Despite a recent media focus on campus protests and changes in institutional leadership, substantive academic planning at Harvard is going on all the time, including curricular innovations and faculty growth in fields spanning both arts and sciences. Harvard Magazine spoke in January with Martignetti professor of philosophy Sean Kelly, dean of arts and humanities (A&H), a division within the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS), and with Colony professor of computer science David Parkes, dean of the Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), to learn about their priorities and agendas. Both are relatively new to their decanal roles, but have been deeply involved in helping shape the dimensions of a Harvard education.
• Arts and humanities. Kelly, who became A&H dean last July, has been thinking about the role of humanistic learning in undergraduate education for a long time, notably as chair of a 2013 working group report on “The Teaching of the Arts and Humanities at Harvard College: Mapping the Future.” In 2015, he chaired the broader General Education review committee that found the program lacking; he then led its overhaul later that year. As dean he is leading a faculty effort to develop new introductory undergraduate humanities courses.
Arts and humanities enrollments have been declining nationwide (see “Humanists All,” January-February 2023, page 34), but within Harvard, that is not universally true: in certain fields—including philosophy, Kelly’s home department—the number of concentrators has risen dramatically. “When I arrived in 2006,” he says, “we had around 30 concentrators.” Now there are almost 160. What changed, Kelly says, was the curricular approach. Instead of ensuring that every concentrator was being prepared to pursue a Ph.D. in philosophy, the department began offering rigorous courses that would nevertheless “invite students into the discipline” by teaching the field’s methods and practices through a topic students would find interesting, such as what it means to live a meaningful life. “I believe,” he says, “that was at least part of the success of the philosophy department.”
A few other introductory courses like this exist already across the division. Humanities 10, taught by Bass professor of English Louis Menand and Cogan University Professor Stephen Greenblatt, is “hugely successful,” Kelly points out, attracting 400 applicants each year for a course limited to 90 students. Philosophy 16, a new course on sex, love, and friendship taught by professor of philosophy Gina Schouten, has also generated significant undergraduate interest.
Now Kelly wants to “incentivize the design and teaching of more great introductory courses” by senior faculty. Developing such courses, he hopes, will help stem the decline in interest in the arts and humanities that students exhibit after their first year at the College. “The goal is not primarily to attract more concentrators,” he explains, but to “introduce more students to the value of what we do” in the arts and humanities,” to “make their lives richer… no matter what they go on to do.” Kelly is gathering new course proposals now, with the hope of introducing a few this fall.
Looking ahead, he will meet in February with colleagues from several different disciplines to explore “an opportunity that most other institutions don’t have…to become places where the creative and the critical come together and interact with one another.” Harvard has writers and teachers of literature, he points out, “film theorists and film producers, art critics and painters.” Creating master of fine arts programs in departments such as English, music, and art, film and visual studies, or in the theater, dance, and media (TDM) concentration has been discussed before, but Kelly thinks that risks siloing creative faculty; instead, with TDM as a potential starting point, he envisions the scholars benefitting from the imaginative capacities of creators, and the creators benefitting from the rigor and critical thinking of the scholars. By “combining these two approaches to the written word, to artworks, to music, and to performance,” he believes, Harvard could create a “uniquely generative” undergraduate program.
• Science and engineering. One in four current undergraduates are engineering concentrators, stunning growth for SEAS since its establishment as a school in 2007. But only one in seven FAS faculty members, David Parkes points out, teach within SEAS. To address that imbalance, the school has been actively making new appointments: 15 since January 2023, seven of them since Parkes became dean that October. (Three of those appointments, of world-leading junior machine-learning experts, have been “extremely competitive” joint hires with the Kempner Institute for the Study of Natural and Artificial Intelligence, an independent entity housed in the school’s Science and Engineering Complex.) The school currently plans to make up to eight additional appointments, he says, “but there is a lot more we need to be doing to get up to world-leading strengths” in three focus areas identified by the faculty: artificial intelligence; climate and energy (with a particular focus on technological solutions); and health engineering.
“In each area where we have the capability to lead,” says Parkes, “if we are going to have an impact, we need to understand the societal connection. AI is much broader than something just being studied by computer scientists,” he adds: for instance, “It is cross-school and it is going to transform research and education just as much as it’s going to transform society.” (A collaboration with FAS will explore these impacts.) In the realm of climate, energy, and sustainability, he continues, “we have a lot of strength in climate modeling”—but solutions will require expertise in areas including materials science, electrical engineering, and computer science. And health engineering entails “more than solving a technical bioengineering problem in drug delivery,” he explains. The technology needs to scale, to be economic, and to work within regulatory constraints. “If you are going to address human health at scale,” he explains, “you have to get all these other pieces right”—perhaps suggesting ties to Harvard experts in government, law, and other pertinent fields.
Alongside this focus on faculty growth, the dean’s plans include reviewing the undergraduate engineering curriculum, developing a co-curricular entrepreneurship program, launching a new concentration in technology for energy and sustainability, and unveiling new master’s degree and professional development programs aligned with the school’s priorities. (The master’s of data science program Parkes helped create in 2018 is now the most competitive in the nation—almost as selective as the College.) Also on the agenda is renewal of the school’s Cambridge facilities in collaboration with FAS, including Maxwell Dworkin (1999) and Pierce Hall (1901). In Allston, completion of the first phase of construction at the commercial enterprise research campus, just a few hundred yards from the dean’s office in the Science and Engineering Complex, may lead to further entrepreneurship opportunities for a school, Parkes notes proudly, that already generates “more spinoffs and intellectual property, per capita, than any other” within the University.
