From Kirby, A (54 Page) Long Goodbye

William C. Kirby released his last annual letter to colleagues on Friday—a 14,000-word missive that trumpets the growth of the Faculty, the construction of new buildings, and a proposed choice-based model of general education as the legacies of Kirby’s four-year tenure at the helm of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

Kirby acknowledged the “approaching conditions of financial constraint” caused by the Faculty’s expansion, partly set into motion under his watch. But he wrote that a plan of increased fundraising, creative money management, and a boost in revenue from the Faculty’s endowment will cover a deficit that could amount to $68.4 million by 2010.

The summary of the financial status of the Faculty occupies just over three pages near the end of the 54-page document posted on the FAS website.

On the whole, the letter represents part of Kirby’s long farewell as he leaves a deanship marked by ambitious projects but marred by a series of intense battles between professors and University President Lawrence H. Summers.

Those battles pushed Summers to resign in February, but not before the president had pressured Kirby to step down.

In the letter, Kirby wrote that the “often tumultuous discussions” sparked by Summers’ January 2005 comments on women in science focused the faculty’s attention on “issues of diversity and inclusiveness.”

“We must be conscious of our efforts to recruit and retain outstanding women and minorities,” Kirby wrote.

Kirby’s senior adviser on diversity, Dillon Professor of International Affairs Lisa L. Martin, will set up programs to help department heads to conduct “effective and inclusive” searches, he wrote.

The letter outlined Kirby’s priorities and took a retrospective look at his deanship. His four years in University Hall saw a building boom worth almost a billion dollars, the growth of the Faculty from 635 professors to 703, and the beginning of the College’s first full-scale curricular review since the 1970s.

The letter underlined Kirby’s efforts at revamping student life and undergraduate education. “The past four years have brought major change to nearly every aspect of College life,” Kirby wrote.

He described the goal of the continuing curricular review as bringing students in closer contact with professors, and urged that the still-undetermined successor to the Core Curriculum be grounded on student choice, rather than on specific required courses.

“If our new, foundational curriculum in the life, physical, and engineering sciences is to succeed, let it be because it is better conceived and better taught, not because any one part of it is unavoidable,” Kirby wrote.

The Faculty has yet to agree on the next system of general education, which is the centerpiece of the current review and will likely replace the Core. But the review has already led to Faculty approval of a semester’s delay in concentration choice and the introduction of secondary fields—both actions that Kirby called part of an effort to bring students and professors together.

“The most consistent—and most accurate—criticism of a Harvard education today is that student-faculty contact is much too limited,” Kirby wrote.

The ten-page-long section on the College also touched on an issue that sparked controversy at Tuesday’s meeting of the full Faculty, which saw three professors criticize the current system of student course evaluations administered by the Committee on Undergraduate Education (CUE). At the meeting, Philip J. Fisher, the Reid professor of English and American literature, said he “learned nothing” from the online evaluations he received last fall.

But in the letter, which is dated last Monday, Kirby wrote that the online method “gave students more time for considered responses, and the very high participation rate has convinced the College to move the CUE fully online.”

Kirby, who will take over as director of Harvard’s Fairbank Center for East Asian Research after he steps down June 30, quoted Confucius as one who “captures the ideal intersection of scholarship and academic leadership”:

“To learn, and at due times to practice what one has learned, is that not also a pleasure?”

—Staff writer Anton S. Troianovski can be reached at atroian@fas.harvard.edu.