FAS, Inc.

He just wanted to move a door.

The request was simple: A faculty member needed more space for a new graduate student. But when he wrote to the administrator he thought would be responsible for that, he was redirected to another administrator. He tried again; he was kicked to another administrator. And finally he got an answer back: It would be expensive, and it would take time.

So with two graduate students, the faculty member went to work himself. In 20 minutes, they unhinged the door. It had cost nothing.

This is the anecdote of one professor, who wished to remain anonymous to maintain his relationship with the administrators involved. But it is also part of a larger story. Over the past ten years, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences has seen a proliferation of its administrative positions that has outpaced the growth of tenure-track faculty. While this growth has led to greater efficiency and focus, it has also created a complex bureaucracy at Harvard’s largest school.

This “corporatization,” as many faculty members and even some administrators call the trend, is not unprompted. With more federal demand for research oversight and a once-quickly growing faculty, the school’s office workers were finding themselves with more paperwork on their desks, larger facilities to maintain, and an institutional reputation to protect.

But by the time FAS found itself with more than 3,000 administrators and staff, the transition had changed the culture of the school, according to many faculty members. They suggest that communication between professors and University Hall has diminished. There is a new door between faculty and administrators, and with every new assistant or associate dean, that door closes just a bit more. On one side are the hallways of a traditional, open academic institution. On the other lie the offices of FAS, Inc.

NEW CHIEF OFFICERS

When William C. Kirby moved into his corner office on the second floor of University Hall as the new dean of FAS in 2002, departing FAS Dean Jeremy R. Knowles left him some advice. Managing the school’s more than 600 faculty without much intermediate support was too much for one dean—especially when the school desperately needed to hire more faculty. Before he joined as dean, Kirby remembers, one department in the life sciences had failed to attract nine of the last ten of its search candidates for senior faculty positions.

“For some time the governing boards had been encouraging the Faculty of Arts and Sciences to expand,” Kirby says. “There was a strong perception that we were in danger of falling seriously behind in several important fields.”

And so FAS expanded, and quickly. The school began multiplying its number of ladder faculty at the end of Knowles’ tenure as dean, and Kirby accelerated that hiring spree. From 2001 to 2008, 100 tenure-track faculty were added to the previous core of 619 professors. Initially, a single faculty dean presided over the entire operation. The Corporation, FAS administrators, and even faculty realized that this might no longer be practical.

“My sense was that too much rested on a single person in the form of the dean,” says Carol J. Thompson, former associate dean for academic affairs.

“You can’t have a single dean doing this,” says linguistics professor Jay H. Jasanoff ’63. “It requires competencies that most people don’t have.”

So Kirby decided early in his tenure to create a new network of deans that would operate below him: faculty divisional deans for the humanities, social science, life sciences, engineering, and physical sciences. Kirby hoped that these faculty deans would bring personal knowledge of research and teaching into the administration and also serve as ambassadors for the administration to their peers in departments.

Current FAS Dean Michael D. Smith, a tenured professor in computer science himself, meets weekly with the Academic Planning Group, composed of school and divisional deans; these faculty leaders regularly check in with their own department chairs. Smith says the communication between each layer of the administrative organization allows suggestions, thoughts, and concerns to ultimately make their way to him.

But the new divisional deans would foreshadow a slew of non-academic administrators in FAS.

ADJUSTING SUPPLY TO A SHIFTING DEMAND

In 2006, the federal government launched an investigation into the possibility that Yale University researchers inappropriately used more than $3 billion in grants from over thirty federal agencies. The university eventually settled for $7.6 million, but the incident showcased the need for greater administrative oversight over research and scholarship at academic institutions.

This episode was a “major factor” in Harvard’s decision to open Research Administration Services, a new office that now employs 29 people to oversee federal research compliance, according to Associate Dean for Research Administration Patrick W. Fitzgerald.

“Our priorities at this level are to facilitate what faculty do, but to get them to comply with rules and regulations,” Fitzgerald says.

In this way, Fitzgerald—and other administrators like him—provides support to the faculty. “One of the reasons for staff growth is to relieve the administrative burden on faculty,” Dean of Administration and Finance Leslie A. Kirwan ’79 says. Kirwan, who is second in authority only to Smith in FAS’s governance structure, is the highest ranking non-faculty administrator in FAS.

In addition to expanding the base of administrators to manage greater external pressures, FAS leadership has also created new positions to help respond to student demands. When senior exit survey results indicated that students wanted more advising, for example, offices were created for academic support and advising, according to Jorge I. Dominguez, government professor and vice provost for international affairs.

But as administrative ranks swell with middle managers and support staff for hundreds of administrators—there are 69 with “dean” in their title and many other directors and executive assistants—faculty members say there is a new drag in the school. Implementing innovative ideas and getting answers to questions can now take longer.

“It’s not a structure that’s agile and can move quickly,” says Ali S. Asani ’77, chair of the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations.

“Because of the large increase in the administrative apparatus, necessarily things have become more formal,” says Henry S. Rosovsky, who served as dean of FAS from 1973 to 1984. “Greater formality may make it less interesting or desirable for faculty to participate.”

According to some faculty, a rigid system of delegating responsibilities down a chain of command is gradually replacing the open dialogue among peers that has traditionally characterized academic institutions. Faculty members communicate more with department chairs than with the upper-level administrators who often wield the most authority.

“The relationship has a corporate kind of structure,” says Eric N. Jacobsen, chair of the chemistry department.

PASSING MEMOS

When Jacobsen petitioned FAS to authorize a new faculty search earlier in May, he placed his report on the divisional dean’s desk. Beyond that point, he says he does not necessarily know how the decision to say “yes” or “no” will be made.

“These critical decisions that impact the future of the department are [now] made behind a closed door,” Jacobsen says.

Smith, however, says that he maintains varied and frequent contact with the faculty. “I am a tenured member of the faculty. I work with faculty constantly,” he writes in an email to The Crimson. “In fact, no major decision is made at the FAS without significant faculty consultation.”

Professors participate in 67 standing committees, and many, including Smith, cite the Faculty Council—a body of 18 elected tenure-track and non-tenured faculty—as one of the strongest forums for dialogue.

But faculty members also confess that their priorities—teaching and research—often come before their desire to participate in faculty governance.

“Faculty have always had a rather odd attitude,” says Rosovsky. “On the one hand they want to influence decisions, and on the other hand, they don’t want to put in the time to change things.”

PRIVATE OR PUBLIC?

Kirby says that professors will get involved if they are included in decisions they care about. And faculty members have not been shy about expressing their frustration when not consulted on such decisions.

Months after leaders of the newly-organized Harvard University Library announced their intention to reduce its workforce, for example, uproar has yet to die down over the lack of faculty input in the library’s transition process. Many suggest that the library, the University’s primary asset in scholarship, cannot be effectively governed from the top down.

“If what has happened to the library is evidence, then it’s not a good thing to be more corporate,” says English professor Joseph C. Harris. “There’s nobody listening when faculty members are talking. There’s nobody listening up there.”

Even the monthly Faculty Meetings do not always provide a satisfactory forum through which professors can engage in spontaneous and frank discussion. Just a few weeks ago, the sudden announcement of the central administration’s decision to close the Financial Planning Group—which provides many faculty members with financial advice and retirement planning services—drew sharp criticism from professors.

At the faculty meeting this May, multiple professors used the question period to challenge Provost Alan M. Garber ’76 on his decision to close the FPG without first consulting faculty. But because the discussion was not part of the meeting’s agenda, an 80 percent majority vote from the faculty would have been required to extend conversation on the matter—a motion that did not pass.

“[The Docket Committee] several times thought about trying to arrange time at faculty meetings for more wide-ranging discussions—we never quite saw a way of doing it,” says Richard J. Tarrant, interim dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and a classics professor. “There is some kind of structural problem or obstacle to having that kind of open discussion.”

“It seems to me that the faculty and administration are not communicating as well as they have in the past,” says German professor Peter J. Burgard, adding that those who expressed frustration over the FPG decision are planning a meeting to discuss communication within the faculty and with the administration, along with stronger methods of faculty governance.

Almost all Harvard faculty interviewed for this article said that as a result of being excluded from important discussions, the sense of ownership they used to feel for Harvard and FAS—their University, their school—is dissipating.

“Some colleagues have suggested we might discuss the possibility of a faculty senate or some kind of caucus,” Burgard says. “We have faculty governance, technically. It’s just a question to what degree it happens in practice.”

KEEPING UP WITH THE COMPETITION

Harvard is not alone in witnessing a burgeoning bureaucracy in recent years.

“I think there has been a seismic shift from an academic culture to a corporate culture in universities across the country,” says Michael Shinagel, senior lecturer in English and dean of the Extension School.

According to Benjamin Ginsberg, author of the book “The Fall of the Faculty: The Rise of the All-Administrative University and Why It Matters,” the past 25 years have seen a 50 percent growth in the number of faculty at colleges and universities in the United States but an 80 percent growth in the number of deans and provosts. The number of non-academic administrators—whom Ginsberg terms “deanlets”—has exploded by 240 percent.

“The faculty everywhere has looked around and discovered it’s been displaced,” Ginsberg says.

At Harvard, the number of ladder faculty grew by about 16 percent from 2001 to 2008. In the same time period, the number of University-funded staff in administrative or professional roles has jumped roughly twice as much, according to the Fact Book published by the Office of Budget and Financial Planning.

FAS did reduce the number of administrators and staff in 2009, from 3,100 to approximately 2,900, as part of its strategy to eliminate the $220 million two-year deficit caused by the 2008 financial crisis. But the nearly 3,000-strong operation still outnumbers the faculty.

FROM TWEED TO PINSTRIPES

In the Faculty Club, oil paintings hang on the dark wood-paneled walls. Elegant flower arrangements brighten the hallways. And once upon a time, there was a “long table”—a place for faculty without appointments to drop in for lunch. When he was University president, Derek C. Bok would often frequent the long table, Rosovsky remembers. But many faculty say that the drift toward a more corporate structure may be eroding this kind of “meaningful human contact”—interaction that Rosovsky considers critical to Harvard’s values.

That today’s top administrators would frequent the Faculty Club seems “inconceivable” to Rosovsky. “I think President Faust might enjoy that kind of thing,” he says, “but I don’t think it’s really possible today.”

Some administrators are trying to reach across the divide. Gary P. Cormier, director of human resources consulting, recently met the chair of the statistics department at the Faculty Club—for a business meeting, to discuss performance management techniques.

“As FAS has gotten larger and larger...the challenge remains how to get buy-in and vet issues with faculty—you have to remember to do it,” Cormier says. “I think Harvard is such a big place that it’s much easier to work down than sideways.”

But this top-down structure has engendered a malaise through which the faculty and the administration see each other as separate entities.

“Harvard is very special and our job is to keep it special—the faculty and the administration certainly share that view,” says Jacobsen. “Ideally, we should be able to do that without the faculty and administration feeling like we’re on opposite sides.”

—Staff writer Radhika Jain can be reached at radhikajain@college.harvard.edu.

—Staff writer Kevin J. Wu can be reached at kwu@college.harvard.edu.