1636 FORUM EVENT: On October 6 at 8 p.m. ET, join 1636 Forum co-founder Allison Wu for a live Zoom conversation with Harvard professor and Nobel laureate Eric Maskin, co-president of the Council on Academic Freedom at Harvard. We’ll discuss what the Council is working on this year and get an early look at the new $1 million Carob Trust Prize for Academic Courage, which he is helping to select. We’ll also discuss how the Council sees Harvard’s jump in this year’s FIRE College Free Speech Rankings, alongside FIRE’s campus advocacy chief of staff Connor Murnane. Register now.
Last week, The Crimson reported that the Harvard Kennedy School (HKS) has launched a new Master in Public Policy (MPP) technology concentration as a pilot and is considering a specialized technology-and-policy degree.
These are early steps toward the only quantified goals in HKS 2036, the school’s new 10-year vision: training 600 “public-sector technologists” and 6,000 “technology-minded public leaders” over the next decade.
So who will teach these 600 technologists? HKS 2036 calls for “faculty cluster hires in new areas of strategic priority,” suggesting the school recognizes that today’s faculty isn’t the final set with which the school will be pursuing its technology ambitions. (Read our prior analysis of HKS 2036 here.)
To understand where the effort is starting from, we reviewed the backgrounds of all 210 non-emeritus faculty members listed on the HKS faculty directory, across every appointment type, plus incoming assistant professor Ann-Katrin Reuel. Here’s what we found:
Four of HKS’s 74 tenured or tenure-track (ladder) faculty combine substantial technical experience with active work in AI or other technologies. Three focus specifically on AI: Sharad Goel and new assistant professors Stephen Casper and Ann-Katrin Reuel. Assistant professor Luis Armona, a former software engineer whose research uses machine-learning methods, is the fourth. Goel is the only tenured faculty member among the four.
HKS’s ladder faculty have a much broader bench in technology policy. Another 10 tenured faculty have substantive expertise in AI or other areas of science and technology policy. They include David Deming (FAS, HGSE, HKS), a professor of economics and public policy whose research examines AI’s effects on the workforce, and Jonathan Zittrain (HKS, HLS, SEAS), a professor of public policy, computer science, and law who researches AI governance.
But seven out of 10 of those faculty are shared via joint appointments with other Harvard schools. This gives HKS access to expertise across the University, but it may not provide the same teaching or program-building capacity as faculty based primarily at HKS.
Non-tenure-track (NTT) faculty add considerably more policy and practitioner expertise than technical expertise. Among HKS’s 43 professors of the practice and lecturers, Jim Waldo, a professor of the practice jointly appointed with SEAS, is the only one we classified as having deep technical expertise. But nine others bring substantial AI or science and technology policy expertise, including professor of the practice Jake Sullivan, the former U.S. National Security Advisor who is teaching a course on the policy and geopolitics of AI.
Another 14 ladder and NTT faculty have some engagement with AI or technology policy. Seven in each group have a paper, book, course, or other work related to AI or technology policy without it being a primary academic focus.
Adjunct and affiliated faculty broaden HKS’s technical bench, but not by much in AI research. Four of 94 fellows, affiliates, and other adjunct faculty have substantial engineering or computer science backgrounds, but none met our definition of core technical AI faculty.
Expanding HKS’s faculty bench will require choices about where to direct its existing and new faculty lines and resources. Endowing a new Harvard professorship can require roughly $10 million each, and ladder appointments are generally long-term institutional commitments.
The relevant question, then, isn’t simply how quickly HKS can add new technical faculty, but how it decides which expertise warrants those investments.
The new MPP concentration is one opportunity for HKS to learn before making each of those decisions. As students move through the pilot, HKS can see where the program would benefit from additional technical expertise, and what other faculty expertise may help students apply their knowledge more effectively across technical and policy settings.
But the pilot can also only tell HKS so much about the faculty it will need for the long term. The technologies HKS is preparing students to help govern will continue to change, while the ladder faculty it hires could remain at the school for decades. The challenge ahead will be building for the long term in fields that may look very different a decade from now.
➔ A note on our methodology:
We reviewed faculty members’ HKS profiles and other public biographies, then sorted each person into one of four rough categories based on the main focus of their work.
Technical focus: A degree in a STEM field, and/or a hands-on technical career, and substantial work that uses technical methods to build, engineer, or research technology itself.
Technology policy focus: AI or another technology is a primary focus of their work, without meeting our technical threshold. This means at least one of: holding a senior government or industry role centered on a technology; having a body of published work around technology and policy or societal implications; leading a program dedicated to it; or running a technology venture.
Technology as a secondary focus: AI or other technology is the subject of some of their work, but not its main focus, such as publishing a single paper or book or teaching a single course on it.
Other fields: No AI or other technology focus readily apparent in their work.
Ask 1636
Send us your Harvard and higher education questions!
Q: What does the Vice Provost for Advances in Learning do?
The Office of the Vice Provost for Advances in Learning (VPAL) develops and supports new approaches to teaching across Harvard, including digital learning tools, online education, and educational technology. For example, VPAL recently launched Syllabus Explorer with Harvard University Information Technology (HUIT), allowing the Harvard community to search more than 10,000 Harvard course syllabi for classes, instructors, and course materials dating to the 2015-2016 academic year. Harvard Kennedy School (HKS) and Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) government professor Dustin Tingley was recently named vice provost, formalizing a role he had held on an interim basis since August 2025.
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Events
Los Angeles, CA — October 21 from 6:00-8:30 p.m. PT: Meet HKS Dean Jeremy Weinstein at this HKS on the Road series event. Register here.
FYIs
Nicholas Kristof Defends Contested Reporting at HKS Lecture in International Political Economy; Harvard Chabad Condemns Remarks
The annual Malcolm H. Wiener Lecture in International Political Economy took place at Harvard Kennedy School (HKS) on September 18, weeks after the speaker selection of Nicholas Kristof (AB ‘82) prompted controversy.
As we previously covered, the Harvard Jewish Alumni Alliance had asked HKS Dean Jeremy Weinstein (PhD ‘03) to remove the lecture’s designation as an endowed one, arguing that it constituted a University honor. (Read our previous 1636 Forum newsletter on this topic here.)
In introducing Kristof during the lecture, Dean Weinstein highlighted his influence on humanitarian and public-policy issues and addressed the controversy surrounding his reporting on Israel and Gaza. “We cannot shy away from topics that might invite controversy,” Weinstein said, adding that HKS expects speakers’ ideas to be “challenged” and “publicly scrutinized.”
The discussion, moderated by HKS Institute of Politics (IOP) former interim co-director Ned Price, more broadly traced Kristof’s four-decade journalism career, including his move from news to opinion, his reporting on international humanitarian issues and later domestic problems, and his views on journalism and public trust.
During the talk, Kristof defended his reporting on alleged sexual abuse of Palestinian detainees, including an allegation that a detainee had been raped by a dog. Asked by Price about his citation of Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, which Price said the Israeli government has described as a Hamas front, Kristof said, “I did not rely on Euro-Med for that,” explaining that he had interviewed a detainee himself and found similar accounts elsewhere.
Hours after the lecture, Harvard Chabad founder and president Rabbi Hirschy Zarchi criticized Kristof’s remarks during Harvard Chabad’s Shabbat 1000 gathering. Zarchi said Kristof had “doubled down” on what he called “vicious, perverted conspiracies against the Jewish people.” While saying that Kristof “certainly has a right to his free speech,” Zarchi questioned “the wisdom of inviting him and honoring him.”
Harvard Graduate School of Education Partners With Hamilton College on Early-Assurance Master’s Pathway
The Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE) is partnering with Hamilton College to create an early-assurance pathway to three HGSE master’s programs: Teaching and Teacher Leadership, Human Development and Education, and Learning Design, Innovation, and Technology.
High school students applying to Hamilton can indicate their interest through the Common App, with roughly five to 10 students selected each year. Selected students will receive an “early assurance” letter from HGSE alongside their Hamilton acceptance, but students must remain in good academic standing, meet program requirements during their four years at Hamilton, and complete HGSE’s regular admissions process to be admitted. The first eligible students will enter Hamilton in fall 2027.
HGSE Assistant Dean for Admission and Financial Aid Frank Arce said “HGSE students are getting younger,” with more applicants coming “directly out of undergrad,” making the partnership an opportunity to “be proactive with students earlier.”
The partnership is part of a broader expansion of early-assurance graduate programs among liberal arts colleges. Hamilton now lists pathways with Harvard and Penn (education), Duke and Vanderbilt (business), WashU (engineering), and UChicago (various master’s programs).
NIH Director Bhattacharya Refuses Trump’s Request To Cut Harvard’s Funding; Bipartisan Pushback Stalls Plan for Political Oversight of Grants
A planned White House executive order that would give political appointees veto power over National Institutes of Health (NIH) grants appears unlikely to move forward following bipartisan opposition in Congress, though the White House hasn’t publicly confirmed that the order has been abandoned.
The order was proposed after a September 18 Oval Office meeting in which NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya reportedly refused President Trump’s request to cut Harvard’s research funding. The president then directed Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Director Russ Vought to draft the order.
The proposed executive order would have altered NIH’s longstanding grant-review process, in which scientific peer-review panels assess applications and NIH officials make final funding decisions. Instead, it would have created a board that includes Bhattacharya and Vought and requires unanimous approval for NIH grant awards (effectively giving Vought veto power over grants).
Separately, this week NIH launched “Linked Discoveries,” a new PubMed tool intended to help researchers identify related studies, including replication studies, reviews, and retractions. The tool is part of a broader NIH initiative to strengthen research reproducibility — whether published findings can be independently replicated — amid widespread concern about the issue among scientists. A large-scale project published in Nature this year attempted to replicate findings from 164 social- and behavioral-science papers and successfully replicated statistically significant results for just under half of the papers.
Harvard Students Report Spending More Time on Coursework as College Classroom Practices Shift
A Crimson analysis of roughly 130,000 undergraduate Q Guide evaluations found that Harvard students reported spending substantially more time on coursework over the past three years, with the largest increases in fields that previously had among the lightest workloads.
Among courses offered in both fall 2023 and fall 2025, students reported spending roughly 20% more time on work outside class, equivalent to about four additional hours per week for a student taking four courses.
The largest increases were concentrated in fields that previously had lighter workloads: reported time spent rose 28% in the Social Sciences and 22% in Arts and Humanities, compared with 12% in Science and 9% in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. General Education courses rose 51%.
The increase in time spent doesn’t necessarily mean professors are assigning more work. Margaret Rennix, assistant director for humanities and social sciences support at Harvard’s Academic Resource Center, said she was “not currently seeing any evidence to suggest courses have gotten more difficult or are assigning more pages,” though she had heard anecdotally from professors that students were struggling more with readings than in the past.
The Office of Undergraduate Education’s October 2025 report on grading similarly shared faculty concerns that students were arriving less prepared for reading-intensive courses, with some faculty reporting that students struggled more with complex texts. The Atlantic has also detailed how more Ivy League students are showing up to college without ever having read a full-length book.
More News
More News at Harvard
The Crimson: “Former College Dean Rakesh Khurana Criticizes Gay, Other Presidents Over 2023 Antisemitism Testimony”
The Crimson: “Harvard Asks Judge to Toss Admissions Lawsuit, Citing Procedural Failures”
Harvard Law Today: “Sherif Girgis Joins the Harvard Law Faculty”
The Crimson: “New IOP Director Betsy Fischer Martin to Pair Each Fellow With a Student Program”
The Crimson: “New IOP Director Plans to Expand Diminished Senior Advisory Committee, Backs Close Integration with HKS”
The Crimson: “SEAS Pilots Client-Facing Capstone Option for Engineering Students”
HGSE: “The Initiative on Superintendent as Civic Leader Launches at HGSE”
OpenAI: “Advisory Group on Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence” — feat. Harvard math professor Melanie Matchett Wood
HKS IOP: “Debate, Debrief, and Dessert: The Role of Diversity in Higher Education and American Life” — feat. president of The Heritage Foundation Kevin Roberts, HKS professor and former NAACP president Cornell Brooks, and HKS professor Julia Minson (AB ‘99)
The Crimson: “Physics Faculty Lose Bid to Preserve Grant Administrator’s Role Under FAS Restructuring”
The Crimson: “Grad Students, Academic Workers Rally at Science Center as HGSU-UAW Sets Strike Authorization Vote”
The Crimson: “11 Harvard Law Faculty Join Call for UCLA Chancellor to Retract 9/11 Conference Statement”
The Crimson: “HMC Quietly Removed Diversity Data from Internal Investment Tracker Weeks after Trump Demands”
Harvard Gazette: “Who’ll Win AI Race? U.S.? China? Maybe No One.” — feat. Harvard economics professor Jason Furman (AB ‘92, PhD ‘04)
The Crimson: “Worried About the Grade Cap? Study More.” — op-ed by Matthew Tobin (AB ‘27)
The Crimson: “Citizenship Needs a Home at Harvard” — op-ed by Ira Sharma (AB ‘28)
The Crimson: “HLS Must Draw the Line on AI” — op-ed by Ava Ribaudo (AB ‘27)
The Crimson: “The Harvard Brand Is Not for Sale” — editorial by The Crimson Editorial Board
The Crimson: “AI Is No Siren’s Call” — op-ed by Andrew Shlomchik (AB ‘29)
The Crimson: “America Won’t Beat China by Beating Harvard” — editorial by The Crimson Editorial Board
The Crimson: “Stop the Slop” — op-ed by Cyrus Sarfaty (AB ‘29)
The Crimson: “Leave the Phone at Home” — op-ed by Olivia Nelson (AB ‘29)
More News Beyond Harvard
Yale Daily News: “College to See No New Cuts After Saving $3 Million Last Year, Lewis Says”
Yale Daily News: “School of Medicine Faculty Share Funding Cut Worries Amid Trump Talks”
Daily Pennsylvanian: “Penn Endowment Sees Nearly $7 Billion Jump in Largest Single-Year Return on Record”
Cornell University: “Report of the Committee on the Future of the American University”
Columbia Daily Spectator: “Columbia’s 2025-26 Common Data Set Shows Admissions, Diversity Shifts”
Chronicle of Higher Education: “Vanderbilt’s Chancellor Publicly Criticizes the Sector But Talks Quietly With the White House”
ABA Journal: “LSAT Moves to In-Person Testing in August After China Cheating Scandal”
Forbes: “Humanities Degrees Are Poised for a Comeback. AI Gets the Credit.”
Wall Street Journal: “The Tech Elite Is Funding an Alternative to College”
Penn Today: “Penn Arts & Sciences Receives $22.5M Commitment to Advance Affordability and Academic Excellence”
The Dartmouth: “Magnuson Center for Entrepreneurship to Absorb Dartmouth Patent Office in $60 Million Expansion”
Chronicle of Higher Education: “Hasan Piker Is the Latest Test of College Speech”
Daily Pennsylvanian: “Penn Community Discusses Lingering Impacts of Federal Antisemitism Lawsuit”
The Atlantic: “College Is Coming Apart”
New York Times: “Professor Sues New School, Claiming Tenure Has Been Dismantled”
Wall Street Journal: “Cornell’s Limited Self-Critique” — editorial by the Wall Street Journal Editorial Board
Washington Post: “A Report Exposed a Crisis in Academia. The Response Was Telling.” — op-ed by Vanderbilt Chancellor Daniel Diermeier
Chronicle of Higher Education: “Colleges Should Take Linda McMahon’s Call to Action Seriously” — op-ed by Harvard University Professor Danielle Allen (PhD ‘01)
Note: Last week, we attributed the op-ed “Free Expression Is Essential to MIT’s Mission” to the MIT Free Speech Alliance; the piece actually was written by the co-presidents of the MIT Council on Academic Freedom.