She says she is confident that Harvard faculty will be attracted to the interdisciplinary medium Radcliffe provides and will be eager to participate in the Institute’s research, either as fellows or more informally.

“You don’t have to generate the sentiment,” she says. “It’s already there.”

This winter, with the help of a grant from the Mellon Foundation, Newman plans to create an interdisciplinary cluster of social scientists dedicated to the study of recent trends in immigration in the U.S. and other countries.

“Scholars from Harvard and other universities will form the backbone of the cluster,” she says.

Getting the Word Out

In addition to facilitating a new type of scholarship at Radcliffe, the new academic administrators also want to attract the best scholars from around the world to the Institute.

In order to make those people fellows, Vichniac says, public relations will have an increasingly important role.

“I want to help get the word out that the Radcliffe Institute is a very exciting place in the world of higher education,” she says.

Radcliffe has a considerable amount to offer in contrast to similar institutes of advanced study, its new administrators say.

Grosz points to Radcliffe’s smaller size as an advantage.

“Because we’re small, we can have the best people and have a significant number of them be women,” she says.

“We are going to build a model that integrates the Institute into the University,” Newman says. “That is a very different kind of enterprise than we find in other institutes of advanced study that are deliberately independent.”

Though she says that she does not have a specific timeline for the proposed changes, Newman says that she is eager to implement change.

“I love building new things out of the building blocks that are already here and thriving,” she says.

—Staff writer Catherine E. Shoichet can be reached at shoichet@fas.harvard.edu.