Dear Members of the Harvard Community,
I am pleased to announce that John F. Manning, the Morgan and Helen Chu Dean and Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, has agreed to serve as Harvard’s interim provost. He will begin a leave from his deanship on March 14.
John has led HLS with distinction since his appointment as dean in 2017, advancing excellence in the School’s core activities while launching important new initiatives. In a community that deeply values vigorous argument and debate, he has developed a reputation for listening carefully to different points of view; engaging faculty, staff, and students in a spirit of common enterprise; building consensus in support of highly consequential decisions; and working with a team to move significant initiatives forward across multiple areas. He has supported his faculty’s unwavering commitment to rigorous and impactful scholarship and innovative teaching. Moreover, despite polarization in the wider society, John and his colleagues have developed several successful initiatives at HLS that nurture a culture of free, open, and respectful discourse. Drawing on his own experience as a first-generation student, John has also worked to make an HLS education more accessible, regardless of one’s background or financial need, and to enable more HLS graduates to pursue careers of their choosing.
An outstanding dean and eminent scholar of public law, John is also a valued colleague and a trusted advisor to me and to other leaders around the University. He is an ideal individual to advance several key University initiatives, including forthcoming efforts to explore institutional neutrality and how best to nurture an atmosphere of open inquiry, respectful dialogue, and academic freedom essential to academic excellence. I am thrilled by the prospect of the important work John will do in his new post and look forward to welcoming him to Massachusetts Hall.
While John Manning serves as interim provost, John C. P. Goldberg, Carter Professor of General Jurisprudence, has agreed to serve as interim dean of Harvard Law School.
A member of the faculty since 2008, John is admired as much for his integrity, generosity, and compassion as for his extraordinary intellect, rigorous academic work, and broad institutional service. As deputy dean of HLS from 2017 to 2022, he worked closely with John Manning on issues ranging from the oversight of curricular reform to the response to the COVID-19 pandemic. He has been a member of the HLS Lateral Appointments Committee for eleven years, three of them as chair, and led the redesign and implementation of a mentoring program for the Law School’s tenure-track faculty. He has also served as a member of the steering committee that oversaw the development of the University’s non-discrimination and anti-bullying policies, as a member of the committee that drafted Harvard University’s Electronic Communications Policy, and as the inaugural chair of the Electronic Communications Policy Oversight Committee. I have benefited from John’s thoughtful counsel through his participation on the Provost’s Advisory Committee and look forward to collaborating with him more closely.
John Manning and John Goldberg have more than a given name in common. They are University citizens of the highest order, devoted to their areas of scholarly excellence and to their intellectual home in equal measure. I am grateful for their willingness to serve in their new roles and inspired by their commitment to advancing Harvard’s vital work of teaching, learning, research, and service. Please join me in congratulating and thanking them.
Sincerely,
Alan M. Garber
P.S. For more, please see the related news release.
