This morning, rising with formless, benignant wonderings about my future and vague remembrances of my long-ago youth, I surprised myself with an abrupt focus on Prof. Joshua Whatmough (“WUTT-moe”). I googled and found a perfect description of his terrifying and exhilarating classroom (in 1947) put up on a webpage by one of Whatmough’s former students, […]
Category Archives: Harvard
Admitting Writers and Artists to Harvard
November 30, 2012 – 11:07 am
The following essay is taken without alteration from Harvard Magazine’s current issue. I reprint it without comment because its clarity and persuasiveness require none. Read and reflect. * * * * * Porter University Professor Helen Vendler, a preeminent poetry critic, has served on Harvard College’s undergraduate admissions committee. Given contemporary admissions processes and pressures, […]
Steve Cotler in Harvard Business School Alumni Bulletin
September 26, 2011 – 9:26 pm
For fairly obvious reasons, Harvard Business School keeps very good track of and contact with its alumni. One of the best things they do is their magazine, HBS Alumni Bulletin. Some of the articles are interesting, okay, uh-huh, but the real reason alumni turn this mag’s pages is the Class Notes. Every class that still […]
MBA Oath — “My purpose is to serve the greater good”
September 29, 2009 – 2:15 pm
Within my college circle, a career in business was not an admirable path. When I revealed to my friends that I intended to seek an MBA from Harvard Business School, for the next several meals I became invisible. No one spoke to me. I had died, and they referred to me in the past. HBS […]
A House Cat Murdered My Wife…That’s My Story
May 24, 2009 – 5:19 pm
Treswick was a big cat, a bad cat. He was, his owners averred, tres wicked. It was 1967. I was a first-year graduate student living in Peabody Terrace, the married students’ housing, a walking bridge across the river from Harvard Business School. These were tall, narrow buildings, four units to a floor, all sharing a […]
Un-Racism: You Have to Be Carefully Taught
January 22, 2009 – 5:21 pm
James Michener‘s short story collection, Tales of the South Pacific, a bestselling Pulitzer Prize winner in 1948, was eclipsed a year later by South Pacific, the blockbuster Richard Rodgers–Oscar Hammerstein musical that includes some of the most memorable songs written for the stage. One song, “You’ve Got To Be Carefully Taught,” includes this verse: You’ve […]
Schweppervesence…and Malaria
August 18, 2008 – 8:35 am
Commander Whitehead Mixers…and medicine. In 1968, Commander Edward Whitehead came to Harvard Business School to give a talk on the continuing importance—in the face of computers and other rapidly advancing technologies—of people in industry. (A similar, and rather drier talk he gave in 1955 is here.) Perhaps the first CEO to become his company’s advertising […]
CBS Manipulates the News
July 24, 2008 – 5:01 pm
One of the most important lessons I learned at college did not come in a classroom. In the newsroom of The Harvard Crimson, I was taught that journalism demanded impartiality and a near-religious adherence to accuracy and truth. We put out the college paper six days a week, and every published story was pasted into […]
George W. S. Trow (1943-2006)
February 18, 2008 – 5:50 am
Almost two months had passed by my Harvard freshman door. It was 1961, early November, and the air was crisp and blue-gray. I had moved into Pennypacker Hall from a smallish farm town 60 miles northwest of Los Angeles, the smartest of 900 kids graduating from a large public high school that had never sent […]
