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Updated May 13, 2025, at 4:30 p.m.

Harvard Kennedy School professor David J. Deming will serve as the next dean of Harvard College, Faculty of Arts and Sciences Dean Hopi E. Hoekstra announced in a Tuesday afternoon email.

The decision comes about nine months after current College Dean Rakesh Khurana announced in August that he would step down at the end of this academic year. He has held the position since 2014.

Deming, who serves as Kirkland House faculty dean and also holds an appointment at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, will assume the deanship on July 1. He and his wife, Boston Children’s Hospital administrator Janine M. Santimauro, will step down from their faculty dean roles at the end of June.

Deming will take up his new post as Harvard faces an unprecedented battle with the Trump administration. Hoekstra initially told faculty she hoped to make the announcement earlier in the spring semester to maximize overlap with Khurana’s term, and Deming was interviewed for the deanship at least as far back as March.

Now, his appointment comes as undergraduates begin to leave campus — and the same day as the federal government dealt another $450 million blow to Harvard’s federal funding.

With Deming, Hoekstra has tapped a College dean who is not a vocal figure in campus politics — but has been an outspoken critic of Donald Trump. In a February article in The Atlantic, Deming wrote that the Trump administration’s cuts to research funding will “make America sicker and poorer in the long run.”

Deming will be the first College dean since the office took its modern form in the 1980s not to hold an appointment in the FAS — Harvard’s oldest and most powerful faculty, and the home of Harvard College.

He has nonetheless been heavily involved in undergraduate life through his role as Kirkland’s faculty dean, to which he was appointed in 2020. He began teaching a freshman seminar in 2018.

In the announcement, Hoekstra praised Deming as “recognized and respected expert in higher education research and policy, an inspiring academic leader, and a beloved faculty dean with a deep, authentic connection to undergraduate life.”

“David is uniquely well suited to lead the College at this consequential moment in Harvard’s history,” she wrote.

Deming previously served as the Kennedy School’s academic dean from 2021 to 2024. After former HKS Dean Douglas W. Elmendorf resigned at the end of 2023, Deming emerged as a frontrunner for the deanship, but was ultimately not selected.

Deming’s research focuses on higher education, economic inequality, and evolving labor markets. In 2022, he was awarded the Sherwin Rosen Prize for his contributions to labor economics.

His scholarship involves extensive research on elite universities and social mobility. His work has closely guided Harvard’s own admissions policies — so much so that the University cited a study he co-authored on SAT scores’ predictive power in its decision to reinstate a standardized testing requirement in undergraduate admissions.

Now, Deming will lead the College at a time when faculty and administrators have sought to keep students focused on their work inside the classroom — and to make sure they feel comfortable sharing their viewpoints amid a series of prominent reports showing hesitancy to speak on controversial topics in class.

But the most imminent challenges Deming will face as dean may come from outside of Harvard.

As Harvard grapples with the Trump administration’s nearly $3 billion cuts to Harvard’s federal funding, as well as threats to international students’ status, Deming will have to navigate an unprecedented political climate and adapt accordingly.

Trump’s funding cuts have had their harshest effects on Harvard’s Longwood medical campus, but the FAS — a research powerhouse in its own right whose work is also heavily backed by federal funding — has similarly started to impose austerity measures, including caps on pay and a freeze on staff hiring for the next fiscal year.

The FAS has committed to keeping spending flat in fiscal year 2026 and conducting no new full-time hires — meaning Deming will enter with significant constraints on his ability to shape programs and his staff. The FAS’ guidance, which urged administrators to phase out “low-priority” initiatives, suggests that one of his first tasks may be helping Hoekstra choose where in the College’s budget to make cuts.

The College dean has historically had a limited role in Harvard fundraising. But Khurana has been praised for his work to recruit donors to the College’s Intellectual Vitality Initiative. And Hoekstra praised Deming’s fundraising skills, writing that as director of the Kennedy School’s Malcolm Wiener Center for Social Policy, “he helped recruit top faculty and raise major gifts to support their work.”

A talent for wooing donors and making faculty hires may be an especially coveted quality as Harvard braces for years of ripple effects from Washington’s funding cuts.

Deming’s appointment to College dean will also put him at the helm of the Administrative Board, which faced a legitimacy crisis among student activists and some faculty after it meted out punishments for undergraduates who participated in the pro-Palestine Harvard Yard encampment last spring.

And his appointment was announced around a month after a faculty committee proposed changes to the structure of the College’s disciplinary body, the Administrative Board, after a monthslong review — changes which he may be expected to implement.

But federal lawmakers have also put Harvard’s disciplinary policies under a microscope, and the College may face pressure to take a more punitive line against protesters amid threats from Trump and a lawsuit alleging Harvard permitted antisemitism on campus. Harvard’s governing boards have already moved to centralize some disciplinary cases under University President Alan M. Garber ’76.

As College dean, Khurana has largely refrained from making public statements on the administration’s targeting of international students, despite heightened anxiety among undergraduates, instead directing students to the Harvard International Office.

With just months left of his deanship, Khurana has nonetheless been one of the most visible campus officials — and the only one to continue a tradition of regular interviews with The Crimson. He offered a defense of diversity at Harvard in February and accused the Trump administration of using antisemitism as a pretext to attack Harvard at an April 1 faculty meeting.

Facing a review of billions of dollars in multiyear federal funding commitments to Harvard, Khurana urged Harvard to defend its autonomy — weeks before Harvard rejected wide-ranging demands subsequently imposed by the Trump administration.

Khurana has also been an outsized figure in undergraduate life, omnipresent at campus events, a frequent witness to student protests, and famous for snapping selfies with students. Faced with Khurana’s gregarious 11-year precedent, it remains to be seen whether Deming will carve a similar role for himself on campus.

Deming was born in Nashville, Tennessee, and lived there until his family moved to Shaker Heights, Ohio — a Cleveland suburb — when he was 15. He holds undergraduate degrees from the Ohio State University in political science and economics, a master’s in public policy from the University of California, Berkeley, and a Ph.D. from Harvard through the Kennedy School’s public policy program.

He first taught at Carnegie Mellon University before returning to Harvard in 2011 and earning tenure in 2016.

—Staff writer Samuel A. Church can be reached at samuel.church@thecrimson.com. Follow him on X @samuelachurch.

—Staff writer Cam N. Srivastava can be reached at cam.srivastava@thecrimson.com. Follow him on X @camsrivastava.