A Top-Heavy Administration?

In 1958, Stephen Kuffler was invited to come from Johns Hopkins Medical School to Harvard Medical School to become a full professor in the Department of Pharmacology. He brought with him four post-doctoral fellows: Torsten Wiesel, Ed Furshpan, David Potter, and myself. Along with Ed Kravitz, we formed the nucleus that led to the founding of the Department of Neurobiology five years later.

When we arrived, Harvard Medical School was directed by one dean—George Parker Berry. He was assisted by a genius, Henry Meadow, who joined HMS in 1950 as executive secretary to the Committee on Research and Development. The two of them ran the whole school. Berry was grouchy and firm-handed and what he said was law.

In subsequent years, Berry was succeeded by four deans at the Medical School: Robert H. Ebert, Daniel C. Tosteson, Joseph B. Martin, and our present dean, Jeffrey S. Flier. With each successive dean, the dean's office increased in size, with the addition of associate deans and assistant deans. A graph showing “Number of Deans” as the ordinate and “Year” as abscissa would tell the story at a glance.

The list of HMS deans of various categories today runs one and a quarter pages long. Academic deans, nine in all, include an executive dean for research, a dean for faculty affairs, a dean for medical education, one for graduate education, one for clinical and translational research, one for students, one for diversity and community partnership, and one for academic and clinical affairs. Administrative deans are also nine in number (five are associate deans). Finally comes the Council of Academic Deans, of whom there are four. You can find the list on the Internet, under Harvard Medical School under “Deans” on the Harvard Medical School Website.

But if you think that is a mouthful, you should see the list of FAS administrators. My printout runs to over 16 pages. I haven't counted up the various kinds of FAS deans, but the list dwarfs that of the Medical School.

At a reception prior to a meeting of the Cambridge Scientific Club some weeks ago, I got talking with Henry Rosovsky, who was Dean of FAS from 1973-84. I asked him how many deans of various kinds there were when he held the office. He held up an index finger, "one,” and he pointed to himself, "me."

There are certainly many reasons besides top-heavy administration for the skyrocketing costs of a college education. Harvard has grown to be much larger and more complicated in the last half-century, and its administration has obviously done the same. But I would suggest that the administration’s growth has outrun that of the University.

In his State of the Union address, President Obama decried the ever-rising cost of attending college. Only yesterday, the Crimson opined on the increasing expensiveness of a college education. The next time that Harvard undergraduates and medical students ask themselves why their fees are so high, they could estimate the annual salaries and expenses of the various deans, their secretaries, and assistants—and do some arithmetic.

David H. Hubel is the John Franklin Enders Professor of Neurobiology, Emeritus, at Harvard Medical School. He was awarded the 1981 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Torsten Wiesel for their discoveries concerning information processing in the visual cortex. He has taught the Freshman seminar, which he is offering this spring, “The Neurophysiology of Visual Perception” for ten years running.