A Strong Voice Steps Down

By the time Theda Skocpol resigned from the deanship of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (GSAS) in March, the footprint she had left on teaching and learning at Harvard was a large one. But will it last?

Some of her initiatives—such as the University-wide committee that called on Harvard to value pedagogy as much as it values research—made far-reaching recommendations, but these—and others—remain on the drawing board.

Lauding her as an ambitious leader with a persuasive, no-nonsense style, some professors saw Skocpol as a strong candidate to lead the Faculty of Arts and Sciences after William C. Kirby resigned from the FAS deanship last year.

But now, with Skocpol on her way out of University Hall, her legacy will be in the hands of the person whose job, by many accounts, she wanted.

LONG CAREER, BRIEF DEANSHIP

Despite a rocky start, Skocpol’s career led to the pinnacle of the social sciences.

Denied tenure by the Harvard sociology department in 1980, Skocpol left for the University of Chicago and filed a grievance claiming she had been passed over because of her gender. Her complaints were acknowledged by a review committee, and University President Derek C. Bok offered her a professorship here five years later.

She is this year’s recipient of the Johan Skytte Prize, the highest international honor for political scientists. The prize committee honored Skocpol “for her visionary analysis of the significance of the state for revolutions, welfare, and political trust.”

Skocpol ascended to the GSAS deanship two years ago, just months after she emerged as one of the most vocal Faculty critics of then-University President Lawrence H. Summers in the firestorm that erupted over his comments on women and science.

Yet she relinquished her position this spring after just two years at the helm of the graduate school. “I’m stepping down because I’ve achieved the goals that I set out for myself as GSAS dean,” she said then.

In an interview recently, Skocpol declined to comment further on the circumstances surrounding the resignation, preferring to focus instead on her role in recommending teaching reforms and creating a new advisory committee for the whole graduate school.

Those efforts helped to make her a candidate for the FAS deanship—and last spring she reportedly rose to the top of Interim President Derek C. Bok’s list of potential successors to Kirby.

Professors say that Skocpol led a quiet campaign to lead the Faculty. But that campaign appeared to falter this spring, as the prospect of Skocpol’s promotion stirred strong opposition among some influential FAS professors and administrators, sources told The Crimson.

Now, the new dean—computer scientist Michael A. Smith—will have to decide how far to push Skocpol’s proposals.

AN AMBITIOUS AGENDA

When she became GSAS dean in fall 2005, Skocpol outlined her priorities as increasing Faculty involvement in the governance of the graduate school, boosting funding available to the graduate school, improving graduate student teacher training, shortening the length of time to obtain degrees, and evaluating faculty advising to graduate students. By and large, she accomplished all of those goals.

Professors praise Skocpol for establishing the groundwork for future reforms, specifically for her role in recommending pedagogy reforms and for creating the Graduate Policy Committee (GPC) to regulate policies, review graduate programs, and coordinate doctoral programs with Harvard’s other schools.

Under Skocpol’s guidance, the GPC developed prizes in innovative teaching by graduate students, proposed secondary fields for doctoral candidates, and shortened the time students need to attain a degree.

“It was a long-overdue addition to our University committees,” Watts Professor of Music Kay K. Shelemay, who has served as a member of the GPC, says of the committee. “I think Dean Skocpol gets credit for deciding to constitute it.”

But Skocpol’s widest-reaching impact may stem from her role in leading the Task Force on Teaching and Career Development, which Bok assembled in the fall.

The group’s report won widespread notice—including a 1,200-word article in The New York Times—both for the sobering picture it painted of the state of teaching at Harvard and for the ambitious initiatives it proposed.

The “Compact on Teaching and Learning,” as the report was called, found that teaching skill was ignored or even stigmatized in performance reviews of graduate students and professors. In response, the compact called for a slew of fundamental changes to the way the University approaches pedagogy—including more documentation of teaching ability during hiring and promotions, more funding for pedagogical experimentation, increased scheduling flexibility to allow for different class formats, and a push for professors to visit each other’s courses and share teaching materials.

Yet despite the attention they garnered, most of the report’s proposals for now remain just that. In a FAS meeting last month, professors refused to approve the recommendation that professors be required to have courses with enrollments of five or more be evaluated by students, citing concerns about how the evaluations would be used.

“We don’t have a compact that we voted on,” Professor of German Peter J. Burgard said at the May 15 meeting, adding that the Faculty knew of Skocpol’s report “from The New York Times last week” and “from our very brief discussion last year.”

Thus, the question of whether the Faculty—with its elaborate bureaucracy and deeply ingrained traditions—will actually adopt most of Skocpol’s reforms is an open one. “It depends entirely on the commitment of the next dean to make sure that these go forward,” she said.

Maier Professor of Political Economy Benjamin M. Friedman ’66, who served on the task force, echoed Skocpol’s sentiment.

“I think that if Theda were remaining as a physical presence in University Hall, that would continue to remind the new dean of the agenda in the new report,” Friedman says. “But the report is really full of recommendations that require leadership and action from the dean of the Faculty.”

Smith, who will take over as dean in July, says teaching reform will be one of his priorities. “We need to sit down and seriously consider all of the recommendations that are in that report.”

Having relinquished the reins of the graduate school and been passed over for the FAS deanship, Skocpol is now becoming an observer of what Harvard’s new set of leaders will make of her potentially far-reaching legacy.

—Staff writer Madeline W. Lissner can be reached at mlissner@fas.harvard.edu.