Dean Allan Brandt
Amalie Moses Kass Professor of the History of Medicine, Harvard Medical School 
Professor of the History of Science, Faculty of Arts and Sciences
Academic Year 2009-2010

Admissions

The Graduate School’s admissions efforts in 2009–10 were characterized by prudent economizing, productive collaboration with departments, and strong results.

In anticipation of severe fiscal constraints, the Graduate School moved to reduce the size of its incoming class in September 2009. Offers of admission were made to 1,105 applicants, 9.75 percent of the applicant pool, representing a decrease in offers of 13 percent from the previous year. In total, the entering class for 2009–10 was made up of 580 PhD and 85 AM candidates, with a combined yield of 60 percent.

Careful preparation and strong support from departments made the 2010 admissions cycle one of the most successful in decades. To meet admissions targets in a highly competitive academic environment requires excellent recruitment processes that fully engage admitted students. This year, the Graduate School discussed admission procedures with each program to assure that programs employed known best practices. GSAS developed and disseminated a new on-line evaluation tool for admissions committees that encouraged through assessment of applications.

The results were striking. GSAS had the largest number of applicants in its history (nearly 12,000) and the highest yield across the GSAS since the 1950s (when the GI Bill boosted graduate study at Harvard and elsewhere). In the humanities and social science departments, yields averaged over 75 percent; in the natural sciences (including the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences) yield was 60 percent. The entering PhD cohort in September 2010 will be approximately 610; compared to 580 the previous September.

The incoming class counts a record number of students who have won National Science Foundation Awards and other external fellowships. As a result, GSAS was able to admit and recruit a larger cohort of students without the need to draw on additional unrestricted funds. In the fall of 2009, 21 new students came with NSF awards; in the fall of 2010, 48 new students with these awards will be welcomed. As of September 2010, GSAS will have 138 new and continuing students with NSF awards, doubling the number present a year earlier. Certainly this reflects new funds that became available through the federal stimulus program, but it also reflects the continuing capacity of GSAS to draw the strongest students to its programs.

Graduate Seminars in General Education

The Graduate Seminars in General Education, an initiative announced by Dean Allan Brandt in spring 2008, give faculty and graduate students the opportunity to undertake the planning and development of courses for the new undergraduate General Education curriculum. The first of the courses developed in Graduate Seminars were offered to undergraduates in September 2009.

The Seminars give graduate students a substantive role in course design and implementation, offering them a chance to sharpen important intellectual and pedagogic skills as they work closely with faculty. They have quickly become institutionalized as a key mechanism for developing and introducing new and innovative courses into the Gen Ed curriculum.  By the end of 2010-2011, some thirty Graduate Seminars will have been offered; more than a third have produced formal proposals or new Gen Ed courses.

Graduate students who have taken these seminars — who later are the first to be considered for teaching fellowships in the resulting Gen Ed class — have benefitted from observing and participating in the creative work of conceptualizing new courses. The experience goes beyond that offered in typical teaching roles; students research and read deeply, think extensively about materials and assignments, and conceive of methods to translate sophisticated scholarship into an engaging undergraduate syllabus. 

The coming academic year will mark the last year of the funding for this program, and efforts are underway to identify a new source of at least partial funding for this highly productive program.

Training for 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 Oral Communication Skills for International TFs, is designed to address the disciplinary communication needs of graduate students and future TFs who are not native speakers of English. It aims to help students develop the communication skills they need in order to succeed in their Harvard programs and in the American classroom. The course focuses on improving impromptu speaking skills, effective delivery of short talks, answering questions effectively, and engaging in small talk. It also offers the chance to practice general pedagogical strategies for teaching undergraduates.

The class meets twice a week for 12 weeks. Each participant will also have a half-hour individual meeting with the instructor each week in order to receive focused and specific feedback and coaching on how to improve. And each participant will meet once a week with an undergraduate course assistant to focus on communication skills relevant to his or her own improvement.

With continuing support from GSAS, the Bok Center will offer the course again in AY2010–2011. Since there have been long waiting lists, GSAS and the Bok Center will explore ways to expand the reach of this training to accommodate more students.

Alumni Activities

International health leader Paul Farmer outlined his vision of how research universities can serve the needs of global health and development in a timely, topical address at the Graduate School’s annual Alumni Day festivities, held this year on April 10, 2010. Farmer, PhD ’90, anthropology, MD ’90, is the Maude and Lillian Presley Professor of Social Medicine in the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School and a founding director of Partners in Health, the renowned global health care organization.

Also on Alumni Day, after lunch at Dudley House, alumni headed to the Science Center, where they sampled an interdisciplinary menu of faculty symposia — on photography and art history, the rise of multiracialism in the United States, the genetics of aging, the role of cooking in human evolution, challenges of the Internet age, and the art of making films about science.

On Friday, April 9, graduate alumni of Harvard’s East Asia programs came together for a truly global reunion that featured a series of discussions on Asian governance, culture, food, medicine, arts, and technology.

On January 20, GSAS alumni gathered in London with Dean Brandt and other Graduate School officials to inaugurate the Global GSAS series. In partnership with the Harvard Club of the United Kingdom, the Graduate School Alumni Association brought in Harvard economist Benjamin Friedman, AB ’66, PhD ’71, for an evening presentation in the City on the financial crisis and the moral threats arising in its aftermath. Earlier in the day, alumni and graduate students working in London met for lunch at the Oxford and Cambridge Club with Quentin Davies, the United Kingdom’s Minister for Defence Equipment and Support, an M.P. for Grantham and Stamford, and a former Frank Knox Fellow at Harvard.

Interdisciplinary Graduate Consortia  

In spring 2008, Dean Brandt launched the Harvard Interdisciplinary Graduate Consortia to encourage collaboration not only between adjacent disciplines, but across the University. Graduate Consortia are intended to draw together faculty from a range of FAS departments, as well as from other Schools, to offer proseminars, courses, lectures, and conferences in important interdisciplinary topics.

During 2009-10, the two consortia now in existence solidified their outreach. The Graduate Consortium in Microbial Sciences, offered by the University’s Microbial Sciences Initiative, explores an expanding biological field that has attracted intense interdisciplinary interest. And a vibrant community of participants has assembled around the Graduate Consortium on Energy and the Environment, offered in coordination with the Harvard University Center for the Environment. Doctoral students from across the University have affiliated with the consortium, bringing their distinct backgrounds to bear in the study of the broad, interconnected issues of energy and the environment.

Particularly encouraging progress was made this year in developing a consortium in the area of Human Rights that will bring graduate students together across the University.

Initiatives

Financial Support

Despite the economic crisis, stipends rose modestly in 2009–10. In the social sciences and humanities, the typical fellowship package included payment of tuition and required medical and insurance fees as well as a 12-month stipend of $26,796. In the sciences stipends varied by department, ordinarily between $28,440 and $29,700 for 12 months.

In December of 2009, the FAS announced a three percent increase in graduate student stipends. This decision was made in recognition of the very high quality of our graduate students and their role in attracting and retaining Harvard’s world-class faculty, and of their contributions as teaching fellows, which are essential to the strength of Harvard’s undergraduate programs.

Dudley House

Dudley House, the Graduate Student Center, played host to many of the most significant events on the student and alumni calendars this year. In addition to hosting a monthly grab bag of student-run social, intellectual, and recreational opportunities, the House hosted the GSAS Alumni Association Council in November, the Alumni Day luncheon in April, and the Everett Mendelsohn Excellence in Mentoring Awards, also in April, to name a few.

Dudley House is also home to a series of professional development events for graduate students, from workshops on applying for Fulbrights to sessions on networking etiquette and career options. And Dudley was central to the Graduate School’s January @ GSAS programming efforts.

Outreach to Directors of Graduate Study

Since the beginning of his tenure in 2008, Dean Brandt has made it a high priority to engage the Directors of Graduate Studies (DGS) as a community. They have met regularly as a group and in smaller interest groups, organized by fields and divisions. In addition, over the last two years GSAS has held a fall retreat that takes up substantive student issues, including student progress, employment strategies, and mentoring/advising, among others. As a result the DGSs have come to know the GSAS administration and, more importantly, one another.

Emphasis on Mentoring and Advising

As a result of the new community around graduate education in the departments, broad discussions have taken place among the DGSs about a range of issues, including the culminating activities for the PhD degree. Those discussions have revealed that some form of defense was a highly beneficial process, not only for the student, but also for the departmental intellectual community. This year, Classics, History, English, and East Asian Languages and Cultures all voted to institute PhD defenses. Other departments, like Mathematics, have reviewed and revised their defense processes. Obviously, it is best for departments to establish practices that fit well with their particular disciplines and cultures, but it is gratifying that more departments are rightly seeing the defense as the last chance for committee members and other faculty to make valuable suggestions about work done under their auspices.

Dean Brandt has also spoken frequently about the critical importance of advising. The Graduate School undertook pilot efforts to standardize the advising process this year, and those efforts will continue. And GSAS has an active partner in the Graduate Student Council, which annually bestows awards for excellence in graduate student mentoring to faculty members nominated by their students. This year, 123 nominations were received, and most of the nominated faculty — in addition to the five winners (Alán Aspuru-Guzik of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, Norman Daniels of Global Health and Population, Farish Jenkins of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, Michèle Lamont of Sociology, and Elaine Scarry of English) —gathered at Dudley House in April for a collegial and celebratory evening.

Secondary Fields

Secondary fields continue to attract PhD students, who see them as a method of enhancing the competitiveness and professional reach of their Harvard studies. A secondary field in PhD studies consists of a set of four or five graduate courses in a discipline, interdisciplinary area, or intellectually coherent subfield. The program offering the secondary field provides an intellectual rationale and outlines the package of courses required.

This year, PhD students could elect a secondary field from the following departments or committees: African and African American Studies, Celtic Medieval Languages and Literatures, Classics Secondary Field, Comparative Literature, Film and Visual Studies Secondary Field, Historical Linguistics, Linguistic Theory, Medieval Studies Secondary Field, Music Secondary Field, Romance Languages and Literatures Secondary Field, and Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality. In the fall of 2010, faculty from the Kennedy School, the Graduate School of Design, and the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences are developing an interfaculty secondary field in Science, Technology, and Society.

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. This year’s offerings spanned topics as diverse as behavioral economics, American literature, musicology, ecology and politics, the Renaissance, the history of medicine, urban sociology, and Latin American politics. Grants of up to $5,000 per year are available for projects in the humanities and social sciences.  The number of currently funded workshops now tops 100.