I: Whatever the Form, Let Us Have It
In the first week of April 1969, politically active Harvard undergraduates held Volume One, Issue One of a new student publication in their hands. A black-and-white photo of an anti-Vietnam War protest adorned the cover, with simple text in all lower case on a white background announcing the new publication: the Harvard Political Review.
The paper’s editors chose the protest photo and its stark contrast for a reason. “In order to reach the broader student population in the hothouse atmosphere at the time, we had to put something on the cover that would gain some attention,” remembered Andrew Effron ’70, the magazine’s first editor in chief, in an interview with the HPR.
The cover certainly gained attention, and so did the interior spreads. On the second page, the HPR’s editors asked rhetorically, “Quo vadimus?” Where are we going?
The editors then answered their own question. “This is a highly politicized community — and a highly opinionated one. A huge volume of material, germane to politics is written here — and never read. What we have set out to do is to bring the two together.”
They railed against the “pomposity and self-righteousness” of politics as well as the “dullness” and “ideological fulminations” in political journalism. “We hope that there will be many of you who have something to say,” they wrote in a call for submissions. “Whatever the form, anything from a nasty letter to the editor to a lengthy treatise, let us have it.”
Even though the “hothouse atmosphere” in 1969 died down over time, the HPR’s mission to bring political writing to the Harvard campus never stopped. The publication faced budgetary shortfalls, the day-to-day challenges of running a magazine, and conflicts with its umbrella organization, the Institute of Politics. Its writers commented on Democratic administrations and Republican ones, economic recessions and economic booms, well-written books and poorly written ones. It embraced technological change and stood firm despite all the challenges.
Three major trends have stood out throughout HPR history. First, HPR reporting has broadly reflected national political issues — but it has nonetheless sought to cover issues that mainstream political publications do not. Second, the magazine has fought to maintain an identity as an undergraduate publication, where undergraduates could learn the skills to write about politics and policy while still in college. Finally, and most importantly, the HPR has established itself as an informal and nonpartisan community to discuss politics, without the elitist and self-reinforcing trappings that surround other political institutions at Harvard.
This two-part series should matter to three different audiences. For present-day HPR writers and staffers, our history manifests itself in HPR life’s many facets. We hear about Al Gore’s (rather overstated) role in the HPR’s founding during initiation, we receive books from publishers hoping for reviews due to the Culture section’s former life as the Books & Arts section, and we train budding undergraduate politicos because the HPR’s founders envisioned the magazine as a space for undergraduates. HPR history has come into play in conflict with the IOP, too. For instance, in 1986, when HPR editors left the magazine to protest the IOP’s decision to appoint a publisher to the magazine, both sides made appeals to HPR history in defending their position.
For students of broader Harvard history, this series speaks to the importance of extracurriculars in Harvard student life. Many alumni spoke to the immense impact the HPR had on their undergraduate and postgraduate careers, yet traditional Harvard histories treat extracurriculars as secondary to classroom activities. Indeed, “standard” histories of Harvard generally tell a more administration- and professor-centric story, focusing on famous alumni when they focus on students at all.
However, at admissions panels and in everyday conversation, Harvard students frequently cite “the people” that they meet in extracurriculars as Harvard’s distinguishing factor — not research, classroom learning, or the administrative machinations of the University’s grand poobahs. The HPR served as an important conduit for undergraduates interested in talking and writing about politics in an informal way to get together in the same space, and other student groups served the same function for their particular niches.
For the general public, the HPR’s story contributes to a broader conversation about journalism and media history. In many ways, the HPR reflects broader trends in journalism, especially surrounding print journalism’s financial pressures and the perennial tension between editorial control and financial control. The HPR’s influence has extended beyond campus, adopting both technological and methodological innovations in student journalism. And just as journalism influences the political landscape, student journalism — and the student political commentary that the HPR provided — also can influence the broader political milieu.
Unfortunately, I had limited access to archival documentation about the HPR. The Harvard Archives refused my request to view the Dean of Students’ records on the HPR, responding that administrative files cannot be viewed for 50 years after their creation, and “records that include personal or evaluative information” about students must be sealed for 80 years.
They did not specify whether the HPR files contained any “personal or evaluative” information on students or when, exactly, the files would become open for research.
As a result, this article also relies on articles from publications like The Crimson and HPR issues themselves. Above all, this series relies on 45 interviews with former HPR editors and writers in total. (All interviewees expressed their own personal opinions, and do not represent the opinions of their employers or the HPR itself.) I mainly interviewed former HPR editors-in-chief and managing editors because they had a higher-level view of events during their tenure, but also because many lower-level editors and writers did not remember much about their time in the HPR.
Of course, this particular source breakdown also reflects those sources’ biases and blind spots. For instance, White men are overrepresented in the HPR’s top brass, even as Harvard’s (and the HPR’s) writer base grew more diverse. Although I reached out to people of color for this article, I got few responses from Black or Latinx HPR editors. (In fact, the HPR has never elected a Latinx editor-in-chief.)
Human memory is also fallible. As William Moss wrote in the American Archivist, historians “must understand that the evidence has been refracted several times before [they] confront it” in an oral history. But, as Moss also puts it, “recollections [also] provide the historian with a corresponding abstractive value of fascinating richness… the aggregate recollections of many people can provide a rough means for approximating historical truth” where few other primary records exist.
This series attempts to do that work. Even though the HPR’s nature as a college publication has stymied organizational memory, those “aggregate recollections” span the first 50 years of a publication that has remained vibrant to this day. Therefore, this series is divided into two parts. Part I (this article) examines the HPR’s first 27 years, from its founding to its first website. Part II examines the HPR during the internet age, up until its 50th anniversary.
“A Start-Up With Three or Four Interesting People” (1969-1970)
Twenty years after the fact, the Harvard Crimson branded the Spring 1969 semester — the semester that the HPR was founded — as “the spring that shook Harvard.” Even before the infamous student takeover of University Hall that semester, agitation was brewing in other avenues: Students demanded to expel ROTC from campus, protested against Harvard plans to raze houses for a new hospital in Roxbury, and successfully petitioned to diversify curricular offerings by creating a committee on Afro-American Studies.
During that eventful spring, The Crimson ran another, less politically charged article. On March 11, it reported that the Harvard Political Review, “a publication which promises to provide the Harvard community with scholarly articles and commentary on current political issues,” would appear in early April. It further reported that “a heavy response from seniors” wishing to publish excerpts from theses led to a “sufficient backlog” to publish articles well into 1970.
Despite the “hothouse atmosphere” that Effron remembered at the time, the magazine’s founders wanted the magazine to have a different ethos. “The Crimson, which had a crew of excellent writers, frequently addressed political issues, but as a college newspaper, it focused primarily on internal campus matters,” he remembered in a 2016 interview. “Given the widespread and intense conversations among our classmates on matters of national life and world affairs in the sixties, we thought there would be an audience for a magazine devoted exclusively to political issues.”
Thomas Platt ’71, who took over as the magazine’s editor-in-chief in the May 1970 issue, also remembers the publication’s tumultuous start. The publication had “very low visibility,” he said in an interview with the HPR. “Think of a start-up with three or four interesting people trying to make ends meet.”
The HPR was not yet formally affiliated with the Institute of Politics. Even though the IOP’s Student Advisory Committee had spearheaded the HPR’s creation — and Effron had served on the SAC — it did not yet accept a financial subsidy from the IOP. Effron remembers soliciting advertisements from the Leverett House Grille and the Church Street Garage, where he held part-time jobs as an undergraduate.
Although the magazine had a close relationship with the IOP, the publication enjoyed editorial control over its contents; it also maintained an independent organizational structure. “I don’t think the SAC had a lot of influence,” Platt said. “We had carte blanche over the hinterlands; we were totally separate and apart from the more fancy Institute of Politics.”
The magazine could not muster enough resources to put out their publication on high-quality paper. It had a “rough texture” with “low-level paper,” remembers Platt, “but we did get articles that were of some interest.”
Future Vice President Al Gore ’69 wrote one of those articles. Gore’s article, an excerpt from his senior thesis on television’s impact on the presidency, typified HPR pieces from that era. It was rather long, taking up nine pages in that magazine, but Bruce Vladeck ’71 remembered that “everyone was all excited that he was doing this article,” as he said in an interview with The Crimson.
Despite HPR mythology that Gore played a large role in founding the magazine, Gore only contributed that article to the first issue. “He was not on the editorial board,” Effron told me. “His only interest was having his piece published.”
Along with Gore’s piece, the magazine covered topics like the impact of volunteer programs abroad and Harvard’s relationship with the current housing crisis in Boston and Cambridge. In fact, despite the cover, the publication did not feature any articles on the Vietnam War or the protests against it. (The first magazine was certainly timely and timeless, and controversies over volunteer programs and Harvard’s role in surrounding neighborhoods have not gone away.)
Effron recalled that dining rooms and house activities hosted discussions about the HPR, outside the formal IOP space. “Someone might be talking about an interest that they had, a paper they were writing, their upcoming senior thesis, and that provided a connection for a variety of the materials that we had,” he said. That process meant that they focused on niche, undercovered political events — a strategy that still characterizes the HPR in the present.
In the end, the paper’s founders set an editorial culture that survived to this day. By focusing on undergraduate work (even theses), the HPR’s founding editors created a space for undergraduates to insert themselves into national political life. And by separating themselves from more formal spaces in the Institute of Politics, the HPR’s founders created a more relaxed space to discuss politics.
But change was in the air, and 1971 would bring a major transition to the publication.
“Try a Young Publication” (1971-1976)
For the HPR’s third volume, Platt handed over the reins to Bob Reitherman ’72 and Jeff Levine ’72. The duo “picked up the ball and ran with it, but there wasn’t much to run with,” Reitherman told me in an emailed statement, “so we scavenged articles from people and did the paste-up etc. work for printing.”
But in mid-1971, the publication’s leadership shifted over to an IOP-led triumvirate: Simeon Kriesberg ’73, Rick Hausler ’72, and Paul Jakab ’72.
The details are murky: Reitherman did not mention anything about the transition, and when I asked Kriesberg about it, he did not remember how or why he originally came to lead the HPR. Hausler and Jakab did not return requests for comment. The Crimson reported several years later that the magazine “fell into decline” when the original editors graduated, but that view also ignores the transition from Effron to Platt that the former remembers clearly (and the subsequent publication of the Fall 1971 issue under IOP leadership).
Nonetheless, two things are clear about the transition. First, the HPR largely focused on publishing articles from “experts in various fields of public policy” from Fall 1971 to Spring 1972, likely to keep the magazine afloat while Kriesberg worked to “rejuvenate” the magazine. Second, the publication received its first explicit subsidy from the IOP — a subsidy that would later raise important questions about the role of outside money in journalism.
The publication welcomed the subsidy at the time. “This was long before desktop publishing, so we had to get the Review typeset and printed,” remembered Kriesberg, so the publication used the subsidy to pay for things like “printing, the layout work,” and “postage to send advertising solicitations out.”
“This was not exactly a high budget operation,” Kriesberg added. At the time, his business staff wondered, “Can we get a few hundred dollars in advertising? Can we even get $100 in subscriptions?”
November 1971 financial projections substantiated this worry: $350 per issue in ads was a “projection which will be difficult to meet but is realistic,” as HPR financial manager Tim Bliss ’74 ascertained. Bliss projected that the magazine’s operations would cost the IOP $870 in total over the academic year.
Kriesberg and his team — Bliss, associate editors Gary Meisel ’74 and Richard Mendelson ’75, and publisher Richard Meislin ’75 — worked to launch their revitalized publication in force for the Fall 1972 issue. The publication certainly had few links to the original HPR founded in 1969. “Whether it had formed a little earlier, we felt we were creating something new, as far as what we were doing,” Meisel told the HPR.
As the school year kicked off, they mounted a campaign to attract new writers to the publication. “This year, after a period of sporadic publication, the HARVARD POLITICAL REVIEW will be undergoing major changes,” a document distributed to incoming students read. “Revitalizing a magazine is both an exciting and a difficult task. Many policy decisions have to be made; much work needs to be done.”
A comp poster from the Spring 1973 comp attempted to make the same points in a more attention-grabbing format. “Are centenarians a bit too stodgy for you?” it asked in a large serif font. “Then try a young publication: the Harvard Political Review.”
As the publication attracted new blood, it added more content. “We started getting letters to the editor, so we added the Letters to the Editor section,” Kriesberg remembered. “We decided to add a department called Political Currents to [provide] capsule summaries of some key developments. Then we decided to add a humor column called Political Currants, and we added book reviews.”
With its content, the HPR hoped to fulfill a niche on campus, both with regards to the type of pieces and the partisanship of pieces. As Meisel put it, the HPR aimed to be “progressive, but not so radical” as a very left-leaning Crimson. “And we were all on the same page … with our leanings.” As the campus shifted rightward after the chaotic Vietnam protests, the HPR was “giving voice to very much mainstream politics, including Republicans.”
The HPR also drew upon writers from The Crimson to modernize its layout. Revitalizing the publication “wasn’t just a matter of content; it was a matter of design as well,” said Kriesberg, who pointed to Meislin (who went on to pioneer web journalism with the New York Times) as a key figure in the HPR’s design transformation. Indeed, the magazine adopted a more formal nameplate on the cover, and its covers grew more sophisticated than text superimposed on a stock photo.
By all accounts, Kriesberg’s efforts to revitalize the publication succeeded, and the HPR elected Meisel as editor-in-chief to succeed him. Meisel remembered especially “recruiting new staff, younger staff, to keep it going, because there weren’t a lot of us at that point.”
Despite the IOP subsidy, Meisel did not remember IOP interference during his editorship, nor did Kriesberg before him. “I don’t recall the Student Advisory Committee ever dealing directly with our Political Review,” said Meisel. “But [the IOP] was clearly a place where we could read and work from,” he continued, adding that it served as a home for the publication.
“I think there was also some benefit to the IOP from having a publication associated with it that got students more engaged in thinking and writing about political issues,” Kriesberg added.
While Meisel mainly remembered working on writing, editing, and staffing, Richard Mendelson — who succeeded Meisel as editor-in-chief — had nationwide ambitions for the publication. In doing so, he provoked both a financial and an identity crisis for the magazine.
Mendelson and Bliss — who had become an associate editor — desired a major refresh for the magazine at the beginning of the 1974-1975 academic year. “They thought that with a slicker-looking product the Review could appeal to a much wider audience than just the Harvard wastebaskets where it had languished so long,” Tom Blanton wrote in a postmortem for The Crimson in 1976. (Blanton later went on to direct the National Security Archive at George Washington University.)
Looking back on the HPR’s “identity crisis” nearly 50 years later, George White ’77 remembered The Crimson article that Blanton wrote as “a pretty fair, pretty accurate description of the situation,” as he told the HPR.
To increase readership, Mendelson made major changes to the publication’s design. During his tenure, the HPR paid a professional artist to design the cover, tripled the number of photos in its issues, and it added a “sharp new logo” on a “stiff-paper color-coded cover.”
“Am I right that we significantly changed the look and feel and substance when we relaunched during my tenure?” Mendelson asked me in a July 2021 conversation about his time in the HPR. Forty-six years later, I agreed that they had.
To pay for those changes, Mendelson launched a major outreach campaign to HPR alumni, as well as asking for a bolstered IOP subsidy to jumpstart the expansion efforts. “Like a parent putting out those last few thousands of dollars for college, hoping that the degree insures the kid’s future, the SAC went along,” Blanton reported. As part of Mendelson’s alumni outreach effort, Teddy Kennedy reportedly gave the HPR a large sum of money in 1975, although The Crimson never could ascertain how much the HPR received. The HPR also reached a mutual advertising deal with nationwide publications like the Columbia Journalism Review.
“We wouldn’t have undertaken the redesign, the reformatting, the outreach without a vision in mind, and the vision was beyond just being a campus publication,” Mendelson continued in his interview with the HPR.
But, as Blanton wrote, those efforts “failed miserably.” After all, a worldwide recession in the wake of the 1973 oil crisis was hardly an auspicious time to start a major nationwide expansion. “Even such a sound, conservative, well-connected publication as National Review ran in the red in 1975,” Blanton drily noted.
Beyond the financial crisis, Mendelson’s changes fostered an identity crisis in the publication. “With all the interest in marketing, we kind of lost sight of what kind of magazine we were putting out,” Mendelson’s successor, Mark Saylor ’76, told The Crimson. Saylor’s successor, George White, called Mendelson’s expansionary tendencies “idealistic and unrealistic.”
The IOP spared no criticism either. “Nothing like the optimistic goals that the previous editors had suggested was possible,” it wrote.
Mendelson claimed that his team “still didn’t want to lose the touchstone of articles written by undergrads” even as it attempted to expand to a broader audience, but as the contemporary critics noted, this point got lost in the shuffle.
For the history of the HPR, Mendelson’s tenure has three main lessons. First, the currents that buffeted magazine journalism in general also affected the HPR. With even mainstream publications losing money in a deep recession, a student publication had even less of a chance of making money in a competitive national news environment.
Second, as a nationwide publication, the HPR also had less of a niche. At Harvard, it served as an outlet for students to write about national and international politics in a way that other publications — especially The Crimson and the Independent — could not. But on the national stage, it would compete with many other largely left-of-center political magazines.
It made sense, then, that Saylor and White would refocus the magazine on providing an outlet for undergraduate political writing. It would save money by not attempting to bite off more than it could chew, and it could once again affirm its founders’ intentions by serving primarily the undergraduate community.
Finally, the competition between two visions of the HPR — one vision driven by the desire to put out solid editorial content, and another to invest more in the business side of the publication — would recur more than 30 years later as the internet’s rise questioned the all-encompassing focus on editorial issues.
In the wake of the HPR’s overexertion, Mendelson’s successors went back to the basics: writing and editing undergraduate articles. “Our only general philosophy is just stabilizing the magazine, making sure that we’ll be coming out the following year,” Mark Saylor told The Crimson.
Saylor and his successor, George White, focused mainly on “publish[ing] people who wouldn’t otherwise be published,” as White said at the time.
That involved publishing ideologically divergent perspectives by definition. “During that period, we had writing for the review Jeff Sachs and Larry Wright, both of whom have become a leading economists. They had then, and they have now, diametrically opposed views on economic development and the role of government,” said White in a June 2021 interview with the HPR.
“The whole point [in] what we were trying to achieve was to provide a platform where writers, people who are passionate about politics [with] a variety of different views could find a good home,” White continued.
Paul Demakis ’75’s experience fit in nicely with White’s editorial philosophy as well. He liked having the opportunity “to write about some things that were important to me, and [issues] that I thought were important to the public at large,” as he recounted in an interview with the HPR.
Demakis (later a Massachusetts state representative) vividly remembered an article he wrote on such an issue, about the Boston busing crisis. Judge Arthur Garrity had ruled that Boston would have to desegregate its schools by busing Black students to majority-White schools and vice versa, provoking riots from White families dissatisfied with integration. “This was this huge, huge issue that just really dominated the city for a period of several years, and I felt there was … insufficient coverage as to what brought about the judge’s order in the first place,” Demakis remembered.
“I had to go out and interview a white school committeeman, a notorious racist who made no bones about it,” Demakis continued. This committeeman “pulled down his pants in the middle of the interview, with his office door open, to show me how a good Harvard boy pulls up his socks.” Despite the bizarre interview, Demakis’s article typified HPR content not only because it represented a fresh angle on a topic of nationwide discussion, but also because the topics that the article discussed — racism, informal housing segregation and redlining, and educational inequity — still resonate today.
Of course, White and Saylor’s editorial philosophies mirrored the original editorial philosophy of publishing undergraduate work. In the meantime, the HPR ceased publishing excerpts from senior theses — Mendelson argued that senior theses were too detailed for a publication that “wanted to expand the subscription base [and] the interest base” of the publication — but the idea of giving students an outlet for their written work remained the same.
Indeed, Marilyn Booth ’77 remembers the HPR aiming to produce a high-quality publication that featured student voices, even if those voices were hard to come by sometimes. “Rather than having a particular identity in terms of what it was covering or what it was doing, I think we really wanted [the HPR] to have a professional identity,” she told the HPR. “We did work very hard to make sure it was well written and well produced, and you know not full of typos and that kind of thing.”
Returning the HPR to its roots also involved repairing the relationship with the IOP. Mendelson and Bliss’s project involved making the HPR more financially independent of the IOP and its subsidy, but White and his associates concluded otherwise. “There were always additional sources of income, but the SAC subsidy was essential,” White said.
As he concluded, decoupling entirely from the IOP “was just not tenable.”
“Corralling a Bunch of Intelligent Cats” (1977-1984)
As White finished out his term, Martha Gershun ’78 made HPR history by becoming its first female president in December 1976 — the year before Radcliffe College and Harvard College’s infamous “non-merger merger” but four years after full residential integration. As she told The Crimson at the time, she foresaw “no problems working with a predominantly male staff.”
Forty-five years later, Gershun does not remember her election happening with much fanfare. Back then, her groundbreaking election “was completely invisible and a nonissue,” Gershun said in an interview with the HPR. “I would like to say something wonderful and feminist and important. But the real truth is, I never gave it any thought at all.”
With all the changes that her predecessors had made, Gershun described her presidency as a “status quo” presidency. “For me, George White had done a very, very good job running the magazine,” she said, “and my goal was not to screw up what George had done.”
Gershun described the political context of her editorship as a “calm time on campus everyday.” “This was a time in Harvard’s history when the student body wasn’t fighting with itself, or with the administration. It was well after Vietnam. We had already passed the South African apartheid issues,” she said. Consequently, the publication did not have many internal debates. “All the issues were what I would now consider to be managerial: Who is missing their deadline? Who isn’t carrying their weight? Who isn’t doing their job?”
As in previous years, the HPR had maintained a relatively collegial working environment. Gershun attributed this to a shared physical space, a “three-story yellow clapboard house” on Mt. Auburn St. that housed the HPR and the IOP. Going to HPR meetings “was like going to a friend’s house for dinner,” she said.
But IOP leaders disliked the house because it remained separate from the Kennedy School’s faculty, then hosted at the Littauer Center. Fortunately for them, a new building for the IOP at the intersection of John F. Kennedy and Eliot Streets was under construction at the time. With its completion, the IOP and the HPR would stand at a crossroads.
IOP director Jonathan Moore celebrated the new building’s opening in October 1978. “If you’re not living off by yourself” in the house on Mt. Auburn Street but “living in the same physical community, with the other elements, the other resources, the other partners, everything works a lot better,” he told The Crimson at the time.
Linda Bilmes ’80 had a different opinion from Moore’s. The yellow house was “much more informal” than the new building, she told the HPR. “I can remember just having lots of very impromptu conversations with the fellows because everybody was just milling around,” Bilmes continued. “Perhaps I’m remembering it a little bit with rose-tinted glasses, but it was just much more informal in the yellow house.”
The IOP seemed to be preoccupied with its move to its current location. Bilmes remembered constantly having “to fight for money and for airtime” with the IOP. “I think that the HPR writers had a more academic bent, and the SAC members had a more event-focused and political activist-focused bent,” she said.
During Bilmes’ editorship throughout 1979, the publication constantly probed itself to determine its niche within the IOP and on campus more generally. Its editors discussed the magazine’s purpose, its comparative advantage with other student publications, and potential roles for graduate students in addition to quotidian questions of which articles merited publication. “I think there was a pretty strong consensus among the students that it should be a student-driven publication,” Bilmes recalled. “There were a lot of opportunities for people who were already established,” Bilmes continued, “but [the HPR] was an opportunity for students to write in-depth articles.”
Three years later, the publication elected Jay Hamilton ’83. Hamilton identified four priorities for his term: maintaining community, stability, financial solvency, and continuity with the IOP.
Since the publication had existed for little more than 10 years at that point, building community took priority. “I think part of [building community] was just an open call for articles, encouraging discussion, trying to find out what people were interested in writing about,” Hamilton (now the director of Stanford’s journalism program) told the HPR. “I spent a lot of afternoons physically there [at the IOP]… Being there so that people can know that I was there at regular times, that was helpful.”
The IOP and the HPR also enjoyed friendly relations. “The IOP didn’t try to steer us towards interviewing particular people. It was more opportunistic on our end,” said Hamilton, and the publication took advantage of the Kennedy School’s status as a “crossroads for politicians, journalists, and policymakers.”
Hamilton’s philosophy on outside contributors differed somewhat from Bilmes’s. Although the HPR focused on student contributions, it also encouraged outside contributors. “For us, [they] were a way of trying to build our reputation,” Hamilton said, but the lack of publication outlets before the internet’s advent encouraged professors to publish in the HPR as well. “Professors from other schools who might now have a Twitter account or… write something on Medium, back in the day, they would be very interested,” he remembered.
As computer technology got better, the HPR moved quickly to take advantage. “1984 was the year a few of us purchased the Apple Macintosh for word processing,” Janice Sue Wang ’85, the publication’s editor-in-chief during 1984, wrote in an emailed statement. “We’re talking about 64K [to] 128K [in memory]. That’s right, ‘K.’”
But the HPR continued to use older typesetting methods. At one point during Wang’s tenure, Secretary of State Caspar Weinberger had lingered in the IOP building, and the Secret Service instituted a cordon around the building. Since it was the night before the printer’s deadline, Wang still had some last-minute prep work to do to put the magazine together. As Wang recalled, “Two impressively large fellows with earpieces let me in [to] fetch the photographs I needed to crop for the next issue, but gently made sure I left!”
Wang continued, “Printing costs were rising, the HPR was overbudget and we had to find a less expensive printer, and the lament of all managers is corralling a bunch of intelligent cats to turn in their work on time!”
But Richard Kahlenberg ’85 felt like Wang had successfully corralled those “intelligent cats.” “I don’t remember there been major challenges around that,” Kahlenberg told the HPR, but ensuring that people turned in work on time definitely was a major challenge for “any magazine that comes out less frequently [that isn’t] central to to people’s college life the way that The Crimson is for folks.”
Fortunately, the publication still maintained its relationship with the IOP. In the few years following Wang’s tenure, events of the IOP’s own making would call that relationship into question.
“A Subsidized Press Is Not a Free Press” (1985-1986)
When Andrew Buckser ’86 became the HPR’s editor-in-chief in 1985, the HPR’s relationship with the IOP had not changed much from the Wang era. Although the two programs maintained a close connection, the HPR still operated “fairly independently” from the IOP, Buckser said in an interview with the HPR. “We were not thinking about the magazine as something that was an organ or a reflection of the Institute,” he said.
Indeed, the publication maintained a different culture from their peers in the SAC as it discussed and wrote about politics in a much more informal manner. Buckser ascribed that difference to HPR writers’ interest in “journalism, as opposed to administration.”
Around the same time, a financial revolution was underway. Under Buckser’s watch, the HPR transitioned from “using glue and exacto knives to create the layout pages,” as David Barkan ’87 described it, to a new computerized layout system. The Aldus Pagemaker software had just come out, and the HPR quickly took advantage of the Science Center’s iMac computers to put the magazine together. “And so by the fall of 1985, we really had slashed our operating costs,” Barkan told me.
But as Bucker’s term came to a close, the relationship with the IOP would change dramatically for the worse.
In October 1985, the IOP’s then-president Peter Gelfman proposed to appoint a publisher in order to manage the publication financially after several years in debt, coordinate between the SAC and the HPR, and mount long-range planning efforts.
This proposal would soon prove controversial. At the time, the HPR’s masthead objected to the proposal for three reasons. First, they complained that the SAC “adamantly refused to allow the HPR staff any official voice in the selection of the publisher.” Second, they viewed the SAC as usurping “final authority over the magazine” by handing ultimate decision-making authority to the IOP in the present. Finally, they charged that “the SAC proposal would effectively nullify the HPR’s Constitution” by allowing the IOP to make future changes to the publication without the consent of the HPR staff.
As the year came to a close, the HPR and the IOP attempted to reach a compromise with the mediation of then-Dean of Students Archie Epps. “I thought it looked pretty favorable in that fall,” Barkan recalled, “but as things developed, he wasn’t able to get a compromise that worked for both the IOP and for the editorial staff.”
Those negotiations resulted in a compromise proposal in which the HPR as a publication could elect to “sever ties with the Institute if the new system did not work after one semester.” In a meeting on Dec. 4, 1985, the HPR staff voted down that proposal 14-4 because they felt the proposal did not preserve their autonomy substantially enough.
With that vote, the IOP saw red. The SAC sent an imperious letter to the HPR in response to the vote, warning them that “If the HPR staff does not approve these policies, then the officers elected Saturday should understand that the legitimacy of their titles will be subject to decisions that the SAC will make… the SAC will vote on the issue of suspending the magazine’s activities.”
Three days later, the HPR staff defiantly and conclusively voted to reject the IOP’s proposals and elected Barkan as editor-in-chief.
He would never see his name in the magazine with that title.
The next day, the IOP voted to suspend the magazine’s publication and appoint its own publisher, Tony West ’87. Negotiations dragged out until February 1986, when the IOP issued the HPR an ultimatum: Agree to the IOP’s proposal or leave the magazine.
On February 5, 1986, the HPR’s editors took the latter option. They resigned en masse.
The story reached The Crimson, where the IOP cited the magazine’s poor finances and inability to stay on schedule as factors in appointing the publisher. “Oh, for heaven’s sake!” exclaimed Buckser when I asked him about the financial explanation. “One of the reasons we had gone in the direction of electronic production of the journal was precisely to reduce costs, so that we wouldn’t have problems,” he said.
On February 8, the resigning editors distributed a pamphlet claiming that the IOP’s decision “circumvented the comp procedure established by the magazine’s charter, removed the staff’s power of approval, and ultimately usurped control of the magazine.”
“The institute’s contention that control of the magazine lies with the source of subsidy violates the most fundamental tenets of student journalism,” they charged.
The IOP made an appeal to history to defend its actions. Charles Truehart, the associate director of the Institute of Politics at the time, pointed to a “traditional dependence” on the IOP. “The only place where there is independence is that editors have regarded themselves as independent — which speaks to the editorial independence the SAC has given them,” Truehart told The Crimson.
Truehart had an incomplete command of the history. He likely referred to the publication’s years under Kriesberg, when the SAC not only revitalized the magazine but also injected it with desperately needed capital. At the same time, he also ignored the Effron and Platt years, when the magazine operated with little editorial or financial guidance from the IOP.
Former HPR president Alexander Kaplen ’81 shot back at Truehart in an op-ed published in The Crimson several days later. He most certainly did not hold back in his language, using all the eloquence a HPR writer could muster. Truehart’s remark was “wrong — plainly, simply wrong,” Kaplen wrote. “At best, it constitutes an uninformed assumption; at worst, cynical bullying.”
Kaplen also got his history wrong somewhat. “The magazine was established outside of the institute by students without any ties — financial or otherwise — to the institute,” he claimed, perhaps unaware of Effron and Vladeck’s ties to the SAC in the very beginning. But he had a point: The HPR operated without an IOP subsidy in its first two years of operation.
But the crux of the matter came down to the HPR’s identity as an undergraduate publication. While the HPR viewed itself as “a place where they could learn how to write an essay, to edit, to solicit subscriptions: where students could experience working on a political magazine,” the HPR editors believed that the IOP wanted to “transform the Review from a forum for student writing into a press for bureaucrats and professors.”
Buckser also remembered conversations along those lines while he served as editor-in-chief. For the Summer 1985 issue, the HPR published a magazine entitled “India in Transition,” which an Indian American student had proposed. “The people on the Student Advisory Committee were getting very long faces” about that issue, said Buckser. “They told me, ‘Last issue, you have this big interview with Charles Murray and so on, that’s more like what we want to see,’” indicating their desire to have more big names in the publication rather than student-written articles on more niche topics.
Barkan, who published his own jeremiad not long after Kaplen’s piece in The Crimson, framed the issue with the aphorism “a subsidized press is not a free press.” “The SAC argued that because it doled out an endowment, it effectively ‘owned’ the product of staff members’ labor,” Barkan wrote. “However, no student publication on campus operates in this fashion for good reason.”
In his conclusion, Kaplen did not mince words. “Put bluntly, [the Institute] are interlopers who have inherited the Review through force and intimidation.”
“Picking Up the Pieces” (1986-1989)
Of course, the editors who walked out did not want to sit idly by, twiddling their thumbs while political events passed them by. As a result, Barkan and his compatriots founded a new publication: the Harvard New Review.
In its first issue, the HNR published Barkan’s philippic against the IOP’s decision to appoint a publisher, as well as its own statement of editorial principles. Essentially, the HNR attempted to mimeograph the HPR, except without the IOP’s influence. The political cartoon on the HNR’s cover says it all: By jettisoning the Student Advisory Committee, the HNR could leave a shackled HPR behind and fly away to “editorial freedom,” “independence,” and “self-determination.”
To many in the HPR, the walkout and the establishment of the New Review were an attempt to maintain their publication’s identity. As an advertisement in the November 1987 issue of the HNR read, the publication had become “the only independent and nonpartisan magazine on campus written and produced entirely by undergraduates,” the bolding in the original emphasizing a suspicion that the IOP’s adult staff had taken over parts of the HPR — a suspicion that appears not to have basis in reality.
But the HNR soon ran into financial challenges. Barkan had printed the HPR on “a nice glossy paper, kind of a magazine format,” but the newly-minted HNR could only afford newsprint. “We really were sort of bare bones at that point since we didn’t have the subscription revenue that the HPR had built up over time,” Barkan said.
After two volumes, the HNR folded. Although Barkan did not have any direct insights into its failure, the HNR presumably could not continue competing with the HPR, either for potential writers, subscribers, or for advertising dollars.
Ultimately, the arguments surrounding the IOP’s decision to appoint a publisher mirror longstanding arguments about corporate and billionaire control over news outlets happening today. While Jeff Bezos at the Washington Post has largely maintained a hands-off approach in the newsroom, other papers have not seen the same situation. Similarly to the HPR’s unfolding crisis during the late 1980s, a billionaire owner purchased the left-wing magazine the New Republic in 2012, tried to remake it, and drove out the magazine’s longstanding staff in the process.
The Las Vegas Review Journal exemplified those tensions even further. After casino magnate Sheldon Adelson purchased the publication, he used his financial control to shape the paper’s editorial priorities — to a point that one former Review Journal editor called its coverage of Adelson’s business interests “public relations.” Sinclair Media — a right-leaning media conglomerate — has similarly purchased more and more local news outlets, where it has used its financial heft to shape editorial priorities.
As far as I can tell, the IOP never directly influenced the HPR’s editorial content, skewing to the Bezos end rather than the Adelson end. But the 1986 walkout nonetheless paralleled these larger conversations about the relationship between financial and editorial control.
In any case, Harvard College largely moved on from the controversy. Even though the walk-out meant that the HPR could not produce a Spring 1986 issue, The Crimson did not publish any more articles or op-eds about the HPR’s crisis. David Hsu ’89 emerged as the new editor-in-chief for an entirely new masthead, which managed to produce a Spring/Summer 1986 issue, incredibly off-schedule.
Hsu said in an emailed statement that Tony West ’87, the IOP’s appointed publisher (and Kamala Harris’ future brother-in-law), never interfered with the HPR’s editorial process. “In no case did the IOP exercise any editorial control directly or indirectly with the HPR during my tenure,” Hsu wrote. The IOP’s involvement only extended to “providing office space, appointing the publisher, and providing minimal funds for printing.”
As Hsu remembered, “The publisher didn’t bug us.”
I also reached out to David Michael ’87, the president at the SAC at the time, for comment. He did not respond to queries directed to his email on file in the Harvard alumni database or to general contacts for his company, investment firm Anzu Partners.
After things quieted down, the mastheads that followed Hsu’s tenure attempted to mediate the walkout’s impact. We were “picking up the pieces” from the walkout, as Hsu’s successor Jonathan Miller ’89 said in an interview with the HPR. “The HPR had been struggling a bit, and I think there were some real problems with the ability to get issues out on time,” Miller continued, “and I just saw an opportunity to do something.”
To revitalize the HPR, Miller and his team attempted to do “fun stuff to get some attention,” especially within the student body. In the 1988 presidential campaign, “the Democrats were called the Seven Dwarfs,” said Miller, “so we did a little graphic where we listed the height of each of the folks, compared to a dwarf.”
They also piloted a new opinion section and emphasized quality control in their publication. “In the process, we… have tried to give the reader interesting articles on a wide variety of political subjects,” Miller concluded in his editor’s note in the January 1988 issue. “We hope to have succeeded.” But beyond giving readers interesting content, Miller also sought to give a wide spectrum of undergraduates the opportunity to appear in the magazine.
Maxwell Rovner ’90, who succeeded Miller as editor-in-chief, certainly thought Miller had succeeded. Miller had done “terrific things for the magazine,” Rovner said in an interview with the HPR, “and my goal was to just keep that dream going.”
Rovner actually appreciated the IOP-appointed publisher’s financial management. “If you ask me any questions about the financing of the magazine when I was there, I wouldn’t know the answer, because I didn’t have to worry about it… at any stage of my time,” he said, also confirming that the IOP never exerted editorial control over the publication.
During Rovner’s tenure, the publication’s identity again emerged as a topic for debate. Unlike the identity crisis during Richard Mendelson’s tenure, this identity crisis surrounded the publication’s partisan bent. Several staff members wanted the publication to adopt a more leftist stance, “and they held that view very strongly,” Rovner remembered.
Rovner opposed this line of argument, citing the HPR’s historical nonpartisanship. The HPR “wasn’t meant to have any stance, really. It was meant to sort of serve [as] a clinical examination of what was going on politically,” he opined. The staff also largely opposed that argument, and the staff members in question resigned because “they didn’t find anyone else to really join them in that effort.”
Nothing about 1989 in particular suggested that the HPR should adopt a more partisan stance. Broadly, the HPR alumni I talked to characterized the period as less divisive than today’s partisan hothouse, even though Harvard’s campus (like now) was overwhelmingly liberal. Specifically on Harvard’s campus, partisan publications like the Salient and the Perspective (right- and left-leaning publications, respectively) served partisan niches. In that environment, the HPR’s role as a nonpartisan, analytical publication definitely stood out, and it maintained that niche after partisanship’s proponents lost out.
“Pretty Much Smooth Sailing” (1990-1996)
While the HPR attempted to reorient itself in the late 1980s, the early 1990s represented a period in which the HPR’s collegiality rose to the fore. Indeed, the publication largely focused on putting out excellent content and serving as a space for undergraduates to discuss politics.
Peter Kozinets ’91 took over the editor-in-chief role after Rovner. “We didn’t introduce a lot of changes in the way we conduct the business of the magazine,” Kozinets told the HPR, “and the interest that I had was more content-related.” Kozinets remembered an issue about Tiananmen Square and a retrospective about the civil rights movement, with interviews including civil rights activist Julian Bond. But the most salient interview for Kozinets was “this oddball, somewhat unknown Socialist mayor from Vermont named Bernie Sanders.” Bernie “brought this sort of different perspective [to the magazine] that you didn’t often hear,” Kozinets recalled.
Ben Sheffner ’93 also remembered focusing on producing good content. However, he cited a less successful January 1991 article in which HPR writers attempted to predict who would run for the Democratic nomination in the 1992 presidential election. “We predicted Mario Cuomo, who did not run; Chuck Robb, who did not run; Al Gore, I guess [he ran]… Sam Nunn, he didn’t run,” Sheffner told the HPR. “Anyway, our predictions were terrible.”
After Kozinets’ term, Beth Johnston ’93 ran for editor-in-chief with her friend Elizabeth McGuire ’93’s encouragement. “We were always concerned because there weren’t a lot of women involved in the HPR,” Johnston told me, “so when I ran, I made that pitch that we want to recruit and retain women.” (Of course, recruiting and retaining women proved easier said than done.)
But Johnston did note that the publication “had diversity in other ways.” She shared an anecdote about HPR editors sharing leftovers from an “opulent dinner” at the IOP. After one dinner, an IOP staff member brought “a large chocolate cake” for the HPR editors to eat. As Johnston remembered, “Everybody who was Christian was like, ‘I can’t eat that because I gave up chocolate for Lent.’ Everybody who was Jewish was like, ‘I can’t eat that because it’s [Passover], and I can’t have anything leavened.’ All the Muslims were like, ‘I can’t eat that because it’s Ramadan, and I can’t have anything until sundown!’”
Like the editors before her, Johnston cited the magazine’s day-to-day operations as a major challenge. “I’m really proud,” Johnston said, that the publication engaged with major issues like the Clarence Thomas judicial hearings and Bill Clinton’s impeachment, with major themes that are “still current and important.” “But I don’t feel the same way about the design. I wish it didn’t look like we did it with a ruler in our backyard.”
Largely, though, the publication kept humming, even with its subpar design. “I don’t remember any big controversies or fights or disputes or anything,” said Sheffner, who became managing editor under Johnston. (Johnston similarly did not remember any major controversies, either.)
Peter Juhas ’94, who succeeded Johnston, also remembered “pretty much smooth sailing” during his time on the publication. “It was a relatively nonconfrontational time at Harvard,” he said during an interview with the HPR.
During our interview, he mused about the model for the HPR’s reporting. He pointed out that the Economist had short, snappy articles about a variety of topics that readers “might not be otherwise aware of.” “If I were to say, ‘What would I like to see like the HPR become?’ I think that some version of [the Economist] would be great.” Juhas’s editorial philosophy, then, mirrored his predecessors’ editorial philosophies: reporting on timely topics, but writing analyses that would still remain relevant when an issue was published several weeks or months later.
Charlie Woo ’95 ascended to the editorship after Juhas, and the publication’s atmosphere remained relatively the same. Woo told the HPR that he did not originally imagine himself being editor-in-chief. But “it was such a collaborative and team-oriented atmosphere [that] there was nothing you couldn’t do,” Woo said, so he took the plunge.
Woo extensively discussed his perceptions of the HPR’s culture at the time. “It was very informal and casual but serious,” Woo said. “Getting assigned an interview or an article [or] raising your hand to do more… was always encouraged, but it wasn’t this daunting task.” Students could discuss and write about politics, but in a relaxed and collegial fashion and without having to commit “all-in” like The Crimson or even other IOP organs.
During Woo’s tenure, the publication ceased appointing a publisher — the position that had created the editorial walkout several years earlier. Instead, it replaced the position with a business manager and a circulation manager. Neither Woo nor Jordan Singer ’97, the assistant managing editor in the successive masthead, remembered the exact circumstances that led to the position change. “I think we made that change as a cosmetic change, maybe just to try to attract better advertisers,” Singer speculated in an interview with the HPR. But dividing up the position definitely allowed the publication to devote more time to managing subscriptions and to soliciting advertisements.
On that point, Singer lamented the publication’s inability to secure good advertising. As he put it in June 2021, “We’d look at each other and say, ‘I guess we’re going to run the same ad we’ve run on the back of the magazine for the last few issues, even though no one’s paying us for it, because we have to put something on the back of the issue!”
Epilogue: “Hey, There’s This Thing Called the Internet”
Beyond the division of the publisher role into the circulation manager and the business manager, Singer also discussed a new position that appeared in the first issue in 1996: the online editor. “I think part of the discussion was, we woke up and said, ‘Hey, there’s this thing called the internet, people seem to be getting on it,’” Singer said.
The Spring 1996 issue also marked the first appearance of a small URL in the publication. It read hcs.harvard.edu/~hpr, and it linked to the publication’s first website. In that issue, editor-in-chief Andrei Cherny ’97 hoped that the novelty “will allow us to reach a far greater number of readers than we presently do.”
With the link and the online editor, the HPR’s digital presence — a presence that spans 25 years and counting — would begin. Those changes would definitely presage much more than the publication’s editors realized at the time.
And while the HPR’s unconnected era was coming to an end, it had still achieved a lot in the 27 years before its first website. It had published more than 100 issues, taught thousands of undergraduates how to write, edit, and design, and written hundreds of thousands of words. Most importantly, though, it found a niche on Harvard’s campus and filled it. It held onto its identity as a nonpartisan publication that largely served Harvard’s undergraduate population, despite numerous crises from the inside and the outside.
The online era would not change the HPR’s purpose or its identity, but it would certainly change the way that the HPR carried out its day-to-day work.
And it would bring its own set of challenges.
