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What the Deans Do
When an undergraduate needs help with such varied challenges as planning a course schedule or coping with a family emergency, the residential college dean provides “one-stop shopping” for advice and assistance.

by Bruce Fellman
May 2000

Rashan Clark, a senior who lives in Ezra Stiles College, had a problem.While his fellow undergraduates were either busy preparing for entry into the lucrative world of investment banking and consulting, or getting ready to go on to graduate and professional schools, Clark was intrigued by a career road rarely taken by Yale students.

“I wanted to explore the field of law enforcement,” he said, “but I wasn’t sure how to proceed.”

Clark, however, knew just where to turn for ideas: Susan Rieger, the dean of his residential college. Rieger, who has held the Ezra Stiles deanship since 1992, listened attentively, and while the senior half-expected her to be skeptical, “the dean was very supportive,” said Clark.

“My job is to be a reliable adult who’ll be on the student’s side,” said Rieger, a veteran at unconventional career choices (she left law to teach and write), and in short order, she referred Clark to Gary Abrecht '67, chief of police for the District of Columbia.

It was a typical day in an atypical job.

The deans are a rare breed. Part parent; part scholar (a dean is expected to teach a course every year); part facilitator; part parish priest, minister, mullah, or rabbi; part vice principal—the formal job description is a four page document—these multifaceted people are, in the words of Richard Brodhead, the dean of the College, “Yale’s first line of defense in ensuring the well-being of our students.”

Undergraduates turn to the deans, who live full-time in the colleges, for help with virtually everything from planning a course schedule and getting extensions for work not done (the so-called “dean’s excuse”) to solving roommate difficulties and navigating the Yale bureaucracy in order to complete a project. A dean may write a letter of recommendation, quiet a noisy party, cheer on the college’s varsity team members, or even, on occasion, fill in at first base or tight end in an intramural contest. He—or she (5 of the 12 deans are women)—could be lending a sympathetic ear at dinner one minute, then rushing a student to the emergency room the next. “We’re here 24 hours a day, and we never know what will be coming through the door,” says Laurence H. Winnie, the John B. Madden College Dean of Berkeley College. “We have to be prepared for every kind of situation.”

Ironically, the kind of essential oversight that has become synonymous with the success of the residential college system is of comparatively recent vintage. Things were quite different in the 1930s when the colleges opened, notes Yale historian Gaddis Smith, who graduated in 1954, earned his doctorate in 1961, and has been at the University for almost 50 years. Smith, whose book Yale and the External World: The Shaping of the University in the 20th Century, will be published in 2001 as part of the Tercentennial celebration, explained that for about the first 30 years of the system, freshman lived in their own dorms and distinctly apart from the colleges, which were led—some would say “ruled”—by their masters.

Toward the end of their first year, freshmen would apply for admission to a specific college, and democracy did not always govern the selection process. “Some masters sought to pack their realms with a certain type of student, and they wouldn’t choose anyone who didn’t fit the mold,” said Smith, who was master of Pierson from 1972 to 1981, well after the practice had been changed. “As a result, Davenport was populated by members of the Social Register, Jonathan Edwards by artists, Calhoun by athletes, Silliman and Timothy Dwight by the slide rule set, and Pierson by Daily News types and student leaders,” he explained.

Trumbull, which was dark and noisy—the trolley lines were nearby—was downright unpopular. In fact, there was a slogan, adapted from that of a popular cigarette, which summed up the college’s reputation. “It was ‘LSMFT’—Lord Save Me From Trumbull,” said Smith. “Clearly, this was not a good system.”

In 1962, President A. Whitney Griswold convened a committee, chaired by psychologist Leonard Doob, to take a hard look at the policies governing the freshman year. Among its conclusions was to end the kind of segregation that had been the rule for first-year students. The “common freshman year” became history, and incoming students were instead assigned, essentially at random, to one of the colleges. This strategy eliminated what Smith calls the “unseemly competition for bodies,” and another recommendation—the establishment of the dean’s position—was aimed at helping first-years and upperclassmen alike deal with the rigors of being a college student.

“The masters never had any official curricular role,” says Smith. “If you had a problem, you had to go to the central dean’s office, sit on a long bench, and wait for someone to see you. Advising was pretty much an impersonal, catch-as-catch-can affair.”

To remedy that acknowledged deficiency, the residential college dean was assigned the role of “chief academic adviser to all the students affiliated with a residential college, whether they actually lived there or not,” explains Mark Schenker, who is currently dean of academic affairs for the College and served as dean of Branford from 1990 to 1996.

Monitoring the classroom progress for each of the 400 to 450 undergraduates in a residential college and making certain that the necessary paperwork required for advancement and graduation is completed remains a central part of the responsibilities. “This is essentially an administrator-slash-counselor type position, and the person who thrives in it has to be very good at processing some very important pieces of paper—those you need to get a Yale degree,” says Schenker.

But over the years, the job description has expanded and now includes oversight responsibilities for every aspect of student life. “The dean is the point person, the liaison between a student and all the services the University has to offer,” says Schenker.

There is a bewildering number, and in recent years, the portfolio of duties has expanded to include helping out with the redesign and renovation of each residential college. When it came time to begin planning the overhaul of Berkeley College, which was completed last year (see “Worth the Wait”), Dean Winnie added “hardhat” to his repertoire of roles. “I could talk to the project designers and engineers about how students actually used the building,” said Winnie, who brought undergraduates and planners together in numerous meetings to develop plans for facilities that would work both short and long term.

Finding a person with such a wide range of skills—Winnie compares his job to that of a town manager—can require a lengthy search. “Of course you have to be well-suited to the academic world, because you’re going to teach,” says Dean Brodhead, the administrator to whom the deans report. “But we’re also looking for some real human gifts, such as the ability to help students grasp the rules and take advantage of the opportunities we offer. A dean also has to be able to provide a kind of moral education that enables students to learn to accommodate to one another and overcome the inevitable distresses and abrasions that come from living so close together. And perhaps most important, a dean has to be the kind of person who gets great pleasure from taking note of the forward progress of students.”

When the call goes out for candidates, the applicants are first vetted by a committee made up of the college master, the fellows, and a representative group of students. The finalists are then interviewed by Brodhead, who actually makes the appointment. Every three years, another committee—which includes a senior and junior member of the faculty, a former college master, and Mark Schenker—evaluates the dean’s performance. “It’s a very rigorous review process,” says Schenker, explaining that the committee solicits the opinions of everyone who might have worked with the dean: the master, the students, the department in which he or she teaches, the members of the College deans’ office, the University committees on which a dean has served, and the various resources of Yale, from the cultural centers to health services, with which the dean might have interacted during the period under review.

“It’s not an automatic reappointment, but some deans do serve long tenures,” says Schenker, noting that Christa Dove, dean of Pierson, is currently the senior member of the group, having been in the job for 17 years.

Ensuring that the deans can succeed is no longer a matter of wishful thinking. When the first ones began their jobs in 1963, there was no formal tutelage in matters that ranged from understanding arcane academic regulations to mastering conflict resolution. The late Martin Griffin, who was dean of Saybrook College from 1968 to 1971, took on the role of mentor in the 1970s and 1980s through various administrative positions he held in the Yale College dean’s office. Master of a bygone art—the literary memo—Griffin once reported on his search for guidance in the work of Machievelli. Writing to the deans, he noted, “There is, of course, Chapter XVII of The Prince, on 'Whether it is better to be Loved or Feared,' but this is not so helpful as one might have a right to expect. If I were you, I would instead attend to the example of the White Queen, who did a thousand impossible things before breakfast.” It remains an apt description of the job.

“Martin professionalized the deans and put them on the map,” notes Joseph W. Gordon, dean of undergraduate education, “but he did it in a very personal, informal way.”

After Griffin’s death in 1988, Gordon created what has come to be known as “dean’s school,” an extensive, formal training program that takes place throughout the first year of service. (Deans also meet together twice a month to compare notes.) Classes begin in August before the students arrive, says Schenker, who now oversees the program and whose then six-year-old son Matthew coined the phrase “dean’s school” to describe his father’s experience. “In the morning, we concentrate on the academic regulations you need to know inside and out,” notes Schenker. And after thorough drilling in “Blue Book 101,” there are “field trips” in the afternoon during which the new deans meet everyone from the college’s writing tutor and dining hall director to the registrar and the head of health services.

“In this day of the telephone and the Internet, it’s important that a dean actually visit the other person’s office to see the kind of situation a student will encounter,” says Schenker, who adds that face-to-face contact is also critical in forming personal relationships. “You don’t want to be meeting the fire marshal for the first time at midnight during a crisis situation.”

Perhaps the closest working partnership in the college is between the master and the dean. “A student in trouble will need them both,” says Gordon, adding that who a person turns to first may be more a matter of geography—whose office is closest—or personal preference—a student may find it easier to talk to a man than a woman, or vice versa—than of title. “At one time, these were fairly separate jobs,” he explains, “but now, it’s much more of a collaboration.”

The dean is also involved in an intense collaboration with the freshman counselors, a select group of seniors (there are between 9 and 12 freshmen for each counselor), who mentor and monitor first-year students. “The counselors are our barometer,” says Hugh Flick, who has been dean of Silliman College since 1988. “I depend on them to let me know what’s going on and when I might need to line a student up with a tutor, a psychiatrist, or a doctor.”

The counselors are chosen by each dean and trained by Dean of Student Affairs Betty Trachtenberg, and they form a key part of Yale’s psychological, social, spiritual, and academic safety net. “We stress community here—that people have to look out for each other,” says Trachtenberg.

By design, this ethic pervades the residential colleges, and the dean is the head watch, absorbing dispatches from the counselors, eating meals with students, zeroing in on appearances (and disappearances), observing, and listening.

“You can’t hide from the dean,” explains Margaret Ziegler, a freshman who lives in Silliman and comes from Tulsa, Oklahoma. Nor does Ziegler rue the loss of anonymity. “Dean Flick is the kind of adult you can talk to, and he seems to have a handle on everything,” she says. “I can whine to him about my roommate, and he has served as my faculty adviser. If he wasn’t here, I’d feel like I was floating.”

That feeling is precisely what the system is set up to overcome. “Because we can get to know the students personally, it’s more likely that we can spot troubles when they’re small and prevent them from becoming big problems,” says Flick.

That’s the goal, and by and large, it works, says Trachtenberg. “Our support system is pretty all-encompassing,” she notes. “There aren’t a lot of cracks to fall through.”

Louis Tompros ’00, a freshman counselor at Silliman, concurs. “The system has worked out really well for me,” says Tompros, contrasting his experience at Yale with that of friends who attended other schools and experienced “endless hassles with the administration and with registration—and had no one to talk to. Here, the deans are the answer people. You call them, and they can help you figure out what to do. There’s a great element of security in this, and it feels good to know there’s someone watching out for me.”  

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