John Manning named next provost

John F. Manning.

Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographer

Campus & Community
John Manning named next provost

August 15, 2024 long read

His seven-year tenure as Law School dean noted for commitments to academic excellence, innovation, collaboration, and culture of free, open, and respectful discourse

President Alan M. Garber ’76 announced Thursday that John F. Manning ’82, J.D. ’85, has been appointed the next provost of the University. Manning, who has been a professor of law at Harvard Law School (HLS) since 2004 and HLS dean since 2017, has been on leave from that post since March to serve as interim provost.

The search for Manning’s replacement at HLS will launch in September, with John C.P. Goldberg, who was previously deputy dean, continuing to serve as interim dean until the conclusion of the search.

“Since he became interim provost in March, John has done an outstanding job maintaining momentum across a broad portfolio of academic activities while leading efforts to articulate, communicate, and uphold the values of the University,” Garber wrote in a message to the Harvard community. “John is a widely respected colleague, rigorous scholar, and celebrated teacher who is admired as much for his dedication to Harvard as for his broad and deep intellect.

“Through his efforts to understand more about more parts of our community, he has demonstrated both humility and wisdom, two attributes that will serve him exceedingly well throughout his tenure,” Garber continued. “Most important, he is the right person for the moment in which we find ourselves, motivated by love for and service to the institution that raised his own sights, and eager to make it possible for all members of our University to thrive.”

“John is a widely respected colleague, rigorous scholar, and celebrated teacher who is admired as much for his dedication to Harvard as for his broad and deep intellect.”
President Alan M. Garber

As interim provost, Manning played a central role alongside Garber in advancing several key University-wide initiatives. Earlier this year he led the formation of the Open Inquiry and Constructive Dialogue Working Group and the Institutional Voice Working Group. Both groups bring together the expertise and leadership of faculty from across the University to examine vital questions – specifically, how to foster open inquiry on campus and when the University should speak on public issues — that affect the way the University fulfills its mission of research, teaching, and learning.

“I love this University, and I am grateful for the opportunity to serve the Harvard community at this critical time,” said Manning. “Over the past five months as interim provost, I have gotten to know better the depth and breadth of this University’s academic excellence — in the arts and humanities, in the social sciences, in the sciences, and in our world-class professional Schools. I’m excited about meeting and hearing from colleagues across this great University and learning more about the spectacular work they do. I am also looking forward to working with colleagues to nurture academic excellence, collaboration, open and constructive dialogue, and a sense of belonging in which everyone feels that this is their Harvard and that they can thrive here.”

As provost, Manning will serve as the University’s chief academic officer, working in tandem with academic and administrative leaders to foster collaboration among faculty across all the Schools, advance innovations in teaching and learning, promote academic excellence and the free exchange of ideas, and support the array of offices under the provost’s purview. These include Harvard’s University-wide offices dedicated to advances in learning, faculty development, research, international affairs, technology development, trademark, student affairs, gender equity, and Harvard Library.

Manning will also have responsibility for cultural and artistic units, such as the Harvard University Native American Program, Harvard Art Museums, and the American Repertory Theater. He will also support the scholarship and programs of the University’s 33 interfaculty initiatives, academic collaborations among multiple Schools on shared areas of research. Manning will also support the University’s important work addressing its legacy of slavery, guided by the recommendations and findings of the Presidential Committee on Harvard & the Legacy of Slavery.

Manning brings many perspectives to his new role — as an alumnus of Harvard College and Harvard Law School, as a professor, as dean of HLS and, most recently, as interim provost. An active University citizen, he has also served on numerous University-wide committees, including the Presidential Task Force on Inclusion and Belonging, the Vice Provost for Advances in Learning Committee, and the HarvardX Faculty Committee.

Manning, who first set foot on campus in the fall of 1978, described his enthusiasm and enduring gratitude for his experience as a Harvard College student. “I was a first-generation student, and it felt like I had a lot to learn. I felt nervous, but also determined. I had great teachers and classmates, and every class I took was mind-opening and exciting. Especially coming to Harvard College as a first-gen student, you get to feel the sensation of your life changing in real time. It was amazing.”

“I am … looking forward to working with colleagues to nurture academic excellence, collaboration, open and constructive dialogue, and a sense of belonging in which everyone feels that this is their Harvard and in which everyone can thrive.”
Provost John F. Manning

After graduating summa cum laude in 1982, he attended HLS, earning his J.D. magna cum laude in 1985. He clerked for two judges — U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia and Judge Robert Bork on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit — and served in the U.S. Department of Justice in both the Office of Legal Counsel and in the Solicitor General’s Office.

Before returning to Cambridge in 2004 to join the Harvard Law faculty, Manning was a professor at Columbia Law School for 10 years. A renowned scholar of administrative law, legislation, and federal courts, he was appointed deputy dean at HLS in 2013 and dean in 2017.

During his seven years leading the Law School, Manning focused on several key objectives: continuing to deepen the excellence of HLS’s world class faculty; nurturing a culture of free, open, and respectful discourse; supporting curricular and teaching innovation, including online learning; broadening access to legal education; and deepening the HLS community.

“John Manning has brought great integrity, huge intelligence, real creativity and action, empowerment of others, genuine listening, and a big heart to his leadership first of Harvard Law School and recently to the entire University in his interim provost role,” said Martha Minow, 300th Anniversary University Professor and former HLS dean.

Academic excellence and the free exchange of ideas

In the past seven years, Harvard Law School has continued to build its world-class faculty, recruiting outstanding new colleagues across multiple fields, who are dedicated to excellence in scholarship, classroom pedagogy, and clinical education. Manning and his colleagues also launched a number of initiatives to help nurture the free exchange of ideas and a culture of generous listening.

These included building a greater variety of faculty workshops in which colleagues could exchange ideas about important issues in real time, as well as new orientation programming for incoming students on how to have difficult conversations. In addition, the Law School adopted for its classrooms a new principle modeled on the Chatham House Rule to foster classroom conversation and debate — to create room for students to express what they truly think, take risks, try on ideas for size, and make the mistakes that are part of learning. And just last year, the faculty implemented a negotiation and leadership requirement with the objective of having all students engage in an academic offering focused on listening actively and generously to opposing viewpoints.

In 2020, HLS launched the Rappaport Forum, a series in which experts from different perspectives come together to model respectful debate about some of society’s most challenging issues. Topics have included the potential limits of campus free speech, whether and how the U.S. Supreme Court should be reformed, voting rights, internet censorship, and judicial reliance on history and tradition in high-profile cases.

Novel ways of teaching old and new law

The launch of a new January Experiential Term for first-year students in 2019 was an early sign that Manning and his colleagues planned to think continuously about how a law school curriculum could best prepare students for legal practice in the 21st century. Through that new program, the Law School launched an array of hands-on courses intended to give students opportunities to explore areas of the law and build practical skills often not taught during the first year of law school.

To better prepare incoming students, Manning and his colleagues also drove the creation of a new, self-paced online course, Zero-L, which premiered in 2018. Taught by Harvard Law faculty, the program was designed to prepare all incoming students to feel ready for law school on day one. Manning, who was the first in his family to graduate from college or attend law school, saw it as a way to give new students, regardless of their backgrounds, “a common baseline of knowledge about the American legal system and about the vocabulary of law.” More recently, Manning and his colleagues spearheaded the creation of Harvard Law School Online, a strategic initiative designed to bring the expertise of the School’s faculty to new learners around the world.

Manning and his colleagues also responded to the changing demands of the legal profession, gathering data through student and alumni surveys, regular curricular focus groups with students, and focus groups with lawyers in the private, public interest, and government sectors. Resulting innovations included a newly instituted legal writing requirement, another in negotiation and leadership, the introduction of a first-year Constitutional Law course to provide foundational knowledge of the nation’s basic charter, and the development of a new Transactional Law Workshop that uses deal simulations to deepen students’ understanding of complex transactions in the global economy.

As dean, Manning also oversaw the creation of five new in-house legal clinics focusing on animal law, LGBTQ+ issues, election law, religious freedom, and ending mass incarceration. With 37 clinics and 11 student practice organizations, HLS students have more opportunities to get hands on experience serving clients in need than at any other school in the nation.

Making legal education accessible to all

Manning worked with colleagues to reduce barriers to legal education. In addition to increasing spending on financial aid grants, Manning announced in February the launch of a new Opportunity Fund, which enables J.D. students with the highest financial need to attend Harvard Law tuition-free for all three years.

Under Manning’s leadership, HLS also repeatedly bolstered the School’s Low Income Protection Plan, or LIPP, which helps J.D. graduates pursue lower-paying, often public interest, jobs by repaying some or all of their student loans based on income and assets. In recent years, the School improved the threshold for full coverage of loan repayments by nearly 50 percent, ensuring that graduates working in qualifying roles earning $70,000 or less annually are eligible to have LIPP cover the full cost of their loan repayments. At the same time, HLS also launched a new Public Service Loan Forgiveness program.

Manning and his colleagues have also focused on broadening access to law school for people from all backgrounds, primarily reflecting first-generation and less advantaged backgrounds. Last year, the Law School launched Future Leaders in Law, a yearlong pre-law pipeline program co-sponsored by Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison to help prepare students to apply for admission to law schools around the nation. Two years earlier, the School partnered with the National Education Equity Lab to create Future-L, which introduces high achieving high school students from underserved backgrounds to law and the legal profession. These two initiatives joined an existing pre-law program, TRIALS, a collaboration between HLS, NYU Law School, and the Advantage Testing Foundation that just celebrated its 15th anniversary.

Creating a community where everyone feels they belong

Strengthening the Harvard Law community by making it deeper and more inclusive has been a key objective of Manning’s time as dean. In 2019, the Law School launched HLS Amicus, a new online directory and matching platform for alumni, students, and faculty, to enable community members to connect more easily across backgrounds, interests, aspirations, and generations. The School has also expanded its student mentoring and advising offerings, including several new mentorship programs using the Amicus platform, such as an Alumni Mentorship Program that matches interested graduates with first-year J.D. and LL.M. students. During Manning’s time as dean, the School also funded and encouraged lunches between faculty and students; sponsored School-wide community service weeks for staff; fostered a speaker series to bring together faculty and staff around important topics of the day; and hosted mock classes to enable staff to experience what it is like to learn in a law school classroom.

“John Manning has been a brilliant and indefatigable leader of the Law School,” said Guy-Uriel Emmanuel Charles, Charles J. Ogletree Jr. Professor of Law and faculty director, Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice. “He is a person of deep integrity and wisdom. He is also someone who genuinely cares about people.”

Addressing Harvard Law School’s past and looking forward

In 2017, at the opening of the HLS bicentennial observance, Manning helped unveil on the Law School campus a memorial to the enslaved people whose labor helped make possible the founding of the School. And as the new academic year began in 2021, he unveiled a new Law School shield that sought to convey the dynamism, inclusiveness, connectivity, and strength of the HLS community, while underscoring the School’s commitment to truth, law, and justice. The previous shield, which reflected the family crest of Isaac Royall Jr., an early donor to Harvard College and subsequently the Law School, had been retired in 2016 by then-Dean Minow with the Corporation’s approval.

Following the release of Harvard’s long awaited report detailing the many ways the University participated in, and profited from, slavery, Manning announced several initiatives that the Law School would undertake, including the commitment to create a meaningful, central convening space and commemorative installation on the HLS campus to pay tribute to Belinda Sutton and other enslaved people from the Royall estate, an academic conference and lecture series designed to advance the understanding of the legacy of slavery and the ongoing pursuit of racial justice, a more formal relationship with and support for the Royall House & Slave Quarters in Medford, Massachusetts, and the retirement of the Royall Professorship.

A sense of gratitude

Reflecting on his new role at Harvard, Manning says, “I am grateful every day to be here. Harvard has enabled me as a student, as a teacher, as an administrator to learn and grow and to live a life of professional fulfillment that I could not have imagined as a child. Even on the hardest days, I love the alma mater and am grateful for the opportunity to serve.”

President Garber also acknowledged Goldberg’s work as interim dean of HLS.

“I especially want to thank John C. P. Goldberg, Carter Professor of General Jurisprudence, for his continued service as interim dean. He is an admired, generous, and respected colleague whose thoughtful counsel continues to enrich the University,” Garber said. “I look forward to commencing a search for a permanent dean in September, and I will be in touch soon with more details.”