Campus & Community

The grass wasn’t greener on the other side of the river — although for a while it sure looked like it was. Vying for their first Baseball Beanpot win in three years, the Harvard men’s baseball team took the field at Fenway Park on Monday (April 13) against the Boston College (B.C.) Eagles in the 20th annual Beanpot consolation game. And, despite a 14-hit barrage from the Eagles, the Crimson gave their state rival quite a scare.

Harvard University has a long-standing tradition of community engagement and public service. Students, faculty, and staff contribute to the quality of life in the University’s host cities through more than 350 programs addressing education, affordable housing, economic opportunity, civic life and culture, health, and the environment.

The Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University have announced this year’s winners of the Lukas Prize Project Awards. The awards, established in 1998, recognize excellence in nonfiction books that exemplify the literary grace and commitment to serious research and social concern that characterized the distinguished work of the award’s Pulitzer Prize-winning namesake J. Anthony Lukas, who died in 1997.

William R. Fitzsimmons, Harvard College’s dean of admissions and financial aid, was honored last night (April 15) by Access, the leading provider of financial aid, scholarships, and valuable advice to Boston high school students. The dean was recognized for his outstanding work ensuring that institutions of higher learning are affordable and accessible to everyone.

On Thursday (April 23), the Semitic Museum will host half-hour discussions at 11 a.m. and 1 p.m. (appropriate for grades three through six) on how ancient Israelites made bread — from planting to eating — and explore everyday life of the average villager 2,700 years ago. Students will also have the opportunity to handle original ceramic fragments and try to match them with whole vessels on display. Registration is required and limited to 15 children per session, $2 per child. For more information, call (617) 495-4631 or e-mail Dena Davis at davis4@fas.harvard.edu.

Popular author and professor of medical law Alexander McCall Smith will give a lecture under the auspices of the Edmond J. Safra Foundation Center for Ethics today (April 16).

Herbert C. Kelman, the Emeritus Richard Clarke Cabot Professor of Social Ethics, was awarded the 2009 Socrates Prize for Mediation by the Centrale für Mediation. A multidisciplinary mediation association focused on the promotion of mediation and dispute resolution in society, Centrale für Mediation recognized Kelman for his outstanding contributions to the solution of national and international conflicts at the 13th Annual Mediation Congress in Berlin. Kelman has been engaged for more than 30 years in efforts toward the resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and is a pioneer in the development of interactive problem solving, an unofficial third-party approach to the resolution of international and intercommunal conflicts.

The Melanoma Research Foundation (MRF) awarded its Established Investigator Grant to Edward E. Harlow, the Virginia and D.K. Ludwig Professor of Cancer Research and Teaching at Harvard Medical School (HMS), on Feb. 24.

For his book “The Reaper’s Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery” (Harvard University Press, 2008), Vincent Brown, the Dunwalke Associate Professor of American History, has been selected by the Organization of American Historians (OAH) as the 2009 recipient of the Melre Curti Award. The honor, presented annually, is awarded for the best book published in American social and/or intellectual history.

The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation announced its 2009-10 fellowship awardees on April 8. Five Harvard faculty members were named Guggenheim recipients, as well as one fellow from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. The winners include: Peter Galison, Pellegrino University Professor; Ingrid Monson, the Quincy Jones Professor of African-American Music; Alexander Rehding, professor of music; Jessica Eve Stern, lecturer on law, Harvard Law School; Jeannie Suk, assistant professor of law, Harvard Law School; and Priya Natarajan, fellow, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.

April 23, 1900 — Harvard runners take to the new Soldiers Field track for the first time. April 25, 1900 — Wu Tingfang, Chinese Minister to the United States, visits…

Following are some of the incidents reported to the Harvard University Police Department (HUPD) for the week ending April 13. The official log is located at 1033 Massachusetts Ave., sixth floor, and is available online at www.hupd.harvard.edu/.

Harvard University and the Harvard University Employees Credit Union today (April 15) announced a partnership that will make credit union loans available to international graduate and professional students.

In the early part of the season, the Harvard Crimson softball team has racked up their fair share of frequent-flier miles. The first 25 games of the season have seen the Crimson play up and down the East Coast — from Rhode Island to Florida — but it was about time for a game in front of a friendly crowd as Harvard opened its home schedule with a six-game series culminating in a 4-2 record — the result of two wins over the Rhode Island Rams and two split doubleheaders against Cornell and Princeton.

Mark Moore, a leading expert in criminal justice, police, management, nongovernmental organizations, and nonprofit management, has been appointed the first Herbert A. Simon Professor in Education, Management, and Organizational Behavior at the Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE), effective July 1. Moore will maintain his current appointment as the Hauser Professor of Nonprofit Organizations at the John F. Kennedy School of Government (HKS).

A former Massachusetts water official is proposing a new network of central Massachusetts reservoirs to meet population-driven demand that he says will outstrip current supplies in the coming decades.

Morris Simon, MB, BCH, died suddenly and unexpectedly on January 17, 2005, one day after his 79th birthday. At the time of his death he was professor emeritus at Harvard Medical School and working regularly in the Department of Radiology at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, as he had for almost a half century.

The University will test its emergency text-messaging system, MessageMe, on April 16. The test message will be broadcast midday to more than 14,000 Harvard community members who have signed up for the alert system to date.

Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) Dean Michael D. Smith will host a town meeting for faculty and staff to update the community on the financial challenges facing FAS; talk about the progress made toward solving these challenges; and present the next steps to address the budget shortfalls projected for FY10 and FY11. The meeting will take place in Sanders Theatre on Tuesday (April 14) at 4 p.m. The April 14 faculty meeting has been canceled.

In an e-mail sent Monday (April 6) to Harvard students, faculty, and staff, Harvard College Dean Evelynn Hammonds and Faculty of Arts and Sciences Dean Michael D. Smith announced that Harvard College will be closed during the 2009-2010 mid-year break, between the end of exams in December and the first day of classes in January.

Effective April 1, unleashed pets will no longer be allowed in Harvard Yard. All pets, with the exception of service animals, must be on a leash at all times.

A memorial service for Samuel P. Huntington, who was the Albert J. Weatherhead III University Professor at Harvard, will be held on April 22 at 3 p.m. in the Memorial Church in Harvard Yard. Huntington, a longtime Harvard University professor, an enormously influential political scientist, and a mentor to a generation of scholars in widely divergent fields, died Dec. 24. He was 81.

Venkatesh “Venky” Narayanamurti will be the new director of the Science, Technology, and Public Policy Program at Harvard Kennedy School’s (HKS) Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Belfer Center director Graham Allison announced April 1.

For the second consecutive season, the Harvard Crimson men’s golf team found success in New Haven, Conn., capturing the Yale Spring Opener behind the play of senior John Christensen and juniors Danny Mayer and Greg Shuman, who finished first, second, and third, respectively, in the tournament.

The Harvard women’s golf team, which before this past weekend (April 4-5) had won each of the five tournaments they competed in this season, made it six-for-six on Sunday (April 5), completing the 2009 Brown Invitational 34 strokes ahead of second-place finisher Boston College.

In dramatic fashion, the Harvard men’s baseball team took three-of-four from Cornell and Princeton this past weekend (April 4-5), with the help of three key walk-off hits, two from Tom Stack-Babich ’09 and one from Taylor Meehan ’09.

The Phillips Brooks House Association (PBHA) will host its sixth annual Auction for the Summer Urban Program at the Cambridge Queen’s Head Pub (45 Quincy Street) on April 28 from 5:30 to 8:30 p.m. The event will support PBHA’s 12 summer camps, which serve more than 900 children and youth in Boston and Cambridge.

Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s PBS documentary “African American Lives 2” has won the Parents’ Choice Gold Award for Television, awarded last month by the Parents’ Choice Foundation.

Michael Aaron Lambert, assistant professor of medicine in Harvard Medical School, received the inaugural Thomas H. Lee M.D. Award for Excellence in Primary Care on April 3. Lambert is the medical director of Southern Jamaica Plain Health Center in Boston.

April 5, 1898 — Responding to the Spanish-American War, 1st Lt. Wirt Robinson, Instructor in Military Science, solicits volunteers to drill under his supervision. Sixty students show up the next day. By May, more than 400 have responded.