Fifteen Minutes Magazine: Oct. 2021

21

PEER MENTAL HEALTH

Jennifer Luong

23 LETTER WRITING

Christina M. Xiao

25 AWAY FROM HOME

Maya S. Bhagat

27 D FOR DREAM

Aiyana G. White

FIFTEEN MINUTES

EDITORS’ NOTE

FM CHAIRS

Olivia G. Oldham ’22

Matteo N. Wong ’22

EDITORS-AT-LARGE

Jane Z. Li ’22

Scott P. Mahon ’22

ASSOCIATE EDITORS

Josie F. Abugov ’22

Paul G. Sullivan ’22

Malaika K. Tapper ’22

Rebecca E.J. Cadenhead ’23

Maliya V. Ellis ’23

Saima S. Iqbal ’23

Roey L. Leonardi ’23

Sophia S. Liang ’23

Kevin Lin ’23

Garret W. O’Brien ’23

Harrison R.T. Ward ’23

WRITERS

Josie F. Abugov ’22, Maya S. Bhagat ’22, Kendrick N. Foster ’22, Tamar Sarig ’22, Jennifer Luong ’23, Harrison R. T. Ward ’23, Aiyana G. White ’23, Christina M. Xiao ’24, Anne M. Brandes ’25, Katie S. Griem ’25

FM DESIGN EXECS

Cat D. Hyeon ’22

Max H. Schermer ’24

FM PHOTO EXECS

Sophia Kim ’23

Jonathan Yuan ’22

PHOTOGRAPHERS

Simon J. Levien ’23, Josie W. Chen ’24, Angela Dela Cruz ’24

DESIGNERS

Keren Tran ’23, Samanta A. Mendoza-Lagunas ’23

PRESIDENT Amanda Y. Su ’22

MANAGING EDITOR

James S. Bikales ’22

The last time we published a physical copy of this magazine, Cornel R. West ’74 was still a Harvard professor. You are holding the first printed edition of Fifteen Minutes in almost two years, in which West’s 51-year relationship to the University, as well as his recent and turbulent departure, are front and center.

The pandemic ceased not only printing but also in-person reporting. If we’ve been slowly working our way back, then this “glossy” issue announces an emphatic return: JSA and HRTW, two of our executives, took the Amtrak from Boston to New York City to interview West, accompanied by SJL, who took original photographs for the piece. Their conversation lasted for over three hours and lays the foundation for an incisive and fastidiously-reported story that investigates why Harvard would not even consider a towering Black intellectual figure and activist for tenure when West already held that status nearly 30 years ago. The story asks what and who, exactly, constitute the “True Harvard”: prestige, endowment returns, a sprawling administration — or those who seek earnest dialogue and speak truth to power, the so-called “undisciplines”?

The issue includes a slew of other timely and thoughtprovoking stories. TS profiles Susan Block, a leading professor of psychosocial oncology and palliative care, who in the middle of teaching a class on caring for critically-ill patients was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. AMB and KSG talk to a lawyer suing over mask mandates in Cambridge public schools. KNF dives into the archives to recount the tale of the Sever Hall benches, which were sold to alums in the 1940s and ’50s. And as the University claims to value student mental health, JL talks to the students running Harvard’s peer mental health groups.

Rounding out the issue are two beautiful and moving personal essays: Fittingly for our first print issue since the pandemic closed Harvard’s campus, CMX tells us about her love of writing to pen pals with physical letters. MSB writes a heart-wrenching reflection on how she has not been home to Mumbai, India in nearly two years. And, if you stick around to the very end, AGW drew a lovely comic about dreaming.

To our writers, thank you for your excellent reporting and sharp prose. To our executives, thank you for diligent editing, late nights, and insightful work shaping the future of this magazine. And to you, thank you for reading — we are more excited than words can express to inaugurate Fifteen Minutes Magazine’s return with the first of many glossily-printed issues to come.

MNW & OGO

A Physician in the Patient's Chair

Tamar Sarig

In the fall of 2018, three weeks into Susan D. Block’s first semester teaching a freshman seminar on death and illness — “The Heart of Medicine: Patients and Physicians and the Experience of Serious Illness” — she learned that she had a mass on her pancreas. In the worst way possible, her field of work and personal life had collided.

As the founding chair of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute’s Department of Psychosocial Oncology and Palliative Care, Block, a psychiatrist, had spent almost 40 years treating patients with serious illnesses like cancer, trying to figure out how to make their last months more meaningful and less frightening. Now she found herself in the patient’s chair.

Block had been undergoing routine tests for pancreatic cancer as part of a research study for over a decade, due to a strong family history of the disease. Luckily, her preliminary screenings caught what seemed to be cancer at a relatively early stage. “People were looking for it and then they finally found it,” she says. “It was terrifying.”

That terror lasted for about three weeks, as Block prepared for a surgery to remove most of her pancreas. When she finally went into surgery, however, her doctors discovered that, against all odds, she had been misdiagnosed. The mass was the result of an autoimmune disease.

“People had told me that there’s a 95 percent chance that it’s cancer. I wish to be in the 5 percent, but I don’t ever assume that I am,” she says. “It was wonderful, amazing, incredible good news.”

Even after recovering, Block’s brush with cancer would touch all aspects of her life — her attitude toward work, her presence in the classroom, and her conversations with her own patients.

Block’s lifelong interest in the social and emotional aspects of serious disease began during her internal medicine residency program at Beth Israel Hospital in Boston, where she found herself gripped by “how poorly we cared for people who were at the end of their lives.” Drawn to understand her patients’ psychological experiences, she ended up completing a residency in psychiatry as well.

At the time, Block says, “there was no field of palliative care, and there was barely a field of psychooncology” — the study of the social and psychological dimensions of cancer. “There was sort of no way to go forward.”

If Block couldn’t follow traditional paths to change the way medical institutions supported critically ill patients, she was determined to forge a path herself. In 1998, she started a new job at Dana-Farber with a substantial mission: to build a psycho-oncology and palliative care program from scratch.

By the time Block landed in the operating room herself, she was a leader in her field. But even after 40 years of teaching about severe illness care and doctor-patient communication, when she found herself on the opposite side of that relationship, Block discovered that some things could still surprise her.

“The one really bad part of my care was being in the hospital after the surgery,” she remembers.

“It was really clear that I couldn’t teach a class on serious illness, death, and dying while I was in the middle of this very terrifying personal experience.”

Susan D. Block

Photo by Josie W. Chen

Struggling to recover from the operation, Block shared a twobed hospital room with another woman. “I had to crawl over her to get into the bathroom,” she says. “It was so cramped, and so small.”

At night, after her crowd of visitors had left, the woman began sobbing, and Block’s instincts as a physician kicked in.

and, ultimately, death from an aggressive lymphoma. The pain of that experience instilled in her a philosophy of “do it now,” and in the wake of her own treatment, she’s focused on putting it into practice.

She built her own house in western Massachusetts, something she’d always wanted to do. She gave herself permission to cut back on the parts of her career that drained her energy, and focus on teaching and seeing patients instead. When she met a new partner, she allowed herself to find love again.

“There I was, half doped-up still from the anesthetic, I was trying to comfort her,” Block says. “How can you not respond to somebody who’s that vulnerable?”

In that hospital room, she also saw another, uglier side of the health care system up close.

“[The woman] felt like the nurses weren’t taking good care of her because she was Black,” Block says. “Because [nurses] put on their best behavior when the doctor comes in the room. I’d never seen that kind of dismissive, seemingly racially-driven behavior, as I saw from nurses.”

Back home from the hospital, readjusting to normal life after the surgery brought its own set of challenges.

“I had a pretty hard recovery,” Block says. “And I thought a lot about how much stress was safe to put my body under.” This was especially challenging after decades of juggling a fastpaced career of clinical work, field-building, teaching, heading departments, and research.

Three years before, she had been by her husband Andy’s side through his own struggle with

“I’ve been really lucky in terms of my material circumstances, and I have just wonderful people in my life,” she says. And, of course, she feels lucky to be back in the classroom, teaching undergraduates.

Leaving her seminar three years ago was bittersweet — she didn’t want to stop teaching, but she knew her experience with illness would be an arduous one.

“I felt this obligation to the students,” she says, “but it was really clear that I couldn’t teach a class on serious illness, death, and dying while I was in the middle of this very terrifying personal experience.”

Her class focuses on encouraging difficult discussions about health; she often brings in speakers ranging from doctors to chaplains to seriously ill patients. At the beginning of the semester, she asks students to fill out a survey about their own attitudes toward death, and for freshman family weekend, she asks them to interview a family member about their goals for end-of-life care.

“I love the idea of trying to teach about this very difficult topic to younger people who hadn’t

had the kind of indoctrination or socialization into either the pre-med world or the medical culture,” Block says.

At the end of fall 2018, she returned to the seminar class she had to leave behind when she began her treatment and told them her story.

“They didn’t really know me that well, but it was still sort of a traumatizing, discombobulating, upsetting experience for the students,” she says. She believed sharing her story would serve as a valuable learning opportunity. “I don’t like the word closure that much, but it brought things full circle in a way.”

This semester, Block is teaching “The Heart of Medicine” for the third time. The seminar looks different today than it did in the fall of 2018, but not necessarily because of her own harrowing diagnosis. She’s modified the course to incorporate a discussion of Covid-19, and to focus more on health inequities. She says she doesn’t go out of her way to bring up her story, although she does touch on it when the class opens up about personal experiences with death.

“I want them to name their experiences. So I can’t just stand behind a sort of wall of neutrality and pretend I don’t have relevant experiences,” Block says. “That would not feel right, as a teacher.”

“How can you not respond to somebody who’s that vulnerable?”

“I can’t just stand behind a sort of wall of neutrality and pretend I don’t have relevant experiences.”

THE BATTLE AGAINST MASkING COMES TO CAMBRIDGE SCHOOLS

ANNE M. BRANDES &

New Hampshire-based attorney Robert M. Fojo has filed 12 lawsuits challenging school mask mandates in the past five months. His targets have included a Catholic school in Florida, school districts in his home state, and most recently, the Cambridge school district. Fojo filed the Cambridge lawsuit on behalf of the advocacy group Children’s Health Rights of Massachusetts.

Fojo, a Harvard Law graduate, filed the lawsuit on Sept. 19, in addition to four others. The suits challenge mandates instituted by the Massachusetts state education department, the city of Cambridge, the city’s school district, and other school districts — at a time when debates over mask mandates in schools have engulfed the nation, ranging from parent petitions to physical protests and arrests at school board meetings.

Run by a team of anonymous parent volunteers, CHRM was founded in August 2021. “Our first objective is to fight illegal and cruel school mask

mandates,” reads the organization’s mission statement. CHRM claims its membership includes “teachers, frontline healthcare workers, police officers, business owners, and veterans,” according to its website.

The CHRM lawsuit contends that the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education and Cambridge schools lack the authority to enact mask mandates. In several recent, similar cases, federal and state courts in Arizona, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, and elsewhere have ruled in favor of school mask mandates.

A large part of Fojo’s case centers on a contentious argument that masks are both ineffective for stopping the spread of Covid-19 and potentially harmful to children. Citing a study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention conducted in Georgia, the lawsuit argues that “measures like social distancing, classroom barriers, HEPA filters, and forcing students to wear masks did not result in a statistically significant benefit.” Although the CDC report documented that the correlation between in-

KATE S. GRIEM

“The masking debate in the United States is uniquely political and tribal in a way that it is not elsewhere.”

- David Zweig

school mask mandates and lower coronavirus case levels was not “statistically significant” among younger students, the report noted a “21% lower incidence [of Covid] in schools that required mask use among students” than in schools that didn’t.

controversial claim that mask mandates have been consistently debunked. Zweig’s article argues that there is no “evidence of more outbreaks” in countries that allowed students to unmask, including some of America’s peer nations.

that studies have “unequivocally shown” that masks cause “no negative health effects” for children. While the World Health Organization and UNICEF do not advise for children five and under to wear masks, they do advise for children between six and 11 years old to wear masks in environments with high transmission rates, and for those over 12 to wear masks at the same rate as adults. And the American Academy of Pediatrics has issued a “universal school masking recommendation” for children two years and older.

The lawsuit challenges State Education Commissioner Jeff Riley’s mask mandate for school buildings instituted on Aug. 25, which Riley recently extended through Nov. 1. The update stipulates that schools with a vaccination rate among staff and students of 80 percent or higher will be able to unmask as early as Oct. 15. Since children under 12 are not authorized to be vaccinated, only middle and high schools could qualify for unmasking.

When asked for contact information of CHRM parent organizers, Fojo responds that “the organization asked me to speak in their stead, so I don’t think that anyone will be commenting from there.”

According to Fojo, CHRM parents decided to sue as a “last resort” after they found school committees unreceptive to their complaints. The parents “don’t believe [a mask mandate] is necessary, and they believe it’s harming their children,” he says.

The lawsuit also cites journalist David Zweig’s New York Magazine article “The Science of Masking Kids at School Remains Uncertain,” using it to make the

However, many health organizations and scientists continue to recommend masks for children. Mayo Clinic, for example, reports on their website

When asked to estimate the levels of support for anti-masking efforts in general, Fojo replies that although he could not supply any numbers, he’s observed that “the

Graphic by Keren Tran

energy is very palpable,” adding that “there are many more parents that support this position than people believe.”

An August 2021 poll by the MassINC Polling Group of registered Massachusetts voters found that 81 percent supported requiring masks for anyone entering a school building, while just 12 percent opposed the proposal.

Fojo’s legal strategy is multipronged. To him, one key limitation for mask mandates is statutory authority: “There’s nothing in the statute governing school districts and school committees that enables them to pass these broad health measures,” he asserts.

He argues that the “broad scheme” of authority granted to the Massachusetts Department of Health in the area of infectious diseases “preempts any action by other local institutions” in that field, including the state education department. According to Fojo, since the DPH has not initiated a school mask mandate, no subordinate institution has the right to do so.

Cambridge Public Schools Interim Superintendent Victoria Greer, Chief Strategy Officer Lyndsay Pinkus Brown, and city spokesperson Lee Gianetti declined to comment.

Fojo is also making a constitutional argument that mask mandates “infringe on parents’ fundamental rights concerning their children.” He adds that masks “cause [students] anxiety and stress” and “inhibit social development and social interaction,” among other “psychological, mental and

emotional impacts.” Fojo cites negative physical impacts of maskwearing, too, such as “increas[ing] the amount of carbon dioxide that one intakes” and higher levels of acne.

Those claims have been disputed by several studies. A study conducted by the University of Wisconsin-Madison on children between the ages of seven and 13 in which participants were asked to identify facial expressions from photographs found that “masks are unlikely to dramatically impair children’s social interactions in their everyday lives.” Postdoctoral fellow Ashley Ruba, one of the Wisconsin-Madison study’s authors, strongly believes that social isolation among children should be a much bigger mental health worry than mask-wearing.

The CDC notes that CO2 molecules are small enough to “easily pass through mask material,” while Covid-19 respiratory droplets are not. A report published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health similarly found that “wearing a medical-grade mask does not appear to impact blood oxygen or carbon dioxide concentrations.” The report concluded that “in healthy populations, wearing a mask does not appear to cause any harmful physiological alterations.”

It did, however, acknowledge potential psychological impacts of mask-wearing, noting that these “may contribute to the controversy associated with wearing masks during the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States.”

Another suit seeking to end mask mandates filed in

Hampden County by The Family Freedom Endeavor, by contrast to the CHRM lawsuit, was more narrowly focused. The Hampden lawsuit only uses jurisdictional reasoning to substantiate their claim.

In a Change.org petition entitled “No Mask Mandate for Easton Public Schools — Parental Choice!” CHRM wrote: “As parents, we have to look no further than ourselves to find who has the very best interest of our children in mind.” The group added that there are “countless qualified medical professionals on BOTH sides of the argument. And… their opinions often change!”

In a Sept. 14 update to the petition entitled “Big Update — Lawsuit Pending,” CHRM explained it had been working “behind the scenes” on legal challenges to mask mandates and requested donations for the Easton School District portion of the lawsuit fund.

In the same MassINC poll reporting broad support for mask mandates in Massachusetts schools, 85 percent of Democrats supported requiring masks to enter schools compared to 69 percent of Republicans; a nationwide poll by AP News found the partisan divide may be as high as 80 to 30.

“The masking debate in the United States is uniquely political and tribal in a way that it is not elsewhere,” Zweig says in an interview. “That doesn’t mean that there isn’t dissent or some degree of argument about this in other places, only that it has not taken on the binary left-right dynamic with such vehemence as it has in the United States.”

cornel west and the ‘true harvard’

Raising his hands as if at a pulpit, cast under the fluorescent light of his new office, Cornel R. West ’74 reflects on his recent departure from Harvard. He wears his daily uniform: golden Africa-shaped cufflinks, a black scarf, and a three-piece suit. He leans forward, his voice strained. He has one question for Harvard: “What the hell is so controversial and fraught about giving tenure to somebody who you gave a university pro-

fessorship to 20-something years before?”

On July 12, after a months of conflict over the University’s decision to not consider him for tenure, West tweeted his letter of resignation, dated June 30. He accused Harvard of harboring “spiritual rot,” casting “the shadow of Jim Crow,” and attributed his rejection, in part, to “cowardly deference to the anti-Palestianian prejudices of the Harvard administration.”

West wants to understand Harvard’s decision

JOSIE F. ABUGOV & Harrison r.t. ward

Photo by Simon J. Levien.

at its core. “Based on academic grounds? I want to know. Age grounds? I want to know. And if it’s not academic grounds, not based on age,” he says. “Must be political.”

His departure is one in a string of recent incidents across the nation in which a university denies tenure to a professor of color whose scholarship and politics dispute the foundational ideals of the United States. Most notably Nikole Hannah-Jones, creator of the 1619 Project, was initially denied tenure at UNC Chapel Hill in June; at Harvard, Lorgia García Peña, a scholar in Ethnic Studies and vocal immigrant rights activist, was denied tenure less than two years ago. Both had their work politicized and belittled by those in more traditional realms of academia. And all this concurrent with Harvard and similar institutions committing themselves to recruit scholars from, to use the University’s words, “the widest possible pool of exceptional talent, unifying excellence and diversity; promotion processes should be characterized by nondiscrimination and should recognize excellence in all its forms.”

We met West on 121 St. at the campus of Union Theological Seminary, where he was first hired as a professor 45 years ago and is now tenured. On a September evening, he takes us to his office inside a gothic tower overlooking Harlem and Columbia University’s main campus. The room is sparse, its perimeter lined with walls of bookshelves and framed images, including a signed “Funkadelic” George Clinton tour poster.

It’s already 9 p.m. when West greets us for one of the first extensive interviews he’s given about his

51-year relationship with, and turbulent departure from, Harvard. Only when his wife calls him, three hours later, does he walk the few blocks home, carrying just a plastic bag with his laptop inside.

West’s relationship to Harvard spans five decades: He was an undergraduate in the early 1970s leading demonstrations for Harvard to establish what was then called ‘Afro-American Studies’; he became a University Professor in 1998, a tenured position and the most recognized position a Harvard scholar can hold; he departed

that Ta-Nahesi Coates “fetishizes white supremacy,” sparking a debate on Twitter that became so contentious it drove Coates off of the platform.

A radical figure like West seems almost fated to clash with an institution like Harvard — an institution so established it verges on calcification. His recent letter of resignation provides an electrifying critique of the University, steeped as much in the structural as it is in the interpersonal, vacillating between a condemnation of Harvard’s “narcissistic academic

after a dispute with then-University President Lawrence H. Summers; and he returned five years ago.

West is not known to hold his tongue, and his recent viral departure is in keeping with a history of high-profile conflict. When he resigned from Harvard in 2002, his meeting with Summers was so salacious it made headlines in the New York Times. He also captured headlines away from the University — West was one of President Barack Obama’s fiercest critics from the left. In 2017, he charged

professionalism” to grievances about his salary. His condemnation, at heart, also offers a prediction: his alma mater, which he still loves, risks falling into decay.

“When I think of Harvard, I always have a smile and a critique at the same time,” West says.

If Harvard can appear obsessed with its status, hubristic, and lethargic — the last Ivy to add the study of women, gender, and sexuality as a degree; embroiled in controversy over establishing an Ethnic Studies department, with multiple high-profile departures

Paraphernalia in West’s office. Photo by Simon J. Levien.

of faculty of color proceeding García Peña’s; criticized for being overly-preoccupied with endowment returns — West presents an alternative vision to the “narcissistic” core most visible to the public.

He recalls a William James speech from 1903, “The True Harvard,” in which the esteemed philosopher said there is the Harvard of social clubs, money, and status, but also the True Harvard, the invisible Harvard, the best of Harvard. James — and West — call those who embody this divergent tradition the “undisciplinables.”

James said, in his speech, “The true Church was always the invisible Church. The True Harvard is the invisible Harvard in the souls of her more truth-seeking and independent and often very solitary sons.” With his unruly commitment to truth — to “Veritas,” Harvard’s motto and a staple of his vocabulary — West proudly follows this faith. His multiple clashes with the University are another chapter in an ongoing struggle between these two opposing sects within Harvard.

That Harvard’s own mystique would end up consuming its substance was James’s ultimate concern. West shares this anxiety: “If Harvard slips down the slope of self-institutional idolatry and loses sight of the best of its past and its present,” then the True Harvard will be subsumed. Left behind, West continues, will be “an empty institution obsessed with itself, dishing out different kinds of status, but the excitement, the vitality will be gone.”

University spokesperson Jonathan L. Swain declined to comment for this article.

When West recalls hearing from the University that there was, “no way under any conditions that

[the administration] would consider that recommendation of tenure,” he says he interpreted this decision as an act of profound disrespect.

“If they make a recommendation, and say, ‘well, you’re not worthy,’ then you’re messing with my integrity,” West says.

Many of his peers agree. UCLA professor Robin D.G. Kelley, one of the foremost historians of African American history, put it bluntly.

Not even bringing his tenure application up for review “was just stupid,” Kelley says. “Because what, they thought that Cornel’s gonna be like, ‘Oh, yes, boss. Yes, massa. I know my time on the plantation is coming to an end, but massa, you know, I understand, I go back to the slave quarters.’ Like, really?”

West felt he was left with no option but to defend his dignity.

“Harvard disrespect me, I come out fighting,” he says. “That’s just the way it is.”

West arrived at Harvard as an undergraduate in 1970 during what he describes as the “second Golden Age of the philosophy department.” In a low and rhythmic tone he lists his undergraduate influences: John B. Rawls, Hilary W. Putnam, Stanley L. Cavell, Robert Nozick, Roderick Firth, H. Nelson Goodman ’28. Professor Orlando H. Patterson, who West deems “the greatest Black scholar in the academy,” was his tutor.

Born in Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1953, West was raised in South Sacramento, his mother was an educator and his father worked at McClellan Air Force Base.

“I had people in my life who loved me so deeply, sustained me.

And not just family, but those people I was talking about at Harvard,” he says. “They weren’t just my professors. These are people who loved me. These are people who cared for me.” It was his first encounter with the “True Harvard.”

Under the personal guidance of Martin L. Kilson, the first Black scholar appointed to a full professorship at Harvard, and J.G. St. Claire Drake, who created one of the first African American studies programs in the country at Roosevelt University, West decided to become an academic during his freshman year, at the age of 17.

West says he already entered college with “certain decolonized sensibilities and decolonized perceptions.” He and his classmates “were riding the crest of the social movements” of the late ’60s and early ’70s. In college, he volunteered for the Black Panther Party’s breakfast program and, every Sunday after church, travelled 30 miles from Cambridge to Massachusetts Correctional Institution-Norfolk, where Malcolm X was incarcerated, as part of the Panthers’ prison program.

As co-president of the Black Students Association, West’s on-campus activism included multiple takeovers of University Hall. “I was taking it in with tremendous joy — just to learn,” he says, “the sheer adventure of being rooted in the life of the mind and relating that life of the mind to the world of actions, struggle, and passion.”

After his freshman year in Holworthy Hall, West moved to Leverett House with a group of six friends, including Sylvester Monroe ’73, who went on to become an editor at The Washington Post, and James T. Brown ’73, later the

sportscaster of the James Brown Show.

Placed in two adjacent suites of three, the young men dismantled the connecting door so they could move freely in a makeshift, six-person rooming set-up. Monroe describes his friend group as “very militant activists, all of us,” concerned with “changing the world and changing Harvard. It was about changing Harvard, getting Harvard to accept us for who we were, who we are, and not trying to turn us into Black versions of Harvard students who had been there for years and years.”

In 1969, the number of Black students who matriculated to Harvard, 100, doubled from the previous year. Monroe, who is currently writing a book on Harvard’s Black student body in the graduating class of 1973, attributes this jump to the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the University subsequently making a greater effort to recruit Black students.

West spent an inordinate amount of time with his head in a book. “We’d be at a party, and when there was a lull in the music or something, you’d see Cornel with a book, reading some great philosopher. He always had a book, even at a party,” Monroe says. During a takeover of University Hall in protest of Harvard’s investment in Angola, West jumped out of a window, ran to a nearby building to take a Hebrew test, then hurried back into the occupied building.

Despite these flashes of eccentricity, “he was just one of us,” Monroe recalls. He describes West in college as down-to-earth, fun, and even unassuming. He wouldn’t don an afro or a daily three piece suit until years later.

West’s closest friends knew he had an unbelievable intellect, but he was never obnoxious or condescending. “He’s imposing in that he’s so smart, but he doesn’t make you feel like an idiot when you’re around him,” Monroe says.

West describes, at various points, his undergraduate days at Harvard as “fructifying,” “magnificent,” “empowering,” and “enabling.”

“It allowed me to become fruitful in my quest for truth and goodness and beauty, and I remain a revolutionary Christian, so I include the holy as well,” he says. Even so, he cut his college days short. Worried about his scholarship money running out, he enrolled in eight courses his junior fall and spring, got A’s in all but one, and graduated a year early.

After West’s graduation from Harvard, he was soon hired by Donald W. Shriver as a professor at Union Theological Seminary in New York, at age 23. He stayed at Union for eight years before being hired by the Divinity School at Yale in 1984, where he was later appointed to a joint position in the American Studies department.

Very little time passed before West ran afoul of the Yale administration — a year into his time at Yale, he says he became “the first Yale professor in its history to get arrested on Yale property” while protesting in support of a clerical workers union.

West recalls that after his arrest, then-Yale President Angelo B. Giamatti summoned West to his office. He informed West that “we can’t have faculty getting arrested” and ended West’s sabbatical a semester early. However, West had already committed to

teaching courses at the University of Paris, so he flew between New Haven and Paris every week to teach at both institutions.

This conflict proved irreparable, and West left Yale for Union the following year. “I can’t put up with these kinds of conditions,” he recalls thinking. Shortly after his return to Union, Toni Morrison invited him to form “an intellectual neighborhood” with her at Princeton; he accepted, beginning one of the most prolific periods of his academic career.

He won the 1992 Critics Choice Award and the 1993 American Book Award. In 1992 West released “Race Matters,” propelling him from prominence in academic circles directly into the American zeitgeist. That book sold a million copies and firmly cemented West as one of the leading Black intellectuals of the decade.

Two years after the publication of “Race Matters”, West left Princeton and joined the “dream team” that Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. was forming in the Afro-American Studies Department at Harvard, which included other prominent Black academics such as the philosopher K. Anthony Appiah and sociologist and statistician Lawerence D. Bobo.

Four years after his return to Harvard, he became a University Professor and expanded his teaching to cover religion and philosophy. He released an album, “Sketches of My Culture,” a project that again brought West’s work to a broader audience. “It’s intellectual without being cerebral,” he said in an interview with the New Yorker in 2001.

The same year that album was released, Summers became Harvard’s 27th president; tensions between him and West ensued

immediately.

West alleges that Summers met with the head of every department with the exception of Afro-American Studies. Gates says he cannot speak for other departments, but that Summers “did not reach out and have a meeting with our faculty — that’s absolutely the case.”

In an email statement to The Crimson, Kelly C. Friendly, spokesperson for Summers, says that the Afro-American department was “the first department he met with.”

Gates, then head of the Department of Afro-American Studies, says he wrote a four-page letter to Summers on West’s behalf describing “how brilliant of a professor West was.”

Soon after, West says Summers summoned him to his office. Immediately, West says, Summers requested West’s help in “effing up Harvey Mansfield,” the conservative professor of Government.

With some edge to his voice, West recounts that “[Summers] in his little truncated sensibilities thought we gon’ become friends. ‘Oh, you a Black man, you must hate Harvey Mansfield.’” West took offense to this assumption and says he considers Mansfield “a brother of mine.”

When West refused, he recalls, the conversation turned. West says Summers “launched into all his different attacks,” claiming that West was missing class, embarrassing Harvard with his support for a potential 2004 Al Sharpton presidential campaign, inflating grades, and humiliating Harvard by associating it with an art form like hip-hop through his album.

Friendly wrote that “the suppositions are ludicrous and nonsensical, but it would be inappropriate for Professor Summers to

discuss the details of any conversation with faculty for whom he had oversight responsibility.”

West waxed about his initial bout with Summers: “Here was a neoliberal gangster, upfront. But he’s honest about it, he’s candid,” West continues, “He is not wearing a mask, he’s not posing, and he’s not posturing.” According to West, Summers indicated that the days of the Afro-American Studies’ department centrality to the University’s mission, which it had been under the previous administration, were numbered.

Gates recalls that Summers

ily costs to attend Harvard for low and middle income families, offering opportunity to younger faculty and growing the faculty, especially in the sciences.”

The clash with Summers continued a streak of fierce public conflicts, which would only grow in notoriety in subsequent decades. These conflicts feed West’s celebrity — a reputation that seems tangential to his scholarship but has become inextricable from his status as a public intellectual.

Reflecting on the meeting with Summers, West says, “From that

made it clear during their first meeting that “President Summers didn’t regard the field with the same esteem as President Rudenstine did.”

Friendly wrote that Summers “highly valued the African American Studies Department as a vitally important part of the FAS,” adding, “President Rudenstine made the department his top priority when he became President. Ten years later, Larry’s top priorities for the FAS were the student experiences, elimination of fam-

moment on, it was clear we were gonna have a real, real struggle.” And he was right. West and Summers’s relationship would continue to sour. In April of 2002, West announced that he was leaving Harvard for Princeton.

“The saddest day of my academic career was when Cornel West and Anthony Appiah left,” Gates says. “The second saddest was when Cornel left again. I spent 14 years trying to get him back.”

Union Theological Seminary in New York City. Photo by Simon J. Levien.

Between 2002 and 2016, when West was invited back to Harvard, he had stints at Princeton and at Union Theological Seminary. He garnered criticism from journalists, academics, and other public figures for a purported decline in both the quality and quantity of his academic output. A review of “Black Prophetic Fire”, published in 2014, called the book “a strange and disappointing culmination of [West’s] metamorphosis from philosopher to celebrity.”

Even some former allies of West felt his forceful critiques of both Obama and Coates reeked of jealousy. “In truth, West is a scold, a curmudgeonly and bitter critic who has grown long in the tooth but sharp in the tongue when lashing one-time colleagues and allies,” Michael Eric Dyson, a former collaborator and friend of West, wrote in a 9,000-word attack of West published in The New Republic in 2015.

When West was a University Professor at Harvard 20 years ago, he taught more classes than required and relished in his day-today role as a teacher. When we ask him about his decision to return to Harvard in 2017, he answers confidently, “I was under the impression that I would just be what I am and teach and have a good time.”

West quickly became a fixture of campus life, especially within communities of color. The energy he brought to the classroom breathed life into the study of Black history and culture. For Undergraduate Council President Noah A. Harris ’22, West was the first Black teacher he ever had. In West’s popular “Introduction to African American Studies” course,

Harris remembers engaging with the history of Black art in a way that felt novel. Harris remembers West speaking to the class and saying, “we’re engaging with black culture, not by reading just about the history of music,” but instead, “we’re gonna listen to it, and we’re gonna get up and dance, and we’re gonna have a good time.”

West’s approach in the classroom seems unconventional to some, even undisciplined — and that might be the point. A Black man rocking an afro encouraging students to dance, playing hip-hop music in class, and unapologetically critiquing white institutions does not fall under the rubric of respectability politics that many Black professionals contend with. Yet West’s experiential methods and confrontational scholarship are just as legitimate as his academic publications.

“I thought being a professor was teaching freshman seminars. I thought being a professor was teaching introductory courses to be able to revel in the minds of 18-year-olds who are just showing up unjaded, at least for the moment,” West says.

Suraj Yengde, a former postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School, was one of West’s most notable mentees. Before Yengde arrived in America, West was one of two scholars he was aware of (Gates was the other). When he got to Cambridge, West became his primary mentor — Yengde is now a leading scholar of Dalit studies, and his recent book, “Caste Matters”, is a clear allusion to West’s canonical text.

Towards the end of the fall of 2020, West’s joint appointment as Professor of the Practice of Public Philosophy at the Harvard Divinity School and the Faculty of Arts

and Sciences was up for renewal. Divinity School Professor David Carrasco, one of the faculty members at the Divinity School in charge of evaluating West’s position, says that “we recommended him at the end of our report, that he should not only be renewed as professor of the practice but that he be put in the process for tenure evaluation.” Gates says that the African American Studies department voted unanimously to put West forward for tenure review. But the University refused, marking the beginning of the conflict that drove West to leave Harvard.

Swain, the Harvard spokesperson, declined to comment on the specifics of this article, but he told the Boston Globe in February that West’s performance review followed “normal procedures” in which a faculty committee from both schools West was affiliated with evaluated him and recommended his reappointment to the same rank. Swain told the Globe that the committee did not itself have the authority to conduct a tenure review.

But three Harvard professors on the committee, including Carrasco, wrote a statement in March stating that while Swain’s description of the committee’s report to reappoint West was technically accurate, it was “neither a full nor a forthright characterization of [the] report’s contents and recommendation.”

Carrasco rises in his chair and almost shouts with indignation that the letters of recommendation for West’s renewal compared him to some of the “major philosophers of the last hundred years.”

He adds, “This man is making a contribution to human thought.”

One of those letters came from Kelley, a leading scholar of Ameri-

can History at UCLA. His letter to Dean of Harvard Divinity School David N. Hempton includes the following:

“I will confess that I find the entire exercise of writing letters of evaluation for such a towering intellectual figure as Dr. West to be absurd, though I’m sure such letters must exist for the likes of Hannah Arendt, Herbert Marcuse, W. E. B. Du Bois, Michel Foucault, John Dewey, Angela Davis, Slavoj Žižek, and the like. But it does seem like an abuse of time since, honestly, if Professor West produced nothing since his appointment and tenure review in 2016, Harvard’s Divinity School would still bend over backward to retain him.”

Similarly, Gates notes, “To me the most important criteria for tenure is academic excellence,” and that “there is absolutely no question that Cornel West exemplifies academic excellence. In fact, I believe that Cornel West is a genius.”

Hempton, in an earlier statement to The Crimson “on behalf of Harvard Divinity School,” wrote: “We had hoped to retain [West] on our faculty for many years to come. We nonetheless wish him every success in his future endeavors. We will miss him very much.” Bobo, Dean of the Social Science division, declined to comment.

After hearing of the University’s decision, West says he wanted to speak to the President. He sat down with Bobo and told him, “I want to talk to brother Bacow,” but says Bobo discouraged him.

“Why not?” West asked. “I’ll sit down and talk to the brother, person to person, eye to eye, soul to soul. Over a drink, I’ll buy the cognac.”

West alleges that after public

outcry surrounding his case, the University reversed its decision and offered to consider him for tenure. But that came after West’s announcement that he would be leaving and, in his view, the decision only compounded the original affront. Swain declined to comment on whether the University made this offer.

“I think Harvard goes around as if everyone’s replaceable, and we’re not,” says Harris, who sponsored a student-led petition against the University, favoring West’s tenure review. “If you want to keep the best, you have to treat them with the respect that they deserve. And so you can’t replace Cornel West.”

West has repeatedly contended that the reason the University refused the faculty committee’s request to consider him for tenure was that he is “too controversial” — referring in particular to his vocal support for Palestinians.

He argues he could not have been refused on academic grounds. “If it was just, some isolated Black man [who had] been around Harvard 47 years, I would be very, very, very, very reluctant and careful to say this has anything to do with anti-Palestinian prejudice. But once I saw it was a pattern of behavior, I said, ‘It’s hard to deny this.’”

West lists a number of Harvard affiliates whom he alleges have been pushed out of the University in part for their positions on Palestine; multiple sources interviewed for this story concurred. Kelley points to a broader trend in academia, saying he has “lived through the past decades of University presidents who just close rank in terms of attacking any members of the faculty, or any organizations that are critical of

Israel’s occupation, in illegal wars, on Gaza.”

When West publicly stated that Harvard declined to review him for tenure because of his stance on the Israel-Palestine conflict, Rabbi Jonah C. Steinberg, the Executive Director of Harvard Hillel, responded that West’s comments risked stoking conflict. Following an op-ed published by Steinberg in The Crimson, the two convened for what Steinberg calls a “warm and amiable” dinner at a Cambridge restaurant. Steinberg remembers asking West “if he had any evidence at all for his claim that he was denied tenure because of his views on Israel and the cause of the Palestinian people,” and says West did not.

At the end of the dinner, West says Steinberg acknowledged that they may not come to a satisfying agreement on the Israel-Palestine conflict. West responded, “We all have a right to our opinion. But the truth is the truth. I’m not a relativist. A domination is a domination.”

It may be too simplistic to claim that West was not considered for tenure solely due to his stance on the Israeli-Palestine conflict, especially given the black box of Harvard’s tenure review process and bureaucratic hurdles posed by his non-tenure-track appointment.

It’s also too easy to dismiss West’s claims as unfounded or to write him off as peddling anti-semitism — which would fit into a longer tradition of discrediting Black leaders and activists through character assassination. Supporting Palestinian human rights is not anti-Semitic, and West has deeply engaged in scholarship on Black and Jewish relations; in 1996, he wrote “Jews and Blacks: a Dialogue on Race,

Religion, and Culture in America” with Michael Lerner, a progressive rabbi and activist.

“If by trying to speak the truth, I am sowing division, then I stand accused: I’m guilty,” West says.

Yet focusing only on the significance of Palestine in West’s experience with tenure may distract from how the structures of the University affect scholars of color. And the very opacity of Harvard’s tenure process, which many argue is at the root of the problem, makes it impossible to pin down the role West’s stance on Palestine played.

ences produced similar results. That overwhelming support from faculty at the Divinity School and in African and African American Studies, as well as peers in academia, could not even get West considered for tenure reveals an unyielding rigidity. At a time when Harvard purports a commitment to diversity, its inability to overcome superfluous and bureaucratic barriers illustrates the entrenched complacency of the University.

“It’s built into the system,” Kelley says when asked about the nature of West’s case. “The system is one that has a façade that claims,

March. “And I understand why it can be difficult to answer.” Kelley is careful to note that he heard Gay “wasn’t opposed to [West] coming up for tenure, but it’s not her choice to make.”

Thirteen percent of tenure-track faculty at Harvard are underrepresented minorities, a marginal increase from the 11 percent in 2007. Last January, 107 faculty signed a letter questioning Harvard’s opaque protocols surrounding tenure, citing García Peña’s case among others, which prompted Gay to initiate a review of the tenure process. The results, released last Tuesday, found the

West’s being denied the opportunity to be considered for tenure differs from the outright denial of tenure to Professors García Peña or Ahmed Ragab (the first Muslim professor to be considered for tenure at the Divinity School). While all three are distinguished scholars of color and vocal activists, only West’s position as Professor of the Practice was not tenure-track. Administrators may have been legitimately constrained from putting West up for tenure review or providing public clarification on the bureaucratic complexities.

Yet these procedural differ-

on the one hand, to be fair, impartial, focus on standards, but on the other hand to be racist, sexist, classist, patriarchal, and succumb to big money. That’s just how it is.”

Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences Claudine Gay declined to comment for this article, but through a spokesperson, referenced an earlier comment where she acknowledged West’s controversy fuels debates over “whether Black scholars can succeed at Harvard.”

“It’s a legitimate question to ask of a university as old as ours, with a past represented rather instructively by the portraits on the walls of our Faculty Room,” Gay said in

FAS tenure-track system was “structurally sound,” even as faculty expressed “mistrust and low morale” in the process.

Speaking to the Harvard Gazette, Professor Hopi E. Hoekstra, who chaired the committee, said they thought about bias mitigation and “also made several recommendations about how we can better and more fairly assess contributions to teaching, advising, mentoring, and service.”

Decisions like West’s denial, which determine an academic’s worth and come from some nameless heart of the University’s administration — seemingly indifferent to a professor’s commit-

Photos by Simon J. Levien

ment to educating students and antithetical to values the school supposedly holds dear — may feel most salient to the student body. After the public announcement of his case, hundreds of graduate and undergraduate students signed petitions in support of West.

But the strength of the institution’s inner workings relative to even someone of West’s stature, with so much public support, are overwhelming. “It’s their house, they are boulders, we are just passengers in this journey,” Yengde says. “And you know, it would be mad to think that we are the occupants, or we are the permanent residents of this house.” Paradoxically, the positions of those who

happened to West, the knee-jerk reaction may be to treat his case as exceptional — but it is not. Both the quiet and sensational forms of alienation West experienced happen to undergraduates, adjuncts, and postdocs, and spill over to the students, peers, and mentors whose lives they touch — countless people whose names you will never hear. “The True Harvard,” William James wrote, “is the invisible Harvard.”

Before West’s departure in 2002, he says he angrily told Summers, “I’m just as much, or more, Harvard as you are.” He first stepped foot on campus 51 years ago. He studied under Rawls. He took over University Hall

body this alternative ethos are drawn to the school because “of her tolerance of exceptionality and eccentricity, of her devotion to the principles of individual vocation and choice.” To lose this spirit would be the death of a persisting heritage at Harvard.

“Like any other institution, [Harvard] can decay, it can deteriorate, and it can undergo serious bankruptcy, spiritual intellectual bankruptcy,” West says.

There is — and always has been — a danger of a disquieting homogeny consuming the rebellious spirit.

Over a hundred years earlier, James said, “ The day when Harvard shall stamp a single hard and

embody the “True Harvard” are often the most precarious.

West has decades of accomplishments, accolades, and a magnetic presence; he has attracted just as many controversies, criticisms, and personal feuds. In other words, he is human. After what

when the Black Panthers were still running a breakfast program in Jamaica Plain. He was central to establishing one of the leading African American Studies departments in the nation.

In his “True Harvard” speech, James wrote that those who em-

fast type of character upon her children, will be that of her downfall. Our undisciplinables are our proudest product. Let us agree together in hoping that the output of them will never cease.”

Photos by Simon J. Levien

selling the sever benches

In October 1949, Harvard alumni had a unique chance to own a piece of Harvard’s history: a bench from Sever Hall.

Today’s undergraduates might scratch their heads at that announcement: What Sever benches? But before the renovation of Sever Hall in 1949, undergraduates sat at long workbenches, rather than modern desks, to listen to professors expound on foreign languages, classics, and math.

During that renovation, the University decided to replace the benches with “blond, polished desks in the Lamont tradition.” In turn, this prompted the

Harvard Alumni Association to sell off 150 benches for $15 each — equivalent to almost $175 today. The funds would go towards transforming Wadsworth House into an alumni center.

“They are the ancient writing desks of thousands of Harvard men,” the HAA wrote in its announcement to alumni about the benches on Oct. 22, 1949. “Their tops are carved beyond belief with names, dates, scores of games, drawings, doodles, and plain destructive incisions.”

“Like the varsity football team, however, they don’t cave in so easily,” the Alumni Bulletin’s message

kendrick n. foster

A student biking in front of Sever Hall. Courtesy of Harvard Unviersity Archives.

Cover of the October 22, 1949 Harvard Alumni Bulletin depicting graffiti-covered Sever benches. Courtesy of Harvard Unviersity Archives.

concluded.

Responses from nostalgic alumni poured in. The day of the announcement, Brookline physician Harold Bowditch, Class of 1905, wrote to the HAA to request a specific bench with the 1901 Harvard-Yale game’s score inscribed. “I cut it in myself and do not blush to say so,” Bowditch confessed. That year, the Crimson had pummeled the Bulldogs 22–0 in front of a record-setting crowd of 36,000 at Soldiers Field.

Alice John Vandermeulen, an economics professor and Radcliffe alumna, reported that the images of the benches “made [her] feel very sentimental.” “I am taking a year’s leave of absence to write a book,” she continued. “What better place for inspiration than a desk from Harvard Yard?”

Other letter-writers sought to gift benches to Harvard-affiliated relatives. Ruth Nash Chalmers of Scarsdale, N.Y., wished to give the bench to her son-in-law, Collis M. Hardenbergh ’33, for Christmas. “If I’m not going to get it […] I’ll have to invest in something else, as one can’t neglect one’s sons-in-law at Christmas,” she wrote.

Nancy Nichols bought a bench to inspire her young son George Nichols III. Nichols — a mother with high expectations — hoped that George would enter Harvard “despite his present poor grades in ‘Sandbox Play.’” (Nichols did eventually receive a Master of Arts in Religion from the Divinity School, although he did not attend Harvard as an undergraduate.)

Still others thought the benches could mark momentous occasions in their own lives. William B. Kehl ’40, then a mathematics instructor at MIT, wished to acquire a bench to celebrate his five year anniversary — their “wooden”

anniversary — with his wife, which fell on Oct. 24. “Hope you get a lot of gifts, but not too many early ones,” he wrote.

W. M. Tugman, Class of 1914 and an editor at the Eugene Register-Guard, wanted to commemorate the construction of a new Student Union at the University of Oregon. “I intend to give it to the University of Oregon as a ‘good will from Havana’ item,” he wrote, “and as an example of what NOT to do to furniture.”

But for most people, the scarring and graffiti only added to the nostalgic appeal. W. B. Gresham Jr. ’37, an entomologist, wrote on Oct. 30 that “the more notches, carvings, cuttings, and defacings, the more I will value this bench.”

“We were very glad to receive the bench, but much to our dismay there is not a single scratch on it,” Horace Hart ’33 complained upon receiving his bench in December 1949. “Can these be from Sever?” The Alumni Association promptly sent a new bench to Hart, this one with substantially more scratches on it.

By Nov. 5, just two weeks after the initial announcement, the Alumni Bulletin released an update on the benches: It had sold 126 out of 150, raising more than $2,000 for the Wadsworth House renovations. The requests continued to pour in, some prompted by the new announcement in the Alumni Bulletin.

In its Dec. 3 issue, the Alumni Association announced that it sold all 150 benches, raising $2,364.50 in total. Beyond the original 150 on offer, the HAA also announced that it had discovered another 100 benches. That discovery allowed it to “open the lists again” to the

many people who had expressed interest in purchasing a bench but had missed their first opportunity.

Requests for the benches started petering out around February 1950, when the Wadsworth House renovations had essentially concluded.

However, some interest lingered: Bertram J. Smith inquired plaintively to HAA secretary F. W. Willett on Feb. 21, 1952. Willett replied that no benches remained. “The little article in the Alumni Bulletin created much more interest than was anticipated and apparently we could have sold ten times the number, had they been available,” Willett wrote. Smith eventually received his bench more than a year later, when the HAA discovered several additional benches in August 1953.

By August 1955, the HAA had finalized the accounting for the Wadsworth House project. According to the final ledger, the HAA had raised $4,572.01 — almost $50,000 today — from a total of 282 benches, an average donation of $16.21 per bench.

More than 50 years after the original article put the benches up for sale, Sever has neither “ancient writing desks” nor “blond, polished desks.” Instead, it has humdrum chairs with attached desks and few scratches or markings, now the norm in university classrooms from Pittsburgh to Paris.

Even though they have less physical evidence of undergraduate presence, those chairs will probably produce nostalgia for us in 50 years from now — and if the HAA sells them off to raise money, they will likely cost more than $15.

Late nights and Lava lamps

“It’s equal parts energizing and tiring,” says Meiling L. Thompson ’22, co-director of Response Peer Counseling, a group of trained undergraduate counselors who specialize in relationship issues, intimate violence, psychological and physical harassment, and sexual assault.

RESPONSE, ECHO, Room 13, Indigo, and Contact make up the five peer counseling organizations on campus. Each group focuses on different aspects of mental health: relationship issues, eating problems, general mental health, identity intersections, and BGLTQ issues, respectively.

The staffers occupy a complicated space — on one hand, they need to manage their own lives and mental health, and on the other, they’ve volunteered to support fellow students through their struggles.

Most peer counselors pursue this work to aid their peers, not as a pre-professional opportunity. They

don’t typically plan on pursuing psychology-related career paths. “The vast majority of people are just here because they want to help people on campus,” Thompson says. “And they think that peer counseling is a really valuable resource.”

Though the position is demanding, there is no lack of interest among undergraduates. ECHO, for instance, gets more qualified applicants for their counselor position every semester than they can accommodate, according to ECHO’s co-director Jenny X. Hong ’23.

Potential counselors have to complete a “robust training,” according to Hong,, and both ECHO and RESPONSE counselors are guided by licensed clinicians in weekly debriefing sessions.

According to Hong, the ideal undergraduate staffer is empathetic, and especially for ECHO they’re also mindful of the way they put things into words, skilled at tone matching, and knowledgeable about

Jennifer luong

Photo by Angela Dela Cruz

eating disorders.

RESPONSE also prioritizes empathy, or as Thompson puts it, “the general philosophy is that anybody can become a really good counselor, as long as their hearts are in it, and the intention is there.” She adds, “I think the first few drop-ins you just constantly feel overwhelmed and you don’t quite know what to do, but that quickly fades.”

Even the most seasoned counselors can struggle with the work. “When people are expressing pain to you, you feel that deeply within yourself. It can really take a toll,” Hong says. But both Hong and Thompson stress how much they care about what they do, and how they want people to utilize the resource.

“Obviously I’m not licensed, I’m not a therapist. But just being another human and sharing space with someone can be so incredibly powerful,” Hong says. “And I feel really honored to be able to have that experience and share those very vulnerable moments with the people I do serve.”

“At the end of the day, every time I take a shift I’m always glad. You learn how to manage your emotions better over time,” Thompson says.

In order to do this, staffers eventually develop what Thompson calls “counselor mode,” during which their focus lies on the advisee and not their own emotions.

Hong admits that at the end of the day she is human, and she recognizes how important it is after difficult shifts to engage in self-care — ECHO allows staffers to take time off whenever they need and works to create a strong community of counselors that actively check in with one

another. Hong says she sleeps with her ringer on, so that she can talk with any staffer who may need to check-in after an especially difficult conversation.

Similarly, Thompson highlights how RESPONSE counselors are a support network for each other. They’re all hyper-aware of the emotional demands of the job. “A lot of us will check in with each other. We’ll text each other after our shifts to make sure that everyone’s okay,” she says. Talking to her fellow staffers gives her energy, and often after a dropin counselors will talk through their own emotions together and “counsel each other.” Of course, they speak minimally about actual conversations they’ve had during drop-ins for privacy purposes.

But even with the emotional toughness of the job, the resounding message Thompson wants people to hear is that they should drop in. “I want people to come in and I don’t want them to think that they’re being a burden on the peer counselor,” she says. “They’re the reason why [peer counseling] exists.”

Although Thompson and Hong are very aware of the significance and impact of their work, they also feel somewhat limited about how they can help. As peer counselors are unlicensed, they have to use ‘non-directive,’ non-prescriptive tactics during counseling, meaning they can’t give actionable next steps beyond additional resources. “That’s a really difficult aspect, especially with the focus that we have with sexual assault,” Thomson says. “There are definitely moments where you don’t want to be nondirective but at the same time I also think that we’re not trained to do that.”

Hong agrees and feels a bit held back by the non-directive, non-judgmental role of being a peer counselor, saying, “Asking reflective questions to stimulate the caller’s own thinking is definitely helpful but still extremely limited. We can’t give advice. We can’t prescribe. We can’t fix the problem.” Hong sometimes sees the role of peer counselors as band-aids that treat the crisis at the surface. “I think that’s something that we all feel as peer counselors: the desire to go deeper.”

Although Thompson and Hong are sometimes frustrated with non-directive counseling, they both agree that it’s often the most appropriate response. “There’s a lot that you can help a dropin with without needing to give them direct advice. But honestly, I understand why that sort of nondirective barrier needs to exist,” Thompson says. “I’m learning that it is very difficult, but at the same time, it gives you an entirely new way of thinking about how to help people with problems and how to support them.”

Regarding their groups’ biggest obstacle, both Thompson and Hong highlighted the issue of location and publicity. Thompson and Hong just want more people to know about their groups, so that people know where to go should they need support.

This semester, ECHO is located in Eliot basement T-24 and RESPONSE is held in Lowell EL-15. Additionally Contact and Room 13 are located in Thayer Basement B-04 and Thayer Basement B-09, respectively. As of publication, Indigo has not announced a location.

“We have a lava lamp,” Hong says. “Stop by!”

From me, in cambridge, with love

Throughout the week, I collect wilting leaves from plants, scraps of colored paper, and tea bags with names like “Honey Chestnut Bonfire” and “Marigold Hibiscus Wonderland” — all the detritus of a world in a constant cycle of use-discard-grow-outgrow-buysell.

On Saturdays or Sundays or even the rare Tuesday afternoon, I sit down and write, first in my chicken scratch handwriting and then transcribed onto my

Christina M. Xiao

laptop in whatever point font means I’ll only have to pay for one page of printing: “Hi.” “I miss you.” “It’s so nice to hear from you!” “How are the roommates?” “As always, I am running out of time.”

The recipients of these words and trinkets are, in no particular order: a girl in France who is the only person I’ve ever trusted without thinking. A boy from Somerville who shares a name with my favorite actor and goes to my school; I haven’t seen his face so anyone I pass by on campus could be him, but

christina m. xiao

I’ll never know. The most lesbian lesbian I’ve ever met. My best friend from pre-k whom I lost and then found again, just a couple miles from home.

We swap poems and custom playlists and bad drawings of fruits and handfuls of stickers. They cannot parse my handwriting. They understand what it’s like to feel like you’re constantly running out of time. They wish things were different but can’t pinpoint exactly why. I love them all, and I try to tell them in the best way I know how: by sending letters into the

nothing in the letters themselves that I can’t replicate in text: e-gift cards to local cafes instead of bags of tea, pictures of my baby plants instead of their dead snippings, actual photos instead of crude drawings.

In fact, there are more things I can send by text than mail: GIFs and emojis and clickable links to funny tweets, to name a few. Not to mention the obvious speed of texting compared to mailing letters — they call it “instant messaging” for a reason, too. Why wait weeks on end for an outdated

They say, “I sat down and put pen to paper for you. I sat down and thought about what I wanted to tell you and narrowed it down to these two or three pages. I wanted to tell you exactly this and I did.” Talk is cheap — especially under T-Mobile’s unlimited data plan. Limited by pen and paper, letters force us to distill every line into the most concentrated version of what we want to convey. They make us more honest, less standoffish. There are things you can only write when you know the response will take weeks to contemplate and pen.

sprawling system of the United States Postal Service and hoping they reach my penpals.

As much as I cherish my penpals, the average lifespan of this kind of relationship is only three to five letters. Life simply moves on faster than the postal system — it’s why we call it snail mail. By the time I read a letter, it’s already outdated, an anachronism like the very medium it was sent through. I moved three times last year in the time it took Somerville Boy to send me his first letter. I sent a letter to French Girl when she was my girlfriend, and when she received it she was already my ex-girlfriend.

I could text these people. I have their numbers. I do text some of them, sending my miscellaneous thoughts on the limits of sleep deprivation and pictures I can’t be bothered to print in color. There’s

letter that might never come? Why put faith into the United States Postal Service when cell towers and satellites are so much more dependable? We don’t even mail important documents anymore; we email or e-sign them.

Still, I keep sending mail. The physicality of letters is valuable to me. In our digital world, texts and DMs and phone calls get buried and eventually deleted when phone storage reaches its limit. Conversations move faster than we can process, and there’s no way to save it all. The world spins, and data is lost.

Meanwhile, the letters I’ve received sit in carefully-crafted piles on my desk, organized by send date and author. They are few and far between enough for me to know them all by heart.

The letters are tangible manifestations of effort and intent.

Letters sent by mail are outdated, yes. But they are snapshots of time, the culmination of a friend’s life between the day they mailed their last letter and the moment they sat down to write this new one. This temporal distance allows each letter to be embedded with the weight of several weeks, or even months. Time flows from the broad past into a sharpened point marked by the send date. The future remains an amorphous unknown to be filled in by the next letter.

As I write every one of my letters, painstakingly condensing thoughts into the crux of the issue and folding origami paper swans, I think about what my penpalling friend might be doing at the same time. Even with the texts we’ve exchanged regarding newlystarted TV shows and anecdotes about neighborhood animals, we don’t really know how the other is doing at the moment. I will send out my letter, the culmination of me at this moment, without knowing who they really are in this same moment. And I will wait weeks on end for the letter sent in return, to know them back.

There are things you can only write when you know the response will take weeks to contemplate and pen.

Are we home yet?

Ifinally decided to take seriously my long-held dream of becoming a teacher and spent my summer teaching middle-schoolers, 7,605 miles from home. I sat in the Zoom room with my co-teacher for lesson planning time, which inevitably devolved into a get-to-know-you time for us.

“I feel like I haven’t aged since the start of the pandemic,” he laughed. “It’s like time has stopped.” He looked up, expecting me to promptly agree.

“No, Ron, I feel like I’ve aged a few years this past year and a half.” His face fell in concern as I tried

to explain myself, to put my experience into words, but they didn’t come. So much had changed. Words and tears evaded me.

When Harvard sent us home in March of 2020, abrupt decisions were made — what belongings to sell, how to spend the last five days on campus, where to use excess BoardPlus. As an international student with American citizenship, I had to make a decision about where to go. My options were to stay on campus, live with my older sister in Chicago, or

Maya S. Bhagat

Graphic by Samanta A. Mendoza-Lagunas

to return to my home in Mumbai. Returning home didn’t make much sense in terms of finishing the semester, and it was a scary prospect to stay alone on an empty campus. I chose Chicago. At the time, everyone thought the virus would pass in two months. I thought I’d get home by July 2020.

was scrolling on her phone when she suddenly put down her food. I wouldn’t have usually noticed, since I knew she often wouldn’t finish her food, but this time I saw her eyebrows scrunch up and her chin crinkle the way it always did when she was about to cry when we were younger. She refused to tell me what was wrong, but for the first time, I made the connection that she wasn’t eating enough because of anxiety. I realized that I needed to look out for her, too.

season approached, the stresses that I had tried to put on the backburner during the summer became impossible to ignore. Covid-19 got worse in the U.S. that winter, and my mother stopped asking us when we were coming home.

It’s September 2021, and I haven’t been home for 20 months.

During the first few months of the pandemic, my sister and I often stayed up late talking. It brought back fond childhood memories of whispering to one another when we stayed up past bedtime. But we were overcome with worry. Things had run out in the grocery stores, and my sister felt responsible for taking care of me. She did everything she could, cooking meals for us, giving me her bed and sleeping on the floor, and introducing me to her graduate student friends, who were also stranded in the U.S.

It was soon clear, though, that she needed parenting too. One sunny morning, Raina and I sat in her bedroom, eating steaming bowls of upma. The room was warm, the food piping hot, and if I closed my eyes, the clink of steel spoons on steel bowls and the temperature made it feel just like breakfast time at home. Raina

My sister’s summer Russian classes were online, and she had graduate exams at the end of that summer. I’d never seen her so stressed. She sought my advice on her problems, which was flattering, but at times overwhelming. I felt ill-equipped to tackle the issues of someone four years older than me and whom I had always seen as more mature than myself. I stepped up, carrying groceries home from the store, which was a 20-minute walk. When my feet grew sore and my back began to hurt, I’d sit down in the summer heat to catch my breath. I tried to imagine the pounding rain typical of the monsoon happening at the moment in Mumbai. But all I could hear was my mother’s voice asking me when I’d be coming home.

Soon it was August, and the time had come for me to decide whether or not to live on campus for the fall semester. I had received permission, but I chose not to go — it seemed like rules would be strict and I was still reeling from my sophomore slump. Sharing a bedroom and house keys with my sister in Chicago wasn’t ideal, but I liked my online classes and it was nice to spend time away from Cambridge. But as the days got shorter and darker and finals

By the time the spring semester rolled around, I was utterly exhausted. I felt like a side character witnessing my sister’s life, so when Harvard called juniors back to campus and two of my blockmates said they would return, I decided to as well. It was eerie to be back on an empty campus and eat meals in our common room. I also had to deal with the fallout from my last 10 months in Chicago; I had ignored my mental health to help my sister, and I had a lot of back pain from lifting groceries and attending class on Zoom. Living apart from her gave me the space to recover and focus on my own needs. We still video-chatted daily. A sense of normalcy returned as we fell into our own routines.

I’ve been at Harvard since the spring, watching all the seasons go by and the shifting tides of the pandemic in the U.S. and in India. As things got better here, they seemed to worsen at home, with vaccination availability entrenching this inequality. My sister and I finally booked tickets to go home this December. I don’t know what awaits me there — reading the Indian news became too painful many months ago, and I know my parents haven’t told my sister and me everything. But I do know that for the first time, I will be returning home, not just as the baby of the family or the younger sister, but as an adult.

I thought I’d get home by July 2020. It’s September 2021, and I haven’t been home for 20 months.