Summers Critic To Lead Graduate School

Thomas Professor of Government and Sociology Theda Skocpol—a leader of the attacks on University President Lawrence H. Summers’ leadership earlier this semester—will be the next dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Science (GSAS), Dean of the Faculty William C. Kirby announced today.

Skocpol will replace outgoing dean Peter T. Ellison, who has led GSAS for the past five years, when he steps down on July 1. Skocpol becomes only the second woman to lead the graduate school.

She said she was offered the position at a lunch meeting with Kirby on Tuesday.

The Dean of the Faculty has sole power in appointing the GSAS dean, though he first vets potential candidates with faculty members—and especially with the Faculty Council, the 18-member governing body of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS).

Sociology Department Chair Mary C. Waters, a long-time friend of Skocpol, praised Kirby’s decision to appoint Skocpol.

“I see it as a brilliant move by Dean Kirby to have a very, very capable and talented person be in charge of the graduate school,” she said.

Waters said the prospect of having a female dean—particularly in light of faculty disappointment with the declining numbers of tenure offers made to women since Summers became president in 2001—might have been part of the motivation for appointing Skocpol.

“It’s possible,” she said. “There’s been a lot of pressure to begin having some more women deans around here, so I’m sure that was one thing considered” in choosing Skocpol.

“I’m sure [being a woman] didn’t hurt,” Skocpol added.

But Skocpol, herself a GSAS graduate, also brings to the job a lot of experience with the graduate school.

She has served as director of graduate studies for the sociology department, and she currently chairs GSAS’s Committee on Research Workshops.

According to Waters, the workshops committee, launched by Skocpol in 1994, provides funds for graduate students or faculty to hold workshops where they present their works-in-progress.

“I am delighted that Theda has agreed to lead the Graduate School at a moment of great strength and challenge,” Kirby said in a press release. “She is a national leader in multiple fields of study, a devoted mentor of graduate students, and a dedicated citizen of this Faculty.”

As GSAS dean, Skocpol, a long-time critic of various administrators, will become an administrator herself.

Earlier this semester, Skocpol was one of the professors who led the first round of attacks against Summers.

On Feb. 15, Skocpol accused Summers of “wrapping [himself] in the mantle of academic freedom” in refusing to release the transcript of his January remarks on women in science. At the meeting, she also said that the University was suffering from a “crisis of governance and leadership.”

And on March 15, Skocpol submitted a docket motion calling for the Faculty to censure Summers for his remarks on women in science and certain “aspects of the President’s managerial approach.”

Minutes after voting no confidence in Summers, the Faculty passed Skocpol’s motion, 253 for, 137 against, and 18 abstaining.

Skocpol said that though she has been a critic of Summers, she has a good personal relationship with him.

“Personally, my relationship with Larry Summers has always been mutually respectful and a relationship in which there is vigorous discussion and back and forth,” she said. “I don’t anticipate any difficulties in working with him.”

A quarter-century earlier, Skocpol filed a grievance in 1981 against the University for gender discrimination after her tenure application was denied. Then-Dean of the Faculty Henry Rosovsky and then-University President Derek C. Bok agreed to review her case, and after she spent four years at the University of Chicago, Harvard offered Skocpol tenure. She accepted the offer and has been at Harvard ever since.

In 1986, Skocpol described her tenure conflict as “a many-year game of chicken with the leaders of the most arrogant university in the Western World.”

Skocpol said that even though she now becomes a top administrator, she will not necessarily become a less vocal faculty member.

“Obviously I’m a dean and I need to address issues with caution from that perspective,” she said. But she added that she is "at least considering the possibility that occasionally [she] will speak in Faculty meetings" in her capacity as a faculty member.

“That will be a daring departure from past precedent, but I am considering it,” she said.

—Staff writer William C. Marra can be reached at wmarra@fas.harvard.edu.