Poet August Kleinzahler and orator Linda Greenhouse ’68,
speaking in Sanders Theatre, launched the Memorial Day-shortened Commencement
week at the 223rd Phi Beta Kappa literary exercises for the College
on Tuesday morning, May 28. The much-honored Kleinzahler
has a reputation as a pugnacious poet rooted in his home ground of Fort
Lee, New Jersey, and his adopted home of San Francisco; Greenhouse
is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author, renowned for her decades
covering the U.S. Supreme Court for The
New York Times and in books since leaving that position in 2008. (For
detailed background on each, see “Bicoastal Poet, Beat Reporter.”)
Kleinzahler read three richly figured poems from his 2008 collection, Sleeping It Off in Rapid City. Greenhouse drew on her experience as Chief Marshal in 1993—when General Colin Powell was the Commencement speaker and gay rights became a more prominent public issue—to engage her audience in understanding the changes in American society and the court’s role in those changes. (The poems and the oration appear as sidebars alongside this report.)
In the formal Alpha Iota Chapter business that preceded the
poems and oration, president Logan McCarty
(director of physical-sciences education, lecturer on chemistry and chemical
biology, and lecturer on physics) oversaw the ceremonies. The
Reverend Daniel Smith, lecturer on ministry (he teaches “Introduction to
Public Preaching”) and affiliated minister in the Memorial Church, offered the
invocation. The music—Randall Thompson’s “Felices Ter” (“Thrice happy they,”
based on Horace’s Odes I, 13; 17-20,
and inscribed on Harvard Yard’s Holyoke gate) and Franz Joseph Haydn’s “Stimmt
an Die Saiten” (“Awake the Harps,” from The
Creation)—was performed by the Harvard-Radcliffe Collegium Musicum,
conducted by Andrew
G. Clark, director of choral music.
In his
introduction, McCarty touched on a drama about which most of the audience was presumably unaware. He began by addressing “Madam President [Drew Faust], Dean Hammonds….” Only minutes before, as she was putting on her academic gown for the ceremony, Harvard College dean Evelynn M. Hammonds’s forthcoming departure from her office, at the end of the term, was announced. Thus, this was both a welcoming comment and a valedictory one, as Hammonds will preside over Commencement exercises involving College students for the last time this week.
McCarty traced Phi Beta Kappa’s origins to William and Mary College, at the outset of the American Revolution, and said that through the centuries, its purpose—to promulgate “philosophy,” or in modern terms, “critical thinking,” as the guide to living life—had remained important and intact. He then said the chapter would recognize guests who had conducted their lives guided by such a map.
Honorary Members
As it does
annually, the chapter conferred honorary memberships on College alumni from the
fiftieth-reunion class—people who have led lives marked by distinguished achievement and intellectual pursuits—plus retiring faculty members known for distinction in their fields and for mentoring students. Daniel Donoghue, Marquand professor of
English, recognized these recipients:
Photograph by Jim Harrison
His Excellency the Right Honorable David Johnston
Photograph by Jim Harrison
Steven Lubin
Photograph by Jim Harrison
Frederica Drinkwater Perera
Photograph by Jim Harrison
Robert D. Reischauer
Photograph by Jim Harrison
Christopher Sims
Photograph by Jim Harrison
Gurcharan Das
Photograph by Jim Harrison
Joaquim-Francisco Coelho
Photograph by Kris Snibbe/Harvard News Office
Stanley Hoffmann
Photograph by Jim Harrison
Michael O. Rabin
His Excellency the Right Honorable
David Johnston ’63, Governor General of Canada, a former hockey player
elected to Harvard’s Athletic Hall of Fame, twice an All-American despite his Canadian origins, law professor, dean of the faculty
of law at the University of Western Ontario, and principal and vice-chancellor
of McGill University. He served as fifth president of the University of
Waterloo, and was the
first non-American president of Harvard’s Board of Overseers, the University’s
junior governing board, in the 1997-1998 academic year. He became the
twenty-eighth governor general in October 2010.
Steven Lubin ’63, pianist and
fortepianist, who has taught at Cornell, Vassar, and the Juilliard School.
He is now professor of music at the conservatory of music at Purchase College. (Lubin will give a concert of Mozart works tomorrow at 1:15 p.m. in Sanders Theatre.)
Frederica Drinkwater
Perera ’63, professor of environmental health sciences at Columbia’s Mailman
School of Public Health, where she directs the center for children’s
environmental health. A pioneer in the field of molecular epidemiology, she is also a lifelong learner, Donoghue noted: she added a Ph.D. to her other educational attainments only last year.
Robert D.
Reischauer ’63, Senior
Fellow of the Harvard Corporation, the University’s senior governing board,
who has overseen
its modernization and expansion during a period of reform formally unveiled in
late 2010. Reischauer is past president of the Urban Institute and served as
director of the Congressional Budget Office from 1989 to 1995. Donoghue said Reischauer had been a “public intellectual at the service of the public good.”
Christopher
Sims ’63, Ph.D. ’68, econometrician, now Helm professor of economics and banking
at Princeton and 2011
co-Nobel laureate in economic science. He has explored important connections between information theory and economics.
Gurcharan Das ’63, AMP ’91, retired business
leader and now author of a blog, whose books include India Unbound, and newspaper columns. A philosophy concentrator, Donoghue noted, Das wrote his thesis under the guidance of John Rawls, author of the magisterial A Theory of Justice.
Joaquim-Francisco
Coelho, Smith professor of the language and literature of Portugal and
professor of comparative literature. Donoghue noted that a colleague called Coelho a “gem,” and cited his scholarship on Portuguese poetry of every era, and his own original poems in the language.
Stanley Hoffmann, A.M.
’52, Buttenwieser University Professor (profiled in Harvard Magazine’s “Le Professeur”). Hoffmann has completed a half-century on the faculty, Donoghue noted; illness unfortunately kept him from attending the ceremony.
Michael O. Rabin, Watson
Research Professor of computer science. The winner of every major prize in computer science, Rabin remains active investigating important problems in encryption, privacy, and security, Donoghue noted.
August
Kleinzahler, the poet.
Photograph by Jim Harrison
Jacob Barandes
Photograph by Jim Harrison
Stephen Blyth
Photograph by Jim Harrison
Amanda Claybaugh
Teaching Prizes
POPE
PROFESSOR of
the Latin language and literature Richard Tarrant, who also coaches the
student orators who speak in Tercentenary Theatre during the Morning Exercises
on Commencement day—as shown in action in 2012—presented the Phi
Beta Kappa teaching prizes on recipients chosen from the pool of candidates
nominated by the PBK undergraduates themselves. The recipients this year were:
Jacob
Barandes, Ph.D. ’11, lecturer on physics and associate director of graduate
studies, who teaches Physics 210, “General Theory of Relativity,” and
Physics 232, “Advanced Classical Electromagnetism.” His nomination cited his “ability to explain even the most complex technicalities” in clear, simple language, and to convey “a broad and unified picture of physics.”
Stephen
Blyth, Ph.D. ’92, professor of the practice in statistics, who is also managing
director of Harvard Management Company (HMC), where he oversees public markets
and is
among the top-performing endowment portfolio managers. He teaches
Statistics 123, “Applied Quantitative Finance on Wall Street.” According to his
nomination, Blyth brings “mathematical rigor with a rich store of real-world experience” to the study of finance, and enriches his teaching by having students operate simulated portfolios in which they execute trades.
Amanda Claybaugh, Ph.D. ’01,
professor of English, who studies nineteenth-century American literature,
Victorian literature, and trans-Atlantic literary relations. (Read the
magazine’s Harvard Portrait of Claybaugh here.) She was cited for “bring[ing] the tools of
literary criticism to bear on contemporary writers, and invit[ing] her students to
read the latest Jonathan Franzen novel with the same degree of attention they
would apply to Dickens or Bronte.” Her innovative teaching methods include having students compose not only conventional analytical essays, but also assessments in the form of book reviews. “She makes the study of English come alive,” her nomination continued, “by treating the writing of
the present with respect and by showing the classics to be fresh and relevant.” The quotes in this paragraph are updated and corrected May 28 at 4:40 p.m.
The Poet: “At the heart of the heart of America”
August Kleinzahler—born in Jersey City and raised in Fort
Lee, New Jersey; educated at the Horace Mann School in New York City, the
University of Wisconsin, and the University of Victoria, in British Columbia;
and now a resident of San Francisco—has been honored for his many books of
poetry with a Guggenheim Fellowship, an American Academy of Arts and Letters
Award in Literature, and a Berlin Prize Fellowship. Chapter vice president and president-elect Ann Pearson, Ross professor of environmental sciences, calling him “an American poet to whom a sense of place is foremost,” cited his reputation for modernist language employed in the service of precise poetics. The most recent of his 10 volumes of poems, Sleeping It Off in Rapid City (2008),
collecting earlier poems and new work, won the National Book Critics Circle
Award.
An animated and expressive reader—complete with vivid renderings of a hawk’s harsh cries—Kleinzahler read three
poems from that collection: “Sleeping It Off in Rapid City,” “The Hereafter,”
and “Anniversary.” (The poems are also available in the sidebar link at the upper right alongside
this report.)
The first,
written from “The dead solid center of the universe/At the heart of the heart
of America,” is laced with Kleinzahler’s characteristic profusion of precise
details, in which he is deeply immersed even as he seems alienated from them:
The Lord’s
blessing is everywhere to be found
The Lambs
of Christ are among us
You can
tell by the billboards
The
billboards with fetuses, out there on the highway
Through the
buzzing, sodium-lit night
Semis grind
it out on the Interstate
Hauling
toothpaste, wheels of Muenster, rapeseed oil
Blessed is
the abundance, blessed the commerce
Across the
Cretaceous hogback
Hundred
million year old Lakota sandstone, clays, shale, gypsum
And down
through the basins of ancient seabeds
Past the
souvenir shops and empty missile silos
The ghosts
of 98 foot long Titans and Minutemen
150,000
pounds of thrust
Stainless
steel, nickel-alloy-coated warheads
Quartz
ceramic warheads, webbed in metal honeycomb
8 metagon
payloads
Range 6,300
miles
Noli me tangere
God bless
America
We’re right
on top of it, baby
“Anniversary”
shows this urbanite equally adept at observing natural detail. It begins:
You’d
figure the hawk for an isolate thing,
Commanding
the empyrean,
Taking his
ease in the thermals and wind
Until that
retinal flick, the plunge and shriek—
cruelly perfect at what he is.
The Orator: “Wounds that for too long had gone
unacknowledged were at last being recognized and healed.”
Linda Greenhouse has
perhaps set a record for serving as the all-occasion Harvard speaker and
citizen, even before her PBK oration. Among her engagements:
She was
elected to the Board of
Overseers in 2009.
She
appeared on the Radcliffe
Day panel, “From Front Line to High Courts: The Law and Social Change,” during
Commencement week 2012, and moderated a Radcliffe panel on “Gender and the
Law: Unintended Consequences, Unsettled Questions” in 2009.
In 2006, she was
awarded the Radcliffe Institute Medal, its highest honor, and was
the featured speaker at the institute’s luncheon.
Just last
Thursday, she was among the speakers at the Memorial Church service for Anthony Lewis’48, NF
’57, who pioneered the Supreme Court coverage at The New York Times and elsewhere, to which Greenhouse became the
lauded successor. In 1993, she was elected Chief Marshal of her class’s
twenty-fifth reunion—an experience that figured prominently on her oration,
itself the occasion for Greenhouse’s return to Sanders Theatre to complete
another Crimson circle: she graduated as a member of Phi Beta Kappa 45 years
ago.
“The
Sentence and the Parenthesis,” as the oration is titled (it also appears in the sidebar, above), perhaps spoke more directly
to the students attending than some prior orations have done. Greenhouse began by drawing
on Sonia Sotomayor’s recent memoir, in which the author, now a Supreme Court
justice, recalled that when she was elected to Phi Beta Kappa at Princeton, she
had not even known what it was, and had thrown away the letter of notification
as “some junk mail from some club.” Greenhouse contrasted Sotomayor’s
experiences with her own at Harvard College, coming from a middle-class family
with college-educated parents. She then drew on the experience of Justice Harry
Blackmun (Greenhouse
published a biography of the justice in 2005), who had expected to attend
the University of Minnesota, but instead was diverted east when the Harvard Club in that state gave him a $250
annual scholarship and a $100 loan, to cover his tuition in Cambridge (at the
rates prevailing in the 1920s). “In four years,” she noted, “Harry Blackmun
could never afford to go home over the Christmas vacation.” He studied hard,
made PBK, and graduated summa cum laude
in mathematics.
Greenhouse
then said that her review of recent orations revealed that “most of them have
dealt with high questions of policy rather than personality,” and that she had
settled on a different approach—one that drew on her experience—a decisive
moment at Harvard that foreshadowed larger issues in American society.
This was
not the first time she had spoken from the Sanders stage, she said:
Twenty years ago, I was the chief
marshal of the 1993 Harvard Commencement, an office bestowed every year on a
member of the twenty-fifth reunion class. The Commencement speaker and chief
honorary degree recipient that year was General Colin Powell, at the time the
chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. In the aftermath of the Gulf War,
Harvard was honoring General Powell not only for his military accomplishments
but for his great American life story.
In
the interval between General Powell’s selection and the approach of Commencement,
something had happened. The question of gays in the military had become a
matter of raging political controversy, and Congress, with the support of
General Powell and President Clinton, had adopted the much-despised and, in
retrospect, preposterous “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. This policy permitted
gay men and lesbians to serve only so long as they kept secret an essential
part of their personal identity.
Beyond
regarding the policy as silly, I had not given it a lot of thought by the time
I started getting calls from classmates after General Powell’s selection had
been announced. I knew some of these classmates, but not most of them. I’m gay, these classmates told me. And
they asked: How can I possibly participate in a ceremony honoring someone who
embodies a policy that withholds dignity and respect from men and women who
want only to serve their country? How can I enjoy my reunion?
These
calls were remarkable because I had never had a personal conversation of any
kind with these callers. As I perhaps need to remind younger members of the
audience, most gay people were not out to near strangers in 1993. Certainly
back in our college days, a number of gay classmates were not yet out to
themselves or, if they were, didn’t casually share this information with
others. So the calls I was getting reflected a degree of pain and urgency that
I couldn’t ignore. It just seemed unthinkable that classmates would feel
excluded from their own twenty-fifth reunion, and I was certain that Harvard
had not anticipated or intended anything like this result when it chose to
honor Colin Powell.
So
I turned to my friend Margaret Marshall, who was then Harvard’s general counsel
[and was married to Anthony Lewis; in 2003, as Chief Justice of the
Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, she wrote the majority opinion in Goodridge v. Department of Public Health
that recognized same-sex marriage in the Commonwealth]. She and President Neil
Rudenstine let it be known that they were sympathetic to the dismay of my
classmates and of others who were expressing similar reactions. The Harvard
administration opened its door to anyone who wanted to come in and talk about
the situation and about what type of public display at Commencement might be
appropriate. The administration let it be known that a public protest at
Commencement would be acceptable, as long as it was civil and non-disruptive.
Against
this background, my classmates gathered for the week-long reunion. Of course,
classmates without a personal stake in the issue were generally unaware of what
had been taking place. Gay members of the class engaged others in serious
conversation. For many straight members of the class, it was the first time
they had participated in such conversations. Don’t forget that Lawrence v. Texas, the Supreme Court
decision that freed homosexuality from the stigma of criminalization, was still
a decade in the future.
One
of my more pleasant duties as chief marshal was to select classmates to be
invited to the lunch preceding the afternoon Commencement exercises. I invited
one of my very out classmates, who arrived in his top hat and tails, festooned
with banners and buttons proclaiming the gay-rights cause and denouncing “don’t
ask, don’t tell.” He went up to Colin Powell, whose uniform was festooned with
a general’s stars and medals. What a picture this pair made. “General Powell,”
my classmate said, “I look forward to the day when this issue no longer divides
us.”
It
was a gutsy move. For all my classmate knew, General Powell would spurn him,
cut him dead. Instead, the general embraced him with both arms, and replied:
“So do I, and I hope that day comes sooner rather than later.” My classmate was
so taken aback and touched by this response that he had tears in his eyes as he
recounted it to me. Word of the encounter spread quickly among the gay
community as the crowd gathered in Tercentenary Theatre that afternoon for General Powell’s
speech. The mood had shifted: the anxiety and incipient anger were gone. When
General Powell got up to speak, some of my classmates stood in silent,
dignified protest. The general acknowledged them graciously. What might have
been an experience of pain and isolation became instead one of solidarity and
community. [Read Harvard Magazine’s coverage of the 1993 Commencement exercises, including General Powell’s address and the protest, here. It is also available in the sidebar, above].
All
these years later, that week remains one of the most vivid experiences of my
life. I saw connections being made among people who, while they had a Harvard
degree in common, had been in a basic sense strangers to one another as they
moved through adulthood. It seemed to me that as we stood on the cusp of middle
age, wounds that for too long had gone unacknowledged were at last being
recognized and healed. At the close of that reunion week, when I was invited to
this stage to say a few parting words, I said that Harvard, without the
slightest intent, and through an accident of history, had nonetheless managed
to bring us together in a way that no one could have scripted and no one would
ever forget. We were, as always, but in a new way, in Harvard’s debt.
Greenhouse reflected on
that experience, and others, to categorize the ebbs and flows—the sentences and
parentheses—as America, and its Supreme Court, work their way through periods
of social progress and of pauses, consolidations, or even, in her view,
regressions. Considering the court’s role as a leader or follower, she said, “it
seems to me that it’s one thing to refrain from leading, and another to reach
out to unravel settlements reached elsewhere in the political system,
settlements by which we have agreed to live with one another in a complex and
increasingly diverse society.”
At the conclusion of the
exercises, Reverend Smith gave the benediction.
A “Pugnacious” Poet and a Pulitzer Prize-Winner at Phi Beta Kappa
August Kleinzahler and Linda Greenhouse spoke at Harvard's Commencement-week literary exercises. Watch the videos.