Alabama has recently made national headlines as the future home of two CoreCivic mega-prisons. CoreCivic is the leading constructor and owner of private prisons and detention centers in the United States. Each of the top five owners of CoreCivic has links to Harvard University via employed alumni, and two of those five employ high-ranking executives who also serve as Harvard faculty members.
If you’ve ever rushed to CVS to buy a box of chocolates on Valentine’s Day, you’re part of a generations-long, world-wide chocolate obsession. The impulse is not your fault: chocolate manufacturers massively marketed chocolate into a household staple and transformed the way people expressed love. To help unravel this history, the Independent spoke to a […]
Professor Elisa New and Larry Summers are very different people. “Larry is an extrovert and I’m an introvert; he likes sports and competition and I do not,” New tells the Independent. “We are in many ways a dramatic illustration of how opposites attract.” Summers was President of Harvard University from 2001 to 2006. He served […]
The Independent asked you, Harvard students, to start off your week by answering the over-simplified question: what is love? There was, however, a caveat: your response could only be one word. To answer this question, respondents had to ask themselves a multitude of other questions first: what does it feel like to be loved? What […]
Harvard’s General Education (Gen Ed) program’s website invites its students to “Explore new ideas. Expand your horizons. Engage with the world.” It instructs faculty that their proposals for course claims should be “geared toward non-specialists” and “not an introduction to a scholarly discipline.” In short, Gen Eds are orthogonal to the main thrust of anyone’s […]
On January 20th, students received an email from the University Health Services (HUHS) indicating that Harvard had acquired shipments of and received approval to distribute the COVID-19 vaccine. Throughout the nation, underdog states like West Virginia are leading in vaccine distribution without priority-based phases, while wealthy states like California lag behind and face issues with […]
What do we gain, and lose, when residential life moves off-campus? Plus, what should off-campus students expect this spring semester? Housing has always been an integral element of Harvard student life. From the distinct personalities of the upperclassmen Houses to intramural sports and Housing Day, Harvard places a high priority on making residential life feel […]
Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?
These words capture the enigma of the now — our endeavor to position the Independent on a timeline of its past, present, and future.
You’re staring in the mirror. It’s day infinity of being stuck at home, and your split ends aren’t the only thing that’s dull. Life, it seems, is an endless stream of Zoom classes and news articles. But look in the mirror—there’s infinite potential for change! You could cut your hair, dye it, pierce your ears, […]
How do you tell a tenured faculty chemist from a graduate student chemist? Ask her to pronounce “unionized.” On June 30, the Harvard Graduate Student Union, HGSU-UAW, voted 2026-65 to ratify their contract with Harvard. On July 1, it went into effect for one year, providing a raft of benefits ranging from pay raises and […]