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Nanoscience, Megabuilding: Designed to foster collaboration in nanoscale research, the new 12000-square-meter Laboratory for Integrated Science and Engineering connects eight buildings.

Although Narayanamurti says his plan met with virtually no resistance on campus, people did raise lots of questions, the most obvious being: How would Harvard make a mark in engineering with the mighty Massachusetts Institute of Technology just down the street? And why would Harvard, essentially the world's greatest liberal arts college, want to do engineering anyway?

In countering those and other questions, the dean pointed out that engineering is essential to the kinds of interdisciplinary collaborations that drive today's cutting-edge research—collaborations that advance both basic and applied fields. He also argued that a modern liberal arts education needs to encompass technology too.

And as for “that small school down the road,” as Narayanamurti jokingly refers to MIT, Harvard isn't interested in direct competition. Rather than cover the whole engineering universe, it plans to focus strategically on a few areas—nanotechnology, bioengineering, energy and the environment, computers and society—that, he says, “can leverage Harvard's strengths.”

At least one MIT luminary backs the Harvard plan. In a recent interview, Charles Vest, a former president of MIT and now president of the National Academy of Engineering, in Washington, D.C., noted that the timing couldn't be better, as the United States is under increasing pressure to train more engineers in the face of competition from Europe and China. “It's a great symbol to the country that a university that's been built largely around the liberal arts tradition is now saying, ‘Look, technology is a big part of the world today, and it needs to be a part of us,' ” Vest says.

If Harvard now appears ready to embrace engineering, it wasn't always so, says Frederick Abernathy, a professor of mechanical engineering and the engineering school's unofficial historian. Over the past century and a half, he says, engineering came close to disappearing from campus on several occasions.

The story begins in 1847, when Harvard started offering a formal technical curriculum under the auspices of the Lawrence Scientific School, named after Abbott Lawrence, a Massachusetts industrialist. The school had a promising start, but it would soon lose its edge to an upstart. In 1861, a geologist named William Barton Rogers, after failing to secure a faculty appointment at Harvard, founded another technical school: MIT.

The Lawrence school soon faced opposition from within Harvard Yard as well. Charles W. Eliot, perhaps Harvard's most influential president, felt that the applied sciences, with “a practical end constantly in view,” was a poor fit with the university's liberal arts culture. During his tenure, Eliot— who, ironically, had taught analytic chemistry at MIT before becoming Harvard's president in 1869—did his best to eliminate engineering at Harvard or have it transferred to MIT.

In 1906, he succeeded in dismantling the Lawrence school, whose fragments were absorbed by other parts of Harvard. But his victory was short-lived, thanks to another Massachusetts industrialist, Gordon McKay, who made his fortune developing machinery for the shoe industry. Back in 1891, McKay had designated the Lawrence school as the chief beneficiary of his vast estate. He died in 1903, and six years later Harvard received the first $1 million of his bequest, to be used toward technical education and research.

Finally, in 1918, Harvard—after another failed attempt to combine its engineering efforts with MIT—decided to use the McKay money to reestablish its school of engineering. The school would not get hold of the entire bequest until 1949, as McKay's will provided lifetime payments to one of his two ex-wives, two sons, and several mistresses.

The McKay fortune went on to support 42 professorships, in effect keeping engineering alive at Harvard. But despite its accomplishments [see time line, “Yes, Harvard Has Engineering”], the overall engineering enterprise never attained world-class status. It never became, well, an MIT.

Things began to change in the mid-1990s, when Harvard president Neil Rudenstine and dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences Jeremy Knowles decided that basic scientific research at Harvard needed to be strengthened by more fully embracing engineering and technology. Knowles began consulting experts around the country on how to revitalize the engineering program, including what to look for in a new engineering dean. One of those experts was Narayanamurti.

One weekend in January 1998, Knowles flew to California to meet Narayanamurti, who was then dean of engineering at the University of California, Santa Barbara. “By the end of that Saturday morning,” Knowles says, “I realized that I did not just want Venky's advice; I wanted Venky himself!”

Narayanamurti's career began in 1968, when, after receiving a Ph.D. in physics from Cornell University, he joined Bell Laboratories, where he would stay for 19 years. His Harvard office is festooned with memorabilia from the labs, where some of his underlings took to calling him Lord Venky because of his exacting style of management and his eye for spotting promising research.

In 1987, Narayanamurti left Bell Labs and became vice president of research and exploratory technology at Sandia National Laboratories, in Albuquerque. Five years later, he moved on to Santa Barbara. There he expanded the faculty, fostered interdisciplinary programs, and established ties to the local high-tech business community. But the challenge of revamping Harvard engineering appealed to Narayanamurti, and in mid-1998 he moved to Cambridge.

Over the next several years, he hired a dozen new faculty members—he stole at least three from MIT—to strengthen such areas as artificial intelligence, materials science, and biomechanics. The academic stars he recruited include Lene Vestergaard Hau, an applied physicist who devised experiments to slow and stop light pulses and then reconstitute them, and Federico Capasso, a former Bell Labs researcher and coinventor of the quantum cascade laser.