Registrar Headed to Ireland

Unbeknownst to the average student, one woman has directed the piles of paperwork at 20 Garden St. for nearly seven years—Arlene F. Becella.

But Becella will end her stressful career as the registrar of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) next month, leaving behind a crowded schedule of serving on faculty committees, advising students, stuffing diplomas and filing paperwork for an early retirement next month.

Becella and her husband will be seeking greener pastures in Ireland next year—where they will move to fulfill their dream of cultivating a garden together.

“It’s not really a retirement, because I am not old enough to retire,” Becella, 56, says. “We decided to leave.... We want to be in the garden more, hiking and moving.”

She says she gave notice in early January, after taking the Christmas vacation to reevaluate her plans with her husband.

“It was a very hard decision and a very personal decision,” Becella says. “We have been city people for a long time. We wanted more of a country life.”

Though she says she has loved her tenure at Harvard—particularly her friendships with students, faculty and the man who appointed her—Dean of the College Harry R. Lewis ’68—she says she needs a change of pace.

“I have learned to eat my lunch walking down the street,” she says.

Her daily grind, she says, starts at 8 a.m., when she answers e-mails and phone calls until her meetings begin. Since Becella sits on more than five committees, there are many, and her routine regularly runs until at least 6:30 or 7:00 in the evening.

Becella sits on the FAS Classroom Committee, the executive committee of the Administrative Board and the Committee on Undergraduate Education. She is a voting member of the Faculty and a guest of the Educational Policy Committee and the Faculty Council.

She also wades through the paperwork of 10,000 undergrads and graduate students. Grade changes, exam conflicts, leaves of absence, postponed exams, unfulfilled graduation requirements, classroom switches and every single set of grades, at some point pass through her office.

With four assistant registrars and 36 others on staff, Becella says she can delegate some of her responsibilities.

“I meet with the entire staff about once every six weeks, we do some updates, we have some tea and coffee together,” she says.

But Becella says she would like to see more information available online in the future to alleviate some of the unnecessary legwork that her staff has to deal with.“From my perspective, we’d like to have more services on the web for students,” she says, adding that a searchable FAS catalogue and transcript requests online would be particularly useful.

Her least favorite task by far, she says, is handling the cases of those few students who don’t fulfill their graduation requirements by the end of their senior spring.

“One to three students every year walk in the procession but have to complete one course,” she says. “We get really upset when we see that. We hate to see that.”

She says she anticipates that the registrar’s office will face significant changes in the next few years, with the upcoming curricular review and the reorganization of the College.

And currently, the office is working hard to finish up changes in the grading system—recalculating each student’s GPA to conform to a four-point scale and notifying each student of this change.

“People have a lot on their plates,” she says.

As a result, Becella says that her hectic schedule has left her with little time to pursue her own interests, which include travelling, gardening or painting.

Few students ever come face to face with the registrar during their time at Harvard.

“She is known as the bureaucracy,” says Brenden S. Millstein ’06.

But a small group of her admirers and advisees say they will be sad to see her go.

“We share a lot of interests,” says Erinn M. Wattie ’06, one of the two first-years whom Becella takes on as advisees each year. “She seemed very important...but she always seemed very warm.”

“I am really happy not because she is leaving, but because she will be happy and it is something that she has been looking forward to for a long time,” Wattie adds.

Ironically, the New York City native, born and raised in a Greenwich Village stretch of West 12th Street, says she fell into her current line of work because of her desire to go abroad.

“I love to travel, or I did when I was younger, and I wanted to work overseas,” she says.

When an advertisement for a registrar position at a university in Europe caught her eye, she decided to take it. However, she soon moved back the United States and ended up working for nine years as a registrar at the University of Arizona and at Boston University before coming to Harvard.

The administration was more centralized there, she says, which in many ways made her job easier, particularly when dealing with jointly offered courses.

“The big difference here at Harvard is that everything is so decentralized,” Becella says. “Coming from two centralized universities, you are accustomed to working in a central post.”

But Becella says she’s sure the next registrar to juggle the course schedules of 10,000 students will be up to the task.

“If you have had experience,” she says, “you can generally get through the day.”

—Staff Writer Alexandra N. Atiya can be reached at atiya@fas.harvard.edu.