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An Open Letter to President Drew Faust Concerning Occupy Harvard

November 22, 2011

Dear President Faust,

We the undersigned faculty members of the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, the Department of Comparative Literature, the Department of Linguistics, and the Committee on Degrees in the study of Women, Gender and Sexuality, are writing to express our opposition to the decision to lock the gates of Harvard Yard. We sympathize with your difficult position, but all of us agree that locking the gates is contrary to the principle of open inquiry for which the university stands. Historically, Harvard has never locked its gates (at least, not in recent...

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Open Ye the Gates by Francesco Erspamer

December 14, 2011

Harvard should remain (or return to be) a place where unhindered passage is granted to those who seek knowledge, truth, and social justice. 

 

Harvard news office writer Ken Gewertz died a few months ago, in September. He did not see his university lock and guard its gates, the gates that in December 2005 he had described in a fascinatingarticle published by the Harvard Gazette. “The gates have become such fixtures in the Harvard landscape...

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Languages and Literatures by Kyle Hall

May 3, 2012

A twentieth century poet once said: "You see the old way wasn't working / so it's on us to do what we gotta do / to survive." A similar tack, which reevaluates the humanities' arguments for their very existence, seems necessary in today's university.

 

The town hall meeting that was held on May 1st in Boylston left me with a few things to say that I hope could help our thinking about the debates that surround our department. While we had an agenda that listed diverse topics such as the name of the department, future retirements/hires,...

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Hospitality and the humanities by Alina Opreanu

May 7, 2012

In one of the best-known elegies of the Romanian language, Mihai Eminescu (1850-1889) expresses what many world travelers have felt at some point in their wanderings: “Mai am un singur dor: / În liniştea serii / Să mă lăsaţi să mor / La marginea mării” [“I have one more desire: / In the evening quiet / That you let me expire / By the edge of the sea”]. According to linguists, a unique feature common to English and Romanian is that the amount of borrowed words in the vocabulary is higher than in other languages (approximately 80%) making them the...

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