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At the end of his first year as Harvard’s Arts and Humanities dean, Philosophy professor Sean D. Kelly has been thinking big about how to make the humanities work for career-driven undergrads — and taking small steps to support faculty in the division.
But some bigger changes have been put on hold as the Faculty of Arts and Sciences tightens its budget following the Trump administration’s moves to axe federal funding.
When Kelly took office, a stack of major proposed changes swiftly hit his desk in the form of a strategic planning report completed under previous dean Robin E. Kelsey.
Faced with an extraordinary start to his tenure, Kelly has taken up some of the report’s recommendations, but he’s also — in incremental actions and broader philosophical musings — started to develop his own vision for the division.
An Arts and Humanities “support group” hired roughly a dozen centralized administrative support staff for all departments prior to Harvard’s hiring freeze, and Kelly has been steadily working with faculty to develop new introductory courses. He even plans to bring on an intern over the summer to put together a report on core curricula at other universities — possibly a template for a more centralized humanities curriculum at Harvard.
And when he arrived for an interview last week, Kelly had just finished a call with staff at Harvard’s career services center and institutional research office, where he discussed compiling a report on what humanities grads do after graduation.
“What kinds of things do they go on to do? What kinds of skills and habits of mind do they get through study of the arts and humanities?” Kelly said. “How does that prepare them for their career trajectory?”
However, a pause on the hiring process to fill a new assistant dean for arts and humanities education position has been a major roadblock to implementing some broader recommendations from the strategic plan, Kelly said.
Those changes include turning Ethnicity, Migration, and Rights — currently offered as a secondary — into a concentration.
Kelly hoped that the new assistant dean would start the conversations necessary for this process. Especially without the position, “we literally just haven’t had the opportunity to talk about it,” Kelly said.
“We’ll take them up when we can, when we have the staff to do it,” he added.
The 2024 report also proposed turning the standing committee of Theater, Dance, and Media into a department. The current standing committee, which oversees the curriculum for Harvard’s TDM concentration, is unable to host ladder faculty.
Kelly said the proposal is not a priority for him at the moment.
“Since it started, I haven’t had the opportunity or the bandwidth, or the support across the division to try to institute that change,” Kelly said. “The current financial circumstance, though, makes it maybe not the first thing that we’ll be doing.”
The report also proposed the introduction of two interdisciplinary coordinating committees, with one for the arts and one for the humanities, along with a standing committee on the Interdisciplinary Study of Society and Culture.
The proposed coordinating committees for the arts and the humanities will be advisory groups, not standing committees or departments. Kelly said he hopes to invite faculty to sit on the groups and set them up over the summer to start next year.
The proposed ISCC standing committee, however, would be a major reorganization of several programs — with a much more complex startup process. It would involve dissolving at least three standing committees — History and Literature; Ethnicity, Migration, and Rights; and Folklore and Mythology — that currently oversee concentrations, then replacing them with a new committee.
Kelly estimated that the process of voting to dissolve the existing committees or waiting for them to expire, then setting up a new standing committee, could take two years — likely followed by another year of piloting the new structure.
Kelly said he thought humanists could also benefit from reconsidering how they design and conceive of undergraduate programs. Historically, he said, Harvard has understood the goal of concentrations as preparing students to continue in a “first-rate Ph.D. program” in their discipline. Today, departments should also think about how their programs benefit students who choose other careers, he said.
—Staff writer Ellen P. Cassidy can be reached at ellen.cassidy@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X at @ellenpcassidy.
—Staff writer Catherine Jeon can be reached at catherine.jeon@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X at @cathj186.
