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The Yale Alumni Magazine is owned and operated by Yale Alumni Publications, Inc., a nonprofit corporation independent of Yale University. The content of the magazine and its website is the responsibility of the editors and does not necessarily reflect the views of Yale or its officers. |
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Y: Yale has three searches open for deans—at the schools of art, music, and public health—and six were hired within the past two years. Is this unusual? L: It’s slightly more action than usual. There are 14 deans who serve five-year terms, and the average tenure in the position is six or seven years, so there are usually two or three searches in any given year. Y: In 1995 you appointed Jeff Garten, former undersecretary of commerce for international trade, as dean of SOM [the School of Management]. The new dean, Joel Podolny, is an academic. In the medical school you first appointed the well-known former FDA commissioner David Kessler, and then nephrologist Robert Alpern. Is there a pattern here—a high-powered outsider to shake things up, then an eminent academic to settle them back down? L: No, I don’t think there’s a pattern. But there is a question of what’s good for a particular school at a particular time. In the case of SOM in 1995, the school needed someone with Jeff’s credentials and connections to raise its profile. In the professional schools, it’s sometimes important to have people come in who are known in the professional world. Y: You have just appointed Margaret Grey ['76MSN] as dean of nursing. She was the school’s associate dean of research. In the environment school you have Gus Speth ['64, '69LLB], an environmental advocate. Do these appointments reflect the directions you want for the schools? L: In the nursing school, yes. Research is a critical priority. As for Gus, I appointed him not because he was an environmental advocate but because of his outstanding record as a leader. He was a founder of the Natural Resources Defense Council and the World Resources Institute, and he reenergized the UN Development Program—a stellar record. Y: The professionals coming to academia must find it an enormous adjustment. They’re responsible for a division, but they can’t, for instance, fire any senior people. L: Yes, with academics you have to lead by persuasion, rather than command. There are always tensions and some difficulties in adjustment, and I think deans Speth, Kessler, and Garten all encountered some of that. But although the deans can’t fire tenured faculty, they can direct resources within the school. They have wide latitude to build up some areas and restrict others. Y: What is the hiring process? L: Traditionally, the search committee is made up of faculty from inside and outside the school. I convene the committee and give the members their charge. They solicit input from other faculty, students, alumni, and outside connections. I charge every committee to look at outside candidates—although the law school, graduate school, and college have a tradition of hiring from within, and they don’t always take that charge too seriously. The law school has a tradition of open faculty discussion: deans are chosen virtually by consensus. But in every other case, I ask the committee to choose three to five candidates for me to interview. The single most important criterion is leadership ability. Y: Except for the Korean American dean of law and the female dean of nursing, it’s a homogeneous group. L: Oh, yes, I’ve thought about that a great deal. It’s always in my charge to the committee to seek out qualified women and minority candidates. There may be opportunities to find women candidates for the searches currently in progress. A few years ago we had three women deans, but two of them [Rebecca Chopp and Susan Hockfield] have moved on to head other universities. Y: In some cases, you’ve rejected the search committee’s candidates. L: That’s right. One case was the forestry and environment school. The committee presented me with several candidates—all excellent people, but no one with what I thought were the leadership abilities to take advantage of the opportunities ahead. I went back to the committee and asked them to identify the highly ranked candidates who had said they were not available. They were actually relieved, and they gave me the names of three people, including Gus Speth—who had said, six months earlier, that he could not leave the UN at that time. I recruited Gus personally, and the entire faculty was delighted. In the case of architecture, the school was falling behind. We were losing students not only to Harvard, but also to Princeton, MIT, and elsewhere. The committee presented me with candidates who were not world-class architects. I asked if they had considered [Robert A. M.] Stern. It turned out they had deadlocked over him—which sometimes can be a reflection of the candidate’s strength of personality. Stern was very controversial with the architecture faculty. Why? Because he is an architect in a conservative tradition. The faculty wanted someone more avant-garde. But I knew that Bob was a true intellectual, who likes to discuss ideas and hear different perspectives. After interviewing him, I knew that he would not seek to impose his own views, but he would bring in faculty from a variety of traditions. And so I made the choice to hire him in the face of some faculty opposition. He has reenergized the school—it’s on top once again—and has brought in people who work in many different styles, including Frank Gehry and Zaha Hadid. Y: A new dean imposed on the faculty against their will might be saddled with a large burden of resentment. L: Yes. But Bob won them over within a few months. Very shortly after he came on, I began getting notes from faculty that said, “You were right. Thank you for getting us a great dean.” |
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