Christina Lee, Senior Photographer

Tamar Gendler ’87, the former inaugural dean of Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, will return to the classroom next semester after over a decade away from full-time teaching.

According to Yale’s course search website, Gendler will teach two courses in the spring: a Directed Studies section on philosophy and “Intelligence: Human, Animal, Artificial,” a seminar on what the course description calls “intelligence across species, centuries, and systems.” The courses will mark the first time Gendler teaches in a full-time capacity since spring 2013, before her deanship.

“One of the challenges about the job I had for a decade is that, pretty much, administration took up a large proportion of my time, so I couldn’t do a lot of writing, and I couldn’t do much teaching,” Gendler said in a Zoom interview with the News. “I’m super duper happy about the prospect of being able to do two of the other things that I really, really love about universities.”

Gendler said her seminar on human, animal and artificial intelligence, which she said is intended for seniors, brings together topics on behavioral science and artificial intelligence that she explored during a sabbatical she is currently spending at Stanford University. She also said she was excited to return to teaching the first-year Directed Studies program, which she described as “the greatest course in the world to be able to teach.”

“In the spring, I’m teaching both ends of the Yale spectrum in terms of career cohort,” she said. “I love meeting students on their way in, and I love meeting students on their way out.”

While Gendler taught “Public Plato: Ancient Wisdom in the Digital Age” during a medical leave in spring 2023, she said the standard expectation for full-time faculty in the Humanities division is to teach two courses a semester. She added that she sees no reason why she wouldn’t continue to teach full-time in the fall and the upcoming years.

Gendler, who graduated from Yale College summa cum laude in 1987 with distinctions in the humanities and the mathematics and philosophy majors, served as the University’s Deputy Provost for the Humanities and Initiatives from 2013 to 2014 and the Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences from 2014 to 2024.

In an interview with the News that was published in December 2024, Gendler said she was one of the top contenders to succeed former University President Peter Salovey, whose tenure as president ended in June 2024. She also said she was interested in leading one of the four Ivy League universities that at the time did not have permanent presidents and thought she was passed over for the Yale position because she is uninhibited in her public speaking.

Gendler said that her administrative experience will make her “more imaginative and more effective” in the classroom. Serving as dean — working with the Poorvu Center and reading about tenure cases — familiarized her with other professors’ innovations in teaching, she said.

Since the end of her term last December, Gendler said, she has been spending her sabbatical at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford. She also said she wrote a book that is “basically an introduction to philosophy in the voice of a stand-up comic,” which she hopes to publish in the “reasonably near future.”

“Imagine Socrates were to give a TED Talk on Comedy Central. That’s the book,” Gendler said. “In some ways, this year that I spent writing a non-academic, popular book was an effort to teach a really, really large audience. Now I’m thrilled to go to the interpersonal part of just teaching students again.”

Gendler said her course on human, animal and artificial intelligence struck her as “the perfect way” to bring together everything she’s learned during her sabbatical. The fundamental question of the course, she said, is “What is it, intelligently, to make sense of the world?”

The first two-thirds of the course will focus on well-developed topics in human and animal intelligence, she said, while the last third will explore “literature that’s literally being written while we are teaching and taking the course.” The course is cross-listed in the cognitive science, humanities, philosophy and psychology departments.

Gendler is also returning to teaching Directed Studies, the first-year Great Books program that includes two semester-long courses on historical and political thought, literature and philosophy. She said she taught DS for the first time in 1996 and several more times between 2006 and 2013.

She said Directed Studies is the “one course at Yale where you don’t have to write the play and direct the play” and compared teaching the program to writing within the constraints of the sonnet form.

Gendler praised Yale College Dean Pericles Lewis’ plan to expand the program starting next year. To make for a “nice knitting together” of the first-year class, she said, every first year should be one degree of separation from a DS student — just as every student should be one degree of separation from a varsity athlete, an international student and a first-generation student. 

Lewis said that Gendler’s return to the classroom — like former Yale College Dean Marvin Chun now teaching and Salovey’s plans to teach next year — is “a sign that they stay connected to the academic enterprise.”

“She’s just a very widely read, knowledgeable person,” Lewis said of Gendler in a Tuesday interview. “Obviously, she’s a philosopher, but she’s very knowledgeable about literature and history and politics as well. So I think she’ll be a terrific teacher of Directed Studies.”

Cognitive science professor Laurie Santos, who has hosted a podcast episode with Gendler in 2020, wrote in an email to the News that “Tamar is an amazing teacher and I think it’ll be wonderful for students to have her back in the classroom.”

Ariella Kristal ’14, who took “Philosophy and the Science of Human Nature” with Gendler in 2011, wrote in an email to the News that Yalies are “incredibly lucky” to have the opportunity to learn from Gendler again. Kristal recounted Gendler’s passion for teaching, recalling a discussion section when she brought in cake to illustrate John Rawls’ “I cut, you choose” principle.

Robert Nozick, the American philosopher, was one of Gendler’s three doctoral advisors at Harvard.

Olivia Woo contributed reporting.