The Harvard Crimson - Volume CL, No. 26 by The Harvard Crimson

THE HARVARD CRIMSON THE UNIVERSITY DAILY, EST. 1873

VOLUME CL, NO. 26

PSYCHEDELICS

LABOR

| CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS

HARVARD YARD

MUSIC

Student Groups Mourn Palestinian Children in Vigil

Daniel Caesar Concert Shows Off Singer’s Range

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PAGE 13

| FRIDAY, OCTOBER 27, 2023

Undergrads Unionize

Harvard To Launch Study of Psychedelics

UNIONIZATION. Harvard undergraduate workers voted to form a union by a landslide 153-1 margin Wednesday. The unionization effort follows a series of undergrad union campaigns around the country as workers seek higher wages and greater employment stability. SEE PAGE 6

HIGHER ED. Harvard will launch a new interdisciplinary program aimed at studying the social and cultural dimensions of psychedlic drugs, the University announced last week, following a $16M donation. SEE PAGE 8

EDITORIAL

A Gold Star for Goldin, None Yet for Economics ADVANCING THE FIELD. After Claudia D. Goldin won the Nobel Prize, it’s the perfect moment for Harvard to follow her lead and champion diversifying Economics for the rest of academia. SEE PAGE 10

ELIAS J. SCHISGALL — CRIMSON PHOTOGRAPHER

TASK FORCE

Harvard Creates Task Force for Doxxed Students Amid Backlash Over Israel Statement BY MICHELLE N. AMPONSAH CRIMSON STAFF WRITER

ICE HOCKEY

No. 17 Men’s Hockey Hits the Ice at Dartmouth BREAKING THE ICE. Harvard’s men’s ice hockey team will hit the ice against Dartmouth this Friday after a season in which they made the Beanpot title game but could not win the NCAA. SEE PAGE 16

arvard will establish a task force to support students experiencing doxxing, harassment, and online security issues following backlash against students allegedly affiliated with a statement that held Israel “entirely responsible” for violence in the Israel-Hamas conflict. The new task force will be in operation until Nov. 3, at which point the task force will reassess its efforts to ensure that its work meets student needs, according to an email obtained by The Crimson. The message, dated Tuesday, was sent to doxxed students by Dean of Students Thomas Dunne. “We are truly grateful for all the tre-

HOTLINE

AND FRANCESCO EFREM BONETTI CRIMSON STAFF WRITERS

EDUCATION

BILL PROPOSED. A bill before the Massachusetts legislature would grant teachers the right to strike amid a contract standoff between Cambridge’s teacher’s union and the public school district. SEE PAGE 11

darity Committee. “Today’s events did not occur in a vacuum,” the PSC’s statement reads. “For the last two decades, millions of Palestinians in Gaza have been forced to live in an open-air prison. Israeli officials promise to ‘open the gates of hell,’ and the massacres in Gaza have already commenced.” In the weeks that followed, students have faced doxxing attacks on websites, social media, and a billboard truck displaying group members’ names and faces and describing them as “Harvard’s Leading Antisemites.” Even as the PSC moved to state that the group “staunchly opposes” violence against all civilians, at least 10 student groups have since withdrawn their endorsements from the statement. According to the email, the DSO will lead the task force, alongside Harvard

University Information Technology, the Harvard University Police Department, Counseling and Mental Health Service, the Office of General Counsel, the Mignone Center for Career Success, the Office of Undergraduate Research and Fellowships, and the Office of Undergraduate Education. The University had begun providing doxxed students with resources prior to the creation of a formal task force. An HUIT document dated Oct. 20 provides guidance on requesting for false statements, online harassment, and personal information to be taken down. The guide also advises those doxxed to consider disabling social media accounts and to block, mute, or ignore attackers. HUIT also allows Harvard affiliates to

SEE PAGE 4

RILEY GAINES

Harvard Junior Starts Riley Gaines Event Israel-Palestine Hotline Draws Controversy BY MEGAN S. DEGENHARDT

Teachers Seek Right to Strike

mendous work that students have put forth in supporting each other through this most difficult time, and we appreciate the collaborative spirit in which students, faculty, and staff have come together to repel this repugnant assault on our community,” Dunne wrote. Aside from serving as a single point of contact, the task force will communicate proactively with students to share available resources, ensure the coordination of services, hear student concerns and suggestions, and communicate with residential staff and other College administrators. The formation of the task force comes more than two weeks after more than 30 student organizations drew national backlash for signing onto the controversial statement, which was penned by the Harvard Undergraduate Palestine Soli-

Following the outbreak of war between Israel and Hamas, Havard junior Shira Z. Hoffer ’25 is launching a text hotline service for information on the Israel-Palestine conflict. The effort has already picked up 20 volunteers on Harvard’s campus and around the world and aims to launch formally in the next two weeks. The hotline will provide nonpartisan information aimed at “promoting dialogue for peace” and countering hate, according to its website. Hoffer said she first had the idea for an Israel-Palestine information hotline after forwarding an Oct. 11 statement by University President Claudine Gay about the conflict to her House’s mailing list. At the end of the email, Hoffer added her contact information as an open offer for conversation.

“I have this perhaps naive, but really powerful belief that conversation across difference can change the world,” Hoffer said. Hoffer said she initially did not expect anyone to reach out to her, but when she received several responses, she thought, “maybe there is interest in making this a broader initiative.” Nicolas G. Pantelick ’24, a Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations and Government joint concentrator, said he learned about the initiative from Hoffer and decided to get involved as a volunteer after studying the Israel-Palestine conflict for the past six years. “I think the hotline is mostly aimed at those who are seeking to learn more about what’s going on, and maybe even cutting through the noise,” he said. Pantelick — who along with Hoffer, is a fellow with the Safra Center for Ethics’ Intercollegiate Civil Disagreement

SEE PAGE 4

BY PATON D. ROBERTS AND SOPHIA C. SCOTT CRIMSON STAFF WRITERS

Riley Gaines, a swimmer who has advocated against the participation of transgender women in women’s sports, drew criticism from dozens of demonstrators during her speaker event on campus Thursday evening. Gaines was invited to campus by Harvard’s Network of Enlightened Women, a conservative women’s club. But students demonstrated against the event — held in Boylston Hall — by throwing what they described as a “Big Trans Party” at its entrance. Groups including TransHarvard, the Queer Students Association, and the Harvard Law School’s Women’s Law Association gathered an hour before the event began to create posters and listen to speeches by organizers who criticized Gaines.

But inside the auditorium, which saw a heavy security presence from Securitas and the Harvard University Police Department, more than 100 attendees applauded Gaines’ speech. Gaines is a former collegiate swimmer for the University of Kentucky who has been a vocal critic of transgender female athletes in women’s sports. She began her advocacy work after tying for fifth place in an NCAA freestyle championship with University of Pennsylvania swimmer Lia C. Thomas — the first openly transgender woman to win an NCAA swimming event. As Gaines’ talk began, demonstrators outside began speeches of their own. Schuyler M. Bailar ’19, a former Harvard swimmer who was the first openly transgender man to compete in NCAA athletics, gave a speech praising the growth of trans advocacy at Harvard since his time as an undergraduate. “People like her are happening because

SEE PAGE 7

THE HARVARD CRIMSON

LAST WEEK

OCTOBER 27, 2023

KENNEDY SCHOOL

DESIGN SCHOOL

POETRY

Activist Advocates for Prison Abolition

Portuguese Architect Gives Lecture

Palestinian American Poet Shares Work

RESTORATIVE JUSTICE. Danielle Sered, a restorative justice activist, advocated for prison abolition and extensive reforms to the current criminal justice system during a Harvard Kennedy School event Wednesday. Sandra Susan Smith, a criminal justice professor at the Kennedy School, moderated the event. The discussion was part of a semester-long speaker series at HKS focused on abolitionist policies and practices. Sered said her end goal is the full abolition of the prison system by enacting meaningful and incremental changes to the current legal system. BY WILLIAM Y. TAN AND ANNABEL M. YU — CONTRIBUTING WRITERS

‘CITY-MAKING’. Manuel Salgado, an architect and former head of urban planning on the Lisbon City Council, discussed “city-making” at a Harvard Graduate School of Design lecture Tuesday evening. Salgado chronicled the city’s restoration after the fall of the authoritarian Estado Novo regime in 1974. “I have known several Lisbons,” Salgado said. “The explosive one from the revolution, the proud one from the Expo ’98, the sad one from the IMF bailout, the deserted one from the pandemic, and the cosmopolitan one from the global economy.” BY

PALESTINIAN AMERICAN. Lisa Suhair Majaj — an author and scholar of Arab American Literature — shared a collection of her poems at a Tuesday event at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies. Majaj, who was born in America and grew up in Jordan, shared 17 of her poems chronicling her life as a Palestinian American. Speaking to an audience of more than 30 people, she acknowledged the difficulty of the subject matter amidst the violence unfolding in Israel and Palestine following the invasion by Hamas on Oct. 7. BY NOAH V. PARKER AND EMILY T.

BENJAMIN ISAAC AND ANGELINA J. PARKER — CONTRIBUTING WRITERS

SCHWARTZ — CONTRIBUTING WRITERS

AROUND THE IVIES YALE COLLEGE EXPERIENCES AN INCREASE IN NUMBER OF STEM STUDENT MAJORS

In Photos: The 58th Head of the Charles Regatta BY CRIMSON MULTIMEDIA STAFF

Yale is seeing a decline in student interest in the Arts and Humanities, following a broader national trend of more college students majoring in STEM. To sustain this change in concentration preferences, Yale College announced in 2022 that it plans to distinguish its School of Engineering & Applied Science, separate from its Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

CREW COMPETITION

Every year, the Head of the Charles Regatta draws tens of thousands of visitors and athletes to Cambridge to participate in the largest threeday rowing regatta in the world. The Regatta runs for three miles along the Charles River. First started in 1965, the Regatta is a “head” race, where rowers compete with each other against the clock. Thousands of spectators lined the banks of the Charles to watch the races this Saturday and Sunday.

THE YALE DAILY NEWS

DOXXING TRUCK ARRIVES ON COLUMBIA’S CAMPUS A “doxxing truck,” similar to the one previously seen at Harvard, arrived at Columbia on Wednesday morning. The truck’s digital billboard displays the words “Columbia’s Leading Antisemites,” along with the names of Columbia affiliates that were allegedly in organizations that signed a Palestinian solidarity statement. Columbia University President Minouche Shafik denounced its behavior as “harassment.”

HARVARD SCULL. Rowers in a Harvard quad scull cut through the water during a race.

SARAH G. ERICKSON — CRIMSON PHOTOGRAPHER

ZUZANNA M. KOWALSKI — CRIMSON PHOTOGRAPHER

MATTEO CAGLIERO — CRIMSON PHOTOGRAPHER

MATTEO CAGLIERO — CRIMSON

THE COLUMBIA SPECTATOR

PHOTOGRAPHER

DARTMOUTH ANNOUNCES NEW STUDENT MENTAL HEALTH PLAN Dartmouth recently partnered with the JED Foundation to release its “Commitment to Care” student mental health plan. The 26-paged document states five long-term “strategic goals” and 10 short-term “action items” that the college will aim to accomplish this year to promote positive mental wellbeing. During her inaugural address, Dartmouth President Sian Leak Beilock promised to make mental health a priority of her tenure.

EIGHT. An eight boat passes the newly renovated Weld Boat House as spectators watch from the shore and the Anderson Memorial Bridge.

BINOCULARS. Spectators and umpires on the banks of the Charles River watch the event through binoculars.

THE DARTMOUTH

PENN CLUB OF ISRAEL DISTANCES FROM UNIVERSITY The Penn Club of Israel announced that it would dissociate from the university in response to the University of Pennsylvania’s alleged lack of concern following Hamas’ attacks on Israel. The decision will disconnect almost 700 graduates from the University’s alumni regional club network. After the University’s Palestine Writes Literature Festival, which occurred during Yom Kippur, multiple Penn Club of Israel donors threatened to and subsequently revoked financial support to the University. THE DAILY PENNSYLVANIAN

SARAH G. ERICKSON — CRIMSON PHOTOGRAPHER

UNDER THE BRIDGE. A skull and a quad pass by each other underneath the Anderson Memorial Bridge.

SARAH G. ERICKSON — CRIMSON PHOTOGRAPHER

BRIANA HOWARD PAGÁN — CRIMSON PHOTOGRAPHER

SIDE BY SIDE. Bowdoin College and Bates College ON THE DOCK. Here, rowers prepare to lower a Men’s rowing teams race side by side underneath boat into the Charles River for the race. the Eliot Bridge.

MCKENNA E. MCKRELL — CRIMSON PHOTOGRAPHER

SARAH G. ERICKSON — CRIMSON PHOTOGRAPHER

PRINCETON ENDOWMENT HAS LOWEST RETURNS IN IVY LEAGUE For the second consecutive year, Princeton University’s endowment experienced an investment loss. The decrease of 1.7 percent marks Princeton’s lowest investment return since the 2008 financial crisis, when it recorded a 23.7 percent decrease. All Ivy League universities, except Princeton, that have reported their endowment numbers thus far saw positive investment returns this year. These returns come in Princeton University Investment Company President Andrew Golden’s penultimate year in the position. THE DAILY PRINCETONIAN

RACING. The race begins from the Western Avenue Bridge at the Boston University DeWolfe Boathouse and ends near the Harvard Athletic Complex.

CELEBRATION. The Harvard-Radcliffe Varsity Lightweight team celebrates its victory on the dock of the Weld Boathouse with their coach, friends and family.

NEXT WEEK

THE HARVARD CRIMSON OCTOBER 27, 2023

What’s Next

IN THE REAL WORLD HOUSE ELECTS CONSERVATIVE REP. MIKE JOHNSON SPEAKER After three weeks of infighting, Republicans nominated little-known Louisiana lawmaker Mike Johnson to overcome voting deadlock, the New York Times reported Wednesday. Johnson, 51, was one of the architects of the movement to overturn the 2020 election and a staunch opponent of abortion rights and gay marriage. His election marks a victory for the farright of the Republican party and puts Johnson second in line to the presidency.

ARAB LEADERS CALL FOR END TO GAZA ASSAULT Fearing war and unrest in their own countries, Arab leaders are speaking out against Israel’s counteroffensive on Gaza, the Washington Post reported. The impending invasion amplifies the threat of a war involving Iran and its allies, causing leaders of countries that have grown closer to Israel in the recent past to condemn the Israeli government’s plans of intensified attack. Israel’s counteroffense comes after militants from Hamas invaded the country on Oct. 7, killing more than 1,000.

Start every week with a preview of what’s on the agenda around Harvard University

Friday 10/27

Monday 10/30

Wednesday 11/1

HARVARD BANDS MONTAGE CONCERT

DAVID AXELROD IOP FORUM

INDIGENOUS NEW ENGLAND CUISINE

Sanders Theatre, 8-10 p.m. Join The Harvard Band and Harvard Wind Ensemble for their annual Montage Concert. The concert will feature works by Vaughan Williams, Bach, Copland, Reed, Tomaro, and Anderson. Students will be joined by guest soloist Allen Vizzutti — a famed trumpet player who has previously performed on more than 100 soundtracks.

Saturday 10/28 HARVARD-PRINCETON GLEE CLUB CONCERT

Sanders Theatre, 8 p.m. Tickets are free for Harvard affiliates who want to hear both glee clubs sing from their wide repertoire, which spans many genres.

Harvard Kennedy School Institute of Politics, 7:30 p.m.-8:30 p.m. The IOP is hosting a talk on the 2024 Presidential Election. At the event, featured speaker David Axelrod, former adviser to President Obama and now a podcast host and political commentator on CNN, will give his assessment of the race .

Smith Center Mt. Auburn Room, 4:30 p.m.5:30 p.m. November is Native American Heritage Month. Jordan Clark, assistant director at the Harvard University Native American Program, will deliver a lecture on Indigenous dishes.

Tuesday 10/31

Thursday 11/2

FIRST-YEARS PUMPKIN PAINTING

RESPONSIBILITY AND REPAIR: LEGACIES OF INDIGENOUS ENSLAVEMENT

Holworthy Arts Room, 4-6 p.m. Freshmen can celebrate Halloween by painting pumpkins in Holworthy Hall. The First-Year Arts Board will provide attendees with crafting materials, hot chocolate, and mini pumpkins to celebrate the occasion.

Sunday 10/29

Knafel Center, Allston, 7:30 p.m.-9 p.m. Sponsored by Harvard University’s Native American Program, speakers including Dallas Goldtooth of the Dakota tribe and President Claudine Gay will discuss universities’ responsibilities toward past treatment of Indigenous peoples.

Friday 11/3

HARVARD UNIVERSITY CHOIR FALL CONCERT

DINNER WITH TARA HOUSKA

The Memorial Church Sanctuary, 4-6 p.m. Listen to the Harvard University Choir perform their annual fall concert . They will perform both John Rutter’s “Requiem” and Herbert Howells’ “Requiem.” The concert is free and open to the public.

5:30 - 7:30 p.m. Students can register for a private dinner with tribal rights attorney and founder of the Giniw Collective Tara Houska. The event is part of the Climate and Education Action Series.

DEADLY SHOOTING TAKES PLACE IN MAINE As of Thursday night, at least 22 people were killed in an active shooting in Lewiston, Maine, the Wall Street Journal reported. In the state’s second-largest city, an active shooter carried out a mass shooting across multiple locations. The city’s entire population and those of the neighboring city, Auburn, were asked by police to shelter in place. The local sheriff’s department released a photo of the shooter entering a bowling alley holding a rifle.

UNITED AUTO WORKERS AND FORD REACH TENTATIVE AGREEMENT

GOLDEN HOUR

After a 41-day strike, United Auto Workers and Ford reached an agreement that would bring over 16,600 employees back to work within the next few days. The agreement entailed raising pay by 25 percent by the year 2028 at Ford. The strike, however, will continue at General Motors and Stellantis. The deal will not go into effect until all 57,000 rank and file members of UAW ratify the deal, a process that could take more than a week.

HURRICANE OTIS BATTERS MEXICO’S PACIFIC COAST Hurricane Otis devastated Mexico’s Guerror State on Thursday, the New York Times reported. The storm quickly intensified from a tropical storm into a Category 5 hurricane. Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said the country was mourning the deaths of 27 people at a press conference Thursday. JULIAN J. GIORDANO — CRIMSON PHOTOGRAPHER

THE HARVARD CRIMSON Cara J. Chang ’24 President

STAFF FOR THIS ISSUE Brandon L. Kingdollar ’24

Cynthia V. Lu ’24

Managing Editor

Business Manager

Magazine Chairs Io Y. Gilman ’25 Amber H. Levis ’25

Design Chairs Sophia Salamanca ’25 Sami E. Turner ’25

Eleanor V. Wikstrom ’24 Christina M. Xiao ’24

Blog Chairs Tina Chen ’24 Hana Rehman ’25

Multimedia Chairs Joey Huang ’24 Julian J. Giordano ’25

Arts Chairs Anya L. Henry ’24 Alisa S. Regassa ’24

Sports Chairs Mairead B. Baker ’24 Aaron B. Shuchman ’25

Technology Chairs Kevin Luo ’24 Justin Y. Ye ’24

Associate Managing Editors Leah J. Teichholtz ’24 Meimei Xu ’24 Editorial Chairs

Associate Business Manager Derek S. Chang ’24 Copyright 2023, The Harvard Crimson (USPS 236-560). No articles, editorials, cartoons or any part thereof appearing in The Crimson may be reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the President. The Associated Press holds the right to reprint any materials published in The Crimson. The Crimson is a non-profit, independent corporation, founded in 1873 and incorporated in 1967. Second-class postage paid in Boston, Massachusetts. Published Monday through Friday except holidays and during vacations, three times weekly during reading and exam periods by The Harvard Crimson Inc., 14 Plympton St., Cambridge, Mass. 02138

Night Editors Isabella B. Cho ’24 Vivi E. Lu ’24 Mayesha R. Soshi ’24 Assistant Night Editors Muskaan Arshad ’25 Ella L. Jones ’25 John N. Peña ’25 Samuel P. Goldston ’26 Tiffani A. Mezitis ’26 Neil H. Shah ’26 Story Editors James R. Jolin ’24 Brandon L. Kingdollar ’24

Leah J. Teichholtz ’24 Meimei Xu ’24 Eric Yan ’24 Rahem D. Hamid ’25 Elias J. Schisgall ’25 Design Editors Toby R. Ma ’24 Nayeli Cardozo ’25 Sami E. Turner ’25 Laurinne P. Eugenio ’26 Photo Editors Cory K. Gorczycki ’24 Joey Huang ’24 Julian J. Giordano ’25

CORRECTIONS The Harvard Crimson is committed to accuracy in its reporting. Factual errors are corrected promptly on this page. Readers with information about errors are asked to e-mail the managing editor at managingeditor@thecrimson.com.

Christopher L. Li ’25 Addison Y. Liu ’25 Nathanael Tjandra ’26 Editorial Editors Aden L. Barton ’24 Cara J. Chang ’24 Arts Editor Zachary J. Lech ’24 Sports Editors Mairead B. Baker ’24 Aaron B. Shuchman ’25

Trench

THE HARVARD CRIMSON

NEWS

OCTOBER 27, 2023

HKS

HKS Faculty Told to Discuss Hamas Attacks FACULTY ADVISORY. In an email, the Harvard Kennedy School urged its faculty to address the attacks by Hamas with students two days after Israel was invaded. BY THOMAS J. METE AND ASHER J. MONTGOMERY CRIMSON STAFF WRITERS

wo days after Islamist militant group Hamas launched a surprise attack on Israel, the Harvard Kennedy School urged faculty to address the ongoing events in their classes — before any public statement had been made by University President Claudine Gay or HKS Dean Douglas W. Elmendorf. In an Oct. 9 email obtained by The Crimson, HKS Academic Dean for Teaching and Curriculum Suzanne J. Cooper called on faculty members to “not ignore the events in Israel and Gaza,” citing concerns that a lack of response would be viewed by students as “dismissive and could also exacerbate their fear.” After consulting with her colleagues, Cooper provided suggestions on how faculty members could commence their morning classes. The email outlined “a few potential ways to acknowledge but not have a protracted discussion,” including a moment of silence for “the loss of life,” an example script that could be read in class, and an invitation to discuss the subject with students in office

hours. “I have no easy answers and no special tips that will necessarily make class tomorrow better,” Cooper wrote at the conclusion of the email. “Again, please be compassionate and flexible with students who are experiencing grief, fear, and an unusual degree of worry.” Cooper’s Oct. 9 email came several hours before Gay and senior Harvard administrators issued an initial public statement that was later widely criticized by Harvard affiliates and politicians for its lateness and lack of condemnation of Hamas. In two subsequent messages to affiliates following the backlash, Gay denounced the attacks by Hamas and disavowed hatred and harassment. Mathias Risse, the executive director of the Kennedy School’s Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, wrote in a statement to The Crimson that he appreciated the thoughtfulness of the recommendations. “The dean’s office thereby signaled that it did not simply leave individual faculty alone with the challenge of how to go about their classes,” Risse said. Risse wrote that he devoted the entirety of his Philosophy of Technology class on Oct. 11 to discussing the crisis in Gaza — first providing his own thoughts and then opening the discussion for students to speak. To keep the class on schedule, he produced a video to cover the material that was originally scheduled for that day. “I did this by gauging the mood

among my students, not because I received any instructions for what to do,” Risse wrote. “I received a lot of positive feedback for that class, so my sense is that, overall, students appreciated this way of proceeding, given how many people at HKS are close to this situation, one way or another.” Professor Khalil Gibran Muhammad said in an interview that he and colleagues at other universities found the prompt to speak on this issue “shocking.” “I’ve never experienced in 25 years of being in academy that faculty would be expected to have something to say explicitly about a matter of world affairs,” he said. “As you would expect of a topic of major concern, the University would speak on behalf of the institution,” Muhammad said. “But we were expected to do it in our classrooms.” Cooper declined to comment on criticisms of the email. Academic Dean David J. Deming said Cooper collected suggestions from some faculty with “relevant experience” and shared them so faculty could “draw on the collective wisdom of their colleagues.” “A good faith reading of Dean Cooper’s message clearly shows that she was only trying to help fellow faculty members as she has done countless times in service of the teaching mission of HKS,” Deming said. Harvard Economics professor Jason Furman ’92 — a vocal critic of the University’s initial response on social media — wrote in an

The Harvard Kennedy School issued guidance to its faculty on discussing the Israel-Hamas conflict, according to an Oct. 9 email obtained by The Crimson. LARA BERLINER — CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHER

emailed statement that he found Cooper’s email to be “helpful” and “appropriate.” “Many of our students had Israel and Gaza on their minds and frankly many of them had a hard time focusing on anything else,” he wrote. “I found it helpful to give us suggestions — not commands — for how to address it with them is exactly the sort of support and guidance I expect to get from the school.” “It read like the suggestions we often get for teaching — something that I would expect and hope

our dean for teaching would do,” he added. HKS has faced significant backlash over the University’s response to the attacks by Hamas and a student group statement that called Israel “entirely responsible” for the violence. Earlier this week, former Maryland Governor Larry Hogan withdrew from an HKS fellowship and last week, the Wexner Foundation severed financial ties with the school, citing a”‘dismal failure” by the University to condemn Hamas. In a statement, professor Pip-

pa Norris wrote that she believes it is important to discuss the conflict in the classroom. “As one younger participant said, previous to this in their studies they hadn’t paid that much attention to the politics of the Middle East and they wanted to learn more,” Norris wrote. “We shared views because this is an important watershed event with consequences for the world which we all need to understand better.” thomas.mete@thecrimson.com asher.montgomery@thecrimson.com

Harvard Student Groups Hold Vigil for Palestinian Children Killed in Gaza BY AZUSA M. LIPPIT AND JOHN N. PEÑA CRIMSON STAFF WRITERS

More than 150 Harvard affiliates mourned the deaths of Palestinian children in a vigil around the steps of Widener Library Tuesday. Organized by the Harvard Undergraduate Palestine Solidarity Committee and Graduate Students 4 Palestine, the vigil follows a series of protests in support of Palestinian victims last week across several of Harvard’s graduate schools. Since the outbreak of war between Israel and Hamas, the death toll in Gaza has surpassed 5,000, more than 2,000 of whom were children, according to UNICEF. The war follows Oct.

7 attacks by Hamas that killed more than 1,400 Israelis. The PSC and GS4P previously held a silent vigil in the Yard for civilian victims in Gaza and Israel. A news helicopter whirred overhead as two speakers at the vigil spoke of their experiences teaching in the West Bank and Gaza. The Crimson granted speakers at the vigil anonymity due to safety concerns. The first speaker, a Palestinian organizer who has been teaching in Ramallah for the past seven years, said Israel’s occupation of Gaza has “fragmented” Palestinians for decades. “The fragmentation of the Palestinian people by the Israeli occupation is deliberate and intentional,” the speaker said. “It kills dreams, it kills connections, it kills the imagination of Palestin-

ian youth.” The speaker also asked attendees to “honor all the young people and all the families.” “Speak up and show up not just now, but until Palestine is free for the youth, elders, and for all,” they said. Another speaker also cited experience teaching children in Palestine. “I can go on and on about the wonderful, exciting, and thoughtful hopes that these adolescent girls from Gaza have for their future,” the speaker said. “These hopes and dreams are, for the most part, no different than any of those of my students in L.A. or D.C. These girls want to make their mother happy. They want to swim in the sea,” they added. The PSC received national

backlash earlier this month for a joint statement with more than 30 other student groups that held Israel “entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.” Students affiliated with the original signatories have faced instances of doxxing in recent weeks as at least four online sites and a billboard truck have publicized their personal information. Tuesday’s vigil came one day after the PSC published a letter signed by more than 400 Harvard alumni in support of PSC and GS4P and students facing doxxing. The letter called on Harvard’s administration to condemn “anti-Palestinian racism” and apologize to and protect students who experienced doxxing. It also asked that “deans write letters of recommendation for all students targeted by smear campaigns

that may impact their professional and academic futures.” Though Harvard spokesperson Jason A. Newton declined to comment on the letter’s contents, he pointed to an Oct. 12 video message from University President Claudine Gay in which she said Harvard “rejects the harassment or intimidation of individuals based on their beliefs.” “Our University embraces a commitment to free expression,” Gay said in the video. “That commitment extends even to views that many of us find objectionable, even outrageous. We do not punish or sanction people for expressing such views.” Tuesday’s vigil also featured a video projection of Gazan children affected by violence in the region. Organizers also played “Salute to Gaza — Salam li Ghaz-

za” sung by the Gaza Youth Choir at the beginning and end of the vigil. An organizer also asked attendees to donate to the PSC’s Gaza relief fundraiser, which launched Monday. The PSC has pledged to triple all donations. One organizer who spoke at the vigil called on organizations that have “made the defense of Israel a core part of its ethos” to join in mourning the Palestinian victims of ongoing violence. “If your grief has transformed into a bloodlust for revenge, that hides behind shallow phrases like ‘right to defend themselves’ while children die, how can you call yourself pro-peace?” they said. azussa.lippit@thecrimson.com john.pena@thecrimson.com

TASK FORCE FROM PAGE 1

HOTLINE FROM PAGE 1

Task Force Created for Doxxed Students

Junior to Launch Israel-Palestine Hotline

report online security incidents through its website. Students earlier this month also circulated a guide for those experiencing doxxing and harassment in collaboration with conversations with Harvard administrators. The document offers additional guidance on interacting with the media and changing online visibility settings. According to the document, Harvard’s career services center is also “reaching out to employers independently to vouch for students and to discredit the doxxed profiles.” Harvard students, alumni, and faculty have called on University President Claudine Gay to condemn doxxing and provide greater support for affected students since online backlash began earlier this month. On Monday, the PSC posted a letter from alumni to Harvard administration on its Instagram page. According to the PSC’s Instagram, the letter has been signed by more than 400 alumni. “It is deplorable that, at the time of this writing, the Harvard administration has yet to meaningfully criticize or condemn the public doxxing campaigns threat-

ening students — primarily targeting marginalized students who are Palestinian, Black, Arab, South Asian, Muslim, undocumented, and/or international,” the letter states. The letter calls on Harvard’s administration to issue a written apology to students who have been doxxed and harassed, to condemn anti-Palestinian racism, xenophobia, Islamophobia, and antisemitism, to offer resources to combat doxxing, and pledge that deans will write letters of recommendation for students who have been targeted by doxxing campaigns. Harvard spokesperson Jason A. Newton declined to comment on the contents of the letter, but he pointed to an Oct. 12 video message from Gay. In that message, Gay said Harvard “rejects the harassment or intimidation of individuals based on their beliefs.” “Our University embraces a commitment to free expression,” Gay said in the video. “That commitment extends even to views that many of us find objectionable, even outrageous. We do not punish or sanction people for expressing such views.” michelle.amponsah@thecrimson.com

Partnership — said he hopes the hotline can be an effective educational resource despite polarization around the issue. “I believe that, regardless of difference, whether it’s Israel-Palestine, whether it’s any other contentious political issue where there’s extreme polarization and people are pushed to one side or the other, there’s always an opportunity for impactful and productive exchange of ideas,” Pantelick said. “I’m just most looking forward to hopefully creating an environment on campus that’s open to this inquiry and in a nonjudgmental and nonconfrontational way,” he added. “So often, emotions can get the best of us when there are very real human consequences.” According to Hoffer, volunteers are compiling a master document of reliable sources for information on the Israel-Palestine conflict as well as possible solutions. The website provides an email address for questions on the conflict and lists the direct hotline as “coming soon.” A LinkTree for the hotline includes a volunteer information sheet offering guidance on what to do if volunteers do not know how to answer questions from users or the conversation becomes heated, as well as outlining the hotline’s overall philosophy. “Our philosophy follows the ad-

age, ‘give a man a fish, and feed him for a day; teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime,’” the guide reads. “When people contact the hotline with a question, our volunteers do not give a definitive answer; rather, they contextualize the question and provide resources from different perspectives for further education. That way, the person will know where to look next time.” Chiraz Arbi, a Tunisian political scientist, said in an interview that she learned about the hotline through a Harvard mailing list. Arbi, who is Muslim, said she has noticed a “lack of conversation” in the U.S.-led organizations she has worked for. She said she volunteered to help combat misinformation circulating within both pro-Israel and pro-Palestine circles. “I worked in NGOs, for the right to information, right to access information to average citizens,” Arbi said. “I believe that this is a fundamental right and so yeah, I wanted to be part of it.” Arbi stressed the need to reach and educate younger generations, who are especially susceptible to influence by social media. She said that historical background for the ongoing war is vital because “this conflict did not start yesterday, didn’t start on Oct. 7 —

and started decades ago in the case of our generation, and there are new generations that have never heard of what’s happened before.” Hoffer — a member of the College’s Intellectual Vitality Committee, a group of students, faculty, and alumni committed to open dialogue on campus — said it is important that volunteers frame their responses in a way that doesn’t place blame on one side. “The ultimate goal is to teach people to be able to educate themselves, and to show people that dialogue across differences even among such a controversial and identity-based topic is really possible and necessary.” Volunteer Shabbos Kestenbaum, a student at the Harvard Divinity School, said he hopes the hotline is able to “tear down some of the walls” between Harvard students. “Ideologies can only take you so far, but they won’t be able to allow you to see the individuals behind the social media screens or public statements,” he said. “This initiative very much brings people to other people — students to students — by doing it in a personal way.” Shukri Taha, another volunteer for the hotline, is a Palestinian tour guide living in Israel. Taha, a Muslim secular educated in a Christian

school, said his background and experience moving to Israel motivated him to join this initiative. “Throughout my life, I was raised in a way that Jews are your enemies, Israelis are your enemies, until I decided to be a tour guide,” he said. “Today, I can proudly say that half of my best friends are Israeli Jews, and I realized that the only solution for real peace is to be able to create this dialogue and to create friendships, let the people meet.” Taha said that, though conversations may become difficult, people who would come to the hotline to ask questions will likely have an open mind. “When we talk about politics, everyone is biased,” he said. “The only truth that you can take is from the people that are living there.” So far, Hoffer said reactions to the hotline on campus have been positive, though she said one person called the initiative “inappropriate” because there is just “one right side to the conflict.” “I just fundamentally disagree with that,” Hoffer said. “I think the whole idea of a conflict is that there’s multiple sides. The purpose of this initiative is to engage people with different perspectives.” efrem.bonetti@thecrimson.com megan.degenhardt@thecrimson.com

To the Harvard Jewish Community, You Are Not Alone. We See You, and We Su ort You Join us

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THE HARVARD CRIMSON

COVER STORY

OCTOBER 27, 2023

Harvard Students Vote to Unionize with HUWU CAME E. KETTLES — CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHER

ELECTION RESULTS. All but one voter cast a ballot in favor of unionizing with HUWU-UAW Wednesday. BY CAM E. KETTLES CRIMSON STAFF WRITER

arvard’s non-academic student workers voted overwhelmingly to unionize with all but one ballot in favor after the initial vote tally. The win comes after nine months of organizing by the Harvard Undergraduate Workers Union-United Automobile Workers, joining a small handful of undergraduate unions across the county. Out of 154 accepted votes, 153 votes were in favor of the union. Votes were counted immediately after the two-day voting period concluded Wednesday at 4 pm. While the preliminary count is decisively in favor of unionizing, the result is not final until certified by the NLRB. Both par-

ties can file objections to the tally in the next seven days. “The University looks forward to the collective bargaining process with Harvard Undergraduate Workers Union-United Auto Workers, so that we can negotiate in good faith for a contract that will benefit our student workers and the University,” Harvard spokesperson Jason A. Newton wrote in a statement to The Crimson. The total bargaining unit includes at least 400 students working in Harvard’s libraries, cafes, The Cambridge Queen’s Head Pub, and the University’s Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion offices. Of the total unit, only 320 workers were included on the official voting list due to a minimum working requirement of 20 hours in the five weeks preceding Oct. 7. The official voter rolls also included multiple students’ dead names, despite having preferred names listed on the University’s

official directory, Harvard Connections. HUWU organizer Syd D. Sanders ’24, who was listed by his dead name, said the errors have made organizing harder. “They should know what people’s names are,” Sanders said. “But they gave everyone’s dead names, which then when we’re doing text banking means that we’ve accidentally dead named people, which is obviously a bad experience.” Newton did not comment on how the lists were created. The new union joins its sister, the Harvard Graduate Students United-UAW under Local 5118 of the organization’s parent union, UAW. Having both voted to affiliate in March, the two unions will share an executive committee in control of union finances but will bargain for separate contracts with the University. But voting in this week’s election does not make workers official union members. While the union informally consid-

ers workers that signed authorization cards members, official membership will be established after the union successfully negotiates its first contract with the University. When the graduate students unionized in 2018, they began officially bargaining with the University six months later. Before beginning contract negotiations with the University, the union will elect a bargaining committee and establish their bargaining priorities using a unit-wide survey. HUWU organizer Olivia G. Pasquerella ’26 said the union’s current goals include higher compensation, job stability, and transparency around hiring and firing. During this week’s election, voters said pay and stability were top of mind. “We deserve to be compensated fairly for all the work we do on campus,” said EDI Office worker Amber C. Nolazco-Torres, who

voted in favor of the union effort Tuesday. Sam W. Trottier, who also voted for the union effort on Tuesday, said his vote was “more of a why not.” “I don’t know if it will do anything or not, but I wouldn’t mind making more money,” he said. The union will also immediately begin the process of adding additional workplaces to its bargaining unit. It hopes to submit a petition for an Armour-Globe election, in which workers not in the bargaining unit vote to join. That could include undergraduates working in Harvard’s schools and centers. Undergraduate course assistants and teaching fellows are already represented by HGSU-UAW. “We already are having conversations about what workplaces to organize next,” Sanders said. While organizers had initially launched HUWU-UAW alongside a similar fledgling campaign

to unionize non-tenure-track faculty, that effort has not had similar success. Harvard Academic Workers organizers said their campaign remains strong despite remaining in the carddrive phase nine months later. Should the NLRB certify HUWU-UAW, Sanders said he still predicts bargaining will be a “long and drawn out process.” “I don’t think the demands will be easily given by the school,” he said. “They’re famously union busting and evading.” Newton declined to comment. “There is at least an understanding that we need more than what we have to protect us at our jobs,” said Pasquerella, a Crimson Magazine editor. “Even if it isn’t something that people are passionate enough to get into an organizing meeting about, people have a consciousness that unions are broadly a good thing.” cam.kettles@thecrimson.com

Harvard Union Forms Amid Wave of Undergrad Unionization BY CAM E. KETTLES CRIMSON STAFF WRITER

staggering 99.4 percent of A Harvard’s nonacademic workers voted to unionize Wednesday. But Harvard Undergraduate Workers Union-United Auto Workers wasn’t the only undergrad workforce to unionize that day. A second election — this one at the University of Oregon — also concluded on Wednesday, and with a decisive victory for organizers, 1055 to 30. The two successful votes reflect a growing push among undergraduates across the country toward unionization. “Our success and Harvard Undergraduate Workers Union’s success just spell a real shift in the labor movement — a shift toward success,” said Noah Thompson, an organizer of the UO Student Workers Union. The new Harvard union now represents more than 400 students working in libraries, cafes, the Cambridge Queen’s Head Pub, and the equity, diversity, and inclusion offices. Undergraduate course assistants and teaching fellows are already represented by the Harvard Graduate Students Union-UAW. “When I go into work, it will be a union job,” said Marcus W. Knoke ’24, a HUWU-UAW organizer who works at Widener Library. “It’s another step towards something that’s going to be a really positive change for my life and the lives of my coworkers.” While their approaches vary, undergraduates across the country are organizing en masse for greater financial compensation and job stability. “There is an increasing push for unionization, regardless of

the kind of work or the type of workplace,” Knoke said. ‘They Need This Work’ The earliest known undergrad workers union, the Wisconsin Student Workers Union, began representing student dining workers at the University of Wisconsin in 1914 but eventually dissolved. From 2003 to 2016, the Resident Assistant and Peer Mentor Union at the University of Massachusetts Amherst was the only union in the country with a primarily undergraduate bargaining unit. RAPMU’s 2021 contract included weekend time off, 2.5 percent yearly stipend increases, workload restrictions, and an established grievance process. After Grinnell College students established the Union of Grinnell Student Dining Workers, more than a dozen new undergraduate-focused unions have been recognized, including at Barnard College, Tufts University, and Dartmouth College. Keir M. Hichens, a graduate of Grinnell and former president of UGSDW, said the union effort began out of a desire to improve wages and working conditions for student dining workers. “At the time, the college did not really understand what was going on or how big of a deal it would end up being,” Hichens said. The college voluntarily recognized UGSDW, according to Grinnell spokesperson Ellen de Graffenreid. The UGSDW expanded in April 2022 to include all Grinnell undergraduate workers, becoming the first fully unionized undergraduate workforce in the country.

Harvard undergraduates began their campaign supported both by HGSU-UAW and by veteran undergraduate organizers from Grinnell and Kenyon College. Undergraduates are increasingly turning to unionization as a means of ensuring financial stability. “Sometimes it’s sort of belittled — the fact that undergrads, some people need this money,” said HUWU-UAW organizer Kojo Acheampong ’26. “They need this job, they need this work.” Undergrad course assistants and teaching fellows that have been represented by HGSU-UAW since 2018 have seen their minimum wage increased to $21 per hour in the union’s 2021 contract. Other student campus workers have called for similar job stability and improved compensation. “I think that all workplaces should be unionized,” HUWU-UAW organizer Brit G. Shrader ’24 said. “There are a lot of low-income students that have to have a campus job.” “Undergrads deserve to know if they’ll be employed year to year, if worksites will reopen, if they’ll be able to live off the wages they’re provided because not everyone at Harvard is rich,” former HGSU-UAW President and current UAW Staff Organizer Koby D. Ljunggren said at a HUWU rally last spring. Harvard spokesperson Jason A. Newton declined to comment at the time of the rally. Students who voted in Wednesday’s HUWU-UAW election said winning tips for cafe workers and transparency around workplace closures partly motivated their votes. At Barnard, resident assis-

tants voted to unionize last year and are currently in the process of negotiating their first contract, a process they began nine months ago. Compensation for students on financial aid is a sticking point in the negotiations, according to union organizer Nina Goldschmid. Still, the need to schedule bargaining sessions around classes has slowed down the process. “It’s not if we’ll get a contract done; it’s when we’ll get a contract done,” Goldschmid said. The upward trend in undergrad-led unionization demonstrates a general increase of support for labor among younger generations. Over the past decade, unionization efforts have seen “large growth” among non-tenuretrack faculty, postdoctoral fellows, graduate students, and undergrads, according to William A. Herbert, executive director of the National Center for the Study of Collective Bargaining in Higher Education and the Professions at Hunter College, City University of New York. “This is consistent with polls that demonstrate overwhelming support for labor among those 30 years of age and younger,” he wrote in an emailed statement. John T. Trumpbour, research director of the Center for Labor and a Just Economy at Harvard Law School, said the increase in graduate student unions created more support for undergraduate union efforts. “They are in a much stronger position now that so much more of the University is unionized,” Trumpbour said of Harvard’s union scene. “We do have a lot of workers very unhappy right now. They do feel like they’ve got to take some strong steps,” he added.

Strength in Numbers For many undergrad unions, gaining bargaining power is a numbers game. Campus workers around the country have taken different approaches to who — and how many — to represent. While resident assistant unions are the most common type of undergraduate union, they are not the only type of bargaining unit. Sports teams, library workers, dining hall workers, and students working in clerical roles are covered to varying degrees by unions. Most recently, on Sept. 13, the men’s basketball team at Dartmouth filed a petition seeking voluntary recognition as a labor union from the college, following in the footsteps of Northwestern University’s football team, which sought to unionize in 2014 but was later denied by the National Labor Relations Board. At Emerson College, in a more ambitious effort, organizers have been attempting to unionize the entire student body — workers and non-workers alike — for more than a year. Organizers say they aim to bargain for lowering the college’s tuition cost and increasing financial aid, but Emerson College Students’ Union has not been recognized. The New Student Workers Union at the New School in New York is the closest direct counterpart to Harvard’s undergraduate union in its approach. NewSWU, which began organizing in March, intends to unionize every undergrad worker on their campus, bringing together a diverse group of small workplaces. NewSWU organizer Vanessa N. Guaraca said the campaign is

still waiting for a decision from the NLRB on their bargaining unit size before an election can be held. But unlike NewSWU, which opted to unionize the entire undergraduate workforce at once, HUWU-UAW has taken a sector-by-sector approach. After Wednesday’s election, only some of the undergraduates employed on campus are included in the bargaining unit. Others, including peer mentors, tour guides, and house aides remain without representation. HUWU-UAW will begin the second phase of unionizing by submitting an Armour-Globe election petition to allow undergraduates who are currently not included to join HUWU-UAW at a later date, the same strategy used at Grinnell. The two-pronged approach allowed organizers to avoid the initial challenge of including workers in very dispersed workplaces while forming their initial union body. The union will now elect a bargaining committee and establish their top priorities through a unit-wide survey. “We’ll have a two-part focus, which is organizing other student workers to have card campaigns and do an Armour-Globe and get them into the unit, and also obviously negotiating our contract,” HUWU-UAW organizer Syd D. Sanders ’24 said. Wednesday’s official vote count by the NLRB was observed by both HUWU-UAW organizers and Harvard Director of Labor and Employee Relations Paul R. Curran. After the vote tally was announced, Curran turned to organizers in the room before leaving. “See you soon,” he said. cam.kettles@thecrimson.com

NEWS

THE HARVARD CRIMSON OCTOBER 27, 2023

Larry Hogan Withdraws From Two Harvard Fellowships BY THOMAS J. METE AND ASHER J. MONTGOMERY CRIMSON STAFF WRITERS

wouldn’t that inherently mean pro-trans is anti-woman? I’m most certainly pro-woman and I’m not advocating for the exclusion of trans athletes,” Gaines said. “You just compete where it is fair and where it’s safe.” Gaines said being called transphobic carries “literally no meaning” for her. “It’s almost — truthfully — as if it’s a term of endearment because of how often it’s thrown around,” she said. Gaines said she believes productive discourse is “lacking in our society,” adding that she urges “everyone to think for themselves.” “Other than the fact that we live in a godless society, I think the two scariest things about our society is the inability to think for oneself and the unwillingness to admit when we’re wrong,” Gaines said. Oliver J. Slayton ’26, the deputy director of TransHarvard, said the demonstration outside the event aimed to show trans athletes that they are supported at Harvard. “This is really just a visual manifestation and a physical manifestation of what that community really looks like when it’s powerful, in that we all get to be together,” Slayton said.

Former Maryland Governor Larry Hogan announced Monday that he will withdraw from two Harvard fellowships, citing a wave of “dangerous anti-Semitism” on campus. Hogan’s announcement — shared in an open letter to Harvard President Claudine Gay — adds to the intense criticism and backlash brought by politicians, alumni, faculty, and other affiliates against the University over its response to the Oct. 7 invasion of Israel by the Islamist militant group Hamas. Hogan wrote that a statement penned by the Harvard Undergraduate Palestine Solidarity Committee and originally co-signed by more than 30 student organizations played a substantial part in his decision to back out of the two fellowships. The statement held the Israeli government “entirely responsible” for the ongoing violence in Israel and Gaza. “Harvard’s failure to immediately and forcefully denounce the anti-Semitic vitriol from these students is in my opinion a moral stain on the University,” he wrote. The former two-term Republican governor accused the student organizations of “attempting to justify and celebrate Hamas’ terrorism” and lambasted students and the University for not condemning the terrorist attack as “pure evil.” “While these students have a right to free speech, they do not have a right to have hate speech go unchallenged by your institution,” Hogan wrote. “There is no ‘both sides’ when it comes to the murder, rape, and kidnapping of innocent women and children,” he added. In a previous statement, a spokesperson for the PSC wrote that the organization “staunchly opposes violence against civilians — Palestinian, Israeli, or other.” “It is unacceptable that Palestinians and groups supporting them are always expected to preempt their statements with condemnation of violence,” the PSC spokesperson wrote. Hogan was initially appointed to serve as a fall 2023 Harvard Kennedy School Hauser Leader, a program that invites high-profile leaders and practitioners — this year including former New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern — to spend time on campus advising students and engaging with faculty. Hogan was scheduled to visit the school for two days in November. Hogan also agreed to serve as a fellow at the School of Public Health. Due to Hogan’s limited availability, he was instead scheduled to participate in a livestreamed Q&A and hold private meetings and round-table conversations with students and faculty. During an alumni reunion event Monday, Gay reaffirmed her commitment to making the University a safe space for Jewish affiliates, and she again distanced the University from the student group’s statement. “Let me say this unequivocally — I condemn antisemitism in all forms and it has no place at Harvard,” Gay said. “I am 100 percent committed to making sure that Jewish life thrives here on our campus.” “I am determined to do more to make sure all members of our community know and feel that they belong,” she added. Hogan’s withdrawal is the latest in a series of severed ties between high-profile affiliates and the Kennedy School following the University’s response to Hamas’ attack on Israel. Last week, the Wexner Foundation severed its programmatic and financial links to Harvard, calling the University’s response to the Hamas attack, “tiptoeing, equivocating” and a “dismal failure.” A few days prior, CNN reported that Israeli billionaires Idan and Batia Ofer had quit the Kennedy School’s executive board, citing similar concerns.

paton.roberts@thecrimson.com sophia.scott@thecrimson.com

thomas.mete@thecrimson.com asher.montgomery@thecrimson.com

This year’s HackHarvard was the eighth since the event was launched. Students, pictured, participate in the 2019 iteration of the event. JOCELYN WANG — CRIMSON PHOTOGRAPHER

STUDENT LIFE

Hundreds of Students Participate in the Eighth HackHarvard ‘HACK TO THE FUTURE’ Hundreds of stundents from around the world participate in the eighth iteration of HackHarvard BY XINNI CHEN AND ANNA FENG CONTRIBUTING WRITERS

ore than 600 students representing universities around the country and the world gathered in the Science and Engineering Complex last weekend to participate in HackHarvard, a student-run hackathon. During the hackathon, which kicked off Friday night and lasted until early Sunday morning, students were tasked with creating a new tech product from scratch in teams. Groups could submit to one of four tracks: “Health and Fitness,” “Earth and Space,” “Efficiency Boosters,” and “So You Think You Can Do Better?” According to student organizer Rachel V. Cevallos ’26, this year’s theme, “Hack to the Future,” aimed

to reflect a futuristic mindset and differentiate itself from prior years. This year marked the eighth iteration of HackHarvard. “Most tracks that we do are new,” Cevallos said. “Our biggest track this year is called health and fitness, and it was brought to us by our title sponsor, Terra API.” Terra API, a wearable technology integration company, was the title sponsor of the competition. Other sponsors included Google, the Harvard COOP, and quantitative finance firm Hudson River Trading. Sponsors provided various awards and mentorship for contestants throughout the weekend. For many, HackHarvard was their first experience participating in a hackathon. “I think we all came into it just waiting to have fun. It was my first hackathon and there were many people’s first experiences with this in college,” Davin Jeong ’27 said. Jeong’s team won a prize for creating a virtual reality 360-degree panorama that allows users to relive personal experiences. The project was conceived after

a casual conversation with Neal K. Shah, the founder of CareYaya — an elder companion care startup and one of the sponsors. “It’s interesting to talk with this founder of a startup who just came to talk about his work and to try to get students interested in the field, and so he’s the guy who initially was pushing us to work on therapy,” Jeong said. While many Harvard students had an easy commute across the Charles River to the SEC, some teams traveled from across the country to compete. Stanford freshmen Kyler Y. Wang and Michelle B. Lau said they took a red-eye to Cambridge because they wanted to try something new. “We wanted to get out of the Stanford bubble,” Wang said. “And we thought it looked really cool.” “This is a warm-up for TreeHacks,” Lau added, referring to Stanford’s annual hackathon. University of Pennsylvania sophomores Millie Gu and Caroline Chen are two organizers for Penn’s annual hackathon. They said they competed in HackHar-

vard to gain hackathon experience. “I really like the vibe of everyone coming up together and just working on some things,” Gu said. “My teammates are also very dedicated to our project, which makes it even more fun. And we can sacrifice sleep for hours.” Chen said that her team came to “learn and then also be a hacker this time ourselves.” Contestants were judged on innovation, technical complexity, functionality, and teamwork. Weilin Chu, a sophomore at Rutgers University who judged the hackathon, discussed how her background as a marketing major informed her selection process. “I’m very design-focused. So I’m looking for a lot of functionality. I think if I was just a person who doesn’t really know coding — I’m just a general user,” Chu said. “Am I going to find this app easy to understand and navigate?” Chu added. “Does this solve a problem?” Software engineer Jay Jung said he applied to be a judge because he wanted to be a role model for fellow software developers. Jung has pre-

viously worked at Meta and Microsoft. “I never had anyone in my family who did CS, as well as attend hackathons and stuff like this. So I’ve always wanted someone to tell me things that I wish I knew,” Jung said. “As cliche as it sounds, it’s really important, especially in this market and the competition right now for CS.” Though there were various smaller awards, a team from Colorado College won the overall competition with TeleSpeech, a Google Chrome extension that converts Telegram messages into AI-generated speech that mimics the distinct voice of each sender. The overall second-place winner was HackAnalyzer, an AI tool for hackathons. TrustTrace, which detects donation fraud, won third place overall. Wang and Lau — the Stanford freshmen — said despite the outcome of the hackathon, they would walk away from the competition with a positive outlook on the weekend. “As long as we’re learning here, we’re all winners,” Wang said.

RILEY GAINES FROM PAGE 1

Riley Gaines, Critic of Trans Women’s Participation in Athletics, Draws Student Demonstration at Harvard we’re making progress, right? Because we’re more visible than we ever were before. Because we actually are striving for more than what the box is that they put us in,” he said. Chastity Bowick, an ambassador for the Transgender Emergency Fund of Massachusetts, emphasized the importance of visibility for trans students. “I want more and more trans people to have the opportunity to grace this campus, to play sports and to become the next dean or the next president of Harvard University,” she said. “Continue letting your voices be heard — your faces be seen — because that is the only way that we’re going to create concrete change for our trans youth.” During the speaker event, Gaines repeatedly misgendered transgender athletes, including Thomas, drawing laughter from the crowd. “Men are men, women are women. There are only two sexes. You can’t change your sex and each sex is deserving of equal opportunities,” she said. Gaines touched on several policies from international sports governing bodies, criticizing those that permitted transgender athletes to compete with athletes of the same gender identity. “The Olympics says there’s no difference whatsoever be-

tween men and women, which is lunacy. We all know there are differences between men and

women,” she said. Still, Gaines described her views as “pro-woman,” not “an-

ti-trans.” “I think if we’re labeling pro-woman as anti-trans,

Riley Gaines, an advocate against transgender women’s participation in women’s sports, spoke in Boylston Hall. MATTEO CAGLIERO — CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHER

THE HARVARD CRIMSON

NEWS

OCTOBER 27, 2023

FAS

Harvard Announces Study of Psychedelics PSYCHEDELIC DRUGS. Following a $16 million donation from the Gracias Family Foundation, Harvard will be launching a new interdisciplinary program focused on studying psychedelic drugs. BY ELYSE C. CONCALVES AND MATAN H. JOSEPHY CONTRIBUTING WRITERS

arvard will be launching a new interdisciplinary program focusing on psychedelic drugs, the University announced last week. Funded by a $16 million donation from the Gracias Family Foundation, the Study of Psychedelics in Society and Culture will fund “cutting-edge scholarship” and “research support,” along with endowing a professorship in the field, according to the Harvard Gazette, a University-run publication. Programs through the study will be offered across the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Harvard Divinity School, and Harvard Law School, with a focus on interdisciplinary research. Michael K. Pollan, a lecturer in the English department who has researched psychedelics, said the broad nature of the research is core to the Gracias Foundation’s mission for the gift. “The donor is very eager for this gift to be truly interdisciplinary,” Pollan said. “It should facilitate conversation between different parts of the university. We’re exploring different ways to do that.” I. Glenn Cohen, the faculty director of the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School and the leader of the Proj-

JULIA DO — CRIMSON DESIGNER

ect on Psychedelics Law and Regulation, wrote in an email that the study presents an opportunity to expand ongoing psychedelic studies at HLS. Cohen wrote that because of the funding, HLS will offer its first psychedelic law course and will allow for students at other Harvard schools to cross-register. Other projects will include “‘bootcamps’ on Law, Ethics, and Policy Training for Future Leaders in the psychedelic space,” Cohen wrote. “We are hoping to bring together experts from within and outside Harvard to help prepare the next generation of policymakers and stakeholders in this space,” he added. Bruno M. Carvalho, the interim director of the Mahindra Humanities Center, wrote in an email that the study’s staff members “will allow us to better serve as a convenor, crossroads, and bridge-builder across Harvard (and beyond).” The Mahindra Center is already collaborating with researchers at the University of California, Berkeley’s Center for the Science of Psychedelics, Carvalho wrote. Pollan said the gift is “significant” because it “prioritizes the humanities and also law and divinity,” as opposed to funding for psychedelic research nationwide, which is generally focused on scientific research. “But psychedelics are a cultural phenomenon as well as a medical phenomenon. They have huge implications for law and policy as we kind of stumbled toward approval and legalization,” Pollan said. “So I think it’s wonderful that these other dimensions of psychedelics are going to get studied.” “It’s just a very rich field, and Harvard has the opportunity to lead,” he added.

Thousands Gather for Harvard-Affiliated VC Firm Xfund Names Three Student Startup Winners of $100,000 Head of the Charles BY CAMILLA J. MARTINEZ AND TIFFANI A. MEZITIS CRIMSON STAFF WRITERS

Xfund, a Harvard-affiliated venture capital firm, recently unveiled three recipients of $100,000 grants, aimed to help founders develop their companies and choose non-traditional career paths. The winners of Xfund’s inaugural “Xperiment Stake” competition are startup teams from Harvard College and Business School. They include Ream, a subscription platform for authors; YouShift, a platform for hospital shift scheduling; and a not-yet-named early-stage supply chain startup. YouShift, founded by Mar Grech ’25, Jota J. Chamorro ’25, Adolfo Roquero ’22-’23, and visiting student Lucia Vives, is a startup that streamlines medical providers’ on-call scheduling

through an online platform. “We basically designed this platform that is able to create a schedule that works for the hospital. So that means all the hospital needs and also the doctor’s preferences, like personal preferences, so that doctors can also choose when they work,” Grech said. Ream, founded by Michael P. Evans ’24-’25, is a subscription platform for fiction authors to unleash their creative talents and provide an online dialogue for authors and readers to engage with each other. With Ream, readers pay a monthly subscription from as little as $3 to hundreds of dollars to support authors, according to Evans. “A lot of authors will post bonus content in the platform that isn’t available anywhere else. They’ll post their books here before they’re available elsewhere. So the idea is just to create an

amazing experience for your super fans, and they support authors monthly on the platform,” Evans said. “People love it. And authors have done really well.” Madhav Datt, whose project is the final recipient of the Xperiment Stake, is currently an MBA student at the Business School and a master’s student in Engineering Sciences. His pitch focused on supply chain risk management. “I think one of the things that the Xperiment Stake does incredibly well is that they make this a very real opportunity,” Datt said. Xfund co-founder and Managing General Partner Patrick S. Chung ’96 said the venture capital firm is committed to being a “for-profit commercial venture firm” with a “double bottom line mission to be educative as well.” In 2020, Xfund announced that it had raised a $120 million fund. The firm has deep ties to Harvard’s School of Engineer-

Xfund’s Cambridge office is located at 67 Mount Auburn St., which houses Harvard Student Agencies. SAVANNAH I. WHALEY — CRIMSON PHOTOGRAPHER

ing and Applied Sciences as well as on-campus student organizations, such as Harvard Student Agencies. Chung, a former Crimson Editorial chair, said he believes the Xperiment Stake can serve as a “counterweight” to corporate job recruiting, making it more possible for students to “swim against the tide” by receiving guaranteed financial support to start a company. “Teams of founders can apply to us, and if we love what they’re doing, we will give them an actual term sheet — a signed term sheet — that is just as concrete as their signed offer letter from their summer job,” Chung said. “The genesis behind the Xperiment Stake is to give people an actual real choice and hopefully to encourage them to do the thing that they were really meant to do, the thing that they wanted to do,” he added. With a concrete term sheet and offer, Datt said the stake provided him with the “faith to take the leap” and reinforced the “conviction” he had in the potential impacts of his product. Xfund aimed to recognize the persistence and initiative of the founders in the selection process for the Xperiment Stake, Chung said. “It wasn’t just they were talking. They were doing. It wasn’t just an idea. It was actually a thing that existed today and what they want is help to make this thing real enough that it will counterbalance their choice when they graduate,” he said. Chung said Xfund aims to tap into the entrepreneurial potential of students who would otherwise pursue more traditional post-college careers. “For every Microsoft that was produced here, for every Facebook that came off this campus, I think there have been dozens of founders who were just as good, probably even better than Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, etc. But they just felt like they couldn’t afford to start their companies,” Chung said. camilla.martinez@thecrimson.com tiffani.mezitis@thecrimson.com

BY XINNI CHEN AND ARAN SONNAD-JOSHI CONTRIBUTING WRITERS

More than 11,000 athletes and 200,000 spectators from across the globe gathered in Cambridge this weekend for the 58th annual Head of the Charles Regatta, the world’s largest three-day rowing event. Rowers from more than 25 countries, such as China, Ukraine, and South Africa, registered for more than 55 events — including collegiate, alumni, and high school races. Teams competed in a winding three-mile upstream race on the Charles River. Stephanie K. Eble ’19, a former member of the Harvard-Radcliffe Heavyweight team, raced the alumni eight on Saturday and said it was a pleasure to be back on campus. “It’s always good to get a group together — folks that are coming from the U.K., from all parts of the country,” Eble said. “So it’s a great kind of reunion event for us.” Eble complimented the newly renovated Weld Boathouse, which reopened in April after more than a year of renovations. “It’s always a pleasure to be back in Weld,” Eble said. “Especially with the new renovations, to kind of admire everything that’s changed, but also the history that they’ve maintained — I think it’s awesome.” Meredith E. Kent ’24 and her partner Monah Javidan-Nejad ’24 said they were only notified that they were participating in the Women’s Collegiate Doubles two days prior to the race. Nevertheless, they won. Speaking right after her victory, Kent said she was “so honored to be able to represent Radcliffe.” “It’s my last race as a senior, and never thought I would be racing the Charles, a, sculling, and b, coming out with a medal,” Kent added, referring to rowing with two oars rather than one. “I’m super happy about that.” Many rowers were supported by their family and friends. Lucas Grellmann came to the regatta this year to watch his mother row with Community Rowing, a Bos-

ton-based rowing club. “She’s done it for the past two years so each year we come out,” Grellmann said. “It’s just fun.” Despite the rain on Saturday, crowds of spectators gathered to watch the races from the river banks and bridges. Spectator Christopher Quartararo, who returned to Head of the Charles for the first time in years, said this year’s race was quieter than he remembered. The event was “not as boisterous as some years, not as much yelling from the shore,” Quartararo said. While most were concentrated on the races, some organizations used the regatta as a chance to raise awareness for various causes. The Harvard and Yale Heavyweight rowers jointly raised more than $4,000 for the Robert Connor Dawes Foundation in support of brain cancer research. Others, such as Emily Reiling — a development manager at the Charles River Watershed Association — focused on the environment. Reiling said she was there to inform attendees about the health of the Charles River watershed. “A lot of the work we do supports recreation on the river and making it healthy, like reducing invasive plants and reducing public health risks,” she said. Chris Penta, who worked to collect recyclables with the Massachusetts Department of Conservation and Recreation during the race, said that spectators should be more conscious about the trash they leave behind. “I love doing the cleaning,” Penta said. “I hate to say it, but it’s a lot of mess out there.”

THC View the related image gallery on our website THECRIMSON.COM

EDITORIAL

THE HARVARD CRIMSON OCTOBER 27, 2023

OP-ED

Pro-Israel? Pro-Palestine? You Can Be Both.

In Defense of the Truth

in many ways it is. But ultimately, it is not that hard. There were, and are, two main obstacles. On the Israeli side, it is the extremist settlers and their supporters, who believe that Palestinians have no right to govern any part of the land. On the Palestinian side, it is Hamas and its supporters, who are unwilling to tolerate Jewish sovereignty anywhere between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. Could these obstacles be overcome? It will be hard. But we cannot give up on something so important just because it’s hard, especially when it’s the only hope we have of finally ending the carnage. Israel has removed settlements before, both in Sinai after the peace treaty with Egypt and in Gaza in 2005. The West Bank settlements are more numerous, so removing them will be harder. But it is not impossible, and I firmly believe that, in the context of a peace agreement, it could be done. What about Hamas? Well, recent events have given us the most horrific reminder yet that if you support peace, you must reject Hamas. But this would not make you anti-Palestine. Quite the opposite. The weaker Hamas becomes, the greater the chances are for a peace agreement that would allow an independent Palestine to thrive alongside Israel. So, not only is it possible to be anti-Hamas and pro-Palestine: If you support a free Palestine, you should oppose Hamas. Now, close your eyes and imagine a gathering of students, on the steps of Widener Library, who are both pro-Palestine and pro-Israel. What slogan would they chant? How about “free Palestine, free Israel, side by side”? Yes, it’s a little clunky. You could probably come up with a better one. But it’s unambiguous, it’s humane, and most importantly, it’s the only possible path we have toward ending the cycle of death.

BY EREZ MANELA

he horrific events that have unfolded in Israel and Gaza since the Hamas attack on Oct. 7 have roiled our campus. Some have spoken out strongly in support of Israel; others are passionate advocates for Palestinian rights. Tensions have flared. And then there are those, perhaps a quiet majority, who are unsure what to do: Which side should they support? Well, if you are one of those people, I may have a glimmer of good news for you amid all the horror: You can support both. You can stand for the right of Israelis to live in safety and security in a Jewish state and, at the same time, support the right of Palestinians to self-determination in a state of their own. What’s more, the way to do this has been an open secret for many decades now. It’s called the two-state solution. In the recent protests on our campus, the most common chant I heard was “free Palestine.” It is a powerful slogan, but also an ambiguous one. You should ask those who call for a “free Palestine” what they mean. If they mean an independent Palestinian state alongside Israel, then they are in fact pro-Palestine and pro-Israel at once. But if they say they want an independent Palestinian state instead of Israel, ask them: What do you think should be done with the more than 7 million Jews who now live between the river and the sea? Their answer will help you understand what they believe and whether it is something you can support. Okay, maybe the two-state solution is something that sounds good to you in principle, but you wonder: Can it be achieved? After all, the idea of partitioning the territory between a Jewish state and an Arab one has been around at least since the 1930s, and there were serious efforts to achieve it in the 1990s and more sporadic efforts since. Why have all those efforts failed so far? This seems like a complicated question, and

Erez Manela is the Francis Lee Higginson Professor of History.

LETTERS

BY JOEL SABANDO

ast week, Harvard Hillel and Harvard Chabad organized a vigil “to grieve together and to show support for Israel.” More than 1,000 members of the Harvard community, including the College dean and associate dean of students, attended. In the days after, snippets of speeches from the vigil were published in The Crimson and shared on its social media. One speaker said, “These are the hardest days in the history of the Jewish people,” noting also rising antisemitism on campus. She also declared, “We have lived in exile too long. We will not be exiled again.”

And, we must also ask, what is violent? Where in our remarks did we ever incite violence? We both stand unequivocally opposed to civilian harm in Gaza and the suffering of innocent Palestinians. Categorizing our speeches as violent is not only irresponsible journalism — it is a dangerous perversion of our words. The author misinterprets our rallying cry that antisemitic hate does not intimidate us as an admission that Jews feel safe and comfortable on this campus. We do not — especially not when our peers apparently feel comfortable celebrating the murder and rapes of our people via anonymous posts. Taking our grief and distorting our eulogies does not help. To diagnose our concerns about a second Holocaust as “imagined” is incredibly rich after the largest massacre on Jews since the actual Holocaust. And seemingly ignoring the rampant hate targeting the Jewish community in social media posts from our peers does little to assuage us.

AND MAYA SHILONI

recent op-ed providing extensive commentary on a vigil co-hosted by Harvard Hillel and Harvard Chabad accomplishes the marvelous feat of speaking about the Jewish historical experience while seemingly dismissing Jewish concerns about antisemitism. As the two unnamed speakers quoted in the article — speakers whose statements are explicitly compared to “violent, violent lies” — we feel the need to ask the obvious question: What is a lie? Is it a lie to say antisemitism exists when students at the College anonymously comment statements like “LET EM COOK” under posts on the social media platform Sidechat? Or that Jewish students feel unwelcome on this campus when a classmate feels comfortable proclaiming that narratives of antisemitism in the current conflict are a “western scheme” in a public Instagram story? Or that the massacre of more than one thousand Jews at the hands of a terrorist group — one that has declared that “the day of judgment will not come until Muslims fight Jews” — has resulted in trying times for our Jewish community?

–Jacob M. Miller ’25, an Associate Editorial Editor, is a Mathematics concentrator in Lowell House and the President of Harvard Hillel. Maya Shiloni ’26, a Crimson Editorial comper, lives in Mather House.

supported by the commander in chief of the most powerful military on earth — that is under siege. That it is Israelis who are in danger of exile, not the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who have fled their homes, many of which no longer exist, in northern Gaza in the last two weeks. The events of the Oct. 7 attack were tragic: More than 1,400 Israeli civilians were killed. There are no words to describe the pain so many are feeling. But when I hear statements like “these are the hardest days in the history of the Jewish people,” I am obliged to respond that they are not. History books are filled with antisemitism, from pogroms and ghettos to trains that were never meant to bring anyone back. These are the memories, the anguish, that hovered over the crowd at last Sun-

“

After the Harvard Undergraduate Palestine Solidarity Committee published its statement, Harvard was again the site of a bone-chilling attack on free speech.

I do not pretend to speak to what it is like to be Jewish right now. I believe and sympathize with the discomfort and fear expressed at the vigil about antisemitism, and I have mourned the loss of Jewish life over these past two weeks. But statements like these are violent, violent lies. At the vigil, speakers suggested that antisemitism would not stop them from speaking out in support of Israel. For example, one speaker said, “There is hate swirling around on campus… But our unity transcends that hate. It does not silence us. It does not intimidate us. It does not stop us from gathering here in public together, hundreds strong.” I am relieved to know that they feel that way. Anti-Zionist students do not. In April 2022, The Crimson Editorial Board published a staff editorial in support of Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions, a Palestinian-led organization and movement in support of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, styled after the South African anti-apartheid strategy. In the days fol-

day’s vigil. But comparisons to the Holocaust carry power which haunts our campus and threatens lives in Gaza. Our cultural conception of the Holocaust makes it necessarily unique: It is the unrepeatable, incomparable crime. We still speak of the banality of its evil, the inhumanity of its contempt for human life. If Oct. 7 was like the Holocaust, then what becomes of Gazans? Monsters, devils, things unworthy of moral regard; their deaths become, in Gabriel Winant’s words, “famously, publicly worthless and undeserving of commemoration.” Slowly, we inch closer to an ideology that groups together millions of people — children, mostly — and names them the public enemy, says that “it is an entire nation out there that is responsible” for the violence of Oct. 7. Like this, any call for Palestinian statehood can be transmuted into a bloodthirsty growl, and the mere existence of Gaza, home to Hamas, those “human animals,” and the people supposedly responsible for their rise, becomes reason enough

“

To the Editor: What is a ‘Violent Lie?’ BY JACOB M. MILLER

There is a state in the world right now with plans to turn another into a “city of tents.”

lowing, our editors became the targets of an intense doxxing campaign, receiving misogynistic, racist, and antisemitic letters and messages from around the world. Names of Editorial editors were placed on online watchlists, where many remain to this day. And two weeks ago, after the Harvard Undergraduate Palestine Solidarity Committee published its statement, Harvard was again the site of a bone-chilling attack on free speech. Trailed by local and national news, the conservative organization Accuracy in Media paraded students’ names and faces around Harvard Square. I watched as the truck broadcast the identities of two of my friends. What troubles me about the first speaker’s comments at the vigil, the ones still ringing in my mind, is this reality, a campus where anti-Zionism puts your name and face on a moving wanted poster and support of Israel puts your name and face in the New York Times. This reality reflects the enormous disconnect between what is happening on the ground in Gaza and what is reported on in the media. So we hear that it is Zionism —

to fear the worst. Last Sunday, another speaker asked of Palestinian activists: “What are they calling for? Are they calling for the eradication of the State of Israel? Are they calling for the slaughter of the nine million Jews, Muslims, Christians, Bedouins, and Druze living in Israel? Are they calling for the killing of my family?” A quick jump from the specter of the Holocaust to the imagined threat of a second. There is a state in the world right now with plans to turn another into a “city of tents.” It wields the death of its citizens as a weapon with which to kill others and with it has killed at least 3,000. There are no signs its carnage will end. Multiple international observers have sounded the alarm of genocide. On the ground, at night, families lie awake in prayer, and if the sun rises they pray again, grateful to have seen another day. I only ask that we be honest. This state is Israel.

–Joel Sabando ’24, a Crimson Editorial editor, is a joint concentrator in Comparative Literature and Mathematics in Lowell House.

OP-ED

Harvard Students Are Failing History BY MAYA SHILONI

fter Hamas’ atrocious terror attack on Israeli civilians earlier this month, some decided that supporting Hamas amounts to being “on the right side of history.” Likewise, some Harvard students and recent graduates seem to believe that being on “the side of justice” requires supporting Hamas by framing its horrific actions as a legitimate decolonization attempt. While the justification of an attack on civilians is extremely worrying, it reflects a deeper problem on campus: utter ignorance about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict itself. This ignorance has led to statements that are, at best, misinformed and, at worst, deeply dangerous. For that, I can only advise my fellow classmates that, if they want to be on the right side of history, they should know history — specifically the history of Jewish people in Israel — first. As an Israeli who has spent her life learning about the conflict and living its ramifications, I am mortified by the historical inaccuracies spreading around campus used to justify violence and the eradication of the state of Israel. The heart of many of the criticisms I’ve seen recently rely on the idea that Zionism or Israel is inherently colonial. But that view is completely

ahistorical. The Jewish people inhabited the land of Israel between 1,200 B.C.E. and 136 C.E. In this land, we developed a language, a culture, and a governing body. There, we became a unified people. After living under the foreign occupation of the Neo-Assyrian Empire and the Roman Empire, in their several attempts to regain sovereignty, we were exiled time and time again, though a minority Jewish presence remained in the land continuously. When Jews were deported from the land, many were sold into slavery, and others were dispersed across the region and outside of its boundaries. Nevertheless, Jewish culture did not die out. Over the approximately 1,800 years of exile, we longed to return to our homeland, retained our culture and tradition, and never lost our identity or assimilated into other nations. During the 19th and 20th centuries, we escaped the countries we lived in as we were slaughtered in masses and finally returned to our homeland, which since our departure, had been under the control of various empires but never had its own independent regime. Zionism is the ideology — borne from that centuries-long desire to return home — supporting Jewish self-determination in the only Jewish homeland that has ever existed. The modern State of Israel is the manifestation of this political movement. After diving into the history, it becomes clear that

framing Israel as an inherently colonial state completely ignores Jewish history and denies the Jewish people’s connection to the land where that history took place. It ignores archeology, genetic studies, and historical records like Josephus’s “Antiquities of the Jews,” all of which unambiguously establish the history of the Jewish people in the land of Israel. The most obvious manifestation of this distorted historical understanding arises in chants like “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” — a call for Palestinian self-determination in the entirety of the land that currently encompasses both Israel and Palestine. This rallying call presents Palestinians as the sole people indigenous to the land between the river and the sea, while denying the indigeneity of the Jewish people and, therefore, denying the right of Jewish people to also exist as a free entity in this land. It claims that any Jewish state on any part of the Jewish homeland is illegitimate. I believe in the right of the Jewish people to self-determination precisely because I believe in the right of Palestinians to self-determination. One right to self-determination does not exist without the other, because they both stem from the same principle: the belief that peoples have the right to live freely in their indigenous land. Unevenly endorsing the right to self-determination is either a logical absurdity or a deliberate attempt to deny the

Jewish people this basic right. Of course, the Israeli government has its failings. It should be criticized for its faults, a cause I have taken up my entire life, in protest after protest. Nonetheless, criticism against the government should not — by any means — lead to questioning the right of that country to exist. Israel’s right to exist cannot be undermined by its government’s faulty actions, just as the Palestinian right to self-determination must not be undermined by the Palestine Liberation Organization’s or Hamas’ actions. If I can still stand for the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination even after Hamas brutally massacred more than 1,400 of my own people this month, pro-Palestinian activists should stand up for the Jewish right to self-determination, in spite of Israel’s many flaws. So next time when a classmate calls to free Palestine “from the river to the sea,” know that they are calling to once again exile one of this land’s indigenous peoples. For these people — the Jewish people — rights and safety have been repeatedly elusive throughout history. Being on the right side of history is fighting for the right of both people to exist and enjoy sovereignty in their native land, not just one.

–Maya Shiloni ’26, a Crimson Editorial comper, lives in Mather House.

THE HARVARD CRIMSON

EDITORIAL

10 OP-ED

EBONY AT HARVARD

Past and Present: The (In)Visibility of Black Lower Level Faculty WE CANNOT be afraid to critique the hierarchical structure of academia, and the ways it has harmed Black scholars. BY EBONY M. SMITH

he African and African American Studies Department was born out of trouble. Good trouble. On April 10, 1968, the Harvard-Radcliffe Association for African and Afro-American Students, or AFRO, initiated a watershed moment in the history of Harvard University by publishing a monumental list of demands: “Establish an endowed chair for a Black Professor.” “Establish courses relevant to Blacks at Harvard.” “Establish more lower level Black Faculty members.” “Admit a number of Black students proportionate to our percentage of the population as a whole.” Though they have not all been met, each of these demands is important as they ultimately laid the foundation for the first version of the African and African American Studies Department. In 2023, our flourishing department consists of some of the best professors and scholars in the country; there is a wide range of courses offered in the African and African American Studies Department, many of which are interdisciplinary. In short, I wouldn’t be getting the degree I have such a passion for without this history. Still, one question remains unanswered and rarely discussed. Where are the lower level Black faculty members? According to the 2023 Faculty Development and Diversity report, out of the 581 total tenured faculty members in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, only 6 percent of them identify as Black or African-American. Meanwhile, out of the 142 tenure-track faculty, merely 8 percent of them identify as Black or African-American. The numbers dwindle when gender and race intersect. Meanwhile, in the 2020-2021 academic year, only 5 percent of non-ladder faculty identified as Black or African-American. These figures indicate little difference in the representation of Black or African-American scholars between tenured faculty, tenure-track faculty, and non-ladder faculty. However, the burden of constituting such a small percentage of overall faculty falls the hardest on non-ladder faculty, who lack the most resources and stability out of all groups despite doing so much heavy lifting at the University more broadly. As a current senior at the College, I’ve been taught by very few non-tenured, non-tenure track Black faculty members. These non-ladder faculty members are often balancing temporary appointments, little job security, and great responsibility to students. Teaching staff are often not only responsible for grading assignments, but also for leading sections, hosting office hours, and providing the one-on-one communication that is more difficult to find with tenured faculty members. On top of being the most accessible resource in classrooms, teaching staff are pursuing their own research and seeking tenured mentors to assist them. Their unique positionality in the classroom should be celebrated. Not only does their proximity to students make them one of the most visible resources to Harvard students, but it serves as symbolic representation for those to come. We must question why lower-level Black faculty members remain so sparse in numbers at the University, because it points to a troubling stereotype.

“

We must question why lower-level Black faculty members remain so sparse in numbers at the University, because it points to a troubling stereotype. It suggests that every faculty member of color must be at the top of their field. In reality, though, Harvard should be providing resources to lower level faculty so that they can confidently conduct research. They should be allowed to academically grow while at Harvard, and receive proper mentorship and attention. Harvard must strike a balance between hiring extraordinary scholars and professors — those who have broken the glass ceiling in their fields — and hiring lower level Black faculty who are just entering academia, but have so much to offer. The relative success of AFRO’s original demands and the current African and African American Studies Department can serve as the blueprint for Harvard’s next steps. While we should absolutely continue to push for more tenured Black faculty, we must also advocate for a parallel system that highlights the accomplishments and value of Black non-ladder faculty members. The 1968 cohort of AFRO made no mistake when they demanded more Black representation at the University. If we are to truly honor the demands of AFRO, we cannot be afraid to critique the hierarchical structure of academia, and the ways it has harmed Black scholars and professionals.

–Ebony M. Smith ’24 is a Government and African & African American Studies Concentrator living in Eliot House. Her column “EBONY at Harvard” runs biweekly on Mondays.

OCTOBER 27, 2023

OP-ED

A Gold Star for Goldin, but None Yet for Economics WHILE GOLDIN’S WORK uses economics to highlight issues and interventions for gender equity, economics is a tragically male-dominated field. BY THE CRIMSON EDITORIAL BOARD

o the long list of Harvard’s Nobel laureates, Economics professor Claudia D. Goldin is a welcome addition. We extend professor Goldin our warmest congratulations. Her groundbreaking work on gender parity in the labor force and academia, opportunities provided by contraceptive access, and the history of women’s rights exemplifies what economics can do best: bring radical data-driven insight to societal problems. As Harvard students, we are thrilled to be able to learn from one of the brightest economic minds of our age. Despite our unreserved joy and pride in Goldin’s achievements, we can’t quite shake off the irony underlying our celebration. While Goldin’s work uses economics to highlight issues and interventions for gender equity, economics is a tragically male-dominated field. Goldin is being recognized — and rightfully so — for “having advanced our understanding of women’s labour market outcomes,” but is only the third woman ever to win the prize in economics and the first not to share the award. She was the first woman in economics to receive tenure not only at Harvard, but also at Princeton and the University of Pennsylvania. In 2018, only five tenured Harvard Economics professors were female, and only 35 percent of Economics concentrators were women — despite Economics remaining the largest, and thus supposedly most accessible, concen-

basic concentration requirements are purely theoretical; opportunities to engage with pertinent societal issues more often come in the form of more inaccessible, prerequisite-heavy electives. While we agree that a solid grasp of economic theory is fundamental to more specified and rigorous study, topics like Goldin’s can and should be accessible to students with less Economics background or from other disciplines entirely. Goldin’s work concerning gender disparity in economics could be folded into more introductory Economics courses at Harvard — giving female students early exposure into how Economics can fit into their worldviews. The challenge also highlights mentorship — from upperclassmen and professors who look like them — as an important mechanism to inspire women in economics. The perception of Economics concentrators as pre-‘finance bros’ likely discourages women from engaging with the discipline; a change in this perception, through the notable faces of the department, could help sway this tide. Goldin’s Nobel Prize in economics is a stellar achievement not only for her, but also for a generation of female economists beginning their academic journeys. It’s the perfect R E GN moment for Harvard to follow Goldin’s SI DE N lead and champion diversifying EconomO S IM CR ics for the rest of academia. G—

tration at Harvard. Recognizing Goldin as a leading female economist is a great first step toward increasing respect for and representation of women in economics. But more needs to be done. Schools should implement the various recommendations set forth by the Undergraduate Women in Economics Challenge — a brainchild of professor Goldin — to better recruit and retain female economics majors.

A N GE L

N ZHA

As the challenge suggests, economics is about more than just financial markets. Economics professors should focus courses on societal issues such as inequality, education, and health, sparking interest in a wider range of students. Currently, many of Harvard’s Economics

–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.

Submit an Op-Ed Today!

The Crimson @thecrimson

OP-ED

No, You Don’t Need To Be President. BY JASMINE N. WYNN

ight United States presidents, 22 Supreme Court justices, and 29 Massachusetts governors have one thing in common: the transformative experience of a Harvard education. It is no secret that Harvard is a breeding ground for our nation’s, and the world’s, budding political superstars. Our university is routinely one of the top-ranked schools for political science and its neighboring disciplines, and we maintain close ties with power players like the Kennedy and Obama families. But while Harvard’s proximity to power might benefit the political aspirations of our affiliates, we ought to worry about its negative effects on democratic representation. In an interview with The Crimson after University President Claudine Gay’s recent inauguration, Massachusetts Governor Maura T. Healey ’92 praised Harvard’s intellectual and social diversity when she was a student as useful preparation for leadership. However, despite diversity in some aspects, a look at the makeup of our student body reveals a more homogenous reality. Based on current research, 67 percent of enrolled students come from the top 20 percent of the income distribution nationwide and around 30 percent of admits are athletes, legacies, and children of faculty or donors. Such statistics illustrate a glaring and uncomfortable truth about our institution: It provides an education by the elite and for the elite. Even if an admitted student is not a part of the socioeconomic upper class upon enrolling, they are likely to join it when they leave.

For example, in The Crimson’s senior survey of the College Class of 2023, over 50 percent of respondents on full financial aid reported that they would make more than $90,000 annually in their first post-graduation job, or more than $30,000 above the national average for recent college graduates. No matter one’s background entering Harvard, we all tend to leave as elites. Given the high concentration of socioeconomic power held by Harvard alumni, one must begin to question whether or not our political overrepresentation is just, and whether our University’s affiliates in government are truly representative of the majority of the United States’ constituency. At present, Harvard is at a crossroads regarding its role in fostering equity in our society, especially given its position as one of the world’s top ranked and richest universities. Between ongoing admissions debates and the commencement of Claudine Gay’s administration at the moment of affirmative action’s demise, Harvard has spent the past year publicly battling a tension between a facade of equity and diversity and an adherence to a status quo that favors the wealthy and otherwise hyper-privileged. Harvard’s allegiance to the powerful is exemplified by its persistent defense of donor and legacy preferences in admissions, as well as its gaudy rewards for individuals who donate to the University, no matter the nature of their individual impact. Significant questioning of Harvard’s excessive influence in national, state, and municipal government probably won’t be led by its administration. Instead, it must begin with our choices as students and alumni. To engender a political electorate truly representative of the vast class and educational backgrounds of the

United States, we must shift away from the traditional structures of power that typically benefit us as Harvard students. It is time for Harvard affiliates to take the backseat in our pursuit of political leadership. That’s right: Harvard students should seek public office less often. Instead, students and alumni should dedicate more time to uplifting candidates and representatives who don’t have the privilege we share. To be clear, I am not arguing that Harvard alumni have no place at all in government. Rather, Harvard students should use their positionality to advocate for the advancement of leaders from underrepresented class and educational backgrounds in American political leadership — candidates without bachelor’s degrees, candidates with a community college education, and candidates with working class jobs. In other words, Harvard and its affiliates do not need to be front and center in political movements all the time. As Harvard students, we enjoy a crimson-tinted gravitas that we can use to draw attention to a myriad of issues that do not require holding elected office to influence. In fact, many Harvard students enter this institution already having created immense political change within their communities without being elected to public office. Harvard students can and should still strive to continue the legacy of changemakers that came before us. But we do not need to be United States President, Speaker of the House, or Senate Majority Leader in order to do so.

–Jasmine N. Wynn ’27 , a Crimson Editorial comper, lives in Thayer Hall.

METRO

THE HARVARD CRIMSON OCTOBER 27, 2023

CAMBRIDGE ELECTIONS

Cambridge’s Voting System, Explained RANKED CHOICE. Cambridge is one of five U.S. cities that uses rankedchoice voting, where voters list candidates based on preference. BY MUSKAAN ARSHAD CRIMSON STAFF WRITER

hen Cambridge voters head to the polls on Nov. 7, they will elect Cambridge City Council and School Committee members through an election system known as proportional ranked choice voting. Here’s how that

works. Cambridge is one of only five cities in the United States that uses a proportional ranked choice voting system — adopted by the city in 1939 — for its biannual municipal elections. Rather than just choosing one candidate to support, ranked choice voting allows voters to rank multiple candidates based on preference. At the polls, voters will be provided with a ballot which includes a list of all candidates for each race. They can list as many candidates as they like — or even all of them — in order of preference.

Based on the number of ballots cast, the Cambridge Elections Commission calculates a “quota” of votes each candidate must meet in order to be elected. Any candidate who receives enough first-choice votes to meet the quota is immediately elected. Any excess first-choice votes that the elected candidate receives over the quota will be transferred to the candidates that those voters ranked as second-choice on their ballots. Cambridge randomizes which excess ballots are transferred from their first-choice candidate to their second-choice can-

didate. Once excess ballots have been transferred to their second-choice candidates, any candidate who meets the quota is elected. Their surplus votes are transferred to the next highest ranked candidates on those ballots who have not already met the quota. This process repeats until no other candidates meet the quota. At this point, any candidate who receives less than 50 firstchoice votes is eliminated from the race, and their ballots go to the next highest ranked candidate.

Then, the remaining candidate with the least amount of first-choice votes is eliminated, and their ballots are similarly redistributed. Candidates are eliminated and votes are redistributed until nine Council candidates and six School Committee candidates have been elected. This year, 24 candidates are vying for spots on the Council, while 11 are running for School Committee. Cambridge residents can register to vote in-person at the Election Commission Office or online on the Election Commission’s website through Oct. 28.

Voters have the option to vote early, by mail, or during election day. Early voting is open from Oct. 28 to Nov. 3 at the Cambridge Water Department, the Main Library, or the Valente Library. The deadline to request a mail-in ballot is Oct. 31. The Election Commission recommends voters mail ballots at least a week before Election Day or drop them off at an official ballot drop box. Polls will be open on Election Day, Nov. 7, from 7 a.m. until 8 p.m. muskaan.arshad@thecrimson.com

Proposed Bill Would Grant Cambridge Teachers Right to Strike BY SALLY E. EDWARDS CRIMSON STAFF WRITER

Locked in a contract battle with Cambridge Public Schools, the city’s teacher’s union lacks a weapon in the arsenal of nearly every other labor union: the right to strike. A bill co-sponsored by one of Cambridge’s state legislators could soon change that. H.1845 — presented by Massachusetts State Reps. Mike L. Connolly and Erika Uyterhoeven — would amend state law to guarantee the right to strike for certain public employees, including teachers. Currently, no public employees in Massachusetts have the right to strike. Accompanied by S.1217, a corresponding bill in the Massachusetts Senate, the proposal would allow teachers and other public employees across the state to withhold their services as a bargaining tactic after six months of negotiation. Connolly — who represents parts of Cambridge and Somerville — presented the bill in the House because he believes “having a right to organize — and by extension, a right to strike — is really a fundamental workplace right.” “I think it’s unfortunate that we have this prohibition that

surely makes it illegal for public sector employees to exercise that right to strike, and so our legislation would address that,” he said in an interview. The bill came before the Joint Committee on Labor and Workforce Development on Tuesday afternoon, where advocates testified in favor of its provisions. Speaking alongside the presidents of the Brookline and Malden educator’s unions, Massachusetts Teachers Association president Max Page said the “right to strike will mean fewer strikes.” “At the moment bargaining begins, school committees and mayors will know that the clock is ticking,” he said. “They need to set aside their high-priced lawyers who are making millions off our school district, get to the table, bargain in good faith on the issues that are crucial to members and students.” Uyterhoeven, who also testified at the hearing, said in an interview that the right to strike is a “foundational tenant of worker rights” that is “one of many tools” used to negotiate a fair contract. “Without that, what we see happen — and we’re seeing this in Cambridge, and we see this across the state — is this prolonged, dragged out, hiring me-

diators, hiring lawyers,” she said. “It’s just this whole process.” “I mean, we have all these issues that are left unresolved and dried up for so long — everyone in the community deserves better than that,” she added. Despite the legal prohibition, teachers around the state have repeatedly gone on strike amid contentious contract negotiations. Justin Brown, the president of the Brookline Educators Union, testified about his union’s decision to go on strike amid a contract impasse with the city’s school committee. “We were stonewalled at the table while the process was being stretched out by the school committee,” he said. “Knowing that a strike was illegal and that the other side would continue to draw it out, we felt like they were fighting with one hand tied behind our back.” Chrissy Lynch, the president of the Massachusetts chapter of the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations, also testified in favor of the bill. In an interview, Lynch said that while a strike is never ideal, she believes it’s a necessary bargaining tools for educators across the state. “I am a mother of kids in public schools, and I’ve seen how long contract negotiations have

H.1845 would guarantee Massachussetts teachers the right to strike. JULIAN J. GIORDANO — CRIMSON PHOTOGRAPHER

dragged out, and the stress that puts on educators who worked really, really hard to educate our kids,” she said. “And I think it’s only fair that they have every tool available to make sure that they get the best contracts possible.” As the bill continues to make its way through the State House, Cambridge educators are preparing to escalate their negotiation tactics with the Cambridge Public School Committee. With negotiations now in their second year — and after nearly two months

without a contract — the Cambridge Educators Association has held rallies, organized weekly work-to-contract demonstrations, and coordinated community letter-writing campaigns. Until a new agreement is reached, the city’s educators remain employed under the terms of the previous contract. Dan Monahan, the president of the CEA, was in attendance at Tuesday’s hearing. Connolly said in an interview that if the CEA chooses to strike,

he would “support them and stand with them,” though he added that it should “be a last resort” and that he hopes striking is “not necessary.” “But at the end of the day, I think we’re sending the wrong message to our teachers and our other public sector employees,” he said. “We expect them to not only take on all the responsibilities of public service or teaching, but to be locked in a situation where they’re continuing with an outstanding contract.” sally.edwards@thecrimson.com

Cambridge Residents Alliance Endorses Eight Candidates BY SAMI E. TURNER CRIMSON STAFF WRITER

Cambridge Residents Alliance, a local nonprofit housing advocacy group, endorsed eight candidates

ahead of this year’s Cambridge City Council election. The CRA endorsed two incumbent Council members — Patricia M. “Patty” Nolan ’80 and Cambridge Mayor Sumbul Siddiqui — as well as a former coun-

cilor seeking to return to his seat, Jivan G. Sobrinho-Wheeler. The group also announced support for five first-time candidates: Harvad alumna Ayah Al-Zubi ’23, Doug Brown, Dan Totten, Vernon K. Walker, and

Ayesha M. Wilson. CRA President Lee Farris said in an interview earlier this month that the group chose to support candidates who align with their platform, which includes prioritizing affordable housing, up-

The Cambridge City Council elections are slated for the first Tuesday of November. JULIAN J. GIORDANO — CRIMSON PHOTOGRAPHER

holding human rights and public safety, and championing environmentally friendly developments. Endorsed candidates also pledge not to take any money from large developers or corporations. During the interview, Farris explained why the CRA decided to endorse three of the six incumbent candidates in the race. Farris said she believes that Nolan has “been phenomenal on various climate-related and environmental efforts,” highlighting the councilor’s work on the Building Energy Use Disclosure Ordinance. The ordinance requires large building owners to report their annual energy use and reduce their greenhouse gas emissions according to the size and type of the building. An amendment to the ordinance passed this summer requires large buildings to reduce their emissions to net zero by 2035 or face a compliance fee. Sobrinho-Wheeler “has a great all-round range of issues that include affordable housing and include climate and environmental issues,” according to Farris. In particular, she praised Sobrinho-Wheeler for his efforts to raise “linkage” fees, an expense commercial developers pay per square foot of their building that goes to Cambridge’s Affordable Housing Trust. In a change from last year’s slate of endorsements, the CRA decided to support Siddiqui for the first time since 2017. Siddiqui — who has recently been accused of creating a toxic work environment — did not receive an endorsement from the CRA in 2019 due to “policy differences” and chose not to seek the group’s endorsement in 2021, according to Farris.

The group announced its decision to endorse Siddiqui prior to the publication of reports that the Cambridge mayor allegedly fostered a toxic work environment for her staff. “I’m glad to endorse her,” Farris said. “I think she’s done a great job in the last two terms, particularly as mayor getting us through Covid.” “Obviously, it was very bumpy for the whole country, but I think Cambridge did better than a lot of places and I think she had a role in that — a big role,” Farris added. Farris also pointed to Siddiqui’s efforts to establish the Rise Up Cambridge program, as an example of “another policy where Cambridge is ahead of pretty much the whole country.” The program provides eligible residents with direct cash disbursements as part of an effort to combat family poverty and income inequality. With just six incumbents in the race for nine council seats, Farris acknowledged that at least three members of the City Council next year will be first-time councilors. During the interview, she expressed hope that the newcomers “will be folks that will work along the lines of the Residents Alliance platform.” In an emailed statement to The Crimson after the interview, Farris wrote that she hopes “the next council will support creating social housing where tenants and residents have more of a voice in housing that is outside of the for-profit market.” “I hope the Council better addresses homelessness,” Farris added. “I’d like to see the Council continue the planned separated bike lanes, and work with the city to improve communication with residents about them.” sami.turner@thecrimson.com

THE HARVARD CRIMSON

METRO

OCTOBER 27, 2023

CAMPAIGN FUNDRAISING

Incumbents Lead Campaign Fundraising FINANCE BREAKDOWN. Six incumbents and 18 challengers gear up for the Cambridge municipal elections in less than two weeks BY JULIAN J. GIORDANO CRIMSON STAFF WRITER

ess than two weeks before Cambridge’s municipal elections, City Council incumbents continue to lead the fundraising race over challengers, according to campaign finance data from the Massachusetts Office of Campaign and Political Finance. Since January, the six incumbents — Paul F. Toner, Marc C. McGovern, Patricia M. Nolan ’80, E. Denise Simmons, Burhan Azeem, and mayor Sumbul Siddiqui — have raised an average of around $30,000 each, while 18 challengers have raised an average of roughly $9,000 each as of the Sept. 30 reporting deadline. One-term incumbent Toner leads the pack in fundraising, with more than $63,000 in receipts since the start of the year — nearly twice as much as the $36,000 collected by the second-highest fundraiser, McGovern. Toner and McGovern also lead the field in terms of funds received from non-Cambridge residents, raking in around $33,000 and $20,000, respectively. ‘Magazine Beach Lady’ Catherine Zusy leads the challengers with a total of around $29,000 raised. Jivan G. Sobrinho-Wheeler — who served a single term on the Council from 2020 through 2022 — follows with nearly $18,000 in donations. Zusy is also the candidate who has donated the most to her own campaign, loaning herself more than $10,000. Challenger Joan F. Pickett reported $4,000 in personal contributions to her campaign, just ahead of the $3,000 fellow challengers Sobrinho-Wheeler and Federico Muchnik contributed to their own campaigns. Only candidates Joe McGuirk, Ayah A. Al-Zubi ’23, and Robert Winters have reported any contributions from donors who disclosed Harvard affiliation, with Winters having received the most, followed by McGuirk and Al-Zubi. In addition to raising the most, Toner has also been the highest spender of the campaign season, with $51,000 in expenses since

the start of the calendar year — $28,000 more than McGovern in the same period. Nineteen candidates have spent less than $10,000 each. Frantz Pierre — the only candidate running simultaneously for Cambridge City Council and School Committee — is also the only candidate not to have raised any money. At a campaign event hosted by the Cambridge Citizens Coalition at the start of October, outgoing Councilor Dennis J. Carlone, who served 10 years on the council, said it takes around $30,000 for a candidate to win election. “First time I ran, I had to loan myself $10,000,” he said. “My wife, who’s not here, wasn’t very happy about that.” The Cambridge Citizens Coalition is connected to a fundraising organization in the same name that is one of three Independent Expenditure Political Action Committees — known as IEPACs or “superpacs” — in Cambridge. They have donated around $1,000 to each of their 11 endorsed candidates. The CCC has raised $19,000 since January, second only to the Cambridge Bicycle Safety superpac, which has raised nearly $23,000, though it hasn’t made any expenditures. The third superpac, A Better Cambridge, has raised more than $15,000 and distributed around $150 to nine endorsed candidates. Two other political action committees — Cambridge Voters for Good Government and the Democracy for Cambridge Political Action Committee — have raised smaller sums, though their corresponding civic organizations have only released candidate endorsements and not contributed to any campaign directly. Cantabrigians will head to the polls to elect Cambridge City Council and School Committee members on Nov. 7. julian.giordano@thecrimson.com

THC Read more at THECRIMSON.COM

Cambridge to Serve as Site for National Hub for Life Science Research BY JACK R. TRAPANICK CRIMSON STAFF WRITER

The federal government has chosen Cambridge’s Kendall Square as the site of a new hub for investment in health care and biomedical research as part of a national program launched by President Joe Biden last year. The hub is one of three announced centers in the United States as part of the new Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health. It aims to “catch” the region’s biomedical innovations and provide them with financial support and advisory, according to Cambridge Assistant City Manager for Community Development Iram Farooq. The Investor Catalyst Hub will help bring projects to the market, which requires business, regulation, and logistics-related expertise, according to a press release. Governor Maura T. Healey ’92 called the placement a “huge win for Massachusetts” in the press release. The ARPA-H initiative will support work that “traditional research or commercial activity” would not normally undertake, according to the National Institutes of Health website. Mark A. Marino, project director of the new hub and vice president of a local health nonprofit, said efforts by both the public and private sectors have grown the state’s life sciences industry. “This has been 10, 20, 50 years

in the making,” Marino said, calling the Greater Boston area “the life science, biotech capital of the world.” “The equivalent of the Hollywood or the Silicon Valley, that type of aura around biotech has been by design — it’s not an accident,” he said. Since the 1970s, Kendall Square in Cambridge has become a home for biotechnology businesses from pharmaceutical giant Pfizer to budding startups. Across the river, the Longwood Medical Area in Boston — home to Harvard Medical School, the School of Public Health, and the School of Dental Medicine — is itself a long-established center of hospitals and health care research. Other parts of the Greater Boston area, including Allston, are emerging as newer centers of biotech — with mixed feelings from affected residents as the increasing presence of labs encroaches on long-cherished neighborhood institutions. In February, Allston’s Sound Museum closed after biotech real estate investor IQHQ purchased its building in 2021 for $50 million. Great Scott, a popular music club, closed in 2020 as more lab spaces opened in the neighborhood. Another factor that differentiated the Boston area from other states vying for the hub was the region’s companies pursuing partnerships with local organizations and residents.

“The element that put us over the hump is that way we have made life sciences real in the lives of people,” said Reverend Willie Bodrick II, a pastor in the Roxbury neighborhood of Boston who participated in pitching the state to federal officials. Since the Covid-19 pandemic, he said, the life science sector has seen a closer relationship with the local populations surrounding it. “The region has moved to a much, much more collaborative model and has recognized that we are actually stronger when we work together because we each have different competitive advantages that we offer,” Farooq said. In May, federal officials came to Boston to hear local leaders pitch their state as the ideal location for the Investor Catalyst Hub. They highlighted the case study of Chelsea, a small city to the north of Boston whose population is nearly 50 percent immigrant and two-thirds Hispanic. The city faced elevated rates of Covid during the pandemic. City leaders, startups, and nonprofits across sectors collaborated to address the problem, “and it flipped,” said Marino. Chelsea became “one of the gold stars of pandemic preparedness and responsiveness,” Marino said, opening the door to similar interventions for more long-standing health issues like diabetes or substance use disorder.

In Bodrick’s neighborhood, the Boston Medical Center partnered with church leaders to vaccinate thousands of residents in an area hit hard by the pandemic. Though Bodrick praised the benefits of the hub and broader life sciences sector, he cautioned that Massachusetts would not keep its edge if it failed to keep its

industry inclusive. Bodrick warned that life sciences “historically has not been a diverse industry.” If Massachusetts loses its ability to collaborate with local organizations, “we lose our standing,” said Bodrick, an alum of the Harvard Divinity School. “There are other cities apt to become a global leader,” he said.

Marino, the project director of the hub, said he has a “commitment for place-based hiring” within his office. “There’s no reason that we should have billion dollar entities in the commonwealth and they don’t reflect the diversity of the commonwealth,” said Bodrick. jack.trapanick@thecrimson.com

Cambridge will be the home to a new center established as part of the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health. MARINA QU — CRIMSON PHOTOGRAPHER

THE HARVARD CRIMSON

ARTS 13

OCTOBER 27, 2023

Daniel Caesar began his Boston performance with a white film enveloping him like a veil. ALISA S. REGASSA — CRIMSON PHOTOGRAPHER

MUSIC

Daniel Caesar Shows Off Range at MGM THE BANTER on stage was kept to the minimum; what shone through at the Oct. 16 concert was Daniel Caesar’s skill. BY GRANT S. C. SHUEH CONTRIBUTING WRITER

aniel Caesar made the sold-out MGM Music Hall feel intimate with his Boston performance on Oct. 16. While shredding electric guitar solos, spinning sophisticated harmonic tapestries on a Wurlitzer, playing stripped-back acoustic versions of his songs, and even accompanying his fans’ singing, he transcended the boundaries of genre and stage. Music enthusiasts were treat-

ed to an unforgettable evening, starting as opening act Montell Fish set the stage ablaze. His signature falsetto, booming baselines, and flashing red and blue lights captivated the crowd. Fish even ran through the audience, drawing screams from the first rows. His high energy antics and flashy backdrop provided a stark contrast to Caesar’s calm entrance. A brief intermission bathed the stage in ethereal white light, creating an atmosphere of mystique and anticipation. Through the smoke, Caesar appeared, and the crowd erupted. Recovering from illness the day before, Caesar addressed his devoted fans with gratitude and vulnerability. “I’m going to need you guys to carry me through this one to-

MUSIC

FROM THE SIDELINES: KIM PETRAS CONCERT

On Oct. 7, Petras brought her infectious persona in all its raunchy glory to Boston’s MGM Music Hall at Fenway as a part of her “Feed the Beast” World Tour. BRADY M. CONNOLLY — CRIMSON PHOTOGRAPHER

Petras turned what could have been a brief, one-album tour into a lengthy showcase of all her many eras. BRADY M. CONNOLLY — CRIMSON PHOTOGRAPHER

The show was split up into distinct acts, each of which was primarily comprised of songs from one of her EPs or “Feed the Beast,” her debut album. BRADY M. CONNOLLY — CRIMSON PHOTOGRAPHER

night. Just hold me down,” Caesar said. The opening songs featured Caesar’s distinctive raspy timbre, beautiful despite recent illness. Translucent curtains surrounded him for the opening songs, and video screens behind him played surreal visuals. When the curtains lifted, he seamlessly transitioned to playing a Wurlitzer piano. Caesar’s skillful accompaniment drew on his gospel roots. During his performance of “Entropy,” the backdrop featured scrolling Bhagavad Gita passages, including one which read “Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.” With a dreamlike backdrop and the constant presence of smoke, the stage created an otherworldly setting for the song’s haunting lyrics, such

as, “Ain’t no stopping entropy.” Throughout the performance, the crowd’s enthusiasm was palpable, with occasional screams of adoration and declarations of love. Despite the mellowness of his discography and his relaxed stage presence, every song brimmed with energy, a testament to his fanbase’s fervor. Fans held up posters declaring their affection, with messages like “I love Daniel Caesar” and “Still asking for Omar’s number.” Someone in the audience FaceTimed a friend, allowing them to watch the performance from their bed in a state of jealousy and awe. Caesar engaged with the crowd often, holding the microphone out for them to sing along and building off of their energy. Caesar surprised the audience

with a few acoustic renditions of old hits, in one instance admitting, “I haven’t played this song in like 5 years.” When he forgot the lyrics to “Show No Regret,” a diehard fan took over. Caesar let her take the lead. She belted her heart out while he accompanied her on the guitar. It was a touching moment that showcased the intimate connection between the artist and his fans. His performance focused mainly on the music, keeping his stage banter minimal. With the audience’s unwavering support, however, he was visibly moved. “You guys are the fucking best for real, this is the only thing I need right now,” he said. As the night continued, Caesar showcased his musical prow-

ess with a series of electrifying performances. He shredded an alternating-picked guitar solo, dazzling the audience with his pentatonic blues runs and whammy bar tremolos. The crowd came alive during “Superpowers,” raising their hands to the sky to the lyrics. The night continued with a Wurlitzer-only edition of “Valentina,” and the entire crowd joined in on the melismatic refrain of “Play it cool.” Caesar closed his show with “Always,” a standout heartbreak ballad from his 2023 album “Never Enough,” joined by seemingly every member of the audience. As the night concluded, Caesar expressed his gratitude. “I enjoyed that very much. Y’all were absolutely incredible,” Caesar said.

‘Killers of the Flower Moon’ Review: Scorsese at His Best BY HANNAH E. GADWAY CRIMSON STAFF WRITER

“Can you find the wolves in this picture?” So asks Ernest Burkart (Leonardo DiCaprio) in Martin Scorsese’s latest film, “Killers of the Flower Moon.” The film constantly teeters on this feeling of dread and horror, as if wolves are truly about to descend. “Killers of the Flower Moon” is an unflinching account of the Osage killings of the 1920s and ’30s, and it is not afraid to make audiences uncomfortable. The film features incredible performances and a stunning understanding of the cinematic form, but, above all, “Killers of the Flower Moon” is an attestation to Scorsese’s storytelling power. “Killers of the Flower Moon” is based off of the book of the same name, written by David Grann in 2017. The story is a nonfiction account of the murders that plagued the Osage tribe, who became the wealthiest people in the U.S. after finding oil on their land. At the center of Scorsese’s adaptation is Mollie (Lily Gladstone), one of four sisters in an Osage family. After marrying a white man named Ernest (Leonardo DiCaprio) who operates under the influence of his sinister uncle (Robert De Niro), Mollie’s family members start to die and her peaceful life dissolves. The story is harrowing and highlights the countless ways in which Native Americans have been exploited and oppressed by white Americans. The core of this film’s success is its incredible acting. While DiCaprio and De Niro don’t disappoint, the real star of “Killers of the Flower Moon” is Gladstone. Gladstone perfectly embodies the complicated figure of Mollie and perfectly showcases both subtle and intense emotion. Her stoic and restrained character contrasts sharply against DiCaprio’s Ernest, whose extreme tendencies represent the hotheaded attitudes of white men. Gladstone’s appropriately sub-

dued acting shows the warring internal emotions of a woman wracked with inner pain. As Mollie’s family members start to drop off due to the evils brought into her tribe, you can see parts of her inner soul shutting off. Since her character is normally collected, her moments of anger and grief feel all the more powerful. Besides Gladstone, it is also notable that many of the Osage characters are portrayed by first-time actors. The film highlights an amazing array of actors from different points in their careers, and each of them brings all of their energy to the table. Scorsese grounds the film in real life not just through its performances, but also through the form of the picture itself. Most of the film’s cinematography is modern and golden-hued. But while he tells the story of the Osage nation killings, Scorsese also utilizes techniques from the past. When the Osage tribe and their newfound oil money are first introduced, Scorsese uses black-and-white, squareframed shots to recreate the aesthetic of the 1920s. When referring to historical events, such as the Tulsa race massacre, he also uses monochrome clips with silent film-era intertitles. This use of old techniques reminds the audience of how the United States’ past is often thought of as something far-off and historical. Yet, by making his characters walk out of these black and white photographs into high-quality modern film, Scorsese reminds the audience that the legacies of these stories are still very much alive and in need of our understanding. Indeed, “Killers of the Flower Moon” feels incredibly alive and important. Scorsese is known for his grand storytelling, but the film never feels remote or overwhelming. The film’s length feels necessary and is ingrained with a deep respect for the Osage tribe and their stories. Scorsese does not shy away from any details of the violence brought against the innocent Osage people. This frankness is solidified in the fi-

nal moments of the film when Scorsese himself appears to complete the tale. In a scene set forward in time, Scorsese carefully narrates the deaths of Ernest, King, and Mollie directly to the camera. As he explains that Mollie is buried “with no mention of the murders,” he looks directly into the camera. Scorsese’s own inclusion in the film feels like a personal moment between the director and the audience. After his speech, the film fades into a song and dance of the Osage nation and then cuts to black. Scorsese uses the final moments of the film to make it clear that the film is not his own story, but instead an attestation to crimes that were once forgotten or swept under the rug. Of course, there is one aspect of the film that must be addressed: its over three-and-ahalf-hour runtime. The length is truly daunting and there are some moments when the film begins to lag. While the pac-

ing is overall snappy, the story slows at the two-hour mark before ramping up again. In order to prevent losing the film’s focus on the Osage people, Scorsese could have cut some extraneous scenes that developed King and Ernest’s relationship. Overall, the film’s length prevents it from being rewatchable. Scorsese’s drama proves that the filmmaker is willing to combine his favorite flourishes with new, compelling, and diverse stories. He highlights the crimes against the Osage people without pretending that the story is his own. Scorsese’s work continues to be both culturally relevant and thrilling to watch, and “Killers of the Flower Moon” is sure to leave a mark on all who watch it.

4.5 STARS hannah.gadway@thecrimson.com

COURTESY OF EPK.TV AND MELINDA SUE GORDON

THE HARVARD CRIMSON

ARTS

OCTOBER 27, 2023

EDITOR’S PICK: THEATER

THEATER

‘WHITE HOUSE PRINCESS:’ TEDDY ROOSEVELT’S WILD CHILD

COURTESY OF EMMA GREALLY

‘Heathers’ Hits the Croquet Ball Out of the Park FOR A SHOW that could be copied directly from the original film, “Heathers” exceeds expectations. BY ISABELLE A. LU CRIMSON STAFF WRITER

irected by Ava K. Pallotta ’25, “Heathers: the Musical” brings audiences back to high school in its worst form: a hellscape of social anxieties, power dynamics, and also, murder. The theater adaptation of the 1989 dark comedy film, “Heathers” follows Veronica Sawyer (Shannon M. Harrington ’26) in her senior year at Westerburg High School, whose social scene is ruled by the hegemony of Heather Chandler (Isa E. Peña ’23), Heather Duke (Caron S. Kim ’24), and Heather McNamara (Gabrielle M. Greene ’27). When Veronica finds herself accepted into the Heathers’ clique and falling in love with darkly alluring outsider Jason “J.D.” Dean (Max B. Allison ’25), she becomes entangled in a series of staged suicides. “Heathers” is dramatic and hilarious while remaining deeply empathetic, hitting the metaphorical croquet ball out of the park. “Heathers” both plays up stereotypes and deconstructs them, asking how social hierarchies fail everyone involved. This production flourishes from a cast and direction that handles its characters with complexity. When jock Ram (Julian Wagner-Carena ’23) drops his goonish front to comfort best friend Kurt (Will

Jevon ’27), Wagner-Carena’s earnest acting offers us a glimpse of what’s under the uncaring persona that teenagers uphold to escape judgment. In Act II, through solos that spotlight the deep isolation of both the popular Heather McNamara and social laughingstock Martha Dunnstock (Jillian E. Vogel ’24), Greene and Vogel elicit compassion with their soaring, emotionally charged voices. At the same time, characters’ youthfulness sours into reckless selfishness, requiring multifaceted acting. As Veronica and J.D. flirt throughout Act I, Harrington carries a giddiness reflected in Allison’s love-struck smiles. But when Veronica fakes grief over Heather Chandler’s death, Harrington’s smug, simpering tone hints at Veronica’s emerging dark side. Meanwhile, Allison plays J.D. with an escalating violence that never invalidates its counterparts: obsessive teenage love and a vision for a tolerant high school. Both actors seamlessly switch from dark anger to tender idealism, their versatile voices transporting the audience between unease and sympathy — sometimes within the same song. For a show whose design could be copied from its iconic first iteration without much thought, “Heathers” also exceeds expectations with its innovative costuming, lighting, and blocking. Costume designers Steph S. Brecq ’24 and Al M. Bilski ’25 reimagine the traffic-light uniforms of the Heathers by dressing each of them with a variety of tones that still complement each other. The ensemble’s patterned neutrals allow the bold monochrome colors

of the lead and supporting characters to stand out. Meanwhile, lighting designers Kayla R. Reifel ’26, Jodie Y. Kuo ’26, and Clarissa Briasco-Stewart ’24 switch effectively between typical stage lights and LED strip lights. The latter’s electric look perfectly represents Act II’s explosion, and it adds campy energy to numbers like “Candy Store” and “My Dead Gay Son.” In the climactic song “Meant to Be Yours,” stage lights flood hellish red during J.D.’s manic anger, unearthly white during his recitation of a school-wide suicide note, and sobering blue when he barges in on Veronica’s seemingly dead body. This lighting is creative and versatile, realistic when needed while heightening intensity elsewhere. Even the blocking of “Heathers” is flawless, taking full advantage of its small cast and three-tier set. Each scene distributes characters across the set to create balance, fill space, and represent relationship dynamics. The last of several exhilarating fight scenes is Veronica and J.D.’s brawl for a gun, which culminates in the former shooting the latter as they embrace on the floor. The intertwined representation of sex, violence, and power jarringly assert that love and coercion can coexist and feed into one another. While funny, the highly sexual choreography by Adrienne L. Chan ’25 also conveys key ideas. Sexuality is a social commodity, one that upholds the girls’ popularity but exposes them to the constant harassment of Kurt and Ram. The dead Heather Chandler sings “The Me Inside of Me”

on her hands and knees, emphasizing her looks as what drive the student body to mythify her. Ms. Fleming’s (Kyra S. Siegel ’25) suggestive gyration while encouraging students to share their trauma on live television signals the perversity of exploiting teenagers. Meanwhile, Kurt and Ram’s physical closeness and phallic gestures hilariously exaggerate toxic masculine relationships and the homoeroticism they tend to suppress. These acting and design strengths electrify the Act I finale, in which J.D. shoots Kurt and Ram. Kurt breaks from the confines of the stage to run into the aisles, startling the audience during a life-or-death chase. As Veronica staggers with J.D.’s terrifying capacity for violence, he lifts her chin with his gun, guiding her into a stifling embrace that heightens the shock factor to its climax. While the two chant “our love is God,” the strip lights glow to their brightest white, a blinding, destructive, immortal light. “Heathers” consistently remains on top of its game throughout the show. Pallotta’s production pulls off every joke, note, and beat, while its clever, fresh design enriches the story’s deeper themes. The musical is exceptionally entertaining with its raunchy humor and energetic music, but the nuances of character illustrated in its every choice reassure us that everyone is damaged, complex, and hurting, but may someday open up and come together.

COURTESY OF LOTEM L. LOEB

When it comes to White House royalty, you’ve heard of first ladies — but have you heard of a White House princess? Introducing Alice Roosevelt, the eldest child of former U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt. The original musical comedy “White House Princess” premieres on Oct. 26 at the Agassiz Theatre. Co-written by Maureen Clare ’24 and Charlotte J. Daniels ’23, the show follows Alice Roosevelt and her cousin, Eleanor. As Alice proves to be a handful for her father to keep under control, and as Eleanor struggles to realize that her own desires are stifled by societal constraints, the musical explores family dynamics, queer love, and the realities of life as a woman in the 20th century. This show was a long time in the making. Clare and Daniels, who have been friends since their first year at Harvard, both spent the spring of 2020 at home, saddened by the fact that their freshman year was cut short by the Covid-19 pandemic. They found inspiration in a small picture of Alice Roosevelt in the National Portrait Gallery and instantly knew they wanted to learn more about the White House wild child — leading them to eventually write “White House Princess.” Writing in various moments of free time after they returned to college in person, they dedicated significant time to the project during the past two summers with support from Harvard’s English Department. When they learned they received a residency, Clare traveled to Daniels’ home in Los Angeles, where they spent twelve to fifteen hours a day writing songs, finishing the finale just before Clare had to leave for her departure flight at 5 a.m. Bringing the show to life was much harder than they anticipated. Creating vocal arrangements, orchestrations, and underscoring were skills that they had to refine while working in order to be ready for the cast and orchestra. Then, Clare and Daniels moved away from writing and into their roles as Executive Producer and Vocal Music Director, respectively. In the words of Clare, Director Lollie R. McKenzie ’26 added “a layer of magic” to every aspect of the show. For her, this musical is an opportunity to share purposeful stories, particularly a woman’s story and a queer love story. The circumstances surrounding the show feel special to her: A women-led team tells a woman’s story in the Agassiz Theatre, named after Elizabeth Agassiz. The show’s engagement with history extends beyond the performance. The crew spent a lot of time at Houghton Library’s Roosevelt Collection, and select archival materials will be available to explore before and after the performances. Headlines, photos, and letters are projected during the performance as the show progresses with a non-chronological timeline, and some costumes are borrowed from the Huntington Theater in Boston.

isabelle.lu@thecrimson.com

AI and Books: Can Craft Become a Commodity? BY ERLISA DEMNERI CONTRIBUTING WRITER

Many have experienced the difficulties of writing — sleepless nights hunched over the keyboard, futile searches for the perfect word, and the seemingly impossible task of translating formless ideas into comprehensible paragraphs. The process can often feel exhausting and take many months, years, or even decades to master. However, with the rising applicability of generative AI, new online tools are looking to change that. Boo.ai describes itself as “a beautifully simple writing app that gives you superpowers,” Lex is “a modern word processor that enables a radically new way to write,” and Sudowrite can help “write a novel from start to finish. In a week.” Using language models such as Claude 2 by Anthropic and variants of GPT-3, GPT-3.5, and GPT-4 by OpenAI, these AI writing tools can brainstorm ideas, generate plot lines and character arcs, find the perfect synonyms, and write and edit thousands of words in seconds. With writing appearing easier and more accessible than ever, the question arises of whether such enhancing tools should be promoted or encouraged. In order to best answer this, a thorough consideration of the act of writing, its value, and how the usage of AI can change that is

necessary. Firstly, writing is valued because it is the result of a difficult and often painful process. Writer’s block is a phenomenon familiar to everyone who has tried to put thoughts to paper — even the greats, such as Tolstoy, have suffered from it. The triumph of the artist is pushing past various obstacles to produce something that truly represents them, exhibiting great vulnerability and thoughtfulness in the process. What generative AI hopes to offer is a shortcut, an easy way out of these challenges. But these shortcuts hinder the growth of the artist, leading writers to be more occupied with choosing between various premade options than coming up with their own. At the same time, through the usage of these tools, a new issue emerges: In a work produced jointly by a human and a computer model, how much of the intellectual property belongs to the human, how much to the model, and how much to the model’s programmer? Drawing the line here seems even more difficult. Secondly, when engaging with generative AI, it is important to consider the materials used to train it — books, written wholly by human writers. An investigation published last month by The Atlantic showed a dataset of more than 191,000 pirated ebooks, called Books3, that were used without the permission of the

writers to train generative models by Meta, Bloomberg, and others. According to the article, books were stored in the dataset as “large, unlabeled blocks of text.” Out of the total amount of books used in the dataset, the majority published in the past 20 years, 183,000 were associated with author information. Written by authors such as Margaret Atwood, Zadie Smith, Stephen King and more, and spanning across numerous genres, these books were used to train AI to better communicate and produce long, natural-sounding answers. Upon learning the news, many authors were not ecstatic. Min Jin Lee, whose books “Free Food for Millionaires” and “Pachinko” were used in the dataset, wrote on X (formerly Twitter), “Here to report a theft. I spent three decades of my life to write my books. The Al large language models did not ‘ingest’ or ‘scrape’ ‘data.’ Al companies stole my work, time, and creativity. They stole my stories. They stole a part of me.” In order to produce human-like answers, the AI models were fed human-produced writing. Thus, if AI-enhanced tools are used in the future to produce new books, these newly-published titles can be in turn used to train further, more advanced models. However, that would put the industry in a loop of relying on AI-generated art to produce more AI-generated art, pro-

viding no progress for the craft. This accounts for a third contradiction regarding why we value writing, and art in general. Throughout the centuries, the written word has been used as an expression of freedom and core values, birthed by personal experience, and it has inspired movements and genres. Books have served as markers of history. With the emergence of these centralized, uniform tools for creating, this ability of books to shape the progression of history would be lost forever. Furthermore, books aren’t the only medium affected by generative AI. One of the main concerns of the SAG-AFTRA strike is that artificial intelligence will lead to less employment and unfair use of the actors’ images to create fake performances. Held jointly with the Writers Guild of America strike — which ended less than a month ago — SAG-AFTRA is still struggling to finish negotiations. And last year, many visual artists were shocked to discover that their paintings had been used, without consent nor compensation, to train Stable Diffusion, a text-to-image model released in 2022. Thus, artificial intelligence is finding its way into numerous facets of our creative lives. There is one thing that I believe AI-generated art will never be able to encapsulate — the relationship between the artist and the receiv-

er. We read knowing that someone exists behind the words, that our thoughts align with someone else’s. As beautifully stated by C.S. Lewis, “We read to know we are not alone.” This connection between writer and reader can only be facilitated by an author’s intentional choice of words, themes and symbols. We enjoy the writings of Márquez, Austen, Morrison, and many others not only because they are great on their own, but because there was someone behind them

who labored over the best way to tell the story. There can be nothing intentional about generative, derivative art. If, however, AI becomes an inevitable part of our current creative lives, then defined rules, such as those proposed by the Authors Guild regarding consent, compensation, transparency, and labeling of AI-generated content, should be correctly implemented. The inability to do so will only hinder the progress of art and self-expression.

NAYELI CARDOZO —CRIMSON DESIGNER

THE HARVARD CRIMSON

FIFTEEN QUESTIONS

OCTOBER 27, 2023

runo M. Carvalho is a professor of Romance Languages and Literatures and African and African American Studies and is an affiliated professor in Urban Planning and Design at the Graduate School of Design. His work focuses on cities and culture. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

FM: When started here, you talked to the Harvard Gazette about leading an effort to establish an urban studies secondary. How has navigating that been, and what do you think the future of urban studies at Harvard looks like? BMC: One thing I’ve learned is that Harvard sometimes moves slow. And that’s not always a bad thing. Since then, we now have the Bloomberg Center for Cities which provides a campus-wide space for conversations around the urban. There’s plenty of student interest, I think there are a lot more interests coming to college now, realizing the role that the built environment plays in their lives and the legacies they inherited from the past, and the possibilities that we can envision for the future. There are ways in which Urban Studies can help us fulfill what I see as one of the greater promises of liberal arts education, which is to bring together people with very different perspectives, backgrounds, aspirations, and skills, because it generates a common denominator. You can have a computer scientist and anthropologist discussing the perils and promises of smart cities, or a poet and an engineer talking about different priorities or aesthetic values and design. I think that our curriculum doesn’t do enough to produce pathways for these pretty radical encounters between very different kinds of students and different kinds of conversations. And I think urban studies almost necessarily does that.

Q&A:

BRUNO CARVALHO ON CITIES, BIKING, AND HALLOWEEN COSTUMES THE URBANIST sat down with Fifteen Minutes to discuss cities and urban studies. “I’m not sure I would say cities are inherently anything except for places where strangers live among each other and places where constructions are supposed to last beyond a single generation,” he says. BY SARAH W. FABER CRIMSON MAGAZINE ASSOCIATE EDITOR

the future. As part of the research on this book, because the imagination of futures and transit were such a key to that, I want to expand that to my next book, but focusing more narrowly on bikes and the very important role that they played in the late 19th century, including the New Women movement, and then taking it to the present and trying to think through biking in multiple dimensions from the experiential to the emissions related, the environmental advantages of bike lanes, but then also some of the social aspects that can come with more bike centric cities. You get to feel the air blowing against your face. Also the silence. It’s remarkable when you go to a city with few cars how you can hear the chit-chat of lovers or grandparents hanging out with their kids. And there’s something else too: We often think of cars in motion, but a great problem is that most cars spend most of the time not moving and they take up a hell of a lot of space. So if we have less need of a space for parking, we can use those spaces in other ways, either for more housing, or for more pollinator gardens, or bioswales. FM: How would you characterize the Cambridge bike lane debate, in terms of other cities and also in terms of your lived experience in Cambridge?

FM: You teach a freshman seminar on how people in the past imagined future cities. What are some common predictions that people had in the past that didn’t pan out to what our reality is now? BMC: I’ve been researching and thinking about this for the better part of the last 10 years, and I have a book that’s called “The Invention of the Future: A Transatlantic History of Urbanization,” where a lot of this research culminates. Some generalizable things from my research are that reasonable predictions tend to underestimate the range of possible outcomes. In other words, we’re often really, really wrong in our forecasting. All sorts of things people assumed didn’t pan out, from concerns of overpopulation to flying cars. There’s a sort of general tendency for people to imagine, after there’s been an inflection point in the history of technology, to imagine that it will continue at the same pace and not a plateau, whereas it often plateaus. So on the one hand, people were pretty convinced that there would be flying vehicles right after flying technology started to become available all the way from balloons to airplanes. At the same time, nobody really predicted that the car would so dramatically reshape our built environment, because it just seemed like it made so little sense to rethink our cities and function of what are really fairly inefficient technologies to move a lot of people around. And yet it happened.

AMANDA Y. SU — CRIMSON PHOTOGRAPHER

LEANNE ALVARADO — CRIMSON PHOTOGRAPHER

FM: How do you measure the health of a city — socially, economically? BMC: A healthy city is a city that enables the widest range of futures possible while also adapting to changing aspirations. A healthy city is never static. FM: When you go to a new city, what’s the first thing you notice? BMC: How easy it is to get around without a car. What kinds of spaces are dedicated to pedestrians, to children, to the elderly? How do people pay their bills? How do they have fun? Where do they hang out? How do they dress, how do they interact with each other? What does the building stock tell us about its histories? What are the layers that you can kind of unveil, if you look close-

ly into cues like architecture? FM: If you were to design a city from scratch, how would you make it? BMC: I wouldn’t. We have plenty of cities that we can redesign. And there’s so many cities that I love that are so different from each other. I would say that my urban politics is defined more by walkability than anything else, and there are different cities that get to that from very, very different places. FM: Are cities inherently unequal places and is there any way to design cities in a way that would mitigate inequality? BMC: I’m not sure I would say cities are inherently anything except for places where strangers live among

each other and places where constructions are supposed to last beyond a single generation. Now, are human societies inherently hierarchical and unequal? I also don’t know. Certainly cities historically have been, but some much more than others. Access to mobility, access to jobs, culture, housing, and so on, have been the factors that made some cities more mobile and open and inclusive than others. FM: What is your favorite historical city slash city that no longer exists? BMC: Novo Airão. FM: What current projects are you working on? BMC: I’m finishing up this history of

BMC: So I never learned how to drive, first because I was too poor to own a car, and then out of a certain commitment to certainly not a world with no cars — we’re well past that — but a world with fewer cars. I think that the environmental burden of car centric urbanization should be at the heart of any conversation about climate change, about adaptation, about mitigation, and about emissions, and it often isn’t. Many cities in Europe have transitioned back to less car centric mobility and have really placed a bet on bikes as a solution to all sorts of environmental, social health, spiritual, and practical challenges of moving people and goods around packed spaces. I think Cambridge has been a leader in the United States. The biking Safety Ordinance is, I think, a very good piece of policy that has transformed the city for the better. There are very clearly many City Council candidates that are opposed to bike lanes. I think many of them don’t really understand how cities work, to put it bluntly. I think many of them don’t understand that making spaces for bike lanes can actually make traffic congestion better. Many of them think that bike lanes hurt businesses, which sort of goes against most of the studies that we have, though of course upzoning and bringing more people closer to businesses should be part of how we think of that economic equation. This is a very pivotal moment for Cambridge: Does it actually try to do something different from the surrounding suburbs, or does it actually maintain the status quo that only privileges cars? sarah.faber@thecrimson.com

FM Fifteen Minutes is the magazine of The Harvard Crimson. To read the full interview and other longform pieces, visit THECRIMSON.COM/ MAGAZINE

THE HARVARD CRIMSON

SPORTS

OCTOBER 27, 2023

MEN’S HOCKEY

Harvard Hits the Ice in 2023 YOUNG AND HUNGRY Harvard’s men’s ice hockey looks to turn youthful vigor into strong results, after a disappointing end to last season. BY BRIDGET T. SANDS AND AARON B. SHUCHMAN CRIMSON STAFF WRITERS

hen the Harvard men’s ice hockey team returned to the ice for its first post-pandemic season in the fall 2021, the team was defined by youth and potential. With the arrival of top recruits in forwards Matt Coronato, Sean Farrell, Alex Laferriere, and Zakary Karpa and defensemen Ian Moore and Jack Bar, the squad was brimming with potential and inexperience. This fall, after two strong seasons led in part by that core, the Crimson finds itself back where it started in 2021. With a number of key NHL departures after last season, Harvard is again a team full of young talent and potential but lacking college hockey experience. “Definitely pretty obvious we’re young, but that shows that we got a lot of room to grow and get better as a group,” said junior captain and defenseman Ian Moore. “Up and down the lineup, we are young, but we got the kind of mentality that we can grow each day and keep getting better quickly, and kind of grow together. So that’s what we’re focusing on now.”

Harvard put together an excellent season last year, making it to the Beanpot title game and defeating archrival Cornell twice. The Crimson earned an at-large berth in the 2023 NCAA Tournament despite failing to win the ECAC Tournament, but Harvard’s journey in the tournament ended abruptly after an 8-1 beatdown by the Ohio State Buckeyes. “There’s a lot of good teams in college hockey, and I think by the time you get to the tournament, each game you have the potential to end up on either side of it,” head coach Ted Donato said. “I think for us it was a disappointing ending, but I think the tougher part of it is not really playing the way we could have played to at least make the game much more competitive.” After the loss to the Buckeyes, many of the Crimson’s top players moved on to the NHL. While seniors Henry Thrun, John Farinacci, and Mitchell Gibson were expected departures, Sean Farrell, Matt Coronato, and Alex Laferriere all left school early to join the NHL clubs that drafted them, leaving holes throughout the lineup, especially at forward. Despite the void left by the team’s departed stars, Donato has been very impressed with his team’s mindset in the preseason. “The one thing I would say that I’ve been impressed with is just the overall attitude around the team, I think it’s been really positive,” Donato said. “I give the captains and the juniors and seniors a lot of credit f o r that. I feel like the per-

spective, the work ethic, the compete level, has been really positive.” To mitigate the personnel losses, Donato has brought in a talented recruiting class with NHL draft pedigree and junior league experience that will challenge for immediate ice time. Forward Ben MacDonald, a Boston-area native and the son of Hobey Baker winner and 1989 na-

Definitely pretty obvious we’re young, but that shows that we got a lot of room to grow and get better as a group. Ian M. Moore ’25 Junior Captain and Defenseman

tional champion Lane MacDonald ’89, is a draft pick of the Seattle Kraken who spent last season in the British Columbia Hockey League. Forward Michael Callow, selected by the Anaheim Ducks, spent last season in the United States Hockey League, after attending St. Sebastian’s School in Needham, Massachusetts. Joining MacDonald and Callow at forward are New Jersey natives Salvatore Guzzo and Ryan Fine. Guzzo and Fine both attended Don Bosco Prep in New Jersey before spending last season with the United States National Team Development Program in

Then freshman forward Joe Miller handles the puck in the 2023 Beanpot Championship against Northeastern University. BY DYLAN J. GOODMAN — CRIMSON PHOTOGRAPHER

SAT | NOVEMBER 4 SUN | NOVEMBER 5 3PM

the USHL. Both won gold medals with Team USA at the 2023 IIHF U18 World Championships, and they each earned spots in the 2023 Biosteel All-American Game. Rounding out the forward group is Cam Johnson, a Vancouver native with experience in both the BCHL and USHL. On defense, the new recruiting class includes BCHL alum David Hejduk, the twin brother of

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sophomore forward Marek Hejduk. Also joining the Crimson defense corps is Matthew Morden, a draft pick of the Arizona Coyotes with experience at the 2022 IIHF U18 World Championship and in the USHL. Morden is an alum of St. Andrew’s College in Ontario, the alma mater of junior defenseman Jack Bar. Moore and his co-captain, junior forward Zakary Karpa, learned a lot from the leadership of the team’s upperclassmen during their first year on campus, and they recognize the importance of being a role model to their younger teammates. “Our freshman year we had a great group of seniors and juniors that kind of set a good example so

that us young guys could come in and make a good impact as a freshman,” Karpa said. “I think that kind of came together later in the year, winning the ECAC playoffs and the Ivy so hopefully we can try to do that for our younger guys too.” With spots to fill in the lineup, the task falls not only on incoming recruits, but on young players from last year’s group taking a step up. At forward, sophomore Joe Miller, last year’s Ivy League Rookie of the Year, is primed to step up and build on his total of 15 goals from last season. Marek Hejduk also finished last season strong with nine points in his final 12 games, and he will look to continue his growth in an expanded role this year. “We’re going to need to be a little bit more team driven as far as offense,” Donato said. “Guys like Joe Miller and [Alex] Gaffney have proven to be goal scorers in the past, but everybody else is, in some ways, trying to do something for the first time, so with that usually comes some ups and downs.” On defense, sophomores Ryan Healey and Mason Langenbrunner will have an opportunity to fill some of the void left by Thrun and Ryan Siedem, though Moore and Bar may have the first crack at toppair minutes. In net, Donato will ride both senior Derek Mullahy and sophomore Aku Koskenvuo to begin the season without naming a specific starter. “I think both guys have the confidence of their teammates. I thought both guys played well at our scrimmage against Lowell,” said Donato regarding his goalie tandem. “Derek certainly has a

little bit more experience, but I’m very optimistic that we’ll get excellent goaltending.” Harvard’s 2023-24 campaign begins with five straight ECAC games, including a home game against No. 5 Quinnipiac and a road trip to face No. 12 Cornell. The squad will face two top non-conference opponents the weekend after Thanksgiving with home games against No. 19 UMass and No. 3 Boston College, before wrapping up 2023 with three ECAC games and a trip to face UConn. The Crimson will begin 2024 with a trip to the Desert Hockey Classic in Tempe, Ariz., and it will then face seven ECAC opponents in a row, including Quinnipiac and Cornell. After the Beanpot games on Feb. 5 and Feb. 12 (Harvard will play Northeastern in the semifinals), the Crimson will conclude their schedule with its final six ECAC matchups, wrapping up on March 2 at home against Brown. After a long preseason and one exhibition game against UMass Lowell, the squad is finally ready for its first regular season game. “It’s been a lot of fun. We’re working hard. We’re putting in some structure here the past couple of weeks,” Moore said. “It’s fun to get to play another team in Lowell for once so we’re super excited to get to play this weekend. Can’t wait to play another team. So we’re really looking forward to it.” Harvard’s season begins on Friday, Oct. 27, on the road against the Dartmouth Big Green. Its first home game will be on Friday, Nov. 3 against the Princeton Tigers. bridget.sands@thecrimson.com aaron.shuchman@thecrimson.com

SPORTS

THE HARVARD CRIMSON OCTOBER 27, 2023

WOMEN’S HOCKEY

Harvard Off to 0-3 Start ROUGH START A young Harvard squad started the season on a poor note, losing to RPI, Union, and Dartmouth last weekend. BY JOSEPHINE S. ELTING AND CHRISTOPHER D. WRIGHT CRIMSON STAFF WRITERS

hen the whistle blew at the end of the first period on Saturday, it looked as if Harvard women’s ice hockey (03-0, 0-3-0 ECAC) was on the way to its first win of the season. The Crimson lead 3-0 over Rochester Polytechnic Institute (6-1-3, 2-00) going into the 2nd period. Led by senior captain Shannon Hollands, who had a goal and assist in the first period, they played aggressive and tactical hockey in the first period. However, the rest of the game was a different story, as the Engineers battled back to force overtime and deliver a 5-4 loss to the hopeful Harvard women. This was only a continuation of the Crimson’s rocky start to the 2023-24 season. After a dominant 4-0 shutout win over McGill University during the preseason, the Crimson dropped its first two games against Union and Dartmouth. The early season woes highlight the youth of the Harvard squad which features only one senior, forward Shannon Hollands, and six first-years. “We have a young team, new coach. We’re learning a lot of new systems,” said Hollands. “All of us are freshmen at this point. I think we built from last weekend and it’s only up from here.” Despite the lack of seniors,

they have been able to find leadership in their group and create a positive environment in the locker room. Many look to junior captain and goalie, Alex Pellicci as someone to provide guidance during this time of change for the program. Hollands has seen members of other classes step into the leadership typical of seniors. “Our juniors were a big class, but honestly, they’ve been super supportive. And my co-captain Alex Pellicci, she’s like another senior to me.” The newest member of the team is head coach Laura Bellamy ‘13. Coach Bellamy joined as head coach this August only a few months before the start of the season. She previously was the assistant head coach at the University of Minnesota, Duluth. She led the Bulldogs to a No. 4 ranking in the 2022 season, and the squad always held a spot in the top 15. As a top seeded team they made 4 NCAA tournament appearances and came in 2nd place in 2022. Bellamy’s collegiate success started at Harvard as she was the goalie for the Crimson, leading her team to two NCAA tournament appearances and an Ivy League title in 2013. HARVARD 4, RPI 5 Friday’s game against RPI was a heart breaker for Harvard. On Friday, Hollands expressed that she thought the team could rebound offensively from the previous few showings. “I think we’re a little nervous on our sticks, gripping them a little tight. I think getting more shots to the net is a huge thing. We’re kind of looking for the perfect play right now. And sometimes you just gotta get the gritty goals.”

In the first period they did just that, earning them three goals all from different players. Pellicci also only faced three shots on goal the entire period. As the second period began, so did the blue-line turnovers for the Crimson. The Engineers put a stop to the attacks before they could get quality shots off. RPI had control of the game from this point on and the Harvard defense could do nothing to stop it. What once seemed like a solid win became a 5-4 loss. HARVARD 1, UNION 3 On Friday, the Crimson faced off against a strong Union team. Early on they struggled to maintain possession on offense. The Garnet Chargers took advantage of this and applied heavy pressure to the Harvard defense, resulting in two first period goals. This could have gotten even uglier if it were not for first-year defender Annie Sun, who put many of the Union attacks to waste. Sun displayed great physicality and strength on defense and provided much needed support for Pellicci. The Crimson netted a goal with four minutes left in the first to level the game at one apiece. The goal was Holland’s first of the season and came after great passing from first-year forward Zoe Boosamra and junior forward Gabi Davidson Adams. Ultimately, team discipline was the main opponent of Harvard, as it recorded four minor penalties in the game. These penalties proved costly, as the Garnet Chargers scored two power play goals. HARVARD 2, DARTMOUTH 4

Harvard traveled to Thompson Arena looking to get off on the right foot versus a familiar foe, Dartmouth. On paper, the matchup seemed like an easy one for the Crimson as it finished ranked eighth in the preseason poll, three spots above the Big Green’s projected 11th place finish. However the result on the ice proved otherwise as Harvard’s third period comeback attempt was not enough to prevent a 4-2 opening day loss. The defeat was the Crimson’s first to Dartmouth since 2015. The first period was full of promise for the Crimson as they went on an early power play due to a Dartmouth penalty for body checking. After the Big Green thwarted Harvard’s power play offensive, the Crimson responded quickly with a great chance. With less than eight minutes left, sophomore forward Gwyn Lapp and junior forward Hannah Chorske had a two-on-one opportunity that culminated in a Lapp shot that narrowly missed the net and hit the pipe. Despite having momentum, Harvard exited the first period down one as Dartmouth forward Hamilton Doster scored following a series of deflections in front of the goal. A tremendous effort from Davidson Adams halfway through the second period tied the game at one. Davidson Adams received a pass from Boosamra in neutral ice and skated to the faceoff dot before firing a bullet past the Big Green goalie. Dartmouth responded with a goal of its own in the final seconds of the second period to once again take a one goal lead into the intermission. The Big Green appeared to jump out to a two-goal lead in the first minute of the third period; however, the goal was waved off following a successful first ca-

reer challenge by Bellamy. Dartmouth’s two-goal lead quickly became a reality as forward Jenna Donohue converted on a penalty shot that was awarded as a result of the review. Seeking to kickstart a Crimson comeback, junior forward Kayley Crawford placed a shot into the back of the net to cut the Big Green lead to one. The third period goal marked Crawford’s first career goal, which came almost a year after her first career assist, also against Dartmouth. Harvard’s comeback never materialized as Dartmouth added a late insurance goal to win 4-2. The team does have a lot of tools to work with this season, some being its offensive speed and physicality. Despite a loss on Friday against Union, the Crimson displayed how gritty it is wil-

ing to be. Deep into the third period it fought hard for loose pucks and delivered big hits against the boards to the tired Union squad. While it was not enough for the win, as the new pieces that are Harvard Women’s Hockey start to come together this will prove important. This coming weekend the Crimson has a chance to get their first win against rival Yale. The Bulldogs (1-1-0, 1-1-0) will welcome Harvard to Ingalls Rink in New Haven, CT. With four games under their belt, Harvard hopes to come out of this weekend with their first of many wins to come of this season and this new era of Crimson hockey. josephine.elting@thecrimson.com christopher.wright@thecrimson.com

Harvard faces off against Quinnipiac on Jan. 6, 2023, at Fenway Park. COURTESY OF HARVARD ATHLETICS

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