Suzanne Glassburn has been appointed vice president and secretary of the University, President Alan Garber announced Thursday. 

“A deeply experienced and widely respected senior university administrator, Suzanne is an individual of exceptional demeanor, diplomacy, and intellect,” Garber said. “Her leadership of the Office of the Governing Boards will advance and strengthen the critical work of both the Corporation and the Board of Overseers at a moment of great consequence for Harvard and for higher education.” 

Prior to her appointment at Harvard, Glassburn spent 15 years at MIT, most recently as vice president and secretary of the Corporation, and previously as counsel in MIT’s Office of the General Counsel. Before her move to higher education, Glassburn was a partner at the Boston law firm Nutter, McClennen & Fish, LLP.  

“I am deeply grateful to President Garber for the opportunity to serve an institution with such an incredible history of strong governance and respected leadership,” said Glassburn. “I look forward to joining a team committed to maintaining, upholding, and strengthening this essential partnership between administration and governance.” 

As vice president and secretary of the University, Glassburn will serve as chief administrative officer of the governing boards, which are comprised of the Corporation and the Board of Overseers. As leader of the Office of the Governing Boards, she will set the priorities and vision for the office, which is responsible for supporting and offering guidance to the boards. 

“It is a privilege to work with the dedicated individuals who serve on the Corporation and the Board of Overseers,” said Glassburn. “I look forward to providing guidance and counsel in support of their efforts to steer this venerable institution toward a future in which it continues to make profound and meaningful contributions to society.” 

As secretary of the Corporation at MIT, Glassburn coordinated the activities and operations of a large governance body, as well as its standing and visiting committees. Her work included advising on governance issues, serving as liaison between MIT’s senior administration and governing board members, and overseeing the Office of the Corporation.

As vice president, Glassburn was a senior adviser and chief of staff to MIT’s president and a member of the senior team, which included the president’s direct reports. She also oversaw the Office of the President, federal relations, institute events, and the ombuds office. 

Her work in the MIT Office of the General Counsel focused on academic and research collaborations, other contracts, governance, and policy. Notably, Glassburn collaborated with colleagues in Harvard’s Office of the General Counsel to structure and establish edX, Inc., a nonprofit online learning and Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) provider.  

At Nutter, McClennen & Fish, Glassburn represented public bodies and private businesses in a variety of industries, as well as nonprofits, and served in a number of leadership and administrative roles within the firm. Her practice areas included mergers and acquisitions, trademarks, intellectual-property licensing, and securities. 

Glassburn will succeed Marc Goodheart, who announced plans in September to conclude his service as vice president and secretary of the University. Goodheart, who held the position for nearly three decades, will become senior adviser to the president and other University leaders while working to ensure a seamless transition in the Office of the Governing Boards. 

“We are fortunate that Marc will continue to serve the University with his customary insight and wisdom as Suzanne steps into her new role.” said Garber.

Glassburn is a graduate of University of Pennsylvania Law School and received her undergraduate degree in English from Vanderbilt University.  

Helping mothers protect their bodies during childbirth, reimagining how hydrogen can be transported safely and affordably, and leveraging AI and robotics to transform the thousands-year-old process of hair braiding are a few of the 2025 Harvard President’s Innovation Challenge’s extraordinary winning ventures.

“At a time when so much is uncertain, the possibility of redefining what’s possible is not only a springboard to your own achievements, but also a gift to our community, our nation and our world,” said President Alan Garber. “Your willingness to pursue ideas, to take risks and to carve new paths to excellence reminds us all of the power of knowledge, and the importance and necessity of places like Harvard.”

The President’s Innovation Challenge is an annual competition for Harvard students and select alumni and affiliates pursuing ventures that are redefining what’s possible in their fields. During the Wednesday awards ceremony at Klarman Hall, President’s Innovation Challenge finalists pitched their ventures to a global audience of more than 2,000 in-person and virtual attendees. Winners received a share of $517,000 in non-dilutive funding, made possible by a gift from the Bertarelli Foundation, co-founded by Ernesto Bertarelli, M.B.A. ’93.

“Each year, the Harvard President’s Innovation Challenge showcases the incredible creativity and impressive drive of students from across the University,” said Bertarelli. “It’s been an immense honor to support these founders at the earliest stages of their ventures and see how they go on to make a positive impact to society.”

$75,000 award recipients

Gurus Inc. (Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health): Providing vulnerable populations with housing, education, mentorship, and support services.

Halo Braid (Harvard Business School, Harvard College, Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences): Building an AI-powered robotic hair braider that reduces braiding time from hours to minutes, empowering hair stylists to double their business.

PeriPeach (Harvard Medical School): Designing a medical device to prevent severe tears from childbirth.

Regatta Bio (Harvard Medical School): Developing cellular therapies to restore immune tolerance and prevent immune system-related diseases.

The Paal (Harvard Kennedy School): Improving financial outcomes for smallholder livestock farmers in India.

“Advocacy and awareness has always been a central part of PeriPeach, and I want to thank everybody here today,” said Tess Kim, founder of PeriPeach, after receiving the $75,000 prize. “This is for all the women who had to suffer with severe tears and for all the women who won’t have to.”

$25,000 award recipients

Adaptive Reader (Harvard College): Reimagining books so that every learner is able to engage with rigorous content, using AI to personalize languages and reading levels.

Brain Exercise Initiative (Harvard Law School): Preventing memory loss with cognitively stimulating exercises.

HydroHaul (Harvard Business School): Building a safer, more reliable, and cheaper solution for transporting hydrogen using a proxy carrier molecule.  

Modulate Bio (Harvard Business School): Developing therapies to treat neurological disorders, including Essential Tremor, epilepsy, and anxiety.

Radiate Biosciences (Harvard Medical School): Creating a new colorectal cancer screening method with a blood test that delivers colonoscopy-level performance.

Ingenuity award winners

AIRQUA (Harvard Graduate School of Design, Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences): Transforming flood relief with air-generated water technology, delivering clean, safe water to families in urgent need during crises.

Pythia Diagnostics (Harvard College, Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences): Making a wearable device that predicts epileptic seizures by analyzing skin-released chemicals.

SAMI+ (Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health): Equipping health workers in the Democratic Republic of the Congo with AI-powered handheld ultrasounds, enhancing prenatal care.

SpiroSniff (Harvard College, Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences): Creating an affordable breathalyzer to detect lung cancer early, using sensors and AI for rapid, non-invasive, accessible screening.

Wyndergy (Harvard Extension School): Harnessing wind power to increase range for electric vehicles and eliminate range anxiety.

“Today is one of our favorite days of the year,” said Becca Xiong, managing director of programs and engagement at the Harvard Innovation Labs. “We get to celebrate bold ideas, real-world impact, and the remarkable people behind both. It takes vision, courage, and a lot of hard work to reach this stage — and even more to bring that vision to life.”

To learn more about the President’s Innovation Challenge finalists and winners, and watch a recording of the May 7 awards ceremony, visit the Harvard Innovation Labs website.

Six years ago, Sahil Chinoy was a new hire at The New York Times, working at the intersection of journalism and data analysis. At 23, he was a graphics editor at the paper of record.

Crunching numbers, making charts, and speaking week by week to experts about party ideology, police brutality, or facial recognition: It was a dream job for a curious person.

And it wasn’t enough. “I’d want to read the underlying paper,” Chinoy said. “You’re reading this research on the way home, on the subway, and feeling like, ‘I just don’t have the energy to really understand this — I’d have to do this full time.’”

In retrospect it’s clear to Chinoy how he was borne along — and repeatedly redirected — by his particular curiosity: about systems, abstractions, how things work.

He came to UC Berkeley in 2013 as an aspiring aeronautical engineer, but the shine quickly wore off. “When I went to my first class, all the other kids were super excited to get into the machine shop,” he laughed. “And I was like, ‘Oh, no: The part of this that I like is thinking about building things.’”

So engineering gave way to physics, and physics was in turn displaced by economics. After his year at the Times, he joined Harvard’s Economics Department as a doctoral candidate. He’s set to graduate from the Harvard Griffin Graduate School of Arts and Sciences later this month.

In papers for the National Bureau of Economic Research, he and his co-authors have studied big datasets in search of the sociopolitical patterns that structure American life, such as the influence of “zero-sum” thinking on American policy preferences and how military service in World War I drove Black veterans into the NAACP.

Along the way Chinoy may have benefited from the winding route he took to Harvard, drawing on advanced math, an interest in American politics, and the journalistic instinct for the timely investigation.

Chinoy’s distinctive approach has won him admirers among faculty collaborators and mentors.

Stefanie Stantcheva, his main adviser, is herself a rising star; she was awarded the John Bates Clark Medal for the top American economists under 40 just last month.

In written remarks, Stantcheva said it’s been “such a joy working with Sahil. He is super curious about new issues, but then also engages with them on a deep level.”

Vincent Pons of the Business School praised the “curiosity and ambition” Chinoy brought to their paper on neighborhood roots and political affiliation.

“Sometimes there are very big questions that you’re interested in, but it’s very unclear how you might study those questions,” Pons said. “Sahil is someone who — once he has a big question he’s after — he’ll find the data, and find the strategy, that is required to provide a convincing answer.”

For Chinoy’s latest job-market paper, which found “substantial segregation” on the basis of ideology in American workplaces, that meant yoking together two enormous digital databases — voter rolls and the networking site LinkedIn. The work created a political-economic window on more than 34 million Americans, likely the largest such dataset ever compiled.

He and co-author Martin Koenen found that not only are there conservative- and liberal-aligned firms, but voters will measurably forgo some pay to work at a firm that reflects their values — or to avoid joining one that doesn’t.

Chinoy acknowledges that the interdependence of work and politics prompted decades of economic scrutiny before he ever came to Harvard. “A lot of what I am doing is I think addressing some of these long-standing questions with really modern econometric tools and with big data.”

Three papers later, the work has helped him to a nuanced view of personal politics at work.

“In this research, I kind of seesaw between thinking that politics is now this defining form of identity, that for a lot of people shapes all kinds of decisions,” Chinoy said. “On the other hand, the labor market is also about people who want a paycheck, who want to put food on the table. And when a job pays less than another job — even if it’s more politically aligned with your views — that matters, too.”

For now, that’s the big question preoccupying Chinoy: what he calls “the interplay between political identity and political behavior and some of these economic forces,” like the labor market, immigration patterns, and racial coalitions.

And that interest has prompted one more evolution in Chinoy’s professional career. Trained as an economist, he’ll join the political science department at Stanford in 2026.

In the meantime, he has a postdoctoral appointment at Yale’s Program on Ethics, Politics and Economics, which will keep him in Cambridge for one more year with his partner, a public defender.

But first comes Commencement, which the Chinoys — his parents, his brother, and a couple of cousins — will attend ahead of a celebratory weekend trip to the Berkshires.

Asked if he can share any lessons for our polarized political moment, Chinoy remains — characteristically — in the interrogative mood.

“We started getting really good public opinion data in the mid-20th century, around the 1950s. And so we chart the rise of polarization from what might have been a particularly peaceful time in American politics, or at least, where there was less open conflict between different factions. Perhaps that was the anomaly.”

Sometimes an important discovery springs from a fishing expedition. In Joel Habener’s case, it was an actual one.

More than three decades after the discovery of GLP-1, the hormone has transformed the treatment of obesity, diabetes, and cardiometabolic disorders that affect more than a billion people worldwide. Habener, Svetlana Mojsov, Daniel Drucker, and Jens Juul Holst — scientists who played a crucial role in the hormone’s discovery and characterization — have received some of the biggest awards in science.

But more than three decades ago, when Habener, Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School investigator emeritus, set up an experiment that helped lead to the discovery, this outcome was far from clear.

“It’s just been one surprise after the next,” Habener said. “It’s amazing to me.”

Back in the late 1970s, Habener’s goal was to identify possible prohormones — precursors of hormones — for the pancreatic hormones glucagon, which raises blood sugar, and somatostatin, which inhibits both insulin and glucagon.

He and MGH investigators P. Kay Lund and Richard H. Goodman decided to use recombinant DNA gene cloning to isolate these prohormones from the pancreases of rats, but they ran into a problem. The National Institutes of Health, which helped fund this fundamental research, had declared a moratorium on recombinant DNA research in warm-blooded animals as scientists evaluated ethical and safety concerns of the new technology.

“The solution to the problem,” Habener said, “required a fishing expedition.”

A member of his lab knew a commercial fisherman who had provided research specimens for other scientists. The anglerfish was raised as a possibility “because the anglerfish is a trash fish,” Habener said. “We throw them back. And they’re big, and they’re ugly.”

 It was also cold-blooded and therefore exempt from the NIH moratorium.

The anglerfish turned out to be a boon for Habener’s research. While endocrine and exocrine tissues exist together in a rat’s pancreas, the two types of tissue are separated in anglerfish — with endocrine cells in a marble-sized organ called the Brockmann body. The separation made isolating the mRNA, and the peptide hormones and their precursors, easier.

After extracting mRNA from the Brockmann bodies, Habener and his team were surprised to find that glucagon and somatostatin were embedded in larger proteins that later cleaved into their active forms.

“The eureka moment,” as Habener puts it, was when they discovered that in the larger precursor protein proglucagon, there was a signal peptide, an intervening peptide, a peptide that was homologous to mammalian glucagon, and then a second GLP-related peptide later revealed to be GLP-1.

It took many more fundamental breakthroughs before this discovery could translate into therapeutic use. Mojsov, now a research associate professor at Rockefeller University and then a member of MGH’s endocrine unit, identified the biologically active form of GLP-1, known as GLP-1(7-37).

Holst, a University of Copenhagen professor, discovered that GLP-1 acts as an incretin hormone, stimulating insulin secretion in response to food.

Drucker, a clinician scientist at Sinai Health’s Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute — and a former member of Habener’s MGH research group — uncovered more of GLP-1’s physiological actions and helped translate GLP-1’s therapeutic benefits to drugs.

The impact of GLP-1 drugs might seem like a given today, but Habener knows that some of the federally funded developments that led there were far from preordained.

“I think the word is serendipity,” he said. The unique pancreas of an ugly fish helped accelerate a revolution in modern medicine.

Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo says the U.S. appears to be pulling back from its leadership role on the world stage and warns there is no other nation that can step in as the champion of global democracy if America walks away.

Pompeo, J.D. ’94, sat down on Monday for a closed-door talk at Harvard Kennedy School about his time as the nation’s top diplomat and spoke candidly about his efforts with Israel and the Middle East, Iran, China, and his views on Russia’s war with Ukraine.

The event was part of the American Secretaries of State Project, a collaboration between the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School and the Belfer Center’s Future of Diplomacy Project at HKS. Over the years, past secretaries including James A. Baker III, Henry Kissinger, Madeline Albright, Condoleezza Rice, and Hillary Clinton have come to these sessions to share insights into some of their greatest diplomatic challenges.

In the wide-ranging discussion, Pompeo detailed the negotiations behind the 2020 Abraham Accords, a series of agreements normalizing relations between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco, and Sudan.

He said there were three essential components to getting these deals done: first, demonstrate the U.S.’ unwavering support for Israel; second, make clear Iran is a bad actor in global politics and the central impediment to improved Mideast relations; and lastly, convince the Arab Gulf nations that the U.S. would not throw them under the bus if things fell apart.

Pompeo also defended his close relationship with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman even after a CIA assessment found he was behind the 2018 murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi. Pompeo, who Monday called the killing “horrific,” said he felt it was important to U.S. long-term strategic interests to remain close with Saudi Arabia.

Asked about the Israel-Palestinian conflict, Pompeo, now at the Hudson Institute, a Washington, D.C., think tank, said it’s “very unlikely” there will be a two-state solution in the near or medium term.

While in Congress, Pompeo had been a vocal critic of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal negotiated by Secretary of State John Kerry, believing it gave Iran too much leeway to enrich uranium, a necessary step in the production of a nuclear weapon. Less than two weeks after he became secretary of state, the U.S. withdrew from the deal.

Even now, with Iran’s power diminished from a decade ago, it’s “an absolute imperative” that the U.S. stand firm on its policy of “no enrichment” because there’s no way to ever be absolutely certain Iran wasn’t doing so secretly. “If they can cheat, they will,” said Pompeo.

“As good as our intelligence agencies are, as wonderful as our collection is, [Iran is] a big country, and they have demonstrated their ability to foil our efforts to actually know what’s going on,” he said, adding, “If the Iranians get any closer than they are, you’ll have proliferation in the region.”

Pompeo was joined in the discussion by Ambassador Nicholas Burns, Roy and Barbara Goodman Family Professor of the Practice of Diplomacy and International Relations at HKS; Robert Mnookin, Williston Professor of Law, Emeritus, at HLS; Meghan L. O’Sullivan, director of the Belfer Center and Jeane Kirkpatrick Professor of the Practice of International Affairs at HKS; and James Sebenius, Gordon Donaldson Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School.

Before becoming secretary of state, Pompeo served as CIA director from 2017‒2018. While a supporter of the agency, he believes it remains too focused on Middle Eastern counterterrorism after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

One of the CIA’s lingering “shortcomings,” he said, is that it does not spend enough time on economic intelligence, which puts the U.S. at a great competitive disadvantage with China given that President Xi Jinping “has been at war with the United States for 40 years — economically.”

He called standing by as China moved to weaken democracy in Hong Kong following the 2019‒2020 protests “one of my great failures” as secretary.

In regard to Russia, Pompeo said he has not been surprised by the actions of Vladimir Putin. It makes sense that the Russian president remains fixated on Ukraine and righting what he perceives as a historic wrong done to Russia as he continues to “chip away” at Europe’s borders.

“It’s intrinsic to who he is,” Pompeo said, which is why “we should never give an inch of Europe to him, and I regret that it appears that we’re headed that way.”

Pompeo rejected the notion that the U.S. can’t afford to help countries like Ukraine and should cut back its defense of democratic values around the world.

“That’s what saddens me in my own political party, is that too many people who know better, who know how important this is,” have been unwilling to do the hard work and explain to the country “why it’s in America’s best interest to be the world’s leader, that the benefits far exceed the costs,” said Pompeo, who served in the U.S. Army before attending the Law School.

A more isolationist approach to foreign policy is the easier political argument to make to voters, but the U.S. will regret it in the coming decade if we fail in this moment to lead on the global stage, he said.

“If America doesn’t lead, the world is forlorn. There’s nobody. The Japanese can’t do it. The Australians can’t do it. The Indians won’t do it,” said Pompeo. “For good or for bad, it sits on our shoulders, and we should own that, and we should be happy to go lead in that way.”

Five faculty members have been awarded a Harvard College Professorship for excellence in undergraduate teaching, in fields ranging from high-dimensional geometry to comparative politics. Hopi Hoekstra, Edgerley Family Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, announced the recipients on May 6. They are:

• Denis Auroux, Herchel Smith Professor of Mathematics
• Christina Maranci, Mashtots Professor of Armenian Studies
• Michael Smith, John H. Finley Jr. Professor of Engineering and Applied Sciences
• Karen Thornber, Harry Tuchman Levin Professor in Literature and Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations
• Yuhua Wang, Ford Foundation Professor of Modern China Studies

“I am delighted to recognize these five outstanding colleagues for their contributions to teaching, mentorship, and research,” Hoekstra said. “Their passion, rigor, and creativity inspire our students every day, giving them the opportunity to ask big questions, explore new ideas, and grow as thinkers and scholars. I am grateful for their extraordinary commitment to our students and our educational mission.”

The Harvard College Professorship was launched in 1997 with a gift from John and Frances Loeb. Professors hold the title for five years and receive support for a research fund, summer salary, or semester of paid leave.

Illuminating ‘deep connections’ across math

Auroux is a pure mathematician who has spent his career studying ethereal domains such as high-dimensional geometry, in which some shapes are too abstract to be drawn on a blackboard. He finds much more tangible rewards when it comes to teaching.

“I am really happy when I feel that I’ve explained something to a student in a way that suddenly they get it,” Auroux said. “The process of seeing knowledge being acquired, I just love that.”

Auroux has taught at Harvard since 2018. Educated in France, he previously held positions at the Ecole Polytechnique, MIT, and Berkeley. Among his classes is the legendary “Math 55,” a fast-paced course for advanced first-year students.

He described his teaching style as classical — lectures, a “massive amount” of homework, and office hours — and he still prefers an old-fashioned chalkboard. He seeks to guide students toward a deeper understanding of mathematics from multiple perspectives, including algebra, geometry, and analysis. Over the course of the year, the class revisits the same facts from different branches of the discipline.

“There are deep connections that run across different areas of math,” he said. “It’s very beautiful when you get to illuminate that in a class.”

Auroux himself still seeks those deep connections. He studies the geometry of abstract spaces that are not encountered in everyday life, but are subjects of keen interest for mathematicians and theoretical physicists. His research interests include symplectic geometry, low-dimensional topology, and mirror symmetry.

“I’m still trying to understand the same questions I was trying to understand 10 years ago,” said Auroux. “I’m just changing what it means to understand. I have understood certain things, and now I realize there’s more I don’t understand. Maybe mathematicians are a bit obsessive about that.”

Putting images first to promote curiosity

Maranci, an art historian with a focus in pre-modern Armenia, likes to begin her classes with images — perhaps a 7th-century Armenian manuscript depicting the Annunciation, or photographs from fieldwork in Eastern Turkey — and let her students first experience the image, then learn to understand it.

“One of the wonderful things about working with art and visual culture is that you can really confront them with things before they know what they are, and they just look,” Maranci said. “Then you teach them to ask questions about what they’re looking at. For me, it’s a really helpful way of teaching and it also promotes curiosity.”

Maranci’s area of expertise falls at the intersection of art, architecture, and material culture of medieval Armenia. She teaches courses on all aspects of Armenian culture and history, from liturgical textiles to art and literature.

For Maranci, teaching is a “whole-body” experience. She doesn’t read from notes, choosing instead to walk around the room as she lectures, welcoming questions and drawing individual students into lively, public dialogue.

She vividly recalled her own undergraduate struggles — grappling with material that seemed easily understandable to her peers. That experience, she said, informs the way she teaches today.

“I really like to talk them through things,” Maranci said. “I’m putting myself in their shoes and I want to break things down in a way that makes everybody feel that they can learn this stuff. Even when it’s obscure 7th-century Armenian Church architecture, at bottom it’s all knowable, and that’s something I try to get across.”

Engaging, hands-on, with problems

For Smith, the surest route to learning is doing — engaging with real problems, solving technical challenges, and wrestling with ethical dilemmas.

“It’s one of my passions,” he said of teaching. “I especially enjoy working with our undergraduates. I try to make it as hands-on and engaging as possible and connect it to the issues that the students are thinking about at the current time.”

Smith has spent decades thinking about education. He began teaching at Harvard in 1992 and spent 11 years as dean of the FAS. He is writing a book about teaching.

A prime example of his hands-on approach is “CS 32: Computational Thinking and Problem Solving,” an introductory course that enrolls some 300 students. On the first day, students install the Integrated Development Environment (a software interface with tools for computer programmers) on their laptops so they can work on problems simultaneously with the professor. In the final weeks, each student presents an independent project. Some students designed a program to turn the popular online game Wordle into a two-player version; another wrote a program to scrape recipes from the Internet and then suggest what to cook for dinner that night based on the ingredients on hand in the kitchen.

“I want them to have a foundation on which they can start to learn for themselves and become self-sufficient,” said Smith.

He applies a similar philosophy to his upper-level class, “Critical Thinking in Data Science,” in which students grapple with the ethical implications of ever-more-powerful information technologies. The class features two-week “sprints,” exercises in which students build deepfakes and facial recognition programs — and contended with the social consequences of their creations. Smith summed up the dilemma: “Yeah, I can build it, but should I build it?”

Creating a space where all perspectives are welcome

Thornber, a cultural historian of East Asia, strives to make her classroom a space where all perspectives are welcome, and where students feel comfortable sharing their insights, even when discussing difficult topics such as gender-based violence, mental health stigmas, or end-of-life care.

Thornber said co-chairing the FAS Civil Discourse Advisory Group and becoming the Richard L. Menschel Faculty Director of the Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning last year made her realize the need to foster this environment with greater intention.

“It’s made me realize the importance of being attentive to students’ own inclination to self-censor, or to come to premature consensus,” Thornber said. “There’s a need for being really intentional about this and being really explicit with the students. If we all come in with the same opinion, that’s great, but we’re going to tackle other opinions as well, because it’s really important that they understand the range of opinions on a difficult topic.”

Thornber’s own scholarship spans the medical and health humanities as well as the environmental humanities, gender justice, indigeneity, and transculturation, as related to the literatures and cultures of East Asia. Her research scope also includes South and Southeast Asia, well as Africa, Europe, and North America. She has taught a range of undergraduate courses, from first-year seminars on gender justice and literature of pandemics to general education courses on mental health and the arts. This fall she will teach a new course, “HUMAN 2: Introduction to the Medical and Health Humanities.”

She said creating a “transformative experience” for students gives her work meaning. For her, that means helping students feel connected to each other and breaking down some of the silos that separate students from different backgrounds so they can all engage in lively and productive classroom discussions.

“I believe very strongly that the humanities provide our students with unique and invaluable information, insights, and perspectives into how we can best make sense of and ameliorate some of our most complex global challenges,” Thornber said. “Not only is it exciting to work with students on increasing their knowledge of global challenges, but also to work with them on how they might ultimately render this knowledge into impactful action. Nurturing the hopefulness, excitement, and creativity that students bring to the table — it’s really a privilege and an honor to be able to do that.”

Learning along with his students

Wang likes to build his political science courses around intellectual debates, to show his students that there is always another way to look at the world. Sometimes this means assigning readings and structuring class discussions to reflect contradictory views.

“I ask them, ‘What do you think?’” Wang explained. “We can challenge the reading and challenge each other. I think that debate form is really useful for getting to the bottom of things. At the end of the conversation, we usually gain more understanding of the issue but also change our previous view about the question.”

Wang’s area of expertise is Chinese politics. He has written extensively about state-building in China from the seventh to 20th centuries and is currently doing comparative research to see how China and Europe diverged politically after the year 1000. The undergraduate courses Wang teaches regularly include “Government and Politics of China” and “Comparative Political Development,” and he is part of a rotation of faculty who teach “Foundations of Comparative Politics.”

Wang said his favorite part of teaching Harvard undergraduates is how often they challenge him intellectually — something that he says is “the best thing that can happen to a professor.” He sometimes presents a provocative argument on purpose, inviting students to push back. More than once, their responses have led him to change his own viewpoint.

“One thing I really want to emphasize to them is I’m learning with them — in this class, we are exploring something together,” Wang said. “I think that’s really important, because I don’t want them to stop learning after this class, or after Harvard. I want them to realize even people my age are still learning, and that I can learn from them.”

Inside a sound- and scent-proof room at Harvard’s Canine Brains Lab, photographer Elias Weiss Friedman tapped a hammer on the floor near his hand as Sasha, the Harvard University Police Department’s community engagement dog, watched attentively. When Friedman feigned injury, pretending to hit his thumb and crying out in pain, the black Labrador looked briefly to Officer Steve Fumicello, her handler, before rushing to Friedman and licking his face. The moment was part of an experiment used regularly to assess the empathy of dogs in the lab.

“Some [dogs] react like that, some of them couldn’t care less,” explained Erin Hecht, assistant professor in the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology, who runs the Canine Brains Project. “In the real test, the person does this three times, and we had a couple of dogs actually take the hammer away.”

Friedman, founder of popular social media account “The Dogist,” visited Hecht’s lab last week. Friedman has photographed more than 50,000 dogs while Hecht uses a different kind of imagery — MRIs — to study the science behind the beloved pet.

“I’m OK, I was just joshing,” Friedman reassured Sasha, after the experiment, while petting her ears. “Thank you for being so empathetic and caring, because if that were to happen in real life I would need your love.”

Hecht and Friedman later discussed the way they each approach dogs visually in a fireside chat at Kirkland House moderated by Faculty Dean David Deming, Isabelle and Scott Black Professor of Political Economy at Harvard Kennedy School and Professor of Education and Economics at Harvard Graduate School of Education.

“They make great photographic subjects because they’re 100 percent candid,” said Friedman, whose new book, “This Dog Will Change Your Life,” is forthcoming. “You can look at a dog and see the expression on their face and know that they’re being 100 percent honest, and there’s something very great about that.”

Hecht said MRI scans allow her to explore the question many dog owners have wondered at some point: What is going on inside their head?

“You can see all kinds of things, signatures of fearfulness, or aggression, or trainability, something we might think of as cognitive capacity or ability to learn, and differences between breeds that might relate to their historical functions,” Hecht said. “I still get shivers when we get a dog in the scanner and their brain image comes up for the first time. It’s like, ‘Wow, there’s a brain in there. That is the dog, all of its emotions and thoughts and plans and desires, we’re looking at it right now.’”

She said that in science, it’s always possible to invest time in a study only to find no significant results. But that hasn’t been the case with her dog research, likely because of the remarkable variability in canine brains and their close ties to behavior. Hecht’s lab is actively recruiting dogs for research studies, particularly seeking dogs with behavioral issues related to early life stress or trauma. They are also looking for children ages 7 to 12 and their dogs to participate in a study exploring the bonds between kids and their pets.

Friedman said dogs are like “furry icebreakers” that have helped him meet tens of thousands of interesting people as part of his work.

“Before you get a dog you know your neighbor, and after you get a dog you know your neighborhood,” Friedman said. “There is this force of community and socialization when your dog needs to go out, you just end up meeting like 10 people. That’s very real.”

Hecht said dogs have been bred to be good at making friends with people.

“The ability to form a bond with people is the most fundamental thing that they’ve evolved. We are their social partners. Their natural place in the world is within human society. They’re adapted for our world,” Hecht said. “Then humans have developed different lineages of dogs. Some breeds need to be defensive and territorial in order to protect a family or a flock of sheep. Others need to do a job that’s more interactive with the environment. It’s this huge range of cognitive styles.”

During the Q&A, students asked Friedman and Hecht a range of questions: “Do dogs pick favorites within the household?” (Hecht: They have favorites for different activities); “Are dogs judgmental?” (Hecht: They can intuit when people’s intentions are not friendly); and “Do people really look like their dogs?” (Friedman: Yes).

When asked if there were any dogs that stood out from the thousands he has photographed, Friedman recalled Pudding, a pit bull mix bearing the scars of past abuse, whom he photographed back in 2013 when his Instagram account was barely a month old.

“Until then I had been going about it as the joke, like, ‘Wouldn’t it be funny to photograph dogs?’” Friedman recalled. “This was a pivotal dog because it made me realize this project was much more profound. Dogs make us laugh and cry and there’s some beauty and sadness, and it’s important that I share all of it.”

Starting this fall, students will be able to choose among nine introductory courses launching in the Division of Arts and Humanities as part of an initiative by Sean Kelly, dean of Arts and Humanities and Teresa G. and Ferdinand F. Martignetti Professor of Philosophy.

To counter the nationwide problem of declining enrollment in these fields, the initiative aims to engage more first-year students in the studies.

While Kelly attributes declining enrollment in part to a lack of emphasis on the subjects in American high schools, one Harvard statistic gave him pause: While about 12 percent of first-years arrive on campus interested in pursuing arts and humanities, about half end up changing their minds by the time they declare their concentrations.

“That was the thing that really struck me,” Kelly said. “The kinds of introductory courses that we’re teaching don’t grab our students. That was the issue that I wanted us to have conversations about.”

There are exceptions to the enrollment decline — courses in Art, Film & Visual Studies and Theater, Dance & Media, as well as creative writing and music performance, are in high demand among students. But Kelly believes the “Canon Wars” of the ’80s and ’90s — debates over which major texts define disciplines like English or art history — impacted the design, and appeal, of many introductory humanities courses. While these debates broadened our understanding of what counts as a “great work,” Kelly said, they also made it harder to curate a definitive list of must-reads to introduce the subjects.

“The idea that you’re studying something ‘great’ is motivating for a student, and that it was harder for us to say about any text that it is great had an effect on the kinds of courses that we were able to design and teach,” Kelly explained. “That makes it hard for a first-year student, since they can’t gain any sense of what matters in the field.”

Kelly took inspiration from the Department of Philosophy, which has increased its number of concentrators nearly fivefold since 2006 after shifting its goals from preparing students for future Ph.D.s to engaging undergraduates in fundamental questions about human beings and the universe. Questions like these can be beneficial regardless of a student’s future career path.

The department introduced intro courses like Professor Samantha Matherne’s “Phil 129: Kant’s ‘Critique of Pure Reason,’” which garnered an enrollment of 80 students, and Professor Gina Schouten’s “Phil 16: Sex, Love, and Friendship,” which attracted 120 students the first time it was taught.

Building on this model, and after a series of conversations with faculty last fall, Kelly put out a call for introductory humanities course proposals. He received nearly two dozen. Ten were selected, nine of which will launch in the 2025-2026 academic year.

This fall Karen Thornber, Harry Tuchman Levin Professor in Literature and Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, will teach “Introduction to the Medical and Health Humanities”; Richard F. Thomas, George Martin Lane Professor of the Classics, will teach “Bob Dylan the Classic”; Lauren Kaminsky, associate senior lecturer in History & Literature, will teach “Culture in Context”; and Raquel Vega-Durán, senior lecturer in Peninsular and Transatlantic Film and Literature, will teach “Migration and Border Crossing in Film and Photography.”

Next spring Moira Weigel, assistant professor of comparative literature, will teach “Humanity, Technology, and Creation”; professor of linguistics Kathryn Davidson will teach “Language”; and incoming assistant professor of comparative literature Spencer Lee-Lenfield will teach “Translation and the Craft of Reading Carefully: A World Literature Introduction.”

John T. Hamilton, William R. Kenan Professor of German and Comparative Literature, will teach “HUM 17: The Human Sciences: Fundamentals and Basic Concepts” next spring. The course offers an overview of the methods, questions, and tools that define the humanities in much the same way gateway courses like LS50 or CS50 do in other disciplines. Students will tackle metaphor and metonymy, epistemology and ontology and the structures of language, and grapple with philosophical ideas such as consciousness, perception, and moral freedom, all ideas that define what it means to study human culture.

“It does give you that ground plan,” said Hamilton. “It says, OK, you’re interested in the humanities? This is what we do, this is how we grapple with all sorts of things. Then you may have a better idea of where you want to delve into for your following time at Harvard.

“In the same way you need to know how momentum works to study physics, and how cells reproduce to study biology, you need to know what a metaphor is, what realism is, and what consciousness is to do the humanities.”

Laura van den Berg, senior lecturer, and Neel Mukherjee, associate senior lecturer in creative writing in the Department of English, will co-teach “HUM 9: Reading for Fiction Writers” in the fall. The course introduces students to a range of texts, including Anton Chekhov, Ursula Le Guin, and Octavia Butler, to help them understand how reading shapes writing, and begin to write their own stories.

“We are trying to bring together the critical side of the English Department, which trains students in how to close-read, understand, and analyze the text, with the creative-writing side, which trains in technique and craft,” Mukherjee said. “We wanted to marry the two to show that good writing is always dependent on being a good reader.”

“Our ability to tell our own story to ourselves and to others, to absorb other people’s stories — that’s so foundational to who we are and our identity,” van den Berg agreed. “A richer, more rigorous, nuanced understanding of how story works, how we work on story, and how story works on us, is incredibly important as a human practice.”

For Kelly, the intro course initiative is not just about increasing enrollment, but about building a more inviting and engaging humanities culture for new students. He hopes to underscore the humanities’ inherent value, not just their instrumental use. As he put it, it’s the difference between reading Shakespeare’s “King Lear” to analyze tyranny, versus reading it to explore what it means to be human.

“I want these introductory courses not just to be about the instrumental value of the disciplines, but about their intrinsic value. I want them to focus on why it matters for all of us engaged in the human project to learn how to read great literature, to think about great philosophy, to encounter great art,” Kelly said.

“I hope these courses meet the students where they are and really help them understand the intrinsic value of what we do. I hope they are great courses that change their lives.”

Addie Esposito ’25 grew up with stories about life in Germany.

“My mom was there for two years just after the Berlin Wall fell,” Esposito said. “She actually has three tiny pieces of the Wall, one for me and each of my sisters.”

At Harvard, Esposito’s fascination with German culture, and the complicated legacy of its post-World War II split into East and West, deepened. A double concentrator in government and German, she was able to fully immerse herself in these interests while completing an internship in the German parliament last summer. Working at the Bundestag also allowed Esposito to launch an ambitious project studying how the Cold War continues to shape German identity today.

“She completed this rich, rich analysis of the persistent divide between East and West,” said her thesis adviser, Daniel Ziblatt, the Eaton Professor of the Science of Government and director of the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies. “When Germany unified in 1990, the expectation was that this divide would quickly pass. What’s remarkable is that it has endured for more than a generation and become a permanent feature of German political culture. … In some ways, it’s analogous to regional divides in the U.S. after the Civil War.”

Esposito first visited Germany with her mother at age 5. “I was just fascinated by the language,” she recalled. “My mom said I started saying German words in my sleep, just some basics like ‘blau,’ which is blue, and ‘Brot,’ which is bread.”

In middle school, German was the obvious choice for Esposito’s foreign language elective. In high school, the Raleigh, North Carolina, native completed a two-week exchange program in Frankfurt, Germany, and interned at a nonprofit run by her mother’s friend in a small town near the French border.

As a College first-year, Esposito enrolled in Ziblatt’s “Democracy: Breakthroughs and Breakdowns,” drawn to the professor’s expertise in authoritarianism and democracy in the U.S. and in Europe — Germany in particular.

“I thought, ‘This person is at the intersection of all my interests,’” Esposito recalled. “I kind of clung to him like a barnacle ever since.”

“I’d love to be the ambassador to Germany. I would be thrilled to work for the State Department. I would like to use my German no matter what.”

Ziblatt helped Esposito land her position with a member of the center-left Social Democrat Party representing part of Hamburg, Germany. This provided her with access to the full chamber, which totaled more than 700 legislators at the time. “It meant I could go anywhere I wanted in the Bundestag unaccompanied,” said Esposito, whose internship was made possible by the Center for European Studies.

One area, however, was strictly off-limits. Mainline German political parties have constructed what they call “a firewall” against cooperation with the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, which is most popular in the country’s eastern states.

“For the parliamentarian with whom I was working, that meant zero contact,” Esposito explained. “Therefore, the AfD was initially excluded from my interview pool.”

In the end, the former Harvard International Review co-editor in chief surveyed 183 parliamentarians to learn about their backgrounds as well as the contours of their identities. Esposito also did face-to-face interviews (in German) with 48 members, including 17 members from the former Soviet-controlled German Democratic Republic (GDR). Once her internship was complete, she moved to secure what Ziblatt characterized as “rare” research interviews with two members of the AfD.

“It’s pretty common for students to rely on pre-existing surveys for their theses,” he said. “But in this case, she used her own interviews to dig a lot deeper into how people think about their lives — and how those lives relate to politics and history.”

Esposito’s approach, with its unusual focus on political elites, uncovered regional attachments more pronounced than what pollsters had found with the broader German public. She discovered that more than half the parliamentarians from the former GDR still identify more as East German than anything else.

The identity proved somewhat less central for parliamentarians who grew up after East Germany’s Peaceful Revolution of 1989. “But it was still incredibly high,” Esposito said, with more than 40 percent of Millennial and Gen Z members from the region selecting East German as their primary identity.

A different pattern was observed with parliamentarians hailing from the part of the country once occupied by the U.S., Great Britain, and France. Just 9 percent of those Esposito surveyed identified as primarily West German. More than half identify as broadly German. More than a quarter identify as broadly European.

“West German identification isn’t really a thing,” Esposito said.

Esposito drew on her interviews to advance what she calls an “underdog” theory of East German identity. “It’s strengthened both by adversity and triumph,” she said. “That makes the identity incredibly durable.”

Outsiders can be too quick to connect the phenomenon to the East’s persisting socioeconomic disadvantages, Esposito noted. “There’s also this sense of positive distinctiveness rooted in feeling responsible for reunification. People said things like, ‘We earned this freedom — we’re the reason the wall fell.’”

The thesis also builds on previous findings concerning the East/West divergence in regard to 20th-century history. The East German dictatorship, founded in 1949, positioned itself as an anti-fascist state and distanced itself from Nazi crimes, she said.

In fact, lawmakers with the AfD (both from the former GDR) made statements Esposito interpreted as trivializing the Holocaust — by comparing it to COVID-19 restrictions, for example.

This dynamic helps explain the nuances Esposito recorded in how East and West Germans express national pride. “West Germans’ responses often followed a pattern of ‘I am not proud to be German, but I am proud of Germany’s achievements,’” she writes in her thesis. “East Germans often dropped the hedging language.”

Those from East Germany — comprising 16 to 26 percent of the overall population, depending on how the region is defined — also spoke of experiencing discrimination, a phenomenon Esposito corroborated in interviews with lawmakers from the West.

“She had this incredible access to the highest level of politics in the country,” Ziblatt observed. “And she used it to engage politicians in these long conversations about what it means to be German.”

Next up for Esposito is a master’s in public policy at the Hertie School in Berlin, where she’ll have the opportunity to complete public policy internships while perfecting her German. “By the time I finish at Hertie, I want to be fluent,” Esposito said.

Longer term, she hopes to earn a Ph.D. in political science. “Honestly, my dream position would be to do what Professor Ziblatt does now,” she said. “But I’m also interested in the public policy side of things. I’d love to be the ambassador to Germany. I would be thrilled to work for the State Department. I would like to use my German no matter what.”

An encounter with grief during summer camp set Jett Crowdis on the path to a medical career.

While a Harvard undergraduate, Crowdis — who will graduate from Harvard Medical School this spring — served as a counselor at a camp for children whose parents have cancer. There, he met a 9-year-old boy whose father had died of pancreatic cancer just weeks before.

It was “a sad opportunity to be with someone going through such a challenging time in their life,” Crowdis said. “In later years, I got a chance to talk with him a bit more about his experience and he opened up about it.”

Before that experience, Crowdis knew he liked science, but wasn’t sure the best way to make a career of it. His experience at Camp Kesem, run by a national organization with chapters at several colleges, put a human face on the medical needs he knew were out there.

“That was the first time that I got to be with someone through a very challenging experience in their life and just listen to what they were experiencing,” Crowdis said. “That was very meaningful to me. I realized that was something that I wanted in a future career, and I think medicine naturally merged that with my interest in science.”

Crowdis, who grew up in Florida, entered Harvard College thinking he would study molecular biology, but during his sophomore summer he worked in the lab of Louise Foote Pfeiffer Professor of Cell Biology Joan Brugge, who encouraged him to learn coding in order to better analyze his research results. Crowdis spent a summer teaching himself the Python coding language and began taking computational biology courses in the fall.

“I just absolutely loved it,” Crowdis said.

Crowdis graduated from the College in 2019 but made the decision to apply to medical school late. He took two gap years in the lab of Associate Professor of Medicine Eliezer Van Allen, also a Camp Kesem alum. Van Allen’s lab at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute seeks to use computational biology to analyze genomic data from cancer patients, probe cancer’s molecular origins, investigate resistance to cancer therapies, and use genomics to guide clinical decision-making.

Crowdis used his computational skills to advance projects in the Van Allen lab, analyzing data from a prostate cancer genomic study. He was the first author of a Cell Genomics paper that highlighted the benefits of a broad-based experimental framework that engaged study participants as partners who freely share biological samples, clinical information, and details of their cancer experience. The work showed that the model, called the Metastatic Prostate Cancer Project, could break down barriers to treatment and care.

“My favorite aspect of research is when I get to ask questions that no one else has asked, with data that no one else has,” Crowdis said. “That’s the core aspect of research that I love the most, really, the exploration.”

After Crowdis entered HMS in the fall of 2021, he kept in touch with Van Allen, continuing work on some projects. When he expressed an interest in learning immunology, Van Allen connected Crowdis with Arlene Sharpe, Harvard’s Kolokotrones University Professor. In the Sharpe lab, Crowdis investigated how a technique called checkpoint blockade that harnessed the immune system to fight cancer can go wrong, causing potentially dangerous adverse reactions.

“He’s very thoughtful, very interested and engaged, he’s a critical thinker,” Van Allen said. “That’s a pretty unique combination to have. He really wants to be as critical and as keen as he possibly can.”

Though he has amassed considerable research experience, Crowdis is still exploring how large a role that research will play in his career. He matched with Yale New Haven Hospital and will head there after Commencement to begin a residency in internal medicine. The move will also give him a chance to rejoin his wife, Sruthi Muluk, a Harvard College classmate now in an obstetrics and gynecology residency at the University of Connecticut.

“It’s fascinating,” Crowdis said of internal medicine, “and also gives you time to sit and be with patients in the same way that I enjoyed the process at Kesem.”

A team of Harvard researchers have unveiled a way to map the molecular underpinnings of how learning and memories are formed, a groundbreaking new technique expected to offer insights that may pave the way for new treatments for neurological disorders such as dementia.

“This technique provides a lens into the synaptic architecture of memory, something previously unattainable in such detail,” said Adam Cohen, professor of chemistry and chemical biology and of physics and senior co-author of the research paper, published in Nature Neuroscience.

Memory resides within a dense network of billions of neurons within the brain. We rely on synaptic plasticity — the strengthening and modulation of connections between these neurons — to facilitate learning and memory.

Synapses, or the junctions where neurons communicate, lay the groundwork for every memory we form, from a childhood melody to a loved one’s face to what we ate for breakfast.

In their new paper, the team detailed their new technique, dubbed Extracellular Protein Surface Labeling in Neurons (EPSILON), which focuses on mapping the proteins vital for the transmission of signals across synaptic connections in the brain.

These specific proteins are called AMPARs and are considered key players in synaptic plasticity, the process that allows the brain to adapt and reorganize itself in response to new information.

Utilizing sequential labeling with specialized dyes, EPSILON enabled the researchers to monitor these proteins’ movements at high resolutions. Traditionally, understanding such detailed microscopic phenomena has required more invasive methods. Using EPSILON to observe AMPARs’ behavior in neurons represents a significant scientific advance.

This work was undertaken by several members of Cohen’s lab, including Harvard Griffin GSAS student Doyeon Kim and postdoctoral scholars Pojeong Park, Xiuyuan Li, J. David Wong-Campos, He Tian, and Eric M. Moult, as well as scientists from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

A combination of fluorescent labeling and cutting-edge microscopy allowed the researchers to illuminate synaptic behavior at unprecedented resolution. The technique’s precision was akin to shining a spotlight on some of the brain’s most intricate functions, allowing the team to monitor the synaptic interactions critical for learning.

As synaptic changes of specific memories came into view with greater clarity, patterns started to reveal rules governing how the brain decides which synapses to make stronger or weaker when storing a memory.

Prior research into synaptic processes often lacked such granularity, making EPSILON’s insights particularly valuable for future explorations into diseases like Alzheimer’s, marked by synaptic dysfunction that results in memory and learning impairment.

As synaptic changes of specific memories came into view with greater clarity, patterns started to reveal rules governing how the brain decides which synapses to make stronger or weaker when storing a memory.

“Our most important breakthrough is our method that can map the past history of the synthetic plasticity in the living brain,” Kim said. “We can look at the history of the synaptic plasticity, studying where and how much of the synaptic potentiation has happened during a defined time window during the memory formation.

“By mapping the synaptic plasticity over time at multiple time points, we can truly map the dynamics of the synapses,” Kim added. “We’ll also be able to apply this to different kinds of memories that have different patterns of synaptic plasticity.”

The technique’s first application has already yielded intriguing results. By applying EPSILON to study mice undergoing contextual fear conditioning — a process that helps animals associate a neutral context with a fear-inducing stimulus — researchers were able to demonstrate a correlation between AMPARs and the expression of the immediate early gene product cFos, a signal that tells us when brain cells are active.

These findings suggest that AMPAR trafficking is closely linked to enduring memory traces, or engrams, within the brain, where specific neurons become activated following learning experiences.

Cohen credits the significant and sometimes unexpected role basic science can play in fueling progress with enabling their study to succeed.

“The HaloTag technology, which is used to label proteins, was based on a gene discovered in 1997 by a group of scientists in Ireland who were studying a soil bacterium, which had an unusual ability to break down pollutants,” Cohen said. “It’s a generations-long arc from the basic research characterizing the natural world to making discoveries that can make human health better. We really need to support the entire arc to make progress.”

Looking forward, Cohen is eager to see how EPSILON can be further applied to study numerous cognitive phenomena and potentially improve therapeutic strategies targeting memory impairments.

“We’ve already distributed the molecular tool to labs around the world who are now starting to use these tools to explore how synaptic strength is regulated in their favorite question and context,” he said.

This work was partially supported the National Institutes of Health.

Among the artifacts on display in a new exhibition at the Schlesinger Library are photos of Ainu and Visayan women who were displayed as “living exhibits” at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair. 

The women’s names are not known. Their images have survived because they were included in the archives of Jessie Tarbox Beals, one of America’s first female photojournalists. But their stories are now being revisited as part of “Illuminate: Contextualizing Asian American Women’s Stories Through the Archives.” 

“Asian American history is oftentimes invisible, given the population and the history,” said Victor Betts, the curator for collections on ethnicity and migration at the Schlesinger Library. “It’s pushed to the margins. That’s also reflected in the archives.”

The exhibition, on display through January, presents materials spanning 150 years and asks viewers to examine their own assumptions about Asian and Asian American women’s roles in history. 

The show was created in conjunction with a spring undergraduate course called “Asian American Women’s History in the Schlesinger Library,” which Betts co-taught with Erika Lee, Bae Family Professor of History and the Carl and Lily Pforzheimer Foundation Director of the Schlesinger Library.

“It’s a model of co-teaching and co-creation, of research and learning, that we hope will serve as a model for other classes,” Lee said. 

Students used the archival material to consider the ways Asian and Asian American women have been forgotten, made hypervisible, or both, as were the women displayed at the World’s Fair.

“We had a whole week on erasure,” Lee said, laughing. “Like, where are they?”

Christian D. Topinio ’27 researched Beals’ photos for his final project.

“[The women] were objects to study, potentially objects of cultural curiosity,” Topinio said. “There’s a really interesting idea in these photos where you’re ascribing colonial hierarchies among these people, buttressing colonial hierarchies abroad.”

Betts said that in more contemporary collections, Asian American women tell their own stories on their own terms, like the donated archives of famous chefs and cookbook authors Grace Zia Chu and Madhur Jaffrey.

“Other women, earlier in history, in the 19th and 20th centuries, didn’t have that luxury,” he said. So he and the students went looking. 

Sophia Wang ’25 researched the 1874 court case of Ah Fong, a Chinese woman who was detained at the Port of San Francisco. She and about 20 other detained women and girls, age about 17 to 28, filed writs of habeas corpus on their own behalf.

Their legal action also contributed to the 1875 Supreme Court case Chy Lung v. Freeman, in which the court ruled that only Congress, not states, had the power to regulate immigration. 

“As someone who’s Chinese American and whose parents immigrated to the United States, when I read her case, I was in tears,” Wang said. “They were legal pioneers, although their stories still remain untold.”

Although there was little concerted effort to collect and preserve Asian American women’s stories at the time, archivists found Asian American women’s stories throughout local history and Harvard’s history. 

Siok-An Chiu Wu, Wai Tsu New Kuo, and Manik Kosambi appear in Radcliffe College yearbooks in 1919 and 1922.  

Manik Kosambi was the first South Asian woman to graduate from Radcliffe.

The exhibit places Asian American women’s photos, political posters, comic books, and zines in the context of the Chinese Exclusion Act, Japanese American internment, the Civil Rights era, and anti-Asian violence in the years of the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Betts wanted to play with the exhibit’s title, “Illuminate,” as part of the display. He commissioned artwork by Greater Boston Taiwanese-American artist Shaina Lu to accompany the archival material. Her translucent illustrations, placed over the windows, allow sunlight to filter into the gallery.

Betts is working to expand Schlesinger’s collections of Asian and Asian American women’s materials. But for now, he said, what’s missing is part of the point. It’s an opportunity to ask why Asian American women’s stories have been marginalized in the first place, and how our understanding of American history would change if they weren’t.

“Asian American history is American history,” Betts said, “and so it should have the same level of seriousness and value that we understand U.S. history, collectively, to have.”

“Illuminate: Contextualizing Asian American Women’s Stories through the Archives” is on display through Jan. 23 in the Lia and William Poorvu Gallery of Schlesinger Library.

A long career bridging medicine, social science, and the humanities has left Arthur Kleinman with one critical insight.

“Care, critically understood and practiced, matters most,” he told a packed lecture hall last week. “This is at the center of whatever claim I can make to wisdom and truth.”

Kleinman, M.A. ’74, a psychiatrist whose many titles include Esther and Sidney Rabb Professor of Anthropology, plans to officially retire next year after a total of nearly 50 years at Harvard. But his work in the classroom ended Tuesday with the final meeting of his “Future of Medical Anthropology” seminar.

The occasion drew nearly 200 current and former students to Sever Hall, with dozens more joining via Zoom. Five former students also testified to Kleinman’s impact as a teacher, author, mentor, and moral anchor committed to building cross-cultural understanding and advancing well-being.

“The gift that he leaves us with is the idea that knowledge is not only linked to patents and businesses,” offered Adams House Faculty Dean Salmaan A. Keshavjee, Ph.D. ’98, who also serves as director of the Center for Global Health Delivery at Harvard Medical School (HMS) and professor of Global Health and Social Medicine in the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine (GHSM). “It’s linked to a better understanding of how to improve the human condition.”

Kleinman, who is also a professor of medical anthropology in GHSM and professor of psychiatry at HMS, first landed at Harvard with his wife, Joan, in the fall of 1970. With support from the National Science Foundation, the Stanford-trained M.D. came to do a comparative study of medical systems across cultures.

“I quickly figured out that for me, anthropology was a suitable way forward,” Kleinman explained.

He taught Harvard’s very first course in medical anthropology in 1973. He left in 1976 for an associate professorship at the University of Washington, but the expert on health care in Chinese culture was back in Cambridge by 1982, now in a senior position split between the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and HMS.

“And that is the position I will be retiring from in July 2026 when I formally retire, and from which today — 43 years later — I deliver this, my final lecture,” Kleinman said.

He honored the contributions of the late Harvard social medicine/psychiatry professor Leon Eisenberg and former students including the late Paul Farmer, M.D/Ph.D. ’90, the celebrated co-founder of Partners In Health. Kleinman also name-checked a long line of staffers and faculty assistants who over the decades helped build the medical anthropology program.

“We’ve had about 100 doctoral students, 25 of whom are M.D./Ph.D.’s; more than 250 postdoctoral fellows, including researchers from much of the world; over 50 M.A. students; dozens of students from the Chan School of Public Health and other Harvard Schools; hundreds of medical students; and thousands of undergraduates,” he said.

Veterans of the program praised more than Kleinman’s intellectual rigor and moral mentorship. His influential body of work also figured prominently. In the final class, former World Bank President Jim Yong Kim, M.D. ’91, Ph.D. ’93, who co-founded Partners In Health with Farmer, testified to the career-altering discovery of Kleinman’s “Patients and Healers in the Context of Culture” (1980).

Anne E. Becker ’83, M.D./Ph.D. ’90, the Medical School’s dean for Clinical and Academic Affairs and its Maude and Lillian Presley Professor of Global Health and Social Medicine, spoke to the inspiration provided by “The Soul of Care” (2019), Kleinman’s account of navigating the healthcare system as a family caregiver from Joan’s Alzheimer’s diagnosis until her death in 2011.

“This book has become my touchstone as a clinician — and quite frankly, in my responsibilities as an educator, mentor, and colleague,” Becker said.

An AI tool trained to analyze multiple brain scans over time predicted risk of relapse in pediatric cancer patients with far greater accuracy than traditional approaches, according to a new study. Researchers hope the results lead to improved care for children with brain tumors called gliomas, which are typically treatable but vary in risk of recurrence.

“Many pediatric gliomas are curable with surgery alone, but when relapses occur, they can be devastating,” said corresponding author Benjamin Kann of the Artificial Intelligence in Medicine Program at Mass General Brigham and the Department of Radiation Oncology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. “It is very difficult to predict who may be at risk of recurrence, so patients undergo frequent follow-up with magnetic resonance imaging for many years, a process that can be stressful and burdensome for children and families. We need better tools to identify early which patients are at the highest risk of recurrence.” Kann is also Assistant Professor of Radiation Oncology at Harvard Medical School.

The results of the study by investigators from Mass General Brigham and collaborators at Boston Children’s Hospital and Dana-Farber/Boston Children’s Cancer and Blood Disorders Center were published in The New England Journal of Medicine AI.

The research, which was funded in part by the National Institutes of Health, leveraged institutional partnerships across the country to collect nearly 4,000 MR scans from 715 pediatric patients. To maximize what AI could “learn” from a patient’s brain scans — and more accurately predict recurrence — the researchers employed a technique called temporal learning, which trains the model to synthesize findings from multiple brain scans taken over the course of several months post-surgery. 

Typically, AI models for medical imaging are trained to draw conclusions from single scans; with temporal learning, which has not been used previously for medical imaging AI research, images acquired over time inform the algorithm’s prediction of cancer recurrence. To develop the temporal learning model, the researchers first trained the model to sequence a patient’s post-surgery MR scans in chronological order so the model could learn to recognize subtle changes. From there, the researchers fine-tuned the model to correctly associate changes with subsequent cancer recurrence, where appropriate.

Ultimately, the researchers found that the temporal learning model predicted recurrence of either low- or high-grade glioma by one year post-treatment, with an accuracy of 75-89 percent — substantially better than the accuracy associated with predictions based on single images, which they found to be roughly 50 percent (no better than chance). Providing the AI with images from more timepoints post-treatment increased the model’s prediction accuracy, but only four to six images were required before this improvement plateaued.

The researchers caution that further validation across additional settings is necessary prior to clinical application. Ultimately, they hope to launch clinical trials to see if AI-informed risk predictions can result in improvements to care — whether by reducing imaging frequency for the lowest-risk patients or by pre-emptively treating high-risk patients with targeted adjuvant therapies.

“We have shown that AI is capable of effectively analyzing and making predictions from multiple images, not just single scans,” said first author Divyanshu Tak of the AIM Program at Mass General Brigham and the Department of Radiation Oncology at the Brigham. “This technique may be applied in many settings where patients get serial, longitudinal imaging, and we’re excited to see what this project will inspire.”

This study was supported in part by the National Institutes of Health/the National Cancer Institute.

After Harvard rejected Trump administration demands related to hiring, governance, and the viewpoints of faculty and students, the government froze more than $2 billion in grants for research in science, medicine, and technology at the University. In all, the administration has targeted more than $9 billion in Harvard funding for review. The University responded with a lawsuit late last month.

The disruptive effects of cuts to research funding at Harvard and other institutions of higher ed have already been seen across the U.S. economy. Even if the total funding cuts end up being one-quarter of what has been threatened, gross domestic product will shrink by 3.8 percent (adjusted for inflation) over the coming years, a rate comparable to the 2008-2009 Great Recession, according to new research from economists at American University. Their analysis followed a March report by the nonprofit United for Medical Research that detailed $2.56 in U.S. economic activity for every dollar put into federal biomedical research in 2024.

Less immediately visible are the potential effects the funding freeze could have on a key engine of U.S. economic growth, the startups that help bring scientific innovation and breakthroughs to market.

In this edited conversation, Jeffrey J. Bussgang, senior lecturer in entrepreneurial management at Harvard Business School, discusses the role research universities play in the startup world and how disruptions to funding for science and medicine could reshape the future of entrepreneurship. Bussgang teaches the M.B.A. course “Launching Technology Ventures” and is co-founder and general partner of Flybridge Capital Partners, an early stage venture capital firm.

How do research universities figure into the startup and venture capital ecosystem?

There are two critical pathways to bridge the university system and the startup ecosystem. One is through the faculty and the second is through the students.

On the faculty side, often we see commercialization pathways coming out of research in the labs. That can occur both in the computer science departments as well as in the biomedical arenas. And, of course, Harvard has many, many labs and many diverse vehicles, whether it’s the Wyss Institute or the Broad Institute, which operates in conjunction with MIT, as well as the electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, and computer science departments. Robotics, as well. Those tend to be very rich environments for startups.

Second, students benefit from an incredibly rich entrepreneurship curriculum. It’s the most popular field of study at Harvard Business School and the largest faculty unit at Harvard Business School. We consistently have dozens and dozens of startups that come out of our students’ work. As does SEAS — both graduate students and undergraduates. 

Research universities seem to play an incubation role in that model. Why has it evolved that way — is it because of risk?

It’s less about risk and more about an intentional curriculum and launching pad for academics and for students. The school is engineered to help faculty through the technology licensing office and various entrepreneurs in residence and venture capitalists that surround the school. We have a very explicit objective of helping our students become company creators and entrepreneurs. So it’s not about risk; it’s more about opportunity and intentionality.

Historically, why is the federal funding of scientific research and development so critical to tech and biomedical startups and entrepreneurs? How does it foster U.S. economic growth?

The more heavily resourced the labs are, the more performative they can be in terms of generating novel ideas that can eventually become massively successful commercial companies. I would also say, the more of a magnet the school is for the best and the brightest internationally, the more likely it is to attract brilliant, aspiring entrepreneurs. And if their work is inspired not by necessarily the labs, but just because of the nature of the work and the quality of the educational system and the quality of the faculty, then that’s also an important magnetic force.

What impact has the federal funding freeze on NIH research and the halting of previously approved grant payments had so far?

We’re just seeing the beginning. There are hiring freezes. There have been initiatives canceled and there have been grants canceled. The pipeline for company creation takes time. The companies that are being created now and launching in 2025 were incubated over the last three years, so we won’t see a short-term effect. It’s going to be more of a medium- and long-term effect in the coming years. We’ll just see fewer promising startups come out of the system.

How long until we start to see the full effects of this situation, and could the damage be reversed?

It could be reversed, but I think it’s going to be a one-to-three-year ripple effect because of how long it takes for these ideas in the lab to come out and to become commercially viable companies.

Elegy, a form of poetry traditionally meant to honor the dead and lament the loss, is often composed in solitude. On a warm recent Tuesday afternoon in Lamont Library, a small group — some poets, most not — gathered to write, read, and workshop elegies of their own.

The workshop, led by Karen Elizabeth Bishop and David Sherman in partnership with the Woodberry Poetry Room, is part of the duo’s ongoing “Elegy Project.” The event late last month was paired with a reading that evening in Houghton Library’s Edison Newman Room by poet Peter Gizzi, author of the T.S. Eliot Prize-winning collection “Fierce Elegy.” 

“The Elegy Project is a public poetry initiative,” Sherman said. “We put poem cards in public places for strangers … Our intention is to make grief less lonely.”

The Elegy Project was the recipient of the Poetry Room’s 2023 Community Megaphone grant. Using funds provided by poet Tom Healy ’83, the Poetry Room began offering stipends to individuals and nonprofits in the Boston area to support their work and creative contributions to the community.

“Elegy is perhaps the most primal and human of poetic impulses — the need to mourn, to praise, and to console all springing from the inescapable human predicament: to be alive is to experience loss,” said Mary Walker Graham, associate curator of the Woodberry Poetry Room. “Elegy not only makes this loss more bearable, it enlarges our capacity to experience the full spectrum of human emotion.”

Started in spring of 2022, Bishop and Sherman said they were inspired to create the Elegy Project when they noticed the loneliness and grief caused by the pandemic and thought there must be a way to show people that they weren’t alone.

“During the pandemic we wanted to do an anthology of elegy. But the publishing world works at glacial speed,” Bishop said. “Everybody was in their houses. And so we thought to do a deconstructed anthology that would be immediately free and accessible, and ‘aggressively randomly accessible,’ as Dave says.”  

Both Bishop and Sherman distribute poetry cards wherever they go.

“I walk around with thumbtacks in my pocket and the cards, and I put them on wooden utility poles, or leave them in the post office, on the train, or the bus, or maybe a bench, and it’s aggressively contingent and random,” Sherman said. “It’s unsystematic. It’s aggressively embracing randomness.”

Both Bishop and Sherman say they use elegy in their professional work as well. Bishop is an associate professor of Spanish and Comparative Literature at Rutgers University, where she researches and teaches modern poetry and narrative. Sherman is an associate professor of English at Brandeis University, where he researches elegy and the politics of commemoration.

“I think that elegy performs this beautiful kind of stretching toward something that’s gone or something that’s gone missing,” Bishop said. “Isn’t that the nature of death? That you want to reach out, you want to kind of make that movement forward.”

This most recent workshop was the second between the Elegy Project and the Poetry Room. Last spring they did poetry workshops with invited guests. This time around, there was an open call for anyone interested in crafting a poem.

“I think these are people who probably use poetry privately and maybe share with a few friends, and want to expand that experience by a significant step,” Sherman said. “These were people who are busy with life, busy with real experiences where poetry is useful for processing, and they just want to write in community.”

The group assembled ranged from doctoral candidates in physics to retired painters. They were asked to use the Poetry Room’s collection and prompts by Sherman and Bishop for inspiration.

“The thought behind the steps was to create a dynamic conversation between people and books, between people and people, between lines and other lines, so that something unexpected would emerge,” Sherman said. “It was exploring openly, exploring new books on the shelves, and then feeling the desire to say something back of your own.”

Bishop added that using prompts and exploring texts can help get the creative juices flowing, too.

“It takes a little bit of the pressure off sitting around waiting for a line to appear or waiting for your brain to come up with something,” she said. “I think that that kind of scaffolding is really useful for people to get into to writing a poem or just engage poetry in some way.”

Graham, the Poetry Room’s associate curator and co-organizer of the event, said workshops like the Elegy Project’s are important to engage the community and bring poetry out from the stacks.

“Poetry belongs to everyone, not just to the authors of published books,” she said. “We all have an equal right to access it, not only to receive it but to create it. Workshops like this one nurture the poets in us all.”

For public health researchers, getting a federal grant is a big deal. 

More than 30 years later, Karen Emmons hasn’t forgotten her first one. She was an assistant professor in Brown University’s Department of Psychiatry when the letter came in the mail on green carbon-copy paper that was so smudged she could barely read it. Now a professor of social and behavioral sciences at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, she still has that faded piece of green paper.

“You go into science because you want to make a difference, and when you get a grant, it means you can do something to try to help people,” Emmons said. “It just has so much meaning.” 

Those meaningful moments are now under threat. The Trump administration has frozen more than $2.2 billion in research grants to Harvard, halting studies with implications for neurogenerative disease, tuberculosis, and other conditions. The government’s move came after Harvard rejected White House demands for viewpoint “audits” of students and faculty, hiring changes, and other measures. Last week, the University filed suit against the administration.

The halt to funding disrupts a process that researchers say is appropriately competitive considering the stakes of their primary goal: advances in science and human health.

Jorge Chavarro, a professor of nutrition and epidemiology at the Chan School, understands the challenges from both sides. He applies for grants for his research on nutrition and human reproduction, and he’s served for about a decade on a scientific review group, also called a study section, evaluating other investigators’ proposals. 

“The NIH really does everything it can to ensure there is an absolutely fair review process for every single application,” he said. 

For Emmons, who studies strategies to reduce cancer risk in under-resourced communities, the work begins long before the application is written. It includes building relationships with community partners, staying up to date on what’s been published in her field, and networking with other researchers to gain a sense of what’s coming next.

“You don’t want to do things that somebody’s already doing,” she said. “You want to take things in a new direction.”

Then you have to test the idea. The NIH requires evidence that the research is not just innovative but grounded in evidence.

“You can’t just say, ‘I have this idea, please give me grant money,’” Emmons said. 

It could take another six months to write the application, which begins with a one-page statement, known in NIH lingo as specific aims, explaining how the study fills existing gaps, the impact it could have, and the methods investigators will use. After the aims page comes the full application, which can stretch to more than 100 pages once you add in the 12 pages of detailed science and all the required administrative documentation, Chavarro said. It includes dense summaries of previous work, results from preliminary research, detailed descriptions of methodology, and a biosketch, a kind of academic CV. For Emmons, who works with human participants, there are also lengthy requirements for ensuring the ethical treatment of her subjects. And of course, there’s the budget. 

The cost of doing innovative research has grown faster than the average size of a typical grant, Chavarro said, effectively requiring scientists to be more innovative with the same amount of money. So every line in the budget must be justified. “Why is it important to buy a new piece of equipment that you don’t have?” he said. “Why do you need money for tubes or pipettes, liquid nitrogen?” 

Once submitted, applications are assigned to Scientific Review Groups made up of volunteer scientists who can judge the research on its merits. Study sections score proposals against one another for their innovation, significance, and approach. Then, advisory councils for each institute perform a second-level review to determine whether the studies fit with the missions of their organizations. The two reviews are aligned, and only the top projects receive funding. 

Success varies by institute, but at the National Cancer Institute, where Emmons submits most of her applications, there was a 14.6 percent success rate for the most common type of grant, the R01, in 2023, the most recent data available. That means for all the months or years of preparation, the pilot studies, the partnership-building, the haggling over budget lines, only one in six proposals will be funded. Researchers whose proposals aren’t funded have a chance to incorporate feedback and resubmit.

Both Chavarro and Emmons accept that the process can be frustratingly slow. The meticulousness of the approach, they say, is part of what makes it exceptional. Emmons pointed to the decadeslong public-private partnership between universities and the government as a shared commitment to science as a public good. 

“Early on, the government realized it benefits society and it benefits the government: It keeps people healthier, it gives people access to lifesaving treatments, and it reduces the cost of taking care of people when they’re ill,” she said. “It’s just what the government should be doing: It should be helping people.”

A major global study of human flourishing reinforces prior warnings about the lack of well-being among youth, particularly in the U.S., and highlights the adage that money isn’t everything, with middle-income — not wealthy — countries topping a ranking of 22 nations.

“It raises important questions with regard to whether we are investing enough in our youth,” said Tyler VanderWeele, the John L. Loeb and Frances Lehman Loeb Professor of Epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and one of the study’s lead authors. “Patterns around the world are complex, but in many countries — especially Western countries — this pattern is real.”

The results stem from a huge trove of data gathered by The Global Flourishing Study, a major investigation into individual well-being within specific communities and environments. The survey enrolled about 203,000 people speaking 40 languages and spanning an array of nations, cultures, histories, and economic circumstances. Launched in 2021, the study was conducted on all six inhabited continents and represents about 64 percent of the world’s population, organizers said during a media briefing Monday.

The study’s data allow for comparison across and within nations. Respondents were asked questions about seven variables that together define “flourishing” — health, happiness, meaning, character, relationships, financial security, and spiritual well-being.

It also gathered demographic data such as age, sex, marital and employment status, education, health, religious service attendance, and information about personal history, specifically childhood, including family financial circumstances and exposure to abuse.

VanderWeele called the findings on youth flourishing “troubling.” He said they bear out other recent findings that point to change.

Formerly, a typical life pattern of flourishing looked like a U-shaped curve, with satisfaction highest early and late in life. The lowest point came during the middle years when the pressures of raising children, meeting work expectations, and caring for aging parents come to bear.

It has now shifted to something like a J-shape, with measures of flourishing turning nearly flat from the late teens into the 20s before rising later in life. That pattern was seen in several nations, VanderWeele said, but the U.S. had one of the steepest gradients between flourishing levels of its youth and older adults.

“It’s pretty striking,” said VanderWeele, who is also director of the Human Flourishing Program at Harvard’s Institute for Quantitative Social Science. “It’s real cause for concern.”

The study, published in the journal Nature Mental Health and sponsored by eight private foundations, was led by researchers at Harvard and Baylor universities and included colleagues from 21 institutions, including universities in the U.S., Germany, Poland, Spain, Canada, and the U.K., as well as the Gallup polling firm.

VanderWeele said the national ranking data was the study’s biggest surprise, offering strong evidence that financial circumstances alone don’t guarantee flourishing. The study surveyed 22 countries and one territory (Hong Kong) that organizers said span an array of cultures, races, economic circumstances, and living conditions.

A ranking without financial indicators put Indonesia at the top, followed by Mexico, the Philippines, Israel, and Nigeria. The U.S. was 15th on that list. Adding financial indicators reordered the list slightly, with Israel and Mexico switching places, and Poland moving into the top 5, bumping Nigeria down. The U.S. moved up to 12th in that ranking. Last on both lists, however, was Japan.

Brendan Case, associate director for research at the Human Flourishing Program and a paper author, said the national rankings call into question prevailing models of economic development that raise as examples nations such as Japan — whose rapid post-World War II modernization made it a global industrial power. That contrasts with Indonesia, a nation often cited as an example of the “middle-income trap” where developing nations’ initial economic progress turns to long-term stagnation.

While Japan is wealthier and its people live longer, respondents there were the least likely to answer “yes” to a question asking whether they had an intimate friend, Case said. Indonesia, meanwhile, ranked higher in measures of relationships and pro-social character traits, which foster social connections and community.

“We’re not here to say those outcomes [wealth, longer lifespans] don’t matter a lot, or that we shouldn’t care about democracy, we shouldn’t care about economic growth, we shouldn’t care about public health,” Case said, “but it’s interesting to consider that the Global Flourishing Study raises some important questions about the potential tradeoffs involved in that process.”

While many of the survey’s broader trends masked significant variability, there were a few findings that were nearly universal. Having good maternal and paternal relationships as a child and excellent childhood health were universally associated with higher adult flourishing.

Weekly or more frequent attendance at religious services also was nearly universally associated with adult flourishing. Authors said the salutary effect of religious participation tracks with previous studies in the West and now has been documented globally.

“The results also raise important questions for the future progress of society,” the authors wrote. “Are we sufficiently investing in the future given the notable flourishing-age gradient with the youngest groups often faring the most poorly? Can we carry out economic development in ways that do not compromise meaning and purpose and relationships and character, given that many economically developed nations are not faring as well on these measures? With economic development and secularization, have we sometimes been neglecting, or even suppressing, powerful spiritual pathways to flourishing?”

Researchers said the dataset is enormous — it’s the result of what are essentially 23 separate national or territorial longitudinal studies — and contains many interesting patterns, more of which will emerge with additional analysis. It also extends globally the investigation into human flourishing, which has been mainly focused on populations in the West.

“Each country is a unique place, and we’re keen to study and understand that,” said Tim Lomas, a research scientist in epidemiology at the Harvard Chan School and at the Human Flourishing Program and a paper author.

Some of the questions raised by the survey may be answered as additional data is collected, Case said. The study, which resulted from a Harvard conference six years ago, is longitudinal, so researchers will resurvey respondents annually, with additional analyses planned to be released over the next five years.

“If society is to ultimately flourish,” the authors wrote, “these questions of age, and of development, and of spiritual dynamics need to be taken into consideration.”  

The Harvard Alumni Association (HAA) has announced that Kathy Delaney-Smith, Paul J. Finnegan ’75, M.B.A. ’82, Carolyn Hughes ’54, and David Johnston ’63 will receive the 2025 Harvard Medal.

First awarded in 1981, the Harvard Medal recognizes extraordinary service to the University in areas that include leadership, fundraising, teaching, innovation, administration, and volunteerism. Alumni, former faculty and staff, and members of organizations affiliated with the University are eligible for consideration. The medals will be presented to recipients on Harvard Alumni Day on June 6.

Kathy Delaney-Smith

The all-time winningest coach of any sport — men’s or women’s — in Ivy League history and a trailblazer for gender equity, Kathy Delaney-Smith put Harvard basketball on the map and expanded its profile both nationally and internationally.

With 630 career victories, Delaney-Smith led Harvard Women’s Basketball to 11 Ivy League titles and 16 postseason appearances during her 40 seasons with the Crimson — the second-longest coaching tenure among NCAA Division 1 coaches. In honor of her illustrious career, the women’s coaching position was renamed the Kathy Delaney-Smith Head Coach for Harvard Women’s Basketball upon her retirement.

The first woman named to the Massachusetts Basketball Coaches Hall of Fame, Delaney-Smith has been honored for both her coaching abilities and her advocacy for gender equity in sports. 

Her strong but caring coaching style was defined by her “act as if” mantra, which encouraged team members to carry themselves with the confidence of already having achieved their goals. She employed visualization, mindfulness, and sports psychology decades before they became commonplace, and throughout her long career has guided players through difficult experiences off the court. At the request of basketball alumnae, she wrote the book “Grit and Wit: Empowering Lives and Leaders,” published earlier this year.  

Delaney-Smith came to Harvard in 1982 after compiling a 204–31 record at Westwood (Massachusetts) High School, with six undefeated regular seasons and one state title. During her tenure at Westwood, she worked to ensure that the girls’ team had sufficient resources. She also coached USA Women’s Basketball three times, including the team that won gold at the World University Games in Turkey in 2005.

A cancer survivor, Delaney-Smith has dedicated much of her time to helping the American Cancer Society and spreading the word of early detection, for which she received the Gilda Radner Award. 

Paul J. Finnegan

Paul Finnegan has been a devoted and dynamic champion of Harvard for over 40 years, lending his expertise and steady voice to top leadership roles, including Harvard Corporation member, University treasurer, Harvard Overseer, chair of the Harvard Management Company, and HAA president. Guided by his passion for education and love for his alma mater, Finnegan has worked tirelessly to strengthen the University’s financial health, governance, and educational mission.

Finnegan was a member of the Harvard Corporation, the University’s senior governing board, for 12 years. From 2014 to 2023, he served as University treasurer, where his financial acumen and deep institutional knowledge informed the work of the University’s financial administration and guided major changes at Harvard Management Company, which he chaired from 2015 to 2024. 

Finnegan was also a driving force behind The Harvard Campaign, planning and leading fundraising efforts as executive committee co-chair to raise a remarkable $9.6 billion — making it the most successful fundraising campaign in the history of higher education when it concluded in 2017.

A collegial leader admired for his down-to-earth nature and ability to see opportunities within challenges, Finnegan served from 2008 to 2012 as an elected member of the Harvard Board of Overseers, where he chaired the committee on finance, administration, and management. As HAA president from 2006 to 2007, he enhanced alumni communications systems and expanded global outreach.

Through the decades Finnegan has been closely involved with several Harvard Schools, serving on Harvard Business School’s Board of Dean’s Advisors, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health’s Leadership Council, as honorary co-chair of the Harvard Graduate School of Education’s campaign, and the Faculty of Arts and Sciences’ Dean’s Council, where he spurred meaningful improvements to the undergraduate experience.

A member of the Committee on University Resources, Finnegan was chair of the HBS Fund and of the College Class of 1975 reunion committee. He is a longtime supporter of Teach for America.

Carolyn Hughes

Motivated by a passion for education and a commitment to helping future generations of talented students attend Harvard, Carolyn Hughes has been a loyal and celebrated Harvard volunteer and ambassador for nearly 50 years, interviewing countless high school students and engaging alumni through her leadership of the Harvard Club of Long Island.

Hughes grew up in Boston’s Allston neighborhood, the daughter of a prison guard and a homemaker. Though she had not planned to attend college, an eighth-grade teacher insisted she take the academic program and be prepared. Four years later she was admitted to Radcliffe and given partial funding through her high school. Research work on the melting icebergs in the Arctic Ocean paid for the rest. After Radcliffe, she moved to New York and taught herself computer science and systems design, joining the first cohort of women in the field.

Never forgetting the tremendous opportunities Radcliffe provided, Hughes began volunteering in the late 1960s, interviewing college applicants as a member of the Radcliffe Club of Long Island — before it eventually merged with Harvard — and personally visiting 120 of the area’s high schools. In the five decades since, Hughes has served as an HAA director for Clubs and SIGs, an elected director of the HAA, and chair of the National Schools and Scholarship Committee within the Harvard College Admissions Office.

With unwavering dedication, she has held nearly every leadership position in the Harvard Club of Long Island, including president, helping to develop robust programming and outreach. As chair of the Long Island Schools Committee, her role expanded to training Harvard interviewers and organizing guidance counselor programs. She now serves as co-chair emerita of the Club’s Schools and Scholarship Committee.

Hughes has received numerous commendations, including the HAA Award in 1990, the Hiram S. Hunn Award in 2002, and the HAA Clubs Award in 2020.

David Johnston

The 28th governor general of Canada, a former university president, and a professor of law for more than four decades, David Johnston has dedicated his life in service to his country, to academia, and to Harvard — where he brought his strength as a consensus-builder and commitment to excellence to a variety of roles, including president of the University’s Board of Overseers.

Growing up in a mining town outside Sudbury, Ontario, Johnston quickly learned that an education could open many doors. He was first approached by Harvard at age 14 on the advice of an alumnus who had heard he was a promising scholar-athlete. Johnston enrolled in the College in 1959 on a scholarship, excelling in his studies while also becoming a two-time All-American ice hockey player. He graduated magna cum laude and was later named to the Harvard Varsity Club Hall of Fame.

Dedicated to ensuring talented students from all backgrounds have access to the same opportunities that Harvard afforded him, Johnston has been a steadfast volunteer, serving on his class reunion and gift committees for decades, as an HAA elected director, and on several Overseers visiting committees — including athletics; arts and humanities; finance, administration, and management; and information technology.

Elected to the Board of Overseers in 1992, Johnston was named chair in 1997 — the first non-U.S. citizen to hold the position. In recognition of his service to the University, the Harvard Club of Ottawa established the David Johnston Financial Aid Fund for Harvard, which supports students from Canada. 

Johnston was Canada’s governor general from 2010 to 2017. He also served as dean of the faculty of law at the University of Western Ontario, principal and vice-chancellor of McGill University, and president of the University of Waterloo.

Married 61 years, Johnston and wife, Sharon, have five daughters, all in public service, and 14 grandchildren.

Harvard University will build upon its previous work, as well as launch new initiatives and actions, to combat antisemitism and anti-Israeli bias, President Alan M. Garber announced on Tuesday. The actions laid out by Garber come in conjunction with the release of the final report and recommendations from the Presidential Task Force on Combating Antisemitism and Anti-Israeli Bias.

In his community message, Garber thanked the members of the task force “for pursuing their work with a spirit of openness, empathy, and compassion during a period of unrest within our community,” noting that their report is “the product of strenuous, prolonged efforts by some of the most generous and dedicated citizens of our University.”

The actions announced by Garber focus on three main areas: nurturing a widespread sense of belonging and promoting respectful dialogue; revising and implementing policies, procedures, and training; and strengthening academic and residential life. Building upon work the University has done over the last 15 months, the new actions include launching a major initiative to promote viewpoint diversity; dedicating resources to the creation of a research project focused on antisemitism; further review of disciplinary policies and procedures to assess their effectiveness and efficiency; and the expansion of resources to directly support students who experience antisemitism and other forms of discrimination.

Harvard’s Schools are actively reviewing task force recommendations concerning admissions, appointments, curriculum, and orientation and training programs, including those organized by recognized student groups. Deans will work to strengthen existing academic review processes for courses and curricula to ensure that they uphold the highest standards of academic excellence and intellectual rigor. Action plans designed for the College, the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, and each professional School will be shared with the president’s office by the end of the spring term.

“The scope of recommendations made by both task forces underscores the breadth of the challenges we face. They must be addressed with determination at every level of the University by effectively tackling issues that arise where our students congregate or live; ensuring that expectations for both students and teachers in the classroom are clearly communicated and met; nurturing vibrant debate and open speech in ways that encourage everyone to express their ideas freely; preserving the right to protest and dissent while avoiding disruption, harassment, and threats; and, when our policies are violated, ensuring that our disciplinary processes are fair, consistent, and effective. If we intend to make significant and durable change across Harvard, it is critical that we act decisively in each of these areas,” Garber wrote in his message.

The release of the task force’s report and recommendations caps off an effort that began in spring 2024 to document the experiences of Jewish and Israeli students, faculty, and staff on campus.

Through a series of listening sessions, as well as an online survey last spring and summer, the task force gathered extensive feedback from students, faculty, staff, and alumni. Members were not charged with investigating the reports they heard, though participants were advised of University policies under which they could file formal complaints. Stories are described in the report as they were heard. The task force also completed a comprehensive historical analysis of the Jewish experience at Harvard from the 1920s to present. 

The report includes findings and a set of recommendations designed to address antisemitism and anti-Israeli bias across the University. By reviewing concerns about select courses, events, and programs, the report also identifies specific areas where the task force feels the University can improve its approach to teaching about Israel and Palestine and to ensuring that all students feel free to express their opinions without fear or reservation.

Research and findings

The task force, whose members were appointed in late February 2024, began their work by hosting in March and April 2024 a series of listening sessions with students, staff, and faculty. Nearly 50 sessions were held with about 500 participants. Following the listening sessions, the Task Force on Combating Antisemitism and Anti-Israeli Bias joined with the Task Force on Combating Anti-Muslim, Anti-Arab, and Anti-Palestinian Bias in jointly issuing a University-wide survey.

From those who attended the listening sessions, several themes emerged related to the Jewish and Israeli experience on campus. Most notable was the deterioration of the campus climate after the terrorist attack on Oct. 7, 2023. Jewish students in general, and those who identify as Zionist in particular, felt that the climate had become less welcoming, even leading some to conceal their religious identity. Feelings of rejection and marginalization were common among Israeli students.

“The listening sessions provided a window into the real-time experience of Jewish students on campus, both inside the classroom and within the larger campus community,” said Jared Ellias, task force co-chair and the Scott C. Collins Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. “While specific incidents of antisemitism are of significant concern, there is also this larger issue of Jewish students feeling less of a sense of belonging at Harvard and less comfortable expressing their true selves and true identities.

The task force further explored programs, events, and courses at specific Schools that were perceived to be unbalanced in their approach to Israel and Palestine. In the report, task force members signal concern about these offerings and whether they are consistent with Harvard’s standards for excellence and academic integrity. The authors also argue that perceived bias in academic settings directly impacts the sense of belonging Jewish and Israeli students feel on campus. 

The online survey of the Harvard community indicated that, across nearly every category, Jewish student respondents reported greater levels of discomfort and alienation than their Christian or atheist/agnostic peers. Though the number of individuals responding to the survey was not as high as similar University-wide surveys, the data allowed for a meaningful examination of the differences in responses by subgroup. Of the 2,295 respondents, 477 identified as Jewish. Jewish student respondents reported higher levels of concern about their physical and mental safety. They were also more likely to feel uncomfortable expressing their opinions and, in particular, their political opinions.

“Harvard makes a point of recruiting amazing students, staff, and faculty from all over the country and the world, and our work suggests that at some point in the recent past we stopped looking for ways to connect with one another as Harvard community members and started focusing on the issues that divide us,” Ellias said. “All the faculty on the task force were very surprised at how much student life had changed since we were college students.” 

Many student respondents expressed concern about the University’s response to incidents of bias and were critical of both policies and the timeliness of responses. These concerns and experiences were exacerbated by what they saw from their classmates and, in some cases, teachers, on social media, which often served to amplify hostility and hateful rhetoric.

In addition to the qualitative and quantitative findings, the Task Force on Combating Antisemitism and Anti-Israeli Bias conducted a historical analysis of the Jewish experience at Harvard. This experience, the authors say, has been shaped by both the number of Jewish students on campus and the influence of world events on dialogue, discussion, and activism. The report finds the decline of respectful engagement regarding Israel and Palestine to be deeply troublesome and a significant contributing factor to the current campus climate. 

“The historical analysis provided us with a unique lens into how the Jewish experience at Harvard has changed over time,” said Derek Penslar, co-chair of the task force and the William Lee Frost Professor of Jewish History in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. “It is clear that world events have often influenced campus events and activities. However, it also became clear that civil discourse on the issue of Israel and Palestine has declined over time, signaling to the faculty that we must help our students learn to engage with each other in respectful ways even when we disagree.” 

Final recommendations

In June 2024, the task force issued a set of preliminary recommendations that identified near-term opportunities to address areas of concern prior to the 2024-25 academic year. Those recommendations asked leadership to clarify University values; act against discrimination, bullying, harassment, and hate; improve student disciplinary processes; implement antisemitism and anti-Israeli bias education and training; foster constructive dialogue; and support Jewish life on campus.

The University rolled out a series of changes, including new campus and protest rules; centralized fact-finding in discipline cases across Schools; new training opportunities for faculty, staff, and students on identifying and preventing antisemitism; and new initiatives in the Schools for constructive dialogue and disagreement across differences.

In the final report, the task force has expanded upon these preliminary recommendations. The final recommendations fall into the following categories: 

Admissions and early student experiences: The task force recommends a focus on attracting and admitting students who are eager to contribute to a learning community that is grounded in open inquiry and mutual respect. The report adds that once on campus, the University should ensure that these values and aspirations are emphasized in early student experiences.

Academics and academic offerings: The task force calls for the University to strive to ensure a classroom experience that is free from antisemitism, anti-Israeli bias, and all forms of discrimination. Moreover, the report recommends that the University’s academic offerings should include significantly more plentiful and diverse opportunities for the study of Jewish civilization, antisemitism and the Holocaust, Israel, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. 

Co-curricular activities and residential life and pluralism: The task force recommends providing student organizations with support and guidance to ensure that their activities do not have antisemitic or anti-Israeli impacts, so that their activities enhance the Harvard learning community. According to the task force, this recommendation goes hand in hand with building a pluralistic community in which students can express diverse opinions and viewpoints. 

Religious life: The task force recommends steps to strengthen religious life on campus, better supporting Jewish students and students of all faiths.

Administrative infrastructure and complaint mechanisms: The task force recommends a robust administrative infrastructure to support and coordinate efforts. This recommendation includes efforts to strengthen complaint mechanisms and to develop equitable disciplinary procedures across Schools.

Oversight: The task force calls for changes related to governance issues to strengthen ladder faculty oversight of educational programs and instructor training across Schools. 

Read the full report of the Task Force on Combating Antisemitism and Anti-Israeli Bias, as well as President Garber’s message about the new University action plan and more information on the action steps Harvard has taken to respond to the concerns, information, and recommendations shared by the task force. 

President Alan M. Garber announced new actions and initiatives the University is undertaking in conjunction with the release Tuesday of the final report from the Presidential Task Force on Combating Anti-Muslim, Anti-Arab, and Anti-Palestinian Bias.

In his community message, Garber thanked the members of the task force “for pursuing their work with a spirit of openness, empathy, and compassion during a period of unrest within our community,” noting that their report is “the product of strenuous, prolonged efforts by some of the most generous and dedicated citizens of our University.”

The actions Garber announced focus on three main areas: nurturing a widespread sense of belonging and promoting respectful dialogue; revising and implementing policies, procedures, and training; and strengthening academic and residential life. Building upon work the University has done over the last 15 months, the new actions include launching a major initiative to promote viewpoint diversity; undertaking a comprehensive historical overview of Muslims, Arabs, and Palestinians at the University; and further review of disciplinary policies and procedures to assess their effectiveness in ensuring that every member of the community feels supported.

Harvard’s Schools are actively reviewing task force recommendations concerning admissions, appointments, curriculum, and orientation and training programs, including those organized by recognized student groups. Deans will work to strengthen existing academic review processes for courses and curricula to ensure they uphold the highest standards of academic excellence and intellectual rigor. Action plans designed for the College, the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, and each professional school will be shared with the president’s office by the end of the spring term.

“The scope of recommendations made by both task forces underscores the breadth of the challenges we face. They must be addressed with determination at every level of the University by effectively tackling issues that arise where our students congregate or live; ensuring that expectations for both students and teachers in the classroom are clearly communicated and met; nurturing vibrant debate and open speech in ways that encourage everyone to express their ideas freely; preserving the right to protest and dissent while avoiding disruption, harassment, and threats; and, when our policies are violated, ensuring that our disciplinary processes are fair, consistent, and effective. If we intend to make significant and durable change across Harvard, it is critical that we act decisively in each of these areas,” Garber wrote in his message.

Last spring and summer, the task force gathered feedback from students, faculty, staff, and alumni through a series of listening sessions and a joint task force survey. In addition, the task force explored how salient events at the University over the past year and key world events over the last several decades impacted the campus climate.

The final report includes findings and a set of recommendations designed to address feelings of abandonment and silencing described by many Muslim, Arab, Palestinian, and pro-Palestinian members of the Harvard community, especially following the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks and their aftermath. Through a review of the concerns raised by community members, the report outlines how the University can improve safety and anti-discrimination policies, uphold free expression and open inquiry inside and outside of the classroom, rebuild institutional trust through an emphasis on equal access and transparency, expand faculty and academic offerings that provide a more comprehensive and representative view of the histories, beliefs, and cultures of Muslims, Arabs, and Palestinians, and related topics.

Research and findings

Task force members were appointed in late February 2024 and began their work in early April 2024, hosting a series of listening sessions with students, staff, and faculty. Nearly 50 sessions were held with an estimated 500 participants. Following the sessions, the Task Force on Combating Anti-Muslim, Anti-Arab, and Anti-Palestinian Bias joined with the Task Force on Combating Antisemitism and Anti-Israeli Bias in issuing a University-wide survey that garnered 2,295 responses. The task force was not charged with investigating reports, but participants were advised of University policies under which they could file formal complaints. Stories were described in the report as they were heard.

From those who attended the gatherings, five themes emerged: descriptions of experiences of discrimination and hate against Muslim, Arab, Palestinian, and pro-Palestinian members of the Harvard community; dissatisfaction with institutional response to incidents of bias and hate; growing divisions, self-censorship, and alienation within the community; concerns about educational experience and a desire for a more inclusive curriculum reflecting global complexities; and calls for divestment as a means for Harvard to address ethical concerns regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

In addition to describing these themes, the report also notes that the history of Muslims, Arabs, and Palestinians at Harvard reflects a complex and evolving narrative. It starts with a limited presence on campus in the 17th and 18th centuries confined mostly to theological studies. It was followed in the 20th and 21st centuries by a period of increasing Muslim, Arab, and Palestinian diversity among students and activism fueled by global events such as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Throughout this latter period, and due to events like the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Muslims, Arabs, and Palestinians reported facing marginalization, discrimination, misrepresentation, and silencing. According to the report, these issues continue today and now affect an even wider set of community members.

The survey also highlighted significant disparities in feelings of safety, belonging, and freedom of expression across religious and racial lines. The data included responses from individuals who self-identified as Muslim, Jewish, Christian, and atheist/agnostic/spiritual. Though the number of individuals responding to the survey was not as high as similar University-wide surveys, the data allow for a meaningful examination of the differences in responses by subgroup. Respondents who described themselves as Muslim and Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) reported some of the worst outcomes on various measures of safety and belonging and freedom of expression: 47 percent of Muslims and 35 percent of MENA respondents felt physically unsafe on campus, and 92 percent of Muslims and 83 percent of MENA respondents felt there were academic/professional penalties for expressing political views. In examining contributing factors, respondents indicated that interactions within the Harvard community with faculty and peers were largely positive, whereas interactions with outside influences were generally perceived negatively.

“The listening sessions, combined with the University-wide survey, brought to light so much of the pain, struggle, and fear that those in the community here at Harvard were experiencing,” said Asim Ijaz Khwaja, task force co-chair and Sumitomo-Foundation of Advanced Studies in International Development Professor at Harvard Kennedy School. “It is critical that we document the experiences and biases faced by Arab, Muslim, Palestinian, and pro-Palestinian members of our community through regular and systematic data gathering and analysis. This will enable us to better understand and address their concerns.”

Final recommendations

Following the review of qualitative findings last spring, the task force provided preliminary recommendations to President Garber in June 2024, which identified urgent issues the task force believed should be addressed prior to the start of the next academic year. Those recommendations included actions related to safety and security, recognition and representation, institutional response, freedom of expression, transparency and trust, relationships among affinity groups, and intellectual excellence. The University pursued a series of changes including new campus and protest rules, centralized fact-finding in discipline cases across Schools, new training opportunities for faculty, staff, and students on identifying and preventing anti-Arab, anti-Muslim, and anti-Palestinian biases, and new initiatives at Harvard’s Schools for constructive dialogue and disagreement across differences.

In the final report, the task force expanded upon these preliminary recommendations and proposed additional ones.

“These recommendations align with Harvard’s academic mission by prioritizing the safety and security of our students, faculty, and staff, and aiming to ensure their full participation in the pursuit of knowledge while guaranteeing that all voices are heard and respected,” said Wafaie Fawzi, task force co-chair, Richard Saltonstall Professor of Population Sciences, and professor of Nutrition, Epidemiology, and Global Health at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. “The University can support this mission by ensuring the institutional supports are in place — policies, procedures, and protocols — but also by providing opportunities for our community within and across affinity groups to come together and engage with each other.”

A summary of the final recommendations includes:

Safety and security concerns: The task force recommends continuing to address issues in this area expressed by Muslim, Arab, Palestinian, and Pro-Palestinian students, staff, and faculty. This includes both those involving physical and mental health. The recomendations include investing in culturally competent mental health support, offering comprehensive resources and training to combat doxxing, and formally defining instances of Islamophobia, anti-Arab, and anti-Palestinian bias within University policies.

Recognition and representation: The report recommends establishing a standing advisory committee of faculty and specialists well-versed in areas pertinent to Middle Eastern history to guide policy, programming, and University responses. It further calls for providing regular and ongoing in-person training for stakeholders and actively supporting programming on key community issues to enhance civil discourse and intellectual vitality within the University. The task force also recommends undertaking a comprehensive historical overview of Muslims, Arabs, and Palestinians at Harvard to address bias and promote inclusivity on campus.

Institutional response: The task force calls for adopting clearly communicated, user-friendly, and transparent processes for bias incident complaints and anti-discrimination and anti-bullying procedures. The report also suggests establishing support roles to help manage and guide complainants through these protocols.

Freedom of expression: The task force recommends not only adopting policies to protect open academic inquiry, constructive dialogue, and active demonstrations of freedom of expression, but also proactively encouraging and supporting these efforts and providing safe spaces to exercise them. According to the report, clear and transparent policies should exist to manage protest and counterprotest activities, and it should be clearly communicated that the University celebrates community members exercising free speech, provided they respect time, place, and manner restrictions.

Transparency and trust: The task force recommends developing a shared policy framework adaptable by individual Schools, ensuring consistent understanding and flexible application across the University while recognizing the need for School-specific variations. The report suggests a unified communications strategy for these and related policies should be developed. In addition, the task force states that greater transparency and disclosure is needed on issues raised by some community members, such as divestment and greater engagement in the Middle East, including supporting Palestinian and other universities in the region and facilitating exchanges.

Relationships among affinity groups: To strengthen relationships between and within the community at Harvard, the task force recommends creating dedicated permanent spaces and programming that can address the diverse needs of the Muslim, Arab, Palestinian, and pro-Palestinian community. To facilitate community relationships, both task forces call for a central hub for pluralism efforts. In addition, the report proposes a University-wide Office of Religious, Spiritual, and Ethical Life to bolster multifaith work. As envisioned by the task force, these efforts would connect pluralism and multifaith practices across disciplines and enhance programs like interfaith collaborations and cultural events.

Intellectual excellence: As core to the mission of Harvard University, the task force emphasizes the need to enhance the intellectual experience on campus. The report suggests this could include expanding academic offerings by recruiting faculty and increasing courses on Palestinian studies and Arabic language, designing experiential learning programs to address issues like antisemitism and anti-Palestinian biases, and engaging in more University-wide dialogues on crisis issues, alongside existing campus efforts to model respectful dialogue. The task force also calls for leveraging regular surveys, like the Pulse survey, as well as building the capacity to collate and analyze administrative data to monitor community well-being and address key issues on an ongoing basis.

The full report of the Task Force on Combating Anti-Muslim, Anti-Arab, and Anti-Palestinian Bias can be found here, as well President Garber’s message about the new University action plan, and more information on the action steps Harvard has taken to date to respond to the concerns, information, and recommendations shared by the task force.

President Trump has had a difficult relationship with Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell.

Concerns over Trump’s global tariff plans roiled markets earlier this month. Powell, who was first nominated to the post by Trump in 2017, noted the president’s policies could lead to higher inflation and slower growth.

Trump accused the Fed chair of failing to boost the economy by not being more aggressive about cutting interest rates. (The two also disagreed over rates in Trump’s first term.) He also hinted he was contemplating ousting Powell before his four-year-term expires next year, further unsettling markets.

Many analysts said such a move would gravely harm the Fed’s longstanding independence and is, according to Powell, “not permitted under the law.”Trump later said he had no plans to fire Powell.

In this edited conversation, Daniel Tarullo, Nomura Professor of International Financial Regulatory Practice at Harvard Law School, discusses the potential fallout should the president make good on his threats to fire Powell. Tarullo served on the Federal Reserve Board and the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC), the body that decides on interest rates, from 2009 to 2017.

The Federal Reserve Act of 1913 allows governors to be removed for cause, but it doesn’t say anything about the FOMC chair. In your view, does a president, as head of the executive branch, have the power to oust Powell?

There are two separate issues. One is a statutory interpretation issue — whether the addition of the amendment to the Federal Reserve Act in the 1970s, which provided for Senate confirmation of the chair for a four-year term, incorporates the “for cause” protection the original Federal Reserve Act afforded to all members of the Board of Governors.

The alternate reading would be that the four-year term for the chair as chair is not protected by the “for cause” provision.

The second issue, of course, is whether — regardless of what the Federal Reserve Act provides — the Supreme Court believes that the Constitution gives the president removal power for anybody at an independent agency who is performing what the court considers to be “executive” functions. Those two issues are related, but in the first instance, they’re actually distinct.

Is the Supreme Court likely to support such a move given recent decisions on the scope of executive authority?

I think most observers expect some further erosion of the famous 1935 decision Humphrey’s Executor, which for 85 years was understood as validating “for cause” protection for the principals at independent agencies.

Whether the court will further erode Humphrey’s step by step or will sweep it away in a single case remains to be seen.

The issue, though, would be whether the Fed (and perhaps other agencies) would be treated differently. And I think we’ve seen some hints from three of the conservative justices — Samuel Alito, John Roberts, and Brett Kavanaugh — that they may regard the Federal Reserve differently from other agencies.

They may still hold a broad view of the president’s authority, but favor a carve-out for the Fed?

Yes. None of the three justices has done more than hint at a potential difference, so we don’t have a sense of what their basis for distinction would be.

One that is available is the legacy of the Federal Reserve in the First and Second Banks of the United States. There could be an argument that from the very first Congress, which convened right after the Constitution was ratified, there was an acknowledgement that Congress could create an independent central bank.

Now, the First Bank of the United States was not a central bank as we would think of it today, but in the late 18th century it was pretty close to what was then thought of as a central bank, epitomized by the Bank of England. So that argument would be available. It’s not overwhelmingly compelling, but it’s arguable. Besides, I haven’t thought that the court’s recent decisions on the “for cause” removal protection have themselves been compelling, so there is an opportunity for the court to do some picking and choosing.

Is there a good legal argument for removing Powell before his term ends?

We can go back to the fact that for 85 years “for cause” protection in independent agencies was generally thought to be the prevailing doctrine.

But the Supreme Court gave substantial reason to question that proposition in Seila Law, the 2020 case that found Congress’ grant of “for cause” removal protection to the head of the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau to be unconstitutional.

So, it’s the court which has changed that 85-year-old understanding and left unanswered the question of how broadly it will ultimately rewrite Humphrey’s Executor.

If there were an effort by the president to remove the chair, the market reaction would be very significant — well before any court had an opportunity to pass on the issue. The anticipated market effect is a disincentive to try to remove the chair, no matter how unhappy the administration may be with his policies.

Given Powell’s term as chair now has only a year to run, that’s probably an additional argument for just waiting until the president can name his own person as a successor. And so, at some level, the market is as much a protection for the Board of Governors as the law may end up being.

Why is Wall Street rattled by the prospect of Powell removal?

Sitting administrations will almost always favor a looser monetary policy in order to promote near-term economic growth. The point of having some independence for a central bank is that the central bankers can look at the potential impact on inflation over the medium term and try to keep inflation closer to what today for the Fed is a 2 percent target. It’s a pretty simple rationale, but it’s a powerful one.

What markets fear is that if a president removes the chair or other members of the Board of Governors, it would be with the intent of having a looser monetary policy. At that point, the markets’ trust in the central bank will be substantially undermined, and thus, the central bank’s credibility as an inflation fighter will be undermined. Longer-term interest rates will then rise, probably dramatically.

Thus, there’s the potential for an odd situation in which the Fed central bank is more responsive to the administration’s desire for near-term growth and reduces short-term rates, but markets, thinking that’s going to be inflationary, essentially demand a higher premium for holding longer-term Treasuries and other longer-term debt. It’s for that reason that I believe that any action by any administration to try to remove the chair or other members of the board is ultimately self-defeating.

Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent has quite understandably been focused on the 10-year Treasury rate, because that rate is very important for investment decisions throughout the economy. One would presume the administration doesn’t want to drive up that rate because of uncertainty in markets.

How much power does the chair actually have over internal policy deliberations?

There’s still some significant public misperception on just how powerful the chair is within the board and within the FOMC.

For a period when Alan Greenspan was chair, his preferences and decisions apparently more or less drove FOMC decisions. By the time I joined the Board of Governors in early 2009, that was certainly not the case. I think Ben Bernanke, Janet Yellen, and now Jay Powell have all had to do a substantial amount of internal consultation and internal work trying to forge a consensus around monetary policy.

There’s no question that the chair is far and away the most important individual on the FOMC. But it’s not the case that the chair can simply dictate what policy is going to be and the rest of the FOMC will fall into line.

If Powell was replaced by someone with a certain pedigree, would that calm market jitters?

I think if there were an effort to remove him, the identity of the successor wouldn’t be all that consequential because I believe markets would read into the very act of removal an intent to have a significantly more accommodative monetary policy.

If Jay Powell is allowed to serve out his four-year term, then obviously the identity of the individual whom the president nominates to succeed him will be of substantial interest to markets.

Survey results released by Harvard Monday find a strong sense of belonging among community members, but lower levels of comfort sharing opinions and forming relationships across differences. The new data was released as part of a report of the Pulse Survey on Inclusion & Belonging.

First piloted in 2019 following a recommendation of the Task Force on Inclusion & Belonging, the survey seeks to take the “pulse” of the community and gauge the climate around inclusion and belonging of the entire campus community. Administered for the second time in September 2024, the survey asked every member of Harvard — students, faculty, researchers, and staff — to share their personal experience as an individual interacting with peers, and with the institution as a whole. The results will be integrated with other survey data and used to make improvements to programming related to culture and community. 

“The Pulse Survey is a valuable tool for assessing how members of our community experience the University and understand their place in it,” said President Alan M. Garber. “The insights it provides will help guide us as we work toward creating a culture in which each of us feels included, respected, and valued.” 

To understand the results of the survey, including areas of strength and areas for improvement, the Gazette sat down with Sherri Charleston, chief community and campus life officer, and Drew Allen, associate provost for institutional research and analytics. They shared key findings and next steps for improving campus culture related to inclusion and belonging. 

Sherri, I see that you have a different title, and the name of your office has changed. Can you tell me how those changes came about?   

Charleston: Over the past five years, we have evolved to direct a variety of services on campus. I started in 2020 as the chief diversity and inclusion officer, leading the Office for Diversity, Inclusion, & Belonging. Given the high-level outcomes of the last Pulse Survey, President Garber decided to rename the portfolio to Community and Campus Life to align with its current focus — building community and increasing belonging. As we administered the Pulse Survey again last fall and considered the best way to communicate all the services we offer, it seemed like the right time to adjust my title to better reflect what the offices under my direction do for our campus community. 

Tell us more about the Pulse Survey.

Charleston: The Pulse Survey provides a snapshot of how we are faring as a University community relative to inclusion and belonging goals across a variety of metrics. Because it is a “pulse” and not an “MRI,” it is meant to provide us with data that is directional in nature, rather than diagnostic. It can then be supplemented with other survey data to provide a fuller picture of the climate here at Harvard relative to inclusion and belonging.

Allen: It is rare that we have a survey that allows us to hear directly from every member of our community — students, faculty, researchers, and staff. The data are powerful because they point us in the right direction and provide a catalyst for more specific efforts to examine inclusion and belonging at Schools and units across campus. 

What did the survey ask and how many individuals responded? 

Charleston: The survey questions sought to examine the full breadth of human experience levels at Harvard: individual, community, and institutional. The survey looked specifically at four dimensions of inclusion and belonging: sense of value, acceptance and integration, connection across difference, and supportive assets. We wanted to gauge if individuals felt valued, respected, and recognized. We also wanted to know if they were comfortable expressing themselves and forming meaningful relationships with other community members, including those with viewpoints different than their own.

Allen: Importantly, this survey was taken by over 10,000 members of the Harvard Campus community, representing approximately 20 percent of the population. Given the response rate, which is in line with response rates of similar surveys in higher education, we feel confident that the data give us a valuable pulse of the Harvard community and can provide important direction for future initiatives and resource allocation. 

What are the key highlights from the 2024 Pulse Survey data?

Charleston: The survey showed that large majorities of our respondents — students, faculty, researchers, and staff — feel like they belong at Harvard (including 78 percent of students, 81 percent of staff, and 75 percent of faculty and academic personnel). Respondents also generally feel respected (80 percent of students, 79 percent of staff, and 74 percent of faculty/academic). These numbers are very promising, but of course, come with the caveat that there are portions of our community who do not feel like they belong and do not feel respected.

We also found that while most members of our community feel comfortable sharing opinions with others and have been able to form relationships with people who have different viewpoints, it is not as high as we would like it to be. So, this is another area that we will want to explore to consider how we can effectively expand and strengthen efforts like the President’s Building Bridges Fund, which funds student-driven programs to bring community members together across differences. 
 
Allen: As Sherri points out, the survey did show that the majority of students do feel like they can be their authentic selves here at Harvard. In some cases, our data showed an even higher level of positivity than in 2019 when the survey was first administered. The survey provides us with solid data to inform our decisions moving forward. 

How will the University use the data? 

Charleston: We will use this data to improve the experience of belonging and connection on campus, particularly across differences. The learnings from this survey can be used directionally to help us make decisions around where we need to allocate resources, both in terms of capacity and focus. 
 
Allen: I think the data can also be used to identify areas of further analysis. A survey is just one method by which we can try to understand inclusion and belonging, but there are other methods we can use to try to understand something that is difficult to measure directly. The Pulse Survey data will guide us to develop additional lines of inquiry that our institutional research office can pursue so that we can better understand our community and their needs.

What improvements or changes were made on campus after the Pulse Survey was administered in 2019? 

Charleston: There has been a real focus on strengthening our community and increasing the sense of belonging here on campus. One specific example was the establishment of the Harvard Culture Lab Innovation Fund  (HCLIF). Funded by the President’s Office, HCLIF supports project ideas that foster a culture of belonging on campus. Grants are awarded to teams that aim to have a direct impact on the University community, engage the broadest audience, and align with the University’s goals toward excellence. 

In addition to HCLIF, we have leaned into both building digital communities and building communities in person on campus. Our office newsletter has about 16,000 subscribers and allows us to share information across many different communities. We have also focused on building communities on campus through our now annual forum, providing community spaces to combat isolation and polarization, and working with colleagues to promote opportunities for community support. Recently, we awarded funding through the President’s Building Bridges Fund to student-led projects designed to build connection and community across differences. 

What are your next steps and when can we expect the next Pulse survey? 

Charleston: Our first step will be to convene community members to help us think about what we have learned and how we can use this data moving forward. Another piece is for us to think about how the various surveys that the University has conducted over the past few years fit together and how we can integrate those findings. We can use this opportunity to ground our decision-making in data and ensure we take actions that will support and improve the sense of belonging and community at Harvard. 

Allen: When we consider when to do this survey again, we want to make sure that enough time has passed so that we can measure meaningful progress. Consistency and timing for the next survey will be important so that the data we collect is valuable and informative. 

The Trump administration’s freeze of more than $2 billion in federal research grants to Harvard has disrupted work in a number of areas, including efforts to ensure the rights and safety of patients who take part in medical studies.

The administration sent the University a stop-work order for the SMART IRB federal funding contract on April 14. The notice came hours after Harvard rejected government demands that included changes to governance and hiring practices and “audits” of viewpoints of students, faculty, and staff, among other measures.

SMART IRB is a national system administered by a Harvard Catalyst team along with other collaborators. It is used by hospitals, universities, and federal agencies to facilitate oversight of medical research taking place at multiple sites.

Barbara Bierer is the principal investigator and program director of SMART IRB and director of the Regulatory Foundations, Law and Ethics Program at Harvard Catalyst, the University’s clinical and translational science center. She is also a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School.

In this edited conversation, she outlines how the funding cuts will impact patients who take part in research.

How do NIH funds go toward protecting patients?

Generally research, including NIH-funded research involving human participants, must be reviewed, approved, and then overseen by an institutional review board (IRB) to ensure compliance with applicable institutional, local, state, and federal rules, policies, laws, and regulations, as well as to ensure the rights and welfare of research participants.

For most universities and research institutions, IRB review and oversight are included as indirect costs in the research lifecycle. An NIH policy introduced in 2018 and applied more broadly to federally funded research in 2020 has also required multisite, collaborative research to be reviewed by a single IRB (an sIRB), which takes on the responsibility of reviewing and overseeing the research for all sites.

In some of these cases, the costs may be considered direct costs paid for by federal funding.

What role do these IRBs play in protecting patients?

IRBs, which are set up within — or independently work with — hospitals, universities, and other centers that conduct research, play a key role in carefully reviewing research proposals to ensure participants are protected in a number of ways.

These include consideration of the research question and study design, of recruitment plans, the process for obtaining and continuing to ensure informed consent, assessment and mitigation of risks of harm, participant safety, the determination of the relationship of adverse events to the research, data monitoring, etc.

“Every citizen who has benefited from the efforts of clinical research — taking a new drug, using a medical device, or undergoing a diagnostic test — is impacted by the way we conduct and monitor research.”

IRBs and the human research-protections programs also work to train and support investigators, manage interactions with sponsors, and work with federal and state regulators, among other responsibilities.

Think of IRBs as the “checks and balances” system that maintains the ethics and oversight that medical research studies need. Without this dedicated group of professionals and community members, our studies could potentially, and even inadvertently, cause harm to the individuals and communities that participate. Our valued federal laws and regulations were developed and continue to evolve in response to very real examples of such harms.

Across the U.S., thousands of people dedicate their careers to supporting the ethical oversight and conduct of research, working together every day to safeguard those of us who volunteer to take part in a study.

And of course, every citizen who has benefited from the efforts of clinical research — taking a new drug, using a medical device, or undergoing a diagnostic test — is impacted by the way we conduct and monitor research.

Where do we see this work have the biggest impact?

Concern for the safety, well-being, and protection of study participants drives this community of professionals. We make sure that a system exists for potential study participants to understand the research plan, risks, benefits, and burdens, and freely choose whether or not to participate in the research.

The IRB is also a resource to participants should they have questions or concerns about their participation in a study.

IRBs were the result of historical events that highlighted the need to monitor ethical issues that arise with human research. Can you talk about that a bit?

History has proven what’s at stake: the horrors of medical experimentation by German scientists during World War II; the tragic 1932-72 untreated syphilis study at Tuskegee that upended the public’s notion of safety and consent in medical trials and led to the system of oversight we have today in an act signed by Richard Nixon in 1974; the hepatitis studies at the Willowbrook State School for Children where children with developmental disabilities were intentionally infected with hepatitis; and the betrayal of trust and the principle of informed consent in genetic research involving members of the Havasupai Tribe.

Furthermore, our ability as a nation to advance scientific research is at stake. Imagine you have a dozen or more hospitals and universities across the country working on a new therapeutic that could treat Alzheimer’s disease. Before SMART IRB was available, these centers would have spent countless hours and faced numerous hurdles and delays just to collaborate. The process that is now available has reduced many of these blocks to innovation.

How will funding cuts impact this work? 

Broadly, the increasingly expansive cuts to research funding, the cancellation of countless grants and contracts at exceptional research institutions across the country, will have a significant negative impact on research participants as well as on the IRBs and research professionals.

Studies halted midstream risk significant harms to participants and communities and can reinforce public skepticism and mistrust for the research enterprise and inhibit the commitment of researchers and institutions to fully, honestly, and collaboratively work with the communities they serve.

Since SMART IRB received a stop-work order on April 14, ongoing studies cannot add new clinical sites, more than 25 institutions have been prevented from joining, and dozens and dozens of research studies have been delayed.

At present, support from Harvard Medical School is allowing our team to continue the essential work of supporting collaborative research across the nation. It is our intention to continue to do so: The risks are too great, and the health and safety of the American people depend on it.

During recent travels to the West African nation of Benin and to Cuba, his home country, internationally renowned musician and composer Yosvany Terry began to research the link between the musical traditions of Benin and the Caribbean.

He had the opportunity to visit with, learn from, and perform alongside musicians keeping those traditions alive. Now Terry, a senior lecturer on music and director of the Harvard Jazz Ensembles, intends to bring his findings to the classroom and his own performances, including one on May 1 as a part of ArtsThursdays.

In this edited conversation, the Gazette sat down with Terry, who shared insights into his research, the importance of expanding the arts through cross-departmental collaboration, and what he likes best about working with Harvard students.

Tell us about your most recent research project.

My research in Benin (the former Kingdom of Dahomey) in January, as well as the research I have conducted in Cuba over the years, is meant to better understand the roots of modern jazz and the impact of the African diaspora on musical traditions.

Going to Benin and visiting remote regions was an opportunity to engage with musicians, learn from them, and perform with them. I could sit with people who are steeped in this culture and its traditions. It was in those magic spaces where they shared their cultural treasures with me. These musical and cultural traditions are not often researched. My Cuban heritage and personal connections to this culture allowed me to be able to connect with the practitioners I met in Benin and to have access to the traditions they continue to practice.

West African musical and cultural traditions came to the Americas with the slave trade, and this profoundly influenced the music that grew as a result of contact with these African traditions.

As we know, slavery ended much later in Cuba than elsewhere. Slaves closely guarded their cultural traditions. Safeguarding these traditions became a part of their rebellion and a way of maintaining their cultural identity under pressure to assimilate. This movement of resistance allowed them to keep the music, dance, culinary arts, spirituality, and religious practices of the societies they came from.

What will you do with this research?

My plan is to give my students access to this primary source material. I want them to know how these traditions prevailed and were safeguarded, but also how they influenced the musical traditions of Cuba, Haiti, Brazil, and the development of American jazz. With this information we can explore how this music influences popular culture and more deeply, how it becomes part of the fabric of who we are — our identity. One of my missions as an artist and an educator is to give life to this incredible wealth of information and culture that gets overlooked. It is so much a part of our daily life, but for so many, we don’t know where it comes from.

“One of my missions as an artist and an educator is to give life to this incredible wealth of information and culture that gets overlooked.”

What impact will it have on you as a musician and composer?

As an artist, this research allows me to create a new body of work that is in conversation with these traditions. I may base new compositions on this research, or I may be inspired to create a new avenue of exploration and inquiry.

I am now working on writing an opera, which is based upon the life of the first free person of color who organized the first rebellion against the Spanish colonial system in 19th-century Cuba. It is relevant today because the core of this work is unearthing a history that has been overlooked or forgotten.

While I was in Benin, I also traveled with a friend, Davey Frankel, a great filmmaker who was filming and documenting our conversations with historians, musicians, and the people of Benin who still practice these music and cultural traditions. The hope is to create a documentary that would connect the dots between the old Kingdom of Dahomey and today’s jazz music.

As director of the Harvard Jazz Orchestra, what is your vision for students who participate in that group?

I was fortunate to inherit a program that Tom Everett founded in 1972. It became an important jumping-off point for jazz at Harvard because it created space for jazz masters to visit the University. With support from the Office for the Arts at Harvard, it grew into something that the University really embraced, naming more than 120 jazz masters.

Part of what I have done to advance the jazz program is to support the engagement of artists of Afro Latin American descent and to make this a fixture of the band. By inviting jazz masters from all different musical backgrounds, including Chucho Valdés, Angélique Kidjo, Gonzalo Rubalcaba, and collaborating with other departments, we have expanded the scope and learning of students who participate. When we bring in artists of this caliber, we get feedback that this experience “changes students’ lives” Whether they decide to become professional musicians or simply to become lifelong supporters of the arts, we have planted the seed that stays with them.

The other piece I have emphasized with the jazz program is to learn from travel. We have visited Cuba and Dominican Republic, which are countries that students may not have otherwise chosen to visit on their own. These educational trips are not centered on tourist attractions, but rather on real learning from educators and other students in these countries. Our students hear lectures from masters of these musical traditions, including jazz band directors and professors. They engage with other music students in concerts and in jam sessions. These educational trips provide unique experiences that students tell us will stay with them for a very long time.

You have participated as a performer in ArtsThursdays a few different times. How has this programming raised the profile of the arts at Harvard and in the larger community?

ArtsThursdays, an initiative of the Harvard University Committee on the Arts (HUCA), has been vitally important to raising the visibility of art-making at Harvard, not only within Harvard but beyond Harvard into our surrounding communities. It has exposed these communities to the incredible work that is done by Harvard faculty who are active artists and performers, by inviting them to free concerts. Not only does it provide unique opportunities for faculty to engage with other artists, but it inspires students to imagine new possibilities. Importantly, it encourages art creators, students and faculty, to reach out across disciplines within the University, but also to bring artists in from other communities.

I am performing at ArtsThursdays again on May 1. At that performance, you will see a direct connection to the research that I did in Benin and Cuba. It reveals the way in which an artist moves from idea to performance — you can see the full circle — artist research, art-making and creation, and then finally, performance.

In conjunction with the May 1 performance, we are planning a dance workshop to engage dance students with these musical traditions. This is an example of the way in which ArtsThursdays inspires collaboration between departments that are not always in conversation. It’s a collaboration that could grow and might show up in our curriculum or classroom teaching in the future.

What is your favorite thing about teaching at Harvard?

Harvard students are, of course, very smart students who really want to learn. They have an enormous sense of curiosity. But many come to our department without knowing very much about the music or genre they are studying. Over the semester, it is so rewarding to see them grow and at the end, it’s possible to see how these courses have transformed their understanding of jazz and its history. They have this new wealth of information that they will take with them, and they become advocates for the information they have learned.

For me as an educator and composer, I love the collaboration with my colleagues across the different departments. I imagine the things you can do with collaboration in unusual departments. For example, I am working with my colleague Demba Ba, the Gordon McKay Professor of Electrical Engineering, on how we can use AI on creative aspects of composition. We are asking the question about how we can train new models to better learn and use aspects of certain musical traditions that AI has not been able to because of the death of data — traditions from West Africa, for example. Basically, how can we teach the system elasticity? This collaboration is exciting and important.

You have been at Harvard for 10 years. What is your hope for the arts in the next 10 years?

Since 2015 I have seen a lot of changes and growth, particularly in our music department. Those changes can be seen in what was offered before and what is offered now. We have been intentional about expanding our offerings to include different musical traditions. By doing so, we are now seeing a broader group of students coming through our department.

Of course, we cannot be complacent. We must continue with initiatives like HUCA, as well as inviting visiting artists and professors and hosting jazz masters in residence. We need to bring the brightest artistic minds to Harvard to spend time here in order to create new spaces for arts understanding. We need to push for new ways to reimagine arts at the University so that we have a healthy, robust, and diverse arts presence on our campus.

Yosvany Terry and Afro-Cuban Roots: Ye-dé-gbé ensemble will perform Imaginary Dialogues: Dahomey May 1 at 7:30 p.m. in Lowell Lecture Hall. This event is part of ArtsThursdays, a University-wide initiative supported by the Harvard University Committee on the Arts, in collaboration with Arts Fest and with additional support from the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research.

How old is language? A new study from researchers at the University of Zurich and Harvard University reveals that bonobos, our closest living relatives alongside chimpanzees, use the equivalent of word compounds and phrasings, suggesting that the roots of language predate humans.

Communication has always been about more than just words, say the researchers, Assistant Professor Martin Surbeck of Harvard’s Department of Human Evolutionary Biology, and Professor Simon William Townsend and postdoc Melissa Berthet, both at the University of Zurich. The way we pair words to make phrases and sentences and then link these parts into phrases and sentences defines language, and our ability to communicate with each other.

This capability — known as “compositionality” — lets us create new words and phrases. For example, a “bad dancer” is not necessarily “bad” in any absolute sense. That modifier links with “dancer” to create an easily understandable neologism. Such phrasings can help communicate complex social situations.

“There’s been a long-held evolutionary relationship between vocal complexity and social complexity,” said Townsend. Humans are proof of that. “Arguably humans have the most complex social organization, and we also have the most complex communication system with the most complex forms of ‘combinator’ reality.”

The study details the researchers’ observations of the vocal behavior of wild bonobos, a key species for reconstructing human evolution, in the Kokolopori reserve in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Using novel methods borrowed from human linguistics, the team demonstrated for the first time that bonobo vocal communication also relies extensively on compositionality.

Like humans, bonobos have complex social bonds. For example, their social group sometimes breaks off into smaller groups before coming together again. “The social organization is perhaps possible because of this more sophisticated communication,” said Berthet, lead author of the study.

The data collection, done over eight months, was painstaking. Researchers began with a list of roughly 300 contextual features to check off when a bonobo made a sound classified as a peep, yelp, or whistle, and “what they were doing or what was happening.” These assumed that a call could give an order — such as, “Run!” — announce an upcoming action (“I will travel”), express an interior state (“I am afraid”), or refer to an external event (“There is a predator”). The team recorded what happened for two minutes after each vocalization to see how that vocalization influenced the group.

Not only did various vocalizations link to various acts or occurrences, but strings of vocalizations revealed their own meanings, allowing the team to create “a dictionary of sorts,” said Berthet. This dictionary revealed how many of the call combinations had the compositionality recognized from human languages. “This dictionary represents an important step in understanding animal communication, as it is the first time researchers have systematically determined the meaning of all the calls of an animal,” Berthet wrote.

“The beauty of this approach is that all of a sudden we have something that allows us to quantify these aspects of the vocal repertoire in all different types of species,” said Surbeck. “It opens a new understanding into animal communication.”

Such structured language is not unique to humans and bonobos: Similar combinations have been observed in chimpanzees. However, that research has tended to focus on single-call combinations, while this new study looked at an entire vocal repertoire.

“It does seem to be the case that at least in chimpanzees and now bonobos, these species that are characterized by this quite complex social system and long-term social bonds between individuals, that you do start to see levels of combinatorial complexity that you might not see in species with less complex social systems,” said Townsend. This suggests that species “evolve a complex communication system so that you can keep the social bonds and the social relationships going at a distance.”

Because humans and bonobos share a common ancestor from approximately 7 million to 13 million years ago, said Surbeck, they share many traits by descent. “It appears that compositionality is likely one of them.”

It was just hours after Harvard rejected the Trump administration’s demands that the stop-work order arrived in Don Ingber’s inbox.

Ingber, the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering’s founding director, said the April 14 order targeted two of his organ-on-a-chip projects, which together had more than $19 million in multiyear contracts with a unit of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

Ingber, who is also a professor at Harvard Medical School and the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, was among many University researchers who received such orders after the government froze some $2.2 billion in research funding to the University.

The move came in response to Harvard’s rejection of demands that included changes in governance, hiring and admissions, and audits of student, faculty, and staff opinions. A week later, Harvard filed a lawsuit, calling the demands an illegal and unconstitutional overreach and asking for funding to be restored.

After Ingber received the order, work halted but the scrambling — and uncertainty — began for everyone with a direct stake in the projects, including researchers, students, and postdoctoral fellows, he said.

With Harvard and the federal government at odds, with lawsuits filed, and after watching the Trump administration take dramatic steps in other areas only to walk them back, Ingber said he is reluctant to do anything permanent like layoffs.

“This is a stop-work order that could end next week, especially with the lawsuit going,” he said. “We’re going to take care of the people first. The projects need to stop in terms of expending funds, but if there’s spaces on other grants, we’re shifting people to them. We’ll try to find internal funds to keep them going at least until we figure out what’s going on.”

But decisions needed to be made quickly about how to wind down projects. Experiments halted midstream would likely be lost, as would the progress of students and postdoctoral fellows working on theses or papers based on those projects. There has also been a scramble to protect people, Ingber said, by finding places for them in other projects.

The research itself is also of consequence.

Ingber’s primary project uses organ-on-a-chip technology developed at the Wyss to investigate radiation damage to human lung, intestine, bone marrow, and lymph node, providing a tool to both model damage to tissues lining the chip’s tiny channels and identify new drugs that might ameliorate damaging effects.

Ingber said the research is particularly important given the administration’s plans to ramp up nuclear power production to support the energy-intensive artificial intelligence industry.

But even without AI, the project would be useful in modeling radiation damage to human organs in the event of an accident at a nuclear reactor, for cancer patients who undergo radiation therapy, and — in a worst-case scenario — a nuclear bomb explosion.

The second project uses organ-on-a-chip technology to model the effects of microgravity and radiation exposure on astronauts in spaceflight. Scheduled to be aboard the Artemis II mission to the moon, the specialized chips incorporate the astronauts’ own cells to investigate the impact of spaceflight on bone marrow — where blood cells arise.

“Once you get past the Earth’s atmosphere, solar flares generate incredibly high energy radiation that can be lethal,” Ingber said. “Astronauts will undoubtedly be exposed on a long flight to Mars and you can’t just put them up in a capsule made of lead, which is what some people might suggest, because weight is critical to getting out of the atmosphere. Unless we solve that problem, we’re not going to get to Mars with humans. Maybe robots, but not humans.”

The uncertainty is forcing hard decisions. Ingber said he’s already been approached by one scientist on his team who had immigrated to the U.S. and has decided to leave the Wyss to pursue work in Europe. Ingber agreed to give her a recommendation and help her find a suitable position.

“She’s only been here for six or eight months, but she’s terrified. They’re all terrified,” Ingber said. “It’s hard to know what to tell them, other than we’re going to protect them as much as we can.”

It has also affected the decisions of scientists to come to Boston. A European postdoctoral scientist who had accepted a position at the Wyss recently withdrew his acceptance, saying he had been warned by family and friends it’s not safe to be a foreigner in the U.S.

“We’ve been the magnet for the best and brightest around the world. It’s a positive-feedback loop. They really do attract others, build new industries, and become tax-paying Americans,” Ingber said. “Now, no one from America is going to go into science with its lack of stability, and we already have people in Europe turning down job offers.”

Ingber is baffled at what positive outcome the administration hopes to achieve. He spent 90 percent of his time over the last week managing the crisis: meeting with his leadership team, researchers, and staff; consulting with University administrators; and figuring out where funding can be found to meet rapidly shifting priorities.

He’s also writing op-eds about cuts at the NIH, FDA, and CDC and talking to the media in an attempt to make the broader point that academic research is the foundation of America’s innovation economy and underlies many of the things we accept as part of everyday life, from computers to optical cables to iPhones.

“What has driven the economy over the past 50 years is America’s innovation engine that fosters sciences which fuel technology development, driven by the pact between the government and academia,” he said. “This seems to be coming to an end.” 

Harvard’s Stefanie Stantcheva has been awarded the American Economic Association’s 2025 John Bates Clark Medal, an annual prize recognizing an under-40 economist for significant contributions to the field.

“I’m incredibly honored, truly humbled, and very grateful for this award,” Stantcheva, the Nathaniel Ropes Professor of Political Economy, said Tuesday during a department celebration with colleagues and students.

In announcing the award, the association praised Stantcheva for exploring questions in public finance and producing new insights on tax policy and its impact on economic behavior. 

“The tax system is something so powerful that can essentially make or break an economy,” Stantcheva said. “It can either encourage things like innovation — if it’s properly designed — or really discourage economic activity.”

In their 2022 paper, “Taxation and Innovation in the 20th Century,” Stantcheva and her co-authors found that innovation responds to changes in tax policy with high elasticity. The study also revealed that higher taxes have a negative effect on the quantity of innovation but not the quality of inventions.

“Stefanie’s important contributions to the field make her so deserving of this award,” said Hopi Hoekstra, Edgerley Family Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. “It’s wonderful to celebrate her alongside her colleagues, including several past winners, which speaks to the continued strength of this department.”

“We’ve been extremely lucky this year, but not surprised at all that Stefanie got it,” said Elie Tamer, Louis Berkman Professor of Economics and chair of the Economics Department. “She has done stellar work and we’re very proud. It’s a happy day for Harvard and Harvard economics in particular.”

Stantcheva founded the Social Economics Lab in 2018. Her recent work has tackled issues in trade, immigration, climate change, and social mobility.

“I am excited to continue the work at the Social Economics Lab to better understand how people think about economic issues and policies,” Stantcheva said. “We are currently exploring new topics — such as the interplay between emotions and policy — and key mindsets, such as zero-sum thinking.”

A new study reveals how a critical imbalance in bile acids — the substances made by the liver that help digest fats — can trigger liver diseases, including hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC), the most common form of liver cancer. By identifying a key molecular switch that regulates bile, the study sheds new light on potential liver cancer treatment.

The findings were published this month in Nature Communications.

A unique function of the liver is to produce bile, which in turn acts as a natural detergent, breaking down fats into smaller droplets which are more readily absorbed by the cells in the lining of the small intestine. Beyond acting as a detergent, bile acids — a major component of the bile — also play a hormone-like function that governs a number of metabolic processes. Corresponding author of the study, Yingzi Yang, professor of developmental biology at the Harvard School of Dental Medicine, looked at the delicate control of how bile acids are produced and how disruption of the tight regulation leads to liver injury, inflammation, and eventually HCC.

Yang and her team at HSDM have spent years studying cell signaling. One of the pathways they focus on is the Hippo/YAP pathway — a signaling pathway crucial for regulating cell growth related to cancer.

“In this study we discovered that YAP promotes tumor formation with a surprising role in regulating bile acid metabolism. Instead of encouraging cell growth as expected, YAP acts as a repressor, interfering with the function of a vital bile acid sensor called FXR,” she said. 

YAP activation paralyzes FXR (Farnesoid X receptor), a nuclear receptor essential to bile acid homeostasis. This causes an overproduction of bile acids that build up in the liver, leading to fibrosis and inflammation, ultimately leading to liver cancer.

Blocking YAP’s repressor activity — either by enhancing FXR function or promoting bile acid excretion — could stop this damaging cycle, according to researchers. In experimental models, activating FXR, inhibiting HDAC1 that enables YAP repressor function, or increasing the expression of a bile acid export protein (BSEP), all helped reduce liver damage and cancer progression.

“With this finding, it could lead us to pharmacological solutions that stimulate FXR, which is very exciting” Yang said.

According to Yang, the findings have additional implications as more is discovered about how YAP influences metabolic control by regulating nutrient sensing. Yang’s interest in studying this function came from her longtime work in cell signaling in liver biology and cancer. She is also a member of the Dana-Farber/Harvard Cancer Center.

The Yang Laboratory uses molecular, cellular, genetic, and genomic approaches to investigate the critical roles of cell signaling in embryonic morphogenesis and adult physiology. Their research focuses on the mammalian skeleton and liver to explore human biology and address the underlying pathophysiological mechanisms of diseases, including cancer.

This work was supported in part by the National Institutes of Health and the National Cancer Institute.

The average citizen shouldn’t be afraid to imagine a radically different future for humanity, Ruha Benjamin argues. After all, the billionaire CEOs of tech companies are doing it.

The professor of African American Studies at Princeton University, who delivered the Tanner Lectures on Human Values hosted by the Mahindra Humanities Center last week, argued that proponents of AI-powered futures often frame their visions as altruistic despite actually being driven by self-interest.

“There’s absolutely no reason to trust that tech elites have any wisdom to offer when it comes to alleviating human suffering,” Benjamin told the audience who packed Paine Hall. “Billionaires building bunkers to survive AI apocalypse, attempting to disrupt death through cryopreservation, scouting the planet for pop-up cities and network states, are not reliable stewards of the collective good.”

Too often AI technologies marketed as “efficient” and “progressive” only create more oppression, Benjamin said, citing examples such as facial recognition software leading to false arrests and automated triage systems deciding who receives healthcare.

Benjamin said AI is often touted as a moral (or, at least, morally neutral) decision-making technology because it operates on math rather than emotion. But making decisions for society based on math and algorithms hurts the same marginalized groups harmed by the 20th-century eugenics movement, she said.

“One of the buzzwords that goes around is that these systems are so special because they’re engaged in ‘deep learning,’ by which people mean computational depth,” Benjamin said. “But what I suggest is that computational depth without social and historical depth ain’t that deep.”

Benjamin said it’s hypocritical to see superintelligence, Mars colonies, and underground apocalypse bunkers as bold innovations while viewing public goods such as free public transportation and affordable housing as impractical.

“This is an invitation to think about the different types of knowledges that we need around the table,” Benjamin said. “We can’t leave it simply to those who have technical know-how. Many of the problems we’re enduring right now are because those people who are creating tech solutions for society don’t know anything about society.”

Benjamin called for a renewed focus on creativity and imagination, urging universities to prioritize inquiry through arts and humanities.

“This is an invitation not only to be critical, but to be creative. To ask ourselves, ‘Now what?’” she said. “Instead of trying to make the world a little less harmful and make these systems a little less harmful, what if we were to completely reimagine them, envisioning a world beyond borders, beyond policing, beyond surveillance and supremacy? In the process, I think we’ll have to work on dismantling the walls in our own minds, those mental barriers that tell us to ‘get real’ when we attempt to imagine otherwise.”

In 2022, Alyssa Tapley was 13, suffering from T-cell leukemia, and facing a grim prognosis after existing treatments failed to improve her condition. Then, a clinical trial using a novel gene-editing technology called base editing cleared her cancer. It was a breakthrough for science — Tapley’s therapy was the first enabled by base editing — and a lifeline for the patient.

“Now, 2½ years later, I’m 16, preparing for exams, spending time with my family, arguing with my brother, and doing all the things I thought I’d never be able to do,” Tapley told the audience at the 2025 Breakthrough Prize ceremony on April 5. The prizes, whose recipients this year included several Harvard researchers, honor achievements in physics, life sciences, and mathematics.

The scientist behind the technology that saved Tapley’s life is David Liu, the Dudley Cabot Professor of the Natural Sciences and vice chair of the faculty at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. 

“It’s incredibly exciting, and also comes with a heavy sense of responsibility, to make sure that — to the extent humanly possible — we have done everything we can to make these agents as safe and effective as possible for use in patients,” Liu said. 

Hundreds of millions of people worldwide suffer from genetic diseases. To help them, Liu, with support from the NIH, DARPA, and other federal agencies, has built on and looked beyond CRISPR-Cas9, the transformative gene-editing protein found in bacteria that cuts through DNA like scissors. 

“That approach of cutting the DNA double helix is very useful for gene disruption or deletion,” he said. “But if your goal is to correct a mutation that causes a genetic disease, it’s not easy to use scissors to achieve gene correction.” 

The limits of the “scissors” approach led Liu and his team, including former postdocs Alexis Komor and Nicole Gaudelli, to develop two new approaches to gene editing: base editing and prime editing. Base editing works on the four nucleotide bases of a DNA strand — A, C, G, and T — rather than on the entire double helix.

“You can change a C to a T, a T to a C, an A to a G, or a G to an A,” Liu said. “And those happen to be four of the most common kinds of mutations that cause genetic diseases.” 

But what about genetic diseases caused by other kinds of single-letter swaps, or by unwanted extra letters, or by missing DNA letters? For those cases, Liu’s team, including former postdoc Andrew Anzalone, developed prime editors. Liu likened the tool to a word processor, able to search out a flawed piece of DNA and replace it with a synthesized DNA flap that is specified by the user. 

As of today, there are at least 18 clinical trials using base editing or prime editing to treat a range of diseases, with dozens of patients already treated, Liu said.

Liu connects his research to basic science — research that seeks to understand something new about the world without a clear application in mind — that began at Japan’s Osaka University in 1987. There, a team of researchers noticed something unusual in DNA from E. coli bacteria: highly repetitive DNA sequences that were interspersed with non-repetitive sequences, but with the exact same spacing. The phenomenon became known as Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats, or CRISPR.

“There was no knowledge of what CRISPR did, or whether it was going to be useful,” Liu said. “But it was interesting enough for curious people to study. This is the essence of basic science.” 

Over the course of decades, researchers learned that CRISPR was a kind of immune system that bacteria use to protect themselves from viruses. When a virus enters a bacterial cell, the bacterium incorporates some of the virus’s DNA as a kind of genetic memory, allowing it to identify and destroy the virus if it encounters it again. 

“You can imagine a critic saying, ‘Why do I care about a bacteria’s ability to kill a virus?’” Liu said. “The answer is that it turned out to lead to all the CRISPR nuclease clinical trials, and eventually led to base editing and prime editing, and now we can make just about any kind of change in the DNA of living systems, including correcting the vast majority of mutations that lead to genetic disease. And it all came from the basic science of geneticists who first looked at these clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats and wondered what they were doing.” 

Liu is loath to call his technologies a cure: “Scientists are reluctant to use that word until there’s evidence of years without any apparent symptoms of the disease,” he said. But, he added, “The writing’s already on the wall: In some of these clinical trials, the patients are no longer on any medication and don’t have any symptoms of the disease.”

Looking to the future of research and innovation, Liu says he’s deeply worried about the current threat to the partnership between higher ed and the federal government, especially as it relates to young scientists.

“There’s a lot of fear and chaos now that is preventing young scientists from entering the phase of their careers where they can contribute to society in a direct way,” he said. “And that’s a very real tragedy.”

Gary Ruvkun and Victor Ambros were not known as superstars in their field back in 1992 when they discovered microRNA, a feat that would earn them the 2024 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine.

“We were fine. We weren’t terrible,” said Ruvkun, a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School. “But there was nothing about it that made it seem like, ‘Oh, these guys are walking on water!’”

Even after the former Harvard collaborators published their findings in the journal Cell in 1993, revealing a new level of gene regulation in the C. elegans roundworm, the evolutionary biology community was not overly impressed. It wasn’t clear that the genes Ruvkun and Ambros, now a professor at the University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School, discovered mattered to other species, including humans.

Instead, their work, mostly funded by the National Institutes of Health, drew interest from a smaller group of RNA researchers and what Ruvkun calls the “worm community” — those interested in the same model organism.

But the interest in the RNA field kept growing. Meetings that formerly would have drawn 100 attendees doubled in size within a few years. It became clear that the same tiny RNAs had the same role in plants and in worms, and scientists in all different fields were interested in the same questions.

Ruvkun started to realize, “This was some revolutionary stuff, and we were the only people thinking about tiny RNAs in the world.”

Decades of federally funded breakthroughs later, microRNAs are considered fundamental to how organisms develop, mature, and function — playing a key role in translating genes into proteins.

Studies have discovered that the human genome contains about 1,000 microRNAs that control most human protein-producing genes. Therapies based on microRNAs to treat heart disease, cancer, Crohn’s Disease, Alzheimer’s, and several other diseases are in clinical trials.

Ruvkun says about three-quarters of his lab research has been funded by the federal government for the past 40 years, at about $150,000 a year. The money provides enough support for about four people. “It’s not like I had a lab of 50,” he said.

He expresses puzzlement at calls to cut federal funding, emphasizing that spending on scientific work is far from wasteful. “The average pay of the people in my lab has always been about three times the minimum wage,” he said. “These are scientists, and they’re super educated. They have Ph.D.s or are getting Ph.D.s, but they’re paid a little better than working at Dunkin’ Donuts.”

Ruvkun is proud that basic research from his field has led to major pharmaceutical companies like Alnylam, which focuses on the discovery, development, and commercialization of RNA interference therapeutics for genetic diseases.

“It’s one of the 10 biggest companies in Massachusetts,” he said, “and it didn’t even exist 20 years ago.” He’s also glad that his research had enough of an impact that he can continue doing basic science while others worry about the business implications.

Of the top 500 companies in the country, Ruvkun emphasizes, well over half are driven by technology — much of the foundational research behind them driven by federal grants. He credits federal funding with turning the U.S. into a scientific and economic superpower during and after World War II.

He worries that a lack of investment could push members of his laboratory away from science research.

“I have all of these people who are 25, 30 years old, and they’re like, ‘What career do I have? What am I going to do?’” The answer, he said, might be the reverse of the post-war trend: They’ll leave the U.S. for more stable positions in Europe.

Legendary basketball player, writer, and activist Kareem Abdul-Jabbar will address the Harvard College Class of 2025 during the annual Class Day celebration on May 28, the day before Harvard’s 374th Commencement.

“We are so excited to welcome Kareem Abdul-Jabbar as the featured Class Day speaker,” said Uzma Issa ’25, first marshal of the 2025 Class Committee. “He’s a champion in every sense of the word — celebrated both for his extraordinary achievements on the court and his lasting efforts to build a more just and compassionate world. He has shown that true leadership is measured by the difference we make in people’s lives.”

“It’s a privilege to share this moment with the Class of 2025 and to celebrate all that lies ahead,” said Abdul-Jabbar. “The world needs their ideas, their energy, and their heart. I hope my words will encourage them to keep learning, keep growing, and keep showing up — for themselves and for others.”

Widely regarded as one of the greatest basketball players of all time, Abdul-Jabbar is also an award-winning author, cultural icon, and tireless advocate for social justice. In 2016, he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom — the nation’s highest civilian honor — in recognition of his contributions on and off the court.

The 7-foot-2 basketball Hall of Famer dominated the NBA for two decades with his trademark skyhook, becoming the league’s all-time leading scorer — a title he held for 39 years. A 19-time NBA All-Star and six-time NBA champion, he remains the only player in NBA history to win six Most Valuable Player awards. Time magazine once dubbed him “History’s Greatest Player.”

Since retiring in 1989, Abdul-Jabbar has continued to use his platform to challenge public thinking on a wide range of issues. An influential columnist, he has written for major media outlets worldwide and now publishes regularly on his Substack newsletter. A nine-time Southern California Journalism Awards Columnist of the Year, he is known for incisive commentary on sports, politics, and popular culture. Today, he remains one of the most outspoken and respected voices confronting racism and inequality in America.

A New York Times bestselling author of 20 books, Abdul-Jabbar’s forthcoming book, “We All Want to Change the World: My Journey Through Social Justice Movements From the 1960s to Today,” offers a sweeping account of the protest movements that reshaped America and will be released in May.

Abdul-Jabbar traces his activism back to his high school years in Harlem, when he had the chance to ask Martin Luther King Jr. a question at a news conference. The brief exchange sparked a lifelong commitment to fighting injustice like systemic racism and inequality in education, health, and employment.

Appointed in 2012 as a U.S. Cultural Ambassador by the State Department, he was tasked with promoting education, racial tolerance, and cross-cultural understanding among young people around the world. In 2021, the NBA established the Kareem Abdul-Jabbar Social Justice Champion Award to honor the next generation of athletes working to lift up their communities. His public service efforts have earned him numerous honors, including Harvard’s W.E.B. Du Bois Medal in 2022.

Abdul-Jabbar is the founder and chair of The Skyhook Foundation, which brings science, technology, engineering, and mathematics education to underserved communities in Los Angeles.

An award-winning documentary producer and two-time Emmy-nominated narrator, Abdul-Jabbar is the subject one of HBO’s most-watched sports documentary of all time, “Kareem: Minority of One.” His on-screen appearances span hundreds of iconic film and television roles.

“Kareem Abdul-Jabbar has spent a lifetime speaking out against injustice and using his platform to educate and inspire,” said Srija Vem ’25, second marshal of the 2025 Class Committee. “As we prepare to take our next steps in life, his legacy reminds us that we all have the opportunity — and the responsibility — to use our voices, our intellect, and our talents in service of something greater.”

In addition to Abdul-Jabbar’s address, Class Day includes award presentations and student orations. The event will begin at 2 p.m. on May 28 in Tercentenary Theatre and will be livestreamed.

Harvard filed a lawsuit Monday against the Trump administration, arguing its freeze on research funding is unconstitutional and “flatly unlawful” and calling on the court to restore more than $2.2 billion in research dollars.

The filing, in U.S. District Court in Boston, requests that the court vacate and set aside the funding freeze to allow previously approved funding to flow and halt administration efforts to freeze current or deny future funding without engaging in procedures contained in federal law.

In a message to the community Monday, President Alan Garber said the suit was prompted by steps the government took over the last week, after the University rejected administration demands for changes to Harvard’s governance, hiring, and admissions policies, and to ensure “viewpoint diversity” in part through audits of viewpoints of students, faculty, and staff.  

Garber described those changes — contained in an April 11 letter from the government — as intrusive and said they’d impose “unprecedented and improper control over the University.”

Garber noted some Trump administration representatives have said since April 11 that the letter was sent by mistake. But he said other statements and the administration’s actions since don’t bear that out.

Within hours of Harvard’s rejection of White House demands, the administration doubled down by announcing a freeze of $2.2 billion in funding and has since said it is considering revoking Harvard’s tax-exempt status and threatening the education of international students. In addition, Garber said, the administration is considering freezing an additional $1 billion in funding.

“Moments ago, we filed a lawsuit to halt the funding freeze because it is unlawful and beyond the government’s authority,” Garber said. “Before taking punitive action, the law requires that the federal government engage with us about the ways we are fighting and will continue to fight antisemitism. Instead, the government’s April 11 demands seek to control whom we hire and what we teach.”

Harvard’s complaint says the First Amendment protects free speech against government interference intended to enforce ideological balance and bars the government from using legal sanctions or other coercion to suppress speech it doesn’t like.

The complaint also describes the government’s freeze-first strategy as violating laws that lay out procedures for research fund recipients suspected of civil rights violations. Prescribed steps progress from voluntary negotiations to an official hearing followed by findings. Then, only 30 days after the findings are released can funding be terminated.

“These fatal procedural shortcomings are compounded by the arbitrary and capricious nature of Defendants’ abrupt and indiscriminate decision,” the lawsuit said.

The filing describes a rapid escalation on the part of the government. After initial inquiries in February from the administration’s multi-agency Task Force to Combat Antisemitism, administration and University officials scheduled an official visit to campus in late April.

In late March, however, Harvard received a letter announcing a review of research grants totaling $8.7 billion to the University and its hospital affiliates. On April 3, Harvard received a list of conditions under which it might ensure continued funding and, finally, on April 11, a letter fleshed out those conditions.

Those details, which included overreaching and broad-ranging demands, prompted the University’s rejection and Garber’s statement that Harvard would not negotiate over either its independence or its constitutional rights.

Garber said the administration’s actions have jeopardized critical research being conducted on cancer, infectious disease, and battlefield injuries.

With funding in flux, the lawsuit says, hard decisions about things like living cell lines being used to investigate disease and the jobs of researchers whose positions are tied to federal grants will have to be made. Unless funding is restored, Harvard’s research programs will be considerably curtailed.

“The consequences of the government’s overreach will be severe and long-lasting,” Garber said. “Indiscriminately slashing medical, scientific, and technological research undermines the nation’s ability to save American lives, foster American success, and maintain America’s position as a global leader in innovation.”

Garber acknowledged that work to fight antisemitism remains to be done on campus. “We need to ensure that the University lives up to its ideals,” he said.

Though Harvard has already taken several steps in that direction, Garber said the Task Force on Combating Antisemitism and Anti-Israeli Bias and the Task Force on Combating Anti-Muslim, Anti-Arab, and Anti-Palestinian Bias will soon release full reports.

He described them as “hard-hitting and painful” and said they include recommendations that have concrete plans for implementation.

“As a Jew and an American, I know very well that there are valid concerns about rising antisemitism. To address it effectively requires understanding, intention, and vigilance,” Garber said. “Harvard takes that work seriously. We will continue to fight hate with the urgency it demands as we fully comply with our obligations under the law. That is not only our legal responsibility, it is our moral imperative.”

The Trump administration’s decision to freeze more than $2 billion in long-term research grants to Harvard has put a halt to work across a wide range of medical, engineering, and scientific fields. The action came in response to the rejection of White House demands for changes that the University argues infringes on its independence and constitutional rights and exceeds the administration’s lawful authority.

The NIH had earlier halted an estimated $110 million in grants to Harvard and its associated hospitals since late February.

We interviewed some of the researchers whose projects have been halted or face an uncertain future.

Sarah Fortune

John LaPorte Given Professor of Immunology and Infectious Diseases, and chair of the Department of Immunology and Infectious Diseases, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health

Research interrupted: A $60 million seven-year, multi-institutional consortium to study how the immune system controls tuberculosis.

“About a third of the world is thought to be infected with TB and carry TB, and most of those people will not get sick. But every year, 10 million people get sick, and 1 million people die, which makes TB the world’s leading infectious cause of death. We’re trying to understand the difference between protective and failed immunity to TB to better identify people with TB and then prevent TB, ideally with an effective vaccine.

“This consortium was conceived of at the National Institutes of Health as their moonshot effort to move the needle on TB. The goal was to bring together the very best researchers from around the country and around the world to bring the very best cutting-edge technology, the very best science to understand TB immunity. And if it stops, the whole thing is gone.

“I’ve been building this consortium since about 2014. For me, this is over a decade of work. Scientific knowledge, scientific expertise is a craft. And if you blow it up, you can’t just rehire people and recreate it and then start again. It’s gone.”

[Open Philanthropy, a California-based philanthropic group, has authorized a $500,000 grant to allow researchers at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine to complete an ongoing tuberculosis vaccine study, The Boston Globe reported Monday. That study is a single piece of the broader project Fortune is working on as a principal investigator.]

Donald E. Ingber

Founding director of the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard, Judah Folkman Professor of Vascular Biology at Harvard Medical School and the Vascular Biology Program at Boston Children’s Hospital, and Hansjörg Wyss Professor of Bioinspired Engineering, Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences

Research interrupted: Two contracts worth under $20 million: one to test and develop drugs to treat long-term radiation exposure, including chemotherapy, and the other to study the effects of microgravity and radiation in space on human cells to help astronauts travel to Mars.

“Both projects were contracts administered by the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA), which is responsible for developing countermeasures for biological, radiation, and chemical threats for the U.S.

“The larger BARDA contract focuses on development of human organ-on-a-chip microfluidic culture models of human lung, intestine, bone marrow, and lymph to model the human response to exposure to gamma radiation, and to identify potent radiation countermeasure drugs. We have made great progress on this project.

“The BARDA project supported by NASA is to use human organ-on-a-chip technology to create living ‘avatars’ of astronauts by lining the chips with cells from astronauts and then flying the chips alongside them on space missions. The goal is to use these to understand the effects of microgravity and radiation (which currently makes it impossible for man to go on long space flights, to Mars, for example) and again, develop countermeasures. This initial project is to demonstrate the feasibility of this approach.

“Radiation countermeasure drugs we are developing would be valuable for cancer patients, many of whom receive radiation therapy and experience side effects (higher and more effective therapeutic doses could be administered with less toxicity) as well as be stockpiled to protect against a nuclear disaster or attack; and they could enable long term spaceflight, and hence, exploration of Mars, which is not possible now.

“As for what the repercussions are, it means that this type of work would stop but more importantly that the salaries of almost 20 students, fellows, and staff are at risk if this stop order is not reversed soon.”

Duane Wesemann

Associate professor of medicine, Harvard Medical School

Research in peril: A $10 million project grant to fund a large consortium of laboratories to study the immune system and its ability to respond to different coronaviruses as preparation for future possible pandemics. That grant was halted before the most recent freezes and later temporarily reinstated by a court order pending appeal.

“What we learn from coronaviruses is relevant to other infections because we’re trying to understand how the immune system operates.

“We were finishing up our third year of a five-year plan. The termination was a surprise.

“There are multiple levels of loss. On one level, these grants from the NIH are vetted very heavily by independent scientific review, and there’s only a small percentage of grants that end up getting funded because of the review process. Grants like this and others that are terminated, which have been vetted, scored, and deemed important, rigorous, and worthy to happen, represent a loss of all the effort that went into the process.

“For our lab, it is a huge loss of opportunity. We have been collecting longitudinal blood samples from several individuals over many years to try to understand the long-term effects of immunity to the virus, infection, as well as vaccination, to study how long-lasting things are, and what regulates the longevity of the immune response.

“We may have to cancel collecting blood from this cohort. To see this happen to our lab and to see it happen to other labs across the country is devastating.”

Subhash Kulkarni

Assistant professor of medicine, Harvard Medical School

Research facing uncertainty: A $3.5 million neuroscience research project that studies how the neurons in the gut change with aging and conditions such as Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s diseases.

 “My research project has not been stopped yet. Whether it will be stopped or not is something that I don’t know.

“My project is based at my research lab, which is a neuroscience lab that studies the gut. We study the neurons that reside in the gut and regulate the human functions related to eating, digesting, and defecation.

“It is important to understand how these neurons change with aging or with conditions such as Parkinson disease, Alzheimer’s disease, or irritable bowel syndrome. What our lab does is try to understand how the neurons in our gut age, and what can we do to make them young again.

“This is an ongoing project. Our ability to keep on going depends upon our ability to keep putting in grants and getting in the money because we are at the end of our grant cycle. If our grants don’t get funded, all that research stops, and the years of work will go wasted. We are in the last year of a five-year grant. If the grant is curtailed even before the time ends, then the work will stop immediately.

“One of the main things to remember is that when we get funding, part of that goes toward salaries, but a significant part goes towards buying reagents and chemicals from American manufacturers and buying mice from American companies. Every single dollar of federal funding is spent toward people’s salaries and reagent materials that are here in the U.S.

“Our ability to train undergraduates, who are American, all stops immediately if our funding gets stopped.”

“There is uncertainty right now. We don’t know how it’s going to go.

“We hope that crucial research is not stopped because every research that we do at HMS and elsewhere is a result of a highly competitive process. This is not funding that we get because of the largess of the federal government. We have to compete with every single lab around the entire country and it’s a function of that competitive process that we get grants to do the work that we do.”

After years of careful stewardship, the University began this fiscal year with its endowment worth a record-setting $53 billion. 

But that overall number can conceal several important details. Most of the endowment is not only restricted by donors and held in separate funds, but the majority of those funds belong to one of the University’s 12 Schools. Less than 5 percent of the overall value is unrestricted and directly under the discretion of University leadership.

After the conflict that erupted last week between the University and the White House, the Trump administration moved to freeze billions in long-term research grants, with many more “under review.” The president has also argued that Harvard should lose its status as a tax-exempt institution. 

To some degree, endowments can be used to allay financial uncertainty and cover unexpected costs. But those decisions come with costs of their own. 

In this edited conversation, John Y. Campbell, who has served as the Morton L. and Carole S. Olshan Professor of Economics at Harvard since 1994, talked about how the endowment actually works.

Campbell’s research focuses on long-term investing, asset pricing, and personal finance. He served on the board of the Harvard Management Company, which oversees the endowment, from 2004 to 2011. And in 2021, he was a member of a working group that helped reimagine endowment management for Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, or FAS. 

In 2024, you co-wrote a paper on endowment management, using Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences as a kind of case study. What generally did you find?  

That paper sought to give a framework for helping the FAS think about its long-run budget situation. I, along with my co-authors Jeremy Stein and Alex Wu, were motivated by a frustration with the usual accounting approach, which is all about managing this year’s cash flows so things add up.

So, for example, if you’re short of money and you can spend a little more from the endowment, that fixes the problem this year. But of course, it takes away resources that you would otherwise have in the future. It doesn’t help you in the long run.

This is an economist’s perspective on what can seem like a very large amount of money. You found that — in the case of FAS — the endowment is already being used to cover what would otherwise be a large budget deficit. 

That’s right: When people in the Harvard community or the public at large look at the endowment, they look at those billions of dollars, and they think that that’s money that can just be spent on anything that the University wishes at any time.

There are two separate problems with that. Yes, much of the endowment is restricted — there are severe limitations on what the money can be spent on. But there’s another problem we identify: That in a certain sense, the endowment revenues have already been spent — to fund the ongoing existing operations of the University. 

Those operations funded out of the endowment vary widely: professorships, research, construction among them. And then about a fifth of the annual distribution allows Harvard to offer really generous financial aid, just increased once more this spring. 

Absolutely — and I’m all for that policy. But it does reduce the revenue that the School could otherwise collect, and thus it puts more burden on the endowment to cover expenses each year. 

Then there are the exogenous shocks: financial crisis, recession, the COVID-19 pandemic. In those cases, a university can — and Harvard has — stepped up distributions to cover shortfalls elsewhere. 

That’s right. You can do it in different ways. You can do a “decap” — using endowment funds for current expenses; you can adjust the payout rate; you can borrow against the endowment.

In a short-term emergency, like the pandemic or what may develop in today’s political environment, it may be entirely appropriate to do so. But the thing you need to be aware of is that, when you do that, you are easing your budget problems this year in return for a tighter budget in future.

Harvard’s approach to endowment management, like many others’, relies on targets and projections: It assumes 8 percent returns on investments, 3 percent inflation, and a payout of roughly 5 percent each year. But if the last 20 years have taught us anything, it’s that reality can be a great deal more volatile than that.

That’s right. Our way of looking at volatility — long adopted by Harvard financial administrators — is, in any one year, to find ways to smooth out its effects.

If the endowment does super-well one year — goes up by 25 percent — now you have a lot of new resources. But you don’t need to spend them all at once; in fact, it would be very imprudent to do so. Instead, you smooth it out, gradually increasing your spending in a cautious, well-planned way. 

Meanwhile, there are also downside risks, too: In the wake of the financial crisis, in 2009, the endowment lost 27 percent of its value. And as of this week billions of federal dollars may be at risk of being frozen or revoked. What are the options now? 

University leaders now need to sit down with the sort of spreadsheet framework that’s in our paper, and they need to do a scenario analysis: “How bad could this get?” 

If there’s an endowment tax, if we lose “x” million dollars in sponsored research funding. You could even look at what might happen if Harvard lost its tax-exempt status.

What they are going to see is — if this a prolonged or permanent change — it’s going to have very meaningful implications for Harvard’s long-term future. And you’ll have to do some radical things: There will have to be a major change in spending or a major change in revenue — where you find it somewhere else. 

You don’t have to do everything at once. That would be foolish. The luxury that Harvard’s endowment gives us is time — you have time to make change in an orderly fashion. But our framework says that if circumstances change so that you have less money coming in on a permanent basis, you are eventually going to have to fully adjust.

Some runners cross the Boston Marathon’s finish line with hands held high, a look of elation on their faces. Others find themselves slumped in a medical tent with Jeff Brown, lead psychologist for the Boston Marathon medical team.

“We’re not talking about, ‘Oh, I need ice for an ankle,’” Brown said about these finishers. “Someone is significantly overheated or underheated. They’re having terrible cramps. They’re disoriented. They might not know exactly where they are.” Laid out on cots are people with extremely low levels of salt in the blood, and others who are sad, fearful, and agitated for reasons they can’t explain. Brown’s role, along with his team of mental health clinicians, is to help perform psychological evaluations and recognize symptoms of a wide range of medical conditions.

Seeing these high levels of acute distress mere meters from the finish line, some might ask, “Why bother?” There are other ways to stay in shape or raise money that don’t require an extreme feat of cardiovascular and muscular endurance over multiple hours in unpredictable weather conditions.

It’s a question that Brown, a Harvard Medical School lecturer, McLean Hospital psychologist, and author of “The Runner’s Brain,” ponders each year as thousands of runners funnel past him. It will no doubt be on his mind Monday during the 129th edition of the Boston Marathon.

The reasons, Brown said, are inexhaustible, but what they have in common is that they’re “very, very personal, and really it is that personal energy and commitment that keeps people going, regardless of where they are in their lives.”

Over the years, he’s met hundreds of people who are running for a recently deceased loved one, contending with a cancer diagnosis, and fundraising for a beloved charity. He’s met women who — monitored by medical staff — finished the marathon while far along in their pregnancies and other athletes who explicitly ignored their doctors’ instructions and ran with cracked femurs, torn muscles, recent sprains, and diabetic complications. “Perhaps it’s not a surprise,” said Brown, “that they meet us in the medical tent at some point.”

A marathon channels people’s energy into a methodical, focused pursuit, and, especially at Boston, one that provides some bragging rights. “It allows people to come to terms with themselves,” Brown said. “When it comes to self-concept and belief about one’s capabilities, we always do better when we have some sort of objective measure.”

That objective nature is crucial, Brown says. Not only do you complete a race, but when you finish, you get a medal placed around your neck. “I think of that as kind of this transformational moment,” he said, “because it’s something that was a hope that is now realized as a wish fulfilled. It’s the mind-body thing happening.”

He loves seeing people he’s treated gather enough mental and physical strength to leave the medical tent and finally collect their medals. “It’s almost like they had a chance to review their whole experience one more time,” he said, “and it might mean a little more to them.” He’s seen huge smiles, tears, and quiet reflection. “I think that’s just a reflection of the vast continuum of emotion and purpose and goals that people bring to running the Boston Marathon.”

Marathon runners invest enormously varying amounts of time and energy preparing for the race. Some are young, single people who sacrificed late nights out and lazy weekend mornings to set a personal record. Others are older, first-time runners who might be taking time away from their kids and spouses to complete a bucket-list item. A few are looking to advance professional running careers, and others show up having done barely any training at all.

A medal — and some bragging rights — are far from the only reward that motivates some people to invest thousands of hours into race-specific training and for others to ignore the sound medical advice of their doctors.

“In our world that’s rather cluttered with a lot of criticism, it’s a really nice way of getting affirmations in a healthy way,” Brown said. “And people, in our heart of hearts, we just want to be treated civilly.”

Running is also an opportunity to change your own conception of yourself and, at least for a few hours, how others view you. “For a while there after you complete a marathon, you’re kind of a hero,” Brown said. “You’ve done something that a lot of other people would never set out to do or think about doing, which is pretty darn cool.”

The mental side of running still fascinates Brown and has kept him on the Boston Marathon’s medical staff for more than 20 years.

“That one day, with 30,000 runners, there are 30,000 different ways of completing that marathon,” Brown said. “Imagine all the thinking and psychological experiences and reflections and motivations and negative thoughts and positive thoughts that went all those 30,000 different ways.”

Lawyer and legal scholar Randall Kennedy can fairly be described as something of an iconoclast.

As a public intellectual, he is known for his openness to different points of view and his nuanced and sometimes provocative opinions about issues such as affirmative action (there are costs along with benefits), racial profiling (not completely nonsensical but ultimately discriminatory), Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion statements (abandon them), and some other issues typically associated with the left.

Kennedy, the Michael R. Klein Professor of Law, has also been unafraid to engage with the right. In 2020, the conservative Manhattan Institute invited Kennedy, a longtime questioner of critical race theory, to participate in a discussion on the topic. He eventually took other CRT critics on the panel to task for being too categorically dismissive.

“The great thing about his work is that you can never predict where he will end up — on racial justice, he sometimes seems conservative, sometimes liberal,” said then-Law School Dean Martha Minow in a 2013 profile of Kennedy. “In his field of race and the law, he is unique in the legal academy. I don’t know anyone else who has his commitment to pursuing the truth about controversial issues to wherever it goes.”

Kennedy, 70, was born in Columbia, South Carolina, and raised in Washington, D.C. His family’s move north from the Jim Crow South, along with his father’s pessimism about prospects for lasting racial justice in the U.S., left a deep imprint on Kennedy’s intellectual life.

The son of a postal worker and a schoolteacher, Kennedy attended the prestigious St. Albans School, did his undergraduate studies at Princeton, and was a Rhodes Scholar. He attended Yale Law School and has taught at Harvard since 1984. The author of seven books, Kennedy recently spoke with the Gazette about his life, career, and views on racial equality in the U.S. The interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Why did your father decide to move the family from Columbia to D.C.?

My parents were refugees from the Jim Crow South. My father was from Louisiana. My mother was from South Carolina. My father was a postal clerk and my mother a schoolteacher. They met at Fort Jackson, South Carolina, during World War II.

In the mid-’50s, soon after my birth, they left. An incident precipitated their move. It involved my father. He carried a gun as part of his employment driving a truck with the postal service. In some little town in South Carolina a white policeman stopped him. The policeman said, “We don’t allow negroes to have guns. Surrender yours.”

My father refused, and they had a standoff. My father got out of there fast, made it to Washington, D.C., got on the telephone, and said to my mother, “We’re moving.” Years later, I asked my father why he had left inasmuch as he and my mother had just built a house outside of Columbia. He said to me the following: “I thought that if we did not move, I was going to kill a white man, or a white man was going to kill me.”

Did you experience discrimination while you were growing up?

Yes. The most memorable episodes transpired during trips from D.C. to South Carolina for holidays. Even as a kid, I sensed how the atmosphere changed as soon as we went over the 14th Street Bridge from D.C. into Virginia.

I remember a couple of times when my father was stopped by the police as we were driving in Jim Crow territory. The scenario was the same. A policeman would pull our car over. My father would ask, “Is there a problem, officer?” and the officer would say, “No, there’s no problem. I pulled you over because I noticed you have Washington, D.C., license plates, and I wanted you to know that we do things differently down here.”

The policeman was testing my father, and my father played along. He did what the police officer wanted, and what the cop wanted was for my father to call him “sir,” and be deferential, show that my father knew to stay in his place.

My father performed as required, and we went on our way. God bless my father for that! He put as his highest priority the well-being of his family. If he had to swallow his pride to accomplish that aim, so be it. What commitment. What poise. What discipline. What love. Yes, God bless my father for that.

How did your parents’ views on race influence you?

They influenced me greatly in all sorts of ways, some of which undoubtedly are beyond my conscious awareness. One was my father’s bone-deep pessimism about the possibility for lasting racial justice in America. He believed that the United States of America was created to be a white man’s country and would always be a white man’s country, and he never forgave the United States for its mistreatment of African Americans.

At his burial, because he was a veteran, a representative of the U.S. military was on hand to deliver an American flag, nicely folded, to my mother. I remember looking at my brother and smiling amidst the tears. We both knew that our father would have found this scene uproariously funny because my dad was not a patriot. He was an anti-patriot. The effort to understand the sense of aggrievement that he felt has been a big part of my intellectual life.

What memories do you have of your childhood?

I had a wonderful childhood! I spent several summers in Columbia, South Carolina, where I would stay with my Aunt Lillian. I had a great time even though during some of those summers no public parks were open. Why? Because South Carolina preferred to close the public parks rather than see them desegregated. But I had lots of friends, and we had lots of fun.

I also recall my childhood in D.C. with fondness. My parents bought a house two blocks from the Takoma public park. It was at that park that I learned to play football, baseball, and, most importantly, tennis. The tennis courts at Takoma public park are named after my father, Henry Kennedy Sr. He was known as “Mr. Tennis.”

To support his tennis-playing children, he learned everything that he could about the game and became quite proficient as a teacher and organizer of tennis tournaments. When he passed away, people in the neighborhood successfully petitioned the city government to name the tennis courts in his honor.  

Is it true that you were a very good tennis player in your teens and that you played against Robert McNamara, who was then secretary of defense under President Lyndon Johnson?

I was a very good junior tournament player, as was my brother. He and I took care of the tennis courts at the St. Albans Tennis Club in Washington, D.C., on the grounds of the National Cathedral.

On Sunday mornings we were supposed to close the courts down during the Cathedral service. Usually, we did. But occasionally Defense Department Secretary Robert McNamara and National Security Adviser Walt Rostow would show up and beseech us to allow them to play. We even played doubles with them from time to time.

On one occasion, a chauffeur came to the courts and announced that the president was on the phone and wanted to speak with McNamara right away. The secretary left for a few minutes, returned, and play continued.

McNamara and Rostow were both quite competitive, but Rostow was the better of the two.

I read that tennis allowed you to attend the prestigious St. Albans School.

When my brother began taking care of the tennis courts at St. Albans, I would help him. When courts were open, and few people were around, I would practice with him.

The head pro at the club, who was also the tennis coach at the St. Albans School, saw me play and contacted my parents about applying to the school. They told him right off that we didn’t have St. Albans-level money. He told them that he could get me a scholarship if I could gain admission.

I ended up applying, gaining admission, and playing No. 1 on the school varsity from the eighth grade to the 12th.

I’ve gone to very fine schools, but the most transformative was St. Albans, where I fell under the sway of my favorite teacher, John F. McCune, known to generation of boys as Gentleman Jack McCune. He was my American history teacher and introduced me to the work of Richard Hofstadter at Columbia University and C. Vann Woodward at Yale University.

Reading their books changed my life. It was Mr. McCune who got me interested in the politics of historiography. He was a thoroughly inspirational figure. We shared a birthday and became close friends. I was with him the day before he died and was honored to speak at his memorial service at the National Cathedral.

How did you become interested in law?

Lawyering as an idea was an active presence in my household. My father spoke often about the time that he saw Thurgood Marshall argue the South Carolina whites-only primary case, Rice v. Elmore, in 1947.

The plaintiff was a Black business owner by the name of George A. Elmore, who challenged the exclusion of Black voters from the South Carolina Democratic primary. The judge ruled that the Democratic Party of South Carolina could no longer exclude qualified negroes from participating in primary elections.

And my parents were very proud of their friendship with the leading Civil Rights attorney in South Carolina, Matthew J. Perry. Most influential, however, was the example set by my brother, a 1973 graduate of HLS, who became a prosecutor, a Washington, D.C., judge, and then a judge on the United States District Court in the District of Columbia. (When he retired, he was replaced by Ketanji Brown Jackson, who now sits on the Supreme Court.) 

You seem to have great admiration for your brother Henry.

Yes. He was a conscientious jurist and is a remarkably encouraging and loving big brother. He has been a wonderful cheerleader for me and our younger sister, Angela, who is also an attorney. He has been especially important to me since my wife passed away.

Could you tell me how you met your wife?

My romance with Yvedt L. Matory began when I was a first-year student at Yale Law School, and she was a second-year student at Yale Medical School. We had met previously when she attended Sidwell Friends School, which was a 15-minute walk from St. Albans.

We married in June 1985 and had three children. She was a surgical oncologist at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital. She died of melanoma when she was only 48 years old. She passed away two months shy of what would have been our 20th wedding anniversary. I have lived a charmed life. The great tragedy that befell it was the death of my wife of blessed memory.

You served as a clerk to Justice Thurgood Marshall in 1983-1984. Can you talk about that experience?

It was thrilling to be able to work with and for “Mr. Civil Rights.” (Two of my co-clerks, by the way, are esteemed colleagues here: Terry Fisher and Howell Jackson.)

A strong argument can be made that Marshall was the greatest lawyer in American history. Think about the variety of posts he held — counsel for the NAACP, court of appeals judge, solicitor general, and Supreme Court justice — and the difficulties he had to overcome to make such positive contributions to American life and law!

I learned a lot working in the Marshall chambers. Seeing him up close was an inspiration that has deepened over time as I’ve gained a better sense of what he was up against and the patience, tenacity, poise, and grit that he displayed over a long period of time.

Did your father get a chance to meet Marshall?

My father met Justice Marshall on the next to last day of my clerkship. My father told “Mr. Civil Rights” how inspiring it had been to see him in that courthouse fighting for Black folks’ rights in a fashion that elicited grudging respect even from racist enemies. 

How did you come to Harvard Law School?

When I left Yale Law School, I was all set to go work for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund after my clerkships with Judge J. Skelly Wright and Justice Marshall.

But near the end of my third year of law school, I got a telephone call from HLS Dean James Vorenberg, who invited me to the Law School to talk with him and other members of the faculty about a career in legal academia. I shall always be grateful for his solicitude.

When I talk about my fondness for HLS, some friends tease me, calling me a Pollyanna. Too bad! It’s hard for me to imagine a better setting for a professor than Harvard Law School. I have been surrounded for nearly 40 years by wonderful colleagues and students. Working here has been a blessing.

What role does teaching play in your career compared to research and writing?

I thoroughly enjoy research and teaching and am engaged in writing all the time. The course that I’ve taught the most is contracts. For a long time, I felt considerable anxiety before every class. Over the past decade, though, that anxiety has steadily dissipated. Now teaching contracts is wholly fun. One of my upcoming books will be about contracts in the context of intimate associations — friendship, dating, marriage, surrogacy, adoption, etc.

Much of my teaching and almost all of my writing thus far has been about the regulation of race relations. I am about to complete a book on which I have been working for nearly a decade. It responds to the following question: How did protests over racial injustice in the mid-20th century change American law? I seek to answer that question in 800-plus pages.

You wrote a book that examines the historical, cultural, and social significance of one of the most offensive words in the English language. Can you talk about it?

It is my only best-seller and has generated considerable controversy. It provoked an attempted assault at a bookstore reading and has triggered walkouts. It has also prompted lawyers to seek my assistance as an expert witness in employment discrimination suits, union grievance actions, and prosecutions for murders and assaults in which I have testified for the defense in some cases and for the state in others. By the way, the full title of my book is “Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word.”

There were many people who said, “Well, you could have titled your book something else,” and there were people who would say, “You’re just trying to be sensationalistic.” My main goal was to educate, but how do you educate? If you’re boring, you’re not going to educate. You have to do something to get people’s attention and keep people’s attention. Do I try to do that? Sure, I try to do that. But I don’t view it as a bad thing.

Some in the media have, at times, labeled you a conservative. How do you respond to that?

Anybody who labels me conservative has not paid attention to what I have written over the course of my life. I believe that the United States is afflicted by unjustifiable hierarchies and inequalities that generate avoidable social misery. I think that it is scandalous that in a country this wealthy, there are so many people who are insecure regarding nutrition, shelter, healthcare, employment, and personal security due to crime and poor policing. I am in favor of reforms that aggressively address these problems.

The intellectual and ideological communities I find most attractive find voice in magazines such as The American Prospect, Dissent, The Nation, and The London Review of Books. If that makes me conservative, so be it.

I think that some observers have erroneously pegged me as conservative because I savor the company of intelligent conservatives such as my recently departed friend and colleague Charles Fried, because I participate enthusiastically in programming sponsored by conservative organizations such as the Federalist Society, because I strongly criticize certain policies such as mandatory Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion statements for university hiring and promotion, and because I indulge in certain rhetorical gestures that raise eyebrows — such as my use of the word “negro,” a term that I began using in 1984 at the insistence of my boss Thurgood Marshall and continue to use in homage to him and A. Philip Randolph, Martin Luther King Jr., Medgar Evers, W.E.B. Du Bois, my grandmother Lillian Spann, “Big Momma,” and countless other admirable souls.  

You said that your father was pessimistic about the possibility of achieving lasting racial justice in America. What is your view?

Yes, my father was a pessimist on the race question. He did not believe that we shall overcome. The tradition he voiced is a strong tradition that includes the likes of Thomas Jefferson, Alexis de Tocqueville, Abraham Lincoln, Marcus Garvey, Malcolm X, and Derrick Bell. Tragically, there is much to which proponents of this tradition can point to substantiate their view that racial justice in America is doomed.

I place myself, however, in a different tradition, the tradition expounded by Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King Jr., the tradition that embraces the possibility, indeed the likelihood, that racial decency will become an increasingly large and influential feature of American life.

I am deeply alarmed by the effective mobilization of racial resentment that has gripped American politics. But I take solace ironically in recognizing that a substantial part of that menacing reaction stems from remarkable successes in racial reform. 

When I was born on Sept. 10, 1954, my home state of South Carolina explicitly subjected African Americans to a degraded, stigmatized status. It was not alone. Pigmentocracy was pervasive. 

Yet, within a lifetime, by dint of remarkable struggles undertaken by Americans of all complexions, things changed sufficiently to enable a Black man to be president of the United States — a Harvard Law School alumnus who comported himself with consummate intelligence, grace, and honor.   

Finally, what advice do you have for young lawyers?

Keep the fun quotient high by finding work that you love.