The State of the College

According to silver-tongued Dean of the Faculty Jeremy R. Knowles, his University Hall officemate Harry R. Lewis '68 is now nearly one year into his second "quinquennium" as dean of the College.

The first year of Lewis's second Five-Year Plan, while never rivaling the beginning of his tenure in turmoil, has presented significant challenges of its own.

Having once taken on the volatile issues of House randomization and Phillips Brooks House Association (PBHA) reorganization, Lewis now muses about issues of inadequate academic advising, student space and athletic facilities.

These are problems that require more than administrative ingenuity. While Lewis had carte blanche to revamp PBHA and the House system and needed only to weather student opinion, seemingly immovable obstacles stood in his way this past year--insufficient funds, an intransigent Faculty and the physical limits of Harvard itself.

And Lewis says initiatives to renovate the sub-par Malkin Athletic Center (MAC) and to improve an advising system consistently given low marks by students have not had moved along as quickly as Lewis had hoped.

MAC Attack

The issue of space, said Knowles in his 2001 report to the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS), is not just the biggest issue facing the College, but is also "unquestionably" the largest problem in FAS itself.

But for the College, the physical restrictions of Harvard and of the city of Cambridge are unyielding. One hundred new acres in Allston mean little to undergraduates who still dream, against all odds, of a student center in the heart of Harvard's campus.

Lewis, for his part, has played the mule in the student center debate, sounding the same note for the past six years.

Even if there were enough space, Lewis says, a central location for students to congregate socially to play pool and eat fast food would not be a top priority for the College.

Lewis is more concerned with a crunch on space in which the constantly increasing number of student organizations can meet, work and practice.

But this distinction between a social and a work-oriented student center as been until now a meaningless one--there simply has not been enough space for either.

But Lewis now has a plan to kill two birds with one stone.

Administrators freely admit that the MAC is a decrepit waste of space, and Lewis thinks he might be able to revamp the ailing gym and provide some student groups with much needed office and meeting space at the same time.

Beyond the usual calls for new Universal machines and Stairmasters, Lewis thinks that it might be possible to open up the building by adding another floor above the swimming pool. A new MAC, he has suggested this year, could ostensibly serve as a 24-hour student center.

But renovating the MAC--which Lewis calls "my highest priority right now"--is still a waiting game for the College, one that is taking a disappointingly long time, Lewis says.

"We have not made as much progress as I would like to," he says.

For one thing, HNTB Corp., the firm that Harvard hired to evaluate FAS's athletic and recreational facilities, has not yet completed its survey.

Knowles wrote in his annual report that he expects HNTB's report to result in renovations to the MAC, but the survey's end does not appear to be imminent.

Lewis is also aggravated that the expected renovations--which will run in the tens of millions of dollars--still have not been paid for. He has left Cambridge a number of times this spring to attempt to find donors, so far without success.

"We've reached the point where we have to do some fundraising to make the project happen and I wish we could get past that stage," he says.

The College is also in the midst of an evaluation of space in the residential Houses, another project that Lewis says "has taken longer than I hoped."

While Lewis hesitates to call the situation one of "overcrowding," Lewis did devote a section of his January report to "crowding."

"We would be well served to recognize that with the present housing stock we should be housing about 100 fewer students in the Houses than we now are," he wrote.

It has been 10 years since the College last significantly changed its housing stock--with its acquisition of 220 beds in the DeWolfe complex)--and perhaps it is time for another reassessment, Lewis says.

In January, he suggested that the College could ease the crowded situation in the Houses by encouraging more students to study abroad. He later backtracked, explaining that this would only happen if expanding study abroad was judged to have legitimate educational purposes, but now believes that there will be action taken on this front.

Lewis also says that there needs to be a reevaluation of whether tutor and guest suites in the Houses are the best use of space. But like MAC renovations, this cannot happen until a report is filed.

"I hope by next fall we'll have all of the rooms documented," Lewis says.

Advising Woes

Lewis' other crusade is to improve the state of academic advising in the College.

His five-year report contained data from surveys of the Classes of 1997 and 1999, which showed that many departments--particularly large ones like economics and government--have been doing a bad job at advising undergraduates and may actually be slipping.

For instance, only 34 percent of government concentrators in the Class of 1999 said their advising conversations covered appropriate courses to take, down from an already disappointing 53 percent in the Class of 1997.

Arguing that students are poorly served by departments that do not require senior Faculty members to advise undergraduates, Lewis has spent a great deal of energy--in conjunction with Dean of Undergraduate Education Susan G. Pedersen '82--trying to cajole departments into devoting more resources to advising.

The task is not easy. Departments are autonomous, as Lewis puts it, and it is tough to get tenured Faculty members to do anything that they do not want to do--they need to be given incentives.

And even if the College could penalize rogue departments, Lewis says it would not want to, for fear of hurting students. Carrot-and-stick coercion, in other words, does not work.

"There are no sticks," Lewis says.

So Lewis and Pedersen have tried to use persuasion, writing letters to a number of departments explaining their position and hoping that student voices on the Advising and Counseling Committee will convince certain departments to make reforms.

Results have been mixed.

For the economics department, the possibility of assigning professors formal advising responsibilities is not even on the table. Christopher L. Foote, director of undergraduate studies in economics, says the department's high student-faculty ratio makes such a change problematic. The department, he says, is looking into other ways to improve advising by graduate students.

The anthropology department, though, has quickly responded to Lewis and Pedersen's challenge. Last month, senior Faculty members from the social anthropology wing of the department met with chair William Fash and agreed to mandate a minimum of six undergraduate advisees per professor.

Lewis and Pedersen have also supported Undergraduate Council efforts to create a guide to concentrations that would let students compare the quality of advising across departments before choosing a concentration.

Putting The Houses In Order

Some aspects of Lewis's second Five-Year Plan went off without a hitch this year, though.

If Lewis's tenure is associated with any one thing, it is the House life that he irreversibly altered with his decision to carry out randomization.

The real challenge of randomization, in many ways, lay not the implementation of itself but dealing with the fallout of the policy--for instance, the objections of old-school House masters who vigorously opposed the new scheme and actively drummed up opposition to it.

Lewis's vision of House life, beginning with the 1994 report he helped to write, has been one of reliable and uniform quality as opposed to unpredictable individuality. The old, idiosyncratic masters stood in the way of this plan.

And with two appointments of new masters in the past two months, Lewis notes that he has now appointed nine of the next year's 12 House chiefs.

Soon to be gone are Quincy House Master Michael Shinagel, whose 15-year tenure is the longest among current masters, and Dunster House Master Karel Liem, who criticized Lewis soon after his resignation for a lack of diversity among masters. Liem is currently the only member of a racial minority group to lead a House.

Taking their place will be two popular professors--Robert P. Kirshner '70, professor of Science A-35, "Matter in the Universe" and IBM Professor of Business and Government Roger B. Porter, who teaches Government 1540, "The American Presidency."

Lewis says he is very excited about both choices.

And Lewis is also thrilled about the choice of Lawrence H. Summers as Harvard's 27th president. Though it took Summers until May to schedule a meeting with Lewis, there is evidence that the new boss--a former Ec 10 TF and member of the economics faculty--will take more of an interest in the College than current University President Neil L. Rudenstine.

Lewis calls his meeting with Summers a "good conversation," if not one full of policy specifics.

In a sense, the meeting was indicative of the sort of year it was for the College and its administration. There are arguably no more big projects that the College can undertake on its own.

The second five years, it seems, will be marked by Lewis consolidating his early reforms and working around the edges of the Faculty, University and Corporation to strengthen the College's hand when it competes for valuable resources.