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<p>Multiple things wrong with this. First of all, you have a fundamental misunderstanding about how an endowment works - it’s not a bank account, as most of its funds are tied to a specific purpose. Harvard cannot legally spend that money on anything but its donor-specified purpose. The unrestricted portion of its endowment - $5-6 billion - is also largely tied up supporting stuff that doesn’t have a restricted fund to support it. Thus, Harvard can’t just move the money to a new column, in this case “engineering.”</p>
<p>Second, Harvard does want to become a top engineering school - desperately. It’s been left in the dust by Stanford, which manages to be a top liberal arts school with a top engineering school. It’s left in the dust by its cross-town rival MIT. Heck, it’s left in the dust by tiny Princeton. And even its long-time rival Yale is well on its way to becoming a top engineering school. Suffice to say, Harvard strives to be the best in whatever it chooses to do. I won’t say that Harvard wants to be the best in everything - for example, agricultural studies aren’t something that Harvard cares about - but everything that Harvard does choose to pursue, it wants to be the best. Indeed, that’s true for every school out there. If Harvard weren’t serious about engineering, it wouldn’t have created an entire school for it.</p>
<p>Finally, even if its endowment were useful here, it couldn’t just “make” a top engineering school. That’s because engineering is fundamentally different from, say, anthropology or comparative literature. Unlike those disciplines, engineering is facilities-intensive, and such facilities are also very expensivep. What’s more, the going rate for top profs in engineering is much higher, because they could all have a very lucrative career in industry, unlike those in the humanities and social sciences. And top talent in engineering (NAE-level talent) is scarcer, so there’s truly a bidding war among the top schools for the top engineering profs. Add on top of that all the costs of staff, support for grad students, etc. and you can see why it’s not so easy to just make a top engineering school pop out of thin air.</p>
<p>If Harvard didn’t care about its relative place in engineering, it wouldn’t be about to launch a massive capital campaign largely dedicated to bolstering it. That science complex in Allston? Funny how similar in scope it is to Stanford’s soon-to-be-completed Science & Engineering Quad. ;)</p>
<p>P.S. let’s not pretend that Harvard’s lack of individual engineering departments and subsequent offering of general engineering degrees is because it’s “taking the high road” on engineering education and emphasizing a liberal arts approach. It’s because Harvard doesn’t have the money to make these departments out of scratch. By the way its competitors also emphasize a liberal arts education even in engineering.</p>