Rudenstine Names Dual Acting Deans of Ed. School

In a move creating an administrative structure unprecedented at any of Harvard’s ten schools, University President Neil L. Rudenstine last week named two individuals to serve as acting dean of the Graduate School of Education (GSE).

Judith D. Singer and John B. Willett, who have jointly served as the academic dean of GSE for the past two years, will serve as dean until a permanent replacement can be found for retiring GSE Dean Jerome T. “Jerry” Murphy, who announced in June last year that he would step down the end of the 2000-2001 academic year.

The pair will also continue to serve as the school’s academic dean for the upcoming year.

University officials could not remember any past instances of two individuals appointed as dean of a school, even in a temporary capacity.

Rudenstine pointed to the success of their arrangement as joint academic deans in announcing the unusual appointment.

“Judy Singer and John Willett have provided excellent academic leadership to the School of Education over the past two years, while pioneering a unique administrative partnership,” Rudenstine said in a prepared statement. “I am grateful for their willingness to extend their creative approach and dedication to this new role.”

Singer said that they view their chief goal for the upcoming year as serving as stewards for the school until a new permanent dean can be named. In this role they mainly hope to continue Murphy’s policies and initiatives and leave any major moves at the school to the next dean.

Additionally, Willett said they hope to play a large role in advising University President-elect Lawrence H. Summers in his choice of the next dean. Summers has not yet announced the process he plans to follow in selecting deans.

Both Singer and Willett emphatically said that they have no desire to serve as permanent dean of the school, sentiments they said that they have shared with both Rudenstine and Summers.

Singer said that they agreed to serve in the position in order to do a service for the school, but with no desire to become permanent administrators.

Singer and Willett, both experts in the field of educational statistics, have been close collaborators from their earliest days as Harvard professors. Each was hired as junior professors in 1985. Quickly they began to discover that they had common academic interests and begun co-authoring papers and jointly presenting at conferences.

Instead of competing against each other for tenure, the pair demanded that both be tenured simultaneously—a bold request at a University so exacting and usually unyielding in its tenure procedures.

Willett said they plan to jointly share virtually all the responsibilities as dean, as opposed to dividing the tasks in advance. The two will have adjoining desks within the same office and have a joint “to-do” list, as they have in their past collaborative efforts.

The two are also careful to avoid appearances that one is more powerful than the other, even going as far as alternating the order in which their names appear on memos and papers.

A clue to their close collaboration was even present in the University’s official notice of the appointment, as the two were referred to as the “acting dean”—as if they were just one person.

Willett said that their experience as joint academic dean over the past two years had significantly stregthened their collaboration and that they would carry the lessons of that collaboration into their new position.

“The last two years reinforced how much I value being in this with somebody else,” Willet said. He noted that one benefit of the arrangement is that since the two must always collaborate on decisions, snap decisions are avoided.

While Willett said that he believes the arrangement as joint administrators works very well in their particular case, he believes that it is not a structure that can be arbitrarily introduced to any school or any pair of administrators.

Willett said he believes their situation only works because of longevity of their collaboration.

“We kind of resolved all our issues 15 years ago,” said Willett.

While the arrangement may be highly unusual, members of the schools’ faculty were unsurprised by the selection.

“They were the obvious choice,” said GSE Professor of Higher Education Richard Chait.

Chait said that he believed that while such an arrangement was a good fit in the specific situation, he did not believe it really had any broader significance for the field of higher education and would not be the start of a great tend.

Willett said that Rudenstine expressed no concern at the unusual arrangement and suggested that the pair serve jointly from his first contact with each.

Both said that they believed that Murphy, who originally introduced the “out of the box” idea that both serve as academic dean, was instrumental in suggesting to Mass. Hall that the pair jointly serve as dean this year.

Murphy, who served as dean of GSE for nine years, will officially leave his post at the end of the day tomorrow. His tenure saw the school’s first capital campaign, which brought in $111 million to the school and allowed it to increase its number of endowed professorships from 8 to 24.

Rudenstine, whose tenure as a Harvard’s president will likewise end tomorrow, chose last fall not to conduct a search for a new dean himself but to leave the task to his successor.

—Staff Writer Daniel P. Mosteller can be reached at dmostell@fas.harvard.edu.