"Where are the greatest needs?"

"Where is the University's comparativeadvantage [in relation to other institutions]?"

The pattern of review meetings and the basicquestions are the same in each school, but theprocess moves more quickly in some places than inothers.

"One key issue in this is how long have thedifferent deans been in place," says Fineberg.

At the Graduate School of Education, where anew dean will take office July 1, the planning isvery tentative.

On the other hand, the Law School, which is inthe midst of its own capital campaign, and theMedical School, which recently concluded a funddrive, are more secure in their plans. TheBusiness School, too, is "booming along," saysFineberg.

Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences JeremyR. Knowles asked for a delay in presenting hisfaculty's academic plan because of the "giganticamount of work." When Knowles finally presentedthe plan in May, it took eight and a half hours.

The Faculty of Arts and Sciences, the largestfaculty at Harvard, plans to improve theundergraduate experience by increasing studentinteraction with faculty members and relying lesson graduate students as teaching fellows.

"We must not have graduate students teaching somuch," Knowles says, explaining that graduatestudents can get their degrees quicker if theyteach less.

Knowles also says he hopes to increase the sizeof the faculty. He said the numbers of professorsstayed constant during the past 20 year, while thenumbers of students increased 10 percent.

Most of Harvard's faculties already had someplans in place before Rudenstine kicked off theUniversity-wide effort.

The School of Public Health, for example,already had a strategic planning subcommittee inplace. Fineberg says the academic priorities hetalks about now are the same ones he talked aboutlast year.

Confronting major diseases like AIDS, cancerand heart disease and studying health care,environmental health, behavior, nutrition andlifestyle remain on the school's agenda. A finalpriority for the school, where one third ofstudents are from outside the U.S., is worldhealth--studying the mix of infection,overpopulation, malnutrition and poverty thataffects health in the developing world.

The Kennedy School, on the other hand, had morework to do before presenting its academic plan. Ithad a long range strategy committee last year, butthings were up in the air after the surpriseresignation of former Dean Robert D. Putnam.

This year, the new dean, Carnesale, held twofaculty meetings to discuss where the schoolshould be going. He also talked to faculty membersindividually, and considered an Overseers visitingcommittee report.