Illustration by Benjamen Purvis / Image via Getty Images

First published in the print edition of Boston magazine’s October 2024 issue with the headline, “When Crisis Calls.”

Previously

• From 2019: Massachusetts Has an Anti-Semitism Problem

Illustration by Benjamen Purvis / Photo by Jamie Schwaberow/NCAA Photos (Baker) / Getty Images

Once upon a time, Charlie Baker says—before he was governor, before he was in politics, before he was anything, really—he wanted to be, of all things, a sportswriter.

“This is back in time, long, long ago, probably before your parents were kids, when there were daily newspapers everywhere,” Baker is saying. It’s a crystal-clear afternoon, and Baker, now president of the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), is inside the organization’s national office in Indianapolis, addressing a few hundred college students interested in sports management careers.

This is the kind of setting that Baker—who’s long brimmed with a just-right mix of self-assuredness and regular-guyness—has always been at home in, and today is no exception. Looking relaxed in an open-collar shirt and speaking off the cuff, he’s funny, open, and direct, sharing his own story in hopes that it might contain some lesson for the students.

Baker posing in his Harvard basketball uniform in 1979. / Photo courtesy of Harvard Athletics

Back to the sportswriter dream: Baker explains that he played basketball in college—three years at Harvard, mostly on JV. He also began contributing stories to those small local papers that used to be everywhere, including the Daily News Transcript in Norwood. “I covered high school sports, college sports, pretty much whatever they needed somebody to write about,” he says.

Baker was so bitten by the sportswriting bug that, in the summers while he was at Harvard as well as post-college, he worked a loading-dock job during the day so he could continue stringing for the Transcript in his off hours, hoping that before long, the editors there—or somewhere—would give him a staff job, and he’d be on his way.

Alas, after a year of no offers—this was in the late ’70s, not long after Woodward and Bernstein had turned journalism into a glamour occupation and competition for jobs was fierce—Baker was finally persuaded he needed to pivot, career-wise. He landed a communications job at the Massachusetts High Technology Council, which got him interested in public policy, which led to him getting an MBA at Northwestern, which led to a job at a libertarian think tank, which eventually put Baker on the radar of a GOP gubernatorial candidate named Bill Weld. There were a lot more twists and turns from there, but we basically know how things ended up: Baker not only served two terms as governor of Massachusetts but became the most popular governor from sea to shining sea.

Baker’s point in telling the kids all of this? Well, in part it’s to urge them to be receptive to opportunities, to keep their “peripheral vision,” as he puts it, open. “This journey you’re about to go on, maybe everything will go according to plan, and bully for you if it works out that way,” he says. “But more often than not, it won’t.”

That’s okay, he continues. “Your goal here should be constantly trying to find places and spaces where you do stuff you’re good at and you enjoy. Bring the grind. Bring all that stuff you learned as an athlete. Be a good teammate.”

If they do that, well, who knows where they’ll end up? As Baker tells the kids, “Here I am, literally 47 years after I said I wanted to be a sportswriter, and I finally found my way”—Baker starts to bellow, in a sort of Masshole way—“INTO A JOB IN SPORTS! BUT IT TOOK ME 47 YEARS TO GET HERE!”

Baker in action at Oklahoma City’s Hall of Fame Stadium during the 2023 Women’s College World Series. / Photo by Stan Grossfeld/The Boston Globe via Getty Images

Yes, Charlie Baker is now in sports, although it’s worth noting he’s taken on what just might be the worst job in all of American athletics: trying to fix the mess that is the NCAA. Over the past 15 years, the 118-year-old body that regulates sports for nearly 1,100 colleges and universities, from behemoths like Ohio State to wisps like Holy Cross—has found itself upended by the twin forces of hyper-capitalism and hyper-litigation, the result of which has been nothing less than chaos. High-profile schools regularly switch conferences in order to make more money. Bigtime athletes—who can now be paid—regularly switch schools, also to make more money. Meanwhile, sports-betting apps such as FanDuel have given fans the daily opportunity to be separated from their money. Since taking over the NCAA 18 months ago, Baker has, by most accounts, done an effective job in at least beginning to get things under control, but what college athletics will look like in the future is still something of an open question.

Sports, of course, is hardly the only area of life that’s been upended of late, as Baker knows maybe better than anyone. Indeed, one can pretty easily make the case that if politics—especially Republican politics—hadn’t been taken over by extremists, Baker would be sailing along in his third term as governor or perhaps even occupying one of two spots on the GOP presidential ticket.

But the world did change, and so Charlie Baker—a man shaped in a different era, the quintessential centrist, an uncommon finder of common ground—now spends his days trying to bring sanity back to college sports. Which isn’t to say he’s necessarily given up on trying to bring sanity back to politics, too.

Charlie Baker at the NCAA headquarters in Indianapolis. / Photo by Jamie Schwaberow/NCAA Photos

A few minutes after Baker’s chat with the students, he and I sit down in a conference room that overlooks the White River on the west side of Indianapolis’s spiffy, refurbished downtown. “Because this is a convention town, the number of hotels is just stupefying,” he says of his home away from home. “As is the number of steakhouses. We’ve got a steak place on every corner.”

Baker, who’ll turn 68 in November, typically spends two or three days each week here at NCAA headquarters and a couple more on the road, attending to NCAA business or taking in one of the thousands of sporting events—from bowling to water polo—that the organization oversees. On weekends, he tries to be back in Swampscott with his wife of 37 years, Lauren. “The Wonderfund is her passion project, and she needs to be there for that,” he says. He pauses, then adds, smiling, “We still like each other.”

When the news hit in late 2022, just weeks before the end of his second term, that Baker was going to be the NCAA’s new president, many people were surprised—including, to an extent, Baker himself. He and Lauren had been envisioning a different kind of post-gubernatorial life, a mix of consulting, speaking, and writing. But a couple of months earlier, Baker had received a call from Red Sox president Sam Kennedy. Would Baker be interested in heading the NCAA? (A search firm had reached out to Kennedy, mining for candidates.) “I laughed and said, ‘Sam, I haven’t been in higher education or college athletics,’” Baker remembers. “He said, ‘I know, but I read the job description, and you’re the first person I thought of.’” Baker was skeptical, but—peripheral vision always operating—he agreed to look at an overview of the position. He was intrigued enough to share it with Lauren. “She looks at me and says, ‘Yeah, this does sound like you.’”

The job description, he continues, “talked a lot about the complexity of the organizational structure, the 180 committees the NCAA has, governing, bylaws, challenges associated with getting everyone to work together…blah blah blah.” (Yes, Baker actually says blah blah blah, though the geeky details were undoubtedly part of the job’s allure.)

From the NCAA’s perspective, the governor was an attractive candidate not just because of his skill set and political connections but also because of where he was in his career. “I don’t think he was really worried about his next job,” says Springfield College president Mary-Beth Cooper, a selection committee member who had crossed paths several times with Baker when he was governor and championed Baker within the committee. “So his desire to solve the problems surrounding the NCAA and student-athletes was really born out of ‘This is something I can do,’ versus ‘This is something I have to do,’ or ‘This is going to get me my next job.’”

Which is not to say, given the NCAA’s massive challenges, that taking the gig wasn’t a fairly ridiculous decision by Baker. “I called a bunch of people I knew that had some tangential connection [to the NCAA],” he says, “and they were like…‘Oh, I’m not really sure that’s such a great next move.’ But the more I thought about it, the more I thought, you know, this feels a lot like service, and that’s kind of the way I’m built.”

The problems plaguing the NCAA have reached a crisis point in recent years, but they’ve been building for a generation and essentially revolve around one thing: money. Not too little of it, ironically, but too much of it. Indeed, over the past couple of decades, the amount of cash that TV networks have been willing to throw at major conferences like the Big Ten and SEC has skyrocketed. In 1994, CBS paid the SEC about $17 million per season for rights to televise its football games. Under a contract that begins this year, ESPN will pay the conference $300 million per season. At the same time, big schools have been able to leverage sports for sponsorships, donations, and other revenue generators. Last year, the football program at the University of Texas pulled in more than $180 million, with other bigtime schools not far behind.

Perhaps predictably, it’s led to a fight about who actually gets the cash. For decades, the NCAA stubbornly stuck to its model of “amateurism,” essentially saying that because sports are part of a broader educational experience, the only compensation athletes—or as the NCAA invariably refers to them, “student-athletes”—should receive is a scholarship to attend school. (Never mind that, in recent years, coaches at the biggest universities have gotten eight-figure annual contracts, nor that those same schools are spending hundreds of millions of dollars each on lavish training facilities.)

The first serious challenge to the NCAA’s model came when UCLA basketball player Ed O’Bannon filed a class-action lawsuit, saying that UCLA had benefited financially from the use of his “name, image, and likeness” (NIL) while giving O’Bannon bupkis in return. The case took years to wind its way through the courts, but in 2014, the U.S. Supreme Court sided with O’Bannon et al. The case ultimately ended with a mere tweak to the rules—schools were allowed to give athletes a $5,000 stipend put in a trust for their NIL rights—but it was the first legal crack in the NCAA’s façade. Seven years later, the Supremes ruled against the NCAA in another case, with Justice Brett Kavanaugh writing that the “NCAA’s business model of using unpaid student-athletes to generate billions of dollars in revenue for the colleges raises serious questions under the antitrust laws.”

Sensing the shifting winds, the NCAA quickly made two significant changes in the spring of 2021. One was loosening its onerous transfer rules, which had long forced athletes who switched from one school to another to sit out a year before playing again. Under the new guidelines, on their first school transfer, students could play right away. The second change was even more dramatic: Athletes could now accept an unlimited amount of so-called NIL money. At first blush, it appeared the NCAA was merely opening the door for kids to sign commercial endorsement deals, but it didn’t take long for deep-pocketed boosters at big schools to form “NIL collectives”—essentially giant pools of dough that could be handed out to the best players and most promising recruits.

The two changes have led to an atmosphere many call “the Wild West” in bigtime college sports. The problem isn’t just that athletes are switching schools every year, pursuing ever-bigger NIL checks (the going rate for a quarterback at a major school is said to be around $2 million per year). It’s that there’s little transparency, and fewer rules, around any of it.

This was the situation that was developing when Baker took the reins of the NCAA in early 2023. His first act was one familiar to anyone who’d watched him work as governor: to sit down and talk with as many people as possible. Over the course of his first six months at the NCAA, he traveled around the country, meeting with representatives from 97 different athletic conferences, including numerous athletic directors, coaches, staffers, and students. His goal was to understand their problems, their differences, and where the solutions might lie. “One of the things I’ve noticed about him is that he’s an incredible listener and an incredible notetaker,” Cooper says. She describes a meeting with Springfield’s athletic training staff in which Baker took seven or eight pages of notes.

The upshot of Baker’s listening tour? First, he identified some issues he could move on right away. Unbelievably, the NCAA had no project management system in place, nor did it have a database of its own fans. It now has both. Based on feedback from the schools, on Baker’s recommendation, the NCAA also implemented a mental health program for student-athletes, as well as an insurance program that protects kids in case of injury.

Still, Baker says the most important thing he learned during his listening tour was just how different schools are in the NCAA. The organization has long divided its members into divisions based on size, but even at the largest level, Division I, Baker says there are enormous differences: While some schools have $15 million annual athletic budgets, others have $220 million budgets. No less important is the role sports play at the institution. At some schools, sports really are just another part of the educational mission. At others—the powerhouses like Georgia, Alabama, USC, and Michigan—sports are first and foremost a revenue generator. “It’s an incredibly difficult challenge to take such a wide-ranging group of institutions…and try and put them all in the same bucket and serve them all the same way,” says Beth Goetz, athletic director at the University of Iowa (home for the past several years to phenom basketball player Caitlin Clark). “I think Charlie has openly recognized that there’s not a one-size-fits-all answer and response to every issue that might arise.”

Indeed, last December Baker made headlines when he proposed a new structure for those schools at the top of the athletic pyramid. Under new guidelines, the schools themselves would be able to offer direct payments into trust funds for athletes. It was a solution, many would argue, that was coming about 25 years too late, but internally it was a major step forward.

Meanwhile, Baker was busy negotiating with the plaintiffs in yet another high-stakes lawsuit against the NCAA. The “House” case, as it’s known, is a class-action suit demanding that universities give damages to many student-athletes who’d been screwed out of their NIL rights before 2023. In May, after winning the support from all of the major conferences, Baker announced a potential settlement in the case—one that would not only compensate those prior athletes but also put new compensation rules in place for the next 10 years. At the highest levels of Division I, each school could spend up to $22 million per year paying its athletes (in addition to any NIL money players might get).

The settlement isn’t final yet—the judge in the case still has to sign off on it. If the plan is approved, though, Baker’s December proposal effectively becomes moot. Still, the proposed “House” agreement doesn’t address another legal threat facing the NCAA, including whether athletes should be classified as “employees,” which would explode athletic budgets and potentially force small schools to drop sports altogether. Despite that, Baker is pleased by the progress. As he says, “Having gotten here a year ago and having talked to 97 conferences and having talked to tons of kids and grownups, the big message from all of them was, I really wish the ground would stop shifting every three months.” If the settlement holds, Baker will have done precisely that.

Baker at the NCAA Headquarters in Indianapolis, Indiana in 2023. / Photo by Jamie Schwaberow/NCAA Photos

If Baker has one big talent, it’s his ability to not just listen to various parties in any given situation but to synthesize what he hears and craft a path forward. In a different era, that capacity for consensus and compromise was considered a virtue; today, at least in the most extreme political circles, it’s perhaps the worst vice of all.

Baker’s knack for finding common ground is a byproduct, one supposes, of growing up in a household during the 1960s and 1970s with a Republican father and a Democratic mother who regularly talked about the issues of the day. “They used to argue about this stuff at the dining room table,” Baker remembers. “Friends of mine used to come over just to watch. And, of course, they weren’t really arguing. They were debating and discussing.”

Something about that image—a sit-down family dinner, first of all, but also two adults civilly disagreeing about politics and policy over meatloaf and mashed potatoes—seems quaint in our faster, harsher, more wired era. And it’s only one reminder that Baker came of age at a time unlike the one we’re in today. “We live in a world that is so profoundly different than the one I grew up in,” Baker said in a speech he gave in the fall of 2022, just months before the end of his term. “There were no portable phones. Cameras were cameras, and papers were typed on typewriters.”

Baker’s upbringing seems to have been particularly apple-pie-flavored. He had a paper route. He once built a basketball court in his backyard using railroad ties, gravel, and tar. He earned extra spending money typing papers for his buddies. Even his “dark” side—a fondness for beer and loud classic rock—seems wholesome.

The all-American ideals that were instilled in him—listen, work hard, be a good teammate, but don’t be a stick in the mud—ultimately served Baker well in his professional career. One of the people who spotted his promise was Bill Weld, who met Baker when Weld was making his first run for governor in 1990. Weld was impressed by all the stuff Baker knew about healthcare, and he called him frequently from the campaign trail to pump him for information. After getting elected, he made Baker, then 34, under-secretary of health and human services. Within a couple of years, Baker was leading the department, and he eventually became Weld’s secretary of administration and finance—a clear rising star in Republican politics.

Still, there were definitely some bumps in the road. In 2010, after spending more than a decade post-Weld administration as CEO of Harvard Pilgrim Health Care, Baker blew what many considered a winnable governor’s race against Deval Patrick. On a personal level, Baker was devastated, but in the months after the election, he put his listening and synthesizing skills to work, meeting one-on-one with reporters and politicos and asking point blank what he’d done wrong. One answer he heard frequently was about preaching to the converted—he’d avoided campaigning in places where he knew people disagreed with him. That was no way, he was told, to win a tight election.

The other criticism cut deeper. “People would say things to me like, ‘I’ve known you for a long time. I think we’re friends. I HATED you as a candidate, and I didn’t vote for you,’” Baker remembers.

It was pretty heavy abuse, but accurate. “One of the main reasons he lost was because he acted like a jerk in the debate and on the campaign trail,” says longtime Boston political analyst (and Boston contributing editor) Jon Keller. “There was a potent streak of jerk in Charlie—an ego and an obnoxious side—and that was on full display.”

Baker says he grew from both critiques, and when he ran for governor again in 2014, a New Charlie had emerged. He got his brusque side under control, and he made a point of campaigning in places where Republicans typically didn’t stand much chance of winning, talking to—no, listening to—voters who had different life experiences, different work experiences. He didn’t necessarily win many of those neighborhoods, but he didn’t lose by as much as he had four years earlier. He beat Martha Coakley in the general election by two points.

That approach—reach across partisan lines, try to understand the problem from all sides—became the playbook for Baker’s governorship. Granted, he didn’t really have much choice; he was, after all, a Republican governor in arguably the nation’s bluest state, complete with a heavily Democratic legislature. “His power was constrained,” Keller says, “so he had to work collaboratively, you might even say subserviently, to the Democratic majority. But he did it in a way that didn’t make him look weak.”

The occasionally combative but ultimately productive sharing of power was what many people wanted. Moderate Democrats in the legislature liked having a Republican governor since it let them push back against their more progressive colleagues—there’s no way the governor will go for that. The broader public also approved. By the time Baker and Lieutenant Governor Karyn Polito won reelection in 2018 with 67 percent of the vote, he was the single most popular governor in America.

Ironically, as governor, Baker long enjoyed higher approval ratings from Democrats than Republicans, a fact that would, in the age of Donald Trump and rising political extremism, ultimately become his political Achilles’ heel. Baker came out against Trump in 2016, supporting Chris Christie in the primary and not casting a vote for president at all in the general election. His never-Trumpness didn’t cost him much in his first term as governor, but by the time the pandemic hit in 2020, more strident voices, fueled by the Internet and social media, were gaining increasing sway. Indeed, Baker—who mandated vaccines for state workers—was not only dubbed a RINO by people in the Massachusetts MAGA movement but also fell into open warfare with then-state GOP Chair Jim Lyons, a major Trump booster. In mid-2021, with Baker still mulling whether to try for a third term, state Representative Geoff Diehl announced he was running in the GOP primary, quickly earning Trump’s endorsement. By the fall, one poll found Diehl leading Baker 50–29 in a potential Republican primary matchup.

The ground, to use Baker’s phrase, was shifting. Was he concerned about losing a primary? When I bring it up, Baker takes an indirect route to answering the question. “The lieutenant governor and I talked quite a bit about whether to run or not to run, the challenges, and all the rest,” he says. “And at the end, we basically decided that we’ve done a pretty good job of managing COVID without turning it into a political football. And not running for office would ensure that that would continue to be the case.”

Then he gets more to the point: “I always thought that if [we] had run again, we would have a very good chance of winning. I think we both felt like we had a pretty good understanding of where the people of Massachusetts were at on both sides of the aisle, and I think we were pretty confident if we had run again, our chances were pretty [good]…. But you know, turning all that stuff into a political overlay is just not something either one of us wanted to do.”

One can imagine the shift within the state GOP was difficult for Baker not just on a personal level—it was, in a way, a rerun of people telling him they HATED him—but on a practical level as well. “I think one of the reasons he didn’t run for a third term,” says UMass political science professor Tatishe Nteta, “was his recognition that Republican politicians in the state were less interested in winning elections and influencing policy and wielding power than in expressing an ideological position.”

Put another way, the new version of the Republican party was no longer interested in governing, in solving problems, in working things out with the other side. Baker—who left office with a 68 percent approval rating—was out.

Baker with national championship-winning volleyball player Logan Eggleston, Vice President Kamala Harris, and Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff during College Athlete Day on the South Lawn of the White House in June 2023. / Photo by ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS / AFP via Getty Images)

Perhaps because of the era in which he was raised (not to mention the fact that he built his own home basketball court out of gravel and tar), Baker deeply believes in the virtues that come from competing in sports. The habits it instills. The life lessons it imparts. He spent his youth playing sports, and so did his wife and their kids, as well as many of their friends and their friends’ kids.

What’s more, for all that’s wrong with college athletics of late, Baker makes the case that much remains very right. When I ask him, for instance, what he hopes the landscape will look like a decade from now, he doesn’t talk about expanding March Madness or the extraordinary revenue potential of a 12-team college football playoff (though the former is on the table and the latter is happening). Instead, he begins by talking about the smaller schools, which don’t get nearly the attention or acclaim of the big ones. “I’m going to assume DIII and DII are, hopefully, still able to kind of do what they do now,” he says. “Because they actually serve most of the kids in college sports. And having been to enough DIII and DII championships and tournaments and games, it’s very clear to me that the kids really like it, the schools really like it, and the fans really like it.”

Baker allows that Division I will change—the best athletes will be paid—but the fundamentals of success really won’t. “You’re still not going to win a lot of games unless you’re willing to be a good teammate and do the grind and be well coached and get a good night’s sleep and a whole bunch of other things,” he says, then adds, “99 percent of DI athletes, even in the most upper end, are not going to play professionally outside of their time in college. Most of them are going to need an education. Because even if they’re paid very well—and I hope many of them are—during their college years, they got a lot of life left to live after.”

In an ideal world, in other words, the student-athlete isn’t going anywhere.

Baker is happy—proud, even—that the top college athletes, at least in football and basketball, will be paid for their efforts, and it’s pretty hard to argue against that notion. It’s their performances—their skills, dedication, hard work—we’re tuning in to watch; denying them compensation under the guise of “amateurism” seems like the worst form of exploitation.

Yet it’s not hard to imagine a future in which bigtime college sports is essentially swallowed whole by monetary interests. Earlier this year, it was reported that Florida State was partnering with a private equity firm to raise capital for its athletic program, presumably giving the school more money with which to recruit top athletes. It seems inevitable that other leading programs will follow suit. And as universities essentially graft multibillion-dollar professional sports operations onto themselves, it’s fair to ask: What does any of this have to do with education?

It’s also fair to ask about the trickle-down effect. Already, many states (including Massachusetts) allow high school athletes to receive NIL money. With college recruiting now effectively starting in middle school, are we eventually looking at a scenario when a particularly promising 7th or 8th grader signs a six-figure contract, as long as he or she commits to a particular school?

When I wonder aloud if any of this concerns Baker, the pragmatist in him takes over. He tells me a story from when his own kids—now in their twenties and thirties—were teenagers. He remembers them huddling around the family’s computer (they only had one), watching videos of another kid who played hilarious songs. The kid was from Hamilton, it turned out, and his name was Bo Burnham. At the time, Baker remembers, he had maybe 500,000 YouTube followers. But a year later, he had a million followers—and all kinds of partnerships. “Bo was making a lot of money because he was a phenomenal talent at a really young age,” he says. “You always worry about that stuff with young people. There are lots of examples of young people who were child stars and managed to get through what must have been an incredibly disorienting period in their lives to be successful as adults. And there’s a bunch that didn’t. But I don’t think we should say that if you’re a young actor or musician or clothing designer, you can get paid for it, but, gee, if you’re a basketball player, you can’t. I don’t think societally we can do that.

“I think the Internet and social media changed everything about this,” Baker says finally. “And whether it’s good or bad, I suppose time will tell.”

Baker delivering the State of the Commonwealth Address in 2022. / Photo by Barry Chin/The Boston Globe via Getty Images

As Baker well knows, the Internet and social media have changed politics as well.

The division and extremism we see—which arguably brought an end to Baker’s political career—are directly tied to the ideologically curated content we’re served up online; to the websites and social media that give oxygen to conspiracy theories; and to the social media influencers who only see the world in black and white, never gray.

I ask Baker what happened to the Republican Party he was once a star of, and he points me to that speech he made in the fall of 2022. It was actually the Godkin Lecture, the annual address sponsored by Harvard’s Kennedy School, which over the years has featured remarks by a range of influential thinkers, from Lord Bryce to Daniel Patrick Moynihan.

Baker, with just weeks to go as governor, used the lecture to talk about our country’s political divide. He discussed the technology that engulfs us, calling it a mixed blessing: We can do things we could never do before, but the world is also filled with misinformation and extremism and less tolerance of divergent viewpoints. What’s more, he said, the Internet has pushed the two main political parties farther to the left and the right. The parties no longer tolerate people who are not ideologically pure, and party leaders seem to spend most of their time accentuating the other party’s most extreme positions.

“Why do they play the game this way?” Baker asked in the speech. “My conclusion is a simple one. Both parties and their candidates believe this is how they can win…. Outrage and false information travel farther, faster among partisans and advocates on social media than anything that looks like straight news. Advocates use these outlets—and others—to keep their supporters outraged and engaged and to inflict discipline on elected officials.”

Then Baker got to his main point: Just because America’s political parties are farther apart than ever before, does that mean Americans are as well? He insisted the answer was no.

Three or four decades ago, Baker explained, the country’s electorate was split about equally among Democrats, Republicans, and Independents. But since then, the number of Independents has grown substantially—it’s now closing in on 50 percent—while the number of Democrats and Republicans has withered to about 25 percent each. “As the two largest parties became less and less able to tolerate dissent, voters who carried around a mix of ideologies on policy found less and less room in either party for their points of view. And they left.”

The crux of the matter, Baker tells me now, is that we’re not really as divided as the media and others make us out to be. “My own experience, generally in public life, is that people, for the most part, agree more than they disagree,” he says. “The problem we all live with now is that’s just not very interesting.”

From the moment Baker announced he wouldn’t seek a third term as governor, there’s been speculation about whether he was done with politics for good.

From the moment Baker announced he wouldn’t seek a third term as governor, there’s been speculation about whether he was done with politics for good. Many pundits have pointed to the fact that Massachusetts has two U.S. senators in their seventies, including Ed Markey, who’ll be up for reelection in 2026. Would Baker challenge him or run for his open seat should Markey choose to retire?

Baker has always given a non-answer—“A politician never says never”—and he sticks with that when I bring it up. “I’m really enjoying what I’m doing,” he says. “And I’m not getting any younger.”

But when I dig deeper about a potential Senate run, saying I actually wonder if he’d even be happy as a legislator, he seems to open the door a little. I find myself thinking about what Baker told the students about the journey and peripheral vision and finding spaces and places where you do things you’re good at and enjoy. “You tend not to ever get too definitive about any of this stuff,” he says. “If you told me in the spring or summer of ’22 that I was going to be working for the NCAA, I would have found that to be an unusual question. But I have talked to former Governor, now Senator, Mitt Romney about being in the Senate, and he said it was a pretty interesting place.

“Look,” he continues, “I obviously enjoy public service a lot. And I, generally speaking, would never rule out doing something in the public sphere. But I’m very happy where I am, and I don’t anticipate being anywhere else anytime soon.”

Make of that whatever you wish. A sign Baker is never going to run. A sign he’s absolutely going to run. A sign he legitimately hasn’t decided. Could he make it through a primary if he ran as a Republican? And if he did, would Democrats, who’ve long crossed the aisle to support him, do so if control of the U.S. Senate was at stake?

Baker was forged in a different age, and in many ways, he can seem out of step with where we are now. He’s a man who sees virtue in sports at a time when sports are mostly about money. A political moderate at a time when the extremes have taken over. A guy who believes in being useful and being a good teammate and bringing the grind. Despite newspapers dying, typewriters going away, and our phones turning into computers and cameras, Baker has a hunch you still believe in all of that stuff, too.

First published in the print edition of the September 2024 issue with the headline, “Charlie Baker’s (Still) Got Game.”

Previously

Catching Up with Charlie Baker
Charlie Baker: Leadership, Lessons Learned, and What Lies Ahead

Illustration by Dale Stephanos

It was an early moment of truth in the fledgling Harvard presidency of Claudine Gay. Called to testify in front of Congress about rising incidences of antisemitism on campus, Gay made her way to the Capitol on December 5 sporting her signature black-rimmed glasses, a classic gray suit, and a slight air of annoyance at having to explain herself to a committee stacked with skeptical Republicans.

The past few weeks had already been challenging for Gay, who was dealing with a torrent of unrest at Harvard following Hamas’s shocking October 7 assault on Israel. Almost immediately after the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust, more than 30 student groups issued a pro-Palestinian statement squarely blaming Israel for “all unfolding violence”; this was followed by massive protests on campus, during which participants chanted antisemitic slogans. Some students reported being harassed, assaulted, and intimidated while on school property. In the midst of it all, Gay herself came under fire for not publicly addressing the attack quickly enough and not condemning Hamas strongly enough when she finally did.

Seated in the hot seat with the microphone inches from her face, Gay had already watched her fellow panelists, MIT President Sally Kornbluth and the University of Pennsylvania’s Liz Magill, drop jaws with their claim that calling for the genocide of Jews on campuses with significant Jewish populations might not violate their rules against bullying and harassment. As Magill said, “It is a context-dependent decision.”

Then it was Gay’s turn. “At Harvard, does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Harvard’s rules of bullying and harassment, yes or no?” asked Republican U.S. Representative from New York Elise Stefanik, a Harvard graduate herself.

“It can be, depending on the context,” Gay replied unemotionally.

Former president Claudine Gay testifies before Congress. / Photo by Mark Schiefelbein/AP Photo

The response, among other statements from Gay during her testimony, immediately set off an international firestorm. “I’m no fan of @RepStefanik but I’m with her here,” tweeted arch-liberal Harvard Law School professor emeritus Laurence Tribe of Gay’s “hesitant, formulaic and bizarrely evasive answers.” Even White House officials weighed in: “It’s unbelievable that this needs to be said: calls for genocide are monstrous and antithetical to everything we represent as a country,” said deputy press secretary Andrew Bates in a statement. Gay herself apologized a few days after her testimony, telling the Harvard Crimson: “I got caught up in what had become, at that point, an extended, combative exchange about policies and procedures. What I should have had the presence of mind to do in that moment was return to my guiding truth, which is that calls for violence against our Jewish community—threats to our Jewish students—have no place at Harvard and will never go unchallenged.”

Truth. The Congressional debacle was a rare and revealing glimpse into how far Harvard has strayed from the single Latin word—veritas—emblazoned on its seal. But in reality, it shouldn’t have surprised anyone that Harvard would handle this globally broadcast moment with such a tone-deaf, veritas-free spin. In fact, for a school that has always managed to sidestep external scrutiny, Harvard now finds itself under an electron microscope that is exposing just how deep the flaws are of this formerly impervious university.

Over the past few years alone, Harvard’s coveted image as the pinnacle of academic excellence has been taking a beating. Gradeflation is out of control: By 2021, 79 percent of students received A-range grades—compared to 60 percent a decade earlier. Two school leaders, Harvard diversity and inclusion chief Sherri Charleston and Gay herself, have recently been accused of being plagiarists. The Harvard Kennedy School, created to incubate public-sector leaders, has mostly become a finishing school for private sector executives. While construction crews toil away on Harvard’s long-delayed life-sciences mini city in Allston, it’s hard not to wonder what Harvard brass was thinking—or not—when it watched MIT for four decades build the biotech epicenter of the world in Kendall Square. Meanwhile, top life-sciences academics from Harvard are bolting for up-and-running competitors. As for the vaunted Harvard Business School (HBS), its rankings dropped sharply in the most recent Bloomberg Businessweek MBA standings to its lowest spot in nine years. Perhaps most frightening of all to the faculty and students for whom the Harvard brand is a passport to big jobs and contracts with high salaries, the business school has fallen behind its competitors at Yale, Dartmouth, and Cornell in job offers for graduates.

Meanwhile, the reality of the campus environment is far removed from the glossy brochure images of undergrads happily strolling beneath ivy-covered walls. Harvard students who aren’t terrified of getting confronted or canceled by the ‘woke mob’ are often left wondering when their campus became the place where fun goes to die. At the same time, prominent alumni already alienated by Harvard’s increasingly strident political climate were further repulsed by the post–October 7 hurricane of inept management and arrogant disregard for their input. And in what maybe the most telling rebuke of a place where, truth be told, money and status-seeking long supplanted veritas, big-money donors are bailing—a painful injury added to the insult of embarrassingly poor endowment investment performance.

Photo by Boston Globe/Getty Images

Regardless of what level of education is offered in the classrooms, it’s enough to make you wonder—could one of the world’s best-known and admired brands be past its prime? With the possible exceptions of the Bible and the Beatles, no great brand lasts forever. Just ask the folks behind the Duesenberg, the automotive star of the 1920s done in a decade later by mismanagement and the Depression; Pan Am, which led the boom in air travel before federal industry deregulation and the terrorist bombing over Lockerbie took their toll; and Cadillac, the ne plus ultra of luxury cars brought low by the end of cheap gas.

It seems even the most successful institutions can be humbled by their own arrogance and miscalculation of changing economic and political realities. In Harvard’s case, the Gay fiasco only ignited more speculation about how the Cadillac of colleges has blown a gasket, leaking academic prestige while lurching along on the noxious fumes of knee-jerk political correctness. “When you’re more concerned with making everybody feel good rather than having serious debates about the truths of our world, you’re going to fall into this malaise, where faculty are scared of students, administrators are afraid of faculty, and everybody consults a lawyer before doing anything,” says U.S. Representative Seth Moulton, Harvard College Class of  ’01 and the recipient of master’s degrees from the Kennedy School and HBS. “The brand has been tarnished, but in part because of Harvard’s own doing.”

All of this doesn’t just put into question the value of a Harvard education; it also puts into question the entire value proposition of college itself. If students can’t freely learn and discuss ideas, what is the point of dropping more than $200,000 for a degree? Harvard’s failures have done more than a disservice to the university—they’ve done a disservice to higher education as a whole.

It’s all quite the indictment of an academic institution that has ruled the roost for centuries while proudly sporting the regalia of its illustrious history. These days, though, it seems the emperor by the Charles has no clothes.

The first college of the colonies, Harvard was created in 1636 with a £400 government grant—more than $110,000 in 2024 dollars, significantly less than the salary of a Harvard professor today. Its first commencement consisted of nine graduates. One hundred and thirty-four years later, eight of its alumni were among the signers of the Declaration of Independence.

Throughout the 1800s and into the 20th century, Harvard’s stature—and, by extension, its complexity—mushroomed. As early as 1869, newly installed school President Charles William Eliot could boast that “this University recognizes no real antagonism between literature and science, and consents to no such narrow alternatives as mathematics or classics, science or metaphysics. We would have them all, and at their best.”

Yet by the 1930s, key Harvard caretakers began expressing concern over whether the school could continue to live up to its reputation. As the tercentenary celebration in 1936 neared, Harvard’s celebrated reformist President James Bryant Conant wondered in a report to the university’s board whether places like Harvard that had grown “startlingly large and complex” could “escape the curse which has so often plagued large human enterprises well established by a significant history—the curse of complacent mediocrity? What will be written and said about the role of the university…when the four hundredth celebration draws near in the winter of 2036?” A more prescient statement could not have been uttered.

Though Harvard’s roof is far from caving in—when you’ve got $50.7 billion, you’ve got $50.7 billion—waiting until 2036 for a thorough inspection of one of the country’s wealthiest and most prestigious institutions probably isn’t a good idea given the cracks now showing in Harvard’s academic edifice. It’s been 18 years, for instance, since Harvard began the process of transforming university-owned land in Allston into a massive science-oriented campus that, according to the house organ Harvard Gazette, would help it “maintain academic leadership into the next century.” Ever since then-President Drew Faust temporarily put the project on hold in 2009 due to the recession, Harvard has been left playing catch-up with “lesser” rivals such as MIT, which played a huge role in Kendall Square’s 21st-century biotech boom. That neighborhood now has the greatest concentration of biotechnology companies in the world, which regularly work with and draw from MIT’s vast talent pool.

One consequence of Harvard’s lack of life-sciences progress has been brain drain. In one instance, renowned scientist and Broad Institute cofounder Stuart Schreiber recently bolted from the Harvard faculty to start a powerhouse Kendall Square drug research and development institute, Arena BioWorks, which has been aggressively poaching employees from university labs. It would take Harvard years or even decades to match its facilities, and in any case, the days of the university’s preeminence in funding for such ventures seems long gone—Arena BioWorks’ major investors include Celtics co-owner Steve Pagliuca, a Duke grad, and billionaire investor Michael Dell, who dropped out of the University of Texas.

Other areas of the university are similarly lacking. Harvard may still have the best-known name in American politics adorning its school of government, but it no longer sports the best reputation for nurturing public-sector leaders. While the Kennedy School has produced more heads of state than its competitors, these days, its graduates are just as likely to be found working at consulting firms or hedge funds as government agencies—as evidenced by the whopping 44 percent of the Class of ’22 who went to work in the private sector.

It’s a trend that’s been building for years. A 2017 article in this magazine referenced a Kennedy School instructor’s research from the early 2000s that found striking levels of “skepticism and disdain” toward government among students and “a decline in stated interest in government careers.” Students are not encouraged to think otherwise by official policy; the word “government” was removed from the school’s promotional materials in the late 2000s and is absent from its online mission statement.

Most recently, the Kennedy School stepped in it over one of the most pressing political issues of our times when it dismissed online disinformation expert Joan Donovan from the faculty as a result, she claims, of her harsh criticisms of Facebook and its parent company, Meta, both of which are the brainchild of mega-donor Mark Zuckerberg. Was the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative’s $500 million gift enough to buy Donovan’s silencing? Harvard has adamantly denied it and claims the research into Facebook’s culpability for misinformation continues. But Donovan’s accusations are still picking up steam. “If you think the plagiarism scandal or the failure to address antisemitism and Islamophobia are the biggest problems facing Harvard today, read my account of how donors from Facebook influenced [Kennedy School] Dean [Douglas] Elmendorf to shut down my research lab and prevent me from digging into Meta,” tweeted Donovan, who is now on the faculty at Boston University.

Donovan’s low grade for Harvard is an anomaly on a campus where a jaw-dropping 79 percent of undergraduates got As during the 2020 to 2021 academic year. That’s a 19 percent increase in As over just the past decade. Grade inflation has been a long-term trend in American education, but reports show the Ivy Leagues lead the parade, with Harvard’s grade point average on par with Yale’s. Are the students getting smarter? Perhaps not. After a meeting last fall of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, dean of undergraduate education Amanda Claybaugh told the Crimson that while many grades were well deserved, external “market forces” have been influencing grading, as faculty are reliant on positive course evaluations from their students for professional advancement.

Students also railed against former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos when she came to speak at the Kennedy School in 2017. / Photo by Maria Danilova/AP Photo

Beyond the questionable grading of students, the campus has become a breeding ground for political intolerance, particularly when it comes to more-conservative voices. Student comments gathered by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) for its annual rankings of free-speech climates on campuses range from scathing to sad. “I felt very alone,” wrote one senior who self-described as a moderate Republican. “It is an incredibly difficult and isolating political landscape to navigate.” One recent graduate noted, “I’ve had many moments where I didn’t want to disagree with the most ‘woke’ take during class for fear of backlash.” It makes sense on a campus where, as FIRE noted, 41 percent of Harvard students surveyed think it’s at least sometimes acceptable to shout down an individual to prevent them from speaking on campus. No wonder the school was given an “abysmal” rating and ranked dead last in the national pack.

This culture of intolerance has extended to the Israel/Hamas war, as evidenced by a pair of recent legal complaints filed against the university. Appalled by last fall’s aggressive, unrestrained displays of anti-Israel animus—including an instance in which two “visibly Jewish” law school students said they were regularly stopped and targeted in the student lounge based on their clothing—in January, a group of Jewish students sued Harvard, alleging that the university is in violation of Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. In the federal lawsuit, the students noted that the university has “at least five applicable sets of policies ostensibly to protect students from discrimination, harassment, and intimidation” that it failed to enforce last fall, despite threatening penalties in training classes for engaging in everything from “size-ism” to “fatphobia” to “transphobia” on campus.

That same month, the Muslim Legal Fund of America filed a civil rights complaint with the Department of Education on behalf of Palestinian students at Harvard, alleging the administration failed to protect them from discrimination. The allegations include instances in which they were stalked, threatened, and even assaulted on campus for wearing keffiyehs, traditional Palestinian scarves.

Beyond conflicts with their peers, students have had to endure the cold shoulder from Harvard—in some cases, quite literally. When the kids returned from their winter break earlier this year, the heat was out at Leverett House, sending some students fleeing for hotel rooms while others slept in jackets, hats, and gloves, according to the Crimson. Other dorms have also struggled with heat and hot water shortfalls. The issues aren’t a one-off. A 2019 Crimson article reported “repeated issues with [Harvard University Housing’s] infrastructure, including flooding and broken elevators.”

Students and their parents are noticing. When one mother moved her son into Cabot House recently, “it looked like something out of the ’50s,” she said. “There was peeling lead paint on the windowsills. What are they doing with their $50 billion endowment?” At Peabody Terrace, graduate students dealt with those and other problems in 2019, including destructive renovations and “days without water,” according to the Crimson. Kennedy School student Emma Margolin’s computer printer and charger were damaged by flooding and other issues, and she was displaced from her room for six days. When she sought rent compensation, Harvard officials refused, she said, choosing instead to give her some gift cards from Whole Foods.

If you had major maintenance issues in your home, you probably wouldn’t hesitate to throw money at the problem. But at Harvard, problems with campus upkeep persist despite the university’s massive wealth, which the administration could ostensibly use to improve the facilities if that were a priority.

Not only are some campus buildings in need of a little TLC, but Harvard Square itself is a symphony of for-lease signs that blight one of the most valuable pieces of land in America. The square is an outgrowth of Harvard’s campus, yet the university has shown little leadership in improving its appearance, choosing instead to turn its back on their own front yard. Conversely, Boston University saw a decaying Kenmore Square as a blight on the school and invested in the strip, including partnering on the construction of major hotel, restaurant, and office developments over the past four decades. In doing so, they repositioned the area into an asset for the campus.

Harvard Business School dropped sharply in Bloomberg Businessweek’s latest rankings, to its lowest point in nine years. / Photo by Dariusz Jemielniak (“Pundit”)/Creative Commons

Then again, perhaps it’s wise for Harvard to be penny-pinching—especially in light of the recent exodus of big-dollar donors. Take, for instance, Tim Day, a Marine Corps veteran and 1964 graduate of Harvard Business School who went on to make a fortune in the processed-meat industry. He’s given millions over the years to fund HBS fellowships for former and current Marines, as well as $5 million for a gleaming new fitness center that bears his name. These days, though, he’s openly questioning whether Harvard is fit to pocket any more of his charity. “I am very much against the whole diversity, equity, and inclusion aspects that have been built into the culture at Harvard,” he tells me. “I thought it should be purely a merit-based system.” Day was also “shocked” by what he saw as a “lack of concrete action to protect the Jewish students” on campus after October 7. He’s holding back further donations, he says, until he sees concrete evidence that Harvard is serious about making changes.

Billionaire businesspeople who’ve given hundreds of millions to Harvard, either individually or through their foundations—such as Leslie Wexner of Bath & Body Works fame, Israeli philanthropist Idan Ofer, and hedge-fund guru Bill Ackman—have also bailed in the wake of the administration’s botched response to October 7, along with countless smaller donors. Most recently, Citadel hedge-fund founder Ken Griffin, who has donated $500 million to the university over the years, announced he’d be shutting his checkbook until the school stops producing “whiny snowflakes” who are “caught up in the rhetoric of oppressor and oppressee.”

Griffin sees the broader failure of Harvard and his withdrawal as a donor as akin to a nuclear bomb going off in the school’s endowment office. But there are other problems there, too. Despite virtually unlimited resources, the university’s endowment team made a measly 2.9 percent return on its investments in fiscal year 2023, managing to underperform a Charles Schwab money market account, whose returns hover around 5 percent. Add all of that to expenses that are growing faster than revenues, and it’s clear that, as Harvard chief financial officer Ritu Kalra told the Crimson, the university has “a lot of repair work to do.”

A woman prayed for the Israeli hostages adjacent to another pro-Palestine rally at Harvard. / Photo by Boston Globe via Getty Images

So far, Harvard hasn’t done a great job of allaying donors’ concerns. Rabbi David Wolpe, appointed by Gay last fall to an advisory committee designed to curb campus antisemitism, says he resigned from the group in part because “changes weren’t happening on campus. Things were at least as bad or getting worse.” Advisory committee suggestions for easing the “culture of intimidation” of Jews on campus by “enforcing policies, not allowing protest to interrupt classes, [and] making sure professors didn’t turn seminars into political events” were being paid lip service but not being implemented, Wolpe explains. Instead, he believes Gay’s administration was enabling these behaviors “if enabling is defined as being able to put the brakes on something more than you have.”

Gay resigned in early January following her disastrous Congressional testimony and accusations of plagiarism, but the era following her presidency so far hasn’t been any more promising in that regard. Case in point: Interim President Alan Garber recently received some criticism for appointing a harsh critic of Israel, Professor Derek Penslar, to cochair a new and supposedly improved antisemitism task force. “He is unsuited,” tweeted former President Lawrence Summers. “Could one imagine Harvard appointing as head of [an] antiracism task force someone who had minimized the racism problem or who had argued against federal antiracism efforts?”

Jewish voices haven’t been the only ones calling out the university’s unwillingness to crack down on campus antisemitism. “Any form of protest that disrupts the conduct of a class violates basic prohibitions against interference with the normal duties and activities of the university,” wrote one of Harvard’s leading Black scholars, political philosophy and ethics professor Danielle Allen, in a Washington Post op-ed.

Lost prestige, financial pressure, anxious (and cold) students, dismayed faculty, furious alumni, and donors voting with their wallets—that’s some bad karma, all right. Still, as Gay was hustled to the curb the day after New Year’s like a once-festive family Christmas tree turned unwanted fire hazard, there was no immediate sign that anyone in power at Harvard truly grasped the depth and severity of their problems, let alone had a clue what to do about it. In a New York Times op-ed piece published the day after her resignation, Gay offered a spin widely echoed by defenders of Harvard’s status quo—that her exit was the work of outside “demagogues” out to “undermine the ideals animating Harvard since its founding: excellence, openness, independence, truth.” Universities like Harvard, she wrote, “must remain independent venues where courage and reason unite to advance truth, no matter what forces set against them.”

For all the handwringing over the hard time being given to Harvard by outsiders—presumably including the U.S. Supreme Court, which threw out the university’s race-based admissions programs, and the U.S. House Ways and Means Committee, which is investigating whether the mishandling of antisemitism at Harvard and other campuses might compromise their tax exemptions—the university’s embrace of outside forces is actually a fast-growing feature of campus life. According to the Network Contagion Research Institute, Harvard pocketed $894 million from foreign governments—the large portion of which were authoritarian regimes—during a five-year stretch of the 2010s. The institute’s study of the fallout from $13 billion worth of such funding to 203 American colleges and universities concluded that it resulted in “heightened levels of intolerance toward Jews, open inquiry and free expression.” When asked about foreign donors at the Congressional hearing, Gay gave this context: “We will not accept gifts that do not align with our mission.”

Protesters decrying the Supreme Court’s ruling against affirmative action policies at Harvard last year. / Xinhua News Agency/Getty Images

For all of its wealth and sprawl, what has always distinguished Harvard from lesser institutions is the esteem in which it is held by the marketplace—by prospective students, alumni, and outsiders. So when a self-proclaimed bastion of tolerance and courageous upholder of veritas is shown to harbor intolerance and debase standards while offering unpersuasive denials of it all, it’s time to call in the brand doctors.

One of the first things the university should work on, believes Edward Boches, a former chief creative officer for the MullenLowe ad agency who’s done work for General Motors, Google, and other blue-chip companies, is transparency. With the advent of social media and the Web, “brands of every kind lost the ability to control their messaging,” he explains. “You saw the most progressive and open-minded brands actually embrace that—how to be more transparent and interactive. Harvard is one of those who’ve stayed completely closed.”

Gay touched on the idea of openness in her inaugural address back in September, citing a litany of ways in which Harvard should open up. “Why not reach as many people as possible through our educational programs?” she asked. “Why not open our treasure troves of books, objects, and artifacts to the world?”

Still, when it comes to criticism of the university, Harvard tends to snap shut faster than a Venus flytrap. Journalists are likely to have better luck getting quotes from the Vatican than from the Harvard administration (who did not respond to a request for comment on this article). As Kennedy School professor Khalil Gibran Muhammad put it during a recent GBH radio interview: “The communication strategy of my employer is not to speak publicly on just about anything.”

The problem of communication, or the lack thereof, runs deep in Harvard’s culture. In just one example, Vanessa Beary, a graduate of and donor to Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, resigned in disgust from the board of the Harvard Alumni Association when she saw that the HAA’s executive committee—without consulting other members of the association, she says—had issued a statement supporting Gay after her Congressional testimony. For Beary, it was the climax of more than a decade of frustration with “the absolute lack of political diversity” she experienced at Harvard, including “blanket statements being made by students that are egregious and going unchallenged by the professor.” As she says, “It’s about Claudine, but it’s also about Harvard, going back three presidencies. It’s entrenched.”

As with any valuable brand, blunders have consequences. In a postmortem for Fortune magazine, Yale management guru Jeffrey Sonnenfeld wrote that “by allowing the erosion of the school’s public reputation for integrity and truth and a breakdown of trust internally, the board was negligent in attending to the priorities of key stakeholders: students, faculty, staff, and alumni. The board’s negligence has damaged the attractiveness of Harvard to the outside world.”

What now? Boches reaches the conclusion that Harvard needs transfusions of humility and openness, stat—a finding echoed by University of Maine communications expert Michael Socolow. Socolow cites the teachings of the late Edward Bernays, a longtime Cambridge resident who was known as “the father of public relations.” In his 1928 book Propaganda, Bernays suggested two possibilities when a university is hit with criticism: Either “the public is getting an oblique impression of the university, in which case the impression should be modified; or it may be that the public is getting a correct impression, in which case, very possibly, the work of the university itself should be modified.”

When it comes to Harvard, Boches says, that translates to making “enough change to the governing body so they can talk about it.” They should also “embrace and foster some different perspectives, then make sure the world knows about it.” Finally, “they need to do a better job of anticipating consequences of future criticism—they can’t just issue a press release or make a speech.” Professor Muhammad expressed a similar sentiment in his radio interview, saying, “Harvard’s strategy of rising above the fray and choosing silence over engagement has run out of road. It is no longer effective.”

Which brings us back to the word Harvard long ago embraced as the definition of its brand: veritas, the motto that, in the hands of this generation of university leaders, has become a sad, ironic antonym. “The meritocratic university nurtured the ideal of detached, objective scholars committed to the pursuit of truth,” wrote Brandeis University historian Morton Keller and longtime Harvard associate dean Phyllis Keller in their coauthored 2001 book Making Harvard Modern: The Rise of America’s University. “But in many areas of the academy, a new, postmodern skepticism with regard to objectivity and truth has come into its own. Closely related is political correctness, with its deadening effect on the free exchange of ideas…it is arguable that Harvard today is no more (and possibly less) open to diversity of thought than it was at the height of the Cold War during the 1950s.” (Full disclosure: The Kellers also happen to be this author’s late parents.)

Two decades later, Representative Moulton sees the same rot. He was appalled at Gay’s reluctance to immediately condemn Hamas following the October 7 attacks, a hesitancy he sees as reflective of an over-eagerness to accommodate opinions rather than shape them. “It’s not that hard to say that terrorism is bad—it doesn’t require a Ph.D. to say,” he says. “You used to go to Harvard to learn how to lead—now it seems you go to learn how to concede.”

Harvard is not the first great venture to overlook the cracks in its foundation. “Every institution, however successful, carries within it the seeds of future trouble,” wrote the Kellers in Making Harvard Modern. After the industrial revolution, the German universities of the 19th century became international role models, just as Harvard did in the 20th century. Then came the two world wars. Observed the Kellers: “That preeminence, to understate the matter, did not last.”

Can Harvard stop its slide by reforming its management style, practicing what it preaches about openness and truth, and, not least of all, making sure the heat works in the dorms? Looking back over the sweep of the university’s history, there have been numerous times when leaders stepped up to confront social and economic upheaval, rejuvenate the institution’s mission, and keep the place growing and relevant. They shaped the circumstances of their time for the better and left behind a university valued far beyond its immediate constituents.

So the answer is, yes, Harvard can most likely get its act together this time, too. But it all depends on the context.

First published in the print edition of the March 2024 issue with the headline, “The Crimson Has No Clothes.”

From left, Boston Unity partners Ami Kuan Danoff, Stephanie Connaughton, Jennifer Epstein, and Anna Palmer. / Photo by Pat Piasecki

No matter how many times we try, or how much we love our hometown teams, Boston has seldom been able to expand its professional sports offerings. Plans for Olympic Games and IndyCar racing came a cropper. Owner Robert Kraft spent years unsuccessfully trying to build a stadium in the city for the New England Revolution. Red Sox owners were stymied when they proposed a new, more spacious and modern ballpark in Southie.

Perhaps it takes a woman to get the job done.

More accurately, several women. In a first for the region—and a rarity in the country—a women-led group of owners will soon own a professional sports team: a yet-to-be-named franchise in the National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL). Their bid to join the league in 2026 has been accepted, and a deal has been inked to play in a renovated 11,000-seat venue in the heart of Boston: Franklin Park’s White Stadium, the premier, though deteriorating, athletic venue for Boston Public Schools.

In the mind’s eye of optimists, come 2026, there will be thousands of diverse, enthusiastic fans from suburbs and city neighborhoods alike gathering to take in some of the best athletic competition in the world in the same place that Boston’s schoolchildren train and compete. That would have a “triangle impact,” says state Senator Liz Miranda, whose district includes White Stadium. “The team has a home, the schools have a home, and soccer has a home.”

It’s the work, primarily, of four power-house women who hastily assembled, somewhat Avengers-like, to form Boston Unity Soccer Partners late in the summer of 2022: Jennifer Epstein, 54, of the South End; Anna Palmer, 38, of Dedham; Stephanie Connaughton, 58, of Chestnut Hill; and Ami Kuan Danoff, 60, of the Back Bay. They and the investors they’ve since added—including Boston Globe Media CEO Linda Pizzuti Henry and Boston Celtics basketball operations president Brad Stevens—will reportedly spend more than $100 million before the team even takes the field, including a $53 million franchise fee to join the league, plus at least $30 million to get White Stadium spit-shined and ready for action.

The avenging, if we use that analogy, is for the loss of the city’s previous NWSL team, the Breakers, which folded after the 2017 season due to financial struggles, poor attendance, and two failed ownership deals. And, perhaps, a little bit for the city’s male-dominated sports history. The four women all believe in “equity in sports” and in the need to provide “the missing piece in the sports landscape here in Boston,” says Epstein, who has taken the lead role in the franchise. “We have these five amazing championship legacy teams”—the Red Sox, Bruins, Celtics, Patriots, and Revolution—“and it’s time to write the story of the next.”

Boston Mayor Michelle Wu with Jennifer Epstein, controlling partner of Boston Unity Soccer Partners, in a September 2024 press conference announcing that a Boston team will join the National Women’s Soccer League. / Photo by Matthew J. Lee/The Boston Globe via Getty Images

The partners’ road to the National Women’s Soccer League began, as many business deals do, totally out of nowhere. In the summer of 2022, Anna Palmer, the first female general partner at Flybridge Capital, sat down with Los Angeles–based venture capitalist Kara Nortman over breakfast. The morning meetup had nothing to do with soccer—or, at least, it wasn’t supposed to.

At one point, though, Nortman, a cofounder of a new Los Angeles–area NWSL franchise, happened to mention that the league was looking to award additional franchises, and Palmer—an avid fan and believer in the growing value of women’s sports—locked onto the topic and wouldn’t let go for the rest of the meal. And beyond. Back in the office, “she was obsessed with the idea,” says Flybridge cofounder Jeff Bussgang. “She’s an entrepreneurial force of nature.”

As luck would have it, Palmer also had a catch-up breakfast the very next day with Juno Equity founder Jennifer Epstein, a previous investor in one of Palmer’s startup businesses and a restaurateur behind the Beehive and Cósmica. As the two were standing up to leave, Palmer mentioned the NWSL opportunity. Epstein—whose family is part of the Celtics ownership group—immediately wanted in. “There are very few ideas that spark the fire quite like this one did,” Epstein says.

Epstein started making phone calls. Among the very first was to Stephanie Connaughton, a Wharton and Harvard alum who has mentored startups for years and previously did marketing at Gillette. The two had previously worked together, and she knew Connaughton could bring her branding expertise to the NWSL project. It took very little convincing. “I don’t even think I thought about it for two minutes,” Connaughton says. “It was a whole-body yes.”

In fact, Connaughton was so enthused that she couldn’t help talking about it while attending a Red Sox game with Ami Kuan Danoff, a former Fidelity equities analyst and Putnam portfolio manager who cofounded the Women’s Foundation of Boston in 2017. “Stephanie talked about it,” Danoff says, “and I said, ‘I’d like in.’”

In just a few months, the core founding team had formed, thanks to previous connections among four local investors, all with the means and startup experience to bring the idea to life. They all happened to be women, in addition to successful company-builders, equity champions, and philanthropists with deep wells of useful (and wealthy) contacts. “We’ve seen a lot of founding teams,” Palmer says, but “it’s fairly rare when you have a group of people come together that instantly mesh so well.”

The Boston Breakers, celebrating here at Boston’s Jordan Field in August 2017, folded due to financial struggles, poor attendance, and two failed ownership deals. / Photo by Fred Kfoury III/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images

In January 2023, not long after the idea of a soccer team first entered Palmer’s head, she and her partners received the news they were hoping for: Boston had been tapped for a potential NWSL expansion team.

There was a snag, though: Before the announcement could be made official, they needed a place to play games. The founding group believed that one reason for the former team’s failure was the lack of a true home stadium. In fact, the Breakers changed venues several times: Harvard Stadium, with more than 30,000 seats, proved too cavernous for the relatively small crowds; Dilboy Stadium in Somerville was too small, with merely 2,500 seats, as was Jordan Field on Soldiers Field Road.

The solution to this Goldilocks-like moveable feast of venues, the Boston Unity founders believed, was obvious: White Stadium, the 10,000-seat facility in the heart of Boston owned by BPS and used for a bevy of school activities and competitions. Mayor Michelle Wu had already made renovating the rundown field, built in 1945, a key part of her Green New Deal for BPS in the spring of 2022. Wu did not, however, have a specific plan for that renovation—or, crucially, a way to pay for it. So when the newfound partners approached the mayor about partnering with the city on the project, Wu was enthusiastic—but wary. After all, two of her recent predecessors, Marty Walsh and Thomas Menino, had tried—and failed—to renovate the stadium. The mayor also had virtually no relationship with the four women who wanted to be involved.

At the same time, the idea of a pro sports team paying for most of a renovation that would benefit city schoolchildren—and the community bordering Franklin Park—was too tempting to pass up. “A big part of this was getting to know the ownership group, understanding their goals, and hearing very firmly that this soccer team is being completely embedded in the community,” Wu says, “and ensuring that the benefits of this team would directly strengthen Boston.”

Wu put several City Hall folks to work on the project, appointing Morgan McDaniel, deputy chief of operations for capital investments, as the lead. Wu also, critically, convinced WilmerHale attorney William Lee to pull together a pro bono team of lawyers to research creative ways to structure a deal that could work for both the team and the city. Still, Wu says, “To be totally honest, I would have put the odds [of coming to an agreement] at maybe 50–50, if that, when we first embarked on this.”

The plan that Lee’s team successfully cooked up calls for a half-and-half arrangement: Boston Unity will spend some $30 million to renovate the west grandstands and expand the capacity to 11,000 seats, outfitting it with all of the facilities a major sports team needs. The team will also pay for annual upkeep of the field itself. The city of Boston will rebuild the fire-damaged east grandstand with new student amenities, including everything from weight training to a sports medicine facility. A new eight-lane running track will, at least in theory, turn Boston into a major host for track-and-field events. And the stadium will continue to be owned by BPS—the first time a professional sports team will play in a facility owned by a public school.

By July, the city and Boston Unity entered the unusual public-private agreement. With a home stadium secured, the NWSL officially announced its selection of Boston over Tampa Bay and other bidders for a coveted franchise.

There are concerns to overcome, of course, specifically from members of the Roxbury, Dorchester, Jamaica Plain, and Mattapan neighborhoods—mostly people of color—whose communities will see increased traffic, parking problems, noise, and other disruptions as up to 11,000 people attend 20 home games a year. In preparation, the Boston Unity team has embarked on a series of community meetings to assuage skepticism and convince residents of the benefits, including an economic boost from fans dining and shopping in the neighborhood.

Community feedback thus far has been evenly split, state Senator Miranda says, between excitement and concern. Transportation issues lead the worry list: Wu has said that “We are not paving over any of this historic Olmsted park for game-day parking,” which means that on-street parking is likely to be flooded on game days even with park-and-ride shuttles and admonitions to use the MBTA.

Still, Miranda says that her constituents are potential customers as much as complainants. “Soccer is a huge cultural sport in African-American and immigrant communities,” she says, noting that the game is popular not just at schools but through organizations such as South End Soccer. Dream Big founder Linda Driscoll, whose organization provides sports equipment and other assistance to economically disadvantaged girls, echoes that sentiment, saying she’s optimistic about the impact of the team and the stadium. “This is going to give back bigtime to the youth of Boston,” Driscoll says. “It would have been so easy for them to plop some fields in the middle of Newton so that all of the suburban families could go to these games.”

Of course, Boston has a long history of wealthy developers promising that their big plans will benefit the community. Skepticism is to be expected. For their part, the Boston Unity founders are at least doing all the right things so far, including Connaughton’s attendance at the first in-person community meeting about the project, focused specifically on transportation. And to say they’re excited about the prospect of bringing women’s soccer to Franklin Park is an understatement. “It’s a global sport, and Boston is a very global city,” Epstein says. “We are going to attract a diverse fan base that reflects the diversity of the population in our city.”

Enthusiasm for the team is already high. In fact, the Boston Unity partners have already started getting stopped in public by potential fans.

Although the founders and their financial backers believe the new team is a lucrative investment, there are plenty of reasons to be skeptical, beyond just where fans are going to park. In fact, the biggest question looming is whether there will be any fans at all.

Before the Breakers stopped playing for good following the 2017 season, the team was drawing only 3,000 fans to its home games, a figure well below the league average at the time, and which today would put them solidly in last place. But a lot has changed since then. Women’s sports have skyrocketed in popularity: In the past couple of years, women’s soccer—along with basketball, tennis, and even volleyball—has repeatedly set and reset records for attendance and viewership. Women’s soccer is also riding a wave of popularity following a record-smashing 2023 FIFA Women’s World Cup. The United States’ second game in the series, for instance, drew an average of 6.4 million viewers, up more than 20 percent from the corresponding match in 2019.

As a result, NWSL franchise values have soared—Boston’s franchise fee, for instance, is 20-plus times what teams were paying to enter the league just a few years ago. A new television deal, currently being negotiated, will bring additional revenue and exposure to the league. And advertisers are more eager than ever to pay for exposure to a young, diverse, active audience: Of the league’s 14 corporate sponsors in the 2022 post-season, four were new that year and four were from the year prior. Bud Light sponsors the postseason; Ally Financial’s logo is on every jersey. Individual teams all have additional jersey sponsors—many have one for the front and another for the sleeve.

It’s all become so promising, in fact, that Nortman—the investor who first mentioned the NWSL opportunity to Palmer over breakfast—has since started a firm, Monarch Collective, dedicated to investing solely in women’s sports. That fund has already raised $140 million, according to Nortman’s partner, Jasmine Robinson. The fund’s very first investment? Boston Unity Soccer Partners. “It became very clear that this was an incredible investment opportunity, and with people we really wanted to partner with,” says Robinson, a former San Francisco 49ers investment manager who was more recently with the Boston-based venture capital firm Causeway.

So will the fervor be even higher in another two years when the Boston franchise finally takes the pitch for the 2026 season? In the time between now and then, Boston Unity is planning to build excitement with a flurry of events and announcements, including the team’s name, logo, coach, player signings, and sponsorship deals. To that end, Epstein has been talking to large financial institutions, while Connaughton and Danoff are in discussions with auto manufacturers and other global corporations. In particular, Danoff says, they are pressing Boston-area companies to step up the way they do for men’s sports teams. “Why is this firm, one that’s right in our backyard, sponsoring this many teams,” she asks, “and yet not a single women’s team?”

The good news is enthusiasm for the team is already high. In fact, the Boston Unity partners have already started getting stopped in public by potential fans: Palmer was flagged down at the Boston Children’s Museum, Epstein at a South End coffee shop. They all hope that positive signs like these mean Bostonians are ready for another sports franchise. For their part, the founders say, they’re gearing up for what could be a wild ride—so long as Boston is.

First published in the print edition of the December 2023/January 2024 issue with the headline, “Bend it Like Boston.”

Photo by Mona Miri

Sandy Edgerley used to spend a lot of time at Clarendon Street Playground in the Back Bay, making connections with other moms as she watched her young children play. Today, the No. 12 Most Influential Bostonian of 2023 is still making connections, albeit in a much grander way: as the cofounder of the ’Quin House, a 21st-century private social club that instantly became the most coveted membership around when it opened in 2021. A Harvard graduate and MBA who’s known for her enviable style and eye for art—the ’Quin’s permanent collection has more than 400 pieces, including a Picasso and a Warhol—Edgerley is deeply involved with numerous nonprofits, including the Boston Foundation. We sat down with her this spring to talk real estate, secret rooms, and why Friends will always be one of her favorite sitcoms.

What was your vision for the ’Quin?

My husband, Paul, and I have been in Boston for a long time, and I feel like we’ve met so many people in different ways, whether through work, our kids’ schools, nonprofit involvement, or just the neighborhood. But we could never figure out how to socialize with them or where we could run into these people. Where do you gather together? And in an easy kind of way? When our kids were little, we lived in the Back Bay, and I’d take them to the Clarendon Street Playground. You didn’t really have to make a plan. It was social activity without having to work too hard, and I hope the ’Quin is like that.

The club has so many little secrets and special touches, like the champagne button in Scottie’s and the bust of Sinatra that opens a secret door to the listening room. How many times have you pressed the champagne button or the Sinatra bust?

With the champagne button, I actually don’t drink alcohol, so I’d be more prone to press for a Diet Coke. I’ve used the Sinatra head many times, though. When we were going through the design process, I really wanted to have these little moments of surprise, where you kind of have to be an insider to know, and it’s unexpected. I loved the idea of a secret room, a hideaway where you can listen to records. And my husband Paul’s birthday is the same day as Frank Sinatra’s, December 12, so I thought it would be cool.

Any changes afoot or plans for expansion?

The club is 56,000 square feet, believe it or not, so we did our very best to get it right the first time. But as we’re starting to realize how our members use it and what we could have done differently, there are going to be some tweaks. For example, we have two rooms that are like function or conference rooms. When we originally designed them, it was pre-pandemic, and we thought members would have meetings here or bring their work teams here for brainstorming sessions. And now, of course, people aren’t really looking for those kinds of spaces anymore. So we’re going to convert it into private event space.

Any plans for new hospitality ventures?

I want to make sure we’ve reached our full potential with the ’Quin, and we’re well on our way to doing that. At some point, when we’re really operating on all cylinders, if there’s a demand, could we potentially expand? I don’t know yet. I think I’d be open to it. People from other cities and some of our non-resident members have said, “Please, would you do this in Chicago or wherever?” And right now, I say no. But never say never.

The ‘Quin House’s Commonwealth Ave exterior. / Photo by Jenna Peffley

Is real estate the easiest way to get rich?

I’d say it’s an effective way for a person to become self-sustaining and invest for a great life in the future. When Paul and I were engaged, we were having dinner with my parents, who were both European and had lived through the war. My father was from Belgrade, in a country that was taken over by Communists, and my mother is from Vienna, and they said they had some important advice for us. I remember thinking, “This is going to be about togetherness or love.” Instead, they said, “Invest in real estate.” [Laughs.]

You also run Hexagon Properties, which specializes in luxury rentals. When it comes to your primary residence—rent or buy?

I think if you can, own, but a lot of it depends on how much you want or need to be in one place versus being flexible. I have four kids. They’re all in their twenties, and they’re all renters because they’re young and starting out in their careers, still figuring out where they’re going to be. You have to take a little bit of a long-term view to buy.

So many of Boston’s wealthiest families seem to be in real estate.

Well, when you look at lists of the super wealthy, I don’t think a lot of those fortunes are from real estate. It seems like technology and invention, creativity and innovation, are probably more common sources. But real estate is an asset that hopefully will grow in value, and ideally, and more important, it’s also something that brings you joy. It’s more about family, and home and hearth, and all those things so that you have the psychic value of that.

You’re known for your style. Is Boston a fashionable city?

I think it’s more fashionable than its reputation. I have so many friends who are so stylish. They always look incredible. We have a reputation for being stodgy and not very chic, but the reality is different than that, and it’s just getting more so. I think people, in general, like to dress up and put on something cool. At the ’Quin, we don’t have a dress code. It’s come as you are because if you’re, let’s say, a tech entrepreneur in your twenties, you’re probably working in something super-casual. I never wanted that to be a barrier or to feel like you had to put on a jacket and tie. But people do make an effort.

Photo by Mona Miri

Where do you get your style?

My mother was an artist, so I think I’ve always had an artistic appreciation. Maybe it comes from the fact that I’m an art lover? I’m certainly not an art producer. I can’t draw well or anything like that. But I like to express myself through what I wear, and I do feel like that’s a creative statement.

Do you have a muse?

I take inspiration from a lot of different people. I have a daughter—three sons and one daughter—and she’s always an inspiration. I have friends who I admire, people I look up to. But in terms of fashion sense? I probably take a little bit from a lot of different places.

Favorite shopping city?

I’ve been enjoying London. And I’ve gone to some fashion shows in Paris, which is so much fun. But honestly? I love shopping in Boston.

Where do you shop in Boston?

I love Saks. I’m a longtime Neiman Marcus customer. I’ve done Alan Bilzerian for edgier things. They always pushed me to try new things, which I love. And there are so many beautiful stores on Newbury Street. I have fun poking into all of these different places and seeing what they have.

Favorite foreign city to visit and favorite hotel?

One of my favorite cities is Vienna because my mom was from there, and when I was growing up, I used to visit my grandparents there, so when I go back, it always feels a little bit like home. I’ve had the opportunity to stay at the Sacher hotel, right in the center of the city. It’s just this Old World, beautiful hotel.

What is the significance of your company’s name, Hexagon?

Ultimately, it comes from our last name. We had a small boat, like a little dinghy, and we were going to name it. The kids were fairly young. And we wanted something kind of family-oriented. So we thought, “Edgerley. Edge.” And then one of our kids said, “Six edges,” because there are six of us. And it turns out that the hexagon, I believe, is the strongest shape in nature, so we thought that was very cool. It became like a family symbol.

What three things are always either on your person or in your purse?

My wallet and my cell phone, for sure. My daughter was just saying, “I think you’re addicted to your phone,” and I was like, “No, I’m not. I can put it down.” But I’m not actually sure that’s the case. And I always have my favorite lip balm by RéVive. It’s just so good. I also take my iPad everywhere.

You’ve assembled a world-class art collection. What’s the first thing you look for in a piece?

Just how I feel about it. It’s a visceral thing. Do I love it? Does it make me pause for a moment? That’s really it.

Favorite artist?

We just had Julian Schnabel here yesterday. He’s one of my favorite artists, and we’ve now developed a friendship over the years because we’ve gotten to know him, and that adds a whole other layer to it.

What’s the one thing you’d grab if the house was burning?

Well, first, of course, my family. I’d make sure everybody was safe. And then maybe my wedding album. That was such a special day. We’ve been married for 33 years.

You went to Harvard Business School. Is it worthy of the hype, or is it just a label?

It’s worthy of the hype. I had the most incredible experience there. As an undergraduate, I was a biology major, and then I worked at Bain & Company for three years. But when I went to Harvard Business School, I felt like I was actually learning business because they teach by the case method. You learn quickly how to get to the essence of a strategic problem because you’re doing three cases a day. You’re reading it. You’re doing the analysis. You’re getting to the crux of it. So over a two-year period, I think you get quite good at solving strategic problems. It teaches you a new way to think.

You’re one of the city’s most generous philanthropists but also one of its quietest. Is that intentional?

We’ve been very lucky that we can give back, and my husband and I are big believers in trying to make a difference. I’ve been very involved in nonprofits my whole career. I did consulting from the beginning, and then there were about 15 years when I wasn’t working, and I was on nonprofit boards and very, very involved as a volunteer. To me, that’s important because I want to understand what’s happening. How can we make a difference? And how do we support the amazing staff and leaders of these organizations? I mean, the Boys and Girls Clubs of Boston is changing lives. So is Big Brothers Big Sisters and the mentorship that’s happening at Horizons for Homeless Children. The Boston Foundation, United Way—we’re so lucky to have these incredible organizations with a huge amount of innovation.

Is Boston a leader in that way?

Absolutely. There are so many great, innovative ideas and solutions that develop here and then go national. I love that. It’s like the spirit of innovation lives in the nonprofit sector as much as it does in the tech or life sciences, or other sectors in Boston. It’s also where I’ve made so many of my best friends from what we’ve done together. I feel so lucky to be a part of the nonprofit community.

What’s the first thing you notice about a person when you meet them?

I always look for kindness, openness, and warmth.

If your life were a TV show, what would it be?

Ooh, that’s a good question. I can tell you the shows I love, like Friends or How I Met Your Mother. It’s always a group that has these long-term relationships. So I guess it would be an ensemble comedy.

Flower you’re most drawn to?

I love orchids.

Is there a business you’re curious about that you’d want to be involved in?

Well, the ’Quin House and hospitality were it for me. That was kind of the dream that I wanted to try. I don’t know what would be interesting to do next. I’d have to give that some thought. Maybe there’s a next chapter for me.

By the Numbers

Gone Clubbing

The ’Quin is the place to be—here’s a peek at what goes on inside. 

1,600

Number of martinis poured every month at the club.

400+

Number of artworks in the ’Quin’s permanent collection, which includes pieces by Picasso and Andy Warhol.

 2,800+

Number of vinyl albums in the ’Quin’s record collection.

1,650,000

Amount, in dollars, the ’Quin’s philanthropic arm, the ’Quin Impact Fund, has given so far to more than 47 organizations.

 2,300

Number of burgers sold each month at the club’s restaurants.

First published in the print edition of the June 2023 issue with the headline “Simply Sandy.” 

Previously

• The Interview: Crime-Fiction Writer Dennis Lehane
• The Interview: Novelist Hank Phillippi Ryan
• The Interview: Black Economic Council of Massachusetts Head Nicole Obi
• The Interview: GBH President and CEO Susan Goldberg
• The Interview: MIT President Sally Kornbluth
• The Interview: Boston Public Library President David Leonard
• The Interview: CNN Anchor and Correspondent Audie Cornish
• The Interview: Joey McIntyre of New Kids on the Block

Photo illustration by Benjamen Purvis / Photo via StockSnapper/Getty Images

My first taste of the so-called Harvard experience occurred the week before school started. I stood in a line of fellow giddy 18-year-olds who, at least on paper, were among the world’s best and brightest. In front of us, a self-assured sophomore with a messy blond bun held a sponge above a filthy toilet and led us in a sacred ritual. She wore a vibrant red T-shirt with what closely resembled the Harvard shield, but instead of the university’s Latin motto “Veritas,” it read “Sanitas.” We hung on her every word as if still trying to impress the latest in a series of admissions gatekeepers.

Our “captain,” as she was called, submerged her green-and-yellow sponge into the water below. Up to her elbow in its deepest, darkest caverns, she expertly showcased scrubbing techniques perfected over generations. One by one, we took the plunge. For most of us, it was the first time we’d ever cleaned a toilet.

It wasn’t a hazing ritual of the elites. This was Dorm Crew, a student employment and leadership program once cited as the largest—and one of the oldest—student-run fee-for-service organizations in the world. A division of Harvard’s Facilities Maintenance Operations, Dorm Crew had been employing students for custodial work in dormitories since the 1950s. For decades, Dorm Crew provided some of the best-paying jobs on campus: cleaning student bathrooms throughout the fall and spring terms and cleaning dormitories at the beginning and end of the school year. During much of its existence, roughly one out of five Harvard undergrads worked Dorm Crew in some capacity before graduating.

Still, that legacy came under scrutiny in 2019 when Anthony Abraham Jack, an assistant professor of education at Harvard, published the book The Privileged Poor: How Elite Colleges Are Failing Underprivileged Students, revealing the struggles of less privileged students at top-tier universities. As an example, Jack critiqued a student custodial organization with the fictionalized name “Community Detail” at an unspecified Ivy college for furthering class and racial divisions on campus and shared anonymized student accounts depicting its “disgusting” and “dehumanizing” work. It didn’t take much to connect it to Dorm Crew. A viral tweet by Sara Goldrick-Rab, a professor of higher education policy and sociology at Temple University, followed and intensified these discussions: “Low-income students at HARVARD working 20 hours a week in their first year of college cleaning goddamn dorms??”

What the Tweet got wrong was that students were only required to engage in two hours of weekly cleaning to participate in the program during the school year and that they were not exclusively low-income students who participated. Students from different socioeconomic backgrounds joined Dorm Crew, enticed by the high hourly wages—the last going rate for bathroom cleaning was $16.25 an hour.

It didn’t matter; the backlash was swift and unsurprising. After all, the optics Dorm Crew’s critics presented were terrible: a form of forced servitude imposed only on the school’s most vulnerable students for the benefit of its most elite.

After 70 years of being Harvard’s trusted workhorse, Dorm Crew suddenly had a bull’s-eye on its back, one placed there not by students in Dorm Crew themselves but by onlookers. In the winter of 2019, the university halted all Dorm Crew bathroom cleaning during the school year, later saying the decision stemmed from the pandemic, even though, in reality, the decision predated it. In April of this year, Harvard announced that all Dorm Crew cleaning would stop. The organization, if it wanted to continue to exist, needed to find a new home outside of the facilities and maintenance department. For the first time in memory, when students return to campus this month, they won’t be greeted by the usual sight of hundreds of welcoming peers sporting “Sanitas” shirts and wielding mops and buckets.

Largely left out of the public discourse and decisions related to Dorm Crew? The legions of students—past and present—who participated in the program. I was one of the low-income students who critics are purporting to defend against the supposed indignities of cleaning the toilets of classmates. To me and to Dorm Crew’s current leaders, Harvard’s decision to quietly dismantle a program that was such a large and positive part of our college experience has a lot less to do with equity than it does with a deep cleaning of its appearance.

My own love affair with Dorm Crew—and with Harvard—was not immediate. I signed up for Dorm Crew’s weeklong Fall Clean-Up because it was the only optional freshman pre-orientation program that didn’t cost anything and guaranteed I’d start the semester with book money in my pocket.

A working-class “townie” from a mile away in Somerville, I had grown up knowing the difference between myself and many of the students who attended Harvard. Historically, the university looked to my town for labor, while Crimson students crossed the town line for colorful tales and cheap rents. My brother had worked through high school at the hardware store in Harvard Square, catering to its comically insufferable clientele. I knew the dynamics; I had just never straddled them.

The transition wasn’t exactly smooth. In class, my fellow students informed me that my Boston accent—I didn’t think I had one—would make it harder for me to pronounce French words. A classmate’s mother affectionately called me “the girl from Slummerville.” Incoming freshmen in my dormitory were told to always use the so-called buddy system when leaving Harvard’s protective bubble to enter my neighborhood. Suddenly, I, the nerdiest of nerds in my high school, became a go-to bodyguard for trips to Circuit City.

After the intensity of Fall Clean-Up, I took a cushy, even higher-paying campus job in a special collections library while I tried to acclimate to life on campus. I was tasked with filing delicate design sketches, but a lot of the time I listened to music and did homework in the quiet subterranean stacks. It was what many would call a dream job, but I was bored out of my mind. I missed cleaning and the peers that Dorm Crew attracted.

I returned to Dorm Crew at the end of the year for Spring Clean-Up. I was one of approximately 400 students who, during the course of a month, would clean rooms, set up elaborate university events, and provide hospitality support for Harvard’s annual commencement and alumni reunions, which together bring roughly 30,000 visitors to campus. We were all there to make a quick buck—some to earn tuition money, others because their parents refused to bankroll European summer travels—but many of us found much more than a paycheck. There was a certain catharsis in cleaning and in watching my more financially privileged classmates not just toil in misery—and some did toil—but actually experience the joys and value of manual labor. Something clicked for them, as it had for me. They found a respect for this type of work, even if it was the only time in their life they experienced it.

I saw future physicists scrub shower grout, fledgling investment bankers damp-dust Harvard’s iconic crown molding, and soon-to-be doctors learn best practices for broom-sweeping. (Future medical professionals always seemed to gravitate to Dorm Crew.) Some did not enjoy it or excel at a job in which the solely intellectual were no match for students who also possessed practical knowledge and the ability to execute it. Even that was a lesson for students. Most important, perhaps, the work became an equalizer among Dorm Crew members from different economic strata and diverse backgrounds.

Despite the fact that many participants of Dorm Crew gained a newfound respect for manual labor, the recent discourse surrounding Dorm Crew has, in part, been fueled by—and continues to fuel—the stigmatization of custodial work. The notion that any Harvard student would be working an on-campus manual labor job cleaning toilets instead of working in a library or for a professor is appalling to some. “The entire premise for the argument to get rid of Dorm Crew,” says Harvard senior Magdalen Mercado, Dorm Crew’s latest, and likely last, Head Captain, “rests on the idea that manual labor is inherently degrading, that these essential jobs are not appropriate for Harvard students.”

That viewpoint ignores the qualities that Dorm Crew members and people willing and eager to do manual labor work bring to the job and develop along the way: being down-to-earth, quick-thinking under pressure, self-assured, and possessing a sense of humor. These are all qualities one would think Harvard would want to instill in its future real-world leaders. “No one gets into Harvard without being willing to work hard. But the Dorm Crew people are not afraid of any kind of work,” says Mercado, who fought tirelessly to save the program. After Harvard’s recent decision to scrub custodial jobs for students, the program has pivoted. Perhaps fittingly, what remains of Dorm Crew’s staff will now work in jobs with better optics: providing multimedia support in classrooms.

For my own part, I returned to Dorm Crew each semester until I graduated, eventually working my way up to captain and leading hundreds of fellow students in crews during my tenure. I found my social community in the process. It was only through Dorm Crew that Harvard started to feel like home. Maybe that was part of the problem.

As the news of Dorm Crew’s fate started spreading, I found myself reaching out to Dorm Crew alumni to mourn the program’s passing. Among the most notable Dorm Crew alum and also someone who is well versed in its history is Baratunde Thurston, class of ’99. He is an activist, comedian, and the author of How to Be Black, in which he describes his time as a Dorm Crew captain. Thurston admits that the dynamics of working Dorm Crew were sometimes “awkward as hell” but said he loved it. It was an experience, he said, that “helped shape who I became.” It was among the Dorm Crew ranks, Thurston tells me, that he found community and like-mindedness.

Thurston believes that the conversations around Dorm Crew are not so simple and that we may not be having the right conversation at all. Maybe the question is not what kinds of jobs low-income students should be working at Harvard, but why any student at an institution with as many resources as Harvard should have to work in order to afford tuition at all.

Dorm Crew’s origin story itself is messy. Immediately following World War II, Harvard reformed its admission policies, admitting students from more diverse socioeconomic backgrounds, which brought an influx of working-class students and returning soldiers, some married with families. Unlike its previous pedigrees, these new students needed jobs. The process of creating them likely undermined local laborers from towns such as my own, unionization efforts, and calls for higher wages. On-campus jobs also allowed administrators to assert greater control and oversight over these new types of students. Yet Harvard never anticipated that it would evolve and that student workers would take ownership over the organization and befriend—while working side by side with—the very workers they had the potential to undermine.

Harvard also never appeared to have anticipated that Dorm Crew would become a source of pride and agency for generations of students and a home for not just those on the fringes but anyone—financially privileged, middle class, or low-income—who connected with the work and the mindset. Students were expected to stealthily clean their peers’ bathrooms. In reality, they became an enthusiastic, mop-wielding and bucket-toting army of young adults wearing brightly colored T-shirts mocking the Veritas logo while developing and passing on highly visible traditions like the hundred-person tug of war in Harvard Yard every fall. During my senior year, Harvard threatened us with copyright infringement over our logo—an exact replica of Harvard’s except for the word “Sanitas”—forcing us to tweak the shield. Apparently, the university didn’t appreciate the joke. “Maybe Dorm Crew students were a little too visible and a little too proud of their work,” Mercado says.

Perhaps the biggest issue raised by criticisms of Dorm Crew is not about whether low-income students should work Dorm Crew or even whether any student at Harvard should have to work at all. The real question in my mind—and one Harvard doesn’t seem to want to address—is why so many of us felt more at home in Dorm Crew than elsewhere in the university.

A statement provided to me by a Harvard College spokesperson read: “We strive to ensure every student finds a path that supports their life on campus and work with each student individually to pursue their passions, build their community, and enhance their learning.” But what about all of the students like me and Mercado who found community and passion working Dorm Crew? The answer, according to media coverage and Twitter, is that participants must be exhibiting a kind of Stockholm Syndrome in which we defend Dorm Crew because we cannot see how the system has abused us.

None of this is to say that some of the criticism of Dorm Crew isn’t valid. It is. But Harvard hasn’t remediated anything by eliminating student custodial jobs. Providing better-paying, more-flexible campus jobs didn’t require the eradication of these jobs or the dissolution of a beloved student institution. This was a choice Harvard made. In favor of appearances, it disenfranchised the students in the program and ensured that future students will never have the chance to experience everything it has to offer.

For the students who have sat in the cool shadows of Harvard’s institutional hierarchy and have witnessed the messes behind the Ivy façade, these questions warranted more than a lofty edict; they warranted a discussion. Thurston calls it a missed opportunity for Harvard. “It comes back to agency,” he says. “When well-meaning people claim to speak on behalf of the downtrodden without actually talking to the downtrodden about their needs, it’s a problem.”

In June, I found myself back in Harvard Yard for my 15-year reunion. Harvard’s commencement and reunions are the pinnacle of engineered nostalgia—Veritas-stamped Belgian waffles, crimson lanyards with name badges, and photo montages that feature vaguely familiar faces. Instead of enjoying the pomp and circumstance, I found myself longing for those days during Spring Clean-Up when I worked with some of the most capable, interesting people I’ve encountered in my life—both the students and the facility workers. Many of my closest friends worked Dorm Crew—doctors, human rights activists—not necessarily the people most likely to show up for a reunion during a pandemic. What I really wanted to attend was a Dorm Crew reunion.

When I spoke to Mercado, she shared my sentiment, as do so many Dorm Crew members I have known over the years. “Harvard is a very hard place to be someone from a minority background or from a lower socioeconomic class,” she told me. “It’s a place of tremendous inequity. Dorm Crew didn’t make that experience harder. It made it easier.”

That is the real mess that Harvard needs to clean up.

Aerial view of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA via iStock/Getty

From Harvard, we’ve come to expect spots near the tippy-top in lists of the best colleges. But while the celebrated university is still in exclusive company among its elite peers this year, there were some changes worth noting in the 2023 U.S. News & World Report rankings for the best graduate programs.

Harvard Law, per the number-crunchers at the magazine, slipped from third to fourth among top law schools, a position it now shares with Columbia Law School. So a Crimson law degree is now listed behind Yale, which came first, followed by Standford and the University of Chicago, which has stepped up to snatch Harvard’s bronze. Still, the U.S. News researchers continue to sing Harvard’s praises, pointing out that “[o]pportunities to put classroom lessons to work start early” in its first-year training programs. Elsewhere in the state, BU ranked 17th, BC ranked 37th, Northeastern was 73rd, and Suffolk was 122nd, followed by New England Law at 147.

Also slipping ever so slightly in the rankings was the Harvard Graduate School of Education, which now claims the number two spot behind UPenn in that category, despite being first-in-the-nation last year. BC came 19th, and BU was 45th. The UMass system ranked highly as well, with Boston in 49th, Amherst in 71st, Lowell in 153rd, and Dartmouth in 175th.

Harvard did, meanwhile, retain its top spot in the ranking of research-oriented medical schools, ahead of NYU in second, and coming in 9th among schools oriented toward primary care.

As for our other Cambridge-based frequent MVP, the MIT School of Engineering is still top of the heap in its category, once again beating out Stanford and U.C. Berkeley. Massachusetts was well-represented on that list as well: Harvard came 21st, Northeastern was 33rd, BU was 35th, UMass was 57th, WPI was 86th, UMass Lowell was 126th, and UMass Dartmouth was 152nd.

Photo via Washington Post/Getty Images

I was sitting on the porch of Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb’s stately home in Lexington this summer, as cardinals flitted among his roses and hydrangeas, when his phone unexpectedly rang. The bespectacled scientist, compulsively clad in a dark blazer and dress pants, took the call on his Apple Watch. It was a producer from CNBC explaining that, because of the fast-breaking Andrew Cuomo resignation story, the network would have to push his scheduled interview back until later that night. No problem, Loeb said. “I’ll try to be much more enlightening than the Cuomo story.”

CNBC and I were merely two of the seven interviews Abraham “Avi” Loeb had on his schedule—a typical day, he was quick to point out. Operating out of his pandemic-era home office, Loeb has become nothing short of a pop-science phenomenon since the beginning of the year, logging more than 1,200 interviews on everything from mainstream television and radio to podcasts hosted by the likes of Joe Rogan and the singer King Princess. “I checked her out,” Loeb told me. “She has very good songs.”

Even before I’d arrived at his home, Loeb had sent me a tweet from a science writer whose wife announced that “her new TV crush Avi Loeb is like a sexier Anthony Fauci.” Loeb was unimpressed: “My wife said Fauci is a low bar.” Indeed, Loeb speculated with an impish grin, seeing as how Brad Pitt had played Fauci on Saturday Night Live, perhaps Pitt could play him, too, in the movie that was sure to be made about him one day. “It seems like it’s reached a certain threshold where a lot of people know about me,” he remarked. “I’m perhaps the most known scientist in the U.S. Maybe the world.”

It was quite a self-assessment for a guy who specializes in dense academic papers with titles such as “A Statistical Detection of Wide Binary Systems in the Ultra-Faint Dwarf Galaxy Reticulum II,” and whose best claim to fame, until recently, was that he directed Harvard’s Institute for Theory and Computation and its Black Hole Initiative. But it is certainly true that no other scientist has crushed the media in 2021 quite like Loeb. He first started to gain widespread attention a few years ago, after saying that a mysterious object that had recently passed through the solar system was most likely put there—get ready for it—by aliens from outer space. It was an astounding moment for the field of astrophysics, and for the popular imagination. Many respectable scientists have speculated on the odds of there being alien life. Never before, though, had such an established figure in the scientific community gone full Roswell.

The response inside the academy was nothing short of withering. Loeb’s peers publicly and forcefully accused him of grandstanding, pandering, and, worst of all, pseudoscience. It was a highly unusual dressing-down in a discipline accustomed to duking it out through circumspect papers on arcane topics published in obscure journals. Yet Loeb was unfazed, doubling down on his arguments in a series of articles published by Scientific American and then in a 2021 book, titled Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth, that became an instant bestseller and catapulted Loeb into the celebrity stratosphere. Even as his detractors fumed and pointed out the comet-size holes in his argument, Loeb announced an ambitious and privately funded effort to search for evidence of extraterrestrial life, meaning Harvard is now officially on the hunt for little green men.

Now just a few months shy of 60, Loeb appears to be having the time of his life taking the public on a wild ride. At the same time, it isn’t hard to imagine that this initiative could torpedo his career, or, at the very least, put his painstakingly built and heretofore sparkling professional reputation on the line. Yet Loeb, who slams his critics as a bunch of boring party poopers who lack scientific curiosity, could care less about the very real risks of exploring a topic many have long shunned and dismissed as pure fiction. The stakes, he says, are simply too big not to.

Our civilization, he suspects, has a small window of opportunity to take to the heavens before we self-annihilate. The old ways of doing science—waiting patiently for evidence to trickle in, then waiting even longer for scientific consensus and government action and funding—might not get us there in time. So Loeb’s taking the necessary leaps now—with intrigued billionaires footing the bill—and letting the looking for evidence follow. There’s only one question left: Will Loeb be successful in making his case, or is he flying way too close to the sun?

Loeb has been searching for the universe’s hidden truths since he was a child. He grew up on his family’s farm in Israel in the 1960s, raised by a mother who taught him to love philosophy. When he wasn’t chasing chickens, collecting eggs, or tending to his chores, he’d drive the family tractor into the hills and curl up with the existentialist works of Camus and Sartre. Still, he didn’t need these books to appreciate the precariousness of his own existence. “Echoes of the Holocaust were never absent,” wrote Loeb in Extraterrestrial. His family on both sides landed in Israel to escape the Nazis, and Loeb’s grandfather on his father’s side was the only one of his own 66 family members to flee Germany alive.

Loeb’s childhood was punctuated by Israel’s wars for survival against its neighbors, which instilled in him an appreciation of the profound unlikelihood of his own existence and the need to make the most of the gift. When he fulfilled his mandatory military service after high school, his aptitude for math and physics made him a natural for designing high-tech weaponry. Philosophy was placed on the back burner.

Still, physics led Loeb to astronomy, which offered “a more direct route to the most basic truths of the universe,” he said in his book. Astrophysics, he realized, “had actually reunited me with my old love; it was just dressed up in different clothes.”

In the late 1980s, Loeb moved to New Jersey to take a job at the Institute for Advanced Study. He entered Boston’s orbit in 1993 when, at the age of 31, he took a junior faculty position at Harvard, where he was granted tenure after just three short years. Throughout his career, he published prolifically on a range of subjects, but was often drawn to cases where math breaks down and infinity looms—such as black holes and the Cosmic Dawn, the Genesis-like period after the Big Bang when the first stars, made up of primordial dust, formed. Always supported by formidable math and theory, he loved to inch his way out on the branch of the unknown, and it soon made him a major figure in astrophysics.

One thing Loeb’s research convinced him of was that the universe might well be teeming with life. The argument is based on lots of zeroes. Number of stars in our galaxy: 250 billion. Number of galaxies in the universe: some 2 trillion. Another way to get at it is to pick any dark point in the night sky and blow it up—there are 3,000 galaxies and trillions of stars there.

Until recently, we had no idea how many of these stars had planets circling them, nor how many of those planets were in the so-called Goldilocks zone—just the right distance from a star to have liquid water, a requirement for life as we know it. But that is changing quickly. Thanks to scientists including MIT’s Sara Seager, we know of more than 4,000 “exoplanets,” and there are bound to be more. It seems that most stars have planets, and perhaps one in five has Goldilocks planets. In the universe, it’s likely that there are more such planets than there are grains of sand on all the world’s beaches. Even if life arising on such a planet is a one-in-a-million long shot, we should still have billions of buddies out there.

The problem is that even our own galaxy is a big place. It takes a little more than four years just to beam a signal at the speed of light to Alpha Centauri, the nearest star system to our solar system. It would take 100,000 years to send it across the entire Milky Way. Interstellar travel is out of the question on any conceivable time scale—which is to say that the universe may be crawling with life, but there’s a good chance none of it will ever crawl our way.

Such reasoning is common among professionals who think about deep space and our place in it, and Loeb was a prominent and reliable member of that club, with hundreds of relatively uncontroversial papers under his belt. But then a mysterious visitor came hurtling through our solar system, and with it Loeb went from being a respected, play-by-the-rules department chair at Harvard to a cosmic heretic willing to take on—and take down—the very field that he helped build.

Scientists originally thought ‘Oumuamua was shaped like a cigar when it was spotted passing through our solar system. / Photo via DottedHippo/Getty Images

On November 20, 2017, Loeb was sitting in his Garden Street office in Harvard’s Department of Astronomy, beneath the half-dome cover of the Great Refractor, the university’s iconic rooftop telescope, when word rocketed through the astronomy community of a new paper in the journal Nature about a mysterious object that astronomers had detected the month before. He had already been following reports of this strange object’s appearance in a series of preliminary research notes. Now the topic was the subject of an article in one of the most prestigious scientific journals, announcing to the world this major moment in astronomy: It was the first time an object from outside our solar system had been seen passing through ours.

The object had traveled incredibly fast—about 59,000 miles per hour, which is 30 times faster than Halley’s Comet has been clocked moving—and headed almost directly for the sun. Unlike planets, comets, asteroids, and many other solar system objects, which orbit in a flat plane around the sun, it came in at a steep angle from the “north.” The object cut inside the orbit of Mercury, slingshotted around the sun at 200,000 miles per hour, passed close to Earth, and took off in the general direction of the constellation Pegasus. Only then was it picked up by Pan-STARRS1, the giant telescope atop Hawaii’s Haleakala volcano that scans the sky for passing objects. After consulting with Hawaiian-language experts, the Pan-STARRS team named it ‘Oumuamua (oh-MOO-ah-MOO-ah), meaning “first messenger from afar.”

As the Pan-STARRS team analyzed the data, ‘Oumuamua’s mysteries multiplied. It was about the size of a football field, and pulsing with light in a pattern that would best be explained if it were flattened like a saucer and tumbling through space so that its apparent brightness witnessed from Earth would change as it presented different sides to us. No comet or asteroid has ever had such extreme dimensions. It didn’t have any tails—the long trains of both ionized neutral gasses and dust particles that stream off a comet as the sun’s radiation vaporizes it. Comets are far more common than asteroids, which are made of rock, but ‘Oumuamua didn’t seem to be one.

“This thing is very strange,” confessed Karen Meech, the University of Hawaii astronomer who led the observations and coauthored the Nature paper.

After reading the paper, Loeb started running arcane calculations, looking up obscure data sets. Could it be? he wondered. Could it really be?

Years earlier, Loeb had worked on an estimate, based on what we knew at the time about solar and planetary formation, of dormant comets traveling through interstellar space and the odds of one of them passing nearby. Not very good, he’d concluded, pegging the chance of us sighting an interstellar traveler over 10 years of looking at somewhere between 1 in 100 and 1 in 10,000. The odds of that traveler being a rocky asteroid, rather than a comet, were even lower. So ‘Oumuamua’s mere existence was a conundrum. Perhaps there were way more objects hurtling through our solar system than he’d thought.

Or perhaps its arrival wasn’t accidental at all.

For years, Loeb had been speculating about how to find life in the cosmos. He published his first paper about searching for extraterrestrial radio waves in 2007, and in 2015 he became the chairman of the advisory board for the Silicon Valley entrepreneur Yuri Milner’s Breakthrough Starshot initiative, a $100 million attempt to pave the way for launching humanity’s first mission beyond our solar system.

The only problem? Traveling to Proxima Centauri, the closest star to our solar system, using current rocket propulsion would take tens of thousands of years. Loeb and Milner soon came up with a plan to do it using a light sail—an ultra-thin sheet of mirror pushed by a laser beam—that could travel a fifth of the speed of light and arrive in just over 20 years. Once there, the probe could scan Proxima Centauri’s planets for signs of life and beam the information back to Earth. A number of technical challenges remain before Starshot can become a reality, but the exercise convinced Loeb that interstellar travel within our lifetime was far more doable than many believed—both for us, and for any alien civilizations with the same urge.

Less than a year earlier, Milner also dropped $100 million on Breakthrough Listen, another project Loeb is involved in, to bring new energy to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence in the universe—in this case by renting time on large radio telescopes to scan nearby stars for signs of electromagnetic transmissions. Milner has argued for a “Silicon Valley approach” to searching for extraterrestrial life: big investments, big gambles. Decide on the future you want, then figure out how to make it happen. It’s a philosophy in which Loeb and Milner seem perfectly aligned.

By November 30, 2017, Loeb could no longer keep his thoughts about ‘Oumuamua to himself. He sat down at his computer and fired off an email to Milner. “Dear Yuri,” he wrote, “I wanted to let you know about a most peculiar object that is passing through the solar system…. The more I study this object, the more unusual it appears, making me wonder whether it might be an artificially made probe which was sent by an alien civilization.” In his email, Loeb ticked through the oddities: the trajectory, the dimensions, the lack of a cometary tail. “Overall, a very peculiar object indeed,” he concluded. “Which makes me wonder—could it be an artificially produced interstellar probe?”

Milner couldn’t wait to hear more. He quickly arranged a meeting with Loeb at his estate in Palo Alto, and Loeb caught a flight—paid for by Milner—out there a few days later. Both agreed that ‘Oumuamua had to be monitored for communications, however unlikely. So Milner made a call to West Virginia’s Green Bank Telescope, nestled into a deep and radio-silent valley in the forested hills of Appalachia, and rented some emergency time.

On December 13, the great gears on the stadium-size radio telescope groaned into action, swinging the massive white dish to bear on the spot in the sky from which ‘Oumuamua was departing at rapid speed. Like a giant ear, the telescope listened for the slightest chirp out of ‘Oumuamua, down to one-10th the magnitude of a cellphone signal. Over two weeks, it monitored four different radio bands, making sure it caught every possible orientation of the tumbling object. In the end, the machine heard nothing. Loeb was disappointed but not surprised. It had been a long shot. Even if the object was transmitting, the odds that it was doing so using a spectrum humans could detect were slim.

For the next six months, ‘Oumuamua continued to simmer on the back burner of Loeb’s mind. Then, on June 27, 2018, another bombshell appeared in Nature. After rounding the sun, ‘Oumuamua had accelerated away at a pace that could not be explained by gravity alone, as if something was lightly powering it. Comets do this as well, as the heat of the sun causes jets of vapor to shoot out and propel them, but jets would have been visible to the many telescopes trained on ‘Oumuamua, and there were none. Vaporizing jets also would have produced a “herky-jerky” acceleration, while ‘Oumuamua’s was smooth. Now the messenger from afar had all of Loeb’s attention.

Some of Loeb’s best breakthrough moments have come in the shower, and that was where he once again found himself contemplating ‘Oumuamua’s mysteries, the haze of steam obscuring the world’s distractions. What, he asked himself, could give ‘Oumuamua a steady push other than vapor jets?

That’s it! It could be a light sail, harnessing the sun’s energy on its wide, millimeter-thick surface. The more Loeb mulled the trajectory, the dimensions, and the acceleration, the more he could see his cosmic counterpart on some distant Starshot initiative. If this Avi Loeb had settled on light sails as the best way to launch a craft into deep space, why wouldn’t lots of alien Avi Loebs have come to the same conclusion? As far as Loeb was concerned, he had stared deep into the vast reflecting pool of space, and found himself staring back.

Looking for affirmation, Loeb called Ed Turner, an astrophysicist at Princeton University and one of the world’s preeminent astronomers, and ran the idea by him. How crazy was it? he asked. Not so crazy, Turner replied.

Together with one of his postdoctoral fellows, Loeb worked on the physics of it all and published a paper in the Astrophysical Journal Letters titled “Could Solar Radiation Pressure Explain ‘Oumuamua’s Peculiar Acceleration?” He also took his hypothesis to the court of public opinion, writing an article for Scientific American, where he found a receptive audience of newfound fans. After so many years of staring up at the stars, Loeb was well on his way to becoming one himself.

Abraham “Avi” Loeb’s suggestion that ‘Oumuamua was the work of aliens made this esteemed Harvard astrophysicist highly controversial—and insanely popular. / Photo by Ken Richardson

For as much attention as Loeb’s work received, not everyone was so impressed. The criticism from his fellow astrophysicists was as swift as it was sharp. “I got an email from one well-known, highly credentialed astronomer,” says Michael Lemonick, Loeb’s editor at Scientific American. “The subject line was ‘Avi’s New Essay.’ And the only word in the email was, ‘Seriously?’”

Other experts were more direct.

“No, ‘Oumuamua is not an alien spaceship, and the authors of the paper insult honest scientific inquiry to even suggest it,” tweeted the astrophysicist Paul Sutter.

“If we decide that anything slightly odd that we don’t understand completely in astronomy could be aliens, then we have a lot of potential evidence for aliens,” argued another astrophysicist, Simon Goodwin.

“A shocking example of sensationalist, ill-motivated science,” added the science writer Ethan Siegel.

“If and when we do find extraterrestrials—and I think there’s a real chance that we might detect some sort of life, intelligent or not, in the next decade or two—we’re going to have a ‘boy who cried wolf’ problem,” the University of Toronto astronomer Bryan Gaensler explained to the Atlantic. “The people who find real evidence of this are probably not going to get the credit they deserve, because we’ve heard this all before.”

As the battle played out in public, Loeb refused to back down. Instead, he raised the stakes, impugning the entire scientific enterprise for playing it safe, discouraging original thought, and being more concerned with its own hermetic world of accolades than with the interests of the public that funds it. In so doing, he managed to alienate the very people who should have been his best allies.

Case in point: In a public webinar Loeb gave in February, Jill Tarter—who cofounded the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute (SETI) 37 years ago, and perhaps most famously was the model for Jodie Foster’s character in the Hollywood movie Contact—accused Loeb of undermining the discipline by criticizing its methodical approach. “I get a little bit pissed off when you throw the entire scientific culture under the bus,” she said. When researchers such as Tarter wait for irrefutable evidence before making any claims about the existence of extraterrestrial life, she explained, “We’re doing that as a way of differentiating ourselves from the pseudoscience that is so much a part of the popular culture.”

Loeb didn’t address Tarter’s criticism. Instead, he exploded at her, saying that the search for extraterrestrial life required a thousand times more funding than it received and that groups such as SETI should stop letting themselves be bullied by the establishment.

“I don’t feel bullied,” Tarter tried to counter, but Loeb cut her off. “Why are you opposing me?” he thundered, sounding a little too much like a Sith Lord trying to turn a Jedi. “Why don’t you join me in arguing for a thousand times more budget?”

Loeb wrote a public apology to Tarter later that day, but the damage was done. Many people criticized Loeb’s behavior, with one observer noting that he didn’t even address Tarter’s criticism that he had violated the scientific principal requiring extraordinary evidence for extraordinary claims.

In one telling way, though, Loeb’s response was right on target: How can scientists demand extraordinary evidence when there isn’t enough funding for any of them to produce it? There is wide agreement among scientists that the search for extraterrestrial life has been woefully underfunded for decades, while a billion dollars went to finding gravity waves, something that has little impact on society. The question is how to change that. Conduct slow, meticulous research, in hopes that you will at last be taken seriously by the powers that be? Or stoke the public imagination, and with it some capitalist fervor, and see how far it takes you? Loeb was willing to find out.

Partway through my afternoon with Loeb at his home, he pointed to the white rocking chair I was sitting on and told me that just in the past two weeks, right on this porch, two multibillionaires had visited him. “They were asking questions about the book and the science that I’m doing,” he said, adding that “one of them told me I was a rock star.”

Bolstered by his well-heeled supporters, Loeb is gaining powers that are extremely unusual for working scientists in his field. This summer, he announced the Galileo Project, which seeks to establish a network of telescopes around the globe to obtain high-quality images of unidentified aerial phenomena, or UAP, as UFOs are now called. His $2 million in starter funds is enough to build a few prototype telescopes and test the systems. To really cover the sky and get good data, Loeb told me, “We probably need a hundred telescope systems—tens of millions of dollars.” He shrugged. “It’s not a lot.”

The announcement of this new project came just a month after the U.S. government released its long-awaited report on UAP. Although the report was inconclusive, it kicked the hornet’s nest, and most researchers ran as far away from it as they could. “Scientists are trained to be cautious,” says Lemonick, the Scientific American editor, “not to make outrageous claims, nor to venture into territory that has a history of being highly questionable.” In other words: No serious scholar wants to be tainted by the UFO kooks peddling conspiracy theories on TV shows and in supermarket tabloids.

In any case, the idea that aliens are about to descend seems implausible to most scientists. “I believe they’re out there,” MIT’s Seager says, “but I don’t believe [they] have ever visited Earth. They’re probably too far away, or it’s too energetically costly, for them to come here.” Also, why would they bother? The conventional wisdom in the field is that if there are sextillions of civilizations out there, it stands to reason that we’re probably about as interesting as a roadside ant colony. And even if little green men did miraculously decide to visit, there’s a good chance their craft would be imperceptible to us. They aren’t going to be caught by accident, for instance, on a Navy jet’s radar.

Surprisingly, Loeb did receive a vote of confidence from Seth Shostak, a senior astronomer at the SETI Institute. “Although academe may dismiss the Galileo Project as nothing more than pandering to a gullible public, such prejudice is unhelpful and myopic,” Shostak wrote in Scientific American. The project is unlikely to find anything, he conceded, but that’s no reason to stop it. “As a SETI scientist, I’m grateful that [Loeb] has the freedom, and the guts, to sidestep the barrier of conventional wisdom and boldly go where few would dare to go.”

For his part, Loeb recently told a virtual audience at a Harvard Physics Colloquium that “You will never find the extraordinary evidence if you don’t search…extraordinary conservatism leads to extraordinary ignorance.”

Such a fate is unlikely to befall Loeb. “I’m blossoming,” he told me. “I’m engaged in creative work all the time. Every morning I wake up with a ton of ideas.” A sequel to Extraterrestrial is in the works, a documentary is under discussion, and the interviews continue unabated.

This period of professional transformation and ascendant fame for Loeb has come at a time of personal loss. His father died several months before scientists got their first glimpse of ‘Oumuamua, and he lost his beloved mother, to whom he spoke daily, just a year after it was last spotted. It was Loeb’s mother who nurtured his interests in existentialism and the big questions that now occupy his time. He’s aware that his interest in cosmic companionship grew more acute—and urgent—just as his earthly connections were fraying. “Each of us is merely a transient structure that comes and goes, recorded in the minds of other transient structures,” he writes in one of the more moving passages in Extraterrestrial. “And that is all.”

This glimpse of the void seems to have spurred Loeb to take a leap of faith. If he has his way, before his transience here comes to an end he may still get to see his ideas celebrated as revolutionary, not irresponsible. “In my field of exoplanets, the line is constantly shifting between what we consider mainstream and what we consider crazy,” Seager says. “When I started out, everyone thought my work was totally crazy and would never go anywhere. I couldn’t get a faculty job. Exoplanets was a dead end. And now, the work I did back then is as mainstream as it gets. So someone’s got to move that line.” Maybe it’s Loeb’s turn to be that someone.

Ultimately, it’s hard to disagree with the vast majority of astronomers who think ‘Oumuamua was almost certainly a natural object of some kind. Yet, it could have been a craft, however unlikely, and that may be the far more important takeaway. No matter how tiny the chance that alien astrophysicists are sending trillions of ‘Oumuamuas spinning into space, why not get out your telescope and try to convince our distracted planet to take a look?

That, Loeb believes, is ‘Oumuamua’s ultimate message, and now that it has departed our solar system, he is ready to take over the job of delivering it. “I just want to shape reality in a way that is more conducive to innovation, to risk-taking,” he told me. “It’s not about selling my book. It’s about delivering the message.” Loeb is determined not to let criticism from his fellow scientists or the risk of losing his footing in the ivory tower get in the way of that.

As I took my leave from Loeb after hours of conversation, sending cardinals to the wind while walking down his porch steps and across the perfectly manicured lawn, Loeb waved goodbye and glanced at his watch with a satisfied smile, ready to do it all over again. Through that tiny window on his wrist, an eager universe awaited.

CAMBRIDGE, MA – APRIL 16: An aerial view of Harvard Hall in Harvard Yard in Cambridge, MA on April 16, 2020. (Photo by Blake Nissen for The Boston Globe via Getty Images)

Want your college experience to include license to shout from the Ivy draped rooftops We’re the best in the whole wide world! (or even We’re the second best?) Well, Boston is still the place to be.

At least, so says the U.S. News & World Report‘s 2022 Top Global Universities rankings, which once again put Harvard and MIT in the first and second-place slots, respectively.

This year’s list, which crunches the numbers on 1,750 colleges from across the globe, has results that don’t line up exactly with the publication’s ranking of American colleges, which it released earlier this fall. In that ranking, Harvard, MIT, and Columbia shared the second-place spot, behind Princeton.

The discrepancies between the two US news rankings are due to the fact that the global survey focuses “specifically on schools’ academic research and reputation overall and not on their separate undergraduate or graduate programs,” according to a press release explaining the global survey’s methodology.

Analyzing colleges in this way, and taking into account institutions around the world, means you have to read further down the list to find some of our prestigious local institutions. Boston University ranks 65th, down from 57th last year. UMass Amherst is slotted at 148th, Northeastern tied for 176th, Tufts earned 198th place, Brandeis is 320th, UMass Boston tied for 417th, and Boston College tied at 625th.

Williams College, which perennially tops the U.S. News list of American liberal arts colleges, didn’t make the cut at all. Nor did other local smaller schools like Amherst, Babson, Leslie, Simmons, Smith, Stonehill, and Suffolk.

Harvard and MIT also featured heavily in the U.S. News rankings that compared universities in specific subject areas. Harvard snagged the number one spot for clinical medicine; MIT ranked at the top of the list for physics; while UMass Amherst came in 5th for agricultural sciences.

After Harvard, the other Ivies placed high in the overall rankings as well: Columbia was 6th, Yale was 12th, Princeton was 16th, UPenn was 13th, Cornell was 22nd, Brown was 119th, and Dartmouth was 247th.

Of the 10 schools that placed highest in the rankings, just two were from outside the U.S—Oxford (5th) and Cambridge (8th)—and the U.S. had the largest share of top universities on the list, with 271. China, at 253, had the next most.

You can read the full results for yourself here.

Parents sit socially distanced during the Boston College 144th commencement exercises in Alumni Stadium in Chestnut Hill, Boston, MA on May 24, 2021. Photo by Pat Greenhouse/The Boston Globe via Getty Images

Colleges are not yet fully back to normal—the delta variant has made sure of that. But college students are indeed headed back to the classroom in person this year, albeit with varying vaccine, masking, and distancing policies. While we don’t know exactly what college will look like next year, we do know that the next crop of college freshman is already diving deep into the research to figure out where they want to go to school.

One thing we can reliably say about what’s to come is that, once again, U.S. News and World Report  has once again measured, sliced, diced, and, of course, ranked the nation’s universities. And local institutions have once again come out on top.

The organization on Monday released its 2022 Best Colleges rankings. Top marks in the National Universities category went to Princeton, which has claimed the top spot for 11 straight years.

Little old Harvard, always the bridesmaid and never the bride, is still ranked second. It shares the spot with Columbia and MIT, which actually saw a boost from the 2021 rankings, when it placed fourth. Good for MIT.

Elsewhere in the Commonwealth, Tufts tied for 28th (up a smidge from its 30th ranking last year), Boston College ranked 36th (about on par with last year, when it placed 35th); Boston University and Brandeis were not far behind, tying at 42nd; Northeastern placed 49th; and UMass Amherst was 68th.

Massachusetts also dominated in the Liberal Arts Colleges category. Williams College, ever the favorite in this report, placed first, followed by Amherst. Wellesley was 5th. Smith was 17th.

According to U.S. News‘ Best Value Schools ranking—which weighs academic quality against the average cost of attending after scholarships and other discounts—Yale claims the top spot, with MIT 2nd and Harvard 3rd.

Those interested can also peruse the results for several analyses, among them the top schools for computer science, business, and engineering programs, the best colleges for veterans, and the schools that are most ethnically diverse.

New this year is a ranking of the nation’s best nursing programs, which assessed programs based on reviews from deans and faculty of other nursing schools. The top local school in that category was Boston College, which tied for 19th. UMass Boston ranked 43rd, and the MGH Institute of Health Professions ranked 58th. The best program, according to the report, can be found at UPenn.