Key themes include graduate education, academic communities, faculty support
By: Anne J. Manning / Harvard Staff Writer
The Faculty of Arts and Sciences launched the new academic year by gathering together at the first-ever FAS faculty retreat, sharing space and ideas around a common vision for the future.
The late August retreat for voting members of the FAS faculty was more than two years in the making, starting with then FAS Dean Claudine Gay, now president of Harvard, inviting the faculty to participate in a series of academic visioning conversations.
Those early conversations germinated a strategic planning process with the goal of defining structures and resources to support long-term excellence in teaching and research, said new Edgerley Family Dean of the FAS Hopi Hoekstra as she welcomed retreat participants. Over the last two years, strategic planning gelled around three major themes: excellence in academic communities, faculty support and development, and graduate education. Each theme was explored in detail throughout the daylong retreat.
“Today is about the next step in our long-term planning,” Hoekstra said, “giving you a chance to engage with the insights and recommendations coming out of this process—recommendations that many of you contributed to.”
President Gay, whose initial vision gave rise to the ongoing process now helmed by Hoekstra, reflected on the fall of 2021 when the effort launched. Campus was still mired in the pandemic, “and thinking about the future, at that moment, felt both necessary and impossible,” Gay said.
“As you come together to reflect on what you’ve discovered through the strategic planning process, I know the intention today is to do more than just take stock. It’s also to begin to put the new ideas and insights that have emerged from this process to work, as you chart the course for a future FAS, an FAS that empowers you as teachers and scholars, and meets the needs of this generation and the next.”
Emma Dench, dean of the Harvard Kenneth C. Griffin Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, convened the first morning session. She outlined the process undertaken by the GSAS Admissions and Graduate Education—or GAGE—working group, whose charge included the consideration of multiple sources of data and the development of actionable steps to ensure graduate students leave the University with the potential to serve as intellectual leaders for the 21st century.
The GAGE working group met 26 times over the last year and a half. They took a deep look at data collected on advising; teaching; employment outcomes; institutional finances; and equity, diversity, and inclusion. What emerged was a report providing a far-reaching review of these issues, and potential steps for immediate and long-term enhancements to the graduate student academic experience.
The report outlined a host of recommendations developed from the committee’s scrutiny of data and multiple conversations with students, faculty, and administrators. The most detailed recommendations concerned advising, which plays a critical role in graduate students’ academic success and well-being. Among them: development and communication of comprehensive and clearly defined degree requirements and reasonable expectations for program length, establishment of clear advising structures for every stage of the graduate program, and facilitation of the development of a broader group of advisors and mentors.
The committee made other recommendations ranging from improved training in advance of teaching, which is an academic requirement in many programs, to departmental participation in culturally aware mentoring programs.
The GAGE report maps an approach to graduate education that aims to provide students with the best possible education and maximizes their chances of success, while increasing opportunities for embarking on world-class intellectual leadership roles in the future.
“Looking back on the past two years of GAGE meetings, I’m struck by how much I learned from colleagues in different disciplines and by how we landed in places that were quite different from what I had expected,” Dench said to the assembled faculty. “Our north star throughout was what I know we all want—providing the best possible educational support for our students and enabling the best possible outcomes for them.”
As a way to highlight some of the many ways faculty and graduate programs are advancing graduate education, three faculty members shared examples of creative actions they are taking on advising. Organismic and evolutionary biology professor Elena Kramer described an approach for creating a culture of open communication and respect within her lab by explicitly defining reciprocal expectations between her students and herself as their mentor and leader. Professor Jeffrey Schnapp, chair of the Department of Comparative Literature, shared innovations the department has undertaken in trying to build horizontal connections across disciplines. Among those efforts has been the launch of a graduate concentration in translation studies, in response to an increasingly multilingual world.
Rounding out the panel was Matthew Liebmann, Peabody Professor of American Archaeology and Ethnology and chair of the Department of Anthropology, who spoke about changes made over the last five years, which included creating a coadvising structure, rather than the traditional one-to-one, and creating clearer expectations for students through individual development plans. The department has also implemented an advising cap for faculty.
During the first afternoon session, the three FAS divisional deans gave insights into how long-standing academic structures can help or hinder best practices for teaching as well as intellectual pursuits by faculty.
Robin Kelsey PhD ’00, Shirley Carter Burden Professor of Photography and dean of arts and humanities, painted a historical overview of how academic departmental structures have evolved since Harvard’s founding, and how the FAS could examine new opportunities and pathways. He spoke about how Harvard has, throughout its history, added new departments, programs, and centers to meet emerging scholarly interests, but that “we need dynamism that does not rely solely on growth and endless differentiation.”
Building on that theme, Samuel C. Moncher Professor of Physics and of Astronomy and dean of science Christopher Stubbs described a proposal being circulated that would create a centralized administrative structure for cross-disciplinary collaboration without the overhead of a traditional center or program. Instead, groups of faculty who wish to collaborate on a project could apply through a nonburdensome and standardized review process for access to this centralized support for a set period of time, with a clear exit strategy at the end of the project.
Lawrence Bobo, W. E. B. Du Bois Professor of the Social Sciences and dean of social science, spoke about his own division’s efforts to increase communication between departments, centers, and teaching units in a world in which many scholarly disciplines have moved away from narrow or regional areas of focus. The division is also seeking to increase the visibility of some of its key academic centers, such as the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies. These efforts include developing a thorough list of graduate funding opportunities offered across the various centers.
“Our work doesn’t end today,” said Hoekstra, closing out the day. “Further progress on these efforts is really only possible with your continued engagement and partnership.”