Gendler to return to faculty after leading FAS for a decade

Tamar Gendler will complete her second five-year term as dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) on Dec. 31 and return to the Yale faculty, President Maurie McInnis announced Tuesday.

Gendler — who is also Vincent J. Scully Professor of Philosophy and professor of psychology and cognitive science — conceived of and implemented the current structure of the FAS. She was appointed its inaugural dean in 2014 and reappointed in 2019.

In the role, Gendler oversees more than 1,000 faculty in some 50 different academic fields, “nearly all of whom she knows by face and name,” McInnis wrote in a message to the Yale community.

“Tamar inaugurated this role with brilliance and grace, and I am grateful for her leadership amid a period of unprecedented growth and historic restructuring,” the president wrote.

In 2025, Gendler will spend a sabbatical on the West Coast exploring cutting-edge work in artificial intelligence and educational technology. When she returns to Yale, McInnis said, Gendler will apply what she learns to her research and teaching and will “lead efforts to help us determine the role of these innovations within institutions of higher education.”

An “entrepreneurial spirit and an embrace of outside-the-box thinking,” McInnis wrote, “are two of the qualities that made Tamar the obvious choice to lead FAS a decade ago.”

Under Gendler’s leadership, the FAS has recruited more than 350 new ladder faculty members and instituted practices to recognize the contributions of those on the instructional track. More than half of the current FAS faculty came to Yale under her deanship, McInnis wrote, and Gendler “has worked relentlessly to secure the resources needed for them to excel.”

Landmark accomplishments of Gendler’s two terms as dean include the construction and renovation of the Humanities Quadrangle; the creation of the Tobin Center for Economic Policy at Yale; and the establishment of the Department of Statistics and Data Science. During her deanship, the FAS provided faculty leadership for transformative campus projects, including the Wu Tsai Institute and the Jackson School of Global Affairs, and advanced key campus priorities in the sciences, from neuroscience and planetary solutions to quantum, data, and computer science.

Nearly every facet of the FAS’s governance was developed under Gendler’s leadership.

“All that work came out of an organization that did not exist when Tamar assumed her post a decade ago,” McInnis wrote. “Tamar conceived of and implemented the current structure of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, including her own role as dean.”

Gendler also introduced the role of divisional deans and the Scholars as Leaders and Learners (SAL2) faculty support program, and she oversaw the design of the FAS seal and mace.

Gendler earned her undergraduate degree summa cum laude at Yale in 1987, in humanities and mathematics-and-philosophy, and her Ph.D. in philosophy at Harvard in 1996. The author of field-shaping books and articles in philosophy, cognitive science, and education policy, she frequently speaks to audiences beyond academia on topics that range from ancient philosophy to human flourishing to the role of liberal arts education. Recent presentations include lectures at the Aspen Institute IDEAS Festival, the New Haven Festival of Arts and Ideas, and the New York Academy of Sciences; and media appearances on “Hidden Brain” with Shankar Vedantam, “Ten Percent Happier” with Dan Harris, and “The Happiness Lab” with Yale’s Laurie Santos.

Gendler currently serves as a trustee of the London School of Economics, and as a board member of New Haven Promise and of the Marc Sanders Foundation. A sought-after expert on higher education, Gendler has served in advisory roles for the Ecole Normale Supérieure, the Israeli Council of Higher Education, the National University of Singapore, Harvard University, MIT, and numerous other institutions.

McInnis said she and Provost Scott Strobel have begun the process of identifying Gendler’s successor, and will provide more information about the search soon.

“The person who assumes this office will have enormous shoes to fill,” McInnis wrote, “but also an incredible foundation on which to build.”

Gendler, she said, established that foundation, “something new at a centuries-old institution that operates with the seamlessness of our most storied traditions.”