Nathan Heller writes:
I first visited the Harvard.edu home page as a callow West Coast high-school student more than twenty years ago. Back then, it had links to basic topics: “Academics,” “Admissions,” “Campus Life.” There was a virtual tour and low-resolution QuickTime videos. In the lead reel, I remember, Seamus Heaney, Harvard’s Nobel laureate in literature, read a poem as a choir sang “Shenandoah.” . . . the Web site was my portal to an unfamiliar world.
Harvard.edu now has a different mood. When I looked recently, the top item was a guide to following New Year’s resolutions. Below that was a module advertising Harvard’s free branded online courses (“Building Personal Resilience,” “Backyard Meteorology”), with a link to many others–some free, some purchasable for a few thousand dollars. Next came a module with mindfulness instructions (“1. Sit, 2. Focus, 3. Expand, 4. Embrace”); another was called “Read an Engaging Book” (“Revisit anything Agatha Christie wrote. She is more brilliant than you remember. I’m immersed in the Body in the Library”). Nowhere on the home page was there any information about the academic institution.
“Backyard Meteorology”? I was curious so I went over to harvard.edu. This takes me to https://www.harvard.edu, and what I see is a long scrolling page:
Innovations from Harvard.
For nearly 400 years, the Harvard community has made important contributions to scientific, scholarly, and humanitarian progress.
The innovations listed are:
First things first:
1954. The first organ transplant
2023. The first logical quantum processor
1908. The first M.B.A. degreeLeading the way in learning:
Sesame Street
Reading braille
Multiple intelligencesMedical Breakthroughs:
1961. Defibrillator
1968. Oral rehydration therapy
1991. Functional MRI
2025. Gene-editing medicine
2016. Portable surgery
1854. A baking revolution at HarvardAthletic advancements:
The forward pass
The golf tee
The catcher’s maskAn innovation hub . . .
Bringing education to everyone . . .
Technological marvels . . .
Robot revolution . . .
Great moments in global relations . . .
Important innovators . . .
A wonderful way with words . . .
Bringing the past to life . . .
Advancing art and architecture . . .
Latest news and innovations
Nothing on the Gospel of Jesus’s Wife, but, hey, there’s not room for everything!
Seriously, though, Harvard’s home page didn’t have any of the silly things mentioned by Heller. I went back using the internet archive to versions of harvard.edu from earlier in this year, and they had different things on different days . . . ummmm, here it is, from 7 Jan 2025:
A guide to keeping your resolution
Free courses on Building Personal Resilience and Backyard Meteorology
Try a mindfulness exercise today
Read an engaging book
. . .
I don’t see anything on Agatha Christie on that page, but if you click through on the first link in the “Read an engaging book” section, it takes you to a list of book recommendations from Harvard Business School, which gives recommendations from several faculty members. There are lots of recommendations there, and it’s kind of unfair to pick out the Christie.
From this exercise I learned that Harvard changes its homepage often.
Maybe they could follow this example from the University of Oregon.
What about Columbia’s homepage?
Congrats to the basketball team.
