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November-December 2007
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"First Day of School" for EngineeringWith speeches and feasting, Harvard celebrated the launch of its new School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) on September 20. During a luncheon ceremony on the lawn outside Pierce Hall, President Drew Faust signaled for the unfurling of banners bearing the school’s new seal. Two former presidents of the Board of Overseers spoke: Thomas E. Everhart ’53, former president of the California Institute of Technology and professor of electrical engineering and applied physics emeritus, traced contemporary engineering at Harvard back to “the vision of James Bryant Conant”; Susan Graham ’64, Chen Distinguished Professor of electrical engineering and computer science emerita at the University of California, Berkeley, stressed the importance of “intellectual linkages” between the engineering faculty and “virtually every other part of the campus.” As SEAS dean Venkatesh Narayanamurti explained in his remarks, the change in status for the former Division of Engineering and Applied Sciences “reflects the fact that these disciplines now influence almost all aspects of human endeavour—from advancing knowledge, to meeting human needs, to advancing prosperity, to ensuring sustainability.” 
Photograph by Justin Ide/Harvard News Office President Faust and SEAS dean Narayanamurti launched a bridge-building new school. During a decade of leadership under Dean Venky, as he is known, the school’s faculty has grown about 50 percent, now numbering near 70, and is expected to grow as much again in coming years (see “Quantum Leap for Engineering,” July-August 2006, page 63). The number of graduate-student applicants has tripled, allowing the program to become more selective even as the number of enrolled students more than doubled. This is not the first ascendance of applied science at the University. In 1847, Harvard created the Lawrence Scientific School (funded in part by industrialist Abbott Lawrence) in response to the mid-nineteenth-century’s growing industrial economy; it provided a technological education that could be applied to the “useful arts.” But in 1906, President Charles William Eliot—uneasy with the “practical” bent of the school despite his own training in chemistry—disassembled it. “In the century since,” Faust recounted at the inaugural ceremonies, “the organizational saga of Harvard engineering has had more twists than a Möbius strip. But like a Möbius strip, it has come full circle.” She then catalogued the various incarnations of Harvard engineering since Eliot’s day—“The historian in me can’t resist,” she confessed—remarking that “through it all, Harvard’s engineering and technology enterprise, whatever people have cared to call it at any given moment, continued to make remarkable contributions to the world of useful scientific knowledge.” 
Photograph by Tom Fitzsimmons Flags bearing the seal of the new School of Engineering and Applied Sciences adorned centerpieces at the luncheon that celebrated the school’s debut. Among the many such contributions, Faust noted discoveries ranging from the crystal oscillator that enabled radio and television to nuclear magnetic resonance, now the basis for modern medical imaging. She also stressed applied science’s “power to connect, to bridge, and therefore to enliven and strengthen a great many other parts of the University….” 1 | 2 | continued >  
 
 
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