All articles


  • Campus & Community

    GSD new financial aid program for international students

    Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD) Dean Alan Altshuler recently announced an expansion of GSD’s financial aid policy.

  • Campus & Community

    IOP announces pair of distinguished visiting fellows

    Harvard University’s Institute of Politics (IOP), located at the Kennedy School of Government, has announced that U.S. Sen. Carol Moseley Braun, D-Ill., and former Egyptian parliamentary member and human rights advocate Mona Makram-Ebeid will serve as IOP Visiting Fellows. Makram-Ebeid’s fellowship is under way; Moseley Braun’s fellowship will occur during the week of Nov. 12.

  • Campus & Community

    University employees honored for 25 years of service

    More than 140 Harvard employees will be honored Oct. 18 for reaching a milestone: 25 years of service to the University. The 53rd annual 25 Year Recognition Ceremony — a unique event in that it recognizes both faculty and staff from across the entire University — will be held at the Ropes-Gray Room, Pound Hall,…

  • Campus & Community

    Emergency text message service available

    As part of its evolving emergency communications procedures, Harvard University is making available text message alerts to students, faculty, and staff to be used only in the event of an extreme, campus-wide, life-threatening emergency.

  • Campus & Community

    Grad student victim of robbery

    On Saturday (Oct. 6) at approximately 12:05 a.m., a male graduate student and an unaffiliated male reported to the Cambridge Police Department (CPD) that they were the victims of an armed robbery at the corner of Broadway and Highland avenues.

  • Campus & Community

    Portrait of Amos unveiled

    A portrait of Harold Amos, who taught at Harvard for nearly half a century, was unveiled by the Harvard Foundation on Oct.4 at the Courtyard Café in the Warren Alpert Building at Harvard Medical School. Amos was a member of both the Medical School Faculty and the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. He was the…

  • Campus & Community

    Elizabeth J. Perry named director of Harvard-Yenching Institute

    Elizabeth J. Perry, a scholar whose work has illuminated the study of Chinese politics, has been appointed director of the Harvard-Yenching Institute, effective July 1, 2008.

  • Campus & Community

    Sports brief

    The Ivy League has named senior safety John Hopkins its Defensive Player of the Week for his efforts in the Harvard football team’s 32-15 dismissal of host Cornell on Oct. 6.

  • Health

    Hormone therapy for prostate cancer puts heart at risk

    Administering androgen deprivation therapy (ADT) prior to surgery and combining ADT with radiation therapy are popular approaches to treating men diagnosed with advanced or high-risk localized prostate cancer. However, the potentially negative side effects of ADT are just now being explored. Researchers at Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH) have found that ADT may increase the…

  • Health

    Researchers better understand biological clock

    Researchers at Harvard University and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) have discovered that a simple circadian clock found in some bacteria operates by the rhythmic addition and subtraction of phosphate groups at two key locations on a single protein. This phosphate pattern is influenced by two other proteins, driving phosphorylation to oscillate according to…

  • Nation & World

    How Sputnik changed U.S. education

    Education experts said Oct. 4 that the United States may be overdue for a science education overhaul like the one undertaken after the Soviet Union launched the Sputnik satellite 50 years ago, and predicted that a window for change may open as the Iraq war winds down.

  • Arts & Culture

    Harvard scientists predict the future of the past tense

    Verbs evolve and homogenize at a rate inversely proportional to their prevalence in the English language, according to a formula developed by Harvard University mathematicians who’ve invoked evolutionary principles to study our language over the past 1,200 years, from “Beowulf” to “Canterbury Tales” to “Harry Potter.”

  • Nation & World

    JFK and the Cuban missile crisis — a new assessment

    The Cuban missile crisis of October 1962 has been called the “single most serious moment in human history.” During the 40 years of the Cold War, it was the closest the United States and the Soviet Union ever came to nuclear war.

  • Health

    Mahzarin Banaji looks at biology of bias

    Mahzarin R. Banaji, a Harvard social psychologist, studies how people think, and how they think they relate to one another. She’s an expert in the little secrets we all have: those implicit attitudes — sometimes prejudicial — regarding race, age, gender, and similar territories of otherness.

  • Arts & Culture

    Redesigned Hasty Pudding Theatre is now New College Theatre

    Harvard’s newest space dedicated to the performing arts, the New College Theatre — formerly the site of the Hasty Pudding Theatre, located at 10-12 Holyoke St. — will open this fall under the auspices of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) and managed by the Office for the Arts at Harvard (OFA).

  • Arts & Culture

    Manuscript discovery brings medieval music to life

    Medieval history comes to life at Harvard University on Oct. 18, when students and guest musicians collaborate in the North American premiere of an 800-year-old chant repertory from Harvard’s Houghton Library.

  • Health

    Biologists remember landmark theory

    Forty years ago, Edward O. Wilson and Robert H. MacArthur described how size and isolation determine how many species an island can support. Last week, biologists gathered to mark the theory’s anniversary, calling it a “pivotal point” in ecology’s relatively short history.

  • Arts & Culture

    Harvey Mansfield on politics, the humanities, and science

    Harvey Mansfield wants to reintroduce the concept of thumos into political science. As employed by Plato and Aristotle, thumos refers to the “part of the soul that makes us want to insist on our own importance.” Mansfield believes that modern political science has excluded thumos, and as a result has narrowed its understanding of what…

  • Health

    Data on life expectancy show many countries clustered in high mortality ‘traps’

    Growing recognition of the importance of health as a contributing factor to economic development and societal change has prompted the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) to add a new subsection on sustainable health to its existing section on sustainable Development.

  • Campus & Community

    Police reports

    Following are some of the incidents reported to the Harvard University Police Department (HUPD) for the week ending Oct. 8. The official log is located at 1033 Massachusetts Ave., sixth floor, and is available online at http://www.hupd.harvard.edu/.

  • Health

    At HMOs, Medicaid patients fare worse than others

    Once viewed as a panacea to the nation’s health care problems, HMOs have fallen out of favor. Commercially insured patients who flooded into HMOs, or managed care, in the early 1990s left in droves by the end of the decade. Medicaid patients, however, don’t always have the luxury of choosing their health plans, and the…

  • Campus & Community

    In brief

    “Legends in Queer Performance: Can Theater Change the World?” The Edmond J. Safra Foundation Center for Ethics is now accepting applications from graduate students for its 2008-09 fellowship in ethics.

  • Campus & Community

    Initiative is designed to underscore importance of republicanism

    Daniel Carpenter’s new educational initiative will reaffirm the significance of the history of republicanism and its influence on the American political system. Carpenter is supported by an $875,000 challenge grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) to launch a program at Harvard regarding American political history and political thought.

  • Nation & World

    Treating workers like people: A history

    “The Human Relations Movement: The Harvard Business School and the Hawthorne Experiments (1924-1933),” the first in a series of exhibits to commemorate the 100th anniversary of Harvard Business School (HBS), is on view through Jan. 17 at the School’s Baker Library.

  • Nation & World

    Labor and management, together at last

    Harvard University hosted “The Future of Labor Forum” last week (Oct. 2), a first-ever conference that brought together prominent voices from the sometimes adversarial worlds of management, unions, government, and the academy.

  • Campus & Community

    Newsmakers

    It was announced Wednesday (Oct. 10) that the prestigious 2007 IZA Prize in Labor Economics goes to Harvard’s Richard B. Freeman. He was praised by the Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) in Germany for “fundamental contributions that have monumentally shaped modern labor economics.”

  • Nation & World

    ‘Who is the human in human rights?’

    What does it mean to be human? Are all people the same, and if so, entitled to an identical set of rights and treatment? Or, in the age of globalization, do wide-ranging cultural, moral, religious, and political beliefs and behaviors make the definition of humans — and therefore human rights — contingent, that is dependent…

  • Campus & Community

    President’s office hours 2007-08

    President Drew Faust will hold office hours for students and staff in her Massachusetts Hall office on the following dates:

  • Campus & Community

    FACULTY COUNCIL

    At its third meeting of the year on Oct. 10, the Faculty Council held a discussion about the role of nonmembers of the Faculty and expectations of access and confidentiality in the regular meetings of the Faculty.

  • Campus & Community

    Crimson with a touch of green

    When Drew Faust is inaugurated as Harvard’s 28th president this week, there will be more than a touch of green to go with the crimson.