On this day in 1795, 21 Harvard students gathered in a dorm room and formed a secret social club to cultivate “friendship and patriotism.” Members agreed to take turns providing a pot of hasty pudding for the meetings. Thus did the Hasty Pudding Club, the nation’s oldest dramatic institution, get its name…
Dr. David Himmelstein is an associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and a primary care doctor at the Cambridge Hospital in Massachusetts. “Our most recent study found that nearly two-thirds of Americans who declared bankruptcy cited illness or medical bills as a significant cause of their bankruptcies. And of the medically bankrupt, three-quarters of that group had insurance, at least when they first got sick….”
Harvard’s Humanist Chaplaincy, a community for agnostics, atheists, and the nonreligious, started a free, open-to-all group this year that practices different forms of meditation, including Buddhist and Quaker, said Zachary Alexander, 26, the group’s founder.
The university’s Houghton Library recently purchased the archive he developed for his 1989 book, “What Should We Tell Our Children About Vietnam?” “It is still hard for me to believe that something that came from my head and hands will end up being preserved forever between the walls of such a great institution,” said McCloud, himself a Vietnam War veteran…
“It’s contradictory . . . because you don’t have to test, but if you do and you find it over 50 parts per million, then this whole cascade of regulatory requirements kicks in,’’ said Robert Herrick, senior lecturer at the Harvard School of Public Health…
In a celebratory forum in Lowell Lecture Hall Sept. 3, Harvard President Drew Faust and others explain and extol Harvard’s new General Education requirements, which take effect this year with the Class of 2013.
Harvard University this week unveiled its open database of faculty research, with more than a third of its arts and sciences faculty members participating so far. Since the faculty of the main undergraduate college voted in February 2008 to support the system known as Digital Access to Scholarship at Harvard, in which professors’ scholarly works are automatically included in the online repository unless they specifically opt for them not to be, Harvard’s law, government and education schools have also agreed to participate.
Massachusetts biomedical researchers are seeing a windfall from federal stimulus money, with the state receiving more in grants from the National Institutes of Health than all others but California.
Louis Byington Barnes’s practice of focused attention to speech was probably born out of his lengthy and accomplished teaching career, a legacy built on his personal mantra that teaching is, “the discipline of listening extra carefully before making interventions in the discussion.’’ He died Aug. 22 at Eastern Maine Medical Center in Bangor.
At its first meeting of the year on Sept. 2, the Faculty Council welcomed new members, elected subcommittees for 2009-2010, and discussed the work of the Council in the new…
In the latest use of the Internet and social media to counter the flu and infectious diseases, researchers from MIT and Harvard said Tuesday that iPhone users have a new means of monitoring the spread of swine flu and other disease outbreaks.
The Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations will convene a Consultative Conference on International Criminal Justice at United Nations headquarters in Manhattan Sept. 9-11.
The Harvard University Extension School will celebrate its centennial anniversary this fall. A private convocation will be held Sept. 25, and a public panel on the future of technology is slated for Nov. 18.
On Sept. 10, at 4:30 p.m., a cow will cross the Yard — in celebration of the achievements of Hollis Professor of Divinity Harvey Cox, who retired in June.
In high-profile positions in New York and at the University of California, Harvard’s new executive vice president established a reputation as a collaborative leader with a knack for creative problem-solving.
The Technology and Entrepreneurship Center at Harvard (TECH), based at SEAS, launched its new Innovation Space Sept. 1. The space expands SEAS’s resources for experiential innovation education and provides Harvard’s undergraduate student innovators with the first dedicated environment for learning and working in teams on entrepreneurial projects.
An official convocation ceremony took the place of the traditional opening exercises for Harvard College’s Class of 2013. The service included some new and old traditions.
Harvard President Drew Faust, following long tradition by leading the academic year’s first Morning Prayers service at Appleton Chapel, praised the sense of common purpose brought by a coordinated School calendar. “We have chosen a common calendar for the common good,” she said.
Professor Holly Prigerson, director of the Center for Psycho-oncology and Palliative Care Research at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute, has confronted the issue professionally and personally. Last fall Prigerson and her co-investigators published a study in The Journal of the American Medical Association examining how end-of-life care discussions between doctors and terminal patients affected the patients’ quality of life and that of their caregivers. They found that both patients and loved ones were likely to fare better, based on a variety of criteria. Yet many doctors are disinclined to broach the subject…
As the newly arrived Class of 2013 settles into the brick dormitories of Harvard Yard, they are already distinguished as the first matriculating class to study exclusively under the new requirements of Harvard College’s Program in General Education.
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