Summers’ Installation set

Final details were being set into place this week – along with thousands of chairs in Harvard’s Tercentenary Theatre – in preparation for installing Lawrence H. Summers as Harvard University’s 27th president on Friday (Oct. 12).

The tradition-rich ceremony, scheduled to begin at 2 p.m. with an academic procession, is open to members of the Harvard community. It will feature speeches by Undergraduate Council President Paul A. Gusmorino, Harvard Alumni Association President Karen Spencer Kelly, and Yale University President Richard Levin.

The centerpiece of the ceremony will be Summers’ installation by Senior Fellow Robert G. Stone Jr. and Board of Overseers President Richard E. Oldenburg, and Summers’ subsequent speech.

Six symposia, on topics ranging from brain science to ethics and the market economy, will lend an academic air to the day. The symposia, which begin at 9:45 a.m., are open first to invited ticket holders.

A limited number of tickets to the symposia will be available to the Harvard community on a first-come, first-served basis. Tickets can be picked up at the Harvard Ticket Office in the Holyoke Center arcade between noon and 6 p.m. today. Tickets can also be picked up at the Ticket Office between 8:30 and 9:45 a.m. on the day of the Installation, Oct. 12. Up to two tickets will be given to Harvard I.D. card holders. Signs indicating the locations of the symposia will be posted at the ticket office. Ticket holders will be admitted to the symposia after 9 a.m.; doors will be closed at 10 a.m.

The symposia and moderators

• “Science on the Edge,” Dudley R. Herschbach, Frank B. Baird Jr. Professor of Science 
• “The Company of Educated Men and Women: Challenges for the Twenty-First-Century Undergraduate Experience,” Richard J. Light, Walter H. Gale Professor of Education 
• “The Professional Ethic Meets the Market Economy: Professional Education in a Global Society,” Dennis F. Thompson, Alfred North Whitehead Professor of Political Philosophy 
• “Balancing the Scales: Global Inequality and the Challenge of Development,” Michael Kremer, professor of economics 
• “Brain Science and the Science of Learning,” Jerome Kagan, Daniel and Amy Starch Research Professor of Psychology 
• “Great Art, Mass Culture: Distinguishing the Enduring from the Entertaining,” Elaine Scarry, Walker M. Cabot Professor of Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value.