Some students choose to adopt the ivory tower approach to attending Harvard confining themselves to the University environs and taking no notice of the real world during their four years here. An encornous university like Harvard however cannot afford that isolation; instead is very aggressive in making its voice heard in both federal and state government.
Harvard's interest in government goings-on exists for two major reasons. Firstly, as a major research university its scientists and scholars rely extensively on government monies to support their work. Secondly a large portion of the discussed legislation both on Capitol Hill and the State House often can have a direct hearing on atleast one of Harvard's 10 schools. Harvard employs three full-time people to take care of its interests in Washington. D C--the most of any university--and one to minor state affairs.
Faculty along with staffers from the Office of Sponsored Research seek our grants from different federal agencies like the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanies. The Reagan Administration's first budget in 1981 made severe cuts across the board in research funding Recently however, science has regained prominence and money from a government which is now worrying about our technological inferiority both economically and military's. The administration asked for funding increases up to 15 percent for science research in the upcoming fiscal year and proposed separate percent for science education and futuristic defense projects. Funding, however, for the social sciences and the humanities, has continued to fall.
One specific bill that Harvard focused on recently was one aimed at limiting the flow of illegal aliens from Mexico and the Carnbean. The measure as originally proposed would have also limited the number of foreign students and scholars from other countries that coult come to-Harvard Secing that those parts of the bill could have a detrimental effect on the University, governmental relations officials worked hard with other schools putting pressure on Congressmen to delete the harmful sectors of the bill. When it pussed the Senaine in June, most of those parts had indeed been excised.
Harvard, in the past couple of years has also begun to keep an eye on state government University officials have worked with state government leaders, many of whom served as faculty in Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. But a couple of box local ressues have given them troubles such as anima' resting at the Medical School, and the toxic that other researchers produce in then work.
Tenure
One Harvard professor has computed the selection of tenured professors in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences to the canonization of a saint. He is not too far off. The search for and appointment of scholars to Harvard's chairs and other permanent position is one of the most exacting negating and in the view of some critics, impractical in all of academia.
On the face of it, things are not that complicated. The thrust of the tenure system administrators have said, is to ensure the widest possible effort to recruit the very best in a given field. To this end, an elaborate system of checks and balances in place since the 1930s, has been created regard against "insidership" and to make sure candidates are judged strictly on their merits as scholars and teachers, not their political skills. (Some professors maintain, however, that the tenure process in certain departments have mailed the budget process on Capitol Hill).
Tenured professional searches at Harvard are authorized by the dean of the Faculty. Henry Rosovsky, after consultations with the department in question and the budget office. Senior positions in most of Harvard's 40-odd departments open up every couple of years depending on the complicated calculations of the so-called Graustein rule, a mathematical formula that determines the number of annual appointments a department most make to remain at its current sure, factoring in the average stay of a tenured professor at Harvard Adherence to the rule is not rigors new fields in certain deciplines develop that merit an extra appointment, and departments often want to make appointments ahead of schedule when they