This is the first part of a two-part series.  Part two will appear in The Crimson on Thursday, April 24.

In a set of prepared remarks addressed to professors earlier this month, Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) Dean Michael D. Smith did something that would have been impossible a few years ago.

Standing at the front of a sparsely-filled gathering with his notes before him on a stand, Smith asked his Faculty to join him in a “prototype year” in which he planned to further empower cross-departmental “divisional” deans, create new administrative positions in University Hall, and slow down Faculty hiring.

Smith’s changes will grant divisional deans budgetary authority and allow them to authorize searches for faculty, while installing new administrators under them. For a Faculty that as recently as 2005 sharply criticized what they perceived as the increasing and inefficient bureaucratization of FAS, the measures were potentially disquieting.

But for now, professors appear to be offering little in the way of vocal resistance.

The proposed changes represent Smith’s first major administrative overhaul since he took office last summer, and they mark the culmination of a lengthy administrative review process that he launched in the fall with the help of paid consultants. Much of the content of the remarks to the Faculty had previously been presented to the Caucus of Chairs, an informal but influential body of FAS department heads and committee chairs that was formed in 2005 and that strongly criticized the divisional deanships and administrative expansion in the fall of that year.

Perhaps partly as a result of the careful build-up, department heads have been guarded about offering their opinions of Smith’s project. Since the announcement, The Crimson issued repeated requests for comment to 17 active members of FAS who served as chairs in 2005. Only one responded with an on-the-record statement.

All four current chairs who offered statements on the matter expressed support for Smith’s administrative reforms. But another chair, who asked to remain anonymous so as to protect relationships with colleagues, said in an e-mail that in fact there were “several chairs strongly opposed to divisional deans.”

One of the reasons for the closed ranks around Smith, professors suggest, may be the dean’s openness.

“I think the key word is transparency,” said Romance Languages department chair Luis Fernández Cifuentes. “He tells all of us what he’s doing and what his plans are. And that is good. That is always a good sign of an administrator.”

But while Smith may have won the Faculty’s approval for now, there is evidence that the unease of years past about a growing bureaucracy has not been entirely dispelled, creating a potential problem for the dean if the “prototype” year does not go as planned.

“I happen to come from one of the most bureaucratic countries in the world, France,” said History professor Stanley Hoffmann, addressing Smith following his Faculty-wide presentation in April. “And when I hear about new levels, each one with its own enlarged personnel of support, with expanded powers over what is under that level, I’m starting to think of all the reasons I had to come to this country.”

DIVISIONAL DEANS

Department heads used to report directly to the dean of the Faculty—a system that changed when former dean William C. Kirby announced the establishment of the divisional deanships in the summer of 2003.

Presiding over the humanities, the physical sciences, and the social sciences—a fourth position, for the life sciences, was filled by committee—the new deans represented an additional administrative level between the departments and top FAS decision-makers, which some professors found stifling.

The divisional deans were criticized for “insert[ing] an additional layer for chairs to work through, without providing power and help of their own,” according to the minutes of a Sept. 2005 meeting of the Caucus of Chairs.

At a meeting the following month, the Caucus’s minutes again recorded a discussion of the divisional deanships, this time calling them an “obstacle to any effective communication.”

Contacted early this week for comment, one department chair gave no indication that the Caucus had entirely changed its tune.

“I think within the Caucus of Chairs there have been quite divided opinions about the utility of divisional deans,” the chair said. “There are some people who aren’t sure whether it’s a good idea to maintain the divisional deans or not.”

Some suggest that Smith’s fairly smooth ride in pushing his own version of the divisional deanship may be a function of the times. Many professors agree that much of the discontent with the divisional dean structure may have been simply an outgrowth of the turmoil that roiled the Faculty in late 2005 as the tenure of former University President Lawrence H. Summers drew to a close.

“I do think that [the divisional deanship] has been better in the past year or two than its was in the first years,” said Linguistics chair Jay H. Jasanoff ’63. “I think a lot of that has to do with Larry Summers and the personnel in the dean’s office. A lot of the complaints a few years ago were driven by Larry Summers and his agenda.”

That perspective is much the same from one divisional dean’s office.

“People have been a bit frustrated about lines of authority and so on,” said Dean for the Social Sciences David M. Cutler ’87, who is an economist. “Really what that was symptomatic of is that there was so much turmoil that no one ever knew what was happening,”

Smith has since brought stability to a Faculty that had seen three leaders in less than two years prior to his appointment in June. But a key complaint in 2005 was also that the divisional deans’ responsibilities, two years after the position’s inception, remained unclear. And while a stated focus of Smith’s administrative review has been to specify those responsibilities—his handout at the Faculty meeting included a specific list of the deans’ new budgetary powers—he also stated that there would need to be time to vet the new system.

“They’ll be also learning from the types of processes that we put in place as far as which ones work well and which ones don’t,” Smith told the Faculty. “And the goal is by...the start of the 2009 academic year, we will actually know exactly what were doing, all the goals will be clear, and that people will be well aware of what they’re meant to be doing.”

Some professors appeared impatient about the possibility of another year of uncertainty.

“I understand that [Smith] needed time,” said German professor Judith L. Ryan. “Normally when someone comes into a position like this, they don’t need more than a year to take stock. I don’t know, maybe Harvard is more complicated.”

SIZE MATTERS

In the face of detractors like Hoffmann—who said at this month’s Faculty meeting that he had seen signs of professors “not just constrained but pushed aside by the professional administrators”—and others, the argument for further administrative hires is the increasing size and complexity of the Faculty.

“We need more people who can help make things happen as opposed to fewer people, because the biggest problem in University Hall is that FAS is growing so big that its just impossible to make stuff happen,” Cutler said. “My job at times is a full-time job, and I’ve just got one small share of the Faculty that works with me, and so the idea of not having that is just ludicrous.”

The most prominent of the pending hires will be the one to fill Smith’s new planning position, which he describes as sitting between Brian W. Casey, currently the associate dean for academic affairs, and Robert L. Scalise, the interim executive dean. The eventual appointee will focus on coordinating departmental academic aspirations with available resources.

Other administrators will be hired to serve under each of the three divisional deans, signalling an expansion that caused one professor, who asked for anonymity to avoid conflicts with administrators, to say that Smith was being “too respectful of the justice of adding administrative layers.”

“The concerns that [faculty] brought up that extra layers will actually lead to a more inefficient system than an efficient system—I certainly have some experience with organizations and that is absolutely not what we’re trying to do,” Smith said in an interview last week, before explaining that the goal of bolstering the divisional deanships was to push budgetary and decision-making authority to the proper layer of the organization.

“Authorizing a particular position in a particular department is going to be understood better by a divisional dean than by this office,” Smith said.

One of the reasons Smith was selected as dean, University President Drew G. Faust said last spring, was his organizational experience outside of the academy. He was the founder of Liquid Machines, a company that sells digital rights management software to major corporations. But this very experience is sometimes a source of friction with the professors he leads.

“I thought that some of Dean Smith’s comments were couched in a different kind of language than the kind we usually hear in academia—I suppose more like that of a CEO,” Ryan said of Smith’s comments at the Faculty meeting. “I think that some of the things that he quoted seemed to sound like a business advice book.”

Smith said that time, which the Faculty currently appears willing to give him, will bring the critics around to the merits of the new administrative structure.

“We’re certainly being driven through the mission and therefore the Faculty is going to be more accepting of it,” Smith said. “Because what we’re trying to accomplish aligns with what the Faculty is trying to accomplish in both our academic and curricular programs.”

—Staff writer Maxwell L. Child can be reached at mchild@fas.harvard.edu.

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