Michelle A. Williams has been appointed dean of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health (SPH), filling the vacancy created when Julio Frenk departed last summer to assume the presidency of the University of Miami. Williams will be familiar to many members of the SPH community: she is the school’s Kay Family professor of public health and professor of global health and population, and chair of the department of epidemiology; and she is a graduate who earned her S.M. in population science in 1988 and her Sc.D. in epidemiology in 1991. She will become dean in July, succeeding Gregory professor in cancer prevention and dean for academic affairs David Hunter, who has served as acting dean since last August.

The appointment comes at an important time for Harvard’s Longwood Medical Area: both SPH, until today, and Harvard Medical School have been in the process of transitions to new leadership. Both are, obviously, pursuing ambitious capital-campaign objectives (read about SPH’s campaign here and here—and about the $350-million unrestricted-endowment gift that essentially transformed its finances; read about the medical campaign here). In the wake of reduced federal support for sponsored research, the medical school, particularly, has been running at a deficit, but both schools are heavily dependent on research grants (the source of 67 percent of SPH’s operating revenue in fiscal year 2015—by far the largest proportion among all of Harvard’s faculties). And although their disciplines differ, the two schools’ faculties collaborate extensively (see below about some of Williams’s interfaculty activities).

In shaping its campaign priorities, the school defined four programmatic objectives:

• Old and new pandemics (ranging from underwriting basic research on malaria, to exploring innovative institutions and control measures, to understanding emerging diseases like the recent Ebola crisis in western Africa)
• Harmful physical and social environments (from air and water pollution to gun violence, tobacco use, and diet-related problems)
• Poverty and humanitarian crises (from war-caused population displacements to natural catastrophes, and including efforts to advance health as a human right)
• Failing health systems (and the related challenges of healthcare affordability, accessibility, and efficiency)

Frenk, former minister of health for Mexico and an architect of that country’s move toward universal health coverage, brought particular expertise to the last of those priorities. Williams’s work suggests hands-on exposure to and engagement with elements of the first three priorities.

Her research has focused on maternal and infant mortality and health. According to the description on her faculty profile, “I have spent the last two decades focused on integrating epidemiological, biological and molecular approaches into rigorously designed clinical epidemiology research projects that have led to greater understandings of the etiology and pathophysiology of placental abruption, gestational diabetes, and preeclampsia.” That research has spanned North America, sub-Saharan Africa, Asia, and South America—useful experience for the leader of an especially international school. She is also an affiliate of the Medical School’s division of sleep medicine, as an outgrowth of her work on perinatal outcomes. She appears here talking about stress and health. And she is faculty director for the Harvard Clinical and Translational Science Center’s program on health-disparities research and for the population health-research program.

A 1984 graduate of Princeton, where she studied biology, Williams earned her M.S. at Tufts in 1986, in civil engineering and public health. She did a postdoc at the University of Washington School of Public Health and Community Medicine, and joined the faculty there in 1992. She was recruited back to Cambridge in 2011 to become chair of epidemiology.

With today’s appointment, she becomes the first African-American leader of one of Harvard’s faculties. (There have been multiple women deans. For example, President Faust was founding dean of the Radcliffe Institute, and her successors have been women. The Graduate School of Education has been led by Patricia A. Graham and Kathleen McCartney, and the Law School’s dean, Martha Minow, was preceded by Elena Kagan, now a U.S. Supreme Court justice. Evelynn M. Hammonds served as dean of Harvard College—one level down from leading a faculty per se.)

The University announcement cited Williams for the “creative integration of epidemiological, biological, and molecular approaches” in her public-health research, and for award-winning work with students. She received SPH’s Outstanding Mentor Award last year.

In the announcement, President Drew Faust said:

Michelle Williams is an eminent epidemiologist, an outstanding teacher and mentor, and an energizing leader and institutional citizen, impassioned about the power of public health to change people’s lives for the better.

She is a skilled builder of bridges—between the theoretical and the practical, the domestic and the international, the different disciplines that drive the school’s academic endeavors, and the different communities that shape its identity and aspirations. I know she will approach her new role with the intelligence, dedication, integrity, and humane spirit that she brings to all she does.

Williams said:

I am honored and excited by the opportunity to lead the Harvard Chan School, and grateful to President Faust for inviting me to serve in this role at such a crucial moment for public health in the United States and around the world. As an alumna and faculty member, I have witnessed the transformative impact that this institution can have in education, research, and discovery related to the health of communities in need. We have an imperative to lead and to serve, and I am looking forward to working even more closely with the school’s faculty, students, staff, and alumni to build on the school’s achievements under Julio Frenk’s remarkable leadership and to advance our collective commitment to understanding and confronting public health challenges worldwide.

Acting dean Hunter said:

Michelle has been a valued colleague since she returned to Harvard five years ago. Along with many others, I’ve come to admire her for her collaborative research, her mentorship of students and faculty colleagues, her work to strengthen her department, her contributions to shaping the new Ph.D. program in population sciences, and her important focus on health disparities through the Harvard Catalyst [the Clinical and Translational Science Center linked above]. I’m confident our school will be in excellent hands.

Read the University announcement here.

The contested election for Harvard’s Board of Overseers seems anomalous in this noisy U.S. presidential election year. There are no airport rallies, no televised attack commercials or Super PACs, no polls. The voters—Harvard degree-holders—are dispersed worldwide, and the voting itself extends from the mailing of ballots by April 1, until noon on May 20, with results announced at the Harvard Alumni Association’s (HAA) annual meeting on the afternoon of Commencement day.

So no one knows at this point who among the 13 candidates (eight HAA nominees and five petitioners) is leading in the competition for five new Overseers. On average, only about 11 percent of eligible voters actually cast their ballots in the annual elections; one imponderable is whether—as in the presidential polling—a contested Overseer election elicits more robust participation, or if ballots mostly find their way into recycling bins.

Herewith, a summary of campaign developments at the midpoint of the election calendar.

A Campus Conversation

Ron Unz ’83, who organized and acts as spokesman for the “Free Harvard, Fair Harvard” petitioner slate, came to campus April 10 hoping to debate representatives from the Coalition for a Diverse Harvard, who are backing a slate of HAA-nominated Overseer candidates. Coalition representatives declined the bait, so the forum became a panel discussion among Unz, Daniel Solomon ’16, and Luran He ’18, moderated by 1L Pete Davis ’12, online editor of the Harvard Law Record.

The discussion focused first on the petitioners’ proposal to make Harvard College tuition-free. Calling Harvard “one of the world’s largest hedge funds with a small college attached,” Unz argued that if Harvard dropped tuition, Yale, Princeton, and Stanford would immediately follow its lead. He later elaborated this point: parents of students at those schools would demand the change, and eventually, he hoped, the mere presence of tuition-less private schools would generate sufficient pressure to force state schools to lower or eliminate their own tuition charges. He suggested state-school tuition has risen astronomically because colleges have had to add amenities like Olympic pools and better cafeteria food to compete with the private schools, and above all, because they’ve added large numbers of high-paid administrators who do nothing while poorly paid adjuncts do most of the teaching.

Briefly mentioning Fair Harvard (a multipart plank alleging that “powerful statistical evidence” exists of an “Asian quota” for undergraduate admissions, and insisting on “far greater transparency in the admissions process”), he asserted that the population of Asian Americans of college age has risen 60 percent, while the percentage enrolled at Harvard has stayed steady or even declined a bit. Later he summed up: Harvard says its goals are meritocracy and diversity (which, he pointed out, “may sometimes be in opposition”). In fact, they are corruption and nepotism.

Solomon, in response, stressed that eliminating tuition would be a giveaway to the wealthy, and rebutted Unz’s claim that eliminating tuition would no different than the wealthy benefiting from public programs like Social Security. The latter, Solomon said, is a public benefit that builds necessary social cohesion; the former, a giveaway by a private college with a much wealthier-than-average student body. He also suggested a Harvard change wouldn’t necessarily affect other schools, pointing to the University’s effort to end early decision, which had limited impact.

Luran He asked about Unz’s position on room and board. The “Free Harvard” plan refers only to tuition; room and board fees total about $20,000 next year, and are covered fully in financial-aid packages for students with family incomes below $65,000. (The tuition focus of the petitioners’ plank has been interpreted in some quarters to mean that current aid packages would become less generous to students with significant need.) Unz said the slate is dealing only with tuition, but he thinks the charge for room and board is too high and one could make a case for abolishing it as well.

Unz then argued that dropping tuition would be the best way to attract the low-income applicants the College says it wants to attract, because the news coverage would resonate worldwide, having far more impact than institutions’ communications about financial aid—and suggested such a move would make wealthy families unhappy with Harvard because their own children would face more competition.

(In a sort of debate from afar, Daniel Lobo ’14, of the First Generation Harvard Alumni shared interest group, wrote in a Harvard Crimson op-ed published April 20 that the barriers to applying to the College are cultural, not—given existing aid packages—financial. As he put it, “[F]or the family I met in New York, as for so many others like them, it’s not about being hindered by the price tag. Rather, it’s about feeling as though one does not possess the pedigree and social capital required to even knock on the door of the Ivies—an externality of the exclusive legacy that Harvard and its peers spent centuries constructing.” Lobo argued that suggestions like Unz’s—that the admissions process should more narrowly focus on test scores and grades—discourage students like him from applying to selective institutions.)

Unz argued that Harvard’s online financial-aid calculator prevents comparison shopping against other colleges, and is so opaque it likely discourages applicants from completing it. He also criticized the financial-aid system for failing to account for local costs of living. He raised a favorite example of two New York City public-school teachers with about 20 years’ service, putting their salaries at about $90,000 to $95,000 each, and said it would cost them about $150,000 to send their child to Harvard.

In response, Solomon identified himself as the son of two public servants from Queens, New York, who has two siblings in college—and yet is at Harvard.

On admissions generally, Unz confirmed that he has always opposed affirmative action, and thus Harvard’s admissions policies (detailed here)—but, he noted, other members of the petitioner slate do not share that view, and so the “Fair Harvard” plank aims at “transparency” about admissions criteria, such as the role of race, ethnicity, athletics, legacies, and gift-giving in the evaluation of candidates. Ending affirmative action, he said, is not a goal of the petitioners’ campaign.

(In his answer to the Coalition for a Diverse Harvard’s candidate questionnaire, for example, petitioner Ralph Nader, LL.B. ’58, responded, “I strongly support affirmative action and reparations for African Americans” and “I support race-conscious college admissions with historical wisdom.” Beyond those differences, of course, any candidate, if elected, can advance whatever views she or he wishes on the Board of Overseers. Proponents of Harvard’s admissions practices, which incorporate race and ethnicity, have therefore opposed Unz as a likely opponent of affirmative-action policies.)

Unz stressed that neither pure meritocracy (which puts “terrible pressure” on students to do well) nor pure diversity works as means to pick a College class and offered instead his proposal: 80 percent of a class should be chosen by lottery from among all applicants with sufficient test scores, with the rest of the class filled by the top-scoring scholars. (See the discussion linked above for a comparison to current admissions practices.)

See The Harvard Crimson’s account of the panel here, and a full video of the debate here.

Another Campaign

Unz has made a busy winter and spring for himself. After unveiling the Overseer effort in January, he made a snap decision in mid March to enter California’s Republican U.S. Senate primary. In an e-mail announcing his candidacy, he wrote:

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 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 this 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.

Unz’s senatorial campaign platform proposes “completely dismantling” affirmative action and “forcing universities” to cut their costs and tuition. Immigration restrictions also feature prominently in his platform. “I doubt there are many political figures in California with stronger pro-immigrant credentials than my own,” he writes on his campaign site. But, in this context, he goes on, “immigration is too high, causing our society all sorts of problems. As a U.S. Senator, I would propose cutting legal immigration and drastically reducing illegal immigration.” He points to immigration-driven population growth, resulting in “enormous pressure on our environment and natural resources while reducing our quality of life” and, “[e]ven more serious…the negative economic impact on most of our working population, which is forced to compete for jobs and wages with new immigrants, who are often desperate to take any job at all. 

Teeing Off on Tuition

Echoing the “Free Harvard, Fair Harvard” campaign, protestors at Harvard Law School (HLS)—undoubtedly proceeding from a different end of the political spectrum—have now called for the abolition of tuition there, under the banner of “Fees Must Fall.” Their argument—tuition is nearly $60,000; students graduate with large debt loads—poses even more severe challenges for HLS than the Overseers’ petitioners’ plank might for the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (whose finances are detailed here).

According to the latest University financial report, HLS derived 46 percent of its operating revenue in fiscal year 2015 from “student income” (tuition and fees), the highest proportion of any Harvard school, and twice FAS’s dependence on such revenues.

HLS does offer financial aid, and its Low Income Protection Plan provides loan-repayment assistance for graduates who pursue public-service careers. Its capital campaign seeks to augment resources for these purposes.

And then there is the matter of a significant number of graduates’ economic prospects. As The Harvard Crimsoneditorialized, citing HLS data, graduates who pursue employment in the top-tier corporate law firms now enjoy starting salaries of $160,000 or so—and median compensation for members of the class of 2015 was at the same level. For them, incurring debt is a wise investment, and providing a tuition-free legal education, in the Crimson’s words, “subsidizes the most privileged and diverts resources from those who most need the financial support and seek to serve the public good for lower compensation.” (The newspaper did not delve into the sources of funding for HLS’s faculty, their research, or other operating costs.)

Friends “All Over the Ideological Spectrum”

Unz has also published a thick volume of his essays this winter, titled The Myth of American Meritocracy and Other Essays, after his long essay on admissions that underlies his campaign for the Board of Overseers (the essay is discussed at length here and here—along with his evolving, and at times opposed, views on the ethnic composition of Harvard’s student body).

On April 14, theCrimson published a report on Unz’s charitable support for what he called a “quasi-white nationalist” group, VDARE. (VDARE’s website says, “We inform the fight to keep America American.”) The report quoted Unz as saying, “I support all these different people and groups because they’re mostly totally broke and they write interesting things. That’s the left, the right, all over the ideological spectrum.” Of this particular contribution, he told the Crimson, “VDARE is probably one of the hardest core anti-immigrant webzines around, and I think it would be fair to characterize them as a quasi-white nationalist perspective.”

Unz responded in an extended essay, “My Stasi File Published in the Harvard Crimson,” posted on the Free Harvard, Fair Harvard website. He wrote, in part:

Over the last dozen years I’ve certainly provided donations to a very wide range of political groups and individuals, including leftwingers, rightwingers, and libertarians. Many of these groups are on the political fringe and espouse controversial views on all sorts of different issues. I might agree with them on some things and disagree with them on others, but frequently find their ideas a useful counterpoint to the conventional wisdom presented in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, which I spend hours closely reading every morning.

Much of the Crimson article focused on my financial support to VDare, a rightwing and very hard-core anti-immigrant webzine, with the dollars representing less than 1% of my total donations over the last decade. Since immigration issues have always been one of my main interests, I read VDare quite regularly and am on friendly terms with their staff. But as everyone knows from the hundreds of thousands of words I have published on immigration-related topics, I’ve always been one of America’s leading pro-immigrant voices, hence almost invariably on the exact opposite side from VDare. I find it odd that the Crimson article left out that significant detail, which surely would have made their account of my donation seem even more shocking and newsworthy.…

I reject “guilt by association” and just because I am personally friendly with various people, publish their writings, or even provide them some financial assistance, that does not necessarily mean that I endorse everything they say…

I have a long record of closely associating with people of sharply different views. I am often identified as the former publisher (2006-2013) of The American Conservative (TAC), an opinion magazine that absorbed over 60% of my donations over the last decade. TAC was co-founded by Pat Buchanan and always had a strongly Buchananite stance on immigration, trade, and social issues, positions I did not share. However, I strongly supported their lonely opposition to the disastrous foreign wars of the Bush Administration, afterward continued by the Obama Administration.

All this is a long way from the ordinary concerns of the Board of Overseers, and perhaps an unexpected turn in the issues being raised. As noted above, the campaign, such as it is, is proceeding on websites, less visibly in social media and e-mails, and in the occasional op-ed and forum. Its results will become known to all a month from today.

Citing their history of gender discrimination and negative influence on campus life, University President Drew Faust announced in an e-mail today that Harvard will ban members of historically male final clubs and other unrecognized, single-gender social groups from holding certain leadership roles and receiving College endorsements for fellowships. The announcement comes after a year of increasingly explicit pressure on the clubs from Faust and Harvard College dean Rakesh Khurana, and follows criticism of the clubs highlighted in the report of University’s the task force on sexual assault.     

“Over time, Harvard has transformed its undergraduate student body as it has welcomed women, minorities, international students, and students of limited financial means as an increasing proportion of its population. But campus culture has not changed as rapidly as student demography,” Faust wrote. “A truly inclusive community requires that students have the opportunity to participate in the life of the campus free from exclusion on arbitrary grounds. Although the fraternities, sororities, and final clubs are not formally recognized by the College, they play an unmistakable and growing role in student life, in many cases enacting forms of privilege and exclusion at odds with our deepest values. The College cannot ignore these organizations if it is to advance our shared com­mitment to broadening opportunity and making Harvard a campus for all of its students. Nor can it endorse selection criteria that reject much of the student body merely because of gender.”

Seemingly responding to criticism that sanctions on final clubs would undermine students’ freedom of association, Khurana stressed in a letter to Faust recommending the policy that students will still have the right to join discriminatory groups, but that association with such groups is contrary to Harvard’s values. “These new policies will not prevent undergraduates from choosing their own paths while at Harvard,” he argued. “The recommendations are instead focused exclusively on decisions belonging to the College about what it funds, sponsors, endorses, or otherwise operates under its name.”

Members of final clubs and other unrecognized, gender-exclusive groups whose purpose is primarily social, like fraternities and sororities, won’t be allowed to hold leadership positions in recognized student groups or athletics. Nor will they receive endorsements from the College dean’s office for fellowships that require them, such as the prestigious Rhodes and Marshall scholarships. The policy will take effect in fall 2017, affecting only students in the class of 2021 and younger. Single-gender organizations that are recognized by the University, such as the South Asian Men’s Collective or the Association of Black Harvard Women, won’t be affected. The University plans to appoint an advisory committee of faculty, students, and staff to enforce the policy. 

The announcement follows a year of escalating hostilities between the clubs and the College administration, which had pressured them to accept women members. In an interview with The Harvard Crimson Wednesday, Faust condemned the clubs for promoting an environment of “exclusion and discrimination” not only on the basis of gender, but also through their arbitrary admissions criteria, echoing arguments from students that the clubs also discriminate against students from disadvantaged backgrounds. The new College policy, though, will only target groups that engage in gender discrimination.  

“[A]t this time, the College should not adopt a rule prohibiting students from joining unrecognized social organizations that retain discrimina­tory membership policies,” Faust wrote, an option many final club members had feared. “Students will decide for themselves whether to engage with these organizations, as members or otherwise.” But the cachet associated with leadership roles and top fellowships, for many students, will serve as a de facto ban.  

Douglas Sears ’69, a former president of the graduate board of the Fox and the now-defunct Inter-Club Council, condemned the policy, and disputed the link between sexual assault and final clubs. “Sexual assault is marginally linked to the clubs,” he said. “Women at Harvard are more likely to be assaulted in dormitories than anywhere else.” Sears argued the new policy is clearly intended to force final clubs to go co-ed, but doubts whether they’ll accede. “People will just say, ‘My daughter can’t be a lacrosse captain just because she joined the Bee,’” he said. 

“This decision depends on Harvard getting millions of dollars in research funds from the federal government,” Sears argued, suggesting that the University was under pressure from the Department of Education (DOE) to ban gender-exclusive groups. The DOE two years ago launched a probe into Harvard’s sexual assault policies. Universities can lose federal funding if they are found in violation of Title IX, the law that protects students from sex discrimination.  

Despite his statement, Sears said he supported the Fox’s decision to admit women last semester because its student members had elected to, and that he was dismissed from his presidency of the graduate board for his position.  

Since the beginning of his deanship two years ago, Khurana has focused attention on final clubs for their policies of gender discrimination and perceived contributions to alcohol abuse and sexual violence. Clubs that go co-ed (as the Spee and Fox clubs did this year, in response to College pressure) won’t be affected by the new policy.

In March, a widely publicized report of the University’s Task Force on Sexual Assault Prevention denounced final clubs and urged the administration to address “the disturbing practical and cultural implications they present in undergraduate life.” The report draws on an earlier University sexual-assault climate survey conducted last spring, whichfound that 47 percent of senior women participating in final-club activities reported experiencing nonconsensual sexual contact since entering the College, compared to 31 percent of senior women overall. A related statistic—that 17 percent of sexual assaults reported in the survey took place in spaces used by single-gender social organizations, compared to 75 percent in dorms—has also been used to suggest that final clubs contribute disproportionately to sexual violence. The 75 percent may also include assaults involving final club attendees that took place in dorms—after parties on final-club property, for example. Critics have questioned the University’s reliance on correlations to make causal inferences about the influence of the clubs. 

Some final clubs have publicly condemned pressure from the administration, disputing the University’s statistics and challenging the assumption that admitting women would reduce sexual assault. Last month, Charles Storey ’82, then the graduate board president of the Porcellian Club, wrote in the first public statement in the club’s history that forcing final clubs to become co-ed would “increase, not decrease the potential for sexual misconduct.” Storey resigned from his role on the graduate board a few days later, following widespread ridicule of his comments in the national media.

Though framed as a top-down decision, it’s clear the College’s policy would not have changed without strong activism from students. The movement to dismantle final clubs reaches back at least a few decades. The College revoked their official recognition in 1984, after they declined to admit women. In 2004, a group calling itself Students Against Super Sexist Institutions-We Oppose Oppressive Final Clubs organized a campaign to disband the clubs, but was largely ignored by the administration, which said there was nothing it could do about the privately controlled clubs. In 2010, students organized the Final Club Campaign to promote dialogue about the negative influence of the clubs and to demand alternative social spaces from the administration. But calls to restrict final clubs really began to gain currency only in the last few years, following a wave of student activism targeting sexual-assault policies at Harvard and elsewhere, and a federal Title IX probe of the University for its handling of sexual assault. 

The College’s new policy imposes sanctions on individual undergraduates rather than the private clubs themselves, unless they push their clubs to go co-ed. The change in tactics may divide current student members and alumni members—as apparently happened at the Fox this year—and create a face-saving way to change the College’s culture down the road. 

On the agenda for President Barack Obama’s visit to Vietnam beginning this Sunday are important strategic issues extending back to the devastating war between the countries that ended in 1975, and forward to the rising tensions between China and its neighbors bordering the contested South China Sea. Renewed arms sales and access to the naval base at Cam Ranh Bay are reportedly under discussion.

But the presidential visit may also serve as the coming-out party for the Fulbright University Vietnam: the first nonprofit, academically independent institution of higher education in the country. Its development was endorsed by leaders of both countries in 2013, in a formal White House statement. The Vietnamese government granted full licensure on May 16. And formal recognition of the new institution is expected during the high-level exchanges.

As reported in Harvard Magazine’s feature, “A Nation, Building” (May-June 2014), and a subsequent dispatch, the university is rising on the foundation established by the Fulbright Economics Teaching Program (FETP), established in 1994 by Harvard Kennedy School (HKS) affiliates, in collaboration with the University of Economics in Ho Chi Minh City. They modeled their Fulbright School and its meritocratic public-policy curriculum on the Kennedy School’s core public-policy classes. Thomas Vallely, senior advisor on mainland Southeast Asia to HKS’s Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation, directed the work and the school's predecessor academic engagements with Vietnam. Ben Wilkinson, former HKS Vietnam program director, was based at FETP’s campus in Ho Chi Minh City for many years. They remain deeply involved in organizing and raising funds for the nascent new university: Vallely is chair of the board of the parent organization, and Wilkinson is the full-time staff member. (Read an Ash Center report on the history and development of the new university. Additional stories are available at the FETP website.)

Thus, while military assets and strategic position dominate the government-level discussions this weekend, the quiet work of elevating higher education in Vietnam and developing its future intellectual capital proceed as well, building on decades of close academic ties between scholars and leaders there and a handful of deeply involved Kennedy School staff members.

Updated May 23, 2016, 8:45 a.m. The New York Times has reported that “Mr. Obama also announced on Monday that the two sides had formalized an agreement to allow the opening of Fulbright University Vietnam in Ho Chi Minh City, the first independent university in Vietnam in which the government will have no role in creating the curriculum or teaching students. The university’s chairman, Bob Kerrey, a former senator of Nebraska, said the school may start teaching undergraduates in the fall of 2017."

Updated May 25, 8:45 a.m.Secretary of State John Kerry, Senator John McCain, and former Senator Bob Kerrey wrote about Fulbright University in a New York Times op-ed on Vietnam; Bob Kerry will chair the board of the new institution. All three were involved, during their senate service, in supporting the Vietnam Fulbright program administered by the Kennedy School staff named above, and in laying the foundations for the program that has evolved into the emerging university.

Departing from its customary practice, the University today announced that five Harvard Alumni Association (HAA) nominees—Lindsay Chase-Lansdale; Helena Buonanno Foulkes; Ketanji Brown Jackson; Alejandro Ramírez Magaña; and Kent Walker—have been elected to six-year terms on the Board of Overseers. The news is customarily disseminated on the afternoon of Commencement day—this coming Thursday, May 26—during the annual meeting of the HAA. But this year, with eight HAA-nominated candidates and a slate of five petition candidates campaigning on a “Free Harvard/Fair Harvard” platform all competing for seats on the board, it may have been politic to announce results as soon as possible after the ballots were received (by noon on May 20) and counted, lest the outcome leak piecemeal as candidates were notified of their status.

The complete list of candidates, in ballot order, with identifying information, appears below.

As reported (see all prior dispatches at harvardmagazine.com/overseerelection), the HAA nominated these candidates:

• 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, 
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 nominees by petition included:

• 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.

According to the University announcement, 35,870 ballots were cast—a relatively robust turnout, perhaps reflecting the competitive nature of the campaign this year, which was accompanied by significant social-media and online outreach. In recent years, a typical response has been 27,000 ballots from the 250,000 or so eligible voters: about 11 percent.

The petitioners outlined their platform and campaigned via the Free Harvard/Fair Harvard website; alumni who opposed their platform, and who focused particularly on supporting current undergraduate admissions practices, organized and campaigned via the Coalition for a Diverse Harvard website. After soliciting all candidates’ responses to a questionnaire, the coalition—seeking to minimize the possibility that any of the petition candidates would win election—endorsed Ketanji Brown Jackson, John J. Moon, Alejandro Ramírez Magaña, Damian Woetzel, and Lindsay Chase-Lansdale.

In the weeks since College dean Rakesh Khurana and President Drew Faust announced that Harvard would take action against unrecognized single-gender social organizations on campus, both those opposed and those in favor of the policy—ranging from members of the clubs to alumni and the national media—have made their opinions known in articles, on social media, and, in at least one case, by staging a protest outside Faust’s office in Massachusetts Hall.

The new rules, which will go into effect starting with students entering the College in 2017, will prohibit members of groups such as final clubs, fraternities, and sororities from holding leadership positions in University-recognized teams and clubs, and will also prevent them from receiving College endorsement for fellowships. In his letter announcing the policy, Khurana criticized the single-gender groups, asserting that they are “at odds with Harvard College’s educational philosophy and its commitment to a diverse living and learning experience.”

Some members of single-gender social organizations have vocally opposed the new policy. A number of members of women’s clubs, for instance, were instrumental in organizing the Massachusetts Hall protest. Protesters chanted, “Hear her, Harvard,” as they demanded Harvard revise its policy to protect all-female social clubs; Rebecca Ramos ’17, who is president of a sorority, helped lead the rally, which she said was attended by more than 400 women.

“We feel that it is very important that women have a place they can go that is safe for them and where they can continue to discuss women’s issues in a safe environment,” Ramos said. “We agree that we want to help build a more inclusive environment, and we want to make sure that we are making strides to improve the sexual-assault issues on campus, but we feel that eliminating all women’s spaces is not an effective way to do that.”

In a statement following the protest, College spokesperson Rachael Dane said Harvard had received messages of support and of criticism from many Harvard students and alumni. “We continue to believe that gender discrimination has no place on Harvard’s campus,” she added. “At the same time, we support the right of every community member to express their views.”

Harvard’s fraternities and sororities have the support of the national organizations to which they belong; in a joint statement, leaders of the National Panhellenic Conference, the National Association of Latino Fraternal Organizations, the North-American Interfraternity Conference, and the Association of Fraternity/Sorority Advisors rebuked Harvard for denying fraternity and sorority members “the basic right of free association” and depriving them of “experiences that foster leadership, personal growth and the very sense of engagement college is designed to create.”

The ranks of the rules’ opponents were further bolstered when a letter from Harry Lewis ’68, Gordon Mackay professor of computer science and a former dean of the College, expressing his concerns about the policy to Khurana, was published in TheHarvard Crimson. In his letter, Lewis called some of the final clubs “noxious,” but warned Khurana of his worry that “The good you may achieve will in the long run be eclipsed by the bad: a College culture of fear and anxiety about nonconformity.”

But some students and recent graduates said they support Harvard’s policy and hope that it will lead to a more inclusive social atmosphere. Reina Gattuso ’15 said she finds that the notoriously exclusive final clubs “represent this concentration of material power and social prestige in the hands of a few students on campus.” She called the decision to take action against the clubs “a really exciting opportunity for Harvard social life to be vastly reconfigured along more egalitarian lines.”

Gattuso also wrote an op-ed for the Crimson, rebutting the argument that all-female organizations should not be punished along with the historically dominant male final clubs. In an interview, she conceded that “women’s groups have an alternate history to men’s groups,” but maintained that the female clubs can also contribute to issues of discrimination, which, she said, “can be related to what kind of gender norms are persisting in the space.”

Gattuso’s article was accompanied by another op-ed, written by Carl Rogers ’16, which also argued that sororities and women’s final clubs exclude people who do not conform to traditional expressions of gender. In the article, titled “Sanctions on Single-Sex Organizations: A Queer Perspective,” Rogers asked, “Why can’t a female final club or sorority one day become a safe, inclusive space for people of all genders who express feminine gender characteristics?” 

Beyond the editorial section of the Crimson, a number of responses to the policy changes have circulated online. Aaron Slipper ’18 posted an essay of more than 3,000 words on Facebook and later on Dropbox, in which he lambasted the Harvard administration, which, he said in an interview, “in punishing the individual members of these organizations, is manifestly trampling on our rights of association.” He continued to speculate, “If the administration can blacklist people because they belong to an organization that embodies views that the administration finds disagreeable, what’s to stop it from blacklisting Catholics, or Republicans?”

Catherine Katz ’13, a member of Harvard’s chapter of Kappa Kappa Gamma, wrote a post called “An Open Letter to Harvard” on the blogging site Medium. In an interview, she explained that she was disappointed by what she saw as Harvard’s failure to solicit adequate input from the community before going forward with the new policy. “I felt like Harvard had really missed an opportunity to encourage students to participate in a debate, to challenge assumptions, and to come together as a community to discuss how everybody can best move forward in this contentious time together,” Katz said. “There are a lot of people here who are really great contributors to the community, whether they’re male or female, and it is very important that all of them have the opportunity to speak and voice their opinions.”

The debate about Harvard’s social organizations has spread far beyond Cambridge, attracting the attention of several prominent news outlets. Charles Lane, a columnist for TheWashington Post, wrote that what he called Harvard’s “new crackdown” on fraternities, sororities, and final clubs is the embodiment of a sort of “clueless illiberalism.” He went on to speculate that “Only Harvard…could so cunningly manipulate its hyper-competitive students’ ambitions in the cause of social leveling.”

In contrast, TheBoston Globe’s editorial board issued a resounding endorsement of Harvard’s plan: “Free association at a private college doesn’t entail a right to participate in organizations that have been shown to endanger classmates.” The Globe went so far in its criticism of the single-gender clubs as to say, “The college has a responsibility to do everything it can to force them to integrate—or disappear.” 

Alumni of single-gender organizations were not unanimous in opposing the policy. Elliot Gerson ’74, who serves as the American secretary of the Rhodes Trust (its prominent scholarship could be denied to fraternity, sorority, and final club members under the new policy) and who was, as an undergraduate, president of the Spee Club, which admitted women for the first time last year, wrote in the Crimson that he approved of the new rules and predicted a future in which they would no longer be the source of controversy. “Some day,” he wrote, “most Harvard final club alumni will look back and wonder how we could accept gender discriminatory membership for so long.”

The Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (GSAS) Centennial Medal, first awarded in 1989 on the occasion of the school’s hundredth anniversary, honors alumni who have made contributions to society that emerged from their graduate study at Harvard. It is the highest honor GSAS bestows, and awardees include some of Harvard’s most accomplished alumni. Brief biographies of this year’s honorees, based on material provided by the school, appear below.

The 2016 Centennial Medal Winners


Francis Fukuyama, Ph.D. ’81 

A political scientist, Francis Fukuyama studied classics with Allan Bloom as an undergraduate at Cornell. As a graduate student, he spent time with Barthes and Derrida in Paris. He completed the final year of his doctorate in government at Harvard on a fellowship that he received through Samuel Huntington, a leading figure in comparative politics and international relations. Fukuyama began his career at the RAND Corporation in California and as a deputy director of policy planning in the U.S. Department of State. He is currently based at Stanford, where he is the Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and director of the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law.

“Intellectually I think he’s the student that Sam would be the proudest of,” says Graham Allison, director of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs and Dillon professor of government at the Harvard Kennedy School. “Like his teacher, Fukuyama asks fundamental questions about where political order comes from, and how it evolves, and the pros and cons of various forms. He does so with a commitment to scholarship and a courageous independence that never ducks uncomfortable and challenging conclusions.

David Mumford, A.B. ’57, Ph.D. ’61 

Mathematician David Mumford’s career has encompassed both pure mathematics and applied mathematics; he has made advances not only in the abstract world of proofs and theorems, but also in the psychology of vision and the scientific modeling of thought. Mumford taught on the Harvard faculty for 35 years, from the completion of his doctorate in 1961 until his appointment in 1996 as University Professor in the division of applied math at Brown, where he is now emeritus. After leading the field of algebraic geometry for two decades, he made a transition to applied mathematics. He is particularly interested in pattern theory, visual perception, and the neurophysiology of vision, and he has used statistical approaches to advance the field of computer vision and study some of the most puzzling mysteries of cognition.

One of the undergraduates in Mumford’s Harvard classroom was Joe Harris, now Higgins professor of mathematics—a chair that Mumford himself held for 20 years. “It would be hard to overstate Mumford’s impact on mathematics,” says Harris. “The subject of algebraic geometry, which had been studied intensively for almost two centuries and which occupies a central place in mathematics, was completely transformed, largely as a result of his work.”

John O’Malley, Ph.D. ’65 

Professor and priest, historian and Jesuit, John O’Malley is the rare scholar who has emerged as both an academic and spiritual leader. He taught at the University of Detroit before returning to Cambridge to serve for nearly three decades as a distinguished professor of church history at the former Weston Jesuit School of Theology. He is now University Professor in the department of theology at Georgetown. He began his career as a scholar of Italian Renaissance intellectual history and went on to become a leading authority on early modern Catholicism.

“John is like a pied piper,” says Mark Massa, Th.D. ’87, professor of church history and dean of the Boston College School of Theology and Ministry, who studied history with O’Malley both as an undergraduate and as a graduate student. “A lot of my friends were inspired to go into history because of John’s ability to make it interesting, relevant, alive. He connected all the dots for us. William Faulkner once said that the past is not really dead, in fact it’s not even past—and I think John has the ability to make us see how that is true.”

Cecilia Rouse, A.B. ’86, Ph.D. ’92 

A leading scholar of the economics of education, Cecilia Rouse completed a dissertation in economics that tackled a previously unexplored topic: the economic effects of attending community college rather than a traditional four-year college. “She opened a completely new research area,” says Lawrence Katz, Allison professor of economics and one of her primary advisers. “Almost all research on the economics of higher education focused on four-year schools, and she in her dissertation broke new ground in trying to understand the increasingly important role community colleges played, particularly for disadvantaged and minority students.”

Rouse went on to become co-chair of the American Economic Association’s Committee on the Status of Minority Groups in the Economics Profession, where she has championed a summer program that increases diversity in academia by preparing undergraduates for doctoral study. She also served as an economic adviser to the Clinton administration and on President Obama’s three-member Council of Economic Advisers. In 2012, she was named dean of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University, whose faculty she had joined in 1992. “There are economists who choose problems merely because they’re intellectually interesting,” says Lawrence H. Summers, Eliot University Professor. “Ceci chooses problems because they are the real problems of our society. She is a model of the socially committed intellectual.” 

During the Morning Exercises of the 365rd Commencement, on May 26, Harvard planned to confer honorary degrees on six men and three women. Among them are:

• a lawyer who has pioneered cases ending discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation (now also a lecturer at Harvard Law School), and a moral philosopher known for her thought experiments (including a famous argument about a woman’s right to control her body and to terminate a pregnancy);
• a biographer of Langston Hughes and Ralph Ellison, an eminent African found-objects sculptor, and the former leader of Brazil;
• a film director, producer, and screenwriter whose credits include the 1997 historical drama Amistad, about a mutiny aboard a slave ship, and the preeminent historian of slavery and abolitionism; and
• a stem-cell scientist, and an astrophysicist who has made leading contributions to the study of black holes and the “cosmic dark ages”—the period after the Big Bang, before the universe was lit.

Two of the guests will add honorary doctoral degrees to their earned Harvard doctorates.

There is no obvious candidate this year for the role of honorand-performer, a recurring Commencement motif during President Drew Faust’s administration—à la soprano Renée Fleming last year, trumpeter Wynton Marsalis (2009), tenor Plácido Domingo (2011), poet Seamus Heaney reading his famous Harvard villanelle (2012), hugger extraordinaire Oprah (2013), and soul singer Aretha Franklin (2014). But perhaps Harvard Band members will riff on composer John Williams’s movie scores.

The honorands are listed below in alphabetical order, not in the order of conferral of degrees, except for filmmaker Steven Spielberg, who by custom, as guest speaker at the Afternoon Exercises, will receive his degree last during the Morning Exercises. For details on the conferrals, check back for coverage of the morning ceremonies later today.

El Anatsui, sculptor, Doctor of Arts.El Anatsui, born in Ghana in 1944 and based in Nigeria for much of his career, has become a preeminent West African artist, widely recognized for sculptures and shimmering, tapestry-like wall hangings made from found objects, such as the discarded tops, seals, and neck labels from bottles of distilled spirits. They have been compared to mosaics and kente cloths, changing with each installation.

A biography posted by the Jack Shainman Gallery, New York, notes that his sculptural- assemblage work “defies categorization,” as his use of discarded bottle caps and cassava graters “reflects his interest in reuse, transformation, and an intrinsic desire to connect to his continent while transcending the limitations of place. His work can interrogate the history of colonialism and draw connections between consumption, waste, and the environment, but at the core is his unique formal language that distinguishes his practice.” His assemblages, held together with copper wire, “are both luminous and weighty, meticulously fabricated yet malleable. He leaves the installations open and encourages the works to take different forms every time they are installed,” in part because, he has said, “I don’t want to be a dictator. I want to be somebody who suggests things.” As a result, “In morphing to fit various installation spaces, Anatsui’s sculptures, which are often wall-based, challenge long-held views of sculpture as something rigid and insistent and open up his work to exist on its own terms. ‘I work more like a sculptor and a painter put together,’” as he explained himself in an interview that accompanied a solo exhibition at the Sterling and Francine Clark Institute in 2011.

Locally, the Museum of Fine Arts owns Black River (2009), which it describes as a “metallic tapestry” which, when installed, recalls a “topographical map.”

Mary L. Bonauto, lawyer and civil-rights advocate, Doctor of Laws. Attorney Mary L. Bonauto has been a leader in the effort to eliminate discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identify. Long associated with GLAD (Gay & Lesbian Advocates and Defenders), where she has been civil rights project director since 1990, she was lead counsel in the Goodridge case; in its 2003 ruling, the Supreme Judicial Court made Massachusetts the first state to legalize same-sex marriage. She was one of three attorneys who argued Obergefell v. Hodges before the U.S. Supreme Court; the resulting 2015 ruling determined that state bans on same-sex marriage are unconstitutional.

She is a 2014 MacArthur Foundation fellow, and Shikes Fellow in civil liberties and civil rights and lecturer on law at Harvard Law School. At the honorands’ dinner in Annenberg Hall Wednesday night, President Drew Faust called her “one of the civil-rights champions of our time.”

His Excellency Fernando Henrique Cardoso, sociologist and former president of Brazil, Doctor of Laws. Fernando Henrique Cardoso, professor emeritus of sociology and political science at the University of São Paulo, served as president of Brazil from 1995 to 2002—the first incumbent to be re-elected to that office (following a change in the constitution allowing successive terms), reflecting the effect of economic and political reforms he implemented, which ended hyperinflation and rooted out corruption while beginning to address Brazil’s historic inequality and promoting privatization of government-owned enterprises.

The grandson and son of generals, Cardoso sympathized with leftist politics as a student and professor, and fled Brazil following a military coup in 1964, teaching in Chile and Paris. The co-author of Dependency and Development in Latin America, he entered public life as an elected senator in the early 1980s, and became foreign minister (1992) and finance minister (1993-1994) before being elected president.

The conferral of his honorary degree highlights the University’s ties to Brazil. It follows the recent announcement of deepening support—for Brazilian students enrolling at Harvard, and for research on Brazil by University scholars—from long-time supporter Jorge Paulo Lemann ’61, the billionaire banker and investor.

David Brion Davis, historian, Doctor of Laws.In a year when the University formally began recognizing its former deep engagement with American slavery, it seems appropriate to recognize David Brion Davis, Ph.D.’56, widely considered the preeminent historian of slavery and abolition in the New World.

Yale’s Sterling Professor of American History emeritus (equivalent to a University Professorship at Harvard) and director emeritus of the Gilder Lehrman Center—Yale’s center for studies of slavery, resistance, and abolition—he is best known for a sweeping trilogy: The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (1966), which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize; The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution (1975), which was awarded the Bancroft Prize, the highest honor in the field of history, and the National Book Award; and The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation (2014), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for general nonfiction. Challenging the Boundaries of Slavery, published in 2006 by Harvard University Press, traces slavery throughout world history; it originated as the Nathan I. Huggins Lectures at Harvard. He received the National Humanities Medal in 2014, and the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences’ Centennial Medal in 2009. Faust referred to his pursuit of history, in his words, as “disciplined moral reflection,” and noted his observation that abolition had been the “greatest landmark of willed moral progress” in human history.

Elaine Fuchs, stem-cell biologist, Doctor of Science.Elaine Fuchs is Lancefield professor at Rockefeller University, where she directs the laboratory of mammalian cell biology and development, and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator.

In nominating Fuchs for the 2015 E.B. Wilson Medal, the highest honor awarded by the American Society for Cell Biology, in recognition of her pioneering exploration of the basic principles of stem-cell biology, Amy Wagers, Forst Family professor of stem cell and regenerative biology at Harvard, wrote that during the past 30 years, she had “performed ground-breaking work that has led a revolution in our understanding of the biology of mammalian skin and revealed broad paradigms that regulate tissue regenerative stem cells across organ systems.”

A 2009 winner of the National Medal of Science, Fuchs is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Medicine, among other affiliations.

Her laboratory website notes of her studies of the epidermis and stem cells that “As basic scientists with an interest in applying our knowledge to human medicine, we chose skin as a model system, because skin epithelium is one of the few tissues of the body whose human and mouse stem cells (keratinocytes) can be maintained and propagated in culture. This feature has been exploited for nearly three decades in the successful treatment of burn patients with epidermis generated from cultured stem cells.”

Her Howard Hughes biography describes the work this way:

To heal from wounds and deal with daily wear and tear, skin constantly regenerates itself. Stem cells are key to this renewal process. Using molecular and genetic approaches in cultured cells and mice, Elaine Fuchs’s work sheds light on how skin stem cells make and repair tissues, and how this process goes awry in genetic diseases, cancers, and proinflammatory disorders.

Fuchs’s team has uncovered many molecules that guide cell divisions in developing skin and control cellular movements during wound repair in adult skin. Some signals turn skin stem cells on, telling them when to make hair and when to repair injuries. Other signals direct stem cells to stop making tissue.…Their research suggests that the behavior of stem cells within tumors is determined by the stem cells’ genetic mutations as well as differences in the tumor’s microenvironment. The combined effects of both intrinsic and extrinsic factors produce hundreds of changes in gene expression in cancer stem cells that are not present in normal skin stem cells. Fuchs’s team wants to study how these changes transform a controlled program of stem cell self-renewal to a chaotic one.

Fuchs’s faculty home page proceeds in a particularly accessible way from the basic facts about the epidermis to the challenging scientific problems and opportunities that arise from working with the skin:

The skin epidermis is what allows us to survive as terrestrial beings. It acts as a saran wrap seal to our body surface, excluding microbes and retaining body fluids. Subjected constantly to mechanical stress, epidermal cells protect themselves by producing an elaborate cytoskeleton that connects to specialized cellular junctions and enables the cells to form adhesive sheets of resilient tissue. The epidermis also produces protective appendages, such as feathers in birds, scales in fishes and hair follicles in mammals. Finally, in order for the epidermis to survive normal wear and tear as well as injuries, it must constantly self-renew, making it one of the body’s reservoirs of stem cells. Given their proximity to the body surface, epidermal cells are also subjected to harmful UV rays, and not surprisingly, epidermal cancers are the most common of all human cancers.

…[W]e are trying to understand how the multipotent stem cells of mammalian skin give rise to the epidermis and hair follicles.…Elucidating the normal process of tissue development is an important first step in understanding how these processes go awry in genetic skin diseases, including cancers.

Arnold Rampersad, biographer, Doctor of Laws.Arnold Rampersad, Ph.D. ’73, now emeritus, was a professor of English at Stanford, where he holds the title of Kimball professor emeritus in the humanities; he also taught at Rutgers, Columbia, and Princeton. A leading scholar of race and American literature, and African-American literature, he has written about W.E.B. Du Bois, A.B. 1890, Ph.D. ’95 (the subject of his Harvard doctoral dissertation); edited the Collected Poems of Langston Hughes for the Library of America; and published acclaimed biographies including The Life of Langston Hughes (two volumes, 1986 and 1988), nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, and Ralph Ellison (2007), a National Book Award finalist. He has also written about Arthur Ashe and Jackie Robinson.

A MacArthur Foundation fellow (1991-1996), Rampersad was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2010. The description of his work accompanying that honor noted the “surprise” that this leading American biographer was born and raised outside the country: “Growing up as a schoolboy in Trinidad, I received an education in literature that some people might dismiss as ‘colonial,’ ” Rampersad recalled. “It nevertheless served me well in dealing with the complexities of American biography.” Of his Du Bois work, he recalled:

I thought that Du Bois was extraordinarily important and complex. My life was changed in a basic way by my first reading of The Souls of Black Folk. And while the historians who had written about him had done good jobs, I believed that they had missed his genuine essence—which is, in my opinion, the grandly poetic imagination he brought to the business of seeing and describing black America and America itself.

He pursued biography, he said, “because I saw the African-American personality as a neglected field despite the prominence of race as a subject in discussions of America. African-American character in all its complexity and sophistication was, and still is, by and large, a denied category in the representation of American social reality.”

His interest in Ellison reflected his own life, Rampersad said, having “come of age just as my native country was marching toward political independence from Great Britain.” In this light, he perceived black American artists as “colonials in their own country, struggling against a greater power for political and cultural independence—relatively speaking—and for freedom of expression.” Reflecting on the changed circumstances of African Americans, he told his interviewer,

[T]he life of the African-American writer has changed dramatically. In part through holding positions at programs in creative writing and departments of English at universities, the black writer has gained a solid presence on the literary scene that has replaced the fugitive nature of expression and publication forced on blacks over the centuries, especially in the slave narratives but continuing into the twentieth century. That presence does not guarantee fine writing but it has led, in my opinion, to an assurance that bodes well for the future. Black literature was described a long time ago as a “literature of necessity” rather than one of leisure. That element of necessity still exists but it does not dominate as it once did. Black American literature as a cultural phenomenon has reached a level of stability and maturity that the circumstances of American life once routinely denied it.

Rampersad, traveling from Stanford, had a big East Coast week: Yale made him an honorary Doctor of Humanities at its graduation on Monday, May 23. Harvard’s graduate school conferred its Centennial Medal on Rampersad in 2013.

The Right Honourable Lord Martin Rees of Ludlow, astrophysicist and cosmologist, Doctor of Science. Martin John Rees, Baron Rees of Ludlow, Astronomer Royal and past president of the Royal Society, is both a leading astrophysicist and an important popular writer on science. His Royal Society biography notes that his theoretical work has ranged from the formation of black holes (the subject of a new initiative at Harvard) to extragalactic radio sources. He is recognized as among the first scientists to predict the uneven distribution of matter in the universe, and proposed tests to determine the clustering of stars and galaxies. He has made valuable contributions to understanding the end of the so-called “cosmic dark ages,” after the Big Bang, when the universe was “as yet without light sources”—before the first stars formed.

Lord Rees served as master of Trinity College, Cambridge, from 2004 to 2012; as an undergraduate, he had studied mathematics there. He remains a fellow of Trinity College and emeritus professor of cosmology and astrophysics at Cambridge.

Judith J. Thomson, moral philosopher and metaphysician, Doctor of Laws. Judith Thomson, professor emerita in MIT’s department of linguistics and philosophy, where she was Rockefeller professor of philosophy. She has pursued studies in ethics and metaphysics, and critiqued utilitarianism. Her book The Realm of Rights (Harvard, 1990) probed the meaning of the concept of a right as the basis for a systematic theory of human and social rights. She is known for employing “thought experiments” to tease out philosophical points; one of these underpins her 1971 essay, “A Defense of Abortion,” which examines a pregnant woman’s right to control her own body (as opposed to focusing on the status of a fetus). In the thought experiment, she imagines an adult woman captured and tied into the circulatory system of a famous artist suffering a kidney ailment—for nine months. The constraints imposed to save the artist’s life raise issues about the autonomy of the woman and her right to control her body—and the resulting conflicts. The essay understandably has been widely discussed among moral philosophers and bioethicists.

Thomson has also probed such challenging issues as assisted suicide and preferential hiring. Many of her important essays appear in Rights, Restitution, and Risk: Essays in Moral Theory (Harvard, 1986).

Steven Spielberg, filmmaker, Doctor of Arts.Steven Spielberg has directed, written, and produced movies ranging from the historically serious and shattering Schindler’s List and Saving Private Ryan to massively popular entertainments such as Close Encounters of the Third Kind, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Jurassic Park, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and Jaws. Harvard’s news office indulged in a bit of fun, teasing the announcement of his role as afternoon speaker at Commencement by releasing a video trailer using University venues and familiar audio clips from the movies.

A team of scientists led by Feng Zhang ’04 of the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT announced Thursday the discovery of a bacterial protein, called C2c2, capable of editing the genetic information contained in RNA. The research, to be published in the journal Science this week, builds on previous work by Zhang and his colleagues: he and Winthrop professor of genetics George Church were the first to describe the use of a similar biological system, known as Crispr-Cas9, to edit the DNA of human cells, in 2013.

Both C2c2 and Crispr-Cas9 are types of an immune system found in certain bacteria called Crispr-Cas (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats and Crispr-associated genes). The systems work by targeting specific stretches of genetic code and then using proteins like C2c2 to cut out portions of that sequence. In nature, Crispr-Cas systems help bacteria fend off hostile viruses by identifying and disabling them; in the lab, scientists are now learning how to harness the systems to edit genetic information, by taking advantage of the fact that, if a replacement sequence that resembles the excised letters of code is supplied, existing cellular machinery will repair the break using the replacement sequence. The newly identified C2c2 protein is distinct from other proteins that have been studied before because it targets molecules of RNA instead of DNA.

That distinction, according to Eugene Koonin, a researcher at the National Center for Biotechnology Information and a coauthor of the new study, is part of what makes the discovery of C2c2 so important. “So far,” he explained, “this is the only identified case…that uniquely cleaves RNA as opposed to DNA.” Although other systems have been found that interact with both DNA and RNA “in a sort of complicated mechanism,” he added, “this system seems to be rather differently formed and completely RNA-specific.”

In humans and other multicellular organisms, DNA stores genes and transfers them from generation to generation. RNA acts as a messenger, carrying information stored in DNA to other parts of the cell, where it is used to synthesize and interact with proteins, the principal players in the metabolic pathways of cells. The discovery that RNA can both heighten and suppress the functions of genes has led to attempts to create drugs made of RNA; Koonin said that C2c2 has the potential to be much more efficient than previous methods for modulating the expression of proteins. The discovery of C2c2 could also allow researchers to mark RNAs with fluorescence so that their biological function could be better understood. 

Unlike DNA, RNA is not transmitted from parent to child. That means this new research is largely unaffected by concerns about the ethics of gene editing. Some scientists have urged caution when using Crispr-Cas to edit DNA, fearing its potentially irreversible effects on the human genome. Some in the media have argued the technology could lead to parents creating “designer babies,” using only the genes they want their ideal child to have. But in the case of the current research, Koonin said, “I suspect that such concerns will take the back burner,” because RNA-specific Crispr-Cas systems like C2c2 “do not change the genome.” 

Crispr-Cas systems have also been the source of another controversy: Zhang and the Broad Institute are engaged in a legal battle with a team at the University of California, Berkeley, led by Jennifer Doudna, Ph.D. ’89, over who owns the patent for the use of Crispr-Cas9 to edit DNA. And more than just intellectual pride is at stake: Cambridge-based Editas Medicine, a biotech firm co-founded by Zhang to commercialize Crispr-Cas9, raised $94 million from its initial public offering in February. Since the C2c2 protein acts on RNA and is separate from Crispr-Cas9, Koonin said the process of obtaining patents for the new discovery will be entirely separate and “has nothing to do with those under dispute.”

Now that they have identified an RNA editing system, scientists may be able to expand the use of Crispr-Cas to a whole new arena of applications. Koonin noted in particular that C2c2 could have what he called a “toxic effect”: the protein might be able to identify and destroy only bacteria that carry a particular unwanted gene. But he warned against putting too much faith in grand conjectures. Because this is “the first experimental characterization of these systems,” cautioned, “There are more questions that remain to be answered than have been answered. And also, because of the same reason, all discussion of applications, while tantalizing, remains at this point speculative.”

Prominent political and business leaders, including U.S. senators Elizabeth Warren and Ed Markey of Massachusetts, Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell, and Massachusetts governor Charlie Baker ’79, gathered this morning for the official dedication of the new gateway to the executive-education program at Harvard Business School (HBS)—the replacement for Kresge Hall.

The new building was constructed following a $40-million gift from the Dr. James Si-Cheng Chao and Family Foundation. The Ruth Mulan Chu Chao Center—honoring Dr. Chao’s late wife—will be the first building on the HBS campus named for a woman, as well as the first building at Harvard named for an Asian American. (An HBS press release issued in 2014, when construction started on the building, stated that the Chao Center would be the first Harvard building named in honor of a woman; that claim overlooked Maxwell Dworkin, named for Mary Maxwell Gates and Beatrice Dworkin Ballmer, the mothers of donors Bill Gates ’77, LL.D. ’07, and Steve Ballmer ’77, respectively, and Agassiz House, which carries the name of Radcliffe’s first president, Elizabeth Cary Agassiz. Update, June 6, 2016: In addition, Longfellow Hall at the Graduate School of Education is named for Alice Longfellow, a benefactor of Radcliffe College and the daughter of poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.)

HBS dean Nitin Nohria opened the ceremony by thanking the Chao family for their gift, calling the new center “a building with a true sense of place and purpose” and its namesake “an extraordinary matriarch of a remarkable family.” The Chaos have six daughters, four of whom—Elaine Chao, M.B.A. ’79, who was Secretary of Labor under George W. Bush; Grace Chao, M.B.A. ’78; May Chao, M.B.A. ’85; and Angela Chao ’95, M.B.A. ’01—are HBS alumnae.

President Drew Faust told the crowd, which included Chinese-language media and some of James Chao’s classmates from Jiao Tong University in Shanghai, “We gather today to celebrate a new building that will inspire extraordinarily talented students and faculty, not just from around the country, but from across the world.”

Elaine Chao, speaking on behalf of her family, explained the motivation for their philanthropic gift: “We were excited to have the opportunity to help educate leaders who make a difference in the world.” She praised her parents, who fled China after its civil war, settling first in Taiwan and eventually in the United States, for their dedication to their daughters’ education. “The hardships that they endured,” she said, “instilled in them a lifelong commitment to build bridges of understanding between people of different backgrounds and cultures.”

Although Elaine Chao’s husband, Senator McConnell, did not speak at the ceremony, his Democratic colleague, Senator Markey, addressed him directly in his remarks, acknowledging, “I know what it means to you to have this incredible family celebration, honoring this historic family.” Markey also commended HBS for its worldwide reach. “The presence of so many people here from around the world,” he said, “reflects the truly global story that is the foundation of this center, this family, and the greatest global institution for academics in the world, Harvard University.” He added, in jest, that HBS “is also where you can take a class in business [with] Channing Tatum, LL Cool J, and NBA stars”—celebrities enrolled in a recent executive-education course on education, media, and sports. The Business School, Markey said, “has something for everyone.”

There was also more serious political talk at the ceremony, despite its bipartisan roster of speakers and guests. Markey took the opportunity to laud immigrants in general, asserting that immigrants “now launch more than one-quarter of all businesses in the United States. Immigrants are risk-takers, and they’re job creators.” He called the Chao family “the pluperfect example of the American dream come true, the quintessential immigrant story to the United States of America.”

Senator Warren, a former Law School professor, delivered a short statement in which she also recounted the Chaos’s immigrant success story: “They worked hard in this country,” she said, “but they never forgot how they started. They never forgot the opportunities that were opened to them because of education.” Warren called the Chao family’s donation “a gift that will permit the School to build a lasting legacy to expand opportunities for many, many more young people.”

Governor Baker announced that he was discarding his prepared remarks, and instead read a statement previously issued by James Chao: “Because Ruth devoted her life to excellence in education and enhancing U.S.-China relations,” it read in part, “she embodied the spirit of the love of learning of this university community.”

That evocation of the building’s namesake led fittingly to the ceremonial conclusion, when James Chao cut the red ribbon and opened the Chao Center, flanked by the Harvard and government dignitaries, as well as his daughters and six grandchildren. He spoke only briefly, to thank those in attendance by citing a Chinese saying—“When you have big thanks, just keep silent.”

In 1816, Harvard awarded Nathaniel Bowditch an honorary doctor of laws, a decade after its (unsuccessful) offer of the Hollis professorship of mathematics and natural philosophy. These were remarkable moves, considering that Bowditch was entirely self-taught. But Bowditch was no less remarkable. He was the country’s most accomplished mathematician, the man Thomas Jefferson called “a meteor of the hemisphere.” Though remembered now largely for his New American Practical Navigator (1802), the ubiquitous guide for nineteenth-century mariners, he took much greater pride in his annotated translation of that apotheosis of Enlightenment quantitative sciences, Pierre de Laplace’s Mécanique Céleste.

So did his countrymen. For a young nation anxious to prove to Europe that it was not a cultural desert, this accomplishment would “be something to boast of,” wrote Harvard professor Edward Everett in 1818. Earlier Everett had complained that Europeans were barely aware of American scientific publications, noting that the only copies of Bowditch’s article on meteors to be found on the Continent were “the one my brother had brought in his trunk to Holland, and I in mine to Germany.” Citizens were therefore elated when in 1818 the Royal Society of London “paid a tribute to American genius,” as one Boston newspaper put it, designating Bowditch an honorary member of that august institution.

But why did he turn down the Harvard professorship? At the time, Bowditch already headed a marine insurance company in his native Salem, and unlike the Hollis chair, that post provided a generous salary and leisure to pursue his studies. He could hardly have doubted his ability to teach teenagers math and science (not until 1803 did the College add arithmetic to its admissions requirements), but he was haunted by his lack of a gentleman’s education, with its immersion in Latin and Greek. He was, one contemporary observer commented, afraid of “singing small on classic ground.”

Harvard tried again in 1810, seeking him as an Overseer. Once assured the “indispensable duties of the office” were minimal, he accepted. He assumed a far more significant role in 1826, when he was named to the Corporation, appointed this time for business, not mathematical, expertise. The College was in a financial mess and Bowditch, who had taken charge of a Boston trust and investment company, had a reputation for making it operate like a miniature solar system, a “great machine” running “with the regularity and harmony of clock-work.” Had Harvard’s powers-that-be known what he would do, they might have thought twice about their decision. “Order, method, punctuality, and exactness were, in his esteem, cardinal virtues; the want of which, in men of official station, he regarded not so much a fault as a crime,” Josiah Quincy reflected in his History of Harvard University, and when Bowditch detected such wrongdoing, he “would descend on the object of his animadversion with the quickness and scorching severity of lightning.”

Once Bowditch caught on to the loose, even negligent, way Harvard was run, the storm was not long in coming. College monies were mixed in with personal accounts, the books hadn’t been kept in years, and official papers consisted of “detached scraps” and shorthand “hieroglyphics.” President John T. Kirkland distributed scholarships without the Corporation’s knowledge or consent, awarded honorary diplomas against its explicit orders, regularly skipped chapel duty to dine with patrician friends in Boston—and then sought reimbursement for the bridge tolls. Bowditch set about cleaning house, social niceties be damned! Out went the College treasurer, the steward, and finally Kirkland himself.

Proper Boston was appalled, not so much by what Bowditch had revealed, or even by the results of his actions, but by the roughshod way in which he had conducted affairs. F.R.S. though he might be, Dr. Bowditch lacked the polished manners of the classically educated gentleman. It was all a “shameful business,” confided Charles Francis Adams in his diary. “But some men have no delicacy.” On campus, wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson, Bowditch “is sincere assafoetida”—a foul-smelling gum.

Eventually the Brahmins realized that Bowditch’s forthright ways had their uses. The patrician corporations he administered—financial, educational, and cultural alike—ran efficiently and profitably, and his willingness to offend powerful people had political utility. In maintaining the rule-bound Bowditch as a standard-bearer of their class, Brahmins promoted the notion that their institutions operated impartially, treating wealthy capitalists and poor folk with the same no-exceptions, clockwork regularity. When Bowditch received more European honors in the 1830s for his newly published Laplace volumes, elite Bostonians eagerly embraced this American Newton as a cultural ornament to the Athens of America.

Bowditch made no permanent mark as a scientist, but his methodizing, systematizing, rationalizing ways shaped American institutional life and the modus operandi of American capitalism. Harvard is a case in point. He left his Laplace manuscript to the College, and somehow it ended up at the Boston Public Library, sidelined like Laplacean science itself. But a numbering system for Harvard’s libraries? Printed annual reports of the President? That carefully managed endowment? Look no further than the Laplacean businessman on the Corporation. 

Six men and three women received honorary degrees at Commencement. University provost Alan M. Garber introduced the honorands in the following order, and President Drew Faust read the citations, concluding with the recipient’s name and degree. For fuller background on each, see harvardmag.com/honorands-16.

Judith Jarvis Thomson. Moral philosopher and metaphysician, a professor of philosophy emerita at MIT. Doctor of Laws: Eminent moral theorist and metaphysician who ponders with acuity what it means to be good; exemplar of reason and scholarly values, who models with ingenuity what it is to be good.

David Brion Davis, Ph.D. ’56. Yale’s Sterling Professor of American history emeritus, a leading scholar of slavery and abolition. Doctor of Laws: Confronting the unconscionable negation of freedom, discerning our demons and our better angels, a sterling chronicler of inhuman bondage who shows that the past not was, but is.

The Right Honorable Lord Martin Rees. Astrophysicist and cosmologist, who has pioneered understanding of black holes and the dark early universe. Doctor of Science: Luminous star in the firmament of astrophysics, royal citizen of science and namesake of an asteroid, he has shone fresh light on the cosmic dark ages and the genesis of galaxies far, far away.

El Anatsui. Preeminent West African sculptor, best known for shimmering hangings made from found objects. Doctor of Arts: Fusing ordinary articles of refuse into extraordinary artworks that refuse categorization, he weaves strands of diverse cultures and genres into splendorous cascades of gravity and grace.

Elaine Fuchs. A National Medal of Science-winning stem-cell researcher, based at Rockefeller University. Doctor of Science: Stem-cell eminence and doyenne of the epidermis, whose innovative investigations of genes and proteins have pluripotent power to get under our skin.

Arnold Rampersad, Ph.D. ’73. The acclaimed biographer of W.E.B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, and Ralph Ellison. Doctor of Laws: Lifelong student of the human spirit, literary biographer extraordinaire, an erudite expositor of the American experience who lucidly illuminates the matter of Black lives.

His Excellency Fernando Henrique Cardoso. Sociologist and former two-term president of Brazil. Doctor of Laws: Expert on dependency and development, exponent of democracy and engagement, he has ascended the echelons of both academe and government to guide his nation through challenge and change.

Mary L. Bonauto. Lawyer and civil-rights director of GLAD, leader in the effort to eliminate discrimination based on sexual orientation. Doctor of Laws: Savvy strategist in the quest for equality, supremely deft advocate for the dignity of all, she has brought to life stories both of love and of loss, and now, thanks to her, countless hearts may be glad.

Steven Spielberg. Film director, producer, and screenwriter. Doctor of Arts: Sovereign of celluloid storytelling who draws us into the dark then directs us toward the light; his movies move us in magical ways as we closely encounter the terrors and wonders of life.

Rashida Jones’97, College Class Day speaker, on selling a script for a $16-million movie, only to watch the deal fall through and then making the movie with her partner, for $840,000—“almost a year of Harvard tuition.”

Sheryl Sandberg
Photograph by Stu Rosner

Chief Marshal Sheryl Sandberg ’91, M.B.A. ’95, COO of Facebook, representing the twenty-fifth reunion class at the Commencement day luncheon spread in Widener Library: “I am so happy to be here because this is one of the very few things I get to do that Mark Zuckerberg does not. I worked really hard to graduate from Harvard—twice. And then I go work for someone who didn’t graduate once.”

Fiftieth reunioner Daniel Brooks ’66, waiting with classmates to process into Tercentenary Theatre for the afternoon oratory, where he was “looking forward to a Spielberg spiel.”

Latin Salutatorian Anne Ames Power’16 offered a “dictionary” of Harvardian terms (with English translation tucked into the Morning Exercises programs for the unschooled). Teasing out meanings, she explained: “[A]t Harvard a ‘concentration’ can be defined as ‘an individual course of study’ as well as ‘what you lack in Friday morning class’”—and added the senior-year revelation “that ‘thesis’ can be a noun, a verb, and a state of being.”

Amy Tuteur’80, an obstetrician-turned-writer and mother of four, is the self-proclaimed “Enemy Number One of the Natural Parenting Industry,” a spirited combatant in the childbirth wars. In Push Back: Guilt in the Age of Natural Parenting (Dey St./HarperCollins, $26.99), she enters the fray with zest. From the introduction:

No woman should ever feel guilty about the choices she makes regarding childbirth, breastfeeding, or the manner in which she cares for her baby. Surprised? Unfortunately we live in a society where these fundamental aspects of a woman’s life are now an arena where judgment, second-guessing, and guilt reign supreme. It is no longer enough to give birth to a healthy baby and to care for that baby, providing food, warmth, and tenderness. Now all of these acts must be done, in many circles, in ways decreed “correct” by the natural parenting industry.

Where did this industry that dictates the behaviors of millions of women come from?

Surprisingly, the currently popular philosophies of natural childbirth, lactivism, and attachment parenting are based on nothing more than the personal beliefs of a few individuals, most of them men. To my mind, though, the most damaging aspect of this paradigm is that the judgment and guilt surrounding childbirth and child care are heaped upon women most often by other women.…

Initially I was simply bewildered by the ways in which my patients tormented themselves. After delivering a beautiful healthy baby to a joyous healthy mother, I would visit her the next day in the hospital and find her tearful over her “failure.” Instead of enjoying the miracle of her new child, she would be berating herself that she had “given in” and gotten an epidural for pain relief. Or perhaps she would have concluded that her C-section reflected the fact that her body was “broken.” There was a myriad of if-onlys. If only she hadn’t agreed to the postterm induction; if only she had trusted birth more. Sometimes I wondered if the process of birth was more important than the baby itself.

Having spent the last days of the groundfishing season on the open ocean east of Cape Cod, Russell Sherman ’71 chugged into Gloucester Harbor in April and docked his Lady Jane at the Jodrey State Fish Pier. Running the 72-foot trawler around the clock, he and two crewmen had taken shifts at the wheel and ultimately caught 6,000 pounds of bottom-dwelling species, mostly haddock, flounder, redfish, and cod, along with a slew of lobsters. He netted $9,000.

A decent haul, Sherman said, given the decades-long decline of the New England saltwater groundfishing industry, but laughable compared to his days on deck in the 1970s. Then, Gloucester was home to generations of fishermen at the center of a thriving business that had been feeding Americans since the seventeenth century. Fresh out of Harvard, Sherman took a summer job on a boat, and essentially never left. “You came and went as you wanted,” he said. “Plenty of dough in my pocket. And when times were a little tough, you worked a little harder, that’s all.”

A high-school football player, he reveled in the physical labor, the manly camaraderie at sea, and standing up to gale-force winds and 15-foot swells “that knocked me around,” he added. “Being young and vigorous, full of fire in the belly, I loved the life I led.”

But the North American fishing industry, already wrangling with foreign fleets, would soon start changing dramatically. The Fishery Conservation and Management Act of 1976 (commonly referred to as “Magnuson-Stevens”) officially asserted U.S. jurisdiction over waters within 200 miles of shore. This boon for domestic fishermen, who supported it, initially spawned optimism and an influx of newcomers, especially in Gloucester. Yet the law simultaneously addressed overfishing, a concern voiced as early as the turn of the last century, by mandating unprecedented management of American fisheries. John Bullard ’69, regional administrator of the National Marine Fisheries Service, a branch of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), credits the act with foreseeing the need to safeguard fish stocks from domestic vessels as well, especially given the advances in dragging gear.

Regional governing councils were established, and the law, tightened to increase conservation and enforcement efforts in 1996 and 2006, set in motion the constantly shifting, often labyrinthine, federal regulations that have since frustrated groundfishermen like Sherman. The councils and NOAA can now specify everything from fishing-ground closures, catch quotas, bycatch requirements and protected species, to boat monitors and their fees (paid by the fishermen), and components of gear.

The most recent groundfishery management system to be adopted in New England, in 2010, is the quota-based Annual Catch Limit (ACL); it replaced the age-old effort-based “days at sea.” The ACL percentages are set annually, based on NOAA’s Northeast Fisheries Science Center stock assessments, and represent the number of pounds of 16 different monitored species a given boat can land (bring ashore) each season.

Groundfish historically dominated the regional industry, but now represent only one of 16 Northeast fisheries, including surf clams and quahogs, herring, and deep-sea red crab, many of which, like sea scallops, are flourishing. The fishermen of New Bedford, Massachusetts, where Bullard used to be mayor, are the country’s leading sellers of sea scallops, a nearly $500-million business, for example (compared to the $60-million average annual revenue from groundfish). Various stock levels can and do fluctuate, even year-to-year: the quotas for Georges Bank Cod were cut more than 60 percent this year, but hiked very slightly for Gulf of Maine Cod: “They are still in trouble,” Bullard says. On the other hand, the quotas for redfish, pollock, and Georges Bank haddock rose, he adds, because surveys show they are the most plentiful of the 20 groundfish stocks. But because cod and other low-quota species often swim among them, “the challenge is, how do fishermen catch the fish that are abundant without catching the cod and other [restricted] species? It’s very hard to do.” Some of the different species tend to swim together. And once fishermen fulfill their quotas for cod, for example, they are precluded from fishing in waters where cod live.

More pointedly, the overall population of groundfish will never return to the 1970s levels Sherman and others knew, Bullard asserts. Ultimately, “You’re not going to have happy groundfishermen,” he adds, “because there is no longer enough groundfish for all of them to catch and make a good living, and the managers are going to have to restrict the catch no matter what system they use.”

Human contributions to climate change, and the resulting deleterious effects of warmer temperatures and acidification on the ocean and its marine life, he adds, share much of the blame for declining fish stocks across the globe. Fishermen are asked to put fresh fish on our tables, he says, and “then we collectively put carbon into the atmosphere that makes [their] place of business a more hostile environment. It’s not fair.”

NOAA measures, although aimed at balancing the often competing interests in the ocean’s health and resources, spur continuing, often volatile debates. The Gulf of Maine codfish, for example, has been the poster child for all groundfish. “And because they regulate to the weakest stock,” Sherman points out, “we’re set up for a fall right away.” Yet based on his own experience, and what he hears from fishermen in Massachusetts, Maine, and New Hampshire, the cod “are everywhere. When we’re out there, we can’t avoid catching cod.”

The “right answer,” Bullard allows, referring to balancing these competing agendas, is ever elusive. That’s partly because the resources shift and scientific data can lag such trends, but also “because the fishing industry is incredibly complicated and litigious—for every action, there are multiple counter-actions.”

Sherman agrees that relations are acrimonious. “We feel there is more interest in getting rid of fishermen than in saving the fish,” he explains. The problem, as he sees it, is worsened by “over-used and unenlightened” policies produced by bureaucrats who fear lawsuits by the “enviros,” and have therefore “privatized what have been common resources for 400 years” (the fishing grounds) and destroyed “the industry that built this Republic.” He has learned to live with the ACL system, and has survived by “stubbornness” and a canny ability to switch up his targeted species, fish inshore and offshore, and gauge ways to benefit from trading his ACL quotas (which is allowed) among fellow fishermen. The ACL system “has done its work, which was to pare us down to very few participants,” he adds. “But they keep cutting the quotas. And now we are in the death throes.”

Educated and outspoken, Sherman has often been drafted to advocate for his community, which he was glad to do—believing that “we could reach fair and equitable solutions for the environment and the traditional fishing folk.” He started in the late 1980s (when some fishermen and environmentalists were actually working together productively), and was heartened by the hard-won battle that helped lead to a ban on oil exploration and drilling on Georges Bank, a particularly nutrient-rich stretch of sea floor between Cape Cod and Nova Scotia. Sherman has since testified before Congress, served on advisory panels for the New England Fishery Management Council, helped co-found the nonprofit Northeast Seafood Coalition—and even engaged in brainstorming sessions with environmentalists, scientists, and politicians. In 2014, he won the industry’s National Fisherman Highliner Award for his efforts.

Aboard the Lady Jane, Sherman gears up for his forty-fifth year on the water.
Photograph by Stu Rosner

Regulators should “cease focusing on us as the bête noire,” he said during a recent interview at his Gloucester home, four miles from the downtown pier. They should “focus on the other problems that exist: natural predatory mortality—seals, dogfish, and skates are doing a better job than fishermen; pollution—sound and chemicals; and water quality. I am not saying we’re lily-white, but the majority of us have done exactly what we’ve been told since they have been in charge since 1976. Now, where the hell is the result?”

Painfully aware of his role as a relic, the 68-year-old wants to retire, but can’t. In 2000, against the wishes of his wife, Christine, he invested in a bigger boat that could operate both inshore and offshore, thereby hedging unpredictable fishery closures. That’s the main reason he’s still in business at all. But having done that, he now cannot get a decent price for his nest egg, Lady Jane. So Sherman hangs on, and this spring he geared up, despite a titanium hip and bursitis in both shoulders, for his forty-fifth year on the water, saying simply: “You do what you have to do.”

That ethic, he says, grounded family life while he was growing up in modest circumstances in the small “backwater mill town” of Putnam, Connecticut. His father was a World War II veteran who worked hard at any job he got, on railroads, as a meat-cutter, truck driver, and insurance agent, and ultimately as a bank-debt collector repossessing cars in Hartford’s toughest neighborhoods. “He was a real gentleman, he was calm and rational,” Sherman says. “And after the war, nothing scared him. He used to say, ‘Put your best foot forward, always, but if somebody steps on it, all bets are off.’”

A top student and football player on scholarship at St. George’s School in Rhode Island, Sherman arrived at Harvard, also on scholarship, in the fall of 1967. Political and cultural tensions already were roiling the campus, and by sophomore year, things turned violent. He recalls “seeing the cops drag a young lady out of building who had beautiful blond hair, and it was soaked in blood, and I lost it. I charged. I was an excitable boy at that age, a young Irish spalpeen. Big mistake. Billy club. I got taken to pieces.” Perhaps more privately traumatic was his personal life. At the end of freshman year Sherman married his prep-school sweetheart, Marion Pratt, who was pregnant; the couple moved off campus and shared brief roles as parents to two infants—both whom died of a rare genetic disease—before separating at the end of his senior year. Moving to Gloucester soon after that, he fell in love with the place, with “her people and history, the bedrock of our Republic,” as much as with fishing.

Sherman catalogs his life choices, and knows he had more than many because of his Harvard education. Turning one’s back on a professional career was not that unusual among his classmates, he says, at least in the years following graduation, largely as a consequence of political activism—the fight against the Vietnam War, the fight for social and economic equality. His only regret about college, where he concentrated in history, is that he didn’t study hard enough.

In 1982, when he married Christine (a Gloucester native from a fishing industry family), his parents, always disappointed by his career decision, urged him to return to school for an advanced degree. But he “wanted to be the captain of my own boat, my own business.” He put $10,000 down on his house, and in 1984 borrowed another $10,000 to buy the Captain Dutch. In 2000, at age 52, Sherman took on a second mortgage to buy the Lady Jane, knowing that the increased financial burden would mean spending more time on the water, catching more fish, and adding crew. The industry outlook had somewhat improved, he recalls. In an interview with producers of the 2002 documentary film Empty Oceans, Empty Nets, in which he is featured, Sherman agreed that although the industry was shrinking, a “hard-core” group of fishermen “who stick it out for this interim period [of] the next three or four years, are going to be rewarded at the end. I have to believe that.”

Sherman has never been against “intelligent” regulation that conserved fish stocks, and has voiced his beliefs even if they ran counter to those around him—“often to my detriment,” he reports. “I’ve had my gear sabotaged, I’ve had personal threats.” But he does think regulation has “gone too far now.” So far, he worries, that the next time federal leases for offshore exploration or extraction are proposed for sites in the mid and south Atlantic Ocean (a process that could begin as early as 2019), there won’t be any independent fishermen “screaming and hollering like scalded cats, ‘Don’t drill! Georges Bank is too rare a jewel.’ Because,” he says, “we are gone.”

In 2012, when Sherman’s blood pressure hit 190 over 90, his doctor warned him to bow out of political activity, or risk having a stroke. He is now out of the danger zone, but it was nevertheless a relief, he says, to come ashore after finishing the 2015-2016 season, to work on repairs and maintenance for the Lady Jane, and to sleep in his own bed.

By mid June he was back on the water, following a business plan revised to reflect the new ACL allocations and grounds-closure timetables, volatile market auctions, weather patterns, the state of his health, and that of his crew. “I’ve been 30-odd years a captain now, and I’ve never been a high-liner—what we call a guy who just made the fish dance aboard. What I did was by rote, by cussedness,” he says. “So I did okay. We raised our daughter and had our house. And in a business full of corruption, I’ve never cheated anyone, always played by the rules. Took care of my crew. And if I can just retire out, please, without ever having hurt anyone or lost anyone on my boat, and knowing people will say, ‘Jeez, that Russell did all right by me,’ then I will be a happy guy, my career a success.”

Four people—Thomas G. Everett, Roger W. Ferguson Jr.’73, A.M. ’78, J.D. ’79, Ph.D. ’81, John H. McArthur, M.B.A. ’59, D.B.A. ’63, and Betsey Bradley Urschel, Ed.M. ’63—received the 2016 Harvard Medal for “extraordinary service to the University” on May 26, during the Harvard Alumni Association’s (HAA) annual meeting on the afternoon of Commencement day. President Drew Faust read the citations, printed in italics below.

• When Thomas G. Everett, now director emeritus of the Harvard Bands, arrived in 1971, he found the campus to be (in the words of The Harvard Crimson) “a jazz wasteland.” He started the Harvard Jazz Bands, developed courses on the genre and its history, and brought in artists for master classes and residencies. Meanwhile, he directed the Harvard University Bands for decades—and in that capacity, oversaw football game halftime shows, the Harvard Wind Ensemble, and the Harvard Summer Pops Band. Everett has also been a supporter of the Harvard Alumni Jazz Band and the Harvard Band Foundation.

Harvard’s beloved music man for more than four decades, you calmly guided the Harvard Bands “through change and through storm,” setting the stage for the jazz program and touching the lives of generations of students, alumni, faculty, and staff through your prodigious creativity, your trailblazing scholarship, and your boundless generosity of spirit.

• Roger W. Ferguson Jr., president and CEO of the financial services provider TIAA, is also a member of President Obama’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board and a former vice chairman of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors. Besides serving as president of the Board of Overseers from 2008 to 2009, Ferguson has contributed to a number of committees at the University: he chaired the standing committee on institutional policy and Harvard’s audit committee, and also served as a member of the executive committee and the board’s standing committees on social sciences and alumni affairs and development.

Esteemed economist and trusted advisor to presidents from Mass Hall to Pennsylvania Avenue, you have served the University with humility and wisdom, leading the Board of Overseers and countless committees with a steady hand, a sharp mind, and a deep devotion to Harvard’s educational mission.

• John H. McArthur, dean emeritus of Harvard Business School, joined the HBS faculty in 1962, teaching courses in corporate finance; he became dean in 1980. During his 15-year tenure, he introduced new fields of study and overhauled the school’s M.B.A. program and publishing arm, and also improved its campus. Reporting in 1995 on how McArthur brokered the merger that created the Partners HealthCare System—now the state’s largest private employer (and the provider network where the University spends most of its health-benefits money)—the Crimson wondered, “Is John H. McArthur the Most Powerful Man at Harvard?” A University professorship was named for him and his wife, Natty, in 1997; HBS’s McArthur Hall was dedicated in 1999.

McArthur has also served elsewhere at Harvard: at the College, as honorary coach of the men’s ice hockey team; at the medical school, as a member of the Board of Overseers; and at the schools of education and public health, as a member of their Dean’s Councils. He is the honorary chair of the current HBS capital campaign.

Distinguished Harvard statesman and visionary leader with an unparalleled gift for building consensus and cultivating warm personal relationships, you expanded the frontiers of intellectual thought at Harvard Business School and provided wise counsel to Schools and institutions across the University and around the world, earning the respect and admiration of colleagues and communities from Cambridge to Canada.

• Betsey Bradley Urschel is highly regarded for her volunteer service in Texas and in Cambridge. She has contributed her leadership in a variety of capacities, including as an elected director, regional director for Texas, and vice president of University affairs of the HAA Board of Directors. A past president and director emerita of the Harvard Club of Dallas, she co-chaired the club’s centennial events in 2014 and, with her late husband, Harold, started the community service fund that bears their name and provides financial assistance to a College undergraduate working in a public-service internship in north Texas.

The heartbeat of the thriving Harvard Club of Dallas, you have given generously and passionately of your time and talents to many areas of the University, galvanizing the alumni community and mentoring other volunteer leaders with exemplary grace, unwavering dedication, and Texas-sized enthusiasm for Harvard.

The oldest graduates of Harvard and Radcliffe present at Commencement were 99-year-old Ruth Rabb ’37, of New York City, and Leon Starr ’40, of Boston, due to turn 98 in July. Both were recognized during the afternoon ceremony by Harvard Alumni Association president Paul Choi ’86, J.D. ’89. Starr, whose seventy-fifth reunion was last year, was accompanied by his wife, Jacqueline. “There are a lot more women here than when I was at college,” he said, adding that the custom in his day, of having Harvard professors teach the men and then walk over to Radcliffe College to teach the women separately, “was cuckoo”; they should have “had the classes together.” Rabb, seated a few chairs away beside her daughter, Emily Livingston (wife of David Livingston ’61), said she was “very pleased to be a ’Cliffie,” although “it was awful in my day that we were not recognized.” Harvard does seem to run in the family: her late husband was Maxwell Rabb ’32, J.D. ’35, her other children include Bruce Rabb ’63 and Priscilla Rabb Ayres, M.B.A. ’69, and her grandson is Jeremy Maltby ’90. Rabb was glad when, in 2000, the College began granting only Harvard degrees, she added, “because now we’re on the same playing field.”

The Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Centennial Medal, first awarded in 1989 on the occasion of the school’s hundredth anniversary, honors alumni who have made contributions to society that emerged from their graduate studies. It is the highest honor the Graduate School bestows, and awardees include some of Harvard’s most accomplished alumni. The 2016 recipients, announced at a ceremony on May 25, are: Francis Fukuyama, Ph.D. ’81, a political scientist, political economist, and author; David Mumford ’57, Ph.D. ’61, a theoretical and applied mathematician who studies visual perception; John O’Malley, Ph.D. ’65, a priest, professor of theology, and historian of early modern Catholicism; and Cecilia Rouse’86, Ph.D. ’92, an economist who served as adviser to two presidents and is now dean of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton. For more about the honorands, see harvardmag.com/centennial-16.

“It’s so brutal,” Elizabeth Claire Walker ’11 says of ballet, the art form she loves. The dancer isn’t just talking about the daily classes and rehearsals, the aches and pains, and the wrenching pursuit of impossible physical ideals. She’s talking about the daunting, ever-replenishing ranks of young talent competing for limited jobs. “You have to be really lucky,” she says, “and you have to never stop working, and never give up, and not get hurt, and also develop your personality as a dancer. There’s always someone to replace you, so you have to have no ego but also be very confident. It’s a tricky thing.”

Still, during a recent rehearsal, Walker radiated contentment. In a warm, sunny studio, she and the rest of Los Angeles Ballet’s corps de ballet were learning the finale to George Balanchine’s Stravinsky Violin Concerto. Its tempo was quick, the counts long and complex, but Walker remained unruffled. In ballets like this one, dependent on an impeccable corps, she dances for herself and her own commitment to her art, but also for the sake of the whole: for the other dancers who move with her in precise, shifting formations across the stage, to realize the choreographer’s vision and dazzle the audience. During breaks, other dancers sought her out for help, counting and gesturing through the phrases they’d just learned, double-checking the movements. Like almost all ballet dancers, she is slight but very strong, with spectacular posture. Her technique is crisp, her presence alert yet serene. She smiles as she dances. “I feel like I’ve had it almost taken away so many times that I’m just astounded with the fact that I’m still able to keep going,” she says.

Walker’s path has been uncertain, and unusual for a professional dancer. A native of New York City, she studied at American Ballet Theatre’s elite Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis School as a teenager. Her senior year of high school—even after she’d been accepted to Harvard—was spent attending massive cattle-call auditions for professional companies. Just when she was about to give up, she spotted a notice for Los Angeles Ballet, a new company with impressively pedigreed artistic directors. The audition happened on a rainy day, she remembers; her mother encouraged her to go. “She said I’d regret it if I didn’t. I was sewing pointe shoes in the car.” A week later, she got the call.

Walker deferred college and headed west. Both city and company proved to be good fits, but an experimental summer-school stint in Cambridge in 2007 made Walker fall in love with Harvard, too. She decided to put her career on hold. While earning her degree in the history of art and architecture, she squeezed in classes at José Mateo Ballet Theatre in Harvard Square and kept up a heavy involvement in the Harvard Ballet Company, even though she was plagued by a ligament she’d torn in her foot back in her JKO School days. Though she always felt the pull of ballet, she says, “I wasn’t sure if it was a possibility for me. I wasn’t sure if my body was going to be able to handle it.”

In her junior spring, mostly healed, she took a leave to dance a two-month contract with Los Angeles Ballet. After graduation she endured yet another cattle-call audition before being taken back into the company full time. During her second season, in class on Valentine’s Day 2012, disaster struck. “I was doing soutenus, the simplest step you could do,” she says, of a turn performed by extending one leg and bringing the other to meet it, “and somehow my foot slipped, and all my weight was on it in a twisted way over the pointe shoe, and I felt it go.” She had torn the same ligament as before, this time severely enough to require surgery. For four months, she couldn’t put any weight on the foot. Her recovery was grueling: “I had to teach myself to dance again, basically,” she says. “That was a really, really low point for me.”

Even for the luckiest dancers, careers are relatively fleeting; the fragility of the body, pushed to extremes, is part of ballet’s allure and its heartbreak. As the curtain rose for the following year’s Nutcracker, Walker found herself tearing up, overwhelmed. “I wasn’t sure it was going to happen,” she says.

Now in her sixth season with Los Angeles Ballet, Walker has danced a wide range of roles; her favorites include the Dark Angel in Balanchine’s Serenade, Desdemona in Limón’s The Moor’s Pavane, and Arabian in The Nutcracker. She has also avoided major injury since her surgery, although, at 28, she has begun considering what she will do after she retires. She used to think she would seek out an entirely distinct second career, but now she is increasingly intrigued by the prospect of contributing to the survival of American ballet. “The longer I’m in this world, the more I realize what a special thing ballet is and how much it’s struggling,” she says. “The business model is not ideal. It’s just so hard for these incredible companies to keep going. I’d love to somehow make an impact.”

For now, she dances. “I’m going to keep doing it until I can’t anymore or until it doesn’t make sense to anymore,” she says. Back in the studio, Stravinsky Violin Concerto took shape with amazing quickness. Walker, in black tights and diaphanous green skirt, darted and turned and leapt. After an hour, the dancers had mastered Balanchine’s clockwork choreography. The company would not revisit the piece for six months, until final rehearsals for the performance, but when the time came, Walker would remember the steps.

Is she glad she took time away from ballet? Walker’s characteristic gratitude is tempered by what-ifs. “Some days I’m frustrated, because you never know if you’d be farther along in your career if this or that hadn’t happened,” she says. But she wouldn’t give up what she learned, or the people she met, while at Harvard. “With time lost from that and time lost from the injury, I think I appreciate everything I get to do a lot more,” she continues. “I feel like I’ve earned the things that I do.”

For the 365th Commencement, Harvard went Hollywood, with headline speakers Steven Spielberg (the afternoon exercises), Rashida Jones ’97 (College class day), and Sarah Jessica Parker (Law School class day). The set designers did their work well: for the second year in a row, the Big Day itself was spectacularly summery, verging on hot (but clear, nary a storm in sight), with lilacs and dogwoods lingering in bloom after a long, cool spring.

In the cinematic vein, the University itself unspooled some carefully prepared narratives this year. President Drew Faust began formal acknowledgment of Harvard’s past entanglement with slavery, welcomed Air Force ROTC back to campus, and chatted about the arts and humanities with Conan O’Brien ’85. Other staged appearances featured visitors Al Gore ’69, LL.D. ’94 (work on climate change in China) and Stephen Hawking, S.D. ’90 (black holes—where, as in China, the sun doesn’t shine).

Of course, there were unscripted stories, too: the long, bitter protests and sit-in at the Law School, aimed at addressing perceived deficiencies in diversity and inclusion (see an image in the photo gallery below); the Free Harvard/Fair Harvard slate of petition candidates for election to the Board of Overseers; and the year-ending controversy over new College policies aimed at reining in single-sex final clubs and other social organizations.

As if counter-programming the sunny backdrop and the intramural concerns of the preceding semesters, much of the week itself focused on the world beyond, in decidedly darker tones. On Tuesday morning, Cogan University Professor Stephen Greenblatt, orator for the Phi Beta Kappa literary exercises, drew on a personal experience of anti-Semitism and his immersion in The Merchant of Venice to make the case for understanding the other. He concluded with a commentary on an unperformed play about Sir Thomas More, in a passage thought to be in Shakespeare’s own hand, in which a mob demands the explulsion of “strangers” from England. He told the scholar-graduates-to-be that “You will have to decide for yourselves” how to deal with “wretched strangers” in flight—“to look away or become involved, to secure your safety or to open yourselves to risk, to succor or to punish.” He wished for them “the gift of seeing the other as a human being”—as Sanders Theatre suddenly felt close to southern Europe. (Seewww.harvardmagazine.com/commencement for detailed reports on PBK and all the other events summarized here.)

Wednesday’s jam-packed roster of class days had a home-and-home series, of a sort. Freeman Hrabowski III, LL.D. ’10, president of the deservedly exemplary University of Maryland, Baltimore County (known nationwide for educating minorities, women, and low-income students in science, technology, engineering, and math), spoke to the Graduate School of Education candidates just days after Faust spoke at UMBC’s graduation—her first non-Harvard commencement address. “[M]any colleges—most colleges—have not figured out how to do as good a job as UMBC at enabling all students to reach their highest potential,” she said.

Hrabowski’s Cambridge remarks were preceded by, and turned out to echo, a moment that went viral: Ed.M. candidate Donovan Livingston’s spoken-word poem, “Lift Off,” on freedom, education, and equality—and on African Americans’ difficult, entwining histories with all three. (“As educators, rather than raising your voices/Over the rustling of our chains,/Take them off. Un-cuff us.…/I’ve been a Black hole in the classroom for far too long;/Absorbing everything, without allowing my light to escape./But those days are done. I belong among the stars.”). Hrabowski saluted Livingston as a “twenty-first-century Martin Luther King,” and recalled his mother’s saying, “We the teachers make the difference.”

Faust struck an almost grim tone on Thursday afternoon. After beginning noncomittally ( “[M]y assignment is to offer a few reflections on this magnificent institution at this moment in its history. And what a moment it is”), she was all business, and then some:

What is going on? What is happening to the World? The tumultuous state of American politics, spotlighted in this contentious presidential contest; the political challenges around the globe from Brazil to Brexit; the Middle East in flames; a refugee crisis in Europe; terrorists exploiting new media to perform chilling acts of brutality and murder; climate-related famine in Africa and fires in Canada. It is as if we are being visited by the horsemen of the apocalypse with war, famine, natural disaster—and, yes, even pestilence—as Zika spreads, aided by political controversy and paralysis.

On Friday, “Building an Economy for Prosperity and Equality,” the Radcliffe Day morning conversation, wasn’t quite at the Four Horsemen level of despond—the current economic indicators are relatively robust, after all, particularly in the United States. But it didn’t take long for panelist David Autor, Ph.D. ’99, an economist at MIT, to declare that the halcyon decades from the end of World War II until 1970 (robust growth, rising incomes, and widely shared prosperity) were an anomaly. Given slower productivity growth, an alarming erosion in educational and skills gains for workers, and what he called the “commodification” of unsophisticated labor under the twin hammers of globalization and technological change, he and others were downbeat. Louise Sheiner ’82, Ph.D. ’93, now at the Brookings Institution, pointed to the dismaying, divergent outcomes for those at the top and bottom of the economy: a clear and widening “inequality in life expectancy.” Most agreed that investments in education and other policy prescriptions could help close those gaps. Whether economic growth can be reignited is “the hardest part,” concluded Lee professor of economics Claudia Goldin. “Equity may be easier.”

Mirth broke through the gloom from an unexpected quarter. During the Morning Exercises, the University brass, elevated on the dais beside Memorial Church, typically adhere strictly (one is tempted to say religiously) to their elaborate script, only to be knocked off course by ebullient M.B.A.s, or gavel-wielding J.D.s, or, especially, spirited A.B.s—full of beans, and sometimes effervescing beverages, cheering their fulfillment of “the Faculty’s requirements for the first degree in Arts or in Science,” as the script puts it (even if they do not seem, just then, particularly “ready to advance knowledge, to promote understanding, and to serve society”).

This year, frisky deans did a number on themselves, beginning with Xiao-Li Meng—a professor of statistics, for goodness sake. Presenting the doctoral candidates, he said, “As dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences…,” paused, then continued, “hearing no cheering,” finally elicited the desired response—but not loud enough to satisfy—and cued another round. Faust, trying to confer said doctorates, was in turn interrupted, and had to command the rowdy scholars to “wait a minute, here comes the responsibility part. You can’t leave that out.”

There were further miscues and amusements. School of Dental Medicine dean R. Bruce Donoff approached the microphone and froze as Provost Alan Garber paused. At times, students were supposed to rise but did not, or when commanded to rise were deemed to have risen already. Dean David N. Hempton ad libbed about being leader of “the huge faculty of divinity.” (The school does have longevity: it celebrates its bicentennial this coming academic year.) Graduate School of Education dean James Ryan, stopped mid introduction by the future teachers’ cheers, said, “I’m gonna forget my lines.” He didn’t, of course. All in good fun.

Compared to their graduate and professional school predecessors, the undergraduates were downright orderly, reversing the normal order of affairs. People were fanning themselves, so perhaps the temperature, by then in the low 80s, was getting to them.

After the lunch respite, it fell to Spielberg (whom Faust called “one of the greatest storytellers of our—or any other—time”) to steer a middle course between the downbeat and the daft. He did so most winningly by talking about his own trajectory. “I can remember my college graduation—which is easy, since it was only 14 years ago,” he said. “How many of you took 37 years to graduate? Like most of you, I began college in my teens, but sophomore year I was offered my dream job at Universal Studios, so I dropped out. I told my parents that if my movie career didn’t go well, I would re-enroll. It went all right.” In the end, he went back “for my kids. I’m the father of seven, and I kept insisting on the importance of going to college, but I hadn’t walked the walk. So in my fifties, I re-enrolled at Cal State, Long Beach, and I earned my degree. I just have to add, it helped that they gave me course credit in paleontology for the work that I did on Jurassic Park. Three years of Jurassic Park. Thank you.” Life lessons, learned.