Celebrating 25th anniversary of Radcliffe Institute

Three Harvard presidents and two Nobel laureates gathered with Dean Tomiko Brown-Nagin last Thursday to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the founding of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.

During the celebration, Brown-Nagin reflected on the institute’s “unique legacy and remarkable impact” and noted the many important contributions made by Radcliffe pioneers, including Mary Ingraham Bunting, a microbiologist and the college’s fifth dean, which ultimately led to the institute’s founding and success.

“Bunting was one of the main trailblazers. She was also acknowledging the many women who were educated at Radcliffe as students who went on to become leaders in many different fields, along with prior administrators going back to Radcliffe College who, in their own way, pushed/supported the idea of what eventually became the institute as we know it in 1999,” she said. 

Brown-Nagin also announced the launch of a new three-year initiative on academic freedom and a project by Schlesinger Library to digitize its substantial collection of archival material from Radcliffe College’s own 120-year history.

The Radcliffe Institute was established in 1999 following Radcliffe College’s formal merger with Harvard.

At its heart is the fellowship program, which promotes interdisciplinary exposure for participants, with a particular focus on lending a hand to female scholars, who, for years, were very much in the minority in their departments and institutions and at a distinct disadvantage when it came to financial and professional support.

“The goal was twofold: to encourage and catalyze women’s scholarly and creative work and to discover the conditions that best supported women’s endeavors in the face of persistent societal barriers,” Brown-Nagin said.

During the celebration, Harvard President Alan M. Garber spoke with distinguished economists Claudia Goldin and Oliver Hart about their careers, the interdisciplinary nature of their work, and how today’s technology might have reshaped their prior research.

They were each awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, Goldin in 2023 and Hart in 2016.

Both laureates spent a year as Radcliffe fellows and recalled being challenged and inspired by their experience engaging with other fellows whose expertise was outside of economics — arts and humanities, hard sciences, and the law — and how they were able to use the fellowship’s time and resources to pursue research that informed their later work.

Goldin, a labor economist who is currently researching the many giant steps women have taken economically over the last several decades and “why women won,” talked about how she was able to collaborate with former fellow Claudia Olivetti, a young economist who became a valued colleague, co-author and, eventually, her best friend for the last 18 years.

“It was truly magical,” said Goldin, a 2005-06 fellow, of her time at Radcliffe.

Hart, an economic theorist and a 2020-21 fellow, said he’s most excited about what he’s working on now, research that builds on his earlier scholarship by forging an alternative approach to the traditional way legal contracts are constructed. “I think it may be, in the long run, my most significant,” he said.

Garber, an economist and physician, was appointed provost in 2011 by the then-President Drew Gilpin Faust, before stepping in earlier this year to serve as interim and now president. He recognized Brown-Nagin for her deep involvement in key University initiatives in recent years.

As a legal scholar and historian, she chaired the group that produced the Harvard Legacy of Slavery report in 2022, which made recommendations to the University about redressing harms that occurred during its 400-year history.

Brown-Nagin currently co-heads a University working group on fostering “open inquiry and constructive dialogue” that Garber said would soon issue its own report.

Gilpin Faust, president emerita of Harvard and the institute’s founding dean, presented a Radcliffe medal to Neil L. Rudenstine, the University’s president from 1991 to 2001, in recognition of his leading role in reimagining the former women’s college into a robust center of independent and interdisciplinary scholarship at Harvard.

Accepting this rare award, Rudenstine recalled the daunting challenge before them in those early days and the worry “whether we could possibly live up to the idea of a truly distinguished Advanced Institute worthy of both Radcliffe and Harvard” that would flourish like Radcliffe College had over the previous century.

Today, “the institute embodies, in my mind, exactly what we hoped it would do,” which was to sustain and embolden intellectual achievement and imagination, said Rudenstine.

“It’s done so much to bring Harvard as well as Radcliffe to the fore in ways we never could have imagined 25 years ago.”