Message from the Dean: Beyond the Campaign

Dean Michelle A. Williams
Dean Michelle A. Williams

The five-year capital campaign for the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health proved a stunning success: $933 million raised, more than double our initial goal of $450 million. For their generosity, I am grateful beyond measure to some 13,000 donors who understood the profound and lasting benefits of such gifts—farsighted investments in people, ideas, and infrastructure. I also owe a debt of gratitude to our two inspiring campaign co-chairs, Jonathan S. Lavine and Jeannie Bachelor Lavine. And I thank alumnus Gerald Chan, SM ’75, SD ’79, and his brother, Ronnie Chan, whose $350 million naming gift, through the family’s Morningside Foundation, was transformational in every sense of the word.

But now that the campaign is over, what’s next?

I believe that the next phase should be devoted to filling in the gaps that remain in the School’s public health mission. In particular, we need to extend financial aid for deserving students, who often put everything on the line for an opportunity to study here and apply their insights toward improving health and relieving suffering around the globe.

I would also like to draw on the School’s flexible discretionary fund for innovative research, which will apply cutting-edge science to the world’s most challenging public health problems, from climate change to antimicrobial resistance to health inequities. And I hope that in the not-too-distant future, we will break ground for a campus worthy of the scholarship and vital civic engagement of the School’s faculty, students, and fellows.

In planning for the years ahead, I am acutely aware of competing scales of time. Rigorous scientific research takes decades or more— which is why the long-term investments from our campaign will generate benefits for years to come. At the same time, there’s not a moment to lose. Even as the media quickly respond to acute calamities, such as outbreaks of Ebola or Zika, slow-moving disasters are brewing, usually beyond the radar of daily news reports—until the problem explodes into the public consciousness, as we have seen with the Flint, Michigan, water crisis, or the opioid epidemic, or the many catastrophic signs of a shifting climate.

That’s where public health comes in. We are pros at disaster response. But in our quest for data and our desire to connect the dots, we are also attuned to the quiet signals of disasters to come. We know that once a problem becomes complicated, chronic, and complex, the solutions are far more difficult and more costly.

Our extraordinary capital campaign is behind us. With the help of our donors, extraordinary solutions to the most urgent public health problems are on the horizon.

Michelle A. Williams

 

 

Michelle A. Williams, ScD ’91
Dean of the Faculty, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health Angelopoulos Professor in Public Health and International Development,
Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and
Harvard Kennedy School

Photo: Ben Gebo