The Harvard Crimson THE UNIVERSITY DAILY, EST. 1873
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VOLUME CXLIX, NO. 57
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CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS
| WEDNESDAY, APRIL 20, 2022
OP ED PAGE 4
SPORTS PAGE 6
SPORTS PAGE 6
Pre-term course registration is the enemy of liberal education
Women’s tennis fell to Princeton, ending a conference winning streak
Fencers reflect on second place finish at Division I championships
Students Run the Boston Marathon Brick Art Project Pops Up in Yard By VIVIAN ZHAO
CRIMSON STAFF WRITER
More than a dozen Harvard affiliates ran the 126th Boston Marathon on Monday, joining the 30,000 other athletes who raced the city’s iconic 26.2-mile course in front of hundreds of thousands of cheering spectators. The event is the oldest annually run marathon in the world — and one of the toughest to qualify for, requiring a qualifying time this year of 3 hours for men aged 18-34 and 3:30 for women in the same category. However, individuals running for specific charities are allowed to participate without meeting the threshold. “The crowd was just incredible, and I was just feeding off the energy of everyone along the way,” said Yao Yin ’23, who ran on Monday. Though Harvard holds class as normal on Patriots Day, most other Boston area schools take the day off, allowing college students to line the course, which snakes from the town of Hopkinton to Boylston St. in Boston. “It was a once-in-a-lifetime experience,” Yin said. “It’s like the whole city went
SEE MARATHON PAGE 3
By CAROLINE E. CURRAN and SARA DAHIYA CRIMSON STAFF WRITERS
Throughout the month of April, student-carved bricks will sit in Harvard Yard as part of an art installation aiming to represent the role students play in shaping the University — from its physical campus to its academics, social life, and culture. Juniors Kiana N. Rawji ’23 and Cecilia Y. Zhou ’23, who created the installation, discussed the display alongside professor Tracy K. Smith at a Tuesday event entitled “Inclusions: Envisioning Justice on Harvard’s Campus.” Organized as a part of the Presidential Initiative on Harvard and the Legacy of Slavery, the talk focused on the role of monuments as expressions of art and visual culture. From fall 2021 to February 2022, Rawji and Zhou provided Harvard students with bricks on which they could write messages in response to the prompt, “If these bricks could speak, what would they say, about Harvard, about you?” “We eventually settled on
Runners fill the streets for the 126th Boston Marathon, held annually on the third Monday of April. ZADOC I. N. GEE— CRIMSON PHOTOGRAPHER
the idea of bricks as our foundational visual metaphor because it occurred to us that it is a built environment at Harvard that really kind of transcends the tenure of any particular student,” Zhou said Tuesday at the event. Rawji and Zhou said they wanted to highlight diverse and varied responses to the prompt, encouraging students to express their genuine feelings. “It was important to us to not pick and choose,” Rawji said. “We didn’t censor any of the bricks. Every brick that was made is up on our wall.” Zhou said they wanted their project to overcome “various shortcomings” in current monuments, which she said are often “vetted and determined by an authoritative body.” “We were thinking about turning the idea of the public monument on its head and decentering it,” Zhou said at the event. “We wanted to give students the ability to speak for themselves and represent themselves as they want to be
SEE BRICKS PAGE 3
Joe Kahn ’87 to Serve as Next HMS Editor of the New York Times Studies Diet and Sleep By YUSUF S. MIAN and CHARLOTTE P. RITZ-JACK CRIMSON STAFF WRITERS
More than 36 years after he was elected president of The Harvard Crimson, Joseph F. Kahn ’87 is set to take over another storied American journalism institution: the New York Times. Kahn will take over as the Times’ next executive editor in June, succeeding Dean P. Baquet in its top post, the newspaper announced Tuesday. Kahn, a Boston native who graduated from Harvard College and received a master’s degree from the school in East Asian Studies, currently serves as the Times’ managing editor. He previously led its international section and won two Pulitzer Prizes as a reporter covering China. Kahn led The Crimson in 1986 after stints covering the University president and Harvard Medical School. As pres
Joe Kahn ‘87 is set to be the next executive editor of the New York Times starting June 2022. BY CELESTE SLOMAN FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
ident, he succeeded Jeffery A. Zucker ’86, the former CNN president who resigned earlier this year. “He was extremely hard-working — I don’t recall anyone working harder at The Crimson,” said David S. Hilzenrath ’87, who served as the newspaper’s managing editor while Kahn was president. Kahn edited his high school newspaper before enrolling at Harvard in 1983, where he studied History and lived in Mather House. At The Crimson, he earned a reputation as a serious and hard-working journalist. Jill E. Abramson ’76, who served as executive editor of the Times from 2011 to 2014, wrote in an email that Kahn is “brilliant and a great listener, a rare combination.” “It’s a tough job for sure, but my bet is that he will be a stellar Executive Editor,” wrote Abramson, who teaches in Harvard’s English Department. Kahn’s appointment to one
of journalism’s top jobs comes as the industry is grappling with how to reach an audience that is increasingly digitally oriented. As ME of the Times, he oversaw sweeping changes in the newspaper’s operations as it sought to optimize for online readership, instead of only its print edition. John N. Rosenthal ’87, who served as a News Board senior editor while Kahn was president, said, “We all knew this day would come.” “It was only a matter of time,” Rosenthal wrote in a text message. Other Crimson colleagues described Kahn as passionate and serious, even as an undergraduate. “He was very determined,” said Dahlia Weinman ’87, who served as one of The Crimson’s business managers during Kahn’s tenure. “He knew what he wanted and knew what he
SEE KAHN PAGE 3
HBS Affiliates Reflect on BGLTQ Identity By KATE DELVAL GONZALEZ and KENNETH C. MURRAY CONTRIBUTING WRITERS
A panel of seven queer-identifying Harvard Business School alumni discussed their experiences at the University and beyond at a panel hosted by the HBS PRIDE club and the Business School’s LGBT Alumni Association Tuesday evening. The seven panelists — Ellen W. Bossert, Megan N. Chann, Paula K. Cobb, Paul J. Donaher, Willis M. Emmons ’81, Reginald V. Lee, and Joseph D. Steele — described the difficulties they faced and continue to face as BGLTQ individuals within Harvard and the workforce. Cobb, who is the Chief Business Officer at Affinia Therapeutics, described their time at Harvard Business School as a “straight cocktail party” that was not as openly accepting of queer-identifying students. Many of the panelists added what it meant to live and work in predominantly non-BGLTQ
INSIDE THIS ISSUE
Harvard Today 2
spaces, adding that some professors encouraged students to not disclose their sexual orientations at work. “It really didn’t work that well for me,” Bossert said of their decision not to discuss their identity at work. “Lacking that authenticity was really a problem, and what I thought was safety was really suffocation—and I [recognized] that over time.” But Lee said he had the opposite experience. “I was sort of careful in the early days, but I never represented myself as anything else,” he said. “My experience was not nearly as negative. I was a little concerned but then got very comfortable rather quickly and was embraced enough,” Lee said. Steele said that acceptance of queer identities in the workplace has increased in recent years but “there’s still a lot of
SEE HBS PAGE 3
News 3
Editorial 4
The Harvard Business School is located across the river on the Allston campus near Harvard’s athletic facilities. CHRIS HIDALGO—CRIMSON PHOTOGRAPHER
Sports 6
TODAY’S FORECAST
SUNNY High: 57 Low: 37
By PAZ E. MEYERS CRIMSON STAFF WRITER
Harvard Medical School researchers discovered that recurrent circadian disruption, which occurs in individuals with irregular sleep schedules, can cause reduced glucose tolerance when combined with a high-fat “Western-style” diet. The discovery builds on over a decade of research led by Charles Czeisler ’74, who serves as a professor in HMS’ Division of Sleep Medicine and teaches a widely popular General Education course on the science of sleep. The paper will appear in the May 2022 issue of the medical journal Metabolism. Previously, Czeisler’s lab had discovered that the combination of minimal sleep and an irregular sleep pattern disrupted glucose metabolism. This follow-up study was “meant to separate these two components to determine whether the impairment was mainly coming from the sleep restriction or from the circadian disruption,” according to Kirsi-Marja Zitting, the first author on the study. Czeisler explained that studying these two factors separately required performing two different experiments. The first of these was to limit the amount of sleep participants were allowed without disrupting their circadian rhythms, which surprisingly seemed to have little effect on glucose metabolism. “I was shocked that we didn’t see sleep restriction alone with minimized circadian disruption result in any adverse metabolic consequences,” Czeisler said. The second trial, which resulted in the publication of the Metabolism paper, aimed to do the opposite — to test the effect of an irregular sleep pattern alone, with minimal sleep restriction. The researchers also sought to determine whether participants’ glucose
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