Dear Harvard College students,

Welcome back to snowy Cambridge. I hope you had a joyous and restful winter break. While I appreciated the time off, I am eager to have you back on campus and to see you again in the Yard, the Houses, and all the other corners of our beautiful campus.

The new year and the new semester provide an opportunity to reflect on where we have been and where we are headed. I hope you take some time to assess what you’ve accomplished so far this academic year and to set new goals for yourself. You may recall from my message in the fall that I shared some of my own goals for the year, and this feels like a good time to revisit them, to share some updates, and to look at what is coming next at the College.

Since the summer, we have pursued a broad effort to re-center academics at the College. Dean Claybaugh has spearheaded an open conversation about grading and has held extensive office hours with students, hosted dinner conversations in the Houses, and held meetings with departments and divisional deans. This spring, we will ask the FAS faculty to consider policy proposals about grading at the College, and your input continues to be extremely important to that process.

I want to emphasize that this effort is much broader than grading. We’ve worked with partners across the FAS to create a set of guidelines and guardrails around the use of generative AI in the classroom, to limit device usage in class, and to engage in better and more systematic training of teaching fellows and new faculty, among other changes. These conversations will continue in the spring, and I want to hear from you about how we can continue to improve your academic experience at Harvard.

I hope you have also seen some meaningful improvements to the student experience. We’ve partnered with HUDS to refine menu selections and to bring you hot breakfast sandwiches and other improvements. We’ve expanded dining hall access to FAS faculty, leading to nearly 400 of your professors eating more than 2,000 meals with you in the fall, and we hope that number will be even higher in the coming months. As we announced last semester, we brought you free laundry starting this term. I hope these incremental improvements add up to a better Harvard College experience, and I welcome new ideas on how to make things even better.

To that end, I want to close by letting you know about some ways that we can stay connected.

• I will hold an Open Forum this Tuesday (tomorrow) from 6:00 p.m. - 7:30 p.m. in the Lowell House JCR. You can submit questions in advance at the registration link or just come and ask me in person. I hope to see many of you there. These will be monthly events, with future dates already set for 2/19, 3/31, and 4/13, so please plan to attend and mark your calendars.
• I hold weekly office hours for currently enrolled College students on Fridays from 2:00 p.m. - 5:00 p.m. in my office in 119 University Hall. You can make an appointment here.
• I will continue to serve snacks in dining halls during the dinner hours throughout the spring semester, and I will drop by Annenberg for lunch whenever my schedule allows (typically about twice a week).
• You can also find me on Instagram (@deandeming)

I am so proud of Harvard. By most objective measures Harvard is thriving, and our students, faculty, and staff are more excellent than ever. Over the past semester, I had the opportunity to meet and talk with members of our community from across the country and around the world. Throughout these interactions, I’ve been deeply humbled by the extraordinary talents that are brought to bear on the hardest questions facing humanity and seemingly boundless efforts of this community to do good.

Harvard College has served American society since our nation’s founding. This year we mark the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Eight Harvard College alumni signed that fateful document and set in motion the American Revolution. Since those early days, the success of the country and the College have been intertwined. When we set our minds toward a noble goal, there is nothing we cannot accomplish together.

I feel a tremendous sense of gratitude to be part of the Harvard College community, and I’m eagerly looking forward to our new year together.

Warmly,

David

David J. Deming
Danoff Dean of Harvard College