There's a very simple answer to that last question: Yes, yes, yes. Housing is more crowded than in the 1990s, and in some cases is falling apart, while other Ivies have been building new dorms.
 

Curriculum and review mirror the housing.
 

Yes, the housing needs renovating. But does even the Dean of the College have the authority to depress enrollment a smidge so that there's a little flex space so that buildings CAN be renovated? Count me as one who doubts it.

Count me also as one who thinks deans should come in with a vision for education, and then talk about buildings as a subset of that vision. Buildings are a classic freebie for administrators who want to show an impact but don't want to reckon with abstractions.

I'm not impressed so far, and I would urge Prof. Hammonds to STOP using the word 'undergraduate.' Has no one noticed that it has the word 'under' in it, as in 'under the radar,' 'underemphasized,' etc? The word, Madame Dean Designate, is COLLEGE.

College!

Standing Blutarsky
 

Standing Eagle, Yale actually built two (I think, may have been just one) "temporary colleges" to house students from the colleges which were in the midst of renovation.

I don't sense any movement towards diminished enrollment, but rather, in the opposite direction.

What's striking about this is that in the midst of all the Allston planning, there seems no attention paid to the state of college housing, and that takes years of planning before such projects can even commence. So you're probably looking at a decade before anything could improve....
 

Richard, some attention is already being paid, though you're right that it's a long-term process. Look at the current job postings in FAS Physical Resources.
 

Richard's right, Yale built a "swing space" (officially "Boyd Hall," though no student will know what that is) to house students while they renovated each "college" and now that is part of regular housing.

But Yale is not perhaps the best example or model for renovation plans. Harvard has continually renovated parts of campus; including the freshman dorms, housing the displaced students in 29 Garden St in the mid-90s (that space is now itself renovated graduate student housing), and renovating other buildings on campus like Boylston in the Yard, Barker Center, Widener, Paine music hall, now the gym (MAC), and presumably a gizillion science spaces. Yale had severely neglected its buildings across the entire campus for decades and was playing catch-up with a massive renovation undertaking.

This is all just to say that I don't think Harvard's been so terrible on this issue, staying more or less on top of renovation needs across campus. More so than some other campuses that are now in the midst of long overdue renovations (typing as my office shakkkkes from the jack hammers of construction next door).
 

The Dean who invented a whole new approach to ascen: 1) Conduct a faculty survey; 2) Report some of the results just to enough people so they know how much you know about matters of explosive implications; 3) Hold on to the results until ascended --and bring the results up in key conversations from time to time so people remember what information you have; 4) Never, ever, make the results of the survey public --as it would give away all the power you hold as the gatekeeper to this privileged information; 5) Whether you get to do anything at all about the matters covered in the survey is, in the end, completely irrelevant.

PS: Hold on to those results, they may still deter others from setting a trip wire for your Deanly walks.
 

Actually, don't hold on to the results. Others have them, they're going to come out whether Dean H wants them to or not. If she wants to spin the results, or if other deans do, now's the time to do it....
 

so what else is new? walk over the backs of your colleagues to move up in the ladder of success. Who said the road to a University Presidency had anything to do with principles?