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Dear Alumni and Friends,
I find something wonderfully energizing about September in
Harvard Yard. Freshmen unpack their bags,
decorate their walls with the Coop's finest Picassos and Monets,
and set off on one of life's great adventures.
Stereos blare through open windows, frisbees and footballs
crisscross the Yard, and returning faculty and students catch up on
summer doings. The air seems fresh and full of
possibility.
Maybe I've felt this sensation more this September than in past
years because I'm a recent arrival in the Yard myself, gradually
getting my bearings, looking forward to the year before
us. My summer in Cambridge has given me the
opportunity to visit and talk with people from all across the
University - to listen and learn, and to think together about plans
and aspirations as we look ahead. I am deeply
grateful for the generosity and warmth I have been shown by all in
these first weeks of my presidency.
Harvard is just one generation shy of its 400th birthday, but
for all its history and all its extraordinary resources - academic,
physical, and financial - what drives its progress and sustains its
vitality is the collective effort of all of us - faculty, students,
staff, alumni, and friends. No community I know
holds greater potential to shape the world of ideas and contribute
to improving the human condition. And one of my
paramount hopes for the coming years is that, more and more, when
all of us at Harvard think and talk about our endeavors, we will be
describing not just an accumulation of discrete individual
pursuits, but the efforts of people in different parts of the
University working actively toward common ends.
We not only share Harvard as a place to live and work, as a line on
our return address; we share a stake in its overall directions and
its determination to look forward a lways with thoughtful ambition,
never with complacency.
* * *
Knowing that our institutional capacity depends so much on the
qualities and contributions of the people among us, I am especially
pleased by the successful conclusion of a number of important dean
searches. Mike Smith assumed office as Dean of
the Faculty of Arts and Sciences in mid-July.
Jeff Flier became Dean of the Faculty of Medicine on September
1. Mohsen Mostafavi will join us as Dean of the
Faculty of Design next January. In addition,
Barbara Grosz has stepped forward to serve as Acting Dean of the
Radcliffe Institute, and David Pilbeam, having admirably served as
the FAS interim dean last spring, has graciously agreed to carry
forward as Acting Dean of Harvard College. They
all bring to their new roles an impressive record of accomplishment
as teachers, scholars, and academic leaders. And
they all share a commitment, with on e another and with our other
deans, not only to the success of their own faculties and schools,
but to the future of Harvard as a whole.
I am also delighted that the distinguished historian Robert
Darnton has joined us as the new Director of the University
Library, and that Tamara Rogers will assume her duties as Vice
President for Alumni Affairs and Development on October 1, as we
begin to move toward a university-wide campaign.
A search for Harvard's first Executive Vice President is under
way. And we now confront the need to replace
Mohamed El-Erian, the head of Harvard Management Company, who has
decided for family reasons to return to southern
California. James Rothenberg, the Treasurer of
the University and chair of the HMC board, has begun to organize
the search for Mohamed's successor.
As the new year begins, we can look forward to some noteworthy
changes in our academic landscape. This month we
launch our new School of Engineering and Applied Sciences - a
recognition of the rising importance of engineering and technology
in our academic universe, as well as their power to bridge
different fields and to connect us with the larger
world. Later in the fall we will open the New
College Theater - an embodiment of our determination that the
lively arts find an even livelier home at
Harvard.
Within months, we hope to break ground on the first science
complex in Allston - a milestone in our larger efforts to shape new
spaces hospitable to interdisciplinary collaboration, and to extend
our campus in ways that will brighten our academic future, benefit
the surrounding community, and reinforce our commitment to
sustainability. This complex will complement the
impressive new buildings that have recently risen along Oxford
Street in Cambridge - the Laboratory for Integrated Science and
Engineering, now open for business, and the Northwest science
building, expected to open in 2008.
Nearby, construction work has just begun on a historic
transformation of the Law School campus, part of a broader project
of adapting our programs of professional education to the needs and
opportunities of changing times. Meanwhile, we will pursue the
important work of designing an ambitious and long-overdue
renovation of the Fogg Museum. We are committed
not only to responsible stewardship of the invaluable collections
we possess, but also to making the close-up study of works of art a
more integral part of our educational
programs.
These are but a handful of examples of initiatives now in
progress - examples one could easily multiply looking across our
schools. From engineering to theater, from
interdisciplinary science to art to law, and in innumerable fields
around and in between, we have opportunities not just to advance
our efforts in discrete fields, but to work to become a university
known more for bridges and less for walls.
* * *
There is another event on the fall calendar, set for October 12,
that the formal invitation characterizes as the installation of a
new president of the University. I like to think,
however, that the event is not about a person, or even an office,
but about the larger community of learning. It
gives us an occasion to reflect on higher education's highest
aspirations, to remember what it is that draws us together in this
extraordinary place, to challenge ourselves to build a future that
both honors and transcends our past. For today,
let me offer just a few observations on the new academic year in
front of us - not a map, but a sketch, with more broad strokes and
plenty of significant detail yet to come.
First, this will be a pivotal year in the continuing effort to
enhance undergraduate education at Harvard. Last
spring marked the adoption of a new curricular framework for
general education, after years of important discussion and
debate. Ahead lies the equally important - and no
less challenging - work of designing an array of new courses and
shaping the elements of the overall curriculum into a cohesive
whole. As these efforts proceed, I hope we will
bear in mind the question of how our undergraduate program can draw
greater strength from the fact that Harvard College makes
its home within Harvard University, with its matchless
collection of schools, centers, libraries, laborator ies, and
museums. More generally, as we think about
educational programs across the institution, and as we look forward
to harmonizing the schools' academic calendars, I hope we will find
more ways for students and faculty in one school to benefit from
teaching and learning opportunities in others.
Second, this will be the first full year of work for the Harvard
University Science and Engineering Committee - a new body bringing
together the provost, key deans, and faculty leaders to help us
consider our initiatives and investments in this domain in a more
coordinated way. This effort is obviously vital
in its own right, for the future of Harvard science - as is the
launch of our first-ever cross-faculty academic department, the
joint FAS-Medical School Department of Stem Cell and Regenerative
Biology. More broadly, these developments
underscore both the opportunity and the need to think in more
integrated ways about our activities in other large domains that
transcend individual schools - whether the social sciences, or the
arts, or international studies. Each such domain
poses its own challenges, both intellectual and practical, and will
warrant distinctive approaches over time. And any
such approaches will demand that we work to strengthen individual
parts of the enterprise at the same time we ponder potentially
productive ways to link them. The point for now
is simply that we owe it to ourselves to think more consciously
about where such linkages might benefit education and scholarship,
and how our institutional structures and habits of mind can
encourage rather than inhibit their pursuit.
Third, this year stands to be a critical one in our planning for
Allston. As I noted, we aim to break ground on
the initial set of buildings - the first science complex - that
will inaugurate a decades-long extension of our
campus. As we intensify our planning, it seems to
me essential that we come to view Allston as a shared opportunity -
an investment not merely in one school or another, in this program
or that one, but in the common future of an institution whose
vitality depends on new intellectual connections, new spaces in
which to work and live, new ways of engaging each other and our
neighbors. While we are deeply involved in discussions of plans for
Harvard's presence in Allston, we must remember that these plans
take root in aspirations for Harvard more
generally. They must grow out of the needs and
hopes we define for ourselves as schools and programs, faculty and
students, teac hers and learners - not just in our new precincts,
but in our traditional ones. And we must explore
as well the opportunities that Harvard's changing landscape offers
to build strengthened relations with our neighbors both in
Cambridge and Boston.
Finally, if Harvard is first of all defined not by buildings or
endowments or traditions but by people, we have an overriding
interest in attracting to our community the most talented people we
can find - as students, as faculty, as staff. We
have made encouraging strides in recent years in opening our doors
more widely to people of different backgrounds, different
experiences, and different economic means. We
have learned, more and more, that our commitment to excellence
depends on a commitment to inclusiveness. We have
much more still to do - not least, in considering how our programs
of financial aid, not just in the College but across the schools,
can enable us to attract the very best students to Harvard, and
allow them to pursue careers without the burden of excessive
debt.
In the villanelle he wrote for Harvard's 350th anniversary,
Seamus Heaney closed with an evocative couplet, well known to some
of you, worth knowing by all:
A spirit moves, John Harvard walks the yard,
The books stand open and the gates unbarred.
May that spirit welcome all of us into this new academic
year.
Sincerely,
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