Gutenberg 2.0 | Harvard Magazine May-Jun 2010

Photograph by Jim Harrison

Nearly half of Harvard’s collection is housed at the Harvard Depository, a marvel of efficient off-campus storage. Library assistant Carl Wood reshelves books in the 30-foot-high, 200-foot-long stacks.

“Throw it in the charles,” one scientist recently suggested as a fitting end for Widener Library’s collection. The remark was outrageous—especially at an institution whose very name honors a gift of books—but it was pointed. Increasingly, in the scientific disciplines, information ranging from online journals to databases must be recent to be relevant, so Widener’s collection of books, its miles of stacks, can appear museum-like. Likewise, Google’s massive project to digitize all the books in the world will, by some accounts, cause research libraries to fade to irrelevance as mere warehouses for printed material. The skills that librarians have traditionally possessed seem devalued by the power of online search, and less sexy than a Google query launched from a mobile platform. “People want information ‘anytime, anyplace, anywhere,’” says Helen Shenton, the former head of collection care for the British Library who is now deputy director of the Harvard University Library. Users are changing—but so, too, are libraries. The future is clearly digital.

Photograph by Jim Harrison

Isaac Kohane, director of the Countway Medical Library, sees librarians returning to a central role in medicine as curators of databases and as teachers of complex bioinformatics search techniques.

Yet if the format of the future is digital, the content remains data. And at its simplest, scholarship in any discipline is about gaining access to information and knowledge, says Peter Bol, Carswell professor of East Asian languages and civilizations. In fields such as botany or comparative zoology, researchers need historical examples of plant and animal life, so they build collections and cooperate with others who also have collections. “We can call that a museum of comparative zoology,” he says, “but it is a form of data collection.” If you study Chinese history, as Bol does, you need access to primary sources and to the record of scholarship on human history over time. You need books. But in physics or chemistry, where the research horizon is constantly advancing, much of the knowledge created in the past has very little relevance to current understanding. In that case, he says, “you want to be riding the crest of the tidal wave of information that is coming in right now. We all want access to information, and in some cases that will involve building collections; in others, it will mean renting access to information resources that will keep us current. In some cases, these services may be provided by a library, in others by a museum or even a website.”

Meanwhile, “Who has the most scientific knowledge of large-scale organization, collection, and access to information? Librarians,” says Bol. A librarian can take a book, put it somewhere, and then guarantee to find it again. “If you’ve got 16 million items,” he points out, “that’s a very big guarantee. We ought to be leveraging that expertise to deal with this new digital environment. That’s a vision of librarians as specialists in organizing and accessing and preserving information in multiple media forms, rather than as curators of collections of books, maps, or posters.”

Librarians as Information Brokers

Bol is particularly interested in the media form known as Google Book Search (GBS). The search-engine giant is systematically scanning books from libraries throughout the world in order to assemble an enormous, Internet-accessible digital library: at 12 million books, its collection is already three-quarters the size of Harvard’s. Soon it will be the largest library the world has ever known. Harvard has provided nearly a million public domain (pre-1923) books for the project; by participating, the University helped with the creation of a new tool (GBS) for locating books that is useful to people both at Harvard and around the world. And participation made the full text content of these books searchable and available to everyone in the United States for free.

GBS appeals to Bol and other scholars because it gives them quick and easy access to books that Harvard does not own (litigation over the non-public-domain works in GBS notwithstanding). For Bol, such a tool might be especially useful: Harvard acquires only 15,000 books from China each year, but he estimates that it ought to be collecting closer to 50,000. So GBS could be a boon to scholarship.

But GBS also raises all kinds of questions. If everything eventually is available at your fingertips, what will be the role of libraries and librarians?

“Internet search engines like Google Books fundamentally challenge our understanding of where we add value to this process,” says Dan Hazen, associate librarian of collection development for Harvard College. Librarians have worked hard to assemble materials of all kinds so that it is “not a random bunch of stuff, but can actually support and sustain some kind of meaningful inquiry,” he explains. “The result was a collection that was a consciously created, carefully crafted, deliberately maintained, constrained body of material.”

Internet search explodes the notion of a curated collection in which the quality of the sources has been assured. “What we’re seeing now with Google Scholar and these mass digitization projects, and the Internet generally,” says Hazen, “is, ‘Everything’s out there.’ And everything has equal weight. If I do a search on Google, I can get a scholarly journal. I can get somebody’s blog posting….The notion of collection that’s implicit in ‘the universe is at my fingertips’ is diametrically opposed, really, to the notion of collection as ‘consciously curated and controlled artifact.’” Even the act of reading for research is changed, he points out. Scholars poring through actual newspapers “could see how [an item] was presented on the page, and the prominence it had, and the flow of content throughout a series of articles that might have to do with the same thing—and then differentiate those from the books or other kinds of materials that talked about the same phenomenon. When you get into the Internet world, you tend to get a gazillion facts, mentions, snippets, and references that don’t organize themselves in that same framework of prominence, and typology, and how stuff came to be, and why it was created, and what the intrinsic logic of that category of materials is. How and whether that kind of structuring logic can apply to this wonderful chaos of information is something that we’re all trying to grapple with.”

How does searching digitally in a book relate to the act of reading? “There may be a single fact that’s important,” Hazen explains. “Is the book’s overall argument something that’s equally important as the single fact or is it just irrelevant? When people worry about reading books online, part of the worry is that the nuances of a well-developed argument that goes on linearly for 300 pages [are missing]. That’s not the way you interact with a text online.” How the flood of information from digitized books will be integrated into libraries, which have a separate and different, though not necessarily contradictory, logic remains to be seen. “For librarians, and the library, trying to straddle these two visions of what we’re about is something that we’re still trying to figure out.”

Photograph by Jim Harrison

The printed book took hundreds of years to replace handwritten manuscripts, which persisted as an economical way to produce small numbers of copies into the nineteenth century, nearly 400 years after Gutenberg invented movable type. Robert Darnton, director of the University Library, shown with Diderot’s Encyclopédie, predicts great longevity for the book.

Moreover, the prospect that, increasingly, libraries will be stewards of vast quantities of data, a great deal from books, and some unique, raises very serious concerns about the long-term preservation of digital materials. “What worries us all,” says Nancy M. Cline, Larsen librarian of Harvard College, “is that we really haven’t tested the longevity for a lot of these digital resources.” This is a universal problem and the subject of much international attention and research. “If you walk into the book stacks,” she points out, “you can simply smell in some areas the deterioration of the paper and leather. But with something that hums away on a server, we don’t have the same potential to observe” (see “Digital Preservation: An Unsolved Problem,” page 82).

Despite these caveats, Bol’s vision of future librarians as digital-information brokers rather than stewards of physical collections is already taking shape in the scientific disciplines, where the concerns raised by Hazen are less important. In fields faced with information overload—such as biology, coping with a barrage of genomic data, and astronomy, in which an all-sky survey telescope can generate a terabyte of data in a single night—the torrents of raw information are impossible to absorb and understand without computational aids.

Medicine has had to cope with this problem ever since nineteenth-century general practitioners found they could no longer keep up with the sheer quantity of published medical literature. Specialization eventually allowed doctors to focus only on the journals in their particular area of expertise. Throughout such transitions, libraries played an important role. Doctors, upon completing their rounds, would comb the stacks for records of similar cases that might help with diagnosis and treatment. Today, the amount of new information being generated in the biological sciences is prescribing another momentous shift that may provide a glimpse of the future in other disciplines. For a doctor, learning about a genetic test and then interrogating a database to understand the results could save a life. For libraries and librarians, the new premium on skills they have long cultivated as curators, preservers, and retrievers of collective knowledge puts them squarely on top of an information geyser in the sciences that could reshape medicine.

Mining the Bibliome

Isaac Kohane, director of the Countway Library at Harvard Medical School (HMS), recently asked a pointed question on his blog: Who is the better doctor—the one who can remember more diagnostic tests or the one “who is the quickest and most savvy at online searching for the relevant tests?” He predicts that “we are going to be uncomfortable with some of the answers to these questions for many years to come” because success based not on bedside manner, but on competence interacting with a database, implies a potential devaluing of skills that society has honored. And who is pondering these issues most acutely? A blogging librarian and pediatric endocrinologist with a Ph.D. in computer science.

One hundred years ago, says Kohane, a report on medical education in the United States concluded that doctors were inadequately prepared to care for patients. Half the medical schools in the country closed. “I think we are at a similar inflection point,” he says. “If you look at bioinformatics and genetics, you see vivid examples—which can be generalized to other parts of medicine—where the system has inadequately educated and empowered its workers in the use of search, electronic resources, and automated knowledge management.” Genetic testing, he adds, offers a “prismatic example”: studies in the Netherlands and the United States have shown that “physicians are ordering genetic tests because patients are asking them to, [even though] they don’t know how to interpret the tests and are uncomfortable doing so.”

Kohane sees similar problems when making the rounds with medical students, fellows, and residents: “When we run into a problematic complex patient with a clearly genetic problem from birth, and I ask what the problem might be and what tests are to be ordered, their reflex is either to search their memories for what they learned in medical school or to look at a textbook that might be relevant. They don’t have what I would characterize as the ‘Google reflex,’ which is to go to the right databases to look things up.” The students doubtless use Google elsewhere in their lives, but in medicine, he explains, “the whole idea of just-in-time learning and using these websites is not reflexive. That is highly troublesome because the time when you could keep up even with a subspecialty like pediatric neurosurgery by reading a couple of journals is long, long gone.”

The journals themselves have grown in number and quantity of articles, but “the amount of data being produced and analyzed in large, curated databases,” Kohane says, “exceeds by several orders of magnitude what appears in printed publications.” The fact that students and doctors don’t think to use this digital material is an international problem. “Even at Harvard,” where “we spend millions of dollars” annually for access to the databases, “many of the medical staff, graduate students, and residents don’t know how to use…,” he pauses. “Well, it’s worse than that. They don’t know that they exist.”

But in this lamentable situation Kohane sees an opportunity for medical libraries, whose role, he believes, had faded for a while. “It is becoming so clear that medicine and medical research are an information-processing enterprise, that there’s an opportunity for a library that would embrace that as a mission…to be again a center of the medical enterprise.”

Kohane has sought to do just that by creating an information institute—an HMS-wide center for biomedical informatics—embedded within Countway Library. The institute offers voluntary mini-courses, invariably oversubscribed, explaining what the relevant databases are, how to plumb them, and how to analyze the data they produce. A parallel effort under his supervision seeks to “mine the bibliome”—the totality of the electronically published medical literature—by allowing researchers to track down relationships between genes and diseases in the published literature that would not be apparent when searching one reference at a time. Librarians in the institute also comb databases for contradictions, and find references to sites in the genome that can’t possibly exist because the coordinates are wrong. In making sure that information is good, the library is “returning to its original mission of curation,” says Kohane, “but in a genomic era and around bioinformatics.” This defines a new role for librarians as database experts and teachers, while the library becomes a place for learning about sophisticated search for specialized information.

Such skills-based teaching, learning, and data curation depend on finding individuals who are trained in medicine and also have the public-minded qualities of a librarian—rare indeed, as Kohane readily acknowledges. And even though the cost of such bioinformatics education is small relative to the millions of dollars spent on subscription fees for electronic periodicals (the price of which doubled between 2000 and 2010, says Kohane; see “Open Access,” May-June 2008, page 61 for more on the crisis in scholarly communication), the resources to provide more educational support for complex types of database search training are insufficient across the University. “That’s because we are trying to bolt on a solution to a problem that probably should be addressed foursquare within the core educational process,” he says.

There is growing awareness of the need to have an “information-processing approach to medicine baked into the core education of doctoral and medical students.” Otherwise, Kohane says, “we’re condemning them to perpetual partial ignorance.” Already, a few lectures on the topic are being introduced into the medical-school curriculum, making HMS a pioneer in this area. Discussions about bringing more of the biological/biomedical informatics agenda to the undergraduate campus are also under way.

Even in the relatively tradition-bound profession of law, digitization cuts so deeply that when Ess librarian and professor of law John G. Palfrey VII restructured the Law School library last year, he says he thought about the mission less as “How do we build the greatest collection of books in law?” and more as “How do we make information as useful as possible to our community now and over a long period of time?”

This focus on information services within a community guided both personnel decisions and collections strategies. “We scrapped the entire organizational structure,” reports Palfrey (whose digital genes can be traced back to his former position as executive director of the law school’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society). Last June 30, all the librarians handed in resignations for the jobs they had held and received new assignments. There is now a librarian who works with faculty members, teaching empirical research methods, and another who helps students and faculty conduct empirical research. The collection development group includes “a lab for hacking a library”: a member of that team is working on an idea called “Stack View” that would allow the re-creation of serendipitous browsing in a digital format. Technology “allows you to reorganize information and present it in a totally different way,” Palfrey points out.

The law library’s new collection-development policy is organized along a continuum of materials for which the library takes increasing responsibility. These range from resources in the public domain that aren’t collected, but to which the library provides access; to materials accessed under license; and all the way up to unique holdings of an historic or special nature that the library archives, preserves, and may one day digitize in order to provide online access. The fact that the library no longer buys everything published in the law has been made explicit. “It is no longer possible financially, nor is it desirable—not all of it is useful,” Palfrey says bluntly. Only a third of newly purchased books are initially bound. “We’ll put a barcode on it, put it on the shelf, and see if people use it,” he explains. “If they do, and the book starts to wear, then we’ll send it to the bindery.”

Even though these changes may seem like cutbacks (they were in fact planned and in process before the University’s financial crisis became apparent), he believes skilled librarians are in no danger of becoming obsolete: “The role of the librarian is much greater in this digital era than it has ever been before.” Good lawyers need to be good at information processing, and Palfrey found in research for his book Born Digital that students today are not very good at using complex legal databases. “They try to use the same natural-language search techniques” they learned from using Google, he says, rather than thinking about research as “a series of structured queries. It’s not that we don’t need libraries or librarians,” he continues, “it’s that what we need them for is slightly different. We need them to be guides in this increasingly complex world of information and we need them to convey skills that most kids actually aren’t getting at early ages in their education. I think librarians need to get in front of this mob and call it a parade, to actually help shape it.”

Mary Lee Kennedy, executive director of knowledge and library services at Harvard Business School, whose very title suggests a new kind of approach, agrees with Palfrey. “The digital world of content is going to be overwhelming for librarians for a long time, just because there is so much,” she acknowledges. Therefore, librarians need to teach students not only how to search, but “how to think critically about what they have found…what they are missing… and how to judge their sources.”

Her staff offers a complete suite of information services to students and faculty members, spread across four teams. One provides content or access to it in all its manifestations; another manages and curates information relevant to the school’s activities; the third creates Web products that support teaching, research, and publication; and the fourth group is dedicated to student and faculty research and course support. Kennedy sees libraries as belonging to a partnership of shared services that support professors and students. “Faculty don’t come just to libraries [for knowledge services],” she points out. “They consult with experts in academic computing, and they participate in teaching teams to improve pedagogy. We’re all part of the same partnership and we have to figure out how to work better together.”

Photograph by Jim Harrison

“A man will turn over half a library to make one book,” said Samuel Johnson. Nancy Cline, Larsen librarian of Harvard College, displays a manuscript letter from the Hyde Collection of Dr. Samuel Johnson; all its Johnson letters are available online as part of the University Library’s open-collections program.

“Just in Time” Libraries

All this is not to suggest that the traditional role of libraries as collections where objects are stored, preserved, and retrieved on request is going away. But it is certainly changing. Two facilities—one digital, the other analog—suggest a bifurcated future. The two could not be more different, though their mandates are identical.

In Cambridge, the Digital Repository Service (DRS) is a rapidly growing, 109-terabyte online library of 14 million files representing books, daguerreotypes, maps, music, images, and manuscripts, among other things, all owned by Harvard. In a facility that also serves other parts of the University, a two-person command center monitors more than a hundred servers. Green lights indicate all is well; red flashes when environmental conditions such as temperature or humidity exceed designated parameters. In a nearby room, warm and alive with the whirr of hundreds of cooling fans, their cumulative sound resembling the roar of a giant waterfall, a handful of servers hold the library’s entire digital collection. Other servers are dedicated to “discovery,” the technical term for the searchable online catalog, or “delivery,” the act of providing a file to an end user.

There are at least three copies of the entire repository—one in, and two outside of, Cambridge. One of them, secured by thumbprint access, is constantly being read by machines at the disk level to ensure the integrity of the data, a process that takes a full month to complete. “Several times a year,” says Tracey Robinson, who heads the library’s office for information systems, “we detect data that have become corrupted. We engage in a constant process of refreshing and making sure that everything is readable.” Any damaged material is quickly replaced with another copy from the backup.

The analog counterpart to the DRS is the Harvard Depository (HD), located in the countryside about 45 minutes from Boston. A low, modular building with loading dock bays, it resembles a warehouse more than anything else. In many ways, that is precisely what it is. Just two librarians oversee 7.5 million books held in an energy-efficient, climate-controlled environment—more than twice as many as are held at Widener, which is three times as large. “The libraries based in the city are among the most expensive in terms of linear capacity,” says Nancy Cline. “The Depository as a concept is absolutely essential for us.” A number of other libraries in the Boston area, including MIT, use the HD. The facility absorbs half a million new books each year, circulates 220,000, and boasts a 100 percent retrieval rate. (In 24 years, just two books could not be found for delivery; in a typical library, one study showed, patrons find what they are looking for only 50 percent of the time.)

The secret to the HD’s extraordinary density and retrieval rate is simple: here, a book is not a book. Titles, subjects, authors—none of this so-called “metadata,” the information people typically use to find things, matters. “We know how many books we get in,” says assistant director of the University Library for the Harvard Depository Tom Schneiter, who directs the facility, “but we don’t know what they are. To us, they are just barcodes. It makes our work much more efficient.” A staff of dedicated workers, who rotate through different tasks in order to break up the routine, can check in as many as 800 barcodes an hour. All the items are sorted and shelved according to size in bins that are themselves barcoded. This allows the height of the shelves to be perfectly calibrated to the height of the books; no wasted airspace. Place a request for one of the books in the HD and it will be delivered the next business day to the campus library of your choosing.

Originally, the HD was intended to store only low-circulation items. But because the libraries of the Cambridge campus are “full to bursting,” says Pforzheimer University Professor Robert Darnton, the director of the Harvard University library, “doing triage” on thousands of little-used books from the shelves each year to make room for new ones proved impractical. Now, most new books are simply sent to the HD. Although some professors lament the death of shelf-browsing, others are grateful when a book they love is sent off, because they know that when next they want it, not only will it be found, it will be well-preserved: time essentially stands still for the books at the HD, where an environment set at 50 degrees and 35 percent relative humidity is expected to maintain a book in the condition in which it arrived for 244 years.

The price of such longevity and retrievability is about 30 cents per stored volume per year, which compares favorably to the cost of digital storage; expense estimates from the HathiTrust (a national group of research libraries that have created a joint repository for digital collections) for storing a digital book scanned by Google range from 15 cents for black and white to 40 cents for color annually. Actually delivering a physical book from the HD, on the other hand, costs $2.15—much more than the delivery of a digital book to a computer screen.

But making comparisons between digital and analog libraries on issues of cost or use or preservation is not straightforward. If students want to read a book cover to cover, the printed copy may be deemed superior with respect to “bed, bath and beach,” John Palfrey points out. If they just want to read a few pages for class, or mine the book for scattered references to a single subject, the digital version’s searchability could be more appealing; alternatively, students can request scans of the pages or chapter they want to read as part of a program called “scan and deliver” (in use at the HD and other Harvard libraries) and receive a link to images of the pages via e-mail within four days.

One can imagine a not too radically different future in which patronless libraries such as the DRS and the HD would hold almost everything, supplying materials on request to their on-campus counterparts. Print on demand technology (POD) would allow libraries to change their collection strategies: they could buy and print a physical copy of a book only if a user requested it. When the user was done with the book, it would be shelved. It’s a vision of “doing libraries ‘just in time’ rather than ‘just in case,’” says Palfrey. (At the Harvard Book Store on Massachusetts Avenue, a POD machine dubbed Paige M. Gutenborg is already in use. Find something you like in Google’s database of public-domain books—perhaps one provided by Harvard—and for $8 you can own a copy, printed and bound before your wondering eyes in minutes. Clear Plexiglas allows patrons to watch the process—hot glue, guillotine-like trimming blades, and all—until the book is ejected, like a gumball, from a chute at the bottom.)

Indeed, the HD might one day play a role as the fulcrum for “radical collaboration” with the five other law libraries in the Boston area, says Palfrey. “We’re asking, ‘Could we imagine deciding, as a group of six, that we’re actually going to buy something and put it in the Harvard Depository,’” a central location from which the physical book could be delivered to any institution? “It would cost us a sixth as much.” Other Harvard libraries could explore the same strategy.

That doesn’t mean Harvard’s campus libraries would become less important. Because they are embedded in the residential academic community, they remain integral to University life. Students (and faculty members) are big users of the physical spaces in libraries, though they are using them differently than in the past.

“Libraries are not conservative places anymore,” says Cline. “From the user perspective, it is an interesting time. Some people still want the quiet, elegant reading room. Others would be frustrated if they had to be quiet in every part of the buildings, in part because their work requires that they talk, that they work in collaborative teams, that they share some of their research strategies. We’re rethinking the physical spaces to accommodate more of the type of learning that is expected now, the types of assignments that faculty are making, that have two or three students huddled around a computer working together, talking.”

Libraries are also being used as social spaces, adds Helen Shenton, where people can “get a cup of coffee, connect to WiFi, and meet their friends” outside their living space. In terms of research, students are asking each other for information more now than in the past, when they might have asked a librarian. “The flip side,” Shenton continues, “is that some places are embedding their library and information specialists within disciplines and within faculties. So I think the whole model is like one of those snow globes. You pick it up and shake it around and all the pieces will settle in a different way, which is incredibly exciting.”

A Future for Books

“A big misconception is that digital information and analog information are incompatible,” says Darnton, himself an historian of the book. “On the contrary, the whole history of books and communication shows that one medium does not displace another.” Manuscript publishing survived Gutenberg, continuing into the nineteenth century. “It was often cheaper to publish a book of under a hundred copies by hiring scribes,” he says, than it was to set the type and hire people to run the press. Likewise, horsepower increased in the age of railroads. “There were more horses hauling passengers in the second half of the nineteenth century than there were in the first half. And there is good evidence that now, if a book appears electronically on your computer screen, and it’s available for free, it will stimulate sales of the printed version.”

Jeffrey Hamburger—a scholar of an even earlier medium, the medieval manuscript—who was recently named chair of a library advisory group, says that “the notion that we are going to abandon the codex as we have known it—the traditional book—and go digital overnight is very misguided. It is going to be a much longer transition than anyone suspects, just as the transition in the past between the oral tradition of literature in antiquity and silent reading as we’ve known it for almost two millennia was a long transition, taking the better part of a millennium itself.”

Hamburger, the Francke professor of German art and culture, has worked extensively here and in Germany on projects involving the application of new media to the study of medieval manuscripts, but he says there are “still many, many things that new media cannot do as effectively as a good old-fashioned book”: for example, combining text and an associated image on opposing pages. “It’s instructive how many of the words we use to describe computer interfaces—tabs, bookmarks, scrolling—are derived from our experience with the book, and that’s not just because of experience or familiarity,” he adds. “It’s because they have a certain practicality, and all of those, it so happens, are inventions of the Middle Ages.” Computers, in reverting to scrolling, have “gone back to a much older technology, which had its merits but was deficient in its own ways, which is why it was replaced.”

In advocating for the continued importance of books, and raising his concern that this could become the “lost decade” for acquisitions to Harvard’s library collections, Hamburger emphasizes that he is not framing the University’s current crisis in terms of books versus new media. “We need both, and we’ll continue to need both. I think we have to take as a premise that the library is a vast, far-flung, varied institution, as varied and diverse as the intellectual community of the University itself, working for a range of constituents almost impossible to conceive of, and it’s not just a service organization. I would even go so far as to call it the nervous system of our corporate body.”

It would be a terrible mistake, Hamburger continues, “if different factions within the faculty, be it scientists and humanists, be it Western- or non-Western-focused scholars, started squabbling over resources. As a university, we have by definition a catholic, all-embracing mission, and the question is how to coordinate resources, not compete for them. The greatness of this university in the past and in the future rests on the greatness of our library. Without the library—old, new, digital, printed—this institution wouldn’t be what it is.”

Jonathan Shaw ’89 is managing editor of this magazine.

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Super-active students are over-scheduled - Harvard Magazine

Today’s superhero undergraduates do “3,000 things at 150 percent.”

by Craig Lambert

Photograph by Stu Rosner

You wake up each morning with a fever; you feel like a shadow of yourself. But no time for sickness today—the Adams House intramural crew has one of its thrice-weekly practices at 6 A.M., and you…will…row. Some mornings, you watch the sunrise from Lamont Library after hitting your study groove there around 11 the night before and bushwhacking through assignments during the quiet time between 3 A.M. and 5. The rower and late-night scholar is Becky Cooper ’10. “Lamont is beautiful at 5 A.M.—my favorite time,” she says. “Sunlight streams in.” There’s plenty to do—Cooper is taking five courses, concentrating in literature but still pre-med: “I can’t close doors.”

She writes out her daily schedule to the minute: “Shower, 7:15-7:20.” Lunch might be at the Signet Society, the private, arts-oriented, undergraduate club where she is vice-president. She also belongs to the Isis, a female social club, and has held the post of Dionysus at the Harvard Advocate, planning social events like the literary quarterly’s spring dinner (which she revived) for 70 attendees. Cooper has an omnivorous appetite for learning and experience: new fascinations constantly beckon, and she dives in wholeheartedly. Yet the ceaseless activity leaves little space or time for reflection on who she is or what she wants. “I’m more terrified of being bored than busy,” she explains. “Though I’m scared I’ll work myself into a pile of dust if I don’t learn when to stop.”

Cooper has always been super-active. Even in elementary and middle school, she “adopted an intense work ethic” and participated in track, basketball, chorus, a pottery class, and gymnastics. At the “pressure cooker” Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan, she put the shot and racewalked for the track squad, and added cheerleading. After track meets and practices on Saturdays, she had a Sunday job as a docent in a science museum. And from seventh grade on, she attended summer camps for gifted students at upstate college campuses.

At Harvard, she has hosted a two-hour weekly jazz show on WHRB, and as a freshman acted in Ivory Tower, the long-running Harvard TV soap opera viewable on YouTube. (Last summer, she also acted in an independent film shot by a friend in Miami, learning American Sign Language for the part.) In the summer of 2007, Cooper tasted some ravishing ravioli di zucca (pumpkin)—“I was in heaven”—and determined to learn Italian and cook in Italy. As a sophomore, she got a job with Harvard University Dining Services, working with their consultant, cookbook author Mollie Katzen, and the next summer, after two months in Paris with the International Herald Tribune, was baking in Italy as a pastry chef and speaking only Italian.

As a Crimson staffer, Cooper wrote a food column every other week for the arts section. Frequently, her classes and meetings ran from 8 A.M. until 11 P.M., when she went over her column, line by line, with another Crimson editor. She returned to college this spring after taking the fall term off to continue a summer job assisting New Yorker staff writer Adam Gopnik. “It’s exhausting—here now, where next?—continually hopping from one thing to another,” she says. “You never let yourself rest. Harvard kids don’t want to do 5,000 things at 97 percent; they’d rather do 3,000 things at 150 percent.”

There’s no irony intended: “That’s the standard operating procedure,” Cooper explains. “College here is like daring yourself to swim the length of a swimming pool without breathing. A lap is a semester. I want to do everything I possibly can.” She works on a 28-hour day, she says: some days sleeping 10 hours, others, two. She can describe different levels of exhaustion. One level, she explains, is a “goofy feeling, like feeling drunk all the time; you’re not quite sure what’s going on. Then there’s this extra level of exhaustion, where you feel dead behind your eyes. The last four weeks, that’s where I’ve been. I get sick a lot.”

Keeping Up with the Einsteins

Amazingly enough, Cooper is not unusual at Harvard College. Students today routinely sprint through jam-packed daily schedules, tackling big servings of academic work plus giant helpings of extracurricular activity in a frenetic tizzy of commitments. They gaze at their Blackberries (nicknamed “Crackberries” for their addictive pull) throughout the day to field the digital traffic: e-mail and text messages, phone calls, Web access, and their calendars. Going or gone are late-night bull sessions with roommates and leisurely two-hour lunches—phone calls and texting punctuate meals, anyway.

“They are unbelievably achieving,” says Judith H. Kidd, formerly associate dean for student life and activities, who retired from Harvard last year. “They are always on. They prefer to be busy all the time, and multitask in ways I could not imagine. Students will sign up for three or four activities and take one of them up to practically NGO level. They were organizing international conferences.”

There’s a wide consensus that today’s undergraduates make up the most talented, accomplished group of polymaths ever assembled in Harvard Yard: there’s nothing surprising about meeting a first-chair cellist in the Harvard-Radcliffe Orchestra who is also a formidable racer for the cycling club, or a student doing original research on interstellar dark matter who organized a relief effort in sub-Saharan Africa. “You could say it’s a high-end problem,” says dean of admissions Bill Fitzsimmons ’67, Ed.D. ’71, “but one of the dilemmas for the kind of multitalented people who come to places like Harvard is that they could do almost anything. And especially if that’s true, you need to think hard about what it is you really value, which direction is right for you.”

The paradox is that students now live in such a blur of activity that idle moments for such introspection are vanishing. The French film director Jean Renoir once declared, “The foundation of all civilization is loitering,” saluting those unstructured chunks of time that give rise to creative ideas. If Renoir is right, and if Harvard students are among the leaders of the future, then civilization is on the precipice: loitering is fast becoming a lost art. And if the tornado of achievement that whirls through Cambridge has its obvious rewards, there are, as with most tornadoes, downsides.

Sleep deprivation, for example: varsity athletes, representing about 20 percent of undergraduates, seem to be the only sizable student category to sleep and rise at roughly conventional hours, according to Harry Lewis ’68, Ph.D. ’74, McKay professor of computer science and former dean of Harvard College. At Becky Cooper’s high school, the standing joke was: “Friends, grades, sleep: you only get two.” Sleep was nearly always the odd one out. Cooper attributes her own frequent low-level infections and colds to exhaustion. Undergraduates tend to push themselves relentlessly and to disbelieve physical limits. “Harvard kids,” Cooper says, “think of themselves as superheroes.”

New technologies vastly enlarge the game of keeping up with the Einsteins. “If you aren’t on Facebook, you feel guilty, you feel like you’re being a bad citizen, or worse, that you are out of it,” says Hobbs professor of cognition and education Howard Gardner ’65, Ph.D. ’71, who studies excellence in the realm of work. “One thing we discovered in our research is that kids look up people whom they don’t know on Facebook, because they want to see how much they’re achieving. If you’re on the Crimson, but someone else is on the Crimson and the swimming team, well, then….”

The explosion of busyness has occurred not in academics (most students still take four courses a semester), but largely in extracurricular activities. “Extracurriculars are now as important as coursework,” says Gardner. “I wouldn’t have said that 40 years ago.” The number of student organizations grew almost sevenfold from 1960 to 2007-08, skyrocketing from 60 groups to 416, although undergraduate enrollment grew only about 10 percent, from about 6,000 to 6,655. In recent years, the College has added an average of 40 to 50 new student groups annually (though about half don’t endure), says David Friedrich, M.T.S. ’04, assistant dean of Harvard College for student life. In singing, for example, there are now 19 small a cappella groups at the College; before the Radcliffe Pitches were founded in 1975, the Harvard Krokodiloes were the sole such group on campus.

Does this mean that students are starting new groups to build their résumés, so they can boast of having been the founder or president or editor-in-chief of an organization? Impossible to say.

“Yes, it can often be frenetic and [done] with an eye toward résumés,” says Friedrich, “but learning outside the classroom through extracurricular opportunities is a vital part of the undergraduate experience here.” And extracurricular experiences may in fact be the strongest preparation for the “real world”; for years, Harvard alumni have achieved notable success in the arts, for example, despite the lack of undergraduate concentrations in the performing arts. Instead, they learned and practiced their crafts at the highest levels in groups like the Harvard-Radcliffe Dramatic Club, the Harvard Lampoon, the Harvard-Radcliffe Orchestra, and Hasty Pudding Theatricals.

In Excellence Without a Soul, his 2006 book on the future of liberal education, Harry Lewis relates a conversation with three of his former students who had launched a highly successful Internet start-up. What in their computer-science educations had contributed to their success, Lewis wanted to know. There was an awkward silence, then one spoke up. “I really loved my computer-science education,” he said, “but I could have read books and learned a lot of that on my own. The thing that was really valuable was running the Quincy House Grill.” Lewis explains: “He’d had to get people to show up on time, and make sure there was enough hamburger ordered the day before—but not too much, or he’d have to waste it, and that would cut into his profit margin. He took all this stuff and combined it with his technical skills to become a very successful entrepreneur. The way social progress gets made is by learning to work together, and the real place where people can learn to cooperate is in extracurriculars.”

“There are so many opportunities here, I don’t want to sleep,” declares the preternaturally busy Will Guzick ’11. “I want to soak it all in and make the most of my four years.” Last year he pulled plenty of all-nighters, but this year is “shooting for seven hours a night,” usually rising at 9 A.M. for a day of classes, going to meetings for activities in the evening, and studying in the Quincy House library (open all night) or the dining hall until 2 or 3 A.M. “The man who cleans the dining hall knows me well,” he says, grinning.

Guzick rooms in a centrifugal Quincy House suite with four other driven young men who found themselves together (and awake) only twice during the fall term: once on Guzick’s birthday, and one night when they fortuitously encountered each other in the dining hall “and decided to take a picture to commemorate the occasion.”

Guzick juggles an astonishing array of commitments in addition to five courses for his economics concentration with a secondary field of statistics. He played varsity tennis his first two years, but dropped that 20-to-25-hours-per-week commitment to clear time for other activities. These include the Leadership Institute at Harvard College, which aims to promote leadership on campus; work as a research assistant to a Business School professor, a grader for an Extension School finance course, and as a campus representative for a GMAT tutoring business; the Harvard Undergraduate Economics Association; running (he runs 10 to 15 five-kilometer races per year); working at the Banco Credito del Peru in Lima for four weeks this January; and serving as a peer adviser for nine freshmen and as a drug-and-alcohol peer adviser (he is trying to launch a Friday-night movie series at the Science Center as an alternative to intoxicants). Guzick is also working to organize a series of conferences on French, Italian, and Spanish at Harvard and other colleges because “We don’t have a system of language learning outside the classrooms.”

He’s applying to the Harvard Business School’s new 2 + 2 program for college juniors, which would assure him entry into its two-year M.B.A. program after he’s worked for two years beyond college. Regarding on-campus leadership positions, he says, “From a résumé perspective, yes, you have to have them. From a personal standpoint, they prepare you very well for staying on top of things in the business world.”

The pace of that preparation, though, can be frantic. “People are going nonstop,” says Olivia Goldhill ’11, a philosophy concentrator from England, “and there are a lot of negative implications. You don’t have time to dedicate to your friends or to yourself—or to thoughts that you haven’t been taught to think.” Goldhill, educated at London’s venerable Westminster School, where discussion and debate are the warp and weft of the school day, marvels that, at Harvard, “there are so few intellectual discussions outside of classes. I try to take at least an hour for lunch with friends. There are days, though, that even when you want to go and hang out, everyone else is in their nonstop mode.”

An aspiring journalist, Goldhill herself writes opinion columns for the Crimson; she also volunteers for the Phillips Brooks House Association, tutoring female ex-prisoners for their GEDs and in job skills. But she believes, too, that “People need to have hobbies, not just extracurriculars—things they do for themselves.” (Her own hobbies include reading fiction and plays, going to the theater, and meditation.) “Many have such busy lives building up credentials,” she says. “A lot of extracurriculars are résumé builders, and you sit in these meetings not really doing very much. To me, time with friends is the most important, and to my mind it’s a little bit selfish, putting future jobs before relationships.”

Cradle to Goldman Sachs

“Students are very conscious of what it will take to get into graduate school or to get a job,” says dean of freshmen Tom Dingman ’67, Ed.M. ’73. “I regularly have conversations with freshmen who say things like, ‘This summer, I have a chance to go back to the yacht club where my family has been involved, and I would run the sailing program. But I don’t think I should do that. I should be doing an internship in an office somewhere so that next summer I can build on that, and maybe ultimately get an internship with Goldman Sachs.’ But they’re not paying attention to the things they really enjoy, and not seeing the opportunity to develop themselves holistically—it’s more strategizing about how best to build a launch pad.”

The strategizing starts early; today’s parents groom their children for high achievement in ways that set in motion the culture of scheduled lives and nonstop activity. “This is the play-date generation,” says Kidd. “There was a time when children came home from school and just played randomly with their friends. Or hung around and got bored, and eventually that would lead you on to something. Kids don’t get to do that now. Busy parents book them into things constantly—violin lessons, ballet lessons, swimming teams. The kids get the idea that someone will always be structuring their time for them.” Dingman notes that, “Starting at an earlier age, students feel that their free time should be taken up with purposeful activities. There is less stumbling on things you love and that give you fire in your belly, and more being steered toward pursuits—some of which may, in fact, become passions.”

For her part, Olivia Goldhill recognizes that “filling time with activities can be almost a distraction, so you don’t have to investigate other aspects of life. The reaction to J-term was a good example of people being scared of what they would do if they weren’t given some structure by the University” (see “January Reading,” January-February, page 52).

Home life has changed in ways that would seem to undercut children’s development of autonomy. There was a time when children did their own homework. Now parents routinely “help” them with assignments, making teachers wonder whose work they are really grading. Youngsters formerly played sports and games with other children on a sandlot or pickup basis, not in leagues organized, coached, and officiated by adults; kids had to learn to settle disputes over rules and calls among themselves, not by referring them to grownup zebras. Once, college applicants typically wrote their own applications, including the essays; today, an army of high-paid consultants, coaches, and editors is available to orchestrate and massage the admissions effort.

Adults have taken charge even of recreation, as in play dates. “When birthdays come along, kids have been entertained by magicians,” says Dingman. “Or taken out to Chuck E. Cheese. They are the ‘Chuck E. Cheese generation.’” Having had their parents organize play and social activities, many young people now arrive at college expecting the institution to operate similarly, in loco parentis. “It’s very upsetting to read on [year-end freshman] surveys that people have been spending Friday and Saturday nights doing problem sets, finding it hard to escape from what they characterize as the ‘intense pressure’ of this place,” Dingman adds. “When they identify what they think is lacking, they say, ‘You haven’t organized other things for us’—things like ‘trips to bowling alleys.’ When I was in college, it never occurred to me that it was Harvard’s responsibility to entertain me.” Kidd, too, recalls “complaints from parents that we weren’t providing enough social activity.”

Indeed, parental engagement even in the lives of college-age children has expanded in ways that would have seemed bizarre in the recent past. (Some colleges have actually created a “dean of parents” position—whether identified as such or not—to deal with them.) The “helicopter parents” who hover over nearly every choice or action of their offspring have given way to “snowplow parents” who determinedly clear a path for their child and shove aside any obstacle they perceive in the way.

Some of the impetus for this is probably “overcompensation,” explains Dingman. “With more and more families having both parents working, there’s some guilt, and there’s a sense that ‘When I can be available to you, I’m going to make all things happen for you.’ There’s no recognition that by stepping up to clear the path, they’re really handicapping their sons and daughters, making them unaware that they actually have the capacities to do things themselves.” Parental involvement can reach astonishing extremes. One Chicago father received a call from his Harvard-freshman daughter who had taken the subway into Boston and wanted to know whether to go right or left at a downtown intersection. (He supplied the answer.)

Dingman’s office writes to families of incoming freshmen, asking how Harvard can welcome and support their progeny, and “Oftentimes, we get from parents a very definitive chart of where that student is going,” Dingman says. “We’ll hear, ‘So-and-so has always wanted to be a doctor and will be a pre-med at Harvard, use the summers to work in labs, go to med school, and begin a career in pediatric medicine.’ The parents’ letters are expressed with such certitude—it’s quite remarkable. This doesn’t suggest that the student has much room to explore, or that there’s much support for someone falling in love with a different field of study.”

Today’s college students, partly due to cell phones, texting, and e-mail, “are in remarkably close communication with their parents,” Dingman continues, citing frequent conversations with undergraduates who tell him things like, “‘My mother’s going to kill me because I didn’t get to the [Institute of Politics] Forum last night—Newt Gingrich was speaking, and she said I had to get a ticket.’ My parents never would have known what was happening on campus; nor would they have thought it was their role to push me toward it.” A survey carried out, in collaboration with Cornell and several other colleges, by associate professor of psychiatry Paul Barreira, director of behavioral health and academic counseling for the University Health Services, showed that one-third of undergraduates are in contact with their parents daily.

The parental tendrils can extend even into academic work. In the early 1990s, some undergraduates faxed drafts of term papers home to their parents and received edited, marked-up faxes back; today, e-mail streamlines the process. Barreira cites a study indicating that students who were in frequent contact with parents did better academically; perhaps parents are still “helping” with homework, boosting grades, or perhaps close parent-child ties enhance performance in more indirect, diffuse ways. Barreira doesn’t see reason for alarm. “You hear about parents dictating exactly what is going on with their kids, what courses they are going to take,” he says. “I actually think that’s a minority of students—it may be overplayed.”

Fitzsimmons adds, “Sure, there are more helicopter parents, and they come in all different forms—rich and poor, from all kinds of backgrounds. But for the most part, the helicoptering has worked, and is perceived as a positive thing by students.” He cites a study by the College Board indicating that more than 60 percent of students felt their parents had the “right” level of involvement in the admissions process, and that only 5 to 6 percent felt their parents were overly involved.

The Ecology of Overachievement

In the latter part of the twentieth century, the composition of Harvard College changed dramatically. The funnel of access became tighter numerically (20 percent of applicants were admitted in the mid 1960s, versus 7 percent today), yet broadened for greater diversity in race, sex, ethnicity, geographical origin, and social class. “Twenty-five percent of my class [1967] was on some kind of need-based financial aid,” says Fitzsimmons. “It’s a little over 60 percent for the current freshman class. True, we have a better financial-aid program now, so the comparison isn’t exact, but there’s no question that this place has many more people from the bottom quarter and bottom half of the American income distribution. Now, about a quarter of the class comes from families earning less than $80,000 per year.” New financial-aid initiatives have accelerated change in the last five or six years; consequently, for many students now, “This is their big chance,” Fitzsimmons says. “They have no safety net, no family money—or ‘social capital’—to fall back on.”

Harry Lewis explains: “People who come, on average, from more comfortable backgrounds are less worried about getting a job after college than those who are very strongly motivated to do better than their parents did. The second group are their parents’ best hope for moving the family up in the world. So there’s more upward mobility, which makes people more energized and ambitious, and sometimes driven—and I don’t consider ‘driven’ itself to be a negative term. That helps create the energy.”

Another shift is that Harvard has become a far more international university than it was a few decades ago. “Harvard may or may not be the greatest university in America,” says Howard Gardner, “but it is clearly the greatest one in the world” in that it’s known from Malaysia to Chile to Sri Lanka, whereas references to Yale, Stanford, and Princeton draw only blank stares even in western Europe. “To get in, you’re competing with people all over the world,” he continues, “which makes it an incredibly selective process.”

Hard-working, enterprising international students may well be raising the benchmark on achievement for everyone, as well as enlarging students’ reference group to global scale. “The average American kid does very little homework,” explains Fitzsimmons. “You can find statistics that show high-school seniors averaging 45 minutes to an hour of homework per night. In many other countries, the norm is four, five, or six hours of homework each day.”

Perhaps the pendulum has swung to an extreme, and a reaction will set in, with a new balance asserting itself. But right now, many College students seem to suffer from a horror vacui, a fear of empty spaces, whether those be the J-term, a leisurely summer near the water, or simply an unplanned hour.

“Like one of those puzzles in which you try to rearrange little tiles—to get the number 1 in the upper left corner, and so on—it’s the empty space that makes the other squares maneuverable,” says Dingman. “Without it, the pattern can be fixed and not open to new permutations. I tell students that’s a good way to think about their lives: if they don’t have any empty space, there’s not likely to be any movement. It’s really in those moments where they have created windows of free time that they may learn the most about themselves and end up with the kind of movement they’re looking for.”

One undergraduate who seems to have a feel for empty spaces is Olivia Goldhill, who makes sure there is time in her day for friends, unhurried meals, and cultivating her inner garden. Although she had to take a required quantitative reasoning course to graduate, “I wasn’t willing to put in vast hours of work just to get an A,” she declares. “I think a lot of other students would.” She also feels less pressure because, given her career interests (journalism) and the likelihood of returning to England, “My GPA won’t matter.” Her family, too, has a relaxed, low-pressure attitude about grades. “My mom said she doesn’t want me to get As,” Goldhill says, smiling. “Because that would mean I was missing the college experience.”

Craig A. Lambert ’69, Ph.D. ’78, is deputy editor of this magazine.

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At Harvard, Leaner Times Mean No More Hot Breakfast - NYTimes.com

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By ABBY GOODNOUGH

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Gone are the hot breakfasts in most dorms and the pastries at Widener Library. Varsity athletes are no longer guaranteed free sweat suits, and just this week came the jarring news that professors will go without cookies at faculty meetings.

By Harvard standards, these are hard times. Not Dickensian hard times, but with the value of its endowment down by almost 30 percent, the world’s richest university is learning to live with less.

The Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Harvard’s largest division, has cut about $75 million from its budget in recent months and is planning more. With the cuts extending beyond hiring and salary freezes to measures that affect what students eat, where they study and other parts of their daily routine, the euphoria of fall in Harvard Yard is dampened.

The Faculty of Arts and Sciences anticipates a deficit of $130 million over the next two years and is awaiting recommendations from groups of faculty members and students who have been weighing the options.

“Everyone is worried,” said George Hayward, a junior who lives on a part of campus, the Quad, that lost its library to the cuts. “It could be anything next; nobody really knows.”

Harvard is not the only elite university where student life is more austere this fall: Princeton has closed some computer labs, and one of its dining halls on Saturdays. At Stanford, the annual Mausoleum Party, a Halloween gathering at the Stanford family burial site, lost $14,000 in financing and might be canceled.

But many here assumed student life at Harvard, more than at any other institution, was immune from hardship. The loss of scrambled eggs, bacon and other cooked breakfast foods in the dorms of upperclassmen on weekdays seems to have stirred the most ire.

“Students generally feel that if you come to Harvard, for what you’re paying, you should probably have the right to a hot breakfast,” said Andrea Flores, a senior who is president of the Undergraduate Council. “They want to preserve the things that are at Harvard that you can’t get anywhere else.”

Some students are feeling the cuts more than others. Mr. Hayward said that those who live on the Quad, a 15-minute walk from Harvard Yard, were disproportionately affected because the library there was closed and shuttle bus service to and from the central campus curtailed. (Quad residents are touchy to begin with — “getting quadded,” or assigned to live in that area, is many a student’s nightmare.)

Varsity athletes have also suffered disproportionally, said Johnny Bowman, a junior who is monitoring the cuts for the Undergraduate Council, because they were the biggest devotees of hot breakfast. “It was a big shock,” Mr. Bowman said. “Athletes were accustomed to coming back from early morning practice and getting their nutrients — a solid meal.”

On top of that loss, some club teams find themselves sharing space at the Malkin Athletic Center because it now closes earlier on weeknights. Khoa Tran, president of Harvard Taekwondo, told The Harvard Crimson that his team would have to share practice space with the Crimson Dance Team.

“It will be an interesting mix because they will be playing dance music while we do our routines,” he told the paper. “We ourselves yell every time we kick... and we kick a lot.”

Harvard’s endowment was $26 billion in June 2009, down from $36.9 billion in June 2008, a 27 percent decrease. The loss is especially hard on the Faculty of Arts and Science, which includes Harvard College, the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and the School of Engineering, because the endowment provides half of its budget.

Though faculty jobs have so far been protected, the university laid off 250 staff members this summer, said Jeff Neal, a Harvard spokesman. He said it was too soon to know whether future cuts would affect students.

“We are working hard to minimize the impact of the global financial downturn on any substantive aspect of student life,” he said in an e-mail message.

Mr. Neal pointed out that despite its budget problems Harvard had increased financial aid to students to $145 million this year, from $136 million last year. More than 60 percent of this year’s freshman class, a record number, is receiving financial aid, he said. The total cost of a year at Harvard is $48,868.

Ms. Flores said that after excluding students from conversations about what to cut last spring, the administration was now seeking their ideas. It scrapped a plan to end weeknight shuttle service at 1:30 a.m. instead of 3:45 a.m. after an outcry, she said, though it did cut service on weekend mornings.

The Faculty of Arts and Sciences has started an online “idea bank” where students can suggest savings. The 170 submissions so far include charging tour groups to enter Harvard Yard and having students clean their own bathrooms instead of paying other students to do it under a work program.

“We understand we have to give up something,” Ms. Flores said. “But students want to be able to say what they’re willing to give up and what they want to protect. As long as that’s part of the discussion, I think the process can hopefully be done peacefully.”

After Arrest, Cambridge Reflects on Racial Rift

By Krissah Thompson and Cheryl W. Thompson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, July 26, 2009

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- The town where a white police officer and a black scholar ignited a national conversation on race and law enforcement has begun to open the dialogue that President Obama invited.

Before summer's end, the mayor, district attorney and police officials will convene a forum to grapple with the controversy over the arrest of Harvard University professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. by Sgt. James Crowley -- which exploded into a divisive debate that drew in the president.

Obama, who spoke to both men last week, called it a "teachable moment" for the nation on a "troubling aspect of our society." Gates said in an e-mail statement that he accepts Obama's invitation to begin talking and wants to work with the Cambridge Police Department. Crowley has not publicly responded to the invitation.

Residents of Gates's neighborhood, mostly upper-middle-class whites and a transient but diverse group of students in university housing, have begun pondering the meaning of the incident. Other questions also have emerged: What does it mean to have the nation's first black president involved? Will the discourse have lasting impact on the relationships between police and blacks and Latinos?

"It's disappointing," said Lawrence Neely, a 33-year-old doctoral student at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who lives in a university-owned apartment building next-door to Gates's yellow wood-frame house. "We're in Cambridge, Massachusetts. We have an African American mayor. We have an African American governor. We have an African American president, and just looking at the situation strictly at face value -- without getting into who is right and who is wrong -- we are now having a conversation about the question of whether one of the most influential African American scholars in the country has been racially profiled. It all makes it clear that this is still a reality."

Although others have been critical of Obama's role, Neely, who is black, said he was glad that the president weighed in and hopes the conversation on race will not go back underground.

People in the neighborhood are friendly and speak to one another, Neely said, but he added that the horde of reporters and television cameras outside Gates's home in the days after the arrest served as a reminder that the deeper issues of race are still little discussed.

Much is known about Gates's arrest on the charge of disorderly conduct, which was later dropped, but the folks who live here acknowledge that the incident did not happen in a vacuum.

Demographically, Cambridge is a liberal college town of about 100,000 people -- 65 percent white, 11.5 percent black, 12 percent Asian and about 7 percent Hispanic. The divide between the intellectual university affiliates and the rest of the mostly working-class residents is "from time to time quite tense," said Priscilla McMillian, a civic activist and historian who is white.

Merritt Harrison, a 75-year-old white man who lives around the corner from Gates, said that he understands why the police feel defensive, but that he probably would have had the same reaction as Gates if a police officer had showed up at his home and suspected him of being a burglar.

"I'm white, so I probably wouldn't have been arrested," said the part-time Episcopalian pastor, real-estate agent and counselor who has called the community home for 25 years. "I don't know. Was it racial profiling? I don't think anyone will ever know. But plenty of people think it was. The thing to do is to use it as an occasion to look at the issue. People need to talk."

Orlando Patterson, a professor of sociology at Harvard who lives next-door to McMillian, said the moment provides an opening to look at "a real paradox persisting in the nation."

"You have a country that has pretty well come to accept blacks in the public domain: in politics, in the media, in sports, in religion," said Patterson, who is black. "But there is still persistent segregation and indeed some areas where there is not much progress, such as integration in the schools. There is a complete mismatch between the world of blacks in the public domain and the world of blacks in their personal relationships."

Patterson, author of "The Ordeal of Integration: Progress and Resentment in America's Racial Crisis," is convinced that race and class influenced the interaction between Gates and Crowley.

Not lost on Neely: The irony that all the research on race and socialization gathered in this academic town did not result in greater understanding. "The police officer made a judgment," he said. "Gates made a judgment. The challenge is the subjective assessments of one another."

'Moving From Fear'

In Cambridge this time last year, a young black man was removing a lock from a bike on campus when a Harvard police officer pulled a gun and demanded identification, according to a six-member committee report on the practices of the police department ordered by Harvard President Drew Faust. The youth showed the officer his Boston Public Library card, began crying and said he was a high school student working at the university. (Harvard police were also called to Gates's home.)

Such incidents have prompted Charles Ogletree to convene meetings of police and community members over the years. Ogletree is a Harvard law professor and Gates's attorney, and he is now helping to map out the citywide forum. Gates is going to participate, he said.

"The goal is for people to speak candidly and have the difficult conversation," he said. "The constant factor in all of this fear. Police fear that they are encountering a situation that is dangerous, and suspects fear that police don't care who they are and what they are doing. So, it is moving from fear to a sense of tolerance and a level of acceptance."

The Cambridge Police Department is gathering law enforcement and policing experts to study the case as it looks for its own lessons, said Commissioner Robert Haas, though he added that his own review found that race played no role in the arrest.

Law enforcement experts nationwide are watching as the city and the incident become an important, if imperfect, petri dish for discussing racial profiling.

"My suspicion is that this was not about race, this was about power," said Richard Weinblatt, director of the Institute for Public Safety at Central Ohio Technical College. "In the old days, we used to call this 'contempt of cop.' This person was charged with 'contempt of cop' because they kept pushing and pushing. But it has opened up a very powerful national dialogue on race, and it's something that police need to address."

In the 1990s, after high-profile cases such as the beating of Rodney King in Los Angeles and the fatal shooting of Amadou Diallo in New York, departments began requiring officers to document whom they stopped as a way of monitoring their work. Others beefed up cultural diversity training, formed partnerships with the community and, more recently, began using video cameras and other technology to record interactions.

"I'm not saying racial profiling doesn't exist, but I don't think we get as many complaints as we did 10 or 20 years ago," said Atlanta Police Chief Richard Pennington, adding that what happened to Gates was not a case of racial profiling because Crowley received a call of a possible crime in progress. "It's not like he was walking through the neighborhood, saw Gates and demanded to see his identification. That's racial profiling."

Gates wrote in a 1995 New Yorker magazine article: "Blacks -- in particular, black men -- swap their experiences of police encounters like war stories."

Saturday, he said in an e-mail statement: "I have spent my entire career as an academic attempting to bridge differences and promote understanding among all Americans. To that end, I have pledged to do all that I can to help us learn from this unfortunate incident. This could and should be a profound teaching moment in the history of race relations in America. I sincerely hope that the Cambridge police department will choose to work with me toward that goal."

Research editor Alice Crites contributed to this report.

Obama Voices Regret to Policeman

By Michael A. Fletcher and Michael D. Shear
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, July 25, 2009

President Obama, attempting to quell a mushrooming racial controversy that threatened to eclipse his top domestic initiative, expressed regret Friday for saying that police "acted stupidly" by arresting black scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. at his home near Harvard University.

Making a surprise appearance before reporters at the White House, Obama said that he had unwittingly fanned smoldering racial resentment with his response to a question at a news conference Wednesday night. The president said he conveyed that sentiment in a five-minute telephone call to Sgt. James Crowley, the police officer who arrested Gates after being called to the Harvard professor's home to check out a suspected burglary.

"I want to make clear that in my choice of words I think I unfortunately gave an impression that I was maligning the Cambridge Police Department or Sergeant Crowley specifically -- and I could have calibrated those words differently," Obama said. "And I told this to Sergeant Crowley."

The Wednesday comment had become politically costly for the nation's first African American president, who has sought to cast himself as a clear-eyed arbiter of the nation's racial divisions.

That image was challenged once before, in a controversy surrounding another Obama friend. When the racially charged sermons of the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. became a lightning rod, candidate Obama gave a rare speech that directly addressed the country's racial wounds, and he cast aside Wright, someone he had once called a father figure.

This week, as a growing clamor from conservative critics and police representatives painted Obama as siding with his friend Gates in a battle with the police in Cambridge, Mass., Obama moved swiftly to remove himself as a combatant.

The president said he continues to think the arrest was an "overreaction" by the officer, but he said Gates "probably overreacted as well."

"My sense is you've got two good people in a circumstance in which neither of them were able to resolve the incident in the way that it should have been resolved," Obama said, adding that he hoped the controversy would become a "teachable moment" for improving racial understanding.

Though he tried to remove the bite from his earlier statement, Obama described an uneasy relationship between African Americans and law enforcement.

"Because of our history, because of the difficulties of the past, you know, African Americans are sensitive to these issues," said Obama, who sponsored legislation to track the racial breakdown of drivers stopped by police when he was an Illinois state senator. "And even when you've got a police officer who has a fine track record on racial sensitivity, interactions between police officers and the African American community can sometimes be fraught with misunderstanding."

But the president rejected the notion that, as Crowley said Thursday, he was wrong to take a position on the incident. Any president, he insisted, has a responsibility to contribute constructively to the discussion of racial discord, which he called "a troubling aspect of our society."

"There are some who say that as president I shouldn't have stepped into this at all because it's a local issue. I have to tell you that that part of it I disagree with," he said. "Whether I were black or white, I think that me commenting on this and hopefully contributing to constructive -- as opposed to negative -- understandings about the issue is part of my portfolio."

The controversy has become a lesson for Obama's young presidency, reminding him of the raw sensitivities surrounding race and its ability to distract. Determined not to let the issue distract from the discussion of health care, his top domestic priority, Obama moved within 48 hours from shrugging off the controversy surrounding his comments to coming before the cameras to recalibrate them.

From the moment the word "stupidly" slipped through Obama's lips Wednesday night, debate over Gates's arrest became a polarizing national issue. Obama's top advisers said the president quickly became aware that his words had been received in a way he had not intended.

"We all read the newspapers," said David Axelrod, a senior adviser to Obama. "It was obvious from [Thursday] morning on that this discussion had taken on a life of its own."

The morning after the news conference, conservative blogs and police union representatives pummeled the president for not being more supportive of law enforcement. At first, the White House was publicly dismissive of the controversy.

In an interview with ABC News's "Nightline" on Thursday, Obama defended his words, saying that he was surprised at the controversy they had stirred. "I thought it was a pretty straightforward commentary that you probably don't need to handcuff a guy, a middle-aged guy who uses a cane, who's in his own home," he said.

On Thursday, just hours before Obama spoke to reporters, press secretary Robert Gibbs said the president had not made any attempt to talk to Gates, Crowley or anyone else involved in the case.

"If he realized how much of a overall distraction and obsession it would be, I think he would probably regret distracting you guys with obsessions," Gibbs said.

He added: "I think he's said what he's going to say on this."

Aides would not say what finally convinced Obama to revisit the issue.

Shortly after Gibbs's remarks, police officers in Cambridge denounced the president's statement and demanded an apology in a news conference carried live on cable news channels. Dennis O'Connor, president of the Cambridge Police Superior Officers Association, said the Cambridge police "deeply resent the implication" that race was a factor in the decision to take Gates into custody.

"The president used the right adjective but directed it to the wrong party," O'Connor said.

Axelrod hinted that the police news conference at least in part prompted Obama's remarks.

"We live in a dynamic world. You can see issues evolving and how they are evolving. He was well aware of that," Axelrod said. "His reaction is: 'You know what? Let's deal with it. Let's confront it.' "

It was not the first time that Obama has been forced to quell a public relations storm he created with comments that, in retrospect, seemed less than well considered. Early in his term, he said huge bonuses awarded to executives by companies that had taken bailout money were "shameful" and "the height of irresponsibility."

But when his words helped fuel a congressional effort that almost resulted in legislation banning bonuses, Obama quickly moved to tamp down the criticism.

In March, he drew criticism for jokingly invoking the Special Olympics in describing his bowling skills to Jay Leno on "The Tonight Show."

On Friday, Obama said he and Crowley had talked about "having a beer" at the White House with Gates. Later in the day, he called Gates and invited him to join them.

"I think the president is doing the right thing by trying to lower the temperature in this matter and trying to make sure that this leads to an opportunity for constructive dialogue," said Charles Ogletree, Gates's attorney and a friend and confidant to Obama.

Ogletree said: "I don't think that Skip drinks beer, but I think he would welcome the invitation."

Harvard Scholar Henry Louis Gates Arrested

By Krissah Thompson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, July 21, 2009

Henry Louis Gates Jr., one of the nation's most prominent African American scholars, was arrested last week at his home near Harvard University after trying to force open the locked front door.

According to a report by the police department in Cambridge, Mass., Gates accused police officers at the scene of being racist and said repeatedly, "This is what happens to black men in America." The incident was first reported by the Harvard Crimson.

Gates, the director of the W.E.B. DuBois Institute for African and African American Studies, has been away from his home much of the summer while working on a documentary called "Faces of America," said Charles Ogletree, a Harvard law professor and friend of Gates who is working as his lawyer. Gates returned from China last week and had trouble opening the front door with his key.

Gates, 58, was arrested Thursday by police looking into a possible break-in for disorderly conduct "after exhibiting loud and tumultuous behavior" at his home, according to the police report. Officers said they tried to calm down Gates, who responded, "You don't know who you're messing with," according to the police report.

Ogletree said Gates was ordered to step out of his home. He refused and was followed inside by a police officer. After showing the officer his driver's license, which includes his address, Ogletree said Gates asked: "Why are you doing this? Is it because I'm a black man and you're a white officer? I don't understand why you don't believe this is my house." Ogletree said Gates was then arrested and charged with disorderly conduct and racial harassment.

Gates did not return calls to his office Monday, and the police department would provide no further details on the arrest. He was released four hours later, and arraignment has been scheduled for Aug. 26, but Ogletree said they hope to resolve the case sooner.

Gates is resting on Martha's Vineyard, according to Ogletree, and will soon resume traveling. He is scheduled to interview cellist Yo-Yo Ma, whose genealogy he was researching in China.

Gates, is a founder of the Root (http://www.theroot.com), a Web site owned by The Washington Post Co. He is also host and co-producer of "African American Lives," a Public Broadcasting Service show in which he uses genealogical resources and DNA testing to trace the family lineages of prominent black Americans. He was named a MacArthur Fellow in 1981 and was among Time magazine's "25 Most Influential Americans" in 1997.

Gates's arrest points to broader racial disparities in the criminal justice system, said Ryan S. King, a policy analyst at the Sentencing Project, a think tank that researches incarceration rates.

"If you look at every stage of the criminal justice system from initial police contact all the way through sentencing and incarceration, you see that African Americans are disproportionately impacted by each stage," King said. "What we ultimately see as disparate incarceration rates are contributed to by all of these factors."

As news of the arrest spread Monday from Harvard into broader academic circles, one professor who follows Gates's work said the arrest was both "not surprising" and "disheartening."

"I felt bad that I would hear about something like this happening, especially to someone as recognizable and distinguished as [Gates], but in the academy we still sometimes encounter that. I've been in situations where I encounter people who don't believe I'm a college professor," said Jelani Cobb, an associate professor of history at Spelman College in Atlanta. "We have obvious signs of progress, but we're not there."