Rika Burnham

— 5th — (1977) Jimmy Carter

I am alive and well in New York City — teaching part-time at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and dancing part-time with two small modern dance companies. I have been a grateful recipient of a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship, and a grant from the New York State Council on the Arts.

— 10th — (1982) Ronald Reagan

I am still dancing -and hoping to survive the eighties.

— 15th — (1987) Ronald Reagan

I am teaching at the Museum, still dancing and choreographing — trying to survive the spiritual and economic droughts of Reaganomics and the arts in the eighties.

— 30th — (2002) George W. Bush

My year and my life were reshaped on September 11, 2001. My apartment is just fifteen blocks or so from what was once the World Trade Center. That Tuesday morning, I was home, getting ready to go to work. As everyone now so painfully remembers, it was an especially beautiful cool clear morning. There were blue skies overhead and the warmth of the sun was creeping into the streets of New York. I heard a plane flying low, very low, overhead, and knew instantly something was very wrong. Planes never fly as low as this one was flying over New York City. I heard a not-too-distant crash, more like a huge but dull thud, people screaming "oh my God" in the street, after which I ran to the rooftop of my building and saw the Trade Center tower closest to my eye view on fire. Soon the second tower appeared to explode and burn. People were gathering in two's and three's on the rooftops everywhere, not moving. Silence descended upon the city. I thought about taking a photograph, but decided to wait. What appeared to be stasis suddenly gave way to the disappearance of the buildings, folding into the smoke, first one and then the other. From where I was, it was a movie without sound. Streams of people from the business district came through the streets like refugees. I thought about leaving, but had no idea where to go. And there was no way to get there, had I decided to. I couldn't get my mind around what I had seen. I took a photograph of the smoke filling the sky.

If it was impossible to understand, it was equally difficult to live with the aftermath. For almost a week, I was living behind police lines in the shadow of what were the steaming, smoking remains of the World Trade Center. There were no cars in the streets, no laughter on the sidewalks. Stores were boarded up. The walls of buildings, park entrances, and the walls of the subways were posted with hundreds of pictures of the "missing," anywhere Someone might see. They were pictures of people just like us, young and old, women and men, rich and poor, of all races. They were people who had rushed out the door that morning, people who had grabbed their last cup of coffee in the corner coffee shop. One sign said, "Where there is great love, there are great miracles." Days and nights passed, and we slowly realized there would be no miracles. There was only the haunting truth of the death of thousands of us, cremated in the middle of our city. For weeks afterwards, the smoke wandered north, reaching my neighborhood almost every evening when the ocean breezes changed direction, an odd mixture of the smell of burning and death, visitations by the ghosts of those who had worked in what was now a vast wreckage.

Later, as life began to resume, I went uptown on the subway and was startled to see people in restaurants, people shopping, people going to the museums. Most of all I was surprised at how clean everything looked, no dust, no debris. And the air smelled clean and fragrant. Only four miles away, it was a different reality. I was reminded of the year we graduated, when the Vietnam veterans came home. And how we, focused on ending the war, couldn't understand their tragic re-entry into a world that had clearly gone on in their absence, that lived nicely in the American dream while their world had been one of napalm and rice fields and helicopters and death.

Like everyone else, I am now asking myself the profound questions of our time. What is peace, what is country, and what is it to have freedom? I wish everyone in America could have seen the vast smoking pit in this city and so close to my home. Many have said pictures did not convey the magnitude, or the despairing terrain of the devastation, and it is true. This is the wreckage of war we studied in our college history classes and see on the evening news, but it is a landscape so few of us have seen in our backyards.

— 40th — (2012) Barack Obama

Recently some of our Class gathered at Tom Shattan's home in New York for a pre-Fortieth- Reunion gathering. Everyone was smart (of course), genial, accomplished, well-spoken, generous, and kind, time perhaps having softened some edges. But beneath the exchanges of our current lives and successes I felt the dark undertow of our Harvard years, as many of us are still trying to understand what happened in our four years there. Those who witnessed the police busting University Hall are still in a state of disbelief; no one can forget the sound of skulls cracking and the sight of bodies being pushed from second-story windows. I lived in Cabot Hall; the predawn cries of runners from the Yard to the Quad calling us to come down, to lend support, to help stand against the Cambridge cops, still ring in my memory.

In the spring of 1969 and again in the spring of 1970, strikes shut down the University. Undergraduates filled the Yard and were joined by contingents from the various graduate schools. Some of the faculty joined the protests, others canceled classes in sympathy with the strikers. In the dining room of Dudley House, a bank of telephones kept Harvard wired into political movements at Berkeley, Columbia, Chicago, Yale. (Could Occupy Wall Street be the new us?) The University officially shut down the school. As a result, few turned in final papers or took final exams, and the resulting Passes (or Fails) are on our transcripts as evidence. In the year of our graduation, 1972, there was a less total strike, but a strike nonetheless. Of our four years at Harvard, we wonder what happened to our formal education. Complicit or not, we never received the education Harvard promised. Certainly it was not the education Harvard students have now. But the tumultuous years had other impacts, harder to calibrate. We celebrate the curious triumph of unintended lessons learned — lessons about equality, justice, community, love, peaceful resolution, civic and moral responsibility. Was our education, if other, not something?

Radcliffe's woes were even more intense. Yes, the Harvard men had to face the draft and ravenous ROTC recruiters at their doors, but Radcliffe women faced an institution that was slowly but surely abandoning them and moving us toward a merger with another institution that publicly endorsed coeducation but in fact didn't accord us equal rights, from the significant to the trivial. Hard as it is to believe now, as women we were denied access to Widener, the central library of the University. At graduation, the highest-ranking member of our entire Harvard — Radcliffe Class, Helen Schultz, was denied the first prize she had rightfully earned, because she was a woman. And as my footballhating classmate Lyndy Pye loved to point out, we couldn't even get tickets to the sacred Harvard- Yale game. Mary Bunting, the president of Radcliffe we adored, was stepping down. And Radcliffe, like a woman in a bad divorce, would eventually lose everything: her endowment, her real estate, her independence, her self-governance, her library, her very sense of self. The days of being a "Cliffie" were coming to an end.

We had two graduations that year: one at Radcliffe, one at Harvard. Many of us refused to wear the traditional gowns. Nearly all of us wore armbands with peace signs. Perhaps our search for understanding of those years is made more poignant by how hard we worked to get into Radcliffe and Harvard. Admission for the Radcliffe Class of 1972 was 13.8 percent; for Harvard it was 18.5 percent. Some of us represented the University's first wave of diversification — surprising in my case perhaps, since I am white and Episcopalian (lapsed), but I came from a working-class family. I was one of the 10 percent of our Class who received a scholarship and one of the 20 percent who had attended public high school. But Mary Bunting told us that we were chosen because we were the best and the brightest, and we believed her. Her pride in us stays with me to this day. Many of our Harvard-Radcliffe classmates say we wouldn't be able to get in if we were to apply today. I don't think that's true. As institutions, Harvard and Radcliffe may have botched a lot of things during our years, but admissions wasn't one of them.

The something of our education made it possible to seek out unconventional lives, to dream and pursue other ways of being in the world. I became a dancer in New York, studying with Martha Graham and Merce Cunningham, then leading my own dance company, The Burnham Company, for nearly ten years. Making dances, working with artists, thinking in new ways to articulate what we saw, felt, and experienced, I was living in what Wallace Stevens called "an immense activity, in which everything becomes morning, summer, the hero, the enraptured woman, the sequestered night." It was indeed other, and it was something: ephemeral and fleeting, long hours of disciplined ballet classes and shimmering evanescent moments on stage when the world made a kind of sense "as of a general being or human universe" that I have never before nor after experienced. I persisted, pulling shapes and unpredictable moves and pliant energy out of the "swarming air" until I was injured beyond repair. I returned to my undergraduate world of art history, and moved into a second life as a museum educator. "With favorable transformations of the wind" I became known for a way of teaching that invites the museum visitor into a deep and transformative experience with works of art. After more than twenty years at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, I am currently the head of education at the Frick Collection in New York City. Others I care about also made unconventional choices: my roommate Catherine Badgely went on to save the wolves; Rick Tarnas studied and taught at the Esalen Institute for ten years; Jon Kerlin runs by the sea and thinks and reads far more than most of us; Greg Hornig abandoned a career in finance to become a pediatric neurosurgeon and manages not only to participate in Medicins Sans Frontieres every year, but climbs high peaks all over the world; Kit White '73 (who by temperament should have been in our Class) became an artist whose work brings together the numinous edges of worlds known and unknown.

This year, I am the coauthor of a book with a colleague at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, Elliott Kai-Kee, edited by the ardent and brilliant Christopher Caines '85, and with the support of Professor Lee Patterson (Yale —sorry! —'62), whose trenchant scholarship immeasurably pushed this book forward. My coauthor, our editor, and I were immensely gratified when Teaching in the Art Museum: Interpretation as Experience won a PROSE award, given by the American Association of Publishers for the Best Book in Education of 2011. And I am gratified in recent years to have been invited to speak about art museum gallery teaching in most of the major art museums in our country, including the National Gallery of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Getty, MFA Boston, the Barnes Foundation, the Nelson-Atkins, the Yale Art Gallery, and most recently, and felicitously, our own Harvard Art Museums (a.k.a., the Fogg). Ironically, the last was a special pleasure, for it put to rest the bitter memory of my senior advisor, Oleg Grabar, who told me at graduation that with my AB in art history from Harvard, the best I could hope for would be a job in the bookstore of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It is no small pleasure to be able to write in this report that my book is now sold in that very bookshop, as well as in many other museum bookshops, including that of the Harvard Art Museums.

I wanted to end with something we all have to be thinking about as the list of deaths of our classmates grows: mortality. At our Thirty-fifth Reunion, the Reverend Peter Gomes, who himself died last year, reminded us we would not all be back for our Fiftieth. No doubt like all of you who were present, I vowed to be one of those who would return. (Will I?) But then Reverend Gomes said that when no one else remembers you, Harvard will. (Will it?) A bell will ring for each of us he said. (The women, too?)

We can only go on now, for as long as we have ahead of us, with the something of our Harvard years, "As if the air, the midday air, was swarming/With the metaphysical changes that occur/Merely in living as and where we live."

(Quotations are from Wallace Stevens, "A Pastoral Nun" and "Esthetique du Mai.")

— 45th — (2017) Donald Trump

In the five years since our last Reunion: My book, Teaching in the Art Museum, won a PROSE award. I received an honorary doctor of fine arts from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design, gave the Innovative Thinker lecture at SITE/Santa Fe, lectured abroad (Canberra, Jerusalem, Madrid, Lisbon, Antwerp, Porto Alegre), served as a panelist for the National Endowment for the Humanities, danced in Arias at the Manhattan Movement Arts Center, continued to serve as head of education at the Frick Collection, and, last but hardly least, married Joseph Francis Graham. Then and now: Not everyone decided to participate in our 1972 Commencement Exercises, and not all of those who did wore traditional robes. Many of us wore peace signs on white arm bands that day, not knowing the shapes of our lives to come, not knowing how important our well-honed capacities for activism would be forty-five years later.

It is now forty-five years later. We know the shapes of our lives, and the new shape of America. In the words of Wallace Stevens, we await the "favorable transformations of the wind."

Frick Collection Bio