Around the Ivies

Harvard Law to fund year for future public servants

Harvard Law School announced March 18 that starting with its Class of 2011 it will fund the third year’s tuition for all students who pledge to work five years in the public sector after graduation.

“I want all of our students to have the ability to make public service their first choice after law school,” law school dean Elena Kagan ’81 said in a statement. “We have tried in many ways to make this choice easier, particularly for students who have accumulated significant debt in college and law school.”

The announcement came after the law school’s first-ever “Celebration of Public Interest,” a three-day event that brought more than 600 alumni back to the Cambridge campus. Harvard officials said the initiative is the first of its kind in the world of legal education.

Students who pledge to work five years in a qualifying job in various government and nonprofit organizations will receive a grant totaling the cost of their third-year tuition, which next year will be $41,500. Administrators expect the project to cost $3 million per year.

Those interested in benefiting from the program must first demonstrate a commitment to public service during their time in law school and can do so by earning “credits” through various public service activities. While the program will not go into full effect for a few years, current second years and first years will be offered tuition grants of $5,000 and $10,000, respectively, if they commit to five years of public service.

Yale student dies in sleep

Members of the Yale community are mourning the loss of sophomore Andrew Liotta, who died at his San Francisco home on March 14. He was 21.

While the official cause of Liotta’s death is unknown, his mother told the Yale Daily News he passed away in his sleep.

Liotta was a staff photographer for the paper and served as publicity manager for his residential college council. Originally a member of the Class of 2009, he took a year off after his freshman year and returned to New Haven last summer before traveling to Italy with a Yale summer program.

Liotta graduated from St. Ignatius College Preparatory in 2005 after serving as co-president of the school’s film club and coxswain on its award-winning crew.

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Funeral services will be held Wednesday morning in San Francisco. Yale officials said a gathering on campus to remember Liotta will take place in the near future.

Brown offers more gender-neutral dorm rooms

In response to student requests, residential life officials at Brown are launching a pilot program this spring that will designate one-third of non-freshman double rooms as gender-neutral. This designation allows a male student and a female student to live in one room together.

Gender-neutral rooms had already been available at Brown in upperclass suites and apartments, but the few gender-neutral rooms were usually taken by the time the rising sophomore class entered the housing lottery.

The buildings with new gender-neutral rooms are spread across the campus, so no single area will become a gender-neutral zone.

A group of administrators and students has been studying the availability of gender-neutral housing since 2003. Officials say they expect little, if any, reaction from outside the university community, and said that is consistent with schools like Penn, which recently expanded its gender-neutral policy. Brown received little negative response when it implemented gender-neutral bathrooms in 2006.

Schwarzenegger to address climate change at Yale

California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger will deliver a major address on global warming at Yale next month, officials at the university confirmed last week.

The Austrian-born Republican will speak at a meeting of state governors to discuss climate change at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies on April 17 and 18.

The conference will mark the 100-year anniversary of President Theodore Roosevelt’s White House summit with the nation’s governors that some say sparked the conservation movement. In 2006, Schwarzenegger signed into law the first enforceable, statewide cap on greenhouse-gas emissions.

—Matt Westmoreland