Budget Plans Proceed Slowly

Though Faculty of Arts and Sciences Dean Michael D. Smith has stressed the significance of the six FAS working groups in closing the school’s projected $110 million annual deficit, the committees have made mixed progress in their task of drafting the highly anticipated budgetary proposals aimed at closing that gap.

The committees were tasked in the spring with generating budgetary recommendations, and their progress to date runs the gamut from the social sciences working group, which has drafted two full-length proposals, to the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences working group, whose members seems unclear or even unaware of their particular budgetary charge.

FAS spokesman Jeff A. Neal wrote in an e-mailed statement that the groups have no set deadline for the recommendations, though he expects that the process will continue into next semester “if necessary.” In contrast, a timeline posted on the FAS planning Web site in June designated the end of October as the deadline for working groups to draft recommendations for FAS’ top academic deans.

According to FAS Divisional Dean of Social Sciences Stephen M. Kosslyn, Smith has said that all six working groups’ recommendations are due to him by Thanksgiving.

At an open forum two weeks ago, Smith said he had seen the early recommendations of some of the working groups and that he will eventually compile a summary of the groups’ recommendations.

“The work that the working groups are undertaking right now remains critical,” he said. “I can’t see a way for us to just make administrative actions to get there...We do need your ideas. We do need your participation. We do need the recommendations that will come out of the working groups.”

In recent weeks, most members referred inquiries regarding the committees to Neal or the chairs of their groups. But even FAS Divisional Dean of Science Jeremy Bloxham, who chairs the sciences working group, declined to comment last week and said Smith had informed him that he would like the group to progress further in its work before speaking with The Crimson. FAS Divisional Dean of Arts and Humanities Diana Sorensen—who chairs the humanities working group—could not be reached for comment.

“There are some processes we have to go through,” Smith said. “We’re not going to be publicly debating these sorts of things—that doesn’t make sense at all.”

SOCIAL SCIENCES MOVE AHEAD

The social sciences working group has drafted two “very temporary, transitional” proposals—concerning the division and FAS, respectively—and is now soliciting feedback from faculty, staff, and students in the division, said Kosslyn. The committee met several times over the summer and “could have been done at the end of the summer if the Faculty and students had been around” to give feedback, he said.

The committee had been primarily charged with cost-cutting to pare down the division’s budget—not including sponsored research and operations and maintenance—by roughly one-third. But the group’s goal soon changed from cutting back to balancing the budget by generating new revenue and “stretching what we have further,” according to Kosslyn.

The working group started with “divergent thinking,” in which the committee strove to generate as many ideas as possible. At its first fall meeting in early September, the committee moved into a phase of “convergent thinking,” during which it scrapped ideas deemed unfeasible. “The ground rules for the first phase was you could think of everything. Nothing is sacrosanct because you could have ideas that spin off of those,” Kosslyn said. “Now we’re beyond that.”

After gathering feedback, the working group will decide by Oct. 7 which ideas to keep, discard, refine, or replace and will submit their final recommendations to Smith by mid-October.

ALL QUIET ON THE COLLEGE FRONT

After the two College working groups gathered for a joint introductory meeting in May, several members said they did not receive any communication from top administrators until September. Dean of the College Evelynn M. Hammonds said she met with the staff heads of the College groups over the summer but did not organize any official meetings because most students were not on campus.

But Athena L.M. Lao ’12, a member of the undergraduate education working group, said in an interview two weeks ago that the administrative silence regarding the status of the committee’s work made her worry that perhaps student involvement had been discarded altogether.

“I’m just very confused about what’s going on and what point we are at in terms of deciding things,” Lao said. “I just want to hear something from them.”

Today, the undergraduate education working group—one of the two College committees—will meet for the first time as a separate entity to begin tackling the budget problem.

A member of a College working group—who requested to not be named in order to preserve relations with the University—said that a problem the committees must confront is the lack of detailed budgetary information necessary for the thoughtful drafting of recommendations.

“You will want to know how much things cost if you’re going to talk about them in any context,” said the individual, adding that the College committees have received “nothing, no number, no benchmarks.”

NOW YOU ‘SEAS’ US, NOW YOU DON’T

According to the planning Web site, a preexisting governance committee within SEAS is meant to double as that school’s working group, but some members of the “C-9” said they did not know about this new responsibility.

“Frankly, I wasn’t aware of this as a specific charge of this existing committee,” said engineering professor and C-9 member Robert D. Howe, who is listed as a SEAS working group member online.

Former interim SEAS Dean Frans A. Spaepen, who also serves on the C-9, said that budget-cut discussions “have not been part of the C-9 business so far.” But Howe said it is “conceivable” that the C-9’s intermittent budget discussions at meetings could be part of the working group’s agenda.

—Staff writer Bonnie J. Kavoussi can be reached at kavoussi@fas.harvard.edu.

—Staff writer Esther I. Yi can be reached at estheryi@fas.harvard.edu.