Susan Stout
— 15th — (1986) Ronald Reagan
The issues remain the same; the day-to-day ways of celebrating or struggling change. Our son is a source of age-old wonder. David is forever willing to work on two careers and egalitarian cohabitation and parenting, and to cook from Jordan J cookbooks. My new professional focus is the complexity of the northeastern forest, and I'm proud to be part of the U.S. Forest Service's efforts to diversify its workforce. I'm still anti-apartheid and pro-divestiture, and many of our dearest friends are those with whom I went to Radcliffe.
— 35th — (2006) George W. Bush
Perhaps the most unusual thing that has happened around me in the last five years is an arson attack on the Forestry Sciences Laboratory where I work. On August 11, 2002, at about five in the morning, my husband and I were awakened by a call from the lab's security company stating that the alarms at the lab were reporting a fire. In our rural community, such reports are sometimes caused by faulty wiring, so as we dressed we checked with the local non-emergency number for 911, and they reported that when the volunteer fire department arrived, the fire was "fully involved, and through the roof" Three weeks later, only moments after our son, an intern at the local newspaper that summer, had closed up shop after an uneventful evening, the local paper received an e-mail from an anonymous resender service in which the Earth Liberation Front took responsibility for the fire. The cell claiming responsibility for the fire also renounced the ironclad non-violence code that Earth Liberation Front had maintained to that point. They threatened that if we rebuilt, they'd reburn. But for most of us at the lab, the work of understanding the forests is a calling, and our immediate impulse was to continue. We were fortunate to have the support to be able to do so. We were displaced for six months, and reconstruction cost $1 million. But we resumed our study of the causes of sugar maple decline the day after the fire, our studies of carbon budgets in forests soon thereafter, and we canceled only one of the continuing education courses offered to foresters and others every fall. A wildlife biologist who was scheduled to start work shortly after the fire found a silver lining in our displacement: "If I'd arrived at a fully functioning lab, I would have been the new kid on the block while the rest of you went about familiar routines. I am fitting in more quickly because this is new to all of us together." He's gone on to some fascinating work on cerulean warbler habitat preferences and use of early successional habitat by neo-tropical migrant songbirds after fledging. We're also hard at work understanding self-replacement of oaks in forests, the impact of white-tailed deer on forest renewal and diversity, and a wide variety of other issues. For us, the fire was a sharp reminder of the sometimes small role that science plays in policy discussions, despite our best efforts to produce rigorously designed and refereed information about the functioning of the forests in our region with and without management.
During the same period, I have lurked on the HR'71 Web site, watching the sometimes friendly, sometimes acrimonious debate of today's issues. My husband and I find ourselves in the odd position of being moderately liberal in a very conservative area, with a son whom we adore who is conservative to the core, and that affects our deep wish that our debate could be more civil. Both of us feel shame and helplessness about the fact that our country seems to be espousing the right to torture, is flagrantly flouting international law, and is more interested in placing blame for Hurricane Katrina than in addressing either the agency failures or the deeply entrenched poverty and racism that she exposed.
Through all of this, friendships from HR provide a rich diet of food for thought and fun. We've taken a couple of trips to the Deep South to immerse ourselves in the blues and its roots, and we have shared some of that time with HR friends.
— 40th — (2011) Barack Obama
I'll begin with an anecdote that captures the best spirit of these five years. We spent Fourth of July weekend 2010 with our friends Rick Hubbard '73 and Alaka Wall '74 (fellow denizens of Jordan J) and Alaka's sister in Cleveland, Ohio. As we enjoyed great food and abundant wine at a downtown restaurant on Friday night, David became increasingly aware that the couple at the adjacent table really was staring at us. Finally, the couple stood up and called Rick's name — it was Rick's Harvard roommate (and childhood friend) whom he hadn't seen in about a decade. The friends were traveling through Cleveland from the West Coast, having dropped a daughter at a nearby summer camp. They had tried to make reservations at the restaurant where we were eating, and failed, but showed up anyway (wrong directions in their GPS), and the restaurant seated them — next to us. As conversation continued on into the night, we learned that Gary had also been a next-door neighbor to an African friend of mine in Sweden sometime in the years between Harvard and 2010. The world is small, there are good friends everywhere — and many have a Harvard connection! Life these last five years has been rich. We've watched our son marry a woman whom he loves and who loves him and watched them grow together and support each other through Ben's days at Harvard Law, from which he'll graduate this spring and move on to a clerkship with Federal Justice Jeffrey Sutton in the Sixth Circuit. We're thrilled that they'll be as close as Columbus, Ohio, before a (probably final) move to Washington, DC, for a position with Gibson, Dunn. Our politics and theirs have not converged, which continues to give us pause as we contemplate the issues of the day and the acrimony that seems to displace civil debate.
We've had the luxury of travel to Portugal, Italy, Montreal, and Oregon; we've heard great music (still keen on the blues); and our marriage continues to mature so that we are more and more able to support and enjoy one another. David is a remarkable cook with a cholesterol challenge, so I have benefited from his exploration of how wonderful food can be and still be good for us. We enjoy growing some of our own vegetables each year, as well as supporting our farmers' market, walking and riding bikes together, sitting on the back porch and watching the birds together. The word "retirement" has entered my vocabulary as many of the people who began careers with me begin to actually retire, but I'm still loving the opportunity to understand the complex forests that surround us, to help myself and others conduct research to help sustain them, and to teach others how to use our results in their stewardship efforts. Our research team has expanded to include some of the leading scientists working on climate change impacts on forests, and it has been fascinating and challenging to understand their work and help forest managers think about management in the face of changes of unknown magnitude and interaction with other drivers of forest change. You might find their work interesting and can find it at: nrs.fs.fed.us/atlas. I'm guessing I'll still be working when the next Class Report comes due.
— 50th — (2021) Joseph Biden
Off and on through these five decades, I've wondered how my life would have been different if I had taken my mother's advice and gone to a university or college where I could have been a big fish in a small pond. Such ruminations in today's world are intertwined with thoughts about the ways that privilege has shaped my life's path and the opportunities I was offered. How much of a role did my father's study at the Harvard Forest influence my admission to Radcliffe? Did his easier access to the GI Bill make those years of study at the Harvard Forest more affordable for a farm boy from West Virginia? Those years in Petersham shaped his life in critical ways, and therefore mine. How much did my Radcliffe degree and my father's success as a professor of forestry influence my admission to a forestry master's program at SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry at a time when students, especially female students, without an undergraduate forestry degree were anathema to at least some of the faculty? And then, how often were the doors that opened before me professionally influenced by the Harvard and Yale titles in my resume? Even after David and I settled in a small, rural community in northwestern Pennsylvania, I wonder whether some of the social and community opportunities I've had (David earned his through hard work and innovative ideas) were created because of my "fancy degrees."
Yet, given that choice with all I know now, I would again choose Radcliffe, and I feel grateful that I landed there with the Worst Class Ever. Each time I revisit that question, the friendships formed while at Radcliffe, many of which continue through the present and are some of the most important friendships that David and I share, win out over any benefits of a different path or any guilt I feel about my privilege and all the factors that created that privilege.
As I matured in my profession and gained a leadership role, however, influenced by my privilege, I became increasingly committed to finding ways to open doors for others. Despite the negative public image of forestry, I found working as a forest scientist at the intersection of forest management and forest ecology to be a privilege. Our work settings were beautiful, our intellectual and practical challenges stimulating, and our opportunity to meet human and community needs, both by the care that we learned to take of the forest and by the sustainable wood products that emerged from science-based management, meant that most days were good ones. But our profession has not been welcoming to women or people of color, and I will continue to work to change that as long as I am able.
At fifty years out, I am grateful for the friendships and habits of thought formed during those years in Cambridge. I was able to work at a job I loved, I have a wonderful marriage with a spouse who supported me much more than I deserved, we have a son who has formed a loving family and is on a meaningful career path. We have a grandson in whose growth and development we delight. We are blessed that my brothers and their spouses and our cousins and all their children are supporting each other as we grow old together. We live in a small town in which David and I both feel that we are able to make a contribution. And maybe, with all the strangeness of 2020, we will be able to be part of the change that sets right some of the unbalances of privilege about which I will continue to ruminate.