Judith Singer to Step Down as Senior Vice Provost for Faculty After 18 Years

Harvard Graduate School of Education professor Judith D. Singer will step down as senior vice provost for faculty in June after 18 years coordinating faculty recruitment and development across campus, the University announced last week.

Singer was first appointed senior vice provost for faculty development and diversity in 2008, three years after the role was created following recommendations from the Task Force on Women Faculty and the Task Force on Women in Science and Engineering.

Those task forces were charged with finding ways to improve the advancement of female faculty members at Harvard and recommended expanding data collection on faculty demographics, strengthening recruitment efforts, and creating a senior administrative position focused on faculty diversity and development.

In 2025, the Office of Faculty Development & Diversity was renamed to the Office for Faculty, and the word “diversity” was also dropped from Singer’s title amid a broader University-wide retreat from language and programming around diversity, equity, and inclusion.

In a press release announcing Singer’s departure, University President Alan M. Garber ’76 praised her impact on faculty life across Harvard.

“Few people have done as much to nurture and sustain academic excellence across the University as Judy Singer,” Garber said in the press release. “When I returned to Harvard in 2011, she quickly became one of my most trusted advisers, a person of great discernment who is valued for her good humor as well as her knowledge and wisdom.”

Singer said she was grateful for the opportunity to help shape faculty policy over nearly two decades.

“It has been an honor to work closely with presidents, provosts, and deans these last eighteen years toward our shared goal of supporting excellence across Harvard’s faculty,” Singer said in the press release. “I have been fortunate to lead a remarkable team in building the frameworks, practices, and resources that enable Harvard to attract and retain the best and brightest scholars from around the world and support them in their work.”

When Singer entered the role, she pledged to improve the campus environment for junior faculty members — particularly women and underrepresented scholars. She has said her commitment to that effort was shaped in part by her own experiences studying and teaching at Harvard.

Singer earned a Ph.D. in statistics from Harvard in 1983 at a time when the department did not have any female tenured faculty members. In a 2008 interview reflecting on her early career, she said that when she began as an assistant professor she had been told to assume tenure would not be an option for her.

Her background as a statistician informed her approach to the job. Singer compiled annual reports tracking the number of women and underrepresented minorities among ladder faculty across the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and Harvard’s graduate schools. In 2011, the report included a historical overview of tenured female professors across the University for the first time.

As senior vice provost, Singer also advised the University’s ad hoc tenure process and chaired the Provost’s Review Committee on Faculty Appointments.

Harvard’s ad hoc tenure process has drawn criticism in recent years after several contested decisions, including the 2024 denial of tenure to Saul Noam Zaritt, Harvard’s only tenure-track professor of Yiddish. Singer ran the meeting of the ad hoc committee that had been convened to gather additional information on Zaritt’s qualifications.

Neither Garber nor University Provost John F. Manning attended that meeting, which some faculty members criticized as a procedural irregularity. Garber later denied Zaritt’s tenure application.

Singer herself has acknowledged the opacity of the process. In a 2013 interview with The Crimson, she described the ad hoc tenure review system as “shrouded in mystery” and said that “remarkably little is written about it.”

During her tenure, Singer also oversaw the creation of several faculty support programs, including University-wide medical leave policies, expanded childcare resources, and improvements to Harvard’s faculty mortgage loan program.

In 2015, Harvard reached gender parity in junior faculty hires for the first time as part of an effort to broaden representation in faculty recruitment. The Faculty of Arts and Sciences’ Sciences Division reached gender parity among tenure-track faculty in 2018.

A 2019 University report found that the share of women and underrepresented minorities among Harvard’s ladder faculty had gradually increased since the early 2000s, including gains in tenure-track representation in the sciences.

Singer’s office also played a role in expanding childcare access for faculty members. In 2018, Harvard announced plans to build a childcare facility in Allston after faculty in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences pushed for additional childcare resources — a project that required approval from Singer’s office.

Singer will take a sabbatical before returning to teach at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, where she previously served as academic dean from 1999 to 2004.

—Staff writer Catherine Jeon can be reached at [email protected].