On my first day on the job as Harvard's Vice Provost for International Affairs, I didn't know what to do, because Harvard had never had a vice provost. But on the twelfth day, I realized what the job was. War began in the Middle East, Israel bombed Lebanon, and I had to ask myself the question, "Do we have anybody there? And if so, what do we do?" The answer, Harvard being a very decentralized organization, is, "We have no idea whether we have anybody in Lebanon or, for that matter, in almost any other country in the world." We began to discover, almost retail, one by one, that in the end we had 47 Harvard affiliated people in Lebanon.

The question then became specifically, "And so what?" So the first decision — and it had to be made just like that, because there is a war going on — is, "Yes, we will try to evacuate each and every Harvard affiliate who is there. We will evacuate our people."

The second question — just as instantaneous because there's a war going on — "Who are our people?" Not only those 47, but many of them were there with others. They were with spouses. They were with kids.

So we had to make a series of decisions and we had to make them quickly, that we would evacuate them with their spouses. And we would evacuate them with their partners, if they had them there. Then, the next obvious question is "Well then, who is a partner?" Well, there's a war going on, you're being shot at, a partner is whoever you tell me is your partner.

We also had to make some decisions about, "Who is not part of the 'we'?" So we evacuated spouses, partners, and children, but not parents. And then, of course, we had to actually carry out the evacuation. We had a subcontractor. The next part of the "we" was, "Do we just evacuate people who are returning to the U.S., but not the Lebanese?"

And the answer was, "The Lebanese, of course, we're taking them from home, but they too are part of Harvard University." I discovered that Harvard really was a global enterprise and that the key question is to realize that Harvard is wherever its people are.

That's what makes each and every one of us who works for Harvard valued individually and what makes Harvard the organization that it wants to be.