These are excellent priorities. No 1 and 3 are achievable. Not sure about No 2, quite a challenge. The bottom line is that Professors are hired by departments and schools and are not interchangeable across these units, and these tubs have to be self-contained financial units, so not keen to share faculty resources. How do you get people to collaborate in this context? How can faculty create new programs that may be at the nexus of extant fields, or worse yet that may represent new fields. MIT can do that, not sure Harvard can. Good luck to the President!
 

Change the fundraising and donative intent of gifts; reorganise the budget and challenge the platform of deans to be flexible with programs, staffing and funding - look at the business school for a model for the future....it is all about the money who has the power of the purse. You will see it change; it will take time but it will change.
 

Business School as a model? For What? Business schools are on the way out, as we all know, since training the young to make money can be done more efficiently elsewhere.
 

The simplest way to change is to turn Harvard into a matrix organization. Make all faculty University Professors, in the sense that they are on a single payroll form a singular funding source. That is one dimension in the matrix.

The other dimension in the matrix are the departments and schools. They 'buy' proportions of the time of each Professor from the singular hiring unit.

Initially all this would mean is to consolidate the faculty salary portion of the departments and school budgets into a single item in a 'University' budget. The proportion of each faculty member's time 'sold' from this source would be 100% to each department and school that currently hired the faculty member.

Those faculty working on collaborative projects would be free to fund fractions of their time from other units, different than those which initially hired them, or from the University budget, which would be used to fund work --new fields-- in activities across fields.

This change would make faculty time fungible across units and would create a market that would push each faculty to maximize their comparative advantages, whether those are aligned with the work currently recognized in one particular deparment or not. It would stimulate creativity, innovation and maximum faculty productivity, instead of forcing faculty to spend time in activities that exist only because they have always rather than because they make sense to students, to the market or to faculty.

This change would make each faculty member maximally accountable for their time and talent and would give maximum freedom to individual and groups of faculty to pursue those projects they think are most important --and they can convince one of the departments in the university, or the singular, and now more important, University, to fund them.

More importantly this change would stimulate competition among the departments and schools to identify and fund the most promising initiatives, in order to retain the talent of the most productive faculty.
 

The system you propose would have to be purely voluntary. That is, faculty could choose to give portions of their time to departments or schools other than the one that hired them or not. The default would have to be the status quo, 100% to the school that made the initial hiring.
 

Of course. This is a system for those faculty who represent and are interested in activities that reflect a single Harvard. The rest can stay where things are at present.
 

What is needed is a combination of many more University Professors (100 times the current number) who account for their time in the way Professors do at the Kennedy School, using a University-wide system of points, with extra points for interfaculty research or teaching collaboratives.
 

Is this goal consistent with building a single Harvard?

"Another unspoken priority will be to mend what has become a fractious relationship between the administration and the faculty. Known for her diplomacy, Ms Faust says: "My hope is that I will be able to build trust, so that I am able to do things that people may disagree with, but still maintain their faith."
 

I thought 10:19 was on the mark:

"Business School as a model? For What? Business schools are on the way out, as we all know, since training the young to make money can be done more efficiently elsewhere."
 

"For What?" That is the critical question. A single university? for what?
 

Harvard is really 6 or 7 universities in one. An alternative to creating a single university, which maybe very difficult, is to create a few well integrated universities --but not as many as the current tubs. For instance:

1. An undergraduate college
2. A Graduate School of Physical Sciences and Engineering
3. A Graduate School of Arts and Humanities
4. A Graduate School of Health and Medical Sciences
5. A Graduate School of Management of Public and Private Organizations
 

Yes, the Business School needs to move out of the business of training MBAs. It could assume the mission of preparing managers of complex organizations, integrating what are now the Law School, Kennedy School, parts of the Education and Public Health schools.

It could change its name to School of Organizations, Learning and Management.
 

But surely the Business School is not capable of extending itself in intellectual ways out of its current vocational mission. Wouldn't you have to have a complete turnover of its faculty to create such a transformation?
 

12:01
Don't you think they have already figured that out? Look at the siting of various facilities in Allston- coincidence? I think not, so whether in form or function the change is already taking place.

See you in the funnies!