Trump is trying to eradicate Harvard's inconvenient truths
I began my PhD in English at Harvard back in 1996, after a BA at the University of Sydney. Harvard's president then was Neil Rudenstine, an English professor whose research had been on Shakespeare and Keats. It was Keats who coined the term 'negative capability' in a letter to his brother, which he described as the state 'of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason'. This condition of open-minded, curious, creative doubt underpins all great universities and is a crucial pathway to knowledge.
Harvard University has not always been a beleaguered underdog. With the world's news cameras trained on the colonial brick facades and leafy greens of Harvard Yard, it's an ideal moment to reassess what makes Harvard exceptional, and what social purpose is met by having outstanding universities, worldwide.
One of my first memories of being at Harvard is of attending a small poetry reading given by Seamus Heaney in a swimming pool under an undergraduate hall of residence. The pool had in fact been drained a few years earlier, after one Suetonian free-for-all too many, attended by smoking, fornicating, pontificating future New Yorker writers. By the time I got there it had been converted to a decorous small theatre.
Heaney had won the Nobel Prize the year before and was a member of the Harvard English department. He read that evening from something new he was working on, a verse translation of the Old English masterpiece Beowulf. Heaney's Beowulf is now a classic of a classic. Its brilliance was to couple the sounds of mainstream English lyric (e.g. Keats and Shakespeare) with rhythms and dialects that are distinctively Irish, Welsh and Anglo-Saxon, reminding readers that Britain's history is shaped by invasion, resettlement and language displacements, over many centuries.
Beowulf is a contentious poem. Its aggressive tone and intensifying mood of sadness let us glimpse imaginative residues of Anglo-Saxon migrations, which displaced native Britons and old Roman settlements. Heaney's translation is a reminder not to oversimplify this story into a simple invasion and erasure narrative. It's asking us to think about national identity as changeable, volatile and complex.
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Later in my degree, I was a teaching fellow for Stephen Greenblatt's classes on Shakespeare. His lectures were about how the power and beauty of Shakespeare depends on the plays' continuous experiments with wildly different, colliding systems of imagination and belief. Shakespeare was purposefully provocative, reminding audiences of the most debated topics of his time: still-unsettled conflicts between Protestantism and Catholicism, rifts between monarchy and parliament, conflicts between nation states and threats to political authority. His writing was always at the very edge of what was permissible.
Anyone who's been an international student in a great university will have their own versions of these memorable encounters. I couldn't have put my finger on it that night down in the Adams House pool, but it was when I first sensed what is truly remarkable about Harvard and other great universities. The brilliance of its faculty and students comes from being unafraid of new and different ways of thinking. There's a crucial institutional pressure to keep broadening perspective and learning from other deeply creative, thoughtful people in other disciplines.
It doesn't work perfectly all the time. As with any complex institution, Ivy League universities struggle with internal problems and conflicts that need fixing. They need to keep draining the pool. But at their best, universities such as Harvard are international communities of extraordinary teachers, students and scholars working to make knowledge from a collective dedication to not
knowing and not being right all the time. The questioning of beliefs and assumptions is undergirded by deep expertise.
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West Australian
2 days ago
- West Australian
Unlikely link between legendary artist and small English village explored in art exhibition
Just days after coming face-to-face with one of John Singer Sargent's most breathtaking paintings, Lady Agnew Of Lochnaw, I find myself in the heart of the English Cotswolds getting a left-of-field glimpse into the renowned American artist. I'm at the Broadway Museum and Art Gallery, where an intimate exhibition marking the centenary of Sargent's death explores how this quaint Worcestershire village played a surprisingly crucial role in his artistic development. After the explosion of controversy of his portrait Madame X at the Paris Salon of 1884 (which practically tipped Paris high society on its head), Sargent came to England to seek refuge from the chaos. At the time, Broadway was becoming a creative hub for both American and British artists, and it wasn't long before Sargent was drawn to its picturesque charm alongside friends Edwin Austin Abbey and Francis Davis Millet. Unbound by the societal pressures of Paris, Sargent began experimenting with light, colour, and composition. It was here in Broadway, while residing at Farnham House, the home of Millet, that he painted some of his most celebrated, transformative works. But unlike the masterpiece I saw a few days ago at National Galleries Scotland, the paintings hanging before me today are works rarely seen by the public, with a personal edge to them — mostly depictions of Sargent's closest loved ones. Starting with an affectionate tone, the exhibition opens with heartfelt portraits of Sargent's younger sisters Emily and Violet. His portrait of Alice Barnard, wife of illustrator Frederick Barnard, is a masterclass in textural depth, and a true feast for the eyes for those who view it in person. She stands tall and proud in a voluminous gown, rendered with brushstrokes that swirl through an array of greys and whites. 'The Barnards, along with their daughters Polly and Dolly, the models for Sargent's Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose, were among the first of the group of friends to arrive in Broadway in the summer of 1885,' reads a plaque next to the painting. Sargent's oil depiction of Polly and Dolly lighting lanterns at dusk was painted during his time at Broadway and was inspired by the impressionists of the time, including Claude Monet. It would go on to become a highly influential work, not just for the artist himself, but for the English art scene to which he was contributing. Michael Shane Neal, chairman of the Portrait Society of America, notes: 'He exhibited the piece in London in 1887 and it quickly became a sensation. The English critics had refused to widely celebrate French Impressionism until this moment, when they found satisfaction from an American artist, painting in a French quasi-impressionist style, in England!' Of course, no John Singer Sargent exhibition would be complete without works depicting his beloved friend (and dare I say, muse) Flora Priestley. Lifelong friends, the pair shared a strong connection, and Sargent painted her throughout the 1800s. Two strikingly different portraits of Flora sit side by side on display, painted between 1885 and 1889, and in 1889 respectively. The latter — described as the most 'highly evolved' of Sargent's portraits of Priestley — is rendered in a fluid, vibrant style that exemplifies the development of his technique, which took London by storm in the early 1890s. In addition to the oil paintings that fill the intimate gallery walls are personal items of the late great painter in cabinets — his original palette, manufactured by C. Roberson & Co of London (which remain in business to this day) and a selection of his paintbrushes. 'The exhibition is small but beautiful, bringing to life the artist's family and close friends at a time when his career seemed in jeopardy,' said Sargent's great-nephew Richard Ormond. 'His summers in Broadway revived his creative energies and set him on a new course. He painted the people who mattered to him in highly individual and touching portraits that reflect the influence of French progressive art.' While most people look to blockbuster galleries in capital cities — like the Louvre or the Met — for breathtaking art, sometimes it's in a quiet English village that you unexpectedly encounter it, woven into the fabric of an artist's personal journey. A leading one of his generation, at that. + Megan French was a guest of Albatross Tours. They have not influenced this story, or read it before publication. + A visit to Broadway is included in Albatross Tours' Best of British. The 17-day tour starts and finishes in London, and visits Leeds Castle in Kent, Stonehenge and Salisbury, Bath, Glastonbury, Bristol and Tintern Abbey, Chester, the Lake District's Windemere and Grasmere, Gretna Green, Edinburgh and Alnwick Castle, Whitby and other spots in Yorkshire, Chatsworth and Stratford-upon-Avon, and Windsor. But it is at a slower pace, with a four-night stop, three of three nights, a two-night stop, and only one of one night. Travel is in a first-class coach with a tour manager, driver and local guides. The price includes 27 meals. Prices for 2026 are to be confirmed, but the price in 2025 was $13,347 per person, twin share, and $16,547 for solo travellers. and 0734 974 996 or 07 3221 5353 + John Singer Sargent and his Circle is at Broadway Museum and Art Gallery, supported by the Ashmolean Museum, until July 19, 2025. Open Monday to Saturday 10-4.30pm + Ticket prices are; adult £10 (or £16 for a guided tour), 65years+, concessions and students £7, and under-16s free. To book online, visit
Perth Now
2 days ago
- Perth Now
Cosy bars to escape the cold in
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Sydney Morning Herald
2 days ago
- Sydney Morning Herald
One heard voices, another saw her future. Their art will unnerve you
When she was a little girl, Hayley Millar Baker would cover her ears with her long dark hair before falling asleep. She did so as a sign that she was unavailable to the spirit world. It was her way of saying, 'I'm not up for talking, I don't want to hear you tonight', she tells me when we meet at Buxton Contemporary gallery in Melbourne. It's a habit she continues to this day. Millar Baker hears voices, feels presences, astral travels. This awareness of a realm beyond the physical is not something she can control. Perhaps sensing my reserve about the possibility of such things, she looks at me with her remarkably bright hazel eyes and asks 'Do you believe in ghosts?' I fumble for an answer and settle for 'I don't know'. Millar Baker, who has Aboriginal heritage on her mother's side (Gunditjmara and Djabwurrung peoples) and Anglo-Indian and Portuguese-Brazilian ancestry on her father's side, has delved into the paranormal in her three short films – Nyctinasty (2021), The Umbra (2023), and her latest, Eternity the Butterfly. All three films are screening together for the first time in the veil exhibition at Buxton Contemporary, conceived by First Nations curator Hannah Presley. Indeed, Millar Baker's films and the concepts they explore are the impetus for the exhibition, which has been two years in the making and features the work of six female artists, four of them Indigenous. 'I approached Hayley about her next film and what her plans were and we started talking about Eternity the Butterfly, which now has a title and exists, but then was in the very early planning stages,' Presley says. 'We locked in the commission, and then I started to think, Hayley has two previous films, and the ideas across the films were really my inspiration to build the entire exhibition.' The exhibition deals with themes such as the importance of emotion, of instinct and ritual, of Indigenous knowledge and spirituality, and even of magic in a world that tends to privilege the rational. For Aboriginal people, 'the land is alive, the spirit world is a given', says Presley. In its premiere screening, Eternity the Butterfly is the exhibition's masterwork, shown across a nine-metre screen. Like Millar Baker's two previous films, it is beautifully austere, wryly haunting, subtly political. She sets her films in impeccable architectural spaces that jar with the mysterious happenings that take place within them. Filmed in black and white, her short films evoke the works of Hitchcock on the one hand, with their film-noir edge, and Bill Viola's mystical video art on the other, with its references to religious iconography and Renaissance paintings. It doesn't surprise me that Millar Baker is a fan of horror, but I'm intrigued to hear that Quentin Tarantino is another inspiration. She loves his 'long-winded' scenes, such as the opening of 2009's Inglourious Basterds, where the psychological tension mounts to a terrifying climax as a menacingly polite Nazi officer tries to outmanoeuvre a French farmer who is hiding a Jewish family under his house. Like Tarantino, Millar Baker is unafraid to linger over a scene, to build tension through the simplest of gestures. Loading Eternity the Butterfly is set in the stunningly minimal 'House at Big Hill', near Victoria's Great Ocean Road, designed by Kerstin Thompson Architects. In a striking performance, Georgia Mokak, who is not a professional actor (none of the actors in Millar Baker's films are), plays Eternity, a goddess-like being, who enters a meditative state and conjures ancestor spirit guides, calling them at one point with deep guttural sounds. The film's title references the life cycle of the butterfly, and its constant evolution, from egg to caterpillar to chrysalis to butterfly to egg, over and over, which in turn speaks of the persistence and survival of Aboriginal culture in the face of historic efforts to suppress and destroy it. The film was about a year in the writing, another six months in post-production: 'All the scenes came to me in dreams, so that was a waiting game,' Millar Baker says. She likes to create works slowly, letting the ideas form intuitively, a method that she says is counter to the way the arts often operate in Melbourne – fast-paced and competitive. Millar Baker's past photographic work has alluded to ghostly encounters, while leaving open the possibility that the disturbing voices and noises she heard as a child could have been a play of the imagination, a warp of memory, or an idea planted by a trusted elder to encourage awareness and prevent her from 'straying too far from the pack', as she puts it. But it was only in Nyctinasty, commissioned by Hetty Perkins for 4th National Indigenous Art Triennial: Ceremony at the National Gallery of Australia in 2022, that Millar Baker explicitly acknowledged her connection to the spirit world. She stars as a woman, alone at night in an elegant contemporary home, who performs a series of rituals that evoke the ways in which Aboriginal people care for the body and spirit after death. She bathes, tends an open fire, applies charcoal to her hands before lying back on a couch, eyes closed, summoning. A sense of foreboding pervades the film and builds to a startling final scene. Millar Baker had just had her second child when she made the film, which adds another layer to this story about the cycles of birth and death. Comparable themes are explored in the works of Lena Yarinkura, a senior weaver from Maningrida who has made two gloriously large and intricate fibre sculptures inspired by creation stories; Glenda Nicholls (Waddi Waddi, Ngarrindjeri and Yorta Yorta) a master weaver who makes vast hanging nets, hand-woven from jute and decorated with feather flowers; Lisa Waup, who has screen-printed 365 hessian sandbags that allude to floods and waterways affected by climate change and colonisation; and Hannah Gartside, who creates sculptures from found fabrics and cast-off clothes. The exhibition also marks the first time that the work of Polish artist Aneta Grzeszykowska is being shown in Australia. Presley and Millar Baker were deeply affected by Grzeszykowska's photographic series, Mama, when they saw it together at the Venice Biennale in 2022. When Presley began working on the veil, she and Millar Baker immediately thought of inviting Grzeszykowska to take part. 'I was very happy of course,' Grzeszykowska tells me via Zoom from her home in Warsaw. 'I really admire the works in the exhibition because the art is so true, so I'm kind of proud that my work fits this, and I really like this intercultural context.' Mama is an eerie, darkly humorous and disturbing series of photographs of Grzeszykowska's daughter Franciszka, who was then seven years old, playing with an uncannily life-like and life-size bust of her mother. Franciszka bathes this artificial mother figure, hugs it, gives it a cigarette, paints its face, takes it down to a river bank in a trolley cart, swims with it, and eventually buries it. Like Millar Baker's films, the series evolved organically, the idea revealing itself over time. Grzeszykowska had ordered a bust of herself from a company that makes props for films. She documented the process – an interesting exercise, as it was the first time she could view 'herself' from behind a camera. But this documentation didn't seem strong enough for a finished artwork. So she took the bust home, put it in her living room, and went about her daily chores while she thought about what she might do with it. 'After a few weeks I noticed that my daughter started to play with it. She was combing its hair and she was dressing it up, she was really treating this object as if it was a doll,' Grzeszykowska says. The role of mother and child was reversed. The resulting photographs are psychologically unsettling and imbued with a haunting sense of mortality. The mother figure may not be real, but the complex emotions that the photographs stir certainly are. 'I must admit there are some photographs in the series which are more intense, even for me,' Grzeszykowska says. One of them is the photograph of Franciszka washing the doll in the bathtub. Grzeszykowska's bathroom is small, so she had to shoot the photographs from a mirror on the opposite wall of the bath. 'This picture is amazing,' she says, 'because when I saw it seemed to me that I was looking into the future.' As the curator who has brought these artists and their distinctly different mediums together, Presley says it's rare in Australia for the work of a senior weaver such as Lena Yarinkura to be exhibited alongside that of a Polish feminist photographer. But these are exactly the kinds of connections and juxtapositions that she feels are important for Indigenous artists. 'We're at a stage where we've got these really established artists that need to communicate with other artists,' Presley says. There's a lot to absorb in this quietly expansive exhibition, and when I come to writing this piece, I'm not sure how or where to start. The words come to me in my sleep: When she was a little girl, Hayley Millar Baker would cover her ears with her long dark hair before falling asleep.
