Experience

Leaders at Harvard in and out of the classroom tell their stories in the Experience series.

Campus

‘I realized that I couldn’t say no — not because of personal ambition, but given the moment.’

Inspired by his mother, Larry Bacow decided he wasn’t done being a leader

Campus

‘If you stay the same in everything you do as things around you are changing, eventually you’re going to hit a wall. You just have to adapt and evolve and change.’

Harvard’s Tim Murphy, winningest coach in Ivy history, on trusting his gut, ‘Murphy Time,’ other life lessons

Campus

‘I’ve never done work that I was not interested in. That is a very good reason to go on.’

Amartya Sen’s nine-decade journey from colonial India to Nobel Prize and beyond

Campus

‘I wanted to warn future social movements that listening only to one’s own side can generate dangerous amounts of unrealism’

Jane Mansbridge talks about her 'jagged trajectory' to becoming one of the world’s leading scholars of democratic theory

Campus

‘I developed a sense of the enormous, great luck in managing to survive, giving me a strong feeling that I had an obligation to pay it forward’

As he prepares to retire, Laurence Tribe retraces his path from teen immigrant math whiz to leading constitutional law scholar and admired professor

Campus

‘When you see death all the time, you go into this mode of increased energy and sharper focus’

Harvard Chan School AIDS pioneer Max Essex shares lessons from the frenzied search for answers about a once-mysterious ailment

Portrait of Harvard School of Dental Medicine Dean Bruce Donoff

Campus

‘Integrating oral health and primary care can really help the health of this nation and of the world’

Bruce Donoff, University’s longest-serving current dean, details lessons learned as he prepares to hand off helm of School of Dental Medicine

Campus

‘To be horrified by inequality and early death and not have any kind of plan for responding — that would not work for me’

Paul Farmer on Partners In Health, ‘Harvard-Haiti,’ and making the lives of the poor the fight of his life

Campus

‘I was confused and inspired. I wanted to do everything’

As an architect and a teacher, Toshiko Mori made her name by making statements

Campus

‘The greatest gift you can have is a good education, one that isn’t strictly professional’

In a life of multiple pursuits, Howard Gardner has remained a student above all else

Campus

‘What the hell — why don’t I just go to Harvard and turn my life upside down?’

Family, history, and the 1960s all helped to shape Drew Faust, but it was illness that urged her forward

Campus

‘There was just no way I was going to do what everyone else did’

Pamela Silver took time to be a dreamer before science seized her imagination

Campus

‘There were just so many things that I was curious about’

Joe Nye found the adventure of a lifetime in the finer points of international power

Campus

‘You can’t let your emotions overtake you so much that you can’t do the work’

Annette Gordon-Reed’s personal history, from East Texas to Monticello

Campus

‘I had the conviction that my ideas were correct’

In America, safe from Nazi power, Martin Karplus began on a Nobel Prize journey quickened by intuition

Campus

‘If you can stay present, that’s a better place to be’

For Kathy Delaney-Smith, basketball is a mind game

Campus

‘If you’re not failing, you’re probably not trying as hard as you could be’

George Church’s scientific drive

Campus

‘People want politics to be about big things’

Michael Sandel’s passion for justice

Mallinckrodt Professor of Physics and Professor of the History of Science, Emeritus Gerald Holton is pictured in his Cambridge home. He first arrived at Harvard in 1943. Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographer

Campus

‘A completely new life was beckoning’

Beyond the reach of monsters, Gerald Holton found infinite possibilities

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Business

‘I had this extraordinary sense of liberation’

Nitin Nohria’s exhilarating journey

Campus

‘It seemed to me miraculous that you could actually hear Shakespeare or Keats speaking from the page’

Helen Vendler’s encounters with reverie

Laurel Ulrich is the 300th Anniversary University Professor at Harvard University. She is pictured in her home in Cambridge. Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographer

Campus

‘I had the advantage of disadvantage’

How Laurel Thatcher Ulrich caught up with the past

Stephen Greenblatt is the John Cogan University Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University. He is pictured in his home in Cambridge. Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographer

Campus

‘So that represented my own little rebellion’

The literary adventures of Stephen Greenblatt

Campus

‘Physics was paradise’

Melissa Franklin’s experimental zeal

Walter Willett is the Fredrick John Stare Professor of Epidemiology and Nutrition at Harvard School of Public Health. He is pictured in his home in Cambridge. Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographer

Campus

‘I spend a fair amount of time thinking about what might go wrong’

Walter Willett’s data-honed wisdom

Campus

‘What could be more interesting than how the mind works?’

Steven Pinker’s history of thought

Campus

‘I have always been temperamentally wired to carry on’

Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot’s lessons in resilience

Campus

‘My life was going to have to deal with issues of social injustice’

Martha Minow’s sense of purpose

Campus

‘Search until you find a passion and go all out to excel in its expression’

For E.O. Wilson, wonders never cease