A Critical Hire at FAS
At a crucial moment, as it faces a $350 million deficit caused partly by the federal government’s actions, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) has hired a new dean of administration and finance. Warren Petrofsky, a veteran of Cornell University who has led significant transformations in academic administration throughout his career, will start on April 20, taking up a position that has been vacant since the summer of 2025. The role “is central to the work ahead,” said Edgerley Family Dean of the FAS Hopi Hoekstra, who has warned faculty members about impending cuts and difficult choices ahead. “This is a moment,” she said, “that calls for disciplined financial stewardship, thoughtful implementation of a reimagined administrative model, and continued modernization of our systems and processes in service of teaching and research.”
The Harvard Corporation’s New Fellows
Sylvia Mathews Burwell ’87 and Michael S. Chae ’90 will join the Harvard Corporation, the University’s senior governing board, beginning on July 1. Burwell, the U.S. secretary of health and human services under President Barack Obama, J.D. ’91, previously served as president of American University. Chae, a director of Harvard Management Company (HMC) since 2024, is the vice chairman and chief financial officer of Blackstone, the world’s largest manager of alternative assets—the dominant category of HMC’s endowment investments. Burwell and Chae will fill two of three vacancies on the board. Venture capitalist Kenneth I. Chenault, J.D. ’76, and private equity investor Karen Gordon Mills ’75, M.B.A. ’77, conclude their service at the end of June, while Carolyn A. “Biddy” Martin, a leader in higher education, completed her service earlier this year.
Further Epstein Fallout
Eliot University professor and former Harvard president Lawrence H. Summers announced his resignation from the University in February—a move that stemmed from the government’s release of millions of documents related to the federal investigation of convicted child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Summers, the University president from 2001 to 2006, had been on leave from Harvard since November 2025 following revelations that he and Epstein had remained in close contact long after Epstein’s initial conviction as a child sex offender in 2008. Harvard opened a new investigation into its affiliates’ ties to Epstein last November and expanded the probe in February to include donors as well as faculty. Also in February, professor of mathematics and biology Martin Nowak was placed on paid administrative leave for a second time by the FAS, in response to new information pertaining to his dealings with Epstein. Nowak was first placed on paid administrative leave in 2021 based on information uncovered during a previous investigation into Epstein ties.
Kempner’s Computing Power
A major expansion of the supercomputer at the Kempner Institute for the Study of Natural and Artificial Intelligence has transformed it into one of the most powerful AI clusters in the world, capable of performing more than a quintillion (a billion billion) mathematical operations per second. The upgrade delivers 1.79 exaFLOPS of performance, allowing large- and small-scale experiments to run simultaneously. The supercharged platform, housed at the Green High Performance Computing Center in Holyoke, Massachusetts, will allow researchers to develop large language models with fundamentally new capabilities and AI agents capable of solving problems independently in a series of reasoned steps.
Radcliffe Acquires a Black Feminist’s Archive
The radcliffe Institute’s Schlesinger Library has acquired the papers of Black feminist scholar and activist Barbara Smith. Smith is an architect of Black feminism and Black women’s studies who ushered into the cultural lexicon concepts such as “identity politics” and “intersectionality,” an approach to understanding how overlapping identities—such as race, class, gender, and sexuality—can compound or complicate a person’s experience of inequality. The collection should be publicly available by early 2028.
House Donations for a Day
Harvard College introduced a new donation program for Housing Day, when first-years learn where they will live for the next three years—and drew eye-catching results. For 24 hours this year, alumni could make donations directly to their residential Houses; usually, donations to student life are shared across the College. Adams House coasted to gold, with 444 donations totaling $170,051, followed by Lowell with 403 donations and $51,310, and Eliot with 72 donations and $11,813. In last place was Kirkland, with 30 donations totaling $2,411. The fundraising competition is likely to become an annual event. In other College news: Nancy Hill, Bigelow professor of education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and her husband, Rendall Howell, will become the new faculty deans at Currier House beginning on July 1. Hill, a developmental psychologist whose research focuses on parenting, is the co-author of The End of Adolescence: The Lost Art of Delaying Adulthood. Hill and Howell replace Paul professor of the practice of government and technology Latanya Sweeney and Sylvia Barrett, who led Currier House for the past decade.
