The Harvard Crimson - Vol. CLII, No. 18

The Harvard Crimson

How DOGE Blocked Harvard’s Grants

DATA DISPUTE. The University filed a counterclaim against former Business School professor Francesca Gino, accusing her of manufacturing a dataset to clear her name of data fraud allegations. Gino sued Harvard two years prior over its investigation into the claims.

ON PAUSE. Harvard canceled psychiatry appointments through the TimelyCare platform for the month of September after hitting a contractual limit on annual visits.

Students, Faculty Rally Against Trump Deal

‘FIGHT BACK.’ Roughly 80 students, professors, and supporters gathered at a Students for Freedom protest on Saturday to celebrate Harvard’s court win — and to urge the University to avoid a settlement with the administration.

SEE PAGE 5

ARTS

Preview: Fall 2025 Theater at Harvard

RAISE THE CURTAINS. From a theatrical adaptation of “The Addams Family” in October to a December run of “The Glass Menagerie,” check out Harvard’s fall 2025 student theater season. Other productions include “Merrily We Roll Along,” “The Pirates of Penzance,” and an original operetta inspired by the works of Nikolai Gogol.

SEE PAGE 13

Federal agencies have begun to inform Harvard researchers that they are reinstating portions of research funding frozen since the Trump administration’s pause on $2.7 billion in grants and contracts in the spring, according to a Harvard spokesperson on Wednesday evening.

The move comes exactly one week after a federal judge ruled that the administration acted unlawfully in halting the funding, calling the White House’s stated justification — a crackdown on campus antisemitism — a “smokescreen” for targeting Harvard and other universities.

a deal with the White House, the person said.

The National Institutes of Health began allocating some grants to Harvard in July to comply with a federal court ruling. But Department of Government Efficiency officials have quietly blocked all the funds at the last mile, withholding money because the University has not reached a settlement, according to four people familiar with the matter, including NIH staff.

The NIH resumed issuing some grants in mid-July to schools, including Harvard, that had been barred from receiving federal dollars under April guidance, according to an internal memo obtained by The Crimson. But officials from DOGE, the government cost-cutting group, used their control over the NIH’s payment system to keep the money out of researchers’ hands.

DOGE officials allowed funds to flow to Columbia University and Brown University — but only after the schools struck multi-million dollar deals with the White House in late July, according to one person familiar with the matter. Hoekstra said. The only other school that DOGE has completely blocked from receiving NIH-approved funds is Northwestern University, which has also not yet struck

The extent of DOGE’s role in quietly obstructing NIH grant disbursements to universities — even after the agency was legally compelled to begin restoring some awards in July — has not been previously reported. And it suggests that, even in the absence of a formal stay or injunction, DOGE may use its power over federal payments to continue to quietly sidestep the Wednesday ruling that directs the Trump administration to reinstate the more than $2.7 billion in federal grants to Harvard that the administration froze or terminated in the spring. Cornell University, which has also not settled, has seen its funding only partially limited. While the main campus in Ithaca, New York, is under restriction, its New York City-based medical school — the Weill School of Medicine — has been able to draw down some funds, the person said. (Weill is institutionally separate from Cornell and uses a different federal grant identifier.)

Of the four other schools that have drawn Trump’s ire, the University of Pennsylvania received funds after settling on July 1, and Princeton University has continued to get NIH payments without DOGE restrictions — though it is unclear whether any of its frozen funds from April involved NIH grants, according to the person.

Duke University and University of California, Los Angeles — who were targeted

in the most recent round of cuts in late July — still received NIH disbursements in August, the person said, likely because those drawdowns covered expenses incurred in July before the cuts. The restrictions, and DOGE’s involvement, would be more likely to show up starting in September, based on the NIH’s typical payment schedule. No guidance has been given to employees at the NIH on restricting future UCLA or Duke grants.

The NIH began issuing notices of award — official documents that authorize grant funding and signal that money should be available — to Harvard, Northwestern, Cornell University, and a number of other public institutions around July 3, according to an internal email obtained by The Crimson.

That move — reversing earlier guidance that imposed sweeping funding pauses — came in response to District Judge William G. Young ’62’s ruling against the Trump administration’s attempt to block billions of grants for research it deemed out of alignment with its political priorities.

Young ordered the restoration of $783 million in federal funding for fiscal year 2025 — a portion of which, totaling millions, was allocated to Harvard — before the Supreme Court stayed the order nearly two months later. (The total multi-year funding pool affected by Young’s ruling

Inside the Hasty Dismantling of Harvard College’s Diversity Offices

BY SAMUEL A. CHURCH AND CAM N. SRIVASTAVA CRIMSON STAFF WRITERS

Few details were finalized when Harvard College Dean David J. Deming informed staff on July 23 of plans to shutter the College’s Women’s Center, Office for BGLTQ Student Life, and Harvard Foundation for Intercultural and Race Relations.

In a message to College staff, Deming cast the diversity offices’ closure as a way to integrate their work and staff into a new “Harvard Foundation,” part of a monthslong effort to revamp Harvard’s approach to student support systems.

But key questions — including the future job titles and responsibilities of employed workers — remained undecided when the message went out. Into late August, administrators were still ironing out those details, leaving students and center directors in the dark about the future of their work.

Former directors of the three diversity offices were officially informed of the

plan to close their centers and integrate them into the new foundation just hours before Deming sent the email to all College staff, according to two Harvard employees familiar with the matter.

The abrupt nature of the rollout has not been lost on students. Deming was questioned in August by Peer Advising Fellows as to why the College was shifting away from identity-based programming. And last week, students denounced the College’s decision to close the centers at a Harvard Students for Freedom protest.

In his remarks to PAFs, Deming said the changes were motivated by external pressure and constraints from outside the University, according to seven attendees. And when asked by a student employee about the reason for the changes, one of the center directors said they believed they were made as a direct result of threats from President Donald Trump, according to the student, who was granted anonymity to discuss the private conversation.

But in public, Harvard officials have avoided mentioning the University’s po -

litical troubles in announcing the diversity office shakeups — a trend they continued from the spring when Harvard renamed its central Office of Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging, citing changing internal missions.

During a different PAF meeting in August, Habiba Braimah, now senior director of the Harvard Foundation, and associate director Matias Ramos said the decision to close the centers was made after administrators received guidance from the Office of the General Counsel, Harvard’s legal team, according to one PAF in attendance. Since the Supreme Court struck down the consideration of race in college admissions policies, universities’ diversity and affinity programs have been under more legal scrutiny. The Trump administration has argued that the affirmative action ruling makes any race-conscious college programming illegal. Full-time staff at the centers were left wondering what titles they held after

“Harvard has begun to receive notices of reinstatements on many of the previously terminated federal awards from a range of federal agencies,” a Harvard spokesperson wrote.

“So far, payments have not been restored on these awards.”

The spokesperson declined to comment on the value and number of grants that federal agencies have indicated they will restore.

A person familiar with the matter confirmed that the National Institutes of Health — whose grants make up about 70 percent of Harvard’s federal funding — has not disbursed any funding to Harvard since Judge Allison D. Burroughs’ ruling last week.

A Wednesday evening email obtained by The Crimson to researchers at the School of Public Health — the Harvard school most dependent on federal funds — noted that the school had yet to see its money

THE BROWN DAILY HERALD AMID THREATS TO DIVERSITY INITIATIVES, STUDENTS AT BROWN HOLD BLACK CONVOCATION

of half-capacity last year.

The Wharton School, the University of Pennsylvania’s business school, will

ISRAEL STRIKES QATAR,

TARGETING HAMAS LEADERS

Israel attacked the headquarters of Hamas leadership in Qatar on Tuesday, rocking a suburb of Doha with explosions and killing at least six people. Qatar, an ally of the United States and a critical third-party in negotiations between Israel and Hamas, called the airstrikes an act of “state terrorism” and said it was not given advance notice of the attack. Hamas said that five of its members were killed in the attack, but none of its top leaders. A Qatari security officer was also reported dead, Reuters reported. Middle Eastern nations were quick to condemn the operation, and President Donald Trump distanced the U.S. from the strikes, writing on social media that such an attack “does not advance Israel or America’s goals.”

CONSERVATIVE ACTIVIST

CHARLIE KIRK ASSASSINATED

Charlie Kirk, the founder of conservative youth group Turning Point USA and an influential ally of President Donald Trump, was shot and killed Wednesday at a Utah Valley University rally. Kirk, 31, did not hold an official role in the Trump administration but was an ever-present member of the president’s inner circle. An investigation is ongoing, according to F.B.I director Kash Patel. Officials said they took two people into custody on Wednesday, but they were later released, according to the New York Times. Kirk’s visit to Utah was the opening stop on a fall tour intended to counteract liberal values on college campuses.

NATO DOWNS RUSSIAN DRONES IN POLAND

NATO warplanes downed Russian drones flying over Poland on Tuesday night, the first shots fired by NATO in Russia’s war on Ukraine. Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk said there were 19 drones launched, but did not comment on how many were shot down. In response, Poland has invoked Article 4 of the NATO treaty, which allows them to demand consultations with allies. NATO officials said it was unclear whether the incursion was intentional or a mistake on Moscow’s part, according to the New York Times. This is not the first time that Russian drones have entered Polish airspace, but Western leaders said the attack crossed a line and marked a brazen escalation from Moscow.

SUPREME COURT SIDES WITH TRANS BOY OVER BATHROOM USE

In an unsigned order on Wednesday, the Supreme Court denied South Carolina’s emergency request to enforce its ban on transgender students using their chosen bathrooms. The decision will allow a transgender boy to continue using the boys’ bathroom while his challenge to the policy proceeds through lower courts, the New York Times reported. The court did not explain its reasoning in the order, but Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel A. Alito, and Neil M. Gorsuch noted their dissents.

NEXT WEEK 3

What’s Next

Start every week with a preview of what’s on the agenda around Harvard University

Friday 9/12

M.L. RIO AT HARVARD BOOK STORE

Harvard Book Store, 7:00 p.m.

Actor, music writer, and author of the novel

If We Were Villains M.L. Rio is coming to the Harvard Book Store to discuss Hot Wax, her latest novel. The conversation will include Daphne Kalotay, the award-winning author of The Archivists.

Saturday

AN EVENING WITH CHAMPIONS

Bright-Landry Hockey Center, 7:00p.m.

An Evening with Champions, a student-run nonprofit organization, presents their annual figure skating exhibition featuring nationally-ranked and Olympic-level figure skaters. Their show raises money for The Jimmy Fund, which supports the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.

Sunday

THAI MARKET AT HARVARD SQUARE

Harvard Square, 12:00 a.m.-6:00 p.m.

Come to Harvard Square as it comes to life with local Thai vendors to enjoy handmade crafts, authentic Thai food, live music, and cultural performances. Admission is free!

Monday 9/15

THE FUTURE OF HUMAN RIGHTS IN FOREIGN POLICY

Institute of Politics, 6:00 p.m.

The Institute of Politic’s inaugural Human Rights & Foreign Fellows cohort discuss the role of human rights on America’s foreign policy, sharing insights into why these are crucial to sustaining democracy and American leadership.

Tuesday 9/16

GETTING STARTED IN TV AND FILM

Virtual, 4:00-4:45 p.m.

Former students in the Harvardwood 101 program — run by a Harvard alumni group for Arts and Entertainment — and entertainment interns speak on exploring and launching careers in the entertainment industry for current Harvard students in this online panel.

Wednesday 9/17

LANGUAGE CENTER OPEN HOUSE

Harvard Language Center, Science Center B06, 4:00-6:00 p.m. The Harvard Language Center is hosting an open house for current students to learn about the language programs at Harvard, connect to fellow multilingual students, and welcome in the new academic year.

Thursday 9/18

FOOD

Friday 9/19

A NIGHT STROLL

V. THAKKAR

JOEY HUANG — CRIMSON PHOTOGRAPHER

GLOBAL HARVARD

DRCLAS Closes Chile, Mexico Offices

BUDGET CUTS. After longtime funding sources ran out, the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies closed two offices abroad.

BY MIA F. LUPICA AND JORDANOS S. SISAY CRIMSON STAFF WRITERS

Harvard’s David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies will close its office in Santiago, Chile at the end of this year and allow its office lease in Mexico City to expire this month because of a strained budget.

The changes were announced in July 22 emails to center affiliates. Staff in the Mexico City office will work remotely, but summer internships, courses, and other student programming will still take place in person. DRCLAS’s third international office, located in São Paulo, will remain open.

Government professor Steven R. Levitsky, the faculty director of DRCLAS, said that the center decided to close the office in Santiago because a funding source that had supported it for roughly two decades ran out several years ago.

The bulk of the funding came from a 1999 donation by Andrónico Luksic, a Chilean businessman. Unlike the Brazil office, the Chile office does not have an endowment — and, according to Levitsky, DRCLAS’s budget is too tight to spend its unrestricted funds on the Chile office.

“In order to keep it open, we either had to find a big donor, like in Brazil, to sustain it, or to use unrestricted funds from Cambridge to finance it, and given the broader fiscal crisis in the University, we just didn’t have the money,” Levitsky said.

Levitsky said DRCLAS faced

EPSTEIN FROM PAGE 1

a million-dollar deficit last year, and the cuts were made after faculty associated with the center identified funding priorities. “We had to make horrendous, horrendous choices this year — really, really painful choices, choices that felt like we were cutting off limbs,” he said. DRCLAS had already made cuts to its internship programs. By the end of last year, the center no longer offered their Puerto Rico Winter Institute, a study abroad program that ran in January, or winter internships in Mexico.

Levitsky said the recent

changes were also an attempt to accommodate declining student interest in travel to Chile while broadening DRCLAS’s work in other South American countries. Decades ago, Chile was seen as a relatively stable and safe country for students to travel to, unlike many of its neighbors.

Now, Levitsky said, “Harvard kids are going everywhere in South America. They’re going to Peru, they’re going to Colombia, they’re going to Ecuador, Bolivia.”

“Chile is just a smaller place, and there’s less traffic by our

In Epstein Book, a Long List of Harvard Signatures

The signature of Mortimer “Mort” B. Zuckerman, a billionaire who taught at the Graduate School of Design and donated $10 million dollars to establish a graduate fellowship program, also appeared on a short handwritten note. None of the four responded to requests for comment.

The scrapbook was organized by Epstein’s longtime associate Ghislaine Maxwell, who helped Epstein operate a sex ring of underage girls out of New York City and Palm Beach. Its existence first became public in July when the Wall Street Journal published a description of a letter bearing President Donald Trump’s signature and a lewd illustration. But the album itself was not public until Monday. Its release came after Trump vehemently denied that he was the letter’s creator, lending even more fuel to demands to publish files from Epstein’s estate and prompting the House Oversight Committee to subpoena the Justice Department for access to materials from its investigation into Epstein.

The letters, which were created and compiled for Epstein’s 50th birthday, add another layer to the University’s web of ties with Epstein, who frequently associated with Harvard and MIT scientists and made major donations to their programs.

The 2003 entry signed by Nowak consists of five pages of compiled fragments of a science textbook describing computational biology. The entry referred to Nowak, whose Program for Evolutionary Dynamics received $6.5 million from Epstein in 2003, as an author associated with the “Epstein Institute” at Harvard. Nowak, the biologist and mathematician, was placed on administrative leave in 2020 from over Epstein’s donations

to a program Nowak directed after Harvard found that Epstein used the program to rehabilitate his image. Three years later, all of Nowak’s research and advising privileges were restored. Rosovsky’s name appears on one of two consecutive pages that show what appear to be ink impressions of a woman’s breasts. One of the works is labeled “specially commissioned by Henry Rosovsky.”

The now-deceased FAS dean and professor in Harvard’s Economics department was long known as a friend of Epstein’s. In the early 1990s, Epstein facilitated a donation for the construction of the Harvard Hillel building, which was named in Rosovsky’s honor. Maxwell — Epstein’s accomplice and a convicted sex trafficker — alleged in a transcribed Justice Department interview this summer that Rosovsky received a “massage” through Epstein’s network.

The scrapbook entry with the signature of Dershowitz, Epstein’s former lawyer, joked that Dershowitz had steered the focus of a Vanity Fair article away from Epstein to Bill Clinton. The note was accompanied by a parodied magazine cover featuring faux headlines including “Who was Jack the Ripper? Was it Jeffrey Epstein?” and “Jeffrey Epstein’s %&*#@ Rampage” under a “Vanity Unfair” nameplate. The letter was previously described in a Wall Street Journal article. In a July interview with The Crimson, Dershowitz said that he “very possibly” sent Epstein a birthday card but had “no recollection of it.” He added that he was unaware at the time of any crimes Epstein had committed and “never renewed a personal relationship” with Epstein after helping him reach a plea deal

in a case where he was accused of abusing underage girls.

A handwritten entry bearing the signature of Kosslyn, who served as Psychology department chair and dean of the FAS’s Social Science division, includes a series of struck-through equations and wishes for Epstein’s health over another 50 years.

In addition to letters bearing faculty signatures, Epstein’s birthday album also included a message with the signature of former L Brands CEO Leslie H. Wexner, a billionaire Harvard donor. The entry under Wexner’s name included a drawing of a pair of breasts with a note saying, “I want to give you what you want… so here it is.”

Epstein was never a Harvard student or faculty member, though he spent a year as a visiting fellow. But his connections with Harvard run so deep that University President Lawrence S. Bacow commissioned a 2019 investigation into the relationship. The resulting report found that Epstein had contributed $9.1 million to Harvard between 1998 and 2008.

Following the report’s release, Harvard developed policies for reviewing potentially controversial donations, including the creation of “triggering criteria” that faculty and staff are now trained to recognize in each gift. The University donated the remaining balance of Epstein’s contributions — $200,937 — to organizations that support victims of human trafficking and sexual assault.

Harvard has not acknowledged the wave of new revelations about its affiliates’ ties with Epstein that emerged this summer. A Harvard spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment for this article.

sidhi.dhanda@thecrimson.com caroline.hennigan@thecrimson.com

faculty and students to Chile,” he said.

Students who participated in DRCLAS’s programs in Chile said they were disappointed to see the office closing.

Minerva C. Garcia ’26, who participated in Chile’s Summer Internship Program this past summer, said she and her peers “were all in shock” when they found out on the last day of programming that the office would close.

Garcia, who worked in a regional government in Chile, said the program was her first time traveling outside the Unit-

ed States and a valuable opportunity to learn how Chile’s government works. The office closure felt like “a slap in the face,” she said.

Paola Y. Lee-Vega ’26, who completed a summer 2023 internship in Mexico through DRCLAS, said she worried that students, many of whom already work remotely, would lose out if they could no longer convene in the program’s central office.

“The physical space was really important for us,” she said.

“That’s where we did all of our activities. That’s where we

would meet before going on a trip. Or that’s where we would meet to just bond and talk and create community and reflect on our experience.”

Anouska I. Ortiz ’26, who participated in both winter and summer internships in Mexico, said the experience helped her connect to her own Mexican background — and added that she hoped DRCLAS would find a way to reopen its closed Latin American offices.

“Interest is still there,” she said. “I’m hopeful that the DRCLAS office will find more funding, more donors, so that they can keep their offices open.”

But DRCLAS is unlikely to reopen the Chile office — even if it regains financial stability.

DRCLAS spokesperson Vanessa Salas Fuentes wrote in an email that the center “is moving toward a more flexible and sustainable model of engagement with Latin America — one that allows us to support research, teaching, and student experiences without requiring a permanent physical presence.” Levitsky said that if Harvard and DRCLAS move beyond the University’s current crisis, the center would still pursue a different vision for its work in Chile.

DRCLAS “won’t go back and build and open up a brick and mortar office in Santiago, Chile,” he said, but plans to develop a more flexible footprint with multiple Spanish speaking countries to uphold its presence in places including Chile, Argentina, Colombia, and Peru. The center is still looking for funding to support new initiatives and hoping to invest in its Mexico programs.

“Thus far, we just have not secured the funding to do it,” Levitsky said.

mia.lupica@thecrimson.com jordanos.sisay@thecrimson.com

HUDS Adds Breakfast Sandwich Bar, Pickles to Fall Menu

BY DARCY G LIN CRIMSON STAFF WRITER

When Harvard College students returned to campus this fall, they were greeted by a flurry of changes in their dining halls, including Make-Your-Own breakfast sandwiches with fried eggs.

The new sandwich bar, which was rolled out in all the College’s House dining halls, marked one of the most significant changes to breakfast offerings following nearly a decade of student complaints for greater hot breakfast options.

Students have consistently pushed for more hot breakfast options, pointing to the limited service. Currently, only Quincy House and Annenberg Hall provide full breakfast service, while other upperclassman Houses serve only continental breakfast.

Nichole M. Tirado ’28 said that the extra protein choices offered during breakfast “saved” her.

“I’m a very picky eater for breakfast,” Tirado said. “I feel like the sandwich bar is phenomenal.” For others, the breakfast sandwich bar was an insufficient change.

Sophia R. Mills ’27 said that she will continue to eat at Quincy House for breakfast every morning.

“I’m proud of HUDS and hopefully they can put hot breakfast in every single House and then I’ll be super proud of HUDS and talk about it publicly,” Mills said.

According to Crista Martin, Harvard University Dining Services’ Director for Strategic Initiatives & Communication, this semester’s recent host of changes emerged directly from feedback provided by students at the end of last semester.

“Changes – as has always been the case – were motivated by student feedback. With almost 7,000 opinions to be considered in de -

veloping daily menus, we do our best to meet the most needs we can,” she wrote.

The adjustments this fall were not the first time HUDS has altered their menu offerings in response to student feedback. In February, HUDS implemented and quickly walked back its “Pub Night” after undergraduates shared their dissatisfaction with the unhealthy entrees.

In addition to breakfast additions, HUDS introduced a Crunch Station, featuring pickled vegetables at dinner. The new station has replaced the Build-Your-Own station, which featured side dishes like Mediterranean food and nachos.

The change drew a wide spectrum of opinions from students, including Skye Lam ’26-27 who said he was “unfazed” by the swap.

Weston H. Lewin ’26, who preferred the Build-Your-Own station, said that the customizable station added “an extra option for dining and you can’t just eat pickles.”

But Benjamin D. Langman ’26 said that the Crunch Station had versatile applications, giving students “more bang for your buck.”

“With the pickling, you can put the pickled stuff on anything,” he said.

HUDS also phased out Bistro Bowls dishes served at dining hall grills — such as kimchi fried rice and poutine fries— and instead opened daily grill service.

All House grills now serve the Nashville Hot Chicken Sandwich, a student favorite which was previously a rotational offering.

“I’m a big grill user,” Lam said.

“It’s always a good pick-me-up at the end of the day.”

“Who does it hurt if the grill is open every day? Does this not benefit everybody? I think this is just a general plus,” Gunnar Sizemore ’27 said.

But some students said they missed the rotational Bistro

Bowls.

“It was a pre-made, really nice dish by a chef,” Mills said. “So I’m kind of sad about that, even though I do like the grill.”

“Student feedback reflected a strong preference for having the grill available nightly, uninterrupted by other specials,” Martin wrote in an email. Despite the addition of the Make-Your-Own sandwich bar, students mourned the loss of strawberry yogurt, chia pudding, and overnight oats from their breakfast spread.

“Being a student athlete on the football team for Harvard University, I am looking for protein in the morning and without the strawberry yogurt that they used to provide, it’s really hard for me to get the protein that I adequately desire,” Josh V. Fedd ’27 said.

According to Martin, “every house should have four kinds of yogurt – plain, non-fat Greek, plain low-fat non- Greek, plain full-fat Greek, and plain soy” and “overnight oats or chia pudding in rotation.”

“This approach reflects the broad array of feedback we’ve received regarding preferences for the fat-level and flavors of yogurt,” Martin wrote in an email.

Students expressed overall appreciation for the changes and continue to engage with HUDS to further improve their menu offerings.

Lam said that many of his friends regularly text HUDS’ feedback hotline “saying, ‘this is good food. We should include it more.’

“I think they’ve been pretty responsive to whatever students want to see change,”

“I just think that any person who doesn’t like HUDS is grandstanding because this is perfectly good food and we’re perfectly good people,” Lewin said.

The David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies is located in CGIS South. ZENNIE L. WEY — CRIMSON PHOTOGRAPHER

Harvard Funding Cuts Endanger Crucial Fruit Fly Database

The genetics research repository lost a multimillion dollar grant.

BY WILLIAM C.

When Harvard Medical School professor Dragana Rogulja wanted to learn how sleep deprivation affects the human body, she began by studying specimens from another species entirely: Drosophila melanogaster, the common fruit fly.

Rogulja, who studies what happens to the brain during sleep, found that sleep deprivation leads to damage in fly intestines, a phenomenon she also discovered in mice. She eventually hopes to extend her research to understand why humans and other animals need to sleep.

But Rogulja’s lab — and thousands of others worldwide — could soon find themselves without access to the database that underpins their research. Called FlyBase, the free online repository includes a complete map of the Drosophila melanogaster genome, updated continuously, and lets researchers instantly access more than 87,000 papers on Drosophila, stretching back to the 17th century. If it’s an academic cliche that science stands on the shoulders of giants, there is perhaps no clearer embodiment of the adage than FlyBase.

Throughout its more than 30year existence, FlyBase has relied on federal grants worth millions of

dollars annually, the latest of which was cut in May by the Trump administration. The grant, awarded by the National Institutes of Health and worth $2 million a year, was a casualty of the White House’s multibillion dollar freeze on Harvard’s federal funding.

Since then, the scientists who maintain the database have not been able to replace the funding — and FlyBase is paying the price. Eight Harvard employees who help maintain the database were laid off in August, after the Faculty of Arts and Sciences denied a request from the researchers for more bridge funding to maintain the program.

When FlyBase lost its grant in the spring, the FAS provided Harvard Medical School professor Norbert Perrimon, the project’s principal investigator, funding to continue running the database.

But that bridge funding will run out in October. And after Perrimon asked this summer for more funding from an FAS initiative designed to fund research by FAS affiliates whose grants were canceled, the school denied his request on Aug. 8.

The denial means that four fulltime and four part-time Harvard employees have been laid off. Two have already departed, one will leave sometime in the middle of this month, and another five will leave by mid-October.

The departures jeopardize the future of the critical database, which is used worldwide to study issues ranging from cancer to the science of gene expression, and show the limits of Harvard’s capacity to continue funding research once

covered by federal grants.

A federal judge struck down the freeze on Harvard’s funding last week. But it’s not clear when — or if — the money will start to flow again. And the Trump administration has already vowed to appeal the ruling.

FlyBase, Perrimon said on Sunday, has not seen any funding returned.

The layoffs at FlyBase were first reported by The Transmitter, a neuroscience news site, in August.

The database is maintained by research teams at four institutions: Harvard, Indiana University Bloomington, the University of Cambridge, and the University of New Mexico. Those groups were all supported by the canceled Harvard grant.

Flies are similar to humans in most fundamental ways, meaning discoveries made about the insects are often directly relevant for human biology, said Rogulja, who used the database for her research. As a top catalogue of fruit fly genes and genomes, FlyBase is essential for experiments using the small but scientifically rich creatures.

Scientists researching fruit flies can use FlyBase to access past research on how changes to the flies’ genetic material affect the flies themselves. The database also allows researchers to contact labs that have developed different fly lines, populations of flies that have been genetically edited to express certain characteristics.

“We didn’t go a single day without using FlyBase. We used it to look up the names of genes, expression patterns of genes, what have

you, every day for the five years that I was there working on my PhD,” said Susan E. St. Pierre, a researcher at Massachusetts General Hospital who used the repository to complete research for her doctorate degree from Harvard.

The FAS did not provide an explicit justification for denying the request for additional bridge funding, Perrimon said. FAS spokesperson James M. Chisholm wrote in a statement that the Research Continuity Funding program, to which Perrimon applied for funding in July, only supports “FAS senior or tenure-track faculty” whose research was impacted by funding cuts. Perrimon is an affiliate of the FAS’s Molecular and Cellular Biology department, but his primary appointment is at HMS.

“The FAS and MCB are actively working to identify and secure additional funding to safeguard FlyBase’s operations,” Chisholm wrote. “Given the importance of FlyBase to the broader U.S. and international scientific research community, we are hopeful other institutions and other stakeholders at Harvard will support those efforts.”

In the meantime, the four teams began scrambling to find alternative sources of funding.

Only the Cambridge and Indiana teams have been successful. At Cambridge, donations have come in from European fly researchers, the university, and the Wellcome Trust, a charitable foundation that supports scientific research aimed at improving health outcomes. The funding will allow the team to continue its work for one to two years.

The Indiana team, meanwhile, received funding for a year from Thom Kaufman, an Indiana University professor, and NIH supplemental funding awarded to the Bloomington Drosophila Stock Center.

The Indiana team also raised about $75,000, according to Perrimon.

The Harvard and New Mexico FlyBase researchers have not been as lucky.

The New Mexico team was forced to lay off its curator. And at Harvard, efforts to convince philanthropies and other private funders to back the project have so far borne little fruit. In late August, the FlyBase team sent an email asking scientists nationwide who are involved in fly experiments for donations, and the FlyBase website was updated to include a message in neon green soliciting financial support from fly labs in the United States and United Kingdom.

Over the summer, Perrimon also began reaching out to potential supporters after hearing that the FAS denied his request for funding. But most private foundations, he said, are not interested in funding the project.

“Who knows, maybe the miracle is going to happen,” Perrimon added. “But so far, we don’t know.”

Scientists who study flies have also asked Harvard directly to reconsider its decision to deny FlyBase additional funding. Two days after the team solicited donations from fly researchers, 19 current and former leaders of the Drosophila Board — a group of scientists dedicated to fly research — penned a letter to Harvard President Alan M.

’76 and Rachelle Gaudet, the Molecular and Cellular Biology department chair, asking that Harvard provide bridge funding for the next year.

Gaudet responded a few days later, writing that the University is exploring internal and external avenues of near-term support and is also working with Perrimon on a long-term solution.

“While we are navigating a fluid situation, given FlyBase’s visibility and global impact, I am cautiously optimistic that a sustainable path forward can be found,” Gaudet wrote in the email. She did not list more specific steps that either the University or department is taking.

Since FlyBase was established in the early 1990s, its freely available online repository has become essential to research on genomics, neuroscience, and immunology.

“You can’t do fly experiments without FlyBase. You can’t find the reagents that you need. You can’t find the fly lines that you need. You can’t find the researcher who created the line that you can then write to and get some of the flies. All of that happens through FlyBase,” St. Pierre, the MGH researcher, said. Because users can access the website without paying, FlyBase needs other income sources to run, said Mark A. Peifer, a biologist at the University of North Carolina who helped draft the letter to Garber and Gaudet.

“It’s all free, but it didn’t come down on stone tablets,” he said.

william.mao@thecrimson.com veronica.paulus@thecrimson.com

After Court Victory, Students Rally Against Deal With Trump

Harvard drops its litigation.

Three days after a federal judge struck down the Trump administration’s decision to cancel more than $2.7 billion in federal research funding, roughly 80 Harvard students, professors, and supporters rallied to celebrate the court victory — and to urge the University to avoid a settlement with the administration.

The hourlong demonstration — organized by Harvard Students for Freedom, an unrecognized student organization established in the spring — was the first since students returned to campus. It drew a substantially smaller crowd than the more than 300 who attended the group’s last rally in May, which took place shortly after the Department of Homeland Security revoked Harvard’s authorization to host international students.

Speakers at Saturday’s protest pressed Harvard administrators not to follow in the footsteps of peer schools like Brown University and Columbia University, which struck deals with the White House over the summer and made major concessions to restore their federal funding.

“Donald Trump, you cannot meddle; Harvard, we will never settle,” attendees chanted. Kirsten A. Weld, a History professor and president of the Harvard chapter of the American Association of University Professors, said in a speech that United States District Judge Allison D. Burroughs’ Wednesday ruling restoring federal funding proves to Harvard administrators that the best way forward is “not to capitulate, but to fight.”

She said that the ruling will continue to protect Harvard’s funding — and that the AAUP, which scored a win against the funding cuts alongside Harvard on Wednesday, will continue to fight in court even if

“If the government wants to vacate Judge Burroughs’ ruling, it has to defeat that ruling on appeal before another set of judges,” she said. “It cannot simply bully Harvard into dropping its litigation, because if it does — even if the University abandons its own lawsuit — the entire judicial order blocking the government’s illegal actions will remain in effect.”

A White House spokesperson confirmed on Wednesday that the government plans to appeal Burroughs’ decision, but no appeal had yet been filed as of Saturday evening.

Harvard and the White House have been in talks since June. The parties were developing a framework in August for an out-of-court agreement that would have required the University to pay $500 million to educational and workforce programs in exchange for restored federal funding. But The New York Times reported Saturday morning that talks had stalled in recent days.

Speakers took a hard line against a potential settlement on Saturday.

“We will not accept political control disguised as a settlement,” said Alfred F.B. Williamson ’28, an international student from Wales. “Yes, Harvard will suffer, faculty will suffer, and international students like myself will suffer, but I did not cross an ocean to watch Harvard kneel to Trump. I’d rather be forced out of this country than to see Harvard make a deal with this administration.”

Abdullah Shahid Sial ’27, co-president of the Harvard Undergraduate Association, said that a deal would undo the message Harvard initially sent by opposing a long list of demands from the administration to gain greater control over the University.

“Any form of deal legitimizes exactly the same undemocratic demands which Harvard so proudly stood against,” Sial said. “Especial-

ly when we are winning in courts, we can’t have an institution kiss the ring, not now and absolutely not in the future.”

Like at past Students for Freedom protests, the crowd balanced praise for Harvard’s vocal defense of its independence with criticism of changes that attendees saw as concessions to the White House.

Speakers on Saturday reprimanded Harvard for enacting several changes to diversity programming that mirrored demands from the Trump administration. In July, the College announced it would close its three diversity offices — the Women’s Center, Office for BGLTQ Student Life, and Harvard Foundation for Intercultural and Race Relations — and fold their staff into a revamped “Harvard Foundation” under the new Office of Culture and Community.

Eli Johnson-Visio ’26, co-president of the Harvard Queer Students Association, said that students are skeptical that Harvard’s decision to close the offices was not a direct result of pressure from the Trump administration. He also expressed concern over Harvard’s ability to support students of all identities moving forward.

“We’re not just fighting against the loss of offices, programs, resources or classes. We’re fighting for the preservation of the campus we were all promised when we came here — a campus where every student, no matter their background or identity, retains the resources to thrive that were present during our first years,” Visio said.

“We’re all fighting against the sterilization of diversity and the rebranding of offices that claim to now be able to better support us, but have yet to actually do so,” he added.

Spokespeople for the College and University did not respond to a request for comment.

Harvard will also close the spaces in Canaday and Thayer Hall where the College’s Women’s Cen-

ter and Office for BGLTQ Student Life had operated for more than a decade. Olivia F. Data ’26, a former intern at the Women’s Center, said in a speech that “many of the students here today may never have gotten to know a version of Harvard that celebrated its students’ identities.”

The protest began as clouds rolled in over Harvard Square, and around 40 minutes into the event, the skies opened. Data delivered her speech as rain lashed down and the crowd huddled under umbrellas.

“I struggle to find anything divisive in being one of the only spaces on campus to offer free and color printing to students, or in giving funding to student groups to support artistic, athletic and community based programming, or allowing students of all identities to attend our campus spaces and to use our office, or in creating a space where students who might be used to feeling alone and powerless can join together and know that they are supported and believed in,” Data said.

Garber

COVER STORY 6

How DOGE Stood in the Way of Harvard’s Grants

included $3.8 billion in grants, many of which were partially paid out before the freeze. According to a Crimson analysis of court filings, Harvard was awarded more than 140 grants within that pool, with a combined multi-year value exceeding $60 million.)

Harvard expected the grants listed in Young’s ruling to flow back to researchers, according to a person familiar with the matter, even though the White House had imposed a block on all Harvard grants as part of its initial funding cut in April.

But the funds never arrived, and the Harvard School of Public Health wrote in an August post on its institutionally-run news site that the NIH was continuing to “block disbursement of any funds to Harvard University.”

April

May

The

July

Aug.

Sept.

U.S.

According to one person, Harvard has been unable to access any funds from the NIH since April because of the restrictions imposed by DOGE through its oversight of the NIH’s payment system, including in the two-month period in which Young’s ruling mandated that grant awards listed in the ruling be resumed.

Harvard has drawn down $0 from the NIH since the cuts began in April, while researchers at Northwestern have received some small disbursements from the agency for AIDS-related research.

The University received $488 million from the NIH in

fiscal year 2024, accounting for more than 70 percent of Harvard’s federal funding last year.

A White House spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment for this article.

DOGE, which was established by an executive order in January, swiftly wreaked havoc on federal institutions — slashing funds, taking control of sensitive databases, and laying off agency employees en masse. After its billionaire leader Elon Musk feuded with Trump and then stepped away in late May, the group’s employees were distributed across the federal government in permanent posts, embedded in agency-level “DOGE Teams.”

The controls on NIH payments are part of a DOGE review process called “Defend the Spend,” which adds an additional layer of oversight requiring both the grant issuer and recipient to justify a grant before it is formally paid out. If a grant does not align with administration priorities, DOGE can block the payment.

DOGE first obtained control of the Payment Management System, a multi-agency platform used to track and release federal grants, shortly after the Trump administration returned to power. But it turned its eyes to the NIH in April, when three DOGE officials — Edward Coristine, Luke Farritor, and Zachary Terrell — met with chief grant management officers at the NIH to demand

changes, according to one person.

It is unclear which officials are currently involved in overseeing grants awarded by the NIH through the PMS. (Coristine — known by his online nickname, “Big Balls” — left DOGE and moved to the Social Security Administration in June. An attempted carjacking in August left him injured and provoked the Trump administration’s deployment of federal troops in Washington, D.C.)

The NIH terminated the majority of grants to Harvard in May, under directives from the Trump administration, after the University defied White House demands it blasted as “unmoored from the law.” But since at least July, grant payments have been unilaterally withheld by officials from DOGE — and without the review of grant management within the NIH, according to the person.

While District Judge Allison D. Burroughs’ ruling on Wednesday does not directly mandate a change to that process, Harvard could argue that the Trump administration is in contempt of court if DOGE continues to block payments.

As of Sunday, Harvard researchers were still unable to draw down funds, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Samuel R. Bagenstos — who served as the general counsel for the Department of Health

and Human Services under the Biden administration — said a DOGE-controlled grant review would not be a legal mechanism to disobey the court order.

“They do not have the right to use a grant review process to evade the District Court order,” Bagenstos said. “If this continues, it sure looks like something Judge Burroughs would want to look at for contempt.”

But the White House has kept information about what happens to university funding after NOAs are issued tightly under wraps, according to two staffers at the NIH, who added that guidance is rarely put in writing.

The behind-the-scenes suppression of grants to Harvard shows DOGE’s extensive involvement in the White House’s effort to extract hundreds of millions of dollars in settlement money — and extensive policy concessions — from universities. Columbia and Brown only began receiving payments after settling with the government, even though the NIH had resumed awarding their grants weeks prior.

The Trump administration, which has vowed to appeal Burroughs’ decision, has not indicated that it will back away from its efforts to force Harvard toward a settlement. The two parties have been in talks since June and were reportedly drawing closer to an agreement that would have required Harvard to pay $500 million to vo -

cational education programs. But Burroughs’ ruling last week could throw a new wrench in the negotiations if Harvard sees a serious path to retaining its funding.

Despite the ongoing negotiations, the Trump administration kept up its pressure on Harvard over the summer. Federal agencies subpoenaed the University, formally accused it of violating Title VI, threatened its accreditation, and launched an investigation into patents worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Those came on top of a slew of earlier actions against Harvard — including the multibillion dollar funding freeze, attempts to revoke its ability to host international students, and threats to its tax-exempt status in April.

Bagenstos said that DOGE’s involvement as a middleman in the PMS could create a longterm, undercover system to enable the “political manipulation” of federal funding.

“It’s likely to slow things down and create an opportunity for manipulation to the payment process to reward the administration’s friends and punish its enemies,” he said. “It sure looks like, once again, this is the administration using its tools of grant making in a very retaliatory way.”

JULIAN J. GIORDANO — CRIMSON PHOTOGRAPHER

CLOSURES FROM PAGE 1

Harvard Sues Ex-Professor Gino for Defamation

research misconduct.

BY EVAN H.C. EPSTEIN

Harvard sued behavioral scientist Francesca Gino for defamation in August, alleging the former Harvard Business School professor sent the school a falsified dataset to prove she did not commit data fraud.

The University’s lawyers accused Gino of modifying a spreadsheet on her laptop, then manually backdating it to 2010, so it would appear that she had been sent false data by another researcher rather than altered it herself.

Gino, who rose to prominence for her work on honesty, was accused in 2021 of manipulating data in four studies. HBS placed her on administrative leave in 2023 after an internal investigation determined she had committed research misconduct, then fired her in May after revoking her tenure.

But Gino has battled Harvard’s penalties in court since August 2023, accusing the University of defaming her, mishandling her tenure review process, and engaging in sex-based discrimination against her in violation of Title IX and Title VII policies.

Now, Harvard is turning the tables on Gino. In its counterclaim, filed on Aug. 18, the University alleged that she falsely accused HBS of ignoring exonerating evidence in its investigation process. But that evidence, Harvard claimed, was “invented out of thin air.” Harvard has asked the judge in the case to award an unspecified amount in damages.

In a filing this summer, Gino accused the University of suing her as retaliation for her lawsuit. She denied Harvard’s claims in a response filed Wednesday — maintaining that she had indeed found a file that would show her innocence, and that she did not know whether Harvard had reviewed it — and asked the judge to dismiss the counterclaim.

The data in question was gathered in a study that Gino conducted in 2010, which would later become the subject of the first public accusations that she fabricated data.

In the study, Gino and colleagues asked participants to fill out a tax form and sign it either at the top of the page, at the bottom, or not at all. The study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2012, found that participants who signed the paper at the top were more likely to complete the form honestly.

The study’s results were generated based on a dataset that Gino’s team published on the research collaboration platform Open Science Framework. But both external researchers and an HBS investigation concluded that the dataset was likely altered, and Gino’s findings could not be generated from the raw data collected during the study.

When HBS first began investigating Gino in fall 2021, the school sequestered material from two of her computers, including her HBS-issued laptop.

A search of the sequestered files in 2023 found several versions of the dataset.

Three were sent to Gino by her research assistant: one, containing partial data, on July 13; another, named Taxstudy.xlsx and containing a full version of the newly collected raw data, on July 16; and a third file, from July 27, that matched the July 16 spreadsheet.

The laptop also included a file, also called Taxstudy.xlsx, that was identical to the July 16 dataset and had been saved by Gino on July 17. None of the four files matched the altered dataset that was posted to the OSF website and apparently used to produce the study results.

Throughout the investigation process, Gino maintained that someone else had passed her falsified data, which she had unwittingly used in the published study. According to Harvard’s complaint, she never mentioned possessing another copy of the data during the HBS inquiry.

But in fall 2023, half a year after the HBS inquiry found she had committed research misconduct, Gino began to publicly claim that Harvard had ignored another version of the dataset, which she referred to as the “July 16 OG file” and said would prove her innocence. In a post on her blog, she wrote that the July 16 file contained the raw data she had used to produce the study — and was consistent with the OSF dataset, unlike the spreadsheets from her

RA that Harvard had reviewed.

The next year, as HBS pursued an investigation into her tenure status, Gino alleged the school had botched its extraction of material from her laptop, according to Harvard’s counterclaim. She told Harvard that she had hired a “proper forensic expert” to copy the materials on her laptop in January 2024, and she subsequently turned over a partially redacted version of the copy to HBS, according to the counterclaim.

When HBS’s research integrity officer examined the copy, he found that the July 17 dataset was gone, replaced by a file with the same name — but different contents, according to Harvard’s complaint. The new file was formatted like raw data but instead contained the OSF dataset, Harvard alleged.

HBS determined that the file was last saved on Sept. 23, 2023, but had been intentionally backdated to appear as if it was last modified on July 17, 2010.

In its August complaint against Gino, Harvard alleged that the file was intended to mislead investigators or the public into believing she had been sent altered data by an RA, rather than manipulating it herself.

“Upon information and belief, the 2023 Cover-Up File represents an abortive attempt by Professor Gino to intentionally manufacture evidence that would appear to exonerate her, which she later planned to and did disclose as the ‘July 16 OG file,’” Harvard’s lawyers wrote.

According to Harvard’s complaint, Gino refused to turn over the MacOS Terminal logs that HBS believed would show how she had manipulated metadata to backdate the file, citing attorney-client privilege.

Gino also removed her fall 2023 blog post describing the “July 16 OG file” after being contacted by Harvard about the discrepancies.

Harvard’s lawyers argued in the counterclaim that the University “suffered reputational dam-

age and economic losses” as a result of what they called Gino’s false statements.

Gino “impugned and discredited members of the Investigation Committee, eroded internal trust in investigation processes, and damaged external confidence in the Harvard processes for assessing claims of research misconduct,” the University’s lawyers wrote.

But in claiming that the investigation into her work was full of holes, Gino has lodged complaints that extend far beyond whether Harvard properly reviewed the disputed dataset. In her lawsuit and on her website, she has alleged that Harvard violated their usual tenure revocation proceedings, having created a new “interim policy” just for Gino’s case, kept her in the dark about the charges levied against her, and administered overly harsh punishments. Her case has found sympathy with some of her colleagues, including seven HBS faculty who wrote an anonymous op-ed in The Crimson in October 2023 defending her. They concurred that Harvard “violated its norms” and put unfair restrictions on Gino’s ability to defend herself.

Over the summer, two Harvard faculty members submitted declarations supporting Gino in her lawsuit. HBS professor Gary P. Pisano alleged that school administrators had instructed him not to communicate with Gino about the research misconduct allegations when they first surfaced, and that the school had failed to give her sufficient time to defend herself during its investigation.

Harvard Law School professor L. Lawrence Lessig accused HBS of giving Gino short shrift in its investigation, writing that the school interviewed only two of the 66 RAs that she had worked with and did not consult other research staff.

evan.epstein@thecrimson.com graham.lee@thecrimson.com

GRANTS FROM PAGE 1

administrators received guidance from the Office of the General Counsel, Harvard’s legal team, according to one PAF in attendance.

Since the Supreme Court struck down the consideration of race in college admissions policies, universities’ diversity and affinity programs have been under more legal scrutiny. The Trump administration has argued that the affirmative action ruling makes any race-conscious college programming illegal.

Full-time staff at the centers were left wondering what titles they held after the new Harvard Foundation website appeared, but without job titles or descriptions for its employees. Several students who relied on the centers for employment or support said they spent the summer worrying whether the services would be there in the fall.

College spokesperson Jonathan Palumbo declined to comment for this article.

After the College removed the websites for the three offices, a group of 20 office interns and affinity group leaders cosigned a letter to the center directors, University President Alan M. Garber ’76, and Harvard Secretary Suzanne Glassburn inquiring about the future of the offices.

“We are writing out of urgent concern regarding the direction and future of the Office of BGLTQ Student Life, the Harvard Foundation for Intercultural and Race Relations, and the Women’s Center,” they wrote. “While this message is written respectfully and in good faith, it is driven by a collective sense of confusion, frustration, and concern. Right now, many of us feel unsupported, and even worse, invisible.”

“I asked very basic questions, like, ‘What’s changing?’ ‘What was the rationale behind the dissolution of the three offices?’ ‘What’s the reporting structure within your office?’ ‘If students have a problem within the community, do we go to you?’” Johnson-Visio said, adding that Mauro’s answers only added to his confusion.

The diversity offices have since lost designated spaces in freshman dorms, and the more than 30 former center interns have been asked to apply to new roles in the Harvard Foundation. Deming only announced the creation of the Office of Culture and Community to the full undergraduate body on Sept. 2, the first day of classes — without mentioning the closing of the former offices.

“As you have likely heard, the Dean of Students Office has undertaken incredible work figuring out how we can support our entire community during these fraught times,” he wrote. Olivia F. Data ’26, a former communications intern at the Women’s Center who has been in regular communication with center directors, said she did not know whether all of the interns would regain their jobs.

“There is not any answer for how many positions will be open, or what the positions will do and be responsible for,” she said.

“Short answer, I don’t have a job,” Data added. “Long answer, I don’t know what that future will look like.”

Eli Johnson-Visio ’26, co-president of the Harvard Queer Students Association and the author of the letter, said the group’s signatories did not receive a response until more than a week after Deming’s July 23 announcement, when Braimah offered him an opportunity to schedule a meeting with Alta Mauro, Associate Dean of Students for Culture and Community.

Agencies Begin Issuing Grant Reinstatements to Harvard

“Given that we are still not receiving payments, please continue to follow the bridging plans that have been established in partnership with your departments,” HSPH Executive Dean of Administration Kate Calvin wrote.

Spokespeople for the White House and the nine federal agencies whose awards to Harvard were frozen in May did not immediately respond to a request for comment on their plans to reinstate funding. The planned reinstatement was first reported by the New York Times. In her decision last Wednesday, Burroughs ruled that the Trump administration’s freeze on funding was an illegal, and retaliatory, response to Harvard’s decision to reject federal

demands. She enjoined the governments from carrying out its freeze orders and funding termination notices — though the timeline for funding reinstatement remained unclear.

Burroughs also granted Harvard a permanent injunction preventing the Trump administration from reimposing unconstitutional conditions on its funding in the future, giving researchers and faculty renewed hope that shuttered labs would be revived.

But within hours of the ruling, the Trump administration vowed to appeal Burroughs’ ruling, though it has yet to formally file in court. Without intervention from an appeals court, agencies were required to resume the ordinary processing of funds previously

halted by the freezes. The Wednesday move to begin restoring grants is not the first time that federal agencies have issued notices of awards to Harvard researchers. In July, the NIH began allocating some grants to Harvard to comply with a federal court ruling, according to internal documents reviewed by The Crimson. But officials from the Department of Government Efficiency, a government cost-cutting group, wielded their control over the NIH’s grant disbursal system to quietly block the funds from reaching Harvard until it reached a settlement with the White House.

Harvard filed a counterclaim against former Business School professor Francesca Gino, accusing her of manufacturing evidence to prove she did not commit data fraud. KAITLYN M. RABINOVITZ — CRIMSON PHOTOGRAPHER

CHARLES K. MICHAEL — CRIMSON PHOTOGRAPHER

Harvard Cancels TimelyCare Appointments

Students were informed their psychiatry appointments had been canceled after Harvard hit an annual cap on visits.

Harvard canceled psychiatry appointments for students through TimelyCare — a telehealth platform that provides free mental health services — for the month of September because the University hit a contractual limit on annual visits.

Students who had already scheduled TimelyCare appointments for September were offered the option to transition to Harvard University Health Services’ Counseling and Mental Health Services psychiatrists for the month.

According to HUHS spokesperson Tiffanie A. Green, students will once again be able to book psychiatric appointments through TimelyCare beginning in October.

Harvard’s partnership with the TimelyCare platform, which began in 2022, provides each student who has paid the Student

Health Fee with up to 12 therapy sessions, limited psychiatry appointments, and unlimited counseling sessions every academic year.

But the University’s contract with TimelyCare includes only a limited number of total psychiatric visits each academic year — and that cap was reached in July.

The pause on TimelyCare psychiatry appointments took students who use the service by surprise.

A senior at Harvard College who was trying to schedule a psychiatric appointment on TimelyCare after an initial consultation last semester received a “service not available” message on the TimelyCare portal. When the student — who was granted anonymity to discuss sensitive medical information — called the TimelyCare customer support line, they were informed that Harvard had run out of its allotted number of psychiatry appointments. In a subsequent email, which the student shared with The Crimson, a TimelyCare psychiatry care manager told them that “due to a limited number of available visits, psychiatry appointments will not be offered in September.”

The manager added that a

“small number” of appointments are reserved for students with “urgent needs.”

Appointments for sessions with therapists through TimelyCare will still be available throughout September. But students seeking support from psychiatrists, medical doctors who can prescribe psychiatric medications, will have to turn elsewhere.

Green wrote in a statement that “CAMHS clinical staff works in partnership with TimelyCare clinical staff on an ongoing basis to ensure there are no gaps in care for patients.”

CAMHS services, like TimelyCare, are free to students who pay the Student Health Fee, and all students can schedule initial consultations with CAMHS through the HUHS Patient Portal.

A junior at Harvard College who has been seeing a TimelyCare psychiatrist since last fall said they booked an appointment last semester for the beginning of September.

They received an email on Aug. 27 from a TimelyCare psychiatry care manager notifying them that their September appointment was canceled. The student was notified in the email that their TimelyCare appoint-

ment would be transitioned to a CAMHS psychiatrist and was contacted the next day by a CAMHS access clinician regarding the transition.

The junior, who was also granted anonymity to discuss medical information, said that they preferred TimelyCare visits, as they can usually schedule an appointment a week or two in advance compared to CAMHS’ longer wait times.

The senior who was unable to book a September appointment said they were concerned that temporarily transferring services to CAMHS would lead to an interruption in their care because psychiatrists are not “interchangeable.”

“For someone like me who’s taking medication and has somebody who’s familiar with my situation over the course of many months, I can’t just meet with a CAMHS psychiatrist because it’s not the same person who understands my situation,” said the student.

Harvard Students Experience Lower Rates of Mental Illness, Per Survey

Harvard students reported better mental health — including lower rates of anxiety and depression — than their peers nationwide, according to results from a University-wide survey released Tuesday.

The data, gathered in spring 2025 from degree-seeking students across all of Harvard’s schools, showed that student use of mental health services increased over the past academic year, with initial consultations at Counseling and Mental Health Services rising by 14 percentage points compared to the previous year.

Harvard’s survey was part of a nationwide network, called Healthy Minds, run by the University of Michigan that includes more than 100 other universities. The study, which yielded a response rate of 25 percent, was based on a sample of nearly 6,000 students across the University.

Harvard students reported experiencing flourishing at rates that were roughly 10 percentage points higher than among the national sample — symptoms of depression, anxiety, and suicidality at rates that were roughly 10 percentage points lower. A similar but slightly lower proportion of Harvard students screened positively for disordered eating, compared to the national sample. Harvard students also engaged in binge drinking at slightly higher levels.

In an email sent out to Harvard affiliates Tuesday afternoon, Associate Provost for Student Affairs Robin T. Glover and Associate Provost for Campus Health and Wellbeing Giang T. Nguyen wrote that “significant progress” has been made since the University released a capstone report on student mental health in July 2020.

The 2025 survey shows 22 percent of Harvard students reported signs of depression, and 23 percent reported experiencing anxiety. 7 percent of students reported having suicidal thoughts.

In a 2018 survey of Harvard College, 30 percent of undergradu-

ates reported believing they had an anxiety disorder and 31 percent said they believed they might have depression. The report released on Thursday did not provide school-specific breakdowns.

The survey conducted at Harvard also included custom questions designed to gauge whether students felt “impostor syndrome,” or a sense that their accomplishments are undeserved, even if they have evidence to the contrary. More than 60 percent of respondents said they felt their peers were more intelligent than themselves. Around half indicated they were afraid that other students would discover how much knowledge or ability they lacked.

The portion of Harvard students feeling imposter syndrome was also high in 2020, when 61 percent of undergraduates and between 49.4 percent and 78.9 percent of graduate students reported feeling like an imposter.

But more than 80 percent of students surveyed in the spring said they felt a positive sense of belonging on campus. More than half of students felt connected to campus life, but 45 percent said they felt isolated.

The final portion of the survey examined whether Harvard students were aware of University-provided mental health resources. Harvard students reported more knowledge of the services available to them compared to the

national average, with 89 percent saying they were aware of the University’s resources.

But lack of time was a significant barrier for students who indicated they accessed fewer mental health services than they needed, despite receiving some care. Among Harvard students who said they received less care than needed, 38 percent cited lack of time, compared to 33 percent nationally.

Financial reasons were the next most common barrier among this group, with 33 percent of Harvard students — compared to 27 percent nationally — citing high expenses or a lack of insurance coverage.

Harvard University Health Services Senior Director of Student Mental Health Barbara Lewis told the Harvard Gazette, a University-run publication, that she was surprised to learn students reported financial barriers to care.

“Many of the services and support we offer to students are actually free of charge, so we feel we have some education to do around that piece,” she said.

Out of Harvard’s mental health resources, Harvard students utilize CAMHS the most, while TimelyCare — a third-party platform that provides mental health care counseling — was used the least. Roughly a quarter of students reported knowing about TimelyCare indicated that they used its services. The University launched the TimelyCare platform in 2022 in

partnership with TimelyMD, an online health and wellbeing platform. The platform allows Harvard students to access 12 free virtual therapy sessions every year.

The University has also added additional mental health resources in recent years, including CAMHS Cares, a 24/7 mental health care hotline launched 2021. CAMHS has also recently developed a clinical access team, which consists of licensed clinicians who refer students to appropriate mental health resources.

While the weekslong wait time to get a therapy appointment was previously a concern, Lewis told the Gazette that the team has “dramatically shortened wait times to access services.”

Glover and Nguyen wrote in their email to Harvard affiliates that the University will work on addressing the mental health concerns survey participants reported the most, including isolation, imposter syndrome, and binge drinking

“We need to continue our outreach to remind students of the services that are offered and to emphasize that they can get the care that they need in a timely manner,” Glover told the Gazette. “We may need to do some work about emphasizing specific services and consider different forms of outreach.”

Harvard Athletics will begin its fall 2025 season with a hit to its revenue as the National College Athletic Association pays off a nearly $2.8 billion settlement with former college athletes who were unable to participate in lucrative brand deals over the past 10 years.

Alongside other schools outside the Power Five conferences, Harvard Athletics will lose up to 1 to 2 percent of its revenue over the next 10 years, according to an NCAA spokesperson. For Harvard, the loss would amount to approximately half a million dollars over ten years.

Harvard receives roughly $900,000 a year from the NCAA, according to publicly available tax filings. The money makes up a small fraction of the more than $43 million that Harvard receives in annual revenue.

Harvard Athletics spokesperson Imry Halevi declined to comment on how much funding

Harvard will lose as part of the settlement.

The NCAA’s settlement came five years after the association was sued by Arizona State University swimmer Grant House and Texas Christian University basketball player Sedona Prince for prohibiting athletes from profiting off of the use of their name, image, and likeness in brand deals.

House and Prince alleged in their class-action suit that the NCAA’s longstanding ban on direct NIL payments to athletes was a violation of antitrust law. When the Supreme Court ruled unanimously in 2021 to require athletic associations to permit athletes to make NIL deals, the NCAA found itself under pressure — and eventually agreed to cough up billions of dollars in back pay over the next decade to former college athletes, including House and Prince, who played from 2016 to June of 2025. Universities that chose to participate in the settlement will now be allowed by the NCAA to share NIL revenue with athletes but will face NCAA roster caps that limit the size of their teams. The Ivy

League opted out of the settlement in January and pledged not to pay athletes directly.

But that doesn’t mean Harvard is unaffected. To fund the damages, the NCAA is reducing funds distributed to all Division I schools — including those which, like Harvard, opted out of the settlement.

The Ivy League’s hesitance to embrace NIL has already caused anxiety for Harvard coaches who have lost star players to schools that made it easier for athletes to receive compensation. Before direct revenue sharing became widespread over the summer, most schools paid athletes instead through private booster organizations, called collectives.

At Harvard, which never established an NIL collective, the absence of athlete pay drew concern from alumni about Harvard’s ability to attract and retain talent. Now, the expansion of NIL across the country could raise further challenges for Harvard teams’ competitiveness outside of the Ivy League.

Over the past two years, Harvard has lost a number of athletes to other schools that offer more lu-

crative NIL opportunities. In 2024, Harvard’s men’s basketball team lost both star freshman Malik O. Mack and junior Chisom Okpara to Georgetown University and Stanford University, respectively. And just last year, Cooper H. Barkate ’25 — a core member of Harvard football’s offensive team — made the decision to graduate early and complete his collegiate athletic career at Duke University.

Richard Kent, a sports lawyer and sports law professor, said Harvard’s recruitment may continue to take hits as, increasingly, athletes at other institutions are paid by their schools.

“Are we going to see an exodus from Ivy League schools in a lot of sports in March, April, and May? That’s the real question,” Kent said, predicting that the answer would be “yes.”

Halevi wrote in a statement that Harvard Athletics prioritizes both academics and athletics at the highest level.

“We emphasize competitive excellence alongside principled leadership, and that combination continues to resonate strongly with

prospective student-athletes,” Halevi wrote.

The settlement comes with a number of additional changes that apply to all Division I schools, including ones that opted out of the settlement like Harvard.

Alongside the settlement come new reporting regulations for NCAA athletes as well. The NCAA launched NIL Go, a platform where athletes are required to report any deals that surpass $600.

According to Halevi, Harvard’s NCAA athletes will use NIL Go to report their earnings. But athletes in the College’s non-NCAA varsity sports — sailing, squash, and men’s heavyweight and lightweight rowing — will continue reporting their earnings to Harvard via the Influencer app, which also houses the NIL pairing platform where athletes can find deals.

But the regulatory landscape around athlete payments remains unstable, with ongoing litigation and intervention from the Trump administration.

With estimates suggesting that the majority of NIL revenue will go to a small subset of sports, includ-

ing football, the practice could face challenges from women athletes who expect to be shortchanged. A group of female athletes has already contested the NCAA’s settlement with House and Prince on Title IX grounds.

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign law professor Michael H. LeRoy, a sports lawyer, said he expects that schools will see an increasing number of Title IX lawsuits around athlete compensation. Schools that spend more on football and men’s basketball — like those in the Big Ten and larger conferences — may find themselves under fire for inequitably distributing resources, LeRoy said. On July 24, President Donald Trump signed an executive order mandating that schools, including Harvard, that received less than $50 million in athletic revenue during the 2024-25 athletic season “should not disproportionately reduce scholarship opportunities or roster spots for sports based on the revenue that the sport generates.

Counseling and Mental Health Services is located in the Smith Center. SHERA S. AVI-YONAH

DEI Failed at Harvard. So Will the Rebrand.

Harvard affiliates, making diversity something to display rather than embody.

Harvard has outsourced diversity to the thesaurus.

This summer, Harvard College swapped the language of diversity, equity, and inclusion for the language of “culture and community,” closing the Harvard College Women’s Center and BGLTQ spaces, only vaguely promising to keep services unchanged. DEI might have failed at Harvard, but without increased transparency, the cautiously-worded rebrand will suffer a similar fate.

We understand the old project of diversity — DEI as practiced here — to have often been performative and corporate. Like a suspiciously pluralistic brochure, it sometimes capitalized on the identities of

Nonetheless, Harvard’s former DEI offices offered real resources. The Office for BGLTQ Student Life previously provided information for relevant students regarding how to operate Harvard’s housing system or receive certain forms of healthcare. The First-Year Retreat and Experience seeks to provide stable footing for first-generation and low-income students.

Harvard’s previous DEI network was probably imperfect. But it was clear that resources were manifold and accessible, and they were likely a boon to underrepresented students from those backgrounds.

Now, the rage at the College is “viewpoint diversity,” exemplified in its Intellectual Vitality initiative and DEI rebrand. We agree with the premise: the academic mission requires engaging with diverse perspectives. But as Harvard’s institutional emphasis on diversity shifts to the intellectual, students from

backgrounds affected by the DEI purge may find themselves unsupported.

On these terms, the new project is failing. The Harvard Foundation, the new destination for many previous DEI office staffers, describes its programming in the language of viewpoint diversity rather than identity, hoping to “encourage dialogue across difference” and “facilitate peer-to-peer learning.”

Such language suggests a function distinct from previous DEI offices.

Without further clarity on function or an explanation of how former services would be affected the Foundation’s supposed beneficiaries — may rightly wonder: What will the Foundation actually do?

By collapsing identity-specific offices into an opaque umbrella organization and shuttering dedicated spaces, the University has traded targeted capacity for vague promise. As students contend with the new system, they may face delays, a lack of resources, and dead URLs. Students who have specific needs once had equally specific staffed offices and designated proctors. No longer.

The harm is not evenly distributed. For some first-generation and low-income students, LGBTQ students, women, and students of color, identity support is a precondition for the fullest campus experience.

The University might argue that resources still exist — somewhere, lost amidst the alphabet soup. That misses the point. Access requires legibility: names, rooms, pages, and people that students can actually find.

Worse, the new “diversity” picks winners. Veterans and FGLI students remain clearly centered with visible structures and staff — support we applaud — while race, gender, and sexuality barely appear on the Office of Culture and Community’s website. Some groups get to keep their institutional scaffolding — so long as it’s politically expedient.

The timing, tone, and rollout of the DEI shift all feel less like conviction to “intellectual diversity” than compliance with a belligerent Washington. For

Dissent: Much Ado About Nothing

BY HENRY P. MOSS

This summer, Harvard took the sensible step of consolidating and renaming its prolific Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion offices — and the Editorial Board thinks the sky is falling down. What happened when Facebook rebranded to Meta? Were avid users suddenly left in the lurch? Of course not. But in true “Chicken Little” fashion, my colleagues on the Editorial Board surmise that DEI as we know it is coming to an end.

I surely would not complain if that were the case. But, alas, the folding of several of the College’s DEI offices into the Harvard Foundation — a part of the newly rebranded Office of Culture and Community — is nothing more than a cosmetic makeover. First of all, we know too little about what is actually changing to kick up a fuss. Full-time staff weren’t laid off. Websites have been temporarily removed or rehashed, but that does not mean that they won’t be relocated to another domain — just like the physical offices. If anything, this is to be expected — while I am certainly no computer whiz, it seems entirely unremarkable that it would take time to set up new, well-designed websites.

The most significant changes to date have been slight alterations to two pre-orientation programs that serve less than 300 incoming freshmen — less than a fifth of the class. These programs are no longer as social-justice-warrior-focused as the Board desires — but the freshmen participating appear to have not minded the changes. Moreover, the switch from affinity spaces in the First-Year Retreat and Experience to cultural experiences open to everyone should not come as a surprise, given that the University recently stopped funding affinity graduations, a move that the Board supported.

On a more fundamental level, the Editorial Board appears to lament that Harvard’s DEI rebrand focuses on certain groups but not others. Yet these complaints ring eerily hollow: The Board is just disappointed that its favored groups are no longer receiving special treatment. I guess it doesn’t feel so good when the shoe is on the other foot.

Although admittedly anecdotal, my experience suggests that most students would greet this news — assuming they are even aware of it in the first place — with indifference. DEI might be sacrosanct in certain circles on campus — not least the Editorial Board — but its broader popularity is far less certain than the Board would like you to believe. In fact, I would

find it hard to believe that anything more than a miniscule fraction of students interacted with these offices to begin with. With Harvard locked in grave legal and political battles, is this really the hill we want to die on? According to the Editorial Board, yes.

In the end, all we can do is wait and see. I would be shocked if Harvard substantially altered its pro-

months, federal pressure made “ending DEI” a condition for normalcy, a context Deming seemed to acknowledge in a recent presentation to Peer Advising Fellows. If the College truly believed this shift advanced its mission, it would say so plainly and show, in detail, what remains and how to access it. Instead, the messaging has been evasive. During the same presentation, Deming said he assumed attendees would understand the need to change certain DEI programming.

Swapping signage and sanding down language resolves neither politics nor the needs of students. The University’s word salad rollout and silent closures read like an effort to bury both the lede and the ledger at once. Transparency is a prerequisite for accountability, and Harvard has chosen neither. Harvard cannot cave to Washington and keep students whole by wordsmithing and selective silence. If the College insists on “culture and community,” it must pair the rhetoric with clear public services, staffed and resourced. Absent that, the OCC will merely inherit the worst of DEI’s reputation: symbolism without substance. DEI as Harvard practiced it fell short, but giving it a hasty,

tections for minority students — it shouldn’t, it hasn’t, and it won’t. DEI rebranding does not equal sacrificing the menstrual products in men’s restrooms. I’m not holding my breath for that to happen.

On cold and gusty winter afternoons last year, I rushed down to the Canaday Hall basement. I would plop on a soft couch cushion, and for the first time in hours, take a deep breath. As my mind and body thawed from the pressures of the world above, I would start to feel normal again.

My freshman routine had one consistent stop: the Women’s Center. It was the place in the Yard where I felt the safest.

Now that the space is gone, I’m left wondering about what my first-year self would have done — and what this means for campus affinity spaces in the future. I’m sure generations of Harvard feminists are also wondering what’s next.

Now is the time to prioritize action over disappointment: This change necessitates creative solutions from students and faculty to maintain what the Women’s Center provided for me and so many others on campus.

With the closing of the Women’s Center, the Harvard community loses unique resources and a space acknowledging Harvard’s history of excluding women. For much of the 20th century, women were consigned to studying at Radcliffe College, the separate women’s college, and taught primarily by male professors. In fact, Harvard and Radcliffe didn’t officially merge until the turn of this century. Yes, this century.

Today, Harvard’s history of sexism continues to permeate campus culture in subtle ways. Many final clubs — selective social groups that were historically male-only — maintain gender separation. Our language surrounding Housing Day depicts the Quad —

which originally housed only Radcliffe students — as a far away, worse residential situation.

Despite women making up a majority of the undergraduate population, they comprise only 39 percent of the faculty in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, as of 2022. Further, the number of women tenure-track faculty has decreased in recent years, and female faculty are, on average, expected to retire earlier than their male colleagues.

A campus space dedicated to women’s issues implicitly acknowledges both the barriers that women have overcome in higher education and the work that we still have left to fully dismantle them.

This work is threatened by the Trump administration, which has targeted universities’ diversity, equity, and inclusion programs on the premise that they unfairly discriminate. The notion that honoring women’s history and advancement in higher education is a form of illegal discrimination only underscores the need for Harvard women’s history now more than ever.

In light of the loss of Women’s Center programs, the College should offer courses promoting Radcliffe’s history and functions. Harvard can also work with the Institute to expand its academic opportunities like the Radcliffe Research Partnerships. It is imperative that the University highlight a crucial, if undervalued, part of its history that continues to influence how Harvard functions today.

But the University can’t stop at academic solutions. Without the Women’s Center, students lose a space for self-care and wellbeing.

True, some resources, like contraceptives, are still available through Harvard University Health Services at the Smith Campus Center. But that still presents a barrier to access — I doubt that many students will feel comfortable strolling up to a corporate-style reception

desk and asking where the condoms are. And while Harvard offers mental health resources through Harvard University Health Services and peer counseling services, offices like the Women’s Center are a critical, informal access point. They serve as — literal — infrastructure for support-seeking on a campus that can be very overwhelming.

Calling Harvard’s Counseling and Mental Health Services for formal consultation can be intimidating, and students can easily get lost navigating the maze of Harvard’s options for physical and mental support. I know that accessing resources from a soft couch cushion in the quiet of a warm room makes it a little better. It is therefore crucial for students, faculty, and staff to hold Harvard accountable and ensure that the resources it provides through the new Office of Culture and Community meet the same needs that the Women’s Center used to.

Everyone must apply pressure for the University to supplement the removal of affinity programs — whether that be through intentional academic offerings, community events, or publicized resources. No student should be left behind by the new framework of inclusion and belonging (supposedly) for everyone. It is disappointingly clear that the removal of the Women’s Center came in response to outside pressures on Harvard. Now that it is done, I’m choosing not to cry over it. Instead, the Harvard community should focus on what comes next. When I came to Harvard, I was fortunate that the University offered crucial support through the Women’s Center. I hope the same kind of resources are still available when I leave.

EDITORIAL 10

Harvard Must Confront Trump’s Demands for What They Are

BY BENJAMIN ISAAC

Harvard is in a tough spot. The White House tried to freeze $2.6 billion in funding, and while the University won an initial legal victory, the clash is far from over. And as the MAGA world ratchets up the pressure on Harvard to bend the knee, liberal America warns desperately of the consequences of surrender.

Many affiliates have urged the University not to sign a deal and to reverse recent changes seemingly made in response to pressure from the Trump administration. Rather than directly criticizing these moves, detractors have treated their apparent motivation — appeasement — as per se evidence that the moves are bad.

This isn’t to say that concerns about appeasement as a strategy aren’t important. But too often, we’re getting bogged down in a misdirected meta-debate about Harvard’s motives, and it’s keeping us from seeing the bigger picture. Instead of arguing about why Harvard makes the choices it does, we should focus first and foremost on the merits of its actions.

Take a few recent examples: replacing the Harvard College Women’s Center and other DEI offices with the “Office of Culture and Community,” cutting ties with Birzeit University in the West Bank, or dismissing the directors of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies.These changes have earned the University tremendous criticism on and off campus for appeasing an aspiring authoritarian and compromising its integrity. But when every change is dismissed summarily as appeasement, we fail to ask fundamental questions. How should our DEI offices function? How should we balance the interests of free speech with the interests of student groups feeling safe and welcome on campus? How can we balance a desire for ideological diversity with the reality of educational polarization? These should be our primary considerations when evaluating Harvard’s actions. While unconditional surrender would legitimize Trump’s antidemocratic tactics, the University’s procedural defenses are better left for the courts. In public debate, it’s counterproductive to argue only about authority. We must be able to say not just that Trump’s methods are bad, but that his goals are undesirable.

Directly addressing MAGA’s critique of Harvard and higher education means being honest where they have a point. It has been often remarked that Trump has a nose for real problems, even when the solutions he proposes are reprehensible, and his feud with Harvard is no exception. There have been legitimate left-illiberal excesses on campus. Our student body and faculty are overwhelm -

ingly to the left of the country, and our course offerings and research reflect that. The Jewish community has credible grievances about being treated with a double standard. More broadly, higher education must reckon with the fact that it has lost the trust and faith of the American public. There is plenty that Harvard can and should do to address these critiques that is good on the merits. For example, the administration’s increased emphasis on intellectual diversity and civil discourse, while imperfectly implemented, is certainly worthwhile. Acknowledging the merit of these truths does not mean conceding to Trump; it means refusing

to let him monopolize the critique of higher education. The best way to win in the public eye is to seize the high ground by engaging in serious reflection and making appropriate changes. And if they improve the University’s stance vis-à-vis Trump, it certainly wouldn’t hurt.

But this is not just about survival. By abstracting from the merits and defending Harvard’s behavior only on the grounds of pressure, we deny ourselves a generational opportunity to reimagine how the University can best fulfill its mission.

The real danger for Harvard is not reforming under pressure, but defending itself only on the grounds of pressure. If we let “who gets to tell

Harvard what to do” replace “what should Harvard actually do,” we cede the substance of the debate. It’s hardly capitulation for Harvard to say that this tense political moment has revealed some institutional shortcomings and we’re working to improve them. Is now a suspect time to do it? Yes. The best time to make these reforms would have been a decade ago. But the second-best time is now.

’27,

–Benjamin

Harvard Has to Sacrifice Something. It Should Be Funding.

BY M. AUSTEN WYCHE

Harvard finally won. With Judge Allison D. Burroughs ruling that the Trump administration’s freezing of over $2.6 billion in research funding was unconstitutional, the University scored a major legal victory against the White House. However, Burroughs, an appointee of former United States President Barack Obama, will likely not be the last judge to hear our case. As such, Harvard should prepare to lose something. Whether it is academic freedom, research

funding, diversity on campus, or another integral function of our University, we are unlikely to walk away from this fight without making some major concessions. That concession ought to be our funding. If we are going to lose our money anyway, it is better to cede it up front rather than sacrifice our values alongside our cash. For Harvard, the primary question is: should we fight in the courts or settle outside them? The path ahead in the courts doesn’t look promising, but even losing the legal fight is better than giving in. Let’s start with the legal landscape.

Upon hearing the news of Burrough’s decision, the Trump administration vowed to appeal. Assuming this case follows the normal appellate process, appellate circuit courts, filled by Obama and Biden-appointed judges, will likely decide in favor of Harvard. But after this, the path becomes more treacherous.

Over the past eight months, the Supreme Court greenlit the Trump administration to deport immigrants to countries not in removal orders, ban transgender people from the U.S. military, fire probationary civil servants, and allow DOGE to access Social Security records, among many other controversial measures. Many of these rulings, released on the “shadow docket” with little rationale, have permitted President Donald Trump to unleash a destructive agenda on the American people, democratic institutions, and higher education. If our case comes before the Supreme Court, it doesn’t look good for Harvard.

Still, however, there remains a possibility that the Supreme Court could rule in Harvard’s favor, a case which could set a precedent against federal overreach on higher education and private universities.

If Harvard decides to settle, on the other hand, we may regain the $2.6 billion, but at what cost? Based on previous demands, terms of a settlement could place conditions on research, pressure the institution to cease teaching controversial subjects, or inhibit our ability to enroll international students. Any of these changes would fundamentally denigrate the ability of private institutions to operate without federal intrusion.

Furthermore, it is unclear that we even would retain the funding long-term. Any attempt to capitulate to Trump is self-defeating. Brown University’s agreement with the Trump administration includes clauses permitting the federal government to conduct “compliance review, investigations, or litigation” into perceived violations of Students for Fair Admissions at any time. If the Trump administration could whip up a new line of allegations to wring more money out of higher education, why should we take them at their word that they won’t?

At the end of the day, Harvard will either have to settle with the Trump administration and sacrifice the values of our institution, or fight back and maintain our values. I would much rather us fight and lose than capitulate and lose. Harvard, and academia as a whole, will lose more if Harvard decides to settle. When no institution of higher education is willing — or able — to push back against the Trump Administration, it is our responsibility as the nation’s wealthiest university to fight back. In these trying times, it is the responsibility of students and affiliates to resist federal concessions in any way possible. Relinquishing our responsibility to defend higher education will come at great cost to the next generation of leaders. If we must give up something in this fight, let it be our funding, not our values.

an

FRANK S. ZHOU— CRIMSON PHOTOGRAPHER

Wu Takes Lead, Kraft Suspends Campagin

TO NOVEMBER.

Tuesday’s preliminary election narrowed the mayoral field to two — then to one frontrunner.

BY MEGAN L. BLONIGEN CRIMSON STAFF WRITERS

Boston Mayor Michelle Wu

’07 and philanthropist

Josh Kraft will appear on the ballot for mayor in November after the two came out ahead of a crowded pool in Tuesday’s preliminary election.

With 99 percent of votes accounted for, Wu has received roughly 72 percent of the vote, a nearly 50 point lead against Kraft, who has garnered 23 percent. NBC News called the preliminary election for Wu and Kraft shortly after polls closed at 8 p.m. Kraft, Wu’s most plausible challenger, backed out of the race two days later, suspending his campaign on Thursday.

“When I kept looking at the next eight weeks, the negativity, and all that it was going to be about, I realized, ‘wow, I can do more.’ I can make a better impact for the residents of the city of Boston,” Kraft said in an interview with a local news channel, announcing the suspension of his campaign. Community activist Domingos DaRosa and former Boston Police officer Robert Cappucci were also attempting mayoral bids, but only the top two performers from Tuesday’s election

— Wu and Kraft — advanced to the general election on Nov. 4. Wu, a popular sitting mayor who attracted national attention for her testimony before Congress on Boston’s sanctuary city policies, has consistently led her challengers by double digits in opinion polls. A Friday poll released by Emerson College Polling reflected a 50-point lead in her favor.

Kraft, the son of billionaire Patriots owner Robert Kraft, has focused his campaign on his 35year career in Boston, where he has led the Boys and Girls Club of Boston and the New England Patriots Foundation, a non-profit established by his family. He

faced pushback on his lack of a political background since he entered the race in February.

Wu won the mayoral seat in 2021 by a landslide, capturing 64 percent of the vote and becoming the first woman and person of color to lead Boston. She has also received endorsements from U.S. Senators Elizabeth A. Warren (D-Mass.), Ed J. Markey (D-Mass.), and Representative Ayanna S. Pressley (D-Mass.). Warren reacted to the results on X, posting that Wu is “the best mayor in America.”

“No one fights harder for Boston,” Warren added.

Shortly before polls closed at 8 p.m. on Tuesday, Wu held

a rally in Roslindale’s Adams Park to watch results come in and address her supporters. A purple-clad band — the Jamaica Plain Honk Band — serenaded attendees, who played along on maracas. She addressed the crowd later in the night after being introduced by Boston City Council President Ruthzee Louijeune, who is also advancing to the general election in the Boston city council race.

“You sent a message to Josh Kraft, to Donald Trump and to all their enablers,” Wu said to the crowd of more than one hundred people. “Boston is not for sale, and Boston will not be bullied because we stand together.”

Wu thanked DaRosa and Capucci for their work on their own campaigns before throwing pointed jabs at Kraft.

“Boston belongs to all of us, not just those with trust funds,” Wu said. “The mayor of Boston should answer to the people of Boston, not a handful of billionaire donors.”

The two candidates clashed over local issues during their preliminary campaigns. Kraft’s campaign has targeted Wu for her expansion of the city’s bike network and accused her administration of stalling housing construction by slowing the permitting process for developers. He has also taken aim at Wu’s mul-

timillion-dollar plans to rehabilitate White Stadium, attacking the project’s costs and championing local opposition.

Wu’s frequent opposition to the Trump administration has made the mayor a magnet for national attention — and won her favor close to home. Her congressional testimony earlier this year on Boston’s immigration enforcement brought her widespread support as she stood her ground against the House Oversight Committee’s questioning.

On Monday, Wu said the city would pursue legal action against the Trump administration if its most recent immigration enforcement raid — Operation Patriot 2.0, the newest federal immigration surge — violates any laws.

“Boston, we’ve dealt with mad kings before,” she said during the rally. “We don’t take orders from tyrants — not in 1775, and

CPS Election Rundown City Council Candidates Embrace the Cambridge Community Land Trust

BY AYAAN AHMAD AND CLAIRE A. MICHAL CRIMSON STAFF WRITERS

Cambridge is gearing up for November’s School Committee elections, which will close out a twoyear term marked by significant — and often contentious — decisions. Now, parents want a seat at the table.

Cambridge’s seven-member School Committee, which shapes education policy across the district, is facing its liveliest race in years. Eighteen candidates — the most in two decades — are competing for seats, with all but one incumbent running again. The majority of the 13 challengers are parents who are no longer content to sit on the sidelines. Over the past two years, the current School Committee has presided over some of the district’s most important and divisive changes, including the firing of a superintendent and the closure of a school.

Last year, committee members voted to remove then-Superintendent Victoria L. Greer amid growing concerns about her management style, appointing interim superintendent David G. Murphy in July 2024.

Greer’s resignation received mixed reactions from the public, and many parents felt that they were left in the dark about the decision after receiving minimal communication from the district.

Lilly Havstad, one of the candidates and a CPS parent, said that Greer’s resignation was an “important moment that woke up a lot of people to the dysfunction in our School Committee and the district.”

The district is currently searching for its next superintendent, a process that has received considerable criticism from the public. Last month, the Cambridge Education Association — the union representing teachers and staff in the district — released a statement calling for the search to be restarted with more public input, and to vote in new committee members.

“It is clear we need to elect new School Committee members,” union leaders wrote. During public comment at a School Committee meeting last week, nine residents — including four challengers — condemned the search process, many supporting the CEA’s request for it to be halted entirely. Many challengers have said that Greer’s removal and the superintendent search reflects the current

committee’s shortcomings — especially a lack of transparency, public trust, and meaningful engagement.

“Those three things have all contributed to the sense of a lack of transparency. And I think that’s the reason you see 18 candidates this year,” challenger Arjun K. Jaikumar said.

Months after Greer was ousted, Murphy recommended and facilitated the closure of the Kennedy-Longfellow School, which suffered from persistent under enrollment and under performance.

CPS faced immense backlash after the closure, as K-Lo parents alleged the district failed the school and its majority high-needs students — English language learners, low income students, and individuals with disabilities.

Both Anne M. Coburn and JiaJing Lee have children who attended K-Lo before its closure — an important motivating factor in their decision to run.

“Watching Kennedy-Longfellow be ignored for years when it was the single most diverse school in the entire district in the entire state, with 85 percent high-needs students, it felt like now is a good time to start trying to act,” Coburn said. “I want to make the things I believe in happen.”

Another area driving challengers is the disparity in educational outcomes for high-needs students. Many felt that the closure of K-Lo highlighted longstanding inequalities in the district — the school served the highest percentage of high-needs students in the district.

Havstad said that as a district we need to take the rising disparities for high-needs children in the district seriously.

“We need to embrace all of this knowledge and expertise and data that we already have and change the way we are running this district, so that teachers have a voice, so that students have a voice, and so that families have a voice at the table,” Havstad said.

Coburn, Jaikumar, Havstad, and Lee all recommended that the School Committee host regular office hours where they are accessible to talk with district affiliates in an effort to increase transparency.

“Educators and families feel left out of the process, that there is a perception of a very top down culture in district leadership that people want changed,” Jaikumar said. Elections will be held on Nov. 4.

ayaan.ahmad@thecrimson.com claire.michal@thecrimson.com

BY DIEGO GARCÍA MORENO AND SUMMER E. ROSE CRIMSON STAFF WRITERS

Challengers seeking seats on the Cambridge City Council are lining up behind a new proposal to address the city’s intractable affordable housing crisis: supporting a nonprofit that plans to buy up land and use it to protect and create low-cost housing.

Three candidates — Ayah Al-Zubi ’23, Dana Bullister, and Stanislav Rivkin, — have championed the work of a nascent nonprofit, the Cambridge Community Land Trust, which plans to acquire land to either build affordable units, maintain existing housing at low prices, or establish new public spaces.

But the CCLT, which was founded in 2021 out of a working group within the Cambridge Housing Justice Coalition, is still getting off the ground. It currently owns no land and is still in the process of filing for tax-exempt status.

Once its paperwork is in place, the CCLT plans to solicit land donations and seek out property to purchase. The CCLT will then own the land while offering affordable housing options through affordable rental units or limited-equity ownership, where residents can earn part of the value of the property if it is sold.

Thus far, according to CCLT board members, six to eight different landowners have expressed interest in donating their land — either as soon as possible or in their wills.

In recent years, Cambridge’s housing costs have soared, with the median home price sitting at more than $1 million and the median rent for a one-bedroom apartment at $2,875 a month, according to Zillow.

Skyrocketing costs are a barrier for renters and for would-be homebuyers, and rising property values can also strain longtime homeowners who find themselves facing higher property taxes. In a 2024 survey, housing affordability concerns were the top two issues identified by Cambridge residents as priorities. The list of applicants for income-restricted housing units hit more than 20,000 in 2022.

Cambridge’s City Council has battled for years over how best

to address the crisis. In February, the Council adopted a landmark zoning reform ordinance that abolished single-family zoning citywide. The measure passed in pared-back form only after years of debate, and it’s not a panacea: city estimates suggest it will fall short of Cambridge’s goal to create 12,500 new affordable housing units by 2030.

For CCLT’s leaders — and, perhaps, for would-be lawmakers — supporting the land trust is a housing solution that avoids furious debates over zoning and development policy.

“We didn’t identify with the NIMBY/YIMBY binary, and we set ourselves apart by determining that we needed to focus on social housing,” said Stephanie Guirand, a CCLT board member. The group hopes that removing some properties from the market could create a pool of housing that is accessible to low and middle-income households.

Christopher Herbert, the managing director of Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies, said that a land trust could be a good way to fill that gap.

“One of the things the city lacks is more opportunities for middle-income homeownership,” he said.

The price of a house often increases because of the price of the land it sits on — not the structure itself. By taking a share in the value of a house, a land trust can ensure that it sells for a lower cost.

But the shared equity ownership structure means that residents who live on land trust property may not earn as much when they sell their homes. In

some cases, that could lead people to stay in their homes longer — meaning that land trust properties may be slow to reenter the housing market.

Herbert said studies have found that most people who live in shared equity homes tend to move out at roughly the same rates as other homeowners, generally leaving after between five to 10 years on average.

“They do take away equity,” Herbert said. “And so they leave with a fairly substantial nest egg that allows them to have mobility in the housing market. So the evidence that exists suggests that shared equity homeownership models do allow people to gain wealth.”

The CCLT says it plans to offer units for renters as well as homeowners and is looking to acquire property with both single-family homes and multi-family buildings. The group plans to sometimes build new housing on the land it acquires and sometimes preserve existing structures — potentially in a bid to make them more affordable for their original owner, who could otherwise be priced off the land.

Individuals living in land trust properties, “community members,” and the board will be involved in a voting process to decide between the two options. In an ownership situation, the deed for the structure will stipulate how it is used and sold in the future, with the CCLT maintaining ownership of the land. In a rental situation, the organization will maintain ownership of both the land and the structures. Some City Council candidates

think Cambridge should use city money to fund the CCLT. Bullister said in an interview the city should contribute to the trust through land transfers, seed funding, and technical assistance. Al-Zubi believes that the city could help fund CCLT by increasing the cost of parking permits, increasing residential taxes, or convincing Harvard to increase the money it contributes to the city through its Payment in Lieu of Taxes program.

“People are turning and looking for ways to put the power back in the hands of the people,” Al-Zubi said. “And the Cambridge Community Land Trust does that.” Rivkin said the city should raise residential taxes to help fund the CCLT.

“We could increase our revenue collection by quite a bit and still have the lowest residential tax rates of any city in the area,” he said.

Rebecca A. Mailman, the CCLT’s executive director, confirmed that the group is looking for support from Cambridge — either through direct financial contributions or through establishing a right of first refusal, which would allow the CCLT to make offers for city property before other bidders.

None of the three candidates think that a land trust alone will solve Cambridge’s affordable housing crisis, but instead say it is intended to work alongside other solutions.

“It’s not about a silver bullet, it’s about a silver buckshot,” Rivkin said. “Community land trusts are a really exciting piece of the puzzle, and would ensure that we can provide some affordability for folks that, frankly, the private market on its own is just not going to provide.”

Herbert said that city investment in the property would be an important but expensive longterm strategy for preserving affordable housing in the city.

“In a city like Cambridge, where land is also scarce, developable land is scarce,” Herbert said. “It’s particularly important to create means of obtaining that housing.”

“The challenge for land trusts, mostly, is trying to get to scale,” he added.

Incumbent Michelle Wu ‘07 and challenger Josh Kraft advanced in the Boston mayor’s race on Tuesday. MAE T. WEIR — CRIMSON PHOTOGRAPHER

The Cambridge Community Land Trust is located at 55 Alpine St. E. MAT-

TEO DIAZ — CRIMSON PHOTOGRAPHER

ICE Contacted Cambridge Police 6 Times in 2025

uniforms with identifying placards on their back.

Federal immigration enforcement has contacted the Cambridge Police Department at least six times in 2025, an increase from previous years and the sharpest indication yet that the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown has arrived on Harvard’s doorstep.

ICE most recently contacted CPD on September 6 asking for information on a previous arrest that police made in Cambridge, Police Commissioner Christine A. Elow told the City Council at a hearing yesterday. She added that Cambridge police have consistently declined to cooperate with ICE in line with the city’s sanctuary status.

“Every interaction we’ve had with them, it’s involved somebody who has been under arrest,” Elow said. “We’re not seeing anything of picking children up off of streets or anything.” CPD had four total interactions with ICE in 2024, representing a slight decline from the first eight months of this year. Elow added that “we do not have any information” indicating that ICE has operated in Cambridge without notifying CPD, and that police officers have been instructed to wear

This clarification comes just days after vehicles with ICE logos were seen patrolling the streets of Harvard Square. At the time, CPD said they were not aware of any federal law enforcement officials in the area, and an ICE spokesperson did not confirm any agency presence in Cambridge.

Councilor Jivan G. Sobrinho-Wheeler pressed Elow for information on the late May arrest of three undocumented immigrants who worked at The Phoenix Landing, a restaurant in Central Square, which was first reported by Cambridge Day. Elow confirmed that none of the workers were detained in Cambridge.

Before the September request, ICE asked CPD for information on undocumented immigrants in Cambridge on August 20, June 4, May 10, and February 23, Elow said. A Cambridge resident also reported to CPD on February 19 that ICE had knocked on their door asking for information about a specific individual, though CPD did not interact with ICE directly, Elow added.

ICE has arrested at least one person in Cambridge so far, which Elow first told councilors about in late May. In that incident, Cambridge police checked the fingerprints of a woman arrested for shoplifting against a national criminal database as part of a routine booking, which alerted ICE. Federal agents then arrested the woman after she left the station,

sa coriosam fugia voloruntiis veratis a venimen imagni officiis eos autas evenduciet

though Cambridge police declined to assist them.

Elow’s comments came on the back of an increase in federal immigration enforcement

throughout the Boston area in an operation labeled Operation Patriot 2.0. The move was first reported by The New York Times and confirmed by a De -

partment of Homeland Security spokesperson Saturday.

“If you come to our country illegally and break our laws, we will hunt you down, arrest you,

deport you, and you will never return,” the spokesperson wrote in a statement that night.

matan.josephy@thecrimson.com

Super PACs Throw Their Weight Behind City Council Candidates

lamophobic and transphobic

Two major Cambridge super PACs threw their support behind slates of candidates on Sept. 4, leaving incumbent Patricia M. “Patty” Nolan ’80 vulnerable in the upcoming November election. A pair of advocacy groups — the Cambridge Citizens Coalition, founded in response to the city’s rapid development, and Cambridge Bicycle Safety — endorsed a slate of candidates for Cambridge City Council and School Committee, representing a significant boost for both incumbents and challengers.

The two super PACs associated with the organizations spent

more than $110,000 in the last election cycle — using the funds to help candidates advertise via yard signs, canvassing, and digital campaigns. Eight of the nine current councilors were endorsed by one of the two groups.

Last year, the CCC endorsed Nolan, Paul F. Toner, Ayesha M. Wilson, and Catherine “Cathie” Zusy. But this year, the CCC only endorsed Zusy and Wilson, depriving Nolan of resources and the institutional backing of a powerful political player. Nolan said that she was “disappointed” and “surprised” that she was not offered an interview by the CCC.

“I am very much at risk,” Nolan said, referring to her reelection chances without the CCC’s endorsement.

Suzanne P. Blier, president of

the CCC and a Harvard professor, said the CCC decided to not endorse Nolan because of her February 10 vote to allow multifamily zoning citywide.

CBS and the CCC’s endorsements are closely tied to access to super PAC backing. While the CCC, a nonprofit organization, makes candidate endorsements, the CCC super PAC uses its funds to support the endorsed candidates through political consulting and promotion, and it lists the nonprofit’s endorsees on its website. The CBS super PAC likewise uses its funds to support CBS’s endorsees.

The CCC opposed legislation that abolished single-family zoning in Cambridge. Blier wrote in an email that the CCC “has long supported” multifamily zoning, but was concerned about details of the legislation relating to de -

sign and the environment.

“We had made it very clear to councilors that we had endorsed that the upzoning was an absolutely critical one for us,” Blier said. “That played an important role in our decision, which was an incredibly difficult one.”

But the CCC did endorse incumbent Ayesha M. Wilson, who also voted yes on the same proposal.

“She’s always been incredibly responsive,” Blier said of Wilson. “She’s always been very thoughtful and taken some of these issues into account.”

Robert Winters, a civic blogger with more than three decades of experience in Cambridge leadership, was also not endorsed by the CCC — despite being endorsed last election cycle. He faced criticism for reposting and liking Is-

tweets during his 2023 run. Winters said he was not interested in the CCC’s endorsement and prioritized his “independence” over the credential.

“Being associated with any of these endorsing organizations ties my hands and restricts my ability to comment on the pros and cons of these organizations,” he wrote in an email to The Crimson.

The CCC also endorsed Elizabeth Bisio, John Hanratty, Peter Hsu, Zion Sherin, Louise Venden, and incumbent Catherine “Cathie” Zusy for the Council.

The CCC also specified their School Committee endorsements, incumbents Richard Harding Jr. and Elizabeth C.P. Hudson — along with challengers Jane S. Hirschi and Jia-Jing Lee.

They stated their endorsements will ensure “scholarly excellence, accountability, and transparency, as well as ongoing support for our students teachers.”

“I can absolutely sign on to that, and I’m happy to sign on to that. I’m not signed on to any other part of their platform,” Hirschi said.

Cambridge Bicycle Safety split their endorsements into two tiers, based on surveys completed by the candidates. Five candidates, including Nolan, Zusy, Hsu, LaQueen A. Battle, and Stanislav Rivkin, were categorized as “Bike Supporters.” Bike supporters include candidates who support the completion of the bike network, the Cycling Safety Ordinance Network, by November 2026.

For the first time, CBS endorsed Zusy for her commitment to completing the CSO network on schedule, even though they “don’t see eye to eye with every single action that Cathie Zusy has taken.”

CBS went on to do a qualitative review of the candidates answers and endorsed seven candidates

— Burhan Azeem, Marc C. McGovern, Jivan Sobrinho-Wheeler, Sumbul Siddiqui, Ayah Al-Zubi ’23, Dana R. Bullister, and Ned S. Melanson — as “Bike Champions.” Bike Champions also pledged to complete the CSO network by November 2026 but also “responses to other transportation-related topics in CBS’s questionnaire.” CBS specified incumbents endorsed as Bike Champions “had a perfect voting record on bike safety.” Despite completing the survey, neither Timothy R. Flaherty or Zion Sherin were endorsed by Cambridge Bike Safety. Flaherty indicated that he would not accept an endorsement if offered, and his responses — expressing hesitance about the installation of CSO network bike lanes and supporting “strategic use of police details” rather than a citywide traffic circulation plan — clashed with many of the group’s priorities.

Bullister, who supports completing the CSO on schedule but identified concerns with the quality of materials the city has used, said failing to fix the lack of bike safety “would be an abject failure on the part of our city.”

“This endorsement signifies that I do stand with Cambridge Bike Safety to ensure that we never have to hear about another very preventable death in our community,” she added. Cambridge Bike Safety also released the candidates’ survey responses, shedding more light on their stances on developing pedestrian infrastructure and environmental protections.

“I just really encourage people to go and read those responses if they have a few minutes, because they really give you good insight into what people are thinking and where they stand on some really specific issues,” Melanson said.

Fall 2025 Season Preview

spicable Me 3.”

BY ISABELLE A. LU CRIMSON STAFF WRITER

Spanning musicals, plays, and comedy, from beloved, well-known shows to funny and reflective student creations, check out this round-up of campus theater productions running in Fall 2025!

“Merrily We Roll Along”

Stephen Sondheim and George Furth’s musical comedy follows friends Frank (Kaylor G. Toronto ’27), Mary (Grace G. Hawkins ’28), and Charley (Bernardo de Moura Sequeira ’26) as they pursue their ambitions over the course of 20 years, moving in reverse chronological order from 1976 to 1957. As the friends’ failures unwind backwards into youthful hopes and dreams, and their destroyed relationships into meaningful friend-

ships, the story reflects on the path to such loss. Directed by Ben L. C. Arthurs ’27, the energetic yet moving “Merrily We Roll Along” is the only musical this semester to take place on the professional-scale Proscenium stage.

“Merrily We Roll Along” runs at the Loeb Proscenium from Oct. 22 to Oct. 25.

“The Addams Family”

Hot on the heels of Season 2 of Netflix’s “Wednesday,” the theatrical adaptation of “The Addams Family” comes to Harvard under the direction of Riley B. F. Jackson ’27 and Mia E. Schenenga ’27. The musical comedy centers on a macabre-loving family whose daughter, Wednesday (Lexi L. Sexton ’29), falls in love with a decidedly normal boy. Running during Harvard’s Family Weekend, “The Addams Family” is a family-friendly show perfect for visiting parents and siblings.

“The Addams Family” runs at the Agassiz Theatre from Oct. 22 to Oct. 26.

“The Scottish Improv Show”

An improvised take on Shakespeare’s “Macbeth” to add to your pre-Halloweekend plans, “The Scottish Improv Show” is a spot of comedy in a season that otherwise comprises musicals and plays. Directors Katie A. Silverman ’27 and Jack T. Flynn ’26 also lead Harvard’s Three Letter Acronym — fans of the improv troupe may know what to (not) expect.

“The Scottish Improv Show” runs at the Loeb Ex from Oct. 24 to Oct. 25.

“The Pirates of Penzance”

Set sail this semester with Gilbert and Sullivan’s popular 1879 comic opera, put on, of course, by the Harvard-Radcliffe Gilbert & Sullivan Players. “The Pirates of Penzance” narrates the comedic and romantic mishaps of Frederic (Henry D. Pahlow ’28), a young man who is released from his apprenticeship to a band of sympathetic pirates on his 21st birthday. You might have heard of “The Pirates of Penzance” from its 2025 Broadway reimagining “Pirates! The Penzance Musical” or its iconic “Major-General’s Song,” which was parodied by Minions in “De-

“The Pirates of Penzance” runs at the Agassiz Theatre from Nov. 12 to Nov. 16.

“Get a Clue”

An original murder mystery comedy set in 1920s New York City, “Get a Clue” features five colorful suspects and the detective working to solve the mystery that binds them together. “Get a Clue” is the second musical by writer-director Olivia F. Data ’26 and composer Preston C. Bushnell ’26, the duo behind Fall 2024’s “Spurned: A Wild West Tale of Love, Revenge, and Assless Chaps.” Laughs and intrigue will surely abound.

“Get a Clue” runs at the Loeb Ex from Nov. 13 to Nov. 16.

“City of Peace”

Inspired by the gothic works of 19th-century author Nikolai Gogol, “City of Peace” is an original operetta written by Paul Palmer ’26 and composed by Christian Liu ’26. A journey of two friends through the Ukrainian countryside is interrupted by terrifying demonic forces, opening up rumi-

Artist Profile: Josie Totah is on the Rise

BY MAKENNA J. WALKO CRIMSON STAFF WRITER

When she hopped on the phone for this interview, Josie Totah had her sunglasses on, her coffee in hand, and a bustling city skyline sprawled out behind her — looking every bit the up-and-coming itgirl that she is. She spoke about the film and TV industry with all the poise and perceptiveness of someone who has been navigating its pressures for years — and that’s because she has. Totah has been in front of a camera since she was nine years old, starring in popular shows such as “Jessie” and “Saved By the Bell.” Since then, she’s appeared in a broad range of projects across genres. But since the very beginning, she’s been drawn to the idea of making a splash.

“I think initially, it was about entertaining and making a scene — not like making a written scene, but just literally making a shocking scene,” she said. “I loved making people laugh.” Now, at 24, Totah’s perspective has evolved.

“It is still about entertaining, but I think as I’ve gotten older, I’ve gotten more nerdy about it,” she said, touching on the film classes she took in college and her growing appreciation for the craft elements of acting.

“My taste has changed. My palette has changed,” Totah said. This changing palette has led her to “The Buccaneers,” a period drama that follows a group of rebellious young Americans navi-

gating a rigid British social scene. The second season was released on AppleTV on Aug. 6. The show is Totah’s first period drama, a substantial departure from the kinds of projects she’s been involved with in the past. Her agent pitched it to her as “HBO’s ‘Girls,’ but in the 1800s,” according to Totah.

“I was already biting,” Totah said. “I mean, that’s one of my favorite shows. And I think it excited me, the fact that it was a genre that has been done, especially with young adult audiences, but having this twist on it made it sound cooler to me — more fun to me.”

Experimenting with a new genre came with its challenges, but Totah eagerly embraced the opportunity. To prepare, the cast watched other historical dramas from the period, ranging from the original 1995 miniseries “The Buccaneers” to the cult classic “Pride and Prejudice.”

But even these iconic films couldn’t completely prepare them for the modern twist infused into “The Buccaneers.” Totah admitted that, in the beginning, finding the perfect balance between historical accuracy and the more modern tone of the show was difficult. But with time, the unique universe of “The Buccaneers” came to life.

“Each of the girls kind of found our own groove. We now have it almost as a second language or just like a muscle memory. We all have sort of built this synergy,” she said.

This is in no small part thanks to the close bond the cast shares.

“Everyone came to Scotland — where we filmed — with such ex-

citement and vigor. I love our cast. We have such a good group of people and the newcomers, whether it was Greg [Wise] or Leighton [Meester], really handled it with the same level of excitement. I love them all. We have a really good, good gaggle.”

She described their travels around the world together, from Greece to Paris to Mallorca — and even to Massachusetts.

“We went on a retreat during the writers’ strike in Massachusetts with a bunch of 80-year-old women,” Totah said. “Yeah, we have bonded in a lot of ways.”

This authentic connection and sense of trust clearly translates onto the screen in “The Buccaneers,” where relationships take center stage. In addition to the close bonds between the central group of friends, the show follows a romance between Totah’s character, Mabel Elmsworth, and Honoria Marable, a young British heiress. In the world of period dramas, queer relationships rarely garner much screen time, if they appear at all. For Totah, imbuing this relationship with joy and pride was a priority.

“I wanted to make sure that it was a story of positivity and love, because a lot of queer stories can be traumatic,” she said.

“I think it was just about showing what it could be like for two people to actually find peace. And I actually joke that the gays are the only ones in the show that actually know how to communicate. Despite being in a world where it’s illegal to be gay, they somehow have

the healthiest relationship,” she said.

Totah recognizes how rare such representation is — and how powerful it can be.

“Queer people have always existed, and seldom have they been portrayed in this type of medium,” she said. “It doesn’t make any sense, because it’s a real experience that existed back then. Why not tell more stories about more experiences? That’s what makes film and television compelling.”

With this in mind, Totah wanted to ensure the show portrayed Mabel and Honoria’s love story with intention and care — and she had ideas of her own about how to do that. In the first season, she drafted a critical scene in their relationship that was eventually incorporated into the script. She had a hand in the evolution of Mabel and Honoria’s romance in Season 2, as well.

“Towards the end of the season, there’s a surprise scene that’s kind of already in the trailer. And that was definitely something that I brought up to the writers, Joe [Innes] and Katherine [Jakeaways], and wanted to be done. You can see that Mabel’s kissing Honoria in front of the other girls, and that’s a moment that I thought was really important to go full circle on their relationship and evolving this world. Not only their world, but the world of the show,” she said.

Beyond Mabel and Honoria’s relationship, Totah says that Season 2 brings a newfound sense of maturity for her character.

“She’s older, definitely by time

nations on evil, its grip on all of us, and the world which contains it. Palmer and Liu previously collaborated on 2023’s First-Year Musical, the Classics-inspired comedy “Post Mortem.”

“City of Peace” runs at the Agassiz Theatre from Dec. 4 to Dec. 7.

“The Glass Menagerie”

The 1944 play that propelled Tennessee Williams to national fame, “The Glass Menagerie” is narrated by the trapped aspiring poet Tom (Theodore R.W. Ansell ’29), whose histrionic mother Amanda (Kathleen Benson ’26) pushes his timid, disabled sister Laura (Ashley L. Miller ’29) towards a delusion of marriage. As a “memory play,” it pushed the boundaries of realism in theatrical storytelling — Harvard’s production, directed by Texaco U.M. Texeira-Ramos ’26, aims to hone in on the theme of intergenerational memories as well as the influence of 20th-century digitalization.

“The Glass Menagerie” runs at the Loeb Ex from Dec. 4 to Dec. 7.

isabelle.lu@thecrimson.com

and by experience. I think there was a sense of rose-colored glasses she had in Season 1 that I wanted to remove,” she said. “I was trying to infuse just a more mature sense of self, and also as someone who had more agency and kind of stood up to people more in Season 2. Whereas in the first season, she kind of just went with the flow of life.”

For Totah, Season 2 has also allowed her to lean into the aspects of Mabel’s character that she identifies with the most.

“I feel like she’s kind of a mischievous girl who questions authority, and that’s something that I definitely do as well,” she said. “I think I wanted to make her fun and sort of cheeky, in the way that she didn’t really respect the customs of that time, which I often don’t do as well.”

But one of the most exciting parts of filming Season 2 was the opportunity to experiment with even more daring period fashion, according to Totah. She praised the skill and passion of the show’s costume designers, who bring such breathtaking costumes to life.

“That’s one of the best parts about the show, is not just getting to wear full costumes, but getting to wear the art that these people—these incredible designers — make,” Totah said. “It’s super fun to get to wear their dreams on us.”

The costumes in the show are just one example of how the magic infused into the smallest details truly makes “The Buccaneers” shine. The show’s soundtrack, which taps into popular modern

music from Chappell Roan and Gracie Abrams to Japanese Breakfast and Clairo, is another area of success. The result is a fun and familiar soundtrack that melds the show’s emotional resonance and modern sensibilities.

“When I heard Taylor Swift’s ‘Nothing New’ in the first trailer of the first season — life changing moment,” Totah said. “I downright cried. I was emotional.”

With the release of the second season of “The Buccaneers,” Totah’s status as an already rising star is set to propel even higher. Although the sky’s the limit for Totah’s future, she laughingly admitted she’d love to take on an action project some day. “I hate to say this, but I do love a war film,” she said. “I’d love that. That’d be so fun for me. I’d have to get a gym membership. I only get a plan on purpose once in 10 years.” But Totah is also a firm believer in keeping an open mind about the future and where life will take you. Reflecting on her advice for her college self, she said, “It’s okay to not know what you want to do. I think it’s more important to know what you like and what you don’t like. And I think if you can just follow that and be present with that, you’re gonna be A-okay.” For Totah, the philosophy has clearly worked so far. From Bayside High School to the ballrooms of Great Britain, the signature mix of mischief, heart, and unapologetic honesty Totah brings to the screen is sure to stick with viewers long after the credits roll.

makenna.walko@thecrimson.com

LESHUI (JADE) XIAO — CRIMSON DESIGNER

BUILDING HARVARD

THE HARVARD ART MUSEUMS

BY THOMAS A. FERRO CRIMSON STAFF WRITER

hile Harvard’s campus boasts myriad architectural styles, very few buildings themselves exhibit multiple architectural styles as dramatically — and beautifully — as the Harvard Art Museums.

Nestled just off the center of campus and neighboring the Carpenter Center — Le Corbusier’s only North American building — the Harvard Art Museums elegantly combines both new and old.

From Harvard Yard, the museum looks like many other buildings on campus. It has a Georgian façade and a red-brick exterior. It’s stately. It’s quintessentially “Harvard.” However, should one approach the museum from Prescott Street, or even from the nearby 485 Broadway, one sees a very different structure.

With respect to Harvard’s long history, the Harvard Art Museums is a relatively new institution. In 1983, Harvard’s three distinct art museums — the Arthur M. Sackler, the Busch-Reisinger, and the Fogg — merged into one entity. In an extensive sixyear renovation ending in 2014, the original Georgian-style site of the Fogg was transformed and expanded into a new home for the recently formed institution.

The renovation was undertaken by the renowned architect and 1998 Pritzker Prize-winner Renzo Piano and his team at the Renzo Piano Building Workshop (RPBW) alongside Payette, one of the leading architectural firms in Boston and a recipient of numerous American Institute of Architects (AIA) awards. Based in Genoa and Paris, RPBW is known for their steel-and-glass modernist designs, famously demonstrated by the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, The New York Times Building in New York, and the Kansai International Airport in Osaka, to name only a very few. RPBW is not limited to modernist design, however. In fact, many of the firm’s projects demonstrate the careful attention they pay to each site’s history and surroundings. RPBW’s experience in historical preser-

‘Wuthering

BY LAURA B. MARTENS CRIMSON STAFF WRITER

A bony wire frame peeks through the glittering (alleged) polyester of white skirts. Block eyebrows arch over contoured cheeks. (Allegedly) bleached blonde hair sweeps into the iconic half-uphalf down style that no woman in the 19th century ever wore.

Behold: Margot Robbie in the upcoming 2026 film adaptation of “Wuthering Heights.”

Photos of Robbie in the wedding costume were leaked in March, sparking outrage from devout Emily Brontë fans, people who’ve seen a period drama at some point in their lives, and individuals who know that polyester wasn’t manufactured until the mid-1930s. And then the official trailer was released this past week —

vation made the firm especially well-suited to the renovation of the Harvard Art Museums, which, as a historic structure, features a design that is protected by city, state, and federal architectural regulations. The brick façade original to the 1927 Fogg structure, for example, had to be preserved during the renovation.

Werner Otto Hall — the former location of the Busch-Reisinger Museum — was located directly behind the original Fogg Museum on Prescott Street. This building, which experienced various technical issues, was demolished during the renovation, allowing RPBW to add their own mark on the structure’s expansion.

So, while the preserved, historically protected portion of the museum mirrors the architecture of the Yard, a modern yet subtle, large yet unassuming, and unique yet not out-of-place structure makes up the museum’s expanded portion. Notably, Piano’s expansion does not morph into the preserved structure but rather boldly announces its stylistic differences. The new addition is connected to the old brick building with a linear vertical glass partition, allowing visitors to clearly recognize the divide between the new and the old. Despite the museum’s distinct juxtaposition of two architectural styles, the structure is united by a glass pyramid that rests atop the two halves.

In an interview with The Harvard Crimson, Elisabetta Trezzani, a Partner and Director at RPBW who worked with Piano to oversee the renovation of the Harvard Art Museums, said, “We don’t want to hide the fact that one [part] has a history, and another part, it’s new.”

While the contrast may seem quite striking from the museum’s exterior, the different architectural styles are merged in the

interior in a seamless and cohesive manner — most impressively seen in the central Calderwood Courtyard, which is crowned by the glass pyramid.

The façade of the interior Calderwood Courtyard, made of imported Italian travertine, was one of the only elements of the original structure — alongside the exterior brick façade — preserved by the renovation. The courtyard’s interior elevation of stacked arcades takes inspiration from the exterior façade of a 16th-century canon’s house in Montepulciano.

In addition to preserving the original museum’s allusion to a faraway villa, RPBW took inspiration from design elements found a little closer to home.

For example, when studying how to incorporate natural light into the space, Trezzani explained, RPBW took inspiration from the pyramidal tops of streetlamps dotting the campus’ winding paths and brick sidewalks. This detail was translated into the pyramidal glass roof of the Harvard Art Museums itself, illuminating the gallery floors and the spacious central courtyard.

As she directed the renovation of the Harvard Art Museums, Trezzani also oversaw the renovation of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. While certain design elements are consistently prioritized by RPBW across all of their projects — like “transparency, connection, light, [and] lightness” — one has to consider how to incorporate the collection of art, the site, and the broader city into the project’s final form, Trezzani said.

“Every project is different, in a way, because you need to refer to the place and the connection to the place,” Trezzani said.

This devotion to place on part of RPBW is apparent even in the materials they used, as the Harvard Art Museums’ expanded section is composed of thin panels of now-faded wood: a subtle homage to the traditional use of clapboard in Boston and New England.

It is in these understated and subtle moments that the beauty of RPBW’s designs shines especially brightly. For example, as

Trezzani explained, the pyramidal roof was designed to hide just out of sight as visitors approach from the Yard, honoring the original museum’s history in the visual experience of its preserved façade view.

Even the porch of expanded section of the museum was subtly designed so that it connects to the Carpenter Center’s iconic S-shaped ramp — “[It] was a nice gesture towards Le Corbusier, in a way, to make a connection in a very minimal way to connect the two,” Trezzani said.

The museum’s convergence of architectural styles mirrors its role, which, post-renovation, is much more than a showcase of the university’s vast collection of art. Now, the Harvard Art Museums is home to conservation labs, art studies spaces, lecture halls, a museum shop and cafe, in addition to the galleries.

“Now, as a visitor, you’re able to go all the way up to the fifth floor, and you can see into our conservation labs. So, previously, those labs were behind closed doors — something visitors would never get to see, didn’t know much about. But, it’s one of the most important things that we do here. This conservation lab was the first established in the United States for the preservation and care of works of art — and it’s still a very cutting-edge part of our program,” said Daron Manoogian, the Director of Communications at the Harvard Art Museums.

By boosting visibility and emphasizing the courtyard as a welcoming, open space, RPBW helped balance the Harvard Art Museums’ roles as both a teaching and a public museum.

Sarah Ganz Blythe, the Director of the Harvard Art Museums, said, “It’s a lovely kind of nexus of an academic space and a public space.”

Contrary to what one may think today, the museum’s public emphasis is a relatively new development: “Historically speaking, this museum primarily only served Harvard students and faculty,” Manoogian said.

According to Manoogian, the museum had two main goals for the renovation: “One was to create one unified, expanded space for all of our collections to be together and to be presented together.”

The other was to figure out a way to make the museum more accessible to everyone, including the public.

“[Piano] used to refer to his

reconception of this courtyard as creating a ‘piazza,’ which, in Italian culture, is a place where people gather; It’s a town square. It’s a place where people feel welcome to just linger, pass through, spend some time, socialize, and we’re enormously grateful that that’s what it’s become now,” Manoogian said. A “town square,” retrospectively, was just what Harvard’s campus needed. According to the Harvard Square Business Association’s website, over 8 million people visit the Square each year. Other than the Richard A. and Susan F. Smith Campus Center and the Science Center, which may feel more student-oriented, there are not many spaces on campus that prioritize public access as central to their mission.

Calderwood Courtyard serves as a “‘third space,’ where you don’t have to go to the galleries, you don’t have to be here for class, but you can come into the ‘town square.’ And so, around lunch or throughout the day, you see faculty with their office hours, but you also see families with strollers and people meeting up,” Ganz Blythe said.

Along with the museum’s 2023 decision to make admission free to the public, RPBW’s attentive reorganization of the space dramatically aided the museum in opening up the building to everyone. In 2021, the Boston Society for Architecture (BSA) awarded the Harvard Art Museums the prestigious Harleston Parker Medal — reserved for “the most beautiful piece of architecture, building, monument, or structure within the City or Metropolitan Parks District limits,” according to the BSA’s website. “It’s wonderful to think about all the ways that a building is built to perpetuate different ways of being, and then, a decade later, you can see, ‘Hey, did it work? What is it like?’ And so forth,” Ganz Blythe said.

It’s safe to say that it did work. From Georgian bricks and travertine columns to clapboard wood panels, the Harvard Art Museums has not only secured a seat in the pantheon of worldclass art museums, but it serves as a bridge that connects Harvard to the world.

thomas.ferro@thecrimson.com

Heights’ and the Modern Period Drama

and my abject hatred morphed into confusion. The film was written, produced, and directed by Emerald Fennell of “Saltburn” fame. The trailer features a heady mix of Charli XCX’s “Everything is romantic,” oddly suggestive breadmaking, Robbie’s gazinginto-the-void stare, and glimpses of Jacob Elordi’s (Heathcliff) sweaty chest. Also, people frequently putting fingers (their own and others’) in their mouths. It’s surrealist — the trailer shows a blue room with walls completely coated in diamonds. Strange red glassware, like oversized thrift store vases, grace the gilded tables. Robbie’s “peasant” costume is constructed of striking scarlet and blue checkered fabric, jarring viewers out of 19th century Yorkshire into some warped fairy tale, while the background of the stable scene

looks like a modern mansion in California with some historical refuse thrown on the ground here and there. Like Joe Wright’s 2012 adaptation of “Anna Karenina,” the set is designed to look like a theater stage rather than reality.

“Wuthering Heights” is playing a dangerous game. It is a truth universally acknowledged that 2022’s adaptation of Jane Austen’s “Persuasion” was a halfhearted — some say ghastly — attempt to breathe new life into an already extraordinary story. To give just one example, Prahlad Srihari of News9 writes that the film is plagued by “deadened modern jargon.” Studios may rely on tacky modern monologues and other anachronistic elements to freshen 19th century source material, and the leaked photos of the wedding suggest that “Wuthering Heights” may

fall into this category. However, it is possible that Fennell’s film could find the elusive balance between refreshing and revolting that “Persuasion” could not. The wellspring of these modern-jargon infused period dramas in the past few decades is the critical and commercial success of 2006’s “Marie Antoinette.” What makes “Marie Antoinette” a great film and “Persuasion” a horrible one is the respect that director Sofia Coppola has for the original history. In one shot of “Marie Antoinette,” modern converse sneakers lie amidst the 18th-century items in Marie’s closet while “I Want Candy” blares in the background. This anachronism conveys to modern viewers that Marie is a teenage girl allowed all the money and leisure she could ever want. However, Kirsten Dunst’s vulnerable depiction of Marie cry-

ing in a bathtub illustrates how her lavish lifestyle conceals the terrifying loneliness of her station. This scene is so powerful because it parallels the isolation that many teenagers feel as they assert their independence from their family, without truly understanding who they are and what their life will hold.

Meanwhile, 2022’s “Persuasion” takes the core of heroine Anne Eliot — her faith in the enduring power of love and her artistic appreciation for all the emotions of life — and throws it out in exchange for a half-hearted attempt at the enemies-to-lovers banter of “Pride and Prejudice” with the writing skills of a poorly edited fanfiction.

I say this as someone who loves fanfiction: a multimillion dollar film should not feel like something you’d post on Archive of Our Own.

The costumes and modern music in “Marie Antoinette” heighten themes of teenage excess and angst while simultaneously demonstrating an awareness of the time period’s fashions. The surrealist visuals of “Wuthering Heights” paired with its over-the-top eroticism may reach this level of artistic success, entering a dialogue with the original text and revealing themes of sexual repression and female empowerment. Watching the trailer is an experience both uncomfortable and intriguing, suggesting that Fennell may know what she’s doing. Or it could be nothing more than a blatant cash grab, mushing the famous novel with risque sex scenes to draw more numbers at the box office. Who can say — for now?

laura.martens@thecrimson.com

COURTESY OF THOMAS A. FERRO

FIFTEEN MINUTES 15

The Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures sat down with Fifteen Minutes to discuss how she became interested in French literature, the difference between French and English dystopias, and the best places to find vegan food in Harvard Square.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

FM: One of the themes in your book “Unbecoming Language: Anti-Identitarian French Feminist Fictions” is existing as subjectivities without subjecthood. What does it mean to be “subjective without subjecthood?”

ALK: Being a subject is some thing that is not necessarily a positive thing. In fact, for me personally, I think subjecthood is terrible. What is subjecthood? It is the state of being defined by ex ternal forces. It’s what makes you identifiable as a particular kind of subject. The most common kinds of subjecthood are identity mark ers, like sex, sexuality, ability, race, class, etc.

Subjectivity without subject hood is a state where you’re yourself, but free from all of the rather overwhelming pressure that comes with all the norms and forces that shape you into being a subject. A subject is a social entity. If you were just alone in the world as the last person, it wouldn’t really make sense to think of yourself as a subject.

FM: How did you first become interested in French literature and feminist theory?

ALK: French was a lifeline for me.

My parents, they’re immigrants from South Korea. They immi grated in the 80s. I grew up in the Bay Area, California. Even grow ing up in a pretty Asian-heavy area and going to school with lots of other Asians, I still couldn’t shake this kind of conception of Americanness as being some thing that was not Korean. I was the stereotypical immigrant child who was ashamed of my stinky food and wanted nothing more than to have Lunch ables, even though my mom was going to great efforts to make these elaborate Korean food. I just want ed Lunchables because I wanted to assimilate into what I thought was American ness, which was very much mapped onto whiteness.

Korean was the only language I spoke at home until I started going to school. Once English entered into the picture, it very quickly took over.

My sense of why that happened

— I really did lose a lot of my Kore an — is that it was a consequence of me wanting to be as American as possible.

I felt a profound sense of guilt, and English was the only kind of real language that I had that I could operate fully in. Think ing and conducting all of my life in English was a constant reminder of my betrayal of my roots.

Q&A:

ANNABEL KIM ON SUBJECTIVITY, SCATOLOGY, AND GARFIELD

ROMANCE LANGUAGES AND LITERATURES. Kim sat down with Fifteen Minutes to discuss her love of French literature, the idea of literature as theory, and the best places to find vegan food in the Square.

I could choose between French and Spanish. My older sister had chosen French, and I was like, “I’m just going to be like my older sister.”

Once I got enough French to start to be able to actually understand things, to consume cultural objects, etc., there was a moment where a light just came off. I was just like, “Language is just pure potential for communication, expression. French — this language — has nothing to do with me.” So I was able to experience things, to take in the world without my identity, my own weirdness about being Korean, etcetera, getting in the way.

That was such a freeing experience. French has saved my life, has carved out a space for me in which I can think and reflect and experience things and react to things without it having to send me back to my identitarian guilt.

reer, you’re interested in minimalist art, and you studied Art History as an undergrad. How does your love of art inform how you interpret or understand literature?

ALK: It really doesn’t. I actually have aphantasia. I’m not visual. The inside of my head is just absent of any kind of visual content.

For me, the two things are completely separate. The visual is cut off from the textual.

FM: We’ve also heard that you’re very into cats. Do you have a favorite cat character from any novel or film?

ALK: I’m going to have to go with Garfield. To me, that is the cultural cat. Garfield was the first cat I got to know, and I will always love Garfield. I don’t know if your generation still grows up with Garfield as a reference. Garfield was where it was at.

dystopias. What differences do you notice between French dystopian literature and English dystopian literature?

ALK: I don’t think that there are any particularly salient national differences. If I think about the dystopian reading I’ve done in English versus the dystopian reading I’ve done in French, I don’t think that there’s that much of a difference in terms of sensibility. Similar themes come up, similar questions are being raised. Obviously, if dystopian work in French is set in France, the context is going to be different. The basic operations of a dystopian work, I feel like that’s universal. The bad place — that’s everywhere.

FM: On your website, you write that you advise doctoral students interested in working with “literature as theory rather than through theory.” What does it mean for literature to be a kind of theory?

ALK: For me, that means that literature is itself a producer of concepts. Fiction, for instance, is one of the hardest-thinking kinds of objects that we have. It is such a rich conceptual tool because it is a microcosm of the world itself that you can just hold in your hand, and use it to pry at and interrogate so many different things. You can use a novel to think about virtually any kind of question, to produce concepts about anything. But, I think a lot of people are like, “It’s fiction, it’s a story.” So they don’t take its kind of conceptual heft particularly seriously, which is totally opposite to how people receive theory.

Theory often becomes the center of the way you’re thinking, and then you just slot in some object that will illustrate the theory. Whereas for me, I feel like when I read the literature, the concepts that it can produce — again, it’s such a malleable and plastic and expansive world in itself — often can’t be reduced to a certain type of theory. The world is complicated. Whatever you find in a novel is

FM: You translated Céline Minard’s “Plasmas” from French to English. What are some of the unexpected difficulties of translating literature?

ALK: Céline Minard is a very particular kind of writer. She creates a lot of neologisms, but she also uses so much technical and specialized vocabulary.

I find myself having to expand my own kind of lexicon in English. The translation experience was, “Wow, I really don’t know English.” It was a nice reminder of just how much language there is. Language that we have and we know is just a drop in the bucket.

FM: Growing up, what were some of your favorite novels?

ALK: I went through an Ayn Rand phase. I really liked “The Fountainhead.” I liked Hermann Hesse. I read “Demian” and “Siddhartha.” I read “Siddhartha” outside, sitting next to the dog house because we had an outdoor dog growing up. I liked “Lolita,” even though the first time I read it I was in seventh grade and I didn’t understand any of the sexual metaphors. And, reading Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale” was just a revelation to me.

FM: You have done research on Monique Wittig, a French author and theorist who coined the phrase “heterosexual contract.” What do you think she brought to French literature in her time?

ALK: Did she coin the term heterosexual contract? I don’t know that she did. That would be something that we would have to double check.

What she brought to French literature was a bazooka. It was explosive. She blew it up. What she did was cannibalize or appropriate the French canon, which is one of the most heteronormative sites. She lesbianized it, she decentered straightness from within a canon that had absolutely centered straightness for centuries.

FM: You’re a professor at Harvard, but you completed your graduate education at Yale. Are you rooting for Harvard or Yale on game days?

ALK: You’re speaking to someone who was my college mascot and left halfway through a football game because I got bored. So, I don’t really care. But, when I first got to Harvard, I was still on my Yale business. I would go to the MAC gym wearing my Yale shirt. I wanted people to know that I wasn’t “Harvard,” not like so many people. I wanted to mark my difference somehow. Now I’m just, “Yeah, Harvard.”

vivian.rong@thecrimson.com.

Fifteen Minutes is the magazine of The Harvard Crimson. To read the full interview and other longform pieces, visit THECRIMSON.COM/ MAGAZINE

FM: Outside of your literary caalso going to be complicated. Using literature as theory allows you to start with the world and then to arrive at a conceptual conclusion, which might surprise you. I never know what a novel is going to produce for me conceptually until I read it. The beautiful thing about literature is that a text is inexhaustible. If I read a novel once and I’m able to use it to conceptualize a certain type of thing, if I go back to it from a different context, I’ll be able to use it to produce a completely different set of ideas. Don’t subjugate literature to theory by making it just an illustration. Let the literature actually speak for itself, and then bring it into conversation with the theory by putting them on an equal conceptual footing.

FM: You teach a class on French

Women’s Field Hockey Sweeps West Coast

pete this weekend due to injuries, forcing Burger to wrap up her exciting first week of classes at Harvard with her first collegiate start.

braced its captain and erupted into cheers as it took the lead for the first time this season.

After a dominant 2024 fall campaign, the No. 8 Harvard field hockey team returned to the pitch in style this weekend, beating both the University of California and Stanford. Both games went into overtime, forcing the group to rely on its preseason training, conditioning, and deep roster. With the two wins, the Crimson (2-0) kicked off its season with immense success, showcasing both a talented freshman class and a seasoned group of highly competitive upperclassmen. The Crimson’s season began with a long cross-country flight for an intense matchup against the University of California (22, 0-0 ACC). The game marked the home opener for the Golden Bears, although the team had already split contests against Monmouth and Delaware. California undoubtedly looked to target Harvard’s freshman goalkeeper, Linde Burger. The Crimson’s Heerhugowaard, Netherlands, native, looked to fill the big shoes of senior goalkeeper Tessa Shahbo. Shahbo was unable to com -

Despite California’s efforts to test Burger in the first half, the Crimson dominated the first half of play. Harvard’s defense, led by senior All-Ivy League First Team defender Bronte-May Brough, prevented the Golden Bears from getting a single shot off in the second quarter. Throughout the game, Brough was supported in the defensive end by junior Smilla Klas and freshman Brooke Chandler. The rookie from Auckland, New Zealand, seemed to transition seamlessly into collegiate play and even got a shot of her own on goal during the contest. On the offensive end of the pitch, Harvard controlled possession and outshot the Golden Bears 6-1 in the first half. After repeated scoring attempts from junior Sage Piekarski and captain Fiene Oerlemans, the Crimson finally lit up the scoreboard. During the team’s second penalty corner attempt in the second quarter, captain Kitty Chapple hammered her shot home. The Harvard team em -

After the halftime break, the California team evened the score, determined to secure a win during its home opener.

Despite pummeling the Golden Bears with shots, the Crimson struggled to capitalize on net in the second half of play. Tjerk van Herwaarden, Harvard’s Head Coach, will likely focus on improving penalty corner opportunities in upcoming practices. The Crimson will look to take advantage of the penalty corner opportunities in future games, especially once it enters the particularly competitive Ivy League play. With the score locked in a 1-1 standstill, the game headed

cision in 2021, the Stanford field hockey team has struggled to compete against top nationally ranked opponents like Harvard. However, the Cardinal (22, 0-0 ACC) mustered serious momentum heading into its matchup against the Crimson on Sunday. Stanford opened its season with a close 3-1 loss to No. 10 Maryland. The Cardinal then rebounded quickly with a 1-0 win against James Madison and then a dominant 6-0 victory over Ball State. Harvard, too, entered the game with momentum, riding high after winning in overtime in Berkeley. However, the Crimson notably had only a day to recover from the long flight, the game, and the additional period of play.

off and forced the Cardinal’s defense to make a few big stops. After the halftime break, the Crimson really ramped up the pressure. Four minutes into the third quarter, Piekarski was set up beautifully by Oerlemans to even the score. The Concord, Mass., native played fiercely throughout the entirety of the contest. She fired off seven shots and was able to get three of them on net, forcing the Stanford goalkeeper, Daisy Ford, to make some clutch saves. Ten minutes later, midfielder Tilly Butterworth tallied a goal of her own off a penalty shot opportunity. The sophomore hailing from Norwich, England, was able to bury the critical shot to give her team the 2-1 lead, even though the refer -

into overtime.

Two seemingly rapid minutes later, Lara Beekhuis nabbed the winning point, securing the 2-1 win for her team. The junior from Laren, Netherlands, has now tallied an impressive nine game-winning goals during her time at Harvard. Remarkably, her goal also led Harvard to its ninth consecutive season-opening win.

After cutting its program in 2020 and then reversing the de -

The Crimson’s exhaustion was evident, as the Cardinal struck first, taking the lead quickly as they strove to defend Palo Alto from their East Coast competitors. The Stanford team played fast and gritty in the first quarter of play, forcing Burger, in her second straight start, to make some critical saves.

The Harvard team seemed to wake up in the second quarter, as it started getting shots

ees slowed the momentum by resorting to a video review to confirm the penalty shot was necessary.

Despite the lull, Harvard battered the Cardinal’s defense with shots during the third quarter. In fact, the Crimson outshot the home team 8-1 as it got back to being comfortable in regulation play.

With seven minutes remaining in the game, the Cardinal was able to nab the equaliz -

er. Stanford then threatened to walk off the pitch with a win in the final few minutes, as it attacked the Crimson’s defense with penalty corner opportunities. However, Harvard’s defensive unit, led by Brough and backed by Burger in net, was undaunted by the attempts. The Crimson, spurred largely by Piekarski’s rushes upfield, continued to force shots during the two resulting periods of overtime. However, the visiting team was unable to fire home a game-winning shot. The game advanced to a shootout, raising the nerves of the few Harvard fans who made the trip out to Palo Alto. Sure enough, much to the Crimson’s dismay, Stanford’s first shot attempt sailed into the back of the net.

Harvard’s sophomore Martha le Huray responded with a goal of her own.

With the shootout score stuck in a 1-1 tie, all eyes were on Burger in the net. Burger came up with an enormous stop for the Crimson. The

Harvard men’s soccer (2-10) continued its successful hunt for victories on Wednesday, notching a golden 3-1 triumph in front of a Jordan Field crowd of over 350 against its cross-country opponent, the University of California (3-2-1).

“I’m just super happy, super proud of the boys,” said junior forward Andreas Savva in a postgame interview with Harvard Athletics.

Savva, who ended the night with two goals and an assist, began the game with a bang. Junior forward Dylan Tellado snuck a pass to Savva in the box past two Golden Bear defenders. Savva then crossed the ball with his right leg into the left corner of the net, handing the Crimson an early 1-0 lead.

“Scoring is always good,”

Savva said. In the 15th minute, senior goalie Lucian Wood made a crucial save — his first of four — to keep the score 1-0 in Harvard’s favor. The Crimson played well on the back foot, holding off 12 total shots from the Golden Bears in the first half alone. In the 78th minute, junior forward Ben Kelly crossed the ball into the box, where Savva skillfully struck a left-footed shot between two Cal defenders and into the back right corner of the net, extending Harvard’s lead to 2-0.

“It was a good game from the lads. We pushed towards the end. Cal is a really good team.”

Just two minutes later, Tellado delivered Harvard’s final gut punch of the night. As Savva headed a pass from Kelly past all of the Golden Bears’ defenders, Tellado instinctively sprinted past everyone and scored with his left foot.

“Tonight was our night where we got the goals. We got the win,” Savva said. Following the win, the Crimson now leads the Ivy League conference in goals (5) and assists (7). Between the speedy and tactical attack of Savva, Tellado, and Kelly, Ivy League defenses will have their plates full trying to contain Harvard’s goal-scoring abilities.

“Two really big wins for the team. We keep the momentum going,” said Savva. The Crimson now heads to Storrs, C.T. for another non-conference showdown against the University of Connecticut on Saturday at 6

WOMEN’S SOCCER

Women’s Soccer Winless in Second Week

BY JAKE C. SWANSON AND REED M. TRIMBLE CRIMSON STAFF WRITERS

Scoring struggles continued for the Harvard women’s soccer team (0-3-2, 0-0 Ivy) in the second to last weekend of non-conference games. The Crimson failed to score multiple goals in a 1-2 loss to Monmouth (4-2-0, 0-0 CAA) and a 1-1 tie against crosstown foe Northeastern (1-3-2, 0-0 CAA).

Harvard 1, Monmouth 2

Still short-staffed due to injury, the Harvard women’s soccer team lost by a single score for the third time in four games this season, this time to the Monmouth Hawks. The team has yet to score multiple goals in a single game this season. An early corner kick had Harvard poised to put pressure on the Hawks early, but a successful defense flipped the momentum of the game.

A sloppy pass by the Crimson on its own side of the pitch was quickly turned into a goal by Monmouth. The Hawks attacked up the right side off of the turnover before a late cross in the box found the foot of senior forward Summer Reime and then the back of the net. This goal gave Monmouth a lead only eight minutes into the match. The Harvard defense found its back against the wall again only four minutes later. The Hawks took an aggressive approach on a corner kick, lofting it high and into the middle of the box. Senior goalkeeper Rhiannon Stewart punched at the ball to knock it out of the box, but slightly miss-hit the ball. The ball floated only a short distance from the crowd before finding the left foot of Monmouth junior forward Loren Gehret who lofted the ball over the heads of the crowd and finessed the ball into the goal. The Hawks claimed a 2-0 lead early. The teams exchanged shots, fouls and yellow cards for the remainder of the half but neither squad could find the back of the net as the score held at 2-0. The Crimson came close to cutting the lead but two offsides penalties and two saves by Monmouth kept Harvard off the board. The Hawks came out of halftime swinging, but Stewart stood tall and saved two shots early. Then, the Crimson went on the offensive. Three Harvard players tried their luck in a four minute span but none could find paydirt. Finally, sophomore forward Lauren Muniz buried the first goal of the game for the Crimson. A foul by Monmouth allowed Harvard to run a set on a free kick. Freshman midfielder Elsa Santos Lopez curled the ball into the box and Muniz headed it home.

less it becomes more efficient at converting opportunities into goals.

Harvard 1, Northeastern 1

Harvard women’s soccer tied their Beantown rivals the Northeastern Huskies this past Sunday. The Crimson continued a pattern from some previous early season games of coming out strong but being unable to maintain early game momentum.

The game took place on a dreary fall Sunday afternoon at Jordan field. The weather included strong frequent rain, high winds, and borderline thunderstorms.

Muniz’s goal ended the scoring for the day. The Crimson had a corner kick opportunity late in the game but failed to convert. Harvard controlled the game for the majority of the match but could not overcome the hole dug in the early minutes. Early deficits will continue to be difficult for the Crimson to overcome un -

Nonetheless, the Crimson came out full of energy. Havard controlled the majority of possession from the get go. The home team quickly advantaged the ball down the pitch setting up junior striker Ólöf Kristinsdóttir for not one but two shots on goal within the first few minutes of the match.

Both these shots were deflected by the Northeastern’s junior keeper Eliza Teplow,

With Northeastern

forward Jasmine Leshnick and into the goal.

The Crimson took an early lead, less than eight minutes into the game.

From there the Crimson maintained its stride. Throughout the first half the team kept the pedal to the metal, easily moving the ball down the field and into the box, only to have it stopped by the wall that was the Northeastern keeper.

Kristinsdóttir and Leshnick had a combined 5 shots during the first 45 minutes that all seemed close to hitting the mark, without quite getting there, along with notable shots on goal from senior forward Audrey Francois and freshmen midfielder Hannah Eftekhari.

The Crimson went into the locker room with a 1-0 lead,

having dominated possession and shots taken throughout the half.

Coming back from half, Harvard kept on shooting with most of the starting forwards and midfielders padding their statlines with shots and shots on goal. Despite this the Crimson was still unable to capitalize on moving the ball successfully down the field as the ball ended up over the goal or in the Teplow’s hands.

At the same time, the Huskies offensive seemed to find their footing a few minutes into the second half, and began redirecting the pressure that their defense had been victim to for most of the game.

Although the Harvard defense was able to deal with a few sets from Huskies, a Huskie counterattack made its way through the Harvard backline and into the Harvard goal by Northeastern sophomore striker to equalize the game and increase the tension.

With this change in momentum, the end of the game ended up feeling more like Havard

trying to hang on to the tie than grinding for the first win of the season. Northeastern stayed on the attack sending three shot attempts toward the goal without success. During this time, the Harvard defensive core and goalkeeper Stewart showed off their experience and talent which the team has come to rely on throughout its two-week old season. The game ended as a 1-1 between the Boston rivals. The statlines that told the better story of the game though were Harvard’s 16 to 6 shots and 4 to 1 shots-on-goal lead. With this game, the Crimson seemed close to landing its first win, without quite being there. Next week women’s soccer is set to continue their seven game lineup of home games playing at Jordan Field Thursday at 7pm versus Boston University and Saturday at 7 pm, for their first league game, against Dartmouth.

jake.swanson@thecrimson.com reed.trimble@thecrimson.com

Women’s Volleyball Opens With 0-3 Start

Harvard women’s volleyball (03) opened its fall season at the University of North Florida Invitational with three tough losses against non-conference opponents. The Crimson started the weekend with a Friday night loss to Howard University (4-2), a team that destroyed its competition across the weekend. But after a sweep by Howard, Harvard was able to take a set in its games against both University of North Florida (3-4) and Presbyterian College (2-4). Despite the losses, Harvard’s first match-ups gave the team an opportunity to showcase new talent, including standout freshman outside hitter Sofia Rossi. Rossi led the Crimson in a number of key moments, nailing 43 kills for Harvard in three games — an average of 3.91 per set. Rossi was named to the UNF All National Invitational Team following her performance this past weekend, making a name for herself entering her freshman season — and providing new talent for the Crimson.

Harvard 0, Howard 3 Harvard’s first set of the season got off to a strong start, building a call-and-response scoring momentum early in the set. Then

Howard’s dominance began to show as they pulled ahead for a six point lead at 11-5. The Bison kept a firm lead on the set with a four-point run later on that extended the lead to nine. Despite a Crimson effort to snag three points at the end of the set, a Harvard service error closed the set 25-18 for the Bison. Howard was consistent in the second set as Harvard fought to hold its own. With a close start of the game, things were looking up for the Crimson as it took an 11-9 lead— until Howard delivered a series of 10 points against Harvard to widen the gap 19-11. Harvard did not give the set away and held a six-point run towards the end of the set, but the Crimson was ultimately unable to match Howard and fell 25-20.

Despite the team’s misgivings, the Crimson’s junior outside hitter Ali Farquhar played a strong offensive second set, delivering six of her nine kills of the game.

Though the Crimson refused to end the match without a wellfought battle in the third set — including back-and-forth scoring and a total 12 score ties — the Bison were able to snag the last four points with back and forth kills and aces to close out the set 24-22 and ultimately sweep Harvard.

Harvard 1, North Florida 3

Harvard’s second game of the season started like its first. The Crimson seemed to begin hot, jumping out to a 5-2 lead behind an efficient attack. But the wheels fell off as Harvard errors powered a

North Florida charge. The Crimson stopped the bleeding with the Ospreys up 15-11.

Harvard made a push to tie the set at 17 powered by two service aces by underclassmen, sophomore setter Nicole Cornell and Rossi. The service line was a problem for the Crimson last season and something the team will look to improve this season. North Florida broke the tie and took a lead that did not fade as the Ospreys took the first set 25-22.

The second set started poorly for Harvard as North Florida pounced to an early 6-1 lead. Unfazed, the Crimson chipped away at the lead before a streak of kills gave Harvard a 12-10 advantage.

The Ospreys responded with a run of their own that started with two attack errors by the Crimson. The two teams would exchange runs and the lead for the rest of the set. Ultimately, Harvard got the last laugh as kills by junior outside Ali Farquhar and freshman outside Sophia Rossi started the winning push. Cornell put the finishing touches on the 25- 19 set with another service ace.

Set three was one-sided from the start. North Florida was in system and unaffected by the Crimson defense as a barrage of kills avalanched into an 18-4 lead for the Ospreys. North Florida reversed to average for the rest of the set, giving Harvard points off of attack errors, but the Ospreys built enough of a lead early to cruise to a 25-17 third set.

Backs against the wall, the

Crimson once again came out cold in the fourth set. Seven errors by Harvard gift-wrapped an 11-6 lead to North Florida. Two kills by senior outside Brynne Faltinsky and the strong service of Rossi paired up to tie the set at 12. Just when the Crimson was building hope it could force a fifth set, the Ospreys crushed any Harvard dreams. Six unanswered points opened a lead for North Florida that the Crimson never closed. The lead only grew and Harvard’s hopes were officially dashed by a service ace to close the set 25-16.

Harvard 1, Presbyterian 3

In the third game of the weekend, Rossi gave her most convincing performance yet. Despite the team’s loss, she brought the team a total 22 kills — the most of any Harvard player in a game this past weekend. That energy was not immediate. Harvard started the matchup against Presbyterian trailing 0-12 after the Blue Hose made a number of kills and benefitted off of Harvard’s numerous errors. And while the Crimson made a number of efforts to tighten the gap, they were only able to bring the differential to eight points with a final first set score of 25-17.

Rossi took the opportunity to get three of the Crimson’s first three points of the set, giving the team the early advantage. While the Blue Hose was able to tie up the match and eventually take the

lead over Harvard, the Crimson was successful in fending them off, making a 9-1 run towards the end of the game from which Presbyterian could not recover. Harvard made their mark and took the second set 25-19. The Crimson carried its energy into the third set, putting up a brilliant battle against the Blue Hose. A relentless back and forth for the lead made for a thrilling matchup until Presbyterian ran from the 16-16 tie to get nine uninterrupted points on Harvard and claim the set. The third set loss seemed to serve as fuel for the Crimson into the fourth. Presbyterian set an early lead in the game, but Harvard stayed close behind before sneaking into the top following a five-point run that took advantage of Blue Hose errors. But the point-for-point battle eventually came to an end when Presbyterian

but the Crimson had the momentum with the Huskies defense scrambling to recover.

still off balance, Harvard was able to win a corner kick where junior midfielder Susie Long sent the ball down the center of the box directly to the foot of junior

The team wrapped up its second

weekend of play against non-coference oppenents KATHARINE M. SHIN — CRIMSON PHOTOGRAPHER

Bright Vibes with Bryce Vine at Crimson Jam

BY PAVAN V. THAKKAR