He added that he felt it was less than honest to use funds that might have been earmarked for other projects to go across the river.
“That’s kind of bothersome because these were monies that were given to particular faculties for particular uses,” he said. “Many of the donors didn’t imagine [their gifts] would go to clean up pollution in Allston.”
Berman said it is not yet known how much the construction of the Allston campus will ultimately cost Harvard, as “the planning process is in early stages, and the cost will depend on decisions about program, what types of buildings, et cetera.”
But the cash flow from the various endowments will not be the sole source of support for the work in Allston—Berman said more money will come from income such as gifts, rents, parking fees and indirect cost reimbursement.
Also at the meeting, the financial officers told the council that FAS would have to continue to judiciously monitor its costs.
“Expenditures were going to have to be controlled and reined in because the money available from the endowment would be down,” council member Everett I. Mendelsohn said.
As far as what in particular would be affected, Mendelsohn said Berman and Hoffman did not go into specifics. However, he pointed to several areas that have recently had to tighten their belts and said the officials gave no sign that relief was in sight.
“Some things are more tightly controlled than others,” he said. “We know that the library’s planning to cut their expenditures. We know that faculty salaries grew at a very modest rate. We knew that department expenditures are being held either at no growth or very modest growth.”
And the soft hiring freeze on staff, implemented last winter will continue indefinitely, Berman and Hoffman told the council.
Kirby said yesterday one of the biggest challenges facing the Faculty will be finding uses for the Faculty’s restricted endowment funds—gifts earmarked for a particular purpose, such as establishing named professorial chairs in specific disciplines.
“The bulk of our discussion of finances dealt with the following issue: the Faculty is hardly poor, but an enormous part of the Faculty’s resources lie in restricted endowments,” Kirby wrote in an e-mail. “Therefore one of our largest challenges is to make the maximal use of all of our resources, not simply our unrestricted accounts.”
Some professors questioned the need for caution in spending.
“At the November Faculty meeting, Dean Kirby warned of spending cutbacks because of shortness of funds in FAS, and we have been told that FAS does not have the money to continue with the planned North Yard science building,” Professor of Physics Daniel S. Fisher wrote in an e-mail, referring to plans for a building in the east section of the North Yard that have been scrapped. “Yet in October, the Dean spoke of ‘wondrous opportunities’ in Allston and the President [has told the Boston Globe that] cost should not be a limiting factor. Larry Summers is an economist, yet he acts as if Allston dollars and Cambridge dollars were different currencies.”
And several professors grilled Summers at the November Faculty meeting about this year’s endowment payout increase. The 4 percent raise pales in comparison to the 37 percent payout of Fiscal Year 2002.
—Staff writer Laura L. Krug can be reached at krug@fas.harvard.edu.