GSAS Dean Search Narrows

The list of candidates for the deanship of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (GSAS) has been narrowed to five, and the job might have already been offered to a top contender, the Faculty’s top administrator has told The Crimson.

“The Graduate School search is getting closer,” said Faculty of the Arts and Sciences Dean Michael D. Smith, who is charged with making the appointment. “I had a long list of names. I’ve been working my way through the names, interviewing people, trying to convince the top of the list to take the job.”

When Smith was later asked to confirm whether he had already extended an offer, he refused to answer definitively, saying only that it is “possibly” the case.

While Smith said he believed the post—which opened up in March, when current GSAS Dean Theda Skocpol announced her intention to resign—would be filled before winter break, he did note that any timeline would be contingent on whether he could sell the deanship’s appeal to the candidates being sought.

“Feel free to write whatever it is you want to write, but don’t write anything that will make people start to question that they want to take the job,” Smith told The Crimson in an interview last week. “We absolutely need people to take this job.”

Werner Sollors, a professor of English literature who served on the advisory committee for the dean search, said he felt confident that a good candidate would accept the position. But he appeared to understand Smith’s concern about the job’s appeal, given the level of commitment required to run GSAS.

“It’s a very demanding post, with not terribly much limelight,” Sollors said. “So it takes more than a full day’s work to do it every day.”

However, when asked what he believed the chances were that the first-choice candidate would accept the GSAS job, bringing a quick conclusion to a long process, Sollors said he did not feel comfortable speculating.

“I lost a case of champagne on the Bush re-election,” he said. “I’m a bad person to ask for odds.”

MOVING FORWARD

The selection of a new dean should signal an end to a period of uncertainty that has followed Skocpol’s resignation announcement nine months ago, and allow FAS to move forward on key initiatives such as the reviews of the administration’s structure that Smith, enlisting the help of professional consultants, announced in November.

Smith said that without the completion of appointments to the vacant deanships of both the College and GSAS, it has been difficult to conduct these reviews.

“It will do us more good to look at their structures in detail when we have the new leaders,” Smith said.

For his part, Kyle M. Brown, an Organismic and Evolutionary Biology graduate student who serves as the president of GSAS’ Graduate Student Council, said he believed a key aspect of the appointment of a new dean would be the stability it would bring.

“It’s hard to move forward as an institution when you know that your leader is leaving,” said Brown, who met with Smith to offer some student perspective during the search. “There’s all these sorts of general concerns about, ‘Is Skocpol still the dean? Who should we be dealing with?’...It’s just hard to get coherent messages and leadership going if you have sort of a lame duck, if you will.”

—Staff writer Christian B. Flow can be reached at cflow@fas.harvard.edu.