Can Hopi Hoekstra Have It Both Ways?
As Faculty of Arts and Sciences Dean Hopi E. Hoekstra has found repeatedly, it’s hard to simultaneously serve Harvard, the corporation churning through the news cycle, and Harvard, the collective of researchers and students filling its classrooms and labs.
Can Hopi Hoekstra Have It Both Ways?
As Faculty of Arts and Sciences Dean Hopi E. Hoekstra has found repeatedly, it’s hard to simultaneously serve Harvard, the corporation churning through the news cycle, and Harvard, the collective of researchers and students filling its classrooms and labs.Updated March 14, 2025, at 3:24 p.m.
“I want to begin by really appreciating the sense of humor and decency that you are bringing —” History professor Walter Johnson tells Faculty of Arts and Sciences Dean Hopi E. Hoekstra at the FAS’ October meeting, before his mic cuts out mid-sentence. Hoekstra was already fending off a volley of challenging questions, and Johnson, one of the administration’s most dependable critics, had approached the stand — presumably to hand her another.
In August, Harvard restricted chalking and posting signs — tactics used by pro-Palestine protesters in the spring. At the meeting, several professors are irate, accusing administrators of treading on free expression. Johnson himself had protested the rules by chalking messages like “I love puppies,” earning himself a conversation with the dean. So, I’m shocked when he starts his question by applauding her; most Harvard administrators go their careers without Johnson commending them in public.
“I want to praise the dean’s human decency,” he tries again, finding his mic silent for a second time. By now, Hoekstra sees the compliment coming. With a knowing laugh, she invites Johnson to give it another go. “I’m going to make you say that a third time,” she says from the stage.
Johnson straightens. “I would like it spread upon the record of Harvard University that I have come to praise the dean’s human decency,” he proclaims to the 150 or so faculty members filling the windowless basement lecture hall, this time finishing his thought.
Then, he tears into the new policy, declaring it “abominable.” He demands that Hoekstra either urge University officials to rework the rules or deem the FAS exempt.
Despite the sudden reversal, Johnson means what he said about Hoekstra. When I email months later for permission to print his remarks, he stresses that I have to include the criticism alongside the kudos. (The FAS’ media policy requires reporters to obtain permission to directly quote professors’ faculty meeting comments.) He recalls, “I was saying that she was a very decent person but also one who was being borne along on a tide of reactionary policy-making.”
That is the paradox of Hopi Hoekstra. Over the last two years, I have reported on virtually every Harvard official, from Provost John F. Manning ’82 to former President Claudine Gay. With Hoekstra, the sharpest criticisms usually come with positive prefaces.
Across hundreds of conversations over my year as one of The Crimson’s two FAS admin reporters, people usually leveled criticisms at “the administration,” rather than at Hoekstra herself. Even her loudest detractors either like or, at minimum, respect her.
That goodwill wasn’t built overnight. Hoekstra, who came to Harvard 18 years ago as an associate professor, became known for teaching Harvard’s flagship introductory genetics course, Life Sciences 1b, and her research on — and love for — mice. She obtained tenure in 2010 and became a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator in 2013 — an achievement that, according to her colleague Andrew J. Berry, a lecturer in Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, is reserved for “the best of the best.”
Much of the leeway Hoekstra’s critics afford her comes from the understanding that she took the reins at an excruciatingly difficult time — during Harvard’s “annus horribilis,” as Harvard Corporation fellow Shirley M. Tilghman describes the 2023-24 academic year. On June 27, 2023, Harvard named Hoekstra the next FAS dean, effective August 1. Two days later, the Supreme Court deemed Harvard’s race-based affirmative action policies unlawful — a mess she was expected to come in and clean up. That could have been the defining issue of most Harvard deanships. For Hoekstra, it was a warm-up.
Just two months after she started the job, Hamas attacked Israel, Harvard leadership made a series of convoluted, heavily criticized statements, and Harvard was splashed across every front page. Hoekstra, a first-time administrator, was still “listening and learning” to figure out her priorities, as she told The Crimson in November 2023. She gave that interview over Zoom as pro-Palestine student activists occupied the basement of her office building.
As dean, Hoekstra toes an extraordinarily tough line — between being the representative of the faculty and protecting the larger institution she helps lead. As she’s found repeatedly, it’s hard to have it both ways: to simultaneously serve Harvard, the corporation churning through the news cycle, and Harvard, the collective of researchers and students filling its classrooms and labs.
Even today, as her friends and colleagues in the life sciences face unprecedented funding cuts from the Trump administration, Hoekstra has largely avoided addressing the matter herself — limiting her public remarks to broad strokes and veiled references.
Despite administrators’ “passive silence,” as one professor describes it to me, Hoekstra — in keeping with other Harvard officials — has now enacted a flurry of cost-cutting measures in response. On Tuesday, Hoekstra decided to reject all waitlisted applicants to the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, saving approximately $400,000 per admitted candidate. The day before, Harvard had instituted a University-wide hiring freeze.
With the attacks on Harvard not relenting eighteen months in, Hoekstra’s balancing act seems more precarious than ever.
Addressing Johnson’s faculty meeting query in October, Hoekstra carefully avoids giving any indication of her own views on the matter, dodging adjectives or emotion. She commits to relaying professors’ concerns to the University’s central administration “firmly and directly and repeatedly” instead.
To better understand Hopi Hoekstra the biologist — and the life she left behind — I venture to the Biological Laboratories, nestled in the pocket of campus between Harvard’s museums and its divinity school. After a day of traversing the building’s white-walled, sterile hallways, I wind up in the office of Andrew Berry, one of Hoekstra’s biologist comrades.
Berry — a frenetic man with a characteristically British sense of humor — has spent much of the last 18 years co-teaching classes with Hoekstra, including the 400-person introductory lecture Life Sciences 1b. The moment I sit down at his desk, he whisks me away on a brief field trip to admire the bronze rhino statues flanking the BioLabs’ main entrance, sculpted by Katharine Lane Weems in the 1930s. He mourns the fact that people (myself included) enter from the BioLabs’ side door on the street instead of taking the long way past the rhinos. “This is one of the great tragedies,” he declares, ruefully.
LS1b is full of “uptight premeds” with high expectations, he says, but Hoekstra was up to the challenge. He describes her as a meticulous teacher, one who would rehearse her lectures the night before, ensuring everything was perfect. In an email, FAS spokesperson James M. Chisholm writes that she would practice with her then-six-year-old son, who “is now well-versed in basic genetics.”
Hoekstra’s also “bold,” Berry adds. While pregnant with her son, she put up the karyotype of the fetus she was carrying on the screen during their lecture on “Sex Chromosomes.” “She says, Oh, it’s normal!’” Berry recounts, with a look of awe. “Maybe, some sharp-eyed kid in row three, ‘Excuse me, there’s two bands on that chromosome which look like they shouldn’t be there,” he quips, imitating a hypothetical student’s nasal voice. “Anyway, kid turned out fine, so, no, the story has a happy ending.”
Leaving the interview, I hike up three flights of stairs and down the hallway to the Hoekstra Lab. I know I’m in the right place when I see the mice.
They’re everywhere in the hallway of her lab, starting with the sticker in the corner of the stairwell door. I count more than 40 photographs or drawings on display. Hoekstra’s a collector of mammalian trinkets; more than a decade ago, her lab filled a display case with beer bottles — each with a picture of a mammal on its label — as part of a competition with their neighbors, who studied reptiles and amphibians. The bottles had museum-like labels and were taxonomically arranged. (Her spokesperson stresses that the bottles are empty, and they were consumed outside of the lab.) In her hallway, every name tag next to a door has a mouse drawn on it — except Hoekstra’s, which has two.
Hoekstra has spent her career researching how genetic changes influence evolution, primarily through her prized mice. She’s most famous for pioneering the study of Peromyscus, or deer mice, to understand how genes impact their behavior, such as burrowing and climbing, or their more basic traits, like the color of their fur.
Shirley Tilghman, the former Princeton University president, says she learned of Hoekstra’s work because their labs shared a rare niche: the intense study of the same kind of mice. She was such a huge fan of Hoekstra’s work that when Princeton made its unsuccessful attempt to recruit her in 2007, Tilghman, as president, sat down to make a personal recruiting pitch to Hoekstra — a candidate three years out of her postdoc who didn’t even have tenure.
At the time, Hoekstra was a 34-year-old assistant professor at the University of California, San Diego, looking for a new job. She had her pick, with offers from Stanford and UC Berkeley alongside Harvard and Princeton. Hoekstra was “in the driver’s seat,” Biology professor emeritus James Hanken, who was on her hiring committee, recounts. Biology professor Daniel L. Hartl, another committee member, tells me the competition was so fierce he resorted to a desperate tactic: pointing out how proud Hoekstra’s mother would be if her daughter were a Harvard professor.
Hartl, who I speak with in his office exactly two floors below Hoekstra’s lab, says she has “a nose for a good problem” — when you can “sort of smell” something is worth working on. Her successful research career, he says, is a product of the way she approaches her work. “She can seize the nub of a problem considerably before other people can see the heart of it and she can make decisions — sometimes tough decisions — but she will make them,” Hartl explains.
Hoekstra was also the longtime Curator of Mammals at the Museum of Comparative Zoology, housed in a brick building just across the street from the BioLabs. The museum seems to be holding out hope that she’ll come back soon; a directory in its side entranceway describes her as merely “on leave.”
In 2008, at Hanken’s request, Hoekstra taught a lunchtime seminar on mammalogy for four undergraduates who couldn’t find a course on the subject. As a final project, the students helped Hoekstra update the “Great Mammal Hall” — a two-story room with whale skeleton centerpieces — reorganizing the specimens by evolutionary relationships and rewriting their labels. Today, the room has a plaque, recognizing Hoekstra and the four students’ work.
Joshua H. St. Louis ’09, one of the four students, describes Hoekstra’s interactions with undergraduates as “special,” adding that “she has a deep respect for undergrads’ intelligence and sophistication.” Hoekstra takes more of a “guide on the side” approach to mentorship instead of being a “sage on the stage,” he feels. “Even if I hadn’t talked to her in a few years, I know that she’d be right there to be so,” he says.
This past May, Hoekstra, the students in that mammalogy seminar, Hanken, her old lab neighbor Jonathan B. Losos ’84, and Losos’ thesis advisee Hannah K. Frank ’09 reunited during Commencement week. Despite her busy schedule — she was both organizing the FAS’ Commencement activities and dealing with the fallout from the pro-Palestine Harvard Yard encampment — Hoekstra made time for a margarita with the group at Harvard Square’s Painted Burro. (“A margarita, not margaritas plural,” her spokesperson emphasizes to me.)
Frank says she’s stayed in touch with Hoekstra over the years, turning to her for advice on some of her toughest career decisions, including whether to pursue a Ph.D. or go to veterinary school.
“She’s kind of superhuman in a wonderful way,” Frank says. “I don’t understand how she is able to do all of the things she does and also make time to have these mentoring conversations for someone that she last had to interact with — and arguably even then she didn’t have to interact with — like 17 years ago.”
It’s trickier, however, to describe Hoekstra as dean; the stuffed mouse on her BioLabs desk has been replaced by the book “Science & Art” on her University Hall coffee table. Her acquaintances speak easily, even effusively, about Hoekstra as a friend, teacher, and mentor, but many are tight-lipped about Hoekstra as a leader — now their boss — beyond generic praise. Some were initially adamant about speaking with me only off the record or anonymously.
When then-FAS Dean Claudine Gay and then-Provost Alan M. Garber ’76 named Hoekstra dean, some of her colleagues-turned-charges wondered if she was even qualified to lead the FAS — a complicated institution as large as Princeton.
After all, Gay was previously Dean of Social Science — her move to the FAS deanship merely meant a trip down the University Hall stairs. Michael D. Smith, who preceded Gay, used to be the Associate Dean of Computer Science and Engineering. And William C. Kirby, the dean before that, had led Harvard’s Asia Center and History department for several years. But Hoekstra, for many, was a surprising choice.
In fact, when University Professor Henry Louis “Skip” Gates Jr., who now counts himself among Hoekstra’s biggest fans, first saw the announcement email, he had to “look her up.”
“Sadly, I didn’t know her before she became dean,” he admits.
Meanwhile, Biology emeritus professor Andrew A. Biewener, who had known Hoekstra for more than a decade, had a different kind of confusion. “Well, actually, I was thinking it would be great if you were our department chair,” he recalls saying in a congratulatory email.
There was no shortage of candidates that fit her predecessors’ mold, either, with picture-perfect resumes for the job. For instance, Robin E. Kelsey — who was also considered for the position, according to two people familiar with the situation — chaired the History of Art and Architecture department for four years and was Dean of Arts and Humanities for eight.
Hoekstra had taken a different path to leadership.
She didn’t head departments or divisions, but she served on some of Harvard’s most important faculty committees. From 2012 to 2015, she was on the FAS’ Faculty Council — an elected group that advises the dean and helps set the agenda for the faculty’s monthly meetings. Then, from 2016 to 2021, she was on the FAS’ Committee on Appointments and Promotions, a powerful but confidential group that vets nominees for tenure. On that committee, Harvard College Dean Rakesh Khurana says, she was good at asking piercing questions that singled out the most important details of a candidate’s dossier, often dozens of pages long.
Hoekstra’s committee service earned her the attention of Harvard’s top brass. In 2017, she was asked to serve on the faculty advisory committee for the Harvard presidential search that picked Lawrence S. Bacow. Around that time, Hoekstra began popping up on shortlists for leadership; Berry, her OEB colleague, says Hoekstra once told him she was being considered for the Science deanship.
When I ask OEB professor Peter R. Girguis, who helped advise Garber and Gay in the 2023 dean search, for memories of Hoekstra, he first recalls another one of her committee assignments — when she led the FAS’ Tenure Track Review Committee from 2020 to 2021. She not only spearheaded the production of a 105-page report critiquing the school’s tenure process — but also won the support of Gay and others in leadership, a person familiar with the search process tells me. Daniel Hartl says that after working “closely” with Hoekstra, Gay gained “tremendous respect for her.”
In the end, though, Hoekstra’s personality set her apart. Though “several people” were capable of being “excellent” deans, Garber says, she stood out because of her “demonstrated ability to work with people, to understand them, and to make decisions in a way that would strike people as fair.” She’s also an incredibly data-driven person, several colleagues tell me, and likes to have all the facts in front of her before making any decision.
But the upshot of the pick was that — when all hell broke loose two months later — the University had tasked a first-time administrator with navigating the FAS through its most tempestuous period in decades. The traits Garber and other administrators hoped for in Hoekstra — her ability to work collaboratively and compassionately to deliver fair, carefully-considered decisions — came under an intense stress test.
Many professors’ frustrations with Hoekstra boiled over after the FAS’ annual degree meeting in May, perhaps the most demanding moment of Hoekstra’s still-nascent tenure.
Degree meetings are usually poorly attended, pro forma events, where only a small subset of the faculty get together to approve the list of students receiving degrees. Typically, few motions are proposed, and the details are usually worked out in advance at the department level.
This May, however, the meeting was anything but uneventful. On Friday, May 17, the Harvard College Administrative Board delivered sanctions to students who participated in the Harvard Yard encampment — deeming 13 seniors ineligible to graduate. The students’ faculty supporters were incensed. That same day, the administration became aware of a potential “ruckus” at the Monday degree meeting.
The professors had started circulating plans to show up and submit a motion to add the sanctioned protesters back to the list of graduates. To the dismay of many colleagues and even members of her own inner circle, Hoekstra — at the FAS parliamentarian’s recommendation — let the motion be heard.
By all appearances, Hoekstra allowed a move that went against her own beliefs. In subpoenaed texts to Harvard College Dean Rakesh Khurana, released by House Republicans, she seemed to advocate for the suspension of student activists that occupied University Hall in November, asking if the school had a strong Administrative Board. But, this time, she stood by as suspensions were rendered toothless, instead hearing out the faculty in attendance.
Though the Harvard Corporation ultimately overruled the faculty’s maneuver, many professors were outraged that this act was even permitted.
In a subpoenaed email to Harvard Corporation head Penny S. Pritzker ’81, Economics professor Jason Furman ’92 castigated Hoekstra for “once again” running the meeting “while saying almost nothing and coming off as clueless.” He stressed, “If you had a video you would be appalled.” (Furman did not respond to requests to speak for this story.)
But some of Hoekstra’s critics have changed their tune.
One professor who was frustrated with her at the time tells me that despite their initial grumbles about her leadership and what they felt was a disorganized, rocky start, Hoekstra has won their trust after a fall semester of consultative and careful leadership. Now, they simply attribute what they saw as missteps to a lack of experience.
A mere eight days after committing to address Johnson and others’ criticisms of the campus use rules, Hoekstra quietly follows through. In FAS-specific guidance, rolled out without even an emailed announcement, Hoekstra deems chalking permissible, as long as it does not deface property. She even relaxes the restrictions on posting signs, limiting them to approved locations like “bulletin boards” without prior clearance.
Hoekstra’s move came without warning. One of the chalking protesters tells me that when they spoke with her privately on the matter, she avoided giving any opinions of her own — sticking to the “party line” instead. Then, in an emailed statement, a spokesperson writes that Hoekstra had found her colleagues’ concerns about the rules to be “clear and sensible,” and that she had passed them along to the people “already” working on a new interpretation.
That’s not to say she made the decision independently, without pressure. One professor told me that if Hoekstra had not acted, a group intended to move to change the rules on their own — a dynamic she was aware of. Instead, by listening to professors’ complaints and acting on them herself, Hoekstra dodged what could have been a small faculty revolt in the process.
It’s unclear what came first: Hoekstra’s agreement or her colleagues’ ultimatum. But her actions let her avoid the issue of backing the faculty versus defending the administration.
As dean, Hoekstra has viewed listening to her colleagues as her chief duty. She usually responds to tough times by hosting sessions with University leadership, taking questions from faculty members, and getting their feedback on important decisions. Even in peacetime, Hoekstra wants to hear what they have to say — and what they’re working on.
“I’ve been a professor at Harvard, blissfully, for 33 years and the first time the dean asked me to speak about my work before the Faculty of Arts and Sciences was by Dean Hoekstra,” Henry Louis Gates Jr. tells me. Hoekstra, in her first major change to the FAS’ monthly meetings, instituted the “research minute,” where professors speak for five minutes — or, in Gates’ case, considerably longer — on their research.
After Gates’ talk, Hoekstra came to find me afterward just to ask me what I thought. I told her I loved it, and she delightedly walked me over to Gates and made the introduction.
Almost a year after that faculty meeting, Gates describes Hoekstra as someone who leads her colleagues as “the first among equals,” instead of just as their boss. “She’s not up on Mount Olympus, looking down at mere mortals. She’s not living with the gods of administration, sending down lightning bolts like Zeus,” he offers, chuckling. “She’s more horizontal.” Shirley Tilghman would take Gates’ characterization a step further. Hoekstra, she says, will “make the dreams of the faculty come true.”
Hoekstra certainly hasn’t been the dean of everyone’s dreams (a contradiction in terms for a group as fractious as Harvard’s faculty). But what her colleagues tell me — in almost every conversation I have — is that she’s a good listener.
Government professor Ryan D. Enos, who advised encampment protesters through disciplinary hearings last spring, tells me he found his meetings with Hoekstra to be “reassuring” — despite his often dissenting perspectives. When she summoned him to her office after he participated in the chalking protest last fall, Enos admits that Hoekstra asked him not to protest again, but also that “she expressed a willingness to hear our perspective moving forward.”
“There hasn’t always been anything actionable that’s come out of that, and I think that’s often a disappointment, but listening is the first step,” he says.
Discussions of Hoekstra’s collegiality pop up all over my interview transcripts on her. Garber says “one thing that characterizes her approach is that she often seeks to integrate multiple seemingly divergent points of view.”
In the wake of Claudine Gay’s now-infamous congressional testimony, Hoekstra attempted to ease faculty members’ concerns by holding town halls where they could directly ask questions to top Harvard leaders. And, in May, after faculty members expressed a lack of confidence in Harvard’s governing boards, she successfully lobbied for members of the Corporation to sit down for a Q&A with the faculty — the first meeting of its kind in decades.
That’s when things seemed to blow up. Two days after that meeting, my co-writer and I posted a detailed account of the Corporation’s remarks at a confidential meeting. At the next faculty meeting, Hoekstra lamented her colleagues’ decision to speak with us, calling it a “breach” of trust. A few weeks later, her former spokesperson departed.
Over the course of her Crimson interviews over the 2023-24 academic year, she became significantly more confident. She started off shaky and had a clumsy moment in just her second interview: “I really want to move on from this topic,” she said when a reporter pressed about student protesters’ then-ongoing occupation of University Hall. By March, she was deflecting reporters’ inquiries with ease.
Shortly thereafter, Hoekstra canceled her May interview with The Crimson because of a conflict with upcoming travel. A spokesperson finally declined The Crimson’s requests to interview her in November — after months of scheduling back-and-forth — effectively ending the FAS dean’s usual practice of regularly sitting down with The Crimson.
“Dean Hoekstra respectfully declines the opportunity,” a spokesperson wrote to me on Monday after more than a month of repeated requests for this article.
Faculty members say they begrudgingly understand. One disappointed professor says they felt it was sensible to reduce the number of potential news events at a time when Harvard was struggling to keep its public profile under control.
During the FAS’ May 7 meeting, Music professor Vijay Iyer asked Hoekstra why divestment from Israel was not on the table after the semester of protests. Hoekstra sidestepped the question, saying that she, as the FAS dean, was not the right person to ask about the University’s finances.
Taking Iyer’s place at the microphone stand, Germanic Languages and Literature professor Alison Frank Johnson called out Hoekstra’s bare reply.
“Your leadership is like a breath of fresh air,” Johnson began. “I suppose I had to understand your nonresponse as an inability to lie to us.”
Less than two years after Hoekstra took office, the view from University Hall is bleak — and not just because of the receding Cambridge winter.
The Trump administration’s blitz on higher education has put her — and other Harvard officials — in a seemingly unsolvable position. There appear to be two competing paths: loudly oppose the federal government’s funding cuts on principle — risking even harsher retaliation — or try to curry favor and pray for lesser punishment.
No matter what the University chooses, someone is going to be upset with Harvard. And someone in the FAS will blame Hoekstra.
For now, the University claims to be taking a middle path. At a Feb. 28 summit with women alumni donors, Hoekstra and Provost John Manning reassured attendees that the University intended to choose its battles carefully — not rushing to take the lead, but willing to do so if need be. Hoekstra’s remarks seem to have gone over especially well; Lauren E. Bonner ’04 told The Crimson Hoekstra “really renewed” her trust that Harvard would be led “with a data-driven, scientific approach, just a balanced mentality.”
Last week, the Trump administration announced that it was canceling $400 million of grants and contracts to Columbia University because of alleged inaction toward antisemitism on campus. Harvard officials, Hoekstra included, recognize that similar cuts could just as easily happen here.
As a result, Hoekstra has found herself using an educator’s least favorite phrase: budget cuts. In addition to ceasing admissions offers from the graduate school’s waitlist, FAS leaders have been told to keep their budgets flat for the next academic year and look for ways to cut costs while maximizing existing sources of revenue. And, as every faculty member I’ve spoken to since has said, there’s almost certainly more to come.
These days, Harvard professors regularly accuse the University of rolling over in the face of what they see as existential attacks from the right.
In January, Harvard contracted Ballard Partners, a lobbying firm with ties to Trump, to plead its case in Washington — a politically savvy move that some say looks unseemly. At the same time, at least two diversity, equity, and inclusion-related deanships have been left vacant — in the FAS and at the Harvard School of Dental Medicine.
Many antsy Harvard professors understand the budget cuts; the financial situation is unquestionably unpredictable. But, some find the silence from Harvard — the symbolic heart of American higher education — to be indefensible. (A University spokesperson declined to comment for this article.)
Professor Steven R. Levitsky, a scholar of authoritarianism who has embarked on an anti-Trump media tour of late, texts me, “It’s unconscionable that Harvard has not said a word about what the administration did to Columbia.” He continues in successive messages: “We need to lead a coalition of universities.” “We need to have each other’s back.” “We need to speak out.”
It’s unclear what Hoekstra — and Harvard — will do next.
But after the president she was hired to serve stepped down and Harvard’s administration was reshuffled, Hoekstra stuck around. And, despite being forced to oversee reductions to labs and programs, her attempts to be the voice of the faculty are hanging on — for now.
Reflecting on Hoekstra’s first year as dean, Tilghman tells me that Hoekstra successfully — and adeptly — made it through the “hardest test she’ll ever face” as dean. Surely, it can’t get worse.
“Talk about a trial by fire, right?” Tilghman says.
—Magazine writer Neil H. Shah can be reached at neil.shah@thecrimson.com. Follow him on X @neilhshah15.