CORRECTIONS APPENDED

While students returned to campus this week to begin the second semester grind, Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) Dean Michael D. Smith is still in the balmy climes of California.

The west-coast swing is an early step in the University’s capital campaign, aimed at communicating with prominent alumni to build a fundraising message for potential donors, according to Smith.

Smith’s trip, it appears, has gained momentum from the presence of established leaders in University posts that, for the past few years, have been the domain of uncertainty and interim stewardship.

Smith said that his own appointment as permanent dean of FAS, together with that of Allan M. Brandt, who recently stepped into the top spot at the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (GSAS), will help University President Drew G. Faust launch long-term initiatives.

“It’s best to launch a new campaign with permanent leadership,” Smith wrote in an e-mail yesterday.

But one piece of the administrative puzzle remains in limbo.

Seven months have passed since former Dean of the College Benedict H. Gross ’71 announced his intention to step down from his post. But Smith said that he did not believe the progress of the search for Gross’ permanent replacement had been unduly slow.

“I move at the pace that I need to move in order to get it right,” he said. “Everybody would like it to be done, we’d all like to be moving on, but this is an important position and I’m taking my time to get the right person.”

INTERIM IMPEDIMENTS

The man currently filling Gross’ shoes, Acting Dean of the College David R. Pilbeam says he gets “irritated” when an interim label is attached to his position.

“I am not the interim dean, I have never been the interim dean,” Pilbeam said when the term came up. “I am Dean of the College. That’s the way I behave, whether its for six months or six years.”

Pilbeam’s aversion to the interim tag may be due in part to the negative associations that the label seems to evoke among representatives of both students and the Faculty, who believe that the transient tenures of top University officials in the past few years have retarded high-level decision-making.

“I served under three presidents, four deans of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, only one provost..but there was a lot of interim-ness,” said former GSAS Dean Theda R. Skocpol this winter, “so it was hard to make progress or big news on big pending problems.”

For former UC President Ryan A. Petersen ’08, difficulties in pursuing policy arose when high-level University positions—among them the College deanship, the FAS deanship, and the University presidency—turned over in the middle of his tenure, yielding, in his words, “administrators unfamiliar with their new roles, and the Undergraduate Council.”

And though Pilbeam says that the short duration of his tenure has not limited his agenda, Petersen, who watched Pilbeam abolish the Undergraduate Council’s five-year-old policy of reimbursing alcohol for undergraduate parties, said that he believed that the interim Dean’s decisions were rash.

“Sometimes administrators were willing to work with us reasonably given the amount of time they would be filling their roles,” Petersen said. “And at other times administrators, particularly Dean Pilbeam, have been cavalier with the consequences of their decisions as interim administrators.”

Petersen also said he believed that mid-level College administrators have taken advantage of interim uncertainty to implement their “personal agendas.”

Pilbeam himself has acknowledged in the past that a lack of permanent leadership can hinder progress. Last May, while serving as interim Dean of FAS, Pilbeam said that he would stay on for as long as necessary, but that staying too long would be undesirable.

“I think that would be a very unfortunate situation to be in, because we’ve had so much turmoil and so much interim-ness that that would not be good for FAS or for the University,” he said.

A TOUGH JOB

After a year-and-a-half as interim dean of the Faculty and a semester as acting dean of the College, David R. Pilbeam took a trip of his own this winter break—to the Caribbean, for a much-needed personal holiday. [SEE CORRECTION BELOW]

Last May, on the tail-end of his stint as FAS dean, he told The Crimson that he would stay on as long as President Faust asked him to, though the job was taxing.

“It is inexorable,” he said. “I had to give up thinking that I was going to take a nap on a Sunday afternoon.”

With his tenure as College dean winding down (Pilbeam plans to make way for the new dean before the end of the semester), some of the same strain shows.

Last month, he said he hoped that the news of the appointment would come soon, pointing to the relief he has witnessed in his predecessor Gross, a man now free of the deanship’s responsibilities.

“He says, ‘I’ve died and gone to heaven, you’re going to find out soon,’” Pilbeam recalled. “I see him from time to time, looks content, relaxed and happy.”

The stress of the job has not gone unnoticed by those who have worked with Pilbeam over the past semester.

“Everyone agrees that Dean Pilbeam has made a lot of sacrifices,” said Undergraduate Council President Matthew L. Sundquist ‘09. “He has given a lot of time and energy.”

Smith emphasized that these difficulties would not necessarily render the post unattractive to candidates.

“There’s wonderful parts of being a dean—you get to meet all kinds of people, you get to make real change, wonderful change,” Smith said. “There’s lots of great people—people who’d want to be dean of the college. Who would not want to work with you guys?”

A LIKELY STORY?

The only name that has been mentioned with consistency by students in connection with the college deanship has been that of Jay M. Harris, a professor of Jewish studies and the master of Cabot House, whose credentials include the top spot on the committee that is responsible for implementing the College’s new General Education curriculum.

Harris is also slated to teach four courses this spring—including a near eastern civilizations sophomore tutorial and a moral reasoning core class. [CORRECTION APPENDED]

Last semester, Smith consulted a group of student representatives about the qualities students might value in a new Dean. Students mentioned Harris’s name, emphasizing that a House Master would best be able to address student concerns.

Despite Harris’s student-focused credentials and ostensible popularity, Smith says that the field is still open.

“I think our pool of candidates is much larger than one,” Smith says, adding that one could “imagine” that the list of candidates is now shorter than a page, and that he aims to make a selection soon.

“We should have one, I hope, in February,” Smith said.

—Staff writer Aditi Balakrishna can be reached at balakris@fas.harvard.edu.
—Staff writer Christian B. Flow can be reached at cflow@fas.harvard.edu.


CORRECTIONS

The Jan. 30 story "New College Dean Pick To Come Soon," misstated the amount of time David R. Pilbeam served as dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Pilbeam served from April 2007 to July 2007, not for "a year-and-a-half." Jeremy R. Knowles served as dean from the summer of 2006 through April 2007, when he resigned the deanship because of health reasons.

The story also said that Jay M. Harris, a professor of Jewish studies, would teach four courses in the spring. In fact, he will teach two: one in moral reasoning and one in Jewish studies.