A Report Suggested Big Changes to the Arts & Humanities. The Division’s New Dean Is Taking It Slow.

Harvard’s Arts and Humanities division will centralize its administrative services and develop new introductory courses, Sean D. Kelly announced on Tuesday in his email as the division’s new dean.

The announcement marked Kelly’s first effort to implement recommendations from a report that proposed sweeping changes to the division, including consolidating several degree programs under a new standing committee and making Ethnicity, Migration, and Rights a full concentration.

The report concluded a contentious strategic planning process that began in January 2022 under the guidance of Robin E. Kelsey, the Arts and Humanities division’s former dean who departed the post in June. Though Kelsey chaired the 17-member Strategic Planning Committee, the task of implementing its recommendations will fall to Kelly.

The final report is the culmination of more than 30 meetings of the SPC, which solicited broader faculty and staff feedback through focus groups, study groups, and a survey. Its proposals represent the most detailed articulation yet of the interdisciplinary vision held by many of the FAS’ top administrators, including Dean Hopi E. Hoekstra.

Notably, Kelly’s message focused only on quicker changes, giving only a passing nod to the boldest suggestions in the June 12 report, which also proposed establishing two high-level interdisciplinary coordinating committees and turning the Theater, Dance, and Media program into a department.

“There are many other ambitious and thought-provoking recommendations outlined in the report as well,” Kelly wrote. “As I look to the fall, I am excited to hear directly from our community about them.”

Kelly wrote in his email that taxes, visa status, and financial transactions had burdened staff, preventing them from providing direct support for research and teaching.

Neither Kelly nor the report directly addressed staffing levels, but the report’s authors said the growing “operational demands” of the division have strained staff and considered how to “strengthen and better distribute support” across units — a proposition that would likely entail new administrative hires.

The FAS has already started to pursue some of the report’s recommendations, including expanding the resources offered by Arts and Humanities Administrative Services, a centralized office that supports faculty and teaching fellows in the division. The division also plans to develop “faculty assistant cores” to help individual programs with faculty searches, event planning, course registration, and class and departmental websites.

The SPC’s work to modernize the division, which has gone unchanged for decades, came amid declining enrollment in Harvard’s humanities concentrations. Academics at Harvard and elsewhere have fretted about dwindling interest in the humanities among college students.

Kelly argued that strengthening Harvard’s introductory humanities coursework could improve retention in the division. But he did not specify any planned changes, writing only that he hopes to engage in “further discussion” with faculty and students.

The establishment of an Ethnicity, Migration, and Rights concentration would be a victory for students and faculty who have long called for an ethnic studies program at Harvard — a push that began more than 50 years ago. But the report’s recommendations stop short of establishing an ethnic studies department, as some activists have urged.

Instead, EMR would fall under a new standing committee on the Interdisciplinary Study of Society and Culture, which would also absorb both the History and Literature and the Folklore and Mythology concentrations, and have the power to hire full-time tenured professors. All three programs are currently administered by independent standing committees and can only appoint non-tenure-track faculty.

The final report also does not propose changes to the structure of Harvard’s language offerings. Last year, a set of draft recommendations that included merging small language programs into one concentration called Languages, Literatures, and Cultures drew fierce pushback from some faculty, who feared the proposal was the first step toward consolidating their departments.

Boylston Hall houses Harvard's Department of the Classics, one of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences' 18 Arts and Humanities concentrations. By Aiyana G. White

Still, the report indicates a willingness to reorganize the Arts and Humanities division around the contemporary issues that have increasingly drawn the attention of Harvard students.

“Many Harvard students are interested in pursuing humanistic approaches to issues of migration, urbanism, climate change, sustainability, law, technology, medical care, and other matters shaping their world,” the SPC wrote. “Increasingly, our faculty are looking for ways to reach these students and support their scholarly aspirations.”

Though the report’s authors emphasized their commitment to “honoring long arcs of curiosity and conversation,” their recommendations would shift away from structuring the division around its traditional disciplines.

The report recommends forming two interdisciplinary coordinating committees for the Arts and the Humanities. The committees would oversee interdisciplinary courses, consider the development of new degree programs, and construct initiatives and mentoring networks across departments.

The SPC billed the divisional reshuffling as a move away from what they called an unsustainable model of “change through accretion”: the constant addition of new programs to accommodate new fields of study.

Between 1890 and 1969, Harvard responded to changing scholarly interests and expanding methods by adding new departments, the report argues. But because the FAS rarely consolidated or cut departments, perhaps daunted by the prospect of uproar among their faculty, it eventually stopped creating new ones.

Instead, the FAS organized its new programs into an array of stand-alone concentrations, secondary fields, and centers. The report argues that those solutions have marginalized newer fields of study by cutting them off from endowments, tenured professorships, and influence over the broader FAS curriculum.

“Put bluntly, our structure provides good support for fields that were recognized early in the history of the FAS and much poorer support for fields that were recognized afterward,” the SPC wrote.

However, the SPC did propose adding one new department: Theater, Dance, and Media, which was developed in 2015 as a concentration offered by a standing committee.

“The time has arrived to move from the present scrappy program structure to something more sustainable and worthy of Harvard,” the SPC wrote, citing the program’s “strong following among undergraduates.”

Changes to the division’s structure of departments and committees require a vote of the full FAS to move forward. The future of the SPC’s restructuring proposals depends on how Kelly chooses to implement the suggestions he inherited from his predecessor — and whether faculty believe consolidation around interdisciplinary initiatives is the best answer to the Arts and Humanities’ waning enrollment.

“We need a structure that better supports our current scholarly practices and is pliable enough to carry forward the promise of the arts and humanities into unfamiliar times,” the SPC wrote.

—Staff writer Tilly R. Robinson can be reached at tilly.robinson@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @tillyrobin.