Since taking the helm as Danoff Dean of Harvard College a year ago, David Deming has seen students burdened by their own expectation that every step of their future should already be planned. Last week, he set out to address it.
His platform of choice? A podcast featuring long-form interviews with distinguished Harvard alumni and public leaders.
The debut episode, released on May 27, featured Angela Duckworth ’92, a psychology professor at the University of Pennsylvania and author of the book Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance. The second episode was released on June 3, featuring New York Times opinion columnist Ross Douthat ’02.
Rather than spotlighting the achievements of his well-accomplished guests, Deming aims to explore “the uncertainty, detours, and relationships that shape a person long before success becomes visible,” according to a statement promoting the launch of the series. The podcast’s name, “The Context Window with David Deming,” is a nod to both the known limitations of artificial intelligence and the idea of looking beyond polished success stories to understand what shaped influential people.
“I had a lot of conversations with students about a lot of things in my first year,” Deming said in an interview, “but a theme that kept coming up was a sense of uncertainty about the future and a sense among students that they have to plan out their lives from point A to point Z.”
“But when I thought about how it played out in my own life and the lives of lots of other people,” Deming continued, most “can’t really predict with any accuracy what the next three to five years is going to be like in their lives—much less the next 10 or 15 or 20.”
Each episode runs from 50 to 90 minutes, tying together a biographical interview and a conversation on “how AI, economics, higher education, and the changing nature of work are reshaping opportunity and identity,” according to the statement.
Deming, an economist who has studied the impact of AI on the labor market, said the podcast was also, in part, a way to reconnect with his academic interests while serving as dean.
“I don’t have as much time for research as I would like, but I still really care about these things, and I feel it’s important to remind students and alums and everybody that the people who sit in these jobs are scholars and academics, and we do care about ideas,” Deming said. “I wanted to do that side of the job too, and not just the administrative side.”
Across the two episodes published so far, Deming’s conversations frequently came back to the topic of uncertainty.
Duckworth—who studied at Oxford University, worked as a McKinsey consultant, and received a MacArthur “genius grant” after leaving Harvard—spoke about her decade-long period of career uncertainty before she ultimately decided to pursue her Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania.
“If you ask me how many years I was lost—capital-L lost—in terms of what I was really going to be happy doing professionally, I would say ten,” Duckworth said. “Like age 22 to 32, I was lost.”
Even while at Harvard, Duckworth said her life often appeared much more successful than it felt. “When I was at Harvard, I was very unhappy,” she said. “I was very accomplished, I was very energetic. But I really have to say, I wasn’t happy.”
She explained that her award-winning senior thesis and extensive off-campus public service in Cambridge schools often came at the expense of her friendships—and sleep.
“There are 168 hours in a week. Don’t make all 168 of them a race to get ahead,” she said, encouraging students to see the value in maintaining relationships, even when day-to-day work feels like a higher priority.
Upcoming guests include Harvard Corporation member Mariano-Florentino “Tino” Cuéllar ’93, former Massachusetts governor Deval L. Patrick ’78, and former Goldman Sachs chairman and chief executive officer Lloyd C. Blankfein ’75.
Deming said he intentionally turned to the College’s alumni as a starting point—using Harvard as a setting that “establishes some rapport and some familiarity” for the early episodes, though he welcomes non-Harvard guests.
For Duckworth, who said she is a “huge David Deming fan,” recording the episode at her alma mater was an easy choice.
“I’m feeling especially loyal to Harvard these days, because I admire some difficult choices that the University has to make in the current political and cultural climate, and I’m very proud to be an alum of a school that I think is taking a principled stand on difficult issues,” Duckworth said in an interview.
Deming is the first Harvard College Dean to host a podcast. His predecessor, Rakesh Khurana, pushed the once-subdued administrative position into the spotlight with his student-centric Instagram posts, and Deming has also carried on Khurana’s social media presence, often taking to Instagram reels to answer student questions and highlight College programming.
Deming said he hopes his long-form content will “continue to pay off over time,” as people can revisit the episodes. “I hope that it will generate some conversations for me and for others that will make campus life more interesting and richer.”
