With the economic constraints and the ongoing global recession, Harvard University, along with a handful of other elite schools, is facing challenges regarding its constructions and programs. A majority of construction plans have been cancelled and resources are not as bountiful as they used to be.
The $1.2 billion science center that started construction in 2007 halted two years after due to financial conflicts. This has been angering the neighborhood ever since, as the construction site was left inoperative for the past three years. Cherlyn Lee, a resident nearby the campus said, “I haven’t seen any progress happen there and I think it’s only causing more chaos to this already complicated area.” Harvard announced it will resume work hopefully by 2014, but will reduce the size of the center to only a half of the originally planned size.
Harvard also has gotten rid of various scholarship programs. The most recent change was the grant that let third-year students attend the school without charge given the fact that he or she met community-service requirements and vowed to go into public services. The main issue rising from this abolishment is that the percentage of law students going into public services has been gradually dropping ever since.
Furthermore, the library, famous for being the oldest library system and one of the most prestigious libraries in the United States, is going digital due to the monetary limits. With the tremendous amount of books, limited funds on preserving those texts, and the $3.75 million expenses of the university to manage its journal subscriptions, Harvard cannot afford to maintain its tradition of collecting books. “The cost for storage and preserving books, not to mention the price of information, is increasingly becoming unmanageable,” said Mr. Garber, the provost of Harvard University, “Some of these changes would have come eventually as more and more information is accessed digitally, but this recession definitely accelerated those changes dramatically.”
