Harvard

SO MY WIFE and I went to this meeting at our daughter's preschool. The purpose was to give us helpful information about our kindergarten options. Let me just say, as a parent: AIEEEEEEEEEEE. Centuries ago, when I was a small hairless preschool child in Armonk, N.Y., kindergarten was simple. When you turned 5, you enrolled in Wampus Elementary and attended Miss Gregory's kindergarten class, where you made hideous refrigerator art from construction paper and paste. There were no other curriculum options, unless you count the option of, when Miss Gregory was not looking, eating the paste.

Assisting is what Tim Whiteley is all about. It has been his hallmark since he arrived at Virginia from St. Paul's.The Atlantic Coast Conference Rookie of the Year in 1993, Whiteley has 154 career assists, placing him first in the ACC record book as well as Virginia's. He has had at least one assist in each of his 55 games.The senior was up to his typically unselfish tricks yesterday at Johns Hopkins' Homewood Field. Before 5,513 in the first half of a lacrosse doubleheader, Whiteley had six assists and two goals as Virginia clobbered Harvard, 23-12, in the quarterfinals of the NCAA tournament and advanced to a Final Four date Saturday with Johns Hopkins.

Michael Heary is Navy's biggest offensive threat, and when he missed the Midshipmen's game against Rice with an illness on Monday, they immediately fell behind by 16 points and lost by 17.Last night at Alumni Hall, Heary returned to equal his career high of 31 points and Navy ended a four-game losing streak by beating Harvard, 66-63."

BETHLEHEM, Pa. -- Leigh Frendberg couldn't get Michael Jordan out of her mind. She took the basketball great's advice to heart and to the lacrosse cage to lift the University of Maryland to the NCAA women's Division I lacrosse championship, 11-10 in overtime, over Harvard yesterday.Frendberg scored the goal that pushed the game into overtime and the game-winner with 1:15 left in the six-minute overtime. The 5-foot-1 senior also scored the game-winner in overtime in Saturday's semifinal victory over defending national champion Virginia.

Harvard University is set to name the first woman president in its 371-year history to succeed Lawrence Summers, who left his post after questioning the ability of women to master science, the campus newspaper reported yesterday. The appointment process is highly secretive, and Alan Stone, Harvard's vice president for public affairs, said he could not confirm the choice of Drew Gilpin Faust. But The Harvard Crimson reported that the university's 30-member Board of Overseers would meet tomorrow to affirm her selection as the university's 28th president.

In a performance unmatched in more than seven decades at the U.S. Naval Academy, three seniors have won Rhodes scholarships, the prestigious study grants for American college students to attend Oxford University in England. The newest batch of Rhodes scholars with local ties also includes Rachel Y. Mazyck of Laurel, who graduated from college at 19 and is studying for her master's degree at Harvard University. Winners were notified Saturday, and the list of 32 was announced yesterday. Naval Academy officials said more midshipmen received Rhodes honors this year than in any since the Class of 1929, which also had three winners.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. - In a crowded courtroom here yesterday, half the spectators gasped in dismay and half whooped with joy as a judge denied bail to a Harvard graduate student accused of fatally stabbing an 18-year-old cook. Michael Colono died early Sunday after an altercation with Alexander Pring-Wilson outside a pizza parlor. Dozens of Colono's friends and relatives shouted "Yesssss!" when Judge Severin Singleton issued his ruling. Pring-Wilson, the son of prominent attorneys from Colorado, is accused of stabbing Colono, the son of Puerto Rican immigrants, to death in a street fight.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. - In a couple of weeks, roughly 2,000 of the country's most accomplished high school students will receive acceptance letters from Harvard. It will be, to some, a postmarked invitation to the ranks of the ruling class. But with a faculty fight over Harvard's leadership resulting in the largest faculty group's no-confidence vote against President Lawrence H. Summers last week, as well as two new tell-all books offering an unflattering glimpse behind Harvard's red-brick walls, the university with a seemingly unassailable brand name is finding itself on the defensive.

Two years ago, when David McClintick, an author and investigative journalist, agreed to write an expose on Harvard University's effort on behalf of the U.S. government to help Russia privatize its economy in the 1990s, he had little inkling that the article would play a part in the ouster of Harvard's president, Lawrence H. Summers. "I was surprised that he was gone by February of '06," said McClintick, and "that it happened as rapidly as it did." How Harvard Lost Russia was published in the January issue of Institutional Investor magazine, a subscription-only publication, about a month and a half before Summers' resignation, which he announced last Tuesday.

Normally, a women's lacrosse game between Loyola and Harvard would be a marquee matchup.But Harvard is 1-4 this year, and yesterday at Curley Field the visitors were no match for No. 2-ranked Loyola, which cruised to a 14-6 victory, extending its glittering start to 9-0."We're young and inconsistent, and lack speed," Harvard coach Carole Kleinfelder said. "But we had the satisfaction of making Loyola think. We put a zone defense out there and they weren't expecting it."Harvard also had the satisfaction of jumping to a 2-1 lead, but by halftime Loyola led 5-3, thanks to four unanswered goals.