FAS Faculty Discuss Future Initiatives

At the first Faculty Meeting of the academic year, on October 20, the Faculty heard reports on topics ranging from undergraduate and graduate student financial support to the progress of the Knafel Center.

Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences Jeremy R. Knowles led his remarks with an update on current and completed initiatives in several academic areas. With Boylston Hall rededicated officially on October 16, he said, Harvard has "re-homed" 17 humanities departments in Boylston and in the Barker Center.

The challenge for the social sciences, Knowles said, is to complete planning for the Knafel Center, which will house the Government Department and international and area studies centers. Once built, the Center also will allow for expansion of office space in the Economics Department, which now shares the Littauer Center with Government.

Planning in the natural sciences is ongoing, Knowles said, and includes construction of the Maxwell Dworkin Building and an initiative to identify and keep Harvard at the forefront of critical areas of scientific research.

Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dean Christoph Wolff announced the largest rise in the GSAS financial aid budget in the past two decades. The increase will be phased in over the next two years, Wolff said, stressing that current as well as future students would benefit. With a proposed expansion of dissertation fellowships to students in their final years, he said, other students will have more teaching opportunities. And as of next year, all departments will be able to tell incoming graduate students whether and at what level they will receive aid throughout their four-year courses of study. Wolff said Harvard should be able to offer funding at levels to attract the most promising graduate students.

After reports on the progress of the Knafel Center project from Administrative Dean Nancy Maull and Professor Jorge Dominguez, the question arose as to why, in light of the relative stability of faculty and student numbers in recent years, Harvard needs new buildings. Knowles responded that one of the Faculty's most urgent goals is to increase its numbers; that, along with the need for space for complex scientific equipment, the shifting of student concentrators into new areas of study, and the fact that library holdings rise each year (at the rate of 120,000 volumes in Widener alone), makes rededication of existing space and creation of new space essential.