Faust To Start Search for Dean

President-elect Drew G. Faust launched the search for a new dean of the Faculty Arts and Sciences yesterday, saying she would seek input from professors and students as she looked for a permanent leader of the University’s flagship school.

Faust said in an e-mail sent to faculty, students, and staff that she planned to reconvene a faculty committee appointed last spring to advise the search for a successor to former Faculty Dean William C. Kirby.

But Faust does not plan to form her own student advisory committee, according to University spokesman John D. Longbrake.

Undergraduate Council President Ryan A. Petersen ’08 said he was not discouraged by the lack of a formal advisory role for students.

“I am sure that there will be other as legitimate, as effective means of making the student voice heard,” he said.

Petersen said he would like to have a series of open meetings with Faust, or perhaps reconvene the student committee that advised the presidential search, which included three College students.

During the search for a Faculty dean last spring, the Undergraduate Council played a similarly informal role, forming a seven-person committee that drafted a paper and polled students.

Crystal M. Fleming, the president of the Graduate Student Council, said she planned to form an informal graduate student advisory committee to the dean search, similar to a group that convened last spring.

Fleming said the chief concerns for graduate students—affordable housing, student care, and pedagogical issues related to the ongoing curricular review—have not changed over the past year. 

Fleming added that she hoped to solicit feedback from graduate students and meet with professors and Faust in the upcoming month.

In an interview on Monday, Faust said that the new dean would need an understanding of organizations, people, the “intellectual enterprise” of the Faculty, and a “commitment to students and the highest possible level of education for students.”

The dean, she said, should be “somebody who’s willing to be tough and ask hard questions and not just take for granted everything that is.”

Oxford-trained chemist Jeremy R. Knowles has led the Faculty as interim dean since last summer. Knowles succeeded Kirby, whom Summers forced to resign before he himself was pressured to step down.
 
Summers had reportedly offered Faust the deanship as he looked for a replacement for Kirby.

The list of contenders for the deanship considered by Interim President Derek C. Bok last spring included former Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (GSAS) Dean Peter T. Ellison, Government Department Chair Nancy L. Rosenblum, and current GSAS Dean Theda Skocpol, according to two individuals close to the search process. Faust was also seriously considered by Bok at the time, the individuals said.

The Crimson granted anonymity to the sources because the individuals’ relationship with University officials would be compromised if they were named.

The letter was e-mailed to FAS students, according to Longbrake, but many students said they had not received the message.

In her letter, Faust requested that advice related to the search be e-mailed to fasdeansearch@harvard.edu or sent to Fay House at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.

—Christian B. Flow, Claire M. Guehenno, and Javier C. Hernandez contributed to the reporting of this story.
—Staff writer Johannah S. Cornblatt can be reached at jcornbl@fas.harvard.edu.