On a Mission from God

University President Lawrence H. Summers isn’t easily intimidated.

But when it comes to the Harvard Divinity School (HDS), Summers readily concedes his ignorance.

“Of all of Harvard’s Schools, I approach Divinity with the greatest trepidation,” he said last September.

And so when Summers was faced with the task of selecting a new dean for the school as soon as he took office, he had to learn fast.

His eight-month search—a substantially longer period than he took to install new deans at the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS), the Graduate School of Education and the Law School—reflected both his unfamiliarity with the school and the deep divides facing one of the only non-denominational divinity schools in the nation.

After soliciting input from countless faculty members at HDS and across the University, Summers concluded that the time was ripe to reevaluate the mission and focus of a school that has changed dramatically since its last curricular review over 20 years ago.

And after appointing William A. Graham as dean last August, Summers expounded on his vision at the Divinity School’s convocation address this September.

He outlined the major questions facing the school—whether the school should train ministers or academics, whether it should focus on Christianity or many faiths and whether the school’s professional degrees truly carry any weight.

But these questions did not originate in Mass. Hall—they came from the divinity faculty itself.

Since then, Summers has watched almost entirely from the sidelines, meeting with Graham regularly to keep posted on the progress of the school’s curricular review but doing little else.

It has been up to Graham forge a clear mission for the oft-unfocused school.

While the curricular review intended to address these issues is underway, little headway has been made in resolving the thorniest and most divisive issues that speak to the school’s mission.

The faculty largely agree that a curricular review is in order, but what the review should accomplish is still an open question.

And although the review is an entry point for debating the school’s role, no consensus has been reached about where the school should come down on Summers’ questions.

The ‘Encourager’

Although he appointed Graham with a mandate to remake HDS, Summers had little interest in the school coming into his new job, according to Plummer Professor of Christian Morals Peter J. Gomes.

“He really had no choice—he had to learn about us pretty quickly,” Gomes says. “[Presidents] don’t really deal with the graduate schools until they have to.”

The fruit of the dean search was both the selection of Graham and the mandate with which Summers charged Graham—to remake the school. And while most presidents have urged new deans to focus the Divinity School’s mission, Gomes said this curricular review would allow a complete overhaul of the school.

“Once a generation, you have a chance to reshape a school, and I think that is what is happening,” Gomes says.

In his convocation address, Summers underscored two major points about the school’s mission: the need to balance training scholars and religious leaders and the need to balance the school’s Christian heritage—the core of its program—with the growing importance of scholarship and training in other religions.

He also emphasized the need for distinct professional degrees awarded by the school to be reflective of certain skills. A divinity student, he said, should graduate with a particular approach to thinking in much the same way that a law student learns to “think like a lawyer.”

“Within a given degree program, students should face real requirements and graduate with some core of shared knowledge and identifiable competencies,” he said.

While Summers certainly identified the crux of the problem confronting the Divinity School, many say he was simply echoing what he heard from the faculty in his consultations.

“A lot of what he was saying was simply reflecting back to us,” says Associate Professor of Theology Nicholas P. Constas.

Few actually see Summers as the driving force behind discussions of reform.

“I don’t think that President Summers had his own vision for the school—I sometimes wish he had,” Gomes says. “But I think his mandate to the dean was that you should spend your first portion of your time over there trying to get the school to agree what its mission ought to be...and then set to it.”

Professor of Comparative Religion Diana L. Eck agrees that Summers has deputized Graham to chart the school’s course.

“I don’t think President Summers has a vision for the school,” she says. “He has entrusted vision-making to Dean Graham.”

The convocation speech was, in a sense, a “hand-off,” according to Gomes.

“[Summers] wished to be regarded as an encourager of the divinity school,” he says. “He felt he did his job in choosing Bill Graham.”

One senior faculty member said Summers’ charge in the convocation speech is having little impact at the Divinity School.

“I’ve never heard anyone here on the faculty discuss it,” the faculty member says.

HDS Dean of Academic Affairs David C. Lamberth—who is largely responsible for overseeing the curricular review—says Summers has allowed the Divinity School to handle its own review, as promised in his speech.

“He’s not a micromanager,” Lamberth says.

But to some extent, by reinforcing the faculty’s deliberations with his own charge, many professors say Summers has invigorated debate at the school. As a result, Summers’ formulation of the school’s challenges has crept into Graham’s approach, some say.

“An acute listener to the deanspeak would hear Summers’ voice here and there,” says David D. Hall, Bartlett professor of New England church history. “I think we assume we’re hearing the voice of the president, but what that means we don’t know.”

And Summers agrees, insisting that while he has a larger vision for the school, he has let Graham work out the details.

“He and I share in the broadest terms a common vision,” Summers says. “But the real work of making that concrete is Dean Graham’s.”

New Commandments?

Graham began the current curricular review last May, when he was serving as the school’s acting dean. The need for a review was so compelling, he said last August, that he proceeded despite his potentially temporary presence in the Divinity School’s top job.

But the review did not begin in earnest until Graham’s official appointment in August. And HDS professors and administrators note that it has been difficult to accomplish anything at a school that has seen three deans in four years.

“The absence of leadership in recent years has put an awful lot of work on hold,” says Ralph Keen, a Divinity School professor. “In creating a vision for the school, you kind of need to be 100 percent dean to have that kind of power.”

Graham convened three committees to evaluate the master of theological studies (M.T.S.), master in divinity (M.Div.) and master of theology (Th.M.) degrees.

The committees presented draft reports nearly three weeks ago recommending reforms in the curriculum of each of the three degrees.

They expressed ambivalence about the role of the Th.M. degree.

Hall said many professors would not miss the program because its students are relatively weak and the faculty is already busy.

“The question of should we continue it has been seriously broached—and not answered yet,” Lamberth said.

The committees also emphasized a compelling need to strengthen the requirements of the professional degrees—the M.T.S. and the M.Div. That recommendation is in line with Summers’ insistence that the professional degrees have “real requirements.”

Lamberth says the committees recommended limiting the courses that fulfill certain requirements rather than cutting down on electives.

Under the current system, the curriculum is divided into three areas—Area I, “Scripture and Interpretation;” Area II, “Christianity and Culture;” and Area III, “Religions of the World.” Virtually every course offered by HDS—including classes offered jointly with other schools at the University—falls into one of those three areas.

And because the current degree curriculums require only that students take a given number of courses from each area, students can fulfill their requirements by taking “fringe” classes. The result is that those students graduate from HDS lacking a fundamental understanding of the areas themselves.

Hall says the school’s curriculum might have lost focus in drifting too far away from “obligation” and toward “freedom.”

Dunphy Professor of the Practice in Religion, Ethnicity, and International Conflict David Little agrees, saying professional degrees at HDS might have lost meaning due to insufficient requirements. And he emphasizes the importance of redefining the degrees.

“I think that just having a vague degree is perhaps not what the Divinity School should be doing,” he says. “The professional definition is a key concern.”

But with the explosive growth of non-Christian religious study at HDS over the last 20 years, the laxness of degree requirements is not the only reason to reconsider the three-area curriculum structure.

“We want to continue to train women and men for religious service and leadership both in Christian and Unitarian churches and much more widely in American and other societies of the 21st century,” Graham writes in an e-mail.

The school’s area system makes this development particularly difficult to address. Areas I and II have traditionally been the school’s protestant Christian core, with all other religious studies relegated to Area III.

“The curriculum as it stands now...is fundamentally Christian in structure,” Lamberth says.

Many charge that Area III marginalizes non-Christian religious study.

“That area doesn’t strike anyone as appropriate or compelling,” Lamberth says.

This concern and others raised in the early phases of the school’s curricular review speak to many of the larger issues confronting HDS. And the review is the logical way to begin a reexamination of the school, Gomes says.

“We’re looking at the curriculum because that’s the thing that most of us agree upon is at the heart of what we do at the divinity school,” he says. “In a practical sense, the curriculum is the only place to begin.”

Wandering in the Desert

The ongoing review will provide a window onto the search for the school’s mission.

But no consensus has been reached thus far on any of the major questions facing the school.

“We’re not in possession of a clear mission in several areas,” Gomes said last August.

And for now, it appears that such uncertainty about the school’s future continues to be prevalent.

“Everything’s up in the air right now,” Little says. “It remains to be seen what the final form of the new direction of the school will be.”

Keen says different faculty members have fundamentally divergent views of the school’s role.

“The faculty, like every other large discipline, is divided,” he says. “If anything, the clarity has come in the form of identifying the issues—I think that’s especially true in a school that has both an academic and a vocational mission.”

Faculty members agree that the only resolution that has been achieved thus far is a “both-and” desire to do it all—to be academic and ministerial, Christian and worldly.

But this was self-evident in Summers’ convocation address. The challenge is rather how to effectively balance academic and vocational concerns, and Christianity and other religions.

And while Little emphasizes the importance of expanding non-Christian offerings, he says how the school would integrate Christian and non-Christian traditions remains an “open question.” There is some disagreement among the faculty at this point, he says.

“That’s what makes the discussion very lively right now,” Little says.

Gomes insisted last year that the school should remain true to its Christian roots.

“The worst thing we could do would be to become a Kennedy School of Religion, studying everything without a single focus,” he said last year. “If we cease to be a school whose primary professional constituency is Western Christian religion, then our heart will be eviscerated.”

One of the goals of this curricular review is to strengthen the school’s diverse offerings while not losing sight of its core strength—the study of Christianity.

“I’m not at all convinced that you can’t find a way to accommodate both of those school of thought, and I think that’s exactly what’s being considered right now,” Little says.

But Lamberth says there is general agreement that Christianity will remain central, in large part due to the HDS ministry program, because it’s simply not feasible to train religious leaders in many different denominations. Nonetheless, he says he hopes to find a way to give more weight to other religions.

“There are resources limitations there,” Lamberth says. “But in principle, it’s not an either-or, but a both-and.”

The school must find a way to balance its vocational training with the more academic study of religion, a problem that has historically been difficult.

“There’s a kind of traditional divide between theology and religious studies,” Constas says.

In just recently appointing a new dean of ministry, faculty say Graham has reaffirmed his commitment to the program.

“There’s no question [of us] getting rid of the Christian studies or the ministerial program—that’s really central to our mission,” Constas says. “There’s also no question that we’re going to go back on or renege on our commitment to the study of religion more generally.”

He says finding the school’s mission is necessarily an intractable problem.

“That we struggle with this problem shouldn’t be anything we feel embarrassed by,” Constas says. “It’s just an enormous problem, and a terribly complicated one.”

And striking an effective balance could help define Harvard’s niche as one of the few non-denominational divinity schools, he says.

Ivory Tower of Babel?

But with a separate FAS Committee on the Study of Religion that awards undergraduate and Ph.D. degrees, some wonder whether Harvard needs a divinity school.

It comes as no surprise that HDS professors—many of whom also serve on the FAS committee—say that the Divinity School is essential.

Faculty point to the ministry program as a central justification for having an independent divinity school.

“If you’re reaffirming the ministry program [by appointing a respected new associate dean], you’ve got to have a divinity school,” says Hall, who also chairs the committee. “The Faculty of Arts and Sciences is not set up to have a ministry program.”

But the HDS faculty have not yet begun to discuss the ultimate relationship between the Divinity School and the Committee on the Study of Religion.

“It’s an old question,” Hall says. “It will never go away.”

Most HDS faculty say there is a good relationship between the committee and the Divinity School, claiming that any overlap is productive.

“There’s nothing major broken at the moment,” Hall says.

But Eck says despite the success of the partnership, it’s “high time” that the FAS religion committee became a department.

“Every other major university in the U.S. has a religion department,” Eck says.

Lecturer on the Study of Religion Brian C.W. Palmer says students and faculty at FAS would benefit if the committee became a department. But he also expresses concern that a full FAS religion department might jeopardize the Divinity School’s drawing power.

“One worry about making FAS Religion a department has been that it would become more prestigious to be tenured there than to be tenured at HDS, creating an unpleasant inter-faculty rivalry,” he writes in an e-mail.

Many say Summers chose Graham because of his joint appointment and strong relationship with FAS. Graham—a past chair of both the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations and the College’s Council of Masters—will step down as Currier House master this month.

Graham has committed to ensuring a successful relationship with FAS.

“Dean [of the Faculty William C.] Kirby and I have been discussing the future relations of the two faculties since before I agreed to serve as the regular dean, and we shall continue to work together to improve the study of religion as a whole, across the boundary between our two faculties,” he says.

And professors say that in picking Graham, Summers hoped the new dean’s experience working with other schools would lead him to forge strong relationships for HDS across Harvard.

“I know that that’s one reason why he appointed Bill Graham,” Little says. “He brings to the Divinity School a history of integration with the broader University program.”

In his convocation address, Summers urged HDS to create links with other schools at Harvard.

“The Divinity School cannot be isolated from the larger University,” Summers said.

While it is the oldest graduate school, HDS has long been a pariah at the University—both academically and geographically—with an isolated campus at the northeast corner of campus on Francis Ave. and a historic lack of University-wide support. Former president James B. Conant ’14 disliked the school so much he tried, unsuccessfully, to liquidate it.

Fifty years after Conant finished his presidency, HDS still “lives with a sense of being on the margins of the University,” according to Hall.

But with Graham’s ascension to the Divinity School’s top job, many hope he will lead HDS away from the periphery. And his first year, they say, may be an indication that the school is nearing the Promised Land.

“He has a great deal of support. For a new dean’s first year, it’s been outstandingly successful,” Keen says. “There’s a great deal of enthusiasm that this is a school that’s turned the corner and is putting it into high gear.”

But as his first year winds down, Graham’s grace period is likely over.

His true test will come as he moves into his sophomore year, with the need to develop clear answers and curriculum changes rather than merely formulating questions and forming committees.

—Staff writer Stephen M. Marks can be reached at marks@fas.harvard.edu.