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May-June 2008
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< previous | 1 | 2 Tuition trimming. Complementing its loan-forgiveness program, Harvard Law School next fall will begin waiving third-year tuition ($41,500) for students who commit to five years of work in government or nonprofit jobs after graduation. At Harvard Medical School, starting next year, students whose families earn less than $120,000 a year will no longer have to make a parental tuition contribution, saving them an average of $12,500 annually in their four years of study. The policy will affect just over one-third of current medical students. Name game. The Kennedy School of Government has rebranded itself the Harvard Kennedy School. 
Photograph by Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard News Office Allan M. Brandt Historians honored. Historian of science and Graduate School of Arts and Sciences dean Allan M. Brandt has won the 2008 Bancroft Prize, the top professional honor for books in American history, for The Cigarette Century: The Rise, Fall, and Deadly Persistence of the Product That Defined America. Peter Silver ’92, assistant professor of history at Princeton, also won, for Our Savage Neighbors: How Indian War Transformed Early America. Excellent engineers. Radcliffe Institute interim dean Barbara J. Grosz, Higgins professor of natural sciences, who investigates natural-language communication between humans and computers, has been elected to the National Academy of Engineering. Also elected were Frans A. Spaepen, Franklin professor of applied physics, for work on amorphous metals and semiconductors, and Zhigang Suo, Puckett professor of mechanics and materials, for work on electronic material systems and composites. All four are School of Engineering and Applied Sciences faculty members. 
Photograph by Rose Lincoln/Harvard News Office Barbara J. Grosz 
Photograph courtesy of Frans A. Spaepen Frans A. Spaepen 
Photograph courtesy of Zhigang Suo Zhigang Suo
athletics and administration. Faculty of Arts and Sciences executive dean Nancy Maull, FAS’s chief administrative and financial officer for 15 years, stepped down at the end of February. On an interim basis, Nichols Family director of athletics Robert L. Scalise assumed those responsibilities; he formerly served in a similar capacity at Harvard Business School. educating women entrepreneurs. Harvard Business School is among 16 institutions working with Goldman Sachs & Company on the latter’s $100-million, five-year philanthropic effort to provide 10,000 women in developing countries with busi-ness and management skills. HBS will focus on training business school deans and senior faculty members in India to provide case-method training. See www.10000women.org for details. advancing film. The Faculty of Arts and Sciences has approved a new doctoral-degree program in film and visual studies (www.ves.fas.harvard.edu/gradprogram. html), the natural outgrowth of expanded faculty, facilities, courses, and student interest in visual images (see “Cinema Veritas,” November-December 2005, page 34). Poetic pique. Poking fun at the Faculty of Arts and Sciences for canceling two of its scheduled meetings and grappling with unpredictable attendance (which has prompted an exploration of decreasing the required quorum), the Crimson editorialized on March 10 in villanelle form, beginning: “The Faculty Council mused about its forum,/Attendance at monthly meetings dwindled low./‘We think the problem must be with the quorum!’/‘We must not stoop to pressure or implore ’em,/Who cares if professors never go?’” (For the complete verse, see www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?refR2404.) 
Allan M. Brandt Photograph by Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard News Office Miscellany. Faculty of Arts and Sciences associate dean for academic affairs Brian W. Casey, Ph.D. ’00—a senior figure in recruiting new professors—has been appointed president of DePauw University, in Greencastle, Indiana, effective July 1.…Harvard Extension School attracted 350 students worldwide for “Positive Psychology,” its largest distance- learning enrollment to date; the course was a smash in real life, too (see “The Science of Happiness,” January-February 2007, page 26).…James M. Poterba ’80, chair of MIT’s economics department, has succeeded Baker professor of economics Martin S. Feldstein as president of the National Bureau of Economic Research.… The on-line social-networking site Facebook has hired Sheryl Sandberg ’91, M.B.A. ’95, who spent six years at Google, as chief operating officer. She reports to company founder Mark Zuckerberg ’06, who dropped out to work on the enterprise.…The Malkin Athletic Center has installed that must-have amenity for modern fitness buffs: satellite video service.  
 
 
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