Champion of students

From Yale academia to administration: Dean of Yale College Pericles Lewis shares his journey and what he enjoys about his current role.

Few positions at Yale encompass as much responsibility and opportunity to shape the student experience as dean of Yale College. Pericles Lewis, a scholar of comparative literature and English, has spent nearly three decades at Yale, moving from the classroom to global leadership and back to New Haven. Lewis oversees every facet of Yale College life, from admissions and curriculum to residential life and student well-being.

YourYale had the opportunity to speak with Lewis about his path from professor to administrator, his enduring love of literature, and what excites him most about leading Yale College today.

What are your current responsibilities?

As dean of Yale College, now in my fourth year, I oversee the whole undergraduate experience with the associate deans who specialize in student admissions and financial aid, student life and the residential college system, and undergraduate education. We also focus on careers, further education, and fellowships for our graduates. We’re deeply interested in the entire life cycle of the student.

I work with staff at Yale College who are very dedicated to the learning and well-being of our students. I mentioned the main areas above, which are led by deans and directors. I also fundraise, and we have a communications group that thinks about how we connect to the outside world and to our alumni. I love working with these colleagues who contribute to making Yale one of the few places in the world where you can get an undergraduate experience like ours.

What’s your favorite part of working at Yale?

My favorite part of being an employee at Yale is the range of opportunities and exposures you get. There was a recent exhibition of William Blake’s art and books at the British Arts Center. There are terrific performances all the time at the Schwarzman Center and at the School of Music, and there are opportunities to go to lectures by Nobel laureates and have conversations with interesting people in all kinds of disciplines. I enjoy the constant process of education and being able to keep learning. That’s something that’s possible when you’re at a place like Yale, and there’s a unique ecosystem here that’s remarkable.

Talk to us about your love of literature.

I’ve loved literature since I learned to read. My dad is a lawyer who studied French literature and the classics, and my mother is a social worker. At one time before law school, my dad worked in publishing, and my grandfather was a printer, and we had a house full of books. I remember meeting Margaret Atwood as a child because my sister knew her daughter, but I also think my father was the lawyer for her publisher by then. We had a literary kind of fandom in our family.

At McGill I studied English literature, but I was always interested in other languages. I’d learned French in high school and Italian in college, so I wound up going to Stanford for comparative literature, and that’s when I moved to the U.S. I joined Yale to teach English and comparative literature, and I was in both departments the whole time. The research side of being a professor developed out of my love of literature, and I continue to be involved, mainly in editing. I edit the 20th and 21st century part of the Norton Anthology of World Literature.

When was the turning point from professor to administrator?

One of Joseph’s dream intepretations in the Bible talks about seven good years and seven lean years, and I think about that when I reflect on my career. Mine was sort of the other way around. I spent seven years on the tenure track, which feels very lean when you’re there, and then seven years as a tenured professor, which felt like years of plenty, and now 14 years in administration. It divides my career into interesting chunks, and I really enjoyed the life of teaching, writing books, striving to get tenure, and being engaged in scholarship. But at a certain point, I had an opportunity to be involved in higher-level planning and development, and I served as the founding president of Yale-NUS (National University of Singapore) from 2012 to 2017.

I’m very proud that we were able to demonstrate the value of a liberal arts education in a Singaporean context, where most education had been highly specialized. I think other parts of Singapore have developed the notion of a broader kind of education since we started Yale-NUS, and you’ll see that universities around Asia have also embraced a more liberal arts approach.

How has your academic expertise influenced you as a leader?

I think it has to do with psychology. I specialize in the novel, and the novels I’m interested in are often about the way people think and what motivates them, and about the social environment in which they interact with one another. So I think an important skill for an administrator is understanding people’s motivations and encouraging them to share what drives them as a way to work together — to see their interests as part of a broader common interest. A big thing in literature is what’s unspoken, so understanding the subtext is very important.

What do you most enjoy about being the dean of Yale College?

One of the great things about this kind of work is interacting with students. It’s fun in the sense that I have much more direct contact with the students and with the faculty than in some other administrative roles. I’m part of the delivery of the academic mission and I enjoy being part of that delivery. I get to meet the whole range of students; not just, for example, the English majors, or the kids in student government. I meet with students with all kinds of different interests, those in the cultural centers, students involved in residential college life or the arts, and the athletes. You get the sense of the sheer diversity of our student body, and they’re all excelling in various ways, which is amazing.