Farmer, Magaziner: Get involved!

Physician and medical anthropologist Paul Farmer and Ira Magaziner, a one-time policy adviser in the Clinton White House, brought humor, counsel, and cautions to a public conversation on student engagement Sept. 20.

Greeting them was a packed-to-the-ceiling John F. Kennedy Jr. Forum, where the crowd was noisy, young, and ready to laugh — egged on by Farmer’s explosive wit. Magaziner, measured and lugubrious, happily played the young doctor’s straight man.

Not that the panel was a laughing matter. With audience questions included, it was a 90-minute look at global health challenges and related avenues for student activism.

For advice on public service, the audience had come to the right place. Farmer is co-founder and executive director of Partners in Health — a renowned model for delivering health care to the very poor. He is also the Maude and Lillian Presley Professor of Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School.

Magaziner is chairman of both the Clinton Foundation HIV/AIDS Initiative and the Clinton Foundation Policy Board. His passion for social justice began in the rural South more than four decades ago, when he was still in high school.

Early on, Farmer bolted forward in his chair to the sound of applause. “Do they know what they’re getting, these two guys — the squarest guys on the planet?” Slumped in his own chair, Magaziner just smiled.

The two met in 2002 at an AIDS conference in Barcelona, Spain, and by 2004 were working together in Rwanda. They described their collaboration as a blend: the doctor with skills in medicine and clinic architecture, and the analyst with skills in management, business, and politics.

AIDS led the conversation’s list of global health concerns. In the audience, a scattering of students wore T-shirts with the legend “HIV Positive,” part of a campaign by Step It Up, a collaboration of seven Harvard groups committed to fighting HIV/AIDS.