Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences
The Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) is the largest academic division of Harvard University, a private research university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, adjacent to Boston. Serving as the intellectual core of one of the world's most storied universities, FAS encompasses Harvard College, the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, and the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, administering undergraduate and graduate programs across the humanities, social sciences, natural sciences, and engineering disciplines. Its decisions on hiring, curriculum, and institutional policy have frequently shaped national conversations about higher education, academic freedom, and the role of the university in public life.
Overview and Role Within Harvard University
The Faculty of Arts and Sciences occupies a distinctive position within Harvard University's organizational structure. As the university's largest division, it is responsible for the education of Harvard College undergraduates as well as the training of doctoral and master's students through the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. The faculty body itself — composed of professors, associate professors, assistant professors, and lecturers across dozens of departments — holds significant authority over academic appointments, degree requirements, and institutional policy.
Because of its size and scope, actions taken by FAS tend to carry weight far beyond the campus in Cambridge. When the faculty votes on matters of principle or policy, those decisions attract attention from peer institutions, journalists, and policymakers across the country. The division has periodically found itself at the center of national debates over issues ranging from academic governance to diversity in hiring, reflecting its prominence within American higher education.[1]
Historical Context
Harvard University itself was founded in 1636, making it the oldest institution of higher education in the United States. The Faculty of Arts and Sciences, as an organized administrative and academic body, evolved over subsequent centuries as Harvard grew from a small colonial college into a major research university.[2] The university's history includes a long succession of firsts in American academia, many of which originated within or were administered by what eventually became known as FAS.[3]
The Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, one of the primary units housed under FAS, has its own layered history. Among the notable scholars associated with the graduate school's legacy are geophysicist Margaret Kivelson and Jean Berko Gleason, a psycholinguist whose research transformed the understanding of language acquisition in children.[4] These figures represent the breadth of scholarly activity that FAS has historically fostered across the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities.
Governance and Faculty Authority
The faculty of FAS exercises direct governance over a wide range of institutional matters. Faculty meetings, at which full professors and other voting members deliberate on policy, have on occasion produced significant institutional statements. Among the more consequential episodes in recent memory was a faculty vote expressing a lack of confidence in the leadership of then-university president Larry Summers. That vote took place approximately twenty years before the mid-2020s and represented a rare public exercise of collective faculty authority over a sitting university president.[5]
The no-confidence vote underscored the degree to which FAS faculty retain institutional leverage within Harvard's governance structure. While university presidents and provosts hold administrative authority, the faculty's capacity to formally register dissent — particularly within the largest division — functions as a significant check on executive decision-making. Commentary published in national outlets following that episode questioned whether FAS was equally capable of applying that same critical lens inward, examining its own practices and assumptions with the same scrutiny it applied to administrative leadership.[6]
Dean of the Faculty
The Faculty of Arts and Sciences is led by a dean who reports to the university president and serves as the chief academic officer and administrator for the division. The dean oversees budgetary decisions, faculty appointments, and strategic priorities across the colleges and schools that fall under FAS.
In the mid-2020s, the deanship was held by Hopi Hoekstra, a prominent biologist. Under her leadership, FAS undertook several significant policy changes. One such change involved graduate admissions: Dean Hoekstra announced that the school's PhD students would be admitted on a funding-guaranteed basis, a structural shift intended to provide doctoral students with greater financial certainty over the course of their programs.[7] Such decisions reflect the considerable administrative discretion that FAS deans exercise over the character and operation of the division.
Hiring Practices and Diversity Statements
In 2024, FAS made a policy change that drew national attention: the division announced it would no longer require job applicants to submit diversity, equity, and inclusion statements as part of the faculty hiring process.[8] The move was significant in the context of broader national debates about the use of such statements in academic hiring, with institutions across the country reconsidering their practices in the wake of legal challenges and shifting political pressures.
Harvard's FAS had been among the many research universities that had incorporated diversity statements into their hiring review processes, a practice that proponents argued helped ensure that incoming faculty demonstrated a commitment to inclusive pedagogy and research. Critics of the practice contended that such requirements introduced ideological litmus tests into what should be merit-based evaluations. FAS's decision to eliminate the requirement placed it among a growing number of leading academic institutions stepping back from mandatory diversity statements, and its status as Harvard's largest faculty division meant the decision received substantial press coverage and commentary.
The change illustrated the ongoing tension within major research universities between institutional commitments to equity and inclusion on the one hand, and concerns about academic freedom and viewpoint diversity on the other. FAS's choice to discontinue the requirement did not represent an abandonment of other diversity-related efforts, but it did signal a recalibration of how those goals would be pursued in the faculty hiring context.
Academic Figures and Scholarly Legacy
Over the course of Harvard's history, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences has been home to an enormous number of scholars whose work has had lasting intellectual impact. The Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, now formally named the Harvard Kenneth C. Griffin Graduate School of Arts and Sciences following a major naming gift, has trained generations of researchers who have gone on to shape their fields across the sciences, social sciences, and humanities.[9]
Among the notable scholars associated with the FAS community is Jean Berko Gleason, a psycholinguist whose research fundamentally changed the way scientists and educators understand how children acquire language. Her work, conducted in association with Harvard, helped establish core principles of developmental linguistics that remain influential decades after their initial publication. Margaret Kivelson, a geophysicist also associated with Harvard's scholarly community, represents the tradition of natural scientific inquiry that has long been central to FAS's research mission.[10]
These individuals are part of a longer tradition of firsts and milestones in Harvard's academic history — many of which are not immediately apparent even to those deeply familiar with the university's legacy.[11]
Institutional Communications
Like other major divisions of Harvard, FAS maintains an institutional communications function. A spokesman for the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, identified in press reporting as James Chisholm, has served in a communications capacity for the division, fielding media inquiries on matters of personnel and policy.[12] The presence of dedicated communications staff reflects the degree to which FAS operates as a substantial institution in its own right, regularly engaged with national and local media on issues of broad public interest.
Relationship to Boston and Cambridge
Although Harvard's campus is formally situated in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the university maintains deep ties to the city of Boston across the Charles River. FAS, as the largest academic division, is a major driver of the intellectual and cultural life of the broader Boston metropolitan area. Harvard's presence in the region contributes substantially to the concentration of academic talent, research activity, and educational resources that defines Greater Boston's reputation as a center of learning and innovation.
Graduate students, faculty, and staff associated with FAS live and work throughout Boston and Cambridge, and the division's research outputs feed into the region's broader ecosystem of hospitals, technology companies, policy organizations, and cultural institutions. The Harvard Kennedy School, Harvard Medical School, and other professional schools operate separately from FAS but share the broader institutional identity that FAS has helped define over nearly four centuries.
Recent Developments
FAS has continued to navigate significant institutional and political challenges into the mid-2020s. Beyond the elimination of diversity statement requirements in faculty hiring, the division has confronted questions about the structure of graduate education, with Dean Hoekstra's announcement regarding PhD funding guarantees representing a substantive change to how doctoral students are supported financially.[13]
The broader university, of which FAS is the central academic pillar, has also grappled with scrutiny related to centers and institutes housed within its orbit, including debates about academic leadership at Harvard's Middle Eastern Studies programs.[14] These episodes underscore the complexity of governing a large, decentralized academic division in an era of heightened public attention to the internal workings of elite universities.
The Faculty of Arts and Sciences remains, by any institutional measure, the foundational academic unit of Harvard University — the body most directly responsible for the teaching and research that define Harvard's reputation, and the arena in which many of the university's most consequential intellectual and governance debates continue to unfold.