GAZETTE: Are there particular qualities that you simply search for once you construct a management staff?

GAY: There are three issues that I all the time search for. I search for a dedication to excellence, as a result of that’s what it means to be at Harvard. I search for dedication to collaboration, as a result of I consider that nobody has a monopoly on perception — even when it’s in your space and you might be an skilled. And I search for dedication to the mission, as a result of that’s why we’re all right here.

I anticipate that from any member of a staff that I lead and collaborate with. From there, we get to the distinctive necessities of a place and the distinctive contributions or property that a person may deliver to the function.

GAZETTE: When your appointment was introduced, you stated, “We enter a second of risk.” What are the numerous areas of risk and alternative for Harvard?

GAY: I talked in regards to the alternative for Harvard to be extra linked to the world by centering essentially the most urgent challenges that the world faces as College priorities. For me, these embody democracy and all of the methods through which democracy is faltering across the globe, the local weather disaster, and inequality, to call just a few. Harvard has loads to deliver to the desk for society’s pressing priorities. There are additionally “frontier” alternatives that Harvard is uniquely positioned to use. These exist significantly within the life sciences, by advantage of our core strengths within the FAS, at Longwood, on the Medical College, and the Chan College. As well as, we’re embedded in an unbelievable ecosystem — with out peer, I consider — when it comes to its aggregation of life sciences experience: at Harvard, at MIT, on the hospitals, in biotech — the record goes on. For the core challenges round human well being, if the solutions are going to emerge wherever, my guess is that they’re going to emerge right here.

GAZETTE: In speaking about prospects for the longer term, is there one you’re personally enthusiastic about?

GAY: Betraying my bias as a political scientist, I’m actually enthusiastic about what we are able to do round democracy. We’re at a second the place it’s vital for these of us who’re champions of democracy to assist the world perceive how one can make democracies work: How democratic governance and democratic practices can really — if effectively achieved — clear up crises and clear up folks’s issues.

Now we have rising inequality, a planet that’s warming — the record goes on. To the extent that we are able to present a blueprint for a way democratic governance can work extra successfully, it might be an enormous service to the world and to particular person residents who wish to see their democratic governments really fixing their issues. I consider that a spot like Harvard has loads that we are able to deliver to that dialog as a result of we’ve bought school and practitioners across the College who’re engaged on this problem.

GAZETTE: With the Salata Institute for Local weather and Sustainability coming into its first full 12 months, a examine on instructing local weather change in hand, and what seems to be a widespread dedication to handle this international problem head-on, what’s subsequent for Harvard? Are we doing sufficient?

GAY: So long as local weather change stays an issue that threatens the way forward for our society and our planet, no person is doing sufficient. That stated, Harvard has made strides lately to heart local weather change as a serious theme all through the establishment, working to higher match its prioritization at Harvard with the dimensions of the issue. The Salata Institute is a serious a part of that effort, as is the implementation of the latest report on instructing local weather change at Harvard. However in the end, Harvard’s influence on the issue will come all the way down to the person efforts of its proficient and energized school and researchers — a few of whom have been engaged on this downside for many years — and its college students, who will inherit the issue and on whom a major burden of its resolution will fall.

GAZETTE: What about main institutional challenges dealing with the College?

GAY: The challenges, after all, will not be distinctive to Harvard. On the prime of the record, I’d put declining belief in larger schooling and fewer folks understanding the worth of upper schooling for each people and society. That’s an existential problem for us as an establishment. The silver lining is that there are a lot of potential companions as we make the case for why what we do issues and the way it contributes to creating the world a greater place and allows all of us to thrive.

Among the different points dealing with larger schooling — and Harvard — are by-product of that lack of belief in larger schooling, in our establishments, and in our mission. A scarcity of extra sturdy funding for scientific analysis, for instance, is by-product of the truth that public understanding of the worth of upper schooling has eroded over time.

GAZETTE: Is that this an outgrowth of this explicit political second or have we not achieved a ok job promoting ourselves?

GAY: The political polarization doesn’t assist, however it’s hanging that the erosion in public belief is bipartisan. That needs to be telling us one thing, that there’s a broad-based questioning of the worth of upper schooling. Sure, there are some parts which might be being inflected by partisan politics, however that is fairly widespread.

GAZETTE: Harvard, at the very least, has taken some steps to handle it, with monetary help rising, in addition to scholar range.

GAY: Precisely, and a part of it’s that we have to get our story on the market. There’s a whole lot of discourse across the problem of school affordability, for instance, however that occurs to not be a problem at Harvard as a result of we make Harvard Faculty a risk for any proficient scholar that we admit. However we’re nonetheless caught up in that unaffordability narrative, partially as a result of what we do shouldn’t be well-known or understood. We’re doing the work and we have to make that work extra seen, however there are nonetheless selections we are able to make that we haven’t but made. There are alternatives for us to increase our mission in order that it’s extra attentive to what the world wants from Harvard proper now.