Harvard Should Treasure PBHA

Cabinet of the Phillips Brooks House Association, Inc. (PBHA), I welcome Judith Kidd as Public Service Dean for Harvard College. I see her appointment as an opportunity for PBHA to strengthen our identity and clarify our overall mission. I maintain great faith that Dean Lewis and the College have, above all, acted with the interests of the students and the communities we serve in mind.

What alarms me in reading the articles in today's paper is that this faith remains unfounded by the evidence. Other student leaders have said enough about the dismissal of student input in the entire search process; even the most optimistic of them have, in my personal conversations with them, expressed great dismay about the end result. What concerns me are Dean Lewis's priorities for public service at Harvard: "to stabilize, promote and make as effective as possible the kind of public service activities that our undergraduates are involved in."

As someone who was on the PBHA Board of Directors when the College first announced restructuring public service, I read this statement as a euphemism for cutting back public service. We should remember that the context of this restructuring is within the larger Maull-Lewis Report, which had as its mandate eliminating the Faculty of Arts and Sciences' budget deficit. This very same document had recommended cutting employee benefits. Clearly, these goals run in opposition to Lewis's intention to promote" public service.

What truly astounds me is the fact that public service at Harvard is quite possibly one of the most efficient operations in the country. My summer program, for example, annually parlays $2,200 of direct and an estimated $16,000 of in-kind support from Harvard into a $28,700 cash and $63,250 in-kind operating budget.

Most of the in-kind support we receive from Harvard is in staff support. At PBHA, we have four full-time staff working directly with the programs and five providing support. This is to support 1,700 undergraduates involved in over 80 intensive, ongoing programs! I invite comparison with any other department at Harvard--most notably, the athletics department. Try running a decent football program when you share your coach with 19 other teams. These are the conditions under which--despite which our programs thrive.

The analogy with the athletics department is not a randomly chosen one. I understand that Harvard College is above all concerned with its students' education--as well it should. It understandably privileges the educational (and fiscal) value of the athletic department. But it seems to underestimate the enormous learning that goes on in PBHA, Housing and Neighborhood Development (HAND) and the other public service programs around campus.

Nowhere else can one supplement his or her abstract book learning with hands-on experience in the community. Nowhere else can one have the opportunity to design and run an actual program making an impact on real people--experience which easily translates into government or business. Alumni of our program have no less a "success rate" than the student body at large, even if you cynically consider that Harvard's goal may not be to produce individuals "to serve thy nation and thy kind" but individuals who give large contributions to the institution. PBHA has its share of generous alumni, too.

I write this above all with the hope that this letter is absolutely unnecessary. Surely, Dean Lewis (and I say Dean Lewis because, as we have seen in the search process, he is where the back stops) is aware of the value of PBHA's current structure and the enormous opportunities it provides Harvard undergraduates. He is certainly aware that PBHA is the only institution of its kind in America. It surprises me that Harvard, which portrays itself as an educational leader, would not clasp this treasure closer to its breast.

Dean Kidd has a wonderful opportunity to continue in the proud tradition that PBHA has laid down. I place in her every hope that she will do the right thing. Gene Koo '97   Vehicles Coordinator,   Phillips Brooks House Association