Fifteen Questions: David J. Deming on Diversity Office Closures, ChatGPT, and the Biggest Challenges Facing Harvard

David Deming is the new Dean of Harvard College. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

FM: I hear that you’re an Ohio State alum.

DJD: I am.

FM: Before we start this, I just feel the need to warn you that I’m a transfer student from the University of Michigan.

DJD: I forgive you.

FM: I was wondering if you could speak to some of the differences between the state school versus Harvard experience.

DJD: Yeah, well, I had a great experience at the Ohio State University. I was in the Honors College, and they did successfully replicate a lot of the things that make Harvard great.

I would say the biggest difference that I noticed is that I had a lot of friends at Ohio State who were smart and talented but needed a little more attention.

The reality is, when you’re at a big state school, as you know, you can not go to class for two weeks, and nobody even knows, and it’s easy to fall through the cracks. Here at Harvard, we take pride in making sure that our students don’t fall through the cracks.

There’s a lot of infrastructure built around students here that recognizes the fact that you are brilliant and talented, but also mostly only about 18 years old when you come here, and nobody’s born knowing how to do all these things.

FM: Do you ever miss the football culture?

DJD: We’re on our way to getting there. I don’t know if you attended the Brown game. I would say that was the first time that I’ve been here at Harvard that I felt a kind of college football vibe fully. I felt like I was back in school myself, and I had a blast.

FM: What do you miss most about being Kirkland Faculty Dean?

DJD: Even though I’m kind of responsible for all students, as opposed to just one House, I’m not living with any of the students.

There’s a familiarity that comes with that, and an intimacy that comes with having students in your home, and getting to know them as people, late nights, early mornings, that I don’t have anymore. And I miss that, because it was a great joy. And I won’t have it again.

FM: What are ways that you’re looking to replicate that in this job?

DJD: When Janine and I were Faculty Deans at Kirkland House, we used to serve snacks in the dining hall on community nights, Thursday nights every week. We’d give out mozzarella sticks or mochi donuts.

I’m kind of making the rounds to do at all the Houses what we used to do in Kirkland.

FM: Tarek Masoud called you a “straight shooter” for your ability to say no while making the other person understand why. What’s the secret to saying no?

DJD: We all have a very human instinct to avoid saying directly something that people are going to be upset by. But I found, in my experience, that it’s better to just speak directly and honestly and help people understand why you had to make a decision.

FM: I saw that you have a Substack. Do you think that too many people have Substacks, and if yes, would you ever consider breaking into the undersaturated market of male podcasting?

DJD: I started to write the Substack when I was serving as the academic dean of the Kennedy School.

I think had I had things I wanted to say, both about my own research and about the research of others, that just felt like the right format for.

Even though podcast is oversaturated, I would like to do it. I like to have conversations with people. If I ever did it, it would be mostly because it seems like fun, not because I’m trying to make a career out of it. I’ve already got a job.

FM: What’s the significance of the name of your Substack, Forked Lightning?

DJD: It comes from the Dylan Thomas poem, “Do not go gentle into that good night.”

He says — I’m not going to get this line exactly right, I think it’s right: “Wise men, though they know dark is right because their words have forked no lightning, they do not go gentle into that good night.”

What he’s saying is, even people who have spent their life accumulating knowledge realize in their dying days that their words didn’t fork any lightning, that they didn't actually have any impact in the world. They gathered all this knowledge and they didn’t use it.

And so that was my way of saying, “Why am I doing a Substack?” It’s because I want to fork some lightning.

FM: In your Substack, you seem rather optimistic about AI’s effect on the economy. What do you think about the growing optimism around AI-assisted teaching and learning?

DJD: It’s not so much that I think AI is going to be good for everyone in every situation all the time. It’s more that I think if we take up the challenge to find a way to use this new technology for good rather than evil, that eventually it will lead us to a better place. And I think that’s similar in the case of AI-assisted teaching.

I’m excited about using AI to ask a lot more of learners. I’m not as excited about AI just dropping into a classroom and changing nothing else.

FM: In one of your Substacks, you wrote that the growing user frequency, to you, suggested that ChatGPT has gotten substantially better and more user-friendly. But at the same time, there was a recent MIT study that found that users consistently “underperformed at neural, linguistic, behavioral levels” and that Chat GPT users have gotten lazier with each essay and then resorted to copy and paste by the end of the study.

DJD: Can I draw an analogy here?

FM: Yes.

DJD: My mom was an editor, and we were very persnickety about words and spelling.

We didn’t have any spell check, and so I had to memorize how to spell words.

My kids are not as good as spellers, not because they’re incapable of learning how to spell, but because we have spellcheck.

Is that good or bad? Well, it depends on what else you’re doing with your mental effort.

Let’s take advantage of the fact that we don’t have to worry about memorizing words to spell anymore, and instead redirect student effort to deeper, more interesting things. That part hasn’t happened with AI yet.

I don’t know what’s going to come next, but I feel some confidence that eventually, in the fullness of time, teaching and learning will be better and deeper and more interesting because we have this tool at our disposal.

FM: I heard you run. Do you think that all runners should be encouraged to run along the river like you, instead of on Cambridge’s extremely narrow sidewalks?

DJD: Probably, yes.

I do worry sometimes about people, especially students, running with headphones on and cars, you know, pulling around narrow streets, and you have to stop a lot more. So I would encourage all potential runners to make use of the beautiful Charles River pathway.

FM: A recent op-ed about you argued that students are looking for more consistent communication from you and Garber. How do you juggle the desire to be transparent with students and the PR requirements of this job?

DJD: I mean, I’m sympathetic to that. I don’t think Instagram is the forum that that author is seeking for clear and transparent communication. What I hope is that the Instagram feed is a chance for students to get to know me better. It’s not really a place for me to communicate about the important and serious issues facing Harvard, but I am communicating about those in different forums, including talking to The Crimson, and I’m always around. I would just say, anybody who wants to talk to me about anything that’s happening at Harvard, just come talk to me. I’m around. I’m not hiding. I’m in the dining halls. I’m in my office. I’m here.

FM: There’s a difference between having, obviously, having a way for students to talk to you and having them feel heard. How do you make students feel heard?

DJD: Oh, that’s a great question. Part of it is being around. I try to eat lunch in Annenberg a couple times a week.

I think that I take very seriously that all of the students at Harvard College, regardless of their feelings about me or about Harvard, about the administration — they’re all our students and I’m responsible to all of them, and that means those of them who disagree with things I’ve done, or who want to say something negative to me, should still come and do it and not worry that I’m going to judge them for it, because I respect their views and I want to hear from them.

Can I say one more thing about that, also? It will be fun. Like I would enjoy a conversation with any of our students. I literally love talking to students. That’s why I took this job.

FM: In The Crimson’s profile on you, you were quoted saying that you plan to lead with moral authority by getting people on board with decisions, by convincing them “it’s the right thing to do for our students, rather than because I’m the dean, and I said so.” In a Crimson piece that was published [Sunday] night, you said that it wasn’t your place to contextualize the controversial decision you made to close the three diversity centers. Do you see these two comments as being at all at odds with one another?

DJD: If students want to come talk to me about that decision, or want to understand it better, or want to criticize it, or want to make suggestions about how to improve the offerings — not just of the Office of Culture and Community, but anything at Harvard — I want to hear from them, and I take their views really seriously.

Maybe I should say that the part of that story that they didn’t quote was, when I offered a rationale for it, which I’ve offered now on many occasions publicly, which is that even though we, as a matter of policy, no longer funnel students to offices based on their identity group, we do that because students’ identities are actually intersectional.

The example I’ve given many times now is, if you are a first-gen or low-income student, you may want to be connected with another first-gen or low-income student or a resident tutor or a member of the staff. And that’s okay. But you also might form an authentic connection with someone because you’re both from the South, or you both went to a Big Ten school, right? And we don’t want to prevent that from happening. And our feeling was that this office structure kind of funneled students into offices based on their identity group. So yes, we made some changes because the external environment has changed, but also we think there’s a way in which this could actually be better for students, and I defend that change.

It was more that I didn’t think it was valuable to get into the ordering of it all. I just was like, ‘This is what’s happened. I did it, but here’s why,” and so I do actually think that’s an example of me trying to do what I said I was doing.

FM: In a recent Instagram reel, you mentioned you love food. What’s the best sort of mom-and-pop shop to grab a bite from in Cambridge?

DJD: Maybe it’s a little bit of nostalgia — there’s a restaurant in Cambridgeport, called Basta Pasta, a little hole in the wall.

I used to bring my kids there when they were little. We’d eat on a Friday afternoon with our friends, get a little nice plate of pasta. It’s actually kind of hard to find that around here. My wife’s Italian, so we like our pasta.

FM: What do you think are the biggest challenges facing the College in the next few years?

DJD: I would say two challenges. One is the growing public skepticism of the value of higher education, especially elite higher education. That includes some of the actions by the Trump administration. But it’s not just that. It’s that we have too few allies and too few people that see themselves in what Harvard provides. For example, the Massachusetts legislature was considering an endowment tax before a federal endowment tax was passed, and that was on the Democratic side.

Harvard and institutions like it need to do a better job of making the case for our value to the American people.

The promise of Harvard is that we admit incredibly talented students from all around the world, without regard to their financial need, and then they are supposed to go out in the world to provide public value. If we are seen as just a place where people come to benefit themselves, then everything we do is at risk.

I think the second threat is related, but it’s a threat to our teaching learning model.

If you were to design a university from scratch today, it probably wouldn’t look like the average university does now, and that’s because times have really changed. And so the question is, are we willing to innovate and make some changes to the way we educate our students, to adapt to the modern technological landscape, adapt to the challenges that students are facing? Can we meet the needs of our students in the classroom?

FM: Do you have a favorite memory since you first came to Harvard?

DJD: The last commencement, when we said goodbye to Kirkland, was a really special memory for the whole family. You know, I raised my kids there, and they were sad to leave, but also it was a lovefest on both sides.

It just reminded me of how amazing the communities here at Harvard are and how lucky I am to be part of it.

I have a question for you.

FM: Yeah.

[Deming looks Jonathan Palumbo, Harvard College’s senior director of communications and engagement, who sat in on the interview.]

DJD: When I was talking to The Crimson last week — I haven’t cleared this with you, Jonathan, but we’re sitting there and I’m doing an hour-long interview and they’re transcribing, and I was like, “Maybe I should just do this in public.” Like, what if I just did it and everyone was there and then you guys could ask me questions and you can record it and write articles about it, but also students can hear it too?

FM: I mean, I think that’s something that we would be super interested in.

DJD: If I’m going to do it anyway, why not do it for everybody?

FM: An on-the-record chat in front of people where they can ask questions, that’s facilitated by students — yeah, personally, just think that’d be a really great show of transparency and communication.

[Deming leans back with his arms crossed, smiles, and nods at Palumbo.]

DJD: Maybe we’ll do it.

—Magazine writer Aurora J.B. Sousanis can be reached at aurora.sousanis@thecrimson.com.