Harvard's Perestroika

Nikita Khrushchev was a man never short of bold ideas. In 1961. Dismayed at the pace of agricultural output, Khrushchev summarily promulgated one of his boldest: The Ministry of Agriculture would be relocated from its quarters in Moscow to a farm in Milkhailovskoe; similar plans were announced for the regional ministries of Agriculture and the Agricultural institute. "From the asphalt to the land," went the slogan. Innovation by shuffling location: surely, a bold idea. Also an incredibly stupid one, which created only greater chaos than had existed previously.

Within a few years, this debacle was a laughing stock even in the Soviet Union itself; and yet, today, it is an idea which is again be enthusiastically touted as a spur of creativity. Where could such an outlandish failure of socialist statism find a new intellectual home? Where else, but the place that has always shown itself a safe-haven for bureaucratic absurdities. As though it has not done enough in preserving the tradition of pointless paperwork, generous sinecures, proliferating committees, sub-committees, and ad hoc working groups, Harvard has now decided it should adopt the animus of Mr. Khrushchev's greatest folly.

In his address at this past Commencement, President Rudenstine waxed poetic about plans to physically restructure the academic departments. The lynchpins of the plan are the proposed "Bok Center for the Humanities" in the building currently, and for the greater part of this century, known as the Freshman Union, as well as a "Social Sciences Quad" in the Littauer region north of the yard. In front of a sea of wealthy potential donors, Rudenstine seemed suddenly possessed by the spirit of Khrushchev. In his ardent pitch for restructuring he informed the crowd that, "the new facilities will be designed to create--quite literally--physical as well as programmatic `bridges' between separate units." Putting departments next to each other will foster interdisciplinary approaches to problems, he declared, ushering in a scholastic golden age of professorial cooperation. All that, simply by moving offices from over here to over there.

Unfortunately, that's what Khrushchev thought. Three years later he was involuntarily retired, scratching his head and watching his successor undo his "bold" idea. Thirty years later, as hordes of Kennedy School professors stake their careers on cleaning up the economic fallout of such "hairbrained schemes" (as those who deposed Khrushchev referred to this plan, among others), their president is preparing to embark on the same course of bureaucratic juggling.

Perhaps Rudenstine has been led into these big plans by a small scale success. "The Link," the new laboratory building that serves to join Mallinkrodt and Hoffman has garnered nothing but praise. Between chemistry labs on side and the Earth and Planetary Sciences department on the other, "the Link's" main occupant will be a laboratory of Atmospheric Chemistry, a rather felicitous combination of the neighboring disciplines.

Yet linking two related disciplines that are already neighbors with a hybrid lab is a very different matter from uprooting and replanting a good portion of the universities departments.

First of all, many related departments are next to each other. Boylston Hall, scheduled for imminent evacuation, houses the Department of Romance Languages and Literature, the Department of the Classics, the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, and the Department of Germanic Languages and literatures. It seems like a rather sensible collection, yet their physical proximity doesn't really encourage any extraordinary cooperative innovations among them.

Just because two departments share the same water-cooler doesn't mean that intellectual cross-pollination, let alone revolutionary thinking, will result. We have witnessed what happens when adherents of one discipline are given power over the future of another: au revoir, Linguistics.

The restructuring plan flies in the face of the most salient trend of the late twentieth century; that is, the decreasing importance of physical proximity as information technology allows easy interaction at any distance. Perhaps Rudenstine would accomplish a great deal more if he sped up the implementation of the high speed data network rather than engineering a mass-migration across the Yard.

The overarching symbolism of the move is perhaps its most disturbing aspect. As the Humanities are carted across Quincy Street, and the Social Sciences are banished almost to Law-School-Siberia, one might be curious what will fill the vacuum at the physical center of the university. What inevitably fills new space in a bureaucratic organism? More organs of bureaucracy. Boylston, now a convenient and centrally located academic building, will quarter the Freshman Dean's Office. Perhaps this is compensation for the proctors loss of pet-keeping privileges. Considering the importance that Rudenstine ascribes to physical position, we should all recognize the implication of a bureaucratic bloc in the center of the yard while academic disciplines are relegated to their own peripheral ghetto. Thus we should not be surprised that the University perfunctorily apologizes as students are carted off to 29 Garden St., as the Administration plans to convert the Massachusetts Hall dormitories into more office space. Those pesky students and professors! If we can't get them out of our hair, perhaps we can at least get them out of our way.

If there is a legitimate shortage of space for academic departments, the administration should sacrifice some of its ample space and decamp to points beyond the Square. Why doesn't the bureaucracy give up University Hall to the academic departments? Here, the plan is much worse than Khrushchev's; when he kicked the Agricultural Institute out of Moscow, he established Lumumba University in its place.

Rudenstine can't really believe his own rhetoric of restructuring. The underlying reason for the plan is, simply put, the fund drive. The Bok Center, the Social Science Center, and the post-restructuring era of intellectual fertilization are a mobilizing myth. To prospective donors, more chairs, more financial aid, and other quantitative goals are boring. Much more exciting is the prospect of funding a dynamic scheme with easily visible results that will bring about a qualitative change in the academy. The plan may cost millions of dollars, but an inspiring "vision" that excites the alumni can bring in billions.

But when the glowing anticipation of this glorious future fades into the reality of a messy mass-migration, with faculty squabbling about square-footage, and all the inevitable messiness that the distribution of a perk like space among egos like those found in Harvard's professorial corps entails, the "vision" will no longer be so inspiring.

Moving the ministries didn't grow Khrushchev any corn or wheat. For Rudenstine, shuffling the departments will beget him only chaff.