Volleyball Falls to Princeton, UPenn
ROCKY ROAD. After a fast start at home to kick off Ivy League play, the Harvard women’s volleyball team stumbled on its first road trip of the conference season, losing via sweep to Princeton and dropping a tight match to UPenn.
PAGE 16
CLIMBING COSTS. Young Cambridge residents said they have watched as their home city has grown costlier and more gentrified, and they said there needs to be more housing — and affordable housing — to make the city a place where young people can forge a life of their own.
PAGE 12 The Impact of Rising Rents in Cambridge
OPINION
Harvard Must Stop Pushing Out Its Best
TIME CAPS. We have reservations about abolishing these time caps outright, as the newly recognized non-tenure-track faculty union is now seeking to do. But a policy so inflexible that it slams the door on some of Harvard’s most talented instructors does students a grave disservice.
SEE PAGE 10
Jonathan Biss on Performing Schumann ARTS
ARTIST PROFILE. Jonathan Biss spoke highly of the BSO, with whom he will perform with this month. The world-renowned pianist will take the stage with the BSO from Oct. 17 to 19, performing Schumann’s “Piano Concerto in A Minor, Op. 54.”
SEE PAGE 14
The value of Harvard’s endowment grew to $53.2 billion after the Harvard Management Company boasted a 9.6 percent return on its investments in fiscal year 2024 — the first year the endowment has increased in value since 2021.
The HMC’s strong investment returns — which are significantly higher than last year’s 2.9 percent returns — allowed the value of the endowment to increase by $2.5 billion from fiscal year 2023, the University announced on Thursday in its annual financial report.
The growth comes even as Harvard has contended with a significant drop in endowment gifts amid the ongoing backlash to the University’s handling of campus antisemitism. This increase in the endowment value comes after two consecutive years of endowment drops, falling to $50.9 billion in FY 2022 and $50.7 billion in FY 2023. This reversal represents a return to the upward trend in Harvard’s endowment value over the past two decades.
HMC CEO N.P. “Narv” Narvekar wrote in the financial report that Harvard’s endowed funds has a target return of 8 percent, and the annualized return of 9.3 percent averaged over the past seven years has “more than kept pace” with that target.
Though some critics have said Harvard’s endowment has underperformed in recent years, with an investment return of 9.6 percent this year, Harvard is third only to Brown and Columbia among its Ivy League+ peers, which delivered 11.3 percent and 11.5 percent returns, respectively. Endowment distributions in fiscal year 2024 totaled $2.4 billion — 37 percent of the University’s annual revenue — with funds going toward costs such as financial aid, faculty, research initiatives, and more. The contributions have allowed the University to commit $749 million in financial aid across the University, with $250 million provided to undergraduates, according to the report.
The largest allocations within Harvard’s endowment are to private equity and hedge funds, with private equity accounting for 39 percent of the portfolio and hedge funds accounting for 32 per-
The Cambridge Police Department and the Harvard University Police Department are jointly investigating an apparent act of “religiously threatening” vandalism after multiple antisemitic stickers were discovered around Harvard Square.
The stickers were reported to police after they were discovered near Harvard Hillel, the University’s largest Jewish center. The antisemitic stickers portrayed the flag with Israel with a swastika instead of the Star of David.
The stickers, which were posted on both city and Harvard property, also contained the text: “Stop Funding Israeli Terrorism.”
Harvard Hillel Executive Director Jason B. Rubenstein ’04 said incidents of antisemitism at Hillel have become more prevalent in recent months.
“First we saw for a long stretch of time this was happening on social media, and then there were calls for escalation,” he said. “Now, we’re seeing it happen physi-
cally — in a physical manifestation — just a few feet from the Hillel building.” Rubenstein referred to a statement released by the Harvard Undergraduate Palestine Solidarity Committee on the one-year anniversary of Hamas’ Oct. 7 attacks on Israel. In their statement, the PSC wrote that “now is the time to escalate.”
The PSC wrote in a statement that it “rejects all forms of hatred and bigotry and we remain committed to fighting for the safety and liberation of all peoples, which is deeply intertwined with the struggle for Palestinian liberation.”
This incident comes days after Hillel leadership reported “intimidating” posters discovered outside Rosovsky Hall last week.
Hillel later discovered that the posters, which criticized Israel’s war in Gaza, were printed with the center’s own funding by Meredith W. B. Zielonka ’25, who serves as co-chair of JStreetU at Hillel.
Rubenstein has since suspended both JStreetU and Zielonka from using organizational funds.
Early Monday morning, HUPD officers
Roughly 25 Harvard professors conducted a silent study-in at Widener Library on Wednesday to protest the library’s decision to temporarily ban pro-Palestine students who held a similar demonstration last month.
During the study-in, Securitas guards recorded the participants’ names and Harvard ID numbers and distributed sheets of paper warning of possible penalties under the University’s January protest guidelines.
“Libraries are not spaces available for demonstrations or protests,” the sheets read. “Violation of these rules may result in possible revocation of library privileges and/or disciplinary action.”
The ID checks and slips of paper closely mirrored the library’s response to the pro-Palestine study-in in September. The University said at the time that students had violated guidelines on free expression and library use, and library staff banned the participants from Widener for two
weeks. Before the Wednesday study-in, at least 10 tenured faculty signatories outlined their plans in a letter sent to Martha J. Whitehead, the vice president for Harvard Library, and University Professor Ann M. Blair, who chairs the library system’s faculty advisory council.
“We would appreciate knowing if you intend to revoke our access to the scholarly resources we need to do our jobs (teaching, research, writing) based on our decision to read in the library,” the faculty wrote. The letter and subsequent study-in functioned as an ultimatum of sorts to library administrators: discipline faculty participants and risk another round of anger, or withhold punishment and appear to create a double standard.
The Securitas guards at the study-in declined to answer questions — from both protesters and The Crimson — about who had instructed them to conduct the ID checks. A member of the library’s communications staff was also present. Harvard spokesperson Jason A. Newton
BY KACY BAO
CRIMSON
A
edly harassed and intimidated University employees in violation of policy.” It was the second time Davidai, known for his fervent and abrasive pro-Israel activism, was barred from campus.
THE COLUMBIA DAILY SPECTATOR
A Dartmouth administrative building was vandalized with pro-Palestine graffiti Wednesday, the Dartmouth reported. Hanover police said they were investigating the incident. An anonymous email claimed credit for the vandalism, saying that it was in support of Palestinian liberation and protesting the arrests of pro-Palestine Dartmouth students last semester. The email added that the vandalism was not in coordination with any student groups.
THE DARTMOUTH
Jews for Ceasefire Now, a pro-Palestine Jewish student group at Brown University, erected a “Gaza Solidarity Sukkah” on Wednesday to mark the Jewish holiday of Sukkot. The group received administrative approval to build the sukkah, a temporary structure traditionally built during Sukkot, and stated that members plan to sleep in the sukkah for all eight nights of the holiday, according to the Brown Daily Herald.
THE BROWN DAILY HERALD
Yale College administrators told the Yale Women’s Center to institute a policy of “broad neutrality” last month, according to the Yale Daily News. Three student board members of the Women’s Center told the News that the directive would comprise the organization’s mission of advocating for feminist issues, including abor-
HAMAS LEADER SINWAR KILLED BY ISRAELI SOLDIERS IN GAZA OCTOBER 18,
Yahya Sinwar, the leader of Hamas, was killed by Israeli Soldiers during a firefight in Southern Gaza on Wednesday. The New York Times reported that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gave no indication that Israel would roll back its military offensive, remaining committed to freeing the remaining Israeli hostages held in Gaza. Sinwar’s death marked the culmination of a monthslong manhunt by the Israeli military, and news of the event was met with celebrations in Israel.
CHINESE ECONOMY GROWTH SLOWS, STILL SURPASES Q3 PROJECTION
China’s gross domestic product grew 4.6 percent between July and September, narrowly surpassing economists’ projections of 4.5 percent growth. The new economic data, released Friday, puts China on pace to achieve a yearly growth rate near the official government target, according to the Wall Street Journal. The growth numbers come on the heels of a sweeping set of reforms announced by China’s central bank as the government works to restore confidence in a weak economy.
LIAM PAYNE, FORMER ONE DIRECTION SINGER, DIES IN ARGENTINA
Liam Payne, a former member of British boy band One Direction, died Wednesday after falling from a thirdfloor hotel balcony in Buenos Aires. He was 31. Minutes before his death, staff at the hotel called Argentinian police, saying that the singer had consumed excessive amounts of drugs and alcohol and expressing concern that he was putting his life at risk. A toxicology report is pending.
CANADA EXPELS INDIAN DIPLOMATS AMID DEEPENING RIFT
The rift between Canada and India deepened this week when Canadian police expelled several Indian diplomats, accusing them of being part of a criminal conspiracy to silence critics of India and Sikh separatists living in Canada. India responded by expelling six Canadian diplomats. The dispute began last year when a Sikh activist was assassinated in Canada.
MARK MILLEY, KAMALA HARRIS CALL TRUMP ‘FASCIST’
Retired General Mark A. Milley, who served for one year as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Donald Trump, said the former president was “fascist to the core” and “the most dangerous person to this country” in an interview with journalist Bob Woodward, according to the Washington Post. Following the news of Milley’s remarks, Vice President Kamala Harris said that it was appropriate to call Trump a fascist in a Tuesday interview with Charlamagne Tha God.
Start every week with a preview of what’s on the agenda around Harvard University
Friday 10/18
A.R.T. COSTUME SALE
155 Fawcett St., 10 a.m.–5 p.m.
In need of a constume? Head on over to the American Repertory Theater’s scene shop at 155 Fawcett St. for a rare opportunity to purchase one-of-a-kind costumes from the theater’s recent productions, just in time for Halloween.
Saturday 10/19
BALLOT DAY
Various Locations
Saturday will mark Harvard Votes Challenge’s first-ever Ballot Day, a cross-campus effort to mobilize students and affiliates to vote in the upcoming perspective. There will be tables across campus, free stamps and envelopes, and an “I Voted” photo station at the John Harvard Statue.
Sunday 10/20
MADE IN GERMANY? FILM SERIES
Harvard Art Museums, 2-4 p.m.
Come see two German films at the Harvard Art Museum. The two featured films in this series investigate the identity and experience of Black Germans: Magda Korsinsky’s “KNITTING, the Documentary” and James Gregory Atkinson’s autobiographical “6 Friedberg-Chicago.”
Monday 10/21
FIRESIDE CHAT WITH STEPHEN BREYER
6-7:30 p.m.
The former U.S. Supreme Court Justice will appear before an audience of first-year students in this event hosted by the First-Year Experience office. Spots are limited, so apply quickly!
Tuesday 10/22
FALL 2024 W.E.B. DU BOIS LECTURE
Harvard Faculty Club, 4 p.m.
Robert Hill, an emeritus professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, will deliver the fall 2024 W.E.B. Du Bois Lecture on Egyptian influence on the Harlem renaissance. The event is organized by the Hutchins Center for African and African American research.
Wednesday 10/23
WASTE, RECYCLING, AND COMPOST AT HARVARD
Smith Campus Center, 4:30-5:30 p.m.
Courtney Forrester, Harvard Waste Reduction and Compliance Lead, and Dailey Brannin, Harvard Recycling Services Supervisor, will talk about what happens to recyclables and food compost on campus.
Thursday 10/24
ENSURING OUR SHARED FUTURE ON A HOT AND HOSTILE PLANET
Tsai Auditorium, 5-6:30 p.m.
Tjada D’Oyen McKenna, CEO of Mercy Corps, will speak on the twin threats of climate change and conflict. The event is moderated by Director of the Weatherhead Center Melani Cammett and professor Clarence Dillon.
Friday 10/25
HARVARD VARSITY CLUB HALL OF FAME INDUCTION CEREMONY
Harvard Murr Center, 6-9 p.m.
Three former Harvard football players — Michael Berg ’07, Clifton Dawson ’07, and Ryan Fitzpatrick ’05 — will be inducted into the Harvard Varsity Club Hall of Fame in a special ceremony. They will join more than 600 previously inducted athletes from Harvard’s 42 varsity teams.
an awesome in-game experience, and then we beat Yale and feel great about ourselves,” he added.
During the interview, Dunne also addressed the search for the next Harvard College Dean, saying that he hopes the pick will match Rakesh Khurana’s commitment to undergraduates.
Dean of Students Thomas Dunne said the College hopes to plan a “safe” tailgate for the Harvard-Yale football game in November, as his office attempts to keep the event orderly while subduing criticism that Harvard’s officially sanctioned student events are unfun.
In a Wednesday interview, Dunne said the Dean of Students Office hopes to plan a tailgate “that is attractive to students and fun and feels like what they imagined Harvard-Yale to be, but it’s also safe.”
In 2022, the last time Harvard hosted The Game, the DSO faced backlash for placing restrictions on alcohol at the official tailgate and prohibiting student-organized alternatives. Harvard’s final clubs threw an unofficial tailgate on the Malkin Athletic Center lawn in response.
But Dunne said Wednesday that he is “working through what the alcohol policies will be,” adding that he hopes to avoid unsanctioned student tailgates.
“The idea of tailgates popping up in different places is something that we don’t want to replicate,” Dunne said.
“Our goal is to be in a space where there’s thousands of students together, and then everybody goes into the game and has
In August, Khurana announced he would be stepping down from the position in June 2025. The College announced a search for his successor in a September email to undergraduates.
Dunne said he is optimistic about the search, though he acknowledged that not all candidates will be able to match Khurana’s “selfie game” — referring to his ubiquitous Instagram account.
Still, he said, the next dean should focus on “celebrating the magic” of the student experience.
“One of the greatest assets of Dean Khurana’s leadership has been, at such a deep, deep level, he really values and cherishes the student experience,” Dunne said. “Beyond social media, watching him navigate spaces — watching him in a dining hall, even when he doesn’t realize he’s being watched, watching him walk across campus — that’s what I hope for at some level, in their own way.”
“The silver lining is, I’ve learned, there’s actually a lot of people like Dean Khurana at Harvard,” he added.
Dunne said that Khurana left a lasting impression when the two first met at a conference nearly a decade ago.
“I was so struck by him, I started following him on Instagram, which is not surprising to students,” Dunne said. “I have an In-
stagram gateway story to Dean Khurana as well.”
“I just found him really captivating,” he added. “So I started following him on Instagram, never expecting to end up working with him.”
Dunne — who took over as dean of students in June 2023 — has
worked closely with Khurana on intellectual vitality, an initiative that began in 2021 to foster a campus atmosphere of “open, thoughtful conversation.”
At a recent HUA meeting, the HUA Co-Presidents said they spoke with Dunne about potential intellectual vitality initiatives for
the year such as “tracking intellectual engagement via surveys and anecdotes.”
Dunne said he has additionally hosted student groups to his home in Harvard Square to “facilitate conversations.”
I think that one of the through lines in all these conversations that
seems to come up at some point is this sense of, ‘How do we build authentic communities?’” Dunne said. “That’s something that seems really important to people,” he added.
Freshmen students living on the first floor of Thayer Hall were burglarized between the hours of 7 p.m. on Oct. 5 and 1 a.m. on Oct. 6, resulting in the theft of $5,670 worth of property, according to the Harvard University Police Department. An unidentified individual entered Thayer, a freshman dorm in Harvard Yard, through a window and stole three Apple laptops, an iPad, two wallets, cash, electronic accessories, and a $600 Tissot watch, according to HUPD’s daily police logs.
HUPD spokesperson Steven G. Catalano wrote in an emailed statement that “this incident is under investigation.”
“It is the longstanding policy of the Harvard University Police Department to not comment on open investigations,” Catalano added.
Two students were living in the room in Thayer that was burglarized. One of the students whose property was stolen in the incident wrote in a text message that they “felt very anxious the following nights as we felt the security was insufficient.”
The student added that Harvard Yard Operations employees were scheduled to install a theft barrier in the window that the perpetrator used to enter their dorm in Thayer. A representative for Harvard Yard Operations did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Tuesday.
In his statement, Catalano wrote that more than 450 thefts have been reported to HUPD annually over the past three years.
Sidney M. Regelbrugge ’28, who also lives on the first floor of Thayer, said she felt that the breakin served as a necessary “bubble burst.”
“We need to realize that we’re in the city, and it’s important to lock up,” she added.
Tyareth S. Ramirez ’28, anoth-
er Thayer resident, said that though she generally feels safe living in Thayer, the incident was unnerving.
“I don’t like knowing that it happened in Thayer, and that it happened on the first floor,” she said.
Other Thayer residents, however, were less concerned about the possibility of additional crimes occurring in the dormitory.
“Honestly, I don’t really have any worries about it,” said Richard Y. Rodgers ’28, another first-floor resident.
“I’m not particularly concerned about anything, but I can see why people would be,” Rodgers added.
Regelbrugge said that the College could consider additional ID checks to increase a sense of safety on Harvard’s campus or even close the Yard to non-Harvard affiliates.
“I think ID checks are a good precaution or a good measure,” Regelbrugge added. “I think the gate closing just kind of would spook away anyone who’s thinking about coming in because it’s like, ‘Oh, there’s active police on campus.’”
received a report of an individual putting up the stickers around Harvard’s campus and near the Charles River, according to HUPD spokesperson Steven G. Catalano.
Catalano wrote in a statement that “HUPD officers searched the area for the unidentified individual but were unable to locate them.”
“The stickers contained an anti-Semitic symbol,” he added. “HUPD and Cambridge Police are investigating this matter collaboratively.”
CPD spokesperson Robert Goulston wrote in an email that the department is working with HUPD to conduct “a full and thorough investigation,” and are currently seeking surveillance video of the incident.
He added that CPD is committed to “aggressively investigate any reported acts or threats of violence, property damage, harassment, intimidation, or other crimes that appear motivated by bias against or hatred of a particular group.”
Rubenstein said that the incident was first reported to Hillel leadership by a Cambridge resident who regularly attends services at Rosovsky Hall. He added that the individual also reached out to CPD and the Anti-Defamation League of New England.
Peggy Shukur — the vice president of the east division of the ADL — confirmed in an email to The Crimson that the stickers were reported to the ADL.
“We urge a thorough investigation and for those responsible to be held accountable,” wrote the ADL of New England in a statement posted on X.
Rubenstein said that he hopes the sticker incident will spur Uni-
versity leadership to more forcefully examine systemic antisemitism on campus, pointing to initiatives by Harvard during the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests as an example.
“Our call for Harvard and other universities is to undertake the same move against antisemitism,” Rubenstein said.
University spokesperson Jason A. Newton wrote in an emailed statement that “Harvard has and will continue to be unequivocal that antisemitism will not be tolerated on our campus.”
The Harvard Hillel Student Board hosted a “community dinner” on Monday night to discuss the stickering incident, according to an email sent to Hillel affiliates. The email also asked affiliates to send in photos of similar stickers if they see them on campus.
Talia Kahan ’26, a member of Hillel, said the stickers serve as another obstacle to impactful dialogue about Israel and Palestine.
“It’s sad and frightening to see that despite having made so much progress in many directions, there still feels like there’s a lot of antagonism towards Israel and the Jewish community,” Kahan said.
“That antagonism, and perhaps difference of feeling and thought, is not being approached in a way that is kind of conducive towards dialog and discussion — which is something that I’d be really excited about — but rather just with hateful statements that don’t leave room for true engagement,” she added.
The Harvard Undergraduate Workers Union-United Auto Workers has been negotiating at half capacity.
After losing five members over the summer, the bargaining committee of HUWU-UAW only has five members — of nine total positions — one of whom is still in training. When HUWU-UAW first began negotiating with Harvard for a contract in March, five months after the unit voted to unionize, it had filled eight of the nine spots on its bargaining committee. But In the fall, only three members of the committee returned after four students graduated and another stepped down.
In September, the union, which has about 400 workers, held initial nominations for bargaining committee spots, with candidacy statements due at the end of the month — but only one person accepted a nomination.
Taryn M. Riddle ’25, who works in the Harvard Kennedy School library, joined after nominations closed — bringing the to-
FROM PAGE
tal to five — but is still in training and has not yet participated in any bargaining sessions.
“My job right now is to continue my orientation, keep meeting with people,” Riddle said. Bea Wall-Feng ’25, a member of the bargaining committee representing the Harvard Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion Offices and a former Crimson Magazine editor, said the reduced capacity has made it more difficult to represent viewpoints from across the unit.
“The more workplace representation we have, the easier it is to talk really specifically about workplace conditions,” Wall-Feng said. “We can still bring in union members who aren’t on the bargaining committee into bargaining to talk about their experiences, but in terms of the people who are there every week, that’s one difference.”
The bargaining committee — whose members work in Harvard’s libraries and the EDI office — lacks
wrote in a statement that Harvard and the library system “will continue to gather information about the action that took place in Widener Library’s Loker Reading Room today before determining next steps.” Harvard Law School professor Andrew M. Crespo ’05, who participated in the study-in, rebuked the University’s decision to bar protesters from the library, questioning how a silent protest could be considered disruptive.
“I think that a university has every interest in making sure that its libraries are quiet places, that they are places where people can study, that they’re not disrupted,” Crespo said. “But I don’t think that you can describe sitting quietly at a table reading a book as disruptive in a library.” Crespo and the Wednesday demonstrators weren’t the first to question the University’s decision. Over the last few weeks, several professors and free speech advocacy groups have denounced the library’s decision, calling it an encroachment on free expression. Last week, the co-presidents of the Council on Academic Freedom at Harvard signed a Crimson op-ed condemning the decision, and a group of faculty protested the sanctions outside Widener on Friday.
Several student organizers affiliated with Harvard Out of Occupied Palestine, an unrecognized coalition of campus activist groups, were present at the study-
in, wearing keffiyehs and working at a separate table from faculty participants.
At least one of the students — who had brought a camera to photograph the study-in — falsely identified himself as a Crimson reporter to library staff present at the
ers wore black scarves and read texts on dissent, bureaucracy, and censorship — from Franz Kafka’s “The Trial” and George Orwell’s “1984” to the University-Wide Statement on Rights and Responsibilities, which Harvard officials have used to justify imposing sanc-
I don’t think that you can describe sitting quietly at a table reading a book as disruptive
event until confronted by a Crimson reporter.
The student organizer is a Crimson Editorial editor but was not at the event in any official capacity for The Crimson and is not a member of The Crimson’s News staff.
“While I do not comment on personnel matters, The Crimson takes very seriously issues of journalistic ethics and investigates all allegations of staff misconduct,” Crimson President J. Sellers Hill ’25 wrote in a statement.
A library staff member instructed the guards to check student protesters’ IDs but not the IDs of Crimson reporters.
At the study-in, faculty protest-
tions on activists who violate protest guidelines.
When prompted to hand their ID cards to guards, protesters complied but repeatedly asked why the library was conducting ID checks and whether the guards could clarify what actions counted as protests.
Approached by a guard, one postdoctoral student adopted a perplexed tone.
“But I’m just reading,” the postdoc said. “Do you consider this a demonstration?”
“That’s what I’ve been told,” the guard said.
representation of student-workers at cafes or pubs operated by Harvard Dining Services.
According to a public notice calling for bargaining committee nominations, in addition to filling the two open positions from cafes and pubs, HUWU-UAW is still seeking one more representative from Harvard Libraries and another to fill an at-large vacancy.
According to Kay Ljunggren — a HUWU-UAW adviser, UAW staffer, and former president of
the Harvard Graduate Student Union-United Auto Workers — the “main roadblock” is “the balance of being a student and a worker simultaneously.”
Per Ljunggren, the union has also struggled with communication with the University.
“We haven’t gotten a list with full contact information since our election back in November,” Ljunggren said. “So we are working with very outdated information.”
“There could be workers out there who are interested that we’ve never been able to get in touch with,” she added. According to Wall-Feng, Harvard’s representatives initially agreed to send bargaining committee members an updated list of workers by “the beginning of October” before pushing the deadline to Oct. 15
ing both the vandalization and the stickers.
More than 25 people, including University President Alan M. Garber ’76 and College Dean Rakesh Khurana, gathered on the patio of Memorial Church Tuesday afternoon for an interfaith vigil to mourn the victims of the ongoing Israel-Hamas war.
Tuesday’s vigil, hosted by the Harvard Chaplains and Memorial Church, follows multiple events last week meant to commemorate the one-year anniversary of the Oct. 7 attacks, including one vigil organized by Harvard’s Jewish groups and one by the Harvard Undergraduate Palestine Solidarity Committee.
At the event, Harvard Hillel Campus Rabbi Getzel Davis addressed recent “attacks” on Jewish and Muslim students at Harvard.
He specifically mentioned antisemitic stickers found Monday near Hillel and the vandalization of University Hall last week — an attack he attributed to “an international group calling for violence against Jews.”
The vandalism was filmed and posted on Instagram by a since-deactivated account called “Unity of Fields,” which described the video as an “anonymous submission.” The Harvard University Police Department said it was investigat-
Davis also acknowledged reports of Islamophobia and anti-Arab bias from affiliates since Oct. 7, including a doxxing truck targeting members of student groups who signed a controversial statement following the attacks.
“We know well that we are not the only ones who are scared on this campus,” Davis said. “We hear the pain of our Muslim and Arab brothers and sisters targeted by the doxxing trucks that are still to this day around campus.”
“Just as many of my community are afraid to wear kippah in public, I know that it is the same with hijab,” he added.
Davis urged affiliates to “rebuild a campus environment that is both safe, physically and emotionally, for all of us” as global events impact life on campus.
Harvard’s Muslim chaplain Khalil Abdur-Rashid commemorated the loss of innocent lives during his speech.
“To all the innocents whose lives have been taken, held captive, lost, beat down, forgotten, abandoned,” he said. “May God bless you, support you, uplift you, honor you.”
Abdur-Rashid also prayed for peace, both globally and on campus.
“Let us witness and participate in peacemaking,” he said. “Despite our diversity and our differences, we never abandon the unity of peace.”
During his opening remarks, Pusey Minister in the Memorial Church Matthew Ichihashi Potts recognized the “anguish and sadness” being felt globally, telling attendees that “it is an act of love to grieve.” Potts continued by acknowledging the climate in which the interfaith vigil was taking place.
“Those of us gathered here are not naive,” he said. “We know that this gathering here will not halt violence, or free captives, or broker peace there. But love and peace anywhere are their own justification.”
“So despite all we cannot do and all we cannot undo, we can still hold one another in compassion and care right now, right here on these steps,” he added.
Memorial Church Assistant Minister Alanna C. Sullivan led a final prayer acknowledging those afflicted by the war.
“We come together to be so bold as to believe in the possibilities of peace and the power of love,” she said. “We uplift those today who are so desperately in need of your love, justice, and peace.”
The vigil ended with the ringing of the Memorial Church bells, which Potts said was “dedicated to the memory of the dead.”
Potts concluded the ceremony by urging attendees “to care for one another and for the world.”
Months later, some students are still waiting for payment and reimbursement from
BY HIRAL M. CHAVRE AND SAMUEL A. CHURCH CRIMSON STAFF WRITERS
n March 2023, Mateo J. Ve -
Ilarde-Berrios ’25 received an email from Harvard Primus — an undergraduate organization for first-generation, low-income students — advertising an opportunity to staff leadership conferences in Dubai and New Delhi that summer.
Velarde-Berrios and his fellow Harvard students who signed up to work the conference — a job that came with a $500 stipend — said they were “passionate” about the opportunity to help students abroad through their role as youth mentors.
The conference was organized by the Big Red Group, an India-based education firm that rebranded as Big Red Education earlier this year. The group aims to “democratize the Ivy League experience” by hosting leadership workshops for students around the world, accord -
cruited to work.
More than 11 people with experience working with the Big Red Group expressed concerns about poor communication, lack of compensation, and an uncomfortable work environment, according to interviews, documents, and email communications obtained by The Crimson.
Big Red Education’s website also continues to falsely imply an ongoing affiliation with two Harvard student organizations that do not have ties with the educational firm. Several Harvard undergraduates also criticized Big Red Education for continuing to display their names and faces on its website more than a year after ending their association with the firm.
Big Red Education CEO Rishi Jalan said in an interview early Friday morning that he “would never indulge in these things which puts the safety of a Harvard mentor, anyone in danger.”
“They wouldn’t have come back again and again to us if we were not treating them with respect,” Jalan said. Still, Jalan conceded that his company was not entirely without fault.
“I’m not saying I’m 100 percent right here,” Jalan said. “I’m sure I’ve made mistakes.”
University alum, founded the Big Red Group in 2016 to aid youth in India in gaining admission to an Ivy League University.
The Big Red Group — named after Jalan’s alma mater — first partnered with a Harvard-affiliated student organization in 2018, when Jalan approached the now-defunct Harvard Leadership Institute to develop educational workshops for high school students.
In 2022, he began a new partnership with Harvard Youth Lead the Change — later renamed to Harvard Undergraduate Leadership Mentors — an officially recognized Harvard College student organization which organized leadership workshops for students.
Less than one year later, YLC ended its partnership with the Big Red Group. Jalan described the split as “amicable.”
But in a 2023 email with the subject line “Caution Around BRG,” YLC alum Ethan E. Kee ’23 warned Velarde-Berrios and six other Harvard students about YLC’s experience working with Jalan’s company.
“Our relationship was very close until, due to concerns which I’ll explain in full below most importantly including the physical and mental wellbeing of our members, we ended the
in certain going-out activities including the consumption of alcohol, and general disrespect for the safety and personal concerns of our YLC team,” Kee added.
Still, Kee did not advise the students to immediately back out of staffing the conference, writing that the Big Red Group “in many ways, had been a generous partner and thoughtful host.”
tell us.”
The code of conduct instructs mentors to report any experiences of inappropriate behavior to “Mr. Rishi Jalan,” according to a copy of the code obtained by The Crimson. Jalan himself, however, was the subject of several concerns raised by Harvard students who staffed past Big Red Group conferences.
He never responded to any of my messages for months, and I called him multiple times, and he never opened a single message.
“We also don’t want to paint all of BRG — many of whom are caring and kind — in this light,” Kee added. “Nevertheless, we felt compelled to share our experience.”
But Velarde-Berrios and his classmates said their experiences with Big Red Group was filled with moments similar to the
Three people who worked with the Big Red Group recounted instances when Jalan personally pressured students working at the conference to go out with him to different nightclubs at the end of each day.
IKE J. PARK — CRIMSON PHOTOGRAPHER
of the city to give a talk at a local high school that was not previously on their agenda.
The students were then instructed by the Big Red Group employee to participate in a question and answer session about how to gain admission to Harvard, despite the students not being previously informed by the Big Red Group of such planned activities.
One of the students present at the event wrote in a statement to The Crimson that they had “been explicit in sharing our intentions to not be presented to students as such.” No Big Red Education staff informed the Harvard students involved until they arrived at the program, and no one was compensated for their time there, according to the students.
“It was interesting because, especially the CEO, they pushed you a little bit,” said Velarde-Berrios, who staffed leadership workshops during summer 2023 and winter 2024.
Jalan said he had told one of the mentors present about the event, and called the discrepancy “more of their internal issue.” The Crimson corroborated the students’ account by reviewing contemporaneous audio recordings from the travel to the Q&A session and text messages in a group chat of students who staffed the Mumbai conference. But for some students, their negative experience with Jalan and the Big Red Group extended far beyond their time at the conference.
In response to allegations ofpany has implemented a code of conduct to establish a way for mentors “to reach out to us and
“They offered alcohol and continuously offered it,” Velarde-Berrios added. “Told you to relax, have fun.”
Jalan acknowledged in an interview that he invited the college students who staff his conferences over to his home.
“Mentors have come to my house as my guests. They’ve had drinks,” Jalan said. “We want them to have fun.”
However, Jalan said that “indulging in telling them, ‘Please go out’ or something like that, is not something that we do.”
In addition to pressure from Jalan to party, three Harvard students who attended a Big Red Education conference as mentors recalled being pushed to work on projects they had explicitly told Big Red Group employees they did not feel comfortable staffing.
Specifically, at a January 2023 conference in Mumbai, they recalled how they were suddenly driven an hour outside
‘Complete Radio Silence’ In an agreement between the Big Red Group and the student mentors regarding their terms of employment, the firm agreed to reimburse students and pay their stipends “in cash on the last day of the conference.” More than nine months later, Velarde-Berrios and other Harvard students are still waiting to be paid. “They stopped communicating in terms of the stipend reimbursements,” Velarde-Berrios said. “I’ve called more than five times, six times,” he said. “I never got an answer.” Harvard students who worked at Big Red Education’s conferences were guaranteed a $500 stipend in addition to the Big Red Group paying for food, flights, and living accommodations. “Initially, what they told us was that they were going to give
OCTOBER 18, 2024
us sort of cash payments at the beginning of the conference,” said Ashley L. Redhead ’26, a Harvard student who worked at one of the Big Red Group’s conferences.
When they did not receive the funds, students paid out of pocket for taxis and meals with the assurance that they would be reimbursed after the conference.
“We transitioned to this idea that we were gonna get reimbursed,” said Edona Cosovic ’25, another student worker at the conference. “We filed reimbursement forms afterwards, at the end of the conference.”
But there was no response from Jalan regarding the requests for reimbursements.
“He never responded to any of my messages for months, and I called him multiple times, and he never opened a single message,” Cosovic said.
The students finally received communication from Big Red Education “only two or three months ago,” according to Cosovic, a former Crimson News editor.
“He’s been citing some sort of cross-border payment issues,” Redhead said. “It’s very hard for him to figure out how to move money across countries.”
Big Red Group had introduced $500 stipends for staffers for the first time at the December 2023 and January 2024 conferences, resulting in such reimbursement issues, according to Jalan.
He said that banking regulations were the reason for the delay.
“When you have to give $500 or more to other people, it comes under the banking reg -
ulations,” Jalan said. “As the banking regulations change, I can’t, through my business, give personal amounts to Harvard mentors until there is an invoicing aspect.”
“And because of that, there were legal issues which we’re still dealing with right now,” he added.
To address the payment complications, Jalan proposed sending cash with someone who was supposed to travel to the United States in the near future, according to Cosovic and Redhead.
“He initially told us that the reimbursements would be sent with somebody who went on a conference this summer,” Redhead said. “That didn’t happen, and there was complete radio silence after that.”
Due to issues fulfilling larger reimbursements, Jalan has removed the $500 stipend for more recent conferences so that “we’re not landing into the problem that we did with the last set of mentors,” he said.
Jalan’s communication regarding such reimbursement issues has still been “not very frequently” and “not very clear on the status of what reimbursement looks like,” Redhead added.
On Thursday, one day after The Crimson reached out to Jalan to request comment for this article, he sent a message to a WhatsApp group chat with Harvard students who staffed conferences organized by the Big Red Group in January 2024.
“Hey Guys — good news, we have figured out to make the reimbursements through the official PayPal or Venmo through our other partners in the US,”
Jalan wrote. “Thank you so much for the patience and sorry for the delay but hope everything will be smooth sailing from here.”
It was the first message Jalan had sent to the group chat in weeks.
But for now, Redhead, Cosovic, and Velarde-Berrios remain unpaid.
In an interview, Cosovic estimated that she is owed several thousand dollars from the Big Red Group. Other students are owed similar amounts, she said. Cosovic and other students who staffed the conference said that the compensation ordeal tainted what was otherwise a positive experience.
“I liked working with the kids, and it’s just unfortunate that it’s all shadowed by the fact that we weren’t paid the money that we were told,” Cosovic said.
‘A Bit of a Stretch’
The Big Red Education homepage advertises its conferences as an opportunity for students to “learn from professors from the best universities from around the world.”
The website lists affiliated “professors,” including four from Stanford, MIT, and Harvard. However, only one out of the four is actually listed in their respective institutions’ directories.
Jalan said his evidence for their status as professors was their respective LinkedIn pages. None of the LinkedIn pages in question include the word “professor.”
One of the confirmed professors listed, public astronomer
at the University of Cambridge Matthew Bothwell, wrote that he was “surprised” to see his name on the site.
“My interactions with the group were limited to one online lecture about three years ago,” he wrote.
He added that Big Red Education’s description of his affiliation with the organization was “a bit of a stretch!”
In addition to faculty collaborations, Big Red Education currently claims to be “working with” two Harvard student organizations: The Academies by Harvard Student Agencies and Harvard Youth Lead the Change.
President of Harvard Student Agencies Efrain G. “Frankie” Freeman ’26 wrote in an emailed statement to The Crimson that HSA does not “do business” with Big Red Education.
“This information on their website is incorrect and misleading,” he added.
Jalan said that the graphic in question was “put in while those partnerships were there.”
“It’s not necessarily that those partnerships still stand,” he added.
The board and alumni of Harvard Undergraduate Leadership Mentors — which previously partnered with the Big Red Group when it was known as Harvard Youth Lead the Change — wrote in a statement that even after the end of their relationship “BRG proceeded to plan and publicize conferences that bore the YLC name.”
Three Harvard students that participated in the conference accused Big Red Education of implying they had a formal relationship with Harvard Universi -
ty as part of their marketing.
In response, Jalan said that they were “not at all claiming that this is a Harvard program.”
However, the brochure on Big Red Education’s website for their winter conference mentors includes the Harvard seal on the first page and advertises itself as the “Harvard Leadership course.”
In 2024, one year after Harvard Youth Lead the Change broke off their partnership with Big Red Education, Jalan created a website entitled “Harvard YLC,” with the firm’s upcoming leadership conferences also titled “Harvard YLC.”
Jalan said in an interview that he does not believe Big Red Education’s website has “ever given a false impression that this is an official Harvard program.”
“I think our parents and our students who come in for these programs are smart enough to understand that, and that’s something from the beginning we would also mention to them,” he said. While the website is not associated with HULM or any other official undergraduate student group at Harvard, Jalan’s full name appeared in the website’s source code at least 18 times.
In the hour following Jalan’s interview with The Crimson, the website was made private. Until the site was taken down, Jailene Ramos ’24 was listed on the homepage as a student mentor. In an emailed statement to The Crimson, Ramos wrote that she “had no idea” her name was listed on the site or that Big Red Education “was still claiming a partnership with YLC.” College spokesperson Alix -
andra A. Nozzolillo wrote in a statement that student organizations can work with external companies, “provided they adhere to the College’s and University’s established guidelines and policies.”
Those policies require use of the Harvard name to “be reviewed and approved by the Harvard Trademark Program.” They also forbid the use of the Harvard name from being used “to imply any affiliation with or endorsement by Harvard.”
University spokesperson Jason A. Newton confirmed in a statement to The Crimson that Harvard “has not approved Big Red Education’s use of Harvard’s trademarks.”
Jalan acknowledged that Big Red Education has received emails in the past from the Harvard Trademark Office over the company’s use of logos from Harvard-affiliated groups.
“These are things that we also try to keep learning,” he said.
Overall, Velarde-Berrios said his experience with Big Red Education fell short of his expectations — and not just because he is still waiting for his $500 stipend.
“The students pay a lot of money to attend those conferences where the Harvard mentors are barely equipped,” Velarde-Berrios said.
“Ultimately, it seemed like a very large misconception in terms of what the Big Red Group was trying to advertise,” Velarde-Berrios said. “It was a little bit of a scam.”
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tions
they generate has become vital to the University’s financial operations. Donations to the endowment have supported robust financial aid, new research initiatives, and expanded operating expenses to further Harvard’s educational mission.
A sustained decline in endowment contributions would likely pose a long-term threat to the University’s ability to grow
Harvard’s fundraising crisis now has a price tag: $151 million.
Total philanthropic contributions fell by 14 percent in fiscal year 2024 as several billionaire donors publicly severed ties with Harvard over its response to campus antisemitism. The $151 million decline marks one of the most significant year-over-year drops in donations in the past decade. The University saw its greatest reduction in contributions to the endowment, which dropped by $193 million. Current-use gifts, however, remained strong — increasing by $42 million compared to fiscal year 2023.
Senior University leaders had privately warned for months about the lackluster philanthropy figures amid a tumultuous year marked by a leadership crisis and heightened public scrutiny over the University’s botched initial statement after Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel.
Harvard President Alan M. Garber ’76 publicly expressed his displeasure with the University’s latest fundraising figures in an interview with The Crimson last week. His comments came after privately warning alumni in March of a considerable decline in contributions.
“Some of the new commitments have been disappointing compared to past years,” Garber said. “There are also some indications that we will see improvements in the future.”
Unlike current-use gifts, donations intended for Harvard’s endowment cannot immediately be spent — only the annual investment returns from these gifts are available for use. While these contributions are preserved in the endowment, the investment income
beyond its current operations.
Though it is not abnormal for Harvard to experience fluctuations in donations following major leadership turnover, former Harvard President Claduine Gay’s surprise resignation in January amid allegations of plagiarism and criticism of her response to campus antisemitism plunged the University into crisis.
Gay stepped down from office after just more than six months into her tenure, resulting in Garber’s sudden elevation as the University’s interim president. Over the past 10 months, he has sought to assume the role as Harvard’s chief fundraiser and repair relationships with disillusioned donors.
Despite concerns, philan -
thropy continues to be a major pillar of Harvard’s financial stability. It accounted for 45 percent of the University’s revenue — consistent with fiscal year 2023 — and endowment income distribution rose to $2.4 billion, its highest levels, remaining a critical source of funding the University’s operations.
Current-use gifts differ from
endowment gifts as they can be spent in its entirety. The 9 percent increase in current use gifts — amounting to $42 million — played a crucial role in philanthropy’s contribution to the University’s operating revenue. These contributions were often in the form of small-dollar donations, with more than 75 percent of gifts averaging $150 per donor. The report, however, does not account for contributions that occurred after June 2024, outside of the most recent fiscal year. In his interview with The Crimson, Garber said that he believes alumni and donors are “reassured by the direction that the University is taking.”
“They are relieved, at least that so far, this academic year has been somewhat quieter,” he added. One person with knowledge of the University’s fundraising efforts said that June 2024 “was a particularly strong month” for Harvard.
Harvard Chief Financial Officer Ritu Kalra acknowledged in an interview with the Harvard Gazette, a University-run publication, that Harvard may still face some struggles in the coming months.
“The future will be more complicated — both the level of giving and the level of returns may be difficult to sustain — but we remain grateful to our donors for their steadfast belief in Harvard’s academic mission,” Kalra said.
“Their support is vital to everything we do,” she added.
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thomas.mete@thecrimson.com
BY JO B. LEMANN CRIMSON STAFF WRITER
Afederal judge dismissed a lawsuit against the Ivy League last Thursday that sought to end the League’s prohibition of athletic scholarships.
U.S. District Judge Alvin W. Thompson ruled the plaintiffs failed to prove the Ancient Eight were engaging in an antitrust violation. The decision comes over a year-and-a-half after the lawsuit — which named Harvard University as a co-defendant — was filed by Tamenang Choh and Grace Kirk in Connecticut. In their complaint, the plaintiffs argued the Ivy League policy of only allowing need-based financial aid instead of athletic scholarships represented a “restraint of trade.” They also alleged Ivy League athletes pay more for their education and are not properly compensated “for the athletic services they provide” because they aren’t receiving athletic scholarships.
University, Duke University, the University of Notre Dame, and Rice University — which provide athletic scholarships alongside high quality education, undercutting the plaintiffs’ argument that the Ivy League represented a unique and anti-competitive market.
He also ruled that the Ivy League’s policy for need-based financial aid has “altruistic motives” and is not just for a “revenue maximizing purpose.”
Thompson’s dismissal pointed to other universities outside of the Ivy League — such as Stanford
Choh’s filing was also ruled as outside the statute of limitations, since the lawsuit was filed more than four years after he enrolled at Brown. Thompson did not rule Kirk’s complaint as outside the statute of limitations.
Despite the decision, the case will likely be appealed, according to Choh and Krik’s attorney Eric L. Cramer.
“We and our clients are obviously disappointed with the decision,” Cramer wrote in a statement. “We almost certainly will appeal and are optimistic about our chances for reversal.”
The dismissal comes as the Ivy League attempts to adjust to the changing landscape of athletic compensation in the National Collegiate Athletic Association.
With the dismissal, needbased financial aid will remain in place, but changes to athlete compensation could still be in the Ivy League’s future.
In 2021, the Supreme Court ruled that college athletes could profit off of their name, image, and likeness — opening the floodgates for athletes to earn money and for additional lawsuits against the NCAA.
Since the decision, NIL
collectives — booster-funded groups that pay student athletes — have exploded at many universities and, just last week, a $2.8 billion NCAA settlement that would compensate some former athletes and allow schools to directly pay athletes received preliminary approval by a judge.
Despite these changes, Ivy League athletes have largely remained untouched, as the League has yet to see any NIL collectives and athletes are left to navigate deals individually.
The university athletics scene has also seen an influx of unionizing action.
In March, the Dartmouth men’s basketball team voted to unionize, and in July, a judge allowed a case to move forward that could make some college athletes employees of their university.
Harvard Athletic Director Erin McDermott told Harvard Magazine she is not against paying athletes in the future, as long as that payment is tied to NIL deals.
Still, in an interview with The Crimson in April, McDermott emphasized that academics are still a priority for Harvard over the University’s competitiveness in paying athletes.
“We’ve been able to stay competitive even though we don’t give athletic scholarships,” McDermott said.
“We really want to continue thinking about this athletic experience as part of the educational mission here, that we are truly a co-curricular activity and extension of the classroom,” she added.
cent.
Harvard only allocates 14 percent of its endowment towards public equities due to its lower risk tolerance. Fiscal year 2024 was a strong year for public equities — with the S&P 500 often setting new record highs — but the HMC still delivered strong returns given its lower exposure to public equities.
“In FY24, public equity and hedge fund portfolios stood out for their strong performance,” Narvekar wrote in the report. “This is a particularly positive indicator, since HMC’s hedge fund portfolio has less equity exposure than most hedge fund indices, yet still outperformed during a strong year for equities.”
Harvard also reduced the endowment’s exposure to real estate and natural resources from 25 percent in 2018, to just 6 percent in FY 2024. This reduction has helped drive a positive impact on the endowment returns, according to Narvekar.
The University saw a budget surplus of $45 million in 2024, a significant change compared to the surplus of $186 million that Harvard operated with in FY 2023. Revenue growth of 6 percent was outpaced by the expense growth of 9 percent.
Vice President and Chief Financial Officer Ritu Kalra attributed the rise in expenses to HMC investing in its people.
“Our commitment to attracting and retaining top talent through competitive salaries accounted for just over half of the increase in compensation,” Kalra wrote.
“The work ahead demands much of each of us,” Garber wrote. “Fortunately, we are people supported by generous physical and financial resources whose ambitions are limited only by our imaginations.”
“Our University will emerge stronger from this time — not in spite of being tested, but because of it,” he added. Notably, endowment gifts to the University dropped from $561 million in FY 2023 to $368 million this year. In the report, Narvekar noted the University’s increasing dependence on endowment distributions to fund its operations. Twenty years ago, endowment distributions accounted for 21 percent of the University’s budget. Now, it accounts for almost 40 percent.
“The ever-increasing reliance on this critical resource makes our work all the more important,” Narvekar wrote.
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Harvard President Alan M. Garber ’76 acknowledged the challenges facing the University in a message published in the annual report.
ent countries and so many different cultures, legal backgrounds, I think that was very unique.”
A ‘Special Responsibility’
BY S. MAC HEALEY
Every year at Harvard Law School, fewer than 200 students graduate with a Master of Laws, or LL.M., the exclusive HLS degree that has quietly shaped governments, courts, and legal systems around the world.
The LL.M. program at HLS doesn’t often make headlines.
Unlike HLS’ flagship J.D. program — which graduates 1,750 students every year and has dominated the American legal scene since its inception in 1817 — the LL.M. program is designed to further develop people who have already learned the basics of law.
HLS celebrated the program’s 100th anniversary last month, inviting its powerful alumni from all over the world for a two-day celebration. The roster of speakers read like a parade of United Nations guests, featuring leaders of Perú, Taiwan, and Luxembourg.
The Crimson interviewed seven LL.M. alumni from five countries to find out how the program quietly produces some of the world’s top leaders.
“It was a life-changing experience for me,” said Anurag Bhaskar, an LL.M. alum now serving in the Supreme Court of India. “Just the exposure of being around students from so many differ-
The LL.M. program at Harvard Law School began humbly. Established in 1923, HLS introduced the program to give advanced training to a cohort of only four U.S.-based students.
While the program grew in size in the next decades, it wasn’t until 1950 that HLS professor Paul A. Freund and HLS Dean Erwin N. Griswold began an effort to adopt a more international focus, believing HLS had a “special responsibility” to train graduates of foreign law schools.
Freund was himself a graduate of the LL.M. program. Griswold would later serve as dean of Harvard Law school, solicitor general for Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, and the namesake for HLS’ Griswold Hall.
Today, Freund and Griswold’s experiment has fundamentally altered the character of the LL.M. program. Of this year’s class of 182 students, 98 percent are international, hailing from 69 countries.
Once they leave HLS, graduates go on to become prime ministers, justices, and influential lawyers all over the world. Today, more than 25 LL.M. graduates serve on the highest courts of 18 countries.
Some even come back to the Law School. Vice Dean Gabriella Blum, who has been suggested as an early candidate for the HLS deanship, graduated from the
LL.M. program before becoming a tenured professor.
The success of the LL.M program relies on taking students at the top of the legal field. The LL.M. program website boasts that there are 13 supreme or constitutional court clerks and 19 Fulbright Scholars in this year’s class.
“The reality is, it’s from those who are in pretty good law firms, or who are like judges or prosecutors and so, those were the types of people that Harvard usually picks,” said Jennifer Yoo, a Korean lawyer specializing in international arbitration who graduated from the LL.M. program.
“I don’t think that’s a bad thing,” she said. “I think it’s just a criteria.”
But some students say these accomplishments stem from nepotism and connections rather than hard work.
“If one has parents who are able to get them internships, who are able to get them jobs, who are able to get them positions that initially are not necessarily accessible to everybody on merit, these things get elevated in those admission processes,” said Jeet Agarwal, an LL.M. alum and a technology lawyer from India.
Many LL.M. students rely on scholarships and funding to fund their year in Cambridge. Beatriz
Garcia Quiroga, a lawyer from Spain, was awarded a full scholarship from a Spanish foundation.
Similarly, Isabella R. Mosselmans was awarded the Kennedy Memorial Trust scholarship to attend HLS after working as an
immigration and asylum attorney in the U.K.
Mosselmans said her time in the LL.M. program was “one of the best years of my life.”
An International Cohort Juan Felipe Wills, a lawyer from Colombia, was drawn to the program not just for its prestige but for the chance to learn from other legal systems.
“You study a little bit about the U.S. legal culture and the U.S. legal system,” said Wills, “but at the same time, you’re able to interact with people from countries such as Argentina, the United Kingdom, India, Afghanistan, Pakistan.”
Some LL.M. alumni said the opportunity to interact with a diverse group of students is one of the program’s biggest draws. Wills recalled conversations with Russian and Ukrainian LL.M students after Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
“To hear firsthand, from people from both Russia and Ukraine,” Wills said, “it was very fulfilling.”
Yoo said the program’s diverse group of students helped her grow.
“I now really have friends all over the globe,” Yoo said. “It’s kind of taught me that the world is broader than I may have thought,” she added.
For some students, the emphasis on U.S. law can feel limiting, with some international students wishing for a broader selection of courses that address global issues.
“Many of the courses were U.S. law-centered, which is obvious and makes sense because it’s a U.S. law school,” Yoo said.
“But I think I’ve noticed that some other U.S. law schools do have certain classes which deal with some a bit more international matters,” she added.
Still, Mosselmans said that “a lot of the courses really are relevant to my work today,” pointing to a course she took on the history of the conflict in Israel and Gaza.
A Year-Long ‘Cram’
With the program’s rigor, alumni say the LL.M.’s timeline often feels rushed. With just nine months to pack in academic work, social activities, and career development, students feel pressure to make every moment count.
“We wanted to enjoy ourselves, become friends with each other, become part of social activities, become part of school activities,” Yoo said. “At the same time, we had to take classes. There were just so many things that we had to cram into one year.”
“I only wish, honestly, the program was a bit longer, or there was an option to do a two-year LL.M,” Garcia said. “I think staying one year on campus might be too short.”
Agarwal recalled how he had to carefully manage his time.
“You need to really plan your year. You really need to sort of be on top of meeting professors,” he said.
Though some LL.M. students said faculty like Blum, David B. Wilkins ’77, and Elizabeth P. Kama-
li served as helpful mentors, others also said a more comprehensive orientation and stronger advising could help LL.M. students prepare for the intense year ahead.
“I wasn’t very well prepared in choosing the courses,” Bhaskar said. “There were so many opportunities, but I didn’t realize that until I was already there”
“I would have liked to have more support — personalized to my profile and my abilities. During my time at Harvard, I found that the advice that we got was too general and many times dependent on what was recommended for J.D.s,” said Garcia Quiroga.
“I would love to see Harvard making greater improvements in catering the job search to each candidate’s profile,” she added. Some classes also cap the number of LL.M. students who can enroll. Yoo said one of her courses only allowed three LL.M. students, and she initially struggled because the J.D. students formed a more tight-knit group.
“Later on, I got to be friends with the J.D.s taking the same course as me, and it all worked out fine,” she said. “I felt that it would have been nicer if maybe there were more seats allocated to LL.M.s.” Despite criticisms of program structure, all LL.M. alumni described the program as a “life-changing experience.”
“It was an eye opening experience. I had just so much fun, and I’d just learned so much during that one year,” said Yoo.
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BY ADITHYA V. MADDURI AND CAM N. SRIVASTAVA CRIMSON STAFF WRITERS
The Harvard Undergraduate Association’s problem solving team approved constitutional reforms on Wednesday limiting the scope
of student referenda to HUA-specific matters but instituting a semesterly undergraduate survey on broader topics.
Five out the seven members of the problem solving team approved the recommendations, proposed by the HUA’s Executive Team, as of Wednesday morning, ending a months-long constitutional crisis over how the HUA would handle student petitions for College-wide referenda.
The intervention from HUA leadership also ended a crisis of inaction within the problem solving team itself, which formally met only once and failed to carry out its mission of resolving the constitutional dispute since it was convened in April.
The ad hoc body was convened by HUA days after the Harvard Undergraduate Palestine Solidarity Committee successfully passed a petition to initiate a referendum on whether Harvard should divest from institutions supporting “Israel’s occupation of Palestine.” The creation of the problem solving team indefinitely halted all student peti-
tions, including the PSC’s.
But since its inception, the problem solving team offered no recommendations to the HUA on how to resolve the crisis, prompting Assistant Dean of Student Engagement and Leadership Andy Donahue – the College’s official adviser to the HUA – to encourage HUA leadership to send their own proposal to the problem solving team.
On Tuesday, HUA Co-Presidents Ashley C. Adirika ’26 and Jonathan Haileselassie ’26 sent proposed constitutional reforms to the problem solving team, which stated that HUA sponsored referenda must focus on HUA policy, and that the HUA would conduct semesterly college-wide surveys to gauge opinions on questions submitted by student organizations.
Almost immediately after receiving the proposal, members of the problem solving team said they viewed the HUA Executive Team’s recommendations favorably because they eliminate drama associated with the HUA’s referendum process.
“I think it kind of cuts out student drama with regard to referenda — which is what happened last semester — while still allowing students to express their opinions on issues that have some sort of relation to the University,” said Jacob M. Miller ’25, a member of the problem solving team and a Crimson Editorial Chair.
Though the HUA Executive Team’s recommendations did not definitively clarify the fate of the PSC’s spring referendum, members of the team said they believe that referenda submitted to the HUA in the spring are effectively null.
“I would assume that they are functionally dead, because they’re not in line with the policies of right now,” said Henry P. Moss IV ’26, a member of the team and Crimson Editorial editor.
Lorenzo Z. Ruiz ’27, another member, said the new constitutional measures are intended to prevent controversial referenda proposals moving forward.
“I definitely think the goal is
to try and avoid circumstances like that where you have a really controversial referendum come to the table in the first place,” added Ruiz, also a Crimson Editorial editor.
“While I don’t know if this will apply retroactively, per se, I do think that these guidelines will avoid us seeing encounters like this in the future, where parties are able to bring extremely controversial referendum topics to the HUA and expect to see them bring them to the student body for a vote,” Ruiz said. Ruiz and Moss both said that uncertainty over the scope of the problem solving team’s powers and varying levels of commitment among members contributed to the team’s prolonged inaction.
For Moss’s part, he said he struggled to make it a priority.
“Some people within the committee had higher expectations than others,” he said. “I never really cared that much.”
When the best and brightest come to Harvard, we shouldn’t let them walk away on a technicality.
Why should our best teaching talent be allowed to walk?
For many faculty, the choice is not their own — depending on the position, Harvard prevents non-tenure track faculty from staying beyond two, three, or eight years. We have reservations about abolishing these time caps outright, as the newly recognized non-tenure-track faculty union is now seeking to do. But a policy so inflexible that it slams the door on some of Harvard’s most talented instructors does students a grave disservice.
Non-tenure track faculty — often hired for instructional roles and always with the understanding that they will never be granted a permanent position — are immensely valuable to the undergraduate experience. Students interact meaningfully and frequently with non-tenure track faculty — in many cases, about as much as tenured professors. Many of us have had some of our best learning experiences with lecturers, tutors, or preceptors. Former associate Mathematics lecturer Dusty E. Grundmeier, for example, became something of a campus darling for his above-and-beyond efforts to get to know his students as people and help them learn.
Because many of us have been lucky to have nontenure-track faculty like Dusty — and because we believe in the importance of unions to ensuring the rights of workers — we enthusiastically supported their efforts to unionize last year as Harvard Academic Workers-United Auto Workers.
Now, as HAW-UAW bargains for its first contract, we hear its points about time caps. They are something of a strange policy. But we’re inclined to heed the words of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences committee that re-
viewed it in 2009 and recommended against change, finding that the churn of the existing system “brings in fresh ideas, new talent, and the most recent pedagogical techniques.” While we’re hesitant to call for Harvard to abolish time caps altogether, one thing is obvious: The very best of the non-tenure-track faculty must be able to stay. Not a small fraction of undergraduates would say that their single best teaching experience has been with a nontenure-track faculty member. If Harvard is really committed to undergraduate learning, it must find a way to keep those instructors who are a cut above the rest. Departments should be able to nominate exceptional non-tenure-track faculty to be reviewed for a
long-term or indefinite contract. Such an approach would work best in the case of faculty in eight-year positions, who have the opportunity to demonstrate excellence over a significant period of time. In truly exceptional circumstances, however, faculty on shorter-term contracts could receive consideration.
It should go without saying that Harvard should be committed to the professional development of non-tenure track faculty. Still, our proposed amendment offers an additional carrot — it makes good business sense to cultivate top talent if you can keep them for the long term. When the best and brightest of the best and bright-
–This staff editorial solely represents the majority view of The Crimson Editorial Board. It is the product of discussions at regular Editorial Board meetings. In order to ensure the impartiality of our journalism, Crimson editors who choose to opine and vote at these meetings are not involved in the reporting of articles on similar topics.
BY SAUL I.M.
Imagine: It’s your first day of work, but you already know exactly when you’ll be fired, regardless of how well you perform.
For many of Harvard’s academic workers — our lecturers, preceptors, and fellows — that’s the norm. University time caps mean termination dates are written into their employment contracts and enforced no matter how much students love them or how heavy the toll of uprooting their lives and families to find work elsewhere.
The durations are totally arbitrary: two, three, or eight years, depending on the position. They kindle burnout in an already disheartening and stressful academic market, demanding that prudent faculty immediately search for a new job while handling all the responsibilities of their current position.
And these expiration dates harm students whose relationship-building with mentors is cut short by administrative fiat.
The Editorial Board acknowledges almost all of these shortcomings — which is why it’s so ridiculous that they only endorse a slight softening of the status quo.
Their proposal? Keep time caps for most academic workers with exceptions for faculty who are, well, exceptional. The current kick-to-the curb policy keeps fresh talent coming in, they say. Newer is better.
That logic is exactly backwards. In what other professional context would we say that the people most experienced at a job are actually the ones least qualified for it? The proposal is especially strange given that these academic positions are already filled by only a tiny proportion of elite applicants.
Moreover, it’s hard to see how a rotating cast of overworked faculty barely familiar with the University would be the best group to offer high-quality teaching or advising.
Remarkably, these academic workers manage to pull it off. They shine as teachers, researchers, and mentors, despite the time caps that push them away from valuable, student-facing work, and instead towards job talks and CVs.
Still, let’s imagine that the Board is right — that the policy really does improve teaching. The argument for keeping it in place then goes something like this: Time caps make life better for Harvard undergraduates. Therefore, time caps are good.
That’s true — if students are the only people worth caring about.
Obviously, they’re not. At issue is the livelihoods and job security of underpaid, overworked non-tenure-track faculty. The best the Board offers them is the promise that a lucky few can avoid unemployment — as long as they can outcompete all their soon-to-be-former colleagues.
The true purpose of time caps is clear: cost-cutting. It’s easier to offer sparse pay and meager benefits to employees who won’t work at the University for more than a few years. And if they burn out by the time they leave, it’s — contractually speaking —
no longer Harvard’s problem.
So rather than instituting some new, slightly more palatable time cap system, as the Board proposes, the University should just eliminate them altogether in favor of presumptive renewal for faculty who meet performance standards. This approach works well for non-tenure-track academics at Rutgers University and the University of Michigan. Some lecturers at Harvard Medical School and the T.H. Chan School of Public Health enjoy the possibility of indefinite employment too. Every single person on the Editorial Board benefits from the labor of academic workers. It’s a shame the Board refuses to reciprocate.
–Saul I.M. Arnow ’26, an Associate Editorial editor, is a Social Studies concentrator in Adams House. E. Matteo Diaz ’27, a Crimson Editorial Comp Director, lives in Leverett House. Jasmine N. Wynn ’27, a Crimson Editorial editor, lives in Winthrop House. Nuriel R. Vera-DeGraff ’26, a Crimson Editorial editor, is a double concentrator in Social Studies and Mathematics in Mather House.
MATHIAS RISSE
Last week we commemorated the anniversary of that awful day, October 7th, when almost 1,200 human beings lost their lives, setting in motion events that would change the lives of millions more.
As far as debates about the war in Gaza and its context within the Harvard community are concerned — and this includes many pieces published in The Crimson — one thing never ceases to startle me: how people of great intelligence and understanding of the situation still end up articulating a one-sided story that does little more than pay lip-service to the other side, if that.
I’d like to make a plea here for recognizing the moral complexity of the situation in and around Gaza. This approach reflects the human rights standpoint, which calls us to recognize and respond to the pain and suffering of all people, and would lead to better campus conversations.
After Germany and the United States, my two countries of citizenship, Israel is where I have spent the most time in my life. I studied at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem with a conservative Israeli who lost his oldest son in the first Lebanon war. So I understand deeply that there is no justification for the unspeakable atrocities committed against Israeli civilians on October 7th. Anybody who slaughters human beings and then posts videos of their deeds makes a choice — an immoral, irredeemable choice that cannot be justified by anything that happened before. I also understand that the history of tensions between Israelis and Palestinians is long and complex: Hamas’ attack did not come out of nowhere, and Israel’s response has been ruthless.
From the beginning of this crisis, the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, which I direct, has focused its reactions to this new stage in the world’s most visible human rights crisis on the theme of moral com-
plexity. Acknowledging moral complexity requires that we say a number of things side by side, without rank-ordering or qualifying them, because they all matter and require resolution. This approach is not about articulating a dismissive “but.” It’s about saying “this also matters” as we think about how to make some headway.
As a German, the history of the Holocaust has been ingrained in me since childhood. I accept the special responsibility Germany in particular has towards Israel, as well as the responsibility of the global community more broadly towards the Jewish people. Israel is the homeland of the Jewish community, and as such holds special significance globally. A commitment to the Jewish people, however, must also always be a commitment to the Palestinian people, since their fates are inextricably intertwined.
Millions of Jews live in the area now, as do millions of Palestinians. Because both sides have valid claims to the land, a compromise is necessary. It is a staggering failure of leadership on many sides that after generations of conflict, no workable compromise has been found. All these people deserve the kind of life the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights seeks to guarantee.
Too many people have a moral blind spot vis-a-vis the Palestinians, including many who, like myself, accept a special responsibility towards the Jewish people. Too many think Palestinians should be OK with living barely above subsistence. Like their Jewish neighbors, Palestinians, of course, are entitled to pursue flourishing lives.
Peace won’t come unless they can. Nobody should be surprised if people revolt if that is the only way to bring meaning to their lives. Palestinians have been abandoned too many times — by wealthy and powerful Arab states, and also by my two countries of citizenship.
Like the U.S. response after September 11th, Israel’s military campaign shows little promise of making the world safer, especially for the global Jewish popu-
lation. To kill every member of Hamas or Hezbollah would require causing so much trauma that resurgent violence against Jews around the world would be guaranteed for decades.
In any event, there is no justification for the largescale attacks on Gaza that have killed more than 42,000 human beings, among them at least 16,000 children, with no end in sight. This assault has driven almost every Gazan out of their home — as if everyone in that densely populated area were equally accountable for Hamas’ atrocities. Meanwhile, in the West Bank, settler violence has reached all-time highs, and hundreds of Palestinians have been killed there since October 7th.
To be sure, international law and just war theory have long acknowledged that justified military responses may involve collateral harm. However, the Israeli government has stretched claims to proportionality (and consideration of the lives of civilians in Gaza) far beyond any plausibility.
Moral complexity requires acknowledging this reality alongside condemnation of the attacks of October 7th. Atrocities do not cancel each other out, and that certain violations occurred earlier does not mean they justify whatever comes later. October 7th does not legitimize the death of 16,000 children.
Moral complexity also applies to our language. Members of the Harvard community have experienced antisemitism and Islamophobia. This is unacceptable and should not be tolerated.
But some treat any criticism of the Israeli government as antisemitic. This definition is unwise because it makes the space for legitimate political opposition, say, to the policies of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu too narrow. Those who ran the concentration camps were antisemitic. Nobody who calls out the Netanyahu government for causing the death of 16,000 children should ipso facto find themselves mentioned in the same breath.
Moreover, positions like Zionism and slogans like
“from the river to the sea” mean different things to different people, and legitimately so. We should not assume others mean to say what we consider the worst possible interpretation of those phrases. Harvard is home to many and is also an institution of public interest. Much of the concern about the climate here has, of course, been sincere. But it also seems that a contingent of people outside — and sometimes inside — Harvard makes statements about campus life that bear little resemblance to reality. And I find it hard to assess what truth conditions for statements like “Harvard as such is antisemitic” or “anti-Muslim” would even be. The University is a complex place people experience in very different ways, depending on which school they belong to, whom they hang out with, and which parts of campus they frequent. Let me return to the theme of moral complexity one more time. Many awful things have happened at Harvard in the past year (just remember the doxxing trucks). Things many magnitudes more awful have occurred in and around Gaza. And now Israel is under threat from other countries, while at the same time millions in Lebanon have reason to fear they will be held accountable for Hezbollah the way Gazans have been for Hamas.
These realities all need to be named and placed next to each other. They do not cancel each other out. The way forward is to acknowledge the full humanity of all people in this conflict, and to see that they have claims to dignity and a flourishing life. I hope we can all find ways, no matter how limited, of contributing to this cause – of, in our own small way, furthering the human-rights perspective on this horrible situation.
BY ANDREW M. CRESPO AND RESHMAAN N. HUSSAM
Two days ago, we read in the library. We read Martin Luther King Jr. We read Toni Morrison. We read Henry David Thoreau. We read Hannah Arendt. We read Harvard’s University-Wide Statement on Rights and Responsibilities, which declares that “reasoned dissent plays a particularly vital part in its existence.” We read the Harvard Library statement of values, which enjoins “embracing diverse perspectives” — a message that, as it so happens, is printed on a banner outside of the room in Widener Library where we sat down to read.
We printed that same three-word phrase in large type on a reading list we brought with us into the library. We entered when the bells in Harvard Yard rang noon. We sat together reading quietly alongside two dozen of our faculty colleagues, equal parts tenured and untenured across five Harvard schools and multiple departments. When the bells rang one, we left.
Why did we read in the library? Admittedly, it’s an absurd question. Reading, after all, is what libraries are for. Or so we thought. But a few weeks ago, at least twelve of our students were suspended from the same library for doing the same thing: reading quietly, with small signs taped to their laptops.
We strongly disagree with Harvard’s decision to ban our students from the library over this conduct. A university should never deny access to scholarly resources as a mode of punishment. In fact, we believe these sanctions violate the American Library Association’s Bill of Rights.
More fundamentally, there was no reason to punish these students at all. A university has an interest in avoiding disruptive behavior in its libraries — things like shouting, marching, or blocking access. But sitting quietly and reading simply cannot be classified as disruption. This is true regardless of the clothing people wear or the stickers, reading materials, or printed sheets of paper they independently or collectively have with them. Indeed, punishing quiet readers for these attributes would invite discrimination based on the content of their non-disruptive expression.
In making these observations, we stand in disagreement with Harvard University President Alan M. Garber ’76, who recently said the University can and should punish people quietly reading in the library if their “intention” is “to deliver a common message.”
Respectfully, President Garber has it precisely backwards. A university should not punish community
members engaging in non-disruptive behavior simply because those individuals hope to communicate ideas to other community members. The reason, echoed by Harvard’s own core values statement, is simple: Sharing ideas is why universities exist. The day before we read in the library, we sent a letter to our colleagues in the administration who banned the students. In it, we made clear that we don’t see any meaningful distinction between our study session and the one the students held. They, like us, did not say they were conducting a protest. Rather, like us, they said they were holding a study session, with hopes that others might engage with the ideas they set out to study. If there is one noteworthy difference between our study session and theirs, it is that the students all wore traditional Palestinian keffiyehs around their necks, while we and our colleagues wore black scarves. We did this with intention, to underscore the unequal and repeated disciplinary threats and actions targeting students who have expressed a particular point of view this last year. Our students’ suspensions from the library come amid a wave of new, excessively restrictive rules governing campus speech that have been codified in direct response to student protests about the devastation in Gaza.
As professor Melanie Matchett Wood wrote on behalf of the leadership of Harvard’s Council on Academic Freedom, “the students who sat quietly and studied did not interfere with normal campus activity, and Harvard thus has no compelling reason to prohibit their speech.” Wood further noted that current campus policies have “no definition of ‘protest.’” Indeed,
BY MATTHEW R. TOBIN
ou might have heard grades are going up.
YLast year, a report presented to the Faculty of Arts and Sciences revealed the extent of Harvard’s staggering grade inflation. Nearly 80 percent of grades given to students at the College in the 2020–21 academic year were in the A-range.
I’m not here to argue the negative effects of grade inflation; many others have already done that persuasively. Instead, from conversations with friends, classmates, and colleagues on the Editorial Board, I’ve compiled every proposal I can find for solving grade inflation. This piece attempts to present — and evaluate — them all.
What are Grades, Anyway?
At their core, “grades” are just a set of buckets that cluster students of similar academic performance. Every university — and every class within a university — has a slightly different distribution of grades. A grading distribution might be spread out, with both As and Fs handed out liberally, or it could be condensed, with most students receiving Bs and Cs.
“Grade inflation” just means that the center of the grade distribution is slowly moving upwards, while “grade compression” refers to the distribution slowly becoming narrower. The two are linked: As grades rise, they push on the upper bound, causing them to compress closer and closer around an A.
In order to solve grade inflation and compression effectively, we must first figure out what the ideal grade distribution looks like, and to do that, we need to answer the question every student has muttered under their breath at some point: What’s the point of grading anyway?
As I see it, grades serve two purposes: to measure an individual student’s competency and to compare different students to each other. These metrics are related, but distinct — and there is, naturally, disagreement about which to prioritize.
A grading distribution where everyone receives an A signals a high degree of competency but fails to differentiate students. Conversely, a grading curve uniformly distributed among the different grading categories strongly distinguishes students, but if the class consists entirely of similarly capable scholars, it might inaccurately suggest significant differentiation between them.
A student’s individual grade sends a different signal depending on the overall university grading distribution. An A is much more valuable if the distribution is centered at a B-minus than if it is centered at an A-minus.
Curve It Like Beckham
The first set of grade inflation solutions involves the University setting a fixed grading distribution for each class. In its most extreme form, this approach could involve imposing quotas for each grading category. At minimum, the University could set an upper bound on the number of students who receive As.
There are several issues with this fixed distribution model, though.
First, it could lead to a situation where there are more deserving students than good grades to be given — if everyone in a Creative Writing seminar wrote excellent short stories, why should they not all receive As?
Second, limited fixed distributions might help inflation but not compression. A cap on As would likely shift the mean GPA downward, but it may not drastically change the spread of the distribution. Seventy-nine percent of grades are already in the A-range. It would be easy to imagine a fixed distribution merely shifting some of those As down to A-minuses.
Changing the Buckets
The University might instead consider changing the number of grade categories within the distribution.
For example, why not switch from using 12 buckets — A through F — to just three or four?
Many professional schools across the country use an honors/pass/low pass/fail system, including both Harvard Law School and Harvard Business School.
But category changes don’t really solve the grade inflation problem — they just make it harder to detect. In some sense, letter grades are already functionally converging into honors/pass/fail — A, A-minus, or B-plus.
Furthermore, the fewer categories there are, the more we risk unfairly lumping students together. Should we really treat students who receive an 81 the same as ones who receive an 89?
In any event, Harvard seems to be moving in the opposite direction from pass/fail, with the College seemingly poised to eliminate the option for General Education courses.
Reducing the number of grading categories could be useful, however, during the first semester of college, in order to ease students into a new academic environment. At MIT, every first-semester student receives grades of either Pass or No Record, with a No Record not appearing on the student’s transcript.
Alternatively, Harvard could avoid excessively lumping students together by expanding the number of grading categories. Rather than converting percentages to letter grades, professors could assign students a qualitative final score out of 100, allowing them to better capture fine gradations between students.
Currently, a single percentage point can turn an A-minus into a B-plus — a difference that, in this day and age, can seem catastrophic. If Harvard adopted a 100-point scale, students would no longer have to stress over whether they will surpass the cutoff for each bucket. And why stop at 100? Harvard could allow professors to choose their own upper bound. Why not 100,000?
Kidding. This would be impracticable and untenable — almost as much as a system that gives 79 percent of students A-range grades. Full Transparency
Rather than changing the grading system itself, Har-
vard could clarify what a grade signals.
For example, the College could include on each student’s transcript the median grade for a course beside the student’s grade, providing employers and graduate schools a sense for the real achievement the latter represents.
After all, earning an A in The Ancient Greek Hero means something very different than earning one in Stat 110, and this policy could discourage students from taking the easiest classes by making it clear when they have done so.
The policy could be extended: Harvard could put the average GPA for a student’s concentration on their transcript to contextualize their performance more fully. Make Harvard Harder
Finally, the University could simply make Harvard harder.
It’s the most natural way to deflate grades. If you want fewer students to receive As, then challenge us more. (We are Harvard students, after all.)
There are several ways to do this. First, and most intuitively, professors should grade more strictly. Many courses have leniency policies — including quiz and problem set drops, late days, and more — that increase the likelihood of receiving top grades. As a student, I can appreciate these rules for giving me wiggle room. But I also fail to see the benefit they bring to students’ learning.
The Faculty of Arts and Sciences could review course grading policies to see where these attempts at leniency have gotten out of hand. The Harvard College Program in General Education, for example, recently released guidelines recommending that students who miss class often, skip readings, or don’t complete assignments should not be given an A or A-minus.
One likely culprit for lenient grading is the Q Guide, which compiles student reviews of classes. Turns out,
there is a direct correlation between expected grades and Q ratings. It isn’t hard to imagine that professors and teaching staff might be incentivized to make their courses easier or give higher grades in anticipation of better reviews.
Short of eliminating the Q Guide, Harvard should take this pressure off instructors by minimizing the importance of ratings when deciding teaching awards, promotions, and tenure.
Harvard could also simply make the course material itself more difficult by requiring all students to take certain rigorous classes like LPS A, Hum 10, Social Studies 10, or CS50. Alternatively, the administration could change the number of credits each course yields. Because not all classes are equally difficult, maybe not every class should be worth the same on a transcript. ***
Despite widespread gem-hunting and fast-rising grades, I believe that most students come here to learn, not cut corners, and yet many end up doing just that. Maybe they do so out of fear. Maybe they don’t see the costs of taking the easy way out. Regardless, they do so because they can. Ending grade inflation would free students from the disincentives that stand between them and a challenging, rewarding — and, yes, transformative — educational experience. And after all, Harvard students in particular need not fret about their grades — even the ugliest transcript has seven priceless Crimson letters at the top. I see no reason not to explore every option to combat grade inflation. And like every Harvard student, I hope they’re adopted the year after I graduate.
‘SOUL SUCKING.’ Young Cambridge residents bemoaned gentrification and said they were unsure about forging a life in the city.
BY LAUREL M. SHUGART AND GRACE E. YOON CRIMSON STAFF WRITERS
wenty-year-old Aléx Mon-
Tteiro Leith and his family lucked out with their landlord: it’s his grandfather.
As a result, Leith said he doesn’t have to worry about being able to remain in Cambridge. But he knows that for others, it’s not so simple.
“I would say it certainly does alleviate the stress for me personally,” he said. “but there is certainly stress about my peers and just sort of what I see changing in front of my own eyes as I grow up.” In interviews, young Cambridge residents said they have watched as their home city has
grown costlier and more gentrified. But unlike some older residents, who have reacted to the changing face of Cambridge by trying to halt development, they said there needs to be more housing — and affordable housing — to make the city a place where young people can forge a life of their own.
Miranda Santiago, 20, also said her parents own their home, giving her a level of security. But she added that she doesn’t know whether she would be able to stay in Cambridge without it.
“I can imagine that my only way that I would be able to stay in or come back to Cambridge and live there when I’m older is if they did keep the house because I really don’t think I could afford to live in Cambridge otherwise,” she said.
Leith said gentrification is economically polarizing the city, making it largely inaccessible to the middle class, which he called Cambridge’s “identity and lifeblood.”
For 27-year-old Cambridge City Councilor Burhan Azeem — who is the Council’s youngest member — the loss of Cambridge’s middle class created a “perpetual sense of loss” for many as their loved ones have been pushed out of the city because of its price tag.
“Everyone who lives in Cambridge, even if they want to stay themselves, like I do, always have a sense of, ‘My friends are slowly going to be moving away’, and I think that’s just very sad,” he said.
Santiago said that many people in her life have left Cambridge to find housing they can afford elsewhere.
“I know a lot of people who I went to school with, I was in elementary school, and they didn’t make it to high school because they were pushed out of Cambridge,” she said. Teachers in Santiago’s high school were similarly priced out of the city, she said, forced to find employment elsewhere.
Azeem said Cambridge needs to prioritize building housing for residents of all incomes.
“Unless you do something where you just end up winning a lottery, though, you can’t live here,” Azeem said.
Sarah Stone, who moved to the city after graduating college six years ago, said “it stresses me out to think about staying in Cambridge in the long term.”
“Cambridge is a wonderful place to live, but I think that the rising cost of housing is really soul-sucking to any place,” said Stone.
Leith said the insecurity facing young people who want to remain in Cambridge has led him to support the city’s efforts to expand affordable housing.
“This is not a city where the super-wealthy who can just afford to flat out buy a multi-million dollar home should be given priority,” he said.
“Cambridge should keep investing in people who cannot just flat out afford to pay for these places, because if we don’t,
then we risk losing the identity and culture that is our city,” he added.
Emily S. Goodling, who has been in Cambridge for the past two years, said cheaper and more available housing would alleviate the stress that comes with living in the city.
“I feel blessed, lucky to be here every single day. But I also worry about my housing a lot,” Goodling said. Stone said that though Cambridge is changing, the city should respond by accommodating newcomers and trying to lower rents for those already living there, rather than shutting people out.
“People aren’t going to stop moving here, and so we do have to meet the moment,” Stone said.
“The thing that defines the character of a place is the people who live in it,” she added.
laurel.shugart@thecrimson.com grace.yoon@thecrimson.com
BY CLAIRE T. GRUMBACHER AND NISHKA N.
Tatte Bakery and Cafe, a popular Mediterranean bakery in Harvard Square, is undergoing renovations to relocate the espresso bar and expand seating on the first and second floors since late August.
The renovations, which are expected to finish before Christmas, will allow the bakery to meet consistently high demand, according to Assistant General Manager Hillary K. Shamis, who added that Tatte’s Harvard Square location is among the highest-grossing branches.
“We noticed that we have a lot more guests than we’re able to serve in a timely fashion, and we just want to get our guests great service,” Shamis said.
In particular, Shamis said the new espresso bar, which will feature an additional machine, will allow Tatte to improve the customer experience.
“We’re going to have two espresso machines, so we’re able to double our output for coffees and beverages, which has been a big strain on our guests currently,” Shamis said. “We’re just hoping to expedite that process and really get our guests the fastest service we can get while still being quality.”
Currently, half of the first floor and the entirety of the second floor is blocked off with a white plastic drape. Still, Shamis said the impacts of the renovations on Tatte’s sales have been smaller than anticipated.
“We thought with the very decreased seating, that we were going to have to turn a lot of people away, but I think our guests have accommodated along with us,” Shamis said. “We’ve seen an increase in online orders and delivery orders, so our sales have not dipped as much as we thought they were going to.”
But she added that customers “definitely can tell” that renovations are going on.
“They do say that it’s loud. There are power tools going on very early in the morning sometimes, and our space is very limited,” Shamis said. Representatives for Tatte’s central office did not respond to a request for comment.
The large walled-off portion of the bakery confused some customers, including Angelo Gomez, a student at the University of Miami School of Law
“This white plaster here made us originally think this place was closed,” Gomez said.“ We were confused at first.”
Regardless, Shamis said she remains excited about the final product.
“We have some regular cus -
tomers that come in, and they’re super excited for what the upstairs dining room is going to look like,” she said. “We’re super excited to roll it out because it’s going to be a lot more space, and we’re going to be able to accommodate a lot more people.”
Tatte patrons agreed that the consistently busy bakery would benefit from more space.
Expanded seating would “improve the experience, and make it less congested,” Gomez said.
Kary M. Anderson, who was visiting from California, added that the space “should be bigger or someone should open another coffee shop near here because of the crowd.”
But some customers said they would come to Tatte regardless of its physical condition.
“I just love Tatte so much that, even though it’s causing disruption for now, look how many people are here. It’s clearly a beloved place,” Bruno O. Quiroga said.
“I come here for the food, not for the place,” added Harvard Graduate School of Design student Horacio Cherniavsky.
BY SEBASTIAN B. CONNOLLY AND STEPHANIE DRAGOI CONTRIBUTING WRITERS
A rail line currently being used to transport freight and equipment could transform transit in Cambridge, according to a report released by the Cambridge Redevelopment Authority earlier this month.
The report, a collaboration between the CRA and consultant WSP, suggested repurposing the Grand Junction rail line, which runs from North Station in Boston through Somerville and Cambridge before ending in Allston, into a line for passenger use. The report also encourages the extension of a multi-use path for pedestrians and cyclists parallel to the railway. Tom Evans, executive director of the CRA, spoke about the incentives for the project.
“It comes from an economic development interest, from a sustainable transportation interest, and overall, the feeling that the growing options for transit users in the Boston area can only benefit all the neighborhoods that are dependent on transit users,” Evans said. Following the route of the existing Grand Junction corridor, the proposed passenger line would start at North Station in Boston and end at West Station, the planned commuter rail station in Allston. According to estimates by the CRA, a passenger rail service between North Station and West Station would attract between 5,800 and 9,800 daily boardings in the first year alone, a number expected to reach up to 11,200 daily boardings by 2040. The line, connecting Boston and Allston via Kendall Square, would have particular implications for Cambridge as a hub of innovation.
“There’s a tremendous amount of cutting-edge work going into both research and entrepreneurship in Kendall Square, and combined with the challenge of housing in the Boston area, transportation is one of the key issues that we see that we want to address so that we can continue to bring talent into the region, and specifically to the Kendall Square district,” Evans said.
Beth O’Neill Maloney, executive director of the Kendall Square Association, said the Grand Junction project aligns with the KSA’s goals of connecting people to Kendall Square to promote increased innovation in the region.
“That’s what Kendall Square is known for, is innovating and looking for solutions, and we’re consistent in that, and that’s what we’re trying to do here, is make it easier for people to get in, out, and around Kendall Square and Cambridge itself,” Maloney said. “And we believe that Grand Junction is a really critical or essential element in that.” Moving forward with the repurposing of the Grand Junction tracks would require collaboration with MIT, which owns property at two locations along the rail corridor.
“We’re pleased that the CRA’s Grand Junction study has been released. MIT has long been supportive of having some kind of transit implemented in the Grand Junction Corridor,” Joe Higgins, Vice President for Campus Services and Stewardship at MIT, wrote in an emailed statement.
“MIT and the City are currently working closely together to advance the Grand Junction multi-use path for cyclists and pedestrians, which will run next to any future transit installation,” Higgins added. Maloney views the project as a net positive.
“Really planning for the future and planning the infrastructure we need today and for the future so that it’s more sustainable, and more reliable, and more accessible, gives people greater access to where the jobs are, places like Kendall Square,” she said. “I think this is a win-win-win.”
all to find comfort in a summer well spent while we manage this uncomfortable settling in for the upcoming academic year.
madelyn.mckenzie@thecrimson.com
As the leaves turn red and gold, we often turn to our headphones for extra warmth and comfort. Although every season is the season for music, fall is a confusing time of year — a time of death, of color, of change. Wondering what to listen to? Here’s how The Crimson’s Arts Board grieves the summer and welcomes the cold.
“Dreams” by Fleetwood Mac
This fall, I find myself grieving a dreamy Italian summer in the already brisk New England air — but all hope is not lost! Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams” combines lyrics oscillating between feelings of loss and acceptance with a relaxed melody, making it the per-
The Time for Covers Fall is the time for covers. Something about the changing weather and turning leaves sets the perfect scene for leaning into the warmth of old favorites while embracing the brisk excitement of new interpretations. As far as covers go, I’ve come to love acoustic, subdued performances of singalong pop and rock classics. The start of the semester featured Bright Eyes and First Aid Kit’s take on the back-to-school anthem “We’re Going to Be Friends.” And in anticipation of his new album, I’ve been obsessed with soft-spoken folk-singer Christian Lee Hutson’s finger-picked renditions of Taylor Swift’s “Betty” and Liz Phair’s “Why Can’t I.” Hutson really captures the autumn vibe of
the perfect soundtrack to eight minutes spent cozy inside on a cool fall evening.
andrew.choe@thecrimson.com
“Blue” by Joni Mitchell
This fall, I’m drawn to Joni Mitchell’s album, “Blue.”
From the desperation of “Blue” to the giddiness of “My Old Man” to the yearning of “Little Green,” the album’s raw, emotional depth coalesce around the theme of change. Much like the shifting temperatures, shorter days, and transforming colors of the season, Mitchell manages to encapsulate the essence of transformation — bittersweet, beautiful, and anticipatory.
These three themes are both interwoven and dispersed amongst the carefully curated tracks, each of which offer evocative lyric choices against the backdrop of vastly different emotional appeals, mirroring the trademark polarity and “in-betweenness” of fall.
BY JAYA N. KARAMCHETI CONTRIBUTING WRITER
Nestled in the heart of Central Square, missable if it weren’t for the subtle sign that makes it just visible to passersby, is Little Donkey. The restaurant, founded by James Beard award-winning chef Ken Oringer in 2016, serves what it calls “global tapas” — small plates distinguished by their fusion of flavors and different cuisines. With its menu of bites like Brazilian-inspired steak tartare and a Korean take on mac and cheese, Little Donkey is all-encompassing and welcoming to all eaters and every palate. Once inside, Little Donkey’s atmosphere appears reflective of its culinary philosophy. Guests are greeted by a Pride flag as soon as they walk through the door, and the air bops with ’90s hip-hop and R&B tunes loud enough to create a lively environment, but quiet enough to allow for conversation among eaters. Bright and colorful
artwork acts as a contrast to the industrial brick walls, and the lighting is dim without making menus or plates indecipherable. The service is quick, and the waiters are extraordinarily friendly — all of which make for a positive dining experience.
Little Donkey’s “global tapas” are designed to be shared among guests. The restaurant recommends ordering about two to three dishes per eater, but the expansive menu might result in ordering double or triple that. Plates arrive at the table as soon as they are ready, but eaters soon settle into the pace and rhythm of the service.
A popular place to start at Little Donkey is with their “crudos” – plates of raw fish and assorted accouterments. The tuna and salmon belly tartare is a standout on this section of the menu, with buttery fish piled onto a bed of crispy sushi rice and topped with a healthy amount of tobiko. The rice could have done with more time in the pan to ensure a better texture contrast, and some acidity would have brightened up the otherwise rich flavors. However, this dish is still
an excellent choice for sushi lovers looking for an upscale rendition. Next on the menu is Little Donkey’s “snacks” – essentially their appetizers. One of their most popular snacks is the caviar sandwich, in which sturgeon caviar is piled onto a pillowy potato roll with a thick schmear of herb butter on both sides. The sweetness of the roll perfectly complements the brininess of the caviar, and the sandwich is the ideal size to provide a taste of indulgence without overwhelming the tastebuds with too much richness. The sandwich is served on a logoed piece of wax paper that makes it feel as though it’s from a local burger joint – a playful take on caviar that makes the delicacy feel accessible to even the most broke of college students.
Another favorite snack is the shrimp toast bao bun. Unlike a traditional bao bun, Little Donkey’s iteration is fried, giving it a crisp-onthe-outside texture that pairs nicely with the soft shrimp. The BLT lettuce wraps are also great, yet they can be a little heavy for an appetizer due to the house-made lamb bacon and pimiento cheese inside.
A surprising standout from Little Donkey’s “veggies” section is the roasted carrots — the quintessential example of fall warmth and flavor. Influenced by Mexican cuisine, the carrots are topped with a smoky pepita mole, a honey drizzle, a tangy avocado crema, and a dusting of crunchy pepitas on top. They excel in their balance of sweet and spicy, warm and cool, and soft and crisp. A seasonal dish, the roasted carrots are a must-order if present on the menu.
The most disappointing item on the menu is unexpectedly from the “meat & fish” section, specifically the fried cod cheeks that are served on a bed of white corn purée. The breading on the cod overwhelms its delicate flavor and is a bit too thick and chewy. Even when combined with the sweet corn, the dish falls particularly flat; perhaps a sweet or acidic hot sauce could brighten it up.
As far as the entrées go, the star is the cacio e pepe; their rendition is an Italian-Asian fusion dish that perfectly represents what Little Donkey strives to do. Rather than the traditional spaghetti noodles,
Little Donkey makes their cacio e pepe with ramen, and the peppery parmesan sauce includes a hint of miso, providing a rich umami flavor. Little Donkey’s desserts are not to be missed. Unlike other fine-dining restaurants, which often serve pretentious and unappealing sweets, Little Donkey caters to their audience, serving homey classics with an elevated twist. The miso brownie sundae, served with a heaping scoop of French vanilla ice cream, is the perfect example. The miso adds a richness and saltiness that balances out the creamy sweetness of the brownie and ice cream. Even more, the yuzu adds an unexpectedly pleasant tartness to the dish. Little Donkey represents the untraditional within the traditional, fusing flavors from various cuisines. Their menu reminds eaters of the importance of finding collaboration between cultures,
4 STARS
“Getting to have that back and forth, give and take, with such exceedingly fine musicians — this is really a beautiful thing,” Jonathan Biss said about his upcoming performance with the Boston Symphony OrThe world-renowned pianist will take the stage with the BSO from Oct. 17 to 19, performing Schumann’s “Piano Concerto in A Minor, Op. 54.” Described by The Boston Globe as “an eloquent and insightful music writer” and by The New Yorker as displaying “impeccable taste and a formidable technique,” Biss continues to capti -
vate audiences all around the world.
Biss’s journey with music began with his musically oriented family. Influenced by his older brother, who studied piano, Biss decided to take up the instrument himself at the age of six.
“My life was surrounded by music from the time I was born,” Biss said in an interview with The Crimson. “People were practicing at any corner of the house at all times.”
Later, he studied with the legendary Leon Fleischer for four years.
“Everything about him had this terrific intensity, and he was also a person of unbelievable integrity,” Biss said.
From Fleischer, Biss adopted that integrity as a guiding principle in his own approach to music and performance. In terms of other musical influences, Biss found inspiration in composers such as Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, and Schumann.
In 2011, Jonathan Biss started recording the Beethoven piano sonatas. He found that both writ-
ing and teaching about the Beethoven piano sonatas helped clarify his own ideas about the music he played. Moreover, his online Coursera course about the sonatas attracted over 100,000 students from 150 countries, further broadening his impact as both a musician and a music educator.
Biss spoke highly of the BSO, with whom he will perform with this month.
“Orchestras of that caliber are rare. It’s a great orchestra that I, by now, have a 20-year history with, and playing with them also means playing in one of the most beautiful places to play in the whole world,” Biss said.
Although he has worked with the BSO for almost two decades now, he still recalls his first time playing with the Boston Symphony Orchestra as one of his most memorable experiences.
“You can have incredible trust when you play with an orchestra like that,” he said, reflecting on his long partnership with the BSO.
In the world of classical music, concerts are typically planned far
in advance — months or even several years ahead. However, Biss’s first performance with the BSO was on very short notice — he got the call on Tuesday and was set to perform on Thursday of the same week.
“It was obviously scary, but there was an incredible excitement about the fact that I woke up on Monday morning thinking I was going to be home that week, and then on Tuesday afternoon, I was on a plane to Boston for my debut with this symphony,” Biss said. Luckily for his audience this October, Biss’s performance of the Schumann Concerto with the Boston Symphony Orchestra was planned plenty in advance.
“The Schumann Concerto is a piece that I adore,” Biss said.
“Above all, it’s a poetic piece.”
The piece features the piano, but its music is closely interwoven into the orchestra — the piano is in dialogue with the oboe, followed by the clarinet, and finally the strings.
“The beauty in it comes not just from what [Schumann] says, but in the detail of how he says it — the
turn of phrase, the way in which a line curves against the grain and then back towards it. That is really part of what makes his music so magical,” Biss said. Biss has been playing this piece for around 20 years. However, he said that what is important to him when he plays a piece that is already part of his repertoire is that he comes back to it as if it is brand new every time.
“I think one of the most important things that a performer can do is give the impression to the listener that you are experiencing it in real time, rather than regurgitating something which has been done before and completely set in place in advance,” he said.
In a career marked by dedication and passion, Jonathan Biss’s commitment to sharing music remains unwavering. As he prepares to join the BSO for yet another memorable performance, Biss will approach each piece, no matter how well he knows it, with a sense of discovery — offering audiences the chance to experience the magic of his music anew.
Gaia Bencini is a Ph.D. candidate in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations studying Egyptology. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
FM: What were you interested in while you were growing up? And how did you first get into Egyptology?
GB: I come originally from Rome, and this is actually the reason why I got interested in Egyptology in the first place, because Rome is, first of all, a city with such deep history.
When you’re a kid, you see ruins and you’re playing close to them, and don’t ask yourself questions. I was passing by these things going to school every day, both Roman classical artifacts and ruins, and Egyptian ones. When I grew up, I was differentiating these things.
I was like, wait a minute — this has hieroglyphs on it. It looks very dif ferent from the architecture of the classical world. And why are these here? How are they different? And, especially, can I read them?
FM: Were you able to study this in school?
GB: I developed this passion a little bit against the current.
I was frustrated because, in Italy, everything had to revolve around classics.
But Egyptology is totally margin alized, as assyriology is. All the Near East is considered something fascinating to look at, but not really to study.
So I actually started learning hiero glyphs at university. I was going to graduate-level courses because the undergraduate did not teach.
So I was sneaking in these classes. I was going during the afternoons to the Egyptian Academy in Rome.
I applied to Oxford for my master’s, and that was when I started actual ly doing serious language.
FM: When you were at Oxford, tell me about the experience of actually being able to seriously pursue this realm of inquiry. Were there things that were sur prisingly difficult, or did it feel like you were exactly in the right place?
GB: I felt exactly in the right place. I was so happy.
There is a professor called Profes sor Parkinson, who’s the major ex pert in literature. Not many people know that Ancient Egypt has an incredible depth of literature. We have love songs and stories, both fictional narratives, but also ad ministrative accounts that can tell us anything from the legal aspects to laundry lists or little notes, let ters, all types of things.
FM: How do you bring the arti facts of the museum into your teaching?
GB: We always go to two muse um visits, one at the Harvard Art Museum and one at the MFA in Boston, which ties beautifully together with the collection we have here in house, because they are differ ent aspects of the same history.
The goal for the course is for people to walk confidently in an Egyptian gallery anywhere in the world and know what is being talked about.
THE DOCTORAL CANDIDATE spoke with Fifteen Minutes about growing up in Rome as someone interested in Egyptology. During the conversation, she showed Crimson Magazine Associate Editor Sam E. Weil a series of artifacts, including sharing a story of Thutmose the Fourth and the Sphinx.
BY SAM E. WEIL
ple, in English, we use a subject, a verb, and an object. In Egyptian, it’s a verb, subject, object. So if it’s
GB: It’s
FM: With that, might you lead me towards some of these objects?
GB: So we have a beautiful first intermediate period piece.
I want to start by saying a basic 101, hieroglyphic introduction. So hieroglyph is not a language — it’s a script. It’s a script of a language, which is divided into many phases, because Ancient Egypt is an incredibly long span of time. It’s from 2000 or 3000 before Christ.
The last inscription written in hieroglyphs was around 400 after Christ.
As Egyptologists, we have conventionally divided this very long language in three main phases, which is old Egyptian, middle Egyptian and late Egyptian. Then we have a phase called demotic, which is kind of a later phase. And then Coptic, which is the last phase of
the language, which is still a language used nowadays in the Coptic Church, which is a Christian church in Egypt, which makes up 10 percent of the Egyptian population nowadays.
We usually teach here middle Egyptian. Both old and middle and late Egyptian have corresponding scripts, which is hieroglyphic and hieratic.
We can think of hieroglyphics as a monumental script, which you would find in big temples. Probably our most important artifact is actually this, which comes from the Temple of Karnak.
On the other hand, hieratic is a more cursive form of the writing. Probably scribes in ancient Egypt would have learned that first because it’s like our cursive handwriting versus Times New Roman.
Now, Ancient Egyptian is a little bit tricky because it does not have voweling. So we have two or three
semi-consonants, semi-vowels, but we don’t have the full voweling system. We don’t really know how things were pronounced. We can know a little bit from Coptic.
As Egyptologists, we decided that we would put a “schwa” sound in between all the consonants. So for example, we have, that’s a triliteral HTP, which spells the word for offering, and we pronounce it ‘he-tep.’ So we put the 2 e’s in between to make it pronounceable.
FM: Can you tell me more about how you go about interpreting this stela?
GB: It has “registers.” You can read Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs in all directions, which is a little bit tricky.
The only direction you cannot go is bottom to top.
Ancient Egyptians love symmetry, and it’s very iconographic in nature.
Before Champollion, before the deciphering and before the Rosetta Stone, people thought that these were little images. But in truth, we know that these are letters.
So for this stela specifically, we have two right to left registers, and then you go from top to bottom, always right to left.
So it’s “an offering which the king can give, and Anubis gives.” And then we have epithets of Anubis. So Anubis — “He is on top of his mountain. He is the Lord of embalment. He is the Lord of the sacred land.” And then it starts the offering formula itself. So a voice offering, sort of like bread and beer. And then this is the caption for his wife.
FM: When you bring your students here, how do you bring them into this?
GB: We read it together. This is what we train for. We learn all the grammar behind this sort of thing. For exam-
After a fast start at home to kick off Ivy League play, the Harvard women’s volleyball team (8-6, 3-2 Ivy) stumbled on its first road trip of the conference season, losing via sweep to Princeton (5-9, 3-2 Ivy) and dropping a tight, five set match to UPenn (9-6, 3-3 Ivy).
This weekend left the Crimson still looking for its first win in a true road game, as the team fell to 0-4 when not defending its home turf. Conversely, Harvard has valiantly defended the halls of the Malkin Athletic Center, posting an impressive 6-0 record while playing in Harvard Square.
“At home, we thrive in that environment; the crowd, friends, family, and the men’s volleyball team support us immensely,” sophomore setter Amelie Lima said. “Adapting to an utterly different environment on the road is much more challenging. I believe that when we are on the road, we can improve by keeping our same game day rituals and routine. Having a routine is essential for getting into the mindset of playing a formidable team.”
Harvard 0, Princeton 3 Harvard put its three game winstreak on the line as the team traveled down to Princeton, N.J. to take on the Tigers. The Crimson had won nine of its last 11 sets entering the match, but was blanked by Princeton, a foe that Harvard has struggled to topple in the past. The Tigers pounced on the visiting team early and took an 8-1 lead in the first set. Princeton seized the lead with little resistance from the Crimson as the Tigers logged three service aces in the first nine points. After allowing Princeton to take a ten point lead, Harvard finally started to show some fight as the Crimson nibbled the advantage down to six before ultimately dropping the set by a score of 25-14 after another late Tiger surge. The second set started out with promise for Harvard before the team faded in the second half of the period. The two squads traded blows early in the set before a
Crimson run created some separation. Princeton never lost touch, however, as the Tigers crept back to match Harvard before weathering another Crimson surge and besting a 4-0 run by Harvard with a 14-3 run of its own – including smaller 6-0 and 4-0 bursts. This all culminated in a 25-18 set victory for the Tigers, poising the home team for an easy defense of its court. Set three was the most tightly contested of the match as the teams exchanged punches throughout the set. The lead changed hands early and often in the final set as there were 12 ties in total. Princeton held the lead early before the Crimson took a slight advantage throughout the middle of the set. The Tigers then briefly regained the lead from 18-18 to 21-21. In what would seem to be a surge of brilliance and changing tides, Harvard regained its footing, not wanting to leave New Jersey without a fight.
A late 4-0 run by the Crimson gave Harvard a 24-21 lead and made a fourth set seem inevitable. That set would never come as the true inevitability was the dominance of Princeton’s sophomore outside hitter Kamryn Chaney. Chaney led both teams in kills on the day with 15, but none were louder or more impactful than her kills late in the third set. An attack error by the Crimson brought the score to 24-22 before Chaney scored two straight kills to tie up the set at 24. Harvard responded with a kill from a sophomore phenom of its own, middle blocker Ryleigh Patterson. Chaney would get the last laugh, however, as she hit one final kill to tie the set at 25 before her team scored the final two points to secure the set and the sweep, putting the nail in the coffin of Harvard’s squashed comeback run.
In a near inverse of Harvard’s Ivy League opener against Dartmouth, it was the Crimson getting “roofed” by the Tiger’s blockers. Harvard was out-blocked 13-7 by Princeton. The Tiger defensive wall also contributed to the putrid 0.048 hitting percentage by the Crimson.
After curing its error bug over the past three matches, errors came back in a big way to haunt Harvard throughout the match. It was an attack error by the Crimson that sparked the last run for Princeton and another hitting error that gave the Tigers the final lead of the game. Aces also continue to malay Harvard as the Crimson recorded fewer service aces than its opponent again, a trou-
bling trend for the team. Patterson and junior outside hitter Brynne Faltinsky tied for the lead for kills with eight apiece. Patterson also led the team in blocks, her prowess making her one of the few bright spots for the team throughout the night. As per usual, senior setter Rocky Aguirre led the team in assists with 19.
a 14-4 run to end the set in decisive fashion. Faltinsky sparked the run with two kills and a block in between for good measure. Junior outside hitter Peyton Hollis and Patterson took over from there as they both scored three kills in the 14 point span. After the Crimson dominated the second set, UPenn took its turn at domination in the third as the Quakers seized control early and left no doubt who was taking the set. Harvard scored the first point of the set, but that would be the only bright spot of a set the players would likely hope to forget. UPenn tied it up with the second point and took a lead that would never be surrendered with the third point. Eventually, the Quakers took the set 25-15.
Harvard 2, Penn 3
After the disappointing performance on Friday at Princeton, Harvard made the trek an hour southwest to Philadelphia to take on the Quakers of UPenn. Somewhere along I-95, the Crimson figured out some of the errors that plagued the team at Princeton, but the City of Brotherly Love did not prove lovely to Harvard as the team fell just short in the end despite an improved performance. Not among the areas improved by the Crimson was the team’s affinity for slow starts. Harvard once again spotted the other team a huge lead early in the first set. After going up 3-2 in the early onset, the Crimson surrendered a 10-2 run to UPenn to give the Quakers a 12-5 lead. Despite improved play by Harvard for the remainder of the set, UPenn ended up breezing by to a 25-18 win. The seven-point margin of victory for the Quakers was the exact margin the team gained from the Crimson’s sluggish start. For Harvard, any hope of truly competing for an Ivy League title relies on the squad finding a remedy for the abysmal starts that have put too much pressure on the team to be perfect in later sets.
The second set saw the Crimson maintain the groove established in the back half of the first set before stepping on the gas midway through the set. The two teams exchanged points for the first half of the set with neither side taking more than a two point lead up to a 12-11 Quaker advantage. Needing to avoid going down two sets to none for the second match in a row, Harvard turned up the intensity and burst out on
After two sets of blowouts, the penultimate set of the match ended with a close score, but the Crimson was unable to totally overhaul its play, and the final tally resembled the play of the previous two sets. The set started off wanting to emulate the second as the Crimson used an early run to grab a 9-5 lead. Then the set decided it wanted to replay the third set as UPenn launched a run of its own to take the lead. This oscillation of runs continued throughout the set. It appeared that the Quakers would get the last laugh as they used a 3-0 run to force a 24-23 set and match point. Harvard, however, refused to back down and launched a 3-0 run in response that was capped off with a joint block by the young duo of sophomore outside hitter Ali Farquhar and freshman middle blocker Bennett Trubey.
All tied at two sets apiece, the match went to a 15 point fifth set to decide who would be the victor. After going down 1-3 early, the Crimson seemed poised to steal one on the road after a 7-1 run gave the team a four point advantage halfway to the 15 point benchmark. Unfortunately for Harvard, UPenn was able to emulate Philadelphia’s favorite son, Rocky Balboa, and launch a late charge to snatch an unlikely upset victory. The Quakers responded with an 8-1 run and staved off the Crimson’s final push to win the set 15-13 and take the match. Despite the disappointing nature of the loss, there were some signs of hope for Harvard. The team averaged only five errors per set instead of the eight averaged against Princeton. Hitting percentage also improved, though, there was hardly any way to go but up after the infinitesimal number produced against the Tigers. The
Crimson won the blocks battle for the match, but the biggest cause for hope for Harvard is the continued growth and contributions from the sophomore and junior classes that provide belief that the team can continue to improve as the young players grow throughout the season. The service line continues to stymie the Crimson as Harvard managed a meager two service aces as compared to UPenn’s 11. Most concerning for the Crimson is the timing with which these issues resurfaced. While the game against Princeton was not a match the team was favored in, UPenn was. Losing to the Quakers shrinks Harvard’s margin for error for the remainder of the season if the team wishes to make the conference tournament again. The Crimson have a lot to fix, but the next opponent is not a team that will let you work through your errors.
Harvard welcomes perennial power and Ancient Eight rival Yale to the Malkin Athletic Center on Friday at 7:00pm. The match presents the Crimson with an opportunity to steal a conference victory and put a tarnish on a hated rival’s perfect conference record. The good news for Harvard is its home record has the same zero on the end as the Bulldogs conference record. Lima believes that staying focused throughout the week and elevating the team’s play on Friday will be enough for the Crimson to maintain the team’s perfect home record.
“Yale has always been an incredible team. Still, we fortunately get to play them first at home, so being on our home court will elevate our play and make for a super energetic, competitive match. For our preparation for this match, we will continue our practices and lifts throughout the whole week, but also mentally prepare for this anticipated match,” Lima said.
