While students and faculty expressed concern over the searches, criticisms of the Dean of the College and the wider administration reached a fever pitch just under a month later, when Hammonds admitted to Faculty members that she had authorized a second round of searches—this time targeting both the administrative and faculty email accounts of a specific resident dean—unbeknownst to Smith.
This violation of existing faculty email privacy policy outraged faculty members and students, as administrators, yet again, faced intense scrutiny. After Hammonds resigned from her post at the end of June, Pfister was appointed to lead the College, left to repair relations with students and staff following a tumultuous year.
THE STUDENT’S DEAN
With the start of the academic year in September, Pfister began sending emails to the student body once every two weeks or so. Filled with College news, short reflections on the seasons, fun facts, and frequently a book recommendation, the messages quickly became hallmarks of his administration, demonstrating to students the accessibility Pfister said he was so interested in promoting.
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UC President Gus A. Mayopoulos ’15 says that these correspondences, often laced with mushroom and fungi references, revealed a “larger desire on [Pfister’s] part to know what was happening with students and to be a part of it.” So successful were the emails that UC leaders say they looked to Pfister’s example when deciding how they themselves would communicate with the student body.
Indeed, student leaders say Pfister has restored trust and transparency in the College’s top office through constant communication and increased relatability with undergraduates, repairing what UC Vice President Sietse K. Goffard ’15 calls “frayed relations” believed to be caused in part by the email searches and Gov 1310 cheating scandal.
“Dean Pfister has done a phenomenal job at coming out and really restoring that sense of community, of humility that people like to see in the dean,” Goffard says.
While UC leaders also mention the increased visibility that came as Pfister handed cupcakes to undergraduates during reading period and distributed bookmarks on the Quad shuttle earlier this spring, they emphasized his heightened advocacy for student concerns among FAS administrators.
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In their frequent meetings, Mayopoulos says that Pfister was an active supporter for the UC’s initiatives, including proposed funding increases, gender neutral housing, and issues of race at campus brought up by the “I, Too, Am Harvard” campaign. UC leaders say that because Pfister’s deanship was temporary, he was able to be more honest and “relaxed” in discussing the reality of the administration, even when the outcome was not that which students wanted.
“I've never encountered another administrator that was so frank,” Mayopoulos says. “I think in a lot of ways he was very free to talk to with us how he wanted.”
The change in tone and exposure, while seemingly simple to achieve, has significantly shaped the way students look at the position, former UC President Tara Raghuveer ’14 says.
“If this has been a year of pause, an interim year...without any big, long-scale policy, and yet Harvard students feel so much better about him than they did about the previous administration, I think it’s a pretty profound statement about what we value,” Raghuveer says. “And I think what we value is the humanity that he has shown us that we haven’t really seen from a lot of other people.”
TURNING DOWN THE TEMPERATURE
