President Bacow Left His Crystal Ball In His Office. We Asked Him About the Future Anyway.
In The Crimson’s September interview with Bacow, we asked him if he had any updates for the Class of 2020 — and for the Class of 2021, whose commencement is in jeopardy, too.
Photo by Kathryn S. Kuhar
By Camille G. Caldera and Michelle G. Kurilla, Crimson Staff Writers
When University President Lawrence S. Bacow announced in March that Harvard’s 369th Commencement Exercises had been postponed, he promised the Class of 2020 a belated ceremony with “as many of the traditional campus festivities that typically precede commencement as possible” — but not until experts deem it safe.
Over six months later, with the world still in the throes of a global pandemic that has claimed over 1 million lives, it remains unclear when that celebration will happen.
In The Crimson’s September interview with Bacow, we asked him if he had any updates for the Class of 2020 — and for the Class of 2021, whose commencement is in jeopardy, too, considering predictions that the pandemic will continue through at least the first half of 2021. We also asked him the question that’s on many students’ and parents’ minds: will life ever return to normal?
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
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The Harvard Crimson: Do you have any updates to the in-person commencement for the Class of 2020?
Lawrence S. Bacow: Unfortunately, when I moved out of Massachusetts Hall, I left my crystal ball in my office. I wish I could tell you what's going to happen in the spring, but at this point, that's so far away. We'll know a lot more as we progress through the winter. But if it were today, would we be having an in-person commencement? I think the answer to that is pretty obvious. But we'll see what the future brings us. I certainly hope that we can.
THC: To build on that, is it too early to ask about commencement for the Class of 2021?
LSB: What I promised the class of 2020 was that we would find a way to bring them back and give them something as close to a traditional commencement, and I would hope that we could. And I would hope that would be the case for the class of 2021. But at this point, it's so difficult to predict what the world is going to look like in 2021, in the spring.
If you've been monitoring what's going on in Europe and other parts of the world, there are countries that have successfully brought down their infection rate to almost nothing and have experienced, now, outbreaks of this virus which are more serious than they saw the last time around. So we'll just have to see where we are.
And once again, we'll be guided by the advice that we get from public health officials, but also from the state. If the state is limiting gatherings to fewer than 50 people, I don't think we could have a traditional commencement if there were such a restriction in place. So we'll see what the state is at the time.
THC: All over the world, people are asking: ‘Will life ever return to normal?’ Even without a crystal ball, do you think that life at Harvard will return to normal in the foreseeable future?
LSB: I think we will return to normal. There will probably be lasting and lingering effects and changes as a result of this. I compare it, actually, to 9/11. Before 9/11, people were used to going to an airport, showing up 30 minutes before their flight, just rushing through and getting on an airplane. Immediately after 9/11, there were no flights, everything was grounded, nobody went anywhere. And then slowly the world adapted. And so now we have a new normal at airports in which there's more rigorous security, in which people have to take off their shoes, in which we've got special procedures if you've been pre-cleared to go through TSA. But we've adapted to a new normal, and this now seems normal. So I suspect there will be similar kinds of changes in the future.
But I do believe in science. I believe in the power of science and medicine to adjust and to adapt. And I think we will see, at some point a vaccine. But I don't think that we'll go from a binary state of where we are today to things being back to exactly where they were previously. I think we're going to be living with this for a while. What we know about vaccines is that initial vaccines, if we're lucky, are maybe 60 percent effective. We also know that 30 percent of the people in the United States say they won't take a vaccine regardless. And if you do the math and if you have a vaccine that's 60 percent effective and 70 percent of the people take it, you've got 42 percent of the people who are immune for some period. What we don't know about this virus, and we don't know about the vaccine, is that once we have a vaccine, how long will immunity be provided? Will it be like the flu vaccine, which we have to take every year, and there's got to be a different version of it because it's a different strain of the flu? Or will the world be more like the measles or the mumps vaccine, where you're vaccinated once and you're pretty much protected for the rest of your life? There are many many unknowns at this point.
But I do believe that we will continue to make progress in finding ways to protect people from this virus through a vaccine. I also think that we will develop better treatments for the disease once people are infected, so that it is less lethal. And I also think that we're going to improve our testing capabilities, so that it's going to be much easier for people to know whether or not they're infected, and to know whether or not they're putting others at risk, and much cheaper to do that as well. So we'll see what the future brings us but I have great faith in science and technology and medicine to help us find a way through this, so that we can get back to life that looks largely as we knew it previously.
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