“What scientists say to me is that they find that as they sit there working with these microscopes they turn to the person at the next microscope and say, ‘Look what I found!’ and that person weighs in with an opinion,” she says. “If they weren’t adjacent, that conversation, that spark of insight would never have happened.”

Co-development with other universities, private entities, or non-profits has emerged as a possible solution for lessening the financial burden of building a re-imagined Allston campus.

But uncertainty hangs over this effort as well.

Though co-development might overcome obstacles currently facing the Allston expansion, it is a risky proposition, as a large proportion of such efforts at other universities have failed (see story page 45).

And planners do not appear to be in a hurry to move forward, as the current master plan submitted to the city of Boston will be valid until 2012. Officials have been reluctant to offer a time frame for the planning process or when they think they might resume construction.

Until the University decides how to proceed in Allston, the departments slated to move into the Science Complex in July 2011—the Department of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology, Harvard Medical School’s Department of Systems Biology, and the Wyss Institute for bioengineering—have been left scrambling to find temporary solutions at the school level with little guidance from central administration.

‘ONE UNIVERSITY’

“Every tub on its own bottom”—that’s how the University’s decentralized Faculties have long operated.

Autonomy at the schools has served the University well, but has also resulted in bureaucratic obstacles that hinder efforts to promote cross-Faculty collaboration.

When the central administration needed more office space, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, its subsidiary, sold Mass. Hall. Two years later, in 2008, FAS realized it needed more space for dorms and so rented back part of the structure it once owned—a telling example of the administrative morass that often plagues the University.

To combat the deep-rooted bureaucratic barriers between schools, Faust has designated University-wide themes—human rights, global health, and library reform are a few examples—and established new institutes that serve as magnets, Leonard says, pulling professors together from across disciplines. These provide environments more conducive to faculty collaboration.

Instead of setting individual agendas, Faust has adopted a “bottom-up” governance style, allowing those below her on the administrative hierarchy to take more initiative on specific projects within the context of broader goals.

“Faculty in general don’t respond well to high authority leadership,” Leonard explains. “I think President Faust understands that.”

It’s all part of Faust’s “One University” mantra, says Law School professor John G. Palfrey, Jr. ’94, who taught a graduate seminar under FAS this fall, despite the politics and economics of cross-school teaching that historically hamper such efforts.

Palfrey says he hopes to expand his seminar on online research methods into a General Education course for undergraduates and bring together professors from potentially five other schools to teach.