With Visitas canceled, Harvard improvises
William R. Fitzsimmons was running the Boston Marathon with his wife, Pat, on Monday when the downtown bombings forced them off the course at mile 20. On Friday, Harvard College’s dean of admissions and financial aid again was dealing with matters beyond his control, in this case an area-wide lockdown. He was greeting high school students at Logan Airport as they arrived for the College’s planned program for newly admitted students, Visitas. Nearly 1,400 students who had been accepted to Harvard, some of them coming from as far as Australia and India, were heading to Cambridge for three days of activities, before security officials decided to shut down the Boston area early Friday to hunt for the remaining marathon bombing suspect. The edict meant Harvard officials had to cancel Visitas. “With the region-wide lockdown and all the uncertainty and anxiety created on campus by shootings and the ongoing manhunt, we decided to...