Running Harvard Behind the Scenes

The reins of power in the Harvard bureaucracy silently shifted hands this summer.

Georgene Herschbach, former director of Special Programs, became the new registrar of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences--perhaps Harvard's most overworked and undernoticed administrator.

Herschbach says her staff of 36 "well-trained and generally happy" people sifts through the reams of information required to run FAS. These records include graduate and undergraduate registration, concentration enrollment and grades.

"We will certify the accuracy of degree information that Harvard graduates give to graduate schools and employers on a resume," Herschbach notes.

The registrar also administers final examinations. "Students may not recognize this as a service, but I believe faculty members do," Herschbach says.

She adds that her office oversees dozens of studies using data on student enrollment and grades. For example, Herschbach's office is currently studying how long graduate students in various departments take to get degrees. "We are trying to track the lives of graduate students," she says.

But while Herschbach already has some ambitious projects lined up for her first year in the job, she says she will spend the immediate future on the nuts and bolts of registration.

"When you see 10,000 registration packages lined up, it's an amazing enterprise," she says.

But Herschbach's husband, Baird Professor of Science Dudley Herschbach, says that his wife can handle the challenge. The Nobel Prize-winning chemist calls his wife's new career an exercise in "human chemistry."

"Sometimes there are analogies to my world of physical chemistry," he adds.