The Harvard Crimson - Vol. CLII, No. 21

Out of Work After DEI Office Closures

SWEET REVENGE. Harvard roared back after last year’s fourth-quarter loss to Brown, securing a decisive 41-7 win over the Bears. The home game was the first in a decade to take place on a Saturday night.

FACING THE MUSIC. Harvard College suspended the HRO after an investigation into alleged hazing at its annual retreat. Some orchestra members were not persuaded by the decision.

Judge Rules Trump Unlawfully Targeted Pro-Palestine Int’l Students, Faculty

BY WILLIAM C. MAO AND LAUREL M. SHUGART CRIMSON STAFF WRITERS

A federal judge ruled on Tuesday that the Trump administration violated the First Amendment rights of international students and professors who participated in pro-Palestine advocacy, handing a victory to a Harvard faculty group that sued over the government’s use of immigration policy to crack down on activists.

U.S. District Court Judge William G. Young ’62 delivered a sharply-worded, 161-page opinion, ruling that federal officials worked to “intentionally to chill the rights to freedom of speech” by revoking visas of faculty and students involved in pro-Palestine activism.

“This case — perhaps the most important ever to fall within the jurisdiction of this district court — squarely presents the issue whether non-citizens lawfully present here in United States actually have the same free speech rights as the rest of us,” Young wrote.

“The Court answers this Constitutional question unequivocally ‘yes, they do.’”

The American Association of University Professors — joined by its chapters at Harvard and other universities, as well as the Middle East Studies Association — filed a lawsuit in March accusing the Trump administration of arresting and attempting to deport noncitizen university affiliates on the basis of their political speech.

The case played out in federal court in

BY WILLIAM C.

The Faculty of Arts and Sciences will admit new Ph.D. students “at significantly reduced levels” this year as Harvard shrinks its budgets in response to mounting federal funding pressures, according to a Tuesday email from FAS Dean Hopi E. Hoekstra to faculty.

Hoekstra did not quantify the reduction in the number of graduate student admissions slots in her email, and a Faculty of Arts and Sciences spokesperson declined to comment on which departments would see cuts.

Hoekstra’s email, which cited uncertainty around research funding and the increased endowment tax as sources of financial pressure, stated that the FAS decided to continue Ph.D. admissions “after careful deliberation”

July. The nine-day trial brought forward 15 witnesses — including senior federal officials and noncitizen University professors — and more than 250 documents, publicly highlighting the government’s internal decisions that led to the arrests of multiple student protesters.

Young did not mince words in his ruling on Tuesday, castigating Donald Trump and his administration for wielding immigration policy to chill free speech on university campuses across the country.

“I fear President Trump believes the American people are so divided that today they will not stand up, fight for, and defend our most precious constitutional values so long as they are lulled into thinking their own personal interests are not affected,” Young wrote.

Though Young ruled that the administration had acted unlawfully, he stopped short of detailing what relief for the plaintiffs could look like, deferring that process to a later hearing, which he wrote would be “promptly scheduled.”

Young wrote that the harms done by the federal government could not be remedied by money or an injunctive order alone, saying that “the harm here and the deprivation suffered runs far deeper.”

The court initially “thought an effective remedy might be obtainable; today it is not so sure,” Young wrote.

The AAUP’s lawsuit challenged what it described as the federal government’s “ideological deportation policy,” which involved targeting noncitizen students and faculty

with arrest and deportation for their speech on Palestine and Israel. The government repeatedly argued that the policy does not exist.

Young wrote that while there was no written government policy of deporting all pro-Palestine noncitizens, the Trump administration performed a more “invidious” task: using immigration rules to make an example of select students and professors in order to intimidate others into self-censoring their speech.

At the heart of the case were the highly publicized arrests of five noncitizen student and faculty protesters, including Tufts University graduate student Rumeysa Ozturk and Columbia University graduate student Mahmoud Khalil. None of the arrested individuals testified, but the AAUP’s case relied on the testimony of noncitizen faculty who told the court that the high-profile arrests caused them to refrain from political speech.

The government’s aim, Young wrote, was “tamping down pro-Palestinian student protests and terrorizing similarly situated non-citizen (and other) pro-Palestinians into silence because their views were unwelcome.”

Young’s ruling pointed to public statements and social media posts by Secretary of State Marco Rubio — in which Rubio repeatedly televised his intent to deport noncitizens who undermine “national security” — as evidence of a concerted effort to chill pro-Palestine speech.

of federal investigations, and the administration has continued to levy new threats against the University’s access to federal funding since the judge’s order.

Trump said reaching a deal would mean that Harvard’s “sins are forgiven.” Under the agreement, he said, a series of trade schools would be “run by Harvard.”

“They’ve put up $500 million interest and everything else would go to that account — meaning it would go to the trade school,” he said. “It’s a big investment in trade school done by very smart people.”

The agreement described by Trump loosely mirrors the administration’s earlier settlement with Brown University, where the school agreed to pay $50 million to support workforce development in Rhode Island. Under that agreement, Brown did not pledge to directly “run” trade schools.

— suggesting that the FAS may have seriously considered pausing GSAS admissions entirely for the upcoming year. Hoekstra noted that other universities had halted admissions due to financial constraints. “We have chosen a different course,” she wrote. GSAS rejected all waitlisted graduate student candidates in the spring. Even before that, a number of graduate programs had reduced their planned admissions offers in response to federal funding cuts.

But the Population Health Sciences program — a Ph.D. program at the Harvard School of Public Health and Graduate School of Arts and Sciences — plans to admit at most 70 percent of the number mandated in previous years, according to HSPH professor Eric B. Rimm. The program slashed its planned admit spots from 42 to 29, an approximate 30 per-

cent decrease from the mandated number from years prior, according to Rimm. That reduced figure is now the ceiling for the number of students the program will admit this year, Rimm said. And Hoekstra’s email suggests that similar changes could take place in other programs across the school. Cohort sizes will be reduced over the next two years as the FAS evaluates its future model for graduate education, Hoekstra wrote.

FAS spokesperson James M. Chisholm declined to provide specific figures on graduate admission reductions. Slashing graduate admissions is one of many cost-saving measures implemented by Harvard’s oldest school as it braces for sharp limits on future federal funding and new costs under a hiked endowment tax.

In Photos: Car Seat Headrest Rocks Out

GOVERNMENT SHUTDOWN CONTINUES AFTER PARTISAN GRIDLOCK

A government shutdown began Wednesday after congress was unable to pass new funding bills. Thousands of federal workers will be on leave until Congress is able to pass a new funding plan. Food aid, veterans’ benefits, and data from the CDC and Bureau of Labor Statistics will be on pause, while essential services from Social Security and Medicare will continue, according to the New York Times. The Environmental Protection Agency has been hit hardest by the shutdown, with 89 percent of workers furloughed within the first day. As of Thursday, opposing proposals have failed to end the government shutdown, and President Trump threatens further layoffs if the shutdown continues. Wall Street investors are optimistic that the shutdown will be brief as the stock market is currently holding strong.

TRUMP TELLS CONGRESS

U.S. IS IN ‘ARMED CONFLICT’ WITH CARTELS

President Donald Trump sent a notification to Congress that the United States is in “armed conflict” with cartels that send drugs to the U.S., the New York Times and Washington Post reported. The message seeks to give legal cover to the Trump administration’s recent lethal strikes on boats in the Caribbean, which the administration claims belong to Venezuelan gangs. The confidential notice to Congress described the strikes’ targets as terrorists, but did not identify specific groups with which the Trump administration considers itself to be in armed conflict. Democrats and legal experts were dubious about the validity of the administration’s claims.

GAZA FLOTILLA INTERCEPTED BY ISRAEL, ACTIVISTS LOSE PROTECTION FROM EU GOVERNMENTS

Israeli forces intercepted boats carrying humanitarian aid to Gaza on Wednesday night, the New York Times reported. Climate activist Great Thunberg was among those stopped by authorities, according to a video posted by the Israeli Foreign Ministry. The boats were“safely” docked in Israel, according to Israeli authorities. The group that ran the flotilla said the boats were “illegally intercepted” in a social media post. The flotilla — originally supported by EU countries such as Spain and Italy, who sent navy ships during part of the journey — was urged by several countries to turn back before being captured by Israeli authorities, according to NBC.

TRUMP PLEDGES PROTECTION TO QATAR IN EVENT OF ATTACK

President Trump has pledged to protect Qatar as if it was part of the United States in the event of an armed attack, according to Reuters. The milestone written agreement works to strengthen ties between the U.S. and Qatar, which hosts the largest military base in the Middle East. Throughout the Gaza War, Qatar has acted as a middleman between Israel and the U.S. during stop-and-start negotiations for a ceasefire agreement.

Associate

What’s Next

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

Friday 10/3

GALLERY TALK: MOHOLY-NAGY’S

LIGHT PROP FOR AN ELECTRIC STAGE

Harvard Art Museum, 1-1:30p.m.

Come join staff from the Harvard Art Museums as they discuss an experimental light installation created by László Moholy-Nagy, a Hungarian painter and photographer and one of the first professors of the Bauhaus art school.

Saturday 10/4

MUSIC 11O CONCERT

Sanders Theater, 8 p.m.

Come see Music 110 perform Mahler’s Rück -

ert-Lieder with mezzo-soprano Maire Therese Carmack and Mahler’s Symphony No. 4 in Harvard’s historic Sanders Theater! Tickets are free for Harvard students.

Sunday 10/5

MATERIALS LAB WORKSHOP

Harvard Art Museum, 1-3:30pm Join scientific illustrator and educator Erica Beade for a class on observational drawing of the natural world. Beade has taught art classes at the Harvard Museum of Natural History, as well as other venues, for over 20 years.

Monday 10/6

DIAGNOSING THE DIVIDE: INNOVATIONS IN WOMEN’S HEALTH

Knafel Center, 1-5:30pm

The 2025 Harvard Radcliffe Institute science symposium will focus on recent innovations in research and clinical developments, particularly in relation to medication for and complexities linked to women’s health and cancer.

Tuesday 10/7

STUDY GROUP WITH SUSAN GLASSER & PETER BAKER

HKS, Institute of Politics, 5pm Journalists Susan Glasser and Peter Baker will appear together to discuss the evolving role of independent media and the role of journalism in public discourse during times of political uncertainty.

Wednesday 10/8

WHAT ON EARTH IS “PLURALISM” FOR AMERICAN LIFE TODAY?

Countyway Library, Minot Room, 1-2:30pm Join Diana L. Eck, a professor of comparative religion and law and psychiatry in society, for a discussion on the role of pluralism in modern American society.

Thursday 10/9

CULTURE IN ACTION: BUILDING DEMOCRACY THROUGH THE ARTS

Agassiz Theater, Horner Room

Come listen to Deborah F. Rutter, former president of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C., as she discusses how arts and culture relate to democracy and cultural citizenship.

Friday 10/10

EMPOWERING YOUTH FOR SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT

Harvard Kennedy School, Cason Conference Room, 4:30-5:30pm Join Leslie Coles, manager of Harvard’s Lemann Program on Creativity and Entrepreneurship, lawyer Timipre Wolo, and two student leaders at Harvard college, for a summit on youth leadership and sustainable development in the business world.

Harvard Says Trump Botched Investigation

Harvard sent a letter to the Department of Health and Human Services earlier this month, accusing the agency’s civil rights office of twisting facts and misapplying antidiscrimination law in its investigation into antisemitism at the University.

In a 28-page letter sent on Sept. 19 to HHS’s Office for Civil Rights, which was obtained by The Crimson, Harvard rejected the OCR’s June finding that the University had violated Title VI. The letter described HHS’s referral of the case to the Justice Department as “premature,” saying the agency violated its own regulations by moving the case forward before even giving Harvard guidelines to come into compliance.

In the letter, Harvard argued that the incidents cited by the HHS civil rights office were isolated, exaggerated, or involved non-Harvard affiliates, including anonymous posts on the third-party app Sidechat. Disruptions such as the pro-Palestine encampment in Harvard Yard in May 2024, the University said, were temporary, mitigated without concessions to participating activists, and did not block students’ access to education.

Harvard’s letter also cast doubt on the validity of using the conclusions of Harvard’s task force on antisemitism and anti-Israeli bias, which the HHS cited in June as the basis for many of the

claims in its Title VI finding. The letter described allegations of antisemitic harassment in the complaint as “uncorroborated narratives,” noting that the task force did not attempt to verify the accounts it collected, many of which were anonymous or secondhand. The letter also stated that only a small fraction of Harvard’s student body — about 2 percent — responded to the survey, which it described as “non-scientific.” Of 608 students who responded, 130 identified themselves as Jewish. Data from the survey “cannot be used as evidence of a legal violation because they represent the views of a small, self-selected fraction of Harvard’s entire Jewish community,” Harvard wrote.

The letter insisted that the White House’s finding that Harvard had acted with “deliberate indifference” toward antisemitism was patently false. The letter pointed to active reporting systems, sanctions against pro-Palestine

student groups, and the termination of employees involved in allegedly antisemitic conduct as evidence of a good-faith response.

The Trump administration wasted little time in clapping back.

On Monday, HHS referred Harvard to the federal suspension and debarment process — an extraordinary step that could cut Harvard off from billions in federal grants and contracts. The agency made no mention of Harvard’s letter just days before and instead doubled down on its June finding, repeating many of the same allegations and declaring full confidence in its original Title VI determination.

For a Title VI case against Harvard to stick, a court would have to find five things to be true: the harassment of members of a protected class was severe, pervasive, and objectively offensive; it denied students access to education; Harvard had “actual knowledge” of it; it happened within the University’s programs or activities; and Harvard’s

response was clearly unreasonable.

Harvard argued none of those conditions were met.

It said the HHS civil rights office leaned on scattered episodes that, while troubling, fell far short of showing a pervasive climate of hostility. Vandalism cases were investigated by police, including red paint splashed on the John Harvard statue in October 2024 and a string of swastika stickers plastered on buildings days later.

Both investigations yielded no suspects, but Harvard said they showed administrators were not ignoring threats. And an antisemitic cartoon circulated by a student group was promptly condemned by Harvard’s president, the letter noted.

The Yard encampment, Harvard wrote, ended in less than three weeks and did not stop Jewish students from going to class or using campus facilities. The letter emphasized that Harvard did not

make concessions to encampment participants and cited University

President Alan M. Garber ’76’s rejection of activists’ demands to review Harvard’s endowment for ties to human rights violations.

At other universities, leaders’ decision to strike deals with concessions to student protesters swiftly became fodder for Republican attacks. Northwestern University’s president announced his resignation earlier this year after coming under fire for his decision to negotiate with encampment protesters.

Harvard also argued that it did not have contemporaneous knowledge of many of the harassment or discrimination incidents cited by the OCR. Many of the complaints in the Title VI finding were anonymous, came in months late, or provided no names or dates, making it impossible to claim the University had fair notice at the time, Harvard claimed. Other conduct, like hostile posts on the anonymous social media platform Sidechat or vandalism by unidentified actors, fell outside Harvard’s programs and control, the University said.

As for indifference, Harvard insisted its record shows the opposite, touting changes that protesters have bashed as limits on free speech. Administrators pointed to stepped-up restrictions in the wake of Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack — including limits on library access for students and faculty who participated in reading room protests and a commitment to fund security costs for Harvard Hillel.

When it began its investigation, the HHS had alleged that Harvard lacked adequate mechanisms for students to report antisemitic harassment and that complaints often went unaddressed. Harvard said that too was wrong, argu-

ing OCR had conflated two distinct channels — its nondiscrimination and anti-bullying process and anonymous hotline — both of which it maintained were active and handling reports.

“Title VI demands attention, not perfection,” the letter read. Harvard also rejected the OCR’s public claims that the two parties had engaged in “extensive discussions.” In reality, the University said, “there have been no substantive discussions at all,” despite Harvard submitting responses to four separate data requests.

The University wrote that HHS also tried to penalize Harvard for failing to provide information on changes to its Title VI training, even though it had not requested documents on the training. Harvard informed the Education Department’s OCR of the updates as part of a separate investigation, only to receive no response for more than three months, according to the letter.

The HHS probe first began in February, when OCR opened a compliance review into pro-Palestine messaging worn by graduates at the Harvard Medical School’s

Harvard Medical School administrators removed from consideration a potential speaker for the school’s 2024 Class Day out of concern that pro-Palestine messages she had posted on social media would be “polarizing,” according to a document obtained by The Crimson. The document was sent to the Department of Health and Human Services by Harvard in response to its Title VI antidiscrimination investigation, which began in February, into pro-Palestine activism at the event. The 133-page exchange between Harvard’s lawyers and HHS officials reveals extensive contingency plans developed by the HMS administration — including some made just days in advance of the ceremonies — to respond if student speakers made unscripted pro-Palestine remarks. The strategies included cutting the livestream, changing the microphone volume, and even ending the ceremony altogether. Administrators also designated trained de-escalators to diffuse potential protests and pasted a premade statement at the top of HMS Dean George Q. Daley ’82’s speech for him to deliver if speakers veered off script

into pro-Palestine speech.

“I acknowledge your right to protest … I see you, and I hear you. Harvard’s longstanding commitment is that protest and dissent can be valuable forms of expression. However, today is about celebrating the HMS and HSDM Class of 2024 and their accomplishments. I ask for the courtesy to continue with our program. Thank you,” read the remarks Daley was prepared to deliver.

In sharing extensive details about the school’s precautionary measures, Harvard aimed to convince the HHS that it did not violate Title VI of the Civil Rights Act — and took significant steps to protect Jewish students in the event of disruptions to the 2024 Commencement ceremonies, which took place at the height of a wave of pro-Palestine campus activism.

According to the document, the HMS administration first learned that students might stage a protest when an HMS faculty member emailed Daley the day before Class Day warning him that graduates were planning to go off script.

Over the course of the next day, the Medical School devised extensive measures to mitigate the risk of pro-Palestine activism during the event, including the plans for cutting the livestream and potentially sus -

pending the ceremony midway through.

Before then, administrators had reviewed student speeches and repeatedly reminded speakers to stick to their approved remarks. The Medical School also put significant consideration into choosing the Class Day speaker “to avoid the impression that HMS was aligning with a public stance on the Israel-Palestinian conflict.”

Initially, the school was considering two potential Class Day speakers: Uche A. Blackstock ’99, an emergency physician and advocate against racial disparities in medicine who graduated from HMS in 2005, and William Flanary, a medical comedian.

The school opted against inviting Flanary because it thought his humor “would set an inappropriate tone.”

And when officials realized Blackstock had posted several pro-Palestine messages on Instagram, they decided against selecting her too.

“She was removed from consideration out of concern that her presence or comments could be polarizing,” lawyers for Harvard wrote in a March 19 submission to HHS.

When neither candidate was approved, the Medical School selected Melissa L. Gilliam, the incoming president of Boston University, who graduated from HMS in 1993.

The submission to HHS also disputed certain claims by the agency about the nature of the pro-Palestine signage at the HMS commencement.

When HHS first notified Harvard of its investigation in February, the government said it was opening the proceedings because of a Jan. 27 New York Post article that alleged graduations at Harvard and other top universities were “plagued by antisemitism” and “pro-terror antics.”

The article specifically pointed to “three-part stoles consisting of the Palestinian flag, a keffiyeh and an empty map of Israel, with some with the word Palestine or ‘Jerusalem Is Ours’ written in Arabic adjacent

to the map,” which, the report claimed, were displayed at HMS commencement.

The Harvard document acknowledged that some pro-Palestine signs and pins were displayed during the HMS commencement ceremony. But it denied that the three-part stoles were ever worn by HMS students, saying that none of the video footage and more than 1,000 photographs taken at the event showed any HMS students wearing those specific stoles.

The document also said that the Medical School did not receive any complaints related to the Class Day ceremonies and that students only showed pro-Palestine imagery briefly during the proceedings.

“The conduct was neither severe nor pervasive and Harvard was neither indifferent nor did it respond unreasonably. Accordingly, there was no violation of Title VI,” the submission read.

The Medical School has been

the subject of scrutiny over both complaints of antisemitism and the suppression of pro-Palestine speech. In April 2024, students at HMS and the School of Dental Medicine accused the administration of censorship after pro-Palestine imagery was removed from a student music video. And in January, HMS canceled a planned lecture and panel with Gazan patients after people raised concerns that it would be one-sided and wouldn’t hear from Israelis impacted by the war. The panel took place later in the spring semester.

HMS was not the only school whose commencement ceremony was marked by pro-Palestine protests during the turbulent end to the spring 2024 semester. Harvard considered moving the University’s commencement proceedings to Harvard Stadium if participants in the pro-Palestine encampment remained in Harvard Yard through the day of the ceremony.

And the ceremony itself, which took place in Tercentenary Theatre as planned, was overshadowed by protests after the Harvard Corporation denied degrees to 13 seniors who participated in the encampment. Hundreds of attendees walked out as Harvard President Alan M. Garber ’76 spoke.

Two student speakers veered off script to condemn the withholding of degrees, and both drew standing ovations.

“As I stand here today, I must take a moment to recognize my peers — the 13 undergraduates in the class of 2024 that will not graduate today,” undergraduate English address

HHS Moves Toward Cutting Off Harvard’s Grant Access

SUSPENSION AND DEBARMENT. If the proceedings go through, Harvard could lose access to grants and contracts.

BY DHRUV T. PATEL AND SAKETH SUNDAR CRIMSON STAFF WRITERS

The Trump administration launched proceedings on Monday that could bar Harvard from doing business with the federal government, opening a new front in its escalating fight with the University just weeks after a federal judge ordered $2.7 billion in frozen research funding restored.

The Department of Health and Human Services’ Office for Civil Rights referred Harvard to the federal suspension and debarment process, a mechanism that allows the government to designate institutions as not responsible enough to receive federal grants or contracts, according to an HHS press release. If carried out, the move could cut Harvard off from billions of dollars in federal funding across all agencies — a consequence that would sidestep the recent court order forcing the reinstatement of grants that were first frozen or terminated in May.

In the press release, the HHS cited its June finding that the school had acted with “deliber-

ate indifference” toward combatting antisemitism on campus — and emphasized that the agency retained the authority to terminate or suspend funding through “formal enforcement mechanisms” under Title VI.

“OCR’s referral of Harvard for formal administrative proceedings reflects OCR’s commitment to safeguard both taxpayer investments and the broader public interest,” wrote Paula M. Stannard, the director of the OCR.

HHS referred its investigation to the Department of Jus-

tice in late July, teeing up legal action in the case. Harvard has denounced the Trump administration’s accusations of antisemitism as a pretext to assert control over the University’s operations.

Debarment is a rarely used but powerful tool. The process typically begins with a suspension lasting up to one year, during which an institution is barred from federal funding while the government considers permanent exclusion. A full debarment, imposed after review,

prevents an entity from reviewing federal contracts and grants across the government for a set number of years. Because debarment applies government-wide, it would affect not only grants and contracts from HHS — Harvard’s largest source of federal funding — but also agencies like the Department of Defense and the National Science Foundation, both of which likewise direct significant research support to Harvard.

HHS gave Harvard 20 days to decide whether it would request

The agency noted that the Monday move did not affect a separate ongoing investigation announced in April into accusations of race-based discrimination at the Harvard Law Review, an independent organization at Harvard Law School.

House Republicans Demand Records on Campus Antisemitism

Two Republicans on the House Education and Workforce Committee accused Harvard of fostering “a hostile antisemitic environment” and demanded a series of internal records related to antisemitism complaints in a Monday letter to Harvard President Alan M. Garber ’76. Committee chair Rep. Tim Walberg (R-Mich.) and member Rep. Elise M. Stefanik ’06 (R-N.Y.) set an Oct. 13 deadline for Harvard to turn over a broad swathe of internal communications about how the University handled antisemi-

tism complaints, prepared statements in the wake of protests related to Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel and Israel’s war in Gaza, and considered changes to curricula accused of “antisemitism or anti-Israel bias.”

The lawmakers also requested the University turn over all internal documents addressing an altercation that took place at an Oct. 18, 2023, protest on the Harvard Business School campus. The letter also demanded information on the status of a partnership between the Harvard School of Public Health and Birzeit University in the West Bank. Harvard suspended the partnership in late 2024 or early 2025 as the school conducted an internal review, which was set

to finish in spring 2025. An HSPH spokesperson told The Crimson in May that the school would decide whether to permanently discontinue the relationship after the review concluded.

“The Committee is concerned that Harvard has not made its decision, if any, public,” Stefanik and Walberg wrote. Their letter was the first public announcement in months in the Education and Workforce Committee’s investigation of antisemitism complaints at Harvard, which began in December 2023. The last update in the investigation came under the 118th Congress in a December 2024 report by six House committees. Since then, lawmakers have targeted Harvard with inves-

ADMISSIONS FROM PAGE 1

FAS To Reduce Grad Admissions

The FAS has instituted a hiring freeze for full-time staff, announced it would keep its budget flat for fiscal year 2026, and ceased work on all “non-essential capital projects and spending.” A federal judge ruled last month that the government’s freeze on Harvard’s funding was unconstitutional. Since then, the University has received at least $46 million from the National Institutes of Health, but the government’s timeline for returning remaining federal grant money is still unclear. The Trump administration has also threatened Harvard’s international students by attempting to revoke its certification to enroll international students and impose an entry ban. A federal judge blocked the efforts with a preliminary injunction last spring.

The confluence of pressures on both Harvard’s funding and international students has discouraged some prospective applications from applying to the University’s Ph.D. programs, according to several faculty.

Organismic and Evolutionary Biology professor Peter R. Girguis said several prospective applicants told him that although they wanted to apply for his Ph.D. program, they were rethinking their decision out of concerns about funds and visas at Harvard.

“It may have a chilling effect on our graduate programs for years or even a decade,” Girguis said. Prospective applicants have also cited concerns about antisemitism at Harvard, an issue that has become a flashpoint on campus and the Trump administration’s justification for its relentless as-

sault against the University. Girguis said he saw the worries as a product of both real problems and the constant media spotlight trained on Harvard.

“I share their concerns, but I am worried about the exaggeration that we have seen in some media outlets,” he said.

Harvard Medical School professor Shiv S. Pillai, who co-directs the immunology graduate program, said that faculty mentors may become more reluctant to take on Ph.D. students if they don’t know whether they will be able to secure funding to support them.

“There’s a great deal of uncertainty,” he said. “And I would say it’s not at all unique to Harvard.”

tigations into its foreign ties, financial aid practices, and hiring practices.

But antisemitism has been the most persistent refrain in federal Republicans’ financial and legal attacks on Harvard. Stefanik and Walberg issued their request three months after the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights concluded Harvard had acted with “deliberate indifference” toward antisemitic incidents on campus and warned that a failure to make “adequate changes” would harm its ability to access federal resources.

The HBS incident included in the letter refers to an altercation between pro-Palestine protestors and a Jewish student that has remained unresolved nearly two years after the initial conflict. The student, Yoav Segev, stepped over protesters and filmed their faces as they lay on the ground for a “diein” demonstration. Several protesters surrounded Segev, tried to cover his camera lens with keffiyehs and safety vests, and escorted him out of the crowd.

The confrontation drew national attention, and Segev sued Harvard and its police department, accusing them of failing to protect him and obstructing the district attorney’s investigation. Two graduate students involved in the altercation were charged with assault and battery, but the case did not go to trial, and the charges were dismissed after the students completed pretrial diversion requirements including anger management training, a course on negotiation, and community service.

Stefanik and Walberg on Monday accused Harvard of obstruct-

ing the Suffolk County District Attorney’s investigation into the incident and alleged that Garber had stopped HBS Dean Srikant Datar from sending a community message about it, citing text messages obtained by the committee.

“Another complication is that, although [the Israeli student] was technically within his rights … [t] he way he was taking videos appears provocative,” Garber allegedly wrote in one of the messages. The context of the message was not clear.

In a later email, Datar said Garber had told him that Middle Eastern and North African students “will be very upset by” a proposed email addressing the altercation, according to a brief excerpt published in the lawmakers’ letter.

The confrontation took place at a moment when friction and grief on campus were thrust into a national spotlight. Some Jewish students felt threatened by pro-Palestine activism and sharper anti-Israel sentiment on campus, and many students involved in the protests feared doxxing and harassment.

Stefanik previously accused Harvard of delaying “justice” for the students involved in an April 2024 letter to Harvard leadership.

The letter also doubled down on Stefanik’s campaign to make Harvard cut ties with Birzeit, which she and other House Republicans have accused of harboring ties to Hamas. Hamas — which has controlled the Gazan government for 18 years and is one of two major Palestinian political parties — has been popular in Birzeit’s student government elections.

Materials published in the Monday letter suggest that Garber was at least initially ambivalent about the demands. In a brief excerpt from a Jan. 24 email, Garber wrote that “if the big issue is that Hamas is popular on the Birzeit campus … were we to shut down the program on that basis, we’d give ammunition to [Boycott, Divestment, and Sanction (BDS)] advocates.” The lawmakers’ letter did not include any further context from Garber’s email. But it appeared to be an allusion to longstanding calls by student activists for Harvard to cut ties with Israeli universities over Israel’s treatment of Palestinians and, later, the war in Gaza. Garber has said that academic boycotts “run contrary to academic principles and University principles,” and Harvard has strengthened its ties with Israeli universities over the past year, even as its tactics in Gaza drew widespread international condemnation.

Stefanik and Walberg’s letter also requested action plans that Harvard’s schools submitted to the president in April as part of the Presidential Task Force on Combating Antisemitism, as well as former University President Claudine Gay’s short-lived Antisemitism Advisory Group. The letter also requested every communication since October 2023 from the University-wide Office of Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging referring to antisemitism, Israel, or Palestine. A spokesperson for Harvard did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Judge Sides with Harvard AAUP

“The bottom line is if you are coming here to stir up trouble on our campuses we will deny you a visa,” Rubio told Congress in May, in a line that was quoted in Young’s ruling. “I want to do more. I hope we can find more of these people.” At points, Young mused about Trump’s “fixation with retribution” and wrote that the judiciary had been a “bulwark” for free speech under fire. He cited as an example the ruling by U.S. District Judge Allison D. Burroughs in Harvard’s own case against the government’s termination of its research funding, which found that the funding freeze was retaliatory.

But Young was less sanguine about other institutions’ willingness to stand up to Trump. In his ruling, published hours be -

fore Trump said his administration was closing in on a deal with Harvard, Young took aim at “institutional leaders in higher education” who “meekly appease the President.”

“Our bastions of independent unbiased free speech — those entities we once thought unassailable — have proven all too often to have only Quaker guns,” Young wrote.

Young agreed that the AAUP and MESA both had standing in the case, but he removed individual schools’ AAUP chapters — based at Harvard, New York University, and Rutgers University — because they could not demonstrate how they were affected by the Trump administration’s policies. (Harvard Philosophy professor Bernhard Nickel, a German citizen, was the only

member of any of the three chapters to testify in July.)

History professor Kirsten A. Weld, the president of Harvard’s AAUP chapter, wrote that she was “gratified to see a federal judge so powerfully affirm what we knew from the start to be true: that the Trump administration’s efforts to terrorize university affiliates into silence about Palestine were illegal and unconstitutional.”

“Importantly, too, it unequivocally confirms that non-citizens have the same free speech rights as citizens. This legal victory demonstrates once again that when our freedoms and core values are threatened, it is always, always worth standing up and fighting back,” Weld wrote. william.mao@thecrimson.com laurel.shugart@thecrimson.com

Students Left Out of Work and In the Dark After Closures

BY WYETH RENWICK AND NIRJA J. TRIVEDI CRIMSON STAFF WRITERS

When Harvard College’s three diversity offices shut their doors in July, their 35 undergraduate interns lost their jobs — and for weeks after the office closures, nobody told them.

Now, the Harvard Foundation — an umbrella center that replaced the three offices — is accepting only 12 undergraduate workers for this school year, according to job listings posted on the Student Employment Office website on Sept. 11. None of the former interns are guaranteed a spot.

The diversity offices’ staff were transferred to the Foundation, a new center within the Office of Culture and Community, over the summer. But undergraduate employees, who were given no advance warning about the closures, were never officially informed that they were out of a job, according to five former interns who spoke to The Crimson.

Some did not learn the news until the Foundation job listings went up — two weeks into the school year.

“There was never this unified communication from the university that we wouldn’t have our jobs when we returned back in the fall,” said Aaryan K. Rawal ’26, who worked at the Office of BGLTQ Student Life for two years. “It was on a very ad hoc basis.” Until this year, student interns

TRUMP FROM PAGE 1

did not have to reapply for their jobs between semesters, though some were asked to email office directors to confirm that they wanted to return.

Any interns who secure Foundation positions this semester may find themselves taking an effective pay cut. Continuing interns at the Harvard Foundation for Intercultural and Race Relations, the Office of BGLTQ Student Life, and the Harvard College Women’s Center could expect a roughly 30- to 50-cent raise to their hourly wages with the new school year. But the Foundation will offer its student employees the same hourly wage paid to entry-level interns at the diversity offices.

Applications for the Foundation jobs closed on Sunday.

Harvard College spokesperson Jonathan Palumbo wrote in an email that the College “communicated updates on the new office to impacted staff and student employees in the days and weeks ahead of the final announcement as decisions were finalized.”

At the start of the spring semester, some interns feared that President Donald Trump’s second term would uproot the offices. But those worries began to dissipate as the semester passed without major changes.

Rawal said that in at least one conversation in the spring, QuOffice leadership assured concerned interns and other students that the Trump administration would not obstruct LGBTQ student program-

ming on campus.

“What we saw was our directors basically not take the threat seriously,” he said. “I recall a conversation where one of them basically said the Trump administration was incompetent in their first term, and therefore we can bank on that in their second term, which is why we don’t have to act with urgency.”

When Harvard announced a hiring freeze in March, some thought the offices would not be able to make new hires — but believed they would keep their own positions.

Many student interns did not suspect their jobs were in jeopardy until July 10, when the Crimson reported that the offices’ websites had disappeared. When Olivia F. Data ’26, a communications intern at the Women’s Center, left school in the spring, she thought her fall position was “safe.” She might have to reapply, unlike in other years, but only as a formality, Data thought.

But when she tried to sign on to the center’s Instagram account on July 10, the office’s social media had vanished without warning.

“The account didn’t exist,” Data said. “The Women’s Center account just wasn’t there anymore, which seems like a really bad sign.”

In the weeks after the website removals, students remained in the dark. The process was chaotic: even the former directors of the diversity offices were not informed of the decision to close their offices and reassign employees until hours before

the changes were announced in a July 23 email to College staff.

The emailed announcement, which was forwarded to student interns by Associate Dean of Students for Culture and Community Alta Mauro, did not address the status of interns’ jobs.

“As key partners with the DSO and our office, we want to share this important news with you,” Mauro wrote. “We look forward to your partnership and collaboration with our office staff as we expand the reach of our work.”

Students who sought answers over the next few weeks were met with little clarity and sometimes given conflicting information.

Several days after Mauro’s email, former intern Amber M. Simons ’26 visited the QuOffice and asked Meagan von Rohr — the QuOffice’s former director, who is now a Foundation director — about whether the interns would be guaranteed positions at the Foundation in the fall.

“Either she was just being misleading on purpose or she didn’t know, but she made it seem like she thought we were just going to be automatically rehired to the new position,” Simons said.

But former QuOffice intern Hannah L. Niederriter ’26 got a different answer when she met in late August for First-Year Retreat and Experience leadership training with von Rohr and other Foundation administrators, including Mauro, senior director Habiba Braimah, director Bonnie M. Talbert, associate

director Matias Ramos, and program manager for military student services Craig Rodgers.

“Even asking them to their face, they didn’t know how many interns they were going to hire,” said Niederriter, a former Crimson Design editor. “They didn’t know if we would get priority in the application. They just couldn’t really tell us anything about even what our job would be at the new office.”

A day later, one student intern finally got a more definitive reply.

Administrators — including the Foundation’s assistant director of human relations and finance, Bridget Duffy — told Rawal at an undergraduate student worker union bargaining meeting that Rawal and their coworkers would not return to their positions in the fall.

“Harvard basically said that if you’re a previous student worker, you have to reapply for these positions,” Rawal said. “While they intended to give us priority, there was no guarantee about what happened. They also had no idea how many they were hiring for.”

Palumbo, the College spokesperson, declined to comment on what students were told by Foundation staff, citing a policy against making statements about private conversations. He did not comment on when the College decided to ask students to reapply and to reduce the number of internships, writing in an email that the decisions were “part of the ongoing planning.”

Former QuOffice intern Matteo

Diaz ’27 said he and his coworkers

“received about just as much information as the public has.”

“I’d worked there for about a year. I know there are folks who’ve been working there longer, but we know just about as much as everyone else,” said Diaz, a Crimson Editorial editor.

To Data, the offices’ sudden closure “felt like a secret.”

“It happened over the summer when students weren’t on campus to respond,” she said. “There was no dialogue around it.”

None of the five former interns that The Crimson interviewed reapplied to work at the Foundation. Several cited the Foundation’s move away from specific programming for LGBTQ students, female students, and students of color.

“While I’d still be able to create community in the new office, my services would not be dedicated to queer students, which is something I thought was very important about my role at the QuOffice,” Niederriter said.

Simons said the QuOffice’s “messy” closure over the summer convinced them to focus on LGBTQ student organizations instead of reapplying for a job through the Foundation.

“I’m still working as hard as I was to make an impact and help students, but now I’m not getting paid for the work that I’m doing,” Simons said.

wyeth.renwick@thecrimson.com nirja.trivedi@thecrimson.com

Trump Claims White House Is Nearing Deal Gov’t Shutdown Pauses Harvard Lawsuit

At the time of his remarks, Trump was signing an unrelated executive order aimed at advancing pediatric cancer research and tapping into “the extraordinary potential” of artificial intelligence. He pivoted to Harvard when introducing remarks by McMahon and then again after a reporter asked him about the status of the settlement talks, which were first announced by Trump himself in June. Trump’s remarks come as the Trump administration has turned up the pressure on Harvard. On Monday, the White House launched federal suspension and debarment proceedings against the University, a highly unusual move that would cut off the school from access to federal grants and contracts. As recently as Sunday, Harvard’s top leaders had offered little clarity on whether a settlement existed — or, if it did, on its status or terms. When asked by a Crimson reporter while leaving a meeting of

the University’s governing bodies, Harvard Corporation chair Penny Pritzker responded that she had “absolutely no idea” how the negotiations might conclude.

Pritzker also expressed skepticism about Harvard’s willingness to agree to a settlement involving a $500 million payout.

“I’ve heard the Trump administration say that,” she remarked when pressed about the figure.

Meanwhile, Harvard Provost John F. Manning ’82 declined to answer questions regarding the talks when approached, offering only a tight smile.

Trump has repeatedly claimed that the White House has been on the verge of a deal with Harvard.

When he first broke the news that talks had resumed between the two parties in June, he claimed that a deal was coming “in the next week or so.” More than three months passed without signs of a finished deal.

dhruv.patel@thecrimson.com avani.rai@thecrimson.com saketh.sundar@thecrimson.com

BY DHRUV T. PATEL CRIMSON STAFF WRITER

Wednesday’s government shutdown could stall Harvard’s federal funding lawsuit, halting the case before District Judge Allison D. Burroughs can enter a final judgment — and before President Donald Trump can file the appeal he has promised.

After Congress hit a midnight deadline without passing an interim spending bill, the Department of Justice lost funding and paused work on most civil litigation. Trump administration lawyers asked Burroughs to pause the Harvard case’s schedule indefinitely, saying its attorneys are “prohibited from working” during the shutdown.

On Thursday, Burroughs agreed to move a deadline in the case to Oct. 10, partially granting the government’s request.

Burroughs ruled in Harvard’s favor last month, requiring the return of roughly $2.7 billion in federal grants and contracts that the Trump administration froze in the spring. But she told both sides to hammer out implementation details

before she entered a judgment. Harvard and the Trump administration filed a joint report on Sept. 19 telling the court that no disputes remained, but they asked for a delay through Oct. 3 to work through compliance.

The administration cannot appeal the ruling until Burroughs’ decision is finalized.

The Justice Department’s request came just two days before the parties were set to update the court on whether any final issues remained before judgment.

The shutdown, sparked by a partisan fight over Affordable Care Act subsidies, has already furloughed thousands of federal workers and is expected to last at least through the end of the week, if not longer. If Burroughs grants the government’s request, all deadlines will be extended day-for-day with the length of the shutdown.

Burroughs’ order began to take effect last month as both sides moved to implement her ruling. Within two weeks, the Department of Health and Human Services released $46 million to Harvard, covering nearly 200 grants that were frozen

or terminated in April. It is unclear whether those payments will continue under the current shutdown.

Harvard did not oppose the Justice Department’s request for a stay. But the American Association of University Professors’ Harvard chapter, whose case against the funding freeze has been joined with Harvard’s, did.

“It is time for the court’s order to be enforced, and our chapter is prepared to take all of the steps necessary to see that that happens,” wrote Andrew M. Crespo ’05, a Harvard Law School professor and the chapter’s general counsel, in a statement.

A Harvard spokesperson declined to comment Wednesday evening.

Andrew M. Sellars, a professor at Boston University School of Law, said shutdowns often make it “pretty difficult to even get the Department of Justice to answer their phone,” and that courts usually grant delay requests when both sides consent. The timeline of the case, however, could become moot if it ends first in a settlement. On Tuesday, Trump told reporters

in the Oval Office that the White House had “reached a deal” with Harvard, though he later backtracked and said it was not finalized. Offering few details, he claimed the agreement would direct $500 million toward trade schools “run by Harvard.” So far, Harvard officials have offered little about the existence, status, or terms of any deal. On Sunday, Harvard Corporation senior fellow Penny S. Pritzker ’81 told a Crimson reporter that the $500 million figure was coming from the Trump administration and that she had “absolutely no idea” how the talks, which began in June, would ultimately end. While the Trump administration has started the process of complying with Burroughs’ ruling, his administration has also kept up the pressure on Harvard. On Monday, the Department of Health and Human Services opened suspension and debarment proceedings against the University, a rare and drastic measure that could cut off its access to federal grants and contracts for several years.

dhruv.patel@thecrimson.com

HUPD Reports Falling Campus Crime

Reports of violent crime on Harvard’s campus decreased by 52 percent between 2023 and 2024, according to data from the Harvard University Police Department released Wednesday. Reports of hate crimes were also down in 2024, decreasing to from 10 in the previous year. But hate crimes attributed to religious motivation jumped from two in 2023 to five in 2024. The data was released in compliance with the Clery Act, a federal law requiring universities that receive federal funding to publish annual data on campus crime. The figures in the report only cover crimes the University is required to disclose under the Clery Act, which excludes crimes like simple assaults and theft unless they are deemed hate crimes.

The number of aggravated assaults reported to HUPD fell by 43

percent, from 58 reports in 2023 to 33 reports last year. Robbery fell by 79 percent, from 28 to 6 reports. Seven rapes were reported on campus in 2024, compared to the 16 reported in 2022 and the 17 reported in 2023. Reports of domestic violence fell from 10 reported cases in 2023 to four, none of which occurred on Harvard’s property.

The five religiously motivated hate crimes in 2024 were list-

ed in the report as intimidation, vandalism, and larceny. Three of the incidents took place on Harvard’s campus. Other reported hate crimes included vandalism and aggravated assault, both on the basis of sexual orientation.

Though the report did not name specific incidents, HUPD investigated a “bias crime” last October after a Jewish student’s mezuzah briefly went missing before it was found three doors down from the student’s room. HUPD suggested it may have fallen, rather than been stolen.

HUPD spokesperson Steven G. Catalano confirmed that the incident was one of the listed hate crimes, reported as a larceny.

Fears of antisemitism and Islamophobia on campus have been heightened since Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attacks on Israel

and Israel’s war in Gaza, which sparked a wave of student protests and trained media attention on Harvard. Hate crimes attributed to religious motivation appeared in the report for 2023 for the first time since 2021.

The Trump administration has used the incident to accuse Harvard of fostering antisemitism on campus — a characterization that the University objected to in a letter to the Department of Health and Human Services last month.

The Cambridge Police Department and HUPD also investigated an act of vandalism after multiple antisemitic stickers were found around Harvard Square, including in front of Harvard Hillel, the University’s largest Jewish center. Catalano confirmed that the incident was reported as a hate crime on public property.

Two of the 10 hate crimes in 2023 were motivated by religion, while the remainder were related to race, gender, and sexual orientation.

The report released Wednesday revealed an 11 percent decline in total crime on campus, with the total incidents reported to the department falling from 301 to 266 between 2023 and 2024. Still, campus crime figures remain above the 121 and 189 incidents reported to HUPD in 2021 and 2022, respectively.

The rise has largely been driven by a spike in motor vehicle thefts since 2021. Motor vehicle theft rose to 165 reported cases in 2024, up from 139 the previous year. The bulk of that increase can be attributed to growth in electric scooter thefts, which accounted for nearly 97 percent of all motor vehicle thefts reported in 2024. In an email, Catalano confirmed that 148 of the reported stolen vehicles were electric scooters or electric bicycles. HUPD saw 96 reports of stolen bicycles, which are not classified as motor vehicle thefts, in 2024, according to Catalano. Bur-

reports suggested Harvard was closing in on a deal with the White House that would involve a half-billion dollar payment to restore the University’s federal funding and halt the administration’s barrage of federal investigations.

“I’ve heard the Trump administration say that,” Pritzker said when asked about the $500 million figure by a Crimson reporter outside Loeb House, where the Corporation and Harvard Board of Overseers met for more than five hours. Pritzker — and Jennifer M. O’Connor ’87, Harvard’s general counsel, who accompanied her from Loeb House — are all but certain to be consulted in any potential settlement with the Trump administration. Asked whether her remark suggested that Harvard was not considering the $500 million figure, Pritzker repeated her statement.

Harvard has kept its cards close since negotiations reopened this summer. It has not once publicly acknowledged the existence of any talks and has only nodded to their existence in private conversations with top-dollar donors.

Pritzker said on Sunday that outcomes remained up in the air.

“I have absolutely no idea how this is going to play out. I really don’t,” she said.

When asked Sunday about the status of the talks, Harvard Provost John F. Manning ’82 declined to answer, offering only a tight smile before walking away.

Harvard Corporation fellows Joseph Y. Bae ’94, Kannon K. Shanmugam ’93, and Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar ’93 all declined to comment on the status or terms of the settlement talks or the content of the Sunday meeting when approached by a Crimson reporter while exiting the meeting. Nine Overseers also declined to comment on the meeting.

Harvard’s settlement talks with the Trump administration were first publicized by President Donald Trump himself in June, when he announced on Truth Social, his social me -

dia platform, that negotiations were underway. At that time, he pledged that a “HISTORIC” deal would be struck “in the next week or so.”

But three months later, Harvard and the White House have yet to publicly agree on a set of terms.

The two sides traded offers over the summer, but after the Trump administration secured a $200 million deal with Columbia University, it escalated its demands on Harvard. Within days, Trump was personally urging White House officials to ensure Harvard paid more than Columbia.

At one point, Harvard reportedly agreed to pay $500 million toward workforce development initiatives in exchange for winning back its frozen funds and terminating the slew of investigations into its hiring, admissions, and academic practices.

That number has been a sticking point. In a conversation with a faculty member over the summer, Harvard President Alan M. Garber ’76 disputed reporting surrounding the sum, suggesting that it had been leaked by the Trump administration. As late as Aug. 27, President Donald J. Trump demanded at a Cabinet meeting that Harvard pay “nothing less than $500 million” to restore its federal funding, calling the University “very bad.”

After U.S. District Judge Allison D. Burroughs’ September decision, Harvard has regained some leverage in the talks, but little is certain. An appeal is expected in the funding case, the fate of international students remains in limbo, and nearly a dozen federal investigations into Harvard remain open. The Education Department hit Harvard with two new threats to its access to federal financial aid earlier this month.

The Trump administration has made other extensive demands of Harvard, though it is unclear what other terms are under consideration. In April, the White House demanded Harvard gut diversity-related programming, place restric -

tions on protests on campus, and address ideological homogeneity among students and faculty. It also asked Harvard to address the growing presence of “activist faculty” and install leaders committed to carrying out the administration’s demands.

The Trump administration also floated proposals for overhauling the highest levels of Harvard’s governance in a confidential memo sent to the University’s lawyers earlier that month. Suggestions included reducing the Harvard Alumni Association’s influence over Board of Overseers elections and imposing a 15-year minimum “acceptable leadership experience” requirement for Harvard presidents.

In early April, when the Corporation and Board of Overseers last convened together in Cambridge, the crisis was only just beginning to play out. A $9 billion review of federal funding had been announced just days before, and the Trump administration had yet to send its final list of demands. Members of the Corporation still believed it was possible to negotiate and avert a confrontation, according to reports in the New York Times from the spring.

Less than a week later, the Trump administration made its demands official. Garber publicly rejected them as an illegal attempt to exert unprecedented control over Harvard.

One week later, Harvard took its fight to court.

In the months since, the University has rolled back a series of programs targeted by federal Republicans. But Harvard officials have maintained that they are committed to institutional independence — and pressed forward with two lawsuits accusing the Trump administration of violating Harvard’s First Amendment rights.

“Our principles will guide us on the path forward,” Garber wrote in an email after Burroughs’ order restoring Harvard’s federal funding.

Former Vice President Mike Pence voiced support for Harvard researchers caught up in the White House’s antisemitism investigations at a Harvard forum on Tuesday, but he applauded President Donald Trump for attempting to protect Jewish students.

Pence’s defense of higher education puts him squarely at odds with Trump, who has spent months attacking Harvard as a liberal bastion of the elite. Trump told reporters earlier on Tuesday that his administration had reached a deal with Harvard that included a $500 million payment.

Asked to comment on the talks, Pence said he appreciated Trump’s efforts to call on Harvard to address antisemitism, adding that he was “hopeful that issues have been resolved.”

“My hope is that there can be substantive and principled agreement reached so that we can move forward with the kind of support that will continue to underwrite the vital work of research universities around the world,” Pence said.

In the hourlong conversation moderated by Harvard Kennedy School professor Archon Fung, Pence drew a stark contrast between himself and his former boss, making the case for a return to civility and Reagan-era Republican politics.

“I just think in these divided times, it’s maybe more obvious to more Americans that we all have to start listening to each other a little bit better,” Pence said at the start of the talk. “I hope my presence here today and the time that I’ve spent on campuses over the last four years is emblematic of that.”

There is an audience for limited government conservatism, Pence argued on Tuesday, claiming that the Republican party under Trump still contained an appetite for “common sense” and “traditional conservative views.”

“They changed the agenda of the Republican Party,” Pence said of the current White House.

“I don’t think they’ve changed the Republican Party.” Among Trump’s policies, Pence was most critical of the current president’s retreat from the glob-

al stage. He said Trump’s antagonistic tariff policies had hurt U.S. farmers, arguing America should not retreat into isolationism.

“If America is not leading the free world, the free world’s not being led,” Pence said. “There is no B team. There’s no backup country that steps into that gap. It’s only us.”

Pence was especially adamant that the U.S. should continue to provide military aid to Ukraine, though he admitted that Trump had recently shown more support for the beleaguered country.

The Republican party remains divided over whether to fund Ukraine or pull the United States out of the conflict. Trump has repeatedly flipflopped on the issue, but recently has expressed a desire to help Ukraine regain all of its territory occupied by Russia.

“I continue to maintain — whatever the diverse views in our own party — that America must continue to provide Ukraine with the resources they need to defeat and repel the Russian invasion,” Pence said, to applause from the audience.

In an off-the-record study group with a group of 25 students before the public forum, Pence was even more candid about the first Trump administration. He told students that he was shocked by the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol and could not have imag-

ined Trump would incite such violence, according to two people in attendance.

But Pence also told the group that he thought Trump would respect the rule of law in his second term and would, for instance, abide by the Supreme Court if it struck down his tariff policy, the two attendees said.

A spokesperson for the former vice president did not respond to a request for comment on the study group discussion. At the forum, Pence also addressed the rise in political violence after several high profile assassinations over the summer. He called attention to the murder of Charlie Kirk last month, but also condemned the June assassination of Minnesota Democrat Melissa A. Hortman and the attack on Pennsylvania Governor Josh D. Shapiro’s residence this spring.

Pence said Kirk offered a model for the type of dialogue that should be fostered on college campuses.

“He was a fine young man — literally died trying to add to an open debate in the country,” Pence said. “I believe that must be his legacy — that we continue to look for forums just like the Harvard Kennedy School’s doing today.”

How the HRO Ran Afoul of New Hazing Rules

WEEKEND IN THE WOODS. Harvard suspended the orchestra under new hazing rules after the group’s retreat.

When Harvard College suspended the Harvard-Radcliffe Orchestra for the rest of the fall semester following an investigation into hazing at its annual retreat, students were stunned.

The penalties provided the first look into how stringently the College is willing to enforce its new anti-hazing policies — and left many wondering how Harvard’s student orchestra had become the first group to incur sanctions for its initiation proceedings.

At the retreat that drew the College’s eye, upperclassmen blindfolded new members, shouted orders at them, and supplied them with vodka. Returning members also tried to convince new members that they would be subjected to more intense activities, such as being covered in mac-and-cheese or forced to swim in a pool, which never took place.

Many participants were unfazed by the retreat, which HRO social committee member Roshen S. Chatwal ’26 described as a “pretty PG, standard, run-of-themill initiation procedure.” But at least one freshman was deeply uncomfortable with the activities and filed a complaint to the College the day the retreat concluded. The freshman wrote that the initiation had been degrading and anxiety-inducing, according to a person with knowledge of the complaint’s contents.

Now, the College’s suspension

They didn’t intend anything bad, for what I know, but it doesn’t really matter.

Federico Cortese Orchestra Director and Conductor

prevents the orchestra from operating as a club, requiring it to meet only under the banner of its associated class, Music 110R. The group will no longer be able to host community dinners, its holiday party, or formal ball. It will also no longer be able to participate in outreach to local public schools.

The HRO’s page was removed last week from Harvard’s list of student organizations. And when the orchestra takes the Sanders

Theatre stage on Oct. 4 to perform two works by Gustav Mahler, it will not be allowed to do so under its own name. Harvard websites that previously advertised the HRO’s opening concert now refer to the event as the “Music 110 Concert.”

The penalties are part of a broader crackdown on suspected hazing at Harvard that has already netted at least one other student organization, the Crimson Key Society, which was later cleared.

The University tightened its anti-hazing policies this year after Congress passed the Stop Campus Hazing Act in December. The law requires universities receiving federal financial aid to publish reports on student organizations’ violation of anti-hazing policies — and it specifies that activities can be considered hazing even if members participate willingly.

Few would question that hazing is a serious problem on college campuses. Since 2000, more than 120 people have died from hazing incidents, according to an online database maintained by the University of Maine, the University of Washington Information School, and StopHazing.org. When Biden signed the Stop Campus Hazing Act into law, the father of a teenager who died at a fraternity pledge event said the legislation “could have a profound and lasting impact on campus life for years to come.”

But at Harvard, student groups have been forced to assess whether long-standing traditions may now be treated as serious transgressions, and the College has not specified which elements of the HRO’s retreat violated its policies.

Federico Cortese, the orchestra’s director and conductor, wrote in a Friday email to The Crimson that the HRO had “made a big mistake.”

“They didn’t intend anything bad, for what I know, but it doesn’t really matter. Someone apparently felt uncomfortable. That’s bad enough,” he wrote. “That does not change the fact that they are a fantastic group of young people and that I have a very high opinion of them.”

The Retreat

On Sept. 6, around 60 members of the HRO traveled on a three-hour bus ride to the Greenwood Music Camp in Cummington, Mass., for a two-day retreat. Many attendees would leave the retreat unconcerned, interpreting it as a lighthearted tradition that both adopted and mocked the rituals of college hazing. But at least one student was disturbed by the events of that weekend, and the College ulti-

mately decided that the HRO had crossed a line.

The retreat was “mandatory” because it included two rehearsals with the orchestra’s conductor that spanned nearly three hours each, HRO president Veronica A. Li ’26 wrote in a Sept. 3 email to members. It also included an “Initiation,” which was scheduled for 8 p.m. on Saturday, according to a schedule circulated by Li.

Cortese left the retreat after rehearsals concluded at 5 p.m.

Throughout Saturday, upperclassmen insinuated to new members that they should be prepared to get wet and repeatedly noted that there was a pool on Greenwood’s property, according to two freshmen attendees and one upperclassman.

On Sept. 6, around 60 members of the HRO traveled on a threehour bus ride to the Greenwood Music Camp for a two-day retreat.

After 8 p.m., upperclassmen began initiations, first entering the women’s cabin, where they yelled at initiates to turn off the lights, according to two freshmen attendees.

Upperclassmen then marched female initiates to the men’s cabin, where they called new male members outside as well. The men locked the upperclassmen out of the cabin for around 15 minutes, then emerged. At least three of the male students decided to go shirtless and wear swim trunks. Later, when all the initiates were outside, three more male initiates chose to take their shirts off after seeing the already-shirtless individuals.

The sky was already dark. Older club members corralled the entire group of initiates from the cabins to the dining hall of the camp, consistently yelling at the group to remain silent.

When they arrived in the dining hall, upperclassmen grilled the initiates on the names of and fun facts about 40 older members of the club, based on a slideshow Li had emailed to initiates to memorize hours before. One by one, the initiates were picked from the line, questioned, and blindfolded with black surgical masks. One initiate who answered every question correctly was still blindfolded, according to two people.

Upperclassmen then reorganized the now-blindfolded initiates by height. Members walked the initiates out of the dining hall in a conga line and led them up

and down a hill for just over 15 minutes before arriving at the barn, according to several attendees.

At one point, some upperclassmen told initiates to put their hands out and placed hand sanitizer into several of their hands.

The male initiates without their shirts on were given extra hand sanitizer and told by a few upperclassmen to rub it on each other’s backs. A handful of the male initiates, including some who were not asked to participate, massaged each other’s shoulders with the hand sanitizer.

Some initiates were told to sing the national anthem. Afterward, the initiates were told to lift up their arms and take a secretive oath, according to three attendees.

The oath consisted of initiates pledging to give their “body and soul” to the Pierian Sodality — the name of the orchestra when it was founded in 1808. They also pledged to uphold the original mission of the orchestra, which was to “perform music for the enjoyment of others as well as serenade young women in the square.”

The upperclassmen proceeded to guide initiates through an activity where they would tap an upperclassman on the forearm either once or twice to request water or a shot of vodka, respectively. After everyone had their drinks in hand, the group entered the cabin and gathered in a circle on the floor, at which point initiates were told they could remove their blindfolds.

The newer and older members of the club then exchanged notecards, with initiates writing down their hopes and fears at the start of college and upperclassmen sharing advice with them. At the end of the night, there was an afterparty where most attendees gathered for drinks and conversation.

The Complaint

At least one student filed a complaint to the College, on Sept. 7, shortly after the retreat concluded, according to two people familiar with the matter. The complaint largely aligned with the accounts of orchestra members, but called attention to aspects of the retreat the student found manipulative and unpleasant, according to people who described the complaint to The Crimson.

The complaint, which The Crimson was unable to independently review, alleged that when upperclassmen walked to the cabins to pick up new members, one member told the initiates to “be quiet,” claiming, “It’ll be better for you. It’ll be easier.”

It alleged that while new members were walking blindfolded

from the dining hall back to the cabins, upperclassmen told initiates that they might fall into a pool, which was not in their vicinity.

The complaint also alleged that upperclassmen flashed their phone lights into the initiates’ faces during their walk back to the cabins.

Three upperclassmen said that upperclassmen had employed their phone lights while guiding the group in the conga line through the dark. Each of the three said they did not intentionally flash their phones in initiates’ eyes.

Eventually, upperclassmen stopped the line of blindfolded students at the top of a staircase to the barn where the orchestra had rehearsed earlier that day and began the tapping activity.

The complaint alleged that an upperclassman initially told initiates that one tap would amount to three shots of vodka, and two taps to eight shots, according to a person familiar with its contents. It added that after an initiate asked if water was an option, club members shifted to one tap for water and two taps for vodka, the person said.

Prior to the retreat, HRO leaders had stated that there would be several other activities, such

We are doing our best to protect those individuals who do submit reports.

as stargazing or board games, for students who did not want to participate in the afterparty. But the complaint argued that upperclassmen did not actually facilitate alternative activities, so retreat participants either attended the party or returned to their cabins for the night.

Li, the HRO president, did not respond to a request for comment for this story.

Music 110R

While the HRO’s name has been scrubbed from Harvard sites, and the group has stopped meeting as a club per the terms of the suspension, the organization has not been required to cease all its operations.

Student members, both those enrolled in the class “Music 110R” and independent HRO members, will be allowed to attend rehearsals and concerts while the club is suspended. And the orchestra still plans on

performing its Oct. 4 concert, only now under the Music 110 name. The HRO had already designed fliers for the events, but the group was instructed to redesign them without the HRO logo. The box office has instructed student employees to refer to the concert as the Music 110 performance. Cortese wrote in an email to The Crimson that the HRO was still planning to go on its tour to Japan in May, though information on the upcoming tour was taken down from the orchestra’s website after the suspension. The suspension will conclude at the end of the fall semester and be downgraded to a probation for the spring, as long as the orchestra complies with the terms of the suspension, per College policies. The group will be able to return to good standing by next fall.

Associate Dean for Student Engagement Jason R. Meier said in an interview that the severity of hazing determines the level of discipline the College hands down to student organizations in question, and that not every hazing investigation ends in suspension. When a student submits a complaint of a hazing incident to the College, administrators contact the complainant to ask clarifying questions and learn more about the situation.

“We are doing our best to protect those individuals who do submit reports, and what we are frequently seeing are students going to their proctors or tutors and asking them to report on their behalf,” Meier said.

The College then reaches out to leaders of the organization to “figure out what’s going on,” he added.

“We don’t start with responsibility. We start with this frame of, ‘let’s find out what’s happening, so then we can respond appropriately,’” he said. Meier declined to discuss the specifics of the HRO case. After the College held its newly implemented anti-hazing training this year, which was required for representatives of all of Harvard’s student organizations, Meier said he saw an increase in requests from student groups to discuss their initiation practices with Harvard administrators.

“I’m quite heartened by the vast outreach that student orgs have been doing regarding their traditions,” Meier said. “We’re getting a handful a day of student leaders saying, ‘can we workshop with you?’”

“I hope student leaders and student organizations use this as an opportunity to better live their actual values and to create more welcoming spaces,” he added.

Epstein Emailed Faculty After Indictment

CLOSE CORRESPON-

DENCE. Bloomberg reported that Jeffrey Epstein continued to email Harvard professors.

BY

J. TRIVEDI, AND ANNABEL M. YU CRIMSON STAFF WRITERS

Several Harvard professors — including former Social Science divisional dean Stephen M. Kosslyn, education professor Howard E. Gardner, and former Harvard Medical School professor Mark Tramo — maintained contact with convicted sex offender Jeffrey E. Epstein after he was first indicted in 2006 for soliciting prostitution.

Epstein planned gatherings and discussed funding for Harvard research with the professors, who offered the now-deceased felon words of encouragement after the first indictment was filed, according to a collection of more than 18,000 emails from Epstein’s inbox obtained by Bloomberg News.

Between Epstein’s indictment in 2006 and subsequent guilty plea to soliciting prostitution with a minor in 2008, Kosslyn sent Epstein emails arranging dinner with other scholars, and with Harvard Law School professor Alan M. Dershowitz — Epstein’s close friend and attorney.

Gardner sent Epstein a list of book recommendations and promised to follow up with “advice about offsprings.” Two months after Epstein negotiated a guilty plea to two state charges, Gardner advised him to “take a deep breath” and “take one day at a time.”

Epstein’s ties with Harvard are well established. He gave at least $9.1 million to fund University programs and faculty-led research projects in the 1990s and early 2000s, and he formed personal ties with many Harvard scholars. The signatures of both current mathematics professor Martin A. Nowak and Henry A. Rosovsky, the former Faculty of Arts and Sciences dean and twotime acting Harvard president, appear in Epstein’s infamous 2003 birthday book.

A University spokesperson did not respond to requests for comment.

Kosslyn, whose signature also appears in the book, chaired Harvard’s Psychology department from 2005 to 2008, and served as Social Science Dean from 2008 to 2010. According to Bloomberg,

he discussed accepting the deanship with Epstein via email, writing again a month later that he wanted to visit Epstein.

“unfortunately jail starts monday,” Epstein wrote back, according to Bloomberg. (The Crimson did not directly review any of the emails.)

Kosslyn’s research received $200,000 from Epstein between 1998 and 2002. He also wrote a letter of recommendation advocating for Epstein to be named a visiting fellow in the Psychology department during the 2005-06 school year, despite Epstein’s lack of the relevant academic credentials. Kosslyn is currently president of an AI education company and did not respond to a request for comment.

Gardner is still a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and wrote in a statement to The Crimson that Epstein had funded some of his research in the 1990s and early 2000s.

“Once he had been arrested, I made it clear to him that I could no longer accept any funding but, as a friend and beneficiary of his philanthropy, I tried to be supportive,” Gardner wrote. “Of course, no

one I knew (which included dozens of Harvard faculty) had any idea of the nature and extent of Epstein’s crimes, which only became clear in the following years.”

Bloomberg reported that Kosslyn also communicated with HMS genetics professors George M. Church and Gary B. Ruvkun, who won a Nobel Prize in 2024, about encouraging Epstein to fund a research project on “pleasure signals in the brain.”

“i shall again try to drive home the point about the pleasure genome initiative,” Ruvkun wrote in a February 2006 email to Kosslyn. “let me know if this subject is too strange for our patron.”

After the correspondence was forwarded to Epstein, Epstein wrote to his assistant that “the patron has no boundaries.” According to Bloomberg, it’s unclear whether Epstein ever donated to such a project.

A few weeks before his indictment, Epstein wrote in an email about his plans to fund the Harvard Personal Genome Project, run by Church. An itemized budget found in his email also showed plans to spend $1 million on the project, ac-

cording to Bloomberg. Ruvkun and Church are both still genetics professors at HMS. Neither responded to requests for comment.

A spokesperson for Mass General Brigham wrote in an email that Ruvkun “attended a large group dinner with academic colleagues to discuss potential research projects in the spring of 2006, prior to any public accusations being made.”

“Dr. Ruvkun had no further contact with him following the event, did not pursue any of the research areas discussed, nor received any financial support for his work,” the MGB spokesperson wrote.

Epstein’s inbox also contained an exchange with Paul Weiss partner and HLS graduate Mitchell D. Webber from 2006, when Webber was working as a research assistant for Dershowitz, Epstein’s lawyer. Webber, who took notes for Dershowitz during meetings with Epstein’s legal team, wrote Epstein in June 2006 to address a question concerning the legality of transporting a minor for sex.

“I’m sorry I was a little confused about what you were asking on the phone,” Webber wrote. “I se what

you were asking now. The question is: what would happen if one were to transport a minor for sex — or transport oneself with the intent to have sex with a minor — into a state in which the age of consent is below eighteen (assuming the minor is above the age of consent in the given state)? And your intuition was right. The answer is that there is no violation of law.”

Epstein then responded to Webber’s email asking to research sex tourism laws next.

Webber declined to comment on the email exchange.

Though this particular exchange does not include emails from Dershowitz, several separate emails from the HLS professor emeritus were reported by Bloomberg. In one, he vowed “as one of his close friends” that Epstein never participated in sex with minors.

In another, Dershowitz pledged, “When the full story finally comes out, the world will learn what we already know—that Jeffrey is a good person who does many good things.”

In response to a request for comment, Dershowitz cited his legal

representation of Epstein.

“I was his lawyer,” Dershowitz wrote in an email. “It was my legal duty to advocate for him.” When news broke in 2007 that Epstein would plead guilty to soliciting prostitution, Tramo — who left Harvard in 2009 and currently teaches at the University of California, Los Angeles — wrote to offer a message of solidarity. “Please remind him that boys from The Bronx (even if they end up at Harvard) have long memories, know all about cops, and stay true to their friends through thick and thin (no less peccadilloes),” Tramo wrote. In an emailed statement to The Crimson, Tramo wrote that he was first introduced to Epstein in the late 1990s by then-Harvard Provost Harvey Fineberg, who had asked Tramo to sit with Epstein — then a board member of the University’s Mind Brain & Behavior Interfaculty Initiative. Fineberg did not respond to a request for comment Monday evening.

wyeth.renwick@thecrimson.com nirja.trivedi@thecrimson.com annabel.yu@thecrimson.com.

College Expands Budget for Student Groups With New OCC Funding

BY NINA

Undergraduate organizations will draw on a larger pool of Harvard College funding this year as a result of a rise in Student Activities Fee payments and the creation of a new funding stream through the Office of Culture and Community.

The pool of SAF funds expanded to approximately $1,296,000, compared to $1,225,000 last year, after fewer students opted out of paying the $200 fee. Some student organizations will also have access to an entirely new funding stream through the OCC, allocated directly from the Dean of Students Office budget without drawing on SAF funds.

The OCC is in the “final stages” of appointing a student advisory board that will distribute a new pool of funds to finance student organizations, according to associate dean of student engagement Jason R. Meier in an interview on Friday. Meier said that he did not know how much funding would be distributed through the OCC, and College spokesperson Jonathan Palumbo did not respond to a comment request. According to Meier, the student advisory board will establish guidelines for distributing the funding after its members are selected.

The change follows the dissolution of the Harvard College Women’s Center, the Office for BGLTQ Student Life, and the

Harvard Foundation for Intercultural and Race Relations over the summer. SAF funding was previously divided between the Harvard Undergraduate Association, the College Events Board, House Committees, and the Foundation’s student advisory committee, each of which would divide its share across student organizations and House or College activities.

But since the Foundation was dismantled — and with it, the student advisory committee that distributed SAF money to affinity organizations — the SAF funding pool will now be shared by only the three other recipients. The Foundation advisory committee distributed roughly $70,000 of the total to student groups last year.

This year, again, we have seen such an incredible impact of inflation, of tariffs.

Jason

R. Meier Associate Dean of Student Engagement

It is not yet clear which student groups will be eligible for OCC funding. The Foundation student advisory committee supported “cultural, identity, or affinity organizations.” In the 2023-24 academic year, the last year for which the Foundation’s annual report is publicly accessible, funding recipients includ-

ed performing arts groups like Eleganza and Ghungroo, advocacy groups including the Palestine Solidarity Committee, and a list of racial and cultural organizations.

We know that a simple merch order is 20 percent more expensive this year than it was.

R. Meier Associate Dean of Student Engagement

The HUA — Harvard College’s student government — announced at its general assembly meeting on Sunday that its allocation of the SAF was $606,000, a 16 percent increase from last year. The HUA voted to adopt its yearly budget allocation and unanimously agreed to give 85.64 percent of its overall budget to clubs, an approximately $60,000 increase from last year. The CEB received $450,000 in SAF funding, up from $427,500 last year, and the House Committees received $240,000, up from $204,250 last year.

Meier attributed the growth of the SAF pool to a slight rise in the number of freshmen this year, as well as a decrease in SAF opt-outs, which dropped from 959 in 2024 to 932 this year. He also said that the largest group of students who choose to opt out of the SAF are those on full finan-

cial aid, followed by those who are on no financial aid.

But requests for SAF funding generally outpace the size of the funding pool — and this year was no exception. The total amount requested by SAF recipient organizations rose from approximately $1.8 million last year to $2,098,000 this year, even without the Foundation, which Meier said was “not an unrealistic number.”

“This year, again, we have seen such an incredible impact of inflation—of tariffs. We know everything is more expensive,” he said. “We know that a simple merch order is 20 percent more expensive this year than it was; we know that catering is more expensive, and so we anticipated the request to be higher.”

Last spring, student organizations requested more than $1 million from the HUA, but the HUA distributed only $238,000 to student organizations. Unlike last year, when the Dean of Students Office paid more than $43,000 to supplement SAF funds after a rise in opt-outs, the DSO will only distribute money to student organizations through the OCC fund.

claire.simon@thecrimson.com nina.ejindu@thecrimson.com

Harvard Proposes Salary Scheme to HAW

Harvard proposed keeping non-tenure-track faculty salaries flat through June 2026 during negotiations with their union on Thursday — an early sign that the University will resist major wage increases as it weathers a funding crisis.

The proposal — Harvard’s first economic offer to any campus union since it was hit with a massive endowment tax hike — includes subsequent annual increases of 2 percent, 2 percent, and 2.25 percent after 2026. Harvard Academic Workers-United Auto Workers represents roughly 3,600 academic workers ranging from postdoctoral workers to lecturers and preceptors. It has been bargaining for a first contract since last September.

Though provisions on wages and benefits are typically hammered out after other non-economic issues like worker classifications and grievance and arbitration have been resolved, Harvard and HAW-UAW have not come to agreements on the vast majority of proposals. First contracts often require the longest negotiation periods because they set entirely new policies for represented workers. But with inflation in the Boston area hovering around 3 percent the past few months, the proposed 2 percent pay raises are not likely to keep up, according to Petra E. Todd, a labor economist who chairs the economics department at the University of Pennsylvania.

In the University’s proposed pay schedule, non-tenuretrack minimum salaries range from $50,000 for fellows to to $102,300 for specialized researchers. It is unclear whether the proposal increases the minimums, most of which are not publicly available.

A University spokesperson confirmed that all workers on a salary scale received a raise on

July 1, 2025.

According to HAW-UAW bargaining committee member Adam Sychla, the union is not likely to respond to the wage proposal until it negotiates with Harvard on related provisions, including worker titles and classifications. The union is also waiting on information about existing salaries and worker positions, per Sychla.

“There’s not a way to engage on this as things stand,” Sychla said.

Harvard’s proposal is consistent with its financial strategy in facing down a nearly $3 billion in federal funding cut from the spring. The University instituted a hiring freeze and paused merit-based wage increases for faculty and nonunion staff. Several of its

schools have already made layoffs.

Though the 2 percent raises are slightly lower than inflation, Todd said they might still be reasonable given Harvard’s

Trump administration has proposed, which is why they need to be cautious in terms of future compensation guarantees,” Todd wrote in a statement.

“In such a tough environ -

There’s

financial situation.

“Elite universities are facing a lot of grant funding and endowment tax uncertainties, given the changes that the

ment, guaranteeing a 2% raise actually seems reasonable to me,” she added. The minimum worker salary under Harvard’s current pro -

posal is $50,000, for fellows in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and the School for Engineering and Applied Sciences. Per the proposal, all minimum salaries would increase by one-half of across-the-board increases for fiscal years 2027, 2028, and 2029. And any automatic school-specific salary step systems currently in place would be phased out by June 2026.

Workers in HAW-UAW and other campus unions have repeatedly urged the University to pull on $16 billion in unrestricted endowment funds to pay workers. According to Given and Sychla, Harvard CFO Ritu Kalra attended bargaining on Thursday and gave a presentation on University finances and the endowment.

University spokesperson Jason A. Newton wrote in a state -

ment that the University’s offer to HAW-UAW “aligns with steps being taken across the University to navigate substantial financial uncertainties.”

“Members of the Harvard Academic Workers union have a significant role in how the University fulfills its teaching and research mission, and Harvard remains committed to engaging in these ongoing negotiations in good faith and to providing support and resources for them to carry out their work, even during these challenging times,” Newton wrote.

uate student union’s bargaining unit in July, the union lost not just 450 official members, but $20,000 in monthly union fees. Now, the Harvard Graduate Students Union-United Auto Workers is pushing to win a contract that would require all represented workers to pay

ing

union financial secretary Simon A. Warchol. The fight over the provision, known as an agency shop, in HGSU-UAW’s third contract brings its finances into the limelight alongside the University’s, which are currently under the combined pressure of a massive endowment tax hike and federal funding cuts. Last year, HGSU-UAW — which represents 5,500 graduate workers — took in $757,578 from roughly 2,000 workers who opted into union membership and paid dues set at 1.44 percent of their gross monthly salary, according to union financial disclosure forms submitted to the Department of Labor.

Roughly 60 percent of the collected due revenue was sent to the UAW for national disbursement.

A small fraction of the national fund — including strike pay, a salary for a UAW representative, and legal counsel — ends up funneling back to HGSU-UAW. The UAW also helps finance larger legal efforts related to higher education, including an ongoing AAUP lawsuit against the Trump administration related to withheld federal funding. The UAW itself then sends a portion of its receipts to the AFL-CIO, a union federation. These taxes are common, but vary widely depending on a national union affiliate’s size and resources. The 5,000-worker Harvard Union of Clerical and Technical Workers sends a towering 90 percent of its dues to the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, as required by the international. In contrast, Brown University’s roughly 600-worker graduate union remitted around 30 percent of its dues to the American Federation of Teachers.

Former HGSU-UAW financial secretary Ryan B. McMillan said that the UAW — which now represents around 100,000 workers in higher education — gives HGSU-UAW access to a wider range of resources that would be “challenging to replicate if we were an independent local.”

After UAW taxes are taken out, the graduate student union at Harvard is left with roughly $300,000, more than half of which is spent on salaries and

benefits for three external organizers’ salaries and benefits.

According to Warchol, the employees perform a variety of tasks, processing membership cards and leading organizing committees for specific groups of workers. Their compensation is negotiated by the UAW Staff United, the union for the UAW’s New York and New England regional staff workers. The rest of HGSU-UAW’s funds are distributed for a motley crew of expenses: Google Workspace accounts, legal fees, and political activities such as lobbying. According to Warchol, the union has devoted a significant portion of its legal expenses in recent years to battling Harvard’s exclusion of 70 lab-based psychology students from the union.

By requiring all workers to pay union fees under an agency shop, Warchol said that the union could expand this pool of external organizers. McMillan added that outside of external organizers, HGSU-UAW could also begin compensating graduate student union officers who have been working on a volunteer basis.

Policies that require all unionized workers to pay dues are illegal in 26 states that have passed “right-to-work” laws. Republicans have long pushed for a federal ban on due requirements, and the Supreme Court ruled in 2018 that agency shop agreements were unconstitutional in the public sector.

HGSU-UAW is also currently pursuing a grievance over the students’ removal.

“Representing

Several graduate student unions that have adopted an agency shop, including those at Cornell University, the University of Chicago, and MIT, have faced legal challenges from workers who say they should not have to help fund political activities and stances they do not align with. All three unions are affiliated with the United Electrical Workers, a small independent union that became the first national U.S. union to endorse the Boycott, Divest, Sanctions movement in 2015. William A. Herbert, executive director of the National Center for the Study of Collective Bargaining in Higher Education and the Professions at Hunter College in the City University of New York, wrote in a statement that the broader purpose of an agency shop is to cover the cost of union representation provided to non-members. In the meantime, as HGSU-UAW hemorrhages money following the exclusion of hundreds of students from its bargaining unit, it has adopted a manual dues payment system for impacted students. (Harvard deducts union dues automatically for workers it considers part of the union.)

Researchers Detail Slave Ownership by Harvard Family

in a broader story,” said African and African American Studies lecturer Carla D. Martin, the project’s co-principal investigator, in an interview after the Thursday webinar. “The big focus change that we did was, we made them the center.”

Agroup of Harvard-affiliated researchers presented an extensive report Thursday on the people enslaved by the Vassall family, whose members were affiliated with the University and lived at the Longfellow House in Cambridge.

The report, spanning more than 260 pages, chronicles the lives of Cuba and Anthony Vassall and their children, who were enslaved by the Vassall family. The document describes in new detail the Black Vassalls’ efforts to win freedom, start their own businesses, and later advocate for abolition.

“They were always big players

The scholars conducted their research on the Vassalls independently of Harvard’s own slavery research effort, the $100 million Harvard & the Legacy of Slavery initiative. The report will inform future visitor programming at the Longfellow House, a national historic site known as Washington’s Boston headquarters during the Revolutionary War and later as the residence of the famed poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

Cuba and Anthony’s family were among thousands enslaved by the Vassalls between 1747 and 1774. Samuel Vassall, an ancestor of the Vassalls, also led the Guinea Company, which held a monopoly on the West African slave trade in

the 17th century and helped make the slave trade a major industry.

“The white Vassalls were important slave traders,” said Caitlin G. DeAngelis, Martin’s co-principal investigator, in the presentation. “They weren’t minor slave traders or incidental slave traders.”

The Vassalls also had deep ties to Harvard. Many of the family’s sons attended the University — and were known to pay their tuition in plantation goods like molasses or sugar. The Vassalls were also connected by marriage to the Royalls, another slaveowning family who endowed Harvard’s first law professorship, and whose crest was used by Harvard Law School until 2016.

The report detailed how Cuba and Anthony saved money to buy their daughter’s manumission. It also covers how when the white Vassalls fled Cambridge to seek protection from the British army during the American Revolution,

Cuba and Anthony’s family stayed behind on the property — even after it was converted into the headquarters for George Washington.

After the revolution, the Black Vassalls went on to own land and businesses in Cambridge, and eventually became heavily involved in the abolition movement in Massachusetts. Over the years, the Vassalls contributed to causes like the African Society, a Boston group that provided health insurance and funeral benefits to African Americans, and the Massasoit Guard, a militia group formed to protect enslaved people fleeing to the north.

The researchers began their work on the report in 2022.

A document from that year lists the Harvard & the Legacy of Slavery initiative as a partner on the project, and several of the researchers were employed by Harvard or previously worked on the Legacy of Slavery effort.

But DeAngelis and Martin said the project was independent and received no input or funding from the University. And unlike the Legacy of Slavery initiative, the researchers contacted and worked closely with descendants — inviting them on research trips to Harvard’s Houghton library and to the Caribbean, where the majority of the Vassall family’s holdings were located.

“I think that’s the only ethical way to do this work,” DeAngelis said. “That is our role as researchers — to use our expertise and to use our skills to pursue the things that are important to the descendants.”

The Legacy of Slavery initiative, meanwhile, has been mired in controversy. In September 2024, the project’s lead researcher, Richard J. Cellini, accused Vice Provost for Special Projects Sara N. Bleich of instructing him “not to find too many descendants.” Harvard has

“Our

Garber’s Friendship With Trump’s NIH Director Withstands Politics

students.

National Institutes of Health Director Jay Bhattacharya is the face of the agency whose steep funding cuts have put research at Harvard and elsewhere in limbo. But before he was a top Trump administration official, Bhattacharya was friends with Harvard President Alan M. Garber ’76. Garber was Bhattacharya’s undergraduate thesis advisor, mentor, and peer. They traveled in similar academic and social circles, and are among a small, but influential, group of health economists who shaped the field over the last three decades.

“If you have written with somebody for many years, and you have worked down the hall from them in a small building in Palo Alto for many years, and one person has mentored another person, it ends up being pret-

ty personal,” said Brown School of Public Health Dean Ashish K. Jha, who co-authored papers with both Garber and Bhattacharya while all three were at Stanford University.

Like Garber, Bhattacharya — a former professor of medicine at Stanford — has both an economics Ph.D and an M.D., though unlike Garber, Bhattacharya never practiced medicine. They authored nearly a dozen papers together on topics that span Medicare, the economics of aging, and medical innovation.

Together, Garber and Bhattacharya broke down how leading causes of death shift with age among Medicare enrollees, why declining disability among America’s older population is not linked to better prevention of chronic disease, and how lighter treatment for men with localized prostate cancer could be as effective as more aggressive methods. The two were also heavily in-

volved in Stanford’s Center for Health Policy. Garber founded and served as the center’s director until 2011, when he left to become Harvard’s provost.

Stanford Medicine professor John P.A. Ioannidis, who worked with Garber and Bhattacharya at Stanford in the 2000s, said the two men thought very highly of one another.

“Alan felt that Jay was really wonderful and an embodiment of what Stanford can produce,” he said.

“Jay also has expressed the highest positive opinion to me about Alan. I think he thinks very highly of him, and he cherishes all the interaction that they had had,” he added.

Stanford Medicine professor KT Park, who was mentored by both Garber and Bhattacharya during his graduate studies at Stanford, said that he saw the mutual respect between them when they presented findings to their

“They would always defer to one another, show agreement, but also respectful challenge and questioning of certain research assumptions that went into the model,” Park said.

Park said he also saw Bhattacharya, who is Christian, and Garber, who is Jewish, as figures shaped by their religious principles and their commitment to their families. Park said that Bhattacharya’s and Garber’s traditional values “may have served as building blocks for trust outside of their research and outside of their professional lives.”

Garber’s family may have been part of what pulled him away from Stanford. When Garber decided to take the provost position, he told Park he was motivated to make the career shift because the job would help him better provide for his family, Park said.

Bhattacharya took on many of the young researchers that Garber left behind when he departed for Harvard, including Park. The two stayed in touch, according to colleagues who knew them both at the time.

But in 2020, the Covid-19 pandemic would place a new strain on their relationship. Bhattacharya became an early critic of pandemic lockdowns, and in October 2020, he co-authored the Great Barrington Declaration — a manifesto that advocated for societies to lift restrictions and let their populations build up “herd immunity.”

Garber, who was instrumental in shaping Covid-19 policies at Harvard, took a more measured stance than Bhattacharya on the national pandemic response. In March 2020, he advocated for lifting “indiscriminate” social distancing requirements, but he imagined a return-to-work regime that would hinge on widespread testing and the use of protective equipment.

Garber and Bhattacharya communicated about their differing views on Covid-19 responses, according to Ioannidis, who heard about the conversation from Bhattacharya. The two scholars disagreed, Ioannidis said, but remained respectful of each other.

“People who disagreed on pandemic issues — usually, it escalated to be very emotional,” Ioannidis said. “I don’t think that was the case for Jay and Alan.”

The two spoke about their differing opinions on pandemic policy, and after their call, they still maintained a deep respect for one another, according to Ioan-

nidis, who was briefed on the call by Bhattacharya. It was Bhattacharya’s laissez-faire approach to pandemic regulations — and his willingness to bash establishment scientific views — that led to his embrace by right-wing media and paved the way for his appointment to lead the NIH.

Less than a month after President Donald Trump was elected to his second term, he tapped Bhattacharya as NIH director, placing him within a department soon to be helmed by the anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

For some of Bhattacharya’s colleagues, the planned appointments made for a strange contrast: an unorthodox scientist, whose views had been rejected as extreme by many of his peers but who still valued scientific processes, working under a conspiracy theorist known for his wholesale rejection of science.

Even early on, it was clear that Bhattacharya could destabilize universities’ access to federal research funding. In December, he proposed tying schools’ likelihood of receiving federal research grants to ratings of academic freedom on their campuses — a move that could put Harvard’s funding on the line.

But Garber, in an interview the same month, praised Trump’s selection of Bhattacharya for the NIH post.

“I know Jay as a serious and dedicated researcher who has always been well-intentioned and is always worth listening to,” he said. “I expect him to aim to serve with distinction.”

Bhattacharya asked Garber to introduce him at his Senate confirmation hearing, and Garber agreed, the Boston Globe reported in August. But the plans did not come to fruition: when the hearing took place in April, Garber did not appear.

Federal research funding had been on the chopping block since days after Trump’s inauguration. But it was in April that the administration’s threats to Harvard materialized.

Just two weeks after Bhattacharya’s confirmation, the Trump administration froze $2.2 billion in multiyear research commitments to Harvard — including hundreds of millions of NIH dollars. The suspension was only the beginning of a cascade of funding cuts that would halt more than 900 federal grants to the University. It’s not clear how closely Bhattacharya was involved in the

funding cuts. In May testimony before the Senate Appropriations Committee, Bhattacharya acknowledged the decision to cut federal grants to universities, including Harvard, was largely made “joint with the administration.” (An NIH spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment on his involvement in the decision-making process behind funding cuts to Harvard.)

But Bhattacharya said in the same hearing that he lightened the blow against health research at Harvard, saying he “worked very hard” to ensure grants to affiliated hospitals continued flowing. Some of Bhattacharya’s former colleagues trusted him to be a moderating voice. When Harvard Medical School professor Chirag Patel learned in May that he had lost federal support for his research, he called Bhattacharya, his former dissertation advisor at Stanford, to ask why.

“He acknowledged that some of it is not in his control, and that is kind of above his pay grade to a certain degree,” Patel said. “He also was on the side of having some sort of greater conversation with the university and the federal government.”

Bhattacharya also told Patel that federal support for high-impact research at Harvard should continue — but he never said he thought the funding cuts were wrong, according to Patel. Instead, he said that there needed to be more discussion between universities and the federal government on how research funding is administered, according to Patel. Grants did not start flowing back to Harvard until a federal judge required their restoration in September. And the Department of Health and Human Services took steps on Monday toward declaring Harvard unfit to receive federal grants and contracts in the future.

Harvard Medical School professor Anupam Jena, who continues to keep in touch with Bhattacharya after years of research together at Stanford, said it would be difficult for him to believe that Bhattacharya would support the Trump administration’s wide-ranging funding cuts to NIH research funding.

“That just would be completely inconsistent with his whole career, right?” Jena said. “He was an NIH funded researcher. He’s written about the value of scientific innovation. He clearly knows it.”

AI Startup Baffles Students With Marketing

Nathaneo Johnson, a

co-founder of the AI-powered social network Series, has spent the past two weeks in Cambridge, employing unorthodox marketing strategies to promote his company to Ivy League students.

The Yale University senior started Series, which uses AI to match and connect users, in 2023 and said he hopes to take the app to universities across the nation.

For now, he’s starting with Harvard. In an attempt to lure students he has brought a robot football fan, free matcha, and a banner plastered with students’ headshots.

“It was strategic in a way where we wanted essentially to go after an audience that was very prone to try new things,” Johnson said. “I think that Harvard’s a good example of that.” Series users enter profiles in the app, describing interests like finding a startup cofounder, a freelance video editor, a date, or a party planner, and the program matches them with AI chatbots embedded in iMessages. Then the chatbots match users with other students — with the goal of making instant connections and forming a sprawling, but accessible, social network.

Johnson said that the goal of his campus tour is to make people “remember the name Series.”

“The continual pattern of unconventionalism sparks curiosity,” he said. “And the only way to re-

ally stay relevant, I think, in today’s age and media, is to do interesting things.”

The startup raised $3.1 million in pre-seed funding during a twoweek period in April. Its founders have big goals: helping students form relationships without running aground because of stereotypes or social anxiety. But despite Johnson’s best efforts, Series has yet to gain traction at Harvard.

The Crimson spoke with more than 15 students who said they were unfamiliar with the app or its extravagant marketing techniques. Some said they had been caught off guard by the tactics — and a few were surprised to find themselves as the faces of Johnson’s advertising campaign.

Nadia N. Olsen ’29 was leaving

the Harvard-Brown game on Saturday when something unexpected caught her eye: a short, metal robot threading through the crowd below the stands.

“We went down the stairs and I almost bumped into the robot,” Olsen said. “It was at some point almost chasing us, as in, we were leaving and it changed its path to track us. It was a very discombobulating experience.”

Olsen was not alone in her confusion. Though the robot was meant to be an advertisement for Series, its plain metallic body left many students unsure of its purpose — and its human chaperone didn’t explain when asked, according to Riya S. Shah ’29, who saw the robot in the stands.

“There’s a lot of stuff at Har-

vard to do with tech and stuff, so we just figured it was something for a club,” she said.

While the robot mingled with attendees in the crowd, Series employees set up a stand outside of the stadium where they offered students free matcha if they downloaded the app.

Layden H. Kennedy ’29 said he took the company up on their offer and was pleasantly surprised by the quality of the AI-powered chatbot.

“I was impressed with — and taken aback a little bit. For a sec, I actually thought I had texted some other human user,” he said.

But despite his initial enthusiasm, Kennedy said he was ultimately only in it for the matcha. He deleted the app soon after receiv-

ing the drink.

Harvard-Brown was not the only campus event that Series has crashed this semester. On Sunday, Johnson erected a large banner outside of the Smith Campus Center that displayed the faces of fourteen Harvard students. “I believe in unconventional marketing. Try my AI,” the banner read.

At least two of the fourteen students pictured on Johnson’s banner told The Crimson they were not aware their pictures would be displayed on Harvard’s campus.

Idalis S. McZeal ’27, one of the students pictured, said she had been talking with Johnson at Shabbat 1000, Harvard’s largest Jewish celebration, on Sept. 12 when he asked to take her headshot.

“I knew he was legit, and he also was like, ‘Oh, this will be posted in Forbes and Business Insider,’” she said.

“But I did not expect it to be in front of Smith and everything. That was shocking,” McZeal added. Dea Kamberi ’29, another student displayed on the banner, wrote in a statement that though Johnson told her the picture would be used in marketing material, she was surprised to see her face outside of Smith.

Johnson wrote in a statement that Series employees “clearly explained the process to each student, got their verbal consent before taking the headshot, and followed up with all students taking out those who voiced to us they wanted to be removed.”

“We did our best to respect optouts and create something fun for Harvard to look back on,” he added. Johnson said in an interview that Series plans to keep organizing events at Harvard and other universities. The startup’s plan,

Adams Partners with HSA For Free Laundry After Machines Break

BY HARMONY

Harvard Student Agencies gained a new customer for its wash-andfold laundry services this semester: Adams House residents. When many newly installed laundry machines were knocked out of commission because of insufficient electrical capacity, Adams House announced that Westmorly Court, Randolph Hall, and Russell Hall residents could join HSA’s laundry program for free while the House remedies the amenity, according to an email sent to residents Wednesday.

“As many of you have noticed, several laundry machines in the Russell basement are still out of order as we continue to investigate and repair the electrical issue causing the outage,” Matthew

Burke, Adams House House administrator, wrote in an email to Randolph, Russell, and Westmorly residents. Residents were told by House administrators that “the electrical issue” was that the laundry room’s new electrical board supplied an insufficient amount of wattage to power all of the laundry machines.

Harvard College spokesperson Jonathan Palumbo wrote in an email that repair work “could be completed as early as the end of this week.” Students in Adams have celebrated their newly reopened House. Out-of-service laundry machines are not the only problems that cropped up following renovations in Russell Hall and Westmorly Court that residents noticed following the building’s August unveiling. Though the building underwent more than two years of construction, leaks flooded West-

morly Court rooms during heavy rain and several iconic common spaces are still closed off to residents as they undergo finishing touches.

The laundry breakdown also comes after a recent increase in laundry prices, which Harvard raised by a quarter a load at the beginning of the semester.

Residents expressed frustration with the unavailability of functional laundry machines.

“Half of the laundry machines do not work for three-fourths of Adams House,” Evan W. Hsiang ’26 said. “It’s really a nuisance to do laundry.”

For some, laundry service interruptions exacerbated accessibility issues.

“Doing laundry is always difficult because I’m blind,” said Milagros Costabel ’25, who is set to graduate at the end of the semester. “When I decide to do it, I’m like,

‘Okay, I will put myself in a difficult situation.’ And every time I go there, the machines don’t work, so I need to come up with all the clothes, with my dog, with everything.”

To compensate for the inconvenience, Harvard House Renewal is footing the bill for registered Adams students to receive a “light” HSA laundry plan, HSA President Asha M. Khurana ’27 said.

This plan, which would normally retail for $349 per semester, allows students to place HSA laundry bags outside of their room and request pick-up online. The laundry bags are washed and returned the following day.

“This was our dream project, where Harvard is sponsoring laundry coverage for a month for students and it comes at no cost to students,” Khurana said. So far, Khurana estimates that 100 to 110 Adams House students have joined the free laundry program.

Harvard projected that it would take approximately three weeks to repair the laundry machines, according to Khurana.

“They basically said as long as the laundry rooms are down, that they would pay for it,” Khurana said. “They’re trying to give back to the students. They want this to be great.”

HSA has partnered with Harvard in the past to provide similar services while two Harvard Kenneth C. Griffin Graduate School of Arts and Sciences buildings underwent construction, Khurana said.

Several Adams residents still opted out of joining the HSA laundry program. Instead, students explored other alternatives, like avoiding washing or going at odd times to avoid the rush.

“I’ve just been not doing my laundry,” Kate E. Castorena ’28 said, adding that “every single time

I’ve gone,” all of the laundry machines have been in use. Sydney O. Wiredu ’26 went late in the evening to secure a spot in the laundry line-up.

“Kind of have to find weird times to do laundry. I did my laundry at 2 a.m. the other night,” Wiredu said. “I would’ve been awake either way, though.”

“There were actually other people doing their laundry,” he said. Others, like Emil J. Droga ’2627, said they were “unaffected” by the laundry machine shortage.

“Usually there’s one free,” Droga said. “Everything is closed, but I just happen to time it perfectly.” “I don’t think people are that vocal about it,” William A. Hu ’27 said. “It’s just laundry at the end of the day, right? It’s not like we’re waiting in lines.”

harmony.fisher@thecrimson.com darcy.lin@thecrimson.com

Eliot Construction Noise Rattles Kirkland Neighbors

BY BIANCA G. CIUBANCAN CRIMSON STAFF WRITER

House residents hear it loud and

Construction crews began work

in early June to overhaul Eliot’s interior and exterior as part of Harvard’s House Renewal program, and loud demolition noise can be heard from Kirkland’s dining hall and dorms from early in the morning until nearly midnight.

“Even when you’re sitting here,” Hudson D. Bosch ’26 said from the dining hall, “the entire floor is vibrating right now.”

Construction crews are currently demolishing the connecting tunnel linking Eliot and Kirkland — a project which is expected to conclude by the end of September.

One of the project’s first milestones was separating Eliot and Kirkland’s mechanical, electrical, and plumbing systems. Before the renovations, the two houses shared central infrastructure and a kitchen. In addition to the connector work, crews are carrying out interior Eliot demolition with repairs to the house roof, brick siding, and chimneys.In a letter to Kirkland residents, Harvard House Renewal managers wrote that noisy construction is expected to continue

into next year.

“As you know the Kirkland team is working hard to support you amidst these changes and have taken several steps to minimize any disruptions to your House community,” they wrote, detailing steps to keep wi-fi, plumbing, and package services running through the construction.

To mitigate the noise, Kirkland House is also leaving several dorms empty on the south side closest to Eliot where the noise is loudest. Administrators have also installed noise-dampening storm windows and in-window air conditioners in spaces facing Eliot.

Despite the efforts, some Kirkland residents said construction has infringed on their routines.

Rose N. Friedman ’28, a Kirkland resident, said the noise is “pretty annoying.”

“It starts very early in the morning and kind of goes throughout the entire day, so not great,” she said.

“You just hear the constant noise when trying to do work,” she added. Cambridge city law permits construction noise that is audi-

its

According

“I’d rather not listen to hammering on the

said Kirkland resident Calan T. Scherer ’28. “I’m not going to go and protest it, but I would rather not.”

STAFF

Harvard’s Hazing Policy Has Gone Too Far

uine abuse — is a choice.

Harvard’s hazing policy needs some clearing up.

vestigation into alleged hazing — if it can even be called that, based on what we know — the College barred HRO’s student board from meeting, prohibited social events, and scrubbed the HRO name from programming. Harvard points to its revamped policies under the Stop Campus Hazing Act, passed last December, requiring formalized procedures, public reporting, and the nam

be illegal. Full stop. But something has gone wrong when a club initiation culminating in sharing hopes and fears while receiving advice from upperclassmen ends in a suspension whose main consequence is shutting down community service and socializing among Harvard’s top classical musicians. Certainly, complying with federal law is

The problem begins with the law’s vagueness. It targets conduct that creates any additional risk of physical or psychological injury beyond ordinary student life — an ambit broad enough to sweep in benign traditions. After all, what feels fraught to one student may feel affirming to another.

On the morning of Sept. 9, I woke up hoarse and anxious. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression was set to release its annual university free speech rankings, and Harvard was on the cusp of making tragic history. I had spent all night shouting down my peers who had been shouting down a speaker at the JFK Jr. Forum. “The rankings drop tomorrow,” I bellowed in desperation. “You’re torpedoing our chances.”

All that was left was to wait. Would we clinch a Kirkland House-style Straus Cup three-peat — except for the worst speech climate in collegiate America? Or would Harvard rise like a phoenix from the ashes and prove to the world that we are not to be trifled with? Turns out neither. Thanks to Barnard College and Columbia University quietly deciding to be more or less subsumed into the federal government, we were bumped out of dead last and into the profoundly uninspiring position of 245th out of 257. 13th-worst.

But 13th-worst is not Harvard’s natural place. We flourish at the margins, not the middle. Accordingly, if we can’t be the worst at speech — evidently Columbia/Barnard’s domain — we must strive to be the best. After all, we soared from a pitiful zero free speech points last year to a whopping 49.74 this year, representing the single biggest jump of any school. If we replicate that surge again, Harvard won’t merely improve: we’ll rocket to 1st place. Here’s how we get there.

First, there are several categories we can game. Our climb out of last place this year largely came from the elite “federal rebuff” bonus, when University President Alan M. Garber ’76 refused to cave to Washington’s demands to derecognize student groups. That single act of backbone was probably worth, in points, dozens of administrative solutions. The lesson is clear: more rebuffs equals more points. But why wait for crises if we can manufacture them? Garber can hold a press conference exhorting the nation’s pregnant women to max out on Tylenol consumption. He can deploy Harvard University Police Department to Portland to defend the city from Trump’s looming troop surge. He can establish a competing Department of War (Studies) just for the heck of it. Every time he sticks it to the orange man, FIRE’s spreadsheet gets friendlier. With enough creativity, we could turn University Hall into a perpetual-motion machine of principled defiance. Last year’s glitter debacle illustrates another lever we can pull. An animal-rights protester doused Garber in sparkles, costing Harvard two free speech

Most Harvard clubs and their arcane rituals are,

points and costing the assailant one charge of “assault and battery on a person over 60.” But when the president powered through and finished his speech, FIRE reimbursed us entirely due to Garber’s “constructive response,” where he affirmed both Harvard’s commitment to free speech and that he “could use a little glitter.”

Although the incident was net zero points, that’s merely an arbitrage concern. If we stage disruptions that cost little but rebound big, suddenly protests become profit centers. Consider a confetti cannon in Sanders Theatre or a pie to the face at Morning Prayers. Each stunt might dock a point, but when Garber soldiers on with maximal equanimity, we could net at least two in return. Then there’s the University of Chicago Statement that FIRE insists we must adopt in order to attain the coveted “green light” Spotlight rating. But Harvard doesn’t adopt the work of other schools. We produce the work that other schools adopt. An easy fix is to draft our own statement, twice as long, three times

as unreadable, and slap a Latin motto on the front for good measure. “Veritas Liberat ab Overreachium Gubernationis.” Boom. Green light secured. Speaker disruptions? Another solvable metric. The more controversial speakers you invite, the more opportunities for chaos. The math is simple: fewer dicey speakers mean fewer disruptions. Why risk Henry Kissinger when we can book a symposium on municipal zoning bylaws?

And if all else fails, hack the survey. FIRE only polled 411 Harvard students this year. But Harvard has thousands of Extension School students, many of whom aren’t even on campus. Stack the survey with them, and suddenly the numbers look rosier: fewer disruptions (they weren’t there), more comfort expressing ideas (they’re writing essays from Northampton), and fewer administrative gripes (hopefully they weren’t expecting much to begin with). Our beloved extension students could finally be put to good use. Finally, the real drag: penalties for derecogniz-

ing pro-Palestinian groups. With Harvard caught between conflicting interests, each suspension and revoked room runs the risk of dinging us yet another precious free speech point. But this too can be remedied with a neat quid pro quo. Harvard doesn’t derecognize the groups if they agree to reformulate their slogans. Instead of “Free Palestine,” the chant becomes “Free Speech” in a classic two birds with one stone maneuver. And FIRE, bless their algorithmic hearts, would have no choice but to catapult us to the podium. So yes, Harvard faces some challenges. Students self-censor, administrators waffle, and disruptions occur. But culture is hard to fix. Math is not. With rebuffs, rebrands, and recalibration, we can strategize our way to the top. After all, if there’s one thing we excel at, it’s finding artificial solutions to real problems.

Why You Should Read Chris Rufo

BY AMELIA F. BARNUM

Harvard students are desperately in need of MAGA 101.

I’m in my second year at Harvard, and it still surprises me how many people express con fusion about how anyone could vote for Trump.

I’ve noticed an instinct amongst students to quickly shut down any discussion that treats MAGA ideas as legitimate. Harvard conserva tives appear to concur, and they hesitate to voice their opinions as a result. Because of the view that all MAGA ideas are incoherent or offensive, many students go lengths to avoid any associa tion with those ideas — including the supposi tion that they might have a sound foundation. But automatically dismissing ideas is anti thetical to free speech and open discourse. By en gaging with the intellectual basis of MAGA and the Trump administration — especially longform content like op-eds, Substacks, and pod casts — students can practice interacting with these ideas apart from the preemptive judge ment of their peers.

Students need to practice reading ideas that they’ve been told are too Trump-adjacent, and therefore too offensive, to seriously consider. The fear that merely engaging with an idea legiti mizes it prevents students from even consuming opposing opinions.

While the echo-chamber of Harvard’s liberal campus culture certainly plays a part in this phe nomenon, it’s been exacerbated by the Trump administration’s attacks on the University. In the world of the University vs. the White House, stu dents tangle the substance of Trump’s criticisms with his methods of adjudication, preventing critical engagement with the claims themselves.

This lack of engagement hurts free speech yet is missing from the debate on how to protect it. Most conversations about free speech focus ei ther on how to make students feel comfortable expressing controversial ideas or on administra tive change — from admitting more conservative students to establishing a policy of institution al neutrality.

This discussion ignores what Harvard stu dents — the majority of whom are liberal — are learning and their media diet. There’s a set of ideas — namely the intellectual basis of the Trump administration — that many students have either never been exposed to or believe are illegitimate. They won’t find these ideas in the classroom — nor should they. While you might be assigned an op-ed by a reputable economist, political punditry is not something you should encounter in most curricula.

Moreover, intellectual vitality initiatives have focused on developing skills for engaging in hard conversations, not on ensuring students are exposed to differing viewpoints by providing sources for those viewpoints. It would, of course, be strange — indeed, wrong — for Harvard’s administration to mandate engagement with these ideas. They also won’t be getting these ideas from their peers. There simply aren’t enough conservative Harvard students — let alone those who actually voted for Trump — to provide that side of the argument. So, for those of you who don’t know where to find MAGA opinions, allow me to suggest a few places to start: “Interesting Times,” a podcast by Ross G. Douthat ’02, which, in practice, explains MAGA to liberal New York Times consumers. I’d recommend a recent episode featuring S. May

Mailman, the head lawyer for the Trump administration’s case against Harvard. If you’re feeling a little more adventurous, try Christopher F. Rufo’s substack. Be brave: push past the pop up that asks you to subscribe with the caption “leading the fight against the left-wing ideological regime.”

There are some who will still resist engaging with MAGA media because they find the content offensive. In all fairness, MAGA has provided us with plenty of reasons to doubt its legitimacy (one recent MAHA example springs to mind).

But this avoidance is flawed for two reasons. First, you can skip rage-bait culture war articles — there’s a range of controversial content avail -

able; read some Oren M. Cass instead. Second, if you find these ideas so backwards that you can’t even engage with them, you must have some vested interest in proving them wrong. And in order to argue against them, you have to know what exactly you’re arguing against. You might find the ideas you encounter offensive. But at the end of the day, 49.8 percent of 2024’s electorate voted this agenda into place, and we do ourselves a disservice if we refuse to understand why.

–Amelia F. Barnum ’28, a Crimson Editorial editor, lives in Winthrop House.

BY MATTHEW R. TOBIN

Former Harvard President A. Lawrence Lowell, Class of 1877, once said: “A well-educated man must know a little bit of everything and one thing well.”

Today, many Harvard students know two things well — and nothing else.

Since double concentrations were introduced in 2022, the number of students pursuing them has skyrocketed. In 2023, almost one-third of Harvard’s Class of 2027 reported seeking a joint or double concentration. These numbers suggest that students are increasingly instrumentalizing their courses at

the expense of a liberal arts education — and the College is abetting them. Throughout its history, Harvard has flip-flopped on its undergraduate requirements. During the 19th century, almost all of a student’s courses were dictated by the faculty. President Charles W. Eliot, Class of 1853, pushed the pendulum in the opposite direction, doing away with all undergraduate requirements. His successor, Lowell, found a middle ground by creating the concentration system while allowing students to choose electives. It’s unclear exactly when joint concentrations debuted. One article dates “Combined Concentration Fields” to at least 1937. (Only 44 out of 1,088 students that year pursued one.) Students gained the oppor-

tunity to earn secondaries in 2006. It is the double concentration, though, that has done the most damage in the least time.

I wouldn’t be the first to suggest that Harvard students have an optimization problem. Double concentrations only exacerbate this pressure, artificially incentivizing students to narrow their fields of study in order to receive an additional accreditation.

Truth be told, though, double concentrating isn’t necessarily more impressive. All Harvard undergrads must earn 128 credits to graduate. Double concentrators simply choose to take specific courses in lieu of others.

Even still, it logically follows that many students strive to maximize the credentials they receive from their coursework. If given the choice between taking a diverse array of electives versus taking specific classes in exchange for another certificate, why not choose the latter?

But double concentrations seem especially unnecessary at a school like Harvard, which offers students numerous avenues to combine multiple disciplines. Humanities students have History and Literature as well as History of Art and Architecture at their disposal, while students seeking the cliché combination of Government and Economics (and Anthropology, History, and Sociology) can declare Social Studies. Similarly, a History of Science concentrator can take courses throughout the sciences, social sciences, and humanities.

STEM students, meanwhile, have an abundance of options, including the interdisciplinary Integrative Biology degree and a whole host of compound-sentence concentrations, like Chemistry and Physics, Chemical and Physical Biology, and Molecular and Cellular Biology. There’s also Applied Mathematics, which can be allied with any one of 18 fields — no joint or double concentration needed.

And if any student is not thoroughly satisfied, they can design their own Special Concentration.

As the Class of 2028 declares their concentrations, I hope they remember that they need not exploit every ounce of their education. Rest assured, the most important part of their diploma will not be whether it has two concentrations but the big crimson name at the top.

However, it’s unlikely student culture will escape the iron cage it has created. So what can be done about these dastardly doubles?

A more concrete solution could be raising the bar for earning a double. Perhaps there should be an approval mechanism — either at the departmen-

tal or school-wide level — in which students have to show that their academic aspirations require a double concentration, and that a joint or secondary will not suffice.

However, rather than a purely regulatory measure, the course requirements may need to be increased — either for the concentrations themselves or the core curriculum. Given that so many students are double-concentrating, it may simply be too easy. And if nothing else succeeds, the College could simply phase out double concentrations. Past writers have even gone as far as to propose abolishing concentrations altogether and returning to an Eliot-esque elective model.

Some may argue, though, that eliminating double concentrations will harm smaller departments. After all, the classic joke is that double concentrators pursue one concentration they want and one for their parents.

However, when doubles were proposed in 2022, some faculty actually believed they would harm smaller departments since double concentrators would take fewer electives. Since then, it seems doubles have done little to decelerate the decline in Harvard’s shrinking number of arts and humanities concentrators.

Additionally, one of the original sponsors of double concentrations, Dean of Undergraduate Education Amanda Claybaugh, anticipated that only a few students would actually use the option. Evidently, that isn’t the case. As a double concentrator myself, I appreciate the irony of my writing this piece. However, this irony only underscores the fact that students should still be allowed to study whatever they want, even if that means filling all of their electives with just a single field. Indeed, I’m sure there are many students pursuing a double concentration whose interests in two different fields cannot be easily unified in a joint concentration nor satisfied by a mere secondary. But the College should not bestow extra distinction on this coursework constriction — especially as increasing numbers of students are chasing this incentive. For most of the time that Harvard has had concentrations, students did just fine without doubles. We could, too.

So, to any sophomore debating on whether to declare a double concentration this month, please know that one concentration is enough.

–Matthew R. Tobin ’27, a Crimson Editorial editor, is a double concentrator in Social Studies and Economics in Winthrop House.

School Committee Knew of Finalist’s Scam Losses

On Monday evening, the Boston Globe broke the news that a finalist for Cambridge’s superintendent position lost more than $750,000 in a cryptocurrency scam.

That came as no surprise to the Cambridge School Committee.

The School Committee knew the details of Lourenço Garcia’s financial mismanagement earlier this summer, according to a district official familiar with the matter. But members declined to publicly take action on the information — or disclose it to Cambridge residents.

Garcia was recently named as one of three finalists for the position by CPS after a private selection process that has been heavily criticized by parents and educators due to a lack of transparency.

Garcia invested a total of $751,000 into a cryptocurrency platform in late 2021 and early 2022 before his money vanished. Months later, the candidate later sued his bank for allowing him to make the payment to the platform after losing his money, alleging the bank did not take sufficient steps to prevent fraud.

A Massachusetts court denied his lawsuit. Garcia unsuccessfully appealed the decision, and a ruling on the appeal, available online, lays out details from the case. Garcia did not respond to requests for comment.

The cryptocurrency scam is not the only incident that is resurfac-

ing for Garcia. The Globe also reported he was accused of domestic violence in 2013 following a divorce proceeding with his ex-wife. 2013 court documents allege that Garcia “was cruel & abusive to the plaintiff by striking her in the face & struggling w/her causing serious bodily injury,” the Globe reported. A later filing further alleged that Garcia often yelled at her and physically abused her on several occasions.

Garcia denied the allegations in court filings.

While School Committee members were made aware of both the scam and the domestic abuse allegations earlier this summer, the group has yet to take public action based on the allegations. According to the same district official, the School Committee de-

cided to refrain from public comment based on informal advice from a city attorney. The official said members were advised to refrain from commenting publicly on the private lives of candidates, since it could leave the body vulnerable to a lawsuit.

Garcia, the assistant superintendent of equity and inclusion for Revere Public Schools, has had to answer for the incident during the search process. School Committee member Elizabeth C.P. Hudson told the Globe that she spoke with Garcia about the incident, adding that she was concerned that he may not be a good fit for the superintendent position.

Garcia is not the only candidate who has been harshly scrutinized in the search process. Adam Taylor, a former superintendent

of Rutland Public Schools in Vermont, was a semifinalist for the position. His candidacy caused major backlash in the city due to controversial remarks he made in 2019, comparing teachers’ practices of building relationships with their students to pimps or pedophiles. Complaints about the search process boiled over in August, after the Cambridge Education Association — the union representing Cambridge Public Schools faculty and staff — called for the district to restart the search entirely.

Garcia is set to appear in front of the School Committee and Cambridge residents on Tuesday afternoon for final interviews for the superintendent position.

The Cambridge School Committee publicly interviewed the three superintendent finalists for nearly five hours on Tuesday — the final step in a search rocked by controversy and criticism.

Finalists include David G. Murphy, current interim superintendent for the district, as well as Lourenço Garcia, the assistant superintendent of equity and inclusion for Revere Public Schools, and Magaly Sanchez, chief family advancement officer in Boston.

Each finalist had 90 minutes to answer 20 questions pre-written by School Committee members, addressing a comprehensive array of district issues. Finalists detailed how they would address achievement gaps, evaluate teacher effectiveness, improve district communication, negotiate labor agreements, and ensure student equity in the district.

Cambridge, one of the most diverse districts in the state, has long struggled with achievement gaps across racial and economic lines. Members asked each finalist multiple questions related to addressing and eliminating these inequalities. Murphy and Garcia both said CPS must address the gaps as early as possible, focusing on children in early grades to make sure the differences do not get worse over time.

“We know students are coming in from different starting points, so if they come in from different starting points, and they are met with a culture that is not responsive to their needs and is not sufficiently nimble enough to meet their needs, then we should not be surprised that when they get when they get to the finish line, those discrepancies still exist,” Murphy said.

Garcia echoed similar concerns, saying that “studies have shown time and time again that if a child cannot read by third grade level, then the chances for the child to become illiterate is strong.”

“We want to make sure that we invest in our pre-K education where those foundations are set, and that goes through grade level three,” he added.

Sanchez stressed the importance of securing access to advanced learning curriculum to help narrow achievement gaps.

all of our students have the opportunity, and should have the opportunity to access rigorous learning opportunities,” she said. “It’’s up to us to make sure that that happens.”

Other responses addressed teacher evaluations, fostering greater transparency, and managing the district budget were largely driven by candidates’ ideals for the district — but few candidates offered concrete plans for how to achieve such ideals.

Garcia proposed frequent walkthroughs of classrooms to improve teacher evaluations, holding “listening tours” to hear from students and parents, and focusing on cultivating relationships to build trust.

Murphy suggested increasing professional development for teachers, being “relentless” about maintaining high standards, and making sure to eliminate programs that are inefficiently using funds.

Sanchez pinpointed the importance of gathering data before addressing issues in the district while capitalizing on students’ baseline learning and opportunities for enrichment.

But after nearly five hours of interviews, one critical topic was left undiscussed.

The School Committee did not ask Garcia about the cryptocurrency scam where he lost $750,000 — something the School Committee has been aware of since the summer, though Cambridge residents only learned of the financial mismanagement yesterday. Due to interview rules, questions were required to be uniform across all three candidates.

The search has received heavy criticism from parents and teachers for lacking transparency, becoming a central issue in the upcoming elections. The Cambridge Education Association released a fiery statement in August calling for the entire search to be restarted, a demand that some people in the district are still pushing for. Members asked each candidate how they would increase transparency in CPS leadership — a central issue the district has worked to improve. For Murphy, listening was the most important factor.

“If we are not listening first, then it doesn’t really matter what it is that we are sharing or what we are saying, because there’s going to be a large constituency from that school community that we’ve already lost,” Murphy said.

Cambridge is taking the first steps toward increasing mixed-income housing in the city — a goal that is unlikely to come to fruition until at least 2026. The Council voted unanimously to initiate the process of increasing social housing — publicly owned, mixed-income properties — during their Monday meeting. They referred the resolution to the housing committee, directing city staff to iron out logistics and deliver a report by March.

The schedule gives staff time to examine financing options and research how best to implement the policy. The March deadline also allows the Council to include the social housing proposal in the FY27 budget, which is scheduled for approval in spring 2026.

“I don’t want the supporters to feel that we are kicking the can,” Vice Mayor Marc McGovern said.

“It’s a complicated conversation that needs the time that it needs,”

he added.

Councilor Burhan Azeem also pointed to the challenges of the proposed model. He noted it could be more costly for the city because it would not qualify for federal Low-Income Housing Tax Credit funding, which currently supports most affordable housing projects.

“There’s a lot more complicated trade-offs than come at the first imagination,” he said. “It’s not like an easy, low-hanging fruit which we should obviously just be doing.”

Monday’s vote is the latest example of the Council’s effort to make Cambridge a more affordable city for residents of all income brackets — a key priority for voters going into municipal elections this fall. Challengers Ayah Al-Zubi and LaQueen Battle voiced their support for the policy order in public comment.

The proposal has gained popularity throughout the city thanks to its multifaceted benefits. Because properties created under this policy would be publicly owned, revenue from high-

er-income units could be used to cross-subsidize lower-income units and other affordable housing projects.

But the city will not greenlight any new social housing projects until after the new Council takes office in January. Despite the delay, Cambridge’s state representatives are actively pushing to increase social housing in Cambridge.

Massachusetts passed a social housing pilot as part of the most recent state bond bill, which has a dedicated fund to provide municipalities with social housing projects.

State Representative Mike L. Connolly, who was an active advocate for the legislation on Beacon Hill, voiced his support for the proposition in public comment at the meeting.

“When I go to Beacon Hill, I think of us as the housing policy and even the housing production champion around the Commonwealth,” Connolly said. “This social housing order gives us an opportunity to continue being on the forefront.”

Kavish P.M. Gandhi, a member of the CHJC, said that they brought the issue to several city councilors so that the city would have precedent to receive funding from the state as allocation talks begin next year.

“We think Cambridge needs to be part of that conversation,” Gandhi said.

McGovern said that taking inspiration from social housing methods may help the Council find a “middle ground” about whether to change the current 20 percent inclusionary unit rate for housing, where the city helps offset the cost of those units for developers.

“Maybe the developers are paying for 10 percent of those affordable units, and the city’s paying for the other 10 percent,” McGovern said. “You still end up with 20 percent affordability, but the city is now paying into that so that the project can actually go forward.”

“20 percent of nothing is nothing,” McGovern added.

“I would address these inequities and these issues by thinking about ensuring that students have equity and access to rigorous learning opportunities regardless of where they live, where they come from, whether they’re black or brown or whatever their backgrounds are,” she said.

Sanchez pointed to work she did in New Bedford, where she implemented an International Baccalaureate program and opened the door for students to more easily enroll in advanced learning classes. She added that tutoring and peer group systems ensured that students made the most of these opportunities.

“I think that the tale here is that

Sanchez proposed building “consistent feedback loops” to allow families and educators to see how their feedback is being operationalized by district leadership .

“If we’re asking for feedback from families, we want to make sure that it’s purposeful, that it’s very clear, and that we’re utilizing that feedback right,” she said, adding that CPS should pilot “data dashboards” to keep parents abreast of the latest developments in schools. The School Committee is scheduled to vote for the next superintendent on Monday.

As the local election season ramps up, the Cambridge Election Commission met on Tuesday to discuss its plans to distribute information about voting procedures and election logistics. Early voting ballots for the Nov. 4 general election will be mailed to voters beginning Monday, and the city will spend the next month preparing to host over 40 polling sites.

Cambridge voters will head to the polls to elect a new City Council and School Committee from a

crowded field of candidates. Voters will also decide whether the city should amend its charter, which would restructure the local city government. Candidates have hit the campaign trail in recent months, appearing at forums, collecting endorsements, and engaging with local students. Transportation, affordability, and resisting President Trump’s administration emerged among many city council candidates’ platforms — signaling key issues in the race. The commission typically meets twice a month to process candidate nomination papers, ballot measures, and distribute elec-

tion materials. It also weighs in on questions to ensure compliance with federal and state election laws — most recently verifying a school committee candidate’s proof of residence for ballot eligibility.

At the meeting, commissioners said that residents will be able to access voter guides, , which includes early voting times and locations, polling sites, voter registration information, and a list of candidates,in the mail and online.

Commissioners also noted that sample ballots have been uploaded to the city website. The commission will mail a separate information packet covering the proposed charter, with

one proposal including that the School Committee chair be a member elected by the body, rather than the mayor, who currently acts as chair. Another proposed change would expand public participation through new requirements for submitting referenda.

“The ballot question mailer will be sent out, mailed out tomorrow to every household with a voter,” Tanya Ford, the executive director at the Cambridge Election Commission, said. “It’ll have the QR code and the link where people can access the full language of the act in English on the Election Commission website, and be able to access the ballot question mail — which is

the summary and the pro and cons — in English, and translate it into several versions.”

Voters will see 17 new school committee candidates, with just one incumbent running for re-election. Many parents have joined the race, campaigning for increased transparency amidst the committee’s search for a new superintendent and the recent closure of the Kennedy-Longfellow school.

Commissioners also discussed the possibility of moving polling places out of school buildings, referencing a new policy in Watertown that aims to curb safety and accessibility concerns. Officials

confirmed that schools will continue to serve as polling places throughout this year, but they will follow up with the school committee in advance of next year’s cycle. The commission will reconvene on Oct. 15 to randomly draw precincts, which determines the order for counting votes. Residents will begin receiving mail-in ballots in the coming weeks, and requests for mailin ballots must be received by Oct. 28. The final deadline to register to vote is Oct. 25 and in-person early voting will run Oct. 25 through Oct. 31. Polls will be open on Election Day from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m.

Building Harvard’s Startup Reputation

LIFTOFF. How Harvard prepares alumni for entrepreneurship — and what some alums still wish for.

Harvard Alumni Entrepreneurs thinks Harvard has a marketing problem, and they are trying to fix it.

At the inaugural Harvard Alumni Entrepreneurs Startup World Cup regionals on Sep. 12, Harvard graduates from 12 finalist startups made pitches for the chance to be sent to the championship round in San Francisco.

Startup World Cup holds regional competitions everywhere from Seattle to Kathmandu to Johannesburg, but this was the first year a round of the contest was held exclusively for companies with Harvard founders. This year’s 12 companies, which aim to tackle problems ranging from women’s health to food insecurity, were selected from a pool of around 125 applicants from 20 countries.

HAE president Regina H. Ryan said that the purpose of the Harvard-only round was to put more of a spotlight on alumni-founded companies.

“The reason we did this is that not everybody needs to go through an accelerator to get to the next level,” Ryan said. “There are thousands and thousands of alumni-led companies that need the spotlight.” Harvard College ranks third globally in the number of startup founders it produces, according to PitchBook, while Harvard’s graduate schools are ranked second, and Harvard Business

School is ranked first among MBA programs. Harvard graduates have gone on to start highly influential companies including Facebook, AirBnB, OpenAI, and Stripe.

But some alumni believe that compared to peer institutions like MIT and Stanford, Harvard doesn’t yet have the entrepreneurial reputation it deserves.

“If you were to ask, what is the school with the most entrepreneurs coming out of it? You’d think Stanford, you’d think MIT, you’d think Harvard dropouts,” Jeffrey Fidelman, CEO of Fidelman & Company and a judge for the Startup World Cup competition, said.

“Stanford usually gets all the praise for having the most amount of tech startups, or the most amount of startups that come out of it,” he said. “Harvard is, if not above and beyond Stanford, it’s at least equal to in terms of the amount of entrepreneurship that comes out.”

‘Just a Marketing Issue’

In 2021, after observing retail worker shortages in European countries like Germany, Harvard Business School graduate James Sutherland founded Autonomo, a company that builds staff-free stores using AI to track inventory.

“We started our own store in Hamburg in Germany. First year, built the technology. Second year, opened the store, and then third year, we had customers coming to us trying to buy the technology,” Sutherland said.

At HAE’s Demo Day in 2022, where founders pitched their startups to a panel of judges, Autonomo emerged victorious and was launched directly to the final round in San Francisco. While

they did not win in San Francisco that year, Sutherland is shooting for the prize this year after winning Harvard’s regional competition.

“In a month’s time, I’m going to win,” he said.

Harvard Medical School graduate Pablo Lapuerta, founder of 4M Therapeutics, a biotech startup developing an alternative, lithium-free treatment for bipolar disorder, said he worked with the technology transfer offices at MIT and Mass General Hospital to found his company. The offices deal with patenting and other administrative tasks when faculty want to turn a product into a business, in exchange for partial ownership.

“If you look at an example like MIT, it does have university offices that support MIT startups,” Lapuerta said, citing the MIT Startup Exchange and the Industrial Liaison Program, which connect faculty, staff, and alumni with industry executives. “I think that’s a model that other universities could benefit from.”

Lapuerta said that strong relationships with the university’s technology transfer offices are essential in translating research into impactful products, especially for biotechnology startups like his.

Harvard’s Office of Technology Development sponsored 155 U.S. patents and 14 startups from the commercialization of Harvard research in 2024, while MIT’s technology licensing office saw 323 US patents and 24 startups in the same year.

Ryan said that MIT also does better giving a platform to their affiliated entrepreneurs.

“I talk to the folks at MIT all the time, and they do a great job in putting the spotlight on their

alumni, their entrepreneurs and innovators,” Ryan said. “The truth of the matter is, for us, it’s just a marketing issue.”

Alexandra C. Stephens, the director for communications at the Harvard Innovation Labs, said that more can always be done.

“We’re always looking for new ways to tell venture stories and spotlight founders, and I think there can never be enough stories about them,” she said.

‘Meet You Where You’re At’ Not everyone is convinced that marketing is all that important to Harvard’s place as a bastion of entrepreneurship among peer universities.

“When we’re talking about Harvard versus Stanford, or Harvard versus MIT, we’re talking about Alcaraz versus Sinner,” said Jeffrey J. Bussgang ’91, a Harvard Business School lecturer and a former entrepreneur turned venture capitalist.

Comparing the academic giants is akin to comparing “two competitors or three competitors who are just head and shoulders above everybody else,” Bussgang said.

Harvard offers a wide range of institutional support for entrepreneurs, with its primary resource being the school’s Innovation Labs, which houses everything from accelerator programs to classes and below-market rate access to lab benches and scientific equipment.

“We support all students from all 13 Harvard schools anywhere in their innovation journey,” said Stephens.

Skye Lam ’27, founder of MabLab, a startup reinventing drug testing strips, said that the i-lab’s resources were extremely help-

ful during the early stages of his venture, adding that their many programs “really meet you where you’re at.”

“I think they’re at the correct stage where they help entrepreneurs when they’re first starting out, but there comes a point where you should be able to do it by yourself,” Lam said. MabLab won the President’s Innovation Challenge in 2024 and was named a Top 5 Startup for the prestigious Startup Battlefield at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024.

Lam said that although there are many ways for alumni to engage with institutional resources, the i-labs’ main focus is to support current students.

“When you’re a student, you get the most out of those opportunities,” Lam said.

‘A Melting Pot of Ideas’ To strengthen support for entrepreneurs after graduation, Harvard alumni have come together to create their own initiatives supporting innovative ventures among their ranks — the HAE’s Startup World Cup being just one example.

In the early days of Autonomo’s journey, Sutherland joined the HAE’s 12 week Accelerator program. He said the recognition and lessons he learned were invaluable.

“It raised our profile significantly — globally — with the Harvard brand that allowed us to raise the many millions that we have done,” Sutherland said. “It was a game changer.”

The accelerator was led by William M. “Bill” Reichert ’76, a partner at Pegasus Tech Ventures — a venture capital firm that has invested in companies including SpaceX, OpenAI, and AirBnB —

and the Chief Evangelist for the Startup World Cup.

Several other alumni vehicles exist to provide mentorship or funding to start-ups. The Graduate Syndicate, co-founded by Bussgang, is a community fund that invests in pre-seed and seed stage ventures started by Harvard graduates. The latest fund raised a total of $8 million.

Bussgang said he started TGS with a group of colleagues after the retirement of HBS professor Bill Solomon, to pay forward the support he himself received from the Harvard ecosystem.

“He was a mentor of mine and invested in my two startups when I was a young graduate from HBS and Harvard. And so a group of us decided that we wanted to fill, humbly and imperfectly, Bill’s shoes,” Bussgang said.

Bussgang added that the “magic” of entrepreneurship for Harvard graduates is the network of its students, graduates and faculty.

“You have such an incredible intellectual capital at Harvard,” he said. “You have a melting pot of ideas that not only go through ideation, but you have the people and the tools at your disposal to actually build and test whatever, whatever hypothesis that you have,” Fidelman said. Ryan added that Harvard’s strength in entrepreneurship is amplified by its unique focus on theory and liberal arts.

“We’re more than the ivy on the building,” Ryan said. “We’re more than academics. We are people solving problems in all different ways. And that’s the richness. It’s kind of a liberal arts education in entrepreneurship. We have it all.”

stephanie.dragoi@thecrimson.com

thamini.vijeyasingam@thecrimson.com

Hearing Scheduled for Pro-Palestine Protesters After August Arrests

BY MEGAN L. BLONIGEN CRIMSON STAFF WRITER

Pro-Palestine protesters who allegedly assaulted a police officer in August are one step closer to trial, after District Court judge Kareem

A. Morgan set a hearing date for Nov. 18. The compliance and election hearing gives the state more time to provide evidence to the defendants — including body camera footage, police reports, and booking photos — while the three protesters can decide whether to pursue a judge or jury trial. Three protesters — Anna N. Epstein, David Fleig, and Bronte Wen — appeared in Cambridge District Court on Wednesday to face charges of disorderly conduct and resisting arrest at a pro-Palestine demonstration in Harvard Square. Fleig and Wen were also charged with assault and battery with a dangerous weapon, a felony charge. But Wen, who was previously charged for an attack involving ex-

plosives, was let off the hook for the more serious charge. Cambridge Police claimed she threw a “balloon filled with an unknown substance” onto an officer, who reported feeling a “burning sensation,” but the state ultimately decided to not pursue the charge. The three individuals appeared in court alongside several supporters, who sat nearby in the courtroom. Wen and Epstein, who sat next to each other before their case was called, were joined by several peers on the same bench, with more seated on the bench directly behind them. Most wore keffiyahs and many — including Wen — wore face masks.

The incident, which took place outside of the Harvard Square Capital One cafe in early August, sparked fierce backlash in the city.

CPD handcuffed the three protesters after pushing them to the ground, according to videos and images reviewed by The Crimson. Several protesters were seen pouring water on their eyes, apparently irritated by a chemical agent. CPD

later confirmed the use of pepper spray — despite city law prohibiting the use of chemical irritants as crowd control during protests.

CPD later wrote in a statement that the use of pepper spray was not used as crowd control, but was instead used to target “specific individuals who had refused to comply and were actively assaulting police officers.”

The three individuals took to the street to protest Capital One’s loans to an Israeli weapons manufacturer. Demonstrators were affiliated with Boycott, Divest, Sanctions Boston — a pro-Palestine advocacy group that had protested in that location for the preceding two weeks.

Officers had barricaded several parking spaces before the protest began, marking off a space with metal barriers and allowing demonstrators to march without entirely blocking the cafe entrance. One individual began pushing the barricade out toward the street roughly an hour into the protest. An officer grabbed the protester by her arm and apprehended her after she ran

away from the barricade.

Other protesters tried to intervene in the first arrest, according to demonstrators, and police began pushing protesters and using pepper spray. Protesters argued the incident began after police had tried to push the metal barriers inward and contain the demonstration into a smaller area, while police said the protesters attempted to move the barriers out further into the street.

A video also captured police officers and protesters pushing against each other along JFK St. before an officer eventually arrested a person on the ground outside Capital One. Protesters also started yelling expletives at the officers, including a chant that compared CPD to the Ku Klux Klan and the Israeli military.

The dispute marked the first major altercation at a protest near the University’s campus in months — but it is not the only run-in that protesters have recently faced with Cambridge Police.

A man allegedly drove his car towards demonstrators in Harvard Square during another pro-Pales-

tine protest in August. He repeatedly shouted expletives at protesters, including calling demonstrators “Nazis” and hurling homophobic slurs at them. He then opened his car door, brandishing an axe and threatening to kill them.

A video of the incident circulated widely on social media in the days following the confrontation, which occurred less than one week

Modernity on Tradition

MR. H presents itself as a translation, not a transcription, designed for a wide American audience. MR. H REVIEW

Some restaurants court guests; Mr. H stages them. The light gathers, the bustling Seaport noise fades away, and one’s place in the restaurant feels intentional rather than incidental.

Upon arrival, guests can expect a simple courtesy — chairs graciously pulled out, the menu clearly explained — that sets the tone for a well-choreographed evening. The space itself is visually commanding: A palette of lacquered crimson reds and dragon motifs, roofline components that allude to ancient Chinese temple architecture, and porcelain plates engraved with pastoral scenes. Warm, lantern-like lighting and background music seemingly pulled from a speakeasy playbook tie the cocktail bar and dining area together. Even the restrooms sustain the narrative with AI-generated wallpaper reminiscent of vintage Chinese fashion magazines. The effect is deliberate and impressively consistent. However, one thing to note is that Mr. H presents itself as more of a translation rather than a transcription: It’s a modern, upscale restaurant calibrated specifically for Chinese-American diners

and a wider American audience.

As a result, it is perhaps less likely to satisfy mainland China purists seeking the precise, unfiltered versions they are more familiar with.

The bar leans into theatricality without sacrificing craft. Cocktails arrive on bamboo trays that trail a cloud of dry ice, scattered with pink and yellow flower petals and tiny pagoda and lion figurines — props that could feel gimmicky if the drinks did not hold their own. Fortunately, they do.

The Lychee Martini is a clean, sharp choice, greeting one first with the scent of ripe lychee and then with a crisp, decisive taste. The alcohol certainly announces itself as it is noticeably strong on the palate, but the sip still stays neat and refreshing, helped by the plump lychee skewered atop.

The Wuyi cocktail, meanwhile, plays softer and sweeter. A pale layer of frothy foam on top gives it a creamy lift, pineapple and citrus notes add a bit of sun, and a dusting of smoky black tea leaves creates a slight bitterness. Even so, the sweetness builds quickly, tipping toward syrupy and even edging into sickly. A brighter acidic note would help balance it out a bit.

Among the appetizers, perhaps an underrated order is the Tangerine Tuna. Five thin slices of fresh tuna sit in a carefully-timed mandarin-soy vinaigrette that seasons without overwhelming or over-soaking.

A quiet heat from the doubanjiang mayo and the saltiness and crunch of peanuts land in tidy sequence upon the tongue, produc-

ing a very composed crudo that still feels anchored in the Chinese pantry. The Soup Dumplings, on the other hand, are more ambivalent. Presented attractively on a bamboo leaf with self-serve soy sauce and chili oil, the dumplings consist of skins that are thicker and chewier than ideal. That sturdiness preserves structural integrity but there is then a tradeoff with delicacy, resulting in a chew that distracts from other flavors. The broth is seasoned generously with five-spice but runs a touch salty, and the meat filling is hefty and satisfying but borders on dense. Consumed in one bite, broth plus filling collaborate nicely, yet consumed separately, the meat can come off slightly dry. A thinner, silkier wrapper and a gentler hand with salt would elevate the dish considerably.

Entrees follow a similar pattern of refinement and restraint. The Dandan Noodles arrive coated in a sesame-peanut sauce that clings thoroughly, woven alongside minced Sichuan duck pieces that eat like deconstructed meatballs. The flavors are savory and quite tangy from the pickled mustard, but the heat is subdued. Bok choy placed on top is crunchy but underseasoned, and the choice to plate a single large stalk, while elegant to the eyes, proves inconvenient to split and eat. The dish is undeniably satisfying but feels edited a tad too much and just misses the numbing spice element so characteristic of its traditional Sichuan form. By contrast, the House Fried Rice is an unexpected triumph; for

some, ordering fried rice at a Chinese restaurant is not the typical move, but here it is the right one. Each grain of rice remains distinct and properly chewy, carrying a gentle smokiness indicative of competent wok work. The Bàng Bàng chicken and sweet Chinese sausage are judiciously portioned and offer differing flavor profiles that somehow complement each other. Stir-fried bean sprouts contribute snap, and a slightly undercooked egg lends cohesion and a soft, custardy sheen. While not the flashiest plate in the room, it is one that sees a steady stream of dedicated orders. Dessert revisits the restaurant palette with the Chocolate Buddha, an inspiring idea that unfortunately does not fully cohere. There assuredly are standout elements: The salted cookie crumble that brightens the dark chocolate, fudgy brownie bites that add richness, and a housemade black sesame cookies ‘n’ cream ice cream scoop with a subtle, savory lilt. However, the central mousse of the Buddha itself is too heavy, and the hints of oolong unexpectedly evoke a ba-

Those seeking a purist’s intensity and the liptingling sensation of typical Sichuan spice will find a softened alternative.

nana-strawberry profile. One would hope that such an upscale restaurant would know how to whip their mousse as light as air, but the reality is disappointing. A couple sticks of dusted red velvet Pockys nod again to the restaurant’s red theme, but the dish would truly benefit from textural lightness and clearer flavors to close the meal on a confident note. Despite a few hiccups in the execution of the dishes, service remains a constant asset throughout the experience. It is attentive without intruding and clearly versed in the logic of the menu. The pacing of the food and the staff’s composure sustain the grand sense of occasion that the overall space’s design sets in motion. Taken together, Mr. H largely fulfills the aesthetic of an elevated, contemporary Chinese restaurant fluent in both tradition and trend. Those seeking a purist’s intensity and the lip-tingling sensation of typical Sichuan spice will find a softened alternative. Yet, for a polished and belly-filling evening in a visually striking room, Mr. H makes a persuasive case. A touch more heat, a tad less salt, and a lighter dessert would turn a well-produced performance into a definitively memorable one.

audrey.zhang@thecrimson.com

‘Ruth’ Review: A Ruthless Critique of Kate Riley’s Novel

BY ALEXANDRA M. KLUZAK

In the Christian-commune world of Kate Riley’s “Ruth,” dolls are banned and the Bible is the only acceptable children’s reading, revered above all else. Clothing is devoid of color and everyone’s diet is the same, so that all the men “look like Abraham Lincoln” and the women like “rats in kerchiefs.” Food is a communal good. Women exist only to serve their husbands and children to learn to serve God. It is not an environment designed to encourage curiosity about the outside world, which is unfortunate for the novel’s eponymous main character, Ruth, who battles a particularly strong case of it. What do people of other races look like? Is the distant

land of Zanzibar as fantastical as she dreams? What is it like to kiss a boy? All these are questions Ruth, a child with a penchant for knowledge, illicitly ponders. In “Ruth,” Kate Riley, herself raised in such a commune, displays her masterful and nuanced worldbuilding. The detail with which she describes the commune is meticulous and clever, heightening the reader’s frustration along with Ruth’s as they contend with the suffocating restrictions of this world. But the extensive worldbuilding is to the detriment of Riley’s main character, whose development Riley neglects as a result. Ruth’s initial struggle with her curiosity is fertile soil for a powerful narrative arc, but sadly from that soil emerges little more than a sprout; Riley appears to have forgotten that narrative hinges

just as much on the characters as the setting in which they operate. Riley seems to set herself up for success with her initial characterization of Ruth, as a girl just as guilty for feeling curious as she is curious. When Ruth learns that people outside the commune live in locked houses and own their own goods, each question leads to even more. To satisfy her curiosity, Ruth turns to literature, but books only inflame it further, as she wonders about distant lands and ponders racial issues in the United States.

Aware of her grave sin in imagining life outside the commune, Ruth suppresses her wonder — in matters both big and small. When a classmate remarks that another girl’s maroon dress, not conservative enough for the commune, is “becoming,” Ruth agrees internally, but is so timid

that she will not dare voice it. She is “dutiful” outwardly, but also inwardly, not admitting even to herself how unfair she finds the commune’s restrictions. “Remember to remember to remember,” she commands herself. One might assume that Ruth will eventually break free of the commune’s restrictions, given her propensity for knowledge-seeking, diametrically opposed with the objectives of the commune.

This deeply unsatisfying pacing is a flaw in what would otherwise be a beautifully-constructed novel.

Indeed, Riley leads the reader to believe she is fomenting this insurrection in her character’s psyche. “Ruth is clever enough to misunderstand all that she does not like,” Riley writes. Is Ruth a sly rebel in the making? Riley needs to make up her mind eventually on this question, and she never quite does. The reader hoping for this insurrection will be left disappointed, as that long deferred rebellious transformation never manifests and Ruth remains confined to the state of subservience the reader first found her in. This deeply unsatisfying pacing is a flaw in what would otherwise be a beautifully-constructed novel. Why is Ruth, three quarters into the novel, still caught in the same maddening, half-hearted dance with her subconscious? As she wishes ill upon another member of the commune she asks herself, “Should she suppress such prayers? Did they harm anyone but herself?” Such insecurity may have been acceptable 100 pages ago. But Ruth is no longer a little girl and this is no longer the early stage of a novel; there is little patience left for such spinelessness in the main character in whom the author has invested so much hope. Detailed and astounding though Riley’s worldbuilding power may be, it cannot compensate for the meager development of the character who gives the book its name.

AND ARTS

Student Bands Make Marvelous Moves at WHRB Concert in Pennypacker

WHRB hosted a dynamic performance by student performers Eleni Paris, TIme Being, and Droga.

BY ADALIA X. WEN

WRITER

On Friday, Sept. 19, in the liminal space of Pennypacker basement — lit a moody purple and shimmering under the glow of fairy lights, multi-colored disco projectors, and a makeshift lamp — WHRB hosted a dynamic, electrifying, yet intimate program by student performers Eleni Paris, Time Being, and Droga.

While their main stint is operating the popular FM variety radio station, the team at WHRB also regularly curates a lineup of live weekend concerts throughout the year. Sept. 19 was the second concert of the season and organized by Molly E. Egan ’26, lead singer of Time Being and member of WHRB’s Record Hospital department, and Emil J. Droga ’26.5, lead singer and guitarist of Droga.

Egan and Droga named “Born to Run” as the central, unifying theme of the show; the energy of that statement was evident in the setlists and moshing crowd. The night started off on a sweeter note with Eleni P. Sekas-Dadian ’26, known artistically as Eleni Paris, sharing three original songs, the first two from

an EP released last December: “Cry with Me,” “Minute of the Hour,” and “Gross.” The indie-folk singer-songwriter’s soulful voice, delicate fingerstyle guitar playing, and vulnerable thematic choices drew warm applause and murmurs from the crowd.

For Dadian, the WHRB space is a “true home base” and, as she claims, the best spot on campus for music explorations outside of the considerably more traditional-Harvardian institutions of a capella, classical music, and musical theater.

To be clear, this sentiment extends past how WHRB represents a diversity of genres on air and describes how the radio team creates opportunities for Harvard’s student musicians to share their music on a bigger platform and connect with local artists outside of the Harvard bubble.

Dadian’s own experience playing a show for WHRB with a band of Berklee students exemplifies this view.

“Once you have kind of established yourself a little bit in the place that you want to establish yourself in, I truly think that the best thing to do is to move outside of Harvard and bring [outside musicians] in. Because I’ve done a lot of shows with BU and Northeastern bands at Harvard’s campus, and I brought them in as much as they brought me into their space,” she said. She also spoke directly about the show she did at WHRB.

“The last time I played here was two years ago, and I did a show on air. So my family and friends were able to listen on the radio to me playing a live show. It was really fun and I did like a full hour set with a band playing my songs,” she said. Following Dadian, the band Time Being — composed of Egan on vocals and bass, Max M. Jepsen ’26 on the piano and guitar, and Caleb K. Levine ’26 on drums — got the crowd up on their feet and grooving to “Is This It” by The Strokes and “Feeling Like I Do” by Superdrag, and their own mashup of Frank Ocean’s “Super Rich Kids” with “Bennie and the Jets” by Elton John. They ended with an encore of The Beatles’ “Don’t Let Me Down,” while joking that “you can always count on the Time Being for an encore.”

M. Colacito-Bobadilla ’29 reflects on the ease of the atmosphere, the tech work, and active crowd.

“The space is pretty comfortable. There’s no space to get up. There’s no space to sit down. The acoustics sound really nice. Honestly, everything in there sounds really great. It feels really great,” he said.

After a quick set change, Droga stepped in to deliver pure Michael Bolton — eight thunderous songs that had people headbanging and moshing fiercely.

As Droga quipped at the end of the night, “There was a mix of singsongs, song-alongs, some jumping, jumping, jumps, some marvelous moshing and modulations.”

Speaking as an audience member and enthusiastic mosher,

There’s a sort of kinship between Boston live musical acts and college radio. There’s sort of an understanding that people will come in here to give us their music.

The crowd bopped in time, spun each other around, and sang along with gusto, especially to the last two songs. Audience member Sandro

Jepsen remarked on the flow of the night: “We had a beautiful first performance which brought everyone in. And then the openers kind

of got the people going a little. And then Droga got us, you know, super hyped,” he said.

According to WHRB president Ashwin H. Sivakumar ’26, Friday night was the largest live show WHRB has had in several months, referring to the length of the concert — almost three hours — and the size of the crowd.

“Usually,” Sivakumar said, “these [shows] are Friday nights, Saturday nights, two hours, hour and a half.”

He continued: “Sometimes we have people from Harvard, like these guys — Harvard undergrad bands. Sometimes we have people from the Boston area, like recent Harvard grads who were in WHRB. Sometimes we have local Boston artists who come in, usually on the underground scene.”

But of course, their biggest event of the year is the annual Record Hospital Fest, a charity music event, which similarly invites acts from all over Boston and “sometimes even further afield.”

Sivakumar added, saying: “People are very eager to play here usually. There’s a sort of kinship between Boston live musical acts and college radio. There’s sort of an understanding that people will come in here to give us their music.”

The coordinators of the live shows, when they initially throw out the main concept behind the concert, “they’ll have a contact” as they typically also are local musi-

cians themselves. But instead of bringing in an outside act, Sept. 19 spelled out an effort to reconnect the rest of campus with the three music acts, especially since the concert was designed to be a homecoming for Time Being and Droga. Egan and Jepsen had studied abroad last semester, and Droga took a gap semester. In addition, the groups specifically looked forward to returning to WHRB, as an organization dear to their hearts.

“It’s lovely to be back in WHRB,” Egan said, “because WHRB is ‘the spot’ since freshman year,” with audibly fond emphasis on “the spot.” “And now we can let out our frustrations,” she said jokingly, referring to the outpouring of energy that was the concert. Egan continued in a light tone: “It’s really awesome to know that Droga’s on campus this semester to really provide us with some awesome on-campus stuff.” Droga replied: “It’s funny because also it’s awesome that Time Being is now back on campus too.” Jepsen finished: “And we’ve come back to take the campus by storm. You can quote me on that.” The turnout of the Friday night concert and positive reflections from the musicians prove that Harvard undergrad bands continue to be a cornerstone of campus culture.

adalia.wen@thecrimson.com

Author Profile: Sarah Aziza on Crisis Reporting and the Music of the Book

BY LAURA B. MARTENS CRIMSON STAFF WRITER

Seven-year-old Sarah Aziza was notorious at her local library for bringing a crate every week and filling it to the brim with books before she left. Aziza is now a published author, journalist, and poet featured in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Best American Essays, Harper’s Magazine, The Washington Post, and The Guardian, among other publications.

As the daughter of a Palestinian refugee father, books and oral storytelling are an important way for Aziza to hold onto her past and understand new sides of her family members. Aziza’s genre-bending debut memoir, “The Hollow Half,” draws from her background in crisis reporting as well as personal stories spanning three generations to explore displacement, erasure, and nation-building. Aziza has received numerous grants from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, but a career in writing was not what she expected to do with her life. After her un-

dergraduate degree at the University of Pennsylvania, Aziza won a Fulbright to teach college-age students through the United Nations Relief and Works Agency in Jordan.

“I was reluctant to step out of my interest in current affairs, policy, things happening on the ground,” Aziza said in an interview with The Crimson. “MFAs didn’t really interest me. I didn’t want to sequester in the way that I felt an MFA might sequester me.”

After her work in Jordan, Aziza was accepted to the long form journalism program at New York University. Her years of experience in crisis reporting honed her editorial skills and acted as a bootcamp in streamlining her prose.

“Editorially, it was really helpful because I was drawn secretly to more creative writing. I think that journalism was a really good bootcamp in being really rigorous with myself, as far as streamlining my prose, becoming less precious about my adjectives and about my flowery language,” Aziza said. Aziza’s first drafts were usually elliptical, experimental, or indul-

gent. Her editors would then ruthlessly strip her writing down to help her “kill her darlings,” a technique in creative writing where the writer removes bits of prose that are beautiful in and of themselves, but do not contribute to the overall piece.

“I’m still not interested in sequestering. I’m not interested in just getting lost in my own thoughts and just polishing sentences in a corner,” Aziza said. “I think that my horizontality and interest in the moving, living world carries over into whatever I’m doing.”

Aziza’s debut memoir “The Hollow Half” took on a life of its own before Aziza set the intention to write a book.

“I think that a lot of things in my life, I’ve been afraid to fully claim until I had one foot in it. So, I was recently discharged from the hospital,” Aziza said. “I’d actually decided to give up even journalism at that point, just because of the way that my experience in the hospital left me feeling really humiliated and distrustful of my own mind.”

Then, in February and March of 2020, Aziza began to have a series

of dreams.

“I found myself really needing to process through writing, sort of like journaling almost, but even in more of a fugue stage, just waking up from these dreams that were really like recurring memories and just writing them down as a way to process,” Aziza said.

As the dreams began to compound, Aziza realized how much she didn’t know about her family, specifically her grandmother, who was the subject of most of the dreams. She began to ask her father more questions.

“I’d grown up in a Palestinian family. I knew the contours of our history, but I never thought really deliberately about how certain points in our history intersected with my family members’ lives,” Aziza said. “I started to pick up more historical texts and start to plot out parts of her life, features of her personality, stories that she would tell, and map them onto the macro story of her multiple displacements.” Aziza looked into her father’s life as well, and how U.S. foreign policy intersected with her family’s

lives. She poured through declassified Cold War documents and Palestinian literature alike.

“As a form of sustenance, and even maybe coping with all of the trauma I was dredging up, I was reaching for our writers,” Aziza said.

Aziza began to experiment with found materials, including her medical records, snippets of which are featured in “The Hollow Half.”

“There’s so much jargon, and it’s like another representation of how the body can be documented, but sort of lost in a particular type of language.”

On a socially distanced walk in the park during the pandemic, Aziza’s friend said that it sounded like Aziza was writing a book.

“And that was a confrontation for me with the fact that that’s maybe the biggest dream I didn’t know I had,” Aziza said. Aziza’s childhood bookshelves were full of hand-me-down copies of Thomas Hardy, the Brontës, and Shakespeare, gifted by other expats.

“Being an expat, a third culture

kid moving around and being a little out of place all the time, books were really my shelter. Books to me were sacred objects,” Aziza said. When Aziza read “The God of Small Things” by Arundhati Roy, she experienced a true portal to another world that captured Roy’s experiences with the caste system in India.

“The music of the book was so different than anything I’d experienced. So there was something unlocked in me when I read that,” Aziza said. “That writing can actually be magic. It’s not just the enchanting, engrossing, compelling prose of a Jane Austen or Thomas Hardy, but it can actually be magic.” When Aziza’s friend encouraged to compile her research as a book, Aziza’s first reaction was fear. “The amount of fear that I felt when she said it sort of told the truth. It revealed to me, ‘Hey, this is something you really want. And the recognition is what is scaring you the most,’” Aziza said. Her book was published four years later.

laura.martens@thecrimson.com

FIFTEEN MINUTES 19

Alfredo Gutierrez Ortiz Mena is a former justice of the Mexican Supreme Court and the Harry J. Steiner Lecturer in Human Rights at Harvard Law School.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

FM: What inspired you to enter law?

AGOM: I come from a long line of lawyers, so I would have to say lack of imagination on my part. No, I’ve always been interested in the law. I was always interested in public policy, and there was a lot of that in my house and a lot of lawyering in my house. So it was something I was always familiar with, and it just seemed very natural.

FM: Recently, you resigned from your Supreme Court position in response to the reforms that have forced judges to be elected in Mexico. Looking back at your tenure in the court, are there any particular decisions that you think were possible before, but under this new electoral system would be much more difficult to have?

AGOM: I think the jury is still out on this court. I wouldn’t want to presume to think how they are going to rule on issues. Certainly, there were issues that at the time, were very unpopular and would not win an election. For example, same-sex marriage, which I was able to vote on and draft the opinion. Mexico is a traditionally very Catholic country, and that issue would — I don’t think it would win any popular vote. The other issue is women’s reproductive rights, abortion. I was heavily involved in the opinions that led to the decriminalization of abortion. Again, not popular in a very traditional culture like the Mexican culture, and those are counter-majoritarian decisions that, let’s just say, won’t be popular in the ballot box.

FM: Do you think any of those decisions — having already been decided — are at risk of being overturned in this new court, or do you think the President [Claudia Sheinbaum] will hold fairly strongly?

AGOM: Again, it’s very difficult to know, because nobody’s ever done what has happened in Mexico. Nobody’s ever removed all the high courts. Nobody’s ever removed all the circuit court and all the district courts in one fell swoop. So will precedent hold? Will it not hold? Nobody knows. Nobody knows.

FM: Can you share your thought process, a little bit, in resigning from your position instead of standing for election?

AGOM: Well, I truly believe in a counter-majoritarian position of a court. I believe in a constitutional democracy, and I felt that the design — and it wasn’t just the fact that the judges were being elected — it was the fact that you were removing a lot of human capital that the country had invested in heavily, in training and preparing. And I felt that a court that doesn’t have a counter-majoritarian position or defend rights, minority rights, is going to be a court that’s there to legitimize government, and that’s something I felt that was incompatible with my personal beliefs of what the court should be.

FM: What do you think are the most significant differences serving on a Supreme Court in nations with much newer and evolving constitutions, such as Mexico, compared to a country like the U.S.?

AGOM: The U.S., in a lot of ways, is a reference for the rest of the world, because nobody has a constitutional tradition the United States has. And everybody looks to the Supreme Court decisions, Supreme Court case law. Everybody reads them and everybody learns from them. So Mexico really started to have a serious constitutional court in 1994, an important judicial reform. So everything was new, and that has its disadvantages and its advantages. The fact that everything is new is that you can start with the latest decisions, and you’re not bound by precedent, as you

Q&A:

ALFREDO GUTIERREZ ORTIZ MENA ON CONSTITUTIONAL BACKSLIDING

TENOCH. The former justice of the Mexican Supreme Court sat down with Fifteen Minutes to discuss his return to HLS, recent changes in the Mexican judicial system, and his favorite historical court opinions.

would be. The bad thing is precisely that you don’t have a thick doctrine of constitutional law, and that in itself, is very risky. But I would say that those are the differences.

FM: What do you think is the least understood aspect of a justice’s job?

AGOM: It’s lonely. You’re there in your chambers, you’re taking a decision, you know that decision is going to touch lives, and you have nobody to talk to. It’s very lonely work, and if you do it correctly, as years go by, it gets lonelier and lonelier and lonelier.

FM: Do you see any signs of other courts in Latin America going towards an electoral system, or does that feel like it’s fairly isolated in Mexico?

AGOM: Well, first of all, I hope not. I don’t agree with the system. I know Bolivia has struggled with their system. They did it, and I know that there are very strong judiciaries in Latin America — for example, Colombia, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, they have very, very, very robust judiciaries. So I don’t think we will see reforms like this. The OAS [Organization of American States] came out and recommended that nobody endeavor to try a reform like this. They would not recommend it for other countries. However, I do worry that it will have a chilling effect on justices in Latin America and on Supreme Courts in Latin America. That is a worry.

FM: Do you think you have an opinion from your tenure that you are most proud of?

AGOM: Several. It’s a privilege to be on court, any court, and it’s a huge responsibility, because you touch lives and you transform lives, like few other places. I would say the social rights area is where I am proudest of. Same sex marriage is definitely up there, abortion is definitely up there. Indigenous rights decisions are up there. Environment. And one which I particularly did a lot, was with criminal procedure and rights of the accused. There are several there that I’m very proud of. So, yeah, it’s a privilege, and it was incredible to be able to touch lives that way.

FM: Do you have a favorite historical court opinion?

AGOM: Several. That’s a very interesting question. Footnote four of Carolene Products, I think, would be up there. Marbury v. Madison would definitely be there. From the Inter-American Court, I think Radilla, which transformed the Mexican judiciary.

There are several, but I’ve never sat down to think about the historical ones.

FM: Mexico experienced over 70 years of one-party rule, only faltering in 2000. And so what lessons do you see in this triumph over one-party rule that you think are important to keep in mind, both from Mexican and from a U.S. perspective?

AGOM: I think how fragile democracy is and how easy you can lose it, and it’s something people generally take for granted until it’s too late. And I think citizens have to really worry and take some time out and

tional law — which, when you’ree on the court, you’re so busy you don’t have time to reflect. And this time has been enormously important to me, personally, because it has allowed me to gather my thoughts and think about issues that you wish you had more time when you were on the court.

FM: What do you think would be the most impactful reform one could make to the Mexican Supreme Court, short of transitioning away from judicial elections?

AGOM: I think if you couldn’t touch judicial elections, and they were a permanent facet of Mexican constitutional law from here on out, I think you would have to establish some sort of meritocracy to getting on the ballot. Maybe a prior exam, some sort of filter — so that you know that the people that are going to be on the ballot have the knowledge to execute the office that they are being elected to. Judges do technical work, not political work, and if your only requirements are political, you’re creating an incentive for the wrong type of people to get on the bench, and the only way you can correct that is having some sort of merit-based process prior, for those people to getting on the ballot. I think that would be the most important change you can make.

Also, it’s not just about the election. They also created an agency which oversees and sanctions judges. And the fact that they are elected creates an incentive to politicize the overseeing of a judge’s work. So the real worry is whether they are going to use a political criteria to sanction judges for the decisions they make. And I think that has to be revisited as a structural issue also, because it strikes at the independence of the judiciary and of the judicial work, and that’s very erosive to a healthy judiciary.

FM: You attended Harvard nearly 30 years ago, and so in your short time back, what do you think you’ve found to be the most striking differences on campus?

AGOM: They’re a lot softer on the students than back in my day. I think that’s been a big change. I remember it was not pleasant. I understand why, and it’s probably better, but I think that’s a big difference. I don’t see the JDs and the LLMs suffering like I used to see.

FM: Do you think you had a favorite class when you attended?

AGOM: Oh, yeah, Federal Taxation with Al Warren.

think about democracy and what type of democracy they want. It’s a very important question, and it may seem like you can take it for granted, but you can’t.

There’s an anecdote about Benjamin Franklin, leaving the Congressional Convention in Philadelphia, and he walked out, and a woman came up to him, and she said, ‘so, Mr. Franklin, what do we have a monarchy or a republic?’ And Benjamin Franklin replied, ‘a republic, if you can keep it.’ And I think those words are very, very important today. So I think the biggest lesson out of 70 years of one-party rule is you can lose a democracy very quickly.

FM: This semester you’re teaching a course on constitutional backsliding. What do you think is the most important takeaway you hope for your students to leave the class with? Maybe it’s just what you said.

AGOM: It’s just what I said. You have to be vigilant. Nobody else is going to take care of democracy but the citizenship and the citizenry. And the ordinary people are the ones that have to find value in having an independent court. They have to find value in having a democracy, because there are other ways to govern, and you can really slide into competitive authoritarian regimes.

FM: How have you found the transition from the bench to the classroom this semester?

AGOM: Oh, it’s been beautiful. It’s been beautiful. Being able to think, to revisit a lot of decisions, revisit a lot of doctrine on the law, constitu-

FM: And least favorite class? Or are you going to plead the Fifth on that one?

AGOM: Oh yeah.

FM: What is the best book you’ve read in the last year?

AGOM: I picked up, before coming here, “These Truths” by Jill Lepore. It’s on the history of the U.S. I think it’s maybe a 10-yearold book, but I really enjoyed it. I just wanted to brush up on my U.S. history before coming back to the U.S.

FM: I’m not sure they’re very authentic, but can you weigh in on the Felipe’s versus Jefe’s debate here?

AGOM: Yesterday, I had dinner with the Mexican LLMs, and we had this exact discussion. And hands down, they all voted, and I think it was unanimous. Tenoch is the most authentic restaurant, according to the Mexican LLMs at Harvard Law School.

FM: Then it’s official. So now that you’ve stepped down from the court and started teaching, what do you see in the future for you, in the next five or 10 years?

AGOM: Oh, that’s too far away for me. I’m just enjoying the here and now, and I’ll worry about that when it presents itself. For me, right now is a moment of quiet reflection and teaching and giving back a lot of what I had the privilege to learn in this last decade.

Women’s Rugby Captures Ivy League Title

BY RHIANNON STEWART

STAFF WRITER

half set up the next opportunity for points on the board. Senior Tiahna Padilla dashed out, breaking away from the Dartmouth pack to put Harvard within 5 meters of the try line, leaving Jordan to put it over the line, 17-0.

With 20 minutes to go in the first half, all the momentum was with Harvard, but Dartmouth began to show threatening moments. Multiple knockons from Harvard gave the Big Green territory. In the 26th minute, after high pressure, Dartmouth managed to put 7 points on the board.

This first try sparked a fire in Dartmouth, and its team continued to push Harvard to defensive limits in the final minutes of the first half. Their efforts paid off with them turning around their first half fortunes and securing 2 more tries to put them ahead going into halftime, 21-17.

As the second half opened up, the cagey battle continued between the two teams, with it taking over 15 minutes for either side to open up their account for the half. The hosts’ continued pressure meant they were able to strike through the Harvard defense and strengthen their lead to 28-17. Harvard resilience was on show, however, as it responded quickly with clean possession play, leading to Harvard forwards with the ball within inches of the try line. It was Ogoke again who had the finishing hand in getting Har -

vard’s fourth try of the game, narrowing the deficit to 24-28. The game continued to go back and forth with Dartmouth getting a try of their own within minutes, again pushing them ahead to 33-24. With 15 minutes left on the timer, Harvard was not ready to give up. Senior Lennox

Cliff-Diving World Series Makes A Splash

The diver inched up to the edge of the platform suspended 88 feet over the Boston Harbor and placed his hands down, hardly any nerves crossing his face. As he slowly lifted his feet off the ground into a precarious handstand, a hush fell over the crowd.

He steadied himself, then leapt off, executing a series of perfect somersaults and twists while hurtling through the air. The crowd hollered as he broke the water, feet-first and pencil straight, with a splash nowhere near representative of the towering height he dove from.

This gravity-defying daredevil is Gary Hunt, a competitor in the Red Bull Cliff Diving World Series. From Sept. 1920, 2025, the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) in Seaport hosted the Red Bull Cliff Diving World Series final, capping off the 2025 season of the extreme sport. Thousands of spectators watched the 24 athletes compete, and the diving conditions were ideal — sun shining and temperatures in the low 70s.

David Colturi, a Red Bull diver who began his career in 2009, said diving in Seaport is especially meaningful.

“This is where my career started and where my family always comes [to watch],” Colturi said. “It’s a really special moment.”

Many of the spectators said that although they weren’t necessarily fans of cliff diving, they were eager to witness such an awe-inspiring event.

Bryan Do, a graduate student at Northeastern’s pharmacy school, said he was drawn in by the remarkable stunts the divers can accomplish and the fact that the event was free. He paused mid-sentence to look up as a diver teetering on the edge of the platform launched into a flip through the air.

“Exhibit A,” Do said. Tom Colturi, David Colturi’s father, said his son and the other divers are adrenaline junkies. He joked that David Coltu -

ri’s zeal for extreme sports did not come from him. “I don’t even like heights,” Tom Colturi said. “I don’t know how he got it, but he got into this early, and we can’t take it away from him.” Spectators crowded the bleachers under the ICA’s balcony and filled the sidewalks around the port, craning their necks to get a glimpse of the divers. Red Bull staff members strolled the grounds wearing insulated backpacks shaped like Red Bull cans and handed out free drinks. All the while, a jumbotron broadcast the dives, offering closeups of the flips and divers’ emotional reactions once they emerged from the water.

The divers competed for both the Boston title and the King Kahekili trophy, which is the award for winning the most points across the World Series. The World Series has taken place annually since 2009, and the divers travel to seven to eight different stops worldwide, culminating at the final event, this year in Boston. Along with these titles, divers win around $39,000 per event, plus bonuses for winning competitions.

American diver James Lichtenstein won the men’s Boston 2025 title by less than a point in his nail-biting final dive. Australian diver Rhiannan Iffland took home the women’s Boston title and also

the women’s King Kahekili trophy, making it her ninth World Series win. Veteran diver Gary Hunt won his 11th men’s King Kahekili trophy. Tom Colturi, David Colturi’s father, came with their extended family to support his son, clad in purple “TEAM COLTURI” shirts. David Colturi earned the bronze in Boston this year. Tom Colturi said the nerves of watching his son perform have decreased over his son’s career.

“When we started, we used to just hope he was going to be safe. Now, I hope he is not only safe, but he does a great dive,” Tom Colturi said, glancing at David’s score flashing across the jumbotron. “And he just did, so it’s kind of fun to be here.”

Colturi, along with the other 23 divers, competed four dives over the two-day competition. The dives are split into three categories: required, intermediate, and optional dives. Despite the misleading names, the distinction is that required and intermediate dives have a difficulty level cap, but the optional dives can be as difficult as the divers are capable of.

The dives are scored by five rotating judges who grade them on a zero to 10 scale in half-point increments. The highest and lowest scores from the judges are discarded, and then the three remaining scores are added together and multiplied by the dive’s degree of difficulty (DD).

The female divers jump off

a 21 meter platform, and the male divers jump off 27 meters. The divers create their own sequences, which involve a variety of starting positions and a combination of somersaults and twists as they fly through the air. But since most viewers are not familiar with the nuances of Red Bull cliff diving, at the event, the commentators are broadcast over loudspeakers to keep the audience up to speed. All spectators agreed, though, that cliff diving is nerve-wracking and not for the faint of heart. Rob Parker, a Concord, Mass. resident who came to the championships with his wife after receiving an email from their neighborhood organization, said he was inspired by the divers’ bravery.

“I don’t know how people get it in their head that, ‘Yeah, I want to be a cliff diver,’” Parker said.

Natalie Biel, Do’s friend and a fellow Northeastern pharmaceutical school graduate student, echoed Parker’s sentiment.

“It would take a lot of guts for me to do something like this,” she said, looking up at the large TV screen showing a slow motion replay of one of the dives. Some of the most supportive fans at the event were the other divers, who cheered loudly from their hot tub after watching their friends dive. David Colturi emphasized the tightknit community among the competitors.

“I think what you miss when you’re a spectator or you’re just watching on TV is the camaraderie vibe between the athletes,” David Colturi said. “We really are each other’s biggest supporters.” Though the Red Bull Cliff Diving World Series final was a thrilling and, at times, fear-inducing, competition, the divers’ final rankings did not cloud their boundless passion for the sport. Tom Colturi said he didn’t know when, or if,

THE HARVARD CRIMSON

Women’s Soccer Takes Down Princeton

Harvard women’s soccer (3-4-2, 1-1-0 Ivy) recorded an impressive win against Princeton (2-4-3, 1-1-0) to start Ivy League play. The matchup between the two conference foes ended with the Crimson dominating the Tigers 2-0.

On a beautiful Saturday morning, in its 46th matchup, the two storied Ivy soccer programs met on the pitch for yet another marquee rivalry match. Princeton entered confidently against the Crimson with two consecutive victories — including last year’s Ivy League semi-finals while Harvard carried the torment of its recent defeats and the determination to change the narrative. The Crimson drew added inspiration from spirited alumni in attendance for the weekend, providing an extra spark against the opponents that awaited them.

Princeton opened the Ivy League season on a high note with a tough road win over Penn in the previous week. Harvard, meanwhile, entered the match wanting to rebound after a disappointing loss to Dartmouth in the Ivy League opener, raising the stakes for pivotal game. The match began with a furious pace, with the physicality apparent. The ball moved quickly, back and forth across the pitch. Each team attempted to execute its scheme of earning early sights on the goal. Six minutes into the game, Harvard appeared to have the breakthrough in the front field with junior forward Ólöf Kristinsdóttir shooting towards the goal, only to find the hands of the Princeton goalkeeper. Kristinsdóttir would not be denied the second time around. With just under 30 minutes remaining in the first half, senior forward Audrey Francois swiftly moved up the left side of the field, gaining a one-on-one opportunity with a Tiger defender. Francois

proceeded to make two sweeps over the ball and jabbed left, just enough to move the Princeton defender aside and find a window to cross the ball into the box.

“I love the 1v1 matchups and getting in the positions where I can use the moves that have become second nature. I am confident I can win those matchups,” Fracois said. “This time it was just about creating enough separation to serve the box for Ólöf and Elsa to finish the rest.”

Francois’s ball found the foot of freshman midfielder Elsa Santos López who tapped the ball towards the goal for Kristinsdóttir. For a split second, the ball was in no man’s land, creating a race between a Tiger defender, goalkeeper, and Kristinsdóttir. Right before Princeton’s keeper could slide to grab the ball, Kristinsdóttir kicked the ball into the goal for

Harvard’s first goal of the game. The Crimson took an early 1-0 lead.

From this moment, Harvard’s defense became a critical factor in the rest of the game, relentless in its attempt to make the Tigers’ offensive attack difficult. Harvard’s defenders — led by senior August Hunter, junior Amy König, and junior Jasmine Leshnick — held Princeton to one shot on goal for the entire half. Harvard entered the half with a 1-0 lead.

“The key to winning the game defensively was winning our duels, staying physically aggressive and focusing on the details,” Leshnick said.

As the second half began, Princeton came out determined to not leave Camrbdige without a fight. Early in the half, the Tigers rushed up the right side of the field and crossed the ball into

the box searching for an equalizer. The first shot by Princeton was blocked by Leshnick and sophomore forward Anna Rayhill who both slid in front of the ball to force the Tigers backwards.

Once the Tigers retrieved the ball, Princeton attacked with another shot on goal, but Harvard senior goalkeeper Rhiannon Stewart jumped without outstretched arms, preventing the ball from piercing right under the goalpost into the top of the net. The score remained 1-0.

At the 60 minute mark of the game, the Crimson seized momentum again, pushing the ball up the field and into the box. The intensity remained in the game with Princeton desperately trying to prevent another goal. Fortunately, for the Crimson, Princeton’s overbearing physicality led to a penalty kick opportunity for

Harvard. Kristinsdóttir stepped to the penalty spot for a second opportunity to score, peering at the ball and at the goal, and with an elite composure, smoothly kicked the ball into the right side of the goal as the Tigers’ goalkeeper dove in the opposite direction. Harvard stretched the lead to 2-0.

“It’s always a good feeling to score for your team, especially in such an important game with the alumni present but it was a team effort for the win,” Kristinsdóttir said. Harvard remained unyielding in the final 25 minutes.Princeton continued to try and manifest shot opportunities, but the Crimson defense was a fortress turning away every Tiger surge. This performance by the defense allowed Harvard to avenge its recent losses and win its first game of Ivy League play with a 2-0 re -

Field Hockey Undefeated in Historic Season

1-1 Ivy), and the No. 14 Monmouth Hawks (7-2, 0-0 CAA). The Crimson fought for a well-earned 3-1 victory over the Tigers and then blanked the Hawks in a 2-0 win on Sunday. With the fourth consecutive weekend sweep, Harvard now boasts an undefeated 8-0 record (2-0 Ivy), marking the best start in the program’s history. Notably, out of the eight games the Crimson has won this season, four of them have been against ranked opponents. Harvard 3, Princeton 1 The Harvard team’s weekend road trip began in Princeton, where the Crimson was forced to play within the Tigers’ enemy territory. The first period proved to be a complete defensive battle between the two Ivy League powerhouses. For the first time all season, Harvard failed to fire off a single shot in the opening frame. The Tigers were able to notch one shot, but it was deftly deflected by the Crimson’s defensive unit before even reaching freshman goalkeeper Linde Burger. In the opening minutes of the second quarter, the Princeton team fired off five quick shots and earned two penalty corner opportunities. Harvard’s defense, powered by senior Bronte-May Brough, the Ivy League Defensive Player of the Week, stood tall in the face of the Tigers’ attempts. The two shots that did make it through to the net were blocked by the rookie goalkeeper. Burger, a native of Heerhugowaard, Netherlands, has been stellar for the Crimson, start-

ing all eight games in the absence of Harvard’s senior goalkeeper, Tessa Shahbo, who is sidelined with an injury. Spurred by its defense’s grit and momentum, Harvard earned a corner opportunity of its own. Senior Kate Oliver inserted the ball to freshman Rosa Kooijmans. The rookie midfielder, hailing from Bussum, Netherlands, neatly handled the ball and sent it to Brough, who fired it home from just inside the circle. Midway through the third quarter, the Crimson doubled its advantage. On another corner opportunity, Oliver sent a crisp insert to Captain Kitty Chapple. Chapple, in a similar fashion to Kooijmans on the first corner attempt, set up Brough, who ripped another shot into the next, extending the lead to two. In the fourth quarter, junior forward Sage Piekarski sealed the assertive win for the Crimson. Junior Lara Beekhuis made an excellent drive into the offensive zone and sent a shot zipping toward the

net. Princeton’s goalkeeper, Olivia Caponiti, made the first stop but could not prevent the rebound flying toward Piekarski. The Concord, Mass., native set herself up for a field hockey alley-oop, as she popped the ball into the air towards the net and then whaled it home. The goal earned Piekarski the fourth spot on SportsCenter’s Top Ten Plays of the Weekend.

Despite the Crimson’s threegoal lead, the Tigers did not give up. In fact, with eight minutes left, Princeton capitalized on a penalty corner. That being said, against Harvard’s lockdown defense, it was too little too late for the Tigers to mount a serious comeback attempt.

“It felt amazing to beat Princeton at Princeton,” said Piekarski, the Ivy League Offensive Player of the Week. “There is always a tremendous lead-up to any Ivy League game, Princeton in particular.”

The Crimson’s dominant defensive effort, marked by Burger’s career-high six saves, spurred the

team to the 3-1 victory over its rival team.

“Very early on in preseason, we discovered that there isn’t much that can stop us when we play simple two-touch hockey and keep a gritty mentality,” Piekarski added.

“We have leaned heavily into perfecting these basics and making the most out of every opportunity that comes our way.”

The win over the Tigers was undoubtedly a gritty one for the Harvard team, which was outshot 14-5 and forced to trust its defensive unit. That being said, the Crimson did make the most out of each of its scoring opportunities and will strive to create even more offensive chances in its upcoming contests.

Harvard 2, Monmouth 0

On Sunday, Harvard faced off against another fierce New Jersey opponent in Monmouth. Entering the contest, the Hawks led the nation in both goals, averaging 5.29 per game, and points, averag-

ing 15 per game. For Crimson fans, Monmouth’s offensive success this season was a cause for concern, especially after the exhausting defensive effort against Princeton. However, to the relief of the Harvard faithful, the Crimson wasted no time in asserting its own offensive dominance. Merely one minute into regulation play, Chapple wove through multiple defenders and slipped a low shot into the net. The goal marked the captain’s second of the 2025 campaign and set the tone for the remainder of the game.

Monmouth looked to even the score when it earned the first corner of the afternoon; however, the Crimson’s defense, composed of Brough, Brooke Chandler, Smilla Klas, and Marie Schaefers, held firm, protecting Burger from seeing any action.

At the end of the first half, Harvard boasted eight shots and kept the Hawks to three. Notably, none of Monmouth’s scoring attempts made it to Burger, who, thanks to the Crimson’s incredible defensive stand, did not have to make a single save to secure the shutout.

It was not until halfway through the third quarter that Harvard was able to bolster its lead. Sophomore Martha le Huray flung a shot onto the net. Piekarski, hunting for another rebound, expertly poked the loose ball into the net for the second time of the weekend.

Striving to extend the advantage even further, le Huray, Tilly Butterworth, and Piekarski all peppered the Monmouth goalkeeper with a few more shots. Meanwhile, on the defensive end, Harvard held the Hawks to merely two shots in the final fifteen minutes of play. At the final whistle, the Crimson had successfully secured the weekend sweep and had outshot Monmouth 16–6. Harvard’s back line kept the nation’s most prolific

offense scoreless for the first time in 2025.

“It was fantastic to see all of our hard work correlate to on-field success,” said Piekarski. “We hope to carry that momentum forward to our next big hurdle, Penn.”

“As the season continues, our game will keep evolving, but hopefully it is our strong foundation that will keep bringing us success,” the junior forward added. The Crimson will return to action this weekend when it takes on the University of Pennsylvania (43, 1-1 Ivy). The two Ancient Eight teams will face off in Cambridge on Berylson Field on Saturday at noon.

“Going forward, we are taking it one game at a time, with the eventual goal of winning the NCAA Championship,” said Piekarski. “As of now, we hold the longest undefeated record in Harvard field hockey history, and I have no doubt that will only continue if we remain committed to our team goals and philosophy.”

Harvard’s field hockey program is now cemented squarely in the national conversation, as it ranks below only the reigning champions Northwestern (9-0), the University of Virginia (8-0), and the University of North Carolina (91) in the national polls.

“The goal for me is always the same,” Piekarski shared. “To be able to walk away from each game and know that I left absolutely everything I had out on the pitch.” Piekarski and her teammates, who have powered through the opening portion of the season, now strive to extend their success deep into the stretch of Ivy League competition. With the talent, poise, and field hockey IQ that the Harvard team has exhibited thus far, the team is well-positioned to be a serious contender.

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