LOST MONEY. The National Institutes of Health halted research grants worth
Student Visas Revoked
KICKOFF. Ami Kuan Danoff ’84 and Stephanie Connaughton ’87 didn’t know each other in college — but they’ve joined forces to bring professional women’s soccer back to Boston by starting a National Women’s Soccer League team. SEE PAGE 18 Harvard Grads Start Women’s Pro Soccer Team in Boston
KENNEDY SCHOOL
HKS Dean Wins Trust Amid Trump Fears
BY ELISE A. SPENNER AND TANYA J. VIDHUN CRIMSON STAFF WRITERS
s an angry, anxious Harvard waits to
Asee whether University President Alan M. Garber ’76 will resist the Trump administration’s $9 billion ultimatum, Harvard Kennedy School Dean Jeremy M. Weinstein has won rare approval among both faculty and students with his approach to the crisis. Less than a year into his tenure, the former Stanford political scientist has not shied away from addressing Harvard’s Trump problem in both public statements and private conversations with faculty.
In February, Weinstein called for “introspection and action”after Trump’s funding cuts and layoffs, and announced a slew of public service programs as proof. And at a faculty meeting on Tuesday, the
dean addressed Harvard’s standoff with the White House, pledging to defend academic freedom and international students from deportation threats, according to two faculty members in attendance.
Though faculty at the meeting were split over whether the University should make a bold show of resistance or be more cautious in the face of serious financial strain, they agreed that Weinstein had earned their confidence and respect.
“It’s a tremendous amount of reassurance to some faculty and staff when you double down on doing the work that they think is important,” HKS professor Cornell William Brooks said. “And people know you’re serious.”
At the same time, Weinstein has been an effective messenger for the University, refraining from direct attacks against Trump while plainly arguing the administration’s cuts would hurt critical faculty contributions to the public.
“It takes a lot of emotional and psycholog-
ical energy to be dispassionate when you’re looking at a problematic situation, and to remain dispassionate in assessing the realities and then figuring out how to deal with them as best you can,” HKS research professor Mark H. Moore said.
“And I think Jeremy has that quality,” he added.
‘One of the Happier Places’
In the weeks since President Donald Trump began systematically jeopardizing funding to American universities, Weinstein has been able to keep affiliates on his side. In Massachusetts Hall and at various graduate schools, administrators are having no such luck.
At the Faculty of Arts and Sciences meeting last week, Dean Hopi E. Hoekstra publicly defended the decision to dismiss the directors of
SEE HKS ON PAGE 7
Congress Launches Antitrust Probe of Harvard, Ivy League Admissions
BY DHRUV T. PATEL AND GRACE E. YOON CRIMSON STAFF WRITERS
House and Senate Republicans launched an antitrust probe on Tuesday accusing Harvard and other Ivy League universities of colluding to hike tuition prices — lawmakers’ latest move to widen government scrutiny of elite institutions.
In a letter addressed to Harvard President Alan M. Garber ’76, members of the House and Senate Judiciary Committee — including House Judiciary Chair Rep. Jim D. Jordan (R-Ohio) and Senate Judiciary Chair Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) — suggested that Harvard was “engaging in anti-competitive pricing practices” and demanded that it turn over documents relating to financial aid practices and tuition pricing decisions since 2019.
“These institutions establish the industry standard for tuition pricing, creating an umbrella effect for all colleges and universities to justify higher tuition costs than they could otherwise charge in a competitive market,” they wrote.
Similar letters were also sent to the presidents of the seven other Ivy League universities. A Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences spokesperson wrote in a statement that “Harvard’s admissions practices comply with all applicable laws.”
The Tuesday letter comes amid a tug-ofwar between Harvard and Republican critics in Washington. Last week, the Trump administration demanded Harvard eliminate
diversity, equity, and inclusion programming and ban masks at protest — or prepare for a $9 billion cut in federal funding. Harvard has yet to respond to the demands.
But Tuesday’s letter signals that even if Harvard manages to quell Republicans’ efforts to penalize the University over its response to antisemitism, its challenges in Washington are far from over.
In the letter, the House and Senate Judiciary Committee alleged that Harvard and its peer institutions had coordinated financial aid policies and admissions practices in ways that violated federal antitrust laws. They pointed to the use of enrollment management software, algorithms to calculate financial aid, and third-party platforms — including the College Board and the Common Application — as potential tools for collusion.
“The structure and operation of the higher education market strongly suggests the market is not functioning properly and is subject to widespread violations of antitrust laws,” they wrote.
The letter also suggested that Ivy League schools engaged in illicit collaboration to set high upper limits on the rate of indirect cost reimbursements they receive from the National Institutes of Health — a rate the Trump administration has sought to lower across the board.
“Lack of clarity regarding how higher education institutions calculate and allocate the funding for indirect costs in federally funded research projects suggest a lack of competition for public funding among colleges and universities,” the committee chairs wrote.
Harvard received $488 million in grants from the National Institutes of Health in fiscal year 2024.
Lawmakers also argued that admissions strategies like binding early decision, legacy preferences, and selective financial aid packages enabled schools to “maximize profit” by offering personalized pricing, calling them forms of price discrimination.
Harvard offers a restrictive early action program — which allows prospective students to enter a sped-up admissions cycle if they do not apply to similar early action programs at other schools — but does not provide a binding early decision option to applicants.
In particular, the Judiciary Committee members contended that Harvard and other Ivy League schools had continued collusive practices even after an antitrust exemption that allowed elite universities to collaborate on financial aid calculations expired in 2022. The Tuesday probe is one of several cases against prominent universities involving alleged violations of antitrust law. In October, Harvard and 39 other universities were accused of collusion for collaborating on a financial aid strategy that raised the cost of attendance. Harvard and several other universities moved to dismiss the suit in January.
Harvard has until April 22 to provide the congressional committees with the requested documents.Harvard has until April 22 to provide the congressional committees with the requested documents.
dhruv.patel@thecrimson.com grace.yoon@thecrimson.com
BROWN ANNOUNCES MANDATORY TRAINING TO COMBAT DISCRIMINATION, HARASSMENT
Brown announced new required training on discrimination and harassment from the University’s Office of Equity Compliance and Reporting, ac-
of harassment during October and November 2023.”
THE BROWN DAILY HERALD
TRUMP ADMINISTRATION FREEZES MORE THAN $1 BILLION IN FUNDING FOR CORNELL
Over $1 billion in federal funding for Cornell has been frozen by the Trump administration, The Cornell Daily Sun reported
freeze follows the Title VI investigations of Cornell by the U.S. Department of Education.
THE CORNELL DAILY SUN
DEPARTMENT OF COMMERCE $4 MILLION FUNDING CUT FOR CLIMATE RISK PROJECTS AT PRINCETON
Approximately $4 million in climate change research funding has been ended by the Department of Commerce, The Daily Princetonian reported Wednesday. The funding will end in June, and the announcement labeled the research projects as “narratives” and not in line with the Trump Administration’s priorities, stating some projects present unrealistic climate threats. The funds affected are not grants, but rather cooperative agreements between Princeton and the DOC, where Princeton provides expertise in return for funding.
THE DAILY PRINCETONIAN
LOUISIANA FEDERAL JUDGE WILL RULE TO CONTINUE OR TERMINATE KHALIL’S DEPORTATION PROCEEDINGS
A Louisiana immigration judge required the federal government to provide evidence for its removal charges against Mahmoud Khalil, a student at Columbia School of International and Public Affairs. If the government failed to provide this evidence, Judge Jamee Comans said she would end the case on Friday. Khalil, a lawful permanent resident with no criminal record, was arrested on March 8, by Immigrations and Customs Enforcement. THE COLUMBIA SPECTATOR
BY E. MATTEO
The Yard Bops open the evening’s performances. The band was one of three student groups selected through the “Battle for Yardfest,” an annual competition where students vote for their favorite performers to open for the headliner.
By the end of the night, students left Yardfest 2025 with a pocketful of sunshine and a full day of music, food, and campus festivities.
They were followed by Stryk9, a punk rock band featuring student performers Sierra S. Stocker ’25 (left), Ethan W. Ocasio ’25 (center), Chloe M. Becker ’25 (right), and Jack H. Meyer ’25 (not pictured). During their performance, the band criticized Harvard leadership and the Trump administration with songs like “Yes, It’s Fucking
DIAZ - CRIMSON PHOTOGRAPHER
Vocalist Milo Taylor ’25 and bassist Alex Tonelli ’25 make up part of Big Tuesday, the final student band to take the stage. Their performance closed out the openers and led into the evening’s headliner.
What’s Next
Start every week with a preview of what’s on the agenda around Harvard University
TRUMP REVERSES COURSE ON TARIFFS
President Donald Trump walked back his discounted reciprocal tariffs on Tuesday, instead announcing a blanket 10% tariff on U.S. trade partners for the next 90 days. China was not subject to the pause, and President Trump instead raised tariffs on Chinese imports to 125%, according to the New York Times. Last week, markets had tumbled in response to the introduction of tariffs, as the S&P 500 fell 12% and the Nasdaq fell 13%. In response to the reduced tariff rates, the S&P 500 rose 9% and the Nasdaq closed 12% higher on Tuesday.
HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS PROTEST AGAINST TRUMP ADMIN
Organizers said that over 600,000 individuals participated in anti-Trump protests in all fifty states on Saturday, dubbed the “Hands Off!” protest. The protest stretched for almost twenty blocks in Manhattan. In Boston, the protest occurred on Boston Common and featured Senator Ed Markey, Congresswoman Ayanna Presley, and Mayor Michelle Wu as speakers, according to NBC Boston. 50501, the same group that organized the April 5 rallies, is organizing another day of action on April 19, according to Newsweek.
GERMAN CENTRISTS FORM NEW GOVERNMENT, MERZ TO BE CHANCELLOR
Frederich Merz, leader of the conservative Christian Democratic Union Party, announced on Wednesday that his party had entered into a governing coalition with the center-left Social Democrats. This move will allow Merz to ascend to become the next Chancellor of Germany, succeeding Olaf Scholz, a member of the Social Democrats. Merz’s CDU party won the German elections in February, staving off the far-right AfD party, but were unable to form a coalition until this month, according to The New York Times.
HUCKABEE CONFIRMED U.S.
AMBASSADOR TO ISRAEL
Former Arkansas Governor and twotime presidential candidate Mike Huckabee was confirmed by the Senate to become the U.S. Ambassador to Israel on Wednesday. Huckabee has opposed a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas.
PRINT CORRECTIONS
The article “Churches Fill Gaps in Housing Assistance,” which ran in The Crimson’s April 4 print issue, incorrectly described the Temporary Respite Center where the Ugandan woman stayed on one reference. The TRC is located in Cambridge, not Quincy. This list may not be comprehensive. For the most up-to-date versions of articles in The Crimson, please visit thecrimson.com.
Friday 4/11
HARVARD CLIMATE CONNECT SYMPOSIUM
Austin Hall, 111 Classroom - West, 12:00-4:30 p.m.
Hosted by the Harvard Environmental Law Society and the Chan School’s Public Health Environmental Justice Student Organization, the Harvard Climate Connect Symposium will include keynotes and panel discussions from climate and public health experts.
HARVARD MEN’S LACROSSE GAME VS. PENN
Jordan Field, 1:00 p.m.
Looking for a heated game and some friendly-fire of the Harvard Houses? In their best season since 1996, No. 9 Harvard Men’s Lacrosse team will host the Quakers this Saturday.
FOOD FOR THOUGHT FESTIVAL
Massachusetts Hall, April 11, 3:00 p.m.-April 13, 8:00 p.m. The annual ‘Food 4 Thought Festival’ is back for its second year! As the world’s largest student-run food conference, spend three days learning about the future of our food systems through keynote speeches, panels, workshops, the ‘Idea Incubator’ program, and vendors galore!
Monday 4/14
SPLIT SCREEN: FEMINIST GLOBAL PERSPECTIVES
Starr Auditorium, 4:30-5:30 p.m.
Tune in to discuss the portrayal of women beyond American politics. The talk will venture into the political media representation of various social identities, motherhood versus fatherhood, and of global case studies of success.
Tuesday 4/15
AMERICA’S ROLE IN THE WORLD: A CONVERSATION ON NATIONAL SECURITY Institute of Politics at Harvard Kennedy School, JFK Jr. Forum, 7:30 p.m. Former National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan is set to discuss United States’ national security practices at the Institute of Politics this Tuesday.
Wednesday 4/16
TRADE AND INFLATION IN A FRAGMENTED WORLD
CGIS South, Doris and Ted Lee Gathering Room (S030), 4:30-5:45 p.m. The Weatherhead Center for International Affairs will be hosting Şebnem Kalemli-Özcan, Director of the Global Linkages Lab at Brown University, and a Weatherhead Center Advisory Committee Member.
Thursday
HARVARD
APRIL FLOWERS
Friday 4/18
HUGO C. CHIASSON — CRIMSON PHOTOGRAPHER
E. MATTEO DIAZ — CRIMSON PHOTOGRAPHER
Pop Hits, Politics Take the Stage at Yardfest
Hundreds of students packed Tercentenary Theatre on Sunday as Grammy-nominated artist Natasha Bedingfield took the stage for Yardfest — the College’s annual spring concert — following three student band performances, one of which criticized recent federal attacks on pro-Palestine protesters.
Student band Stryk9, one of the openers, criticized Harvard President Alan M. Garber ’76 and the targeting of pro-Palestine protesters by the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement office during their performance.
“This song is for President Garber,” the punk rock band called out before launching into a medley that included songs “Yes, It’s Fucking Political,” as well as Green Day’s “No Trump, No KKK, No Fascist USA” chant.
The band also sang an original song about “things we’re not supposed to say out loud.”
“We wrote this song a few days ago because apparently saying ‘Free Palestine’ gets you abducted by ICE,” the band said, introducing the song.
Hours prior, The Crimson reported that five Harvard affiliates — including three current students and two graduates — had their visas revoked by the Trump administration amid a
nation-wide push to deport international students involved in pro-Palestine activism.
“There’s a lot of repression of student voices right now. There’s a lot of capitulating to the Trump administration and that is headed by President Garber. So we wanted to send that message,” Sierra S. Stocker ’25, Stryk9’s lead guitarist, said in an interview following the performance.
The Trump administration announced Monday that three federal agencies would review more than $8 billion of planned federal funding to Harvard over campus antisemitism concerns. That day, Garber sent an email to Harvard affiliates that he planned
to “engage” with the federal government’s investigation.
When asked what he thought of the students’ political messaging, Dean of Students Thomas G. Dunne, who attended YardFest, said “that’s part of art” and that the band’s statement was “in keeping” with University policies surrounding free expression.
“We support our students’ freedom of speech and expression,” Jason R. Meier, Associate Dean for Student Engagement, said.
The University did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the band’s criticisms Sunday.
Several students said Yard-
Harvard Will Continue Hiring Course Assistants Amid Freeze
Departments in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences are continuing to hire undergraduate course assistants to fill open positions next fall amid a University-wide hiring freeze — marking a notable exception to one strategy for saving money under the looming threat of funding cuts.
The hiring freeze, which was announced in a March 10 email from University President Alan M. Garber ’76, interrupted the hiring of faculty across the University. But professors from two of the few academic departments that depend on course assistants to staff large, introductory courses said they planned to continue with their semesterly hiring process of CAs for the coming fall.
“My understanding is that the freeze mainly applies to external hiring of faculty and staff,” wrote Statistics professor Joseph K. Blitzstein, who serves as co-director of undergraduate studies for the concentration.
“I have not heard any recent guidance about TF/CA hiring, so will assume unless I hear otherwise that this can proceed normally,” he added. Both the Computer Science and Economics departments have solicited CA positions for fall 2025 courses such as for Economics 10.
“We have been informed that there are no policy changes currently affecting TFs or CAs for next Fall,” wrote Economics professor Elie Tamer, who chairs the Economics department.
Many popular intro-level courses at Harvard — like Computer Science 50 or Statistics 110, which Blitzstein teaches — rely on undergraduate CAs to host office hours, grade work, and host sections for hundreds of students. Those roles are critical for supporting the hundreds of enrolled students, most of whom interact minimally with the main professor.
When Garber announced the freeze, he said it was a temporary measure instituted in response to “substantial financial uncer-
tainties driven by rapidly shifting federal policies.” One week later, the Trump administration announced a review of more than $8 billion in “multi-year grant commitments” to Harvard. Though the freeze seems to primarily target full-time staff, other non-academic student positions have also been affected by it.
students “continue to be hired on a case-by-case basis.”
Hundreds of undergraduates also work paid positions in College offices, including for the Dean of Students Office, the Office of BGLTQ Student Life, and the Harvard Foundation for Intercultural and Race Relation. It remains unclear whether those positions will take on new stu-
It is unclear whether students working in non-academic jobswill continue to be hired amid a hiring freeze. MAE T. WEIR — CRIMSON PHOTOGRAPHER
After applying to work as an assistant at the Loeb Music Library, David D. Dickson ’28 was told the freeze would not allow the library to move forward with filling the position.
“They just sent me an email restating that there is a hiring freeze and that they aren’t able to hire anyone for the rest of the semester,” Dickson, a Crimson News editor, said.
Harvard Library spokesperson Kerry Conley declined to say whether undergrad hiring had been frozen for libraries, writing only that “Under the University’s temporary hiring pause there is an exception process to seek approval to hire.”
Faculty of Arts and Sciences spokesperson James M. Chisholm and College spokesperson Jonathan Palumbo declined to comment on the nature of the exception process, but wrote that
dents in the fall. Dean of the College Rakesh Khurana declined to comment on whether the freeze will impact interns across College offices in an interview last month.
Most other undergrad positions are hired in the fall, meaning clarity on new library, cafe, and other positions may not come until then. While the hiring freeze was initially limited to the current semester, it could be extended if the University’s financial troubles continue.
The Trump administration has conditioned Harvard’s federal funding on eliminating diversity, equity, and inclusion programming, banning masks at protests, and fully cooperating with the Department of Homeland Security.
fest was an opportunity to build school spirit and camaraderie.
Ariana N. Barillas ’28 said she appreciated school-wide events like Harvard-Yale and Yardfest where she could feel “connected to the whole school.”
“I feel like we don’t get so many opportunities as an entire school to come together,” Barillas said.
“It’s really easy to feel super disconnected from the student body as a whole, especially just because it’s not considered such a social school. But I think events like this are just so nice.”
Ella V. Ricketts ’28 said she appreciated the opportunity for the class years to “all mingle together.”
Caleb N. Thompson ’27 — one of the newly-elected Harvard Undergraduate Association presidents — said he and his friends used Yardfest as a chance to unwind and show out as “midterm season” wrapped up.
“It’s great to see people when they’re not so stressed, when they’re relaxed, when they’re having a good time,” Thompson said.
Earlier in the day, students attended one of the four block parties hosted by the House Committees, which featured attractions like corn mazes, mechanical bulls, and free food.
Yardfest also featured two other student bands, the Yardbops and Big Tuesday. All three bands
earned the chance to perform alongside Bedingfield at the Campus Event Board’s annual Battle for Yardfest.
Jude L. Stafford ’26 — a Crimson Sports editor — said he is typically more impressed by Yardfest’s student band performances than the main act.
“They’re some famous singer, some famous band. You expect them to be really good,” Stafford said. “These are just students who — on top of all their studies and everything — are incredible talents.”
As the student bands performed, a small crowd of 30 students gathered in front of the stage, but they “got lit,” according to Thompson.
“I was dancing. I was jumping up and down. I had my arms around the people around me,” he said. “We were just jumping — going crazy.” Still, many students expressed satisfaction and enthusiasm for CEB’s pick of Bedingfield.
“I’m super excited,” Kylie S. Oh ’28 said before Bedingfield’s performance, adding that the artist’s song “Unwritten” has been “on repeat” since its inclusion in the romantic-comedy film “Anyone But You.” Ryan F. Irving ’27, who emceed the Battle for Yardfest, called Yardfest “sick.”
“Compared to last year, there’s way more people here. Energy’s high,” he said, pausing as the opening notes to “Unwritten” played.
“Is it okay if I go dance?” he asked before dashing off to join the growing crowd.
hiral.chavre@thecrimson.com darcy.lin@thecrimson.com
Faculty Senate Planning Body Meets With Peer Schools
BY WILLIAM C. MAO AND VERONICA H. PAULUS CRIMSON STAFF WRITERS
The planning body for a University-wide faculty senate is considering whether faculty should push for representation on the Harvard Corporation, the University’s highest governing body, according to its first progress report released Saturday.
The planning body — which is interviewing members of faculty senates at other universities to develop designs for Harvard’s own senate — is also considering the size of the senate and possible voting procedures. The group plans to draft proposed senate bylaws by mid-June and share them for discussion in the fall 2025 semester.
University Professor Danielle S. Allen, who has led the effort to form a faculty senate, said in an interview that the planning body’s current goal was to gather information from other schools to determine which attributes for a senate would best suit Harvard.
“What we’re really trying to do is find the combination of mechanisms that are the right fit for Harvard,” Allen said. “You’ve got to think about your underlying institutional structure, and you’re trying to find the right pieces and parts to fit your context.”
The body, whose work launched in December, is meeting over Zoom every 10 days and has established five subcommittees. Each subcommittee is tasked with a different area of inquiry, including the senate’s eligibility guidelines, procedures such as the threshold for consensus, the structure of offices and subcommittees, communication with University administrators, and alternative modes of faculty governance — including the possibility of adding a faculty representative to the Corporation.
Since the effort to form a faculty senate launched last spring, eight of Harvard’s nine faculties have voted to send delegates to the body, leaving Harvard Business School as the only faculty yet to join. Allen said she couldn’t speak to why HBS had not signed onto the effort.
The body has already met with
faculty senate members at Duke University, University of Chicago, Northwestern University, and Stanford University. During these conversations, members of other faculty senates have “expressed surprise” at the absence of such a group at Harvard, the report read.
The group has also had conversations with faculty at peer schools about alternative forms of governance — such as a citizens assembly, an appointed advisory board, and faculty representation on governing boards — that could supplement or replace a faculty senate.
“There have been some senates where a senate officer actually sits on the Corporation,” Allen said, adding that some universities have a “routine expectation” that a committee from their faculty senate attends at least one governing board meeting.
Harvard Graduate School of Education and Kennedy School lecturer Timothy P. McCarthy ’93, who takes turns with Allen chairing meetings of the planning body, said the group was taking the question of faculty representation on the Corporation and other alternative governance systems “seriously.”
But it’s not clear whether the governing boards will be amenable to adding faculty representatives to their ranks — or whether efforts to expand faculty authority will gain support from Harvard’s central administration, which has so far shown skepticism toward the proposed senate.
In February, University President Alan M. Garber ’76 appointed 16 faculty to Harvard’s inaugural faculty advisory council to “regularly” provide him with guidance. The council was convened months after faculty launched their push for a faculty senate.
The planning body is also considering whether the senate should serve an advisory role, meaning it would communicate concerns to the University’s administration, or a legislative role that would allow it to have a direct hand in governance.
Allen said the framework set up last spring was “oriented towards the advisory picture,” but that faculty senates with advisory roles still have significant sway at other universities.
“That’s true of a lot of senates where that advisory role is really quite impactful,” Allen said. “So to say advisory is not to say unimpactful.”
The planning body’s progress comes as calls from Harvard’s faculty for more say in the University’s governance have only grown louder amid attacks on higher education from President Donald Trump’s administration. Last week, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences elected six new members to its Faculty Council — several of whom said they joined the body to play a bigger role in Harvard’s decision making. When asked whether Trump’s pressure campaign on universities and the growing demands for faculty governance had injected more urgency into the planning body’s work, Allen said the group was already working as quickly as possible.
“I don’t know if it’s possible to have extra urgency,” she said. “Everything we’ve described sounds really slow, but we’re literally working as fast as we can.” The progress report said the body would produce several deliverables, including an overview of the group’s findings, bylaws for the senate, a set of “exemplary cases” that the senate could address, and descriptions of the additional forms of governance that the body might recommend. Several members, including Computer Science professor Boaz Barak, are on leave for the semester, but Allen and McCarthy said that they have remained involved in the group’s work. Members of the planning body are required to attend two-thirds of the meetings.
McCarthy said that he was proud that the planning body had facilitated engaged collaboration between its members and across Harvard’s various schools.
“The huge opportunity of this is that folks are talking to each other across schools and departments and disciplines in ways that I certainly haven’t seen in my 25 years here,” McCarthy said. “We’re a large organism, and that kind of communication across the tubs is really vital.”
Harvard College students sing along to Natasha Bedingfield at Yardfest, the College’s annual
A RAINY CONCERT.
Natasha Bedingfield headlined, and a student band condemned Trump.
BY HIRAL M. CHAVRE AND DARCY G LIN CRIMSON STAFF WRITERS
BY SAMUEL A. CHURCH AND CAM N. SRIVASTAVA CRIMSON STAFF WRITERS
HIO Tells Students To Assess Travel Risks
‘KNOW YOUR RIGHTS.’
Harvard advisors said international students should assess risks before traveling outside the U.S.
BY
Harvard International Office staff advised international students to reconsider traveling outside of the United States — and to be aware that students who engaged in pro-Palestine speech may face additional risk — at a “Know Your Rights” webinar Wednesday evening.
The webinar, led by HIO Director of Immigration Services
Maureen Martin and Harvard Representation Initiative Staff
Attorney Jason Corral, featured a 40-minute long question-and-answer session where students posed hypothetical scenarios to Martin and Corral.
Corral acknowledged that students at other institutions have been targeted based on pro-Palestine speech. Asked about international students’ right to protest, he said he would advise more caution than he did under Trump’s first term.
“I remember having these types of town halls back in 2017 and really saying, like, look, ‘You have a First Amendment right to speak,’” Corral said. “The difference is we have seen situations where it seems as though people’s visas are being revoked simply based on their speech or protests.”
Corral said students should vet their past public statements and academic work when assessing their travel risk.
The session occurred days before the Harvard International Office wrote in an email to international students that three Harvard students and two recent graduates had their student visas revoked amid the Trump administration’s crackdown on international students.
The HIO wrote that they were “not aware of the details of the revocations or the reasons for them” and that Harvard discovered the revoked visas during a “routine records review.” Many
visa revocations so far have been tied to students’ involvement in pro-Palestine activism, but other students have had their visas revoked over minor infractions including traffic violations. Colleges nationwide have generally not been notified before students at their institutions had visas revoked. Instead, college officials have typically discovered the revocations by running checks on the Student and Exchange Visitor Information System, a database maintained by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to track student visas.
Martin indicated that as of Wednesday, Harvard had not
noticed any unusual changes to students’ statuses.
“We’re checking SEVIS on a regular basis for that kind of thing,” she said. “And we haven’t seen anything troublesome yet.”
So far, the Trump administration has revoked more than 300 student visas, Secretary of State Marco Rubio estimated on March 27.
At the session on Wednesday, Corral told attendees to “consider for themselves how essential their travel is and do a risk assessment based on the importance of the travel,” saying he felt “very concerned about international students traveling at this time.”
Harvard Checking International Students’ Visa Status Daily
tify students of any status change within 30 minutes.
Harvard’s International Office confirmed that it is checking the status of students’ visas on a daily basis, following a Sunday announcement to international students on the revocation of five Harvard affiliates’ visas.
Harvard’s graduate student union shared the HIO’s policy in a Tuesday email to its bargaining unit, after the union emailed HIO leadership to solicit guarantees on visa status updates for international student workers. According to the email, the Harvard Graduate Students Union-United Auto Workers contacted HIO Office Senior Director Martha D. Gladue on Monday with a list of requests. They asked the HIO to check international student workers’ Service and Exchange Visitor Information System status daily and no -
The union also requested that the HIO expand email communications to include undocumented and Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals affiliates and relay updates to “the wider Harvard community.” “We understand HIO faces considerable pressures in light of federal scrutiny of the University, as well as significantly increased workload,” union leadership wrote in the email. “We are making these requests because our members have indicated that such assurances, coming directly from HIO as an authority on student-related immigration issues, would significantly alleviate ongoing anxieties about the current situation.”
Following the union’s requests, the HIO confirmed that they are doing daily checks of the SEVIS system. While HIO Director of Immigration Services Maureen Martin said that the
office was checking SEVIS on a “regular basis” at a webinar last week, Harvard did not clarify the daily checks until Tuesday.
But the union’s Tuesday email did not include any details on the request to include undocumented affiliates and DACA recipients on HIO mailing lists.
University officials declined to comment on the union’s request and the HIO’s response.
In an emailed statement, HGSU-UAW President Sara V. Speller wrote that the union does not claim the HIO changed its policies because of Monday’s list of requests. But she added that HGSU-UAW will continue to ask for increased communication from the University.
“Harvard’s students, student-workers, and workers are all facing immense uncertainty with the federal administration’s attacks on higher education, and the lack of updates or resources from University officials over the last few months has left so many people feeling lost and vulnerable,” she wrote.
HGSU-UAW proposed ground rules during their ongoing contract negotiations that included a “safety plan” for international students giving testimony at bargaining sessions, which were not adopted. The two parties agreed to continue negotiations without ground rules during a March 28 negotiation after a protracted debate over open bargaining. Their next bargaining session is scheduled for Thursday.
hugo.chiasson@thecrimson.com amann.mahajan@thecrimson.com
Wednesday’s session, which was announced by Harvard College Dean of Students Thomas G. Dunne in a College-wide email on Sunday, was the second such session the HIO has held in the past two weeks.
“We’ve heard from many concerned students,” Dunne wrote in the email, which addressed the increase in immigration enforcement actions under the Trump administration. “While there are still many unknowns, we want you to know that we are here for you — and make sure that you’re aware of the resources available to you.”
“It’s unfortunate we even have to have a session like this,”
Martin said in her opening remarks. “But we’re hoping that maybe we can help allay some of your fears.”
In general, students whose entry visas are revoked may remain in the United States as long as they are enrolled in courses. But some students have also had their legal residency terminated in recent weeks — meaning they could be detained and deported.
There have been no reported immigration arrests of Harvard students, and Harvard has so far remained tight-lipped on how it would handle a situation like the sudden capture of Tufts University Ph.D. student Rumeysa Ozturk, a Turkish citizen, near
her Somerville apartment.
On Wednesday, Corral and Martin advised international students to carry printouts of their I-20 and I-94 forms, which show their student visa eligibility and records of their entry into the U.S., respectively. They also recommended that students keep a picture of the biographical page of their passport on their phone, though they cautioned that students who carry their passports run the risk of losing them.
Corral also offered advice to students seeking to reenter the U.S. after traveling abroad. He noted that students on F-1 and J-1 visas — whom he said have the most limited rights at ports of entry — could have their devices searched by U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents.
“If you have a bunch of photos on your phone that suggest something that may be contrary to what they deem as a foreign policy interest and a reason for why they’re revoking these student visas — pictures of protests or something like that — that could go into their discretionary decision-making too,” he said. But deleting images or messages could also raise CBP agents’ suspicions, he said. In the event a student is approached by an immigration officer, Corral instructed students to “remain calm.”
“If they ask you about you in particular — if they say ‘Are you so-and-so?’ — I would say, ‘Look, I don’t want to talk to you,’” Corral said. “It’s really in your best interest to try to get your attorney over there as quickly as possible.”
He added that students in such a situation should continue saying that they do not want to talk with the officer, even if the officer tells them they do not have a right to an attorney. “If they say, ‘Well, you don’t have the right to an attorney’ or they pressure you in some way that makes you feel like you need to give up your information, I would just repeat the same line over and over,” Corral said.
Dunne Says College Diversity Offices Will Stay Their Course
BY HIRAL M. CHAVRE AND DARCY G LIN CRIMSON STAFF WRITERS
Harvard College Dean of Students Thomas G. Dunne said in an interview with The Crimson on Tuesday that he does not expect the College’s diversity offices to be affected by the Trump administration’s crackdown on diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives.
Less than a week after three federal agencies conditioned Harvard’s federal funding on cutting its DEI programs, Dunne said the DSO was “operating in the arena right now with the same plans that we had at the start of the year.”
The three offices — the Harvard Foundation for Intercultural and Race Relations, the Office of BGLTQ Student Life, and the Women’s Center — are all housed under the DSO’s Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion team.
The Trump administration’s demands to Harvard on Thursday asked the University to ax its DEI programs as the government reviews nearly $9 billion in funding commitments to Harvard and affiliated hospitals.
“DEI programs teach students, faculty, staff, and leadership to make snap judgments about each other based on crude race and identity stereotypes, which fuels division and hatred based on race, color, national origin, and other protected identity characteristics,” the letter read. “All efforts should be made to shutter such programs.”
But Dunne said he anticipat-
ed programming and events associated with the College’s diversity offices would continue as usual because they serve the entire student body.
“Those are events that are open to all students and so our expectation is that we continue the programs that we always have done,” Dunne said. “All students can and should be engaging with these centers.”
However, the fate of Harvard’s diversity offices will likely be decided by Harvard’s top brass: the Harvard Corporation and University President Alan M. Garber ’76, who must craft a response to Trump’s ultimatum. If Garber and the governing boards concede to the White House, the DSO may have little choice but to shutter its planned events — and potentially entire offices.
At the interview, which took place three days after Harvard announced that three international students’ visas had been revoked, Dunne said the DSO was developing a plan to ensure the College is “a supportive community” for international students.
The DSO met with international student leaders on Monday to discuss how to ensure international students can be supported by their Harvard peers — and how to keep Harvard’s students informed, Dunne said.
Dunnes said the College is looking for ways to make sure international students’ advising networks — including tutors, proctors, and Peer Advising Fellows — can address their emotional needs.
“If students need places to convene and support each other as students, we want to support that,” he said.
The DSO is also considering ways to help fund and organize events in collaboration with international student groups. But Dunne said that “Harvard has to follow the law” on immigration enforcement. Students should abide by “long-standing procedures” set by the Office of General Counsel for requests from law enforcement, Dunne said. The OGC’s guidance recommends that students contact the OGC and Harvard University Police Department if law enforcement officers ask them for documents or for access to nonpublic spaces.
Dunne also said the College is working to ensure international students are connected with advisers at the Harvard International Office, who can answer international students’ questions about their visas that may involve “individually specific processes and circumstances.”
“The best course of action is to get students connected with the people who are best suited to give that sort of information and directives to students,” he said. Rising immigration fears have amped up the demands placed on the HIO during the season when staff are already working to prepare international students for status changes when they graduate, Dunne added, saying staff had put in “Herculean efforts to respond.”
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The Harvard International Office held a ‘Know Your Rights’ webinar on Wednesday. JOEY HUANG — CRIMSON PHOTOGRAPHER
Student Visas Revoked
affected four students and three alumni, were announced to international students on Thursday in an email from the Harvard International Office. The HIO notified students of five earlier revocations on Sunday.
The State Department revoked visas for 12 Harvard affiliates — including seven current students and five recent graduates — in the past week as the Trump administration continues its campaign to strip international students of their visa status en masse. Seven of the revocations, which
PRITZKER FROM PAGE 1
Pritzker Talks Visas, but Says Little
When asked whether Harvard would concede to the Trump administration’s demands, Pritzker stayed guarded in her reply.
“I can’t talk about any of that right now, I have to catch my plane,” she said. “The good news is we’re working hard to help Harvard students.”
But Harvard is strapped for time in crafting its reply to its fiercest critics in Washington. In the letter detailing demands to Harvard President Alan M. Garber ’76, the White House demanded “immediate cooperation” in rolling out the changes before federal funding was slashed. And Monday, the Cambridge City Council unanimously voted to call on the Corporation to refuse the administration’s demands and “safeguard academic independence, the rule of law, and democracy.” In the lead-up to the Corporation’s weekend meetings, more than 1,500 alumni also called on Harvard to “mount a coordinated opposition to these undemocratic attacks.”
Several members of the Board of Overseers told The Crimson after the weekend meetings that a response from Harvard was forthcoming — but since Thursday, neither Garber nor Pritkzer have issued a public reply to the demands.
Overseers and Corporation members were also expected to determine who would succeed outgoing Harvard College Dean Rakesh Khurana over the weekend. A source familiar with the process said that the announcement is expected very soon, but Pritzker said she was unfamiliar with the status of the search on Tuesday.
“I don’t know, I have no idea about that,” she said.
Khurana’s successor would need to be approved by a committee including members of the Corporation.
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Harvard has not named any of the students or alumni whose visas have been revoked. The HIO confirmed on Tuesday that they are checking the status of students’ visas on a daily basis through the Service and Exchange Visitor Information System.
Like other universities where students have been targeted, Harvard has not been notified of the revocations, instead discovering them through SEVIS checks.
“We are not aware of the details of the revocations or the reasons for them, but we understand these actions continue to take place at other institutions across the country,” the HIO wrote on Thursday.
A University spokesperson declined to comment. Students whose visas are terminated lose their authorization to work in the United States and may not reenter the country.
As of Thursday, more than 600 international students have had their visa status changed under the Trump administration, according to a tracker maintained by Inside Higher Education. Schools near Harvard — including MIT, Boston University, Northeastern Univer-
sity, and Emerson College — have seen dozens of students and alumni lose their visas in recent weeks.
Student visas have been revoked for a variety of reasons — many publicly undisclosed, and some related to minor crimes, including traffic violations — but the State Department has zeroed in on some students for pro-Palestine statements.
On March 25, Tufts University Ph.D. student Rumeysa Ozturk, a Turkish citizen who had penned a pro-Palestine op-ed, had her visa revoked after being arrested by ICE officials outside her apartment in Somerville.
Harvard has tried to ramp up support for international students in the wake of the revocations, in-
cluding scheduling several “Know Your Rights” sessions. At a session last week, Harvard staff advised international students to carry copies of paperwork, think carefully about travel outside the U.S., and assess risks if they had engaged in pro-Palestine speech or scholarship.
A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson said Ozturk was accused of engaging in “activities in support of Hamas,” but did not specify the alleged activities.
The email to international students announcing the first round of visa revocations was sent as members of the Harvard Corporation — Harvard’s highest governing body — met in Harvard Square on Sunday.
When approached by a Crimson
Police Union Lacks Confidence in Chief Clay
BY MATAN H. JOSEPHY AND LAUREL M. SHUGART CRIMSON STAFF WRITERS
Members of Harvard’s police union voted overwhelmingly to declare “no confidence” in Harvard University Police Department Chief Victor A. Clay, an extraordinary censure of the department’s leadership by its own rank-and-file.
In an April 2 message obtained by The Crimson, the Harvard University Police Association announced that, in an anonymous survey given to officers, “34 out of 35 responders said they did not have confidence in the current HUPD Chief of Police’s ability to lead the Department.”
The same proportion of officers reported that Clay has not “managed the Department in an open, ethical and fair manner” or “shown respect and appreciation” for the work of officers tasked with negoti-
ating a new contract for the union, according to the message. The HUPA’s current contract expires in November.
The message added that 34 officers also responded that Clay has not “fairly advocated” for improved working conditions within HUPD or “provided a consistent, stable and supportive environment for officers to maximize their ability to perform their jobs to the best of their ability.”
University spokesperson Jason A. Newton wrote in a statement that “University leadership has been made aware of the letter sent by Harvard University Police Association.”
A blank copy of the questionnaire obtained by The Crimson shows that it contained fifteen questions given to union members, many about department culture.
One question asked officers if they believed that Clay has “been an effective leader of the Police De-
partment.” Every officer who responded voted no, according to the HUPA message.
The vote is an indication that animosity between HUPD officers against Clay, who joined the department nearly four years ago to replace longtime chief Francis D. “Bud” Riley, has reached a boiling point.
Riley retired in 2020 amid nationwide protests around policing. His departure followed a Crimson investigation which found yearslong allegations of racism, sexism, and favoritism within HUPD and prompted an external review of department practices.
Clay — who became HUPD’s first Black police chief in decades — arrived in July 2021 with a message of reform, calling on police nationwide to “change the culture within our departments” and pledging greater transparency.
He quickly shook up the department’s leadership: less than a year
after Clay became chief, most of Riley’s senior staff had either been reassigned or left HUPD entirely and two new leadership roles were established.
But HUPD has still found itself under scrutiny since Clay’s appointment as chief.
A 2023 ‘swatting’ incident in Leverett House, where four Black undergraduates were held at gunpoint by Harvard police officers after a false 911 call, led to widespread outcry against the department.
And, as protests rocked Harvard’s campus — and a pro-Palestine encampment was formed in Harvard Yard — HUPD found itself facing regular condemnation from student protesters.
But Harvard President Alan M. Garber ’76 opted not to initiate a police crackdown, and Clay affirmed students’ rights to protest peacefully in the Yard in an interview with The Crimson.
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Lifton To Join Harvard Corporation
BY DHRUV T. PATEL AND GRACE E. YOON CRIMSON STAFF WRITERS
Richard P. Lifton — the president of Rockefeller University — will join the Harvard Corporation in July, the University announced Monday.
Lifton was elected by the Corporation and confirmed by the Board of Overseers — Harvard’s second-highest governing body — which convened for meetings in Harvard Square over the weekend to prepare a response to the Trump administration’s $9 billion ultimatum.
Lifton will succeed Shirley M. Tilghman, the former president of Princeton University, who has served on Harvard’s highest governing body since 2016.
Tilghman’s planned departure, which was first announced Monday, comes before the end of her second six-year term. A second member of the Corporation — Theodore V. Wells Jr. — concluded his 12 years on the board in January, but neither his departure date nor plans for his successor have been made public. A
Harvard spokesperson declined to comment on whether Wells would leave the Corporation this year.
Lifton, a longtime biomedical researcher, was a faculty member at the Harvard Medical School from 1986 to 1993, before moving to Yale University, where he served as chair of the Department of Genetics and was named a Sterling Professor — Yale’s highest academic honor. At Yale, Lifton also directed two research centers focused on investigating the genetic basis of hypertension and kidney function.
Lifton was tapped to lead Rockefeller University, a graduate-only university focused on biomedical research, in 2016. He also serves as Rockefeller’s director of the Laboratory of Human Genetics and Genomics.
Harvard President Alan M. Garber ’76 and Harvard Corporation
Senior Fellow Penny S. Pritzker ’81 praised Lifton’s commitment to the “progress and promise of science” and the “advancement of higher education” in a press release.
“Rick is known to colleagues as a person of deep integrity, extraordinary intellectual curiosity and creativity, exceptional incisiveness,
and sound judgment,” they wrote.
“We look forward to welcoming Rick Lifton to the Corporation this summer, as we navigate these consequential and challenging times for our own university and others.”
Unlike many members of the Corporation, Lifton is not a prominent Harvard donor. He will become the second current member of the Corporation to not have graduated from Harvard.
Lifton’s appointment comes as Harvard becomes increasingly entangled in a tug-of-war with Republicans in Washington — and as the Corporation determines whether the University will challenge or concede to threats to its funding, endowment, and academic programming.
Since Trump’s first presidency, Lifton has emerged as a fierce defender of funding for life sciences research. In 2017, he slammed the Trump administration’s decision to slash National Institutes of Health’s funding as “unprecedented and catastrophic for our health, security, and economy.”
Lifton has previously served on advisory committees for the National Institutes of Health and Broad In-
stitute of MIT and Harvard. He also sat on an advisory body for the Massachusetts General Hospital alongside Garber for four years.
During Lifton’s term on the Corporation, Harvard will also pick a successor to Garber, who is set to leave his post in 2027. The search for his replacement is set to begin in 2026 and will likely be led by a search committee composed of all 12 Corporation fellows and three Overseers.
Lifton has participated in several presidential search committees before, including ones at Yale and the National Academy of Medicine.
Lifton said in a press release that he was excited to ensure “that Harvard sustains and enhances its exceptional contributions to society.”
“Harvard is a national treasure for its leadership in education, scholarship, and research. Its generation of new knowledge advances the betterment of humanity with global impact,” he said.
Lifton will serve for a six-year term with the possibility of extending his tenure for a second term.
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reporter as they left an administrative building on Sunday afternoon, two Corporation fellows — Carolyn A. “Biddy” Martin and Shirley M. Tilghman — were unaware of the visa revocations.
“We’ve been in meetings all day,” they said. But on Tuesday, Penny S. Pritzker ’81, the senior fellow of the Corporation, said Harvard is working to support students whose visas had been revoked.
cam.srivastava@thecrimson.com
BOARDS FROM PAGE 1
all 30 Overseers gathered for dinner in Loeb House on Saturday evening, ahead of Sunday meetings with Corporation members at the Charles Hotel and Loeb House. Several Harvard administrators were also present at the Sunday meetings, including outgoing Harvard College Dean Rakesh Khurana and Faculty of Arts and Sciences Dean Hopi E. Hoekstra. Khurana declined to comment on why he was present. The weekend meetings come at the tail end of a seven-month-long search for the next dean of Harvard College. The announcement is expected very soon, per a source familiar with the search process — but Corporation members declined to answer whether the pick would be made in their Sunday meetings. Harvard Law School professor Jonathan L. Zittrain was also present at the Saturday dinner, but declined to comment on why he was invited. Zittrain, who directs Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, is one of nearly 90 Harvard Law School professors who signed a letter condemning the Trump administration’s efforts to penalize law firms that represent Trump’s political adversaries. A University spokesperson declined to comment on the weekend meetings.
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PAVAN V. THAKKAR — CRIMSON PHOTOGRAPHER
CAMBRIDGE CITY COUNCIL
Council Urges Harvard To ResistTrump
RESOLVED.
Councilors unanimously approved a late resolution asking Harvard to confront Trump.
CRIMSON STAFF WRITERS
he Cambridge City Coun-
Tcil voted unanimously on Monday to call on the Harvard Corporation — the University’s highest governing body — to refuse the Trump administration’s demands as $9 billion in government funding hangs in the balance.
The resolution, a late addition to the City Council agenda announced hours before the meeting, was originally co-sponsored by City Councilors Patricia M. “Patty” Nolan ’80, Burhan Azeem, Sumbul Siddiqui, and Vice Mayor Marc C. McGovern. But in a show of strong support, the other five councilors asked to be added as co-sponsors before the order was adopted.
The order urges, “in the strongest possible terms, the Harvard Corporation to stand up in defense of the values that are fundamental to both the University and our de-
mocracy,” in resisting Trump’s demands to eliminate diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, ban masks, and enact sweeping governance reform.
The Council asked Harvard to “use all measures possible, including the University’s endowment funds, if necessary, to safeguard academic independence, the rule of law, and democracy.”
“It is not hyperbole to draw a parallel between the current administration’s demands and the appeasement policies of the 1930s, when several European nations conceded to the demands of Hitler, contributing to the horrific rise of the Nazi regime and World War II,” they wrote.
Nolan explained on Monday that while the Council usually refrains from commenting on internal Harvard decisions, the stakes of the question before Garber warranted a break from precedent.
“Depending on their response, it could deeply affect the city,” Nolan said.
While the Trump administration has not given a deadline for their demanded changes, officials from three government agencies wrote in a Thursday letter to Ha-
vard President Alan M. Garber ’76 and Corporation Senior Fellow Penny S. Pritkzer ’81 that compliance is necessary for Harvard’s “continued financial relationship with the United States government.”
City Manager Yi-An Huang ’05, who the order requested coordinate a “united front” from government officials, spoke in favor of the motion Monday evening. “This is about more than just a vague list of demands and a big and scary stick,” Huang said. “I care because Harvard is our community, and I also care because Harvard needs to be the leader that I know it can be, an example that inspires solidarity in a united front against these unlawful actions.”
The Cambridge City Clerk will send a copy of the resolution to the Corporation, Governor Maura T Healey ’92, the federal delegation, and the state delegation.
Both the Corporation and the Board of Overseers, the second-highest governing body, met over the weekend, but neither Garber nor Pritzker has issued a public response to the demands since they were announced. But with the resolution, the City
Council added to a growing number of voices — including faculty and student protesters — that have called on Harvard not to bow to the demands, even if that means the University takes a serious financial hit.
“Are there things that Harvard
could be doing better? Absolutely. But we need to call out what the federal administration is doing,” Huang said at the meeting. “This is an attack on the independence and freedom of universities. It’s an attack on learning and research and science that invents life sav-
ing medicines, breakthrough innovations, and new technologies.” “It’s an attack on the very heart of Harvard’s soul, Veritas,” he added.
Harvard To Borrow $750 Million Amid Funding Uncertainty In Anxious Times, A Steady Dean
BY AVANI B. RAI AND SAKETH SUNDAR CRIMSON STAFF WRITERS
Harvard University will issue $750 million in taxable bonds this month, bringing the total offering this fiscal year to $1.2 billion, as the University faces a turbulent economy and waits to learn whether the Trump administration will shut off its federal funding tap.
The bond sale comes just one week after the Trump administration announced a nearly $9 billion federal review of multiyear research funding tied to Harvard and its affiliated hospitals in the Boston area. The government wrote on Thursday that Harvard’s access to the money would depend on compliance with a list of demands — including shutting down diversity programs and further restricting protests.
Sunday’s preliminary offering statement marks the second time Harvard has entered the debt market in as many months. Harvard issued $450 million in March to “finance and refinance certain capital projects,” according to the University’s March preliminary official statement.
In the new bond sale’s statement, the University acknowledged both a March 31 letter from the Trump administration’s task force to combat antisemitism announcing the nearly $9 billion review and the April 3 list of demands issued by the task force.
The statement, like one accompanying Harvard’s March offering, also refers to a proposed 15 percent cap on the indirect cost recovery rate for NIH grants and the Department of Education’s threats to revoke funds for universities that use race-based decision-making as potential financial concerns for the University.
“While the financial impact on the University resulting from the totality of potential developments at the federal level cannot be quantified at this time, any such developments may, directly or indirectly, have a material adverse effect on the current and future financial profile and operating performance of the University,” the statement reads. Harvard used identical language in its March offering.
University spokesperson Jason A. Newton wrote in a statement that the bond sale is “part of ongoing contingency planning for a range of financial circumstances” as Harvard evaluates necessary resources to push forward with its academic and research priorities.
Harvard’s peer schools have
also turned to bond sales in 2025. Stanford University and the University of Pennsylvania also had large bond sales earlier this year, while Princeton University announced they were considering a bond sale last week.
If Harvard is able to attract investor interest in the new bond sale — as it did in March, when Harvard sold its entire offering — its total debt would increase to at least $8.2 billion, a 32 percent increase in debt over two years.
Harvard Business School professor Luis M. Viceira called the $750 million figure “sobering” in an email.
“It seems to me that Harvard is raising liquidity in light of a very challenging funding situation with the potential for a severe funding shortfall. There are three ways of addressing funding shortfalls: reduce spending, borrow money, or liquidate assets,” Viceira wrote. “We now know that borrowing is a way the university is addressing the potential shortfall.”
Rutgers Business School professor John M. Longo wrote that raising additional capital “may be prudent for Harvard and other universities” due to the economic uncertainty fueled by the Trump administration’s acrossthe-board tariff hikes and its rollbacks of research funds.
“The turmoil in financial markets related to the tariffs has lowered interest rates across the maturity spectrum versus even a few weeks ago,” Longo wrote.
“Concomitantly, the uncertain federal funding of grants for Harvard and many other national universities has complicated and negatively impacted operating budgets,” he added.
The University entered this year already concerned about the possibility of an endowment tax. Republicans in Congress — including now-Vice President J.D. Vance — have floated hiking the tax for years, but Republicans’ control of Congress and the White House now make the
prospect more likely.
In 2024, Harvard spent the most it had in more than a decade lobbying the federal government. Filings show its efforts focused on research funding and heading off an endowment tax.
Rice Business School professor Alex Butler wrote that the taxable nature of the bond sale would allow the University to have more flexibility on what they can use the resulting funds for than the previous tax-exempt sale in March.
“Tax exempt bonds have restrictions on the use of funds, such as to fund construction of buildings,” Butler wrote. “Considering the uncertainty that higher education faces currently, I imagine that no research university in the country intends to embark on building new infrastructure right now.”
This means Harvard’s second bond sale could be a sign the University is looking for a stable way to finance its daily operations — not just capital projects, some of which Harvard is now looking to put on hold.
University of Illinois finance professor emeritus George G. Pennacchi suggested that current conditions in the bond market may let Harvard raise money for relatively cheap through bond sales.
Yield rates on U.S. Treasury notes and other relatively safe long-term bonds are falling as investors seek stable places to put their money amid market turmoil. That means Harvard — historically seen as a safe investment — can offer low yields on its own bonds, meaning the University would have to pay relatively low interest rates to investors down the line.
Viceira wrote that the bond sale “speaks to our ability to raise money in choppy markets – that is, assuming we can raise these funds at a reasonable rate.”
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the Center for Middle East Studies, to the dismay of many FAS faculty.
At the same meeting, Harvard College Dean Rakesh Khurana said the federal government was weaponizing antisemitism in its Title VI investigations — but quickly downplayed his implicit condemnation of Trump after the fact.
And days before, Harvard Divinity School Dean Marla Frederick announced the suspension of the Religion, Conflict, and Peace Initiative — a program centered around the study of Israel and Palestine — and prompted outrage from students and alumni.
Faculty members and protesters alike accused Garber of directing the RCPI suspension and the CMES leadership changes as a preemptive capitulation to Trump’s demands. (The Trump administration itself still issued a series of steep demands days later.)
“It seems like Harvard is doing exactly what is demanded by our critics, and almost exactly what was demanded by the Trump administration of Columbia,” Government professor Ryan D. Enos said at the FAS meeting.
But at HKS — a school especially affected by a shrinking public sector and threats to international students — Weinstein has given faculty the impression of a steady leader capable of handling a crisis.
HKS professor Mathias Risse, the director of the Carr Center for Human Rights, said the school, “probably at this stage, is one of the happier places on campus.”
“And I think that is — to a good extent — because of the positive influence of Dean Weinstein,” he added.
The University seems to be taking note of Weinstein’s agile response. He attended meetings over the weekend with Harvard’s governing boards as they debated how to respond to Trump’s demands.
When asked to describe Weinstein’s approach, several HKS faculty members said the dean had been able to recognize the gravity of the moment without panicking.
“I get the sense he’s trying to use an analytic scalpel as opposed to a rhetorical sledgehammer,” Brooks said. “So not ducking the issues, but he is really trying to be precise. And that’s what you would expect. But in a great many places, that’s not what you get.”
HKS professor Tarek E. Masoud added that Weinstein had appeared “not easily rattled” since taking office in July — a stark contrast to the often embattled former HKS Dean Douglas W. Elmendorf.
“On the contrary, this guy is cool as a cucumber, and he’s still
liking his job,” Masoud said. “He’s got a smile on his face — which I don’t think can be said of a lot of other people in higher education leadership.”
‘Careers and Lives Upended’
But Weinstein’s popularity may not be enough to protect Harvard’s school of government from the Trump administration’s plan to gut both the government and elite higher education.
While hospitals and scientific research centers may face the steepest funding threats from the Trump administration, the basic tenets of the Kennedy School — an institution that markets itself as a place to “create lasting positive global impact through public service” — are facing an unprecedented test.
“We’re facing some really difficult challenges,” Masoud said.
“What is the place of a school of government in an America that believes that government needs to be drowned in a bathtub?”
According to Moore, the work of the Kennedy School is inherently a threat to the Trump administration.
“I think the last thing that the current administration of the country wants to see is universities being influential in the practice of government and governance,” Moore said. “And that’s a hard thing, because the Kennedy School stands for that.”
Beyond their research and political affiliations, the Kennedy School’s student body is particularly vulnerable to retribution from the Trump administration.
Nearly 60 percent of HKS current students are international, according to a November diversity report released by the school.
The onslaught of revoked visas and deportations in recent weeks has created a pervasive sense of fear on campus, students said.
At Harvard, 12 affiliates — including seven current students — have had their visas revoked in the past month. Harvard has not named the affiliates and was not told when or why the revocations occurred.
Even before visa revocations were confirmed, rumors of a supposed raid by Immigration and Customs Enforcement on campus spread quickly from an all-student group chat, exacerbating already widespread anxiety over an immigration crackdown. (An HKS spokesperson confirmed to The Crimson that ICE was not present on campus.)
Students and graduates of HKS are also disproportionately affected by the slashing of the federal workforce, with more than 30 percent of the Class of 2024 entering government positions after graduation. Since taking office, President
Donald Trump has fired federal government employees en masse, including tens of thousands of probationary workers who have been in their role for less than two years — including many recent HKS graduates. Weinstein directly addressed the fallout from Trump’s actions in his Feb. 27 public statement, referencing HKS alumni in the public sector who “had their careers and lives upended” and international students “concerned about potential changes to immigration policies.”
“Questions about how to revitalize democracy, strengthen civil society, and improve the performance of government have never been more important,” Weinstein wrote in February.
‘Responsive to the Moment’ Earlier this week, Weinstein launched his latest initiative to address current political upheaval — a competitive grants program offering up to $20,000 to HKS faculty who propose projects “responsive to the moment.”
“The goal is to help us learn from this moment of large-scale change,” Weinstein wrote in a letter to faculty announcing the program. “Significant pivots in critical policy areas have been accompanied by dramatic efforts to transform how the federal government operates.”
The offering represents a rare funding opportunity as schools and programs across Harvard brace for drastic cuts to federal grants. Garber himself announced an indefinite hiring freeze a month before Trump declared that nearly $9 billion in grants were on the line. But while the rest of Harvard takes stock, Weinstein is pushing faculty to research the ongoing policy and institutional changes, analyze their impact “at the household, community, national, or global level,” and propose reforms.
“We will be looking to seed new projects that would not be undertaken otherwise and that frame or scope new agendas that would ultimately have potential to attract significant external support,” Weinstein wrote. The grants are open to any PI-approved faculty and encourage collaboration between multiple HKS research centers. Brooks said he’s confident Weinstein will preserve the government school’s integrity as the federal leadership changes.
“Nobody’s biting their nails, nobody’s quaking in their boots,” Brooks said. “We’re about the business of doing the work.”
On Monday, the Cambridge City Council voted in their regular meeting to call on the Harvard Corporation to stand up to the Trump administration’s demands. STEVE S. LI — CRIMSON PHOTOGRAPHER
Harvard increased its total fiscal year bond offering by $750 million in taxable bonds for April. JULIAN J. GIORDANO — CRIMSON PHOTOGRAPHER
NIH Has Cut More Than $110 Million to Harvard, Hospitals
At least 23 grants to researchers at Harvard and affiliated hospitals were terminated since February.
The National Institutes of Health has terminated research grants worth more than $110 million to Harvard University and its affiliated hospitals since late February, according to public Department of Health and Human Services filings reviewed by The Crimson.
At least 23 grants affiliated with Harvard Pilgrim Health Care, Boston Children’s Hospital, Cambridge Health Alliance, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Massachusetts General Hospital, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and the School of Public Health were canceled over a month-long span between February 28 and April 1.
All of the grants were terminated before the Trump administration announced a $9 billion review of funding to Harvard and affiliated health care centers. At least four grants to Harvard-affiliated scholars — specifically those related to research on Covid-19 — have since been temporarily reinstated as the White House battles court challenges.
The affected projects had more than $43 million in undisbursed funds at the time of cancellation. These grants are only those publicly disclosed on an HHS spreadsheet, which has not been updated since April 4. The total number of terminations may be higher.
An analysis by The Crimson revealed that all of the canceled projects prominently featured themes of gender and sexual identity, Covid-19 and its vaccine, or health disparities. Keywords appearing in the projects’ abstracts include “transgender,” “vaccine,” “race,” “barrier,” “inequity,” “mental health,” “underserved,” and “minority” — all of which have been targeted in the Trump administration’s sweeping erasure of language that conflicts with its agenda.
School of Public Health spokesperson Stephanie Simon wrote that 15 federally funded research grants affiliated with the school — primarily from the NIH, but also from the Department of Homeland Security and USAID — had been terminated since March, although only four were primary holders of the cancelled grants. The other 11, Simon wrote, were “subcontractors.”
No other Harvard-affiliated research institutions whose grants were terminated responded to a request for comment.
“The rationale for nearly all the funding terminations was that the research no longer aligned with agency priorities,” Simon wrote.
NIH officials told gender identity-focused researchers, including at Harvard, via email that they had a grant canceled because it “no longer effectuates agency priorities.”
“Research programs based on gender identity are often unscientific, have little identifiable return on investment, and do nothing to enhance the health of many Americans. Many such studies ignore, rather than seriously examine, bi -
ological realities,” the email read.
At least two Covid-19 researchers at Harvard received a similar email from the NIH reading that the grant funding would end as “the pandemic is over.”
“The end of the pandemic provides cause to terminate Covid-19 related funded grants. These grant funds were issued for a limited purpose: to ameliorate the effects of the pandemic,” the email read.
University spokesperson Sarah Kennedy O’Reilly declined to comment.
Some of the grants related to the Covid-19 pandemic were reinstated following a federal court’s 10-day temporary restraining order on the HHS’s termination of $11 billion in public health grants across the country on April 3.
One of those reversals affected a grant on immunological signatures of the Covid-19 virus and vaccine held by Dan H. Barouch ’93, director of the Center for Virology and Vaccine Research at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center.
Still, the reinstatement left Barouch with little confidence.
“At this moment, the grant
Bashar Masri Resigns from HKS
was first reported by the New York Post. He also denied the lawsuit’s claims in a statement to the New York Times.
Bashar Masri, a Palestinian American billionaire, resigned from the Harvard Kennedy School’s Dean’s Council earlier this week, days after he was accused in a lawsuit of covertly building infrastructure for Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023 terrorist attack. The complaint was filed on Monday in a Washington, D.C. federal court on behalf of more than 200 families of victims of the October 7 attacks. It alleges that Masri’s companies — under the auspices of various real estate initiatives — were used by Hamas to conceal attacks, store and launch rockets against Israel, and produce electricity for its offensives.
An HKS spokesperson confirmed Masri’s resignation in a statement, writing that “the lawsuit raises serious allegations that should be vetted and addressed through the legal process.” Masri had served on the Dean’s Council — a group of roughly 70 high-profile donors and business executives that directly advised HKS Dean Jeremy M. Weinstein — since 2014. Since 2018, Masri has also funded the Rawabi Fellowship, which pays for Palestinian students to attend HKS. Masri did not respond to a request for comment Thursday afternoon after his resignation
“Neither he nor those entities have ever engaged in unlawful activity or provided support for violence and militancy,” his office wrote in a statement to the Times.
The business executive, a U.S. citizen born in Palestine, has extensive ties to the Trump administration’s hostage nego -
The plaintiffs did not allege Masri knew about the Oct. 7 attacks, but did suggest he was aware of Hamas’ military infrastructure on the properties and argued he was civilly liable as a result.
tiation efforts, frequently shuttling Trump special envoy for hostage affairs Adam Boehler across the Middle East.
But in the lawsuit, lawyers for the families blamed Masri’s “grand deception” on his “carefully cultivated image as a peace-building businessman.”
“He and the companies he controls were actively conspiring with Hamas both to build infrastructure used on October 7, 2023, and to provide cover for
Hamas’s true violent aims,” the lawsuit stated.
The plaintiffs did not allege Masri knew about the October 7 attacks, but did suggest he was aware of Hamas’ military infrastructure on the properties and argued he was civilly liable for the result. They asked the court to determine damages in trial.
The lawsuit focuses on three of Masri’s developments: the Gaza Industrial Estate — a 480,000 square meter industrial park in northern Gaza that the plaintiffs claim was a cover for “an elaborate subterranean attack tunnel” — and two hotels from which Hamas officials allegedly hosted events and launched rockets into Israel.
Masri, the founder and CEO of Massar International, has also led the creation of Rawabi, the first planned city in the West Bank.
In January, Dean Jeremy Weinstein traveled to Rawabi for a meeting with HKS alumni, hoping to restore the school’s relationship with Palestine and increase recruitment from the area. The 90-minute meeting was held in Masri’s Massar offices, according to Marwan Durzi, a representative for Harvard Alumni in Palestine.
It is unclear how Masri’s resignation will impact the Rawabi Fellowship. The school currently enrolls only one Palestinian student.
has been reinstated, and by next week, it is not clear what will happen,” Barouch said. “It’s not like a water spout. You can’t just turn them on and off and on and off at will.”
Ariel L. Beccia, a postdoctoral researcher at the School of Public Health said the terminated grant entirely funded both her research and her salary and she was turning to private sources for future funding.
“The project is pretty much halted, because I now need to shift my attention to grant writing in order to be able to fund my work,” Beccia said. “I am now experiencing — as are so many of my peers whose grants were also terminated — job and income insecurity.”
Brittany M. Charlton, the director of the LGBTQ Health Center of Excellence at HSPH, wrote that halted funds had already led to “really tough decisions, like terminating staff.”
Charlton is among six plaintiffs in a federal lawsuit filed in the U.S. District Court for Massachusetts challenging the NIH cuts last week, seeking to have their grants restored and the terminations declared unconstitutional.
Simon wrote that some fac -
BY AVI W. BURSTEIN CRIMSON STAFF WRITER
The Trump administration terminated nearly $200,000 in federal funding from the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute last week, amid a wave of cuts at the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Researchers at HURI were informed of the funding cut on April 2, one day after the NEH was told to expect up to an 80 percent reduction in staff. The grant termination applies to the institute’s publishing arm, which produces books and other material on Ukraine.
In an email to HURI’s grant coordinator, NEH Acting Chairman Michael McDonald wrote that “the NEH is repurposing its funding allocations in a new direction in furtherance of the President’s agenda,” adding that the decision was made in accordance with Trump’s Feb. 19 executive order granting Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency the authority to review agencies for bloat.
“Your grant no longer effectuates the agency’s needs and priorities and conditions of the Grant Agreement and is subject to termination due to several reasonable causes,” McDonald wrote.
The grant termination was effective immediately on April 2, something McDonald said was necessary due to “exceptional circumstances” and urgent administrative priorities. The HURI is not funded by
ulty at the School of Public Health were also appealing the terminations of the grants. Under NIH policy, researchers have 30 days to appeal grant terminations.
“In other cases,” she added, “the school has asked the funding agency to release enough funds to facilitate an orderly and safe shutdown of the research project.”
All researchers interviewed by The Crimson described the terminations as abrupt, unexpected, and disruptive to their work.
HSPH professor of social epidemiology Nancy Krieger ’80 called the cuts “unprecedented.”
“It was shocking to get a termination out of the blue with no advance notice of any form whatsoever,” Krieger said. “It showed up at 5:45, on a Friday.”
Spokespeople for the NIH and HHS did not respond to requests for comment.
Duane R. Wesemann, a Brigham and Women’s Hospital researcher whose Covid-19 research grant was terminated and temporarily reinstated after a court order, said he hoped the cancellation was just a “misunderstanding.”
“The information that we’re learning from this grant is valuable for the future,” Wesemann said. “Hopefully this is just a misunderstanding, and they’ll consider our appeal.
“It is extraordinarily horrible and disrespectful to say that the data of the people that are served by the community health centers don’t matter, that their lives don’t matter,” Krieger, whose research involves methods to measure and analyze discrimination for population health added. “They’re trying to wipe out an entire raft of health equity research.” Elizabeth F.M. Janiak ’03, an assistant professor at HSPH whose research focuses on reproductive healthcare insurance coverage, also criticized the NIH’s decision-making process. “What I can say as a scientist is that this is an egregious affront to peer review,” Janiak wrote in a statement. “My project was awarded funding by qualified experts, and interference in these decisions is a threat to rigorous, transparent science.”
Harvard’s endowment, and relies instead on a private endowment organized independently by a group of students in 1973. HURI’s endowment investment and returns are managed by the University.
History professor Serhii Plokhii, the director of the HURI, said the funding cut was part of a “larger and very disturbing story.”
“It’s actually more damaging and bigger than just the sum of the fund or the person who we didn’t hire and the books that we didn’t publish,” he said.
Plokhii said the institute will attempt to fundraise to make up the difference, but said they face an ethical dilemma because most of the HURI’s individual donations come from Ukrainian families and organizations.
“We are in an impossible moral situation to compete for the money that can go to Ukraine and relief and help refugees, generally displaced people, the families that lost their providers in the war,” Plokhii said.
The cancelled grant — $197,000 for publishing — was received in October. According to HURI Director of Publications Oleh Kotsyuba, the institute experienced a surge in demand for publications about Ukraine after Russia’s invasion in 2022.
“We started basically producing more, dipping deep into our own budget for publication, up to close to 150 percent per year,” Kotsyuba said, adding that the increase has been “exhausting” the HURI’s private endowment funds.
The termination will halt pub -
lication of three books the institute was in the process of producing, including two plays by Lesya Ukrainka, a famous Ukrainian poet. Ostap Kin, a PhD student in Slavic Studies at Stanford, said the publication of his anthology of Ukrainian-Jewish poets has also been stopped by the funding cut.
“This book does not exist in any language, not even in Ukrainian,” Kin said, explaining the book as a “panorama” of the Ukrainian Jewish experience — something that has never been compiled.
The first English translation of a Ukrainian cult-classic novel by Maik Yohansen is also jeopardized by the grant termination. The book’s translator, University College London associate professor Uilleam Blacker, wrote in a statement that the book “was being copyedited when the news hit, and had been scheduled for publication later this year.” Blacker wrote that he does not know how the grant termination will affect the book’s release. Plokhii said he had a scheduled meeting with Kotsyuba and Harvard’s Office for Sponsored Programs on Friday, but is not counting on much financial support from Harvard.
“We will see,” Plokhii said. “But I would be very positively surprised if there is any, given that the University is preparing potentially a big, big hit financially.”
The Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, located in Brookline, is a teaching hospital of Harvard Medical School. Many hospitals affiliated with HMS have seen research grants terminated. BRIANA HOWARD PAGÁN — CRIMSON PHOTOGRAPHER
I’m an International Student. I Refuse To Be Silenced.
BY LEO GERDÉN
The most dangerous response to authoritarianism is self-silencing. I refuse to retreat into it — and Harvard should not either.
Five Harvard students and recent graduates have had their student visas revoked in recent days. International students on campuses across the country are scared of speaking out against the Trump administration, criticizing the war in Gaza, or voicing any opinion that might upset the MAGA crowd. We are afraid to participate in protests, pen op-eds, and conduct certain academic research.
The breakdown of democracy is no longer a case study of some country far away in a Government class. Its consequences are being felt right at the heart of our community. In the face of this authoritarian assault, Harvard is failing to stand up for us.
Just a neighborhood away, Rumeysa Ozturk was arrested by masked federal agents on the way to break her Ramadan fast two weeks ago. The video of her arrest, taken just before she was sent off to a detention center in Louisiana, is chilling — which is exactly the point. Like any authoritarian regime, the Trump administration has made an example out of students like Ozturk in the hopes of scaring the rest of us.
It is dangerously effective. Fellow international students I have spoken with over the past few days have all shared hesitations about speaking out because of fears
of deportation. For those who came to seek a better life in the United States via Harvard, a revoked visa could have detrimental career and life consequences.
When people stop expressing their opinions in public because of fear of governmental repression, freedom of speech has gone out the window. The U.S. is no longer a full democracy, but that does not mean that it cannot get worse from here. President Donald Trump has been in office for less than 80 days; he has about 1,400 days left. Deporting people without a court hearing opens up the possibility for the Trump administration to do the same to American citizens. After all, without due process, an individual cannot prove whether they are a citizen.
How much worse things get from here largely depends on our collective societal response. If we do not stand up to Trump now, we allow him to push the boundaries of governmental repression even further.
At Harvard, the response to this assault on democracy and members of our own community has been to kiss the ring. University President Alan M. Garber ’76 has yet to condemn — or even say anything publicly about — the recent wave of revoked of visas. In the case that students are deported, it’s not obvious that the University will help them to graduate, even if they have to do so over Zoom. My peers and I are unsure if Harvard will provide full legal representation to students who face detention and deportation or have their visas revoked.
Instead, through its words and actions, Harvard has tried to appease Trump by accepting a politicized
narrative of antisemitism — rather than genuinely working to combat it — firing professors from leadership positions, and suspending certain academic programs and partnerships.
Granted, any single college or university will have a tough time facing the federal government alone. Collectively, however, the top institutions in this country boast endowments worth hundreds of billions of dollars, have access to the best lawyers, and conduct research that the government depends on. No other university is better positioned to spearhead such a collective response than Harvard. But if we continue to fold to Trump, others will surely follow. Our actions will set a dangerous precedent for the entire country.
As an international student, I am well aware that the opinions I express carry a certain degree of risk. Still, I refuse to remain silent. Citizens or not,
It’s Time To Disband the PSC — Permanently
BY CHLOE I. GOLDBERG
am a proud Zionist. Do you want me dead?
IOver the past year, I have grown desensitized to the sound of people chanting for my death. Whether it be chants to “globalize the intifada” or platforming calls for Zionists to “perish,” protestors have lost sight of what was once a clear moral line. This blindness runs rampant within the Harvard Undergraduate Palestine Solidarity Committee and affiliated groups.
Recently, the PSC was suspended by Harvard for apparent actions taken at a rally last Tuesday. But based on their hate-filled track record, they should have been disbanded long ago. Put simply, the PSC’s vitriolic rhetoric is killing campus discourse. Actions have consequences — it has long been time for the group to face theirs. Just one day after October 7th, the PSC released a
statement holding the Israeli government “entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.” On the first anniversary of the attacks, the group doubled down, refusing to acknowledge the atrocities committed by a terrorist organization. Not once in either letter is Hamas mentioned. Is kidnapping, rape, and murder, justified when the victims are Jewish?
This type of hateful rhetoric has persisted throughout the PSC’s history. In February 2024, the group shared a heinous antisemitic cartoon depicting a hand tattooed with the Star of David grasping a noose tied around two figures, supposedly Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser and Muhammad Ali.
The vile illustrations did not stop there. That May, members of Harvard Out of Occupied Palestine — an unrecognized coalition of students similar to and likely sharing substantial membership with the PSC — also
created a poster depicting University President Alan M. Garber ’76, who is Jewish, as a devil.
Any group even implicitly conveying such harmful ideals and glossing over a massacre has no place on Harvard’s campus and no right to use our name. The PSC is no friend of Harvard’s.
How can people who seemingly advocate for the slaughter of Zionists claim to fight for justice and freedom in the same breath? Perhaps it is because they do not understand exactly what they call for by using the word “Zionist” or chanting for an intifada.
Zionism is the belief that Jewish people have a right to self-determination in their ancestral homeland. Zionism is not the belief that Palestinians, or their communities, should cease to exist. Nor is it a call to support genocide of any kind.
In fact, Zionism has little to do with Palestinians — it is a core value that prioritizes the safety and security of a Jewish homeland. A homeland that would have saved millions of lives in the 1930s and 40s from the terror of Nazi Germany and go on to function as a safe haven for Jews around the world.
A survey reported that 8 in 10 American Jews say “caring about” Israel is a central tenet of being Jewish. So sure, not every Jew is a Zionist — but most are. That’s why it is hard to believe protestors when they claim their disgust toward Zionism has nothing to do with their sentiment toward Judaism. This also brings up a related point: Why are the majority of Jewish people suddenly being denied the right to decide what is or is not antisemitic?
You can be a Zionist and still advocate for the rights and well-being of the Palestinian people. These are not mutually exclusive. The PSC, however, does not see it this way. It seems that for them, supporting the plight of the Palestinians requires a relentless attack on the ex-
Harvard — Hands Off California’s Water
While fires burned in Los Angeles this winter, accelerated by drought and global heating, water continued to be extracted from Harvard-owned lands. Just 100 miles northwest of Los Angeles, in California’s Cuyama Valley, an exploratory oil drilling project is moving forward on Harvard’s 6,565-acre vineyard. This project is the latest in a series of Harvard’s grabs on natural resources in the region that have worsened a critical drought of groundwater and endangered the area’s many local farmers and ranchers. To repair these harms, the University must, to the extent that it is able, put an end to extractive groundwater pumping and oil drilling in the area and instead invest in building sustainable agricultural practices that prioritize — rather than threaten — a human right to water.
75 years of over-pumping by agricultural companies has devastated Cuyama Valley’s groundwater basin. As a result, California has classified the basin as having a “critical overdraft,” where water has been depleted faster than it can be replenished.
Given local farmers and ranchers’ struggles to stay afloat, the region shouldn’t have been an investment hotbed. So, when a firm called Brodiaea Inc. purchased agricultural land with healthy groundwater deposits at an above-market rate, farmers were shocked. It wasn’t until 2014 that residents learned the real buyer was Harvard University. From 2012 to 2018, Harvard purchased thousands of acres of arable land across California. Of these holdings, North Fork Ranch, acquired through the subsidiary company Brodiaea Inc., has been the subject of particular controversy. The land, historically a dry rangeland, was transformed in a water-intensive process by Harvard into the largest vineyard in the valley. 16 water wells were
drilled by the University on the property — one so deep it would allow water to be continually drawn as the current drought worsens.
Since 2017, Brodiaea has proposed building three massive water-storage reservoirs on the vineyard to protect against frost, each able to hold 45 acre-feet of water — about 22 times the size of an Olympic swimming pool. Farmers and community members protested the proposal, and the Santa Barbara Planning Commission ruled that the reservoirs would exacerbate the already critical overdraft of the area’s groundwater. The project was voted down.
While small farmers and ranchers have struggled to decrease their relatively small groundwater pumping to comply with local water conservation policies, Harvard’s aggressive claims on water seem to be an attempt to evade such limits — with huge implications for the future of water security in the region.
As Harvard’s grapes grew, accusations of a more sinister motive began to take root. Nearby vineyard owners and farmers noted Harvard’s investments, if purely intended to grow and sell grapes, would not make economic sense. Instead, they alleged the University’s vineyards are an investment in water, and that Harvard is instead seeking to profit off of the region’s worsening drought.
In 2018, a member of Harvard’s Board of Overseers, Kathryn “Kat” A. Taylor ’80 resigned in protest of the endowment’s unsustainable investments. Among her complaints, she cited “water holdings that threaten the human right to water.” As climate change and local droughts accelerate, such claims have and will become increasingly lucrative.
Regardless of whether Harvard’s vineyards are a front for water speculation, they pose a serious threat to the valley’s water supply and local communities already made vulnerable by large agricultural companies and climate change-induced drought.
istence of the Jewish state and the use of highly offensive chants. To many, these chants are calls to eradicate Zionists. During the series of demonstrations organized in part by the PSC, protesters chanted “globalize the intifada” and“from the river to the sea.” Just a few weeks ago, the organization hosted an event with speaker Mohammed El-Kurd, who has previously called Israel a “racist endeavor,” likened Zionism to Nazism, and defended a post wishing for Zionists to “perish.”
The PSC has shown time and again that this type of antisemitic hatred and bigotry is what it stands for. If any other student organization openly endorsed speakers and chanted for the death of a group of minority students, the outrage, outcry, and condemnation would be immediate.
To be clear, criticizing the Israeli government is vital to maintaining a fruitful democracy. Just as with any other country, the actions of its government do not represent the entirety of its people — something frequently represented in demonstrations by Israeli civilians. Indeed, all nations have their problems, and are rightfully criticized for such. The key difference, however, is that the right for every other nation to exist is rarely called into question. Make no mistake: just because it is time for the PSC to go, does not mean discourse on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict should go alongside it. But the path to healthy, productive discourse on Harvard’s campus begins with the removal of the PSC.
Dissent is vital and disagreement is healthy. But calling for my death — and that of most Jews — is not dissent.
–Chloe I. Goldberg ’28, a Crimson Editorial Editor, lives in Canaday Hall.
One of the biggest water users in the valley, Harvard’s greed jeopardizes any gains made by conservation policies that have forced locals to reduce groundwater pumping.
Harvard’s continued ownership of the North Fork Ranch property compels a reexamination of the University’s declared sustainability mission to “accelerate the adoption of systems and practices that protect the climate and environment.”
Just last year, West Bay Exploration Co., Michigan’s largest oil producer, was approved to drill a test oil and gas well on North Fork Ranch. Beyond the fact that the drilling could threaten local ecosystems with the spread of arsenic, opponents also highlighted the project’s support for the fossil fuel industry, complicating not only the University’s proclaimed commitments to sustainability but also its 2021 pledge to divest from fossil fuels. Even if the University has limited involvement with the management of the property, ownership of such a property is at odds with Harvard’s stated values.
As fires rage across California, Harvard must make good on its commitments to sustainability
and shift away from investments in natural resources that threaten local communities and the planet.
First, Harvard should insist upon both an end to over-pumping of Cuyama Valley’s already overdrafted groundwater and the acceptance of groundwater limitations already adopted by Cuyama’s farmers.
The University must also urge the end of West Bay Exploration Co.’s lease following the exploratory drilling stage and the public release of any information gathered during drilling about groundwater levels that could help to inform future water conservation policy for the valley. If such action falls short, Harvard should divest fully from the property.
In paying lip service to the climate while siphoning scarce water from the earth, our University has demonstrated its commitment to profit. It’s time to demonstrate its commitment to sustainability instead — the future of Cuyama Valley’s residents and water hangs in the balance.
– Kayla P.S. Springer ’26 is a Social Studies concentrator in Pforzheimer House and an organizer with Stop Harvard Land Grabs.
FRANK S. ZHOU— CRIMSON PHOTOGRAPHER
We Need a Paradigm Shift in Our Approach to Street Safety
BY CLYVE LAWRENCE
Last September, John H. Corcoran ’84 was killed while cycling on Memorial Drive, close to Boston University’s DeWolfe Boathouse. Since then, many road safety advocates have mourned his death by calling for justice. That demand is now partially materializing as prosecutors prepare charges against the driver involved in the crash.
However, while accountability is necessary — drivers must be held responsible when their actions lead to harm — it is not the same as justice. Corcoran’s death was a moment for mourning, but it also signified the importance of transformation.
We need a paradigm shift in our approach to street safety and a “just culture” allowing everyone to move with dignity.
Memorial Drive, overseen by the Department of Conservation and Recreation, is a road with a deadly record. Between 2014 and 2024, at least 1,200 crashes have occurred, resulting in hundreds of injuries and four fatalities, per Massachusetts Department of Transportation records. After Corcoran’s death, DCR began spending over $1 million to enforce a 25 mph speed limit and renovate existing wheelchair and bike ramps.
The proposed charges against the driver and DCR’s commitments are a step forward. Yet, progress has been slow and inadequate. More than piecemeal reform, we deserve a paradigm shift in our approach to road safety.
How do we do it? We can start by seeing how other sectors, like aviation, respond to preventable loss of life — and why our roads haven’t caught up.
One of the keys to the aviation industry’s 21st-century success is the emergence of what experts call a “just culture.” In this environment, safety is a shared responsibility; human error is expected and accounted for, and crisis-response systems are designed to minimize harm when it happens. After a plane crash, there is not a hyperfocus on punishing the pilot. We investigate the entire chain of failures. We change protocols. We update infrastructure. We learn fast because flying is too important to be dangerous.
This culture helped create a near-flawless commercial aviation safety record in the U.S., with only six fatalities involving large aircraft between 2015 and 2024. By contrast, almost 40,000 people died in traffic fatalities in 2024 alone, according to an estimate from the U.S. Department of Transportation.
Without shifting responsibility away from individual errors and toward design systems, we leave blind
spots in our analysis of road crashes. But by applying a just culture to our roads, we can look beyond one person’s culpability in a crash and target the surrounding infrastructure.
First, a just culture is measurable. Implementing design changes like slowing speeds, reducing the number of car lanes, improving visibility, and separating bike lanes can be done in stages. Responding to the conditions of the road, robust audits and studies are useful to diagnose and re-diagnose the effectiveness of those changes.
Second, a just culture supports a just outcome. We’ll know we’ve succeeded at improving the road when it welcomes more ways of using it. That means designing for those who have been excluded from safe access: low-income residents, young people, seniors, and others who are often the most vulnerable. Additionally, people would begin seeing the street as a place not only for moving people but for building community — for example, through pedestrianization and summer programming.
Mobility justice enables this just culture. It asserts that everyone, regardless of background or mode of
transportation, has the right to move safely and with dignity. It reimagines our streets as places for people, not just cars. It invests in design that sustains human life, challenging our leaders to confront the root causes of danger, not just the symptoms.
In recent years, this vision has grown into a paradigmatic social movement and policy agenda. For example, the Safe System approach sets five principles that account for vulnerability, focus on infrastructure, and reinforce protection for pedestrians and cyclists. There is also Vision Zero, the goal of eliminating all traffic deaths, which has been achieved in cities like Hoboken, New Jersey, and Oslo, Norway.
So we have important emblematic policies that help reduce speeds and design for error. But they are only one part of the solution. The other part is political: We need more urgency, moral courage, and follow through from our leaders in Cambridge.
Almost seven months have passed since Corcoran’s death, and I recently biked that same stretch of Memorial Drive. It does not feel significantly safer. I struggled to understand which lane was for bikes and which was for cars. Not to mention that driving there is still danger-
ous: In February, a car crashed, caught on fire, and destroyed a guardrail. At a recent Cambridgeport community meeting I attended, state officials reiterated that changes are underway. But underway is not enough. Even though leaders commit to improvements and align themselves with safety goals, they still lack a just culture that incorpo-
With an eye toward a just culture, I realize that we must funnel our inertia into moral momentum. Accountability alone should not be the sole end goal in these tragic crashes. It is a tool. Justice is the goal, and it requires the courage to change. Not only in memory of the cyclists who have tragically lost their lives, but for all of Cambridge.
– Clyve Lawrence ’25-27, a Crimson Editorial editor, is a Government concentrator in Adams House.
Free Speech Has Become Free Expression. That’s a Problem.
BY HARVEY MANSFIELD
The best instance of free speech I’ve observed at Harvard came long ago when I was an undergraduate.
I attended a debate held in Sanders Theatre between conservative William F. Buckley, Jr and liberal John Kenneth Galbraith. They were equal in fame, rhetoric, and wit. Adding to the drama, Buckley was a consummate Yalie, author of “God and Man at Yale”, and Galbraith, the Harvard professor, was author of “The Affluent Society,” with or without God. They disagreed and did so in a classy way one could admire. In what follows, I will first give a view of free speech you haven’t seen before, one that shows how expression by protest can be harmful to free speech. Then, I will apply that argument to aca -
demic freedom, often confused with free speech.
Speech can be defined in three ways: by the best instance, the average instance, or the minimal instance. Lawyers use the third — is it within the law? Social scientists use the second — an average can be counted in surveys. I prefer the first and will show you why.
Usually, discussion of free speech focuses on “free.” I will change the focus to “speech.” Speech has a noble origin in the Greek word logos — reasonable speech or argument. Socrates told his friend Crito to follow the logos when he speaks, not his preferred opinion. From this high aspect, speech means to communicate to a fellow human being with reason. A “reason” is what a fellow human being can appreciate; it is not just your wish or demand.
Unfortunately, we have come to confuse speech with unreasoned expression by gestures
and shouts. The decisive step in this confusion took place in the famous Flag Salute case of 1943 (West Virginia vs. Barnette) in which a pledge, an act with words, was interpreted as speech. Although the First Amendment of the Constitution refers to “freedom of speech,” the term “expression” began to creep into normal usage.
In time, the relation between them was reversed and speech taken as an instance of expression. Law school courses on free speech today are typically titled “free expression.”
In this new definition, reason is removed as the essence of speech. The result has been that expressive behavior gains more credit than rational speech. Crucially, irrational protest with boasts, threats and slogans has become the prime example of free speech. Speech addresses the speech of another person, whereas expression expresses yourself and
wishes to impress, not convince. Expression is more an exercise of power than reason, often venting through social media and organized public protest.
In universities, free expression encounters academic freedom. Universities are academies whose aim is to pursue truth and thus distinguish between true and false. The larger society sets the limits of freedom by distinguishing what is permitted from what is not.
Universities demand reasons and evidence, and to do so they must insist that classrooms and laboratories be unaffected by expressive noise. Those who want to express themselves in venting should do so in public spaces, not in the university.
Protests at universities give them a bad name in the general public. They force universities either to react in defense and look punitive, or to allow themselves to be used and look weak. Last year’s encampment in Harvard Yard is an example of this protest strategy. When most or all protests come from one side — the left — the other side in society naturally feels excluded and may take action against universities, as is happening now.
Student protest is harmless, one might think, too childish to forbid. It would be better if protesters came to feel shame for their actions, but penalties are necessary to convince the public and (just now) the Republicans that we in universities mean business. Harvard needs to convince itself that it is academic.
Academic freedom, therefore, acts as a constraint upon free expression. They are not the same. Protest is inappropriate where academic freedom reigns.
Free speech prospers when great speakers show the value of speech as opposed to expression. To illustrate this, consider two great men disagreeing over a question vital for us: Should one obey an unjust law? Abraham Lincoln said yes; Martin Luther King Jr., more influential today, said no — one should engage in civil disobedience instead. In his famous “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” King took full responsibility for his actions. No mask to hide him; no lawyers to excuse him. These were gestures, to be sure, but they served his argument. His willingness to bear the consequences of his protest was a matter of honor, perhaps the same “sacred honor” cited by signers of the Declaration of Independence. This is free speech to inspire Americans with just pride. It stands in contrast to the unreasoned protest we saw at Harvard last year. It is better to be proud of the speech one honors than absorbed in tolerating people who are trying to be intolerable. One can express that honor — now here is expression! — with a cheer for the Crimson and an uncompelled flag salute for America.
–Harvey C. Mansfield ’53 is the Kenan Research Professor of Government at Harvard.
ELIAS J. SCHISGALL— CRIMSON PHOTOGRAPHER
METRO 11
City Council Asks Owners To Discuss Plans for Vacant Properties
“The theater, being such a historic space, is something that we can’t turn a blind eye on.”
wrote. “We continue to work diligently on these efforts.”
Nolan, Azeem Call for Toner To Resign
CITY COUNCIL. A ma-
of the Cambridge City Council is now calling for Toner’s resignation.
BY SHAWN A. BOEHMER AND JACK B. REARDON CRIMSON STAFF WRITERS
Pressure is mounting on em-
battled Cambridge City
Councilor Paul F. Toner to yield his seat on the Council as a majority of his colleagues are now calling for his resignation.
Councilors Patricia “Patty” M. Nolan ’80 and Burhan Azeem issued a joint statement late Tuesday calling on him to step down, joining similar calls from Councilors Sumbul Siddiqui, Jivan Sobrinho-Wheeler, and Vice Mayor Marc C. McGovern.
Toner has faced fierce criticism from Councilors and Cambridge residents after he was charged with sexual conduct for a fee in March.
According to a police report, Toner allegedly utilized services at a high-end brothel network more than a dozen times in 2023.
“Given the severity of the allegations and their impact on our community, we believe it is in the best interest of the city that Councillor Toner resign and not seek re-election,” Nolan and Azeem wrote.
Councilor Toner did not immediately respond to a request for
comment on their statement.
Councilors Catherine “Cathie” Zusy and Ayesha Wilson, as well as Mayor E. Denise Simmons, have not called for Toner’s resignation. None responded to a request for comment on Nolan and Azeem’s statements.
In their statement, Nolan and Azeem acknowledged the mounting pressure on Toner to resign from residents and elected officials.
“In light of these considerations, we join those in our community including several colleagues and firmly believe that resignation is the appropriate step for Councillor Toner,” the pair wrote.
Their statement comes almost a week after McGovern reversed his previous statement and issued a call for Toner to resign after hearing residents’ concerns.
Sobrinho-Wheeler was initially the only Councilor to call for Toner’s resignation, releasing his statement on the Friday Toner was charged. Azeem and Nolan had originally signed onto a statement with Siddiqui and Sobrinho-Wheeler that condemned Toner’s actions but fell short of asking him to resign.
Along with a majority of the Council, two members of Cambridge’s delegation to Beacon Hill — Representatives Marjorie C. Decker and Mike Connolly — have called on Toner to resign in light of
the charges.
The statement acknowledges the importance of due process as Toner’s charges make their way through the courts, but argues that other considerations outweigh that concern.
“Due process matters, and ordinarily it would be appropriate to await judicial proceedings,” Nolan and Azeem wrote. “Yet, this situation extends beyond specific legal outcomes, which might fail due to procedural technicalities or be dismissed as minor infractions.”
“Such framing ignores the reality that elected officials are rightly held to high standards, and prostitution is illegal in Massachusetts precisely because brothels commodify vulnerable individuals and undermine genuine consent,” they added.
Though Nolan and Azeem are starkly against Toner’s actions, the pair wrote that they respect the work Toner has done on the Council.
“We respect Councillor Toner’s years of public service and recognize that many community members have valued his responsiveness and thoughtfulness. For as long as he remains on the council, we will continue working with him to serve the city’s best interests,” they wrote.
shawn.boehmer@thecrimson.com jack.reardon@thecrimson.com
Gerald Chan Under Scrutiny for Neglect of Harvard Square Theater
BY JAYA N. KARAMCHETI AND KEVIN ZHONG
WRITERS
Gerald L. Chan — billionaire investor, Harvard donor, and prominent Harvard Square property owner — is under fire from city officials for the 13-year vacancy of the Harvard Square Theatre.
The theater, which sits on 10 Church St. across from the First Parish Church, has sat vacant since 2012. On Monday evening, the Cambridge City Council will vote on a policy order to invite Chan to present his plans for the property.
Since a March meeting about vacant properties throughout the city, the Council has considered options to reduce the number of empty storefronts — including imposing fines and taxes on owners.
In response, Denise A. Jillson, executive director of the Harvard Square Business Association, wrote in a public statement that she is opposed to the fines on developing businesses.
“It has always been our preference to partner with property owners and the city to use unleased space in more useful and community-oriented ways until leases are signed or development plans are underway,” she wrote.
In addition, Jillson publicized a letter from her to Chan urging him to revive the theater before its 100th anniversary in 2026.
“Take your investment to the community a step further by leading the restoration of the
movie theater and reactivating live performances,” she wrote.
Jillson also recognized the negative economic impact of the vacant theater on Harvard Square.
“Gerald, this once-thriving, now desolate and ignored section of Church Street is unsafe and a blight to our district,” she wrote.
“When it was operational, on average 1000 people a day visited the theatre.”
“The loss of entertainment use has had and continues to have an enormous daily adverse impact on the entire district,” she added.
The theater was first opened in 1926, but has been vacant since 2012 after it was sold by AMC. Chan purchased the property in 2015, and proposed a plan two years later to demolish the building and construct a new mixeduse space.
The Cambridge Historical Commission approved the project after a series of public hearings under the condition that the renovations were also supported by the Cambridge Planning Board.
But, according to Charles M. Sullivan, the executive director of the Cambridge Historical Commission, Chan and his team never made it before the Cambridge Planning Board.
“He’s never spoken to us, and he’s never made any public pronouncements that I know of,” Sullivan said.
Dan White, the manager of Chan’s company, Morningside, wrote in a statement that the Covid-19 pandemic impeded ini-
tial plans for the theater’s revitalization.
“Our previous plan, which was well received and on its way to final approval, was derailed by the pandemic, requiring us to reappraise what might work best for the site,” White wrote. “We continue to work diligently on these efforts.”
But no changes have been made to the theater since the plan fell apart in 2019. Now, local leaders are seeking action to bring Chan in front of the council.
Chan has numerous property holdings in Harvard Square, including 40 Bow St., 115 Mount Auburn St., and 39 JFK St., all developed sites occupied by operating businesses such as Blue Bottle, Warby Parker and an apartment complex. But Jillson noted that the theater has not seen the same attention from Chan.
“It seems incompatible to many, myself included, that since acquiring the theater in 2014, you subsequently purchased six additional Harvard Square properties while this asset sits fallow,” Jillson wrote.
Jillson added that she hopes to work with Chan and other business owners to restore the theater.
“Let’s work together to celebrate the theatre’s historic importance, resume its reputation as a cultural destination, repair its cherished mural, and restore its value as an economic driver to our district,” Jillson wrote.
jaya.karamcheti@thecrimson.com kevin.zhong@thecrimson.com
The Cambridge City Council voted unanimously to ask owners of long-vacant buildings to come before the city council to discuss next steps for their properties in a resolution that specifically called out Gerald L. Chan, the billionaire real estate owner and Harvard donor who owns the former Harvard Square Theatre.
The vote is a step forward for several groups, including the Harvard Square Business Association and the city council, who are looking to pressure Chan into action over his long-delayed plans to redevelop the theater — a large building on Church Street that has sat vacant for 13 years.
At a committee hearing last month, councilors floated the idea of establishing fines for the owners of vacant property to reduce the problem generally, although they have not since taken any action toward such a policy.
That discussion did, however, catalyze Monday’s resolution to invite Chan to testify, with Vice Mayor Marc C. McGovern citing the vacant theater as an egregious example of harmful vacant property in the city.
“It’s the heart of one of the busiest commercial districts and most important commercial districts in our city,” McGovern said.
“The vibrancy of our squares are really dependent upon businesses being there,” Councilor Ayesha M. Wilson said.
While the policy order originally targeted Chan alone over his vacant theater, councilors agreed to amend the order to include the owners of 22 other properties that have sat vacant for five years or longer, at the suggestion of Councilor Paul F. Toner.
Councilors, residents, and business owners at the hearing all emphasized that the shuttered Harvard Square Theatre particularly detracted from visitors’ experience of the Square because it is so large and central to the area.
The Harvard Square Theatre first closed in 2012 after AMC sold it to local developer Richard L. Friedman. Chan then bought the building from Friedman in 2015, and put forward a proposal two years later for its redevelopment into a multi-use complex that would include storefronts, movie screens, and office space.
That plan received conditional approval from the Cambridge Historical Commission, but Chan never took the proposal to the Cambridge Planning Board.
Since 2019, the project has stalled.
Dan White, the manager of Chan’s investment firm which owns the theater, blamed the Covid-19 pandemic for the company’s lack of action in a statement to the Crimson.
“Our previous plan, which was well received and on its way to final approval, was derailed by the pandemic, requiring us to reappraise what might work best for the site,” White
Ivy Moylan, executive director of the nearby Brattle Theatre, said at the hearing she and her team had tried to speak with Chan regarding his intentions for the Harvard Square Theatre, but had never been able to make contact. Moylan called the theater “a blight on a beautiful, historic street.”
While the order ultimately received support from all councilors, Toner and Councilor Catherine “Cathie” Zusy both criticized the original draft for targeting Chan too directly.
“I don’t think shaming is the best way to motivate people,” Zusy said.
“We want to partner with Mr. Chan. We don’t want to humiliate him.”
Suzanne P. Blier, president of the Cambridge Citizens Coalition and professor of fine arts and African and African American studies at Harvard, offered a rare defense of Chan during public comment, calling him “a generous individual who cares very much about Harvard Square.”
Many of the dozen public commenters on the vacancy issue emphasized their personal fondness for the theater and the “bohemian” character of the area it represented, while urging the council to take action.
“It’s an emotional connection that people have,” McGovern said during the hearing. “It has such an incredible history and has meant so much to so many people, particularly those of us who grew up here.”
jaya.karamcheti@thecrimson.com
kevin.zhong@thecrimson.com
Council Narrowly Votes To Return Two-Way Traffic to Garden Street
BY SHAWN A. BOEHMER AND JACK B. REARDON CRIMSON STAFF WRITERS
The Cambridge City Council narrowly passed a Monday policy order to return two-way traffic to the entirety of Garden Street, following months of contentious debate.
After residents complained of an increase in traffic on surrounding streets, the Council voted in December to consider reverting Garden Street back to two-way traffic with bi-directional bike lanes. But the plan would remove all parking on the street — a change that brought dozens of residents to oppose the proposition at Monday’s meeting.
Councilor Catherine “Cathie”
Zusy said she has been contacted by multiple constituents who complained that traffic congestion has been a major issue since the change to one-way traffic.
“Hundreds of them have spoken out and written that the change to one way has added congestion, speeding cars in their neighborhoods,” Zusy said. “Cab fares cost twice as much because there’s no direct way to get home. We’ve heard about more accidents in the neighborhoods.”
But other residents disagreed, with more than two dozen speak-
ing during public comment to advocate for keeping Garden St. one-way.
Jack B. Corcoran ’25 — the son of cyclist John Corcoran ’84, who died after he was struck by an SUV on Memorial Drive — said he bikes along Garden Street every day to get to his classes.
“I can attest from the 2022 redesign that the one-way configuration is highly conducive to bike safety while being minimally inhibitive towards driving,” he said. “I would be greatly upset to see the city jeopardize the safety of bikers and pedestrians for only a negligible bump in efficiency in driving.”
Despite public criticism of the plan, the Council agreed that the bi-directional traffic and bike lanes would be a safe option to implement.
“I feel that by going back to two ways for traffic and maintaining a safe, separated two-way contraflow bike lane, we can provide a lot of what I’ve heard people ask me to try to achieve: reduce the traffic on some of the side streets,” Councilor Paul F. Toner said.
The city is set to spend more than $130,000 on the change and plans to start construction in summer of 2026. But despite the approval, Councilors acknowl-
edged that the elimination of parking was a drawback.
“We must provide some loading zones and pickup drop-off places for disabled drivers to park outside of 52 Garden,” Zusy said.
“We’ve got to consider developing a broader transportation plan that provides for the needs of residents and commuters using all mobilities because I feel like there was a bias towards the bicycle with this,” she added. Toner said Harvard previously said they would be “willing to work with the city” on changes to Garden Street, which runs next to the Radcliffe Quadrangle. But a spokesperson for Harvard wrote that the University had not committed to anything related to the Garden Street project. Vice Mayor Marc C. McGovern said that though the plan will not appease all residents, it is still the best path forward to resolve the lingering issue.
“No matter where we end up, we’re going to end up in a place where a lot of people are going to be unhappy,” he said. “Sometimes we love to get to a place where we could all feel good at the end — but sometimes that doesn’t happen, and you have to just vote.”
shawn.boehmer@thecrimson.com jack.reardon@thecrimson.com
Cambridge City Councilor Patricia M. Patty Nolan ’80 at a City Council meeting
HOUSING AND AFFORDABILITY
Cambridge Debates NCDs Amid Upzoning
CHANGING TIMES.
Neighborhood conservation districts are adjusting to new zoningn regulations.
The Cambridge City Coun-
cil voted unanimously to initiate a study on the Half Crown-Marsh Neighborhood Conservation District in light of advocates’ concerns that the body suppresses multifamily zoning projects.
The March 31 vote comes as a the decennial review of the Half Crown-Marsh NCD, a new process mandated by an amendment made to the ordinance that governs the NCDs. The amendment was approved after Cambridge advocates expressed concerns in public comment that NCDs suppress multifamily housing, slow the process of building new construction, and promote segregation.
NCDs are groups of volunteer citizens appointed by the city manager to review building and demolition permit applications within their boundaries. Half Crown-Marsh is one of four Neighborhood Conservation Districts in Cambridge — including Avon Hill, Harvard Square, and Mid Cambridge — founded in the 1980s to preserve the char-
tion, said.
But David E. Sullivan noted that Cambridge’s housing market has evolved since the ordinance was passed more than four decades ago.
“There were other ways of controlling costs of housing that were in existence at the time and don’t exist anymore.” Sullivan said. “The need for more homes in Cambridge wasn’t as pronounced in 1981 as it is today, and as a result, there wasn’t as much attention to it.”
Asha P. Daniere, a Cambridge resident who is renovating her six-unit apartment building to a two-unit development at 18 Clinton St., said working with the Mid Cambridge NCD was a laborious task.
“They did everything they could to try to stop my project and to convince me to take a continuance and to go away and to reframe my project and make the building smaller and not as high,” Daniere said referencing the meeting in which the Mid Cambridge NCD discussed the approval of the construction permit for her project.
But she noted that due to a 2023 amendment which restricts NCDs ability to decide on the size and shape of new construction, the body can only deny a permit on the basis of the publicly visible exterior .
“If they forced me to change the shape and size of my home, they would be breaking the law,” Daniere said.
The meeting to discuss the 18 Clinton St. development was the first time the commission considered approving a permit after the new zoning ordinance.
acter of neighborhoods.
“One of the problems in 1981 when this ordinance was first passed by the council, was that in some neighborhoods, there were out of town developers showing up and just ripping down buildings without much attention to what their significance was, and putting things up that obviously didn’t really increase the amount of housing, but did undermine the fabric of some neighborhoods.” David E. Sullivan, who was the primary sponsor of the original legisla-
“They were being asked for the first time to deal with the implications of a completely new zoning regime for which they had not been trained and which many of them were not familiar with,” Charles M. Sullivan – the executive director of the Cambridge Historical Commission, which oversees the NCDs — said.
“The applicant received her permission to go ahead in the end,” he added. “The idea that commissioners are doing everything they can to stop multifamily housing is ridiculous because up until Feb. 10, the zoning didn’t permit that kind of multi-family housing.”
At the March Council meeting, Charles M. Sullivan said the groups are doing their best to ad-
just to the situation.
“I think you can trust the Conservation District commissions,” Charles M. Sullivan said in his testimony “including most especially the Half CrownMarsh.”
“We haven’t seen any denials of multi-family housing,” he added. “We haven’t seen any reduction in units.”
But he said that accommodat-
ing the 2023 amendment “hasn’t been an easy task for them,” since the size and shape of construction was frequently in the past to determine whether a project would be granted a permit.
“It took away a significant part of the Commission’s authority, but not all of it,” Charles E. Sullivan said.
And on top of the amendment, Charles E Sullivan said
Cambridge’s February decision to end single family zoning further complicated the roles of NCDs in the city.
“It’s a whole different calculus,” he said.
Moving forward, the Council can either pre-approve the Half Crown-Marsh district without amendment, discontinue the NCD, or change its guidelines, procedures, and district boundaries.
“So they have to be used in a responsible way,” David E. Sullivan said. “So that, yes, they preserve buildings that need to be preserved but they also don’t preserve the entire city in amber so that nothing can ever change.”
diego.moreno@thecrimson.com summer.rose@thecrimson.com
In March of last year, John H. Summers, a Cambridge parent whose son has autism, filed a complaint against Cambridge Public Schools about disability-based discrimination in transportation. After a year, the district has taken steps to improve, but Summers says there is still a long way to go.
Summers’ son is one of the many disabled students in Cambridge who take alternative transportation to school. In his complaint with the United States Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights, Summers alleged that the lack of tracking capabilities on the vehicles — as compared to other buses in the district — constitutes disability-based discrimination.
“Put yourselves in the shoes of the parent who has a nonverbal autistic child like myself who doesn’t know when the child is getting or where the child is,” Summers said in an interview with The Crimson.
Following Summers’ complaint, the School Committee instructed NRT Busing, which supplies the vehicles that transport disabled students, to work with the district to install tracking devices in all the vehicles. The School Committee approved a 33 million dollar contract with the company in June,
contingent on the installation.
But Summers said at a Thursday meeting of the Special Education & Student Supports Subcommittee that the district has still fallen short of providing adequate tracking services. At the meeting, Interim Chief Operations Officer Damon Smith said the district has piloted a tracking app that has received “positive feedback” from families.
“It does provide more information to families about locations and where the buses are,”
We are better than what we were before, but still not meeting that particular demand and need.
Damon Smith Interim Chief Operations Officer
he said. “I recognize that even though it is a better product and it’s improved from what it was before, there are still some desires and some hopes in the functionality of the program that haven’t been realized just yet.”
“But in terms of what it was in the fall to where it is now in the spring, I would say, significantly better,” he added. Summers, who was one of the families in the pilot program, said he is “glad that there’s movement” on the issue. But he added
he does not believe the app will “get the transportation system where it needs to be.”
“This is not real time tracking,” Summers said during public comment. “What was presented as radius tracking is just simply, you open the app, it gives you a kind of segment that gets colored in when the van is approaching, doesn’t tell you how long it’s going to be until it gets there, and then it doesn’t track the van or the bus when it leaves.”
“I don’t even use it. I find it pretty much useless for the reasons that I filed a complaint in the first place,” he added.
Smith clarified that parents are able to set radius notifications on the current app. But he conceded that radius tracking is just one step in improving transportation and committed to continue working toward real-time tracking.
“We are better than what we were before, but still not meeting that particular demand and need that I think he is advocating for, and I do want that to be the case for all of our students,” Smith said.
School Committee member Elizabeth C.P. Hudson said that given the number of issues the district faces that are “totally outside our control,” transportation should be an easier problem to fix.
Boston Mayor Michelle Wu ’07 officially announced her re-election campaign at a Saturday event in the South End, criticizing the Trump administration and her opponent — philanthropist Josh Kraft — in her speech.
“We face serious challenges in this moment and now is not the time for a mayor who needs on-the-job training,” Wu said in her address.
Kraft, the son of billionaire New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft, announced his bid for mayor in February. The chair of the Urban League of Eastern Massachusetts, who has no previous political experience, called Wu a “leader that just does not listen” in his campaign announcement.
But Wu was quick to draw a difference between herself and her opponent during her Saturday announcement.
“We have already seen what happens when billionaires and real estate developers try to run a country. We don’t need to see what happens if they run a city too,” Wu said. “Because this is our city. And our city is not for sale.”
Wu touted the city’s improvements to affordable housing and safety during her announcement, highlighting that Boston is the “safest major city in America.”
Prior to the campaign launch, Wu spent the morning in City Hall Plaza at the city’s “HandsOff” protest, a planned national effort with over 1,000 people protesting nationwide against the Trump administration and Elon Musk.
“I refuse to accept that my kids and all our kids could grow up in a world where threats and intimidation are the tactics that the president uses to get his way,” Wu said to the crowd. “Hands off Boston.”
“Boston has never and will never back down to bullies,” she added. “This is our city and you will not break us.”
Wu has been the subject of national attention after she appeared before the Congressional Oversight Committee in March and faced harsh questioning from Republicans committee members on Boston’s sanctuary city status. “Today it is not just our country and our democracy that are under attack. It’s communities like ours — our lives and our livelihoods, our identities and our independence,” Wu said in her campaign announcement.
“It feels like everything that makes Boston Boston is being threatened by an administration that is clearly threatened by who we are as a city,” she added.
Though the city has faced repeated scrutiny from the Trump administration, including threats to federal funding, Wu held her ground in the hear-
ing and remained firm in emphasizing Boston’s impressive safety statistics.
“Boston will never back down — not to kings, not to bullies, and not to naysayers who want to take us backward,” Wu said in her campaign announcement. Representative Ayanna S. Pressley (D-Mass.) officially endorsed the mayor while introducing Wu at the event, calling her “strong and steady force for good.”
“Daily, she makes universal experiences like caregiving for a parent or a child visible, and normalized,” Pressley said. “She knows what it’s like to be the daughter of immigrants. She knows what it’s like to redefine leadership and, in doing so, empower thousands to step into their own.” Wu is the first Asian American woman to serve as a city councilor and mayor — and made history almost three months ago as Boston’s first mayor to give birth while in office.
“It’s not easy making the greatest city on earth even better, and it’s not easy especially during times like these,” Wu said. “But we can and we will because here in Boston we don’t back down.”
“Here in Boston, we stand up, we fight, we win, and we show the world that when we work together — because we work together — anything is possible,” she added.
The Half Crown-Marsh Neighborhood Conservation District has been critized surpressing multifamily zoning projects. MARINA QU — CRIMSON PHOTOGRAPHER
Nubya Garcia Concert Review
THE MESSAGE OF GARCIA AND HER BAND REACHED EVERYONE.
BY AUDREY H. LIMB CRIMSON STAFF WRITER
Nubya Garcia shone on stage at The Sinclair on April 4 as part of her first headline tour in the U.S. After stops in Australia, Japan, and China, the London-based saxophonist, composer, and bandleader made her debut in Cambridge to celebrate the release of her second studio album, “Odyssey.” Despite the bare-bones staging, Garcia and her bandmates kept the energy high with remarkable musicianship and gratitude for the moment.
“Odyssey” is classified as a jazz album, but Garcia’s performance beautifully strung together elements of classical music, hip-hop, reggae, and soul music. Each song is a journey of unexpected harmonies and rhythmic dynamism, and Garcia’s improvisation on tenor saxophone was particularly impressive, transforming the studio album into an interconnected musical experience. Though the concert show-
cased highlights from “Odyssey” and “Source,” her 2020 album, this improvisation brought the recorded works to life in a new way. Alongside her technical mastery of the tenor saxophone, Garcia demonstrated incredible stamina throughout the
“
of “Odyssey” onstage. Double bassist Max Luthert established groove after groove, keeping the band grounded and the audience swaying. As the drummer of the studio-recorded album, Sam Jones knew every song inside and out and flaunted his technical expertise. 70 minutes into
Even during her final solo, she maintained a rich, sonorous timbre and executed flawless control of pitch and dynamics.
100-minute show. Any wind instrumentalist understands the physical demands of playing such a set. Even during her final solo, she maintained a rich, sonorous timbre and executed flawless control of pitch and dynamics.
Equally as inspiring was the instrumental prowess of Garcia’s bandmates. Pianist Lyle Barton danced between several keyboards and synthesizers at once, improvising several excellent solos and bringing the more experimental elements
the concert, one of Jones’ sticks shattered during a hard-hitting solo, eliciting cheers and laughter from the crowd, and all four bandmates grinned as he smoothly grabbed a backup stick, and the music flowed on. This moment perfectly encapsulated the synergy of the night. Each band member was respectful and clearly admired each other. When Garcia was not leading, she provided enthusiastic accompaniment and turned away from the microphone so that she was the only performer
not amplified, allowing all four musicians to share the limelight.
“I didn’t really get to tour my first album in the same way,” Garcia said onstage. She explained the challenges of touring, some of which were evident by the stage’s minimal setup. Boxed in by speakers and sound equipment, the musicians were unable to move around, making the venue feel somewhat cramped. Perhaps the stage could have benefited from some background visuals, graphics, or other decoration to open it up and add visual interest. Nonetheless, the music brought the magic to the performance. Comfortable and confident, Garcia reiterated her appreciation for “this momentous occasion,” keeping spirits high.
To break up the upbeat grooves of the concert, the band performed the slower song “Water’s Path,” which was originally arranged for string instruments in the studio version. Garcia noted that this track marked her first foray into string arrangement. Yearning to bring it on tour, Garcia arranged a band version of the song, showing off her abilities not just as a saxophonist but also as a composer and producer. Having attended the Royal Academy of Music and the Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and
Bluesy Musings: The BSO Celebrates John Coltrane
BY MAKAYLA I. GATHERS CRIMSON STAFF WRITER
Piano, bass, and drums took center stage on March 21 at Symphony Hall, encircled by the traditional string, woodwind, brass, and percussion sections of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. After a brief introduction from Carlos Simon, composer chair of the BSO and curator of this concert in collaboration with the Coltrane Estate, a picture of John Coltrane with his saxophone was cast above the orchestra. Posed with his hand behind his head and his finger on his lip, Coltrane’s pensive expression loomed over the stage, almost like he, too, was waiting for the concert to start. Out walked conductor Edwin Outwater and trumpet soloist Terence Blanchard, who took his place in the center stage quartet, trumpet in hand. With a firm stance, Blanchard brought the trumpet to his lips, and so began a night of bluesy musings commemorating the life and music of jazz saxophonist and composer John Col-
trane. Starting strong with Coltrane’s “Blue Train,” orchestrated by Erik Jekabson, the trumpet proudly emerged as the narrator of this 1957 jazz standard. Soon it was accompanied by the mellowness of the bass played by Dave Zinno, the cleverness of the piano played by Ben Cook, and the flyness of the drums played by George Darrah. Together, they slowly climbed mountains of tempos, alternating between a pulsating plunge and a freewheeling flow. From this point on, it was clear that this would be no normal performance from the BSO. Changing tracks, the strings and winds slowly ushered the orchestra into the next song, setting the atmosphere for an intimate performance of “Naima,” composed by Coltrane in 1959 for his first wife Juanita Naima Coltrane and orchestrated by Andy Milne. Blanchard’s trumpet glided in with long and delicate blasts, truly capturing the desire of this lyrical ballad. The celebration took an energetic and lively shift with the standout performance of Col-
trane’s “Giant Steps,” orchestrated by Steven Feifke. The BSO perfectly paid homage to the explorative and improvisational sound that Coltrane coined. The strengths of this performance lay in the skilled fluttering of Blanchard’s trumpet and Darrah’s delightful drum solo. From beginning to end, the BSO revived the famous theme of “Giant Steps,” bringing a new understanding to how the symphony can blend into genres outside of “traditional” classical music. Outwater remained hyper and dynamic in his conducting throughout the piece, turning to the audience with the big finish.
Thelonious Monk’s “Crepuscule with Nellie,” orchestrated by Andy Milne, and Guy Wood’s “My One and Only Love,” orchestrated by Ben Morris, were both creative in the way the orchestra was uniquely used to create starkly different tones. Milne’s orchestration artfully incorporated a xylophone that tiptoed through the eerie tune, while Morris’ arrangement was tender and complemented by the dainty sound of a triangle.
Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme,
Part I: Acknowledgement” was the striking finale of the first act.
Orchestrated by Milne, this piece uplifted and memorialized Coltrane’s musical impact and personal journey. As Cook, Darrah, and Zinno took their cues off of Blanchard and his trumpet, the other musicians in the symphony raised their voices, chanting “a love supreme.” As the voices and instruments slowly dropped off, the piece ended with the deep resonance of the bass, communicating devotion.
After the intermission, Blanchard shared anecdotes about his admiration of Coltrane.
“I’ve always loved John Coltrane’s music. I’ve always loved his story. He’s been an inspiration to me for a number of reasons, not only because of his music but the type of person he was,” Blanchard said.
Perfectly setting the stage for the second act’s new era of Coltrane, he continued speaking.
“He’s a shining example for all of us in terms of the things that are really important to life, as evidenced by the tune we finished the first half of the set with, ‘A Love Su-
Dance, Garcia’s expertise in numerous aspects of performance were striking.
“Water’s Path” helped frame the other songs of the setlist, which were at times difficult to distinguish from one another. The title track “Odyssey” and the album’s final song, “Triumphance,” presented the strongest sense of identity when performed live. The concert was designed to be a holistic wash of sound and feeling rather than a list of discrete pieces, shedding any expectations of an ordinary jazz gig and foraying into something more liberated.
“I know we have these preconceptions when we go to see any gig,” Garcia said. “I’m here to tell you, please be yourselves in this space. However you want to respond to the music is completely allowed.”
Those in the Sinclair seemed to respond to Garcia’s words with enthusiasm. Friends and strangers bopped their heads together, clapped when they wanted to, and reacted spontaneously to the music. The message of Garcia and her band reached everyone.
“In the face of everything that’s going on, wherever it’s going on,” she said. “We’re here together in community, in unity.”
audrey.limb@thecrimson.com
preme,’” he said. Returning to the music, BSO came back from intermission with Duke Ellington’s “In a Sentimental Mood,” orchestrated by Simon. The orchestra came in like thunder going into soft rain. Symbolizing the start of a new era of introspection, Outwater controlled the storm as Blanchard gently breathed through his trumpet, like it was an extension of himself.
The most stirring and emotive performance of the second act was Coltrane’s “Alabama,” also orchestrated by Simon. Blanchard gave a personal introduction to the song, describing how it led him to tears.
“Being a musician, sometimes we forget why the music is really created,” he said, before explaining how the piece was written for the four girls who were killed in the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama.
“It made me realize where the music really comes from, it comes from your heart and your soul,” he said. The piece erupted into harmonious chaos and intense mourning until the lonely trumpet en-
tered. The orchestra’s intro to the piece paired with the weight of the tragedy, and Blanchard played his trumpet fully bent over, expressing tortured emotion and grief. The orchestration of this piece communicated Coltrane’s nature and what messages he conveyed through his music. As the finale, the BSO played Coltrane’s rendition of Richard Rodgers’ “My Favorite Things,” orchestrated by Jonathan Bingham. Elaborately bringing together the classical elements of the orchestra and the magical energy of the jazz quartet, the finale was less like a concert ending and more like a cozy and nostalgic get-together, toasting to Coltrane’s multigenerational legacy. Blanchard played his trumpet one last time with a humble stance before being met with a well-deserved standing ovation. The first image of Coltrane returned to the screen, but with a new energy to his expression after a very well-executed and revealing concert by the Boston Symphony Orchestra.
makayla.gathers@thecrimson.com
ould you jump off a ledge overlooking Fifth Avenue if your husband did not love you? This is just one of many plotlines that blossomed in the Harvard-Radcliffe Dramatic Club’s (HRDC) recent run of “Songs for a New World” from March 27 through March 30. One thing is certain — this production was not for the faint of vocal chords: 111 minutes, four singers, and eight dancers revitalized the black box setting of the Loeb Experimental Theater to put on a performance of 19 songs revolving around love, identity, and the choices that are made during pivotal life moments. The production team put a delightful modern spin on the captivating, original song cycle by incorporating graceful and polished dancers into the various storylines and imaginatively using the Loeb Ex’s smaller space. As suggested by the title, the show consists of songs surrounding the uncertainty, yet hope, that the future may hold for the various protagonists. Although there are four singers, each plays multiple characters. First performed off-Broadway in 1995, productions of this abstract musical typically incor -
porate the original cast of four but have also expanded to include a larger ensemble. This HRDC production incorporates the best of both worlds, featuring the original cast of four singers — Woman 1 (Gabrielle G. Medina ’26), Woman 2 (Shannon M. Harrington ’26), Man 1 (Kaylor G. Toronto ’27), and Man 2 (Saman de Silva ’26) — alongside an entourage of eight featured dancers. The Loeb Ex can be a challenging space for a director and choreographer to work with, given its smaller, more intimate thrust stage setup, which brings the performers closer to the audience while still maintaining a traditional “front” to the stage. Stage director and co-choreographer Jess R. Hung ’25 made excellent use of the entire space to ensure audience engagement throughout the production. This was accomplished through choices like using the entire cast of singers and dancers to form a ship of bodies during Man 1’s song about the exploration of a new world and
praying for the hard times to end. Dancers then emphasized the different corners of the black box space with their motions to reflect a change in the song. The overall use of space by both dancers and singers added a captivating element to the production.
The eight dancers also left their marks on the show as valuable additions, contributing to a deeper layer of artistic complexity by physically representing the wide array of emotions felt by the singers throughout the song cycle. In Man 2’s number “She Cries” dancers Eliza Pritchard, Katherine Byunn-Rieder ’27, and Lana M. Schwartz ’28 played various love interests as the man is torn between chasing after the girls he falls in love with and making the difficult decision to live life on his own. The compatibility between dancer and singer, through choice movements that conveyed the chasm of conflicting feelings and disdain for each other, allowed for a more engaging story than what mere singing would provide. In addition to the dancers’ stellar abilities, the singers were also able to show off their physical finesse by joining dancers throughout certain numbers. This decision by Hung integrated everyone into the scene, distributing the spotlight evenly across the entire cast.
While Harrington’s performance as a groveling Mrs. Claus was hilarious, one of the show’s most unforgettable moments comes in her number “The Stars and the Moon.”
The song follows a woman who leaves the love of her life to marry a wealthy man, only to feel deep regret. This melancholic song is brought to life by the use of hanging strands of colored shapes ingeniously illuminated on the floor and wall by lighting designer Jada P. Lee ’26 to represent the stars that Woman 2 sings about, or the lack thereof, as she chose a life of money over the happiness she would have received from her true love. Harrington’s performance prowess and ability to encompass numerous singing styles is highlighted by her starkly different role of a flagmaker during the Revolutionary War towards the end of the production, crying about the horrors of the war with an even more frighteningly beautiful melody. Seated at the far side of the theater was the talented pit orchestra, overseen by music director, pianist, and conductor AJ Yi ’25 and consisting of a rhythm section and strings. The musicians’ ability to keep time and play the entire show under Yi’s excellent piano conducting was admirable. It exhibited the intimate connection fostered between the cast and the musicians throughout the production’s development.
A feature of the show that may give rise to viewers’ confusion is the unconventional plot — or lack thereof — paired with
the insufficiency of costume changes to keep up with the changes in the story. As a song cycle, the production does not follow one linear plot throughout the entire show, but consists of a different mini story within each song. So, as the singers perform multiple songs, the lack of costume changes in between contributed to a general blur between the characters that the singers portray throughout the cycle. Some costuming changes were present, as was the case in Man 1’s number, “The Steam Train,” for which he changed from his seaman outfit — consisting of a simple button down shirt and cuffed pants to a hoodie and jeans, finished with a basketball. This was done to portray a basketball player determined to make it big in the sport and escape from his life of hardships, but a wider array of costumes could have conveyed the storylines within each song more vividly. Tasked with an unconventional production, the cast and crew of “Songs For a New World” were able to perform the timeless journey of self discovery presented in the split moments before a decision is made with modern and original interpretations. Hopes and expectations for future productions to demonstrate such a large array of talent, ingenuity, and creative ideas are in store for Harvard’s theatrical community.
anmol.grewal@thecrimson.com
BY KAI C. W. LEWIS CRIMSON STAFF WRITER
“You see a swan glide gracefully across the water, but its legs are flapping like mad. And that is basically what each one of these episodes are,” said co-creator and actor Stephen Graham in a behind-the-scenes video for Netflix about the awe-inspiring technicality of the new Netflix show “Adolescence.”
“Adolescence” has rightfully become one of the most popular shows on the streaming service. For the show, Graham reunited with director Phillip Barantini to create yet another anxiety-inducing experience which follows in the footsteps of their sensational 2021 film “Boiling Point”.
The tragi-thriller follows the arrest of 13-year-old Jamie Miller (Owen Cooper) after he is accused of murdering his classmate, Katie Leonard (Emilia Holliday).
The show uses a chronological four- episode format that guides the audience through the day of the arrest, the repercussions of the arrest at Jamie’s school, Jamie’s conversation with a child psychologist for a pretrial assessment, and the consequences his family faces.
A huge risk that “Adolescence” gambles on is using the one- shot format, in which each
episode is accomplished through one continuous shot with no hidden stitches or cuts. This elaborate technique can be a risk because it has potential to make any narrative a gimmick — especially if it is deemed unnecessary. Yet “Adolescence” distinguishes itself by using this method to reconstruct the crime thriller.
“Adolescence” is anything but sensationalist, and the one-shot technique acts a wonderful restraint to a relatively mild narrative in a hyper-saturated genre market. The story cannot use a nonlinear structure to cut to evidence or expand its emotional scopes by cutting to the reaction of other characters. Editing
not be wasted to reveal exposition or thrills. The audience must simply witness this neorealist story in humanizing totality where the weight of consequence is almost too tangible.
Episode 3 of the show is widely regarded as its best — and with good reason. The episode puts the brakes on the exhilarating pace of the story and dives into a complete two-hander between Cooper and Erin Doherty, who plays psychologist Briony Ariston. What ensues is an exemplary episode in screenwriting where Jamie is given the spotlight to explain his actions and his child psychologist to deconstruct them.
Yet the magic of “Adolescence” isn’t limited to just Doherty and Cooper’s work, but also the ensemble that performs without any fault.
is a ghost in the world of “Adolescence,” and the show is all the more masterful for it. Any downtime, like Jamie being taken from his home to a police station, can-
The performances are so incredible that one wonders why modern media has fallen into such a state of excess when sometimes all a creative needs is
a camera and two dedicated performances.
Yet the magic of “Adolescence” isn’t limited to just Doherty and Cooper’s work, but also the ensemble that performs without any fault. Such a story needs to be grounded by the bravery of its actors to carve out a deep sadness within them, and everyone, truly everyone, seamlessly accomplishes this. Graham and Christine Tremarco are obvious standouts as Jamie’s parents as they muster an emotional cauldron of care, anger, and hopelessness. Ashley Walters, as DI Luke Bascombe, beautifully balances the sophistication of his role as a lead investigator and the delicate nature of being a parent himself. Special recognition should be
given to the child ensemble that braves such a mature complexity for their roles with ease and grit.
To find such talent, casting director Shaheen Baig went to two northern drama schools in the UK that work with underrepresented communities. Although the show is best enjoyed with no prior knowledge of its thematic explorations, the dark heart of “Adolescence” lies in the unfortunate interconnected web between masculinity, incels, acts of mass terrorism, and social media. With the early exposure to this web children are now susceptible to via extremists on social media, the playground is now not the only place where the politics of children are kept hidden from adults. “Adolescence” is a much-needed con-
versation about how the parental sphere of influence on a young mind is slowly shrinking against the behemoth of the internet, and the deadly consequences of corrosive unmonitored ideology. Co-creators Graham and Jack Thorne have created a magnificent piece of television that places a much-needed conversation in the forefront of our modern times, and it is all the more brilliant for the crew and cast’s palpable commitment.
APRIL 11, 2025
Caroline M. Elkins is a Professor of History and African American Studies. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
FM: I saw in a previous interview that you were a low income, first generation student when you entered Princeton. Starting with your college experience, what was it like to step into that Ivy League environment?
CME: Oh, it was overwhelming. I always say I felt like the pumpkin truck hit a bump and I fell off. It really took a good year or two to get my feet under me. At the same time, I think there were other students like me, and we kind of gravitated together. It makes me very happy now that Harvard and other schools are really focused on that.
FM: And, while you were a student at Princeton, what drew you to studying African history? Was that something you were interested in prior?
CME: I’d always loved history. I went to a big public high school in New Jersey, where there was lots of American history and a teeny bit of European history. There was this course on modern African history the fall of my first year there. It was taught by a professor named Bob Tignor, and that was it. I knew that’s what I wanted to do. Professor Tignor became a lifelong mentor — he just passed away about a year ago.
Sometimes we find our passion when we’re not looking for it, and it sort of found me in that way.
FM: Then, after Princeton, you began a dissertation at Harvard on the suppression of the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya. Was there a specific moment or case that sparked your interest in Kenya’s colonial history and that rebellion specifically?
CME: There was a definite connection between what I did as an undergrad and as a grad student. When I was an undergrad, I was doing a senior thesis on the social transformation of Kikuyu women in Kenya. When I was in Nairobi the summer before my senior year, I came across these documents about the detention camps in Kenya. At that point, I knew I really wanted to be an academic. I discovered pretty quickly that nobody had written on this before. And I said, “well, if I ever go back to graduate school, this is gonna be the topic of my doctoral dissertation.” And sure enough, a couple years later, I came to Harvard for my doctoral work, and that was the topic of my dissertation.
FM: Your first book that came out of that project, “Imperial Reckoning,” received widespread acclaim, winning a Pulitzer Prize, but also some criticism. How did you approach researching such a contentious episode of history that even the British government had worked hard to keep secret?
Q&A:
CAROLINE ELKINS ON LIBERAL IMPERIALISM, MORAL RESPONSIBILITY, AND “THE CROWN” FIFTEEN MINUTES
FIFTEEN QUESTIONS. The professor of History and African American Studies sat down with Fifteen Minutes to talk about the two-sided coin of liberalism, her undergraduate years at Princeton, and her favorite historically inaccurate television shows.
BY RACHAEL A. DZIABA CRIMSON MAGAZINE WRITER
or even our present moment?
CME: Understanding the degree to which the British government — both in the 1950s and in the present time — were trying to hide this story really became apparent to me in the context of doing my research.
The British colonial government put a lot of effort into trying to get rid of the documents. There’s a massive document destruction. But if you’re a graduate student with a lot of time and funding — I went through every single piece of evidence. It was about three or four years into it when I had an initial hypothesis, which was that these camps were largely about what was called a “hearts and minds” campaign and reform behind these barbed wires. There’s all kinds of documents left behind that told this story. But then I went out to the field and interviewed all these former detainees who told these horrendous, horrific stories of torture. And I was getting very frustrated and also pretty worried, thinking the evidence isn’t adding up.
It seems kind of self-evident now, but I thought to myself at the time, what happens if I take the entire premise and turn it upside down? That it’s not a story about hearts and minds or liberal reform and detention camps with some oneoffs of abuse, but what if this is an
entire story about systematic torture and abuse and then widespread cover up? And then suddenly all the evidence made sense. At that point, I was pretty young and pretty naive in terms of understanding the degree to which it was going to be an uphill battle once that research was published about people accepting this revised narrative.
FM: It seems like oral histories and that fieldwork played an important role in uncovering the narratives which entities have tried to suppress. Was there any particular person you interviewed or story that still sticks with you today?
CME: There are at least two immediately coming to mind. One is a woman named Molly, who shares in quite extensive detail with me about how her child was killed. At that time, I didn’t have children myself, but when somebody expresses to you such deep anguish, and they’re crying but they’re not making a sound — the anguish is so deep. And you don’t forget that. That never leaves you.
And then another is with a former British colonial officer named John Nottingham, who was a bit of a whistleblower, and him talking to me at the time about the guilt he felt about not doing more. It was also — in a very different kind of way — very poignant, and something that I can remember. These interviews were 20, 30 years ago, and you don’t forget them.
FM: Your research laid the groundwork for the lawsuit against the British government that led to a formal apology and reparations.
As a younger scholar at the time, how did you make the decision to join this lawsuit as an expert witness? Were you worried about repercussions for your academic career?
CME: Yes, I was definitely warned by several folks that this was not a good idea. I remember when I was doing all these interviews, nobody asked anything of me. They didn’t ask for money. They wanted one thing, and that one thing is they wanted people to know what happened to them.
I really felt a moral responsibility — and perhaps it was my life journey of coming from the kind of background I came from — but I had this privilege, and I was now custodian of this knowledge. For whatever reason, I was that person. And these five claimants were five elderly claimants who were going up against the British government, and it was made clear to me by the attorneys who were representing them in London and Nairobi that the case couldn’t go forward if I weren’t an expert witness.
On the one hand, it, at least at the time, did not seem like necessarily the best career move because you never know the outcome of a case. And at the same time, it was the absolute right thing to do. I have no regrets. I had no idea what I was getting into
entirely—it was four years of a full time job—but it was probably the most extraordinary professional experience anybody could ever hope for as an academic, at least for my own self.
FM: Has that experience shaped how you’ve thought about the role of academia in the broader world throughout the rest of your career?
CME: I think again about the privilege we have. When I think about my education, that I landed here, that I have stayed on the faculty, it’s just an extraordinary life I’ve had, but with that comes a great deal of responsibility. I think that our ability to speak outside of the ivory tower, to make a difference in lived experiences, to listen. If you work on a period of time where the people that you are subject of your research are still alive, as a historian, that can often come with responsibility. I feel pretty strongly about — at least in my own mind — being able to lend my knowledge where it can be helpful.
FM: After “Imperial Reckoning,” your next book “Legacy of Violence” tackles more of a sweeping history of the British Empire. You explain that violence was “endemic to the structures and the systems” of the empire. Does conceiving of violence not as an anomaly but fundamental to imperial regimes have implications for histories beyond the British Empire
CME: Just to back up for a moment, “Imperial Reckoning” was a book that established something as fact and bore witness to events that the British government had tried to erase. But the book was limited in so far as I got done with it and I was just filled with these questions of how and why did this happen? And in some ways, just that single set of questions — how and why did this violence unfold — and then maybe another question after that, was this unique to Kenya or to the empire, led me on 15 years of research. And my own interpretation of 14 different research sites and 200 years of history was that there was something about the nature of liberal imperialism. There’s this conundrum. How can an empire that professes reform and enacts reform — let’s be clear, it wasn’t just window dressing — also be so immensely violent? How do we make sense of this? The theoretical framing of [“Legacy of Violence”] is saying there’s something endemic. There’s something about the nature of liberalism itself, that liberalism has both at once the capacity to repress and reform. Two sides of the same coin.
When you start thinking about not just the ways in which violence is enacted by the state and who’s doing it, but if it is, in fact, adhering to liberalism, then it makes us question the liberal project more generally. So in some ways, the book is this sweeping book about violence and how it’s moved around by people crisscrossing across the empire, but it’s also about the pernicious nature of liberalism and its capacity, as I said, to be both reformist and coercive at the same time.
FM: What do you think is one of the biggest misconceptions people still hold about the British Empire today?
CME: That they got empire right. That somehow or another, Britain had a kind of exception to the broader rule about exploitation and violence and dispossession in empire. If anything, the myth of British imperial exceptionalism still continues to this day.
FM: Speaking of that myth, I took a class freshman year about British soft power and the mythology around it. I personally have enjoyed watching “The Crown” and other things that glamorize…
CME: Love “The Crown”! During the pandemic, I had to revise the entire manuscript. And my wife — who is also a professor here — and I were watching “The Crown.” There were certain moments like, for example, when Mountbatten was assassinated on his boat. It’s a horrific scene right I mean, it’s horrendous. And of course Mountbatten had been the last viceroy in India, and the IRA ends up assassinating him. It wasn’t going to be in the book. And I saw this, and I thought to myself, this is the coda that I need for Mountbatten. So in some ways, “Legacy of Violence” is the anti-“Crown.” But there are many things in “The Crown” that were helpful as entertainment but also in terms of me thinking, “Oh, wait, okay, let me think about that.” I do think ideas are sparked in the most interesting places.
FM: And based on that, is there a historical fiction show or movie that you love, even if it’s not so accurate?
CME: Oh, I love them all. What’s really great too is Shonda Rhimes’s “Bridgerton.” So I love all historical novels, I love historical films. Some of them obviously take liberty with facts. But, I’m a big fan.
Fifteen Minutes is the magazine of The Harvard Crimson. To read the full interview and other longform pieces, visit
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Harvard Grads Launch Boston NWSL Team
BY
When Ami Kuan Danoff ’84 overheard Stephanie Connaughton ’87 chatting at a Red Sox game about the potential for a National Women’s Soccer League expansion bid for Boston, she did not wait for an introduction.
“I immediately butted in,”
Danoff said, “I turned around and said ‘Oh — I’m interested.’”
This moment of spontaneity led to a partnership, and to their roles as part of the all-female ownership group behind Boston Legacy Football Club, the city’s newest professional sports team and a major step forward for women’s sports in the city. With the team set to begin league play in 2026, Danoff and Connaughton are helping to guide its founding, combining a shared Harvard history with decades of experience in marketing, investing, and innovation. While neither had experience working in professional sports, both were drawn to the project for the same reason — the importance of seeing women’s soccer represented in Boston.
“We have a lot of purpose. We’re going to have an impact on the city of Boston and on the National Women’s Soccer League,” Connaughton said. “Boston is going to arrive, and we are really committed to that.”
From Hurlbut to the Boardroom
Though they didn’t know each other as undergraduates, Connaughton and Danoff started their Harvard journeys in the same dorm, Hurlbut Hall. From there, their paths diverged.
Connaughton studied economics, lived in Eliot House, and walked on to the women’s lacrosse team. After college, she worked as a management consultant at Bain & Company, earning her business degree from The Wharton School before spending 15 years at Gillete, where she worked in marketing, leading the development of the Venus razor and laser hair removal technologies.
Danoff took a different route.
A Visual and Environmental Studies — now Art, Film, and Visual Studies — concentrator, Danoff spent less time on the field and more in the Carpenter Center, focusing on architecture. She pivoted towards finance after graduation, working first at Fidelity, then man -
aging international equity portfolios at Putnam. After earning a master’s degree in finance from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, she became an active angel investor, focusing on early-stage tech and science ventures.
Their professional worlds began to intersect as the two got more involved in Boston’s startup scene, particularly around women-led ventures. So, when the opportunity to bid for a NWSL expansion team surfaced, it felt like a natural extension of their interests.
“It was like a whole-body yes for me,” Connaughton said. “It combined my interest in gender equity and sports with really being a startup, which is something that I love.”
Reflecting on their Harvard experiences, both women credit the university with helping them develop the confidence and self-reliance to navigate complex and highly-important projects like this.
Danoff pointed to the idea of creative independence fostered in Harvard’s arts and design programs.
“It’s one of these fields where you do the projects on your own, but you are surrounded by other people. So there’s a lot of cooperation, but you’re doing your own thing. I think that taught me something about working with other people, but also pursuing your own thing.”
For Connaughton, the value of hard work was the most important life lesson she learned at Harvard.
“The thing that Harvard taught me was that everything worth doing is hard,” Connaughton said. “And there’s joy in doing things that are hard.”
Rebuilding a Lost Legacy
The NWSL’s expansion into Boston marks the return of a storied, though troubled at times, history in women’s soccer.
The city was previously home to the Boston Breakers, a founding team of Women’s Professional Soccer, and later a part of the NWSL. Launched in 2007, the Breakers featured stars like Kristine Lilly, the player — male or female — in the history of international soccer with the most appearances at international competitions, and Maren Meinart, a 2003 World Cup Champion, and played an important role in developing women’s soccer in the United States.
However, the team struggled financially, eventually ceasing operations in 2018, leaving Bos-
ton without a professional women’s team.
Recognizing the city’s passionate fanbase and sports culture, the NWSL awarded an expansion franchise to Boston Unity Soccer Partners in 2023. For Connaughton and Danoff, this wasn’t just a business opportunity, but a chance to write a new chapter in that legacy.
Choosing the Name
In October of 2024, the team launched as BOS Nation FC, but received national backlash for the name and accompanying ad campaign. As a result, the name was retracted and the team launched as Boston Legacy FC on March 26th after analyzing over 500 name suggestions from fans and brand professionals.
“Especially in the Harvard context, legacy is something you inherit, or it’s a privilege that you didn’t earn that would pass to you,” Danoff said. “But what we found was that outside of the ‘Harvard bubble,’ people think of legacy as something much more active, something they build to pass on to people who come after, which is much more positive.”
The name also encapsulates the team’s long-term ambitions.
“It’s a collective action. It’s about building a shared legacy for the future and honoring the past,” Connaughton said. “It isn’t colonial, but it does honor the fact that Boston is sort of the ‘leg-
acy city’ of the United States.”
A Home In Franklin Park
One of the most ambitious parts of the project is the proposed stadium in Franklin Park, part of Boston’s historical Emerald Necklace, an 1,100 acre chain of parks and waterways.
The venue, still moving through development and community approval processes, is envisioned by Boston Unity Soccer Partners to be a shared space, hosting both professional sports matches and high school events for the Boston Public Schools system.
The site was a deliberate choice. Both Danoff and Connaughton stress the importance of integrating the stadium into a living, breathing part of the city, not creating a stand-alone commercial area.
Danoff, drawing on her time spent studying architecture at Harvard under John Stilgoe, an expert on the North American built landscape, was particularly interested.
“This is a Boston first, the idea of a public park that is for the good of the citizens of Boston,” Dannoff said. “I was extra excited by the idea that this stadium would be for the students of the Boston Public Schools, for the people in the community, for the women’s soccer community, and for the sports community. It would be like a jewel in Franklin Park.”
The development of White Stadium is a $200 million pub -
lic-private partnership between the city of Boston and Boston Legacy FC. The stadium will continue to serve Boston Public Schools and offer public access on non-game days, a model intended to ensure community benefit.
However, the project has faced pushback. A lawsuit has sparked ongoing debate about concerns like environmental impact, access equity, and whether local voices were properly included in planning. Opposition to the proposed development has been a point of contention in local politics — including the mayoral election — but there is currently no known delay to the 2026 start date for Boston Legacy FC.
A Startup With Emotion
Both Connaughton and Danoff bring impressive backgrounds in business to Boston Legacy FC, but, as they have discovered, launching a pro sports team comes with a unique set of challenges.
“Having worked at a company that removed hair for a living, it’s not as emotional. It turns out that nobody really cares about a razor name as much as they do about a sports team name,” Connaughton said, “I think that’s emblematic, or that just it typifies how sports is so unique, and what makes sports such a beautiful thing to work in.”
Fans have strong feelings, especially in a city like Boston where sports are an essential
part of the culture. That passion extends beyond wins and losses to include names, branding, and stadium locations. Although some may see it as a challenge, for Connaughton and Danoff, it is part of the magic.
“Ultimately, we are stewards of a community asset,” Connaughton said.
As Connaughton and Danoff look forward to Boston Legacy FC’s inaugural season, success for them goes far beyond making the playoffs.
“We want to see fans in merch, fans who don’t even know who we are wearing merch,” Danoff said.
For Connaughton, success is “seeing the community enjoy the stadium, seeing it revitalize and activate in a way that’s positive, as positive as it can be.” With support from the community, fans, and fellow owners, that vision is well on its way to becoming reality. The journey to get here hasn’t been simple, but this is no challenge to the two.
“For me, success is not a linear thing. It’s a thing that comes in fits and starts,” Connaughton said. “It’s a mindset that has taken them from Harvard Yard to Franklin Park, creating the heart of Boston’s newest team.” Because for Boston Legacy FC, it’s not just about soccer. It’s about building something that lasts. It’s about building a legacy.
ally.brown@thecrimson.com
Women’s Water Polo Sweeps Doubleheader
BY BENNETT TRUBEY CONTRIBUTING WRITER
No. 13 Harvard women’s water polo (20-6, 8-2 CWPA) dominated two Saturday matchups in Ann Arbor, MI. The last regular season double-header against St. Francis (1215, 2-9 CWPA) and Bucknell (14-11, 4-7 CWPA) proved to be a showcase for the Crimson’s suffocating defense and fierce offense.
As the CWPA tournament approaches, Harvard is keeping its sights set on potential first-round opponents and using the remaining matches to fine-tune their play and competitive edge.
Harvard 18, St. Francis 1 The Crimson started its doubleheader off strong with a complete domination of the Red Flash. Harvard’s steady flow of points throughout the match consistently broke down St. Francis’ defensive efforts.
“Our entry passes this weekend were spot on, which helped generate a lot of offense for us,” junior utility Heidi Heffelfinger said. “We also did a good job of keeping our spacing which allowed us to move into open space and make that extra pass for a shot on a more open cage.” Heffelfinger scored four goals throughout the match, with eight teammates also contributing to the Crimson’s growing tally. Harvard’s younger talents put their skills on full display against St. Francis. Sophomore attacker Maya O’Dea, sophomore center defender Emma Gilbert, and freshman defender Niki Piovan each accomplished their own hat tricks. No doubt shaken by the Crimson’s relentless onslaught and unwavering blocks, St. Francis suffered from passing miscom-
munications that became easy turnovers. The well-balanced offense in the pool at all times allowed Harvard to make the most of every possession.
“Our bench may be small, but it is incredibly talented, and there’s no drop off when we sub a full six-for-six,” Heffelfinger said. “Subbing frequently in games where we are up by a lot helps keep the energy and competition up.”
When the buzzer sounded, it signaled the end of a masterful, ruthless match for the Crimson, as the team charged ahead into its afternoon game.
Harvard 18, Bucknell 5
In its final matchup of the day, the Crimson shocked Bucknell with its characteristic, dominant defense.
At the start of the first period, Harvard continually forced Bucknell to run down their shot clock as the opposing team made frantic attempts to score. The Bison initially struggled with some ball-handling errors and misplaced passes, causing scrambles for possession.
The Crimson easily netted four goals before Bucknell’s first, giving its opponent a taste of the scoring difficulties they would face throughout the match.
The first quarter was highlighted by a Crimson surge of points. Highlights include an energetic goal from Heffelfinger off senior utility Dany Zapata’s assist and sophomore attacker Lily Britt’s skipper shot to put Harvard up 6-2 at the end of the first quarter.
O’Dea opened the second quarter with an explosive shot, giving Bucknell little time to react as Harvard steamrolled ahead.
The Bison responded with their own goal but would not put together another successful shot until the end of the quarter, overwhelmed by the Crimson’s physicality.
Harvard’s skillful ball move-
ment throughout the period tired out Bucknell’s defense and opened up perfect shot opportunities. Piovan then fired a shot into the back of the net, setting off a string of three straight goals for the first-year from almost the same spot each time.
While Bucknell managed to score their second point of the quarter with a lob shot into the upper corner of the goal, it was a meager attempt at making up their 12-4 deficit to Harvard at the end of the first half.
The third quarter began with little hope for the Bisons’ improvement, with Zapata’s up-close shot, aggressively pushing the ball right past the opposing goalie.
Soon after, Piovan scored once again with impressive power. The Crimson’s ball control earned Freshman attacker Sofia Del Villar a point after her teammates helped spread the Bison’s defense thin.
Bucknell faced a scoring drought in the third period as they struggled to get close to the net.
But when they did, freshman goalkeeper Orli Cooper was sure to shut down any attempts, with eight total saves throughout the match.
The third period ended with a controlling 16-4 lead for Harvard.
The final eight minutes continued at a slower pace for the Crimson, as they shared some back-and-
forth scrambles with Bucknell. Perhaps desperate for points, the Bison managed an early goal, and their goalie blocked several fiery shots from Harvard.
Halfway into the period, however, sophomore attacker Lucy Berkman placed a demoralizing goal into the back of Bucknell’s net. Entirely discouraged, the Crimson’s opponents could do little to overcome the commanding lead, and the match ended with a dominant 18-5 win for Harvard. Piovan led the team with six total points, three of which were scored in the second period alone. The second half of the match was not as goal-heavy for the Crimson, but its defense was a well-oiled machine, allowing only one goal for the Bison over the final two periods.
Capping off the weekend with an impressive 36 total points and keeping its opponents’ combined scores well below double digits, the Crimson looks ahead to the matchup of the regulr season on April 19 at Blodgett Pool versus Iona University (11-12, 5-4 CWPA).
“Our main focus the next three weeks will be on conference,” Heffelfinger said. “And, as always, we’ll be focusing on our own game and continuing to build our dominating mindset.”
Niki Piovan takes aim. ASSMA ALREFAI — CRIMSON PHOTOGRAPHER
The founders of Boston Legacy FC, including Ami Kuan Danoff ’84 and Stephanie Connaughton ’87 COURTESY OF BOSTON LEGACY FC
TRACK AND FIELD
Harvard Track Breaks Records SPORTS 18
BY RIYA SIKAND CRIMSON STAFF WRITER
Harvard’s track and field team traveled to Tucson, Ariz. over the weekend to compete in the annual Jim Click Shootout — garnering several school records, personal bests, and top-place finishes.
On the opening day, the Crimson started out strong with sophomore Marta Amani setting a new school record for women’s long jump with a jump of 6.31 meters and taking home first place. For Amani, breaking a record formerly held by Olympic gold-medalist Gabby Thomas was “very emotional.”
“Breaking the record made me feel more part of the Harvard track and field team and of its history,” Amani said. “I feel honored to have broken her record.”
The Crimson continued to make history throughout the tournament, especially in the Men’s 4x100-meter Relay Team
— which was composed of freshmen Harlow Tong, LeRoy Horton, Jordan Coleman, and junior Jonas Clarke. The four set a school record with a time of 39.40 seconds and earned second place in the tournament.
Coleman shared he “had no idea it was going to be a school record, especially by such a large margin.”
“Seeing that time was such an amazing feeling for all of us,” he added.
While the history may have been a surprise, this success was a long-time coming according to Tong.
“We knew all season that we had a deep roster with plenty of talent to break the record so it was great to see the work we put in pay off,” Tong said. Coleman noted that this time sets them up for regionals and future success and he has “a lot of hope that this season is only going to get better and end so much stronger than it has begun.”
The success was particularly notable for a squad with three
freshmen, but Tong credited the coaching staff with making the group find its groove quickly.
“The coaching staff has been excellent in providing support and smoothing out the transition,” Tong said.
Amani and the relay group of Tong, Horton, Coleman, and Clarke also earned Ivy League Athlete of the Week honors with their performances.
In addition to this strong freshman performance, the veterans of the team continued to perform as well. In the women’s heptathlon, senior Izzy Goudros delivered dominant results, securing first place with top finishes in the 100-meter hurdles, high jump, shot put, and 200-meter events. Adding on to this strong senior showing, Victoria Bossong also earned first in the women’s 800 meters with a time of 2:01:96.
The Crimson also saw depth across all events, with senior Jeremiah Swett placing fourth in the Men’s Javelin Throw along with several other top-ten fin-
ishes on the women’s side in pole vault, long jump, discus, and shotput.
On the men’s side, sophomore Zane Wallace rounded out the Crimson’s strong field showing with a fifth-place finish in long jump.
After this resounding success on the first day, sophomore Simon Weiser started the closing day off strong with a fifth place finish in the Men’s 110m Hurdles. Senior Chloe Fair secured second place in the women’s 400-meter hurdles and Ivy League Champion Fabiola Belibi came sixth in the women’s 60-meter hurdles.
Other standout performances included Sophia Gorriaran earning her personal best in the women’s 400-meter, placing sixth overall. Making more history, senior Peter Fischer recorded his personal best in the men’s 400-meter hurdles, finished fourth in the tournament, and now ranks sixth in all-time school history. In women’s high jump, Klara
Barbic came third and Lilly Hodge placed fourth while the men’s 4x400-meter relay team closed off the tournament with a third place finish. As the runners shared, the Harvard track team feels like a family and this connection is what enables them to achieve such success as they hope to continue to beat school records. After this strong showing in the tournament, the Crimson
Women’s Rugby Falls To Dartmouth
Despite a strong showing in the group stages, Harvard fell short of first place at the Emperor 7s last Sunday, losing to a talented and aggressive Dartmouth team that nullified the Crimson. The second place finish was an improvement from last week’s third-place performance at Crimson 7s. The day’s schedule had Harvard A scheduled to play two games before an opportunity to play in the playoffs. A wet, grey, and muddy day set the scene for a competition filled with high-level teams playing under difficult conditions.
Harvard 26, Queens 10
The Crimson kicked off the tournament with an explosive performance.
Although it was Queens who got on the scoreboard first, capitalizing on a misplaced Crimson lineout, their lead did not last long. Harvard was able to find junior outside back Cameron Fields, who used her electric pace to carry the ball the full length of the field for the Crimson’s first try of the day.
The score remained 7-5 until the end of the first half when soph-
up a break in the defensive line of the Queens and struck for her second try of the game. Queens found a way to narrow the score back to 19-10, but senior lock Jara Emtage-Cave finished out the game
fenses aren’t allowing us to play wide”, she said.
Harvard 22, Quinnipiac 7 Harvard used its momentum to
omore flyhalf Maya Hilger made a drive across the field, and with two quick passes, the ball was in the safe hands of junior outside back Victoria Stanley who was able to carry the ball over the line, putting Harvard up 14- 5 at the break. The second half began with transitional moments for both teams. A loose ball was capitalized on by junior back row Lennox London, and from the ruck, Fields eyed
“In practice, we’ve been focusing a lot on support and backing yourself and I think that’s something that I’ve been working on more and more this season is just backing my speed and also backing my ability to get around defenders.” said Fields on having the confidence to beat players.
with the final try for Harvard to secure its first victory of the game.
The Crimson’s dynamic nature helped it to a strong start to the day. Fields reflected on how their training during the week aided their performance.
“We have been able to get a lot of high-quality reps in practice because we get to see different defensive pictures and challenge ourselves to be more creative if de-
take off where it left off. It only took 3 minutes for the team to pull ahead against Quinnipiac.
An unconnected pass led to some quick thinking from Emtage-Cave. She executed a wellplaced kick that she chased down to score through the posts.
The Crimson’s lead did not last long however, with Quinnipiac responding with their own try and conversion to lead the game 7-5.
Harvard Defeats Dominican
keep up.
The Harvard men’s volleyball team (9-10, 5-3 EIVA) played its second tune-up, non conference match in a row Friday, defeating Dominican University of New York (5-19, 2-2 ECC) in the friendly confines of the Malkin Athletic Center.
The Crimson did not get much of a challenge in its final non-conference game of the season as the team fired on all cylinders and dismantled its overmatched foe. But the game still served as valuable practice time and recovery for Harvard.
“I think it is a good chance to really dial in our fundamentals before the big games,” said junior middle Brian Thomas.
“We have had a lot of sickness and injuries, so just kinda getting a feel again, getting our rhythm, making sure our serve and pass game is good, and all that kind of
stuff,” he added. Thomas opened scoring for the Crimson with a victorious joust at the net — a manhandling at the net that was symbolic of things to come in the first set.
The only resistance Harvard faced early on came from the service line. The Crimson dominated every facet of the game but committed four service errors in the first 15 points. Harvard doubled Dominican 12-6, forcing the Chargers to burn a timeout. Dominican found no magic formula in the timeout as the Crimson continued to double-up the Chargers. Even the service line turned towards Harvard in the latter half of the set as the Crimson cruised to a 25-12 set victory. The Chargers put up a better fight to start the second set, holding pace with Harvard through the first half of the set. Every time the Crimson seemed set to pull away, Dominican would put together two or three points to
Harvard finally created some distance midway through the set, taking a 15-10 lead. From there, the Crimson conducted hitting practice as Harvard’s dominant attack steamrolled the Chargers defense to claim the second set 25-17. Similar to the second set, Dominican played with the Crimson early in the set. Tied at 6-6, Harvard created its first separation of the set, opening up a 12-9 lead.
The Crimson’s lead was brief as the Chargers tied it back up at 13. From that point the pendulum of the set swung one last time in favor of Harvard as the Crimson pushed out to a 20-15 lead. Senior defensive specialist Callum Diak served for the match for Harvard as the Crimson won the final set 25-19. With only two series left — both with conference foes — Harvard has confidence that it is peaking at the right time. Fac-
ing down a critical matchup with rival Princeton next week, the Crimson seems confident. While the schedule says that Harvard just played its last home game, Thomas is not so sure. When asked if tonight would be the last home game of the season he gave a definitive answer.
“Hopefully not, definitely not. We are bringing it back here for the IBA playoffs,” said Thomas. In order for Thomas to be right, the Crimson must win the EIVA. Harvard currently sits third in the EIVA, two games behind Princeton and one behind George Mason, a team the Crimson split with on the season. Princeton and George Mason play this weekend, meaning Harvard will gain ground on one or both of its foes.
The Crimson will return to action against Princeton next Friday, April 11th, at 7:00pm at Princeton.
Harvard went into the break 12-5 with London displaying her phenomenal pace with a break from the Crimson’s defensive zone all the way up the wing to the posts at the other end.
London recognized the team effort that contributed to her tries.
“We moved the ball well and played off of each other which allowed for a lot of our tries. The plays that I scored off of were fairly simple which is why they’re so beautiful but so effective we just had great continuity,” she explained.
Fields continued her contributions for the day with another try in the early stages of the second half. Again London struck into the try zone, to complete Harvard’s dominant display. The game was Harvard’s second victory of the day, 22-7.
Harvard 7, Dartmouth 15
The championship game was a familiar lineup of two teams who have dominated college rugby, a suitable rivalry for the occasion.
Dartmouth kicked off and with a couple of slick passes, the Crimson got Stanley free, to drive towards the Dartmouth half of the field. She was caught before she could near the posts.
The Big Green responded by quickly applying high pressure, earning an early try for its efforts. The aggression and intensity of Dartmouth did not allow the Crimson to establish any rhythm and neither team was able to make
a mark on the game. At halftime, the score stood at 7-0. The group hoped to change the tides of the game in the second half.
“It was clear that we were playing under a lot of pressure and we were not adjusting to that well. I think we hoped to get back into the game by giving ourselves more depth and time off the ball and changing direction when we felt like they’d defense was in our face”, reflected London. Harvard came out in the second half hoping to turn its fate around. Dartmouth dampened these hopes early in the second half, with a similarly timed try of that in the first half. They continued with their fierce attack scoring a minute later, putting the Big Green ahead 15-0. Despite this deficit, the Crimson was not deterred. The team fought back, and despite the conditions making it hard to connect passes, Harvard was able to gain territory on the field. Freshman forward Eseta Pale powered her way under the posts for Harvard’s only try of the day. The game ended 15-7, meaning the Crimson claimed second place at the Emperor 7s tournament. The Crimson are now able to regroup with a two-week break until its next competition. The team next plays at home again on April 19th at the Ivy 7s.
