Seeking the familiar comforts of class and classmates
After 18 months away, Harvard students returned cautiously and excitedly to physical classrooms this past week. Masked up, they filled first-year seminars, General Education lectures, and performance studios, meeting their professors and one another — often for the first time. With strict public health measures in place, the circumstances of the new school year were far from the old normal, but September’s optimism was palpable everywhere from Harvard’s Robinson Hall to its new Science and Engineering Complex in Allston.
Harvard Yard during the first day of classes at Harvard University. A student walks past Widener Library. Students return to in-person learning, masking, and COVID testing.
Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographer
Chelsea Xia ’24 (left) and Abdul Repon ’24 and Melissa Jones ’24 (right) study in the new Science and Engineering Complex (SEC) during the first week of classes.
Photos by Kris Snibbe/Harvard Staff Photographer
Linda Chavers, lecturer on African and African American studies and assistant dean of Harvard College, teaches “How Did We Get Here? From Slavery to #MeToo” in Harvard Hall.
Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographer
Students in Yaron Singer’s “Adaptive Methods in Machine Learning” class at the Science and Engineering Complex in Allston.
Rose Lincoln/Harvard Staff Photographer
Yaron Singer, Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics, (pictured) in the SEC classroom.
Rose Lincoln/Harvard Staff Photographer
Students head to class in the Science and Engineering Complex with kinetic art marking the way.
Rose Lincoln/Harvard Staff Photographer
Sever Hall and Memorial Church in Harvard Yard on the first day of classes.
Photos by Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographer
In Emerson Hall, Michael Bronski, professor of the Practice in Activism and Media Studies of Women, Gender and Sexuality, teaches “Power to the People: Black Power, Radical Feminism, and Gay Liberation,” an introduction to the radical American social change movements of the 1960s and ’70s. At left is Clarisse Wells, lecturer on Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality.
Kris Snibbe/Harvard Staff Photographer
Students listen and take notes in Michael Bronski’s class, “Power to the People: Black Power, Radical Feminism, and Gay Liberation.”
Photos by Kris Snibbe/Harvard Staff Photographer
Students gather in the transept of Memorial Hall before heading into class.
Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographer
Charles Czeisler (pictured) and Frank A.J.L. Scheer teach “Sleep” in Harvard’s Sanders Theatre.
Photos by Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographer
Charles Czeisler (right) and Frank A.J.L. Scheer, professors of sleep medicine, teach the Gen Ed class “Sleep,” which addresses how sleep affects your health, safety, and performance, and how the global COVID-19 pandemic has affected sleep.
Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographer
People pass by the steps of Widener Library on the first day of class.