Biography|Stephen J. Adler — Harvard College Class of 1977 Walked Out of This Yard

People meet Stephen J. Adler as the man who ran Reuters. The paper trail starts here, in Harvard Yard.

He was born in New York City in 1955.

His father, Norman, chaired a high-school English department. His mother, Mildred, wrote and did social work.

He took an A.B. from Harvard College in 1977.

University Hall, the white granite building Charles Bulfinch raised in 1815, still faces the Old Yard.

The John Harvard statue stands on its west side. Commencement still fills Tercentenary Theatre, the grass between University Hall, Widener Library, Memorial Church, and Sever Hall.

That is the pin: a public college yard, not a dorm or a private room.

He did not go straight from the Yard into a national newsroom. After Cambridge he reported local government in Florida, first at the Tampa Times and then at the Tallahassee Democrat.

The law degree came later, in 1983, a few hundred metres north of this lawn at Harvard Law School.

Columbia Journalism School later listed both Harvard credentials on his faculty page. The encyclopedia entry compiled in the 1990s already had the 1977 college year and the 1983 law year.

The Yard is where the public life is first dated. Everything after it — American Lawyer, the Wall Street Journal, BusinessWeek, Reuters — sits on that year.

A visitor today still walks the same paths. The buildings have been repaired and the trees replaced.

The commencement lawn is the same plot.

Photo: Marco Almbauer, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.