Alum Will Edit N.Y. Times Section

Susan D. Chira '80, president of The Harvard Crimson in 1979, has been appointed editor of the Week in Review section of The New York Times.

"I don't have any specific plan for the near future except to enjoy this job, because you get to think about all the news," Chira said.

Chira, who will begin her new position in October, said that her time at Harvard and at The Crimson was very influential on her journalism career.

"The Crimson is a great way to learn how to be a journalist. You have a certain freedom there, so that you can learn and you take chances and write about different things," she said.

Chira's classmates said they admired her hard work and dedication as president of The Crimson.

"She's a very unusual person. She's extremely accomplished and yet she doesn't come off that way," said Katherine S. Burke '79-'80, also a Crimson editor and friend of Chira.

"She was clearly extremely talented and motivated and I always thought that she would do something great," Burke said.

Chira's peers also praised her writing and social skills, which they said were honed during her work at the college daily.

"It was a fairly high pressure environment," Burke said.

"She had to learn how to resolve conflicts and I think that she did it with an amazing amount of maturity for someone her age," she added.

Chira's involvement with the Times had its roots in her undergraduate years, when she was a History and East Asian Studies concentrator at the College.

"One of my areas of knowledge is Japan," Chira said. "I was hired partly owing to the training that I received in this area at Harvard. I got the East Asia bug and foreign news has always been part of my life."

Before being appointed to her new editorial position, Chira, who has been a member of the New York Times staff for 19 years, was the deputy foreign editor of the Times, a position that she has held since 1997.

Chira said she owes her start with the Times in part to one of her East Asian studies professors, Ezra F. Vogel, the Ford Professor of the Social Sciences.

"When I graduated, I planned to go to Japan," Chira said. Vogel "wrote to the Times and told them about the fact that I knew Japanese but was also a reporter from The Crimson," Chira said.

During her time in East Asia, Chira began to write for the Times, and continued her work when she returned.

"I was filing on occasion for the Times almost like an intern in the Tokyo bureau," she said. "Then they took me on in a reporter in trainee position, and then I got hired on a trial basis."