Fifteen Minutes Magazine: April 2022

A Secret at the hearth of Adams house FM FIFTEEN MINUTES

FIFTEEN MINUTES

FIFTEEN MINUTES

THE CRIMSON’S WEEKLY MAGAZINE

FM CHAIRS

Maliya V Ellis ’24

Sophia S. Liang ’23

EDITORS-AT-L ARGE

Josie F. Abugov ’22-’23

Kevin Lin ’23

ASSOCIATE EDITORS

Rebecca E.J. Cadenhead ’23-’24

Sarah W Faber ’24

Saima S. Iqbal ’23

Tess C. Kelley ’23

Akila V. Muthukumar ’23

Harrison R. T. Ward ’23

Maya M. F Wilson ’24

Meimei Xu ’24

WRITERS

Simon J. Levien ’24 Mariah Norman ’25

Benjy B. Wall-Feng ’25 Tamar Sarig ’23

Francesca J. Barr ’22 Jem K. Williams ’25

Graham R. Weber ’25 June K. Fergus ’25

HewsonP. Duffy ’25 Akila V. Muthukumar ’23

Sammy Duggasani ’25 Kendrick N. Foster ’22

FM DESIGN EXECS

Max H. Schermer ’24

Michael Hu ’25

S ophi a Sa l amanc a ’25

FM PHOTO EXEC

Joey Huang ’24

PHOTOGRAPHERS

Julian J. Giordano ’25

Santiago A. Saldivar ’24

Ben Y. Cammarata ’25

DESIGNERS

Samantha Simpson ’25

PRESIDENT

Raquel Coronell Uribe ’23

MANAGING EDITOR

Jasper G. Goodman ’23

BUSINESS MANAGER

Amy X. Zhou ’23

COVER DESIGN

Madison A. Shirazi ’24

EDITORS’ NOTE

Dear Reader,

At this point in the semester, reality is starting to blur. Late nights bleed into early mornings, the diluted d-hall coffee does little to bust our brain fog, and we shuffle around campus, heads down, barely aware of our surroundings. We’re past the gloom of March but not yet in the warmth of May (also known as April), in that misty, liminal space postspring break but pre-reading period.

It’s the perfect atmosphere, we think, for a real-life mystery. In this issue’s scrutiny, Simon J. “Sherlock” Levien uncovers the dark truth about a century-old fireplace in Adams House: it has racist caricatures sculpted into its pillars. House administrators have yet to formally, publicly acknowledge these sculptures — on the contrary, they’ve boarded them up to divert students’ attention away. Their cover-up and subsequent silence have garnered criticism from former Adams residents who expressed their desire to see the fireplace uncovered, its context explained, and an open, honest dialogue facilitated between the University and its students. How do we construct a more just future for Harvard, a university with racism literally built into its foundation?

The fireplace in Westmorly Court is a reminder that this campus is full of history, much of it unsavory and still unknown. We invite you to probe, push, cause a little trouble, and always, always ask questions.

For example, here’s a sampling of (slightly lighter) queries that motivated us this month: How real is BeReal, really? Who’s ringing those damn Lowell bells? What do those Harvard Yard squirrels get up to after hours? What would happen, hypothetically, if one were to obtain 16 post-graduate degrees? This issue may or may not answer these questions — and it will definitely pose some more.

Speaking of which, we have a question for you: What are you still doing reading this note? There’s a whole issue waiting to be uncovered.

Happy sleuthing, SSL & MVE

THE RUSSIAN BELL RINGERS SOCIETY RINGS OUT SUPPORT FOR UKRAINE

Georgiy A. Kent ‘22, the former president of the Lowell House Society of Russian Bell Ringers, decided to play the Ukrainian national anthem on the bells.

Photo by Julian J. Giordano.

When Russia launched a military invasion of Ukraine on Thursday, Feb. 24, Georgiy A. Kent ’22 watched in anger and dismay as his family’s home region came under attack. Kent, a former president of The Lowell House Society of Russian Bell Ringers, decided to spearhead an emergency ringing of Lowell’s bells in a symbolic display of solidarity with Ukraine.

Around 4:30 p.m. that day, people around Harvard’s campus heard the bells playing the Ukrainian anthem.

Kent joined the Russian Bell Ringers Society during his first year at Harvard. His connection to both Ukraine and Russia has motivated him to be a part of the Society to preserve the culture shared by both countries — he spent five years living in Kyiv with his older sister and mother, who is Crimean Tatar. “Ukraine and Russia are predominantly Eastern Orthodox, and bell ringing is a tradition [celebrated] in both countries,” he says.

For Kent, the close-knit Society is one of his main communities on campus. For their social gatherings, Kent says the bell ringers often enjoy snacks from a Russian store in Allston called BazaAr Supermarket. This week, Kent and his fellow bell ringers are celebrating Maslenitsa, which he says is like the Eastern Orthodox version of Mardi Gras, after their regular Sunday ringing.

In his last two years as the society’s president, Kent has worked on promoting cultural exchange among Society members, alumni, and bell ringers from around the world — but the Society already has a long history of cultural exchange.

The Bell Ringers Society has a long-standing partnership with the Danilov Monastery in Moscow. In 1930, Charles R. Crane, a wealthy American businessman, bought 17 bells from the monastery and donated them to Lowell in an attempt to prevent Stalinist government officials from melting them down. In 2008, the bells were returned to Danilov Monastery and exchanged for a replica set with the help of Father Roman Ogryskov, lifelong bell ringer

and hierodeacon of the monastery.

According to Kent, Father Roman visits Lowell every other year to hold master classes on bellringing techniques with the Society.

Before the pandemic, groups of Harvard bell ringers would travel to Russia for two weeks in the summer to study bell culture, tour sites of bell production, and practice ringing bells at various monasteries around Russia. “This is the cultural exchange that we were able to experience firsthand,” Kent explains.

The Society has not been able to visit Russia since the summer of 2018, and Father Roman’s last visit was in early 2020. With the pandemic, recent war, and airspace sanctions, Kent says it is unclear when the group will resume its exchange.

Though he recently retired from his two-year presidency in the Society, Kent maintains his engagement with the organization by mentoring the next generation of bell ringers. If you happen to be in Lowell House on a Sunday around noon, you might run into Kent wearing his signature black Karakul hat, discussing logistics with his ringers near the entrance of the bell tower.

Kent refrains from characterizing the Bell Ringersw Society as Russian-centered. He says that his relationship with the organization has not changed as a result of the war, as the Society ultimately is a community that values cultural exchange and understanding. “It just happens that the bells came from a Russian monastery,” Kent says. “At the end of the day, Eastern Orthodox bells are Eastern Orthodox bells, and they make the same sounds.”

Now, Kent utilizes the Society as a platform for not only cultural exchange but also solidarity and advocacy. Some of the bell ringers recently joined hundreds of demonstrators in a rally urging the University to publicly denounce the Ukrainian invasion.

“Even though we have Russian in our official name, we’re more than that,” Kent says. “We’re a community of bell ringers who are supportive of Ukraine, their independence, and sovereignty.”

When Russia launched a military invasion of Ukraine on Thursday, Feb. 24, Georgiy A. Kent ’22, former president of the Bell Ringer’s Society, watched in anger and dismay as his family’s home region came under attack.

Benjamin B. Bolger Has No PostGraduation Plans

JUNE K. FERGUS & GRAHAM R. WEBER

Benjamin B. Bolger never bothered to collect his diploma from Dartmouth College. He could easily retrieve his degree — a Master of Arts in Liberal Studies — from the administrative office, but he is satisfied with the symbolic green tube that he received during his 2004 commencement ceremony. At some point, Bolger explains, he’ll probably pick up his certificate when he returns for a Dartmouth football game. “I have the education. That’s what I’m most concerned about,” he says.

Bolger’s Dartmouth degree was just another addition to his veritable arsenal of academic qualifications. He has graduated from some of the world’s most prestigious institutions, including Harvard, Brown, Columbia, Stanford, Dartmouth, Cambridge, Stanford, and Oxford. He now lives in Cambridge, Mass., where he is the head teaching fellow for a course in Harvard College’s General Education Program. He is also working virtually toward his 17th degree — in writing for performance from the University of Cambridge.

asking follow-up questions. “The lions are gonna get hungry. I mean, how does this work?” he recalls asking.

Diagnosed with severe dyslexia as a child, Bolger struggled to find his footing in various elementary schools and finally dropped out in the third grade. Bolger’s mother, a teacher, decided to homeschool him. They would drive in their 1978 Ford pickup truck on field trips to Gettysburg or the Air and Space Museum. At age 12, Bolger enrolled in courses at Muskegon Community College near his home in Grand Haven, Mich.

Bolger’s childhood was also marked by personal tragedy. At age two-and-a-half, Bolger and his family suffered a devastating car crash that left both his mother and father in intensive care. Though his parents survived, defying doctors’ predictions, he witnessed their harrowing recoveries throughout his childhood. “I hope a lot of children have carefree childhoods,” Bolger says. “But, I really, at a young age, realized that I could have been orphaned. And so that really made me understand truly how fragile life is.”

Ever since the accident, Bolger has forced himself to sleep just four or five hours a night. “If I die at an early age,” Bolger says, “I will have at least experienced more life because I’ve been awake more, both literally and figuratively.”

Academic achievement did not always come easily for the perpetual student. Bolger says he was expelled from his preschool, called Noah’s Ark, because of his curiosity about the school’s namesake story. Unsatisfied with the teacher’s responses, Bolger kept

While awake, he exerts a superhuman level of attention that showcases his extensive knowledge on wide-ranging topics. In just an hour-and-a-half interview, Bolger discussed telemedicine in rural communities, the prison system, gravity, Paulo Freire’s “Pedagogy of the Oppressed,” and brutalist architecture. Asked to select his favorite national park, Bolger mentions that he loves the Grand Canyon. But rather than admiring its beauty, Bolger

“Other people might read a magazine article in The Economist,” Bolger says.

“Maybe I’ll do a master’s degree instead on the topic.”

emphasizes how water cutting through rocks “speaks to plate tectonics” and is a “metaphorically powerful statement,” especially given that “a big part of our bodies are water.”

Bolger constantly looks for opportunities to learn from his surrounding — be it the Grand Canyon and his professors or the laundry list of celebrities he has encountered. At Harvard alone, Bolger recalls overhearing the Winklevoss twins complain about Mark Zuckerberg and having many “unbelievably great conversations” with Amanda S. C. Gorman ’20. “I try to be humble,” Bolger tells us, before sharing a digital copy of his award from Harvard University’s Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning — his 13th distinction from the Center, he notes.

Bolger’s website features a repository of well over 100 pictures he’s taken with influential and famous people — including three former presidents, four Supreme Court justices, senators, governors, mayors, Syracuse University’s cheerleading team, Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield of Ben & Jerry’s, Yo Yo Ma, Fat Joe, I.M. Pei, and Robin Williams.

Bolger funds his unique lifestyle with revenue from Bolger Strategic, an admissions consulting firm that he describes as “highly successful” in an email.

Bolger is quick to add that, because of his financial success, he holds an Amex Personal Black Card and an Amex Business Black Card, making him “one of a very select group of people in the world” with this honor.

Today, Bolger shares his passion for learning with his two children, seven-year-old Benjamina Brook Bolger and two-year-old Benjamin Blitz Bolger. (“We love ‘B’s,” he says.) Their education began long before their homeschooling, as Bolger read books to them from outside the womb. “From day one, we’ve been focused on a comprehensive education,” Bolger says.

Benjamina and Benjamin Jr.’s educations also include access to many notable figures, such as writer and activist Gloria Steinem, whom Bolger introduced to Benjamina so that she would learn not to “accept the status quo.” Bolger’s dedication to his children’s education has seemingly paid off. At age six, Benjamina published her first book, “Guri: The Very Friendly Owl.”

For Bolger, education is not a means to an end but the end itself. Bolger has a slew of qualifications, but if there’s one thing he can teach us, it is about the endless pursuit of curiosity. “Embrace being eccentric,” he says.

Benjamin B. Bolger holds 16 post-graduate degrees from some of academia’s most prestigious institutions. Photo by Santiago A. Saldivar.

Duane R. Wesemann leads a Harvard Medical School team that researches the maximal immune response a vaccine could muster to protect against multiple strains of Covid-19. Photo courtesy of Duane R. Wesemann.

A vaccine for the next pandemic

Akila V. Muthukumar

Anew variant of Covid-19 has been popping up every few months, each time adding a new letter to the Greek alphabet soup: alpha, delta, and omicron are just the latest. With every variant comes a rise in cases and a delay to returning to normal life.

Researchers, too, are having a hard time keeping up. “You’re always waiting for the variant to appear and then pushing as quickly as possible to try to catch up,” says David E. Anderson, former professor

headquartered in Cambridge, Mass.

Biotech giants like Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech were able to make potent mRNA vaccines within six months of the outbreak in the United States — a feat Anderson says is “the equivalent of when we put a man on the moon.”

evolving virus as it develops increasingly unrecognizable spike proteins.

of

neurobiology at Harvard Medical School and the current chief scientific officer of Variation Biotechnologies Inc., a biopharmaceutical company

However, these vaccines won’t last in the long term. Current Covid-19 mRNA-based vaccines rely on recognizing a specific spike protein — the more a vaccine looks like the virus it aims to target, the more potent it will be. While this specificity has made vaccines incredibly effective against current strains, they cannot keep up with the quickly-

As a result, many researchers are trying to develop an entirely different type of vaccine — a universal one. A pan-coronavirus vaccine would protect against strains of Covid-19, a future strain of SARS-CoV-3, or even a new coronavirus that might not yet have jumped from animals to humans. The idea has been endorsed by Anthony S. Fauci, chief medical advisor to the president and director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease.

In a January 2022 New England Journal of Medicine op-ed, Fauci wrote: “our ongoing experience with the current Covid-19

pandemic, together with the everpresent threat of the emergence of other potentially pandemic coronaviruses, necessitates the expeditious development of safe and broadly protective coronavirus vaccines.”

Moderna and Pfizer’s approach “is a game where you’re playing catch up constantly,” Anderson says. “This pan-coronavirus candidate is to stop chasing the variance and get ahead of it.”

VBI’s team of 35 scientists are working on a pan-coronavirus vaccine that exposes the immune system to multiple variants at the same time, to “educate it.”

“We thought we could teach the immune system to be more broadly reactive,” Anderson says.

Human immune systems have two strategies for addressing threats — one is hardwired from birth to sense and respond to infections, while the other is made of T and B cells that respond adaptively to foreign invaders, including vaccines, by secreting customized antibodies.

As an analogy, Anderson says you can imagine the spike proteins from three virus variants — MERS-CoV, SARS-CoV-1, and Covid-19 — are red, yellow, and blue. The VBI team hypothesizes that after being exposed to different variants, the immune system could learn to recognize mixtures of these colors.

“If a B cell or an antibody saw the red, and then it saw the yellow, it might start seeing a shade of orange somewhere in between,” he says. “Or if it saw the yellow spike, and then the blue spike, it might actually see … a shade of green.” After seeing these mixed shades, antibodies would be able to target a greater variety of viruses for destruction by the immune

system.

While the VBI team studies how the immune system might better identify these spike proteins, researchers at HMS are studying how to make it harder for the proteins to escape from the immune system.

Duane R. Wesemann, an immunologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and professor at Harvard Medical School, is leading this research. In September, his group received one of just three NIAID grants issued to search for a pan-coronavirus vaccine.

Wesemann’s team is interested in the maximal immune response that a vaccine could muster to protect against multiple strains of Covid-19 and potentially even multiple coronaviruses — though he notes that its potency against an unknown strain, whose spike proteins have not yet been characterized, would be much lower.

Immune responses are driven by neutralizing antibodies, which can block the entry of a virus into healthy cells. Wesemann’s team is manipulating several variables, including vaccine delivery methods, vaccine dosage, target regions of spike proteins from different variants, and the timing of spike protein delivery, with the aim of making these neutralizing antibodies as strong as possible.

Early results from both VBI and HMS are promising, suggesting that it is possible to optimize the immune system to recognize multiple variants. But only time will tell if a pancoronavirus vaccine can prevent the next pandemic.

“You don’t want to overpromise when you have pretty early stage clinical development ongoing,” says Nicole E. Anderson,

the Director of Corporate Communications & Investor Relations at VBI. “It’s encouraging, but it’s also early days, and we have to see it bear out in the clinic and see it put into humans, hopefully in the middle of this year.”

The approaches to developing a pan-coronavirus vaccine are just as diverse as the viruses they are targeting — and the process has revealed many gaps in our fundamental understanding of the immune system.

“We’re not quite masters of understanding our own immune system in terms of predicting what happens with a vaccine or how to make a proper response to a pathogen,” Wesemann says. “So is it possible to make a universal HIV vaccine or universal flu vaccine? Is it possible to make a pan-coronavirus vaccine that really is highly potent? We don’t know.”

A closeup of the inner figure on the left pillar of the Westmorly Court fireplace, thought to be a racist caricature. In either sport or war, this statue is purported to depict an Asian person.

A SECRET AT THE HEARTH OF ADAMs HOUSE

Simon J. Levien

Photo by Simon J. Levien.

Westmorly Court, the stately brick building on Bow St., had all the trappings of the most lavish dormitory in Adams House. With its dark oak paneling and diamond-leaded window panes, it was so luxurious that when Franklin D. Roosevelt, Class of 1904, called the building home, his housing costs were nearly double the price of tuition.

Though the interior has faded slightly with age, traces of Westmorly’s former opulence remain. When I pull open the curved doors to A entryway, I step into a red-carpeted lobby fit for a small metropolitan hotel. To my immediate right stands a gargantuan granite fireplace. It spans the entire wall from floor to ceiling, with a hearth deep enough to walk into and two pillars, thick as tree trunks, supporting its sides. Before the days of central heating, you could hurry in on a cold winter evening, take a fireside seat, and warm up before heading upstairs to bed.

But if you take more than a cursory glance, it becomes clear that something is off about this fireplace. The octagonal pillars are faux and oversized, too new and too bulky. They’re not solid stone but

rather panels painted light gray, a slightly different shade than the granite behind them. Someone has tried to make them look as though they belong but didn’t quite succeed. I knock on one of the pillars. It’s hollow. What’s behind there?

After nearly a year of research and reporting, I would come to learn that what’s behind the panels are in fact the two original stone pillars, each adorned with three gargoyle-esque sculptures. The six figures crouch at the top of the pillars, impishly posed as if they’re holding up the mantel on their backs. But these aren’t your standard-fare Gothic grotesques — they’re racist caricatures. Little men with their proportions twisted and exaggerated, a heavy-handed rendering of “civilized” and “uncivilized” races. And they’ve been covered up. ***

Those panels weren’t always there.

In her senior year of college, Cory A. Ransom ’19 lived in Westmorly Court, and her route home would take her through the A-entryway lobby. She normally whisked right past the fireplace on her way to her room. But one day, as she lingered in the lobby to chat with a few friends, her eyes caught the

What the boarded-up fireplace looks like in the Westmorly A-entryway lobby in 2022. The panels enclosing the sculptures on either pillar are noticeably oversized and off color.

Photo by Simon J. Levien.

sculptures, then in full view.

“I happened to look up, and I saw the — I guess it’s a very poor depiction of the African man, the savage,” Ransom recalls. “I remember taking pictures of it being like: ‘this is insane. It is insane.’”

Next to “the savage” was a figure ostensibly meant to represent an amalgamation of Indigeneous cultures, wearing a large, feathered headdress and a ring in its protruding nose. Together, the trio of figures on the left pillar depicted an African, Indigenous, and Asian figure holding a club, a ball, and a stick respectively, as if they were participating in sport or war. In contrast, the righthand pillar depicted figures with European features participating in learned activities; a monkish figure held an open book.

Ransom was taken aback.“I’ve walked by it a million times before,” she says, “never even noticing that there’s this blatantly racist image of how the people who built it saw me and saw my people.”

A handful of other Adams House residents had noticed the sculptures, too. Amelia Y. Goldberg ’19 took photos of the fireplace in October 2018 and brought up the issue with the Adams House faculty deans at the time, John G. “Sean” Palfrey ’67 and Judith S. “Judy” Palfrey ’67, who both retired in 2021. Goldberg says the deans told her they knew about the fireplace, and it was “on their radar” to address.

By the time Westmorly residents returned from winter break in 2019, construction around the fireplace had begun. Two massive, hollow pillars — colored as if to mimic the granite, with architectural flourishes made

to look like they belonged — were built to surround the sculptures. Carmella Verrastro ’19, who lived in Westmorly that year, says that when she returned from winter break, “they had just plastered these weird columns over the statues.”

“I was like, wow, they’re really going to cover it up like that and not say anything about it?” she says.

Three years later, they still haven’t. Since spring 2019, the figures on the fireplace have been hidden behind semi-permanent walls, out of sight and out of mind. Harvard College and Adams House administrators have never formally, publicly acknowledged these racist sculptures, nor the fact that they were boarded up.

Administrators say it wasn’t the right time to draw students’ attention to the fireplace without a clear process in place to subsequently handle it; they were awaiting further guidance from several different committees across the University tasked with examining visual culture issues.

Nearly all of those committees have since completed their work, and all of their reports have recommended holding transparent conversations to confront the uglier aspects of Harvard’s past. But in the case of the racist sculptures, such conversations have yet to take place as administrators continue to dawdle. They seem committed to avoiding the subject instead, stonewalling curious students as well as my own reporting efforts.

A

This literal and figurative cover-up has garnered criticism from recent Adams alumni who want Harvard to practice the transparency it preaches —

close-up shot of the purported Indigenous figure with a large headdress, ball in hand, and a ring hanging from its nose. Courtesy of Amelia Y. Goldberg.

A close-up shot of the “savage” figure holding a club on the left pillar of the fireplace. A senior, then living in Westmorly Court, took this photo in October 2018. Courtesy of Amelia Y. Goldberg.

the right time to talk about the fireplace in Westmorly Court, these former residents say, is right now.

‘Pompeiian Extravagance’

“It was a surreal experience that something this grotesque was in the building I lived in,” Ransom says, reflecting on the sculptures. “The reminder that Harvard was never built for people like me to be there. It’s honestly really hard tofindwords.”

The entryway where the fireplace is located was built in 1902, four years after Westmorly Court first opened. Michael D. Weishan ’86, who maintains the historic Westmorly suite where FDR once lived, wrote that “Westmorly Hall of 1902 was newly built to house the newly rich.” Before Harvard established its house system, Westmorly was a private dormitory where only well-to-do students could afford tolive.

The dorm was designed by the architectural firm Warren & Wetmore as an early project in their burgeoning partnership. The pair would go on to build even more palatial commissions, like Grand Central Station and the NewYorkYachtClub.

Crimson articles written in the dorm’s heyday — and even those published after Harvard purchased the building in 1920 — laudeditsgrandiosedecor.

“Adams House is all things to all men,” a 1933 Crimson article read. “To the aesthete it is a gold-plated reconstruction of the glories that were Venice with a touch of Florentine, Aztec, NeoPlatonic,andColonialinfluence”

A St. Louis Post-Dispatch article from 1937 described

Westmorly as having all the “Pompeiian extravagance” of a social club: a private swimming pool, “exclusive squash courts,”

Cory A. Ransom ’19 was living in Westmorly Court’s A entryway when she noticed the lobby fireplace had sculptures depicting racist caricatures. Courtesy of Cory A. Ransom.

liveried servants who attended to students’ electric push-bell calls or pressed their garments. It was a way of dormitory life that was distinctly white, male, and upperclass.

Decades later, Ransom says she was still “feeling the weight of being a Black woman at Harvard.” Race was “at the forefront” of her mind amid the affirmative action admissionstrialinhersenioryear, and that burden, combined with the racist sculptures “hidden in plain sight” as she returned to her room each day, left her exhausted.

‘We Certainly Don’t Want Them to Notice It Now’

Though they had all brought up

The entrance portal to Westmorly Court’s A entryway, which opened in 1902. Westmorly Court was a private dormitory known for the lavish lifestyle its residents afforded.

In this undated photo, a student uses the Westmorly fireplace, with its then-exposed sculptures, as a climbing wall.

their concerns about the fireplace to their deans, neither Ransom nor Verrastro nor Goldberg ever got a follow-up. But unbeknownst to them, Adams administrators had been privately deliberating about the fireplace since at least 2017, as a result of students’ complaints over the years. The faculty deans were working alongside the House

Photo by Simon J. Levien.

Renewal Advisory Committee (HRAC), which dealt with issues related to the forthcoming Westmorly renovations, to figure out what to do with the fireplace.

Dean of Administration and Finance Sheila C. Thimba, the College’s liaison to this committee, was the only administrator willing to tell me on-record what the sculptures appear to depict. Thimba says the fireplace issue kept being raised by students within Adams House, and the Palfreys sought to address it toward the end of their tenure as faculty deans.

“They were saying they haven’t done anything about it, but they feel not great about never having done anything,” Thimba says. “We covered the fireplace as a temporary way of dealing with the issue.”

According to a 2019 email correspondence between administrators I obtained, house renewal architect Nathaniel F. R. Rogers ’05 was tasked with going to Columbia University, which holds many of Warren & Wetmore’s papers, to research the architects and their fireplace. He came up with little information on what the artist intended the figures to represent, according to the email. (Rogers and his firm, Beyer Blinder Belle, which is handling the ongoing renovation of Adams House, declined to comment, directing my inquiries back to a College spokesperson.)

“We were able to find some information, but not as much information as we would have liked,” former Faculty of Arts and Sciences Assistant Dean Merle Bicknell, who sat on the HRAC, tells me in an interview. In one of the emails between administrators, Bicknell expressed her reluctance to engage students before understanding more of the fireplace’s history.

I didn’t have any more luck — I enlisted a Columbia journalism student to visit the archive, and they confirmed it held only scant references to Westmorly Court. At other archives both at Harvard and around Boston, I couldn’t locate substantive information on the fireplace.

Regardless of the artist’s specific intentions, though, the sculptures are steeped in the context of the Gilded Age’s exclusive social values and are undeniably problematic by today’s standards.

“There were numerous such sculptures at other colleges and institutions in the era … that were intended to mark groups that needed civilization and elevation to full western civilization status,”

George E. Thomas, who leads the Critical Conservation program at the Graduate School of Design, wrote in an email after reviewing photos of the fireplace sculptures.

Thimba says the HRAC and the Palfreys consulted Harvard faculty, art historians, and Adams House affiliates. Ultimately, she says, Adams affiliates decided that the figures should be removed.

“The house leadership team felt strongly that the figures in question were incompatible with the house’s longstanding ethos of inclusivity,” former Adams Resident Dean Adam MuriRosenthal wrote in an email. “Plans were put in place for the [figures’] removal.”

But according to Bicknell, the fireplace could not be carted off so easily, as its stone is structural to the building. A full removal would have to wait until Westmorly went under the knife in phase three of the Adams House renewal process. (With Randolph Hall renovations underway, Adams is still in phase two, after delays due to Covid-19.)

When asked about the longterm removal of the whole fireplace, Thimba says, “It’s been decided that it will need to be decided.”

For the meantime, the house renewal architects and the HRAC presented the Palfreys with a few alternatives. The particular blocks containing the sculptures could be sent to a museum and replaced with plain granite. The fireplace could be left as-is but contextualized with some sort of plaque nearby. It could also be obscured from view.

Opening up discussion on the fireplace was not something the committee was keen on, for fear of vandalism and subsequent disciplinary action, Thimba says.

A portrait of Dean Sheila C. Thimba.

Courtesy of Harvard Public Affairs and Communications.

She was reminded of the 2016 case of a Yale employee who was fired for smashing a stained glass window that depicted enslaved people.

“This was on our minds, that the more attention brought to this and the more conversation is happening about there not being action around some of these issues, the more likely we would have an [Administrative] Board case come out of this where somebody has destroyed property and you’re in this ugly moment,” she says.

Keeping the fireplace intact and contextualizing the figures with a plaque or description was also not something Thimba felt was appropriate. After all, the architects didn’t have much archival material to reference, and a plaque would only attract more eyes to the fireplace.

“What would make it make sense to keep it and then drive additional attention to something that we were thinking, as a group, we would rather not draw attention to?” Thimba asks, rhetorically. “Well, if there’s a contingent of folks who walk by it and never notice it, we certainly don’t want them to notice it now, right?”

So the Palfreys decided to board up the fireplace pillars. According to Thimba, this was intended as a stopgap measure until they

Shots of the left pillar’s statues, which are purported to caricature an African person and an Indigenous person, taken before the carvings were encased.

received more information on which to base a discussion. At the time, a number of committees were springing up around the University to address, at least in part, the problematic artifacts of Harvard history.

In an emailed statement, Judy Palfrey wrote that “we did not hold house wide meetings because we understood there were collegewide committees forming to look at all such objects and learn their provenance and meanings.” She added: “We felt that this process would be inclusive and would provide the kind of teachable material that we did not possess at the time.”

“Doing nothing is not really an option,” Thimba says, recollecting the decision-making process at the time. “We need to do something, but we can’t do something permanent yet … So let’s cover it and hope that by the time we need to make that permanent decision, the various committees and various panels that were supposed to speak to these questions would have given us some guidance about how to think about problematic art.”

‘You Have to Acknowledge It’

But when that guidance did come, it seemed to indicate that covering up problematic imagery

without public discussion — as the deans had already done in boarding up the fireplace pillars — might do more harm than good.

Judy Palfrey wrote in an emailed statement that at the time she and her husband decided to cover up the fireplace pillars, they were waiting for recommendations from three different committees: the Presidential Task Force on Inclusion and Belonging, the Working Group on Symbols and Spaces of Engagement, and the HRAC. Aaron M. Goldman, a spokesperson for the Dean of Students Office, wrote that Thimba was waiting for the same groups’ recommendations.

The Presidential Task Force on Inclusion and Belonging primarily set University-wide diversity and inclusion goals, rather than specific guidelines on campus art like the fireplace sculptures. Its final report only broadly recommended that the University’s public art should display “values of excellence, inclusion, and openness as well as [convey] how those aspirations both grow from but also transcend our history.”

Then came the College-specific Working Group on Symbols and Spaces of Engagement, which analyzed how such “symbols and spaces” affect the undergraduate learning environment. Its report concluded that artwork

representing “‘exclusivist’ elements of Harvard’s past” are often found in spaces that students frequent, such as their residence halls. The report quoted one student who said, “It’s one thing to encounter these images in public spaces, and quite another to have to live with them in our own spaces.”

The chair of the working group, professor Ali S. Asani ’77, says that although the fireplace was not a focus of the group’s discussions, it came up as an example of a symbol that can cause harm, and working group members were divided on potential solutions.

The working group solicited students’ opinions on whether offensive symbols should be removed or contextualized in place. “There was a strong sense among students that the argument for retaining offensive symbols and artwork in residential spaces must be especially compelling to justify doing so,” their report concluded. “Many students feel that they should not have to live

with seeing such artwork daily in a space that is supposed to be their home and sanctuary.”

Still, Asani says he believes that the Westmorly fireplace sculptures shouldn’t be removed outright.

“Works of art like that — they’re part of Harvard history,” Asani says. “You can’t erase the history; you need to acknowledge it.” He would like to see the offensive fireplace juxtaposed with a “counterpoint,” such as an audio tour that highlights the diversity of people who lived in the dorm.

Asani’s report further identified a lack of a clear process for making decisions about house art and the visual culture of “the most trafficked spaces on campus” more generally. And when it comes to altering these heavilypopulated spaces, the report says, “change cannot happen without transparency and a clear understanding of what is possible.”

Shortly after, Faculty of Arts and Sciences Dean Claudine Gay announced an FAS-wide group that could formalize such a process — the Task Force on Visual Culture and Signage. The initiative aimed to determine not only which symbols ought to be displayed on campus but also how these decisions ought to be made.

through the issues.”

“Many people expressed their concern about the values [the fireplace] represented. No conclusions for next steps were drawn,” wrote task force member Dan Byers, who is the director of the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts.

In an interview, Kelsey stresses the importance of holding open discussions before making decisions on pieces of art like the fireplace. “We’re going to have situations where some members of our community are going to want to keep the visual culture the way it is, some will want to contextualize it, some will want to replace it,” he says. “And it’s these conversations that are going to be essential for the community to have.”

The task force recommended following a standardized (if slightly generic) process: identifying stakeholders, holding discussions, and bringing in experts. It emphasized that this process should be transparent, and students should play an active role.

Professor Ali S. Asani ’77 chaired a working group focused on the “symbols and spaces” of Harvard College. He says that the fireplace came up as an example in group discussions.

Courtesy of Ali S. Asani.

This group was not cited by Judy Palfrey as one that would guide the ultimate fate of the Westmorly fireplace. However, Asani says the task force was in part a successor to his Collegespecific working group; Thimba, the HRAC liaison who dealt with the fireplace, was a task force member; and the task force’s chair, Dean of Arts and Humanities Robin Kelsey, confirms that the fireplace came up “in passing in a particular discussion” as an individual case to “help us think

“We learned that what concerns our community is less the institution’s past than its willingness to share honest and inclusive accounts of it,” the report read.

Finally, Judy Palfrey told me they were waiting on a report from the HRAC to make long-term decisions regarding the fireplace — as did Thimba, who leads the HRAC. I asked Goldman, the Dean of Students Office spokesperson, to clarify what this report is or will be, to which he replied: “The House Renewal Advisory Committe[e] works closely with the House Renewal Executive Committee on various

items related to each of the House Renewal projects.” He added that “there is not a publicly available report” from the HRAC.

But the reports that are publicly available, as well as the committee members who contributed to them, echo a similar sentiment — problematic art on campus ought to be discussed out in the open, and student voices in particular are essential in the decisionmaking process.

‘I’d Rather Not’

In the case of the Westmorly fireplace, however, these bureaucratic recommendations have failed to translate into action.

The Presidential Task Force had published its final report in early 2018, before the fireplace encasings even went up after the fall 2018 semester; Asani’s

working group finished its work in early 2020; and Kelsey’s task force finalized its report in December 2021. In other words, report after report over the years has recommended transparent discussions about Harvard’s symbols and spaces in order to foster a more inclusive, historically conscious campus environment. Open acknowledgement of visual culture issues, they say, is a crucial first step. Yet Adams administrators and the HRAC remain unwilling to call public attention to the racist sculptures even today.

“I don’t feel comfortable opening up this question without knowing how we are going to work on it,” Thimba says.

When I ask her if she has any photos of the uncovered fireplace, Thimba says yes, but she won’t let me see them: “I’d rather not.”

At the end of our interview, she nudges me to “cast a wider net” on campus issues of race. There are many other things at Harvard I could be looking into instead, she suggests.

***

This wasn’t the only discouragement I faced as I tried to piece together the story of the Westmorly fireplace. None of the administrators I asked were willing to share sketches and photographs of the fireplace in their possession; despite my best efforts, I still don’t have clear photos of the “civilized” European figures on the right-hand pillar, only a verbal description from Thimba.

According to the email correspondence between administrators I obtained, Rogers — the house renewal architect — found an original sketch of the fireplace stored in the Harvard

Planning Office archives, known as the Property Information Research Center. At PIRC, I requested to view a sketch of the A-entryway east lobby wall, where the fireplace stands. The request was denied.

“I forwarded your request to the building owner and they have decided to not release the materials,” a PIRC archivist wrote to me in an email.

Through my reporting, though, I obtained an architectural sketch of the fireplace with the exact same description as the one I requested from PIRC. I was surprised (and a bit disappointed) to find that the sculptures in the sketch were barely visible, much less racist — a drawing so innocuous overall that it hardly seemed worthwhile to keep from me.

When I initially asked the Palfreys about their role in handling the fireplace, Judy Palfrey did not respond, and Sean Palfrey declined to comment.

“That is a complex and sensitive issue that had our input early on but is now being handled at a Harvard Admin level,” Sean Palfrey wrote in an email. I asked him to clarify his involvement. In a follow-up, he wrote, “the whole thing is uncomfortable and we’re no longer directly involved, so I’d rather not comment.”

In an interview about the visual culture task force he led, Kelsey said he remembered little from the brief discussions the group had about the Westmorly fireplace in particular. When Kelsey was pressed further about the racist sculptures, FAS spokesperson Rachael Dane said she would cut the discussion short if the line of questioning continued.

When I followed up via email to ask when the FAS began

Judith S. Palfrey ’67 pictured in Apthorpe House in 2017. Palfrey wrote they were still waiting for several reports to finish before making further decisions about the fireplace.

Photo by John Y. Wang.

assembling the visual culture task force Kelsey led, Dane declined to answer further questions for the story.

With the exception of Thimba, all current Dean of Students Office administrators and all current Adams House administrators I contacted have either not responded to or have declined my interview requests. All members of the House Renewal Advisory Committee except Thimba and Bicknell, who is now retired, either declined to comment or did not respond to my inquiries.

Associate Dean for Inclusion and Belonging Alta Mauro and Associate Dean of Students Lauren E.Brandt declined to comment.

Current Adams House faculty deans Salmaan A. Keshavjee and Mercedes C. Becerra ’91 did not respond to a request for comment. Adams House building manager Jorge P. Teixeira and Adams House Administrator Matthew Burke declined to comment. And none of the Adams House race relations tutors whom I reached out to — including one who lives in the suite immediately next to the racist fireplace — responded to inquiries for this piece.

‘It’s Built In’

Thimba says that the decision to board up the fireplace

sculptures was in part motivated by a desire to protect Adams residents.

“I fear that drawing a lot of attention to this particular thing is going to actually silence the people who actually have to live with it,” she says.

But “no matter the intention, covering up a harmful symbol, whether in the public square or in a dormitory, without acknowledgement, public process, or dialogue often leads to further confusion,” wrote Paul M. Farber, whom I consulted about the handling of the fireplace. He is the director of Monument Lab, a Philadelphia-based studio that

examines the history and impact of public art.

Asked if they could recall anything about the Westmorly A-entryway fireplace, dozens of former Adams residents from 2019 or earlier couldn’t remember a fireplace at all. The few who did confirmed, unsurprisingly, that there was no public acknowledgement or discussion surrounding it.

Verrastro remembers her frustration with the silence that resulted from this lack of attention.

“I was so mad because they didn’t acknowledge it. They didn’t put a statement out or anything,” she says. “We kept pictures of the statue[s] because we were like, ‘no one is ever going to believe us.’”

Because she took a gap semester, Verrastro stayed for the fall term after her senior spring. By then, what little talk there was about the fireplace, which had primarily taken place among Westmorly A-entryway seniors, had all but evaporated.

“We need to have these conversations,” she says. “As a

A close-up side profile of the middle figure on the left pillar of the Westmorly fireplace. This is purported to be a caricature of an Indigenous pevrson with a protruding nose, headgear, and nose jewelry.

Photo by Simon J. Levien

Dean Robin Kelsey, pictured here in 2017, led a task force focused on articulating principles related to the visual culture and signage in FAS spaces.

Photo by Ellis J. Yeo.

person of color, there’s a lot of things at [this] institution that remind you that it wasn’t made for you … so it was hard when they didn’t recognize that.”

Farber, the director of the Monument Lab, wrote that without timely acknowledgement of “a wound” such as this one, the onus of discussion often ends up burdening students like Verrastro: “the efforts to narrate and counter such harmful and toxic depictions fall back on those who are most impacted and raise the concerns in the first place.”

Ransom says she still has mixed feelings about how the fireplace was handled.

“It felt like slapping a BandAid on it. Like it was an issue they didn’t want to have to touch,” she says. “I’m happy they did the bare minimum in covering it, but the damage was already done. I knew it’s under there.”

To Ransom, the renovations are an opportunity to uproot the racism that is quite literally structural to Harvard.

“We just have to keep covering things because it’s built in,” she says. “To undo it you’ll have to break down the entire thing. Deconstruct it, kind of like what they’re going to do when they remodel Westmorly.”

House renewal discussions on Westmorly Court will likely resume by December, with the hope of breaking ground on renovations in June 2023. The fate of the fireplace is anyone’s guess — from my interview with Thimba, it was unclear what either the HRAC or Adams House’s new faculty deans, Keshavjee and Becerra, plan to do with it. Thimba says she has yet to have a thorough briefing with the new deans about the issue.

***

Each time I walk past the

Westmorly fireplace, I pause to let my gaze linger. I imagine myself seeing past the panels, straight through to the figures on the other side.

When you’ve stared at the structure for as long as I have, you start to notice the little details: the decorative swirls on the castiron shield over the firebox; the stone floor streaked and smudged by years of footsteps and soot; the inner panel of the left pillar that’s cracked ever so slightly ajar, practically daring you to move it and take a peek.

And one more thing. On the wall above the mantel, directly above the racist sculptures and the fake pillars that were built to conceal them, hangs the Harvard crest — a giant, red shield inscribed with the word “VERITAS.”

— Felicia He and Sophia S. Liang contributed reporting.

A large, red Harvard shield on the overmantel of the Westmorly fireplace. The left pillar’s encasing seems to be cracked ajar.

Photo by Simon J. Levien.

WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE

First-years, sophomores, and juniors will experience spring on Harvard’s campus for the first time this semester. New England’s flowers come into full bloom, the concrete jungle aesthetic yields to green grass, and undergraduates emerge from midterm-induced stupors to actually enjoy the landscape.

Though Harvard’s humans are making their springtime debut, for campus fauna, it’s not their first cotillion. To the squirrels, turkeys, and geese that make their homes here, we are mere guests for four years.

FM set out to honor our gracious hosts by investigating their history and capturing their daily life. While doing so, we uncovered some pretty neat stuff.

Sammy Duggasani & Kendrick N. Foster

Up close, a stately squirrel towers, commanding the attention of its square of pavement.

Photo by Ben Y. Cammarata.

WILD

Eastern Gray Squirrel (Sciurus carolinensis)

In 2011, a (now defunct) student project aimed to collate an archive of Harvard Squirrels over the centuries, and in 2013, the Huffington Post declared Harvard one of America’s “most squirrel obsessed colleges.”

But the squirrel’s prominence in Harvard’s culture has figured since at least the Great Depression.

On January 11, 1938, student Bernard D. Shea ’41 innocently held out unpopped popcorn to an interloping squirrel. Instead of eating the popcorn, though, the squirrel took a bite of his index finger.

By 1941, squirrels had switched from menacing pests to saviors in The Crimson’s annals, when it reported that a “chivalrous squirrel” protected “three damsels in distress” from an overactive laundry salesman.

Since then, squirrels have definitely stirred up campus controversy: One Crimson headline from 1996 provocatively asked, “Are Squirrels a First-Year’s Friend? Or Are They Only Glorified Rats?”

Friend or foe, today it seems almost impossible to walk around the Yard without encountering one of these tall-tailed tree huggers.

We asked Jason W. MacKay, a landscape services supervisor at Harvard, if he had any insight into squirrels’ iconic status. Although he could not say for sure, MacKay did point out their ubiquity across campus. According to MacKay, Harvard Yard has enough mature oak trees to support a large resident squirrel population. “They produce an abundance of acorns that it’d be hard to not be attracted to Harvard Yard,” he says.

Science historian Etienne S. Benson adds some context to MacKay’s intuition in a December 2013 article for the Journal of American History. According to Benson’s article, squirrels did not have the conditions for growth in the northeast until the 1870s, with the rise of the urban parks movement spearheaded by Frederick Law Olmsted.

Indeed, squirrels did not become ubiquitous until the early 20th century, when public land around Cambridge, where squirrels ran the risk of getting shot, gave way to private land, where homeowners often fed squirrels they found on their property. In turn, this shift led squirrels to migrate from their natural habitats around Mount Auburn Cemetery to the manicured urban habitat around Harvard Yard.

Whatever their origin, Harvard squirrels have

now made their way into popular culture: In a 2001 episode of the cult TV series “Gilmore Girls,” Rory Gilmore and her mother, Lorelai, visit Harvard and bring back photos — including one of a “Harvard squirrel … sitting on a Harvard rock.” Family matron Emily Gilmore replies, “Good grief.”

“Doesn’t he look smart?” asks Lorelai. “He looks dirty,” says Emily.

Unfortunately, we only found Harvard squirrels sitting on Harvard grass, not Harvard squirrels sitting on Harvard rocks. But at least they weren’t dirty.

Canada Goose (Branta canadensis)

As temperatures rise above freezing and the sun sets at a reasonable hour, one Canada Goose is exchanged for another. All along the Charles River, these birds announce their homecoming with honking fanfare. Their reputation precedes them, as any picnicker knows.

Unlike the beloved squirrel, these migratory birds don’t have the best image. In fact, because Canada geese frequent residential and suburban areas and because their fecal matter poses public health concerns, the Massachusetts Division of Fisheries and Wildlife provides residents with a number of tips for

warding them off.

In a list of the most effective strategies to deter unwanted geese, they mention using “decoys” that resemble a “full bodied swan or coyote.” It is of utmost importance, they point out, that these decoys are moved “periodically”; otherwise, they warn, “the geese will realize the decoys aren’t real.”

Eastern gray squirrels are a common sight in Harvard Yard.

Photo by Ben Y. Cammarata.

Cambridge boasts a significant population of Canada geese — though they’re not everyone’s favorite bird.

Photo by Ben Y. Cammarata.

harassment” with “trained border collies” to reduce the goose population by at least 90 percent.

Canada geese are severely overpopulated in the Boston area. North America has seen their population explode from about a million in 1970 to over five million in 2012. Along with that growth has come a shift in the ratio of migratory to nonmigratory geese: though the latter group made up only 20 percent of all Canada geese in 1970, they soared to 68 percent in 2012.

Before the 1930s, the geese were characterized by their seasonal migration patterns and rarely nested in Cambridge. But now, Cambridge, like many other American cities, hosts more resident geese as they opt for the warmth of urban environments.

Unless you plan to walk barefoot along the Charles, they

do not pose much of a threat. For now, it seems that the Canada geese are here to stay, so we might as well appreciate their beauty.

Wild Turkey (Meleagris gallopavo)

To first-year students living in the Yard, opening the door in the morning to find a turkey perched on the steps is not an uncommon phenomenon. An intriguing sight for tourists visiting campus, the birds have now become an icon.

Despite their ubiquity, turkeys have not always had a place on Harvard’s campus.

Intense deforestation and overhunting that began in the 1600s deprived wild turkeys of their habitat and food sources. By the mid-1800s, they were dangerously close to extinction,

One Boston-area company named Geese Police uses a “proprietary system of

A Canada goose glides across the pond on the Boston Common. Photo by Ben Y. Cammarata.

a status which lasted for about a century before conservation efforts were successful. In the 1970s, 37 wild turkeys brought from New York’s Adirondacks began the revival of the species in Massachusetts, according to the National Audubon Society.

Over the next few decades, they expanded their territory from the Berkshires, where they were first released, to the Cambridge area, reclaiming an ancestral home. While the forest of Massachusetts housed their predecessors, the urban environment took in today’s turkeys.

As with most city-dwellers, they unabashedly disregard basic traffic rules. In a Thanksgivingthemed New York Times article about turkeys on college campuses, Harvard’s Environmental Public Health Officer Richard Pollack points out that “turkeys regularly held up traffic in the streets around campus and have been known to

peck at the hubcaps of cars.”

Harvard’s turkeys have grown accustomed to the steady stream of people into and out of their home — comfortable enough to lay their eggs amidst a heavily trafficked college campus. During a month of brooding that begins around April, wild turkey hens look after

about a dozen eggs. As spring advances, a number of poults will take their first steps (hopefully not into oncoming traffic).

After long days of jaywalking, the wild turkeys use their limited flight ability to reach the treetops, where they rest. Late-night strolls around the Yard reveal shadowy

A turkey pecks at the camera in front of the Barker Center.

Photo by Ben Y. Cammarata.

A puffed-up turkey struts across the road in front of Hong Kong Restaurant. Photo by Ben Y. Cammarata.

figures silhouetted among the branches.

Asters and Goldenrods (Symphyotrichum novaeangliae, Solidago erecta)

In addition to the turkeys, squirrels, and geese that have made Harvard Yard their happy

home, there’s a whole host of other species that one Harvard professor hopes will make a return.

Joyce E. Chaplin, a professor of Early American History, has taught a class called “Rewilding Harvard” for two years now. Its main goal? To return Harvard to precolonial biodiversity levels, one planter at a time.

“Where does Harvard come from? Where does it fit into a longer story of claiming land, often by taking it away from the traditional rightful inhabitants and owners, and developing that land of resources in more intense ways in line with capitalism?” Chaplin asks. “What is lost in those processes? What can be put back?”

Rewilding Harvard’s first planter in front of the Harvard Museum of Natural Science contained multiple native plants, including New England asters and showy goldenrods. This year, students will tackle a site at the Harvard Business School.

Meanwhile, students continue to sashay out into the Yard to enjoy the springtime climate. As Chaplin reminds us, the Yard is a consciously designed space — parklike, but not a park. Indeed, its current plants and animals must be “able to exist in a curated, non-original environment,” she says.

But that won’t stop us from enjoying the Yard, the squirrels and the turkeys and the Canada geese notwithstanding. MacKay appreciates students “hearing nature” even through the 1 Bus’s incessant call for passengers to Nubian Station and the Red Line’s low rumble.

When the (in)famous lawn chairs come out, MacKay hopes that faculty, students, and visitors will sit in the Yard and take a breather. It’s worth sitting down “even for just a moment,” MacKay says, to “forget that you’re in the middle of the city.”

“Rewilding Harvard,” a class in the History department, populated a planter with species native to New England as part of a class project.

Photo by Ben Y. Cammarata.

‘Conscious Consumerism’ at No Frills All Fun

Francesca J. Barr and Jem K. Williams

A shopper searches through the racks of used clothing inside Warehouse XI at the No Frills All Fun clothing shop in Somerville.

Photo by Francesca J. Barr.

There seem to be two ways to go about it. You could spend all morning combing through old clothes — as one woman we spoke to did – trying to decide if that sweater you once loved is still oversized in a cute way or if it just plain doesn’t fit, before driving a basketful of your closet clutter across the Charles River to Somerville’s Warehouse XI.

Or if you’re like us, you could pick three pieces that you haven’t worn this semester, chuck them in your backpack, and walk to Union Square after missing the 86 Bus. Regardless of your mode of transportation, the No Frills All Fun Clothing Swap waits with open doors.

Held on March 27 and hosted by We Thieves, a women-run vintage boutique located in Inman Square, the No Frills All Fun Clothing Swap was organized to offer the community a more sustainable shopping option. To participate in the swap, attendees were encouraged to bring three to 15 articles of clothing. After checking in outside, swappers were ushered into the space. Some hung their assorted dresses and jackets — formal intermingling with casual — on the racks that lined the walls, while others found room on the blanket-covered floor. A fitting room stood in the back as an open, half-walled off space with about as much privacy as a window. Patrons tried desperately to shimmy on their new finds over the clothes they came in. One woman nearby, too busy to answer our questions, worked with intense concentration at a sewing machine, repairing garments in an effort to extend their wearable life. Across the warehouse, a band picked at their guitars.

It was chaos. There couldn’t have been a better way to spend the Sunday.

But the free shopping experience has a deeper story. “The real purpose of this swap,” We Thieves owner Sandra E. Rossi explains, “is just to keep garments in circulation as long as possible before they actually get donated.”

It may seem counterintuitive to fight against donation, often touted as an environmentallyfriendly choice. But though the secondhand clothing industry claims donation is the lynchpin of the “circular” clothing industry, it is actually one step in the process of waste colonization. In reality, 84 percent of donated clothing is sent to landfills or incinerators, according to the EPA. And billions of these disposed

garments are exported to the Global South each year, forcing local communities to manage literal tons of waste. These countries previously relied on vendors to resell those donated clothes — but now, they’re encountering a major roadblock.

“Since fast fashion has really taken off, they can’t resell the clothes,” Rossi says. “We’re basically placing our trash in other places.” As clothes aren’t built to last anymore, their once-circular path now ends in overflowing landfills.

Rossi is trying to intervene before this process begins. We Thieves is all about “conscious consumerism,” according to its website. Beyond its vintage clothing collection, the store has produced a conscious consumer resource guide with an extensive list of ways to shop more responsibly — most importantly, it suggests consumers buy fewer clothes and keep the ones in their closets for longer.

No Frills All Fun is another extension of this mission, providing the experience of shopping with the sustainability of a swap. In partnership with On The Rise, an organization that provides support for women and transgender or nonbinary people experiencing homelessness in Cambridge, the event also encouraged donations and sent any unclaimed clothing to their Safe Haven.

Back at the warehouse, attendees ducked, stretched, and apologized as they navigated the packed walkways like pirates in search of treasure. At the center of it all, Rossi darted back and forth in a red shirt with black undersleeves, green pants, and a long-sleeved floral print tied at her waist.

We even saw our own clothing pieces find new owners in real time. Jem brought a gray striped shirt, one of the first things she ever bought for herself during the summer when she got her first job, her license, and her first bit of freedom from her parents. A few minutes later, a woman with short, dark hair picked it up, examined it, and laid it across her arm. Just like that, it found a new home.

Perhaps someone else in that room had that exact same feeling as we picked out our own new closet additions — a velvet v-neck for Jem, a striped buttondown for Francesca. “Conscious consumerism means only taking what you need,” read the sign in front of the clothing rack. Perhaps we didn’t need those new pieces, but we’re happy to take them home anyways.

Black Nationalists in December

From Martin Robison Delany to the Organization for Black Unity

Mariah Norman

As of March 2022, Harvard Medical School limits prospective students to a maximum of six letters of recommendation for consideration in their application. But when Martin Robison Delany — the son of a free mother and formerly enslaved father — was admitted to the wintersession of 1850, it took a whopping 17.

Some may know the story of Richard T. Greener, Class of 1870, the very first Black person to graduate from Harvard College. But before the courage of Greener, there was the persistence of Delany. Delany and two other men, Daniel Laing Jr. and Isaac H. Snowden, became the first Black admits to any school at Harvard University.

Unfortunately, their historic attendance was shortlived. The moment they stepped on the Medical School’s campus, they were met with constant protests and complaints from their enraged white peers who insisted that they could not “consent to be identified as fellow-students with blacks; whose company we would not keep in the streets, and whose society as associates we would not tolerate in our houses.”

By December of 1850, less than two months into their first term, Delany, Laing, and Snowden were asked by the administration to leave at the end of the semester.

In a time when many believed that the “problem” of race could be solved by simply sending Black people back to Africa, Laing and Snowden had been sponsored by the Massachusetts Colonization Society to attend Harvard. The goal was to graduate, then migrate to the colony of Liberia and practice medicine in America’s growing settlement of “unproductive slaves and free blacks who might

encourage antislavery activities in the United States,” according to then-associate professor of pathology at New York University Louis Rosenfeld’s 1989 survey of Delany’s life.

But to Delany, the American Colonization Society was “one of the most arrant enemies of the colored man.” He rejected Liberia for its location near the equator and its government’s dependence on white colonizationists. However, Delany was not entirely opposed to the idea of the migration of Black people out of the United States — as long as it was on their own terms. In fact, he’s credited with creating the popular Pan-Africanist slogan “Africa for Africans,” and has even been called the “father of Black nationalism.”

Black nationalism is a political ideology that advocates for the unity and self-determination of Black people through the creation of a separate, allBlack nation-state. Delany’s version in particular, however, viewed some indigenous African and South American cultures as barbaric and “in need of civilizing” by Black Americans — a colonial notion that was largely abandoned in later developed theories.

Delany returned to the United States in 1861 after several expeditions across Africa and through London during which he attempted to raise funds, gain support, and negotiate with tribal leaders to take control over their land. His refusal to collaborate with white colonization groups, as well as his strong reputation with little tangible support, eventually led to his downfall — especially up against the growing imperialist force of England. Still, he continued spreading this ideology throughout his many endeavors that followed until his passing in 1885.

Over a century later, Black nationalism found its way back to Harvard’s campus. On November 3, 1969, a small group of Black students sat down for the first time to organize the goals and values of a new political action group on campus — the Organization for Black Unity.

An 1969 article in The Crimson says that during their official launch, the “250 members present agreed that the goal of OBU was to ‘coordinate the interdisciplinary skills toward the building of a black nation for all African people,’” according to Philip N. Lee, at the time a third-year law student and spokesman for the group.

Blurring the lines between an affinity group and a radical political action organization, OBU wasted no time in making noise on campus. Its first order of business focused on “[c]hecking out the blatantly racist employment practices for Harvard University,” especially in regards to the new construction of Gund Hall, a

building of the Graduate School of Design. Their stringent seven-point list of demands included significantly increasing the hiring of Black and other minority workers and improving overall opportunities for upward mobility.

OBU held their first negotiation meeting with administration on December 1, in which Harvard was largely unable to meet their demands with the immediacy and full commitment that OBU believed the situation demanded.

Citing the initiatives already in place that OBU was targeting as insufficient, Harvard repeatedly insisted that “the University regrets the failure to find a basis for a common approach to the problems of increasing black and other minority employment on construction projects.”

But for OBU, that was not going to cut it.

Over just two short weeks, they held a rally in the Yard and occupied the construction site of Gund Hall, the Faculty Dining Club, and University Hall (once on December 5, and again on December 11). “Black, Black power to the African people,” the

91 OBU members passionately chanted, arms linked as they slowly filed out of University Hall and into the cold December air after nearly five hours.

In another 1969 Crimson article, OBU claimed that 86 members of the December 11 University Hall occupation were suspended — while a chairman of the subcommittee dealing with suspensions denied that any notices were issued as of December 16.

On December 12 of the same year, the University’s Committee on Rights and Responsibilities sent a letter to attendees of OBU’s occupation of University Hall, informing them of their temporary suspension. Another temporary restraining order was issued at 3 p.m. on the day of the occupation, addressed to specific members as well as to the general population of the OBU, telling them to “desist and refrain from occupying, trespassing upon or remaining in or about University Hall, the Gund Hall construction site, the Faculty Club, or any other building or premises of President and Fellows of Harvard College.”

Finally, on December 19, 1969, 40 members of OBU were formally charged with a violation of the Resolution on Rights and Responsibilities for their participation in the University Hall occupation. But despite constant clashes with the University, OBU continued organizing through 1970.

Whether it’s Delany’s expulsion in 1850 or the inaugural action of the Organization for Black Unity in 1969, one thing is for certain: Harvard does not fare well with Black nationalists in December.

Martin Robison Delany, soldier, activist, and one of the first Black men accepted to Harvard Medical School.

RIVER BLUES

hewson p. duffy

Thursday, March 9, 2023

Dear Mom,

We might have to donate another building. This was supposed to be the best day of my first year, but then the unthinkable happened.

I got River’d.

I know, I know — it used to be different. Back when you were here, everyone wanted to get river’d. But this isn’t the ’90s: Now, the Quad is the place to be.

According to Cousin Lowell, it all started when they quadded just about every first-year last Housing Day. When I got to campus last fall, the tide was just beginning to turn.

First the a cappella groups started meeting in Currier all — 67 of them. Then The Crimson staged a successful coup at the nearby Harvard University Press building. Rumor has it the Advocate now holds meetings on the roof of Cabot Hall, where they drink white wine and buy charms on Etsy to hex someone into finally reading their magazine.

By October, commerce started to follow. The Harvard Shop opened five new locations next to the Quad, all within a block of each other. The last nail in the Harvard Square coffin was when Jefe’s opened its new location just behind Pfoho. The Lampoon, always regressive, stayed behind.

By November, even the Dudley Co-Op was adapting to the influx of students, opening Dud’s: a vegan pizza joint operating entirely on the barter system. Their synthetic cheese pizza is in such high demand late at night that my Yeezys only bought me ten slices.

It should go without saying that I did everything I could not to get River’d. My blockmates and I partied

exclusively at the Quad, but so does everyone else. We had to go even further.

Every Thursday since January, no matter the weather, we faithfully ate breakfast, lunch, and dinner in Cabot, all eight of us scootering there and back in perfect formation, like Canadia Geese clad in Canada Goose.

And with Housing Day looming, I made an offering to the Quad Gods. After the Sigma Omega CHi (SOCH) party got shut down Saturday night, I abstained from Ubering back to my dorm and stood valiantly in the freezing rain for 30 minutes. Yes, Mother, I waited for the “River Shuttle.”

After such a sacrifice (not to mention our family’s considerable donations), I was so sure of my housing status, I almost forgot to do Radcliffe Roach last night. I know you don’t approve of marijuana, but it’s much safer to smoke a joint out the window of three houses than to take shots at nine.

It was all for nothing. At 8:36 this morning, a knock came at the door, and suddenly the room was filled with cheering upperclassmen in moose costumes. I was dumbstruck. Dunster?

I barely saw the confetti and champagne bottles, barely heard the Dua Lipa Housing Day parody that a moose-person was performing a cappella on my desk. I held back tears as a costumed ballerina handed me the housing letter and a fresh pair of Nike Air Moose 1s. It was the worst dorm-storm ever.

But Housing Day wasn’t over yet. Remember my annoying roommate Steven? You know, the “divest” one? Of all people, he got Cabot. The smug look on his face as he sat in our GenEd section this afternoon made me want to scream.

Cabot was all I ever wanted. My dream house. And Steven stole it from me. How will I go on? Next year, I’ll have no choice but to wait in the cold by the SOCH every night. My whole life will revolve around those confusing River Shuttle schedules.

The River houses might have meant something to you, Mother. To generations of our family, even. But if I have to sleep in a rat-infested Dunster hellhole a single night, I will fill out a transfer application not just for Cabot, but for Yale.

Yours truly,

Phillip D. W. Leverett-Mather III

HOW REAL IS BEREAL?

TAMAR SARIG

The first time one of my friends tried to sell me on BeReal, I balked. A mandatory photo of my face at an unpredictable time each day? My first thought: I would have to do my makeup every morning.

Of course, that unscripted quality — the loss of control over how your friends see you, and when — is the whole point of BeReal, an app that bills itself as a way to “discover who your friends really are in their daily life.” Launched in 2020, BeReal first gained steam in Europe, then exploded across American college campuses this spring.

The idea is to strip away the curation, planning, and artificiality of other content-sharing apps like Instagram. Once a day, at a random time, the BeReal notification flashes on users’ screens, warning them that they have two minutes to post their daily photo. (You can choose to post late, but the app shows everyone else exactly how late you posted.) You can’t see your friends’ photos until you post yours, and once you’ve shared, you can comment and react to everyone else’s. The feed stays up until the next day’s BeReal alert, at which point the old photos disappear — a nod to Snapchat’s ephemeral stories.

BeReal self-consciously styles itself as a sort of anti-social media. Its App Store description warns, “BeReal is life, Real life, and this life is without filters.” Andrea Mach di Palmstein, BeReal’s head of growth, described the app’s selling points in a LinkedIn post as “no social pressure, no toxicity and no social comparison on social media.” Some of the app’s descriptions explicitly call out other platforms, like TikTok and Instagram, as the antithesis of what BeReal wants to do.

By the time I heard about BeReal, my screen time was already embarrassingly high. Adding another social media app to my repertoire of distractions seemed unwise. Fundamentally, I didn’t like the idea

of being caught off-guard — of feeling social pressure to show myself at my worst, if necessary.

For Karen Chan ’22, though, that’s exactly what makes BeReal so much more enjoyable than other types of social media.

“I think a lot of times, you’re used to interacting with your friends in very well-chosen and specifically chosen instances and times of the day,” she says. “And unless they’re your roommate, or a really, really close friend, you don’t really get to see them beyond the public instances when you choose to hang out. And I think the fun thing about BeReal is that you get to see a side of their lives that you don’t normally see.”

Amina T. Salahou ’25 agrees, to an extent, that BeReal is more genuine than other apps.

“When I post on Instagram, it’s a process,” she says. By contrast, BeReal leaves no time to think about how you look or where you’re posing. Still, Salahou says the app is far from an unfiltered window into real life.

“Especially just with Gen Z and the way people are, there’s kind of no way for things to not be curated,” she says. She cites another feature where you can see the number of times a post was retaken. “I remember once me and my friends were on the app, and we saw some guy re-took a picture of his feet, like, seven times.” She’s planning to delete the app soon, she says; she doesn’t feel the need to see her friends out on a jog when she’s still lying in bed.

For the sake of honest journalism, when I was assigned to write this article, I decided to download the app and give it a fair shot, at least for a week.

Things started off well enough: On day two, BeReal blessedly caught me in the middle of an outing to the Boston Symphony Orchestra. I’m not the kind of person who goes to orchestra performances, but my friend had offered me a free ticket, so I got to post a photo of us in our regal outfits at intermission.

BeReal is a photo-sharing app that notifies users once a day to post a candid photo of themselves. Design by Samantha Simpson.

Saul A. Glist ’22-23, a devoted BeReal fan, says these daily posts make social outings feel more valuable.

“It makes you appreciate when you’re with people and when you’re doing something fun, because so many of the BeReals you get, you’re just in your room doing work,” Glist says. “The artificial scarcity of the app makes you appreciate social situations more.”

Of course, that artificial scarcity is a double-edged sword: if capturing exciting moments spent with friends makes us feel happy and grateful, then how does capturing all the mundane moments make us feel?

Emily Weinstein, Research Director at the Harvard Graduate School of Education’s Project Zero, has spent much of her professional career asking similar questions about young adults and their technology use. She first heard about BeReal in early February, during a panel discussion held for her Ed School class “Digital Dilemmas.” Weinstein emphasizes that the effects of BeReal, like every other social media platform she studies, are nuanced and personally specific, but she points out that the nature of the app can make users increasingly selfconscious about their daily lives.

“Another thing that came up in the early conversations was this kind of awareness of, ‘how many times I am getting the push to post that I’m alone?’” Weinstein says. “And does that elevate your own sense of when you’re with others and when you’re alone? And how does that make you feel?”

On the fifth day of my experiment, I was already late when I got the BeReal notification. I’d spent most of the past few

hours alternatively panicking about an upcoming job interview and crying because I’m scared to be unemployed. My room was its usual level of messy, and I was attempting to work from my bed, which I hadn’t made in days. Both the front-facing and backfacing camera views felt a little too humiliating. I decided to wait until I’d at least gotten out of bed.

For Michal Goldstein ’25, a Crimson News and Magazine editor, BeReal makes her feel the opposite of alone.

“I think any social media that tries to sell itself as authentic and not a way to outwardly show your life is falsely advertising what it is,” Goldstein says. But she thinks BeReal’s authenticity is beside the point.

She and her friends started using the app as a way to stay connected over winter break; rather than call or text each other constantly, they could easily share little spontaneous snippets of each other’s lives every day.

For Weinstein, the uncurated aspect of BeReal is also not necessarily the app’s purpose. “I wonder if maybe it makes sense to flip the question, so that instead of judging if others are authentic, we focus more on questions about how we feel, and specifically questions that might signal whether we’re being authentic in ways that matter for ourselves,” she says. “So I’m asking questions like, ‘How do I feel when I share on this app? What am I getting out of this?’”

After about a week on BeReal, I gave up on feeling bad about the unglamorous parts of my life. For three days in a row, I posted a picture of myself alone in my room, on my computer, doing homework. I posted several truly

hideous back-facing selfies, the kind of photo I would rather die than put on Instagram. It helped that I only have 17 friends on the app — a common theme among everyone I spoke to is that BeReal doesn’t encourage building a vast, performative network of followers like other apps do. But I still couldn’t stop myself from retaking my pictures five times before they finally felt acceptable enough to show to my ten closest friends.

While the BeReals we post are temporary to everyone else, users can scroll back through their own archive, flipping through the random moments like a photo album. When I look back at my (now going on a) month’s worth of memories, I see what Glist meant. I’ve assembled a little mirror image of my life, more or less accurate despite the brief and random moments I captured, 90 percent of them intensely mundane: me in my common room with my friends, me working in my room, me on the shuttle to class. The remaining 10 percent (restaurants and parties and spring break by the pool) feel the way they should — special, unusual, precious, but not inherently better or worse than the millions of boring moments, like the 3 p.m. sun beaming in through the windows on an ordinary Tuesday in my ordinary dorm with my beloved, ordinary friends.

PETER L. Laskin