Scott Miller’86 dreams of producing an absurdist musical called Promenade. The author, Maria Irene Fornés, recorded a series of nouns on index cards and then randomly selected from the stack to write each scene. “It’s so bizarre,” he says, grinning and leaning back against the show posters that line the walls of his home office. “Honestly, I’m terrified that no one would actually come to the show.” The prospect of a theater devoid of patrons doesn’t dull Miller’s smile. The self-described “bad boy of musical theater” has earned a following in his hometown, St. Louis. And New Line Theatre, the nonprofit company he founded, recently celebrated its twenty-fifth anniversary and moved into its first permanent home.

Miller began his career as a teenage usher at what was then the city’s only professional musical-theater company. For eight consecutive summers, he guided patrons to their seats and listened to family-friendly productions of Oklahoma! and Fiddler on the Roof. Itching to tackle “more challenging, adult stuff,” he arrived at Harvard ready to start a concentration in musical theater, only to learnthere wasn’t one. “It didn’t even occur to me to ask,” he says. He briefly considered transferring before learning that the College would fund student productions. Then he proceeded to stage what he calls “guerilla theater” in common rooms, libraries, and wherever else he could find space. “Because there was no theater department, there was no control,” he says. “It was wild and really cool.”

After graduation, Miller opted against a move to New York, electing instead to launch his career away from the entrenched norms of Broadway. Partly because costs were lower, St. Louis was a “safe space” for the kinds of rule-breaking productions he wanted to stage. “If it’s bad,” he says, “it’s bad in St. Louis.” He founded New Line in 1991. The early years were challenging. Making money by writing and directing edgy theater in small venues across the city was almost impossible, but Miller became skilled in the financial acrobatics necessary to keep the company afloat: “We figured out we could do one show that might tank, like Jerry Springer: The Opera, and then something that was more secure financially, like Bonnie and Clyde.”

“We’ve accidentally become this company that saves shows from Broadway,” he says.

Beginning in 2008, the company earned national attention for reviving Broadway flops. Miller became infatuated with the cast album for a new show called High Fidelity, adapted from Nick Hornby’s novel. Curious to find out why it tanked on Broadway after just 13 performances, Miller dug up a bootleg video of the production, concluded that the “original director was just awful,” and reached out to the composer and lyricist about getting the rights. They were surprised but thrilled that he wanted to resuscitate their show.

High Fidelity made its second debut in a raucous, pared-down production that sold out almost every night of its three-and-a-half-week run. Following that hit, New Line revamped two more shows with short-lived Broadway runs: Cry-Baby, adapted from the John Waters film, in 2012, and Hands on a Hardbody, about a Texas contest in which participants vie to win a truck, in 2014. Each of the re-crafted productions drew enough attention that directors all over the country began seeking his advice. “We’ve accidentally become this company that saves shows from Broadway,” he says.

In the theater world, Miller’s faithfulness to scripts is uncommon.Many directors cut chunks from shows—even from hits—to save time and hassle, or to broaden appeal. New Line’s associate director, Mike Dowdy, says he’s never seen Miller cut a line from a production. When something feels wrong, Miller scavenges for past versions of scripts, tracks down writers and lyricists, and scours the Internet for anything that helps provide useful context. He relied on the memoir of an addict in early 1990s New York City to shape his interpretation of Rent. For Hair, which New Line has produced several times, he scrounged up a first-person account of an LSD experience to help his actors bring the psychedelic scenes to life. As Miller does more research, “he gets more and more excited, and that fuels us,” Dowdy says. “He’s really about creating a world for the actors to live in.”

Miller’s production choices strategically highlight each story’s social relevance. His version of Rent offers one example. For the set’s focal point, he requested a vast round platform painted to look like the moon. The platform represented everything from a table to a dance floor to a state of limbo for characters forced to navigate lives shattered by addiction and disease. He also cast unusually young actors, judging that the show’s wrenching narrative was much sadder that way.

According to Miller, shows like Rent, which debuted in 1996,are part of a new age of musical theater created by writers and lyricists who spurn commercial norms and turn instead to productions focused on social and political issues. “People were writing these shows that felt like old-school musicals, but with new dark, ironic content,” he says. “It was happening all around the country, but all the little pieces didn’t know about each other.”

New Line started as one of those pieces, a radical Midwestern theater lonely in its mission. But after two-plus decades operating out of church basements and college theaters, it finally has a permanent brick-and-mortar home. The Marcelle Theater is tucked inside a renovated warehouse on a gentrified street in the city center. Designed especially for New Line thanks to local philanthropists Ken and Nancy Kranzberg, the facility holds a black-box theater, rehearsal space, studios, and offices. New Line inaugurated the space in November with its sold-out production of Heathers. Next up is American Idiot, opening in March.

As for his dream production of Promenade? Well, Miller says, “We’ll do that one when we have $20,000 in the bank.”

During its 150th-anniversary celebration in December, the Harvard Club of New York unveiled Everett Raymond Kinstler’s portrait of John P. (Jack) Reardon Jr. ’60. In accompanying remarks, club president Charles L. Brock, J.D. ’67, AMP ’79, a past HAA president, cited the highlights of Reardon’s formal University service: director of undergraduate admissions, of athletics, and of the Harvard Alumni Association. (He also served on the club’s board, and is a Harvard Medalist.) Brock then turned to address the man he called “our Jack of all trades. Our ace of Harvard clubs. Our king of countless Crimson hearts.” Reardon’s “rare wisdom, wit, and warmth” have been deployed as he has “counseled and cajoled presidents and provosts” and other members of the Harvard community. But more important, Brock said, Reardon is “the kind of person so many of us aspire to be,” at the core of Harvard as a human institution: “Jack, you are our John Harvard.”

Juan Francisco Torres Landa, LL.M. ’90, a corporate attorney in Mexico City, has never used marijuana and doesn’t plan to start now, even though he recently became one of only four people in Mexico granted the right to do so, after a legal battle that went all the way to the country’s Supreme Court.

For him, the fight isn’t about the freedom to grow his own pot or a desire to get high. It’s about the catastrophic violence engulfing his country, fueled by drug trafficking—murders, kidnappings, torture, extortion—and the desperate search for some way, any way, to stop it.

Between 2007 and 2014, according to data from Mexico’s National Institute of Statistics and Geography, the country recorded more than 164,000 homicides, as many as half or more (estimates vary) attributable to drug violence—and no comprehensive count exists for the thousands of drug-related kidnappings. In 2011, at the height of the cartel wars, 27,000 people were killed. And this January, a newly elected mayor in the central city of Temixco, who had vowed to combat organized crime “frontally and directly,” was shot to death at her home less than 24 hours after taking office. Days later, UCLA researchers released findings that the drug violence in Mexico was undoing a century’s worth of gains in male life expectancy.

“It’s a disaster,” says Torres Landa. And Mexico’s prohibitions against drugs, along with its ceaseless campaigns against traffickers, he argues, “have themselves created more damage than the damage they were supposed to mitigate.”

Which is why, in 2013, he and Armando Santacruz, M.B.A. ’87, whom he met through the Harvard Club of Mexico, along with two other plaintiffs, sued for the right to grow and consume their own pot. As members of the anti-crime organization México Unido Contra la Delincuencia (Mexico United Against Crime/MUCD), all four would like to see marijuana legalized outright.

On November 3, the Supreme Court ruled 4-1 in the plaintiffs’ favor, declaring that the country’s laws against the possession and use of the drug represented a violation of their fundamental human rights, specifically “the right to the free development of one’s personality,” enshrined in the Mexican constitution. (The ruling applies only to the four who brought the case, though; for it to become law, the Supreme Court would have to decide four more cases in the same way. And it may get the chance: since December, at least five other sets of plaintiffs have applied for permission to grow their own marijuana, the first step in filing suit.) With the lawsuit, the plaintiffs risk exposing themselves to danger—and indeed, they are careful never to call out a cartel by name, never to attack any specific person—but, Torres Landa says, “When you see damage being done, you cannot simply watch. You cannot stand by and say it’s OK for people to be kidnapped and extorted. No.”

American consumers are, by far, the prime market for Mexican drug traffickers, so legalizing marijuana in Mexico, where the drug is less popular, will not immediately undermine the drug cartels’ business. But as Santacruz and Torres Landa hoped, the court decision did open a conversation that had remained stalled for years: about the effectiveness of Mexico’s drug laws (some of the most severe in Latin America), and about the wisdom of its tough-on-crime approach.

Since the ruling, President Enrique Peña Nieto, a longtime opponent of marijuana legalization, has said he welcomes a debate—though he hasn’t changed his mind—and has promised to convene medical experts and sociologists to discuss possible reforms. A senator from Nuevo Leon, a state deeply scarred by drug violence, proposed legislation to allow the import of medicines made from cannabis. And Mexico City’s mayor introduced a plan to potentially legalize medical marijuana nationwide. The city’s archbishop, Cardinal Norberto Rivera, gave his and the Catholic Church’s assent. “We have no problem,” he told reporters, with the drug’s medicinal use. Months later, Torres Landa says, “This topic has not faded. It is being discussed not only in the executive branch and the congress, but in offices, restaurants, and colleges. It is a true awakening.”

After more than a decade, the country’s American-backed “war on drugs” has imprisoned thousands of Mexicans but secured few lasting victories against organized crime, political corruption, and the flow of drugs and money throughout Mexico. “The cost to society” of drug-related incarceration, Santacruz says, “is huge; the destruction of lives is huge. This is a totally dismal, totally destructive policy.”

Organized crime “is tearing the country apart,” Mexican Supreme Court justice Alfredo Gutierrez Ortiz Mena, LL.M. ’96, said during a December talk at Harvard on the role of the court in Mexico’s democracy, and meanwhile, the issue of drug policy “had been pushed under the rug.” He ruled in favor of the plaintiffs in November and in his talk compared the landmark case to the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education and Brown’s role in sparking an American conversation on civil rights. “If the court had not stepped in,” he mused, “would the states have done something? Would the federal government?”

Juan Francisco Torres Landa

Torres Landa and Santacruz found themselves asking similar questions about Mexico’s drug policy. The men seem unlikely antagonists in a fight over access to weed. Husbands, fathers, buttoned-down professionals, each has served as president of the Harvard Club of Mexico. Born in the state of Guanajuato, Torres Landa was raised in Mexico City and earned a law degree from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México and worked for several years at a firm in Mexico City before moving on to Harvard and six months in practice in Washington, D.C. He then returned home to the firm (which in 2014 merged with the international firm Hogan Lovells), where he is a partner.

Santacruz also grew up in Mexico City; he studied accounting at the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México before attending Harvard Business School. He is co-founder and CEO of Grupo Pochteca, a raw materials, chemical, and paper-distribution company with operations in Brazil, Central America, and Mexico.

Armando Santacruz

Both men remember a different, safer Mexico. As a child, Santacruz traveled on the equivalent of a Greyhound bus to a family ranch in Chihuahua, some 800 miles from Mexico City: “When I turned 13, my mom allowed us to go there on our own.” By the 1990s, however, things had turned “nasty,” and in 1997 he and others started MUCD. Its lead founder—and one of the legalization plaintiffs—is Josefina Ricaño de Nava, whose son, Raul, had been kidnapped that May by a killer nicknamed “El Mochaorejas”: The Ear Chopper. “He used to send them to the families to put pressure on them to pay up,” says Santacruz. In the end, Raul was killed; a family member found his body at the morgue months later. And three years ago, Santacruz’s own brother was abducted, although he was released unharmed. Torres Landa had a cousin who was kidnapped and killed. “And an uncle,” he says, “whom I was able to recover.”

In 2004 a MUCD-organized “Let’s Rescue Mexico” march drew 250,000 people, all dressed in white, onto the streets of Mexico City, and the group has pushed for reforms in policing and criminal justice. But, Santacruz says, the group saw that such efforts “would always be overwhelmed by the power and the incredible force of the drug business.” Torres Landa adds, “The drug policy we have lived with for many years has in fact generated tremendous availability and diversity of drugs, and in a way that the government exercises no control over whatsoever.”

Changes in drug policies among other countries in the region should bolster efforts in Mexico. In Colombia, personal marijuana use is legal, and Uruguay legalized cannabis in 2013. The following year Chile planted its first crop of medical marijuana, using 850 seeds imported from the Netherlands.

But public opinion in Mexico has solidly opposed legalizing pot. In part, say Santacruz and Torres Landa, that’s because the drug, paradoxically, is little known locally. In a 2011 survey, about 2.5 percent of Mexicans reported having used marijuana during the past year, versus the 7.5 percent of Americans who report having used it in the past month. The Supreme Court ruling has been widely reported and “gives us a chance to spell out the real dangers,” Santacruz says. “Look, pot is certainly dangerous.…But it’s not going to turn you into Godzilla. And if anyone you know smokes under regulated conditions—which is what we’re proposing, that the government regulates it—we will all be better off than if people have to touch base with organized crime every time they need to get some dope.”

The lawsuit has its origin in MUCD, a citizens' group formed in 1997 to try to reduce crime.

Most pivotal in shrinking the Mexican marijuana trade are the evolving revisions of U.S. marijuana policies. “Honestly, it will be best for us when the U.S. fully legalizes,” says Santacruz. “Legalizing locally here in Mexico, we can reduce some of the problems, but we still will have the illegal export market.” Some 40 percent to 70 percent of the pot consumed in the United States comes from Mexico (estimates vary among U.S. law enforcement groups)—enough to represent roughly 15 percent to 30 percent of the cartels’ overall revenue. But in recent years, 23 states and the District of Columbia have legalized marijuana in some form, and Mexican suppliers, reportedly, are already being affected: between 2012 and 2014, Border Patrol seizures of Mexican pot fell by 23 percent, according to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA). And late last year, multiple news reports described how legal marijuana grown in the U.S. was driving down the price so sharply that some Mexican farmers had stopped planting it.

Those same reports, though, noted that some farmers are switching over to poppies. That tracks with the DEA’s findings, too: seizures of heroin (and methamphetamines) along the Mexican border have risen. To truly disable organized crime, Torres Landa and Santacruz know, will require legalizing not just marijuana but those other, harder drugs. “In the long term, yeah,” Torres Landa says. That’s a tougher sell, but one that is also gaining traction around the globe. Last year, Brazil’s Supreme Court began debating the decriminalization of marijuana, cocaine, and heroin, and Ireland announced plans to decriminalize heroine, cocaine, and marijuana possession. In Colombia and Peru, it is legal to cultivate and possess cocaine; in Germany and Switzerland, people caught with cocaine face fines instead of jail. Several countries, including Canada, the United Kingdom, and the Netherlands, allow the medical use of cocaine or heroine—or both. Portugal decriminalized all drug use in 2001.

For now, Santacruz and Torres Landa are pursuing one small step at a time. “When people see that we don’t become a zombie nation because marijuana is legal,” Santacruz says, “then we can move on” to other drugs. “We know it’s a long journey.” Perhaps that’s why, on December 11, when the plaintiffs picked up their permits from Mexico’s federal health authority office and displayed them for news photographers waiting outside, the two men, half-smiling, looked not so much exultant as resolute.

Jeremy and Kathryn Medlen have two children, but with eight-year-old Avery around, it often felt like three. A beloved mixed-breed mutt with flopped-forward Labrador ears, Avery was a member of the family, welcome on the couch, included on vacations, a fixture in family photos. But in June 2009, the dog spooked at a thunderclap and fled the Medlens’ Fort Worth, Texas, backyard. He ended up at a nearby shelter, where his overjoyed owners found him the following day. They lacked the cash to pay the required fees, however, so a “hold for owner” tag was placed on Avery’s cage until their return. But when Jeremy Medlen arrived with the cash and his two children in tow, their pet had disappeared. Somehow, there’d been a mix-up, the Medlens were told. Avery had been put to sleep.

Devastated by the loss, the Medlens brought a lawsuit seeking damages for Avery’s sentimental value from the shelter worker who’d made the tragic mistake. But in the Lone Star State, they learned, “loss-of-companionship damages” were available only for human plaintiffs who’d lost close human family members. In the eyes of American law, animals are considered property, and in Texas, this entitled the Medlens only to their “property’s” market value. As an eight-year-old mutt, Avery had virtually no value at all, and the case was dismissed.

So the Medlens appealed the decision. In the past, Texas courts had awarded damages for the sentimental value of personal property with little or no market value—such as lost heirlooms like jewelry, pistols, and hand-made bedspreads—and the Medlens argued that Avery fit this category perfectly. The Texas Court of Appeals agreed, but the state’s Supreme Court overturned that decision, ending the Medlens’ quest for compensation.

Animals were property, the Supreme Court ruled, but they were not like other types of property. Although an heirloom is “sentimental,…an owner’s attachment to a beloved pet is more: It is emotional…based…on the rich companionship it provides,” the court found, and “cannot be shoehorned into keepsake-like sentimentality for litigation purposes.”

The Medlens were stunned. If this were true, they argued, one could seek sentimental damages for the destruction of a “taxidermied” pet deemed an heirloom, but not for a euthanized animal. Furthermore, it trapped them in a Catch-22. “Loss of companionship” damages were not available because Avery wasn’t human, yet the court also said that pets offered such “rich companionship,” they could not be treated as things. It left the Medlens wondering: Did property law apply to animals, or didn’t it? Was a lost heirloom, an inanimate thing, really more emotionally valuable than their beloved pet? And why, if judges believed an animal to be a special kind of property—“not a fungible, inanimate object like, say, a toaster,” as the court wrote—was the law still so unclear?

These questions are at the center of a Harvard Law School (HLS) course on animal law. First offered in the spring of 2000, it was initially among a handful of its kind; today, more than 150 American law schools offer classes on the topic, a reflection of the growing interest in a young field whose scope and influence are still being defined.

These issues have also become increasingly compelling to practicing lawyers. In the United States, laws regulating the treatment of animals have been on the books since the early Colonial period, but “animal law” as a field is relatively new, and focuses increasingly on the interests of the animals themselves, rather than on their value to the humans who write and litigate the laws governing them.

As the role of animals in society and the economy has evolved, and more recently, as scientific research has revealed more about animals’ cognitive abilities and social development, public sensibility has changed dramatically, often leaving outmoded law behind. As a result, lawyers worldwide have begun searching for innovative ways to make animals more visible to the law: strengthening and enacting new anti-cruelty statutes, improving basic protections, and, in some more radical cases, challenging animals’ property status itself in an effort to grant them fundamental rights.

But even as legal advocates press toward the same goal—closing the gap between the way many people believe animals should be treated, and how the law actually treats them—their strategies can differ vastly. Sometimes, they clash outright.

“Animal welfare and animal rights are two different goals within the field of animal law,” explains law professor Kristen Stilt, who teaches the animal-law survey class—an annual course typically oversubscribed on the first day of registration. The law divides everything in the universe into just two categories, she explains: “persons” and “property.” Legal persons have rights, property doesn’t—so all “animal laws” on the books are about protection and welfare, not about intrinsic individual rights.

Most lawyers interested in animal issues focus on animal welfare, she says, using the existing legal system to challenge, improve, augment, and enforce laws protecting animals. But the issue of whether animals should have legal rights—and which rights, and which animals should have them—is wide-open. If persons have rights and property doesn’t, some scholars and practitioners argue, then legal “things” like animals remain mere chattel in the eyes of the law, subject to whatever use legal persons deem important. But if animals are no longer deemed property, many ask, where should law draw the line? Should primates have the same rights as humans? Should dogs? Should ants? What about animals in the wild, or those used in medical research, or the billions slaughtered for food?

At the moment, says Stilt, the law remains unwavering: animals are property—albeit with certain protections. But the people administering that law have become increasingly uncomfortable with that designation. The Medlens’ case is a good example that she teaches in both her property and her animal-law courses. “Even the Supreme Court judge who wrote the opinion, before he ruled against [the Medlens], spent pages talking about how ‘Texans love their dogs,’” she points out; he drew a clear distinction between animals and anvils.

According to Stilt, this is where things stand in 2016 in animal law—a discipline that, 40 years ago, formally didn’t exist. “It’s part of what makes this field fascinating,” she says. “We know how law doesn’t work for animals, but we have no clear idea yet about how it should.”At the moment…the law remains unwavering: animals are property—albeit with certain protections.

Harvard’s original animal-law class, taught over the years mainly by adjunct professors who are scholars and practitioners in the field, was a product of student demand. In 1995, law students founded a local chapter of the Student Animal Legal Defense Fund (SALDF), affiliated with the national Animal Legal Defense Fund, a nearly four-decade-old organization dedicated to protecting animals from abuse through legislation and litigation. (SALDF members don’t litigate; their mission is to educate the community about issues facing animals, and various avenues of reform.) Hosting and promoting more than 20 events per year, SALDF quickly became a strong voice on campus, and by 2000, HLS had acknowledged their appeals. A gift from Pearson Television in honor of game-show host and avid animal protectionist Bob Barker funded the original course. In the years since, both regional and national bar associations have established their own animal-law committees to support and shape the burgeoning field. That has, in turn, inspired Harvard to broaden its investment in the discipline.

 This year, HLS added “Wildlife Law” to its curriculum. Taught by Jonathan Lovvorn, senior vice president and chief counsel at the Humane Society of the United States and an adjunct professor of law at Georgetown University, the class is one of several new courses Harvard plans to offer. A gift from Bradley L. Goldberg, founder and president of the Animal Welfare Trust, has underwritten a new Animal Law & Policy Program intended to expand the animal-law curriculum, establish an academic fellowship program, and foster future academic gatherings and scholarship.

“This is one thing most law schools have not done to date—to approach animal law in an integrated academic program as opposed to a one-off course,” says Goldberg, who hopes his gift will help establish animal law as a recognized academic discipline. “My interest comes from believing that animal protection is a global social-justice movement…but unlike other social-justice movements such as women’s rights or civil rights, animal rights goes almost totally unrepresented in academia.”

Dean Martha Minow thinks the climate for animal-law growth is ideal. “Though treatment of animals has always been an issue, only recently has law begun to take it seriously,” she says. “For anyone thinking about the purpose of law, the legal treatment of animals forces a confrontation with what law is actually about—‘What are its purposes? What are its limits? Is law only about human beings?’” One way to understand legal history, she explains, is to trace “the ever-expanding circle of law—who’s in and who isn’t.” Animal law is part of the newest expansion of that circle, and “there’s an opportunity now to contribute to the development of law reform in a way that hasn’t always been the case.”

That opportunity and responsibility fall largely to Stilt, the faculty director of the new program, and Chris Green, its executive director, who must decide how to design a curriculum that covers a topic intersecting with all other areas of legal study. Cases involving animals range from civil suits (like the Medlens’ pet-compensation case) to criminal trials (like football player Michael Vick’s, for animal cruelty and dog fighting) to environmental lawsuits (protecting wildlife and its habitat), says Stilt—and “those are just the obvious ones.” She ticks off a long list of other questions that have come before the courts, among them: Does the right to free speech apply to undercover videotaping of cruel animal practices? Should humans be able to patent an animal? Who gets the pet in a divorce? Should religious freedom outweigh animal-welfare concerns?

Stilt touches on many of these topics in her survey class, but says a single course can never do the field justice. Among the topics she and Green are considering for attention is comparative international animal law, a topic with which Stilt is quite familiar. Her own background is in Islamic law (she also directs Harvard Law School’s Islamic Legal Studies Program, including its new Animals, Law, and Religion Project). Her interest and expertise in animal law began as a Middle Eastern history doctoral student living in Cairo, where she worked with a group of Egyptians who were starting the first modern animal-protection organization in the country. Animal issues became a focus of her scholarship, and she is currently working on a study of the recent inclusion of an animal welfare provision in the Egyptian constitution.

Chris Green’s career in animal law, in contrast, began at HLS. After a year there in the early 1990s, he took a six-year leave of absence and planned to enroll in veterinary school; he credits Harvard’s decision to offer that first animal-law class—and its engaging teacher, animal-protection lawyer and scholar Steven Wise—for helping him chart his professional life. Green eventually became an officer in the school’s SALDF chapter and immersed himself in animal advocacy; he went on to publish on the subject and become a legal advocate for animals, serving as chair of the American Bar Association’s animal law committee and, most recently, as the director of legislative affairs for the Animal Legal Defense Fund (ALDF). He also became a committed vegetarian—as are most animal lawyers; attorneys, quipped one practitioner, don’t eat their clients.

Wise began that first class, recalls Green, with a seemingly simple question: “Why should a human have fundamental rights?” Wise, in a recent telephone interview, said he has raised that issue in every class he has taught since, and students have responded with several explanations: sentience, cognition, language, and spirituality. But according to Wise, “The only way to answer that question is: ‘Because a person has the form of a human being.’” Consider the case of a baby born with only a brain stem—no consciousness, no sentience, only the ability to breathe and digest. Students would recoil, he said, when he’d ask why they couldn’t experiment on that baby…or kill, or even eat, her.

Courts or legislatures may ultimately decide that it is“human form” that determines personhood, Wise told a New York Times Magazine reporter in 2014. But if they do make that decision, he continued, “I’m saying that’s irrational. Why is a human individual with no cognitive abilities whatsoever a legal person with rights, while cognitively complex beings such as [a chimp] or a dolphin or an orca are things with no rights at all?”

Some legal scholars answer the animal rights question very differently. Richard Epstein, a law professor at New York University, is an outspoken critic of Wise and of the notion of extending rights to animals. “You cannot prove that an animal has the capacities of a human being by proving that it’s not a stone,” he said in an interview. The issues that would come with rights, he argued, would cascade and snowball down a slippery slope. If a wild animal occupies land, can it own it? Can animals enter into contracts? Can they vote by proxy?

Even if the law awards animals just one right—the right to bodily liberty, as Wise advocates—the question, Epstein argued, becomes, “Which animals?” “We kill millions of animals a day for food,” he pointed out. “If they have the right to bodily liberty, it’s basically a holocaust.”

Epstein pointed to the work of many animal-welfare lawyers—as well as to the work of Temple Grandin, an autistic professor of animal studies who designs farm-animal slaughter systems that take animal needs and fears into consideration—as shining examples of what animals need. “You can give animals protection without giving them rights,” he said. “The two are separate things.”

During the past few decades, animal protections have expanded exponentially. Various states now have laws banning unethical hunting practices. In 2013, California became the first state to ban the use of lead bullets for hunting (which not only kill their target, but poison the scavenger birds and animals who clean their carcasses). Many states outlaw steel-jawed leg-hold traps and cock- and dog-fighting (some, including Colorado and Massachusetts, ban bear-baiting). Florida, by ballot initiative, was the first state to forbid gestation crates (6-by-2-foot-wide metal crates in which breeding sows spend their entire lives, unable either to stand or turn around); eight states followed suit with similar protections. A 2016 Massachusetts ballot initiative proposes ensuring that breeding pigs, veal calves, and egg-laying hens can stand up, lie down, turn around, and extend their limbs by phasing out inhumanely small and crowded cages. Perhaps most notably, as of 2014, when South Dakota added a felony provision to its animal anti-cruelty laws, all 50 states can now prosecute violations of animal anti-cruelty laws as felony offenses.

Nevertheless, the scope of the protection afforded an animal often depends on where it lives and what “business” it’s involved with. Many state anti-cruelty laws categorically exempt farmed animals or standard husbandry practices, such as de-horning, de-beaking, tail-docking, and castration without pain relief. There is no federal law protecting chickens from cruelty or abuse on a farm, for instance, and state anti-cruelty laws often exempt them from protection, says Jonathan Lovvorn—but if someone kills or injures a blue jay in the rafters of a chicken house filled with 10,000 laying hens crammed five or more to a crate, he “could be fined $15,000 and sentenced to six months in jail under the Federal Migratory Bird Treaty Act.”There is no federal law protecting chickens from abuse on a farm…but if someone kills or injures a blue jay in the rafters of a chicken house, he could be fined $15,000 and face months in jail.

Steven Wise agrees that animal-welfare work is both valuable and necessary; he practiced it himself for years. To date, he points out, the Nonhuman Rights Project (NhRP), an organization he founded and now runs that protects the civil rights of animals, is the only group of lawyers practicing animal rights law, or animal jurisprudence, as he now calls it. “I practiced animal law,” he says, “because that was the only law that existed.” Although he now fights to address the larger question of legal personhood, he acknowledges that there are thousands of suffering animals that need legal protection today.

His sights, though, are set squarely on removing animals from the category of “things,” a goal he believes requires the construction of a new kind of law dealing with the rights of nonhuman animals. In 2013, he filed his first of three cases on behalf of chimpanzees, producing headlines such as “Should a Chimp Be Able to Sue Its Owner?” and “Are Chimps Entitled to Human Rights?” (Chimpanzees, says Wise, are just the first of many animals he hopes to help free. He settled on them because of the abundant research on their cognitive capacities; not only are they the closest nonhuman relatives, sharing 99 percent of humans’ DNA, they also share the ability to think, feel, anticipate the future, and remember the past. More practically, he adds, if his team does achieve success, freed captive chimps can go to established sanctuaries; other large animals with high levels of cognition, like orcas, have no such option.)

Wise’s strategy has been to file writs of habeas corpus (requests that a judge evaluate whether someone is wrongfully imprisoned) on behalf of chimpanzees. In the past, such writs have been issued only for persons, and no U.S. judge has yet broken that legal precedent. But personhood has been awarded to nonhumans in the past, Wise points out: corporations and ships have been classified as persons under the law. They don’t enjoy all the rights that individual humans do, but in the case of corporations, for instance, the Supreme Court has ruled that businesses have the right to spend money in elections, and may in some cases, on religious grounds, refuse to cover birth control in employee-health plans.

Although he has not yet won a habeas claim on behalf of a chimp, Wise has gained significant ground with courts. When he began his work, no court had ever allowed a non-injured human to sue on behalf of an injured animal. But this past year, one judge did grant Wise “an order to show cause” (basically habeas without a prisoner being called into court, he explains)—allowing him to argue on behalf of his chimpanzee client in front of a judge and the chimpanzee’s owner. The judge did not rule the chimp a “legal person,” but the mere granting of the hearing—an action historically reserved for humans—was, says Wise, a milestone in his multiyear effort. “I don’t believe that animals’ property status is the root of the problem,” he explains. “I believe that being ‘a thing’ is.”

His work for two chimpanzee clients, Hercules and Leo (used for research at Stony Brook University), may already be paying off. In 2013, he and NhRP filed a case against the university on the chimps’ behalf. NhRP persisted through an appeal, and refiled the case in March 2015. A month later, Stony Brook indicated that it would no longer experiment on the chimps. Now, after months of negotiation with the chimps’ owner, the New Iberia Research Center, NhRP has begun a public-pressure campaign to release the animals to the custody of a sanctuary.

In the past, when teaching her animal-law survey class, Kristen Stilt has devoted an entire segment to nonhuman primates and Wise’s work. What he may not yet have achieved in the courts, she says, he has unquestionably achieved in the court of public opinion. Coverage of his work has brought the issue of animals in captivity—particularly chimpanzees—into general public conversation, raising questions among activists, scholars, and “people who simply had never given these issues thought.”

This past May, Loeb University Professor and constitutional-law scholar Laurence Tribe submitted an amicusletter supporting NhRP’s request for an appeal in one of its first chimpanzee cases. His procedural argument: that “the lower court fundamentally misunderstood the purpose of the common law writ of habeas corpus,” which is simply to consider arguments challenging restraint or confinement (“the question of whether and when a court has authority to entertain a detainee’s petition at all”), not to decide whether or not to award relief (“the question of what substantive rights, if any, the detainee may invoke, and what remedy…the detainee may properly seek”).

Perhaps more significantly, Tribe also claimed that the court “reached its conclusion on the basis of a fundamentally flawed definition of personhood.” The court reasoned that habeas corpus applies only to legal persons and assumed that chimpanzees could not qualify. But that line of reasoning, he wrote, relied on “a classic but deeply problematic—and at the very least, profoundly contested—definition of ‘legal personhood’ as turning on an entity’s present capacity to bear ‘both rights and duties.” This definition, he argued, “would appear on its face to exclude third-trimester fetuses, and comatose adults…importantly [misunderstanding] the relationship among rights, duties, and personhood.”

Denver University constitutional law professor Justin Marceau, J.D. ’04, also filed an amicus brief on behalf of a group of fellow scholars, stating that “this may be one of the most important habeas corpus issues in decades and the lower court’s resolution of the matter is in fundamental tension with the core tenets of the historical writ of habeas corpus.”

Marceau recently attracted national attention for winning a landmark federal case in Idaho as the lawyer representing ALDF, an animal advocacy organization that, along with a diverse coalition of organizations, challenged a state statute criminalizing undercover investigations documenting animal welfare, worker safety, and food-safety violations at industrial-farm facilities. The court set a precedent, ruling that the statute violated both the First Amendment (regarding free speech) and the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal-protection clause by enacting a statute motivated by “unconstitutional animus” against animal advocates. The decision may be a harbinger for other states that have enacted such agricultural gag (“ag-gag”) laws. “Laws like the one in Idaho try to silence modern-day Upton Sinclairs—the whistleblowers of our time,” says Marceau, “and a court has now ruled that’s unconstitutional.”

In law school, Marceau originally planned to focus solely on civil rights and the death penalty. But after taking the animal-law survey course, then taught by David Wolfson (a visiting professor, now a partner at Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy who devotes his pro-bono hours to animal-welfare law), he, like Chris Green, found a new passion. “The class absolutely changed the trajectory of my life,” says Marceau. At the Sturm College of Law, he now holds the first animal-law chair in the country.

Support from scholars like Tribe and practicing lawyers like Marceau helps bolster Wise’s work, Kristen Stilt explains, but the resulting news coverage is no less significant. “We’ve seen time and again that law follows a change in societal thinking,” she says. Obergefell v. Hodges, the 2015 Supreme Court decision to allow gay marriage, and Brown v. Board of Education, the 1954 ruling to desegregate public schools, both followed significant shifts in public opinion.

Steven Wise’s habeas corpus work is important, explains Stilt, but it is certainly not the only route toward legal change for animals, or even for chimpanzees used in research. Although he hopes to change a system of legal thinking from the ground up by fighting for individual chimps, other lawyers are navigating the existing legal system and fighting, perhaps more pragmatically, for the species as a whole.

For the past two decades, first as a private attorney, and then as chief counsel for the Humane Society, Harvard’s current wildlife-law instructor, Jonathan Lovvorn, has done just that. “As an academic and intellectual matter, I think Steve Wise’s work is fascinating,” says Lovvorn. “But the bottom line is, it’s not a practical use of time and resources, and I don’t think it’s feasible politically or legally.” Instead, he urges lawyers to work within the existing legal framework: improving, enforcing, and drafting new laws and measures to protect animals today. Rather than pursuing a revolutionary change in legal thinking, he adds, “We need practical action to prevent animal suffering.”

Consider the Animal Welfare Act, the federal law protecting animals in research facilities, breeding facilities, and places of exhibition like zoos and circuses. Passed in 1966, it is now the primary federal law regulating minimal standards of treatments for animals in human care, “and yet there are several loopholes,” Lovvorn points out: the vast majority of animals used for research—rats and mice—and the billions of birds and livestock slaughtered for food each year fall outside its bounds.

Is the end of chimpanzee research in the United States at hand?
Photograph by Cyril Ruoso/Minden Pictures/Corbis

But primates used in research do fall under the act’s protections. In 1985, Congress passed an amendment requiring the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), which administers the law, to adopt standards promoting the psychological well-being of primates licensed and registered to research facilities. The USDA adopted the standards as mandated, but failed to set specific enforcement guidelines, requiring instead that research institutions set their own. For the next two decades, animal advocates filed lawsuits against the department, but none of their efforts produced the guidelines they sought.

The issue continues to be a legal battleground. Meanwhile, in the clash over protections for chimpanzees, Lovvorn’s team has made progress on a much larger scale. Five years ago, they filed a petition requesting that captive chimps be reclassified as “endangered” under the Federal Endangered Species Act (ESA), as wild chimps already are. For years, the Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS), which administers the ESA, instead labeled captive chimps as “threatened,” a classification, Lovvorn’s team argued, that the government used to turn a blind eye to the use of the animals in medical research.

In 2011, while Lovvorn’s group was still trying to change chimps’ ESA classification, their argument was bolstered by a report from the National Academy of Sciences stating that chimps were no longer necessary for medical research. Two years later, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) agreed to phase out most government-funded chimp research and retire most of its chimps to sanctuaries. The NIH also implemented a list of stringent conditions for the psychological welfare of chimps used in future research for any lab seeking funding—exactly what the USDA had resisted doing for decades. These included a definition of an “ethologically appropriate environment” for chimps (dictating minimum standards for enclosure size and design, management tactics, and social conditions), and proof that the lab’s research could not be done by any method other than by using chimpanzees.

In June 2015—five years after Lovvorn’s team first filed their petition to reclassify captive chimps as endangered—FWS agreed to bring captive chimps under the same umbrella of protections their wild counterparts enjoyed.

That single ruling didn’t dispense with chimpanzee research, Lovvorn explains; the change in practice had come incrementally from a multipronged, multiyear effort involving the courts, government agencies, Congress and state legislatures, and social advocacy. The result: any lab hoping to continue invasive work with chimps must now meet the NIH’s stringent standards and apply for an ESA permit—permits that will be granted only for work that benefits or enhances survival of the species in the wild. Following the NIH’s declaration and the reclassification of captive chimps as “endangered,” no lab hasapplied for a permit to conduct research, suggesting the end of an era of invasive chimpanzee medical research.

“For years it was believed that we would solve every other animal-welfare problem before we ever got chimps out of research labs,” Lovvorn says. “It turns out, this will be one of our first.”

Last fall, on the first day of Harvard’s first new animal-law class in more than a decade, a group of students filed into a classroom in Wasserstein Hall for “Wildlife Law,” with several lining up by Lovvorn’s desk to see whether they had made it off the waiting list. Once the students were sorted, he began with a brief introduction and a PowerPoint presentation.

“For decades, there was a huge difference between this chimp in a cage, and this one here in the wild,” Lovvorn told the class, pointing to two photos on a screen at the front of the room. Now a banner moment had arrived, “one we’ve been working on for more than 20 years.” Four months after the Fish and Wildlife Service had designated captive chimps as endangered, the law had officially gone into effect, making that very day, September 14, 2015, the first day it became illegal to harm, harass, kill, or injure any chimp anywhere in the United States—in a cage, in a lab, or in the wild.  

Five petition candidates have qualified for placement on the ballot for this spring’s election of members to the Board of Overseers, the larger but less powerful of the University’s two governing boards (and the only one whose members are selected by alumni votes).

The petitioners, who have joined to promote a program they call “Free Harvard, Fair Harvard,” advocate tuition-free undergraduate education and what they call “transparency” in admissions procedures—both measures linked to a larger argument about the qualifications and characteristics of applicants that the College can and should be allowed to use in composing an entering class. (The College recently announced that it had received a record 39,044 applications for admission to the class of 2020, entering this fall; a typical undergraduate class enrolls about 1,650 students.)

As reported previously (see here for a detailed discussion of the issues and arguments), the petitioners’ program poses fundamental challenges to the University’s longstanding admissions processes and goals—including the use of race as one factor in assessing applicants. One recent indication of the institution’s position on these matters came at the Faculty of Arts and Sciences’ (FAS) first regular meeting of the semester, on February 2, a few weeks after the petitioners’ effort to gain access to the ballot became public. The faculty members present voted unanimously to endorse as a statement of FAS’s values the report of the Committee to Study the Importance of Student Body Diversity brought before it late last semester (it is described in the news account linked above). Among other findings, that report concluded explicitly, “The role played by racial diversity in particular in the development of this capacity for empathy cannot be overstated,” in the context of the learning the institution seeks to make available to its students.

If enacted, the petitioners’ program also would significantly change FAS’s financial model (encompassing the faculty itself, Harvard College, and the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences); tuition revenue is its largest source of unrestricted funding—and therefore a significant source of the monies used to pay for financial aid.

The debate over tuition comes against a backdrop of renewed interest by some members of the U.S. Congress in exploring private universities’ endowments and spending on financial aid. (Perhaps ironically, the 56 institutions that received the most recent query—from Senator Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, and Representatives Kevin Brady, R-Texas, and Peter Roskam, R-Illinois—include those which lead in need-blind admissions and in initiating fully paid, loan-free scholarships for lower-income students.)

In a conversation with The Harvard Crimson, President Drew Faust criticized the free-tuition proposal on distributional grounds: “The kind of program that is being proposed here funds a lot of students who we don’t think have need, from families who could and should afford to pay for their student’s education. We would be using an enormous amount of institutional resources to subsidize families who could easily afford to support their children in college.” At a time when the University news office has been publishing a long-planned series covering professors’ research on inequality, the petitioners’ proposal would in effect have the institution move away from need-based financial-aid assessments and awards—a sharply progressive structure in which students from the lowest-income families attend the College at no cost, while those from the highest income tier pay a full term bill.

In order to gain what they say would be a highly effective tool for attracting applicants from across the socioeconomic spectrum (the no-tuition proposal), the petitioners place less emphasis on the expense of having the University underwrite the undergraduate education for the children of families from the upper strata of the income distribution. (There would, of course, also be effects on FAS from forgoing the current stream of after-aid tuition income, used to fund the faculty’s research and other operations as well.)

With the petitioners having secured a place on the ballot, it is likely that these issues will be aired more widely during this spring’s election; ballots are mailed to eligible alumni in early April. It will be interesting to see whether more eligible voters exercise their franchise as a result; during the past five elections, according to University data, slightly more than 250,000 ballots have been distributed annually to eligible Harvard degree-holders, and an average of more than 27,000 (about 11 percent) have been returned.

The initial announcement of candidates, in  January, before the petition campaign was announced, appears here. The February 19 announcement—including the petition candidates, now qualified for the ballot, and their affiliations—appears here.

The full Overseer slate, as published by the University, thus includes two groups of candidates, as follows:

•The initial cohort, proposed by the Harvard Alumni Association’s nominating committee

Kent Walker ’83 magna cum laude
Senior vice president and general counsel, Google Inc.
Palo Alto, Calif.

Ketanji Brown Jackson ’92 magna cum laude, J.D. ’96 cum laude
Judge, United States District Court for the District of Columbia
Washington, D.C.

Helena Buonanno Foulkes ’86 magna cum laude, M.B.A. ’92
President, CVS/pharmacy; executive vice president, CVS Health
Providence, R.I.

John J. Moon ’89 magna cum laude, A.M. ’93, Ph.D. ’94
Managing director, Morgan Stanley
New York, N.Y.

Alejandro Ramírez Magaña ’94 cum laude, M.B.A. ’01
Chief executive officer, Cinépolis
Mexico City, Mexico

Damian Woetzel, M.P.A. ’07
Artistic director, Vail International Dance Festival; director, Aspen Institute Arts Program, DEMO at the Kennedy Center, and Independent Projects
Roxbury, Conn.

Karen Falkenstein Green ’78 magna cum laude, J.D. ’81 cum laude, ALI (Advanced Leadership Initiative) ’15
Senior partner, Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr, LLP
Boston

Lindsay Chase-Lansdale ’74 magna cum laude
Associate provost for faculty and Frances Willard Professor of Human Development and Social Policy, Northwestern University
Evanston, Ill.

•The cohort of nominees by petition

Ralph Nader, LL.B. ’58
Citizen-activist and author; founder, The Center for Responsive Law and Public Citizen
Washington, D.C.

Stephen Hsu
Professor of theoretical physics and vice president for research and graduate studies, Michigan State University
Okemos, Mich.

Ron Unz ’83 magna cum laude
Software developer and chairman, UNZ.org; Publisher, The Unz Review
Palo Alto, Calif.

Stuart Taylor Jr., J.D. ’77 magna cum laude
Author, journalist, lawyer; nonresident senior fellow, Brookings Institution
Washington, D.C.

Lee C. Cheng ’93 magna cum laude
Chief legal officer, Newegg, Inc.
Santa Ana, Calif.

On a Saturday evening in March 2009, the Harvard basketball team returned to the visitor’s locker room at Yale’s John J. Lee Amphitheater, moments before tipping off the final game of a disappointing Ivy campaign.

After knocking off nationally ranked Boston College in non-conference play, the Crimson had sputtered, losing seven of eight games to Ivy opponents. The latest setback had come the previous night on a buzzer-beater at Brown—a loss that guaranteed that the Crimson (then 13-14 overall, 5-8 Ivy) would finish below .500 in conference play for the seventh consecutive year.

But as the team met for the final time, and as they heard Yale’s notoriously boisterous fans, the seniors vowed to fight. Captain Andrew Pusar ’09 recently recalled, “We said, ‘We don’t want to go down and lie down and go out that way.’” With guards Drew Housman ’09, Jeremy Lin ’10, and Oliver McNally ’12 combining for 50 points, the Crimson defeated Yale 69-59—a victory that helped set the tone for the six consecutive 20-win seasons that followed.

Nearly seven years later, the Crimson, playing at Yale and Brown on the penultimate weekend of the season, found themselves in a remarkably similar position: at 11-15 overall and 3-7 in Ivy play, they sought to sustain the momentum from last week’s come-from-behind victory over Cornell—and set themselves up to finish .500 overall and in conference play. A winning weekend, moreover, would reinforce the standards and identity that had enabled Harvard to capture the last five Ivy League championships.

The Crimson succeeded in part, falling to league-leading Yale 59-50 but defeating Brown 61-52 in a pair of games that demonstrated the growth of Corey Johnson ’19 and the challenges facing Zena Edosomwan ’17. It also showed what Stemberg coach Tommy Amaker tries to instill in his team: a willingness to fight and a commitment to excellence—no matter the current record.

Harvard Hardwood
Sign up for Harvard Magazine’s basketball e-mail and follow the Crimson all season long! David L. Tannenwald ’08 will provide the latest news, game summaries, and insights.

Johnson’s Breakout

In last week’s thrilling win over Cornell, freshman Tommy McCarthy broke out with a team-high 21 points and the game-winning basket with just six seconds to go. McCarthy was sidelined this weekend because of a concussion. But against Brown on Saturday, his classmate, Johnson, sank six three-pointers and scored 24 points to lead the Crimson to its fourth conference victory.

Johnson burst onto the scene earlier this year, sinking five threes against Providence in November and hitting a three from the corner that sealed a win over Boston University in December. But his production dropped off when teams realized he was an elite shooter and started guarding him more closely. In a three-game stretch in January, he scored just seven points.

His performance against Brown showed that Johnson’s adapted. He had a number of “catch and shoot” threes (plays where he caught a pass and quickly released his shot), but also got to the basket and had a pull-up jumper (dribbling to a spot and quickly releasing a jump shot) from approximately 16 feet. Clearly, he has expanded his arsenal.

The strong play of McCarthy and Johnson during the last two weeks reflects how much the freshmen have contributed. As senior captain Evan Cummins pointed out, people often unfairly evaluate the team’s freshmen and upperclassmen by the same standards, even though many of this year’s upperclassmen, including Cummins, played very little during their freshmen years. This gave them an opportunity to learn the team’s system in practice. McCarthy and Johnson, thrust into the starting lineup at the start of the season, never had that luxury. That they’ve withstood this pressure so well bodes well for the future.

Edosomwan’s Struggles

Meanwhile, Edosomwan has struggled. After a dominant performance in non-conference play (highlighted by his 25-point, 16-rebound effort against Oklahoma in the Diamondhead Classic final), the junior center did not score against Yale and had just three points against Brown. Admittedly, the Bulldogs and Bears have some of the best post players in the conference, but as Amaker said after the Yale game, the team needs more production from its frontline, including Edsomwan.

Cummins, a fellow frontcourt starter, pointed out that the Ivy League is exceptionally well coached (and therefore aware of Edosomwan’s ability to make a difference in games), and Ivy teams also tend to pack the lane. Brown, Cummins observed, often had three defenders within five feet of Edosomwan when he caught the ball. And when opposing defenses concentrate on defending the junior big man in the interior, the guards, of course, have opportunities to sink shots from outside. Thus, Edosomwan’s presence affects the game in ways that don’t show up in the box score.

Nonetheless, his decreased productivity is a cause for concern. The best players adapt to the defenses they face. For Edosomwan, that means passing more quickly out of double- or triple-teams and improving his foul shooting. If Harvard is to compete for the Ivy title next year, Edosomwan will need to have a much bigger impact in conference play.

A Fighting Spirit

Despite its disappointing record, the team has continued to play spirited basketball. Senior Agunwa Okolie hauled in 19 rebounds against Brown and scored in double digits in both Providence and New Haven this weekend. Nor did the team’s backups pack it in against Yale in the final minutes on Friday night: they closed the game on a 10-0 run to make the final result respectable. Finally, Harvard won consecutive Saturday night games on the road—no easy feat in the Ivy League, which has the unusual practice of scheduling conference games on back-to-back weekend evenings.

This year’s squad (now 12-16 overall, 4-8 Ivy) is not going to reach the post-season.  Nonetheless, as Pusar and his classmates discovered, these isolated demonstrations of strength can lay a foundation for future success. The Crimson—anticipating the arrival of a highly touted recruiting class and the return of injured all-Ivy point guard Siyani Chambers ’16—will have plenty of talent next year. If Harvard combines that potential with hunger and toughness, the team may again be formidable in conference play and beyond. They have two final opportunities to reinforce that foundation: the season concludes at home next weekend against Princeton (still battling Yale for the Ivy title) and Penn.

Women’s Team in Title Hunt

What more can one ask from Destiny Nunley ’17? Before Saturday’s game against Brown, she performed the national anthem. Then she came off the bench to score 15 points on 7-11 shooting to help lead her team to a 92-79 win. But sitting in the basketball office after the game, she pointed to another line in the box score: rebounds. The Texas native averages 5.3 boards per game but corralled just three on Saturday.

Nunley’s devotion to improvement—and identifying ways she can help her team—exemplifies how the Crimson (now 14-11 overall, 9-3 Ivy) has willed its way into contention for the Ivy League title.

Head coach Kathy Delaney-Smith said after the game that no one outside the team expected the Crimson to be in this position. Multiple players have had to play out of position, primarily in response to teammates’ injuries; the team lacks a true center; and Delaney-Smith has had to rely on three freshmen guards, two of whom start. That inexperience showed when the Crimson lost five consecutive non-conference games and an early Ivy contest against Dartmouth.

But after beating Yale 65-63 (Harvard won on a buzzer-beater by co-captain AnnMarie Healy ’16) and knocking off Brown (behind 24 points and 12 rebounds from another senior, Shilpa Tummala) on Saturday, the Crimson will head into its final regular-season games—next weekend at Princeton and Penn—with an outside chance of winning the Ivy title and a legitimate shot at reaching the post-season. If Harvard wins both games and Penn and Princeton (with three games apiece left, including one against each other) lose twice more, the Crimson, Quakers, and Tigers will share the conference championship and compete in a three-team playoff for the automatic Ivy berth in the NCAA tournament. If Harvard finishes second in league play, it will receive an automatic berth to the women’s National Invitation Tournament—the second-most prestigious post-season tournament.

The Crimson still face long odds to win the league, but they have a chance. Given their inexperience, and struggles earlier this season, what more can fans ask?

Five years ago, on the final evening of the 2011 season, the Harvard men’s basketball team hosted the Princeton Tigers with a chance to win the Crimson’s first Ivy League championship. Behind 24 points from star Kyle Casey ’13, coach Tommy Amaker’s squad did just that, dismissing the Tigers 79-67 and beginning a run of five consecutive conference crowns.

When Harvard played Princeton in Cambridge on the penultimate night of this season last Friday, the Crimson (12-16, 4-8 Ivy heading into the contest) had no hope of winning a league title. But Harvard did have an opportunity to shake up the conference race by handing Princeton (which was 10-1 in Ivy play, half a game behind Yale) its second league defeat.

In fact, Harvard beat the Tigers 73-71—the team’s most impressive Ivy win. Paired with Saturday’s 74-56 drubbing of Pennsylvania, the victory shored up the legacy of this year’s senior class, highlighted the growth of Zena Edosomwan ’17, and began the conversation about what the team can accomplish—and how it might adapt—as it turns to next season.

The Senior Class

The men’s basketball class of 2016 has been part of some of the most momentous games in program history: the upset of New Mexico in the opening round of the 2013 NCAA tournament; the near miss against Michigan State in the round of 32 in the 2014 NCAAs; and last season’s 53-51 squeaker over Yale in an Ivy playoff that sent the Crimson to March Madness for the fourth straight year.

At first glance, the games this weekend seemed far less important, but the seniors played with their customary competitiveness. With less than two minutes to go and the team up by 18 against the Quakers on Saturday night, captain Evan Cummins ’16—who tallied six points and six rebounds—stood on the sideline, yelling defensive instructions to his younger teammates. Agunwa Okolie ’16—the team leader in scoring and steals in Ivy games—continued his outstanding play, pouring in 16 points to go along with nine boards against Penn, after scoring 12 points against the Tigers.

Yet the most valuable performance by a senior came from Patrick Steeves, who spent the previous three seasons sidelined by injuries. Against Princeton, he led all scorers with 25 points, including the game-winning free throws with just seven seconds to go. And on defense, he had the game’s biggest play: swatting away a Tigers shot in the final seconds to secure the upset.

Amaker often tells his players that the “last part has to be the strongest part.” For the class of 2016, that was absolutely the case.

Edosomwan’s Emphasis

The strength of next year’s season for the Class of 2017 will depend largely on whether Edosomwan can become more consistent. After playing sparingly in the previous weekend’s road trip to Yale and Brown, the junior big man registered a pair of double-doubles in the final home stand, notching 16 points and 14 rebounds against the Tigers and 11 points and 14 rebounds versus the Quakers.

His success against Penn was especially impressive because Penn’s starting center, Darien Nelson-Henry, is six-foot-eleven and weighs 265 pounds—and did not hesitate to use his body to establish offensive position and compete for rebounds. For Edosomwan, who is six-foot-nine and weighs 245 pounds, the challenge is to be aggressive enough to hold his own but not so physical that he gets lured into committing fouls. Against Penn, he nearly fell into that trap, getting whistled for a flagrant foul early in the second half. But that was his lone foul, while Nelson-Henry fouled out of the contest.

If Edosomwan can build on that performance, he could become the Ivy League’s best player next year. If not, the team may struggle to find consistency in conference play.

The Path Ahead

Next season does not hinge on Edosomwan alone. A number of story lines will shape the campaign: How effective will Siyani Chambers ’16 be after returning from an ACL injury? How will the team’s highly touted recruiting class be integrated into a squad that returns all but three seniors? Who will replace Agunwa Okolie as Harvard’s premier perimeter defender?

Following Saturday’s game, Amaker declined to talk much about next year; he understandably preferred to focus on the seniors’ strong play and the team’s success down the stretch. But it’s worth considering what elements of this year’s squad can translate to the future—and what changes the coaching staff might want to make. Amaker naturally focuses on what stays the same: the team’s standards, its identity, and above all its emphasis on defense. But his squad is an evolving entity shaped by the player-leaders, the team’s past success and struggles, and the weight of expectations—and next year, expectations will again be high. How will the team handle the increased attention that will accompany the influx of so much talent? Opening the season against Stanford in Shanghai on November 12 certainly raises the Crimson’s profile.

To meet those expectations, the 2016-2017 team might follow the example set by this year’s senior class, who were devoted to perseverance, improvement, and competitiveness to the last moments of their careers. This year, that was not enough to earn the squad a championship. Next year, it may make the difference between the reemergence of a championship tradition and another season that ends sooner than the players and their coaches hoped.

Women’s Basketball Swept

The women’s basketball team lost its final games of the season—79-69 at Princeton and 62-46 at Pennsylvania—and in the process were knocked out of the Ivy title race. The Quakers and the Tigers have 12-1 records in the league and will decide the conference title in their regular season finale on Tuesday night.

Although the Crimson ended the year 14-13 overall and 9-5 in Ivy play, head coach Kathy Delaney-Smith’s team, which relied very heavily on three freshmen guards and will welcome several talented recruits, is well positioned to reinsert itself in the Ivy title race in coming years. The team graduates just three seniors: Kit Metoyer, Shilpa Tummala, and AnnMarie Healy.

Check out the May-June edition of Harvard Magazine for a more detailed recap, and preview of things to come, for the men’s and women’s squads.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Admissions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Should Harvard Be Free? The Impact on Applications

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Campaign Logistics

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

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

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

President Faust’s Perspectives

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

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

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

Diversity Data

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Summarizing these critiques, Gelman concluded:

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

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

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

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

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

When President Drew Faust visits the United States Military Academy at West Point today, she is scheduled to meet with an interdisciplinary colloquium of faculty and staff members who have been reading her acclaimed 2008 book, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (excerpted here). She will also deliver the inaugural Zengerle Family Lecture in the Arts and Humanities to the broader West Point community (she is expected to talk about the importance and role of humanistic study).

To those outside West Point, who associate it with training its students to lead soldiers in war—accompanied by a heavy dose of engineering and arduous physical conditioning—Faust’s talk might appear quixotic. But in fact, the academy’s core curriculum, described in its academic catalog, prescribes multiple courses in foreign language, history, philosophy, political science, and English composition and literature. The cadets pursue a concentration as well, and in a typical graduating class perhaps 20 to 25 choose to study literature. The department of English and philosophy (host for the lecture) has four dozen faculty members.

Among them is Elizabeth D. Samet ’91, a professor of English who has spent her career, after completing her doctorate at Yale, teaching literature at West Point. As planner for the day, Samet will accompany Faust and her party, and moderate her meeting with the reading group. Given Faust’s advocacy of the humanities, and her role as a leader—both interests among West Point’s faculty members and leadership, Samet characterized the day as “a nice meeting of two worlds that don’t often meet in that way.”

Since joining the faculty in 1997, Samet has written about the close relationships she has developed with many of those soon-to-be officers who have grappled with Homer and Shakespeare, majored in English, and written theses about Anne Sexton. Unlike her professor-teachers at Harvard, St. Andrews, and Yale, Samet has also received e-mails from former students describing what they are reading in the moments of tedium and tension between patrols in Baghdad, or alone on a desolate mountain in Afghanistan. The death of a colleague in an IED-exploded Humvee became emblematic, for her and for many soldiers, of the war in Iraq, much as World War II airmen resonated to Randall Jarrell’s blunt “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner” (“When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.”)

Educating Leaders

As she was engaged in the academic study of eighteenth-century British literature in graduate school, Samet said in a recent conversation during a visit to Greater Boston, she circuitously came across the memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant. She was fascinated both by his “deeply ambivalent” attitude toward his West Point experience and by the ways military culture engages fundamental social issues—justice and vengeance. In her book Willing Obedience: Citizens, Soldiers, and the Progress of Consent in America, 1776-1898 (2004), a scholarly analysis of how a liberty-loving citizenry came to terms with submitting to military authority, and how some of those citizens represented that submission in literature and oratory (Washington, Thoreau, Lincoln, Billy Budd), Samet credits her West Point experience, preceded by “explor[ing] intersections between fiction and military memoir at Yale with David Bromwich.” And so it was, in 1996, when the Modern Language Association posted an opening at West Point, Samet found herself interviewing for and being offered the job. Her work, she said, “took on a different direction.”

Both Harvard and West Point aim to educate “leaders.” But the University and the Academy go about fulfilling their mission, as they define it, in radically different ways. The cadets’ grueling required curriculum—shaped by what Samet calls its “biggest customer,” the army and, by extension, the American people, and complete with military leadership, constitutional and military law, and mastery of weapons and tactics—is, she says, “a different educational experience than the one I had.” She contrasts long, “luxurious” talks in the Kirkland House dining hall with the cadets’ 15-minute meals punctuated by announcements and upperclassmen’s demands on the plebes, leaving “no time for that kind of conversation.”

As she writes in No Man’s Land: Preparing for War and Peace in Post-9/11 America (2014):

[T]he most important difference between the student I was and the students I teach is that my students think they know exactly what it is they are preparing for. They crave this particular guarantee in a world in which most assurances are far more elusive. Whatever else they might be in life, the cadets who sit in my English class will almost certainly be second lieutenants, receiving their commissions in the U.S. Army on the very day of their graduation from West Point, bachelor’s degrees in hand. They cannot know exactly what this passage entails, but they know their title, rank, and duty position.…

As an undergraduate, I had aspirations and expectations, I envisioned possible paths and scenarios, but I couldn’t have drawn the map from there to here. I had none of the certainty that can limit an educational experience in ways large and small. After abandoning sometime during my freshman year in college a longstanding plan to become a physician, I no longer had a blueprint to consult. As I reflect on my own undergraduate experience, I realize the degree to which I depended on a criterion of engagement rather than one of utility. My attitude no doubt stemmed in part from my ignorance about what the future held, and it was only when I did not find a given subject particularly compelling that I started to complain of its irrelevance. My students might protest—or might be conditioned to feel they ought to protest—that they don’t have the luxury of adopting such an attitude because they know unequivocally what is and is not relevant to their future profession. But that kind of vocational sureness is illusory.

Pat C. Hoy II, who taught English at West Point and at Harvard from 1989 to 1993, described the differences in a way Samet recognizes from her own experience. In his essay, excerpted in Harvard Magazine as “Soldiers & Scholars,” he noted, “At West Point I spent a great deal of time trying to convince bright students that it was all right to be smart, that getting high on the play of the mind could be as exciting as teamwork and victory.” In contrast, Harvard admissions officers, he thought, would be most excited by an applicant’s “quirkiness, an intellectual passion—eccentric, understated—that would set each student apart, distinguishing one from the other,” because Harvard, driven by the fundamental work of creating knowledge, “clings unconsciously to destruction.”

Of West Point, sited above the Hudson River, Hoy wrote: this “citadel of traditional strength incites a passion for preservation and leans always toward the status quo,” with the “army’s sublime work…done in concert,” and so is necessarily unlike the “intoxicating freedom” cultivated along the Charles. “It is not the play of the mind that West Point cherishes, but the application of mind.” Culturally, “Harvard students learn little about mutual support from their elders. Those in positions of leadership seem to know almost nothing about enabling hierarchies. Because they have long been caught up and consumed in a world of their own idea-making, they have been denied a lasting return on communal investments. At West Point, from day one…[cadets] are always investing themselves in each other’s lives.”

Within the confines of this milieu for training military leaders, as it turns out, literature and the humanities can play an unusually important role.

Learning with Literature

In her introduction to Leadership: Essential Writings by Our Greatest Thinkers, a Norton anthology (2015), Samet, the editor, observes:

I work in an organization geared to crisis, but its most successful leaders deal with emergencies in the calmest possible way. Military culture, in which hierarchy is explicit, extremity often the norm, presents what might be thought of as an intensified version of dynamics that operate in a range of institutions, industries, and professions….I have talked with various audiences…about the ways in which literature can help to illuminate such phenomena and to foster the creative imagination, mental discipline, and improvisational skills essential for strategic leadership.

The inescapable backdrop for my thinking about leadership—and for this book—is the series of wars in which the United States has been engaged since almost the beginning of the twenty-first century. That enterprise at once crystallized and confused so many things a lot of people in uniform and out thought they understood about developing leaders. For me, it reaffirmed in any number of ways the great value literature offers to anyone serious about the project of taking responsibility for other people and the organizations of which they are a part, about helping them to realize their full potential, about leading them anywhere (sometimes into hazardous places), and about preparing them to endure the aftermath of any trial.

That can be harder work than teachers and students outside the service academies encounter. Samet’s West Point experience began at a time of relative peace, and was then transformed—as was so much else—by the attacks of 9/11 and the ensuing military actions that morphed from relatively limited engagements into what has become America’s longest war. Along the way, of course, the missions descended from a focused sense of unity and purpose through such disastrous miscarriages of command and control as Abu Ghraib: crises not only for the country, but also for its military. Samet, a civilian who teaches alongside officers, and whose students undergo experiences she will never share, has written about these transitions, and her teaching, in two unacademic, first-person books: Soldier’s Heart: Reading Literature Through Peace and War at West Point (2007), and No Man’s Land (mentioned above).

Their titles suggest their texture. The first is a reference to the syndrome now identified as post-traumatic stress disorder, experienced by many soldiers after exposure to intense, violent, and norm-challenging acts of war. The second, a bow toward the shattered Western Front during the trench warfare of World War I (the book appeared in 2014, that war’s centennial year), depicts soldiers’ experience of “commuting” to endless deployments in Afghanistan. It is a powerful metaphor for their in-between status, both at war and on the civilian home front, where routine greetings of “Thank you for your service” descend into pointless, meaningless ritual that pales against Samet’s dedication, in memoriam, to two cherished students who were killed in Afghanistan.

How does literature inform military training? “Skilled tacticians,” Samet writes in No Man’s Land, “cannot be assumed automatically to possess capacious visions. What seems to be most sorely lacking, at both the individual and the institutional levels, are imaginations bold enough to anticipate a future that may look nothing like the past or remarkably like some forgotten past.” Soldiers in training “become well versed in what the army calls Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures, or TTPs. The military excels at training competencies, at inculcating a specific set of moral values that guide practice, at instilling a particular kind of emotional and physical discipline. Yet its culutre can seem less interested in—perhaps even ill designed for—the project of developing habit of mind or intellect.”

But given the chaos and ambiguities of combat, of course, “The fundamental paradox of military preparation is that the more exhaustively and exclusively one prepares for a particular event, the more one unfits oneself for any other.” Accordingly, “how best to prepare soldiers for the inevitability of their own unpreparedness is a conundrum with which anyone responsible for their education must reckon.”

And reckon Samet does, with sensitive readings of the classic epics, of Ovid (a guide perhaps to the metamorphoses those second lieutenants will face), of Shakespeare, of Edith Wharton’s acute accounts of World War I France, of Tolstoy and Saint-Exupéry, and of Wilfred Owen and other poets of war. (In various contexts and courses, Samet also draws upon her seemingly endless command of film history, war-themed or not.) “When I read ancient epics with cadets or talk them over with my colleagues,” she writes, “we often find less truth and power in the rousing battle cries of Agamemnon and his fellow bloody-minded enthusiasts than in the disillusion of Achilles, the humanity of Hector, or the ambivalence of Aeneas.”

In encountering literature—reading, performing Shakespeare, writing their own Ovidian metamorphoses—Samet writes, cadets can encounter “atmospheres of productive discomfort,” refine “analytical skills and observation through practice at close reading,” and even “acquire a sophisticated sense of narrative.” The latter may be of special importance to volunteer soldiers returning to a nation unengaged with, and uncertain about, its military: Samet notes that Odysseus and Penelope could become reunited only when they could tell each other their stories—the very kind of narrative act that a tag line like “Thank you for your service,” after so many years of distant bloodshed, essentially precludes today.

A reader encounters vivid examples of the potential moral power of such teaching and learning from literature throughout Samet’s books. To take an example from Soldier’s Heart, she describes an early encounter with Colonel X, whose first words to her, during her first week at West Point, were, “Thursday, twelve hundred, squash courts.” The colonel is, she writes, “quite simply the toughest man I’ve ever met…because he has a more powerful sense of discipline, both mental and physical, than anyone I’ve known.” She continues:

Colonel X has the attribute Saint-Exupéry found among the mail pilots he flew with in the early, chancy days of aviation: “There is a quality which is nameless,” Saint-Exupéry writes in Wind, Sand and Stars. “It may be gravity, but the word does not satisfy me, for the quality I have in mind can be accompanied by the most cheerful gaiety. It is the quality of a carpenter face to face with his block of wood. He handles it, takes its measure. Far from treating it frivolously, he summons all his professional virtues to do it honor.” Saint-Exupéry met with this attribute in his friend Guillaumet, who survived a forced landing and a harrowing walk through the frozen Andes. If the quality can be given a name, perhaps it is “responsibility.”

Saint-Exupéry described his friend’s “moral greatness” as consisting in “his sense of responsibility. He knew that he was responsible for himself, for the mails, for the fulfillment of the hopes of comrades.” And of her early squash partner, Samet concludes, “A sense of ultimate responsibility was something that Colonel X also possessed. When I asked him, after he retired, what element of his life had changed the most, he replied: ‘That’s easy: I’m not responsible for other people any more.’”

Learning from Students

The many other merits of Samet’s work aside, her first-person accounts reveal her role as an educator to an unusual degree, and so bring to light that most humanistic of activities, the relationship between the teacher and the taught.

For example, she writes in No Man’s Land, “I have always found unpersuasive the ease with which Iago warps Othello, who is no insubstantial man, to his purposes.” But then, she notes, Othello’s life has been endless battles and “hair-breadth scapes,” the very life story which bewitches Desdemona. Voilà:

To my complaint about Othello’s gullibility with respect to “honest Iago,” several of my students had a ready response. For them, the answer was obvious: Iago and Othello had fought together. The trust welded by that battlefield history trumped all else, even the bond between husband and wife. I’m not sure this explanation is sufficient, but the vehemence with which the cadets endorsed it seemed a key to understanding their own attitudes toward loyalty, service, and hardship.

Far more gravely, from Soldier’s Heart: “These days the shadow of the battlefield experience bleeds through the language of literature all the time.” Samet and her students were discussing “Bullet in My Neck,” an essay by poet Gerald Stern about being shot. As her students prepared to write their own personal essays, she counseled them:

“Your essays don’t have to begin with a showstopper like that,” I suggested. “Most of us don’t have bullets in our necks, but if you do, that’s a great story.” As soon as I said it, I realized that the whole room had gone miles away, and my you-idiot voice told me that some of them might well be able to write that very essay one day. As I sustain the faith that I am equipping my students through the study of literature with the ability to read and interpret their world, one of the things  I have begun to suspect is that there is no preparation—not in the Bible, not in the Aeneid, not in Henry James—wholly adequate to some of the experiences they may well endure.

In the end, her students bring Samet herself to the fore. Soldier’s Heart draws toward its close with a passage recounting her response when a cadet challenges her, “Ma’am, it’s time you told us why you teach here,” given her civilian status. Is it because her father served in World War II? Yes, in part, she agreed. “Is it because of patriotism?”

Suspicious of patriotic chic, mindful of Samuel Johnson’s observation that it is the “scoundrel” who seeks “refuge” in self-aggrandizing boasts of patriotism, I was leery of this explanation as well.

“I like to think I’m arming you with something you may need,” I ventured, “something of value.” I hoped that we were becoming travelers of the sort Montaigne describes, wayfarers who visit “foreign lands” not “the way others do so (knowing how much longer and fatter Nero’s face is on some old ruin over there compared with his face on some comparable medallion) but mainly learning of the humours of those peoples and of their manners, and knocking off our corners by rubbing our brains against other people’s.” Whatever we were discovering in that room wasn’t tangible. It lacked the particular satisfaction of a well-built bridge or the marvelous utility of a well-aimed M-16, but one day whatever it was might help them in war, and one day it might help them come home.

I can’t be sure, of course. “Only fools,” Montaigne warned, “have made up their minds and are certain.” Make the student understand, Montaigne insisted, advocating the study of Plutarch and others, “that confessing an error which he discovers in his own argument even when he alone has noticed it is an act of justice and integrity, which are the main qualities he pursues; stubbornness and rancor are vulgar qualities, visible in common souls whereas to think again, to change one’s mind and to give up a bad case in the heat of the argument are rare qualities showing strength and wisdom.” I think I see this capacity in cadets …[who] strike me as the sorts of adventurers who, wherever they may find themselves, will be trying to discern people’s “humours” and “manners” rather than comparing notes on Nero’s nose. As I envision them in those “foreign lands” that Montaigne conjures, I find them not only courageous in confronting the physical dangers they will likely encounter but also unafraid to change their minds. There they’ll be knocking their metaphorical corners off and peering into the brains of others, just as we used to do in the corridors of Thayer Hall.

…Over the last several years, cadets have had to think a lot about their function, too. They know their lives may contain a share of necessary violence, even the possibility of death, but they have the courage to meet brutality with imagination as well as ammunition, with questions as well as convictions, with books or without. They have the wherewithal to resist the abstractions of sacrifice with the realities of leading soldiers in combat and in a peace that one day will come. And that kind of patriotism isn’t chic at all.

Updated March 25, 2016, 3 p.m. The text of President Faust's West Point address, titled “To Be ‘A Speaker of Words and a Doer of Deeds’: Literature and Leadership,” is now posted at her website. (The title quotes the Iliad, book 9, from the speech of Phoenix to Achilles, whom he helped to rear.)

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

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

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

The Coalition’s Questionnaire

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

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

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

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

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

and

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I strongly support affirmative action and reparations for African Americans.

I support race-conscious college admissions with historical wisdom.

Coalition Endorsements

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Petitioners’ Response, and Another Campaign

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Past Overseers’ Presidents Weigh In

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On november 28, 1942, during a Thanksgiving weekend dinner party at a colleague’s home, a phone call abruptly summoned Champ Lyons, M.D. ’31, a surgeon who specialized in treating bacterial infections, to Massachusetts General Hospital. A horrific fire had destroyed Boston’s Cocoanut Grove nightclub; of the more than 1,000 patrons present, 490 eventually died. Years later, Lyons told his son that he found the hospital’s long brick hallways lined with dead partygoers still in their evening clothes. He began treating survivors immediately and did not return home for three days. His work with the burn victims would change his career forever, taking him to army hospitals across the country and then to the Mediterranean—all because of his use of the revolutionary new antibiotic, penicillin, to treat his patients.

Benjamin Champneys Atlee Jr. had medicine in his genes. His father’s family included many distinguished physicians; a great-grandfather was president of the American Medical Association. Even after his parents’ divorce and his mother’s remarriage gave him a new home in Mobile, Alabama, and a new surname, medicine beckoned. At the University of Alabama, Lyons helped fellow students found the national premedical honor society, Alpha Epsilon Delta. At Harvard Medical School, he became interested in microbiology while finding a mentor in surgeon Edward D. Churchill; when he later joined the MGH surgical service under Churchill, he kept up with microbiology, studying surgical infections.

Penicillin had been discovered in 1928, but was not used to treat humans until 1941. Although it showed great promise, particularly for treating anticipated wartime casualties, it was very difficult and expensive to produce in quantity. But the senior U.S. government official charged with evaluating its use by the armed forces knew of Lyons’s work in surgical bacteriology and saw the Cocoanut Grove disaster as an opportunity to test the drug’s efficacy. He arranged for all the penicillin then available—less than a liter—to be released to Lyons to treat a select group of 13 burn patients at MGH. Initially, they received 5,000 units of penicillin intramuscularly every four hours, but Lyons soon learned that the drug wasn’t toxic and the dosage was inadequate. He then tried penicillin with sulfadiazine, which had been used for infections since its discovery in the 1920s. That made it impossible to distinguish the individual effects of the two drugs, but the patients benefited from the combined therapy, which controlled infection in their wounds.

This success prompted the U.S. Surgeon General to set up a pilot unit for penicillin therapy at a Utah military hospital, with Lyons in charge; after a disastrous Allied defeat in Tunisia in February 1943, many soldiers were sent there for care. Lyons used the new antibiotic in increasing doses, eventually treating 209 men with intramuscular penicillin; more than 80 percent showed immediate improvement. A second study unit was established, on Staten Island, again with Lyons in charge, and the U.S. Army began an all-out effort to increase the manufacture of penicillin, rightly convinced that it was vital to prosecution of the war. Thanks largely to this and other advances in medical care, only 3 percent of the wounded treated in front-line hospitals during World War II died of infections; between 12 and 15 percent had died in World War I.

Lyons, meanwhile, had been inducted into the army as a major and assigned to the Mediterranean theater, where he ensured that the additional knowledge he gained about wound management, and the usage and dosage of penicillin, was widely disseminated. In 1945, he contracted a severe case of hepatitis when an inexperienced surgeon accidentally nicked him during an operation. He was sent home on a stretcher and discharged in June; later that year he accepted a position at the Ochsner Clinic in New Orleans.

In 1949, the dean of the Medical College of Alabama offered him its new chair in surgery. Lyons took full advantage of the opportunity, training a generation of surgeons—“Lyons’s boys”—who remembered him with respect and admiration. At a dinner given in his honor 30 years after his death, they were still in awe of him. As residents, they thought him a taskmaster, but a fair man who led by example. One recalled that Lyons once “yelled at a resident for dressing a hand in a way he didn’t approve.” The resident, a veteran and former medic, replied that he’d seen and done the worst a man could do during the war, and did not appreciate being yelled at in public. Lyons never did so again. He was also known for not accepting excuses: when a lab failed to finish tests before the weekend, Lyons located the technician involved and waited on the phone for the test to be completed. But when a faculty colleague threatened to terminate a young doctor’s residency if she took a month’s leave to help in a family crisis, Lyons interceded, though he insisted she never say that he had done so.

One July day in 1965, Lyons was finishing rounds when he announced, with a sly grin, that he had one more case to present. His residents and his family had shared their concerns about his increasing facial palsy and personality changes, including forgetfulness and uncharacteristic levity; that day, he produced a brain scan showing a left cerebral lesion. A subsequent craniotomy confirmed the terminal diagnosis. In two months, Lyons was dead. “Before he died,” a colleague recalled, “he asked me if he had faced death ‘gallantly.’ I assured him that he had.”

Commencement Week includes addresses by Harvard president Drew Gilpin Faust and director, screenwriter, and producer Steven Spielberg. For details and updates on event speakers, visit Harvard Magazine.

Tuesday, May 24

Phi Beta Kappa Exercises, at 11, with poet Robyn Schiff and orator Stephen Greenblatt, Cogan University Professor and Shakespeare scholar, Sanders Theatre.

Baccalaureate Service for the Class of 2016, at 2, Memorial Church, followed by class photo, Widener steps.

Class of 2016 Family Reception, at 5. Tickets required. Science Center plaza.

Harvard Extension School Annual Commencement Banquet, at 6. Tickets required. Annenberg Hall.

Wednesday, May 25

ROTC Commissioning Ceremony, at 11:30, with President Faust and a guest speaker. Tercentenary Theatre.

Harvard Kennedy School Commencement Address, at 2, by former U.S. secretary of state Madeleine Albright, LL.D. ’97. JFK Park.

Senior Class Day Picnic, at noon.Tickets required. The Old Yard.

Senior Class Day Exercises, at 2, with the Harvard and Ivy Orations, remarks by incoming Harvard Alumni Association president Martin J. Grasso Jr. ’78, and actress, writer, and producer Rashida Jones ’97. Tickets required. Tercentenary Theatre.

Law School Class Day, 2:30, with featured speaker Sarah Jessica Parker, actor, producer, businesswoman, and philanthropist. Holmes Field.

Business School Class Day Ceremony, 2:30, with Thomas J. Tierney, M.B.A. ’80, chairman and co-founder of The Bridgespan Group. Baker Lawn.

Graduate School of Design Class Day, at 4, with a guest speaker. Gund Hall lawn.

Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health Award Presentation and Celebration, 4-7. Kresge Courtyard.

Graduate School of Education Convocation, 3-5, with a guest speaker. Radcliffe Yard.

Divinity School Multireligious Commencement Service, at 4. Memorial Church.

Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dudley House Faculty Dean’s Reception, 4-6.

Faculty Deans’ Receptions for seniors and guests, at 5. The Undergraduate Houses.

Harvard University Band,Harvard Glee Club, and Radcliffe Choral Society Concert, at 8. Tercentenary Theatre.

Thursday, May 26

Commencement Day. Gates open at 6:45.

Academic Procession, 8:50. The Old Yard.

The 365th Commencement Exercises, 9:45 (concluding at 11:45). Tickets required. Tercentenary Theatre.

All Alumni Spread, 11:30. Tickets required. The Old Yard.

The Tree Spread, for the College classes through 1965, 11:30. Tickets required. Holden Quadrangle.

Graduate School Diploma Ceremonies, from 11:30 (time varies by school).

GSAS Luncheon and Reception, 11:30 to 3. Tickets required. Behind Perkins Hall.

College Diploma Presentation Ceremonies and Luncheons, at noon. The Undergraduate Houses.

Alumni Procession, 1:45. The Old Yard.

The Annual Meeting of the Harvard Alumni Association (HAA), 2:30, includes remarks by HAA president Paul L. Choi ’86, J.D. ’89, President Faust, and Commencement speaker Steven Spielberg; Overseer and HAA director election results; and Harvard Medal presentations. Tercentenary Theatre.

Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health Diploma Ceremony at 2, with guest speaker Donna Shalala, president of the Clinton Foundation, and former U.S. secretary for health and human services and president of the University of Miami. Kresge Courtyard.

Medical and Dental Schools Class Day Ceremony. Ticketed luncheon at noon, followed by a speech, at 2, by Jeffrey S. Flier, retiring dean of the faculty of medicine and Walker professor of medicine.

Friday, May 27

Radcliffe Day, celebrating the institution’s past, present, and future, includes a morning panel discussion followed by a luncheon honoring the 2016 Radcliffe Medal recipient, Janet L. Yellen, chair of the board of governors of the Federal Reserve System.

The discussion, “Building an Economy for Prosperity and Equality” (10:30 a.m.-noon), is moderated by Cecelia Rouse’86, Ph.D. ’92, dean, Katzman and Ernst professor in the economics of education, and professor of economics and public affairs at Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. Panelists include: David Autor, Ph.D. ’99, professor of economics at MIT; Douglas W. Elmendorf, dean and Price professor of public policy at the Kennedy School; Claudia Goldin, Lee professor of economics and director of the Development of the American Economy Program at the National Bureau of Economic Research; and Louise Sheiner’82, Ph.D. ’93, senior fellow in economic studies and policy director for the Hutchins Center on Fiscal and Monetary Policy at the Brookings Institution.

The luncheon, 12:30-2, will feature remarks by former chairman of the Federal Reserve Ben S. Bernanke ’75, now a distinguished fellow in residence in the economic studies program at the Brookings Institution; economics professor Gregory Mankiw will then talk with Yellen about her life and career.

Tickets are required to attend the day’s events in person, and have already been distributed. The events will be webcast live at www.radcliffe.harvard.edu. For questions, contact events@radcliffe.harvard.edu.

For updates on Commencement week and related activities, visit alumni.harvard.edu/annualmeeting or commencement.harvard.edu/morning-exercises.

Harvard’s own 2016 campaign is in full swing, as eligible degree-holders mull their choices in the annual election of members of the Board of Overseers—unusually contested this year—and Harvard Alumni Association (HAA) directors. The full slates—eight HAA-nominated Overseer candidates and the five challengers who successfully petitioned for a place on the ballot, vying for five places on the 30-person Board—appear here. Ballots were mailed by April 1, and must be returned by May 20, in time for the results to be tallied and announced during the HAA’s annual meeting on the afternoon of Commencement day, May 26.

As reported, a group of five candidates organized by Ron Unz ’83 under the “Free Harvard/Fair Harvard” (FHFH) banner announced in January that they would petition for places on the Overseers’ ballot. They were successful.

The petitioners’ campaign advances two linked proposals. First, they “demand far greater transparency in the admissions process, which today is opaque and therefore subject to hidden favoritism and abuse.” That message is coupled with language about “powerful statistical evidence” of an “Asian quota” in admissions—leading to their statement, “Racial discrimination against Asian-American students has no place at Harvard University and must end.” Second, they “demand the immediate elimination of all tuition for undergraduates since the revenue generated is negligible compared to the investment income of the endowment.” They link this proposal to the notion that moving from financial aid to a tuition-free model would more readily promote diversity in the student body because, they suggest, “relatively few less affluent families even bother applying because they assume that a Harvard education is reserved only for the rich,” despite the existence of financial aid.

In opposition, a group of alumni organized as the Coalition for a Diverse Harvard have focused particularly on the admissions part of the FHFH platform, and on some of the FHFH candidates’ expressed antipathy toward admissions policies that incorporate consideration of applicants’ racial or ethnic background. As the Coalition’s website notes, the campaign “was launched by Harvard and Radcliffe alumni to take a stand against the FHFH slate—and in favor of race-conscious and holistic admissions practices that support campus diversity.” Coalition members have also supported the current financial-aid program, and criticized the proposal to abolish tuition as a giveaway to the families of upper-income applicants and students. The group collected statements on the issues from all 13 Overseer candidates, published them online, and then, on March 25, endorsed five for election—all from among the eight HAA nominees.

Both petitioner proposals are at odds with University policies and practices. In an interview, President Drew Faust said, “Free tuition is a really bad idea. It would mean we would be subsidizing significantly people who could afford to pay Harvard tuition, and our sense has always been that Harvard’s resources should be devoted to enabling those who otherwise would be unable to come to Harvard….” Citing the University’s financial model, she said, “When we think about the wide range of purposes to which we devote resources, they include more than tuition. They include spaces, faculty salaries, research—and if we were to subsidize those who were not in need of subsidy, we would be taking resources away from those very important purposes at Harvard.”

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

Separately, five past presidents of the Board of Overseers wrote to the magazine, addressing these issues; their letter appears in full here.

Now the matter rests in the hands of alumni. As in the U.S. presidential caucuses and primaries, turnout may matter: in recent elections, an average of 11 percent of the 250,000 or so eligible voters have returned their ballots.

In January, the newly elected mayor of Houston, Sylvester Turner, J.D. ’80, donned work gloves and safety goggles, picked up a shovel, and spread hot, smoking asphalt over a gaping pothole on Neuens Road in West Houston. As news reporters watched, the small-framed, powerfully built 61-year-old announced that this was the 936th cavity plugged since he took office.

In a city facing budget deficits, $5.6 billion in total pension liabilities, and plunging oil prices that are gutting the local energy-driven economy, potholes might seem like a low priority. But drivers who endure the notoriously cratered streets have welcomed Turner’s focus on road repair; roughly 10,500 potholes were filled in January and February—nearly all of them, as he had promised in his inaugural speech, within one business day of being reported.

“The campaigning is over, and now it’s time to govern,” Turner said during a recent interview at City Hall. Filling potholes is his way of showing residents historically skeptical of government that he can actually improve their lives. And Turner will need at least that burgeoning trust to accomplish his more pressing goals: stabilizing municipal finances, hiring a new permanent police chief and enlarging the force, and redirecting transportation funding from ever-wider freeways toward mass transit. Developing regional public transportation—an issue long promoted by other elected officials and environmental activists—has significant public support. Adding suburban highway capacity, he told the Texas Transportation Commission in an unusually strong speech in February, is “not creating the kind of vibrant, economically strong cities that we all desire.”

Turner has also called for “shared sacrifices.” That means, he says, “Everyone needs to participate in the financial stability and viability of the city. The sacrifice is not necessarily the same for everybody. As we say in my church, ‘It’s not equality of giving, it’s equality of sacrifice.’ Some can give more because it won’t hurt them as much.” Turner, a career trial lawyer and former state legislator, plans to be “a transformative mayor in these challenging times—and you can’t be transformative by being an incrementalist,” he adds. “Either you go bold, or you go home.”

In truth, Turner has always been home. Born and raised in Houston, the centrist Democrat spent 26 years in the Texas legislature, most of them on the appropriations committee, where he earned a reputation as a pragmatic coalition-builder. Yet he has long sought the mayoral office: after two failed attempts in 1991 and 2003, he won last December’s runoff election over Republican businessman Bill King by just under 4,100 votes.

Houston is one of the most diverse U.S. cities, demographically divided almost evenly among whites, blacks, and Latinos, with foreign-born residents comprising almost 30 percent of the population. Turner, the city’s second African-American mayor, was elected largely because he won 93 percent of the majority-black precincts. (King, who is white, won 71 percent of majority-white precincts, but Turner also won the Hispanic vote.) Turner insists those numbers are “only relevant to analyzing what took place in 2015. My term started on January 2, 2016, and my challenge and responsibility are to represent all the city of Houston, not just those who voted for me. I’ve worked with Republicans, Democrats, conservatives, liberals, however you want to define it. I don’t see the distinctions.”

Turner grew up in Acres Homes, a semi-rural African-American neighborhood in northwest Houston, where he still lives. “I didn’t realize I was poor,” he notes, “until people told me I was. My parents always found a way to make sure there was food on the table. I had a roof over my head. I had clothes.” He shared a single bedroom with his eight brothers and sisters. His father, a handyman, died when Turner was 13, leaving his mother to support the family on her salary as a maid at a downtown hotel.

In seventh grade, he was in the first group of black students bused 18 miles away, under a court order, to an all-white school. He recalls “a lot of fights. You have to picture, here come these buses with these black kids pulling up to the school. The doors come open, and we were walking as a group, going into a school that was 100 percent white. We’re looking at them, and they’re looking at us, for the first time.” The students on both sides were just “responding to what adults were putting in their ears,” he adds. “I tell everyone, if you leave kids to themselves, they find a way of getting along. After two or three years, things started to level out and improve.”

He remembers listening closely to Texas congressman William Reynolds Archer Jr., who visited the school and talked about the “role of government and the importance of participating in politics,” Turner says now: “I was impressed, even though he was a Republican.” By the time Turner graduated as valedictorian, he had been elected president of the student council and “Mr. Klein High School,” and had been the school’s debate champion for four years. Among his heroes were Martin Luther King Jr. and John F. Kennedy; he recited their speeches over and over again at home, practicing his delivery. “I would pull out JFK’s speeches and get in front of the mirror and do my thing,” he says with a laugh.

At the University of Houston he studied political science and was the only African American on the school’s debate team. He applied to law school despite not knowing a single lawyer (nearly everything he knew about the profession came from television shows like Perry Mason), and was bound for the University of Texas at Austin until two of his professors took him to lunch and urged him to reconsider Harvard, where he had also been accepted. “For any student, it would be a tremendous plus to go to Harvard,” one of them told Turner, “but especially for an African American.” Turner did some research, talked to his mother and friends on the debate team, and then, despite never having lived outside Houston, headed to New England.

In 1977 he landed at Logan Airport with all his belongings in a single footlocker. He soon met a fellow African-American first-year from Wyoming, and the two rented an apartment in Central Square. “Both of us came from relatively poor families, so we went to the Salvation Army” thrift shop to buy furniture, and carried it home through the city streets, Turner reports. “It was only when we went to pick up the television, that the cops stopped us,” he adds. “Somebody saw two black guys carrying furniture and had called the police.” The young men had to produce their Harvard IDs before the police let them go.

 
Following two failed runs, the election-night victory was especially sweet for Turner.
Jon Shapley/Houston Chronicle via Associated Press

That incident, and struggles to fit in among wealthier, more cosmopolitan classmates, stand out, Turner says of his experiences while at Harvard, which he terms “a different world for me.” Because those around him had money to go out to lunch at restaurants, he went to see a financial-aid officer, “and I’ll never forget what she said: ‘At Harvard, we want everyone to have a meaningful experience. We don’t want anyone to feel any less than anyone else.’” She increased his stipend and had it deposited directly to his bank account. “After that, I started living large,” he jokes. “To heck with trying to prepare these little sandwiches, ‘Let’s go to the restaurant and order off the menu!’ I give her a lot of credit to this day because prior to that it was difficult. She helped put me on a level playing field.”

He did well at Harvard; after graduation he had a corporate-litigation job waiting at one of Houston’s top firms, Fulbright & Jaworski. Within a few years, though, eager for more independence, he and two other young African-American lawyers, Barry Barnes and Rosemarie Morse, J.D. ’79, founded their own firm. They sometimes represented corporations, like a local utility, Centerpoint Energy, but most of their clients were smaller, black-owned businesses. Creating a practice “was a huge risk,” admits Barnes, a longtime friend who’s continued running the firm since Turner resigned to become mayor. “But at a young age sometimes you don’t appreciate the risk. Sylvester was just starting a family and so was I, so there were people who relied on us.” (Turner and his then-wife, Cheryl, divorced in 1991; they have a grown daughter, Ashley, who was active in her father’s campaign.)

It helped, Barnes notes, that “Sylvester never gives up on anything. He’s a litigator by nature, and a fighter.” Being mayor, Barnes believes, was already in Turner’s mind by 1984, when he first ran for office, for a seat as a Harris County commissioner. He lost that race, badly, to a local political heavyweight, El Franco Lee.

Four years later, however, he ran for the state legislative seat representing the district that included his Acres Homes neighborhood—and won. During his nearly three decades in that post, Turner became a leader of the Democratic delegation, and, from 2006 to 2016, served on the 10-member conference committee that writes the state budget.

During the 2005-2007 legislative season, Turner helped reverse devastating cuts to the Children’s Health Insurance Program, a key part of the safety net in a state where one in five children are uninsured. “Even when the Republican speaker said Republicans wouldn’t vote for it, at the end of the day, 64 Democrats and 62 Republicans voted for it,” Turner says with obvious pride. His efforts secured medical coverage for some 130,000 Texas children. He also advocated consistently for better mental-health treatment. Two of his brothers face mental-health challenges, he says, and Texas has “always been near the bottom when it comes to mental-health care, and for poor families it’s even harder to get access.”

Over time, he became known as the “conscience of the House” for his passionate floor speeches defending the neediest Texans. “I came up in a household that was at the bottom of the economic ladder,” Turner says, “so I know what I’m talking about when I talk about income inequality. I know about the importance of education, since neither of my parents graduated from high school.”

Houston has been celebrated for its economic dynamism and racial diversity, but now the protracted collapse in the price of oil and a looming reversal in its overheated real-estate market will likely exacerbate the city’s financial problems. The police force is considered understaffed, and faces controversies and lawsuits over questionable officer-involved shootings that have been detailed in The Houston Chronicle and The Texas Observer. Meanwhile, Turner took office facing an estimated $160-million budget gap that must be addressed by July, atop the city’s $3.3 billion in general obligationdebt that will come due in the next five years and a $2.4 billion in unfunded pension liabilities, among the highest in the nation. (The total pension bill is $5.6 billion, with retirement payroll contributions now consuming 20 percent of the city’s budget, according to Texas Monthly.)

But the main reason Houston can’t fix its streets or hire enough police officers to patrol them is that in 2004 its voters approved a draconian revenue cap that limits increases in property-tax collections to the combined rates of inflation and population growth, or 4.5 percent, whichever is lower. Last year the city took in too much money, so it was forced to cut tax rates to the lowest level since 1987. “We’ve got a cap that says, even when a growing city generates a certain amount of revenue, we can’t take advantage of it,” says the mayor, clearly frustrated. In March, citing that cap, the city’s high fixed costs and unfunded pension liabilities, and low oil prices, Moody’s Investor Services downgraded Houston’s general obligation limited tax rating to Aa3 from Aa2.

Turner ran a diligent, if anodyne, campaign, during which his opponent accused him of not having the stomach to implement reforms to fix Houston’s financial crises. But he has moved surprisingly fast since moving into City Hall. He has already announced layoffs and across-the-board budget cuts for city departments and city councilmembers’ discretionary funds; the only sector spared was the police force. He is also developing a 10-year fiscal plan that is likely to take on the “self-imposed” revenue cap, a divisive issue among voters. “I think you win people over by showing them that there is new management, and that government can work for them,” he asserts. “That it’s responsive to their needs—not to my needs.”

An optimist as well as a fighter, Turner takes a long, somewhat personal view. “I’ve lived through hard financial times, and the city’s facing financial challenges right now. We are going to engage in shared sacrifice, and we will work through it.” Once the crises are resolved, infrastructure can be developed to sustain the population growth, he says. “Quite frankly, I don’t think there’s another city in the country that’s in a better position than we are.” He pauses, leaning forward in his chair, a slight grin on his face. “And we’re going to keep fixing the potholes.”

This spring, alumni can vote for five new Harvard Overseers and six new elected directors of the Harvard Alumni Association (HAA).

Ballots, mailed out by April 1, must be received back in Cambridge by noon on May 20 to be counted. Election results will be announced at the HAA’s annual meeting on May 26, on the afternoon of Commencement day. All holders of Harvard degrees, except Corporation members and officers of instruction and government, are entitled to vote for Overseer candidates. The election for HAA directors is open to all Harvard degree-holders.

Candidates for Overseer may also be nominated by petition if they obtain a prescribed number of signatures—201 this year—from eligible degree-holders.

The names below are listed in the order they appear on the ballot.

The HAA’s nominating committee has proposed the following candidates for Overseer (six-year term): 

Kent Walker ’83, Palo Alto. Senior vice president and general counsel, Google Inc.

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

Helena Buonanno Foulkes’86, M.B.A. ’92, Providence, Rhode Island. President, CVS/pharmacy; executive vice president, CVS Health.

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

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

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

Karen Falkenstein Green’78, J.D. ’81, ALI ’15, Boston. Senior partner, Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr, LLP.

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

The following candidates for Overseer were nominated by petition:

Ralph Nader, LL.B ’58, of Washington, D.C. Citizen-activist and author; founder, The Center for Responsive Law and Public Citizen.

Stephen Hsu, of Okemos, Michigan. Professor of theoretical physics and vice president for research and graduate studies.

Ron Unz ’83, of Palo Alto. Software developer and chairman, UNZ.org; publisher, The Unz Review.

Stuart Taylor Jr., J.D. ’77, of Washington, D.C. Author, journalist, lawyer; nonresident senior fellow, Brookings Institute.

Lee C. Cheng ’93, of Santa Ana, California. Chief legal officer, Newegg, Inc.

The HAA nominating committee has proposed the following candidates for Elected Director (three-year term):

David Battat’91, New York City. President and CEO, Atrion Corporation.

Farai N. Chideya’90, New York City. Distinguished writer in residence, Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute, New York University.

Rye Barcott, M.B.A.-M.P.A.’09, Charlotte, North Carolina. Managing partner and co-founder, Double Time Capital.

Susan M. Cheng, M.P.P. ’04, Ed.LD. ’13, Washington, D.C. Senior associate dean for diversity and inclusion, Georgetown University School of Medicine.

Victor Jih, J.D. ’96, Los Angeles. Litigation partner, Irell and Manella LLP.

Eliana Murillo’10, San Francisco. Head of multicultural marketing, Google Inc.

Trey Grayson’94, Fort Mitchell, Kentucky. President and CEO, Northern Kentucky Chamber of Commerce.

Janet Nezhad Band’83, M.B.A. ’89, J.D. ’90, New York City. Development consultant to nonprofit organizations.

Michael C. Payne’77, M.D. ’81, M.P.H. ’82, Cambridge. Attending physician, department of internal medicine, division of gastroenterology, Cambridge Health Alliance.

Fred Crafts ’50 was six when in 1935 his father first took him hunting on Monomoy, which juts into Nantucket Sound “at the elbow of Cape Cod some 70 miles southeast of Boston,” as he puts it in the introduction to his first book, Remembering Monomoy. The sometime island(s), sometime peninsula, now a National Wildlife Refuge, “has been my second life,” he writes, and the future lawyer, land planner, and developer began collecting information about the spot in 1950.

In 2012, staff members at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service head- quarters in Chatham, Massachu- setts, asked him, as the last surviving hunting-camp owner on Monomoy, to share his recollections. That “simple request turned into a very enjoyable project”: his 230-page omnium-gatherum contains personal reminiscences and photographs; copious re- prints or summaries of related newspaper and magazine articles; copies of relevant maps, charts, and official documents; reproductions of duck stamps from 1939 to 1971; and even a 15-page memoir of Monomoy Point “circa 1900” written in the 1980s by another one-time resident. Besides fishing, hunting, and camp life, Crafts covers the Coast Guard on Monomoy and tells how, geologically and historically, the wildlife refuge came to be, recalling now-vanished places like Wildcat Swamp, a songbird haven with abundant high bush blueberries, “the healthiest and...best flavor I have tasted.”

 

Crafts’s father, Judge Frederic A. Crafts Sr., went duck hunting on Monomoy with state game wardens in 1934. He liked it so much he bought a three-room “camp” there (adding his son’s name to the deed), where his family spent almost every weekend, from April to December, until 1950. By then, terrain and use were both altering. Approval for Monomoy’s “taking” for public use was given by all federal and state agencies in 1940. The judge “worshipped” Teddy Roosevelt, his son recalls, and as “a conservationist as well as a duck hunter, he realized there was a crying need for a wildlife refuge,” but he also negotiated life tenancy for existing camp owners on the then peninsula.

When the author’s children were growing up, in the 1960s, beach buggy access to Monomoy had ended. The family rented a cottage for a few weeks each summer and visited what was once again an island by small boat during their stay; later, he supervised annual Boy Scout camping trips to Monomoy until 1987. But “Mother Nature pretty much does what she wants to,” he writes; in 1991, he let Fish and Wildlife burn the remains of his vandalized, much eroded camp.

Crafts is happy his self-published first printing of 500 copies is running out, and his book is going back to press. His goal “was to collect as much information as possible about all aspects of Monomoy, past, present, and future...[in] one book so readers could better understand what is going on, as nothing stays the same on Monomoy or the outer Cape barrier beaches.” Wetlands preservation, he stresses, should be a primary concern: “They are the source of life for so many different species. You see this if you’re a duck hunter, sitting in the marsh all day.”

“You don’t steal photographs,” explains Leslie Tuttle ’72. “You engage, and the photograph should show something of your relationship to the people in it.”

A social documentary photographer, curator, and archivist, Tuttle has had a lifelong focus on women’s work, in developing countries and closer to home. The former visual and environmental studies concentrator shifted career plans away from architecture when she was introduced to photography at Harvard and fell in love with photojournalism. By her definition, “You’re not [a social documentary photographer] if you think you’re going to go illustrate an idea you already have. You go look for the story, and you listen, and you see what the story is once you get there, and then you document it.”

With this in mind, Tuttle decided to live overseas after graduation “and see the world from a different perspective.” She was offered a job documenting agricultural projects in rural villages in Turkey, and went, intending to stay one year—but she learned Turkish, and the single year stretched to four. That experience with rural communities launched her into a job with Oxfam America. Traveling from Cambodia to India to Mali, she continued narrating stories through images and writing, trying to condense complex circumstances into pieces that were understandable, but not oversimplified.

Gaining entry into private communities with vastly different social expectations is central to doing her work properly, Tuttle explains, especially when her focus involves observing people in their everyday lives. She stresses the importance of honoring lo- cal culture, whether that means dressing conservatively or taking off shoes indoors: “You can avoid barriers if you show that kind of respect. I think in a lot of places I would have been rejected or shunned if I hadn’t done something as simple as covering my head.”

After Oxfam, Tuttle changed gears, “got an M.B.A., had children, and started a nonprofit with my husband,” the Consensus Building Institute. But several years later, when asked to do a photo exhibit about Turkey, she opened up her dark room and printed 60 black and white images from the mid 1970s for display in London and Istanbul. She credits those shows with returning her to the roots of her career. Since then, she has worked for organizations that allow her to photograph, curate exhibits, and create new materials. In 2000, she began an independent project in Turkey, connecting with some of the women she’d met in the mid 1970s, and their daughters. In photos and interviews, she has documented a remarkable generational change. Many of the older women married young, with relatively few resources; their daughters are “getting education, getting birth control, [and] making their own life choices.” She calls the project her “unpublished book”; its working title is “Don’t Judge a Woman by Her Headscarf.”

In 2013, she saw a chance to work on a local project about New Hampshire farms. She and Helen Brody, a friend with a background in food writing and local agricultural concerns, produced New Hampshire Women Farmers: Pioneers of the Local Food Movement (University Press of New England), published last fall. They didn’t initially focus on women, but during their research, she and Brody realized that many factors supporting farm prosperity—adding value to the product, promoting farmers’ markets, and interacting directly with customers—were strongly driven by women. “We never said that the men aren’t involved...there are lots of exceptions and lots of partnerships,” Tuttle explains. “But a lot of the women are doing the things that are pushing the local food movement.”

At the New Hampshire Farm and Forest Expo, she and Brody spoke with commissioner of agriculture Lorraine Stuart Mill, U.S. senator Jeanne Shaheen, and Governor Maggie Hassan about how their material could be used for “everything from running workshops for young farmers to tourism”; the pair hope to design an exhibit for the state Department of Agriculture to further these causes. “I didn’t want this book to be just another picturesque rendering of the New England countryside,” Tuttle writes, but instead a “tribute to women,” sharing their stories and telling their tales.

Many Shared Interest Groups (alumni.harvard.edu/haa/clubs-sigs/sigs-directory) host get-togethers during Commencement and Reunion week. Some early listings appear below; updates will be posted at alumni.harvard.edu/events/haa-shared-interest-group-2016-reunion-events.

Harvard Gender & Sexuality Caucus

HGSC holds its annual Commencement Dinner on Thursday, May 26, at Lowell House, with featured guest Annise Parker, mayor of Houston from 2010 to 2016. For details, visit www.hgsc.org.

Harvardwood

On Friday, May 27, local members and reunioning alumni will gather at Charlie’s Kitchen in Harvard Square to meet and mingle from 5 to 7 p.m. Cash bar. This event is free, and guests and family members are welcome. RSVP requested; visit www.harvardwood.org/ harvardwood_2016_reunion_mixer.

Holden Alumni

Join fellow Harvard Glee Club/Radcliffe Choral Society/Harvard-Radcliffe Collegium Mu- sicum alumni on Saturday, May 28, at 3 p.m. in Paine Hall for the only reunion event where you can relive your Holden years! This Marvin double-header features sing-throughs of the Fauré Requiem and Haydn Lord Nelson Mass, with Dr. Jameson Marvin, conductor, and Noam Elkies, orchestra. No RSVP required. Details at www.hrcmf.org.

Phillips Brooks House Association Alumni

All alums interested in public service, whether former PBHA volunteers or not, are invited to an Open House on Saturday, May 28, from 2:30 to 5 p.m. at Phillips Brooks House to reconnect with classmates and meet PBHA staff and current students engaged in exciting public-service projects in homelessness advocacy, child and youth services, and elderly and prison services. Light appetizers and refreshments will be served. Learn more at alumni.pbha.org.

No outward sign sets the pale yellow house at 31 Inman Street apart from its neighbors. Someone going on a literary pilgrimage in Cambridge might start a mile away, at 104 Irving Street, where e.e. cummings ’15 grew up; then head west, to 16 Ash Street, where T.S. Eliot ’10, A.M. ’11, Litt.D. ’47, studied Sanskrit in the attic; then westward still, to the final residence of Robert Frost ’01, Litt.D. ’37, at 35 Brewster Street—guided the whole way by blue historical markers, never thinking to glance in the opposite direction. But back in Central Square, that anonymous Victorian was the cradle of the Dark Room Collective. There, in the late 1980s, a trio of young African-American writers—Sharan Strange ’81, Thomas Sayers Ellis, and Janice Lowe—formed their own literary center of gravity. During its decade of existence, their reading series and writers’ group gathered a nebula of creative energy, a starry critical mass whose impact on American letters continues to expand.

The Dark Room Collective (DRC) was a haven for early members like writer and translator John Keene ’87, experimental prose writer Tisa Bryant, and poet Patrick Sylvain, Ed.M. ’98—a place to get together and get serious about their craft. It was “a whole ‘nother kind of education,” says Keene. “It was an immersion in a world that I only kind of glimpsed when I was in college.” By e-mail, co-founder Sharan Strange comments, “I often say that working within the DRC and curating the reading series was in many ways my true M.F.A. experience.” The reading series was also an early performance venue for then-emerging talent—from current Boston poet laureate Danielle Legros Georges to Natasha Trethewey, RI ’01, U.S. poet laureate from 2012 to 2014. Many others passed through over the years, including Aya de Leon ’08, now director of Poetry for the People at the University of California, Berkeley; poet and critic Carl Phillips ’81; visual artist Ellen Gallagher; sound artist Tracie Morris; and actress Nehassaiu deGannes. In all, the participants’ published books number in the dozens, and they have earned fellowships and nominations and wins for honors like the National Book Awards, Whiting Awards, and Pulitzer Prizes.

“Once you’re in, you’re in forever,” declares poet Kevin Young ’92 in his nonfiction inquiry The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness. Young joined while still an undergraduate, as did Tracy K. Smith ’94, who remembers thinking, “Oh, wow—these young people want to be writers, and I want to be a writer, but they’re actually doing it.” She began to help with lighting at events, just to “be in that space and see what the model for this life that I wanted looked like. For me,” Smith adds, “the Dark Room was really about saying, ‘If you want to do this, this is how you do it. And don’t wait. Do it now.’”

“For me, the Dark Room was really about saying, ‘If you want to do this, this is how you do it. And don’t wait. Do it now.’”

The audience for literary writing is small, and slimmer still for poetry; by that measure, it’s unsurprising that the Dark Room remains obscure. But even dedicated readers of contemporary verse might know the Collective only as a common footnote to its alumni’s impressive biographies.

Over coffee at Lamont Library, Harvard Review poetry editor Major Jackson, RI ’07, muses, “I almost tweeted this, but am glad that I didn’t—,” then just barely hesitates before continuing, “And maybe this is no better—but I think if there were a group of poets who were white and male, or white and male and female, or white and female, there would have been a documentary made about them by now. There would be a movie about them.” Individual members have been celebrated, and the Dark Room has been loosely associated with those summed accomplishments. But, he says, the Collective has not been recognized as a whole: “Maybe we need to all grow gray hairs before that happens and America catches up.”

Snow
      for Toi Derricotte

It came once, the year I turned ten.
That year they told us how we
would become women, and I began
my monthly vigil. But this was
the miracle, singular, unexpected.

The whites had finally stopped
resisting. Unwanted at their school,
we went anyway—historic, our parents
intoned, eyes flashing caution
to our measured breaths.

That first martial autumn mellowed
into a winter of grudging acceptance
and private discontent, a season of hope
shaped by fists and threats.
Then angels molted, pelting all

of creation with their cast-off garb.
We went home early, drifting through
a landscape of sudden ghosts,
the yard churning in frothy waves,
as if by an invisible tide of protestors.

What I remember most is its rude
coldness, stinging and wet. How we
mixed it with milk, sugar, vanilla,
into a poor child’s ice cream that
melted before we could savor it.

—Sharan Strange

Reprinted from Ash by Sharan Strange
Copyright © 2001 by Sharan Strange
Reprinted by permission of Beacon Press, Boston

“For Some of Us, It Was Church”

The Dark RoomCollective began with loss. As the members tell it: on December 8, 1987, Strange, Thomas Sayers Ellis, and their two housemates piled into a car to make it to Harlem by noon, for the funeral of James Baldwin. More than 4,000 paid their respects at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou, William Styron, and Amiri Baraka spoke at the service. Strange and Ellis, aspiring writers who first met Baraka at a reading at Tufts University, came at his invitation (“It was probably very clear that we needed a lesson in Who We Owed,” Ellis later reflected in an essay) and his eulogy may have left the deepest impression. Baldwin’s spirit “will be with us as long as we remember ourselves,” Baraka told the attendees. “For his is the spirit of life thrilling to its own consciousness.”

Strange had stood in the same room as Baldwin once. He had come to Harvard for a tea, and, as she later wrote in the literary magazine Mosaic, she felt “too shy to break through the thick clot of fans around him and offer the admiration he had been accustomed to for decades.” She and Ellis, their mourning amplified and made vague by distance, felt their hero’s absence as a double negative; having never known him in person, they missed him twice over. The funeral filled them with new urgency about honoring their literary ancestors while they were still alive. They began planning the following spring.

In a third-floor room of their house used for storing old photographic equipment, they’d been building a library they christened “The Dark Room: A Collection of Black Writing.” At the time, 31 Inman was alreadya communal house for artists and activists. Strange worked as a community organizer in Roxbury and as a prisoner advocate through Cambridge’s American Friends Service Committee; Ellis was a projectionist at the Harvard Film Archive and a clerk at the Grolier Poetry Book Shop.

As Ellis recalls in his 2007 poem “Spike Lee at Harvard,” the bookshop experience was fraught, and in that way, instructive: “I got my first glimpse/of the life of poetry/(through the Grolier’s/cinematic glass window).” The life on display was orderly and monochromatic: the faces in the portraits above the shelves were nearly all white. At some point, his employer wondered if the black poets should be shelved separately so customers might more easily find their work; Ellis said he didn’t think so. (An intervening line, dry but not unkind, adds: “Well, at least she asked.”)

This homogeneity reflected the shop’s surrounding scene. Literary events in Cambridge rarely featured artists of color, though a number of prominent black writers taught in the Boston area. Teaming up with Janice Lowe, a poet and musician studying at the Berklee College of Music, Strange and Ellis paid visits to such eminences as science-fiction writer Samuel R. Delany and future Nobel laureate Derek Walcott, asking them to headline a new reading series that would pair them with a younger writer. The Dark Room couldn’t offer an honorarium, they said, but they could promise eager listeners and book sales.

In their living room, “We met on Sunday afternoons after church and for some of us it was church,” Strange wrote. In fact, they did it “with chairs from the church,” as Tisa Bryant told an interviewer in 2005. “We’d get some water and some snacks and some stuff and put some music on, clean the house and everybody would come in.” Sometimes the space grew so full that not everybody could fit. Spilling onto the porch and down the street, the audience listened through open windows and doors.

As later described by poet Cornelius Eady, who was invited to be a young voice in the series’ early seasons, “It was like being part of a Sunday revival meeting. A crowd showed up (I couldn’t tell who actually lived there and who didn’t), some furniture got moved, some chairs unfolded, and Pow! Their living room turned into a salon…that’s how they all seemed to take it: with a serious joy and pride in their belief in being black andbeing wordy, which totally disarmed me.”

Self-Portrait as the Allegory of Poetry

A corpse snores in morning traffic.
I edge along a sidewalk
hoisting trash can after trash can.
Even maggots marvel
at the eloquence of my lift.

I peer inside the roar
of a steel mouth
& know lampshades once
channeled light.
Everyone is dumbstruck

like Cousteau at seaside.
A cat smarter than me
circles a boom box.
An unclothed doll
prostrate on a curb
tans in the sun.

When I lie down at night
my wife says I reek
of recycled news. I carry
wet onions into sleep.
Days unfold in sheaves.

I’ve pondered retiring
to a shopping cart,
to crushed cans for shoes.
I’d whistle songs only
from my youth.

      —Major Jackson

Reprinted from Roll Deep: Poems by Major Jackson. Copyright © 2015 by Major Jackson. With permission of the publisher, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved. 

A Scene, Busted Open

Word about the series spread. Older writers praised the project to their colleagues; members posted photocopied neon flyers around town. The organizers made a concerted effort to reach out to “journalists, editors, critics, arts organizations, academic institutions, activists, merchants, students, and just plain folks,” wrote Strange. John Keene, then a loan-officer trainee at the Bank of Boston, learned about the Dark Room through his barber, who thought that it was a bookstore. This “sent my 22-year-old behind hiking halfway across Central Square to see these books I thought they’d be selling,” he later wrote in a remembrance on his blog. When Keene showed up, some neighbors set him straight, and intrigued, he kept checking back until he finally came upon a reading. Joining “was one of the most fortuitous occurrences, but also one of the best decisions, I ever made in life,” he says now. “The people who came through were extraordinary”—including, memorably, Alice Walker.

“After the reading,” he reports, “There was a young woman who had really been struggling, and she was crying, and she told Alice Walker that her work had basically kept her alive. And Alice Walker—I’d never seen this—she left the podium, and came and embraced her.”

Other young artists also were eager to join what came to be known as the Dark Room Collective, and to pay their literal and figurative dues. They put together the readings and accompanying musical performances and art shows. They pooled their resources to pay for their guests’ tickets to Boston, for gas money to drive them to the train station and airport—for a dinner out if possible, but a home-cooked meal if not. On the off-Sundays when there wasn’t a public event, they would hold small sessions to critique each other’s work. In between, they kept busy, swapping books and going to film screenings and museum exhibitions. Along the way, they documented their activities. Patrick Sylvain was the Collective’s videographer, recording readings on tape. Ellis, a photographer, coaxed his often camera-shy fellow members to pose for shoots around Cambridge.

Occasionally, the visiting writers would lead impromptu workshops. Sylvain relates how Yusef Komunyakaa—still five years away from his Pulitzer, but recognized by the Dark Room Award for Poetry in 1989—took the time to review his drafts. “And he says, ‘Patrick, there’s a lot there’—and then he kept going—‘But I think there is too much. Oh dear, but there’s too much. Okay. Now we have to remove all the fat. We have to make this poem muscular.’” Sitting outside Carpenter Center, the two men cut through the unnecessary adjectives and adverbs. The older writer gave the younger some advice he’s remembered ever since: “Make sure that the verbs and the nouns dance on the page.”

The Dark Room gathered a wide circle of associates and patrons, which may explain the varying accounts of the membership process: a phone interview in one person’s report, a nomination and voting process in another’s. “It was not like pledging a fraternity or a sorority or anything like that—but it came close,” Jackson jokes. Kevin Young, who attributes his early publishing ambitions to Strange and Ellis’s encouragement, says that “I thought we just were friends”—until his poems ran in the literary journal Callaloo, and Ellis asked why the Collective didn’t appear in Young’s author’s note. “And I was like, ‘I didn’t know I was in the Dark Room.’ That was how I got in.”

“The Dark Room Collective was one of the more influential movements in the city of Boston,” says fiction writer Don Lee, an associate of the group. Lee, who first moved to the area to pursue his M.F.A. at Emerson College, and then became editor of the journal Ploughshares, observed how they shook up the “lily white” literary scene. “There was terrific energy, and it was contagious.” He helped write a grant application that secured the Dark Room $12,500 from the Lannan Foundation—“not a huge amount, but at the time fairly significant”—which helped cover the travel expenses of writers they were beginning to invite from farther afield.

“...what these young people did is historic. That house could not hold them. They needed more room, and they made it. I hope they have changed this scene forever. They certainly busted it open.”

Eventually, this activity drew the interest of establishments like the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston. Strange says that the founders initially conceived of the Dark Room as independent of publications, universities, “or bookstores, even. We wanted it to be more homegrown—grassroots, so to speak. We wanted our guests and audiences to feel comfortable, not alienated in any way, we hoped, by the venue.” Forced out by rising rent, the series relocated to the museum, just across the river, on Boylston Street. They brought a local jazz band, the Roxbury Blues Aesthetic, with them. Though the museum’s auditorium could hold hundreds, the Dark Room series continued drawing standing-room-only crowds.

“Ours was a pretty eclectic audience” in terms of ethnicity, age, and class, says Strange. “I will venture to say that they probably had more folks of color from Dorchester, Mattapan, Roxbury, Jamaica Plain, Cambridge (and not just “Ivy League Cambridge”), and other parts of the city coming into that space on a regular basis than they had before. And once folks came for the reading series, they were a captive audience for the museum’s exhibitions”—like one on the legacy of Malcolm X, curated by a Dark Room supporter, video artist Yvette Mattern.

“Although I never visited that house on Inman Street, I do know that what these young people did is historic,” wrote Askold Melnyczuk, editor of AGNI. “That house could not hold them. They needed more room, and they made it. I hope they have changed this scene forever. They certainly busted it open.” “Black poetry is/a place you can go/to in Cambridge,/Massachusetts,” Columbia University professor and presidential inauguration poet Elizabeth Alexander, an early reader in the series, wrote in her tribute, “The Dark Room: An Invocation.” “Soul buddies, compañeros /of sound, word, mind / Boston is no longer /Boston with you there.”

Dead Daddy Blues

The weather says
Listen
My mother says Pray
I walk around looking
for the light all day

God says nothing
The river Why
don’t you stay
I wait around, wait
for the start of the rain

My feet say Forget you
My hands say Never
We look for him
by firefly light
like the supposed summer

Old grief can’t protect you
New sorrow
sails your way
Lately it stays evening
almost all day

      —Kevin Young

Excerpted from Blue Laws by Kevin Young. Copyright © 2016 by Kevin Young. Excerpted by permission of Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

The Drive-By Readings

By 1994, when their local series’ final season—in its final venue, Derek Walcott’s Boston Playwrights’ Theatre at Boston University—drew to a close, the Collective writers were taking their show on the road. During their travels they brought new members into the fold. One was Jackson, who had invited them to read at Philadelphia’s Painted Bride Art Center, after interviewing Ellis for The Source, ahip-hop magazine. “Thomas and I talked for almost two hours about everything. I had never talked to another man that long on the phone,” Jackson recalls, laughing. “We covered art, we covered literature, we covered poetry.”

In his 2006 collection Hoops, Jackson versified the encounter: “I, myself, emerged from a dark cave lured/By history and two visions. A romantic,/I stood in my b-boy stance, arms ruled,/Angled back, head posed for the authentic—/Up joined the Dark Room Collective./Were I in Kentucky, I would, even then,/Have united with the Affrilachians,/So strong the urge to place my pen aside/My generation. Ellis was our Pound.” Piling into cars and splitting up what little money they made from these stops, Collective members traveled throughout the Northeast, and farther afield to Washington, D.C., Atlanta, and Miami for what they called the Drive-By Readings.

The Dark Room’s presence on the page had grown, as members’ writing appeared in Callaloo, AGNI, Ploughshares, The Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. But before any of them had “a readership—lowercase ‘r,’” Jackson says, “we tested out poems in public. When you are aware of the poem both on the page and potentially read before an audience, it does, I think, impact the spirit of the writing. Not to say that it’s less interior. But you become aware that the poem should have a certain sound, should have a certain rhythm or pace.”

In an e-mail, Strange writes, “Going on tour further solidified a sense of collective as well as individual identity—it made me more conscious of functioning within a larger group, and thus of the similarities and differences in voice and style among us. I’m a shy person; I have a ‘quiet’ style. Others, I think, were more conscious of themselves as ‘performers’—or, rather, different personalities led to different performance styles. Performing with the other Collective members made me more desirous of doing strong work in order to contribute something worthy.”

“It felt, really, like you were participating in this long tradition found in jazz and hip hop and baseball and boxing—of being yourself but also having to step up your game,” Young says. “I think that was really important, to make you do that extra moment of editing or woodshedding.”

Although they did not establish a permanent physical home, the Collective opened a lasting symbolic space in the literary world. In his 1996 sketch of the Dark Room for TheNew Yorker, Cornelius Eady wrote, “[I]t’s clear they are in this for more than trophies…they are marking a path for others to follow.” That same year, he and poet Toi Dericotte led their first summer retreat for African-American poets, in upstate New York. (The foundation that resulted, Cave Canem, now offers fellowships to 54 new writers annually, as well as regional workshops and residencies.)

The Dark Room’s camaraderie was not conflict-free. “As you can imagine, it wasn’t all smooth bike riding,” Jackson says. Personalities clashed, and there were aesthetic and political fights. A piece by Ellis in The American Poetry Review from 1998, the year the Collective ended, alludes to times of turmoil: “Clean house, lose friends—like Angry Sister X—forever.” Sylvain’s memory, with the comfort of distance, is breezier: “Of course, as with all groups and families, we have divisions—which sister or cousin you prefer, and so forth.” Don Lee riffed on these “natural rivalries and skirmishes” in his 2012 novel, The Collective, about a fictional coterie of Asian-American writers. Pressed for particulars, he laughs and says, “They’ll keep those things under their hats. But I think it’s the natural outcome of having people who were as passionate and as smart and as opinionated as that group. I think they all look on it with great fondness now, in the light of nostalgia.”

“I think there were probably a number of reasons why it disbanded, good and bad,” says Keene—not least of which were the graduate programs and other job opportunities that beckoned. At heart, they were all “inkslingers,” in Ellis’s parlance—focused on their work and decreasingly interested in the business of logistics and promotion. As the members moved away from Boston, it became more difficult to come together to perform.

The Dark Room’s last drive-by reading was on Valentine’s Day, 1998, at the Painted Bride. As the Collective dissolved, Cave Canem solidified. With its annual prize—judged blind by someone different each year, granting $1,000 and publication to one debut talent—it ushered the first books by Trethewey (Domestic Work, 1999), Jackson (Leaving Saturn, 2000), and Smith (The Body’s Question, 2002) into the world.

The Good Life

When some people talk about money
They speak as if it were a mysterious lover
Who went out to buy milk and never
Came back, and it makes me nostalgic
For the years I lived on coffee and bread,
Hungry all the time, walking to work on payday
Like a woman journeying for water
From a village without a well, then living
One or two nights like everyone else
On roast chicken and red wine.

      —Tracy K. Smith

Tracy K. Smith, “The Good Life” from Life on Mars. Copyright © 2011 by Tracy K. Smith. Reprinted with the permission of The Permissions Company, Inc. on behalf of Graywolf Press, Minneapolis, Minnesota, www.graywolfpress.org.

Elbow Room

The critic who tries to sum up the Dark Room succinctly—hunting for that single thread that weaves the writers into aesthetic unity—will be stymied. If ever there was a Dark Room manifesto, it’s been lost; in any case, its likely signatories are working artists, who generally have strong allergic reactions to that kind of definition.

They do have common interests, in the broadest sense: identity and history. Pick any two members and they’ll share themes, or plain old enthusiasms—for the honed chaos of Sun Ra’s jazz, say, or the tropes of genre movies. Several draw on their Southern heritage for inspiration: Young’s Dear Darkness includes a series of odes to foods like chitlins, sweet potato pie, and pepper vinegar; Strange’s Ash delves into her childhood in Orangeburg, South Carolina; Trethewey’s Native Guard dwells on the meeting of personal and public history, examining her parents’ interracial marriage alongside the scars of the South. Keene’s dense fictions in Counternarratives—speculating about W.E.B. Du Bois and William James passing each other on Mount Auburn Street, or Langston Hughes’s trysts—have a kinship with Tisa Bryant’s sharp interrogations of classics, from Manet’s Olympia to Woolf’s Orlando, in her book Unexplained Presence.

What the Dark Room gave to its members makes their output difficult to corral. It’s something Ellis has called “elbow room”—a jostling freedom of movement that made Bryant, all those years ago, feel unexpected exhilaration during her 40-minute phone interview with the Collective. Though she at first tried to fake a love of jazz and the blues—at the time, these genres were to her parents’ taste, not hers—she then admitted to being a fan of the Cure, the Smiths, and Siouxsie and the Banshees. “And it was the most miraculous thing, because suddenly we were doing these bizarre medleys of Smith songs and P-Funk and Run DMC and Billy Bragg and Psychadelic Furs and Joan Armatrading. It was outrageous,” she told her interviewer. In “Dark Room: An Invocation,” Elizabeth Alexander declares “the house/came down because/we knew how to read/each other, could code-switch/with the same fast dazzle.” Now it’s a critical commonplace to hear that some Dark Room writer can reference Homer and Tupac in the same space, making virtuoso maneuvers between different expressive registers. At the time, Bryant said to herself with relief, “Okay, I’m not the freak I thought I was.”

The Dark Room has been criticized for producing depoliticized, conservative, and academic literature—art in which social concerns are subsumed by introspection and genteel form. Professionally, the “academic” critique sticks—many of the Dark Room alumni are tenure-track. But the implicit accusation of assimilation overlooks how they may shake up the institutions they inhabit. Ellis, despite being a visiting professor of poetry at the mecca of M.F.A. programs, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, is especially difficult to pin with that critique. His current project involves a band of writers and musicians (including Janice Lowe) called Heroes Are Gang Leaders, who create collage-like sound poetry—including tributes to forebears like Amiri Baraka and Gwendolyn Brooks.

As with theatrical works, these texts can be encountered as print (they’ve been published in TheOxford American, Poetry, and The Paris Review) but reveal different dimensions in live performance and audio recordings. By design, no single medium offers access to the unruly whole, and its essence can be viewed only peripherally. Only on the page can the reader observe the sly, intricate word games, swinging freely between made-up ideophones and unusual homophones; only aloud can the listener enjoy the exuberant sonic play, the performers biting off some syllables and extending others in a comic glissando drawl. And both would miss the theatrical antics of the performers seen up-close, and in person.

This past October, Heroes Are Gang Leaders celebrated the release of their second album, The Avant-Age Garde I Ams of the Gal Luxury, at the Bowery Poetry Club in New York City, which shares a space with a burlesque show and supper club. Sitting around candlelit tables covered in white cloth, the audience—socialized by other readings, perhaps, into polite reticence—didn’t answer Ellis’s “Good evening” loudly enough. “It means you’re scared,” he told them. “And if you’re scared, we’ll take you hostage.” He wasn’t kidding. The cacophony was intended to confuse; it laid siege to preconceptions of how sound builds sense. Ellis waved his arms wildly like a conductor, mimed playing a violin, flung around a wooden clapper whose loud crack made everyone flinch. (The CD track of the same piece seems almost gentle by comparison, despite the vocalist’s occasional yowls: the saxophone riffs wind through the words rather than battle them.)

Few writers devote themselves to making the “Assassin poems, Poems that shoot/guns” that Baraka called for in his iconic “Black Art,” in which he enjoins, “Clean out the world for virtue and love,/Let there be no love poems written/until love can exist freely and/cleanly.” Perhaps the Dark Room takes its cue, instead, from the imperative laid out in Brooks’s “The Second Sermon on the Warpland”: “This is the urgency: Live!/and have your blooming in the noise of the whirlwind.” The group’s internal diversity is innately political, because defiant freedom underwrites it, and that freedom is hard-won. A clue to how this connects to a larger project of black liberation might be found in the Collective’s unofficial motto, the closest they come to a list of demands: “Total life is what we want.”

Going on Tour, and Home

In 2013, the members marked their twenty-fifth anniversary with readings at literary hotspots in various American cities: the Associations of Writers & Writing Programs Conference, held that year in Boston; the Poetry Foundation in Chicago; Poets House and the Harlem Arts Salon in New York City. They took along commemorative buttons, their books, and a talisman—an imperfectly-round watermelon with “The Dark Room Collective Reunion Tour” Sharpied on its side. As in the old days, the events had live music, and reading order was determined by drawing names out of a hat.

The weekend after the tour kicked off, Smith was awarded the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for her third verse collection, Life on Mars—a stark, elegiac book drawing on sci-fi imagery to examine grief and God. In 2006, Trethewey had won the prize—also just as she turned 40, and also for her third book, Native Guard.

“If you told us in 1991, ‘Two of you guys will win,’” says Young, it would not have seemed out of the question. “We might have thought that. But it was amazing to have that come true.”

Later that April, the group gave their Washington, D.C., reading at the Lutheran Church of Reformation, on Capitol Hill. Every pew was filled. Then the writers and attendees (including several Cave Canem fellows) headed to the home of anesthesiologist and art collector Darryl Atwell, toasting the occasion with red and blue Solo cups and sharing a sheet cake with “2 Pulitzers” piped on it in icing. Ellis orchestrated a ceremony in which Trethewey presented Smith with a black statuette he dubbed the “Dark Room Pulitzer.” A life-sized cutout of Langston Hughes, kidnapped from the local restaurant Busboys and Poets, presided; in another corner, the lucky melon was placed in the hands of a statue, held aloft like a stripey green jewel. In June, Trethewey would be named Poet Laureate.

“The idea of collective changes, transforms.”

These days, the members of the Dark Room Collective are scattered across the country, and call various universities home: Brown, Emory, Princeton, Rutgers, Spelman, CalArts, Washington University in St. Louis. The usual demands of adult life (students, children of their own) and the unusual ones of literary stewardship (judging prizes, editing journals) compete for attention. And foremost, there’s the writing. In 2015 alone there was Keene’s fiction collection Counternarratives, Smith’s memoir Ordinary Light, andJackson’s Roll Deep; 2016 brings Lowe’s Leaving CLE, and Young’s volume of selected and uncollected poetry, Blue Laws. Amid the years of extraordinary productivity, the 2013 tour was an occasion for stock-taking.

“I’m absolutely humbled by everyone’s growth on the page, and you can read the work quietly to yourself. But to see people grow into a comfort—everyone grown into their art, and what their sound is—that’s humbling,” says Jackson. It felt less like a reunion than “like going to a family home somewhere.”

The final stop, in Santa Fe in December, afforded a last moment of public reflection. Of their founding, Ellis said to the audience, “Of course, we were having fun. And we were—you know, you need each other. You need other people who think like you, maybe, who read like you, maybe, who walk and breathe like you, maybe. You think you’re adding something that’s needed, that you don’t see. There’s something about that, that never ends, no matter who you are and where you are.”

Later in the evening, he added, “The idea of collective changes, transforms. We’re not a collective in the way we used to be, but”—his voice became mock-solemn—“We’re honoring the paaaast with the possibility of the futuuuure.”

In the recording of their appearance at Furious Flower, a 1994 conference at James Madison University, the Dark Room members are round-faced and un-grayed. They read their work with the kind of quiet that comes from confidence. When they stumble over their words, they smile. The narrator of the video, the last in an anthology about African-American literature, calls them the “initiates”—bearers of a torch handed down by elders in the Black Arts Movement and beyond. It’s tempting to describe their activity as a kind of literary renaissance, when in fact the Dark Room Collective placed themselves in a tradition with deep historical roots, an unbroken lineage that called for continuation, not rebirth. “Even in the nineteenth century, groups of African Americans got together and discussed the work,” Jackson explains. “So I don’t want to fashion the Dark Room Collective as trailblazers as much as a group of privileged, young, black aspiring writers who wrote work. We have to acknowledge that—that we benefited from the gains of the previous generations, writers who had to answer questions that we don’t have to answer now.”

The Dark Room provided a place for minds to crash freely into each other and spark. It nourished embryonic talents as they decided how they wanted to grow. With “safe space” now a watchword of campus activism, and Silicon Valley co-opting “incubator,” both terms seem somehow inadequate to the phenomenon described by Ellis at the Santa Fe reunion. “At the Dark Room Series all those years ago,” he said, “there was always that moment when the reading would reach that total togetherness, that place where, no matter who we were or where we were from…the moment of community would explode.”

“Explode,” but to where? Jackson puts it this way: “Each generation triggers the next generation into song and lyric.” “We might think of tradition not just as inheritance but as devotion—one measured by fetish as well as by other religion—and even invention,” Young suggests in The Grey Album. “Tradition is not what you inherit, but what you seek, and then seek to keep.” As other Dark Room alumni have in the past, both will teach at Cave Canem next summer.

While its writers are mid career—and until some manuscript library gets acquisitive and ambitious—the Dark Room’s material memory rests with various members who have the old photo negatives, videotapes, clippings, and flyers. And of course, there are the poems themselves, preserving youthful aspirations in amber. When Jackson is asked about some lines from his long sequence “Letter to Brooks,” in Hoops—“This was the aim of the DRC, / To test the puddles of white supremacy…”—it takes him a moment to “play critic to Major Jackson,” interpreting the original intent. “Puddles,” he says. “That’s interesting.” Then: “Puddles evaporate, right?” He laughs. “With enough heat.”