Gendler stepping down as FAS dean

Dan Renzetti

As the first dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Tamar Gendler ’87 helped reorganize the way Yale governs its faculty. View full image

If you find yourself in conversation with Tamar Gendler ’87—no matter what the topic—don’t be surprised if she offers you a list of people she thinks you would be interested in talking to. Describing herself as an “intellectual matchmaker,” Gendler has spent the last ten years as the inaugural dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS). She will leave that post at the end of this year to return full-time to her teaching and scholarship.

In addition to managing a budget of just under a billion dollars, the FAS dean oversees hiring, mentoring, and compensation for around a thousand faculty members in 45 academic fields. (Before the position was created, those tasks were shared by the provost and the deans of Yale College and the Graduate School.) For Gendler, the Vincent J. Scully Professor of Philosophy, reading faculty activity reports has been a joy and an inspiration. “I get to review the academic work of a thousand of the most interesting people in the English-speaking world,” she says, “and have the opportunity to make connections among people whose work I think would stimulate others.”  

Gendler grew up in a family in which the norm was “to ask questions about the structure of everything,” she says. Her research, writing, and teaching engage with philosophy, cognitive science, and education policy, and she speaks frequently to nonacademic audiences. “What is especially fun in philosophy,” she says, “is that, very often, noticing the question is more interesting than coming up with the answer.”  

Gendler is particularly attuned to the works of the ancient Greek philosophers because of the still-relevant questions they raise about what human beings need to thrive individually and in community, and what kinds of structures can make that thriving possible. In her recent course Public Plato: Ancient Wisdom in the Digital Age, Gendler’s students examined contemporary questions using core philosophical texts, recent findings in cognitive science, and activities that included making TikTok videos and skydiving.

“I've never met a scholar with such facility with so many fields and academic domains,” says Laurie Santos, Chandrika and Ranjan Tandon Professor of Psychology. “Tamar has a zest for new ideas. Academically and energetically, she is the human equivalent of a double espresso.”

Beginning next year, Gendler will take a sabbatical in California, during which she will engage in what she calls “intellectual anthropology”—exploring West Coast understandings of the nature of cognition and the nature of education through projects in both the private and education sectors. She will also be working on a book titled Words You Didn’t Know the Words For, an introduction to philosophical thinking.

Reflecting on Gendler’s leadership of FAS, Pericles Lewis, dean of Yale College, says, “While Tamar made important innovations and wise decisions in putting together the Faculty of Arts and Sciences structure that we have now, her most distinctive trait is her empathy, which allowed her to build a sense of community in FAS that has strengthened Yale immeasurably.”