The Faculty of Arts and Sciences voted on Tuesday, March 27, to approve the creation of a new interfaculty PhD program in education to be offered jointly by Harvard’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and Graduate School of Education (HGSE). The program, leveraging the resources of both Schools to advance scholarship and practice in education, will enroll its first cohort in fall 2014.
“The new interfaculty PhD program in education will leverage the renowned strengths of Harvard’s Graduate School of Education and its Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, and will engage distinguished faculty from across the University,” said Harvard University President Drew Gilpin Faust after the faculty vote. “Bringing experts from several Schools together reflects a commitment both to advancing as one Harvard and to addressing urgent issues related to human progress.”
With the approval of this new degree, Harvard now confers the PhD in 54 departments, programs, and divisions. The PhD in education is the 17th interfaculty PhD program at Harvard, bringing the arts and sciences together with the professional graduate schools.
“This new PhD program will expand our intellectual and programmatic collaboration with other Schools at Harvard, while opening an opportunity for critical interdisciplinary scholarship in the area of education policy and practice,” said Michael D. Smith, Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. “The Faculty of Arts and Sciences is home to scholars who do groundbreaking work on topics in education from within the disciplines of the social sciences, the sciences, and the arts and humanities. By creating formal channels of collaboration, we will now explicitly integrate the theoretical and methodological work of the FAS disciplines with applications and translations beyond the academy.”
In addition to HGSE faculty members, nearly 50 faculty members from other Harvard schools—28 from FAS and 17 from other professional schools including the Medical School, the School of Public Health, the Kennedy School, and the Law School—have agreed to affiliate with their Education School colleagues on the PhD faculty.
“This program will harness the intellectual resources of the entire university to address the most important public policy issue of the 21st century. Education is the civil rights issue of our time,” said HGSE Dean Kathleen McCartney.
“In addition to providing an important opportunity to rethink how we prepare education scholars, this new degree will benefit GSAS students across our disciplines,” added Richard J. Tarrant, interim dean of the Graduate School. “Collaboration with education faculty and students will give our social scientists, in particular, a new way to explore the applications of their work. And new research models and new connections to education practice and policy will enrich the work of many humanities and natural science students as well.”
The proposal for the PhD in education was prepared last year by an interfaculty working group, following several years of prior discussion and planning. The members of the working group were Mahzarin Banaji (Psychology), Paul Harris (HGSE), Larry Katz (Economics), Gary King (University Professor/Government), Bridget Long (HGSE), Jal Mehta (HGSE), Catherine Snow (HGSE), Mary Waters (Sociology), and Hirokazu Yoshikawa (Chair/HGSE). Former GSAS Dean Allan Brandt strongly supported the proposal and provided key guidance along the way.
The PhD in education will succeed and replace HGSE’s EdD as Harvard’s program for training education researchers. The EdD program will enroll its final cohort in the fall of 2013.
Read:
Coverage from the Graduate School of Education
Coverage in Harvard Magazine