A president next door
At L. Rafael Reif’s inauguration as 17th president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) on Friday, dignitaries from dozens of universities, academic societies, and government agencies were on hand. But only one was there to give remarks on behalf of the academy — and she had traveled a mere 1,797 Smoots from “that red brick school up the street.” “We are close neighbors, sometimes rivals, often collaborators, always friends,” Harvard President Drew Faust told Reif and the hundreds gathered beneath a sprawling white tent in Killian Court on the sunny afternoon. Faust came not only to praise Reif — a longtime engineering faculty member at the institute and an important collaborator on Harvard and MIT’s new online education platform, edX — but also to tease him. “We at Harvard owe it to MIT never to let us take ourselves too seriously,” she said. To make good on her word, and in recognition...