STAFF-ED. Students do a disservice to ourselves and our classmates when we engage halfheartedly in our courses, the Editorial Board writes. It’s up to students and faculty alike to ensure classroom environments are worth engagement.
Engineering and Applied Sciences — said limits on indirect cost reimbursements would put critical research and administrative teams on the chopping block.
After a Feb. 7 order from the National Institutes of Health attempted to slash federal funding for overhead expenses tied to research projects, researchers across Harvard feared their work was in limbo.
The NIH awarded Harvard more than $488 million in grants in fiscal year 2024, $135 million of which covered indirect expenses. Under the proposed limits on overhead costs, which have been temporarily blocked by a federal judge, that total — which supports everything from animal labs to the regulatory bodies that oversee clinical trials — could have dropped to $31 million.
In statements and interviews with The Crimson, nine life sciences researchers at Harvard — from the Harvard School of Public Health, Harvard Medical School, Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and School of
The Feb. 7 directive drew a sharp and immediate response from Harvard administrators — frequent communications from department heads and emails from University leadership, including Harvard President Alan M. Garber ’76.
And on Thursday, Vice Provost for Research John H. Shaw offered nervous SEAS and FAS faculty a meeting to discuss the funding cuts face-to-face.
During the meeting, Shaw — who was joined by SEAS Dean David C. Parkes and Jeff W. Lichtman, dean of the FAS’ Science division — said he worried about the state of Harvard’s research if indirect reimbursements were cut, but urged faculty members to continue their research without pause, according to applied physics professor David C. Bell, who attended the meeting.
But when Bell asked Shaw and other administrators about the magnitude of the
impact the order would have on staffing and research at Harvard, they didn’t have an answer. “It’s unclear,” they said, according to Bell.
Shared Infrastructure
The federal order would have forced Harvard to charge the NIH at most 15 cents in overhead costs for every dollar spent on research — a significant drop from the 69 cents the University currently charges. Unlike grants, which are won by individual principal investigators, indirect expenses are distributed by Harvard administrators from a general pool of money awarded by the NIH. Indirect expenses fund the rent, equipment, and utilities needed to maintain research projects. They also fund oversight teams like the Institutional Review Board, which is responsible for approving any studies involving human subjects.
tions across the board, which will immediately slow down research projects, present potential health and safety risks, and even jeopardize national security interests,” Shaw wrote.
Just hours before the lawsuit was filed, attorney generals in 22 states — led by Massachusetts Attorney Andrea J. Campbell — separately sued the Trump administration over the order. A federal
BY DIEGO GARCÍA MORENO AND SUMMER E. ROSE CRIMSON STAFF WRITERS
The Cambridge City Council voted 8-1 to approve a proposal eliminating single family zoning city-wide in a meeting Monday night, capping off more than a year of laborious dealmaking between activist residents, experts, and councilors in an landmark attempt to face the city’s housing crisis.
The final measure allows four-story buildings to be constructed by-right on all residential properties in Cambridge, and six-story buildings for inclusionary housing projects under certain limitations.
Around a third of residential land in Cambridge only allowed for one- or two-family homes before Monday — meaning thousands of properties are now eligible to increase their total height by several stories, or become apartments, without going before the planning board for approval.
“It was a remarkable team effort from everyone across that we were able to get almost consensus,” Councilor Burhan Azeem said in an interview after the vote.
Though councilors celebrated the passage of the measure as a successful compromise, most acknowledged they would have preferred a different version.
“Everybody got something they want-
ed, but nobody got everything they wanted,” Vice Mayor Marc C. McGovern said.
The original proposal would have legalized six-story residential buildings across the city, but faced pushback from some residents who said that it would disrupt the character of residential neighborhoods that were more used to one- and two-story homes.
In response, councilors added amendments that cut the number of stories legalized by-right to four, and added conditions — including a minimum lot size of 5,000 square feet — to constructing the next two stories. The changes helped it attain overwhelming support from the council on Monday, bringing it across the finish line.
“I personally wouldn’t have, and couldn’t have supported the original petition,” Councilor Patricia M. Nolan ’80 said. “I was happy to discuss and work with folks to say, let’s put in some amendments to make it something I could support,” she added.
Despite what many described as the historic significance of the measure, most councilors acknowledged their work to make the city more affordable was far from finished.
Before casting her vote to pass the ordinance, Cambridge Mayor E. Denise Simmons described the action as “adding another tool in the toolbox of affordability.”
“For too long, exclusionary zoning has put up barriers — barriers that have kept
people out, that have restricted growth and have made it hard for families to put down roots,” Simmons said.
Since the 1950s, many American cities have seen an accumulation of increasingly complicated limits on the construction of home and apartment buildings, which has significantly dragged down housing production. In the Boston metro area, that has contributed to a dire housing shortage — driving rent prices to historic highs that policymakers are now racing to bring down.
Reducing such zoning regulations on housing development has been one, often contested, way of increasing the local housing supply and ultimately trying to end the housing crisis.
Cambridge’s decision to end single-family zoning makes the city a “role model” in that movement, said Simmons — as the city has frequently been on other progressive priorities, too, including eliminating parking minimums and establishing a city-wide network of bike lanes.
After the vote, councilors commended their action as trend-setting and urged other municipalities to follow suit.
“We have to push neighboring towns to follow our lead and do much more than they’re currently doing,” Nolan said. “We cannot solve the housing crisis alone.”
DONALD TRUMP IMPOSES 25 PERCENT TARIFFS ON FOREIGN STEEL AND ALUMINUM
President Trump announced 25 percent tariffs on global metals, re-upping a policy from his first term. The move came after intense lobbying from domestic steelmakers, whose businesses faced intense competition against cheaper manufacturers overseas. According to the New York Times, industries that use metal in their products are frustrated with the policy. The reimposed tariffs will increase their costs of production, which could impact prices of sale for consumer goods. The move is part of President Trump’s recent tariff policies against China, Canada, Mexico,
US AND RUSSIA TO BEGIN NEGOTIATIONS TO SETTLE UKRAINE WAR
After a call with President Vladimir Putin of Russia, President Trump signaled that the two governments were beginning a negotiation to end the Ukraine War. It was the first conversation between the two leaders and a critical step in ending a three-year-long war. For President Trump, the call was a step in fulfilling one of his most significant campaign promises to resolve the conflict. According to the New York Times, following the announcement of the call, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky clarified that he would be a part of the path to peace. Still, the Ukrainians are looking in from the outside. In his first term, President Trump repeatedly mentioned his positive relationship with President Putin.
ELON MUSK PROPOSES ACQUISITION OF OPENAI
According to the New York Times, a group of investors headed by Elon Musk made a $97.4 billion bid to buy the controlling nonprofit of OpenAI. The investors include Vy Capital and Xai, Elon Musk’s Artificial Intelligence company. The massive bid is Musk’s most recent effort to attack the organization and is representative of a rivalry between Musk and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman to control the future of AI. Altman promptly rejected the bid despite not having formally seen its terms. The bid comes after OpenAI raised a new round of funding that reached $300 billion. The success of the fundraising would make OpenAI one of the most valuable private companies in the world despite still being a nonprofit.
PHILADELPHIA EAGLES
DEMOLISH KANSAS CITY CHIEFS IN SUPER BOWL
On Sunday, the Philadelphia Eagles defeated the Kansas City Chiefs in Super Bowl LIX, 40-22. The win was spearheaded by the Eagles’ suffocating defense, which held Kansas City scoreless for the entirety of the first half. The victory ended the Chiefs’ quest for a Super Bowl three-peat, an achievement no team has accomplished since the NFL named the Super Bowl as its championship game. For his efforts, Eagles’ quarterback Jalen Hurts was named Super Bowl MVP.
Associate
Start every week with a preview of what’s on the agenda around Harvard University
Friday 2/14
LOVE IS EVERYWHERE: A VALENTINE’S DAY CELEBRATION FOR ALL
Harvard College Women’s Center, 5 p.m.
Celebrate Valentine’s Day at the Harvard College Women’s Center with flowers, chocolate, cupcakes, and more. Don’t forget to stop by the Harvard COOP at 3 p.m. to pick up a free bouquet, or build your own bouquet at a florist pop-up at the Barker Cafe!
Saturday 2/15
HARVARD UNIVERSITY WOMEN’S TENNIS VS. UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN
The Murr Center, 12 - 3 p.m.
After a great start to the 2024 fall season, come watch the Harvard University Women’s Tennis team take on the University of Wisconsin at the Murr athletics center.
Sunday 2/16
SPOTLIGHT TOUR: OUT OF THIS WORLD, WITH ARIELLE FROMMER ’25
Harvard Art Museums, 11 - 11:50 a.m.
Astrophysics student Arielle Frommer will lead a conversation exploring the world of art and astronomy in works by Claude Monet and László Moholy-Nagy. The event is free and open to the public — stop by if you want to learn about how studying astrophysics can enhance artistic perspectives.
Monday 2/17
TOM ACITELLI AT THE HARVARD BOOKSTORE
Harvard Book Store, 7 p.m.
Join author Tom Acitelli in conversation with award-winning writer and publisher Andy Crouch as they discuss Acitelli’s upcoming book, “The Golden Age of Beer: A 52-Week Guide to the Perfect Beer for Every Week of the Year.”
Tuesday 2/18
THE ECONOMIST AS DETECTIVE
Institute of Politics at Harvard Kennedy School, 6:00-7:00 p.m.
Join 2023 Economics Nobel Prize winner Claudia Goldin for a discussion focused on education, labor markets, and unemployment. Goldin will describe the importance of research in her work as an economic historian.
Wednesday 2/19
FLP SPEAKER SERIES: HLS FOOD LAW AND POLICY CLINIC GOALS & PROJECTS
Richard A. and Susan F. Smith Campus Center, Mt. Auburn Room, 4:30-5:30 p.m. Explore the ways the food system is influenced by law and policy with Clinical Fellow Kristen McEnrow from the Harvard Food Law and Policy Clinic.
Thursday
FUN IN THE SNOW
Friday 2/21
widespread political support for stripping universities of their funding, and a 2017 endowment tax as a road map, an endowment tax hike could be passed with remarkable speed.
Rep. Mike V. Lawler (R-N.Y.), a loyal ally of President Donald Trump, became the latest Republican lawmaker to introduce an endowment tax on Friday, proposing an 8.6 percentage point tax hike for Harvard and other wealthy colleges and universities.
Though the proposition barely made headlines, buried under massive research funding cuts to the National Institute of Health and a federal hiring freeze, an endowment tax increase of that scale could hurt Harvard more than any of the previous financial penalties combined.
Lawler’s bill is one of two endowment tax bills introduced since Congress went into session Jan. 3. They build on previous threats from Trump and the House Committee on Education and the Workforce to drastically raise the current 1.4 percent endowment tax.
Harvard has lobbied hard against endowment tax proposals on both the federal and state level in recent years. Now, with a Republican trifecta in Washington,
University spokesperson Jason A. Newton wrote in a statement that “raising the endowment tax would inflict harm directly on our students and faculty – it would diminish our institutional capacity to support financial aid and research, and it would impair our ability to hire and retain faculty.”
‘Deeply Concerned’
Harvard’s endowment — the largest in higher education — has long been a target of conservative lawmakers, but recent developments signal a growing push to significantly increase taxes on university investments.
Before being selected as Trump’s running mate, then-Senator J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) introduced a bill in Dec. 2023 that proposed raising the tax on endowments from 1.4 percent to 35 percent for private educational institutions whose assets exceeded $10 billion.
Vance said the bill would strip funds used for “DEI and woke insanity.” But at Harvard, the tax would directly affect funding for financial aid.
“Over half our undergraduates received aid, and those students paid less than $16,000 a year on average to attend,” Newton wrote.
“An increase in the endowment tax
would divert those funds for other purposes, making college less affordable, not more.”
The current endowment tax rate of 1.4 percent was established under the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, enacted by a Republican-controlled House and Senate during the first Trump administration.
Prior to 2017, private universities were exempt from such federal income taxes, allowing them to reinvest all endowment returns, funding programs like financial aid, faculty hiring, and research.
The TCJA marked the first time that a federal excise tax was imposed on the investment income of large private university endowments.
When the 1.4 percent tax was passed in 2017, then-Harvard President Drew Gilpin Faust said she was “deeply concerned” it would hurt research and student support
services.
“The provision will constrain the resources that enable us to provide the financial aid that makes college more affordable and accessible and to undertake the inquiries that yield discoveries, cures, innovation and economic growth,” Faust wrote in a 2017 statement to The Crimson.
With the act set to expire on Dec. 31 and Republicans expected to preserve and extend its policies, it is almost certain a new endowment tax policy will be introduced by conservative legislators on Capitol Hill this calendar year.
When it is — if the proposals trickling in from Republican lawmakers over the past few years are any indication — the current 1.4 percent rate will look like pennies. With proposals ranging from 10 percent to 35 percent, the Republican push for an endowment tax hike marks a dramatic escalation in the financial attacks on private universities like Harvard.
Significant Cuts
Even at the low end, if Harvard gets hit with a 10 percent tax rate for the last fiscal year, during which it generated $5.1 billion in endowment returns, the University would pay approximately $510 million in taxes to the federal government — far more than the $71.5 million it would pay under the 2017 law.
Should such a law pass, Harvard would be forced to pay 8 percent of its 2024 annual operating budget in taxes.
And if Harvard’s endowment maintained its 9.54 percent average annual return since 2014, the University would pay a total of
$7.56 billion in taxes to the federal government by 2034 under a 10 percent tax rate. Should the tax rate increase to 35 percent, as Vance proposed, Harvard would pay $1.79 billion in taxes for fiscal year 2024 — 27.9 percent of its annual operating revenue.
Because around 80 percent of Harvard’s endowment is restricted — meaning it cannot be reallocated by University officials — the tax would also disproportionately impact the programs funded by unrestricted income: primarily financial aid, research, faculty hiring, and other critical operations like building maintenance.
In the last fiscal year, the University spent more than $749 million in financial aid, including $250 million for undergraduates.
‘Billions and Billions of Dollars’
Unlike other Republican plans to punish Harvard financially for what they see as negligence in the face of antisemitism — that range from Title VI investigations to eliminating accreditation all together — an endowment tax is already a proven strategy.
It also does not require complex legislation.
Because the current tax rate is codified in the Internal Revenue Code of 1986, a hike in the endowment tax rate to 10 percent requires a one-sentence bill that states: “Section 4968(a) of the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 is amended by striking ‘1.4 percent’ and inserting 10 percent’.”
Excluding the proposals by both Vance and Lawler, at least three other Republican legislators have introduced bills that tax
endowment earnings in the last two years. Now, those proposals also have support from the White House.
In a 2023 campaign video, President Donald Trump said he would start a new online free university with the profits from taxing private University endowments, specifically calling out protests at Harvard.
“Americans have been horrified to see students and faculty at Harvard and other once-respected universities expressing support for the savages and jihadists who attacked Israel,” Trump said.
“We will take the billions and billions of dollars that we will collect by taxing, fining, and suing excessively large private university endowments, and we will then use that money to endow a new institution called the American Academy,” Trump added.
While Trump can exercise executive authority to control federal agencies and departments — power he has used to freeze federal hiring and research funding — altering the federal tax code requires legislative action by Congress. But, according to NYU finance professor David L. Yermack ’85, support from the Trump administration would likely accelerate efforts to pass an endowment tax.
“You have a new government that really hates elite universities,” said Yermack, a former Crimson managing editor.
“It wouldn’t surprise me if they start looking for ways to tax Ivy League schools, not just through the endowment, but every which way you could think of,” he added.
avani.rai@thecrimson.com saketh.sundar@thecrimson.com
Breitbart co-founder Steve Bannon called on President Donald Trump to “cut out all the money” flowing to elite universities at the Harvard Conservative and Republican Student Conference on Saturday. The all-day conference — hosted by conservative and Republican student clubs at four of Harvard’s schools, as well as conservative campus publication The Harvard Salient — featured panels of right-wing think tank fellows and legal scholars, including embattled University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School professor Amy L. Wax. Just steps from Harvard’s campus, Bannon took credit for Trump’s fusillade of orders restricting federal funding to universities. He said he had told Trump “we have to go into these elite institutions” and return them to “meritocracy.”
“Once you cut the money off, for them, that’s a bitch slap, right?” he said. “They’ll start paying attention. You have to root it out.”
Saturday’s event was sponsored by hedge fund billionaire Kenneth C. Griffin ’89, a Harvard megadonor whose name adorns the College’s financial aid office and the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. Other sponsors included the Heritage Foundation, the rightwing think tank that developed Project 2025, and the Job Creators Network, a conservative business group that backed hydroxychloroquine as a Covid-19 cure.
Sharply dressed conference guests sat around banquet tables in a ballroom on the third floor of the Charles Hotel. Some were graduate students. At least two attendees from Quincy, Mass., showed up after hearing the event advertised on Bannon’s War Room podcast. At a panel on immigration policy, Wax, who has long flirted with white nationalist rhetoric, said “it’s important to have a European majority.”
Two moderators — Harvard Law School student Dean Sherman and Harvard Republican Club president Leo A. Koerner ’26 — posed questions submitted by audience members. Reading one audience question, Koerner asked Wax, “How important is main-
taining America’s white majority for our cultural cohesion and further success?”
A gust of laughter swept the room.
“I think our nation needs a demographically dominant group that represents its culture,” Wax said. “That group should be numerically and otherwise dominant — not exclusive, but dominant.”
The European cultural origin of many Americans, Wax said, is “the secret sauce of our success.”
Wax, who remains a tenured professor at Penn, is currently on suspension with half pay for making offensive remarks and inviting a white supremacist to speak in her class. She has sued the university for racial discrimination, breach of contract, and violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act.
George Mason University economics professor Garett Jones, who sat on the panel with Wax, proposed a “points-based” immigration system that would prioritize migrants from countries with higher savings rates, lower corruption metrics, and higher standardized test scores.
“Immigration policy, fortunately, can be used to dilute the
influence of Americans who are likely to be in that mediocre-to-negative contribution category,” Jones said.
“Bringing in new Americans is a way to make America better by changing the composition of the nation through bringing in folks who have the traits that would make our nation better.”
In his keynote address and a subsequent question-and-answer period, Bannon asserted his populist bona fides and took his weekslong feud with tech billionaire Elon Musk to the podium. Echoing what has become a favorite refrain, Bannon denounced “the apartheid state of Silicon Valley” — an implicit dig at Musk, who grew up in South Africa.
As the two men compete for ideological influence in Trump’s movement and administration, Bannon has found himself at odds with Musk over tax and immigration proposals. Musk emerged in December as a fervent defender of the H-1B visa program, which allows high-skilled immigrants, including many of his companies’ employees, to work in the U.S. But Bannon on Saturday also praised Musk’s efforts to tear down what he described as the “administrative state.” Musk —
who helms the quasi-governmental Department of Government Efficiency — has canceled diversity programs, issued mass buyout offers, and tried to dismantle the U.S. Agency for International Development.
“DOGE is a weapon. It’s an armor-piercing shell,” Bannon said.
“Just like Trump, DOGE is a bluntforce instrument, and it gives blunt-force trauma.”
Bannon said Democrats had shown “they don’t care about the people.”
“The Democrats are so messed up with the donor class and the credential class. You see — over here, that’s what they’re training: the credential class,” he said. “We took the working class.”
UNIVERSITY. Harvard will keep its protections for LGBTQ students in the Sexual Misconduct Policy.
BY ANNABEL M. YU CRIMSON STAFF WRITER
Harvard will keep its policy protections against sexual misconduct based on gender identity and sexual orientation, despite the Department of Education’s recent announcement that it will do away with the Biden administration’s mandated protections for LGBTQ students.
The University’s current sexual harassment policies consists of two policies: the Interim Title IX Sexual Harassment Policy and the Interim Other Sexual Misconduct Policy. The former complies with federal and state laws — including the Department of Education’s directives — while the latter includes University regulations outside the scope of federal legislation.
The Department of Education sent a Jan. 31 “Dear Colleague” letter to universities across the country clarifying that educational institutions must abide by the Title IX regulations from Trump’s first term. This officially renders the Biden administration’s Title IX rules, which prohibit discrimination and harassment on the basis of gender identity and sexual orientation, obsolete.
Biden’s Title IX regulations faced several hurdles, including a July 2024 injunction from a Kansas District Court and legal challenges in 25 other states. A Kentucky federal judge ultimately struck down the changes on Jan. 9. According to Nicole M. Merhill, the University Title IX Coordinator and Director of the Office for Gender Equity, Harvard spent the past summer working to update their existing policies in accordance with Biden’s rules. The revisions, however, were never implemented.
“It should be no shock that the Department of Education issued the ‘Dear Colleague letter,” Susan C. Stone, a Title IX attorney, said. “It should also be noted that many schools around the country never changed the regulations to conform with the Biden regulations.”
“So from our perspective, not
much changed,” she added. In accordance with the letter, the University will continue to hold live hearings with cross-examination conducted by the complainant and respondent’s personal advisors — a process which some have called disadvantageous and re-traumatizing for victims.
Keith Altman, an attorney specializing in Title IX and student defense, said the Biden administration’s attempt to do away with the requirement for live hearings with cross-examination “was a substantial degradation” that “fortunately has been done away with.”
David J. Grimaldi, a defense attorney in Boston who has experience defending students in sexual misconduct cases, said that live hearings with cross-examination “can reveal important aspects of a complainant’s allegation that are important for decision makers to understand.”
“That said, there should always be resources available to complainants of sexual assault, and nothing about this process should discourage people who wish to make a claim of sexual assault from making that claim,” Grimaldi added.
Unlike the University’s procedure to evaluate complaints that fall under Title IX, complainants and respondents under the Other Sexual Misconduct Policy are subject to interviews with an investigative team but are not evaluated with a live hearing or cross-examination.
But the policies were not completely unaltered. Harvard changed its definition of sexual harassment in one of its policies — the Interim Title IX Sexual Harassment Policy — to abide by Trump’s Jan. 20 executive order that denies recognition of gender identity.
In compliance with the order, “harassment based on sexual ori-
entation and/or gender identity” has been removed from the definition of sexual harassment in the University’s Interim Title IX Sexual Harassment policy.
But harassment based on sexual orientation and gender identity will continue to be prohibited by the Interim Other Sexual Misconduct Policy, as indicated by a footnote added to the Title IX policy on Feb. 4.
Grimaldi said it is important for transgender students to be aware of “other policies under which they can seek relief.”
“At many schools, there will be other policies that might capture the conduct that the new Title IX regulations under President Trump do not capture,” Grimaldi said.
Harvard adopted its Interim Other Sexual Misconduct Policy in Aug. 2020, which effectively protects students against harassment that does not fall under the jurisdiction of Trump-era Ti-
tle IX policies. The University’s two-policy structure allows for the protection of University affiliates against harassment based on gender identity and sexual orientation, while also complying with federal law.
Rosie P. Couture ’26, a member of the Harvard Feminist Coalition, called the University’s two-policy structure “messy” and “frustrating.”
“Even if it seems like, ‘Oh, another policy is going to overlap and protect,’ I think any indication that Harvard is going to fold in and cave in to the demands of the Trump administration is scary and frightening and an act of injustice,” Couture said.
Merhill wrote in a statement the “Interim Other Sexual Misconduct policy maintains protections for our community that are consistent with other laws and policies, including Massachusetts state law.”
Ruth K. O’Meara-Costello ’02,
BY WYETH RENWICK
Harvard University Health Services indefinitely postponed a panel on LGBTQ care at Harvard due to uncertainty about the implications of President Donald Trump’s executive orders targeting transgender individuals.
Maegan von Rohr, Director of the Office of BGLTQ Student Life, was set to moderate the Feb. 7 virtual discussion between representatives from Harvard University Health Services’ LGBTQ+ Care Committee, Member Services, and the Patient Advocate on resources for Harvard affiliates at HUHS. The day before the event was scheduled to occur, HUHS sent an invitation to the BGLTQ Student Life mailing list and publicized the event on the Harvard College Office of BGLTQ Student Life Facebook page.
But on Friday afternoon — less than two hours before the panel was scheduled to begin — HUHS emailed the BGLTQ Student Life mailing list that the event had been postponed.
“We have received several questions surrounding the recent executive orders and how they may impact care at the University,” HUHS wrote in the email. “We are currently working to understand any potential implications, with a commitment to providing you with up-to-date information.” The postponement comes amid a Trump administration
crackdown on gender-affirming care across the country. Trump signed an executive order Jan. 28 stating that the federal government would not “fund, sponsor, promote, assist, or support the so-called ‘transition’ of a child from one sex to another” for individuals under the age of nineteen.
According to the Harvard University Student Health Program website, Harvard’s health insurance plans for students “cover gender-affirming services,” including hormone therapy and
“We postponed the panel in light of the recent executive orders and are planning to reschedule soon,” Harvard spokesperson Tiffanie Green wrote in a statement.
The postponement is Harvard’s latest attempt to account for Trump’s executive orders targeting trans individuals. Two days before the panel was postponed, Harvard removed its inclusion policy for trans athletes from its website in response to an executive order banning trans women from participating in school and
surgery. The HUHS primary care team also provides consultations for hormone therapy and referrals for gender-affirming surgery. Trump has also directed federal agencies not to fund institutions that distinguish between gender identity and sex assigned at birth, mandating in a Jan. 20 executive order that “federal funds shall not be used to promote gender ideology.”
college-level women’s events.
“Harvard University Health Services is committed to supporting the health and wellness needs of our LGBTQ community,” Green wrote. “As always, we will continue to closely monitor all announcements related to patient care.”
a private practice attorney based in Cambridge who has experience litigating in Title IX and student conduct, said that the Title IX regulations are a “floor” and “not a ceiling.”
“Schools have to forbid discrimination based on sex under Title IX. If they want to also forbid discrimination based on sexual orientation, I think they can do that,”
O’Meara-Costello said.
O’Meara-Costello said universities “have to comply” with the Trump administration’s regulations because, if they don’t, “they risk losing federal funding.” The University is currently facing cuts to funding from the National Institutes of Health for indirect research expenses, though the plan has been temporarily blocked in court. The Trump administration is locked in other legal battles over its attempts to ax funding for diversity initiatives and international aid.
“This is an administration that is hostile to higher education and perfectly likely to try to pull funding if given an excuse to do that,” O’Meara-Costello added. The University’s procedures for evaluating and investigating sexual harassment complaints also remain unchanged, according to Merhill.
While Harvard’s policies continue to protect LGBTQ students from harassment, the Department of Education’s letter comes during a period filled with executive orders targeted at higher education institutions to curb diversity, equity, and inclusion programs and ban transgender students from competing in women’s sports.
“This is a presidential administration that I think is unlike anything that I’ve seen in my lifetime. They’re clearly very against anything that they term to be DEI,” O’Meara-Costello said. “I don’t feel like I could totally predict even what kinds of steps they might try to take to prevent private colleges from guaranteeing their students freedom from discrimination.”
“I think this is the beginning of a really dark time for the United States, and it could be a very dark time for Harvard too, if Harvard doesn’t stand up and protect its students,” Couture said.
BY KATIE B. TIAN CRIMSON STAFF WRITER
Harvard University Dining Services walked back spring 2025 changes to its weekend dining hall menus on Tuesday after students complained that the new options were “junk food.”
HUDS introduced the “Pub Night” theme, serving mozzarella sticks and burgers on Fridays and pizza and chicken tenders on Saturdays, in an attempt to draw students back to dining halls on the weekends.
But outcry among some undergraduates prompted a swift about-face.
“Effective immediately, we are transitioning back to the old menus and style of service, to include traditional hot entrees, starches and vegetables,” HUDS spokesperson Crista Martin wrote in an emailed statement on Tuesday afternoon. She added that HUDS made the switch after receiving “feedback from some number of students who did not appreciate the menus and wished us to return to the previous dinner formats.”
Martin wrote in a previous statement on Friday that the changes were designed to serve students “some of their favorite menu items on a night when they might normally head into the Square to enjoy these same foods.” She added that the changes were designed to help students save money and keep dining halls lively.
Dining hall attendance was higher than at the same time last year, according to Martin’s Tuesday statement, which noted that the Pub Night menu drew compliments from some students.
But prior to the reversal, many students aired their dissatisfaction with the new menus online and in interviews with The Crimson.
Somto M. Unini ’26 said that she thought the Pub Night menu was “fun” but lacked nutritious options.
“Dinner, I feel, is the meal that HUDS does make like an actual meal — like entree, vegetable, lots of nutritional variety and availability,” Unini said. “And I don’t know if this food is doing that.”
One post with more than 400 upvotes read, “HUDS tonight is giving school lunch pre michelle obama” — invoking the former first lady’s efforts to improve the nutritional standards of school lunches.
Some students said they were particularly frustrated by the limited options for students with dietary restrictions.
Arjun Nageswaran ’25, who is vegetarian, said on Saturday that the current selection “makes it difficult to find a nice warm meal when your only choices are between mozzarella sticks and burgers.”
Taj S. Gulati ’25, sitting in the Eliot House dining hall for dinner on Saturday, pointed to his vegan friend and said, “That guy is just eating like a bowl of black beans every day. It’s insane how bad it is.”
Martin wrote on Friday that in response to student complaints HUDS staff recently updated the weekend menu to include a hot vegetable in the Friday entrée line and a gluten-free pizza option on Saturday upon request. Nageswaran said he thought students might appreciate having more snack options — but that this semester’s changes had gone too far.
“It seems they might have gone a little bit in the extreme end, where they replaced the actual entrees with the junk food items, so I think trying to find a balance there might be good,” he said.
“The other day it was like chicken fingers, chicken tenders for lunch. There was chicken tenders for dinner,” Gulati said. “I can’t do this. It’s so much fried food.” But multiple students said they missed the Nashville hot chicken sandwich that HUDS used to serve on Friday nights — which was recently discontinued — and requested that HUDS reintroduce it.
“It was the one item that we’d look forward to like three, four days in advance,” Sungjoo Yoon ’27 said. Martin wrote in her Tuesday email that HUDS would return to serving the sandwich on Fridays.
“Because we plan menus and procure ingredients three weeks in advance, we will make this transition as expeditiously as possible but ask for student patience as we complete the switch,” she wrote.
Some researchers said they worried the overhead limits would cut the flow of money to specialized facilities and resources that are shared across labs.
Joan S. Brugge, a professor at HMS, wrote in an email that her lab hosted data on Harvard-wide servers and relied on the Countway Library for access to proprietary scientific reports — shared resources, she said, that would be affected first if Trump’s order took effect.
“If the indirect costs are cut dramatically, we would still have salary for research staff and funding to buy supplies, but the University would have to cut services that are essential to carry out the research and we would be crippled,” she wrote.
Richard M. Losick — a retired HMS professor whose lab relied on NIH funding for more than five decades — said animal facilities, like the mice lab under the BioLabs, were particularly vulnerable because of their status as shared resources for researchers across Harvard.
Some research centers at Harvard extend their services to researchers for a fee — a model that could quickly be tested under the Feb. 7 directive.
“Most of our money comes from indirect costs of research grants. We provide the equipment and the expertise for servicing research grants,” said
Bell, the computer science professor who leads the Center for Nanoscale Systems. “So my biggest concern is to make sure that we do not lose any staff because of these cuts.”
Since 2009, more than 2,300 published papers have used the Center for Nanoscale Systems’ facilities.
Louise Trakimas, a research assistant at the Electron Microscopy Core Facility, said the funding shortages labs could face if the order passed would have directly challenged the use of her team’s services.
“We aren’t relying on any NIH grants because we’re a feefor-service facility, but it’s going to trickle down to us,” she said. “Because if people aren’t getting their funding, they’re not going to be able to afford to use our services, so it will affect us.”
‘Dismantling the System’
Indirect funding awarded by the NIH also covers oversight bodies at Harvard that manage research and ensure compliance with federal regulations. Those include Harvard’s institutional review board — a federally mandated body responsible for approving any studies involving human subjects at the University — and the Environmental Health and Safety Office, which oversees research involving hazardous chemicals.
A cut to indirect reimburse -
ments would directly threaten the ability of these two bodies to oversee research at Harvard, Shaw wrote in a declaration accompanying a Sunday lawsuit filed by thirteen colleges — but not Harvard — against the order.
HMS professor Jeremy M. Wolfe said the loss of indirect cost recovery could require Harvard and affiliated hospitals to furlough staff in offices that manage grant applications, ensure research follows federal regulations and ethical guidelines, and submit compliance reports.
“If you start dismantling the system, then it would become very difficult to apply for the new grants that are required on a continuing basis to keep your work going,” he said.
Shaw wrote in his declaration that the loss of indirect funds could force the University to cut staffing at its IRB.
“That would in turn lead to substantial delays in critical research that relies on human subjects, including projects funded by NIH,” he wrote.
HSPH professor Sarah Fortune said the order’s passing would challenge her lab’s ability to provide privacy measures for human subjects in her research on tuberculosis.
“Would it stop tomorrow?” Fortune said. “No, probably, because we’d limp along for a little while and try to figure out what the offramp looks like.”
But she said her research
would quickly become unsustainable without the indirect cost recovery that funds containment labs that conduct infectious disease research and regulatory bodies that protect data security.
“Infrastructure required to do what we do safely and at the highest level is so complicated that — in the absence of indirect cost-supported infrastructure — I do not think that we would be able to do at all what we do,” she said. “There is no halfway.”
Dianne Bourque, a healthcare attorney at the Boston law firm Holland & Knight, said
that when research loses funding, universities face a choice: cover the costs out of pocket, or trim the study down to use only the more limited funds.
But Bourque said that many cases may be all-or-nothing. Studies follow specific protocols approved by federal authorities, and those protocols determine the contractual obligations between researchers and human subjects. If researchers are unable to adhere to the determined contract, projects may simply shut down, according to Bourque.
Even the process of closing
an experiment poses challenges. “A bunch of sick patients have volunteered to have an intervention of some sort — like get a device implanted in them or swallow something that’s untested to see if it helps them,” Bourque said. “Now that you can’t carry out the study the way you had planned scientifically and budgeted, you’ve got to figure out what to do, because those people can’t just sit in limbo.”
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judge blocked the order from going into effect in the states which co-signed the lawsuit and set a hearing for Feb. 21.
The NIH’s Friday order sought to slash funding for maintenance, utilities, laboratory equipment, and other indirect expenses associated with research projects. If it had
not been blocked in Massachusetts, Harvard would have been forced to charge the NIH at most 15 cents in overhead costs for every dollar spent on research — a significant decrease from the 69 cents the University currently charges.
The NIH covered $135 million in indirect cost expenses from Harvard researchers in fiscal year 2024, according to Shaw. Under the new limits, Harvard would have received only $31 million, he wrote. Over the next five years, Shaw estimated Harvard would lose $590 million relative to anticipated levels.
Shaw’s declaration follows Harvard President Alan M. Garber ’76’s sharp rebuke against the directive in a Sunday email to Harvard affiliates.
The Monday filing struck many of the same themes as Garber’s email, which described
the NIH order as a threat to vital research. But Harvard’s choice not to sign onto the lawsuit lets other schools lead the charge in combating the directive.
“NIH’s extraordinary attempt to disrupt all existing and future grants not only poses an immediate threat to the national research infrastructure but will also have a long-lasting impact on the country’s research capabilities,” the plaintiffs wrote.
The plaintiffs took particular aim at the NIH’s effort to set a universal cap on indirect cost reimbursements, writing that Congress had instructed the NIH to account for “each institution’s unique cost structures and grants.”
The campaign to set a cap on indirect cost reimbursements is a second try for the Trump administration. In 2017, Trump unsuccessfully attempted to
implement a 10 percent cap on indirect costs.
In a Sunday interview on Air Force One, Trump targeted Harvard in an explanation of his administration’s decision to pursue the cut again.
“Why are we giving money to Harvard when it’s got a $50 million endowment?” Trump asked. “And yet they don’t use that endowment to help their students.”
Shaw wrote that Harvard’s endowment would not offset lost federal support for indirect costs, as 70 percent of the endowment is restricted to “donor-designated purposes.”
“Harvard is not legally permitted to use those funds to cover research infrastructure costs,” Shaw wrote.
Former Harvard Medical School Dean Jeffrey S. Flier called the cut a “moronic approach” to tighten federal spending and said that it would
impede critical scientific research.
“I can assure you, there would be people who would not have jobs,” he said. “There would be labs that would be closed down, there would be facilities that would no longer exist or would have to function in a different way.”
Friday’s order, Flier said, was an example of the Trump administration’s rapid-fire campaign against higher education — a campaign whose effects Harvard and its peers have struggled to contain.
“They have the capacity to do tremendous damage to Harvard, broadly speaking, and all these other institutions, and they have the ability to do it with legal mechanisms,” he said.
ANTIGUA FROM PAGE 1
“The people of Antigua and Barbuda seek not symbolic gestures, but real engagement and meaningful action that befits the benefits that Harvard derived,” he wrote. In an interview, Sanders advocated for a “program of exchange” between Harvard and the University of the West Indies. He specifically called on Harvard to collaborate with UWI on climate disaster research and to provide high-achieving students from Antigua and Barbuda with scholarships to study at Harvard. University spokesperson Sarah E. Kennedy O’Reilly declined to comment on Sanders’ demands or on the contents of his letter to Garber.
In a statement, Kennedy O’Reilly cited the University’s existing partnerships with UWI, through which it has shared some online coursework and Harvard Library holdings with Antiguan researchers. She also referenced Harvard scholars’ participation in conferences and collaborations with UWI schol-
ars.
Sanders said that, in the past, Antigua and Barbuda footed the bill for Harvard faculty members to speak in the Caribbean nation and that the partnership had cost the country “more money than we were getting from it.”
Kennedy O’Reilly declined to comment on Sanders’ specific criticisms but said that Harvard is “committed to continuing and expanding this partnership, with UWI’s priorities guiding the direction of this collaborative work.”
Sanders said that despite the HSRP team’s visit to the country just one week before the layoffs, the Antiguan government had not been notified of the impending outsourcing of the team’s work to genealogical society American Ancestors.
“That is the worst discourtesy of all,” he said.
Sanders added that neither American Ancestors nor Harvard has communicated with Antigua and Barbuda since HSRP’s work was outsourced.
Antigua and Barbuda has long sought reparations from Harvard. In 2019, Antiguan prime minister Gaston A. Browne demanded in a letter to then-Harvard President Lawrence S. Bacow that the University repay the island nation for its ties to early donors who owned plantations in the region.
Sanders had written two other letters demanding reparations from Harvard before his Tuesday letter to Garber: one to Bacow in 2018 and another to former University President Drew Gilpin Faust in 2016.
Two weeks ago, Browne called on Harvard to take “meaningful action” on Antiguan public radio.
“We are not asking for favors. We are seeking justice for the people whose suffering built Harvard into what it is today,” Browne told the radio station.
“Our ancestors worked for centuries without pay, and their labor fueled Harvard’s early development.”
Sanders emphasized in his interview with The Crimson that
he was “not expecting Harvard to write a check to Antigua and Barbuda,” and that he was not seeking to humiliate the university. “We don’t know what the answers to any of this is, but we do know that injustice was done,” Sanders added. “Wrong was committed. Harvard University was a
FOR CANADA. Mark Carney and Chrystia Freeland are running to replace Justin Trudeau as Canadian Prime Minister.
In 1985, Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Elliot Trudeau was headed to lunch at Winthrop House when he crossed paths with a group of juniors on the men’s hockey team.
Though there was more than one Canadian among them, only Mark J. Carney ’87 recognized the Prime Minister as he descended the stairs to the Winthrop dining hall.
“Good afternoon, Prime Minister Trudeau,” he said.
Now, nearly a half century later, Carney is the front-runner to succeed Trudeau’s son as the 24th Prime Minister of Canada and the next leader of the Liberal Party.
Last month, after a decade at the helm, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced his decision to step down as both the nation’s leader and head of the Liberal Party, triggering an expedited race to select his successor.
The race to lead both the country and a reeling party has narrowed to two frontrunners: Carney, the former Canadian and British central bank governor, and Chrystia A. Freeland ’90, the former deputy prime minister and a fellow Harvard alumna.
After just his freshman year, Carney — who graduated magna cum laude in economics — stood out to his friends, who recognized that he was “special.”
“Leave it to Mark to recognize with a fleeting glimpse at lunchtime,” said Peter E. Chiarelli ’87, one of Carney’s roommates. “The last thing on our minds is to recognize a world leader walking from the dining room in our sweats back to our room.”
“I might have told him after freshman year that I think you’re going to be Prime Minister, jokingly, but kind of half seriously,” Chiarelli said. “He just impressed me — his drive, his work ethic.” Carney is now a member of the Board of Overseers, Harvard’s second-highest governing body. Both Carney and Freeland have children who attend Harvard.
‘Fly SWATter’ During Carney’s final years at the College, another young Canadian, Freeland, was making her mark. Though they never crossed paths despite their time overlapping, the two are now close friends. Carney is the godfather to Freeland’s son. Freeland graduated magna cum laude in history and literature and won the Rhodes Scholarship.
While attending college in the U.S., Freeland remained proud of her Canadian heritage. She regularly quizzed her roommates on the 10 Canadian provinces, making them recite the provinces in order from
coast to coast.
“She felt very strongly about Canada and would make sure everyone remembered Canada, all the time,” said Robyn H. Fass Wang ’90, Freeland’s college friend.
Throughout her time on campus, Freeland was a dedicated student activist. She devoted herself to Perspective: Harvard’s Liberal Monthly and was a prominent student organizer. Freeland rallied against women’s exclusion from male-only final clubs and Harvard’s financial ties to apartheid-era South Africa.
Two years before Freeland was a student, the University cut ties with final clubs, known for their exclusive membership that served as a mode of social separation on campus, over their refusal to admit women.
“Chrystia was against the sex segregation of the final clubs,” Fass Wang said.
“An elite social club isn’t something she would have really wanted to be in anyway, but reinforcing institutional sexism — she was against that,” she added. Carney, along with some of his close friends were members of the A.D. Club, a male-only final club.
During Freeland’s time at the College, the Fly Club, also a male-only final club, only allowed women into parties through a side door. In protest, Freeland led a group of friends to enter the party through the front door.
“We were just going to go through the front door in order to protest the second-class citizen appearance that it has when you can’t enter a building through the front,” Fass Wang said.
Her group of friends were ultimately unsuccessful and rejected at the door.
Freeland, a former Crimson editor, wrote extensively in opposition to final clubs. She later joined a student organization, Stop Withholding Access Today, that supported a legal complaint filed with the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination, alleging that the clubs’ admissions policies were discriminatory. Crimson articles at the time referred to members as “Fly Swatters.”
‘The Shutout’
Carney, who played hockey throughout his childhood, was a member of the Harvard men’s hockey program during his time at the College. While on the varsity team, Carney was Harvard’s thirdstring goaltender, playing behind two All-American goalies.
“He was a very, very good player,” said Michael W. DeVoe ’87, one of Carney’s teammates.
“Had he not been stuck behind those two guys, I am sure he would have been starting at a lot of the top programs in the country,” he added.
Although Carney did not start a game for the Crimson, he was thrown into action against Colgate, a close rival, for his only varsity play during his sophomore season.
Carney stopped 100 percent of the shots he faced, leading the team
to a lopsided 10-2 victory, creating a perfect save percentage during his college career.
“We like to call it the shutout,” Chiarelli said.
Seth A. Goldman ’87, one of Carney’s blockmates in attendance, recalled the energy in the BrightLandry Hockey Center following the win.
“The fans chanted: ‘Goalie! Goalie!’,” he said. “That was enough for him.”
In Carney’s senior year, the Harvard men’s hockey team advanced to the NCAA’s Frozen Four while Chiarelli, his roommate, was the captain.
He remembered Carney’s “tremendous work ethic” and dedication to balancing athletics with his studies, where he was a top economics student.
“It’s a big commitment on time and he played it for three years,” he added.
“He was someone who the younger members of the team looked up to,” William C. Kennish ’89, a teammate of Carney’s, wrote in a statement to The Crimson, when Carney was named head of Canada’s Central Bank in 2007. “He was an excellent player who enjoyed his hockey but also was highly intelligent and focused on his studies.”
Carney would go on to play on the Oxford men’s hockey team as a backup goalie during his graduate studies in economics. There he met his wife, Diana Fox Carney.
Goldman said Carney didn’t have so much luck during his Harvard days.
“I mean, it’s funny,” Goldman said. “We were both not super successful in terms of developing girlfriends.”
“We developed that skill later in life,” he added.
The Journalist
Freeland, who pursued a prolific career in journalism for publications including the Globe and Mail and the Financial Times, studied abroad at the University of Kiev during the 1988-89 academic year.
During her undergraduate studies, she worked with a New York Times reporter to document mass graves in the Soviet Union and was in Ukraine when the Berlin Wall fell. As Soviet control crumbled, she found herself at the heart of one of the most defining geopolitical shifts of the era.
“That was the biggest news in the world in the late 80s, early 90s, the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the end of the Cold War,” said professor Serhii Plokhii, who arrived at Harvard from Soviet-controlled Ukraine in the Soviet-American academic exchanges and was introduced to Freeland at a 1987 event.
“So young people from Harvard and from other places were just pouring into Eastern Europe,” he added. “She was uniquely positioned to do that, given her knowledge of Ukrainian language and culture.”
Freeland feared her reporting placed her in the crosshairs of Soviet authorities. Archival KGB materials reviewed by the Globe and Mail revealed Freeland’s phone was tapped by the intelligence agency where she was labeled with the nickname “Frida.”
“She had to burn her notes and stuff because she was afraid the KGB would be after her,” said Lucan A. Way ’90, one of her close college
friends, who said he and Freeland were often referred by Freeland’s boyfriend as the “nerdy twins.”
On campus, Freeland pursued journalism with the left-leaning student publication “Perspective: Harvard’s Liberal Monthly.”
In one of her sophomore year investigations, Freeland infiltrated a pregnancy crisis center in Harvard Square. The center, a Christian anti-abortion organization, offered help to women who were considering getting abortions.
Freeland wanted to see how far the center would go in pushing anti-abortion messages. She posed as an uncertain pregnant woman, bringing Fass Wang along, as a part of the investigation, and recounted her experience in Perspective.
“I was there to be an additional witness. It seemed plausible that you would bring your friend, so I went as her friend,” Fass Wang said.
Freeland, an activist for abortion access, emerged from her undercover expedition sharply critical of the center’s work. She alleged in her Perspective article that a worker asked her how her loved ones would react if she terminated her supposed pregnancy and regaled her with “Brueghelesque descriptions of abortions.”
Later during her time at the College, Freeland supported her close friend through her own abortion.
“She actually accompanied me for me to have an abortion when we were — I guess we would have been — juniors, seniors” Fass Wang said.
“She was the friend I chose, because she was just so level-headed, and I just thought she would just be calm and the kind of presence you would want in something that could be difficult,” she added. A spokesperson for Freeland did not respond to a request for comment Tuesday.
The 24th Prime Minister Current polls show Carney as the clear front-runner, holding a 40-point advantage over Freeland as the Liberal leadership race enters its final weeks. While Carney has resigned from all his previously held positions since entering the race, he has continued to hold his role on the Harvard’s Board of Overseers. He has not stated if he will resign from the Board if elected as Prime Minister. No other current members of the Board of Overseers are active politicians. Whether Carney or Freeland emerges victorious in the March leadership vote, the next Prime Minister will face a turbulent landscape, marked by the threat of continued tariffs from the Trump administration and a fragile political situation at home. With Canada’s
Only one-third of Harvard’s last graduating class felt comfortable expressing their opinions about controversial topics during their time at the College, the University’s 2024 senior survey found, reporting a 13 percent decrease from the Class of 2023. The full survey results are not public, but were partially included in a report issued last week by the Classroom Social Compact Committee, convened by Faculty of Arts and Sciences Dean Hopi E. Hoekstra last spring in response to questions about the state of free speech on campus. The committee — co-chaired by Economics professor David I. Laibson ’88 and History professor Maya R. Jasanoff ’96 — wrote in their report that despite “near-universal support for the principle of free speech,” there is disagreement about how Harvard “can support open expression in practice.”
“Whatever the causes of explicit and implicit censorship on campus, it is clear that Harvard hasn’t found a way to address them robustly,” they wrote. Harvard’s internal senior survey is conducted annually by the Office of Institutional Research and Analytics in May. The 2024 survey had a response rate of 89 percent among graduating students, according to the CSCC. While the data was not widely distributed, Dean of the College Rakesh Khurana expressed dismay
over the 2023 results in a January 2024 email to College affiliates.
“In a university, this freedom comes with the responsibility of being open to debating and dialoguing about important topics,” Khurana wrote. “Yet, on this campus, many students and faculty report feeling they cannot express their views.”
“This environment shuts down learning and growth. I know we can do better,” he added.
Later that semester, Khurana launched the College’s Intellectual Vitality Initiative, aimed at fostering the free exchange of ideas on campus. Though not a result of recent campus tensions, the project addresses many of the criticisms Harvard has faced over its handling of campus antisemitism and Islamophobia, anti-Arab, and anti-Pales-
tinian bias following the onset of the Israel-Hamas war.
Since then, according to the 2024 survey results, students have become even less likely to share their opinions openly.
According to the survey, students who reported being somewhat or very reluctant to express their views on controversial topics cited fears of being labeled offensive and criticized by their peers as the primary reasons.
Those fears were also the subject of an October report by the University’s Open Inquiry and Constructive Dialogue working group, which recommended adopting a non-attribution policy in all Harvard schools to encourage participation in discussions on controversial issues.
That report also included similar results from a University-wide classroom climate survey which found that 45 percent of students in all schools are hesitant to share views on controversial issues in class.
The undergraduate senior survey found that a student’s political affiliation influenced how comfortable they felt in expressing opinions.
While 41 percent of liberal students reported feeling comfortable discussing controversial topics, only 25 percent of moderates and 17 percent of conservatives felt similarly.
More than half of the Class of
2024 — 56 percent — identified as liberal or very liberal, while only 9 percent of the class identified as conservative or very conservative.
Slightly more than a quarter of the class of 2024 respondents said they only like to engage socially with people who share their political beliefs. Only 29 percent disagreed or strongly disagreed with that statement.
In the CSCC report, the committee wrote that reluctance to engage across ideological lines was preventing students from “learning and practicing how to speak about topics that are fraught, politically or otherwise.” They recommended instructors be aware of how their own beliefs affect their teaching and explicitly inform students that holding political views that differ will not result in negative consequences.
“A successful education is only possible when academic leaders, administrators, and other societal decision-makers foster the institutional conditions that enable students and teachers to flourish,” the committee wrote.
“It is therefore incumbent on instructors to explain and abide by the principle that students are free to hold and express political opinions that differ from those of their instructors, without fear of negative consequences,” they added.
samuel.church@thecrimson.com cam.srivastava@thecrimson.com
BY HUGO C. CHIASSON AND AMANN S. MAHAJAN CRIMSON STAFF WRITERS
Mass General Brigham announced layoffs for hundreds of administrative and management employees on Monday in anticipation of a $250 million budget gap, an unprecedented decision for Massachusetts’ largest private employer.
The layoffs — which began Monday and will continue until March 14 — will be “focused on non-clinical and non-patient facing roles,” according to an email sent to employees by MGB chief executive Anne Klibanski on Monday morning.
Department of Medicine chairs Bruce D. Levy and Jose C. Florez explained in a separate email to the department that the decision was made to address a major financial deficit.
“We have not been able to meet our budget goals for several years, and entered fiscal year 2025 with a substantial
loss in operations,” they wrote in a Monday email obtained by The Crimson. “We must balance our operating budget, and consequently we have had to examine the configuration of our administrative workforce and benchmark it against industry standards.”
MGB, which has more than 82,000 employees, reported an overall gain of $2 billion and a $72 million loss in operations in 2024. An internal document from the hospital system cited operational inefficiencies — including “duplicative processes and too many administrative layers” — as part of the “unprecedented and unrelenting pressures” it currently faces. The company is aiming to save around 2 percent of its salary and benefits costs, adding up to $200 million annually, according to the Boston Globe. By reducing redundancies in administrative and managerial positions, the hospital hopes to cover the $250 million shortfall and shrink bureaucracy.
MGB spokesperson Jennifer Street wrote in an emailed statement that the decision “is necessary despite years of diligently promoting a culture of responsible resource stewardship and developing initiatives that generate diversified sources of revenue.”
According to third-year internal medicine resident William J.H. Ford, the administration has not clarified which specific roles will be subject to termination, making it difficult for clinical staff to gauge how they will be impacted.
“There’s a fuzzy line between what is a clinical or patient-facing role and what roles are really crucial to supporting the clinical work versus what is really tangentially related or extraneous to the work of the hospital,” Ford said.
“Are there people who work in my primary care clinic — who make it easier for me to care for my patients, who make it easier for people to schedule appointments, get prior autho -
rizations for medications approved through their insurance — are these people going to lose their jobs?” he added.
The announcement comes on the heels of a dramatic funding saga for the National Institute of Health.
After the Trump Administration announced an NIH directive on Friday that capped indirect costs at 15 percent, a federal judge has temporarily blocked the order from going into effect in Massachusetts on Monday. But the proposal, which would strip hospitals and universities of substantial research funding, unleashed panic at Harvard and MGB.
In their Monday email, Levy and Florez said the financial stress stems from a flawed healthcare funding model and slammed the “new threat” from the Trump administration.
“It will take some time for any federal changes to be implemented, due to the rulemaking process and anticipated legal challenges, but we understand how distress-
ing it can be to speculate on what changes the future may bring,” Levy and Florez wrote.
“Our hospitals and our nation have faced serious challenges before, and we have always emerged to continue our foundational mission in the
service of our fellow human beings,” they added. “Our success did not evade sacrifice and required generosity and a shared sense of purpose.”
Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences has been without an associate dean for diversity, inclusion, and belonging for nearly two years after Sheree M. Ohen left Harvard for Amherst University in April 2023. Despite the vacancy, the FAS has not begun looking for Ohen’s replacement. FAS spokesperson James M. Chisholm declined to say whether the school plans to fill the position at all in the future.
The FAS Office of Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging’s
website has also been stripped of the names of its staff, which were listed as recently as December 2023. Several links on the website also no longer lead to valid pages, including the “News” page and a page listing the office’s faculty liaisons. Over the last year, the FAS has distanced itself from previous diversity policies amid criticism that they were at odds with academic freedom. In June, the FAS stopped requiring candidates for faculty positions to submit statements describing their commitments to diversity, inclusion, and belonging. Instead, finalists are now asked to write statements on “efforts to strengthen
academic communities” and on promoting open classroom discussion.
At the time, Nina Zipser, the Dean of Faculty Affairs and Planning, said the school remained committed to its principles of diversity and inclusion but framed the change as allowing the school to balance those principles with other considerations.
The deanship has been left vacant as diversity, equity, and inclusion programs at universities across the country have been attacked by critics in Washington.
On just his second day back in the White House, President Donald Trump issued an executive order requiring all universities that receive federal funding to eliminate their race and gender-based diversity programs. A few days later, he named several vocal critics of university DEI programs to leadership roles in the U.S. Department of Education.
The deanship has been occupied for less than three years since its inception. Ohen, who joined the FAS in Sept. 2020, was the first person appointed to the position.
James Crowley, a sergeant with the Cambridge Police Department, sued The Harvard Crimson in Massachusetts Superior Court on Feb. 3 over a November 2024 article in The Crimson, alleging the article defamed Crowley by falsely accusing him of sexual assault. Crowley, who is seeking at least $50,000 in damages, contended in his complaint that the claims in the article caused him reputational harm and emotional distress. The suit also named the article’s two reporters, as well as “unknown persons” who edited or distributed the article, as defendants. According to Crowley’s complaint, the Nov. 13 article — which described CPD’s hiring of officers from outside Cambridge to fill staff vacancies — initially stated that Crowley had faced allegations of sexual assault that were uncovered by The Boston Globe. A version of the article that appeared in print on Nov. 15 included the
claim that Crowley had been accused of sexual assault.
The Crimson issued a correction to the article on Nov. 18, stating that Crowley had been accused of harassment — not assault — in documents obtained by the Globe. Crimson President McKenna E. McKrell ’26 declined to comment on the suit. At the time of the article’s publication, J. Sellers Hill ’25 was president of The Crimson and Miles J. Herszenhorn ’25 was managing editor. Hill and Herszenhorn declined to comment.
Crowley wrote in his complaint that his counsel contacted The Crimson “immediately” to say that the article included a “false and defamatory statement,” but did not provide a date or time for the outreach.
The Nov. 15 print version of the article stated that CPD Commissioner Christine A. Elow “declined to comment on the continued employment” of Crowley. Crowley’s attorneys asserted in the complaint that the original version of the article “conveyed the impression that Elow was aware of and effectively validated or endorsed
the notion” that he had committed sexual assault.
Crowley’s complaint accused the defendants of “distorting” the Globe’s reporting by omitting that he denied the sexual harassment allegations. When The Crimson’s article appeared in print on Nov. 15, it did not mention that Crowley rejected the allegations against him.
By Nov. 18, the online version of the article stated that “Crowley strongly denied the allegations to the Globe, saying that he had not heard of many of the allegations until he was reached by a reporter.” The suit names police reporters Sally E. Edwards ’26 and Asher J. Montgomery ’26 as defendants. Edwards is
When sprinter Mfoniso
M. Andrew ’26 came to Harvard as a recruited athlete on the track team, she was making day-in-the-life vlogs about her college experience. Then, she signed a name, image, and likeness deal with DoorDash, and the vlogs turned into a profitable advertising gig.
“I think that’s when everything popped off,” Andrew said.
Since then, Andrew has signed deals with Amazon, ZipCar, TurboTax, Heartbreak Hill Running Company, coffee company RYZE, and more — earning thousands of dollars in total.
After the National Collegiate Athletic Association first allowed athletes to profit off of NIL deals in 2021, brand deals became a major currency in the world of college sports.
Harvard athletes have made more than 250 NIL deals since then, according to Harvard Athletics spokesperson Imry Halevi. Some schools were quick to build opportunities for students to directly profit off of their athlete status — supporting athletes’ efforts to build personal brands and working closely with NIL collectives that distribute contributions from donors and brands. But the Ivy League has taken a more hands-off approach towards its NIL policies. Ivy League Executive Director Robin Harris wrote that the league should serve as a “well-rounded experience that will continue to resonate in this evolving and uncertain era of college sports” in an email to coaches and players last month.
Alumni and players have increasingly questioned whether Harvard’s NIL infrastructure is strong enough to recruit and retain athletes — especially after multiple Harvard athletes, including star freshman basketball player Malik Mack, transferred to schools that offer more lucrative NIL opportunities.
In July 2023, the Department of Harvard Athletics announced a partnership with Teamworks Influencer, an app where athletes can report their NIL deals for compliance review and view official team photos. But DHA administrators still wanted to simplify the process. On Jan. 8, Harvard Athletics announced the launch of the One Crimson NIL Exchange, a marketplace-style platform on the Influencer app that allows businesses to directly connect with student profiles.
However, the platforms have yet to catch on among many of Harvard’s student-athletes. The Crimson interviewed 11 Harvard athletes across seven teams, none of whom had experience using One Crimson or had been taught how to use it in the month since its release. But — even without Harvard’s help in landing deals — some students have found their own ways to tap into NIL profits.
‘It’s All Been Independent’
Last month, when Harvard debuted the One Crimson NIL Exchange, the DHA wrote in a press release that the platform was designed to “provide new resources for student-athletes to maximize their NIL opportunities through connections with businesses and brands.”
But all athletes who spoke to The Crimson said they had not been trained on using the platform.
Women’s soccer player Gemma L. Maltby ’27 said she did not know much about using Influencer or One Crimson to get NIL deals. Beyond the app, Maltby added that she and many of her teammates are generally unfamiliar with the process of making NIL deals.
Daniel O. Falode ’25, a triple-jumper on Harvard’s track and field team who has pursued multiple NIL deals, said he has yet to use
One Crimson.
“It’s all been independent. I haven’t used the One Crimson, so I don’t really have much experience with it,” Falode said. “If I had the opportunity to, I’d love to learn more about how to use that. I just haven’t had the chance to.”
Harvard’s Associate Director of Athletics for Compliance Christian Bray said Harvard Athletics plans to teach athletes about getting NIL deals through One Crimson at their annual required training at the beginning of the academic year, which already discusses compliance and using the Influencer app among other NCAA-mandated policies.
While the DHA was unable to incorporate One Crimson training into the beginning of the year’s session, Bray said they reached out to all teams and trained all coaching staff about the new program.
Still, Maltby said the current independent process that students undergo “seems like a lot of work” without agents or advising.
Halevi, the Harvard Athletics spokesperson, wrote in a statement that “the launch of the One Crimson NIL Exchange was not a one-time event.”
“Through ongoing outreach and education, the platform will continue to grow and expand, as more student-athletes and businesses explore its many benefits, and determine the best way for them to utilize it,” Halevi added.
Navigating NIL
Rather than using One Crimson, many athletes at Harvard continue to independently pursue NIL deals. Some athletes have leveraged their online presence to connect with businesses through social media.
Falode, who has more than 8,000 followers on Instagram and more than 19,000 on TikTok, said that he has found most of his deals from companies that sent him direct messages.
He said he has inked deals with performance beverage company Electrolit, financial startup Stackwell, and Heartbreak Hill, where he makes posts advertising the company’s products.
“Some of the smaller companies will offer you two to three hundred dollars for a post,” Falode said. “But I’ve had a company that’s paid me $1,000 for a post on TikTok.”
Like Falode, Andrew — the sprinter — has also signed NIL deals primarily after companies reached out to her. Andrew, who has more than 4,000 Instagram followers and 26,000 on TikTok, said that she tried to partner with companies most applicable to her and her experience.
“I don’t reach out to brands,” Andrew said. “They usually find my name, and I try to stay as authentic to myself as I possibly can.”
Andrew said that she makes between $1,000 and $5,000 on recurring deals and $300 to $400 on sin-
gle posts. Maltby, the soccer player, said the students she knows who have profited off their names have cultivated large social media followings and made active efforts to hunt deals.
Skier Clara E. Lake ’27 currently has a deal with outdoor apparel brand Stio, which she obtained after filling out the company’s affiliate influencer application.
Lake said the company provides her with merchandise in exchange for promotional posts on Lake’s Instagram. Lake also includes a code in the posts that gives followers a discount on merchandise, which gives her a small commission on these sales.
“I think one of the reasons I particularly wanted to work with Stio is because I think it aligns with my own kind of personal values,” Lake said. “So I feel like I can represent them well while using their gear.”
Cross country standout K. Graham Blanks ’25— who finished ninth in the Olympics last year and forgoed his last semester of eligibility to sign a professional deal with New Balance — signed with an agent in the fall of 2023, and by the end of that year, had an NIL deal with New Balance.
“It was basically all done by the agency,” Blanks said. “All the negotiations were done by them. All I did was sign the papers.” Blanks described his experi-
ence using an agent as a “no-brainer” due to the individual nature of his sport.
“They obviously negotiate your shoe deal, but they also help you get into meets, they help you plan travel,” Blanks said. “They’re almost like a second coach, except that what they coach is basically every other aspect of the sport other than the training.” Blanks also said that an agent was able to provide the “institutional knowledge” he lacked in the NIL space, helping him determine what was a fair deal. However, Blanks said that he was not aware of any other Harvard athletes who used agents.
Beyond Harvard’s gates, the NIL market is booming. Total NIL compensation is expected to hit $1.67 billion during the 2024-25 season, according to an annual report from online marketplace Opendorse. As Harvard adapts to the rise of player compensation, some athletes say they’ve accepted taking it slow.
“I think I’ve come to terms with the fact that I probably will not make a crazy amount of money unless I grow my following by a ton this year,” Andrew said. “But, I’m okay with that.” “I’m okay with being able to at least figure out what works for me,”
The use of artificial intelligence meeting assistants — bots that record and transcribe audio on virtual meeting platforms — will be prohibited at Harvard meetings moving forward, Harvard University Information Technology leadership announced in a Tuesday email.
The email cited potential legal and data security risks as motivations for the ban, in addition to concerns that AI assistants “have the potential to stifle conversation and open inquiry.” In particular, the updated guidelines warned that meeting data could be exposed to third parties or used by companies when training future AI models.
The ban will not, however, apply to assistants with which the University maintains contractual enterprise agreements.
HUIT spokesperson Timothy J. Bailey wrote in a statement that HUIT had worked with Harvard administrators and its Office of General Counsel to develop the new guidelines after
receiving “community requests for more information on AI meeting assistants.”
Bailey added that the University was conducting a pilot program to assess the viability of Zoom’s meeting assistant, Zoom AI Companion. The updated guidelines come just one week after a Faculty of Arts and Sciences committee recommended the adoption of Chatham House rules, which would bar students and instructors from attributing comments made in classroom discussions to specific speakers. Computer Science lecturer Christopher A. Thorpe ’97’98 wrote in a statement that he believed the updated guidelines were “a thoughtful, practical balance of making these innovative tools available—while keeping longstanding commitments to data privacy and the comfort of meeting participants.” Thorpe teaches COMPSCI 1060: “Software Engineering with Generative AI.” “I also think the Zoom AI Companion pilot is a great idea as a starting point,” he added. HUIT’s updated guidelines acknowledge the role of AI
note-taking assistants in aiding attendees with accessibility concerns and instructed individuals who required AI accommodations to reach out to their accommodations coordinator “to discuss options.”
The guidelines urged Harvard affiliates to avoid using AI assistants in sensitive meetings, review and correct AI-generated summaries, and delete past transcripts once no longer needed.
Subir Majumder, an Electrical Engineering postdoctoral researcher, said he felt AI assistants had become “intrusive” in his meetings prior to the updated guidelines.
“During certain meetings, one of my colleagues also had some automatic note-taker who automatically joined in. My boss then said, ‘Who is this guy?’” Majumder said. “This creates a little bit of miscommunications.”
However, A. Rhys Greenland ’27 said he felt the new policy had a minimal impact on him as an undergraduate student.
“It’s not a big deal,” he said.
BY ALLISON P. FARRELL
If Massachusetts is going to survive the Trump era, we need to start fixing our problems at home.
Just two weeks into office, President Donald Trump has already issued executive orders that target immigrants, LGBTQ+ citizens, equitable employment practices, and more.
In an interview last Thursday, state representative Marjorie C. Decker indicated that the Massachusetts state legislature is preparing to defend residents against deleterious executive actions. We should commend Decker and her fellow legislators who are promising to take a stand. We need their leadership now more than ever.
But good intentions aren’t enough. If we are going to successfully resist the president’s agenda, we need a state government actually capable of taking decisive action.
As things stand, Beacon Hill is hardly up to this task. In 2021, only 0.41 percent of bills introduced in the State House passed, earning it the unfortunate superlative of least effective legislature in the nation, according to one study.
When it comes to D.C. politics, it can seem like gridlock and government are synonymous. We should expect better from our leaders closer to home.
State Attorney General Andrea Campbell’s concrete action to block executive orders provides one avenue of recourse — but our legislature should also be working to protect the residents of the Commonwealth. If state legislators like Decker want to fulfill their promise to protect Massachusetts residents, the first thing that they need to
of a progressive state. On paper, this is a near-truism: Its odd habit of electing Republican governors aside, both of its legislative chambers hold a Democratic supermajority, and it has voted Democratic in all but four presidential elections since 1928. Even its Republican governors are far from staunch conservatives when it comes to policy; after the overturning of Roe v. Wade, then-Governor Charlie D. Baker ’79 signed an abortion sanctuary bill into law to protect the reproductive freedoms of those from states with restrictive measures. Democrats finally gained back the governor’s
duced notable results. That year, only 0.2 percent of bills passed successfully. The Democratic Party’s grip on power in recent years makes their ineffectual record all the more damning. The root of the problem? Despite legislators’ left-wing views relative to the rest of the country, the state’s institutions and norms are deeply conservative. Consider how the incentives are structured for state legislator salaries: Their base pay is approximately $82,000 per year. In practice, however, many earn more. “Leadership pay” supplements, given for additional committee assignments, range from $7,776 to $119,632, potentially dou -
bling members’ pay.
Because these leadership assignments are largely controlled by party brass, this precedent gives massive sway to a tiny number of individuals. Research from The Boston Globe found that in 2023, 149 out of 200 legislators received this “leadership pay” which made up, on average, 20 percent of legislators’ salaries.
Combined with the fact that votes to advance bills in House committees are not required to be public, we are left with a legislature that is neither truly democratic nor accountable to the public. Instead, bills are far too often “sent to study” and never heard of again.
These perverse incentives promote perverse outcomes. On average, Democratic legislators vote the same way as the speaker of the house 90 to 100 percent of the time, according to the advocacy group Act on Mass. This figure should hardly shock us as long as a powerful few can shape legislators’ career prospects, salaries, and powers. This top-down control makes the legislature’s lack of productivity head-scratching. If anything, it should ensure a completely effective (while un
BY GABRIELLA N. ABOULAFIA, NADIA S. BELL, AND AMY L. EISENSTEIN
Yesterday evening, the Harvard Institute of Politics invited Lord Dominic Johnson, co-chairman of the UK Conservative Party, to speak at the JFK Jr. Forum in a session titled: “Can DOGE Reduce Government Regulation? Lessons from the U.K.”
As graduate students at Harvard, we are disap pointed to see the University host an event high lighting the purported merits of the recently-estab lished Department of Government Efficiency. Doing so lends Harvard’s legitimacy to DOGE, an entity ac tively defying the rule of law. Conversations about government efficiency are only productive when engaging with good-faith po litical actors. And DOGE has proven itself to be any thing but a thoughtful and responsible steward of government spending.
Many DOGE staffers aren’t public servants — like those the Kennedy School trains — but twentysomething-year-old software engineers, including one who resigned after his racist social media activity resurfaced. Some of the entity’s actions have been kept secret from the public. And those that we do know about — like accessing a critical Treasury Department payment system and dismantling the U.S. Agency for International Development — face numerous lawsuits. The entity has no legal authority to seize the “power of the purse,” a power the U.S. Constitution vests in Congress.
Instead of reacting to this onslaught of autocratic
BY KAYLA P.S. SPRINGER
Harvard University calls Cambridge home, but it’s quietly become a bigger landlord across the river. With over 360 acres in Allston – surpassing its 213-acre Cambridge footprint – the University isn’t just expanding its campus; it’s reshaping an entire neighborhood’s destiny. For many longtime Allston residents, that’s a serious problem. Nationwide, housing prices are on the rise, and Boston’s Allston neighborhood is no exception. Just last year, roughly 10,500 people applied to live in 88 new affordable housing units built in the area. Talk to any Allston resident about the changing face of their community, and you’re likely to hear a mention of Harvard — and for good reason. Over the past decade, our University’s investments have turned Allston into a rising biotech hub at the expense of a liveable neighborhood long-time residents can continue to call home.
In short, Allston is beginning to gentrify, and Harvard is to blame.
While true that rising housing costs are not unique to Allston, one need only venture outside of Harvard Square and into Allston to see the changing character of the neighborhood, replete with massive Harvard-sponsored construction projects and shiny new lab spaces. Harvard’s expansion into Allston didn’t happen overnight. The story began in 1989 with the University’s secret acquisition of more than 50 acres of land through a Boston developer. Throughout the 2000s, Harvard continued to anger residents with its purchases, amassing over one-third of the neighborhood’s land mass.
heard neither the speaker nor the moderator acknowledge the risk of “irreparable harm” the entity has posed in its first few weeks of existence.
With yesterday’s event, the Kennedy School has portrayed DOGE as a traditional government institution, sending the message to the public that DOGE is a trusted department rather than a rogue entity. Discussing the potential merits of DOGE and ignoring its blatant disregard for the rule of law is dangerous and irresponsible.
Some readers may wonder if we are suggesting that the University cancel all events about government efficiency. We are not. While we personally
governmental regulation.
For example, a thoughtful IOP-hosted event on this topic could explore questions like: How can we enhance governmental efficiency? Is involving the private sector the best way to do so? Which democracies have the most effective regulatory practices, and how can we learn from them?
Numerous Harvard scholars have devoted their careers to exploring these questions. We would rather the IOP engage with these topics than lend legitimacy to an entity that has repeatedly broken not just democratic norms, but also — according to a lawsuit from 19 state attorneys general and many
legal experts — the law. The IOP prides itself on being a pillar of nonpartisanship within Harvard and beyond. But nonpartisanship does not mean acquiescence to clear democratic backsliding. While conversations about reducing regulatory burdens may be within the interests of the Harvard community, we need not legitimize DOGE. Hosting this event makes Harvard complicit in the entity’s antidemocratic actions. Our nation was built on a system of checks and balances. Congress and the courts are supposed to hold the executive branch, and the groups like DOGE at its helm, in check. From its inception, DOGE has circumvented these checks. With its focus on democracy and governance, the Harvard Kennedy School has the chance to call attention to this dangerous phenomenon, instead of treating it as lawful, normal, and legitimate. HKS can — and should — use its wealth of expertise to protect the democratic bedrock of our country. Now more than ever, Harvard needs to work toward strengthening public policy and governance in the U.S. and around the world. We ask that the Kennedy School leverage its institutional legitimacy to strengthen democracy, not contribute to its demise.
–Gabriella N. Aboulafia is a graduate of the Harvard Kennedy School and a second-year PhD student in Harvard University’s Interdisciplinary Program in Health Policy. Nadia S. Bell is a first-year PhD student in Harvard University’s Interdisciplinary Program in Health Policy. Amy L. Eisenstein is a third-year JD-MPP student at Harvard Law School and the Harvard Kennedy School.
In the early 2010s, biotech exploded in Greater Boston. Kendall Square rose to prominence as a national biotech hub and set the paradigm for university-industry partnerships while reaping huge benefits for MIT. Soon after, Harvard, looked across the river to Allston and identified its swaths of unused land as a similar opportunity to capitalize on the ongoing boom.
In 2013, with the announcement of the Enterprise Research Campus, a $1.5 billion, 36-acre science and innovation district bridging the gap between the University and the private sector, Harvard officially kicked off its plans for a new Allston.
The University’s decision to direct life science investment into the neighborhood catalyzed a flood of biotech development that has transformed Allston’s physical landscape. New commercial lab space and an accompanying host of construction projects, mostly housed on Harvard land, spread down Western Avenue from the ERC site toward Allston’s Brighton border. In 2024, three laboratory and office buildings and four residential buildings were planned or under construction on Western Avenue alone. Harvard’s residence in Allston has been a major draw for such development, promising a lucrative flow of knowledge and capital between the University and the private sector.
While Harvard’s development might bode well for the University, the payout for Allston’s residents is far less obvious.
If the neighborhood does become a second Kendall Square, new commercial development will serve commuters and a wealthier class of employees, not longtime residents. Expensive, chain eateries and privately policed office buildings do more than demolish neighborhood character — they erode the livability of the
area.
Areas of lower Allston occupied by Harvard and biotech could become ghost towns after work hours. New residential development, while much needed, has consisted overwhelmingly of single-bedroom units, which will make it harder for families to find housing in the neighborhood.
The recent slowing of the commercial lab space market has left Allston’s future in limbo. Projects — including a nearly billion-dollar mixed-use development on Soldiers Field Road, intended to include office, lab, and residential space — have been discontinued or lay dormant.
Harvard’s efforts to expand the commercial lab space market into Allston could leave residents living among these abandoned projects – not to mention Har vard’s vacant buildings scattered across the neighbor hood – for years to come. Properties that could be filled with local businesses or turned into vibrant communi ty spaces will lie empty. All the while, rents in Allston will continue to surge. Harvard must address the question: Who will All ston be for in 20 or 50 years? Walking down Harvard Street and Western Avenue, it’s clear the University has set the gears in motion for an Allston that serves life sci ences companies, their employees, and Harvard af filiates. A future for Allston that serves its current res idents — renters, families, artists, immigrants — is in jeopardy.
figure — will have no
Our University’s investments have attracted new biotech development, which in turn draws a new, wealthier class of residents to the neighborhood. With out dramatic additions to Allston’s housing stock, hous ing costs will only continue to rise. Many Allstonians — in
is only beginning, and it will continue to unfold as
construction is completed. It’s not too late, however, for Harvard to change its course, especially during the current community benefits negotiation process. With Allston’s future in the balance, a more responsible Harvard is non-negotiable. Throughout this column, I’ll discuss how Harvard can not only do better for Allstonians, but also for communities impacted by Harvard’s land speculation
This is Harvard. We came here to learn.
A recent report released by a Faculty of Arts and Sciences committee paints a bleak pic ture of the state of academics at the University. Aggregating the results of numerous surveys, lis tening sessions, and informal conversations, the committee revealed several worrisome realities of “the FAS classroom.” Chief among them was the finding that “stu dents do not prioritize their courses.” Instead, extracurriculars, including a dizzying array of pre-professional clubs, occupy the spotlight.
The committee is right to recommend that classes be more rigorous. But what Harvard tru ly needs is well-purposed rigor — one designed to increase learning rather than merely enhance its difficulty. That starts with students taking great er personal responsibility, faculty stepping up to the plate, and a community-wide reckoning with Harvard’s pre-professional culture.
We do a disservice to ourselves and our class mates when we engage halfheartedly in our courses. Students are free to make their own de cisions — but freedom of choice does not imply freedom from consequences.
We all know the feeling of sitting in a section where no one did the reading. Such sections are plagued with shallow platitudes and broad, non specific lines of questioning. As those sections painfully make clear, when even a mere handful of students decline to engage in the course mate rial, all students lose out.
Such disengagement takes many forms: fran tically typing up a problem set for another class, coasting through discussions by parroting others’ ideas, and stalking friends on LinkedIn during lectures. These habits don’t just undermine individual learning — they dilute the integrity of the academic experience.
That said, blame for Harvard’s widespread deprioritization of academics does not fall solely on students. If students can coast through cours -
half of faculty must be undertaken to increase course engagement. Faculty play a crucial role in shaping the academic culture, and they too must take responsibility for fostering an environment where learning takes precedence. So, what can be done? Any efforts to recenter academics in the undergraduate experience must prioritize learning
difficult simply to meet hour requirements will not reinvigorate academic engagement, and instead risks pushing students towards shirking work and relegating assignments to ChatGPT. Assignments, problem sets, and readings must serve an identifiable purpose — not simply fill an arbitrary 12-hour quota — lest students come to see their coursework as obstacles to en -
Let’s face it, Harvard Square just isn’t what it used to be.
Bowl-based fast food and coffee chains seem to be taking over, with big-box franchises happy to pay the high rent that has been forcing some decades-old Square staples to close. The mom and pop shops that were promised to us by alumni nostalgic for their Harvard days are quickly becoming a memory. But we shouldn’t fear the change that comes with an expanding Harvard Square. Many of the chain businesses make an often challenging Harvard experience just a little easier. As long as the new additions continue to satisfy the practical needs of Cambridge residents, students actually stand to benefit from this change.
Consider, for example, the slew of restaurants where a “bowl” is a menu option. The taqueria trifecta of El Jefe’s, Felipe’s, and Achilito’s offer a convenient, cost-effective solution to post-midnight cravings. Cava is settling in quite nicely along Brattle Street, and Pokeworks has occupied the corner of
While these businesses aren’t exactly unique or historic (Felipe’s Taqueria is the sole non-franchised restaurant on this list, and, in my opinion, it shows), they’re invaluable additions to the Square. They promise large portions, hundreds of calories, and relatively low prices compared to the nearby Mr. Bartley’s Burger Cottage, where the cheapest burger is nearly $15. And it’s much easier to inconspicuously scarf down a bowl of carnitas and refried beans in the back of class or at a library desk than it is to cover your hands in burger grease and sauce trying to overcome the “Masshole” burger.
For the modern Harvard student, convenience is king. Establishments that provide this convenience will thrive at the expense of places that take time and energy away from studying and extracurriculars. There’s a reason why a 24hour CVS seems to be the most high-traffic area of Harvard Square. The propagation of coffee shops that encircle campus are part of the same story. The JFK Street Starbucks now occupies a prime spot that once belonged to the world’s only Curious George store. We can lament the loss of Curious George
mit that the students, faculty, and residents of Cambridge are certainly better served by a coffee shop where they might go daily than a novelty shop where they might go once in their lives.
Is it unfortunate that these franchises occupy spaces that could otherwise be used for a restaurant truly unique to Harvard Square? Yes. But, above everything else, they serve the needs of the hungry, cash-strapped, and sleep-deprived college students who occupy the Square.
Of course, corporate franchises work best in moderation. I wouldn’t want Harvard Square to resemble a shopping mall, nor do students really need that. There should be a healthy mix of the corporate chains that offer low prices and popular products and the small businesses that bring historic charm to the area.
Fortunately, the old Harvard Square isn’t lost yet. Many of the iconic staples continue to thrive. I have seldom seen a short line at Pinocchio’s Pizza & Subs on a weekend past midnight or the Harvard Book Store without a crowd of students and tourists. Even the businesses that seem no longer to cater to these residents, like the ever-mys-
dure rather than opportunities to learn. There are a couple of common sense methods to increase student buy-in. First, incorporating attendance into course grading incentives to attendance. Second, check class preparation through reading responses and lecture cold-calling. There isn’t a need for such responses to be needlessly burdensome — but some form of reading check would do well to shore up the well -
Third, distracting screens should be phased out of our classrooms. However inconvenient, the proportion of students using their devices to shirk work often outweighs those taking notes. Instructors can help by providing pre-written
Students and faculty aside, there’s a cultural issue at work, too: We’ve lamented the rise in careerism here before. It’s a parasitic culture that launches students into the pre-professional rat race much too soon and puts transcripts at odds
We can’t ignore that students need jobs, and many turn to pre-professional organizations out of necessity. Recruiting and the post-graduation job market loom large over students’
ing. There is still popular demand for these historic businesses. The businesses of Harvard Square should do more than simply evoke nostalgia. They should serve their town’s residents, who, in turn, get to decide which businesses succeed. I, for one, am confident that Harvard Square has reached a critical mass of four bubble tea shops. After all, a new one seems to open every year (sometimes in the exact same location). Change is not a bad thing. Chains are not a bad thing, as long as those chains serve the people of Harvard Square. While every vacant space does not need to be a new HSA Harvard Shop and
When Johannes Fruehauf started his first biopharma start-up in Cambridge nearly two decades ago, a major challenge was finding the money and time to build his own lab before the research could even begin.
“When I built my first few companies, in each case, we had to start from scratch and go out, find space, get a moment to build it out, hire the contractor, hire the architect to plan,” Fruehauf said.
Building the lab was expensive and time-consuming — but the ownership it granted was also a luxury, one that a flood of cheap venture capital at the time made easy for many startups coming to Kendall Square. Since the pandemic, however, industry experts say times have changed: rising interest rates and a drop in venture capital funding have made building companies’ own labs harder. Now, higher costs and less cash on hand have pushed more biotech companies to lease out labs, in what they say has become an unexpected boon for their work.
“If you build your own lab space, you need to come up with the capital to build it out,” Fruehauf said. “And ultimately, that value is going to remain with the landlord.” Fruehauf is the Founder and President of LabCentral, a biotech incubator that provides fully equipped co-working and laboratory spaces at much lower costs for startups.
This new model of leasing has given biotech companies quicker access to ready-to-use shared lab spaces, allowing proximity to fellow researchers
and entrepreneurs that they say feeds innovation.
The Crimson spoke to a range of commercial realtors, startup founders, and a commercial lab space owner to understand how the immense draw of Kendall Square has forced the myriad startup companies that define its ecosystem to adapt to more challenging economic conditions as they fight for a prized place in “the most innovative square mile on the planet.”
Robert Bench, who recently founded a blockchain technolo -
gy company, leases from the coworking site Cambridge Innovation Center, just next to the Kendall/MIT Red Line stop.
Bench said the proximity to other start-ups within the CIC has added to the “serendipity” of daily encounters that acts as “an incredible accelerant for the ecosystem.”
The new, and increasingly common dynamic of startups sharing space has proven a “wonderful resource” for the companies, Bench said, offering a well of “innovative people
The Cambridge City Council set a tentative timeline for residents to approve changes to the city’s charter in a November 2025 ballot measure — more than three years since the city voted to update the charter on a regular basis.
In November 2021, Cambridge voters approved a ballot measure requesting the City Council establish a process to review and update the city’s charter every 10 years. Since then, the Council has approved five amendments — which largely preserve the current structure of Cambridge’s local government — and is currently debating increasing Councillor’s terms from two to four years. In a Thursday special meeting, the City Council confirmed that Cambridge residents would vote on approved Charter amendments as ballot measure in November 2025.
“I’m hoping that we can hear more clearly about the timelines that we need to meet in order if we seriously want to have something on the ballot for November,” Councilor Paul F. Toner said.
Tanya L. Ford, the executive director of the Cambridge Election Commission, said that in order to be able to procure the necessary physical ballots for the election, the Election Commision would need to know the ballot measures by June 30. But the deadline to finalize the ballot measures is even closer, as the City Council must first receive the approval of the Massachusetts Legislature before procuring the physical ballots. Even with this tight timeline, Vice Mayor Marc C. McGovern voiced concern that Cantabrigians would not have enough time to “digest” the measures before voting on them in November.
“This is making me nervous the more I think about this, because these are big questions they’re asking people, and people are going to need time to debate,” McGovern said.
“How do we give enough time for there actually be a healthy debate within the community and people who are going to want to campaign for should we do this or not do that?” he added. The City Council appointed a 15 member committee of residents to make recommendations on changes to the Charter. After meeting 36 times between August 2022 and January 2024, it passed its final report without a final recommendation about the City’s current Plan E form of government. At Thursday’s meeting, however, Councillor Sumbul Siddiqui acknowledged that many of the recommendations did not materialize in the Council’s discussions.
“I did want to just apologize,”
she said. “There’s so many meetings that happen, and this is how the Council is kind of doing it — doing the work.”
She added that the body’s work set a precedent for how residents and local leaders can work in the future to amend Cambridge’s charter the next time the process takes place.
“Whoever is on the body then will be able to give much more direction and learn from the past,” Siddiqui said.
Resident Heather Hoffman encouraged the Council to more purposefully involve residents’ input in future Charter review discussions.
“One of the continuing things that I have seen in all of this charter change discussion is how to keep people like me out of the process” she said. “Let us actually talk about stuff. Let us be more of a part of this government.”
to draw from at multiple stages of their career.”
Another benefit of the model is the flexibility it affords startups that can avoid long-term leases, which can become burdensome for biotech companies that hope to be acquired on a faster timeline.
Big pharmaceutical companies like Pfizer, Novartis, and Astellas are now buying startups in earlier stages of research and development, according to Fruehaf, even as soon as the preclinical or early Phase I tri -
al stages. Fruehaf said that the industry has shifted to a model where big pharma companies are increasingly outsourcing research, development, and experimentation to start-ups, focusing their own efforts on late-stage trials and regulatory strategy.
“What we are seeing is a natural separation according to skills and strengths, into distributed, early innovation and consolidated late-stage development,” Fruehaf said.
As the power of Kendall Square has created new, subsidiary biotech hubs across the wider Boston area, the newer centers of biotech have seen a similar shift toward leasing. “Over the last 15 years, Cambridge has been tighter than a drum, which has motivated firms to locate elsewhere,” said Dennis A. Clarke ’90, CEO of Cummings Properties.
Skye Lam ’26 and Vienna Sparks are co-founders of MabLab, a start-up focused on building drug detection strips. MabLab started leasing its space from an Allston coworking lab run by Harvard. Lam said he felt “lucky” to be
stephanie.dragoi@thecrimson thamini.vijeyasingam@thecrimson.com
A Boston Municipal Court judge dismissed hate crime charges on Monday in an assault case involving two Harvard graduate students at a pro-Palestine protest, according to online court records. Graduate students Elom Tettey-Tamaklo and Ibrahim I. Bharmal were charged in May for their involvement in an Oct. 2023 protest at the Harvard Business School. The two pleaded not guilty to the assault and civil rights charges at a November arraignment, after a series of postponed court dates.
Judge Stephen McClenon dismissed a misdemeanor civil rights violation for each man on Monday, though they will still face one misdemeanor count of assault and battery each.
In an emailed statement, a spokesperson for the Suffolk District Attorney’s office wrote that the civil rights charges “were based on the defendants’ actions impeding the victim’s ability to freely move around campus,” and that the District Attorney is “reviewing the judge’s ruling.” A video of the Oct. 2023 confrontation shows Tettey-Tamaklo and Bharmal approaching HBS student Yoav Segev, who was attempting to film the faces of protesters. Bharmal and Tettey-Tamaklo then blocked his camera by holding up keffiyehs and fluorescent security vests while escorting him out of the protest.
The case has been delayed by nearly nine months, after the Suffolk County District Attorney’s Office requested additional information from the
Harvard University Police Department. At a Jan. 17 appearance, lawyers for the two men requested the judge dismiss the case for lack of probable cause after filing a motion in December. Monica R. Shah, the attorney for both Tettey-Tamaklo and Bharmal, did not respond to a request for comment on the judge’s dismissal. In a May police report from the Harvard University Police Department – more than six months after the protest – Segev told officers that he was hit by “many individuals.” He specifically identified Tettey-Tamaklo, Bharmal, and a third unidentified individual as the “most prolific and aggressive.” In a November motion to dismiss both the assault and civil charges, Shah argued that Tettey-Tamaklo and Bharmal were targeted by HUPD on ac -
count of their race. She further argued that the case against Tettey-Tamaklo, who is black, and Bharmal, who is of South Asian descent, was tainted by racial bias.
Though the motion was denied at the time, the defendants were given a Dec. 23 deadline to file the motion to dismiss due to lack of probable cause. A Harvard spokesperson declined to comment on the case. HUPD spokesperson Steven G. Catalano did not immediately respond to a request for comment. A status hearing, where attorneys will meet with a judge to discuss the status of the case and a possible settlement, is scheduled for Feb. 27 at the Brighton division of the Boston Municipal Court.
LAWSUIT
INDUSTRY. Sage, a Cambridge Biopharma Company, sued Biogen after rejecting their buy-out.
Cambridge-based biopharmaceutical company Sage Therapeutics filed a lawsuit against their partner, the biotechnology company Biogen, after rejecting their $469 million buy-out proposal late last month. Sage’s board wrote in late January that the offer “significantly undervalues” the company, which is currently working with Biogen towards commercializing ZURZUVAE, the first and only oral FDA-approved treatment for postpartum depression.
Biogen’s offer is significantly lower than Sage’s $504 million cash holdings according to their 2024 financial results report, which was published Tuesday.
Sage wrote in their 2024 annual report that their rejection of Biogen’s proposal “may adversely impact our relationship with Biogen, and our efforts to commercialise ZURZUVAE.” The company has incurred net losses every year since its inception, except for in 2020
when a license agreement with Biogen increased revenue.
Biogen, which currently owns 10 percent of Sage, first made a public offer in mid-January proposing to buy the remaining 90 percent of Sage’s shares for $7.22 each. When Biogen initially invested in Sage, it paid $104.14 for each share.
Just under a week after this year’s offer, Sage filed a lawsuit against Biogen, “seeking preliminary injunctive relief” to enforce an agreement that prevents Biogen from publicly disclosing any proposals for a buyout.
A Biogen spokesperson, however, said in an interview with Endpoint News that the company was required to publicly disclose the letter due to their existing equity holdings in Sage.
Biogen and Sage both declined The Crimson’s requests for comment.
The strain on the partnership is the latest of a series of challenges faced by Sage, which saw several clinical failures and lackluster sales last year.
In November, Sage announced that it was abandoning development of Dalzanemdor, a drug intended to treat neurological disorders like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, after it failed to meet goals in clinical studies.
Just a few months before, Sage
decided no longer to pursue approval of ZURZUVAE for treatment of major depressive disorder. The drug was previously rejected by the FDA for treatment of MDD in 2023. The current designation of ZURZUVAE as treatment for postpartum depression significantly narrows the drug’s market.
Although the company undertook several restructuring initiatives, including laying off over 100 employees in October 2024, the resulting savings in research and development were not enough to offset total company costs.
According to their annual report, Sage’s net loss was $400.7 million in 2024, and the accumulated deficit was $3.0 billion as of December.
The company expects that existing cash and assets are sufficient to fund currently planned operations for the next 12 months, but “anticipates it will require additional financing to fund its future operations,” Sage wrote in their annual report.
Although Sage wrote that they are also exploring “strategic alternatives” with the help of Goldman Sachs, the company’s future remains uncertain.
The Cambridge Historical Commission approved Harvard Chabad’s plan to demolish their 54-56 Banks St. property — a necessary step in their plans for expanding their building — in a Feb. 6 meeting. In a previous hearing, Chabad had agreed to the commission’s request to preserve the buildings on 38-40 and 48 Banks Street. Since then, Chabad has come out with an updated expansion proposal which would require the demolition of an additional building at 54-56 Banks St. — requiring them to appear once again before the CHC.
The Historical Commission primarily sought to answer whether Chabad’s property is architecturally and socially historic to determine whether or not it should be protected from demolition. In a January staff memo, the Historical Commission determined that the house in question was “significant for its connection with the development of the Kerry’s Corner neighborhood,” despite exterior renovations in 2007.
At Thursday’s meeting, however, the commission concluded that the building did not merit preferable preservation — leaving the only impediment to Chabad’s expansion their ongoing mediation with the Board of Zoning Authority.
The four-hour discussion saw numerous conflicting public comments, leading to accusations of hostility from Cambridge Histori-
cal Commissioner Paula Paris.
“I would say the majority of the public commentary has made our job very difficult,” Paris said, adding that “conflict between neighbors” made it hard for dialogue to occur. Manager for the Massachusetts Historical Society, Gavin Kleespies spoke in favor of Chabad’s proposal for expansion.
“This new proposal does a very good job of contextualizing two historic structures,” he said. “We are losing a third historic structure.”
“That’s a choice to make, but I think that in terms of how the two that will survive are presented — I think it’s a good adaptive reuse of a space, and it’s a space that’s evolving and becoming more functional,” Kleespies added.
Chabad Rabbi Hirschy Zarchi; Ben Tymann from the law firm Tymann, Davis and Duffy; the architect on the project Jason Jewhurst; and Joshua Sydney from Sydney Project Management appeared in defense of the new proposal.
Zarchi noted capacity issues that Chabad has faced when hosting Sabbath events, which he said were “arguably the most central, regular focal point of Jewish life.” He pointed to a recent Sabbath where it was raining, and Chabad was unable to accommodate all attendees.
“The majority of them were out in the cold, in the tent with the rain,” he said.
“Others were forced into the first floor of the building, others to the second floor of the building, and a large number were forced into 54 Bank Street.” Members of the public were also
given the opportunity to offer their opinions at the meeting, with some criticizing the proposed expansion.
“I walk down the street every day, and you get a real sense of the history of Cambridge, and you walk down especially that side of the street, and that building is part of it,” Cambridge resident Tom Serwold said. “In that way, it is very architecturally significant in that context.”
Some residents, however, voiced their support for Chabad’s plans.
“I feel like, as a citizen of Cambridge, if we hold this up, it is blocking the continued evolution of our incredible city,” Cambridge resident Emily Anne Jacobstein said.
“If you look in this neighborhood in particular, you have so many different styles,” she added. “Dunster’s right there, and then Mather, and then Banks Street. And that’s what makes it so unique and interesting, and we need to allow that continued evolution.”
BY SHAWN A. BOEHMER AND JACK B. REARDON CRIMSON STAFF WRITERS
Harvard will double its annual payments to the town of Southborough to $50,000 in response to a request from the city to increase their contributions to the Payment in Lieu of Taxes program, the University announced in a letter last month.
The payments are meant to offset the tax-exempt status of its land holdings in the town. Because it is a nonprofit, Harvard does not pay taxes on its institutional land, which in practice deprives municipalities of money that funds their budgets.
As an offset, Harvard has PILOT agreements with Boston, Cambridge, and Southborough to contribute a fraction of what they would otherwise pay in property taxes.
Harvard owns 89 acres of land in Southborough, part of which currently houses the Harvard Depository, an off-site storage facility holding approximately 45 percent of Harvard’s library collection. The area previously housed Harvard’s New England Primate Research Center, which closed in 2013.
In May 2022, Southborough attempted to appoint a PILOT committee with the “objective of establishing formal agreements” with nonprofit organizations that held real estate in the town. Several months later, then-Attorney General Maura T. Healey ’92 intervened, arguing the selectboard was prohibited from delegating such powers to a committee of non-members, in effect blocking their power to directly negotiate with Harvard.
Since then, four of the seven PI-
LOT committee meetings scheduled for Southborough have been canceled. The last meeting of the committee occurred in 2023, though it was largely limited to sharing research on the PILOT programs of neighboring cities.
It is unclear what conversations happened between Harvard and Southborough in the interim. Neither the selectboard office nor the body’s chair responded to requests for an interview for this article.
A Harvard spokesperson also did not respond to a request to comment for this story.
Their $50,000 voluntary payment is $23,773 more than the $26,227 they paid last year, with the amount set to increase by a small percentage each year, keeping pace with inflation.
“Harvard has increased its voluntary donation to the Town to $50,000 for FY2025, with a 2.5% annual escalation after this year,” according to a letter that Harvard sent to Southborough Town Administrator Mark Purple.
Previous PILOT Payments that Harvard made to Southborough were restricted to Southborough’s police and fire departments. However, the new “donation,”as Harvard’s letter describes it, will not be earmarked for any specific purpose.
As part of the deal, Harvard also agreed to hold and preserve documents for Southborough.
“In response to the Town’s interest in document preservation for public access through the Southborough archival project, we are excited to offer the Town reserved storage space at the Harvard Depository,” according to Harvard’s letter.
Southborough has faced problems with documents deteriorating in their Town House
vault, due to a lack of climate control. Harvard’s Depository is climate-controlled, helping to boost the life of important documents.
“The Depository is designed to provide an archival-quality storage environment that will stabilize the condition—and extend the useful life for a variety of materials,” according to the Harvard Library Department.
Harvard also provides PILOT payments to the cities of Cambridge and Boston, where it has been a target of controversy. In both cities, Harvard is in ongoing negotiations to update the terms of that program, though progress has been slow so far on both fronts.
In 2023, Cambridge forced the University to renegotiate their terms 20 years into their 50-year PILOT contract after the city exercised its option to withdraw from the agreement. City officials have cited the significant growth in Harvard’s budget and endowment — which City Manager Yi-An Huang ’05 noted had “more than doubled” since the contract was first signed — as reasons for reworking the program.
At a Jan. 27 City Council meeting discussing the proposal, Cambridge Vice Mayor Marc C. McGovern described Harvard and Cambridge’s relationship as a “complicated marriage”. In Boston, meanwhile, Harvard’s payments have been falling short of the amount requested for more than a decade – paying almost $3 million less than the city requested in 2023. The city has been attempting to renegotiate its agreement with Harvard since at least last summer.
jack.reardon@thecrimson.com shawn.boehmer@thecrimson.com
Daniel L. Smail is a professor in the History department. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
FM: You’ve done cool interdisciplinary work bringing history and biology together, largely through the nexus of evolution. What do these two fields have to learn from each other?
DLS: One side of biology is paleontology, which is one aspect of the way people think about evolution. I’ve done a fair amount of reading in paleontology — some general things, more pop science, and some more careful, detailed research articles. The thing that really strikes me is how there are so many features of paleontology that are directly commensurable to trends in history. They just use different vocabularies.
FM: You’ve argued that the brain can be a helpful tool to use to shed light on history, and on deep history particularly. Can you explain how biology can then be a tool to help expand the scope of ways that history can be studied?
DLS: An example that I’ve been really interested in over the years is chronic stress. All people are capable of feeling chronic stress, and this is true for animals as well. That’s universal, but it can lead — this is an insight by the neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky — to situations where chronic stress can turn people dispirited and passive. It can become an instrument of power to manipulate structures in such a way that you get a dispirited population that suffers from chronic stress. So it becomes something where power can intersect with the brain and human society. We just can’t leave the brain and biology out of the way in which we think about the past.
FM: Switching gears slightly, how would you define “deep history” as a field?
DLS: In the Euro-American world, for a long time, they thought that human history was coterminous to the history of the Earth, and they thought that both of those were about 6,000 years. Then we had this massive time revolution in the middle of the 19th century, associated with Darwin, associated with trends in archeology and trends in geology. Suddenly, the bottom dropped out of history. Everyone, within the space of a few decades, realized that the history of the Earth and the history of humanity was much, much longer than had previously been thought. What happened is that, although people began to understand by 1900 or 1930 that humans had a past that was much deeper than the part accorded to history, they didn’t stretch the concept of history to include that deeper past.
“Deep history” is the idea that whenever we think about humans, we have to think about the whole stretch, and that means thinking about different methodologies.
HISTORY PROFESSOR Daniel L. Smail sat down with Fifteen Minutes to talk about forged Roman coins and the long view of history. “Whenever we think about humans, we have to think about the whole stretch,” he says.
BY ELLIE S. KLIBANER-SCHIFF CRIMSON MAGAZINE EDITOR
it compel you to activism, or does it offer some zoomed-out perspective?
DLS: The latter. It’s not that I don’t get involved in activism, but when you take a long, long view, shit happens constantly, and things come out the other end. We’re not always happy with the way that things come out the other end, but the one thing about the long term perspective is that it lowers the blood pressure. I have a number of colleagues that I admire and respect who work primarily on the 20th century, and I can imagine them saying that, “Well, the problem then is it leads to a kind of moral cowardice, because everything’s going to be fine.” I’m acutely sensitive to that issue. For me, the crisis is the
FM: I heard from a friend who took “Deep History” that there are fun pedagogical techniques in the course, like you can “phone a friend” during assessments and get graded based on their answer. What’s compelling to you about that sort of activity?
DLS: The phone-a-friend thing was a method that I picked up from a colleague in the business school. He’d written an article about this technique that he had for quizzes. His proposal was that you have a quiz that might have ten really hard questions. For one of them, rather than giving your own answer, you can choose any member of the class and say, “I’m going to accept that person’s answer instead of my own.” The point of it is hidden. It’s meant to promote lateral learning. Normally, when students think, “I won’t get a chance to speak. Why should I bother listening to this person over here, what they’re blathering on about?” But when it turns out that you might want to use that person’s answer on the quiz, you listen carefully
It’s actually not about the quiz at all. It’s all about developing interest in what other students are saying and listening to them.
FM: The “Harvard Gets Medieval” course that you teach is about objects, specifically the historical objects that are in Harvard’s vast collections. Have you or your students in the process of this course found things that really surprise you that Harvard was holding them?
DLS: One of the one of my favorite stories about unexpected stuff was actually in the “Deep History” class, not the “Harvard Gets Medieval” class. There was a student who got fascinated by a token supposedly given to a Roman legionnaire after 20 years of service that was in the Peabody. He was super fascinated, did an object biography of this token, and did a lot of studies of Roman soldiers and Centurions and the rewards they received for service. He sent us an email halfway through the semester — we’d recommended that he go and talk to a colleague in the Classics department, just to get a sense about what Classicists would say about it. Our colleague told him, “It’s a 19th
century forgery.” So he’d grown in utter despair about this. Both Matt and I said, “That’s fascinating. Write about 19th century forgeries of ancient objects, because that’s a wonderful topic.”
FM: How do we look at history differently when we study it through the lens of objects as opposed to texts?
DLS: One of the things that I particularly like about objects is, if you think about text, and especially if you think about older texts, we have a very limited range of texts. In the 20th century you can find documents and texts on anything you want to find out about. But as we go further into the past, the range of things, insights that you get into the human mind, get smaller and smaller, because not as much survives. Plus, there’s different styles of literacy and writing. But the objects are continuous. You can pick up an object and see things that you cannot see in texts.
FM: A lot of your research focuses on the Mediterranean region and Europe. What draws you to that part of the world?
DLS: I went to graduate school — I had French, I had a little Latin — and I was thinking that I was going to be a French historian. And I am a French historian, to some extent. I mentioned that I have somewhat unusual tastes for a historian. I don’t like to work at the center of historical or even academic inquiry. I like to work in the edges. If you think of academic space as being like a galaxy where there’s great gravitational wells that pull in lots of scholarship, that’s where amazing scholarship is done. There’s also interstellar space, where there’s fewer people, but they’re working in this interstellar space between these gravitational centers. I’m an interstellar space person. For me, going to the Mediterranean was getting away from the center of gravity of French scholarship. I wanted to get into out-of-the-way, obscure subjects that no one, at least in this country, knew anything about.
The weather is lovely too.
FM: We’re living in turbulent political times right now. I’m curious about how the study of history impacts your interpretation of the events around us. Does
the Admiral of Sicily, who was active in the region of Sicily and Naples. She was captured by a Marseille privateer and brought back to Marseille as a slave, and then she clawed her way to freedom, and it was an extraordinary story. She sued her former master for a debt, sparking the longest continuous running case in the archives of Marseille. It’s a micro-history. I just sent it off to the press three weeks ago.
arvard’s historic Hasty Pudding Theatricals honored Jon Hamm as its 58th Man of the Year on Friday, Jan. 31, in a rambunctious evening filled with playful jabs and iconic references to the Emmy-winning actor’s contributions to entertainment. Since its inception in 1967, the Hasty Pudding Man of the Year award has recognized performers who have left a notable mark in entertainment. Past honorees have included Tom Hanks, Samuel L. Jackson, and last year’s recipient, Barry Keoghan. The annual celebratory roast and award ceremony took place at Farkas Hall, where Hamm gamely endured a barrage of comedic barbs before receiving the famous Pudding Pot.
Jon Hamm has boasted a three decades-long career and is most acclaimed for his Emmy and Golden Globe-winning role as Don Draper in “Mad Men.” He currently stars in the Paramount series “Landman” and will soon appear in Apple TV+’s
“Your Friends and Neighbors” and the live-action adaptation of the podcast “American Hostage.”
Hamm strode onto the stage to thunderous applause, met by a group of student performers eager to put his quick wit to the test. The roast, presented by Cathy J. Stanton ’25 and Bernardo M. Sequeira ’26, poked fun at his height, lack of an Academy Award, and inferior looks compared to many previous winners. His comedic tendencies provided ample material for the Pudding’s signature theatrical antics. One skit saw Hamm reassume his “Mad Men” character, Don Draper, as a salesman. He was tasked with pitching commercial services and products like car insurance to a baby driver and a pen to a wom -
BY JOSEPH A. JOHNSON CRIMSON STAFF WRITER
“Hot Ones” is a YouTube show in which host Sean Evans scrupulously interviews famous guests as they eat increasingly spicy chicken wings. It has featured star talent ranging from Billie Eilish to Gordon Ramsay, and produced meme-ified moments including Jennifer Lawrence’s uber-famous “What do you mean?” outburst, with a total view count of over 4 billion — that is, billion with a “B.” YouTube channel Good Mythical Morning is no slouch either, hosted by childhood best friends-turned-YouTube creators Rhett James McLaughlin and Charles Lincoln “Link” Neal III. Like Evans, Rhett & Link are most famous for their food-inspired YouTube content. To give just two examples, their “World’s Hottest Pepper Challenge: Carolina Reaper” and “Making Real Food w/ Play-Doh Toys” videos amassed over 25 million views apiece.
YouTube creators might at first seem out-of-place at a Sundance Film Festival-sanctioned event, but Evans, Rhett, and Link are no ordinary YouTube creators. “Hot Ones” was nominated for “Best Talk Show” in the 2025 Critics Choice Awards, and the “Rhett & Link’s Wonderhole” TV series has been acclaimed by critics and fans alike.
YouTube creators have finally left the sidelines and taken the field, transforming public perception of short-form video
content from disposable content to essential, celebrated, and here-to-stay entertainment media. BrandStorytelling, as its title suggests, is an organization that connects brands with storytellers, and it recognizes this turning point in short-form video content.
BrandStorytelling’s inaugural “Creator Day” showcased short-form video creators and collaborators at one of the year’s “most influential cultural events” according to “Creator Day” co-host and curator Gabe Gordon. Brands like YouTube, Ray-Ban, Meta, SiriusXM, and Whalar were represented, as well as “Creator Economy experts” from Doing Things, Ensemble, Feastables, Hartbeat, NowThis, Paramount+, and Portal A. To close out the day’s festivities, BrandStorytelling invited Evans and Rhett & Link to a Fireside Chat, where they discussed their careers and the future of entertainment.
During the chat, Evans pointed to TV and radio icons — not YouTube creators — as his “formative role models,” including David Letterman, Conan O’Brien, Jimmy Kimmel, and Howard Stern.”
“When you look at where the show has gone, its place in culture, the guests that we interview, the views that we get, it’s absolutely worthy of comparison and competition with those other shows, and then some categories it actually weighs pretty favorably over on our side,” Evans said.
Rhett also swept false mod -
an who had just lost her dream job. He also jokingly sold a lifetime voucher for bath time with Harry Potter — a reference to his 2012 series “A Young Doctor’s Notebook,” in which he starred alongside Daniel Radcliffe.
The roast culminated in a fabricated poll.
“When we announced you as Man of the Year, 65 percent of our company members were such big fans that they repeated your most iconic line from ‘Mad Men’: ‘I do not think about him at all.’ 34 percent said, ‘That guy’s still alive?’” Stanton said.
“Well, what about the last one percent?” Sequeira said.
“Oh, that vote doesn’t count,” Stanton said. “It was the real Paul Rudd who said, ‘We would make beautiful babies together.’”
During the roast’s conclusion, Hamm was rather witty when prompted for final remarks.
“Did you all seriously think I was dead? This is such a wonderful honor. You guys are so kind to have me. What kind? I don’t know,” Hamm said.
esty aside. Referencing a big moment for Good Mythical Morning and its place in the entertainment pantheon, he said, “Last year, the microphone that sits in the center of our desk was archived in the Smithsonian.”
This type of unfiltered pride isn’t uncommon for YouTubers like Evans and Rhett & Link, who value authenticity over all else. Starting out as Davids, these YouTube creators have built Goliath institutions known the world over, and their success story is in no small part due to “the level of connection” they foster with their fans, as Link said.
Starting out as Davids, these YouTube creators have built Goliath institutions known the world over.
“I think that the connection that [the fans] build with content is the connection that they build with the person and the people on screen in a way that you just don’t get with traditional media,” Link explained. “If you’re gonna tell narrative stories, you’re not gonna feel as connected as with someone who’s just being themselves on the other end of that screen.”
But these connections aren’t made overnight, and You -
Following the roast, Hamm took the stage for a press conference, reflecting on his storied career and sharing insights into its trajectory. He acknowledged the profound impact of “Mad Men” on his journey, calling it “a mark in [his] life and career,” while also crediting “Saturday Night Live” creator Lorne Michaels for giving him the opportunity to showcase his humorous side, despite his usual work in dramas.
“I figured, while I do that for my day job, there’s more fun stuff to do,” said Hamm,
The St. Louis native noted his personal connection to Cambridge through his wife, actress Anna Osceola.
recalling how his SNL appearance led to roles in “30 Rock,” “Bridesmaids,” and beyond.
The St. Louis native noted his personal connection to Cambridge through his wife, actress Anna Osceola, who grew up in the area. He also recounted visiting the city over the years and reflected on his time filming “The Town” in
Boston, noting the unique energy of the local community. “There is a lot of hometown pride in the Hamm household for sure,” he said. He also touched on his experience performing live, comparing the unpredictability and audience reception of theater and sketch comedy to the carefully curated nature of film and television.
“With film or television work, you’re hoping that this will resonate in the future, somewhere down the line after it’s gone through an edit, a sound pass, a VFX pass, and all of the other things you do to filmed work before it gets seen by people,” Hamm said. “So there’s something to the immediacy and the live aspect that’s really exciting and dangerous and scary.”
The evening concluded with a preview of Hasty Pudding Theatricals’ 176th production, “101 Damnations,” a story about a comedic romp through the underworld.
When asked where he would keep his newest award, Hamm said, “I’ve not won an Academy Award — as some of you heard mentioned this evening — but I have won some other things, so this will have lovely friends on my shelf.”
lydia.fraser@thecrimson.com
Tube stardom isn’t always as hunky-dory as it might seem from afar.
Offering advice to aspiring YouTube creators, Evans said, “Unless you’re sick in the head and need to do this, just get a normal job, because it will make you miserable and you are exposed and creative work can oftentimes be embarrassing and vulnerable and you’re always there for immediate feedback.”
Rhett cheekily said to Evans, “Damn, Sean. I gotta be real, you know. You’re just talking me out of the whole thing.”
This cynical side of the conversation came to a halt, though, when Rhett broke out into song. “Anything you can be, you can do! Anything you may be, might come true!” he sang.
Whether their content is seen on phone screens or movie
screens, Evans and Rhett & Link are world-class entertainers.
Rhett’s improvisational, breakout lyrics were just one example of his dedication as an entertainer to drawing attention to himself — and keeping a firm hold of it.
“We don’t want to become just subject to the whims of the audience, because they’ll chew you up and spit you out. But you want to take them into account,” Link said. “But just be one step ahead of them and create the thing that they’re about to start liking.”
While this innovative approach to storytelling is certainly important, there are also tried-and-true approaches that have stood the test of time, whether or not they’re immediately apparent to the entertainment doomsayers of today.
“At the end of the day, trends can change, things can happen, but people rolling up with a blanket on the couch and watching something that invites the next episode in a binge (but isn’t that great of a commitment), I think that’s timeless, and that’ll never go out of style,” Evans said, discussing the parallels between “Hot Ones” and the sitcoms he grew up watching.
“I expect things to change a lot,” he continued. “But the classics and the behaviors of people and what they’re looking for, it’s not that different from what I was looking for when I was a kid or what my dad was looking for when he was a kid. So I think as much as things change, I’m kind of betting on things staying the same.”
THE PUDDING celebrated Erivo with a parade through Harvard Square
BY JACKIE CHEN CRIMSON STAFF WRITER
Eager spectators, already forming a line down Massachusetts Avenue well before the parade’s slated start time of 1:45 p.m. on Feb. 5, jumped up and down from excitement and an effort to stay warm against the biting cold. Fueled by complimentary cannolis and ice cream, they strained for glimpses and photographs of the approaching shiny convertible escorted by dancers donning black-and-green and marching bands blasting a triumphant, instrumental version of “Defying Gravity.” Then, in an epic crescendo of chatter and camera shutters, there she appeared in a moment that defied the usual rhythm of another school day: Grammy, Emmy, and Tony Award-winning performance powerhouse Cynthia Erivo.
Erivo is the 75th person to be named Woman of the Year by Harvard’s Hasty Pudding Theatricals, honored alongside actor Jon Hamm as Man of the Year. The Pudding celebrated the Woman of the Year with a parade through Harvard Square with a destination of Farkas Hall, where a roast, a press conference, and a performance of the
‘We
Pudding’s 176th production “101 Damnations” awaited her that evening.
Cynthia Erivo launched into theatrical stardom with roles in the West End and Broadway, best-known for her work in “The Color Purple.” She also starred on the big screen in “Harriet” and has now garnered an even wider fanbase through her recent, critically-acclaimed portrayal of Elphaba in Universal’s record-shattering film adaptation of the beloved Broadway musical “Wicked,” on which the day’s events primarily focused.
Many Harvard undergraduate fans watched the parade, bearing signs laden with references like “You make GREEN better than CRIMSON.”
“How incredible is it that Cynthia Erivo is here right now at Harvard University? I am feeling blessed right now,” Isaac A. Newman ’25 said.
During his time at Harvard, Newman has been a conductor for the Pudding.
“This is probably the biggest thing that’s happened at this school since its founding,” he said.
A flurry of multicolored crepe streamers, propelled by members of the music and art performance troupe the Blue Man Group, heralded Erivo’s procession down the road. Pudding members dressed in quirky, eye-catching costumes followed beside. As the convertible drew closer to Farkas Hall, the crowd
peeled from the passed-by spots and scurried along Erivo’s path to maximize their chances of eye-contact, a wave, or a selfie.
Hours later at 7 p.m., Pudding producers Willow A. Woodward ’26 and Daisy M. Nussbaum ’26 welcomed Erivo on the Farkas stage for her roast, which centered around the whopping runtime of “Wicked” and its numerous pairs of co-stars on Broadway and beyond, before she could win her Pudding Pot. Erivo played along with an initial response of “dreadful,” then “fantastic,” when asked by Woodward how her day had been.
Pudding members Danny O. Dennenberg ’26, Chris L. Rivers ’25, and Will W. Jevon ’27 took to the stage, parodying three famous comedians. Dennenberg, in the voice of John Mulaney, described the “Wicked” script as “so bloated, whoever wrote it must have been holding space.” Rivers, as Jerry Seinfeld, echoed the sentiment: “The ‘Wicked’ movie just kept going!” Finally, Bill-Burr-impersonator Jevon broke from the pattern by dwelling on Erivo’s role in the DreamWorks animated children’s comedy series, “The Boss Baby: Back in Business.” Erivo laughed heartily after the three comedians, then was met with her first task.
Spoofing Erivo’s infamous interview with “Wicked” co-star Ariana Grande, where Grande clutches a singular finger of Erivo’s, the Pudding challenged
her to a fingerpainting contest against character Finn Gerpainter, played by Isabel V. S. Wilson ’26. The prompt given invoked Grande winning Best Supporting Actress at the Oscars, and Emma Rogers ’25 entered onstage as Ariana Grande. The contest concluded with Gerpainter’s victory as their easel turned around to display a pasted-on image from that interview towards the audience.
“I won’t ask you to shake hands, but I know you love to hold fingers,” said Wilson as Gerpainter. Next, Erivo faced a social-media-inspired riff-off challenge, where she and two “Tiktok Elphabas” played by Caitlin A. Beirne ’25 and Gabrielle M. Greene ’27 each nailed her iconic twist to “Defying Gravity.” When asked who won, Erivo — the final contestant — humbly said: “I’d go with number one.”
With these challenges complete, Erivo was primed for her crowning achievement of the day: the Pudding Pot presentation. But the Pudding had one last trick up their sleeves, ushering out the Blue Man Group — complete with a blue Pudding Pot — in witch hats and capes, walking to the melody of “Defying Gravity.”
“I enjoy the blue, it’s a change,” said Erivo, who asked to keep the parody Pudding Pot even once the real deal was brought out.
“This has been awesome, by the way, thank you so much for
Literature is so back. Han Kang, the recipient of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature and the first Korean author to win the prize, has returned with the novel “We Do Not Part.” First published in Korean in 2021 and translated into English by e. yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris this year, the book follows writer and protagonist Kyungha when her documentarist-turned-carpenter friend Inseon, undergoing emergency treatment for a hand injury, asks her for a favor: to travel to Inseon’s remote home on Jeju Island to feed her pet bird. Holed up in Inseon’s house during a dangerous winter, Kyungha finds herself haunted by her friend’s family history — a story of political violence, unresolved grief, and seeking truth.
At the heart of “We Do Not Part” lies a narrative about the Bodo League massacre, a series of mass executions of alleged communist sympathizers that the South Korean government carried out in 1950. According to some estimates, up to 200,000 Koreans — some of them children — were killed. In the novel, the family members of Inseon’s mother were among those detained and murdered — a story that reveals itself slowly as a ghostly apparition of Inseon, upon meeting Kyungha in her house, provides her own narration. Han is no stranger to exploring the legacy of mass murder, having written about the 1980 Gwangju massacre in the novel “Human Acts,” which she considers to be of a “pair” with her latest book. Echoes of “Human Acts” linger throughout “We Do Not Part,” most notably in the
fact that Han repeatedly declines to recount history in a conventional way. Stories of the massacre are filtered through multiple layers of telling — for instance, Inseon telling Kyungha the stories that her mother told her.
The prose in “We Do Not Part” is ghostlike, moving freely between voices and timelines. The perspective shifts between Kyungha’s narration and Inseon’s storytelling, while the plot itself progresses non-chronologically through scenes of historical events, flashbacks showing the two women’s friendship, and the novel’s present-day narrative.
“We Do Not Part” is unconcerned with reproducing reality — when Inseon appears in the house with an impossibly unharmed hand, readers aren’t supposed to ask, “What’s really going on here?” Instead, the book leads the reader through a narrative that, real or not, grasps at the
story’s emotional truth. This lack of explanation could have been frustrating in the hands of a less capable author, but Kang’s storytelling is so immersive that the novel’s internal logic becomes the last thing on a reader’s mind. More explanation would have, in fact, lessened the story’s dreamlike quality. Instead, “We Do Not Part” drops the reader into a remote Jeju village in the middle of winter. It might not seem like praise to say that a novel’s most impressive aspect is its description of the weather, but Han depicts Kyungha’s perilous journey through a winter storm with simultaneous ferocity and beauty in an astonishing display of writerly skill. As Kyungha struggles through freezing winds and punishing cold to reach Inseon’s house, the descriptive prose heightens the intensity of a setting that is already well-matched to the sto -
all of it,” she said. She smiled with sportsmanship at the roast’s conclusion to a standing ovation from the audience. Erivo then joined members of the press upstairs in Farkas Hall, where she answered questions about the significance of acting, particularly theater, in her life.
“Theater doesn’t really leave you. All that you build before you get to the screen doesn’t leave, so to still be awarded for things I’ve done on stage means a great deal, means it’s been shining through,” she said about her Woman of the Year recognition.
Erivo also remarked on what she’s looking forward to in her career.
“It can be very difficult to let a character go, even from a practical sense — it’s intrinsically who you are,” she said. However, she shared that she is “hungry” to find her next character and already has something in the works.
“There might be something cooking already. I might have done something that’s more comedic than other things,” Erivo said.
Erivo reflected on the role of Elphaba, too.
“I’m excited to share the next part of this character and what journey she might be on. I know there’s something else brewing and coming,” she said.
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ry taking place within it. “Everything I have ever experienced is made crystalline,” Kyungha narrates. “Nothing hurts anymore.”
Just as impressive is e. and Morris’s translation. Their work is unobtrusive and restrained, providing context where necessary and preserving Korean words and dialect when called for. The novel’s dreamlike atmosphere dissipates in its third act, which pulls back from the book’s previous reality-bending style to give a more straightforward retelling of history. While this makes the story less immersive, the shift to a more direct account is arguably needed to drive home the horrific nature of the events described in the novel. The book returns to form in the final section, “Flame,” which closes the novel with its characteristic surrealism, imagery, and expressive prose.
“We Do Not Part” is also a novel that questions how to make art about historical atrocities. Like Han herself, Kyungha and Inseon are artists whose work deals with real-life instances of mass violence. Snippets of documentaries and Kyungha’s own book pepper the narrative; the novel’s emphasis on descriptive imagery means that reading it often feels like looking at a photograph. “We Do Not Part” offers up art as a medium for truth-telling — for imparting the stories of the dead in a way that is, like a winter storm, both brutal and beautiful.
5 STARS
BEANPOT After a disappointing loss in its semifinal game, the men’s ice hockey team responded with a 4-3 win over Northeastern at TD Garden.
In its third place game at the 72nd annual Beanpot Tournament, the Harvard men’s ice hockey team (713-2, 6-8-2 ECAC) defeated the Northeastern Huskies (9-133, 4-9-3 HE) 4-3 in regulation, earning its 21st third place finish. The Crimson’s offensive performance was fueled by power plays, with Harvard securing four power-play goals on six attempts.
Harvard freshman goaltender Ben Charette also shined Monday night in his second collegiate career appearance at the Beanpot, making 23 saves and locking down the win for his team. The game got off to an uncharacteristically slow and sloppy start for Harvard, a team that played a superb first period and a half in its eventual 7-1 loss to Boston University last Monday. On Northeastern’s share of
opportunities in the offensive zone, the Crimson faced multiple unlucky deflections that prevented it from exiting the zone cleanly.
More often than not, Harvard made errant passes in its own zone, much as it had in the latter half of last week’s game, and for a moment a repeat of last week’s blowout seemed in the cards.
Junior defenseman Ryan Healey was the one who got caught, falling while handling the puck, and leaving it in perfect position for Husky junior center and captain Jack Williams to fire an uncontested shot on Harvard freshman goaltender Charette’s net.
Northeastern, looking to maintain its offensive pace, continued to play aggressively in front of the net, which led to matching penalties for both teams.
Harvard freshman defenseman Lucas St. Louis was called for roughing and Northeastern sophomore center Andy Moore for slashing during a scuffle after the whistle.
Another penalty came against Northeastern freshman defenseman Jack Henry when he held Harvard sophomore forward Salvatore Guzzo against the glass shortly after 4-on-4 play had concluded.
Now Harvard, which trailed significantly in shots on goal at this point, would get a solid chance at tying the game.
Crimson freshman Mick Thompson seized the opportunity by skating into and through the back of Northeastern’s zone, taking it all the way behind Husky sophomore netminder Cameron Whitehead.
Shooting just barely to the inside of Whitehead’s skate, the puck bounced off it and into the back of the net, where Whitehead was unable to see it to bring the game to even at 1-1.
“I guess after the beginning of the power play was quite possibly the worst power play in the history of hockey,” said head coach Ted Donato, when asked about the power play during tonight’s performance. “And we were able to then bang it off the back of the goalie.”
“After that, we were able to get three more and had some good chances,” he added.
The Huskies were again called for a penalty, this time a tripping minor against freshman forward Ben Poitras approaching the final minute in the period. And again, Harvard found a way to score on the power play.
A cross-crease pass to the slot by Harvard sophomore forward Ben MacDonald led to a
wide-open shot from junior defenseman Mason Langenbrunner aiming top left for the score.
With the momentum swinging in the Crimson’s favor and the tremendously poor passing from the first period subsiding, Harvard players managed to get to the right spots on the ice on both ends to set itself up for good opportunities.
The intermission fixes began to overwhelm the Huskies, as they took a rare bench minor for too-many-men on the ice.
Seconds into the third power play, a faceoff win by the Crimson gave defenseman and captain Ian Moore the puck. Moore shot with space from the point, which was tipped by junior forward Casey Severo for another score. Leading 3-1, all of Harvard’s goals continued to come off the power play.
The team’s success coming out of the locker room refused to die down, despite allowing Northeastern to scrape back by earning its first goal of the period on a rebound attempt.
Notably, Northeastern played the game down a key player due to injury. Northeastern men’s ice hockey head coach Jerry Keefe said that he had hoped the absence of junior defenseman Vinny Borgesi would allow the rest of the team to “step up,” but they ultimately did not.
“Obviously not having Vinny in the lineup is a big deal, right?” Keefe said. “He plays 27 minutes, more than any guy in the country. So he’s a very good player.”
Another two penalties were called in quick succession, a goal from Langenbrunner coming on the first power play giving him his second of the contest and also bringing Harvard’s lead back to two goals.
“Obviously scoring two at the Garden is awesome,” said Langenbrunner, when asked what it meant to score two goals in TD Garden as a Bruins prospect. “I wish it would have been in the later game, but it’s always good to get a couple”
“It’s always nice to come by, and I don’t come by them often,” he added.
A scary moment ensued on the second when a Northeastern player attempted to clear the puck down ice but instead hit a referee up high to the head as the puck deflected off the glass.
After a few moments he was able to get back on his feet and continued to referee the rest of the game.
The penalty, ultimately unsuccessful for Harvard, was its first in five attempts to not go in the net.
Pushing on still, the Huskies created an odd-man rush in the final two minutes of the period,
a 2-on-1 play down ice setting up Williams again for a one-timer goal from his knee over Charette’s right shoulder. Harvard junior forward Philip Tresca would then trip a Northeastern player carelessly in the final period’s first few minutes to give the Huskies their first power play chance. The Crimson made swift work of the power kill and a risky Northeastern play would put Harvard back on the offensive. Junior Husky defenseman Joaquim Lemay made a purposeful crosscheck with his stick on Severo. After review, Lemay was assessed a five-minute major and a game misconduct penalty, ejecting him from the game. A second unsuccessful power play chance for Harvard and two additional late-game penalties against the Crimson threatened to allow Northeastern to crawl back once more, but that luck was not on its side. After a close loss to Dartmouth in Hanover, NH last Friday, this win marks the team’s first since Colgate on the road in late January. The Crimson is set to play up in New York in four days as it takes on the St. Lawrence Saints and Clarkson Golden Knights.
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Harvard women’s basketball (17-3, 6-2 Ivy League) concluded its four game home stand with a resounding 66-31 victory over Dartmouth (8-13, 2-6). Three Crimson players tallied double digits in scoring with senior tandem Harmoni Turner and Elena Rodriguez scoring 21 and 10 points respectively, and junior Saniyah Glenn-Bello dishing in 11 points.
“Just a really good response,” said Harvard head coach Carrie Moore. “I thought we really got after it, less about Xs and Os, and more about culture – how we act and interact with one another. I felt defensively and offensively we were more connected from start to finish. I’m really proud of them for that response.”
The Crimson dominated from the opening tip, using its patented full court press to full effect, forcing turnovers and converting them into points on the other end. After five minutes of action, Harvard fielded an astonishing 16-0 lead with Turner and Rodriguez contributing 12 points. Following a strategic timeout by Big Green, the Crimson’s offense slowed down and Dartmouth found its first points of the contest courtesy of a jumper from the charity stripe. Despite the reset, Harvard maintained an 18-5 advantage after the first quarter.
First-year Lydia Chatira immediately drained a corner three to restore Harvard’s 16 point lead at the start of the second quarter. Big Green issued a response from the top of the key, but the Crimson fired off a 10-2 run, prompting a Dartmouth timeout.
This time, the rest resulted in the Big Green committing back-to-back turnovers. Turner capitalized on the takeaways, draining a floater and swishing a three pointer, bringing her scoring total to 15 points. The Crimson continued to move the ball well, finding junior Saniyah Glenn-Bello for another triple as Harvard sported a 39-14 halftime lead.
“We had nine turnovers at halftime,” recalled Moore. “Way too many against this team. I think a lot of that was just on us trying to throw cross court passes or force the issue with a dump down. What we did in transition defensively was really solid, I felt our defense really helped us when we needed to get stops to combat the turnovers.”
As the second half began, the Crimson continued to dominate defensively, allowing just five points in the first sev -
en minutes of the third quarter. Turner got her first points of the second half with a crossover jumper from the free throw line, bringing Harvard’s lead to 30.
Harvard started the fourth quarter strong with an immediate layup by Rodriguez followed by a ten-second backcourt violation forced by the Crimson’s suffocating full court press. With six minutes left, scoring began to ramp up on both sides, as sophomore Karlee White’s three pointer was immediately responded to with a Dartmouth triple. Despite its forty point lead, the Crimson’s defense remained relentless in the final minutes, pressuring the Big Green to hoist numerous hail mary three pointers to avoid a shot-clock violation. The Crimson finished its onslaught with a final score of 66-31. Harvard returns to the
road, traveling to New York for matchups against Cornell on Valentines Day and Columbia, undefeated in the Ivy League the following Sunday. The latter matchup will be pivotal for
the Crimson jumped out to a 6-3
The Harvard men’s volleyball team (3-4, 1-0 EIVA) dominated perennial conference power No. 17 Penn State (0-7, 0-1 EIVA) with a three-set win Friday night, giving the Crimson a surge of momentum to start its weekend against the Nittany Lion.
Harvard’s team, entering the matchup unranked after two straight losses last weekend, clinched a momentous win that ended Penn State’s 38-match win streak within the conference.
Harvard saw a fully packed crowd at the Malkin Athletic Center for their first conference matchup of the season.
Harvard got off to a strong start in the first set with an efficient attack and opportunistic play. A vicious early service run from junior outside hitter Zach Berty and two Nittany Lion service errors gave the Crimson a 6-4 lead and forced Penn State to burn a timeout. Lights out play from Berty came to be a defining characteristic of the set.
Harvard scored again out of the timeout to grow the lead before the Crimson went cold and surrendered a rebuttal run as the Nittany Lions seized a 9-11 lead. But senior outside hitter Logan Shepard fought back with a wily kill down the line that ignited a Harvard spurt. Penn State was once again forced to burn a timeout at 20-16 in the heart of another strong service stretch from Berty.
Quinn Bishop, a service specialist for the Crimson, subbed in and did his job late in the set, pounding a Penn State player with two serves and forcing the Nittany Lion’s coach to find a sub. A kill by senior outside hitter
Owen Fanning slammed home to give Harvard a 25-21 first set.
Bishop said the team picked out their opponents weakest passers, following their Coach’s orders to serve to Penn State’s soft spot. Bishop was able to target one player in particular, forcing Penn State’s hand in pulling him off of the court.
“The entire time, we’re trying to press him the most, and he got subbed off, so we did a good job,” Bishop said. “It worked.”.
Set two started with deja vu as
lead and forced a timeout. And once again Penn State responded by tying it up.
But while the first set was a game of runs, this set was filled with back-and-forth play with neither team taking a lead of more than one until a Harvard spurt gave the Crimson a 16-13.
Harvard extended their lead up to five before the Nittany Lions cut it back down to 20-18 and caused a Crimson timeout.
The timeout once again stoked Harvard’s flame as the Crimson extended the lead to 24-20. The lead bent but never broke as Fanning once again crushed Penn State’s hopes and clinched the set.
Harvard’s front line forced a series of blocks to start the third set as Harvard claimed a 4-0 lead.
When the Crimson’s service was called out, Head Coach Brian Baise challenged the call as fans along the baseline pleaded for the challenge, resulting in the call being overturned, earning the Crimson their fourth point in the set.
The Nittany Lions tried to claw their way back into competition, but the Crimson kept them at around a five point distance. Harvard carried an 18-13 lead into a
Penn State timeout as the Nittany Lions geared up for what could be their last opportunity for a stand. But that stand never came as the Crimson cruised to a 25-19 victory punctuated by a strong serve from Bishop that put Penn State out of system and led to one final Harvard block.
Berty, who spearheaded a strong start that led the Crimson to victory, said that while the team “really came through” ear-
ly in the game to defeat Penn St., they still have more to prepare for this weekend.
“We got a game tomorrow, so it’s not over yet,” Berty said. Harvard faces Penn State again tomorrow evening at 5 p.m. for a second face-off, looking to turn their victory against their opponents into a winning streak.
The Harvard women’s fencing team won the Ivy League Championship Sunday for the first time in nine years, with the men’s team finishing fourth overall.
The tournament — held in a round-robin format and hosted by the University of Pennsylvania — marks the women’s first outright Ivy title since 2009, with Harvard co-championing alongside Columbia and Princeton in 2016. The win adds another accolade to Harvard fencing’s dominance over the past several years. Just last year, Harvard won the National Collegiate Athletic Association men’s and women’s fencing championship for the first time since 2006, sent four current fencers to the Olympics, and secured two Olympic medals. The women’s team went undefeated against its six competitors, dominating across events and clutching up in close bouts against second-place Columbia. Leading the women to the crown were sophomore Jessica Guo, who posted a perfect 18-0 record in the foil, junior Zoe Kim, who also had an undefeated 5-0 record in the saber, senior captain Lauren Scruggs, and freshman Jenna Shoman. Scruggs, who took home the silver medal in women’s individual foil and the gold in team foil at the
The Harvard men’s volleyball team (3-5, 1-1 EIVA) fell 0-3 to No. 17 Penn State (1-7, 1-1 EIVA) on Saturday after crushing the Nittany Lions the day before.
Penn State brought a stronger game in their second matchup against the Crimson in the Malkin Athletic Center, and Harvard was unable to respond. This time, the Crimson was without its captain as outside hitter Logan Shepard missed the game with an ankle injury. The loss of its captain proved too much for Harvard as Penn State flipped the script from last night and swept the Crimson. In the first point of the game,
Olympics last summer, described the team’s win in a press release by Harvard Athletics as a “dream come true.” Scruggs, a quick and aggressive fencer who loves to take the weapon behind her back, finished 16-2 in foil at the Ivy championship. The silver medalist was named to the All-Ivy League First Team along with fellow Olympic competitor Guo. Scruggs and Guo continue to trade off accolades. Though Scruggs defeated Guo on her way to her silver medal in Paris, it was Guo who was named Ivy League champion for the women’s foil.
However, they maintain a bond as teammates and friends off the piste.
“I could just tell that we were going to win,” Scruggs said in the release. “Both days our energy was off
head coach Daria Schneider — who has led Harvard’s team since 2019 — said in the release that she was “most proud of the unseen effort behind the scenes with this women’s team,” citing the leadership of
the charts and you could see how hungry we were for the title.”
The women, who were ranked first nationally in the US Fencing Coaches Association Preseason Poll and are currently ranked fifth, brought their match win percentage on the season to an impressive 82%, winning 297 bouts overall and dropping 162. Men’s and women’s fencing
the past several years of players in building the culture of the program.
“It’s rare to coach a team that so consistently impresses me with their hunger to win and their professionalism, they are a joy to coach and it was exhilarating to see them accomplish this feat,” Schneider said.
On the men’s side, the team defeated Yale but dropped to Princ-
eton, Columbia, and Penn in close bouts across events thanks to strong showings from sophomore Daniel Zhang who went 8-4 in foil and sophomore Henry Lawson’s 9-3 performance in epee. Despite being ranked first nationally in the preseason poll, the men are currently ranked 13th behind fellow Ivy competitors No. 7 Yale, No. 4 Penn, and No. 2 Columbia and have struggled all season.
The difficult three months come shortly after Crimson students and alumni made history with an all-Harvard U.S. Olympic men’s saber team. In July, the four-man saber team was quickly eliminated from Olympic competition, a shock upset for a squad expected to compete for at least two medals. This season, they have stumbled against No. 5 Ohio State and No. 6 Duke University before decisively defeating No. 14 NYU last week. They Post a 9-6 record overall with 55% of bouts won. Now, both teams
Harvard established an impenetrable line at the net — returning multiple Penn State swings. Errors, however, plagued the Crimson early in the set, including three of the Nittany Lions first seven points coming from service errors. The service line was one of Harvard’s biggest advantages in the previous game, but a change in strategy by Penn State negated that advantage. Instead of hitting primarily float serves, the Nittany Lions came out swinging from the line and pounded the Crimson’s returners — keeping the team out of system and on the defense throughout the set. The Penn State lead ebbed and flowed but never subsided as the Nittany Lions took the first set 21-25. Sophomore outside hitter Owen Woolbert said the Crim-
son’s win yesterday made the team complacent during today’s game, weakening the start of Harvard’s game when Penn State was on its toes already.
“We came out slower than we did yesterday,” Woodward said. “We weren’t really firing on all cylinders like we were yesterday, and they came out with a vengeance after getting swept.”
Harvard started off the second set effectively — leading Penn State by 6-4 and bouncing back from the faults of the first set.
Harvard stayed ahead of Penn State into the set before the Nittany Lions mounted a swift recovery, battling the Crimson’s blocks and closing the gap to 20-19.
After back-and-forth rallies for the rest of the set, Harvard failed to overcome Penn State, bringing the Nittany Lions to
overtake the Crimson 24-26.
Harvard faltered at the start of the third set, letting up eight points to Penn State before scoring its second. Penn State held a series of firm blocks against the Crimson, stopping most of Harvard’s early attempts for a point. Harvard bounced back later in the game, and a consistent push for more hitting opportunities fueled hope for a recovery.
But the Crimson lost momentum during a final push from Penn State, failing to get power behind the ball as the Nittany Lion brought the final set to a score of 21-25.
Despite the bitter end, it was a successful weekend for Harvard. Penn State was undefeated in the previous season and one of the favorites to win the conference again. The Crimson finished
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fourth in the five team EIVA last year and are now poised to improve upon that position by taking the crucial game yesterday. Bishop said yesterday’s victory against Penn State, despite Saturday’s loss, proves the Crimson is prepared to take on the season — and prove formidable in its conference.
“It just shows that we’re able to hang with all the top teams out there, so a lot of confidence going into next week,” Bishop said.
“If they’re one of the top teams, I’d say we can compete with any of them.”
Harvard returns to action next Friday, February 14 at conference foe Charleston (3-6, 0-0).