Work and marriage brought Danielle Guichard-Ashbrook to India, Japan, and Hong Kong, where she studied, taught, and assisted refugees. That was ample preparation to direct MIT’s International Students Office, but her emotional resume was just as pronounced. To sense the struggle of adapting to a distant new home, she needed only to look inside her heart.

Fencing came so easily to Eric Sollee that he was elected captain of Harvard’s freshman squad not long after picking up the sport, and went on to become an All-American, placing fifth in the NCAA championships in 1952.

Even among college professors and the politically passionate, Louis Menand III was notably unabashed.