Even in Challenging Times Harvard Must Move Ahead

By now every student, faculty member, and alum is aware that the global financial calamity has influenced every component of University finances: endowments, private philanthropy, and gifts from cash-strapped foundations. While stimulus funds have temporarily swelled the budgets of federal science agencies, the long-term picture for government funding is hazy at best, and may fall victim to deficit-cutting two years from now. Within Harvard, the deans and central administrators have had the unenviable task of cutting budgets in order to match our expenses to our newly constrained resources. We have all spent many hours since October engaged in these painful exercises.

It is important to remember, however, that Harvard not only remains a great university, but that we must continue to move forward even in these challenging times. While the deep and likely prolonged nature of the downturn means that budget cutting must be widely distributed across many cherished programs, the deans are also keenly aware that we must be strategic, protecting essential investments, such as financial aid, and even growing in a small number of critically important areas. Indeed, several University-wide committees have been focused on how we can make Harvard stronger in priority areas in the near term, albeit with smaller investments than we would make in other times. These committees, made up of faculty members and deans, include the Harvard University Committee on Science and Engineering, the University Planning Committee on Social Sciences, and the University Library Task Force.

At the risk of slighting those whose interests go unmentioned because of the brevity of the space available here, I would like to highlight two university priorities: global health and energy and environment. What is it that makes these areas of scholarship and teaching priorities even in the current climate? First, they have real world significance. Global health (which also includes domestic health issues, if only because microbes do not need passports) and issues of energy and environment confront challenges that any great research university must address. The emergence of pandemics, the development of new drugs, vaccines, and devices for neglected diseases, the assurance of access to new discoveries in resource constrained areas, and the impact of these discoveries on diverse populations are centrally important to the world. Similarly, the development of newer, cleaner, cheaper forms of energy and energy storage, the global security issues related to energy, and the diverse problems posed by climate change are extremely significant concerns.

In addition, from the point of view of bringing the Harvard community together, these areas have the obvious benefit of requiring input from many—indeed most—of our faculties across the University. As intellectual matters, they touch on everything from basic research and scholarship to challenging and important applications that engage our professional schools. The issues presented by global health, energy, and the environment also cross the boundaries of the natural sciences, engineering, the social sciences, and the humanities. For example, the dissemination of antiretroviral drugs in South Africa has, until recently, been inhibited by benighted leadership that denied the role of HIV in causing AIDS; similarly, the World Health Organization’s attempts to eradicate polio have run into ethnic and religious barriers in northern Nigeria and parts of India. Thus biological discovery and technology development can be stymied if not coupled with an understanding of political science, anthropology, and religion.

Above all, global health and energy and environment are critical areas for the education of our undergraduates and graduate and professional students. The problems of global health and of energy and environment are of interest to many students because they represent some of the paramount problems facing the world today. In consonance with the stated goals of the new General Education curriculum, they connect a liberal education with the problems of the real world that students will engage after graduation. Harvard recognizes the importance of such endeavors. Even today, we must continue to gain strength.


Dr. Steven E. Hyman is Provost of Harvard University and Professor of Neurobiology at Harvard Medical School.