Make sure there are lots of Harvard M.B.A.s working for MIT Ph.D.s in the future.
As an undergraduate at Harvard in the 1960s, I was fascinated by my visits to psychologist B.F. Skinner’s laboratory.
I come from a middle-class family, where you grow up thinking about government service. But when I went to Harvard, I saw that entrepreneurs and business leaders were just like me. It gave me a feeling that I could also do such things.
One of the best highlights of my Harvard business program I attended was I had 60 students in my class. I was the tallest, of course, but looking at the students, 30 of them were American and 30 of them were from all over the world.
Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and the rest of the Ivy League are worthy institutions, to be sure, but they’re not known for educating large numbers of poor young people.
I came to New York in 1948 at 19, after one term at Harvard. Well, Harvard wasn’t for me at all.
One time, someone came up to me and said, ‘I know so-and-so. They’re a professor at Harvard. They’re a big fan of your work.’ But that doesn’t impress me more than any other people feeling that way.
Courtney Vance and I are college classmates, weirdly enough. We’re both Harvard class of 1982. Courtney, as a work-study job, was a typesetter at the Harvard ‘Crimson,’ the newspaper where I worked.
I remember I was up for the role of Jim in ‘Huck Finn,’ and because I went to Harvard and Yale, they didn’t think I would be able to play a slave. I said, ‘Oh, please.’ I had to go in there and prove to them that I wasn’t too intelligent to play a slave.
I ended up going to Harvard College, which was about as likely in my neighborhood as going to the moon.
I was on the Harvard board of overseers for six years, between 1989 and 1995.
The resources at Harvard – its professors, our fellow students, the libraries, its alumni – created for me the opportunity to pursue my passions in finance.
Harvard was also a little bit of a villain in my first book, ‘The Dante Club.’ I guess there might be a way to make Harvard more of a sympathetic presence, but it’s such a powerful institution that it more naturally lends itself toward not necessarily a negative but an obstructionist element in a story.
I got into baseball, and everyone just started calling me a geek, like, ‘There’s the nerd from Harvard.’ Then it took 20 years of working in baseball and me actually leaving and going to football for people to say, ‘He’s the baseball guy.’ So maybe at some point I’ll be known as a football guy too.
I moved to Harvard in 1998, and in 2000 the first kidney exchange in the United States was done at a hospital nearby. I started to think, ‘Gee, there might be a way where I could help organize it, make it easier for people to find kidneys.’
My dad was a singer in a band and neither of my parents went to college, and I ended up getting into Harvard and was the first person in my family that went to college and it happened to be Harvard.
If you’re last in your class at Harvard, it doesn’t feel like you’re a good student, even though you really are. It’s not smart for everyone to want to go to a great school.
In Poland, my audience is all women between 18 and 30. At U.S. conventions, you have the fantasy and science fiction crowd. At Harvard you have an entirely different audience. It’s so schizophrenic.
I was promoted associate professor in early 1970 and full professor in October of the same year. I spent the two spring semesters of 1972 and 1974 as visiting professor at Harvard University, giving lectures and directing a research project.
If you go to Wall Street, there is someone from Harvard, Stanford, etc, who relate to each other by the batch they studied in, the dorm they lived in, and so on.
Coming to Harvard was an eye-opening experience because there’s so much diversity on campus.
Harvard University researchers found that women at high risk of heart disease who had a tablespoon of peanut butter five or more days a week appeared to nearly halve their risk of suffering a heart attack compared with women who ate one serving or less per week.
Like the protagonist of her 2006 novel, ‘Love and Other Impossible Pursuits,’ Ayelet Waldman is a Jewish redhead who attended Harvard Law School and is madly in love with her husband. But the obvious similarities end there.
From a personal standpoint, I consider myself much more of an accidental entrepreneur. I was involved in the entrepreneurship club at Harvard, but I heard of it only because it was new on campus.
I picked Harvard because it was in a big city, and a lot of girls’ schools were nearby. And I liked President Kennedy, who went to Harvard.
There are few student species more nakedly ambitious, focused, and future-oriented than the average Harvard law student.
I feel like my 50 years at Harvard were an interlude. I’m really a New Yorker.
I don’t believe I’ll ever get credit for anything I do in foreign affairs, no matter how successful it is, because I didn’t go to Harvard.
While at Harvard, I was struck by the palpable sense of noblesse oblige that surrounds their sophisticated outreach and bursary programmes. It is almost as if they view extending opportunity to disadvantaged individuals as their highest mission.
Would physics at Geneva be as good as physics at Harvard? I think not. Rome? I think not. In Britain, I don’t think there is one place, neither Cambridge nor Oxford, which can compare with Harvard.
During all my undergrad years and in high school, I was involved in tutoring and public service. At Harvard, I spent over 35 hours a week doing service. I was a Big Sister, I worked for the homeless, the elderly; it was the epicenter of my focus.
These movies are like my kids. I just love them to death. Some of them go to Harvard and some of them can barely graduate high school.
Harvard was the most intimidating experience. I felt so out of my league there.
Harvard is first and foremost a university and not a consulting operation, and our job here is to teach and to research and to create knowledge on Asia in conjunction and in cooperation with scholars as well as with political, intellectual, and cultural leaders in Asia.
Harvard is a wondrously tolerant climate for debate and exchange among a wide variety of thoughts, backgrounds, and beliefs, but the voice of religion on campus is largely inaudible.
I think that racism has gotten more subtle, and it’s not even racism anymore: it’s placism. Like where you live or whether you went to community college or Harvard, and it exists within the race.
You know, I’m from the Midwest, man – that shapes my personality much more than having gone to Harvard.
I’ve been awed by the incredible opportunities that automatically float to the Harvard undergrads I once taught – from building homes for the poor in Nicaragua to landing prime White House internships.
My wife is also from Harvard and we do have some family in the Cambridge area so we try to make it back at least once a year. We really enjoyed our time out there.
Harvard is famous for being an ‘absorbing state’ for faculty with almost no one leaving it for another institution, which is why the decision of granting tenure is a life long commitment.
There is a neurologist, a woman over at Harvard who wanted me to come talk to them, and in France I have a lot of readers in the sciences. I can’t tell you why.
I had been offered fellowships to enter as a graduate student at either Harvard or Princeton. But the Princeton fellowship was somewhat more generous, since I had not actually won the Putnam competition… Thus Princeton became the choice for my graduate study location.
Nearly everything faith-related that I have done at Harvard has been followed by free food, from going to services at Harvard’s Episcopal Chaplaincy to attending a day of interfaith discussion and dialogue hosted by the university chaplains in the fall.
As president of the American Historical Association, I started a programme to make dissertations into e-books in 1999. Before I knew it, I was involved in other electronic projects. Harvard invited me to become director of the libraries in 2007.
In 1969, when I graduated from Harvard Law School, women and minorities made up a tiny fraction of the first year associates accepted by top law firms.
At Harvard, people like to impart the idea that you are a mover and shaker.
I don’t think I was funny until college. I lived with some Harvard MD/PhD students – they were so smart, and what I contributed to the house was, I was the funny one.
I was completely unqualified to get into Harvard. But then I went to my interview for Harvard, and the woman asked, ‘Why do you want to go here?’ And I took out all of my comedy writing samples that I had done. I couldn’t have been more delusional in terms of what I thought they wanted in a candidate for college.
There were so many great music and political scenes going on in the late ’60s in Cambridge. The ratio of guys to girls at Harvard was four to one, so all of those things were playing in my mind.
I was at Harvard when Mark Zuckerberg created Facebook, and I begged him not to do it.
I believe that Harvard can have, and must have, a strong affirmative action program that reflects our commitment to equal opportunity while fully respecting the academic standards of the University.
