Victory, and Beyond

Three months before the University Campaign's conclusion, Harvard had raised $2.325 billion--$234 million above its nearly $2.1-billion goal. As of September 30, each school had exceeded its fundraising target (the schools of public health, government, and medicine by 55 percent, 51 percent, and 38 percent, respectively), and the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) alone had raised $1.02 billion. Gifts for endowment totaled $1.5 billion, and current-use funds $650 million, both comfortably above the plan. Most of the campaign's academic priorities had also been met; even the $78 million sought for libraries, at times a seemingly intractable goal, was within reach, with $69 million raised. Areas conspicuously lagging included professorships ($173 million, or 34 percent short of plan); facilities ($95 million); and certain University-wide funds, including those designated for flexible use by the president and the interfaculty initiatives (an aggregate of $77 million).

President Neil L. Rudenstine, Provost Harvey V. Fineberg, most of the deans, and other University officials disclosed this success to campaign leaders and major donors gathered at the Harvard Club of New York on October 6. The deans of arts and sciences, business, education, law, and medicine reported on the campaign's effect on their schools' educational missions. And the participants jointly planned efforts for the campaign's final weeks and discussed focal points for Harvard's future fundraising. (The New York meeting took place after this issue went to press, but data on the campaign were made available, and Rudenstine and Fineberg talked about Harvard's position and prospects, a few days earlier.)

Campaign Commitments: The large share of unrestricted (chiefly annual-giving, current-use monies) and undesignated funds may make it possible to satisfy unfulfilled goals at the campaign's end.

While celebrating the campaign's numerical achievements, President Rudenstine emphasized, "It's all about education. The dollars are wonderful, but they're only as good as the programs they're put to use on." In that light, he noted, donors' gifts largely validated the "coherence and power of the plan" prepared by administrators and deans from 1991 through 1993, through which fundraising priorities were established. Fineberg, who as provost oversees interfaculty programs, said the planning process and execution of the fund drive "brought operational coherence to a very diverse University," significantly advancing "the way we carry out learning in new configurations that cut across traditional boundaries." In fiscal terms, he said, the campaign "undergirded the whole University," enhancing each school's capacity and mobilizing central resources that will enable growth in new intellectual areas.

The campaign put forth broad themes, none more important than "enabling more excellent people to do their very best work," as Fineberg put it. A readily visible result is what he called the "phenomenal physical rehabilitation, restoration, and extension of the University." Those improvements include the renewal of Harvard Yard, Memorial Hall, Sanders Theatre, and Lowell Hall, and conversion of the Freshman Union into Barker Center; significant new building projects for engineering and the sciences within FAS, and at the law, medical, and public health schools; and the wholesale reconstruction of central libraries including Widener and those at the divinity, law, and medical schools (under way or complete) and the business school (forthcoming). The library catalogs are now on line, and the buildings bristle with electronic cabling and network connections, as do dorms, classrooms, and faculty workspaces.

Within those buildings, several dozen senior faculty positions have been endowed, notably including a baker's dozen in education and 24 new professorships in FAS (which still hopes for a total of 40, to further reduce the faculty-student ratio).

Measures to assure student access to Harvard's faculties and facilities--a second high campaign priority--included raising almost $220 million for undergraduate financial aid, and $31 million for FAS graduate-student support. Although the fundraisers exceeded their initial targets on both counts, the ever-increasing pressure on student finances since the campaign was first planned led administrators to push especially hard for even higher goals. Rudenstine noted that a nearly 10-percentage-point rise in the College's admissions yield during the decade, to 80 percent last spring, was one measure of Harvard's success in attracting and supporting superior students.

In programmatic terms, both men emphasized four accomplishments. First, in an era of expanded intellectual and economic exchange between nations, Harvard has markedly strengthened its international resources. Well over $100 million has endowed faculty positions, research support, student travel grants, and funds for foreign fellows. Existing or new centers for Asian, European, Islamic, Korean, Latin American, and Russian studies have expanded or begun. So have broader programs in international affairs and economic development.

Second, research and teaching across departmental and school boundaries has proliferated far beyond the five initial interfaculty initiatives (on the environment; health policy; mind/brain/behavior; professional ethics; and schooling and children). The area-studies centers operate across the University, and so, increasingly, do new programs on nonprofit enterprises (at the business and government schools) and in human rights (at the schools of government, law, and public health). The new Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study institutionalizes this Harvard-wide model of flexible scholarly endeavor.

So do recent commitments in the sciences, a third highlight, particularly the new multidisciplinary centers for genomics, small-scale materials, neuroscience, and other emerging fields within FAS, and FAS-medical school collaboration on cellular research (see "Big Thinking about Science," March-April, page 65).

Finally, information technology has become much more embedded in Harvard operations than the campaign planners imagined. Beyond the wiring of campus buildings and digitizing of library data, Fineberg--who oversees technology--said, "We're just scratching the surface on its implications for operations and education." Noting that thousands of courses now use web pages for instruction, he said they ranged in robustness from mere bulletin boards for syllabi to richly interactive teaching media, with far greater potential at Harvard and beyond.

On a different scale, gifts for athletics more than doubled the campaign's $28-million plan, as alumni rallied to endow coaching positions, and major new facilities like Murr Center came on line.

As a whole, Fineberg said, the campaign and endowment appreciation have come to underpin "the fiscal vitality of the University," with the share of a growing Harvard budget derived from investment income rising from roughly one-sixth to more than one-quarter during the 1990s.

Celebration aside, the October 6 agenda was decidedly forward-looking. In conversation, Rudenstine sketched a full agenda. He said the opportunities for research into other cultures and international issues continued to expand "dramatically" and described basic and applied science and medical research as being "at an incredible moment, really a takeoff point." Combined with further spending on information technology and financial aid, he said Harvard's priorities in the next decade were, inevitably, "all high-cost areas." (All this reminded FAS dean Jeremy R. Knowles of the spirit captured by historian Samuel Eliot Morison in 1936 at the Tercentenary, with Harvard "in a normal state of self-dissatisfaction, thinking of numerous things she would like to do better, rather than boasting of what she has done well.")

Against those needs, the president forecast declining federal willingness to pay for the buildings and equipment used for research, and self-imposed limits on the revenue derived from tuition. Fineberg underscored the latter point, declaring, "It would be folly to expect tuition could grow at the same rate in the next quarter-century that it did in the past quarter-century."

That leaves gifts, endowment income, and "creativity" in securing other sources of revenue (beyond "patents and T-shirts, which don't now add up to enough") to pay the bills, Rudenstine said. "Harvard cannot not do more in information technology, in science, in financial aid. If we don't, we're not going to be able to get the kind of students and faculty we want, to make the kind of progress we need to make."

Main Menu · Search · Current Issue · Contact · Archives · Centennial · Letters to the Editor · FAQs