Both Singer and Willett emphatically said that they have no desire to serve as permanent dean of the school, sentiments they said that they have shared with both Rudenstine and Summers.

Singer said that they agreed to serve in the position in order to do a service for the school, but with no desire to become permanent administrators.

Singer and Willett, both experts in the field of educational statistics, have been close collaborators from their earliest days as Harvard professors. Each was hired as junior professors in 1985. Quickly they began to discover that they had common academic interests and begun co-authoring papers and jointly presenting at conferences.

Instead of competing against each other for tenure, the pair demanded that both be tenured simultaneously—a bold request at a University so exacting and usually unyielding in its tenure procedures.

Willett said they plan to jointly share virtually all the responsibilities as dean, as opposed to dividing the tasks in advance. The two will have adjoining desks within the same office and have a joint “to-do” list, as they have in their past collaborative efforts.

The two are also careful to avoid appearances that one is more powerful than the other, even going as far as alternating the order in which their names appear on memos and papers.

A clue to their close collaboration was even present in the University’s official notice of the appointment, as the two were referred to as the “acting dean”—as if they were just one person.