No Easy Task

Like the rest of the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies (VES), Chris Killip didn’t find out that his friend and colleague Ellen Phelan had been dismissed as chair of his department until it was too late.

Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences Jeremy R. Knowles had removed her, due in part to anonymous staff complaints, but never told the faculty of their co-workers’ concerns until after he had asked Phelan to resign and never had to provide any evidence to justify making the “administrative adjustment.”

Although Killip was more than chagrined, he had little reason to be shocked—faculty and administrators both inside University Hall and out say that the way Knowles handled the recent VES situation was typical—quietly, forcefully and unilaterally.

FAS’ intellectual and fiscal growth during Knowles’ tenure has been the product of a leadership style that emphasizes streamlined bureaucracy, efficient consultative processes and a moderated, collegial tone of public discourse. Being a popular dean is no easy task—the same faculty that seem to believe they have an inalienable right to be informed, consulted and included in decisions dread serving on faculty committees—but Knowles’ style has won him both friends and battles.

Yet some faculty critics contend that Knowles has made FAS less democratic as he cut through administrative obstacles, introducing a “top-down” approach that excluded their input. Because public conflict is kept to a minimum, they say the real decision-making takes place behind the scenes. And as was the case with VES, Knowles rarely tips his hand until a path has been chosen and the fait accompli can be presented as a positive step.

Navigating this minefield successfully is crucial for a dean to win the support of his faculty, and despite the introduction of several new consultative mechanisms under Knowles’ watch, many professors see him as an autocrat. As Killip put it, “there’s only one dog that barks at Harvard.”

A Forest of Consultation

Knowles’ style of leadership is hardly unprecedented. Traditionally, deans of FAS have served as the University’s number two administrator. A large degree of unilateral authority is built into the dean’s job description: he is solely responsible for setting budgets and appointing chairs, subordinate deans, and ad hoc committees.

But although the Dean’s structural strength within the Faculty has remained constant over the past half-century, the Faculty has in recent decades claimed a greater right to consultation and influence than they had in previous eras.

The catalysts for this change were numerous. According to a report published in October 1969, the draft, ROTC, “the demands of Black students,” “proposals for courses with a radical perspective,” student requests to participate in Faculty decision making and the administrative response student takeovers of four buildings led many vocal faculty members to call for greater oversight and transparency of decision-making processes.

“All that turbulence…enhance[d] the sense that there was a need to take careful account of all points of view,” said Derek C. Bok, Pusey’s successor as President. “The late 1960’s impressed upon administrators that their decisions had consequences.”

The result was the October 1969 report that recommended a Faculty Council as a faculty-elected liaison body between the Faculty and the Dean and instituted a host of new committees aimed to increase the faculty’s consultative role.

“Before 1969, there was contentment in allowing Deans considerable discretion,” says Secretary of the Faculty John B. Fox Jr. `59. “Afterwards, there was a forest of consultation. It significantly changed the governance by instituting lots of new committees that had to be involved.”

The first Dean to confront that forest of consultation once it had been fully established was Bok appointee Henry Rosovsky, now Geyser University Professor Emeritus.

Rosovsky, who Professor of Music Christoph J. Wolff says had a “personal yet authoritative touch about everything,” was masterful at navigating the triple-checks installed after the protests. Rosovsky announced his plans to implement the now-familiar Core Curriculum to professors two years ahead of time and pushed the program through entirely constitutional channels, winning a trial by fire at the hands of a faculty of intellectual prizefighters.

Some faculty critics allege that the “transparency” of the era, in the words of Abbe Professor of Economics Dale Jorgenson, placated Rosovsky’s opposition into believing that their views mattered when in fact they had no more power than they had before 1969.

“I doubt whether the committees made all that much difference,” said Trumbull Research Professor of History Donald H. Fleming. “Every dean can impose his will. If only for cosmetic purposes, the forms were gone through. It was a strategy in the wake of that trouble—he was a more visible person, he circulated, which flattered people.”

After Rosovsky’s resignation, Bok was inevitably hard-pressed to find another Dean who would be equally capable of implementing decisions through navigation of this consultative forest.

Bok said he wanted Knowles, then the very effective chair of a chemistry department Bok deemed “very proud with a lot of strong characters,” to assume the position, but Knowles indicated that he preferred to continue with teaching and research.

The man Bok selected instead, A. Michael Spence, unwittingly demonstrated the challenges presented by the position. Although he made a number of strong appointments to FAS, he was unable to maintain the support the President over his five year tenure, and in 1990 he abruptly resigned.

Observers remember Spence as less outspoken than Rosovsky, and faculty at the time questioned his responsiveness to their concerns.

According to Wolff, many faculty members objected to Spence’s expansion of University Hall bureaucracy to include an Administrative Dean and an Associate Dean for Academic Planning as an unwelcome increase in bureaucratic red tape.

They protested even more strongly when a University committee decided to turn a recently acquired Massachusetts Avenue gas station into the Inn at Harvard during Spence’s deanship. According to Coolidge Professor of History David S. Landes, Bok’s central administration had already decided to use the space for a “commercial enterprise” instead of using it to extend FAS’ library capacity.

“It was precisely the kind of thing where the Faculty should have been consulted,” he said.

The New Dean

When Knowles took over in July 1991, the protests of 1969 were a distant memory. More immediate was FAS’ operating deficit of $12 million—the result of planned deficit spending by Spence that spiraled out of control. Confronting the deficits, Knowles had little time to ask the Faculty where and how cuts should be made.

His first step as Dean was to write a letter to the Faculty warning them of FAS’ dire financial straits and to brace them for the “brutal” measures he would impose—including a three-year freeze on departmental budget growth. Knowles has continued to write the budget letter every year, keeping the faculty apprised of his initiatives and goals.

By many accounts, Knowles has simultaneously increased faculty consultation from the Spence era and streamlined FAS bureaucracy. In addition to adding two effective committees, the Educational Policy Committee (EPC) and the Resources Committee, according to Associate Dean for Academic Affairs Vincent J. Tompkins, Knowles always tests big ideas against the faculty.

David A. Zewinski `76, FAS associate dean for physical resources and planning, cites Knowles’ preliminary steps to developing the North Yard Precinct: initial interviews with department chairs, a subsequent letter to all department chairs elaborating the goals that emerged from those interviews, a second set of interviews with the chairs (and other faculty) to amend those goals, and a third interview to clarify individual departments’ square footage needs.

“He is not a man of bold gestures but of well-reasoned decisions,” Wolff said, “[which] slows down many a process but, more often than not, with better results.”

Knowles’ chosen administrators within University Hall say that he is, in Tompkins’ words, “highly consultative.”

“From the very beginning, he seemed to have had great confidence in me and always gave me broad authority to handle matters creatively,” said Wolff, who was dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (GSAS) from 1992 to 2000. “Virtually no decisions came from the top down; most everything was developed in consultation processes.”

Knowles says he aims to be ``carefully consultative, while trying to avoid overloading the faculty and diverting them more to administration and away from their teaching and scholarly work.”

This “careful” consultation typically enables Knowles to present consensus decisions to the larger Faculty and avoid the “controversial tone” that Jorgenson says characterized the Rosovsky era.

“This style is not appropriate for the current circumstances,” Jorgenson says. “The debate is very orderly now… [Knowles] doesn’t feel that he has to be blunt. Everything is cordial.”

And even within his consultative meetings, University Hall administrators say, Knowles manages to keep his administrators on the same page.

“The style of exchange between Jeremy and this office is the same as can be found throughout FAS administration,” said Associate Dean for Administrative Resources Geoffrey Peters. “There is very limited explicit conflict. It is natural for us to leave a decision-making session in agreement and for no one to feel as though anyone has ‘gotten the last word.’ However, if you had watched the discussion, you would have little difficulty in seeing who is the Dean.”

“Knowles tends to look for a more structured discussion,” echoed Professor of the History of Science Everett I. Mendelsohn. “He gets a little tense when it becomes unscripted.”

These structured discussions allow Knowles to get things done fast.

“He allows himself to cut corners when he is sure about something,” Wolff says. “He twice added significantly to the undergraduate financial aid budget. The decision about the first nearly $10 million increase was made, atypically for Knowles, within very few days.”

Overall, it seems, Knowles is an efficient manager, implementing decisions as soon as an educated decision can be made. But it is precisely this style that causes some professors to worry that Knowles is actually circumventing their input.

Critics insist that although Knowles, in the words of one professor, “has done very well by the University and the College, [he] is more comfortable with a top-down way of proceeding.”

Professors point to Knowles’ establishment of the MacFarquhar committees as unofficial hand-picked bodies, his distaste for vocal dissent, and his decisive, often unexpected intervention in departments as examples of a deanship that is as autocratic as it is diplomatic.

Observers inside University Hall say that Knowles deftly slices through administrative obstacles and acting decisively, if not unilaterally, on his convictions.

The Nimble Bureaucrat

The first example of Knowles’ preference for efficient and informal bureaucracy came with his establishment of the Educational Policy Committee (EPC), an unofficial body advising him on undergraduate education, in 1992 that has been a model of efficiency over its decade of existence.

Knowles initially charged the committee to mount an unofficial review of all undergraduate concentrations. The committee finished its first set of reviews in the fall of 1993 and has continued to review about four concentrations a year, according to EPC member and Professor of Philosophy Richard G. Heck. In addition, all changes to concentration requirements must also be approved by the EPC.

The EPC has engineered substantial changes in the FAS curriculum. According to Dean of Undergraduate Education and EPC Co-Chair Susan G. Pedersen `82, its conversations with concentrations led 14 of 41, including English, Government, and Biology, to decrease their overall requirements, just as the faculty had voted to recommend during the 1996-97 Core reform. Most recently, it coordinated the near-doubling of freshman seminars over a single academic year that was announced this spring.

And, said Associate Dean for Undergraduate Education Jeffrey Wolcowitz, it accomplished all this without any formal constitutional powers, simply using its accepted status as “Dean Knowles’ committee” and the members’ powers of “moral suasion” to achieve these results. One University Hall administrator says Knowles’ lesser reliance on formal consultative processes has enabled delicate issues to be discussed in greater detail and with better results due to the added privacy of unofficial channels.

Despite this success, many faculty members are concerned by the EPC’s constitutional status—or lack thereof. In 1989, a faculty committee recommended to Spence that it be instituted as an unofficial, hand-picked committee rather than a Faculty Council subcommittee to avoid divided loyalties to the Faculty and the Dean that created it.

Today, many professors say they believe that a faculty committee assessing faculty teaching should be selected by the Faculty Council instead of the Dean.

Most recently, the EPC’s popular expansion of the Freshman Seminar program took place without answering to vocal faculty critics.

“It’s the problem of authority and decision-making,” says Landes. “To what extent can they make decisions without consulting interested parts of the faculty? That depends on what comes [up in] meetings and what doesn’t, and whether faculty are notified in advance, and that depends on the Dean’s desire to be guided.”

Knowles says he did not have the faculty vote to establish a standing committee on education policy because he was “in a hurry.”

But Mallinckrodt Professor of Applied Physics William Paul claims that Knowles’ implementing the faculty report’s recommendations, as Spence did not, fits a longstanding pattern.

He says deans have never followed the 1969-72 regulations requiring that the Faculty Council “exercise a general oversight over the committee structure of the Faculty [and] serve as an advisory body on decanal [dean’s] and committee appointments and will advise the Dean and the Faculty on allocations of space, building programs, and plans and priorities for Faculty growth and development.”

“Every one of these rules except the election of the Council has been broken by the Deans,” says Paul. “They do it and then they say it’s evolution…all of them built on each others’ variations of the rules. It’s a lot easier to be a benevolent dictator than to go through the process of consulting people.”

“Dean Knowles is more comfortable with appointed rather than elected committees,” agreed another senior professor. “You can avoid having people who you think might not go along.”

Knowles Intervenes

Allegations of Knowles’ autocracy have been most pronounced in instances in which he has taken a hands-on approach in mending “troubled” areas of FAS. Knowles says he has installed department chairs three times who were appointed professors in other FAS departments. In addition, he has removed faculty or staff from positions without consulting them ahead of time at least twice.

His critics allege that in these cases, Knowles intervened prematurely, giving the targets of his action no warning or opportunity to respond to his concerns.

Knowles’ first two controversial external interventions took place a month apart in the fall of 1993, when he recommended “structural” changes in both the Department of Linguistics and FAS’ Semitic Museum.

When Knowles took office, Harvard’s Linguistics department was in a shambles. It had never excelled in comparison to many of its national competitors, but by the early 1990’s the situation had become embarrassing—the department had only two tenured professors, and had not made a senior appointment since the 1960’s.

Knowles’ first step was to install Wolff, who says the department was “dysfunctional,” as Acting Chair in 1992. But Pearson professor of modern mathematics and mathematical logic Warren Goldfarb ’69 says that the department’s dire condition and FAS’ still-burgeoning budget deficit led Knowles to question Linguistics’ place in Harvard’s liberal arts curriculum.

that made him think about the linguistics department,” Goldfarb says.

According to Goldfarb, Knowles appointed him that fall to chair a committee examining how—not whether—to dissolve the department and propose a new structure, most likely a committee. Moreover, Goldfarb says, Knowles did not consult the Faculty Council before appointing the committee.

Knowles now says that the committee did have the option to recommend that Linguistics maintain its departmental status. But at the time, Wolff told The Crimson “It is not the function of the committee to look into departmental reorganization… We have tried that.” Knowles says he also sent a sternly worded letter to committee members, including both of the department’s professors, advising them of the gravity of the situation.

“I quite consciously shook the bars of the cage,” Knowles says. “I knew exactly what I was doing.”

The announcement that a committee had been formed with the purpose of dissolving the department prompted tremendous opposition from both inside and outside Harvard. The department’s students formed the Harvard-Radcliffe Undergraduate Linguists Society, and Knowles received letters from linguists across the country. One concentrator, Joel L. Derfner ’95, met with Knowles that year to appeal the decision but says he found Knowles condescending and unresponsive.

In this first controversial intervention, Knowles was dealt an unexpected hand when Goldfarb’s committee reported to him the following spring. Goldfarb says the committee circumvented Knowles’ charge by proposing alternative structures for the department but said each was imprudent. Knowles never followed up.

Many faculty members say they felt Knowles’ commitment to consultation in the Linguistics case was only skin deep; he appointed a committee without giving them a full range of options.

“There was a certain amount of complaining to be sure, although it didn’t reach the level of a wholesale lack of confidence,” Goldfarb says. “There was a general wish he’d be more consultative, a general sense that he wasn’t talking to people before he acted on things.”

In the fall of 1993, when Knowles received a mandate to intervene from another hand-picked faculty committee in regards to the Semitic Museum, he acted decisively. Just one month after he announced the formation of the Linguistics committee, Knowles released the findings of this committee to members of the Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations department and museum staff.

The report, which Knowles said he released to provoke discussion of its recommendations, assailed the museum for focusing too much on public exhibitions at the expense of FAS’ needs and suggested cutting the department’s staff by two-thirds to address its $1 million deficit.

The report itself provoked the resignation of Rosovsky’s wife, Nitza, the museum’s curator of exhibitions. But two weeks after the report was circulated, with a mandate of due process and consultation in hand, Knowles told The Crimson that “some changes in structure will have to occur.” That day, he fired eight Semitic Museum staff members.

Semitic museum staff members said they felt Knowles misled them to believe that their responses to the report would influence him, and New Republic editor Martin Peretz wrote a long letter to The Crimson denouncing the firings.

“The Dean has been lying through his teeth,” William Corsetti, curator for educational planning, told The Crimson after the firings. “It was a fait accompli.”

“The conclusions were made long before our response to the report was made,” Ms. Rosovsky concurred. “I think if a year ago, we had been called and told, ‘We can’t support you,’ it would have been easier to understand and accept. [But] all of a sudden there’s a committee which says ‘Goodbye.’”

But Israel Lawrence Stager, the director of the museum who chaired the committee and was harshly criticized by staff, lauded Knowles for doing what he had to do.

“This was a high point of Knowles’ administration,” Stager says. “He didn’t buckle to outside pressure. Once he had made up his mind, he stood his ground, and for that I give him an A+.”

“It’s the job of a dean to act swiftly when a path seems clear,” agrees Tompkins.

The most recent department to “go into receivership,” in Knowles’ words, was VES, and this intervention is probably the most vivid example of Knowles acting without prior warning. It also prompted strong resentment from vocal department faculty who say that Knowles acted unilaterally.

Four staff members who joined the department last summer filed informal complaints with FAS Personnel this winter about the work environment in VES. They alleged that three department faculty members, including chair Ellen Phelan, treated them either dismissively or disrespectfully and that the department was in administrative chaos.

The complaints were relayed to Knowles, who removed Phelan from her chair without warning and installed a proven administrator, Kenan Professor of English Marjorie Garber, after Phelan refused to resign. The department faculty members were not officially notified of the decision for nearly three weeks. At this point, the permanent professors met with Knowles but were told that the exact substance of the complaints had to remain confidential.

Some professors expressed outrage both at Knowles’ removal of Phelan and of the lack of correspondence that preceded it. Phelan says that the department’s most recent external review was strongly positive and that she received a merit raise just months before she was removed from her position.

Arnheim Lecturer on Studio Arts Nancy M. Mitchnick called Knowles’ actions “crooked.”

“Ellen was really wronged,” she says. “There were other ways to solve this. There could have been a roundtable discussion.”

A Dean and His President

Knowles and Harvard President Neil L. Rudenstine entered their current jobs on the same day, and both say they are good friends and colleagues.

Next month, however, Knowles will have to start his relationship with the Central Administration anew.

Faculty deans serve at the pleasure of the President, just as FAS administrators serve at the pleasure of the Dean. Knowles is evasive about his future plans, conceding only that barring Presidential indication to the contrary, he will remain in office “more than a year but less than a decade.”

Summers has given no indication that he wishes to replace Knowles, and Knowles says they have begun a correspondence.

Unlike the eternally patient Rudenstine, whose priorities were fundraising and university integration, the assertive Summers has implied that he will focus his managerial energies on undergraduate education, an area that falls entirely within the Dean of FAS’ domain. Observers say it is too early to tell whether this overlap will be a source of collaboration or conflict.

This potential clash in substance may be accompanied by an even more pronounced clash in style—from the outside, Summers’ famously direct managerial style is ripe to collide with Knowles’ insistence on diplomacy and decorum. Although past Presidential-Dean pairings where both jobs were held by strong personalities have sometimes worked well, the transition may prove to be almost as great an adjustment for Knowles as it will for Summers.

—Staff writer David H. Gellis can be reached at gellis@fas.harvard.edu.

—Staff writer Daniel K. Rosenheck can be reached at rosenhec@fas.harvard.edu