Results tagged “harvard”

-- A woman was sexually assaulted early Saturday morning as she crossed through the Back Bay Fens on Agassiz Street. The woman was reportedly attacked by three men, one of whom raped her in the park's bushes. [BPDNews]

Two months ago, six Harvard Medical School researchers, who work with mice to determine how diseases interact with the immune system, became ill after drinking from a coffee machine in the New Research Building at the Longwood Medical area. It was determined that all of them had ingested sodium azide, a poisonous substance. Today, the Herald finds a source to assert that the incident couldn't have been an accident, even wondering whether it could have been attempted murder. Harvard appears to be keeping the investigation hush-hush, but the Herald reported that OSHA and the Boston Public Health Commission are involved.

Harvard is, apparently, the best university in the world, despite lack of cookies. The school has plenty of kooks, though, or at the very least a very major one: conservative columnist Peggy Noonan, who has parlayed her avoidance of poor people into heading a study group at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. Good call, Peggy: Harvard doesn't dig the poor, either!

Apparently 8 billion didn't do it, but a bit more did. The New York Times reports that Harvard is cutting cookies out of the budget for faculty meetings, leaving Skip and co to fret for lack of chocolate chips, raisins, and maybe even peanut butter. Hot breakfasts, Widener pastries, and track suits are also off the ledger, as are shuttle rides, as we noted some time ago. MIT dropped sports teams and Emerson College denied employees bagels and coffee at meetings starting earlier this year. What will be next on the list of collegiate cuts?

The Herald reports that thieves in California lifted $27 million dollars (and possibly more) from a retired Harvard professor of medicine. Ralph Kennaugh, a former Harvard Med School professor, moved to Cali from the South End just two months ago. Adding insult to injury, the paintings had not yet been insured in California. We always knew those Left Coasters were up to no good. A $1 million reward is being offered for the return of the paintings and $5 million for information leading to the thieves' arrest.

-- Somerville soccer fields must be in short supply these days. A 33-year-old man was arrested after allegedly practicing his soccer kick on the back of a teenage boy who refused to give up the soccer field at the Capuano School on Glen Street. [Somerville Journal]

The Harvard Crimson reports that it ran a full-page ad from a Holocaust denier group in today's paper. The ad has been pulled, according to the article, and will not run again this week. The ad was placed by Bradley Smith, the creepazoid who runs the "Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust," the foremost Holocaust denial group in the United States. There is no controversy, among people who aren't Nazis, about whether or not the Holocaust took place. Hate groups like Smith's have been placing ads in college papers for over a decade, in the attempt to lend credence to their pretend scholarship.

Notwithstanding its students' inability to pee appropriately, Harvard offers cows the opportunity to graze (and, possibly, relieve themselves?) on campus. Harvard has long given its Hollis Professor of Divinity grazing rights, which were exercised with vigor by early professors but have fallen by the wayside of late. Religion scholar Harvey Cox will celebrate his retirement from this chair on Thursday by renewing the grazing tradition with a cow renamed Faith (her real name, Pride, was deemed religiously unacceptable). At 4:30 pm at Memorial Church (across from Widener Library), Cox will speak and Faith will eat. This will be followed by a celebratory procession (complete with Cox playing saxophone) to the Divinity School, where Faith will be milked. Cox is now the Hollis Research Professor of Divinity at Harvard and has a new book out, The Future of Faith. If you miss the grazing celebration this week, you can see Cox read from the new tome next Wednesday at First Parish Church. Sadly, the bovine Faith is not part of Cox's personal cow collection; she normally lives at the Farm School in Athol, and her future will be to return there.

Many people are rightly concerned about the level of socialization attained by incoming Ph.D. students, but Harvard might have gone overboard spelling things out for their newest academic cavepeople. And the word the university is spelling? "P-E-E." The crack reporters at IvyGate have uncovered the special pamphlet that Harvard gives its new graduate students called "Bathroom Etiquette." As IvyGate writes, "The information covered is simple enough, but some of it is shocking when you realize people had to do this stuff a lot to earn it a spot in the pamphlet. Organized into what is inappropriate and appropriate to do in the shower, toilets, and sinks, the concerned student learns how to govern himself in the mystical chamber of secrets found down the hall." [IvyGate]

Harvard historian Niall Ferguson just came out and said it. Obama is a lucky black man! No, really. That's pretty much what he wrote in the Financial Times: "President Barack Obama reminds me of Felix the Cat. One of the best-loved cartoon characters of the 1920s, Felix was not only black. He was also very, very lucky. And that pretty much sums up the 44th president of the US[.]" Not only that, but Ferguson also thinks that Obama is totally wrong about everything. Do you think he eats lunch a lot with Skip Gates? [via Brainiac]

Seven out of fifteen ain't bad. That's how many New England schools made the Princeton Review's "green honor roll" of the greenest colleges in America by receiving as-close-to-perfect-as-possible green rankings of 99 points.

MC Hammer, Gary Vaynerchuk, and many other speakers will be at Gravity Summit at Harvard this August 31st. Gravity Summit is about how to market your organization, how to connect with users and customers and how to best leverage the new tools available.

--Three teens, at least two of whom were friends, went to Callahan State Park in Framingham on Saturday to smoke marijuana and only two lived to tell the tale. The trio arrived in a Volvo, two fought over some allegedly stolen pot, guns were drawn and witneses heard three shots and a man yelling. According to police reports, the shooter said he would kill the victim and anyone who snitched on him, and "did not care if he went to jail for life." Nice. His attorney asked for cash bail - really - which the judge obviously denied. [MetroWest Daily News]

Layoffs have been hanging over the heads of Harvard employees like the sword of Damocles since word of staff reductions started to circulate in February. Today, Harvard President Drew Faust let workers know that the string was about to snap, the sword was about to fall, and heads were about to roll. 275 heads, to be exact.

-- Police have made a second arrest in connection with the May 18 shooting of Justin Cosby outside of a Harvard dorm. Blayn Jiggetts, a 19-year-old New Yorker, was arrested in Harlem yesterday just before midnight. Jiggetts joins Jabrai Jordan Copney, also of New York, in prison for the crime, which police say was a "botched 'drug rip'" that left Cosby dead from a gunshot to the gut and $1,000 cash and a bag of marijuana laying nearby. Police still seek a third suspect. [Globe]

When news broke that two private investigators were busted in the Kirkland House dormitory, we weren't surprised to learn that MIT, or, more specifically, MIT's Crime Club, was behind it.

-- Deanna Watkins, a 29-year-old mother, was shot to death Thursday night in front of her children at their home in Mattapan. Watkins had a troubled history, having drifted in and out of homeless shelters, and police believe that she was targeted by the masked gunman who killed her. [Herald; BPDNews]

Each week Bostonist is dedicated to bringing you the most viral Boston-based video the internet has to offer.

--Police in Cambridge continue to unravel Monday's shooting of a 21-year old man at Harvard University's Kirkland House residence hall. Middlesex District Attorney Gerard T. Leone Jr said the killing occured after an alleged drug deal gone bad. Jabrai Jordan Copney, 20, turned himself in and will be arraigned today in Cambridge District Court. [Boston Herald, Boston Globe]

New details have emerged in yesterday's daylight shooting outside of Harvard's Kirkland House dorm. The victim is reportedly not a Harvard student, and police believe that he was "targeted" by his assailants. Witnesses report hearing three gunshots, and police have intimated that two or three assailants fled the scene of the crime. The victim, who was shot in the torso, remains in stable condition. [Crimson]

-- Authorities say that a "college aged" man was shot in the gut outside Harvard's Kirkland House dorm around five o'clock this afternoon. Harvard administrators quickly claimed that no Kirkland House resident was involved in the shooting, but they have yet to rule out whether the victim or the shooter were Harvard students. The victim is in stable condition at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, and no arrests have been announced. Critics of Harvard's proposed reduction in late night shuttle service were quick to link the incident to their complaints, but, presumably, a late night shuttle can do little to keep you from being shot in the gut in broad daylight. [Harvard Crimson, Cambridge Chronicle, IvyGate]

It's almost graduation: you know, that time when the city is flooded with parents, graduates, and moving trucks as everyone prepares to move to their new job and city—or, in this economy, back in with the 'rents. What happened over the past year at the big (and small) schools around town? Bostonist looks back at some news stories, from Harvard's billion-dollar losses to Emerson's Holocaust insensitivity, and provides graduation information as well, including commencement speakers, in which category Berklee blows everybody away. Did we miss an important story? Let us know in the comments!

The hot new trend around town is to leave something scary in front of a bank. It could even be a store mannequin -- or practically anything to put people in a twitter.

-- With the tag line "Find out what the real Harvard is hiding under the covers," new blog This is Harvard's focus is less sexy coeds and more sad, abandoned buildings. [This is Harvard]

-- A 26-year-old man was shot in the head near a housing project in Roslindale last night around 8:30 p.m. He was hospitalized with life-threatening injuries. [Roslindale Transcript]