Date published: December 9, 2010
A picture may be worth a thousand words, but for years Harvard's oil portraits have been saying only one: White. Now the school is working to change that. Led by Dr. S. Allen Counter, director of The Harvard Foundation for Intercultural and Race Relations, the university has commissioned more portraits of minorities and women. New faces include Rulan Pian, a Chinese-American music professor and Harvard's first minority house master, and Caleb Cheeshahteaumuck, who in 1665 was the first Native American to graduate from Harvard. Good luck to the foundation, though, if it's hoping to achieve some kind of parity: A 2002 inventory found that of the 750 paintings at the university, 690 were of White men. Two - two! - featured minorities.
