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The Wi-Fi is Bad and I Blame HMC
It’s springtime again in Cambridge: The days are lengthening, the leaves are returning, and my inbox is filling with Senior Gift emails. Sixteen of them, to be precise.
I’ve seen a lot of Senior Gift marketing. I’ve seen the email blasts, the T-shirts, the social media posts, and the raffles. I’ve seen the posters up around my House, trumpeting the multifarious recipients of senior generosity, including the Classroom to Table program (shuttered for the semester, lacking funds), the Wi-Fi (slow), and my Faculty Deans’ dogs (very cute, but I bet not actually fed by the Harvard College Fund).
All Quiet on a Variety of Fronts
The 1945 report of the first committee on General Education is not the product of your usual Harvard task force. The inside cover is outfitted with the regalia of the United States government, replete with the State Department seal. The eagle clasps a banner that reads, “Truth is our strength.” The cover is emblazoned with the high aims of the program: “General Education in a Free Society.”
In those first post-war decades, it must have been easy to see Harvard as an essential American institution. President John F. Kennedy ’40, a former Crimson editor, could hold meetings of the Board of Overseers at the White House and invite the dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences to be National Security Advisor.
CS50 as Religious Experience
This week is Holy Week, and truly it is a time of miracles: Christ raised from the dead, the lapsed returned to the pews, and Harvard professors contemplating the possibility of grace in the face of human depravity.
Our reading today comes from Computer Science 50: “Introduction to Computer Science I”, the wildly popular class taught by David J. Malan ’99. The course has a turbulent history with academic dishonesty—one that includes a full tenth of the class, or over 60 students, being investigated by the Honor Council in 2017—though perhaps charitably it also is more rigorous than many courses about checking for such transgressions.
The Thesis Fog
Yesterday, with two hours to go until the 5 p.m. deadline, I found myself watching the man at the copy store hand me inch-thick reams of off-white paper on which was printed my senior thesis.
It’s an odd sort of feeling—having pondered, labored over, drafted, edited, and re-written something for the past year—to finally hold the thick stack of paper that is its final, physical manifestation. I don’t know what exactly I expected. But to slide the printout into its binder, to head out into the rain towards the Government Department offices at the Center for Government and International Studies, and to finally hand over the two black binders was remarkably anticlimactic.
For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow
The Scripture tells us, “Surely the Sovereign Lord does nothing without revealing his plan,” and if we can expect that from the Almighty Himself, it does not seem too totally crazy to ask that of the Harvard Corporation.
I speak, of course, of the surprising recent announcement of Lawrence S. Bacow to be the 29th president of Harvard University.