College Seeks New Administrator

Will Madison Avenue advertising executives be willing to trade their cushy corner offices for crimson cubicles in Harvard Yard?

Harvard College is seeking a “communications professional to assume leadership of branding efforts,” according to an advertisement placed on a Harvard employment website.

The internal communications director would report to Associate Dean for Administration and Finance John F. Gates, and would help build “a Harvard College community,” according to the advertisement.

Revitalizing student life at the College has been a priority for college administrators after a series of satisfaction surveys have shown that Harvard students are more dissatisfied with their undergraduate experience than peers at other colleges.

Last spring, the Boston Globe reported on an internal College memo from 2002 that revealed that Harvard students gave lower ratings to their college experience than students at other elite schools.

The memo, which analyzed data from the survey, stated that Harvard students rated their overall satisfaction at 3.95 on a five-point scale, compared to an average of 4.16 at the 30 other schools surveyed, according to the Globe.

But Dean of the College Benedict H. Gross ’71 said Monday that the new position was a way “to pull together our own information in a coherent way.”

“We’re not looking to have press releases,” he said.

Gross added that the internal communications director will be handling “communications that the College sends to itself and to its students.”

Deputy Dean of the College Patricia O’Brien said that the director will make it easier for students to find information about the College, both in print and online.

“We have over 700 websites,” said O’Brien. “We need all the websites built on the same platform so that they’re searchable. Students often say to us, ‘why don’t you do x or y or z?’ and we say we do, but they don’t know it. Part of what an internal communications director can do is tell our story.”

—Staff writer Alexander D. Blankfein can be reached at ablankf@fas.harvard.edu.