Drowning In the Red Ink

It's more than just platitudes and empty warnings: the Faculty of Arts and Sciences is, for the first time in at least 20 years, in serious financial trouble. The evidence of the crunch is everywhere.

Dean Rosovsky said this week that the Nathan M. Pusey Library, which was touted two years ago as a much-needed facility, may not open when it is completed next fall because the Faculty doesn't want to pay the costs of running it.

Rosovsky's possible plan for Pusey is still very much in the formative stages, and he says he doesn't yet have estimates on how much money not opening Pusey would save. But that the plan is even being considered--leaving a shiny, new, expensive library closed is, after all, a major step--is indicative of the dimensions of the problem.

The cost of operating buildings is one of the Faculty's thorniest problems, for several reasons. Besides the normal rises in costs that inflation has brought, worldwide oil shortages have made building heating especially expensive in the last two years.

It was hard to plan in advance for the astronomic rise in heating costs because of the suddenness with which it happened. So Faculty and library officials grossly underestimated the 1975 costs of running Pusey Library when they made up a preliminary operating budget for it in 1972.

For many of the same reasons, the Houses and undergraduate dormitories are facing a deficit of up to $800,000 this year, the largest housing deficit in Harvard's history. The red ink is separate from the Faculty's own $2.5 million, but the Faculty still has to deal with it.

Even Harvard's newest building, Canaday Hall, has financial problems. The beleaguered Faculty must pay between $250,000 and $300,000 for an overrun on the construction costs of the building. The reason for the overrun is Canaday's expensive "fast-track" construction, a method the University used to get the building finished by the time this year's freshman class arrived in Cambridge.

The Faculty has one thing to fall back on in paying for these deficits--a special fund of liquid capital it set up in the early 60s, before the financial woes set in. But the fund has dwindled to about $6 million, which at present deficit rates will last another year or two. After that, the Faculty will have to borrow money from the central administration and pay it back with interest, which will only make matters worse.

Dean Rosovsky is now working on various ways, most of them less extreme than the possible Pusey solution, of combatting the financial crisis. Perhaps he will eventually come up with a scheme that will solve all the Faculty's money problems, but at this point all the news is bad.