Harvard President Drew Faust urged the Harvard medical community to take the long view of Harvard’s future in moving ahead. “All of us are stewards of this remarkable place,” she said on Oct. 28 at a Medical School faculty meeting. “We have to be accountable to the long-term future in how we approach the use of any of the resources.”
The one-hour meeting attracted nearly 200 people to the TMEC amphitheater, with invitees including faculty, heads of affiliated institutions, and administrative and student leaders. Faust met with Dean Jeffrey Flier in a conversation about the economy, future of science, and global health. Then she took questions from the faculty.
“What surprised me most since I became president?” responded Faust to a question that excluded the 27 percent drop in the endowment last year. “It was how much Harvard is in the public eye and what that means on a day-to-day level.”
In more significant ways, Harvard must adapt to changed circumstances, Faust said. Before its steep drop, the endowment had funded more than one third of the University’s overall operating budget and about one fifth of the Medical School’s operating budget. Looking ahead, Harvard planning and decision-making will assume a slow economic turnaround, reduce its dependence on the endowment and focus on its core missions, she said.
“The new normal requires of us a realignment of how we do our work, the kinds of expectations we have for ourselves, and a real setting of priorities and a making of choices,” she said. “We have to ask: what is our mission as a university? What are we teaching students? And whom do we need to have present to do this in the best possible way?”
Well before the economic downturn, Faust advocated greater intellectual collaboration across Harvard’s traditionally independent schools and programs. The economic downturn makes sharing resources and collaborating on research and education more important than ever, she said.
Those shared resources range from the approximately 73 separate libraries to the endowment itself, including those pieces customarily under the control of individual departments. “Ultimately, they are all the fiduciary responsibility of the Harvard Corporation and me,” said Faust, a Civil War scholar, echoing the accountability expressed in the memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant, which she had pointed to earlier.
The pace of development in Allston has been slowed as administrators reassess capital planning in light of the unprecedented drop in the endowment. The first building’s five-acre foundation is being built up to ground level, and decisions about the future of the project are expected by late December. In the near term, Harvard has an obligation to “figure out positive uses of the properties we have acquired to contribute to a vibrant community life,” said Faust, who cited the Dental School clinic there.
“Until we have the physical spaces we aspire to,” she said, “we can invest in and enable the people and programs that continue to advance the important scientific goals at the heart,” such as those involving stem cells, engineering and genetics.
One unifying aspect of the University is its capacity to be the leader in global health. “We can reap the benefits of collaborations and joint projects by learning from and investing in intellectual enterprises around the world,” she said, “without mounting the equivalent of a Harvard University elsewhere.”
Flier added that Partners In Health was in the process of becoming an affiliate of the Medical School, which would further extend Harvard’s global training and educational opportunities.
Another looming financial threat comes in two years. “I worry a lot about what happens to science funding at the end of the stimulus,” Faust said. “When that set of investments is completed, given the deficits the nation will be facing, will we be able to count upon support from the federal government to compete effectively with the other parts of the world that are investing so heavily?”
Universities, research institutions, and hospitals will have to work hard, Faust said, to make the case for continuing investment in publicly funded research.
