harvard essay quotes

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Harvard Style Guide: Quotation

• Introduction
• Harvard Tutorial
• In-text citations
• Book with one author
• Book with two or three authors
• Book with four or more authors
• Book with a corporate author
• Book with editor
• Chapter in an edited book
• Translated book
• Translated ancient texts
• Print journal article, one author
• Print journal article, two or three authors
• Print journal article, four or more authors
• eJournal article
• Journal article ePublication (ahead of print)
• Secondary sources
• Generative AI
• Images or photographs
• Lectures/ presentations
• Film/ television
• YouTube Film or Talk
• Music/ audio
• Encyclopaedia and dictionaries
• Email communication
• Conferences
• Official publications
• Book reviews
• Case studies
• Group or individual assignments
• Legal Cases (Law Reports)
• No date of publication
• Personal communications
• Repository item
• Citing same author, multiple works, same year

Harvard style - quotation

The Harvard Style dictates that when using another's exact words, known as direct quotation, then those words must be placed in inverted commas/quotation marks ('' or "") followed by an in-text citation that includes the Author Last name, Year and page numbers. Inverted commas/quotation marks can be single or double, simply be consistent or check with your lecturer/school. 

For materials without page numbers, such as eBook, it is acceptable to use other indications of location such as chapters, paragraph numbers or section headings etc.. See s hort and long quotations see example below.

Short quotations

Short quotations are generally held to be two or three lines in length. They are kept within the structure of the sentence in which they appear. An example of a short direct quotation would be

It was reported that 'findings show children have a high level of enjoyment, while exercising with the system as indicated by the positive responses to all three questions ' (Fitzgerald et al ., 2008, p. 66).

Moran (2012) describes how "mental simulation processes such as motor imagery are crucial to success in sports," particularly in high performance athletes (para. 4).

Downes (2012, p. 6) studied the development of "selective attention skills" in pre-school children with sickle cell disease.

Long quotations

Long quotations are generally held to be longer than three lines. These are laid out in a separate paragraph of text and indented. No inverted commas/quotation marks are included. An example of a long quotation would be

In their research on rehabilitation using Wobbleballs, Fitzgerald and her team conclude that:

The fourth question collected some feedback from children and while most provided positive comments a small number of children (n=13) mentioned that the wobble board was “difficult to control” or “hard to use”. We must therefore investigate some easier methods to control the game as an option for some children. Future research is needed to investigate the benefits of the system as an exercise intervention for children and to examine how training using Wobbleball could be integrated into the existing physical education curriculum in schools. (Fitzgerald et al ., 2008, p. 66)

Quoting ideas

If you are including the ideas of another person from a specific page range or page in a source, rather than direct quotation, Harvard also requires you to include a page number. Your quote would look something like this

In the review it was noted that research shows open plan office spaces damage workers' attention span, creativity and satisfaction (Davis et al ., 2011, p. 22).

If you are unclear as to when to include a page number when quoting ideas, discuss this with your lecturer or tutor. Bring along examples to show them.

Quotation - over use and plagiarism

Too much direct quotation from original sources, with less critical analysis from the writer can lead to accusations of plagiarism, even if full citations and references are provided. 

It is important that quotations are used only when absolutely necessary to the content. Otherwise, it is preferable to paraphrase and interpret the information you are discussing and use your critical analysis skills.

Harvard style quotation and first year (undergraduate or postgraduate)

Finally, because the Harvard Style does not have a manual of style with exact rules, always discuss with your lecturer or module coordinator what their expectations are around quotation, citing and referencing. Show them the advice on this guide, and clarify if they expect any alternative writing practices. This is especially important for first year students or those beginning a course/module.

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Harvard Referencing

• Summarising/Paraphrasing
• Citations/Direct Quotations
• Books (print or online)
• Electronic Journal Article
• Website/Web Document
• Journal/Magazine Article
• Academic publications
• Audiovisual material
• News Article (print or online)
• Figures/Tables
• Public documents
• Performance
• Reference List Example
• More Information

If you are quoting someone word-for-word or using someone else's ideas or statistics in your writing, you will need to reference it within the body of your work. Work the author’s surname or organisation’s name, the year of publication and the page number into the paragraph you are writing. The purpose is to give basic details so your reader can get more information from the list at the end.

Example 1: 'In the food and beverage industry, it is estimated that 25 percent of employees steal regardless of the controls in place' (Walker 2011, p. 222). Example 2: Walker (2011, p. 222) states that 'in the food and beverage industry, it is estimated that 25 percent of employees steal regardless of the controls in place'. Example 3: In his 2011 text, Walker states that 'in the food and beverage industry, it is estimated that 25 percent of employees steal regardless of the controls in place' (p. 222). Note that page numbers are only necessary for in text citations when direct quotes or precise information is used. Direct quotations  

•    should be used sparingly in an assignment
•    can be used if you need to record exact words or phrases
•    are useful if you find some writing which expresses exactly what you want to say very well
•    can be a phrase, a short sentence, or longer

Small quotations  (less than 30 words)are included in your writing with the text in single quote marks: The pearl has been 'a particularly potent literary device' (Joyce & Addison 1992, p. 15) in many cultures from ancient times. If the quotation is longer than 30 words, set it out like this: The post-war years were not a time of great innovation.  As Ewing (2001, p. 167) states:    To get back to normal, which meant to order and stability, was the general longing and fashion voiced this conservative mood in a series of smooth, well-balanced lines, embodied in clothes of notable elegance, carefully designed, well-made and flattering. OR The post-war years were not a time of great innovation:      To get back to normal, which meant to order and stability, was the general longing and fashion voiced this conservative mood in a series of smooth, well-balanced lines, embodied in clothes of notable elegance, carefully designed, well-made and flattering.  (Ewing 2001, p. 167) Points to remember for longer quotes:  

• place a colon (:) at the end of your writing before the quote
• leave a space of one line before and after the quotation
• do not use quotation marks around the quotation
• use a smaller font for the quote, e.g. if your assignment is in 12, use 10 for the quotation
• indent the quote
• if your assignment is in double spacing, keep the quote in single spacing

Citing Someone Else's Quotation

Sometimes an author will cite another author and you may want to use this in your assignment.  Care needs to be taken with quotations and citations taken out of context.  It is a good idea to try to track down the original work.  If you are not able to find the original work, you may still use a quotation from or a reference to the cited work, making sure that you acknowledge both of the authors.

Original text:

'Although Barnes sees the mods as a male-dominated youth culture (Barnes, 1991: p.8), Garber and McRobbie argue that the mods were the first 'softer' working-class subculture, in which girls could participate more openly and directly (Garber & Mc Robbie, 1979: p.226).'

In-text citation:

Some writers disagree with the idea that the mods were a male dominated subculture (Garber & McRobbie 1979, p. 226 in Jenss 2005, p. 192).

Garber & McRobbie (1979 p. 226 in Jenss 2005, p. 192) claim that the mods were one of the first youth subcultures in which girls could participate more fully.

Reference list:

Jenss, H. 2005, 'Sixties dress only!', in A. Palmer & H. Clark (eds), Old clothes, new looks: second hand fashion, Berg Publishers, Oxford.

Personal Communications

References to personal communications such as letters, emails, interviews, or phone conversations can be included in assignments. The in-text citation should have the author's surname followed by their initials, then the abbreviation pers. comm. and the date. These citations should  not be included in the Reference List/Bibliography.

The patient valued the knowledge and experience of other cancer patients more than medical information ( Wilson, P. 2013, pers. comm., September 10).

When interviewed, Susan Jones said she halted her information seeking because of fearful and contradictory information (Jones, S. 2013, pers. comm., September 28).

Information From More Than One Source

If you include the authors in the sentence, they are listed in chronological order by year of publication in brackets.

If the author's names are not included in the sentence, they are enclosed together in one set of brackets and presented chronologically, starting with the first published. A semi-colon is inserted after each citation of the author and year of publication.

Morrow & Young (1996), Irish & Parsons (2016) and Elish-Piper (2017) all stress the importance of parent participation in children's literacy development. 

Previous research has found that parents play a key role in their children's literacy development and school success (Morrow & Young, 1996; Irish & Parsons, 2016; Elish-Piper, 2017).

Using Abbreviations

If you are referring numerous times to an organisation with a long title, you may use the relevant acronym or initialism. The first time you refer to the organisation, include both the full title and, in parentheses (round brackets), the acronym or initialism. Thereafter, the acronym or initialism will suffice. Both acronyms and initialisms are written without full stops .

Example in text :

The Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA) has a policy on removing injured animals. The RSPCA is permitted to enter a property at any time following a report of complaint (RSPCA 2006).

In the reference list, both the long title and the acronym or initialism must be included. For example:

Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA) 2006, Policy statement on removal of animals at risk , RSPCA, Brisbane.

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Harvard Style

• Position of the citation
• Secondary Referencing
• Date of Publication
• Page numbers
• Citing from Web pages
• Paraphrasing and Summarising
• Examples of References in Harvard style
• Harvard Reference Examples A-Z
• Setting the Bibliographic Style
• Inserting In-text Citations
• How to create a Reference List
• Managing Sources
• Editing Citations
• Updating your Reference list
• Find Sources
• Evaluate Sources
• Write the Reference
• Write the Annotation
• Examples of Annotations

To quote is to directly use another’s words and to acknowledge the source. If you are quoting someone word-for-word or using someone else's ideas or statistics in your writing, you will need to reference it within the body of your assignment. 

Small quotations (less than 40 words) are included in your writing with the text in single  quotation marks. After the quote, add the author’s surname, the date of publication and the page number(s) of the quote.

Quotations longer than 40 words

If a quotation is longer than 40 words, no quotation marks are used, and the quotation is indented instead:

• place a colon (:) at the end of your writing before the quote
• leave a space of one line before and after the quotation
• do not use quotation marks around the quotation
• use a smaller font for the quote, e.g. if your assignment is in font 12, use 10 for the quotation
• indent the quote

Modifying a direct quotation

If you want to omit a word or words from a quotation, indicate this with an ellipsis (three dots) with a space before and after the ellipsis ( ... ). A direct quotation should neither start nor end with an ellipsis. Words should only be omitted from a quotation if they are superfluous to the reason why you are using the quotation and the meaning of the quote is not affected by the change.

Square Brackets

If you need to add a word or words to a quotation, or change the capitalisation of a word to fit with your writing, put the word(s)/letter in square brackets [ ]. Words should only be added to a quote for explanatory reasons (e.g. a name might be added to explain who a pronoun is referencing).

If you need to indicate a misspelling, grammatical error or lack of inclusive language, insert the word [sic] (meaning so or thus) in square brackets immediately following the error but do not change the error in the quotation.

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A publication of the harvard college writing program.

Harvard Guide to Using Sources 

• The Honor Code
• In-Text Citations

In APA style, you use parenthetical citations within the text of your paper to credit your sources, to show how recently your sources were published, and to refer your reader to a more detailed citation of the source in the reference list at the end of your paper. You should use parenthetical citations when you paraphrase, quote, or make any reference to another author's work. A parenthetical citation in APA style includes the author's last name as well as the year in which the work was published, with a comma between them. If you are referring directly to a specific page in the source, you should also include the page number in your parenthetical citation. APA requires you to cite page numbers when you are quoting directly from the source. If you are paraphrasing, which is more common in the social sciences, you generally do not need to include a page number. If you have questions about whether you should include page numbers when citing in APA, you should consult your instructor.

If you mention the author's name and/or the year of publication in the sentence preceding the citation, you do not need to include them in the parenthetical citation. When you name the author in the sentence, you should include the publication year in parentheses right after the author’s name—do not wait until the end of the sentence to provide that information.

When you include a parenthetical citation at the end of a sentence, the punctuation for your sentence appears after the citation.

Citing author and date in a parenthetical citation

When you don’t mention either the author or the date of publication in your sentence, you should include both the author and the year, separated by a comma, in the parenthetical citation. 

Colleges and universities need to create policies that foster inclusion for low-income students (Jack, 2019).         

Citing when author’s name is mentioned in body of paper

When you mention the author’s name in your sentence, the year of publication should immediately follow the author’s name.

Anthony Jack’s (2019) study of low-income students on an elite college campus revealed that these schools are often unprepared to support the students they admit.

Jack (2019) studied the ways low-income students experience elite college campuses.

Citing page numbers

When you cite a direct quote from the source or paraphrase a specific point from the source, you should include the page number in the parenthetical citation at the end of the sentence. When you refer to a specific page or pages of the text, first list the year of publication and then list "p." followed by the page number or "pp." followed by the range of pages. If you refer to a specific chapter, indicate that chapter after the year.              

The author contends that “higher education in America is highly unequal and disturbingly stratified” (Jack, 2019, p. 4).

Jack (2019) contends that “higher education in America is highly unequal and disturbingly stratified” (p. 4).

Citing sources with more than one author

When you cite a source that has two authors, you should separate their names with an ampersand in the parenthetical citation.

The authors designed a study to determine if social belonging can be encouraged among college students (Walton & Cohen, 2011). 

If a work has three or more authors , you should only include the first author's name followed by et al. ( Et al. is the shortened form of the Latin et alia , which means “and others.”)

The implementation of postpartum contraceptive programs is both costly and time consuming (Ling et al., 2020).

Attributing a point to more than one source  

To attribute a point or idea to multiple sources, list them in one parenthetical citation, ordered alphabetically by author and separated by semicolons. Works by the same author should be ordered chronologically, from oldest to most recent, with the publication dates separated by commas.

Students who possess cultural capital, measured by proxies like involvement in literature, art, and classical music, tend to perform better in school (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1977; Dumais, 2002; Orr, 2003).

Citing multiple works by the same author 

If your reference list includes multiple works by the same author in the same year, identify them in your parenthetical citations and in your reference list by a lowercase letter after the year, assigning each letter in alphabetical order by the title of the work. When establishing the alphabetical order of works in your reference list, do not count the words "A" or "The" when they appear as the first word in a title.

One union-endorsed candidate publicly disagreed with the teachers' union on a number of issues (Borsuk, 1999a).

Citing multiple authors with the same last name        

If your reference list includes sources by multiple authors with the same last name, list each author's initials before their last name, even when the works were published in different years.

The question of whether a computer can be considered an author has been asked for longer than we might expect (B. Sobel, 2017).

Citing when no author is listed           

To refer to a work that is listed in your reference list by title rather than by author, cite the title or the first few words of the title.

The New York Times painted a bleak picture of the climate crisis (“Climate Change Is Not Negotiable,” 2022).

Citing when no date is listed

If the work you are citing has no date listed, you should put “n.d.” for “no date” in the parenthetical citation.

Writing research papers is challenging (Lam, n.d.). 

Citing a specific part of a source that is not a page number

To refer to a specific part of a source other than page number, add that after the author-date part of your citation. If it is not clear whether you are referring to a chapter, a paragraph, a time stamp, or a slide number, or other labeled part of a source, you should indicate the part you are referring to (chapter, para., etc.).

In the Stranger Things official trailer, the audience knows that something unusual is going to happen from the moment the boys get on their bicycles to ride off into the night (Duffer & Duffer, 0:16).

• Citation Management Tools
• Reference List Format
• Examples of Commonly Cited Sources
• Frequently Asked Questions About Cite Sources in APA Format
• Sample Reference List

PDFs for This Section

• Citing Sources
• Online Library and Citation Tools

Harvard Referencing Guide: Long Quotations

• Introduction to the Guide
• The Harvard Referencing Method
• Cite Them Right Style
• Referencing Example
• Cite-Them-Right Text Book
• Online Tutorials
• Reference List / Bibliography

Introduction

Short Quotations

Long Quotations

• Single Author
• Two Authors
• Three Authors
• Four or More Authors
• 2nd Edition
• Chapter in an Edited Book
• Journal Article - Online
• Journal Article - Printed
• Newspaper Article - Online
• Newspaper Article - Printed
• Webpage - Introduction
• Webpage - Individual Authors
• Webpage - Corporate Authors
• Webpage - No Author - No Date
• Film / Movie
• TV Programme
• PowerPoint Presentations
• YouTube Video
• Images - Introduction
• Images - Figure from a book
• Images - Online Figure
• Images - Online Table
• Twitter Tweet
• Personal Communication
• Email message in a Public Domain
• Course notes on the VLE
• Computer Games
• Computer Program
• General Referencing Guide >>>
• APA Referencing Guide >>>
• IEEE Referencing Guide >>>
• Research Guide >>>
• Direct Quotations - Long

If you wish to insert a long quotation (more than three lines of text) into your work:

• Enter the quotation as a separate paragraph.
• Indent the paragraph.
• Do not use quotation marks.
• Leave a blank line above, and below the quotation.

In-text citation

Full reference for the Reference List / Bibliography

Direct Quotations

Harvard Referencing Guide: A - Z

• APA Referencing Guide >>>
• Bibliography
• Books / eBooks - 2 Authors
• Books / eBooks - 2nd Edition
• Books / eBooks - 3 Authors
• Books / eBooks - Individual Chapter
• Books / eBooks - Introduction
• Books / eBooks - More than 3 Authors
• Books / eBooks - Single Author
• Chapter in an edited book
• Cite Them Right - Style
• Cite Them Right - Text book
• Conversation - Personal
• Direct Quotations - Introduction
• Direct Quotations - Short
• Emails - In a Public Domain
• Emails - Personal
• Fax message
• General Referencing Guide >>>
• Harvard Referencing Method
• PowerPoint Presentation
• Reference List
• Skype Conversation - Personal
• Support - 'Cite Them Right' textbook
• Support - Online tutorials
• Text Message
• Webpage - Corporate Author
• Webpage - Individual Author
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• Last Updated: Mar 13, 2024 11:31 AM
• URL: https://libguides.wigan-leigh.ac.uk/HarvardReferencing

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• Writing Tips

Using Long Quotations – Harvard Style

2-minute read

• 3rd January 2016

When writing an essay, we quote sources to support a point we’re making or to attribute particular ideas to a particular thinker. Using quotations judiciously is thus a vital study skill for every university student.

However, many people format longer quotations incorrectly in their work. Herein, we focus on Harvard style conventions for using quotations, in particular longer passages of text.

Quoting Sources – The Basics

Ideally, when quoting shorter passages, you should integrate them into the main body of your text. This is done by simply enclosing the quoted material inside ‘quotation marks’ and providing the relevant page numbers in your citation:

J. R. Irons (1948, p.1) says of bread that ‘there really is no other food to take its place’.

It’s worth noting that ‘single inverted commas’ are traditionally favoured in Australian English, but this has become more fluid lately, so you might want to check your university style guide on this matter.

Longer Quotations

Sometimes, however, you’ll need to quote a source more extensively. To do this, you can use a ‘block quote’. This is where the quoted text is separated from the main body of your work.

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Harvard conventions suggest doing this when quoting passages of 40-50 words (approximately four lines). To block quote, the quoted text must begin on a separate line after a colon and be inset from the rest of your essay, somewhat like this:

We must realise that bread is made to eat, and that the palate and not the eye must always be the deciding factor in how much is consumed. Bread will always have a place in the diet, but… there are signs that the bread of today is lacking – often dry, mostly under-fermented – and such is not likely to maintain sales. (Irons, 1948, p.4)

You’ll notice that indenting the text already distinguishes it from your own work, so quotations marks are not required in block quotations.

Depending on your style guide, you may also need to adjust the formatting of block quotes (e.g. changing the line spacing for quoted text). Whichever style you use, though, the important thing is that block quotes are:

a) Distinct from the main body of your work b) Clearly cited with the author name, year of publication and relevant page number(s) c) Presented consistently throughout your document

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10 Successful Harvard Application Essays | 2021

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Successful Harvard Essay

I had never seen houses floating down a river. Minutes before there had not even been a river. An immense wall of water was destroying everything in its wake, picking up fishing boats to smash them against buildings. It was the morning of March 11, 2011. Seeing the images of destruction wrought by the earthquake and tsunami in Japan, I felt as if something within myself was also being shaken, for I had just spent two of the happiest summers of my life there.

In the summer of my freshman year, I received the Kikkoman National Scholarship, which allowed me to travel to Japan to stay with a host family in Tokyo for ten weeks. I arrived just as the swine flu panic gripped the world, so I was not allowed to attend high school with my host brother, Yamato. Instead, I took Japanese language, judo, and karate classes and explored the confusing sprawl of the largest city in the world. I spent time with the old men of my neighborhood in the onsen, or hot spring, questioning them about the Japan of their youth. They laughed and told me that if I wanted to see for myself, I should work on a farm.

The next summer I returned to Japan, deciding to heed the old men’s advice and volunteer on a farm in Japan’s northernmost island, Hokkaido. I spent two weeks working more than fourteen hours a day. I held thirty-pound bags of garlic with one hand while trying to tie them to a rope hanging from the ceiling with the other, but couldn’t hold the bags in the air long enough. Other days were spent pulling up endless rows of daikon, or Japanese radish, which left rashes on my arms that itched for weeks. Completely exhausted, I stumbled back to the farmhouse, only to be greeted by the family’s young children who were eager to play. I passed out every night in a room too small for me to straighten my legs. One day, I overslept a lunch break by two hours. I awoke mortified, and hurried to the father. After I apologized in the most polite form of Japanese, his face broke into a broad grin. He patted me on the back and said, “You are a good worker, Anthony. There is no need to apologize.” This single exchange revealed the true spirit of the Japanese farmer. The family had lived for years in conditions that thoroughly wore me out in only a few days. I had missed two hours of work, yet they were still perpetually thankful to me. In their life of unbelievable hardship, they still found room for compassion.

In their life of unbelievable hardship, they still found room for compassion.

When I had first gone to Tokyo, I had sought the soul of the nation among its skyscrapers and urban hot springs. The next summer I spurned the beaten track in an attempt to discover the true spirit of Japan. While lugging enormously heavy bags of garlic and picking daikon, I found that spirit. The farmers worked harder than anyone I have ever met, but they still made room in their hearts for me. So when the tsunami threatened the people to whom I owed so much, I had to act. Remembering the lesson of compassion I learned from the farm family, I started a fund-raiser in my community called “One Thousand Cranes for Japan.” Little more than two weeks later, we had raised over $8,000 and a flock of one thousand cranes was on its way to Japan.

Professional Review by AcceptU

This essay is very clean and straightforward. Anthony wisely uses imagery from a well-known historic event, the 2011 tsunami, to set the scene for his story. He visited Japan for two summers and provides depth about what he learned: In his first summer, he explored Tokyo and studied the language and culture; in his second summer, he lived in rural Japan and worked long hours on a farm.

We like to see how applicants learn, grow or change from the beginning to the end - and Anthony rightfully spends more time describing the hard work and lifestyle of farming and what he learned from this experience.

The beauty of the essay actually lies in its simplicity. Admittedly, it is not a groundbreaking or original essay in the way he tells his story; instead, Anthony comes across as someone who is very interesting, hardworking, intellectually curious, dedicated, humble and likable - all traits that admissions officers are seeking in applicants.

We like to see how applicants learn, grow or change from the beginning to the end - and Anthony rightfully spends more time describing the hard work and lifestyle of farming and what he learned from this experience. Anthony concludes with a reference to his opening paragraph about the tsunami, and impresses the reader with his fundraising to help victims.

It is not necessarily missing, but perhaps a sentence or two could have been added to explain why Anthony was in Japan in the first place. What was his connection to the country, language or culture? Does it tie into an academic interest? If so, that would make his already strong essay even stronger in the eyes of admissions officers.

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I entered the surprisingly cool car. Since when is Beijing Line 13 air-conditioned? I’ll take it. At four o’clock in the afternoon only about twenty people were in the subway car. “At least it’s not crowded,” one might have thought. Wrong. The pressure of their eyes on me filled the car and smothered me. “看看！她是外国人！”(Look, look! She’s a foreigner!) An old man very loudly whispered to a child curled up in his lap. “Foreigner,” he called me. I hate that word, “foreigner.” It only explains my exterior. If only they could look inside.…

I want to keep reading because there is something she is saying about her identity--be it performative or actual--that I am curious about.

They would know that I actually speak Chinese—not just speak, but love. They would know that this love was born from my first love of Latin—the language that fostered my admiration of all languages. Latin lives in the words we speak around the world today. And translating this ancient language is like watching a play and performing in it at the same time. Each word is an adventure, and on the journey through Virgil’s Aeneid I found that I am more like Aeneas than any living, dead, or fictional hero I know. We share the intrinsic value of loyalty to friends, family, and society. We stand true to our own word, and we uphold others to theirs. Like Aeneas’s trek to find a new settlement for his collapsed Troy, with similar perseverance I, too, wander the seas for my own place in the world. Language has helped me do that.

If these subway passengers understood me, they would know that the very reason I sat beside them was because of Latin. Even before Aeneas and his tale, I met Caecilius and Grumio, characters in my first Latin textbook. In translations I learned grammar alongside Rome’s rich history. I realized how learning another language could expose me to other worlds and other people—something that has always excited me. I also realized that if I wanted to know more about the world and the people in it, I would have to learn a spoken language. Spanish, despite the seven years of study prior to Latin, did not stick with me. And the throatiness of French was not appealing. But Chinese, more than these other traditional languages, intrigued me. The doors to new worlds it could open seemed endless. Thus I chose Chinese.

If these subway passengers looked inside me, they would find that my knowledge of both Latin and Chinese makes me feel whole. It feels like the world of the past is flowing through me alongside the world of the future. Thanks to Latin, Chinese sticks in my mind like the Velcro on the little boy’s shoes in front of me. If this little boy and his family and friends could look inside, they would understand that Latin laid the foundation for my lifelong commitment to languages. Without words, thoughts and actions would be lost in the space between our ears. To them, I am a foreigner, “外国人” literally translated as “out-of-country person.” I feel, however, more like an advena, the Latin word for “foreigner,” translated as “(one who) comes to (this place).” I came to this place, and I came to this country to stay. Unfortunately, they will not know this until I speak. Then once I speak, the doors will open.

Professional Review by Bridge to College

Your college essay should serve two purposes: allow the reader to gain insights about you that they are not able to do in other parts of your application and provide an example of your writing abilities. To the former, you are hoping to demonstrate five soft skills that most colleges are at least implicitly interested in gleaning, those that indicate your capacity to be a good student at their institution.

Alex arrives at both goals in an interesting way. Without seeing the rest of her application, I can only assume that she is possibly interested in pursuing a major in a language (if she is pursuing a major in an applied math, this essay would be extremely interesting) and she has likely participated in some kind of team sport to demonstrate the soft skill of teamwork. To be honest, as someone who speaks five languages myself and studied Latin in undergrad, I don’t necessarily agree with her assessment of the languages. BUT I’m interested. I want to keep reading. She isn’t supposed to get everything right in this essay; she’s supposed to demonstrate a capacity for learning. And she does that.

I want to keep reading because there is something she is saying about her identity--be it performative or actual--that I am curious about. With our work in college access and admissions, we’ve only worked in underserved communities, be they students of color or girls interested in STEM or first-generation college students or more. People make an assumption that we are exploiting these identities into sob stories that admissions readers will immediately hang on to. We’re not doing that. We are encouraging students to write about something similar to what Alex did—describe how your identity has created a learning opportunity or a moment of resilience or determination. Alex seems like someone who is well resourced: her access to certain text; language curricula and the amount of time she spent studying those languages; even her sentence structure, gives that away. But her openness to adapt with humility is a critical skill that is so necessary to be a great student, and unfortunately a skill that many students miss.

For the second goal, she does a tremendous job of demonstrating her writing abilities. Her sentence structures are varied and there aren’t egregious mistakes in grammar and spelling. The last two sentences of the second paragraph sold me on her skill-level and personhood. I also really appreciated that she wasn’t shying away from what she has been able to access as far as her schooling. Alex is smart, witty, and well-traveled, and you’re going to know it. I love that.

The essay works as an introduction to who she is and her soft skills, as well as a demonstration of her writing abilities.

CEO and Founder of Bridge to College

Elite Educational Institute has been helping students reach their academic goals through test preparation, tutoring, and college consulting services since 1987. Learn more at www.eliteprep.com .

When I was a child, I begged my parents for my very own Brother PT-1400 P-Touch Handheld Label Maker to fulfill all of my labeling needs. Other kids had Nintendos and would spend their free time with Mario and Luigi. While they pummeled their video game controllers furiously, the pads of their thumbs dancing across their joysticks, I would type out labels on my industrial-standard P-Touch with just as much zeal. I labeled everything imaginable, dividing hundreds of pens into Ziploc bags by color, then rubber-banding them by point size. The finishing touch, of course, was always a glossy, three-eighths-inch-wide tag, freshly churned out from my handheld labeler and decisively pasted upon the numerous plastic bags I had successfully compiled.

Labeling became therapeutic for me; organizing my surroundings into specific groups to be labeled provides me with a sense of stability. I may not physically need the shiny color-coded label verifying the contents of a plastic bag as BLUE HIGHLIGHTERS—FAT, to identify them as such, but seeing these classifications so plainly allows me to appreciate the reliability of my categorizations. There are no exceptions when I label the top ledge of my bookshelf as containing works from ACHEBE, CHINUA TO CONRAD, JOSEPH. Each book is either filtered into that category or placed definitively into another one. Yet, such consistency only exists in these inanimate objects.

Thus, the break in my role as a labeler comes when I interact with people. Their lives are too complicated, their personalities too intricate for me to resolutely summarize in a few words or even with the 26.2 feet of laminated adhesive tape compatible with my label maker. I have learned that a thin line exists between labeling and just being judgmental when evaluating individuals. I can hardly superficially characterize others as simply as I do my material possessions because people refuse to be so cleanly separated and compartmentalized. My sister Joyce jokes freely and talks with me for hours about everything from the disturbing popularity of vampires in pop culture to cubic watermelons, yet those who don’t know her well usually think of her as timid and introverted. My mother is sometimes my biggest supporter, spouting words of encouragement and, at other instances, my most unrelenting critic. The overlap becomes too indistinct, the contradictions too apparent, even as I attempt to classify those people in the world whom I know best.

For all my love of order when it comes to my room, I don't want myself, or the people with whom I interact, to fit squarely into any one category.

Neither would I want others to be predictable enough for me to label. The real joy in human interaction lies in the excitement of the unknown. Overturning expectations can be necessary to preserving the vitality of relationships. If I were never surprised by the behaviors of those around me, my biggest source of entertainment would vanish. For all my love of order when it comes to my room, I don’t want myself, or the people with whom I interact, to fit squarely into any one category. I meticulously follow directions to the millimeter in the chemistry lab but measure ingredients by pinches and dashes in the comfort of my kitchen. I’m a self-proclaimed grammar Nazi, but I’ll admit e. e. cummings’s irreverence does appeal. I’ll chart my television show schedule on Excel, but I would never dream of confronting my chores with as much organization. I even call myself a labeler, but not when it comes to people. As Walt Whitman might put it, “Do I contradict myself? / Very well, then I contradict myself, / (I am large, I contain multitudes.).”

I therefore refrain from the temptation to label—despite it being an act that makes me feel so fulfilled when applied to physical objects—when real people are the subjects. The consequences of premature labeling are too great, the risk of inaccuracy too high because, most of the time, not even the hundreds of alphanumeric digits and symbols available for entry on my P-Touch can effectively describe who an individual really is.

Professional Review by Elite Prep

Amusing yet insightful, perhaps the most outstanding quality of Justine’s personal statement lies in the balance she strikes between anecdotal flourish and honest introspection. By integrating occasional humour and witty commentary into an otherwise lyrical and earnest self-reflection, Justine masterfully conveys an unfettered, sincere wisdom and maturity coveted by prestigious universities.

Justine breaks the ice by recalling a moment in her childhood that captures her fervent passion for labelling. When applying to selective academic institutions, idiosyncrasies and peculiar personal habits, however trivial, are always appreciated as indicators of individuality. Justine veers safely away from the temptation of “playing it safe” by exploring her dedication towards organizing all her possessions, a dedication that has followed her into adolescence.

She also writes from a place of raw honesty and emotion by offering the rationale behind her bizarre passion. Justine's reliance on labelling is underpinned by her yearning for a sense of stability and order in a messy world—an unaffected yearning that readers, to varying degrees, can sympathize with.

She also writes from a place of raw honesty and emotion by offering the rationale behind her bizarre passion. Justine’s reliance on labelling is underpinned by her yearning for a sense of stability and order in a messy world—an unaffected yearning that readers, to varying degrees, can sympathize with. She recognizes, however, it would be imprudent to navigate all facets of life with an unfaltering drive to compartmentalize everything and everyone she encounters.

In doing so, Justine seamlessly transitions to the latter, more pensive half of her personal statement. She extracts several insights by analyzing how, in staunch contrast with her neatly-organized pencil cases, the world is confusing, and rife with contradictions. Within each individual lies yet another world of complexity—as Justine reflects, people can’t be boiled down into “a few words,” and it’s impossible to capture their character, “even with the 26.2 feet of laminated adhesive tape compatible with [her] label maker.”

In concluding, Justine returns back to the premise that started it all, reminding the reader of her take on why compartmentalizing the world would be an ultimately unproductive effort. The most magical part of Justine’s personal statement? It reads easily, flows with imagery, and employs a simple concept—her labelling practices—to introduce a larger, thoughtful conversation.

The best compliment I ever received was from my little brother: “My science teacher’s unbelievably good at telling stories,” he announced. “Nearly as good as you.” I thought about that, how I savor a good story the way some people savor last-minute touchdowns.

I learned in biology that I’m composed of 7 × 10 27 atoms, but that number didn’t mean anything to me until I read Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything. One sentence stayed with me for weeks: “Every atom you possess has almost certainly passed through several stars and been part of millions of organisms on its way to becoming you.” It estimates that each human has about 2 billion atoms of Shakespeare hanging around inside—quite a comfort, as I try to write this essay. I thought about every one of my atoms, wondering where they had been and what miracles they had witnessed.

My physical body is a string of atoms, but what of my inner self, my soul, my essence? I've come to the realization that my life has been a string as well, a string of stories.

My physical body is a string of atoms, but what of my inner self, my soul, my essence? I’ve come to the realization that my life has been a string as well, a string of stories. Every one of us is made of star stuff, forged through fires, and emerging as nicked as the surface of the moon. It frustrated me no end that I couldn’t sit down with all the people I met, interrogating them about their lives, identifying every last story that made them who they are.

I remember how magical it was the first time I read a fiction book: Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. I was duly impressed with Quidditch and the Invisibility Cloak, of course, but I was absolutely spellbound by how much I could learn about Harry. The kippers he had for breakfast, the supplies he bought for Potions—the details everyone skimmed over were remarkable to me. Fiction was a revelation. Here, at last, was a window into another person’s string of stories!

Over the years, I’ve thought long and hard about that immortal question: What superpower would you choose? I considered the usual suspects—invisibility, superhuman strength, flying—but threw them out immediately. My superhero alter ego would be Story Girl. She wouldn’t run marathons, but she could walk for miles and miles in other people’s shoes. She’d know that all it takes for empathy and understanding is the right story.

Imagine my astonishment when I discovered Radiolab on NPR. Here was my imaginary superpower, embodied in real life! I had been struggling with AP Biology, seeing it as a class full of complicated processes and alien vocabulary. That changed radically when I listened, enthralled, as Radiolab traced the effects of dopamine on love and gambling. This was science, sure, but it was science as I’d never heard it before. It contained conflict and emotion and a narrative; it made me anxious to learn more. It wasn’t that I was obtuse for biology; I just hadn’t found the stories in it before.

I’m convinced that you can learn anything in the form of a story. The layperson often writes off concepts—entropy, the Maginot Line, anapestic meter—as too foreign to comprehend. But with the right framing, the world suddenly becomes an open book, enticing and ripe for exploration. I want to become a writer to find those stories, much like Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich from Radiolab, making intimidating subjects become familiar and inviting for everyone. I want to become Story Girl.

By combining her previous interest with her newfound love for biology, Carrie is able to highlight how her past experiences have assisted her in overcoming novel challenges. This portrays her as a resilient and resourceful problem-solver: traits that colleges value heavily in their students.

Carrie begins her essay with a fondly-remembered compliment from her brother, introducing her most passionate endeavor: storytelling. By recalling anecdotes related to her love of stories, she establishes herself as a deeply inquisitive and creative person; someone whose greatest virtue is their unfettered thirst for knowledge. Curiosity is greatly prized by colleges, and Carrie’s inclusion of this particular value encourages admissions officers to keep reading.

Going on to explore the intersections between stories and science, Carrie reveals her past difficulties with AP biology; that is, until she learnt about the amazing stories hidden within the subject. By combining her previous interest with her newfound love for biology, Carrie is able to highlight how her past experiences have assisted her in overcoming novel challenges. This portrays her as a resilient and resourceful problem-solver: traits that colleges value heavily in their students.

Carrie ends her essay with her belief that through stories, everything is possible. She expounds on her future ambitions in regards to storytelling, as well as her desire to make learning both fun and accessible to everyone via the power of stories. By comparing her goals to that of a superhero, Carrie is able to emphasise her enthusiasm for contributing to social change. Most importantly, Carrie’s ambitions show how she can contribute to the Harvard community positively, making her a strong applicant.

As an admission essay specialist , Dan Lichterman has been empowering students to find their voice since 2004. He helps students stand out on paper, eliminating the unnecessary so the necessary may speak. Drawing upon his storytelling background, Dan guides applicants to craft authentic essays that leap off the page. He is available for online writing support within the US and internationally. To learn more and schedule a brief complimentary consultation visit danlichterman.com.

I have a fetish for writing.

I’m not talking about crafting prose or verses, or even sentences out of words. But simply constructing letters and characters from strokes of ink gives me immense satisfaction. It’s not quite calligraphy, as I don’t use calligraphic pens or Chinese writing brushes; I prefer it simple, spontaneous, and subconscious. I often find myself crafting characters in the margins of notebooks with a fifty-cent pencil, or tracing letters out of thin air with anything from chopsticks to fingertips.

"One's handwriting," said the ancient Chinese, "is a painting of one's mind." After all, when I practice my handwriting, I am crafting characters. My character.

The art of handwriting is a relic in the information era. Why write when one can type? Perhaps the Chinese had an answer before the advent of keyboards. “One’s handwriting,” said the ancient Chinese, “is a painting of one’s mind.” After all, when I practice my handwriting, I am crafting characters.

My character.

I particularly enjoy meticulously designing a character, stroke by stroke, and eventually building up, letter by letter, to a quote person­alized in my own voice. Every movement of the pen and every drop­let of ink all lead to something profound, as if the arches of every "m" are doorways to revelations. After all, characters are the build­ing blocks of language, and language is the only vehicle through which knowledge unfolds. Thus, in a way, these letters under my pen are themselves representations of knowledge, and the delicate beauty of every letter proves, visually, the intrinsic beauty of know­ing. I suppose handwriting reminds me of my conviction in this vi­sual manner: through learning answers are found, lives enriched, and societies bettered.

Moreover, perhaps this strange passion in polishing every single character of a word delineates my dedication to learning, testifies my zeal for my conviction, and sketches a crucial stroke of my character.

"We--must--know ... " the mathematician David Hilbert's voice echoes in resolute cursive at the tip of my pen, as he, addressing German scientists in 1930, propounds the goal of modern intellectu­als. My pen firmly nods in agreement with Hilbert, while my mind again fumbles for the path to knowledge.

The versatility of handwriting enthralls me. The Chinese devel­oped many styles -- called hands -- of writing. Fittingly, each hand seems to parallel one of my many academic interests. Characters of the Regular Hand (kai shu), a legible script, serve me well during many long hours when I scratch my head and try to prove a mathematical statement rigorously, as the legibility illuminates my logic on paper. Words of the Running Hand (xing shu), a semi-cursive script, are like the passionate words that I speak before a committee of Model United Nations delegates, propounding a decisive course of action: the words, both spoken and written, are swift and coherent but resolute and emphatic. And strokes of the Cursive Hand (cao shu) resemble those sudden artistic sparks when I deliver a line on stage: free spontaneous, but emphatic syllables travel through the lights like rivers of ink flowing on the page.

Yet the fact that the three distinctive hands cooperate so seamlessly, fusing together the glorious culture of writing, is perhaps a fable of learning, a testament that the many talents of the Renaissance Man could all be worthwhile for enriching human society. Such is my methodology: just like I organize my different hands into a neat personal style with my fetish for writing, I can unify my broad interests with my passion for learning.

“...We -- will -- know!” Hilbert finishes his adage, as I frantically slice an exclamation mark as the final stroke of this painting of my mind.

I must know: for knowing, like well-crafted letters, has an inherent beauty and an intrinsic value. I will know: for my versatile interests in academics will flow like my versatile styles of writing.

I must know and I will know: for my fetish for writing is a fetish for learning.

Professional Review by Dan Lichterman

We learn that he expresses his innermost self through an art that has become a relic within the information age. As we peer into his mind, we learn something essential about Jiafeng's character–that he is irrepressibly drawn to the intricate beauty of pure learning.

Jiafeng’s essay succeeds by using the metaphor of handwriting, and it’s immense physical satisfaction, to showcase the unbounded pleasure of pursuing knowledge. We can visualize spontaneously crafted letters filling his notebooks. We see him trace Chinese characters into air by chopstick and fingertip. We learn that he expresses his innermost self through an art that has become a relic within the information age. As we peer into his mind, we learn something essential about Jiafeng’s character–that he is irrepressibly drawn to the intricate beauty of pure learning.

Jiafeng goes on to reveal that his intellectual pursuit has been shaped by not one but three Chinese styles of handwriting, each reflecting a distinct element of his intellectual growth. We see Jiafeng’s logic when engaged in mathematical proof, rhetorical flair when speaking before Model United Nations, and improvisational spark when delivering lines on stage. He presents these polymath pursuits as united by writing, indicating to readers that his broad interests are all an expression of the same principle of discovery. By the time readers finish Jiafeng’s essay they have no doubts regarding the pleasure he derives from learning–they have experienced him enacting this celebration of thought throughout every line of this well-crafted personal statement.

Crimson Education is the world’s most successful US/UK university admissions consultancy. A member of the NACAC and the IACAC, the company counts US News & World Report and Times Higher Education as its partners. Crimson's students work with expert tutors and mentors to gain admission to the Ivy League, Stanford, MIT, Caltech, Duke — as well as Oxford, Cambridge and other world leading institutions in the UK — at 4x the general applicant rate. Crimson’s unique model of support sees students work one-on-one with Ivy League and other top school graduates on every aspect of their application, from their academics to their extracurriculars, personal statements and supplemental essays. The company is led by co-founder and CEO Jamie Beaton, who at only 26, has completed an undergraduate dual degree at Harvard, an MBA at Stanford, is an Oxford Rhodes Scholar. In February 2022, Jamie will release his first book: “ACCEPTED! Secrets to Gaining Admission To The World's Top Universities.

“Ella, what did you think of Douglass’s view on Christianity?” I gulped. Increasingly powerful palpitations throbbed in my heart as my eyes darted around the classroom – searching for a profound response to Dr. Franklin’s question. I took a deep breath while reaching the most genuine answer I could conjure.

“Professor, I don’t know.”

Dr. Franklin stared at me blankly as he attempted to interpret the thoughts I didn’t voice. My lack of familiarity with the assigned text wasn’t a consideration that crossed his mind because he was familiar with my past contributions to class discussions. I was a fervent critic of the corrupted culture behind Christianity of the Puritans in Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown” and modern evangelicals involved in the puzzling divinity of Donald Trump. He arched his flummoxed brows as he began to open his mouth.

“Professor, what I mean is that I’m not sure whether or not I even have a say on Douglass’s statements on Christianity in his Narrative of the Life.”

In class, I often separated the culture of Christianity from the religion. To tie these immensely disparate concepts as one and coin it as Christianity would present fallacies that contradict with the Christianity I knew. Lack of tolerance and hostility were products of humans’ sinful nature – not the teachings of Christ. People were just using Christianity as an excuse to exalt themselves rather than the holy name of Jesus. These were the “facts.”

My greatest realization came when Douglass declared Christian slave-holders as the worst slave-holders he ever met because of their deceptive feign of piety and use of Christianity to justify the oppression of their slaves. I realized that I couldn’t bring myself to raise the same argument that I used to convince myself that my Christianity of love was the only true Christianity. To Douglass, Christianity was the opposite. I didn’t want to dismiss his story. People use this sacred religion to spread hatred, and to many, this is the only Christianity they know. Their experiences aren’t any bit falser than mine.

Christianity isn’t the only culture that harbors truth that transcends the “facts.” America’s less of a perfect amalgamation of different ethnic cultures and more of a society severed by tribal conflicts rooted in the long established political culture of the nation. Issues such as racism, white privilege, and gender disparity are highly salient topics of current political discussion. However, during a time when people can use online platforms with algorithms that provide content they want to see, we fail to acknowledge the truth in other people’s experiences and express empathy.

My protective nature drives my desire to connect with different people and build understanding. To do so, however, I step outside my Korean American Southern Baptist paradigm because my experiences do not constitute everyone else's.

As a Korean-American in the South, I am no stranger to intolerance. I remember the countless instances of people mocking my parents for their English pronunciation and my brother’s stutter. Because their words were less eloquent, people deemed their thoughts as less valuable as well. I protect my family and translate their words whenever they have a doctor’s appointment or need more ketchup at McDonald’s. My protective nature drives my desire to connect with different people and build understanding. To do so, however, I step outside my Korean American Southern Baptist paradigm because my experiences do not constitute everyone else’s.

Excluded from the Manichaean narrative of this country, I observe the turmoil in our nation through a separate lens - a blessing and a curse. Not only do I find myself awkwardly fixed in a black vs. white America, but I also fail to define my identity sandwiched between Korean and American. In the end, I find myself stuck amongst the conventional labels and binaries that divide America.

“You seem to work harder than most to understand other people’s points of view,” Dr. Franklin said after I shared these thoughts to the class.

“I find this easier because I spent my childhood assuming that my culture was always the exception,” I replied. As an anomaly, accepting different truths is second nature.

Professional Review by Crimson Education

At a time in which the Black Lives Matters movement was sweeping America and racial tension was at a high, Ella was able to offer a powerful and brave perspective: how she feels to be neither Black nor White. The true strength of this essay is its willingness to go where people rarely go in college essays: to race, to politics and to religion.

This is a trait that exists in a powerful independent thinker who could push all kinds of debates forwards - academic ones or otherwise.

Her dedication to her religion is evident - but so is her willingness to question the manipulation of the word ‘Christianty’ for less than genuine purposes. It requires intellectual bravery to ask the hard questions of your own religion as opposed to succumbing to cognitive dissonance. This is a trait that exists in a powerful independent thinker who could push all kinds of debates forwards - academic ones or otherwise.

Her word choice continues to emphasize bravery and strength. “I protect my family” inserts Ella as the shield between her family and the daily racism they experience in the south because of their accents and heritage. Her humorous quirks show the insidious racism. She even needs to shield her family from the humble request for some more Ketchup at McDonalds! Imagine if one is nervous to ask for some more Ketchup and even such a mundane activity becomes difficult through the friction of racial tension and misunderstanding. This is a powerful way to deliver a sobering commentary on the real state of society through Ellen’s lived experiences.

She demonstrates her intellectual prowess in her discussion of somewhat high-brow topics but also grounds herself in the descriptions of her daily acts of kindness.

She connects major societal debates (Trumpism for example) with daily experiences (her translations at the doctor’s office) with a gentle but powerful cadence. She demonstrates her intellectual prowess in her discussion of somewhat high-brow topics but also grounds herself in the descriptions of her daily acts of kindness.

Creatively Ella weaves numerous literary devices in and out of her story without them being overbearing. These include alliteration and the juxtaposition of longer sentences with shorter ones to make a point.

Her final dialogue is subtle but booming. “....my culture was the exception”. The reader is left genuinely sympathetic for her plight, challenges and bravery as she goes about her daily life.

Ella is a bold independent thinker with a clear social conscience and an ability to wade in the ambiguity and challenge of an imperfect world.

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"Paint this vase before you leave today," my teacher directed as she placed foreign brushes and paints in my hands. I looked at her blankly. Where were the charts of colors and books of techniques? Why was her smile so decidedly encouraging? The sudden expectations made no sense.

She smiled. "Don't worry, just paint."

In a daze, I assembled my supplies the way the older students did. I was scared. I knew everything but nothing. And even in those first blissful moments of experimentation, it hurt to realize that my painting was all wrong. The gleam of light. The distorted reflection. A thousand details taunted me with their refusal to melt into the glass. The vase was lifeless at best.

As the draining hours of work wore on, I began wearing reckless holes in my mixing plate. It was my fourth hour here. Why had I not received even a single piece of guidance?

At the peak of my frustration, she finally reentered the studio, yawning with excruciating casualness. I felt myself snap.

"I barely know how to hold a brush," I muttered almost aggressively, "how could I possibly have the technique to paint this?"

She looked at me with a shocked innocence that only heightened the feeling of abandonment. "What do you mean you don't have the technique?"

It was as though she failed to realize I was a complete beginner.

And then suddenly she broke into a pitch of urgent obviousness: "What are you doing! Don't you see those details?? There's orange from the wall and light brown from the floor. There's even dark green from that paint box over there. You have to look at the whole picture," she stole a glance at my face of bewilderment, and, sighing, grabbed my paint,stained hand. "Listen, it's not in here," she implored, shaking my captive limb. "It's here." The intensity with which she looked into my eyes was overwhelming.

I returned the gaze emptily. Never had I been so confused…

But over the years I did begin to see. The shades of red and blue in gray concrete, the tints of Phthalo in summer skies, and winter’s Currelean. It was beautiful and illogical. Black was darker with green and red, and white was never white.

I began to study animals. The proportions and fan brush techniques were certainly difficult, but they were the simple part. It was the strategic tints of light and bold color that created life. I would spend hours discovering the exact blue that would make a fish seem on the verge of tears and hours more shaping a deer’s ears to speak of serenity instead of danger.

As I run faster into the heart of art and my love for politics and law, I will learn to see the faces behind each page of cold policy text, the amazing innovation sketched in the tattered Constitution, and the progressiveness living in oak-paneled courts.

In return for probing into previously ignored details, my canvas and paints opened the world. I began to appreciate the pink kiss of ever-evolving sunsets and the even suppression of melancholy. When my father came home from a business trip, it was no longer a matter of simple happiness, but of fatigue and gladness' underlying shades. The personalities who had once seemed so annoyingly arrogant now turned soft with their complexities of doubt and inspiration. Each mundane scene is as deep and varied as the paint needed to capture it.

One day, I will learn to paint people. As I run faster into the heart of art and my love for politics and law, I will learn to see the faces behind each page of cold policy text, the amazing innovation sketched in the tattered Constitution, and the progressiveness living in oak-paneled courts.

It won’t be too far. I know that in a few years I will see a thousand more colors than I do today. Yet the most beautiful part about art is that there is no end. No matter how deep I penetrate its shimmering realms, the enigmatic caverns of wonder will stay.

Professional Review by College Confidential

My favorite college essays begin with one moment in time and end by tying that moment into a larger truth about the world. In this essay, Elizabeth uses this structure masterfully.

This essay is a great example of a create essay. It's real strength, however, lies in showing how the writer pursues her goal despite frustration and grapples with universal questions.

The essay opens with dialogue, placing the reader right in the middle of the action. She shares only the details that make the scene vivid, like the holes in her mixing plate and her teacher’s yawn. She skips backstory and explanations that can bore readers and bog down a short essay. The reader is left feeling as though we are sitting beside her, staring at an empty vase and a set of paints, with no idea how to begin.

The SPARC method of essay writing says that the best college essays show how a student can do one (or more) of these five things: Seize an opportunity, Pursue goals despite obstacles, Ask important questions, take smart Risks, or Create with limited resources. This essay is a great example of a “create” essay. It’s real strength, however, lies in showing how the writer pursues her goal despite frustration and grapples with universal questions.

As the essay transitions from the personal to the universal, her experience painting the vase becomes a metaphor for how she sees the world. Not only has painting helped her appreciate the subtle shades of color in the sunset, it has opened her up to understand that nothing in life is black and white. This parallel works especially well as a way to draw the connection between Elizabeth’s interest in political science and art.

Written by Joy Bullen, Senior Editor at College Confidential

At KEY we take a long-term, strategic approach centered on each individual student’s best interests. Working with our college-bound students beginning in Grade 8, we guide them in establishing a strong foundation of academics to build their unique profiles of co-curricular and extracurricular activities, academic direction, and professional skills. We aspire to give each of our students the best opportunity to thrive within their current education environment and beyond. For a free consultation about our services and more, please visit our website .

When I failed math in my sophomore year of high school, a bitter dispute engulfed my household -- “Nicolas Yan vs. Mathematics.” I was the plaintiff, appearing pro se, while my father represented the defendant (inanimate as it was). My brother and sister constituted a rather understaffed jury, and my mother presided over the case as judge.

In a frightening departure from racial stereotype, I charged Mathematics with the capital offences of being “too difficult” and “irrelevant to my aspirations," citing my recent shortcomings in the subject as evi. dence. My father entered a not guilty plea on the defendant's behalf, for he had always harbored hopes that I would follow in his entrepreneurial footsteps -- and who ever heard of a businessman who wasn't an accomplished mathematician? He argued that because I had fallen sick before my examination and had been unable to sit one of the papers, it would be a travesty of justice to blame my "Ungraded” mark on his client. The judge nodded sagely.

With heartrending pathos, I recalled how I had studied A-Level Mathematics with calculus a year before the rest of my cohort, bravely grappling with such perverse concepts as the poisson distribution to no avail. I decried the subject's lack of real-life utility and lamented my inability to reconcile further effort with any plausible success; so that to persist with Mathematics would be a Sisyphean endeavor. Since I had no interest in becoming the entrepreneur that my father envisioned, I petitioned the court for academic refuge in the humanities. The members of the jury exchanged sympathetic glances and put their heads together to deliberate.

Over the next year, however, new evidence that threw the court's initial verdict into question surfaced. Languishing on death row, Mathematics exercised its right to appeal, and so our quasi-court reconvened in the living room.

In hushed tones, they weighed the particulars of the case. Then, my sister announced their unanimous decision with magisterial gravity: "Nicolas shouldn't have to do math if he doesn't want to!" I was ecstatic; my father distraught. With a bang of her metaphorical gavel, the judge sentenced the defendant to "Death by Omission"-- and so I chose my subjects for 11th Grade sans Mathematics. To my father's disappointment, a future in business for me now seemed implausible.

Over the next year, however, new evidence that threw the court's initial verdict into question surfaced. Languishing on death row, Mathematics exercised its right to appeal, and so our quasi-court reconvened in the living room.

My father reiterated his client's innocence, maintaining that Mathematics was neither "irrelevant" nor "too difficult." He proudly recounted how just two months earlier, when my friends had convinced me to join them in creating a business case competition for high school students (clerical note: the loftily-titled New Zealand Secondary Schools Case Competition), I stood in front of the Board of a company and successfully pitched them to sponsor us-- was this not evidence that l could succeed in business? I think I saw a tear roll down his cheek as he implored me to give Mathematics another chance.

I considered the truth of his words. While writing a real-world business case for NZSSCC, l had been struck by how mathematical processes actually made sense when deployed in a practical context, and how numbers could tell a story just as vividly as words can. By reviewing business models and comparing financial projections to actual returns, one can read a company's story and identify areas of potential growth; whether the company then took advantage of these opportunities determined its success. It wasn't that my role in organizing NZSSCC had magically taught me to embrace all things mathematical or commercial -- I was still the same person -- but I recognized that no intellectual constraints prevented me from succeeding in Mathematics; I needed only the courage to seize an opportunity for personal growth.

I stood up and addressed my family: “I’ll do it.” Then, without waiting for the court’s final verdict, I crossed the room to embrace my father: and the rest, as they (seldom) say, was Mathematics.

Professional Review by KEY Education

For some, math concepts such as limits, logarithms, and derivatives can bring about feelings of apprehension or intimidation. So, Nicolas’s college essay reflecting on his personal conflict coming to terms with Mathematics offers a relatable, down-to-earth look at how he eventually came to realize and appreciate the importance of this once-dreaded subject. Not only does Nicolas’s statement use a unique, engaging approach to hook the reader in, but also he draws various connections from Mathematics to his relationship with his family, to his maturation process, and to his extracurricular involvement. A number of factors helped Nicolas’s statement add color to his application file, giving further insight into the person he is.

Nicolas’s choice of Mathematics as the focusing lens is effective for a number of reasons. Firstly, it is genuine and approachable. It is not about some grandiose idea, event, or achievement. Rather, it is about a topic to which many students—and people for that matter—can relate. And from this central theme, Nicolas draws insightful linkages to various aspects of his life. At the outset of his essay, Mathematics is presented as the antagonist, or as Nicolas skillfully portrays, the “defendant”. However, by the end of his piece, and as a demonstration of his growth, Nicolas has come to a resolution with the former defendant.

Adding to the various connections, Nicolas presents his case, literally, in an engaging manner in the form of a court scene, with Nicolas as the plaintiff charging the defendant, Mathematics, with being too difficult and irrelevant to his life.

Through Nicolas’s conflict over Mathematics, we gain a deeper understanding of his relationship with his father and the tension that exists in Nicolas fulfilling his father’s wishes of following in his entrepreneurial footsteps. His father’s initial attempts at reasoning with him are rebuffed, however Nicolas later acknowledges that he “considered the truth of his words” and eventually embraces his father, signifying their coming to a resolution with their shared understanding of each other. Furthermore, Nicolas connects his evolved understanding of Mathematics to his important organizational role in creating the business-focused New Zealand Secondary Schools Case Competition, acknowledging how “mathematical processes actually made sense when deployed in a practical context, and how numbers could tell a story just as vividly as words can.” As he states, “I needed only the courage to seize an opportunity for personal growth,” which he ultimately realizes.

Adding to the various connections, Nicolas presents his case, literally, in an engaging manner in the form of a court scene, with Nicolas as the plaintiff charging the defendant, Mathematics, with being too difficult and irrelevant to his life. Bearing in mind word count limitations, what would have been interesting to explore would be deeper insights into each of the connections that Nicolas drew and how he applied these various lessons to other parts of his life.

Nicolas employs a number of characteristics essential for a successful essay: a theme that allows for deeper introspection, an engaging hook or approach, and a number of linkages between his theme and various aspects of his life, providing insight into who he is and how he thinks.

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Successful Harvard Essay by Abigail Mack

Abigail gained national attention after reading her application essay on TikTok earlier this year, with over 19.9 million views on the first video. Her essay helped her to recieve a rare likely letter in the most competitive Harvard application cycle in history with a less than 4 percent acceptance rate, and now she uses her platform to help other college hopefuls navigate the application process. Watch her read the beginning of her essay here and check out her other writing tips on her TikTok .

I hate the letter S. Of the 164,777 words with S, I only grapple with one.

I hate the letter “S”. Of the 164,777 words with “S”, I only grapple with one. To condemn an entire letter because of its use 0.0006% of the time sounds statistically absurd, but that one case changed 100% of my life. I used to have two parents, but now I have one, and the “S” in “parents” isn’t going anywhere.

“S” follows me. I can’t get through a day without being reminded that while my friends went out to dinner with their parents, I ate with my parent. As I write this essay, there is a blue line under the word “parent” telling me to check my grammar; even Grammarly assumes that I should have parents, but cancer doesn’t listen to edit suggestions. I won’t claim that my situation is as unique as 1 in 164,777, but it is still an exception to the rule - an outlier. The world isn’t meant for this special case.

The world wouldn’t abandon “S” because of me, so I tried to abandon “S”. I could get away from “S” if I stayed busy; you can’t have dinner with your “parent” (thanks again, Grammarly) if you’re too busy to have family dinner. Any spare time that I had, I filled. I became known as the “busy kid”- the one that everyone always asks, “How do you have time?” Morning meetings, classes, after school meetings, volleyball practice, dance class, rehearsal in Boston, homework, sleep, repeat. Though my specific schedule has changed over time, the busyness has not. I couldn’t fill the loss that “S” left in my life, but I could at least make sure I didn’t have to think about it. There were so many things in my life that I couldn’t control, so I controlled what I could- my schedule. I never succumbed to the stress of potentially over-committing. I thrived. It became a challenge to juggle it all, but I’d soon find a rhythm. But rhythm wasn’t what I wanted. Rhythm may not have an “S”, but “S” sure liked to come by when I was idle. So, I added another ball, and another, and another. Soon I noticed that the same “color” balls kept falling into my hands- theater, academics, politics. I began to want to come into contact with these more and more, so I further narrowed the scope of my color wheel and increased the shades of my primary colors.

Life became easier to juggle, but for the first time, I didn’t add another ball. I found my rhythm, and I embraced it. I stopped running away from a single “S” and began chasing a double “S”- passion. Passion has given me purpose. I was shackled to “S” as I tried to escape the confines of the traditional familial structure. No matter how far I ran, “S” stayed behind me because I kept looking back. I’ve finally learned to move forward instead of away, and it is liberating. “S” got me moving, but it hasn’t kept me going.

I wish I could end here, triumphant and basking in my new inspiration, but life is more convoluted. Motivation is a double edged sword; it keeps me facing forward, but it also keeps me from having to look back. I want to claim that I showed courage in being able to turn from “S”, but I cannot. Motivation is what keeps “S” at bay. I am not perfectly healed, but I am perfect at navigating the best way to heal me. I don’t seek out sadness, so “S” must stay on the sidelines, and until I am completely ready, motivation is more than enough for me.

Professional Review by HS2 Academy

There's an honesty here as she reveals to the reader her attempts at filling this void in her life by constantly keeping busy. It's further satisfying to see these attempts at committing to various activities evolve into what she terms a double

Abigail’s essay navigates one of the most delicate sorts of topics in college applications: dealing with personal or family tragedy. Perhaps the most common pitfall is to take a tragic event and effuse it with too much pathos and sense of loss that the narrative fails to reveal much about the author’s own personality other than the loss itself. In short, a “sob story.” However, Abigail’s essay adeptly skirts this by utilizing wit and a framing device using the letter “S” to share a profoundly personal journey in a manner that is engaging and thought-provoking.

Rather than focus purely on the loss of one of her parents to cancer, Abigail reflects on her life and the adjustments she has had to make. It is particularly poignant how she expresses the sense that her life with only one remaining parent seems somehow anomalous, that the constant reminders of the completeness in the familial structures of others haunts her.

What also makes this essay all the more intriguing is how we get a glimpse into her internal life as she learns to cope with the loss. There’s an honesty here as she reveals to the reader her attempts at filling this void in her life by constantly keeping busy. It’s further satisfying to see these attempts at committing to various activities evolve into what she terms a “double S,” or “passion,” as she discovers things that she has become passionate about. Perhaps this essay could have been strengthened further by giving the reader a sense of what those passions might be, as we’re left to speculate based on the activities she had mentioned.

Lastly, we see a sense of realism and maturity in Abigail's closing reflection. It’s easy to end an essay like this with a sense of narrative perfection, but she wisely concedes that “life is more convoluted.” This poignant revelation gives us a window into her continuing struggles, but we are nonetheless left impressed by her growth and candor in this essay.

collegeMission is an undergraduate admissions consulting firm focused solely on helping applicants craft their best admissions essays to gain acceptance at top academic institutions. collegeMission's elite admissions consultants have assisted thousands of applicants in successfully pursuing their educational dreams. As accomplished writers and graduates of prestigious universities, our consultants are uniquely qualified to guide you through brainstorming, outlining, and writing your college essays so that the admissions committees take notice. To learn more or schedule a free brainstorming session, visit www.collegemission.com or email [email protected].

I learned the definition of cancer at the age of fourteen. I was taking my chapter 7 biology test when I came upon the last question, “What is cancer?”, to which I answered: “The abnormal, unrestricted growth of cells.” After handing in the test, I moved on to chapter 8, oblivious then to how earth-shattering such a disease could be.

I learned the meaning of cancer two years later. A girl named Kiersten came into my family by way of my oldest brother who had fallen in love with her. I distinctly recall her hair catching the sea breeze as she walked with us along the Jersey shore, a blonde wave in my surrounding family's sea of brunette. Physically, she may have been different, but she redefined what family meant to me. She attended my concerts, went to my award ceremonies, and helped me study for tests. Whenever I needed support, she was there. Little did I know that our roles would be reversed, forever changing my outlook on life.

Kiersten was diagnosed with Stage II Hodgkin's lymphoma at the age of 22. Tears and hair fell alike after each of her 20 rounds of chemotherapy as we feared the worst. It was an unbearable tragedy watching someone so vivacious skirt the line between life and death. Her cancer was later classified as refractory, or resistant to treatment. Frustration and despair flooded my mind as I heard this news. And so I prayed. In what universe did this dynamic make any sense? I prayed to God and to even her cancer itself to just leave her alone. Eventually, Kiersten was able to leave the hospital to stay for six weeks at my home.

But the beauty that resulted from sympathizing as opposed to analyzing and putting aside my own worries and troubles for someone else was an enormous epiphany for me. My problems dissipated into thin air the moment I came home and dropped my books and bags to talk with Kiersten. The more I talked, laughed, smiled, and shared memories with her, the more I began to realize all that she taught me.

My family and I transformed the house into an antimicrobial sanctuary, protecting Kiersten from any outside illness. I watched TV with her, baked cookies for her, and observed her persistence as she regained strength and achieved remission. We beat biology, time, and death, all at the same time, with cookies, TV, and friendship. Yet I was so concerned with helping Kiersten that I had not realized how she helped me during her battle with cancer.

I had been so used to solving my problems intellectually that when it came time to emotionally support someone, I was afraid. I could define cancer, but what do I say to someone with it? There were days where I did not think I could be optimistic in the face of such adversity. But the beauty that resulted from sympathizing as opposed to analyzing and putting aside my own worries and troubles for someone else was an enormous epiphany for me. My problems dissipated into thin air the moment I came home and dropped my books and bags to talk with Kiersten. The more I talked, laughed, smiled, and shared memories with her, the more I began to realize all that she taught me. She influenced me in the fact that she demonstrated the power of loyalty, companionship, and optimism in the face of desperate, life-threatening situations. She showed me the importance of loving to live and living to love. Most of all, she gave me the insight necessary to fully help others not just with intellect and preparation, but with solidarity and compassion. In this way, I became able to help myself and others with not only my brain, but with my heart. And that, in the words of Robert Frost, “has made all the difference.”

Professional Review by collegeMission

Nikolas is candid, writing about how he could solve problems intellectually, but struggled to cope emotionally during Kiersten's diagnosis and treatment. Ultimately, he finds his way and gains a deeper perspective on life, and thus shares a story of overcoming and of complex intellectual and emotional growth.

Nikolas uses an unexpected approach in this essay, sharing a story of someone else’s struggle, as he highlights change within himself. The emotions and connection that he felt for Kiersten, his older brother’s girlfriend, are quite powerful, as is his recognition of his own attempt to navigate his way through the experience. Nikolas is candid, writing about how he could solve problems intellectually, but struggled to cope emotionally during Kiersten’s diagnosis and treatment. Ultimately, he finds his way and gains a deeper perspective on life, and thus shares a story of overcoming and of complex intellectual and emotional growth.

Nikolas’ use of imagery is terrific. We first see it in the essay when he describes one of his first impressions of Kiersten, with her blonde hair flowing in the wind by the Jersey Shore and how that contrasted with the dark hair of his family. That description then flows as we read the next paragraph, where he talks about the impact of her cancer. “Tears and hair fell alike after each of her 20 rounds of chemotherapy as we feared the worst.” Instead of explicitly sharing everyone’s heartbreak, through details that heartbreak becomes so very evident.

One missing piece here is an explanation of why Kiersten stayed with Nikolas’ family rather than returning home to her own family. Maybe a quick explanation would have helped the reader make sense of her location, and create an even stronger linkage with Nikolas and his family. Additionally, Nikolas might have taken one more step toward the end of the essay to connect this newfound emotion to other parts of his life. The final paragraph feels slightly repetitive, and a compelling route could have been to show how he went on to embrace the idea of “loving to live and living to love.” Nonetheless, Nikolas reveals that he is capable of growing through adversity, a character trait that this admissions committee clearly appreciated.

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• Referencing

Leeds Harvard introduction

Citing quotations using leeds harvard, what is quoting.

Quoting is where you copy an author's text word for word, place double quotation marks around the words and add a citation at the end of the quote. Quotes should be used sparingly. Using too many quotes can suggest you don't fully understand the text you are referring to.

In most academic writing, you should generally paraphrase from sources, rather than quote directly. Quoting more extended sections of text tends to be more common in arts and humanities subjects where it may be appropriate to quote frequently from sources that are being analysed or translated, like novels, plays or historical texts.

As you take notes, ensure you clearly mark where you have quoted directly from the source.

Direct quotations

If you use a direct quotation from an author, you should:

• enclose it in quotation marks
• give the author, date and page number(s) that the quotation was taken from, in brackets.

If you are quoting from a website or webpage that does not have page numbers, you do not need to include anything to indicate this in the citation.

Example: "Language is subject to change, and is not caused by unnecessary sloppiness, laziness or ignorance" (Aitchison, 1981, p.67).

Quotations more than two lines long

If the quotation is more than two lines:

• separate it from the rest of the paragraph by one free line above and below
• indent at left and right margins
• it may be in a smaller point size
• it is preceded by a colon
• it does not use quotation marks
• the citation includes author, date and page number(s) that the quotation was taken from.

Example: One answer to this is that language has always been subject to change, just as everything else in the world is, and we should not feel that this is a bad thing. As Aitchison (1981, p.16) puts it:

Language, then, like everything else, gradually transforms itself over the centuries. There is nothing surprising in this. In a world where humans grow old, tadpoles change into frogs, and milk turns into cheese, it would be strange if language alone remained unaltered. In spite of this, large numbers of intelligent people condemn and resent language change, regarding alterations as due to unnecessary sloppiness, laziness or ignorance.

Aitchison clearly sees every change in language as neither good nor bad, but inevitable...

Editing a quote

You may want to make minor changes to a direct quotation. This is possible (as long as you don't change the meaning), but you must follow the rules.

• If you omit parts of the quotation, use an ellipsis. An ellipsis consists of three dots (...). Do not begin or end a direct quotation with ellipsis points. The reader already assumes that the quote has been excerpted from a larger work.
• If you want to insert your own words, or different words, into a quotation, put them in square brackets [ ].
• If you want to draw attention to an error in a quotation, for example a spelling mistake or wrong date, do not correct it; write [sic] in square brackets.
• If you want to emphasise something in a quotation that is particularly relevant to your essay, put the emphasised words in italics, and state that the emphasis is your own.
• If the original has italics, state that the italics are in the original.

Example 1: Language changes are natural and inevitable. It has been argued that language:

gradually transforms itself over the centuries. In a world where [everything changes], it would be strange if language alone remained unaltered. In spite of this, large numbers of intelligent people condemn and resent language change (Aitchison, 1981, p.16, my italics).

Example 2: According to Smith (1992, p.45), "Aitcheson [sic] appears to believe that everything changes ; but this is questionable" (italics in original).

Home / Guides / Citation Guides / Harvard Referencing

Harvard Referencing Style Guide

What is referencing.

Whenever you write, the writings of others will influence your work. Although it is difficult to gauge all the influences, many of your ideas can be traced back to the resources and materials that you have consulted. These might be books, images , articles, reports, or, of course, the internet. These sources help enrich your writing by giving you ideas to build on. It is important always to give credit to the original thinkers and authors.

Referencing is the method that gives credit to the sources you have used in your work. You should provide references whenever you use a direct quote, paraphrase someone else’s idea, or borrow conceptual words and phrases.

Referencing not only allows credit to be given where credit is due, but it also helps track the various influences on any original piece of writing. If you do not cite the sources of the ideas that you have used in your work, you run the risk of plagiarism. Plagiarism is not only unethical but is also an actual crime in some of its forms. But how do you reference?

Elements of Harvard referencing style

Harvard referencing is a popular method of adding citations to your work. Its appeal lies in the simplicity of the basic system it uses – the author-date structure. Along with this, in Harvard style, you only need to mention the source in two locations: in the in-text reference(s) and in the reference list. Both elements together incorporate all the necessary details about a source in the most efficient way.

So, while reading something, when you come across a citation that looks something like this:

Furley (1999) or (Furley, 1999)

it is an in-text reference that follows the author-date system.

This is an entry in the reference list for the same in-text reference.

Furley, D. (1999) Routledge history of philosophy volume II: from Aristotle to Augustine . 1st edn. London: Routledge.

These Harvard referencing examples provide details about the citation formats for different types of sources.

In-text reference/citation

As is obvious from the name, Harvard in-text citations are references included within the text, that is, inside the sentences that make up its content. These can either be direct statements or quotes, or a paraphrasing of the original work. This type of reference helps in precisely pointing out which portions of the text are borrowed from or influenced by which particular source.

In his work, Furley (1999) wrote about… OR …from Aristotle’s works (Furley, 1999).

As you can see, in-text references provide the author’s surname and the year of publication. The year is provided because sometimes two or more works by the same author are referenced. In this case, the year helps in distinguishing between these works. Note that if you are citing a direct quotation, the in-text citation should also include the page number of that quote, for example (Furley, 1999, p. 2).

However, in-text citations don’t provide other important details about these resources. Rather, they are short enough that you don’t get interrupted while reading the text. Other details are presented in the reference list that you include at the end of your paper.

Reference list

A reference list presents the details of all the resources cited throughout the text in the form of a list at the end of your paper. It includes detailed entries about each of the referenced sources.

Citation structure:

Surname, Initial. (Publication year) Name of the document . Place of publication: Publisher.

Every in-text citation corresponds to an entry in the reference list. So, the reference list entry for the in-text citations discussed above would be:

Einstein, M. (2004) Media diversity: economics, ownership, and the FCC. New Jersey: Routledge.

This entry can also include other details like page numbers, editor’s name, edition, URL, access date, etc., depending upon the type of resource. A reference list allows you to provide all the necessary information without crowding your paper. With this list, you can keep track of how many materials you have consulted and even see if you need to include any more or any other kind of references in your text.

The difference between a bibliography and the Harvard referencing system

Typically, you’ll refer to multiple sources and materials for writing a text, and just using a bibliography can be confusing. You can use the Harvard referencing system to point out the exact location of all your references.

By marking the in-text reference, you can easily locate which idea or quote corresponds to which author. This makes your work easy to read and understand. This way, you and your reader can easily trace the specific portions of the work back to the original texts.

You can also show how much of your text uses source material (whether directly or indirectly) and how much of it is your own ideas and thoughts.

Format for Harvard Referencing

Typically, a paper that uses Harvard referencing has the following format:

• 2.5 cm OR 1-inch margins on all sides
• Recommended fonts: Arial 12 pt or Times New Roman, with double-spacing
• Title is in the center of the page just above the text
• Left-aligned text, with the first sentence of every paragraph indented by 0.5 inch
• Last name is at the top-right corner of the header, followed by page number
• Title page is centre-aligned
• Subheadings are in sentence case and left-aligned

Key takeaways

• Referencing is a way of crediting the various resources consulted while writing a text. Harvard referencing is a system that allows you to include information about the source materials. It is based on the author-date system.
• It includes references: 1) as in-text citations and 2) in a reference list (which is different from a bibliography).
• In-text citations: (Author Surname, Year Published).
• Reference list entry: Author Surname, Initial. (Year Published) Title . Place of Publication: Name of Publisher.

For more help creating citations in Harvard style, try the EasyBib Harvard referencing generator !

Published October 25, 2020.

Harvard Formatting Guide

Harvard Formatting

• et al Usage
• Direct Quotes
• In-text Citations
• Multiple Authors
• Page Numbers
• Writing an Outline
• View Harvard Guide

Reference Examples

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Free Harvard Referencing Generator

Generate accurate Harvard reference lists quickly and for FREE, with MyBib!

🤔 What is a Harvard Referencing Generator?

A Harvard Referencing Generator is a tool that automatically generates formatted academic references in the Harvard style.

It takes in relevant details about a source -- usually critical information like author names, article titles, publish dates, and URLs -- and adds the correct punctuation and formatting required by the Harvard referencing style.

The generated references can be copied into a reference list or bibliography, and then collectively appended to the end of an academic assignment. This is the standard way to give credit to sources used in the main body of an assignment.

👩‍🎓 Who uses a Harvard Referencing Generator?

Harvard is the main referencing style at colleges and universities in the United Kingdom and Australia. It is also very popular in other English-speaking countries such as South Africa, Hong Kong, and New Zealand. University-level students in these countries are most likely to use a Harvard generator to aid them with their undergraduate assignments (and often post-graduate too).

🙌 Why should I use a Harvard Referencing Generator?

A Harvard Referencing Generator solves two problems:

• It provides a way to organise and keep track of the sources referenced in the content of an academic paper.
• It ensures that references are formatted correctly -- inline with the Harvard referencing style -- and it does so considerably faster than writing them out manually.

A well-formatted and broad bibliography can account for up to 20% of the total grade for an undergraduate-level project, and using a generator tool can contribute significantly towards earning them.

⚙️ How do I use MyBib's Harvard Referencing Generator?

Here's how to use our reference generator:

• If citing a book, website, journal, or video: enter the URL or title into the search bar at the top of the page and press the search button.
• Choose the most relevant results from the list of search results.
• Our generator will automatically locate the source details and format them in the correct Harvard format. You can make further changes if required.
• Then either copy the formatted reference directly into your reference list by clicking the 'copy' button, or save it to your MyBib account for later.

MyBib supports the following for Harvard style:

🍏 What other versions of Harvard referencing exist?

There isn't "one true way" to do Harvard referencing, and many universities have their own slightly different guidelines for the style. Our generator can adapt to handle the following list of different Harvard styles:

• Cite Them Right
• Manchester Metropolitan University (MMU)
• University of the West of England (UWE)

Daniel is a qualified librarian, former teacher, and citation expert. He has been contributing to MyBib since 2018.

So much is at stake in writing a conclusion. This is, after all, your last chance to persuade your readers to your point of view, to impress yourself upon them as a writer and thinker. And the impression you create in your conclusion will shape the impression that stays with your readers after they've finished the essay.

The end of an essay should therefore convey a sense of completeness and closure as well as a sense of the lingering possibilities of the topic, its larger meaning, its implications: the final paragraph should close the discussion without closing it off.

To establish a sense of closure, you might do one or more of the following:

• Conclude by linking the last paragraph to the first, perhaps by reiterating a word or phrase you used at the beginning.
• Conclude with a sentence composed mainly of one-syllable words. Simple language can help create an effect of understated drama.
• Conclude with a sentence that's compound or parallel in structure; such sentences can establish a sense of balance or order that may feel just right at the end of a complex discussion.

To close the discussion without closing it off, you might do one or more of the following:

• Conclude with a quotation from or reference to a primary or secondary source, one that amplifies your main point or puts it in a different perspective. A quotation from, say, the novel or poem you're writing about can add texture and specificity to your discussion; a critic or scholar can help confirm or complicate your final point. For example, you might conclude an essay on the idea of home in James Joyce's short story collection,  Dubliners , with information about Joyce's own complex feelings towards Dublin, his home. Or you might end with a biographer's statement about Joyce's attitude toward Dublin, which could illuminate his characters' responses to the city. Just be cautious, especially about using secondary material: make sure that you get the last word.
• Conclude by setting your discussion into a different, perhaps larger, context. For example, you might end an essay on nineteenth-century muckraking journalism by linking it to a current news magazine program like  60 Minutes .
• Conclude by redefining one of the key terms of your argument. For example, an essay on Marx's treatment of the conflict between wage labor and capital might begin with Marx's claim that the "capitalist economy is . . . a gigantic enterprise of dehumanization "; the essay might end by suggesting that Marxist analysis is itself dehumanizing because it construes everything in economic -- rather than moral or ethical-- terms.
• Conclude by considering the implications of your argument (or analysis or discussion). What does your argument imply, or involve, or suggest? For example, an essay on the novel  Ambiguous Adventure , by the Senegalese writer Cheikh Hamidou Kane, might open with the idea that the protagonist's development suggests Kane's belief in the need to integrate Western materialism and Sufi spirituality in modern Senegal. The conclusion might make the new but related point that the novel on the whole suggests that such an integration is (or isn't) possible.

Finally, some advice on how not to end an essay:

• Don't simply summarize your essay. A brief summary of your argument may be useful, especially if your essay is long--more than ten pages or so. But shorter essays tend not to require a restatement of your main ideas.
• Avoid phrases like "in conclusion," "to conclude," "in summary," and "to sum up." These phrases can be useful--even welcome--in oral presentations. But readers can see, by the tell-tale compression of the pages, when an essay is about to end. You'll irritate your audience if you belabor the obvious.
• Resist the urge to apologize. If you've immersed yourself in your subject, you now know a good deal more about it than you can possibly include in a five- or ten- or 20-page essay. As a result, by the time you've finished writing, you may be having some doubts about what you've produced. (And if you haven't immersed yourself in your subject, you may be feeling even more doubtful about your essay as you approach the conclusion.) Repress those doubts. Don't undercut your authority by saying things like, "this is just one approach to the subject; there may be other, better approaches. . ."

Copyright 1998, Pat Bellanca, for the Writing Center at Harvard University

Why the Pandemic Probably Started in a Lab, in 5 Key Points

By Alina Chan

Dr. Chan is a molecular biologist at the Broad Institute of M.I.T. and Harvard, and a co-author of “Viral: The Search for the Origin of Covid-19.”

This article has been updated to reflect news developments.

On Monday, Dr. Anthony Fauci returned to the halls of Congress and testified before the House subcommittee investigating the Covid-19 pandemic. He was questioned about several topics related to the government’s handling of Covid-19, including how the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which he directed until retiring in 2022, supported risky virus work at a Chinese institute whose research may have caused the pandemic.

For more than four years, reflexive partisan politics have derailed the search for the truth about a catastrophe that has touched us all. It has been estimated that at least 25 million people around the world have died because of Covid-19, with over a million of those deaths in the United States.

Although how the pandemic started has been hotly debated, a growing volume of evidence — gleaned from public records released under the Freedom of Information Act, digital sleuthing through online databases, scientific papers analyzing the virus and its spread, and leaks from within the U.S. government — suggests that the pandemic most likely occurred because a virus escaped from a research lab in Wuhan, China. If so, it would be the most costly accident in the history of science.

Here’s what we now know:

1 The SARS-like virus that caused the pandemic emerged in Wuhan, the city where the world’s foremost research lab for SARS-like viruses is located.

• At the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a team of scientists had been hunting for SARS-like viruses for over a decade, led by Shi Zhengli.
• Their research showed that the viruses most similar to SARS‑CoV‑2, the virus that caused the pandemic, circulate in bats that live r oughly 1,000 miles away from Wuhan. Scientists from Dr. Shi’s team traveled repeatedly to Yunnan province to collect these viruses and had expanded their search to Southeast Asia. Bats in other parts of China have not been found to carry viruses that are as closely related to SARS-CoV-2.

The closest known relatives to SARS-CoV-2 were found in southwestern China and in Laos.

Large cities

Mine in Yunnan province

Cave in Laos

South China Sea

The closest known relatives to SARS-CoV-2

were found in southwestern China and in Laos.

philippines

The closest known relatives to SARS-CoV-2 were found

in southwestern China and Laos.

Sources: Sarah Temmam et al., Nature; SimpleMaps

Note: Cities shown have a population of at least 200,000.

There are hundreds of large cities in China and Southeast Asia.

There are hundreds of large cities in China

and Southeast Asia.

The pandemic started roughly 1,000 miles away, in Wuhan, home to the world’s foremost SARS-like virus research lab.

The pandemic started roughly 1,000 miles away,

in Wuhan, home to the world’s foremost SARS-like virus research lab.

The pandemic started roughly 1,000 miles away, in Wuhan,

home to the world’s foremost SARS-like virus research lab.

• Even at hot spots where these viruses exist naturally near the cave bats of southwestern China and Southeast Asia, the scientists argued, as recently as 2019 , that bat coronavirus spillover into humans is rare .
• When the Covid-19 outbreak was detected, Dr. Shi initially wondered if the novel coronavirus had come from her laboratory , saying she had never expected such an outbreak to occur in Wuhan.
• The SARS‑CoV‑2 virus is exceptionally contagious and can jump from species to species like wildfire . Yet it left no known trace of infection at its source or anywhere along what would have been a thousand-mile journey before emerging in Wuhan.

2 The year before the outbreak, the Wuhan institute, working with U.S. partners, had proposed creating viruses with SARS‑CoV‑2’s defining feature.

• Dr. Shi’s group was fascinated by how coronaviruses jump from species to species. To find viruses, they took samples from bats and other animals , as well as from sick people living near animals carrying these viruses or associated with the wildlife trade. Much of this work was conducted in partnership with the EcoHealth Alliance, a U.S.-based scientific organization that, since 2002, has been awarded over $80 million in federal funding to research the risks of emerging infectious diseases.
• The laboratory pursued risky research that resulted in viruses becoming more infectious : Coronaviruses were grown from samples from infected animals and genetically reconstructed and recombined to create new viruses unknown in nature. These new viruses were passed through cells from bats, pigs, primates and humans and were used to infect civets and humanized mice (mice modified with human genes). In essence, this process forced these viruses to adapt to new host species, and the viruses with mutations that allowed them to thrive emerged as victors.
• By 2019, Dr. Shi’s group had published a database describing more than 22,000 collected wildlife samples. But external access was shut off in the fall of 2019, and the database was not shared with American collaborators even after the pandemic started , when such a rich virus collection would have been most useful in tracking the origin of SARS‑CoV‑2. It remains unclear whether the Wuhan institute possessed a precursor of the pandemic virus.
• In 2021, The Intercept published a leaked 2018 grant proposal for a research project named Defuse , which had been written as a collaboration between EcoHealth, the Wuhan institute and Ralph Baric at the University of North Carolina, who had been on the cutting edge of coronavirus research for years. The proposal described plans to create viruses strikingly similar to SARS‑CoV‑2.
• Coronaviruses bear their name because their surface is studded with protein spikes, like a spiky crown, which they use to enter animal cells. T he Defuse project proposed to search for and create SARS-like viruses carrying spikes with a unique feature: a furin cleavage site — the same feature that enhances SARS‑CoV‑2’s infectiousness in humans, making it capable of causing a pandemic. Defuse was never funded by the United States . However, in his testimony on Monday, Dr. Fauci explained that the Wuhan institute would not need to rely on U.S. funding to pursue research independently.

The Wuhan lab ran risky experiments to learn about how SARS-like viruses might infect humans.

1. Collect SARS-like viruses from bats and other wild animals, as well as from people exposed to them.

2. Identify high-risk viruses by screening for spike proteins that facilitate infection of human cells.

2. Identify high-risk viruses by screening for spike proteins that facilitate infection of

human cells.

In Defuse, the scientists proposed to add a furin cleavage site to the spike protein.

3. Create new coronaviruses by inserting spike proteins or other features that could make the viruses more infectious in humans.

4. Infect human cells, civets and humanized mice with the new coronaviruses, to determine how dangerous they might be.

• While it’s possible that the furin cleavage site could have evolved naturally (as seen in some distantly related coronaviruses), out of the hundreds of SARS-like viruses cataloged by scientists, SARS‑CoV‑2 is the only one known to possess a furin cleavage site in its spike. And the genetic data suggest that the virus had only recently gained the furin cleavage site before it started the pandemic.
• Ultimately, a never-before-seen SARS-like virus with a newly introduced furin cleavage site, matching the description in the Wuhan institute’s Defuse proposal, caused an outbreak in Wuhan less than two years after the proposal was drafted.
• When the Wuhan scientists published their seminal paper about Covid-19 as the pandemic roared to life in 2020, they did not mention the virus’s furin cleavage site — a feature they should have been on the lookout for, according to their own grant proposal, and a feature quickly recognized by other scientists.
• Worse still, as the pandemic raged, their American collaborators failed to publicly reveal the existence of the Defuse proposal. The president of EcoHealth, Peter Daszak, recently admitted to Congress that he doesn’t know about virus samples collected by the Wuhan institute after 2015 and never asked the lab’s scientists if they had started the work described in Defuse. In May, citing failures in EcoHealth’s monitoring of risky experiments conducted at the Wuhan lab, the Biden administration suspended all federal funding for the organization and Dr. Daszak, and initiated proceedings to bar them from receiving future grants. In his testimony on Monday, Dr. Fauci said that he supported the decision to suspend and bar EcoHealth.
• Separately, Dr. Baric described the competitive dynamic between his research group and the institute when he told Congress that the Wuhan scientists would probably not have shared their most interesting newly discovered viruses with him . Documents and email correspondence between the institute and Dr. Baric are still being withheld from the public while their release is fiercely contested in litigation.
• In the end, American partners very likely knew of only a fraction of the research done in Wuhan. According to U.S. intelligence sources, some of the institute’s virus research was classified or conducted with or on behalf of the Chinese military . In the congressional hearing on Monday, Dr. Fauci repeatedly acknowledged the lack of visibility into experiments conducted at the Wuhan institute, saying, “None of us can know everything that’s going on in China, or in Wuhan, or what have you. And that’s the reason why — I say today, and I’ve said at the T.I.,” referring to his transcribed interview with the subcommittee, “I keep an open mind as to what the origin is.”

3 The Wuhan lab pursued this type of work under low biosafety conditions that could not have contained an airborne virus as infectious as SARS‑CoV‑2.

• Labs working with live viruses generally operate at one of four biosafety levels (known in ascending order of stringency as BSL-1, 2, 3 and 4) that describe the work practices that are considered sufficiently safe depending on the characteristics of each pathogen. The Wuhan institute’s scientists worked with SARS-like viruses under inappropriately low biosafety conditions .

In the United States, virologists generally use stricter Biosafety Level 3 protocols when working with SARS-like viruses.

Biosafety cabinets prevent

viral particles from escaping.

Viral particles

Personal respirators provide

a second layer of defense against breathing in the virus.

DIRECT CONTACT

Gloves prevent skin contact.

Disposable wraparound

gowns cover much of the rest of the body.

Personal respirators provide a second layer of defense against breathing in the virus.

Disposable wraparound gowns

cover much of the rest of the body.

Note: ​​Biosafety levels are not internationally standardized, and some countries use more permissive protocols than others.

The Wuhan lab had been regularly working with SARS-like viruses under Biosafety Level 2 conditions, which could not prevent a highly infectious virus like SARS-CoV-2 from escaping.

Some work is done in the open air, and masks are not required.

Less protective equipment provides more opportunities

for contamination.

Some work is done in the open air,

and masks are not required.

Less protective equipment provides more opportunities for contamination.

• In one experiment, Dr. Shi’s group genetically engineered an unexpectedly deadly SARS-like virus (not closely related to SARS‑CoV‑2) that exhibited a 10,000-fold increase in the quantity of virus in the lungs and brains of humanized mice . Wuhan institute scientists handled these live viruses at low biosafet y levels , including BSL-2.
• Even the much more stringent containment at BSL-3 cannot fully prevent SARS‑CoV‑2 from escaping . Two years into the pandemic, the virus infected a scientist in a BSL-3 laboratory in Taiwan, which was, at the time, a zero-Covid country. The scientist had been vaccinated and was tested only after losing the sense of smell. By then, more than 100 close contacts had been exposed. Human error is a source of exposure even at the highest biosafety levels , and the risks are much greater for scientists working with infectious pathogens at low biosafety.
• An early draft of the Defuse proposal stated that the Wuhan lab would do their virus work at BSL-2 to make it “highly cost-effective.” Dr. Baric added a note to the draft highlighting the importance of using BSL-3 to contain SARS-like viruses that could infect human cells, writing that “U.S. researchers will likely freak out.” Years later, after SARS‑CoV‑2 had killed millions, Dr. Baric wrote to Dr. Daszak : “I have no doubt that they followed state determined rules and did the work under BSL-2. Yes China has the right to set their own policy. You believe this was appropriate containment if you want but don’t expect me to believe it. Moreover, don’t insult my intelligence by trying to feed me this load of BS.”
• SARS‑CoV‑2 is a stealthy virus that transmits effectively through the air, causes a range of symptoms similar to those of other common respiratory diseases and can be spread by infected people before symptoms even appear. If the virus had escaped from a BSL-2 laboratory in 2019, the leak most likely would have gone undetected until too late.
• One alarming detail — leaked to The Wall Street Journal and confirmed by current and former U.S. government officials — is that scientists on Dr. Shi’s team fell ill with Covid-like symptoms in the fall of 2019 . One of the scientists had been named in the Defuse proposal as the person in charge of virus discovery work. The scientists denied having been sick .

4 The hypothesis that Covid-19 came from an animal at the Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan is not supported by strong evidence.

• In December 2019, Chinese investigators assumed the outbreak had started at a centrally located market frequented by thousands of visitors daily. This bias in their search for early cases meant that cases unlinked to or located far away from the market would very likely have been missed. To make things worse, the Chinese authorities blocked the reporting of early cases not linked to the market and, claiming biosafety precautions, ordered the destruction of patient samples on January 3, 2020, making it nearly impossible to see the complete picture of the earliest Covid-19 cases. Information about dozens of early cases from November and December 2019 remains inaccessible.
• A pair of papers published in Science in 2022 made the best case for SARS‑CoV‑2 having emerged naturally from human-animal contact at the Wuhan market by focusing on a map of the early cases and asserting that the virus had jumped from animals into humans twice at the market in 2019. More recently, the two papers have been countered by other virologists and scientists who convincingly demonstrate that the available market evidence does not distinguish between a human superspreader event and a natural spillover at the market.
• Furthermore, the existing genetic and early case data show that all known Covid-19 cases probably stem from a single introduction of SARS‑CoV‑2 into people, and the outbreak at the Wuhan market probably happened after the virus had already been circulating in humans.

An analysis of SARS-CoV-2’s evolutionary tree shows how the virus evolved as it started to spread through humans.

SARS-COV-2 Viruses closest

to bat coronaviruses

more mutations

Source: Lv et al., Virus Evolution (2024) , as reproduced by Jesse Bloom

The viruses that infected people linked to the market were most likely not the earliest form of the virus that started the pandemic.

• Not a single infected animal has ever been confirmed at the market or in its supply chain. Without good evidence that the pandemic started at the Huanan Seafood Market, the fact that the virus emerged in Wuhan points squarely at its unique SARS-like virus laboratory.

5 Key evidence that would be expected if the virus had emerged from the wildlife trade is still missing.

In previous outbreaks of coronaviruses, scientists were able to demonstrate natural origin by collecting multiple pieces of evidence linking infected humans to infected animals.

Infected animals

Earliest known

cases exposed to

live animals

Antibody evidence

of animals and

animal traders having

been infected

Ancestral variants

of the virus found in

Documented trade

of host animals

between the area

where bats carry

closely related viruses

and the outbreak site

Infected animals found

Earliest known cases exposed to live animals

Antibody evidence of animals and animal

traders having been infected

Ancestral variants of the virus found in animals

Documented trade of host animals

between the area where bats carry closely

related viruses and the outbreak site

For SARS-CoV-2, these same key pieces of evidence are still missing , more than four years after the virus emerged.

For SARS-CoV-2, these same key pieces of evidence are still missing ,

more than four years after the virus emerged.

• Despite the intense search trained on the animal trade and people linked to the market, investigators have not reported finding any animals infected with SARS‑CoV‑2 that had not been infected by humans. Yet, infected animal sources and other connective pieces of evidence were found for the earlier SARS and MERS outbreaks as quickly as within a few days, despite the less advanced viral forensic technologies of two decades ago.
• Even though Wuhan is the home base of virus hunters with world-leading expertise in tracking novel SARS-like viruses, investigators have either failed to collect or report key evidence that would be expected if Covid-19 emerged from the wildlife trade . For example, investigators have not determined that the earliest known cases had exposure to intermediate host animals before falling ill. No antibody evidence shows that animal traders in Wuhan are regularly exposed to SARS-like viruses, as would be expected in such situations.
• With today’s technology, scientists can detect how respiratory viruses — including SARS, MERS and the flu — circulate in animals while making repeated attempts to jump across species . Thankfully, these variants usually fail to transmit well after crossing over to a new species and tend to die off after a small number of infections. In contrast, virologists and other scientists agree that SARS‑CoV‑2 required little to no adaptation to spread rapidly in humans and other animals . The virus appears to have succeeded in causing a pandemic upon its only detected jump into humans.

The pandemic could have been caused by any of hundreds of virus species, at any of tens of thousands of wildlife markets, in any of thousands of cities, and in any year. But it was a SARS-like coronavirus with a unique furin cleavage site that emerged in Wuhan, less than two years after scientists, sometimes working under inadequate biosafety conditions, proposed collecting and creating viruses of that same design.

While several natural spillover scenarios remain plausible, and we still don’t know enough about the full extent of virus research conducted at the Wuhan institute by Dr. Shi’s team and other researchers, a laboratory accident is the most parsimonious explanation of how the pandemic began.

Given what we now know, investigators should follow their strongest leads and subpoena all exchanges between the Wuhan scientists and their international partners, including unpublished research proposals, manuscripts, data and commercial orders. In particular, exchanges from 2018 and 2019 — the critical two years before the emergence of Covid-19 — are very likely to be illuminating (and require no cooperation from the Chinese government to acquire), yet they remain beyond the public’s view more than four years after the pandemic began.

Whether the pandemic started on a lab bench or in a market stall, it is undeniable that U.S. federal funding helped to build an unprecedented collection of SARS-like viruses at the Wuhan institute, as well as contributing to research that enhanced them . Advocates and funders of the institute’s research, including Dr. Fauci, should cooperate with the investigation to help identify and close the loopholes that allowed such dangerous work to occur. The world must not continue to bear the intolerable risks of research with the potential to cause pandemics .

A successful investigation of the pandemic’s root cause would have the power to break a decades-long scientific impasse on pathogen research safety, determining how governments will spend billions of dollars to prevent future pandemics. A credible investigation would also deter future acts of negligence and deceit by demonstrating that it is indeed possible to be held accountable for causing a viral pandemic. Last but not least, people of all nations need to see their leaders — and especially, their scientists — heading the charge to find out what caused this world-shaking event. Restoring public trust in science and government leadership requires it.

A thorough investigation by the U.S. government could unearth more evidence while spurring whistleblowers to find their courage and seek their moment of opportunity. It would also show the world that U.S. leaders and scientists are not afraid of what the truth behind the pandemic may be.

More on how the pandemic may have started

Where Did the Coronavirus Come From? What We Already Know Is Troubling.

Even if the coronavirus did not emerge from a lab, the groundwork for a potential disaster had been laid for years, and learning its lessons is essential to preventing others.

By Zeynep Tufekci

Why Does Bad Science on Covid’s Origin Get Hyped?

If the raccoon dog was a smoking gun, it fired blanks.

By David Wallace-Wells

A Plea for Making Virus Research Safer

A way forward for lab safety.

By Jesse Bloom

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips . And here’s our email: [email protected] .

Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook , Instagram , TikTok , WhatsApp , X and Threads .

Alina Chan ( @ayjchan ) is a molecular biologist at the Broad Institute of M.I.T. and Harvard, and a co-author of “ Viral : The Search for the Origin of Covid-19.” She was a member of the Pathogens Project , which the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists organized to generate new thinking on responsible, high-risk pathogen research.

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Video: Religion in Times of Earth Crisis: Apocalyptic Grief: Reckoning with Loss, Wrestling with Hope

This was the fourth event in the six-part Religion in Times of Earth Crisis Series.

Human-caused climate change already contributes to manifold global disasters. As the planet inevitably continues to warm, these disasters will be routine and unrelenting. Addressing the reality of loss must become a basic spiritual task of our climate present and future, along with summoning the resolve to respond to all our losses. In this session, Matthew Ichihashi Potts considered the apocalyptic roots of the Christian tradition in order to diagnose how Christianity has contributed to the present crisis and suggest possibilities for a different way forward. Through particular attention to grief and hope as religious categories and with specific reference to various moments and movements from within the Christian tradition, Potts reflected upon the spiritual crisis at the heart of climate catastrophe and suggests the potential for a religious response.

Speaker: Matthew Ichihashi Potts, Plummer Professor of Christian Morals and Pusey Minister in the Memorial Church

Moderator: Diane L. Moore, Diane L. Moore, Associate Dean of Religion and Public Life

Matthew Ichihashi Potts, MDiv '08, PhD '13, was appointed the Pusey Minister in the Memorial Church and the Plummer Professor of Christian Morals in 2021. Potts has served on the faculty at Harvard Divinity School since 2013 and has focused his teaching on sacramental and moral theology, ministry and pastoral theology, religion and literature, and preaching. He is the author of two books, Cormac McCarthy and the Signs of Sacrament: Literature, Theology, and the Moral of Stories (Bloomsbury, 2015) and Forgiveness: An Alternative Account (Yale University Press, 2022). He sits on the editorial board of the journal Literature and Theology. He is also co-host of the podcast Harry Potter and the Sacred Text. Potts served as both an officer in the United States Navy and as a college administrator before being ordained a priest in the Episcopal Church.

For more information on this series, visit https://hds.harvard.edu/news/religion-times-earth-crisis

This event took place on February 26, 2024.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

SPEAKER 1: Harvard Divinity School.

SPEAKER 2: Apocalyptic Grief, Reckoning with Loss, Wrestling with Hope. February 26, 2024.

DIANE L. MOORE: And welcome to all of you who are joining us live for this live web seminar. And welcome also to those who will be viewing this event in a recording of this tonight's session. I'm Diane Moore, and I'm the Associate Dean of Religion and Public Life here at Harvard Divinity School. And on behalf of myself and our Dean, Marla Frederick, we are delighted to welcome all of you to the fourth in a six part series entitled religion in times of Earth crisis.

This series features faculty from Harvard Divinity School, and is intended for a larger public audience of which you all are representative of and we are delighted to be in conversation with you about this critical issue in this critical time. This series is sponsored by Religion and Public Life, and we are in partnership, in co-sponsoring with our colleagues at the Salata Institute for Climate and Sustainability at Harvard University. Our dear friends and colleagues at the Center for the Study of World Religion at Harvard Divinity School, the Constellation Project, and Harvard X.

Please join me as we pause now to offer the Harvard land acknowledgment of land and people. Harvard University is located on the traditional and ancestral land of the Massachusett, the original inhabitants of what is now known as Boston and Cambridge. We pay tribute to the people of the Massachusett tribe, past and present, and honor the land itself, which remains sacred to the Massachusett people.

These events, of course, don't happen in a vacuum. And I am eager to offer appreciation and thanks to our colleagues at Religion and Public Life, who behind the scenes have made all of this happen. Rochelle Siu, Romatzyh, Tammy Liao, and Natalie Campbell. I also want to thank our wonderful colleagues in our communications department, particularly Kristi Welch for the beautiful posters that animate this series in such a powerful way.

And our dear friend and colleague, Kamal Lord, in our IT department who helps make sure that this series runs with as few glitches as possible. The entire series has really been inspired by our colleague, Professor Mayra Rivera, who was the president of the American Academy of Religion, which is the professional associations of scholars of religion.

She was the president in 2022, and gave a powerful address for her presidential address. And I want to read an excerpt from that presentation. And then also another scholar and colleague who has inspired us with his writings, but first from Mayra. We need a more capacious sense of collectivity that can only emerge when we are willing to honor our stories and tell the truth about injustices that are shaped both environmental devastation and responses to it. We need a world of our many worlds, and that's from Mayra Rivera.

And the second quote is from Amitav Ghosh in his remarkable publication called The Nutmegs Curse. This is from Ghosh. This is the great burden that now rests upon writers, artists, filmmakers, and everyone else who is involved in telling stories. To us falls the task of imaginatively restoring agency and voice to non-humans. As with all the most important artistic endeavors in human history, this is a task that is once aesthetic and political. And because of the magnitude of the crisis that besets the planet, it is now freighted with the most pressing moral urgency. Again, Amitav Ghosh, The Nutmeg's Curse.

We're so excited to share the work of our colleagues at HDS because like colleagues in religious studies and all of the humanities, so much of the conversation about climate, and climate catastrophe, and the Earth crisis is about the science and the challenges that beset us in public policy. These are very critical questions and issues.

But what is often overlooked is the contribution that the humanities can offer. And what the humanities invite us to consider is, what are the ways that we are even thinking about these challenges? And particularly relevant to Ghosh's quote, what are the stories that shape both the current way that we think about crises across a variety of genres, but also what other stories can invite us to think imaginatively in fresh ways about what we think we already know?

And that is what we hope that this series of conversations will spark both for us as we engage with each other, and also with you, our audience. So before I turn to introduce our speaker for the evening, I just want to remind you of a few things. This event is being recorded.

It will be-- a recording of the event will be available on our website at Harvard Divinity School Religion and Public Life in a few days time once the transcripts are provided for that sharing. I also want to say that Professor Potts will be speaking for about 50 minutes, and then we will have time for question and answers for another 40 or 45 minutes, depending on the timing, and we will end promptly at 7:30.

So please, as you're hearing him and listening to him, please be thinking about questions that we hope you will put into the Q&A function at the bottom of the web screen, and trust that we're all quite familiar now with Zoom and webinars. But there is a Q&A function at the bottom, and you can ask your question either with your name or you can ask it anonymously, but we hope to have a rich flow of many questions, so thank you for that.

So it is now my incredible pleasure to introduce a beloved colleague and friend, Professor Matthew Ichihashi Potts. Matt is the-- was appointed the PUC Minister in the Memorial Church, and the Plummer Professor of Christian Morals in 2021, but he has been a member of the faculty at Harvard Divinity School since 2013. He's focused his teaching on sacramental and moral theology, ministry and pastoral theology, religion and literature, and preaching.

He's the author of two books, Cormac McCarthy and the Signs of Sacrament Literature, Theology, and the Moral of Stories, published by Bloomsbury in 2015. And most recently his very highly acclaimed and incredibly creative and critical text entitled, Forgiveness: an Alternative Account, published by Yale University Press in 2022.

Matt's presentation tonight is entitled, Apocalyptic Grief, Reckoning with Loss and Wrestling with Hope, and it is a part of his current book project, next book project, which is also tentatively titled, Apocalyptic Grief. So Matt, we'll turn it over to you, and thank you so very much for being part of this critical conversation.

MATTHEW ICHIHASHI POTTS: Thank you, Diane. I hope everybody can hear me OK. And thanks to the Religion and Public Life, and to everyone at the [INAUDIBLE] who has done so much to make this happen. To Marie Michelle Tammy, Naomi, I'm grateful to be with you tonight and to talk about this stuff. I'm going to share my screen now, so everyone can see what we're talking about. So Apocalyptic Grief: Reckoning with Loss, Wrestling with Hope.

Just from the introduction that Diane just gave, in many ways this conversation, this series of slides I'm going to talk through with you tonight is about stories. The stories that form the way we relate to the world around us. And one of the things I'm going to try to do is think about how some of the stories that at least have formed the Christian tradition, how they have led us to the predicament we're in. I mean predicaments kind of a euphemism or an understatement, but I want to talk about how maybe one interpretation of the stories that we read together and have passed down have led us to this situation we're in.

But I also want to lift up some possibilities from within tradition for thinking through these stories in a different way. And the two main themes I want to focus on in the next 45 or so minutes are the themes of loss or grief and hope so. Those are going to be the main categories of thought, or affect, or whatever I want to explore together.

So I'm going to start with a little bit of a story. Actually, which is that I've been worried about climate change for a long time like any, I think-- like a lot of people, like most people, I think, who are paying attention to the world around us, and trusting the evaluations of those who the science. I think, I've been worried about climate change for a while. But the idea behind this thing about apocalyptic grief began when I attended a session down in Falmouth, Massachusetts, I guess it was six or seven years ago now, maybe more, seven or eight years ago.

I used to live in Falmouth, so I used to Pastor a church down there and I commuted up here to teach. And Falmouth is home to the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute which is one of the great scientific centers in this country, and they have a lot of scientists working on climate change, and a lot of people in the community who are concerned about climate change. And I went to an event in one of the churches in town that was about Christianity and the climate crisis.

And they invited some folks who were fairly well known in Christian circles as eco theologians or people thinking about how Christians should respond to the climate crisis. And there were some scientists there, but there were also these theologians. And I sat through this presentation, and it really kind of bothered me because the especially the Christian theologians who were presenting the-- who were presenting their work, said things that I couldn't really agree with. They said things like, if we make the right choices now, if we do the right things, if we turn and repent from our ways, then we can avoid the catastrophes which are coming.

And it seemed to me that the scientific evidence said that there's already some catastrophe baked into the system. And in fact, if we look around the world today, we know that these things are already happening. Climate change is not something that's going to happen in the future if we do not repent in the present. Climate change is something that is happening and has been happening.

And I'm worried about this formulation, a Christian triumphalist formulation which is, if we repent, if we turn around, then God will come in and undo all the bad effects that we might have set ourselves up for. And it seemed to me an inadequate way to respond to the reality of the task at hand, which is one where there is some calamity baked into the system. And that what we really need is to think about what it means to live into and through calamity with some courage, with some justice.

And that's where I thought the Christian tradition is, could be useful to us. Not in telling us a story about how we might avoid it. Although, I think we should try to mitigate as many effects as possible, but I thought that was a little bit of a magical thinking or something, which Christianity could be rightly accused of at times. So that got me thinking about things. And it was also informed by this article that came out in New York Magazine in July of 2017 called the Uninhabitable Earth, where this author named David Wallace-Wells wrote a really harrowing account of what the future will look like if we are not able to remain I can't remember exactly the degrees. I think it was 3 or 3.5 degrees Celsius.

If we were not able to contain climate change, warming to within that range. And it was truly horrifying. I mean, there was that article, and I remember there were follow on articles saying about how bothered they were by this article. Interestingly enough, in the last year or so, I think, David wallace-wells has written again and said that even some of those predictions have gotten less severe. But still, I mean, this article really affected me, like it affected a lot of people.

But one of the things that Wallace-Wells said in that article is he said, scientists are in a bind because they don't know how to talk to the general public about dangers this grave and horrifying. He said, they feel like if they tell the truth people will despair, and do nothing, and if they lie people will not recognize the urgency and do nothing, and so their only option is people doing nothing, so what do they do?

And what I was thinking is, I think, that we have access to more realism or we can accommodate more realism than that, most humans. I think that we have access to some resolve. We don't always, but I think that we do, and I actually think that if we read the Christian tradition in the right way, we might be able to orient ourselves towards that courage, towards that resolve, without compromising any of the realism that's required. But that means that we need to wrestle with a couple of things that have been part of the Christian tradition in inconsistent and problematic ways since the beginning, which is how we deal with loss, and what we mean by hope.

And so I really want to engage ideas of grief and hope in this talk. And as Diane said, this is the beginning of a book project. What I'm going to be talking to you about tonight is like me kind of working out, working through some of the early theology. I'm actually really grateful for this talk because I forced me to get a little bit deeper into some of the questions of hope than I had been before.

But like a lot of my scholarship, my focus is going to be very much on literary work. So I'm going to talk to you about the ideas behind how I want to talk about grief and hope in this talk tonight. But if folks want to talk about literature or film, the kinds of things, the texts that I'm going to take up in the book when I eventually write it, I'd be happy to talk about that during the Q&A. OK, so apocalypse, this is the Michelangelo's Last Judgment, it's the Sistine Chapel.

I think Mayra said this in the first talk of this series, but it's important to note that what we tend to think of as apocalypse is not what the word actually means. I think right now, if you Google apocalypse or image search apocalypse, you'll see end of the world type scenarios, maybe even see this Last Judgment from Michelangelo. But end of the world is what we think apocalypse means, but that's not actually what it means. As I said, I think Mayra already covered this so I won't belabor it.

But the word apocalypse is just the Greek word for revelation or unveiling. The reason why the last book of the Bible is called the Revelations of John or Revelations is because it's-- and it's also considered an apocalypse is because it's the same word. Now, apocalypse is not only like the word for revelation, it also became a dominant literary genre from-- I'm not an early Christian, or historian, or scholar of the ancient Mediterranean, but from about 200 BCE to about 1 to 200 CE apocalypse or the apocalyptic was a dominant literary genre.

And what apocalypse does or what the apocalyptic genre does, is it reveals the meaning behind things. So especially in a situation where there is great suffering or where the world does not seem to be going according to God's plan, apocalypse was supposed to be the revelation of God's plan. Here's the meaning behind all this stuff that's going on. It looks like there's no plan here, actually, there is a plan it's just hidden, and we'll unveil it, and you will see it.

Now, often that unveiling comes at the end of time, at the end of history. And so apocalypse came to be associated with the kind of end of history narrative, but it just means unveiling, it just means the revelation of the meaning of something. And in particular, I think the reason it becomes popular in that kind of 300 to 400 year window is because there was great suffering among Jewish peoples. And this is the kind of genre that arose, how do we make sense of this catastrophe that's going on around us?

And these genres would emerge, which we're trying to make sense, trying to reveal what the meaning behind these things were. So there are many Christian apocalypses. Some would say that the whole New Testament is apocalyptic, there are lots of apocalyptic literary works or whatever. You could consider each of the Gospels, at least, the three synoptics, but maybe each of the four Gospels on apocalypse in one sense.

At the very least, each of the synoptics, Matthew, Mark, and Luke have a chapter or two just before Jesus is killed where Jesus talks about the ends, and what's going to happen in the future, and what will be revealed, and those are often called the little apocalypses. But in a broader sense, you could also see each of the Gospels as an apocalypse. Now, to develop this kind of conversation that I want to have tonight about grief and hope, I'm going to focus on two. The first is the Gospel of Mark, and the second is what's called the Showings of Julian of Norwich.

The Gospel of Mark. So this is an image-- it's I mean, it's a cramped image, you're not seeing the whole painting. This is Tintoretto, Jacopo Tintoretto, who is a great artist of Venice, and it's a painting of the body of Saint Mark, his remains being translated to Saint Mark's Cathedral in Rome. And his body is supposed to be a thing about 600 years old by then, so he's looking pretty good. So the Gospel of Mark, I want to give you some history for the composition of the Gospel of Mark.

So the Gospel of Mark, scholars believe it was written in probably the year like early '70s AD. And that's important because it means it was written after the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem. And I think it's especially for Christians who don't know this history, who aren't reminded of this history consistently, it's kind of hard for us Christians, and I'm speaking as a Christian and as a Christian theologian now. I think, it's hard for us to really get our heads around how catastrophic and how apocalyptic the destruction of the temple and the destruction of Jerusalem was in the year 70 AD.

So there had been an insurrection and then Rome had decided to come down very hard. And they sieged Jerusalem for several years, and then burned Jerusalem to the ground. It was truly, I mean, truly apocalyptic. If apocalypse means end of the world, the world ended for people who lived in and around the capital of Judea at that time. Josephus, who is a reliable historian in other cases, we're not sure how reliable his figures are now, but we have no reason to believe that he was exaggerating tremendously. Probably exaggerating a little, but he said, hundreds of thousands of people were killed, hundreds of thousands were enslaved and taken to Rome.

He said, as many as 500 people a day were crucified in and around the city walls during the siege of Jerusalem. I think we have to really think through what this means. The streets in and around Jerusalem just lined with naked, tortured bodies, and crucifixes everywhere.

And then, the whole city burned to the ground and made a minor encampment for the Roman military after that. The temple and Jerusalem were the cultural and religious center of the Jewish diaspora, and that destruction was cataclysmic, it was apocalyptic, it meant the end of the world for these people. And the Gospel of Mark arises right in the wake of that, while people are still suffering. Their families still killed, their relatives, and loved ones, and friends enslaved, all of this going on.

And then the other Gospels follow. Mark was probably the first gospel of Matthew, Luke, John, they follow. So this is the apocalyptic situation in which the Gospel of Mark is written. And I think it's important for understanding what the gospel says. So two things I want to focus on about the story it tells. So the Gospel of Mark you can read in halves, there are other ways to break it up. But the first half is sort of, Jesus and his ministry in Galilee.

And then the first half of the gospel, I mean, He's working miracles left and right. He's healing everybody, and He's taking care of everybody, and He's doing magical things, He's walking on water, He's calming storms, He's feeding 4,000, He's feeding 5,000, He's raising the dead, He is exhibiting signs of immense, immense power. And as in this kind of remote backwater of Galilee, and as He exhibits these signs of immense, immense power people start following him, of course, they do.

Here's this powerful, charismatic leader who can raise the dead, who can calm storms, who can take a loaf and feed 5,000 people, they're starting to follow him and they're talking. And they're talking to each other and Jesus hears them talking, this is in Mark 8. Jesus hears them talking and says to his disciples, well, what are they saying about me? And they're saying, oh, there's some saying you're a prophet, some say this, some say that. And then Jesus says to them, what do you say about me? And this is a very famous line, and it's one that the Christian tradition does a lot of-- puts a lot of weight behind, but Peter says, you're the Messiah, you're the anointed one of God, and Jesus says, you're right.

And this is like this big turning point in the gospel. Halfway through, about halfway through Peter makes this declaration. He finally recognizes based upon all these acts of power that this is who Jesus is. And Jesus says, you're right. And then Jesus says, and I'm going to go to Jerusalem, and I'm going to suffer and die. And then Peter-- I preached about this yesterday at church, and then Peter says, by no means, that can't happen to you because what's at stake for Peter is Peter is thinking like everybody else, you are powerful, you can do the most phenomenal feats of power, you can calm storms, you can feed thousands, you can raise the dead, you are the person to lead us to this triumph.

You are the one who has the power to help us overthrow the boot of Roman oppression, which is on our necks. And Jesus says, no, that's actually not what all these miracles are about. What's actually happening is, during what Jesus is doing is Jesus is reaching out to the poor, and to outcasts, and people outside the community, to Gentiles, and this is what he holds on to.

And what He's saying in Mark 8 and my reading is, when He says we are going to Jerusalem, and He says that he must suffer and die, that must is really important. That He must suffer and die. It doesn't mean that suffering is like this necessary, redemptive thing. I think what Jesus is saying in that moment is, no, I am not going to turn away from what my true calling, my true mission is, which is not deeds of power, but serving the lost, and reaching out in mercy and goodness.

And I will go to Jerusalem and reach out in mercy and goodness. And even there, if it costs me my life, I will not turn away from mercy and goodness. That's not what they want to hear. And what happens in the second half of Gospel Mark is he stops with the miracles. He does almost no miracles in the whole second half of the gospel. He curses one fig tree, which is a weird thing. He curses one fig tree, and it withers and dies. But apart from that, He does almost no miraculous stuff. And He goes into the city on Palm Sunday, and they think that He's a new kind of warrior, general king, and they're cheering him as if He is one. And then they find out He's not, and they're upset with Him.

And when he is brought before Pilate, He goes to the death that he predicted. it's this incredibly ignominious and gruesome end to this story, precisely because He wasn't the person that Peter had first thought that He would be. But there's something really important about how it ends, when it ends. So this is the last-- I'll qualify this in a second, but this is chapter 16. The first eight verses of chapter 16 from the Gospel of Mark.

And this is actually the original ending of the Gospel of Mark, the oldest versions of the Gospel of Mark that we have. And at the end of verse 8, and this is what it says. "When the Sabbath was over, Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James, and Salome bought spices, so that they might go and anoint him. And very early on the first day of the week, when the sun had risen, they went to the tomb. They had been saying to one another, who will roll away the stone for us from the entrance to the tomb?

When they looked up, they saw that the stone, which was very large, had already been rolled back. As they entered the tomb, they saw a young man, dressed in a white robe, sitting on the right side, and they were alarmed. But he said to them, 'Do not be alarmed, you are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has been raised, He is not here. Look, there is the place they laid him. But go, tell his disciples and Peter that he is going ahead of you to Galilee, there you will see him just as he told you.' And then this last line. So they went out and fled from the tomb for terror and amazement had seized them, and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid."

So this is the first testimony of Jesus. The first line of the Gospel of Mark is, this is the good news of the Gospel of Mark. And the last word, the last line of the Gospel of Mark is, for they were afraid. And afraid maybe undersells it here. It says something more like, in Greek it says, for they were terrified. So this gospel, which is supposed to be the good news, it ends in terror. It ends in these women going to the tomb, seeing the tomb empty, and being terrified.

It seems to me that what the gospel is doing is different than what we think the gospel is doing when we talk about resurrection. It's suggesting something else. Now, what we know is, maybe 5 or 10 years later, they added some more to the end of the gospel, and Jesus shows up in a more overt and obvious way, and talks to them. And a few years later, they added even more to the gospel or Jesus shows up more times, and gives them more assurances. But in the first version of this, which is written when Jerusalem is still smoldering, and the bodies are still on the crosses all around, they end in terror and fear.

And it seems to me posturally, theologically, what this first version of the earliest gospel was inviting its readers to do was to think about what it means to live with and through terror and fear. What it means to look to stare into emptiness, to look into the tomb and see emptiness, and to turn, and live with that fear. And what we see looking retrospectively is that, what Jesus had done throughout, which is reaching out to the outcast, reaching out to the poor, reaching out to the marginalized, this is what it is recommending as the way we should live when we have fear, when we face emptiness.

We turn to each other because this is what it says that the women said nothing to anyone. We know that's not true because I'm talking about it right now. They said something to someone. And what happened is in the wake of this utter destruction, a community of people, who started caring for each other in the way that Jesus taught them to care for each other, rose up.

It was not one built around kind of his fabulous deeds of power, not only because they couldn't do them, but also because that's not what they had available to them. What they had were these more mundane, but also revolutionary practices of care and community. And I think this, before the more obvious physical Resurrection appearances are appended to the end of this first version of the first gospel, that is what people were suggesting this is what we do, this is how we live in this moment of emptiness, and fear, and terror.

And so this thing about resurrection and Christian triumphalism. I think, that's a hard thing to do. I think, the reason the gospel is written is because the author is looking around at the ruin and destruction around him, and is saying, we need a way to live in the midst of ruin and destruction, and here is our model. Jesus gives us our model on how we can support each other, how we can live with each other. But that's a hard thing to do because what you want instead is for everything to get better, is to not have to stare into the empty tomb, to not have to end in fear, and not have to face terror.

And so what we have are different versions of the resurrection story appearing, and being appended, and being discussed in different ways. Now, this is something we can talk about in the Q&A. I actually think that there are very viable ways to read the Gospels of Mark. And excuse me, of Matthew, and Luke, and John, which are consistent with this reading, which also want to, I think, maybe contemporary Christian readings of the Resurrection over read those ancient stories. Those ancient stories too are inviting us into this productive relationship with emptiness, with loss, with fear rather than trying to kind of shunt or push those feelings of fear and terror away.

But there's a version of Christian triumphalism that emerges which says, if we are willing to endure suffering, then there will be some resolution at the end where it will all go away. I'll say more about that in a second, but I to look at some other sources first. So this is the other apocalypse I want to discuss tonight. As far as I know, I'm not sure anyone has called this an apocalypse, but I think it must count by any broad definition of what an apocalypse is.

So I want to talk to you about the Showings of Julian of Norwich. Julian of Norwich is a Saint, well, I guess, she's not officially a saint in the Roman Catholic Church, she is in my tradition. Julian of Norwich is a woman from the 14th century, mid-14th century in East Anglia, England. She lived as an anchoress, which means that we can talk about this during the Q&A as well, but that means that she was walled in to the side of a church, to Saint Julian's Church in Norwich, a church you can still visit if you go to Norwich, and she lived there.

Now, the 14th century, if 70 AD in ancient Judea was a time of literal apocalypse for the Jewish people, then 14th century England was also a time of apocalypse in ways that will probably sound familiar to many of us. There was climate change, there was a little Ice Age in the early 14th century, which because it was an agricultural society in Europe, it led to widespread famine.

And the average lifespan drop down into the low 20s or early teens, just from the famine but there was more to come. The bubonic plague also came in the 14th century. And the bubonic plague ended up killing, depending upon your various historians estimates, anywhere from a fifth to a half of the European population.

All this death and destruction led to an incredible amount of unrest and disease among the people. Institutions that they had trusted like the church, like governments, began to be distrusted, so there were all kinds of religious rebellions, all kinds of political rebellions. There was a war between England and France that killed many people. That in England they were prosecutions of immigrants, there was an insurrection in London. I think they beheaded the Lord high treasurer, and imprisoned the Archbishop of Canterbury. All this stuff going on in the 14th century.

And at this time, this woman whose name we don't know, we call her Julian of Norwich because she was attached to the Church of Saint, Julian she had some kind of grave illness. Maybe it was plague, maybe it wasn't, but she had some kind of grave illness. And while in her grave illness, she had a vision of Jesus coming to her. And what the message Jesus brought her in her illness was one of love. And so what's called the showings of divine-- of the showings of Julian of Norwich is also known as the revelations of divine love.

Now, there's so much in this text, it's incredibly rich, and we can talk about it during the Q&A if you like. But I just want to focus on two parts of it, which I think are really instrumental. At least, the way I want to put it in conversation with the Gospel of Mark, and also the way I want to think about things like grief and hope. So those you are heaven and you are my crown, and I'll talk about those next. So this is a moment in the revelations.

Early on in the revelations, Julian is recounting this experience we had, she had the Jesus. And Jesus comes to her in a vision while she is in her sick bed. And the vision she has of Jesus in a way that is very consistent with many medieval visions of this sort, is incredibly gruesome. There are sheets of blood coming down his face, and his body is desiccated and dry, and the blood cakes and dries, and then more blood comes, and she's-- it's incredibly gruesome, and she loves Jesus dearly, and she's having a hard time looking at him.

And this is when this moment comes. And then I thought my reasons suggested to me as if there had been said to me in a friendly way, look up to heaven to his father. And then I saw clearly with the faith that I felt that there was nothing between the cross and heaven, which could have distressed me. Either I must look up or else reply. I answered inwardly with all my soul's strength and said, no, I cannot for you are my heaven. Now, what's really fascinating about this is that, Jesus, excuse me, Julian has this vision of Jesus in this immense pain. This person she loves in this immense pain.

And then her reason says to her, and she sees clearly that she could be carried up to the Father, she could be carried up to heaven. All she has to do is look away from the cross and look up to heaven. There is nothing between the cross and heaven which could distress her. If she looks away and looks up, she will be carried away to paradise. And she has to make a decision, and the decision she makes inwardly with all her soul strength is to say, no, I cannot for you or my heaven.

She looks at Jesus and says, you are the one I love, so you are the one I want to be with, and I'm not going to turn away from you even though I'm afraid, even though this is gruesome. Heaven is not out there someplace for me to escape the suffering or the difficulty of the present because I love you. I will remain in the difficulty of the present because you are my heaven I mean this is interesting in its own right but it's also interesting in the way it's mirrored by the language of Jesus so she has this conversation with Jesus.

And this is actually not-- this is not in his own words, but he had asked in the moment the quote I'm going to give you right now, Jesus has just said to her, are you satisfied with how much I suffered for you? And she's kind of like, what do you mean satisfied? What are you talking about? And then while they're talking about whether or not she's satisfied, whether she's pleased at what he did for her, she has another vision of these three levels of heaven, and then the first heaven is what she describes here. This is the action of the Father that he rewards His son, Jesus Christ.

This gift and this reward causes Jesus such joy that His father could have given Him no reward that could have pleased Him better. So this is what she's saying, she's saying, I had this vision, and I had this vision that Jesus had to suffer for us. And I learned that God gave Jesus this wonderful reward and I started wondering, but what could be this wonderful reward that God gave Jesus for suffering for us? The first heaven was full of bliss for the father is highly pleased with all deeds Jesus has done with regard to our salvation.

And therefore, we are not only His through His redemption of us, but also through His father's courteous gift. We are His bliss, we are His reward, we are His glory, we are His crown. So Julian comes to Jesus and says, boy, you suffered so much for us, God must have given you something really great. There must been some great reward that God gave you for doing what you did for us, for me, right? And what Jesus says to her is, you are the reward, you are the gift. There is no thing beyond you that you are the way that I get to.

There is not some greater good that I'm going to arrive at if I go through you, you are the one I love. It's a mirror of what she says to Jesus too when she sees Jesus suffering. I'm not trying to get to some other heaven, you are the heaven, love itself is the reward. And this is what Jesus says to Julian as well. I wasn't trying to suffer so I could get to some greater good beyond you, you are the greatest good because love is its own reward. And this really becomes, I think, the argument of the revelations.

Now, I don't want to overstate this, Julian has a vision of paradise of bliss beyond all this, but she also insists that love is the whole meaning of everything. And when we exist in love, we have already arrived at whatever our reward will be, even in spite of whatever sufferings we are enduring. There's a strong sense, in a way I think that echoes, obviously very differently, but in a way that I think that echoes the Gospel of Mark, which is saying that love is its own reward.

That facing terror, and pain, and loss is where-- in love is what we are meant to do, it's not some conduit or escape hatch by which we arrive at some kind of greater security or salvation. And this is where we can start talking about grief and hope in a less theological, maybe more theoretical event. So a lot of the way I'm thinking about grief comes from the writings of a really important theorist that many of you, I'm sure, have heard of named Judith Butler.

This book Precarious Life came out in the mid aughts or early aughts, I think, 2003 or four, or something. And I'm focusing on the first essay of this book, which is called Violence Mourning and Politics. And in that work she talks about grief, and grief ability, and about grief as the ground for ethics, so these are just a few quotes from her writings there. Right at the beginning of the essay, she writes, she asks these questions, who counts as human? Whose lives count as lives?

She's thinking about the US involvement in Iraq at the time, and the way that we were grieving both Iraqis who were killed in the war, and American soldiers were killed in the war, but she's also talking about the AIDS pandemic in the United States when she's talking about who counts as human, whose lives count as lives. And finally, what makes for a grievable life? Despite our differences in location and history, all of us have a notion of what it is to have lost somebody. Loss has made a tenuous we of us all.

And if we have lost, then it follows that we have had, that we have desired and loved, that we have struggled to find the conditions of our desire. Butler, she's a critical-- they are a critical theorist and they often use language as is kind of difficult and in the tradition of critical theory. But part of what is going on in this quote here is that, what they are suggesting is that, what makes a life grievable is that we love it. And we love those lives, which we are afraid of losing, and which are also precarious, which could be lost.

Our urge to protect, our urge to love, our impulse to grieve after we lose that which we love is a sign that we love. She's there diagnosing this idea that grief and love go together. We love that which we would grieve losing, and we grieve that which we love. Loss is the thing that ties love and grief together. And if that is true, Butler suggests that grief can become something of foundation for our politics, but maybe not in the ways that it often is.

So here, later on in the essay, when grieving is something to be feared, if we don't think of grieving as a line with love, but think of grieving as something we have to suppress or something that we can't face, if we look away from the empty tomb and don't want to face emptiness and fear or terror like the end of the Gospel of Mark does, when grieving is something to be feared, our fears can give rise to the impulse to resolve it quickly, to banish it in the name of an action invested with the power to restore the loss of return the world to a former order, or to reinvigorate a fantasy that the world formerly was orderly.

So when we fear grief, when we can't look in that empty tomb, then we start to take actions that restore the loss or return the world to order. We either tell stories that help us to look away from the empty tomb, or we do other similar things, or we reinvigorate a fantasy that the world formerly was orderly. This inability to grieve becomes problematic because we start taking actions that don't reckon with the world as it actually is. And therefore, become inclined towards forms of injustice that we're going to in a minute.

To grieve, they say later on, and to make grief itself a resource for politics, is not to be resigned to inaction because they're concerned that, maybe if we're thinking about grief, we're just thinking about wallowing in sackcloth and ashes. They say it's not that. It's not to be resigned to inaction, but it may be understood as a slow process by which we develop a point of identification with suffering itself.

To grieve, to recognize what is precarious, which lives are precarious, which lives are at risk, which is all of them. Is to start to understand that these lives are precious. They're precious because they are at risk, and therefore we have an obligation to protect them. We start to pay attention to their suffering. If we refuse to grieve, if we refuse to acknowledge that things are at risk, then why would we be inclined to protect them?

It's only by acknowledging grief, sort of anticipatory grief. Only by acknowledging that which we might lose, that's the only kind of-- that's the only way we progress to a real, fulsome love. Knowing that a thing is at risk, knowing that we might lose it, knowing that we will lose it, is exactly the thing that encourages us to try to protect it, and to care for it. So failure to grieve becomes a failure to love. This becomes very ironic, or very paradoxical, or very critical if we look at something like the later versions of the ending of the Gospel of Mark.

The first version of the Gospel of Mark is fully willing to grieve. There's fear, terror, and emptiness, but it's still called the Good news of God in Jesus Christ. And all we have left are all Jesus's actions on behalf of those who are suffering and poor. That is all that's left, and that's the good news, and it looks right at that emptiness and terror. And then you have versions added on which become gradually more triumphal, gradually more unwilling to grieve in that particular way.

And it raises the question if it also becomes less willing. To love pays less attention to all those precarious lies because it becomes completely fixated, excuse me, less available to all those precarious lives because its vision becomes completely fixated upon that one life which is no longer at any risk, the life of this risen Jesus. So this failure to grieve could be read as a failure to love in the way that the first version of the gospel is maybe calling us to.

So let me talk about hope for a minute. As I said, I've been working through some stuff on hope, so there's more bullet points here, but I promise we won't go too deep into the weeds on some of the theology. Now, hope is one of the three theological virtues that Paul outlines faith, hope, and love. Those of you who are familiar with the Christian tradition might be familiar with the way Paul talks about this. But it doesn't really talk in any kind of exhaustive or systematic way about what these virtues are. He gives a little bit of description of them, and I want to look at the way that Paul describes them a little bit. This is a depiction of Paul here.

So this is in Romans 5. And not only that, but we also boast in our sufferings knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us. What's interesting here is that hope is very closely tied to God's love being poured into our hearts.

I want to talk about that again. I mean, there's also all this stuff about suffering, and I think probably our Q&A we're going to have to reckon with the Christian the harmful and problematic Christian tradition of valorizing suffering. And I think, Paul's up to a little bit of that here. But the main thing I want to point to and call back to later is this idea that hope and love are closely related. That's not the way he talks about hope necessarily in Romans 8. Paul says, "For in hope we are saved. Now, hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what is seen? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience."

So hope is not the same thing as seeing. If you can see it, it's there. But here, hope is something about a relationship to the future. It's something about anticipating an outcome. Now, these two versions of hope don't have to be in tension. This idea that hope is from God's love being poured into us, that hope is related to love, and that hope is about anticipating an outcome. They don't have to be in tension, but I think they are in tension in some important ways. And I actually want to lift up one and critique the other.

And the way I want to critique the other is starting with this guy here who is Friedrich Nietzsche. Now, Nietzsche in the 19th century, you'll see here the first line. This is from Human, All Too Human which is one of his earlier works. He calls hope the worst of all evils because it prolongs the torments of man. This is a very Nietzsche line. But he's very much concerned with hope like delusion, hope is a delusion.

You have no evidence, Nietzsche would say. You have no evidence that things are going to go the way you want them to go, and yet you hope in something that has no evidence, and all it's doing is prolonging your torments. Your faith in this delusion is just a way that you're torturing yourself. And persisting, it's the worst of all evils because it is a delusion. He says also in Human, All Too Human, we are only reasonably entitled to hope when we believe that we and our equals have more strength in the heart and head than the representatives of the existing state of things.

Now, this is really important here. He says, there is some reason for hope. We can have hope in ourselves. If we are sure or believe that we are stronger than our opponents, or at least that we are stronger than the inept people who are running things, then we can hope because that's a hope where we can have some confidence. But what he's really worried about is what he's calling here extraterrestrial hopes.

Nietzsche was just kind of anathema to any kind of hope in anything beyond this world, any kind of supernatural anything, any kind of supernatural hope, or religious hope, or theological hope he would call it, he saw as poisonous. He said because what that does is-- he said it was a kind of nihilism. He's often accused of being a nihilist, but it's actually the opposite. He thought that if you had placed all your hopes in some great beyond or in some other world, that naturally would stop paying attention to this world. That you would believe in something which doesn't exist out there that other world, that supernatural world, which he did not believe in.

And displacing all your cares and concerns to that world would make you ignore what is right here in front of you, which is where you should be focusing actually, all your energy. So it was in particular extraterrestrial hopes or supernatural hopes that he hated. But he also had other ways of speaking about hope, when hope was placed in the here and now. In particular around ethics, that mankind be redeemed from revenge, that to me is the bridge to the highest hope and a rainbow after long thunderstorms. He had this recurring image of hope as a rainbow, hope is the rainbow over the cascading stream of life.

And I think that's it's an ambivalent image because the rainbow is kind of an optical illusion. But it also is a beautiful thing that is part of the world around us, part of this world where we are living. So he hated hope in the one sense, but he hated it for the way it's confidence in an outcome it could not prove could lead to delusion. Now, that's not the way more contemporary folks are talking about hope. This is Vaclav Havel, who was President of Czechoslovakia and the Czech Republic, also a literary writer.

And in one of his books he has this short passage on hope, where he says, hope in this deep and powerful sense is not the same as joy, that things are going well. It's not the same as willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously headed for early success. But rather hope is a willingness to work for something because it is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed.

Hope is the willingness to work for something because it is good in itself, not because of what it is going to become or succeed. Think of Julian looking at Jesus's face and saying, no, you are my heaven. I don't love you so I can get to someplace else, I love you because I love you. Or Jesus in turn saying to Julian, you are my reward. I didn't love you so I could get something better from God for the sake of you, I love you for you. Hope is a willingness to work for something because it is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed. The more unpropitious the situation in which we demonstrate hope, the deeper that hope is.

Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It's not the first version of Nietzsche's critique, which is that things are going to turn out well for no reason. You have no evidence to believe it will. It is not the conviction that things will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense regardless of how it turns out. Now, I don't know if the translation from Czech makes sense is, to me, makes sense seems not really to carry the full weight of what he's trying to say, but the certainty that what we are doing has meaning whatever the outcome.

That what we are doing has meaning whatever the outcome. That I did this for you, not because you could get me to someplace else in the way that Julian and Jesus say to one another. This is Gustavo Gutierrez, the founder of Latin American Liberation theology, who around the same time that Vaclav Havel was writing what he was writing about hope, he had an interview in which he said this, hope is not the same thing as optimism. Optimism merely reflects the desire that external circumstances may one day approve there's nothing wrong with optimism, but we may not always have reasons for it.

I think the implication there is, if we have no reasons for it, there could be something wrong with it because it makes us believe that things will improve even though they won't, and that makes us complacent in a way that Nietzsche, I think, would find reprehensible. The theological virtue of hope is much more than optimism. Hope is based on the conviction that God is at work in our lives and in the world. So this is Terry Eagleton in a recent book of his, which is called Hope Without Optimism, where he's really playing on and developing these ideas of Havel and Gutierrez, although he doesn't-- I'm not sure he actually directly attributes either of them.

And then when he's talking about hope here, he's quite grave in his description. There are occasions when men and women must die in order to defend a principle that makes life worth living. I mean, this is the description of Jesus in the second half of the Gospel of Mark, powerful enough to rule with power and to lead insurrection, but committed to principles that peace, and mercy, and forgiveness, and goodness are the values by which he is going to live.

And so there are occasions when we live by hope, when men and women must die in order to defend a principle that makes life worth living. There is more at stake in acting than dismal or agreeable outcomes. Hope can acknowledge loss or destruction to be unavoidable, which is where it differs from some currents of optimism, it still refused to capitulate. Hope can acknowledge that a bad outcome is unavoidable, but it acts not because it feels it can guarantee a good outcome, but because the action is worthwhile in itself because the thing for which we were acting is good and deserves our action, even if we can't save it, even if we can't guarantee the outcome.

What this means is that, I think, hope is wrongly been characterized as a form of knowledge. Hope is a way we can have a relationship to what's going to happen in the future, know what's going to happen in the future. And I don't think that's actually what it is. At least in my theology like all things, it actually should be rooted in love.

And if hope is a form of love, it's actually not about knowing what the outcome of the future is going to be, it's actually deciding what is worth acting for in the present regardless of outcome. Even if I cannot save the future, even if I cannot guarantee an outcome, this is worth acting on. This is Julian looking at the face of Jesus and saying, you are my heaven. These are the women going to the tomb at the end of the Gospel of Mark saying, even though we cannot save our beloved friend, Jesus, anymore, we are going to roll back the stone we can't roll and care for this body that we can't raise.

And what I think is really important here is how this confounds the logic of capitalism. And maybe the confounds the logic of extractive capitalism in particular, where the worst-- excuse me, where the Earth exists for us to use it, so that we can ensure our own security. The purpose of the Earth by the logic of extractive capitalism is that the Earth exists so we humans can make ourselves more safe and more secure.

And we use it, and we do things to it, and we master it, and we become lords over it in order to shore us up and make us more secure. It's a tool by which we build ourselves up. That's what capitalism, extractive capitalism in particular would want us to do with carbon resources. But if instead we think about the Earth not as something to be used, but as something to be cared for regardless of the outcome, whether or not we can save it, whether or not it's going to make our lives easier or longer, then we come into a different relationship with this Earth.

And that relationship of love for things acting on behalf of things, merely for the sake that they exist because they are good, rather than what they can do for us, that does confound the logic of capitalism. And I worry that actually, I'm going to skip to the last bullet here as I-- I'll talk about some of these other things, but I'm going to skip to the last bullet for a second.

I worry that the way we read the resurrection story now, actually inclines us more towards the idea of extractive capitalism where other things exist for us to sacrifice them to our sense of security. I mean, you think about the way that this resurrection story is told, the one suffers immensely, but that suffering buys everybody else security. And if the one suffers, everybody else gets to be safe and secure forever, and that's the way we think about. I mean, that kind of utilitarian approach to the body of Jesus, to the life of Jesus, is also this kind of triumphalist resurrection account.

There are lots of ways that the Christian story and Christian stories can be used to show a kind of disordered, and I would say sick relationship that much of the Christian tradition has to the natural world. You can think about the Eden story of where we're banished away and separated from the Earth, and have to toil and struggle against it rather than to live in a more peaceable way, that's certainly one of the stories.

But another story, I think, is this idea that, oh, what it takes for me to be secure is for somebody else to sacrifice. And especially when we think about the way that climate change is not just dangerous for everybody, but how the levels of that danger are unjustly distributed among peoples. And how much people in the North and the First World are very much willing to allow others to suffer first and more for the sake of our security, this it troublingly follows the logic of resurrection.

But I think within the Christian story, there are other ways to think through what it might mean to look at emptiness, to look at fear, to look at outcomes we cannot predict, even outcomes that we worry will end badly and still say, it's worth acting, it's worth loving the world as it is because it is good, because God told us it's good. Not because we can save it, not because if we save that it will save us, but just because it deserves to be loved. We care for it because the beloved deserves our care, not because it will reward us.

I have some examples. I'll just close like talking about one example from pastoral life since that's the first bullet here. But the reason I had this intuition is not because I'm a theologian, it's not because I went to a talk in Falmouth from some scientists and Christian theologians, it really comes from my work as a pastor, which is limited. And I'm sure in this audience, there are people with a lot more pastoral experience than me.

But in that article from New York Magazine that I referenced at the beginning of this talk, when David Wallace-Wells talks about, we present people with a horrible news, and they'll either deny it, and hide their heads and pretend it doesn't exist, or they'll despair and not do anything. And it's a different scale. Climate change is an absolutely unique thing for us. But I've been with several people who have received apocalyptic news, when people-- with people when-- who have received the most awful news they can imagine.

When their loved one or someone they love dearly gets catastrophic apocalyptic cataclysmic news, news of terminal illness or that kind of thing. And in no cases, it's a small sample size, but in no cases among those good people that I've had the honor to sit with in those conversations and to journey with through the course of their illnesses, and as they accompanied their loved ones through illness. In no cases did people throw up their hands and say, well, I deny it, it's not going to happen. Or don't tell me that, or whatever.

Obviously, people are shocked, and people are hurt, and people are sad. But in every case of a person, including very personal ones when people get this kind of news, what I find is that human beings when given-- when told the truth about how much time is left and what they can do, they do everything they can to love one another as much as they can with the time they have left. I think we humans are capable of this. I actually think that Christian tradition gives us all the tools we need to do it if we read the tradition the right way.

The problem now is one of scale. I mean, we're thinking about a habitable planet that is in a similar situation, which is getting pretty grim news. The question is, will we be able to respond the way that I see so many of my parishioners respond on a fairly consistent basis, which is to respond with love. To look to the thing that maybe we can't save and decide to love it not because we think we can save it, or not because we think by saving it, it will save us, but simply because it's good.

DIANE L. MOORE: Matt, thank you on an incredibly powerful, and rich, and illuminative conversation you've sparked for us. The scale and scope of what you're addressing here, I think, just is remarkable both in its depth as well as its breadth because you really give us some language and tools yet again, to think about what we-- to think in fresh ways what we think we know.

And just incredibly grateful for the richness of the resources that you represented here. I'm going to encourage folks to go ahead and start putting questions in the chat. We've already got a few but one of the things I wanted to ask you about is, first of all, I'm sure the connections with other stories and scholars that I'm sure the synapses are just like firing for you throughout this whole journey.

I'm just so struck by your comment about what it means to not just what-- I often quote Donna Haraway in this series because I think she's such a powerful interlocutor around these questions. And of course, her latest work is called Stay With the Trouble. And what I hear you doing here Is the same thing.

It's like we can't be thinking about the consequence of actions, but to stay with the action, to be present. And the question I wanted to raise for you relevant to that, and to Butler's notion of we can't love what we can't grieve. I'm just wondering, what are your reflections on our connections with the non-human world? How do we move into a space of the recognition that is so critical relevant to life, non-human life around these same questions?

MATTHEW ICHIHASHI POTTS: I think, yeah, that's absolutely-- that's the right question. And I think Butler is a really great tool for us to do that because I think what's implied, it's not in this essay, but in other of their work what's implied is, when we ask what lives are grievable, they're also talking about non-human life. And I think what they would say is that, our failure-- something like climate denialism is a failure to grieve.

It's a failure to grieve the world around us, failure to grieve what we're losing natural places, non-human, beyond human creatures. It's our unwillingness to see, to grieve those lives is an inability to love those things as well, which in any reading of-- I mean, even the most conservative readings of the Christian text is a betrayal of humans obligations to the world around us.

The inability to grieve, I think, as a sign of our failure to determine that the world needs love and care, yeah, I think that's absolutely right. And that's what Butler is calling us to. Think about who you're not grieving. We can start with humans like gay men during the AIDS pandemic. And we can-- or we can expand it out to victims of war and violence in various places in the world. But I think they're also saying, what else are we losing? Because we're losing. The ones you're not paying attention, you can know what you love by what you grieve, and that's what they're inviting us to try to grieve as broadly as possible.

And that's not something that's-- I mean, just to name my own community. For all our proclamations, that's not something Christians like to do or humans in general, I think, but it's grief is hard, and it's hard to lose things, and we want to turn away from that. And what Butler suggests is like, no turn toward it because you're not going to know, you're not going to learn how to protect it, you're not going to have the courage to face it, you're not going to do what needs to be done to love it, even bracketing the question is saving it, you're not going to do what needs to be done to love it until you're willing to grieve it. And yeah, and so I think you're right to point it towards the beyond human and non-human. Yeah.

DIANE L. MOORE: Yeah. Thank you. Just one quick other comment, and then want to turn to some of these really great questions. I'm so moved by your experience. And think which everyone in this talk can relate to about what does it mean to hear a terrible news about people we love, and what do we do with that news? And I just find that simple but very relatable experience so powerful that we don't run, we don't say, well, I give up, we stay, we stay in the pain, and because that is our expression of love. So I just want to say, simple but very powerful connection, so thank you for that.

MATTHEW ICHIHASHI POTTS: I mean, the analogy would be like, I will care for you these next three months as long as you get better.

DIANE L. MOORE: Right.

MATTHEW ICHIHASHI POTTS: None of us would ever say that. On the contrary we say, if it's two months, whatever I will do whatever I can for as long as I have just because the act itself is the gift. You are my heaven, that's the--

DIANE L. MOORE: Yeah. Really beautiful. Thank you. Thank you for that. One of our beloved students, Rebecca, who's in your forgiveness class says that she's seeing real deep parallels here. And so her question for you is, how do you see the relationship between hope and forgiveness?

MATTHEW ICHIHASHI POTTS: Yeah. That's a great question. I think, as I've gotten deeper-- and I'm not very deep in this writing project, I've had the idea and I kind of the books I want to write about and I'm developing ideas of hope is the thing that-- I'm a sports fan, it's the hope that kills you they say in sports, right? And so like the hope has been the thing I've been avoiding just because there's-- yeah, the sources are difficult, and it's a complicated topic.

I think maybe what you see the way I'm-- the more I'm-- let me start over. The more I'm thinking about hope, the more this looks like an analogous problem to the one I found with forgiveness. And not to derail this conversation, but that it can be used and it has been used by the Christian tradition towards the ends opposite of what it's intended for, I think. This kind of, I think, the idea of hope as a kind of religious form of optimism as a way of saying, oh, everything will be all right, it can lead to some complacency. It can lead us to not care. It can lead us not to grieve.

If my hope is just mere optimism. If my hope means that, oh, actually the icebergs won't melt, then I'm not greeting them, and then I'm not-- and if I'm not grieving, and then I'm not caring for them. But a different kind of hope would be one that says, oh, the icebergs might melt, but they are these non-human beyond human parts of creation are worthy of my care just on their own for no other reason. That's a different kind of thing, and it depends upon us being willing to look into this empty tomb, be willing to wait-- be willing to face grief, which is the way I also want to think about forgiveness.

Forgiveness isn't this magical way for us to undo the past, it's actually a way for us to live with a broken past. And maybe hope is the flip side. Is not a way for us to magically fix the future, it's the way to live into what might be a broken future.

DIANE L. MOORE: Wonderful. Thank you. Great question. Thank you, Rebecca. There's wonderful questions here. Just I'm going to turn to Sarah Brownsberger. Thank you, Sarah. She says, thank you for a beautiful talk. Isn't there a parallel here for refounding medical ethics. Care for the patient as a mortal self, not as an autonomous mind seeking to optimize the criteria of health, but as the doomed frail body each individual life is doomed and that's interesting and powerful language. Please.

MATTHEW ICHIHASHI POTTS: I mean, I think one of the places-- this is a question that Christians have to grapple with. This I think, not just what it means to have bodily life and to be mortal, but also our relationship to whatever immortality is. I think that's a problematic thing for Christians, and I think that we have not handled it well traditionally, that's also not what this talk is about. However, I do that-- I think you're right, Sarah, that part of what Butler is pointing us is to just come to the to be frank about the fact that all is vulnerable to loss, that all everything around us is potentially grievable.

And the degree to which we grieve it is the degree to which we love it. Yeah. And I see this from the kind of chaplain side. I worked very briefly at CPE as a chaplain, but also as a priest working in a pastoral situation, and also with loved ones of my own who have had terminal illnesses and died from terminal illnesses. There's a point in every illness where the conversation shifts from, how do we get more days, to how do we-- or at least not in every illness, but in some of these experiences I'm talking about.

Where the conversation ought to shift, sometimes it shifts later than it should from, how do we get one more day because one more day means that we don't have to face the end, to how do we live this day with as much caring and love as possible? And not to make it too personal, but my mom died last year. I think, if we could go back now, she would probably say, she waited a couple of weeks too long.

And I think thats to alot of folks because I think the medical establishment with its great skill at prolonging life is inclined towards doing this and has trouble having that conversation. I'm grateful for really wonderful chaplains, many of whom are trained by this school, and by the CPE programs in Boston for helping us, people who have loved ones going through that, and helping medical clinicians and so forth. Make that turn, have that conversation as early and as thoughtfully as possible. So I think you're right.

I mean, I can't-- I'm not an expert in medical ethics, so I can't speak broadly as to how it might reorient Christian medical ethics. But I do think there is a difference between approaching a human body as a body available for saving as opposed to approaching a human body as one which is mortal and finite always and already.

DIANE L. MOORE: Right. I'm so stuck to buy that. Deeply understandable in my own experience too of the desire to have one more day, which that doesn't also address that. That's about me wanting more time for my beloved.

MATTHEW ICHIHASHI POTTS: That's right.

DIANE L. MOORE: It's not about the well-being of and the confrontation of the frailty and our finitude. So thank you. Beautiful. Thanks for the wonderful question. I'm just skipping around. These are wonderful questions. But this is from an anonymous attendee. You talked about anticipatory grief and this makes me think of solostalgia, or the grief one feels from the loss of place due to environmental change.

I think, you can also-- I just want to say, I think, that can also be not just about environmental change, but loss of place around refugees, loss of place around a host of things, that's my addition. Back to the question. I'm curious how you think we can work with anticipatory grief that you identified in a way that feels fruitful and not paralyzing.

MATTHEW ICHIHASHI POTTS: Yeah. I mean, I think that-- I think grief-- I think, I oversimplify that pastoral example, a little bit because I think for the first day or two, sometimes people are paralyzed. And there often is denial for-- there often is denial for a period of time. I just, I think we have to look lean into that, look into it because in my limited experience, people move through that stage towards other stages of grief.

And so it may be that really turning towards grief in a self conscious and deliberate way will feel paralyzing, and will fill us with despair. For a period of time, I think, the women going to the tomb or running away in terror, that is something we move through as we do that. One of the things that I taught a class with Terry Tempest Williams, who's going to be talking later on in this series that was also titled Apocalyptic Grief, I've been using this title for a while now.

But she had us do an exercise at the beginning of the class, which was incredibly memorable, and affecting, and effective. That she didn't give anything away maybe the way I'm talking already did. But it was the first day of class, and she invited everyone to take out their journals, and write for 10 minutes about a place they love. Just the place you love most in the world. And everyone has that place.

And people were writing, and you could see that they were taking themselves to that place with their writing. And then after 10 minutes, she told us to break. And she said, OK, now, imagine that place will be gone in five years. I mean, kind of enforced solostolgia. Imagine that place will be gone in four years, five years, whatever it is, now right how you will spend that five years. Write what you will do with the next five years.

Well, how would you relate to that place knowing that it's finite, knowing that it's frail, knowing that you can't save it? And I know no one's writing, turn away, find a new favorite place. And this is I think these sorts of exercises can be useful. That really-- I mean that I said sticks with me, I still remember the place I wrote about, I still remember she didn't tell me she was going to do this, I still remember kind of the shock of that prompt, the second prompt. And then trying to think about what would I do.

And then she did because she's a skilled writer and caring teacher, she just kind of used that as a way to broaden out the scope of what that grief could look like. Because we had a room of 20 people and they all had a different place, and now all of these places are all at risk, and all of us are in relationship with one another. She was, I think, there are ways that we can invite people to turn towards grief that can-- will feel shocking and may feel even like fill us with despair or something like an emotional paralysis or something.

But that's something we can't be afraid of because it maybe we can-- maybe what's needed is to face that, and then endure that so we can move through it towards the care that these places deserve.

DIANE L. MOORE: Yeah. Wonderful. We have a-- I almost didn't want to ask a question because it's, I think you partly answered it, but I think Jacob Walker has another slight twist.

MATTHEW ICHIHASHI POTTS: Jacob.

DIANE L. MOORE: So thank you, Jacob, for this question. There's so much in your talk. Thank you for your talk. Something that seems particularly hard about galvanizing action around climate catastrophe is how removed specifically and temporarily the negative effects are from those who cause it. I can imagine those same difficulties arising in the context of failing what you call anticipatory grief.

So his question, how do we feel grief in a non-manufactured way about something that has largely not yet happened? And even when it does happen, will likely not affect us in Cambridge as gravely as it does others i.e. how do we feel genuine grief for something that is not immediately confronting us?

MATTHEW ICHIHASHI POTTS: Yeah. I think, that's the other part of the Christian prophetic message is it's partly sort of this imaginative work. One of the things I want to think about in my book is, in my head I have broken up chapters, I want to think about imagination, imaginative work as a way of-- and in a way that these questions are really helping me maybe anticipation or anticipatory grief is related to imagination somehow.

Imagination is one of the tools, like this thing that I think that Terry did for us and for our class was to help us use our imaginations so we could actually access our grief better, access some of those places that we were not yet grieving, or that we were not recognizing as fragile, and frail, and subject to passing. But I think the other thing that Christianity has or ought to have is its prophetic voice for justice.

I think part of what's going on in that first half of the Gospel of Mark, all the people, the crowds around him think it's about the power, and for Jesus it's about the people. It's about the man in the tombs who spends all night crying, and cutting himself with stones, and that his friends chain him up. It's Jesus going to him and saying, I'm going to care for you.

And everyone sees the power that he uses to banish the demons, but for Jesus it's about the person. For Christians, I think our job, our pathetic job is to try to get as many of ourselves and others as possible, grieving lives that are being lost right now and yesterday, even especially when very privileged. And I mean, I'm talking to you from the basement of the Memorial Church in the middle of Harvard yard there is not another more privileged Christian church perhaps in the world.

But from this vantage, our responsibility is to try to grieve as much as possible, to call us to grieve, to recognize those who are suffering because as you say, Jacob, it's already happening. And it's easy for us to pretend it's-- I'll speak for myself, it's easy for me to pretend it's not, and I could very well pretend it's not for the rest-- for much of my life. But I think we have an obligation, a moral obligation to grieve as publicly as possible and to call attention to where that suffering is.

DIANE L. MOORE: Wonderful. I'm going to-- I have a thought, a brief thought that, I think, links the previous question and one that I'm about ready to share from Dan McCannon, who's another speaker in this series. But again, apologies for my returning to Haraway again. But her call around this question of staying with the trouble. Is it one of the things she asks of us to do rather than kind of avoid the grief or address stay with the trouble of whatever the times are?

And with that attentiveness to the presence, be attentive to the multiple relationships that we actually do have that sustain us, that be more attentive to the non-human kin that our lives are dependent upon. And she calls us to consciousness about that as a way to be responsible, to be able to respond because if we are not aware or attentive, we can't.

And I just-- it's that same recognition of the profound interdependency rather than autonomy of human being that, I think, is also what we have to fight against relevant to a larger framework of how we even think about the human. It goes into neoliberalism and a whole host of things, extractive capitalism. But so I just think that a paradigm shift into what it means to be human is to not be autonomous.

MATTHEW ICHIHASHI POTTS: Yeah. That's right.

DIANE L. MOORE: So Dan's question though, is also a really rich one. And thanks Dan for it. I'm entirely convinced that the inability or reluctance to grieve is a huge part of the current predicament, but I wonder if grieve ability is the only path forward toward love? Especially, love for our more than human kin.

Every day species are going extinct, but every day species are also evolving in creative new ways. Most likely species will continue to evolve thousands of years from now. If we celebrate a story of evolutionary creativity that seems likely to outlast humanity, is that Resurrection triumphalism or is that an additional path to love?

MATTHEW ICHIHASHI POTTS: Yeah. That's a-- I think, yes. I think you're describing something like-- this is not one of the classical three theological virtues, but I think you're describing something like wonder. Having a relationship of wonder towards the natural world. I think that that's love also is that, it's not just grieving that which is precarious, it's also being filled with wonder in spite of its precarity the beauty, and ingenuity, and creativity of the world around us.

And the fact that the human habitable world is a very short period in the history of life on this planet. And that what we are in-- I think what we-- the relationship of grief that we have to be in is within a particular kind of habitable world. One of the things that frustrates me is when-- it's kind of when kind of folks talk about saving the Earth or saving the Earth. And just kind of placing the value of the Earth or the Earth itself in a very narrow human scale.

I think what we're talking about is an unnecessary extinctions of lots of species and ourself in the present. And thinking about grief in that sense while also remaining in relationship of wonder that far outstrips and exceeds the human, the scope and span of the human. And that also can be a-- yeah, that also can be a way.

But as I think about it though, I know grief is one of those slippery words where I can get away with a lot just because it covers so many things, kind of love, or hope, or forgiveness, which is that, again, just analogizing from the most narrow personal or pastoral examples. The experience of grieving with someone even in a stage of extreme disease or something, end of life as I was talking about, will include sadness. Affective states like sadness, and anger, and despair. It also includes joy and wonder, and in ways that are not contrary necessarily to grief.

So I take your point, Dan, I think you're right. I think it can make it one telling of the story and maybe the telling the story I gave can make it too grim or only grim, whereas reckoning with loss, if that's what grief is. If reckoning with loss is what grief is, it will include many human affective states and wonder, and kind of joy the creativity of life even as it passes. You can be part of it, I think.

DIANE L. MOORE: Wonderful. Wonderful. Thank you. Back to grief. Janet Keating. Thank you, Janet, for this wonderful question. She's basically asking, is our collective turning away from grief the major driver of climate change? And the sense she also-- she goes on to say, we also when we turn away from grief, we obsess with other forms like screens, and distractions, and a whole host of things. So we occupy our time and world.

MATTHEW ICHIHASHI POTTS: I don't feel qualified to answer the question, that's a cop out I guess. I think because there are so many things, especially huge institutions and economic forces that drive climate change. But I think that there's something in the Christian West and something in the Christian capitalistic system that does look at the-- that look at the world around us as something to be sacrificed for our own security.

And maybe to prop up an illusion that we don't need-- that we aren't frail and aren't fragile. And that sometimes we do that to other people in other religions. We sacrifice them to-- I mean, Baldwin has this wonderful critique in The Fire Next Time about how racism is a symptom of this. That we are willing. We cannot accept that we are mortal, and so we project our mortality on others so we can live with the illusion that we don't have to die.

And the logic of unending growth that extractive capitalism in particular tells us is certainty, is the only narrative that's possible. We must keep growing. We cannot keep-- we cannot stop growing. This is endlessly sustainable is just that's an illusion and a lie. And this is a stretch, but I think in a way that is turning away from just like a reckoning with limits, a reckoning with finitude, which is related to something like grief.

So again, like I think the-- I'm not an economist. The economic forces and all those things are not ones that I could understand or claim to. But as a theologian, boy, it looks a lot like some of these problems I see in the theological tradition about the way we think about our own fallibility infinitude.

DIANE L. MOORE: Yeah. I think, I'm really grateful to the question, I'm grateful for you tackling it with the caveat because I do feel like what's the major cause of climate change? I mean, I don't think anyone can answer that. But I do think, based on my opening remarks that we have very many instrumental answers to that question. But I think the psychological, emotional answers are what will also be required for us to be able to tackle these times in a responsible way. So thank you. Thank you for that. For both of you, for asking and answering that challenging question.

Margaret Bullard Jones, asks about-- she speaks out of her own also Christian heritage, but I think it has broad representations for others as well. I wonder how our Christian witness could be transformed if we reclaim the power of lament. So I think, I'm just going to shift that and say, have you given any thought to the relationship between grief, and lament, and love, and what that human emotion might incite in us?

MATTHEW ICHIHASHI POTTS: Yeah. I mean, not in any sophisticated, theoretical way. I think that's right. I think Margaret's question is right. And I think that it's more than intuition. I think, that recognition that there's a long standing scriptural and theological tradition of us turning towards grief. It doesn't start with the empty tomb in Mark, it goes all-- it's shot through the Hebrew Bible.

Turning in lament to one another and to God is something that has just always been part of the scriptural tradition that Christians inherit, and that obviously precedes us. I think that's right. And maybe this is because I'm here in the undercroft of Memorial Church, I think, that the form of grief that I-- and also because I think I have standing preoccupations with forgiveness as a topic.

The way I'm thinking about forgiveness-- I mean, excuse me, the way I think about repentance, excuse me, the way I think about grief is around repentance. It's about, oh, what have we done that we can't undo? How do we actually-- I think the failure to repent is also a failure of grief. It's saying, oh, I didn't. The thing is not broken, I can fix it. Oh, it's not that bad.

To actually turn to something and say, nope, we did this, and this is-- and we must take responsibility for it. Taking responsibility for it, I think, repentance becomes a form of lament, look what we've done. Have mercy upon us God for what we've done. Have mercy upon us all you other creatures in the world, human, and non or beyond human. Look what we've done. Being as honest with that as possible, I think, a really honest expression of repentance would be one of lament because it would be honest about what's been lost, and what can't be brought back.

But I think only when we become honest about what's been lost and can't be brought back, do we actually learn what we can do. Then you start to say, OK, then what can we do? And what must we do with the time we have?

DIANE L. MOORE: With the time we have, yeah, in the midst of it. Thank you, Matt. What a powerful, profound, illuminating presentation. And then the-- and thank you all in the room for the wonderful and generative questions. We're sadly right up against the hour of the end of our conversation for tonight. But I hope that you will join us next week for the last in the single presentation series when, Terry Tempest Williams, our beloved writer in residence next week on March 4 at six o'clock, Eastern time, she will be here presenting the practice of wild mercy, something deeper than hope.

So we're going to stay on the question of hope. So I hope you all will join us for that. And again, I just want to say thank you, Matt, for a wonderful and very thought-provoking, and generative conversation. So thank you so much, and thank you all.

MATTHEW ICHIHASHI POTTS: Thank you Diane, and thanks everyone.

SPEAKER 2: Sponsors: Religion and Public Life at Harvard Divinity School, the Salata Institute for Climate and Sustainability at Harvard University, The Center for the Study of World Religions, the Constellation Project, and Harvard X.

SPEAKER 1: Copyright 2024, the President and Fellows of Harvard College.

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Columbia Law Review Website Pulled Offline Over Essay by Palestinian

T he Columbia Law Review website has been taken offline after an article by a Palestinian human rights lawyer was published there. As of this writing, the website URL leads to a page reading simply, "Website is under maintenance." The university's law review is, per the New York Times , "one of the United States' most prestigious student-edited law journals." Typically, its board of directors—consisting of alumni and faculty members—stays out of editorial matters, but in this case, it was the board that pulled the website for the 123-year-old journal offline. The Intercept spoke to multiple editors at the law review and has an extensive look at the timeline.

・ The beginning: The genesis of the issue dates back to November, when the Harvard Law Review censored an essay by Rabea Eghbariah, who would have been the first Palestinian legal scholar published in the journal. Eghbariah's article, per the Intercept, was "an argument for establishing 'Nakba,' the expulsion, dispossession, and oppression of Palestinians, as a formal legal concept that widens its scope." It was fully edited, but killed by the Harvard Law Review before it was published.

・ Columbia's involvement: The Columbia Law Review then reached out to Eghbariah asking for a new article, which Eghbariah says he and editors worked on for more than five months. Editors say that despite a much more extensive than normal editorial process, the board pressured them to delay publication of the essay. A letter from the board to the editorial staff accused staffers of handling the essay's publication with an "unacceptable" and unusual amount of secrecy.

・ The publication and backlash: Amid discussions with the board, editors became concerned the essay had been leaked, so they published it online Monday. Board members asked them to take it down, they refused, and the entire website was then pulled. The board claims in a statement that not every student on the law review read the essay before it was published, and that editors refused to delay its publication to Friday so that more people could read it first. It says the temporary yanking of the website will give the law review "time ... to determine how to proceed."

・ A quote from the essay: In the essay, Eghbariah accuses Israel of crimes against humanity, arguing that Palestinians are living under a "brutally sophisticated structure of oppression." Per the Intercept, the essay "significantly expands on Eghbariah's argument for Nakba as its own legal concept in international law" in a manner "similar to genocide and apartheid, which were concretized as crimes in response to specific atrocities carried out by Nazi Germany and white minority-ruled South Africa, respectively."

Critics are accusing the board of stepping in only because the essay was critical to Israel. "I don't suspect that they would have asserted this kind of control had the piece been about Tibet, Kashmir, Puerto Rico, or other contested political sites," says one Columbia professor.

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This article originally appeared on Newser: Columbia Law Review Website Pulled Offline Over Essay by Palestinian

Columbia Law Review Website Pulled Offline Over Essay by Palestinian

The Columbia Law Review website has been taken offline after an article by a Palestinian human rights lawyer was published there. As of this writing, the website URL leads to a page reading simply, "Website is under maintenance." The university's law review is, per the New York Times , "one of the United States' most prestigious student-edited law journals." Typically, its board of directors—consisting of alumni and faculty members—stays out of editorial matters, but in this case, it was the board that pulled the website for the 123-year-old journal offline. The Intercept spoke to multiple editors at the law review and has an extensive look at the timeline.

• The beginning: The genesis of the issue dates back to November, when the Harvard Law Review censored an essay by Rabea Eghbariah, who would have been the first Palestinian legal scholar published in the journal. Eghbariah's article, per the Intercept, was "an argument for establishing 'Nakba,' the expulsion, dispossession, and oppression of Palestinians, as a formal legal concept that widens its scope." It was fully edited, but killed by the Harvard Law Review before it was published.
• Columbia's involvement: The Columbia Law Review then reached out to Eghbariah asking for a new article, which Eghbariah says he and editors worked on for more than five months. Editors say that despite a much more extensive than normal editorial process, the board pressured them to delay publication of the essay. A letter from the board to the editorial staff accused staffers of handling the essay's publication with an "unacceptable" and unusual amount of secrecy.
• The publication and backlash: Amid discussions with the board, editors became concerned the essay had been leaked, so they published it online Monday. Board members asked them to take it down, they refused, and the entire website was then pulled. The board claims in a statement that not every student on the law review read the essay before it was published, and that editors refused to delay its publication to Friday so that more people could read it first. It says the temporary yanking of the website will give the law review "time ... to determine how to proceed."
• A quote from the essay: In the essay, Eghbariah accuses Israel of crimes against humanity, arguing that Palestinians are living under a "brutally sophisticated structure of oppression." Per the Intercept, the essay "significantly expands on Eghbariah's argument for Nakba as its own legal concept in international law" in a manner "similar to genocide and apartheid, which were concretized as crimes in response to specific atrocities carried out by Nazi Germany and white minority-ruled South Africa, respectively."

• A DuckDuckGo extension in your browser, please access Newser without it: Either by removing it, whitelisting us, or using another browser.

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When should Harvard speak out?

Institutional Voice Working Group provides a roadmap in new report

Jessica McCann

Harvard Correspondent

In April, interim President Alan M. Garber and interim Provost John F. Manning  announced  two University-wide initiati v es to explore how best to cultivate and reinforce open inquiry, constructive dialogue, and academic freedom on campus. The first, the Open Inquiry and Constructive Dialogue Working Group, is examining how to nurture and support engagement across differing viewpoints in Harvard’s teaching, learning, and dialogue. The second, the Institutional Voice Working Group, has taken up the more specific question of whether and when Harvard as a University should speak on matters of social and political significance and who should be authorized to speak for the institution as a whole. On Tuesday, Garber, Manning, and the deans of Harvard’s Schools announced that they had accepted the working group’s proposed statement of principles.

The Institutional Voice Working Group began its work by conducting a broad review of the types of public statements that Harvard and peer institutions have made in recent years. It also invited community feedback. The group has engaged in extensive outreach to members of the Harvard community, conducting a survey, soliciting input via email, and hosting more than 30 virtual and in-person listening sessions. Discussions covered the criteria by which the University and its various units should make official statements about public matters, the rationale behind these criteria, and the consequences that might arise for Harvard and its community when they do so.

The Gazette spoke with co-chairs Noah Feldman and Alison Simmons about the working group’s report . Feldman is the Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and chair of Harvard’s Society of Fellows. Simmons is the Samuel H. Wolcott Professor of Philosophy and faculty co-director, Embedded EthiCS, in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. The interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Can you summarize the report and what it seeks to do?

Simmons: Our charge was to answer the question: When, if at all, should the University make official statements about global events, and why/why not? We leaned into the why/why not. When the University speaks on an event or issue, why? What makes speaking about that event appropriate? Recognizing that not speaking about an event or issue is itself a speech act that will be “heard,” a compelling reason needs to be given for that too. We aimed to produce a guiding document that sets out the principles underlying the decision whether or not to issue a formal statement.

Feldman: The main point of the report is that the University’s leadership can and should speak out on anything relevant to the core function of the University, which is creating an environment suitable for free, open inquiry, teaching, and research. That environment is threatened these days, and we need to defend it. At the same time, the University as an institution should not make official statements on issues outside its core function. Harvard isn’t a government. It shouldn’t have a foreign policy or a domestic policy.

In the end, we believe this approach is actually more inclusive to the whole community. We heard loud and clear from many stakeholders that if we speak out some of the time on some global or national issues, then many people feel we are ignoring other issues. And on some issues, our community is divided or the world is divided in such a way that we are going to drive controversy no matter what we say.

“Given the broad consensus we heard, we hope these principles will serve the University’s diverse community well for many years to come.” Alison Simmons

The report describes the University’s purpose as “the pursuit of truth.” Why is this the core principle that should inform the use of Harvard’s institutional voice?

Feldman: Here at Harvard, we hold firmly to our ideal of Veritas. Our charge was to think about how institutional statements affect the carrying out of this purpose. As members of a university, we pursue truth through inquiry, debate, research, and a range of other methods. Our expertise lies in our scholarship. As an institution, Harvard doesn’t add to the truth by announcing a single official position on what is true in science or politics or whatever. In fact, it undermines our mission if the University makes official declarations about matters outside its core function.

Simmons: Pursuing truth looks different in different fields of study. Some of us think we are after understanding (a text, an artwork, a religious tradition). Some of us think of ourselves as producing knowledge (scientific, social, medical, legal). Some of us think we are preserving (cultural forms, objects, ideas). And methodologies vary widely across academic disciplines and Harvard’s Schools. So, by “truth” we mean to cast a wide net.

If what we do in the University is to pursue truth — and to pursue it by reasoned argument and debate, controlled experiment, and so on — then the job of the University as an institution is to create an environment in which we can have a healthy, productive, and free exchange of ideas and argument among diverse points of view on issues of science, society, values, culture, etc. We make progress by encountering friction with the things we take to be obviously true now, so long as the friction comes from a desire to get it right and not to shut down argument. We all have to be open to being challenged and to changing our minds in the face of new evidence. And we all have to engage people who think differently from us with curiosity and openness.

Feldman: One comment from a focus group with students that stands out in my mind is, “Everyone gets the emails and then everyone feels bad.” We’ve come to understand just how unsatisfactory statements truly are and how far they stray from our core function as an institution of higher learning. Leadership cares deeply for the community and they want to respond to the community’s desire for solutions to difficult social and political events playing out all over the world — but statements can’t provide this. Even expressions of empathy, when sent to such a broad community, can fall flat. What we recommend in our report is a return to what a university does best — teaching, research, learning, and service as an answer to these events.

In this report, who is the “we” when you say “institutional voice”?

Feldman: Our report applies to anyone authorized to speak on behalf of the University officially (the president, provost, deans, and other administrative leaders). Individual faculty and students have academic freedom. But they don’t speak on behalf of the whole University. That needs to be understood by the whole world.

Simmons: It is the individual community members who have academic freedom to pursue the questions they find important and interesting, to develop expertise in their chosen field, to teach the material they think is important, and to speak out on issues they find compelling. The University does not tell us what to say or think. And when we speak, we do not speak for the University. The University (i.e., its leadership) must use its voice to protect and promote the ability of all its community members to do precisely those things.

What did you hear in the listening sessions and from those who submitted thoughts and ideas through the survey or via email? How did it inform the report?

Simmons: One thing I learned is just how much people care about this institution. They really want Harvard to be the best place it can be. In that respect, I felt we were all trying to figure out how to answer this question together. We also heard a lot from people who feel pressure to “speak for Harvard” when they do not want to (because they recognize they cannot speak for everyone).

Feldman: We also heard a lot about how institutional statements and statements by individuals are taken up by the media, including social media. In an age of social media, it is easy for the public to think that anyone who posts wearing a crimson sweatshirt speaks “for” Harvard. They don’t! And we need to make that clear.

Given that Harvard is often the subject of intense public interest , some community members have called for the University to adopt a policy of institutional neutrality . This would be si milar to the University of Chicago’s policy, as outlined in a document known as the Kalven Report , which calls for the neutrality of the university “out of respect for free inquiry and the obligation to cherish a diversity of viewpoints.” Does your report call for institutional neutrality?

Feldman: Our report has some meaningful overlap with the Kalven Report. A key difference between the Kalven Report and ours is that we’re saying that, as an institution with values, we have a responsibility to promote our core function as an educational institution and defend ourselves against forces that seek to undermine our academic values. In that sense, we aren’t neutral, and we can’t be. Another big difference is our reason for restraint, which is based on speaking where we are experts and not speaking where the University as an institution isn’t expert.

Is the report a response to the many challenges Harvard and other higher ed institutions have faced since Oct. 7?

Simmons: The University has been making statements about all sorts of things for a long time. Conversations about whether it should be making so many statements have also been taking place for a long time. But the reality in which the University operates has changed over the past 10 years or so in ways that make it pressing to form a policy on the “to speak or not to speak” question.

First, news travels rapidly and widely through social media. When the University issues a statement, it reaches the entire world (intact or in distorted pieces) in seconds. (By contrast, when Derek Bok was president from 1971 to 1991, he wrote up quite long statements that were physically slid under the doors of faculty and students!) What’s more, anyone with a social media account can appear to the public to speak for Harvard. And that makes it hard for people outside the University to know what is and what is not an “official” Harvard statement. There’s just a lot less control over University communications.

Second, we now live in a world of extreme political polarization. And that means both that people tend to react to University statements (again, intact or distorted) in a polarized way, and also put pressure on the University to speak or not speak in polarized ways.

These two changes were certainly on display in the wake of Oct. 7. But they have been in place for quite some time. And the combination of these two new realities has made it important to form a policy.

How will this work dovetail with the work of the Open Inquiry and Constructive Dialogue Working Group?

Feldman: We were fortunate that we were asked for a clear deliverable — a set of principles for when the University should and should not issue official statements. The Open Inquiry Working Group has been asked to address a broader and more complex set of issues about how we can maintain and improve the work we do as a University. The two are connected, though. Both are concerned with how we achieve the core purpose we share.

Simmons: I think that our report might help to provide a framework and some core principles that can support the important work of the Open Inquiry and Constructive Dialogue Working Group. They are already thinking hard about how to promote constructive dialogue in the classroom, in the dining hall, and in the Houses — i.e., on the ground. I think they will help us learn how best to encourage our students to learn from each other through constructive disagreement, genuine curiosity, intellectual give and take, and a desire to grow.

We think our proposal can support that and we take it as a reminder to all of us that the University must commit itself to the value of creating an environment that facilitates open inquiry, and to acknowledge that the University itself must positively promote it and take great care not to jeopardize it, even if only inadvertently.

What’s next? How does the University translate these principles into action?

Simmons : For one, the community will need some time to get used to the idea that the University will not be speaking on a great number of things.

Feldman: Absolutely. With the University’s decision to take up these principles, there will need to be a significant culture shift as people realize, inside Harvard and outside, that the University has genuinely adopted a “say less” policy.

Simmons: We have come to expect those emails from the president’s office (and then the deans’ offices and then other School-based offices) when something urgent happens in the world. It will be startling, and possibly unsettling for a while, not to get them. University leadership will have to remind us all why it is not making as many statements as it used to. Another thing University leadership will have to do is figure out how to translate our recommendation into concrete policy and how to operationalize it.

Our working group set out to provide principles for a strong foundation for the University and any other university that might find these principles valuable. We received thoughtful input from more than 1,000 people across the University. Given the broad consensus we heard, we hope these principles will serve the University’s diverse community well for many years to come.

Feldman: Our goal is for the individual, expert voices of the University to be heard loud and clear. When the University focuses its institutional voice on its core function — and only on its core function — that will highlight the extraordinary work the members of the University do. When the University flourishes, we all can make more valuable contributions to knowledge and to the world.

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Want To Get Into The Ivy League? Here’s How Long The Application Process Really Takes

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One of the main gates on the Brown University campus, decorated with the University crest. (Photo by ... [+] Rick Friedman/Corbis via Getty Images)

While the college admissions process begins in earnest during a student’s junior year of high school, a standout college admissions profile is the result of years of strategic and intentional planning. This is especially true for students with Ivy League dreams—joining the ranks of students at Yale, Princeton, and Harvard requires time, dedication, and consideration long before students start their applications. Even the most talented, qualified students underestimate the amount of time that goes into planning for and completing the application process. Starting early and planning ahead are crucial for crafting stand-out Ivy League applications.

Here’s a detailed breakdown of how much time you should realistically expect to invest in the Ivy League admissions process, from start to finish:

Developing Your Hook: 4 Years

A “ hook ” is the element of a student’s profile that “hooks” the attention of admissions officers—it is the X factor that distinguishes a student from thousands of other applicants. It should be the anchoring interest around which all other elements of an application coalesce. Developing this defining passion requires time and dedication, so the earlier a student starts intentionally exploring their interests to develop this hook, the better. Beginning in freshman year, students should explore activities, courses, and volunteer opportunities in their schools and communities, thoughtfully weighing what they most enjoy as they do so. Over the next few years, students should hone their hook through continued involvement in extracurricular or volunteer opportunities that align with their guiding interests, seeking leadership opportunities when applicable.

Building an Independent Project: 2 years

One of the most effective ways to showcase a hook is through an independent passion project. Sophomore, junior or fall of senior year, students should craft an initiative that uses their passions to better their communities, as this will demonstrate self-motivation, genuine passion, and leadership acumen to Ivy League and other top colleges. Their project could take the shape of scientific research, a nonprofit, a community initiative, or a startup business. Students should spend a few months brainstorming, planning, and setting clear goals before entering the implementation stage. They should be sure to document their progress meticulously as they overcome hurdles and meet their goals, as this will enable them to relay their successes clearly and specifically on their applications in the future.

Researching Colleges & Structuring College List: 6 months–1 year

During their junior year, students should consult a variety of resources and rankings and begin to develop their college lists. As they do so, they should keep in mind that every ranking system takes unique factors into account—for instance, while U.S. News and World Report focuses on metrics related to academic quality such as academic reputation and graduation rates, Forbes is heavily focused on financial metrics , considering ROI, average debt, and alumni salary. In addition to weighing schools’ rankings, students should also seek to balance their college lists by comparing their academic standing with the academic profile of admitted students. If a student’s GPA and test scores fall within the middle 50% of admitted students, the school is a match; if they are above the 75th percentile, that school is likely a safety, and if their scores are below the 25th percentile, the school is a reach.

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Studying & Taking Standardized Tests: 6 months–1.5 years

Typically, students will have completed the mathematics coursework needed to take the SAT and ACT by the spring of their sophomore year and should sit for diagnostic ACT and SAT tests around that time. Once they receive their diagnostic scores, students should create a study plan that will enable them to reach their goal score, which should be set relative to their college aspirations; students with Ivy League dreams should aim to earn a 34+ on the ACT or a 1550+ on the SAT. The amount of time needed to prepare for and ace standardized tests often varies greatly depending on students’ diagnostic scores, goal scores, and how much time and effort they devote to studying.

Writing Essays & Assembling Applications: 6 months

Finally, completing the actual application is perhaps the shortest stage of the process—though it is the most important. Students who have dedicated time and effort to building their applicant profiles throughout their high school careers will reap the benefits of their long term planning; they will be able to approach the process with a clear understanding of the unique story they wish to convey through their application components. Students should kickstart the process in the spring of their junior year by requesting recommendations from their teachers, school counselors, and other non-academic mentors. The summer before senior year is a critical time to work on the personal statement, which tends to be one of the most time consuming elements of the application process as it requires lengthy brainstorming, drafting, and editing. Supplemental essay prompts for specific schools are generally released in August, so students should plan to devote the remainder of their summer and fall to completing those essays. Finally, with focus and dedication, students can complete the activities list in one to two weeks, but they should devote concerted attention to the activities list like all the other elements of their application and be sure not to save it until the last minute.

While every student is different and will need to assemble their own timeline, the college admissions process is a demanding one—particularly for students determined to gain admission to the most elite universities in the country. Students should begin preparing early in order to give themselves some leeway and submit applications that they are truly proud of.

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• Reference a Website in Harvard Style | Templates & Examples

Reference a Website in Harvard Style | Templates & Examples

Published on 19 May 2020 by Jack Caulfield . Revised on 7 November 2022.

To reference a website in Harvard style , include the name of the author or organization, the year of publication, the title of the page, the URL, and the date on which you accessed the website.

Different formats are used for other kinds of online source, such as articles, social media posts and multimedia content. You can generate accurate Harvard references for all kinds of sources with our free reference generator:

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Online articles, social media posts, images, videos and podcasts, referencing websites with missing information, frequently asked questions about harvard website references.

Blog posts and online newspaper articles are both referenced in the same format: include the title of the article in quotation marks, the name of the blog or newspaper in italics, and the date of publication.

The format for a magazine article is slightly different. Instead of a precise date, include the month, season, or volume and issue number, depending on what the magazine uses to identify its issues.

The URL and access date information are included only when the article is online-exclusive.

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To reference posts from social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, include the username and the platform in square brackets. Write usernames the way they appear on the platform, with the same capitalization and symbols.

If the post has a title, use it (in quotation marks). If the post is untitled, use the text of the post instead. Do not use italics. If the text is long, you can replace some of it with an ellipsis.

Online content is referenced differently if it is in video, audio or image form.

To cite an image found online, such as an artwork, photograph, or infographic, include the image format (e.g. ‘Photograph’, ‘Oil on canvas’) in square brackets.

Online videos, such as those on YouTube, Instagram, Vimeo and Dailymotion, are cited similarly to general web pages. Where a video is uploaded under the name of an individual, write the name in the usual format. Otherwise, write the username of the uploader as it appears on the site.

If you want to locate a specific point in a video in an in-text citation, you can do so using a timestamp.

For a podcast reference, you just need the name of the individual episode, not of the whole series. The word ‘Podcast’ is always included in square brackets. As with videos, you can use a timestamp to locate a specific point in the in-text citation.

Online sources are often missing information you would usually need for a citation: author, title or date. Here’s what to do when these details are not available.

When a website doesn’t list a specific individual author, you can usually find a corporate author to list instead. This is the organisation responsible for the source:

In cases where there’s no suitable corporate author (such as online dictionaries or Wikis), use the title of the source in the author position instead:

In Harvard style, when a source doesn’t list a specific date of publication, replace it with the words ‘no date’ in both the in-text citation and the reference list. You should still include an access date:

It’s important to assess the reliability of information found online. Look for sources from established publications and institutions with expertise (e.g. peer-reviewed journals and government agencies).

The CRAAP test (currency, relevance, authority, accuracy, purpose) can aid you in assessing sources, as can our list of credible sources . You should generally avoid citing websites like Wikipedia that can be edited by anyone – instead, look for the original source of the information in the “References” section.

You can generally omit page numbers in your in-text citations of online sources which don’t have them. But when you quote or paraphrase a specific passage from a particularly long online source, it’s useful to find an alternate location marker.

For text-based sources, you can use paragraph numbers (e.g. ‘para. 4’) or headings (e.g. ‘under “Methodology”’). With video or audio sources, use a timestamp (e.g. ‘10:15’).

In Harvard referencing, up to three author names are included in an in-text citation or reference list entry. When there are four or more authors, include only the first, followed by ‘ et al. ’

A Harvard in-text citation should appear in brackets every time you quote, paraphrase, or refer to information from a source.

The citation can appear immediately after the quotation or paraphrase, or at the end of the sentence. If you’re quoting, place the citation outside of the quotation marks but before any other punctuation like a comma or full stop.

Cite this Scribbr article

If you want to cite this source, you can copy and paste the citation or click the ‘Cite this Scribbr article’ button to automatically add the citation to our free Reference Generator.

Caulfield, J. (2022, November 07). Reference a Website in Harvard Style | Templates & Examples. Scribbr. Retrieved 7 June 2024, from https://www.scribbr.co.uk/referencing/harvard-website-reference/

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Feature   Jun 4, 2024

AI and Democracy Summer Reading list

This list, curated by the GETTING-Plurality Research Network at the Allen Lab for Democracy Renovation, highlights a mix of foundational texts and new thinking on the timely issue of how AI will impact democracy, especially as we head into election season.

Allen Lab for Democracy Renovation ,   GETTING-Plurality

Democracy and AI

2024 is a historic election year for the future of our world’s democracies with over 80 countries voting in elections . This year has also been notably impacted by the rise in novel artificial intelligence systems, which present unprecedented challenges and opportunities for democratic institutions.

The reading list below on AI and Democracy, curated by the GETTING-Plurality Research Network at the Allen Lab for Democracy Renovation, highlights a mix of foundational texts and new thinking on these issues—connecting questions of technology ethics and governance to broader works in democratic theory. The selected material aims to support ideas that technological development should serve broader collective aims and interests, as well as that deliberative democratic governance provides just procedures and most effectively steers towards just ends.

The books and articles below explore the intersections of AI and Democracy rooted across disciplines from philosophy, economics, political theory, history, policy development, and more.

Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson tell a sweeping story challenging economistic conceptions of technological progress and automation.

Danielle Allen outlines her mature theory of democratic justice, a product of several decades of work on deliberation, democracy, policy, and political economy.

Coeckelbergh builds on a decade of work on the philosophy of technology to develop a manageable yet thorough introduction to various approaches in the philosophy of AI.

This is a magisterial overview of the material inputs and physical substrates behind abstract, data-based AI systems. Crawford identifies the power struggles and submerged politics behind contemporary technological systems.

Risse’s book deals significantly with the kinds of epistemological threats posed by novel digital technologies, examining questions of verification and public discourse in the ‘digital age.’

This history of the emergence of data as a fundamental unit of knowledge contextualizes the epistemology of contemporary AI, examining how it came to be that technologists believed human behavior could be so thoroughly measured and transformed into discreet packets of “data.”

Articles and Essays

Allen and her co-authors outline an approach to AI governance drawing on her political theory, one which aims to govern technology with an eye towards human flourishing and power-sharing liberalism.

Tasioulas makes a necessary case for humanistic values behind technological development.

Alex Pascal and Seth Lazar question the phantasmagoric aim of “AGI” that drives much of contemporary technological development in places like OpenAI, arguing that it is neither a clear nor necessarily desirable goal.

AI Now, a leading organization conducting research and advocacy on AI, produced this powerful series of essays on industrial policy and AI governance, arguing for robust regulatory action to curtail the monopolistic power of big tech.

This convening invited experts in political economy, the history of science, and the ethics of technology to discuss the ways contemporary paradigms in technological development privilege the powerful and enable the centralization of corporate power.

This roundtable featured leading voices from the Ash Center (including Bruce Schneier) and other organizations demanding greater power-sharing and accountability in technological development.

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The GETTING-Plurality Research Network at the Ash Center’s Allen Lab and Connection Science at MIT Media Lab hosted a webinar event focused on “AI and the 2024 Elections”. In this session, we hear from Danielle Allen , Harvard University; Sandy Pentland , Massachusetts Institute of Technology; and Nate Persily , Stanford University. Each presenter gives a lightning talk, followed by audience Q&A.

May 16, 2024