Faculty of Arts and Sciences Dean Michael D. Smith may offer sunny news in his report on the school’s finances over the past year.

William “Ned” Friedman, an evolutionary biologist from the University of Colorado, will take charge of the Harvard-administered Arnold Arboretum at the end of the semester as the University continues efforts to consolidate its disparate research programs.

Harvard boasts the highest number of top-performing doctoral programs, according to a National Research Council report released yesterday.

After leading the University’s largest school through a trying process of closing a $220 million deficit since 2008, Faculty of Arts and Sciences Dean Michael D. Smith said yesterday that he plans to focus on academic issues going forward.

The University has advised its schools to plan for a 4 percent rise in the value of the endowment payout for the next fiscal year, marking the first yearly increase since the beginning of the financial crisis in 2008.

Following the exposure of psychology professor Marc D. Hauser’s multiple instances of academic misconduct, the scientific community has quietly set out to review the relevant literature that may have been affected by the researchers’ faulty work.

A week has passed since the University announced a surge in its endowment, but the Faculty of Arts and Sciences has not asserted plans for responding to Harvard’s new-found wealth after two years of rigorous cost-cutting.

The coming academic year will pose the greatest budgetary challenges the Faculty of Arts and Sciences has faced since the Great Recession struck in 2008, as FAS Dean Michael D. Smith has predicted over the past few months.

Horace Gray Lunt ’41, a revered linguist and philologist who served in the Slavic languages and literatures department for 40 years, died Aug. 11. He was 91.

Female faculty members in the sciences are nearly half as likely as their male counterparts to receive paid advisory positions in the private sector, according to a Harvard Business School study drafted this summer.