173 posts tagged with harvard.
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The Curious College Career of Benjamin Bolger
The Cut Has Done It Again
"He is ten years older than I am. I chose him on purpose, not by chance. As far as life decisions go, on balance, I recommend it." [more inside]
New York Times, Get out of My School
Politics this, plagiarism that. Harvard is in the limelight, which means that the student journalists of the Harvard Crimson have picked up some competition.
Follow the Money with $upreme Connections
ProPublica has created a database of Supreme Court financial filings searchable by various categories. After the groundbreaking reporting from ProPublica on Clarence Thomas' gifts and loans from billionaires which led to the new toothless "ethics code" in 2023 for the Supreme Court.
Claudine Gay out at Harvard
Harvard President Resigns After Mounting Plagiarism Accusations. Gay, a political scientist, was the first black woman to be the president of Harvard. Her tenure lasted six months. [more inside]
Being there because cookies
Sara Lippincott (1938-2023), science editor, died this weekend in the fullness of her years. One of the last things she wrote was a memoir The Tea Table [1500 words = 5 mins] about her days as a secretary in the Harvard Bio Labs. As with so many editors her work was vital but largely invisible.
Honest as the data is wrong
Professor Francesca Gino, "who focuses on why people make the decisions they do at work" is on administrative leave from Harvard Business School and had some papers retracted because it looks like data were faked. Guardian. Or with more detail: Vox. Irony alert: the seemingly dishonest research was about how honest are regular people. [more inside]
"For all intents and purposes, overruled."
Supreme Court Strikes Down Race-Based Admissions at Harvard and UNC (NYT, WaPo, NBC News) [more inside]
“I view the humanities as very hobby-based,” she said.
It’s like thinking back to when Latin was the center of the world— Nathan Heller (previously) explores the decline of the English major in American higher education. (SLNY) (Archive.is copy)
Low-income people need ‘15-minute cities’ the most
"Those who think “15-minute cities” are for wealthy urbanites should consider this graph from a recent nationwide study. It shows a powerful reverse correlation between household income and use of services and amenities within a 15-minute walk of home. In other words, the wealthier you are, the less you rely on goods and services within your immediate neighborhood or adjacent neighborhoods. (You can easily afford to drive, or take a cab or Uber/Lyft to more distant locations)." [more inside]
Special Appearance by the "Harvard Fart Squad"
Buses and Bribes: Lagos’s Shadowy Transit Network
Yet Another Example Of Why Sexual Harassment In Academia Is Endemic
Three graduate students at Harvard have filed a sexual harassment lawsuit against the school and anthropology professor John Comaroff over the professor's conduct and the university turning a blind eye to it. [more inside]
Early Arabic Sound Recordings and the Public Domain
Harvard's Loeb Music Library is releasing a small subset of their early 20th century Arabic 78 collection. Acquired over many years, the Arabic 78 Collection currently contains nearly 600 cataloged recordings of Arab and Arab-American music spanning the first half of the 20th century, from roughly 1903 through the 1950s, valuable not only for their musical content, but also as artifacts of the early sound recording industry. [more inside]
On "meritocracy."
Turns out, Harvard students aren’t that smart after all. 43% of Harvard’s white students are either recruited athletes, legacy students, on the dean’s interest list (meaning their parents have donated to the school) or children of faculty and staff. The kicker? Roughly three-quarters of these applicants would have been rejected if it weren’t for having rich or Harvard-connected parents or being an athlete. This dynamic is inherently racialized, with almost 70% of all legacy applicants at Harvard being white. A white person’s chances of being admitted increased seven times if they had family who donated to Harvard. Meanwhile, African American, Asian American and Hispanic students make up less than 16% of students who are children of faculty and staff. (SL Grauniad) (archived link)
Why Lorgia García Peña Was Denied Tenure at Harvard
As someone who has followed this case for over a year, there is a lot in this article that had not been previously reported. Mainly the depth of racist vitriol García Peña faced in the years leading up to her tenure denial.
Not the year of the MOOC but the week of cashing out
Three leading ed tech companies, three major moves for money. To start with, major online program manager (OPM) 2U purchased much of online class provider edX for $800 million. As part of the deal Harvard and MIT will launch a new and so far unnamed education nonprofit. [more inside]
Why Cornel West’s Tenure Fight Matters
I wrote letters for West’s hire and renewal at Harvard. The school’s administrators completely miss the point of tenure. Noted scholar Robin D.G. Kelley explains why tenure matters, and why he thinks West was denied tenure.
Judge Asked Harvard to Find Out Why So Many Black People Were In Prison
"They could only conclude that the criminal justice process was a Rube Goldberg machine that produces “racially disparate initial charging practices..." An excellent data-driven look at one state's charging and sentencing rates. [more inside]
DIY Covid Vaccine
new CDC and WHO guidelines are to keep the mask on
Harvard Law professor Adrian Vermeule recently wrote an article for The Atlantic magazine in which he argued that the American conservative constitutional doctrine of originalism had reached an end and the US Constitution should be re-understood to focus on on the "common good." Vermule: "As for the structure and distribution of authority within government, common-good constitutionalism will favor a powerful presidency ruling over a powerful bureaucracy, the latter acting through principles of administrative law’s inner morality with a view to promoting solidarity and subsidiarity. The bureaucracy will be seen not as an enemy, but as the strong hand of legitimate rule. "
Reaction was .... swift:
Ramesh Ponnuru: A Harvard professor's unsound attack on constitutional originalism. Randy E. Barnett: Common-Good Constitutionalism Reveals the Dangers of Any Non-originalist Approach to the Constitution Eric Levitz: No, Theocracy and Progressivism Aren’t Equally Authoritarian Matt Ford: The Emerging Right-Wing Vision of Constitutional Authoritarianism [more inside]
Reaction was .... swift:
Ramesh Ponnuru: A Harvard professor's unsound attack on constitutional originalism. Randy E. Barnett: Common-Good Constitutionalism Reveals the Dangers of Any Non-originalist Approach to the Constitution Eric Levitz: No, Theocracy and Progressivism Aren’t Equally Authoritarian Matt Ford: The Emerging Right-Wing Vision of Constitutional Authoritarianism [more inside]
T.S. Elliot and Emily Hale
Over 1,000 letters sent from T.S. Eliot to his "muse" Emily Hale have been released, per Hale's wishes, 50 years after her death. In anticipation of this event Eliot prepared a... statement as a rebuttal to his own letters.
My mentor was denied tenure. Why should I stay in academia?
Ruben Reyes Jr. discusses the impact that Harvard denying Lorgia García-Peña tenure has had on black and brown students. García-Peña is a scholar of romance languages and literature, and was the only latina professor on the tenure track at Harvard. Especially as she was expected to head Harvard's ethnic studies department, which still does not exist at the university despite a 50-year push, her tenure denial has been met by widespread uproar and protest.
Those Sorts Of People
“When the rude masses began arriving from Eastern Europe, the WASPs got paranoid that they were, to use the phrase chanted by the rioting Nazis in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017, about to be “replaced.” They turned on their former class siblings, the German Jews, with whom they’d once shared the upper rungs of American society. As the nineteenth century turned into the twentieth, many old-line WASPs embraced a toxic mix of social Darwinism and eugenics.” To Serve Is To Rule: On WASPs and the longing for a more polite ruling class. (Harper’s)
Wild Nights with Harvard University Press
"Please, please, I’ll tell you anything I can, but I can’t afford to be on the outs with Harvard!" There's been renewed focus on Emily Dickinson, with fictionalized treatments of her life in last year's Wild Nights with Emily and in the upcoming Dickinson series. But the real-life drama over control of Dickinson's writings -- including "theft, adulterous affairs, a land deal gone wrong, a feud between families, two elite colleges, and some of the most famous poems in American literature" -- could go toe to toe with either of them.
Cognitive effort, and learning more but feeling like I'm learning less
According to a new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, "though students felt as if they learned more through traditional lectures, they actually learned more when taking part in classrooms that employed so-called active-learning strategies" (solving sample problems with peers and with help from the instructor). As the lead author says, "Deep learning is hard work. The effort involved in active learning can be misinterpreted as a sign of poor learning.... On the other hand, a superstar lecturer can explain things in such a way as to make students feel like they are learning more than they actually are." The research studied Harvard students in a physics class; instructors on Twitter share their similar experiences in other settings.
Harvard Art Museums begin to address their racist, sexist history
The project shifts which works are displayed side by side in the museums and changes, sometimes dramatically, the words on the walls alongside them. Since February, the museums have been working their way through the collections, rewriting the wall labels that accompany virtually all of their historical works with a mind to presenting a more inclusive, holistic view of art history. A John Singleton Copley portrait of Nicholas Boylston now describes him as having “amassed a fortune sending enslaved Africans and foreign goods to the Americas.”
Mortgage backed securities, but for knowing things
Because AI Said So - The Blue's own zittrain dons a sandwich board to warn us of the dangers of "intellectual debt": accepting answers proffered by "AI" (and often building upon them) without bothering to understand the principles, or lack thereof, upon which they're built – a veritable house of punch cards! [more inside]
"Me after reading any article on the cut: this is horrifying"
The Most Gullible Man in Cambridge: A Harvard Law professor who teaches a class on judgment wouldn’t seem like an obvious mark, would he? (SL:The Cut) [more inside]
A (Not So) Quiet Revolt In A Harvard House
Last Saturday, Harvard announced that it would not be renewing the faculty dean appointment of Harvard Law professor Ronald S. Sullivan Jr. and his wife, lecturer Stephanie Robinson. The decision had been in part due to toxic behavior going back years, but had ultimately been precipitated by student response to Sullivan choosing to join the defense team of sexual predator Harvey Weinstein. [more inside]
the house with a mainframe in its walls
Is This Harvard Prototype the Greenest House in America?
HouseZero, the headquarters for the Center For Green Building And Cities was extensively retrofitted by Snøhetta and Skanska Teknikk, even to the point of having no HVAC system. The Brain in The Basement controls temperature and ventilation.
Calm your nerves, massage your brain
Are you tone deaf?
Test your tone-deafness with The Music Lab at Harvard University's department of psychology. [more inside]
Woman Astronomer's Firsts Not Credited
Cecelia Payne wrote her PhD thesis on the composition of the sun. Everybody poo-pooed her idea that it was composed of hydrogen and helium, as were other stars. Fellow astronomer Henry Norris Russell, who had doubts about her theory, persuaded Cecilia not to present her thesis, only to publish her discovery in 1930 as his own discovery. Cecilia’s 200-page long research was ignored and she was robbed of her of her due credit. [more inside]
Landry Lies
Unfortunately, sometimes feel-good stories of academic achievement are built on lies and abuse. SL New York Times. Tw for racism, child abuse, and general awfulness.
It's a coin flip as to if you're now going to achieve the American dream
It used to be that people born in the 1940s or '50s were virtually guaranteed to achieve the American dream of earning more than your parents did, Chetty says. But that's not the case anymore. "You see that for kids turning 30 today, who were born in the mid-1980s, only 50 percent of them go on to earn more than their parents did," [Harvard University economist Raj] Chetty says. "It's a coin flip as to whether you are now going to achieve the American dream." Chetty and his colleagues worked with the Census Bureau's Sonya Porter and Maggie Jones to create the The Opportunity Atlas ... merging U.S. Census Bureau data with data from the Internal Revenue Service. (Via NPR) [more inside]
Wanna see a magic trick?
Harvard's James Mickens (previously) recently gave the keynote address at the 27th USENIX Security Symposium. The title? Q: Why Do Keynote Speakers Keep Suggesting That Improving Security Is Possible?
A: Because Keynote Speakers Make Bad Life Decisions and Are Poor Role Models [more inside]
Asian-American Students Sue Harvard Over Alleged Admissions Bias
Who knew there was a Harvard personality type? It's not what you know; it's what you're like: "Harvard consistently rated Asian-American applicants lower than others on traits like 'positive personality,' likability, courage, kindness and being 'widely respected,' according to an analysis of more than 160,000 student records filed Friday by a group representing Asian-American students in a lawsuit against the university." [more inside]
She Left, He Stayed
Only a few years after federal courts recognized sexual harassment as a form of discrimination, Terry Karl tried to get Harvard to hold her harasser accountable. And despite the time spent trying to get Harvard to do something and many other complaints, Jorge Dominguez's career has flourished
Virginia Woolf's Monk House Photo Album
Harvard has digitized Virginia Woolf's Monk House photo album. All (most) of the crowd is pictured, and just to set the internet in historical context, there are several cat pictures.
"Their Spirits Were Trapped In Those Masks"
At the end of the Southern Plains or "Red River" wars in 1875, the U.S. War Department shipped seventy-two Kiowa, Cheyenne, Arapaho, Comanche, and Caddo Nations prisoners of war held without formal charges or trial from Fort Sill, Oklahoma, to Fort Marion in St. Augustine, Florida. In 1878, the Smithsonian commissioned “life masks” — faces molded from clay — to be made of the Fort Marion prisoners. An American war trophy, the masks would become part of the United States' nationalistic propaganda effort to "depict indigenous peoples as vanishing, as nearly 'extinct,' and thus worthy of museum dioramas, not political rights." The masks are now stored in the Peabody Museum of Anthropology and Ethnology's collection at Harvard University. But to whom do they really belong? [more inside]
Sea snails, cow urine, mummy flesh and digital preservation
Alongside a few tubes of Mummy Brown are other pigments whose origin stories are practically legend. Tyrian purple, an ancient Phoenician dye that requires 10,000 mollusks to produce a single gram of pigment, is said to have been discovered by Hercules’s dog as he snuffled along the beach. Indian yellow, purportedly made from the urine of cows fed only on mango leaves, was banned by the British government in the early 20th century on the grounds that its production constituted animal cruelty. Ultramarine, a vivid blue made from lapis lazuli mined in Afghanistan, was once more precious than gold.[more inside]
Meet the Transgender NCAA Swimmer from Harvard
"I will live a redeemed life, one of service and value to others."
Michelle Jones is a new doctoral student at NYU this fall. Her BA is from Ball State, but her most recent institution was the Indiana Women’s Prison.
"people forgot they were there"
A Team of Women is Unearthing the Forgotten Legacy of Harvard’s Women 'Computers' by Alex Newman. From 1885 to 1927 over 80 women computed and analyzed astronomical data for Harvard University. Said data, mostly in the form of glass plate photographs, is in the process of being digitized by the Harvard Observatory as part of the DASCH Project. If you would like to know more about pioneering female astronomers such as Williamina Fleming or Henrietta Swan Leavitt, the Harvard Observatory has compiled some links. If you would like to take part in making their work available to the public, take part in Project PHaEDRA and transcribe their logbooks.
"an occasional draft will look like a passing cloud"
A demonstration of Schlieren photography, which makes minute changes in air's index of refraction visible, allowing us to see air that is moving or that contains gases that would otherwise be invisible. A segment from a Science Channel program has some additional examples and some explanation. [more inside]
Bom Bom Boodely Bom Bom Boodely Bom Bom Boodely Bom!
Women in the Ivy League
They do a little education on the side.
. . .Which brings us back to all those strange Harvard Crimson corrections, appended in 2013 and 2014 to articles dating back to 2005. Each one reads: “An earlier version of headline of this article and statements in the article stated that the DoubleTree Suites hotel is Harvard-owned. To clarify, the company is housed in a Harvard-owned building.” Harvard’s sudden reticence to claim its property stemmed from a straightforward labor dispute that would last three years and, in the end, lay bare the tension between a burgeoning corporate feminism and the rights of working-class women.
How a dispute at Harvard led to a grad student’s forced mental exam...
At 1 a.m. on 4 June 2016, Gustavo German, a doctoral student in biomedicine at Harvard University, heard a knock at his door. It was three police officers. A doctoral student at Harvard is forced to take an in-patient psychiatric evaluation. Concern for the student or a reprisal for blowing the whistle on his advisor?
"The judge issued an order that has created an extraordinary situation: Rubin must allow German to work in his laboratory, but stay at least 30.5 meters away from him, and have no direct or indirect contact. Rubin must also provide German with all of the lab resources he had before the problems began."