Shifting Ground

While Harvard’s St. Patrick’s Day revelers downed green beer and kicked little Irish jigs last Friday, Derek C. Bok was huddled in his office sending an e-mail to the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) community. He reached out a hand, not to dance, but rather to solicit input on the search for a dean of the Faculty to replace William C. Kirby. At this juncture, we have two primary suggestions for Bok to consider in the dean search. First, the next dean of the Faculty should have only an interim appointment and second, Harvard undergraduates must be involved in the searches for both the interim and permanent FAS deans.

The notion of a permanent dean is certainly tempting, given the vacuum of leadership left behind by the resignations of Kirby and University President Lawrence H. Summers. But there are numerous disadvantages of a permanent dean that outweigh our desire for such an appointment. The presence of a new permanent dean in September, for example, would likely limit the pool of candidates for University president, due to the necessity of having a president and dean who are operating under some shared goals and priorities. Appointing an interim dean would give the new president a greater ability to shape his or her administration and ensure an effective relationship between the new president and the new FAS dean.

There is a historical precedent for the selection of an interim dean. Recent Harvard presidents have had the chance to appoint their own deans of the Faculty within the first two years of their tenure—including Summers’ appointment of Kirby and former President Neil L. Rudenstine’s appointment of Jeremy R. Knowles. And Harvard’s next president should have that same opportunity.

It is also crucial that undergraduates have a say in the decanal search. The Undergraduate Council (UC) on Sunday called on Bok to appoint two students to a faculty committee that will advise Bok in the decanal search. The UC resolution also established a seven-member undergraduate committee that will issue a “substantive report” on its criteria for the next dean. We agree with these resolutions because we agree that student input must play a role in the search process. While the FAS Dean is officially the dean of the Faculty, faculty members are hardly its only constituents. Students are, too, and the decisions of the Faculty affect students in a variety of ways. Most importantly, FAS controls the College’s purse strings, and with the Faculty budget in the red, it is important that the Faculty continues to grant the College the funding it needs for social and academic initiatives. In addition, the Faculty appoints of the Dean of College, who plays perhaps the most significant role in the student experience at Harvard. As an example of the influence the Faculty has on academics, recall that Kirby and the Faculty administered the curricular review, whose fruits will govern undergraduates’ academic life for the next generation. The decisions made by the new dean will thus have a considerable effect on the student body. It is only fair that a person in a position with such a large effect on students is chosen with some student input.

Placing students on the search committee will also send important signals to the candidates themselves. First, it will be a physical manifestation of the importance of students to the purview of FAS. Second, having undergraduate students ask questions of the potential deans will appropriately send the message that Harvard cares about undergraduate life and that the new dean ought to share this emphasis as well.

We hope that the faculty on the search committee will be receptive to students’ presence on the committee. We do understand that students are not qualified to consider all the relevant qualities in a decanal candidate, such as certain types of administrative abilities, but students must be able to represent their own interests in the search process. And by making Bok’s decanal appointment a temporary one, the probability is greater that the new president, and whomever he or she chooses to eventually serve as the permanent dean, will have a solid working relationship. As a result, we urge Bok to move quickly to integrate students into the search process and to choose a dean on an interim basis only until a new University president is selected.