Forty new professorships are planned, and perhaps a large chunk will go to fund engineering sciences and computer science faculty, not traditional areas of strength at Harvard.

Social Life

The funds will have an equally dramatic effect on student social life. First-year students will not longer eat in the Freshman Union.

Instead, they will dine in the brand-new Loker Commons in Memorial Hall, which will also include Harvard's first all-campus student center.

"A student center would give the school something it lacks," says Sarah J. Reber '96. "If they actually build one, students will have somewhere central besides the Greenhouse and Science Center to go."

In Harvard's traditionally decentralized, fractionalized social life, the center could be a new force for campus-wide unity and interclass contact. But many students doubt its effect will be so dramatic, especially with a location so far from the houses.

"A campus center would be a major improvement," says Benjamin D. Wildasin '97. "Other schools have nice ones, but I think given the area they're using, the chance of Harvard's being a real center is pretty slim."

Physical, Intellectual Change

The capital campaign will also finance a physical transformation of the campus. While first-year dorms are getting a face lift, the construction projects likely to have the greatest effect are those which will shape the intellectual life of the faculty.

A proposed Humanities Quad will bring together Harvard's fractured faculty, uniting departments from Afro-American Studies (presently found above the CVS pharmacy on Mass Ave) to English (which is itself divided between two inconvenient buildings clustered around Prescott Street).

The move is intended to bring together the humanities disciplines and encourage intellectual work, says English department chair Leo Damrosch.

While Damrosch says the project probably won't have so dramatic an intellectual effect as administrators had hoped for in his department, he does applaud plans to bring the English department together.

"We do need to be under one roof," he says.

And the bursting-at-the-seams government and economics departments, two of Harvard's largest concentrations, will finally get to spread out. A new social sciences center is planned, which will bring together many of disciplines in one physical location.

"[Government faculty] are scattered now in three different locations, and space is tight in each one of them," says Susan J. Pharr, chair of the government department.