Rakesh Khurana shares lessons learned at helm  — and as an influencer, off- and online

For Rakesh Khurana, understanding the mission comes first. Without it, the what-do-we-do-next-and-how are meaningless.

That principle helped guide Khurana, who will step down at the end of the academic year after 11 years as the Danoff Dean of Harvard College and return to teaching in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and at Harvard Business School.

Khurana, the Marvin Bower Professor of Leadership Development and a professor of sociology, first arrived at Harvard in 1993 for graduate school, earning a master’s in sociology in 1997 and a Ph.D. in organizational behavior in 1998.

During his tenure as dean, Khurana worked to enhance opportunities in the arts and public service, reorganized office infrastructure to better align supports for students, helped launch the Intellectual Vitality initiative, and defended the goal of recruiting students to the University from a diverse set of backgrounds and experiences.

And, of course, he built a presence on Instagram affectionately known as the Deanstagram. In this edited conversation, Khurana talks about the work he’s done and the lessons he’s learned — about himself and the community.

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You’re one of the longest serving deans of Harvard College. Can you talk a bit about aspects of your tenure that you found particularly gratifying?

I think I’ve had the best role in higher education. As an immigrant to this country, growing up in a family that held higher education and education as sacred and Harvard as being one of the institutions that embodied that idea, I feel lucky.

Part of what we accomplished from the start was knowing that we were going to be a mission-oriented organization and institution, going back to the founding. Our aim has been to educate citizen leaders and be clear how we do it — through the transformative experience of a liberal arts and science education and developing specificity around the intellectual, the social, and personal transformation.

One of the things that I feel good about is that there’s a strong sense of understanding of the College’s mission. That clarity has let us take numerous actions on everything ranging from adopting an honor code, which is emblematic of the kind of aspiration that we want to have for our students, to the renewal of the Gen Ed program, which occurred at a time when there was a debate over whether it would even continue.

The commitment to the idea of a general education that’s broad and anchored in the liberal arts and that centers on important questions of society is really critical. Professor Michael Sandel’s renewed class “Justice” is one example of creating a intergenerational connection between our students and alumni who took that class decades earlier that both honors the past, but that’s also relevant/critical for the issues of today.

I am also proud of our work on the Intellectual Vitality initiative, which was something the team had been focused on for several years. Having a data-informed but also flexible approach helped us recognize how Harvard could avoid the fashion of the day and rather commit to substance on these issues. I hope the approach of holding true to our mission and at the same time evolving is remembered as one of the mainstays of my deanship.

“To be in a place where the past is being honored, the present is being contended with, and where the future is being shaped through research is an incredible privilege.”

During your tenure as dean, you faced various challenges. Is there one you think you learned the most from?

Universities reflect the world, but they can also magnify what is happening beyond our campus. Bringing together people who are, for the first time, living with and learning from people with very different backgrounds and experiences is probably the greatest opportunity we have.

But creating this community requires building a lot of capacities and skills and role modeling. Maybe in the past we could take for granted that this all existed, but I think we can’t assume that students and faculty and staff are coming here with this understanding.

We have to recognize that Harvard is not a perfect institution. I think recognizing this work of bringing together people with different backgrounds and experiences has existed in this institution from Day One. This is an institution that recognizes that excellence comes in a variety of forms. In the process of that evolving understanding we get closer to our motto of veritas.

How different was the job of being dean from what you expected?

My background is as an organizational sociologist, and my particular focus is studying institutions, leadership, and bureaucracy. In that field, you learn a lot of theory, do empirical work, write case studies.

There’s a lot of knowing, and then there’s the doing, and then you discover the knowing/doing gap. While some of what you teach are concepts that are helpful and useful, they’re often ideal types that don’t take into account all the particular contingencies and challenges of the specific experiences.

There are three things that, for me, held true. A sense of mission — “What is our purpose?” The vision — “Where are we going?” And the values, or “How are we going to get there?” The power of that is something I’d been teaching about for years, and it’s so interesting to see how powerful it is and how easy it is to forget. I start every meeting with the College mission. If people who are leading are not minding the mission and the vision and the values, who is?

The second lesson that I learned is the microscope that we’re under. When you’re in a position of responsibility, you are constantly role modeling. People are not just paying attention to what you say, but to what you do. Your walk has to be your talk. In fact, your walk is probably more important than your talk.

Something you learn working with students and your team is that you’re a coach, and you’re often trying to figure out what people’s aspirational skills are, what their motivations are. While you’re coaching them to try to help connect those two, in the process you’re coaching yourself.

The other thing I learned is that we’re all works in progress. We’re all trying to become better versions of ourselves. If you’re surrounded by people who care about the mission, who understand the vision of where we’re going, and desire to operate with those values, you can create incredible trust, allowing you to do important things, including getting through some really difficult moments.

Structurally, the most difficult moment was COVID-19.

In many ways we had to live without the things that made us distinctive, the day-to-day being on this campus: the serendipity, the sense of learning to see behind each other’s eyes and hear from each other’s perspectives, not only in the classroom but in the dining halls, in our student organizations. To de-densify campus in a short time period, to try to deal with the reality of the situation, the uncertainty that it presented, and keep academic continuity. Keeping the academic mission going and then restarting and bringing people back to campus in a safe way with the protocols and the testing. That was the most challenging moment, but it was the moment where the University worked as one institution to move forward in a really powerful way.

“Harvard is not a perfect institution. I don’t think we should be a perfect institution because if we were coming close to that ideal, that would mean we are not playing a big enough game.”

You’ve been vocal in warning about the challenge higher education faces with declining trust. How do we rebuild that?

Rebuilding trust is not something that can be done overnight. Part of what we have to do is to make sure that our core is quite strong. The basic functions that people expect of a university around teaching and research must be rock-solid.

For a place like Harvard our legitimacy has depended on two things: a commitment to academic excellence and a commitment to meritocracy.

I would say there are three things that institutions like ours should be doing. One is that we convene excellence — in our faculty, our students, and staff. We should be highlighting excellence in bringing people together.

Second is our commitment to veritas. The reason we depend on academic excellence and meritocracy is that it gets you to a better understanding of the truth. We need to be an institution that lives with an uncomfortable truth rather than a comfortable delusion.

The third thing we need to do is streamline as an institution.

In our commitment to being a place where people across differences and backgrounds and experiences can openly and thoughtfully discuss complex issues, we have two responsibilities.

First, we have to make sure that if we’re asking families to invest in our education, we have to educate effectively.

Then there’s the moral responsibility. Any institution that takes on the responsibility of educating youth is a moral institution at the same time. And this cannot be politicized. When you are politicized, people believe you are producing biased research, not encouraging independent thinking, inculcating ideology, or not allowing for conversations on difficult topics.

Many in the community think one of your defining characteristics is your approachability. Is that something that you’ve always had, or did you develop that over time, and if so how?

It would probably surprise people that during the time I spent in college, I could count on my hands how many times I ate a meal with somebody. I had a small group of friends, but they kept very different hours than I did. They were all artists and painters, and so they would work like night owls. I was in social science and would get up early, go to the library to study.

I ate most of my meals by myself, but I never felt lonely. I had my books. I always felt I was in conversation with scholars like Max Weber, John Stuart Mill, Milton Friedman, and others. It wasn’t that I didn’t like people. I was using the four years I had in college to do something I didn’t think I’d ever have the time to do again — work on my thinking and understanding of the world.

In hindsight, I think I should have realized that I had just as much to learn from my peers. Something I learned from my mother and from Stephanie, my partner, is that everybody has an important and interesting story to tell.

My mother would always say, “Nobody’s better than you, but you’re also not better than anyone else.” That kind of humility is something that I just love my parents for because when I came to graduate school I just found myself being friends with and getting to know everybody — not only my peers, but also the custodial staff and the staff at the sociology department and at HBS. I just started realizing that everybody had such an interesting story to tell.

I would often look for the student who was sitting by themselves at a meal and think to myself, “I wish somebody would have sat with me at that time.” I always found myself drawn to sitting with students, which culminated in us becoming faculty deans at Cabot House. That’s when I became comfortable with being uncomfortable in terms of just sitting with somebody new and asking them a couple of questions, and it has become one of the most joyful parts of my day.

Something that you’ve often spoken about is being an immigrant kid who attended New York City public schools. Did that kid ever think he would be the dean of one of the world’s leading educational institutions?

I was born in India. My parents immigrated to the U.S. the same way millions of other families have for the same reason of trying to build a better life for their kids, and primarily for the educational opportunities.

My mother was a public school teacher in the Bronx, and my dad was an accountant for the city. I always remember that we would move because my mom would look at which schools had higher Regents scores, even a couple of blocks, so that we would be zoned for that school. I know firsthand the transformative power that education has — not just on the individual life, but the generational impact that it has.

My higher education experience began at SUNY Binghamton, and then I transferred to Cornell when a professor came up to me after class and said, “You’re doing well in this class. You should think about transferring to Cornell.” I was like, “Why?” He said, “I went there, and I think you would do really well.”

I had never had a teacher say something like that. It showed the power of a teacher seeing something in you that you didn’t even see yourself. This highlights the power of the mission. How do you create those opportunities for interaction where a conversation, question, or suggestion ends up shaping and changing the trajectory of your life?

After college, I worked in a small tech startup that ended up growing. Somebody from HBS came to write a case study on the company and that conversation led me to apply to graduate school. The next year I was at Harvard.

What does working on this campus mean to you now that you’ve been teaching and leading for so many years?

One of the things I love to do is just go to higher education institutions and visit campuses. I remember the first time seeing the libraries, the first place I would go when visiting. Visiting Cornell’s Sage Hall library, Widener and Baker libraries at Harvard, and dropping off my brothers at Dartmouth and Wesleyan.

To be in a place where the past is being honored, the present is being contended with, and where the future is being shaped through research is an incredible privilege. At times when things can feel challenging, we need to remember that colleges and universities are a candle in the darkness. We have a special responsibility to make sure that that candle is burning bright.

Harvard is not a perfect institution. I don’t think we should be a perfect institution because if we were coming close to that ideal, that would mean we are not playing a big enough game. Our aspirations should always run ahead of our reality.

Final question: Are we going to have to go to Allston to get a selfie?

It will be interesting to highlight the life of a professor, so I plan on continuing my Instagram. I think sharing our experiences on campus helps also with the element of rebuilding trust, because it takes away the mythology that institutions like ours don’t have people who are working hard and trying to do their best for the world. As former President Drew Faust said, “Harvard’s not trying to be the best in the world. It’s trying to be the best for the world.” My sense is that is what the community is, but you can’t tell that. You have to show it.