The Community Health leads in the Houses and dorms have provided essential support as residential communities have adopted the required public health protocols that are so essential to limiting exposure to and the spread of the virus. As all those who live and work in our residential buildings can attest, these changes have been hard.
Our residential experience is optimized to bring people together into a supportive, face-to-face community. It is a testament to the dedication, care, and resourcefulness of our residential staff and House faculty leaders that the sense of community has continued so successfully under these new conditions.
And the positivity our students bring is an invaluable source of energy and motivation. I am profoundly grateful to all those who are working so hard toward a successful fall for our students in residence. I would also like to recognize the ongoing work of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, in partnership with departments and programs across the University, to support graduate students.
The range of circumstances our graduate students face is broad. Students working with faculty who have restarted their campus-based activities may be advancing well in their research, while others, facing disruptions to travel plans and lacking access to much-needed resources, are not.
The few students living on campus may be confronting feelings of isolation, while those living off campus may struggle to find quiet spaces in which to work or are juggling academics and family responsibilities. Regardless of their particular circumstances, we have been able to support graduate students across all programs by increasing access to resources and support.
These include cohort building activities and virtual programming, enhanced advising, writing and fellowship workshops, expanded access to library materials and more.
Finances are an important part of the context of our planning. Of course, there are still many unknowns in the FAS financial picture, whether in calculating the ultimate cost of our pandemic response, or the impact on tuition, sponsored research and our other traditional sources of revenue. In November, the FAS Annual Report will provide a comprehensive view of our fiscal position, looking back on the results of last year and outlining how we are approaching the year ahead.
Over the last few weeks, I know many of us have been confronting the news that a beloved and trusted colleague is retiring after many years of service to Harvard.
Nearly members of the FAS staff community elected to participate in the Voluntary Early Retirement Incentive Program, and together they have invested 4, years in supporting our mission.
These are long-serving leaders with tremendous institutional knowledge and experience, and their loss will be felt keenly by many. With this painful loss, we will be afforded an opportunity to look with fresh eyes at how we structure the work of our units and programs, in some cases for the first time in many years, enabling alignment with current academic needs and available resources. The Offices of the Academic Divisions and FAS Human Resources have resources to support organizational planning and, where replacements are deemed necessary, strong search practices so that our staff population reflects the diversity of talent that exists.
Seven months into the pandemic and I have not reconciled myself entirely to the new normal. I still miss the serendipitous encounters with colleagues in the Yard, lunch with my first-year advisees, a cup of tea with a job candidate at the end of their campus visit. Read More. The Straus Center for Conservation and Technical Studies is a world leader in fine arts conservation, research, and training.
In , the venerable Harry Elkins Widener Library turned years old. Widener is the centerpiece of the Harvard library system, and also the largest university repository of books and manuscripts in the world. Researchers from the Harvard John A.
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