FAS Dean of Social Science search

To: FAS faculty
Cc: FAS staff; FAS Dean's Office; FAS Steering; President's Office; Provost's Office

Dear colleagues in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences,

As you learned from the announcement sent last spring, we are seeking a new FAS Dean of Social Science to success Ken Scheve. The new dean will be appointed effective January 1, 2026, and I am very grateful to Alan Gerber for serving as acting dean in the interim.

Below is some information about the search advisory committee and the search process, and a brief description of the role.

Committee Membership

To inform the selection of the new FAS Dean of Social Science, I have appointed a faculty advisory committee that spans our social science units. I am very grateful to the committee members for agreeing to serve.

• Dan Spielman, Committee Chair; Sterling Professor of Computer Science; Professor of Statistics and Data Science, and of Mathematics
• Costas Arkolakis, Professor of Economics
• Veneeta Dayal, Dorothy R. Diebold Professor of Linguistics; Chair, Department of Linguistics
• Jennifer Gandhi, Howard Wang ’95 Professor of Global Affairs and Political Science; Deputy Dean, Jackson School of Global Affairs
• Philip Gorski, Frederic and Laura Goff Professor of Sociology
• Nick Turk-Browne, Susan Nolen-Hoeksema Professor of Psychology and Professor of Psychiatry, Neurosurgery, and in the Child Study Center; Director, Wu Tsai Institute
• Claudia Valeggia, Professor of Anthropology

The committee will be assisted in its work by Bob Burger, Senior Associate Dean, and Alex Nedelcu, Senior Administrative Assistant.

I have asked this committee to consider as potential candidates for the role of FAS Dean of Social Science current full professors in the FAS, and to provide me with a short list of candidates and a sense of their strengths by the end of November.

The committee invites your nominations and feedback on potential candidates via this webform. If you are interested in being considered for this position, I encourage you to reach out to Dan Spielman to let him know.

Roles and responsibilities

The FAS Dean of Social Science oversees the day-to-day well-being and mid- and long-term planning of the departments and programs in the social science division of the FAS and (in conjunction with the FAS Dean of Humanities where appropriate) of certain cross-divisional units. They oversee faculty hiring plans, hiring processes, offers, recruitments, and retentions, as well as faculty promotion, tenure, and retirement for these FAS academic units. They chair the social science advisory committee, and with the Dean of the FAS, lead the social science tenure appointments and promotions committee.

The FAS Dean of Social Science sits on the major FAS committees, including FAS Steering (which oversees all matters of FAS policy) and the Faculty Resource Committee (which oversees the allocation of all FAS ladder faculty searches). Together with the FAS deans of humanities and science, they meet regularly with the Dean of the FAS to coordinate FAS-wide goals, strategies, policies, and practices.

A more detailed description of the role is available online.

I am looking forward to working with the FAS community to identify candidates for this important role, and I extend my thanks once again to the search advisory committee for their service.

Best wishes,

Steven

Steven Wilkinson
Dean
Faculty of Arts and Sciences
Yale University