Kirby: 'It's the Right Time'

In his first extensive interview since announcing his resignation just over one week ago, Dean of the Faculty William C. Kirby on Friday called the move a “mutual decision” reached by himself and University President Lawrence H. Summers.

“We are very different people,” Kirby said of himself and Summers. “We share the same goals and ambitions for Harvard, but we have different approaches for achieving those goals,” Kirby said.

Appearing relaxed in his University Hall corner office, Kirby avoided direct questions on the reasons behind the decision. But he did not deny that Summers had forced him to resign, which four individuals close to the central administration told The Crimson.

Summers, in an interview Friday afternoon, said Kirby resigned voluntarily.

“This was his decision,” Summers said. He added that Kirby’s letter announcing the resignation “says fairly clearly that, I think, that he decided to resign, and I think he gave reasons in his letter.”

Summers said, though, that he did discuss Kirby’s decision with him prior to his resignation. “Any decision like this is a mutual one,” Summers said.

Summers characterized his relationship with Kirby as respectful but sometimes marked by differences of opinion.

“I think we had common objectives. There were certainly moments when there were differences in view, certainly at some point there were tensions,” Summers said. “But I think it...is a relationship based on mutual respect.”

KIRBY: “IT’S THE RIGHT TIME”

In the Friday morning interview, Kirby stressed that “for many reasons, it’s the right time” to step down.

Kirby said he did not expect his resignation, effective June 30, to derail the curricular review—as some professors have said it might.

“You cannot expect that the next dean will come in and lead a counter-reformation,” Kirby said, casting the recommendations of the review’s committees as views of the Faculty, and not his own. “It is up to the Faculty to vote on the recommendations that it is bringing before itself.”

Kirby, who will take over as director of Harvard’s Fairbank Center for East Asian Studies, said he would step back next year from the review. “As a Faculty member, of course I will stay interested,” he said, but “I think I’ve done my committee work.”

The dean said a renewed focus on undergraduate education, which included the review, has been one of the most important achievements of his tenure.

“I think that it has not been common, except occasionally in our history, for someone in this office to pay enormous attention to undergraduate education,” Kirby said. He added that he and Dean of the College Benedict H. Gross ’71 “realized very early on that we had very significant issues in undergraduate education.”

Now, Kirby said, “I see a Faculty that is much more engaged in undergraduate education than four years ago.”

Kirby also said he was proud of the Faculty’s rapid growth under his watch—from 636 in 2002 to at least 700 this semester—as well as the expansion of the Faculty’s physical facilities. That expansion entailed enormous expenditures and produced a budget deficit in the tens of millions of dollars for the Faculty.

But Kirby has said that the endowment and the Faculty’s reserve funds would comfortably cover the budget deficit, and he stressed today that the spending was necessary to keep Harvard at the top of America’s institutions of higher education.

“The most important job of a dean is to bring in the absolute best faculty,” Kirby said. “We are who we hire.”

Although Kirby’s tenure will be the shortest of the last four Faculty deans, he said that he was comfortable leaving his post after “four years of very ambitious activity.”

“In those broad areas in which I wanted to make a difference...I think we have set a strong foundation,” he said, adding that he wants to return to his studies of modern China before he falls too far behind the changing times.

“China is changing even faster than Harvard,” Kirby said.

—Staff writers Nicholas M. Ciarelli and Javier C. Hernandez contributed to the reporting of this article.

—Staff writer Evan H. Jacobs can be reached at ehjacobs@fas.harvard.edu.

—Staff writer Anton S. Troianovski can be reached at atroian@fas.harvard.edu.