“Departments tend to be sort of silos, autonomous entities, and I’m hoping that what a humanities dean will be able to do is facilitate dialogue,” she said.

One important way divisional deans could encourage such dialogue while advising on new hires, she said, was in “trying to identify scholars who are sometimes missed in departmental searches because they’re doing interdisciplinary work.”

Narayanamurti said he looked forward to making connections between fields which do not obviously relate to one another.

“Once you decide to put some structure in, I think the real thing is to build some bridges,” he said.

He said that as dean of DEAS he had already served as an informal coordinator with the physical sciences which he will now oversee.

“I see my role being some of the things which I normally did anyway now becoming official,” Narayanamurti said.

In addition to facilitating academic planning on this broader level, Tatar and others said the new divisional heads will help bridge the gap between professors and administration while also relieving some of the burden of a taxed dean of the faculty.

Tatar said she thought she would serve as “a mediator” between professors and Kirby—solving a problem she said was inherent in the present administrative structure of FAS.

“Clearly faculty have not felt comfortable about just going in to talk to the dean about an issue,” she said. “They can always go to Bill Kirby about salary issues or needs that they have, but they can’t go in and talk about a great idea they have.” She said this obstacle had resulted from the limits of any individual dean overseeing a group as large and complex as FAS.

“It hasn’t been the job of the dean of FAS to micromanage or to think about the curriculum,” she said. “I know that as a Faculty member I sometimes felt frustrated.”

But Narayanamurti was careful to point out that the new structure won’t mean professors will have less face-time with Kirby.

“The faculty in a university always have access not only to the dean of the faculty but also to the president,” he said. “I don’t expect to be that kind of gatekeeper—I wouldn’t want to view it as just an intermediary but rather as a facilitator.”

However, Narayanamurti said the FAS dean’s job as presently defined is unusually challenging.

“Harvard is the only place where you have such a large faculty reporting to one person,” he said.

Both Narayanamurti and Tatar said they were ready to shoulder their share of such an outsized burden.