The DNA of Harvard Falling Behind

When prefrosh descended on the College’s campus in late April, the admissions office plugged the many advantages that puts Harvard atop the higher education world: its first-rate faculty, its unmatched resources, a campus steeped in history.

One thing they didn’t pitch was Harvard’s top-flight engineering school.

That’s because it doesn’t have one.

As a result, many top students and faculty in engineering, applied sciences and technology don’t give Harvard a second thought, opting for more engineering-friendly rivals like Stanford, Princeton or crosstown powerhouse MIT.

And while top University administrators had long been content to forgo the best researchers in these fields, a sea change has taken place in Harvard’s approach to engineering sciences.

The arrival of Dean of the Division of Engineering and Applied Sciences (DEAS) Venkatesh “Venky” Narayanamurti in 1998 from the engineering school of the University of California at Santa Barbara marked the beginning of a resurgence in the long-ignored department.

The size of the engineering faculty has grown from about 50 to 65 full-time equivalent (FTE) faculty under Venky. While DEAS is still dwarfed by competitors, an even more ambitious plan for expansion to the 90 faculty sported by Caltech or the 120 sported by Princeton has begun to gather momentum and institutional support.

“In engineering, in fields like computer science, thanks to Venky’s leadership, we’re in a much stronger position than we were five years ago,” University President Lawrence H. Summers said in an interview Friday. “But I hope and expect to be in a much stronger position five years from now.”

The Allston science and technology task force, which was charged with considering the future of science at Harvard’s planned campus across the River, concluded that the University must commit to an ambitious expansion of engineering and several other scientific fields to stay competitive.

The May report says Harvard “is significantly underinvested in technology; most notably its engineering efforts, though qualitatively strong, are much smaller than those of our competitor institutions by almost any measure.”

“Harvard must grow engineering and applied sciences,” it concludes starkly.

The University “must also continue to invest ambitiously in the life sciences and physical sciences, which, in certain areas, have not always kept pace with other institutions,” wrote the task force led by Harvard’s most prominent scientists, including Venky and University Provost Steven E. Hyman.

Faculty say it has become harder for Harvard to maintain its preeminence in the life sciences over the last 20 years, given the proliferation of elite life science research universities—including medical schools—and relatively little investment in new University life science facilities over the last decade.

Although a spate of Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) and University-wide science initiatives—including the $300 million Broad Institute for genomics—have been launched over the last year, top administrators have concluded that the University’s two existing science campuses in Cambridge and Longwood will be insufficient to keep Harvard at the vanguard of scientific research.

Allston represents an opportunity to aggressively address scientific weaknesses by constructing from scratch a third science campus at the University—a one-million-square-foot science hub geared to shore up the areas where Harvard has fallen behind, Hyman and other colleagues have said.

ENGINEERING A RESURGENCE

In the U.S. News and World Report rankings for engineering programs, Harvard finds itself in an unfamiliar place: 19th.

Without a full engineering school, the University has struggled to attract top faculty and students in applied fields of science. Harvard’s faculty of 65 is small compared to Princeton’s 120-faculty engineering school and tiny by comparison to larger engineering programs like those at Stanford and MIT, which have around 250 and 300 faculty, respectively, Venky said.

He added that while DEAS’ small size made recruitment challenging, the recent expansion has made it possible for him to hire people in electrical engineering, computer science and bioengineering, “which were a very tough recruit before.”

“It has been very hard, but I’ve broken some of that logjam,” he said.

Hyman wrote in an e-mail that technology’s central role in the future of science necessitates a stronger engineering program.

“There is an enormous unmet need for engineering collaborators around the University,” he wrote. “As a result it is a major priority to develop engineering.”

Venky said that an expansion to about 100 FTEs would allow Harvard to “really compete head on with some very good places.” He added that the school is working to expand in experimental areas while maintaining its theoretical base.

“If that happens, I believe we can compete very effectively across the board [and] still be highly interdisciplinary,” he said.

Last year’s graduating class of 1,586 had only 16 engineering sciences concentrators, 45 applied math concentrators and 75 computer science concentrators. Venky said that increasing the number of undergraduate DEAS concentrators had been discussed at recent meetings of his seven-member advisory group.

“I certainly would like to see some commensurate growth in the undergraduates,” he said. “Harvard College could still stay at 1,650 [students per class], but I would like to have a somewhat larger share.”

Director of Undergraduate Admissions Marlyn McGrath Lewis ’70-’73 wrote in an e-mail that while the College is successful in attracting a high proportion of engineering students who are admitted to Harvard, many look to more engineering-focused schools and may not even apply to Harvard.

“There are some people—can’t tell how many at the very high levels of academic excellence that would make them good matches for us—who think primarily of a more intensively engineering-focused place such as MIT or Cal Tech,” she wrote. “We may not see them in our pool, perhaps for good reasons (i.e. the match with Harvard may not in fact be good.)”

Harvard’s lagging ability to attract top students and faculty in these areas is a product of what McKay Professor of Environmental Engineering Joseph J. Harrington said is a history of indifference to DEAS. Adminsitrators were perfectly content to let DEAS subsist as a small outpost in the FAS science compound along Oxford Street.

“That’s been for quite a long time,” Harrington said.

But Venky’s arrival and the installation of a new administration under Summers that has made science a top priority has also brought a new focus on applied science.

Faculty and administrators alike laud Venky for his superb leadership of the DEAS expansion thus far. They say he has been instrumental in helping to attract a significant number of faculty members over the last five years. He estimates he has hired about 30 professors, between replacing retiring faculty and creating new positions.

“He was able to make, when he came here, quite a number of faculty appointments [and] the appointments still continue,” Harrington said. “This place is really very very different, frankly, than it had been in the past 25 years.”

And many support pushing the expansion even further to create a full-sized School of Applied Sciences, Engineering and Technology, an idea embraced by Hyman’s Allston science committee.

DEAS has conducted significant fundraising over the last year, raising $27.5 million, including the addition of 5 endowed professorships at $3.5 million each.

Summers said that although Harvard’s engineering efforts would expand, they would not match the scope of other top-tier facilities.

“In engineering, we’re never going to compete on quantity and field coverage,” Summers said. “We’re never going to try to have the kind of scale that MIT has—that’s not our focus.”

But he said efforts to date have helped Harvard catch up in many areas and the plans for Allston expansion would position the University to lead in many cutting-edge fields.

“On our ability to be interdisciplinary and to be extraordinary, if you look at the flagship faculty…we stand out,” he said. “And as we increase the scale, I think we’ll become much more attractive.”

Hyman wrote that in building engineering, Harvard would have the advantage of starting from scratch in many areas under “a strong and visionary DEAS dean.”

“We do not have legacy areas of engineering that we might now wish to restructure [and] we have a tradition of interdisciplinary collaboration to build on,” he wrote.

There’s only one problem: there isn’t space in Cambridge for DEAS to expand beyond its Pierce Hall base. In the life sciences, expansion to keep pace with competitors faces similar constraints.

NUCLEUS OF THE PROBLEM

While Harvard has long been an international leader in the life sciences, never has it faced such stiff competition.

Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology Chair Andrew P. McMahon said that while Harvard remains “exceptionally strong” in life sciences, the field is growing increasingly competitive. “In the life sciences particularly, there’s been one enormous change over the last 20 years, and that’s the growth of top-rate research in medical schools,” McMahon said. “20 years ago, all the top-rate research happened within a regular undergraduate university campus or within specialized research institutes.”

Harvard’s biology program used to be comparatively stronger because it had fewer competitors, Professor of Molecular and Cellular Biology Catherine Dulac said.

“In the past, there were very few places where there was very good quality life science, and Harvard was one of them,” Dulac said. “Now, there are several very good places.”

The upshot of this shift is that the University has a much harder time recruiting top faculty and students in the life sciences, faculty say.

“Today it’s a much more competitive world in recruiting anyone, because one’s competing not only with the best universities but also with a plethora of medical schools,” McMahon said.

“In its youth, Harvard could go after people and they would come, but now it’s much more competitive,” said Howard C. Berg, professor of molecular and cellular biology and professor of physics.

He added that the University has lacked a commitment to cutting-edge biological facilities in recent years.

“Harvard has not been very aggressive about providing facilities for work in modern biology,” Berg said. “I don’t think the Harvard development office was particularly interested in science—I think more so now.”

As a result, other schools have gained a competitive advantage by constructing innovative facilities, like Stanford’s Bio-X program, Cornell’s $500 million New Life Science Initiative or the University of California at San Francisco (UCSF)’s new Mission Bay life sciences campus.

“Most of the universities that I know have been building buildings left and right,” Berg said. “Nothing like that has happened at Harvard.”

While FAS plans a cutting-edge Northwest life sciences building for Cambridge, groundbreaking is still years away. An FAS official acknowledged that the construction of this crucial new facility has lagged behind.

“I wish that the planning for this lab, which is so important for FAS science faculty recruitment, had started a year or two earlier,” the official said.

Summers said he aims to more closely integrate FAS and medical school life science to improve Harvard’s competitiveness.

“In biology, I think as FAS and the medical school work more closely together, I think our capacity to attract students will only increase,” he said.

THE ALLSTON REMEDY?

The tide in these sciences may be beginning to turn already, with a spate of initiatives underway. The expansion in DEAS has been accompanied by a significant commitment to life sciences projects like the Broad Institute—to which Harvard and MIT committed $100 million apiece for research on clinical uses of the human genome—and the new Harvard Stem Cell Institute.

But top administrators see the Allston campus as the lynchpin of their strategy to improve. With a successful science campus in Allston, administorators say the University will remain at—or, in some areas, join—the forefront of scientific research. Without it, they fear Harvard may be doomed to second-rate programs in key emerging areas.

Hyman wrote that the science hub in Allston would be used “to keep Harvard at the cutting edge.”

Allston development will focus on addressing “the increasing centrality of large-scale new platform technologies to our researchers’ needs (ranging from gene sequencing to high performance computing),” Hyman wrote.

Although some development has been possible in the historic North Yard home of FAS science, Cambridge space is scarce.

The new Biological Research Infrastructure, the Laboratory for Interface Science and Engineering—which includes a state-of-the-art clean room—and the planned Northwest building, will take up about 670,000 square feet, and an additional 500,000 square feet of science expansion are planned for the next 25 years.

But Summers and other University leaders say this won’t be enough for Harvard to stay afloat in the sciences. In his October letter to the community, Summers said that even with expansion plans in Cambridge and the new 525,000-square-foot New Research Building at the medical school, “we will before long confront an insufficiency of space for science.”

“If we aspire to full-scale participation in the approaches shaping much of the leading edge of scientific discovery, Allston should figure prominently in the future of Harvard science, as home to a robust critical mass of scientific activity,” he wrote.

The task force recommended 11 other “promising areas of inquiry” that represent some of the University’s weak spots: innovative computing, origins of life, quantum science and technology, neuroscience, systems biology, chemical biology, global health, microbial diversity and global infectious diseases, environment, clinical research and a center for collaborative science. But it emphasized the improvement of engineering as central to the future of University science.

“It will be essential, if Harvard is to maintain its leadership position in the sciences, for the University to make significant new investments in technology development. Harvard cannot simply be a user of new tools that happen to emerge,” the report says. “Allston offers us the opportunity to expand our efforts in engineering and applied science and thus to increase our capacity to develop new technologies and new scientific tools.”

The report also echoes University leaders in calling for closer ties to industry, especially through so-called “tech transfer,” which allows University discoveries to be marketed to industry.

The task force’s conclusions meant that in order to build and maintain strong sciences, Harvard must construct new labs to attract top faculty, according to Kathy A. Spiegelman, the University’s top planner.

WHAT WILL IT LOOK LIKE?

Spiegelman said the planned science campus will be geared toward interdisciplinary work, echoing Summers’ October call for “new kinds of space.” The physical layout of most current science laboratories inhibits cutting-edge collaborations, she said.

In modeling the campus, planners and scientists alike have looked to other examples of ambitious science expansion. One of the most frequently mentioned is UCSF’s new Mission Bay campus, which is cited throughout the science task force report.

Those who have seen the site heap praise on UCSF for an enormously successful implementation of a brand-new science expansion. While there are some important differences, Mission Bay and Allston share many similarities: it’s a separate campus centering on the life sciences, and it is being constructed in a run-down section of the city on waterfront property that used to be a railyard.

Summers visited the campus last summer, and a slew of other top administrators have followed suit. Scientists and physical planners alike say the campus—despite obvious differences—is in many ways a model to build on.

“There’s a lot that’s attractive about the building that you can build in Mission Bay,” Summers said.

Stanford’s Bio-X, a single building geared toward bringing together scientists with an interest in biology, was also studied closely by planners as a model for buildings seeking to foster collaborative work, Spiegelman said.

Summers said many scientists have been out to see locations like Mission Bay and Bio-X in the course of their work.

Matthew P. Scott, chair of the Bio-X Scientific Leadership Council, said finding “daring” faculty to help pioneer new cross-discipline facilities has proved key at Stanford.

“The people who are rigid, the people who think that because it’s the way they’ve always done it, it’s got to be right—this kind of stuff stops progress dead in its tracks,” he said. “And then we either have to go around it or through it.”

Hyman wrote that University planners would draw lessons from Mission Bay, Bio-X and a number of other recent science facilities.

“Each university is different, but clearly we can learn from each other’s successes and mistakes as long as we are sensitive to our local academic context,” he wrote. “What seems to be universal is the desire of scientists to collaborate across disciplines and the role of core facilities, computer power, and large-scale databases in the efforts of many peer institutions.”

Cooper, Robertson & Partners, the firm selected Friday to lead the first stage of Harvard’s master planning for Allston, was partially distinguished by its body of work on academic science campuses. Cooper has worked at Johns Hopkins University, team member Laurie Olin has helped plan Yale’s Science Hill and Frank O. Gehry designed the brand-new Stata Center at MIT.

“I think there’s no question that if you want to attract the best faculty and the best students you’ve got to have adequate facilities for them to work in and study in,” said David McGregor, managing director of Cooper, Robertson.

In view of Harvard’s current needs, the science task force warned starkly that the University cannot afford to lose the opportunity presented by a new campus.

“If we fail to take advantage of Allston…we expect that Harvard’s capacity to maintain a vital, world-class environment that can attract and engage the brightest minds will be diminished,” the report says.

But if Harvard does capitalize on Allston, the committee projects that Harvard will be better able to attract top faculty and students across the sciences.

“We will be able to expand significantly in the area of multidisciplinary research, positioning the University to identify and lead scientific revolutions and to develop important commercial applications,” the report says.

To be successful, the science report stresses “flexibililty” in development to accommodate emerging cutting-edge areas of research.

“There will be a new edge to the blade in 10 years,” McMahon said.

Vice President for Government, Community and Public Affairs Alan J. Stone said he is not concerned about convincing people that the University has a stellar science program.

“Of all the public relations challenges I have here at Harvard, the last one, the least among them is that we have image problems because of our academic ranking,” he said.

But for a University at 19th that aspires to the top, there’s still a long way to go.

—Staff writer Stephen M. Marks can be reached at marks@fas.harvard.edu.