From Provincetown to Cambridge: History, Institutions, and the Stories We Carry

 

A place made by people

Coming back from Provincetown, we had time between flights before heading home to Phoenix, so we made a short trip to Cambridge and began walking through Harvard’s campus. It was my first time there, and the experience stayed with me, not just because of its beauty or age, but because history seemed present everywhere I looked.

Harvard was founded in 1636, making it the oldest institution of higher education in the United States. Walking through the gates and among the old buildings, I could feel the weight of nearly four centuries: generations of students, educators, researchers, artists, staff, organizers, and workers who have shaped its legacy.

But the buildings themselves are not the institution.

The brick, stone, libraries, laboratories, classrooms, archives, and courtyards matter. They hold memory. They make room for learning, research, argument, imagination, and discovery. But what gives an institution life is its people—their questions, labor, courage, intellectual freedom, care for one another, and determination to keep building something larger than themselves.

That thought landed especially hard because of where we are right now.

The fight over higher education

Across the country, colleges and universities are facing intense political pressure. The Trump administration has pursued major changes affecting higher education, including a reduction of nearly half the U.S. Department of Education workforce in 2025—cuts that affect an agency responsible for federal student aid, civil-rights enforcement, special education oversight, and support for public education.

It has also moved to reshape college accreditation, which is central to whether institutions can participate in federal student-aid programs. The administration’s 2025 order directs federal officials to challenge accrediting agencies over diversity, equity, and inclusion-related standards, putting new pressure on the systems that evaluate colleges and universities.

Harvard became one of the clearest examples of this conflict. In 2025, the administration froze roughly $2.2 billion in Harvard research grants and $60 million in contracts after the university rejected broad federal demands concerning its governance, admissions, hiring, diversity initiatives, discipline, and academic oversight. A federal judge subsequently ordered the funding restored.

The administration also tried to prevent Harvard from enrolling international students, and later moved to suspend entry for many new Harvard students using F, M, and J visas. Federal courts blocked those efforts.

None of this means institutions should be beyond criticism. They should not be. Universities have long histories of exclusion, inequity, elitism, and complicity in systems of power. Harvard is no exception. But accountability is not the same thing as dismantlement. We can insist that our institutions be more accessible, more just, more transparent, and more responsive to the public without abandoning the very idea of public education, research, cultural memory, and independent thought.

History at the harbor

Earlier, at Boston Harbor—where we caught the ferry to Provincetown—I noticed the markers at Long Wharf. They acknowledge a history that is too often minimized in the popular story of Boston and New England.

The Middle Passage Port Marker stands at the end of Long Wharf, facing the harbor. It marks a place where ships carrying enslaved people arrived, while also looking inland toward State Street, where enslaved people were bought and sold as property. The marker was erected in 2020 to recognize Boston’s direct connection to slavery and the transatlantic trade in human beings.

In 1638, the ship Desire arrived in Boston carrying the first documented enslaved Africans brought to the Massachusetts colony. Over the following generations, Boston and Massachusetts became deeply involved in the slave trade and its economy; historical records identify nearly 200 voyages to or from Boston connected to the trafficking of enslaved people.

That marker matters because it refuses the comfort of forgetting.

It tells us that a harbor can be both a place of departure—a route to Provincetown, open water, summer light, and escape—and a place where people were brought against their will, separated from home, family, language, and freedom. The same landscape holds joy and grief. The same city holds innovation, education, wealth, resistance, exploitation, survival, and the ongoing work of repair.

Moving forward truthfully

As I walked from the harbor to catch a train to Harvard, those histories began to connect for me.

We cannot move forward if we do not understand what we are moving forward from. History is not something sealed inside a textbook, a museum case, or an old building. It lives in our institutions, our landscapes, our laws, our communities, and the stories we choose to tell—or refuse to tell.

What is happening to colleges and universities is connected to what is happening across our federal, state, and local communities. Public institutions, libraries, museums, schools, nonprofits, government agencies, archives, cultural organizations, and newsrooms all depend on people who believe shared knowledge and shared responsibility still matter.

Everything made of brick and mortar is, in the end, brick and mortar.

What breathes life into a place is its spirit. Its intention. Its willingness to confront history honestly. Its capacity to hold grief without becoming trapped by it. And its people—the ones who continue to learn, teach, question, preserve, organize, create, and care for one another.

My hope is that we persevere. That we resist the impulse to erase, diminish, or destroy what generations have built. That we confront the trauma and disconnect in our past with honesty, and reestablish our institutions not as monuments to power, but as living places of learning, accountability, belonging, and possibility.

Homeward

After a week in Boston, Cape Cod, and Provincetown, I return home with a fuller mind and a more open heart. Travel has a way of changing the lens through which we see things—not only the places we visit, but the places we already know and love.

This week, I walked through history at the harbor, along the water, through streets shaped by centuries of arrival and departure, and across a campus whose legacy is still being written. I read, listened, observed, and tried to make room for the complicated stories held in each landscape: stories of beauty and struggle, freedom and dispossession, knowledge and power, memory and possibility.

Now I eagerly return to Phoenix, to my own desert horizon, my own community, and the work still waiting there. I carry with me new stories and experiences of the life I walk: the histories that ask us to remember, the people who keep institutions and communities alive, and the belief that understanding where we have been is essential to imagining where we can go.

May we keep moving forward with curiosity, courage, and care. May we protect what is worth protecting, repair what has been harmed, and keep making room for truth, learning, connection, and hope.

Jeffrey

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