Commencement

my meetings are adjourned

Commencement, n. The action or process of commencing; beginning; time of beginning.

All manner of things commence in the spring, like baby waterfowl, farmers markets, goddamn pollen everywhere, and young people sliding down the razor blade of life.

Spring is graduation season in this city of eds and meds, an end but also a beginning for the thousands of students who came to school here despite it not being a big college town. Starting mid-April, hotels fill up on the weekends while charging a king’s ransom for rooms, and restaurants near campuses are packed with large parties on random weeknights. For the graduates, it is fun and fraught and literally intoxicating all at once. For their families, it is fucking exhausting.

(don’t worry, there is food in this newsletter it just comes later)

At H we refer to it as Commencement because that is fancier and that’s how we roll and let me tell you we do it with a heckin’ lot of pomp and circumstance (catch a glimpse of the magnificence at the end of this).¹

The second week of June is also celly szn in our house with my birthday (60!!), our anniversary (31!), and Izzy’s birthday (21!!!!) all happening in the space of seven days. (See above re: fucking exhausting.) And to top it all off, I’m doing a little commencing myself this year. June 12th was my last day at H, just one month shy of 38 years yoked one way or another to that storied institution.

I’m an institutionalist (I just made that up but I quite like it), meaning, I like to be a part of things that have been around for a while. You don’t need an analyst to tell you that moving around a lot as a kid probably contributed to this weltanschauung.² I loved being part of Harvard in so many ways, for so many years, so the decision to leave was less about the institution (warts and all) and more about just not feeling inspired by the work anymore.

My wonderful colleagues gave me a super-nice party, and a lovely gift of a bowl made from a windfall limb of a Harvard Yard swamp oak

Reminded that at this party someone would say something nice about me so I should probably say something nice as well, this is what I came up with:

When you start to feel like Elaine Stritch sitting in the corner, muttering I’m Still Here, then maybe it is time to, as Sondheim also wrote, move on.

I’ve been at Harvard for almost 38 years - the only person in this room who can confirm that is Bill but you can trust him. This wasn’t the plan - I was going to have a brilliant and glamorous career in advertising in New York but obviously that didn’t work out. My first office in then Holyoke Center is now Mark Elliot’s office and I started working there right out of college. For those who don’t know, after working in what was then called the University Development Office, I moved across the river to the Business School for more fun-in-fundraising, then I got the obviously mistaken idea that it would be fun to get a PhD in history so I chucked that stable and satisfying career path for the far more questionable rewards of graduate school back on this side of the river, taught for a truly forgettable year in the History Department, then embraced my bureaucratic destiny by moving into academic administration at the Summer School and then coming to the Big House as we called it, the OUE in University Hall. Along the way, I met my husband (thank you Development Office!) and had the two marvelous children about whom many of you have patiently listened to me brag for 25 years now.

I have met many many wonderful and amazing people and had tremendous guidance and mentoring from people like David Thornton, Mike Boland, Bill Gienapp³, Rob Lue, Don Pfister, Sandra Naddaff, Jay Harris, and Gillian Pierce to name just a few. I’ve shared perhaps a few tears but more than a few laughs with so many people - expert development professionals who are now doing good raising money for non-profits all over the US; the truly brilliant historians who were in my graduate cohort, and so many of you from the Summer School, the OUE, Special Concentrations, and the many offices and departments and committees and projects and things that I’ve been involved with over the years. I’ve had the opportunity to travel for work and help develop amazing study abroad programs at the Summer School, to support the institution work through positively seismic upheavals like calendar change and graduate student unionization, and through moments of serious concern like the exam-period bomb threat and of course the pandemic that turned our world upside down and inside out. I’ve heard the Harvard band shock the world when they played the Yale fight song Boola-Boola to honor George HW Bush at a commencement and I count as particular highlights watching Nelson Mandela get an honorary degree and hearing Aretha Franklin sing the national anthem. And while less exalted, I am pleased that my legacy will include the one-credit Experiential Study course, which means nothing to most of you but if you know you know!⁴

I can’t decide if it’s been a long strange trip or Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride. I once heard Dean of Admissions Bill Fitzsimmons, after he’d regaled a meeting with tales from the admissions office say that his time here was the greatest book about Harvard that will NEVER be written. Mine isn’t as juicy as his surely would be, although probably also unpublishable, but definitely filled with memories of jobs well done and the amazing wonderful incredibly hard working people - all of you - who joined me in that quest. I will miss you all - you can reach me at lisalaskin@gmail.com! and while I won’t miss the students who need that form signed yesterday or actually any number of things that I am too diplomatic to go into here, I think the thing I will miss most of all is that moment when you are talking to a student and you realize that they are one of those Harvard students - the ones with the genuine intellectual curiosity and the extraordinary talents who will take full advantage of their time at this amazing college and then maybe transform the world. Thank you for letting me be part of that.

Don’t get me wrong, Smith College is still the greatest college in the land, H is permanently no. 2. But I feel absolutely privileged to have been part of it and unlike Smith, which is eternal, I am not an insider anymore as evidenced by the fact that I can no longer swipe into University Hall to use the bathroom during Commencement Exercises. I am adjourned.

One has to keep up one’s strength during all of this so fortunately in addition to celly szn spring is also asparagus season and we pretty much ate our collective body weight in the glorious grass from Hadley, Mass. We’ve had it steamed, braised, roasted, stir-fried, deep-fried, grilled, and pickled and it’s just great every time.

Rhubarb comes on the heels of asparagus in these parts⁵ and is very possibly my favorite of the hyper-seasonal offerings at our farmers markets. Here’s what I’ve made with rhubarb so far:

• crumble (with custard, natch)

• NYT Rhubarb Big Crumb Cake (twice because it is that good)

• the annual gin, due to be sampled next week

• rhubarb-mint water kefir

• chicken and potatoes and favas with hot honey rhubarb butter⁶

• Ballymaloe almond tartlets with rhubarb

• strawberry-rhubarb syrup for a Juneteenth More Perfect Punch

• and this magnificent rhubarb lemon drizzle cake for Izzy’s birthday and I’m not done yet.

You know who else had a birthday this spring? Bonus Dog Newton, that’s who! He turned 2 and he didn’t get much of this funfetti cake but we enjoyed it on his behalf.⁷

There are lots of big feelings when you wrap things up and your youngest turns 21 and your dog turns two and you know I process the big feelings through the musical theater so apropos of that and also absolutely nothing I urge you to read, perhaps on a Sunday, this article about the song that some consider the apotheosis of Sondheim’s oeuvre. And when you’ve done that, enjoy this tear-jerking, spine-tingling, goose-bumpingly glorious version of Wheels of a Dream sung by two UNDERGRADUATES (that’s what I’m talking about when I refer to those Harvard students) honoring Audra McDonald at Commencement. That car full of hope, indeed.

1. 2026 marked H’s 375th Commencement Exercises - that fact alone gives the lapsed historian in me a little frisson of delight.

2. There I go being all Harvard again.

3. dammit why can I not say WG’s name in public without getting all choked up

4. biggest cheer of the night here

5. But not in Wisconsin where they overlap gloriously as you can tell if you visit the Eau Claire Farmer’s Market over Memorial Day weekend.

I just wanted to lie down on this farmstand and worship.

6. Recipe calls for peas but if you’ve been reading me for a while you know how I feel about peas so favas it is.

7. Don’t worry, he got all manner of other special birthday treats. But you might enjoy the inspiration behind this particular funfetti cake.