Renovated MAC Could House Student Groups

As part of a University-wide initiative to increase physical space available to the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS), student groups may be able to move their offices into the Malkin Athletic Center (MAC) after it is renovated, according to Dean of the Faculty Jeremy R. Knowles' annual letter to the faculty released yesterday.

Knowles wrote that a "likely outcome" of the ongoing space analysis of athletic facilities would be the relocation of the three varsity sports teams that currently practice and play at the MAC and the addition of space within the building for fitness equipment and "perhaps" student group offices.

Dean of the College Harry R. Lewis '68 also wrote that making better use of the MAC's 110,000 square feet was a top priority in his five-year report on the College.

Knowles wrote that increasing available physical space was the largest challenge for the faculty. He said after yesterday's faculty meeting that the lack of space available to FAS was the strongest reason why the Faculty has remained at essentially the same size over the past ten years, even though increasing its ranks has been a top priority of his.

"If you hire an experimental physicist, you might need four or five thousand square feet," he said at University Hall after a faculty meeting.

Although his letter did not highlight the shortage of student housing to the same degree as Lewis' report, Knowles wrote that the possibility of renovating the Jordan buildings, former undergraduate cooperatives now used as overflow Quad housing, was being considered.

Although discussion of the material in Knowles' letter was postponed until the next faculty meeting, yesterday's meeting focused on funding for improving 50 acres in Allston recently acquired by the university, which President Neil L. Rudenstine said would free space closer to the Yard for FAS use.

"We cannot move the University forward without using this land..." Rudenstine said. "We are almost out of space on this side of the river...Anyone who moves over there frees up space."

Knowles agreed, writing that the land would "provide welcome breathing room for the University as a whole."

According to Rudenstine, the renovation would involve purchasing the easements on the land owned by railroads, cleaning up land that has been polluted by years of industrial usage, and preparing basic infrastructure for the land to be integrated with the rest of the University.

These changes would be funded by taking one-half of a percentage point off of the individual endowments of each faculty in the university.

Several faculty members, including Everett I. Mendelsohn, professor of the history of science, expressed concerns that this system would be a subsidy from FAS, which has a endowment large relative to its operation expenses, to schools such as the Business School, which is much less dependent on endowment revenue.

Aside from space concerns, Knowles' letter also cited faculty recruitment and increasing the size of the Freshman Seminar program as priorities.

Knowles said after the meeting that many of the changes he suggested in his letter regarding recruitment, including increasing both the number and the scope of concurrent position searches, were already underway. But he said the future prospects for increasing the size of the faculty would not be affected one way or the other by the selection of any particular Presidential candidate.