Dean Allan M. Brandt
Academic Year 2010–2011

Major Achievements

Harvard Tops National Research Council Rankings

Harvard University’s doctoral programs received exceptionally strong evaluations in the National Research Council’s long-awaited assessment of research doctoral programs, released on September 28, 2010.

The National Research Council (NRC) report, containing both a rating and a ranking of 4,838 programs in 62 fields at 212 institutions, shows that in the dominant, core disciplines that are crucial to the overall strength of any institution of higher learning, our PhD programs are remarkably strong, vibrant, and successful.

Especially impressive is the breadth of excellence that the NRC has found at Harvard. Ninety percent of GSAS programs are in the highest tier of the NRC rankings, which are based on quantitative measures and faculty assessment. More than half of GSAS programs are the very highest ranked in the country.

The NRC report is the result of a complex and serious process that engaged faculty in the work of assessing their own strengths and ambitions, as well as evaluating peer programs. But like all rankings of higher education programs, it has limitations in methodology and in the currency of its data. Rather than focusing exclusively on the numbered rankings, GSAS expanded the context in which these results were received, so that the NRC report stood as a reminder of the importance of graduate education in the United States and in the larger global society.

A Record Year for Admissions

The Graduate School’s admissions efforts in 2010–2011 were characterized by thoughtful collaboration with departments and strong results. GSAS received nearly 12,000 applications—a record high. Offers of admission were made to roughly 9 percent of that pool, 1,188 applicants, as compared with 1,127 in the previous year. In total, the entering class for 2011–2012 is made up of 637 PhD candidates and 82 AM candidates.

The GSAS is especially pleased to report that the PhD programs in East Asian Languages and Civilizations, Inner Asian and Altaic Studies, Music, South Asian Studies, Anthropology, Architecture, and Organizational Behavior enjoyed yields of 100 percent. Other examples of high-yielding programs: Organismic and Evolutionary Biology (90 percent), Psychology (82 percent), History of American Civilization (80 percent), and Government (79 percent).

In the social sciences and humanities, overall yields were above 70 percent. In the natural sciences, the GSAS continues to yield above 60 percent.

Beyond the numbers, the accomplishments of GSAS incoming students are remarkable. Many have already logged significant academic achievements, including major publications and real-world experience, making their admissions files look in many cases like the dossiers of newly appointed assistant professors.

Significant Progress Toward Recruiting a Diverse Student Population

Over the last decade, despite ongoing efforts, the number of underrepresented American minorities seeking the PhD at Harvard has remained at just below 5 percent. This year, GSAS took several steps to begin to more aggressively address this issue, starting with the appointment of an assistant dean for diversity and minority affairs, Dr. Sheila Thomas.

With this new appointment, GSAS worked proactively with key departments to raise their awareness of strategies to identify and recruit talented minorities, as well as to help them rethink approaches in which qualified candidates might be overlooked.

During the 2011­–2012 admission cycle, Dean Brandt asked committees in the departments to select and discuss the best minority candidates in their applicant pool. This proved to be a useful exercise for identifying critical aspects of the admissions process that bear especially on the applications of candidates from less well-known institutions.

These interventions had a dramatic impact. In the 2011–2012 admissions cycle, GSAS admitted the largest number of minority students in recent memory. Second, and more important, it successfully recruited the largest number of minority students in the history of GSAS: 48 students, nearly 70 percent of those admitted, chose to matriculate (compared with 29 students, or less than 50 percent of those admitted, last year) thanks in great part to diligent work by our faculty to build relationships with admitted students. Nearly 6.5 percent of the incoming 2011–2012 class will be from underrepresented minority groups.

Three New Secondary Fields Enhance Interdisciplinary Opportunities

A central issue for enhancing the experience of students involves developing appropriate interdisciplinary opportunities that expand the curricular boundaries of our departments and programs. One strategy for achieving this has been the development of secondary fields for graduate study. This year the Graduate Policy Committee approved three new secondary fields, all committed to particular interdisciplinary areas of inquiry: Science, Technology, and Society; Critical Media Practice; and Computational Science and Engineering.

PhD students may now enroll in a secondary field in 14 areas of study at GSAS. These secondary fields—which typically consist of a set of four or five graduate courses in a discipline, interdisciplinary area, or intellectually coherent subfield—are of great interest to the increasing number of students who want to broaden the scholarly or professional reach of their degree work. Each of the newly approved fields also has the potential to expand significantly the kind of analytic skills that will strengthen field-based research.

Seizing the Opportunities Presented by January@GSAS

The adoption of a University calendar is yielding important opportunities for student engagement and professional development at GSAS. Taking advantage of the fact that GSAS students typically stay close to Cambridge and Longwood for most of winter break, the Graduate School continued to define and expand the January experience it has offered to students for two years—a series of intellectual, recreational, and skill-building opportunities known as January@GSAS.

GSAS and affiliated units—ranging broadly across Harvard’s resource centers and including the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, the Graduate Student Council, the Office of Career Services, and the Harvard College Library—presented approximately 75 programs or events. According to a student survey conducted by the Registrar’s Office, the most popular offerings were career programs (for instance, a program on creating a professional identity online); a course on science writing; library workshops on critical research tools; and recreational offerings at Dudley House, notably a student-led tour of the Art of the Americas Wing at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the annual Dudley ski trip.

For the second year, the Graduate Student Council sponsored and, in some cases, funded mini-courses taught by graduate students for a nonexpert audience of their GSAS peers. These courses—on subjects ranging from mathematical games to Russian culture to the psychology of happiness—were more popular among students and better planned and executed than those offered last year. This evolution of programming is welcome, and the GSAS will continue these courses in 2011–2012.

Recognizing the Central Role of Dudley House

The Graduate School celebrates an important milestone in 2011: the 20th anniversary of Dudley House as the graduate student center. GSAS began the celebration by hosting a very successful reunion of former Dudley Fellows, coinciding with our annual Alumni Weekend (April 1­–2, 2011). This event drew GSAS alumni from around the country, as well as current GSAS students who served as fellows earlier in their programs.

The commemoration will continue this fall, with targeted events at Dudley House all term and a campus celebration scheduled for October 27. That day will feature an open house and entertainment in the Dudley courtyard, as well as a gala dinner in the Dudley dining hall for University officials and GSAS alumni who were key to the establishment of Dudley House as a central point of connection for graduate students at Harvard.

When Dudley was dedicated as the graduate student center in 1991, the idea of building a graduate community was still considered experimental. Harvard recognized in those early days the importance of mitigating the isolating nature of the graduate experience and fostering social and intellectual interaction among students across disciplines. The experiment has been a grand success and a model for Harvard’s peers.

Ongoing Initiatives to Enhance Graduate Education

A Commitment to Preparing Our International Teaching Fellows

GSAS helped support the launch of an innovative and well-received training course for international teaching fellows created by the Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning. The course, called “Classroom Communication Skills for International TFs,” is a student-centered, highly interactive course designed to help international graduate students develop the oral communication skills needed to be successful in their programs, with a particular emphasis on skills necessary for teaching in the Harvard classroom. The course focuses on improving impromptu speaking skills, delivering short talks, answering questions effectively, and engaging in small talk. It also offers the chance to practice general pedagogical strategies for teaching undergraduates.

With continuing support from GSAS, the Bok Center will offer the course again in 2011–2012, among other offerings for international teaching fellows. GSAS has helped to ensure the resources necessary to expand the capacity of the Bok Center to serve and support this critical population, who—as waiting lists for last year’s course showed—are interested in and highly receptive to such intervention.

Best Practices in Mentoring and Advising

Directors of Graduate Studies as Faculty Leaders
Since the start of his deanship, Dean Brandt has made a commitment to ensuring that departments and programs meet best practices in the advising and mentoring of GSAS students. As one means of addressing this goal, he has taken steps to strengthen the community of directors of graduate studies. DGSs now participate in a yearly retreat and meet regularly during the academic year. This group has emerged as a community of faculty leaders who now easily share their own successful practices across departments and divisions, and who discuss the issues—time to degree, progress to degree, funding—that are critical to managing a productive graduate program.

Benchmarking Student Progress
GSAS has refined its student progress database to include key benchmarks of graduate students’ progress, making it easy to identify students who require greater attention. An experiment with student self-evaluations is also being explored as a means to provide additional perspectives on a student’s progress and status.

Student-Driven Mentoring Guidelines
Working closely with the Graduate Student Council, GSAS has developed a set of guidelines and best practices for new faculty on mentoring and advising.

Enhancing the Undergraduate Curriculum: Graduate Seminars in General Education

The Graduate Seminars in General Education, an initiative announced by Dean Brandt in the spring of 2008, give faculty and graduate students the opportunity to jointly undertake the planning and development of courses for the undergraduate General Education curriculum. They have quickly become institutionalized as a key mechanism for introducing new and innovative courses. Eight new seminars were offered this year, totaling over 30 in three years. More than a third have produced formal proposals or new Gen Ed courses.

In these innovative seminars, students think critically about lectures, assignments, exams, and learning goals. Faculty uniformly describe the seminars as among their best teaching experiences with graduate students.

As a result of this program, the Bok Center developed a grant for a seminar on course development for graduate students. This course received funding from the Teagle Foundation this year and was well received.

Innovative Research Workshops

The GSAS Research Workshops Program encourages scholarly discussion of works-in-progress by supporting weekly gatherings in departments or fields. These workshops, proposed by faculty and students and selected for funding by a GSAS committee, are collegial settings for graduate students learning to conceive, write, and present scholarly arguments. They also offer faculty members an opportunity to share drafts of their scholarly work. Grants of up to $5,000 per year are available for projects in the humanities and social sciences. The GSAS has supported 226 workshops to date.

Achievements in Alumni Affairs and Development

GSAS continued this year to develop and present a robust set of programs to engage its alumni. A successful alumni reunion for the Department of Economics was held in conjunction with the annual Alumni Day, drawing alums from around the world back to campus in April.

The Graduate School Alumni Council remains active and engaged, meeting on campus in the fall and spring. The connections between the Graduate School Fund and the council were strengthened over the last year. The Centennial Medals, which the council awards to an elite group of high-achieving GSAS alumni, represent an annual highlight.

GSAS alumni played a significant role in an event offered in April by the Office of Career Services, called “Leveraging Your PhD in the Workplace.” An overflow crowd attended this event, designed for students considering a nonacademic career track. Alumni who had made the leap to nonprofit, corporate, governmental, and other nonacademic sectors joined a large panel discussion and shared key lessons and advice.

A major aspect of Dean Brandt’s work with alumni over the past year centered on the Interface Committee, which he co-chaired with Ashley Leeds AB ‘80. The committee, a group of distinguished University alums, met three times to discuss the “interface” between the GSAS and the College, with a final report to FAS Dean Smith outlining recommendations for ensuring that undergraduate and graduate students develop effective teaching and learning relationships in sections, as advisers, and in the Houses.

GSAS continues to develop strong relationships with foreign nations and national foundations that will support the graduate work of international students. This year, thanks to the leadership of Vice Provost for International Affairs Jorge Dominguez and GSAS Administrative Dean Margot Gill, GSAS signed three major agreements that will help to bring graduate students to Harvard from abroad (Mexico, China, and Taiwan). These students significantly contribute to the diversity of our community, and a great majority return to their home countries as academic and scholarly leaders.