Radcliffe Revamps Bunting

After a summer of sweeping administrative changes, the latest incarnation of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study’s Bunting Fellowship program is beginning to take shape, and a new dean for science is looking to “radically change” how Radcliffe contributes to scientific research.

With a new fellowship director, a new name and two newly created positions—a dean of science and a dean of social science—Radcliffe is trying to strengthen its academic mission and improve the Institute’s internal organization.

The staff changes are the latest move in Radcliffe’s ongoing attempt to redefine itself along the guidelines given by an ad hoc committee report released last February. The report advised the Institute to make the fellowship program the core of Radcliffe’s work.

As a result, this year all Institute fellows are called Radcliffe Fellows, a profound change from past years where fellows were scattered among the different Radcliffe divisions, like the Bunting Institute or the Murray Research Center.

“The [fellowship] program is now unified,” says Radcliffe Associate Dean for Advancement Tamara Elliott Rogers ’74.

In August, Radcliffe Dean Drew Gilpin Faust selected Judith E. Vichniac, a former director of studies in Harvard’s social studies department, to be Radcliffe’s new fellowship director.

Vichniac says she is charged with making the fellowship program “the heart of Radcliffe” and increasing the fellows’ ties to Harvard faculty.

Vichniac, who began her work at Radcliffe at the end of September, says this is a “very exciting moment for Radcliffe and myself. There aren’t many opportunities in one’s life tohelp shape a new institution.”

Though she says she is still adjusting to her job at the moment, she adds that she hopes to create an environment in which learning takes place “within and across disciplines” at Radcliffe.

“One of my roles is helping create a community of scholars and artists who interact with one another,” she says.

A Scientific Revolution

Over the last decade, Radcliffe’s presence in the sciences has dwindled, according to Barbara J. Grosz, Gordon McKay professor of computer science and the Institute’s new dean of science.

“We need to radically change the science program,” she says.

At the moment, Grosz says she is “taking the pulse of the different sciences” and trying to get a sense of how Harvard’s science departments can work with Radcliffe.

“Radcliffe can play a very important role, not just in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences but also in other faculties of the University,” she says.

Grosz notes that because Radcliffe does not have any laboratories of its own, the Institute has not tried to attract laboratory scientists, preferring instead to work with theoreticians.

She said, however, that she is exploring how Radcliffe fellows might use Harvard laboratories in the future.

In addition, Grosz says she hopes to find more ways for College students to be involved in Radcliffe research.

“One of the best things about being a faculty member at Harvard is the undergraduates,” she says.

Change in Fellowships

Never before has Radcliffe had deans who were solely in charge of developing specific academic disciplines. In the past, deans at Radcliffe were primarily administrators who concentrated on the logistics of running Radcliffe College and after 1999, the Institute for Advanced Study.

But this summer, Faust appointed Grosz to give direction to Radcliffe’s work in the sciences and hired Katherine S. Newman as Radcliffe’s new dean of social science.

These women are charged with making Radcliffe a world-class producer of research in the hard and social sciences. Newman will split her time between Radcliffe and the Kennedy School of Government, where she is currently the Wiener Professor of Urban Studies.

Newman says she will focus on reframing and enhancing the role of social analysis and public policy at Radcliffe, which she describes as an “intellectual hothouse for the whole University.”

In addition, Newman says she hopes to “create longer-term scholarly relations for the social sciences” and also to invite fellows back for public symposia after they have completed the program.

“I hope that Radcliffe will become a place where new ideas and perspectives will be made available to the public and to the scholarly community,” she says.

As they go through the applications for the 2002-2003 Radcliffe Fellowships, which were due yesterday, Vichniac, Grosz and Newman say they are working together to develop a new approach to scholarship at the Institute.

In addition to attracting individual fellows with specific research interests, the team hopes to attract groups of fellows, or “clusters,” with complementary academic interests.

“Science is a very social activity,” Grosz says. “It’s critically important to be able to attract groups of people.”

Newman describes the nature of Radcliffe as “inherently interdisciplinary,” and hence an ideal environment for developing clusters.

She says she is confident that Harvard faculty will be attracted to the interdisciplinary medium Radcliffe provides and will be eager to participate in the Institute’s research, either as fellows or more informally.

“You don’t have to generate the sentiment,” she says. “It’s already there.”

This winter, with the help of a grant from the Mellon Foundation, Newman plans to create an interdisciplinary cluster of social scientists dedicated to the study of recent trends in immigration in the U.S. and other countries.

“Scholars from Harvard and other universities will form the backbone of the cluster,” she says.

Getting the Word Out

In addition to facilitating a new type of scholarship at Radcliffe, the new academic administrators also want to attract the best scholars from around the world to the Institute.

In order to make those people fellows, Vichniac says, public relations will have an increasingly important role.

“I want to help get the word out that the Radcliffe Institute is a very exciting place in the world of higher education,” she says.

Radcliffe has a considerable amount to offer in contrast to similar institutes of advanced study, its new administrators say.

Grosz points to Radcliffe’s smaller size as an advantage.

“Because we’re small, we can have the best people and have a significant number of them be women,” she says.

“We are going to build a model that integrates the Institute into the University,” Newman says. “That is a very different kind of enterprise than we find in other institutes of advanced study that are deliberately independent.”

Though she says that she does not have a specific timeline for the proposed changes, Newman says that she is eager to implement change.

“I love building new things out of the building blocks that are already here and thriving,” she says.

—Staff writer Catherine E. Shoichet can be reached at shoichet@fas.harvard.edu.