New Dean of Social Sciences Focuses on Junior Faculty

Since taking the helm of the Social Sciences division last fall, Dean Claudine Gay said she is prioritizing improving the experience of junior faculty members on the tenure track, which at Harvard is notoriously rigorous.

Gay said she hopes to have gone to lunch with each junior faculty member in the division by the end of the semester, a project she began in the fall. From the conversations she has had so far, Gay said it is apparent tenure track faculty members want more opportunities for feedback from scholars outside of Harvard. To that end, she began a program that allows junior faculty members to spend a day discussing their research with a scholar from anywhere in the world.

“That’s a concrete thing that I’m excited that I’m able to launch and that I know will be a big part of the kinds of support that I want to provide,” Gay said.

Gay said she also hopes to communicate well as an administrator with junior faculty members. Harvard’s tenure track, which typically lasts 7 or 8 years—a duration longer than many other universities—can be particularly difficult to navigate— especially for young faculty with children.

“We want to create an environment where every day that they’re here, there’s a strong reason why they’re here,” Gay said. “We want to create an environment where our faculty don’t even want to entertain the possibility of leaving here.”

Keeping women faculty is especially important, Gay said, as they tend to have higher rates of attrition.

Regarding the division's curriculum, Gay said she has not been closely following current student initiatives around various ethnic studies programs, but believes the University’s offerings in ethnic studies have increased significantly since she attended the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.

“Maybe the challenge now is less about making sure that there’s a place in the curriculum for these really important topics, and I think they’re important, that’s why I work on them, but bringing more visibility for what we already have,” she said.

—Staff Writer Mia C. Karr can be reached at mia.karr@thecrimson.com. Follow her on twitter @miackarr.