A Better Dean of the College

We are expecting a lot of the next Dean of Harvard College. After a rocky year that culminated in the resignation of former Dean of the College Evelynn M. Hammonds, interim Dean Donald H. Pfister has done an admirable job of bridging the divide of distrust between students and administrators. But the College needs a strong, permanent leader to build on Dean Pfister’s progress.

The new dean needs to be friendly and approachable to students and a powerful advocate for students’ interests. Small gestures—eating in dining halls, sending quirky emails, being visible at undergraduate events—make students feel like they know their dean. Those small actions also speak to a genuine interest in student affairs. The new dean should be for the College what Dean of Freshmen Thomas A. Dingman is for the freshman class—a booster, a capable administrator, and a warm presence.

The Dean of the College should also represent the needs of students in deliberations at the university level. Harvard is a complex place where the needs and desires of faculty of all stripes, students, staff, and the institution itself need to be reconciled. The Dean of the College must be a person who is willing to support undergraduates, even against other competing interests on campus.

More than anything else, the dean should have a clear sense of where the College is and where it should go. With the capital campaign and House Renewal underway, the College is potentially poised for a period of tremendous change. There are so many questions that the next dean must answer, both big and small. The new dean needs to have a vision of what the College will look like in 10 or 20 years, but he or she also needs to have a plan to build community, make Harvard a more welcoming place, improve the subpar system of freshman and sophomore advising, and so much more. The new dean should constantly ask, “How will this decision affect students? Will it make students’ lives better now and in the future?”

We are disappointed that Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences Michael D. Smith has excluded students from the search committee for the new dean. The student consultation has been reduced to four meetings around campus. There is no opportunity for students to be involved in deliberations or even to be consulted about certain candidates. Even as Dean Pfister has helped the College move beyond the events of last year, Dean Smith appears to be pulling us back towards an uncommunicative and closed-minded past.

Despite Dean Smith’s unwise search process, the prospect of a new dean is exciting. The fresh perspective of a new leader will allow the College to consider what it has done well, fix what it has done wrong, and chart a course for the future.