s completely understandable. They’re running complicated operations; they can’t let every store manager make their own decisions, not only because it would be chaos, but also because if somebody in Topeka is getting fired, but a person who did the same thing in Toledo is being kept because the store managers made different decisions and it all ends up in court, the company loses.

And companies, especially human resources functions, hate administering exceptions. Walmart employs a million people. If all of a sudden everything is customized, they’d be out of business in 6 months.

One thing my early research showed is that caregiving concerns are endemic. They affect roughly 80 percent of the workforce some of the time, most of the time, or all of the time. But the way working relationships have been structured by employers for a century rests on propositions like “I’m paying you and providing a decent place to work. I don’t want to intrude on your life, and I don’t want to hear about it. I don’t want to talk about it.”

Besides concerns about fairness, administrative logistics, and lost productivity, there are costs for failing to address the caregiving needs of employees, costs many companies don’t realize they’re paying. What are some of those?

First, there’s a very substantial cost of replacing a worker. It doesn’t matter if they’re fired, or they quit. Even for low-wage workers, the cost is between 25 percent and 35 percent of annual compensation. That’s a good proxy for how much it’s going to cost to replace that worker.

Second, people who have some tenure with the employer have lots of knowledge based on that experience, which makes them more productive. Say they join your company at age 24 or 25 and then after four or five years, they decide to start a family. They’ve got five years of work experience; they have a network inside the company; they may know customers; they know how you do things. But they conclude they can’t stay given the requirements of the job.

“There’s a very substantial cost of replacing a worker. Even for low-wage workers, the cost is between 25 percent and 35 percent of annual compensation.”

Unless employers assist them so they can stay in the job, they give up a productive worker. Their replacement is an unknown quantity. Employers constantly make speculative bets on new employees based on pieces of paper and a couple of interviews to replace a worker the company has a huge amount of data on from personnel files, performance evaluations, etc.

When they replace the worker who leaves because of caregiving conflicts, they incur the direct costs, but they also absorb indirect costs, what we call “tacit knowledge” — how we do things around here. And say that worker is on a team and they’re the glue on that team. Another team member has been thinking about quitting, too. We know from psychological research that person will feel psychological permission to quit if another worker quits.

What my research shows is the more senior you are, and the more money you make, the more likely you are to leave a job because of a caregiving obligation. Employers are always surprised by that. They assume a worker is more likely to leave if they’re low-paid.

A worker in the top quartile of compensation is more likely to leave a job because of a caregiving conflict by a factor of two than a bottom-quartile worker. And that 25 percent to 35 percent cost of replacing a worker goes to 100 percent or more of annual compensation if you’re talking about a top-quartile worker — middle management, upper-middle management, all the way to the executive ranks.

All those things add up. Unfortunately, employers historically aren’t very good at connecting those dots. They don’t understand their own economics.

Why aren’t they better at seeing the full picture of these costs?

Unfortunately, the lack of connection between managers and supervisors of workers, and their lived experience, and the human resources function is really quite surprising. HR, particularly in big companies, just tends to see data. They’re not talking to supervisors who say, “My best workers are leaving regularly and here’s why.” A lot of companies don’t do exit interviews, so they don’t connect data about why somebody leaves in performance reviews. They don’t say, “Is there anything that’s causing you to think about leaving the company?”

What should employers do to remedy this situation?

The first is to realize there’s a big pool of talent out there that’s been marginalized because of caregiving responsibilities.

Employers should review how they search for talent and what conditions they’re putting on applicants in the applicant tracking system and adjust them to include more candidates. There’s this big pool of workers that is being structurally obliged to end up in part-time, low-wage work because of these “disqualifying” factors. I’m not going to say those standards are arbitrary, but they contribute to an artificial shortage of qualified candidates that employers complain about despite policies creating that shortage.

A second is, understand that all your employees are past, current, and future caregivers and that their circumstances will change. Their life path affects their productivity and their propensity to quit or to behave in a way that causes you to fire them.

Understand the care demographics of your workforce. Make their caregiving lives outside work something that’s discussable with their supervisor. There’s a tremendous return on loyalty and engagement from workers who hear from their supervisors.

Do exit interviews, add to your performance review questions like “Have you thought about leaving? What would cause you to do that?” Find out what’s driving absentees and resignations? Look at your own data.

Just invest in having a more sophisticated understanding of your own economics. Because if you do, you’ll make better decisions.

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Many nations around the globe appear deeply divided, with dissatisfaction over democracy on the rise. The central issues are rooted in the “very real failings” of liberal democratic institutions today, according to Daniel Chandler.  

“It’s surprisingly hard to find a coherent vision of what a truly just society, grounded in [classical] liberal principles, would actually look like,” said Chandler, an economist and philosopher at the London School of Economics, during a talk Monday with Eric Beerbohm, director of the Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard.

The pair discussed Chandler’s new book, “Free and Equal: A Manifesto for a Just Society,” in which he defends the ideas of the late John Rawls, the renowned 20th century Harvard political philosopher, and attempts to apply them to the economic and political issues of today.

The book offers a full-throated defense of liberal egalitarianism, as Rawls outlined it, and then tries to “bridge the gap between Rawls’ quite abstract, high-level principles and a whole range of practical policy questions,” Chandler said. 

Rawls was a deeply influential political, moral and legal philosopher who taught at Harvard from 1962 until his death in 2002 and is best known for his 1971 opus, “A Theory of Justice.”

His theory of “justice as fairness” envisions a society in which every person has an equal right to the basic liberties and opportunities, and where inequalities exist, those with the least power or advantage should be prioritized. And he begins with a thought experiment: Would we design a more just society if nobody knew in advance whether they’d be among the most powerful or the most vulnerable? 

Chandler was first inspired to explore this question while he was at Harvard in 2008 on a one-year Henry Fellowship. He wondered why economics and political theory appeared to have drifted apart for progressives since Rawls’ heyday and whether he could find a way to reunite them. 

One objective of the book, he explained, was to offer an accessible summary of Rawls’ ideas to a non-academic public and to address some of the common criticisms and misunderstandings about him.

“I think one of the reasons Rawls hasn’t had as much influence as he might have had on public policy is that he said so little about the practical implications of his ideas,” he said. 

“I particularly wanted to bring out some of the communitarian aspects of Rawls’ thinking, and to emphasize how his account of economic justice is much richer and also much more radical than his commons,” essentially his views on sharing of societal resources.  

In Rawls’ view, economic justice involves more than how wealth is distributed, but about the balance of power between workers and business owners and the importance of having a sense of financial independence and opportunity. 

A secondary goal was to respond to critics of classical liberalism, which embraces individual freedom as a primary value, and try to “rehabilitate” it as a progressive public philosophy. 

“I think in popular discourse, particularly on the left, liberalism has come to be associated with the neoliberal ideas of thinkers like [Friedrich] Hayek and [Milton] Friedman,” with their faith in the markets and singular focus on economic growth. 

That kind of thinking has come to dominate political discourse and economic policy since the 1980s, Chandler notes in his book. It has left progressives without a solid philosophical mooring for their thinking and policies.

Whereas President Ronald Reagan and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher could look to Hayek and Friedman in the 1980s for a source of intellectual coherence and direction, it’s not as obvious today where progressives look for similar inspiration, he added. 

“The long-term failure of mainstream progressive parties, like the Democrats here [in the U.S.] and the Labour Party in the U.K., to develop a coherent political vision of their own” is not merely an intellectual problem, but it deeply undermines the parties’ chances for ongoing electoral success, Chandler said.   

Rawls, Chandler believes, offers a useful framework for weaving an array of different policies together in a coherent way and provides an intellectual and ethical clarity about why we should pursue progressive policy ideas like workplace democracy or universal basic income or various forms of participatory democratic politics.

Not everyone will agree with Chandler’s point of view, but for politicians and others looking for justifications of certain policies, that clarity could have significant practical value. “Being able to explain why we support different policies is important, and Rawls can help us do that.” 

A new book by Daniel Chandler, “Free and Equal: A Manifesto for a Just Society,” offers a vision for democratic change inspired by the work of John Rawls, the towering political philosopher who joined the Harvard faculty in 1962 and maintained ties to the University until his death in 2002. Rawls’ 1971 magnum opus, “A Theory of Justice,” has influenced generations of philosophers and legal scholars.

In a conversation that has been edited for clarity and length, Chandler, an economist and philosopher at the London School of Economics who studied at Harvard under Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen, explained why Rawls’ ideas speak to the present day. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Which of Rawls’ principles offer the best framework for envisioning change?

The fundamental idea of Rawls’ philosophy is that society should be fair, and he developed a famous thought experiment called the “original position” for thinking about what that might actually mean. If we want to know what a fair society would look like, we should imagine how we would choose to organize it if we didn’t know what our position in that society would be, whether we would be rich or poor, gay or straight, Black or white, as behind what he called a “veil of ignorance.” It’s a very intuitive way to think about fairness, similar to the idea that someone might cut a cake more fairly if they didn’t know which piece they were going to end up getting.

He uses this thought experiment to identify two fundamental principles, to do with freedom and equality respectively — hence the title of my book — that we can then use to think about how to design the basic institutions of a democratic society: what the Constitution should look like, how to organize the political process, the broad outlines of our economic system, including the role of markets, the nature of property rights, the scope of government intervention, and so on.

Rawls’ first principle is what he called the “basic liberties” principle. That’s the idea that everyone is entitled to a set of truly fundamental freedoms, including both personal freedoms, such as freedom of speech, religion, sexuality, but also political freedoms — not just the right to vote, but all of the freedoms that we need to play a part as genuine equals in the political process. 

His second principle has two parts. The first is what he called “fair equality of opportunity.” That’s not just the absence of discrimination but the idea that everyone should have a genuinely equal chance to develop and apply their talents and abilities in life. Equality of opportunity is sometimes seen as the less radical partner to equality of outcome, but it’s really a very demanding ideal, one that countries like America and the U.K. fall far short of today. 

The second is the “difference principle” — the idea that we should organize our economy so that the least well-off are better off than they would be under any alternative economic system. So, some inequality can be justified because it’s necessary for markets to function well, and higher pay gives people incentives to work hard and innovate, but we need to make sure the benefits are widely shared, and that isn’t something we can just leave to markets. 

One of the things that I think is most interesting and important about Rawls’ economic thinking, but has often been overlooked, is that when he’s talking about inequality and economic justice, he’s not only talking about the distribution of financial resources. He’s concerned with how our society distributes power and control, like the balance of power between owners and workers, and also what he calls the “social bases of self-respect,” which include having a sense of independence, of being able to stand on your own two feet, social recognition from our peers, and opportunities for meaningful work.

Historically, one critique of Rawls is that his ideas, while important, are not very pragmatic and don’t offer a roadmap for change. How might the kind of change you propose come to fruition?

I think that’s a fair criticism. You know, although Rawls is really the unrivaled giant of 20th-century political philosophy, his ideas haven’t had much impact on popular debate or public policy, at least not compared to Milton Friedman and F.A. Hayek. I think it’s this lack of practical application that helps explain this gap. I’ve tried to pick up where Rawls left off and flesh out how we could put his ideas into practice. 

In terms of how change can happen, there aren’t easy answers. But we can be pretty certain that change won’t happen unless political parties and the people who shape our public debate are able to articulate a positive and unifying vision of where they want society. The starting point for making the quite deep changes that America needs, to both its political and economic institutions, is to be able to articulate that positive vision.

Some commentators have suggested a binary choice — liberal principles on one side, authoritarian ideas on the other — in the coming presidential election. You say we should reject that idea. 

It’s not that I don’t think that choice exists; it’s that I think it’s possible and necessary to try to appeal to people across the spectrum. What I’m rejecting is the idea that society is divided into two fixed camps who can’t speak to one another anymore. It’s still the case that large majorities support liberal freedoms, the existence of a democratic political system, and an economy that is broadly market-based, but genuinely works for everybody. The divide is much more tied to party identification rather than to issues. So, despite how divided things seem right now, I think it’s possible to build a broad-based coalition around these kinds of ideas, and I hope my book provides people with the ideas and arguments to try to do that.

The idea of sea monsters has captivated us for centuries. Could there really be something scary lurking in the dark depths? Folklore and popular culture say yes, yet science urges us to dive a little deeper.

“Sea Monsters: Wonders of Nature and Imagination” is a new exhibition at the Harvard Museum of Natural History, one of the four Harvard Museums of Science & Culture, which investigates the mystery and lore behind some of the ocean’s most fascinating creatures. It was inspired by a popular course taught by Peter Girguis, guest curator and Harvard professor of organic and evolutionary biology.

“This course is really a survey of humankind’s relationship with the ocean, from ancient mariners to current political affairs,” he said. “What’s been most rewarding is seeing the students realize how important the ocean is to humanity and how we often apply monstrosity to things we simply don’t understand.”

Sea monsters are a universal phenomenon, appearing in the myths and legends of cultures around the world. However, many of these exciting stories come from real creatures hidden in the deep. In the exhibition, visitors will ask themselves: Do sea monsters exist? And if so, what do they tell us about ourselves and our connection with the ocean?

Ancient mythology depicts the sea as a realm of chaos, filled with fearsome creatures like the Greek Hydra. Hindu mythology conjured the Makara, a sea monster that symbolizes protection and good fortune. In African folklore, creatures like the Mngwa and the Inkanyamba are feared as evil water spirits. However, with modern science and technologies, we better understand the lives of the real creatures behind these legends. For instance, the New England-based Scituate Sea Monster was ultimately identified as a decaying basking shark; the Kraken in Jules Verne’s “Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea” is likely the enigmatic deep-sea giant squid.

Visitors will discover the existence of sea creatures whose real lives are often more astonishing than the fantastical beings we may have imagined. Visitors can see these creatures firsthand when peering into displays of specimens from the Museum of Comparative Zoology’s extensive collections, such as a viperfish, the tentacle and beak of a giant squid, and a Megalodon shark tooth.

The exhibition features historical illustrations of these fabled monsters and detailed ancient mariners’ maps. Ancient maps held important cultural knowledge, often revealed through depictions of mythological creatures that served as warnings of dangerous and uncharted waters. Also on display is a Peruvian ceramic pot made by the ancient Moche people, which shows a crab with human-like features losing a battle with a god. A two-foot Gregorian reflecting telescope made around 1750, decorated with two sea serpents, also appears in the gallery.

Tentacles and teeth are frequently associated with monsters of the sea. In reality, tentacles are important and adaptable tools used to sense the environment, catch food, and for protection. Surprisingly, the viperfish’s needle-like fangs feel more like toothbrush bristles than daggers. And while the deep-sea anglerfish may look scary, most are just a few inches long and only eat small fish and shrimp. Many of these creatures are captured in eerie and stunning deep-sea photography by Solvin Zankl and others.

The exhibition explores how ocean ecosystems are threatened by creatures such as the crown-of-thorns starfish which feeds on coral polyps and Sargassum seaweed which is growing out of control in some places due to agricultural-nutrient runoff, creating dead zones in the ocean and overwhelming beaches. Even more monstrous than these invaders are the pressures we humans place on the ocean. Plastic pollution and human-influenced climate change are endangering marine life and ecosystems. These are the real sea monsters and the exhibition shows that we have the chance to work toward sustainable solutions that protect our oceans for future generations.

The exhibition is open to the public through June 26, 2026.

Harvard community members, some holding signs calling for the release of hostages held by Hamas, gathered on the steps of Widener Library Monday evening during a memorial vigil co-hosted by Harvard Chabad and Harvard Hillel. The event was held to “honor those lost and stand together in solidarity, unity, and hope” on the one-year anniversary of the terrorist attack by Hamas on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. Speakers offered prayers and shared stories about friends who perished or were taken hostage. Some sang songs in memory of lost loved ones. The names of all the hostages were read.

A year ago, a terrorist attack on Israel by Hamas sparked the war in Gaza, which has claimed tens of thousands of lives and recently begun to spread to Lebanon and Iran. What happens next?

Scholars at the Harvard Kennedy School came together Monday to discuss the risks of further escalation in the Middle East in a panel led by Meghan O’Sullivan, director of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at HKS.  

“It is a day of remembrance for many who lost loved ones a year ago today in the terrorist attacks by Hamas and those who lost loved ones in the many, many deaths that have occurred since that time,” said O’Sullivan, who is also Jeane Kirkpatrick Professor of the Practice of International Affairs. “It’s a day of mourning for many people who are still losing members of their families and loved ones.”

A major point of discussion revolved around the role of Iran, a longtime opponent of Israel, in the ongoing conflict. Last week, Iran launched a major ballistic missile attack on Israel — only the second time the country has been directly attacked by Iran. Iranian officials said the action was in retaliation for the killing of a Hamas leader by Israel in Tehran in July. Israel has not claimed responsibility for the death.

The missile attack was widely viewed as an escalation between Israel and Iran, which has long actively supported Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and smaller militant groups in the West Bank in conflicts with Israel.  

“We’re facing a Middle Eastern crisis,” said O’Sullivan, who served in the George W. Bush administration as deputy national security adviser on Iraq and Afghanistan. “We have moved away from a decade-long war between Israel and Iran by proxy to a place where now Israel and Iran are in conflict with each other directly.”

The panel featured Edward Djerejian, a former U.S. ambassador to Israel and current a senior fellow at Harvard’s Middle East Institute; Gidi Grinstein, an Israeli entrepreneur and former peace negotiator under Prime Minister Ehud Barak; Karim Sadjadpour, an Iranian-American policy analyst at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace; and Omar H. Rahman, senior fellow with the Middle East Council on Global Affairs.

For more than an hour, the panelists discussed Israel’s strategy as the dominant military power in the region, Iran’s involvement, and what America’s role is — and may become.

“What [Israel] has done in terms of degrading Hamas’ capabilities and decapitating Hezbollah’s leadership, these, in my eyes, are brilliant tactical victories,” Djerejian said. “But what about the day after?”

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said his goals are to demilitarize and de-radicalize the opposition in Gaza, but his actions don’t align with those aims, Djerejian said.

“He’s defined the Israeli military movements in Lebanon to change the balance of power on the northern border of Israel. But these are not a strategy. These are mostly tactics without resolving the key issues.”

Rahman was tougher in his assessment of Israel’s actions.

“You’re creating a bottomless pit of despair, trauma, anguish, anger, all the things that will feed the resistance for generations,” he said of the situation in Gaza. “And so Hamas is not going anywhere as an organization. Hezbollah is not going anywhere as an organization.” 

He argued that the U.S., which has provided almost $18 billion in aid to Israel in the last year, must reconsider its role in the conflict.

“Does America want to continue underwriting an indefinite Israeli war on the region? Is that something we want to do with our taxpayer money and our support at the cost of our national interest, our credibility, on the international stage?” he said.

Grinstein said that the conflict could end immediately if Hamas were to surrender. 

“I do want to say and acknowledge that our tragedy creates a challenge of compassion,” he said. “To look at the other side and feel their tragedy as well, because there is an unimaginable tragedy happening in Gaza. Here could be an easy solution for this war, which is for Hamas leadership to leave Gaza and end the war.” 

As for the likelihood of Iran relenting, Sadjadpour said that it’s unlikely. 

“I don’t think we’re ever going to see meaningful peace and stability in the entire Middle East until you have a government in Iran, I won’t say democratic, but whose organizing principle is not the revolutionary ideology of 1979 but the national interest of Iran.”

For more information, including a transcript of the event, visit the Belfer Center website.

Gary Ruvkun, a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School and a Mass General researcher, was the center of attention Monday among Harvard and hospital colleagues after receiving the 2024 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine for his role in the discovery of microRNA.

Ruvkun, who shared the prize with his longtime collaborator Victor Ambros, formerly of Harvard and today a professor at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, waved to fellow researchers and cracked a few jokes during a news conference at Mass General, not too far away from his lab at the Richard B. Simches Research Center.

“It’s been a good morning,” he said.

Ruvkun was born in Berkeley, California, in 1952, and earned his bachelor’s degree from the University of California at Berkeley in 1973. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1982, and became a principal investigator at Mass General and at the Medical School in 1985. Ruvkun and Ambros were Harvard colleagues when they began to collaborate on studies of the role played by two genes, lin-4 and lin-14, in regulating abnormal development in the roundworm C. elegans.

In work conducted at Harvard and published in 1993, Ambros cloned C. elegans’ lin-4 gene and found that it did not code for a protein, as most other genes did. Instead, it encoded a very small strand of RNA, just 22 bases long. Next, Ruvkun discovered a tiny RNA string with the ability to bind to lin-14’s messenger RNA, large molecules that carry genetic information from the gene to the cell’s ribosome, where the information gets translated into protein. By disrupting this process, the microRNA disrupted the gene’s expression and affected development.

Seven years later, Ruvkun’s lab found a second microRNA, called let-7, that also blocks the expression of its target gene, again altering development. But it was the subsequent discovery of let-7 in a range of living things, from worms to fish to humans, that illustrated that its role is fundamental enough that it has been conserved over millions of years of evolution. That finding sparked an explosion of interest in the role of microRNA in regulating development. Today, more than 1,000 human genes for microRNA have been discovered. These genes play roles in normal and abnormal development and in heart disease, cancer, neurodegenerative disorders, and other conditions.

Ruvkun received the call informing him of the prize at 5:30 a.m. Monday

“The phone rang and we don’t get middle-of-the-night phone calls,” he said. “We answered it and it was the secretary of the Nobel committee and it sounded real. We’ve received awards for this and it’s always been wonderful. It’s a big deal.”

During the news conference, Ruvkun thanked Mass General for supporting his work and that of other microbiologists. Even after 40 years, there’s no end in sight to his research, he said. C. elegans has some 20,000 genes. There are thousands he knows nothing about.

“The surprises are what keep you young in science and I’m constantly surprised,” Ruvkun said. “My ignorance is bliss.”

Harvard President Alan M. Garber extended his congratulations to the new Nobel laureates, praising their pioneering research.

“Nobody who knows Gary or his work could be surprised by this recognition for his research on microRNA,” he said. “A brilliant investigator, his curiosity has led him to one remarkable insight into fundamental biology after another. The implications of discoveries like Gary’s and Victor’s aren’t always obvious at the outset. With promising medical applications of microRNA research on the horizon, we are reminded — again — that basic research can lead to dramatic progress in addressing human diseases.”

Speakers at the news conference celebrated Ruvkun’s achievement and, like Garber, noted that his work demonstrates the power of basic science.

“We celebrate with the entire world your incredible achievements — we celebrate the power of science, the power of brilliant minds,” said David Brown, president of academic medical centers for Mass General Brigham and the Mass General Trustees Professor of Emergency Medicine at HMS. “I’m thrilled to welcome you as Nobel laureate Dr. Gary Ruvkun — and that has a nice ring to it. Dr. Ruvkun and his colleagues have pushed the boundaries of science on our understanding of life on this planet.” 

Dean George Q. Daley of the Medical School echoed Brown’s praise.

“The revelation of microRNA regulation is absolutely a shining example of how curiosity driven research can be turned into actionable knowledge that will advance human health for the betterment of humanity,” he said.

At first it looked almost as if Wang Dongling was sweeping the floor with one hand, using a brush about a yard long. The graceful strokes trailed compacted, staccato black lines and sweeping curves on a rectangular white sheet the size of a living-room rug.

The artist, dressed in black, his dark hair collar-length with streaks of gray, has been creating large-scale calligraphic works for decades. On Friday, in front of an eager crowd gathered in the courtyard of the Harvard Art Museums, he did it again in “Flying Flowers and Scattered Snow: Wang Dongling’s Calligraphy of Su Dongpo’s West Lake Poems.”

Drawn with calligraphy ink on paper, Dongling uses his own brand of “chaotic script” (luan shu 亂書) to reproduce ancient texts “that have been written down thousands of times before,” Sarah Laursen, the Alan J. Dworsky Curator of Chinese Art at the Harvard Art Museums said. 

His style, she said, “could be seen as a descendant of the ‘wild cursive script’ of the Tang dynasty. However, he also draws inspiration from Abstract Expressionism, choosing to layer his characters on top of each other, and integrating physical performance into his practice — elements that have never been used in combination before.”

At Harvard, Dongling recreated the “West Lake” poems of Chinese poet, calligrapher, and essayist Su Dongpo. The poems depict the ornate scenery of the lake located in Hangzhou, China. 

“It’s in the city where he has lived for decades,” said Shining (Christina) Sun, a doctoral student at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. Sun is part of the team that helped organize Wang’s visit and served as his translator on campus. 

“He’s bringing that experience of his hometown, through these poems, all the way with him to Harvard,” she said. 

Onlookers gathered on both the ground and balcony levels to watch Dongling in action. Making swooping, inky strokes, the almost 80-year-old artist got lost in the work — placing characters in a way that looked almost predetermined, despite the improvisational nature of his process. 

“He’s really focused when he does it,” Sun said. “He can either do it in isolated tranquility or among a huge crowd. But there’s an atmospheric interplay always going on.”

Dongling, through Sun, recounted a recent performance at the Belgian Royal Academy of Fine Arts. He said he totally blocked out the crowd and forgot anyone was watching until people started clapping. 

That seemed to happen with the Harvard spectators as well, who watched intently through the nearly 30-minute performance. Polite applause broke out after the artist announced he was finished.

And despite his clear connection to the ancient, Dongling has begun exploring combining calligraphy with modern technology. 

“He actually has works where he uses Virtual Reality to create a 3D installation,” Sun said. “He has done not only VR but also projective technologies, where he projected art on top of another piece of words, like Matisse. So he creates that palimpsest between the ancient and current.” 

Hosted in conjunction with the Harvard Art Museums Materials Lab, or M/Lab, the demonstration was part of an effort to facilitate interactions between the public and experts in the art world. 

“My co-organizer at the M/Lab, Francesca Bewer, and I were also very excited that the performance could take place in the Calderwood Courtyard, with its vantage points on every floor. This took many hands behind the scenes, from facilities and collections management to the director’s office,” Laursen said. 

The Art Museums are in the process of formally acquiring the artwork created last week, as well as the brush used to create it. Once they have entered the collection, they will be available for students and other researchers to view in the Art Study Center by appointment and may be used in future exhibitions.

Laursen added that for those interested in seeing some of Dongling’s inspirations, works by Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, and Joan Miró are currently on view on the first floor of the museums. 

“In particular, I would encourage readers to visit Jackson Pollock’s “No. 2” (1965.554) in Gallery 1200 and think about the energetic but controlled physical movement of the artist as he created the work and the rhythmic balance of light and dark,” she said. 

The museums are open and free to the public Tuesday through Sunday, from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.

ChatGPT’s debut in November 2022 caused a near-instant sensation. It gave most users their first opportunity to try out a new type of artificial intelligence that uses existing data and published materials to create content known as generative AI. 

Once the initial buzz faded, economists were eager to find out who was using the technology and how often, what they were doing with it, and whether they used it at work, at home, or both. How quickly and robustly the public adopts a technology is widely thought to predict its economic impact.

As of August, nearly 40 percent of U.S. adults aged 18-64 had used generative AI, according to new survey research. Of those employed, 28 percent used it at work, while nearly 33 percent used it away from work. That pickup rate is significantly faster than the public embrace of the internet (20 percent after two years) or the personal computer (20 percent after three years, the earliest researchers could measure). 

The Gazette spoke with David J. Deming, the Isabelle and Scott Black Professor of Political Economy at Harvard Kennedy School, and professor of economics and education at Harvard Graduate of Education, about what he and co-authors Alexander Bick, an economic policy adviser at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, and Adam Blandin, assistant economic professor at Vanderbilt University, found and what it could mean for business. Interview has been edited for clarity and length. 

Why is it important to measure how quickly Americans have embraced generative AI tools like ChatGPT relative to PCs and the internet?

For a new technology like this, it’s really important for us to have some baseline understanding of how much it’s used and by whom, and what are they using it for. To do that, you need a high-quality, nationally representative survey. So, we recreated all of the question wording and the structure of the Current Population Survey (CPS), which is the big survey that produces the unemployment rate every month. It’s the main source of labor market data in the U.S. 

The CPS, back in 1984, started asking questions about usage of the personal computer at home. In 2001, it started asking questions about internet usage. And so, we took the same question ordering, replacing those technologies with generative AI, so we could directly compare it to the speed of adoption of other technologies, asking the same people the same questions. 

That’s how we are able to show the usage rate in our data, which is 39.4 percent, is actually higher than both personal computers and the internet at the same stage in their product cycles. 

In which specific tasks is AI most useful at work?

In which specific tasks is AI most useful at home?

Were you and your team surprised by these findings? 

I personally was surprised at the high rate of usage. Whenever I tell colleagues about this, I always ask, “What do you think we found?” before I tell them. Most of my colleagues are aging academics like me, so we tend to underestimate generative AI usage. When I ask my graduate students or undergraduates, they tend to estimate numbers that are higher than the actual number we found. And I think that really tells you something about it. We found that young people are using generative AI at much, much higher rates than older people, which is very common across other technologies. 

I didn’t come into this thinking this is what we’re going to find. I just was interested in the answer because I’d read a lot of things suggesting it was mostly hype, and I read a lot of things suggesting it was the Next Big Thing. And so, we wanted to know where the truth was.

What accounts for such swift adoption?

I can give you some informed speculation. One is that generative AI is built on top of those previous two technologies. You could think about the fact that people have computers in their home, and they have access to the internet, as base layers that allow you to easily adopt some new technology like generative AI. The personal computer, when it was released, was big and expensive and not everyone had it at home. The internet was less expensive, but we built this incredible grid that allowed people to be connected. Without those two things, you wouldn’t have generative AI. I think one of the reasons why it’s been adopted quickly is because the base level technologies were already there, and you could, in some sense, think about generative AI as a complementary innovation to the internet.

Demographic differences in AI use at work

Adoption is not uniform across demographic groups. Men, younger people, those with a college or graduate school education, and people in white-collar jobs are more likely to use generative AI and more often. What accounts for the usage gaps? 

The bit about younger people and more educated people adopting a technology is actually common to almost every new technology. In studies of the adoption of personal computers, people found the same thing. The one thing that was different, relative to PCs, was gender. Women used PCs at work more than men in the 1980s largely because the job of administrative assistant or secretary, and office jobs in general, skewed very female and they were using computers whereas generative AI is not as concentrated in occupations. It’s everywhere. We find higher usage in STEM and management careers and those do skew male. 

I don’t think access is explaining it because a lot of people use computers on the job. We found very, very broad adoption across occupations. It’s highest in STEM jobs and management, but 22 percent of blue-collar occupations were using AI. And usage rates were above 20 percent in every category of occupations except personal services, so it’s really common across places. 

If you look at how many companies say they’re using it, it’s actually a pretty low share who are formally incorporating it into their operations. People are using it informally for a lot of different purposes, to help write emails, using it to look up things, using it to obtain documentation on how to do something. I think a lot of variation reflects the fact that some people like to tinker, and companies aren’t telling you don’t use it, but they’re not necessarily formally requiring you to use it.

This is something we’re really interested in tracking. We’ve already started our discussions about the next wave, and we’ll try to update the data over time and ask more questions about usage and dig into some of the threads that were left hanging. 

AI use at work by occupation

AI use at work by industry group

This is the first-ever national survey on this subject. Should business and tech executives consider acting on any of these findings? 

I would say most definitely yes. Another way to think about this is if you were to go back to 1984 and tell people, “Hey, there’s this new thing called the personal computer. I have a crystal ball. Twenty years from now, everybody’s going to have one of these and every single new technological development and every single new product is going to be using it as the base.” Knowing that now, what would you do differently? You would change a lot. You could make billions and billions of dollars. 

I think this survey is saying, “We don’t have a crystal ball, but it sure looks like generative AI is going to be on that scale.” And so, the spoils will go to people who can figure out how to harness it first and best. So yes, I think they should be paying attention. I think a lot of them are already. 

Much like the internet was a base layer for a lot of other technologies, you’ll see that the people who figure out how to use this technology that’s so versatile, that can do so many things well, but doesn’t yet have a killer app — the people who find that killer app, who build something on top of it, are going to really, really profit and benefit. I think that’s what the next five or 10 years will be about. 

These companies are about trying to build human-level intelligence. That’s fine, but there are a lot of commercial applications that don’t require that. They need to be built with this thing as an input into it, rather than this being the product itself. So, I think you’ll see a lot of that in the next few years, and it’s going to be really exciting. 

Nearly 400 Harvard Extension School degree candidates and guests gathered at Memorial Church on Sept. 20 to celebrate convocation, marking a moment of unity and achievement for this global network of students.

This was the fifth convocation for HES degree candidates. For some, it was their first time visiting Cambridge, with many meeting classmates in person after only seeing them through online classes.

Among those experiencing this milestone was Jean Michael Lif, a Master of Liberal Arts candidate in international relations, who flew in from the Dominican Republic specifically for the event. Having only been on campus twice before, Lif expressed his joy at finally connecting with his peers face-to-face.

“It’s something really beautiful,” he shared, reflecting on what initially felt like a daunting commitment. Lif began his HES journey while working at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in the Dominican Republic as the financial coordinator for European markets. Lif said he needed a master’s degree that provided both academic rigor and flexibility and he saw HES as the perfect fit. Now, he manages a media company dedicated to elevating the image and culture of his country and eventually hopes to return to a role in government.

Suzanne Spreadbury, HES dean of academic programs, welcomed the group. “Harvard Extension School degree candidates put challenging academics at the center, not the margins, of their lives,” she said.

Spreadbury highlighted the extraordinary projects undertaken by past graduates, from partnering with NASA scientists to evaluate satellite data to collaborating with the North American Blackfeet Nation tribe on a wetland restoration project.  She remarked that while these accomplishments are noteworthy, they are also quite ordinary for HES graduates, emphasizing the academic rigor and support from staff that propels students.

Dean of the Harvard Extension School and Continuing Education Nancy Coleman closed the ceremony by addressing the group. Coleman acknowledged the unique challenges that many students have experienced in their pursuit of education.

“We cannot deny that our world is facing extreme challenges, many of which we’ve never seen before,” Coleman began. “We know what they are because we live them every day — in the media, in social media, and maybe around our kitchen tables.” Yet amidst these obstacles, Coleman praised the students for choosing to pursue their academic goals, particularly at a place as rigorous as Harvard. “You have challenged yourself in the pursuit of something bigger, and that is optimism,” she added.

Coleman encouraged students to harness this optimism, to use the knowledge they’ve gained at HES to push through difficulties and make meaningful changes in their communities. “Each and every one of you has the power to ask the difficult questions, to courageously change the course of your history, and the optimism to succeed.”

MANAUS, BRAZIL — Students were hours into exploring the Amazon rainforest when their guide caught the glint of something special.

Thiago G. Carvalho, a staff zoologist with Museu da Amazônia (Musa), removed the caterpillar-like creature from a tree branch and raised it on the pads of his fingertips like an offering. He wanted the group to appreciate this fuzzy little insect patterned with greens and golds.

“We have to learn as biologists to see beauty in all kinds of life,” Carvalho said, noting that he couldn’t be sure of the exact genus in an area so rich with biodiversity. “And this little guy is beautiful.”

The find was one of thousands during a recent teaching and research intensive organized by the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies (DRCLAS). The Harvard Amazon Rainforest Immersion explored the region’s intricate ecosystems as well as urgent threats to its economic security, environment, and public health. A primary goal was expanding partnerships with scientists and other innovators who work in a place of central importance to the global climate. But the 10-day course also served a more fundamental purpose.

“Most Brazilians don’t know what the Amazon is,” said Marcia Castro, the Andelot Professor of Demography at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and chair of the DRCLAS Brazil Studies Program. “And for those outside Brazil, it’s even bigger … the information they get is filtered. Sometimes it’s biased. Other times they think they have the perfect solution to solve all the Amazon’s problems.”

Speaking at the immersion’s kickoff in this city of 2.3 million, Castro pressed the students, professors, and young academics to bring a different mindset. “Be curious, listen — don’t judge,” she said.

A few hours later, the group toured Musa, a 250-acre reserve at the city’s edge veined with outdoor exhibits and walking trails. As Carvalho plucked dragonfly larvae and other life forms from the forest, the visitors grew more observant, focused. The Brazilian state of Amazonas, where invertebrates account for the majority of biodiversity, proved full of inviting detail.

Soon a trio of students were staring at a boa constrictor in a tank. Another set of visitors crouched to inspect a young tarantula Carvalho spotted. Others paused over the line of leaf-cutter ants soldiering by.

“I love studying ant colonies! They’re so interesting!” cried David Caleb Brown ’25, an applied math concentrator from Alabama currently investigating how high-altitude remote sensing balloons can be used to fight deforestation in the Amazon.

Co-sponsored by the Salata Institute for Climate and Sustainability, the multidisciplinary experience was organized by the DRCLAS Brazil Office with help from Amazonas State University (UEA) and Academia Amazônia Ensina. Twenty-one students and academics represented the College and four Harvard graduate Schools as well as universities across South America in fields that included the sciences, romance languages, public policy, and law.

All are engaged in research that impacts the Amazon, from fighting the rise of illegal gold mining to promoting sustainable agriculture and limiting government corruption. But for many, the immersion marked their first visit to the world’s largest tropical rainforest.

“Being here and seeing everything around me is a childhood dream come true,” shared Dariana González-Aguilar ’25, an integrative biology concentrator with roots in North Carolina and central Mexico who hopes to work on conservation in Brazil.

“The whole idea is to give people a chance to get to know this extremely important biome,” said Castro, a Rio de Janeiro native who has studied malaria in the region since 1999 and teaches a three-week course in Brazil every January (the 2024 iteration was set in the Amazon). “I hope in the end everyone goes back to Harvard, or goes back to their homes in Brazil, transformed but above all inspired to continue their work.”

Deep dive into the Amazon basin

For three days, participants immersed themselves in the vast topaz of the Amazon basin, home to nearly 20 percent of the world’s river waters. Boarding the Victória Amazônica with the group was Scot Martin, the Gordon McKay Professor of Environmental Science and Engineering and Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences at the John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, who has deep ties to the region known as Amazonia.

Martin first visited in 2007 and now travels to Manaus regularly. He has picked up Portuguese, started following World Cup soccer, and partners with UEA researchers on various projects. “The Amazon is a place that inspires in every regard,” he said as the boat traveled a quiet stretch of the Rio Uatumã.

In a lecture, Martin charted the inner workings of the Amazon watershed, with its famous system of “flying rivers.” Trees act as the rainforest’s “water pumps,” he explained, taking in H₂O and gradually releasing it skyward via a process called evapotranspiration. That’s why deforestation means lower river levels across the Amazon basin and less rainfall far beyond.

“I had imagined the deforestation was driven by cattle ranching,” said Chun-Yu Su ’27, a sophomore from Taiwan concentrating in integrative biology. “But Professor Martin pointed out there’s heterogeneity in terms of geography, because the Amazon is about two-thirds the size of the continental U.S.” In some areas, the land was deforested for large-scale ranching and soybean fields. In others, it was driven by smaller-scale agriculture, including subsistence farming.

Consequences include extreme drought, increased wildfire risk, and crop loss in the Amazon and its neighboring “breadbasket” regions, Martin said. Future implications could include water rationing and power shortages  across Brazil, a nation heavily dependent on hydroelectric. “And then you have one that was big last year,” he added, noting that water levels would be even lower in the last months of 2024. “The only way to get to most towns in the State of Amazonas is by river navigation or air. When the drought hit, these communities were really cut off.”

Martin also outlined one of his projects with UEA collaborators, this one involving a team that monitors water quality in area rivers. Specifically, the team is investigating the source of high mercury levels across the Amazon basin, where communities are at heightened risk of exposure because residents consume so much fresh-water fish. Co-leading this research is Martin’s SEAS colleague Elsie Sunderland, the Fred Kavli Professor of Environmental Chemistry and a global expert on mercury contamination.

One culprit is illegal gold mining, on the rise in Amazonia since the early 2000s. It’s a “messy business,” Martin explained, with mercury used to isolate gold from river sediment. The mercury-gold amalgam is then roasted, releasing toxic fumes into the atmosphere while leaving behind the prized metal. In parts of the northern Amazon where illegal mining is highly prevalent, widespread mercury poisoning has been found in some Indigenous communities, he said.

On a still evening, a team from UEA demonstrated how their partnership with Martin works. They ferried the group in a fleet of small motorboats across a remote stretch of the Rio Uatumã, speeding past cow pastures before settling near the shoreline.

“I do a lot of mapping of the Amazon,” remarked Nicholas Arisco, M.S. ’18, Ph.D. ’23, a postdoctoral fellow from Connecticut studying health and populations at the Chan School. “I didn’t expect the rivers to be this big.”

Collected samples were transferred to the floating laboratory UEA recently built to test water for contaminants such as bacteria and phosphorus. Analyzing for mercury is done in Sunderland’s lab at Harvard.

Back on Victória Amazônica, UEA biotechnology Professor Rafael Lopes e Oliveira underscored the logistical challenges of performing this work. The Amazon basin vacillates between drought and downpour, a challenge to researchers as well as those residing in rural communities, he explained through a DRCLAS translator. If you want to study biochemistry or microbiology, he said, you need to understand culture and interpersonal relationships, because access depends on local communities.

‘Social construction of ignorance’

Joining the immersion for their first visits to the Amazon were Naomi Oreskes, Henry Charles Lea Professor of the History of Science, and Scott V. Edwards ’86, Alexander Agassiz Professor of Zoology and chair of the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology as well as curator of ornithology in the Museum of Comparative Zoology.

“I’m part of a small group of scientists talking about a field called agnotology, or studying the social construction of ignorance,” Oreskes explained one afternoon, speaking to the group sitting cross-legged in the boat’s air-conditioned dining room.

Her insights on “market fundamentalism” — the idea that free markets can solve all of society’s problems — proved especially pertinent to Amazonia. Reviewing ideas explored in 2010’s “Merchants of Doubt” and 2023’s “The Big Myth,” Oreskes underscored the “negative externalities” of business ventures that drive climate change — essentially, taking profits from activities that damage the environment but leaving costs of cleanup and environmental rehabilitation to communities.

“We’ve had many lectures on deforestation and science,” said Peruvian Lucero Beatriz Reymundo Dámaso, a master’s candidate in anthropology at Brazil’s Federal University of Santa Catarina. “I appreciate that Naomi came in and said, ‘Wait — there’s also this cultural component.’”

The river trek featured several stops in the Uatumã Sustainable Development Reserve, where residents have banded together to fight exploitive development. André Vianna from the Manaus-based NGO Idesam outlined the initiative’s purpose of bridging conservation goals with marketing and supply chain supports for small, rural producers. Today, the area is zoned by the state of Amazonas for ventures that conserve the rainforest.

Furnituremaker Elizângela Cavalcante introduced the group to the São Francisco das Chagas do Caribi community of artisans, planters, and “extractivistas” (or those who harvest the rainforest’s abundance sustainably). She walked participants past the community’s tiny gift shop, where açaí beaded jewelry and elegant wooden bowls were available for purchase, and charmed visitors with stories of marriage, work, and family life.

“For me, it was remarkable to learn how women are leading business development and taking care of sustainability,” said Vinícius Prado, Ph.D. ’27, a former program officer for the United Nations Population Fund from Belo Horizonte, Brazil, who is studying population health sciences at the Chan School. “They already are overburdened with their work on caregiving added to their economic activities … and yet they are concerned about the environment and creating a better world for future generations.”

The group also met with José Monteiro, keeper of the Pousada Mirante do Uatumã inn and a 30-acre agroforestry plot launched in 2008 with support from Idesam. Monteiro had previously deforested his land in favor of cattle ranching. Today, the family property yields shade as well as farm-fresh eggs and Brazil nuts.

“It was really interesting because I asked him: ‘How are you doing? Are you earning a better living?’” Oreskes said. “He said they weren’t; it’s about a wash. But the life is so much better.”

It was a reminder for Oreskes that green transitions seldom trigger immediate financial rewards. “This is true even in the United States, with putting in solar panels or installing better windows on your house,” Oreskes said. “Often there’s an upfront investment, but you get it back in the long run.”

The mixed blessing of roads

Heat and humidity challenge those conducting research in Amazonia, but the lack of reliable roads serves up additional impediments. From the Victória Amazônica, traveling to the next stop required one hour on a speed boat and another four hours by bus. At a rural meeting point, groups of three or four transferred to heavy-duty trucks, some of the only vehicles capable of navigating the final stretch of watery and deeply rutted roadway.

Located 70 miles north of Manaus, Camp 41 is a reservation and research station established in 1979 by the late Thomas E. Lovejoy III, a George Mason University ecologist and Amazon preservationist. It was part of an initiative to protect pristine rainforest fragments as roads, developers, and cattle ranchers moved in. The site has since served as a base for scientists tracking diverse species of birds and butterflies as well as monkeys.

Welcoming the group there this summer was Massachusetts-born ornithologist Mario Cohn-Haft, a member of the ecology faculty at the Brazilian National Institute for Amazon Research (INPA) in Manaus and a top authority on avian life in the Amazon. He traced his own involvement with the camp to a 1987 bird-monitoring internship.

“I ended up moving my whole life down here,” Cohn-Haft said. “I married a Brazilian. I conduct my life in Portuguese, teach graduate students in Portuguese. And it’s all thanks to this project.”

A series of tin-roof pavilions where tight rows of hammocks can be tied for overnight stays populate the camp. After one restful night, evolutionary biologist Edwards draped a sheet from one of these structures for his slide presentation. Using a tree branch to underscore key points, he addressed the evolutionary roots of Amazonia’s enormous spread of plant and animal life, which accounts for 10 percent of biodiversity worldwide.

A highlight concerned the Amazon’s ties with the Caribbean. “The Amazon River used to flow west,” marveled Edwards, showing a map of ancient Lake Pebas that stretched north from where the Andes Mountains eventually formed 20 million years ago. As evidence, he cited everything from fossilized mollusks found throughout the western Amazon to the region’s famous river dolphins, including the beloved boto (or pink dolphin).

“Some of the plants in western Amazonia are more adapted to what you might see in an estuary or a delta,” said Edwards. “These are possibly relics of species there when this lake system was still present.”

Two nights at Camp 21 left plenty of time for experiencing this biodiversity up-close. Day treks brought glimpses of blue morpho butterflies and views of an overstuffed harpy eagle nest. Venturing out by night yielded varieties of spider, lizard, and frog through the beacon of a flashlight.

“I was looking at a book yesterday with an image of a gecko,” recalled Evanna Jaramillo, a master’s candidate in tropical ecology and conservation at Ecuador’s University San Francisco de Quito. “I thought, ‘I wish I could see a gecko.’ And it came true that night! It was tiny, and I don’t know how I even saw it because everything here is inconspicuous. You have to turn over every leaf!”

The forest proved a comfortable place to wander. Despite extreme humidity there were no mosquitoes, and temperatures hovered near 80°F. During a morning bird walk, Cohn-Haft talked about the interplay between these conditions and the rainforest’s extraordinary biodiversity.

“One of the secrets behind there being so many species in the tropics is that many are highly specialized,” he explained. All that specialization evolved with help from the equator’s environmental constancy, with the forest’s understory offering an additional degree of stability.

“And the more specialized you become, in some ways, the better competitor you are. You can survive in your own little world just fine. But any kind of change and suddenly you’re screwed,” Cohn-Haft continued. “So climate change is a killer for tropical forests and highly specialized organisms.”

Tapping knowledge of regional specialists

Manaus is a hub for scientists studying biodiversity and those addressing threats to Amazonia. With the city as their base, immersion organizers took the opportunity to program lectures with respected specialists and stops at influential institutions.

“The thinking is, how can we increase our presence in the Amazon? How can we provide opportunities to that student looking for a passion project?” offered Tim Linden, associate director of the DRCLAS Brazil Office. “We want to deepen collaborations with local institutions like Amazonas State University. And there are other organizations of scientific excellence like INPA. There are innovative sustainable development projects led by entrepreneurs in the region and different NGOs.”

One of the biggest names on the itinerary was Philip Fearnside, a biologist and prolific researcher with INPA. “He’s a person I cite in all of my papers,” said Kathryn Baragwanath, a Chilean political economist and 2023-24 Academy Scholar with the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies who just started as a University of Melbourne senior lecturer. “I was very excited to be in front of him.”

Fearnside’s presentation underscored the stakes for the region — and the world. The Amazon captures huge amounts of carbon. Its destruction would trigger an immediate spike in greenhouse gases and global temperatures. In addition, failing to curb emissions worldwide means the eventual collapse of the Amazon biome.

Other high-profile experts leaned into solutions to Amazonia’s challenges. They included Gersem Baniwa, Indigenous philosopher and University of Brasilia anthropology professor, Virgilio Viana, Ph.D. ’89, Sustainable Amazon Foundation director, and Izabella Teixeira, Brazil’s former Minister of the Environment, who played a key role in negotiating the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement.

“We’re here to listen and learn from individuals who have been guardians of the Amazon for so long,” said Eduardo Vasconcelos ’25, a double government and economics concentrator from Brasília whose senior thesis investigates how local policymaking can better preserve the ecosystem. “I’m inspired to conduct my research in a way that supports those on the frontlines.”

Tasso Azevedo, a social entrepreneur based in São Paulo, outlined for the group his widely cited MapBiomas project, which relies on satellite imagery to track land use changes throughout South America and even Asia. Castro and Martin have already published research that draws on Azevedo’s Brazilian data, along with at least three immersion participants studying the country’s environment, health, and government.

“If we want to achieve sustainable development goals, and we don’t have much time left … we need all these disciplines working together,” said Castro, who also chairs the Chan School’s Department of Global Health and Population.

And Ivo Makuxi, a young lawyer from the neighboring state of Roraima who lectured before slipping into the role of immersion participant, spoke to the complexities of Brazilian political history and constitutional law as they relate to Indigenous land rights.

The global community should care about the issue, he explained, because Indigenous peoples have historically proved excellent stewards. While 20 percent of the Amazon has already been deforested, just 1 percent of rainforest that falls within Brazil’s Indigenous territories has been cleared.

“The Amazon is a special place for a lot of people,” Makuxi, who takes his last name from the Indigenous community to which he belongs, said in an interview at Camp 41. “People say it’s the lungs of the world. What we say is it’s our home.”

“Navigating the Amazon,” featuring Harvard faculty and undergraduates who conducted recent research in the Amazon Rainforest, 4-6 p.m. Oct. 8, Harvard Kennedy School.

CAMP 41, Brazil — The Harvard Amazon Rainforest Immersion reminded Nick Kowalske of the dangers of complacency.

Over the 10-day research and teaching intensive hosted this summer by the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies (DRCLAS), the senior integrative biology concentrator spotted and identified 121 species while exploring the Brazil state of Amazonas. Highlights include a toco toucan, red-billed pied tanager, and neotropic cormorant, all documented on eBird.org.

As a long-time birder, he knew it was easy to get spoiled by the abundance of avian life. “I frequently catch myself saying, ‘Oh, it’s just a cormorant,’” said Kowalske, who completed a DRCLAS biodiversity internship earlier in the summer at Instituto Terra Luminous near São Paulo. “But I try to remain excited about the common things.”

With a sharp eye and an even sharper mind for the region’s biodiversity, the Dallas native’s knowledge proved an asset to anybody with binoculars. Some of it was acquired while volunteering in Ecuador a few summers ago. And some came from studying up on the Amazon’s bird life before the big trip.

His ecological education, however, began much earlier. “It started when I was 4 or 5 years old,” Kowalske said. “Every night I would make my mom sit and read the ‘Encyclopedia of Animals’ with me.”

Co-sponsored by the Salata Institute for Climate and Sustainability, the August immersion was organized by the DRCLAS Brazil Office with help from Amazonas State University (UEA) and Academia Amazônia Ensina. Twenty-one students and young academics from Harvard and universities across South America explored the world’s most diverse biome while learning from locals about the Amazon’s beauty and climate, economy, and public health challenges.

Bird lovers were pleased from Day One, which brought the group to the top of a 138-foot observation tower at the Museu da Amazônia (Musa), a sprawling natural history museum and rainforest reserve on the outskirts of Manaus, the capital of the state of Amazonas.

“Looking down into the canopy and seeing toucans and macaws flying everywhere was just ridiculous,” said Nicholas Arisco, M.S. ’18, Ph.D. ’23, a postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health who fell hard for birding during the immersion.

Also memorable was the two-night stay at Camp 41, a far-flung research station and preserved rainforest fragment located about 70 miles north of Manaus. For ornithologist Scott V. Edwards, professor and chair of the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, the trip’s best moment concerned a yellow-headed vulture that perched itself above the dining shed.

“I’m not so much into the rarity of things,” explained Edwards, who also serves as curator of ornithology at the Museum of Comparative Zoology. “I’m more into getting a good view.”

Camp 41 proved especially prime for fans of birdsong. “It’s a lot harder to see stuff here in the woods, but it’s fun to just listen,” said ornithologist Mario Cohn-Haft, the group’s host at the site as well as a member of the ecology faculty at the Brazilian National Institute for Amazon Research (INPA) in Manaus.

Participants gathered at picnic tables one morning before dawn, with Cohn-Haft immediately recognizing the low-pitched hoot-hoot of a blue-crown motmot. As the sun rose, the chorus grew to include a black nunbird, red-billed woodcreeper and chestnut-rumped woodcreeper, among many others Cohn-Haft identified by ear.

“I’m sure we’ve heard well over 50 species of birds today,” he said that night.

At Camp 41, Kowalske added more than 40 species to his tally, including three varieties of manakin, a swallow-tailed kite, and a whiskered flycatcher with its baby in their nest. “It’s great to see Nick in his element,” Edwards said. “I’ve been very impressed.”

For Kowalske, the best birding was found at São Francisco das Chagas do Caribi, a small community of eco-friendly artisans and planters on the Rio Uatumã. “We saw red-and-green macaws at eye level in short palms between the houses,” Kowalske recalled. “It was an absolutely fantastic view of a magnificent bird.”

His biggest surprise unfolded next to a rural schoolhouse near Camp 41. Kowalske and Arisco moved in for a closer look at some açaí trees with a flock of toucans, including a few green aracari and one channel-billed toucan.

Then Arisco pointed to a far more diminutive creature in the treetops.

Kowalske shrugged it off at first when asked what it was. “I said ‘Oh, it’s another flycatcher,’” he recalled with a grin. “I didn’t even really look. And complacency is evil … so don’t do that.”

When he zoomed in with his Nikon DSLR, Kowalske recognized it was a rare and “legendary sighting” called a dusky purpletuft. The bird was last spotted around Camp 41 by Cohn-Haft in 1987 when he first arrived for a bird-monitoring internship.

“These birds are known primarily from the Guyanas and Suriname, but their range, we now know, extends farther south,” Kowalske rattled off. “It was super cool to see — even if it was just a little bird in the canopy.”

Sometimes all it takes is one small brush with the arts to change a career trajectory.

Kevin Lin ’12 knows this as well as anyone. An Organismic and Evolutionary Biology concentrator at Harvard, Lin was preparing for a career in biology when he made a spontaneous decision junior year to volunteer for an American Repertory Theater production. One A.R.T. internship and one Harvardwood 101 trip later, Lin found himself applying to intern in the theater department of Creative Artists Agency after graduation.

“I figured that, for one last hurrah before going to grad school for biology — which I had already applied to — I might as well do an internship in theater,” he told an audience of students gathered in the Agassiz Theatre last week. Now Lin is an agent, representing theater artists like Leslie Odom Jr. and Darren Criss, Columbia Professor Kimberlé Crenshaw, and Olympic diving champion Tom Daley.

“It was very clear to me that I’m not going to be a writer, I’m not an actor, I’m not a director, but I want to be surrounded by people who are extraordinary,” Lin said. “In my position now, my day is filled with insanely talented people who inspire me on a daily basis.”

Lin was one of the keynote speakers at the inaugural Creative Careers Conference co-hosted by the Office for the Arts at Harvard, the Harvard Alumni Association, and the Mignone Center for Career Success. The conference brought together current students interested in the arts with alums working in the field for a panel discussion and networking reception. The event concluded with a reimagined student performance of “The Human Comedy” (1983), the result of a weeklong musical theater residency with alumni that included Broadway producer Jack Viertel ’71, director Sammi Cannold, M.A. ’16, and arranger Ian Chan ’23.

“I think there are so many extraordinary jobs in the arts that are not super visible,” said Fiona Coffey, director of the Office for the Arts. “When you can see how people have forged these very unique and specific careers, it opens up students’ minds to what’s possible. It gives them permission to dream in a similar way.”

Alumna composer-lyricist and novelist Julia Riew ’22, the other keynote speaker, started at Harvard on the pre-med track. Although she had always loved musical theater, she was intimidated when didn’t see many other Asian American students pursuing the field.

“From freshman fall through junior year I knew I had this theater passion, and I knew that it felt impractical,” Riew said. “I’d literally go home and cry after class every day. I’d be writing musicals in the back of Life Sciences 1B, not listening to the lecture.”

Ultimately Riew decided to jointly concentrate in music and Theater, Dance & Media. Now, she is represented by Lin, and working on projects in musical theater, literature, film, and TV. Riew emphasized to students the importance of using their time as undergraduates to explore their craft.

“There’s this opportunity to make bad theater and put it onstage. I was like, ‘When else, other than College, am I going to be able to write a show and have it go up onstage and not have to spend a dime of my own money?’” she said.

James Caven ’22, a writer’s assistant on “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon,” spoke on a panel alongside fellow alumni Abraham Rebollo-Trujillo ’20, a dramaturg and actor, Veronica Leahy ’23, a musician and composer, and current junior Gabby Anderson ’26, a guard on the women’s basketball team and artist and entrepreneur who makes customized sneaker art.

Caven, who was involved in the Harvard Lampoon and the Harvard Radcliffe Dramatic Club while being an Integrated Biology concentrator, spoke to students about the fast-paced realities of comedy writing, which involves producing a new show every day between first pitches at 9 a.m. and the show taping at 5 p.m. Caven said he was encouraged to apply for his position by a fellow alumnus also involved with the Lampoon.

Anderson said balancing her art career with being a student is definitely time-consuming, but she makes it easier by combining the two whenever she can, sometimes submitting paintings (and accompanying essays) for econ class projects.

“I find myself very inspired, not only when I play basketball, but taking courses. Even econ sometimes makes me think, ‘Oh my gosh, I need to make this huge painting about the economic state of the U.S. right now,’” Anderson said. “Because my hobby is also my career, I’m more passionate about it, which motivates me. I’m having fun so it doesn’t necessarily feel like work.”

Students in the audience asked alumni about a range of topics, from how to self-advocate and how to navigate family approval around a career in the arts to how to decide which creative projects to accept or decline.

Leahy, who entered Harvard believing she would study math, was a TDM and music concentrator in the Harvard-Berklee Joint Studies Program. She told students, who were curious about networking, that many of the performance and directing opportunities she has now are a direct result of professional and social connections she made on campus.

“Truly the people that you are making art with now are the people that you might be making art with for the rest of your life, or definitely for the next couple of years,” Leahy said. “Just enjoy it, appreciate it, and really take advantage of being here with all these talented people.”

Fans of Clementine, the cat who recently captivated TikTok with her rare eye color, should take note.

The piercing golden gaze of cheetahs, the striking blue stare of snow leopards, and the luminous green glare of leopards are all traits that can be traced to one ancestor, an ocelot-like feline progenitor that roamed Earth over 30 million years ago. 

In a new study published in iScience, Harvard researchers say this ancestral population likely featured felines with both brown and gray eyes, the latter paving the way for the rapid and wide diversification of iris color seen in cat species today.

“When I started this study I asked, ‘What do we know about eye color?’ And the truth is, very little, as there are basically almost no phylogenetic evolutionary studies on eye color,” said lead author Julius Tabin, a Griffin Graduate School of Arts and Sciences student in the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology. 

Most studies focus on the distribution of eye colors in a species, or on the genes involved in making eye color in humans and domesticated animals. Studies on eye color in animal populations are rare due to the challenges of preservation and lack of diversity — most animals have brown eyes. 

While eye color in humans is likely a result of sexual selection, and in domesticated animals a result of artificial selection, Tabin wondered what spurred the wide diversity in wild Felidae. Without fossil preservation to rely on, Tabin took a novel approach analyzing digital images from sources such as iNaturalist to identify and categorize the varied eye colors in 52 felid taxa.

Tabin and co-author Katherine Chiasson, a master’s student at Johns Hopkins University, created an algorithm to map iris colors onto a phylogenetic tree of Felidae.

“We found a lot of variability of color between species,” said Tabin, “but shockingly, we also found a lot of intraspecific variability. Most species have a singular eye color with no variation. So, it’s really surprising that once you get into the cats — lions, tigers, panthers, etc.— we see all these different eye colors. There are actually very few Felidae species that have only a singular eye color in their population.”

Equipped with the colors mapped onto the phylogenetic tree, the researchers set out to reconstruct the ancestral state. They found that early, pre-felid lineages (the ancestor of felids and their closest relatives, the linsangs) had brown eyes only. However, after the linsang species branched off, gray-eyed felines appeared alongside brown-eyed ones.

“It’s likely this happened due to a genetic mutation that drastically decreased the pigment in the eye,” Tabin said. Melanin can be either eumelanin, which is brown, or pheomelanin, which is yellow. To go from a brown eye to a gray eye would require a decrease of eumelanin. That decrease would lead to an eye that is not fully brown and not fully gray, but a brownish gray color, which is what the researchers found.

Those gray-eyed felines opened the door to a burst of greens, yellows, and blues, providing an anchor between brown eyes and the new colors. 

“Blue eyes require carefully balanced low levels of pigment and are likely recessive in felids. A wild population would probably not be able to maintain blue eyes in a population with only one blue-eyed individual among a sea of brown eyes. It’s probable that you would need something lighter than brown, but not as light as blue, to be the mediator. And that’s what you see: In every single cat species with blue eyes, they also have gray eyes,” said Tabin. 

Tabin and Chiasson also observed that brown eyes and yellow eyes rarely coexist in a species. They said they were surprised to find a positive correlation between yellow eyes and round pupils, and a negative correlation between brown eyes and round pupils.

The researchers found no significant correlations for activity mode, zoogeographical region, habitat, and uniformity of eye color, which leaves the adaptive benefit of having varied eye colors an open question to pursue.

The researchers not only reconstructed the general eye color types present at each evolutionary node, but they were also able to predict the exact color of each ancestor’s eye. 

“Being able to reconstruct color quantitatively is one of the paper’s greatest strengths, because it means we are the first animals to see the color of these eyes since these felids were alive millions of years ago,” Tabin said.

For Chiasson the study was special in part because all the resources they used are freely available online. “The fact that rigorous studies like ours can be done by anyone with an internet connection and some curiosity is indicative of a field-wide revolution that is increasing the accessibility of science around the world.”

The study opens opportunity for more investigation of the evolutionary importance of gray eyes, as well as eye-color evolution in natural populations, Tabin said. “I’m still riding high on the excitement of knowing that the felid ancestor had both brown and gray eyes, because that’s something I didn’t go in expecting or even thinking about.”

Some may be surprised to learn that academic and other intellectual breakthroughs and art spring from the same source.

Both begin with hard questions, and even when they lead to many answers or no answers at all, they should be pursued to advance knowledge and understanding, said artists and scholars during a panel discussion last Friday on how writing and art can stir the public imagination.

The interdisciplinary panel of writers included two novelists, a computer scientist, a journalist, a visual artist, and a scholar of race, all Radcliffe fellows. The discussion was part of the festivities marking the 25th anniversary of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and was moderated by Claire Messud, Joseph Y. Bae and Janice Lee Senior Lecturer on Fiction at the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

In her opening remarks, Tomiko Brown-Nagin, dean of the institute and the Daniel P.S. Paul Professor of Constitutional Law at Harvard Law School, highlighted the distinctive aspect of the institute she leads.

“True to Radcliffe’s interdisciplinary mission, fellows represent a broad range of scholarly, professional, and creative fields. They come to Radcliffe from different types of institutions and at various stages of their careers,” said Brown-Nagin, also a professor of history at the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. “Pulitzer Prize recipients and National Book Award winners work alongside promising artists and scholars in the early stages of the careers. Filmmakers, visual artists, musicians, and novelists exchange ideas with historians, biologists, physicists, social scientists, physicians, lawyers and more.”

Panelists agreed that the only way to push the boundaries of what we know is by asking new questions or finding fresh ways of looking old ones.

“Every book that I write, every article begins with a question, and I try to answer it using all the bibliographies, but also the methods that are at my disposal,” said Imani Perry, Carol K. Pforzheimer Professor at Harvard Radcliffe Institute and Henry A. Morss Jr. and Elisabeth W. Morss Professor of Studies of Women, Gender and Sexuality and of African and African American Studies.

Novelist Kaitlyn Greenidge RI ’19, author of the novels “Libertie” and “We Love You, Charlie Freeman,” agreed. During her Radcliffe year, Greenidge faced many questions while working on “Libertie,” her second historical novel.

“With an artistic project, oftentimes the point is that you’re asking a question that doesn’t have an answer or that could have multiple answers at once,” she said.

For Sharon Weinberger RI ’16, national security and foreign policy editor at the Wall Street Journal, the hardest part is to come up with the initial question but also decide whether it is important enough to pursue.

“First of all, it may not be answerable,” she said. “And if you could answer it, maybe it’s not that important. And that’s where I think the interdisciplinary part is helpful. Having colleagues who say, ‘Is that an interesting question?’ ‘Would you want to know the answer?’’’

Computer scientist Francine Berman RI ’20, faculty associate at Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, said being surrounded by fellows from different disciplines allowed her to examine the social and environmental impacts of technology on people’s daily lives and the ways in which technology could be used to further the common good.

“Radcliffe is a great place to ask big questions,” said Berman. “For me, the big questions really have to do with how we thrive in a technological world and what strategies we can use to reduce the risk of the technologies we deal with every day, and that certainly includes AI, and to promote the benefits.”

Messud quoted the novelist Vladimir Nabokov (“A writer should have the precision of a poet and the imagination of a scientist”) in asking panelists to talk about the role of imagination in their intellectual ventures.

Clarissa Tossin RI ’18, interdisciplinary artist, said imagination is central to her art.

“Imagination, for me, is everything,” said Tossin. “I do research to do my work, but then I have to do that extra leap, which is where the imagination enters to guide me where I can go because it’s not just a scientific or scholarly inquiry.”

For writers, imagination helps create stories, characters and entire worlds, they said. And scholars said they benefit from learning storytelling techniques to make their writing more vivid and reach a broader audience.

As an interdisciplinary scholar, Perry said imagination works in both scholarship and nonfiction. Scholars might be constrained by the facts, she said, but imagination intervenes to help put all the facts together to tell a story that would resonate with readers and to envision possible futures.

“It’s the work of the imagination,” said Perry, “but the undercurrent of all the work is getting closer to a just and good world. And that absolutely requires the imagination, to get us toward something that we have not yet fully seen.”

In April, President Alan Garber and Provost John Manning announced a faculty working group to examine how community members experience Harvard classrooms and the broader campus environment and to make recommendations on how the University can most effectively nurture and reinforce a culture of open inquiry, constructive dialogue, and the free exchange of ideas.

The Open Inquiry and Constructive Dialogue Working Group, which released its report on Tuesday, was initiated to address concerns that members of the community feel constrained in their ability to share their views, with some students, faculty, and staff members expressing hesitancy to discuss controversial issues out of concerns about peer judgment, social media criticism, professional or reputational damage, and the potential for complaints about bullying and harassment. The working group conducted surveys and held extensive listening sessions across Harvard’s campuses and found that among students, 55 percent of respondents said they are comfortable engaging in discussions of controversial issues inside the classroom, with 45 percent indicating that they are reluctant to share their views about such topics.

Among Harvard faculty members and instructors, 59 percent of survey respondents reported that they are comfortable pursuing research on a controversial topic; 49 percent reported that they are comfortable leading a classroom discussion about controversial issues; and 32 percent reported that they are comfortable discussing such issues outside of class. The working group underscored that, while these findings are not unique to Harvard, the reluctance of community members to discuss controversial topics demands attention. The report thus highlights activities and pedagogical best practices already in place across the University and makes recommendations to nurture open inquiry across its campuses.

The Gazette discussed the report with the co-chairs of the working group: Tomiko Brown-Nagin, dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the Daniel P.S. Paul Professor of Constitutional Law, and professor of history; and Professor of Government Eric Beerbohm, faculty dean of Quincy House.

The working group faced what seems a difficult task, assessing an emerging cultural problem at odds with strongly held beliefs about the nature of the educational experience at Harvard. How did you tackle this issue?

Brown-Nagin: We engaged a broad cross-section of the Harvard community over a period of several months. As co-chairs, we met with faculty representatives of every Harvard School. We conducted 23 listening sessions with more than 600 Harvard affiliates, including faculty, instructors, students, staff, and representatives of the Harvard Alumni Association. We also surveyed undergraduates, graduate, and professional school students from all of the Schools as well as faculty, instructors, and staff. I found the conversations with so many different members of our community fascinating. One could really appreciate the cultural differences and the wide variety of disciplines, backgrounds, and viewpoints that are represented across the Schools.

Were people eager to talk about this?

Beerbohm: Implementing Chatham House-style norms during our listening sessions really made a difference. It created a space where people felt safe to open up about their hesitations around discussing contested topics. Students, staff, and faculty shared their fears about being misunderstood or misrepresented, whether in class or outside it. One student said something that really stuck with me: “I want to speak freely, but I’m constantly worried that if I say the wrong thing, I’ll end up all over Sidechat or TikTok and be labeled forever.” That captures a key concern we highlighted in our report — many students are reluctant to share their views because they’re afraid of peer judgment and social media backlash. But what’s encouraging is that our discussions often pointed toward solutions. Many participants expressed a hunger for tools to help them disagree more constructively.

Did anything surprise you in these conversations?

Brown-Nagin: We often think of Harvard in terms of the whole instead of the parts, and this was an assignment that brought to the fore both the whole and the parts. In speaking to the different groups across the University, I was impressed by the hunger for engagement about the issues at hand, the unified commitment to excellence in teaching and learning, and support across the University for learning communities in which everyone can thrive. Students, faculty, instructors all want the tools and the policies in place that will enable the kind of intellectually engaging community that people arrive on this campus to pursue.

Coming from the Law School, where we teach about an adversarial system, there’s comfort with disagreement and an expectation that arguments can be made in support of many different positions. The same is true for my understanding of the history profession, which also involves the interpretation of evidence. So, one thing I did find surprising was the extent to which some across campus do not necessarily welcome debate and disagreement. To me, they’re a big part of the point of higher education. Becoming a professional in any field should mean learning how to be persuasive, how to marshal evidence in support of an argument, how to reason.

What did the committee find through its work?

Brown-Nagin: A majority of Harvard students — including 55 percent of survey respondents — reported that they are comfortable engaging in discussions of controversial issues in the classroom. However, other students, including 45 percent of survey respondents, reported that they are reluctant — some very reluctant — to share their views about charged topics. We also identified key drivers of this reluctance to talk about controversial issues. The first is concern about peer judgment. Harvard students respect one another. They respect one another’s talents and positions, and they’re very concerned about what others think about them. There is reluctance because of worries about criticism on social media. There is unease about potential reputational damage from speaking out. We also noted some concern about potential bullying and harassment complaints being made against them as a result of comments in class. The other thing we found is that this reluctance is not confined to students. There are many faculty and instructors who also expressed a reluctance to teach about controversial topics. I should note that this concern is greatest — as one might expect — among untenured faculty or non-ladder instructors.

It is critically important to appreciate that the reluctance to speak about controversial issues is hardly unique to Harvard or to the higher education sector, generally. It is a widespread problem across American society and institutions. However, given our mission of excellence through the pursuit of truth and the creation and dissemination of knowledge across generations, the difficulty in speaking openly and respectfully is especially harmful in higher education.

Beerbohm: It’s a significant challenge and not unique to Harvard, but I think Harvard is uniquely placed — with our full immersion system of undergraduate life, in particular — to tackle it. I think we can learn a lot and share a lot with broader higher education.

Are there substantial best practices already in place that might lead us toward a community-wide answer to this challenge?

Brown-Nagin: Absolutely, there are people all over our campuses who are already engaged in doing the work of promoting constructive disagreement. But we still have work to do. The point of the report’s appendix is to showcase some of the models and resources that are already available and suggest to readers that although we are reporting on challenges, we also have tools available to move toward remedies.

Beerbohm: Our findings show that Harvard is already home to a wide range of best practices that, if expanded and systematized, could foster a more robust culture of open inquiry. Many of our faculty are employing innovative classroom techniques designed to foster constructive disagreement. This involves creating spaces for respectful, good-faith dialogues where participants are genuinely curious about each other’s perspectives. One promising practice is the use of anonymous polling at the start of discussions, which allows students to see the diversity of views within the room and feel more comfortable sharing their own perspectives. In my own teaching, I’ve started to use large-language models to identify and engage students who hold outlier views. I’ve found that hearing these students’ voices, in particular, can expand the space for ideas and arguments.

A cross-section of our courses already focus on the skill of constructive disagreement, and this is something we could expand across the University. Take Michael Sandel’s course, “Justice: Ethical Reasoning in Polarized Times.” It engages about 700 students in some of the most contested issues of our time. What’s great is that some sections meet in the Houses, with follow-up discussions in our dining halls. This creates a spillover effect — a kind of co-curriculum that engages with students who aren’t enrolled in the course.

We envision the Bok Center for Teaching, the Harvard Initiative for Teaching and Learning, and the Edmond and Lily Safra Center for Ethics developing required teaching modules that, early on, foster the intellectual virtues necessary for productive discourse — qualities like humility, fairness, and curiosity. We can also reward faculty who excel at navigating difficult discussions and share successful practices across Harvard’s different Schools. Our professional Schools have some of the leading experts in facilitation and negotiation, and we hope to tap into their expertise as we build community-wide solutions. The real challenge is creating consistency so that these modules aren’t just one-off experiences but become a defining part of our students’ time here.

Let’s talk about the recommendations. Is there a particular thread that ties them all together?

Brown-Nagin: What we are suggesting through the recommendations is that there is an imperative for the University and the Schools to take steps to ensure that everyone is aware of what is expected of us. We have to broadly appreciate lively classroom interactions, disagreement, a spectrum of viewpoints in order for us to move toward a realization of our goals of open inquiry and constructive disagreement. We have to agree that rigor, debate, and disagreement are elements of an excellent education. Another overarching theme in the recommendations is that the capacity to engage in challenging conversations can be taught and learned. These are challenges on which we can make progress. There are many different Schools that are committed already to making progress and my hope is that the report can galvanize greater commitment to the goals of the working group and to the tools necessary to achieve them.

Beerbohm: We’re recommending what you might call a “full stack” solution — one that doesn’t stop at orientation but runs throughout a student’s entire experience at Harvard. This means cultivating these skills from the moment students set foot on campus and reinforcing them through every aspect of University life — from the Yard and the Houses to student organizations, and of course, within the classroom itself.

Our report emphasizes that this culture of empathetic curiosity has to be immersive. It’s not just about isolated events or courses; it’s about embedding the norms of open inquiry across curricular, co-curricular, and extracurricular spaces. This includes creating environments where students and faculty alike are encouraged to engage with views they profoundly disagree with. We stress the importance of modeling these practices ourselves. That means faculty demonstrating what my colleague Ned Hall calls “collaborative disagreement”—bringing students and alumni into these discussions, and creating spaces where diverse perspectives can be explored without fears of conversations going viral on social-media platforms. The goal is to make these ideals — of open-mindedness and big-heartedness — central to our students’ experience.

The report makes several recommendations. Are there ones that you think particularly important?

Brown-Nagin: I would cite the recommendations about confidentiality of classroom discussions and responsible social media usage as absolutely key to making progress on some of the challenges that we identified. So many different people expressed concerns that statements made in class might be disseminated in ways that could be harmful to the speaker’s reputation; that fear is obviously detrimental to open inquiry and constructive dialogue. Several of our Schools have mandated the Chatham House Rule of non-attribution of classroom statements that we cite in the appendix and that we hope will be more widely adopted to mitigate fears about communicating in class and to build trust in the classroom. The reluctance to freely communicate inside and even outside of class is strongly related to concerns about reputational damage from social media postings. There is a widespread concern about being attacked on social media and it, too, is highly detrimental to open inquiry and constructive dialogue. Fortunately, there are many people on campus who are well acquainted with these and who can help us find ways to both promote responsible usage and ensure the freedom of expression absolutely also vital to achieving our goals.

Beerbohm: There’s a kind of collective action problem when it comes to open inquiry. Members of our community seek challenging dialogue but many report hesitation in initiating it. As faculty, we can play a crucial role in breaking this stalemate. Through case studies, simulations, role-playing, in-class games, and debate, we can signal our commitment to creating a learning environment where students feel safe to disagree — with each other and with us. It’s important to set clear classroom norms that encourage critical thinking and respectful debate, making it explicit that diverse perspectives are not only welcomed but are essential for intellectual growth. This isn’t virtue signaling but a deliberate effort to reshape classroom norms to foster trust and openness, giving our students the permission to stick their necks out and experiment with ideas and arguments. One student shared with us, “I sometimes feel there’s an invisible script in class that I’m expected to follow, and if I deviate from it, the atmosphere goes cold.” Our challenge is to counteract this by demonstrating that there is no script — that the most valuable contributions come from genuine engagement and independent thought, not from echoing presumed viewpoints.

Is that moment when the classroom goes cold also the moment when the faculty member should step in and open up the conversation? Is there an element of faculty skill-building needed here?

Beerbohm: Absolutely. When the classroom atmosphere goes cold — when we sense that students are starting to bite their tongues — it’s a signal that we need to create structures that allow the conversation to reopen. This might mean assigning roles for students, running a simulation where each student knows they are advocating for a position, even if they disagree with it. The ability to argue a point you personally don’t hold is a cardinal take-home skill, not just in law school but across disciplines. It’s Socratic at its core. We’re also envisioning faculty workshops where we can share best practices, techniques that have been successful in keeping classroom discourse open and constructive. This doesn’t mean a one-size-fits-all approach, but it is our pedagogical responsibility to establish this ethos early in our syllabi and in the first weeks of class. The norms of how we respond to and harness disagreement need to be clear and practiced from the start. Our report highlights the need for a carefully worked-out pedagogy around disagreement, and this is where skill-building among faculty and graduate students can make a real difference.

How does norm-setting happen?

Beerbohm: We take a pluralistic approach to norm-setting. Some of our colleagues co-create a compact with their students on the first day of class, defining how discussions should unfold in ways that are both rigorous and respectful. Others provide a set of guidelines for dialogue and invite students to discuss and refine them. There are also faculty who don’t formally set out rules but instead model the behavior from the outset, allowing students to observe and internalize these norms through experience. We were careful not to prescribe one particular method in our report. Each of these methods — whether co-creation, guided discussion, or modeling — can be effective, depending on the instructor’s style and the classroom dynamic. The key is to ensure that students — through a pedagogy inside and outside the classroom — embrace norms of constructive dialogue grounded in empathy and curiosity.

How will mastering this ability to have conversations across differences help students when they leave campus?

Brown-Nagin: In addition to pursuing truth and creating knowledge, the University and certainly the College explicitly aspire to educate leaders who can contribute to broader society. And our view is that learning to thrive on a campus that includes many identities, experiences, and viewpoints is excellent preparation for living in a democratic society committed to pluralism and opportunity for all.

How does your work intersect with the Presidential Task Forces on Combating Antisemitism and Anti-Israeli Bias, and on Combating Anti-Muslim, Anti-Arab, and Anti-Palestinian Bias?

Brown-Nagin: I think our community is eager to imagine how open inquiry could move us toward a better way of talking about the kinds of issues that are being tackled by those task forces. Few of us have been unmoved by the events of the past year. In our listening sessions, we heard from a wide range of students about experiences inside and outside the classroom that touch on the charges of those task forces. Some of the most gripping stories came from Israeli and Jewish students whose attempts to engage in dialogue were rejected by other students, who have disavowed talking to Zionists on the assumption — mistaken in many cases — that all of those students agree with whatever premises are being ascribed to Zionism. We also heard from Arab, Muslim, and Palestinian students who had been called “terrorists” on the assumption that anyone who cares about or stands up for the rights of the Palestinian people supports terrorism. Some reported that criticisms of Israeli government policy were wrongly conflated with a challenge to the right of Israel to exist.

So there very much is an intersection between the goals of open inquiry and constructive dialogue and the imperatives of those task forces. These are very complicated, painful issues. But if we are to live up to our expectations, our aspirations to open inquiry and constructive dialogue, we have to be able to engage across those differences. Open inquiry is for everyone, for all backgrounds and identities, and I hope that this work can be a part of an effort to create opportunities and spaces for community members to connect across those particular boundaries.

Beerbohm: I’d like to add that our report aligns with the important work of our sibling Working Group on Institutional Voice. That report raises concerns about how, when University leaders speak on certain issues, they might inadvertently pre-empt individual speech and, in some cases, hinder open inquiry. The fear is that official statements can close off debate by signaling an institutional stance that may discourage the diverse and rigorous exchanges essential to the pursuit of truth.

Our report offers a vision for how a university that speaks less as a collective entity can foster a vibrant dialogue among its members. We emphasize our responsibility is to create an environment where differences are not only tolerated but welcomed. The goal isn’t to prescribe viewpoints but to support a culture where people are encouraged to engage with the sources of each other’s disagreements and, through that engagement, uncover new insights. Taken together, the reports present a unified vision: a commitment to open, rigorous dialogue. It’s a vision in which intellectual diversity is embraced as part of the search for truth — which is what unites us as a community.

Three Harvard presidents and two Nobel laureates gathered with Dean Tomiko Brown-Nagin last Thursday to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the founding of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.

During the celebration, Brown-Nagin reflected on the institute’s “unique legacy and remarkable impact” and noted the many important contributions made by Radcliffe pioneers, including Mary Ingraham Bunting, a microbiologist and the college’s fifth dean, which ultimately led to the institute’s founding and success.

“Bunting was one of the main trailblazers. She was also acknowledging the many women who were educated at Radcliffe as students who went on to become leaders in many different fields, along with prior administrators going back to Radcliffe College who, in their own way, pushed/supported the idea of what eventually became the institute as we know it in 1999,” she said. 

Brown-Nagin also announced the launch of a new three-year initiative on academic freedom and a project by Schlesinger Library to digitize its substantial collection of archival material from Radcliffe College’s own 120-year history.

The Radcliffe Institute was established in 1999 following Radcliffe College’s formal merger with Harvard.

At its heart is the fellowship program, which promotes interdisciplinary exposure for participants, with a particular focus on lending a hand to female scholars, who, for years, were very much in the minority in their departments and institutions and at a distinct disadvantage when it came to financial and professional support.

“The goal was twofold: to encourage and catalyze women’s scholarly and creative work and to discover the conditions that best supported women’s endeavors in the face of persistent societal barriers,” Brown-Nagin said.

During the celebration, Harvard President Alan M. Garber spoke with distinguished economists Claudia Goldin and Oliver Hart about their careers, the interdisciplinary nature of their work, and how today’s technology might have reshaped their prior research.

They were each awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, Goldin in 2023 and Hart in 2016.

Both laureates spent a year as Radcliffe fellows and recalled being challenged and inspired by their experience engaging with other fellows whose expertise was outside of economics — arts and humanities, hard sciences, and the law — and how they were able to use the fellowship’s time and resources to pursue research that informed their later work.

Goldin, a labor economist who is currently researching the many giant steps women have taken economically over the last several decades and “why women won,” talked about how she was able to collaborate with former fellow Claudia Olivetti, a young economist who became a valued colleague, co-author and, eventually, her best friend for the last 18 years.

“It was truly magical,” said Goldin, a 2005-06 fellow, of her time at Radcliffe.

Hart, an economic theorist and a 2020-21 fellow, said he’s most excited about what he’s working on now, research that builds on his earlier scholarship by forging an alternative approach to the traditional way legal contracts are constructed. “I think it may be, in the long run, my most significant,” he said.

Garber, an economist and physician, was appointed provost in 2011 by the then-President Drew Gilpin Faust, before stepping in earlier this year to serve as interim and now president. He recognized Brown-Nagin for her deep involvement in key University initiatives in recent years.

As a legal scholar and historian, she chaired the group that produced the Harvard Legacy of Slavery report in 2022, which made recommendations to the University about redressing harms that occurred during its 400-year history.

Brown-Nagin currently co-heads a University working group on fostering “open inquiry and constructive dialogue” that Garber said would soon issue its own report.

Gilpin Faust, president emerita of Harvard and the institute’s founding dean, presented a Radcliffe medal to Neil L. Rudenstine, the University’s president from 1991 to 2001, in recognition of his leading role in reimagining the former women’s college into a robust center of independent and interdisciplinary scholarship at Harvard.

Accepting this rare award, Rudenstine recalled the daunting challenge before them in those early days and the worry “whether we could possibly live up to the idea of a truly distinguished Advanced Institute worthy of both Radcliffe and Harvard” that would flourish like Radcliffe College had over the previous century.

Today, “the institute embodies, in my mind, exactly what we hoped it would do,” which was to sustain and embolden intellectual achievement and imagination, said Rudenstine.

“It’s done so much to bring Harvard as well as Radcliffe to the fore in ways we never could have imagined 25 years ago.”