Transcript

Well, I remember one meeting, of the three or four I ever had with the Harvard Corporation. The subject was how the Business School could share more generously its resources. And I can't remember what stratagem they had in that particular discussion, but in any case, the bottom line was it was a way to shift some funds towards other parts of Harvard.

Which I have no problem with. As a matter of fact, I think that all of these schools go through phases of the moon where they're favored by where society is, and we are committed to having the kind of schools we have. So that wasn't an issue. But I knew how hard people were working here to recover from the period when Baker started when they were kind of broke, and even when Larry had to work very hard, in the '70s, to get the School in a better financial condition, and able to pay people more, in a more reasonable way, which was at the top of his short list of things he was trying to get done.

So I think for one of those meetings, I went over and I had some photographs from Widener Library of University catalogs. And, you know, the first hundred years, let's say, of—I don't think they had catalogs going back to the 1630s, but anyway, the first hundred years—there was a section, and we put a book or something marking where it ended. And so a hundred years took two feet. And then the next hundred years took ten feet. And the most recent year took forty feet.

And I had these three photographs, and I passed them out to the Corporation, and I said, "I think what I want to talk about, and what this all makes me think about is, you know, if you think of a company, a drug company or something, that at the turn of the last century was mixing molasses, and beer, and bees' wings and selling it for arthritis—or all the things they did before we knew how to diagnose different conditions, and before we had anything like antibiotics, or even sulfa drugs to deal with it—if that drug company still had in its catalog, like we do, almost everything we ever did, often because we've got endowments that create a chair in something or other studies that a long time ago some students were interested in, but we have no process here. And I think our School has done rather a better job than any other part of the university in attending to that.

"And yes, it's a professional school, so that's a different proposition than, say, the core of the Arts and Sciences, where the strategy is, more or less, to do everything. But even so: I think just looking at these pictures, it makes me think that probably somebody, if they took a look at this, would see things that could be trimmed, or consolidated. And the demands then on us and other people who seem to have some money at the moment wouldn't be so great."