Portrait Of a Dean

At eighteen, Jeremy Randall Knowles was an officer in the Royal Air Force, in command of troops twice his age and aircraft worth millions. At 62, he commands the Faculty of Arts and Sciences' (FAS) $530 million annual budget and 631 junior and senior professors.

Knowles, who assumed the office of Dean of the Faculty in 1991, has earned the respect of colleagues and subordinates in cockpits, labs and classrooms for his dedication to the task at hand.

Those who have known Knowles best, including his family and former graduate students, call him "disciplined," "driven" and "highly reasoned." He considers his greatest achievement as dean--the elimination of the huge deficit he inherited in 1991--to have come largely through a capacity for saying "no."

But Knowles is also a sought-after speaker, whose remarks are painstakingly prepared during late nights or Saturday mornings at the office.

He has poured FAS resources into large-scale projects like the Memorial Hall/Loker Commons Complex, the massive renovation of first-year dorms and the Barker Center for the Humanities. According to his wife, he's also a great dancer.

As a chemist, Knowles was an internationally known enzymologist. Now, as dean of some of the most accomplished academics worldwide, he is satisfied with his work.

"I really have the best academic job in the world," he says.

THE MAKING O

Knowles was born near Oxford, England in 1935, the son and grandson of Oxford University professors. World War II hit Europe before he was five, and Knowles has early memories of 1940's Battle of Britain, hiding in cabinets and cellars as German bombs fell on his hometown.

After graduating from secondary school at 18, Knowles followed Britain's national service policy and joined the Royal Air Force (RAF) as a Pilot Officer.

In his first working day as an officer, Knowles was assigned to pick up 250 enlisted men from London's Victoria station and get them safely delivered to Germany by train.

"I was a very young 18. I had a funny hat on, so they saluted me, but some of the sergeants were as old as my father," Knowles recalls. "That sort of builds character, although as I sat there alone in the officer's carriage, I didn't think about it building character."

Knowles' wife Jane, now the college archivist at Radcliffe's Schlesinger library, says that as a radar-controller in the RAF (Knowles was slightly near-sighted and thus ineligible to fly), her husband learned crisis management skills at a young age.

She tells of one instance during a war games exercise when her future husband took over for another controller who had lost his nerve, inheriting eight jets low on fuel and still in the air. Knowles managed to save all eight pilots and all but one fighter plane.

"That's just the kind of thing he had to do at 18 or 19," Jane Knowles says.

After completing his service, Knowles returned to Oxford, enrolling in the prestigious Balliol College, where he earned a B.A. in chemistry in 1959 and a masters in the same subject two years later. In 1960, he married Jane Sheldon Davis, also the daughter of an academic.

"He had a tremendous vitality, and he was a great dancer," Jane Knowles says. "I played the violin, and he played the piano, and we sang in all the same choruses."

Knowles won tenure as a chemist at Oxford, but traveled extensively to the U.S., visiting the California Institute of Technology, Yale University and Harvard during the '60s and early '70s.

In 1974, firmly esconsced in Oxford academia as his father and grandfather had been before him, Knowles opted for a change of scenery and accepted tenure at Harvard.

Jane Knowles said that when she came to America, she left a life as the spouse of an Oxford faculty member that greatly differed from her years as an Oxford undergraduate.

"As a faculty wife, you disappeared when the faculty members went out to dinner. The wives would sort of stay home and have a boiled egg," she says, noting that her husbands' colleagues at American schools made a point of inviting her as well.

"America was always fun to come to," she adds.

Timothy F. Knowles, youngest of Jeremy and Jane's three sons, was nine when his home shifted across the Atlantic. Knowles refers to his oldest son, Sebastian, Timothy, and middle child Jay as "one English, one American and one bilingual."

"Absolutely never have I heard him raise his voice. There always had to be a rationale," says Timothy, 31, now a student at the Graduate School of Education (GSE). "My father is nothing if not deeply reasoned."

The first word Jane Knowles uses to describe her husband is "driven."

"He is and he's always been deeply involved in whatever he does," she says. "As a chemist, he's totally absorbed, and as a dean he's totally absorbed. He really loves his job."

Timothy says that from the age of eight on, he would fix his father a gin-and-tonic after work, and talk with him over hors d'eouvres and carrots before dinner.

"Dad was definitely always consistently there, to the minute," Timothy Knowles says. "If ever there was an issue or a problem at school, he would always be there."

Timothy Knowles says he shares his father's passion for working with his hands. Along with a capacity for solving problems through trial and error, Knowles says this love for handiwork is an inheritance from his own father.

"We were very poor in those days, and if father needed a wall, you figured out how to make a wall and you made it," Knowles says. "There was very much a sense of experimentation and figuring things out for yourself."

Knowles says that his experiences as an officer and a father presented him with a sense of responsibility which still colors his mindset as dean.

"It's the same feeling--that I have a responsibility and I had better take it seriously," he says. "I said 'this is my problem, and there are people relying on me, so I'd better do it."

Although Knowles is a scientist in both his academic interest and his love of meticulousness, he also has a deep personal connection to the fine arts.

Upon becoming dean, he redesigned his office to better display a matching pair of John Singleton Copley portraits, one of Thomas Appleton, class of 1714, and the other of Appleton's wife Margaret.

"Would you imagine that, with her looking at me, I would do anything wrong?" Knowles says, indicating Margaret's pensive portrait on the wall opposite his desk.

Knowles also retains the love of music that brought him and Jane together in their undergraduate years at Oxford. They recently outfitted their Vermont weekend cottage with a piano.

In Vermont, the Knowles' wooded lot has demanded that the dean learn how to handle a chainsaw in order to fell trees and clear land--a skill that has served him well in his budget-cutting responsibilities as dean.

THE CHEMIST

By training, Knowles is a research enzymologist. After obtaining his D.Phil. in Chemistry from Balliol College, Oxford, in 1961, he went on to teach and research as a tutor and fellow of Wadham, another Oxford University college.

At Oxford, Knowles directed his own research group, which investigated the workings of enzymes.

During his time at Oxford, Knowles and his family spent several extended periods in the United States. In addition to a post-doctoral fellowship at the California Institute of Technology, Knowles also spent several sabbatical terms as a visiting professor at Yale.

Knowles first came to Harvard in 1973 to hold the Sloan visiting professorship. After he returned to England, Harvard's Chemistry Department offered him a tenured appointment, and the Knowles family moved to Cambridge the following year.

Science absorbed his father during Timothy Knowles' childhood.

"I had no idea he was a famous chemist," says Timothy Knowles, who was a principal of a primary school before studying at the GSE. "I knew he was an incredibly busy man, always going to somewhere called the lab."

Harvard's Chemistry department gave Knowles his own laboratory in the Mallinkrodt Building and a group of 15 or so researchers when he accepted the tenured position.

In his twenty years at Harvard, as at Oxford, the research group Knowles directed consisted of an equal male-female ratio, his wife Jane notes proudly.

As Houghton Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry--a post he holds to this day--Knowles swiftly earned the professional respect of both his students and scientists worldwide.

He also served as chair of the department from 1980 to 1983.

"He was certainly one of the world's most influential enzymologists at the time he retired," says Theodore Widlanski, a former graduate student of Knowles' who is now a tenured professor of chemistry at Indiana University.

Widlanski describes Knowles's lab as a congenial place, with a boss who insisted all the students call him "Jeremy." Many of those graduate students are now tenured professors themselves--a distinction which reflects on their dissertation adviser's ability as a mentor.

Associates say Knowles has an unusual gift for making the intricacies of the most complex scientific experiments clear even to non-specialists.

"One thing he was good at doing was taking very complex experiments and explaining them to people who had no background in his field," Widlanski says.

During the course of his career, Knowles received many honors and awards for his scientific accomplishments. In 1993, Britain's Queen Elizabeth II named him a Commander of the Order of the British Empire, one of the country's top honors.

In addition, Knowles has won a slew of prizes for his academic work--including the Charmian Medal, the Bader Award, the Repligen Award, the Prelog Award and the Welch Award in Chemistry. He also won the Davy Medal for the Royal Society, of which he is a Fellow.

When he became Dean of FAS, Knowles gave up teaching and conducting research of his own, although he continued to supervise his graduate students' research. His research group disbanded about two years ago when the last student graduated.

Despite his administrative duties, Knowles continues to maintain a strong interest in chemistry. The Dean keeps the tables in the waiting room of his spacious University Hall office stacked with issues of Science and other scientific journals.

THE DEAN

In 1983, when the 48-year-old Knowles was still chair of the Chemistry Department, then-president Derek C. Bok invited him to become Dean of FAS to replace Henry Rosovsky. Knowles refused.

"We made a big effort to recruit Jeremy as Rosovsky's successor," Bok says. "He was the first person we asked."

Bok says he was impressed by Knowles' record of leadership in the chemistry department, which "does not take well to leadership and is a group dedicated to the highest intellectual standards."

Knowles says that when he declined Bok's offer of the deanship, he was sure the offer to occupy the Dean's University Hall office would not be repeated. However, he says he was "too young" and still had much to contribute to science before giving up his research.

Bok recalls that Knowles cited his research as the primary reason for turning down the dean's job.

"When he was asked to be dean, he replied, 'This is really not the best time for me to leave the lab,' which is a really nice reaction to get," Bok says.

But the offer was extended again in 1991. Bok was leaving the presidency, and Rosovsky, who had served as acting Dean of FAS after A. Michael Spence left, was also stepping down.

The administration needed a new dean who could work well with the incoming president, Neil L. Rudenstine. The successful candidate also faced the rising FAS budget deficit, which totaled $12 million at the time.

Knowles had met Rudenstine when he served on a visiting committee at Princeton University, where Rudenstine was the provost. The two men did not know each other well, but a good deal of mutual respect existed between them, Knowles remembers.

"At the age of 56, suddenly, you're given something new," he says, explaining his decision to leave his lab and accept the Dean's job.

Named Dean of FAS on Class Day, 1991, Knowles's first task was to eliminate the Faculty's deficit. He accomplished this through attrition, staff cuts and austerity.

Now kept in the bottom drawer of his desk, "Jeremy's Yellow Bars," a bar graph showing the shrinking deficit, was a well-known visual aid to Knowles' struggle to curb the debt.

Knowles says the key to reducing the deficit rapidly was "saying no" to new Faculty appointments and other expensive projects.

He also notes proudly that he cut the FAS staff by nearly 10 percent in six years.

The Faculty's deficit is now gone. Other administrators attribute the current financial health of FAS to Knowles's firm hand.

"There was an unwillingness to spend," remembers Secretary of the Faculty John B. Fox Jr. '59, who served as dean of the College from 1976 to 1983. "He's still extremely cautious in spending."

According to Fox, Knowles's financial management is his greatest achievement as dean.

"He's done a terrific job having gotten financial control over the FAS budget," says Jeffrey Wolcowitz, the assistant dean for undergraduate education. "Now we're seeing this turning point when suddenly there is money to be spent and choices to be made."

Now that FAS has greater budget flexibility, Knowles says, he can focus on new projects, such as the planned international studies complex.

But he may have more difficulty maintaining control as the financial situation improves.

"He's coming into the difficult part of his deanship," says outgoing Dean of Undergraduate Education David A. Pilbeam.

Pilbeam says that Faculty members may start clamoring for more money now that the FAS budget is on a more even keel.

"It's easy to say 'no' to everyone, but it's difficult to say 'yes' to some people and 'no' to others," he says. "He's entering the planning process for how to spend the fruits of his frugality and the campaign."

Like Rudenstine, Knowles carries a heavy fundraising burden. He is particularly proud of the Barker Center for the Humanities, funded by a $25 million grant, which will begin to house departments this summer.

In addition to doling out funds, the dean is also responsible for the quality of undergraduate education. This year, he oversaw the lengthy Core Curriculum review process, which culminated this May when the Faculty passed a reform legislation package.

"Both he and [Pforzheimer University Professor Sidney H.] Verba ['53, who headed the Core Review Committee] should take credit for steering the Core review through to a successful conclusion," says Harry R. Lewis '68, dean of the College.

Knowles also supervised a complete review of the concentrations and their academic requirements during his deanship.

"The systematic review of concentrations through the Education Policy Committee, which he created, has had good effects in terms of understanding instructional needs in various departments," Lewis says. "He has overseen enormous strengthening in the departments."

KNOWLES AS A MANAGER

Administrators and Faculty members who have worked with Knowles say he has a direct, personal management style.

"Scientists have an endemic need to be hands-on people," says Lawrence Professor of Chemistry David A. Evans, who succeeded Knowles as chair of the Chemistry Department, now the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology.

Because of his background in scientific research, Evans says, Knowles tends to involve himself deeply in his University Hall duties.

"Jeremy has a hands-on approach to the deanship," Evans says. "He's less of a delegator than some of the previous deans."

But subordinates say Knowles also allows for initiative.

According to William R. Fitzsimmons III '67, the dean of admissions and financial aid, Knowles gives the admissions staff a good deal of leeway in making decisions.

Famous as a strict grammarian and a proponent of clarity in academic writing, Knowles is known for his attention to detail in Faculty matters and being second only to Fox in his ability to manuever through the parliamentary procedure of Faculty meetings.

Knowles places a premium on knowing the facts, Lewis says.

"He has a reasonably large number of people with whom he consults, but he always tries to get information firsthand," Lewis says. "He doesn't delegate in the sense of handing things off and expecting never to see them again."

Knowles's disarming British wit serves him well in speeches at formal occassions, including Faculty meetings, dinners and his address at Convocation.

His celebrated sense of humor was in heavy demand during the early years of Knowles' deanship, when budget demands made saying "no" to Faculty positions and student projects a major part of his working life.

"Behind all the wit and politesse is a very smart man," says Todd.

INTO THE FUTURE

In four years, when the University's capital campaign is expected to be finished, Knowles will be 66, the official age of retirement for Faculty.

Knowles himself says he doesn't know when he will leave the deanship. But many point to the campaign's culmination as a logical endpoint for Knowles's tenure as dean.

Jane Knowles says that her husband continues to love his work.

"He's happy," she says. "Exhausted but happy."