Varsity softball player Sara W. Williamson ’04 says she was impressed by Lewis’ defense of Harvard athletes at a meeting of the Athletic Committee that he chaired earlier this year.

“It’s kind of saddening because you see how he was trying to help us,” she says. “It was nice to have a dean in your corner who was trying to build up academics and athletics together.”

Lewis counts watching the women’s hockey team win the National Championships in 1999 in Minnesota as one of the highlights of his deanship.

“I think everybody here really has sad feelings about Dean Lewis,” Jewett says. “A lot of people aren’t satisfied with the way things went.”

The Fast Fall

And, by all accounts, things have not gone well for Lewis this year.

Apparently unbeknownst to him, Kirby and Summers had been considering the combination of the deans’ offices for months. Kirby sent Summers a copy of the 1994 “Report on the Structure of Harvard College.”

In the so-called Lewis-Maull Report, Executive Dean of the Faculty Nancy L. Maull—along with Lewis—proposed three possible organizational structures, one of which joined the Office of the Dean of Undergraduate Education and the Office of the Dean of the College in a “Single-Faculty-Dean Structure.”

Then-Dean of the Faculty Jeremy R. Knowles decided not to implement the single-dean structure when the report first came out under his tenure.

While Lewis did not get the nod to assume a combined deanship during Knowles’ time, some believe he would have filled the position well.

Mangelsdorf Professor of Natural Sciences J. Woodland Hastings says Lewis, as a Faculty member, was chosen to be dean of the College in part because the dean of the College might eventually oversee undergraduate education as well.

“That was one of our hopes,” Hastings says.

Ironically, the new structure—which Kirby says is the reason Lewis must go—is very similar to a proposal made by Lewis almost 10 years ago.

“Dean Lewis looked to be the perfect person to take the new position because he understood both ends,” Jewett says of the new deanship. “My preference would have been for him to continue as the dean.”

Kirby would not say why Lewis was not a candidate.