At the budget review meeting, School of Public Health officials discussed the school’s financial planning process, which includes cost-cutting measures and a streamlined focus on several programs, Ware says.
Harvard Business School Chief Financial Officer Donella M. Rapier says the school’s capital plans were one among many topics discussed at their budget review meeting, which also addressed academic programs and fundraising plans.
Though the economic downturn has been particularly hard on HBS, she says the school is in “pretty good shape.”
“If there is a deficit, it will be small,” she says, “but only through tremendous efforts of a lot of people.”
And though the budget reviews are a return to past practices of the University, participants have they have a different style.
The meetings in the early 1990s were more focused on the capital campaign’s goals. And, according to Dean of the Faculty Jeremy R. Knowles, they were also much longer.
“I felt as if I’d given one of those Kremlin seven-hour speeches on the next five-year plan,” Knowles writes in an e-mail about the earlier review.
—David H. Gellis and Elisabeth S. Theodore contributed to the reporting of this story.
—Staff writer Catherine E. Shoichet can be reached at shoichet@fas.harvard.edu.