IEEE Spectrum April, 2008 - 44

nanoscience,
megabuilding:
designed to foster
collaboration
in nanoscale
research, the new
12 000-squaremeter Laboratory
for integrated
science and
engineering
connects eight
buildings.

An instant of silence ensued,
but no objections were raised; the
motion passed by acclamation. The
proposal would now go to the university's top governing body, the
Harvard Corporation, to be ratified,
and then Harvard would finally
have the beginnings of what it had
notably lacked for its entire 372-year
history: a world-class engineering
school on a par with the university's other famed dominions, such
as business, law, and medicine.
As the meeting moved on to other
business matters, Narayanamurti
grinned from ear to ear.

itting in his corner office
in Pierce Hall last fall,
Narayanamurti-known
to nearly everyone as "Venky"-
recounted that day and the
chain of events leading up to it.
Engineering at Harvard, he noted,
has long been a modest enterprise
in comparison with the universi-

NA * iEEE SpEctrum * April 2008

ty's world-famous humanities and
social-sciences departments and
professional schools. After World
War II, when most elite U.S. universities nurtured their engineering
schools into full-fledged enterprises,
Harvard had lumped its engineering and applied-sciences faculty
into one division. The division status didn't command much respect
inside or outside Harvard, and even
the engineering faculty joked that
they spent more time explaining
what the term division meant than
what they did there.
The transition to school-the
first new school at Harvard in
70 years-is designed to fill a glaring gap in Harvard's report card,
Narayanamurti says. "Harvard
will always get a grade of incomplete until it has a preeminent engineering school."
The expansion plan is certainly
ambitious. Armed with the Harvard
name and a US $999 million endow-

ment, the engineering school plans
to increase its faculty from 70 fulltime professors to 100, double
its graduate student body to 600,
enhance undergraduate courses
for nonengineering students, and
establish more collaborations with
other Harvard departments and
with industry.
In pushing for a first-rate engineering presence at Harvard,
Narayanamurti had the backing of some well-placed academics. Thomas E. Everhart, a former
president of Caltech and a Harvard
graduate who has presided over
Harvard's board of overseers-a
body that advises the university on a
wide range of issues-says the move
was long overdue. "With engineering and applied sciences becoming
much more important in academia
and in the economy as a whole,
Harvard wasn't doing its share," he
says. Since Narayanamurti became
a dean at Harvard nearly 10 years
ago, Everhart says, the technologyoriented fields are finally getting
much more recognition.
Although Narayanamurti says
his plan met with virtually no resistance on campus, people did raise
lots of questions, the most obvious
being: How would Harvard make
a mark in engineering with the
mighty Massachusetts Institute of
Technology just down the street?
And why would Harvard, essentially the world's greatest liberal
arts college, want to do engineering anyway?
In countering those and other
questions, the dean pointed out
that engineering is essential to the
kinds of interdisciplinary collaborations that drive today's cuttingedge research-collaborations that
advance both basic and applied
fields. He also argued that a modern liberal arts education needs to
encompass technology too.
And as for "that small school
down the road," as Narayanamurti
jokingly refers to MIT, Harvard
isn't interested in direct competition. Rather than cover the whole
engineering universe, it plans to
focus strategically on a few areas-
nanotechnology, bioengineering,
energy and the environment, computers and society-that, he says,
"can leverage Harvard's strengths."
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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Spectrum April, 2008