Author: Harvard Gazette Online

The 1910 class notes for the all-woman Garland School of Homemaking in Boston were titled “Times Where We Need the Man.” The list of gendered chores now seems antiquarian: chop wood, sweep ashes, care for horses, and bring in coal.

But one chore still sounds familiar. It reads: “wash windows (?)”

That question mark, a sign of the longstanding tug-of-war over housework, survived the past century intact. But relations between American men and women have changed a great deal — and are still changing.

One aspect of ever-shifting gender relations is being explored this semester at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study: space, that wide realm of interiors and exteriors that marks the social commons — that is, everything outside our bodies. How are men and women negotiating access to space? And how have those negotiations changed over time?

In mid-April, Radcliffe will sponsor “Inside/Out: Exploring Gender and Space in Life, Culture, and Art,” a two-day international conference of artists, architects, researchers, legal scholars, and sociologists. It’s part of an annual series of Radcliffe spring conferences on gender that have explored war, food, and other points of intersection between the sexes.

The conferences are usually accompanied by an exhibit in the Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America, and “Inside/Out” is no exception. “Inside/Out: The Geography of Gendered Space,” by turns grave and whimsical, is on display through October.

The exhibit is in four parts, each representing a realm within space: private, public, political, and artistic. The categories are derived from feminist scholar Kerstin Shands, who sees two types of gendered spaces. “Bracing” spaces represent resistance, and “embracing” spaces imply empowerment and safety.

In the “private” section of “Inside/Out,” there are documents, magazines, books, and photographs that illustrate what for centuries was regarded as a woman’s exclusive purview, the household.

The 1910 class notes are there, in looping old-fashioned handwriting. So are fragile issues of 19th century magazines, with titles such as Mrs. Mayfield’s Happy Home (1877) and The Mother at Home and Household Magazine (1864).

On display in the same case are passages from books that express the exclusivity — and confinement — of a woman’s household dominion. In her 1875 novel “We and Our Neighbors,” Harriet Beecher Stowe, the author of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” offers up a passage that would make a modern-day Eliza flee across the ice to escape the slavery of gender: “Self begins to melt away into something lighter,” she wrote of women kept inside by social norms. “Her home is the new personification of herself.” A passage from “Art in the Home” (1879) goes further, by modern standards, declaring that a woman “should be herself the noblest ornament of her ornamental dwelling.”

For 19th century women who were uncomfortable being ornaments, there was travel, or even living alone in cities, a set of spaces explored in the exhibit’s “public” section. In cities, women could take on nontraditional roles, said the exhibit notes. Lynn, Mass., entrepreneur Lydia E. Pinkham (1819-1883) did well, turning her home remedy for “female maladies” into the most popular patent medicine of the age.

But urban spaces were also segregated by gender. An engraving from the July 21, 1875, Illustrated London News pictures a “ladies” window at a New York post office. “I just love the image of going to a post office and having their window be for me,” said Schlesinger executive director Marilyn Dunn, with a laugh. “It captures the idea of gendered space.”

In the same display case is a note on the Women’s Hotel in New York City, which opened in 1878, offering a week’s board and lodging for $6. The Barbizon, a more contemporary women-only hotel, was profiled in a 1963 issue of the New York Evening Post. The headline was “Where the Boys Are Not.”

Where the boys are not is also a theme in the “artistic” section of the “Inside/Out” exhibit. There’s a photo of Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro, co-founders of the California Institute of the Arts Feminist Art Program, at “Womenhouse.” The 1971 art installation, set up in a deserted Hollywood mansion, featured the work of only women, and men were banned from the opening.

But the same section in the exhibit shows that the art world was often where the boys were and the women were not. On display is a 1985 banner from the Guerilla Girls, an anonymous group of feminist artists formed to protest a Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art show. Of the 169 artists represented, they complained, only 13 were women.

The banner, a spoof on an odalisque-like nude, also claimed that while 5 percent of the artists were women, 85 percent of the nudes were. “Do women have to be naked,” the banner asked, “to get into the Met. Museum?”

“Inside/Out” offers a glimpse at the feminist pioneers of the art world, including sculptor Harriet Hosmer (1830-1908), who was born in Watertown, Mass. She sculpted “The Sleeping Faun,” a male figure whose softened musculature rewrote the standards of masculine display. Hosmer’s plaster model of “Queen Isabella of Castile” — monumental and imperial — was intended to show that the queen was the equal of explorer Christopher Columbus, whose iconic journey she helped to sponsor.

The sculptor “was very much interested in female heroism,” said Schlesinger operations manager Bruce Williams, who co-chaired the exhibit committee.

An 1861 photograph shows Hosmer — elfin, pugnacious, and defiant — in the center of a group of rough male artisans in Italy. On the back, the inscription reads, “Hosmer and Her Men.”

Then there is that sphere that is more familiar — or at least more dramatic — than the others: “political” space. This section looks at “sites of resistance,” said Williams, including the parades, protests, sit-ins, and other events that demanded expanded access for women in social and physical spaces.

Protest is on display, in the video touch-screen portion of “Inside/Out,” including black-and-white footage from a stormy 1970 takeover of the New York offices of Ladies’ Home Journal by feminists. The magazine’s editorial policy, they said, kept women in the confining grooves of “children, kitchen, and church.”

One joyful photograph, a line of women at the front of a protest march, is from the opening of the 1977 National Women’s Conference in Houston. Prominent in the picture are Betty Friedan, author of “The Feminine Mystique,” and Bella Abzug, a New York lawyer, activist, and congresswoman. Abzug is famous for her defiant pun: “This woman’s place is in the House — the House of Representatives.”

“Inside/Out: Exploring Gender and Space in Life, Culture, and Art” will be held April 15-16, Radcliffe Gymnasium, 10 Garden St. Free and open to the public, registration is required. Deadline to register is April 5.

Also in conjunction with “Inside/Out,” the Harvard University Graduate School of Design presents the exhibition “Inhabit” by independent artist and “Inside/Out” conference panelist Janine Antoni. “Inhabit” will be on display from March 22 to April 16 in Gund Hall, 48 Quincy St., Cambridge, Mass.

Adams, a lecturer on sociology and co-director of the Program on Central Asia and the Caucasus, delivers an insightful look into nation building in Central Asia during the post-Soviet era.

Kingsley Porter University Professor Vendler, a venerable critic, takes another crack at the 20th century’s greatest poets’ last works and how their style reflects their contemplations of death.

Rodowick, a professor of visual and environmental studies, edits this collection of writings on Deleuze, a French philosopher and prolific writer on literature, film, and fine art.

HAYNEVILLE, Ala. — One afternoon this week, George Thampy ’10, a chemistry concentrator, joined four other Harvard undergraduates on a low scaffold at a nearly completed church in this small south-central Alabama town. Their task was to screw a heavy wood panel onto the rafters.

Thampy stretched both arms wide. When the board still wobbled, he did what any good Harvard student would: He used his head.

The Mather House senior won’t always be working on scaffolds. After graduation, he plans a career in finance. But this week he is one of 22 Harvard undergraduates using their Alternative Spring Break to do finishing work on a new Hayneville Church of Christ. The original burned down, an arson target, in 2008. Said Thampy, “I’m irrepressibly happy to be here.”

The Harvard workers are along on one of 10 domestic public service trips sponsored this year by the Phillips Brooks House Association (PBHA). They made the 21-hour drive to Alabama in three PBHA vans.

Along the way, Emmett Kistler ’11 stopped in his native New Jersey to renew his license so he could help with the driving. “For us, this is grounding,” said the Eliot House junior. “You get down here, and it’s revitalizing.”

There’s more, too. “Before I got here, I didn’t know how to swing a hammer,” he said.

“It’s fun to do something tangible,” said Marcel Moran ’11, one of four co-leaders on the Hayneville trip. “It’s using your brain in a whole new way.”

This week, students are tackling a wide range of construction work, painting, staining, tiling, putting up sheet rock, installing siding, and building scaffolds. “We’re at the finishing steps of this church,” said Moran, a pre-med student on his third service trip. “So precision is the key.”

There were three volunteer experts on site Tuesday (March 16). “We do the work,” said Moran, “but they’re showing us how to do it.”

Standing nearby in the carport was William “Bill” Gorsline, an Illinois information technology consultant and volunteer carpenter. “They send us pretty talented kids,” he said of the PBHA workers. “They can’t get enough of this. They want to learn it all.” He was working with two other experienced construction mentors, Joe Piekos and George Holtz.

Gorsline, who volunteers on behalf of St. Isidore Parish in Bloomingdale, recognizes that other kinds of learning are going on too. He took his own children on a work trip to the Gulf Coast following Hurricane Katrina. “They were in tears for the whole week, “ he said.

Joseph Gaspard ’12, a government concentrator, was cutting tile on a wet saw. It buzzed and whined, and a cloud of mist shot from the back. “This is more hands-on than I’m ever going to get,” he said. Careful and intent at the saw, Gaspard wore an Adams House T-shirt, old jeans cinched with kneepads, safety glasses, and a dust mask.

This is better than a standard break, he said, because, “I’ve done the whole sitting-on-the-beach thing before.”

Will Quinn ’10 of Winthrop House braced his feet and lowered a portable cement mixer into a 5-gallon bucket. It was his second PBHA alternative spring break trip, he said, but his first time using a cement mixer. Quinn pressed the trigger, and a sheet of gray slurry sloshed over the wrists of Trevor Bakker ’10, who had crouched to steady the bucket.

Bakker has applied to Oxford, where he plans to pursue a one-year master’s degree this fall before embarking on a career of human rights law. Meanwhile, he is learning how to lay tile. Does that compare to studying governments? “Certainly, there is little room for error in tiling,” said Bakker.

Tim McCarthy ’93 looked in on the cement mixing. This is the 12th PBHA service trip he has directed, all in the South and all to rebuild churches. McCarthy, a big man in a tails-out white shirt and a ball cap, is a lecturer in history and literature and public policy at Harvard and director of the Human Rights and Social Movements Program at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Carr Center.

He started taking such trips as a graduate student at Columbia University. “I was really transformed by the experience, and found my herd, so to speak,” said McCarthy.

In the spring of 2001, he led Harvard’s first Alternative Spring Break trip, and has since squired hundreds of undergraduates — “some of Harvard’s best souls,” he said — on similar work trips. “I’m on my own spiritual journey,” said McCarthy. “This is part of it.”

There is time on these trips for intellectual engagement too. At one point, McCarthy stood in the unfinished carport for an animated conversation with three students. “We were trying to solve the affirmative-action problem,” he said later of the discussion, while heading back to work. “Now we’re going to put up a ceiling.”

To get to Hayneville, population 700, you drive down Lowndes County Route 26. Two lanes of blacktop cut through a screen of sticklike trees hung with Spanish moss. Just beyond the trees are placid creeks, pale yellow dirt driveways, neat doublewides, sparkling ponds, and rolling acres of pasture for goat, cattle, and horse farms.

But Hayneville wasn’t always a crossroads in picture-book farmland. It is a former Ku Klux Klan stronghold, 20 minutes by car from Montgomery, the first capital of the Confederacy. It is a few minutes south of where the Selma protest march broke the back of Jim Crow segregation in 1965.

Before then, said 57-year-old Martin McCall Sr., “I was scared to come to Hayneville because of the KKK. We got people shot right in the street here.”

McCall, pastor at Hayneville Church of Christ, said most church burnings in the South even today are racially motivated. But the 2008 fire that burned down the old church was “a break-in that went bad,” he said, set by a black man later convicted of the crime.

“They saved only the front porch,” said McCall of local firefighters, who kept running out of water. “It was horrible to watch.”

Building a new church  — brick and wood, like the old one — has cost about $260,000 so far, said McCall, a mason and carpenter who did much of the work himself. Insurance money helped, but so did $100,000 donated by local residents, “white and black,” he said.

The PBHA volunteers help too.

“I’ve never seen anything like this,” said McCall. “It’s like the angels from heaven came down and blessed the congregation.”

Count Harvard computer experts among those who responded swiftly to the deadly earthquakes in Haiti and Chile, throwing their expertise behind an effort to improve information flow for responders on the ground through a Web portal designed as a central data site.

The Haiti Earthquake Data Portal was designed in the days following the Jan. 12 disaster by Merrick Lex Berman, research manager at Harvard’s Center for Geographic Analysis. The portal was based on a similar Web page that the center created for a quake in China in 2008. But whereas that site took weeks to create, Berman drew on that prior experience to build the Haiti site in just a few days. When an earthquake struck Chile on Feb. 27, Berman was able to accelerate the process further, creating a portal for that country in just a few hours, using templates made for Haiti.

Berman and Wendy Guan, the center’s director of GIS research services, said that in the wake of disasters like these, a treasure trove of information becomes available, but there is often no central location for those who need to access it. Satellite images and aerial photographs have grown increasingly detailed, making them potentially useful to identify damaged areas or blocked roads.

“A huge amount of information was made available through goodwill, but there was no single place collecting it all,” Guan said.

Of the three nations — China, Haiti, and Chile — the Haiti Earthquake Portal has gotten the most use, the two said, probably because geographic-information specialists and offices remained operational in China and Chile, whereas in Haiti the office where GIS specialists work was destroyed, and several researchers and administrators were killed.

Berman began work on the Haiti site the day after the quake, and realized within a few hours that there was an enormous demand for information. Berman collaborated with a Mississippi university, Delta State, and its Center for Interdisciplinary Geospatial Information Technology, which through its director, Talbot Brooks, made available a large amount of Haiti-related information. Berman was contacted by a group from Boston University (BU) that was heading to Haiti and was looking for information and high-resolution maps. He was also contacted by staffers working with the U.S. military in Haiti as they made on-the-ground response decisions.

The Center for Geographic Analysis was able to help, Berman said, because it has the equipment and expertise to store, manipulate, and print detailed maps.

“We produced these maps and got them into the hands of the [BU] team,” Berman said.

The Haiti Earthquake Data Portal, features a main page with a description of the site’s purpose. Along the left are links to major data sources, such as the U.S. Geological Survey, ReliefWeb, and a U.N. geographical information site, UN-SPIDER. On the right is a news feed featuring the latest Haiti stories, while other pages accessed through tabs on the top take visitors to more specialized locations, such as sources for Haiti-related data and Web-based maps. The site is aimed at people who need more detailed information than is available through general services such as Google Earth and who are proficient at using GIS programs and data sets.

The information on the site, Berman said, came from “unprecedented volunteerism” and people pitching in from many locations. Information came in, he said, about where streets were blocked, where people were gathering, and where water was available, all of which was shared with responders on the ground, including the U.S. military.

“There was an unprecedented amount of outreach and involvement,” Berman said.

Guan said she hopes that researchers who are now analyzing the earthquake and its response will close the loop and post their analyses on the portal pages, making the site not just a place where people turned for information during the immediate aftermath, but also for analysis as the response continued.

Researchers “can feed data back to us and use the site to make data known to decision-makers,” Guan said.

Their Web sites could hardly be more different. One urges students to join a community of online learners “to keep pace with the changing world.” The other points to Chaucer, Einstein, Freud, and Plato atop its home page.

The representatives of two distinct approaches to higher education met at Harvard last week to present their philosophies on learning.

The president of the University of Phoenix, with a for-profit model and a digitally connected student body, and the president of St. John’s College, a small, liberal arts school that emphasizes classroom dialogue around the classics, outlined the merits of their respective models during a discussion at the Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE) on Thursday (March 11).

The event, titled “Classic College Meets Online Opportunities: Whither the Future of Higher Education?” seemed destined for some tense moments.

And while the event’s moderator, Joseph Blatt, HGSE lecturer in education and director of its Technology, Innovation, and Education program, said there might be “sparks,” the discussion was devoid of fireworks. Instead, the presidents explained their respective approaches to higher education and agreed that the future has room for both.

Society still needs a place where learners can focus on the classics, said the president of St. John’s, Christopher B. Nelson. An alumnus of the college who once practiced law, Nelson noted that the college’s curriculum, which is based on the study of the Great Books, revolves around intimate classroom discussions. Simply referred to as “The Program,” the curriculum offers students a critical foundation in the liberal arts.

Talking about what’s ahead for higher education, Nelson said, “The future will always have room for an education in what it means to be human.”

Works by the Greek poet Homer, the biblical Book of Moses, and literary classics such as the “The Epic of Gilgamesh” are fundamental texts that address issues such as heroism, love, betrayal, and friendship — all subjects that have “a remarkably contemporary feel,” said Nelson.

“We at St. John’s have said we think we know better than the typical 18-year-old what a good education is,” he said, “and we refuse to flatter them and pretend that they know more than we do about what is best for their education.”

Founded on the back of the electronic age, the University of Phoenix offers more than 400,000 students the opportunity to learn in a largely digital environment, at their own pace, from any location.

“Our students don’t make a distinction between physical and virtual learning,” said university President William J. Pepicello. “What they tell us is ‘it’s all the same to us,’  ‘I want it when I want it, where I want it,’ sort of like their experience in the rest of life.”

While many students benefit from the traditional college campus experience, almost 75 percent of higher education students in the country, said Pepicello, want and need something else. Such “next generation learners,” he said, have goals such as security for their families and the respect that comes from having a college degree. Many have schedules and responsibilities that make a typical campus experience impossible.

In addition, he said, they “do not expect that they have to know everything. They only need to know how to access the information at those times when they need it.”

Pepicello argued for a move away from the “cottage industry” of higher education, where knowledge is “owned” by the faculty and then transmitted to students, to a more collaborative model based on a sound technological infrastructure.

“Knowledge is everywhere,” he said, “and we need to be able to manage that within the structure of higher education, if we are to keep pace with the rest of culture.”

NEW ORLEANS — It was just past noon on Monday (March 15) when Clifton Dawson ’07 steadied himself on an aluminum stepladder.  Ahead of the former Crimson running back was a task more daunting than the NFL tacklers he dodged for his three professional seasons: painting a shotgun-style house the size of a rail car.

“It’s a small house, “ he said, “but it’s a big job.”

Dawson was in charge of a team of Harvard alumni tasked with painting the exterior of the peeling frame house. Other crews rolled powder blue paint onto interior walls, mowed the wide lawn, and painted another house nearby. The concrete steps, a handsome rust red, were already done.

The alumni were the first to take part in “Alternative Spring Break,” a tradition of public service initiated by the student-run Phillips Brooks House Association (PBHA), which is sponsoring 11 trips this year. It’s a concept that the Harvard Alumni Association (HAA) has embraced.

“Last year, I went and sat on the beach by myself, “ said Margaret Richards, Ed.M. ’05. “It was kind of boring.” Volunteers may be drawn these days to Haiti or Chile, she said, but they are places where — unlike New Orleans — “good intentions get in the way.”

New York City dentist Mercedes Franklin, Harvard School of Dental Medicine ’74, had been to New Orleans many times to do charity dental work in the city where her parents had met in the 1930s. But this time she came armed with a paint roller. “We’re helping,” she said.

Less than five years ago, courtesy of Hurricane Katrina, seawater had lapped over the window frames of the modest white house on Harrison Avenue in Gentilly, a New Orleans neighborhood where every third house is still empty.

Dawson, Franklin, and 21 others will work through Saturday (March 20), putting the two houses in shape on behalf of the Pentecost Baptist Church next door. The church’s pastor, the Rev. Lionel Davis Sr., stood on the lawn between the two houses, remembering the day when Katrina buried a vibrant neighborhood in water and swept 40 percent of his congregation into other neighborhoods and cities. How high was the water? He held one hand up to his neck.

Davis looks forward to summer when — finances willing — the house that Dawson’s crew was working on would have new flooring, electrical work, and plumbing. Then it would be ready for use as a neighborhood resource center for job seekers still knocked low by the 2005 storm. The other building would house an after-school program. “This is one of those communities,” he said of his neighbors, “where you have to bring them from nowhere to somewhere.”

Nearby, in the Broadmoor section of New Orleans, the theme of the last five years has been the same: going somewhere from nowhere. And Harvard students are helping, whether it’s on spring break this year or during internships in January and over the summer.

Angela Primbas ’12 co-directs an alternative spring break program in Broadmoor, where Katrina left houses 10 feet under water and where many streets are still heaving and undulant from the flooding. (Officially, Broadmoor is 85 percent rebuilt.)

Some of the volunteers are working as math and writing tutors at Andrew H. Wilson School, a new charter school where half of all fourth-graders are at risk of not passing a state exam required for promotion. They were in kindergarten when Katrina struck, a disaster that kept some of them out of school for two years.

One of the tutors is Schuyler Milender ’13, who on Monday spent her first day at Wilson, a glittering school built out from a two-wing building wrecked in the hurricane.

After just one semester at Harvard, she was “inundated by opportunity and experience,” said Milender, and wanted to express her gratitude by giving back to others. Blogging about her alternative spring break helps too, since that involves “reflecting and digesting and processing,” she said. “I’m learning a lot. It’s putting things in perspective.”

Other Harvard undergraduates work on two of the many projects under way at the nonprofit Broadmoor Development Corp. (BDC). One is EnviRENEW, a weatherization and conservation program aimed at reducing energy bills. The other helps owners of blighted houses to navigate the legal system.

BDC executive director Hal Roark called it “intellectual work,” involving analysis and data gathering that shows how public service trips aren’t just about gutting houses. He draws volunteers to Broadmoor from colleges and universities that include Harvard, Yale, Notre Dame, Tulane, and Bard.

Doug Ahlers was in Roark’s office Monday. He’s director of the Broadmoor Project at the Harvard Kennedy School. Since early 2006, he said, “Harvard wanted to do a long-term commitment to a specific neighborhood.” As for student volunteers, he said, “real contributions are made.”

Harvard students acknowledge the advantages of an alternative spring break, including the satisfaction of doing good, and immersion in cultures, places, and issues that are not familiar or are hard to find in a classroom.

Though learning often involves books, said Obi Okwara ’12, who is on the Broadmoor team, “there’s another type of learning that takes place with experience.”

Terry Ding ’11, co-director of the Broadmoor trip, had been there three times on PBHA trips. The experiences, he said, “made me angry, and inspired.”

That’s another legacy of volunteers at Broadmoor and elsewhere, said Roark. They come back, they inspire others to visit, and they return as leaders who supply a continuum in the long slog to rebuild New Orleans.

“Even though students may change from trip to trip,” he said, “the leadership continues.”

New Orleans and places like it constitute living classrooms beyond the cultural and geographic confines of Cambridge. Luxuriant palms droop over highway median strips. Narrow canals glitter between apartment complexes. Houses, even on ordinary streets, have a compact elegance and style.

Then there is the French Quarter, where a few students repaired Sunday night on the St. Charles streetcar for dinner at the River’s Edge and to eat beignets. This is, after all, spring break too.

“It was so great,” said Lisa Akorli ’12, “to see how alive the city is.”

Founded in 1904, PBHA is student-run and staff-supported. It has about 1,400 volunteers, making it the largest student group at Harvard.

Noted PBHA alumni include President Franklin Roosevelt, retired U.S. Supreme Court Justice David Souter, education writer Jonathan Kozol, and Roger Baldwin, founder of the American Civil Liberties Union.

This year, PBHA oversees 85 service and social action programs, including literacy, mentoring, health advocacy visitation, and tutoring. In the Boston area, 10,000 residents benefit.

But PBHA also casts its public service net wider, sponsoring “alternative spring break” trips. In the past, students have fanned out along the East Coast and into the South to help rebuild churches, renovate houses, fix playgrounds, and tutor students.

This year, there are 10 PBHA alternative spring break trips to domestic locations. Another will be overseas. One of four Habitat for Humanity trips is in El Salvador, with 14 Harvard undergraduates taking part. On the U.S. side, there are trips to New York City, Washington, D.C., Kentucky, Georgia, North Carolina, Alabama (two), Mississippi, and New Orleans (two). PBHA alumni will take their own alternative spring breaks, to New Orleans and Jackson, Miss.

Participants say the benefits of alternative spring breaks go both ways, to those helped and to those helping.

Marcel E. Moran ‘11, a human and evolutionary biology concentrator from Eliot House, is taking his third domestic public service trip. “I keep coming back to them,” he wrote, “because no other time during the year do I feel as connected to the people around me, both from Harvard and the community.”

Moran went to Hayneville, Ala., this spring, part of a team helping to rebuild a church damaged by fire. He and the Harvard cohort were to meet with the congregation and then travel to the church to assess needed repairs to the interior, including wiring and paint.

“As much as we tangibly help these congregations that have faced disaster,” wrote Moran, who helped replace another church last year, “our time together with them helps put our entire Harvard experience in perspective.”

To read the students’ Service Break blog and view images capturing their experience.

Humans living at the end of the last ice age endured their own version of climate change, one where a harsh, bitterly cold Europe gradually warmed to become the forested continent that exists today.

Lawrence Straus, Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the University of New Mexico, described life for people of the Magdalenian culture, who in many ways were like us, but endured the difficult living conditions of the Upper Paleolithic, which stretched to 10,000 years ago.

Straus, who on Thursday (March 11) delivered the annual Hallam L. Movius Jr. Lecture, sponsored by the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, said humans had nearly been pushed out of Europe by the time of the last glacial maximum, 20,000 years ago, when the enormous sheets of ice had pushed furthest south.

At that time, people were clustered along the coast of the Iberian Peninsula, which today contains Spain and Portugal. They were likely living away from the modern coast, he said, because the sea level was 425 feet lower than now. Some residential sites undoubtedly exist along now-drowned riverbanks and coastlines under today’s Mediterranean Sea.

It was a time of enormous environmental stress, Straus said, when glaciers not only chilled the world, they bound up moisture, resulting in a “polar desert,” barren and treeless, across much of Europe that was not covered in ice.

But as the world slowly warmed, the Magdalenian people expanded northward and away from the coast into the peninsula’s mountains, where they hunted ibex. As they made their way into France and further northwest across Europe to the Vistula River, they hunted the abundant reindeer and horse herds, as well as bison and red deer. They caught rabbits by the hundreds in large drives, likely using nets, and developed harpoon tips to spear the day’s enormous salmon and other fish. During hard times, they consumed shellfish.

“This was a world of re-expansion. It was a world in which humans are on the rebound after a very severe crisis during the last ice age,” Straus said.

In such a harsh environment, Straus said, shelter was a constant concern. People would march deliberately across open areas, fearful of getting caught in a storm, and settled in caves across the region. They were not only hunters, but artists, creating cave drawings in wide caverns that were likely public gathering places, and in deeper, hidden areas that may have been for specific rituals. They crafted statues, baskets, and elaborately decorated clothing. They conducted rituals, played music on bone flutes, and created many kinds of blades for their weapons. They even engaged in construction, paving areas that might become muddy, and may have built stonewalls.

Because stone is so durable and scientists can trace its origin, it provides a particularly good way to track the travels of the Magdalenian people, Straus said. What stones — which were used for weapon points and other artifacts — tell researchers is that they were a people who tended to stay in a set range, but who had contact and trade with nearby groups.

The further north people journeyed, he said, the more they traveled to find game, and the more critical it was that they maintain ties with groups to the south, since it was harder to eke out a living on the harsher landscape.

Ironically, as that landscape became less harsh and forests gradually pushed north, Straus said, the richness of the culture seems to have dissipated as environmental changes gathered steam and people were forced to learn new ways to survive, and new patterns of their prey’s travel and behavior.

“It was a world in very rapid evolution,” Straus said.

Laptops, personal digital assistants, and iPhones were a ubiquitous and fitting presence at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy Jr. Forum on Wednesday (March 10).

As audience members tapped away on their myriad electronic devices, Jerry Mechling, Harvard Kennedy School (HKS) lecturer in public policy and faculty chair of the Leadership for a Networked World Program, asked a panel of experts to discuss the wealth of opportunities and challenges presented by new digital technologies.

The discussion, titled “Digital Governance from the State House to the White House,” specifically examined how the technology revolution has impacted federal, state, and local government, and explored the ways technology can be used to promote and advance democracy while at the same time avoiding potential pitfalls like privacy issues and outdated infrastructures.

Leaders who “get it,” who understand the importance of using technology to further democracy and “are committed to the principles of openness and transparency,” are a vital part of the equation, said Aneesh Chopra, chief technology officer of the United States.

Chopra noted that his boss is part of the new generation of leaders who fully embrace the power and potential of technology.

He cited Obama’s Open Government Initiative, which promotes transparency, access to information, and the public’s participation in federal government through feedback and collaboration, as evidence of the administration’s commitment to engage with technology.

Using the Internet, said Chopra, the administration has engaged with doctors who weighed in on an online forum on health care as well as with the front line of Department of Veterans Affairs workers who offered suggestions via the Internet on how to improve the cumbersome method of processing veterans’ claims. Additionally, all federal agencies, he noted, continue to solicit feedback from the public via links on their Web sites that allow visitors to submit ideas.

“If you want to solve big problems,” said Chopra, “you are going to want to tap into the expertise of the American people and hear … all of their views in order to come up with the best strategy.”

The current governor of Massachusetts used the Internet to gain critical name recognition and communicate with voters, remarked Anne Margulies, chief information officer for the commonwealth. A relatively unknown four years ago, Gov. Deval Patrick used online platforms, she said, “to get his message out,” adding that the state’s highest executive continues to use technology as an important “way to communicate and engage” with the public.

Expanding broadband access in underserved areas, developing universal technologies that can be used from state to state, reworking an outdated infrastructure, and developing solid privacy and security practices are all part of the way forward, said the panelists.

Persuading middle managers within any organization, many of whom are not as tech savvy as younger generations, to embrace the digital age and its innovations, is another challenge, said Teri Takai.

Assisting those managers in understanding how “tweeting” or “blogging” can “change the dynamics” of what they do will drive important systemic change, said Takai, chief information officer for the state of California.

Chopra, who holds an M.P.P. from HKS, urged the School’s next generation of graduates to be part of the technical revolution.

“We will be there to help,” he said, “but we need to have your participation.”

At its 10th meeting of the year (March 10), the Faculty Council discussed final exams and study abroad transcripts with Jay Harris, the Harry Austryn Wolfson Professor of Jewish Studies and dean of undergraduate education. The council was also briefed about Harvard’s digital dissemination efforts.

The council next meets on March 24. The preliminary deadline for the April 27 faculty meeting is April 12 at 9:30 a.m.

From where David Kessler sits, Americans live in a whiz-bang, lights-flashing, bells-ringing, nonstop carnival of food. It’s everywhere, and expertly blended to taste good. For most of us, that’s too much to resist.

The result is an obesity epidemic roaring out of control, sweeping up Kessler himself, along with two-thirds of Americans who are overweight or obese.

Kessler, former commissioner of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), said Tuesday (March 9) during a talk at the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) that obesity mirrors many traits that smoking had before public health efforts began to erode both its image and the number of smokers.

Chains and processed-food manufacturers have opened a restaurant or snack shop at most major intersections and bombarded the public with advertising that says processed and restaurant food makes you cool, makes you have fun, and makes you popular. Even as those images sink into the nation’s psyche, food scientists have applied themselves to creating perfectly irresistible concoctions of sugar, salt, and fat.

The result, Kessler said, is something of a perfect storm of messaging, opportunity, and desirability that has successfully snagged all too many of us. Today, Kessler said, cultural barriers that once restricted where and when we eat have fallen. Americans now eat at mealtimes, but also between meals, in meetings, in cars, on sidewalks, and in university lecture halls. Excess is no longer frowned upon, it’s celebrated, creating a supersized-food free-for-all that doesn’t exist in many other countries, where eating between meals is rare and where eating in formal locations, such as lecture halls, is frowned upon.

Kessler, who led the FDA during the 1990s campaigns against tobacco, said the similarities to that predicament provide a roadmap out of this one.

Like tobacco, he said, unhealthy eating and eating to excess need an image makeover. Tobacco at its height bombarded the airwaves with images of cool smokers, manly smokers, sexy smokers. Smoking was allowed everywhere — including in restaurants and on planes — and was accepted in many homes. Slowly, however, public health officials successfully fought tobacco’s general acceptance through campaigns against secondhand smoke and bans on advertising, eroding smokers’ cool image and crafting an unhealthy one.

“We didn’t change the product, we changed the perception,” Kessler said.

Food will be a tougher nut to crack, Kessler acknowledged. Unlike tobacco, which everyone can survive without, people can’t live without food. The neural circuits and urges that food manufacturers have successfully tapped are among the most basic.

“I think it’s going to require everything that we’ve learned with tobacco. It’s going to take efforts on the public health side greater than anything we’ve done to date,” Kessler said. “Remember the middle school child who said, ‘Mom and Dad, please stop smoking?’ We will know we’ve made a change when that kid says, ‘Mom and Dad, please don’t take me to McDonalds.’”

Kessler delivered the annual HSPH Stare-Hegsted Lecture, named after two founders of the School’s Nutrition Department. He also has written “The End of Overeating: Taking Control of the Insatiable American Appetite.”

In his talk, which was introduced by HSPH Dean Julio Frenk and Nutrition Department Chair Walter Willett, Kessler described his own struggle with obesity — he said he owns suits in many sizes — and his growing fascination with its biological roots.

He described recent obesity-related research that shows that it’s not just sugar, salt, and fat that make food attractive, but a combination of flavors that pull us toward specific foods. Behavioral pathways in the brain are created by eating those foods repeatedly, so if we’re not careful we become behaviorally predisposed to eating certain foods at certain times and places, whether we’re hungry or not.

Comparing medical treatments to find the best and the cheapest may be a pillar of U.S. healthcare reform efforts, but very little such research is being done, according to a report published on Tuesday…

“Most of the comparative effectiveness studies we reviewed simply tested whether medication ‘x’ is better than medication ‘y,’ rather than addressing fundamental questions such as: How can we use this medication more effectively? When is this medication better than surgery? Which among two effective approaches is the safest?” said Dr. Danny McCormick of Harvard Medical School in Boston, who led the study…

Read more here

WASHINGTON – Young adults are financially anxious, worried that they can’t meet their educational, housing and health-care needs, according to a new poll that exposes a growing pessimism about achieving the American dream.

The poll by Harvard’s Institute of Politics found that six out of 10 of those surveyed worry they may not meet their current bills and obligations. Nearly half of those attending college wonder whether they will be able to afford to stay in school. And more than eight out of 10 said they expect difficulty finding a job after graduation…

Read more here

Last year, author-turned-activist Bill McKibben ’82 spent just 60 days sleeping in his own bed. The rest of the time he was on the road, organizing what he deems essential to force political change on a warming planet: a global grassroots movement.

In remarks at Harvard on Monday (March 8), McKibben — whose 1989 book “The End of Nature” popularized the science of global warming — apologized for the greenhouse gases that his worldwide travel consumed, a bigger carbon footprint than most small villages, he said. But with glaciers melting, oceans acidifying, and climate zones shifting, he said, the world needs a political makeover fast.

His new organization, 350.org, could help by educating the political classes to a new reality that greenhouse gases shrouding Earth should go no higher than 350 parts per million in carbon dioxide equivalents.

One problem, of course, is that the level of such gases is already at 390 ppm “and rising fast,” McKibben told listeners in a crowded Sperry Room at Harvard Divinity School. The world is running out of oil, though perhaps slowly, he said, and that requires the political will to think beyond petroleum.

Beyond oil’s decline are the stark, immovable facts of physics and chemistry, said McKibben, the “deep physical limits” caused by proliferating greenhouse gases.

So what can people do?

“A new logic prevails,” he said in a talk called “Reality Check: How the Facts of Life on a Tough New Planet Shape Our Choices.” The event was part of a lecture series called “Ecologies of Human Flourishing,” co-sponsored by the Center for the Study of World Religions. The session included a conversation with Harvard climate scientist Daniel Schrag.

By this “new logic,” said McKibben, security and stability will become more important that constant economic growth. “All the glory associated with the concept of growth will start to tarnish,” he said. “Maturity will become our credo.”

He said that centralized energy systems dominated by fossil fuels will be slowly replaced by systems that are dispersed and localized, and that rely on renewable energy. McKibben’s house in the Vermont woods, for instance, has an array of solar panels on the roof. “On sunny days,” he said, “I’m a utility.”

And food systems — the way we grow and distribute what we eat — will shrink from global to regional models, he predicted. Farmers’ markets are among the fastest growing sectors of the economy. (In Madison, Wis., one regional market draws 100,000 shoppers on a Saturday.) And the last five-year census of U.S. agriculture showed the first growth in the number of farms in 125 years, most of them small-scale operations.

Current U.S. farming and food systems are like much of modern Western life, intensively dependent on oil. Farming requires fertilizers, tractors, and carbon-based transportation systems, he said. “The food you eat is essentially marinated in fossil fuel before it reaches your lips.”

In addition to asking what we can do, said McKibben, another important question is: How can we flourish? Perhaps by living better, but with less, he said.

He sketched in a world of sprawl, increasing social isolation, and declining happiness, an America of “enormous houses, and enormous cars to drive between them.”

McKibben said the chief untold consequence of our dependence on fossil fuels is that oil “has made us lonelier people than we were before.” We are inhabitants of “bigger houses farther apart from one another,” he said, isolated by television, and enjoying half the meals we had with friends in 1950. Meanwhile, “human satisfaction” polls show that American happiness peaked nearly 60 years ago, despite a trebling of material prosperity since then.

“These are enormous changes,” said McKibben, but shifting our sense of scale might help. He cited a recent study showing that shopping in farmers’ markets engendered 10 times the number of personal interactions that a stroll under fluorescent lights at the supermarket does.

“I love hearing Bill talk. Bill always makes me hopeful,” said Schrag, Sturgis Hooper Professor of Geology and professor of environmental science and engineering, and director of the Harvard University Center for the Environment.

But other reality checks are required, he said. For instance, only about 40 percent of Americans think climate change is actually happening. And just 15 percent think climate change is “actually serious,” said Schrag.

Add to that the speed and gravity of the ecological consequences of climate change. California’s rivers that are now fed by glacial melt may run dry by the end of the century, stranding water-hungry farms. And by as early as 2035, melting glaciers in the Himalayan mountains may cause dry conditions on farms far downriver that presently feed 3 billion people.

Then there are problems with renewable sources of energy, said Schrag. Rooftop photovoltaic solar arrays such as McKibben’s are expensive.

Renewable resources such as wind and solar will require massive construction projects, an idea offensive to many people in an environmental movement inspired by pastoral ideals.

Then there is the issue of energy density, said Schrag. A wind farm may create a watt for every square meter of its physical footprint. But a coal mine in Wyoming may represent an energy potential that is a million times denser.

A social movement such as McKibben’s 350.org is important, and even necessary, said Schrag. But any such movement “has to support trade-offs,” like the “massive building projects” that a shift to renewables will require.

McKibben said he understands that, and he is in favor of a wind farm proposed near his beloved Siamese Ponds Wilderness in New York’s Adirondack Park. “Build this as fast as you can,” he said, bowing to the grave urgency of global warming. “There’s not going to be winter there in 40 years.”

But at the same time people make compromises in the cause of renewable energy, they can certainly do more with less, said McKibben. Profligate use of energy is “astonishing,” he said. “We’ve spent the last decade driving semi-military vehicles back and forth to the grocery store.”

This year’s campaign by 350.org includes a “great power race,” he said, a competitive challenge to universities in China, India, and the United States to prompt novel ideas for sustainable energy.

Last year, 350.org sponsored the largest political demonstration held worldwide, with 5,200 rallies in 181 countries, which engendered 25,000 pictures on the group’s Web site.

The capstone day this year for 350.org is Oct. 10 — 10/10/10 — with a “global work party” that will install solar panels, lay out bike paths, dig community gardens, and demonstrate other local projects that have a light carbon footprint.

Global warming is too grave a problem to solve one project at a time, but a worldwide gesture, said McKibben, “will help us make the point to our leaders that if we can do this work, they sure as hell can too.”

Upcoming

Next in the “Ecologies of Human Flourishing” series: “Does Thoreau Have a Future? Reimagining Voluntary Simplicity for the Twenty-First Century,” a lecture by Lawrence Buell, Powell M. Cabot Professor of American Literature in Harvard’s Department of English. It will be held Thursday (March 25) from 5:15 to 7 p.m. in the Sperry Room, Andover Hall, 45 Francis Ave., Cambridge, Mass.

In 1963, Richard Holbrooke was a 22-year-old Foreign Service officer in the Mekong Delta of Vietnam, where a war that would inform U.S. policy for a generation was just beginning to widen.

Nearly 50 years later, he is still involved in diplomacy, now for the White House as special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan. Measured and frank, Holbrooke spent an hour recently discussing foreign policy issues at the Harvard Kennedy School (HKS). Among other things, he shared his concern for Afghanistan (critical), his belief in negotiating styles (flexible), and his relationship with Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai (respectful).

The longtime diplomat spoke along with Graham Allison before a capacity crowd at the JFK Forum on March 4. (Allison, a friend of Holbrooke’s going back to Vietnam, is Douglas Dillon Professor of Government at HKS and director of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs.)

The first question was one that Holbrooke acknowledged he is asked a lot, “but never by anyone under 50”: Is Afghanistan America’s new Vietnam?

Not really, he said, naming a “core difference,” in that North Vietnam and the Viet Cong were never a threat to the U.S. homeland. The Taliban and al-Qaeda, on the other hand, represent “a direct, unambiguous threat to the United States,” said Holbrooke. “They know what they want. They want to create chaos … to destroy a civilization they hate.”

It was not a mistake to get into a war in Afghanistan, he said of the months following 9/11, but “the tragedy is, we got diverted to Iraq.”

Allison cited Holbrooke’s noted skills as a negotiator. For instance, he was the chief negotiator behind the 1995 Dayton Peace Accords, which ended the Bosnian civil war.

“Negotiations are a lot like jazz,” said the 68-year-old diplomat. “They’re improvisations on a theme.” The bargaining table is a place for both focus and flexibility, he said, but final agreements had better be both acceptable to all parties and enforceable.

Still, any classic assumptions about negotiation are confounded in Afghanistan, because “the Taliban do not represent a government,” said Holbrooke, who called the group instead “a political movement led from sanctuary.” Al-Qaeda, which he said is “even more shadowy,” represents the same bargaining complication. “There’s nothing they want we could give them,” said Holbrooke, “and there’s nothing we could give them they want.”

Also, there are places that U.S. diplomacy does not go these days, and one is Kashmir, he said, because “an outside negotiator can’t do the job.” Since 1947, India has been pitted against Pakistan in conflicts that have erupted three times over that disputed area.

India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan are the center of what may be “the most volatile part of the world today,” said Holbrooke, and are important to international stability. Other nations have security interests there, including Russia, China, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Iran. It’s “a very, very large terrain,” said Holbrooke, which in diplomatic terms includes “a lot of moving parts.”

At the unsteady center of this unstable region, he said, is Afghanistan, “a weak and poor country” wracked by 31 years of warfare.

Thirteen months ago, Holbrooke and his new team at the White House were “astonished at what a mess we had inherited” in Afghanistan, he said. Back then, the United States was represented by just 300 civilian employees and — more disturbing, said Holbrooke — only 10 agricultural specialists in a country that was once a breadbasket to the region. (A year later, those numbers, respectively, are 900 and 100.)

The United States halted a poppy seed eradication program that was driving farmers into the arms of the Taliban, he said. Cash-for-work programs are in place for farmers, and U.S. National Guard teams are bringing agricultural experts to the countryside.

There are also more efforts now to train Afghan police and army units.

With these “vast changes,” said Holbrooke, comes an ancillary fact: There has been no emphasis yet on bringing international diplomacy to bear on Afghanistan. But in the wake of America’s civilian buildup, he added, the United States is now ready to look at issues of international terrorism.

For future diplomats in the HKS audience, said Holbrooke, Afghanistan offers an opportunity for an active posting analogous to the one he took as a young man, distributing U.S. aid in rural Vietnam. “It was greener,” he said of the Mekong Delta, but in Afghanistan parallel opportunities await.

Holbrooke praised other changes in the U.S. response to Afghanistan in the past year, including a provision requiring a minimum tour of one year for federal civilian employees, up from six months under the Bush administration. Recruitment for the civilian buildup has been accelerated by “3161 authority” provisions in the U.S. Code, he said, a process that streamlines getting federal civilian employees into reconstruction zones. The same authority, said Holbrooke, is needed to speed U.S. federal civilian employees on their way to Pakistan.

But U.S. aid of any kind should avoid what he called a “dependency trap,” through assistance that overrides or neglects local authorities. “Classic direct civic action” can certainly accomplish good deeds, said Holbrooke, but if it stays American-only, it is not sustainable.

At any rate, starting in July 2011, the United States expects to begin military withdrawals from Afghanistan, the “pace and scope” of which are yet to be determined. But “the civilian effort must continue,” said Holbrooke.

Cambridge may soon be called the college squash capital of the United States.

Laura Gemmell ’13 of the Harvard women’s squash team and Colin West ’10 of the Harvard men’s squash team took home College Squash Association (CSA) individual national championships this past weekend (March 5-7), continuing Harvard’s dominance in the squash world this season.

The titles come just two weeks after Gemmell and the Harvard women’s squash team won the 2010 CSA national team championship (Feb. 21) over Penn and West helped lead the Crimson to a fifth-place finish.

Gemmell, who led Harvard to their 12th national title, finishes the season a perfect 16-0 as a freshman, after overcoming a 2-1 deficit against Trinity College’s Pamela Hathway on Sunday (March 7) to take home the crown 3-2 (11-7, 5-11, 13-15, 11-8, 11-9). Gemmell becomes the 11th Crimson player to win the Ramsay Cup and the first since Kyla Grigg ’07 in 2007.

West defeated Princeton’s Todd Harrity (11-9, 13-11, 11-1) in Sunday’s title match, claiming the men’s crown and completing the season with a 16-1 record. He is the 33rd Harvard player to win the Pool Cup, and completes his career at Harvard with a 50-9 record. West was also awarded this year’s Skillman Award, given annually to a senior men’s player “who has demonstrated outstanding sportsmanship throughout his college squash career.”

For Harvard juniors and their parents, graduation is still more than a year away, far off enough that there is ample opportunity to prepare for that exhilarating but somewhat daunting time. During Junior Parents Weekend (March 5-6), juniors and their parents enjoyed an early visit from spring and learned what to expect during that last year at Harvard.

As was the case during Freshman Parents Weekend, tours and open houses were offered in the libraries, museums, and student centers. But Junior Parents Weekend also focused on the challenges and opportunities that students will face as they prepare for life beyond Harvard.

“Junior Parents Weekend is a great time to see what the College can offer closer to graduation,” said Jeff Chernow, who traveled to Cambridge from New York City, and whose daughter, Victoria Chernow ’11, is concentrating in chemistry. “There is some anxiety now about what happens next.”

“We are looking to understand the whole process,” continued his wife, Imma Chernow. “For example, she wants to take a year off before medical school.” Chernow said she learned this weekend that students were advised to do exactly that. “We also want to know: How important is it to do a thesis? We have a lot of information, and we would like to sift through to find out what is important in her fourth year.”

But the weekend was as much about how students can experience Harvard to the fullest in their time remaining — even if that means trying something unrelated to any career path.

“Senior year is not just about career development, it’s about taking advantage of what Harvard has to offer,” said David Friedrich, assistant dean with the Office of Student Life, which organized the weekend. “We hope that juniors have a chance to explore something new, something outside the box, and to work on being well-rounded individuals.”

For juniors, House life is at the center of their Harvard experience. On Friday evening, the Houses hosted receptions for parents. On Saturday, parents sampled presentations from professors in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Harvard Law School, and the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

During a program on Friday in Sanders Theatre, President Drew Faust and Harvard College Dean Evelynn Hammonds welcomed parents back to campus. Hammonds moderated an informal and interactive student panel discussion with four seniors who talked about how they are maximizing their final year. The panel included Andrés Castro Samayoa ’10, Shiv Gaglani ’10, Julia Goldenheim ’10, and Casandra Woodall ’10.

In her opening remarks, Faust reflected on the last time she met the parents of the Class of 2011. Today, she observed, it is a different world than when they gathered for Freshman Parents Weekend in 2007, acknowledging the uncertain economic climate, and the competitive nature of the job market and admission to graduate and professional schools.

On that topic, the Office of Career, Research, and International Opportunities (OCRIO) presented a panel titled “Excelling Beyond Harvard.” The discussion, moderated by OCRIO director Robin Mount, included advisers from that office who specialize in helping students to establish career paths and apply to professional schools and other graduate programs.

Earlier, that office held an open house, where parents spoke one-on-one with career advisers and learned about electronic databases and resources available to students. Jerry Spector of Princeton, N.J., father of Andrea Spector ’11, wasn’t originally planning to attend, but stopped in when he and his wife noticed the office’s sign welcoming parents. He was glad he did.

“Now, with two or three years under our belt, the discussion shifts to exploring the future. We learned this office has a lot of useful resources for her,” he said.

More than a year has passed since the Harvard women’s basketball team last lost at home, on Feb. 14, 2009. But the Crimson, who also had an eight-game winning streak on the line when they hosted first-place Princeton, saw both streaks end on Saturday (March 6), with a 78-66 loss to the Tigers.

Harvard, who slipped past Penn with a 55-52 victory Friday (March 5), entered Saturday’s contest two games behind the Tigers in the Ancient Eight standings with two games to go, needing a win to hold onto their Ivy League title and NCAA tournament dreams this season.

Meanwhile, Princeton, who had already defeated the Crimson once this season, 73-54, clinched a share of the league title the night before, and were just one win away from their first trip to the tournament.

From the jump, the second-place Crimson were tested by Princeton’s determination. After scoring the game’s first six points, the Tigers took a 9-2 lead after five minutes. But Crimson forward Emma Markley ’11 provided the spark for her team early on, scoring eight of her team’s first 14 points.

After tying the game at 14, the momentum swung in the Crimson’s favor. In a two-minute span, Harvard went on a 7-2 run to grab a 21-15 lead, making an early statement to the Tigers that to win at Lavietes, it would have to be earned.

Princeton got the message. After trailing by as much as seven in the first period, the Tigers went on a 13-3 run to close the half, entering the break with a 36-33 lead.

Falling behind by as much as five early in the second half, Harvard clawed their way back to a 52-52 tie. But a deeper and more physical Princeton team eventually prevailed.

“I think Princeton takes a lot of chances. They’re athletic, they have taller guards. Our guards are smaller,” said Harvard head coach Kathy Delaney-Smith. “They use that height and that wingspan to get pieces of the ball, so you have to make the extra pass and be a little more under control at times.”

Turnovers were a big back-breaker for the Crimson. Nine of Harvard’s 14 turnovers came in the first half, and were critical in Princeton’s late first-period surge.

“I’m disappointed. I thought we could have done a better job,” said Delaney-Smith. “I thought we could have been more mindful” of the scouting report “at times, but we weren’t.”

Markley, who recorded her seventh double-double of the season, led the Crimson in scoring with 21 points, pulled down 10 rebounds, and blocked four shots. Sophomore point guard Brogan Berry tallied 14 points, a game-high seven assists, and seven rebounds. Victoria Lippert ’13 added 15 points.

Even with the loss to the Tigers (25-2; 13-0 Ivy League), the Crimson are still in good shape with a 19-8 (10-3 Ivy League) record and 10 wins in the past 12 games.

Harvard faces off against Dartmouth in the season finale on Tuesday (March 9), aiming to close the season off with their 20th win, and then will await word of their first-round opponent in the Women’s National Invitation Tournament (WNIT).

“I think we’re good enough to do something in the WNIT, but I think right now … we have to be confident in ourselves and in our system,” said Delaney-Smith. “I think if I can get my team to know how good they can be, we can do some damage.”