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| Upcoming Events | |
May 2011
* May 5 - Monthly Happy Hour. Coolin Irish Pub Paris. 15, rue Clément (Place du Marché Saint Germain), 75006. Paris. More Info.
* May 21 - Weekend in Loire Valley for HCF members and friends. Contact Jonathan Kamler for more information.
* May 23 - Speaker Series with Quentin Dickinson (Radio France's Europe Bureau Chief) at CAPE- jointly hosted with Stanford Club. More info.
* May 24 - Professor Roland Baron speaking on medical research in the United States. RSVP HERE.
* May 28 - Polo match between the Harvard and Sciences Po Polo at the Domaine de Polo de Chantilly More information coming soon.
* May 31 - Joint Breakfast with HBS Club de France featuring Olivier Buquen (Senior French Government official in charge of economic intelligence) at Cercle Interallie. RSVP via this document.
June 2011
* June 8 - 16th Annual Peniche Party. Bateau Concorde Atlantique. RSVP HERE.
* June 14 - HCF/ADI Speaker Series event featuring the distinguished Harvard professor Stanley Hoffmann at the Académie Diplomatique Internationale. More info.
* June 30 - The Annual Harvard-Yale Cocktail Party at an Exclusive Venue. Join fellow Harvard and Yale alumni for this special event where we honor the French Scholarship students. More info.
More Info:HarvardClub.fr |
| MEMBERSHIP |  Are you a member of the HCF? If not, join us today for good times and compelling events!
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Les Echos are resounding!
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Our esteemed club, the Harvard Club of France, has made the press! If you didn't catch the "L'Enquete" on us in the Friday February 4th, 2011 edition of the economic newspaper Les Echos, never fear. It is online in perpetuity here.
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Harvard Mobile Web & iPhone Applications
| | Harvard has announced a University-wide initiative to deliver useful, usable, and mobile-appropriate content to the Harvard community locally and worldwide. To take advantage of this technology, go to m.harvard.edu, or download the Harvard app from the iPhone app store to see the latest news and campus information on your mobile phone. |
| More Advantages of being a Harvard Alumni |
The Harvard Alumni Association is going to reward you for your Harvard Club of France membership!
As a member of the HCF, in 2011 you are eligible to receive Harvard Magazine at a significantly discounted annual subscription rate.
The annual subscription form is here. Register now (login required). If you need assistance please contact Harvard to initiate your individual annual subscription and continue receiving Harvard Magazine at your preferred address.
Discounted rates for International Harvard Club members are 54% off reg. subscription price: Regular annual subscription price (six issues): US $65
Harvard Club member price: US $30
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President's Welcome
I hope you are enjoying this newly improved newsletter for which I must thank our ever efficient and creative Club coordinator, Courtney Pulitzer. Please do not hesitate to send us your comments and suggestions - as many of you have done already. Paris in May is famous for its various street activities (the few of our members who were here in 1968 would remember). This year, May is also the Harvard Club of France's busiest month! We have no less than seven events and I strongly encourage you to take part in either social activities (happy hours, bowling, week-end in the Loire Valley, Polo games...) or in more serious happenings with Medical School Professor Roland Baron at France-Amériques or Radio France's European editor Quentin Dickinson at CAPE. Also, you may start planning your June evenings with the universally liked Harvard Club of France Peniche party (June 8th) followed by the Harvard-Yale summer garden party with His Excellency the US Ambassador (June 30th). We will also be making shortly some major announcements for our Harvard Kennedy School alumni community in France... watch this space! Sincerely, Philippe Philippe Le Corre - President of the Harvard Club of FranceFrance Amériques
9, Avenue Franklin Roosevelt, Paris
Web: http://www.harvardclub.fr/ |
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Special Film Screening "Race to Nowhere" ~ April 13
| |  Parents, educators, administrators and child psychologists filed in by ones and twos on Wednesday April 13th for the exclusive French premiere (our private showing) of the American documentary "Race to Nowhere."
Everyone enjoyed ample hors d'ouvres and fresh juices by Lustyk catering as they mingled and mused about this film that is causing so much buzz in the States. Promptly at 7:00 PM we filed upstairs to the CAPE (Foreign Press Center) screening room in the Grand Palais. We were drawn in to the compelling film, and had an opportunity to discuss some of the broad themes afterward with noted French pediatrician, child educator and Député de l'Assemblée Nationale Dr. Edwidge Antier.
Special thanks go to Elizabeth Kan, HCF executive committee member, for spear-heading this exciting event; and to her daughter who took pictures (coming soon)!
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| Member Spotlight! James William Silver | | |
Harvard graduates tend to be interesting. And graduates who find themselves living in one of the most interesting cities in the world, well, that just adds uniqueness. This is why we are starting a new feature in the newsletter featuring a member each month.
 For our inaugural column, I interviewed James William Silver, a lawyer who attended Harvard College (B.A. 1961) and then after five years where served in the military and then worked for civil rights in Mississippi, he received his J.D. from the Law School, Class of 1969.
Coming to Harvard as a scholarship student from Mississippi, "the poorest state in the country... everything about Harvard University seemed magical" to William. Regarding his favorite memory, he said, "to say that I was naive when I arrived is an understatement. When an Exeter graduate tried to lord it over me because I'd gone to a public school, for example, I felt sorry for him because only delinquents went to private schools in the south and I assumed that he was one of those. There was, however, very little social snobbery at Harvard, much less than at Yale or Princeton or even at the University of Mississippi where my father taught and where I grew up. My favorite memory of Harvard is being accepted for my own merits, such as they were, with little or no regard given to my background."
After a long career, William moved to Paris in November 2004, as he states, "the day after Baby Bush was re-elected President of the United States." He continued, "the re-election of Bush was part of it: he was a great personal embarrassment to me, our worst president since Warren Harding. The seeds of my move, however, had been planted much earlier, when my parents brought me here in January 1950. Paris was the most beautiful city that this ten-year-old boy had every seen, and fifty-four years later, when I retired from practicing law, it was still the most beautiful city that I had ever seen. So I moved here."
Since being here, William says his favorite Paris moment is actually an awareness of a gradual increase in French fondness for American musical theater: "The Sound of Music," "Show Boat" and "My Fair Lady." "All these shows have been great successes in Paris within the last eighteen months, which represents a sea-change in French attitude. When one adds the offerings of the Comédie Française and of the private theaters, Paris has become a theater capital comparable to London and New York." He also takes advantage of touring, be it on daily basis by walking or by bike, or greater distances by train. "I never tire of exploring its glories and its two thousand years of history. Since I'm retired and all my time is free, and having best friends that have vacation homes near les Eyzies in the Dordogne, on the Côte d'Azur and near Briançon in the Alps, I frequently have the pleasure of visiting." He adds, "I'm constantly taking French trains, which are among the best in the world, to one or another French city, simply for the pleasures of exploring the cities and of train travel."
Of course, if a Harvard Graduate, and living in Paris...joining the Harvard Club of France is the next logical step! When asked "why did you join the HCF?" William was quick to point out "By far the greatest pleasure of having attended Harvard, so far as I'm concerned, is the closeness of its alumni. I go to all my class reunions without fail, including the fiftieth college reunion to be held in Cambridge at the end of May. Class reunions provide all the fun of being a student without the obligation to take examinations or to write papers. What could be better? The HCF is another of these wonderful alumni activities."
When asked about his favorite HCF memory thus far William admits to have enjoyed most of all the events he's attended. Some that stand out were the talk by Professor Randal Kennedy about Barack Obama ("who in my view is the best American president since FDR, but that's another story) and the receptions for President Faust and at the home of the American ambassador."
Not the only Francophile in the family, William has a diplomat niece who will begin a two-year assignment in Brussels in June. She and his nephew and great-nephew will be close. His sisters live in Washington D.C. and Florida, and his sister-in-law (the sister of his former wife) and her husband and young daughters live in New Hampshire, whom he will visit at the end of May, and of course they visit frequently here in Paris.
* * * * I'd like to thank William for being so open with me for this interview, and I hope you all enjoyed reading about one of your fellow HCF members! ~ Courtney
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Spring Week-end in the Loire Valley for Harvard Alumni
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| Our friend and fellow member Anh Pham-Vu is organizing a week-end (leaving Saturday morning, coming back Sunday night) in the Loire Valley, for the weekend of May 21-22. Fifteen Harvard alumni will be joining an existing group to tour the region, visit some of the most prestigious chateaux and enjoy some great food and wine. Please let us know if you would be interested in such a trip, and we will get back to you.
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Calling All Harvard Professors!
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| If you (our dear readers) have any connections with a Harvard professor, please let us know! Many of them travel to Paris and we would love to see if they might have availability to speak for us during their stay.
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We hope you enjoyed this newsletter. Please send us any comments.
Looking forward to seeing you at an upcoming event,
Courtney Pulitzer, Club Coordinator |
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