Harvard’s most popular concentration is on the move. The Department of Economics, which has topped undergraduate enrollment rankings for years, is getting a new home.
Construction on Pritzker Hall, a new nine-story building funded with a lead gift of $100 million from Harvard Corporation Senior Fellow Penny S. Pritzker ’81, has been underway for a year, and is expected to be complete by December 2027. The new building is rising behind the Littauer Center for Public Administration, the Department of Economics’ current home on Cambridge Street.
Harvard received Pritzker’s donation for the building in 2021, just a year before she was tapped to lead the University’s highest governing body. The Faculty of Arts and Sciences mobilized to break ground on the project last June, looking to give the growing economics department space that will enhance faculty interaction, the mentoring of junior colleagues, and connections with students.
The department currently lists 58 faculty members and enrolls nearly 200 graduate students and upwards of 1,000 undergraduates. Small, densely packed faculty offices and a lack of large co-working spaces have made it difficult for the growing number of undergraduates, doctoral students, and postdocs to collaborate, faculty members have said.
The Littauer Center was built in 1938 to house the Graduate School of Public Administration (now the Harvard Kennedy School), and has been renovated only once since, with design modifications to the building’s interior in 1978. The building, designed by Boston-based architectural firm Coolidge, Shepley, Bulfinch, and Abbott, has also housed the Fine Arts Library since 2009, when renovations to the Harvard Art Museums necessitated a move. According to a University spokesperson, discussions about a permanent location for the library’s collections are ongoing.
The new Pritzker Hall will include offices and collaborative workspaces, classrooms, and meeting and event rooms, according to the project’s website. Erection of the building’s structural steel framework began on June 15.
Pritzker, who studied economics as a Harvard undergraduate, said in a press release at the time of her donation that she hoped the new building would “galvanize a new era for Harvard economics.” The move to fund a new facility, she said, was motivated by the department’s “incredible, cutting-edge work to understand the drivers of a more inclusive economy.”
Since Pritzker’s initial donation, the University has secured gifts from several other high-profile alumni donors. In January, Harvard announced that Pritzker Hall would include an event and teaching space named after Hong-Tu Tsai, chairman of Cathay Financial Holdings, following a donation from his sons, Joseph T. Tsai ’98, Jeffery T. Tsai ’01, and Jason T. Tsai ’05. (The Tsai family have been longtime donors to the University, most notably contributing to the Center for Government and International Studies in 1996.)
Alumni have also stepped in to fund new professorships that will have offices in Pritzker Hall, according to a University press release. Alexander Slusky ’89, M.B.A. ’92, a founding partner of Vector Capital, and his wife, Danna Slusky, have endowed a position for an economist studying “real-world applications.” Slusky attributed his decision to fund a faculty position to the mentorship he received from economics professors during his undergraduate studies at Harvard.
Don Smith ’66—the CEO and co-founder of EnviroBeef, a company that produces environmentally friendly beef—endowed a professorship for a scholar of climate change, natural resources, or energy economics. He said in the University press release that the donation was inspired in part by the mentorship he received from economics professor John Kenneth Galbraith, who died in April 2006.
Harvard has not yet announced a future use for the Littauer Center, which houses administrative offices in addition to the economics department and Fine Arts Library.
