FM Front Feature
The Drinking Games
It’s 9 p.m. on a Friday night, and Serena and five friends from her freshman entryway are getting ready for the annual freshman formal. Sitting around a second-floor common room with all the lights on and a “HARVARD 2017” banner hanging over the mantle, they’re drinking mango-flavored vodka and Coke from nine-ounce red plastic cups. They estimate that they’ve each had about four shots since returning from the formal dinner in Annenberg, though they’re not sure.
Club Harvard
Successful Harvard grads follow well-tread paths that lead from campus to New York, Hollywood, and across the globe. If they go where the existing university network shapes their trajectory, it is too easy to remain within the Harvard bubble—obscuring the possibilities that exist outside of it.
Harvard’s Three Things: An Origin Story Laid Bare
Today, it is said that there are three things every Harvard student must do before graduating: pee on the John Harvard statue, run in Primal Scream, and have sex in the Widener stacks. Yet the lore of Harvard's "Three Things" only developed recently, with nude primal scream being unheard of just 20 years ago.
Same Story, New Book: Repackaging Humanities at Harvard
Recently, national news outlets have declared a crisis of the humanities. But at Harvard, the plot gets more complicated. The challenges facing Harvard's humanities necessitate changes to course offerings far more than the core of the humanistic enterprise.
General Education and the Future of Liberal Arts
With the Gen Ed program up for its first five-year review, longstanding questions about the role of a college education in changing times and beyond campus remain contested.
Interactive Feature: Harvard University’s Cyberwar
While governments and corporations alike experience cyberthreats, universities like Harvard face a unique test: how to balance an academic mission demanding an unfettered flow of information with the need to protect valuable data and computer systems.
The Best Team You've Never Gone to Watch
Currently, five players on the Olympics-headed national women's ice hockey team are either current or former members of the Harvard team. The Harvard women’s hockey team is one of the most successful teams on campus but struggles to maintain fan attendance levels.
Engineering Mike Smith
The FAS Dean’s proponents describe him as a consensus-building visionary, and his detractors see him as a functionary in an increasingly corporate administration. But seven years into his tenure, many members of the community he leads still don’t have a clear grasp on what drives Mike Smith.
Making the Cut: The Real Pre-med Requirements
The story of droves of students entering college expecting to be pre-med, but later switching tracks—whether because of the rigor or the draw of other disciplines—is a familiar one. However, at Harvard unique factors play into this whittling down of aspiring doctors.
Let me Entertain You
Harvard Square has an uncanny ability to attract entertainers of different backgrounds. Unlike Boston’s Faneuil Hall, which admits performers on an audition-only basis and makes them schedule their performance times far in advance, Harvard Square does not discriminate: Performers who have never been in front of an audience before and those who have spent their entire careers in entertainment have equal access to its streets.
The Gates Unbarred: Seamus Heaney at Harvard
It is a natural, perhaps inevitable reaction, when confronted with news of a star, to try to bask in his or her reflected light.
Fifteen Hottest Freshmen '16: Around Our Town
It’s that time of year again. FM brings you the much-anticipated, much-loved Fifteen Hottest Freshmen of the Class of 2016. They’re cute, they’re fierce, and they’re about to lead you through some of Harvard Square’s favorite haunts. Have fun with it.
The High Society
“If you ask the right questions, you’ll find out that a lot of people are doing drugs here,” Greg continues.
Joining the Ranks
“The ad hoc process is greatly shrouded in mystery; remarkably little is written about it,” says current Senior Vice Provost for Faculty Diversity and Development Judith D. Singer. She smirks wryly as she swigs coffee from her mug, as if this is something she’s explained a hundred times before.
