The indefatigable Bill Ackman has quantified Harvard in a slide deck done in the style of a corporate takeover analysis. I am particularly pleased by slides 24ff---the first time, as far as I can recall, that anyone has noticed or attached any significance to the change in Harvard College's Mission Statement. I wrote the first version he cites, with editorial help from Jeremy Knowles and Neil…
This short bio of an interesting character appears in Harvard Magazine. Enjoy! https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2023/09/features-vita-arthur-augustus-johnson
The Crimson asked me to weigh in on the SCOTUS ruling against Harvard. My piece (" Unfinished Business ") is now up. It's Harvard-specific. I don't think losing this case will actually matter much to Harvard, given that the majority opinion invites colleges to consider race in its admissions practices insofar as race matters to the experience of the individual applicant. Harvard's process is so…
A video recording of my Skolem Lecture in Oslo on the Birth of Binary is now available here . The Birth of Binary: Leibniz and the Origins of Computer Arithmetic The curious history of the binary number system includes a multimillennial prehistory and a few early seventeenth-century sparks that did not catch fire. Though several others independently came up with the binary system, my recent…
(This piece is jointly authored by Harry Lewis and Bill Gasarch, who is Professor of Computer Science at the University of Maryland at College Park.) There are elections in Hong Kong, but to get on the ballot you have to be nominated by a committee controlled by Beijing government. Elections for the Harvard Board of Overseers—one of Harvard’s two governing bodies—are almost as well-controlled. A…
Following publication of my edition, with Lloyd Strickland, of Leibniz's writings on binary arithmetic , I'll be giving the annual Thoralf Skolem Memorial Lecture at the University of Oslo on December 8, and it will be both live-streamed and recorded. The lecture will be at 1:15pm Oslo time, which is 7:15am EST. Here is the full information, including the Zoom link (I imagine a link to the…
The imperative to show our commitment to redress social injustices, even if it means overshooting the mark, takes Harvard to positions that are, if not literally indefensible, far beyond what most of the community would be willing to defend. Extreme positions may even offend and injure the very people they are voiced to advance. To declare such a position is "virtue signaling"--broadcasting to…
Noted civil libertarian and free speech advocate Harvey Silverglate is trying to be elected to the Harvard Board of Overseers. I know Harvey well and have never met a more principled person -- and on top of that, I admire the principles he stands for and his way of defending them, even though we don't always agree on how they should play out in practice. He is exactly the kind of no-BS person who…
I’ll be a keynote speaker at the IEEE International Conference on Teaching, Assessment and Learning for Engineering (TALE) in December. My topic is “ Why and How to Teach the Classic Papers ,” and I will be describing the experience of reading about 50 classic computer science papers with about 150 computer science students per year. The course is Harvard’s CS191, and I have collected the papers,…
Harvard took over responsibility for women's athletics in 1974. Until then, such teams as existed were administered by Radcliffe College, then a legally independent entity. This transition was one of several steps that eventually (but not rapidly) led to the end of the asymmetric status of women students at Harvard. In connection with the ongoing commemoration of Title IX (which was enacted into…
The Harvard Crimson yesterday published my op-ed on preregistration (AKA the end of "shopping period"), a matter expected to be voted by the Faculty on May 3. (On this matter, see also the excellent letters in Harvard Magazine by Howard Georgi and an impressive list of alumni, not that I expect such sentiments to have much traction with the faculty or the current administration.) I have long been…
A recent meeting of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences was devoted largely to undergraduate education. That is a rarity, and an uninformed reader, hearing that, might hope that the tragic crisis in Europe had resulted in some introspection on the larger purpose of higher education in a democracy, along the lines that motivated the educational classic, General Education in a Free Society (aka…
My colleague and friend Fred Abernathy passed away a few days ago, at the age of 91. A fine obituary is here . Fred was my mentor and collaborator in several of my loving criticisms of Harvard; one of them I detailed on this blog ; see also Harvard Magazine's account . And it was Fred who, in his innocent, shambling way, asked President Summers why Harvard was so vigorously defending its actions…
A few years ago, the computer science faculty took it upon themselves to increase the number of first-year advisors in their ranks. They had grown frustrated at advice commonly given to first-years planning to study CS, especially to women and underrepresented minorities: Don’t take CS your first term, it’s too hard, wait and get your feet underneath you before you try it. I signed up one…
For the past 20 years or so, Harvard has been trying to rid itself, bit by bit, of its distinctiveness. At the same time as it touts its numbers of Rhodes winners and the size of its mammoth gifts, it has been striving to make itself function as a university like any other. Unique local i nstitutions, ones that don't conform to the general norms and forms of American higher education, are seen as…
Blown to Bits: Your Life, Liberty, and Happiness After the Digital Explosion is now available in its second edition! This is the book about the the social consequences of the explosion in digital information that was first published in 2008. For the second edition, the original authors, myself, Hal Abelson, and Ken Ledeen, have been joined by Wendy Seltzer. The book has been out in hard copy and…
This is the text of an address I gave (by Zoom) to a symposium on Service Learning organized by the Polytechnic University of Hong Kong. Attendees were scattered all over the world and were affiliated with universities throughout Asia and beyond. A video recording of my talk is posted here . Learning as Service Harry Lewis Address to PolyU HK Service Learning Program July, 2021 Good afternoon! I…
I have nothing to say here about pregnant women. My title refers to the words “pregnant women,” a phrase not henceforth to be uttered in Harvard’s Department of Human Evolutionary Biology. The permissible phrase is “pregnant people,” so as to include, for example, trans men carrying unborn babies. If you think I am writing parody or have launched on some outlandish extrapolation from a more…
A very nice review Bill Gasarch b of Ideas that Created the Future appears in SIGACT News, Volume 52, Issue 2, June 2021, pp. 10-17. (Most people in universities can access the review through their library systems.) In general I am pleased by the reception the book is getting, have had very few second thoughts about my selection of papers, and have found that readers with little interest in…
In the next few months two longstanding projects of mine will come to fruition. With the jacket copy and pub dates in hand, I am letting you know about them! Coming from Pearson, December 3, 2020 Blown to Bits, Second Editio n Coming from MIT Press, February 2, 2021! Ideas That Created the Future
Reading about some ongoing Harvard controversies, programs, and initiatives recently, I was reminded of this short talk William James gave on June 24, 1903, at the Commencement Dinner after receiving an honorary LL.D. degree. It was printed in The Harvard Graduate's Magazine [the ancestor of the current Harvard Magazine ] for September, 1903. I think it should be better known; it sounds very fresh…
The group of students who hung around the Aiken Computation Lab +/-50 years ago got together last February, and I wrote up an account of our collective memory for Harvard Magazine . There was a lot going on scientifically in a remarkably supportive and creative atmosphere, even though we were by no means a tier 1 CS program in those days. I have done my best to explain it here, but those of you…
I used to visit Hong Kong regularly, and also made a few trips to mainland China. One of those trips put me in a provincial Chinese city on the morning of June 4, 2009, a day that seemed to be like any other when I awakened. After breakfast I flew to Hong Kong, where the people were afoot by the thousands. That night I attended the massive gathering in Victoria Park commemorating the 20 th…
The four-year fight over Harvard’s “USGSO” policy is over. (”Unrecognized Single Gender Social Organizations.”) But many questions remain. This is the policy President Faust and Dean Khurana announced, without any prior public discussion, during spring reading period in 2016. It denied certain honors and privileges to members of single-gender clubs, clubs that had no Harvard space or official…
There was a striking coincidence between the legal reasoning in the Supreme Court's opinion outlawing employment discrimination against gay and transgendered people, and the reasoning of Judge Gorton when he denied Harvard's motion to dismiss the federal suit against the University filed by certain single-gender organizations. I wrote up that decision in a post called But For , because the key…