The Faculty

As an undergraduate here, you'll be dealing almost exclusively with the single largest and most important of Harvard's many branches--the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. The Faculty runs all undergraduate education as well as the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, whose students will be teaching you in sections and tutorials. It operates out of an old white building in the center of the Yard, called University Hall.

The people who run the Faculty are perceptably different from their central administration counterparts across the way in Mass Hall; they're older and less highpowered, and their ambitions in life generally don't extend past the Charles River. Their job is in some ways more delicate than that of the people in Mass Hall, because Harvard's 750-odd faculty members are an eccentric, intelligent, anti-administrative and easily bruised lot.

Since administering the faculty is so tricky, it's always done by someone who is a faculty member himself--the current dean of the Faculty, Henry Rosovsky, is an Economics professor, and his three top assistants are career academics as well. But Rosovsky has more to worry about than just keeping faculty members content. Like the people in Mass Hall, he spends a lot of his time worrying about how to cut down on the soaring costs of running a college education. Rosovsky and his predecessor, John T. Dunlop, have been steadily raising tuition fees at a $200-a-year clip, and there's no apparent end in sight to the increases.

All these heavy problems have led to a change in the way University Hall operates: Rosovsky is now trying to delegate many of the administrative chores that go along with his deanship to his associate deans, Burton Dreben of the graduate school and Francis Pipkin of the College.

Rosovsky chairs an 18-member elected committee, the Faculty Council, that really runs the Faculty. Before 1970, when the council did not exist, all the Faculty's business was hammered out in meetings that got longer, more frequent and more political as student activism at Harvard increased. Now, the meetings are infrequent and almost all the legislation the Faculty considers has been prepared beforehand by the council, so things run with an almost eerie smoothness.