Their job didn't get any easier this year. In a major victory for Harvard, which has stubbornly opposed the union, the National Labor Relations Board overturned an earlier ruling which separated Med workers from the rest of the University.
The decision backed Harvard's position that all clerical and technical workers should be considered a single bargaining unit. This now means that, in order to win recognition, the union has to win support from workers throughout the University--a strikingly more difficult task, but one which union officials vowed they would pursue.
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Since 1980, Harvard's Graduate School of Design has run a deficit. Students have charged that the school suffers from a lack of direction. Outside professors have said the school, once the premiere architecture school in the country, has slipped in prominence.
The school has begun to take notice.
In the fall, President Bok proposed creating three joint professorships between the Design School and the Kennedy School of Government in housing, transportation, and urban development. And in the spring, school officials began discussing a major expansion of its academic scope and ways to alleviate its financial problems.
Administrators said that specialized advanced degree and post-professional programs are needed to expand the curriculum and being in new sources of funding for the school.
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Littauer Professor of Political Economy Thomas C. Schelling has made his academic reputation for his path-breaking work in games theory. He was one of the early strategists of the nuclear age, and he has studied the effect of arms sales abroad.
But now Schelling is training his analytic guns on an entirely different problem--getting people to quit smoking. With the help of a $658,000 grant from the Carnegie Foundation, Schelling this spring founded a new interdisciplinary center at the Kennedy School of Government to study cigarette smoking and to come up with policy suggestions to help smokers quit.
Schelling already chaired a smoking behavior study group formed of scholars from the K-School, Med School, and School of Public Health. He also won a $216,000 research grant in January from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation.