What Harvard Will Do With Its $2.1B

Harvard is raising $2.1 billion through its new University Campaign, and Joshua L. Distler '97 has a suggestion about where some of it should go.

"If they're raising all this money, why can't they do something about tuition?" asks Distler, who like all undergraduates will see his yearly contribution to Harvard crack $25,000 next year. "That should be their first priority."

Like Distler, most undergraduates have ideas on how to spend the pot of cash their alma mater is amassing. They ought to. Students--though not those at Harvard now--will be affected more than anyone else by the transformations the money will cause.

Everything from where first-years eat, to the topics of Law School Courses, to the pictures in the Fogg Art Museum, to the way undergraduates communicate will be shaped by the five-year campaign.

It will "prepare Harvard for the next century," says campaign co-chair Robert G. Stone Jr. '45 and in the process decide what the University will look like for students of the future.

Administrators' Priorities

The campaign's goals, of course, are not decided by the students.

Administrators--the deans of Harvard's 10 schools and the University vice-presidents--set the priorities.

The first concern, or at least the area that will eat the most money, is the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

Perhaps the most significant longterm change the FAS funds will spark is to bring Harvard into the future technologically.

Hookups in the houses and first year dorms have already put Harvard on-line and given students access to the resources of the Internet, a global data communications network.

Students now communicate with each other, get course assignments, read the newspaper and even meet dating prospects over the Internet.

The new funds could add to the Harvard Arts and Sciences Computer Services' overburdened staff and bring Harvard closer to a par with schools like MIT and Dartmouth.

"I think money put into the student network will really help a lot of students," says Kevin G. Breney '97.

The funds will also be used to add to the FAS faculty, giving much-needed support to technical fields which could have broad impact in a rapidly advancing society.

Forty new professorships are planned, and perhaps a large chunk will go to fund engineering sciences and computer science faculty, not traditional areas of strength at Harvard.

Social Life

The funds will have an equally dramatic effect on student social life. First-year students will not longer eat in the Freshman Union.

Instead, they will dine in the brand-new Loker Commons in Memorial Hall, which will also include Harvard's first all-campus student center.

"A student center would give the school something it lacks," says Sarah J. Reber '96. "If they actually build one, students will have somewhere central besides the Greenhouse and Science Center to go."

In Harvard's traditionally decentralized, fractionalized social life, the center could be a new force for campus-wide unity and interclass contact. But many students doubt its effect will be so dramatic, especially with a location so far from the houses.

"A campus center would be a major improvement," says Benjamin D. Wildasin '97. "Other schools have nice ones, but I think given the area they're using, the chance of Harvard's being a real center is pretty slim."

Physical, Intellectual Change

The capital campaign will also finance a physical transformation of the campus. While first-year dorms are getting a face lift, the construction projects likely to have the greatest effect are those which will shape the intellectual life of the faculty.

A proposed Humanities Quad will bring together Harvard's fractured faculty, uniting departments from Afro-American Studies (presently found above the CVS pharmacy on Mass Ave) to English (which is itself divided between two inconvenient buildings clustered around Prescott Street).

The move is intended to bring together the humanities disciplines and encourage intellectual work, says English department chair Leo Damrosch.

While Damrosch says the project probably won't have so dramatic an intellectual effect as administrators had hoped for in his department, he does applaud plans to bring the English department together.

"We do need to be under one roof," he says.

And the bursting-at-the-seams government and economics departments, two of Harvard's largest concentrations, will finally get to spread out. A new social sciences center is planned, which will bring together many of disciplines in one physical location.

"[Government faculty] are scattered now in three different locations, and space is tight in each one of them," says Susan J. Pharr, chair of the government department.

Like the humanities faculty, the government professors applaud the move to bring together their splintered intellectual disciplines.

"I think the feeling is that coming together in one complex will be enormously intellectually stimulating," says Pharr, who is also Reischauer professor of Japanese politics. "It will be of great benefit to the intellectual life of the department, and of course to students."

The Graduate Schools

But not all the money will go to the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Harvard's graduate schools will also line their pockets to the tune of $861 million, and students and professors there will see changes as well.

The Law School will add new faculty positions and fund related research projects.

The School of Public Health wants to increase funding for research in areas ranging from the human genome project--which is mapping the entire human gene pattern--to the study of AIDS. The school will make much needed capital improvements. constructing its first new building in several decades.

The Business School, however, says it has no new capital needs. But it still has a $220 million campaign goal--the largest of any graduate school.

Most schools--and the FAS as well--look to strengthen financial aid with the new funds.

And finally, with all this money going to students and faculty, the administration put something in to help further its own goals.

President Neil L. Rudenstine is seeking a hefty "President's University fund" to help fulfill his vision of Harvard. It would basically function as a reserve for promoting interdisciplinary projects and helping the poorer graduate schools.