FAS Dean Expected To Give Financial Update

As members of the University await Faculty of Arts and Sciences Dean Michael D. Smith’s financial update for the school due early next month, many faculty members say they hope next year’s budget will address the needs of growing departments, several of which say they have been short-staffed in recent years.

Following Smith’s Dec. 2008 meeting in which he announced a hold on the majority of searches—in addition to freezing annual salary increases—many concentrations that have since seen increases in the number of concentrators   say they find themselves with a shortage in faculty and a lack of resources to balance the sudden increase.

“We’re all understaffed. We all could use more,” Visual and Environmental Science Professor Tom C. Conley said.

The paucity of funding has left some professors concerned about the criteria used by FAS administrators when deciding how to allocate resources.

According to the number of respondents in the Senior Exit Surveys from the Class of 2010, VES has seen an increase of 56 percent in concentrators over the past eight years—the largest percent increase of any concentration with more than 25 students. But VES and Sociology—which has seen an increase in concentrators of 41 percent over the past eight years according to survey numbers—have seen little to no increase in their number of faculty over the past few years.

According to Conley, a faculty search launched two years ago fell through after the two final candidates chose to go elsewhere. The department is currently looking for an assistant professor in film history, an appointment that will bring the number of professors in the department to 13.

According to Conley, many Harvard departments tend be small but composed of top-notch faculty members, which the administration frequently takes advantage of, knowing that what Conley calls “Type A” people are likely to work very hard.

Smith said that as FAS emerges from an era of fiscal belt-tightening, the school is looking to reallocate resources effectively.

“Departments’ needs and aspirations determine how new authorizations are determined and how visiting faculty and lecturers are allocated,” Smith said in an interview last week.

Smith said that faculty searches are being authorized on a case by case basis, but the school still is not in “growth mode.”

While “working to support the teaching and research needs of departments,” Smith said, “we still have a structural deficit, and there are limited funds, so we can’t do everything we would prefer to do. We must be strategic in how we authorize new resources.”

Still, some faculty members wonder whether this evaluation process is addressing the needs of growing departments that face a shortage in faculty.

“By all the measures which FAS uses, we’ve come out on top—we’ve achieved them and done more,” Sociology Professor Orlando Patterson said earlier this month. “But they [the administration] do nothing in terms of trying to meet the problems we face.”

“In a way, we’ve become victims of our success,” Patterson added.

After the endowment dropped by nearly 30 percent from its historic high of $36.9 billion, funds from the endowment to pay for the FAS budget decreased significantly, resulting in a $220 million deficit.

Since 2008, Smith has pared down the deficit. In September, he announced the standing deficit rested at $35 million, and he has consistently repeated a promise he made in 2008 to balance the budget by the end of the 2012 fiscal year.

—Staff writer Kevin J. Wu contributed to the reporting of this story.

—Staff writer Sirui Li contributed to the reporting of this story.

—Staff writer Gautam S. Kumar can be reached at gkumar@college.harvard.edu.