Fifteen Minutes Magazine - November 2023

NOVEMBER 2023

EDITORS’ NOTE STAFF FOR THIS ISSUE FM CHAIRS Io Y. Gilman ’25 Amber H. Levis ’25 EDITORS-AT-LARGE Michal Goldstein ’25 Kaitlyn Tsai ’25 ASSOCIATE EDITORS Maya M. F. Wilson ’24, Mila G. Barry ’25 Hewson Duffy ’25, Sarah W. Faber ’24 Ciana J. King ’25, Jade Lozada ’25 Kyle L. Mandell ’25, Bea Wall-Feng ’25 Graham R. Weber ’25, Sam E. Weil ’25 Jem K. Williams ’25, Dina R. Zeldin ’25 WRITERS Lisa Gao ’25, Clara E. Shapiro ’27, Cam N. Srivastava ’27, Cam E. Kettles ’26, Yasmeen A. Khan ’26, Serena Jampel ’25, Hannah W. Duane ’26, Sam E. Weil ’25 GLOSSY LAYOUT Laurinne Jamie P. Eugenio ‘26 Hannah Lee ‘26 Sophia Salamanca ’25 Sophia C. Scott ’25 Max H. Schermer ’24 Sami E. Turner ’25 Angel Zhang ‘26 FM MULTIMEDIA Julian J. Giordino ’25 Joey Huang ’24 Marina Qu ’25 GLOSSY PHOTOGRAPHERS Sami E. Turner ’25 DESIGNERS Pema Choedon ‘25, Hannah L. Niederriter ‘26, Sophia Salamanca ’25, Sophia C. Scott ’25 Eileene J. Lee ’24 PRESIDENT Cara J. Chang ’24 ASSOCIATE MANAGING EDITOR Meimei Xu ’24 MANAGING EDITOR Brandon L. Kingdollar ’24

Dear Reader, The days are getting darker, drinks are getting hotter, and turkeys are getting harder to come by: The anticipation for Thanksgiving break is palpable. Not only is it a much-needed reprieve between the hangovers from The Game and quickly approaching final projects, but it’s a time to reunite with the people you love (and sometimes, love to hate): your family.

But we understand that family is a complicated term that can mean a lot of things for many different people. In this issue, we’re talking about the family unit as an instrument of power in elite institutions. That’s right: legacy admissions.

SJ and YAK bring us back to the ’20s, when Harvard admissions first became competitive. During his term, President Abbott Lawrence Lowell aimed to limit the number of Jewish students on campus to maintain the Anglo-Saxon character of the school. Some of the measures that Lowell’s admissions committee implemented evolved into legacy preference, which has come under scrutiny in light of the Supreme Court decision this summer that overturned race-based affirmative action. This scrutiny traces the antisemitic history of legacy admissions and what it says about the exclusionary history of the College. Who does a Harvard education aim to serve?

Can college admissions ever be certifiably inclusive at an elite institution?

Also in this glossy, the FM staff also shares tips on what are undeniably the top fifteen places to make out (on campus). LG writes about H Bomb, a now-defunct sex magazine at Harvard in the mid-2000s.

CES and CNS write about mycologist Lawrence B. Millman (or, as his father liked to call him, “dirty little Thoreau”) and his love for spores galore. CEK interviews Aryt Alasti, a security guard at Harvard, about his gardening work around campus and his relationship with Harvard. HWD talks to Jennifer E. Hoffman a Harvard physics professor and cross-country runner — and by cross-country, we mean, she literally ran across the country. HWD interviewed her while she was in the process of shattering the world record for the fastest trans-America run by a woman, which she accomblished at the beginning of this month.

SEW writes an introspection explaining that every square inch of her room is decorated with ephemera, and why she wouldn’t have it any other way. EL makes a comic suggesting various ways to be productive on the endless ride between Central Square and Harvard Square on the T. Take care of yourself, dear reader. Enjoy your break and the little time we have left in the semester. And don’t forget to call your loved ones.

Sincerely Yours, AHL & IYG

JENNIFER E. HOFFMAN ’99 — Physics professor Jennifer E. Hoffman ’99 is halfway to New York and her calves hurt.

Averaging 60 miles a day, she is running, in Forrest Gump fashion, across America. SEE PAGE 23

LEGACY — A Harvard education has the ability to change someone’s life, and, when leveraged properly, to influence the course of the nation. But as legacy admissions favor the children of alumni — who are disproportionately white and wealthy to begin with — many are left questioning the degree to which the University can truly act as an engine of change. SEE PAGE 13

15 PLACES TO MAKEOUT —Here’s our intel on the top 15 places to make out on campus, just for you. Thank us later.

SEE PAGE 3

ARYT ALASTI — Aryt Alasti works as a security guard at Harvard from the evening until early morning. He returns home for a brief two-hour nap before coming back to campus. Then he toils each day caring, alone, for dozens of plants across Harvard. SEE PAGE 9

H BOMB — Along with nudity, the first issue of H Bomb promised art and text galore. The editors also had a vision for the future of the magazine: “longer, smarter, and definitely hotter.” But this projection for H Bomb’s future did not survive the test of time. SEE PAGE 5

LAWRENCE B. MILLMAN — Millman’s passion for discovering drives him still. Whether it’s encountering a fungal species that had not been seen since 1909 or learning about the traditions of the cultures he encounters from the Arctic to the archipelagos, the unpredictability of his work never ceases to impress him. SEE PAGE 7

NESTING — The mere presence of color, and the memories each small picture held, felt like a balm — something consistent and bright and mine to return to. With a couple scraps of paper, I’d planted roots. SEE PAGE 25

Sever Fourth Floor Honestly, who even knew Sever had a fourth floor? No people. No windows. No regrets. Take me to bed or lose me forever.

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Mount Auburn Cemetery Shut up. It’s hot.

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The Widener Stacks The rumors are true, and we can’t deny them. You may even get lucky and check something off your bucket list…

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Smith Campus Center Rooftop Accessing the rooftop of the Smith Campus Center is most definitely forbidden, and technically, we do not endorse breaking rules. Do with that what you will.

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The SEC Bathrooms Showers and all! Steamy.

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Top Floor of the SOCH We get it, everyone hates the SOCH — everyone who’s never made out on the top floor of the building, that is. It’s almost always abandoned so you’ll have privacy. Plus, it’s got a nice view. Don’t knock it till you try it.

Quad Lawn Soak in the sun, touch some grass, and pretend the Cabotians can’t see you through their windows.

The Center of the European Studies Garden This garden is one of campus’s hidden gems. Gorgeous, ethereal, basically Europe.

s Back of the Quad Shuttle Don’t judge. It’s a long, lonely ride.

Carpenter Center Rooftop It’s a bit hard to get access to this rooftop, so this is more of a hope and less of a reality. But we keep dreaming.

Stahr Observatory The ultimate “I know a place.”

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Any Room in WHRB (preferably, the Jazz Lounge) Smooth.

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Benches by the Charles River A classic. Go at sunset and experience the sheer romance that Harvard can offer. That shit is hard to come by.

Pusey Library The joke writes itself.

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iiÉE The Harvard Crimson Hey, we don’t make the rules. We just follow them.

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Did Harvard’s Sex Magazine Come Too Soon?

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BY LISA GAO

T CONTRIBUTING WRITER

wo naked figures stand against a white backdrop, their backs to the camera. The left one holds an apple in one hand, the other covering her partner’s rear. At the top, in all caps, reads “H BOMB.” “It isn’t porn, that’s for sure,” declares the editor’s letter.

In 2004, some Harvard students started publishing H Bomb, a studentrun magazine about sex that included writings, art, and nude pictures of Harvard undergraduates.

In February 2004, the Harvard Committee on College Life approved H Bomb as an official Harvard publication with a 14-0 vote and two abstentions.

To avoid liability issues, administrators prohibited students from taking nude pictures inside of Harvard buildings and declared that the magazine would not be awarded funding from Harvard College, although it could still apply for grants.

The CCL also stated that the magazine was approved with the understanding that it would not include material that would be considered pornographic — a statement ambiguous enough to produce more questions than answers. From its start, H Bomb excited discussions on what counted as pornography.

Otherwise, Harvard did not censor or set requirements for the magazine’s material.

Never theless, H Bomb received significant public attention, with newspap ers across the world jumping to cover the magazine, p u b l i s h i n g headlines like “Naked Ambition” and “Mag Will Turn ’Em

Crimson.” Ultimately, the public attention on H Bomb climaxed with the University changing its policy for establishing student organizations altogether, extending the timeline so that the faculty could spend a longer time reviewing applications.

H Bomb was born in a period when colleges across the nation were embracing sex magazines; CCL reviewed Vassar College’s Squirm magazine during the approval process for H Bomb.

Other magazines like the University of Chicago’s Vita Excolatur and Yale’s Sex Week at Yale: The Magazine cropped up at peer institutions.

In the years leading up to H Bomb’s founding, college newspapers also began to feature sex columnists. According to The New York Times, these publications were “the inevitable outgrowth of a sexcrazed media culture in which many feminists are adopting a ‘sex-positive’ approach that views pornography as expression, not exploitation.”

Psychology professor Marc D. Hauser, then the faculty advisor for H Bomb, told the Washington Post that these trends fluctuate with each generation. H Bomb burst forth when its surrounding cultural context helped light the fuse.

The co-creators of H Bomb, Katharina C. Baldegg ’06 and Camilla A. Hrdy ’05, wanted the magazine to reignite the conversation on sex without exploiting women. They sought to avoid this through including a diverse representation of gender, sexual orientation, and body type. For them, the magazine provided an opportunity to “promote intelligent discussion about sexuality, relationships and love — not found in current magazines or on the Web,” according to the Washington Post.

In that article, Baldegg states that “there is something to be said for a positive appreciation of sexuality,” which she believes her generation had not seen much of.

According to its editors, H Bomb’s philosophy is that “somewhere beyond porn and beyond esoteric scholarly inquiry there is a happy medium where intellectual is sexy and hot is genius.” Along with nudity, the first

issue promised art and text galore. The editors also had a vision for the future of the magazine: “longer, smarter, and definitely hotter.”

But this projection for H Bomb’s future did not survive the test of time.

In April of 2007 — three years after its founding — the magazine “lost official student group status after failing to meet the requirements for student group recognition,” a Crimson article reported.

According to the article, an assistant dean of the College at the time attributed its closure simply to a failure to comply with registration requirements, including a minimum of two officers.

Losing student group status meant that H Bomb could print issues, but they could no longer publicize the magazine on campus.

H Bomb had already been struggling for some time by then, with a floundering leadership group and financial issues that halted their spring 2006 issue.

But they persisted, and in 2009, they published a spring edition that included “lots of text and some artsy/strange pictures,” according to The Crimson.

H Bomb was not alone in its mission to showcase sex on Harvard’s campus.

In 2008, Matthew M. Di Pasquale ’09 founded Diamond Magazine. The pilot issue “featured articles on the hottest new summer kicks, The Dark Knight, and college football, in addition to a veritable bevy of garish fonts and clip art,” The Crimson wrote in 2009. There were also photos of two models, only one of whom — Di Pasquale — was naked.

This magazine, despite its initial buzz, died out soon thereafter.

As for H Bomb, the once-illustrious magazine similarly vanished into thin air. A Twitter profile with the handle @ HBOMBMagazine suggests it was active at least until 2012, with a then-total of six volumes and an online website. Since then, the magazine has left no trace; at Harvard, it no longer exists.

“I would like to see it make a comeback, but I don’t know if it will,” H Bomb’s former business manager Vladimir P. Djuric ’06 told The Crimson in 2007. “The problem is no one ever built an institution where it would continue well beyond the founders.”

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A FunGi Among Us: Lawrence Millman, Expert Mycologist

BY CLAIRE E. SHAPIRO AND CAM N. SRIVASTAVA

A CONTRIBUTING WRITERS

s a child, Lawrence B. Millman loved to play in the dirt — so much so that his father called him a “dirty little boy.” After taking a ramble around Walden Pond, 12-yearold Millman, like his “god” Henry David Thoreau, came into his own as a young naturalist. Naturally, his father upgraded his nickname to “dirty little Thoreau.”

Many decades later, that label still holds true; Millman can often be seen flipping over logs in Harvard Square, pursuing his career in mycology, the study of fungi.

Last Wednesday, though, Millman spoke with us in his unnatural habitat — indoors, in Boylston Hall — clad in a regal purple shirt which declared: “This is my human costume, I’m really a mushroom.” A self-described polymath, Millman is an avid mycologist, writer, and ethnographer. For the last 35 years, he has conducted mycological work around the world and written 18 books documenting his findings and experiences.

Millman began his career as an English professor after earning his Ph.D. in literature at Rutgers University. But the confines of a conference room soon became a frustration to Millman, who much preferred free-range foraging for knowledge to the tedious tilling of one plot of academic land. So, Millman sprung free from the conference-room cage, and headed to the west of Ireland, where he came into bloom as an ethnographer.

His first ethnographic book, “Our Like Will Not Be There Again,” explored traditional oral storytelling in Ireland and its extinction at the hands of its apex-predator,

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television.

I t was not until later on, while pursuing research in the Arctic, that Millman became inspired by

Indigenous peoples’ relationship with fungi. Some of the people he encountered viewed mushrooms as an integral part of their lore. Many others recognized the beneficial properties of fungi, sprinkling antibacterial spores of specimens l i k e “p u f f b a l l” on cuts to s t a u n c h wounds.

S i n c e then, Millman has spent nearly 40 years identifying hundreds of species across New England, in areas like the Mount Auburn Cemetery, Naushon Island, Fresh Pond, and Wachusett

Meadow Wildlife Sanctuary. He’s published some of his inventory in a guidebook called “Fascinating Fungi of New England.”

Millman estimates that he is now “closing in on” donating 1,000 specimens to the Farlow Herbarium at Harvard, an accomplishment he hopes will help expand people’s knowledge of fungal species worldwide. “This is important because a lot of older specimens have desiccated over winters and are nothing but sand and crumbs,” he says from underneath his mushroom-embroidered baseball cap. His squint seems to bear the mark of one well-practiced in peering through a microscope.

Millman also brings his work directly to the public. He regularly conducts free “Mushroom Walks” open to passerby and regulars, whose ages range from under 30 to over 60. Pushing back against the misconception that fungi are too frail for frigid New England, Millman leads these walks at least twice a month in the fall and winter, focusing primarily on the cold weather adaptations of fungi.

ByleadingNewEnglandfolkonthese walks, Millman hopes to lead people to a new philosophical destination as well: one which centers a r o u n d nature

conservation and humans’ role within the natural environment. “In a habitat, everything is related to everything else,” he says. “I want people to see fungi as symbolic or indicative of a sort of organism that is helping out nature and has been doing so for a long, long time. Whereas ever since we were birthed from an arboreal primate, we’ve done just the opposite — destroyed nature.”

Nothing makes Millman happier at the end of a tour than when his audience awakens to this unity with nature. “One of the remarks that makes my heart swell with pride is when people say ‘I now look at the forest in an entirely different way,’’’ he says with a grin.

At the heart of his educational efforts is transmitting information in an understandable and memorable way to his audience. “I do not focus overwhelmingly on Latin binomials,” Millman says. “I mention common names, and especially common names that are memorable.”

To illustrate this philosophy, Millman shared one example about a fungal species with the Latin name of “Dibotryon morbosum” and the common name of “Black Knot.” Rather than referring to the mushroom by its binomial, Millman uses its common name and writes in his guidebook that “Black Knot” is often referred to as “shit on a stick” in certain parts of New England due to its fecal appearance.

Millman’s passion for discovering drives him still. Whether it’s encountering a fungal species that had not been seen since 1909 or learning about the traditions of the cultures he encounters from the Arctic to the archipelagos, the unpredictability of his work never ceases to impress him.

“You don’t know what you’re going to find next,” he says. “I like to lift up logs, and it’s like a Christmas present — who knows?”

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The World is Aryt Alasti’s Garden

BY CAM E. KETTLES

A CRIMSON STAFF WRITER

ryt Alasti works as a security guard at Harvard from the evening until early morning. He returns home for a brief two-hour nap before coming back to campus. Then he toils each day caring, alone, for dozens of plants across Harvard.

I’ve spoken with Alasti many times over the last few months. Several of our conversations were postponed due to a bamboo pruning project he describes as “grueling.” But Alasti is not employed as a gardener. His volunteer work with plants, which spans all three decades of his time at Harvard, is due solely to his love of natural beauty and a refusal to abandon life.

Over a decade ago, Alasti noticed three palm saplings left behind by a plant rental company that had brought 20 of them to campus as decoration for Memorial Hall. After two weeks on the building’s loading dock, it became clear the plants had been abandoned,

so Alasti brought them back inside and began watering them.

During the winter, the palms had to be moved to a warmer place, so Alasti arranged for them to be housed in the Biolabs Greenhouse through the winter. Each year, for 10 years, Alasti wheeled the palms from Memorial Hall to the Biolabs and wheeled them back six months later. The plants eventually grew so big they had to be repotted. Alasti spent $400 of his own money to buy larger pots and potting soil for the two plants.

But after moving them to the lower exterior level of Memorial Hall in 2017, he had no way of getting the plants — which had already grown far too large to carry — out of the building. Alasti began calling other greenhouses outside the University to find a new winter refuge. “I could never find any place that had a combination of willingness and space,” Alasti says. “It’s a species that could be as big as 30 feet high.”

Alasti eventually negotiated their relocation within Harvard, one to the Science Center and two to Northwest Labs. In his search, he also contacted the Harvard football team to help him move the palms out from Memorial

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Hall. “They were good enough to send over four freshman football players,” he says.

Both plants, having found final homes, remained at Harvard for another five years. The Science Center’s palm, at its largest, stood at 15 feet tall — a full story in height. “It was glorious,” Alasti remembers.

The plants tied Alasti to Harvard — a relationship he would have thought unthinkable for much of his life.

Alasti’s father, Arnold Schuchter ’55, had left the University feeling alienated, Alasti recalls. Schuchter had spent much of his time at Harvard volunteering at the College’s chapter of the National Student Association.

The NSA, billed as an international democracy promoter on college campuses, had been secretly funded by the Central Intelligence Agency. When he learned of the funding, Schuchter never forgave the University.

“Harvard was never mentioned in the household when I was growing up,” Alasti says.

Schuchter, wanting to shield his son from the academic pressure he had faced to attend Harvard, didn’t force the issue of schooling on Alasti.

But he never had to. Alasti learned

PHOTO BY SAMI E. TURNER — CRIMSON PHOTOGRAPHER | 10

to read before entering kindergarten and described much of his primary and secondary school education as “a torment” and “excruciating boredom.”

By high school, Alasti was, in his own words, “at my wit’s end.” He stopped attending classes and was eventually expelled. Taking time away from high school, he took classes at MIT for a semester before finally graduating.

During these years, Alasti hiked the Appalachian Trail and the Pacific Crest Trail, trips he describes as “the high point” of his life. It was in the mountains that Alasti developed his enduring love for nature. Upon returning, he began writing about the environment, eventually writing two books that were never published. His research into environmental hazards, however — including chemically polluted rivers, asbestos, and everyday use of Agent Orange — made him severely depressed.

“A big focus for me has been on actually battling despair,” he says.

“It just radically altered my understanding of reality,” Alasti adds.

He turned to gardening and plant care to find a source of hope. For him, nurturing a plant was creating beauty.

Still searching for escape, he explored life in communes and on farms in remote parts of Alaska and Arizona. Without a home, and not wanting to settle down, Alasti got by doing odd jobs, “wandering the back roads, knocking on doors.”

But Alasti needed money, and he

eventually found himself back in Boston working at Whole Foods. At the time, the value of the U.S. dollar was soaring, and Alasti took advantage by importing nature postcards from a Swiss publisher and selling them to tourists, including at the Smithsonian Institution.

But when the dollar fell, Alasti started working as a security guard on night shifts to supplement his income.

By the time he started at Harvard in the early ’90s, he was working all night and spending every day in the garden.

While at Harvard, Alasti has been involved with nearly a dozen activist organizations on campus, most prominently with Occupy Harvard, a climate divestment campaign, and the Student Labor Action Movement. He is well known among student organizers — even those he has never met in person — through SLAM’s email list and as a frequent online commenter on The Crimson’s labor and sustainability coverage.

Alasti, also a vocal critic of the University’s labor policies and pay scales, has attended many protests and marches organized by every union on campus over the years, although he notes his own union — Service Employees International Union 32BJ — rarely holds protests. Like a number of Securitas guards interviewed by The Crimson, Alasti has grown increasingly disillusioned with the union, Securitas, and Harvard.

“On the whole, working at Harvard

Alasti recruited four freshman football players to move his palms in 2017.

PHOTO COURTESY OF ARYT ALASTI

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has not been a pleasant experience,” Alasti says.

University spokesperson Jason A. Newton declined to comment.

For a long time, Alasti’s ability to garden on campus was the job’s saving grace. He tells me he had tried to disconnect from gardening at Harvard, but without assurance the plants would be taken care of otherwise, he felt he could not leave.

His three palms eventually became infested with spider mites and root rot.

Despite spending hundreds of hours trimming damaged leaves and stalks, Alasti was unable to save them, and all eventually withered. When the Science Center’s once 15-foot-tall palm was removed last year, Alasti took its death to heart.

He tells me he doesn’t want students and Harvard staff to associate him with the plant’s death, which he calls “a mess of an outcome.”

Alasti had hoped he could retire come January, feeling an increasing desire to leave Harvard and never look back. With such a plan in place, he wrote to former President Larry Bacow on the last day of his term, explaining his plans for retirement. “My hope is that I can do something which will contribute to bettering the world, or at least that will correspond with my interests and be an experience of positivity,” Alasti wrote.

But Alasti tells me he isn’t able to retire yet.

“If I could find some other job of adequate pay and benefits tomorrow, I would be thrilled to never see any of the Harvard plants again, even if some of them are indeed beautiful,” he says.

“So long as I’m remaining I’ll give my involvements my best effort,” Alasti adds.

Alasti still spends his nights working.

During the day, security guards see him around everywhere, pruning and weeding in many of the campuses’ buildings and outdoor spaces. But the plants that give Alasti hope, he tells me, are outside Harvard. They are pieces of daily positivity: an enduring reminder of nature’s beauty and resilience.

A plant that Alasti cares for in the Science Center. For him, nurturing a plant is creating beauty.

PHOTO COURTESY OF OF ARYT ALASTI

PHOTOS COURTESY OF ARYT ALASTI | 12

The White M

How Antisemitism Shaped Ha

BY SERENA JAMPEL AND CRIMSON STAF

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Man’s College

Harvard’s Legacy Admissions

AND YASMEEN A. KHAN STAFF WRITERS

GRAPHICS BY HANNAH L. NIEDERRITER — CRIMSON DESIGNER | 14

T

he day was June 21, 1922.

It had been raining all week, and the grounds of the Old Yard were still damp. The day prior had been Class Day: Every senior had gathered in Sever Quad dressed in caps and gowns. Soon, a new class of students would take their place.

As the Class of 1922 prepared for their lives beyond Harvard, top University officials met to discuss what they saw as an emerging problem — the racial composition of future Harvard classes.

In the heart of Harvard Yard, within the white walls of University Hall, professor Charles H. Grandgent, Class of 1883, called the meeting to order. In attendance were 12 members of the faculty, including Paul J. Sachs, Class of 1900, professor of Art History and heir to financial firm Goldman Sachs; Chester Noyes Greenough, Class of 1898, then the dean of Harvard College; and Henry Pennypacker, Class of 1888, chairman of admissions at Harvard College.

Sachs opened the meeting with

Many are left questioning the degree to which the University can truly act as an engine of change. three questions regarding the racial breakdown of recent Harvard classes: “Is there a problem? Is it a Jewish problem? Does the problem involve a principle?”

In response, the Committee unanimously voted “Yes.” In the early 20th century, the number of Jewish students at Harvard rose dramatically. These were the sons of immigrants from Eastern Europe, largely from public high schools in cities on the East Coast. In the 1921-22 school year, Harvard’s student body was 21.5 percent Jewish. By comparison, in the mid-1920s, Jewish people made up approximately 3.5 percent of America’s population. University officials worried about this “overrepresentation” of Jewish people on campus.

Over the course of the 1920s, Harvard’s administration passed a series of admissions policies to limit the percentage of Jewish students in each incoming class. These policies were the first attempts in Harvard’s history to restrict the admission of qualified applicants. Legacy admissions were among these changes: A surefire way to preserve the white, Protestant demographics of “Old Harvard” was to admit the white, Protestant sons of “Old Harvard” graduates.

Many of these practices remain in place today. This summer, the Supreme Court released its decision on Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, a case that effectively ended race-based affirmative action. Shortly after, Lawyers for Civil Rights filed a federal civil rights complaint over Harvard’s practice of tipping the admissions scales in favor of children of alumni.

That same month, the Department of Education announced an investigation into Harvard’s legacy and donor preference policies.

In the conversation around equity and access to elite education, critics say the practice of “legacy admissions” contradicts the University’s stated goals of inclusion and diversity.

Harvard spokesperson Jonathan Palumbo did not respond to multiple requests for comment for this article.

According to proponents, legacy admissions sustain alumni loyalty — and with it, a steady flow of alumni donations. In reality, this relationship is more complicated. A study conducted

by The Century Foundation with data from 1998 to 2008 found no statistically significant relationship between legacy admissions and alumni donations among top universities.

What, then, is the purpose of legacy preference? The history of the practice reveals that it was constructed not only to keep the descendants of alumni in, but to keep certain students out.

“Without question, donor and legacy preferences have run along racial lines or at the very least discriminatory lines for years, going back to the ’20s when the legacy practice really became more widespread,” says Michael Kippins, one of the head attorneys for Lawyers for Civil Rights.

Yet Harvard was never meant to be inclusive in the first place. Why dwell on admissions practices at one of the most selective colleges when only about half of American adults receive a degree from any college?

There is a pipeline between the Harvard classroom and positions of

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power. A July 2023 paper by Harvard Economics professor Raj Chetty ’00 found that alumni of the Ivy League and other elite institutions disproportionately occupy highincome and powerful positions, such as prestigious graduate programs and fellowships, leadership of Fortune 500 companies, and high-level government seats.

Abbott Lawrence Lowell, Class of 1877.

PHOTO COURTESY OF HARVARD UNIVERSITY ARCHIVES

For example, there are only nine justices on the Supreme Court — a body that, in the past two years, has restricted the Environmental Protection Agency’s power to curb carbon emissions, limited legislators’ ability to regulate firearms, and terminated federal protections for legalized abortion. Of those nine justices, four are Harvard alumni, including two from Harvard College.

A Harvard education has the ability to change someone’s life, and, when leveraged properly, to influence the course of the nation. But as legacy admissions favor the children of alumni — who are disproportionately white and wealthy to begin with — many are left questioning the degree to which the University can truly act as an engine of change.

The history of legacy admissions throws the discriminatory structures at the core of Harvard admissions into harsh relief, raising questions about the evolution of Harvard’s mission and who it aims to serve.

‘Tolerably Homogeneous’

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n Oct. 6, 1909, Abbott Lawrence Lowell, Class of 1877, was inaugurated as the 22nd president of Harvard University. His presidency was largely marked by his

desire to maintain Harvard’s AngloSaxon character. During his tenure, he held secret trials to expel students suspected of homosexual activity, attempted to ban Black students from freshman dormitories, and tried to institute a “Jewish quota” to limit the percentage of Jewish students on campus.

Before he became president, Lowell served as the vice president of the Immigrant Restriction League, an anti-immigrant activist group. In 1917, eight years into his tenure at Harvard, he was appointed to the advisory committee for the trial of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, two anarchist Italian immigrants who were convicted of murder, despite what was widely understood to be a lack of strong evidence against them. Lowell’s report for the committee helped quell doubts among New England leaders about the fairness of the proceedings, and the trial concluded with the execution of the men by electric chair.

Many thought the verdict was influenced by nativist sentiment — something Lowell was known to have shared. In a 1918 letter, he stated that “no democracy could be successful unless it was tolerably homogeneous.”

Lowell’s attitude was extreme, but not uncommon for his time. The influx of immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe at the end of the 19th century, along with the period of postCivil War Reconstruction, spurred a shockwave of racial anxiety across the United States.

At Harvard, courses on eugenics were taught alongside classes on biology and chemistry. In 1924, a group of graduating students posed with the iconic John Harvard statue in the hooded robes of the Ku Klux Klan.

Lowell granted Harvard’s Eugenics Records Office access to “the physical and intellectual records of students” for research in “racial science.”

Despite the hostile environment on campus, Harvard, which “had stood for liberalism, cosmopolitanism, and opportunity,” had been a “special symbol” for Jewish immigrants and their children, wrote historian Marcia G. Synnott ’61 in her book “The HalfOpened Door: Discrimination in Admissions at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton.”

“Boston was a diverse community because it was a big port of entry for immigrants,” she explains in an interview. “Harvard was attractive to that next generation: the sons of those immigrants, as they were smart and did

well in school, said ‘Hey, why can’t I go to Harvard?’”

But across Ivy League administrations, anxiety about rising Jewish enrollment was brewing.

Historian Jerome B. Karabel ’72 notes that Jewish enrollment at Columbia University before 1920 reached up to 40 percent of the student body. At Columbia, the large population of

terms “a clear and present danger for any institution with substantial Jewish presence.” Many of these pedigreed students matriculated to Harvard instead. Lowell was concerned that a large number of Jewish students would cause the sons of Boston Brahmin to matriculate elsewhere, which would “ruin the college.”

Some alumni echoed Lowell’s fears

A chart included in the Statistical Report of the Statisticians that lists current students who “would have been excluded” under the “New Plan” of admissions. An “x” signifies if a student would have been rejected for being a “line case” or for failing English. Certain students are also marked with a red “J.” PHOTO COURTESY OF HARVARD UNIVERSITY ARCHIVES

Jewish students drove away powerful Protestant families at rates alarming to the university. By the 1920s, only 6 percent of Columbia’s students were the children of elite New York families.

Columbia’s case study with “WASP flight” demonstrated what Karabel

and hostility towards Jewish students.

W.F. Williams, Class of 1901, wrote to Lowell after a Harvard-Yale Game, troubled by the number of Jewish spectators in the stands.

“I cannot but feel that your New England blood must run cold when

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you contemplate their ever-increasing numbers at Harvard,” he wrote. “Are the Overseers so lacking in genius that they can’t devise a way to bring Harvard back to the position it always held as a ‘white man’s college?’”

In its early years, Harvard was restricted to white students, if not in principle then in practice. Before the surge of Jewish students in the 20th century, the applicants who were academically qualified by the standards set out by the administration — a combination of high school grades and exam scores — were usually white, Protestant, wealthy, and related to Harvard alumni. Other groups were explicitly barred from attending Harvard; notably, Black students were not admitted to the University until 1847.

Jewish students. Grandgent notes anecdotally that Jewish students mostly kept to themselves, except for when it came to playing sports.

To prove the existence of the socalled “Jewish problem,” the Committee formed the Subcommittee Appointed to Collect Statistics. The Subcommittee hired statistical experts to produce the Statistical Report of the Statisticians, a comprehensive study of Jewish students at Harvard.

The report included a breakdown of the number of Jewish applicants admitted to Harvard College and each of its graduate schools, both through the regular admissions process and through transfer applications.

The report also studied Jewish life on Harvard’s campus: scholarship,

were classified into three categories: J1 meaning definitely Jewish, J2 meaning probably Jewish, and J3 meaning possibly Jewish.

Administrators combed through enrollment lists and marked up tables with cryptic symbols — all in service of identifying and quantifying the Jewish presence on campus. Classifications were based on an array of available information, including a student’s last name, secondary school, and financial status.

In the end, the Statistical Report of the Statisticians discredited the Committee’s fears. Jewish involvement in campus life was roughly comparable to that of students who were not Jewish — Jewish segregation, self-imposed or otherwise, was nothing more than a specter. Nevertheless, Lowell directed the Committee to continue updating Harvard’s admissions policies.

In Search of the ‘All-Around Boy’

I

Hand-drawn graph included in the Statistical Report of the Statisticians that tracks the increase in the “percentage of Jews to total number of students admitted.”

PHOTO COURTESY OF HARVARD UNIVERSITY ARCHIVES

In the early 1920s, Harvard administration formed the Committee on Methods for Sifting Candidates for Admission. Spearheaded by Lowell, the Committee aimed to limit the number of Jewish students on campus.

The “character” of Jewish students came to fascinate the Committee. A letter dated April 7, 1923 and written by the Chair of the Committee, Grandgent, characterizes Jewish students at Harvard as “a better scholar than the Gentile” but also “more prone to dishonesty and sexual offenses, but much less addicted to intemperance.”

Central to the administration’s anxiety about Jewish students on campus was perceived social segregation between Jewish and non-

disciplinary cases, participation in athletic and non-athletic student activities, membership in social clubs, membership in final clubs, membership in the Harvard Union, and the percentage of students receiving financial aid.

Finally, the report took note of which graduate schools Jewish students attended after leaving Harvard, as well as their eventual vocation once their education had been completed.

At the time, Harvard did not ask students to identify their ethnicity on their applications. To get a clearer picture of the demographics of its student body, administrators designed an elaborate plan to predict students’ ethnicity. Potential Jewish students

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n 1924, for the first time in Harvard’s history, the University limited the number of students it would accept. Up until this point, so long as a student cleared Harvard’s academic requirements and had the money to attend, they were allowed to enroll. Now, with the rising number of applications, Harvard was faced with having to reject qualified candidates and limit the freshman class to 1,000 students. Harvard’s applicants had finally exceeded its capacity to teach — at least, this was how the administration justified its new limit to the public.

The Committee for Admissions, chaired by Pennypacker sent a missive in March 1924 stating that changes in governing admissions “have been adopted as temporary measures because of limitation of staff and equipment” and added that “the freshman class shall be so restricted as not to exceed the possibility of instruction.”

As a result, the Committee needed to determine who would be admitted to the College and by what standards.

One of the key changes to admissions criteria was a newfound emphasis on the applicant’s “character.” Because character could not be quantified through existing methods, the Committee introduced new elements to the application; in particular, the personal essay and the alumni interview.

By 1926, these personal metrics were cemented into the Harvard admissions process. The Alumni Bulletin declared that the Admissions Committee “will

Henry Pennypacker, Class of 1888.

PHOTO COURTESY OF HARVARD UNIVERSITY ARCHIVES

attach much weight to character, personality, and promise, but will continue to give preference to men who pass with high rank the admission examinations.”

That same year, Pennypacker described the ideal Harvard applicant: “We are looking, then, for the allaround boy, and we intend to select him, considering every individual’s record with respect to his promise, his intellectual power, to his character, and to the likelihood that he will profit by what Harvard has to offer.”

By 1934, the definition of the “allaround boy” became more explicitly tied to parentage and pedigree.

“The sons of alumni type might represent, as you remarked to me, forty percent of an entering class,” wrote Dean of Admissions Richard M. Gummere, Class of 1904, in a confidential letter to then-University President James Bryant Conant, Class of 1913, noting that the number was necessary to “conform to a reasonable minimum requirement.”

According to Gummere, the sons of graduates would form a group “from which the ‘manager’ type and the class officer and the later business man would come.”

A 1929 Crimson article titled “Class of 1932 Superior Scholastically to Freshmen of Last Year — Large Percentage Are Sons of Harvard Graduates” corroborated the view that children of alumni were better suited to academic success. The article noted that 48 percent of the freshman class consisted of sons of alumni,

insinuating that this high proportion was responsible for the class’s high academic achievement.

However, it was unclear whether legacy students actually outperformed their peers academically.

“Even if the statistics recently published at Harvard show the publicschool product to be the protagonist in Phi Beta Kappa and Summa Cum or Magna Cum Laude degrees, this superiority may be ascribed to the fact that one does not find many public school boys at Cambridge who can afford to neglect their works for the sake of social contacts,” Gummere wrote in that same letter to Conant.

“If the private-school group, from places like Exeter and Milton, decided in caucus to go after Phi Beta Kappa, they could reverse these figures in a single year,” he claimed.

At the time, the overlap between Jewish students and public school students at Harvard was substantial.

A 1949 memo marked “Confidential For Use of Schools and Scholarship Committees” states that “it is customary to admit sons of alumni provided they are qualified academically and appear to have good character, a stable personality, and a sincere desire to obtain a liberal education.” Legacy preference admissions policies showed how strong personal metrics, perceived academic abilities, and alumni parents characterized Harvard’s ideal of a successful applicant.

‘You Are Indicting the Entire Jewish Student Body’

D

espite the administration’s claims that its limitation on class size was due to a lack of capacity, its actual motives were much more sinister.

Shortly before the 1,000-student restriction was put into place, Lowell corresponded with Henry James III., Class of 1899, son of philosopher William James, Class of 1865, writing: “To prevent a dangerous increase in the proportion of Jews, I know at present only one way which is at the same time straightforward and effective, and that is a selection by a personal estimate of character.”

Such a selection, Lowell added, “can be carried out only in case the numbers are limited. If there is no limit, it is impossible to reject a candidate who passes the admissions examinations without proof of defective character.”

In other words, the purpose of restricting class size was not to preserve

instructor capacity; it was to cap the number of Jewish applicants admitted to each class. Seemingly innocuous methods for measuring character were deliberately created to exclude Jewish students.

One such method was the personal interview. During a Committee on Methods meeting on Nov. 6, 1922, Chemistry professor Lawrence Joseph Henderson, Class of 1898, pointed to Columbia and Cornell medical schools, which “discriminate on the basis of personal interviews, in view of the fact that a selection of candidates must be made.”

The minutes add: “The Columbia Medical School has reduced the percentage of Jewish students very materially of late.” As the meeting wore into the evening, the Committee also discussed “the possibility of personal examinations.” The members alluded to instituting a physical examination into the admissions process, although the exact nature of this examination was left unclear.

To complement this heightened emphasis on character, the 1926 Alumni Bulletin announced another application requirement: a personal photograph.

This was one of many additions to the application that allowed admissions officers to deduce an applicant’s ethnic background. Other additions included questions about the applicant’s mother’s maiden name and whether any changes had been made to the applicant’s name or that of their father.

In public statements, the University reaffirmed their commitment to nondiscriminatory treatment. The apparent dissonance between these statements and internal admissions policy decisions reflects Harvard’s attempt to determine demographic information without appearing prejudiced against any particular religious or racial group.

In the summer of 1922, Lowell asked professor Harry Austryn Wolfson to join the Committee on Methods. Born in Belarus to Jewish parents, Wolfson immigrated to the United States at 16 and later earned his bachelor’s, master’s, and doctorate degrees at Harvard. By the time Lowell sought his presence on the committee, Wolfson was an assistant professor in Jewish philosophy and literature.

Lowell’s request seemed like a surprising one, considering that Wolfson was a Jewish immigrant who studied the Jewish intellectual tradition, and the purpose of the committee was to reduce the number of Jewish students at Harvard.

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However, Lowell argued in a letter to Wolfson that the question of Jewish limitation “is even more important to the Jews than to anyone else.”

“The fundamental question seems to be how we can prevent a repetition here of the conditions of Jewish segregation which exist in the central and eastern parts of Europe, from which so many immigrants of that race are now coming,” he wrote in that same correspondence, dated June 15, 1922.

Lowell claimed to believe that an increased number of Jews on campus would trigger antisemitic reactions within the student body, creating a prejudiced, discriminatory environment that would harm Jewish students.

However, instead of remedying that antisemitism, Lowell’s solution was to simply prevent Jewish applicants from arriving at Harvard in the first place, and he wanted a Jewish professor to help him do it.

Wolfson accepted the position. “I will not consider myself to act in the capacity of a representative Jew to any larger extent than which I can lay claim to,” he wrote to federal judge Julian W. Mack. “I will enter the service in the capacity of one who happens to possess some knowledge of the subject with which the committee, as is conceived at present, is primarily concerned.”

“Throughout the Faculty discussion I was impressed with the general lack of accurate information about the Jewish

student body and their antecedents,” he continued.

He wrote in favor of including “a social survey of the Jewish student body” in the Committee’s report. “It may not, perhaps, modify the recommendations of the present committee, but it will certainly knock the bottom out of some of their recommendations.”

Wolfson opposed his colleagues’ belief in totalizing assimilation. To him, Jewish segregation — if it existed at all — was not necessarily a problem. In a letter to Harvard Law professor Felix Frankfurter, he wrote, “It is just as much important for us to insist upon the right of Jews, of any kind of Jews, to live a free, unhampered Jewish life in the U n i v e r s i t y, so far as it does not interfere w i t h

Wolfson’s suggestion to ask these questions of admitted students rather than applicants, so as not to appear discriminatory in the eyes of the public.

In the same meeting, the Committee agreed not to make the Statistical Report of the Statisticians p u b l i c

University regulations, as it is for us to insist upon unrestricted admissions.”

“I am quite aware that some nonJews are not as yet prepared to grant us that point, and are apt to look upon any form of Jewish activity as an attempt toward Jewish segregation,” he continued. “Well, we will have to make them see the error of their view.”

As he spent more time on the Committee,

for fear o f seeming prejudiced.

Wolfson’s concerns were not unfounded. In a letter to Grandgent, he notes that the publicity of Harvard’s admissions debate had triggered flareups of antisemitism across other college campuses, something he compares to “the unruly spirit of mobs.”

“It seems that some irresponsible students in various places, perhaps only in the exuberance of youth, have taken to Jew-baiting, as yet of a mild form, as a new kind of college sport,” he wrote. He references antisemitic posters at New York University and student resolutions at Syracuse University to restrict the number of Jewish students on their campus.

Despite Wolfson’s disagreements with his colleagues, he outwardly defended the Committee’s purpose.

On April 12, 1923, Wolfson responded to a letter from Rabbi Louis Israel Newman, in which Newman argued that Harvard’s push for geographic diversity in admissions was a ploy to harm Jewish applicants.

“If the ‘exclusion of Jews’ were, as you say, the purpose of the proponents of the new method, it would seem they have devised a rather poor method of accomplishing their purpose,” Wolfson wrote.

His defense of Harvard’s policies was a far cry from his thoughts on restriction before he joined the Committee.

In a letter from the late spring of 1922, Wolfson accused his colleagues of basing their characterization of

Wo l f s o n b e c a m e increasingly concerned with Harvard’s image.

Committee meeting minutes from March 12, 1923 report that the Chairman read a letter from Wolfson about certain questions on the application form, which sought information about a student’s race, if they had changed their name, and religious preference.

The Committee agreed with

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Jewish students not on facts, but “upon hearsay, upon vague impressions, and upon untested popular opinions.”

“About a year ago, one of your leading scholars published an epochmaking article in which he showed how for many centuries Christian writers had misquoted, misunderstood, misinterpreted Jewish texts on which they had drawn indictments against Judaism,” he wrote. “Today, you are indicting the entire Jewish student body without even taking the trouble of acquainting yourselves with the simplest facts of their lives, their thinking, and their believing.”

Although Wolfson later worried about Harvard appearing discriminatory to the public, he initially believed that if discrimination were to occur, then Harvard should be as transparent as possible about their intentions.

“Should you decide to fix the quota of Jews such as is suggested in Professor Ropes’ resolution, we hope you will do it openly as you had originally intended to do,” he wrote.

His statement reads with a bitter irony. In dryly suggesting a direct quota, he is asking Harvard to admit to the discrimination hiding within its bureaucracy.

“There is a great moral advantage to be gained by the Jews in being singled out for discrimination,” wrote Wolfson. “If the University is to gain any advantage by limiting the number of Jews, it should be generous enough to allow the Jews the moral satisfaction of knowing that they are discriminated against for being what they are.”

‘Allowing Racism to Profilerate Through the System’

T

hough legacy was unofficially in practice throughout Harvard’s history, and was one of several policies used to exclude Jewish students, it’s unclear when it became codified in admissions policy. We could not find a publically available “smoking gun,” no document or proclamation or motion instating preference for the sons of graduates at Harvard, though the practice persists to this day.

That said, looking at peer institutions gives us a good sense of what the evidence may have looked like. Karabel and Synnott identify the origins of legacy preferences at other Ivy League schools during this wave of antisemitism in admissions. Dartmouth College codified legacy admissions in 1922.

In that same year, a Yale Board

of Admissions memo entitled “Memorandum on Jewish Representation in Yale” stated that the only “successful” criteria devised by any university to exclude Jewish students had done so through “non-intellectual requirements” to circumvent their academic qualifications.

The memorandum included a comprehensive list of measures taken

by Yale’s peer institutions to restrict the population of Jewish students. The note reads: “Columbia — Psychological tests; Princeton — undergraduate sentiment; Harvard — New Plan examinations, refusal of transfers and registration data; Dartmouth and Williams — dormitories and general restriction of numbers.”

While many policies implemented by various schools seemed innocuous at face value, the Yale Board of Admissions highlights that they were all in service of exclusion for the purpose of maintaining a specific Anglo-Saxon character in the university.

Restrictions on Jewish applicants were thought to have continued as late as the 1950s. In a paper titled “The Changing Harvard Student: Ethnicity, Race, and Gender,” Synnott cites a letter from 1948, in which a Chicago alumnus writes that his daughter, upon applying to Radcliffe, was “very distinctly told that there was a nonofficial Jewish quota” by Radcliffe alumni. The passport-sized photograph requirement remained on the application until 1958.

Though the black box of admissions policies makes it hard to definitively conclude when antisemitic admissions policies fell away, Jewish enrollment rebounded in the 1960s. A 1967 report cited by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency places the percentage of Jewish students at Harvard between 20 and 25 percent, though current-day statistics show a smaller proportion of Jewish students at Harvard today — according to The Crimson’s freshman survey of the Class of 2025, about 7.4 percent of the class identified as Jewish.

In the early 1970s, in the wake of the Civil Rights Movement, the discourse around Harvard’s inclusion of Black students.

According to Synnott, the Black student population doubled between the classes of 1972 and 1975, from 4.24 percent

to 8.68 percent. A concentration in Afro-American Studies was first made available to students starting with the Class of 1972. When racebased affirmative action was deemed constitutional in the 1978 ruling on Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr. cited the “Harvard Plan” — Harvard’s method for recruiting minority students — as a model for other universities in creating a diverse incoming class.

Since the Supreme Court effectively struck down race-based affirmative action this summer, legacy admissions have come under scrutiny for their continued use, with critics pointing to their role in producing disproportionately white and wealthy admissions classes.

Though legacy admissions began as a way to exclude Jewish applicants specifically, today, many now worry that the practice contributes to the exclusion of applicants of color, specifically Black and Latinx applicants.

This past July, Lawyers for Civil Rights filed a federal complaint against Harvard on behalf of three social justice organizations. In the complaint, they argued that “Harvard admits predominantly white students using donor and legacy preferences, and, as a direct result, excludes non-white applicants.”

The complaint alleges that legacy admissions violate the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits practices that have significant discriminatory impacts on the basis of race.

“Especially when we know that the government provides ample funds to Harvard and many other universities, we want to make sure that that money is going to institutions that are not supporting or allowing

GRAPHICS BY HANNAH L. NIEDERRITER — CRIMSON DESIGNER | 20

racism to proliferate through the system,” says Kippins, the attorney.

Kippins adds that nearly 70 percent of legacy or donor admits are white, and that if legacy preferences were abolished, then admission rates for applicants of color would increase while admission rates for white applicants would decrease.

A bill jointly presented to the Massachusetts House of Representatives and State Senate, if passed, would require universities in Massachusetts to either eliminate legacy admissions or pay a fee to the state.

“There are a few devices that really jumped out at me and many others in the public as fundamentally unfair, as unAmerican, and as profoundly inconsistent with the values that elite liberal arts institutions purport to champion,” says State Rep. Simon Cataldo, one of the bill’s co-authors. “I think legacy admissions may be the most pernicious on its face.”

Harvard spokesperson Jonathan Palumbo did not respond to a request for comment.

Defenders of legacy admissions have argued that students with the advantages afforded by a privileged parent are simply better qualified for college. In an application that values high SAT scores, impressive extracurriculars, and stellar grades, wealthy students tend to perform better, Chetty finds.

However, it is not just the privileges afforded by wealth that improve the chances of a legacy student, Chetty finds — it is their legacy status.

If the children of alumni were equally as qualified as their exceptional peers, Chetty reasons, they would have an equally high chance of acceptance at another Ivy League or an institution of equal caliber outside of their parents’ alma mater. Instead, Chetty finds that these students see no boost on their applications when applying to other elite schools.

“I would just say that there should be no scenario where an applicant of color stares at a rejection letter, while some less qualified white applicant celebrates being the third in their line to go to Harvard,” Kippins says.

‘A Broader Construction of Merit’

T

he debate around the dismantling of legacy admissions always comes back around to meritocracy. Who deserves a spot at Harvard? In the 1920s, the prevailing attitude was that it was not just the exceptional scholar who merited a spot, but the exceptional scholar who would also uphold the Anglo-Saxon

tradition of the University. Today, the landscape surrounding who should merit admission to the nation’s most elite institutions has shifted.

“If you ask most Americans how they think students should be admitted to college, they want students admitted based on merit, by which they mean how well a student has done in terms of academics and extracurriculars in light of what obstacles they’ve had to overcome in life,” says Richard D. Kahlenberg ’85, who served as an expert witness for Students for Fair Admissions in their lawsuit against Harvard.

Others challenge the very foundations of meritocracy. In an excerpt

“Merit is an arbitrary construction because it fluctuates based on what a society finds valuable at any given time.” from his book, “The Tyranny of Merit,” Government professor Michael J. Sandel wrote “meritocracy today functions less as an alternative to inequality than as its primary justification.”

“Merit is an arbitrary construction because it fluctuates based on what a society finds valuable at any given time,” Sandel argues.

He also claims that the idea of meritocracy encourages successful people to believe that they have earned their prosperity — and, consequently, that those in less privileged positions have earned their lot as well.

Sandel’s arguments disrupt the bedrock of selective admissions, challenging the idea that admission to Harvard is deserved at all.

“It cannot really be said that even students who win admission through the front door did so solely on their own,” Sandel wrote. “What about the parents and teachers who helped them on their way? What about talents and gifts not wholly of their making? What about the good fortune to live in a society that cultivates and rewards the talents they

21 | PAGE DESIGNED BY MAX H. SCHERMER — CRIMSON DESIGNER

happen to have?”

Instead of obsessing over whether or not someone is qualified to get into Harvard, John Jay College of Criminal Justice professor Evan J. Mandery ’89, suggests that the first step to a more just education system “involves a broader construction of merit” — one premised on the democratization of higher education instead of deliberate exclusion.

Top Harvard administrators have appeared to leave the door open for an end to legacy admissions in recent months.

When asked about legacy admissions in an October interview with The Crimson, University President Claudine Gay said: “Everything is on the table.”

Faculty of Arts and Sciences Dean Hopi E. Hoekstra went further, telling The Crimson later that month that ending legacy admissions is “under consideration”

by Harvard.

But even if Harvard abolishes legacy preferences, whether it can truly democratize its admissions remains in question.

Every year, Harvard receives tens of thousands of applications. In recent years, they have admitted around 3 percent of those hopeful students. Harvard’s admissions officers spend untold hours carefully crafting the university’s newest class of students, ranking and rating each applicant behind closed doors.

Each admissions cycle brings several times more qualified applicants than spots in the incoming class, leading many to refer to Harvard admissions as essentially a lottery. Statistically, every person who gains admission is lucky. Yet that “luck” still depends on a myriad of factors and privileges, which compromise Harvard’s ability to be inclusive. *** The year was 1930, and hammers rang out on Mount Auburn Street. South of the “Gold Coast” dorms of what we now call Adams House, famed for high rents and cushy accommodations, the construction of a new dormitory was underway.

Scaffolding snaked up red brick walls and the outline of a prominent bell tower was beginning to take shape. The new dorm would revolutionize Harvard housing: It was to be a place where students could live together, regardless of financial means and background. According to a New York Times report, the dorm was created to “bring together as many students as possible.”

The building was to be named Lowell House.

Lowell House under construction.

PHOTO COURTESY OF HARVARD UNIVERSITY ARCHIVES

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So, Professor Hoffman is Running Across the Country (For the Third Time)

BY HANNAH W. DUANE

P ­

CRIMSON STAFF WRITER

hysics professor Jennifer E. Hoffman ’99 is halfway to New York and her calves hurt. Averaging 60 miles a day, she is running, in Forrest Gump fashion, across America: one corn field, small town, and two-lane highway at a time.

To be clear: she’s on sabbatical. When I spoke to her on a Wednesday evening, she was cheerful and matter-of-fact, eating her dinner of six eggs and a salad as she told me about her attempt on the wildest of world records: the transcontinental run.

Radical long-distance running is not new for Hoffman. She started distance running while an undergraduate at Harvard. At the time, she mostly

ran along the Charles. But with encouragement from a teaching fellow, she decided to embark on her very first marathon. Together, they drove to run the Philadelphia Marathon. In a blog post, she wrote, “Not nearly enough training, not enough vaseline, not enough food... we brought some chocolate power gels, but they were so gross that we didn’t eat anything until mile 18, at which point we were pretty much toast.”

In the years since, she’s gotten better at planning ahead.

“I was always intrigued by the longer distances,” she says. “I’m not particularly fast or talented, but I’m stubborn and I work hard.”

Her distance increased from marathons to 50 milers and 24-hour events. On her very-2000s blog, she posted her CV, dutifully listing her magna cum laude graduation from Harvard in 1999 and Ph.D. in Physics

PHOTO COURTESY OF JENNIFER E. HOFFMAN

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from the University of California, Berkeley, alongside a complete race list from 1998–2011.

Her blog posts — written in white type on a dark green background — provide detailed accounts of these races. In 2004, she ran the Miwok 100k, her first ultramarathon. She especially appreciated the boiled potatoes at the aid stations. She ran the Superior Trail 100 in 2004 (101 miles in 28 hours, 31 minutes, and 51 seconds, the fastest time for female racers), and lamented the rocks and roots which exhausted her “feet-lifting muscles.” And then there was Across the Years, a 24-hour event from Dec. 31 to Jan. 1 of looping the track, which she completed in 2006 (clocking 126.7 miles). She describes being unable to run after 12 and a half hours as a “total bonk” and then making it her “New Year’s Resolution to start running again.” Then, in 2014, she brought home the national title in the 24-hour run, completing just over 127 miles.

But none of this was enough for Hoffman, who in 2019 turned her eyes towards transcontinental running.

The Guinness world record for the women’s transcontinental run was set

by Sandra Villines in 2017. Villines ran for 55 days, 16 hours, and 23 minutes from San Francisco to New York City. In 2019, Hoffman made her first attempt on Villines’s transcontinental record.

“My run is driven by gratitude for the beauty of this country, and the freedom it affords to dream big, work hard, and achieve goals,” she said at the time.

Hoffman ran for 42 days, averaging 61 miles a day, propelling herself from San Francisco to Ohio. But near Cleveland, her knee gave out. And so Hoffman, too, had to stop. When I spoke to her about it, the disappointment of completing only 2,560 miles, with 450 to go, was palpable.

“It’s a big, audacious goal,” she says. “And I tried and failed.” Actually, she says, she tried twice. In 2022, she planned a second attempt, which ended before it began due to a torn hamstring.

So she’s trying again. On Sept. 16, Hoffman set out from San Francisco, posting 65 miles on her first day. In the weeks since, she’s been continuing much the same. She gets up between three and four in the morning and tries to get out as quickly as possible. Her crew meets her every three miles with snacks and other supplies. On meticulous Strava posts, you can see the long thin line of

her journey, with endless 11–14 minute mile splits listed out in brutal detail. The summary shows mile count alongside calories exerted, a daily eight or nine thousand.

When I asked her what she thinks about while she runs, she highlighted these intense caloric needs. On the day we spoke, she estimated she ate a smoothie, a banana, two egg sandwiches, three bagels with cream cheese, two muffins, two brownies, four mega cookies, four Pop-Tarts, and then six eggs and a salad for dinner. And when refueling isn’t front and center, she’s focused on America.

“The middle of the country is so big,” she remarks. “There’s a lot of people working really hard to feed the coasts.” Running across America is not an urban experience.

Her days are spent on a mixture of highways and farm roads, with the

occasional sidewalk. Her run has taken her through Yosemite and the mountains of Colorado, but also past a cement factor y in Utah, where she was gifted a breakfast burrito. Right now, she’s running on highways with dozens of semis spraying fertilizer for the Nebraska har vest. She highlighted how her 2019 attempt gave her a much greater appreciation for the “glor y and the diversity of our countr y,” and it’s also made her more tolerant and empathetic.

When I asked her what she hopes people will take away from her monumental project, she says, “I hope that by pushing through the hard and the failures, that that could end up being an inspiration to some people to pursue whatever their big audacious dream is, even if it’s quite different from this one.”

PHOTOS COURTESY OF JENNIFER E. HOFFMAN | 24

Nesting in Ephemera

25 | PAGE DESIGNED BY ANGEL ZHANG AND SAMI E. TURNER — CRIMSON DESIGNERS

BY SAM E. WEIL

E

CRIMSON STAFF WRITER

very night this academic year, I fall asleep underneath a cutout of a bowl of salad layered on top of a photo of a hillock sprouting with magnificent red flowers. Above them is a bookmark of a cat looking out a window, and next to that, Claude Monet’s lavendershadowed interpretation of the British Houses of Parliament. Underneath, a picture of someone’s eyes crinkled closed. Nearby, a Frida Kahlo still life of coconuts whose dark circular eyes are shedding small tears behind a Mexican flag that reads, “pintó con todo cariño, Frida Kahlo.”

In the morning, I wake up facing the rest of my collage. Describing the whole thing would take up far too many words, so I’ll put it this way: scraps of paper fill every wall. My mom calls these scraps ephemera — “items of collectable memorabilia, typically written or printed ones, that were originally expected to have only short-term usefulness or popularity,” according to the Oxford Dictionary —and that’s the closest word I can use to describe it all.

Cutouts of art from museum brochures and old calendars, posters ripped from hipster magazines, receipts that I get my friends to doodle on, block prints and postcards bought off the street and at art fairs.

My collection of this ephemera began eight years ago, when I was living in my first dorm room. I was 13 and at boarding school, facing the challenge of cultivating a home in a foreign environment. Like any freshman, I felt utterly uncentered, doggy-paddling against the school’s frenetic intensity.

After my first couple of weeks, my room was a mess, so I took a long Saturday morning to pull my clothes off the floor and direct some more effort into the still-foreign space.

I sliced up some magazines, printed out a few photos from my camera roll with a sticker printer I’d just received for my birthday, and stuck it all above my bed. The mere presence of color, and the memories each small picture held, felt like a balm — something consistent and bright and mine to return to. With a couple scraps of paper, I’d planted roots.

Collaged with mementos of where

I’d been and what I’d seen, my walls reminded me of all the beauty that I’d come across. Walking into my room simmering with stress about the test I felt like I flunked or the article I was struggling to write, I would pause and sit with those vivid memories. To this day, this act grounds me back into the understanding that my life is a series of moments, and the one I’m in is the one I’m in. It is full of feeling — whatever kind of feeling that is — and it is precious, and it will pass.

After that Saturday morning my freshman year, I felt nested enough in my room to invite new friends over.

The warmth emanating from my walls yielded their own warmth, and my room became a base for my group of friends.

But my freshman year room was only my first draft. I resolved to hold onto every single scrap that represented a moment I’d found myself in — ticket stubs, playbills, the business cards that lovely taxi drivers gave me after long conversations. By my sophomore year, all four walls were papered. Thus began the ritual of the ephemera going up for seven months, and coming back down to hibernate in my best friend’s garage during the summertime — only to reemerge with fuller, more colorful force in the fall.

In senior year, my best friend and I lived together. A combination of our collections, the room reached its peak as a vibrantly cozy haven. People were constantly buzzing in and out, lying on the ground or on our pushed-together beds, attempting to study or write essays but mostly joking around and gossiping.

We had lots of wall space that year, and I was committed to filling every bit of it. I’d finally finished plastering every spot of the window nook a couple days before we left for spring break.

Then the pandemic started and we never returned to that wonderful room. We received our belongings in haphazardly-packed boxes, with our precious collection completely gummed together. After lockdown, my best friend and I spent an entire day in her garage peeling each piece of paper apart.

There were many casualties. So, during my gap year I invested more of my money into museum posters and postcards,

PHOTOS COURTESY OF SAM E. WEIL | 26

The mere presence of color, and the memories each small picture held, felt like a balm — something consistent and bright and mine to return to. With a couple scraps of paper, I’d planted roots.

mementos of all the wondrous art I’d been lucky enough to see.

When I arrived at Harvard, I found a kindred spirit in my freshman year roommate, who was equally flush with ephemera. Our collection filled every corner of our room and common room, turning it into a chaotic little jewel box.

Living together our sophomore year, we were given our largest canvas yet — and both rooms were once again completely covered. (Unfortunately, sweaty parties loosened the decorations from their spots at a pace that my repairing could never quite keep up with).

I’ve moved into my own room this year, and for the first time in many years, it’s just me and my ephemera.

I couldn’t find the time to decorate for three weeks, and every night I went to bed restless. But once a free Saturday rolled around, I invited friends to come sit on my couch as I covered every wall. By Monday, the room dripped with color and texture and shape, and I finally felt like I’d arrived home.

*** We each have a particular amount of time on earth. I risk sounding trite by saying this, but I find it to be a very sobering thought. We organize our days by punctuating them by sleep and counting how many days have passed since the start of the month. But really, what we’re doing is setting a framework onto a given stretch of time that we have to be inside these bodies, with the consciousness that we have.

Throughout high school and now in college, I, and everyone around me, are in a perpetual rush. Weeks blur into months, and we forget what we even spent our time doing. Our thought patterns revolve around what we could have done better before, and what we have to do next time. Halfway through this semester, I’m starting to sense burnout singing my edges. It’s becoming very easy to lose sight of the preciousness of each moment.

I’ve found that the contents of my room, the place in which I begin and end each hectic day, profoundly

affect my outlook. My collage brings to mind precious experiences that I’d have otherwise forgotten. It’s like a library of my life, which challenges the ephemerality that my memories can easily take on.

Right now, I’m in the thick of midterms season. I fall asleep each night thinking about the millions of things I have yet to do. But when I open my eyes in the morning, I am met with a patch of ripples, with a doodle that my friend and I drew on a ferry-ride at dusk.

A ripped-out notebook page on which I inked the words “here and now,” using a calligraphy pen that the owner of my favorite cafe had lent me. My mom’s postcards, a flier I picked up at a protest.

The package of a pistachio dessert this guy down the hall gave me because he knew it would be the most incredible thing to eat while stoned (it was). I am reminded of the tenderness of people around me, of the forces of creativity that give way to such complexity, of the fierce richness and beauty that flourishes in this stretch of time that I call a life.

27 | PAGE DESIGNED BY ANGEL ZHANG AND SAMI E. TURNER — CRIMSON DESIGNERS

PHOTO COURTESY OF SAM E. WEIL

PHOTOS COURTESY OF SAM E. WEIL | 28

29 | CARTOON BY EILEENE J. LEE — CRIMSON DESIGNER

Back Door Entrance

BY JOHN G. HARRINGTON

ACROSS 1 Cute baby sound 4 “___ to go” (champin’ at the bit) 9 Ivy Leaguer on the wrong side of “The Game” 14 Vinyl spec 15 Speaker of “All right then, keep your secrets” 16 “Titus as ___” (Rembrandt painting) 17 “1989 (TV)” ___ (time period that began on 10/27/23) 18 *Sound heard at a video game failure, perhaps 20 Performed a cappella, say 22 ___ culpa 23 “Now That We Don’t ___ (TV) (From the Vault)” 24 *Profoundly disturbing 26 Things that seniors enjoy writing much less than crosswords 29 “___ of Eden” (Steinbeck novel) 30 Goat’s bleat 31 Where Elle Woods got her JD 32 Fire prefix 34 “We ___, we happy ___ ...”

35 Doctors’ org.

36 *Ones whose psets may include syntax trees or phonetic transcriptions 41 ___zi (founder of Daoism) 42 “luv uu” 43 Totally enthralled 44 Chicago airport

code 45 “Friends” co-star 46 Some extremities 48 Reach one’s height during 50 *Instrument for determining torque on a shaft 54 Indian dress 55 Where many vets served in the 60s 56 _____ Lee (artist in “Sunflower”) 57 Certain “vertical checkers game” ... or how to understand the legacies of the starred answers 61 Uber fig. below the price 62 Yellow daisy with an anatomical name that is not at all clear 63 Starbucks size 64 Losing him : blue :: missing him : gray :: loving him : _____ (Taylor lyrical analogy) 65 Claire Dunphy portrayer on “Modern Family” 66 Avarice 67 “_____ away” (“Ask me anything”) DOWN 1 Musical notation to raise the vol.

2 “You get a car!” speaker 3 Citizen whose country borders Yemen 4 Baseball players guarding against lefties, for short 5 Musketeer name

for a fragrance

by Estee Lauder, totally dissing Athos and Porthos 6 Taxonomic order in “The Two Mouseketeers” 7 Name bearer, on a pet 8 Negative coordinator 9 Powersports company that also makes instruments 10 Stroll 11 “Keep your eye out!”

12 Comfy stayover spot 13 Squeeze (by) 19 Senators’ city

21 Legendary actress Close 25 Common, churchwise 27 Horror film setting 28 FDR signature agcy.

30 La Méditerranée, par exemple 32 “Why should ___?”

33 “Just like mint condition!”

34 Crypto letters associated with fraud 37 Fascinatingly foreign 38 “Harry Potter” spell to turn off one’s lit wand 39 Wavering musical effect, for short

40 Desert reprieves 41 Cut (off) 45 Hurtle rapidly 46 In every case 47 Voiceless, Zoomwise 49 West possibly being clowned by Taylor’s “robbers to the east, clowns to the West” 50 Figure out 51 Nitwit 52 Epicure, less fancily 53 “Set?” 57 Fun little name for a male swan 58 Kitchen brand 59 Rating for many a Disney Channel show 60 Make free (of)

For solutions and more puzzles, visit https://www.thecrimson.com/section/fm/crossword/

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