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{shortcode-21cc3534b02e5a90dd1b6e61be0fe28423896a7e}fter 11 years as Harvard College dean, Rakesh Khurana is unmistakable on campus.

The Harvard College mission statement is his mantra; he recites it to start every meeting and finds ways to declare the College a “transformative” experience in just about every conversation.

It would hardly be Harvard College Housing Day without Khurana making a viral cameo in a dance circle or being photographed with a suggestive sign (“Big Trunk Energy,” featuring Eliot House’s mastodon mascot, was 2025’s winner).

And then there’s the memes.

In 2023, after Harvard lost The Game to Yale, Khurana made a now-infamous Instagram post — on his hands and knees alongside dogs donning the two schools’ merch. On Election Day 2024, a groggy-looking Khurana with an “I Voted Today!” sticker drew bipartisan support in the comment section: blue hearts from the Harvard College Democrats, and an American flag from the Harvard Republican Club.

In short, he has a personality.

“I always encouraged, when I was hiring deans, for them — first and foremost — to be themselves,” Michael D. Smith, the former Faculty of Arts and Sciences dean who hired Khurana in 2014, said. “Dean Khurana was exactly that.”

“He’s been a fantastic College dean,” he added.

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But behind his easygoing persona, Khurana, who has worked under four Harvard presidents and three Faculty of Arts and Sciences deans, has steered the College through one of its most turbulent periods ever.

From 2016 to 2020, Khurana led the unsuccessful fight to make the College’s single-gender social organizations go co-ed by sanctioning their members. Then, he oversaw the College’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic — managing the shift to remote learning and the eventual return to campus.

Of late, he’s assumed a higher-profile role — as one of Harvard’s public faces as it powers through one news cycle after another. He testified in favor of affirmative action in the Supreme Court, met with donors to reassure them as Claudine Gay’s Harvard presidency publicly collapsed, and has backed Harvard’s resistance to the Trump administration’s attacks.

Khurana, who departs the deanship next month, has reshaped what it means — and looks like — to be the dean of Harvard College. In the more than a decade he spent at the College’s helm, he made the role more social, public, and spontaneous — all while advising his fellow administrators behind the scenes.

‘Call Me Rakesh’

Khurana, the College’s first dean to moonlight as an Instagram influencer, has posted more than 2,000 times and boasts over 23,000 followers. By the end of their time at the College, hundreds of students per class can proudly point to pictures of themselves in one of his many photo dumps.

Instagram is just one part of Khurana’s strategy for reaching students. He frequents dining halls for chance meals with undergraduates and regularly stops to chat with students passing through Harvard Yard.

“A lot of what I’m hoping this does is encourage people to walk into University Hall [and] feel like it’s not some kind of cordoned-off place, but rather that it’s also a place that students should feel really comfortable with,” Khurana said in 2014 of his foray into social media.

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Khurana’s reputation for affability predates his College deanship — back to when he and his wife, Stephanie R. Khurana, became the faculty deans of Cabot House in 2010. Christopher B. Cruz ’18, a former Cabot resident, said Khurana and his wife welcomed incoming sophomores into the House by “instantly knowing everyone’s name” on arrival.

Even as dean, Khurana insisted on keeping things casual.

“He insisted that we all call him Rakesh,” Salman Haque ’18, another Cabot alum, said. “I remember friends in other Houses would find it amusing how everyone in Cabot would say ‘Rakesh.’”

Still, students said Khurana knew how to be serious when he needed to be.

Cruz — who was Cabot House’s representative to the Undergraduate Council, the College’s student government at the time — said he could “very easily” eat breakfast with Khurana, laughing with him, and then watch him tackle issues like final club sanctions in meetings that same day. (To Cruz, Khurana is still “Rakesh.”)

Daniel V. “Danny” Banks ’17, the UC’s vice president in 2016, remembered how Khurana maintained his composure even when students yelled at him over controversial issues in meetings.

Banks described Khurana as an active listener — so much so that he inspired Banks, now a practicing lawyer, to adopt his vigorous note-taking strategy. Khurana kept dozens of Moleskine notepads in his office, Banks said.

“He’s processing things that you’re saying,” Banks said. “He brought us into the conversation like we were on equal footing with the President’s wishes — with the faculty’s wishes. That is why I think that I loved working with him so much.”

Khurana’s Lost Battle

But Khurana’s tenure hasn’t been without its controversies. He entered the role with a vision for transforming undergraduate life — and pursued it with conviction.

Two years into his tenure, Khurana went to war with the College’s final clubs — mostly exclusive, single-gender social organizations that are central and often controversial fixtures of the school’s social scene. The more established clubs only take men, and, at the time, a Harvard task force report found that students involved in the final club scene reported higher rates of sexual assault.

Khurana deemed their gender-exclusive policies discriminatory and wrote in 2014 that they were “rife with power imbalances.”

With then-Harvard President Drew Gilpin Faust’s backing, Khurana sanctioned members of unrecognized single-gender social organizations — banning them from holding leadership roles in recognized Harvard clubs. The move impacted final clubs and the few fraternities and sororities on campus.

The administration’s actions immediately drew outrage from students, alumni, and faculty, who accused Khurana of overstepping his powers as dean.

“It was obvious Khurana had no jurisdiction over these students’ private lives,” attorney Harvey A. Silverglate said. Silverglate was one of several lawyers retained by the Fly Club, one of the all-male final clubs, after the sanctions were announced.

“It was foolish, it was overreach — vast overreach,” Silverglate added.

The sanctions roused the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, causing University Hall’s Faculty Room to overflow as faculty members turned out to debate taking a stand against them. Some professors felt the sanctions discriminated against students who joined lawful organizations, while others felt Khurana and Faust had encroached on the FAS’ authority to regulate social life.

Harvard dropped the sanctions in June 2020 after an independent Supreme Court ruling established a broader interpretation of gender discrimination that the University believed was at odds with the policy.

Despite the policy’s unceremonious end — only two final clubs remained co-ed in the long-run — Khurana moved on. Even as the policy, widely seen as Khurana’s brainchild, unraveled, those around him said he not only kept his credibility intact but came out stronger.

“You just try to do the right thing, and it’s not always going to be popular,” Khurana said when asked if he regretted taking up the issue.

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Dean of Arts and Humanities Sean D. Kelly, then a rank-and-file faculty member, said Khurana was able to emerge unscathed from such a polarizing issue because his “heart was in the right place.”

“Hardly any bridges were burned as a result of that quite controversial thing,” Kelly said. “That’s, I think, a testament to his ability to maintain relationships with people, even through quite difficult disagreements.”

Kelly added that Khurana is skilled at navigating “detailed and dense” conversations, even when stress is high.

“In meetings this year, there have been times when there’s real legitimate concern about budgetary issues, financial issues, ‘How are we going to keep the institution running?’” Kelly said. “He’s been able to say, ‘Look, we’re going to make these decisions, and we have to, but we’re not going to make them absent this understanding of what we’re about.’”

Khurana said that, despite the challenges of the last 11 years, he still shows up to work enthusiastically each day.

“Sometimes, in the evenings, I would be like, ‘Oh, that was tough,’” he said. “But in the morning, I would be like, ‘Hello, handsome,’ and everything felt new to me and fresh and possible and exciting.”

“As dean, I’ve tried to do the best I could with what I had, and I wanted my family to be proud of me, and I wanted the students to feel like, even when we didn’t agree, that we were on the shared journey together and we were each trying to do the best for each other,” Khurana added.

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‘The Same Person in Every Place’

In moments of campus tension, Khurana regularly faced public scrutiny from faculty and students. Sometimes, he built trust by hearing people out — even when they strongly disagreed with him.

Government professor Steven Levitsky publicly condemned the Harvard College Administrative Board’s decision to suspend students involved in the 20-day pro-Palestine encampment in Harvard Yard last spring — a decision that, as chair of the Ad Board, Khurana took part in. But despite his criticisms, Levitsky said Khurana always engaged with his perspective.

“I strongly disagreed with him. I let him have it,” said Levitsky, who served on the faculty advisory group for the College dean search that chose Khurana. “To his credit, he always listened. He always picked the phone. He always dialogued.”

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Others said that Khurana’s judgment, though sometimes misunderstood, has been sound. David I. Laibson ’88, the faculty dean of Lowell House, said that he found Khurana’s judgment to be “excellent” based on his “insider’s view” into Khurana’s decision-making.

“I think often the doubt that someone might have relates to the information gap between what Rakesh knows — often something that is confidential — and what the external observer knows,” Laibson said.

The Ad Board’s disciplinary actions against pro-Palestine protesters were criticized by many faculty and students as being too harsh and out of sync with precedent. The FAS subsequently voted to add 13 students — who had been suspended or placed on academic probation — back to the list of graduates, and the Harvard Corporation, the University’s top governing body, ultimately had to step in to settle the matter. Faculty who attended the FAS meeting recalled Khurana was visibly upset at their attempt to overrule the Ad Board.

Phoebe G. Barr ’24, one of the seniors initially barred from graduating, said Khurana’s desire to connect with students rang hollow when he sanctioned student protesters.

“It didn’t feel like he was very present or concerned about his students in that moment,” Barr said, referring to when she was informed of the decision to prevent her from graduating.

Similarly, Clyve Lawrence ’25-’27 told The Crimson in August that Khurana seems to retreat into the background whenever there are issues surrounding student activism.

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“It’s ironic because he’s visible when it comes to student life, but then when it comes to decision-making over things like divestment, he kind of disappears,” Lawrence said. “When it comes to meeting with students about their concerns being doxxed, he kind of disappears.”

College spokesperson Jonathan Palumbo wrote that “Dean Khurana has regularly spoken with student activists to hear their thoughts including as recently as this semester and remains open to those conversations.”

“The College took many steps to support students who were doxed, under Dean Khurana’s leadership, including setting up a task force, meeting with students one-one-one and in groups, standing up a digital safety toolkit with HUIT, working with HUPD to talk to police departments in hometowns of students where the trucks showed up, working with the Mignone Center for Career Success to speak with employers and advocate on behalf of students, among many other steps,” he added.

Whether students or faculty have agreed with him or not, Khurana said his tenure brings him peace because he fought for the issues that mattered to him — and acted based on his interpretation of the Harvard College mission statement.

“I tried to listen to feedback and criticism and always find the truth in it,” Khurana said in a May interview with The Crimson. “But at the same time, when you lead, your job is not to be a weathervane.”

In addition to working with students and faculty, Khurana was one of the first College deans to extensively work with another key constituency: donors.

Michael Smith, the former FAS dean, said Khurana took on a much larger role in fundraising than previous College deans.

“I got to see a couple of different individuals in the College deanship position and they were doing some fundraising, but that really stepped up with Rakesh coming into the position,” Smith said. “I was like, ‘Yeah, let’s let Dean Khurana go out and talk to them.’”

Khurana’s fundraising abilities proved especially useful after donations dropped sharply following criticism of Harvard’s response to Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023 attack on Israel and to campus protests over the war in Gaza. Several major donors paused contributions to the University over what they saw as a failed response to antisemitism on campus.

Khurana was one of several Harvard administrators who were deployed on trips to meet with parents, donors, and alumni to allay their fears about the state of the University and raise funds to offset the University’s losses. When asked about his travel, Khurana said it wasn’t about the money for him.

“I always felt that what I was doing was not raising money in as much as trying to share with people the mission of the College and what we were doing to get advice and feedback from people — to answer questions about what was happening,” Khurana said.

“I tried to engage with our alumni community and our donor community the same way I try to engage with our students and our faculty,” he added. “I try to be the same person in every place and say the same things because I think it’s just easier to remember the truth.”

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Since 2021, Khurana has tried to spearhead an initiative on intellectual vitality at the College to promote civil discourse on contentious topics. Economics professors Jason Furman ’92 and David Laibson both said separately that Khurana often fundraised on the issue, and Furman said Khurana told him donors were excited by it.

“There’s few people as skilled as he is in describing to folks outside the University what we do, what our values are, and it turns out, when you know what we actually do and hear our actual values, most people are excited to support that mission,” Laibson said.

“Dean Khurana’s embrace of intellectual vitality as a major mission of the College in 2021, I think, is a great example of both his core values and the type of mission-based commitment that our alumni and other supporters find reassuring as they think about the future of the University,” he added.

Back to ‘The Bureaucratic Machine’

After more than a decade as dean, Khurana is ready for a change of pace.

Next fall, he will leave the University’s bureaucracy to instead teach a 9 a.m. course titled “The Bureaucratic Machine: A User’s Guide to Modern Society,” in which he will examine the growth of bureaucracy since the late 19th century.

He plans to use his experiences in various bureaucracies throughout his career — including the College — to inform class discussions.

“Very rarely do people not leave my office asking for a rule or a new office, or a new assistant dean, or some new specialized activity,” Khurana said in a February interview. “Part of what I’m really interested in and have been writing about is, ‘why does that happen?’”

“I hope somebody will sign up,” he quipped.

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Khurana had initially hoped to return to teaching last year, but he decided to stay on as dean for one more year at the request of the University’s senior leaders — who were already dealing with significant turnover within their ranks.

In December, Khurana started drafting a letter with some advice for his successor. Though he did not know who would get the job at the time, he already knew what advice he wanted to share.

“You shouldn’t do this job if you don’t love working with students,” Khurana said in February. “You won’t get the fullness out of the role, because the students are our purpose.”

“Life is too short, and we’re too lucky to be in a place like this not to enjoy the work we’re doing,” he added.

—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.