A Dean For Students

This is the first in a three-part series on A Decanal Decision.

The examples are seemingly endless: the new pub in Loker Commons, the creation of the Lamont Library Café, the renovation of the Mather and Dunster dining halls, and the creation of a new dance center when the old one was shut down. All of these major student life initiatives were on the brink of doom or significant delay because of the whim of one person—the dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS).

Don’t be fooled by the title. The dean of the Faculty wields more influence over the lives and educations of Harvard College students than any other person, the president included. As President-elect Drew G. Faust prepares to select her dean in what will likely be the single most important decision of her first years in office that fact should weigh heavily on her mind. All the lofty rhetoric about how Harvard was a college for its first two centuries or how the College is the most central unit to Harvard’s mission will ring hollow if Faust’s dean acts as only a dean of the Faculty and not as a dean of students as well.

At Harvard, “every tub is on its own bottom,” or so the old saying goes. This means that each faculty—or “tub”—is largely independent of the central administration, setting its own policies, granting its own degrees, and, most importantly, setting its own budget. The power of the purse is largely invested in one person and one person alone: the dean of the Faculty.

This would not be all that bad for undergraduates if Harvard College was its own tub and the dean of the College reported directly to the president, as is the case at nearly every other university in the country. At Harvard, however, the College is fully under the purview of the FAS dean, who controls every aspect of the College’s budget and lords over and selects the relatively weak dean of the College.

This brings us back to the laundry list of important student life initiatives—all of which were funded by former University President Lawrence H. Summers when the dean of the Faculty pulled financial support. Even the Campus Life Fellow (better known as the fan czar) is funded largely by the Office of the President. And it’s not just student life initiatives that the FAS dean controls—everything from House life to advising to athletics to the curriculum is ultimately managed by the dean.

This arrangement has produced disastrous results in the past because the FAS dean’s highest priority is inevitably to professors. And when faculty or administration interests clash with student concerns, it is always the students who lose out. The prime example sits at 90 Mt. Auburn Street: a lot at the hub of student life that was given to the library to build a library administration building, thanks in large part to then-Dean and currently interim-Dean Jeremy R. Knowles. And given that FAS owns all of the College’s real estate and can allocate it as it sees fit, the new dean will have many more opportunities to give space to—or take space from—the College for everything from the Harvard-Yale tailgate to a student center.

Moreover, as Knowles reminded the Faculty in a letter this week, FAS faces a deficit that is projected to persist long into the future. That will mean belt tightening for each of its constituent departments and centers. The College must not, however, be left in the dust. The way to improve the student experience is not to funnel all the money to faculty, a perilous policy supported by a ludicrously large number of otherwise-intelligent people. Improvements that directly impact students—which have dramatically enhanced the student experience in recent years—cost comparatively little.

For college students, these small budgetary issues may seem like distant details that belong on the desk of some University Hall administrator. They could, however, mean the difference between small improvements that make a big difference to the student experience and the stagnation in student life that marked the 1990s, when Harvard’s student satisfaction scores plummeted. Faust must keep that sad memory firmly in the past by ensuring that the new dean cares deeply about the experiences of students at the College.