FAS Adds New Advisory Committees

When Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) A. Michael Spence appointed a committee to look into the FAS governance structure last spring, some observers predicted radical change.

However, when the committee, chaired by Professor of Government Roderick MacFarquhar, presented its report to the Faculty this week endorsing the creation of two new dean's committees, it sparked no controversy.

Because the recommendations outlined in the report required no faculty legislation, the Committee on Resources--which has already met--and the Academic Policy Committee will immediately become part of the governance structure of the FAS, administrators say.

Spence, who says the committees will be strictly advisory, will chair both bodies and will have the sole responsibility for choosing their members.

Spence says he hopes the two committees will gather more specific expertise in their respective areas than the Faculty Council--the FAS's steering committee--now has.

Although some faculty members had been concerned that the new governance structure might be an attempt to over-centralize control of FAS policy, Council members said yesterday that the report had not sparked much controversy, since professors viewed the new committees as purely advisory.

"The general response of the faculty to the want of a dean to get advice is that that is exactly his prerogative," said Brendan A. Maher, a member of the MacFarquhar Committee and the Committee on Resources. This summer, Maher will become dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.

When Spence set up the MacFarquhar Committee, he suggested that the Committee on Resources and the Academic Policy Committee were necessary because the high level of turnover prevents the Faculty Council from developing expertise in specific areas.

However, the MacFarquhar Report points out that turnover on the Faculty Council is no higher than that on most academic committees. It suggests that the usefulness of the new committees instead will lie in their ability to focus on long-range planning without becoming mired in day-to-day governance issues which occupy the Council.

The Committee on Resources, which is composed entirely of senior faculty, has already met three times. It will be responsible for advising Spence on budget concerns, staffing and space.

"At this point it's been a kind of educational enterprise in a sense, namely we are being briefed on how things work," says Maher of the body's first meetings, which he describes as a series of "mini-seminars from various budget officers and people who are in charge of space."

"So far it's been a kind of tour of the machinery, very kind of necessary and very worthwhile, but not dreadfully exciting in its own right," Maher says.

The MacFarquhar Report recommended that the Committee on Resources address what FAS should do with the former Gulf Station site, which will become FAS property once Spence devises a use for it.

The use of the site caused controversy last semester when the Faculty unanimously voted that it should be used for an academic purpose--despite Harvard Real Estate's plans to build a hotel there.

This month Spence announced an agreement that would ensure that FAS will eventually own the site. But designation of the land is just one part of a huge task facing the University--where to house its burgeoning supply of books and scholars.

"I suppose ultimately...there will have to be some sort of resolution about what you do about library space in an age when the books being produced by the publishers exceed any rational ability to provide space for them," Maher said.

The Academic Policy Committee will "identify problems in any aspect of the curriculum and attempt to resolve them," Spence says. It will include junior faculty and will receive student input from the Committee on Undergraduate Education, the report says.

Administrators say the Academic Policy Committee will probably be established in the next couple of months.

Although there were a few differences between the original structures which Spence recommended and the MacFarquhar Committee's final advice, Spence said yesterday that he agreed with the changes they had made.