When Marla Frederick began her tenure as dean of Harvard Divinity School (HDS) in January 2024, the campus was engulfed in turmoil over the war in Gaza. Student protests were intensifying (though the encampment in the Yard had not yet begun), complaints about antisemitism were rising, and within days, Claudine Gay would be forced out of her job as Harvard president.
Those upheavals, and their intersection with religion, heightened the significance of Frederick’s first major undertaking as dean: a months-long process to examine the school’s mission and set priorities for the future. In late October, HDS released the results of that process, a five-year strategic plan that emphasizes a commitment to religious pluralism. Citing growing religious diversity in the U.S., religion’s “dual role in fueling and resolving conflicts,” and the pervasive influence of religion in politics, HDS’s planning document lays out four broad priorities:
- advance and strengthen the academic study of religion;
- fully realize the promise of a multireligious academic environment;
- prepare students to lead in a multireligious world; and
- enhance HDS visibility, reach, and impact.
In an interview with this magazine last week, Frederick discussed some of the concrete steps underway to achieve these goals, and the urgency—and hope—in doing so. “If we’re going to be successful at this experiment of a multireligious, multiracial democracy,” she said, “places like Harvard Divinity School,” founded in 1816 as the country’s first nonsectarian theological school, “are at the center of these conversations.” A scholar and ethnographer of the African American religious experience, Frederick previously taught at Harvard for 16 years before departing in 2019 for Emory University.
The past two years of division over the war in Gaza, she said, have been “a painful time” for HDS. The school became a frequent locus of campus clashes. In November 2024, students were temporarily suspended from the HDS library after staging a pro-Palestinian “pray-in” there. Then, this past February, two top leaders of HDS’s Religion and Public Life (RPL) program—which had become a target of complaints about antisemitism (and was singled out as problematic in the April report from the University’s antisemitism task force)—departed abruptly. In his resignation letter, one of the departing leaders accused Harvard of anti-Muslim prejudice and interference. (Harvard’s task force report on anti-Muslim bias, released in April, expressed a similar concern and listed RPL as one of the few sites on campus that hosted events and educational opportunities “that represent the Palestinian situation—historically and in the current context, especially the ongoing humanitarian crises.”)
In March, HDS suspended its Religion, Conflict, and Peace Initiative, a major component of RPL, in order to “rethink its focus and reimagine its future.” The institute had faced criticism that its programming was one-sided in favor of Palestinian viewpoints. The suspension prompted an outcry from alumni who saw the move as anti-Palestinian. Then in late May, the school’s Commencement speaker went off-script to highlight the conditions in Gaza, generating fresh controversy.
“I think people across the divide felt misunderstood,” said Frederick of the past two years, “and it’s taken ongoing conversations to bring people together to heal.” She praised the work of HDS’s Office of Community and Belonging, which hosts a series of lunchtime events for students, using a restorative justice framework, she said, “to talk about what it looks like to engage people who have different ideas and opinions than you, and how to engage them in a way that builds community and understanding.” In response to concerns raised in Harvard’s task force reports on antisemitism and anti-Muslim bias, she added, Melissa Wood Bartholomew, the associate dean for community and belonging, is planning upcoming workshops on antisemitism and Islamophobia.
Many of the changes underway at HDS are curricular. The strategic plan calls for continued development of the religion and public life master’s degree, launched in 2021 as a cornerstone of RPL and designed for mid-career professionals from a wide array of non-religious industries. The plan also calls for a curriculum review to strengthen the Master of Divinity Program, a three-year degree intended to prepare students for roles in religious communities, as well as for nonprofit and public service work.
Frederick also described plans to expand HDS’s ministry training. “We’re strong in the academic study of religion,” she said, explaining that faculty members can teach students about numerous religious traditions. When it comes to ministerial training, however, the school’s main focus has been on Christianity. “But we also have people here who want to lead synagogues or want to lead a mosque, and historically, they’ve had to kind of shape shift and go through our Christian ministry study to come to an understanding of how to do ministry in their context.” Now HDS is working to build ministry initiatives that focus on Jewish, Muslim, and Hindu practice. “We have a faculty committee working together,” Frederick said. “We’re fundraising around building out those initiatives.”
An approximate model for these new programs, Frederick continued, is the school’s Buddhism Ministry Initiative, established in 2011. That program offers courses on the religion’s history, thought, and practice, as well as on Buddhist languages and Buddhist arts of ministry. In addition, the program supports field education for students at hospitals and other places of pastoral care.
The Jewish initiative got underway this year, Frederick said, and HDS has made some related faculty hires in Jewish studies, though some have proven controversial, drawing public complaints that the faculty remains tilted toward anti-Zionism, creating an unwelcoming atmosphere for many Jewish students. One prominent new hire is the rabbi and scholar Shaul Magid, who had been a visiting professor at HDS for two years before being named a professor of modern Jewish studies in residence. Magid is an expert on Hasidism, Jewish thought, and Jewish mysticism. His 2023 book, The Necessity of Exile: Essays from a Distance, argues that although Zionism was once a necessary ideology, Israel’s position as an exclusively “Jewish state” now stands in the way of equality and democratic ideals.
Rabbi David Wolpe was one of those who criticized Magid’s appointment. Wolpe was a member of a Harvard antisemitism advisory committee formed by then-President Claudine Gay in the wake of of the October 7, 2023, Hamas terrorist attack on Israel, but he resigned in frustration that December. Regarding Magid’s new role at HDS, Wolpe wrote on X this past June: “Shaul Magid is a gracious human being & an estimable scholar of Jewish texts, notably Hasidism. I profoundly disagree with his stance on Israel and wish HDS would appoint someone whose views reflect the mainstream of the Jewish community.”
Asked for a comment on Wolpe’s criticism, an HDS spokesperson pointed to the school’s June statement announcing Magid’s new role. In that statement, Frederick said, “His appointment affirms our mission to engage critically and compassionately with the complexities of religious life today…His teaching has been met with enthusiasm and acclaim from students, and he has played an important role in helping to shape scholarly programs at Harvard Divinity School.”
In last week’s interview, Frederick also talked about the importance of building “empathy, understanding, and respect for people of various traditions,” and she described the school’s requirement that Ph.D. students take a course in a religious tradition outside their focus. “The curriculum is built to encourage students to understand other traditions, even as they’re learning their own.” She also praised HDS’s longstanding collaboration with the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS). The two institutions share a degree-granting program, the Committee on the Study of Religion, which offers both a doctoral and an undergraduate concentration. Most of the roughly 115 courses that HDS offers each semester are cross-listed in the FAS catalog.
Part of the strategic plan calls for increasing HDS’s visibility and impact, and to that end, the school is in the process of building a “professional and lifelong learning” program. So far, two components have launched. One is a three-day mindfulness curriculum led by Buddhist chaplains and mental health professionals. The other, begun this past June in partnership with the Jerusalem-based Shalom Hartman Institute, is the Black and Jewish Leadership Initiative. Designed for senior professionals in higher education, business, and the nonprofit sector, the new initiative offers a six-day training focused on religious pluralism, civil discourse, and coalition building. Its curriculum draws lessons from Black and Jewish alliances in American history, including the civil rights movement.
Other elements of the lifelong learning program are yet to be determined, Frederick says. “What we’re thinking about is, how do we make the richness of HDS available to a wider community? So, we’ve been meeting and thinking about what that looks like and developing committees to help us work on it.”
As HDS looks to the future, one bright spot in particular buoys Frederick: more people than ever are interested in attending the school. At a time when many divinity schools are struggling to attract students and the number of people interested in ministry is declining, applications at HDS have been rising every year. According to school officials, 2024 saw a 12.8 percent increase over 2023, and 2025 saw an even bigger jump of 25 percent. The gains stretch across HDS, Frederick said, from Ph.D. programs designed to send graduates into research and academia, to the master’s programs that train students for ministry, to additional master’s programs that prepare students for work in civic organizations. “A number of students are coming here because they’re trying to think about how to help lead community organizations and nonprofits,” she said. Those organizations “are not necessarily faith-based,” she added, “but often they’re dealing with the human condition, whether it’s housing or grief care or violence in the community.”
Yet another category of graduates does none of the above. Instead, Frederick said, “They take what they’ve learned here and translate it back to their industry.” Those graduates, she said, work in fields like entertainment, media, law, and business.
The school’s master’s programs in divinity, theological studies, and religion and public life saw especially large surges in applications, Frederick said. “This is a dynamic place,” she said, “to study religion and think about religious life.”
