Provost focuses on communication across boundaries

By Ken Gewertz

Gazette Staff

Harvey Fineberg became University provost on July 1, 1997, succeeding Albert Carnesale, who left Harvard to become chancellor of the University of California at Los Angeles. Fineberg has been associated with the University for 34 of his 52 years -- as an undergraduate, graduate student, faculty member, and for the past 13 years as dean of the Faculty of Public Health.

He earned an A.B. degree in psychology from Harvard College in 1967, an M.D. degree from the Medical School, a master of public policy degree from the Kennedy School of Government in 1972, and a Ph.D. in public policy in 1980 with a dissertation on innovation in health care and the evaluation and diffusion of technology.

Fineberg is only the fourth University provost in Harvard's history. Recently, Fineberg shared some of his thoughts on becoming Harvard's provost.

What are some of your goals as provost?

As you know, I am just beginning as provost, but I have a general sense of the direction I'd like to see for the office. One very important function of the office is to help bring together different parts of Harvard to enable the University to achieve intellectually and educationally all that it is capable of achieving. We have tremendous latent opportunities within the faculty, though there is not a strong tradition here of working across schools. The provost's office can help by lowering some of the obstacles to collaboration, and thus promoting communication and interaction across disciplinary boundaries. I believe the natural interest and wide-ranging curiosity of the faculty will drive the process, as will the interests of students.

The initial five Interfaculty Initiatives (Environment, Ethics and the Professions, Health Policy, Mind/Brain/Behavior, and Schooling and Children) are demonstrations of the rewards that can come from that kind of collaboration. In each instance, these programs have enabled people to come together in ways that otherwise would not have happened. We also have some exciting new interfaculty efforts such as the Hauser Center for Non-Profit Institutions, and the Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies. I would like to think much more openly and broadly about opportunities to facilitate this kind of cross-faculty communication, to stimulate intellectual recombinations in the University, and I'm going to work with the deans and individual faculty to find ways to accomplish that. I would say that at the intellectual and academic level, this is the most fundamental responsibility of the provost's office.

What about central administrative functions? I understand there are a lot of recent developments in that area.

Yes, the provost's second general area of responsibility is in trying to improve the efficiency of the Central Administration. The Central Administration is key to effective operation of the University, and we have been paying closer attention in recent years to how to manage that important role effectively. We've put in place new budget and planning mechanisms. We also have an extremely able group of vice presidents who manage very large areas of responsibility, and, as provost, I'm hoping to support them in their ability to do their jobs more effectively.

There are also many very important and exciting developments in information technology, and this is an area where the provost's office can play quite a critical and catalytic role. University Information Systems [UIS] reports directly to the provost, and that puts the provost in a rather special position of opportunity. There was some terrific groundwork done over the last year by a faculty committee on information technology, which worked on issues such as academic IT planning, intellectual property, and partnerships with entities outside Harvard. It has produced a very insightful draft document now under review. My hope is that by building on that work we'll be able to accelerate the application of information technology for the academic as well as administrative side of the University.

Related to that is the most significant administrative reform in a generation, Project ADAPT. It's going to bring about a radical transformation over the next several years in the University's financial and human resource areas. It's a huge, very important undertaking, and one to which I feel very keenly committed.

What about other initiatives from your office?

I should also mention the role the provost plays in the strategic planning of the University, which is another responsibility of the office, and a very important one. And that relates not only to planning for the Central Administration per se, but also working with the faculties on their plans. We went through an extremely useful University-wide planning process in 1992-93, and it makes sense to continue to look at how to sustain the progress that was made then.

Finally, I would say that there will be a number of areas of special interest, important to the University as a whole, on which I will work with the deans. One of these is the work of the University in the international arena -- how we can organize ourselves most effectively and appropriately to achieve our educational and scholarly goals worldwide.

You've been at Harvard ever since you came here as a freshman in 1963. Did you ever dream that you would be here this long and that one day you'd be helping to run the place?

No, I never expected it. It wasn't my game plan when I first arrived at Harvard as a freshman, nor at any stage since. It has always seemed to me that at each juncture I made what was the best next career choice, whether it was medical school or graduate school or taking a faculty position or choosing to remain in a position as opposed to going someplace else. And the simple truth is that, to me, at each choice-point, the best option available always seemed to be the next choice at Harvard. So rather than being a predefined strategy with a calculated series of steps, in retrospect it was the product of a set of independent decisions, each of which ended up in a different spot within the same large institution. I've never regretted it. It has been a wonderful place to grow and to contribute. I will also confess to still feeling very much a student. I love learning, and I think it is a marvelous vocation as well as avocation. And we're so fortunate, those of us who love learning, whether faculty, staff, or students, to be in an environment that is premised on the fundamental value of learning. So from an emotional point of view it has always been a very sympathetic environment.

What was your game plan as a young man? Have you departed from it, or has it just fulfilled itself in ways you never expected?

I always had an academic career in mind. I just never expected to spend that academic career entirely at Harvard. I always had in mind a research career with some practice -- and I did practice internal medicine part time for 10 years. If I were to characterize my own intellectual predilections, I've always inclined toward the intersections of fields. In the health policy area I liked the fact that you quite naturally draw upon political analysis, economic analysis, quantitative/analytic methods, all brought together on a particular problem, and that it's frequently necessary to intersect with the ethical perspectives, medical and scientific perspectives, and sometimes also humanitarian and philosophical perspectives. So I've always enjoyed the idea of reaching into different fields and pulling together pieces in some new way.

Will you miss being involved in the issues of health and public policy that were part of your daily life as dean of the School of Public Health?

At each stage of my career I've felt I gave up something to gain something. For example, when I became dean I stopped my part-time medical practice. I really enjoyed seeing patients, but it wouldn't have made sense to continue doing that while I was also serving as dean. I also radically diminished my exposure to students in the classroom, which I enjoyed very much. In fact, I would say that going from professor to dean was probably more of a transition in the sense of changing the nature of what I thought about and worked on than the transition from dean to provost.

At the same time, there are several aspects of the provost's position that appeal to me very strongly. The main satisfaction is the sense of helping to shape a great institution, making a contribution that may enable it to achieve even more than it would otherwise. The provost is still a relatively new position at Harvard. It's only been in place for about five years now, and while there have already been wonderful precedents established, it is new enough that the role can still be shaped to a certain degree. The heavy lifting has been done but the finishing work is yet to be accomplished. And I was also attracted by the fact that it is a great learning experience. It forces you into exposure to the whole spectrum of scholarly work undertaken at the University, as well as to the core managerial functions of running what is, after all, a very large institution. And, of course, one of the most prominent attractions was the chance to work more closely with Neil Rudenstine. I got to know him when I was dean, and I admired tremendously both the approach he brought to the job and the goals he envisioned for the University.

Is there anything in particular that you feel your experience as Dean of the School of Public Health has given you that you will bring to bear on the provost's position?

I think that a dean of Harvard has a very interesting opportunity, which is distinct from that of most university deanships. Harvard deanships are more like managing a small college, or in some cases, a rather large college, than they are like being a dean in some complex bureaucracy. So, in a way, the faculty of the School of Public Health, or any of the other faculties, is a kind of microcosm of the whole of the University, and the deanship requires you to handle a whole spectrum of tasks and problems and to work on both the academic and administrative sides of the equation. I would say that being a dean of a faculty is very useful preparation for the kind of tasks that the provost faces.

Now with respect to the School of Public Health particularly, one feature of the faculty there, which, to a greater or lesser degree is characteristic of other Harvard faculties, is the variety of disciplines and the array of scholarly work represented in that faculty. It's a very problem-oriented field, and the key is bringing together a variety of disciplines needed to solve a particular problem. Facilitating interaction and communication amongst faculty who have different training and experience is also a very apt preparation for the provost's office.

What is it like moving your daily activities from the Longwood Campus to Harvard Square?

It was wrenching to leave the School of Public Health. I have many dear friends at the School, people with whom I've worked very closely on the faculty and as the dean there. I love that school very much. I think it is a very exceptional institution in its combination of mission and capacity. I think being a dean at Harvard is a wonderful job. It's got this terrific combination of authority and responsibility. I did realize I wasn't going to be the dean forever, but my baseline expectation was that I would probably return to the faculty, as many former deans at Harvard seem to do. It's a little nostalgic and at once familiar and strange coming back to Harvard Yard after so many years. But speaking of the environments of the two places, they're different and they're both good.