Sic
vos non vobis mellificatis apes
— So
d o yo u b e e s m a k e ho n e y , n o t f o r yo u rs e lv e s .
Virgil
2021 Newsletter of the Signet Society of Harvard College 46 Dunster Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138 • 617-547-0526 • SignetSociet y.org
A h , the H appy S ound of Lunchtime Laughter
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ay, this is more like it! The Signet reopened on the first of September with 17 returning members (usually 35-40), most of whom had only been drones for a mere three weeks in March of 2020 before the pandemic forced them home and the Hive into a quiet, lonely hibernation. There was much to do. Our plucky band of restarters swiftly set about their main task of repopulating the Signet. In five short weeks of our open-admissions process, they inducted 26 new electees from our largestever pool of 119 applicants—just 21.8%, which might well be the highest selectivity of any Harvard undergraduate organization. Their standards are high. Our membership now includes practictioners of so many of the arts and letters—poets, writers of fiction, philosophers, filmmakers, actors, a drummer/ composer, a cellist/conductor, a graphic designer, comedy writers & performers, painters, photographers, a sculptor, and a professional actress & model. We are again a home for the arts at Harvard. To all our donors who supported us through the past 18 lean months: thank you! And if you’ve thought about giving, this year is a great time. Please donate! {
Returning to Harvard After 45 Years
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hen Ruth Streeter ’76 arrived on campus in 1972, she joined the first class of Radcliffe women who were allowed to live in Harvard Yard. 200 women and 1,000 men lived in the Yard that first year, and all the men had read up on each of the women: years later, when Streeter met the man from the Class of 1976 who would become her second husband, he knew exactly who she was. (She didn’t remember him.)
Now, after more than 35 years producing 60 Minutes, Ruth has returned to Harvard as a Fellow at the Advanced Leadership Initiative. The ALI prepares an interdisciplinary cohort of leaders to spend the next phase of their careers working to address social issues—perhaps climate change, democracy, or public health. “Of course,” says Ruth, “there’s a lot to learn at Harvard from the Ruth Streeter, Class of 1976 very accomplished experts who are giving the lectures—but you want space to learn from each other, too.” One way Ruth has been finding that space: slipping back into undergraduate classrooms, thesis film screenings, and rehearsals. “I do miss the creative joy of being in the editing room, working with visual images to tell these stories.” So she wrote to every member of the Harvard film department. “I told them I needed to get my hands on some film!” Ruth has also found it meaningful to watch the way current students move through these hallowed halls. “Four of the kids in my medieval studies class introduced themselves as freshmen women. I was already amazed at that, that freshmen got themselves into this class, and then in the first week of class they were raising their hands! We never would have felt like we could do that, maybe not any time in our first semester here. It’s their confidence,” she says, that’s most surprising. “It’s strange to be back at Harvard, looking around and seeing all these past layers of yourself. When I was here, we felt so overwhelmed,
even intimidated, that I don’t think anyone felt like we could speak up.” Ruth reconsiders: actually, she says, her own male classmates had always raised their hands readily. Perhaps they felt more sure “that they belonged, that this was where they had always been meant to be. I felt like I was trespassing!” At the Signet, Ruth found a community of classmates whose passions mirrored her own. “You met people working on different projects than you, but who you could talk to and share those ideas. Professors and alumni would join in—it was one of the few places you could have those conversations and not feel like you were being graded.” Today’s students might speak more freely in class, but there’s still something vital about conversations that happen at the Signet. “The dialogue and the back and forth that we’re having here”—our lunch table had just had a collegial disagreement about Justice Antonin Scalia—“that doesn’t really happen in classes,” Ruth says. “Not in the same way.” When she graduated from college, Ruth followed many of her peers from the Crimson to New York, working at David Garth Associates as a political consultant. But after realizing that she hadn’t been given the same resources or support
as a male classmate who had started at the same time—he was assigned to strategy, she was assigned to the clipping room—Ruth got mad: “so mad that I got fired,” as she puts it. But it gave her a chance to think about what stories she wanted to tell. “I really didn’t want to be selling candidates to voters. I wanted to be reporting on them.” Sometimes, Ruth muses, “you get to figure out who you are by doing something that shows you what you aren’t.” She found her way to 60 Minutes, where she got to tell stories about business, politics, and health—and the arts. Those were some of her favorite segments to produce, and that interest stuck with her: this fall, she’s working on producing a series of conversations with artists and arts institutions. “I was always thinking about storytelling, and what it meant to be the one choosing stories, creating narratives, and speaking to a national audience.” Most of the viewers who see a piece about the Metropolitan Opera, for example, won’t already be opera fans—only about 4% of Americans are. “But even if it only lands with twenty people, maybe there’s one kid who’s never heard of opera who thinks, ‘Hey, I want to see that,’ or ‘I think I could do that,’ or ‘I want to run that place someday,’ and that’s part of the impact of telling stories about the arts.” {
Prizewinners in the Class of 2021 They finished their undergraduate careers alone and virtually—let’s honor their achievements! By the way, how many scholarships does this Rhodes fellow hand out anyway? Che Applewhaite—Hoopes Prize A New England Document: Proto-Cinematic Practice against Genocidal Acceptability History & Literature and Anthropology Carissa Chen—Rhodes Scholarship; Hoopes Prize Department of History Undergraduate Essay Prize; Sally and Cresap Moore Prize ‘Though Dwelling in a Land of Freedom’: An Intergenerational Biography of the Slaves Whose Labor Built Harvard University and Their Descendants in Boston, 1714–2020 History
Ruva Chigwedere—Jonathan Levy Award Visiting Committee Prize for Undergraduate Book Collecting For Daughters of Ezili; or, How to Be a Black Girl and Find Love and Survive 101 Theater, Dance, & Media and History & Literature Ashley Cooper—Hoopes Prize Racism’s Health Harm on Black Youth Mental Health: From (Neuro)Scientific Orthodoxy to Neuroscience as a Vessel of Visibility Neuroscience and Anthropology
Joy Nesbitt—Louis Sudler Prize in the Arts Call, Response, and Go-Go Live: Making a Musical Movement for Black Lives in Washington, D.C. in 2020 Social Anthropology and Music
Abigail Sage—Robert E. Levi Prize Lions, Tigers, and Bears: Masculinity, Queerness, and the Movement for Home Rule in British India, 1920-1940 History and Literature
Nina Pasquini—Cyrilly Abels Short Story Prize; Le Baron Russell Briggs Fiction Award ‘Why Return?’: Fragmentation, Repetition, and Memory in the Works of Marguerite Duras and Assia Djebar History and Literature
Vivian Tian—Rudolf Arnheim Prize Studio thesis presented to the Department of AFVS Art, Film & Visual Studies
Devonne Pitts—Edward Eager Memorial Fund Prize for Poetry; Special Citation in Theater from the Council on the Arts; Visiting Committee Prize for Undergraduate Book Collecting Playwriting Is Not a Luxury: The Black Feminist Tradition of Dealing with Death on the American Stage History & Literature and Theater, Dance, & Media
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Sofia Tong—Hoopes Prize Eugene R. Cummings Senior Thesis Prize in LGBT Studies The Queer Good Place: Reading Henry James through Asexuality English Eli Zuzovsky—Rhodes Scholarship Hoopes Prize Louis B. Sudler Prize in the Arts Mazel Tov (or the Day I Became a Man) English and AFVS
We’re Part of the Wall Art in the Harvard Square MBTA Red Line Station
ur Artist-in-Residence, KeeHup Yong ’19, happened to notice something new in the Red Line upper level—an image of our façade is a part of a baked-enamel graphic panel in the T station. If you happen to be on the outbound platform to Alewife, check it out. With the ready accessibility of our web page and Wikipedia entry on mobile apps, people look us up. Our gardener has enjoyed listening to tourists “discover” us on the sidewalk, sometimes while standing right next to him. “Honey, it says it’s Harvard’s arts & letters society. Lots of famous members— Natalie Portman and Rashida… John Lithgow, FDR, Robert Frost, and… Chuck Schumer? And a character from 30 Rock— Do you remember Toofer?” Photos by KHY ’19 and JSS ’18
Culinary Art!
Signet Associates Executive Committee Prof. Thomas Forrest Kelly, Chair Bryan Eric Simmons ’83, President Thomas F. Moore ’98, Treasurer John H. Finley IV ’92, Clerk Stephen Coit ’71, At Large Matthew C. Lee ’91, At Large Finance Committee Thomas F. Moore ’98, Chair Winthrop Minot ’73 Jonathan Moses ’88
“Chipped Blondies” by Donna Coppola, October 14, 2021
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ignet lunches are back, on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday at 12:15 p.m. each week while classes are in session. Our chef Donna Coppola is glad to be back, too, creating meals for an enthusiastic audience that she enjoys getting to know each year. If you’re returning to Cambridge and would like to join us, use the weekly sign-up at www.SignetLuncheon.org. Meals are $25, or you can buy 5 tickets for $100. Bon appétit! {
Development Office Notes: Drones Who Make Honey? ßßColin Jost ’04—host of SNL’s Weekend Update; married to Scarlett Johansson; maybe pulls in $100k a year: wait until he’s famous? Conan O’Brien ’85—lost his job of 20 years, making what, $125k? Condolences, but still, might have some savings: save the stamp. Charles Schumer ’71—Majority Leader of the U.S. Senate, published salary of $193,400: ask again after they end the filibuster. Can you give in case they don’t? We’re so grateful for donations of any amount!
YES, THIS TIME IT’S R EALLY H A P P E N I N G — S A V E T HE DAT E FOR OU R G A L A 15 0 t h +2 A NN U A L DI NN E R AT BOSTON’S PAR K ER HOUSE ON APR IL 23rd, 2022!
Board of Associates Jill Abramson ’76 Megan Amram ’10 Alison Blount ’11 Susan Stevenson Borowitz ’81 Mimi Brown ’97 Agnes Chu ’02 Stephen Coit ’71 Prof. Diana Eck Steve Ekert ’20 John H. Finley IV ’92 John W. Gillespie, Jr. ’76 Sam Hagen ’18 Joel Henning ’61 Richard Hyland ’69 Meredith James ’04 Kenneth M. Kaufman ’69 Prof. Thomas Forrest Kelly Daniel Kim ’97 Christopher Laconi Matthew C. Lee ’91 Kathleen Lusk Brooke Winthrop Minot ’73 Thomas F. Moore ’98 Jonathan Moses ’88 Philip Munger ’95 Patrick O’Donnell ’67 Devonne Pitts ’21 Auguste Roc ’17 Bryan Eric Simmons ’83 Prof. John Stilgoe Chef Donna Coppola Artist-in-Residence KeeHup Yong ’19 Membership Coordinator Julia Steigerwald Schnall ’18 Gardener Mark Hruby ’78