Job-sharing at the Top: Harvard Graduate School of Education Appoints New Co-Academic Deans

Jerome T. Murphy, dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, has appointed longtime research and teaching team Judith Singer and John Willett to the post of academic dean. Singer and Willett will share the position — traditionally held by one person — with responsibility for overseeing the academic life of the school, enhancing the professional development of faculty, advising on faculty searches, and ensuring that graduate students have sufficient financial and academic support.

"Singer and Willett's research and teaching collaboration has been extraordinarily rich and fruitful," says Murphy. "I was taken with the idea of having ‘the Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers of the statistics world' take their act to the academic deanship. Seeing that partnership translate into administration and reaping its benefits will be exciting for the School."

As universities struggle to fill administrative posts with faculty who are reluctant to take time away from teaching or research, Willett and Singer's arrangement could provide a new model. As a team, they share goals for the advancement of their research and administrative work. "The notion of distributing an academic deanship between two people is an interesting idea," Singer says. "Because we're now collaborators in both administration and research, we share common goals in both aspects of our lives. There's an incentive for each of us to advance our careers jointly."

Singer and Willett, who navigated a successful joint tenure process at HGSE in 1993, have garnered a host of honors for their research, including the prestigious American Educational Research Association's Raymond B. Cattell Early Career Award for Programmatic Research in 1992 and its 1993 Review of Research Award. Willett and Singer have cowritten two books, By Design: Planning Better Research in Higher Education (with R. Light, 1990) and Who Will Teach? Policies That Matter (with R. Murnane, 1991), as well as dozens of articles on statistical methodology, research design, and education policy.

With support from the Spencer Foundation, they are finishing a book on the analysis of longitudinal data, Twice Is Not Enough. Also in the future is a companion book (with the working title The Best Laid Plans) describing recent advances in the design of longitudinal research.

Most would call their working style synergistic. Willett says, "In statistics, it's called an interaction. It's where the sum of two people is greater than the addition of their parts. So we prefer to be called a ‘statistical interaction.'"

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Contact Christine Sanni at 617-496-5873