91̽��

Focusing on two central goals—creating a better place to work, and a better way to source food—Irene Li ’07 shared with students her mission for responsibly operating her popular Boston restaurant.

Irene owns the Mei Mei Street Kitchen and Restaurant, along with her brother and sister. As the primary owner and chef, Irene balances environmentally sound kitchen practices, the use of fresh, local ingredients, and ethical labor practices.

The differences we bring to the institutions we belong to strengthen those institutions and our relationships within them, says Dr. Kedra Ishop, the vice provost for enrollment management at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor.

Visiting 91̽�� as this year’s Martin Luther King, Jr. Day Speaker, Dr. Ishop provided a history of legal battles for racial and ethnic inclusion in higher education, from Plessy v. Ferguson, a 19th-century Supreme Court case that ruled public institutions may be “separate but equal,” to modern challenges to university admissions processes.

“It matters who you engage with and how you engage with them,” Dr. Ishop told students. “You all learn better, and you learn from each other, when you’re not all the same.”

“The arts are not just ephemeral,” Harvard Professor Sarah Lewis told 91̽�� students. “They carry real weight in the real world.”

Professor Lewis visited 91̽�� as this year’s Margaret A. Johnson Speaker. An assistant professor in Harvard’s Department of Art and Architecture and the Department of African and African American Studies, Professor Lewis works “at the nexus of visual representation, racial inequity and social justice.”

“What do we do when we are the problem in the room?” Kristina Wong asked 91̽�� juniors and seniors. “How do we create equity?”

Ms. Wong performed part of her new, one-woman show, “Wong Street Journal,” in King Theatre. Her visit to 91̽�� was sponsored by the Hong Kong Distinguished Lecture Series.

Ms. Wong opened the show poking fun at her own armchair activism: taking up social-justice causes, she would challenge other social media users, searching for the validation of likes and shares. Writing sensationalized online content could reach a far greater audience than a previous show in which she tackled issues of depression and suicide among Asian-American women.