$20 Million Will 'Reshape' Education

At the Business School, it's not unusual for professors to prepare documentary films for their courses, often with the help of professional directors. Faculty administrators expect the University's forthcoming $250 million capital campaign to enable some college professors to embark on similar projects with money from a $20 million grab-bag labeled "shaping undergraduate education" in the campaign plans.

Alfred D. Chandler Jr., Straus Professor of Business History, says he plans to show a film a week in his Core Curriculum course, Historical Study A-16, "The Development of Managerial Capitalism," if it is offered next year. "Of course, it's a great aid in teaching history if you can show people what things used to look like," he says.

The money for such films would come out of a $2 million sum earmarked for Core Curriculum "start-up costs," Phyllis Keller, associate Dean of the Faculty for academic planning, says. The Core money will go towards course development costs and addtional junior faculty for Core courses.

Course development could mean projects like Chandler's films, slide shows for art courses, or translations for Foreign Cultures courses. Academic departments normally absorb such costs themselves, but the glut of many new Core courses simultaneously asking for development money makes the capital campaign's allocation essential, Keller says.

The Core also received a $1.25 million grant from the Mellon Foundation last spring for faculty and course development costs of humanities and history courses.

This is the first of a series of articles outlining how Harvard plans to use the $250 million it hopes to raise over the next five years through the Harvard Campaign. Keller said no other foundation grants are imminent.

University fund-raisers have said the Core is the only major new program the capital campaign will finance. Expansion generally interests donors more than supporting exisiting programs, which the campaign will concentrate on.

Thomas M. Reardon, director of development, says the Core may help attract alumni contributors. "It's of fairly high interest in terms of conversation," he says. But since most of the campaign's advance donations come from loyal contributors who don't specify where they want their gifts spent, it's hard to tell how many dollars the Core will attract, he adds.

The rest of the $20 million for "reshaping undergraduate education" will "undergird" exisiting programs, Keller says.

Five million dollars from the campaign will establish the Dean's Fund, a new endowment for non-departmental instruction under the auspices of Dean Rosovsky. The fund will cover programs like Expository Writing, House seminars, freshman seminars, General Education, and the new math courses under the Core.

In the past the Faculty has paid directly for the administration of these programs out of its non-restricted income. Endowment money would free the unrestricted funds for other purposes, but Bruce Collier, special assistant to Dean Rosovsky, say the interest on the $5 million will only pay for a quarter of the total cost of non-departmental programs. "It's more of a footstool than a chair," Collier says.

"Reshaping undergraduate education" also sets aside $7 million to hire more junior faculty in understaffed departments like Government and Economics. "It's for departments where the teaching resources are under greatest strain," Keller says. A decline in the graduate school population has aggravated the high student-teacher ratios in such departments.

Campaign planners originally intended to set aside twice as much money for the Dean's Fund and $3 million more for junior faculty. Not surprisingly, the dean is the most vociferous advocate of discretionary money for the dean," Keller says. But fund-raisers in the field discovered that donors find student financial aid more attractive than "reshaping undergraduate education," so they boosted the goal for financial aid by about $10 million.

The remaining small slices of the $20 million "reshaping" pie will go toward endowing both the Danforth Center for Teaching and Learning and Rosovsky's teaching innovation fund, and toward renovating classrooms and purchasing teaching equipment.

The Danforth Center provides training programs for teaching fellows and section leaders. The Danforth Foundation gave a grant to start the center but not to support it. "They've done a great deal with very little, so far," says Glen W. Bowersock '57, associatedean of the Faculty for undergraduate education.

Keller says the $2 million endowment the capital campaign will leave the Danforth Center will support its operations on their current scale.

Another $1 million will endow a fund for teaching innovations administered by Bowersock. He hands out about $50,000 a year--now taken from the Faculty's unrestricted income--to teachers who need money to introduce unorthodox teaching materials or class activities. John Bohstedt, former assistant professor of history, took his class on on industrial history on a trip to industrial museums in western Massachusetts on such a grant.

"There's really no end to the ways one can help, in a modest way," Bowersock says