For those outside Silicon Valley, the “Internet of Things” is a buzzword often associated with seemingly superfluous toys for early-adopting consumers: the expensive Apple watch, the oft-ridiculed Google Glass, or a “smart” refrigerator that senses when the milk jug is empty. So when Sarnoff professor of business administration Marco Iansiti began looking at how businesses have been transformed by the growing number of everyday objects connected to the Web, the first questioned he asked was: Is the hype real?

For Iansiti and associate professor of business administration Karim R. Lakhani, the answer is an unequivocal yes. We have entered an age of “Digital Ubiquity,” they wrote in HarvardBusinessReview (HBR) last fall. Sensors in gadgets, appliances, and machines generate an unprecedented and growing volume of data that is increasingly easy to share wirelessly. The ability to aggregate and analyze these data at a massive scale, the authors argue, has begun to change the very nature of how businesses create value and make money in nearly every industry.

The researchers point to recent efforts at General Electric that have turned the century-old company into an unexpected digital-transition success story. In the last few years, GE and other electronics companies have seen exponential growth in the volume, velocity, and variety of data that they collect, Lakhani explains, forcing “companies that did not think that they were in the software business to become good at software development.” 

As a result, GE began to take stock of the software underpinning its widely varied product lines. The company’s 12,000 software professionals were working on 136 different products, each with its own underlying technical platform, but only 17 of these were profitable. In an effort to streamline this work, in 2011 the company launched a new business unit, GE Software, a centralized office to develop one underlying program for all its devices. 

The “industrial internet” is the term GE executives have coined to refer to these digital integration efforts. The corporation’s new approach to selling wind turbines exemplifies the opportunities and challenges that this connected future presents. Before the world went digital, the easiest way for GE to add value to a customer’s wind farm was to sell it more turbines. Now sensors wirelessly transmit data on performance and maintenance back to GE, which can replace worn-out parts before they break and adjust controls for torque, pitch, and speed in real time. By keeping the turbines running more efficiently, GE has created worth without selling more products—and a new price model allows the company to capture part of this value. Rather than charging for the turbine alone, the sales force can quantify the wind farm’s data-driven savings and charge a fee based on the value of that optimization. These new ways of creating and capturing value have gone hand in hand with fundamental changes in GE’s operations. The company has invested billions in GE Software, and retrained its sales force to focus on long-term contracts and pay-for-performance.

GE’s example underscores why the Internet of Things—a widespread form of digital disruption—need not be a death knell for large, legacy companies. New business models can be built on the loyalty that GE has spent decades building among its customers. “These assets are amazingly powerful, and if you can just find a way to unlock them, it becomes a great advantage,” Lakhani says. But monetizing such assets “requires new business models.”

For the past two years, Lakhani and Iansiti have taught a popular new elective course on digital innovation, and they’re writing a book on the subject. The main takeaway, they say, is that these transitions are blurring the boundaries that once cordoned off the tech industry.

Take the highly publicized case of Nest, the connected thermostat company that Google bought for $3.2 billion in 2014. Nest offers customers convenience: smartphone users with remote access need never again wonder whether they turned down the heat before they left for vacation. By giving individuals more dynamic control over energy usage, Nest helps customers save—potentially disrupting the traditional, $3-billion thermostat market. But from Google’s perspective, Lakhani and Iansiti wrote in HBR, Nest creates value that goes far beyond just the sum of the savings on each person’s energy bill. Google has, more significantly, bought access to an unparalleled data set about how energy is generated, consumed, and wasted—an opening into a $6-trillion energy sector (see “The Risk of Inaction,” May-June 2015).

The Internet of Things promises to change the way consumers live. But the industrial shift—forcing companies far beyond Silicon Valley to join the tech world—might be even more significant.

The Great Recession fades from memory, but its effects linger. Nations around the globe still carry its legacy in the form of substantial public and private debt. How governments have dealt with such “debt overhangs” in the past 200 years is the subject of a paper by Carmen Reinhart, Zombanakis professor of the international financial system at Harvard Kennedy School; Vincent Reinhart of the American Enterprise Institute; and Kenneth S. Rogoff, Cabot professor of public policy. The authors say that many observers have forgotten about some of the tools that even advanced economies have used in the past to lessen their obligations.

The aftermath of the recent recession was unusual, Carmen Reinhart pointed out in an interview, in that the levels of debt incurred were more characteristic of the accrued sums confronted in postwar periods like those following World Wars I and II, but the inherent recovery mechanisms typically seen at war’s end—the return of a larger labor force, the deployment of resources to economic goods rather than wartime production—did not apply. The reason that debt levels are now so high has everything to do with context, she explained. In addition to government debt, there was massive private borrowing by individuals and the financial sector in advanced economies around the world before the crisis; they took advantage of low interest rates to finance spending—a process now repeating itself in emerging Asia and elsewhere, she said. When sub-prime borrowers defaulted on their mortgage payments, financial institutions were left with the debt. Pension funds also carry large liabilities on their books, mainly related to demographic pressures associated with an aging workforce.

During the ensuing recovery, much of the private and institutional debt was converted to government debt (both in the United States and abroad, notably in Ireland and Spain), through assistance to distressed financial institutions and through mortgage-relief programs for qualified homeowners, for example. That’s a positive development, Reinhart said, because officially held debt (i.e., held by a government, multilateral institution, or central bank) can be restructured more easily than privately held debt.

Today, the debt levels in many advanced economies exceed 100 percent of gross domestic product (GDP). In the United States, for example, government debt is currently 105 percent of GDP, a level from which most governments have historically tried to retreat (as a hedge against the possibility that they might need to borrow during a future catastrophe). The ideal exit strategy from large debt overhangs, according to the Reinharts and Rogoff, is through growth—but that is often difficult to achieve. When an economy grows, even if the absolute level of debt remains the same, it slowly becomes a smaller proportion of GDP. Productivity gains have driven expansion in many economies—the “iconic example,” Reinhart noted, being Ireland in the 1990s. Foreign investment there led to modernization and massive gains in efficiency, fueling substantial growth. But that way out, however ideal, is just one of many means by which governments, including advanced economies, have managed debt.

The Reinharts and Rogoff include growth among a set of orthodox methods for reducing public debt that have been widely deployed since World War II. Increased government spending can stimulate an economy if there are good investments to make in social or public infrastructure. Some governments raised taxes, reduced government spending, or employed a combination of the two, so the state ran primary budget surpluses (a deficit representing government spending, minus current income from taxes, that excludes interest costs). Another strategy, rarely deployed in the United States, was to privatize government assets by turning control of public functions over to private companies.

But in examining 70 debt episodes across 22 advanced economies from 1800 to 2014, the authors find far greater reliance than “many observers choose to remember” on what they call heterodox approaches to debt reversal. Among such approaches is outright default (or restructuring, i.e., partial default), usually on external debt (funds lent from abroad). This option is frequently thought of as exclusively used by emerging economies, but after World War I, all of Europe except Finland defaulted on its debt obligations to the U.S. government, including France, Germany, Italy, and the United Kingdom. So did the United States, in regard to domestic debt: during the Great Depression, President Franklin D. Roosevelt forced conversion of all privately owned gold currency to the government at a fixed price, and simultaneously forced restructuring of contracts backed by the metal (the so-called abrogation of the gold clause). Debt may also be eroded through inflation, but this is more often an unanticipated, unplanned event. (Inflation makes it easier to repay borrowed funds, as the value of the currency erodes.)

Wealth taxes form the other major response category to paying down large public obligations. Perhaps the most subtle and interesting tactic involves “financial repression,” which occurs when real interest rates turn consistently negative. An example of this “gradual tax” occurs when large holders of government debt, such as Treasury bonds, end up accepting a “risk-free” rate of return that is less than inflation. There are many reasons why this may make sense even for the holders of the debt, whose investment will slowly lose value. Risk-free assets may be appealing for very wealthy individuals, as a hedge against potential catastrophic losses. Foreign nations also purchase debt, such as U.S. Treasury bonds, to keep their currencies from appreciating against the dollar, thereby ensuring the health of emerging economies that rely on exports to the United States. (In such cases, the debt holders don’t care as much about the rate of return, Reinhart pointed out. “The objective of asymmetric monetary policies in export-dependent emerging economies is to maintain demand for their goods and services.”)

Domestically, the “essence of ‘financial repression’ is to place debt at financial institutions”—such as banks, pension funds and insurance companies—“via regulatory changes,” Reinhart continued. In the United States, for example, “banks are now required to hold more government debt in their portfolios.” Such tactics, which reach their apex in the advanced economies of Europe, work because surrounding countries are also doing it; the lack of alternatives deters leakage of funds to other economies that offer more attractive rates of return.

During the recent financial crisis, the U.S. Federal Reserve Board “was very aggressive in buying toxic assets and restoring the workings of the credit market,” which is one reason the American economy is faring relatively well, Reinhart explained. But in “periphery Europe,” including countries such as Greece, Portugal, and maybe even Italy, she predicts further restructurings of official debt. “The main point that we try to make in this paper,” she concluded, “is that governments have historically used a variety of tools for dealing with debt,” and tackling the overhang left by the Great Recession may require them to consider all the options.

“Global health” typically brings to mind issues such as vaccination, maternal care, sanitation, and malaria control. It’s not usually associated with surgery. But consider the woman who dies in childbirth because she can’t reach a clinic that performs cesarean sections, or the man out of work because he can’t afford cataract surgery to restore his vision, or the child whose life is cut short by an injury that local healthcare workers don’t have the training to repair. 

A landmark report published by the Lancet Commission on Global Surgery argues that a lack of access to safe surgical care has a major impact on the health and well-being of people around the world. A public conference at Harvard Medical School (HMS) on May 6 marked the report’s launch, following a similar meeting in London. “We want surgery to be part of the discourse on global health, and we want surgery integrated into the discussions about how you build health systems,” says John Meara, Kletjian professor of global surgery at HMS, one of three commission co-chairs. 

The problem is vast. “Five billion people cannot access safe, affordable surgery,” Meara said during his opening address in Boston. That number includes people who can’t afford expensive procedures as well as those who live far from an operating room. Closing the gap would require 143 million additional procedures each year. But the commission laid out an ambitious plan to achieve 80 percent coverage of essential surgical and anesthesia service per country by 2030, and outlined specific recommendations, goals, and indicators of progress that can be used to realize it. 

TheLancet, a preeminent medical journal based in London, formed the commission in 2013 when a small group of surgeons joined with Justine Davies, editor-in-chief of Lancet Diabetes & Endocrinology, to champion an in-depth look at surgery around the world. The commissioners worked with collaborators from more than 110 countries to produce the report, focusing on surgery and anesthesia in low- and middle-income countries. Meara, who became the inaugural Kletjian professor this April, has been a leading advocate for putting surgery on the international agenda; his newly endowed chair is among the first global surgery professorships established at an academic institution. 

Surgery has a role across the entire spectrum of human disease, and conditions that can be surgically treated represent about 30 percent of the global burden of illness. But high out-of-pocket surgical costs push 33 million people into financial catastrophe each year (and 48 million more when indirect costs like transportation are included). Achieving the commission’s 2030 goals would require a $420-billion investment. This staggering cost could yield major returns, though: the report projects that the lack of surgery and anesthesia would cost low- and middle-income countries $12.3 trillion in that span, a 2 percent drag on growth each year. During a talk at the conference, Gavin Yamey, a biostatistician at the University of California San Francisco School of Medicine, said,“Many surgeries are equally [as] cost-effective as other public-health measures.”

“To achieve our vision, we need people on the ground,” said commission co-chair Lars Hagander of the World Health Organization [Corrected June 17, 2015: he is affiliated with Lund University in Sweden] in a talk on workforce education: not only surgeons, but anesthesiologists, nurses, radiologists, pathologists, technicians, and rehabilitation specialists. That means providing medical training, as well as incentives for health professionals to stay in their local communities rather than move to high-income areas. In some cases, it may also require shifting some surgical duties to people with less training. 

Equipment, supplies, and facilities are also needed. Yet a panel discussion on the role of industry in global surgery pointed out that in resource-poor areas, well-meaning donations can overwhelm clinics and nongovernmental organizations with old, faulty equipment and useless items they then must struggle to dispose of. “Equipment donation alone is not going to fix the problem,” said Asha Varghese, director of global health programs at the GE Foundation; it’s also necessary to train technicians who can operate and repair equipment to keep it running. 

Another problem is data collection. “We have no idea how much the world is spending on surgery,” said Meara in his address. (The commission found that only two countries, Georgia and Kyrgyzstan, track those totals.) He and his fellow commissioners identified three “bellwether procedures” that can be used to assess the basic surgical-capability level of a nation’s healthcare facilities: cesarean section, abdominal surgery, and orthopedic surgery for bone fractures. Facilities that can handle those three interventions can easily manage a wide range of procedures.

Historically, global surgery has been most identified with medical missions—teams of surgeons who travel to resource-poor areas to perform procedures like cleft lip and palate repair or cataract surgery, which local people can’t otherwise afford. Such intermittent missions have saved lives and improved the health of many patients, but they have also been critiqued for not offering a lasting solution to the larger problems of healthcare delivery in those areas. As a result, the field has increasingly focused on building local capabilities. 

Many talks at the conference focused on the respective roles of students, residents, surgeons, and academic researchers from high-income countries in improving surgical care internationally. Speakers said that young medical students and surgeons want to get involved in global health but need more opportunities to do so. HMS, for example, offers a one- to two-year global surgery fellowship that enables surgeons to provide surgical care or conduct research in low-income countries, and a one-year research associate position that allows medical students to participate in existing faculty-led programs abroad. Similar fellowships, and exchange programs that let surgeons spend extended time in needy areas, are becoming more common at medical schools and hospitals generally. The American College of Surgeons in 2004 launched Operation Giving Back to help connect surgeons to volunteer opportunities around the world. 

But speakers cautioned that programs to improve care in other countries must respond to local needs. “We need to get away from surgical colonialism,” said Ainhoa Costas-Chavarri, a hand surgeon at Boston Children’s Hospital. Instead, many participants used the word “accompaniment,” an approach advocated by Paul Farmer, co-founder of Partners In Health. Robert Riviello, director of global-surgery programs at the Center for Surgery and Public Health at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, discussed one example, launched in 2012: a seven-year partnership between several U.S. academic medical centers and the Ministry of Health in Rwanda, that aims to boost training for healthcare workers in that country and transfer all clinical and teaching duties to local Rwandans by the program’s end.It’s important, Riviello said, not to arrive in another country with a set curriculum, but to plan together instead: “We shouldn’t assume we want the same things until we actually talk about them.”

In a keynote address, Farmer, now Kolokotrones University Professor of global health and social medicine, said that fixing the “grotesque disparities” in surgical capabilities requires strengthening health systems as a whole. “Building local capacity is critical to the advancement of this agenda,” he said. He also cautioned that a culture of safety in high-income countries should not become an excuse to avoid engaging with and practicing medicine in low-income countries. “It is not safe to perform surgery in most of the places we’re talking about,” he said, and yet there is ample need for surgical treatment, so turning away because of safety concerns is not a solution.

The Lancet report also included success stories about partnerships that have improved surgical care in Haiti, Mongolia, Uganda, and elsewhere. The commission is now working with the Republic of Zambia to begin assessing that nation’s surgical capabilities, based on the approach outlined in the report. Commissioners have also met with several other nations’ ministers of health and finance to make the case for investing in surgery. Meara emphasized that the real work is just beginning. “We’re not celebrating the completion of the project,” he said at the end of the meeting. “We’ve got a long way to go.”

How much does it cost to keep a Kenyan child in school? A decade ago, Gates professor of developing societies Michael Kremer found that improving school attendance among Kenyan children may be a $3.50-a-year problem. That’s because—like one in four people around the world—many Kenyan pupils suffer parasitic-worm infections, and the resulting conditions, such as anemia, often make the children too weak to go to school. Kremer and his colleague Edward Miguel, Ph.D. ’00, discovered that a Kenyan project that distributed deworming drugs to schools reduced absenteeism by a quarter, and the cost per additional year of school participation per child was only $3.50. The program even had a positive impact on neighboring schools that did not receive the drugs. “These spillovers alone are sufficient to justify not only fully subsidizing deworming treatment, but perhaps even paying people to receive treatment,” the researchers wrote.

Today, such treatment is administered to millions of children in Africa and India by governments with the technical support of the Deworm the World Initiative, a flagship program of the Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit Evidence Action. True to its name, the two-year-old organization is committed to translating research-based evidence into cost-effective action. “Evidence Action is founded on the idea that there is a gap between what research shows is effective in global development and what is implemented in practice,” said executive director Alix Zwane, Ph.D. ’02. “We develop business models to bridge that gap.”

“The key thing is moving to scale,” explained Erik Nielsen, a member of Evidence Action’s board of advisers. “Many development projects tend to work in these 10 villages, or these 15 communities. Evidence Action is working with millions and millions of households to achieve the greatest scale possible.” Deworm the World Initiative, which supports governments’ school-based mass-deworming programs, has already reached about 165 million children this year. The program, incubated by the research network Innovations for Poverty Action and taken over by Evidence Action in order to achieve scaling, has been listed twice as a “top charity” by GiveWell, a nonprofit that evaluates and rates charities to help donors decide where to give.

Evidence Action’s other flagship program is Dispensers for Safe Water, a rural water service that maintains chlorine dispensers in communities in Kenya, Malawi, and Uganda that lack access to safe drinking water. Placed directly at a local water source, these dispensers deliver just the right amount of chlorine to disinfect the drinking water. The program currently serves over three million people.

Using medication to deworm children and using chlorine to disinfect water are both solutions that have existed for decades, Nielsen observed. What makes Evidence Action’s programs innovative, he emphasized, is not technical sophistication but a delivery model based on rigorous quantitative research methods, such as randomized control trials. “They are not utilizing the high-tech California approach and imposing that on poor countries that wouldn’t necessarily be able to replace, repair, or manufacture that technology,” he said. “A lot of people think innovation can only be fueled by advances in science and technology. But it’s also about organizing and delivering services and products.”

According to Dina Pomeranz, an assistant professor at Harvard Business School and a member of Evidence Action’s board of directors, the nonprofit sector in particular needs rigorous impact evaluation because it lacks the market signals the for-profit world enjoys. Businesses know something works when customers buy the product, she said, but “if you give people social services for free,” you may never learn about bad service “because the customer doesn't have a choice.” Now, however, thanks to an "empirical revolution" caused by advances in development economics and quantitative-research methods in the past two decades, scholars are better equipped than ever, she said, to evaluate the cost-effectiveness of international development programs.

An evidence-based approach means that the effectiveness of a certain measure is not only proven in empirical trials but also constantly assessed during execution. In an interview, Kremer mentioned a broader movement to adopt such an approach in international development, citing programs such as a campaign to prevent road deaths on Kenya’s minibuses through putting up simple stickers encouraging passengers to “Speak up!” against dangerous driving, and the Mexican government’s Oportunidades program, with its conditional cash-transfer model that has been adopted by many countries around the world.  He pointed out, however, that it is neither feasible nor necessary for all global programs to be subject to rigorous impact evaluation: “For example, there is lots of evidence that basic vaccines work, and it doesn’t make sense to say that every country providing vaccination should regularly check if it improves health.” The right type of monitoring, he said, depends on the context.

Still, Evidence Action board member Kanika Bahl, a principal and managing director at the nonprofit Results of Development Institute in Washington, D.C., said the international development community should focus more on compiling concrete evidence of programs’ value, a benchmark that is often eclipsed by factors such as political trends, funder interests, or even the presence of existing donor mechanisms. Pneumonia, for example, kills more children than any other disease, and costs around 50 cents per child to treat. Yet it receives only a small fraction of the funding devoted to pediatric HIV-AIDS—which causes just 3 percent of child deaths—because, she said, the latter has captured the imagination of the world.

Critics of the “effective altruism” movement (whose philosophy of maximizing the impact of the dollar is shared by organizations like Evidence Action) have argued that not all good causes in the world are quantifiable, that issues like human rights and equality cannot be measured through randomized control trials. Development experts involved with Evidence Action, on the other hand, said that a surprising number of things that may appear unquantifiable can actually be measured, especially given recent advances in empirical methods. “You may think that only money is quantifiable,” Pomeranz said, “but it turns out we can measure the impact of interventions on stress, anxiety, health, and education. Having to measure things is not necessarily restricting [the work we can do].” Moreover, using evidence to guide charity work is crucial to ensuring the efficient use of limited resources. “Where there is an ability to apply evidence, we should,” Bahl said. “You can’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.”

“Let your women keep silence in the churches,” declares Paul in Corinthians 14:34. Catherine Brekus ’85 specializes in hearing the voices of America’s early female religious leaders, nearly lost to history—a casualty of neglect, or sometimes a more deliberate excision from the historical record. Her work has required some sleuthing—finding manuscripts scattered across libraries and antiquarian societies—and deep dives into material history, learning about everything from eighteenth-century medicine to laundry. Always striving for “empathetic engagement with the past,” Brekus easily gets swept up in describing past events. Her voice drops as she describes the revival leader at the center of her most recent book, Sarah Osborne’s World, noting the irony that a “free will person” should be the historian to delve into these fiercely Calvinist writings. In an interview upon winning the 2013 Aldersgate Prize (which annually recognizes works of Christian scholarship), Brekus said that in imagined debates, Osborne has “tried very hard to convince me”—though without success. “I did not like studying history in high school,” the Warren professor of the history of religion at Harvard Divinity School confesses, smiling. “I was always good at it…but the idea is that you memorize a lot of facts, mostly about political history, and what happened when.” When she taught the subject to high-school students for two years, Brekus noticed that textbooks “have this narrative of political events…and then you have this little human-interest thing in a box. That was where the women would appear. My goal as a historian,” she adds, “is to get women out of those boxes and into the main texts.”

Last fall, after a lively class dissection of a nonprofit organization’s options for earning revenue and securing funds to grow, McNair professor of marketing V. Kasturi Rangan, head of “Business at the Base of the Pyramid,” called on Saima Hasan, M.B.A. ’15, who told her fellow students she was living the same dilemma.

As a Stanford undergraduate, Hasan explained in a conversation, she conceived and began piloting Roshni (www.roshniacademy.org), a program to enhance the skills of secondary-school girls in India through a free or low-cost, 110-hour supplementary course of instruction in basic employment and academic skills (from English and computer proficiency to workplace etiquette and interviewing and résumé support). The goals were simple: to enhance their prospects for jobs or higher education—on the way to boosting their families’ incomes and, in turn, ability to afford medical care, schooling for siblings, and more. It is a small front in a larger battle; as The Economist recently put it, “South Asia is one of the worst places in the world to be female.”

Having developed a training model, Hasan, by then a graduate and resident in India from 2009, had to call at schools, without introduction, to find a risk-taking principal who would give Roshni access to the building to pilot its after-hours curriculum (it took 20 cold calls to gain initial entry)—and then persuade parents to allow daughters to participate. A hard-won government endorsement in 2009 (India’s human resource development minister told a nervous Hasan, “Good for you!”) has eased expansion. To date, Roshni has reached some 15,000 girls, and has measured their gains in getting jobs and rising from poverty. Compared to peers, Roshni trainees have also deferred their age of marriage, an important social change.

Roshni weathered its transition to a new CEO, once Hasan enrolled at Harvard in 2013, but its finances still depended on philanthropy from Silicon Valley’s Indian-American community. And so, during her M.B.A. studies, Hasan worked after hours to explore other options: fee-based partnerships with U.S. high schools and universities sending students abroad for global experiences; job-placement fees from local employers who recruit Roshni trainees. But those were insufficient. “There are lots of paths we can take,” she said. Might a Roshni for-profit affiliate for higher-income students subsidize the core program? Could the occasional field-immersion experiences become a bigger, corporation-focused business? Perhaps Hasan’s own planned, post-M.B.A. mobile-technology startup could underwrite Roshni, or rely on it for its workforce?

In the end, Hasan said this spring, a partial solution emerged: Roshni has partnered with Tata Group (among India’s best-known global enterprises) for funding and expansion to 20 new schools, with a curriculum broadened to include vocational and entrepreneurship training currently unavailable in rural areas. If this pilot, extending into next spring, succeeds, and Hasan’s planned company can meet her hiring aspirations, she will have found a way to sustain Roshni—and perhaps to train successor social entrepreneurs in India.

When Nitin Nohria became Harvard Business School (HBS) dean in mid 2010, he detailed five priorities, ranging from innovation in education and internationalization to inclusion. In setting out the latter goal, he said in a recent conversation, he aimed not at numerical diversity, but at a broader objective: that every HBS student and teacher be enabled to thrive within the community.

A decanal missive in early 2011 further defined the work required to make HBS genuinely inclusive. “I have launched an initiative that will focus…on the challenges facing women at the school,” Nohria wrote. He created an institutional home for the work—a senior associate deanship for culture and community—and appointed Wilson professor of business administration Robin J. Ely to the post: a logical choice, given her research on race and gender relations in organizations. (Making progress, he noted, has entailed work by other faculty colleagues, too, including Youngme Moon, then in her capacity as senior associate dean for the M.B.A. program, and Frances Frei, senior associate dean for faculty planning and recruitment. Frei, he said, has played a vital role in helping women faculty members—sometimes “given a shorter runway” in adjusting to their new responsibilities—succeed at the school.)

Ely’s role, he explained in the interview, was initially intended to help HBS look at itself and evolve practices that might make it a role model for other institutions. The school’s W50 summit in 2013, which examined the first half-century of women enrolled in the M.B.A. program, provided an opportunity, he noted, to “come to terms with our own history”—not all of it welcoming or inclusive (see “The Girls of HBS,” July-August 2013, and the linked report on W50).

A complementary strand would involve HBS’s academic life: “Who gets represented?” in the teaching cases professors develop, as Nohria put it. In his annual letter to faculty colleagues this past January, he wrote, “I know that of the dozens of cases I have written, fewer than 10 percent have had a woman in a leadership position.” Moreover “[T]he most effective cases are not necessarily those where women protagonists are dealing with gendered issues like work-life balance, but rather leading change and other strategic initiatives within an organization.” Just as M.B.A. cases have become increasingly global in the past decade, he aims for at least 20 percent to “feature a female” leader within the next three years. (And because HBS sells cases to schools worldwide, that shift will radiate far beyond Allston.)

Writing such cases is part and parcel of HBS professors’ research, and in a natural development, Ely’s initial role has evolved toward the externally focused perspectives Nohria described. HBS’s new Gender Initiative, under her leadership, is a research forum for faculty members who examine gender issues in businesses and other organizations.

Ely recently recalled the concerns that prompted Nohria’s initial interest, including persistent underrepresentation of women among M.B.A. students earning highest academic honors. To address such issues, she said, she wanted to look at the school’s culture broadly, to determine whether possible group differences in how students, faculty, and staff members experienced the culture affected their ability to succeed. (She noted that Cahners-Rabb professor of business administration Kathleen L. McGinn’s prior work with students had explored how HBS’s cultural dynamics might have contributed to a gender gap in grades—helping to pave the way and set the agenda for the culture initiative.)

HBS academic honors, for instance, are based strictly on grades, which are heavily influenced by classroom participation. Exploring the culture, Ely said, made issues such as students’ willingness to express their views, professors’ patterns of calling on them, and the operation of student study groups “discussable”—the precursor to change. (In fact, achievement and satisfaction gaps have narrowed.) Airing these matters has also shaped student conversations about social dynamics and extracurriculars.

Given these fruitful discussions, raising HBS’s scrutiny of gender upward and outward was a natural next step. Nohria’s January letter asked: “Can we conduct work that will accelerate the advancement of women leaders who will make a difference in the world and promote gender and other types of equity in business and society?” The Gender Initiative, with Ely as faculty leader and Colleen C. Ammerman as assistant director, now serves as a locus for research among professors in units across HBS.

It is anchored by a core group including Ely herself; McGinn (now exploring the impact on school performance, age of marriage, and other outcomes of teaching African girls negotiating skills); Chapman professor of business administration Boris Groysberg (author of Chasing Stars: The Myth of Talent and the Portability of Performance, which uncovered a significant gap in financial analysts’ ability to maintain their “star” status when they move to new firms—unexpectedly, in women’s favor); associate professor of business administration Amy J.C. Cuddy (who is looking at gender stereotypes across cultures); assistant professor of business administration Lakshmi Ramarajan (who examines how individuals’ cultural and personal identities affect their engagement and performance in organizations); and others.

Since its unveiling in May, the initiative has already publicized several findings:

• HBS graduates are an elite cohort of above-average means. A survey of women and men who earned M.B.A. degrees reveals that they value careers and professional success equally. But as Ely, sociologist Pamela Stone of City University of New York, and Ammerman reported, although “about 50 percent to 60 percent of men across the three generations [said] they were ‘extremely satisfied’ or ‘very satisfied’ with their experiences of meaningful work, professional accomplishments, opportunities for career growth, and compatibility of work and personal life, only 40 percent to 50 percent of women were similarly satisfied on the same dimensions.”
• A survey of 24 developed nations, led by McGinn, revealed that—far from being harmed—women whose mothers worked outside the home are themselves more likely to work, assume greater professional responsibilities, and achieve higher earnings than women whose mothers were at home full time.
• And although women’s under-representation in the most senior ranks of business leadership is often attributed to the lack of “family-friendly” workplace policies, an in-depth analysis of a consulting firm, co-conducted by Ely, pointed to a more intractable problem: a culture of being at work or on call around the clock—the new norm in lucrative professions like law, finance, and consulting, and one that firms are loath to restrain. Both men and women suffer in these cultures, but women are more likely to avail themselves of part-time options or otherwise adapt to care for family members, derailing their careers.

Interest in gender-related questions, Ely said, also “bubbles up from the faculty” at large. Thus, for instance, a faculty member who focuses on entrepreneurship is determining the antecedents to women’s interest in pursuing entrepreneurial ventures.

In addition to encouraging and publicizing research, the initiative convenes an annual conference to focus scholarship and learning from practice, engaging participants from within HBS and beyond. Like the school’s other interdisciplinary initiatives, Ammerman said, this one provides a locus for faculty members to test ideas with colleagues, learn about pertinent research, and address new questions to data already collected for other purposes: a place to go when those queries “bubble up.” As Nohria hoped, the fledgling venture is becoming an intellectual home for women and men from the HBS faculty who want to understand how gender affects organizations’ operations—and individuals’ trajectories.

Who’s driving up U.S. healthcare costs? A recent study by Harvard professors and colleagues revealed that the culprits may be “cowboy doctors”—physicians who provide intensive, unnecessary, and often ineffective patient care, resulting in wasteful spending costing as much as 2 percent of the nation’s Gross Domestic Product—hundreds of billions of dollars annually. The authors, including Eckstein professor of applied economics David Cutler and assistant professor of business administration Ariel D. Stern, found that physicians’ beliefs in clinically unsupported treatment procedures can explain as much as 35 percent of end-of-life Medicare expenditures, and 12 percent of Medicare expenditures overall.

Physicians treating a critically ill patient may decide either to provide intensive care beyond the indications of clinical guidelines (such as implanting a defibrillator to counter severe heart failure), or attempt to make the patient more comfortable by administering palliative care. The researchers called the former group “cowboys” and the latter “comforters,” and found that their respective concentrations in a region closely tracked end-of-life spending as a whole. “It was absolutely amazing how strong [the correlation] was,” Cutler said. The data indicate that cowboy doctors tend to congregate in southeastern states such as Florida. They are also more likely to be male, and less likely to be specialists.

Though these cowboy doctors may be pushing the frontier of medicine by going above and beyond, said coauthor Jonathan Skinner, a professor of economics at Dartmouth, clinical evidence showed little or no marginal benefit derived from the extra procedures, resulting in wasteful spending. Cutler suggested that doctors’ beliefs in these ineffective treatments may spring from their self-perception as “interventionists”: “I think some doctors are saying: ‘I just can’t accept that this patient is dying and there’s absolutely nothing I can do. I’ve got to do something.’”

The study noted that very few doctors wanted to discuss the option of palliative care with patients, prompting Cutler to draw an analogy to auto mechanics: “You want this engine fixed, I’ll fix it. I’m not going to talk to you about whether you should get a new car—that’s someone else’s’ job.” But as a result, he said, patients are “Ping-Ponged back and forth” between the primary-care physician, who recommends a specialist, and the specialist, who prefers to leave the question of whether certain treatments are necessary to the primary-care physician. Meanwhile, medical bills rise.

Traditionally, researchers attempt to get a picture of physicians’ beliefs by analyzing their actual behaviors. The problem is that other actors, such as patients, can have a say in these behaviors as well. The ability to tease out doctors’ actual beliefs proved to be the study’s biggest innovation, Cutler said. This was achieved by using “strategic surveys” that included vignettes of specific patient scenarios, and asking the responding physicians what they would do in each situation. Such surveys are often used in other areas of social science, Stern explained, but had rarely been used before to study healthcare economics.

Self-reports are sometimes unreliable, because respondents attempt to give the “textbook answer” rather than express their true beliefs. But this time, the researchers found that many physicians reported making decisions supported neither by clinical guidelines nor by medical literature. “Doctors are basically not relying on public scientific evidence,” Skinner said. “They are relying on their own beliefs, developed through…time.”

The study also found that most doctors who recommended unnecessary procedures weren’t seeking extra income—suggesting to Cutler that the lack of financial penalty, rather than the presence of financial reward, accounts for “cowboy” doctors’ actions. The healthcare system’s current incentives, he said, often do not prompt doctors to ask the right questions, such as whether a proposed treatment truly benefits the patient. “If doctors restrict themselves to performing what is evidence-based,” Skinner pointed out, “we can save hundreds of billions of dollars a year.”

According to Elliott Fisher, a professor of health policy at Dartmouth, a movement is under way to shift the healthcare-payment system toward incentivizing concrete benefits for patients. (A case in point is the hundreds of accountable-care organizations around the country, which seek to reward high-quality, low-cost care.) The new study, Fisher suggests, is important because it highlights a power imbalance in the physician-patient relationship: doctors tend to follow their own beliefs about the right treatment to use, leaving patients little say in the process. How to treat a patient is often a multiple-choice question without a straightforward, single “correct” answer. When making these decisions, Fisher said, doctors should pay more attention to the patient’s preferences, instead of relying on their own experience.

The research suggests that it’s time for the cowboys to rein themselves in, and learn to listen.

In an idealized business transaction (ignoring restraints on competition and marketing blandishments), willing shoppers choose the products and services they want, and companies measure their sales, cash flow, profits, and return on capital—financial metrics that managers and investors alike can assess.

But how should social impact be evaluated? In “Business at the Base of the Pyramid” (see main article), students contend with the relative worth of enabling lower-income people to exercise consumer sovereignty (buying a television) versus securing their access to medicines. They consider research suggesting that microfinance—a high-profile tool in development economics and a vehicle for base-of-the-pyramid “financial inclusion”—often appears to bolster consumption more than it enables entrepreneurship, arguably a higher-impact goal.

A broad, deep effort to develop methods for measuring social impact exists in Cambridge’s Central Square, just down Massachusetts Avenue from Harvard Yard. Root Capital (www.rootcapital.org), a nonprofit founded in 1999, lends to small agricultural enterprises—for example, Latin American coffee cooperatives—that need funding beyond the smaller loans offered by microfinance institutions, but are not yet served by commercial banks. Such enterprises provide vital rural services to hundreds of member growers, but are financially stuck in the “missing middle.” To date, Root Capital has disbursed more than $900 million in loans, focusing on producers of high-value, traded products such as coffee, cashews, and cocoa, but also extending of late to smaller growers of local, staple crops in Africa.

Does Root’s lending make a real difference? Brian Milder ’01, M.B.A. ’07, the senior vice president who oversees strategic planning, financial advisory services for clients, and innovation, also directs impact assessment. He outlines three principles. The deepest in-field assessments (see below) ought to be client-centric: not merely generating information for external parties, but engaging clients in a process that results in better growing and operating practices. Assessment also aims at determining “additionality”: measuring the real impact from, say, Root’s agricultural lending versus what would happen in the market were Root not making funds available. Finally, in Root’s vision, there ought to be a balance between impact and financial investment decisions, with both considerations playing a role at a loan’s inception. (For Root, that balance has been shifting in interesting ways; as its clients have grown to need larger and longer-term loans—not just to finance a season’s crops but to build processing facilities, for example—hoped-for bank financing has not been forthcoming, so Root has stepped in. On such loans, it aims to make a profit, following the commercial model, in order to subsidize lending to smaller borrowers—where it is not able to cover its costs.)

Mike McCreless, M.B.A.-M.P.A. ’10, director of strategy and impact, says those principles shape the criteria loan officers use in the field. Given Root’s goal of supporting rural entrepreneurs and rapid economic growth, he said, “We had to figure out how to direct money to where it has the most impact” on local investment: boosting farmers’ income by obtaining higher prices for their produce, and so on. Root’s website and quarterly and annual reports display data on the number of producers affected, women farmers benefited, acreage under sustainable cultivation, and so on—alongside accounting for loan balances and performance.

Of late, those analyses have been supplemented by deeper, almost ethnographic studies. Impact officer Asya Troychansky ’07, for example, visited four Root client coffee cooperatives in Guatemala, interviewing their managers and staff, and training four local consultants who in turn surveyed 407 farmer-members and 233 nonmembers, seeking to tease out their relative incomes, production practices, and other outcomes—and the connection to Root-supplied financing. She found that in effective cooperatives with Root funding, membership was associated with higher incomes, in part because the co-ops could pay growers a base price during harvest—reducing dependence on intermediaries that customarily buy at prices less advantageous to the farmers. Enabling co-ops to pay farmers earlier contributed to a virtuous cycle of higher membership, with member farmers able to take advantage of the cooperatives’ services, including agronomic training that promoted wider use of sustainable practices. Troychansky also gathered evidence on gender inclusion and agricultural environmental impacts—data in place of suppositions, facts by which to direct lending.

Beyond its Root-focused work, Milder’s team works to advance assessment tools generally. One locus is the Global Impact Investing Network, with its impact reporting and investment standards (IRIS): an effort to evolve what he calls an impact “taxonomy” equivalent to Generally Accepted Accounting Principles for financial statements. McCreless, who has driven, and disseminates, some of this work through a blizzard of journal articles and papers on impact assessment, says the measures get at types of impact (income, for instance); scale (the affected population); and depth (the level of impact on each person). Much of Root’s information on impact types and scale comes from loan officers’ reports; depth metrics are least developed. That is where Troychansky’s studies come in. “The metrics are the starting point,” she says. The field studies aim at a “more holistic impact profile” of lives likely changed.

Whatever tools are finally evolved, Milder puts their importance in a larger context. “Business at the Base of the Pyramid” (which he took in 2007) describes the world as a triangle, but from Root’s perspective, he says, the relevant image is a snowman—perhaps ironically so, given the warm regions where Root works. “Think of the 450 million to 500 million smallholder farm families in the world,” he explains: the 2 billion to 2.5 billion people who till less than 5 hectares, and who are perhaps three-quarters of the world population living on less than $2 per person per day. The top 10 percent of this group (the small head) are in organized supply chains for cash crops like coffee or cocoa—and Root and similar organizations are beginning to get them the capital they need. Mid-body are the 150 million to 170 million semi-commercial farmers who grow and sell staples. And at the bulging bottom are the marginal, subsistence farmers, who just manage to survive working their land.

In agriculture, Milder says, the need for investments with beneficial social impact is far greater than anyone envisioned when Root was founded. In human needs, business opportunities, and prospective impact, the same holds true across the entire base of the pyramid.

Ironically, nothing bedevils lower-income people gaining a foothold in the cash economy more than dealing with cash, particularly in developing nations with poor infrastructure. It’s an improvement on perishable stores of value (cows, for instance). But cash can be readily stolen. Getting it from, say, a worker at an urban job to a rural family can involve a time-consuming and expensive bus trip, or reliance on suspect couriers. Many such places lack banking systems: it is too expensive to build and service branches in the countryside; low-income consumers are neither substantial savers nor prospects for home loans or other bank staples; and even if they were, many potential customers lack formal documentation and fixed places of residence. As of 2009, perhaps half the world’s four-billion-plus people at the base of the pyramid had no access to formal financial services, even as their need for moving money—accepting remittances, paying bills, and transferring funds—ballooned.

This is just the sort of need that calls for innovation to serve potential customers. Mobile telephony, as it happens, provides a solution, as examined in the Harvard Business School (HBS) course “Business at the Base of the Pyramid.” Cellphone ownership is becoming universal, and users are typically served by thousands of local retailers who sell minutes. When the British multinational firm Vodafone launched M-PESA (“mobile pesa,” the Swahili word for money), a low-cost money-transfer service, in 2007 in Kenya with its partner Safaricom (Vodafone owns 40 percent, the Kenyan government 35 percent), the response was immediate. Within three years, according to a case used in “Business at the Base of the Pyramid,” 40 percent of Kenyan adults had accounts. The Economist recently reported that the value of transactions effected through M-PESA is equivalent to 40 percent of the nation’s Gross Domestic Product—lubricating the economy, liberating customers’ time, supporting those retailers, and, of course, strengthening Safaricom’s market share. Now, new competitors are emerging—an aim, not always achieved, of social-impact-minded investors.

Meanwhile, Vodafone’s director of mobile money, Michael W. Joseph, A.M.P. ’98, now oversees the technology in use from the Congo to Romania. And the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation recently highlighted phone-based money storage and payments as one of its four “breakthroughs” for the world’s low-income people during the next 15 years—the first step toward broad “financial inclusion” as incomes and banking needs increase; the foundation even invested in bKash, a mobile-money enterprise in Bangladesh.

So much for significant, but relatively simple, functions such as moving money. Can mobile phones lead to breakthroughs in high-touch services like healthcare?

Entrepreneur Santiago Ocejo, M.P.H. ’10, M.B.A. ’14, thinks so. A physician who worked on medical-device innovation and low-income healthcare services at Stanford and Harvard, he now aims to address one of the most widespread chronic diseases in Mexico, his native country. Mexico, he noted, has made “a very fast transition from a developing-country disease profile to a developed-country profile”: from infectious diseases to chronic ones like diabetes and cardiovascular ailments associated with decreasing exercise and the “shift in the nutritional platform” to increased consumption of fast food, soft drinks, and so on.

Heart attacks have been the leading cause of death for many years, Ocejo said, but in the middle and lower classes, appropriate care addressing the causes is uncommon. One-third of Mexicans are hypertensive, he said, citing a leading indicator of future cardiac ills, but only one-third of those affected are aware of the problem. “They do search for healthcare,” he said, but lack adequate insurance or ready access to suitable providers: visiting a clinic may involve long treks—and long lines; lab tests and prescriptions may involve travel to different locations, and paying out-of-pocket fees; and continuous access to an expert practitioner is rare. Too often, when the problem appears as chest pain, the patient neglects it, and is killed by a second heart attack: 93 percent of those who die succumb at home, not in care settings. 

Salud Cercana (“health close to you”), being tested this summer, aims to bring basic cardiac care to this population through a high-quality, low-cost system of primary-care providers and technology: the sweet spot for reaching base-of-the-pyramid customers. (Ocejo encountered some of those principles in a section of the HBS course taught by professor of business administration Shawn Cole, who has experience in finance, insurance, and mobile-phone-based agricultural-advisory services in rural India.)

His model, Ocejo explained, focuses on preventing disease and promoting health by providing consistent primary care, rather than delivering acute care after a heart attack. “Hypertension is a wellness issue,” he said, so Salud Cercana aims to encourage a healthy lifestyle and focused care on a subscription basis, for $15 per month: about one-third the costs hypertension patients in his target market now incur for time-consuming, uncoordinated, inferior care. Following the microfinance model, where loan officers reach out to community groups, “health coaches” will call on the affected population to enroll patients. Cohorts of several hundred patients will be evaluated by Salud Cercana-selected physicians based in local clinics (for which the company will provide start-up funding). Once enrolled, patients will be provided with a proper generic medication and advised, through a mobile-phone app and consultation with the health coach, to follow their medical regimen and adopt diet and exercise routines. There may even be social reinforcement of these behaviors among members of the cohort, much as communal microfinance clients assume collective responsibility for repaying loans. Customers who respond to the health prompts and wellness programs will receive an incentive in the form of cellphone minutes or a points system. Finally, for those who do suffer a cardiac event, insurance will provide up to a $3,000 lump sum for hospital care.

In effect, Salud Cercana guarantees the costs of wellness care and of hospitalization for a single, expensive, and life-threatening condition. It plans to do better than the current system by integrating efficient, effective care through its physician network and wellness plans that patients cannot otherwise access. Low-cost mobile-phone technology plays a key role.

Although he was readily able to secure commitments for startup funding, Ocejo said, it took months to close the deal in a form that satisfied both Mexican and U.S. investors, given the less-developed state of venture financing in Mexico. That hurdle overcome, the company’s six-person team pilot-tested the service among 30 prospective customers, and expects to unveil the first physician clinic by summer’s end. If it works, Salud Cercana will be Mexico’s first prepaid primary-care plan for low- and middle-income patients with cardiac diseases.

Harvard today released the results of a sexual conduct survey taken at the University during the spring of 2015, and the results—echoing those from the 26 other private and public AAU (Association of American Universities) institutions that participated—are troubling both for the University and for higher education more generally in the United States. In a letter to President Drew Faust that was released in conjunction with the AAU aggregate report, former University provost Steven E. Hyman, who chairs the Harvard Task Force on the Prevention of Sexual Assault that was formed in 2014, called “the incidence of nonconsensual sexual contact by physical force or incapacitation…unacceptable” and said that it “requires concerted action from the entire community.” Among the most pertinent results Hyman detailed in his letter:

• 16 percent of female seniors in the College report completed or attempted penetration that was nonconsensual during their time at Harvard.
• When figures for nonconsensual touching are included, the above number rises to 31.2 percent.
• Rates of nonconsensual penetration and touching are substantially higher among both men and women in the LBQAN (Lesbian or Gay, Bisexual, Asexual, Questioning and Not Listed) community throughout the University, particularly among men.
• While Harvard College females reported that the location where completed or attempted penetration most commonly took place (more than 75 percent) was in a dormitory, about 15 percent of incidents took place in single-sex organizations that were not a fraternity or sorority—final clubs and other club settings.
• Consumption of alcohol, either by the perpetrator, the victim, or both, played a role in the majority of incidents of complete or attempted penetration perpetrated by force, and for nearly 90 percent of the respondents who reported completed or attempted penetration by incapacitation.
• Female undergraduates at Harvard are less likely to believe that campus officials would take a report seriously, conduct a fair investigation, or take action against an offender than the full set of students. Worse, only 16 percent of female undergraduates at Harvard believe it very or extremely likely that campus officials would take action against an offender, as compared to 37 percent of female undergraduates at the full set of AAU institutions surveyed, and 25 percent of female undergraduates at the subset of private AAU institutions.

These data buttress federal data that show that one woman in five is sexually assaulted while in college, a claim that had recently been called into question in the national press. The White House, which has been publicizing the one-in-five number, has taken an active stance against sexual violence on campuses by exerting pressure on colleges and universities through the Department of Education, The New York Times reported last year. The problem of sexual assault was brought to the forefront of discussion on the Harvard campus when The Harvard Crimson published “a long, anonymous, first-person account of an unwanted sexual encounter,” as reported at the time in Harvard Magazine. President Faust announced the formation of the task force headed by Hyman a few days later.

This morning, in a letter to the community, President Faust called the prevalence of sexual assault “a deeply troubling problem for Harvard, for colleges and universities more broadly, and for our society at large,” continuing:

These deeply disturbing survey results must spur us to an even more intent focus on the problem of sexual assault.  That means not just how we talk to one another about it, not just what we say in official pronouncements, but how we actually treat one another and live our lives together.  All of us share the obligation to create and sustain a community of which we can all be proud, a community whose bedrock is mutual respect and concern for one another.  Sexual assault is intolerable, and we owe it to one another to confront it openly, purposefully, and effectively. This is our problem.

Only about one in 10 sexual assaults are reported, according to federal data cited by the White House; the Harvard survey indicates that 69 percent of female Harvard College students who indicated they experienced an incident of penetration by force did not formally report it, and neither did 80 percent of those women who experienced an incident of penetration by incapacitation. “The most frequently cited reason for not reporting,” Hyman writes in his letter, “was a belief that it was not serious enough to report.”

Surveys have therefore come to be seen as a key way to learn more about the scope of the problem on college campuses nationwide. Universities—reacting to government pressure and the threat of lawsuits brought by students under Title IX (the federal law that prevents discrimination on the basis of sex)—are therefore seeking more data so that they can figure out ways to increase reporting, prevent sexual misconduct, and comply with the law. (Harvard achieved a response rate of more than 50 percent in the recent survey, higher than any other AAU institution involved, thanks in part to the concerted efforts of administrators who even persuaded Conan O’ Brien ’85 to record a message urging participation.)

The data from the recent survey at Harvard show that the University overall, including the graduate and professional schools, had a lower rate of nonconsensual sexual contact than the AAU average in the eight months preceding the survey. But the reverse is true for the College, where Harvard’s numbers are slightly worse (i.e., higher) than for the average undergraduate student body among the AAU institutions that administered the survey.

Also disturbing is the lack of confidence in campus officials demonstrated by undergraduate women at Harvard: relative to the University-wide student body as a whole, they are less likely to believe that officials would take a report seriously, conduct a fair investigation, or take action against an offender. In fact, Hyman writes, “only 16 percent of female undergraduates at Harvard believe it very or extremely likely that campus officials would take action against the offenders,” as compared to 37 percent of female undergraduates across the AAU, and 25 percent of female undergraduates in private institutions.

This lack of confidence in officials is matched by a paucity of student knowledge of University policies and procedures: about half or more of all undergraduate and graduate students said they knew little or nothing about what happens when a student reports an incident of sexual assault or sexual misconduct; where to make such a report; or even how sexual assault or misconduct is defined. More than a third said they wouldn’t know where to get help if they or a friend experienced such an incident. This lack of knowledge will doubtless be the focus of follow-up by Harvard researchers; the results suggest at the very least a profound need for better guidance and education.

In her letter to the community, Faust pointed to several areas that “merit further exploration,” including the consistently higher rates of sexual assault reported by the BGLTQ community; the high correlation between sexual assault and the use of alcohol among both assailants and those who have experienced assault; the disturbingly low percentage of students who indicate they know where to get help or believe that the University will respond appropriately when assaults are reported; the activities that lead to assaults; and the locations where assaults occur, including the undergraduate Houses and freshman dorms as well as recognized and unrecognized student organizations. She has asked the task force to provide her with detailed recommendations by January 2016.

Faust also detailed some of the steps already taken: the adoption of a University-wide Title IX policy; the creation of the Office for Sexual and Gender-Based Dispute Resolution (ODR) to investigate reports of misconduct; the appointment of 50 [emphasis added] Title IX coordinators across campus; the doubling of staff at the Office for Sexual Assault Prevention and Response; the launch of a new web portal (Sexual Harassment/Assault Response and Education, or SHARE) to aggregate resources; and the expansion of orientation and training on sexual-assault issues. “Clearly, we must do more,” she wrote, seeking to engage the entire Harvard community:

University leaders—starting with the president, the provost, and the deans—bear a critical part of the responsibility for shaping the climate and offering the resources necessary to prevent sexual assault and respond when it does occur.  But this challenge demands the insights and commitment of all of us—faculty, students, and staff—who are committed to building a community in which our care and respect for one another define who we are and aspire to be.

In the coming days and weeks, I want to hear your thoughts about what I can do, what you can do, and what we can do together to end sexual assault at Harvard.  Meanwhile, I have asked the deans of each of our schools to present me with school-specific plans for community conversation, engagement, and action—drawing on the survey findings for their schools, on the ongoing insights of the Task Force, and on the many efforts they have already undertaken to engage their communities on this important issue.

For an account of the reaction from Harvard College students, please read the report filed by our former Steiner Fellow, Zara Zhang.

What are the ingredients of a healthy, inclusive society—one that offers its citizens opportunity, happiness, and a positive quality of life? According to Lawrence University Professor Michael E. Porter, models of human development based on economic growth alone are incomplete; nations that thrive provide personal rights, nutrition and basic medical care, ecosystem sustainability, and access to advanced education, among other goods—and it is possible to measure progress toward providing these social benefits.

Porter’s 2015 Social Progress Index (SPI)—released in April and developed in collaboration with Sarnoff professor Scott Stern of MIT’s Sloan School and the nonprofit Social Progress Imperative—ranks 133 countries on multiple dimensions of social and environmental performance in three main categories: Basic Human Needs (food, water, shelter, safety); Foundations of Wellbeing (basic education, information, health, and a sustainable environment); and Opportunity (freedom of choice, freedom from discrimination, and access to higher education). Porter considers the index “the most comprehensive framework developed for measuring social progress, and the first to measure social progress independently of gross domestic product (GDP).” 

The index, he explains, is in some sense “a measure of inclusiveness,” developed based on discussions with stakeholders around the world about what is missed when policymakers concentrate on GDP (which tallies the value of all the goods and services produced by a country each year) to the exclusion of social performance. The framework focuses on several distinct questions: Does a country provide for its people’s most essential needs? Are the building blocks in place for individuals and communities to enhance and sustain well-being? Is there opportunity for all individuals to reach their full potential? 

The United States may rank sixth among countries in terms of GDP per capita, but its results on the Social Progress Index are lackluster. It is sixteenth overall in social progress: well below Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, and Japan in several key areas, including citizens’ quality of life and provision of basic human needs. The nation ranks thirtieth in personal safety, forty-fifth in access to basic knowledge, sixty-eighth on health and wellness, and seventy-fourth in ecosystem sustainability. “We had a lot of firsts in social progress over the years in America,” Porter points out, “but we kind of lost our rhythm and our momentum.”

About 20 or 30 years ago, for reasons Porter says he cannot completely explain, the rate of progress in America began to slow down. As a society, he points out, Americans slowly became more divided, and important priorities such as healthcare, education, and politics suffered. “We had gridlock, whether it’s unions or whether it’s ideological differences, and—although we’ve made some big steps in certain areas of human rights like gay rights—if you think about the really core things like our education system and our health system, we’re just not moving,” he says. “I think our political system isn’t helping, because we’re all about political gains and blocking the other guy, rather than compromising and getting things done.”

Meanwhile, he notes that even though other fast-growing nations such as India and China haven’t been able to attain a level of social progress commensurate with their economic progress either, certain countries such as Rwanda have “knocked the cover off the ball” in terms of social progress. “They went through a genocide, were devastated, and, to bring the society together, there was a consensus, led by the president, that their first job was to re-energize and restock the society and the capacity of their citizens,” he says. For example, the country achieved a 61 percent reduction in child mortality in a single decade, and today, primary-school enrollment stands at 95 percent. Rwanda also ranks high for gender equity, as women constitute a majority of the parliament—partly he says, because a lot of men were killed, but also because the country set out to be a place where women are not just equals, but leaders. 

Porter hopes his continuing work on the index will help explain why the United States is “doing poorly” relative to other countries that are doing well. His team had “a pretty big mountain to climb” just to get the SPI recognized by national leaders and scholars, mainly because GDP has become the main way of measuring a nation’s success. The goal now is to get the United States to use their tool at the state and city level to assess local performance, and then set priorities for improvement. 

In terms of progress for the average citizen, Porter warns, the United States is more threatened now, globally and economically, than it has been in generations. This phenomenon, he argues, reflects a legacy of anti-progressive politics, as well as bad economic policy. As a result, “We can’t fix our tax system, we can’t improve our infrastructure, we can’t deal with our public schools, and we can’t rein in this excessively costly legal system that we have that doesn’t necessarily achieve better results.” 

Yet the Social Progress Index, Porter hopes, could prove to be a useful tool that will propel America in the right direction. He is currently working with leaders on the national level in several countries, including Brazil, Colombia, and Paraguay, where the SPI is a core element of their national development plan. “Now the general awareness is that this is a critical tool and a necessity—people are starting to use it in thinking about how we [achieve social progress] in our country, in our society, in our region, in our city,” he says. “We’re encouraged—but we’ve got a long way to go.”

The first time Smart professor of law Jon Hanson lived on wheels, he was managing a restaurant and sharing a trailer with his high-school sweetheart, Kathleen. The newlyweds had bought the trailer cheap and persuaded their shop teacher to let them fix it up during class senior year. Neither planned to attend college. That changed after Hanson’s father died, when something jumped out among his father’s few possessions: his books. Applying to Rice on Kathleen’s suggestion, Hanson got in and soared, earning a fellowship for research in Europe. (They traveled in a camper van there, later taking their three kids across America in an RV.) Then on to Yale—he to the law school, and Kathleen to the college. By Hanson’s “2L” year, he’d coauthored his first law-review article, and was off to the scholarly races. At Harvard, Hanson stands out for connecting law to the mind sciences and for his approach to legal education. Teaching 1L torts, the three-time Sacks-Freund teaching-award winner bucks the case-churning norm to spend the semester drilling down on a handful—tracing how each case reveals a “web” of factors that have perpetuated inequities through the years. Last year, with Jacob Lipton, J.D. ’14,  he launched the “Systemic Justice Project” and two accompanying courses to allow students to plumb the sources of law-related social problems—and tackle problems of their own choosing. Students adore him. “Once you’ve encountered him, you cannot leave without being impacted,” says Ariel Eckblad, L ’16. So Hanson hopes. Law school, he argues, “ought to be a place” where students study the problems that brought  them there—and learn “the tools to take those problems on.” 

From the perspective of Harvard Yard—or Yale’s Old Campus, Swarthmore’s sloping lawn, or Stanford’s Main Quad—higher education presents a pleasing prospect: lively students; lovely buildings; an otherworldly serenity (most of the time); visible evidence of stability and strength, and the promise of progress and prosperity. 

But shift the view. Away from the elite, selective universities and colleges that host a single-digit percent of American higher-education seekers, the scene changes utterly: soaring public tuitions and student debt; abysmal rates of degree completion; queues for introductory classes and required courses, often taught by migratory adjuncts; fraught battles pitting liberal learning and education for citizenship against pragmatic focus on vocational training; a stagnant or falling rate of attainment among the population as a whole.

The distressing features of this much larger part of the higher-education industry have spawned a critical, even dire, literature that merits attention for its own sake—and because the issues echo in the elite stratum, too. And for those seeking entry to the top-tier institutions, the ever more frenzied admissions lottery has begun to provoke overdue skepticism. Herewith, an overview of some recent books with heft.

Michael M. Crow, former executive vice provost at Columbia, has since 2002 been president of Arizona State University (ASU), at the center of the public-university problem: rising demand to enroll, and plummeting state funds to pay the bills. He has written and spoken indefatigably about important issues. At the forefront is the need to educate the population at large, given that “our success in maintaining excellence in a relative handful of elite institutions does little to ensure our continued prosperity and competitiveness, especially if we stop to consider the disproportionately few students fortunate enough to be admitted to these top schools.” ASU measures itself “not by those whom we exclude, but rather by those whom we include.” He demands that legacy organizations (academic departments, for example) adapt to better meet modern, interdisciplinary challenges. And he champions “use-inspired research” of immediate, practical import (as opposed to, and alongside, curiosity-driven, basic inquiries).

In pursuit of these aims, Crow claims to have set ASU on a fresh trajectory, what he terms the “New American University,” and has helped to organize the “University Innovation Alliance” of 11 major public institutions: a coalition dedicated to the genuinely essential mission of “making quality college degrees accessible to a diverse body of students,” particularly “large numbers of first generation, low-income students.” In a new category of its annual rankings, U.S. News & World Report put ASU atop its “most innovative schools.”

Crow and William B. Dabars have pulled his ideas together in Designing the New American University (Johns Hopkins, $34.95), intended as an inspiration and a road map for quick-marching higher education into the twenty-first century. Given the urgency of the issues raised and Crow’s prominence in doing so, the result is, unfortunately, a missed opportunity.

The text alone will dismay lay readers, and tax even committed educators. Take one representative sample: “As the central nodes of an integrative discovery and commercialization network, research universities are key institutional actors in national systems of innovation, a concept that encompasses theoretical and analytical frameworks for the interrelationships between entities that determine the rate and direction of innovation.” The legislator eager to encourage growth may find her attention wandering, and it is hard to imagine how faculty members might respond to this vision.

But the substantive shortcomings matter more. For all their emphasis on the “design process” that is supposed to undergird the refashioning of universities, Crow and Dabars remain frustratingly silent on how to do so. The chapter on ASU during Crow’s tenure lists examples of departments joined in thematic and multidisciplinary entities, but offers little insight about either the results or other paths toward interfaculty collaboration. The larger question posed by “disruptive innovation” theorists Clayton M. Christensen and Michael B. Horn (see “Colleges in Crisis,” July-August 2011, page 40)—whether universities will be forced to separate their research, teaching, and civic-preparedness functions—is never addressed head-on. Should ASU be a research university, or is remaining so a legacy issue too politically costly to raise with faculty members and the public officials who control the purse strings? Finally, Designing the New American University simply has too little to say about teaching, which is at the core of ASU’s self-identified mandate to become “an adaptive knowledge enterprise in real time and at scale”—especially given its aggressive, extensive use of technologically based teaching, and its ambition to enroll 100,000 “online and distance-education degree-seeking students.”

The potential of online education itself is the subject of The End of College (Riverhead Books, $27.95), a journalistic tour of the evolving technology of teaching by Kevin Carey of the New America Foundation, a frequent contributor to The New York Times and other media. Carey’s title may suggest a fatal, and unwanted, disassembling of higher education, à la Christensen—and he is indeed critical of the high cost and poor quality of much undergraduate instruction. But his subtitle points in the more positive, or utopian, direction of “Creating the Future of Learning and the University of Everywhere.” In his UofE, unanchored from, say, desert Arizona, “education resources that have been scarce and expensive for centuries will be abundant and free” through digital pipelines. Admissions “will become an anachronism” because the UofE will be “open to everyone” on Earth. Learning this way “will be challenging,” with “no more ‘gentleman’s Cs,’ no grade inflation, no more slacking through adolescence.” And traditional credentials, based on course units and credit hours, “will fade into memory,” with two- and four-year degrees superseded by students accumulating “digital evidence of their learning throughout their lives.” 

Perhaps. One online pioneer, Udacity, has segued from providing massive open online course (MOOC) versions of college classes to fee-based instruction on computer programming, Coursera is venture-funded as a for-profit enterprise, and the Harvard-MIT edX online venture is certainly interested in generating revenue to offset the huge costs of creating its courses, at a minimum. (HBX, Harvard Business School’s separate online venture, is already fee-based, and poised to earn significant revenue on its own and through its new venture with the Extension School.)

Lots of those prospective learners around the world lack reliable Internet access, sufficient prior preparation, or the language skills to take advantage of the courses now on offer. As for rigor and integrity: in August, Harvard and MIT researchers identified a new form of cheating on edX courses, in which registrants create multiple accounts to get the right answers to online exercises—particularly in pursuit of an online credential. And thus far, acceptance of credentials from general online courses (as opposed to those nested within a distance-degree program, or a specifically vocational offering like Udacity’s “nanodegrees”) is nil.

But those caveats about today aside, Carey validly aims for the not-too-distant future. He is sharp on the Ph.D. culture that understandably prioritizes the creation of knowledge, but often sells teacher training woefully short, making “many American universities…grotesquely expensive and shamefully indifferent to undergraduate learning.” He appreciates the research enterprise, and in fact helpfully guides readers to Stanford, Carnegie Mellon, and elsewhere, to introduce pioneers in computing and cognitive science whose discoveries make it possible to envision major advances in learning.

He is vivid on “the fundamental difference between computers and every other kind of information technology that came before them”: the distinctions between earlier advances in information storage (books, film) and movement (postal-enabled correspondence courses, radio, TV), and, now, information processing, adaptive artificial intelligence, and so on. In the future, but not the indefinite future, online learning will go beyond recorded lectures and even the interactive exercises they now contain to something much better, he believes, finally addressing “the two most important aspects of college: how much it cost and how students learned”—both lamentably unaffected to date.

This vision, beyond the current crops of MOOCs, ultimately extends to transferring certification of learning—the transcript, the diploma—from institutions to the individual learners themselves, “[o]vercoming the college diploma’s tick-like embeddedness in the labor market.” The result, Carey thinks, will be remarkably positive for humanity, but not so much for the current “inefficient hybrid university model” whose hidden costs and internal subsidies are “a feature, not a bug.” Thus, back to the Christensen disruptions looming on the horizon.

The challenges that engage Crow and Carey resonate throughout higher education, although thus far with diminished force among the best-endowed, most competitively funded research universities and colleges. For earnest high-school students and their tense parents, the biggest concern is not elite institutions’ viability, but how to get a fat envelope or its e-mail equivalent.

By almost any metric, the process has become unhinged. As admissions rates plunge toward 5 percent (recent Stanford and Harvard classes) and the common application facilitates applying, students who formerly aimed for half a dozen schools routinely send checks off to a score. Standardized-test preparation is a multibillion-dollar industry—and obviously disadvantages lower-income applicants. No parent who knows children in a good prep school, or even a good suburban school system, is unaware of the phonied-up public-service “experience,” often paid for, the chief aim of which is buffing up an essay, world betterment be damned. The New York Times, knowing its readership, blogs about admissions, and is now sponsoring a for-fee conference about it. None of this brings credit to anyone, and none of it produces much of worth for society.

One response aims at the students and parents who find themselves mid-frenzy. Where You Go Is Not Who You’ll Be (Grand Central, $25), by Times columnist Frank Bruni, offers itself as an “antidote” to the mania. He skewers the “industrialization of the…admission process” with its “Ivory Tower porn” marketing and, to extend the metaphor, “fluffing” of candidates. For those whose efforts fall short, the “great, brutal culling” of rejection falls with the deadly weight of a “conclusive measure of a young person’s worth, a binding verdict on the life that he or she has led up until that point.” As if admission, and not the effect of the ensuing education, wherever obtained, were the point of the exercise—sort of like confusing childbirth with the subsequent decades of the new life itself.

Bruni is a reporter; much of what he does most usefully is report on the lives of people, in every walk of life, who went to less than gilt-edged colleges (some you never dreamed of), learned a great deal, and succeeded in engaging, productive, worthwhile lives. He also reveals his own collegiate secret: after prepping at Loomis Chaffee, he turned down Yale to enroll at the University of North Carolina (his siblings went to Amherst, Dartmouth, and Princeton)—and had an absolutely foundational, broadening education. He observes the virtue of pursuing a life that does not unfold in a straight line—resisting the false, and unfair, presumption that “life yields to meticulous recipes.” And he has intriguing things to say about an era of personal “brands” in which “everything imaginable is subdivided into microclimates of privilege and validation”—including higher education, “with needlessly hurtful consequences” that begin with deflated teenagers and their parents, and can end with utterly warped life priorities.

Lani Guinier looks beyond Bruni’s personal narratives and advice to the societal consequences of college admissions as the ultimate funneling device. In The Tyranny of the Meritocracy (Beacon, $24.95), the Boskey professor of law advances a broad argument about the definition of merit as social benefit rather than as individual accomplishment, and the role of inclusiveness in strengthening the civic fabric and better addressing human problems.

Focusing on the SAT as a proxy for credentials, and on admissions to selective schools (which she knows as student at Radcliffe and Yale Law, as professor, and as Yale College parent), she goes after the “testocracy, a twenty-first-century cult of standardized, quantifiable merit [that] values perfect scores but ignores character.” Its sway not only excludes those whose life circumstances and means disadvantage them in test-taking (see Bruni’s “fluffing”), but devalues “democratic merit,” an “incentive system that emphasizes not just the possession of individual talent and related personal success but also the ability to collaborate and the commitment to building a better society for more people.”

One need not accept the wider argument to acknowledge Guinier’s focus on the defects, from society’s perspective, of the Darwinian, quantitative admissions process: “Meaningful participation in a democratic society depends upon citizens who are willing to develop and utilize these three skills: collaborative problem solving, independent thinking, and creative leadership. But these skills bear no relationship to success in the testocracy.” Her examples of programs and teaching practices that elicit leadership skills and learning gains underscore the narrowness of rote testing, much grading, and many of the winnowing devices that make deluged admissions officers’ lives simpler—but perhaps deliver little else of value.

In a way, Guinier is attempting to return education to its first principles. In the final exam for a Harvard Law class, she permits (but does not require) students to work in small groups, modeling the way she has practiced law in collaboration with colleagues—a small instance of testing “as a learning opportunity rather than just a judging opportunity.” Her larger point is that an educational institution’s success “is measured by the skills and contributions of its graduates, not its admitted students.” It is distressing to have to be reminded that that is true value-added—the antithesis of admissions as personal branding.

Bruni begs students and parents to change their behavior within the application process. Guinier would reengineer the system itself. Both refocus on the aims of education, rather than the winner-takes-all admissions gauntlet, with its many individual losers and diminished prospects for social gain. What that education will look and feel like in elite institutions is relatively familiar, at least for the nonce. But for the vast majority of students in the vast majority of less selective schools, the terrain is shifting in face of economic pressure and technological opportunity, from Arizona to the U of Everywhere.  

The new dean of the Harvard Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences has been in his post for barely a hundred days, but now, after listening to his faculty and meeting with leaders from across Harvard’s diverse schools and constituencies, Francis “Frank” J. Doyle III is starting to form ideas about SEAS’s future.

What attracted him to Harvard, he says, was “a harmonic convergence” of circumstances: the prospect of expansionary growth in Allston; the ability to marshal resources for big initiatives due to “Harvard’s generous alums” (notably, large gifts from Steve Ballmer’77 and from John A. Paulson, M.B.A. ’80, after whom the school and Doyle’s deanship are now named); an “unusually creative, inquisitive, brilliant study body at the undergraduate and graduate ranks”; and faculty colleagues who are “luminaries in their fields,” but organized in a boundary-free way (SEAS lacks departments) so they “span a continuum of engineering and applied-sciences fields.” This, he says, gives many faculty members a “multidimensional character.”

Doyle himself is multidimensional: the former chair of chemical engineering at the University of California, Santa Barbara, trained in that field, but is now focused predominantly on biosystems engineering (he is on the verge of introducing, through a start-up, an artificial pancreas for the treatment of diabetes, on which he has been working for 20 years). He also teaches in the fields of controls (in its simplest iteration, think of a thermostat on the wall, regulating temperature) and dynamics: an applied math thrust. Off the clock, he referees high-school and college soccer matches; his enormous black watch, equipped with GPS, enables him to overlay the positional data on a map and see how well he is covering the field. 

The $400-million gift from Paulson, which Doyle learned about only after accepting the deanship, is much more than a financial resource, he says. “More powerful is the attention that it has brought to engineering as a priority mission here at Harvard. He has shone a giant spotlight on us that has attracted the attention” of students and colleagues not only at the University, but literally, around the world—a “tremendous benefit.”

Now, Doyle sees his job as “helping the faculty to realize the visions and dreams that they have in their individual areas.” He avers that he is “still gathering ideas and thoughts that will help to sculpt a good model for the school,” in order to frame some “grand interdisciplinary challenges that emerge from the faculty’s passion.” Certain of these initiatives will be anchored in Allston, where the school’s new building will begin to rise this coming summer, with a probable occupancy date in 2020. Others will remain in Cambridge.

Some foci, though, are already clear. Computer science, in which he will make 10 senior appointments in the years ahead, will grow in Allston. The department, strong already in the theoretical realm, looks to add expertise in applied directions like machine learning and optimization (developing efficient solutions for problems: a simple example is how to get from point A to point B in the shortest time). Bioengineering is another area poised for growth. Its presence within SEAS is relatively small, but “There is so much more we could do” working with Harvard Medical School, he says, particularly with the quantitative-leaning departments such as systems biology and the newly formed department of biomedical informatics. At a recent meeting with the systems-biology faculty, he reports, he was heartened to hear not only requests for collaboration but an offer: “What can we do for you?”

He sees enormous opportunity, as yet unrealized, for cross-school collaboration. SEAS already offers a collaborative degree with the Graduate School of Design, but Doyle says Harvard has “arguably the world’s leading business school, the world’s leading medical school, and the world’s leading law school,” all with faculty members eager to explore the potential of partnering with engineers. He points as one example to the critical mass of 239 faculty members throughout the University who are working in some way on the climate-change problem. In SEAS and the Faculty of Arts and Sciences alone, he sees a top-10 team of researchers poised to become one of the top three in the country. He envisions taking the efforts of this group to the next level, perhaps even to make it “the number one program in the country.”

As with climate change, “The nature of these big challenges in [engineering] research going forward,” he asserts, “is that they are going to touch on policy issues, legal issues, computing, data-privacy issues.” Personalized medicine, for example, an area that he and “a number of our bio-oriented faculty are interested in,” is bound to affect the healthcare discussion, get into legal issues of privacy, and have an entrepreneurial dimension, thereby involving the schools of business, medicine, law, and public health, in addition to SEAS. These are problems “that require rallying something on the order of a couple hundred people to tackle,” he explains. “We weren’t well-positioned” for these kinds of partnerships in the past. “Today we are.”

The jubilation that accompanied the brief flowering of the Arab Spring is long gone as its deadly aftermath—in Libya, Syria, and elsewhere—spirals into transcontinental turmoil. We face the prospect of a grim winter. Hundreds of thousands of desperate people in flight from those indiscriminate civil wars (not to mention the chaos in Iraq and Yemen, the turmoil in parts of Africa, and the ethnic oppression in Myanmar) face arduous hurdles in search of safety and security in Europe and elsewhere, while potential hosts negotiate rising xenophobia (intensified by the November attacks in Paris) and increasing desperation in the face of apparently unending need caused by the continuing migrant arrivals. What alternatives exist? How can this apparent impasse be better tackled? And how should we think about the recurring migration and refugee “crises” that present themselves with almost predictable regularity on every continent? We need a new paradigm for thinking about twenty-first-century “distress migration,” because the post-World War II framework that still governs our laws and procedures is, in practice, defunct.

The Syrian Catastrophe

There is no question about the gravity of the need. The plight of Syrians is most acute. The vast majority of that country’s population (recently estimated at more than 16 million people) are trapped in situations of deadly conflict: flattened cities, escalating civilian casualties (more than 340,000 as of early November, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights), and the disintegration of quotidian life. A substantial minority, more than four million Syrians, eke out lives of “temporary permanence” in underfunded, overcrowded, and increasingly squalid places of refuge in neighboring states, in and outside of actual refugee camps. The prospects of a speedy return home are nil—yet humanitarian interventions are predicated on that assumption, as evidenced by temporary shelter arrangements and makeshift medical care.

Drastic shortfalls in international aid and constantly growing numbers and need have led to increasingly inadequate situations for refugees in the region. In 2014, three years into the conflict, less than two-thirds of the humanitarian aid budget required to address basic needs inside Syria was received. The situation has since deteriorated further. The Regional Refugee and Resilience Plan, a regional planning and partnership platform developed by the five most affected neighboring countries in collaboration with the UN to cover immediate needs in and around Syria for 2015-2016, is less than half-funded. Resettlement, another indicator of international humanitarian solidarity, has also been shamefully low: by August 2015, only slightly more than 100,000 resettlement slots had been offered by countries willing to permanently accept refugees. That number was less than 3 percent of the size of the Syrian refugee population at the time—and less than 10 percent of those promised places have actually been utilized so far. In other words, efforts to address this predictable crisis at the source or in the region have been lackluster and ineffective.

The cost of inaction has been dramatic. One, perhaps unintended, consequence is that protection and aid have been disproportionately allocated to those who manage to leave the region, rather than to those trapped within it—a perverse incentive to migration if ever there was one. The migrants, for all their desperation and exposure to tragic hardship, are, perhaps surprisingly, a relatively privileged minority of at-risk Syrians: those with the physical ability, the financial means, the familial support, and, critically, the determination necessary to seek protection outside the region. It is well known in migration circles that those who flee abroad are typically not the most destitute or endangered.

But even the meager assistance made available has been slow in coming. Only after the startling image of drowned Syrian three-year-old Aylan Kurdi, pulled from the sea near the Turkish resort of Bodrum, went viral did this highly visible minority of refugees—including babes in arms, pregnant women, and young children—garner concerted high-level attention. The old device of using, or exploiting, child suffering to make a broader point worked.

A child's drawing depicts a boat carrying some 500 Eritrean and Somali migrants capsizing off the coast of Italy on October 7, 2013, with the loss of 300 lives.
Photograph by Alberto Pizzoli/AFP/Getty Images

The situation has highlighted the best and worst of Europe, as emergencies often do. Germany’s Angela Merkel has emerged as the surprising heroine of the humanitarian lobby, leveraging her country’s ever-present past and robust economy to welcome more than one million refugees and to stress the potential demographic dividend of a healthy, youthful workforce for an aging continent. Her nemesis, Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán, has been the spokesperson for the fundamentalist, nativist Europe. Echoing fearmongering religious extremism elsewhere, he has warned, “Europe’s Christian heritage is under threat.”

Unlike the threat Orbán referred to, the murderous attacks in Paris on a grim Friday, November 13, do pose a grave threat to Europe’s post-World War II universalist and humanitarian spirit. Traumatized citizens, witness to incomprehensible brutality and wanton disregard for human life within their midst, are easily recruited by European hatemongers intent on exploiting anxiety and fear to further a racist and nativist vision. This incitement of Islamophobia is part of the recruitment game plan of an expansive ISIS: the more Europe can be seen to hate Muslims, the more Muslims should accept that their future lies in running toward, not away from, the Caliphate. 

The notion that the magnitude of refugee arrival, on the other hand, poses any sort of threat to Europe’s future prosperity is laughable. The Syrians arriving represent less than 1 percent of the population of the European Union (EU), the world’s richest continent. In Lebanon, an incomparably poorer polity, every fourth inhabitant is now a Syrian refugee, and yet even that war-torn country is not at the brink of collapse. The current flow of refugees poses no objective threat to the future or prosperity of Europe.

This is not to suggest that short-term challenges are minor. Germany has absorbed hundreds of thousands of Syrian children into its school system, at huge expense. In Sweden, only 30 percent of the new refugee arrivals have been integrated into jobs or education so far. In Spain, following the plea of Pope Francis, hundreds of parishioners have welcomed Syrian refugees into their homes despite a still struggling economy and widespread unemployment. The fund of 2.4 billion euros allocated by the European Commission to frontline countries, including Greece and Italy, only partially alleviates the burden of coping with pressing human need.

 

Syrian children in a refugee-camp school, Kilis, Turkey, September 30, 2015
Photograph by Kerem Kocalar/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images

An Eroding Refugee Regime

Another cost of inaction is destabilization of the EU’s migration framework. The Dublin Convention regime, first adopted by EU member states in 2003 and regularly updated since then, is in significant measure suspended. This regime has been a linchpin of orderly EU asylum processing and management. It discourages asylum applicants from cherry-picking their preferred host state by forcing them to seek protection in the first safe country they reach. Most asylum seekers entering the EU hope to stay in Germany, Sweden, or the United Kingdom, but they typically reach those countries only after having first crossed through the border countries closest to their homes (Greece, Italy, Spain, Malta) and then the transit countries (Romania, Slovakia, Poland, Hungary, France, Austria). Dublin has thus enabled countries such as Germany, Sweden, and the UK to send asylum seekers back to the border countries for processing. This explains why so many asylum seekers destroy their passports or other travel documents: to conceal their routes and reduce the chances of being sent back to their entry point.

But as of November, Germany and Sweden were no longer returning asylum applicants to Greece, Italy, or other first-entry points. The Schengen Agreement, which since 1995 has effected a movement area without border control or physical barriers within continental Europe, is also in tatters. Razor-wire fences now proliferate between eastern European countries. Border checks have been reinstituted at many crossing points.

The Wider Migration Emergency

It is tempting but misleading to think of the Middle Eastern emigration as a circumscribed crisis. Certainly, as Jean-Claude Juncker, president of the European Commission, put it in his 2015 State of the Union speech to the European Parliament in September, “This is not the time for business as usual.” But the problem is deeper and wider than he implied. The current European situation is one episode in an enduring steady state of emergency distress migration that has global roots and reach.

Massive forced migration in sub-Saharan Africa, Southeast Asia, and both within and across Central America and the Caribbean Basin has been a constant feature of the recent past. The so-called “surge” of Central American children and their families across the U.S. border, making global headlines during the summer of 2014, was—as President Obama claimed—a “humanitarian crisis.”

Somali refugees wait at the Sayyid camp south of Mogadishu, October 30, 2014.
Photograph by Mohamed Abdiwahab/AFP/Getty Images

But what he failed to note was that this crisis had been under way for at least a decade, as intense drug wars, gang violence, and failing infrastructure have turned Honduras and El Salvador into the murder capitals of the world. The “crisis” includes the distress migration of Somalis to Kenya, of Sudanese and South Sudanese to Egypt, of Zimbabweans to South Africa, of Eritreans to Israel and Italy, of Libyans, Iraqis, and Afghans to multiple destinations. These forced movements have contributed to the current official UN tally of 19. 2 million “registered” (officially certified) refugees with UN identity documents—a figure that does not include the millions more who are waiting to be registered, the millions who are not “of concern” to the UN but are nevertheless internationally displaced, and the even larger numbers who are “internally displaced persons” within their own countries.

A Broken International System

We are witnessing tragic symptoms of a now-broken international system intended to ensure that those who need to can safely migrate to a place where they can get protection. The system we inherited from World War II addressed the tension between the right of sovereign states to control the entry of non-nationals and individuals’ need for international sanctuary from their own barbarous or collapsed governments. It established mechanisms—national, regional, and international—not only for making protection available, but also for recruiting foreign workers; reuniting divided families; promoting short- and medium-term stays (for study, entrepreneurship, post- college exploration, and cultural exchanges); and for granting long- term legal immigration status, in many cases leading to citizenship in the new country.

The factors that promoted support for that postwar system—political advantages for Western countries in providing sanctuary to refugees from communist governments; economic advantages in recruiting large numbers of formerly colonized unskilled workers to fill unpopular jobs; the social benefits of ensuring that migrant workers were joined by their families and invested economically and culturally in their new countries—are all now under attack by countervailing forces. The most important of these factors is the hostile domestic reaction to the very large flows of distress migrants caused by growing and radical global inequality.

Such inequality extends beyond economic insecurity—it encompasses the lack of access to physical safety, civil order, and the social and cultural attributes of a full and rewarding life that everyone aspires to. The glaring inequality is more evident than ever before, thanks to the omnipresence of global media and information technology. The relationship between inequality and powerful migration pressures has been made equally evident. Finally, news coverage and political attention have highlighted the irrationality and inefficiency of our outdated legal and administrative system of migration management—a system now manifestly premised on incoherent dichotomies and false assumptions.

The most fundamental dichotomy lies at the very root of modern migration law, separating bona fide “refugees” with a “well-founded fear of persecution” under the 1951 UN Convention on the Status of Refugees, from spontaneous “economic migrants” seeking to take advantage of greater prosperity and opportunity outside their home countries. The former are considered legitimate recipients of international protection, the latter unlawful border-crossers.

But for more than a decade, migration experts within the United Nations, in the immigration and justice ministries of many countries, and civil-society organizations such as the Women’s Refugee Commission, the International Rescue Committee, and Human Rights Watch, have acknowledged the artificiality of this dichotomy, given the reality of “mixed migration”—distress migration prompted by multiple, interconnected factors, including survival fears and economic desperation. As a result, artificial political decisions distinguish countries that are “refugee”-producing from those that are not, in ways that confound sense or sensible response. For instance, at the moment Syria is and Sudan is not, Afghanistan sometimes is, Eritrea is not, Iraq may be, Somalia usually is not. Individual asylum applicants are rarely able to overcome these broad-brush and arbitrary classifications, so at the moment there is a brisk trade in forged Syrian passports. Millions are spent in determination proceedings to explore whether someone is indeed a “real refugee” or an “illegal migrant,” as if this were an immutable biological fact.

Moreover, the current system simultaneously blocks lawful means of escape for refugees and punishes irregular entry methods. Lawful migration has become nigh impossible because the moment a country spirals into conflict or civil war, Western governments impose visas on nationals of that country—visas that in practice are never granted, so the only way to get a visa to facilitate border crossing is to buy a forged document with a visa stamped on it. As a result, a flourishing industry of forged and false documents develops—and with it, a lucrative and often brutally extortionate people-moving industry that exploits legal loopholes, corrupts border guards, and uses unsupervised (even if dangerous) entry points to deliver border crossings. But the operators of official carriers caught transporting passengers with false documents into new countries are fined heavily by those countries, while the hapless passengers are denied entry and forced back to where they started; the carriers are legally compelled to do this, and bear the cost.

Thus bona fide refugees are denied legal exit to a place of safety. At the same time, official carriers are required to become experts on detecting forged passports and visas to save their companies from the fines: they become de facto immigration officers, but immigration officers with a vested financial interest in erring on the side of caution to exclude refugees whose documents they find confusing or unclear.

The higher the obstacles to escape, the greater the price of securing it, ensuring humanitarian disasters. Destruction of smuggler vessels and aggressive patrolling of direct escape routes (whether via the Mediterranean or the Mexico/U.S. border) generate itineraries with higher likelihood of death or injury, more cost, and more dependence on unscrupulous “guides.”

In short, our current system ensures that refugees arrive penniless and that the journey to safety exacerbates the preexisting trauma from war. Nor does arrival in a destination state bring hardship to an end. “Distress migrants” who enter with false documents or concealed in car trunks or trucks are regularly detained. Children whose ages are disputed often end up in adult jails, where overcrowding and harsh conditions are routine. In the United States, even women traveling with young children are detained for weeks on end.

Toward a New Migration System

What would the elements of a reformed migration system look like? The starting point is the urgency of preventing mass atrocities and the spiraling decline into endemic violence—a seemingly utopian aspiration at the moment, but in reality an essential precondition for sustainable recalibration of current global migration. No reformed migration system can solve the humanitarian problems caused by pervasive brutal conflict. Migration management depends on majority populations having prospects of hope at home, which in turn depend on negotiated solutions to end the conflict or violence that precipitates flight: Syria’s barbarous civil war, the murderous criminal violence in Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Mexico, the endemic lawlessness and destitution in Somalia, the religious and ethnic anti-Rohingya brutality in Myanmar.

This imperative brings with it another set of obligations, because ending acute violence is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for sustained peace and public security. Humanitarian interventions to rebuild societies riven with violence must be coupled with long-term investment in development: creating infrastructure, delivering public services, supporting economic reconstruction, social networks, and community engagement. Growing regional inequality—especially in an age of hyperconnected publics and increasingly pervasive social media—will continue to generate unstoppable migration in the absence of tangible prospects for dignified personal survival. Robust development, rather than ever-escalating militarization of borders, should be considered an essential component not only of any plausible peace treaty but of any migration-control program, and should be marketed as such to reluctant, fearful publics.

Some element of distress migration and urgent need for foreign relocation will endure. It makes little sense to address this only after refugees arrive at the destination border, physically and psychologically depleted and having been forced to hand over all their savings to smugglers. Yet this is what our current asylum system does: it largely allocates protection only once someone has made it to the border of a safe country. Instead, we need to intervene before people spontaneously embark on dangerous cross-continental voyages. Vigorous, generous, and transparent resettlement programs that preemptively move victims of conflict from refugee camps or informal settlements in adjacent countries to destination states are the most effective and humane way to address this undisputed need for protection.

But such official resettlement is sustainable only if it is a joint endeavor, agreed upon by countries that are willing to host relocated refugees and share the responsibility for doing so with others in their region. The current intransigence of relatively prosperous EU member states such as France, the UK, Slovenia, Hungary, and the Czech Republic vitiates this sort of collective humanitarian endeavor and unreasonably leaves the protection “burden” only to the exemplary few (Germany and Sweden at present). The EU could support a more vigorous and equitable resettlement program among member states by creating incentives for compliance, such as joint skill-training and employment-generation projects. But these measures depend on the prior political will of the member states themselves, a critical element not now in evidence.

 Border Patrol agents checking Honduran immigrant Melida Patricio Castro's birth certificate for her two-year-old daughter in 2014

Photograph by John Moore/Getty Images

Acknowledging up front that hundreds of thousands of people urgently need to relocate in the face of a conflict like the Syrian war, and creating a system for managing this reality, requires powerful leadership and a vigorous partnership among civil society, progressive municipal authorities, and federal and regional bodies. In this context, the U.S. government’s proposal to increase the country’s overseas-refugee-resettlement quota from 70,000 to 100,000 betrays a dramatic failure of vision and leadership. The same can be said for the EU’s proposal to offer only 160,000 resettlement slots for refugees already in Italy or Greece. Millions in Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt, and Turkey have waited patiently for more than three years for international help that has not been forthcoming. Now they are voting with their feet. Given the failure to change the incentives for distress migrants, for smugglers and traffickers, and for reluctant regional partners, hundreds of thousands of traumatized people will continue to leave their troubled homelands and take a chance at reaching a better life in Europe through hazardous and extortionate routes. We would all do the same.

Both a prompt end to the murderous Middle East conflicts and generous and large-scale economic development in the area are, for now, remote prospects. What other revisions to the current international migration architecture are necessary? I suggest three.

First, in addition to much more generous resettlement of distress migrants, we need more capacious categories for legal migration—for family reunification, for education and skill-training visas, for work permits and for opportunities for entrepreneurs, small and large, to access places of safety and contribute to their economies from a position of confidence and strength rather than as destitute supplicants. Hundreds of thousands of hardworking and competent people would qualify, if the authorities in Western states had the courage and vision to enlarge their legal migration categories, rather than place most of their resources in futile deterrence, punitive detention, and post facto humanitarian assistance. Priority in these entry categories should be given to “distress migrants,” a category that should replace the now unworkable distinction between “legal” refugee and economic but “illegal” forced migrant.

Second, high-quality, well-funded systems need to be put in place for the most vulnerable: survivors of trafficking, children separated from their families, and migrants with urgent health needs (physical or psychological). Short-term investment in quality legal representation, skilled care, and sustained support will generate dividends down the line—in terms of employability, inclusion, and loyalty to host states rather than to dangerous and destructive alternatives.

Finally, and most critically urgent, making borders more permeable, not less, will ensure that people can come and go with more ease, moving to safety when they need to but returning home when this seems feasible, without the current fear that a decision to return home is irrevocable.

Without energetic steps to institute these changes, the prospects for the coming winter, and beyond, are indeed grim.  

Students referred to her as formidable, using the French pronunciation. Friends called her “Ropy”—“Radcliffe’s Only Professor.” But Cora Du Bois, in fact, wasHarvard’s first tenured female professor in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, thanks to a bequest that linked the two institutions long before they officially merged: a gift to Radcliffe College to hire an eminent woman scholar to hold the Zemurray Stone Radcliffe professorship at Harvard. (From 1949 to 1954, for a trial period without tenure, medievalist Helen Maud Cam held the post.) Though her appointment in 1954 was in anthropology at Harvard, Du Bois was expected to fulfill obligations at Radcliffe, too.

As the first woman to inhabit a professorial office in the Peabody Museum, Du Bois by her very presence produced small cracks in what had essentially been a century-long male club of eminent anthropologists. She liked to smoke, which required descending from her fourth-floor office to the official smoking room in the basement where she joined her male cohort. Integrating the Faculty Club was more difficult: initially, Du Bois had to enter by a back door and dine apart from the main dining room reserved for men.

She was used to gender imbalances. In World War II, recruited into the Office of Strategic Services as a Southeast Asia expert, she rose to direct research and analysis for its headquarters in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) and worked closely with mostly male intelligence and military officers, including Lord Louis Mountbatten, the British supreme commander. (Two subordinates, Julia McWilliams [Child] and Paul Child, became lifelong friends.) After the war, she joined the State Department’s office of intelligence research as chief of its South East Asia branch—again, as a lone woman.

Her upbringing had not prepared her for these “first woman” positions: her Swiss entrepreneur father and first-generation German-American mother undervalued her intellect, curiosity, and ambition. But an inheritance enabled her to attend Barnard, where an anthropology course taught by Franz Boas and Ruth Benedict, assisted by Margaret Mead, changed her life. Despite Boas’s “mystifying” lectures on Eskimo language and myths and Benedict’s “painful stammer and curiously inappropriate dresses, I was snagged,” she recalled. In Benedict’s lectures she discovered “a vision of the human condition and world view that contrasted with the culture-bound history to which I had been exposed.”

After graduate study at Berkeley, she returned east in 1935 to work at the Boston Psychopathic Hospital and with Henry A. Murray at Harvard. Along with Benedict, Mead, and a few others, she became a leader in the 1930’s “culture and personality” movement that explored the potential impact of culture on the psyche. Two years of fieldwork on a remote island of Indonesia, where she lived alone with former headhunters, resulted in a comprehensive ethnography, The People of Alor (1944), that cemented her reputation as a pioneer in psychological anthropology and thrust her into government service. Asian specialists knew of her work, and after Pearl Harbor, Du Bois was swiftly summoned to Washington, D.C.

“It behooves us to…use our new powers with judicious and constructive wisdom.”

By now a self-made woman with a commanding personality to match her keen intellect, she became famous for acerbic cables (as she was later renowned for trenchant remarks on student papers). She was equally blunt at the State Department in trying to educate government and military officials about the rapid changes under way in South and Southeast Asia after the collapse of European colonialism. “The US is now heir to whatever is left of western influence in the area,” she said in a 1949 speech to the U.S. Army’s Strategic Intelligence Division. “It behooves us to approach this region with more knowledge than is generally current in the US on the Far East and even more importantly to use our new powers with judicious and constructive wisdom.” But Cold War politics prevailed and the United States became embroiled in Vietnam.

World War II, meanwhile, had changed her orientation to anthropology. At Harvard, Du Bois focused on processes of sociocultural change and incorporated her broad expertise into seminars and interdisciplinary courses. “Peoples and Cultures of India” and “Peoples and Cultures of Southeast Asia: The Buddhist World and the Islamic World” introduced students to geography, linguistics, and the prehistory of these diverse regions as well as to contemporary history, economics, politics, religion, philosophy, and kinship.

Despite her courses’ relevance to current events, she refrained from political discussions with students about U.S. involvement in Vietnam. Having given advice in the State Department, she had moved on. But when the CIA sought prospective researchers in Southeast Asia, she advised colleagues privately that anthropological research should never be used as a cover for intelligence work.

She stood by the same principle when leading the American Association of Anthropology and the Association of Asian Studies during that turbulent period, and in her research in the 1960s and ’70s. Her main project involved a 12-year study of Bhubaneswar, an ancient Hindu temple town becoming a capital for the new Indian state of Odisha. Disciplines from anthropology and sociology to religion and urban planning were represented, and doctoral advisees included both Indian and American students. Tough, outspoken, principled, but always compassionate, Du Bois was challenging to some, a guardian angel to others.  

Among the reasons why the United States might be considered exceptional, there’s one that puts it in unexpected company: along with China, Iran, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia, it ranks as one of the world’s top executioners. Because most countries have abolished capital punishment, the U.S. retention of the death penalty is anomalous, especially among Western, industrialized nations. What explains this difference?

“The death penalty, in the larger scheme of history, is normal,” writes Moshik Temkin, associate professor of public policy at the Kennedy School. Rather than ask why capital punishment still exists, he suggests, look at history from a different angle: given abolition’s rapid spread among other democratic countries, why has it failed to take hold in the United States? His recent paper, “The Great Divergence,” takes a transatlantic approach, comparing France—a relative newcomer to abolition, in 1981—to America.

In France, the end of the death penalty resulted from a top-down political process. Robert Badinter, a criminal-justice lawyer nicknamed “Monsieur Abolition” for his activism, convinced Socialist Party leader François Mitterand to take up the cause in the lead-up to the 1981 presidential election. Once victorious, Mitterand named Badinter minister of justice, and within five months pushed a successful vote on the issue through the legislature. Abolition was “contingent on the actions of a select few elites on the political left,” writes Temkin, who notes that the death penalty enjoyed wide popular support among the French people and the media. These select elites framed the vote as a matter of principle rather than policy: as a choice about what to do with the worst criminals—those whose guilt was undoubted, who committed horrific crimes, and who showed no signs of repentance or rehabilitation. Subsequently, abolition was solidified when France signed international treaties that framed capital punishment as a human-rights violation. Today, abolition is a precondition for entering the European Union—and, Temkin says, because secession from that body seems “unthinkable,” that forecloses any possibility of the death penalty’s return.

But Americans are reluctant to relinquish national sovereignty under international agreements, he says, and “don’t use the language of human rights to analyze our own politics.” Instead, they tend to think about the death penalty in civil-rights or constitutional terms. National decision-making about this matter, Temkin explains, “has been handed over, collectively, to the Supreme Court.” Opponents have attacked capital punishment at its weakest legal points, while supporting state-by-state abolition. Beyond a brief moratorium on executions in the 1970s, the lasting result has been regulation and restriction. In a series of decisions between 2002 and 2008, the Court ruled that juvenile offenders, people with certain intellectual disabilities, and those convicted of non-murder offenses could not be put to death. These developments have convinced some observers that the death penalty itself will soon be declared unconstitutional, but Temkin remains skeptical. “My argument, based on the history, is that this is not a track that leads to the sort of permanent abolition we see in other parts of the world.”

“Abolition, as a cause, doesn’t have a champion.”

American arguments against the death penalty tend to be procedural, focusing on breakdowns in the criminal justice system: racial disparities, botched executions, exonerations due to DNA evidence, and the high cost. Abolitionists do not think moral arguments will be politically effective, Temkin reports, so “What they want to do is bring down the number of people executed to as close to zero as possible. And that’s a very pragmatic approach.”

But such “reformist” arguments cannot lead to lasting abolition, he argues. “In a similar way, ” he writes, “anti-slavery activists of the antebellum era could not be considered abolitionists if they claimed that slavery was inefficient, randomly applied, brutal, and racially discriminatory, but neglected to mention that as a matter of principle it was immoral for one man to own another man as property.”

Today, he says, the death penalty is “the orphan in political life,” lacking a grassroots movement to pressure politicians: “Abolition, as a cause, doesn’t have a champion.” The public revisits the issue occasionally—often when there’s a high-profile, controversial execution—but not since the 1988 presidential race between George H.W. Bush and Michael Dukakis has the question been debated in the national political arena.

Late October brought a brief flurry of interest. The editor-in-chief of the Marshall Project, a news nonprofit focused on criminal justice, opened an interview with President Obama by asking point blank whether he opposed capital punishment. “I have not traditionally been opposed to the death penalty in theory, but in practice it’s deeply troubling,” the president answered. Later that week, a New Hampshire voter asked presidential candidate Hillary Clinton her opinion on abolition—she opposes it—leading rival Democrats to declare their own views, in favor. Still, public attention has centered mostly on the Supreme Court; its current docket includes a number of death-penalty-related cases.

Yet capital punishment should be regarded fundamentally as a political matter, not solely the purview of legal experts, Temkin argues; it’s a question grounded in the relationship between people and their government, and the power government is authorized to wield over an individual. “Whatever one thinks of the death penalty,” he says, “I do think that if you’re an American, you should probably think it belongs in the public conversation—and not just in the New York Times op-ed pages. It’s a topic that belongs to everybody.”

In January 1745, Caleb and Phebe Lyman Strong, of Northampton, Massachusetts, brought their only son for baptism to their pastor, Jonathan Edwards—America’s greatest theologian. For the baby, Edwards’s touch symbolized transmission of a legacy of rectitude and humility. The boy, descended from church founders, became known locally as “Deacon”; his later titles included U.S. senator and governor of the Commonwealth.

His parents sent teenaged Caleb to York, Maine, to prepare for Harvard with an alumnus, Reverend Samuel Moody. After graduating in 1764, Strong served as temporary preacher in churches near his home, but then turned to the law, despite a bout of smallpox that left him nearly blind. Apprenticed to a leading attorney, he relied on family to read him law texts, becoming a great listener. In 1772, he earned admission to the bar.

That year he publicly declared his commitment to Christ, affirming his lifelong religious devotion. Northampton townsmen promptly elected the 27-year-old as a selectman—an unusual mark of trust that proved emblematic of Strong’s career as one of the most reliable leaders in the independence movement.

When Britain’s “Intolerable Acts” closed Boston in 1774, galvanizing the colony’s resistance, Strong’s popularity brought election to Northampton’s Committee of Correspondence, Safety, and Inspection. Townsmen also sent him to the legislature and, in 1779, to the convention that wrote the state’s constitution, where fellow delegates put him on the four-man drafting committee. But Strong declined election to the Continental Congress and the state supreme court; he needed to support his growing family by practicing law.

Appointed state prosecuting attorney in Northampton, Strong strengthened his reputation in the Commonwealth’s largest county. He focused on property law—including defending people of color suing for their freedom. Like most attorneys, in 1786-87 he opposed Shays’ Rebellion, a debtors’ uprising to block foreclosures. After its suppression, legislators chose him for the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, where his support for the “Connecticut Compromise,” whereby large states agreed to equal representation for all states in the Senate, helped break a critical impasse. But he left the Convention when his wife fell ill, never signing the Constitution.

When Massachusetts representatives convened to ratify or reject the Constitution in 1788, Strong provided crucial support for national government. A seaboard delegate told him, “You can do more with that honest face of yours than I can with all my legal knowledge.” After ratification, state legislators elected him to the new U.S. Senate, where he helped shape the Judiciary and Naturalization Acts, and the national bank. Reelected in 1792—Vice President Adams declared, “[Massachusetts] cannot do better…he is an excellent head and heart”—he resigned in 1796 to resume legal practice.

By now leaders throughout the state recognized Strong’s capacity to inspire confidence among sharply divided men. In 1800, a fractured Federalist Party nominated him for governor, though some objected “to the choice of a man who lives a hundred miles from salt water, whose wife wears blue stockings, and who, with his household, calls hasty pudding luxury.” He was “too frugal,” and “rides down to Boston in the stage.” But the eloquent partisan Fisher Ames ridiculed such “childish, tattling objections.” Strong, he testified, “is a man of sense and merit, and made and set apart to be a Governor,” notwithstanding his “modesty.”

The contest against another Harvardian, Jeffersonian Elbridge Gerry, was decided by just 100 votes. (In Northampton, Strong won 268 to 2 .) In victory, he was conciliatory: when, during his inaugural parade, he spied the Jeffersonian Samuel Adams standing at his doorway, Strong left his carriage and, removing his hat, walked over to shake the old revolutionary’s hand. Strong’s refusal to dismiss officials based on party won over some Jeffersonians; Federalists valued his staunch support for education and religion. Reelected annually until 1807, in defeat he returned to his practice.

His leadership resumed when Federalists called on him to block state support for President Madison’s warlike policy toward Britain in 1812. After narrowly beating his old rival Gerry, Strong refused to cede control of the Massachusetts militia to the federal government for an attack on Canada, but allowed its use to defend the state against British raids. With the war’s end in 1815, he retired for good.

Moderation, common sense, and an understanding of human frailties, not brilliance, distinguished Strong’s leadership. He supported the death penalty, but as an attorney led an unprecedented popular petition campaign to spare an Irish immigrant client, convicted of sodomy, arguing the penalty was too severe. As governor he showed mercy by granting pardons or, when a young Hindu was to hang for rape, by deporting the youth instead. In an era of fierce partisanship—sometimes leading to fatal duels—Strong’s modesty and understanding won the trust of leaders who did not trust each other. A senatorial successor, Henry Cabot Lodge, wrote that “though he was a leader in a very dogmatic party, he always expressed himself temperately, and in a fashion which gave offense to no man.” Strong supported Federalist principles, but “never pushed them in practice to a dangerous distance.”

In August 1912, Harvard president emeritus Charles William Eliot addressed the Harvard Club of San Francisco on a subject close to his heart: racial purity. It was being threatened, he declared, by immigration. Eliot was not opposed to admitting new Americans, but he saw the mixture of racial groups it could bring about as a grave danger. “Each nation should keep its stock pure,” Eliot told his San Francisco audience. “There should be no blending of races.”

Eliot’s warning against mixing races—which for him included Irish Catholics marrying white Anglo-Saxon Protestants, Jews marrying Gentiles, and blacks marrying whites—was a central tenet of eugenics. The eugenics movement, which had begun in England and was rapidly spreading in the United States, insisted that human progress depended on promoting reproduction by the best people in the best combinations, and preventing the unworthy from having children.

The former Harvard president was an outspoken supporter of another major eugenic cause of his time: forced sterilization of people declared to be “feebleminded,” physically disabled, “criminalistic,” or otherwise flawed. In 1907, Indiana had enacted the nation’s first eugenic sterilization law. Four years later, in a paper on “The Suppression of Moral Defectives,” Eliot declared that Indiana’s law “blazed the trail which all free states must follow, if they would protect themselves from moral degeneracy.”

He also lent his considerable prestige to the campaign to build a global eugenics movement. He was a vice president of the First International Eugenics Congress, which met in London in 1912 to hear papers on “racial suicide” among Northern Europeans and similar topics. Two years later, Eliot helped organize the First National Conference on Race Betterment in Battle Creek, Michigan.

None of these actions created problems for Eliot at Harvard, for a simple reason: they were well within the intellectual mainstream at the University. Harvard administrators, faculty members, and alumni were at the forefront of American eugenics—founding eugenics organizations, writing academic and popular eugenics articles, and lobbying government to enact eugenics laws. And for many years, scarcely any significant Harvard voices, if any at all, were raised against it.

Harvard’s role in the movement was in many ways not surprising. Eugenics attracted considerable support from progressives, reformers, and educated elites as a way of using science to make a better world. Harvard was hardly the only university that was home to prominent eugenicists. Stanford’s first president, David Starr Jordan, and Yale’s most acclaimed economist, Irving Fisher, were leaders in the movement. The University of Virginia was a center of scientific racism, with professors like Robert Bennett Bean, author of such works of pseudo-science as the 1906 American Journal of Anatomy article,“Some Racial Peculiarities of the Negro Brain.”

But in part because of its overall prominence and influence on society, and in part because of its sheer enthusiasm, Harvard was more central to American eugenics than any other university. Harvard has, with some justification, been called the “brain trust” of twentieth-century eugenics, but the role it played is little remembered or remarked upon today. It is understandable that the University is not eager to recall its part in that tragically misguided intellectual movement—but it is a chapter too important to be forgotten.In part because of its overall prominence and influence on society, and in part because of its sheer enthusiasm, Harvard was more central to American eugenics than any other university.

Eugenics emerged in England in the late 1800s, when Francis Galton, a half cousin of Charles Darwin, began studying the families of some of history’s greatest thinkers and concluded that genius was hereditary. Galton invented a new word—combining the Greek for “good” and “genes”—and launched a movement calling for society to take affirmative steps to promote “the more suitable races or strains of blood.” Echoing his famous half cousin’s work on evolution, Galton declared that “what Nature does blindly, slowly, and ruthlessly, man may do providently, quickly, and kindly.”

Eugenics soon made its way across the Atlantic, reinforced by the discoveries of Gregor Mendel and the new science of genetics. In the United States, it found some of its earliest support among the same group that Harvard had: the wealthy old families of Boston. The Boston Brahmins were strong believers in the power of their own bloodlines, and it was an easy leap for many of them to believe that society should work to make the nation’s gene pool as exalted as their own.

Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.—A.B. 1829, M.D. ’36, LL.D. ’80, dean of Harvard Medical School, acclaimed writer, and father of the future Supreme Court justice—was one of the first American intellectuals to espouse eugenics. Holmes, whose ancestors had been at Harvard since John Oliver entered with the class of 1680, had been writing about human breeding even before Galton. He had coined the phrase “Boston Brahmin” in an 1861 book in which he described his social class as a physical and mental elite, identifiable by its noble “physiognomy” and “aptitude for learning,” which he insisted were “congenital and hereditary.”

Holmes believed eugenic principles could be used to address the nation’s social problems. In an 1875 article in The Atlantic Monthly, he gave Galton an early embrace, and argued that his ideas could help to explain the roots of criminal behavior. “If genius and talent are inherited, as Mr. Galton has so conclusively shown,” Holmes wrote, “why should not deep-rooted moral defects…show themselves…in the descendants of moral monsters?”

As eugenics grew in popularity, it took hold at the highest levels of Harvard. A. Lawrence Lowell, who served as president from 1909 to 1933, was an active supporter. Lowell, who worked to impose a quota on Jewish students and to keep black students from living in the Yard, was particularly concerned about immigration—and he joined the eugenicists in calling for sharp limits. “The need for homogeneity in a democracy,” he insisted, justified laws “resisting the influx of great numbers of a greatly different race.”

Lowell also supported eugenics research. When the Eugenics Record Office, the nation’s leading eugenics research and propaganda organization, asked for access to Harvard records to study the physical and intellectual attributes of alumni fathers and sons, he readily agreed. Lowell had a strong personal interest in eugenics research, his secretary noted in response to the request.

The Harvard faculty contained some of nation’s most influential eugenics thinkers, in an array of academic disciplines. Frank W. Taussig, whose 1911 Principles of Economics was one of the most widely adopted economics textbooks of its time, called for sterilizing unworthy individuals, with a particular focus on the lower classes. “The human race could be immensely improved in quality, and its capacity for happy living immensely increased, if those of poor physical and mental endowment were prevented from multiplying,” he wrote. “Certain types of criminals and paupers breed only their kind, and society has a right and a duty to protect its members from the repeated burden of maintaining and guarding such parasites.”

Harvard’s geneticists gave important support to Galton’s fledgling would-be science. Botanist Edward M. East, who taught at Harvard’s Bussey Institution, propounded a particularly racial version of eugenics. In his 1919 book Inbreeding and Outbreeding: Their Genetic and Sociological Significance, East warned that race mixing would diminish the white race, writing: “Races have arisen which are as distinct in mental capacity as in physical traits.” The simple fact, he said, was that “the negro is inferior to the white.”

East also sounded a biological alarm about the Jews, Italians, Asians, and other foreigners who were arriving in large numbers. “The early settlers came from stock which had made notable contributions to civilization,” he asserted, whereas the new immigrants were coming “in increasing numbers from peoples who have impressed modern civilization but lightly.” There was a distinct possibility, he warned, that a “considerable part of these people are genetically undesirable.”

In his 1923 book, Mankind at the Crossroads, East’s pleas became more emphatic. The nation, he said, was being overrun by the feebleminded, who were reproducing more rapidly than the general population. “And we expect to restore the balance by expecting the latter to compete with them in the size of their families?” East wrote. “No! Eugenics is sorely needed; social progress without it is unthinkable….”

East’s Bussey Institution colleague William Ernest Castle taught a course on “Genetics and Eugenics,” one of a number of eugenics courses across the University. He also published a leading textbook by the same name that shaped the views of a generation of students nationwide. Genetics and Eugenics not only identified its author as “Professor of Zoology in Harvard University,” but was published by Harvard University Press and bore the “Veritas” seal on its title page, lending the appearance of an imprimatur to his strongly stated views.

In Genetics and Eugenics, Castle explained that race mixing, whether in animals or humans, produced inferior offspring. He believed there were superior and inferior races, and that “racial crossing” benefited neither. “From the viewpoint of a superior race there is nothing to be gained by crossing with an inferior race,” he wrote. “From the viewpoint of the inferior race also the cross is undesirable if the two races live side by side, because each race will despise individuals of mixed race and this will lead to endless friction.”

Castle also propounded the eugenicists’ argument that crime, prostitution, and “pauperism” were largely due to “feeblemindedness,” which he said was inherited. He urged that the unfortunate individuals so afflicted be sterilized or, in the case of women, “segregated” in institutions during their reproductive years to prevent them from having children.

Like his colleague East, Castle was deeply concerned about the biological impact of immigration. In some parts of the country, he said, the “good human stock” was dying out—and being replaced by “a European peasant population.” Would “this new population be a fit substitute for the old Anglo-Saxon stock?” Castle’s answer: “Time alone will tell.”

One of Harvard’s most prominent psychology professors was a eugenicist who pioneered the use of questionable intelligence testing. Robert M. Yerkes, A.B. 1898, Ph.D. ’02, published an introductory psychology textbook in 1911 that included a chapter on “Eugenics and Mental Life.” In it, he explained that “the cure for race deterioration is the selection of the fit as parents.”

Yerkes, who taught courses with such titles as “Educational Psychology, Heredity, and Eugenics” and “Mental Development in the Race,” developed a now-infamous intelligence test that was administered to 1.75 million U.S. Army enlistees in 1917. The test purported to find that more than 47 percent of the white test-takers, and even more of the black ones, were feebleminded. Some of Yerkes’s questions were straightforward language and math problems, but others were more like tests of familiarity with the dominant culture: one asked, “Christy Mathewson is famous as a: writer, artist, baseball player, comedian.” The journalist Walter Lippmann, A.B. 1910, Litt.D. ’44, said the results were not merely inaccurate, but “nonsense,” with “no more scientific foundation than a hundred other fads, vitamins,” or “correspondence courses in will power.” The 47 percent feebleminded claim was an absurd result unless, as Harvard’s late professor of geology Stephen Jay Gould put it, the United States was “a nation of morons.” But the Yerkes findings were widely accepted and helped fuel the drives to sterilize “unfit” Americans and keep out “unworthy” immigrants.The Yerkes findings were widely accepted and helped fuel the drives to sterilize “unfit” Americans and keep out “unworthy” immigrants.

Another eugenicist in a key position was William McDougall, who held the psychology professorship William James had formerly held. His 1920 book The Group Mind explained that the “negro” race had “never produced any individuals of really high mental and moral endowments” and was apparently “incapable” of doing so. His next book, Is America Safe for Democracy (1921), argued that civilizations declined because of “the inadequacy of the qualities of the people who are the bearers of it”—and advocated eugenic sterilization.

Harvard’s embrace of eugenics extended to the athletic department. Dudley Allen Sargent, who arrived in 1879 to direct Hemenway Gymnasium, infused physical education at the College with eugenic principles, including his conviction that certain kinds of exercise were particularly important for female students because they built strong pelvic muscles—which over time could advantage the gene pool. In “giving birth to a child…no amount of mental and moral education will ever take the place of a large well-developed pelvis with plenty of muscular and organic power behind it,” Sargent stated. The presence of large female pelvises, he insisted, would determine whether “large brainy children shall be born at all.”

Sargent, who presided over Hemenway for 40 years, used his position as a bully pulpit. In 1914, he addressed the nation’s largest eugenic gathering, the Race Betterment Conference, in Michigan, at which one of the main speakers called for eugenic sterilization of the “worthless one tenth” of the nation. Sargent told the conference that, based on his “long experience and careful observation” of Harvard and Radcliffe students, “physical education…is one of the most important factors in the betterment of the race.”

If Harvard’s embrace of eugenics had somehow remained within University confines—as merely an intellectual school of thought—the impact might have been contained. But members of the community took their ideas about genetic superiority and biological engineering to Congress, to the courts, and to the public at large—with considerable effect.

In 1894, a group of alumni met in Boston to found an organization that took a eugenic approach to what they considered the greatest threat to the nation: immigration. Prescott Farnsworth Hall, Charles Warren, and Robert DeCourcy Ward were young scions of old New England families, all from the class of 1889. They called their organization the Immigration Restriction League, but genetic thinking was so central to their mission that Hall proposed calling it the Eugenic Immigration League. Joseph Lee, A.B. 1883, A.M.-J.D. ’87, LL.D. ’26, scion of a wealthy Boston banking family and twice elected a Harvard Overseer, was a major funder, and William DeWitt Hyde A. B. 1879, S.T.D. ’86, another future Overseer and the president of Bowdoin College, served as a vice president. The membership rolls quickly filled with hundreds of people united in xenophobia, many of them Boston Brahmins and Harvard graduates.

Their goal was to keep out groups they regarded as biologically undesirable. Immigration was “a race question, pure and simple,” Ward said. “It is fundamentally a question as to…what races shall dominate in the country.” League members made no secret of whom they meant: Jews, Italians, Asians, and anyone else who did not share their northern European lineage.

Drawing on Harvard influence to pursue its goals—recruiting alumni to establish branches in other parts of the country and boasting President Lowell himself as its vice president—the Immigration Restriction League was remarkably effective in its work. Its first major proposal was a literacy test, not only to reduce the total number of immigrants but also to lower the percentage from southern and eastern Europe, where literacy rates were lower. In 1896the league persuaded Senator Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts, A.B. 1871, LL.B. ’74, Ph.D. ’76, LL.D. ’04, to introduce a literacy bill. Getting it passed and signed into law took time, but beginning in 1917, immigrants were legally required to prove their literacy to be admitted to the country.

The league scored a far bigger victory with the passage of the Immigration Act of 1924. After hearing extensive expert testimony about the biological threat posed by immigrants, Congress imposed harsh national quotas designed to keep Jews, Italians, and Asians out. As the percentage of immigrants from northern Europe increased significantly, Jewish immigration fell from 190,000 in 1920 to 7,000 in 1926; Italian immigration fell nearly as sharply; and immigration from Asia was almost completely cut off until 1952.

While one group of alumni focused on inserting eugenics into immigration, another prominent alumnus was taking the lead of the broader movement. Charles Benedict Davenport, A.B. 1889, Ph.D. ’92, taught zoology at Harvard before founding the Eugenics Record Office in Cold Spring Harbor, New York, in 1910. Funded in large part by Mrs. E.H. Harriman, widow of the railroad magnate, the E.R.O. became a powerful force in promoting eugenics. It was the main gathering place for academics studying eugenics, and the driving force in promoting eugenic sterilization laws nationwide.Davenport explained that qualities like criminality and laziness were genetically determined.

Davenport wrote prolifically. Heredity in Relation to Eugenics, published in 1911,quickly became the standard text for the eugenics courses cropping up at colleges and universities nationwide, and was cited by more than one-third of high-school biology textbooks of the era. Davenport explained that qualities like criminality and laziness were genetically determined. “When both parents are shiftless in some degree,” he wrote, only about 15 percent of their children would be “industrious.”

But perhaps no Harvard eugenicist had more impact on the public consciousness than Lothrop Stoddard, A.B. 1905, Ph.D. ’14. His bluntly titled 1920 bestseller, The Rising Tide of Color Against White World Supremacy, had 14 printings in its first three years, drew lavish praise from President Warren G. Harding, and made a mildly disguised appearance in The Great Gatsby, when Daisy Buchanan’s husband, Tom, exclaimed that “civilization’s going to pieces”—something he’d learned by reading “‘The Rise of the Colored Empires’ by this man Goddard.”

When eugenics reached a high-water mark in 1927, a pillar of the Harvard community once again played a critical role. In that year, the Supreme Court decided Buck v. Bell, a constitutional challenge to Virginia’s eugenic sterilization law. The case was brought on behalf of Carrie Buck, a young woman who had been designated “feebleminded” by the state and selected for eugenic sterilization. Buck was, in fact, not feebleminded at all. Growing up in poverty in Charlottesville, she had been taken in by a foster family and then raped by one of its relatives. She was declared “feebleminded” because she was pregnant out of wedlock, and she was chosen for sterilization because she was deemed to be feebleminded.

By an 8-1 vote, the justices upheld the Virginia law and Buck’s sterilization—and cleared the way for sterilizations to continue in about half the country, where there were similar laws. The majority opinion was written by Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., A.B. 1861, LL.B. ’66, LL.D. ’95, a former Harvard Law School professor and Overseer. Holmes, who shared his father’s deep faith in bloodlines, did not merely give Virginia a green light: he urged the nation to get serious about eugenics and prevent large numbers of “unfit” Americans from reproducing. It was necessary to sterilize people who “sap the strength of the State,” Holmes insisted, to “prevent our being swamped with incompetence.” His opinion included one of the most brutal aphorisms in American law, saying of Buck, her mother, and her perfectly normal infant daughter: “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”

In the same week the Supreme Court decided Buck v. Bell, Harvard made eugenics news of its own. It turned down a $60,000 bequest from Dr. J. Ewing Mears, a Philadelphia surgeon, to fund instruction in eugenics “in all its branches, notably that branch relating to the treatment of the defective and criminal classes by surgical procedures.”

Harvard’s decision, reported on the front page of The New York Times, appeared to be a counterweight to the Supreme Court’s ruling. But the University’s decision had been motivated more by reluctance to be coerced into a particular position on sterilization than by any institutional opposition to eugenics—which it continued to embrace.

Eugenics followed much the same arc at Harvard as it did in the nation at large. Interest began to wane in the 1930s, as the field became more closely associated with the Nazi government that had taken power in Germany. By the end of the decade, Davenport had retired and the E.R.O. had shut down; the Carnegie Institution, of which it was part, no longer wanted to support eugenics research and advocacy. As the nation went to war against a regime that embraced racism, eugenics increasingly came to be regarded as un-American.

It did not, however, entirely fade away—at the University, or nationally. Earnest Hooton, chairman of the anthropology department, was particularly outspoken in support of what he called a “biological purge.” In 1936, while the first German concentration camps were opening, he made a major plea for eugenic sterilization—though he emphasized that it should not target any race or religion.

Hooton believed it was imperative for society to remove its “worthless” people. “Our real purpose,” he declared in a speech that was quoted in TheNew York Times,“should be to segregate and to eliminate the unfit, worthless, degenerate and anti-social portion of each racial and ethnic strain in our population, so that we may utilize the substantial merits of its sound majority, and the special and diversified gifts of its superior members.”“Our real purpose…should be to segregate and to eliminate the unfit, worthless, degenerate and anti-social portion of each racial and ethnic strain in our population, so that we may utilize the substantial merits of its sound majority….”

None of the news out of Germany after the war made Hooton abandon his views. “There can be little doubt of the increase during the past fifty years of mental defectives, psychopaths, criminals, economic incompetents and the chronically diseased,” he wrote in Redbook magazine in 1950. “We owe this to the intervention of charity, ‘welfare’ and medical science, and to the reckless breeding of the unfit.”

The United States also held onto eugenics, if not as enthusiastically as it once did. In 1942, with the war against the Nazis raging, the Supreme Court had a chance to overturn Buck v. Bell and hold eugenic sterilization unconstitutional, but it did not. The court struck down an Oklahoma sterilization law, but on extremely narrow grounds—leaving the rest of the nation’s eugenic sterilization laws intact. Only after the civil-rights revolution of the 1960s, and changes in popular views toward marginalized groups, did eugenic sterilization begin to decline more rapidly. But states continued to sterilize the “unfit” until 1981.

Today, the American eugenics movement is often thought of as an episode of national folly—like 1920s dance marathons or Prohibition—with little harm done. In fact, the harm it caused was enormous.

As many as 70,000 Americans were forcibly sterilized for eugenic reasons, while important members of the Harvard community cheered and—as with Eliot, Lowell, and Holmes—called for more. Many of those 70,000 were simply poor, or had done something that a judge or social worker didn’t like, or—as in Carrie Buck’s case—had terrible luck. Their lives were changed forever—Buck lost her daughter to illness and died childless in 1983, not understanding until her final years what the state had done to her, or why she had been unable to have more children.

Also affected were the many people kept out of the country by the eugenically inspired immigration laws of the 1920s. Among them were a large number of European Jews who desperately sought to escape the impending Holocaust. A few years ago, correspondence was discovered from 1941 in which Otto Frank pleaded with the U.S. State Department for visas for himself, his wife, and his daughters Margot and Anne. It is understood today that Anne Frank died because the Nazis considered her a member of an inferior race, but few appreciate that her death was also due, in part, to the fact that many in the U.S. Congress felt the same way.

There are important reasons for remembering, and further exploring, Harvard’s role in eugenics. Colleges and universities today are increasingly interrogating their pasts—thinking about what it means to have a Yale residential college named after John C. Calhoun, a Princeton school named after Woodrow Wilson, or slaveholder Isaac Royall’s coat of arms on the Harvard Law School shield and his name on a professorship endowed by his will.

Eugenics is a part of Harvard’s history. It is unlikely that Eliot House or Lowell House will be renamed, but there might be a way for the University community to spare a thought for Carrie Buck and others who paid a high price for the harmful ideas that Harvard affiliates played a major role in propounding.

There are also forward-looking reasons to revisit this dark moment in the University’s past. Biotechnical science has advanced to the brink of a new era of genetic possibilities. In the next few years, the headlines will be full of stories about gene-editing technology, genetic “solutions” for a variety of human afflictions and frailties, and even “designer babies.” Given that Harvard affiliates, again, will play a large role in all of these, it is important to contemplate how wrong so many people tied to the University got it the first time—and to think hard about how, this time, to get it right.