Summers Critics to Advise Dean Search

Incoming interim President Derek C. Bok yesterday released the roster of the faculty committee that will advise him in the search for the next dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, including among the group’s 10 members some of the current president’s most influential critics.

Bok tapped Department of English Chair James Engell, who told University President Lawrence H. Summers at the Feb. 7 Faculty meeting that professors are “divided, demoralized, and dispirited”; economist Caroline M. Hoxby ’88, who chastised the president for “break[ing] ties in our web” at a special Faculty meeting on Feb. 22, 2005; and several members of a group of department heads that issued a statement in November attacking Summers for purportedly leaking to The Crimson word of his plan to ask outgoing Dean of the Faculty William C. Kirby to step down more than a year ago.

Professor of Biological Oceanography James J. McCarthy, one of the two coordinators of the department chairs group known as the Caucus of Chairs, is on Bok’s committee, as is Department of Classics Chair Richard F. Thomas, also a caucus member. McCarthy heads the environmental science and public policy committee and is master of Pforzheimer House.

With Summers’ last months as president winding down, Bok’s selection of the current president’s critics reflects a willingness to hand further influence to some of the same faculty members who have previously pushed back against Summers’ attempts to gain more sway in the Faculty.

Department of History Chair Andrew D. Gordon ’74, the caucus’s other coordinator and not a member of the advisory committee, wrote in an e-mail that the group’s makeup “reflects an appropriately wide range of views on the faculty.”

“[It] stands to reason that a well-selected representative group (or a randomly chosen one) would include those who were critical of the president to the extent of about 50% or more of its members,” Gordon wrote.

The advisory committee appears set to work in secrecy, and all of its members yesterday either declined to discuss the dean search or did not return phone calls and e-mails requesting comment.

“I’m just being attentive to the confidentiality of all that I have received so far,” Hoxby, a Harvard College professor and member of the Faculty’s Standing Committee on Women, said in a brief phone interview.

The committee will not include any students, despite a 32-5 vote by the Undergraduate Council (UC) in March calling for two undergraduate representatives to be part of the faculty advisory group. Instead, this search will have a framework of separate student and faculty advisory groups, much like the process that culminated in Kirby’s selection in 2002.

In an e-mail to professors yesterday announcing the faculty committee, Bok said that committees formed by both the undergraduate and graduate student governments would “provide input into the search process.”

UC President John S. Haddock ’07 expressed disappointment that students wouldn’t serve on the faculty advisory committee, but said, “we’re working closely with the folks in Mass. Hall arranging the search to make sure that there’s very frequent contact between our student advisory group and the faculty.”

Both Haddock and Benjamin G. Lee, the Graduate Student Council president, said that undergraduates and graduates would be meeting with Bok to discuss the qualities the next dean should have and to submit names of possible candidates.

Lee said last night that he discussed the process on Monday with Mass. Hall Chief of Staff Katarzyna E. “Kasia” Lundy ’95 and Vice President for Policy A. Clayton Spencer, who told him that a group of graduate students could meet with Bok as late as early May.

“They had a pretty tight schedule for when we could meet with Derek Bok, because decisions were going to be made right after that,” Lee said, adding that he expected Bok to choose the next dean “before the end of May.”

Bok, in an e-mailed response to questions about graduate student involvement in the search, said that he looked forward to “a chance to be enlightened.”

With undergraduate education a main focus for the Faculty this semester and next, Bok’s faculty committee includes several professors who have spearheaded the curricular review.

One of them, Bass Professor of Government Michael J. Sandel, is a member of the “Gang of Five” professors who drafted most of the review’s report on general education, which outlined a system of broad distribution requirements to replace the Core Curriculum.

Two other members of the advisory group, Berkman Professor of Psychology Elizabeth S. Spelke and Smith Professor of Computer Science Margo I. Seltzer, are on the Educational Policy Committee, which is advocating secondary fields—approved at the Faculty meeting last week—and delaying concentration choice to the middle of sophomore year —to be considered at the meeting next month.

And Engell, the English department head, chairs the review’s Committee to Review Writing and Speaking.

Professor of Astronomy Alyssa A. Goodman, who serves on the science and technology task force for the planned Allston campus; David Blackbourn, the Coolidge professor of history; and John Huth, the chair of the physics department, round out the advisory committee’s 10 members.

—Javier C. Hernandez contributed to the reporting of this article.
—Staff writer Anton S. Troianovski can be reached at atroian@fas.harvard.edu.