Knowles agreed, writing that the land would "provide welcome breathing room for the University as a whole."

According to Rudenstine, the renovation would involve purchasing the easements on the land owned by railroads, cleaning up land that has been polluted by years of industrial usage, and preparing basic infrastructure for the land to be integrated with the rest of the University.

These changes would be funded by taking one-half of a percentage point off of the individual endowments of each faculty in the university.

Several faculty members, including Everett I. Mendelsohn, professor of the history of science, expressed concerns that this system would be a subsidy from FAS, which has a endowment large relative to its operation expenses, to schools such as the Business School, which is much less dependent on endowment revenue.

Aside from space concerns, Knowles' letter also cited faculty recruitment and increasing the size of the Freshman Seminar program as priorities.

Knowles said after the meeting that many of the changes he suggested in his letter regarding recruitment, including increasing both the number and the scope of concurrent position searches, were already underway. But he said the future prospects for increasing the size of the faculty would not be affected one way or the other by the selection of any particular Presidential candidate.