Searching for a Corporate Savior?

UPDATED: March 3, 2014, at 2:49 a.m.

Harvard just appointed a new college dean with lots of background in leadership but little experience in undergraduate education. Rakesh Khurana has taught a class on “leadership and organizational behavior” at Harvard Business School for years but his dual appointment in the sociology department was created only earlier this year. I respect Dr. Khurana as a person, but I’m perplexed that someone who has never taught Harvard undergraduates was chosen as Dean of the College.

Perhaps, then, this is a good time to interrogate the role of the university administrator. How should someone’s academic qualifications prepare them to run a modern university? Does the modern corporatized university require corporate leadership?

Two years ago, Staples tapped Drew G. Faust for its board of directors. On its website, the office supply company touts her “extensive leadership and management experience and skills related to recruiting top talent, capital planning, financial oversight, risk management, technology and strategy.” Faust has spent her entire career in universities—first as a professor, then as an administrator. Apparently, Faust’s “extensive … management experience” and skill in “financial oversight” comes from her time as dean and then president at Harvard.

At first glance, it might appear strange that Faust has the requisite skills to advise a major for-profit corporation. But today Harvard’s president spends much of her time on management and finance.

The academic and business elite once intersected in the Harvard administration. Legal scholar and Harvard president from 1909 to 1933, Abbot Lawrence Lowell hailed from two of Massachusetts’s richest families, which had made their fortunes from the textile mills of Lawrence and Lowell. Drawing on his personal wealth and business acumen, President Lowell oversaw the quintupling of the University’s endowment, from $23 million to over $120 million.

As our admissions policies grew more egalitarian, the University’s most respected academics were not drawn exclusively from the ranks of Boston brahmins. The administration, too, changed. Neil Rudenstine, Harvard’s president from 1991 to 2001, is a man of letters from a working-class background.

By Rudenstine’s time, however, Harvard functioned more and more like a corporation, investing its massive endowment to maximize returns and neglecting the social and ecological costs of irresponsible ventures. Harvard has sought out financial analysts to consolidate and centralize Harvard Library in an effort to raise efficiency and lower costs. When short on money, Harvard cuts budgets by slashing low-wage jobs and subcontracting work to the lowest bidder. These decisions are made by administrators in consultation with the Harvard Management Company, and perhaps the Harvard Corporation, with University faculty, students, and workers cut out of the process.

These are the sort of tactics usually implemented by corporations desperately trying to make a profit. Now, they have become the standard for educational and research institutions, as well. How does this affect the day-to-day life of an administrator?

A November 2009 photo essay published by Harvard on “A day in the life of President Faust” follows our president as she mingles with captains of industry, government officials, and artists, her schedule planned to the minute by Senior Special Assistant Lars Madsen. Nonetheless, Faust seems isolated from the University’s academic and cultural life.

Instead, Faust has involved herself in the University’s financial situation. For example, she weighs in on decisions about how to invest Harvard’s massive endowment. As Harvard sought to rebuild its endowment from the 2009 tumble, Harvard Management Company CEO Jane Mendillo “started meeting weekly with Harvard President Drew Faust,” according to Businessweek, as she increased the school’s holdings in forests and farms in the developing world. While Faust only hosts undergraduate office hours for two hours a semester, she can make time for weekly conversations about timber plantations. It is clear where our President’s priorities lie.

From endowment management to budget-cutting, press relations to negotiations, it almost seems like the role of University administrator might be better suited for a businessperson. Maybe Rakesh Khurana is perfect for the job, after all.

Students love interim Dean Donald Pfister for his quirky, down-to-earth emails and sense of humor. Pfister has proven that the Dean of Harvard College can find time to ride the shuttle and write his own emails. He proudly shares his academic interests with students by offering tours of Harvard Yard’s trees and the Natural History Museum. Perhaps Pfister can get away with this because he is only an interim dean—I don’t know how much Pfister is involved in the University politics that plagued Evelynn M. Hammonds. Nonetheless, he provides a model for a University administrator who interacts with undergraduates as much as he watches University finances.

While Harvard may be overtaken with financial considerations, the university’s main purpose is the pursuit of knowledge. Dean Pfister’s engagement with students’ social and academic lives should not be exceptional.

The appointments of Evelynn Hammonds as College dean and Drew Faust as University president challenged the status quo in the same way Rudenstine’s appointment did 25 years ago. Yet these academics have been consumed by financial and managerial tasks, to the detriment of our university’s values. Let’s hope that, in his time as Dean of Harvard College, Khurana draws more from his experience as Cabot House Master than as Business School professor. Our dean should value critical and imaginative thinking more than balancing the books.

Sandra Y.L. Korn ’14, a Crimson editorial writer, is a joint history of science and studies of women, gender and sexuality concentrator in Eliot House. Her column appears on alternate Mondays.