CLASS OF 2000
The Class That Went Online
The Fall of Harvard’s Global Development Powerhouse
BY WILLIAM C.
In the winter of 1987, the Philippine Star, a newspaper based out of the country’s capital in Manila, ran an article with a line that might have turned heads across the world in Cambridge: “Do we have a Harvard mafia running our country?”
The Star was referencing the Harvard Institute for International Development, a Harvard organization that for nearly three decades advised foreign governments on some of their most pressing economic and political issues. The group of Harvard professors and students wielded considerable influence — steering policymaking everywhere from Asia to Latin America and boasting a budget larger than several Harvard schools’.
But 26 years into its remarkable rise, HIID came crashing down in scandal. As the class of 2000 returned to campus after winter recess, Harvard announced that it had decided to shutter the organization. The move was made after a task force recommended the Institute’s dissolution over concerns about structural issues, budget deficits, and insufficient integration with the rest of the University. The Institute’s downfall, however, was largely precipitated by the mismanagement of an HIID project to reform Russia’s economy.
In 1992, experts affiliated with the institute arrived in Moscow to remake the country’s economy in the image of a Western capitalist system. Their arrival marked the beginning of an initiative that would result, just over a decade later, with the U.S. charging Harvard and several individuals involved with the project with conspiracy to defraud the gov -
ernment — forcing them to pay $31 million in settlement fees.
The scandal tarnished HIID’s reputation and ultimately ended its existence. In a staff editorial published in The Crimson just after the Institute was dissolved, students praised the move as “wise” and labeled the controversy over HIID’s activities in Russia an embarrassment for the University.
“These actions have embarrassed Harvard and demonstrate that these programs should be under the more direct control of educational sectors of the University,” the editors wrote.
Still, some say that the Russia incident was a one-off misstep on an otherwise pristine record of providing innovative, informed solutions to governments by some of the world’s leading experts — and giving students the unique opportunity of applying their learnings from the classroom to the real world.
“In hindsight, I’m not sure it was a good decision, to be very honest,” Harvard Graduate School of Education professor of the practice Fernando M. Reimers, once an HIID researcher, said of the institute’s dissolution.
“The good that HIID did in those 30 years for the world, for the advancement of knowledge, for the education of students, far outweighs all the harm that could have [been] caused by that professor who — by violating a norm — basically endangered Harvard’s reputation.”
A Major Player
‘This
Could Be My Friend’:
BY CHANTEL A. DE JESUS AND GRAHAM W. LEE CRIMSON STAFF WRITERS
And it was not just the Philippines.
For years, an HIID researcher wrote the budget for the Gambian minister of finance.
Another advised the Pakistani government on constructing more than 500 elementary schools. Indonesian government officials trained by HIID in the 1980s have dominated the country’s cabinet for more than three decades.
“HIID not only provided advisory services, but it also — through that work — was able to develop some really important research that affected development around the world,” said Georgetown University professor Steven C. Radelet, first a graduate student and later a professor who worked with HIID for almost 15 years.
The Institute was effectively founded in 1974, after Harvard’s Development Advisory Service was renamed HIID following protests over its involvement in Pakistan and Indonesia.
By 1999, the Institute had become a major player in international development. It advised governments from Nepal to Egypt with more than 20 overseas offices and 25 subsidiary international programs. A budget that started at $3 million in the 1970s ballooned to more than $30 million, surpassing the Harvard Design, Divinity, Dental, and Education schools.
At times, its advisory services came under scrutiny by critics and even some of its own members, who said that the Institute was forced to distort its findings based on the beliefs of their clients. Reimers, the HGSE professor, said in a 2024 interview with The Crimson that he was removed from a project on rural education in Honduras after he refused to
The Star’s warnings about a “Harvard mafia” in the Philippines were not unfounded. The upper echelons of the country’s government were chock full of Harvard-educated leaders: four cabinet members, a Supreme Court justice, the director of the Central Bank, and multiple HIID researchers shaping Filipino public policy.
On Feb. 4, 1999, four New York Police Department officers fired 41 shots at Amadou Diallo, an unarmed West African immigrant. More than a year later, the four officers were acquitted of all charges — and Harvard students refused to stay silent.
The verdict sparked a national movement of outrage on college campuses. Student groups at Harvard — like the Harvard Black Men’s Forum, with support from the Harvard Black Students Association and the Harvard African Students Association — sprung into action, organizing protests, town halls, and forum events while encouraging participation from Black and non-Black students alike.
Days after the verdict, the student groups co-organized a silent protest outside the Boston Government Center, encouraging students to wear all black in solidarity.
Harrel E. Conner ’02, the brotherhood chair of the BMF at the time, said that the purpose of the silent protest was to “stand out.”
“One of the things that we did was to start having certain days we wore all black,” Conner said. “The purpose of that was to get attention.”
Shearwood “Woody” McClelland ’00, then-president of the BMF, said that he wanted to increase the “social consciousness of the BMF” through town halls and forum events on racial profiling. In April 2000, with the help of faculty advisor Cornel R. West, the organization invited civil rights activist Reverend Al Sharpton to speak at a Harvard Law School’s Black Law Students Association conference. The forum initially had relatives of Diallo scheduled to
participate, but the family canceled their appearance a week before the event due to unspecified reasons. At the forum, Sharpton urged the students to stand against racial profiling and police brutality.
“We have buried four young men in 14 months who had no weapons but were killed by police. This is absolute insanity,” Sharpton said at the forum, referring to Diallo, Patrick Dorismond, Malcolm Ferguson, and Richard Watson — all of whom were unarmed Black men killed by officers in New York City.
Conner said that their goal for these events was to increase awareness among their peers to create tangible change.
“We also understood that activism is not just about protesting and saying things are bad,” Conner added. “It’s about doing what you can to galvanize change.”
While Conner said the verdict did not cause a “massive amount” of activism, he said it did lead to an “increase in consciousness” for the greater student body.
Students were not the only ones to take action after the verdict. In April 2000, 34 Harvard faculty members released a public statement titled “The Diallo Case is Far From Over.” In their statement, the professors called for sweeping federal oversight, police reform, and deeper reckoning with racial bias in law enforcement.
McClelland expressed approval of the statement, saying that he was glad Harvard faculty members “decided to take a stance on this issue.”
“The overall issue of police brutality and excessive force is bigger than the verdict, which is why I think the statement focused on that,” McClelland said at the time the statement was released. “Even people who supported the verdict should still feel that it is a travesty for
an unarmed man to be fired upon 41 times.”
But McClelland still wanted former Harvard President Neil L. Rudenstine to make a statement on the verdict along with former College Dean Harry R. Lewis ’68 and S. Allen Counter. Rudenstine said in an interview with The Crimson that during his time as president, he tried not to interfere with student and faculty affairs as long as they did not harm the University or the people on its campus.
“My basic view was that students as well as faculty should have a right to say whatever they wanted about current events, and that the University itself, certainly the president, should not be interfering in such things,” Rudenstine said.
“It was important for people to be able to express what they wanted to say, whether it be about this particular event or other events that happened nationally or internationally,” he added. But Rudenstine said that situations that involve conflict between students call for a different approach, such as in the case of student activism responding to the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks on Israel.
“I think that when they begin to insult and potentially harm one another — that’s what calls for another kind of response,” he said. “I think if I had been president, I probably would have felt I needed to say something about the fact that it’s one thing to have a view, it is another thing to insult and harm other people.” McClelland praised Rudenstine’s response to student activism, saying he felt free to express himself regarding issues such as the Diallo verdict under Rudenstine’s presidency.
“It was an environment where underrepresented minorities felt welcome and felt
PHOTOS 3
Looking Back: Scenes from the Class of 2000
Members
Harvard’s Class of 2000 Plugs In
Harvard students.
BY KAITLYN
When the Class of 2000 stepped foot in Harvard Yard in 1996, they entered a university on the precipice of internet connectivity.
Exactly a decade before, Harvard had linked 13 Faculty of Arts and Sciences buildings with data cables. The university had gone officially online in 1992 with its connection to the World Wide Web, and by 1993, 68 percent of the incoming class had college email addresses.
In 1995, a faculty committee called for every staff and faculty member to have access to a computer and the internet, just in time for the arrival of the Class of 2000 on campus.
An annual survey conducted by FAS Computer Services revealed that, in 1997, 74 percent of seniors were connecting to the internet from their dorms. The same survey in 2000 did not ask that question — assuming that nearly all Harvard students living on campus were plugged in.
It’s a shift that shapes, in many ways, the Harvard we know today.
“When I started my freshman year at Harvard,” recalled Wellie W. Chao ’98, “it was, ‘Hey, if you’d like an email address, you fill out this form and we’ll work on giving you an email address.’ And then, similarly for internet, there wasn’t internet in the dorm rooms.”
Now, students are assigned an email address upon enrollment — and Wi-Fi is a given on move-in day.
Modernizing Harvard
The late ’90s and early 2000s at Harvard were marked by dual efforts to give students and faculty access to a customized website for their Harvard-related needs — an initiative known as the Portal Project — and to connect the Houses using physical cables.
Dean of the Division of Applied Sciences Paul C. Martin ’51, who both chaired the Portal Project committee and led the initia-
tive to connect the Houses, “was among those who realized that the internet was going to change everything, and he brought that to the attention of the faculty and the president, and motivated Harvard to get prepared,” said Harry R. Lewis ’68, who served as dean of Harvard College from 1995 to 2003. Lewis cited Harvard’s colonial architecture and remote athletic offices as significant challenges to the effort to connect each of Harvard’s Houses and faculty offices to the internet, which would enable them to go online and send emails back and forth.
But, in the end, he added, “universal connection means universal connection.”
“Everybody, every Harvard office, and every Harvard dormitory room in the College and in all of the graduate schools has got to have a connection,” he said.
David B. Alpert ’00, who was one of the undergraduate representatives to FAS Portal Project, described its goals to The Crimson in 2000 as to create “a single Web page customized for each student where students can go access all sorts of information.” Alpert, at the time, said the system would be like Yahoo’s personalized sites, My Yahoo. The new system “is like My Harvard,” he
campus for the general education course Greek Heroes by Professor Gregory Nagy. Three years later, in 1996, Digitas launched the Course Decision Assistant which digitized both the Q reports and the course catalog, which had previously been “many inches thick.”
The shift from analog to digital student services and increasing access to the internet amongst the student body was a significant one.
“So you had an internet that was designed really for what happened in the science labs on campus, suddenly having all these student computers online,” said Kevin S. Davis ’98, who coordinated residential computing at the FAS’ computer services office from 2000 to 2005. “It was a kind of an era of discovery for everyone.”
Job Hunts Go Digital
The advent of the internet, in particular, shaped the world that the class of 2000 joined as graduates.
By 2000, Cambridge had become a hub for technology and internet startups, many fueled by MIT and Harvard students, enticing new graduates with stock offers and benefits.
“It was an exciting time,” said Robert D. Austin, a then-assistant professor of Technology and Operations Management at Harvard
So you had an internet that was designed really for what happened in the science labs on campus, suddenly having all these student computers online.
Kevin Davis Former FAS Administrator
told The Crimson in 1999. Harvard students’ records and course registration are still accessed through a portal called my.harvard.
Students like Alpert played an increasingly key role in developing online resources for their peers.
Jeff C. Tarr ’96, who co-founded the student group Digitas, told The Crimson that “Harvard did not have any real web presence or anything. They were late getting online as far as offering information for students.”
In 1993, he and his friends created the first course website on
Business School. “There were a lot of people who were trying to get in on what was happening.”
The majority of Harvard students who initially got involved with these startups, said Austin, were not necessarily computer scientists. “Harvard historically has been more about investment banking, consulting, private equity — and their part of the tech industry story might have been venture capital,” Austin said.
But established startups along Massachusetts’ Route 128 — arguably a second Silicon Valley — were not the only ones staffed by
Lewis highlighted a 2000 rule change he proposed to the faculty — to reverse a policy barring students from running their own startup businesses out of their dorm rooms — as one byproduct of Harvard’s internet connectivity.
Pushback to Lewis’ proposal came because colleagues worried what could happen to Harvard’s tax-exempt status if students used Harvard resources, like the internet, for personal profit.
But, Lewis argued, because students on financial aid at Harvard were required to work during the semester, with the advent of the internet, many began telecommuting to Wall Street or Silicon Valley, where they had interned during the summer.
“How would you ever know the difference between a student who was working for himself or for herself, or doing something, and the student was working for McKinsey?” he said. “Why is one something which we kind of insist people have to do if they’re going to get Harvard scholarship money, and the other one is something that you say you absolutely are not allowed to do?”
Student entrepreneurs also participated in the College’s effort to bring its job recruiting system online.
Chao, alongside two cofounders, launched the site eRecruiting, a job recruiting site where students could apply to jobs recruiting at Harvard via the Office of Career Services, in 1997.
The opportunity he and his peers seized upon for digitization, Chao said, was a common thread “with a whole bunch of different sectors in the economy.”
With Crimson Solutions, students could access OCS services outside regular business hours, and from their dorm rooms or from home.
Over time, Chao said, “people saw, ‘oh, the system works, and it provides some significant benefits.’”
But the breakneck pace of money and excitement flowing into tech didn’t last forever.
In the spring of 2000, the NASDAQ — a market indicator especially geared toward tech companies — plunged by nearly 75 percent of its initial value, signaling the burst of the “dot-com bubble.” The drop, which signified the tapering off of the immense venture capital cash flow into the tech industry, resulted in difficulty raising money for new startups, said
Austin. “There were companies that reneged on job offers,” Austin added. “That’s just not done.”
“It was just boom or bust,” said Chao. “And after that point, it was really difficult to raise money because people were just fearful.”
Connecting Online, Disconnecting in Person?
With the advent of the internet came debates about how best it could be used to support the student body.
One such conflict came with Chao’s job-search service: OCS’s 1997 decision to completely switch to online recruitment resulted in pushback from some students, which he estimated to be “10 or 20 percent” of the student body.
“Some of them felt, ‘well, I understand the existing process, I know how I’m going to do well,” Chao said. “And they would point out, you know, shortcomings or risks, like, what if the internet goes down, or what if these other things happen that prevent me from utilizing the system?”
As a result of student pushback, OCS shifted back to paper recruiting in the fall of 1997.
“The objections were maybe a little bit valid, but over time, they became less and less important because the system provided significant advantages,” Chao said. “It became very, very reliable.”
Another debate surrounded concerns about how online interconnectivity would reshape house communities. In 1998, Pforzheimer House became the first to move its communications online with the creation of the “PfoHo Open,” in which residents could send emails to the house in a “virtual common room.”
Benjamin W. Dreyfus ’01, a former Pforzheimer House resident, told The Crimson in 2000 that the email list had benefits and drawbacks
“Even though I do not attend many House events, and indeed do not even spend many waking hours in the house,” he said, “PfoHo Open follows me around everywhere there is telnet.”
But though he might find the emails annoying, Dreyfus added that “PfoHo Open is like a member of the family.”
And, with the advent of cell phones in the late 90s, students and professors alike began questioning whether phones were eroding students’ social interactions.
In a Crimson op-ed in 2000, Noah Oppenheim ’00, a former Crimson editorial chair, wrote that cell phones were “destroying our way of life” and that technology was becoming a flashy status symbol rather than truly promoting community.
Other students felt that the phones were more useful than distracting. In a 1999 interview with The Crimson, Esther L. Healer ’00 said that her phone was “a really wonderful tool for multi-tasking.”
But, the rise of the cell phone also forced instructors to begin reckoning with course policies to contend with the added distraction. For some faculty — including Eric W. Robinson, then a History professor at Harvard — cell phones were not a meaningful distraction.
“The phone rings, I roll my eyes, the students giggle and hopefully within five seconds the student switched the phone off,” he said in a 1999 interview with The Crimson. “It’s an annoyance, but hey, it’s not a big deal.”
But, in the introductory chemistry course Chemistry 5, “Introduction to the Principles of Chemistry,” a ringing phone during an exam was enough for course staff to ban phones during tests.
“People shouldn’t be disturbed in classes by an idiot with a cell phone,” Healer told The Crimson in 1999. “I guess as an idiot with a cell phone I can say that.” By the fall of 2000, Lowell, Mather, and Cabot Houses asked students to turn off cell phones in dining halls and classrooms. Lewis told The Crimson at the time that “the concern is not just the ringing but the holding of telephone conversations in dining halls which tend to ignore the presence of others in a way that is rather discourteous.”
And some longtime traditions began to fade away. Before Harvard went online, the men’s crew team would learn their boat assignments for the day’s practice by checking a schedule posted in the window of Leavitt and Pierce — Harvard Square’s gentlemanly tobacco shop since 1883.
“By connecting that boathouse, you know, that that was the end of that tradition,” Lewis said in an interview. “People could just get up in the morning and look at their email.”
Napster Sparks Debate Over Music Piracy
MUSIC UNLEASHED.
As Napster sparked legal battles nationwide, Harvard students downloaded freely while administrators walked a careful line.
BY CLAIRE MICHAL AND THAMINI VIJEYASINGAM CRIMSON STAFF WRITERS
When Napster was founded in May 1999, students across the country jumped at the opportunity to download their favorite music without the hassle of buying a new CD.
“At the time, there was no music streaming, so a lot of people were streaming downloaded music that they already owned, so that they could have more easy access to it,” M. Ari Behar ’02 said. “And of course, some people were doing it for songs that they didn’t own.” “Napster was the big one,”
DIALLO FROM PAGE 1
open to express concerns,” McClelland said. This rise in consciousness expanded beyond just Black students, motivating non-Black students on campus to take action.
“For the wider community, they began to really understand that they had friends — they may not have been Black themselves — but they had Black friends, and
added Behar, who wrote about the platform for The Crimson in 2000. But for universities, the novel technology posed a new problem: legal threats from the music industry.
Metallica and rap star Dr. Dre filed a lawsuit against Napster in early 2000 for copyright infringement, citing Indiana University, the University of Southern California, and Yale University — among others — as defendants for allowing their students to use Napster on university networks. Those three universities quickly moved to block Napster access, ultimately evading a lawsuit.
But Harvard’s administrators chose a different approach — quietly issuing warnings without banning the service.
Attorney representing Metallica and Dr Dre sent letters to universities, including Harvard, requesting they block access to Napster on campus net-
works. But Harvard declined the request – refusing to be the middleman between its students and the service.
Jonathan L. Zittrain, who was the executive director of Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society at the time, viewed Harvard’s response as “pretty scaled to the situation.”
“The University made a pretty big show of responding to pressure from Metallica and Dr. Dre and the recording industry to say we are not going to start monitoring or changing traffic on our network. That’s not what the internet’s about,” Zittrain said.
Despite denying the request, Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences made it clear to students that if they chose to use Napster they could face consequences, saying it would limit outbound traffic on Napster in order to manage congestion on Harvard’s network.
House tutors encouraged stu-
dents to stop using Napster, and passed along warning letters from the Recording Industry Association of America to students whom the industry group had identified as Napster users.
“They were both trying to maintain that the network is for the students and not for outsiders to say how it’s going to be used, and at the same time trying to bend but not break,” Zittrain said.
He said that the RIAA letters, in particular, placed the University in a difficult situation as recording services began suing their own listeners for, allegedly, downloading songs illegally.
“That was a prelude of hoping that University disciplinary processes could work short of lawsuits, and then ultimately lawsuits against end users, and the University was kind of caught in the middle,” Zittrain said.
Josh Banerjee ’00 said that despite the warnings passed along by Harvard, many students still chose to use Napster.
“I mean, it’s great you have access to music that you otherwise wouldn’t have access to readily,” Banerjee said.
Though he didn’t recall personally using the service, Banerjee said students enjoyed being able to share music fast — but many felt ambivalent about the service, privately considering it a form of piracy.
For others, the benefits of Napster outweighed the legal risks. Lorrayne S. Ward ’03 said she continued to use Napster after the warnings, because it “enabled people to expand their musical horizons.”
“The democratization of musical access that Napster was really on the forefront of — although illegally, obviously — really did help to change the way people consumed music,” Ward added.
Banerjee said he recalled that the administration stepped away from regulating Napster’s use, leaving the dispute between
the company and the students.
“I think the understood message was, like, ‘if you’re going to engage in piracy, that’s between you and the people you’re pirating from,’” he said. Ward said that while Harvard students took note of other universities’ decision to ban Napster, she and her classmates were generally satisfied by the University’s response.
“I think there was general happiness that Harvard wasn’t following suit,” she said. Zittrain said that as the controversy proliferated across the nation, neither universities nor Napster ever secured a clear victory, and other platforms — like iTunes and Spotify — made the debate obsolete.
“There wasn’t a truce declared, or there wasn’t a clear victor — the world moved on,” he added.
claire.michal@thecrimson.com thamini.vijeyasingam@thecrimson.com
This realization that a criminal history was not necessary to be a victim of police brutality served as a wake-up call to students at the time.
McClelland said the incident
Just because you’re at Harvard doesn’t mean you have the luxury of avoiding issues that affect people that aren’t you
McClelland ‘00
of Harvard Black Men’s Forum in 2000
President
they started to realize, ‘Wait, this could happen to my friend,’” Conner said. He added later that this realization extended “all the way to very conservative white people” who he said had always argued with him that instances of police brutality only happened “to criminals” with a “shady background.”
showed him that “just because you’re at Harvard doesn’t mean you have the luxury of avoiding issues that affect people that aren’t you.”
“That’s something that I was very cognizant of, and still am, even in my current career,” he added.
chantel.dejesus@thecrimson.com graham.lee@thecrimson.com
“Amadou Diallo was a little bit different in that he was a cleancut, hard-working guy — no criminal past — and there was nothing that you could pin on him.” Conner said. “He did not have any of the skeletons in the closet.”
A student holds a music CD beside her laptop in spring 2000 — just as Napster
Shearwood
The Adams-Pfoho Dining Hall War of 1999
SANDWICHES AND SKIRMISHES. A clash over lunch access sparked a memorable House rivalry for the Class of 2000.
BY ELLEN P. CASSIDY AND EVAN H.C. EPSTEIN CRIMSON STAFF WRITERS
Today, Pforzheimer House residents regularly swipe into the Adams House dining hall without a passing thought.
But unbeknownst to many, this is a hard-won privilege that their Pfoho predecessors fought for during a militant episode in Harvard’s history: the Adams-Pfoho Dining Hall War of 1999.
During the fall of 1999, upperclassmen regularly flocked to Adams’ centrally-located dining hall to grab a quick lunch between classes. But this led to overcrowding, food shortages, and unpaid overtime for dining hall workers, triggering
House residents to take up arms in defense of their dining hall.
Their first weapon of choice –a large gong — was rung whenever a non-Adams house student attempted to sneak into the dining hall. When this failed to deter hungry outsiders, Adams House put white stickers on its students’ Harvard IDs to mark who was allowed to eat in the Adams Dhall.
This angered many interhouse students who liked to eat in Adams — especially those in Pfoho House — according to Pfoho House Committee chair Manuel A. Garcia ’00.
“People did not like going back to the quad for lunch,” Garcia said.
“Everyone would go to Adams House — especially quad people.”
So, as a response, the Pfoho House Committee held a vote to symbolically ban Adams House residents from their dining hall, which, to Garcia’s surprise, failed to pass.
Still, this incited retaliation in turn from Adams residents, who on October 11, officially declared war
on Pforzheimer House and claimed the “Pf” of Pforzheimer as their own, calling themselves “Pfadams House.”
The first shots of the war were fired on October 13, when Pfoho residents broke into the Adams dhall and stole the gong.
In response, Adams residents plastered posters across Pfoho that read “the sun never sets on the pfadams empire,” crossing out all “pf”s from Pfoho across the House.
Adams House Committee Chair David L. Levy ’00 said the House’s retaliation against Pfoho was not only an escalation in the dining hall war — it was a moment of bonding for Adams House residents.
“We were the second randomized class in Adams. So by the time we were seniors, the House had been fully randomized,” Levy said. “We had come into the house in this transitional moment when the Houses still were trying to figure out, what did it mean to have a House identity when people weren’t
actively choosing their Houses anymore?”
Pfoho responded to Adams’ attacks by locking the gates to Adams House with a padlock. They also posted notes on freshman dorm doors which told them that Annenberg, the freshman dining hall, was closed, and that they should eat at Adams instead.
To resolve the dispute, the warring Houses agreed to compete in an October 17 battle, where both Houses’ masters would preside over a football game, drag contest, and tug-of-war contest.
If Pfoho won, its residents would gain the right to eat in Adams for a year without being plagued by the clang of the gong. If Adams won, Pfoho agreed to permanently relinquish the use of its “Pf” to Adams House.
Levy said the outcome of the competition rested on the results of the tug-of-war competition.
“The tug of war was like, okay, that could be anyone’s game,” he
said. “We knew they were going to beat us in football. We knew we would beat them in drag.”
But he said Adams students planned to “throw” the tug-of-war competition to create a “peace treaty” to give Pfoho residents a “special status in the dining hall.”
“We also now have this way of being like, ‘Hey, listen, we came up with a compromise. Pfoho can come use our dining hall, everyone else can go fuck themselves,’” Levy said. (He clarified that the expletive should be spelled with a “pf,” as in “Pfoho,” and that his account might have involved some revisionist history.)
Adams House Masters Sean G. Palfrey ’67 and Judy S. Palfrey ’67 said that on the day of the competition, Adams students paraded up to the Quad on Massachusetts Avenue – blowing whistles and waving banners – and carried a cage with Pfoho’s “Pf” locked inside. In the end, as Levy had anticipated, Adams won the drag perfor-
mance and Pfoho won the football game and tug-of-war, leaving Pfoho as the overall victors in the war. Pfoho residents were given Adams Dhall stickers on their IDs, and a sign which read “Property of Pfoho” hung over the Adams gong for the following year. Garcia praised the War for creating a sense of House spirit in the newly randomized environment.
“It was actually a nice House spirit-building activity that I still remember really fondly 25 years later,” he said. To this day, Pforzheimer residents are allowed to eat in the Adams dining hall whenever they wish. The tradition has also expanded,
ellen.cassidy@thecrimson.com evan.epstein@thecrimson.com
the end of its time.
change his finding that violence was widespread in schools.
“I’m sure we had to work within the boundaries of what the government allowed us to work in. We’re not there to subvert or even expose corruption,” Reimers said at the time. While the primary focus of HIID was advising governments or training their officials, another key to the program was the opportunity to take classroom learnings to the real problems facing real governments. This educational value, several said, was unique — and invaluable.
“I could not have had the career that I had without HIID,” Radelet said.
Russian Reform
In 1991, HIID started a new $40 million project converting Russia’s economy into a capitalist system. Coming on the heels of the USSR’s collapse, the engagement seemed poised to make the Institute’s name even bigger than it already was.
The project did ultimately leave a mark on HIID — but not the one its leaders might have expected from the high-profile case. After an expedited selection process for contractors, USAID granted HIID the $40 million contract and effective control over the distribution of the agency’s $300 million portfolio for Russian de-
velopment.
Andrei Shleifer ’82, a newly tenured Harvard professor and Russian native who had worked with the World Bank in the country, spearheaded the HIID initiative.
Jeffrey D. Sachs ’76 took over the Institute in 1995, while the project was underway, after working as an economic advisor to President Boris Yeltsin of Russia. In 1994, the team arrived in the country, tacking on a legal reform project headed by Jonathan R. Hay, a young lawyer who had graduated from Harvard Law School two years prior.
Working intimately with Harvard advisors, the government launched privatization through a 1992 voucher program and a 1995 loan-for-shares program. The Institute also advised on the creation of the Russian Stock exchange and the Russian Trading System Index. But the close personal relationships between Russian officials and the HIID affiliates — especially Shleifer and Hay — at times gave way to questionable business dealings that seemed to grade into special treatment. Shleifer’s wife, Nancy Zimmerman, and Hay’s then-girlfriend, Elizabeth Hebert, appeared to benefit professionally in their finance jobs from their partners’ influence in Russia. Herbert’s newly established mutual fund, Pallada, was the first such program approved in
Russia — receiving the green light over larger and older competitors. The organization also worked out of HIID’s offices, and Zimmerman’s hedge fund invested in Russian companies.
Hebert did not respond to a request for comment. Zimmerman could not be reached for comment Neither commented for The Crimson’s 2024 story.
The road to uncovering the questionable dealings in Russia started in 1996, when a House committee directed the Government Accountability Office to audit HIID over incomplete and late reports to the U.S. government. But what began as an audit over lacking reports became a fullblown investigation into HIID — and the business activities of Herbert and Zimmerman.
The investigation found several shady investments by the two in Russia: $200,000 in indirect investments in Russian firms by Shleifer and Zimmerman in 1994. $20,000 invested by Hay into a Russian investment firm managed by Herbert. Russian oil company stocks purchased by Shleifer, under the name of Zimmerman’s father.
By May 1997, USAID temporarily suspended the Russia project and wrote in a letter that Shleifer and Hay “abused the trust of the United States government by using personal relationships, on occasion, for private gain.”
Soon after, HIID removed Hay and Shleifer from the project. By June of that year, Russia terminated the project completely and USAID revoked a $14 million grant to HIID.
Three years later, HIID would be dissolved entirely.
A ‘Dirty-Fingernail’ Education
While HIID might be most remembered for the Russian scandal, its proponents said that project was a one-off incident — and that an overwhelming majority of the institute’s work was highly beneficial for the governments it advised and the world at large.
Radelet, the longtime HIID contributor, said the institute was responsible for “path-breaking research” in international development, from pioneering microfinance in Indonesia to conducting “superb research” on food security work globally.
The Institute also influenced the personal development of those who were involved with its projects.
Tufts University professor emeritus David O. Dapice, who worked with HIID advising the Vietnamese and Indonesian governments, said his experience with the Institute “made a difference” to his teaching.
“It certainly made a difference for the people that were teaching,” Dapice said, “that had had the
dirty-fingernail experience that one gets when one has to actually work with people in developing countries that are colleagues, not employees.”
Radelet said HIID was an incredible training ground for his career, which included serving at a senior position in the U.S. Treasury Department and later as a senior advisor to Hillary Clinton when she was Secretary of State, then as chief economist at USAID.
“I wouldn’t have been able to do any of those things had I not had the foundation that HIID provided of both the practical hands-on work and the academic and scholarly work,” he said.
HIID’s closure was announced in January 2000, just months before the Class of 2000 was set to graduate. Radelet said the dissolution of the institute resulted in a strong response on campus, with students and faculty in HIID feeling “bewildered” and “angered.” The Crimson’s Editorial Board, however, was more optimistic about the change. The editors wrote that it was the right move to disband the Institute and that its projects “do not serve Harvard’s best interest.”
Dwight H. Perkins II, who served as the director of HIID from 1980 to 1995, said there were talks of turning the organization into an independent consulting firm with no ties to the University towards
“It would have been like a teaching hospital, basically independent of the University,” Perkins said. But those plans never came to fruition. And as the University moved toward closing down the Institution, Perkins said he helped employees find new positions. Many went to the Harvard Kennedy School or Education School. Others left for other institutions — Boston University, Duke University, the University of California, San Diego. In 1998, Harvard siphoned off $10 million from HIID’s endowment to found the Center for International Development, a more research-focused institution that serves as the closest equivalent to HIID today. Sachs, the director of HIID when it began its project in Russia, took the reins at CID. Several former members of the Institute said they regretted the decision to end it.
“From my point of view, this was a loss to the University and to the world that we decided to close that institute,” Reimers said.
“There’s no question in my mind that this was a net loss to the educational opportunities of students — that they lost the training ground that HIID was in terms of preparing them to work in development,” he added.
Gridiron to Lab: Chris Nowinski’s Journey
When former Harvard football player Christopher J. Nowinski ’00 first set foot on Harvard’s campus, he had no idea that the hits he took on the field could cause permanent brain damage.
Twenty-five years after graduation, Nowinski’s ground-breaking work on concussions is paving the way for a safer future for the next generation of athletes — including those taking the field for the Crimson.
Nowinski grew up in Illinois and was recruited to Harvard as a tackle. He committed after his high school coach told him that “if Harvard invites you, you shouldn’t turn them down.” He went on to play all four years and was a sociology concentrator.
At Harvard, Nowinski was part of a formidable defensive line — and after some key players graduated, fellow teammate Brian J. Daigle ’00 recalls Nowinski leading the team.
“Our defensive line needed an anchor,” Daigle said. “I think he felt he had a lot to live up to, so he stepped into that role and really kind of became the defensive front captain for us both — both just in energy and performance.”
After graduating, Nowinski became a professional wrestler, working for World Wrestling Entertainment under the ring name “Chris Harvard” for two years. Nowinski said that wrestling was a “blast,” and he enjoyed being able to work alongside the people he had seen on TV.
Terence Patterson ’00, who played alongside Nowinski at Harvard, said that their friend group used to “huddle around the TV” to watch WWE when they were not in practice, adding that the group was excited and supportive of Nowinski’s path af-
ter Harvard.
“Chris is going to win this thing, and he’s going to make it, if anyone does,” Patterson said.
“Everybody was rooting for him, and there was no doubt that he was going to be a successful professional wrestler.”
But as Nowinski continued to wrestle, he began to notice that his body wasn’t recovering like it previously had. Within a six week span in 2003, he sustained two concussions, and with the second one, his symptoms didn’t go away. Though he saw a doctor who told him to rest until he was better, Nowinski lied and returned to wrestling — but when he started the match, he couldn’t remember the planned moves he was supposed to make or if he had even won in the end.
One night, Nowinski began violently acting out his dreams while he was asleep, including jumping off his bed through a
nightstand.
“It was that moment that scared me straight,” Nowinski said.
The eighth doctor he consulted told him that he had been getting concussions for years, which had accumulated to result in the symptoms he was now experiencing.
“I sort of felt like an idiot,” Nowinski said. “As a Harvard graduate, I didn’t know what I was doing to myself and know how to protect myself, and I really destroyed my brain health.”
Soon, Nowinski began attending the Harvard football tailgates and asking his teammates whether they had blacked out after hard hits during games. Few of them knew that they may have had permanent brain damage because of football — inspiring Nowinski to change the culture and educate players.
In October 2006, Nowins-
ki published the book “Head Games”, explaining the longterm effects of concussions on athletes, also known as chronic traumatic encephalopathy. When the book came out, though, it was not initially popular.
Still, Nowinski continued to pursue CTE research. When football player Andre Waters, who Nowinski had grown up watching, died by suicide in late 2006, Nowinski called the medical examiner and received the family’s permission to get a portion of Waters’ brain, before passing it along to scientists to conduct CTE research. As he continued to get more brains, Nowinski said that his football and wrestling career allowed him to connect brains with researchers.
“When I would call families, they trusted my authenticity,” Nowinski said.
Patterson said that it has been
“really exciting and awesome” to see Nowinski lead the change on concussions in sports, as someone who both has experience in the game and is “incredibly smart.”
“People want to make sure that there’s someone that has an appreciation for the sport, but also someone who is respected, and again, just incredibly smart, like ’Ski,” he said.
In 2007, Nowinski started the Concussion Legacy Foundation, which collaborates with the Boston University CTE Center to conduct CTE research and educate athletes on the harms of concussions.
Since then, Nowinski has continued to run the foundation, and received his PhD in behavioral neuroscience in 2017 from Boston University. In 2011, working with former Harvard football head coach Tim Murphy and other Ivy League officials,
Nowinski helped the Ivy League become the first conference to limit the number of full-contact football practices per week in order to minimize head injuries.
“I’m glad that Harvard has been a leader on changing this,” Nowinski said. “Tim Murphy,
Though
Sameera Fazili ’00 Brings Perceptive Ethos to Economic Policy
BY STEPHANIE
Like many Harvard students, Sameera Fazili ’00 arrived on campus thinking she was a mistake.
As a daughter of Kashmiri immigrants, one of the first in her family to receive an elite college education, and part of the first class of female students that graduated with simply a Harvard degree, Fazili initially felt like an “an outsider.” But through deep conversations and an interest in others’ wellbeing, Fazili built a commu-
nity at Harvard — with an impact that is still felt by friends and peers over 25 years later.
“She could talk to you in five minutes, and you feel like, ‘I want to tell her my life story.’ And also she just made me think of things in such a different light. She has made comments that I’ve heard nobody think about,” Evelyn Chung ’00, Fazili’s roommate and longtime friend, said. Since Harvard, Fazili has had a notable career in U.S. economic policy — advising the Treasury on international affairs, microfinance, and housing under the Barack Obama administra-
tion. Under both the Obama and Joe Biden administrations, Fazili served on the National Economic Council, departing the group in 2022.
But in college, Fazili thought she would be a doctor. She took the required pre-med classes, yet quickly discovered she wanted more. Her freshman year roommate had planned to study Social Studies, and Fazili decided to give it a try.
“People were like, ‘you should not be a Social Studies pre-med. Those things don’t go together’,” Fazili said. “But I can be a little bit stubborn when people tell me not
to do something.”
Fazili soon discovered that the concentration was a perfect match for her intellectual curiosity.
“It would give me the ability to work across many different disciplines, and I wanted something really multidisciplinary, which has kind of stayed throughout my career,” she said.
Chung said peers across campus were impressed by Fazili’s interdisciplinarity and embrace of two of the most rigorous courses of study.
“She was just so brilliant, and she could easily go from pre-med to the humanities and social studies, which I think is really rare at Harvard,” she added.
After college, Fazili took a year off to do human rights work before beginning medical school. She soon realized she did not want to be a doctor, and enrolled at Yale Law School in 2003.
There, she took a class with Cantwell F. Muckenfuss, a visiting clinical lecturer at Yale Law School, whom Fazili said served as an invaluable mentor as she considered her career trajectory beyond law school and into policy. Muckenfuss attributed Fazili’s success in economic policy to a unique combination of intellectual agility and emotional intelligence.
“There are a lot of people who are really smart, really interested in the space, and it’s a combination of the smarts with the interpersonal skills to make use of it,” Muckenfuss said.
But a career in policy was never the plan.
As an undergraduate, Fazili ran the Harvard Islamic Society, a Muslim student group. She also served as a counselor with the First Year Urban Program and led the class of 2000 as one of just two female class marshals.
“The phrase unity and diversity is one that I think is thrown around a lot, but it’s one that I think she managed to embody in the class of 2000,” said Daniel A. Lyons ’00.
Her senior year, Fazili was honored with the Women’s Leadership Award, a peer-nominated prize that recognized her work across campus.
Fazili, who is Muslim, said she was happy to have received the award for her work in the Islamic Society. The group was a space that focused on religion when she started, but she worked to expand cultural programming and encourage participation from students across a range of religious backgrounds.
The award was also meaningful to Fazili because she thought it pushed back against stereotypes that women wearing hijab were “oppressed” or “controlled by men.”
“America in the late ’90s was very different than America today,” she said. “I felt seen and heard in a way that really mattered, because to be a veiled woman and try to operate in feminist spaces in the ’90s was to be mistrusted and misunderstood.”
For Chung, Fazili’s policy career was a stride forward in representation, too.
“When she became deputy director of the NEC and you’d see her doing White House press briefings, talking to the President, in
“I think people would have been really, really surprised, because I was not an IOP person. I wasn’t a Gov jock,” Fazili said. “I didn’t do student council, and nobody saw me as a future politician. And I really stumbled into it.” Nonetheless, even in college, Fazili was involved in student leadership and cared about social issues.
her hijab, that was so meaningful and impactful to so many people, young and old,” Chung wrote.
Fazili’s friends and classmates said that at Harvard, she had a magnetic personality and a perceptive eye.
“The mental image that comes first of Sameera as an undergrad is her on rollerblades, whizzing across the Yard and being greeted as a friend by everyone - everyone - she passed,” Iza Hussin ’00 wrote.
Fazili’s penchant for listening and perspective-taking has been an integral part of her role as a policymaker.
“I know how to sit there, listen, take in a lot of different inputs — and really deeply believe that that’s what government needs to be able to do,” she said. “Not just listen to the powerful, not just listen to those who have access, but go out there and put yourself in rooms where you’re listening to people who don’t agree with you, and understand their perspective.”
Those who know her say that Fazili’s curiosity and ability to connect people made her a powerhouse — but that she was also propelled to success by kindness.
“She moves fast, but the way that she gets people from every side of politics, national and international, to come with her is that she is a supremely gifted listener and motivator: kindness, humour, and resilience are her super powers,” Hussin wrote.
Fazili has “so much joy, an amazing laugh, and a child-like sense of humor,” Ziad Obermeyer ’00, wrote. “You will not find a nicer, more caring, more thoughtful person than Sameera,” Muckenfuss said. “And that matters.”
Christopher J. Nowinski ’00 went
CHRISTOPHER J. NOWINSKI
How Raj Chetty ’00 Reshaped Economics
ECONOMIC
GAMECHANGER. Nicknamed “MJ” in college, Raj Chetty now leads efforts to understand and improve upward mobility.
BY AVANI B. RAI AND TANYA J. VIDHUN CRIMSON STAFF WRITERS
Raj Chetty ’00 was not interested in wasting time.
He had only been at Harvard for a week when he began emailing “a bunch of professors” asking if they were looking for research assistants — and soon got a response from Martin S. “Marty” Feldstein ’61, one of Harvard’s star economics professors and chair of Ronald Reagan’s Council of Economic Advisers.
“It became clear to me that I was interested in doing a Ph.D, in economics and studying these issues and being able to make a contribution,” Chetty said. “So starting my sophomore year, I basically didn’t take undergrad classes.”
Even during his early collegiate career, Chetty — now lauded as one of the greatest economists of his generation — was marked as an academic talent, always “a notch above” the rest of his classmates, according to former roommate John R. Gallelli ’00.
Within three years, Chetty had graduated from Harvard, and three years later — at just the age of 23 — he had earned his Ph.D. from Harvard in economics and was a professor at the University of California, Berkeley. In just another five years, he accepted a job at his alma mater, becoming one of Harvard’s youngest tenured economics professors. But before he was an economics wunderkind whose work on economic and social mobility made national headlines and shot him to stardom, he was a talented undergraduate, laser-focused on his economics work — and his beloved Chicago Bulls. Chetty’s college roommates recalled “many hours” playing basketball with the future economist, who was an avid fan of Michael Jordan.
“When we grew up, it was the Jordan era,” Chetty’s childhood family friend and future college roommate Giridhar M. Shivaram ’00 said. “He wanted to be the Michael Jordan of whatever he did.”
“He was a pretty decent basketball player,” Shivaram added. “Not as good as he is an economist.” Gallelli said that they often drew on analogies from basketball to completing their Ec1011 problem sets.
“We always called Raj ‘MJ,’ because he was always able to help us figure out the tough problems,” Gallelli said. “We gave each other names like Scotty or Dennis for the other players on the polls when other people were able to figure out the tough problems. But Raj was always MJ.” Still, when Chetty got injured — he dislocated his shoulder — it was not while shooting baskets, but rather while working on a problem set.
“So he played basketball with us, right? And didn’t get injured,” Jesse A. Visser ’00, Chetty’s longtime friend and blockmate said. “But of course he got injured doing his problem set.” But while Chetty often dominated in the classroom, he did not always come out on top.
John F. Coyle ’00, Chetty’s former roommate, said they would often spend nights playing Mario Kart in their Pforzheimer suite.
“Whatever Raj goes on to do in this world, right? The record reflected, I could beat him in Mario Kart,” Coyle said.
From Student to Professor
With his passion for and talent in economics, Chetty could have pursued any number of opportunities in finance or other industries — but he instead decided to pursue academia.
Shivaram said this interest was fueled by Chetty’s parents, who valued using academic pursuits for societal impact.
“He could have been a master of the hedge fund universe if he wanted, but he made a choice not
to do that,” Shivaram said.
Instead, Chetty threw himself into his research, and eventually began to focus on studying economic influences on upward mobility — an interest that he himself said was rooted in his upbringing.
Chetty’s father and mother were the only children in each of their families to receive an education, an entryway into their careers as an economist and physician, respectively.
“I had seen over the generations how that’s played out in our extended family, where my cousins have had extremely different opportunities, very different circumstances than my sisters and I have had, I think, just as a result of those educational opportunities my parents had versus their own siblings,” Chetty said, lead-
ing him to question how drivers of mobility might have lifelong impacts.
After finishing his Ph.D., Chetty became a professor at UC Berkeley. A few years later, in 2009, Chetty was asked to return to Harvard on tenure, an experience he called “surreal.” Other than a three-year stint at Stanford, he’s been in Cambridge ever since.
But despite his growing fame, Chetty’s roommates point to his continued commitment to social impact — and his grounded humility.
“I think the thing that’s been very, very consistent about Raj is that he really cares about impact. He is very capable technically but has very little interest in technicality for the sake of technicality, but is more interested in broad
social impact,” Chetty’s classmate-turned colleague Jesse M. “Jess” Shapiro ’01, a Harvard economics professor, said. That, he added, “has been true for as long as I’ve known him.” Visser, Chetty’s college roommate, said that Chetty is “probably the only person in my life who I’ve met who I think has that pure, raw intellectual capacity, but you don’t know it when you just interact with him in a casual social context.”
“The sort of magnification, or extra benefit, of that is that he can explain stuff to anyone. He can talk to anyone and kind of meet them at their level,” Visser added.
Lawrence F. Katz, one of Chetty’s mentors and dissertation advisors, said even as a student, Chetty had a distinctive ability to communicate his complex work
to results broad audiences could understand.
“He’s always been amazing at visualizing things, taking complicated stuff and turning it into a single killer graph that basically explains it much better than 50 pages of math can do,” not just for other economists, but policy makers and the general public, Katz said.
Chetty’s belief in the importance of making difficult concepts digestible helped lead to the creation of Economics 50: Using Big Data to Solve Economic and Social Problems, one of Harvard’s most popular electives.
“It struck me that Harvard students, obviously very bright students, should be able to teach in a similar way with very little technical background,” Chetty said.
For Chetty, Ec50, as the course
is colloquially known, has the potential to help change how people view and tackle pressing current-day issues.
“A lot of people really misperceive what economics is about, especially in the present day,” he said, adding that he wanted to design a course that would show students how “data analysis, thinking about equilibrium, thinking about incentives, can be useful in just the day to day challenges — like what you’re reading about in the newspaper.”
“Knowing how we can think about these questions from a scientific point of view, rather than a totally ideological debate,” he added, “would be very productive for our society.”
Raj Chetty ’00, now a Harvard professor, was known as “MJ” in his college suite for his brilliance and drive. MELISSA W. KWAN — CRIMSON PHOTOGRAPHER
Chetty (third from right) stands with his Pfoho Belltower suitemates at Commencement in June 2000. COURTESY OF JOHN COYLE
Harvard’s decision to dissolve the Harvard Institute for International Development (HIID), following the advice of a University task force report that summed up a six-month-long review, was the correct one. The administration can now redirect the resources and staff of HIID toward benefiting the students of Harvard University.
HIID grew out of the work of Harvard’s Development Advisory Service (1962-1974), and earlier projects involving Harvard advisors in international development. The institute itself was created in 1974 to coordinate Harvard’s program for assistance, train-
Wise to Disband HIID A
Aminute after midnight this morning, Radcliffe College’s 105-year history quietly came to an end. Once an all-women’s college, starting today Radcliffe is an “Institute for Advanced Study” and a part of Harvard. Though it took more than a year of agonizing negotiations shrouded in secrecy, this change will have little impact on most students. The “college” label has long been inaccurate; undergraduate education and housing has been handled solely by Harvard for just under 30 years. While Radcliffe remained a great resource for many Harvard women in the years since, it was far from a college. So why did it take until today to get rid of the ob -
We share the staff’s general approbation of Radcliffe’s historic transformation. Indeed, this transition is long overdue. However, the staff fails to recognize the many significant dangers in the creation of an institute devoted to the study of gender, and perhaps more importantly, they are sorely misguided in their support of the Ann Radcliffe Trust.
ing, and research in the developing world. The institute had 20 overseas offices and 25 more international programs headquartered in Cambridge and an annual budget of over $34 million--more than some of Harvard’s graduate schools. Unwieldy and hard to manage, HIID had been tarnished in recent years by allegations of scandal and corruption in Russia.
HIID got into trouble when, in May 1997, the U.S. government cancelled a $57 million grant to HIID in Russia, headed by Professor of Economics Andre Shleifer ‘82, and the U.S. Attorney’s office began an investigation into allegations that HIID invested in Russian securities while advising the Russian government on economic policy. The investigation is ongoing.
These actions have embarrassed Harvard and demonstrate that these programs should be under the more direct control of educational sectors of the University. Furthermore, most HIID staff do research but do not pass it on to students, graduate or undergraduate, and therefore do not contribute directly to the education of Harvard students. International consulting may have been hard to come by 40 years ago; today, these projects, in and of themselves, do not serve Harvard’s best interest.
If certain projects fit within the overall advocacy, research and educational goals of Harvard’s graduate schools, those segments of HIID will have a smooth transfer, as Provost Harvey V. Fineberg ‘67
has promised. Other groups will be disbanded completely, and the University similarly has shown concern that this process will be supervised responsibly. Now that Harvard has disbanded its advisory institute, the University will have to formulate some new policies about its employees and consulting. In doing so, we urge Harvard to remember it must be an educational and research facility, first and foremost, and require all members of the Faculty to make time to teach students. We look forward to the reallocation of resources and staff from HIID to the students of the College and the University’ graduate schools. The University’s decision to follow the report and disband HIID can only be beneficial.
solete moniker? Radcliffe, certainly, had a financial interest in maintaining the pretense it educated undergraduates. Over the long run, Radcliffe alumnae with fond memories of Radcliffe the college might not be so eager to donate to Radcliffe the institute.
But however much retaining the college label may have gratified alumnae, the resulting confusion over its mission only hurt Radcliffe. Now that it no longer has to pretend to be something it is not, we are hopeful that a redefined Radcliffe can truly focus on what it is good at: advanced study focused especially on women, gender and society. In the meantime, Harvard has to fill what was left of the role Radcliffe played in the lives of undergraduate women. This means, more than anything else, funding groups that specialize in ad -
The Radcliffe Institute’s mission to study “women, gender and society” may surely result in the production of worthwhile scholarship. It may also result in an outpouring of Leftist, post-modern nonsense. Only time will tell, but surely our enthusiasm must be mitigated when we consider the unfortunate track record of gender studies.
More immediately, the staff’s endorsement of the Ann Radcliffe Trust is ill-considered. If the staff truly believes that student groups “addressing the concerns of women” have legitimate claim to funding, then such groups should have no problem re -
dressing the concerns of women on campus. The $5 Radcliffe Union of Students (RUS) fee supported dozens of student groups on campus, but will be discontinued next year as part of the merger agreement. The groups that depended on RUS funding will now look to the College to fill its place. Fortunately, the College appears to be ready for this responsibility. A new Ann Radcliffe Trust, under the direction of Assistant Dean of the College Karen E. Avery ‘87, is being set up to fund student groups as part of the Harvard College Women’s Initiative. But the details of the trust have not been worked out, and it is unclear exactly who will be reviewing grant requests. It is important that RUS or some other group with substantial student input has control over how the money in the Radcliffe Trust is distributed; otherwise, the trust
will be a step backwards from the way the student groups that depend on RUS are currently funded. We believe today’s redefinition of Radcliffe will be a good thing for both Harvard and Radcliffe. The Radcliffe Institute has a bright future ahead of it, and in the long run will benefit from having a clearly defined status within the University, something Radcliffe College did not have in its final years. Harvard, on the other hand, now can no longer defer responsibility for women’s issues to Radcliffe. The end of a college will always inspire deep emotions, and it will anger many to see Radcliffe College go. But today’s metamorphosis is the right thing to do; Radcliffe deserves a clear role as it continues its mission of advancing women in society into the next century.
ceiving their funding from the same general pool as everyone else. The creation of a separate Trust symbolically, and unnecessarily, ghettoizes women’s groups on campus. Further we are confused that the staff, which ordinarily is so unyielding in its defense of the University’s non-discrimination policy, does not see the problem that the existence of the Radcliffe Trust represents. Even if the Trust remains in technical compliance with the policy, it will have a difficult time not violating its spirit. Groups likely to receive funding from the Trust will almost always be de facto single sex in their nature.
The 2000 Harvard Men’s Crew Team Leaves a Legacy
For the Class of 2000, the final spring on campus included one of Harvard crew’s most memorable seasons in recent memory. The men’s heavyweight team, under Coach Harry Parker, delivered key rivalry wins, set a Charles River course record, and created a formidable team that left a legacy of success that rippled into future years. Featuring four returning rowers and several sophomores from a freshman squad that won the Eastern Sprints for the first time since 1990, the Crimson’s heavies hoped the turn of the millennium would bring sustained growth and positive results.
In search of another Compton Cup, the team — then-ranked 4th in the country — faced an overcast sky that quickly turned into a downpour, forcing the course to be reworked. Now, boats — starting further upstream — were launched into an 1,850-meter course in minute intervals instead of typical side-by-side style racing.
Harvard cleared Princeton with a time of 5:28.9, compared to the Tigers’ 5:31.8, finishing ahead of both Northeastern and M.I.T as well. With its stellar performance, the Crimson captured the Compton Cup for the 51st time in 64 years, exacting revenge on the Princeton squad who won the prior year.
“The result tells us what we have felt from the beginning of the season,” said Parker, who clinched his 34th Cup victory, in an interview with The Harvard Gazette after the meet. “We have a good crew and we’re getting faster.”
“As a coach, that’s what you want to see,” he added.
In a duel against Northeastern, the heavies’ varsity boat set a Charles River record with a time of 5:37.3. Following the success, the team turned to the EARC Sprint Regatta, where it placed fifth in 1999.
The margins were razor thin. Just three seconds separated the four teams, with Harvard ultimately slotting in last behind Brown, Princeton, and Wisconsin.
Captained by Neil W. Holzapfel ’00, the team opened the season in early April at the San Diego Crew Classic. While the Crimson led the pack of eastern teams, it placed third behind Washington and Cal, finishing just eight seconds — nearly two full lengths— behind the Golden Bears. Following a second place finish at the Brown meet, the heavies returned to their home river later in the month in search of a crown. And it was a decisive victory they found.
With a time of 5:43.18, the Bears narrowly escaped from the jaws of the Tigers, who came in second with a time of 5:44.99.
Following the Badgers in third, the Crimson finished with a time of 5:46.59, failing to win a Rowe Cup for the 10th straight season.
Despite the letdown, the season wasn’t over. Harvard could have laid down and accepted defeat. The team had arguably its most important race ahead.
At the 135th annual Harvard-Yale regatta, the Crimson dominated, posting a nearly 10-second gap between itself and the Bulldogs, reclaiming the regatta crown.
Over the next five seasons, Parker’s crew would only drop one dual meet.
Lightweight Rowing
The Lightweight team, captained by Angus R. Maclaurin ’00 and Sujit M. Raman ’99-00 and coached by Charles Butt, finished the season with a 7-1 record in dual meets.
Entering the season as defending champions, the lights placed second at the San Diego Classic. The team proceeded to notch dual wins over Rutgers, Georgetown, Cornell, Penn, Dartmouth, M.I.T, and Princeton, only falling to Yale in New Haven.
At the EARC Sprints, the lightweight boat came in third place with a time of 5:55.63, finishing over three seconds behind Yale and Columbia. Attempting to defend its ti-
tle at the beginning of June, the lights made the trip to Camden,
River — hoping to defend its title. Despite achieving an ear-
N.J. to race in the Intercollegiate Rowing Association’s National Championship at the Cooper
ly lead, the team’s advantage slipped in the last 200 meters of the race as the crew’s hopes of re -
peating dashed away. At the tail end of the race, a group of contenders led by Yale roared past Harvard, leaving the Crimson in fourth place with a time of 5:51.44. The disappointment didn’t sit well with the lights, who clearly took the loss as motivation during the offseason. The squad rebounded in 2001, winning the IRA Regatta. The 2000 men’s spring rowing season was filled with record-breaking performances and last-second heartbreakers. However, the impact the teams had on the future teams to walk through the boathouses can’t be understated. The 2000 squad helped lay the foundation for what would become a dominant era in Harvard rowing history. Many of the underclassmen from that year matured into the
The Harvard heavyweight crew team lines up dockside during the 1999–2000 season.. COURTESY OF HARVARD ATHLETICS
Sujit M. Raman ’00, a member of the Harvard lightweight crew, stands by the Charles River during his time on the team. COURTESY OF MELISSA K. CROCKER
1999-2000 Year in Review
Timeline
HARVARD’S CAMPUS IN THE REAL WORLD
Jan. 1, 1999
EURO ESTABLISHED. The Euro is established, unifying 11 of the European Union’s 15 countries under a single currency. Just online at first, physical coins and banknotes would come three years later.
Oct. 1, 1999
50 YEARS OF COMMUNIST RULE. China celebrated the 50th anniversary of the People’s Republic with a massive military parade in Beijing, showcasing its growing economic and military power under President Jiang Zemin.
Oct. 6, 1999
JESSE VENTURA VISITS CAMPUS. Minnesota Governor Jesse Ventura appeared at the Kennedy School for a live taping of CNBC’s Hardball, drawing large crowds and campus buzz during his high-profile visit.
Nov. 30, 1999
SEATTLE WTO PROTESTS. Tens of thousands of demonstrators disrupted the World Trade Organization summit in Seattle, protesting globalization and labor practices. The event, dubbed the “Battle of Seattle,” led to widespread arrests and brought global
Dec. 14, 1999
ALL HOUSES ADOPT UNIVERSAL CARD ACCESS. After a unanimous agreement among House masters, all 12 undergraduate Houses moved to implement universal keycard access between 8 a.m. and 1 a.m. Eliot and Adams, the last holdouts, joined following the decision.
Jan. 1, 2000
Y2K BUG FIZZLES OUT. Despite widespread fears of computer failures due to the Y2K bug, the transition to the year 2000 occurred with minimal disruptions, thanks to extensive global remediation efforts.
Jan. 7, 2000
HALF-ASIAN STUDENTS RELAUNCH GROUP. Students reestablished the Half-Asian Persons’ Association (HAPA), aiming to create a space for those who felt underrepresented in existing ethnic groups on campus.
Feb. 4, 2000
COLLEGE PROPOSES ALLOWING DORM-ROOM BUSINESSES. Dean Harry R. Lewis ’68 introduced a plan to revise College rules to permit student-run businesses in dorms, a departure from policies that barred use of campus resources for commercial activity.
Feb. 15, 2000
CORPORATION ADDS FIRST BLACK MEMBER. Conrad K. Harper became the first Black member of the Harvard Corporation, breaking a 350-year pattern of all-white leadership in the University’s top governing body.
March 26, 2000
PUTIN ELECTED RUSSIAN PRESIDENT. Acting President Vladimir Putin won Russia’s presidential election, succeeding Boris Yeltsin. His victory marked the beginning of a new era in Russian politics,
April 3, 2000
MICROSOFT ANTITRUST RULING. A U.S. federal judge ruled that Microsoft had violated antitrust laws by maintaining its monopoly position in personal computer operating systems, setting the stage for potential company restructuring.
April 10, 2000
PRYOR NAMED IOP DIRECTOR. The Institute of Politics selected former U.S. Senator David H. Pryor (D-Ark.) to succeed Alan K. Simpson as director, following an extensive search led by multiple committees.
IWC Ingenieur. Form und Technik.
Ingenieur Automatic 40, Ref. 3289
You don’t have to be an engineer to appreciate the virtues of this watch. The Ingenieur Automatic 40 with a blue grid-patterned dial revisits the bold aesthetic codes of Gérald Genta’s Ingenieur SL from the 1970s, pairing them with outstanding ergonomics and a finishing that is perfected down to the tiniest detail. In the best tradition of engineering, a soft-iron inner case protects the IWC-manufactured 32111 caliber with five-day power reserve from the effects of magnetic fields. IWC. Engineered.
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