Tag: Harvard News

  • Nation & World

    HKS initiative includes new professorships, student support, and research

    The John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University is announcing an ambitious new initiative linking innovative governance to the world’s major social challenges.

    3 minutes
  • Nation & World

    HKS gives $10M boost to program

    The John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University will allocate an additional $10 million to an innovative program that trains emerging leaders from developing nations with the help of funds from the Ford Foundation. The announcement was made at the 50th anniversary celebration of the Edward S. Mason Program, which was held at…

    3 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Post-election: What’s changed, what’s stayed the same

    Barack Obama will enter the White House in January with the strongest mandate of any Democratic president at least since Lyndon Johnson in 1965, and arguably since Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1933. Signs of a generational alignment, like the ones that made “Roosevelt Democrat” or “Reagan Republicans” household words are apparent.

    4 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Redressing five centuries of injustice: A start

    On May 4, 1493 — less than a year after Columbus set foot in the New World — Pope Alexander VI issued “Inter Caetera,” a papal bull that still resonates more than five centuries later.

    5 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Sen. Edward Kennedy to receive honorary degree at December convocation

    Sen. Edward Kennedy will receive an honorary degree from Harvard on Dec. 1 in a special convocation at Sanders Theatre. The honor is in recognition of Kennedy’s lifelong commitment to public service and his tireless efforts as a champion for a range of social issues including health care, civil rights, labor, employment, the environment, and…

    3 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Rights champion Goldstone speaks

    In human rights terms, Richard J. Goldstone, the 70-year-old veteran of South Africa’s highest courts and a visiting professor at Harvard Law School, has walked the walk and talked the talk — chiefly by having a role in a number of this generation’s most important humanitarian events.

    4 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Worldly Weissman Scholars talk trips

    Neagheen Homaifar ’10 helped to create a financial literacy program for a microfinance bank in Mexico City, and Samantha Fang ’10 examined practices on trade and sustainable energy while writing articles for an international organization in Geneva.

    2 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Post-colonial wars parsed at Radcliffe

    Last week, a two-day interdisciplinary conference on post-colonial wars got under way at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. The Oct. 30-31 event was the capstone of two years of private meetings at Radcliffe by high-level experts on the wars that followed independence movements in Africa and Asia after World War II.

    6 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Voter turnout approaches some records, breaks others

    Voter turnout in the 2008 presidential election was not record-breaking, but it appears that it will approach the roughly 67 percent of the eligible citizenry who voted in 1960.

    4 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Spirited discussion brings some clarity to Obama’s strategy on Middle East

    In the final days before the U.S. presidential election, the two leading candidates were too busy dashing from one rally to the next in a few battleground states to make it to the reliably blue Bay State in person.

    5 minutes
  • Nation & World

    And into the night

    It was well after midnight, and America was more than an hour into the Obama era when 02138 erupted in a series of spontaneous, ravelike street parties. In Harvard Yard, revelers dressed up the sedate, seated bronze John Harvard in a cloud of red, white, and blue balloons, and propped on his still chest an…

    1 minute
  • Nation & World

    At the Harvard Kennedy School

    The interest in this contest on the Harvard campus was apparent early at the John F. Kennedy Jr. Forum. Their election night gathering, featuring returns showing on the forum’s large screen, was ticketed for the first time. Forum officials said that 1,500 applied for the 1,000 tickets available.

    7 minutes
  • Nation & World

    A special night at the Queen’s Head pub

    At 7 p.m., with election results still the stuff of dreams, Matthew Clair pitched in to inflate balloons at the Cambridge Queen’s Head at Loker Commons. The Dunster House senior, whose Brentwood, Tenn., family, he said, was the only one in town with an Obama sign on the front lawn, is president of the Harvard…

    4 minutes
  • Nation & World

    At Harvard Law School, and beyond

    One hundred and twenty seven years later, the Harvard Law School can claim it has another alumnus in the White House. On Nov. 4, Barack Obama became the second Law School grad to ascend to the nation’s highest office.

    4 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Chall Lecture focuses on the future of literacy achievement gap

    Research shows that there have been positive trends in literacy achievement in the past 25 years. These gains, however, have not included a significant closing of the gaps between racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic groups, a fact that represents a serious issue in education today.

    4 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Electoral expert will be CBS pundit

    In Stephen Ansolabehere’s sunlit, minimalist Cambridge Street office, there’s a wide, wall-high shelf of books — not a remarkable circumstance for a Harvard professor.

    6 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Gore: Universities have important role in sustainability

    Former vice president Al Gore ’69 addressed a crowd of 15,000 in chilly, leaf-strewn Tercentenary Theatre Oct. 22, 2008, delivering the keynote address in a multi-day celebration of the University’s commitment to sustainability.

    6 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Global ‘chump change’ could provide biodiversity protection

    Harvard biologist Edward O. Wilson said the Earth’s major biological hot spots could be conserved for roughly $50 billion— an amount he termed “chump change” in a world of trillion-dollar financial bailouts.

    5 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Ban calls for international efforts

    United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon called on the United States to combat the “imminent threat” of climate change, both by reducing its own greenhouse gas emissions and by leading the effort to craft a successor to the Kyoto Protocol.

    5 minutes
  • Nation & World

    MessageMe system to be tested today

    The University will test its emergency text-messaging system, MessageMe, today (Oct. 23). A test message will be broadcast midday to more than 14,000 Harvard community members who have signed up for the alert system.

    1 minute
  • Nation & World

    Asia Programs offers master’s in public policy degree

    Asia Programs of the Ash Institute for Democratic Governance and Innovation recently announced (Oct. 16) the launch of its two-year master’s in public policy (M.P.P.) program at the Fulbright School in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.

    2 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Students watch ‘An Inconvenient Truth’

    It’s “an inconvenient truth,” but only about 25 people showed up for a Harvard screening Sunday (Oct. 19) of a film by the same name, which earned former Vice President Al Gore ’69 both an Oscar and a Nobel Peace Prize.

    4 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Controlling greenhouse gases, universities, individuals matter

    From 1850 to 2000, the use of fossil fuels worldwide grew 140-fold, a practice that has gradually filled the Earth’s atmosphere with warming gases.

    5 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Cooper: Doctor-patient relations cause health disparities

    In the United States, a black man can expect to die, on average, 10 years earlier than his white counterpart. For black women, that racial gap in life expectancy is five years.

    4 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Black holes are the heart of galaxies

    Astronomers think that many — perhaps all — galaxies in the universe contain massive black holes at their centers. New observations with the Submillimeter Array now suggest that such colossal black holes were common even 12 billion years ago, when the universe was only 1.7 billion years old and galaxies were just beginning to form.…

    3 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Dan Shore named University’s vice president for finance

    Dan Shore, director of the University’s Office of Budgets and Financial Planning since 2003 and Harvard’s acting chief financial officer since May 2008, has been named vice president for finance and chief financial officer.

    2 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Major step forward in cell reprogramming

    Imagine, if you can, a day within the next decade when a physician-scientist could remove a skin cell from your arm and with a few chemicals turn that fully formed adult cell into a dish of stem cells genetically matched to you.

    3 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Study shows what smokers need to stay clean

    Hospital-sponsored stop-smoking programs for inpatients that include follow-up counseling for longer than one month significantly improve patients’ ability to stay smoke-free. An analysis of clinical trials of programs offered at hospitals around the world finds that efforts featuring long-term support can increase participants’ chances of success by 65 percent.

    3 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Kuwait Program accepting grant proposals

    The Harvard Kennedy School (HKS) has announced the 15th funding cycle for the Kuwait Program Research Fund, which is supported by the Kuwait Foundation for the Advancement of Sciences (KFAS). An HKS faculty committee will consider applications for one-year grants (up to $30,000) and larger grants for more extensive proposals to support advanced research by…

    2 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Are boundaries between ‘the arts’ irrelevant?

    What does Harpo Marx’s bicycle horn have to do with Richard Wagner’s epic opera “The Ring of the Nibelung”? Everything, if you ask Daniel Albright, Ernest Bernbaum Professor of Literature. Albright, who studies the intellectual history of comparative arts, is currently at work on a book about the boundaries and overlaps between different artistic media.

    3 minutes