Painstaking Progress

This was a year of new beginnings for the University and the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS), with a new president and a new dean at their helms. For University President Drew G. Faust, who was in the national spotlight as Harvard’s first female leader, the pressure was particularly strong. Fortunately for her and for the University, Faust proved up to the challenges of her inaugural year. She responded skillfully to the tasks before her, from her appointment of numerous administrators, to the creation of a task force aimed at increasing interdisciplinary cooperation in a field marked by many independent topics.

Occupying one of the most visible bully pulpits in academia—and one that famously tanked one of her predecessors—Faust took courageous and well-reasoned stands on important issues. On her second day in office, she denounced a British boycott of Israeli academics. In March, she testified in front of the U.S. Senate in favor of increasing the funding of the National Institutes of Health. And just yesterday, at the Reserve Office Training Core commissioning ceremony, she leveled much-needed criticism against the Pentagon’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy. Although she took some misguided stances, such as her opposition to beer advertising at NCAA tournaments, she rightly avoided taking controversial stands on issues that were unrelated to her position in academia.

Unfortunately, Faust’s hard work has not inspired similar dedication from the Faculty. This year’s Faculty meetings have been bogged down in unproductive debate and plagued by miserable attendance. Several meetings were dominated by a discussion sparked by a proposal that accused the faculty of censorship. The motion, sponsored by anthropology professor J. Lorand Matory ’82, only talked about free speech to cover his agenda of criticizing pro-Israel bias at the University. Whether or not Matory’s points were valid, his motion was a waste of the Faculty’s time, and the debate that followed—which took up much of November’s as well as December’s Faculty meetings—sucked up time that could have been spent discussing more important issues.

This was just one of many distractions plaguing Faculty action. Despite having several important items on the agenda, they chose to cancel January’s faculty meeting, an apparent annual tradition that nevertheless set back progress in favor of extra long vacations for professors. Fortunately, at the February meeting, the Faculty managed to address several of these issues. At that meeting, the Faculty voted to require that all courses allow Q Guide evaluations—a valuable reform that will ensure that students have at least some information on the quality of the courses they are considering during shopping period. The Faculty also approved a new Ph.D Program in Visual and Environmental Studies, which will benefit not only the graduate students that will participate in it, but also undergraduates, who will receive a new pool of potential instructors and advanced course offerings). Finally, they also passed a measure to make professors’ academic work available online for free—a welcome move to end the era of for-profit academic publishing.

The rest of the semester, however, was not as productive. Having faced several meetings in recent years—including November’s infamous debate—in which the Faculty failed to meet quorum, the Faculty put a proposal to lower quorum from one-sixth to one-eighth on the agenda for the next meeting. Perhaps out of shock at having accomplished something during the February meeting, or maybe out of fear that the meeting would not reach quorum itself, the Faculty decided to cancel their March meeting, putting off their discussion of the quorum question until April’s meeting, at which they failed to meet quorum, and thus passed no legislation at all.

One might blame the impotence of the Faculty these past several months on the Faculty Council, which decides determines both meeting dates and agendas. However, these decisions ultimately reflect the entire Faculty’s apathy, whose abysmally low attendance characterized the few meetings that were held. The Faculty are entrusted with a tremendous responsibility with the power to vote on all of these issues. If they were willing to commit a few hours every month to issues of such import, there would be no need for quorum to be even as low as one-sixth, let alone one-eighth. The institutional inertia affects not only the issues that were put off, such as the quorum vote, but also issues that have received insufficient oversight from the Faculty this year, such as the General Education program.

These cases of poor attendance, partly a result of an aging and entrenched Faculty, are not likely to be helped by FAS Dean Michael D. Smith’s decision to “pause” Faculty hiring during the next academic year, which will temper recruitment to only bring in enough Faculty to replace the number that leave or retire during the year. This plan ignores many of the gaps in the subject matter covered by the expertise of current faculty and will ultimately hurt departments’ academic flexibility.

Yet another instance of the current Faculty’s inertia has been its failure to address the shortcomings of FAS Computer Services. A February server failure cut off e-mail access for thousands of students desperate for contact with the rest of the electronic world. Occasional breakdowns, however, are not the greatest problems that plague the FAS e-mail system. As Undergraduate Council (UC) legislation in January sought to address, a troubling rule in the Student Handbook permits the Ad Board to look at students’ e-mails for disciplinary purposes—a clear violation of even a basic student right to privacy. This year also saw mounting pressure for FAS to outsource the provision of its antiquated e-mail services to a third party. FAS Webmail continues to lack the features—such as adequate spam filters or storage—and the convenience of rivals such as Gmail, a service which more than half of Harvard students use as their primary e-mail client, according to surveys. Harvard should follow the lead of the Graduate School of Design, which recently began outsourcing the provision of e-mail services to Google.

Despite these shortcomings, the central administration has excelled in one notable area this year: financial aid. Most remarkable was the December expansion of financial aid, which eliminated loan-based aid in favor of grants, stopped including home equity in loan calculations, and guaranteed that families making from $120,000 to $180,000 would pay only 10 percent of their income to send a child to college. This program will benefit students as well as the university as a whole, allowing it to recruit and admit students that would be otherwise unable to attend. The trend toward expansion of financial aid was also seen in initiatives at Harvard Law School, Harvard Medical School, and the Harvard Graduate School of Design, which all expanded their financial aid programs. These decisions reflect a University-wide commitment to the principles of accessible education at every level and make Harvard one of the national leaders in financial aid.

Such programs would not be possible without the continuous expansion of the University’s endowment. David Rockefeller’s $100 million donation this past April to provide funding for international programs and the arts is a fine example of the kind of gift that makes such expansion possible. The donation, which Rockefeller originally withheld after then-University President Lawrence H. Summers left office, is one of the largest gifts the University has ever received and is an admirable contribution from a philanthropist who has been one of Harvard’s greatest benefactors.

While Rockefeller has bequeathed much to this University financially, more significant still will be the legacy of former Dean of FAS Jeremy R. Knowles, who died this past April. A towering figure in the modern history of the University, Knowles led the Faculty for 12 years and oversaw some of its most ambitious recent projects, such as balancing its budget in the early 1990s, opening the Barker Center for the Humanities, and renovating Memorial Hall after a devastating fire. We hope that many in the University administration choose to follow his example of visionary and active leadership.