According to silver-tongued Dean of the Faculty Jeremy R. Knowles, his University Hall officemate Harry R. Lewis '68 is now nearly one year into his second "quinquennium" as dean of the College.

The first year of Lewis's second Five-Year Plan, while never rivaling the beginning of his tenure in turmoil, has presented significant challenges of its own.

Having once taken on the volatile issues of House randomization and Phillips Brooks House Association (PBHA) reorganization, Lewis now muses about issues of inadequate academic advising, student space and athletic facilities.

These are problems that require more than administrative ingenuity. While Lewis had carte blanche to revamp PBHA and the House system and needed only to weather student opinion, seemingly immovable obstacles stood in his way this past year--insufficient funds, an intransigent Faculty and the physical limits of Harvard itself.

And Lewis says initiatives to renovate the sub-par Malkin Athletic Center (MAC) and to improve an advising system consistently given low marks by students have not had moved along as quickly as Lewis had hoped.

MAC Attack

The issue of space, said Knowles in his 2001 report to the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS), is not just the biggest issue facing the College, but is also "unquestionably" the largest problem in FAS itself.

But for the College, the physical restrictions of Harvard and of the city of Cambridge are unyielding. One hundred new acres in Allston mean little to undergraduates who still dream, against all odds, of a student center in the heart of Harvard's campus.

Lewis, for his part, has played the mule in the student center debate, sounding the same note for the past six years.

Even if there were enough space, Lewis says, a central location for students to congregate socially to play pool and eat fast food would not be a top priority for the College.

Lewis is more concerned with a crunch on space in which the constantly increasing number of student organizations can meet, work and practice.

But this distinction between a social and a work-oriented student center as been until now a meaningless one--there simply has not been enough space for either.

But Lewis now has a plan to kill two birds with one stone.

Administrators freely admit that the MAC is a decrepit waste of space, and Lewis thinks he might be able to revamp the ailing gym and provide some student groups with much needed office and meeting space at the same time.