Alumni Day honored University grads — including one named Bacow
It was apparent to Mary Louise Kelly that people on the street were afraid to talk to her for fear of reprisals from Iran’s clerical rulers. The National Public Radio journalist had gone to Iran earlier this year to cover the aftermath of anti-government protests after the suspicious death in police custody of Mahsa Amini, an Iranian Kurdish woman who had been arrested for violating the country’s hijab rules. Then one night amid the din of a government fireworks display marking the anniversary of the 1979 Islamic Revolution, she began to hear spontaneous chants for freedom echoing from the apartment buildings around her Tehran hotel. “That moment revealed a very different narrative from what the government wanted us to see and hear,” said Kelly ’93 at Harvard Alumni Day during her keynote address Friday on the role of journalists amid global discord. “And we would have missed it, had we not gotten on...