News from Harvard

Professor Nicholas Burns discusses the visit of India's prime minister to Washington this week.

A rowdy Ohiri Field had to wait a nail-biting 30:18 for Harvard to score the first goal of its second-round soccer match in the NCAA tournament against the Monmouth Hawks. But once the Crimson got on the board Sunday (Nov. 22), they couldn’t be stopped.

Second-team, All-Ivy defender Richard Smith ’13 rebounded the ball in a crowded penalty box after two Crimson shots hit the crossbar. He found an opening and booted the ball into the back of the net to start the scoring. Harvard followed with two more goals in the second half to hand Monmouth (18-2-2) just its second loss of the season, 3-0.

In a game marred by rough physical play, three players on each team were issued yellow cards, and the Crimson finished the game with a season-high 24 fouls. Worried that the game might get out of hand, at one point second-year head coach Jamie Clark strongly urged his team to keep on the ball and stay focused.

“The fouls were 15-9 in the first half, and that’s more fouls than we usually commit in a full game,” said Clark. “I just didn’t want the game to get away from us. We’ve seen 1-0 leads evaporate before, and you just have to make sure you’re really tight.”

In the second half, senior co-captain and 2009 Ivy Player of the Year Andre Akpan ’10 gave Harvard a 2-0 lead in the 67th minute, when the fleet forward split two defenders and fired the ball past the Monmouth goalkeeper for his 12th goal of the season and 47th of his career, tying Chris Ohiri’s ’64 all-time record.

Akpan’s tally was followed by a goal from senior midfielder Adam Rousmaniere in the 85th minute, putting a final exclamation point on the win. Off a free kick, Rousmaniere bent the ball around three Monmouth defenders and past the Hawks goalkeeper.

“From the beginning, we knew it was going to be a little chippy; we knew it was going to be a battle,” said Akpan. “We’ve tried to make a point of coming out strong every game, and that’s what we did. But they did too. So it was kind of two teams butting heads from the beginning.”

“I think it was a great game,” said Clark. “For the most part it was a 1-0 game. A few moments of brilliance separated the game, and I thought that was the only difference between the two teams.”

When asked what it might mean to become the Crimson’s all-time goal-scorer next week in his final collegiate game on Ohiri Field, Akpan said humbly, “It would be huge; it would mean the world. But I’d rather we score 10 goals and I score zero, and we win this game and get to the Elite Eight. Hopefully, I can continue to score goals in my life, but this is my last chance to make it far in the tournament. That’s what I’m really looking for.”

The 10th-seeded Crimson (14-3-1) will continue their stirring run by hosting the Maryland Terrapins on Sunday (Nov. 29).

Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers paid their executives largely in stock, and that stock lost most or all of its value when those companies collapsed.

Many people on Wall Street say these examples help make the case that pay incentives were not what caused executives at these fallen firms to take excessive risks.

But three professors at Harvard are disputing that logic in a new study, saying it is an urban myth that executives at Bear and Lehman were wiped out along with their companies…

Read more here (The New York Times)

When Nina Dudnik arrived at Harvard Medical School in 2001 to pursue her doctorate, her eyes weren’t drawn to the marble hallways, the state-of-the-art facilities, or the august faculty.

They were drawn to the trash.

Dudnik came to Harvard from Ivory Coast, where she had worked for a year in what passes there for a science lab, a facility where she spent much of her time rewashing test tubes and scrounging up basic supplies. It is the kind of stuff that labs all over America toss out routinely.

Why not, she wondered as plunged into her own research that fall, find a way to connect the throwaways of this country to the needs of scientists in the Third World?

Read more here (The Boston Globe)

The Office of the General Counsel at Harvard will host a memorial service at the Memorial Church in remembrance of Harvard in-house attorney Frank J. Connors Jr. Connors, who died on Aug. 14, served as a Harvard attorney for the past 24 years and was a resident of Winchester, Mass. The service will be held on Dec. 10 at 2 p.m.

Two Harvard undergraduates and three recent graduates are among the 32 American men and women named Rhodes Scholars on Nov. 22. Each of the five will begin study next October at the University of Oxford in England.

Harvard’s newest Rhodes Scholars are Roxanne E. Bras ‘09 of Celebration, Fla.; Darryl W. Finkton ‘10 of Indianapolis; Jean A. Junior ‘09 of Troy, Mich.; Eva Z. Lam ‘10 of Milwaukee; and Grace Tiao ‘08 of Marietta, Ga. They were chosen from among 805 students nominated by 326 colleges and universities nationwide.

Created in 1902 by the will of British philanthropist Cecil Rhodes, the scholarships cover all costs for two or three years of study at Oxford. Winners are selected on the basis of high academic achievement, personal integrity, leadership potential, and physical vigor, among other attributes.

This year’s recipients bring Harvard’s total number of Rhodes Scholars to 328, more than a 10th of the 3,196 Americans who have received the award.

Roxanne E. Bras, who graduated from Harvard College in June with a degree in economics, will pursue an M.Phil. in international relations at Oxford, focusing on strategic studies.

Currently a second lieutenant in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Bras is also a Truman Scholar and a marathon runner. Her mentor of nearly five years is Gen. David Petraeus, head of the U.S. Central Command.

As an undergraduate, Bras studied counterinsurgency as part of the economics of national security. Her senior thesis focused on quantitative metrics in counterinsurgency, primarily in Iraq and Afghanistan. She plans to focus on studying other post-World War II conflicts at Oxford.

“I applied for the Rhodes because I wanted to study international relations in a graduate program, and I wanted to do so overseas,” Bras said. “More specifically, I’d like to research the relationships between countries’ diplomatic and military institutions.”

Despite her impressive background, Bras said she wasn’t expecting to win.

“I was shocked,” she said. “I hadn’t ever seriously considered winning, so I was really surprised when they called my name. After a while, the shock wore off, and I was incredibly humbled. I can’t really say I’ve earned it. Instead I feel obligated to live up to the gift I’ve received.”

Bras hopes to make a career in public service, whether in uniform or in some other capacity, possibly teaching at West Point.

After Oxford, Bras intends to return to the Army, where, she said, “I have met fantastic mentors who have taught me about leadership, and I have been profoundly impressed by the courage and commitment of my peers.”

“My life goal is to remove income as one of the factors of life expectancy,” said College senior Darryl W. Finkton, a resident of Quincy House concentrating in neurobiology with a secondary concentration in African and African-American studies. “I don’t believe that the access someone has to health care, the cleanliness of their water, or the expertise of their physician should be determined by something so arbitrary as wealth.”

During his freshman year at Harvard, Finkton co-founded (with Sangu Delle ’10) a sustainable-water-delivery system for a community in Ghana. He has also researched infant cognition, and played varsity basketball for two years.

Finkton was first approached about the Rhodes by Quincy House’s senior tutor, Tim McCarthy, during his sophomore year.

“I thought he was just being nice and optimistic, but I decided to go ahead and look into the programs at Oxford, just in case,” Finkton said. “They seemed pretty amazing and fit into my overall plans, so I decided to throw my hat in the mix to see what would happen.”

Finkton will now pursue an M.Sc. in global health during his first year at Oxford and an M.B.A. in his second year.

“I spent much of my time in college studying global health, human rights, and international development,” Finkton said, adding that studying global health will solidify his understanding of community-based care, and an M.B.A. will help to ensure the success of his development projects in Africa.

Jean A. Junior sees an M.Phil. in comparative social policy from Oxford as a logical bridge between her undergraduate studies in sociology and medical school.

“I applied for a Rhodes Scholarship because I saw it as a golden opportunity to learn about some of the most effective ways to address the socioeconomic challenges facing the destitute sick,” she said. “I realized that while medical school would prepare me to address people’s clinical challenges, I needed additional training to address people’s socioeconomic challenges and to become as familiar as possible with effective policies and strategies for poverty alleviation.”

Since graduating summa cum laude in June, Junior has been a Fulbright Scholar researching HIV/AIDS in South Africa. As a Harvard undergraduate, she studied health behaviors of the rural poor in Bangladesh and co-directed CityStep, which engages public middle school students in dance and other creative activities. She also immersed herself in her sociology studies.

“Studying sociology as an undergraduate really opened my eyes to the depth of socioeconomic inequalities in society, inspired me to act to alleviate these inequalities, and made me a much more critical thinker about the problems faced by the underprivileged,” Junior said.

Junior hopes eventually to lead an organization that advocates for large-scale policy change to improve the lives of the poor and sick while providing health care and socioeconomic services to the poor.

“I also want to mentor and encourage others to do social justice work, because I know that, as one person, I can only do so much,” she said. “But if I can help motivate others, so much more can be done.”

“My undergraduate work, particularly my senior thesis, has focused on cultural competency training in an American context — which almost always refers to white, middle-class teachers working with low-income, black, and Latino students,” said Eva Z. Lam, a senior in Leverett House concentrating in social studies. “At Oxford, I hope to consider cultural competence and teacher training in a broader international context.”

Lam will pursue two one-year master’s degrees at Oxford: one in comparative and international education, and the other in comparative social policy. After Oxford, she plans to teach high school for a few years, hoping eventually to find her way into a policymaking position, either as a school administrator or at the district level.

“My eventual goal is to make education policy, and I’m excited to have the opportunity to study that in an international context at Oxford,” said Lam, a black belt in tae kwon do who was a national champion debater in high school. Also president of the Harvard College Democrats, she campaigned for Barack Obama both at Harvard and in New Hampshire.

The news of her Rhodes took the better part of a day to sink in fully, Lam said.

“Perhaps my favorite part of the format of the Rhodes interviews is that you get to spend the entire day with the other finalists,” she said. “Over the course of the day, I discovered that all of the finalists were really incredible people. They were some of the most intelligent and accomplished people I’ve ever met, but every single one was also refreshingly honest and down-to-earth.”

Grace Tiao went far after graduating summa cum laude in 2008 with degrees in history of science and English and American literature and language. She ran a yearlong research expedition on ecosystem biodiversity in Antarctica.

Working with microbiologist Craig Cary of the University of Waikato in New Zealand, she spent three months doing fieldwork in Antarctica’s McMurdo Dry Valleys.

“Environmental microbiology is a discipline that relies heavily on computational expertise,” Tiao said. “I realized that if I wanted to continue to work in the field, I’d need to go back and learn a good deal of basic and some more advanced statistics.”

So Tiao applied for the Rhodes, which she will use to pursue a second bachelor’s degree, this one a B.A. in mathematics and statistics.

“The B.A. doesn’t build upon my studies as an undergraduate,” she said. “It triangulates them.”

Tiao’s ultimate goal is to write literary nonfiction about science, and in particular to focus on various environments and human relationships to those environments, for a general audience.

“In other words, I’d like to be, as my professor, Steven Shapin, puts it, ‘a spokesperson for reality,’” Tiao said. “That’s his description of who a scientist is. Good spokespeople try to reach as wide an audience as they can. But unfortunately, because scientists are very busy people and aren’t necessarily gifted writers or speakers, the message doesn’t always get through reliably or comprehensively to the public. I think that’s where I fit in.”

Tiao, who is currently working on her first book, said winning the Rhodes will mean not only having the gift of financial support and academic training but also precious time to conduct fieldwork and write between terms.

“It’s an enormous gift,” she said. “I don’t think I understand what it means yet, and I probably won’t till long after I’ve graduated.”

For full biographies on the winners.

It was a classic that neither the Harvard nor the Yale faithful at the Yale Bowl will soon forget. In a game defined by risk and reward, bold decisions by both coaches added to the legacy of one of college football’s oldest and most storied rivalries.

Down 10-0 in the fourth quarter with 8:10 remaining in the game, head coach Tim Murphy’s decision not to punt on fourth down and four yards to go resulted in a 19-yard run by running back Gino Gordon ’11 to give new life to the drive and revive Harvard’s chance at a comeback.

Two plays later, Crimson quarterback Collier Winters ’11 found wideout Matt Luft ’10 down the field for a 41-yard touchdown, bringing Harvard right back into the game and within a touchdown, 10-7.

On the very next possession, Yale failed on a gutsy fourth-and-22 call from their own 26-yard line, giving the Crimson the ball back in Bulldog territory with less than three minutes to go in the game.

Not squandering the opportunity, it only took Harvard three plays to get into the end zone; Winters found Chris Lorditch ’11 down the middle of the field for a 32-yard reception to give Harvard a 14-10 victory.

Winters, who came up clutch when the Crimson needed him to, finished the day with 211 yards passing, 51 yards rushing, and two passing touchdowns.

Gordon finished the day with 86 yards rushing on 13 carries and, in addition to the game-winning touchdown, Lorditch racked up 104 yards receiving for the Crimson on five receptions.

With the win — Harvard’s eighth in nine years over Yale (4-6; 2-5 Ivy League) — Harvard finishes the season with a 7-3 (6-1 Ivy League) record and in second place in the Ivy League. The victory comes a week after the Crimson lost in their home finale to Penn, ultimately impaling their hopes for a third-consecutive Ivy League title.

But the seniors went out on a high note with the Crimson’s fourth-quarter comeback — one that will go down in history as a comeback for the ages.

“In the end, it’s all about not giving up,” Murphy said after the win. “That’s the kind of kids we have. That’s what happened out there today.”

Students in veteran political strategist Steve Jarding’s “The Making of a Politician” class got a taste of what a real-world campaign feels like, when they staged a mock presidential campaign debate Wednesday night (November 18).

In an era when big-time college football too often is tarnished by tales of disrepute – Tennessee this week dismissed two players charged with attempted armed robbery – Murphy and seven Harvard teammates who are bound for medical school represent not only the glory of The Game but the spirit of amateur football as the Ivy League has played it for more than a century.

“Sometimes there’s a myth that you can’t compete in Division 1 football and aspire to things like medical school,’’ Crimson coach Tim Murphy said as he prepared for the 126th Harvard-Yale spectacle. “We’re very fortunate to have a bunch of kids doing it. It’s a great tradition…’’

Read more here (The Boston Globe)

A group consisting of nearly 20 incoming mayors from large cites across the country spent time this week at Harvard University’s Institute of Politics (IOP) for a three-day seminar on leadership and the issues they will face.

Nov. 20 (Bloomberg) — Kidney stones, malaria, Lyme disease, depression and respiratory illness all may increase with global warming, researchers at Harvard Medical School said.

Climate change from the burning of fossil fuels will add to risks to public health, said Paul Epstein, associate director of Harvard’s Center for Health and the Global Environment in Boston. The center and groups led by the American Medical Association are presenting data at a briefing today in Washington as a call for action to curb emissions…

Read more here (Bloomberg)

After a disappointing 17-7 home loss to Penn on Nov. 14, the Harvard football team (6-3; 5-1 Ivy League) will seek some measure of redemption on Saturday (Nov. 21) when it travels to New Haven, Conn. to face the Yale Bulldogs (4-5; 2-4 Ivy League) in the 126th playing of “The Game.”

After last week’s contest, where a Harvard win would have clinched at least a share of the Ivy League Championship, the Crimson now stand in second place. They need to defeat Yale and hope that Cornell (2-7; 1-5 Ivy League) upsets Penn (7-2; 6-0 Ivy League) to clinch a share of their third-straight conference title and 14th overall.

Harvard has won seven of the past eight games against the Bulldogs, and holds a 52-65-8 record in the historic series. In Harvard’s back-to-back championship years, both titles were clinched with victories over the Bulldogs.

Saturday’s contest at the Yale Bowl begins at noon and will be nationally televised on Versus TV, with radio broadcasts on 1120 AM (Boston), 1390 AM (Plymouth), 970 AM (Sturbridge), the Harvard student radio station, WHRB-FM 95.3, and Sirius Satellite Radio.

There are a trillion pages on the Internet. In essence, they are the stars and planets and shooting comets of a vast universe of digital knowledge that is expanding every minute.

For 500 years, books have been inviting readers into contained worlds that imply the possibility of mastery. But the Internet invites them into a world of hyperlinks. They explode the notion of containment and make mastery of all but the narrowest inquiries impossible.

This expansive, open age of digital information challenges the traditions of scholarship, learning, and even the act of reading. So what will be the fate of higher education in the digital age?

That was the subject of a Harvard panel on Wednesday (Nov. 18), “No More Teachers? No More Books?” It is the first of four such sponsored panels this academic year by the Harvard Extension School, which celebrates its 100th year in February.

The panel included Harry Lewis, the Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science; David Weinberger, a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University; Robert Darnton, director of the Harvard University Library and Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor; Craig Silverstein ’94, the director of technology at Google; and Sherry Turkle, director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self.

The Extension School itself is a case study in how the Internet is transforming higher education. This year one-third of Extension enrollees, in more than 120 countries, are taking online courses.

The intent of Extension was “to share Harvard’s learning with the surrounding community,” said Lewis, the panel’s moderator. Now that surrounding community “is the entire world.”

Lewis is co-author of “Blown to Bits: Your Life, Liberty, and Happiness After the Digital Explosion” (2008). Shaken by the digital age, people have reached “some kind of cusped time,” he said, in which they are coping with ubiquitous information and new social forces that have grown up around the Internet.

People are not at the cusp yet because “we’re still using books,” said Weinberger, a media philosopher. He described books as a “disconnected medium,” the kind of containment no longer honored in an age of hyperlinks. Authors no longer decide where a topic stops. Readers do, as they click freely through layers of links.

Books also imply a world of knowledge in which experts filter and choose, said Weinberger, author of “Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder” (2007). But the Internet means embracing a “new strategy” for learning, he said, with a philosophy of “Include everything; filter on the way out.”

Books also imply that knowledge is mastered, said Weinberger, but the Internet is a loose-edged world.

Weinberger showed his training as a philosopher in discussing a revolutionary truth about learning on the Internet. Its layers and links show us “there’s always been an argument about what’s been said.” That is, the Internet is a continual challenge to authority.

As for higher education, universities will remain places — physical entities — in the digital age, said Weinberger. Their material reality will not be “leached away” by the Internet. The learning process will benefit from the knowledge-sharing ethos of the Internet and by its tendency to “fill every interstice” of inquiry, he said, which is “pretty good news for higher education.”

But wait a minute, countered Darnton, a historian as well as library leader. The book is not dead.

“The old-fashioned print codex is doing very well, thank you,” turning out something like a million new titles a year worldwide, he said. Darnton is the author of “The Case for Books: Past, Present, and Future” (2009) and is a cautionary critic on leaping too fast into the digital age.

Not all knowledge can be captured in bytes, just as not all knowledge was ever captured in books, he believes, and the best future will be one in which the digital and the traditional coexist.

The digital age brings with it “a period of enormous confusion … a new world in which we need guidance,” said Darnton. That’s good news for the idea of “teachers and books,” he said, the “two implements” of traditional learning that must be embraced with new attention.

Meanwhile, there is reason to worry about print-digitization projects such as Google Books. Technicians scanning texts may use wrong editions, miss pages or volumes, or employ arbitrary categories for the finished, digitized books. Walt Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass,” Darnton said, “comes up under gardening.”

A bigger worry, he said, is that so much information winds up in the hands of a “corporate monopoly.” Despite glitches, the Google project is “so good” that it should not be in private hands, said Darnton. “It should be harnessed for the public good.”

Sitting next to Darnton was Silverstein, who was Google’s first employee, and who right away said he was “trained by lawyers” not to say anything about Google Books.

But he offered insights into the role of universities in the digital age. Higher education does a good job of imparting technical knowledge, but only in a work environment do people pick up “ancillary skills related to a group environment,” said Silverstein. “You can do well (in school) without learning these other skills.”

Software engineering, for instance, is more than computer science, he said. It involves “testing and programming in a group environment,” and using the social skills that make the transfer of knowledge easier.

Silverstein used the example of a graduate student who wrote software code that worked well but was written in such a way that no one else could understand it. Survival in the workplace requires not just technical skills, but “awareness of the environment you are in.”

Google is aware that the world of the classroom should be supplemented by the workplace, he said, citing the company’s “Summer of Code.” Since 2005, Google has sponsored about 1,500 student software developers. They are given three-month stipends to write code for open-source projects, under the guidance of mentors.

“I’m excited to see where that takes us,” said Silverstein.

In the classroom, the digital age is changing the way that people think, read, and learn in a university environment, said panelist Turkle.

Meanwhile, the digital boom has also created its own myths, she said, including the “myth of multitasking.” Despite our embrace of “volume and velocity,” said Turkle, “when you multitask, you do everything worse.” Ironically, the digital age has brought with it a new imperative to slow down and take some time.

Another myth is that simulation is the best way to learn, Turkle said, but “simulation reality will always leave something out,” including a sense of scale and the necessity to doubt (and not just love) technology.

Sitting in front of computers, wowed by what they see, people “learn to take things at interface value,” often at the expense of focusing on the real. Turkle said that what gets lost is a skill long associated with higher education: critical thinking.

In the world of digital information, she said, “We must approach our tools with the appropriate doubt.”

What has made Walmart the world’s largest corporation? According to scholar Bethany Moreton, the reason largely is a strong religious base.

“If you want to reach the Christian population on Sunday, you do it from the church pulpit,” said Moreton, quoting the executive director of the Christian Coalition from 1995. “But if you want to reach them on Saturday, you do it at Walmart.”

Moreton, author of “To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise” (Harvard University Press, 2009), was on campus Tuesday (Nov. 17) to explore the ideological foundation behind the company’s corporate ethos, one that she said has successfully fueled the megacorporation’s bottom line.

She appeared at Harvard Divinity School as part of its Business Across Religious Traditions colloquium series.

The connection, she said, is largely the product of Walmart founder Sam Walton, who started the discount retail chain in Arkansas in 1962, and gradually tapped into the strong fundamentalist Christian culture across the Sun Belt.

Moreton, assistant professor of history and women’s studies at the University of Georgia, said Walton worked into the company’s corporate structure the notion of “service leadership” that ties worker roles into the concept that “Christ was a servant leader,” and emphasizes the importance in Christian tradition of serving others.

With this vision, said Moreton, men at the company “earned their power through their superior ability to serve,” while women had “an enthusiastic audience for labor that was formally considered unskilled.”

Even an ongoing sex-discrimination case against Walmart illustrated the strong religious connection many of its employees associate with the company. Many of the plaintiffs in Dukes v. Walmart Stores Inc., a class-action discrimination suit filed in 2000 that alleged that the firm offered women fewer promotions and lower pay than men, admitted to an initial strong attraction to Walmart’s “values.”

According to Moreton, citing a story on the suit that appeared in The Nation, the plaintiffs’ “original enthusiasm for their jobs had much to do with Walmart’s reputation as a pro-family, Christian company.”

Another critical element of Walmart’s success, she said, was Walmart’s savvy ability to connect into the underlying social structure of Christian families.

In the 1980s, during regular business meetings with Walmart managers and their spouses, Walmart’s director of family living spoke on the changed relationships between husbands and wives, which were, Moreton noted, “fundamental to the company’s business model.”

Meeting attendees were told, “Men should start expressing their appreciation to their overburdened wives. After all, hadn’t they been motivated this very weekend by Sam Walton’s thanks for their own hard work at Walmart? Did they in turn show that appreciation to their wives? Did they show it to the women working in the stores?”

The message, Moreton said, picked up on the notion of the Christian model of “headship” and submission in Christian marriage with a similar one developing in secular management texts. It then married them “within a service workplace.”

Crimson forward and co-captain Andre Akpan ’10, who was named to the All-Ivy League first team for the fourth time on Tuesday (Nov. 17), has added another accolade to his already lengthy resume by being crowned Ivy League Player of the Year.

Akpan joins the ranks of past recipients Charles Altchek ’07 (2005, 2006), Thomas McLaughlin ’98 (1997), and William Kohler ’97 (1996). The Grand Prairie, Texas, native, who was named Ivy Rookie of the Year in 2006, also becomes the first Harvard player to win both Ivy Player of the Year and Rookie of the Year honors, and the fourth overall.

Akpan, who was also named to the Top Drawer Soccer National Team of the Year (Nov. 19), finished the regular season first in the league in nearly every statistical category, holds the Harvard career points (33) and assists (123) records, and is two goals behind Chris Ohiri’s ’64 goals-scored record (47) going into the NCAA tournament.

Freshman forward Brian Rogers received the Ivy Rookie of the Year and second-team All-Ivy honors. Rogers is the sixth Harvard freshman to win the award. Rogers, who was named Ivy Rookie of the Week twice this season, assisted on three game-winning goals this season in addition to tallying three game winners.

Rounding out league honors were Crimson defenders Kwaku Nyamekye ’10 (first team) and Richard Smith ’13 (second team), and midfielders Brian Grimm ’10 (second team) and Alex Chi ’11 (honorable mention).

On Sunday (Nov. 22), Harvard will host the second round of the NCAA tournament, playing the winner of Friday’s (Nov. 20) match between Monmouth and the University of Connecticut. Game time is 1 p.m.

Policy Brief by Matthew Bunn, Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs

Norman B. “Norm” Coleman Jr., the former Republican U.S. senator from Minnesota, delivered a clear message to a Harvard audience last night (Nov. 17), saying that “America is a center-right nation today, as it has been for generations.”

A new study by Elizabeth Warren, Harvard Law School Leo Gottlieb professor of law, and Deborah Thorne, Ohio University associate professor of sociology, finds that personal bankruptcy has become a largely middle-class phenomenon led by filers who are college-educated and owners of homes. According to the study, “The Vulnerable Middle Class: Bankruptcy and Class Status,” the shift occurred even before the Great Recession…

Read more here (USA Today)