Project ADAPT is Making Improvements
To the editors:
Careful readers of "Faculty Blasts $112M Computer Systems" on Project ADAPT (News, March 21) should be skeptical about The Crimson's reporting.
No one promised us that the implementation of these systems would be easy, and it certainly hasn't been. One component of ADAPT, the travel reimbursement system, provides unacceptable performance, and a major redesign is underway. But most of the systems perform reasonably well, and we are learning to use their powerful features more effectively as time goes on.
It's certainly appropriate for The Crimson to report the comments of dissatisfied faculty and staff members. In particular, however, there were three bits of editorialization that were unwarranted.
One laughable front-page graph, for example, purports to compare Project ADAPT's budget to that of Harvard's faculties. A reader glancing at the graph might conclude that we are spending more each year on ADAPT than on the Law School. This is false. In truth, the graph showed total spending for the multi-year Project ADAPT in one bar, next to separate bars for the annual spending of each of the faculties.
The labelling of comments from my colleagues in other schools as "The Party Line" suggests that they do not feel free to express their own opinions, and that Harvard is run by a communist dictatorship. Is that what The Crimson believes?
The two-inch-tall centerfold headline, "A $112 Million Mess", would be excessive--even if confined to the editorial page.
Read more in Opinion
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