Flush With Campaign Funds, University Looking to Spend

A dean could do a lot with a billion dollars.

Although Harvard administrators have been wholly focused on fundraising for more than half a decade, now that the University has surpassed its $2.1-billion goal they can invest their time and energy into turning some of their visions for their schools into realities.

Wednesday, in New York, Harvard announced that it has raised $2.325 billion over the last five years, rocketing past its original goal.

And already, much of the money taken in during the Capital

Campaign has been put to use at Harvard.

Improved financial aid packages, building construction and renovation, academic initiatives and new professorships were at the top of every school's agenda five years ago. And recently, they have begun to materialize.

Before the campaign was launched, each of Harvard's nine schools developed long-range academic plans outlining their wish lists for the

future. With money rolling in every year, bits and pieces of the plans are already visible to Harvard students and researchers.

"The campaign for Harvard has enabled this University to continue

[its] essential process in a dynamic and wonderfully productive way,"

President Neil L. Rudenstine told an assembly of alumni and donors Wednesday in New York.

Most essential for Harvard College, according to its dean, Harry

R. Lewis '68, is the University's $9 million financial aid increase last year that more than tripled similar initiatives at other Ivy League schools.

"This [is] very expensive and not flashy," Lewis said. "It is a provision of freedom to students, who can choose how to use the flexibility provided."

The aid increase is calculated to keep Harvard's yield rate--the percentage of students who take up the University's offer of admission--at its unparalleled height for years to come.

Although students may be enticed to come to Harvard by hefty financial aid packages, the rewards of the campaign reach farther, touching numerous facets of education, research and residential life at the University.

A Roof Over Their Heads

Over the last couple of years, the English and Afro-American Studies departments and others have had more room to spread out in their multi-disciplinary Barker Center for the Humanities. As of this fall, the Division of Engineering and Applied Sciences (DEAS) has a space of its own in the new Maxwell-Dworkin building.

A center for the social sciences is on the horizon. Major renovations have been made to the Yard, and first-years have a new and improved dining hall. This is all thanks to funds from the Capital Campaign.

"New buildings and facilities are important," Lewis wrote in an email message. "One can see this in the athletic complex, in the newly renovated Harvard Hall, in the wonderfully student-friendly Maxwell-Dworkin building."

Dean of the Faculty Jeremy R. Knowles has also overseen much of the renovation.

"The situation was worst in the humanities," he said. "Many departments were fragmented."

With a donation from Robert R. Barker '36, the University transformed the old student union and first-year dining hall into the Barker Center for the Humanities. Located across the street from the Freshman Dean's Office, it now hosts a variety of humanities classes and departments.

The Barker Center has created "an attractive common space where we can all be situated in proximity to each other as opposed to our former condition of being scattered around several somewhat cramped buildings,"

Marquand Professor of English Lawrence Buell, who is chair of the English department, wrote in an e-mail message.

The center is a product of a new push by the University to integrate departments. But, Buell wrote, the Barker Center has failed to bring all of Harvard's humanities departments under one roof. Literature, Romance Languages and Literatures, Classics and others remain scattered around the campus.

"But to the extent that there IS a center, yes, Barker has become it," Buell wrote.

The $20 million Maxwell-Dworkin Center for computer science and electrical engineering has moved DEAS classes out of the large science center lecture halls and into rooms designed to fit the needs of students.

Some small lecture halls are equipped with microphones at each seat and high-tech image projectors.

Scheduled to be inaugurated on Oct. 12, the center facilitates lab work for students, and the new, more-open amphitheater allows lecturers to have more interaction with their classes, according to Gates Professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering H.T. Kung, chair of computer services.

"Now we have our own place," Kung said. "Before people were spread over multiple buildings."

Kung emphasized that he thinks the center will improve research results.

William H. Gates, Class of 1977, and Steven Ballmer '77 donated the money for the building, which is being named for their mothers.

A similar center for the social sciences is in the works. Sidney

R. Knafel '52 gave about $25 million for the Knafel Center for Government and International Studies--slated for construction in the area adjacent to Annenberg Hall.

A year ago, amid protests from the local community, the University was forced to revamp its plans. Construction has yet to begin.

University Hall is now in compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act and its heating and electrical systems have been overhauled--in all, about a $10 million undertaking.

And first-year life was given a new face.

At a cost of $65 million, the University renovated first-year dorms, beginning the project in 1992. The Wigglesworth music practice room and several common rooms were refurbished among other projects. In 1997, the University constructed Annenberg Hall and Loker Commons with donations from Walter Annenberg and Katherine B. Loker

"Annenberg is a lovely facility, probably the most elegant first year

dining hall anywhere," wrote Dean of Freshman Elizabeth Studley Nathans in an e-mail message.

While much of the building has been within FAS, professional schools--notably the School of Public Health (SPH) and the Medical

School--have erected large centers to further research and study.

SPH, for example, began its campaign with a bang, receiving a $20 million gift from the Countess Albina du Boisrouvray for a new research facility. She named the center--the Francois-Xavier Bagnoud Building--for her son.

A Hard Sell

Libraries, administrators say, are the life-blood of an academic institution. But universities have traditionally had difficulty raising money for them.

"I think in general donors prefer to give to something that they can see or feel or enjoy," Knowles said. Libraries, he said, do not give people that pleasure.

Director of the Harvard Library System and Pforzheimer University Professor Sidney Verba '53 explained it by saying, "The library is everybody's second favorite part of the University."

The largest undertaking is the renovation of Widener--pegged at $52 million. The library will be equipped with climate control technology, new electrical wiring, news carrels and two reading rooms located at the center of the building.

This summer the University replaced the tables in the Lamont Library reading room on the main floor and redesigned the room to make it more comfortable for students. Other libraries have undergone similar renovations.

In addition, the University has been upgrading the library technology-such as HOLLIS and HOLLIS Plus.

The book collection is constantly growing thanks to the gifts from donors. The library system receives, on average, 100,000 books a year.

Recently, the University received several important gifts for the libraries--including one from Paul M. Weissman '52 to endow part of the preservation center.

Scholarship

At the heart of the mission to improve teaching in FAS lies the drive to endow 40 new professorships. Although this goal has proved one of the most difficult for the University to meet, more than half of the positions have been paid for by alumni, at a cost of about $2.5 million each.

Not only have departments received additional teachers, as a result, but so have other fields and programs--like the Core curriculum and Harvard's various research centers.

At the same time, Knowles and Rudenstine are pushing to improve the material that students learn in their smaller classes.

Last winter, they unveiled a $200 million set of science initiatives, aimed at making Harvard home to cutting edge research in important scientific fields.

The biggest piece of the push for improving science research at Harvard is the FAS's launching of two new centers: one for the study of genomics and one for the study of mesoscale structures (minute objects).

Other centers throughout the University have also come into being as a result of the campaign. In particular, numerous programs that work with multiple Harvard schools have grown with campaign giving.

The Ethics and the Professions, Health Policy and Mind/Brain/Behavior programs have been put into place, while recent gifts have made centers such as the Carr Center for Human Rights possible.

And, Harvard administrators proudly point out, that the University is able to move ahead in the latest trend in higher education--internationalization.

With Harvard outposts popping up around the globe--the Harvard Business School, for example, runs one in Asia--the University hopes to find whole new markets of students and topics of research that were previously unavailable.

Centers examining Latin America, Asia, Korea, China and Russia have been formed, along with more broadly defined programs such as the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs and the Center for International Development.

All of these have come with multi-million dollar price tags and have only been possible because of the success of the campaign.

University officials quickly point out that programs like their major academic initiatives mean that large portions of the campaign's billions have already been spent, and fundraising will have to begin again.

The real test for future drives will probably then bank on whether or not the investments Harvard has made in new projects with its campaign money will pay off.