Council Ties Up Loose Ends

As rain showered Cambridge on Wednesday, motions and presentations inundated the Faculty Council—the highest governing body of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS)—at its penultimate meeting of the year.

The council approved a proposal to create a new standing committee that would coordinate current course offerings on global health and offer a secondary field.

The proposal, brought forward by anthropology department chair and council member Arthur M. Kleinman, would augment student resources currently offered through the Harvard Institute for Global Health (HIGH),

The standing committee would work to bring students together with faculty from the Medical School and School of Public Health, Kleinman said. The committee would also work to add new courses on global health issues and to “package” existing FAS offerings, Kleinman said.

“The idea that we’ve had for some time is to increase the opportunities in the FAS for what is just simply an enormous amount of student interest in global health,” he said yesterday. “I just can’t tell you how many undergraduates have come to speak to me about global health issues in Africa, in Latin America, in Asia.”

Kleinman said that since the creation of HIGH, student interest has “skyrocketed,” and he estimates that “probably somewhere between one-third and one-half of all the pre-medical students and probably a group equally as large of other students...have an interest” in global health.

“I’m extremely enthusiastic about this. In terms of my area, medical anthropology, I think this the most exciting and sensible initiative to come forward...in my academic lifetime, which is 30 years,” he said.

Earlier this week, Diana Sorensen, a scholar of Latin American literature and culture, was appointed dean for the humanities to serve in the place of current dean Maria Tartar, who will be on sabbatical during the coming academic year. “During my one-year tenure in the position, I hope to continue the excellent work of Dean Maria Tatar, and to help in the forthcoming transitions,” Sorensen wrote in an e-mail yesterday.

Sorensen arrived at Harvard in 2001 from Columbia. She previously served as dean of the arts and humanities at Wesleyan University.

“We are all anxious to further the production of knowledge within our disciplines, to bring our reflective, analytical skills to bear on our students’ academic life, and to promote the creativity of the performing arts,” Sorensen wrote.

Sorensen, who is the Rothenberg professor of Romance languages and literature and of comparative literature, wrote that she is “very keen” to continue Tartar’s efforts to develop general education classes in the humanities, like the course on odysseys to be offered next fall by English professors Louis Menand and Stephen J. Greenblatt.

The council also approved the 2006-2007 Handbook for Students, amending the current statement about harassment to include those targeted “on the basis of...sexual identity.” The addition reflects a decision reached by the Harvard Corporation on April 3 to include gender identity in the College’s non-discrimination policy.

English department chair James Engell presented a motion to the Council to bring the Expository Writing program under the auspices of the Standing Committee on Writing and Speaking, which he chairs, and to require review by the Faculty within five years.

Reached yesterday, Engell declined to comment on the motion.

The council also heard a presentation by Professor of History Joyce E. Chaplin on the three-year evaluation of the Office of Sexual Assault Prevention and Response.

“When the legislation was passed establishing the new procedures and office and so on, it included a requirement that there be a report to the Faculty Council in three years,” 300th Anniversary University Professor Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, the council’s vice-chair, said. “My sense was that we need to continue to monitor this.”

Council members must now prepare for the final meeting of the full Faculty, to be held this coming Tuesday.

—Staff writer Allison A. Frost can be reached at afrost@fas.harvard.edu. —Staff writer Samuel P. Jacobs can be reached at jacobs@fas.harvard.edu.