Author: Harvard Gazette Online

“Wow, he’s a rock star,” said an audience member at the Radcliffe Gymnasium as she watched the afternoon’s speaker pose for photos and sign autographs for a steady stream of admirers.

But this pop icon in a dark blue blazer and sensible shoes wasn’t a singing sensation, but an economist.

Using data and statistics, Steven Levitt, professor of economics at the University of Chicago, makes a habit of “bringing economics into our lives.” Prostitutes, cheating teachers, real estate agents, sumo wrestlers, and even drug dealers are part of his domain (as are the names that people give their children). In 2005 Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner of The New York Times authored the best-seller “Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything.”

“I took on a bunch of topics … that nobody else wanted to study, and I think it’s exactly the reason … I’ve been able to succeed,” Levitt told the crowd in his remarks Monday (March 22). “If I tried to take the real topics, the hard questions that real economists are doing, I don’t think I would have had any success whatsoever.”

Sometimes his topics prove unpopular. In one of his most controversial papers, which became part of the 2005 book, Levitt examined the links between abortion and crime. He argued that the legalization of abortion in the 1970s corresponded with a drop in the crime rate about 20 years later, since those “unwanted” children — who Levitt said would have been more likely to grow up under difficult circumstances and subsequently would have been more likely to become criminals — hadn’t been born.

His latest book, “SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes, and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance,” has been widely criticized for its claims about climate science.  During his talk, the author addressed critics who have challenged the book’s chapter on global warming, noting that he and co-author Dubner took on the topic in a “peculiar way.”

“We weren’t writing about climate science,” said Levitt. “We were writing about the economics of fighting global warming.”

The economist was at Harvard to take part in the 2009-10 Dean’s Lecture Series at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.  The lectures are part of the institute’s Academic Engagement Programs (AEP), which sponsor projects with Harvard faculty, Radcliffe Institute fellows, and Harvard students in scholarly and research endeavors. The AEP also sponsors lectures, conferences, and symposia.

The 1989 Harvard graduate said he knew early on that economics was his calling. Leaving an introductory class on the topic that had his friends perplexed, he remembered being amazed that they taught “such easy things at Harvard.”

“For me [the class] was just mostly putting names on the things … I had always thought. I had always, I guess, thought like an economist, I just didn’t know it.”

“Sometimes you’ve just got to go with the only thing you are good at,” Levitt continued, describing how he was nicknamed “the rational man” by a classmate, and he created an algorithm to assign his 12 Harvard roommates to three rooms. He even used his economic prowess at the racetrack while in college, employing computer data to figure out which horses were more likely to win.

But despite his aptitude for economics, the alumnus admitted he was surprised that he gravitated toward academia. He was even more surprised when he was admitted to a Ph.D. program in economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

“It’s kind of crazy that they ever let me in,” he said, recalling his poor grades in math.

But Levitt has since won numerous awards, including the 2003 John Bates Clark Medal, which recognizes leading economists under age 40. In 2006 he was named to Time magazine’s list of “100 People Who Shape Our World.” His advice has even been solicited by the Central Intelligence Agency.

During his talk, he outlined several of his research projects, including work done with the help of an intrepid young researcher who infiltrated a drug-dealing gang in Chicago. Together they discovered that the gang’s organizational chart resembled that of McDonald’s, with a group of leaders called the “board of directors” and hundreds of “branches” or “franchises.”

“They very self-consciously were styling themselves after corporate America.”

Levitt also offered the crowd his perspective on a free-market economy.

“I think that anybody who wants to solve the world’s problems is going to have to do it through capitalism with some kind of twist,” he said, adding, “There are certain things governments are outstanding at doing, but running economies has just proven not to be one of them.”

Friends and members of the Harvard community gathered in Lamont Library to mark the 10th anniversary of the Weissman Preservation Center. The center specializes in the treatment of rare and unique books, manuscripts, maps, drawings, music scores, photographs, and other objects held in repositories across the Harvard University Library system.

“It is in the Weissman Center,” said Robert Darnton, Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor and director of the University Library, “that Harvard cares for its greatest treasures. In the Weissman Center, we seem to accomplish miracles every day. And our ability to do so is firmly rooted in the support and commitment of Paul and Harriet Weissman.”

On March 20, 2000, the center was named in honor of Paul M. Weissman ’52 and Harriet L. Weissman for their visionary support of library preservation at Harvard.

In 10 years, the Weissman Center — with its distinct conservation programs for books, paper, and photographs — has earned recognition as a national and international leader in library preservation.

The center focuses on the research needs of individual faculty and students; classroom use, digitization, exhibitions, and loans to other institutions; and identification by curators of materials at great risk. The center treated more than 19,000 items in the 2008-09 academic year.

True to the center’s goals and the Weissmans’ vision, the anniversary observance, held on Thursday (March 18), balanced substance with celebration.

In a panel presentation, Helen Vendler, A. Kingsley Porter University Professor in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, discussed Harvard’s world-renowned Keats manuscripts and underscored their value in teaching. In counterpoint, Leslie Morris, curator of modern books and manuscripts in Houghton Library, and Debora Mayer, Helen H. Glaser Conservator in the Weissman Preservation Center, delineated the role of preservation in teaching with rare manuscript materials.

Robin Kelsey, Shirley Carter Burden Professor of Photography and director of graduate studies in the History of Art and Architecture Department, focused on 18,000 photographic records of the 19th century French physician Jean Martin Charcot. Kelsey’s impassioned views of a vital but lesser-known collection at the Countway Library of Medicine were expanded on by Kathryn Hammond Baker, deputy director of Countway’s Center for the History of Medicine, and Brenda Bernier, the Paul M. and Harriet L. Weissman Senior Photograph Conservator.

“The library is the heart of this institution,” Paul Weissman once said, “and a vital part of all the Harvard libraries is the Preservation Center, which ensures that the University’s great collections remain forever safeguarded for students and scholars.”

The Weissmans’ generosity is palpable across the University. Undergraduates benefit from the Weissman International Internships and the Weissman Family Scholarships. The Weissmans have provided critical support for academic programs in the Villa I Tatti and the Harvard Graduate School of Education, for the Harvard College Fund, and for Harvard’s golf and hockey programs.

Harvard University today launched its own content on iTunes U, a dedicated area within iTunes that allows students, faculty, alumni, and visitors to tap into the University’s wealth of public lectures and educational materials on video and audio.

“At Harvard, we’re committed to providing the highest-caliber digital experience to showcase our excellence in teaching and research. iTunes U provides a robust way to help us meet this standard,” said Perry Hewitt, Harvard’s director of digital communications and communications services. “Our audiences have a strong interest in accessing all that Harvard has to offer online. Making Harvard University available on iTunes U is a logical step toward expanding our outreach.”

The University’s content features the sights and sounds of Harvard, including educational material such as Professor Michael Sandel’s renowned “Justice” course, which is an introduction to moral and political philosophy, and is one of the most popular courses at Harvard. Visitors also will be able to learn about the science of the brain’s “black box,” the secrets of aging, and other health-related topics from Harvard Medical School’s “labcasts,” and will have the opportunity to view public lectures by many of the University’s distinguished professors and guests.

iTunes U is the latest effort to make the University’s world-class learning more accessible through strategic relationships with organizations that provide expertise in content delivery.

Harvard on iTunes U distributes free, downloadable material, created by a wide range of Harvard’s Schools and professors. Harvard offers users more options to stay connected to their interests at the University, while enhancing opportunities for learning beyond the classroom. iTunes U offers free educational content, including lectures, lab demonstrations, and campus tours, all available for download in the same way that individuals access music and movies using iTunes.

Launching on iTunes U is part of an overall digital-dissemination strategy for the University, which is committed to providing access to innovative content platforms and devices.

To access Harvard on iTunes U, start at http://itunes.harvard.edu/.

The Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University has named the Chicago Tribune this year’s winner of the Taylor Family Award for Fairness in Newspapers for its evenhanded and thorough investigation of improper influence peddling in the admissions process at the University of Illinois in “Clout Goes to College.”

The Taylor Award and a $10,000 prize, established to encourage fairness in news coverage by America’s daily newspapers, will be presented at a ceremony on April 8 at the Nieman Foundation in Cambridge, Mass.

In “Clout Goes to College,” the Chicago Tribune revealed that lawmakers and university trustees used their sway to help subpar applicants gain admission to the University of Illinois, at times over the objections of admissions officers. The paper exposed secret admissions clout lists and a corrupt admissions process and in doing so, paved the way for reforms including a new admissions system, a new university president and chancellor, and six new members of the university’s board of trustees.

Over the course of five months, the paper published about 90 stories and developed two online databases that showed readers what role their local high schools and legislators played in the scandal. Reporters Robert Becker, Jodi Cohen, Tara Malone, and Stacy St. Clair worked with editor Tracy Van Moorlehem and graphic artist Keith Claxton to produce the series.

Taylor Award judge Ames Alexander commented, “Fairness was both the means and the end of this investigation. The newspaper let University of Illinois officials speak for themselves at length, publishing e-mails that spoke volumes about the tainted admissions process. But while the Tribune pounded the power brokers and university officials who had corrupted the admissions system, it sought to protect ‘clouted’ students who weren’t demonstrably culpable. The staff’s dogged and conscientious efforts produced a remarkable result: An unjust student selection process was replaced with one based on merit.”

Another judge, Monica Campbell, said, “The idea that political favoritism exists in the university admissions process is not new. But in a nuanced and comprehensive way, this series shows how a university system can allow for such corruption and drives that angle, rather than merely calling out the culprits, in a way that usefully shows how power and undue pressures wind their way through a university’s bureaucracy. Taken together, with informative graphics, reproduced e-mails and sidebars, the series offers a precise case study on deal-making at universities — not just at the University of Illinois, but what may likely exist at other institutions — and fairly portrays the culture that allows such problems to exist.”

David Fanning, executive producer of “Frontline,” will be recognized with this year’s Goldsmith Career Award for his distinguished broadcast journalism career by the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy today (March 23) at the Harvard Kennedy School. He will receive the award at 6 p.m. in the John F. Kennedy Jr. Forum.

Fanning began his filmmaking career as a young journalist in South Africa. He came to the United States in 1973 and began producing and directing documentaries for KOCE, a public television station in California. In 1977, he came to WGBH Boston to start the international documentary series “World.”

In 1982, Fanning developed “Frontline.” Its signature has been to combine good reporting with good filmmaking. In 2010, after 27 seasons and more than 530 films, “Frontline” is currently America’s longest-running investigative documentary series on television and has won every major award for broadcast journalism.

In 2001, Fanning’s determination to bring more foreign stories to American audiences led to the creation of “Frontline/World,” a television magazine-style series of programs designed to encourage a new, younger generation of producers and reporters. The emphasis has been on bringing a largely unreported world to viewers through a series of journeys and encounters. Fanning has said that he sees it as a prototype for the future, and a place to build a community of enterprising journalists.

With Fanning’s encouragement, one the singular achievements of “Frontline” has been its embrace of the Internet. Starting in 1995, the show put interviews, documents, and additional editorial materials on the Web, and the series created some of the first deep-content editorial Web sites in history. “Frontline” made its journalism transparent and had a major influence on the nature and content of the show’s broadcast journalism. In 2010, more than 85 hours of full-length documentaries are streamed on the series Web site, which receives 55 million page views annually.

To view the live Webcast of the awards ceremony, visit http://iopforum.harvard.edu:8080/ramgen/encoder/live.

Although for nearly 60 years people have been urged to decrease their consumption of saturated fats to prevent heart disease, there has been surprisingly little scientific evidence that doing so actually decreases the risk of coronary heart disease events. But a new study by researchers at Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) provides the first conclusive evidence from randomized clinical trials that people who replace saturated fat in their diet with polyunsaturated fat reduce their risk of coronary heart disease by 19 percent, compared with control groups of people who do not.

By systematically reviewing a large group of randomized clinical trials and conducting a pooled meta-analysis of these studies, the HSPH team found that increasing the intake of polyunsaturated fats as a replacement for saturated fats could significantly reduce the rate of heart attacks and cardiac deaths in the population. The study appears in the March 23 issue of the open-access journal PLoS Medicine.

Over the past several decades, the food industry has reduced the amount of saturated fat in many products, and the public has reduced the amount of saturated fat in its food consumption. However, there has been a wide variation in the types of nutrients that have replaced this saturated fat. For example, in many products saturated fats were replaced with trans fats, which have since been determined to be detrimental. And in the overall American diet, saturated fat was generally replaced with increased consumption of refined carbohydrates and grains.

“The specific replacement nutrient for saturated fat may be very important,” said lead author Dariush Mozaffarian, assistant professor in the Department of Epidemiology at HSPH and the Department of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. “Our findings suggest that polyunsaturated fats would be a preferred replacement for saturated fats for better heart health.”

Results from prior individual randomized controlled trials of saturated fat reduction and heart disease events were mixed, with most showing no significant effects. Other trials focused only on blood cholesterol levels, which are an indirect marker of risk. Large observational studies also generally have shown no relationship between saturated fat consumption and risk of heart disease events. For example, earlier this month, researchers from HSPH and Children’s Hospital Oakland Research Institute performed a pooled meta-analysis of prior observational studies and found no evidence that overall consumption of saturated fat was related to risk of coronary heart disease or stroke events. (To access the abstract.)

Some of these mixed findings may relate to the absence of prior focus on the specific replacement nutrient for saturated fat. In other words, was saturated fat replaced primarily with carbohydrates, monounsaturated fats such as in olive oil, or polyunsaturated fats such as in most vegetable oils?

Mozaffarian and his HSPH colleagues Renata Micha and Sarah Wallace performed a systematic review and meta-analysis of all randomized controlled trials through June 2009 in which participants specifically increased their polyunsaturated fat consumption as a replacement for saturated fat, and in which coronary heart disease events were documented. Eight trials met the inclusion criteria, totaling 13,614 participants with 1,042 coronary heart disease events.

The meta-analysis of the trials showed that increasing polyunsaturated fat consumption as a replacement for saturated fat reduced the risk of coronary heart disease events by 19 percent. For every 5 percent increase (measured as total energy) in polyunsaturated fat consumption, coronary heart disease risk was reduced by 10 percent. This is now just the second dietary intervention — consuming long-chain omega-3 fatty acids is the first — to show a reduction in coronary heart disease events in randomized controlled trials.

Currently, the Institute of Medicine guidelines recommend that a range of 5 to 10 percent in energy consumption come from polyunsaturated fats. In addition, some scientists and organizations have recently suggested that consumption of polyunsaturated fats (largely omega-6 fatty acids) should actually be reduced, due to theoretical concerns that such consumption could increase coronary heart disease risk.

The results from this study suggest that polyunsaturated fats from vegetable oils may be an optimal replacement for saturated fats, an important finding for dietary guidelines and for when food manufacturers and restaurants are making decisions on how to reduce saturated fat in their products. The findings also suggest that an upper limit of 10 percent of energy consumption from polyunsaturated fats may be too low, as the participants in these trials who reduced their risk were consuming about 15 percent of their energy from polyunsaturated fats.

Support for this study was provided by the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, the National Institutes of Health, and a Searle Scholar Award from the Searle Funds at the Chicago Community Trust.

The study is publicly available on the PLoS Medicine Web site.

In his last collegiate match, Crimson wrestler J.P. O’Connor ’10 capped off a dominant season and career at Harvard by taking the 157-pound national title at the NCAA Championships in Omaha, Neb., on Saturday (March 20).

The No. 1 seed, O’Connor wrestled his way into the final against Cal Poly’s (California Polytechnic State University) Chase Pami. Despite falling behind 2-0, the Crimson grappler dug deep, and came back against his seventh-seeded opponent to take the match and the title, ending his season a perfect 35-0.

After being named an All-American as a freshman and sophomore, his junior season came to a disappointing end with an early exit in the NCAA Championships. But that was last year.

“It’s always a battle and struggle,” said O’Connor in a press conference after the match. “You always have those negative thoughts, but this year I did a good job of keeping those thoughts out of my head. Having my coaches support me and how [hard] I worked, I felt no one could stop me.”

O’Connor becomes only the second Crimson wrestler to be named All-American three times, joining Jesse Jantzen ’04 (2002-04), Harvard’s most recent national champion.

“I was just trying to follow in the footsteps of former Harvard national champions, John Harkness and Jesse Jantzen, while creating my own path,” he said. “I looked up to Jesse; as great of a wrestler as he is, he is even a better person. I consider it to be an honor to be mentioned in the same sentence with him.”

Starting the season ranked in the top five nationally at 157 pounds, O’Connor plowed through his competition, outscoring his opponents 51-10 overall to finish with 132 career wins — tying Jantzen for the most in program history. And with his 35-0 mark, the senior achieved something even Jantzen couldn’t do — complete a season undefeated.

“I just had the fire and determination to win it this year. I truly believed that I could win it during my sophomore and junior years, but it just didn’t turn out that way, which was disappointing. I tried to turn it into a positive, and thought about it every day,” said O’Connor.

It has been a tremendous career of firsts for the senior out of Oxford, N.Y. In addition to being Harvard’s first undefeated national champion, he also became Harvard’s first freshman All-American in 2007, and is the first grappler to win multiple Ivy Wrestler of the Year honors (2008, 2010). And there is being first all-time in wins. Not a bad career indeed.

Although the grappler is hanging up his Harvard singlet for good, the human evolutionary biology major with medical school ambitions may not be done on the mat just yet. After achieving perfection in college wrestling, O’Connor has his eyes set on international wrestling.

“I would love to continue my wrestling career,” O’Connor said. “It’s always been a dream of mine, and I can’t think of anything better to represent the United States.”

With his résumé, he can do it. Med school can wait.

Harvard University will literally sow new seeds for learning with the launch next month of its first raised-bed garden, located at 27 Holyoke Place in Cambridge.

The 560-square-foot growing space, to be created and maintained by Harvard College students and other members of the Harvard community, will provide experiential education in sustainable, urban agriculture and food for students, faculty, and the community.

The garden initiative will kick off today (March 22) with a naming contest. Members of the Harvard community and the public are encouraged to submit suggested names for the space by midnight Thursday (March 25). (Visit www.green.harvard.edu for details.) A panel from the garden planning committee will select the winning entry.

The space is designed to be an interdisciplinary educational and social experience.

“Sustainable, edible gardens have become important areas of learning and collaboration at colleges and universities throughout the country,” said Kathleen Frith, assistant director of the Center for Health and the Global Environment at Harvard Medical School and acting director of this project. “Several members of our community have been advocating for a garden, and I’m thrilled to see it becoming a reality, already bringing together staff, students, and faculty from across the University.”

The garden will be supervised by the Center for Health and the Global Environment, in collaboration with a new student association called the Harvard College Garden Project, along with the Office for Sustainability, the Food Literacy Project (a division of Harvard University Hospitality and Dining Services), the University Planning Office, Landscape Services, and the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

“We are excited to be the first generation of Harvard students to grow food on campus,” said Louisa Denison ’11, one of the student leaders of the Garden Project. “This project will allow us to be a part of a growing sustainable food movement in a tangible and concrete way.”

Programming will begin on April 17, when volunteers will fill in 25 new raised beds.  With Harvard undergraduates as primary caretakers, the garden will be sustainably and organically managed, drawing from strategies developed and implemented elsewhere on campus, including using composting rather than conventional fertilizers, crop rotation, and minimal water use.

Food raised from the garden will be featured in dishes during on-site tastings, in demonstrations, on undergraduate dining hall menus, and in campus food venues. Food will also be sold at the Food Literacy Project’s Farmer’s Market at Harvard, and donated to The Greater Boston Food Bank, with which Harvard has a dedicated relationship.

“How we grow our food is critical to our own health, the health of our communities, and the health of the environment,” said Eric Chivian, director of the Center for Health and the Global Environment and assistant professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, who is also affiliated with Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. “The garden provides faculty and students with a hands-on teaching and research opportunity that will help them better understand our dependence on nature.”

Students from the Harvard Graduate School of Design’s Landscape Architecture and Technology Department developed the garden’s design, working with a planning committee of staff, students, and faculty. Initial plans are modest, with an eye toward growth as the space becomes a more vital part of the Harvard experience. At the outset, the garden will employ two student summer interns to manage daily upkeep and to develop programming, including inviting faculty to use the garden in their coursework, hosting community events, and having regular volunteer days.

“Creating a student community garden seems at first glance to be a simple undertaking,” said Mike Lichten, FAS associate dean for physical resources and planning. “In fact, it is quite complex in an urban university setting, involving a number of people and organizations across the University. It has been exciting and gratifying to see the student, academic, and administrative groups bring their expertise and enthusiasm together to create a garden that will be educational and enjoyable for everyone. I’m pleased that the Faculty of Arts and Sciences can help support the physical creation of this garden, so that our students can benefit.”

“This garden visibly demonstrates Harvard’s commitment to sustainability, and it is a prominent symbol of our campus’ efforts,” said Heather Henriksen, director of the Office for Sustainability. “It also showcases how students working with staff and faculty can come together to create campus learning opportunities that benefit our community and identify larger solutions.”

For more information about the garden, the naming contest, or volunteer opportunities, visit the Web site.

Professor Regina Herzlinger, the Nancy R. McPherson Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, discusses health care and President Obama’s health care reform in a podcast interview from March 18.

SHANGHAI, China — The Chinese characters framed at the entrance of the new Harvard Center Shanghai capture the concept of “entrepreneurship imbued with the soul of the noble man.”  The intricate calligraphy, created by Qianshen Bai to mark the center’s opening, quotes a Confucian monk who is credited with leading education reforms early in the Ming Dynasty, urging a balance of “intellectual inquiry” and “practical action.”

Intellectual inquiry and practical action were both on rich display at “Harvard and China: A Research Symposium,” a series of lectures, panels, and break-out sessions held to mark the official opening of the Harvard Center Shanghai on March 18. The symposium attracted faculty and administrators from across Harvard, and explored multiple dimensions of China past and present, from its emerging rural health care system to crisis management to “architecture and urbanism” in Shanghai and beyond. Nearly 300 attendees from the Harvard community, including many alumni living and working in the region, attended the conference, as did more than a dozen Chinese dignitaries and several journalists.

The Harvard Center Shanghai, which occupies an entire floor of one of the newly constructed skyscrapers in the city’s Pudong section, is the first such presentation and research space of its kind outside of Boston and Cambridge, and represents an important next stage of the University’s long engagement in Asia. The center is intended to serve as a locus of research and teaching activity, and while its creation has been spearheaded by the Harvard Business School (HBS) and the Harvard China Fund, it is specifically intended as a resource for Harvard faculty, students, and alumni across all of Harvard’s Schools.

In her remarks at the celebratory dinner following the symposium, President Drew Faust called the center the product of remarkable collaboration, and an expression of Harvard’s commitment to what she called the “free trade of ideas. Increasingly,” she said, “we are in a world of universities without borders, and this new center is a case in point. Universities exchange faculty and students as never before and engage in an increasingly porous world of international problem solving and collaboration. Higher education is developing a global meritocracy.”

For Harvard Business School, the new venue will serve multiple purposes, most importantly, enabling it to explore a range of potential activities in support of its research and teaching programs. The Harvard Center Shanghai will operate under the direction of the HBS Global Initiative, which also oversees international research centers in Latin America, Japan, India, and Europe. Each center has an executive director who leads a team of case writers, all of whom are fluent in the language of the host country and familiar with its customs, companies, universities, and governments.

“We are very pleased to be opening this new facility in greater China,” said Dean Jay Light. “Harvard Business School has had a longstanding interest in and commitment to the region. Today, increasing numbers of HBS faculty list China among their top areas of geographical interest. The center will add significantly to our research and our understanding of the world’s fastest-growing economy. We look forward to broadening our partnerships in China and to working with and learning from Chinese businesspeople, government officials, and many others in the years ahead.”

Professor William Kirby, the chairman of the Harvard China Fund who delivered the symposium’s opening plenary, noted: “Our expanded presence in China brings us closer to our thousands of alumni, friends, and partners in the region. Through the resources of the Harvard China Fund, Harvard University will invest in research and teaching partnerships in China, and we will invest in our students: Harvard students who are preparing for a lifetime engagement with China, and Chinese students coming to all the Schools of Harvard. Strengthening our partnerships and enriching the lives of our students is now facilitated by this great new center in Shanghai. For Harvard, as an international university, engagement with and in China is a central and exciting part of our future.”

At a luncheon lecture given by Professor Michael Sandel on “The Moral Limits of Markets,” Mark Schwartz ’76, M.B.A. ’78, M.P.P. ’79, reflected on Harvard’s increasing reach into — and impact on — the world beyond Cambridge and Boston.  “I was in South Africa last week, helping build hospitals there with Harvard Medical School and Mass General,” he said.  “What we are doing in South Africa in medicine is truly transformative. Having been with Harvard last week in South Africa, and learning more about what they are doing here in China today, I have never been prouder to be associated with Harvard. It is simply amazing.”

For three Harvard wrestlers, spring break means one thing: Omaha, Neb.

Traveling to the heartland of America, Louis Caputo ’10, J.P. O’Connor ’10, and Steven Keith ’13 are competing at this year’s NCAA Wrestling Championships, with aspirations of returning to Cambridge as All-Americans and national champions in each of their weight classes.

Mostly, it was a forgettable season for the Harvard wrestling team this year. Suffering from critical injuries and a lack of depth, the team finished the season with a 2-14-1 (0-5 Ivy League) record and was winless in the Ivy League.

But despite losing 11 straight to end the season, Caputo, O’Connor, and Keith did their part to help the team, and earned their way to nationals in the process.

“They basically carried us. When we got injured a little bit, these guys kept their focus,” said Harvard head coach Jay Weiss, who is in his 16th season at Harvard. “It was a difficult year for the guys. But I think everyone’s pretty fired up right now, which is good because hopefully it’s going to carry on to spring and summer of next year.”

For the two-time All-American seniors, it’s their fourth trip to the NCAAs, and their final run. There are high expectations for the co-captains, particularly with O’Connor coming into the tournament as the No. 1 seed and Caputo the eight-seed. O’Connor finished the regular season undefeated, 30-0, while Caputo completed the year 22-3.

Starting Thursday (March 18) morning, O’Connor opened the tournament with an impressive 15-2 first-round win, and followed that up with an 8-1 win against his second-round opponent to earn a spot in the quarterfinals.

Caputo, who won his first matchup, 5-2, but dropped his second by the same score, will continue to wrestle for a third-place finish today, aiming for a shot at All-American status. The top eight wrestlers in each weight class are crowned All-Americans.

The 125-pound grappler Keith, who entered the tournament unseeded two weeks after placing third in the EIWA Championships, is just the 10th Harvard wrestler under Weiss to qualify for the national championships as a freshman. Facing tough competition in his first two tournament matches, the newcomer lost both to end an impressive rookie season. Despite the losses, it is clear that with the departure of the two senior co-captains, Keith represents Harvard wrestling of the future.

“Steven’s inspiring,” said Caputo. “He has a fire and tenacity that’s not in most freshmen. I look forward to following him in years to come, and I couldn’t be more thrilled for him.”

“I’ve definitely learned a lot from Steven, watching the way he competes, watching the way he lives his life, and he’s just doing everything right all the time, and it pushes me to be a better captain, a better person, a better wrestler,” said O’Connor.

Although familiar with success — Keith was a Junior National and two-time state champion in high school — the rookie turned heads this season with a 20-11 record, and exceeded all expectations, including his own.

“Coming into the season, I talked with my parents about what I should expect for the upcoming year, and we agreed that maybe just over a .500 season with a good shot of placing somewhere in the EIWAs” was the goal, said Keith. The Shoreham, N.Y., native made a stunning run in the EIWA tournament, knocking off the No. 3 and No. 2 seeds to claim third place and an NCAA Championships berth.

And for O’Connor and Caputo, no matter how they finish, they will go down as two of the greatest wrestlers Harvard has ever seen. They will both finish in the top three for career wins and have a chance at becoming three-time All-Americans, which has only been done once at Harvard, by Jesse Jantzen ’04, 2002-04.

“I think a coach can coach somebody like them once every 10 to 15 years. I have two of them at the same time,” said Weiss. “They are phenomenal people, and I can honestly say they’re two of my really good friends. I just want the best for them. They’ve put their time in, they’ve raised the bar of the program.”

“I love the sport … I wanted to take that one more opportunity to compete, to do the sport I love, and to represent Harvard,” said Caputo, who finished undefeated in Ivy League competition this season. “My time here has been fantastic, and I love competing for Harvard.”

“This year I have a confidence I really don’t think I’ve had in the past,” said O’Connor. “I developed a motto for this season with one of my coaches: Just no regrets. …  This year has been a year of recognizing that, and trying to take that love for the sport and the passion, and allow myself to wrestle to my potential and get it done, bringing a national title back to Cambridge.”

Closing in on the national title, the No. 1-seeded O’Connor is already the first Crimson athlete to be named Ivy Wrestler of the Year twice (2008, 2010), and he would be the first ever at Harvard to finish an entire season undefeated.

“J.P. was a natural leader coming in as a freshman,” said Caputo. “He was the most successful freshman in Harvard history, and he’s been an unbelievable inspiration in the wrestling room every day. … He has a competitive drive that’s unparalleled.

“I’ve been on a lot of teams, and there’s been no one quite like J.P. as far as drive and mental toughness. I couldn’t have been happier for him this season. He’s getting everything he deserves.”

Although all three are clearly gifted wrestlers, Weiss and his coaching staff have been significant factors in their success.

In his time at Harvard, Weiss has coached 50 NCAA qualifiers, 15 EIWA champions, 15 All-Americans, an NCAA champion, and an NCAA Tournament Most Outstanding Wrestler. That’s certainly no accident.

“From the day I got here, coach Weiss was like a father figure to me. I respect him, care about him, and love him like I do my own parents. That’s how much he means to me,” said O’Connor. “A big thing with coach is development of character and development of the person, and I think that’s something that I got here that I definitely wouldn’t have gotten anywhere else in the country.”

And so for the seniors, the end of the tournament marks the conclusion of two unforgettable careers at Harvard. For the freshman, it’s just the beginning. And when the dust settles, it won’t be the Crimson’s two wins that will be the story of the 2009-10 season, but the three Harvard wrestlers who spent their spring break in Omaha representing Harvard.

WHISTLER, British Columbia — No one knew if Caitlin Sarubbi would live through her first night.

Twenty years later, she’s on leave from her freshman year at Harvard to race on the U.S. Ski Team at the 2010 Paralympics.

Born with a very rare disease, no eyelids and several other facial deformities, Sarubbi’s journey to the Winter Games involves 57 reconstructive surgeries…

Read more here

Harvard’s relationship with Japan dates to the 19th century, to a few years after the island nation opened its doors to the West, and the ties between the two remain strong today. This timeline shows key milestones in that fruitful relationship. As President Drew Faust becomes the eighth Harvard president to visit Japan, faculty members — along with students and alumni — are sending back dispatches about cultural and historical aspects of her trip.

The Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD) has a long history of connections with Japan. The architect Kenzo Tange, a national treasure and Japan’s pre-eminent architect of the modern era, taught at the Design School in the 1970s. The Kenzo Tange professorship was established at the GSD in his honor more than 20 years ago.

Tange’s influence can be seen all over Tokyo. One of his major buildings, Yoyogi Stadium, is a beautiful and dramatic example of collaboration between architecture and engineering. Tange was probably the first “global architect.”

Following in the footsteps of Tange, GSD alumni from Japan have had a remarkable impact internationally. Fumihiko Maki’s buildings, such as his recently completed Media Lab at MIT, are elegant manifestations of an architecture of restraint. They rely on a deep understanding of space and materials.

Yoshio Taniguchi, architect of the most recent addition to New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MOMA), is another celebrated alumnus whose designs are widely admired. The contributions of our alumni, plus the broad appeal and significance of contemporary Japanese architecture, have been the catalysts for many initiatives and programs at the GSD. One of my predecessors, Gerald McCue, should be credited with helping to develop strong ties with Japan, particularly through establishing a number of endowed professorships that were funded by Japanese construction companies.

I have always loved Japan and all things Japanese: the architecture, the urbanism, the people, and the food. I particularly like the films of Yasujiro Ozu and his serene depictions of people and spaces. Recently, a group of us from the University had the chance to visit a number of newly completed projects by Japanese as well as foreign architects in the Omotesando area in Tokyo. These buildings, all of them for the fashion industry, show an amazing design sensibility.

This semester the Japanese architect Shigeru Ban is conducting a design studio at the GSD that focuses on the architecture of disaster relief. Our students have designed and built temporary structures that will be used in Haiti in the areas damaged by the recent earthquake. I am looking forward to our future collaborations with Japan. It promises to be an inspiring journey.

— Mohsen Mostafavi, Alexander and Victoria Wiley Professor of Design, Dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Design

The Harvard Club of Japan is more than 100 years old, and Japan boasts the third-largest alumni body outside the United States, behind the United Kingdom and Canada. My first trip to Japan for Harvard was in the 1960s, and I came again with President Neil Rudenstine in 1998.  Being here to greet alumni in 2010, nearly 50 years after my first visit, was an opportunity to look backward as well as forward.

Earlier tonight President Faust spoke to a packed crowd of 350 alumni at a Harvard Club of Japan dinner held in honor of her first visit to the country, and updated the group on Harvard’s current plans and ambitions, both in her comments and in response to the dozen or so questions she took from the audience.

The dinner committee included Honorary Chair Ben Makihara ’54, former CEO of Mitsubishi Corporation; Carl Kay ’78, club president; Paul Tange ’81, M.A.R. ’85, and his wife Denise Tange; and former club presidents Thierry Porté ’79, M.B.A. ‘82, and Yuichi Katoh ’61, M.B.A. ’70. Diplomats, business leaders, and academics filled the hall, including current U.S. Ambassador John Roos and former U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees Sadako Ogata.

President Faust emphasized the increasingly international nature of Harvard, and answered questions ranging from Harvard’s management strategies responding to changed endowment resources, to the growing importance of the arts and public service in the intellectual and extracurricular lives of our students and faculty, to the importance of teaching students not just to aim high and seek professional success, but also to find time for reflection. A highlight of the evening was Tamako Niva, Radcliffe ’46, offering a birthday toast to Professor Ezra Vogel, a longtime friend of Japan and the author of several books on the region, on the occasion of his 80th birthday.

— Jack Reardon, Executive Director, Harvard Alumni Association

Earlier in the day

The Keio Girls Senior High School is located on the site of a Tokugawa shogun’s residence, and the authentic Japanese gate and stone pagoda evoke memories of the powerful samurai who once ruled here. The samurai are gone, but the young women we met with today exude their own sort of power — a sense of ambition, self-confidence, and assertiveness that stood in stark contrast to many of the female students I encountered when I spent time in Japan 20 years ago.

Seated facing a semicircle of 30 or so students and alumni from the high school, President Faust spoke to the group about her role at the University, about the importance of education, and about her own empowering experiences at an all-girls high school and a women’s college. She told them about the notes and letters she received from girls around the world — as well as their mothers and fathers — when she was named president of Harvard in 2007, and explained that, as a result of that outpouring, she has made it a point to spend time during each international trip visiting a girls’ school and meeting with students. She has visited schools from Johannesburg to Shanghai.

When it came time for questions, they came in a torrent from the girls: “How should Japanese women try to approach balancing work and career?” “How did it feel to break a ‘glass ceiling’?” “How do you plan your day; do you ever procrastinate?” They also came from young alumni of the school now poised to graduate from college: “How can I remain true to myself as I enter a male-dominated workplace?” “How do I leverage my strengths as a woman?” And they came from female professors: “What can we do to reduce the judgment and sense of competition between stay-at-home mothers and those like me who work outside the home?”

I was interested to learn new dimensions about my boss’ own personal and professional path, and amazed to hear the universality of the challenges that women, particularly working mothers, face. At Drew’s request, Professor Susan Pharr, who has done work on gender issues in Japan, gave the students her own advice and perspective. “Choose a partner who is attracted to your strong side,” she told them, “not your weaker side.”

As we began to leave, the young women crowded around Drew and presented notes and letters they had handwritten to her. “It is very impressive to hear that you became president of Harvard University as a woman and makes me feel encouraged,” wrote a student named Ayaka. Another student, Astuko, wrote that “It is a really great opportunity to see you here. Dreams come true … I now know what this really means.”

—  Christine Heenan, Vice President of Harvard Public Affairs and Communications

Midafternoon

A press conference at the National Press Club followed the luncheon at International House, and soon we headed to the prime minister’s office. We met with Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama, who led his Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) to power last August, ending the almost unbroken rule since 1955 of Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party. In so many ways, the Japanese political story echoes the Obama saga in America. An appealing leader comes to power with a promise of change, offering hope in a period of economic distress. In the beginning, there is much public goodwill, and approval ratings are high; then the reality of governing in a deeply troubled economy sets in, and the going gets hard.

In the face of such difficulties, Prime Minister Hatoyama came off as focused and purposeful. As soon as he sat down, he registered his concern about the drop in the number of Japanese students studying abroad, including in the United States. He spoke fondly of his years at Stanford, where he earned a Ph.D. in engineering; they were among the happiest in his life, he told us. No relation is more important to Japan than the country’s ties with the U.S., he said, and cultural and intellectual exchanges are essential: Japan needs global citizens. President Faust told him about the drop in the number of Japanese students (across all faculties) at Harvard over the past decade, from 151 in 1999 to 101 in 2009. The prime minister and President Faust talked about concrete ways to reverse the trend.

The prime minister said several things that meant a lot to me as a scholar in Japanese studies. In the DPJ’s efforts to trim the government budget, some in the DPJ have called for deep cuts in funding levels for Japan Foundation, a government funding agency that is the mother ship when it comes to supporting Japanese studies in the U.S. The prime minister appeared to go out of his way to allay such concerns. When President Faust thanked him for the support through the years from the Japan Foundation for Harvard faculty and graduate students, he volunteered that he wanted to see support for the Japan Foundation maintained.

Prime Minister Hatoyama also seemed genuinely interested in Harvard’s efforts to send its undergraduates abroad. President Faust told him about Harvard’s long-term commitment to giving every undergraduate at some point in their years at Harvard a “significant international experience” and said that Japan has been a prime destination. I was delighted that he not only responded positively but said that he would be willing to meet the Harvard students coming this summer. Hopefully, we can find a way to follow up on his generous offer.

— Susan J. Pharr, Edwin O. Reischauer Professor of Japanese Politics, and Director, Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies, Harvard University

Midday

After some brief downtime following our dawn excursion to Tsukiji fish market, we headed to the Roppongi district of Tokyo for a luncheon honoring President Faust, hosted by the International House of Japan. The event, in a conference room looking out on I-House’s spectacular Japanese garden, gave the president a chance to exchange views with university presidents and other leading educators. For me, I-House was familiar territory. There is hardly a scholar of Japan over the past 50 years who hasn’t stayed in one of its guest rooms or taken part in its seminars at some point. Presiding at the event was I-House chairman Yasushi Akashi, a distinguished diplomat and former U.N. civil servant who is an inspirational figure for young Japanese eager to play an international role. He was a superb moderator, and the session turned out to be one of the intellectual high points of the trip.

The topic was how colleges and universities should go about creating global citizens. After some opening remarks from President Faust, a far-ranging discussion ensued. One issue we’ve heard about throughout the trip got a lot of attention: Why is the number of Japanese students studying abroad declining, when global trends are in the opposite direction? One participant commented that at her institution, even with ample scholarship money available, it is sometimes hard to find takers. Young Japanese are inward-looking and prefer comfortable lives in Japan to venturing overseas, some said. But others saw economic uncertainty as the driver: Students are focused on getting jobs after they graduate, and can’t see the payoff from earning a foreign degree. Small family size could be a factor; parents are reluctant to see an only child study outside Japan. It was gratifying to see so many educators concerned about the problem, even if they did not agree on the causes.

President Faust described Harvard’s own internationalization efforts, from Harvard’s role in earthquake recovery in Haiti to its public health collaboration in Japan with Teikyo University. She also talked about Harvard’s goal of giving every undergraduate a “significant international experience,” i.e., at least eight weeks abroad involving a meaningful cultural encounter. Almost 100 Harvard College students went to Japan last year, she told the leaders, and roughly 25 percent of the undergraduate class now has significant time abroad each year. As another aspect of internationalization, she also spoke of the value of having faculty from abroad; “talent has no national boundaries,” she said.

Several attendees commented on how few four-year, coed universities in Japan have women presidents, and said how much Faust’s appointment as Harvard’s president had meant to them. One president of a women’s college asked President Faust, a Bryn Mawr graduate, how she had seen the relative merits of attending an all-female institution versus a coed school. In the era in which she grew up, President Faust replied, attending a girls’ high school and a women’s college were the right choices for her; at a coed institution, she would have encountered few women in front of the classroom and in leadership positions.

— Susan J. Pharr

I’ve been in Japan since last June wrestling with one of the most essential aspects of human existence — language and communication. This is an overly grand-sounding statement but you don’t realize how truly critical and fundamental human communication is until you put yourself in a setting where you cannot simply freely express yourself. In the short term it is a frustrating process, but in the long term the reward of a whole new language to express oneself in is invaluable.

At the Kyoto Consortium for Japanese Studies, most students are not here for such an extreme language experience as much as they are for a new cultural experience, but my goal is distinctly to have a lifestyle that incorporates the use of both fluent Japanese and English. Thanks to KCJS’s language education, which is the very best I have ever experienced, I am growing closer and closer to that.

In addition, the setting allows for plenty of opportunity to interact with the vast student population of Kyoto, especially the students of Doshisha and Kyoto University, considered two of the top universities in Japan. I’ve become close friends with several of these students and from them have heard many thought-provoking viewpoints quite different from my own. This has vastly expanded my worldly views and more than anything taught me about what it means to be both a Harvard representative and an American university student.

— James Noyes, Class of 2011, Degree Candidate in East Asian Studies, Harvard College

Thanks to the generous support of the Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies, before coming to Kyoto this spring to study, I had the chance to live in Yokohama and Tokyo the summers after both my freshman and sophomore years. Because of these experiences, I foolishly thought that living in Kyoto would be a piece of cake. However, Kyoto, Japan’s ancient capital, is a world apart from the bustling metropolises of Yokohama and Tokyo. In a city where an invitation to come up for a cup of tea once meant that your host wanted you to pack up and leave, learning to read social cues has definitely been my biggest challenge as I go about my life in this city.

Like any other Harvard student, however, I relish the challenge of living in a place that can be so mind-boggling at times. And I was also happy to hear that soon many other Harvard students also will get the same chance. This year the Harvard Summer School will host a program at Dōshisha University, which is located just north of Kyoto’s Imperial Palace.

— Iddoshe Hirpa , Class of 2011

At 5:00 a.m., the auction floor was bustling at Tsukiji, the world’s largest wholesale market for fresh and frozen seafood, and the subject of my book “Tsukiji: The Fish Market at the Center of the World.”

Our group from Harvard had been outfitted with the rubber boots worn by regulars, and we watched as the auctioneers went over their manifests and prospective bidders examined the hundreds of tuna laid out on wooden pallets, each fish carefully arranged in order of quality (and hence expected price) from highest to lowest. The tuna carcasses have their tails cut off, so that buyers can look at something like a tree-ring of the tuna’s internal structure, and rub bits of the meat between thumb and forefinger to judge the fat content.

At 5:30, the auctioneers from several different companies rang hand bells loudly to start their auctions (four auctions for fresh tuna go on simultaneously, spread across a space about the size of two basketball courts). Each auctioneer had his own vocal style — rhythmic cadences to call the lots, solicit bids, and announce the winning bid on each fish — as well as his (they are all men) own body language as they move along the lines of wooden pallets. Drew commented on the almost symphonic quality of the sound.

Mr. Iida, the now retired 7th-generation proprietor of a shop that specializes in tuna, pointed out that of the hundreds of tuna on display, only three were wild caught fish, all the others were farm-raised (that is, fattened up in the tuna equivalent of feedlots).

He pointed at what he thought was the best of the wild tuna and said it would probably bring Y15,000 per kilogram ($167); I checked with him after the auction and he was almost precisely on the money; it sold for Y14,500 ($161) per kilo.

He and others we encountered talked about the anxiety in Japan and the global tuna industry about the international proposals that will be taken up next week to ban the trade in Atlantic bluefin tuna, a mainstay of Japanese sushi consumption. Talk on this was grim. Who is responsible for overfishing? People in the Japanese fish business feel they are being singled out as responsible for a crisis in global resource management.

We visited Mr. Iida’s stall half an hour later, where he and his son, now the 8th-generation proprietor of a shop that opened in 1861, explained the different kinds of tuna they were selling, beneath a display of shipping tags for their deliveries to 150 of the finest sushi restaurants in Tokyo. Suddenly, a couple of platters of tuna sashimi freshly sliced from blocks of tuna that sell to sushi chefs at upwards of $300 per kilogram appeared before us, and Drew, who is not normally attracted to raw fish, sampled a few slices.

— Theodore C. Bestor, Professor of Anthropology; Department Chair of Anthropology, Faculty of Arts and Sciences

Today’s main event was a lunch-time symposium on American studies in Japan.  This was a chance for President Faust to compare notes on recent intellectual currents with Japanese faculty and graduate students in her own academic field.

The event was hosted by Dōshisha University.  Neejima Jō, one of the first Japanese to study in the United States, graduated from Amherst College in 1871 and returned to found this school.  Marking this continuing connection to New England is an elegant brick structure, Amherst House.  As Dōshisha’s President Hatta greeted President Faust in the grand living room of the house, I was greeted by a rush of emotion. I suddenly remembered the other time I had been in this room, on my first trip to Japan.  It was the first day in Kyoto for our group of eight high school students on a summer study program, also hosted by Dōshisha.  In this room we were introduced to our host families and welcomed to Kyoto.  I have been back to Kyoto many times, and to Dōshisha on a number of occasions, but never returned to Amherst House itself.  As President Hatta and his colleagues described to President Faust their university’s initiatives — not unlike those at Harvard — to develop a more globally embedded program in American studies and projects linking in medicine, life science, and engineering, my own thoughts kept sliding back to the summer of 1969.

The luncheon that followed brought together scholars from universities in Kyoto, Nagoya and Tokyo.  We learned of the impressive intellectual ambition, range and depth of the work being undertaken by graduate students and faculty alike.  Particularly prominent were studies focused on questions of race and gender, war and peace, both in American experience and more broadly. Over coffee and dessert after the formal discussion, two Harvard undergraduates studying at Dōshisha this semester joined us.  To our astonishment, they wore kimono.  This was not purely a fashion choice.   March 14, it turned out, is kimono day in Kyoto, and wearers were entitled to discounts in museums, stores, and taxis!

— Andrew Gordon, Lee and Juliet Folger Fund Professor of History; History Department, Faculty of Arts and Sciences

Kyoto is a living museum of Japanese history and culture reaching back more than 1,200 years. Home to some of Japan’s finest universities, it is also a lively hub of higher education and knowledge industries. For a university president who is also a historian, it is a logical first stop on her first visit to Japan.

Our first day began with a tour of the Nanzenji temple, one of the most important centers of Zen Buddhism since the late 13th century, followed by a stop at the Silver Pavilion, both set in the quiet of the city’s eastern hills.  We got a powerful sense of the continuing privilege attached to the imperial family of the modern nation during lunch at the Yoshida Sanso.  Now an inn and restaurant, it was built in 1932 by the parents of an imperial prince, who enrolled that year as a first-year student in Kyoto Imperial University.  A splendid two-story structure atop a hill beside the campus: nice digs for a college student.  The prince (Fushimi no Miya), we learned, was now a retired priest, exactly 100 years old.

One odd highlight of the afternoon visit to the stunning gardens of the Shugakuin Imperial Villa was the electrified fence, designed to keep out wild boars and monkeys.  These animals still live in the adjacent hills, and are more aggressive than humans in their efforts to “vandalize” imperial property.

The day concluded with a sumptuous Kyoto-style dinner (vegetarian and fish cuisine) hosted by Kyoto’s Mayor Kadokawa, along with the president of the Kyoto city council, Mr. Shige.  Both men had visited Boston and Harvard this past August to mark the 50th anniversary of the Boston-Kyoto sister city relationship.  As dinner ended and President Faust offered the Mayor and City Council President gifts sent from Boston Mayor Tom Menino, they offered President Faust some impromptu pitching instruction, just in case she has the opportunity to throw a first pitch at a Red Sox game some day.

— Andrew Gordon

Timeline source: The Harvard-Japan Project is a research effort by Susan J. Pharr, Edwin O. Reischauer Professor of Japanese Politics, director of the Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies, and of the Program on U.S.-Japan Relations at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs. Mari Calder played a central role in the project, and a book is forthcoming. The project is based on archival work and interviews in Cambridge, Washington, D.C., Tokyo, and Kyoto, Japan.

Harvard College will increase financial aid for undergraduates by 9 percent, to a record $158 million, for the upcoming 2010-11 academic year. This $13 million increase will help keep Harvard affordable and ensure no change in the financial burden for the more than 60 percent of students who receive aid. The estimated average need-based grant award is approximately $40,000.

As a result of this investment, families with undergraduates receiving aid at Harvard will pay an estimated average cost of approximately $11,500 next year, which is unchanged from the current year. Additionally, Harvard will continue its efforts to keep overall tuition growth moderate for all families, holding this year’s increase to 3.8 percent, for a total cost of $50,724.

“Harvard remains committed to a fully need-blind admissions policy that will enable us to continue attracting the most talented students, regardless of their economic circumstances,” said Michael D. Smith, dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and John H. Finley Jr. Professor of Engineering and Applied Sciences. “In light of the challenges confronting families across America, we continue to expand our already generous financial aid program so that Harvard will remain accessible to families from all economic backgrounds.”

In 2007, Harvard introduced a new financial aid plan that dramatically reduced the amount that families with incomes below $180,000 are expected to pay. Families with incomes above $120,000 and below $180,000 with assets typical for these income levels are asked to contribute 10 percent of their incomes. For those families with incomes below $120,000, the parental contribution declines steadily from 10 percent, reaching zero for those with incomes at $60,000 and below.

U.S. medical scientists say they’ve developed a laboratory technique that improves on traditional methods of screening potential anti-cancer drugs.

The researchers at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute said their technique more closely simulates the real-world conditions in which tumor cells mingle with the body’s normal cells.

“Despite their often impressive results in the laboratory, for every 100 potential anti-cancer therapies administered in patients in clinical trials, only about eight prove safe and effective enough to receive Food and Drug Administration approval,” said the study’s senior author, Dr. Constantine Mitsiades of Dana-Farber, a teaching affiliate of the Harvard Medical School…

Read more here

In 1942, Lidice, Czechoslovakia, was erased from the landscape.

German soldiers occupied the small village and executed the men by firing squad. Most of the women were sent to a concentration camp, most of their children to an extermination camp. The village’s buildings were burned to the ground. What was the rationale for this almost inconceivable crime against humanity? Retaliation for the killing of a high-ranking SS officer. German officials believed that those who assassinated him had ties to Lidice.

The horrific story of the condemned town is just one of many remembered in a new digital archive at the Andover-Harvard Theological Library at Harvard Divinity School (HDS), one that evokes the horror of the Holocaust and the courage and hope of a small group of organizations that united to provide succor to its few survivors.

“This collection tells stories that have never been told,” said Fran O’Donnell, the library’s curator of manuscripts and archives, who is managing the project. “One of the big stories it tells is of the many small organizations that worked together to help refugees from the Second World War.”

The newly digitized records include the contents of 260 boxes of documents and photographs from the library’s official archive of the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee (UUSC), a relief organization that distributed food, established orphanages and aid centers, and helped to relocate hundreds of European refugees displaced by the war.

The new project makes the material readily accessible.

“Up until now, these records were only available to those who could travel to Cambridge and work with them here,” said O’Donnell. “Now they are digitized; people can access them from the comfort of their own living rooms from anyplace in the world.”

For the past four years, several members of the library’s staff have organized and prepared the information for scanning, created digital specifications for the collection, and developed ways to make it easily findable online.

A company in Frederick, Md., is scanning the more than 250,000 documents and 3,100 photographs in the collection, which date from 1938 to 1960. It will complete the work later this year.

The collection includes correspondence from people looking for family and friends, as well as a host of images, many taken after the war, of the refugees who remained in the centers and homes established by the service organization. The records also include case files of the thousands of people whom the organizations helped relocate to the United States during and after the war.

The project began when the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., contacted the Divinity School’s library in 2006, seeking access to its records of the Unitarian and Universalist service committees. (In 1963, the two organizations merged to become the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee.) The Holocaust Museum selected 29 collections for digitization.

Jointly funded by the museum and the Centre de Documentation Juive Contemporaine in Paris, the project’s newly digitized records help to put a human face on the events of the Holocaust.

“One hundred and six children in Lidice have been dragged away from their mothers,” reads one dispatch from a surviving resident of the town, who recounted her story to Martha Sharp, a social worker who, with her husband, the Rev. Waitstill Sharp, helped to form the USC. “Only a dozen of them have been found after an exhausting search. The Nazi terror continues to wreck the lives of those mothers who have survived the concentration camp; they will never know what became of their children, or if the child returned to them is really their own. The Germans were thorough in everything, in devising torture.”

In a handwritten letter yellowed by time and dated Aug. 28, 1945, a woman pleads for help in locating her missing husband. “The only information I have is that he was on a mission to Paris, France and that his plane … was damaged by enemy anti-aircraft fire while flying over the French Coast. … I have tried many ways to gain any information at all, but have had no luck so far.”

“You read about World War II in a history book, but to actually pick up a letter from someone who’s describing her own family — it just makes it seem so much more immediate,” said O’Donnell. “It brings the whole situation to life; the history is alive in these boxes.”

The collection is also a valuable research tool for scholars. The new book “Rescue & Flight: American Relief Workers Who Defied the Nazis,” by Susan Subak, includes many photos from the archive.

But while some records recount lost life and sorrow, they also offer rays of hope and comfort to those still seeking help.

Recently O’Donnell used the archive to provide a woman orphaned during the war with information about her birth mother. In addition to assisting World War II refugees, the Service Committee’s office in southern France helped many refugees from the Spanish Civil War in the late 1930s. The Spanish government has agreed to pay reparations to those who can prove they were victims of the conflict. Using the records, O’Donnell was able to help a man from Argentina prove that he was a child refugee from Spain who was relocated to a home established by the USC in France.

“If the records can touch some people, and give some people some closure about what happened to their family members and loved ones, I think that is a great service we can offer,” said O’Donnell, adding that the electronic records also capture the sense of collaboration among the many groups that were committed to helping those whose lives were turned upside down by the war.

“This archive shows that there were so many small organizations doing so much good,” she said, “in a very quiet kind of a way.”

Back just three days from a trip to Kenya, colonial era historian Caroline Elkins was thinking about the present and the future, and not just her specialty, the past.

Elkins, who was named professor of history at Harvard last July, had spent several days in January in the East African nation, talking with officials and potential donors as part of her efforts to design and secure study abroad opportunities and internships for Harvard undergraduates in Africa.

Though opportunities for overseas study have proliferated at Harvard in recent years, Africa is still underrepresented, Elkins said. This is a problem, she said, at a time when student interest in the continent — in its languages, people, history, and modern challenges — is growing.

“By and large, my compass is what students want,” Elkins said. “So if we don’t respond, we should go home. That’s what we’re here for.”

Elkins has spent a lot of time in Kenya. She’s an authority on post-colonial violence, particularly involving the British against independence-minded Kenyans during the Mau Mau uprising in the 1950s. Her book “Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain’s Gulag in Kenya” won the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction in 2006. Elkins conducted hundreds of interviews and sifted through mountains of paperwork in compiling the book, a process in which she is again engaged for her next project: an examination of the broader process of decolonization that the British Empire went through after World War II.

For her latest project, Elkins has traveled extensively to former British colonies, including the old Palestine and Malaya, as well as Zimbabwe and South Africa, and London. Though power structures, and their dismantling, are important in telling the story, Elkins is just as interested in the people who populated those structures. She is interested in what life was like in those times, but also in the influence of unheralded individuals, such as British officers active in counterinsurgency operations. These men traveled from colony to colony and may have spread repressive techniques across the disintegrating empire, ultimately influencing even American strategies in Vietnam.

Elkins’ passion for history began young. She grew up in New Jersey and remembers being fascinated with how things were different 100 years earlier and how they evolved to now. She was particularly interested in people’s roles, and how the ordinary stresses of life affected decisions that might have far-reaching consequences.

As an undergraduate at Princeton University, she took an African history course, traveled to the continent, and was hooked. After graduating, she worked on Wall Street and then entered graduate school at Harvard. “Imperial Reckoning” grew out of her doctoral work on the history of women in Kenya. While conducting that, she came across horrible stories of women detained in a British camp system that she had never heard about. She finished the book while a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and was the Hugo Foster Associate Professor of African Studies when “Imperial Reckoning” was published.

In addition to her research and teaching responsibilities, Elkins serves as chair of the Committee on African Studies, a University-wide body responsible for coordinating Africa-related activities. As chair, Elkins said, she feels a responsibility to increase the opportunities for African scholarship for students, which has drawn support from Harvard’s administration. She is collaborating with the African and African American Studies Department and the Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research. She’s also working with the Kenya National Museum and the Kenya Oral History Center, which she co-directs, to augment the history wing of the Kenya National Museum, which was renovated a few years ago.

“It’s fabulous, beautiful. They did a great job, but the din of silence from the history wing is notable,” Elkins said.

Elkins is hoping that Harvard students can play a role in furnishing the exhibit, and fostering exchanges that have Kenyan scholars coming to the University. Between her research and her efforts at building academic collaborations with Kenyan institutions, Elkins logs a lot of airplane time. Though modern technology has brought the world closer, there is still no substitute for face-to-face meetings to get things done, she said.

“At the end of the day, the whole point is to get students there in a more systematic kind of way,” Elkins said.

Although the cast is mainly a herd of sheep, a recent film delivers a profound portrait of struggling humanity — and a last glimpse of the American frontier.

The documentary “Sweetgrass,” produced by Harvard filmmakers and husband-and-wife team Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Ilisa Barbash, is a moving, gritty, and visually stunning look at the life of some of the last cowboy herders in the American West, where animal, man, and land intersect.

Projecting a subtle intimacy and a rawness that only real life can offer, the film depicts the grueling trek made by a group of ranchers as they herd 3,000 sheep though the Absaroka-Beartooth Mountains in south-central Montana to feed in higher pastures.

The pair met while in graduate school at the University of Southern California in the late 1980s and have since collaborated on projects as varied as “In and Out of Africa,” an examination of the African art trade, and “Made in USA,” a film about sweatshops and child labor in the Los Angeles garment industry. Their latest book “The Cinema of Robert Gardner,” explores the work of the ethnographic filmmaker and former director of Harvard’s Film Study Center.

The couple categorize themselves as visual anthropologists who join art making with an empirical attachment to real life. Through their film work, wrote one reviewer, “They have sought to depict as honestly as possible the beauty and ache of actual lived experience.”

“Sweetgrass” lands directly in that category. It’s “an unsentimental elegy to the American West,” and a tribute to a dying way of life. When the couple learned of a Montana rancher who was the last in his county to continue the practice of driving his sheep up into the mountains to graze in the summer, they quickly decided to investigate.

“I was interested in resuscitating this much-derided project of salvage anthropology, which in ethnographic film is predicated on going to remote cultures and documenting traditions that will no longer exist,” said Barbash, associate curator of visual anthropology at Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology. “I liked this challenge of going to film something that was the last of something, the last of a tradition, without falling prey to all the pitfalls of the older paradigm of salvage anthropology.”

In 2001, they moved their family from Colorado to Montana, planning to make the trek into the mountains together. But with two young children and a dangerous predator problem at higher elevations, Barbash stayed in town to film, while her husband headed into the hills. When he returned, they realized they had begun two separate pictures. They chose to focus on Castaing-Taylor’s footage.

Over three summers, Castaing-Taylor was part of the yearly three-month expedition that took the sheep into the mountains to find greener pastures. The director of the Sensory Ethnography Lab at Harvard University, who had never been on a horse, rode the arduous route alongside a pair of hardened cowboys. He strapped his camera to his back with a harness that allowed him to keep the film rolling. Hard riding, grizzly-bear encounters, and fierce weather were all part of the experience that transported him, he said, “to another place, psychically, intellectually, and aesthetically.”

“I couldn’t believe there was anywhere that remote in the lower 48,” Castaing-Taylor, a current Radcliffe Fellow, told a crowd at a March 5 screening of the documentary at the Harvard Film Archive.

During the project, the couple shot additional winter footage and the spring lambing and shearing season. It took eight years to cull through and edit 200 hours of work.

The finished product offers a stirring look at a disappearing livelihood and presents the complex dynamic between man and animal amid a lush and lonesome landscape.

The camerawork and the absence of narration lend the documentary a powerful voyeuristic component. Instead of a voice-over, audiences listen in on a conversation between a herder and his horse, or the furious tirade of a lone herder, desperately trying to corral his wayward flock, or, simply, the constant bleating of sheep.

Camera angles that range from sweeping panoramas to tight shots of the herd at ground level add to the sensory feel of the film.

The result is that “Sweetgrass” doesn’t so much tell a story as drop you right into the middle of it.

“It’s less of a predestined kind of visual anthropology,” said Barbash. “We immerse people into a world in which they’ve got to fend for themselves.”

In a small but significant decision, the couple left out the title of “director” in the film’s brief ending credits. Barbash is listed as producer, and her husband is simply referenced as “recordist.” The omission was intentional, explained Castaing-Taylor. “The whole notion of an expert filmmaker or expert anthropologist directing a nominally documentary film really begs a lot of questions. … What does it mean about your relationship to reality if you claim it can be directed?”

Castaing-Taylor is an associate professor of visual and environmental studies and of anthropology. Once associate director and now director of the Film Study Center, he is currently on leave while he completes the film project, and works on a series of still photographs from Montana, as well as a new sound and video project involving contemporary pastoralists in the Alps and the Pyrenees.

For the couple, “Sweetgrass” is also an artistically innovative version of a well-known and ancient genre. It adds depth and realism to the generic notion of the traditional and idyllic pastoral theme.

“From Virgil to Wordsworth and beyond, you never get any sense of how hard it is to be a shepherd, what kind of work is involved in managing animals, or indeed any embodied understanding of the whole human-animal interface,” said Castaing-Taylor, who noted that the iconography of sheep is “romanticized and sentimentalized” in Western culture, and looms large in religions such as Christianity, Judaism, and Islam.

“It’s a revisionist rift on the pastoral. We try to give flesh and blood and some humanity to this age-old genre.”

The film will screen at the Kendall Square Cinema in Cambridge April 2-9.

Shortly after being named Harvard’s vice provost for international affairs in 2006, Jorge Dominguez looked around and decided to declare victory.

What Dominguez saw was a university that recruits the best scholars, regardless of nationality. He saw classes that teach 70 languages and topics ranging from Middle Eastern studies to world music to global fish diversity. He saw international students from more than 120 countries, who make up nearly 20 percent of the student body, and whose numbers grew 35 percent in the past decade.

Dominguez also saw a faculty that pursues the most important research questions, regardless of borders, and whose work takes them to the Earth’s far corners, from the Large Hadron Collider’s caverns in Switzerland to the Maya ruins in the hills of Honduras, to colonial-era archives in Kenya that recount historical atrocities.

He saw that there are 47,000 alumni abroad in nearly 190 countries, many holding pivotal positions. These include the sitting presidents of Liberia, Taiwan, Mexico, Mongolia, and Colombia, as well as the prime minister of Singapore and the secretary-general of the United Nations.

And Dominguez saw a university that encourages its undergraduates to venture abroad as a fundamental part of their education and as necessary preparation for leadership in a globalized world. As a result, in 2007-08 nearly 1,300 Harvard students studied or worked abroad, in 93 countries. By the time the 2009 Commencement neared, 58 percent of graduating seniors had traveled abroad while at Harvard.

“I did not have to make Harvard an international institution. My colleagues had already done the job,” Dominguez said. “We are vastly international. It is stunning and just simply amazing what the faculty, staff, and students do.”

But globalization speeds ever faster, so Harvard now must adapt to fresh challenges. In an intertwined world, issues involving business and economics, health and government, science and the humanities routinely cross borders. Technology has made the world smaller at the same time that its problems — from climate change to global pandemics —have become larger.

With those realities in mind, Harvard is ramping up efforts to help its students become global citizens of the 21st century, so they will be prepared to confront the knotty problems looming just beyond the horizon.

Harvard President Drew Faust has embraced Harvard’s international image in both practical and symbolic ways. Faust, whose appointment was celebrated around the world as an example of what women now can achieve, has traveled to China, Botswana, South Africa, Western Europe, and is now on a weeklong trip to Japan and China.

Her current visit bolstered Harvard’s long-standing Japanese relationships through meetings with government and university officials, and with some of Harvard’s Japanese graduates, whose international alumni club is the third largest behind those of the United Kingdom and Canada. Faust also visited a Japanese girls’ school, a familiar practice for her.

Faust then headed for Shanghai to speak at the official opening of the Harvard Center Shanghai, which has operated since 2008. The facility, the result of a partnership between the Harvard Business School and the Harvard China Fund, taps into Harvard’s and, more specifically, the Harvard Business School’s long relationships in China. It provides space for conferences and workshops in cooperation with Chinese universities, researchers, government, and public and private organizations.

Enriching student experiences

Harvard College began emphasizing undergraduate study abroad a decade ago, Dominguez said, when faculty and administrators realized that, with globalization on the march, international experience was becoming a critical part of a well-rounded education.

Andrew Gordon, now the Lee and Juliet Folger Fund Professor of History, studied in Japan as a Harvard undergraduate in the 1970s, taking a year off to do so. The experience fostered his interest in Japan, and helped prompt him to become a scholar in its modern history.

Gordon said students who head for Tokyo and Kyoto now tend to have one of two levels of experience. Some have studied the area and are familiar with its language, culture, and history. Others travel earlier in their academic careers, and their experiences may spark enthusiasm for further study.

Some students head off already committed to long-term study of Japan; others come back inspired to study more,” Gordon said.

Foreign experiences for students now come in all sorts of packages. A quick glance at the Harvard Summer School Web page shows programs in archaeology in Honduras, environmental studies in Venice, history in Jerusalem, language programs in nine countries, and science programs in eight. All of these Summer School programs started after 2000.

Harvard also has centers that focus on regional studies, such as the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies and the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, which create communities of scholarship focused on their target regions.

Lisbeth Tarlow, associate director of the Davis Center, said it annually supports 25 to 30 student research projects on the region. This year’s project applications include an ethnography of Muslim life in the Czech Republic and research on a Soviet sanitorium as a prism for environmental, medical, social, and cultural history. Tarlow said the center helps to foster area studies both at Harvard and on site through research funding, through foreign internships, by hosting scholars from abroad, and by providing logistical support for research in the field from a consultant whom the center retains in Moscow.

“All of this is really to foster a vibrant community of students, faculty, and scholars from a variety of disciplines to promote new thinking on the region,” Tarlow said.

Working abroad has always been an integral part of scientific fieldwork. Consequently, Harvard’s scientific faculty, scholars, and students conduct research from the Arctic to the South Pole. Students can participate independently or take classes where fieldwork is integrated into studies. For the past several years, biology professor Gonzalo Giribet has taken his students on a spring break specimen-collecting trip to the Caribbean. This year’s plans called for 14 students to spend the week diving on Panama’s reefs.

“In lab they see live animals, but they have no idea which group predominates in a reef,” Giribet said. While diving, “they see all the corals and sponges and understand where most of the biomass is.” They dive each day, bringing specimens to running-seawater tanks for analysis.

“We do a lot of collecting,” Giribet said. “I tell them they aren’t going on vacation in Panama. You’re going to work.”

Harvard students venture abroad in myriad ways. Members of the Harvard Glee Club performed in Canada earlier this month, while members of the women’s squash team traveled to India over winter break to play top Indian teams, and coach and tutor underprivileged children. Since January, students have worked on malnutrition in Uganda, on illiteracy in El Salvador, and on a clean-water project in the Dominican Republic.

Even as Harvard sends its students abroad, it also draws many international students to its classrooms, more than 4,000 of them in 2008-09. For instance, the Edward S. Mason Program at the Harvard Kennedy School (HKS) has long prepared talented individuals to address the world’s most compelling development challenges. This year, the program is sponsoring 73 midcareer professionals from 46 developing and newly industrialized nations in the School’s master’s of public administration program.

Paulina Gonzalez-Pose, the Mason Program’s director, said the outreach brings together a heterogeneous group of experienced professionals from the public and nonprofit sectors, and also welcomes those from the private sector who have made a serious commitment to public service. In its 52nd year, the program works to improve the analytical and leadership skills required to achieve major political, social, and economic change around the world.

Nontraditional classes, in the form of executive education programs, also draw midcareer professionals in areas ranging from business to government to law to health to journalism. The programs not only provide education in their fields, but they create valuable networks.

In 2007, a Russian submarine became entangled in fishing nets and was trapped on the ocean floor. While the world watched and tragedy loomed, a Russian admiral called a U.S. counterpart he had met in the U.S.-Russia Security Program, an HKS executive education session. That back-channel phone call jump-started a chain of events that resulted in U.S. and British assistance and the crew’s rescue.

Faculty coming here and working there

To Julio Frenk, the clearest sign of Harvard’s primacy as an international institution may be his own hiring. Frenk, dean of the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) since January 2009, was Mexico’s minister of health from 2000 to 2006 and is an authority on global health.

Frenk said HSPH has an international reputation, with a third of the School’s students coming from outside the United States. HSPH researchers work in 50 countries. In a recent survey, a third of the School’s faculty members said they spend 75 percent of their time working on research projects with a global dimension.

Frenk emphasizes that global health now includes domestic health, since medical problems now easily traverse national borders. In the age of AIDS, SARS, and H1N1, health inside a country can be influenced dramatically by what happens elsewhere.

Major research problems increasingly involve issues so large and broad that they require collaboration from scientists across disciplines and around the world, from the nature of human-caused climate change, to the best way to fight AIDS, to the creation of the world’s most powerful particle accelerator.

“The transition to a global outlook is becoming a unifying element of the work of faculty across the University,” said Frenk.

A portal for exploring Harvard’s worldwide activities »

A new firearms research database launched by the Harvard School of Public Health makes scholarly articles about the topic more accessible to reporters, law enforcement agents, public health officials, policymakers, and the public. The Firearms Research Digest provides summaries of articles gathered from social science, criminology, and medical and public health journals, and is written in accessible language for use by those outside academia.

The Web site currently covers research published between 2003 and 2008. The digest will be expanded over time to include articles from 1988 to the present.

“Despite the increased ease of accessing articles through search engines like Google Scholar or PubMed, the sheer volume of returned information in technical jargon can be daunting,” said David Hemenway, professor of health policy and director of the Harvard Injury Control Research Center and the Youth Violence Prevention Center at HSPH. “The principal objective of this digest is to present research findings in clear, lay language so anyone can readily understand the study results.”

With the new availability of gun violence data and research, one of the primary goals of the Web site is to help those in law enforcement, public health, and government to develop best practices and smarter approaches to curbing gun crimes and violence.

— Todd Datz

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