And at the end of a tough week in Haiti, Farmer still manages to pack up and return to Cambridge.

This year, Farmer taught two courses at HMS—and his dedication to academic work is not diminished by his busy life on the front lines of infectious disease, students say.

“He really puts his abilities to good use and challenges his students to look at medicine and issues from a different perspective,” says Robert R. Stavert ’03, who took Farmer’s course, “Poverty, Culture and Infectious Disease,” this spring.

Most importantly, many say, Farmer’s dedication and vision constantly rubs off on those who work and study with him.

According to Howard H. Hiatt ’46, professor of medicine at HMS and former dean of Harvard’s School of Public Health, Farmer and Kim “are really pied pipers,” leading hordes of new medical professionals like themselves into the world.

His skill in the classroom is the result of an intense life of the mind.

Suarez-Orozco cites an “intellectual abstraction and elegance” in Farmer, mentioning grand-scale discussions that Farmer has engaged in with University President Lawrence H. Summers.

Farmer says that Harvard’s leader “strikes me as an ideas person.”

He does not think his own ideas are entirely acceptable to everyone in the academic community, though.

“I’m sure that some of my views, particularly on things like the right to health care and the sorry job we’re doing in equity of access to care, are regarded as extreme by some,” he says.

Still, Farmer feels at home here.

“I have never felt silenced at Harvard,” he says.

Where Everybody Knows Your Name

When those who know Farmer speak of him, it is not uncommon for the word “saint” to come up, and many colleagues marvel at not only his remarkable accomplishments but also his sustained sunny outlook on a usually-dispiriting situation.

“A lot of times those of us who work in this become discouraged by the forces that are maintaining poverty and racism; lots of times people turn away because they feel there’s nothing we can do, it’s something that’s always going to be because it’s human nature,” says Heidi Behforouz, who has worked with Farmer on PIH’s only domestic project, in inner-city Boston. “I think Paul expects more of human nature.”