How exercise leads to sharper thinking and a healthier brain
New findings from 350,000 people make the strongest case yet that exercise improves cognition. A small study shows it raises BDNF, a brain chemical.
By Gretchen Reynolds
April 5, 2023 at 7:30 a.m. Washington Post
To build a better brain, just exercise.
That’s the message of two important new studies of how physical activity changes our minds. In one, scientists delved into the lives, DNA and cognition of thousands of people to show that regular exercise leads to much sharper thinking.
Another study helps explain why exercise is good for the brain. Researchers found that just six minutes of strenuous exertion quintupled production of a neurochemical known to be essential for lifelong brain health.
The studies arrive at a moment when some recent, widely discussed research has been raising doubts about the extent to which exercise bolsters thinking and memory. But the new findings, which analyzed data for almost 350,000 people, make the strongest case yet that regular exercise can improve cognition.
These studies reinforce the idea that “absolutely, exercise is one of the best things you can do” for your brain, said Matthieu Boisgontier, an associate professor at the University of Ottawa, who oversaw one of the studies.
‘Miracle-Gro’ for your brain
The first inklings that exercise remodels brains and minds came decades ago in mouse studies. Active, running animals in these experiments scored much higher on rodent intelligence tests than sedentary mice, and their brain tissues teemed with elevated levels of a substance known as brain-derived neurotrophic factor or BDNF, often referred to as “Miracle-Gro” for the brain.
BDNF prompts the creation and maturation of new brain cells and synapses. It bulks up brains.
Studies in people have since established that exercise also raises BDNF levels in our bloodstreams, although it’s harder to look inside our brains and see if it rises there.
Multiple, large-scale epidemiological studies, meanwhile, have linked more exercise to better memories and thinking skills and less risk for neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer’s.
Qualms have lingered, though, about just how potent exercise really is for our brains.
A study published last year of more than 500 older people found little cognitive benefit from 18 months of regular walking or other light exercise, while a major review of past research published in March pointed out that many human studies of exercise and cognition have been too small or otherwise limited to show persuasive benefits for brain health from working out.
In some scientific quarters, rumblings have begun about whether to continue recommending exercise as a way to maintain mental acuity with age, Boisgontier said. “But we say, ‘No, no. Don’t stop. Look at our findings first,’” he said.
A landmark brain study
The study from Boisgontier and his colleagues, published last week in Scientific Reports, uses a novel and complex type of statistical analysis to go beyond traditional observational research and firmly establish that exercise does improve your brain skills.
They turned to DNA and Mendelian randomization, a recently popularized method of using genetic variations to characterize and sort people. We each are born with or without certain snippets of DNA, some of which are known to contribute to a likelihood of being physically active. From before birth, we are, in effect, randomized by nature to be someone who is or isn’t prone to move. Other gene snippets play a similar role in cognition.
By cross-checking the cognitive scores of people who have or lack the exercise-promoting snippets against those of people with the gene variants related to cognition, scientists can discern the extent to which exercise contributes to thinking skills.
From two enormous databases of health information, they pulled genetic data for almost 350,000 people of all ages, along with objective measurements of physical activity for about 91,000 of them and cognitive scores for almost 258,000. People with a genetic predisposition to exercise typically did exercise, they found, and scored better on tests of thinking, if their exercise was at least moderate, comparable to jogging.
And, yes, you can get brain benefits from exercise even if you don’t have the gene snippets.
The interplay of exercise and thinking was strong enough to indicate causation, Boisgontier said, meaning, in this big study, the right exercise resulted in sharper minds.
6 minutes of intense exercise raises BDNF
The other new study, although comparatively small, may help explain how exercise keeps your brain healthy.
In this experiment, 12 healthy, young people rode an exercise bike at a very leisurely pace for 90 minutes, followed by six minutes of intervals consisting of 40 seconds of all-out pedaling interspersed with 20 seconds of rest. Before, during and after each session, researchers tracked BDNF in people’s blood.
They also measured levels of lactate. Muscles release lactate, often called lactic acid, during exercise, especially if it’s strenuous. It can travel to and be sucked up by the brain as fuel.
Past studies in mice suggest this shift in brain fueling is what jump-starts the creation of BDNF. When animals’ brains begin slurping up lactate in lieu of sugar, they start pumping out more BDNF and the mice soon blossom into rodent brainiacs.
Now, the researchers found indications of something similar happening in people. During easy riding, lactate levels rose slightly in people’s blood after about 30 minutes, as did the amounts of BDNF in their blood. But during and after the six minutes of hard, fast pedaling, lactate soared and so did BDNF. (Another part of the study examined the effects of 20 hours of fasting, but it turned out to have no effects on BDNF.)
What these results suggest is that “exercise is good for your brain and that exercising longer, or particularly, harder, may maximize the benefits,” said Travis Gibbons, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of British Columbia at Okanagan, who led the study.
Boisgontier agreed. “Always, with exercise and the brain, it involves BDNF,” he said, adding that in his group’s study, both moderate and more-vigorous exercise — brisk walking and brisker running — improved cognition, presumably because they prompted a rise in BDNF.
Many questions remain, Gibbons pointed out, including how long BDNF stays elevated after exercise, the ideal types and amounts of exercise to up BDNF, and whether the effects are the same in older or less-healthy men and women, as well as why fasting didn’t increase BDNF in this experiment. He and Boisgontier have follow-up studies planned or underway.
But for now, this research tells us that exercise, fast or slow, should reliably protect our ability to think.
Do you have a fitness question? Email YourMove@washpost.com and we may answer your question in a future column.
Would Usain Bolt Beat This 'Jurassic Park' Dinosaur in a Race?
A physics professor’s playful question pits the world’s fastest human against the prehistoric predator Dilophosaurus.
By Alex OrlandoApr 7, 2022 7:00 AM Discover Magazine
(Credit: Dotted Yeti/Shutterstock)
If you were just going by the 1993 blockbuster Jurassic Park, you might think that the dinosaur Dilophosaurus was pretty spry. In a now-infamous — and scientifically dubious — scene, the Early Jurassic predator dodges behind a tree while playfully evading one of the film’s villains. Moments later, it darts up a stream of cascading water before unfurling its vibrant neck frill and spitting venom in the man’s face.
Paleontologists know that Dilophosaurus didn’t have colorful neck frills, nor did they spew black goo to subdue their prey. And while the double-crested creature is depicted as roughly human-sized on screen, it actuallyweighed a whopping 900 pounds and spanned more than 20 feet in length some 190 million years ago. Still, the filmmakers may have been onto something regarding the therapod’s agility; thanks to its powerful legs, it could reach speeds up to 20 mph.
But was the Dilophosaurus fast enough to beat eight-time Olympic gold medalist Usain Bolt in a 100-meter dash?
It may sound like a strange hypothetical at first. But that’s the question that University of Toledo physicist Scott Lee recentlyposed to his undergraduate students in introductory physics, according to a paper published in The Physics Teacher in March. “I’m always looking for new and interesting things that will excite the students,” says Lee. “Everyone, at some point in their life, has been interested in dinosaurs, so I always try and bring [these] concepts [into the classroom].”
Jurassic Physics
Like many other dinosaur aficionados, Lee’s fascination with the prehistoric beasts started at a young age, ever since he began finding fossils with his family growing up. Years later, in the early 1990s, he found a book by zoologist Robert McNeill Alexander — Dynamics of Dinosaurs and Other Extinct Giants — that uses physics principles to theorize how dinosaurs might have moved throughout the world. “That inspiration of applying physics to actual animals was interesting to me,” says Lee.
Plenty of other physicists have been just as fascinated by the biomechanics of dinosaur movement — particularly when it comes to calculating the running and walking speeds for prehistoric touchstones like Tyrannosaurs rex. For example, one study published in 2017 calculated that T. rex could only reach a maximum speed of around 12 mph; any faster, the researchers speculated, and the predator’s bones would have shattered. (Sorry again, Jurassic Park fans, but it almost certainly couldn’t have outrun a speeding car.) More recently, scientists created a 3D reconstruction — alongside a spring-suspended biomechanical model — of a T. rex tail to calculate that the animal likely lumbered along at just under 3 mph, according to a paper published in Royal Society Open Science in 2021.
Lee points to the variety of approaches that researchers can use to model such predictions. “We have the bones from many dinosaurs; with the Dilophosaurus and Tyrannosaurus rex, we have essentially complete skeletons,” he says. "By looking at modern animals, you can then get an idea of how big the muscles were to then calculate how big of a force you could apply to the leg of a dinosaur to model how fast it would go.” Other researchers have used robotics to model their predictions. “But, of course, this is just theoretical work,” Lee adds. “We don’t have any actual proof of how these things were.” When creating his own hypothetical for his students, Lee says that he chose Dilophosaurus because its top speed comes out much closer to Usain Bolt’s than, say, the more-famous T-rex. “I wanted to have something that’s surprising,” he says, “so it becomes a question of, 'Who’s going to win?' ”
The Race is On
For many students just starting to learn about physics, the difference between speed and acceleration isn’t always intuitive. “They tend to think of that as being the same thing — if you accelerate fast, you’re going to go fast,” says Lee. “Well, that’s true; but they’re actually very distinct concepts.” In preparing his exercise, Lee wanted to create a situation where the speed between two subjects was roughly the same, but because the accelerations were different, so was the outcome. So, a race between the world’s fastest human sprinter and a similarly-speedy dinosaur was born.
Lee was able to draw on more than just earlier studies that probed dinosaur locomotion. There’s actually arobust body of research analyzing Bolt’s speedster status. In 2008, when the Jamaican sprinter changed history at the Beijing Olympics by setting a new world record for the 100-meter dash (9.69 seconds), he was so far ahead of his competitors that he visibly slowed down before crossing the finish line. Physicists at the University of Oslo calculated that Bolt would have finished in about 9.55 seconds if not for his end-of-race celebration. Several years later, after Bolt broke his own record at the 2009 World Championships in Berlin, physicists at the National Autonomous University of Mexico found that his acceleration at the start of the race was 9.5 meters per second squared.
Usain Bolt during the men's 800-meter race at the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. (Credit: Celso Pupo/Shutterstock)
In tackling the exercise, the students applied concepts of kinematics — like displacement, as well as speed, velocity and acceleration — while modeling out the race using spreadsheets. They ultimately concluded that Bolt would easily outstrip Dilophosaurus, leaving the Early Jurassic predator in the dust by 2 seconds.
The acceleration (in meters per second squared) of Usain Bolt (left) and Dilophosaurus (right) during a theoretical 100-meter race. (Credit: Scott Lee)
As Lee emphasized to his class, the key factor was indeed acceleration. Following Newton’s second law of motion, where acceleration is dependent upon an object’s mass and force, Bolt’s smaller size would give him an early leg up. “Dilophosaurus has bigger muscles and can generate a bigger force, but that force goes up against the cross-sectional area of the muscle,” says Lee. “So the bigger something gets, yes it becomes stronger, but its acceleration becomes less. That’s why Dilophosaurus, because it’s so much more massive than Usain Bolt, accelerates a lot slower.” Lee compared the race to other examples in the animal kingdom today, like how lionesses leverage their acceleration to catch quicker prey.
In the future, Lee hopes to keep his students engaged by modeling similarly-enticing exercises. Right now, he’s using data collected from thousands of fossilized tracks to find the fastest-known dinosaur — and pit that dinosaur against a cheetah. But, continuing the trend set by his earlier lesson, Lee says that the exercise will show that even the speediest dinosaur was still slower than the fastest animal today.
Tsökahovi Tewanima held an American record in running for decades, but his training at the infamous Carlisle school kept him from his ancestral Hopi lands
Kathleen Sharp, Smithsonian Magazine
Tsökahovi "Louis" Tewanima became an Olympian while being forced to attend the Carlisle Indian Industrial School. Illustration by Gabriella Trujillo
One morning in November 1906, a Hopi teenager on the Second Mesa of the Arizona reservation awoke to pandemonium. A U.S. Army officer was calling the villagers together. He said the government had reached the limit of its patience. For two decades, the tribe had refused to send its children to government-sanctioned boarding schools, as directed; now, under military compulsion, every Hopi child had to attend one. Soldiers began rounding up sleepy-eyed children and older kids, too. Mothers wailed, babies cried and fathers vowed to stand up to the Army. But the unarmed Hopi were no match for the soldiers, and their young ones were seized.
Louis Tewanima after winning New York City’s 12-mile modified marathon, May 6, 1911. Library of Congress
Tsökahovi Tewanima, a teenager who was 5 feet 4½ inches tall and weighed 110 pounds, was described by one soldier as “thin, emaciated and beligerent [sic].” Tewanima and ten other teens were handcuffed and marched 20 miles east to Keams Canyon, says Leigh Lomayestewa, Tewanima’s nephew. There, the Hopi youths were shackled and forced to build a road. In mid-January 1907, the soldiers marched the prisoners 110 miles east to Fort Wingate, New Mexico, where they boarded a train. About five days later, they arrived at Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania, roughly 2,000 miles from home.
The school was the flagship of a fleet of around 25 federally funded, off-reservation institutions for Native American children, run by religious groups and government agencies. Carlisle, founded by the Union Army veteran Col. Richard H. Pratt, aimed to “civilize” native youth by teaching them Christianity and the ways of Western society. “Kill the Indian, Save the Man,” was Pratt’s motto, and, in fact, many children did die at Carlisle because of disease, starvation, and physical abuse.
The 1912 Carlisle Indian School track team. Louis Tewanima is seated on the far right. Jim Thorpe is standing in the middle of the back row. Photo courtesy of Cumberland County Historical Society, Carlisle, Pa.
Tewanima coped with such cultural eradication by tapping into an ancient Hopi tradition—running. And he would become an inspirational figure: a two-time Olympian, a record-holder for more than half a century and a source of pride for his people.
I became keenly interested in Native Americans as a child, listening to the stories of my grandfather, who was born on the Cherokee Reservation. Later, when I started running half-marathons, I heard about the legendary Hopi runners. But it wasn’t until 2016, when I was invited to visit the Hopi Nation, that I learned about the remarkable Tewanima. I heard much more about him on subsequent trips. On my most recent visit, in March 2019, I stood on the edge of the cliff where he eventually met his tragic fate and found myself haunted by his life. Why, I wondered, was this international champion and teammate of the celebrated Jim Thorpe almost totally forgotten in the wider world?
American runners Louis Tewanima (center) and Joseph Forshaw during the London Olympic marathon, July 1908. Forshaw won the bronze in the event; Tewanima finished ninth. Getty Images
In pursuit of that question, I return to January 26, 1907, when Tewanima, about 18 years old, was enrolled at Carlisle. Officials cut his thick long hair, burned his clothes and gave him a U.S. military uniform. An Army sergeant gave him a new name, which the school spelled alternately as Lewis or Louis. Forbidden to speak his language or to practice his religion, Tewanima was led into Carlisle’s barracks to meet the school’s 1,000 students from dozens of other tribes. Since they spoke different native languages, they couldn’t communicate with one another. Most kids didn’t understand the white adults who spoke English. As a result, many youngsters couldn’t follow directions; school officials punished the children with no supper, extra work or a whipping.
Tewanima’s new life was ruled by the bell, the belt and the bugle. His days were spent learning English, sewing shirts, and, in winter, shoveling snow. “He was so homesick, it traumatized him,” says his nephew Ben Nuvamsa. Early on, Tewanima and two other Hopis ran away by hopping a train. They met some hobos, who taught them how to jump on and off a moving boxcar without getting hurt. After several days, the trio landed in Amarillo, Texas, where they thought they were beyond the school’s reach. They walked boldly in the street, and a man approached and offered to buy them a meal. They accepted. But the stranger turned out to be a sheriff, and the boys were jailed, Lomayestewa says. Tewanima was only 500 miles from home, but he found himself on the next train to Carlisle.
What followed was likely a punishment of hard labor and time in the school jail cell. By April, Tewanima was back in the dorm, trying to ease his heartache by running. “If you were a Hopi male, you were expected to be a runner,” Nuvamsa says. In his boyhood, living 5,700 feet above sea level, Tewanima and his friends had spent hot summer days running 65 miles to Winslow, Arizona, just to watch the trains. After the caboose rumbled past, they would run home.
Louis Tewanima at the Olympic Games in Stockholm in 1912. U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee Archives
Running is also a Hopi spiritual practice. In some ceremonies, young men run to far-off places in the desert to find springs. They fill their gourds with water and run home, where the water is blessed by elders and poured on the fields, symbolizing well-being for not just the Hopi but all mankind.
At Carlisle, students ran for glory. Tewanima, in broken English, asked the track coach and legendary football instructor Glenn “Pop” Warner if he could join the track team. Warner eyed the scrawny kid and said he wasn’t an athlete, but according to family lore, Tewanima insisted: “Me run fast good. All Hopi run fast good.” After clocking his time, Warner saw that Tewanima was indeed fast—and had an astonishing “kick” finish. The Indian quickly made his mark, particularly in distance events, competing against—and beating—better-heeled runners from Lafayette College and other schools.
A year later, Tewanima was picked over many veteran runners to represent the United States in the 1908 Summer Olympic Games in London. One of Tewanima’s teammates told the London papers how he could run faster “than a streak of greased lightning.” The British press clamored to see for themselves.
Race day for the Olympic marathon, July 24, 1908, was hot—78 degrees—and humid. Tewanima joined 54 other marathoners at the starting line near Windsor Castle. For the first mile, Tewanima ran in the back of the pack, writes Matthew Sakiestewa Gilbert, professor and head of American Indian studies at the University of Arizona. Many men dropped out of the race from heat and exhaustion. By Mile 12, Tewanima was in the middle of the pack, accompanied by a U.S. trainer on a bicycle. But by Mile 21, the Hopi began suffering from sore feet and confusion about what his English-speaking trainer was saying. Tewanima entered the new Olympic stadium in Shepherd’s Bush to a roar of cheers. He finished in ninth place. He had “endured more agony than anyone and ran gamest,” one of his teammates recalled.
Tewanima thought that he would be allowed to go home to Arizona. Instead, he was returned to Carlisle, where he baled hay and posed in promotional pieces for the school. “Savage Hopi Indians Are Transformed Into Model Students,” one newspaper headline said above his picture.
Tewanima continued racing. In 1909, at the Pastime Athletic Club’s games at Madison Square Garden, he stunned the sports world with a sprint-finish win in the ten-mile indoor run. A month later, he won a 20-mile race in New Orleans. In May 1911, Tewanima won New York City’s 12-mile modified marathon. Fans called him the “Speedy Red Man.”
In 1912, Tewanima and another Carlisle student, Jim Thorpe, competed in the Summer Olympics in Stockholm. Thorpe, a member of the Sac and Fox Nation, won gold medals in the pentathlon and decathlon events. Still seasick from the trans-Atlantic trip, Tewanima ran the 10,000-meter event in a blazing time of 32:06.6, though he lost to Hannes Kölehmainen of Finland. Still, Tewanima collected the silver medal and set an American record for the event—a combination that would not recur for 52 years, when Billy Mills, an Oglala Lakota Sioux, broke it in the 1964 Olympics in Tokyo.
A poster for the 1912 Olympics in Stockholm, designed by Olle Hjortzberg, a professor at Sweden’s Royal Academy. Getty Images
At Stockholm, Tewanima “gave a remarkable exhibition of grit and persistency,” marveled James E. Sullivan, secretary of the American Olympic Committee. “After Stockholm, Tewanima became a celebrity,” says Gilbert. Yet photographs of the champion that day depict an unsmiling man of about 24. Would he finally be allowed to go home now?
First, he and Thorpe had to return to school. “They were given a fantastic reception by the citizens of Carlisle, with a parade and fireworks,” Nuvamsa says. Dignitaries such as the school superintendent and Pop Warner gave speeches praising the two athletes. Thorpe addressed the crowd, saying he was grateful for the “splendid time.” Then Tewanima stood up. “Me too,” he said, and sat down. To him, the accolades rang hollow, says Lomayestewa.
Finally, after almost six years in virtual captivity, he was allowed to leave Carlisle. In September 1912, he walked into his village on Second Mesa and was soon tending cornfields, herding sheep and participating in traditional ceremonies. Tewanima married a Hopi woman named Blanche, and they had a baby, Rose, their only child. But Rose, like her father, was sent to an Indian boarding school. She eventually became ill and returned home sometime in the 1920s, where she died from an undiagnosed illness.
Tewanima never again competed in a race, running only for his religion. He refused to speak English, didn’t give many interviews despite being sought out, and became chief of one of his clan’s holy organizations, the Antelope Society. In 1954, at age 66, Tewanima returned to New York, and the Helms Athletic Foundation honored him as a member of the All-Time U.S. Track and Field Team. Three years later, he was inducted into the Arizona Sports Hall of Fame. Soon, though, the great runner was forgotten by mainstream sports historians and writers. He wasn’t a multisport all-star like Jim Thorpe. And his civic work in Hopi Nation did not make national headlines.
In his final years, Tewanima played a key role in sacred ceremonies. On January 18, 1969, he was preparing for one such event with his nephew Lomayestewa, then just 10 years old. The boy was supposed to walk his 81-year-old uncle home, but instead grew sleepy and left early. So Tewanima walked home alone in the moonless night. As best as anyone can tell, he saw lights in the distance and, believing they were from his village, headed toward them. But he miscalculated, stepped off a cliff, and plunged 70 feet to his death. All night his clan searched for him. They found his body at daybreak.
Today, more than a century after Tewanima’s unlikely Olympian feats, the Hopi hold the annual Louis Tewanima Footrace in his honor, which is open to runners from all states and nations. Since 1974, hundreds of adults and children have gathered to run the ancient trails of Hopiland. In 2020, because of Covid-19, the races went virtual; runners used the honor system to report their times.
“The thing I learned from him was, ‘Be Hopi,’” says Nuvamsa. “He was never colonized.”
Editor's Note, May 20, 2021: An earlier version of this story said that Billy Mills was the first to break Tewanima's record in the 10,000-meter event. He was the first to both break the record and earn an Olympic medal at the same time.
Blazing Summer
Louis Tewanima wasn’t the only Native athlete from North America at the 1912 Summer games
By Gia Yetikyel
Duke Kahanamoku
(U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Committee)
Hawaiian 1890–1968
Kahanamoku grew up surfing at Waikiki Beach and later popularized the ancient Hawaiian sport across the world. As a swimmer, he won a gold and silver medal in freestyle events in the 1912 Olympics.
Jim Thorpe
(Getty Images)
Sac and Fox Nation 1887-1953
The most famous Native athlete in U.S. history, Thorpe won two gold medals at the 1912 Olympics and had a storied career in pro football and baseball. He was also the first president of the American Professional Football Association.
Keeper, of Manitoba, placed fourth in the 10,000-meter race at the 1912 Olympics. In the Canadian Army, he served as a dispatch runner in France in World War I, earning major decorations.
Alexander Wuttunee Decoteau
(City of Edmonton Archives)
Cree Nation 1887-1917
Before placing sixth in the 5,000-meter race at the 1912 Olympics, Decoteau was the first Native police officer in Canada. He served in World War I and died during battle in Belgium in 1917.
Going
the Distance,
an interview with Luke Harris (originally published in What’s Happening at
Vassar
Associate
Professor Luke Harris, of the Political Science Department,
appeared on ABC News Nightline Fri., 1/26/2006.
POUGHKEEPSIE,
NY — B.A. in political science from Saint Joseph's University; J.D. and L.L.M.
from Yale University Law School; Fulbright Scholar; law clerk for a prominent
federal judge; litigator at a top New York City law firm; Ph.D. in political
science from Princeton.
Not
bad for a guy whose ninth-grade guidance counselor told him he wasn't college
material.
"I
don't believe in the idea that 'the cream rises to the top,'" says Luke
Harris, assistant professor of political science at Vassar. "I believe
that people need to be reached out to and nurtured. Even though in some
respects I grew up in difficult circumstances, I was fortunate that there were
always people who nurtured me and helped me become the person I am. That really
informs my teaching because I want to give back to my students what was given
to me."
Born
to a New York City prostitute who was addicted to alcohol and drugs, Harris and
his brother, Larry, were adopted and raised by their great aunt, Mrs. Eva B.
Cox. They grew up in a small town near Camden, New Jersey, lived in a
segregated neighborhood, and attended a segregated elementary school. Mrs. Cox,
who worked as a domestic for most of her adult life, was their first nurturer
and their "spiritual shield" against adversity. "Propriety, the
church, decency, good manners, hard work, selflessness, being seen and not
heard-those were her ground rules, the rules that she felt would lead us to
success," says Harris.
But
it would take more than good manners and hard work to counteract the numbing
effect of institutionalized racism in public schools. Told by his
ninth-grade counselor that he was "not the kind of person who was ever
going to learn how to master subjects like algebra, chemistry, and
physics," Harris gave up the idea of going to college. By the 10th grade,
he was no longer taking a full load of college-prep courses. "I was on my
way to nowhere fast."
Just
before his senior year, he was training for the upcoming cross-country season
in a park near his home when an older white runner, a man he didn't know,
jogged up alongside him and struck up a conversation. "At first I
wondered: 'What's up with this white guy? Who is he to be talking to me?' But
after he identified himself as a former All-American cross-country runner and
the author of a book on distance running, I was suitably impressed and wanted
to get to know him."
The
white runner, Tom Osler, was a mathematics professor at Saint Joseph's
University in Philadelphia. The two became friends, running 15 to 18 miles
together every Saturday; Osler planted and nurtured the idea that Harris could,
and should, further his education. Although he had too few college-prep credits
to be accepted at a liberal arts college straight out of high school, he was
accepted at a New Jersey teachers' college and was able to transfer to
Saint ]oseph's under its Affirmative Action program. Years later, as he was
about to head off to Yale Law School, Harris learned that Mrs. Cox had asked
Osler to encourage him.
Kathy and Tom Osler
Inspired
by legal giants like Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall and U.S. Court of
Appeals Judge Leon Higginbotham, Harris's original plan was to go to law
school, get a few years of legal practices under his belt, and then teach law.
Along the way, he developed an interest in international law and human rights
issues; earned a second law degree (L.L.M.) at Yale; studied British race
relations and legal theory at the University of Warwick as a Fulbright Scholar;
clerked for the federal judge he so admired, Judge Higginbotham; and landed a
job on Wall Street with a large corporate firm. "All of this was building
towards what I thought was going to be a career in law school teaching,"
says Harris. He'd actually gone on the market and had heard from about four
dozen law schools, including several of the best law schools in the country when he decided to jump tracks and go to graduate school instead.
After
completing the coursework for the doctorate at Princeton, Harris came to Vassar
as the first scholar in the college's Minority Dissertation Fellowship Program
and taught part-time in the political science department while he finished his
thesis on the jurisprudence of race relations. Now a full-time faculty member,
Harris doesn't regret the move to academe. "As a professor, I get a chance
to work with undergraduates on a regular basis, which I like, and I get to
spend 100 percent of my time teaching and writing about issues that I am deeply
interested in and committed to. If! had Judge Higginbotham's job, maybe 20
percent of the cases would be about issues that are of interest to me, but the
rest is anti-trust stuff, commercial stuff, real estate stuff, and I'm just not
interested in it."
During
the academic year, Harris lives on campus during the week and then heads home
to New York City on weekends to be with his wife, filmmaker Kathe Sandler.
Sandler is best known for her film "A Question of Color," a one-hour
documentary about color consciousness in the black community, aired nationwide
on PBS in 1994. Harris worked with her as co-writer and chief consultant on the
film and hopes to collaborate with her again soon on a new project, a
documentary on Affirmative Action.
Harris
served for three years as Vassar's Affirmative Action officer and has written
extensively on the subject from a theoretical as well as a personal point of
view. According to Harris, everything from braille signs in elevators to access
ramps in public buildings to gender equity in sports programs to minority
scholarships should be seen, not as preferential or compensatory, but as
egalitarian, as a means of leveling the playing field. "We need to ask
ourselves what kinds of changes need to be made in our post-apartheid culture
to promote full citizenship and equality," Harris says. "We need to
reenvision our institutions so that they embrace the experiences of all
Americans."
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