Transcript

The campus is one of the jewels that we have here at the Harvard Business School.

I think when students are considering which school to come to, and they're considering the other top business schools, some of which are housed in one or two buildings, and we have thirty buildings here at the School—well, we clearly don't think that is, first and foremost, the reason why students should come here. It is all the reasons that we know: the excellent faculty, the tremendous students, the engaged learning process, you know, all of these types of things.

But we do think the campus is a factor, and we don't apologize for making investments in a residential campus. We think that the learning that takes place here isn't something that just takes place in the eighty-minute sessions in the MBA classroom. That learning is a 24-hour experience. And living, you know, with your peers and colleagues, having informal discussions, having meals with them—are all important. Seeing how a a well-run organization can prioritize the way its physical surroundings reinforce what the mission is is important.

Much of higher education has struggled with a deferred maintenance problem for some time. And I think going back to Dean McArthur, and maybe even some of his predecessors, making sure that we didn't build up a problem like that here has been extremely important to us at the School. So we have, I think every maybe 8 to 10 years, engaged in a campus planning process to think very broadly and strategically about: what are the goals of the school over the next five to ten years, in terms of our needs with faculty, and our needs with students? What types of programs will we be offering? And have really thought about, well, we have thirty buildings today. What buildings do we need? Do we need some new buildings? But equally important, you know, which buildings do we have today that are terrific, but perhaps haven't been renovated in fifty or sixty years? And don't have air conditioning, and are inefficient, in terms of how to maintain them, and don't have the types of facilities and function that we really need to be as well-run as we could today?

We have been investing in dorm renovations recently. We've invested in the library. And I think it makes a big difference to the School. Some of these things, as I mentioned, actually do have paybacks as well. These buildings that were built between the '20s or '30s were pretty expensive, from a utilities perspective. They might not have been well-insulated, and other things like that. They might have not managed the use of water, or other things.

So to the extent that we think about having a green campus—which is quite important to Harvard University as a whole—there are actually some self-reinforcing types of investments that we can and have been making here that we think are important. So the campus is, as I said, a jewel. And one that we do take some potshots for. The landscaping is one in particular that I think, you know, people comment that we're either shampooing the squirrels, or that we're catching the leaves before they hit the ground in the fall. And we don't think that those are accurate depictions of what we're actually doing here!

Getting back to an earlier point about discipline, and the budgeting process, and thinking about what your priorities are: On the one hand, we don't want to neglect the campus, but we really don't think we need to be putting more into it than we have to. The people that manage the budget for the grounds and facilities here are very creative, and are actually very tight, in terms of what their budget is. So the landscaping budget was actually held pretty much flat for at least five years, over a recent period. And we basically told those managers, "Figure it out. We still want the campus to look good, but figure out how to do your pruning in a different way, or your planting, or other things like that."

And I think they have been creative, and found ways to allow the campus to continue to look very good, while not putting a lot more money into that, and instead allowing the incremental investments to go into some of the highest priorities of the School: the new programs, the research, the student fellowships. Those types of things.