College Administrators To Leave Posts

The College’s Dean for Administration Georgene B. Herschbach and Associate Dean of Advising Programs Monique Rinere will both be leaving their posts by the end of this year.

Herschbach is accepting the voluntary early retirement package and will leave in the fall after almost three decades at Harvard, while Rinere will become Dean of Advising and Associate Dean of Student Affairs at Columbia.

Their departures come in the wake of another senior College official’s departure, as Associate Dean of Student Life and Activities Judith H. Kidd confirmed late last month that she will also be accepting the retirement package, which allows staff over 55 years of age to voluntarily retire if they have worked at Harvard for at least 10 years.

Herschbach is a longtime administrator who became the College’s dean for administration last year.

She said she will assist in finding her successor, but noted that the responsibilities of her replacement would probably differ from her own, stressing the new relevance of finance in administrative duties.

“The whole portfolio has to be reshaped around that very prominent element,” Herschbach said.

Herschbach began working at Harvard in 1981 as the Master of Currier House.

Since then, she has served as Registrar of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and assistant dean and director of special programs, associate dean for administration and finance, and associate dean for academic programs at the College.

Recently, Herschbach said she has been involved with creating the Program for Research in Science and Engineering, improving the freshman seminars program, and designing integrated introductory science classes, including Life Sciences 1a and Physical Sciences 1.

She noted that as a dean, she cannot claim any of these programs as her own, “but someone like me, a dean, can make the connection between faculty and understanding the student population and how best to serve students.”

Herschbach also said that her time as Master of Currier House was “probably the most satisfying to me,” noting Currier’s ethnic diversity at the time, which the College has only now been able to match.

Rinere joined Harvard in February 2006 as head of the College’s newly-created Advising Programs Office.

Under Rinere’s leadership as the first associate dean of advising programs, the office revamped the College’s advising system and created the Peer Advising Fellows program, Advising Fortnight, the sophomore advising program, and the online advising network portal.

“I think she’s been an amazing force in bringing the many advising resources that we had at the College together to provide much improved advising to our students,” said APO Assistant Dean Inge-Lise Ameer.

Rinere said she did not know how the College might replace her or how the office might be restructured in her absence.

“We’re going to try to maintain the same high quality with fewer resources,” she said.

“The students will be an integral part of the decision-making going forward and that’s what will enable the office to do what it does with less,” Rinere added.

—Staff writer Danielle J. Kolin can be reached at dkolin@fas.harvard.edu.