FAS enhances teaching, learning, and scholarship

Dean Jeremy R. Knowles recently had the pleasure of telling 12 core academic departments in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) that each has the chance of adding one faculty member to its ranks.

This welcomed announcement represented one of the "first fruits" of the University's $2.1 billion fundraising drive, now in the fourth of its five years. As of late December, the FAS had raised $795.8 million, or 82 percent, of its total $965 million goal.

Many areas have benefited, among them the academic departments in need of teaching and scholarly support -- especially those contributing strongly to the Core Curriculum. Other areas that have benefited from the Campaign include financial aid, athletics, performing arts, student life, information technology, and international studies.

Gazette writer Debra Bradley Ruder talked recently with Dean Knowles about the benefits of the Campaign on teaching and learning in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, which includes Harvard College, the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, and the Division of Continuing Education.

Gazette: How is the Faculty of Arts and Sciences different today from how it was three-and-a-half years ago before the Campaign began?

Knowles: You have to go back six years, because when I entered this office in 1991, there was a grave deficit that was spiraling higher, and the Faculty's financial situation was unstable. During the first three or four years that I was Dean, we developed an academic plan that outlined our fundraising priorities, while simultaneously working to balance the budget. So, we embarked on the Campaign at a time during which equilibrium was being reestablished.

If we had had no Campaign, we would now be stable, but very much less cheery. What happened is that the splendid and continuing success of the Campaign, combined with the achievement of financial equilibrium, has allowed us to undertake a number of palpable improvements to the lives of students, faculty, and staff in the FAS.

Gazette: Could you describe some of those improvements?

Knowles: So far, we have seen more obvious changes in places than in people. For example, we were very fortunate to secure gifts to restore Memorial Hall, turning it into a much more vibrant and useful place. That project was a necessary precursor to the creation of the Barker Center for the humanities, which has changed the lives of nearly 100 faculty, more than 100 graduate students, and the staff members in those 12 departments. My spirits rose when, a couple of weeks after the Center opened this fall, one of the junior faculty said to me, 'You know, I have met more faculty colleagues in the last five days in the Barker Center than I have in the previous four years here.' And that was exactly what I had hoped would happen. That will be followed in the coming months by the reshaping and renovation of Boylston Hall.

So, the biggest changes so far are the visible ones, and that partly has been the consequence of donor generosity targeted to major projects, which had been planned for more than a decade.

Gazette: What other benefits come to mind?

Knowles: The next major reshaping will be in the social sciences, involving government, international studies, and economics. We hope to have a new home for the Government Department and a new center that will integrate the international/regional studies programs in Coolidge Hall and elsewhere. This will liberate space in Littauer so the Economics Department can breathe. Our hope is that the new center -- which will be named for Sidney Knafel -- will have classrooms, a data center, an expanded library, and a café. The interaction between the electronic and printed information in the social sciences will become, I hope, something of a paradigm for the future, because we will have government documents and online geographical, census, and survey data, all available alongside the printed collections.

Gazette: What kinds of faculty positions have been created or endowed through the Campaign, and how will students and departments benefit?

Knowles: One of the first and highest priorities of our academic plan, which was reflected in the Campaign, was an increase in the number of faculty. We do not intend to increase the number of students in the College or the Graduate School, because the ratio of students to faculty in the FAS is already higher than at most of our peer institutions. Some class sizes here are larger. Teaching loads are higher. And faculty take fewer academic leaves than at many other institutions.

Adding new faculty will not only relieve those strains to some extent, but also improve the quality of what is offered to undergraduate and graduate students. In this way, both teaching and research will be strengthened.

The original plan included 40 new faculty positions. So far, we have established a number of chairs in areas of teaching and scholarly need, including the Gates Chair in computer science, the Waggoner and Furer chairs in economics, the Tom Lee Chair in biological sciences, the Armstrong Professorship in the Division of Applied Sciences, and the Madero Chair in Latin American studies.

What is also needed, however, are undesignated chairs that we can assign to departments in the greatest need. So the six chairs from John and Frances Loeb [as part of their record gift to Harvard in 1995] were a godsend. For example, the Philosophy, Music, and Fine Arts departments contribute very strongly to the Core Curriculum and find themselves loaded down with high enrollments. Our largest concentrations -- Government and Economics -- are also in need, particularly deriving from the new Core area of quantitative reasoning.

Gazette: Have other undesignated chairs been created?

Knowles: Yes. The Campaign has allowed me prudently, I trust, to authorize six more chairs. So I wrote this winter to a dozen departments, inviting them to propose how their curricular offerings, scholarly balance, and Core contributions might be improved by the addition of a new faculty position. When I receive those proposals, I shall be able to authorize searches for new colleagues.

I don't doubt that these 12 new faculty positions will have the most dramatic effect on the lives of our colleagues and students. They will ensure that important sub-fields are covered through new course offerings, expand the menu of Core courses, and allow us to spread the administrative responsibilities that our faculty carry among more faculty.

There are other examples of the Campaign's impact on teaching and learning. Our Expository Writing program has benefited from a gift from the Sosland family and is now working with a number of concentrations to improve writing across the curriculum; we now have more funds available for course development; and we hope to endow the Bok Center for Teaching and Learning so that its work with teaching fellows and faculty will be secured.

Gazette: One of the Campaign goals is to more fully endow undergraduate scholarships, and so far Harvard has raised $148 million of the $200 million goal. Why is financial aid support so important?

Knowles: The strongest single reason for the extraordinary depth of our applicant pool is our fierce commitment to need-blind admissions. We are unwavering in the view that admission to Harvard College should be on the basis only of talent and merit, not on ability to pay, and that we must make it possible for all of those who are accepted to come. We spent about $40 million this year on scholarship aid to our undergraduates, but only about three-quarters of that sum is endowed. More than $10 million each year has to come from the Faculty's unrestricted funds in order to fulfill our pledge of need-based aid.

I'm glad to say that after a slightly hesitant start, we've now raised nearly three-quarters of our goal for undergraduate financial aid. Our alumni and alumnae often feel enriched by knowing their gifts are allowing students to come to Harvard who could not otherwise do so. The income on these endowments helps relieve our unrestricted budget to cover other needs, such as new faculty positions.

Gazette: What about graduate students? I understand you've raised $20 million for graduate education, or about two-thirds of the goal.

Knowles: I have been concerned both about the pace of our fundraising for the Graduate School, and more broadly about the nature of support for graduate students. There are practical and organizational things we can do to improve the nature of our offers, for example, by making multi-year offers which are much more attractive to incoming students.

There are, however, more serious questions about how we can recruit the very best graduate students. Here is an area of great concern, because it is central to the scholarly health of the institution, and to the effectiveness of class sections, that the quality of graduate students be the highest possible. We compete with other institutions for the very best candidates, and we must become, again, fully competitive in this area. We need to examine how we can better fund our graduate students so that they can feel secure when they arrive, maintain manageable teaching loads, and not stay too long.

I see three overarching needs in the educational area. The first is for new faculty positions to help relieve the stress on the faculty. The second is for fellowship support of our graduate students. And the third is to bolster the scholarly work of the faculty. The fading support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the higher expectations of faculty for research facilities in science, are concerns that we must resolve soon if we are to sustain Harvard as an exciting and fulfilling place to be.

Gazette: What are the issues around reducing section size?

Knowles: The maximum size of a section is 20. In many fields the sections are smaller, but it takes a skillful teaching fellow fully to engage 20 students in an intellectual discussion in 55 minutes. But smaller sections mean more sections, and more sections mean more teaching fellow hours and more classrooms. So this is a multi-parameter problem. As an illustration, if we trimmed the size of sections in Core courses from 20 to 15, this would be the equivalent in dollar terms of four faculty positions, or 25 graduate fellowships. This exemplifies the kind of acute resource decisions we have to face. Last year, the FAS Resources Committee began to look at this issue, and more study is planned in the coming months.

Gazette: What is the state of our classroom space right now? Do we have enough classrooms, and are they up-to-date technologically?

Knowles: Looking ahead, we will surely need a larger number of small classrooms, and a larger number that are fully equipped in audio-visual and computer terms. We must consider the future of instruction. Should we be thinking more about open and interactive discussion rooms? Is the old Socratic approach of the single lecturer and the amphitheater of scribbling listeners outdated? What should we be building to integrate and exploit the new technologies? Will we not, sooner than we think, expect all our students to have their laptops plugged into their seats? There is a classroom committee looking at the first issue, and an information technology committee thinking about the nature of classroom equipment. Finally, there are a number of colleagues on the Faculty who are experimenting with a more interactive student-professor relationship in a more "wired" environment.

The Barker Center contains 32 meeting rooms of various kinds, and the Maxwell Dworkin building (for computer science and electrical engineering) will have a complement of classrooms, including a state-of-the-art room funded by Robert and Naida Lessin. It's very important that we incorporate into any new construction enough space for teaching and meeting.

Gazette: Campaign gifts for the Library total $28 million so far, but the goal for the Harvard College Library is $67 million. Why is it difficult to generate money for the libraries?

Knowles: When the Campaign began, I felt sure that alumni and alumnae would contain more bibliophiles than seems to be the case! But the Library piece of the Campaign is not proceeding as rapidly as we'd like. Part of that is, no doubt, due to the feeling among many donors and friends that air conditioning and climate control are not very exciting, and are the responsibility of "somebody else." I think that's entirely understandable, but it doesn't solve the problem.

Our books are slowly being destroyed by oxidation, and something must be done. These are priceless collections that would last about twice as long if we lowered the average temperature by 10 centigrade degrees. Preservation -- including fire protection, theft protection, and temperature control -- is by far the largest piece of the Library drive.

This raises a general question. In any fund drive, it is rare that the success of fundraising fits precisely with one's goals. What we must hope is that we shall have enough unrestricted support that will allow us to fulfill pressing needs such as these.

Gazette: How much of your time is devoted to fundraising?

Knowles: I spend perhaps one-sixth of my time on the Campaign; the rest of the time, I am working on faculty appointments, educational policy issues, and challenges in research, and I am thinking about where departments and disciplines are going intellectually.

But you know, I don't look at a Campaign as simply another load on my schedule, because we are in a much stronger position because of the Campaign than we could conceivably have been without it. Without the Campaign, almost none of what we've been talking about could have been done. The pleasure in appointing new faculty, reshaping buildings, and improving support for the scholarship of the faculty is why that fraction of my life is so satisfying.