Author: Harvard Gazette Online

Siobhan Phillips, a junior fellow in Harvard’s Society of Fellows, revisits those well-known poetic masters — Stevens, Frost, Bishop, and Merrill — and analyzes how they transformed quotidian rituals into lyrical fodder.

It is fondly referred to as God’s motel.

And the two-story building on Francis Avenue, with its apartment-style residences and idyllic courtyard, has long hosted religious scholars from near and far.

This year marks the golden anniversary of Harvard’s Center for the Study of World Religions (CSWR), which through its diverse programming, faculty appointments, visiting scholars, and research initiatives has broadened and shaped Harvard’s work in religious and spiritual traditions.

Plans for the center were cemented with a gift to HDS from a group of anonymous donors in 1957, and the building was completed in 1960. The bequest was intended to “help Harvard University maintain graduate and undergraduate courses in the religions of the world, to train teachers in this field, to give ministers a sympathetic appreciation of other religions, and to stimulate undergraduate interest in the religions of the world.”

And since then it has done just that, expanding the vision of the Harvard Divinity School from a largely Christian seminary to one that has embraced and expanded the study and exploration of religions.

Take, for example, the center’s faculty grants program. Recent recipients have studied everything from the ways that New Zealand Maori experience biotechnological interventions, to the curricula of madrasas in Pakistan, to the influence of African-American televangelists on the African diaspora.

The center’s directors have left a legacy of religious diversity. Early directors helped to establish an undergraduate honors concentration in the comparative study of religion, as well as a Ph.D. program that incorporates comparative perspectives.

Lawrence E. Sullivan, an authority on the religions of South America and central Africa who directed the center from 1990 to 2003, initiated research programs that brought scholars from around the world to the center to explore the intersection of religion and the sciences, politics, art, law, and economics.

Current director Donald Swearer took over in 2004. A scholar of Buddhism, Swearer has helped to shape the center’s programming around local and global community building.

His efforts include the World Religions Café, where CSWR residents can discuss their research and work with their peers. He has also worked to develop programming with other Harvard departments, such as the thematic lecture series “The Ecologies of Human Flourishing,” created in conjunction with the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, the Harvard University Center for the Environment, and the Initiative on Religion in International Affairs at the Harvard Kennedy School.

Swearer helped to develop the center’s International Research Associate/Visiting Faculty program, which brings an international scholar to the CSWR to collaborate with a Harvard faculty member on research and teaching, and has fostered collaboration with other institutions.

“I truly see the center here at the center of a mandala that networks out, and involves people from across the University and the globe in the exploration of the world’s religions,” said Swearer, HDS Distinguished Visiting Professor of Buddhist Studies.

Francis X. Clooney, Parkman Professor of Divinity and professor of comparative theology, will take leadership of the CSWR in July. Clooney, who joined HDS in 2005, sees his role as continuing the work of his predecessors, and helping the center to expand the work involving different faiths and scholarly endeavors.

He hopes to use his early months as a “thinking year” during which he can explore ways to expand faculty grant programs, involve students more in the work of the center, and continue to broaden its interreligious ties elsewhere.

“By developing quality connections among ourselves and closer to home, we open the way to fresh explorations into the territory of our increasingly interreligious world,” said Clooney.

Two-day symposium
In honor of the CSWR’s anniversary, the center is hosting a two-day symposium, April 15-16, focused on the future of the study of religion. The event will include the creation of a Tibetan sand mandala by scholar and former Buddhist monk Losang Samten. For more information, visit the Center for the Study of World Religions web site.

The next time the Arctic’s mud season rolls around, Harvard scientists will be there, testing the air to record what the ground is releasing, searching for evidence of a climate change wild card that could spring a nasty worldwide surprise.

The wild card consists of methane — a powerful greenhouse gas — and carbon dioxide, perhaps the best-known climate-changer. The gases would be released, possibly in enormous quantities, by rotting organic material that for centuries was inert, frozen year-round in the subterranean permafrost.

When it comes to climate change, Jim Anderson is stalking surprises. Harvard’s Weld Professor of Atmospheric Chemistry, Anderson has turned his lab’s focus toward the complex Earth-ice-atmosphere interactions of climate change that remain poorly understood despite the efforts of thousands of scientists worldwide.

To find out what’s going on in the Arctic, Anderson is outfitting a recently developed, robotic, fuel-efficient plane with a new instrument created in his lab by research associates Mark Witinski and David Sayres. Next spring, they plan to fly it remotely at low altitudes over the Arctic, sniffing away and seeing what gases are in the air over these melting regions, and in what quantities. The results will inform not only our understanding of the planetary forces at work, but also will influence estimates of the changes going on around us and our responses to them.

From pole to pole

Anderson isn’t the only one working on climate change at Harvard. In fact, he’s not even the only one flying a gas-sniffing plane to better understand the atmosphere. Colleague Steven Wofsy, Rotch Professor of Atmospheric and Environmental Science, is flying another from pole to pole to reveal the atmosphere’s makeup in more detail. Wofsy has been working on climate change for years. One of his experimental towers has been standing among the trees in the 3,000-acre Harvard Forest in Petersham for nearly two decades, providing a mountain of data on temperature, atmospheric water vapor, and carbon dioxide flow from the atmosphere to the trees. The forest is one of the oldest and most extensively studied on the continent.

Climate change is one of the most complex and pressing problems of the age, and faculty members across the University are bringing the tools of their disciplines to bear on its many facets.

Atmospheric and Earth scientists are examining the global-scale processes involved, pushing back the frontiers of knowledge on how the planet functions. Biologists are examining feedback concerning life, cataloging tropical trees’ growth to assess their capacity to store excess carbon, and even tracking changes at venerable Walden Pond, where Harvard graduate Henry David Thoreau spent two years in the 1840s living simply, albeit surrounded by somewhat different plant life.

Climate change, of course, is not just a scientific problem. Caused by human industry and exploitation of the natural world, its solutions are entwined in everyone’s daily activities and in the larger values that regulate how people live. As such, climate change touches governments that struggle to divine effective, politically possible solutions; it touches businesses that ponder their responsibilities beyond making a product, providing a service, and turning a profit; it affects health and medicine, as physicians and public health officials face the potential for shifting disease patterns and changes in drinking water availability; it affects those who conceive and design structures and plan cities.

Harvard’s faculty members are addressing these problems and many more. Government, business, public health, design, religion, and even literature are represented.

“Climate change is a global problem and one of the great challenges of our time,” said Harvard President Drew Faust. “Harvard’s great strength lies not just in the depth of its scholarship, but also in the breadth of the expertise found across our campus. Our faculty members are deeply engaged in this issue, helping us to better understand the complexities of our natural environment, the forces driving climate change, and the ways in which we can move toward a more sustainable future.”

Spanning the spectrum

Harvard’s climate-change efforts span the spectrum, from sober academic teaching to environment-themed cartoon contests, and the campus fairly buzzes with climate change-related activity. Research and teaching on the subject are augmented by a host of centers, programs, and student groups. Lectures abound and draw not just prominent authorities from around the world, but also capacity crowds eager to better understand the planet and others’ points of view.

The Harvard University Center for the Environment (HUCE), for example, sponsors a long-running series examining a key issue driving climate change: the energy used to power diverse activities. HUCE’s “Future of Energy” lecture series has hosted oil company executives, government officials, and proponents of alternative energy, enriching the climate change discussion through diverse points of view.

“There are so many climate-related events that it’s hard to get through the week and get my work done,” said Daniel Schrag, Sturgis Hooper Professor of Geology, professor of environmental science and engineering, and HUCE director.

As the major University-wide center for environmental issues, HUCE provides a coordinating, collaborative clearinghouse where researchers in far-flung fields can gather and discuss climate change. Among its many activities, the center provides a home for fellows researching environmental issues, fosters a community of doctoral students interested in energy and the environment through a graduate consortium, and provides seed grants to spur early-stage research.

The center also promotes less-formal discussions between faculty members working on environment-related issues, through regular breakfasts and dinner discussions. Faculty members working on climate science attend weekly ClimaTea talks with graduate students and postdoctoral fellows, fostering a collegial atmosphere and an exchange of ideas. Several other Schools also have their own centers, programs, classes, and courses of study on the environment, climate change, and related issues.

Grace Brown, a junior environmental science and public policy concentrator, said her classes in economics, policy, and science provide a broad background for understanding these complex issues. During her time at Harvard, Brown has designed a study on organic foods at Harvard Dining Services and works with the Harvard College Environmental Action Committee. She intends to continue working on environmental issues and plans to intern this summer with the U.S. Department of Energy. Eventually, she hopes to attend law school and work in government.

“I came to Harvard as a crunchy environmentalist, wanting to save the forests,” Brown said. “I understand now how climate change impacts not just the forests, but our lives, my life. It makes climate change bigger and scarier when you understand its impact on people. It’s not just saving trees.”

The University itself has made becoming a sustainable institution a high priority in recent years, taking an array of steps to lessen its impact on the environment, from switching to energy-efficient lighting to purchasing renewable energy to running shuttle buses on biodiesel. (See the related story on Harvard’s internal efforts.)

Unraveling complexity

In many ways, the problems of climate change have highlighted how little we know about Earth. Climate change affects the most fundamental natural processes, some of which are well understood, and some not.

Just as important as understanding the processes is discerning the ways they affect each other. Even slightly warmed ocean waters affect the tongues of Greenland’s glaciers sticking into the sea, causing earth-shaking calving that can be detected at Harvard; drinking water for millions is affected by melting Asian glaciers, being studied by Peter Huybers, assistant professor of Earth and planetary sciences, and Armin Schwartzman, assistant professor of biostatistics at the Harvard School of Public Health. Researchers such as Schrag study the dramatic swings of past climates, including such extremes as “snowball Earth,” for clues to processes and feedbacks that affect the planet’s behavior and look to the future as well, providing a foundation for climate change mitigation efforts, such as carbon capture and sequestration.

Global political leaders look to the scientific community to inform their actions. But, given the pressing nature of the climate problem, leaders can’t wait to act until all the answers are known. Harvard’s authorities on governance are examining the knotty problem of how to forge a planetwide consensus on what actions are needed. At the Harvard Kennedy School, faculty members such as Jeffrey Frankel, Harpel Professor of Capital Formation and Growth, and Robert Stavins, the Pratt Professor of Business and Government who heads the Harvard Project on International Climate Change Agreements, are working to identify and advance policy options based on sound scientific and economic reasoning.

In the wake of December’s failed Copenhagen climate summit, Stavins’ project is examining options for moving forward. It plans to bring together authorities to discuss alternatives with an eye toward the next chance at forging international consensus, a December meeting planned for Cancun, Mexico. The group’s activities have already resulted in two books, and Stavins expects upcoming discussions to be published and available to representatives at the Cancun meetings.

The spiritual side

Outside scientific and policy circles, Harvard’s specialists in the humanities are addressing climate change in their own way. For instance, James Engell, chair of the English and American Literature and Language Department, examines the intersection of the environment and literature, and professor of history Emma Rothschild has written on the decline of the auto industry and the need for increased use of public transportation and other alternatives.

Donald Swearer, director of the Center for the Study of World Religions, said it’s important for religion and the humanities to play a role because they get to the heart of what makes us human, what our values are, and how we define our relationship with the natural world. In a recent conversation, Swearer talked about “enoughness,” and how people should live thoughtfully in concert with their lifestyle’s impact on the natural world.

Swearer, who edited a recent book called “Ecology and the Environment: Perspectives from the Humanities,” said climate change stems from millions of choices made by individuals over many years. Once the science is known and the policies passed, success will still depend on influencing individual behavior.

Though society’s inertia on these issues may seem impossible to overcome, Swearer pointed out that we got here through many changes over the years, so change can lead us to a new future.

“What we need to be able to do is create a positive vision of what those changes can be,” Swearer said.

Government and happiness? Not so strange bedfellows, says Derek Bok, former president of Harvard and professor at Harvard Law School, who investigates how happiness research could affect policy.

Ed Kelley doesn’t have your typical desk job. He’s got a computer, yes, though he readily admits he doesn’t much care for it. And he has a window, though it’s not for glimpsing the incoming spring, but rather the thousands of visitors to the Malkin Athletic Complex (MAC) or Hemenway Gym, where Kelley is dually employed. Those fitness seekers aren’t just strangers passing by. They’re his friends.

“You call this a job?” says Kelley, who swipes IDs, makes sure the towels are folded and stacked, and opens the gyms most mornings at daybreak. “My main job is to tease everyone.”

And he does. “I just want to warn you,” Kelley tells an incoming swimmer, “the water is wet.” Someone asks for a Band-Aid. “Fifty cents,” he says seriously, and then quips, “Harvard needs the money.”

Kelley, who turned 78 on April 12, has a mind that’s sharp as a whip — “like a computer,” he says of his memory. “You remember all the good things and let the bad things fade away.”

He greets everyone, remembers their names, jobs, and concentrations; he asks about newborn babies, family members. Gym-goers sometimes bring their children in to meet him.

Kelley has worked at Harvard since 1959, where he started out running linotype machines on a job that was supposed to last just 90 days. But Kelley, it seems, was meant for Harvard. He quickly became full time, and then the computer came along.

That milestone, according to Kelley, happened in 1982, when he was given the choice to leave or pursue something else. He became a foreman, overseeing Harvard’s grounds. That was a pivotal point in Kelley’s life. “Doing linotype, I didn’t see or talk to people,” he recalls. “When I came out on the grounds, it was a different world.” Kelley met students, faculty, and community members, and enjoyed talking to them until he retired in 1999.

But then he got bored. “Real bored,” he says. And he couldn’t stay away from campus. One chance day strolling through Hemenway, Kelley was offered a job opening the gyms in the morning. He couldn’t refuse.

“To me, it’s not a job, it’s an education. I talk to different people from all over the world every day. We have a saying over at the Hemenway Gym: When the kids come in the morning, we have to get a smile out of them to get them going.”

Around the five o’clock hour each morning, you can find Kelley walking to work. “A mile and a half to the MAC” from his home in Somerville, he points out, “but it’s a mile and a quarter to Hemenway.”

“I walk in the snow, rain — doesn’t matter to me,” he says. “When you get to be my age and these eyes open up in the morning, it’s a good day.”

Kelley says all his earnings from his gym gigs go to spoiling his eight grandchildren and two great-grandchildren. He has been married to the same woman for 55 years, a fact he proudly proclaims. Each summer the pair travel to Maine, and come September they jet away to Aruba, where they own a timeshare.

“My wife always tells me to be quiet,” he laughs. “But no matter where I go, I talk to everyone.”

When CNBC’s show “Power Lunch” wanted to gather predictions about Twitter’s future business model, the program’s hosts decided to ask a group of Harvard Business School (HBS) students who follow the economic side of social media.

To prepare for an on-air chat, several M.B.A. students from associate professor Mikolaj Jan Piskorski’s second-year elective “Competing with Social Networks,” which examines the ins and outs of online social platforms, held a brainstorming session where they discussed concepts such as billing for advertising or charging business users for premium tools and services.

To hear more about these strategies, “Power Lunch” anchor Michelle Caruso-Cabrera brought a TV crew to an HBS classroom on Monday (April 12) to conduct live interviews with Piskorski and several students. Caruso-Cabrera spoke first to Piskorski, who discussed the importance of social networks, and his course.

“‘Competing with Social Networks’ teaches students how to develop social strategies and use social platforms for profit,” he said. “It goes well beyond what has already been implemented and asks students to innovate and develop new solutions they can execute after they graduate.”

In the next segment, the students summarized their Twitter business plans in a way familiar to every Twitter user — in up to 140 characters. They suggested the company “capture the value of real-time data through ads, analytics, and premium tools. ”

Second-year students Adam Ludwin, Debbie Rosenbaum, and Oliver Bladek then weighed in on the pros and cons of each potential Twitter revenue model.

“Advertising is a proven business model on the Web, and Twitter is in the unique position of being able to integrate ads into real-time conversations,” Ludwin told the CNBC anchor. “The big question is how much this is worth, and whether what someone has posted on Twitter in real time is worth more than what authoritative sources say, which is why Google’s search results are valuable to advertisers.”

Whether students are going into technology-based careers or not, Ludwin said, social media make up a marketing channel that is growing rapidly and is here to stay. “Business leaders can’t afford to ignore Twitter and the wave of user-generated content that now so clearly influences the direction of products and services.”

April has brought more than showers and sunshine to Harvard; it has brought Africa.

The second-largest continent is the subject this month of Harvard Africa Focus, a series of lectures, panels, and performances formerly called “Africa Week.”

This year, official events stretch for 13 days, through April 18. Add in related events on African languages and on hip-hop, and Harvard’s celebration of 53 countries and 1 billion people goes all the way to May 1.

No matter what the event, hope and optimism are the underlying themes. Africa Focus comes with a subtitle: “Reimagine, Redefine, Reinvent: A New Paradigm for Africa’s Leaders.”

Leadership was a leitmotif from the start during Africa Focus. The keynote address, on April 5, was by Ambassador Johnnie Carson, a 37-year U.S. diplomat and former Peace Corps volunteer in Tanzania. After service in Kenya, Zimbabwe, Uganda, Botswana, Nigeria, and elsewhere, he is now assistant secretary of state for the Bureau of African Affairs.

Carson spoke about “U.S.-Africa Relations in the Age of Obama.” His take? The new administration sees Africa as a strategic partner.

“It was a lot of positive messaging about America’s respect for Africa,” said Ghana native Cheryl Klufio of the keynote. She is a communications officer at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.

Other speakers have included Gen. William E. “Kip” Ward, the first head of the U.S. Africa Command, on an April 7 panel on diplomacy, development, and defense. An April 10 panel on leadership and governance in Africa featured former ministers from Mali, Ghana, and Nigeria.

On Monday (April 12), there was a public conversation at the Harvard Kennedy School with Babatunde Fashola, the youngest governor of Lagos State in the history of Nigeria.

In events to come, there will be other African leaders, along with scholars, jurists, and performers.

Friday through Sunday (April 16-18), speakers and panelists at Harvard Law School’s 2010 Harvard African Law and Development Conference include a supreme court justice from Ghana, a vice president for World Bank Africa Region, and high-level jurists from Sierra Leone and Uganda.

Panels will look at a wide range of issues, including development, natural resources, conflict, technology, business, harmonized legal systems, and national health insurance (co-sponsored by the Harvard Medical School’s Africa Health Forum).

The April 16-18 conference is sponsored by the Harvard African Law Association, one of a long list of Africa Focus sponsors in the fields of law, medicine, and government. Principal underwriters are the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation, the Institute of Politics, the Kennedy School Student Government, and the Committee on African Studies (CAS).

CAS coordinates Africa research and teaching at Harvard, where 300 Africa-related courses are taught in public health, history, politics, literature, and other disciplines.

CAS is also expanding the reach of Africa events at Harvard this month. On Thursday (April 15) is the final iteration of Africa Language Theater Night at Harvard, featuring word play in 18 languages, including Amharic, Dinka, Hausa, Igbo, Swahili, Twi, Wolof, and others. (Co-sponsor is the Harvard University African Languages Program.)

On April 30 and May 1, CAS will pair with Harvard’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies to present “The Language of Global Hip Hop Culture,” a conference and teacher-education event on using hip-hop as a window onto art, culture, and social norms in Africa and the Middle East. Case studies will include hip-hop writing and performances in Arabic, Swahili, Persian, Wolof, and Hebrew.

Africa Focus still has a lot of punch left this month. But the past was not bad either.

Klufio went to other Africa Focus events, including one on the media and social change on the continent (April 6) and another on rebranding Africa through youth (April 8). And on April 10 she went to “Africa Night 2010: An African Odyssey,” two hours of dancing, music, and fashion shows at the New College Theatre.

There was joy and drumming and dance and fashion, fly and fresh. But the frame of the odyssey was two old men in traditional garb who set out with their walking sticks — humorously clueless — to find Europe. “There is always bad news,” one says in the beginning. “That’s why I want to leave this land.”

In the end, the old men decide not to go, but not before they have arrived, naïve and droll, in Mali, Nigeria, and other places where a modern Africa peeks out. “Is this Europe?” one old  man asks early on. “No,” a pretty girl replies. “You are in South Africa.”

Soon after, one old man asks the same question so many Africans are asking themselves today. “Why are we going to Europe?” he says. “It is so beautiful here.”

For more information and a list of activities.

The Silk Road Project will move its headquarters to Harvard University this summer, strengthening a partnership between the University and the world-renowned organization that promotes innovation and learning through the arts.

Harvard President Drew Faust and Yo-Yo Ma ’76, the project’s founder and artistic director, today (April 13) announced that the relocation of the Silk Road Project from Rhode Island to Harvard-owned property at 175 North Harvard St. in Allston this July will enable new artistic and cultural opportunities at the University and in surrounding communities.

“We will act as a working laboratory, exploring intersections between the arts and academics, seeking passionate learning across disciplines and cultures,” said Ma, the acclaimed cellist who founded the project in 1998. “I am thrilled that our partnership with Harvard has resulted in this renewal of our joint commitment to learning through the arts. I am looking forward to an exciting collaboration with Harvard faculty and students.”

The Silk Road Project is a nonprofit artistic, cultural, and educational organization with a vision of connecting the world’s neighborhoods by bringing together artists and audiences. The announcement marked the second time Harvard has welcomed a major not-for-profit organization to Allston in as many months, and it represented a milestone in Faust’s initiative to better integrate the arts into the cognitive life of the University.

“The Silk Road Project is a thriving example of how the arts enhance our understanding of the world,” said Faust. “This new, closer relationship between Harvard and the Silk Road Project will create educational opportunities that will benefit our local communities as well as our students.”

The new partnership builds on the success of a relationship between the Silk Road Project and Harvard, begun in 2005, that has already inspired multidisciplinary college courses as well as numerous workshops and performances involving members of the project and Harvard undergraduate musicians. The new Silk Road Project headquarters’ location — in space shared with the Harvard Allston Education Portal — provides opportunities for further cultural collaborations that will benefit the Harvard community and its neighbors.

The Silk Road Ensemble with Yo-Yo Ma will give annual public performances at Harvard, and Silk Road Ensemble musicians and artists will be available to take part in classroom work on campus, through performance, discussion, and collaborative projects.

The Silk Road Project’s move to Allston highlights Harvard’s ongoing stewardship of its properties and active engagement in Allston. In addition to today’s announcement, Harvard recently repurposed one of its properties to serve as a temporary community skating rink and announced that the world headquarters of Earthwatch, a leading scientific research and environmental education organization, was coming to the neighborhood.

“The Silk Road Project and Earthwatch are great examples of the kinds of vibrant organizations we can bring to Allston,” said Harvard Executive Vice President Katherine Lapp. “These are not-for-profit organizations with priorities that mesh nicely with Harvard’s educational mission, and bringing them into the neighborhood opens up a world of possibilities for collaborations that will benefit the community.”

Faust has raised the profile of the arts on the Harvard campus following the recommendations of a University-wide Task Force on the Arts that she named in 2007. The task force report encouraged new artistic programming and more opportunities for arts-making as a way of moving the arts already prevalent in the Harvard community closer to the curriculum. In the past year, 12 General Education and departmental courses and 15 freshman seminars integrated arts-making into their syllabi, and the number of venues for the practice, viewing, or performing of the arts online and on campus has increased.

“The interchange of music, art, culture, and ideas is the heart of our artistic programming and our educational work,” said Laura Freid, chief executive officer and executive director of the Silk Road Project. “Entering into this deeper relationship with Harvard and fully integrating into the Harvard campus will allow us to enrich our ongoing explorations of the Silk Road as a metaphor for cultural exchange and interdisciplinary collaboration.”

About the Silk Road Project

The Silk Road Project is a not-for-profit artistic, cultural, and educational organization with a vision of connecting the world’s neighborhoods by bringing together artists and audiences around the globe. Founded by cellist Yo-Yo Ma in 1998 as a catalyst to promote innovation and learning through the arts, the Silk Road Project takes inspiration from the historic Silk Road trading routes as a modern metaphor for multicultural and interdisciplinary exchange. Under the artistic direction of Ma and the leadership of CEO and Executive Director Laura Freid, the project presents performances by the Silk Road Ensemble, engages in cross-cultural exchanges and residencies, leads workshops for students, and partners with leading cultural institutions to create educational materials and programs. Developing new music is a central mission of the Silk Road Project, which has been involved in commissioning and performing more than 60 new musical and multimedia works from composers and arrangers from around the world.

About the Silk Road Ensemble
The Silk Road Ensemble is a collective of internationally renowned musicians, composers, arrangers, visual artists, and storytellers from more than 20 countries. Each ensemble member’s career illustrates a unique response to what is one of the artistic challenges of our times: nourishing global connections while maintaining the integrity of art rooted in authentic traditions. Many of the musicians first came together under the artistic direction of Yo-Yo Ma at a workshop at Tanglewood Music Center in Massachusetts in 2000. Since then, in various configurations, ensemble artists have collaborated on a range of musical and multimedia projects, presenting innovative performances that explore the relationship between tradition and innovation in music from the East and West. The Silk Road Ensemble has recorded five albums and performed to critical acclaim throughout Asia, Europe, and North America.

About Yo-Yo Ma

The many-faceted career of cellist Yo-Yo Ma is testament to his continual search for new ways to communicate with audiences and to his personal desire for artistic growth and renewal. Ma maintains a balance between his engagements as a soloist with orchestras worldwide and his recital and chamber music activities. His discography encompasses more than 75 albums, including 16 Grammy Award winners. One of his goals is the investigation of music as a means of communication and a vehicle for the migration of ideas; in 1998 he established the Silk Road Project to promote the study of cultural, artistic, and intellectual traditions along the ancient Silk Road trade routes.

Ma was born in Paris to Chinese parents who later moved the family to New York. He began to study the cello at age 4, attended the Juilliard School, and in 1976 graduated from Harvard University. He has received numerous awards, including the 1978 Avery Fisher Prize, the 1999 Glenn Gould Prize, the 2001 National Medal of Arts, the 2006 Sonning Prize, the 2006 Dan David Prize, and the 2008 World Economic Forum’s Crystal Award. In 2006, he was designated a United Nations Messenger of Peace by then Secretary-General Kofi Annan. In 2007, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon extended his appointment. In January 2009, at the invitation of President-Elect Barack Obama, Ma played in the quartet performance of John Willliams’ “Air and Simple Gifts” at the 56th Inauguration Day ceremony.

About Harvard and the arts

The arts abound at Harvard. Blending theory, practice, and passion across a diverse curricular and extracurricular landscape, Harvard is home to a vibrant and dedicated community that celebrates, interrogates, and practices art. The arts require a prominent place at a research institution because they inspire creative thinking and leadership. As the December 2008 Task Force on the Arts Report said, a university that wants to be a place where dreams are born and exciting collaborations push the boundaries of knowledge must include the practice of the arts in the curriculum and embrace it as an integral part of intellectual life on campus.

The announcement that the Silk Road Project will relocate to Harvard is the latest example of the University’s closer embrace of the arts since a presidential task force called in 2008 for a concerted effort to increase the presence of the arts on campus.

Merritt Moore ’11, a physics concentrator who took the 2008-09 academic year off to perform with the Zurich Ballet, said that break “gave me time to realize there is a change, a great change” in the profile of the arts at Harvard. “The hardest thing now is to say no to things, since there is so much opportunity, and it keeps on growing.”

Moore, one of three students on a new arts committee established at the recommendation of the Task Force on the Arts, is no longer shy about going from a physics lab to a dance rehearsal, she said, because the arts have support from Harvard’s administration.

“It gives encouragement to all the students to pursue something that a lot of times we would do under the table,” said Moore.

Harvard President Drew Faust, who established the task force, and noted cellist Yo-Yo Ma ’76 announced April 13 that the Silk Road Project, founded by Ma, would move its administrative offices from Rhode Island to Allston this summer.

The move means much more to the University than a new organization in Harvard’s property in Allston. It’s one more step to bring arts-making fully into the life of the University.

“This is an exciting moment for Harvard, the Silk Road Project, and the surrounding community,” said Diana Sorensen, dean of the arts and humanities, James F. Rothenberg Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures and of Comparative Literature, and member of the Harvard University Committee on the Arts (HUCA).  “This partnership between the University and the project will make it easier for Silk Road musicians and artists to collaborate with Harvard scholars, performers, and students, and is another example of the ways the arts are increasingly visible on campus and more present in teaching and learning.

Ma himself, a frequent visitor to campus, has already inspired a series of Silk Road-style courses at Harvard — classroom explorations of how the material, visual, and audible facets of art enhance traditional scholarship.

A class, taught by Harvard Shakespeare scholar Stephen Greenblatt, John Cogan University Professor of the Humanities, is featured in “Translating Encounters,” a student-organized exhibit of 17th century objects and documents that opened March 25 at Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnography.

Lori Gross, Harvard’s associate provost for arts and culture, said the list of new arts-related projects, spaces, and additions to the curriculum has been growing rapidly since the release of the task force report. “The task force inspired and catalyzed people and organizations throughout the University,” she said.

One example is HUCA, the cross-disciplinary collection of 31 scholars, students, curators, arts practitioners, and administrators that has met regularly since December.

There have also been several new Web offerings launched since last spring: a University-wide arts portal that centralizes the arts calendar, a new site for Harvard’s Office for the Arts, and Poetry@Harvard.

Museum directors at Harvard also formed a group to boost collaborations between University collections and the curriculum. The Harvard Art Museum added a new position, a director of academic partnerships.

“My sense is the culture is changing,” said historian Robin Kelsey, chair of HUCA and the Shirley Carter Burden Professor of Photography at Harvard.

There is also an increased presence of practicing artists at Harvard. Last spring, Sir Ronald Cohen, M.B.A. ’69, inspired by the task force’s December 2008 report, funded a dramatic reading of T.S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland” by actors Brian Dennehy and Dame Eileen Atkins.

Last June, three of 10 honorary degrees went to practicing artists: writer Joan Didion, screenwriter Pedro Almodóvar, and jazz musician Wynton Marsalis, who will visit Harvard again next spring to start a two-year performance and lecture series on the history of jazz.

A cascade of practicing artists have visited Harvard since last fall in the Learning From Performers series at the Office of the Arts. Among them were Blair Underwood, Fred Ho, and Suzanne Vega. This spring, soprano Renée Fleming stopped by, along with musician-composer James Moody and Judith Jamison.

Zachary Sifuentes ’97-’99, an Adams House arts tutor who arrived on campus in the fall of 1993, has seen the same upward shift in support for the arts at Harvard. Arts-making was always there for those who wanted to do it, he said, but today it’s more available to “people who don’t consider themselves artists.”

The expanded presence is reflected in Harvard’s curriculum: Arts practice is now a part of 12 new General Education and departmental courses, and 15 freshman seminars. The courses, Gross said, “are making both the professors and students think differently.”

Kelsey taught “Photography and Society” last fall, a Gen Ed course that required an arts-practice component. His students had to set up an exhibit of either new or found photographs, accompanied by a “photo script,” a detailed conceptual plan for how the photos would be used.

The course was popular and effective, said Kelsey, and the creative component gave him a sharp tool for assessing how well his students were grasping the material.

In addition, more space in more buildings is being freed up, much of it to showcase student arts, in addition to exhibition spaces at the Graduate School of Design, the Carpenter Center, the Center for Government and International Studies (CGIS), and elsewhere. There also are rotating exhibitions at Massachusetts Hall, the 18th century building in Harvard Yard that is the seat of University administration.

One recent example of how an arts presence can electrify and energize a physical space on campus was the  “Bizarre Animals: An Evening of Contemporary Art Interventions” on March 26 at the Harvard Museum of Natural History.

Video, painting, and performance artists — many of them graduates of Harvard’s Visual and Environmental Studies (VES) program — took over the galleries to create artistic explorations of the animal world, real and imagined.

“Bizarre Animals” included a man cooking a steak and a woman in camouflage inside a dinosaur skeleton. It was organized by Carlin Wing ’02, a VES artist-in-residence last fall. A “quieter event” came the next day, Kelsey said, when a panel of practicing artists talked about the challenges and glories of making a living in the arts.

“These practitioners had learned, and learned as Harvard undergraduates, that arts practice is an intellectual inquiry, with every bit as much intellectual rigor as what academics engage in,” said Kelsey.

“And it’s an important message for all our undergrads to hear,” he said, “that this is not a career that’s about technique and craft so much as it is a career about deepening one’s understanding of certain intellectual problems, and doing it through material or visual means.”

Other examples of the stepped-up physical presence of the arts at Harvard abound across the campus.

An alternative space for performance, exhibition, and collaboration opened last November as the Laboratory@Harvard in the new Northwest Science Building on Oxford Street. There will be a  “silent rave” there on April 11 that combines science, theater, and art.

The American Repertory Theater, under the new direction of Diane Paulus ’87, brought its actors into Harvard Yard for a series of “happenings” last fall: dance numbers, movement classes, and one rave-like musical-chairs event.

This mobile public art took place amid new, intentional “Common Spaces” in Harvard Yard, including a “chairs” installation that lasted until the first snowfall. The  colorful, light chairs go back out into Harvard Yard in mid-April, some of them wearing lines from poems by Emily Dickinson.

As people use the chairs, they will be mixed up every day. So the lines of Dickinson’s poetry will “start to create new poems by themselves,” said Zachary Sifuentes, the idea’s creator. “People who use the chairs will be part of the art-making process themselves.” (He plans to record the new “found” poems every day.)

Inside Lamont Library’s Poetry Room, Sifuentes, who also teaches freshman composition at Harvard, will have a companion exhibit on Dickinson, complete with telescopes to peer at fragments of her work hidden in the exterior landscape.

Other telescopes, 19th century models from Harvard’s Collection of Scientific Instruments, will be on display. (Sifuentes said Dickinson, a famous recluse and agoraphobic, had a deep interest in science, and it informed her poetry.)

Gross called the Poetry Room installation an example of how the arts smooth the pathways between the arts, the sciences, and other disciplines.

Combining arts practice with academics makes sense at many levels, said Moore, the undergraduate dancer, whose physics studies now center on nano-materials and quantum computing. “The arts in general really allow one to try to break boundaries, and be daring and creative,” she said.

“Dance always helps the physics,” Moore added. “If I’m not dancing, my grades go down.”

Historian Robin Fleming’s recent lecture at Harvard was on economic calamity in early medieval Britain, and how people in desperate straits turned to “recycling” Roman ruins for what they needed.

The Radcliffe Fellow, on leave from Boston College, used dozens of slides — of knights in helmets, stone churches, iron fixtures, and more. But one picture was contemporary: a Haitian man, hammer poised in midair, scavenging rebar from post-earthquake rubble.

Perhaps fifth century Britain, thrown into abject poverty by the withdrawal of Roman power, offers a lesson to the modern world. In some countries, after all, culture, industry, and governance are fragile too, and await the fall of some modern Rome.

Recycling can earn us a living, early Britain tells us. (The Haitian man agrees; he sold his rebar to Chinese scrap dealers.)

But the same dark century also says that sometimes recycling is not a way to make money; it is a way simply to survive. Its pervasiveness in a society can reveal a depth of impoverishment so profound that it signals a world devoid of money, factories, literacy, and political structure.

Without the “comforting similarity” of life that Rome brought, Fleming said, Britain’s nascent cities emptied out, London among them, and devolved into “highly mobilized, small-scale communities” forced to make do on their own.

She told an audience of 50 at the Radcliffe Gymnasium that, at around 400 A.D., Rome was beleaguered by wars elsewhere and began to withdraw its soldiers and administrators from remote Britain. The empire also stopped sending shiploads of precious metals to back up the local bronze currency.

Without “the unifying force” of the state, its culture, and its manufacturing prowess, said Fleming, Britain was plunged into centuries of economic travail. Within a generation, fifth century Britain — once “as Roman as any place on the planet,” she said — was without the production, supply, transportation, and money systems Rome had brought to its colony.

The result was a population “deskilled” for centuries and forced to rely on wholesale scavenging, said Fleming. With no money, no industry, and no legacy of craft, there was no one left to quarry stone, smelt metals, or make pottery. (For one thing, she said, Britain was “a-ceramic” for the next 600 years.)

But there was at least plenty to recycle. By the second decade of the fifth century, Roman-era towns, manufacturing sites, forts, villas, and temple complexes had fallen into ruins. People raided buildings for quarried stone, iron clamps, and hefty 2-pound nails. They stripped lead pipe from deftly engineered water systems. They robbed graves for pottery and cooking utensils.

But these scavengers also left behind a rich material record of what they stole, recovered, and reused. That’s another lesson from early Britain, this one for historians. The material record, often little valued by scholars, can be richer than the textual record, said Fleming.

Yet historians of early medieval Britain still cling to text as the preeminent way of shining light on the period. “Most of you think historians are in the past business, but we’re really in the text-interpretation business,” she said. “And we’re as attached to the written word as any professor of literature.”

One famous written source — just 17 words — is still so well regarded by scholars that it trumps archaeological evidence, said Fleming. But there are better sources for historians of early medieval Britain, she said: 10,000 kilos of archaeological evidence, for instance, which can be dated to the fifth century.

Fleming, a one-time junior fellow in the Harvard University Society of Fellows, is using the year at Radcliffe to finish her third book, “Living and Dying in Early Medieval Britain.”

Text sources are important to her. Among other things, she is a scholar of the Domesday Book, the great survey of England’s lands completed in 1086 for William the Conqueror.

But material culture is also important, she said, in this case the “vast stores of Roman-period material” that Fleming said had piled into ruins after the collapse of Rome in Britain. Thousands of Roman sites became vast repositories for scavengers, who combed ruins for brick, tile, iron, lead, and — above all — quarried stone.

Until the 11th century, virtually all stone used to make early Christian churches was from Roman ruins, said Fleming. And as late as the 14th century — 900 years after the fall of Romanized Britain — masons were still using Roman brick and tile.

Architectural surveys of churches built from Roman materials show there were 300 in the London region alone. “Everywhere you look,” said Fleming of present-day British structures, “you see Roman material.”

And it was abundant. She used the example of a Roman bath in East Sussex. It was abandoned in the third century, hidden until the 19th under a slag heap, and finally excavated in the 1970s. The simple bath yielded up “a whole universe of brick and tile,” 13 tons of it, said Fleming.

So vast was the scale of material that salvage operations went on from the fourth to the 20th centuries. Roman engineers had used iron in buildings and walls: clamps, hinges, window grilles, gate pulls, and giant nails. The Coliseum in Rome, Fleming said, offering an example, contains an estimated 300 tons of iron clamps.

Most scrap metal was reforged. Most villages had lost the art of smelting — making metal from ore — but they still had smithies with hot fires. Metal tools that were still useful — agricultural tools, spoons, harnesses — were saved from the melting pots.

Roman pottery, scavenged from dump sites and ritual graves, was popular among medieval recyclers too. But in some communities, old pots were sometimes repurposed, sometimes broken just so their circular bottoms could be used as molds for large-scale brooches.

There’s a lesson here for historians, said Fleming. In the absence of reliable narratives about ancient lives, we can recover some of those lives, she said, “if we bother to look at material evidence they left behind.”

William F. Lee, A.B. ’72, a Boston-based intellectual property expert and former Harvard Overseer who leads one of the nation’s most prominent law firms, has been elected to become the newest member of the Harvard Corporation, the University announced today (April 11).

Co-managing partner of Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr, and recently the Eli Goldston Lecturer on Law at Harvard Law School, Lee will assume his role as a Fellow of Harvard College on July 1, 2010, when James R. Houghton, A.B. ’58, M.B.A. ’62, steps down from the Corporation after fifteen years of distinguished service.

“Bill Lee will be an outstanding addition to the Corporation,” said Houghton, the Corporation’s senior fellow since 2002.  “He’s wise, he understands complex organizations and academic culture, he’s immensely thoughtful and engaging, and he knows and cares a great deal about Harvard.”

“Bill is just an extraordinarily able, energetic, smart, and dedicated person, someone all of us on the search committee considered a natural choice,” said Robert D. Reischauer, A.B. ’63, who chaired the search committee and will succeed Houghton as senior fellow. “He has interests and experience that range from law and education and public service to science and technology and medicine.  And he’s stayed closely involved with Harvard across the years — as an Overseer, a visiting instructor, a parent, an admired local alumnus, and someone people turn to for good judgment and advice.”

“I’ve considered it a privilege to come to know Bill Lee the past few years, and I look forward to his joining the Corporation,” said President Drew Faust.  “His wisdom and experience, his intellectual curiosity, his feel for people and situations, his deep sense of how institutions can adapt to changing times — those qualities and more have made him an exceptionally valuable member of our community, and will make him an excellent member of the Corporation.”

“No institution means more to me than Harvard, and no institution has greater potential to transform people’s lives,” said Lee.  “I’m grateful to have seen and served Harvard from many different perspectives, and I’m looking forward to coming to know the University and its many people and parts even better.  I feel honored and humbled by the opportunity to serve Harvard in this new way, especially at so consequential a time of change, and I will do all I can to serve well.”

Lee began his legal career at the Boston law firm Hale and Dorr in 1976, rising to become senior partner in 1984 and managing partner of the firm in 2000.  He played a central role in the firm’s 2004 merger with the Washington-based firm Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering and has served since then as the co-managing partner of the combined firm, familiarly known as WilmerHale.

Beyond his experience in managing a firm with some 1,000 lawyers and twelve offices in the United States, Europe, and Asia, he has risen to the front ranks of intellectual property practitioners nationwide and regularly appears on lists of America’s best lawyers in his field.  In 2009, the publication Managing IP named him as U.S. Intellectual Property Practitioner of the Year.  His numerous trials in the federal courts have focused on such diverse matters as laser optics, video compression, cellular communications, remote data storage, secure Internet communications, pharmaceutical products, high-speed chromatography, medical devices, and genetically engineered food.

Both before and after his service as a Harvard Overseer, Lee has taught at Harvard Law School, where his courses have included intellectual property litigation and the innovative problem-solving workshop introduced in January 2010.  (For more on the workshop.)  Active in public service, he has served on advisory committees to various United States courts, as well as the nominating committee for Massachusetts state judges.  He went to Washington in 1987-89 as associate counsel to the independent counsel for the Iran-Contra investigation, and also led an investigation of alleged incidents of racial bias in the state courts at the request of the Massachusetts Attorney General.

As an elected member of the University’s Board of Overseers from 2002 to 2008, Lee chaired the board’s committee on finance, administration, and management for three years and was vice chair of the executive committee in 2007-08; he was also an active member of the committee on natural and applied sciences.  He was one of the three Overseers on the 2006-07 presidential search committee, and he served throughout his six-year Overseer term on the joint committee on inspection, the University’s audit committee.

Lee has been a member of the visiting committees to both the Law School and the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, and he served on the committee convened in 2008-09 to consider the relations of the Harvard University Police Department with the broader University community.  He was vice chair of the Boston area gift committee for his 30th Harvard College reunion and served on the Boston committee for the most recent Harvard Law School campaign.  In addition, in recent years he has seen Harvard through the eyes of a parent and uncle:  One of his daughters has attended the College, the Kennedy School, and the Business School, another has attended the Law School, and four of his nieces have attended the College.

Beyond his roles within Harvard and his service within the legal profession, Lee has served on the boards of a range of other scientific, medical, and educational organizations.  He was invited to be one of the founding members of the board of the Broad Institute, a collaboration focused on genomics and medicine that brings together researchers from Harvard, MIT, Harvard-affiliated hospitals, and the Whitehead Institute.  He has previously served as vice chair of the board of University Hospital (a Boston University affiliate), a trustee of the Boston Medical Center, an overseer of the Museum of Science in Boston, and a member of the Cornell Law School visiting committee.  He has also chaired the board of trustees of the Tenacre Country Day School, an elementary school in Wellesley, Massachusetts.

In his student days at Harvard College, Lee was active with Phillips Brooks House and served as a student representative to the joint faculty and student committee on undergraduate life.  After graduating magna cum laude in 1972, he studied at Cornell, where he received his J.D., magna cum laude, and his M.B.A., with distinction, in 1976.  He and his wife, Leslie, live in Wellesley and have three grown children.

The seven-member Harvard Corporation, formally known as the President and Fellows of Harvard College, is Harvard’s executive governing board and the smaller of Harvard’s two boards, the other being the Board of Overseers.  In addition to President Faust, the current Corporation members include Houghton, chairman emeritus of Corning Incorporated; Nannerl Keohane, L.L.D. (hon.) ’93, Laurance S. Rockefeller Distinguished Visiting Professor of Public Affairs at Princeton and past president of Duke University and Wellesley College; Patricia King, J.D. ’69, Carmack Waterhouse Professor of Law, Medicine, Ethics, and Public Policy at the Georgetown University Law Center; Reischauer, president of the Urban Institute and past director of the Congressional Budget Office; James Rothenberg, A.B. ’68, M.B.A. ’70, chairman, principal executive officer, and director of Capital Research and Management Company and treasurer of Harvard University; and Robert Rubin, A.B. ’60, L.L.D. (hon.) ’01, co-chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations and former U.S. Secretary of the Treasury.

In accordance with Harvard’s charter, the Corporation on Sunday (April 11) elected Lee as a Fellow of Harvard College, with the consent of the Board of Overseers.

Bill Lee has seen Harvard from many vantage points: He attended the College, has taught at the Law School, served as an Overseer and has been a proud Harvard parent – twice. As he prepared to join the Corporation, Lee, co-managing partner of the law firm WilmerHale, sat down with the Gazette to share his perspective on an institution that has been part of his life for four decades.

Gazette: Do you have a memory that crystallizes your experience as a Harvard undergrad?

Lee: I do.  I came from a small public high school.  My parents were immigrants from China.  My dad had a Ph.D. in physics, but he was nevertheless an immigrant from China.  And I was the first person from my high school ever to get in and come to Harvard.  I arrived and I thought, I have to be a mistake. There are all these smart, talented people.  I’m just not quite sure what I’m doing here. Years later, when I was elected the Board of Overseers and I arrived at my first meeting, I looked around the room at this phenomenally talented group of people and thought, oh my God, it’s happening again! What am I doing here?

There’s another story, too. The day that my dad dropped me off at Harvard, he helped me move my belongings into Pennypacker and then we took a walk down Mass Ave. He said to me, “so you’re going to be scientist.”  And I said, “I am. I’m going to be an engineer, just like you.”  We walked two or three more steps, and he said, “Well, if you’re going to be a scientist, you need to be a deep thinker.”  I said, “Yeah.”  We walked two or three more steps, and we stopped right across from the Hong Kong restaurant. My father looked me right in the eyes and said, “Well, you’re not.  Change your major, do something different.  It will work out.”  And then he got in his car and he left! I changed my major.

Both of my brothers are professors at the Medical School. Both of them are younger, and both of them majored in science.  They obviously didn’t get the same talk!

Gazette: How did you see the University when you returned as a visiting professor at the Law School?

Lee: I had a very different perspective. I didn’t go to Harvard Law School, so being able to teach at Harvard Law School was just a wonderful opportunity, and an intimidating opportunity.  The faculty was very welcoming, and the kids were just so smart.  They were just so smart.  The course that we just finished teaching was an extraordinary experience. It was designed to address the question: What is a law school education missing? And Dean Kagan and Dean Minow decided that law school was missing the type of education that taught you judgment, leadership, relationship building, and teamwork, and we designed a course based upon business school-type case studies that are focused on legal issues. I actually helped design one about two and a half years ago.  It was great for several reasons: We were doing something that was wholly different for law schools, a wholly different type of education. The class I taught had to do everything in teams of 16 students. They did reports in teams, they had to write in teams, they had to do their analysis in teams.  It’s very common across the river, but not very common up at the Law School.  It was also great because, in a very nontraditional way, the seven of us who were teaching the case to different groups met every day and talked about what worked, what didn’t work, what we would try, what we didn’t try.  It’s just a great experience.

Gazette: How did your Harvard experiences inform your work on the Board of Overseers?

Lee: By the time I joined the Board of Overseers, I had been educated about Harvard in a couple different ways. I had been at the College for four years, and what I learned with the passage of time is that the most extraordinary part of the Harvard experience is your contemporaries. Two or three decades after you graduate, when you examine your relationship with your contemporaries, it is really more than you could have imagined at the age of 18 or 19. I’ll give you an example: Our firm is a merged firm between Wilmer Cutler & Pickering [based in Washington] and Hale and Dorr [based in Boston].  Part of the reason that merger was successful is that my college classmate, [former Deputy Attorney General and former Harvard Overseer] Jamie Gorelick, and [former Solicitor General and current Harvard Overseer] Seth Waxman, who was a year behind me, were at Wilmer.  So when we decided to explore the possibility of a merger, I was sitting down talking to people I’d known since I was 18 or 19. That crystallized one of the great advantages Harvard has, which is it just attracts the most innovative, creative, dynamic people.

I also had the benefit of being around Boston, and being part of a law firm that has a large number of Harvard people. I had the experience of teaching.  And then I had the best experience – I had been a parent. That just allowed me to see things from a whole variety of different perspectives – student, parent of student, faculty member, basically the consumer of what Harvard produces, the beneficiary of everything that Harvard can deliver.

Gazette: The University is emerging from a particularly challenging stretch. From your point of view, how have President Faust and the University handled this period, and how do you think things are lining up for the future?

Lee: I was on the search committee that selected President Faust. From the time I first met her in that process, I’ve been extraordinarily impressed with the type of leadership she brings, her personality, her vision, and her ability to get things done.  She came into office during a time of some turmoil in the community. She did a pretty unbelievable job of taking her very calm, very thorough manner of addressing issues, and actually imposing that personality on the University.  It was a change that I think was a wonderful example of great leadership.  Now, I don’t know of any Civil War historian who thought that they were going to have to understand interest rate swaps.  But having done a wonderful job of restoring calm and confidence, she moved into another tumultuous time, and I think has done a very good job of moving us through that process.

One of the challenges at Harvard is, it’s a paradox.  It’s the most creative, innovative place in the world.  Yet, it probably has more inertia than any place in the world. Part of the task is taking that institution, which is known for innovation and creativity, and then moving it forward and overcoming the inertia.  That requires incremental steps, one by one.  As I read her message to the community at the beginning of this school year, it said we’re coming into a different time, which we are.  It’s going to require that we set priorities, which we will have to.  And it’s going to require everybody to pull together and share both the rewards and the sacrifice of achieving those priorities.  And I think that everybody will.

Gazette: One of the aspects of the Harvard experience that President Faust has been emphasizing is the commitment to public service. You were part of Lawrence Walsh’s team during the Iran-Contra investigation. You’ve done a lot of work advising the federal courts.  Does your experience give you a sense of how Harvard’s mission intersects with public service?

Lee: I don’t know if you’ve heard David Gergen speak about my generation’s failure of leadership in the public arena. He does it sort of mournfully, because we’re the generation that went to college during the Vietnam era, and in some ways we should have been the generation that was most motivated.  He talks a great deal about, as a consequence, how it’s critically important for institutions like Harvard to instill that public service commitment and mentality in the next generation. I agree with him 100%, and I agree that it’s a big part of what Harvard has to do.

Harvard not only has an obligation to train people in the arena; it also needs to help fight the economic and institutional barriers that block people who want to go in that direction. And it has to help reinforce the proposition that public service is a great thing, and it’s really terrifically rewarding.  I think Harvard is one of a few universities that has the ability to make a critically important difference.

Gazette: You are known as one of the top intellectual property litigators in the country. I always think that someone who rises to the top of their field must really love what they do…

Lee: Yeah.

Gazette: So what is it that you love best about your work?

Lee: Well, you have to have in mind my father’s story about my technical background. He always thought it was a riot that this is what I was doing! I’ll go from the narrow to the broad: I like trial work.  I’ve probably done 200 trials in my lifetime.  I’ve argued 100 appeals. I love the crucible of a trial, and I love cross-examination in particular. This area of law has allowed me to really be involved in cases that are at the cutting edge of commerce and technology. It’s allowed me to be in a very intellectually interesting area.  And the field attracts interesting folks, and that’s been a great part of it as well.

Gazette: What do you do when you’re not in the office?  Do you sail? Do you play soccer?

Lee: I used to play soccer until I was 50, and I got clobbered at it! I played over-30 soccer for years. I was playing in a game and someone beat our sweeper back.  I was a midfielder.  I beat the striker to the ball, and instead of just carrying the ball out, I got cute.  I stepped over it and I flicked it with my heel. The other guy didn’t expect it.  He ran me over.  I fell down, he fell – his knee hit me and fractured four of my ribs, and one of them broke in half and went through the side of my lung. I ended up at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital for a week, and my wife said, “No more.”

Now I run a lot.  I’m an avid runner, 25 or 35 miles a week.  I’ve run the Marathon once.  Now and again, I get to sneak out and play for the firm’s coed soccer team, which is fun.  I’m a fan of the Harvard men’s soccer team, which was really great this year.  On Saturdays and Sundays in the fall, I go out to watch the games.  I still follow the Harvard women’s swimming team because my daughter Catie was the captain of the team.  Most of the rest of the time is devoted to my family.  We’re very fortunate, we’re all still here. There are eight grandchildren; they’re all pretty much around here.  We’re all very close.

For the last 15 years or so, the combination of practicing law, being the managing partner here, having us grow into the firm we’ve become, and doing what I’ve done over at the Law School is – it’s been about as much as I want to do.

Gazette: I can imagine.

Lee: But it’s been great.  It’s great.

Gazette: What do you want the Harvard community to know about how you’ll approach your new responsibilities on the Corporation?

Lee: Remember what I said about when I first arrived at Harvard? I have sort of the same humble reaction as I approach this position.  It’s interesting and enticing to come in at a challenging time, because in some sense, in a challenging time you can contribute more.  I think that the president is a great president, with not only a vision of where she wants the University to go, but an understanding of the incremental steps that have to be taken to get there.  I’m just hoping I can help.

Sen. John McCain and former journalist Terry Anderson share a disturbing bond, one they consider torture — solitary confinement.

Stuck in a 15-by-15-foot cell for more than two years, McCain, a prisoner of war in Vietnam, wrote that such isolation “crushes your spirit and weakens your resistance more effectively than any other form of mistreatment.”

In 1985, Anderson was the chief Middle East correspondent for the Associated Press in Lebanon when he was kidnapped by members of an Islamic militant group. He was held for almost seven years, much of that time in solitary confinement.

“The mind is a blank. Jesus, I always thought I was smart. Where are all the things I learned, the books I read, the poems I memorized? There’s nothing there, just a formless, gray-black misery. My mind’s gone dead. God, help me,” Anderson wrote in his 1994 memoir “Den of Lions.”

A noted author and Harvard doctor, perhaps best known for advocating a surgical checklist to help avoid operating room mishaps, spoke to a young crowd at Harvard Law School April 7 about the effects of long-term solitary confinement, a practice he equates with torture. Atul Gawande, who recently penned an article for the New Yorker on the topic, discussed the experiences of McCain and Anderson, as well as the cases of prisoners held in solitary confinement in the United States. During his talk the surgeon explored the physical and mental effects of such confinement, and the reasons the practice is so prevalent in the United States.

Solitary confinement takes profound physical and emotional tolls, said the associate professor at Harvard Medical School and the Harvard School of Public Health.

In a 1992 study of former prisoners of war, Gawande noted that brain scans of the men revealed that the most severe brain abnormalities were found in those who had suffered “head trauma to the point of losing consciousness, or simply solitary confinement.” The mental effects of such isolation include hallucinations, panic attacks, lethargy, and despair. After three years, Gawande said Anderson feared he was “losing his mind,” and resorted to repeatedly banging his head against a wall before his guards were able to stop him.

Research indicates solitary confinement does nothing to quell violence among prisoners, and is ultimately harmful to the general public, said the surgeon. He noted that prisoners subjected to such isolation are less able to deal with social settings as a result of being deprived of human contact, but that they are typically released back into society.

According to Gawande, the United Kingdom has almost completely rid its prison system of the practice. By contrast, the United States has at least 25,000 prisoners in solitary confinement.

If prolonged isolation is so intrinsically cruel, Gawande wondered aloud, “How do we end up with a prison system that subjects more of our own citizens to it in recent history?”

In the United States, the continued practice of solitary confinement in prisons across the country is directly linked to the public’s acceptance of the practice, he said.

“We learn very quickly that public sentiment is the reason that solitary confinement has exploded here,” said Gawande, adding that the support of such isolation is a “generational” construct.

“These are ideas that previous Americans have not found acceptable. And in much the same way that a previous generation of Americans countenanced legalized segregation, I think that ours has countenanced legalized torture.”

Nathan Keyfitz, professor of demography and sociology at Harvard from 1972 to 1983, recently died at the age of 96. Keyfitz was a leader in the field of mathematical demography and a pioneer in the application of mathematical tools to the study of population characteristics.

Born in Montreal on June 29, 1913, Keyfitz graduated from McGill University in 1934 with a degree in mathematics. He began working for the Dominion Bureau of Statistics in Ottawa, Canada, as a research statistician in 1936, where he would remain for 23 years.

He rose to the rank of assistant dominion statistician in the Canadian Civil Service, before beginning a distinguished academic career in 1961. His academic career took him to the University of Toronto, the University of Montreal, the University of Chicago, the University of California, Berkeley, and Ohio State University before he arrived at Harvard as the Andelot Professor of Sociology in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and of Demography in the Harvard School of Public Health. He also served as chairman of the Department of Sociology.

His pioneering work produced hundreds of books and articles in leading journals, and is credited for developing the field of mathematical demography.

Keyfitz, who was married to Beatrice (Orkin) Keyfitz from 1939 until her death in October 2009, had two children, Barbara and Robert.

A memorial service honoring the life of Keyfitz will be held at 1 p.m. on April 13 at the Bigelow Chapel in Mount Auburn Cemetery (580 Mt. Auburn St., Cambridge, MA 02138).

A program that paid city students if they got higher test scores earned an F, a new study shows.

The Harvard-based study led by former city Education Department consultant Roland Fryer examined the program he spearheaded, which poured $6.3 million in private funds into 261 schools in four cities…

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On April 15, 1862, poet Emily Dickinson began corresponding with critic Thomas Wentworth Higginson. Their fervent and revealing letters, written over 23 years, are now considered a landmark of American literature.

Reclusive and shy, Dickinson was rarely published in her own lifetime (she died in 1886), and seldom left her family home in Amherst, Mass. But she is world-famous today for an oblique, vivid style whose interiority and unconventional punctuation anticipated the modernist poetry of T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Mina Loy, Marianne Moore, and others.

Dickinson, 31 years old when she began writing to Higginson, included four poems with her first letter. It began with a now-famous question: “Are you too deeply occupied to say if my Verse is alive?”

At Harvard, her verse is alive all over again, courtesy of “Fugitive Sparrows,” an exhibit of Dickinson poems rendered as visual art. It is on display in the Woodberry Poetry Room in Lamont Library through May 2.

The creator of the installation is Adams House art tutor Zachary Sifuentes ’97-’99. “Her lines behave like large flocks of sparrows,” he wrote in one exhibit card, “fugitive from apprehension.”

Last year, Sifuentes, who is also a preceptor in Expository Writing at Harvard, was reading an index of first lines, which is the only way to access Dickinson’s untitled works. He discovered that the first lines, read together, “create new poems by themselves.”

With many of her poems, added Sifuentes, “You can read the lines out of order, and they still make sense — to the extent Dickinson makes sense.”

He attended an opening reception for the installation on Tuesday (April 6). With him were about 30 other people, old and young. Unlike many other forms of art, said Poetry Room curator Christina Davis, “Poetry is something you can age into.”

In brief opening remarks, Davis — a poet herself — said the exhibit had inspired her to reread Dickinson’s letters. She quoted the poet’s famous opening question to Higginson, then reminded listeners of Dickinson’s not-so-famous following line, which itself anticipates a modernist literary sentiment: “The mind is so near itself — it cannot see.”

Dickinson employed dashes abundantly in her poems, said Sifuentes. This graphical oddity of expression was like the poet “skipping a stone across a pond,” he said, not “delving into a subject so much as grazing it from different angles.”

Sifuentes used different angles of his own — lenses, telescopes, a large-scale drawing, audio, a computer — to renew a reader’s experience of Dickinson’s poems.

Three poem fragments, on placards under trees outside, are only seen through telescopes set up in the Poetry Room, whose windows overlook green space outside Houghton Library. “We noticed smallest things,” one fragment reads, peered at from afar. “Things overlooked before / By this great light upon our Minds … .”

Two other poems, set in miniature type, can only be read through two vintage lenses in a display case. Included is a favorite of Sifuentes, one that “still terrifies me,” he said. “Drowning is not so pitiful,” it begins, “As the attempt to rise.”

Another Dickinson poem, the familiar “This is my letter to the World / That never wrote to Me,” was set in type by Sifuentes, who teaches letterpress classes at Bow & Arrow Press in Adams House. The result is a “metal book,” he said, that can only be read in an accompanying mirror.

The old lenses and spyglasses on display in the exhibit are on loan from the Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments at Harvard University. Sara Schechner ’79, A.M. ’82, Ph.D. ’88, the collection’s David P. Wheatland Curator, was on hand for the opening, ready to give a stand-up lesson on the old instruments.

“I like my collaborations with other parts of Harvard,” she said of the first-time project on Dickinson. “It was fun to mix with poetry here.”

Schechner, a historian of science, said the vintage lenses were variously meant to gather in, magnify, and project light. Pointing to one, she said, “it takes a lot of light and puts it in a small place,” acknowledging the apt analog to a great poem.

One of the spyglasses belonged to the late Frances W. Wright, who taught astronomy and celestial navigation at Harvard from 1928 to 1971. Dickinson, a close observer who wrote 200 poems that touch on science, probably would have liked the idea of lenses and scopes being turned on her elusive work — so little spied in her own time.

But unlike science, Dickinson’s poems hold back from an attempt at full revelation. Schechner observed that, as with telescopes so it is with poems: “One can get close — but only so close.”

Scholars say her poems use science to amplify the wonder of nature, not to define its reductive essence. To Dickinson, that essence remained ineffable. “This World,” she wrote in one poem, “is not Conclusion.”

The technical intercessions in “Fugitive Sparrows” are intended to interrupt “our normal ways of approaching and reading a poem,” said Sifuentes. The telescopes bring “you close, but you still have to focus and work and strive to actually read.”

He focused and worked and strove on his own to complete the exhibit’s most ambitious rendering of Dickinson into visual art. It’s a 90-inch by 45-inch drawing made entirely from her 1,775 poems — all 160,000 words and 450,000 letters, with each line handwritten separate and apart.

The project, said Sifuentes, cost him four months of effort — three or four hours a day, seven days of every week.

“It became an impressionistic process,” he said, and one energetic enough to use up 73 pigment pens. The completed work resembles — well — a flock of sparrows. The result, Sifuentes wrote on an exhibit card, has a way of “turning sight into a metaphor for reading.”

The lines in the drawing “behave the way her poetry does,” he also wrote of Dickinson, “tangential, acoustic, dwelling in a long and layered conversation. They take the form of hubbub on the eye.”

Starting April 14, the Dickinson exhibit will get a kind of second life, with lines from her poems printed on the colorful plastic chairs that are scattered over Harvard Yard in good weather as part of the University’s “common spaces” initiative.

“You can shuffle her lines around, and still create a poem,” said Sifuentes, who plans to record the rearranged chairs’ found poems every day.

In the preface to an 1890 volume of Dickinson’s work, published posthumously, Higginson wrote that “she habitually concealed her mind, like her person, from all but a very few friends.”

“Fugitive Sparrows,” funded with support from Lori Gross, associate provost for arts and culture, may help to reveal what Dickinson has concealed, and may make the shy poet a few more friends. Besides, the secret of Dickinson’s genius is well out, impossible to conceal again.

Making that point, Davis quoted another of the poet’s incisive lines: “No bird resumes its egg.”

The Poetry Room is open during Lamont Library hours, but is only staffed Monday through Friday, 9 a.m.-5 p.m.

One of the nation’s leading educational authorities reiterated Tuesday (April 6) her often-reported warning that American public schools are in peril — perhaps more than ever.

What was unusual, however, about Diane Ravitch’s presentation at the Askwith Forum of the Harvard Graduate School of Education was her approach: What she once championed to save the system is now, she contends, leading to its demise.

“The passion for test-based accountability has turned into a monstrous obsession with data that threatens the quality of education,” said Ravitch, an education historian who served in the first Bush administration’s Education Department.

“I’m not actually opposed to testing. I believe testing can be very valuable when testing is used for informational and diagnostic purposes,” she said. “What I am opposed to is misuse of testing for accountability purposes.”

She singled out “the naïve belief that test scores are infallible and certain.” Rather, “They should be used with caution.”

“I’m not opposed to choice [in selecting to attend a charter school]. I think everyone should have choices. But I oppose choice when it is used — as it has been in some places — as a conscious strategy to undermine public education.”

Once a vocal proponent of standardized testing and charter schools, Ravitch often clashed with progressives. But in her 20th book, “The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education,” she decried the mandates of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB); indeed, she suggested that an alternative book title could be “Lies Our Policymakers Tell Us About School Reform.”

Ravitch insisted she has not “done a 180” degree turn in her thinking. Rather, she said, she always has pushed for all children to have a quality education. “I’ve long been a critic of the rising tide of mediocrity,” she said. “I hoped, perhaps foolishly, that accountability and choice would help us reach [those ends]. And I think now I was wrong.”

Schools and teachers are being punished for failing to reach impossible standards, so schools are “gaming” test results to improve scores, she said. Using 1998 to 2009 data that examines the skills of children who grew up under the No Child strictures, “there is not one iota of improvement,” she said.

She compared using test scores to evaluate schools to judging a baseball player by a single at-bat, saying scores should only be only one element in evaluating a school. “Even Babe Ruth struck out more than he homered,” she said.

Charter schools, once heralded as an alternative to regular public schools, do not get better results, she said. Moreover, they represent only 1.5 million out of 50 million public school students. The focus should be on the majority, she said.

Ravitch slammed President Barack Obama for supporting punitive action against schools that fall short of standards. That, she said, encourages schools to recruit better students to raise scores, rather than help those most in need. She saved her harshest critiques for Congress, accusing lawmakers of knowingly passing impossible and unproven standards. “It is unethical for Congress to mandate remedies that are impossible to achieve,” she said.

Ravitch’s new approach has plenty of skeptics and critics; two of them participated in Tuesday’s forum.

Martin West, assistant professor of education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, hammered both Ravitch’s research and her conclusions, accusing her of a lawyerlike habit of choosing only those facts that support her case and ignoring those that don’t. Ravitch’s book, he said, presents “no studies showing choice destroys education.”

Moreover, Ravitch “ignores the failings of the system that [reforms] were intended to improve,” West said.

Daniel Koretz, Henry Lee Shattuck Professor of Education, addressed Ravitch by wondering, in effect, where she was when the act was being formulated.

“We didn’t have to wait for NCLB [to pass] to know these policies are impossible,” he said.

Still, he agreed with Ravitch that education policymakers “charge along blissfully, unaware of evidence.”